More than Kvetching: A Letter to the Secretaries

I read Diane Ravitch's blog post from yesterday, Ten Years of NCLB: A Student Says, “How Sad.” Her Teacher Agrees and got inspired to do a little letter writing. Here's a copy that went to Jason Snyder, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and School Turnaround in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education. A similar version went to Arne Duncan. 

You can find more names from this office here. I followed the model of Duncan's email address, arne.duncan@ed.gov. 

Dear Assistant Secretary Snyder,

I have the privilege of teaching pre-service English teachers in an M.A. program in the teaching of English. Several days ago, one of my former students wrote the blog post I have included, below. As the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education with a particular focus on turnaround schools, you are the leader who would most closely understand this teacher's concerns. Your response to his closing question would be very helpful. 

You may respond in the comments section here: http://literaciesandtechnologyblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/open-letter-to-veteran-teacher-for.html Alternatively, I would be happy to directly convey your response to this teacher. 

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely, 

..........................

Open Letter to a Veteran Teacher for Advice/Help/A life raft

So . . . I've started my first year of teaching here. A quick background: I'm teaching freshmen at a school in ________. The student population is mostly black, a little Hispanic, very few ELLs. Most are on free lunch. It's a vocational school, so most of my students are boys (I'd say it's 90-95%), three of my classes are literature, two are grammar, classes are forty minutes long, I have no books to use (and so make a lot of photocopies and write a lot on the white board), zero technology in my classroom (not counting the lights) and very limited access to it elsewhere (unless you count a TV with a VCR and an overhead projector, but I use neither since I have PTSD of teachers wheeling those out in front of the class when I was in school), my classes sizes are 30-34 per and my room is small, which has proved highly prohibitive to any arrangement of the desks that doesn't constitute rows. So my students are sitting mostly in rows, rows which have such narrow aisles that are otherwise clogged with backpacks and feet that they prove difficult to walk down if I wanted to, say, tap on a student's desk and ask him to please get his head off the desk. Or if for some reason I didn't want to constantly have to stand in front of my students and wanted to stand in the back. And so, you know, group work's hard to do for purely physical reasons if not for all those typical, sometimes confounding and always frustrating reasons stemming from teenagers being pathologically repulsed by having to do any sort of academic work with someone whom they don't know and on whom they scent the faintest whiff of difference, low-grade coolness, whatever. I taught ESL in _______ in the Peace Corps for two years and taught in school rooms with broken desks and bare shelves and chalkboards, packed to the rafters with students who were so different from myself that the only common ground we seemed to have at times was that we all breathed oxygen and this  . . . this hardly feels different. 

Additionally, I am constrained by a department-wide curriculum map that I'm not opposed to on principle, but that I have little faith in for a number of reasons. One, it's extremely uncreative and uninspired. As best as I can tell it's been copy and pasted together piecemeal from the NYC DOE and Common Core, most apparently in what texts I'm to be teaching my students. And so with little regard for my particular population of students and their background, or what they might respond to, or our (the teachers') own taste in literature (I can teach texts I'm not enthusiastic about, but I can't teach boring texts I don't care for), the creators of this curriculum map have cribbed the canonical suggestions from the DOE and the Common Core and slapped them on there. We are to teach those poems and short stories and novels and teach them together at the same time. (Absurd for reasons I don't need to elaborate on.) And the suggested end-of-unit projects or papers and even what of the texts we're to teach are equally dry, bleak and uninspired and clearly test-driven. When I asked how much we can waver from these circumscribed units, I was told not very, but that if I chose to teach a poem or a short story outside the map, I was to get approval from everyone so that we can all be on the same page. (Why, exactly, we need to be on the same page, is beyond me.) And which leads me to the second reason why I have little faith in the curriculum map: I'm almost positive none of the other freshman academy teachers are following it closely. I've seen print outs left out on the copy machine, peaked into the rooms and the lessons are almost never centered around texts from the curriculum map. And these deviation from the very teachers who shut me down during the department meeting when I meekly challenged the circumscription of the maps. It's all for show. I know it, they know it, and no one wants to admit it out loud. And three, the curriculum map isn't teaching my students what I believe they actually need to be learning. Last week some mentor group came in and wanted to talk to the boys to try and recruit some of them for this after school program. Leaving aside the fact that these guys were young and black and were from the same neighborhoods as my students and I was lamenting the fact that I'll never be able to speak to my students in the same way these guys do (or connect, I should say connect) (and same goes with most of the other teachers, too, who are mostly older and black or Hispanic and have a certain rapport with the students I simply will never have and while I am mindful of the fact that, yes, I have something else to offer my students all I see when I see them seeing me is them seeing a teacher who is basically from another planet and so cold comfort my own particular "uniqueness" is), I was looking at my lesson on the whiteboard behind them and it was about sonnets or some other such bullshit and I nearly had a break down because I was thinking to myself Jesus Christ this is not what my students need. It does not matter that they learn what the "rules" are for what makes a sonnet. Even further, it doesn't really matter that they're able to identify what the "theme" (yuck) of the sonnet is. Sure, there are skills associated with finding those things out that help my students academically, but so many of them seem to need so much more help in other non-academic areas (focusing, getting organized, staying on top of the work) that teaching them what a Petrarchan sonnet is feels absolutely ridiculous. And which is not to say that my students are throwing desks at the window and standing up and telling me to suck their dick and eating nachos in class, because they are all very nice and seem to like me and respect me and want to do well, and so it's not like I'm working with the worst of the worst here, but focus and attention and being organized and actually doing the work are daily mountains to climb nevertheless. And so I bring up the "sonnet" thing merely to highlight how in yet another way how constraining the curriculum map is because if it were up to me, I'd have designed an entirely different poetry unit that would have engaged them (I believe) on a deeper, more important, more relevant way that didn't just answer the what and the how of the literature, but of the why. (Though a current professor eased my mind by wisely offering the counter argument to this which was that "the WHAT is important foundationally, and/or the WHAT develops certain capacities and habits that are missed by an exclusive focus on the WHY or even the HOW. And might it be the case that the WHY is lovely for readers who have certain luxuries to begin with (such as time and resources outside of school), but that other readers (including the more left-brained) really can benefit from a focus on the WHAT?" which helps. And in fact I did, but was told I couldn't use it. So. 

