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.

The English Teacher & The Scientists

A few months ago, some of the good people at ISTE asked if I’d be interested in co-hosting a new grant-funded podcast they were producing.

In conjunction with their new learning sciences initiative – Course of Mind – the podcast would be an investigation of the learning sciences from a school- and classroom-based perspective.

I signed on with the inimitable Shana White to co-host, and we started talking. More precisely, we started listening. Imagine if you could corner your favorite professor immediately after class to shower them with all the burning classes they just inspired. Now, imagine each of their answers worked to directly chart a path to improving your teaching practice. That’s the Course of Mind podcast.

Four of our episodes are out in the world with four more coming this season. I’ve listened to the finish project a couple times. Each time I get the sense of excitement that leads me to backchannel Shana during each conversation with something akin to, “I can’t believe we get to do this.”

You can find our episodes via Apple Podcasts here or Stitcher here or here or here.

So far, we’ve learned about general and personal teaching efficacy, reflective practice, what the learning sciences are, and how learning works. So, you know, just the little things.

The thing that is most thrilling on the whole endeavor is we’re making a podcast I’d want to listen to. In the uneven and rocky soil of education podcasts, that feels like a win.

A Little Reminder of Mattering

Today, I was visiting classrooms in one of our elementary schools. In a grade 4 class, there was a little guy who was having trouble writing what he was thinking. It was his turn to share in his circle of six.

He didn’t want to read what he wrote.

He was a little embarrassed because he hadn’t quite written an answer to the prompt.

I asked if I could read it to the group. He nodded.

I read aloud wha he wrote and said, “So, it seems like he doesn’t think he should have to choose a most important piece because he thinks they are all important. That’s pretty cool to me.”

We moved on.

A bit later in class, he sat next to me to read a book about shark trivia. His fluency and decoding were amazing, by the way.

We chatted for a while and other kids came to talk to me.

When it was time for me to visit another class, I stood. I said, as I usually do, “Thank you for letting me learn with you today.”

He very quietly said, “Thank you for helping me.”

This was 15 minutes later.

There is no more important job than this.

Who cares for me?

Before I dig into this one, a little background on the word choice for this question. If you’ve read Nel Noddings or read what Chris and I had to say about the Ethic of Care in our book, then you might see where this is headed.

Originally posted here.

Taking tremendous liberties with Noddings’s work, let me sum it up this way. You care about the big pictures – poverty, homelessness, racism. You care for the specific humans – someone you know living in poverty, the family at your church struggling to keep their home, your friends who are people of color in a world of too little nuance and empathy.

So, when I think about who cares for me, I’m not considering those who are advocates of teachers or those who champion the rights of queer folks, or the band of people who have joined together to support guys named Zac. I’m talking about the people with whom I am in a caring relation. My parents, siblings, and other family members care for me. For many of us, though not all, this is true.

So, who cares for me in my work? This one gets a bit messier. As a classroom teacher, my students were literally in my care. My responsibility inside and outside of the school day was to care for my students. It’s the responsibility of any educator. It would have been unprofessional and unrealistic to expect my students to care for me. Take off the table the responsibility of the 140+ people with whom I was in most frequent and closest contact, it paints a bleak picture regarding sources of care.

This isn’t unusual. This is part of being a teacher. We are in constant contact with other humans and we would be wrong to expect them to care for us. Maybe you’ve witnessed or experienced a starvation of care this can create. I work with hundreds of educators across the country. Too frequently, I meet teachers who are angry, sarcastic, pessimistic, and closed off about their students. These are teachers who lack a structure of being cared for professionally. They have transferred the inappropriateness of expecting their students to care for them to a lack of expectation of being cared for by their colleagues and administrators. They’ve starved themselves or been starved by systems that fail to recognize caring for all is paramount to success.

Every educator is entitled to an expectation of professional care from the adults with whom they work.

Every educator is entitled to an expectation of professional care from the adults with whom they work.

I ask the question today because I constantly struggle with that sentence pf entitlement.

I deserve the care of my colleagues. To help internalize this, I have taken to reminding myself. My colleagues in my office care for me. Many of the principals and teachers in the district care for me. The coaches, interventionists, and administrative staff with whom I work care for me.

It is difficult for me to rely on others. While I would likely drop everything I’m doing to help out an acquaintance after a few minutes of conversation, I do not afford that same charity to myself. I need to. We all need to.

The people with whom I work and teach and learn every day care for me. Only when I accept that as true and presume it as I do my work will I be able to do better work.

Toward the end of last year, I started posting to Instagram pics I tagged as #TheBigQuestion. The thinking was to throw one question up there each day. Each question was designed to push our practice – yours and mine. It felt like folks responded to the questions, and I found myself carrying each one with me through the day. So, all of this is to say I’m committing to post these questions each day of #2019. I’ll be doing that in the morning. In the PM, I’ll be posting my thinking on the day’s question here on the blog. Since I love conversation, I’m hoping you will also make public your answers as they come. I’ll supply the questions, we’ll all share our answers, and – I’m hoping – have a more thoughtful year.

I Bet Killing a Mockingbird Wouldn’t Be So Bad

Why are you teaching To Kill a Mockingbird?

Most of the time, when I ask this question, I get the answer that it is an important text. Students need to read it because of its place in the American canon. If not the canon, the response is the importance of the lessons of the book. After hearing the response, I went back and re-read the text. What I found is much better stated in this piece by Julia Franks writing for the National Council of Teachers of English. Franks points to the central metaphor, the titular mockingbird, and how it applies to people with mental illness and dealing with addiction. Or, Franks points out, it is applied to people of color, most notably Tom Robinson. These groups don’t hurt anyone, readers are told. They simply “make” music to make our lives better. If the argument for TKAM is the lessons it teaches, surely we can do better than a lesson that shows readers people in historically-marginalized groups still in the margins and as passively and flatly as possible.

