Where We Are: We Need More Consequences

The second semester started this week at our school. As I write this post, more than 50% of all students at each grade level are failing one or more classes. That’s an outrageous number. I’m appalled at that failure rate. But it speaks to one of the traps that exist in inner city schools. It’s the clean, quiet, and safe trap. Students, parents, teachers, and principals all fall into the trap of believing that a clean, quiet, and safe school means it’s a good school. Unfortunately, that’s where the bar is set for a school like ours; clean, quiet, and safe.

I don’t want to belittle those three indicators, because to be honest, we haven’t always been all three. It’s taken an incredible amount of hard work from my teachers and from me to get us to the point where we can call ourselves clean, quiet, and safe. Some city school communities call clean, quiet, and safe a win. For me, it represents the floor-the minimum expectation we must have to ensure the conditions exist for our students to learn.

Back to the failures. I’m working with my teachers to help them understand that we need serious interventions to decrease our astronomical failure rate. I’ll write about why so many students are failing in another post. Most of my teachers have come to the understanding that we need an extended day for many of our students to give them the instructional support they need. So last week, we were discussing an after-school intervention program.  One of my teachers said, “We need real consequences for students who don’t show up to the after-school intervention program.” We were in the midst of a brainstorm, so there wasn’t really an opportunity to discuss the statement, but it was clear from body language and the nodding, that many, maybe most, of my staff agreed with the statement.

I should say that it’s rare for a student to fail only one course at our school. Students either pass everything, or fail multiple courses. Rarely is a student only failing one class. So all these students who need interventions are already on track to be retained; some of them for the second and third time. Retention for some of these students means dropping out. I don’t have the data in front of me, but the reality is sixteen year olds who haven’t yet made it out of ninth grade are extremely unlikely to graduate from high school. Yet some of my team believe we need more consequences if the students don’t show up for help and support.

The truth is we need the opposite of consequences. We need our students to feel more cared for than they have ever felt before. We need them to believe with all their hearts that this time will actually be different than all the other times they’ve failed. We need hope, and we need to nourish and care for that hope for our students, until they can carry that hope on their own without fear of losing it. Consequences? Not a chance. Hope, support, and more opportunities to learn is what we have to provide.

But we don’t really know how to as a team...yet. Some of my teachers can offer hope on their own. But we don’t know how to work together as a school community to offer students hope...yet.

I do understand where my teacher and those who agreed are coming from. My teachers try not to be, but sometimes they are angry with our students. My teachers are working incredibly hard. Frankly, they are working much harder than the students. But the staff doesn’t see the results they expect from the work they believe they put in. “I taught it, they didn’t learn it” is a blog post unto itself. But sometimes I can see my teachers’ perspective. I don’t aways agree with it, but I understand where they are coming from. The teachers choose to come to this environment each and every day. Most pour their hearts and souls into their teaching; in the best way they know how, if not always the most effective way. And the students aren’t learning. Another common inner-city experience, or maybe it’s a common experience when working with teenagers, is to hear, “I didn’t fail the class. S/he failed me.” But it doesn’t always come out using those words. In our environment it’s often said with yelling, and cursing, and extreme anger. So my teachers get angry too. And the result is a belief that we need order and more consequences, because we will show those students that even if they pretend not to care if they are passing, we’ll find something, anything to punish them with, to make sure they care. Especially because I'm not going to work this hard, and have students show me they don't care.

Clean, quiet, and safe. It’s so much easier to measure our success based on those indicators and not on learning. But then we fail our kids. And in our school, when our students fail, are retained over and over again, or simply don’t learn; it dooms them to a life of poverty. Clean, quiet, and safe have to be our minimum set of expectations. 

Tomorrow, we’ll meet again as a staff and I’ll lead a discussion about instructional interventions, learning, and about hope. We won’t be talking about more consequences.

Where We Are: How Would You Start?

Context Building:

I have so much trouble blogging. It’s never about making the time, or not having anything to say. I’ve said in this space before that it’s so difficult to frame the day to day reality of my inner city school, in this incredibly positive blogosphere. But over Winter Break, Bo Adams, on his thoughtful blog “It’s about Learning” wrote on December 30, 2013, a process post about homework. Bo asked for my feedback on his post, which I gladly offered and I’ve been reading the responses and thinking about the post ever since.

What got me thinking the most was and is that Bo uses his blog to think aloud, wonder, and ask questions. It’s clear to me that a blog ought to be used for just that purpose. But I’ve never done that. I’ve shared and wondered for sure, but I haven’t opened the doors to my practice, the struggles I face daily and the challenges I face in trying to move teaching and learning forward at our school.

