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Resolutions again. We make them; we break them. Does any good come of this? Annual attempts reveal, perhaps, that we all sense we are in need of improvement, while February reports of failed resolutions suggest that quick fixes rarely cause permanent improvement.

If you’d like to think about resolutions in a new way, look at Benjamin Franklin’s steady approach to self-development. While still in his twenties, Franklin chose 13 virtues that he thought were essential for a good life. He wrote each on a page of his notebook and concentrated on each for a week at a time. Every thirteen weeks he began again, rotating through his list four times each year for most of his life, concentrating on improving one area at a time.

Do not assume Franklin was wholly successful. A quick look at his life shows areas where he did not reach the lofty ideals he aimed for. Nonetheless, I believe he was a better man for trying.

I invite teachers to take Ben Franklin’s long-term approach, forgiving our own shortcomings yet still pushing on toward our ideals.

During a recent conference, a teacher-in-training identified eleven things he wanted to improve about his teaching next semester. The list was worthy, but humans are not designed to do eleven things all at once. I reminded him of this fact, pointing out that overwhelming himself with eleven all at once would be a quick route to discouragement or despair. To manage his long list, we agreed that he would concentrate on only one each week. That would allow him time for experimenting and becoming somewhat comfortable with each one in turn, so they could all, eventually, become part of his repertoire.

How about you? What are the two– or twelve or six or ten– things that you want to do better? The choice is yours. But once you do choose, truly adopt your goals for the long term. Re-examine one of your goals each week and take some concrete step in that area. Like Franklin, you will need to actually write your list down and go back to look at it repeatedly, so you can form the self-improvement habit.

You might decide to choose some of your strengths and magnify them further. Or select some weaknesses and find compensatory behaviors. Perhaps you would rather identify a major annoyance or problem and form new habits or procedures to get you past the issue. All are good approaches. Which will you choose? And what will you be doing about those goals months and years from today?

Okay, let’s compare learning to an elevator car in a very tall building.

Below us are all the floors our car has already passed—in other words, the things we’ve mastered, the things we have down cold, those things we no longer need help understanding or remembering. Once we know the definition of perambulation, or the square root of four, we know it. We could call this static knowledge; it is nailed down.

Above us, further up that elevator shaft, are all the things we might know someday. Even though we don’t yet understand nuclear fission or speak Bengali, we may learn them in the future; we have that potential. We may comprehend these topics someday, but for today they remain unlearned.

So in the car, where we currently stand, are the things we can process right now; this material is often close to, or related to, what we already know.  This elevator car creates a learning space for building our new knowledge. It is a space between what we know independently and what we can potentially understand with the help of a more knowledgeable person, whether a teacher or a peer. This suggests that all humans need other people in the elevator car with them if they are to learn to their potential. We need to interact with these helpers, asking, listening and co-creating new understandings. This reminds us that learning has a very important social component.

This elevator car of learning sometimes goes by another name. Lev Vygotsky called it the Zone of Proximal Development. However, when we call it a zone, it sounds static and immovable, even though it is not. The ZPD is a moving target; as new things are learned, the elevator car moves upward, presumably for every day of our lives.

So, if learning is an elevator car, what are the implications for us—both as students and teachers. And how will the social component of learning be provided?

First, what is learned in that elevator car, that Zone of Proximal Development, is dynamic. As we interact with people to learn new material, at first our comprehension is slippery. We feel like we understand as we hear explanations, yet explaining what we just heard is hard and applying it even harder. That’s because as we learn, there is movement—we are coming closer to a full understanding—to moving up a floor—but it rarely happens instantly. This explains why a teacher can teach a concept on Tuesday and see confused faces again on Wednesday.

For our students, this means we need to provide times for interaction, discussion, brainstorming and verifying with other learners. It means that “Eyes forward, no talking!” must be tempered with chances to pair and share, talk in a group, ask questions and check answers with tablemates.

Just as important, it means teachers too must have peer interaction. Nobody is likely to learn everything by working solo. If there is no one in our elevator car that we can talk to, then all our blind spots, gaps in understanding and confusion will remain pretty much unchanged. No one is to blame; this is simply a reality. It connects to the adage, “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we got.”

Educators would be very wise to push the “Open Door” button on the control panel of our elevator car, and invite others to share the ride, discuss the situation, suggest some options and give us some feedback. It may be the only way we’ll ever get that elevator car all the way to the penthouse suite.

Going to a conference or an in-service often inspired me, yet putting the new ideas or methods to use when I got back to my own classroom was never as easy as I hoped, nor as simple as the presenter’s words seemed to apply. Over time I realized that learning curves are much longer than I recognized.

