Activities

Every Sunday night the staff at my school is treated to a weekly epistle to get us in the teaching mood for Monday, and remind us of things that need reminding. These emails chide us to check the school calendar (an online document that lists some but not nearly all of the week's extracurricular activities), provide shout outs to teachers who have done extraordinary work in the past week, and notify us of various requirements, tasks and challenges to prepare for.

This week, we got the following "I continue to share my deep gratitude to you for your continuing to maintain the excellent learning atmosphere you have all so diligently worked to create so far this year, but this week, let's keep the students even more focused -- do NOT schedule "parties" in your classes, as this tends to divert attention in other classes, and, oftentimes actually creates disciplinary issues for colleagues when their students feel a need to visit your party. See the attached memorandum." While one can debate whether or not it is appropriate to cancel Christmas, some teachers might be particularly confused (in light of this stern warning) by the administration's decision to allow all juniors to pay to watch a movie on Thursday, in stead of going to their classes (where no parties will be held).

We have some grievances here...

First, there is a bit of childish jealously abroad in the teaching staff. The administration has basically told us that there will be no parties (except theirs).

Second, this activity does set a bit of a precedent. Are we now saying we are comfortable with paying to get out of class? During the same week that the teachers have been admonished to maintain their academic rigor?

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it suggests that we have returned to a rule by Fiat. While procedures exist for school-wide approval of activities that raise funds or impact classes (both categories covered by this movie day), none of them were followed. Not a month ago (at the prompting of the administration, who were tired of fielding questions about poorly planned activities) the Activities committee, and the School Planning and Management Team, came up with a form, and a series of procedures (that were approved and supported by the administration) and approvals that activities must get before they can be enacted. These procedures briefly made it possible to require that these activities be prepared at least a month in advance.

At the first possible opportunity, the administration tossed these procedures out the window in favor of Imperial Fiat. It seems to me that there are really two options for the administration at this point. Either A. We are run as an empire, where all decisions must be ratified by the Emperor (at which point... complaining about our need for your approval seems a bit like pouting). Or B. We are a school that follows procedures, at which point teachers might be empowered to make good decisions, through a series of committees, without having to run to the principal for every change in their class.

Assembly

"Are we, as the adults in the building, comfortable with how yesterday's assembly turned out?"

That is the text of an email I wrote to my colleagues after a particularly difficult school-wide assembly the other day. I did not send it. This week we gathered together the student body to view the telecast of a major announcement regarding scholarships. Without going into details, it was likely the biggest announcement they will ever hear in an assembly. Very few of the students heard the announcement. There were many reasons that no one listened. The announcement was a telecast of a photo op/ press conference, thus it was geared to a political purpose as opposed to an educational one. The students were seated by year, rather than by class, thus drastically diminishing the possibility that their teachers could sit with them and monitor their behavior. But mostly, the students paid very little attention because teachers and administrators allowed them to.

During the assembly, I was patrolling the aisles of the auditorium with a few of my more intrepid colleagues. Our presence tended to cause conversations to diminish, cell-phones to go away, and some attention to be paid. In spite of this I still saw people texting, doing homework, writing notes, reading, playing on their laptops, and chatting at full volume with their friends. And those were just the teachers. I can't imagine how we expect the students to behave themselves when we can't be bothered to. While I am usually hesitant to quote George W. Bush, this is clearly a case of the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.

My larger and more immediate concern however is not whether or not the students who were present understood what was being said to them, but rather, what are the larger implications for a school that can't or won't ask a group of teenagers to listen when someone is offering them thousands upon thousands of dollars. It seems to me that there are a few very specific educational implications, and some very real professional ones.

My educational concerns are two-fold. First, any loss of authority on the part of the school is also a loss of authority for me as a teacher. When students see teachers making no effort to act like adults in the room, it diminishes their opinion of all teachers, and rather than sowing respect for the profession, it sows rebellion. Thus the bar for holding a student's attention ticks ever so slightly higher, and I have to work ever so slightly harder to win it. This makes it particularly difficult to convince my students to suffer through a complex reading or problem without a large quantity of song and dance. Each teacher ends up responsible for demonstrating on their own that what they are doing is worthwhile, because otherwise the students will disregard the material. More over, teachers have to earn the benefit of the doubt where students are concerned, and start from a place of disrespect.

This spiral into disrespect is compounded by another educational ramification of this kind of educational culture, the constant reminder that nothing at all needs to be heard, or remembered based on the first time it was said. After this assembly each student was given a packet, and the teachers trained in answering the students' questions about the scholarship program. Thus the students will get 4 or 5 chances to ask about the program, and come to understand it. It only takes a little imagination to see how this could play out in the classroom. I give instructions, then I am obliged to put them on the board, then I am obliged to repeat them 4 or 5 times, eating up precious moments of time repeating myself. (Naturally anyone who has met a teenager expects to repeat themselves, as I do, but to give up even trying to convince them to listen the first time is the epitome of lowering expectations).

