still here...

Seems The Paper Graders have been swamped by... well, grading papers.

It's the end of the semester--finals next week. It's difficult to pull of much more than school at this point.

Just wanted to let you know we're still here, still thinking/discussing teaching, just haven't gotten the thoughts on the screen for a while.

And now I return to the paper grading...

M. Shelley

Race to the top?

I got in an argument today with my dad. He's becoming more and more of a curmudgeon these days (can't blame the guy, though).

The subject of our argument had to do with the conversation on Meet the Press this morning between Arne Duncan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich, a trio that has been touring the country to look at schools and talk about what direction education policy needs to take in the years ahead.

I just happened to catch this 20 minute conversation while I was walking on a treadmill in a hotel fitness center this morning. I don't have TV at home, so had it not been for the particular circumstances of this morning, I would never have seen this.

The first thing my dad said to me when I entered his living room later in the day was something that asked me to agree with him that the conversation on Meet the Press this morning was thoughtful, balanced, and thought-provoking.

Well, I had already discussed with my husband this morning over breakfast that this was not exactly my assessment of the Duncan/Gingrich/Sharpton Meet the Press dialogue. To me it was one more example of educational discourse that looks at our public schools only in terms of the extremes (it opened with stats about the public schools in Washington DC--while the stats are true and horribly sad, they contextualized the conversation within a view that public schooling in America is failing all of our kids dismally). There was a good amount of conversation that demonized teachers (without considering the horrible, impossible conditions that some teachers are asked to teach within--a massive failure of our system as a whole). There was anti-teacher union sentiment. There was a promise from Duncan that none of the Race to the Top money would be doled out to any state/district that didn't tie their reform plans to test scores.

In short, it was a group of politicians (with NO actual educators) sitting around discussing the needs of educational policy in our country.

My dad is proud of Obama for challenging the teachers' unions. Now, I'm not exactly the most fervent fan of teachers' unions, but they are there for a reason. Teachers have a history of being treated very badly by their school districts. My dad said to me, "you're a good teacher and everybody knows it--you don't need the protection of the teachers' union." Well, until I feel valued for my experience and expertise by my district administration because I see them placing a priority in all of their decision making on valuing teachers, I will still see a need for a teachers' union in my district. My dad made a sweeping statement writing off teachers' unions for protecting bad teachers. Sure, that happens, and I don't like it--but teachers' unions also protect the rest of us who work unbelievably hard.

I told my dad that so far Obama's educational direction is not really a dramatic change of course from the No Child Left Behind bus driven by W. What we certainly don't need is more mandated testing and holding teachers accountable to test scores. The tests are flawed for a whole range of reasons (see the link below for someone else's take on some of those reasons). I do not oppose higher standards or meaningful, rigorous assessment in public schools. I do not oppose requiring districts to examine their test score data by the sub groups of student population within their school and to use that test score data to identify the groups of students who are struggling the most and find ways to close those achievement gaps. In a nutshell, those are the requirements of NCLB, the most recent revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been around since 1965 and responsible for scores of significant and important educational reforms in this country. What I have a problem with is the mandated high-stakes testing--meaning real world consequences for schools that don't make the grade on test scores.

If the tests were meaningful and rigorous with a minimum of fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice test questions, I might be able to get behind it. But they're not. We do not have a testing industry that can support meaningful tests at the scale that federal law requires. So we're left with the tests that are able to be scored efficiently.

But there is nothing efficient about measuring what students truly know and are able to do. It's a messy, complex, nuanced process. And that--as I tried to make the point to my dad today --is why I had a problem with Meet the Press this morning. There are probably scores of Americans who now think they are more educated in this issue after watching that program this morning. But they have no idea how nuanced and complex public education in America is. There is NO simple fix for reform. Each school and district is its own universe with its own unique community context that spills into the school in myriad ways to affect what happens in classrooms. I happen to work in a district situated in a research university town--you bet that spills into our classrooms. The community expectations are high enough that on the whole we believe our students can achieve. And most of them do. You might not believe what we are able to accomplish here at the high school level with many of our students. F. Scott often says that essentially our students are getting a private prep-school caliber education for free. And he's right.

But that doesn't mean that we can't still do better. And we want to. And pressure to tie all of our reform ideas to scores on our state test is not what will make for meaningful reform. Actually--we'll enact meaningful reform, unique to the needs of our students in our community, simply by working together to work on the problems particular to our school context (an achievement gap for our second-language learners, students in the non-IB/non-AP courses who are generally disengaged from school, an impending doom that threatens to bring budget cuts of 6 to 9 percent next year when we are already trying to manage huge class sizes...).

This was going to be just a short piece to direct your attention to the Open Letter to our President that I came across today in the Edurati Review because I believe it gets into some of the nuance that I thought was lacking from Meet the Press this morning. But apparently I had a lot to say (either that or I'm just avoiding the stack of grading and other things I have sitting here staring at me...).

By the way, speaking of the stack of stuff staring at me--in a few weeks, F. Scott and I have agreed to capture here (as well as we can) a typical week in each of our teaching worlds--all in the spirit of helping others to understand what it looks like to do the work that we do.

Signing off,
M. Shelley

Why federal "RTT" reforms won't work...

This is maybe the best articulation ever of why current reform efforts underway in our nation's capital will not work. Funny- it took someone who actually knows education to point it out.

Marion Brady on The One Reason Duncan's Race to the Top Will Fail at Valerie Strauss' Blog at The Washington Post.

Brady says (succinctly) all the things I have wanted to say for years. I think she has it nailed.

Thanks to Schools Matter for passing this along.

F. Scott

Real change?

I'm supposed to be writing a paper (the same paper I've assigned to my students to show up in rough draft form tomorrow). Procrastination sets in so I'm writing, but here instead.

In conversations with colleagues over the last few days, I've gotten to a place where I feel somewhat stuck. Or maybe overwhelmed.

It's one of those times where I feel like I just want to shut my classroom door and do my own thing despite what the rest of the school is doing.

But unless there's some way to enact real change in the rest of the school, I will not be able to realize the hopes and visions I have for my students.

See, I really truly want to figure out what it means to teach language arts to high school students in ways that will meaningfully prepare them for success in our ever-changing, complexifying world. The jargon for this is 21st century skills. What does it mean to create a 21st century high school?

I am willing to chase this question, even if it means I have to throw out everything I've done before and remake my classroom and my teaching.

But I'm not sure my colleagues are equally willing.

When I get little glimpses of what is possible--of cool ways to integrate technology to get students more engaged, of interesting potential for doing cross-disciplinary work, of the options that begin to surface when we consider putting aside the daily/weekly schedule that currently rules our lives in the traditional American high school--I get excited.

But these are changes on the level of paradigm shifting.

Paradigm shifting is really, really difficult.

For now, I feel somewhat stuck within the boundaries created by the ways the community where I teach defines the purposes and practices of school. There are definitions about these things--about what students do, about what teachers do, about what is supposed to be happening in classrooms, about what a day at school is supposed to look like--that we all share and buy into, that we live and exist within, that are as invisible (yet omnipresent) to us as the air we breathe. So within that context, it's really hard for me to make the real change that I would like to move toward.

So there is where I feel stuck. It's such a daunting prospect (paradigm shifting--questioning the air we breathe) that I don't even know where to start.

Signing off (to write that paper I need to write)--
M. Shelley

Out of the office, into the classroom

A great moment today at work (in a day that REALLY needed a great moment).

I was writing a paper to use as a model for my students in a fairly traditional 11th Grade class. They are working on an assignment in which they have to analyze a passage from a play by Shakespeare. So I chose a passage from a different play (one of my favorites- yes I am a literature geek). I wrote a paper (about 750 words- these are very short papers), and handed it off to my teammate to give it a read. We were sitting in my office and my office-mate (M. Shelly) joined in the conversation (I wasn't trying to cut her out, we just don't teach the same classes). Soon we were all involved in a conversation about not only my paper, but what we thought a paper like this should look like. What qualities made a paper like this good? We were, in essence, fully engaged in a writing conference, with my writing as the center of attention.

