In this episode, Zac talks to researcher and graduate student Jessica Alzen about constructing teacher evaluation systems and the differences between online and face-to-face teaching.
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Sit and watch any group of novice teachers – those in their first few years, those student teaching, those teaching a new grade level for the first time – and you’re likely to here some variation of the following, “Yeah, most days, it’s all I can do just to get control of the class.” It’s a frequent question asked of mentor teachers, “How do you get control of the kids?”
Lest you think such speech is solely the domain of novice teachers, try speaking at a conference sesssion or staff development meeting and advocating a shift in practice that would mean giving students more choice in the classroom. Within seconds, a few hands will be raised, one will be called on, and a veteran teacher will say, “Yeah, that sounds great and all, but if we did what you’re suggesting our classrooms would be madhouses. It’d be too difficult to keep control.”
Good.
There is a difference between being an authority and being authoritarian (and we should shoot for the former).
If the bulk of teacher’s practices are geared around maintaining control of the classroom or control of the students, then they’ve lost sight of what’s possible in schools. Scott Paris and Julienne Turner give four key components of this in their piece “Situated Motivation.”
Sometimes, we say motivation as a white washed way of thinking about control, “That student is really motivated,” or “That teacher is very motivational.” Replace “motivation” with “control” in those two students and you get to the meat of the meaning.
Paris and Turner found out motivation, like control, is not inherent in the individual. Anyone who has planned an amazingly successful lesson one day and then felt like a ringmaster the next knows this to be true. Instead, Paris and Turner found that motivation is situated in the context of an activity. Activities, it turns out, are motivational.
Well, they can be if they include four key components – choice, challenge, collaboration, and control. The more of these components a teacher builds in to a learning experience, the more likely they are to find a class that might be construed as being in their control. Structuring lessons to include choice, challenge, collaboration, and control will move the teacher to a different role than that of authoritarian. He will find himself as he should be – an authority.
The teacher as authority knows the content of the day, knows his students, knows the community, and knows how to structure a learning experience that will produce motivation in his students. This is the role of the teacher. Contrary to the tener of much of the driving conversation about teachers, we are authorities. We are authorities of education and we must be willing to stand up and say as much.
Sadly, it is not only the reformist/traditionalist camps that are wearing away the authority of teachers, though they are those whose practice tends toward authoritarianism.
Progressives have long contrued the works of John Dewey to suggest that teachers should step back, hide their authority and let students fail as they will without assistance. This is decidedly neither what Dewey meant nor what he wrote.
Writing in his small but powerful Experience & Education, Dewey wrote, “On the contrary, basing education upon personal experience may mean more multiplied and more intimate contacts between the mature and the immature than ever existed in the traditional school, and consequently more, rather than less, guidance by others.”
What Dewey was certainly arguing against, and what does not become a great school or great community is teacher as authoritarian, dictating actions, answers, and access with little-to-know regard for students’ abilities to navigate those spaces on their own.
Control is a tempting mistress. In the absense of wisdom and the ability or will to structure motivating learning experiences for students, it is frequently the goal of many classroom teachers of all stripes. To build the schools we need, though, we must be authorities within a democracy.
A warning from a teacher during a school visit: Don’t be offended if the students don’t acknowledge you if you say hi in the hallways. They’re on silent and know they’ll get a demerit if they acknowledge your presence.
The offense is not felt at the cold shoulder from these middle school students. They are, after all, only following the rules, and what are schools for if not rules?
The offense comes on behalf of these students. At a time in their lives when norms of socialization a forging connections with others is as salient and important a skills as anything they’re learning in math class, they’ve had their legs cut out from under them with the threat of a demerit if they practice these nascent and important skills.
The silence in this school is championed by adults who claim the rule keeps the students focused. They’re not wild, crazed adolescents when they get to class if they never get a chance to work themselves up.
The counter-argument (well, one counter-argument) is that these students will never know how to de-escalate themselves when they’re outside the restrictive confines of the school and find themselves upset, energized, or otherwise worked up by something in life.