But then again the educational ramifications of this assembly are not my biggest problem, though they are quite troubling. My biggest issue with this assembly was professional in nature. Namely, I have no way of initiating a real conversation with my colleagues (the vast majority of whom are committed to improving the quality of our school) that I think they could have done a much better job in that assembly. I can't figure out a way to have this conversation without appearing to scold (though I heartily think that any teacher who loudly converses through an assembly is deserving of some sort of scolding). In reality the teachers were doing what they were told. The administration merely said to show up, instituting no policies to ensure our help, and making no arrangements to allow us to help. But I have a hard time blaming it on them either.

This is a communal problem. This is a problem of the culture of the school that can only be fixed by the school community. I am trying to get that ball rolling, but the adults get defensive and the kids don't want things to get tougher on them. I am left feeling like I am shouting at the top of my lungs at two trains heading toward each other on the same track. A crash will occur, and knowing its coming still doesn't give me any power over the situation.

Getting Better

In the wake of our evaluation, I had no fewer than 8 conversations with teachers at my school, in which I was asked to provide reasons to continue working at our school. Such was the state of our malaise. It was difficult to decide what to tell these people. I have a great deal of faith in my school, and my colleagues, but I am not well suited to dealing with talk of abandoning ship.

Thankfully, this week things are starting to improve. We had a staff meeting yesterday, and spent the day today in "Professional Development" (which mostly boiled down to a discussion of implementing highernorder thinking), and for the first time in a long time we used distict mandated pd time to do something useful. We had the chance to discuss our teaching strategies, and to begin the process of working building more collaborative lessons. There were opportunities to feel validated, and to talk about what we do in our classrooms. For the most part, these meetings served the desired purpose of shifting the conversation away from how badly we did, and towards the improvement of instructional practices.

While progress was made in terms of our attitudes, time will tell whether or not this conversation translates into action. Much of the staff still feels as if the visitting committee did something to us, and if indeed we taught as well as we talked today, we would be a model school. more over there seems to be a substantial disconnect between the teachers who err on the side of accountability and those who err on the side of accommodation. Without some sort of reconciliation between the two sides, I fear our progress will stall.

Malaise

Last week my school was evaluated "objectively" by a jury of our peers.

This week we are in a funk. We knew we had our problems, but we have spent so many years comparing our work to that of the other urban schools in our district, that we started to think we were doing a good job. Thus it was difficult to hear that our instructional strategies (which we thought were pretty good) were not up to snuff.

Different segments of the school population are handling this funk differently. Teachers are looking for professional development to improve instructional strategies (which were found wanting), or trying to form informal groups designed to provide the instructional leadership that is missing higher up the pay-scale. Students are being a bit hostile (which is a typical teenage reaction to adults when the adults are less forgiving). And the Administration is planning to solve our instructional difficulties with more administering. That means teachers will be receiving more emails about being rigorous, with more links to poorly written doctoral theses in education, but little in the way of observations or suggestions for improvement.

We all know what needs to happen, teachers must make more of what time they have. We need to spend less time on simple recall of facts, and we need to spend more time on the complex evaluation of those facts. Most of my colleagues take no issue with this. Our funk does not stem from the fact that there is room for improvement in our performance. It stems from the fact that our cheese has been moved again. For years we were told that to do well, our students had to do well on the state mandated tests. We worked hard to improve their performance, and we were broadly successful. Now we receive this evaluation, and the principal, the superintendent, and a broad swath of district administrators all say "DO BETTER" while offering little to guide us. They all begin the process of instituting some sort of minor change at their level that is meant to fix the problem, but they offer very little in the way of actual leadership. Each of my many bosses heard this news and focussed in on some tiny facet of the larger problem to beat into the ground.

Our funk stems from the fact that we have little faith that these efforts will help us become better teachers. We are worried that lots of new paperwork is in the offing, that we are not doing a very good job, that the students aren't getting all they could out of our classes, and we aren't exactly sure how to solve the real issue of improving the quality of what we do every day.

Returning for Accreditation

And thus we return. After a long summer, and a long September, I have returned on the first day of our accreditation visit to discuss the process of proving that your school is still educating kids.

Every 10 years a group of teachers and administrators from nearby schools form a committee to assess our school based on 7 indicators of success. The indicators are complex, and don't bear summary. Suffice it to say, these 7 indicators break down every aspect of a school, and set standards for success or failure. We have been working on our evaluation report for the last 3 years, and as co-chair of the steering committee, I have been partly responsible (without any power) for herding our staff into evaluating ourselves.

