Frustrations with research

A conversation with F. Scott today sent me into a bit of a tailspin. This and a string of conversations I've had over the last week, hearkened back to the thoughts I expressed a while back after my experience presenting at the American Educational Research Association conference.

I'm taking a great risk here that readers will assume I'm writing off educational research as a whole. I'm not. I'm an educational researcher working to get my doctoral dissertation published as a book for teachers, working to design a study to examine the pilot I'm running with my senior class next year, working to build a life as a K-12 teacher AND researcher. I'm not writing off educational research as a whole.

And yet, I'm frustrated.

I'm frustrated that given the sheer numbers of educational researchers out there, the current educational policy wave driven by people who are not educators is steamrolling any opposing idea. Shouldn't we have been out in front of that movement? Our involvement has been in the form of the well-known researchers who have been invited to D.C. to simply give a rubber stamp to the decisions the policy makers had already made (this was essentially the role I ended up playing on a state-level committee myself). With so many of us on the ground doing research, how on earth has our role as experts been usurped so completely?

I'm frustrated remembering how it felt in the first year of my doctoral program that my practical teaching knowledge wasn't particularly valued--not explicitly by the things people said directly about teachers but implicitly in the way teachers were positioned in the research we were asked to read and study. I'm frustrated by the conversations I had this past weekend with a former high school student of mine who has already had a career as a high school English teacher and who is now a doctoral student in an education program at one of the leading research universities in the country. She wouldn't dare tell people there that she might want to go back to K12 teaching once she finishes the program. But I say why not? Why shouldn't there be more educational researchers working out the context of K12 practice? Why isn't this a valued outcome of a education PhD program?

I'm frustrated by a conversation last week with a doc student currently in the program I graduated from. He is the editor of a state-level language arts journal that reaches hundreds of teachers in our state, and he has a hard time convincing his doc student colleagues and professors to submit to this journal. Maybe it's not a top tier research journal, but why not have your work read by TEACHERS? Sometimes it seems that we researchers write for each other, present for each other, work our butts off just to impress each other. Do teachers, administrators, and policy makers read the top tier research journals? Sometimes it feels like the goal becomes the most elegant research design, but I want to know how that affects the lives of the students in my 4th period class?

You know what I really want to do? I want to build a research cooperative located right here in the high school where I teach. I want to secure funding so that I can teach maybe 3 classes instead of 5 and have time dedicated to doing the research too. I want funding for some of the other teachers in my building too who are doing amazing things that they should be studying and writing about. I want to cultivate a voice, a presence, and find a way to speak to those who really matter when it comes to designing the contours of students' day to day existence in school. I want to find the best avenues for reaching these decision makers and cultivate a place for voices from the realm of practice to speak and have a seat at the table. Maybe we could even start a journal, something unlike anything that is out there.

But the question is how--how to accomplish this? Who would give us money? Would our school district support us?

Lots to think about.
--M. Shelley

reading ruined already?

I'm sitting here helping my 2nd grade daughter with her homework.

She is to complete three story maps, each on a book from her shelves here at home that she has read and knows well. This task has paralyzed her.

And that's what I find fascinating.

With as natural as stories are to us as human beings, how is it that a task to map out a story paralyzes my child? How is it that identifying the characters, the setting, the problem/solution, and the important plot details is making my child believe that she is unable to succeed?

Normally my child whips through her homework. But tonight, she had to take a five minute break under a blanket on the couch. Now that she's been back at the table she has written down three plot details in about 15 minutes. Not the usual pace for a kid who can complete a week's worth of homework math story problems in about a half hour.

She's sitting next to me, whiny, doodling on her page. "What happens next in the story?" I ask her.

"I don't know. I forgot," she says very sadly. "You told me but I don't remember."

We had just read the story together. Surely she has not forgotten the details of the story yet?

"What if there's a right and wrong?" she asks me. "My teacher writes A LOT when we do these at school. We copy down what she writes on the board."

"Are you worried that you aren't writing enough?" I ask.

