Tag: education

Things I Know 210 of 365: I’m an intellectual hoarder

To understand how hoarders can end up in such dire straits, you need to understand how the process starts, and that begins with understanding one central concept: To hoarders, none of that stuff is trash.

– TLC Network Website

George Siemens wrote a thoroughly interesting post about meeting up with Alan Levine and being introduced to Levine’s Piratebox/Storybox.

The post and the box – be it of the pirate or story variety – are both incredibly interesting and should be read and pondered.

The piece that stuck me in Siemens’s post had everything to do with his thinking around the potential uses of the box. Actually, it was his thinking on his thinking:

I’m not sure how to apply this to teaching/learning (why is that always the measure of an idea? “Hmm, how can I use this with students”? Why can’t things just be sometimes?). Something like a learning box? I’m grasping here.

The question of why things can’t just be scuttles around in my brain constantly.

Movie, book, song or conversation…anything entering my field of thinking is primarily analyzed for education.

No matter its origin or intended purpose, I find myself questioning how the object or idea can make teaching and learning better.

It’s a sickness.

Oddly enough, it’s a sickness I once pitied in others.

In college, as a member of the campus improv troupe, I was close friends with many theatre students. It was a whole other world from the close reading, critically theoretical, OED-loving one I knew as an English major.

Fortunately, all my theatre friends were tremendously talented and consistently found themselves cast in some production or another.

Dutiful friend that I was, I often found myself in the audience.

After a few shows, I noticed something.

While I was sitting in the audience submersed in the world of the play, whichever theatre friend was sitting next to me was seeing a different show altogether.

They saw colleagues on the stage practicing their art.

Where I saw story, they knew the backstory of how an actor moves from part to character to production. The knew and saw the pieces.

After the show, my basis for judgement was how much I’d lost myself in the world of the performance. Their bases for judgement were a million subtle metrics I would never understand.

The closest thing I have for comparison is where my mind goes when watching Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds or even Matilda.

This is also where my mind goes when it finds something novel, new, interesting or important.

I hear Siemens’s question, “Hmm, how can I use this with students?” or some variation of it.

Everything strikes me as an avenue for building conduits of understanding. If I need to use Lady Gaga to show what it means to look deeply at a text, so be it. If I need to compare allowance and birthday money as a means for explaining gross mismanagement of educational funds, superb.

Different from Siemens, my brain doesn’t limit itself to students, but asks how anything can be used to build understanding for others. Even if an immediate use can’t be found, I’ll squirrel the new bobble away like an intellectual hoarder.

Every once in a while, I’ll hit a moment of frustration.

“Why does everything have to be about learning?” I hear from somewhere in my mind, “Why can’t things just be sometimes?”

In these moments, I hear a chuckle from somewhere else in my mind, “You’re cute,” a voice says, “Now, back to thinking.”

Things I Know 187 of 365: Be nice and we’ll work hard

Never look down on anybody unless you’re helping him up.

– Jesse Jackson

A friend recently planted himself firmly behind the idea that effective teachers are the most important factors in student success. In the same breath he said he wasn’t one of those guys to praise teachers and call them the salt of the earth. He works to support kids, he said, not teachers.

It doesn’t work like that.

The two aren’t separate.

If we want healthy schools, places of learning enlivened by vibrant and curious people dedicated to being the best versions of themselves, the systems must support and value all members of those systems.

My morning cup of coffee is better when my barista and the coffee bean farmers in the fields are treated with decency and respect.

I cannot be surprised by a reticence to praise and support teachers when the rhetoric of education paints them so largely as deficient, lazy, undereducated hacks.

Who would dare praise teachers?

Sure, you praise the teacher you know, the cousin or friend of the family who is going into the classroom. They are great. But teachers, in the general sense? No thank you.

Tell teachers the majority are performing poorly and you can’t be surprised when students are performing poorly. I wonder sometimes how many teachers are doing worse right now because they’ve read or heard the rhetoric of education leaders bemoaning the poor quality of teachers.

