Tag: design

Things I Know 231 of 365: Let’s kill school

Kill the mothership.

– Kendall Crolius

In 2006, the former head of San Diego schools Alan Bersin commented on his controversial approach to improving the district’s schools. Not surprisingly, I reacted strongly to much of what Bersin had to say. One comment has remained lodged in my brain since I first read the piece:

In the elementary schools, we moved schools out of the bottom deciles through a common instructional program.  In the secondary schools, the surest way to remove schools from the academic cellar was to shut them down.

I don’t disagree with Bersin, not generally. He’s certainly not the first to suggest hitting the “do over” button as a path to rejuvenating failing schools. I’m sure he won’t be the last.

In Disrupting Class, Christensen, Johnson and Horn tinker around the idea when they suggest fixing ailing schools is akin to repairing an airplane mid-flight.

An apt analogy.

Watching the design teams present today at Reimagine:Ed’s Next Chapter summit, an approach other than powering down and deconstructing occurred to me.

Shut everything down but the library.

Build out from there.

Start a 1:1 laptop program in the school with online and blended classes. Staff the library 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Host study sessions at regular intervals in each discipline. According to student interest, begin pouring money into music, drama and visual arts programs.

Still, no straight physical classes.

Still, a 24-hour library.

During the day, have students design and form student organizations with faculty sponsorship. Technically, these organizations will count as electives. They will range from urban farming to bicycle repair to yoga. At the same time, start up school sports teams with the same eligibility requirements the school had in place before (or more stringent).

In the meantime, students begin repurposing the physical space with funding saved from the reduced overhead of operating the school.

This classroom is a student-run thrift store. The school paper is next door and actually serves as a periodical for the entire neighborhood.

Across the hall, what was a long-neglected home economics room transitions to a coffee shop.

As students determine their interests, they use the library to find the resources they need to draft the business plan the school requires of any student-led venture. Most of these initiatives feature parent volunteers who have parallel careers acting as community advisors.

At night, through a partnership with the local community college, students take college-level courses with local community members. The courses are joint-funded by the school and the college. They are taught by the school’s faculty.

Students comment the spaces make them owners of the school and provide them with the flexibility and support they need while expecting high levels of learning. Teachers comment they able to design more dynamic curricula, build close relationships with their students and  emphasize knowledge, skills and understandings in ways that are authentic and deep. The parents, at first resistant, are amazed how involved their kids are in the school community. They admit life is easier now that their kids have class schedules that fit with their natural internal clocks.

College admissions offices confide they’re amazed to have applicants with diverse interests and college credit. Secretly they worry their universities’ lack of entrepreneurial options might make it difficult to attract the students of the school. Community members – frequent guests and participants at the school – feel a sense of ownership and protectiveness for the space. They take credit for the reduced crime rate around the school since their neighborhood patrol has started guarding what many of them see as the center of their communities.

no straight classes.

24-hour library

robust arts programs

student-led organizations

student entrepreneurship

community involvement/ownership

college preparation/credit

I’d want to teach there.

I’d want to learn there.

Things I Know 176 of 365: Classrooms must design away from anxiety

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,

Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not

even the best,

Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

If I were teaching teachers, I would have them read this Economist article examining a newly published German study showing a strong positive correlation between urban dwellers and high levels of anxiety.

We would discuss the study and its methodology. We’d work our way through a round of “I noticed…” “I wonder…” “What if…” and then someone would hopefully notice the smallish size of the German study. Perhaps a hand would be raised and a “yeahbut” would be voiced.

“What about this,” I would ask, sharing with the assembled teachers this 2009 New York Times Magazine article about Dr. Jerome Kagan’s decades-long research into the origins and possible causes of anxiety.

Kagan has been compiling evidence since the late 80s that shows a connection between anxiety in infants and continued anxiety in those same subjects as they move into childhood, adolescence and eventually adulthood.

These teachers and I would discuss Kagan’s theories regarding those who are “wired to worry.” Again, I would query them on what they noticed, what they wondered and their what ifs.

Using some intertextual analysis, we would then start to make inferred connections between Kagan’s work and that of Dr. Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg, the author of the Economist study.

Wanting to learn alongside, I would posit the idea that one who is both wired for worry and raised in an urban environment would seem to have the proverbial deck stacked against him.

To this person, it would seem not only that the world is a highly unstable and difficult place, but that the environ within which he lives is only working to accentuate that instability. Despite his best intentions, this person will worry, doubt and second-guess more than his hypothetical twin separated at birth and raised in a nearby farm town.