The more important argument against such repressive policies as this and others similar to it in schools across the country that put on or could put on the “no excuses” moniker is what such rules teach students about themselves. The implied lessons of the rules and how they sustain cultural power structures are dangerous and dripping with thinly-veiled racism and classism. In this school, the vast majority of the students are Latino and African American. The teachers – white.
Looking around, no one seems aware of the implied message of dominance and submission that lives within the rule of silence. There’s likely no malevolence in the rule. These teachers, to a person, will likely profess their love of the children in their care, and could probably list myriad ways they’ve worked to help students become more successful.
Creating structures where students are silenced in any way as a replacement for the often difficult task of discussing social norms, answering difficult questions and having to repeatedly model what’s expected is a cop out of the highest order and it does, students, schools and teachers a monumental disservice.
Let’s imagine the school in our example as what it could have been. Rather than a multitude of rules posted at every turn, students and visitors are greeted by a sign upon entry that reads, “Welcome to our community of learning.”
What the visitors can’t see upon entry are the frequent conversations in homeroom, advisory or whatever the common community space is of these students that focus on helping students articulate what a community of learning means and what it means to be a member of that community.
Rather than warning away possible offense at not being acknowledged if we greet a student, our host encourages us to introduce ourselves to students and to let her know at the end of the day if we have any conversations that serve as particularly good models of participating in a community of learning so those students can be acknowledged for representing the school well.
Fostering this latter community is work, much more work, than the first example. It requires adults who see themselves as authorities on helping students build community and citizenship, and it means a curriculum stocked with explicit socio-emotional supports alonside academic content. At a foundational level, a school that sees itself as a community of learners must also be a place where the adults engage in frequent conversation reflecting on who they want to be and how well the school is doing at reaching this goal.
It is much more work, but it is work with an eye toward equity, community, and being the better versions of ourselves.
In this episode, Zac talks with José Vilson about how he shapes his practice in the math classroom, why he hates “wrong answers,” and how education became his life. You can find José at www.thejosevilson.com.
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In a conversation about changes in social expectations of children in communities, juvenile advocate and community orgnizer Jolon McNeil remembered her own childhood in comparison with the worlds and schools of the children she dedicates her life to helping. “If I had gotten suspended,” McNeil said, “everyong in my family, everyone in my community, and everyone in my church would have kicked my butt.”
Today’s students have it differently, McNeil says, because of a disconnect between schools and communities, that same level of home awareness and community consequences have faded into the past for many.
While it is a tough sell that schoold should or could step in and take the space of the family, community and faith organization, there is something they can do that requires minimal resources and improves the lives of everyone involved.
Every kid needs a mentor.
Mentoring builds social and cultural capital in students, connects them with singular adults whose purpose is to support the student, and ties students to an anchor in the community.
For the community, the benefits are equally plentiful. Mentoring is an investment in the community, not in an economic sense (though that argument can also be made). Instead, mentoring is an investment in growing the kind of citizens, neighbors, and community leaders mentors want to live alongside in the coming years.
To be certain, teachers can be and are mentors to the students they teach. We spend more time with our students than many of them spend with their parents in the later grades. Connecting with students on online platforms like Facebook is a form of mentorship in that I am able to model appropriate behavior, find connection with students who are feeling lost and can’t bring themselves to make contact face-to-face, and step in as an adult when students push too far past what is acceptable conduct in any community – online or off.
Expecting teachers to be full mentors is laying an unliftable weight on their shoulders. The thick connections inherent in a full mentoring relationship require time and personal committment impossible with a roster of 150 students.
Schools can be the conduits and catalysts for mentoring relationships though.
Wanting to match as many of its students with mentors as possible, Phoenix Academy, a magnet high school in Sarasota, FL that recruits only the lowest achieving students in the district, sought to build its capacity to meet its goal by partnering with those already doing the work.