My friend told me he’d visited a number of classrooms on a single day, to check up on good teaching. Of the 50+ classrooms he visited, not a one held good teaching. Not a one held a teacher at the time. His evaluation was based on whether standards were posted and other measures of the classroom walkthrough. Choosing not to challenge the evaluation, I asked a question I’ve asked here before.

“So, you can name at least 50 bad teachers. Can you name 20 good ones?”

He liked the question and thought I was making his point for him.

I was not.

My point was something else. Too many people are doing well for there to be fewer than 20 effective teachers for every 50 or 60 ineffective teachers.

“All students can learn,” is a popular bumper sticker of regressive education reformers. Pronounced as though a new idea that, once realized, solves so much.

I don’t disagree with it. I question the next ten words.

So long as we’re putting out truisms and bumper stickers to rally behind, let me try one. Let me try one that, coupled with the idea that all students can learn, would mean a sadly revolutionary way of thinking in education.

All teachers can teach.

And, yes, I’ve got my next ten words.

Things I Know 146 of 365: It’s our sights, not our size, that matters

Thanks to farm subsidies, the fine collaboration between agribusiness and Congress, soy, corn and cattle became king. And chicken soon joined them on the throne. It was during this period that the cycle of dietary and planetary destruction began, the thing we’re only realizing just now.

– Mark Bittman

According to 2009 U.S. Census data, the student population of the ten largest school districts in the United States was 3,939,071.

That same census data put the U.S. population at 307,006,550.

In 2009, ten school districts were responsible for the education of roughly 1.2 percent of the nation’s population.

As Sam Chaltain once said to me, American schools are the only public institutions to directly interact with 90 percent of the population.

America’s public schools are too big to fail.

A recent NPR report on talks currently taking place between the School District of Philadelphia and the City Commission regarding financial support from the city referred to the district as a “perpetually hungry child.”

I can see the comparison. Schools are hungry. They’ve always been hungry.

In dealing with a $629 million shortfall this year, I’d say the district is turning to the commission as a soup kitchen, not a buffet.

What’s clear beyond that admission is difficult to tell.

The $48.6 billion channeled to education through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created change, but seemingly thoughtless change. The states and districts rushing to claim money for their coffers were as varied as Augustus Gloop and that starving child my mother always told me was waiting for whatever I didn’t eat at dinner.

If your state or district received any portion of the $48.6 billion, I’m willing to guess few people can point to where it was spent. If they can, I’ll go double or nothing the majority of recipients can’t give you a clear answer of how ARRA improved the lives of the students we serve.

I say lives because improving learning requires more than improving tests and textbooks. School lunch, transportation, socio-emotional counseling and a slew of other supports are all part of the web of public education. To think otherwise is to think too small and miss seeing the whole board.

In a 2009 Leaning Point and Mission Measurement brief on assessing the effectiveness of the stimulus, reported one interviewee saying, “States need to think of this as an inheritance and do something they wouldn’t normally do. They should be thinking about putting in a high-efficiency heating system and not just paying the mortgage.”

While some recipients did just that, others made investments equivalent to hiring a gardener.

The thinking was too small, the guidelines too restrictive.

I used to work at a magnet school that recruited only the lowest achieving students in the district. (No easy sell.)

Each time I would approach my principal with a new and oftentimes strange idea for instruction, he would approve it.

One day, I asked him why.

“We know that doing everything as usual doesn’t work with these kids,” he told me, “So, we need to try new things.”

The country understands half of the advice, but is missing the critical point.

If the encouragement is to buy the educational equivalent of high-efficiency heading systems, the caveat is those systems need to be fueled by the same coal that’s always been coming down the chute.

Nothing in the Education Department’s four assurances required for the receipt of further ARRA funds suggests a holistic or even humanist approach to education. Initially part of the 2007 America Competes Act the four requirements are:

  • Making progress toward rigorous college- and career-ready standards and high-quality assessments that are valid and reliable for all students, including English language learners and students with disabilities;
  • Establishing pre-K-to college and career data systems that track progress and foster continuous improvement;
  • Making improvements in teacher effectiveness and in the equitable distribution of qualified teachers for all students, particularly students who are most in need;
  • Providing intensive support and effective interventions for the lowest-performing schools.