She finishes with another plot detail and asks me what's next. She has just flipped through the book again but asks ME what's next. She asks me to write it even. Or at least to tell her what to write. When I make a suggestion, she tells me that it's too long, too many words (this from a child who has handwritten several pages of her autobiography in one sitting, a child who read about eight Magic Treehouse house books in one weekend and has no problem with stories).

I worry that already school is teaching her that there is only one set of right answers about a story. I worry that already she is learning that what the teacher says about a book is right and her job is just to copy it down neatly on her story map. I worry that she is learning already that the purpose of reading a story in school is just to identify its parts and pieces, not to say what she thinks about a story.

I ask her if she would rather write about what she thinks about the story. She says the story map never asks her to do that.

I ask her why she picked the book she used for the first story map--and she said it was because it was short and she thought it would be easy to work with.

Oh my. Already? Choosing a book for a school task because it's short? How did this happen?

I'm certain her teacher means well and does not intend for any of this to happen. In fact, I have been quite impressed by what I know of my daughter's classroom. I know that the literacy approaches taken there are all informed by researched best practice.

But it's absolutely fascinating to see my child struggling already with a task in school that boils a book down to its mere components, separated from pondering what the story has to say about our life as human beings. She's so worried about not writing enough and not writing the right details that she's paralyzed.

Well, we just agreed she could have some chocolate if she finished another story map... now she's somewhat more motivated. Good in the short term for getting the homework done. Bad in the long term for her love of reading?

No wonder so many of my high school students aren't readers.

Signing off--
M. Shelley

What if?

You'll be seeing a lot from the book I'm currently reading, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, edited by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. This book is becoming highly relevant to the work I need to do to contextualize the pilot the district has supported me in running next year with my seniors. In short, in order to more effectively differentiate to meet my students' needs, I'll be able to work with attendance in a flexible manner. There will be some days where not all of my students will need to be in class, thus making it possible for the ones who work well independently to do so and giving me more time to work one-on-one with the students who need more of that kind of support. It will be a hybrid online/face time course with a strong web presence to keep everyone on the same page.

I'm excited about this, but I want to approach it well. I want to know exactly WHY I think this might work. I want to know what to look for to see if it is working. And in the end, I want to be able to say with some certainty whether or not it's an approach worth repeating and exactly why. I've got a student teacher this semester and a bit more time on my hands to read, so hence my obsession with this book. I imagine I'll be using this space here to capture some of the passages and thoughts from the book that strike me as critical in my thinking about this pilot project.

So here's today's contribution (actually, I had intended to post it on Tuesday--but as F. Scott already indicated we had a crazy week here with state testing AND parent/teacher conferences). Kylene Beers wonders:

What if students sometimes worked independently and other times worked with others in their school community, local community, state community, or across the globe? What if schooling valued multiple intelligences and the curriculum were dependent on technology and multimedia? What if authentic assessments were more important than multiple-choice state tests? What if asking the probing question were valued more than providing the correct answer? What if students were required to do some sort of service project or community work and what if learning content in the textbook were not substituted for figuring out what to do with that content? What if school were the place where students found their voice, discovered how to think, and saw that what they did and believed and thought mattered? What if school were where students learned a lot (not all, but certainly a lot) about being a part of a democracy, a contributing part? What if school were a place for figuring out, where trying mattered at least as much as adequate progress, where learning proceeded at each student's level and pace instead of lock-step pace? I think if those things happened, then a high school diploma might mean something, and the something it would mean would be far different than what it meant in 1986 or 1996 or even today in 2006. (11)

So yes, what if? I love this vision of the potential the high school education. This vision might better engage more students, thus making school something real and relevant and worth their time.

We need more people wondering what if? and imagining other possible worlds for our students' lives in school.

For now, signing off--
M. Shelley

Quantify this!

In a week where I spent a good chunk of my working time watching 9th graders take a state mandated test that does not help them and tells us very little that we didn't already know, maintaining a positive attitude is tough (we had conferences as well- so additionally an exhausting week).

So I smiled this morning to read this great vignette from Joe Bower at for the love of learning.

I won't repost the whole thing, but the end is perfect:

This quick, light-hearted interaction with these two boys initiated a relationship that engaged them in learning for the remainder of time they spent with me. And in the end, they needed the relationship more than the math.

