Category: Curriculum

25 Jan 21 – Don’t Teach How

A teacher friend opened up her current events assignment from its previous scope after some family pushback. Current events being what they are, some families sniffed an agenda where there was none. Still, it worried the friend.

gray wooden maze
Photo by Soulful Pizza on Pexels.com

She wants her students following contemporary informational texts across a span of time. She wants them tracking how stories are told about a specific event or idea. She is not so much interested in shaping her students’ political leanings.

This was not what the families thought was happening.

She went the route of being less helpful.

Together, her students brainstormed a list of every possible current event they could think of. Everything on the table.

And, just before the brainstorm, a letter home to parents and caregivers.

“Hey,” it said, “your kid is about to start asking questions about the world. It can be about anything happening in said world. Would you help a teacher out and help them pick something that lines up with what you care about as a family?”

I’m paraphrasing.

Then, the students started submitting the topics they thought they might like to dig a bit more deeply on. The swath, my friend has told me, is much wider than could have been imagined.

This does not surprise me. Given the opportunity to ask questions about the world and a little assistance in thinking about which parts of the world, our students will always astound us.

The next thing for these students to do is use the Question Formulation Technique developed by the folx at rightquestion.org to come up with mound and heaps and oodles of questions about their topics. Then, they get to set about the task about finding the answers and, if they’re doing it right, more questions.

The relieved teacher friend and I were talking.

“Of course this is better,” I said, “You’ve proven you don’t care what they think, but that they think and think deeply about their world.”

It doesn’t matter the topic. That skill is transferrable.

16 Jan 21 – Baking in Mistakes

If I know something could be better, is it always right to improve it?

The other day, I asked Chris to take a look at a document I was drafting for our district school administrators in preparation of our new curriculum resources. After reading and clicking through a couple of the embedded links, he got to the summative assessment description for one of our sixth grade modules.

The year focuses on community, and the summative asks students to compose an argument for one key component of a community. It’s all based on the interviews, analyses, and discussions they’ll have during the quarter, but those aren’t mentioned in the project description.

Chris pointed out the prompt could easily lead students to answers that are an inch deep and a mile wide. While I have confidence that the accompanying and building assignments will give students what they need to craft something narrower and deeper, the summative description leave those connections to chance.

What we have could be better.

The thing, though, is we built these resources internally. For most members of our design team, this was their first time building curriculum whole cloth. It’s some really good stuff.

So, now I wrestle with how heavy my hand should be. Do I go through each piece and put it as I would have it done? It’s certainly within my domain professionally and positionally. It’s also in my wheelhouse as someone who’s been doing this kind of design work for almost 20 years.

I could do it.

I don’t know if I feel like I should. Leaving these imperfections in the documents feels like leaving an unfinished puzzle lying around for others to add to and mess about with. When we bring teachers together in the Fall to plan their first quarter implementations, it’s these little pieces I am compelled to leave where they are so that others might realize their own agency when they suggest an edit.

To say I have the better idea and to change it feels as though it undercuts the professional learning I hope comes along with this process and working to make sure our teachers own this curriculum and these resources.

In describing this process, I’ve likened it that of a startup. What we have is well beyond a minimum viable product. It’s good stuff. Am I wrong to leave a few bugs in it for others to find and fix?

The one word I keep

It’s my first year returning to school as a parent. The new reality has me thinking about conversations of hybrid, distance, in-person, synchronous learning differently. While I can’t know how childless Zac would have thought through these options, single dad of fifth and third grader Zac keeps coming back to one word, listen.

It is my deepest hope for the adults into whose care I will be entrusting this little humans for the coming school year. Listen.

In the best case scenario, my kids would be coming to their new school in a new district as part of a new family. All that new would be enough. But that’s not all they and their peers across the country are starting back with. They are the first children of pandemic in generations. They have quarantined, teleconferenced, and fought loud battles over why they can’t go play with friends down the street, “WE SAW THEM YESTERDAY WHEN WE DROVE BY!”

My kids, like all kids, are walking into school this year carrying so much more than they should. Because I know some things about learning and human needs, I also know they need places to lay down all they are carrying before they can pick up the important work of reading, math, music, Spanish, science, PE, social studies, and the rest.

They cannot lay down what they carry unless they know someone will listen.

Both kids, but particularly the 8yo, have this habit of telling me something and ending the statement with, “Right?” I learned early on this “Right?” is not to be ignored. It is a check in to make sure I have registered what has been said, and that I can validate whatever fact or opinion has been shared. Did I hear them? Did what they said matter? Was I paying attention? Was I listening?

