This week, an email and a news story caught my attention, and seemed illustrative of the problems that plaguing education right now.
The news story was that Florida has release rankings of its school districts, rating them from highest to lowest, based in large part on their district-wide performance on the state's standardized test, the FCAT. Ironically, the state's education commissioner said the idea was to "broaden the conversation" about education in Florida. Apparently he thinks "broadening" means the same thing as "narrowing"-- as in narrowing our view of successful education to meaning "high test scores." To no one's surprise, lower income, higher poverty counties scored near the bottom of the list. The commissioner indicated that we must stop making excuses for schools with high poverty populations.
Obviously, we want those students to do better, but on more than just tests. But a ranking like this one, where half the districts are going to rank "low" and some poor district is going to be in last place, is going to create winners and losers by its very nature. And that being the case, do we really think our high poverty districts are ever really going to pull themselves out of the basement on such a rating? Are we hoping for the day when our Title 1 schools outrank our wealthiest schools? Is this likely, or even, in the end, desirable?
I can't think of a single good result that could come out of such rankings, including a "broadened" discussion. The only thing such a ranking can do is make some districts that are already doing pretty well feel good about themselves and others to have a huge dip in morale. This is the whole problem with our obsession with data writ small.
The email I got this week informed me that all our school's computer labs are being commandeered from February to May this Spring. The computers will all be reconfigured so that they can only be used for FCAT testing, FAIR testing (a several times a year reading assessment), and State End of Course Exams.
So much for using technology for learning. So much for my students working on Wikispaces, researching online, typing and printing essays during class time, and working on their novellas this Spring. Assessment now trumps actual learning. This is our obsession with assessment to the detriment of teaching write small.
We are obsessed with rankings and data, winners and losers, and we are so busy checking to see if the pale if full, there's no time left to fill it.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Symptoms, Causes, Cures
This past weekend an older post of mine, my "Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony" suddenly caught on. As of this evening, it has over 50 thousand hits, and dozens of mostly positive comments. A few of the "commenters" made the criticism that I didn't offer any solutions, and other commenters pointed out that finding solutions wasn't my goal in that piece--my goal was to express my frustration. Apparently, in venting my frustration, I expressed what a lot of other people were thinking as well.
But if solutions are what we want-- and I want them as much as anyone--I have one suggestion that is a step toward a solution. My suggestion is a change in mindset.
If you read a lot of the debate surrounding education, people are using data to do two very unscientific things: tell stories and create metaphors. One story goes like this: "Our test scores are low compared to other countries, so it must be the teacher's faults because it's too hard to fire bad teachers, so if we just busted the unions and made it easy to fire bad teachers, we'd be fine." Of course, bad teachers are defined as "teachers whose students aren't getting good test scores." That's one story-- and I'll address that in a later post. What concerns me more today is our metaphors.
The metaphor I particularly want to deal with is a medical one. I think many people view low test scores as a disease, high test scores as good health, and teachers as the doctors who are supposed to fix the problem. I won't even go into the oft repeated implications of this metaphor, that if you send a sick person to the doctor, and they don't take follow the doctor's instructions, then it isn't the doctor's fault when they don't get better. I think that's an extremely valid point.
What interests me about this metaphor is that when we view low test scores as the disease, all our efforts become focused on the test scores. If test scores are the disease, fixing them will fix the child, the school, the system. If test scores are the disease, we must find a systematic cure that will work in every case, and make every "doctor" use that systematic cure. That cure often amounts to attacking the disease repeatedly. With a bad infection, we give repeated doses of antibiotics. With bad test scores, we give repeated doses of skill-drills on the particular types of questions that are causing the disease. As we've discovered with antibiotics, though, overuse can actually make the disease worse.
We are seeing low test scores as the disease, and standardization of materials, assessments, and approaches as the cure, because we must fight disease in a scientific, systematic way. Here's the problem. Low test scores are not the disease. They are the symptoms.
Low test scores are the symptoms, plural, because low test scores are not just a symptom of one problem, but the symptoms of a host of other possible "diseases," and as long as we are merely treating the symptoms, we will never get to the root of the problem. But it's easier to treat this one, easy to identify, easy to track symptom, than to get into the messy, real life work of figuring out how what the real diseases are.
If low test scores are the symptom, what are the diseases? Well, there are lots of educational diseases out there.
If I look at my students who are "symptom free" because their test scores are good, there are certain traits they seem to have that my low-scoring students often don't.
For starters, high scoring students tend to be readers. Low scoring students tend to be non-readers. But even that is a symptom. The real disease is this-- our low-achieving students have boring-itis. They are simply not very interested or curious about the world around them. When I do an "enthusiasm map" at the start of the year, my high achieving students have dozens of interests in multiple areas of life: sports, movies, food, books, hobbies, video games, and classes. My low achieving students have trouble coming up with ten things they are interested in.
My high achieving students read a lot because they are interested in a lot of subjects. My low achieving students don't read because not that much interests them. They look at the world around them and say it's boring, when in fact, the boredom lies within themselves. What if we could somehow inspired our lowest students to be more interested in the world around them the way many of our top students are? It would cure the disease of boredom, and they might become happier, less bored, more engaged, and more likely to sit down and read a book. And test scores might come along for the ride-- the symptom alleviated because the disease was cured.
Some of our students are interested-- but only in a very narrow range of interests, or even in just one interest. But helping a student who is obsessed with drawing manga characters or fantasy football to see that their obsession has connections to literature, writing, math, science, social studies, music, business, art history, and a host of other subjects can make all the difference.
There are other diseases our students suffer from.
Home problems so enormous that school seems like a minor distraction. Poverty so crushing that school is a very low priority. Wealth, toys, and distractions so tempting, so addicting, that school seems like a chore. Depression. Lack of self confidence. Poor attitudes.
Sometimes what looks like an underlying disease may actually be a potential cure. Some students who act out in class because they are bored are actually gifted. Sometimes, as Sir Ken Robinson has pointed out, students' real interests are so stifled by the way we do school, that they act out, or tune out, in frustration. I was obsessed with drawing cartoons as a student. The teachers who did nothing but yell at me to put my drawings away, who made me feel that my drawing was childish, made me shut down. Fortunately, though, I had many, many excellent teachers who set clear guidelines about when drawing was okay and when it wasn't, and who encouraged me to use my drawing in school. Mr. Roach let me bring the comic strips magazines I made with my friends into class, and even to distribute them to my classmates. Mrs. Gottung let me create a packet of dittos to teach the other students how to draw cartoon characters. I think in pictures. That's not a disease. It has been, in school and beyond, the key to every successful thing I've ever done. That trait could have been seen as a liability to my test-score performance and discouraged very early on.
Recent research has indicated that imaginative free play is an important way for children to develop self regulation, imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Imaginative play does not, on the surface, seem to lead directly to higher test scores, and in fact looks like frivolous waste of time. So recess has been cut in favor of more "hard" academic work and more structured play designed to systematically battle obesity. By viewing low test scores as the disease, and good test scores as the highest good and the only worthy goal, we actually end up working against the test scores themselves.
I suspect many high test scores are seen as a sign of educational health, when in fact they are actually signs that bright children are being under-challenged and bored. We don't worry about high achieving kids much; we just pat them on the back for landing in the 99th percentile every year because we're too busy treating the symptoms of our low-achievers.
What if we stopped treating the symptom of low test scores, and looked at treating the real underlying causes of low performance, and, better yet, actually trying to figure out the underlying causes of success?
