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