This is to say nothing of the text’s furthering of the white savior narrative in its positioning of Atticus as so important a figure that his mere passing by requires the African Americans — who have had to function only as bystanders to systemic violence and oppression throughout the story — to stand.

Photo by Katerina Radvanska on Unsplash

Taken separately or together, these issues build an argument that the lessons of TKAM work against its inclusion. They also start to work against the argument for inclusion based around the idea of its status as an “important text.” To consider this claim, I look to Elizabeth Vallance’s 1974 article “Hiding the Hidden Curriculum.” In her introduction, Vallance writes:

Recently we have witnessed the discovery-or, rather, we have heard the allegation, for the issue is cast most often as criticism-that schools are teaching more than they claim to teach, that they are doing it systematically, and doing it well. A pervasive hidden curriculum has been discovered in operation. The functions of this hidden curriculum have been variously identified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedience and docility, the perpetuation of traditional class structure-functions that may be characterized generally as social control. Critics allege that, although this function of social control is not acknowledged openly, it is performed nevertheless, perhaps more effectively than the deliberate teaching of intellectual content and skill, the function in whose name we explicitly justify schooling.

Vallance’s work leads to a questioning of the if-not-hidden-then-implied curriculum at work in the compulsory reading of TKAM in our classrooms. Even if we are calling upon the text for its explicit lessons of choosing to do what is right when it is uncomfortable, or that society is more complex than we may initially understand, these lessons cannot be divested from the text’s implied curriculum. What lessons about expectations of the place of mental illness or addiction are we implicitly teaching through the requirement of TKAM? What systems of hegemony, expected roles for people of color, and implied support of those systems are we passing to our students when we say, “This book must be read?”

Think also, as Franks and others have noted, of the frequency with which our students engage, as readers with characters of color, varying socio-economic statuses, varied genders, or LGBTQIA identities? In a school year, Mayella Ewell may be the only character students see who lives in poverty. Lee’s portrayal of Mayella does nothing to fight against stereotypes of people living in poverty. To the contrary, a shallow reading of the character suggests people in poverty are dishonest. Go deeper, and the dishonesty of poor southern whites is the result of incest. If Calpurnia, Tom Robinson, and the African American audience at Tom’s trial are the only African Americans or people of color with which students interact in a text throughout a year, what are the implied lessons of this essential text? Passivity. Respect for the educated white man. Relegation of people of color to sit and watch while a select group of white people challenge systems of racism on their behalf. The requirement of impossible purity of character to act against injustice.

These are not the lessons we would explicitly teach children. If this is so, then we must be more on guard against implicitly passing these ideas along as truths. What goes unexamined or is understood as condoned through silence shapes how our students understand and interact with one another and the world.

How might we, then, escape these unintended consequences of some of canonical literature’s most pernicious lessons? First, let’s stop teaching books and start teaching children to consider big ideas and essential questions and to use texts of all types as lenses to examine those ideas and questions. Give our students choice of texts. Something along the lines of, “Choose a text with a protagonist with a point of view markedly different from yours,” can be a starting point. If TKAM finds its way into students’ hands via this challenge, all the better, because we will not only be reading the text, but questioning it as well. Rather than deifying a written work, have our classrooms be places of constantly asking, “What does this text get right? What does it get wrong? And, what makes us think that?”

If comedian Hannah Gadsby is correct and “You learn from the part of the story you focus on,” then it is incumbent upon us to be as thoughtful as we can in the stories we choose to tell and have our students read.

If Students Aren’t Wondering, You’re Doing it Wrong (33/365)

Photo by Rick Hatch on Unsplash

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:

  1. Design a question focus.
  2. Produce questions.
  3. Work with closed-ended and open-ended questions.
  4. Prioritize questions.
  5. Plan next steps.
  6. 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.

Help Me Remember These Two Lives? (32/365)

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.

My Compliment Fails & Their Messy Social Contexts (31/365)

Photo by Grégoire Bertaud on Unsplash

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 Need to Write More about the NETP (30/365)

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.

Dead Words: ‘My low kids’ (29/365)

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Let’s stop saying, “my low kids,” or “my low readers,” or “my low math kids,” or whatever other ways we homogenize and dehumanize students.

When I was teaching kids writing, my classroom had a dead word wall. It was a lasting tribute to our lexicographical kills throughout the year – the words we determined as overused or ineffective in communicating our ideas. They added imprecision and subtracted meaning.

“Low” is the first word on the dead word wall of teachers. It acts as a pseudo-insulting stand in for the words we can’t say. It’s a kinder, coded version of slow, stupid, and dumb and also has some sort of qualified protection. When we say low, we are abbreviating “low scoring” (often in reference to standardized assessment). Looking more closely, low and low scoring are abbreviating our students.

In a recent conversation with a principal, she said to me, “Our data…” At the finish of her sentence, I asked, “When you say our data, what are you referring to?” Unless we are examining a robust body of evidence chronicling not only a student’s learning trajectory, but also their multiple opportunities to show their learning, I’m not inclined to sit at a table and pretend we are developing a useful understanding of that child.

Low not only abbreviates our students’ performance on assessments, it abbreviates the extent to which we see them, it closes the aperture of our understanding of the full sets of knowledge and ability they bring to learning as well as to the tasks we assess. When I hear teachers talk about students who surprise them on assessment scores, the sentence is something along the lines of, “Even my low students did well.”

I’m tempted each time to ask how many times these low students will have to score high before they earn enough of our esteem to become our middle or our high students.

I suppose, then, we run the risk of everyone being thought of as capable and diminish the value of framing education as a competition. Wouldn’t that be a beautiful day.