Harvard AGI Conference: Focus and Flow

Greetings from Cambridge! Today we heard from several more incredible high schools, all of which have closed or dramatically narrowed the achievement gap in recent years. Like yesterday, all of them reported a strong sense of community and an intense focus on skills.

The ideas that stuck out for me most today, though, came outside of the schools’ presentations. The first was in a conversation I had at lunch with a lady named Mary Skipper, who’s the principal of TechBoston Academy, a public high school in (not surprisingly) Boston.

One of the biggest challenges in urban education is teacher burnout – great teachers come, teach for a few years, then leave. And while I wouldn’t call myself a great teacher, my career path is definitely a symptom of this problem.

Mrs. Skipper, however, believes that teaching at her school was sustainable over the long term. To look at her staff, you’d believe this; all of the teachers she brought to the conference seemed energized by their jobs, not debilitated. In fact, nearly all of the teachers from all of the schools here today radiated energy and excitement – these were people who love what they’re doing.

Mrs. Skipper attributes this phenomenon to the concept of flow, the idea that when a person receives both a challenge and support to meet that challenge, magic happens. When you’re experiencing flow, you can perform at a high level for extended periods of time without burning out. This, of course, is the situation we’re trying to create in our students; I think Mrs. Skipper had an excellent point that the same applies for teachers as well. In schools where students are learning and performing at a high level, flow pervades.

The second major insight came up during the final session, a wrap-up in which four experts distilled everything we’d heard over the previous two days into eight minutes. Most compelling for me was Richard Murnane of Harvard’s Ed School list. According to Professor Murnane, all of the gap-closing schools we heard from shared the following four features:

• Clear focus – specifically, a single, highly strategic focus (e.g. writing across the curriculum) that led to changes in kids’ experiences throughout the day
• The use of data, coupled with the ability to find a balance between “drill and kill” and ignoring data completely
• The presence of both incentives and capacity-building
• Enormous attention to the details of the change process

While all four are important, Murnane’s last point may have been the biggest message of the conference. What you do matters, but so does how you do it. Schools close the achievement gap when they have the capacity to implement their plans.

On the whole, an inspiring two days! So many schools across the country are closing and narrowing the gap…it’s getting harder and harder to argue that this can’t be done.