The school contacted the local Big Brothers Big Sisters office and explained their goals. BBBS said they could help. In a matter of weeks, the school welcomed representatives from the organization into the school one evening. Also in attendance were those community members school personnel were able to recruit into mentorship. Throughout the course of the evening, the would-be mentors navigated the school district’s volunteer clearance procedure and received BBBS orientation training and clearance checks en masse.
By the night’s end, Phoenix Academy had scores of new mentors on call to match with its students, Big Brothers Big Sisters made contact with many community members with whom it would not otherwise have likely connected.
Most importantly, in the weeks that followed, Phoenix students were matched with caring adults from the community in whom they could find a friend, advocate, and mentor.
These kinds of partnerships are possible in communities and schools across the country. They need only a school willing to set the goal and make the initial investment in organizing the effort.
We know the benefits of mentoring. We know the benefits of community connections. We know the strength of shared vision and goals.
We need to match kids with mentors.
In this episode, Zac got to talk with teacher Cori Saas in discuss her iterative inquiry into the role of stories in her life and in the classroom.
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I’ve been asked by Sam Chaltain to contribute to the conversation over at EdWeek around the series A Year at Mission Hill. I’ll be offering a take on each episode and interpreting some of the research that might be relevant and trying to make it practical. My second piece went live today. You can find it here. For now, you can find the first episode of the series and my first piece below.
In last week’s introduction to the new 10-part series, A Year at Mission Hill, we’re asked an important and timeless question: “How do you create a great school?”
Like most important questions, to answer it we must ask other, deeper questions such as, “What do we mean by great?” “What is the measure of greatness of a school?” and “What greatness has come before us?” Together, our goal will be to use the lens of Mission Hill as a way to collect and translate some of the best thinking and research about how to improve schools and build their capacity for greatness.
Back in 1992, Richard Elmore named a key obstacle to great teaching, and, I would argue, great schools: failing to build the collective capacity of educators beyond the application of “research-based” strategies and tricks. “In current research,” Elmore wrote, “learning means the development of understanding, or the ability to perform complex cognitive tasks that require the active management of different types of knowledge around concrete problems.” To foster this kind of learning in their students, teachers needed — and still need — a different set of tools.
If this is how the students learn, then it must also be true of the teachers.
As Mission Hill Principal Ayla Gavins points out, “Everyone has value.”
Great schools work to uncover each person’s value, and make it explicit.
Some of the most impactful work I’ve seen in this area is the work of Norma Gonzalez, Luis Moll, and Cathy Amanti in their exploration of “funds of knowledge.” Rather than performing a study in order to publish it in a journal article for a select few, these educators chose a different and more practical tack: they trained teachers in the methods of social sciences, and then deployed teams of them into homes throughout the Mexican community of Tucson, Arizona.
These teams were not there to teach parents or students how they could better students’ performance in classrooms. Instead, they were there to discover what knowledge was implicit within these communities. Rather than view the families as impoverished citizens in need of being rescued, these researchers approached the homes they studied as places already rich in value, knowledge, and learning practices. In short, they began from the assumption that when Tucson’s Mexican-American children were at home, they were continuously fulfilling Richard Elmore’s definition of learning. And then they turned their sights on the classrooms from which the teacher-researchers originated and asked: “How can we integrate these deep funds of knowledge into our own teaching practices?”
Not unlike the conversations we’ve already seen taking place at Mission Hill, the Arizona teacher-researchers engaged in after-school conversations designed to compare what was going on in their classrooms with what they’d encountered and grown to understand about their students’ homes. Simply put, they were aligning their professional practices with the lives and experiences of their students.
These stories remind us that teachers who take the time to understand the “funds of knowledge” that surround their students outside of the classroom will learn to see their students as unique individuals with distinct abilities and needs. And while it’s true that this work is insufficient by itself in making and sustaining a great school, it’s equally clear that building such an understanding among adults is an essential ingredient toward deepening a school’s capacity for greatness.
