Today I went downtown for a planning meeting for the Fondren Reforming Schools Summer Institute and then had a lunch meeting with Tim to brainstorm ideas for future training and support sessions. One idea that came up in both of these meetings was the importance of modeling.

For example, one of the strands in the FRSSI is infusing arts into schools. How can we as planners and facilitators in the FRSSI infuse arts into the experiences that the participants have at the Institute in July? How can we walk the walk instead of just talking the talk? We came up with some fun ideas, but they need tweaking. . . .

As Tim and I were talking later, we pushed the idea of modeling even further. How do CFG facilitators model skills and practices? How does the Houston A+ Challenge organization model the practices that it values in schools? Could the HA+C create a portfolio to model reflective practice?

One of the main purposes of this blog is for me to model reflection and documenting my own work. As I work more closely with the Teacher As Researcher grant winners, I think I need to figure out ways to better model my own inquiry.

I started taking guitar lessons back in February, and I am really enjoying learning a new instrument. You may be thinking, "What do Donna's guitar lessons have to do with CFG's?" A lot--because learning how to play the guitar is helping me reflect on my own teaching and learning in different ways.

For example, one thing that I really like about my guitar lessons is learning so much theory. I think that my piano background has helped me quickly progress on the guitar since I already know the fundamentals of music. However, there is one huge difference. When playing piano and oboe, my goal was always to play the composer's vision--to play the written notes on the page.

Now, I have to learn how to improvise more. I have to broaden my own vision--to look at many possibilities and make decisions about what sounds best for my purpose.

This whole guitar-playing experience may actually turn me into a better, more divergent thinker!

For a few weeks, my guitar teacher has been working with me on some chords for a blues sequence--the rhythm part or background part. Last night, he taught me the a minor pentatonic scale so I can start improvising the lead. It was very difficult for me to just lean back and improvise--to let the music carry me away. My teacher joked that maybe my life is too happy to play the blues. To a certain extent, that's true. In many ways, I am living exactly the kind of life that I want to live.

When I shared this conversation with my husband, he helped me remember some experiences that were more doleful. So now I can work on the "I'm a new momma, and my twins won't let me sleep blues" and the "I'm a first year teacher and nobody listens to me blues" or the "I'm part of the 'Religious Left' and there is nobody for me to vote for blues."

One of my jobs is to administer the Teacher As Researcher grant. As someone who has been involved in writing several grant proposals, I must say that I've enjoyed being on the other end of the process. Composing the RFP was fun, and reading the varied applications was fascinating, but the actual scoring was surprisingly difficult.

Let me make it clear that I did not officially score any of the proposals. Since I know several of the applicants, we decided early on that only the external review team would score the grants. When the review team met, I asked them to reflect on the process of reading the grants. Here are excerpts from the reflections and my musings on what can be done to improve the process.

The K-16 CFG met on Thursday, May 20, at the Northwest District Office. Present were Lance, Janet, Jonett, Lidia, Carolyn, Donna, Michaelann, Mary, and Marcela. The meat of our meeting was Lance's giving us a taste of the professional development he facilitates using Developing Mathematical Ideas.

He started by asking us to add the numbers 68 and 24 in our heads. When we got an answer, we gave a thumbs up sign and waited for everybody to finish. Then, Lance scribed our answers and, most importantly, our thought processes for getting to the answer. For example, I thought, "60+20=80 and 8+4=12. Then 80+12=92." Each of us had a slightly different strategy, and it was interesting to talk about the different approaches to such a simple problem.

Then we read a case study about addition from a sixth grade teacher. We read how different students in her class had solved the problem and we applied their methods to solve a different addition problem (27+24). Together we talked about the logic behind each student's procedure and what children need to be able to understand about numbers in order to solve math problems in these ways.

This written summary in no way does justice to the experience. I think it's safe to say that we were enthralled by Lance's work. We learned so much about numbers--even though Lance did not actively teach us a thing. Through skilled facilitation, he created an atmosphere where people shared ideas and could learn from each other. In fact, Lance mentioned that his experiences with DMI have helped him reconnect with how to facilitate. The DMI experience is sort of like CFG's with math. The participants meet regularly, share their own student work, read case studies, write case studies, etc.

It makes me wonder if this is a direction that CFG's in general need to go. Can we inject more content into CFG's? It seems like the impact on student learning would be easier to measure that way. This is obviously powerful stuff--at least a third of Thursday's participants have already contacted their principals about their campuses being involved in DMI next year.

I just re-read an interview of musician Gillian Welch that appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine in July 2003. Here is an excerpt.

I [interviewer Scott Spencer] wonder aloud if she is hoping this new record will allow her followers an even more intimate knowledge of her.
Gillian lifts her strong, chiseled chin and thinks about it for a moment.
"Yes," she says finally. "I'm striving toward that. I recently met Willie Nelson, and he asked me. 'If all people knew of you was your work, would they know you?'" She pauses and then offers a tentative smile. "I'm getting to the point where I want the answer to that to be yes."

That passage made me wonder what people will learn about me by reading this blog. What messages about my values are included in these texts?