1. Draw a fast line.

2. Draw a bumpy line.

3. Make a line that is broken into pieces.

4. Draw a jagged line.

5. Draw dark and light. Draw big and little dots.

6. Hold your pencil on the very top and draw feathery marks.

7. Close your eyes and draw large circles.

8. Use the edge of your pencil, not the tip, and make short dashes.

9. Put your pencil in the less-dominant hand and take your pencil for a walk around your entire page.

10. Put a drawing tool in each hand and make lines that cross one another.

Now look at all the drawings together. What do you see? They are all different. There is no right way to draw these varied marks. We each have our own way to draw a bumpy line or a fast line. In a classroom this is a way to see each person as an individual in a visual way. It is concrete. “I can never draw a jagged line like you,” she says.

2. Trust yourself.
Believe in YOU. Trust your own line. This is true for drawing and for everything else you embark on in your life. Inside, there is a part of you that knows what to do and you have to learn to trust that knowledge. Find your own visual voice — trust the way you make marks or lines on a page. Trust your innate Drawing Mind.

3. There is NO right or wrong way to draw.
You cannot make a “wrong” drawing. We all draw differently and that is something to celebrate. If 100 people drew a tree, all the drawings would look completely different and that is the power of drawing. We have our own visions and ways of expressing that vision. There is no “right” way to explore the world around you visually and we all do that in different ways.

4. Follow through and try.
Come on this drawing adventure and try out different ways to draw.  It may feel funny at first, but the only way you’ll learn is to try.

5. There are no mistakes (and no erasers).
Don’t worry about making “mistakes” because in drawing there are NO MISTAKES. See what you can turn a “mistake” into. Discover something new. For many scientists and artists, their “mistakes” become new discoveries and unexpected paths to follow. Think of a “mistake” as a possible new journey, one that you didn’t intend to travel but once you went it was better than expected.

6. Don’t be critical of your own or someone else’s drawing.
It takes courage to draw and put your ideas on paper. Be respectful of other people’s process and work. Respect your own work, too. It is easy to be self-critical and make fun of your own drawing, but let the judgment go and see this drawing adventure as a process of discovery and unfolding.

7. Take risks and experiment.
Drawing is a process that is always unfolding with each new mark on the page. Like a scientist, an artist has to take risks, follow unusual leads, and experiment with what the materials and your hands and eyes can do. Hold your pencil in a new way, use a material that you don’t often use, crumple your paper and then draw on it.  Don’t be scared to see where your line and process will lead.

Drawing is bigger than just an expressive tool for the artist it is a tool that is used in many professions and for many reasons every day by a range of different people. If we think about drawing as an act that has utilization beyond the studio walls, then we can see the potential the drawing practice has once you re-discover your drawing mind.

Explain what you mean by these three “big pressures.”
Regulatory pressure refers to the laws and policies that schools have to follow as well as the cultural values that shape laws and policies. Normative pressure concerns the norms and values that come from the professions, the pressures from the field that determine what organizations should be doing. And mimetic pressure is not the law or the profession’s way of doing things; it’s looking around at what other organizations are doing.

What’s an example of how these pressures work in school?
Say I’m a teacher. I really want to do great things for my students. I put every piece of energy out there to get these 32 kids to reach their potentials, but try as I might, I can’t reach all of the outcomes I was hoping for. There could be many reasons for this, and not all of them are within a teacher’s control. Some of them are the result of organizational dynamics, such as the way the organization might be constrained by laws and policies, or the way professionals, like school leaders, are trained to do their jobs, or the access that teachers do or do not have to best practices.

In your research, you talk about how most examinations of schools are focused on the “technical core.” What do you mean?
The technical core is the learning and teaching that goes on in the classroom. This is important, of course, and at the core of what happens at a school, but classroom learning and teaching is only one component that determines how effective a school, as an organization, will actually be. There are other factors like the leadership style of the principal, how teachers work together, understanding how teachers are motivated, and understanding how activities in the classroom are constrained by external factors, such as institutional pressures.

Why are people sometimes reluctant to think of schools as organizations?
Because people hear the word organization and think business, and many educators resist the influence of business logics and practices in the education sector.

Why the personal interest in schools and education?
The study of schools is imprinted on me. Both of my parents are committed to human development. My mom is a professor of education at Cambridge College. My dad is director of a community action agency. So there’s a nurturing environment that takes my focus toward schools and their ability to help young people fulfill their potentials.

