Transcriber: Ilze Garda Reviewer: Kristaps Kadiķis
(School bell rings)
Let me tell you some stories of our Mission Possible teachers.
These are young professionals
whom we place in schools and support
through an incredible journey of personal transformation
to become inspirational leaders of tomorrow.
Rasma was a student in my 10th grade English class.
She liked music, and fashion, and arts,
but not English, for she'd never really thoroughly studied it.
I wanted for that to change.
I tried to engage her in my lessons, but many a lesson would pass by,
and she wouldn't say a word.
I was persistent, I insisted.
Step by step, word by word,
she would say some three-word sentences and nod.
I accepted any response, but "I don't know" or silence.
Rasma was shocked.
She tried to avoid me for a while.
Three months passed,
and as we had a class discussion about school and why it was necessary,
it was coming to an end already,
and Rasma raised her hand
because she wanted to speak.
That was a superb moment for both of us.
Since then, she draws smiley faces in all her tests,
regardless of the results,
and she's a regular participant in class,
and she does all her homework.
In my first year of teaching,
I was assigned a class of 23 fifth graders.
It was a tough situation;
more than 2/3 of the kids were actually failing school.
I had to do something about it,
and I decided to involve their parents.
We held regular study evenings
where we tried to make up, to learn
math and English in an engaging way.
We used games and informal conversations
to really also build the class spirit.
I encouraged parents to identify
the strength and improvement areas of their kids,
and we jointly set goals.
Month by month, we monitored the results,
and their motivation and performance improved quickly.
There are many teachers in Latvian classrooms
who can tell such stories,
but we need many, many more of them.
We need 200,000 such stories every year;
that's the number of kids attending school in Latvia right now.
We have kids with great ambitions to become bank presidents,
and neuroscientists, and diplomats.
But we have kids who've lost their faith
in their ability to accomplish anything.
They're happy with average performance.
At school, they've learned that deadlines don't matter,
you can negotiate anything,
and as long as you pass in some work,
that's enough.
We have adults
who believe they can't learn math or science
because it's too hard for them.
We have carpenters and construction workers
who each need a supervisor to monitor
implementation of every simple task.
We have doctors, lawyers, teachers, and politicians
who cannot exercise their professional responsibility.
We have adults
who haven't learned to take charge of their lives,
while in school.
Change is slow and hard to come by in schools,
traditionally, very, very conservative institutions.
If we implemented anything
we're talking about today in education reform,
it would be too late for those kids entering first grade this year.
We need a radical shift
in the mindset of adults affecting kids' lives every day,
parents, teachers, business people, politicians,
neighbours, and bus conductors.
What we've seen, what's obvious,
is that legislative and administrative decisions and actions
haven't been enough.
In this country, for 15 years,
teachers actually have been free
to design their own curricula, to select their textbooks,
to craft their own teaching methods.
But many of them don't even know that.
Many are hiding behind in the comfort of recommended procedures
to exercise their professional responsibility.
That's why we place Mission Possible teachers in schools
to question any assumption
about how things have been done,
to attack problems in their heads,
to actually do what needs to be done
in order to change the education for the kids.
Because schools are not
- because we need a place to park
all information humanity has ever accumulated in a lifetime -
schools are not a place because teachers must have jobs,
and schools are not a place
because we can't find another use for an old building.
Schools are places where kids can find their passion
and become productive and happy citizens.
But before there can be children success stories,
we need teacher stories.
And let me tell you of a story of a Mission Possible participant,
and what it'd actually take to be in school.
This is Igors,
who came to Mission Possible
as a graduate of Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.
After a high-profile tenure,
as a Head of the Latvian Student Association,
he came to us with the ambition to be one day minister of education.
He sought greater insight
in how schools operated and what kids needed.
He taught in a school of about 450 kids nearby Riga,
he taught math to seventh and eighth graders
and economics to high school kids.
The school was located in quite an affluent local authority,
but neither kids nor their teachers had high aspirations
for who they can be or what they can become.
Igors did not have an easy time being a teacher.
He spent a lot of his energy in power struggles in the classroom,
he had low expectations of the kids,
he didn't see that all of them could actually learn math,
and projected his lack of beliefs,
which then showed in their behaviors and their performance.
After his first semester, in January,
he told us we'd made a mistake selecting him for the program.
But we reminded him that he actually had come
with the ambition to become minister of education.
He said: "Well, I did not really need that firsthand experience to be one.
I could have found out about what I needed to know,
from doing some research or from doing a survey."
Sounds familiar sometimes, haven't you heard it somewhere else?
Towards the end of the first school year,
it was clear that many, many of his kids were failing his math class.
He shifted into a crisis leadership mode.