It was a really interesting experience from several different perspectives. First, writing this paper was tough. And I am a professional in this field, I know the play I was writing about, I know the passage cold (mostly have it memorized), and most days I am a pretty good writer. Even so, this is a tough assignment. It isn't tough to think about the passage, but to convert that thinking into a cogent, articulate and extremely focused piece of writing was really challenging. It was a good reminder that what we ask our students to do every day is hard. Even for our good students (and most of my students are very good at being students).

Second, it was interesting to have my writing worked over in the same way that I do my student's writing. I am serious about both writing and thinking about literature. I am a veteran of writing workshops, have my own committed writing practice, and have the toughest editor I know close to hand (I am married to her). It is tough to take criticism, even from people I know like and trust, in a neutral setting! And I really trust both the source of the criticism and the nature of the comments. I have no doubt that following my colleague's advice will improve my paper, and I still wanted to fight about it.

My students are worried about being 'right,' worried about what I will think of them, worried about what their peers will think of them, and all too often they don't really understand why I care about their writing, because they don't. They just want a grade and to move on. Or they want to know how to get to the 'right' answer- and that is tough when studying literature. For many, English class is a perennial mystery, where they never really get a grip on what it is we are doing, no matter how hard my colleagues and I try to make it transparent (yes, I know that there are just as many who love this class, but I am not as worried about them for immediate purposes). What must it be like to have a conference with me?

And third, in the middle of a really engaged conversation about my paper and papers like this in general- a thought struck me. I said to my colleagues, "Wee need to stop doing this in here (here being in our office) and do it in our classrooms." We need to model what it really takes to get good at writing, which was all the things we had in play in my office. I was genuinely committed to the writing (my geekiness knows no bounds), my colleagues we genuinely committed to helping me, and we had the freedom to have a real conversations because we had an already established relationship of trust and respect, making the office a safe place to float my writing.

So I guess the tough question is really, how do I get students to that place. That, of course, is a pretty complicated question. It would be great if the intertube out there had some answers. I am not sure it does. We did talk about how to arrange our schedules so that we could model these kinds of discussions for our students. That is a start.

I am actually not going to show my students a revised draft of the paper, at least not right away. I want them to see it in its raw first draft, without the benefit of the revision process. I took some notes, and Shelly wrote some things on the back of my draft, and I think I will take some suggestions from my students as well.

It was, far and away, the best part of my day.

F. Scott

A 'pick me up...'

I spent the last two days at the National School Board Association T+L conference in Denver. Other than the blizzard in Denver this week, it was a really invigorating time (though I guess you could say that the blizzard was invigorating). There were too many interesting ideas to list them all in one post, but there were some themes- at least for me.

Project based learning came up a lot, in several different contexts. It fit nicely with the thinking I have been doing about "Focus, frame and form." (Updates on that little experiment are forthcoming). Using technology (it was the T+L conference after all) as leverage to engage our students in the larger world, project based learning feels like something I have been headed towards for a while. I was mulling classroom ideas over to myself while listening to several presentations- always a good sign.

Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect, who spoke on Wednesday morning, was everything you might hope for as a dynamic and engaging speaker. He definitely comes across as a guy you'd want to hang out with. His message about the nature of innovation was powerful, as was his admonition that we must be willing to fail in order to innovate. How often do we think/hear/feel that in our working lives? Rarely if ever, though it seems obvious once you think about it. Note to self- how to you say that to students? How do we encourage them to take risks? How do we make a place that's safe to take risks? In our school? In our classroom? In our own heads?

All the presentation addressed innovation, breaking barriers, learning that is meaningful to our students. It was great to hear/participate in some really rich conversations. I was also sorry that so little of this thinking is part of our national dialogue about education. No one in Denver was talking about testing. Everyone was talking about assessing in meaningful ways. Sounds like semantics, but it isn't. There is a difference.

Finally, this conference is, at least ostensibly, about technology. But much more of the conversation was about learning. Yes, up on the main floor three hundred companies were waiting to pitch you software, hardware or services that were technological in nature. But I had way fewer conversations about 'stuff' than I anticipated. It isn't about stuff. It is about what we want kids to know or be able to do, and how to get them there in a way that works.

So back to home. And tomorrow, back to school. I'm tired, but in a good way. With a bag full of ideas that I will have to sort through. Try a few out, maybe fail a time or two?

-F. Scott

Ed Sec Speaks- it can't be good.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will be speaking at Columbia Teacher's College tomorrow- according to CNN. He will apparently be calling for overhaul of teacher preparation to better "prepar(e) teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom." Given the initiatives of the Obama Administration in education policy, which have read like an uninterrupted continuation of the Bush administration, Arne Duncan talking about the 21st Century Classroom is a bit like the CEO of Hormel talking about animal rights. Though I am pretty sure that if the CEO of Hormel claimed to know something about pigs, and even claimed to like them, I would believe him. Whereas when Duncan claims to know anything about real students in the real world, it's awfully tough to buy his rap.

Over and over again, from our district to the Secretary of Education, we hear politicians make noise about 21st century education while pushing agendas that from a more nuanced perspective seem only designed to return us to the 18th century (at best).

Alfie Kohn had a great piece in District Administration in the February issue that said it way better than I.

-F. Scott

One more thing

In the midst of all of this stress today I got some horrible news.

One of my students from last year (and the year before--he was stuck with me for two years in a row) passed away on Friday. The circumstances of his death are not yet certain, but it may have been a suicide, and drugs and/or alcohol were likely involved.

The truth is that this kid struggled intensely in his life. He was in my class nearly every day the first year he was on my roster--but the second year, well, he disappeared pretty much halfway through first semester. His life was crashing in on him. He was one of those kids I never felt like I quite reached--never really knew well, never really convinced him that he deserved to be successful. It always seemed like there were much more significant things going on in his mind/world to care too much about what I asked him to do.

What this leaves for me today is just a pit of sadness in the center of everything. And a connection to times past where I learned about something that they don't teach you in methods classes in college. During a period of 10 months at the school where I taught about seven years ago, we lost seven students. The first was a student in my fifth hour freshman language arts class. It was a car accident in a highway construction zone. I had no idea how to handle this--how to deal with my own grief along side the grief on the faces of my students as we all noticed the violently empty desk in the middle of our classroom.

We muddled through and began to heal, and just about three weeks later, there was another tragic highway construction zone accident--this time with a car load of five of our students. Two died at the scene. The other three were lucky to have survived. In a school of 800 students, this is a lot of tragedy in three weeks. We were all stunned.

Instead of school for the rest of the school year (it was only about a week or so), my students and I talked about life, ate cookies, went on walks, and played games together. It was therapeutic, and we all needed it. Life curriculum trumped school curriculum.

The next school year we lost a student to a skateboarding/car accident (he was also one of mine), two students (a brother and sister) to a house fire, and another student to a terminal illness.

There is something nearly unbearable about attending a funeral or memorial service for a high school student, one that you can remember so clearly as full of life and possibility, eyes on the future, youth shining from their very souls.

And on Thursday evening, there I will be again, trying to grasp all of this. Death of youth.

This time it's different in some ways--instead of a sudden, unexpected disappearance of an energetic life force as was the case of my students about seven years back--here we have a possible suicide. I've not been through this ground before. How much pain must he have been dealing with in his life? As he was sitting in MY classroom? Did anything I ever asked him to do have any meaning to his life? Is there anything I could have done as his teacher to heal the pain?

I'm not suggesting I feel responsible. I just hope that I was somehow a positive spot in his world. That, in short, is really the best, truest goal I can have as a teacher.

The sadness from the students I lost before still creeps in on me once in a while. It catches me in the quiet moments--not as much as it used to, but it still catches me. This week, though, the sadness for this student's death now will creep and hover all around, omnipresent, just waiting for my attention to divert from whatever else I might be focused on at the moment so it can swallow my thoughts whole.

I'll let it. The grief needs acknowledgment.

And it's how I will be able to honor this student--by letting his passing sink in, by working to remember what I can about him, by hoping that he has finally reached some peace.

M. Shelley

So F. Scott said to blog about it

I'm stressed out.

Here's the problem: I'm a member of a state-level committee to rewrite our standards for reading and writing. I've been working with this committee for months. We are up against our final deadline, but we need more time.

