I was listening to the sports talk radio show Mike and Mike in the Morning the other day and one of the hosts Mike Golic said, "They don't do the bench press on the 50 yard line." He was making the point that the game of football is more than speed and strength. Those things are important and need to be trained for but doing only those things would miss out on the big picture. It is necessary to play together as a team to be successful with the ultimate goals of football teams.
I always find a way to relate everything I hear to work but I don't feel that it is too much of a stretch to see how this analogy works with the CHS work this year. It is a vast over simplification of the process that we are going through but it does help explain what we are trying to achieve. In my last post, "The Circle," I spoke of the path that we are following, 1) District Goals, 2) CHS Mission and Graduation Expectations, 3) Overarching Competencies, 4) Courses, and 5) Competencies. Each of these steps, from 1 to 5, act as filters for the next. Each filter needs to inform the step that comes after so that the main goals of the school will be fulfilled. (Fulfilled? Yeah, that's a little over the top by you get the point.)
To continue with the football analogy, consider an extreme example. What if all a team did was work out in the weight room? They could work out to the point that they were the strongest team in the league. This would help them and they may win a few games based just on strength. But they could probably be beaten quite easily by a moderately strong but cohesive and well coached team. The team that only worked out in the weight room would have missed the big goal in favor of focusing on one of the smaller aspects of football preparation.
When you have an ultimate goal it is also sometimes necessary to filter out some other goals and that is what we are doing this year at the high school. With our work on graduation expectations we are trying to always filter what we do by thinking about the graduate that will walk across the stage in June. What do they need and what would we like them to be able to do? This year in the NFL the New England Patriots may have to do some filtering as they near the end of their season. Their stated goal for this year, and every other year, is to win the Super Bowl. This year, though, they also have the chance to go undefeated. This has not been done since 1972 (or somewhere around there) and would be an amazing achievement. But going for the undefeated season might actually hurt New England's chances to win the Super Bowl. If an important player was hurt in chasing the undefeated season and was not available in the playoffs it might cost them their larger goal.
I remember a game in the 90s where the 49ers were 14 and 1 and going into their last game. They had a chance to win at one point but didn't push too hard, wound up loosing the game and ending the season with a 14-2 record. At the time I was young and didn't understand the big picture. I was confused as to why they had not put in all their best players to try and win their last game. After they won the Super Bowl that year I realized that they had been filtering their goals. 15-1 would have been nice but a total waste without a Super Bowl victory. They chose 14-2. They sacrificed one smaller goal to achieve another larger goal.
As we continue with our high school work this year there will be times when we have to do the same thing. We aren't trying to win a football game of course but we do have the ultimate goal of preparing that student that walks across our graduation stage. Just as a teacher would consider all of the little details of their course that they could teach--but don't because they miss the big goals. In biology teachers have decided in recent years to not focus so much on very minor details like alleles. (Do you know what alleles are? Don't worry about it, most likely you are still a highly functioning member of our society--and that is the whole point.) They looked long and hard at their course and decided to leave out (or de-emphasize) some details in favor of the big goal of having biologically literate students. Now as a school we are trying to work with doing the same thing. What are the big goals that we have and what are the smaller things that we can filter out so that they don't interfere with students meeting those goals?
These are not easy questions and this will not be easy work.