That focus includes teaching in a public school after getting your master’s at the Harvard Kennedy School.
I ended up at a public middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y. I taught for three years; one of those years I was an instructional lead teacher. One thing I learned: Policy gets lost when you’re on the ground. Organizational dynamics come to take precedence. That’s how I became fascinated with what was happening in organizations.

Do you miss the classroom?
There are days when I really, really miss it, mostly because there is really no other professional experience, at least for me, where the amount you invest multiplies so quickly. The 10 minutes I spend talking to this child, teaching her how to read this sentence, is so immediate and so rewarding. The way you experience human development, there’s nothing like it.

What kind of students do you hope to see in your classes here?
Students who say, “I want to improve education, either at the building level, state level, or national level, but I have to understand how schools work.” Being able to recognize the importance of organizational dynamics is critical.

You love reading trashy fantasy novels because the …
Trolls and wizards let me use an entirely different part of my brain than that required by my research. It’s like letting my research brain take a nap without actually going to sleep.

PELP
For the past four years, Tom Boasberg, superintendent of Denver Public Schools, has brought a team to the annual Public Education Leadership Project (PELP) summer institute, where leaders from urban school districts learn how to apply management concepts to the challenges they face.

FACULTY RESEARCH
Lecturer Karen Mapp, Ed.M.’93, Ed.D.’99, former associate professor Mark Warren, and 15 doctoral students include a chapter on Denver in their new book, A Match on Dry Grass: Community Organizing as a Catalyst for School Reform.

CURRENT STUDENTS
Two current Ed.L.D. students from cohort 1, David Rease and Alex Smith, are doing their residencies with Denver Public Schools. They are assessing data systems and trying to improve academic outcomes for students with special needs and English language learners.

Ed.L.D. cohort 3 student Thalia Nawi joined the Ed School this year. Nawi was the founding director of the Denver Public School’s Denver Teacher Residency Program.

ALUMS
Alyssa Pearson, Ed.M.’03, is the executive director of accountability and data analysis for the Colorado Department of Education. Colorado state senator Mike Johnston, Ed.M.’00, was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the “7 Most Influential Educators” in 2010.

CEPR
Two projects under the Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) included Denver connections. Three Strategic Data Project fellows, Chung Pham, Tracy Keenan, and Megan Marquez, are in Denver developing an early warning indicator system that tracks student progress in the Denver Public Schools from K–12 toward high school graduation and college readiness.

A team from Denver participated in the National Center for Teacher Effectiveness conference last May, which focused on taking improved teacher evaluation to scale.

PPE
Last spring, the Ed school’s Program in Profession Education (PPE) held a four-day program called Leadership Institute for Superintendents: Systemic Reform in School Districts and Schools. It included a team of 15 from Denver.

But that’s exactly what a bunch of faculty and students asked for — blocks of time each week when no classes were scheduled so that a variety of other things could happen on campus without anyone having to miss out.

Matt Miller, Ed.M.’01, Ed.D.’06, the school’s associate dean for academic affairs, knew the logistics wouldn’t be easy, especially given that this hadn’t been done before at the Ed School. But he also knew it was worth a shot. And he wasn’t worried that the unscheduled time would go to waste.

“If we do good stuff,” he says, “they will come.”

And they have. Since the school’s Community Block pilot started last fall, faculty, students, and staff have used the three open times (Monday, 12–2 p.m., Thursdays, 4–5 p.m., and Fridays, 12–1 p.m.) to organize and attend various events and meetings. There’s a popular “nexus” series that has allowed all doctoral students time to meet. Once a month, students have hosted HGSE Debates, an off-the-record discussion of timely topics such as the Chicago teachers’ strike. During the Thursday block, the Office of Student Affairs has been running a series of diversity dialogues. Faculty members have used the time to meet with cohorts over lunch or bring outside speakers to campus to meet casually with students.

Miller says it was important for the administration to offer these open blocks. “Our community depends on us, as school leadership, to create the conditions to bring people together,” he says. “This is our version of trying to think like school principals and teacher-leaders to create a schedule that will give people time to collaborate and work together.”

In the fall, she took a Friday off from teaching and drove Thursday night to Somerville, so that she could attend an open house at a couple of education schools in the area. I also took Friday off in order to keep her company. The first one we attended was at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I remember very clearly two things from that day. First, when some of the faculty got up to describe their work, Bob Brennan, instructor in education, ended his presentation by saying, “I have to wrap up — I’m suffering from PMA. That’s Parking Meter Anxiety, for those of you not familiar with this Cambridge ailment.” And second, I was surprised to learn that one could get a graduate degree in a field called “higher education.” I had never heard of such a thing and always thought of education schools as places where teachers went.