I saw others’ hopes dashed too.  Sometimes, a few days after a training session, a colleague would announce, “That doesn’t work. I tried it.”  I do not question my colleague’s honesty. I believe each of them did try the ideas—at least they tried some portion of the idea in whatever way they understood it after an initial introduction. The idea of academic freedom was sometimes advanced here, as in, “It’s my classroom and I am not going to do this anymore.”

This leads me to a word I have recently learned to use in a new way. The word is fidelity. This word is probably familiar to you; fidelity means, according to Webster’s, loyalty, faithful devotion to duty, or accurate reproduction of sounds or images. How does fidelity fit into education? Fidelity means learning a strategy or method so well that we can accurately use it in the way it was designed to be used.

Fidelity is important in any professional, trained and reliable profession. Doctors and nurses follow protocols because these are shown to cause better patient outcomes. Teachers too are being asked to use research-based methods, in order to cause better student outcomes.

These days schools are researching programs, interventions and protocols in order to select approaches that will help every child to succeed. Effort and thought go into these selections, and approaches which are chosen show great promise. Still, choosing is only the first step. If we as educators cannot accurately implement the methodology—with fidelity—the choosing is for naught.

There are at least three steps to fidelity as we implement new methods: investigation, initiation and full implementation.

Investigation- Whatever team is charged with selection of new approaches will do the research. However, each staff member will also need to find out the reasons for the choice, and the details that make up the method. Gaps in knowledge will always result in gaps in performance. Furthermore, even after the new method becomes commonplace, each new staff member, whether permanent, like newly-hired teachers, or temporary like student teachers and volunteers, will also need to be brought to an understand of the purpose, the procedures and the payoffs of the planned approach.

Initiation – This is the ramping-up phase. Start with the assumption that none of us will be very comfortable or skilled the first few times we try the new approach. Lots of co-planning and debriefing after the first several attempts will move people forward to growing effectiveness, and get us past the discomfort.  We should beware of adapting before we have followed the recipe numerous times. Too-early adapting is usually the route to corrupting the original plan. I don’t want my surgeon improvising either, not until she has logged in dozens of by-the-book renditions to be sure her skills are in place.

Full implementation – At this point every participant—all teachers, aides, volunteers and teachers-in-training—have learned about the method or research-based-initiative. They all know what to do, how to do it, and they are actually doing it. Until this is true, no one can say if the idea will work, because it remains a mirage unless all are doing it accurately, in other words, with fidelity.

After fidelity is achieved, then creativity, adaptation and academic freedom properly kick in. Teachers begin to see ways to link the new skills to others, to enrich or build upon this new foundation. But until we can practice our craft with fidelity, the freedom to ignore the protocol would be the freedom to fail our students.

I recently spent time in the company of a new arrival—a month old baby named Galen. He didn’t know the culture or the language of this place yet, but looked around often, as if a bit bemused. My desire, of course, was to make eye contact, perhaps see a fleeting smile of recognition, but that didn’t happen. It couldn’t really, because he had not yet developed that skill.

Because of those days of face-to-face contact, I began to wonder what Galen was actually taking in as we spent time together.  He had no words for anything, not even in his mind. I knew that. Then I began to wonder what I would notice if I had no names for anything and no experience with the items in my environment.

The longer I thought, the more it seemed that he doesn’t even know yet that there are items in his environment. I’m sure it’s a kaleidoscope of colors before his eyes, or maybe just shades of gray, but how could he know that the foreground is separate from the background or that some parts of what he sees are distinct from other parts? He couldn’t—he has not yet touched or tasted various parts of the scene before him, nor has he moved between the parts or manipulated them. He needs to investigate and experiment before he can draw conclusions like that.

Trying to put myself his situation, I attempted to find analogies for what he is probably experiencing. I remembered going to the movies and arriving before the previews. On the screen was a swirl of color blobs, merging and separating in random ways that meant nothing to me but were hypnotic enough to keep me staring.  Perhaps Galen sees things that way—movement without meaning.

Until he names things—a process of separating the whole into parts and using random, yet agreed-upon sounds to stand for each slice of reality, he won’t be able to converse about his world with others. And as soon as he does that, he won’t see things as a total experience any more. He is more likely to pay greater attention to named things and pass over the unnamed sections of his world. Now that I think about it, maybe I do the same.

All that time spent watching Galen led me to consider how much adults have in common with a baby learning about his environment. I taught for a dozen years before an Effective Instruction class gave me words for great numbers of teaching techniques—some of which I had accidentally used, but not replicated in other classes, because I didn’t even know they were each a separate part of my teaching environment. After I named them, I could apply them at will, in any appropriate setting.

