The Boss Educator: A Multifaceted Definition for Modern Education
Introduction
The concept of a "boss educator" extends beyond traditional definitions of teachers and principals. It encompasses a dynamic blend of supervisor, mentor, and coach, someone who cultivates a positive learning environment and empowers students and staff alike. This article explores the multifaceted nature of the boss educator, drawing upon insights from innovative educational models and leadership principles.
The Traditional Teacher: A Conductor of Knowledge
The classic image of a teacher involves a knowledgeable individual presenting information to students, who diligently take notes and engage in discussions. This definition casts the teacher as a conductor of knowledge, orchestrating learning within an organized setting. They guide students through formal knowledge, similar to a foreman, supervisor, manager, or guide.
The Challenge of Adaptive Digital Curriculum
The rise of adaptive digital curriculum presents a new challenge to the traditional teaching role. While these programs offer personalized learning experiences, they may also be perceived as diminishing the teacher's role. However, the boss educator embraces these tools, using them to enhance instruction and provide targeted support to students who need it most.
The Boss as Coach and Mentor: Fostering Growth and Development
Effective school leaders are not just good supervisors and evaluators; they are also great coaches and mentors. The roles are similar but distinct. A boss educator understands the importance of fostering growth and development in both students and staff. This involves:
Knowing Your People and Yourself
Spend time getting to know the strengths of the people you supervise or coach, including their work styles and motivations. Be aware of your strengths, skills, and areas for growth, too. Knowing yourself is key to knowing how to lead others. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and social skills can help in creating conditions that foster connection and care. What values guide your work as a school leader? What values shape the beliefs of the team you lead? What strengths do you and your team members possess? What leadership vision do you and your team have for the year? Where do you want to grow? What personal mindsets or actions might be getting in the way of achieving your vision?
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Understanding the Nature of the Conversation
While every interaction contains opportunities for coaching, it’s important to know the purpose of each meeting. Learning-focused conversations include coaching, collaborating, consulting, and calibrating. Who is doing the most talking? What kinds of questions are you asking? When you offer ideas (consulting) or clarify expectations (calibrating), how can you prompt thinking and ultimately return responsibility to the person you are supervising?
Aligning with Clear Goals and Vision
Effective school leaders are guided by a clear vision and direction for the future. They are also keenly aware of where their organization has been. It’s important to internalize the history and context of your school-leaders can’t try to change something without knowing what came before. What is our school’s story? What are people saying about the school, and what do we want people to say a year from now? What challenges are getting in the way of school success, and who can help tackle them? What technical or adaptive challenges are at play in the school?
Creating a Supportive Environment
When coaching, employ strategies that build connection, demonstrate care, and allow discussion of challenging topics. Strategies that can help leaders create this kind of psychological safety, including pausing, paraphrasing, and posing questions. How am I creating time and space for reflection? How effectively am I listening to build clarity and connection? What is the quality of the questions I’m asking, and are they prompting reflection? How do my actions demonstrate that I am present?
Prioritizing Time for Growth
There is a tendency in education to see everything as urgent, making it difficult for individuals to distinguish what’s important. When a leader plans something, it should signal its importance. Leaders can prioritize time for supervision and coaching by “defending” their schedules, and they can empower their teams to do the same. What does your calendar say about your priorities? Is your schedule blocked for observations and coaching conversations? How often do you meet one-on-one with team members? Do you make time for your own growth and development?
The Boss Educator in Action: Examples from Innovative Schools
Innovative schools like Quest2Learn in New York City offer valuable insights into the practices of boss educators. Quest2Learn re-imagines school as one node in an ecology of learning that extends beyond the four walls of an institution and engages kids in ways that are exciting, empowering and culturally relevant.
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Boss Levels: A Model for Student Engagement
Quest to Learn utilizes "Boss Levels," special two-week periods at the end of each trimester. During Boss Level regular classes are suspended, classrooms are rearranged into workspaces, teachers fall into the background, and students work in small teams on a single “challenge” that culminates in a showcase and party for the school’s educators, staff, and family members. In each case, Boss Levels attempt to weave together Connected Learning principles with the strictures of school-based practices. These periods embody the principles of Connected Learning, where students drive activity, connect projects to their interests, and engage in production-centered activities.