He came out with a highly-structured plan,
used draconian methods,
invested countless hours in individual tutoring,
and his kids pulled through,
they successfully finished the school year.
The outcome was achieved,
but the journey left a lot to be desired.
We continuously affirmed our faith
in his ability to become a great teacher and leader.
He got a lot of feedback from his mentors
and, most importantly, from kids
on how his beliefs and his behaviour
reflected in their learning.
The turning point came
when in his third semester Igors went on a study trip to the United Kingdom
to visit schools in challenging circumstances,
with a lot kids from low-income neighborhoods,
many, many recent immigrant kids.
There he saw what a commited group of teachers and principals can do
to put kids in a transformational life path.
He came back with a renewed sense of agency.
He had founded it in himself,
he now saw it, that he can be the change.
His fourth semester in school was a great success.
He had decided that his goals for the students would be
to have them take responsibility of the learning.
He designed a visual flowchart for every one of his lessons,
with very clear outcomes
for what he wanted the kids to achieve,
with clear steps and exercises they had to do in order to get there.
Kids could work at their own pace.
He spent no more than 4 or 5 minutes in front of the class instructing them.
He was there to guide and provide support as necessary.
Now it was about them, about the kids.
Igors shared, upon graduation from the program,
his most significant lesson he'd learned.
The lesson he learned is all kids can and are willing to learn.
If we think that they can't, or that they are not willing to,
it simply means that the teacher hasn't found the key,
that they need to be looking.
"It's a philosophy of the strongest," he said,
"For it's really hard! You've invested countless hours in preparation
and yet failed to meet another challenge.
And it's so easy then to blame everybody else:
the parents, the school, the lack of consistency, the principal,
everybody else, but you.
But such behaviour is not productive
for you haven't found the key.
It is about the locksmith, not the key lock."
Igors is the first ambassador from the program
who has become a school principal after two years of teaching in school.
He is now responsible for
improving the life chances of 260 kids,
from kindergarten through grade 9.
One of the first things he did as school principal
was to introduce a Values Program in school or a character building program.
Together with the teachers and kids, and parents,
they identified five character traits
that they wanted to cultivate, to build in the kids as they graduate.
These were determination, persistence, responsibility,
honesty, and respect.
Any staff member in the school, from teachers to cleaning ladies,
could assign kids little tokens of appreciation
when they demonstrated behaviors in accordance with these values.
The first reaction from the teachers, as the program was being introduced was:
"We need written guidelines
for when the stickers should be given."
A very typical,
let's-have-a-scripted-document-everything approach in education,
that we see from bottom to top.
Igors refused to go down that path,
he'd learned his leadership lessons.
Instead, every Monday morning, when they had their staff meeting,
teachers shared examples
of when they gave kids stickers for their behaviors.
It's become a shared learning experience,
an opportunity for them to take responsibility
for what they do with the kids
because it's all a matter of professional freedom,
not regulations,
not rules, not guidelines.
Recently, as we talked with Igors,
he shared his most important lessons as school principal.
He thought
[that] in order to improve teacher performance initially,
what he'd need to do is to pressure them
into setting ambitious and measurable goals for the kids,
and then go after them,
monitor that teachers really do it, and that these goals get achieved.
Instead, he's understood
that it's about respect and dignity, and treating them as professionals,
and giving them time,
and allowing them to develop their own ideas.
And that's what it looks like in his school right now.
Transforming the lives of thousands of kids
will take more teachers who see teaching as an act of leadership.
It's not about mind-boggling, out-of-this-Earth teaching methods.
It's not even about state-of-the-art technology,
even though those things can help;
but it is about professionals making decisions on a daily basis,
about professional freedom
to set ambitious goals for the kids,
to invest children and their parents,
and other significant adults in achieving them,
to be able to plan effectively,
to execute your plans,
to be able to create a learning environment
where kids can thrive.
And most importantly, to be continuously evaluating your work
and asking whether you've removed
all the road blocks to kid learning.
Having been in education for about 20 years now,
this is my dream job
to be able to start at the beginning,
to form future teachers and leaders.
But, believe me, it's incredibly hard.
It requires
unshaken belief in human ability to change for the better,
an ability to keep a straight face
when you observe quite a few less-than-perfect lessons
during the process;
a deep conviction
that youthful, sky-is-the-limit ambition, and humility
can make great bedfellows;
and most importantly,
relentless, relentless cultivation of the proactive problem-solving mindsets.
The message is clear,
you can't be sitting and whining about
how bad everybody is, or how bad everything is.
The message is
what can you do to make things better?
And we see that the message is getting through to the kids,
what can I do to take charge of my destiny?
Thank you.
(Applause)