In health care we have tried to move away from curing disease to creating health. In psychology we have moved from treating psychological problems to studying and promoting happiness with the positive psychology movement. We need to do the same in education.
What kind of students are we trying to create? What kind of people do we want to help them be as adults?
If we want creative students who are interested in the world around them, who read, understand what they read, and make connections, who write with clarity, voice, and insight, who see the beauty and utility and, yes, fun of Mathematics, Science, and History, and who see the connections between all these disciplines and the arts and sports as well; if we want students who are life-long learners, constantly striving to improve themselves, and who can question, think, and bring fresh insights to the things they are studying-- if we want all of that for our students, then we must stop treating the symptoms-- low test scores-- and even go beyond dealing with the diseases of boredom, poverty, low motivation, and distraction.
We must look at the conditions that lead to educational health and make them available to everyone. This is not a call to warm and fuzzy feel-good education. It is a call to a level of rigor and thought that transcends any multiple choice test.
So that's my suggestion, my first one anyway. Change our mindset: treat low test scores as a symptom not a disease; but then move beyond even treating those underlying diseases to a model we are actively promoting good educational health.
Unless we have a vision for our children that is broader, deeper, higher, and more nuanced than "high test scores," we will never make real improvements-- not even those almighty scores.
But if solutions are what we want-- and I want them as much as anyone--I have one suggestion that is a step toward a solution. My suggestion is a change in mindset.
If you read a lot of the debate surrounding education, people are using data to do two very unscientific things: tell stories and create metaphors. One story goes like this: "Our test scores are low compared to other countries, so it must be the teacher's faults because it's too hard to fire bad teachers, so if we just busted the unions and made it easy to fire bad teachers, we'd be fine." Of course, bad teachers are defined as "teachers whose students aren't getting good test scores." That's one story-- and I'll address that in a later post. What concerns me more today is our metaphors.
The metaphor I particularly want to deal with is a medical one. I think many people view low test scores as a disease, high test scores as good health, and teachers as the doctors who are supposed to fix the problem. I won't even go into the oft repeated implications of this metaphor, that if you send a sick person to the doctor, and they don't take follow the doctor's instructions, then it isn't the doctor's fault when they don't get better. I think that's an extremely valid point.
What interests me about this metaphor is that when we view low test scores as the disease, all our efforts become focused on the test scores. If test scores are the disease, fixing them will fix the child, the school, the system. If test scores are the disease, we must find a systematic cure that will work in every case, and make every "doctor" use that systematic cure. That cure often amounts to attacking the disease repeatedly. With a bad infection, we give repeated doses of antibiotics. With bad test scores, we give repeated doses of skill-drills on the particular types of questions that are causing the disease. As we've discovered with antibiotics, though, overuse can actually make the disease worse.
We are seeing low test scores as the disease, and standardization of materials, assessments, and approaches as the cure, because we must fight disease in a scientific, systematic way. Here's the problem. Low test scores are not the disease. They are the symptoms.
Low test scores are the symptoms, plural, because low test scores are not just a symptom of one problem, but the symptoms of a host of other possible "diseases," and as long as we are merely treating the symptoms, we will never get to the root of the problem. But it's easier to treat this one, easy to identify, easy to track symptom, than to get into the messy, real life work of figuring out how what the real diseases are.
If low test scores are the symptom, what are the diseases? Well, there are lots of educational diseases out there.
If I look at my students who are "symptom free" because their test scores are good, there are certain traits they seem to have that my low-scoring students often don't.
For starters, high scoring students tend to be readers. Low scoring students tend to be non-readers. But even that is a symptom. The real disease is this-- our low-achieving students have boring-itis. They are simply not very interested or curious about the world around them. When I do an "enthusiasm map" at the start of the year, my high achieving students have dozens of interests in multiple areas of life: sports, movies, food, books, hobbies, video games, and classes. My low achieving students have trouble coming up with ten things they are interested in.
My high achieving students read a lot because they are interested in a lot of subjects. My low achieving students don't read because not that much interests them. They look at the world around them and say it's boring, when in fact, the boredom lies within themselves. What if we could somehow inspired our lowest students to be more interested in the world around them the way many of our top students are? It would cure the disease of boredom, and they might become happier, less bored, more engaged, and more likely to sit down and read a book. And test scores might come along for the ride-- the symptom alleviated because the disease was cured.
Some of our students are interested-- but only in a very narrow range of interests, or even in just one interest. But helping a student who is obsessed with drawing manga characters or fantasy football to see that their obsession has connections to literature, writing, math, science, social studies, music, business, art history, and a host of other subjects can make all the difference.
There are other diseases our students suffer from.
Home problems so enormous that school seems like a minor distraction. Poverty so crushing that school is a very low priority. Wealth, toys, and distractions so tempting, so addicting, that school seems like a chore. Depression. Lack of self confidence. Poor attitudes.
Sometimes what looks like an underlying disease may actually be a potential cure. Some students who act out in class because they are bored are actually gifted. Sometimes, as Sir Ken Robinson has pointed out, students' real interests are so stifled by the way we do school, that they act out, or tune out, in frustration. I was obsessed with drawing cartoons as a student. The teachers who did nothing but yell at me to put my drawings away, who made me feel that my drawing was childish, made me shut down. Fortunately, though, I had many, many excellent teachers who set clear guidelines about when drawing was okay and when it wasn't, and who encouraged me to use my drawing in school. Mr. Roach let me bring the comic strips magazines I made with my friends into class, and even to distribute them to my classmates. Mrs. Gottung let me create a packet of dittos to teach the other students how to draw cartoon characters. I think in pictures. That's not a disease. It has been, in school and beyond, the key to every successful thing I've ever done. That trait could have been seen as a liability to my test-score performance and discouraged very early on.
Recent research has indicated that imaginative free play is an important way for children to develop self regulation, imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Imaginative play does not, on the surface, seem to lead directly to higher test scores, and in fact looks like frivolous waste of time. So recess has been cut in favor of more "hard" academic work and more structured play designed to systematically battle obesity. By viewing low test scores as the disease, and good test scores as the highest good and the only worthy goal, we actually end up working against the test scores themselves.
I suspect many high test scores are seen as a sign of educational health, when in fact they are actually signs that bright children are being under-challenged and bored. We don't worry about high achieving kids much; we just pat them on the back for landing in the 99th percentile every year because we're too busy treating the symptoms of our low-achievers.
What if we stopped treating the symptom of low test scores, and looked at treating the real underlying causes of low performance, and, better yet, actually trying to figure out the underlying causes of success?
In health care we have tried to move away from curing disease to creating health. In psychology we have moved from treating psychological problems to studying and promoting happiness with the positive psychology movement. We need to do the same in education.
What kind of students are we trying to create? What kind of people do we want to help them be as adults?
If we want creative students who are interested in the world around them, who read, understand what they read, and make connections, who write with clarity, voice, and insight, who see the beauty and utility and, yes, fun of Mathematics, Science, and History, and who see the connections between all these disciplines and the arts and sports as well; if we want students who are life-long learners, constantly striving to improve themselves, and who can question, think, and bring fresh insights to the things they are studying-- if we want all of that for our students, then we must stop treating the symptoms-- low test scores-- and even go beyond dealing with the diseases of boredom, poverty, low motivation, and distraction.
We must look at the conditions that lead to educational health and make them available to everyone. This is not a call to warm and fuzzy feel-good education. It is a call to a level of rigor and thought that transcends any multiple choice test.