As a result of all this--what I feel is a bad curriculum, little pedagogical autonomy, zero access to digital technologies, overcrowded classroom, little physical space--I feel very strongly that I am failing. Class management has become an issue, most especially for one class (if not two), and while that may have to do with other factors, I also think it has to do with how little I am able to engage them and vary the instruction. I'm finding myself standing in front of the class for almost the entire period, either lecturing or calming every one down because it's so so so difficult to get them to focus. A lecture that I imagined would run 5 minutes, with an reinforcing group exercise I imagined would take also five minutes ends up taking the entire class. Group work has proved fruitless. I find it impossible to go around and make sure everyone's working or everyone's understood the concept simply because most of my time when I send them off to do individual work) is consumed with a few students who are talking or refusing to do work. I do not want to be the center of my classroom. The only time I have success with that is when they do journaling (which they're better at some days than others; I've been experimenting with prompts) or independent reading, but that's new, and I'm only using it in my grammar classes. I don't want to result to simply handing out worksheets and asking the students to do them individually, but I don't know what else to do. 

And so . . . the big question for you, the veteran teacher, and one with a lot of good ideas and a lot of good advice . . . what do I do? Given what I have and where I am, what in the goddamned hell do I do?

Image by Tomas Hellberg Used via Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA 2.0 

A Collision of Media & Look, I'm Teary

Project-Based Learning: Gimmick or Game-changer?

This is the second of several reflections on project-based learning. 

I.  A question of values

What are you teaching toward? 

I don't mean what are the goals or objectives for a unit; I certainly don't refer to the so-called "Essential Questions" of a well-known curriculum planning template. 

I'm asking you to describe the vision of the world for which you are preparing your students. I'm asking what you believe they need to know, and why you believe that.  I ask because curriculum theorist Eliot Eisner (1994) writes that in education, values and beliefs are what shape ideas about what schools "should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons" (p. 47). These values are expressed thru decisions about curriculum, evaluation, teaching, etc. 

"Well, duh," I can hear you thinking. But Eisner's not talking only about elements of schooling that you can see, i.e., a course catalog. He's also talking about the elements we're so familiar with that we don't even think about them. Ways in which schools organize time, physical space, daily operations-- all of these emerge from certain ways of seeing or thinking about the world; in turn, they become powerful conveyors of cultural values, with long-term implications. 

For example, schools organize children by age, moving them in age cohorts from grade to grade. Eisner (1994) writes that this orderly practice

reinforces the idea that the task of being a successful student is to learn the content of the grade, a condition that results in promotion to the next. It also reinforces the idea that knowledge is fixed and tidy, that smart people possess it, that textbooks contain it, and that the aim of schooling is its orderly transmission (Jackson, 1986). (Eisner, 1994, p. 55)

Eisner is asking us to think about a specific practice, yes, but he's also asking us to consider that practice as a metaphor for aspects of a larger cultural system. 

Think about the powerful lessons to be found in spelling and math (and standardized tests): the important aspects of school have single, correct answers; the teacher knows these answers; the student's main responsibility is to learn them. Eisner again:

The school creates an environment that does not put much premium on imagination, on personal spirit, or on creative thinking. It emphasizes a form of rationality that seeks convergence on the known more than exploration of the unknown. It emphasizes the virtues of hard work. It limits the degree to which personal goal setting can occur and it rewards conformity to correct outcome more than it rewards productive idiosyncrasy. [My emphases]

Leaning heavily on Eisner, my question asks you to consider what values or beliefs shape your world. Because that world that you carry within you, that's the world you are teaching toward. 

II. How does the question relate to Project-based Learning?

PBL is not just a different, 'cooler', way to cover academic content. Its purpose isn't primarily to "engage" kids, or to "make learning fun,"  even if these frequently are outcomes. Nor is PBL just a different way to do the same old curriculum.