So here goes; I’m giving it a shot. I’m hoping some of Bo's commenters will choose to respond to this post and continue the conversation we started over on It's About Learning, but this time for my context.

The Goal:

Bo framed an “Option 2” Homework assignment in his post. (Reprinted here with permission from Bo)

• EQ: What is beauty?
• Observe: As you go through the next 10 days, record in your observation journal instances of your thinking related to our current priority essential question. If appropriate and responsible, take pictures of things you find beautiful and make some notes about why. Ask others what they think, too. Because we are near the beginning of this experience together, I can suggest that the VTR (visible thinking routine) “See, Think, Wonder” might be one way to frame your ethnography notes. Of course, you can devise your own strategy (and you’ll be asked to do this more and more as you practice your Innovators DNA skills); if I, or some other mentor/peer, can help with your observation-strategy plan, let me/them know. Ask questions. We’ll share and review our “Game Plans” and “Gantt Charts” in two days, so we can see various strategies and plans.
• Question:
• Record the questions that arise for you as you detail your observations. I don’t want to overly constrain your thinking by suggesting specifics now, but let someone know if you feel yourself in some unresolved struggle about “What kinds of questions should be arising for me?”
• In relation to your subject-organized classes, tag at least some of your questions by the department name(s) for which those questions seem particularly connected. For example, “What percentage of the population finds this painting beautiful?” might suggest a “Math” tag for a statistics portion of your emerging project.
• Experiment:
• Of course, you’ll be experimenting with your observation-strategy plan.
• Also, use your observation notes to scan for trends and patterns. What hypotheses on beauty seem to emerge for you? Begin to outline – in big-picture terms – the experimental methods you might use to test your hypotheses. If it helps, pretend you are on staff with Myth Busters, like we’ve talked about during our f2f time together.
• Network & Associate:
• Suggestion 1 (if needed) – read and comment on the observation-journal entries posted by some of the others in this learning cohort.
• Suggestion 2 (if needed) – find connections in your independent reading and link to nodes in your learning web on this EQ.
• Suggestion 3 (if needed) – explore the playlist “6 TED Talks on beauty” and/or listen to the TED Radio Hour episode “What is beauty?“
• What are your suggestions regarding networking and associating with this EQ?

I love the assignment, and agree wholeheartedly that this is the type of meaningful, thoughtful, and purposeful work I’d like our Design Lab students to be doing.

Our Current Reality:

Here’s a worksheet that one of our teachers assigned before break. It’s not an example of every assignment we give; there are certainly instances of dynamic teaching and learning. But it isn’t an outlier assignment either. We give this assignment, and others like it to 16 year olds at our school all the time. This is both an example of class work and an example of homework.

The Task:

We need to move our instructional practices from the lessons that lead to this worksheet to the lessons that result in Bo's assignment. Some of my teachers are willing to take the necessary steps. Others are unsure if instructional changes need to occur, and if they must occur, what those changes ought to be. I’m not sure how many steps there are between where we are and where we need to be; but it’s a lot. I have a great staff. They care about kids, they want students to learn. Where we are pedagogically is simply our starting point.

Many of the conversations I see and experience on twitter are about who should be leading learning in a school. Should teachers lead learning? Should the principal? I see conversations about trusting adults and students and conversations about everyone’s potential. Here’s our reality; We don’t have a team of people to support our efforts to improve teaching and learning at our school. We don't have a Curriculum Leader, a Chief Innovation Officer, or even Lead Teachers. I drive the instructional agenda because I have the most experience with what instructional can and should look like in school to support meaningful student learning. We need change to occur. But that's hard to do when my team doesn't always know what change should look and feel like. It’s hard to get to “Option 2” when my teachers have never been in a school, where “Option 2” is considered.

I’d love some suggestions about what you would do first, and then next, and again after that. So blogosphere...please help me to think this through. Help me set the professional learning agenda. The goal is the consistent implementation of homework assignments like Bo’s exemplar. The starting point is the worksheet above.

What are Steps 1,2, and 3, and 17? How do you build instructional practices, culture and belief towards wanting to give assignments like Bo’s Option 2?

What would you do to support both teacher and student learning if you were headed to our school on Monday?

Starting At The Beginning

A little less than a year ago, I wrote my last post about attending the funeral of one of my students. Since then, I’ve sat down to write many times, but I just couldn’t put the proverbial pen to paper. The education blogosphere is so positive, and I had such a difficult year. I couldn’t figure out how to frame what was happening at Design Lab without it sounding negative. So I didn’t write. I also backed off on twitter and became much more of a lurker than a participant in the wonderful conversations occurring.