So that's my suggestion, my first one anyway. Change our mindset: treat low test scores as a symptom not a disease; but then move beyond even treating those underlying diseases to a model we are actively promoting good educational health.
Unless we have a vision for our children that is broader, deeper, higher, and more nuanced than "high test scores," we will never make real improvements-- not even those almighty scores.
Monday, January 2, 2012
For the New Year: A Reminder Why I Teach
As we begin a new calendar year, which never seems like as big an event as starting a new school year, I want to write a reminder to myself about why I teach. If it reminds you, too, then that's a bonus. Just before winter break, which ends to tomorrow, I had an experience I'd planned on writing about here, but I didn't make the time to sit and actually write about it before Christmas arrived.
The experience came in two parts.
Part 1: I had a rather hectic last with students the last day before break, one that included a student arguing with me about whether part of his essay was plagiarized, and lots of students being too rowdy and making a mess. It wasn't all bad-- it was just one of those days of teaching that left a bad taste in my mouth. If you've ever taught, you know about those days. You come home wondering why exactly it is why you teach. This can be especially discouraging right before a break-- especially Winter Break.
Part 2: To make things worse, I had set myself up to have a lot of grading to do that night. Friday was a planning day, and grades were due at the end of it. I wanted to clean up my classroom a bit, and do some planning, so it was important to me that I go into school the next day armed with all my essays graded. This meant a good two or three hour marathon of grading, which I wasn't particularly looking forward to.
The essays I had to grade were from both 7th and 8th grade. My seventh-graders had written expository "Enthusiasm Essays" about some activity they loved. My 8th graders had a few late "Education Essays" about an educational issue coming in, as well as their "This I Believe" essays of personal philosophy.
I sat in my big leather recliner, pulled out my pack of colored pens (I recommend the Uniball Signo click-top pens-- they are terrific), and opened the first folder. My seventh graders had written with harnessed enthusiasm, articulately conveying their enthusiasms with words. They wrote about creating music on various instruments, or with their own voices. They wrote about creating art, and about playing a favorite sport. They wrote about reading for the sheer pleasure of it, and wanting to find a job some day that would enable them to read. They wrote with such detail, such passion, that they made their enthusiasms tangible. I told them that I wanted to feel the heat of their enthusiasm radiating from the page-- and for the most part, they did just that. I was starting to warm up.
And then I moved on to my eight-graders This I Believe essays. They wrote about faith. They wrote about doubt. They wrote about their lives, for the most part with eloquence, insight, and thoughtfulness. I knew there were several essays I would want my students to submit to the This I Believe website. When I opened the last essays I had to read, the late-work Education Essays, I read and enjoyed them, but one of them stood out. Sara wrote about letting students bring themselves and their own personal interests into class, rather than trying to standardize everyone. She wrote with such maturity, command of language, and quirky voice that I realized she sounded just like a real columnist.
That's what my goal is all along-- to get my student writers to the point that they transcend rubrics, and writing scores, and hit that place where they no longer sound like student writers, or even excellent student writers, but like Writers. Period.
Of course, I realized that when I go back to school in January, I'd have to send her piece to one of the local newspapers.
I closed the folders, threw my Uniball pens in their bag, and got ready to input the grades on the computer. As I did so, I glanced up at the clock: nearly three hours had passed, but I had been so immersed, so completely swept away by my students' writing, that it seemed no time had passed at all.
And I realized that my kind-of-lousy last day before break had been redeemed. Those papers were the tangible evidence of why I teach: to see my students developing interests, enthusiasms, beliefs, and voices of their own. Not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.
Happy New Year.
Friday, December 9, 2011
How To Make Them Learn
I recently caught a rerun of ABC's comedy The Middle (a very clever show) in which the quirky, gifted son, Brick, didn't want to go to Physical Education. Rather than forcing PE on Brick, the teacher was allowing Brick to stay back in the classroom and read. Dad went to talk to the teacher about the situation.The teacher, so fresh-faced that Dad accused him of being a fifth grader, explained that he wanted Brick to be intrinsically motivated, wanted him to want to go to Gym. Dad explained that Brick would never want to go to PE, but would be perfectly content to sit and read. Dad said, in essence, We need to make him go. The teacher said, in essence, we need to make him want to go.
The issue of student motivation has sort of gotten lost in shuffle in our debates about education, lost in an avalanche of over 30 different reforms (at my last count), very few if any of which actually focus on what's actually going on with students as opposed to what's going on with data. But student motivation is crucial to everything that happens in education-- including the all-mighty data. If a student wasn't motivated to try his best and instead random guessed, does the test score represent how little he knew, or how little he tried?
What I liked about the parent conference on The Middle was that it neatly summed up two adult views of student motivation: make them do it, or make them want to do it.
President Obama, in his yearly address to students, has repeatedly sent them the message that it is their job to do well in school, whether they feel particularly engaged or not. They need to "put in the hard work it takes to succeed." There is a great deal to be said for teaching our students about duty and responsibility. I think our society has become cynical about both. School, in addition to teaching students content, must by its very nature be a place where they learn how to do things that are necessary but not much fun. That's where "make them do it" comes in.
On the other hand, I don't think there's anyone who would say that schools need to be places of intentional drudgery, designed to break the wills of students, to make them compliant drones who see no purpose behind what they do other than following orders. As a parent, I love to hear that my kids are engaged in learning, are enjoying their classes. That's where "make them want to do it" comes in.
So which way is better-- force or engagement?
To answer that, maybe we need to ask what habits of mind we want our children to develop. With our focus on data and statistics these days, we tend to forget that schools are good for more than creating good test-takers. Schools should be working with parents to help students develop the habits of mind that will make them, not just good workers, but good citizens as well.
What habits of mind are we trying to develop with a "make them do it" approach? Make Them Do It teaches them, at the very least, to follow orders, which is, quite often, a good thing. In general, society doesn't function if we don't follow the rules. If we decide we want to be British for the day and drive on the other side of the double yellow line, the results can be deadly. If we are a cashier and decide in the middle of a transaction that we want to step out for some fro-yo and leave the cash register drawer open, the results can be bad for business. Make Them Do It wants to develop the habit of mind that says, "Life is not all fun and games, and life is not all about my happiness. There are things I just need to do, like them or not." As Robert Fulghum pointed out in one of his essays, being an adult is about doing all the gross things no one wants to do, like dealing with dirty diapers and toilets, dead pets, and that gunk at the bottom of the dish drain catch.
I think there's an important thing to note here, though. Make Them Do It is provisional. It should be temporary. From the student's perspective, Make Them Do It is actually They Make Me Do It. Unless it eventually becomes I Make Myself Do It, it's useless. I think it's important to keep that in mind. I think we have all seen young adults (and not so young adults) who still need to be forced to do everything, even once they are grown. They don't see why they should have to get a job, or move out of Mom and Dad's basement, or do anything other than play video games. They keep getting forced to do everything. They never moved from They Make Me Do It to I Make Myself Do It. In the end, our prisons are filled with people who never quite mastered They Make Me Do It, much less graduated to I Make Myself Do It.
I've had students tell me that the only reason they do anything at school is to avoid getting trouble at home (where Make Them Do It is king). I'll ask them if they intend to continue on in that way, or if they intend to eventually start motivating themselves. They don't quite understand the question. I try to explain: are you going to continue to use Fear of Getting in Trouble as your main motivator the rest of your life? Are you going to go to college to avoid getting in trouble? Are you going to do good work on your job just to avoid getting in trouble? They don't quite get the concept of doing things for any other reason other than to avoid getting in trouble.