Can you test for that? How do you quantify the master teacher's judgement that the relationship is more important than the curriculum at that moment? Would you penalize Mr. Bower for failing to focus on the math (his ostensible job). Would you fire him because he's 'not a good teacher?'

Or would you PRAY, to what ever power you believe in, that your kid has teachers like that.

It's always the relationship first.

'No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.'

-F. Scott

and another view of the landscape...

This one courtesy of Carol Jago in her 2010 NCTE Presidential address: "To Cherish the Interests of Literature" from February's Research in the Teaching of English. Jago says:

"Speaking in a commencement address to graduates of the Stanford School of Education, Elliot Eisner (2006) argued that, 'Imagination is the neglected stepchild of American education. Questions invite you in. They stimulate the production of possibilities. They give you a ride. And the best ones are those that tickle the intellect and resist resolution.' It is a remarkable message to send to future teachers and school administrators who will be working in a country in thrall to testing. Eisner urges us to nurture questions not answers, most particularly questions without easy answers. Many teachers find it difficult to make time for such questions and imaginary play in a school day increasingly devoted to the mastery of basic skills. I worry that the focus on serious certainties may in the long run only contribute to our nation's continuing hard times. Consider the instructional approach of schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens's Hard Times:

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

Well, you all know how things turned out in Coketown. Reading literature offers ballast to a Gradgrinding, facts-based education. Stories [...] feed the imaginations of young readers and resist narrative resolution. Such literature is compelling because of, not in spite of, its ambiguities."

Thank you, Carol Jago, for this succinct validation of why I teach the way that I do--mired in questions that have no answers, throwing complexity at my students and asking them to wade through it and find their own thread of meaning that they can then communicate clearly to the world, fighting to convince them that reading literature is the only way to prepare them for dealing with the complexity that their lives will present. They must learn to read their lives to write their future.

And how, please tell me, will standardized tests teach them how to do that?
(still dreading the hours I'll spend over the next few days watching a group of 25 sophomores take the state test...)

--M. Shelley

Our landscape

I've finally started reading a book I've had on the shelf for a few months now: Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, a recent edited volume by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. They invited the leading teachers of and thinkers about adolescent literacy to write about what that means now in the 21st century.

In the introduction, Beers shares the letter that the three editors wrote to invite contributors to participate. In this, I see one of the best articulations of the current landscape in education: "globalization means our middle and high school students will increasingly find themselves living in a world persuasively described in Friedman's bestselling book, The World is Flat. It means recognizing that literacy demands are shifting and becoming more complex. It means understanding that automation--a part of our technological world--will change the landscape of the job market (the grocery cashier in the next decade will be the exception and not the rule). As automation expands, different jobs emerge--jobs that require creating, synthesizing, and evaluating. They will be held by those with ingenuity, imagination, and empathy, those who are willing to take risks and work cooperatively. We should be preparing students for such a world, yet the politicization of education has resulted in a different agenda where a prescribed assembly-line curriculum seemingly asks only that students pass a test. The current focus on high-stakes tests produces students who can answer multiple-choice items but have lost the interest and agility to ask probing questions, to conceptualize our new world" (xii).

Yes. This is the challenge before us. And this is where I'm trying to take my students. But as we head here into two weeks mired in our mandated state testing, I wonder how well the current policy wave will get us there.

M. Shelley

Wisconsin...

Just sharing some reading on the situation in Wisconsin and what it says about the state of the career of teaching in our country today.

Diane Ravitch wrote an opinion piece for CNN this week entitled Why America's Teachers are Enraged.

She wrote a follow up to that piece today, responding to the feedback that she got from readers--most of which she said came from teachers saying thank you for what she wrote, but about 1 in 10 responding in anger about teachers. Read it.

I feel somewhat immobilized by all of this. The tide seems so strong toward scapegoating teachers for problems with our schools that we have no control over. What can I do? How can I effect change in the public perception of teachers? And not because I want the world to be nicer toward me--but because empowering and respecting teachers is the best thing for our students. We are professionals and we need space and support to do our job as well as we know we can.

Maybe this: the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action.

M. Shelley