And every day, I keep wondering what are the things that I don’t see, don’t name and don’t use, things that are there, but outside my awareness. Reading history books, I shake my head at the blindness of former generations to things that seem so obvious to me. I can feel superior because I know the names of those formerly unknown facts and theories, things that are a part of my reality.

But my sense of superiority is short-lived. I look around and wonder what my blind spots are, what they keep me and my culture from seeing. In fifty years, or five hundred, what will be known that I cannot even see yet?  This question keeps me searching and asking what movements, behaviors and sights around me are significant, yet unnamed, and therefore unnoticed. It makes me seek feedback, new data and theories to broaden my ability to see what is just outside my awareness.

What if the most important question isn’t how to bring standardized test scores of U.S. students up to the level of other industrialized nations? What if the bigger issue is how to maintain and nurture our citizenry’s long-standing talent for innovation, patent-earning and productivity on the world stage.

Last year I heard Dr. Yong Zhao speak at a Michigan Department of Education-sponsored conference. I was startled when he told the audience that ever since the first nation-to-nation test score comparisons were made in the 1960’s, U.S. scores have been near the bottom of the pack, yet, as a nation, we have excelled every one of those years in comparison to other nations–more inventions, more patents, and a significantly higher quality of life.

American innovation is legendary and it has been profitable for its citizens. Yet we know that not all of our under-age citizens are getting the start they need. If they did, it is reasonable to assume we might soar even higher that we have in the past century.

You may enjoy listening to Dr. Zhoa’s somewhat contrarian views in the video you can reach through this link.

When I listen to the business news, I often hear calculations of the productivity of American workers. Apparently it has been on the rise for a number of years. American workers really know how to crank it out.

This led me to wonder about my own productivity. How am I doing? How’re my colleagues doing? How could I figure this out? I decided to do some calculations of my own.

Let’s say I was a beginning teacher. How much would I make? I found a site that offers some clues. At www.teachersalaryinfo.com I can find state by state listings of the most recently available information and it seems that $31,000 is a reasonable salary estimate for many beginners. Businesses always add at least 20% when they calculate the true cost of an employee in order to figure in insurance and other benefits, so by that measure, my cost to the state and my school district would run about $37,200.

So assuming the average school year is 180 days, this means that as a novice teacher I would earn $177.22 per day taught, plus benefits that cost about $34.44 per day. Adding that up shows that I cost $ 211.66 per day.

After these calculations, my question to myself would have to be, “Am I delivering $200 dollars worth of education to my students every day?” But wait, that question is correct only if I am a beginning teacher. If I have ten, twenty or thirty years of experience, I have to ask myself whether I am delivering $300 or $400 or, in some states, even $500 worth of education to students every single day of the year. Whoa! That’s a tall order. How would asking this question change my decision making?

Hmmm. Well, Hollywood movies that cost two hours of class time would need to deliver at least $400 of learning. Do they? Most probably don’t. A few could, if I provided background, pointed out significances, and had discussion questions that truly challenged viewers after the viewing, but I could no longer think of movies as harmless fillers—they are costing a bundle.

How about giving free time for good behavior during the week? Or ten minutes to talk at the end of the lesson? Free time sounds pretty suspicious now because it’s costing valuable learning time. I need to plan my lessons to fill all the time available and make the learning more engaging all week so “time off for good behavior” is less necessary.

How about Jeopardy games that take an hour and cover just 35 convergent questions, especially when part of the students are ignoring the proceedings? I definitely need to rethink that approach.

What about assignments like making a brochure? Project-based learning is good, but not if it takes an hour or two and all I really ask of my students is to copy encyclopedia facts onto a folded sheet. I need to make my assignments more respectful—challenging students to do things that are just hard enough to be interesting and not so hard that they are frustrated them and give up–the kind of assignment that helps students discover how truly capable they are.

Well, now that I have calculated the economics of academics, I believe I have a personal duty to use every moment of instructional time in ways that are interesting, challenging and result in new understandings in all my students. I sure hope I can be that productive.

When I coach other teachers I am a firm believer in capturing exact moment-by-moment behaviors. Without them, discussion after lessons is scattered and imprecise. Few teachers could accurately recall precisely what was said and done—by themselves and twenty students—over an entire class period. As a coach, I jot down whatever is said by teacher or students during the lesson.

Realistically I cannot get it all, but I can capture a lot by using the same sort of shorthand that got us through college lectures. I also put student responses inside brackets to help me keep things straight. Then I go through the scripted version to highlight significant points and label teaching behaviors for our discussion. By reading the script together, the teacher and I are able to analyze the effectiveness of the teaching and think about possible interpretations of student reactions.

