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INVITED ADDRESS, LIVING LEGEND 2007
From Legends to Legacy: Lessons Learned in What Counts Toward
Preparing Leaders to Educate Children for Success
Mike MartinINTRODUCTION
It is a special honor to be named by my colleagues as the “Living Legend” for 2007 from
NCPEA...glad I am still alive to be here and cherish it as I move through the many changes
life has to offer. Here is what a hero of mine had to say about this phenomenon:
This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-hearted. It involves
the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one’s potentialities. It involves
the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. (Carl Rogers,
1961)It was surprising to me that preparing a talk and a paper would interrupt my current
involvement in the “stream of life.” It fact it caused me both types of stress that Selye
labeled “distress” and “eustress,” during these past few months I loved doing it (“eustress),
yet kept wishing I didn’t have to (“distress)! Selye (1956; 1974) suggested that we save stress
for meeting new challenges so we would have the energy to take them on. So I welcome the
challenge and the energy it has given me to think about my 42-year career in education, and to
share my ideas with my valued colleagues. Jack Culbertson, an earlier Living Legend and
my former boss at UCEA told us when we had a difficult assignment: “Have the courage of
imperfection, don’t let perfection paralysis take over your life.”
Thinking about that quote from Jack stimulated me to think about past colleagues,
theoreticians, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners who had an impact both on my
desire to learn and, to help others learn, particularly as I watch my grandchildren experience
school for the first time.
The idea for the talk and paper came from an old memory of past courses (We called them
“domains”) where students had to investigate the work of past scholars, and report on the
implications of their ideas for 21st Century educators...I called it, “hooked on classics”.
Always a fun dialogue with classes given my history background where the purpose is to
“interpret the past, for the purposes of the present, with a view to managing the future.”
(Gaddis, 2002). Dewey asserted: “knowledge of the past is the key to understanding the
present...the true starting point of history is always some present situation with problems.”
(Dewey, 1910; 1915). Problems we do have, along with opportunities to shape the future—if
we can learn from the past.
I hope I can follow that advice, as well as that of Schon (1990), to be a “reflective”
practitioner and think about my experiences and learn from them through both deep thinking
and reflection and share them with you from my personal and professional perspective. My
experience with both “reflection” and learning all started with my student teaching career in
Santa Barbara in the early 60’s,and has grown ever since, whether I was teaching secondary
Michael Martin, Emeritus Associate Vice President, University of Colorado System