The systems built on and fueled by such requirements inspire compliance, not creativity. The classrooms made manifest by such systems inspire the same.

Our primary worry should not be that America’s public schools are too big to fail, but that its students will be too compliant to succeed.

Things I Know 140 of 365: We’re doing some great work

In response to a post I wrote a few days ago, Debbie and Mark left comments with a similar sentiment. They claimed my classroom and/or SLA as flukes of education. I hear and read this pretty frequently about any teacher or school making exciting change or doing better things to help kids and teachers.

How many exceptions does it take to change the rule?

Anytime someone claims a classroom or school as the exception they then cite another school or teacher as proof things are bad in the educational mainstream. While progressive pedagogy has yet to read critical mass, I don’t know that naming the handful of schools or teachers into which a person has come into contact as evidence of failure rules out optimism either.

Taking off the table the rest of the faculty of SLA, I can match any “failing” educator you’ve got with one who’s doing amazing things for kids.

Think of 5.

Go ahead.

Ready?

Meenoo Rami teaches kids English here in Philly and incorporates collaboration and student choice in all sorts of ways. Not content to settle for the regular schedule of professional development, Meenoo is co-founder of #ENGCHAT and a teacher-consultant for the Philadelphia Writing Project.

Meredith Stewart makes me think more deeply about what I do every time I interact with her. A teacher of middle and high school students in North Carolina, Meredith is certainly top-notch. Her recent posts about having her students teach their peers shows a commitment to building reflective student practice that could serve as a model for teachers at any level. Howard Rheingold summed up Meredith nicely:

She is willing to experiment with new tools, understands that facilitating student collaborative learning and fostering in each student a sense of individual agency as a learner, not technology for the sake of technology, are the important goals for technology-augmented classrooms.

Mirroring Meredith’s reflective practice, George Couros is a fine example of what learning as a principal can look like. His writing on teaching and learning works to push his own understanding of the topic as well as the understandings of his readers. You want to learn with George the way teachers want their students to learn with them.

Scott Bailey teaches students in juvenile halls in California. More than many teachers I know, Scott could excuse himself from the idea of progressive practice, citing the difficulties of building authentic learning experiences given the restrictions of working with adjudicated youth. Instead, Scott engages his students in public writing that helps them to work through whatever brought them to juvenile hall while giving them voice in the outside world. On days when I think my job is difficult, I read the work of Scott’s kids.

Sefakor Amaa is a force of nature. Teaching in the Dallas-Forth Worth, Sefakor once explained her choice to buy a home in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods of her school district. “It’s where my kids live,” she said, “I want them to see that I am there, and understand where they are coming from.” No teacher martyr, Sefakor teaches agency, empowerment and self-worth by constantly monitoring them for her students through her own words and actions.

I’ve hundreds more.

I’ve been looking for them over the last few years. That’s the thing, we have to be looking for them. You see, only a fraction of the great teachers are telling their stories. Only a handful are blogging and tweeting. The rest are doing what we came here to do – helping our students be the best versions of themselves.

Things I Know 139 of 365: We don’t work in the mailroom

There is absolutely no indication this is a problem beyond the mailroom.

– Phil Budahn

I don’t see myself as working at the bottom of the education hierarchy.

In his weekly media address, President Obama said, “We need to encourage this kind of change all across America. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – not from the top down, but from the bottom up.”

See what happened there?

In attempting to build up the teaching profession, the President admitted teachers work in the equivalent of the mailroom of the educational industrial complex.

We don’t, but it’s subtle turns of phrase like that which continue to make it acceptable for politicians, commentators and anyone in general to talk about teachers as if they were the least important pieces of a student’s life. Often, this is a breath or two after they’ve admitted teachers are the most influential factors in teaching and learning.

“From the bottom up,” is one of those frequent idiomatic turns of phrase thrown in as filler or a linguistic bridge to get from one point to the next.

It draws much less attention than “Teachers are facilitators of learning,” or “We must focus on 21st-century skills.” Those rhetorical lightening rods draw the attention of anyone with an opinion on education while “From the bottom up,” or “From those on the front lines of education,” merit little notice in the educational thunderstorm.