Peer-Supported Learning
Students drive activity during Boss Levels more than at any other time during the year. While educators put students onto teams and define the challenges, students take the lead in designing, discovering, and evaluating possible solutions. Students provide each other with ongoing feedback about each other’s ideas and work styles. Peer education is an important part of the curriculum: students exchanging interests and expertise with one another. They engage in delicate, and often difficult, negotiations over what their team should try next, who should do what, and who can tell or ask someone else to do something. While failure is commonplace, and while conflicts sometimes arise, educators resist intervening extensively. In general, students are active and highly engaged, and the classroom is often vibrant and boisterous.
Interest-Powered Projects
While Quest educators define Boss Level challenges, students have extensive opportunities for connecting Boss Level projects to their own interests, many of which are dissociated from conventional schooling practices. For example, when a Boss Level challenge asked students to write, stage, and perform short plays based on fairy tales, students wove numerous interests and cultural forms from their out-of-school lives into the productions. One scene took place in a medieval coffee shop called “Moonbucks”; plots and characters drew inspiration from popular books, video games, music, and movies; several students with an interest in fashion worked on costumes; a student who was enrolled in an after-school program for gymnastics helped choreograph stage fights; students who participated in online fan fiction communities worked on scripts; students who were interested in media production helped with recording and mixing sound effects; all students produced daily podcasts that provided updates about their projects to family members. In doing so, Boss Level blurred conventional divisions between education and peer cultures.
Academically Oriented Activities
Boss Levels confer academic legitimacy on creative activities that are typically absent or marginalized at conventional schools. By treating Boss Level as the culminating academic experience for every trimester, and by showcasing the students’ work to family members and members of the New York City design community, Quest bestows academic legitimacy on forms of work that are not easily measured by standardized assessments. At the same time, Quest attempts to link Boss Level challenges to more widely recognized academic domains and competencies. For example, the Rube Goldberg challenge required students to put into practice knowledge about physics and simple machines that they had been learning about over the course of the trimester. Similarly, Boss Levels encourage students to approach design challenges from the perspective of “systems thinking,” a twenty-first century literacy that educators emphasize in their instruction throughout the year.
Production-Centered Learning
Boss Level is a time when production and performance are paramount. As already noted, each Boss Level requires students to work together to make something that they do not yet know how to make. Educators encourage students to try numerous ideas and to fail often, noting that each failure offers a learning opportunity that can inform further rounds of iteration. The bulk of each school day is allocated to working on these group productions. Instead of rotating between different academically themed classes every 45 or 90 minutes, students work for several hours at time on their projects, moving fluidly between intensely focused work and more casual genres of practice, such as messing around. In addition to changing temporal routines, Quest reconfigures its physical space during Boss Level. Desks are moved out of rows and clusters and each team is assigned a dedicated workspace that they retain for the duration of the project. Teams travel to different locations to attend short skills-based workshops, but they always return to their workspaces, and they are allowed to leave their in-progress projects in place at the end of each day. Students from other teams often walk by each other’s workspaces and observe and comment on the various productions underway.
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Openly Networked Collaboration
In addition to synthesizing a trimester’s worth of schoolwork into a single project, Boss Levels connect school-based practices to resources, institutions, and persons beyond the school’s walls. For example, for the fall 2012 trimester, eighth graders chose between several Boss Level projects, each of which was supported by a different NYC cultural institution or expert practitioner from the city. Partner organizations and persons included the MoMA, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, the Museum of the City of New York, a professional Flamenco dancer, and a Parkour expert. Additionally, family members and educators donate much of the materials - from old magazines, to cardboard tubes, to foam-core - that students use for their projects. Students use the internet to collect media and research their challenge, and they use digital production tools for prototyping, modeling, and communication. At the finale for each Boss Level, a jury of professional creative practitioners offers feedback and awards prizes for especially noteworthy productions.
