Renewal of Purpose

A few weekends ago, I attended the first day of the North Dakota Study Group conference held in Mundelein, IL. I had the privilege of listening to Detroit activist and community organizer Grace Lee Boggs and UIC professor David Stovall present their views on the state of the education system today, explain their vision for what it could be, and issue a call for action for all educators. I even had a conversation with Deborah Meier herself (in which I tried to sound intelligent instead of starstruck.)

What I heard at the conference was exactly what I needed after several weeks of feeling powerless at my school. The pressure of ISATs, conflicts with co-workers, and concerns about the emotional health of my students had unearthed old questions and frustrations about what it means to be a teacher. The speeches and discussions with other passionate education activists has renewed my sense of purpose and reminded me once again of the larger perspective in our fight for quality public education. I would like to share a summary and my takeaways from the first day of the NDSG conference.

One of the themes from both speeches was that the future direction of our country is intimately tied to the state of public education. According to Boggs, we are living in a special time, the end of an era dominated by the belief in the old American dream. She says that it is time to use our imaginations to create a new American dream, one based not on capitalism and a relentless pursuit of cognition, but on more democratic principles and on a kind of knowing based on care and connection to humanity.

Both were insistent on the insidious nature of the current system. The path we are on now leads to destruction. The type of education the government is encouraging will create a country of passive subjects, content to believe and do whatever they are told by the media and politicians or those with power. Narrowing down teaching and learning to tests and quantifiable data not only dumbs down our students, but makes them completely incapable of thinking and acting on their own. True democracy, however, requires involved citizens who are able to think critically, discuss and dissent, be creative, have moral responsibility, and be active in changing the world around them...qualities that can't exactly be measured by a standardized test. Boggs used a quote by Albert Einstein to make the point that we need a total shift in consciousness that has yet to occur in our history: "The splitting of an atom has changed everything save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe."

Stovall brought the concept to the ground by showing how mayoral control, business interests, and the gentrification of neighborhoods have essentially disintegrated many public schools in Chicago. The city has strategically dis-invested in its lowest-performing schools and communities, leaving them vulnerable for years. Then, citing accountability measures and the miracle of charter schools, the city has moved to close the schools and "turn them around" in a supposed last attempt to save them. He made clear how the city's actions are based on assumptions about urban youth, poverty, and race as pathological. None of these tactics have solid research to prove increased student achievement, and actually there is increasing evidence against them. Yet Chicago is used as a model of successful reform that is now being replicated across the nation.

For Stovall, and many others, this is a crucial time. It is the end of public education as we know it. There was a palpable sense of pessimism and cynicism throughout the conference about the direction of the nation and whether we would see our vision as a reality in our lifetimes. What gave everyone hope, however, was the simple fact that our kids, our students have the capacity to change the human condition.

Stovall asked of the educators gathered together, "What are we doing knowing what we know?" For me, this was the crucial question. As a teacher, what does it mean to resist, to empower, to trust, to work with students to imagine and create a new, different world? I want to join in on the discussion of what a complete redefinition of effective teaching would look like based on these values. One of the first things that we teachers can do, which Stovall adamantly suggests, is to be clear about what we do and why we do it. We need to have a voice, we need to find the "cracks" within which we can act upon what we believe, and we need to seek each other.

Failing and Thriving

Thought I'd share with you an excellent article I came across in Teacher Magazine the other day. It is actually a review of a new book by Thomas Newkirk called Holding On to Good Ideas in a Time of Bad Ones. I have yet to read the book, but the piece by Mary Tedrow, a teacher in Virginia, really struck a chord. I thought she articulated very well what I attempted to in my post about daily failures as a teacher. Her thoughts reflect what I have been thinking and feeling lately at this point of the year, too.

Here is an excerpt from Tedrow's article entitled "How Teachers Fail - and Thrive."

After nearly a decade of high stakes accountability, the meetings, data collection, pre-tests, post-tests, required lesson plans, reports, and more reports have diluted my view of what kids really need to be “well educated.” Newkirk has written a good reminder.

His book, subtitled Six Literacy Principles Worth Fighting For, is something of a manifesto on behalf of quality instruction—recalling for us the basics that good teachers know but may have lost sight of: Keep the curriculum simple, use what kids already know, let kids write a lot.

The review of essential teaching practices is welcome. But in these most difficult times of my teaching career, I think I needed Newkirk’s cheerleading even more.

In Chapter 8, “Finding a Language for Difficulty: Silences in Our Teaching Stories,” Newkirk reinforced for me that I am—all the way to the bones and beyond—a teacher. Obvious, you say? Perhaps. But there are those days when I leave the building feeling like much less than that.

