Go!

There’s a core collection of videos on YouTube that are great for use as metaphors of situations we face in education. There’s the BBC’s School Season video that shows the kindergartener heading off to the first day of school – in space. There are all those “Did You Know” and “Shift Happens” videos that make the point about our changing future. And, of course, there’s one of my personal favorites: herding cats. More than any of these, however, another video comes to mind at the beginning of this school year – a school year likely to be different and more challenging than any other we’ve encountered. It’s the video that shows workers building a plane as it flies through the air. It’s not a new video -- most of us have seen it -- but it’s timely.

Why is this an apropos video as we start the 2011-2012 school year? Quite simply, we are building a new airplane that has to take off before it’s completely built, tested, and cleared for takeoff. There’s a lot that we know about that we have to get started on this year: Common Core learning Standards (and a unit per semester), Data-Driven Instruction (and 6-8 week common interim assessments), and Professional Practice (APPR). Each of these initiatives is significant in its own right; implemented at the same time they represent a statewide shift of never-before-seen scope and complexity. To say it’s a heavy lift is an understatement. It sure would be nice to have all our curricula realigned and our units transformed to be standards-based. It would be great if all our teachers were co-laboring in effective and focused teams with common interim and data-analysis protocols all prepared and scheduled. We all wish we had our APPR plans and decisions about rubrics, local achievement assessments, and growth measures all worked out.

The truth of the matter, however, is that we don’t have all of the details all worked out – nobody does. Yet, our students are waiting… waiting for us to better prepare them for their future rather than for our past. Because they (and the world) are waiting, we have to start the year without all the answers. We have to build the plane as it flies through the air. So, the advice is simple: go.

Get the plane going with what we have and keep working on it as it flies. Get going. Go.