Ultimately, the most effective PBL is built on a different way of seeing the world and the teacher has simply structured class around this way of seeing. 

For example, students are seen as capable and independent. We can tell this by the ease with which students 1) ask questions, 2) talk about their mistakes not as failures but as cues they can use to determine their next move, 3) decide for themselves what they think.  

Students own the learning. We can tell this because they are active in planning and doing, in assessing the progress of the group and themselves as individuals, in problem-solving about the nature of the project's structure and overall organization-- often to the point of expressing more opinions or ideas than the teacher. The teacher talks with students how to do all these things effectively. And, the teacher seems to take his/her cue from the students; s/he appears to be responding rather than initiating or directing. 

The world that students from this classroom are heading toward is not a world where single answers to problems exist, or where people wait for someone to tell them what to do, or where an individual will work alone to accomplish something. 

In other words, the 21st century. 

It's exciting to see/hear the buzz of excitement about project-based learning. But I hear Eisner's caution-- and invitation-- when he says, "As long as we remain oblivious to the values that animate our intellectual life, we will be in no position to modify them" (p. 51). Implementing project-based learning without reflection has just as much potential to be the new gimmick in town, the flash and dazzle that dresses up the same old thing as it does to be a game changer. 

So, you're thinking about trying project-based learning. What are you teaching toward? And, more important, why?

Eisner, E. (1994). The educational imagination : On the design and evaluation of school programs (3rd ed.). New York: Macmillan .

Image credit: Universe in a Magic Drop by h.koppdelaney is used via Creative Commons License BY-ND 2.0

Tech in Schools: It's Not Just the Tools, Stupid

At Educon a couple of years ago, I heard someone-- maybe Will Richardson?-- say that he was thinking that the best kind of PD session would be to take a bunch of teachers, throw 'em in a room with computers, and say "Figure it out." I think that was true several years ago but I'm starting to believe that learning to weave a seamless flow of tech, curriculum, and practice is becoming much, much more complex.

One problem-- challenge-- is the multiplicity of competing, sometimes conflicting realities: the stakes for testing will get even higher as test results become linked to teacher evaluations. We thought NCLB drove learning toward teacher-centered practice, drill and kill test prep, and increasingly narrowed curricula? I predict we ain't seen nothin' yet.

Let's look at one conflict. As districts scramble to understand and implement the Common Core standards, I'm hearing about PD that is not only boring, it's increasingly dictatorial, moving toward telling teachers what to teach and how to teach it. This despite the oft-repeated CCSS assurance (in the Myths section) that this is exactly what should not happen.  

At the same time, the push to move beyond tech-for-tech's-sake-- AKA "engaging" the connected learning environments and real-world contexts is calling teachers to transform the way they think about teaching, learning, and the structures of schooling.  At least, it would if teachers could get access to social networks in their schools.

This push-pull starts to look like "use technology to get kids to do low-level thinking while we trick them into practicing filling in bubbles on Scantron pages." Of course, no one not many intend(s) for this to be the goal, it's just that there's no time allotted for authentic, teacher-driven brainstorming about how to create and work toward a different vision.

So. Enough bemoaning the difficulties. What can we do?

• Teachers, especially those with tenure who know the bureaucratic ropes of their districts, can come together across academic subjects and meet with IT folks, Superintendents, etc. to get specific social networks unblocked: Google Docs, VoiceThread, Glogster, Skype are the ones I see teachers talk about most often. I would add Storify to that list, especially for Humanities teachers.

Strategies need to include

• Concrete examples of how the tech will be used and for what purposes. For example, an argument about developing interdisciplinary work that would build cross-discipline  inquiry-based learning environments across the entire school would be a great way to start using the Common Core to inspire a...well, a common theme for the whole school, perhaps even a grade-level concrete problem to solve or goal to accomplish that every academic subject could connect to 

• Concrete examples of what other schools have done and the results (of course, the positive results). Schools that are similar demographically and/or in closer proximity to your own will carry more weight. There are a couple of YouTube videos you could share-- URL only, because YouTube will undoubtedly be blocked in your school. Here's one: Teachers and Principals Talk about Google Docs

• The Connected Principal, a blog by a group of connected principals, would make great reading for your school leaders. 

• Teachers, even one or two, can commit to spending 1 block of time --and yes, it will probably be after school, and yes, it will undoubtedly be uncompensated-- playing with new tools, and, more important, to talking about ways to use them to build new dimensions in curricula. Teachers can pick a book to read together. I make some recommendations here.

• Parents who are connected will be invaluable resources. Draw on their expertise and ask them to bring other parents on board. 

It's not all about the technology. It's always about power-- what is the tech that matters? That doesn't? The rationale for any decision? Who decides? 

I want to hear teachers' voices loud & strong in the push for change. 

It's time. 

Image: Speak Up: Make your voice heard by Howard Lake used via CC   Some rights reserved by HowardLake