The kids and I, after appropriate and vigilant isolation, went home to Illinois for Christmas. My moms have also been isolating. My sister and brother-in-law have also been isolating. This meant we got to be a big old isolated pod.
I hadn’t appreciated how cut off I’ve been from my family this year. I knew it in a logical way, but had been cordoning off grieving that separation. It lived in a box underneath all of the other detritus that took up 2020.
Here’s the thing, it’s also meant almost the entirety of my first year of parenting was spent without the physical presence of my family. Thinking back now of all the questions in my home study interview that invoked my family as my support network, it seems impossible to have made it through.
Honestly, there were moments of figuring out who we are as a family this year that also had me wondering if we would.
In those interviews, my caseworker asked me, “What do you think could change as a result of placement of children?” My answer, “Everything could change. It won’t all change, but I need to be ready to deal with anything changing.”
If I’d only known.
These two weeks, though. Watching the kids really respond to our larger family as THEIR family. Seeing them with their baby cousin, who has never known a version of our family without them. Watching them hug and receive hugs freely. Again, I appreciated logically that this would all happen – eventually. Emotionally, though, I held back hope that we’d see it this Christmas.
I’m a bit worried I might be holding back hope on a more global scale. Not all hope, mind you. More like, I’m keeping a bit of it back in situations where I’d normally be Head Optimist in Charge.
A former student posted yesterday on Facebook that a former therapist of his advised sitting and making a list of the things he’d accomplished within a year. A tool for regaining perspective. The idea has been knocking around in my brain since reading it. After 900+ miles of driving today, I don’t have it in me right now, but it feels like a good step in the pathway to claiming back more hope.
I’ve been silent here. I’ve been silent a lot places this last year. Everyone has, right?
So, when I thought about whether I wanted to commit to a post a day here again in the way I have in years past, I was hesitant. Then, I recognized that hesitancy as a need to commit. To be sure, the pandemic has meant silence in a lot of places I’m used to using my voice.
Parenting, though, has been the bigger silencer. My mom has asked me a few times if I’m journaling. It’s the tool she’s used as a parent to help her check in and see how she feels. At the beginning, I didn’t quite understand it. Now, more than a year in, I understand how single dad-ing can mean I get to the end of the day and find I’m carrying the feelings of an 11 and 9 yo, but might not know what I’m feeling, thinking, doing.
And, thus, I’m here, typing, again. Committing to finding out where my voice is and how it sounds as an educator and single parent.
I’m doing it here because I’m thirsty for conversation, community, and gut checks. Inspired by the near-constant uncertainty of parenting, I’m more doubtful than before that anyone’s on the other side. It’s all new territory.
I spent a day working with a few hundred teachers a while back, helping them think on the topic of “effective questions”. The conversations were wide and varied. We covered the theoretical and the practical. My goal and charge was to make sure this conversation about student inquiry led to everyone in the room having something to back with them Monday to shift their practice in ways that opened the door to more student inquiry.
A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.
A some point in the second conversation, I realized I have one overarching, non-negotiable component to effective questions in classrooms and schools – they come from students.
You don’t ask effective questions, you open the door for them, create the environments for them to spring forward, and honor them as they surface.
When I get to visit schools, no matter the stated purpose of a classroom visit or observation, I leave with one metric I value above all others – “Do I know what the students in that class were curious about?”
This is different than the question of what can students in that classroom do or what do they know. These are the questions of City, Elmore, Fiarman, and Teitel’s instructional rounds, and they are important.
They also wedge open the door of compliance over exploration. I can leave knowing a student can perform a complex scientific experiment or recite a renowned soliloquy and be rightly impressed.
If I leave these rooms without a clear understanding of what these capable students are wondering, we’ve missed the mark. These are students who are competent, but they are not necessary students who are curious.
Watching a room brimming with evidence of student curiosity is an altogether different thing. Such classrooms are spaces where – were the teacher not to show up the next day – it is entirely possible the students would keep on with their exploration and tinkering.
This is also the reason I’ve latched on so tightly to Rothstein and Santana’s Question Formulation Technique and the brilliance of their book and suggestion of “Make just one change.” For those uninitiated to the QFT, the steps are as follows:
Design a question focus.
Produce questions.
Work with closed-ended and open-ended questions.
Prioritize questions.
Plan next steps.
Reflect.