Another useful tool is videotaping a lesson by simply setting a camera in the corner and letting it run. Such videos can be analyzed in depth to assist teachers in owning their strengths more completely and seeing more clearly where improvement is called for. When a coach cannot be present in the classroom, the teacher can still access help by sharing a video in later meetings. Videos also have the advantage of being available for multiple viewings in which we look for different issues during each playing.

The purpose of any post–lesson discussion of script or video is to help teacher build their analytical skills. In this regard, Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a great resource. By asking each teacher I coach to assess facts, feelings, critiques, potentialities, creativity and process before making decisions, the resulting plans are strengthened dramatically.

A coach must trigger change, not by threats, but by persuasion. In my experience, a good place to begin is to identify strengths of individual teachers, then emphasize those strengths and enrich them further. Concurrently, I mentally prioritize any gaps and weaknesses that I see. Alongside the first discussion of strengths, I discuss only one, or possibly two, areas that need improvement. A teacher is not likely to be able to make multiple changes simultaneously, so I point out the most significant issue first, work with him/her to create strategies, provide time for practice and give helpful feedback in order to help the teacher assimilate new habits. Often, if a major problem is solved, other smaller issues improve as a side benefit. If not, less critical issues will be addressed as they reach the top of the priority list which the coach carries in mind.

No coach should suggest improvements based solely on their own hunches or preferences. It is important to stay informed about what research shows will work. For instance, I might ask teachers to work on developing mutually supportive relationships with others on the faculty, not simply because it is my preference, but because research shows that is an important part of building an effective school. This power of this particular approach is assessed in Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for School Improvement. All suggestions made by coaches should also be supported by information about best practices. Why? Because a coach needs to be an informed, objective assistant in the growth process that characterizes good teaching.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the unknown person who decided to put twenty or thirty biographies on the shelves of my fifth grade classroom. All that year I read biographies avidly.

I met Jane Addams, who I remember as a society girl with a limp and a conscience. Though her father wanted her to marry, she founded Hull House because she wanted to ease the suffering of the poor. She started a movement and America was changed.

I was fascinated by Charles Steinmetz, a brilliant electrical engineer of the 1800s. He had a severe curvature of the spine, but never let it slow him down. He did his part to change scientific understanding.

I loved George Washington Carver for his gentle ways and innovative mind. Born a slave and abandoned in infancy, he was raised by a Missouri farmer—but only for eight years. After that he went to town for schooling and worked for a laundress in exchange for board. He was woefully disrespected even after he became a well-known scientist, but never stopped his investigations into ways to use peanuts to meet consumer needs and thus he provided a living for many desperate farmers.

I was huge fan of the all the Roosevelts, but especially Eleanor. Her mother told her she was ugly, she was painfully shy and was orphaned young, and yet, in spite of it all, she became a world leader by hard work and native intelligence.

I remember them all as if I had met them personally. Collectively they taught me hope and perseverance. No matter how many strokes one had against one, or how unlikely success appeared, it was clear to me that time was on my side. I have lived my life with that belief. So I hereby express my appreciation to the book buyer who made it possible for me to draw those conclusions.

Whatever you teach and wherever you teach it, there are resources and allies around you that you have probably never noticed. I first learned this during an in-service.

“Inventory your community!” the speaker said. “What is in and around your school? How can you connect with it? Who is nearby? How can you solicit their involvement?” The suggestion changed my outlook and helped me to teach differently and better.

One of my first outreach efforts involved an elderly couple who walked the halls for exercise every afternoon about four o’clock to avoid icy sidewalks. The man was slightly stooped and the woman fixed her white hair in an elegant Gibson girl style. As I speculated about their age, I wondered if they had family stories about the 1930s, the era I was getting ready to teach.

The next afternoon I watched for them and went out to introduce myself. I asked if they had any stories about the Depression and whether they would be willing to talk to my students about them. They agreed immediately.

A few days later they were telling my sophomores how President Roosevelt closed the banks just days after their wedding. They described scrip, unemployment, WPA construction projects, and creating meals with other couples in their building based on the meat left over at the butcher shop where one of them worked. They told stories for 45 minutes and then let the students ask them questions. I recorded them and showed the tape to classes who missed the “live” performance.

I realized other teachers were resources too. A teacher who emigrated from Pakistan described how people apply for a visa, sell their possessions, and come with the only two suitcases in order to meet the U.S. requirements. A teacher from Vietnam described fleeing the Viet Cong with nothing but the clothes on his back; this changed students’ views of the 1960’s.

