Hi!
It’s great to meet you.
My name is Pleasant View Elementary School District.
I’m “old country”, born and raised in a remote unincorporated farming community called Poplar, shall we say in the “greater Porterville” region.
Greater in the sense of surrounding, because the students I serve find it hard to say “great” about this area.
I am ecstatic to see so many of you in this room.
For quite some time I have had a strong desire to explain myself but the words have been hard to match with my visions, ideas and thoughts.
Recently I dedicated some serious collective brain power in search of the perfect words.
They say a “Picture speaks a thousand words”. It is my goal to do the opposite and paint a picture of ME in less than a thousand words.
So here we go…
School districts can be paths or deadends to students, and consequently to teachers, families and the communities they serve.
My district was around for a long while in an ambiguous cycle of neither here nor there.
About 13 years ago, I invited Mr. Mark to give us a lending hand as Superintendent. I confess, I am glad he had no clue what he was getting into at the time. Principal Kim Parrish, she had a notion of what was to come as she’d been around a bit longer.
You know, the two of them make an amazingly assertive team for progressive education. I saw it from day one and then it became my goal to pod them together so they’d sprout innovative practices.
I love my school grounds. Recently when in LA, I visited a top notch Charter school in a big fancy building. But me, no! I’ve got acres and acres of farming fields, solar panels and LONG country roads with views to snow capped mountains.
My kids run free – so to speak. But to run free is not “freedom to run” if we don’t give them Life Long Readiness to run towards their dreams.
This is where my story of “transformation” begins.
In other words, my story has an origin and that is an entire story in itself. But, I know you’ll understand when I say it was a teeter-totter of “If-then’s” between School Admin and Teachers.
Admin wanted new practices and different results.
Teachers wanted resources.
So if I allowed my admin to give the resources, then we would have different practices.
Well… I’ll let you guess how that went.
I was frustrated! If the resources were not the answer, then what was? I mulled over this for a while, carrying the burden on my shoulders because I did not have the answer.
I sent Mr. Mark on a trip to Harvard to meet Liz City, and Richard Elmore. Lo and behold the man had an INSPIRATIONAL AWAKENING on the trip “It’s all about human Agency and the power to originate action, bridging from intentionality to self-efficacy through all levels of education” so was his Insight.
It was hard to contain his enthusiasm when he came back. I told him to sit still but that didn’t do much good. I almost put him on the divan!
At this moment it became clear to me: The problem of education is repeating a non functional pattern because our current education is established like fractal patterns.
Fractal patterns are infinitely complex mathematical forms that repeat forever and every part of the Fractal, regardless of how zoomed in or zoomed out, looks very similar to the whole image.
The repeated patterns brought me back to Agency and what that brand new fractal pattern looks and sounds like.
Agency – in a nutshell – SOUNDS like “Shut up and listen” at all levels. We must turn down the volume on “speaking TO students or teachers or families” and turn up the Active Listening to hear them #Shoutout their ideas, thoughts and needs.
If that is what it sounds like, then what does the new fractal look like?
In simple geometry it goes from a vertical tower to interconnected wavelengths in the horizontal that embrace human agency in its entirety.
Human Agency comes from the soul; it is the Essence of what we as Districts are meant to do in being “Relentless in serving”.
Over the last decade and in particular since the Covid-19 lockdowns, I as a District (and I assume all other Districts like myself) have only one reason for students, teachers, families and communities to believe in us, and that is “We owe children transformative actions: To respond, To change and To educate”
I guess that’s why it’s been so hard to put words to my vision. All districts like myself have one reason to be believed in, that’s why we exist.
On the other hand, whenever any specialist in innovative pedagogy, transformative education or educational leadership walks into our classrooms and witnesses what we do so differently, I tend to bundle us into “all districts” and that I learned is my mistake.
I am – like many, many, many others – on the path of transformation, yet unique in my ways. It is this uniqueness that puts me here on this page with you.
It is this uniqueness, that gives me the strength to “Embolden self efficacy and be a global North Star for Educational Transformation“.