After that, Rothstein and Santana suggest, a teacher can continue on with their lessons as they would have were the QFT not a practice they’d adopted. Sure, they could, but I find it difficult to comprehend why they would. If you’ve ever seen a classroom of students who are conditioned to a compliant, prescribed model of learning taste curiosity for the first time in their school careers, you know that toothpaste is unlikely to go back in the tube. You know it because of the spark in students, and you know it because of the energy it brings to teaching.
Two weeks ago, I had the honor of guest teaching in some grade 11 English classrooms. No ground was broken. I spent most of the time asking students about conversations and what made good ones and what led to bad ones. Then, I let them practice and helped through some processing. What did they want to figure out about having good conversations, I asked them. The opinions were as diverse as the room.
“You got X to talk,” the class’s teacher said, “That’s the most I’ve ever heard him say in a class all year.” When I thought about his contributions later, I realized the moments of X’s participation that struck me as most powerful were not what he knew, but what he wondered.
Here was a student who had been waiting for the invitation for inquiry for too long. I wonder how many others are waiting for similar invitations. I wonder what it will take to prop open the door.
I don’t know when, but at some point, I started carrying names around in my pocket. Whenever a friend or colleague was experiencing a loss, I started writing the departed person’s name on a slip of paper and carrying it in my pocket. Reaching for my keys or a pen, my hand will touch the slip of paper, and I’ll pause for a moment and hold in my heart the a story about the person.
I can’t bring them back or erase the pain of loss, but I can carry their memories with me, spread the impact of their lives. It’s funny, I realize I rarely tell the person who’s experienced the loss most directly about my ritual.
This week is proving a bit hard for me. A few days ago, my friend and a force of nature Mary Billington died of cancer. She was thoughtful, brilliant, sarcastic, a light in the world, and a fierce advocate for public service and improving education. While we rarely got to see one another, Mary had a knack for sending out of the blue texts that led to long threads that felt like the warmest kind of hanging out on a couch or in a coffee shop. I will miss those chats, and I dread the first time I think, “I haven’t talked to Mary in a while…”
Mary wrote this a couple years ago. It’s beautiful and thoughtful and captures her voice wonderfully.
Mary leaving the world has been struggle enough.
You will never get to meet Brandon Williams. I got to teach Brandon at SLA. He was a heart, a mind, and a soul of beauty. He would wrestle with an idea, engage in a debate, and be open to changing his mind so long as the argument was strong enough. He could also dig his heels in and stubbornly hold on to an idea as strongly as anyone I’ve ever met. Some of my favorite memories of Brandon are of arguments inside and outside of class where something I or a peer said challenged his view on the world in ways he wasn’t ready to consider. Many’s the time I saw Brandon walk away knowing he was unsatisfied with the outcome.
He was never done with an idea, though. Without fail a day or two later, Brandon would be back, having mulled over the conversation, considered other points of view, surfaced new questions, and ready for consideration. SLA teachers often list our hopes for our graduates as them being thoughtful, wise, passionate, and kind. I will remember Brandon as all of these, and I will treasure most being witness to his constant path toward wisdom. The video below shows Brandon speaking at a community meeting for SLA. It is a testament to his light.
They never tell you your students will die before you do. I suppose we are simply to expect it as part of being in the world. Expecting and accepting are different.
If it’s not too much to ask, would you carry Mary and Brandon and their families with you for the next few days? They deserve to be with us and among us as long as we can hold to their memories.
A few years ago, my moms and sister had a kind of competition. For 30 days, whenever one of them gave the other a compliment, the recipient had to receive it graciously. That was it. That was the whole competition.
At some point, they’d realized they were doing what I’ve been noticing female colleagues doing lately. They’d deflect, demur, or negate the compliment.
Instead, the challenge was to simply say, “Thank you,” and let the compliment stand.
At work, the deflection has led to unexpected escalation.
Example
Me: Wow, you are incredibly thoughtful and good at what you do. We’re all so fortunate to work with you.
Her: No, I’m not.
Me: Yes, you really are.
Her: No. I didn’t really do anything anyone else couldn’t do.
Me: Are you kidding? That’s what I’m saying. No one else did think to do it, and you did.
Her: I’m just part of the team.
Me: Yes, and I’m saying this team is so much better for having you on it.
Her: I don’t know about that.
Me: I will stop complimenting you now.
I’ve had some version of this conversation with female-identifying co-workers over and over again. It’s gotten so that I can feel it starting and have started actively deciding whether or not I’ve the energy to see it through.