Standards documents have never been more high stakes. The results of the assessments tied to them are having more and more real implications for schools, students, and teachers--some even tied to school funding and teacher pay.

That means that standards documents have got to be very carefully constructed: coherent, clear, carrying high expectations for students and teachers. Anything short of this could have catastrophic consequences that we can't even see clearly now.

So why am I stressed out? My fellow committee members and I have built a document that we really want to believe in, but it is not quite there yet. We need more time, and we are not getting it. The whole process has been fraught with unreasonable deadlines and assurances that we would later have the time to do the alignment and articulation work that the document desperately needs.

But we are not getting the support from our department of education to do this right. In fact, I was pretty much told not to even come in tomorrow to work on it--perhaps they think that I'll muddy the process because of my desire to make the document as strong as possible, to do the major big picture articulation with the document that will take more time than the smaller tweaks that the department of education imagined for the document at this point in the game.

It seems that the goal here is no longer on building a strong and visionary standards document that will take my state boldly into the 21st century. It seems that the goal has now become simply a finished document.

Time to get my mind off of this and try to get some grading done.
M. Shelley

A curve ball today

Something surprised me today and still leaves me somewhat unsettled.

Whereas I feel like the reading is going pretty well so far (see my previous post), the group project that I debuted today is not leaving me with quite as much confidence.

The group project was one of the required forms that I presented at the beginning of the unit (that and the compare/contrast paper that is a common assessment across all eight sections of the course I'm teaching, taught by a total of three different teachers). My requirements on the project were few--draw on the stories of your own life experiences to teach us something. Create something to share with us what there is to learn from your life experiences. Integrate into project and/or presentation some text you find that connects in a meaningful way to Into the Wild.

To help explain why I was leaving this all so open, I showed them two youtube videos that both I think make essentially the same argument: schools do not line up with who our students are today. They are not presented with relevant, meaningful classrooms that actually engage their interests and thinking. "A Vision of Students Today" was created by a cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University two years ago. "A Vision on K12 Students Today" is similar but focuses on K12 students. As a teacher, I look at both of these videos as a direct plea to me to make my classroom meaningful, to give them room to design classroom experiences that will have relevance to their lives. That was my initial intent with the group project described above--a few general parameters but then lots of space for them to design something meaningful and interesting to them.

What surprised me was this: my students came up with a few readings of these videos I did not anticipate. Once young man said that the videos showed how lazy students are. If they would only focus and pay attention in class instead of Facebooking, they would be more successful. This interpretation never even entered my brain. I saw the detail about the KSU students Facebooking through class as an indication that the class wasn't relevant and meaningful, not that the students were lazy. Another interpretation from another young man in my class was that education is being ruined by technology, that clearly all these students are distracted by technology and if it just wasn't there they would be doing fine in school. I saw all of the mentions of technology as a plea to teachers to pull that world into the classroom world, to make what we ask them to do in our classrooms better merge with what they do in their lives outside of school. I firmly believe that if we don't do this, school could become obsolete in the minds of our students.

I was not prepared for these responses from my students. Not at all.

And I'm not feeling so much confidence in this group project to achieve the aims that I had for it. I don't see the excitement that I hoped for. I'm not seeing the outside-of-the-box projects developing that I thought would surface when I stepped aside and said, "create something." I'm not sure if I actually ended up directing its focus too much and something that is intended to provide space for students to build relevance to their lives is actually one more teacher-centered endeavor. Or maybe I didn't give enough direction and my students are already flailing?

I just don't know.

But I'll write later to describe how it has gone.

And I have my first discussion planned for tomorrow over the first chunk of reading. I would like to do what F. Scott did by sitting down in the back of the room, taking attendance, and letting them figure out that they better get discussing, but I'm not sure that would work (I don't have here the same kind of super-motivated students that he has in the classes he wrote about). But I do want to think about maybe doing it that way.

Signing off. M. Shelley.

Reporting on that homework of the weekend before last...

And it's been a blur since I (M. Shelley here) made that last posting. Funny how a teaching life will do that.

I did complete the homework I assigned to myself, to cobble together an argument for my students about why they should care to read. I started with explaining to them the concept of procedural display, that it looks like learning, but it's not. I gave them examples from my own schooling (like how I got through AP English Literature with a B without reading a single book), and they shared their own examples. Just as they were accusing me of telling them how to slide through school without actually doing anything of consequence, I asked them if they ever engage in fake reading where you read the words but don't construct any meaning from them. The words just slide on by, for pages even, and you have no clue what you've read once you stop and look back. I admitted (to the shock of several of my students) that this happens to me all the time and that I have to work hard sometimes to avoid it. They talked about their own adventures in fake reading as well.

Then I asked, "what is literacy?" Right away students blurted out responses about being able to simply read and write. I let them keep suggesting ideas until I heard someone say something about "understanding." Aha. It's more than being able to decode the words on the page--you have to be able to construct meaning from them.

I presented a few ideas about literacy--one from here that reviews Paolo Friere's ideas on literacy: "Literacy, [Friere] insisted, is an active phenomenon, deeply linked to personal and cultural identity. It's power lies not in a received ability to read and write, but rather in an individual's capacity to put those skills to work in shaping the course of his or her own life. [...] Friere's view of literacy is at once practical and all-encompassing. It refers to the ability to manipulate any set of codes and conventions--whether it is the words of a language, the symbols in a mathematical system, or images posted to the Internet--to live healthy and productive lives." I used this to talk about how they possess all kinds of literacies--like that the football players in my class have football literacy: the ability to manipulate the set of "codes and conventions" specific to football in order to "shape the course" of their own lives (i.e., to win a game). I talked about how this view of literacy makes the argument that it is so much more than mere reading and writing, but the ability to use those skills to write one's life, and a "healthy and productive" one at that.

The second view on literacy that I presented to them comes from The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, a definition that I found in the Wikipedia page about literacy: "the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute, and use printed and written materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning in enabling individuals to achieve their goals, to develop their knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in their community and wider society." I repeated the list of skills: identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate, compute, and use. I asked them how confident they felt with these skills and their abilities to use them to build the lives that they imagine for themselves. I asked them if they considered themselves literate in all these areas.

They were pretty quiet for a few moments.

Next I argued that whereas I knew that they each possessed skilled literacies in many areas of their lives, there was one particular area that I was most worried about for all of them. The key I saw to the type of literacy I want them to work on is engagement. As learners, they need to be thoughtfully and meaningfully engaged in the learning. What I meant was that they needed to practice the kind of sustained engagement you can practice when you really, truly read a book (something that many of my students have admitted to not have done for several years).

I asked, "when was the last time you practiced this kind of sustained engagement?"

I asked, "do you know the tricks of successful reading?"

I told them that it takes work but that working on their reading and sustained engagement in this way is critical to their future success in our evolving world.

I reminded them that the most complex, difficult book they will ever read is their own life. This practice now will help them later.

From there, I gave them a letter I had written to them explaining the tricks of successful reading as described in Cris Tovani's book. I asked them to write me back to tell me which of those tricks they already employ, which they want to work on, and which they don't understand. I asked them to tell me what kind of readers they are, what kind of readers they want to become, and how my class can help them get there. I've collected and read these letters, which I found to be candid and real. I will give them back to them at some later time and ask them to re-evaluate and look for growth in their reading goals.

And then the next day we started reading Into the Wild together. They were taking it pretty seriously. We stopped often and talked about it, asked questions, made predictions, pointed out what seemed important, told connected stories from our lives. We did that for a couple of classes to round out the week. On Monday then, it was dedicated reading time--individual silent reading, group directed reading (with either the sped teacher that I team teach with for one class or the education student I have working with me in the other two classes) or small pairs or triads of students in their own reading groups. This was the best used reading day I have ever had in my class--even the groups that sat out in the hall and read to each other actually read and discussed what they were reading.

I'm anxious to see how the first chunk of the book will go--the first reading deadline is tomorrow (the first seven chapters of the book). One idea that came up in our negotiations about what should be on the unit calendar for this book was the no-penalty reading quiz. They suggested that they get extra credit for correct answers and no points lost for wrong answers.