As I think about the listening we will need to do as adults, I also think about the listening we will need to do to adults. Few of any of us has had the time and space to grieve what we’ve lost in the last half of a year, and that’s just speaking of the routines of life. For those who have experienced losing someone they love from a distance, that grief must remain all the more raw.

I’m fairly good a creative solutions to complex problems. I love a good conundrum. And, I am terrified of how I will navigate these next months as I feel through the intellectual dark to find what will become normal. And, so, I hope those to whom I turn can listen. I hope all those who care for the adults who care for our children will listen. We have not been this way before.

I hope my kids’ teachers give them spaces to express. I hope journaling in words and pictures and questions is part of every student’s day in the coming weeks. I hope they have the time to get out what needs expressing before they’re asked to ingest standards and facts and the ideas of others.

I hope I remember this too. I hope I listen to those with whom I work, because I cannot be the only one who feels as though he’s got the world in that spot right between his shoulders. I hope I remember self care will do in a crisis, but that I can care for others and ask for their care as we work toward what’s next.

Love, Zac

Be patient with me, it’s been a minute.

Part of being an adult who grew up closeted and queer, for me, is reading a ton of queer YA fiction as an adult. The stories that were kept from me and labeled gross, perverse, and inappropriate by peers and – by way of their silence – my teachers are stories I relish now. As much as it is about helping the students I serve see themselves in the pages of the books our district’s English teachers feature in their classrooms, it’s about applying a balm to the scars left by shame in my childhood.

This is how I first approached Becky Albertalli’s Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda (2015). It was another text to help me somehow feel better about my adolescence. And it was another book to keep on that shelf of my mind for the occasions a caring teacher asked for a recommendation that started with “I’ve got this kid…”

While Albertelli’s Simon is in many ways your standard coming-out/of age-story, it also does what few queer novels had done at the point it was published. It erred more on the side of coming-of-age than coming out. It was more popcorn than tissues. Simon was going to be okay and no one was going to be disowned, beaten, or killed for being queer.

As others have pointed out, Simon is also problematic. While the main character might be othered because of his sexual identity, he’s doing just fine in pretty much every other privilege category. Part of what made the story so warm was knowing his parents were going to be amazingly accepting by the end.

Those problems followed the book into its adaptation to the big screen, albeit with more ethnic variety in the casting than was explicitly stated in the book.

The strengths of both overshadow the flaws. This is why I sat down the other day to start the Disney+-turned-Hulu spinoff of Simon – Love, Victor.

I will not talk much here about the details of Love, Victor, save for the notion that, if any of the above interested you, Victor will pull your heart. I meant to watch an episode. It turned out to be the first and only show I’ve binged since my kids arrived at the beginning of December.

Whereas Simon showed me another queer kid, Victor showed me a queer kid whose path and experiences felt so real and complicated that I found myself sobbing when they got too close to my own.

But that’s not what I’m actually writing about…

And while I really, really, really recommend Love, Victor, it’s not what finally dragged me out of the deep writing slumber to put my thoughts to pixels.

Yesterday, Kristina binged the show on my suggestion and we were texting about it as she wrapped up. I noted, were I still in the classroom, I’d love to do a comparative analysis of the original Simon text and at least a few episodes of Victor to think through how race, class, privilege, religion, gender, and sexuality play out in both pieces of this shared world.

Then, today, as I was playing with this idea that will never happen, I heard this voice in my head say, “But what about the straight kids?”

I’m 39-years-old, and I’ve done some stuff with my life. I am out and proud. To get to the place where I feel comfortable typing any of this has meant putting in some tough work.

With all of that, in thinking about a story I can personally attest reads as truthful and important, I still worried about taking up space of straight people. I recognized the guilt of taking time away from the traditional narrative. I questioned the value of my own story. Still.

In processing all of this, I’ve come to realize my relationship to texts featuring queer characters has been solely focused on mirrors. Never once in all the time I’ve been doing the work have I acknowledged the value inherent in a straight kid reading about a queer kid. And, it makes sense. When those stories were so absent from my own growing up and still too-difficult to find for queer kids coming up now, I get how my brain has put importance on making sure kids (and adults) who feel like they’re living in the shadows can interact with texts that shine light where shame cast a cloud. Kids are killing themselves because these stories are still banned, ignored, or shunned.

But to think only this way is to accept the narratives do not have value as windows and doors. I’m embarrassed not to have thought of this before. It is possible, before today, if you’d asked me if I thought it was okay for a kid to make it through 13 years of public education and never encounter queer characters, I might have said something like, “Not the queer kids.” I would have begged off taking up space or putting explicit value on stories like the story of my life.

