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