Now think about this for a minute: what my students proposed is an incentive system for reading instead of the kind of punishing quizzes that we often end up enacting. I was willing to forgo the reading quizzes altogether since most students in our first pass through of negotiations on the calendar for the unit said that they didn't want them at all. But when I asked them what they really, truly NEEDED to inspire them to get a particular range of reading done, they came up with this idea, and pretty much everyone (in all three of my classes) loved it.

We will do this for the first time tomorrow and we'll see how it goes. Groups of students will each draft one question for the quiz and submit the question and answer to me. I will then type the questions up one at a time on the screen and students will write their answers on paper and submit. We'll then review the questions (which will be the start of our discussion for the day over the first seven chapters).

Do you see what will be happening here? LOTS of discussion about the reading! The no-penalty reading quiz will be an occasion for discussion, for students to check their own understanding of what they read. For students to help each other capture the details.

Of course it won't work so well if after all of our conversation about this students didn't read. I'll add one more question to the quiz: did you read? If so, how much? If not, why not? I'll remind them that there is no penalty on this one either--their honesty is what I'm searching for.

So I'm feeling like I did something right (so far) to establish a positive beginning for a reading experience in school. But like I said, what will be interesting is how many of them will actually read.

More on that later.
M. Shelley

Actually 'Making the Shift'- Update 2

Oooooof. A week or so into this experiment. There are a lot of things I could comment on here, but the main thing to think about right now is my own reaction to the change in dynamic. I (we?) are so used to having not only the control, but also the responsibility, for what our students do. I was really feeling a lack of both this week. I wanted to jump in and start telling them what to do. My teacher brain was screaming, "Oh no, they might do the wrong thing!" The impulse to be the one in the room 'making things happen' was pretty powerful. As much as I was able, I refrained.

In both sections the students had planned to 'have discussions' this week. Both groups decided that they did want to read from the text as a way of gathering some background information, and then have a discussion in class. On the day of discussion, I came in to the room, and rather than taking 'center stage' as I might normally do, I just sat in back and took attendance. The students sitting near me in both classes we watching to see what I would do, but for the most part the group happily ignored me.

In my first class (a bit smaller and harder to hide in), a student asked me after a moment, "aren't we having a discussion today?" I tried to keep my response as neutral as possible. I think I said something like, "I believe that's what you had put on the calendar." She got the point and immediately enlisted some of her fellows in organizing the class (the classes are filled with motivated honors students, so their willingness to take initiative is pretty high). That class launched into a discussion that lasted almost an hour.

On the whole they stayed pretty on topic. I noticed that, especially given the nature of the topic they were discussing (the formulation of knowledge in the social sciences), they raised and discussed some pretty complicated ideas. This class has been doing this with my direction for almost a year now, so they have had practice and some modeling and coaching, but it was still pretty cool to see them try it on their own. After a few minutes they realized that

I just wasn't going to say anything, so they ignored me.

It was really tough to keep my mouth shut, especially when I heard things that were factually incorrect or not well though out. Several times the group shied away from engaging an idea because the voice asserting it was particularly aggressive, even when I could see some pretty significant disagreement in the group as a whole. It was tough not to play 'referee' or my normal role as devil's advocate, especially in the face of ideas that deserved more interrogation than they received.

I kept track of how many members of the class participated- in a group of 22, six voices carried the majority of the conversation, nine participated at some level, and seven did not speak. Of those who did not talk at all, I would say four of them were engaged, but just chose not to speak, and the rest seemed outwardly disengaged (though it can be very tough to tell- just because they look like they aren't listening does not mean they aren't tracking the conversation.

Other than my own struggle to keep my mouth shut, I actually found it quite relaxing. On the whole the discussion was at least as good as an average discussion led by me, and in some ways perhaps more genuine. While it was hard not to immediately jump in when I heard something I thought was 'wrong' the group seemed to work through those moments on its own, more or less, and I almost always heard the 'right' or more accurate information at least raised. I also found that I had the time to observe the class much more carefully than I do when I am leading the discussion. I was much more aware of who was engaged, who was participating, who seemed totally checked out.

When there were only a few minutes left in class, and the conversation was winding down, several students turned to me and asked essentially 'how did we do?' I shared some of what I wrote above, and then asked them how they thought it went. On the whole they seemed pleased. I told them that I would be asking them for ideas on how they could make it even better when we were done with this unit.

Trying this experiment has raised what I think is a major issue in education (for me). When we talk about teaching/learning, are we talking about what occurred in the classroom, or are we talking about what the students take with them when they leave. We all know the dynamic of 'covering the content' in which we make sure that whatever material we feel beholden to is exposed in the room. But we also know that there is a great distance between that and what students actually retain. Engaging my students in their own sense of responsibility for learning certainly seems like it will up their level of learning. But my urge to make sure everything is 'covered' in class is pretty powerful.

I will have to wait and see how they demonstrate and difference understanding on the next assessment, which is next week. They, of course, is the real proof here. I plan to video the presentation so we can digest them as a class. But so far I have to say that the class experience seems a lot more genuine. There is less 'playing at school,' on all our parts. That has to be good, I think.

This weekend's homework

How do you convince high school students that it's important to read? That's my homework this weekend. I want to cobble together an argument to make to my students--seniors, the often unmotivated type--on Monday as we head into our first book together. I will also give them a letter that includes Cris Tovani's tricks of successful readers and ask them to write me back about which they already do, which they need to work on, which they don't understand. Essentially, I want to know about what kind of readers my students are, what kind they want to become, and how my class can help them achieve that. But I want to frame the letter with a strong argument as to why they should even care about what kind of readers they are. An argument with a Truth that speaks to them. An argument that makes them care about their lives as readers, that makes them care to improve. An argument that will send some of them into the first book they have actually READ in high school.

So we'll see what I come up with, but that's my self-assigned homework for the weekend.
Speaking of weekend, let's get that started. Signing off now to go pick up my kid from school.
--M. Shelley

Looking ahead at my focus, form, frame experiement

So F. Scott is blogging every so often about his current experiment with this focus, form, frame framework. He's got me thinking about how to apply this to one of my classes, starting next week when we launch into a new unit reading a nonfiction book together.

The thing is that this framework is very much in line with what I have been working toward as a teacher for years. I have taught very much in this way before--had my AP Lit students in a previous school coming up with discussion topics for our novels and facilitating discussions. Had my Advanced Comp students making more of their own decisions about which modes of writing to study when depending on what angle they wanted to take in responding to a particular topic. Even had them determine our list of topics for a semester.

Even in my current school where F. Scott and I teach, I started out in my first year (I'm now in my third year there) intending to do even more of the kind of teaching I had been working toward where I would involve my students in as much decision making as possible about the what, when, how of our classroom. I believe strongly that we teachers should turn over decision making to our students whenever we can in an effort to more fully engage them in what happens in our classroom. Why should I be the one spending hours with a novel or short story deciding how to engage my class in a discussion of it? Can't they do some of this work? And wouldn't they get something significant out of it?

But pulling off this model in my current school turned out to be quite difficult on many levels. The student population F. Scott is working with on this (extremely motivated advanced level students) is not the same population I attempted it with (not as motivated regular track students). There were also some issues surrounding me as a new person in the building trying to enact something that went across embedded and sometimes unspoken norms about teachers' roles, students' roles, what happens in language arts classrooms, etc. My desire to share authority with my students in my classroom in ways that would work to really engage them in what we were doing was uncomfortable for some of my colleagues.

So in short, I strayed from my roots so to speak. And F. Scott is reminding me of that.

Next week I will attempt to get back to that. I'll start off with a blank 4-week calendar, a book, and a frank discussion with my seniors about their stances toward reading in school. We'll talk about procedural display, what it looks like, why we want to avoid it, how we can inspire them to work to avoid it. I'll ask them what they need in order to want to read the book (some of them have already told me that they have read not one single book in their years of high school language arts classes). Our focus will be the text as it pertains to the big essential question for the course, the frame will be four weeks, and the form will be two-fold: a compare/contrast paper (an agreed-upon assessment for the course) and a group presentation about an issue connected to the text. Other than that, they'll have to help me figure out the details: do they want reading quizzes to motivate them to read? Do they want lots of discussions in class? When should the paper be due? How much in-class time do they want to work on it? When should we watch the film interpretation of the text (if they want to watch it)?

