Prologue

Test for Echo

One of my loves in life is immersion through storytelling. Not only is there an art to storytelling, but there is a science behind it as well. It seems, in one way or another, my entire life has been engrossed by the arts, the sciences, and discovery learning via storytelling. Collectively, they have had an intertwined, profound impact on me, personally and professionally. 

The arts and sciences have composed a great many chapters in the story of my life. Throughout my being, I have embraced storytelling as a learner, a teacher, an instructional leader, a professor, a musician, and as a father, raising twin daughters along with my wife, as reflective narratives alongside pathways of the journey.

As a young learner, I once read if you think back to your earliest memories, they tend to be hurtful, jarring, or profound experiences that created everlasting impressions. The remembrance of these experiences, seemingly, make these recollections important portraits of our initial discoveries of the world. Whether there is any truth to this assertion (I will leave that to Sir Frederick Bartlett and contemporary cognitive psychologists to sort out!), I clearly recall three memories that all occurred when I was about three years old and living in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood. They are among the earliest musings in my life’s story. One involves me saying the alphabet with my friend Lorenzo on my family’s second floor apartment’s back porch while looking at the Music Box Theatre’s marquee, another involves me falling from the top of a slide at Greenview Park, injuring my cervical vertebrae and fracturing the right frontal portion of my skull, and a third took place at Lane Tech High School on Chicago’s Northwest side. 

I am certain of my age for all three of these memories, as they took place while we were still living in an apartment on Bosworth and Grace Avenues. We lived in our apartment on Bosworth for just over one year. The two flat we lived in was owned by an Italian family with a son, Lorenzo, who was the same age as me (Lorenzo and I have remained lifelong friends ever since for close to 50 years running). My family was from Ireland and Lorenzo’s family was from Sicily. Our parents, having emigrated from Europe and navigating life in America, had a number of similarities and differences that made them all “famiglia” familiarities.

My oldest brother Charles, who is ten years older than me, was in eighth grade at the time and wanted to attend Lane Tech High School, which is a selective enrollment high school in Chicago. In the early 1970s, if you wanted to attend a high school other than your neighborhood high school and you lived on Chicago’s Southside, you applied to Lindbloom. If you lived on Chicago’s Northside, as we did, you applied to Lane Tech. Lindbloom opened up in 1917 and Lane Tech opened up in 1908, and they are still providing educational opportunities for students today. 

Fly by Night

In 1973, my mom, Charles, and I attended an open house at Lane Tech for eighth grade students considering applying for admittance. I clearly recall the JROTC students scattered throughout the school welcoming visitors (Charles wanted to join JROTC if admitted). I also recall the sheer size of the hallways, immense shop spaces, the statuesque, imposing clock tower, and the overall colossal magnitude of the building and campus; forever ingrained as a cache of consciousness. 

What I recall most from that day, in addition to the enormity of the facility and grounds, is walking and brushing one of my toddler-aged hands against the slick, cream-glazed bricks rising halfway up the hallways, while my mom firmly held my other hand in hers. I recall the wall’s irresolute textures as my fingertips brushed from velvety, smooth brick down into jagged crevices of mortar, and then back up again. Those tactile sensations, creating rhythmic patterns in synesthetic unison, were cognitively (and joyfully!) imprinting until…that is…my mother noticed what I was doing. 

Chris and Charles

Chris with his brother Charles (LT JROTC 1974)

I remember my mom stopping in front of one of the JROTC students and yelling with her brogue, “Crrrrriste’fer! Take yer bloody haans af’da wall! Yer gettin’ dem dirtee!” I remember my mom spitting on a Kleenex (she would continue this hygienic practice for years to come, especially while at church) to clean my “unclean” hand. Her maternal technique was intended to ensure my hand, and then, of course, the other, remained sterile, in their own special way, for the remainder of the visit. After washing my hands in freshly produced amylase, and ensuring they were completely disinfected, off we went, to finish our tour.

I had never been in a building of that size. Each time we walked into one of the first floor shop rooms, it felt like we were walking into a completely different building or locale. On that basis, as well as my eventual understanding that the facility was built for “kids,” the walkthrough made a lasting impression. Charles would go on to get accepted at Lane Tech and we would visit the school a couple of times each year for parent-teacher conferences. We also lived in the neighborhood and used to pass the school quite often. It was a place for playing in the summer, with an enormous lawn for running, as well as possessing the neighborhood’s largest parking lot, destined for riding our bicycles.

Chris 1987 at Clark (River) Park behind Lane Tech

Permanent Waves

When I returned for my own eighth grade tour ten years later, I remember noticing it was as if nothing had changed on the inside of the building. Aside from the aging wood, plaster, paint and classroom furnishings, nothing had changed. Like Charles, I too, was accepted and attended Lane Tech. Several years after graduating from Lane, I returned, only this time as a college senior, assigned to my alma mater for my student teaching practicum. After graduating college, I began my illustrious career as an educator at a vocational high school on the westside of the city. Years later, I applied for an open position at Lane Tech and was hired as a biology teacher. 