Have you ever seen a Double Dutch jump rope game? Two people each hold the end of an enormous jump rope and swing it in a circle, and a third person finds the right moment to jump in. It takes incredible timing to jump in and participate. For me, this past year the blogosphere was the jump rope, and I was the kid who just couldn’t find the right moment to jump in. Daily, I read such thoughtful posts and tweets from teachers and leaders whose thinking and actions I so admire, and I couldn’t find anything the blogosphere wrote or tweeted occurring in my daily experiences at school.

I found the incredible disconnect between the school I want, the schools I read about on twitter and blogs, and the school I’m in each day to be…overwhelming.

I didn’t get to go to school to talk about flipped classrooms or purchasing Ipads or any of the other cool, important, or interesting topics we’re discussing on twitter. Last year, I went to school everyday to fight. Too often, I found myself physically between students breaking up altercations, but mostly I fought for the hearts and minds of our teachers, parents, and students.

My teachers want to believe that our school could be a great school, but none have ever had the opportunity to work in a school that actually works for students or adults, so could our school really be one that works? I fought to maintain and hold the hope my teachers have that our school could be better.

Too many of our students’ parents had incredibly negative experiences in their own schooling and the result is they view school as a necessary evil. I fought to frame education as a means to a stable job in this changing economy, and I fought to make our school a place where parents could trust that we have their children’s best interests at heart.

I fought for our students also. So many of our students view school and horrific boredom as synonyms. Some want a diploma and some don’t know want they want. Most of our students come from difficult and dangerous neighborhoods and worry far more about getting to and from school safely than getting any homework done. 

I fought physically, emotionally, and mentally. I fought in every way a person can fight, and in the end, most, but not all, of my efforts failed. I failed in large part, because it was “I” and not “We” and because telling people we can be different and leading and modeling our efforts to be different are not one and the same.

The new school year starts tomorrow and I’m committed to learning how to be the principal my teachers, parents and students deserve and need. This summer I stepped back from the chaos and thought about the school we can build. I reflected upon what I’ve learned in this amazing blogosphere and tried to frame it in the context of my own experiences in city schools.

Here’s what I know for sure: A good school is based on a foundation of care.

What happens day to day in a school where teachers, students, and parents feel cared for? What happens at school if we purposefully treat our students like they are our own children? How will teachers participate differently if they feel cared for, supported, and acknowledged? How will our relationships change with our parents if we listen and really hear their concerns? We’re going to ask and learn how to answer these questions with our actions, beliefs, and behaviors this year.

Instructionally, we’ll focus on the start, the end, and the transition points in the lesson. While we ultimately want to offer a curriculum where we empower students as learners, we still have to start framing instructional practices at the beginning to get to our destination.

Truth be told, every aspect of Design Lab Early College High School needs to be improved. But it isn’t going to happen all at once. I’m putting aside the posts about BYOD, and flipped classrooms, and Ipads. My sixteen month old is somewhere between minutes and weeks away from walking, and I don’t expect him to run before he walks. I need to practice the same patience with my school. So we’re starting at the beginning, with care and the foundations of good instructional practices.

I hope I have the courage this year to share our progress along the way. When Design Lab is a school we would all send our children to, I think it’s important to have documented the long journey to get there. If you have any resources for framing discussions and learning around care in schools, please send them my way. In the meantime, I think I’m ready to try out my jump rope skills. See you at the double dutch game.

CC Images:

Writing samples: Parker 75 by churl on September 22, 2006 

Double Dutch by photobunny on May 17, 2008

Concrete for foundation poured, and roof choice for LEED house in Houston by quotlman on March 17, 2011

This is Life or Death

I attended a student’s funeral last Friday. She was a tenth grader, a fifteen year old, and a young woman just beginning her life. She was murdered, shot in the head, while out after midnight in her neighborhood.

I believe it’s important to use this blog as a platform to share my experiences as an inner-city educator as we work to improve our school and our community. I wish I could share how exciting it has been to meet my students and the staff at our school. I’d love to say the first week went off without a hitch. But the truth is the first full week was rough. Grief counseling for students and helping to raise funds for a funeral was a higher priority than getting into classrooms and setting up my office.

Blogging doesn’t always have to be about what went right or went wrong in our schools. I think reading a principal or teacher blog can be an opportunity to see a glimpse of what a colleague in a different setting is experiencing. I want to share my experience at this funeral, but I wish I were a stronger writer, because I’m just not sure what words to use.