I really believe that just engaging them in the conversation is powerful. My dad always taught me that people have the right to a say in decisions that affect their lives. If I want my students to engage in my course in such a way that it does have some meaningful effect on their lives, don't I owe it to them to help me figure out how to make it some worth their effort and engagement?

Actually 'Making the Shift'- Update 1

So- two days in. What an interesting experience! I teach two sections of the same course, and the most startling part of doing this so far is that the two classes have VERY different characters. Not really a surprise, but still interesting. One class is very gung-ho- move ahead, what do we need to do next. The other class wants to spend more time ruminating on data from their last assessment (I gave them scores from their lat presentation as part of our planning today).

I really like just asking them what they want to do. I expressed in both classes that it might be really easy to decided not to do anything, and take the consequences (Luckily, there are honors level classes with highly motivated students- ultimately they do care about their grades quite a bit). I told them I would let that happen if they wanted, but expressed concern about the consequences to them. Since they have almost a years worth of experience in this course, they understand much of what we do and how it relates pretty clearly. As I said in my original post, this is also the class that is closest to this model already.

Both classes wanted some time to work as a large group, obtaining a deeper understanding of the larger subject, and both groups wanted time to work independently on their particular topics in the larger subject. They asked me to do some direct instruction as it relates to the concepts embedded in the rubric, but after that they wanted to direct their own learning in the form of discussion and some looser classroom activities.

By far, the best moment for me came yesterday, at the end of the second class. A student who is generally pretty quiet, though always very engaged was leaving the room after the bulk of the others had left. As she slung her over-large backpack over her shoulder she looked at me and said, "this is actually the hardest thing you've asked us to do so far, isn't it?" I nodded an affirmative, but inside I was jumping up and down. Yes!

Dueling posts!

Oh yeah- take that!

http://jerridkruse.blogspot.com/2009/09/unwelcome-silent-curriculum.html

A great riff on the unspoken curriculum.

Wow- suddenly we are doing a lot of posting.

Wheeeee!

F. Scott

What's possible. What's truly possible.

Okay, F. Scott: check this out

http://www.hightechhigh.org/

How does this help us to envision our own move toward 21st century teaching?

M. Shelley

Actually 'Making the Shift'

I have been reading a series at The Edurati Review called "Making the Shift," by Kevin Washburn. I posted about it a week or so ago. He just published part 4, "From Target Future to Teaching."

I have really been interested in the way he conceptualizes what we might do in the classroom. His view has really spoken to me, and to the needs of the young people who show up in front of me every day. But blogging about a new idea doen't mean much. So feeling inspired by the 4th installment, I am going to take a shot at doing it. We are starting a new unit in a course I teach tomorrow. Rather than having a filled in calendar of things was are going to do, read, discuss, and produce, I am going to had out a blank calendar of the next four weeks.

We will do presentations at the end of the unit (form), there is a subject we need to cover (focus), and we have about four weeks to deal with this topic (frame). In this particular class there is already a rubric for presentations which focuses students on the skills of the course. I didn't write the rubric, though I think it is a good one for the course in question, so rather than re invent the wheel, I am sticking with it.

But tomorrow I am going to ask my students, "given that you will have to do a presentation with some of your colleagues in four weeks, and understanding the rubric as we do, what do you need to do to be successful in that presentation, and go from there. In consultation with Shelly on Friday afternoon, I am putting together a list of suggestions for things that might be useful to them, and I have some concerns that they need to address in their plan, but other than that, it is up to them.

I am going to give them a copy of Washburn's Part 3 article, so they know why we are doing what we are doing, and I will present them with the data from their last set of presentations, so they have a sense of why I might have concerns about how they use their time and what they do, but mostly I am going to try to turn it over to them.

And than I'm going to write about it. Not every day, but regularly over the next few weeks. So we will see what unfolds. Stay tuned...

F. Scott

Procedural Display

I recently had the opportunity to attend a talk by researcher and theorist Kris Gutierrez, and she brought up an idea that I have been mulling over ever since. It's a concept that has heavily influenced my teaching, but until her talk, I hadn't yet put a name upon it.

She challenged us to teach in ways that eschew procedural display. This is when students look like they are learning but aren't actually. This is when students play the game of school and give us exactly what we are looking for, doing the absolute minimum necessary for the grades that they want to get. On the surface, their grades, their demeanor in class--everything about them suggests that they are learning what we are asking them to. But the truth is that they are not actually engaging in the material in any meaningful way. They are not actually LEARNING in ways that are long-lasting and life-altering. They are not learning to THINK, only to demonstrate the procedures in our classes that make it look like they are learning.

I was the master of this as a high school student and as a college student during my first few semesters as an English major. By all outside appearances, I looked like a successful AP English Literature student. I earned a B in the class. I did fine on the exams and essays. I participated in class discussions and group projects. I earned a 5 on the AP Lit exam. But the nasty truth is that I didn't read a single book that year. Not a single one. I was able to "succeed" and get the B (which didn't hurt my GPA at all because it was a weighted class) by listening very carefully to the teacher and giving back her interpretations on exams and essays. I learned how to look like I was reading, but I wasn't. I was engaged in completing the work with a minimal amount of effort. To this day I regret the great works of literature that I didn't experience in that class. I only read what other people said about the works but never built my arguments around my own genuine response to a text. And this continued several semesters in to my English major in college (until I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which blew my mind, and everything changed for me).

Now, the question here for me is how to get my students out of the mode of procedural display? I have thought a lot about my AP English lit class and why I was so disengaged. I take it back to the moment that my teacher told me I was wrong because I disagreed with her interpretation of the Brobdignagians in Gulliver's Travels. I learned in that single moment that my ideas about literature didn't have space in her classroom, so I promptly ferreted them away, never to be seen again until they were pried out of me by an astounding piece of literature. As a teacher, I share this story with my students and ask them not to let that happen to them, to call me on it when I shoot down a student's interpretation, to understand why I run my class the way that I do in order to quiet my voice so that theirs have room to speak. But still I'm not totally convinced that I have worked my students out of the mode of procedural display.

I plan to engage them in a conversation about it soon as we start reading our first book together. Procedural display doesn't just show up in Language Arts in conjunction with the study of books, but that is where I think I'll engage them in the conversation to begin with as what I hope will be some kind of inspiration for them to read. Several of them have already told me candidly that they have NEVER read a book assigned to them in school. NEVER. That is daunting. How will these students ever develop the critical thinking that is a necessary literacy skill in our changing world if they aren't READING?????

This brings up a conversation that F. Scott and I had the other day in the office--he'll have to give you the source, but he read recently an argument that the United States is breeding a new generation of illiteracy. People can read/decode anything, but they can't THINK. Those who can't think are doomed to be controlled and swayed by all sorts of nefarious forces in our society, never questioning anything. I'm not sure if I totally agree with this premise, but if it's true, if our school systems are only breeding these critical thinking illiterates who are highly skilled in procedural display, we are in trouble, folks.

And with that I will sign off. I've decided that I do not want to grade on the weekends anymore. I want weekends that are real weekends. The path to that is working my butt off in the week nights to get the grading done. I have 15 more personal narrative essays to get through before I go to bed--working to provide feedback that is real and genuine and not teacher procedural display. That kind of grading takes longer. So I better get to it.

M. Shelley

Focus, form, frame- I like it!

Kevin Washburn at The Edurati Review has this great post describing a hypothetical working situation twenty years hence. He then describes how that worker might respond and discusses what education might be necessary to make that worker prepared for that moment.

I loved this post for several reasons. First, a lot of what I do looks just like what he described- there's a focus for the work, a framing context, and a form to deliver the learning. Hopefully, when I do it with students it doesn't seem as manufactured as what I just wrote might imply. But he has an accurate description of a whole lot of working contexts. So it was gratifying to have someone pretty smart describe how I try to teach in positive terms.

Second, I loved the flexibility of describing a cognitive process in these terms. This structure is solid enough to actually give some guidance- there needs to be a focus for the work, a frame or context, and a form of delivery, but this structure is also loose enough that I can immediately understand how it applies to all three of the very different courses I teach. And, I bet if I checked with my colleagues in some of the other departments, they would have little trouble seeing how this conceptual idea could guide them, if they chose to be so guided.

