Let’s Keep this Short and Sweet!

Posted on October 31, 2022 by admin

Every time I discuss my model with educators for the first time, whatever their level or role, the response is always the same. They cannot imagine how they could ever find time to do all the things this new model envisions. Of course they are correct, when looking out through the windows of their classrooms and schools.

When we build something, even knowing what we want it to look like when all the work is done, it is not until we step back and observe from across the street that we see the finished product as an integral whole. It is only then we can see what we were actually able to accomplish. Think about how good it feels when you look at something new you have created.

The only the way the model I propose will work is if we change all the rules about how we do what we do, re-order our priorities, and change the way we keep score. Only then will it all begins to make sense. You will be surprised how easy this can be accomplished.

Here is an overview to explain why the outcomes never seem to improve for so many of our students. In my next post, I will try to do a better job of laying out the logic how of the rules and priorities will be re-organized, and how we will keep score differently.

But first, here is a look at why things have not turned out the way we all have hopeed it will.

Tens of millions of students are not meeting expectations, and not just the poor, minorities, or ESL students. This is indisputable fact. The problem transcends race, ethnicity, language of birth, and relative affluence.
In tens of thousands of K-5 schools less than 20% of students are achieving proficiency.
Despite the hype, the NAEP shows charter schools do not perform as well as the public schools they were created to replace.
This should come as no surprise as they rely on the exact same education process. Just changing the name above the door and hiring different teachers makes no difference if they are expected to do the exact same things that teachers in the public schools do.
Thousands of teachers are leaving the profession, frustrated that what they are asked to do does not work for their students and who are sick and tired of being blamed.
Kids struggle because the education process is neither structured nor designed to allow teachers to forge the quality relationships every child needs to feel special and to learn.
Students do not get the time they need to practice and learn; which forces Teachers to accept less than the best kids can do; record their Cs, Ds, and Fs; and then push them ahead to a new lesson, ready or not.
Kids are deprived of the opportunity to experience and celebrate success and benefit from the powerful motivation success instills and that also helps pull parents in.
Kids, also, are deprived of the pre-requisite knowledge on which success on next lessons depends, reducing the probability of future success.
These flaws, that set students up for failure and teachers up for blame, have practical solutions that are easy to address.
It requires educators to open their minds to a new model designed to teach the way kids learn rather than expecting students to learn the way we teach.
Discretion to act is within the purview of school boards and superintendents, already.
I’ve spent 9 years striving to convince education leaders the existing education process is not immutable and is no different than any other production or service-delivery process.
Few have been willing to look at a model that changes the way teachers and students do what they do, while teaching to the same academic standards, just not the same calendar.
The few willing to imagine what it would be like to teach and learn in such a classroom, believe the model will transform education for students and teachers.
The Hawkins Model© is like any other production or service delivery process designed to better serve customers or constituents and produce outcomes we want.
I urge you to examine the model with your colleagues and then help bring it to life.
Our children are dependent on the help of people like you and me.
The futures of our children depend on a quality education, and the future of our society depends on those same children to lead us through the balance of this 21^st Century.

Please read the Synopsis of my book, The Hawkins Model©: Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time, at by clicking on the link at the bottom edge of the black banner at the top of this page or, accept my invitation to preview the manuscript.

Mel Hawkins, MSEd, MPA

PS: Retweets appreciated

The Hawkins Model©: Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time – A Synopsis

Posted on October 25, 2022 by admin

A TWO PAGE EXCERPT:

This is the first excerpt of the Synopsis of my book and i encourage you to click on the link at the bottom of the black banner at the top of this page and read the entire document. I am seeking volunteers to preview the manuscript of my book, prior to beginning the process of querying agents in search of a major publisher. This book and model can benefit from the widest possible audience. I am specifically asking for letters of endorsements from respected educators to provide the credibility that only professionals of your stature can lend. I would be grateful for an acceptance of my invitation to read.

You are also asked to help spread this word by Retweeting and/or share the link to this blog post https://bit.ly/3MGMTks

Synopsis Excerpt #1

Frustration with and Blaming Public Education

The frustration with the disappointing academic achievement of students has been building, over the last several decades, and the evidence of the academic struggles of millions of American children is pervasive and compelling. The assumption of many is that the problem exists in public schools but data from each of the states and from the National Assessment of Educational Progress[1] (NAEP) suggest publicly funded charter schools struggle just as much if not more. Even faith-based schools that typically outperform their public-school counterparts, still have far too many children who fall short of expectations.

The temptation is for educators to blame Covid but although the pandemic contributed to a significant drop in test scores, student performance was already unacceptably low, as NAEP data from 2019 will illustrate, below. What Covid has done is blessed us with an opportunity to abandon the obsession of policy makers with keeping students moving at the same pace, from one lesson to the next. Test scores have, effectively, been scattered by the wind and to return to that objective will be futile.

Since the first version of my model was introduced in 2013, I have been encouraging educators to shift the focus to steady progress by individual students, from one success to the next, wherever we find them on the academic success or preparedness continuums. Covid has provided the perfect opportunity to implement The Hawkins Model© nation-wide.

We believe the standard against which students should be measured is “proficient” which was introduced by the NAEP as one of the “achievement levels” in which students fall. They are “Basic.” “Proficient,” and Advanced. Proficient is defined as:

“Having a demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to subject matter.” [2]

Please note, the highlighting is mine. You will see, throughout this work, we will use “subject matter mastery” and “proficiency” interchangeably.

We believe helping students achieve and be able to demonstrate proficiency is the appropriate goal of education. Many states have adopted modified versions of the NAEP’s achievement levels. Some have added “approaching proficient” or “approaching grade level” to the list of achievement levels. Unfortunately, many students who assess as approaching proficient from one year to the next, never seem to reach a point where they can demonstrate proficiency. This suggests such test results are false positives.