In the past month, my co-chair and I have spent all of our free time fielding questions from everyone from the janitors to the Assistant Superintendent of schools. In the past three weeks, every broken ceiling tile and every water stain has been covered up. Bushes that have never been trimmed in all the time that we been in this building, were cut down and replaced. There are literally posters placed over holes in the wall. On a personal note I have had no fewer than 30 conversations in which someone above my pay grade tells me "We take this very seriously." when they haven't even thought about the success or failure of our school since our last visit 10 years ago.

Amidst all of this craziness, with a whole district worth of administration (and that's a lot of administration) putting up tiles to cover leaky pipes, and dragging out tablecloths to cover beat up tables, I am very proud. I am proud of my colleagues. While everyone above us is trying to spruce up a C+ school, my colleagues are trying to actually improve our score. I have been impressed on a daily basis by all of the little ways that our teachers have sought to improve their practice, all of the paperwork they have completed and all of the meetings they have attended above and beyond their contract to ensure that our school comes out of this visit having earned high marks.

More to come...

Learning as a Passive Enterprise

The assumption that learning is a passive process is perhaps the single most entrenched myth I run into on a daily basis. Almost all of my students, and almost all of their parents seem mired in the belief (contrary to years of personal experience) that one only learns from good teachers, that is teachers that are good at the act of teaching itself. According to this model, a teacher either has the skill to spray facts all over the learner in a way that makes those facts stick, or they don't. This version of what I do makes me out to be a kind of pitcher. If I through a good enough pitch, information will bypass the batter (all the available distractions that might interfere with learning), sail over the plate (meaning the catcher/learner will not need to move at all to catch it) and into the glove/mind of a catcher who merely needed to kneel in the right place...

Most of you understand this to be a silly idea. Setting aside the fact that the catcher must get up, get to school, and open his/her glove (none of which is a given)... most of us understand that more is required of the catcher than his or her presence. Unfortunately, most of the discussion of school reform, and many of the school reform efforts in place around the country serve to solidify rather than break apart this myth. When we hear positive news about teachers, it tends to revolve around the idea that a dedicated teacher can produce miraculous gains on test scores in a school year. This assertion, though strictly accurate from a certain point of view, is far from benign. To the extent that a teacher is capable of helping students produce gains, the teacher is almost always skilled at convincing students that what they are teaching has value, and thereby convincing them to aid in its teaching. In this model the teacher is delivering more of a sales pitch than a baseball pitch.

I have realized this summer that my own sale's pitch requires some work, in that I want to show the students the extent to which learning is an active and social process. In order to achieve this, I must break down the myth that if I simply explain things in the right way, students will "get it" and score well on exams. My inclination is of course simply to explain all of this on Day 1, that intelligence is fluid, that learning is a social process requiring of engagement, and hope that it sinks in. Of course then I would be actively promoting that which I sought to destroy.

This is a problem that plagues my teaching throughout the year, how to convince students to find information, rather than just giving it to them. We all know that we learn from one another. We know what it looks like when we do. We know when we are learning nothing. We also know that "Do as I say, Not as I do" is a method that usually fails. So lecturing about being an active participant in learning is doomed to fail; leaving me 5 weeks to figure out a different approach.

How does one manufacture an authentic situation in which a group of people learn that they are integral to the learning process?



That question is not rhetorical, and I would welcome any suggestions.

Creating a Culture of Learning

Last week I attended an orientation for the summer program I work with. While there was a lot of talk about making interventions and changing lives, I tend to screen that stuff out. Teachers can help, but counting on being someone's savior is probably going to lead to quitting. I don't know when making a difference stopped being enough, but apparently it has. I tend to simply tune these kind of conversations out, but this one got me thinking.

I teach hard courses. As a result, I tend to operate on the assumption that all of my students could be working harder. I also tell them this, frequently. In fact, I begin class every year with a stern discussion (lecture) about how hard my class will be, how hard my work is, and how I will be seeking to teach them to be students. It is not an optimistic conversation, and though it seems to work with 70-80% of my students, and 10% of the students just drop the course at that point, the final 10-20% start my course by giving up. My usual response to this has been to push harder on those students thereby cementing my reputation as a bringer of pain.

While I am fine with this reputation, it worries me that a substantial portion of my class is not motivated to rise to the challenge. This year, I am thinking about starting out with a discussion of the value of my material, and the values of meeting the challenges I will present. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this change, but I guess it is worth a shot. I think at the end of the day, it boils down to whether I want to try force kids to be what I think they should, or make peace with what they are...