Third, the flexibility moves beyond school and work to encompass a lot of life. There are many things that I do that can or could be described as an enactment of this thinking process. Which means that teaching this way isn't just preparation for the working world (I know in this country we think that work is the end all be all, but there is more to life), it is teaching useful life problem solving skills.

So here's what made me really mad when I read that piece. No one talks about teaching that way. Okay, so M. Shelly and I do, and this guy at the Edurati Review does, but in the bigger picture, its not even on the radar. Obama's education guy, Arne Duncan, is continuing NCLB in one form or another. Low income students are getting less and less preparation for anything that looks like what Washburn describes, and even good public schools, such as the one I am lucky enough to work in, are being pushed to adopt methodology and approaches that ultimately teach students rule following and 'performance mimicry.' Not actual thinking skills.

Though we say we want a certain kind of education for our children, we (collectively) are not doing it. The emphasis on test scores and rote learning will eventually penetrate all the way to schools like mine, because it is being codified in federal law and tied to funding, making these mandates impossible to ignore. At that point, only elite private schools will be teaching in the manner described above. And I'm no conspiracy theorist, so I don't believe there is some 'plot' to subjugate the majority of the population, but that is the effect it will have.

Education is power, and we are giving that power to less and less of our current and future citizens. So if its them we are relying on to figure out all these complex future problems (like how to pay for my medical bills when I'm 102), we will be leaving them unarmed. What a downer of a post, but so much is going on that makes me angry that this forum makes a great place to vent.

Tomorrow I will be teaching my classes, to the best of my ability, with the hope that they will have the tools to do the challenging work of living their lives, and that I will have participated in helping them to have those tools.

Thanks to Washburn and the Edurati Review for putting out some good thinking about schools.

F. Scott

too much too much!

Okay F. Scott:
I was just looking through my Twitter stream and I got very overwhelmed. I follow a few educational movements (so to speak, edurati for example) and I found myself wondering how I was ever going to be able to make any sort of a contribution to any of these things. There's no time. I spent the whole day today responding to student drafts, and I didn't get them all done. Didn't make the pot of chili I planned so my family would have food for the week. Didn't pay bills (will have to do that tomorrow evening--takes me two hours usually). Didn't get the one house cleaning/organizing chore done that I had planned. Okay, I could have NOT gone to the zoo with my family on Saturday and gotten all of this done. But that doesn't work either. Family first--my husband and kiddo are more important than getting the papers read or the blog updated.

So it struck me: I want to cultivate a voice on things educational. I can't have that voice in all areas that I'd like to. So I have to pick the place and dedicate myself to it. I have to pick the outlet and make it work. Those conversations we have in the office (except for the loopy Friday afternoon ones--those are just hilarious, especially with the cast of characters that stop by the door and throw laughs at us) are significant and thought-provoking. Let's start talking regularly to an audience wider than the two of us and any hapless soul who happens to walk into our office when we're trying to solve all the problems of the world.

Is this blog the outlet? Perhaps. We have one follower. I know her. I told her about us. She's a great follower to have and will respond very insightfully when she's not totally swamped by the dissertation she's defending in a few weeks. We need to get more followers. How should we do that? I have a student who writes a sports blog and he has about 200 people who regularly read his stuff. He advertises his blog on Facebook. We might need to "out" ourselves to some people around us to get folks to start reading. Would our students care to read this stuff? Do we want to go there?

And I need to commit to a weekly blog update. I've had one rolling around in my head since last week. It's about "procedural display" and how to avoid it. Can't wait to read it, can you? :-)

Enough blabbering. I need to go to bed. See you at school.

M. Shelley

This is a direct response to F. Scott's most recent post:

Whereas teachers like you and I and those great idealist colleagues we work with can get burned out, disappointed, and beat down by how our idealism is constantly chipped away at by the daily demands of our job and the mountain of crap that we work around (those little cuts you describe), I believe that the idealists are the seeds and engine of change. We need to be there, working on change, one classroom, one student at a time. We need to find the time and the way to make our voices heard (which is why I will insist that we write about our professional development experiences this year--your idea for how we structure our professional development time rocks and it's an idea that should be out there for others to consider) (we will be writing about this later I am certain). We need to put pressure on our colleagues, our administrators, our district to be better--like we always push ourselves to be. We need to take a look at our week and carve out a place to do this work--one hour a week set aside to cultivate our voice and get it out there is more time than if we never did it at all.

Your post sounds a lot like where I was when I left the classroom for the new frontier of the doc program. My two years there away from the classroom showed me how much I truly belong in the high school classroom. The absence of the classroom in my life so clearly defined the space it fills in me. I need it to feel relevant and challenged. And this realization will keep me here for a very long time, regardless of all the frustrating crap that comes along with the life of a teacher in our school district.

But I will need to challenge myself every year to be better, to work more efficiently, to explore new ideas, to write about it. To imagine the possibilities for our students and make those possibilities the goal of my teaching. If I don't push myself to do this, I'll get antsy and bored.

This job--it's a life as you know. And you're damn good at it. You're thoughtful and you like your students, and you want to make sure you are doing right by them. You ask tough questions about your teaching and you really want to know how to do it better. You are an idealist--you DO imagine all the great possibilities for your students, and you believe they are possible even if they seem impossible to achieve. But I know that this kind of teaching is exhausting work.

Which is why we each need to decide for ourselves if we can and want to do it.

I'm here for good. My life has shown me, as I explained above, how much I need this work. And for my own selfish reasons, of course I would like for you to stick around. For me though, managing this work in my life means boundaries--times when I don't work and I am with my family. Times during my work week when I put the grading/planning aside and read research or do some writing. I need to think seriously about how to balance everything and be sure to carefully balance it all.

And maybe I need to find a way to steer clear of the parts of the job that make me feel bad, especially the parts that I have absolutely no control over no matter how bad they are (I'm talking here about the current issues surrounding our contract and the shady dealings of our district administration. It sucks, and I hate it, and I wish that we hard working teachers got the recognition and respect that we deserve. But the more I get caught up in the negative discourse flying around about all of this, the worse I feel.)

**********************

Today was the first day of school. Thus starts another school year. I'm full of enthusiasm and hope, excited to learn more about the teenagers I met today. I know there will be rough spots--there always are. And I'm sure I'll write about them. But for now, all is rosy.

And I attended a talk this evening at our local University--gave me much to think about. That will be the focus of my next post.

Signing off,

M. Shelley

Close to Home

Sarah Fine's eloquent essay in the Washington Post struck awfully close to home. You can read it in its entirety at the link above, and you should. She is leaving teaching after four short years, and while so much of my professional life is quite different from her's, so much is also the same.

I most definitely do not teach in an inner-city charter school. Many of the challenges she faced are at the least lessened, if not absent, in the school M. Shelly and I teach in. We are not a charter. For better or worse, we enjoy the protection of our union. Most of our students come to school ready, if not willing, to learn. A large portion of our students are even eager for education. My administration is generally supportive of me, and I have a high degree of autonomy in teaching. I work with wonderful, talented colleagues.

So why did Fine's essay resonate so strongly for me? I too am thinking about leaving the classroom. The continual expansion of the work load (especially by things that seem to have no benefit to my students), the relentless focus on high-stakes testing (even in a very 'good' school) mandated by NCLB, and the endless flow of barriers to actually connecting with students in meaningful ways are a constant drain. It is often a life of death by a thousand cuts. No one thing puts us over the top, but the accumulation buries us.

Most importantly though, Fine hit on one of the toughest parts of teaching for me.

Teaching is a grueling job, and without the kind of social recognition that accompanies professions such as medicine and law, it is even harder for ambitious young people like me to stick with it.

While every one of my parents and community members is appreciative to my face, the continual drumbeat of anti-teacher rhetoric at every level of this society is truly draining. The same parents who thank me write letters to the editor complaining about teachers demanding higher pay (not, for the record, anything that would constitute 'high' pay- our main, and apparently unreasonable, hope, is that our salary schedule could at least keep pace with inflation, which it has never done). Our district administration continually makes decisions and discusses teachers publicly in ways that devalue or show outright contempt for both teachers and the work they do. And the rhetoric and legislation of both the state and nation reflect a lack of interest and awareness of actual teaching that is frankly painful to me.