The oak relief carving on the War memorial in the lower hall was a visual representation of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, so we walked down to look at it and the speech was suddenly easier for students to understand and remember. The names inscribed on the memorial were those of former students. We took down the names and looked them up in the yearbooks the school librarian had stored in the back room. Tenth graders looked up the school activities of long ago students just their age who went on to serve and subsequently die in World War II.

This research spread to the downtown library, city directories and phone calls by some students to people with the same last name as the war dead in search of information about “their” guys.

Soon I moved beyond the school itself. The senior citizen housing up the hill was within walking distance. I arranged with the manager to recruit seniors who would be willing to be interviewed about World War II. I had my students develop interview sheets and we visited the center for a two hour field trip that required no busses at all. We wrote short stories based on the interviews and went back for a reading.

Walking in the opposite direction took us to a city cemetery with gravestones that listed deaths as far back as 1840. There students did rubbings, math problems about life spans and developed plots for stories based on ideas gleaned from epitaphs.

Then I checked the distance to the branch library using my odometer—1.3 miles. This meant that the public access radio and television studios on the second floor of the library were also within walking distance. The public television center provided free orientations and low cost training for videotaping, editing and directing. I applied for a grant to cover training costs and began to build a media cadre. Any student who went to the orientation I scheduled on a no-school day was eligible to get free tuition to the public television classes. I was amazed when 22 kids showed up on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving!

I found helpful individuals too. A local realtor coordinated an essay contest for Memorial Day. A local business recruited volunteers who helped students develop their writing skills. People willingly brought in their scrapbooks and shared memorabilia and artifacts rarely seen outside museums and the students responded eagerly. Best of all, it wasn’t hard or time consuming, yet it brought new excitement into my teaching and re-energized me.

So, the take-away message is that assessing all the resources in your building and neighborhood can yield a wide variety of people, activities and approaches that you can use. You can enrich whatever subject you are teaching in no-cost or low-cost ways that bring the real world into your lessons.

How often do you hear the word impossible tossed around, especially in schools? It sometimes masquerades as “That’ll never happen!’

I have been thinking a lot about the word ‘impossible.” The word is a trickster. When people say something is impossible, it sounds as if they are predicting the future, but in fact, they are describing only the past. When someone declares something impossible, what they are really saying is, “That seems unlikely based on my past experiences,” or “I have never yet seen that happen,” or “I don’t expect that will occur.”

Careful thinking reveals that impossible things happen every day, but, once they happen, they instantly fall out of the impossible category and are transformed into the ordinary. In past centuries, self-powered vehicles, flying machines, moon landings, electric lights–these were the stuff of fantasies, but now they are completely ordinary and unremarkable. What we currently think of as impossible is usually whatever hasn’t happened yet.

The same applies to people. We mistakenly believe the unusual is impossible. If I describe a homely, painfully shy girl and whose mother neglected her and then died when she was eight and whose alcoholic father died two years later, we might pity her. If I said, this girl will become a world leader, listeners might snort, “Impossible!” Yet, I have just described Eleanor Roosevelt. She became First Lady of the World and is almost single-handedly responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela was in prison in South Africa for 27 years—more than 10,000 days. On any one of those 10,000 days, if anyone had declared, “Someday, Nelson Mandela will be president of South Africa,” people would surely have hooted, “That’s impossible.” Yet we all know that the impossible happened.

I am sure that the school principal who called Thomas Edison “addle-pated” would have thought it impossible that Edison would ever amount to anything, let alone become the greatest inventor in our nation’s history. When Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s was in high school, the likelihood of his becoming the head of a huge corporation seemed small. When he dropped out of high school, most people would have deemed it completely impossible, yet it happened.

Why are we are so eager to be bearers of bad news? “You aren’t that talented,” You don’t have the skills/persistence/connections/scores/grades/aptitude for that,” or even “The world doesn’t work that way, buster.” Except, sometimes it does. One of my students, an artist, was colorblind. It seems self-evident that artists cannot be color-blind, but that isn’t true. He is making his living today in southern California as a graphic designer. So it turns out, the impossible isn’t.

If I pointed to a young mixed-race adolescent male being raised by his grandparents, a young man who didn’t look all that ambitious and was thought to be an occasional drug user, would a good future seem impossible? Would observers identify him as a future president of the United States? In Barack Obama’s case, no one saw it coming, but it came anyway.

He and the others above illustrate an important point. Within each human is a seed that can grow, even grow to greatness—as long as we don’t starve it, stomp it or stunt it. When we say, or think, “Impossible!” we are starving hope, stomping dreams and stunting growth. We need to stretch our beliefs and learn to see that each person’s dreams and ideas are actually future realities, no matter how unusual, unpredictable or “impossible” they may seem when we first hear about them.