Blame game

Let us post our biases so everyone can see. Teachers are not the problem with education in America; just the opposite is true. All the positive outcomes of students for the last half century or more are because of the help of teachers, despite the inefficacy of the education process. Teachers are an essential variable in the education equation and the glue that holds it all together. My model and yet-to-be-published book will be dedicated to schoolteachers everywhere.

The response of leaders of business and industry, government officials, and education policy makers has been to point fingers and to assign blame, rather than initiate a problem-solving methodology to understand why the outcomes of so many students are not meeting expectations. One of the many fundamental assertions and assumptions on which this work is based is, “it is only when we stop blaming others and accept responsibility for our problems that we begin to acquire the power to fix them.” Blaming serves only to distract us from addressing the challenges facing education in the U.S.

Our challenge in the development of The Hawkins Model© has come down to the application of the principles of systems thinking[3], organizational design and development, and the principles of positive leadership that I introduced in my book, The Difference Is You, Power Through Positive Leadership[4], published in 2013. Given the axiom that every organization is structured to produce the outcomes it gets, if we want something better, we must determine what it is we genuinely want and then design and structure a process to produce those outcomes. This is the challenge we have undertaken in this work. We offer this model as gift to our nation’s teachers and to their students.

[1] The Nation’s Report Card | NAEP (ed.gov), National Assessment of Educational Progress is part of the National Center for Education Statistics, of the Institute of Education Sciences

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/tdw/analysis/describing_achiev.aspx

[3] Senge, Peter, The Fifth Discipline . . . . .

[4] Hawkins, Mel, The Difference is You: Power Through Positive Leadership, Amazon CreateSpace, 2013

To Teachers, Everywhere:

Posted on October 19, 2022 by admin

This letter is motivated by our assertion that we need to stop blaming teachers for the flaws in the education process. Teachers are heroes who should be credited for all the good things that happen in our classrooms despite the flaws of the process. Teachers are the glue that keeps it all from spiraling out of control.

No one knows what goes on in the classroom better than teachers, so who better to take on the challenge of transforming education in America to ensure the success of both students and teachers. Education leaders and administrators have the same opportunity, and should have the same motivation but, instead, still choose to focus on the preservation of the status quo; but let’s defer that discussion, for the moment.

The disappointing outcomes of students throughout America is not limited to public schools, as charter school students struggle just as much if not more, according to data from NAEP and virtually every state department of education. Even the disappointing outcomes of a significant percentage of students from faith-based schools are a consequence of an “education process” that has become disconnected from its purpose.

For some time, the focus of public education has been directed toward conformance, compliance, and testing, rather than learning and true student achievement. Therefore, so many of the activities the education process demands of teachers and students impede rather than support learning.

Each time students are pushed ahead before ready; they fall a little further behind and must strive to makes sense of future lessons without the pre-requisite knowledge those lessons require. When disappointing outcomes become a pattern, it begins to seep into a child’s confidence and self-esteem. Just as success is a powerful motivating force, the repeated inability to achieve success is discouraging. When children are discouraged their first instinct is to give up and stop trying. When this happens, teaching becomes problematic.

We have waited long enough for our leaders and policy makers to step outside the boundaries of conventional thinking and address the flaws in the existing education process; deficiencies that set students up for academic distress, and teachers up for blame.

When will the leaders and policy makers of education recognize that when a process continues to produce unacceptable outcomes no matter how hard people work or how qualified they are, the process is broken and must be replaced.

This letter is a request of teachers, teachers’ unions, associations, and other advocacy groups to help promote what, recently, one educator described as the “the next big thing in education.” Another prominent educator wrote, “I enthusiastically support a pioneering school district’s willingness to consider The Hawkins Model© as a means of improving student achievement, reducing maladaptive behavior and preparing students to be successful in school and life.”

The Hawkins Model© has been developed to transform the “education process” at work in our schools by creating an environment, focused on learning and that allows teachers to develop and practice their craft and adapt to the disparate needs of students.

This model will be offered free to any publicly funded or faith-based school willing to put the model to the test in the K – 2 classrooms of even just one struggling elementary school. The only revenue I expect to generate is from the royalties from my yet-to-be-published book, The Hawkins Model©: Education Reimagined, One Success at a Time, which was written to introduce the model. A synopsis of the book is available at my website at https://bit.ly/3MGMTks. If you are reading these words, you will find the link along the bottom of the black border at the top of this page.

You are encouraged to invite your most innovative colleagues to join you in previewing my book and model, as a group, not in search of reasons why it might not work rather to imagine what it would be like for teachers to teach and students to learn in an environment that is a learning laboratory. The manuscript can be made available to you but please recognize, it is copyrighted material over which I will need to maintain some level of control.

Let us be clear, the status quo in education is under attack and community public schools are the central target of that offensive. If it has not occurred to you, yet, the futures of teachers, superintendents and their school boards, and other public-school administrators are inextricably linked to the future of local community public schools. More importantly, the future or our nation’s children and our democracy are similarly linked.

This model provides an opportunity for community public schools to set themselves apart and you would be wise not to let “school choice” advocates get the jump on public education. Imagine how much more successful the “school choice” movement will be if their claims they can do a better job are borne out by the data. Public schools must seize this opportunity to reclaim the confidence and loyalty of the communities they serve.

Community publics school leaders can be prompted to act by the ardent advocacy of teachers. The Hawkins Model© provides a perfect solution around which teachers and other educators can rally.

Thank you all for the incredible work you do, and please join me in striving to reestablish public education as the key to the preservation of our democracy. Please share this message with every teacher you know, the broader their platform, the better.

Most Sincerely,

Mel Hawkins, MSEd, MPA