This hardly seems like the height of human potential.
The irony here is obvious-- even the habit of mind Make Them Do It must eventually become the habit of mind I Want To Do It, or it is useless. To be a good citizen, a good adult, yes, you must learn to do your duty, to do unpleasant, un-fun things. But you must see why those things are important, and you must eventually motivate yourself to do them. A populace that is only controlled by fear of punishment cannot function: it will either degenerate into chaos or become a complete dictatorship. There's always someone willing to step in to make everyone else do it his way.
So what about engagement? What about I Want To Do It? I think there's a huge place for it in schools. Here's why. I Want to Do It develops habits of mind as well-- habits of mind every, bit if not more important, than the obedience developed by Make Them Do It. You get different results when you work on something because you are thoroughly engaged, fascinated, and enthusiastic about something than you do when its a chore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about engagement, not entertainment. Entertainment is when I add enough bells and whistles and technology and balloons and You-Tube videos and confetti to make it fun, which in the end convinces students that the subject must not have been all that interesting in the first place if it needed so many special effects to jazz it up.
Engagement is different. Engagement is when students understand why something is important and want to figure it out, explore it, solve it, or otherwise experience it. Watching students try to figure out the ambiguities of happiness and success, explore the power definitions have to shape our lives and give or take away power is to watch real engagement at work. My students are currently writing their This I Believe essays of personal philosophy in my 8th grade classes. Essays about philosophy for 8th graders? Yes. No confetti, no balloons, bells and whistles. Just ideas: ideas that matter. It seems to me we've lost the power of ideas, don't believe that ideas are enough to hold anyone's interest any more.
This brings me to an observation I've made as I've taught many different levels of students over the years, from remedial to regular to advanced to gifted: the best students are just interested in things. The worst students think everything is boring. If we want to talk about habits of mind, here's the heart of the matter. If you are a teacher, think about the very best students you ever had. My guess is that most of them were insatiably curious, and enthusiastic about learning to boot. They found things more interesting, and found more things to be interesting, than other students did. Learning was its own reward.
When I think about the students I struggle the most with, it seems to me that their real deficits aren't to be found in statistical data of test scores; their real deficits are to be found in their lack of curiosity, engagement, or enthusiasm for the world around them. Their real deficits are in their habits of mind, and if we could solve those, the other problems might fix themselves. My lowest students tend to say everything is boring, when in fact it may be that they are simply bored and boring themselves, which is not the same thing at all.
My students create an Enthusiasm Map at the start of the school year to get them thinking about topics to write about. Each student writes his name in the middle of a piece of paper and then surrounds it with all the things he can think of that he's enthusiastic about-- food, hobbies, games, entertainment, favorite places, favorite music, favorite people-- favorite anything. Almost without fail, my brightest kids tend toward running out of room and going to a second page. They are interested in so many different things! But many of my lower level students can scarcely find five or six things they are enthused about. They jot down a few ideas and then run out of steam.
Higher level students read a lot because they're interested in lots of subjects in the world around them, so they score well. Lower level kids don't read much, if they read at all, because they aren't interested in much, and we react to this by skilling and drilling them even more on remedial reading skills. Maybe what they really need is for someone to light the sparks of interest they do have into a fire.
I am not blaming the lower level kids. They may have limited life experiences, or a bad home life where their enthusiasms were stomped on every time they showed themselves. I am saying that maybe we should spend more time trying to tap into what kids find interesting, trying to expand their sense of what is interesting, trying to expand their sense of what matters.
I recently had a student announce during a class discussion that she didn't see why students had to study History or Civics. I couldn't quite believe my ears. How do you not get that? How do you not see that our democracy and way of life can only improve or even last if its citizens are aware of its own history, ideals, and processes? Yes, Make Them Do It-- make them take Civics and History whether they can see the point or not. But if they don't eventually see the point, if we don't eventually Make Them Want To Do It, then the whole endeavor may have been pointless to begin with. Do we really want students to say, "Yes, I got an A in Civics, but I still think the whole course was a stupid waste of time"?
It seems to me that our whole approach to education right now is force it on everyone: the government wants to make the districts force the principals to force the teachers to force the students to get better test scores. Make Them Do It. What habits of mind does that approach create? Stress, apathy, resistance to learning. It even begins to kill off curiosity and enthusiasm in the students who have it.
If we want to create the habits of mind that our best students have- curiosity, engagement, enthusiasm-- we need to encourage them in all our students. So many of our students are failing because they just aren't interested in much of anything. They need someone to light the spark somehow. Yes, we need to send the message that school is a duty, that they need to try their hardest, that they need to buckle down and get the work. But we aren't doing our jobs if we stop there.
It seems the two approaches must work together. Yes, there is a time to Make Them Do It, but that is only a means to and end. In the end, we want them to Want To Do It. Brick's dad and teacher on The Middle were both right.
It seems to me that there is only so far you can go on Make Them Do It. At some point, I Want To Do It must come into the picture. You can make a boat get off the shore by pushing and pulling it and forcing it, but it will only go out and start sailing when it can get away from the pushing and catch the wind in its sails.
So what about engagement? What about I Want To Do It? I think there's a huge place for it in schools. Here's why. I Want to Do It develops habits of mind as well-- habits of mind every, bit if not more important, than the obedience developed by Make Them Do It. You get different results when you work on something because you are thoroughly engaged, fascinated, and enthusiastic about something than you do when its a chore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about engagement, not entertainment. Entertainment is when I add enough bells and whistles and technology and balloons and You-Tube videos and confetti to make it fun, which in the end convinces students that the subject must not have been all that interesting in the first place if it needed so many special effects to jazz it up.
Engagement is different. Engagement is when students understand why something is important and want to figure it out, explore it, solve it, or otherwise experience it. Watching students try to figure out the ambiguities of happiness and success, explore the power definitions have to shape our lives and give or take away power is to watch real engagement at work. My students are currently writing their This I Believe essays of personal philosophy in my 8th grade classes. Essays about philosophy for 8th graders? Yes. No confetti, no balloons, bells and whistles. Just ideas: ideas that matter. It seems to me we've lost the power of ideas, don't believe that ideas are enough to hold anyone's interest any more.
This brings me to an observation I've made as I've taught many different levels of students over the years, from remedial to regular to advanced to gifted: the best students are just interested in things. The worst students think everything is boring. If we want to talk about habits of mind, here's the heart of the matter. If you are a teacher, think about the very best students you ever had. My guess is that most of them were insatiably curious, and enthusiastic about learning to boot. They found things more interesting, and found more things to be interesting, than other students did. Learning was its own reward.
When I think about the students I struggle the most with, it seems to me that their real deficits aren't to be found in statistical data of test scores; their real deficits are to be found in their lack of curiosity, engagement, or enthusiasm for the world around them. Their real deficits are in their habits of mind, and if we could solve those, the other problems might fix themselves. My lowest students tend to say everything is boring, when in fact it may be that they are simply bored and boring themselves, which is not the same thing at all.
My students create an Enthusiasm Map at the start of the school year to get them thinking about topics to write about. Each student writes his name in the middle of a piece of paper and then surrounds it with all the things he can think of that he's enthusiastic about-- food, hobbies, games, entertainment, favorite places, favorite music, favorite people-- favorite anything. Almost without fail, my brightest kids tend toward running out of room and going to a second page. They are interested in so many different things! But many of my lower level students can scarcely find five or six things they are enthused about. They jot down a few ideas and then run out of steam.