I wish I knew how to describe the feeling of watching my student’s teenage friends, classmates and neighbors walk slowly past her open coffin.

I also don’t know how to describe my emotions as I watched how heart wrenching it was for some students to confront their friend’s loss, and how it was even more difficult to watch other students expressions of absolute acceptance of the circumstances of her death. It never occurred to me that attending this funeral meant I would have to watch teenagers accept the death of another fifteen-year old girl as a normal everyday occurrence.

It’s impossible to describe the conflicting messages and the accompanying emotions we received at this funeral. The pastor attempted to lead attendees in a funeral service in which he framed that the deceased is in a better place. While he spoke and participants sang beautiful hymns and songs in honor of the deceased and God, members of the city gang unit watched the mourners carefully to ensure no trouble ensued. Local community organizers spoke directly to the gang members in attendance explicitly stating that gang affiliation and violence leads to more funerals like this one. And the deceased friends spoke lovingly and sadly about their lost friend, while proudly wearing gang symbols and speaking positively about happier times in their neighborhood. Each and every teen who spoke mentioned their other friend or cousin, or neighbor who had been shot, injured or killed. They spoke of these events in a matter of fact tone; in the same way I would talk about last nights’ meal or picking up my suit at the dry cleaners.

What a heartbreaking day. Partially because of all I heard and saw at the funeral, but mostly because I saw acceptance of this event on so many of my student’s faces. There wasn’t nearly enough outrage, anger or fear at the funeral, and frankly I searched for it. As a teacher and a principal, I can use outrage, anger, or fear to fuel the fire in our students. But acceptance is something else; and it’s far more difficult to engage students positively when they accept the violence in their midst as the norm.

Educating in the inner city is actually about life or death. When I was in high school, it didn’t matter if I had good or great teachers because I was headed for college regardless. I could make stupid mistakes and move past them with relatively benign consequences. It's just not the same for my students. A mistake, any mistake can lead to a funeral like the one I attended. 

I believe that you readers who take the time to read this blog and others are some of the best teachers and leaders across this country. I read about your passion in your blogs and tweets. I hear your enthusiasm and commitment at edcamps. We need you at my school and other city schools across this country. School is life or death for our kids and we need the best teachers and leaders this country has to offer. What we do is so hard, but we need you to join us to help city kids imagine a different future than the one I saw at that funeral.

When we returned to school last week, we held a town meeting with all the students to give them one last time to speak about their classmates’ death. We had hospice and grief counselors on hand to speak with individual students who needed support. And then when it was over, we returned to the business of school.

It’s taken me all weekend to write this post and consider my emotions from this event. I checked in on twitter and my Google reader and saw how excited so many teachers are to start the year at their schools. I saw frustrated comments about standardized testing and excited posts about flipped classrooms and web2.0 tools. My start of the year was very different from what I expected. But for me, these events only served to strengthen my resolve about the work we do in inner city schools. After the funeral, I went home and hugged my five-year old son and tried to put aside all that I experienced that day, while he told me about his day at kindergarten. Then I held my five-month old son in my arms, and tried to push aside the images of young mothers carrying their babies by the open casket at the funeral.

I’m in the right place doing the only job I want right now. School for me this week means getting into classrooms and talking about teaching and learning with my teachers. I also need to find a ninth grade girl a pair of glasses. She can’t see the board or the books and she’s purposefully getting kicked out of class because she doesn’t want her teachers to know she can’t see. I also need to figure out where the local Costco is in my new city so I can buy some food to store in my office. One young man keeps on coming to my office to talk, which I love, but he’s also looking for food, because he comes to school so hungry. And he’s not the only one who needs some healthy snack options to get through the day.

I went to a student’s funeral and it was terrible for so many reasons. But I still believe that school and hope can be synonyms if we’re purposeful in our actions. So I’m headed back to work in the morning. I can’t wait to see the kids.

This is cross posted over at Connected Principals 

CC Images:

Angel of Grief/Weeping Angel by elycefeliz

Crimes of Passion by Walt Jabasco

…Hope…by DazT {bad contact, no biscuit}

Time For A Change

Every August, I lead the new teacher training in our district for all incoming middle and high school teachers. Most of the teachers aren’t just new to our district; they are embarking on their new teaching careers. First we have a crash course in how to be a city teacher, and then towards the end of our time together, I make sure they understand the importance of fitting into our district, and knowing that the Lawrence Public Schools is the right place for them. I explain that in our inner city setting, it’s so important to understand that we teach kids first and content second. So, if one of our new teachers perceives of herself as a teacher of Shakespeare, or as someone who loves teaching about volcanoes, then our district may not be the right fit. Connecting with our students and meeting their needs is far more important than specific content knowledge in the world of urban schools. I tell them, there’s no shame in leaving a place to find a better fit for your skill set, strengths, and interests.