This is how we keep teachers in their place. This is how we continue to scratch away the polish of the profession.

“From the bottom up,” implies the President wants to put a suggestion box in the break room and give a coffee mug to any teacher whose suggestion makes it to implementation.

At this point in a conversation, my students would claim I’m reading too much into President Obama’s remarks. Perhaps I am.

Consider, though, the effects if he reversed his language to paint a different mental picture – one that sat educators as the experts at the top of the system and recognized the role of government to provide a foundation of support.

“We need to support expertise of educators all across America. Washington needs to support reforms driven by principals and teachers and parents. That’s how we’ll make progress in education – from the top down.”

It would shift the paradigm. It would acknowledge that educators serve the needs of our students and that Washington serves at the pleasure of its electorate.

The first step toward the adoption of this language will begin with parents, principals and teachers and their rejection of the notion that they operate at diminished capacity simply because that is what they have been told.

We must engage in self-advocacy as we would want our students to do.

If we continue to agree with the linguistically constructed hierarchy, we will never be models of change to our students.

Things I Know 120 of 365: I’m pretty sure we meant to build schools

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

– Pres. George W. Bush

Think back to your school. Elementary, middle or high – it doesn’t matter. Picture the structure, the hallways, the classroom, the layout. I’m guessing you had a central location where you could stand and monitor the goings on in multiple hallways as you turned around.

Picture the materials. Cinder block. Windows that opened, but only a little. (If the room had windows.) A heating system that worked – sometimes. An air conditioning system that didn’t exist. Periodically throughout the day you heard a PA system that announced who should be where when. This was in addition to the bells or tones that sounded at regular intervals to move people from one place to another. The system was likely made complete with the addition of closed circuit cameras and metal detectors in the mid-90s.

Did I get pretty close?

Now add uniforms.

Now add 8-foot fences.

Now add razor wire.

Now you’re in a prison.

We’ve been building schools like prisons for a long time. Lately, we’ve been arguing the design has been about security. I’m uncertain if we’re protecting the students from the outside world or the outside world from the students. Either way, there’s not much about traditional school design that screams “Learning!”

Diana jokes that my classroom is more of a club house. Within my first weeks at SLA, the architects whose offices were directly under my room showed up at the door with a tape measure.

“You have the students moving around quite a bit,” they said, “We’re going to pay for carpeting to help soften the noise.” Since then, I’ve been adding to the room the way large families store things in their garages or attics.

Most recently was the addition of desks whose surfaces operate as dry-erase boards. Throw in the bean bag chairs, icicle lights, and bright paper from lessons past and the club house description becomes apropos. Oh, and their’s a picture my students drew of Neverland on a 14-foot sheet of butcher block paper. It’s hanging from the ceiling.

Levity aside, my classroom is a constant effort to build a comfortable space where people would want to read and write.

Many of my students’ initial literacy educations were in school lockdown. Seated in rows of desks facing a teacher desk, they compliantly learned how school readers read and how school writers write. They did as they were asked to do.

It was incarceration-based education.

A part of me wonders whether the education community should be looking for leadership in the work of L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca who is beta testing his new Education-Based Incarceration Initiative designed to prevent recidivism once inmates are released.

According to NPR, “Baca wants his prisoners to accomplish more than academic achievement. He wants the program to equip inmates for a better life outside prison walls. Courses in life skills like leadership and decision making give time in prison a constructive purpose.”

Not unlike the description of the physical space, replace “prison” with “school,” and you have a decent explanation of what I want for my students.

Things I Know 68 of 365: I got in to Harvard

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should be willing to economize.

– Franklin D. Roosevelt

Two days ago, I got an e-mail telling me my decision was available online.

Forty-five slow-motion seconds later, I was congratulated that I’d been accepted into Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education to study for a Master of Education in Education Policy and Management.

I went for a run.

Three miles later, I’d set a new personal best for the mile and my head was still swimming.

I called my mom and told her the news while my sister Rachel who’s in town for her spring break was standing in front of me.

They yelled in unison. Rachel hugged me.