The male version is different.
Example
Me: Wow, you are incredibly thoughtful and good at what you do. We’re all so fortunate to work with you.
Him: Yeah, thanks, I like doing thing X.
It’s a subtle difference.
I’ve little doubt we start building this habit in school. With boys, we build many more opportunities to be the star, and we encourage it. In girls, we aculturate support roles and expect them to blend in. Consider the weekly football/basketball game. It is much more likely you’ve left a game talking about the star player of the game – a star quarterback, a player who couldn’t miss a shot all night long. Now, think of the cheerleading squad. First, you’re not likely, as a passive observer to know any particular cheerleader’s name. Whats more, you’ve likely never left a game and talked about how a particular cheerleader had a particularly good night.
Even my ability to use the example above reinforces the expectation. Nothing is inherently male or female about basketball, football, or cheerleading. Still, I could offer up each activity with confidence you’d unquestioningly picture boys on the field or court and girls on the sidelines. It’s problematic.
We replicate these roles and expectations in our classrooms as well. We make it acceptable for boys to stand out and make it taboo for girls.
One effect is compliment discomfort. In light of #MeToo, I’ve been wondering if part of the hesitancy also has to do with a defense mechanism against standing out as special in predatory systems. Do compliments elicit a response (conscious or not) that says, “Please don’t make me stand out. This place is already unsafe for me”?
All of this is to say, I’m uncertain what to do. I very much want to compliment those with whom I work and learn on a regular basis. I also realize my compliments run counter to larger social gender norms and could be construed as making people vulnerable in unsafe systems. Bigger than all of this, I know it’s not my job to “fix” anyone or “correct” how anyone responds to my words and actions. So, I’m left struggling with what course is best. What I’ve been doing is wrong, and what is right isn’t clear.
I’m in D.C. for a couple of days at the CoSN conference. Part of being here has also meant having conversations about the National Education Technology Plan. Talking about the NETP usually includes an awkward deflection or understatement of how much I was involved in its drafting and writing. It comes from not wanting to take away from the work or the fact that the document was a serious team effort. Here’s the thing, for more than a year of my life, the NETP was my life. I’ve read nothing else in the world more times than I’ve read the NETP in its various drafts, versions, and revisions.
I crossed the country a couple times and put many miles on many rental cars to get ideas, feedback, and the state of the art around how we might craft a national vision for how learning can be supported by technology.
It’s a good document.
We got input from learning scientists, classroom teachers, librarians, technologists, and even one of the inventors of the internet to write it. It’s a piece of government policy written for and by educators. Still, I’ve rarely talked about it. In fact, other than its mention in my CV, this is the first time I’ve written of the NETP on the blog. Part of that has to do with conflict of interest concerns while I was working at the Department, but that was nearly two years ago.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about the NETP, its content, and where we might look for and see the vision of the document in practice. For now, though, take a few minutes and read it.
“In a bulleted list, what are the rules about punctuation at the end of each line?” I asked a room of English teachers yesterday. Answering off the top of their heads, they began responding with competing rules, several beginning with, “Isn’t it…”
Some started searching online for an answer. In a few seconds, we had a new collection of “According tos” thrown into the mix. What’s more, when asking the question, I’d had an answer in my head and was throwing out the query to get support for my thinking. None came. Each proffered answer was different from what had been in my head when I asked.
Recognizing we were now awash in myriad answers, people started asking me to refine my question and help them understand the specific problem I was trying to solve. Their initial answers, they realized, were specific to the context they’d envisioned when I’d asked, not to the context that had sparked my need for understanding. They’d given their answers, not mine. Even though their first replies were too me, it took time to make their thinking actually about me.
If you’d asked me ahead of time what I was expecting, I’d have said I’d ask the question, others would answer with facts fitting the question, and I’d move on. I was, to my thinking, asking a simple question of experts in the content area about which I was curious.
No question is simple. Most of our initial answers are more about us than the question. Discerning the relevant and pertinent facts takes time and expertise. Everyone will have an opinion. The asking of the question is only the beginning of our work.
It’s an academic coda to a lesson where everyone played their part. It’s turning getting to the last page of a novel and realizing the plot is resolving itself in a way that is both exactly what you wanted as well as nothing you’d ever expected. It’s getting home from a first date and receiving the perfect text message. It’s finding out a meal you loved comes with a complimentary dessert.