I walked away from that day with some information sheets and a catalog in hand and, after looking through the materials, decided to apply to the Ed.M. Program. Somewhat to my surprise I was accepted, and I attended part time while continuing to work at MIT. Twice a week, I would get on the red line at Kendall and ride two stops to Harvard Square.

The master’s program got me hooked, and I stayed on for the doctoral program in administration, planning, and social policy after quitting my job. I had the chance to work as a teaching fellow and research assistant, and these opportunities whetted my appetite for a faculty career — a switch from my entrance to the doctoral program, when I thought I would continue as a university administrator.

I was fortunate enough to land a faculty position at the University of Michigan after graduation, where I specialized in higher education policy and economics. I subsequently moved on to Penn State for a decade, and last January, I began a new position as dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

And that woman whom I accompanied to the open houses? Well, she was not that impressed with the Ed School, but I did convince her to go to graduate school in Boston nonetheless. She enrolled at Wheelock College, where she received a master’s degree and became certified as a principal and special education director. And last year Anne Simon and I celebrated 20 years of marriage together.

— Don Heller, Ed.M.’92, Ed.D.’97, is dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University.

Program:

For David Sloane, a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, the best part of his work has to do with what he calls the “teaching moments” — the times when he’s helping patients, medical students, and even colleagues understand complex information or new ideas.

“I have loved teaching and learning for as long as I can recall,” he says. “From my cultural background, there is no one as venerated as a great rabbi, who is a student and teacher by definition.”

Recently, after noticing that he was turning the latter half of clinic visits into mini-lectures, he even paid homage to the online video teaching master, Sal Khan, by posting his own Kahn-like video on YouTube, explaining the immune system for patients. But as a specialist in immunology and allergies, where does the Ed School fit in? He found the connection in one of those “aha!” moments. (He says it was more of a “well, duh!” moment.) Shoveling his driveway one day, he realized that knowing something about education — learning about learning, teaching, thinking, and understanding — was the first logical step in making medical education (as opposed to medical research) the next focus of his career.

It hasn’t been easy, especially with five kids at home, ranging in age from five months to 12 years, and still working full time. But he says it’s more than worth it. “The Ed School has been a dream come true, a way for me to pursue my love of cognitive studies (neuroscience and psychology), complex systems, and philosophy, to name just a few, all under the guise of reshaping my professional identity. I am in a constant state of amazement that I have not been charged with criminally intense enjoyment.”

Are other students surprised to learn that you’re a medical doctor?
They are indeed! But when I wax poetic about how fantastic an experience I am having, I think they can see that glint in my eye telling them that this is where I belong. Either that, or that they should call 911.

Favorite class so far:
T543: Applying Cognitive Science to Learning and Teaching with Associate Professor Tina Grotzer, Ed.M.’85, Ed.D.’93.

Hardest part of trying to juggle being a doctor and being a master’s student:
The critical dimension is time. If only there were some sleep battery that I could charge up during the summer and live off during the academic year.

Typical day:
Work, part I: 7 a.m.
Classes: late morning
Work, part II: until at least 5 p.m., sometimes until 11 p.m.
Home: dinner, kids’ homework, bedtime
Homework: 3-6 a.m.

Allergy you treat the most: dairy, caffeine, pollen, or cat?
Without a doubt, allergies to medications: antibiotics, pain relievers, and chemotherapy agents. Allergy you’d least like to have: I am already intolerant to dairy, pollens, and cat. Now you’re going to take away caffeine from me as well?! Actually, I stopped all caffeine in 2009, so the end effect is, sadly, similar.

Yes or no: Do you ever see a day when asthma will be eliminated?
In the word of Matt Groening, “N-ye-maybe.”

Television or movie doctor whom you think you’re most like:
My goal is to be a cross between Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock.

Why?
Clinically competent and compassionate while simultaneously thinking logically about harmonizing quantum physics and general relativity by means of M theory.

Your blog ends with, “Beam us up, Scottie!” Are you a Star Trek fan?
See answer to the last question. I need say no more!

Read Sloane’s blog at www.pacasthma.blogspot.com.

“It’s probably our single most popular public institution,” he says. “It enrolls 90 percent of our students, and it meets a wide variety of different goals and needs.”