Higher level students read a lot because they're interested in lots of subjects in the world around them, so they score well. Lower level kids don't read much, if they read at all, because they aren't interested in much, and we react to this by skilling and drilling them even more on remedial reading skills. Maybe what they really need is for someone to light the sparks of interest they do have into a fire.
I am not blaming the lower level kids. They may have limited life experiences, or a bad home life where their enthusiasms were stomped on every time they showed themselves. I am saying that maybe we should spend more time trying to tap into what kids find interesting, trying to expand their sense of what is interesting, trying to expand their sense of what matters.
I recently had a student announce during a class discussion that she didn't see why students had to study History or Civics. I couldn't quite believe my ears. How do you not get that? How do you not see that our democracy and way of life can only improve or even last if its citizens are aware of its own history, ideals, and processes? Yes, Make Them Do It-- make them take Civics and History whether they can see the point or not. But if they don't eventually see the point, if we don't eventually Make Them Want To Do It, then the whole endeavor may have been pointless to begin with. Do we really want students to say, "Yes, I got an A in Civics, but I still think the whole course was a stupid waste of time"?
It seems to me that our whole approach to education right now is force it on everyone: the government wants to make the districts force the principals to force the teachers to force the students to get better test scores. Make Them Do It. What habits of mind does that approach create? Stress, apathy, resistance to learning. It even begins to kill off curiosity and enthusiasm in the students who have it.
If we want to create the habits of mind that our best students have- curiosity, engagement, enthusiasm-- we need to encourage them in all our students. So many of our students are failing because they just aren't interested in much of anything. They need someone to light the spark somehow. Yes, we need to send the message that school is a duty, that they need to try their hardest, that they need to buckle down and get the work. But we aren't doing our jobs if we stop there.
It seems the two approaches must work together. Yes, there is a time to Make Them Do It, but that is only a means to and end. In the end, we want them to Want To Do It. Brick's dad and teacher on The Middle were both right.
It seems to me that there is only so far you can go on Make Them Do It. At some point, I Want To Do It must come into the picture. You can make a boat get off the shore by pushing and pulling it and forcing it, but it will only go out and start sailing when it can get away from the pushing and catch the wind in its sails.
Monday, September 19, 2011
A Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony
The Facebook page Teachers' Letters to Obama offers a lot more than just letters to the president, but I've been thinking for some time about what I would write to the president... or the secretary of education. Or anyone in power who might possibly listen... This is what I finally arrived at as my message.
Dear President Obama,
I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. So let me teach you, as I might my students, about Irony. When I use the second person "You" in this letter, I refer not just to you, but to all the "powers that be" in education reform.
Where to begin? There are so many ironies to chose from. Let's begin with the stated goals of education reform. Supposedly, education reform's goal was to improve the public schools. But as 2015 approaches, and the public schools have not achieved 100% success with 100% of its students, it becomes clear that the real goal, all along, was to force public schools into failure by setting impossible goals for them, and then to privatize education. They said one thing: "Let's save the schools." They meant something else: "Let's drive them to their own destruction." That's called Verbal Irony.
Then there's the irony that many teachers voted for you, President Obama, in the hopes that you might turn things around, only to find that you did indeed turn them around-- 360 degrees. You brought us the wonderful world of Race to the Top, which made competition for grants the way to improve education. To compete, states had to push for even more testing and data, and agree to all kinds of top-down initiatives to "improve"teaching. You reversed course, taking what the previous administration had done, and instead of reversing it, reinforced it. This is called Situational Irony.
Then there's the irony we teachers are guilty of. We didn't see what was coming. We pretended that if we just tried harder, everything would be all right, for us, and for our students. Every time more demands were made on us, we simply pushed ourselves and our students harder to meet those demands. Every time we showed improvement, the demands grew harsher. For every obstacle that was thrown in our path, we jumped higher. For every budget cut, we spent more of our own money on our classrooms. We went on believing that at some point what we did would be good enough. In reality, nothing we will ever do will be good enough. In reality, the goal was never to let us succeed, but to close down the public schools. We were unaware of the big picture. This is called Dramatic Irony.
But those are just the Big Three ironies. What really gets me down is all the other, smaller, yet more insidious ironies piling up on top of us.
For instance, the more we succeed on raising test scores, the less likely it is our students are actually learning anything useful, since standardized tests represent only a myopic, narrow, constrictive, binary, reductionist view of what learning is. So as our test scores go up, real learning goes down. Situational.
On a similar note-- we worry that bad teachers wasting tax payer money, so we scrutinize them by using a whole array of testing and data to analyze their effectiveness. We hire testing companies to create and score tests, third person companies to evaluate the reliability of the tests, test security companies to make sure the test is secure, statisticians who know nothing about teaching but create value-added statistical formulas to evaluate them based on data-- all on the tax payer "dime." And who is making sure these companies are actually doing their jobs? Who evaluates the evaluators? Situational.
We accuse teachers, who actually work with our students on the front lines of education because they care about students, of greed. We never accuse testing companies and statisticians of greed. They are obviously in it for the good they know they are doing students. (That last sentence was verbal irony on my part.)
Testing companies actually say that their tests shouldn't be used for teacher evaluations. But they never refuse to supply a test to districts on principle.
Our relentless desire to raise test scores causes us to focus relentlessly on our lowest students. The lowest students are put in "intensive classes" where they are skilled and drilled on test scores. If we actually looked at why our highest scoring students score high, it's not because they were skilled and drilled a lot, but because they read a lot.
And meanwhile, as we focus our misguided attention on our lowest students, our highest achieving students, who need to be challenged and pushed beyond what standardized teaching can provide, are still putting up with test prep.
Our value-added models are based on learning gains, so teachers who teach the gifted are sometimes unlikely to show many gains. High level students are in as much need of excellent instruction at their level as supposedly low-level students are. Gifted students drop out at a higher rate than the general population-- in part because they are bored. One wonders if teachers of the gifted will start to drop out, too, to go to a position where they can show more value-added gains.
Apparently business leaders are calling for more creativity in their workers. We are killing off creativity in schools, in both teachers and students, and getting ready for multiple choice questions does not make anyone, teachers or students, creative.
You say you want teachers to be in the profession because they care about students. But you assume they are actually in it for the money and try to bribe them with merit pay.
You say you want excellence, which implies that some teachers can do a better job than others, but then micromanage teachers to make them all the same. You tell teachers they will be evaluated on results, but then tell them exactly how to teach, so that they aren't really responsible for the results.
Great teachers are insightful about their subjects, always seeking to grow, to read, to research, to find new ways to think about their subjects and improve their teaching, so you create a set of Common Core Standards that reduce academic subjects to a series of calcified, petrified skills and make growth, change and innovation all but impossible.
We compare our test scores to those of other countries. Yet Finland, for example, which is the star of international test scores, tests as little as possible, has very few standards, values teachers and pays them well, gives them lots of autonomy and focuses on creativity and project-based learning. So what do we do, upon seeing Finland's success? We test everyone as often as possible, even our preschoolers, vilify teachers, create ever more standards, rob teachers of their autonomy, and discourage creativity in teaching in favor of data wrangling and test prep.
People learn best when they are engaged and happy, when there is joy and enthusiasm in the classroom. We are killing off engagement, joy, and enthusiasm, and replacing them with boredom, blind obedience, and stress.
As an English teacher, I teach my students stories about the underdog standing up for what is right, taking the road less traveled. As a teacher, I am being asked to conform, to do as I'm told, even if it goes against everything I believe about teaching.