Newkirk acknowledges that all teachers live with a deep insecurity that we either learn to accept or ultimately ignore for self-preservation. He argues that the profession needs to embrace an awareness that all teachers struggle with regular failures: students they can't reach, lessons that fall flat, explanations that are met by blank stares. He eloquently describes the inevitable class where—because of the time of day, or the season, or the odd mix of personalities—no one appears to have the energy for learning, and the teacher feels mired in lethargy as well. He reminds us that no one is a super-teacher 24/7. Some failure is a natural consequence of the tremendous challenges we take on.

I needed to hear that. I’ve been feeling the failure most keenly of late. Hitting the new round of government goals means that every discussion centers on students who are the hardest to engage. We are asked: Who might fail? What are you doing to ensure this does not happen? What remediation is occurring—with or without system support? Teach harder, we are admonished. Teach harder. This is the message from all corners. It’s a demoralizing one, according to Newkirk. I concur. I’m dancing just as fast as I can.

Newkirk argues that “harder” isn’t the answer. What teachers need is each other. We need to be sharing and discussing student work, bolstering and supporting each other through the inevitable failures, collaborating in manageable small communities, inviting each other into our classrooms. We need to witness daily the great teaching that is already going on inside our buildings.

Newkirk eschews the teacher-hero we all know from the movies. The idealistic views portrayed in these self-sacrificing wonder-workers only undermine the confidence of real teachers who regularly must face failure in their practice. Too often, Newkirk says, teachers deal with the fact of failure in isolation. The true hope of reform lies in a teaching culture where we are expected to share with colleagues, where we are routinely given the time and support we need to find ways through and around failure together. We need to slow down, not speed up the teaching act.

Remember the old chestnut: Put two teachers together, and all they do is talk shop? And why is that? Because we are never permitted time to do it on the job. Because no one else knows what it's like. Because grown-ups need grown-ups. We can't subsist on a diet of all children all the time.

At some point we need to articulate the long view. We need the perspective of many eyes and many ears so that we can survive to teach another day. And even prosper. However, these practices are supported by policies that make us the objects of reform rather than the co-creators.

This idea of co-creation is the hoped-for change that will sustain me through the years beyond 2010: that teachers may one day wrest control of their work from others. If it happens, it will happen by bits and pieces, but it is the most important “good idea” I cling to in this time of very bad ones.

I hasten to say that there are many other excellent reasons to read Newkirk's book. I have several new ideas for informal writing with my students, for instance, and a list of notes on the flyleaf that will no doubt lead me to other good practices. But if you have hit that low place in the school year (or perhaps in the decade of “No Child Left Behind”), you will especially appreciate Newkirk’s offer to help us find “a language for difficulty.”

There is redemption in confession. And here is the affirmation that teachers need to make for and about each other: Our work is hard. And messy. And fraught with the pitfalls of failure. We see it daily and without blinders; we know what is working, what is not. No one grasps the consequences of failing to make forward progress with a student better than a classroom teacher. It is a despair we live with, inseparable from the joys of teaching. We should be able to work on it together.

And another book goes on my "must-read" list!

Voices from the Classroom

A Found Poem of Room 204’s Voices

“Race”

Race is labeling someone of their skin color without even getting to know them.
Race is when someone is judging you.
Race is when you see someone and you say I know what you are going to be when you grow up.
Race is how you classify someone by their skin color or by how they look.
Race is separation of people. Race is something that is a big problem.
Race affects and hurts people’s feelings or attitudes.

Race is only the color of your skin.
Race is a word to say that people are different.
Race is that people have different backgrounds.
Race is a made up group of people that are separated.
Race is a theory that scientists haven’t proven. It is not real because we are all equal and people think different races to be better at other things even though they are not.

Race is not what creates who you are.

We can be an upstander…
by not being racist yourself,
standing up for others if they’re made fun of by someone because of their skin color,
defending yourself like, for example, if someone tells you you’re a certain race, you can say, “Yes, we are and we are happy for it!”

We can be an upstander…
by standing out and working together,
getting to know someone before judging them and try to persuade others to do that as well,
treating everyone equally to make our union a better place to be in,

We can be an upstander by explaining that people who look different are not different because they have feelings, hopes, and joys.

In the Classroom

It's been almost four months of school. I've been mostly abstract and philosophical about teaching so far in my blog. Earlier in the year, I set the goal to talk about the idea of teaching and trust in public schools, but I've been unable to write very much in the moment...I can't separate myself from the messiness and uncertainty of teaching.