And, Like Fine, I am ambitious. Like her friend, I want to "do big things and be recognized for them." I'd like to do them working with kids, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for that in our society.

So, I am giving thought to doing some other things. Unlike Fine, I came into teaching in my thirties, with other professional experiences behind me. It has been invaluable to have that depth and grounding of experience as a teacher, but it also continually reminds me that I have other skills. I have a choice. I'm not sure yet what exactly the next thing in my life might be professionally, and I have a family to consider in these decisions.

I will be starting my eighth year in the classroom in the next few weeks, and while I look forward to, and am sustained by, my relationships with students and colleagues, I am also wondering if that is enough. It makes me very sad, and sometimes angry. I could spend a lot of time wishing for a different world, and sometimes I do (one has to be pretty idealistic to be a teacher at all). I just wish I felt like there was something more I could do with that idealism, something that meant staying in the classroom.

F. Scott

What is it good for...

Curriculum mapping? You are way more motivated than I, Shelley.

With only twelve days to go before we meet agin in our office for another year, I am engaging in denial. Well, not entirely. But I am sure not doing any curriculum mapping.

I am, however, doing  a lot of reading right now. So here are some note and thoughts on my summer reads. I did read, on the recommendation of a mutual friend, Thomas Newkirk's Holding On To Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones (Heineman 2009). I enjoyed it very much and he had some good thoughts on both the state of education and what we as teachers might do in response to some of the crazy stuff that is happening right now. I am not doing any sort of in-depth review here, but I liked the book.

Inspired by a reference in an article in the online Journal of Educational Controversy called "Beautiful Losers" by William Lyne (which was also an interesting essay), I have been reading Managing the Commons, edited by Garrett Hardin and John Baden (1977). It is a collection of essays responding to Hardin's essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons" (Science 1968) which essentially looked at what happens when individual interest is pitted against community interest. I stumbled across this idea this summer and it grabbed my attention  as a way of thinking about some of our struggles with education in a democratic nation. Hardin was focused on environmental concerns, but it seemed to me that his idea is really applicable to education. Hopefully  a longer and more in-depth post will follow.

Finally, but by no means comprehensively, this month's College English (NCTE), which was focused on  Latina/o issues in teaching college writing, had an article by Mark Noe that had a line that really struck me as I thought about the upcoming year (okay Shelley, ya got me, I am thinking about it). Near the end of the essay "The Corrido:A Border Rhetoric" (July 596-605) Noe says,

...I try to make a space in which students are welcome to do the one thing that academic discourse does best: question-question me, my assumptions, my objectivity, my culture. I watch for those moments when students deviate from the conventional, not so I can assess their digressions, but so I can listen for what they have to tell me. (603)

 The limiting nature of our classroom discourse can be pretty repressive, even in the hands of a compassionate teacher. How many times have I redirected a student away from an impassioned response to a work in favor of a more 'analytical' approach? How little time is there in my class for writing that is a genuine and meaningful expression of something relevant in my students lives? I can't quit the academic discourse entirely, it will still form a majority share of what the course I teach is all about, but it would be good, I think, to admit a little more humanity into the room. I would like to listen to my students a bit more, and talk a bit less. We will see.

F. Scott

Looking ahead at the school year

My office mate has directed my attention at a blog, "The Edurati Review: Where Policy Meets Pedagogy."

This particular post got me thinking.

It talks about the nouns and verbs of reform--how we teachers can turn the ideas (the nouns) into actual reform (the verbs) in our classroom. We dream up the nouns over the summer at workshops and conferences and then we are met with the status quo back in the classrooms where we teach, status quo so strong that it seems nearly impossible to do anything outside of it. One chapter of my dissertation is essentially about this, about how a dominant view of the purposes and practices of education within my mind, my students' minds, my school community's mind made it difficult to enact anything outside of that particular framework. That's what the Eduati Review talks about.

In my dissertation, I suggest that reform outside of the status quo is possible if we openly discuss the status quo with our colleagues and with our students and then try to understand who our students are and figure out what our students need as learners and make that our primary goal in our classrooms. If students know why we are doing something that may seem out of their previous experience, and if they know what the consequences are of doing things in classrooms as they've always been done, we can get them on board for different approaches.

Basically what I'm saying here is that my dissertation study taught me that my students can sometimes be a big obstacle to reform and change. They are used to a certain schooling experience and they have been taught to value that experience. They might not know what to do exactly with something that looks different, feels different. But they are smart enough to be engaged in a conversation about it, about them and who they are as learners, about their world and what it will ask of them. I find that far too often do we teachers engage our students in philosopical conversations about the whys of what we do in the classroom. For me, reform will need to start there (especially with the particular population of students I work with--the fairly disengaged, reluctant to read/write seriously high school senior who has been pretty disenchanted by three years of pretty tradiational language arts coursework that seems to value a literary analytic, make-them-literature-scholars goal.

The Edurati Review suggests something different (and I love this because it gives me a vision for my own work this year):

"Start with yourself and maybe a trusted colleague or Twitter friend. Stop thinking about what’s engaging, and look at what engages the students. What media are they using? What learning are they doing outside school? As Wagner and Torres said, ask which skills students turn off during the school day, that they could be using in your classroom. Build with inquiry in mind. Find which of Schlechty’s dimensions of engagement work and use them regularly. Read Sullo on what motivates these students. Design your classroom space so there’s a campfire, cave, and watering hole – areas for instruction, reflection, and social learning (via Bob Moje, VMDO architect). Stop measuring yourself against what good teaching looks like and consider what learning looks like. Students want to produce and collaborate; don’t stick to lessons and rules that get in the way. Create structures that promote inquiry and provide students with chances to show you what they learn. Facilitate students’ learning; don’t deliver content or teaching."

And finally, the Edurati Review calls for "class roots reform":

"Yes, we can reform education in our classrooms; no, we can’t scale it up on our own, but it takes individual action to cause change. Imagine if we held ourselves accountable for our classrooms and for working regularly and intentionally with peers engaged in the same work. Imagine class roots reform. On our teams, in our grades, in our schools, we have enough influence to make learning better for kids, and our students’ expectations of learning will change and follow them from class to class, influencing what they ask of others and making them less satisfied with the status quo, including the status quo of the work they do just to get by or to get an A."

I've always said that I can't necessarily change the whole system--too big, too entrenched in the way things have always done, too many people at policy/big money levels of decision making who are not educators and who are not familiar with the daily contours of classroom life. It's enough to make this reform-oriented educator hit her head against the wall, quit her job, and spend the rest of her life quilting or something. Instead, (because I do dearly love my job and I know I would wilt away if I quilted for a career), I focus on change for the better for my students in my classroom. And then I hope that it will spread in some little way. The Edurati reminds me that meaningful reform actually DOES start in this way. So bring it on!

And here's a direct question for F. Scott: how do we do this in our school? Of course you and I will both be working in our own ways in our own classrooms and conversations about this stuff will be rampant in our office and with the handful of colleagues who regularly stop by to chat it up with us and end up in some deep conversation about the whys of what we do. But can we be more systematic about it? Engage more voices on the faculty? Really think "class roots" here--it's about individuals making little changes. There are plenty of smart people on our school's faculty who would love to talk about this stuff. I have two possible ideas:

1) set up a wiki where we can post links to thought-provoking articles/news reports/blog postings and our own thoughts and questions about them. We invite our colleagues to join the conversation, post their own links, let the wiki take on its own identity. We figure out some way to offer professional development credit for people's work there.

2) monthly lunch time brown bag where we engage willing participants in conversation about big questions/issues related to our classrooms. We pull the topics from stuff like this blog posting in the Edurati Review. We take a paragraph or something, read it (or copy it and distribute it) and just talk. We invite anyone to attend--the more diverse opinions the better. We figure out a way to offer professional development credit for people who participate.

3) we do both of the above.

What do you think?

Time to do some curriculum mapping... (going out of town next week for the last adventure of the summer before school starts and I don't want to be stressed out about not having any plans made yet for the year).

M. Shelley

Swamped by dissertation

I wonder how many blog posts I would have for all that I have written in my dissertation in the last two weeks?