When I attend our county's Teacher of the Year banquet, I see videos of students, elementary through high school, saying that their teachers are great because they are "different" and "creative" and "fun." And then we go back to being told to all teach in a "common" way the next day.
On a personal note, I won at my Teacher of the Year banquet a few years back, and I now feel that the very things that made me a winner- creativity, insight, creative instruction, creative assignments-- are all liabilities now. I should teach the way I'm told, using the assignments and assessments I'm given, and keep my mouth shut.
Education Secratary Arne Duncan has said we want a "great" teacher in every classroom. Do we even know what that phrase means? What is a "great" teacher? A great teacher comes up with activities, assignments, and assessments that will engage students and lead to real thinking and questioning. If all my activities, assignments, and assessments are scripted for me, what is left for me to do well as a teacher-- talk louder? You can't have standardization and excellence.
I came into this profession because I love my subject,and I want to turn students into readers and writers, and I have creative ideas for making this happen. If I am no longer allowed to do those things, if I am being forced to be a curriculum dispenser, what options do I have? Leave for somewhere that allows me more autonomy? Where might that be-- a charter school or private school? Could this be what we wanted to have happen all along-- to drive our best talent out of the public schools to other venues? It's already happening.
In all of this education reform going on to improve our schools, the discussion we are not having is this: What are schools for? To create an obedient, pliable work force? To create a good economy? To make our test scores competitive with the rest of the world? Until we figure out that these purposes for schools are too shallow to serve, until we figure out what schools are for, everything we'll do to "reform" education is likely to fail.
I can't think of a single thing going on in public education right now that make me want to stay in my profession. I know of very few, if any teachers who are happy about what's going on. And yet, no one is listening.
The ultimate irony is this: reformers are saying we should put students first. That is what I try to do every single day in my classroom. But I feel the reformers are putting everything but students first: test scores, data, common standards and assessments, value-added models, and standardized curricula are all coming first. Real, flesh and blood students with real problems, hopes and dreams are the last thing on the reformer's agenda.
I hope you will listen. I hope you understand our frustration a little better now. If not, that would be ironic.
David Lee Finkle
I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. So let me teach you, as I might my students, about Irony. When I use the second person "You" in this letter, I refer not just to you, but to all the "powers that be" in education reform.
Where to begin? There are so many ironies to chose from. Let's begin with the stated goals of education reform. Supposedly, education reform's goal was to improve the public schools. But as 2015 approaches, and the public schools have not achieved 100% success with 100% of its students, it becomes clear that the real goal, all along, was to force public schools into failure by setting impossible goals for them, and then to privatize education. They said one thing: "Let's save the schools." They meant something else: "Let's drive them to their own destruction." That's called Verbal Irony.
Then there's the irony that many teachers voted for you, President Obama, in the hopes that you might turn things around, only to find that you did indeed turn them around-- 360 degrees. You brought us the wonderful world of Race to the Top, which made competition for grants the way to improve education. To compete, states had to push for even more testing and data, and agree to all kinds of top-down initiatives to "improve"teaching. You reversed course, taking what the previous administration had done, and instead of reversing it, reinforced it. This is called Situational Irony.
Then there's the irony we teachers are guilty of. We didn't see what was coming. We pretended that if we just tried harder, everything would be all right, for us, and for our students. Every time more demands were made on us, we simply pushed ourselves and our students harder to meet those demands. Every time we showed improvement, the demands grew harsher. For every obstacle that was thrown in our path, we jumped higher. For every budget cut, we spent more of our own money on our classrooms. We went on believing that at some point what we did would be good enough. In reality, nothing we will ever do will be good enough. In reality, the goal was never to let us succeed, but to close down the public schools. We were unaware of the big picture. This is called Dramatic Irony.
But those are just the Big Three ironies. What really gets me down is all the other, smaller, yet more insidious ironies piling up on top of us.
For instance, the more we succeed on raising test scores, the less likely it is our students are actually learning anything useful, since standardized tests represent only a myopic, narrow, constrictive, binary, reductionist view of what learning is. So as our test scores go up, real learning goes down. Situational.
On a similar note-- we worry that bad teachers wasting tax payer money, so we scrutinize them by using a whole array of testing and data to analyze their effectiveness. We hire testing companies to create and score tests, third person companies to evaluate the reliability of the tests, test security companies to make sure the test is secure, statisticians who know nothing about teaching but create value-added statistical formulas to evaluate them based on data-- all on the tax payer "dime." And who is making sure these companies are actually doing their jobs? Who evaluates the evaluators? Situational.
We accuse teachers, who actually work with our students on the front lines of education because they care about students, of greed. We never accuse testing companies and statisticians of greed. They are obviously in it for the good they know they are doing students. (That last sentence was verbal irony on my part.)
Testing companies actually say that their tests shouldn't be used for teacher evaluations. But they never refuse to supply a test to districts on principle.
Our relentless desire to raise test scores causes us to focus relentlessly on our lowest students. The lowest students are put in "intensive classes" where they are skilled and drilled on test scores. If we actually looked at why our highest scoring students score high, it's not because they were skilled and drilled a lot, but because they read a lot.
And meanwhile, as we focus our misguided attention on our lowest students, our highest achieving students, who need to be challenged and pushed beyond what standardized teaching can provide, are still putting up with test prep.
Our value-added models are based on learning gains, so teachers who teach the gifted are sometimes unlikely to show many gains. High level students are in as much need of excellent instruction at their level as supposedly low-level students are. Gifted students drop out at a higher rate than the general population-- in part because they are bored. One wonders if teachers of the gifted will start to drop out, too, to go to a position where they can show more value-added gains.
Apparently business leaders are calling for more creativity in their workers. We are killing off creativity in schools, in both teachers and students, and getting ready for multiple choice questions does not make anyone, teachers or students, creative.
You say you want teachers to be in the profession because they care about students. But you assume they are actually in it for the money and try to bribe them with merit pay.
You say you want excellence, which implies that some teachers can do a better job than others, but then micromanage teachers to make them all the same. You tell teachers they will be evaluated on results, but then tell them exactly how to teach, so that they aren't really responsible for the results.
Great teachers are insightful about their subjects, always seeking to grow, to read, to research, to find new ways to think about their subjects and improve their teaching, so you create a set of Common Core Standards that reduce academic subjects to a series of calcified, petrified skills and make growth, change and innovation all but impossible.
We compare our test scores to those of other countries. Yet Finland, for example, which is the star of international test scores, tests as little as possible, has very few standards, values teachers and pays them well, gives them lots of autonomy and focuses on creativity and project-based learning. So what do we do, upon seeing Finland's success? We test everyone as often as possible, even our preschoolers, vilify teachers, create ever more standards, rob teachers of their autonomy, and discourage creativity in teaching in favor of data wrangling and test prep.
People learn best when they are engaged and happy, when there is joy and enthusiasm in the classroom. We are killing off engagement, joy, and enthusiasm, and replacing them with boredom, blind obedience, and stress.
As an English teacher, I teach my students stories about the underdog standing up for what is right, taking the road less traveled. As a teacher, I am being asked to conform, to do as I'm told, even if it goes against everything I believe about teaching.
When I attend our county's Teacher of the Year banquet, I see videos of students, elementary through high school, saying that their teachers are great because they are "different" and "creative" and "fun." And then we go back to being told to all teach in a "common" way the next day.