I love a good exit ticket.
That love is why I spend so much time thinking about authentic, helpful, meaningful uses of this after dinner mint of learning.
It is also why I’ve started thinking about what teacher exit tickets might look like. I’m not saying exit tickets from professional development (though those are good too). Teacher exit tickets are in concert with student exit tickets, but they are the questions teachers must answer about what has happened over the course of a lesson. When schedules drown out professional reflection, teacher exit tickets can be moments where we get our heads above the water and survey the ocean around us.
Specifically, two questions stick with me as shaping thoughtful practice and looking for student progress:
What were students in this space curious about?
What did students leave knowing or able to do that they couldn’t do at the beginning of class?
For each, there is the implied, “And how do I know?”
A teacher exit ticket can act as the link between today’s enacted lesson plan and tomorrow’s aspirations. We know what we’re setting out to do at the top of a school day, but we rarely take the time to allow what actually ended up happening to directly and thoughtfully affect what happens tomorrow. Teacher exit tickets allow for this connective tissue to form.
What other questions would be wise to consider as teacher exit tickets? Add them to the comments below.
I don’t follow sports. I can tell you the name of the Eagles’s backup quarterback, but I’ll be completely unaware when he’s replaced by the guy who is their usual quarterback. I know there are divisions and conferences. I know baseball has leagues, but I can’t tell you which team is in which. When watching the Super Bowl with friends Sunday, I knew the play immediately following a touchdown could result in two different point amounts being awarded, but I had no idea which plays got to which points. I cannot tell you how many points a field goal is worth.
I was supposed to get this information at some point in the growing up process. I graduated high school in the only state in the Union that requires four years of physical education. I remember when I realized I was missing a piece of being a guy when Mr. Allen set up stations during the basketball unit of P.E. and explained that Station 1 was where we practiced layups and every other guy around me knew what he was talking about and what to do. I was clueless.
At this point in life, I’ve done some things – some very cool things of which I am very proud. Still, I can feel the moment in conversations with new groups of other men where the conversation is about to turn to sports and I’m either going to have to admit I know nothing about sports or stay as quiet as possible while nodding along until the topic changes.
I hate this expectation.
I hate the other half of the expectation as well.
I hate the fact that I can throw out that I’m a queer man and it will absolve me of others’ expectations I’ll be able to hang in conversations about sports. It’s playing into a stereotype suggesting being queer means I’m not going to understand or have any interest in sports. Outing myself as queer and outing myself as sports illiterate feeds a social construct I’m not here for.
This is the story I bring with me when I look at assessment results along gender lines within our district and nationally. On average, our boys’ reading and writing scores are below our girls’. It starts in elementary schools, and leads me to wonder what stories we’re telling and perpetuating about boys as readers and writers. When sitting with teams of teachers I am often asking how they make sure boys see the men in their lives as textually literate. What strategic ways are they working to make sure boys see reading and writing as ungendered?
I worry in similar ways, at the other end of the spectrum, about the gendered stories we tell about math and science. What is it we are doing to uncouple these disciplines from male and masculine perceptions? Setting aside for the moment the pernicious structural and institutional biases at play in tech and STEM workplaces, how are we stealing identities of scientist and mathematician away from girls? Where are they seeing the women in their lives as capable and engaged science-positive members of society?
So, if we are to tell these stories better with a fuller set of voices, how might we proceed?
Avoid assuming someone’s already told the story. Whether it was Mr. Allen assuming all the boys in our class knew what a layup is or how to shoot one or assuming all girls in a class understand that just because their math teacher is male that doesn’t mean math is for men, examining and addressing our assumptions is a first step to broadening the learning narratives our students hear.
Prompt students to listen to how others tell the same stories. This means practices highlighted by people like Sunil Singh in this post. Singh mentions math teacher Peter Harrison who “used to give out these insanely hard math problem sets. However, he encouraged students to get help from any teacher in the school — or even outside the school. You just couldn’t ask him.” What might be the power of taking ourselves out of the narrative in order that students might write their own?
Remember language matters. In my own work with teachers and students I’ve been striving to eliminate a simple phrase from my lexicon – you guys. While I realize the shorthand is largely accepted as gender neutral in intent, I can’t believe it is neutral in how it is heard. Every time we say, “you guys” when we mean everyone, we are challenging anyone who doesn’t identify as a guy to find their way into the conversation. Once or twice it might not matter, but I’m imagining the deleterious effects of a lifetime of having to instantaneously recode your identity to find your place in a conversation.
