Focus Matters: A Lesson from Star Wars

Remember: Your focus determines your reality Qui-Gon-Jinn

Based on my son's growing interest, my husband was excited to realize that he was ready to watch Star Wars.  With some convincing of my 8 year-old daughter to at least try the first one in the series, "The Phantom Menace" was our feature film for a recent family movie night.  When Qui-Gon-Jinn tells Anakin "Your focus determines your reality," I had an ah-ha moment.  It struck me as good advice that I needed to heed and share. 

Amidst the avalanche of education reform (Common Core, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and mandated Teacher/Administrator evaluation) it is easy to lose focus on what matters.  Let's face it, even rooted in the best of intentions and the need to close the achievement gap by ensuring the highest quality of instruction for all students, there is a lot to question about the grounding of these reforms, their impact, and the roll out (ahem...all at the same time). The inability to approach these questions in a thoughtful systemic way has created a culture of stress and concern not only in our school community, but across the nation.  It was clear that something needed to change.  

I realized to ensure the complete success of our students, the growth of our staff, and the moral of our building, it was time to change our focus.  It had to be on something other than Common Core State Standards, TEVAL/Admin Evaluation, and SBAC.  It had to be on relationship building, providing learning centered instruction, creating opportunities for students to become change agents in our school, and engaging our families in authentic ways. We needed to shift our chair and try to see more of those sunsets Jon Harper wrote about in his recent 44 Sunsets post.

So I did something that I hoped my staff wouldn't find crazy.  First, I apologized.  I explained that I was shortsighted for establishing the wrong priorities by choosing TEVAL and CCSS/Rigor as two of our three big rocks. I apologized for putting the focus on what should not be our reality.  Next, I told them it was time for a mid-course correction where we, as a community, would choose the big rocks that mattered. And then, I invited them to create the reality we wanted by focusing on what will empower and prepare our students, on a culture and climate that makes EVERYONE excited to be in our school, and on measurements beyond the "big" assessment. CCSS,  TEVAL/Admin Eval, and SBAC, under current regulations, are still a part of our requirements but there is more to a school, to its culture, to its success than these things.  Last week, we made a decision not to wait any longer to choose a new vantage point. We shifted the position of our chair to see a few more sunsets.

"But we must wait," I said. "Wait? For what?"

"For the sunset. We must wait until it is time."

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. 

And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me:

"I am always thinking that I am at home!"

Just so. Everybody knows that when it is noon in the United States the sun is setting over France.

If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like . . .

"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!" 

The Little Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupéry