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.

Professional Development

I think we should have some- don't you?

An observation that struck me recently is this. Often what we do under the rubric of 'professional development' is anything but. Yes, we may have some outside expert, usually in a hotel ballroom with five hundred of your favorite people with you, tell us all about a new way of thinking about some aspect of our jobs. And some of those 'talking head' types can be great. But rarely are such experts presented as a cohesive vision of improving classroom instruction. And there is almost no follow up at all. 

The rest of the time, professional development time is filled with a lot of things that are certainly useful, often necessary, but not at all related to improving teacher's skills. The truth is, that in this industry, the time resource is in such short supply that we are always robbing Peter to pay Paul. During time allotted to PD, we are doing all the other stuff that is necessary to running the institution, department or district, but not actually allowed for in the structure of our working lives. So we need to do that work (curriculum development, team planning, department and committee work), but again, very little of it is concerned with making any of us better at our jobs. 

And that's okay, because meaningful improvement for teachers doesn't really start on days when there are no students in the building. Real professional development is better termed 'instructional coaching.' It starts in classrooms with actual students and real teachers. Yes, there probably needs to be some understanding of the learning goals , and some framework for methodology, but after that it is a pretty organic process. The main problem is that once you engage real instructional coaching, it is time intensive. There needs to be time in the classroom, time for reflection on what happened in the classroom, development of new strategies and the translation of those strategies into actual activities, the deployment of the new strategies in the classroom, gathering of data on the efficacy of the new strategies, reflection, and repeat. 

Other than the time in the classroom, there is almost no allowance in our working day for the rest of the process. Teaching five classes a day, the rest of my working time is spent meeting with students, pulling together material for future lessons, working with colleagues on a variety of issues, all of which are important and need attention, and oh year, grading (which eats the lion's share of my non-classroom working time). I do, of course have wonderful, rich , meaningful conversations with my colleagues about our work, but they tend to haphazard. Stuck in between all the other things. If improving student learning is really our goal (and I think it is), then maybe we need something different.

The last key element is that it can't happen in a vacuum. At least not for me. The word 'coaching' is key in this model. Even Tiger Woods has a coach. No one laboring to improve in their chosen field does so without some assistance, some feedback. We need coaches who really understand teaching and learning, and who appear in our classrooms for meaningful amounts of time, for the express purpose of observing our work, in order to give us feedback that will help us to continue to improve. Those observers need to have a wide base of knowledge, both in teaching strategies, pedagogy, and (at least in my context, high school) a high degree of knowledge specific to the subject at hand in a give classroom (very tough to assess a math teacher if you really don't understand math).

I don't know about you, but no such system exists in my building, or as far as I know, my district. But I do know a boatload of people who are qualified to do this work. One of them shares my office with me, and this blog. Several of them are right down the hall. Several more of them are also administrators in my building. They are the people I talk to every day about teaching- its up and downs, our struggles, the student's struggles, the challenges of the particular material we are working with. I already trust these people because I work with them every day. 

We need to be our own instructional coaches. This may be blindingly obvious, but how often is it really happening? I hear about some schools and districts that have positions like this, at the building or department level, but not very often. My experience has been that after the probationary period, no one has been watching my teaching very closely. As long as my kids don't light the room on fire and no parents are complaining, the system seems to be happy with my job performance. I'm sorry, but that isn't good enough for me. I took this job because I actually care about it. I am not a teacher because I had nothing better to do. I had a professional life before this one (and it paid better). I don't want to spend the next twenty years teaching the same lesson over and over again and blaming the students when they don't learn (we all know someone who fits that description). I don't want that for me, my students, or my own child. 

So what would it take to have meaningful instructional coaching in my building? Not that much actually. It would take time, and that translates into money. But not an inordinate about I think. Especially when measured against all the things that money is spent on that don't actually improve student learning. It would take structuring some time into our day when we could sit in each other's classrooms, some time to work together reflecting on the observations and collaborating on new strategies, and ready access to some pretty low tech gear (a video camera being first in my mind). 

It's not too much to ask is it? Seems so simple. Makes a lot of sense- at least to me. 

So, why exactly can't we do it?

Wishing for time...

F. Scott