Finally, to bring things back home, I would point these teachers to Sylvia Martinez’s reflections on a recent keynote by NYU Associate Professor Joshua Aronson. We would examine Aronson’s definition of the stereotype threat – being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one’s group.

Martinez writes:

Simply putting a box to mark gender, for example, at the front of a math test significantly changed test scores – for both men and women. Compared to a test where gender was not asked for, if gender was asked for at the beginning of a test, boy’s scores went up, girls’ scores went down. If gender was asked at the end, boys’ scores went down, girls’ scores went up.

And then we would discuss the implications of these three assembled pieces on the practice of the teachers in the room.

The idea of urban anxiety makes sense to me. I saw it time and again teaching in Philadelphia. Students became distraught and anxious in the face of seemingly surmountable odds. Students completely capable of completing an assignment or understanding an idea shut down or expressed extreme doubt or anxiety. Whereas I could normally connect with and deescalate similar situations with ease, these moments required a level of effort I found deeply surprising.

For me, this creates a question of practice. Even if the vast majority of students are not “wired for worry,” the possibility students in city and urban environments could be more highly predisposed to anxiety illuminates a barrier to learning many teachers probably sensed, but had no name or schema for until now.

Knowing or almost knowing creates an imperative to change.

If the goal of the assembled teachers is to help all students more fully, if elevated anxiety levels impede that learning, and if environment influences those anxiety levels, then it is incumbent upon teachers to design a learning experience that lowers anxiety levels as much as possible.

How can you build a classroom that works against a natural proclivity for anxiety? What could you stop doing immediately to make life less worrisome for your students? What systems can you build to make your classroom, and then your school, a haven of diminished worry?

I have some ideas. I have many more questions. Mostly, I have burning sense that knowing that the designs and structures of learning spaces could be impeding the health and learning of those we are to care for means an ethical imperative to break down those impediments.

Things I Know 120 of 365: I’m pretty sure we meant to build schools

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

– Pres. George W. Bush

Think back to your school. Elementary, middle or high – it doesn’t matter. Picture the structure, the hallways, the classroom, the layout. I’m guessing you had a central location where you could stand and monitor the goings on in multiple hallways as you turned around.

Picture the materials. Cinder block. Windows that opened, but only a little. (If the room had windows.) A heating system that worked – sometimes. An air conditioning system that didn’t exist. Periodically throughout the day you heard a PA system that announced who should be where when. This was in addition to the bells or tones that sounded at regular intervals to move people from one place to another. The system was likely made complete with the addition of closed circuit cameras and metal detectors in the mid-90s.

Did I get pretty close?

Now add uniforms.

Now add 8-foot fences.

Now add razor wire.

Now you’re in a prison.

We’ve been building schools like prisons for a long time. Lately, we’ve been arguing the design has been about security. I’m uncertain if we’re protecting the students from the outside world or the outside world from the students. Either way, there’s not much about traditional school design that screams “Learning!”

Diana jokes that my classroom is more of a club house. Within my first weeks at SLA, the architects whose offices were directly under my room showed up at the door with a tape measure.

“You have the students moving around quite a bit,” they said, “We’re going to pay for carpeting to help soften the noise.” Since then, I’ve been adding to the room the way large families store things in their garages or attics.

Most recently was the addition of desks whose surfaces operate as dry-erase boards. Throw in the bean bag chairs, icicle lights, and bright paper from lessons past and the club house description becomes apropos. Oh, and their’s a picture my students drew of Neverland on a 14-foot sheet of butcher block paper. It’s hanging from the ceiling.

Levity aside, my classroom is a constant effort to build a comfortable space where people would want to read and write.

Many of my students’ initial literacy educations were in school lockdown. Seated in rows of desks facing a teacher desk, they compliantly learned how school readers read and how school writers write. They did as they were asked to do.

It was incarceration-based education.

A part of me wonders whether the education community should be looking for leadership in the work of L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca who is beta testing his new Education-Based Incarceration Initiative designed to prevent recidivism once inmates are released.

According to NPR, “Baca wants his prisoners to accomplish more than academic achievement. He wants the program to equip inmates for a better life outside prison walls. Courses in life skills like leadership and decision making give time in prison a constructive purpose.”

Not unlike the description of the physical space, replace “prison” with “school,” and you have a decent explanation of what I want for my students.