But — and there is a but, he adds — “if the goal is to challenge persistent achievement and attainment gaps by race and class and to play a powerful role in equalizing life chances, the history of school reform is pretty depressing.”

As he points out in his new Harvard Education Press book, The Futures of School Reform, which he coauthored with Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68, and Frederick “Rick” Hess, Ed.M.’90, there has been no shortage of ideas on how to “fix” education. Vouchers. State standards. National standards. School choice. Merit pay. Small schools. Charter schools. More money. More time. More accountability. And these are just the ones tried in the past few years.

Unfortunately, they write in the book, “if we were to honestly appraise all of this activity, we would have to conclude that the results have not been what we hoped.” When it comes to making real gains in education reform, “if we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re never going to get there.”

And so four years ago, Mehta and Schwartz decided to see what they could do. Realizing there really weren’t any existing groups talking comprehensively about what was wrong and what could be done, they took the next logical step: They started one. But they didn’t want the Futures of School Reform working group to be just academics, so they pulled people from various circles and with differing ideologies, including academics, government officials, politicians and policy wonks, practitioners already working on reform, foundation folks, entrepreneurs, and one international deputy minister of education.

When Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., was first approached, he says he was hesitant, wondering if this project would be more rehashing of the same old ideas.

“I was always worried about that,” he says. “In fact, I’d like to think that we were so aware of the tendency to rehash that we made avoiding that trap our organizing principle. When it came to inviting participants, structuring deliberations, and considering takeaways, I think we worked very hard to steer clear of a consensus format, which would simply yield more of the same — or of simply giving folks a platform to reiterate their familiar talking points.”

They also invited the world, literally, to be a part of the discussions by hosting a seven-part series on Education Week’s online commentary pages, explaining to readers, “This isn’t about one more jar of snake oil.”

As a result, there were often heated (but welcome) debates, within the group and from online followers, with a wide range of opinions on what could be done, what wasn’t working, what sounded good but wasn’t feasible, and even on what the real problems are. Core group members did, however, agree on one thing: When it comes to education reform, we’re thinking too small. Making incremental changes won’t work, given that the basic structure of schooling is the same: same teachers, same schools, same subject matter. However, Mehta says, thinking in a bigger way is a challenge.

“Inertia is powerful,” he says. “Structures are created and layered upon, but rarely fundamentally changed or transformed. Schools are critical public institutions that are responsible for children, and hence we are reluctant to change them too much. Many people benefit from the current system, and it’s not in their interest to change it. We are all imaginatively challenged. We have trouble seeing outside existing paradigms. For all those reasons and many others, it’s easier to tinker than to make more fundamental change.”

Does this mean we basically need to start fresh with schools and how we educate kids? Blow up the Industrial Age model and start from scratch? In the last chapter of the book, Mehta says he sees five options: transform, replace, reassemble, expand, or dissolve the system.

“Transform is keeping the structures as they are, but creating a teaching profession with a level of knowledge and skill that would change what happens inside those structures,” he says. “Replace is essentially creating new institutions to do the functions of the old. Reassemble is to break schooling into its components and recreate anew. Expand is linking schooling and other social agencies, and dissolve is imagining a world where students are more directly connected to knowledge and the mediating forces of schooling get weaker. Essentially I think that without making changes in one or more of those directions, we really are just tinkering in ways that won’t have real lasting changes.”

Quote, Unquote

“We could start to tackle the teacher-quality problem not by finding more superheroes able to master a hugely demanding job, or by placing boundless faith in training and professional development, but by rethinking the way we define the role so that more people might do it well. This entails ‘unbundling’ the teaching job so that each teacher is not asked to excel at so many things, and reimaging it in such a way that permits individual teachers to spend more time doing what they are best at.”
— Rick Hess, Ed.M.’90, and Olivia Meeks, chapter 4, “Unbundling Schools and Schooling”

“As the sheer volume of information increases, the portal associated with formal schooling begins to look increasingly restrictive and, in a world of direct access to information, increasingly dysfunctional. What qualifies as ‘official’ knowledge looks old-fashioned in an age when there are many possible portals for access to information and many possible ways to attach meaning to that information through the process of learning.”
— Lecturer Elizabeth City, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’07; Professor Richard Elmore, C.A.S.’72, Ed.D.’76; and Doug Lynch, chapter 6, “Redefining Education”