It turns out, I am not only applying balm, I’m still learning from these stories too. As you or your colleagues start to plan your syllabi or reading lists for the coming year, you are doing it wrong if you are not including queer characters. You are continuing to tell your students – queer and straight – that queer folx need not be given space on the page or in the world. That lesson sticks.

Building Essential Questions for ELA Classrooms

Pulled together a group of teachers last school year just after things wrapped up for them. Middle and high school English teacher folks from around our district who had answered a call to help us design our new secondary English language arts curriculum were assembled in one of our unaffecting conference rooms.

Image of a sidewalk with the words "Passion led us here" imprinted on it with the feet of two people visible standing below the sentence.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

We’d talked through some of the big pieces, overviewed processes, and were ready to build something practical – something foundational.

I broke the teachers into groups, each with the same charge – use your time, your chart paper, and your collective knowledge to come up with grade-level essential questions worthy of guiding a year’s worth of ELA learning in each grade from 6-12.

The teams scattered, most of them choosing to find places in the grass of the building’s ho hum lawn. Putting back on the familiar suit of habits when I was teaching middle and high schoolers, I began to circulate between the groups. Attempting to be observant and unobtrusive, I stayed with each group until I felt the moment when someone looked to me as though I’d stopped by to supply the “right” answer. Then, I excused myself and made my way to the next group.

As team a team started to get to a draft they felt was stable and worthy of sharing, I begged off being presented to and gave them their next direction. “Great, see that team over there? Go combine your team with theirs, take turns sharing drafts and combine your lists into one.” Eventually, they’d become two groups, representing separate halves of the design team – both mixed with middle and high school teachers, honors and general ed, AP and college prep.

We came back to the conference room, and I put the chart paper with the two teams’ drafts up on the wall. “Okay, now we need to combine these into one draft. What do you notice that can help us with our work?” They set in, talking, pointing out, what if-ing. We moved things into an almost working draft, and I spelled the room for lunch. While they were gone, my colleagues and I took a look at what we’d wrought and made some minor tweaks.

After lunch, I pitched our edits to the team, and they consented to the moves. What had emerged – and I cannot emphasize strongly enough how unlikely we could have made it so elegant if we’d tried – was a series of three themes that cycle twice from sixth to eleventh grade with accompanying essential questions. And, then, having looked at those themes through multiple lenses, we drafted a capstone twelfth-grade theme and essential question that lends itself nicely to an attempt to synthesize those three themes.

G6 – G12 Grade-Level Draft Essential Questions

  • G6: Communities: Understanding changing communities: What is community?
  • G7: Identities: Redefining identity and values in the face of struggle: Who am I?
  • G8: Culture: Determining courage and cowardice in the real world: What is culture?
  • G9: Communities: Understanding others’ perspectives: How do we build community?
  • G10: Identities: Building resilience and using your voice: How can my voice be used?
  • G11: Cultures: Deciding who you want to be: How to morality and ethics shape the individual?
  • G12: Interdependence: Connecting with the world: How do I want to impact the world?

A few things strike me as I look back at these questions almost five months later:

First, they hang together. If you were to look across our current curricular resources, each unit or module is complete unto itself. Look for a larger thematic or spiraled link, and you’d find none. Imagine what it must be to be a student moving through our system. The ideas of your sixth-grade ELA class only connecting to seventh or eighth grade only by chance. And connecting to your final years’ experiences in high school? No, certainly not.

“Those questions outside your space, they’re great. I mean, you could really think on those for a good long time.”

Also, they they were drafted by teachers representing almost every secondary school in our district. They were literally asked to come up with the big ideas they might ask our students to play with and consider as readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and thinkers; and they came up with some pretty good ones. These questions, along with their quarterly sub-questions hang on chart paper outside my office. A few weeks ago, our district CIO leaned over in a meeting and said, “Those questions outside your space, they’re great. I mean, you could really think on those for a good long time.” I agreed and explained how they are serving our project. “That’s great!” he replied, “Do you have them typed up somewhere that you could share them with me? I really do love them.” I assured him I’d send them his way.

This raises the element I think I like most about these questions – they are hopeful. And, if not hopeful, then at least loaded with possibility. I’d like to think that comes from the fact they were born of dedicated teachers sitting together, collaborating in the sun, noodling over the best they might do for their students. Either way, they are a long way from “This is when I teach Book X” or “This is my dystopia unit”. So many texts will help our students winnow their ways to answering these questions, and those answers will likely not be well served by activities that ask students “list the important characters in each chapter” or other such drilling that waves at the coast of maturing as literate citizens, but never quite makes it ashore.