Senge, You Never Disappoint!

Everything that I have ever read by Peter Senge http://www.infed.org/thinkers/senge.htm has been enlightening. I enjoy his views of the world, that living and learning are inseparable, where there are no boundaries between work, school, learning and life. Senge does not look at school as walled in building but as a whole society. Just imagine a whole learning society! I decided to check out what he has to say about communication and was instantly drawn to his 592 page book called, SCHOOL THAT LEARN: A FIFTH DISCIPLINE FIELD GUIDE FOR EDUCATORS, PARENTS, AND EVERYONE WHO CARES ABOUT EDUCATION (2000). A mouth full and full of great information about learning.
Senge takes the same view as the Dufours http://www.allthingsplc.info/and focuses his energies on learning and not on the practice of teaching. Many of his communication ideas are similar Rob Garmston's http://www.cognitivecoaching.com/rgarmston.htmmethod, but Senge writes about them in a much more emotional and "less academic" way. The five disiciplines are:
Personal Mastery: Your personal vision and the results you want to create in your life.
Shared Vision: Mutual purpose and commitment to shared images.
Mental Models: Reflect and inquiry focused around our attitudes and perceptions
Team Learning: Using dialogue groups transform collective thinking, to mobilize energies.
Systems Thinking: Learn to better understand change and interdependency
Using these disciplines Senge's goal is the re-create schools for our children that are relevant to now. (Yes, I could say to the 21st Century, but felt that we are here, NOW)
Some ideas about communication from this book:
In his chapter about Mental Models, Senge is asking that we attend to our perceptions and to become more aware of our thinking. Two methods to assist us in viewing our mental models are reflection and inquiry. The ladder of inference introduces the ideas about how we create our own perceptions and assumptions.

Here is our ladder: Start at the bottom!
7. I take action based on my beliefs

6. I adopt beliefs about the world

5. I draw conclusions

4. I make assumptions

3. I add meaning: cultural and personal

2. I select: "data" from what I observe

1. Observe "data" and experiences

Clear real life examples are shared in the book to make this all more real. What a great short PD idea to share with teachers and students.
I remember a high school teacher saying to me that she would never teacher elementary school because the children are young and so impressionable and it was such a big responsibility that you may damage their development. I had really never thought of that and only thought about what positives I could bring to a child's life. All perceptions!

Learning, Leading and the CSU Forum:(

Collaborating, communicating and sharing our ideas are ways that we learn from each other. In ETL504, TL as Leaders, communication is said to underpin all collaborative efforts and endeavors.

I have been using the CSU Forum for 2 years now in my distance learning classes. I have found that there is so much potential for the CSU Forum in the name of communicating and learning but it is generally used for questions about assessment, assessments and assessment. If you look at our different avenues to share in ETL504 we have 10 categories. Six of these categories relate to our leadership topics and two are about assessment and one was introductions. The number of hits on the assessment categories is 834 (that is excluding the out of office repetitions from Roy) and the hits related to actual leadership topics is 56. This leads me to believe that there is a ratio of 15 to 1 of assessment questions to topic questions. You could say that the assessments are real and meaningful and what gets tested, get taught. I would agree with this if the actual questions about assessment were probing, thoughtful, and reflective in relation to our readings. BUT...I am not finding this to be true. For example, twelve questions were asked about word count for our assessment. Someone had stated that LAST year's students were asked to write 6000 words. On our assessment document it says 2000 words. I am not sure why we would be looking at the past and not moving in the present. It wastes everyones time and energy where this process of sharing should be energizing and revitalizing.

Here is an interesting story about the Forum. In my last class ETL402, I wrote the instructor privately about my Forum concerns. I got back an email that mentioned the fact that we were no longer new students to CSU and that the professor guessed that these experienced students no longer needed the "crutch" of sharing as much on the forum. I think she was telling me to "grow up". I guess my feelings of always being able to learn from others was not relevant! I would never view sharing as a crutch. So...during ETL504 I wrote to Roy about the use of the Forum and was there a way to increase relevant sharing. His response was that many of the students in this class were new to CSU and therefore much of the sharing had to do with assessment. Moral of this story: OLD or NEW students need to be encouraged to create relevant, meaningful, reflective comments and questions. I think that we would all agree that it is not the answers we are interested but can we ask great questions. I know this is what I expect from my students and I would hope that CSU would also expect better.

  

Communication: process and problems by William Savage

I was just listening to a podcast called THIS AMERICAN LIFE. This particular podcast was called GOT YOU PEGGED. The idea is that you can be talking to someone in your own language, own country, own town and you can still have no idea what they are talking about. Communication is all about perceptions and these are all different in each person (this article calls this interpretation). Just like we can be looking at the same piece of art and see totally different things.

In this article I love the idea that a principal or leader needs to have a communication flow that is both downward and upward. It is the upward flow that has to be encouraged. I feel myself very comfortable communicating upward. I don’t always believe that my principal and are communicate easily with each other, but we are both willing listeners and work towards understanding.

The process of filtering communication can be important. There are often items that I feel as a teacher are not important for me to know though they are important. Finances for example have been difficult for our school due to taxes. This doesn’t affect my teaching and I would rather have others take care of it. Unless it becomes an issue that we all have to gather around and discuss, I often welcome some filtering.

Rumors? So I have to confess here that I am the wife of an administrator. Everyone assumes that I know all that is going on when in fact my husband and I talk very little about school. I am usually the last to find out about gossip. I find that our principal deals with rumors head on. He states what the rumor is he has heard and address it candidly to stop the wildfire spread. Communication has become such an important issue in our school that we now have a communications person. That is their job. We are a big school 2500 students and we need a person who handles the mass media and creates an image of the school with visual media.