Consider a simple thought experiment. Suppose we could go back to square one and design the nation’s education system from the ground up, in a way that seemed most productive. Would we build an extreme, all-government system in which choice and competition are virtually absent? For most people who are actively involved in the nation’s reform movement, the answer is clearly no.”
— Terry Moe and Paul Hill, chapter 3, “Moving to a Mixed Model”

“Let’s start with what these [high-achieving] jurisdictions do not do. Several of the most significant features of recent education policy debate in the United States are simply not found in any of these countries — for example, charter schools, pathways into teaching
that allow candidates with only several weeks of training to assume full responsibility for a classroom, teacher evaluation systems based on student test scores, and school accountability systems based on the premise that schools with low average test scores are failures, irrespective of the compositions of their student populations. Nor is choice or competition a main driver in any of these countries, though several have some degree of parent choice.”
— Professor Robert Schwartz, C.A.S.’68; Ben Levin, Ed.M.’75; and Adam Gamoran, chapter 1, “Learning From Abroad”

Illustration by Deborah Putnoi

Everything changed with 9/11. Up until that moment, I was a painter, an artist. Exhibiting my work across the country and working alone in the studio. I had made that choice, left educational research at Project Zero, and decided my calling was as an artist. But after 9/11, everything shifted. I wanted my pieces of art to be more than just passive objects. I needed to be on the front lines, with people, to change something at the core of our society. As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, I knew I needed to help people see each other as individuals, as interdependent, not in stereotypical terms. I needed something simple.

The art form that is central to my work is drawing. I draw all the time. I always have a sketchbook tucked away in my bag or next to the driver’s seat so that I can draw even in the in-between moments of my life. I need to draw like I need to eat. And I know that there are others out there in schools, starving in classrooms across the country because their way in the world is through the tip of a pencil, through visual thinking, and they are not being taught how to nurture or develop what I call the “drawing mind.”

Drawing doesn’t happen in schools. If it happens at all, it is shunted to the side. I thought, How do I bring drawing into the heart of classroom learning — not as a way to develop artists, but as a thinking skill, as a language that could help students solve problems and enter different curricular material, be it a math problem or a science experiment or the journal of a historical figure? When students enter kindergarten, drawing is a natural language — stories, ideas, discoveries naturally erupt from the tip of a pencil. But quickly, students are required to learn and master writing, reading, and math. The drawing mind is shut down.

Walking into any classroom, I begin to uncover students’ and teachers’ drawing minds. For visual thinkers, it is a relief to draw in the classroom, to be asked to draw an experience instead of write about it. For the verbal/logistical learners, although perhaps uncomfortable at first using their drawing minds, they are stretched in new ways.

For most people, the mere thought of drawing something — anything — sends a wave of panic. “But I can’t even draw a straight line.” As an artist, I always think, What artist cares about drawing a straight line? As an educator, I think, How can I fix this problem? How can I teach people to find, embrace, and explore their innate drawing abilities? Even students as young as first grade will sometimes look at me in panic when I say, “Draw a bumpy line.” They ask, “But where? How? Is this OK?”

And I just say, “There are no mistakes.” In some ways, this assertion in the classroom that there are no mistakes when I come in and we draw together is the most important thing I say. Your line is your line — no one else’s.

— Deborah Putnoi recently published the book, The Drawing Mind: Silence Your Inner Critic and Release Your Inner Creative Spirit. She also creates interactive installations called Drawing Labs and just opened a community art space in Boston called Artheads Studio, where she teaches classes for children and adults.

Currently reading:

Last great read: Let me sneak in two! Amy Waldman’s The Submission, a novel in which a Muslim American architect wins the commission for a 9/11 memorial, and Adam Goodheart’s 1861: The Civil War Awakening, a wonderfully dense, almost day-to-day portrait of America coming apart.

Favorite book from childhood: There are two books I must have checked out 25 times each — so much that the librarian insisted my parents buy them for me: Visibility Unlimited, the memoirs of a barnstorming stunt pilot, and Mathematics in Everyday Things, a motley collection of questions and answers about numbers, statistics, physics, and more. You’d be hard pressed to spot anything in my grown-up life that’s like stunt piloting, but the fun of pursuing random intriguing questions has clearly influenced my work as a documentary producer. I am ashamed to admit, I have never read…anything about economics. I know it’s a vitally important subject, and lots of very smart people go into it, but I can’t muster the discipline.

How you find the time: I can’t wait in line, ride a bus, or eat a solitary meal without a serious book in hand.