Tell fuller stories. One of the most powerful takeaways I had from C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School was the normative language we use throughout seemingly benign examples we offer students each day. How culturally-representative are the names we use in math word problems? How heteronormative are the texts we ask students to read?
Open the conversation for adults. My guess would be, if you sat down with your school or district and looked at the results from any assessment, you’d see some trends along gender lines. Fiats and banners about equality will not solve this. Instead, faculty meetings require the space to have honest conversations and to ask which systems and structures might be telling students unintended stories of gendered expectations.
Raise your hand if you’ve said or heard the term “student-centered” in relation to whatever system you’re working in?
Okay. That looks like everyone. Now, let’s stop doing that.
Unfeeling monster that I am, I cringe each time I hear the term student-centered. Lest you start thinking me beyond salvation, give me a chance to explain.
Student-centered systems (or worse, student-centered philosophies) will inevitably justify inhumane, uncaring, or incompassionate practices toward non-student members of the system. You’ve been in this faculty meeting. Adults’ negative feelings or alternative points of view are shut down by the gentle but firm reminder, “We are a student-centered school.” No one wants to raise their hand and appear anti-student, so they remain quiet and passive. Or, at least they do so outwardly.
Repeated over the course of several months or years, this anti-adult or myopic view of who our educational organizations must consider as being in their care starts to burn out some of its most caring members because they begin to resent the lack of a reciprocity of care and valuing of well being. When these people leave, they may be easy to write off by leadership as not being able to hack it in a truly student-centered environment. Even if this is the true cause of teachers’ resignations, it is cause for great concern.
Student-centered organizations are naturally incentivized to be harmful to teachers and, in turn, to students. The cumulative effect of being repeatedly asked to set aside one’s own legitimate self-interests and care in exchange for an other is likely to be some level of quiet resentment of the other.
Then What?
To argue against student-centered and suggest nothing in its place could be akin to saying, “Do what feels right” in schools. That’s also not an argument I’m interested in supporting.
Instead of student-centered, let us make decisions based on whether a given choice is learning-centered. More specifically, let us decide matters based on the answer to the question, “All things considered, which choice or action is most likely to improve the learning in this space?”
Asking some variation of this question when considering shifting teaching loads, revising a schedule, adopting new resources, implementing new systems of student or teacher assessment, planning professional development – you get the idea. Asking it in any situation and realizing “all things considered” includes adults and children inside and outside the school is more likely to lead to a decision that is more sustainable than the “Is it student-centered?” question is likely to surface.
Such an inclusive approach to shifting within a system is also more likely to invite input and conversation along the way. An administrator can sit at their desk and more easily make the student-centered decision on her own. To make the learning-centered decision, she is more likely to recognize the factors unknown to her. These realizations are the likely to lead her to seek opinions and input from those who know what she does not.
An example.
I have always been uncoupled in my work as an educator. Single and without kids of my own, I’ve consistently been on my school or district’s go-to team for activities outside the school day. Back to school nights, open houses, coaching, chaperoning – you know the stuff. I and my other single, childless friends have always been not asked, but expected to fill these roles. While I’m always happy to pitch in and help, it’s not always in my best interest. In some of the more frantic times of the year, the rapid fire of these requests becomes deleterious to my ability to perform regular, day-to-day tasks. You know, teaching and stuff.
Having the singles perform these roles is easier for the system and gets the bodies a system needs in the room. (You know, for the kids.) It is a student-centered way of thinking that fails to take into account how repeated asks of a specific group of adults might adversely effect students and learning later.
A learning-centered approach would recognize these constraints and invite input and conversation for how to more equitably meet the needs of all people in the system in service of learning. At the least, it would make room for concerns to be raised. At the most, it might uncover other ways systems aren’t working and re-evaluate approaches to such events.
A final word on the use of student-centered touched on only lightly above. That is the use of the term to incite guilt in those voicing opposition to a view or action. Those who do so are using the term as shorthand for “If you don’t like this idea, you’re probably against kids.” Not only is this mean, it is choosing what is easiest over what is right. Learning is messy work and it is difficult work requiring many voices and uncomfortable conversations. Making choices because they are easy and can be couched in language when we fear or prefer to avoid the messiness builds systems on ideas unworthy of the public good with which we have been entrusted.
