Ethic of Excellence- Quotes, Questions, Comments
An Ethic Of Excellence
Berger believes that excellence is born from a culture (whether it is family, community, school) that expects and supports excellence
from children. When children experience a school culture that sets high expectations, that inspires them to care and take pride in
their accomplishments, and that values “integrity, respect, responsibility, compassion, and hard work” , they begin to develop an
“appetite for excellence” . Berger proposes instead that we focus on “inspirational teaching” that insists on “beautiful, powerful and
important work” As I began reading Berger’s book last night, I couldn't help but reflect on my yester years and the many cultures of
excellence I witnessed.
I remember my school days. Being a Nirmalite I remember, there existed a culture of self discipline. Arts, craft work and needle work
were taught to one and all and we all were expected to show some level of excellence. Our teacher while checking our needle work
would see the rear end and check if there existed any knots. She did not like us to keep knots, instead insisted we make a loop and begin
our work. Each and every student got inspired by this culture. Lessons of love and compassion were constantly shared with us during
the moral science class by the nuns. Most students led an ascetic student life. I can say this is possible if the culture sustains student
interest and such practices are continued not changed.
Ron Berger in chapter one makes an attempt to convince the readers of the need of archiving student work. I quite liked the idea,
however, I must admit, I lack the ability to archive / document work of excellence and often times fail to provide some reference work
to my learners when I set my expectations with them. Since last year, I have managed to capture students work which may help the
coming batches. Yes, I am able to relate to the importance of the same in making the picture clear for others.
Ron Berger talks about displaying student work. Is good, however, I have seen work being torn without any reason and we may not
know who did it. There needs to be a culture of valuing student work in schools. Also I can quite connect to the event where other
than numerical scores, evidence of student work of different types matters. As a PBL unit we did make an attempt to showcase student
work and show different areas of achievement for every student. However, since PBL culture is new to school, units struggled to prove to
parents and other unit members the importance of alternative assessments vs test scores.
Building a culture of Quality Matters. Journal work-Maintaining pieces of rough work, reflective journals, working on feedback received
and going back to reinventing the wheel is quite time consuming and requires a lot of hard work and inspires learners to be open to
change. Most children fail to capture the learning during the process and I would like to encourage this in my practice this year with a
lot of rigor involved.
Projects do not really have reputation in schooling. There are several aspects to this statement.
Projects require careful planning, right from it being authentic problem, to developing literacy through the project to assessment to
product. All these in a nutshell require a lot of insight into what works and what does not. Sometimes the most novel idea goes flat due
to some goof up. Yes good things are students are engaged and develop skills which are interconnected volumes of content which they
are able to reproduce effectively. However in my opinion, if collaborating teachers are not skilled enough to take this task, the project
remains desert project or ill structured project which does not mean anything to the learners. This kind of teaching learning needs to
be taught as we all come from a chalk and talk schooling strategies so it becomes difficult if the teacher is not able to visualize the
outcome and plan accordingly. Most projects appear to develop skills but very few end up showing connections with test scores which
may be one of the reasons why projects do not really reputation in schooling.
The power of the arts suggests one can have aesthetics in all arrangements right from poetry, diagrams, models, sculptures, dancing,
acting, drama, expository writing, displays, maps, posters, illustrations etc. I wonder when can such a thing be possible in snk?
We need expertise to be identified, collaboration to happen at the institutional level. Projects carved keeping expertise in mind and
then the school would look like one described by Ron Berger where art is seen in every walk of life. Planning projects which are at an
institutional level, creating a culture of excellence ensuring the content is covered through the project and projects carved keeping
students interest in mind.
I believe modeling the behaviour in front of student helps and students display those behaviours in classrooms. In my project
Pedal Power, while preparing a documentary as a final product, students could quite imitate the message given in the documentary:
Inconvenient Truth. Of course the message was translated to the local level and storyline carved around the same displaying statistics
and showing some recommendations for all. Giving students the choice to make decisions and helping them refine, reflect and fine tune and be passionate about the idea really brings amazing results for learners. Students were asked to explain
the good versus bad effects of using fueled vehicles, one of my learner, cam up with a unique idea of making a snakes and ladder game to explain the concept.
This task really inspired me. This student was able to translate learning into an observable behaviour which received applause from one
and all. One more group wanted to map the two houses, Loksabha and Rajya sabha to the two wheels of a bicycle and explain how the
other government bodies mapped to the parts of the bicycle make the country run in and organized manner. Amazing results were seen
when an under performer in academics was actually able to assemble the entire documentary using the relevant software. Students
got platform for showcasing their talent through this project.
I quite liked the idea of Multiple drafts and while I was reflecting on my questions: What leads adolescents to overcoming the fear of
failure while playing video games, I got my answer. While playing video games, once failure is experienced the players go back and
plays the game again and again till he/she has mastered/ cracked the code of winning. Which means doing the whole thing again and
again keeping in mind the failed attempts and making sure the same mistake does not happen again. This is precisely the meaning of
making multiple drafts, thinking about ones thinking and again redirecting the thoughts to correct the error. I was amazed to get this
insight. Again this is what honing the metacognitive skills mean. Yes reflections would help capture the aha moments for each attempt.
I am sure this would define excellence but how much time would be needed in doing so is again a debatable matter. Unless schools
embrace the concept of less but excellent work is more valued than the value of more but less efficient or semi efficient work.
Critiquing is a task which needs to be modelled else this may prove fatal for the learners and it may be looked as bullying in a
classroom situation. In a way the process is quite helpful but in some situations, if not handled with care we tend to get flowery
comments rather than useful insights.
Questions:
1) Should we as schools change tried and tested practices which work for students in the name of change?
2) Is doing less more effectively a better practice or doing more less effectively?