It's hard for teachers to write or speak publicly about what goes on everyday in the classroom. The accounts we usually hear are either those melt-your-heart, sweet memories of what a child did today or horror stories about that other kid, about the miserable conditions in the school or community. Teachers rarely talk about the million split-second decisions they make and the results of those decisions, whether positive or negative, in their classrooms.

My confidence wavers at times. I think back at the countless moments in a day and wonder if I could have explained it better, acted sooner, said something to a student before he left for home. It can be crippling to think like this, to doubt every next step and ask if what you are doing is right, if it is any good, if it is effective.

This week, my students and I were analyzing how a writer develops the protagonist in a short story. I realized half-way through the week that I had chosen a very difficult text to read as a class. Several students were lost. I should have given more time to students who needed to finish typing their writing. Several students reminded me this week that I had failed to conference with them while they had worked on their writing project. We spent two weeks studying run-ons and fragments, but those types of sentences abounded in their published work. I yelled at a student in front of the whole class for consistently being disrespectful and moved him to a desk facing the wall. I got tired.

But teaching allows for new beginnings. Teachers and students are currently on break, and I have a lot to think about in terms of figuring out where my students are and how I need to improve my instruction. I don't know if I ever forgive myself completely of the mistakes and missteps I make, but I do try to amend them the next day, the next week, the next quarter, the next year.

I will reconsider how to support students individually with conferences and finally begin pulling small groups consistently. I will rethink how to teach run-ons and fragments. I will sit down and talk with that student about how he can meet expectations in writing class and spell out the consequences for bad behavior. I will need a new approach to get students started writing their own fiction short stories, and I will need to find better mentor texts in English and Spanish.

Reflection is both powerful and painful and often a very private process at my school, if it happens at all. But teachers' decision-making should be made more public. We are afraid of being judged on one moment or on one mistake, but accountability to administration, families, and community is necessary to make sure we are doing our jobs. This is where trust on all sides is essential.

Teachers may not fully trust the public to understand the myriad of decisions they make or what they do everyday and often play the role of victim. But our job is too important to be relegated to secrecy, which breeds incompetency and ignorance. We need to make what constitutes effective teaching more public, despite the messiness of what occurs everyday in our classrooms, and take responsibility for our work. In this way, we can not only turn a critical eye on ourselves, but we can receive focused observation and feedback from those that have a stake in each student's education.

As a teacher, I trust you to know that teaching can be imperfect and experimental. Evaluate me on my performance and also on how I reflect, what I learn, and how I put my reflection back into action. I am open to listening to your voices because I take the trust you put in me to educate your children very seriously. With that - here's to a new year, new starts in my classroom, and new prospects in my professional life as I look for a new position in a more functional school.

Urban Youth Violence

Back in September in Chicago, a high school student was beaten to death by other teenagers near Fenger High School. Reports say that it was a gang fight gone out of control, and Derrion, a sophomore on the honor roll, was a bystander at the scene when he was fatally struck in the head. A cell phone video aired on local TV and now seen across the country has renewed public concern in urban youth violence. Since then, the media has covered other shootings and violent incidents among students in Chicago as well as across the country, including the disturbing gang rape case in Richmond, California.

Violence among urban youth is nothing new, though the details are shocking every time. The debate over the causes and the increasing brutality of the crimes of the young have been hashed and rehashed. Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman has declared he is willing to throw large sums of money at the problem for more programs that target students who live in impoverished, gang-ridden neighborhoods. He has also stated that he wants to see a "culture of calm" in public schools.

Again, nothing new. So I have to ask what the role of the school and the role of the teacher is in addressing urban youth violence. Why is it not the school's problem? Instead, we point to the lack of after-school programs or lack of safety in the neighborhood, both of which are important of course, but as a teacher I wonder if violence was discussed in the classroom beyond the surface level of "keep your hands and feet to yourself," whether such incidents would happen with such frequency.

I think we often shy away from this question because there exists a tension between what should supposedly be taught at home and what should be taught at school. Parents and teachers argue over their respective "domains" in the life of a child. Teachers might complain, for example, that it's not in their job description to teach a child manners or even conflict resolution. In adolescent years and even earlier, there is increasing separation between education of character, which is traditionally the parents' role, versus academics, which is the role of the school. Schools who have it right have found a way to bridge the divide and acknowledge that teachers and parents need to work together on the social, emotional, and academic development of each student.

