The next part that we want to talk about is
the focusing stage because as we said, you can't--
you don't have the luxury of scanning for everyone,
ask them powerful, well-rounded and well-grounded questions
and then look for evidence, particularly
- as we've said in our culture - about intellectual engagement.
But then you've got to come to that place of decision -
where are we going to put our collective attention?
You notice that we're very keen on working as a team.
So, what is the focusing stage? What does it involve?
And what is it not?
So that we have a bit of concept attainment, here.
Well, focusing uses information from the scanning process
to begin to clarify where we need to put our energies.
What should we invest ourselves in most powerfully?
It might be a completely new idea, but it also might be
building from an appreciative perspective on something that you're doing,
maybe not collectively, but there's somebody who is doing well,
one of those ideas that we've learned from the health field where
you know, positive deviance, somebody doing something really well
but doing it alone and we don't know about it,
can be built into the collective life of the schools and our classrooms.
Focusing also usually requires a collection of further information
to clarify what is happening.
So, sometimes as teachers we tend to say, you know, "All the kids are disengaged"
or, "None of them are getting enough sleep anymore"
and we're trying to discipline ourselves at this stage to not assume,
to say "How do we know? Is it everybody?" and "Does it matter?"
Often it does, but we need to test some of our assumptions
and see to what degree what we think we might focus on is a reality for
most learners in the school.
We also have seen an enormous power in the focusing stage
of those schools and districts and jurisdictions that have taken a positive
approach and used emerging strengths to say, "You know what?
This is something that we could be exceptional-- we could really be
amongst the best in the world at this particular thing -
why don't we take that strength, build our self-confidence
and use that to form an identity around our learning environment?"
It might be art, it might be music, it might be drumming, it might be writing,
it might be maths problem solving, it might be scientific understanding of the marine ecology
which is important to us in our province.
But, don't think of focusing as just "What's the thing we're worst at?
Let's plug that hole and we can't possibly move on
until we've done that." There are a lot of ways
of moving forward at the focusing stage.
Here are the kinds of questions that our teams of teachers who are planning
together ask themselves. They ask themselves, "What kind of popped out
as a major theme when we were scanning?
And what evidence have we brought to thinking about that?
What are some strengths that our learners show in this area?
And how can we use that as part of our focus?"
In action research, often we have asked people to pose their focus as a question.
Helen said - and we had interesting dialogue about this -
that she didn't notice that the schools that were making the greatest gains
over time necessarily were posing their focus as a question,
they simply agreed that this is what they were going to focus on,
it might have been more like a title or a topic,
and that sometimes slowing the process down, the focusing process down,
to say, "Let's get the perfectly worded question" - which can be helpful
when we're doing graduate work - wasn't part of the intellectual scene.
So, that's been interesting for us to think about,
that simply taking a focus and making sure the energy is
moving in that direction and that we're alive to the other stages