This is just to say that that is where I have been of late instead of here: dissertation hell.

Hoping it's almost over.

M. Shelley

The dominant teaching paradigm

Greetings.
As promised, here are my thoughts on why we are often unable to teach literature as we should, or to really, truly, enact any meaningful change in the classroom (such as making space for the kind of professional development that F. Scott wrote about a few days ago).

I've been working with a classic study in the field of education, Willis's (1977) Learning to Labour, to help me explain some of the resistance I got from my students last year during my dissertation study. Willis studied a group of young men, "the lads," whose consistent, overt, naughty resistance to school ended up reproducing the omnipresent class system of their community. Due to the culture of their working class lives, they interpreted school as having nothing of real value to offer them, so their days at school consisted mainly of resisting and opposing anything that the school asked them to do. In so doing, "the lads" made it certain that they would continue along the path toward their working class existence, only realizing at a point in the future how they had missed out on their opportunity to get an education that would provide them other options besides a working class destiny.

One particular aspect of Willis's study became incredibly relevant to my dissertation study. The opposition I got from my students in my classroom was often naughty and characteristic of the opposition of "the lads"--which is what led one of my committee members to suggest I take a look at Willis. But what was most salient toward my dissertation was not Willis's finding about class reproduction, but rather his characterization of a dominant teaching paradigm that organized school in the minds of everyone involved in the study--"the lads," the other students, the teachers, the administrators, and the parents.

Willis argues that embedded in the consciousness of our society exists an understanding of school as essentially an exchange between teacher and students. Students comply with what the teacher asks in the classroom in exchange for something. In the school Willis studied, the exchange was for knowledge, which led to certain qualifications for certain jobs, income, and eventual ability to purchase goods and services. In short, if students complied with what school offered, they would eventually be able to get jobs to support themselves.

In reading about this exchange-based teaching paradigm, I realized that the school where F. Scott and I teach is also, at its center, swirling around a basic exchange between teacher and students. Students comply with what we ask of them in the classroom in exchange for grades. These grades will eventually lead to college admission, hopefully at the prestigious college (whatever that might be for each individual student) that our school community holds as the goal. Over 90% of our students go on to 4-year colleges every year. The College Admission is the end goal, and students need the right kind of grades for that, and that is how we get them to comply with our classroom requests. I believe this to be the case because of how often I hear, "how many points is this?" and "what do I need to do to get the A?" and my colleagues belief that unless we give students a grade for everything we ask them to do, they will not do it. Students are not concerned first about actually understanding; their first concern is about their grades.

Willis's framework becomes powerful though when you consider his argument for how impossible meaningful change is within this dominant, exchange-based teaching paradigm. He examines several other versions of teaching and shows how they are all just revisions of the basic paradigm, and not very meaningful ones at that. At the center of all the reforms he examines, he argues, sits still an offer from the teacher in exchange for students' compliance. What changes in what the teacher is offering. Because the basic paradigm is so completely entrenched in everyone's understanding of school, if what the teacher is offering is too far off of what is expected in the exchange, students will not be able to interpret it as anything but some betrayal of the basic exchange, and then you get the naughty, resistant, oppositional behavior cropping up.

Willis argues that the only way to actually enact meaningful reform is to disrupt the basic exhange-based paradigm. How to do this? Well, you have to make changes to the material structures, organization, and practices of schools that are both evidence of the presence of the teaching paradigm and the defining characteristics of it. The material structures have to do with the physical spaces of the school and how students have little privacy, how their movements are often constrained, and how they don't have free access to all areas of the school (think locked up computer labs, off-limits teachers' lounges, restricted student parking areas, smashed-together lockers, small and uncomfortable student desks, etc.). The organization has to do with how the school day/year is structured (think bell schedules, attendance policies, seat time guidelines, etc). The practices have to do with how school is done in a particular community (think advanced vs. regular tracks within schools, teachers starting and ending class periods at the bells, teachers making all the decisions about the curriculum, etc.). If we want to make meaningful change, we have to make real changes to the material structures, organization, and practices that maintain the exchange-based teaching paradigm.

What might those changes look like? I imagine school campuses that feel more open and inviting to students with access at more hours of the day and comfortable places for students to hang out. I imagine flexible daily schedules that can ebb and flow with the demands of the curriculum and the individual needs of students--a class can end early if the goal for the day is met or students can work from home on a particular day if there's no need for the whole class to meet for example. I imagine a dedicated effort to include students in more decision making about curricular in instructional issues. Yes, teachers are the ones with the professional knowledge surrounding this stuff, but we should be looking for meaningful places to involve our students in decision making whenever possible and strive to work to put our students much more at the center of their own education. I imagine using technology in powerful ways to better mirror students' lives outside of school and to create more flexible learning spaces.

I tried last year to deliberately offer my students something outside of this dominant exhange-based paradigm, but the expectations about what school is supposed to be in my students' minds, in my colleagues' minds, even in my own mind--kept getting in the way. I know that unless we examine the assumptions we all carry around about school that serve to maintain the basic, dominant teaching paradigm, we will never be able to make real, meaningful change for our students. We have to look for and examine these assumptions so that we are able to truly imagine ways to meet the needs of our students, now and into the ever-changing future.

Signing off,
M. Shelley
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Willis, P. (1977) Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs. Westmead, England: Saxon House.

Reconsidering Literature and the Classroom

I'm working on my dissertation today. I came across the following tidbit, which captures much of what F. Scott and I have been chatting about in terms of how we've been asking our students lately to discuss literature in class. So here it is:

In Why Read?, Mark Edmundson (2004) calls for a reconsideration of how literature is typically dealt with in the college English classroom. He insists that teachers work away from more traditional classroom (New Criticism-esque) approaches toward a more meaningful approach to literature--asking students, for instance, what it would be like to take on a piece of literature as one's guide to life. What would it mean to live life by the guidelines suggested in this text? He argues that "literature [...] is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes," that "in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation" (p. 3). Probst (2004) echoes this. He explains that reading is not about searching for "'the meaning' of the work, a meaning residing in the text, as in the New Critical approaches," but rather an opportunity for exploration and creation (p. 3). He says that teachers should not ask "What does the work mean?" but rather "What can we do with the work?"--a similar question to Edmundson's about what it would be like to live life via the guidelines suggested in a particular piece of literature. In doing this, Probst reminds us, that our middle and high school students are not the intellecutal elite that end up as graduate students of literature; they are a "representative group from the local community," and therefore it's important to honor and make room for the individual exchanges between reader and text (p. 34). They are not literary scholars, but they can still access the "resevoir of all human concerns" that Probst sees in literature if we create the right kind of classroom space for them to do so.

In Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight, Sumara (2002) makes a similar argument, that teachers need to work toward making literature matter more to our students. He claims that overall, literature "creates the possibility for deep insight," that engaging with literature "can facilitate the creation of interesting sites for thinking," that these literary engagements can "expand [students'] imagined world of possibilities," and that because in life "understanding requires interpretation, and interpretation requires practice," literature study can provide important opportunities for students to learn these skills (pp. xiii-xiv). Ultimately, Sumara believes that literature captures the "unnoticed experiences that combine to make a life" (pp. 154-5).

But Sumara--through his perspective as a former public school teacher--sees problems with literature instruction in schools. He is worried that the public schools "are not very interested in helping young people develop" important interpretation practices for literature (p. 157). He sees this in how students are often forced to read a lot of literature quickly, looking only for literary devices in order to write critical essays (p. 157). This, he thinks, is why students often claim that literature doesn't matter much to them, rather than seeing it as an integral piece of understanding the human experience (p. 157). Instead, literature will matter in schools if teachers put aside "theories of learning that insist on excavating Truth" but instead create "conditions for people to learn to be surprised by what might happen if they dedicated themselves to literary practices that require a sustained engagement with someone else's structure of thinking" (p.160).

(end of dissertation tidbit)

Now, as to why it's so difficult to actually get schools to teach literature in this way --> if I have time today, I'll write about the dominate teaching paradigm that controls the way we ALL think about school.

M. Shelley
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Edumundson, M. (2004) Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury.

Probst, R.E. (2004) Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School (Second Edition). Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Sumara, D. J. (2002) Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretaiton, Insight. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.