Still, after all those years, which could now be counted in decades, I had returned as a teacher and nothing had changed. The facility and classrooms looked evermore “rustic,” and as an instructor, I was intimately aware there were no new, innovative programs being introduced to continue transforming the school.

I taught biology at Lane Tech for several years and eventually transitioned to a district position in my administrative pursuit as an instructional coach in Chicago’s Englewood community. After some time, I was offered an opportunity to return to Lane Tech (once more!), only this time as an assistant principal, where I oversaw curriculum for almost six years. Finally, with thirty-nine years passing since my first visit as a tachrán, I was named principal at my alma mater.

Signals

Although I loved serving Lane Tech as an instructional leader, there was one patterned, and ultimately predictable, occurrence that would repeat itself over and over, and I used to dread hearing it. When I began serving as an assistant principal “alumnus,” I was the natural administrative liaison for welcoming and meeting with visiting alumni. I always enjoyed meeting and chatting with fellow Laneites. Some graduates would return from as far back as classes from the 1940s. Listening to their stories about the school from “back in the day” were engaging narrations that naturally captured my curiosities. However, what I found difficult was that visiting alumni would inevitably declare, “Nothing has changed!” Sadly, they were largely correct. 

Over the years the school had closed almost all of its famed shop classes and almost every large shop space was filled to the brim with trash and discarded, broken equipment (this was the one difference they always identified). Various forms of equipment had accumulated for decades under many, many principal teams who had accepted the closure of tech programs but added no new innovative instructional programs to replace those that were lost. 

Dr. Christopher Dignam LTHS Office 2012

The solution had been, for many, many years, to simply add additional sections of physical education electives in place of the tech program sections that went adrift. The intent was to solve a zero-sum programming (and budgetary) problem and hire additional physical education staff, with the belief they would also serve as coaches. The reality was the vast majority of new physical education teachers would eventually stop coaching and the addition of physical education electives did not add any academic value in terms of student growth. 

Likewise, by the time I was a seasoned assistant principal and being offered the opportunity to become principal, the school had many active junior and senior students taking as many as two, three, and in some cases, up to four physical education classes during their upperclassman years of high school. This accepted curricular pathway was not supporting the academic needs of learners to the best of the school’s potential. The vast majority of students were college-bound, but the rigor of our accepted program of sequence was not aligned to the school’s college preparatory vision. 

 

Principal Dignam during innovation spaces ribbon cutting ceremony

Hemispheres

Lane Tech’s name, as it turns out, had changed several years earlier to Lane Tech College Preparatory High School. It was apparent our program of sequence and lack of creative curricular offerings to replace lost tech courses were lacking. We had added virtually no new innovative curricular pathways or initiated new, creative facility learning spaces to support rigorous, college ready (and fun!) teaching and learning. 

Almost every large room on the first floor, the very reveries that made such an impact on me as a preschooler, were going unused. These instructional spaces measured 3,000 to 4,000 square feet each, and in some cases, they measured upwards of 8,000 square feet of untapped instructional space possibilities. Rather than simply continuing our practice of not addressing college preparatory deficiencies (that would have been the easy route) I began networking and planning potential solutions for creating meaningful, innovative, instructional spaces.

All of the first-floor classrooms that had made such an impression on me decades earlier, represented prospective new, innovative curricular programmatic possibilities. They also afforded opportunities for me to be creative, innovative, and employ distributive leadership for the redesign of each aspiring instructional space. 

In my mind’s eye, each space represented the tonal, instrumental colors of paint on the artist’s palette. These collective intuits, initiated as a child’s cache of consciousness, and coalescing nearly four decades later as applied instructional leadership, are chronicled in this publication.    

 

Chris Prologue Quote

Power Windows

Throughout my life, I have maintained a journal of my life’s journey. These entries have included my personal and professional experiences, warts and all (although I consider them all to be different types of dimples!). I have also maintained memoirs of meaningful interactions I have experienced along the pathways of life. These interactions have included roads walked and trails crossed with the people I know and those whom I have met along the way. These travels, interactions and partnerships are profoundly responsible for the majority of my professional accomplishments. I am grateful for each.   

On many, many occasions, however, some of my most meaningful companions have been people I never actually encountered. Strange as that may seem, life’s greatest teachings have often come through the words of authors and poets, the songs of writers and performers, and the works of creators and designers I never met. Essentially, I know them but they do not know me. They are my life’s coauthor storytellers and they are embedded within each passage of this work. 

My hope is the installments I have memorialized, as a collage of digital graffiti, serve as inspiring pathways for transformational, innovative teaching and learning for fellow instructional leaders, teachers, and lifelong learners. 

Moving Pictures

As a result of my personal and professional experiences, I have learned that nothing changes along the pathway of life unless you stop setting bricks along life’s trails. There are many paths we can choose to continue growing personally, and professionally, throughout life’s journey. However, there is only one path for not changing and evolving, and it is not a path I choose to follow. I choose to lead.

From the eyes of a child, and through focused vision as a leader, I recall firsthand my inspirations for learning, creating, and leading and I hope this particular compendium serves to influence others, from vision to fruition. 

Chris
May 2022

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