In the past 48 hours, I’ve completed my taxes, my first FAFSA (I worked through undergrad), and sent my financial aid application.

Today, I told our advisory the news and stressed that nothing was sure.

It’s not.

Money will decide.

I want this – intensely.

Money will decide.

Still, for now, I got in to Harvard.

Things I Know 53 of 365: The hypotheticals aren’t looking so good

Sixty kids in a class strikes me as a lot.

On average, I teach about 30 kids at a time. In moments when the controlled chaos gets to be a little out of control, 30 feels like it could be 60.

If 60 ever got out of control (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) I suppose that would start to feel like 120.

Last night, I was asked, “What do you think the GOP is thinking by decimating school budgets? I mean, do they really think that 60 kids in a class in Detroit will be anything other than civil war?”

I took the hypothetical bait and started playing out how I would teach in an chronically economically depressed inner-city school where the average class size was 60 students.

It didn’t take long.

In my hypotheticals (and I’m guessing in GOP lawmakers hypotheticals) I’m not in that classroom.

Education is the largest chunk of combined state and local budgets, and teachers are the largest chunk of that chunk.

If you want to save money, eliminate the teachers.

And if you want to back up your argument, trot out selected passages from Christensen, Johnson and Horn’s Disrupting Class. Not the whole book. Present only the pieces of their argument that sound like they back up your plan.

Cite budget deficits and slowly lay off the most junior of your teaching force. This will leave your most senior teachers with little patience and overflowing classrooms.

Some will stick it out, but many will decide things have gone too far and take an early retirement.

You won’t have to worry about much standing in the way of finding reasons to fire the hangers on as you already broke collective bargaining when you destroyed the last vestiges of a collective.

You’d think you’ve saddled yourself with an ugly mess at this point, but this is where the truly beautiful part comes in.

Again, you’ll have the benefit of bastardizing Christensen, Johnson and Horn.

For a fraction of a cost, say $25K each, you hire aides – half hall monitors, half data entry specialist – to oversee the computer labs with which you’ve outfitted your school buildings. Sixty kids to a room starts to sound like a low-ball estimate, so you start to schedule kids in shifts, using the computer rooms around the clock – constantly overseen by what we’ll label education accountants.

It looks like there’s a hole in the plan. All the capital outlay for those computers is going to set you back.

Don’t worry.

Some multi-billionaire benefactor will step in and his foundation will donate the proprietary technology to stock your learning centers.

It will be a happy coincidence the students in your learning centers develop an unquestioning brand loyalty to the corporation founded by your multi-billionaire benefactor in his previous life.

It will be another happy coincidence that the proprietary brand loyalty will quietly suffocate the open source movement that threatened the corporate donors who filled your re-election coffers.

So, you’ll have your closed system. You’ll eliminate your greatest cost, you’ll increase learning production, you’ll increase consumer production (the production of consumers), and you’ll find a place for most of the young people from your electorate.

Most of the young people.

See, what you will be creating is the “public option.”

You won’t be eliminating all teaching positions or schools. The private options will still exist.

You’ll send your kids there.

Your donors will send their kids there.

The best teachers from the old model (many of them likely the most seasoned) will fight tooth and nail to cling to the profession they love. They might disagree heartily with the new way of doing things. You don’t have to worry about that. They’re not a collective anymore, so their voices will be mere whispers on the wind.

So, your children and your donors’ children will be educated. The public option will fit the needs of your electorate. You’ll eliminate the majority of your budget deficit. And, all will be right with the world.

In the early days, you’ll hear grumblings from the disenfranchised about the morlocks and the eloi, but such hesitancy is to be expected in times of great innovation.

Things I Know 49 of 365: Boredom scales

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

– Ellen Parr

Noah and I were chilling in my godmother’s living room earlier tonight.

He and his family had caught a 5 AM flight from Topeka to D.C., so I assumed he was a bit frayed.

He told me no. He’d fallen asleep before takeoff. I asked him about missing the in-flight movie and he stared at me blankly. Evidently, this is not a feature of the Topeka-D.C. run.

I switched the subject.

“I’m guessing you’re in third grade?”