But urban schools are victims of a system of accountability that creates distrust between home and school. Parents are asked to evaluate a school almost solely based on its test scores. At the same time, discipline issues in the classroom are often blamed on bad parenting with the excuse that there is simply no time within the school day. As a urban teacher, one feels the pressure of NCLB and high-stakes testing, which places value on reading and math over anything else. We are asking if students can comprehend a reading passage but not asking them if they feel safe or if they are able to gauge and control their emotions or what it would look like to make good choices.

We forget that social and emotional intelligence also needs to be taught in school, which directly affects students' decision-making in the situations they face outside of school.

At the beginning of the year, I debate internally about whether or not to take the three weeks I need to build a classroom community because my school puts pressure on teachers to do "actual" teaching and ISAT prep instead of the "fluff." Building a classroom community is more than the students getting to know each other. It consists of creating a contract of what we need as learners and what we can do to help everyone achieve their goals in class. We discuss and act out how to make decisions and weigh consequences in tough situations students might face in school and out, as well as how to resolve conflicts with each other by using language and understanding perspectives. Much of the community building ties in with other content areas such as social studies throughout the year, so it is an on-going process. But to be honest, I often doubt I do enough of it.

We have come to a point in education policy debate where the fact that teaching students about how to simply be with each other is completely neglected in favor of math and science. I want my students to care about others, to be strong enough in character and have the confidence to make good choices for themselves and their future. This is possibly the most important thing the students can walk away with from school and home.

And, yes, it is part of my job, and gladly so...in addition to teaching students how to write five-paragraph essays. And, yes, it is the parents' job as well. There is much that both teachers and parents can agree upon in considering the type of adult and citizen we want our students to become. I wonder if the problem of youth violence and the bystander effect could be alleviated if character education or social and emotional intelligence or whatever you'd like to call it could be given the necessary "rigor" in all public schools as are the academic areas.

Mike Rose's Advice to Teachers

Here is a brief excerpt from a Teacher Magazine interview with Mike Rose, professor at the UCLA School of Education, who just published a book called Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us.

What’s your advice for teachers in the current education environment, besides simply, “Hang in there”?

Oooh boy. There’s something to that, actually! When veteran teachers see yet one more new thing coming, they just put their heads down, and work in their classrooms, because they know that in a couple years, there’ll be something else. “Hang in there” is one piece of advice that veteran teachers give to younger teachers. But it’s hard to do.

Right now, I’m teaching in a school of education, so it would be really presumptuous of me to give people who are [teaching] in K-12 classrooms advice. What I can tell you is what I’ve heard other teachers say and do.

Be sure to find colleagues who matter to you – those colleagues you admire, those colleagues who are skilled and competent and are just good to be around. I think it’s hugely important to belong to, to join, to participate in whatever institutional or organizational thing you can find that helps sustain you, whether it’s trying to participate in the National Writing Project or the National Science Foundation, or workshops that reinvigorate you, or your union.

Remember, too, that the work you do has a powerful public and political dimension. And therefore, you are de facto, an actor on the political stage. So don’t be hesitant to write that letter to the editor. Don’t be hesitant to try and get that guest column in your local newspaper.

And then, finally, it’s just reminding yourself of what it is that really brought you into this profession. And those are the moments we all crave. The kid who lights up, the student in trouble who confides in you and you find a way to help her out of a jam, or the pleasure of thinking about how you teach something to somebody. Or just remembering that this is one of the grand cultural activities, one of the historically great things that human beings do with other human beings: We teach each other! It’s so easy to lose sight of it in the day-to-day grind, but it’s really magisterial work. Without teaching, culture collapses.

This helped me get through the week! I also bought Rose's book today and look forward to reading it.

Reflection on Writing

My students have just finished publishing their first writing project while learning the writing process. For many students, this is the first year that they are learning writing as a separate subject. I asked the students to reflect on their work and what they learned about writing and about themselves as writers. Here are some of the responses I got:

I learned that I am a good writer and I like to write now.

I learned that having ideas before writing is so much easier.

I learned that it takes a lot of effort.

I learned that writing isn't just like writing stories but also the way you feel and want to express things your way. I learned that it is possible to write something if I just put my head into it.

I can express my feelings, I can talk about my life that is in the present or in the past, and I can tell other people how I feel by writing.

I learned that I should work harder to come up with way more ideas.

I learned that wriiting is awesome and that it felt good doing a poem. I felt that it's good you get to explain yourself and let it out.

I learned that writing isn't easy, and you need to have a great imagination.

I learned that I might be a writer when I grow up because I love to write and I can't go one day without writing.