On a personal note, I won at my Teacher of the Year banquet a few years back, and I now feel that the very things that made me a winner- creativity, insight, creative instruction, creative assignments-- are all liabilities now. I should teach the way I'm told, using the assignments and assessments I'm given, and keep my mouth shut.
Education Secratary Arne Duncan has said we want a "great" teacher in every classroom. Do we even know what that phrase means? What is a "great" teacher? A great teacher comes up with activities, assignments, and assessments that will engage students and lead to real thinking and questioning. If all my activities, assignments, and assessments are scripted for me, what is left for me to do well as a teacher-- talk louder? You can't have standardization and excellence.
I came into this profession because I love my subject,and I want to turn students into readers and writers, and I have creative ideas for making this happen. If I am no longer allowed to do those things, if I am being forced to be a curriculum dispenser, what options do I have? Leave for somewhere that allows me more autonomy? Where might that be-- a charter school or private school? Could this be what we wanted to have happen all along-- to drive our best talent out of the public schools to other venues? It's already happening.
In all of this education reform going on to improve our schools, the discussion we are not having is this: What are schools for? To create an obedient, pliable work force? To create a good economy? To make our test scores competitive with the rest of the world? Until we figure out that these purposes for schools are too shallow to serve, until we figure out what schools are for, everything we'll do to "reform" education is likely to fail.
I can't think of a single thing going on in public education right now that make me want to stay in my profession. I know of very few, if any teachers who are happy about what's going on. And yet, no one is listening.
The ultimate irony is this: reformers are saying we should put students first. That is what I try to do every single day in my classroom. But I feel the reformers are putting everything but students first: test scores, data, common standards and assessments, value-added models, and standardized curricula are all coming first. Real, flesh and blood students with real problems, hopes and dreams are the last thing on the reformer's agenda.
I hope you will listen. I hope you understand our frustration a little better now. If not, that would be ironic.
David Lee Finkle
Thursday, August 25, 2011
You Can't Have Standardization and Excellence
Florida passed Senate Bill 736 this year, which says that half of every teacher's evaluation, and eventually every teacher's pay, will be tied to the FCAT, the state's standardized test. I'm merely going to mention in passing here that the absurdity of art and music teachers having their evaluations based on Math and Reading standardized test scores: It is absurd. But that absurdity is not the main one I'm going after. There is a larger absurdity afoot.
If I am in charge of the end result-- in this case, test scores-- I need to be given autonomy as to the process which achieves that result.
Let's look at the world of business, since we keep wanting to run everything like one. If I work in a factory, adding wheels to widgets, and I am given the freedom to figure out the quickest, most efficient way to put those wheels on, then I am responsible for the end result, which is lots of wheeled widgets. I might come up with an inefficient system and only put on half the wheels that other workers do, in which case, I get paid less. When there is autonomy, there is the possibility of "merit"-- as in "merit pay." If there is autonomy, I might be able to do something better than you. I might also fail to do better than you. There is risk involved. But the end result is in my hands.
If, on the other hand, World Wide Widgets sets forth a standard procedure and pacing guide for Widget Wheel instillation, which they are entitled to do, they are essentially taking autonomy away from the workers. If World Wide Widget Compliance Officers walk around making sure that no one is deviating from the standard procedure, and everyone is following the same procedure, there really can't be any merit. Everyone should, in fact, get the same exact results, in which case any kind of merit-based evaluation system is, again, a moot point. Because if you are telling me exactly what to do, and I am doing it, then I am not really responsible for the results. You, the Standard-Setter, are responsible. If I can't go above and beyond, then there can be no merit.
Of course, there may also be hidden factory factors that influence my widget wheel effectiveness. For instance, what if you get used widgets, or damaged wheels? Doesn't that influence my results? What if my assembly line machine is older and runs widgets by me more slowly? Those things will also influence my results. But again, if you are giving me a standard procedure for every possible widget situation, I don't have the power to change the result. You, the Standard-Setter, are responsible.
Of course my analogy with schools breaks down, I think, if you view teaching and learning as something more than putting wheels on widgets. I think it is.
The same effect is at work in school, though. I almost long for the days when standardized tests and school grades were all we had to contend with. As long as I'm free to be innovative and creative, to tap into students' interests and do whatever it takes to help them learn, then I can promise you some pretty good results-- even test scores, if you want.
But now with scripted curriculums, and, coming soon to a classroom near you (yours, to be precise), the Common Core PARCC assessments and assignments, teachers are being told exactly how to put wheels on the widgets. Fifty percent of your evaluation is based on test score results. That's absurd enough. But when you are also told exactly how to teach, it goes beyond absurd. If you are telling me exactly how to teach, then I am not responsible for the results I get. You are.
Let me repeat that: If you are telling me exactly how to teach, then I am not responsible for the results I get. You are.
Here is what great teachers do: set goals for learning, get to know their students, select and create materials and activities that will help those particular students sitting in their particular class become engaged so that they will learn. Great teachers adjust their approaches when things aren't working. They are willing to throw out the idea that worked last year, even if it was a "favorite thing," if it isn't going to work with this particular group. They research new techniques and new theories of learning. They think about the nature of what they are trying to get students to do. I guess that's what it boils down to: great teachers think.
But if all my thinking is done for me, if my materials and activities are all selected for me, if I can't adjust my approach because I am supposed to stay "on script," if I can't throw out what doesn't work and add in something new that I've created or researched that will work-- if every instructional decision has been made for me, how am I supposed to excel? Talk louder in class? Present with more enthusiasm? What enthusiasm could I possibly have left?
If you tell me exactly how to teach, then you are responsible for the results. If you tell everyone to teach exactly the same way, then there can be no merit, no excellence, no progress or innovation. I find it ironic that the Common Core Standards curriculum is called PARCC, and acronym that implies sitting still.
We are creating classrooms populated by characters from Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"-- all differences covered up to create an illusion of equality.
Arne Duncan wants a "great teacher in every classroom." You will not get great teachers by asking them all to be the same. I'll repeat it again: if you tell me exactly how to teach, then you are responsible for the results. You can't have it both ways. If you want to tell me how to teach, then you should take the blame, or the credit, for student learning. If you want me to be responsible, then please leave me alone and let me teach.
I know what I'm doing.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
A Summer of Creative Teaching
This summer I taught for the month of July. And I was blissfully happy. My wife, Andrea, and I tried having our own creative writing camp, which we called "Write Away!" It ran for two weeks (nine days, actually), and then I moved into the second half of my summer, teaching at the HATS Program at Stetson University, my alma mater.
I turned these experiences into a series of comic strips where Mr. Fitz taught a summer "Creativity Class." I tried to capture some of the joy and fun that characterized all three of them. (I almost used the phrase "had in common" but then shuddered... "Common" has become a dirty word for some of us.) In any case, as I head into my 20th year in the public schools on Monday, I thought I'd reflect a bit on the summer, and on its contrast to what is happening to public education.
Our creative writing camp was inspired by a presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English by three teachers from Arkansas who had done a creative writing camp on a college campus there. After hearing about their model, we plotted our own version for months, joining forces with our friend Darlene, a children's theater playwright and director, and searching for venues and trying to figure out how to make it work. We finally found a space in some classrooms at our own church, did a very little bit of advertising on Facebook, by word of mouth, and with a few posters. We got some actual sign-ups, and on the 5th of July we started our own camp with four campers, grades 5 through 8. By the end of the nine day camp, we had seven.
Each day began with a fun warm up that introduced the theme for the day. Our themes included Pirates, Space, Inventors, Nature, and Imaginary Creatures. Andrea had the first "period" of the day, poetry, and taught them that poetry is "words at play." She got them playing around with words, exploring multiple genres.