Noah shook his head.

“Secon…”

I stopped short, noticing a decided uptick in Noah’s head shaking.

“Fourth?”

“Yup.”

This is why I’d sat down next to Noah. He was easily the youngest person at the party in that way I remembered meaning I needed to entertain myself when I was his age.

Plus, I like talking to little kids. They give the most honest answers.

As he didn’t have the air of a dropout about him, I began to ask Noah about school.

“Who’s your teacher?”

“Do you like him?”

“What do you think about school?”

The last one surprised me.

Noah had been keeping himself busy for the better part of an hour and a half – following the dog around, walking around in circles, entering a room and whispering “Does anyone want to play Follow-the-Leader” so he didn’t get in trouble for interrupting. The kid was pretty fantastic by all accounts.

I’d totally love to teach him.

By fourth grade, though, Noah was broken.

“I don’t like school.”

“Wait, school’s awesome. How can you not like school? Give me the top three reasons you don’t like school.”

“I can give you four,” he said, and held up four fingers. “Boring, boring, boring, and boring,” he explained ticking off each finger as he spoke.

In some ways, I’m a little relieved. After four years in Philly, I was beginning to worry we could only bore the creativity and curiosity out of children in urban settings.

Noah was offering up evidence young children’s imaginations were being neglected in the rural Midwest as well. It’s a striking display of continuity of message.

It’s easy to argue I’m making snap judgements about Noah’s education after only a few seconds of conversation. As I said, though, little kids give the most honest answers. Imagine, though, what systems must be in place so that Noah can so quickly and self-assuredly jump directly to boredom when asked his opinion on school after only 5 years of what I’m certain his parents hope will at least be a 16-year tenure in education.

Some Topekan had the chance to make this funny little guy think and create, but he’d gone and bored him instead. That’s damage it’ll take years to repair, and faith in his teachers-to-come that Noah might never regain.

It made me sad.

So, I did what I do.

“Does your teacher know you’re bored.”

“Um, I don’t think so.”

“Have you ever told him?”

A smile, “no.”

“You should.”

It might have been wrong of me. I might have just set Noah and his parents up for a parent-teacher meeting. Then again, I’m sure Noah has had to sit and listen to what his teacher thinks and knows and feels for the better part of the school year. I’m a little bit ok with the tables being turned.

Things I Know 36 of 365: We’re really good at not teaching kids to sing

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

– Walt Whitman

Each day in fifth grade, as the bus arrived at school, I hoped everyone would break out in song. I didn’t have a particular tune in mind – at least not one that I recall now.

I just thought we should start singing the way the people did on stage when my grandparents took me to the symphony. Mayber “Carmina Burana” or the “Ode to Joy.” Something simple.

“Let’s sing,” I’d sometimes say to whichever friend was sitting next to me as we stood to de-bus. No one ever did.

Last summer, working with educators in South Africa, as we closed our week of workshops, the teachers would sing in celebration. Everyone, to a person, would sing. We’re talking harmonizing and vocal percussion.

These same teachers who at lunch were bemoaning contract negotiations and class sizes and access to technology, they sang. They transformed from teachers I could drop in to any faculty lounge across the country, to the cast of Glee.

I’ve never felt as foreign as in those moments.

This was what I’d hoped for every bus ride to school. It was happening around me.

But years of education had taught me I didn’t know how to sing.

So I stood sort of clapping arhythmically waiting for what I’d hoped for all those years to be over.

I mean, what would you do if everyone on staff broke into song at your next staff meeting?

When Jabiz Raisdana said he’d be taking my students’ writings and cobbling them together into a song, I thought, “Oh, I could do that.”

When he said, he’d be recording it, I thought, “Oh, no never, hu-uh.”

Worse still was the look on many of my students’ faces when I read them Jabiz’s suggestion that they might contribute a recording of a chorus of the song – fear and panic.

I’m not entirely certain when we teach students they can’t sing. I haven’t found where that particular standard resides in the curriculum. Whatever best practices we’re using to teach students not to sing (or play instruments for that matter) we should really start to employ them in the teaching of math and reading. We’re really good at it.