3) Do we as knowledge workers need to invest time in learning the art of 4C's before taking it to class?
Berger believes that excellence is born from a culture (whether it is family, community, school) that expects and supports excellence
from children. When children experience a school culture that sets high expectations, that inspires them to care and take pride in
their accomplishments, and that values “integrity, respect, responsibility, compassion, and hard work” , they begin to develop an
“appetite for excellence” . Berger proposes instead that we focus on “inspirational teaching” that insists on “beautiful, powerful and
important work” As I began reading Berger’s book last night, I couldn't help but reflect on my yester years and the many cultures of
excellence I witnessed.
I remember my school days. Being a Nirmalite I remember, there existed a culture of self discipline. Arts, craft work and needle work
were taught to one and all and we all were expected to show some level of excellence. Our teacher while checking our needle work
would see the rear end and check if there existed any knots. She did not like us to keep knots, instead insisted we make a loop and begin
our work. Each and every student got inspired by this culture. Lessons of love and compassion were constantly shared with us during
the moral science class by the nuns. Most students led an ascetic student life. I can say this is possible if the culture sustains student
interest and such practices are continued not changed.
Ron Berger in chapter one makes an attempt to convince the readers of the need of archiving student work. I quite liked the idea,
however, I must admit, I lack the ability to archive / document work of excellence and often times fail to provide some reference work
to my learners when I set my expectations with them. Since last year, I have managed to capture students work which may help the
coming batches. Yes, I am able to relate to the importance of the same in making the picture clear for others.
Ron Berger talks about displaying student work. Is good, however, I have seen work being torn without any reason and we may not
know who did it. There needs to be a culture of valuing student work in schools. Also I can quite connect to the event where other
than numerical scores, evidence of student work of different types matters. As a PBL unit we did make an attempt to showcase student
work and show different areas of achievement for every student. However, since PBL culture is new to school, units struggled to prove to
parents and other unit members the importance of alternative assessments vs test scores.
Building a culture of Quality Matters. Journal work-Maintaining pieces of rough work, reflective journals, working on feedback received
and going back to reinventing the wheel is quite time consuming and requires a lot of hard work and inspires learners to be open to
change. Most children fail to capture the learning during the process and I would like to encourage this in my practice this year with a
lot of rigor involved.
Projects do not really have reputation in schooling. There are several aspects to this statement.
Projects require careful planning, right from it being authentic problem, to developing literacy through the project to assessment to
product. All these in a nutshell require a lot of insight into what works and what does not. Sometimes the most novel idea goes flat due
to some goof up. Yes good things are students are engaged and develop skills which are interconnected volumes of content which they
are able to reproduce effectively. However in my opinion, if collaborating teachers are not skilled enough to take this task, the project
remains desert project or ill structured project which does not mean anything to the learners. This kind of teaching learning needs to
be taught as we all come from a chalk and talk schooling strategies so it becomes difficult if the teacher is not able to visualize the
outcome and plan accordingly. Most projects appear to develop skills but very few end up showing connections with test scores which
may be one of the reasons why projects do not really reputation in schooling.
The power of the arts suggests one can have aesthetics in all arrangements right from poetry, diagrams, models, sculptures, dancing,
acting, drama, expository writing, displays, maps, posters, illustrations etc. I wonder when can such a thing be possible in snk?
We need expertise to be identified, collaboration to happen at the institutional level. Projects carved keeping expertise in mind and
then the school would look like one described by Ron Berger where art is seen in every walk of life. Planning projects which are at an
institutional level, creating a culture of excellence ensuring the content is covered through the project and projects carved keeping
students interest in mind.
I believe modeling the behaviour in front of student helps and students display those behaviours in classrooms. In my project
Pedal Power, while preparing a documentary as a final product, students could quite imitate the message given in the documentary:
Inconvenient Truth. Of course the message was translated to the local level and storyline carved around the same displaying statistics
and showing some recommendations for all. Giving students the choice to make decisions and helping them refine, reflect and fine tune and be passionate about the idea really brings amazing results for learners. Students were asked to explain
the good versus bad effects of using fueled vehicles, one of my learner, cam up with a unique idea of making a snakes and ladder game to explain the concept.
This task really inspired me. This student was able to translate learning into an observable behaviour which received applause from one
and all. One more group wanted to map the two houses, Loksabha and Rajya sabha to the two wheels of a bicycle and explain how the
other government bodies mapped to the parts of the bicycle make the country run in and organized manner. Amazing results were seen
when an under performer in academics was actually able to assemble the entire documentary using the relevant software. Students
got platform for showcasing their talent through this project.
I quite liked the idea of Multiple drafts and while I was reflecting on my questions: What leads adolescents to overcoming the fear of
failure while playing video games, I got my answer. While playing video games, once failure is experienced the players go back and
plays the game again and again till he/she has mastered/ cracked the code of winning. Which means doing the whole thing again and
again keeping in mind the failed attempts and making sure the same mistake does not happen again. This is precisely the meaning of
making multiple drafts, thinking about ones thinking and again redirecting the thoughts to correct the error. I was amazed to get this
insight. Again this is what honing the metacognitive skills mean. Yes reflections would help capture the aha moments for each attempt.
I am sure this would define excellence but how much time would be needed in doing so is again a debatable matter. Unless schools
embrace the concept of less but excellent work is more valued than the value of more but less efficient or semi efficient work.
Critiquing is a task which needs to be modelled else this may prove fatal for the learners and it may be looked as bullying in a
classroom situation. In a way the process is quite helpful but in some situations, if not handled with care we tend to get flowery
comments rather than useful insights.
Questions:
1) Should we as schools change tried and tested practices which work for students in the name of change?
2) Is doing less more effectively a better practice or doing more less effectively?
3) Do we as knowledge workers need to invest time in learning the art of 4C's before taking it to class?