Alex transferred to SLA in his junior year from one of large comprehensive schools in Philadelphia after it closed. Toward the end of the first week, I asked him how SLA compared to his former school. It was similar, he said, many of the same classes he’d seen where he came from.
“But that learning, though…You guys are way ahead of us on learning.”
It took time for him to become accustomed to the way of doing things at SLA. The transition was a culture shift, and it wasn’t one he’d asked for.
If we had administered test, I’m sure we would have found gaps in Alex’s literacy and math scores. In conversations in class, he would often ask for clarification on historical ideas that were common knowledge to his classmates.
Using these pieces of assessment, we would have enough data to draw up a deficit model of Alex that fit him somewhere in a remedial class in a traditional school.
That wasn’t the philosophy of the school.
If you want a dipstick along the way, use a quiz or test. If you want to know what a student has truly learned, assign a project.
Throughout his first quarter with us, Alex was assigned a joint project through his English and history classes. He was to find a named building in his neighborhood and research both the building and the person for whom it was named. That done, he was to tell the story of both.
Alex selected a middle school near his house and decided a video documentary would best convey what he found.
The physical structure of the school, Alex found, had been under contract for sale to a local business. Though the contract had fallen through, it hadn’t fallen through before the district installed a new heating system as part of the deal.
Alex found the heating system hadn’t been connected or made operational. It sat in the basement unused while the inefficient system the building was built with limped along.
Then, Alex found something on the tour that changed the story he was telling. In the school’s library, he found bare shelves and was told the school hadn’t purchased a new book for the space in more than five years.
When he returned to SLA, he was impassioned. Recognizing the injustice he’d uncovered, Alex approached the editing and production of his project with new intensity. He had found something real through the asking of authentic questions, and worked to marshal all of his abilities to make the best product he could.
While Alex’s case is not the norm for all projects, it does highlight what can happen with projects at their best. Because he had been givent he scope and charge to build something of meaning that required dexterity with primary sources, interviews, storytelling and myriad other skills, Alex created something that blew the possible deficit understanding of his learning out of the water.
The video narrative he created laid out in stark relief the images he’d captured of the heating system and juxtaposed them heartbreakingly with his images of the library. After the viewing in class, his classmates gave him a round of applause and peppered him with questions, hungry to better understand what he’d uncovered.
As teachers were able to assess his discrete skills through quizzes and other assessments and and offer Alex help in augmenting the areas in which he was weakest. Because of the project, though, we were able to see the best of what Alex was capable and, in turn, she the best of Alex.
Each spring, a group of SLA juniors leave the familiar confines of Philadelphia for the foreignness of Flagstaff, AZ. They go as part of an independent trip where they and 10 students from Flagstaff raft down the San Juan river for four days, experiencing nature and America in a way few people will ever have the chance. Along the way, they stop, disembark their rafts and study collections of ancient petroglyphs left by Native Americans in a time long forgotten.
While archeologists have theories as to the meanings of these alien pictures, we don’t quite know for sure. Each year, students stand near the walls and wonder at the remnants of a people and what they have left behind.
Story matters.
This is most obvious in English and language arts classrooms. Built on narratives, fiction and non, their purpose is to connect story to its parts and parts to story while helping students access both the whole and the pieces so that they might interpret the world. Story most clearly and forthrightly matters in these classrooms. One would be hard pressed to find a contrarian ready to stake a claim in opposition to this fact.
Where we fall down in appreciating story but where it is no less necessary is in the classrooms not officially demarcated as the homes of stories. Math, science, even history classrooms are often thought to be devoid of story or of the requirement of story.
Here, though, is where stories are most necessary.
They need not be the stories of content. While helpful, it is not required that students know the stories of Pythagorus or Euclid. If they learn them, fine, but they are not required.
What should be required, and what should weigh on the heads of all teachers are the stories each of their students lived before they became part of this grade and this class in this school. What were their math, history, science, English, physical education stories before they walked into our classrooms?