I took the second section of the day, Fiction Writing. I taught them about the basic building blocks of writing fictional scenes-- description, moment-by-moment narration, and dialogue. They wrote about pitch black planets, out of control vehicles, and aliens talking with humans. They tried their hand at story "grabbers," and played around with basic premises. When we were brainstorming vehicles to write about being "out of control," someone suggested the space shuttle crawler that moved the shuttle out to the launch pad at a very low rate of speed. I said a vehicle couldn't be out of control at such a low speed. Our son, Christopher, who was assisting us, took that as a challenge, and managed to create a ten page long Cold War thriller about Soviet spies on the crawler trying to sabotage the launch. We had out of control lawn mowers and out of control canoes.
After a break for lunch, the writers moved to a larger room up the hall to work on play writing. They not only wrote, but learned about improvisation, creating dialogue in a different format, creating characters, and focusing a scene on a conflict.
After a quick walk around campus to clear our heads, our afternoon finished out with "free writing" time to finish any projects they'd worked on in the morning, or to try something original, in any of the three genres we'd worked in. The students were so conditioned to being told exactly what to write about and how to write it, this section of the day came as a bit of a shock to them. They were not used to being given autonomy, being given the chance to chart their own paths as writers. Eventually they got used to it, though, and settled in to write. Andrea and Darlene and I wrote too, along with the kids, and found we were enjoying and learning from each others' lessons.
At the end of the first day, one of the students said, "I didn't know writing could be this much fun!" How sad that by the end of 5th grade he had not experienced the fun of writing yet.
We ended the camp with a showcase where students shared their writing with their parents and grandparents, and then taught them some of the things they'd learned. We published an anthology of their writing at Lulu.com called Nine Days, Seven Kids, Pencils and Paper.
A good time was had by all.
The following Monday, the third week in July, I moved over to Stetson University for my third year of teaching a week long class called Flash Fiction. This class started in 2009 with five students, plus my son, Christopher. We spent two days working on the Close-Up aspects of fiction writing, narrative style, description, and dialogue , and on the "Long-Shot" aspects, such as plot structure, theme, irony, and character development.
We then spent all day Wednesday brainstorming a plot, using Chris Van Alsburg's "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" to spur ideas. We eventually cooked up a plot set in 1960's Vermont concerning an ancient Native American tribe, a lake monster, and a ghost the plays the harp. Our outline included a two page back-story, a cast list, and a plot outline broken into chapters. We then divided up chapters on Thursday, and the last two days of the class were spent writing The Spirit of Lake Glimm. Seven people produced a novel in three days.
We repeated the process last year with seven students to come up with The Book of Arkavia, a classic fantasy world quest story in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Chronicles of Narnia.
This summer we expanded to having thirteen student writers, grades 4 through 10, plus my son and myself, working on a book. Although we had gone through the process before, it was still a high-wire act: could we pull it off again, and could we pull it off with this many people? We thought about dividing into two groups and writing two different books, but that created it's own set of problems. We spent Wednesday morning hashing out ideas based on the Harris Burdick pictures. We drifted toward another "collect the magical objects" story, then rejected it. We couldn't settle on a focus. We went to lunch. We came back.
It was Wednesday afternoon, and we still didn't even have a concept for our new novel. I was getting nervous, but I reassured the group by saying, "At some point, someone is going to have the idea, the idea that clicks all the other ideas into place, and everyone's going to go, "Aaaaaaahhh!"
We decided to focus on the Harris Burdick drawings that took place in a house. Why were mysterious things happening in the house? Why was the pumpkin glowing? What was behind the secret door in the basement? Someone suggested that the things going on could be events from fairy tales. Someone else suggested a secret library of old books hidden in the basement. Christopher said, "What if the wall between reality and fiction is breaking down?"
And the class said, "Aaaaaaaahhhh!"
And we were off. We had talked all week about how everything in a story is there for a reason: to move the plot forward, to reveal character, to explore a theme, to create an irony, to foreshadow a later event or be payoff for earlier foreshadowing. We developed a list of characters and described them. We then made a list of fairy tales that could be invading the home of Jared and Paige Henry, our protagonists. We invented a back story concerning two secret societies, the Inklings and the Censors. It soon became clear that we would be touching on censorship and literacy issues, and that one of our themes would be the power of story to change lives. Everything in the story from that point on had to touch on that theme.
You need to picture this taking place in a computer lab. Everyone is sitting in chairs or pacing the room, watching the plot take shape in a Word document being projected on a big screen at the front of the room. I've heard some people say that today's students need to change activities every ten to fifteen minutes. These students were completely immersed in plotting this novel for an entire day and a half. They were just talking and throwing out ideas and discussing what would work or not.
After we outlined and divided up chapters, we all began to write. Older writers helped younger ones flesh out their scenes. Kristine had to write a family dinner scene that turned into the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, so she looked up the original scene from Lewis Carroll online so she could emulate it in her version. I circulated, giving pointers and suggestions to students, one on one, on everything from style to formatting, to proofreading rules.
We worked through lunch to brainstorm a title and an idea for the cover. No one complained about working through lunch. They wanted to work! Students wanted to work. By Friday afternoon, students were finishing. We decided we needed a cover. Annie drew one, and other students decided to draw their own chapter illustrations.
They left, and over the next few weeks I edited the chapters into a coherent whole, ironing out plot inconsistencies that had crept in. We did not begin with a rubric. We did not begin with a multiple choice test. We began with the idea that we wanted to all write a story together and have fun doing it. (I'll post the link to the book later, after the families have received their copies.)
The following week was Cartoon Studio Class. The first part of the week was spent working on original comic strips. This may sound rather light-weight, intellectually. The big word in education right now is rigor. Well, how's this for rigor? We discussed how to create a basic premise, types of irony, types of comedy, writing dialogue, how to frame shots cinematically, gesture drawing, the six basic emotions, how to design characters, how to stage action for clarity of ideas, and... well that's not all. And that's just comic strips.
Animation added a whole list of other concepts. We studied the history of animation, and worked with both hand drawn animation devices and with simple computer animation.
And again, no rubrics. No assessments. No "accountability" schemes.
One parent whose daughters attended both the Flash Fiction and the Cartoon Studio said that her girls came home exhausted every day, yet happy. She could tell their minds were being "stretched." Rigor doesn't have to mean making things difficult and unpleasant for the sake of making them difficult and unpleasant. Rigor doesn't even seem like rigor if it's done in the context of meaningful work.
Why did I enjoy this summer so much? Because, unlike the regular school year, where I must fill Yeats's metaphorical pail, during this summer's teaching experiences, I could instead focus on lighting his metaphorical fire instead. I had no standardized curriculum to follow. I could meet kids where they were at.
It was risky. I wasn't sure what they would produce. I wasn't sure if we would come up with good idea for a model. As Sir Ken Robinson says, creativity means being willing to risk failure. But when you are willing to risk it, you often find your successes are that much more valuable.
So as I head back to school Monday, despite the pressure to get students to perform on tests, despite the pressure to standardize both myself and my students, despite the experts who say creative writing isn't rigorous, and the companies that demand we follow their programs with fidelity (which I've heard referred to as the new "F Word"), this year I will try to bring a little of this summer with me into the classroom. This year I will try to bring creativity, open-endedness, enthusiasm and joy of learning into my classroom.
And maybe I will allow myself to be blissfully happy again. No matter what anyone tries to say about it.
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