Shared Purpose and Goals
As noted above, during Boss Level educators organize students onto teams that they belong to for the duration of the Boss Level. Team members work together on a single project and educators act as an advisers that provide assistance rather than didactic instruction. Educators also recruit creative professionals from outside the school to offer feedback and guidance at various stages of the process. While educators evaluate students’ individual contributions to Boss Level as part of their summative term assessments, the showcases at the end of Boss Levels focus on group, rather than individual, accomplishment. Teams compete against each other for kudos and awards but they are not ranked against each other according to a single metric. Many challenges also connect to communities of practitioners that share an interest or purpose to the ones being addressed by the challenge, whether those persons are environmental activists, digital artist, actors, designers, or animators.
Challenges and Opportunities in Implementing Connected Learning
Realizing Connected Learning principles in a public school setting is not without its challenges. For one, Boss Levels can be seen as taking time away from preparing for state tests. While Quest hopes its students will score highly on tests, its students are evaluated against students who attend schools that place greater emphasis on testing. If the school cannot produce competitive test scores, many families will not apply to the school and the Department of Education could force it to change its leadership or even close. Given these realities, Quest is under constant pressure to scale back on less canonical offerings such as Boss Level, and it has had to diminish the number and duration of Boss Levels as it has matured.
Additionally, the school has had to educate some parents about the educational value of experiences like Boss Level. Less-privileged families, in particular, have pushed the school to focus more on canonical pedagogic offerings, in part because their children’s options in the NYC school system largely depend on test scores. Further, families from various backgrounds have expressed unease with the some of student-centered aspects of Boss Level. The frenetic, messy, and often noisy character of Boss Levels can appear to some as chaotic and undisciplined rather than as engaging and invigorating. Quest educators have responded to these challenges by attempting to educate parents about the forms of learning supported by Boss Levels, and over time many parents have come to see, and even celebrate, Boss Levels as important and unique educational opportunities. Educators have also had to make Boss Levels more structured and adult-managed as the school has matured, partly to ease parental concerns.
Despite these challenges, Boss Levels offer an encouraging example of how Connected Learning principles can be integrated into public schooling. Unlike most canonical schooling practices, Boss Levels organize students’ activity around a shared purpose and they provide students with numerous opportunities for active and creative problem solving. Students, rather than educators, drive the process. Solutions are not defined beforehand and resources are not bound by the school’s walls.
BOSS: Behavioral Opportunities for Social Skills
Another facet of the boss educator is the implementation of evidence-based practices for motivation, discipline, and management skills. BOSS (Behavioral Opportunities for Social Skills) calls for positive reinforcement and drawing from professional experience rather than relying on personal biases.
The Importance of Continuous Learning and Development
While managing the hectic day-to-day activities of the workplace, bosses may not recognize the need for continuous learning and development. Once in place, these methods will result in a positively charged work environment filled with creative and motivated employees working together toward shared goals. Every successful teacher has a plan for where the class will be at the end of the school year along with the specific steps to get there. Just like teachers, managers need to have clearly stated goals that serve the organization’s mission. Good communication about goals is a two-way street. Just as it’s a boss’ responsibility to communicate these organizational goals plainly, it’s also their duty to listen to their workers’ personal goals. One of the most significant responsibilities of a manager is to be able to understand and build the skills needed to accomplish the company’s goals. Unlike in a school system, where assessment tests help teachers to evaluate skills and measure growth, managers need to observe and ask questions to determine where additional training is needed. Managers can empower employees who want to add to their portfolio of skills by allowing them to take on assignments that will provide an opportunity to stretch their abilities and gain new skills. Most workers don’t want to feel stagnant. Giving them opportunities for growth is essential for morale and higher productivity. Effective leaders give their workers constructive feedback while encouraging a growth mindset. Managers who learn to be teachers not only help their employees but contribute to their own professional growth as well.
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