Almost inevitably, we fail to ask for our students’ stories of prior experiences in school with specific regard to whatever subject matter we’re charged with transmitting. When those stories are exchanged, when a student finds an unlikely mechanism for alerting her teacher to the story of how she came to think of her self as always deficient in math, we have few mechanisms for honoring those stories.
Instead, we charge through, foolhardily focused on curriculum timelines and learning objectives for our students without concerning ourselves with our own learning objectives – understanding where our students are coming from and how we might tailor our practice to meet them at the end of their last stories so that our chapters might be more fulfilling.
This is difficult work. It requires the asking of questions to which we might not like the answers. Each year as an English teacher, I heard new students exclaim that they did not like reading, abhorred writing and didn’t even want to consider whatever it was we might consider “classics.”
The instinctual response was not surprising – put so much of all of their aforementioned hatreds in front of them that they couldn’t help but be overcome by wonder at how wrong they were to dismiss those pieces of school that had been part of stories of the failure, difficulty, and embarrassment. Not surprisingly, when I gave room for this instinct, it ended poorly.
When I gave room to their stories, though, and listened for the pieces of previous classes that had hindered my students’ ability to access content and learning, I was able to change my practice and consider thoughtfully how that year might tell a better story than the last.
It is an understandable reflex of the classroom teacher to assume the blank slate of the school year applies to whatever subject area for which she is responsible. This is not so, can never be so.
Given this, we must listen to the stories our students bring with them to our classes. We must listen to them as the first and most important pieces of data available to us in crafting learning experiences that might lead to better stories for whomever is responsible for our students after us.
Remember when you were in school and saw a teacher out in the real world? Do you remember that feeling of awe as you realized this person existed outside of the classroom? It was a mind-bending experience for me, filled with questions – Could they still grade without the classroom? Were they talking to everyone in the grocery store about the quadratic formula? Were they hiding our homework in their purses?
Then, when I was safely back in our roles as teachers and students in the classroom, I could say, “I saw you this weekend!” as though we’d caught them out of bounds. Those are times burned into our memories.
They have no place in the schools we need.
As much as we can, we must be out whole selves in the classroom.
It is easy to step into a classroom and decide, “This is my teacher self. This is who the students will see.” Then, when the day is done, we return to our nerdy appreciation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meet up with our kickball teams, or join with our fiction writers’ workshop as though the two identities are completely separate.
The separation of our professional selves and our private selves must be maintained, to be sure. Taking the problems and worries of every student home with us each night creates martyrs, not teachers.
Still, there is a place for our whole selves in the classroom.
This is the support to which our students must have access. We bring social capital with us. To ignore that and deny our students access is to do them a detriment and limit their access to the “real world.”
Whatever we were before we were teachers, we must take these roles with us into the classroom. In fact, we cannot help it, so we might as well make it explicit.
No matter the social standing of our students outside of school we must consider ourselves as conduits to the cultures they might access when they leave us. Much has been made of the “funds of knowledge” in which our students exist outside of schools, in their daily cultures. To be sure, these are cultures from which teachers should and must learn.
Little to nothing has been mentioned of the funds of knowledge existing in the non-school lives of teachers. Learning lives there. Whatever can be used by students to access the lives of their teachers can be used by teachers to access the lives of students.
As much as we must be our best teacher selves, we must consider how much of our whole selves we can be in the classroom.
A former student recently asked about how much she might share regarding her past. Now in college and preparing for student teaching, this student knew the hardships she’d known in childhood could act as anchors for her students. She knew she would have found it easier to navigate the difficult and tumultuous psychological spaces she’s encountered if she’d had a teacher in her life who’d said, “I’ve been where you are, and I found the way out.” Realizing she was about to enter the lives of her own students, this young woman wanted to make sure she was as transparent as she could be so that her students saw her as a source of strength if they were working through some of the same personal crises.
Certainly, teaching does not require we lay our lives bare for our students in hopes such nakedness of spirit will help them at our experience. When possible, though, whether it be a favorite television show or a traumatic event, begin our whole selves in the classroom gives students access not only to who we are as people, but to who they might become.