Invisible yet powerful barriers

For the record, F. Scott and I have committed to posting SOMETHING at least once a week, even if it's just a tweet (you can follow us on Twitter too--look over there on the right).

F. Scott's been tweeting all week. I've been mulling things over in my mind.

I am completely convinced of the need to make some paradigm-shifting changes in the way we deliver education. But there are some significant challenges to doing this within the context where I teach.

For one thing, it's difficult to convince my colleagues that something is broken that we need to fix. By most standard measures, our students are very successful. They test well. They get into colleges. Most of them do just fine. Why on earth would we need to consider changing anything? What's broken?

The answer to this is pretty complex. Within my particular teaching world, students are too heavily focused on grades, the grades they need to get into the colleges that they want. This currency takes precedent over learning. Another problem is that we have many students with unrealized potential--students who come to school because they feel like they have to, but school doesn't offer them anything truly meaningful. They simply go through the motions to get the grades and move on to more interesting things in their lives. And beyond the scope of my school, our world is changing and our schools aren't keeping up.

Making this argument to my colleagues feels daunting; their unshakable belief that what we're already doing is working is one of these invisible yet powerful barriers. Even putting the right words to the argument to help others see it is difficult. But it's something I need to work toward.

The other barrier is somewhat harder to get my head around. It pretty much has me stymied.

I believe in a few powerful tenets to guide my teaching: student choice wherever possible (choice about what they read and how they show me what they know) and de-centering my own ideas and voice in order to make space for theirs. The reading/writing workshop model is a great way to achieve these goals. I teach one section of creative writing right now. On Mondays, students study mentor texts--imaginative writing (novels, poetry, graphic novels, screen plays, etc) that they admire and want to learn from. They choose these texts on their 0wn, and they have the freedom set a mentor text aside if they don't like it. I have one student who has struggled to do much work for me in the senior lit/comp class I teach who has already read four books of his own choosing for creative writing. On Tuesdays, we have some sort of writing activity mini lesson to help students work on some aspect of writing I'm seeing as a need via their polished drafts that come in every two weeks--and then in the remaining time students have unstructured writing time. On block days, we have another writing mini lesson, unstructured writing time, and peer response group meetings. On Fridays, we workshop two students' work on the big screen together. Students read their work to us as they scroll through it on screen and tell us what help they need, and then we talk. The class is moving toward a portfolio assessment at the end of the semester, something that has already been defined so they know what the end goal is. All their work is driving toward that goal.

My students are engaged and excited about their work. I'm totally convinced in the power of this model.

The challenge is how to take a similar model and place onto the other class that I teach. It seems like it would not be a problem to figure out. Students still choose mentor texts, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on what genre we're working on. Students still have unstructured writing time each week, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on our current set of writing goals/objectives. Students still work toward some kind of end-of-semester assessment, only structured around the specific outcomes in the curriculum for this course. Students still workshop each other's work. Seems simple, right?

No. It's not so simple. Not at all. My brain is having the hardest time figuring this out. The barriers?

I teach on a team. In my department and school, that means we are pretty much on the same page, at least oriented toward the same outcomes for our students. We're pretty much working on the same (or similar) projects at the same time. We're dealing with the same books. It's all about securing a similar educational experience for students who take that class regardless of who is teaching it.

My department is on a quest to acquire enough copies of the major texts taught in each class so that all sections can teach those texts at the same time. If all eight sections of a particular class are all teaching Gatsby at the same time, for example, where's the student choice? We're literally putting in infrastructures that contradict the tenets that focus on student choice and de-centering the teacher's ideas/voice to make room for the students'. Instead, shouldn't we be building libraries of texts that grab and hold students' attention and challenge them as readers and human beings?

I teach with a group of Language Arts teachers who seem to operate on the notion that our ultimate goal is teaching literary analysis. This means practices that coerce students to read, that dictate how students should read and interact with a text, and that control the ways students write in response to texts. Yes, we do teach many classes that are controlled by the scope of AP and IB exams which do essentially drive toward literary analysis, but even in those courses there is room for practices that remind students that we read because we are human beings and we want to learn more about the human experience and there is room for practices that center on student choice. Conversations that question the practices I listed above are difficult and highly charged; I learned in my first year in the department to pretty much avoid questioning anything.

But maybe I need to start questioning again. I'd love for everyone to read Edmundson's Why Read? and for us to talk about it. He essentially makes the argument that traditional literature teaching methods place theory between students and texts, that we are by default teaching students NOT to engage in literature as a human being. They read like analysis machines. Reading is busywork.

Any how, it's because of these barriers and others that I'm sure are yet invisible to me that I'm having such a hard time figuring out how to make the shift. In essence, it's a paradigm shift from the idea that every student needs to be doing the same thing at the same time (reading the same book, working on the same paper, etc) to the idea that students will actually be more engaged if they are able to make choices to drive the focus of their work. I'm certain that the approach to have every student doing the same thing at the same time is about efficiency and managing lots of students in a day, but this model holds back students who would soar if given space and it doesn't provide the extra support others need who feel like they are constantly struggling to keep up. There is certainly a better way.

I just need to figure it out, despite the invisible yet powerful barriers that seem to come up and get in the way of being able to see the solution clearly.