A few weeks ago, I was listening to Bill Simmons’ podcast with David Kahn, general manager of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Kahn has made some questionable player/personnel decisions in the last few years. So many, that some experts consider him to be the worst general manager in the NBA. But as I listened to the podcast, I heard him speak about his decisions in the context of his organization and it was clear that he had made some thoughtful decisions. But they went wrong because of a different problem. There isn’t any alignment between what the owner of the team wants, the decisions the general manager is making, and the manner in which the coach utilizes the players. The result is one of the worst teams in the league.

It’s clear that organizational alignment is vital to the success of a professional basketball team and I would argue it’s just as vital in a school district, especially an urban district facing so many pressures to improve standardized test scores, graduation rates, attendance, and a myriad other issues. I’ve been thinking about fitting in to my district, and the organizational alignment therein for many months.

I’ve been an employee of the Lawrence Public Schools for eight years. Colleen Lennon, one of the finest principals I know, gave me my first administrative opportunity when she appointed me her middle school assistant principal seven and half years ago. And then, a few years later, seemingly out of the blue, our superintendent offered me the opportunity to lead the districts’ efforts to design six small high schools. We converted our 3,000 student comprehensive high school in a building more than one hundred years old, into six small thematic high schools on a state of the art campus. I had the amazing opportunity to lead six groups of teachers to imagine six different schools. And since then, I’ve both led and worked collaboratively to try and re-imagine teaching and learning at the secondary level in our urban school district.

As our work has progressed, my own thinking about what a school could and should be has evolved. I’ve spent the last year attending conferences like Educon, NTCamp Burlington, EdcampBoston, and next week I’m headed to Edubloggercon East. These events, and the wonderful people I’ve met face-to-face, and online, have dramatically and positively impacted my thinking about technology integration, school structures, teaching, learning, and leadership.

To return to that podcast and David Kahn, my thinking is no longer aligned with my district’s thinking. I think it’s presumptuous and more than a little arrogant to assume that my district should conform to my thinking about school, and the more time passes, the more divergent I am from the direction my district is headed. So, I’m taking my own advice and after eight wonderful years in Lawrence, I’ve found a better fit for the educator I am now. My family and I are headed to Cleveland, Ohio, so I can become a principal of a high school in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. I’ll be leading Design Lab Early College High School, in Cleveland’s innovative portfolio of schools. This upcoming school year will be the schools' fourth, and we’ll have our first graduating class. Design Lab is a STEM school, with design thinking as its’ central theme. Our partners are intended to be the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Engineering School at Case Western University. There’s already a strong partnership with Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C) for dual enrollment programs for students. 


My intent is to build an amazing team and imagine a new school together. I’ll use future posts to describe my thinking and our process. For now, what the school will be is undetermined. But I am hoping to install a fab-lab this year to get our students designing and applying STEM principles in hands-on applications of their ideas. And then we’ll see what happens next!

So, all that’s left to do is find a place to live in the Cleveland area, put our house in Massachusetts up for sale, pack up our home, move all our belongings, enroll our oldest son in kindergarten somewhere in Ohio, and change a million of our four month olds’ diapers. Oh, I also have to hire the rest of the school staff, build a school schedule, and actually get to Cleveland, all in the next four weeks. If you’re searching for me, I’ll be hiding under my desk.

If you’re looking to teach or be an administrator in an urban district in Massachusetts, I highly recommend you check out the Lawrence Public Schools. The kids and their families are amazing, and I can’t imagine working with a more passionate and dedicated group of teachers and administrators. It’s a place where being an educator means positively impacting students’ lives every day.

And if you know anyone nice in the Cleveland area, educator or not, let me know. My wife and I would love to meet them. Until March, I’d never visited Cleveland, and we don’t know anyone.

If you’re a teacher, an engineer, a designer, or an artist living in the Cleveland area, and you want to re-imagine high school with me, let me know. I’m starting to build a team.

If I’m being honest, I should say I’m a little scared to start a new adventure. But the truth is, I’m more scared of staying where I am, and becoming complacent, and of giving up on my vision of what school can be just to stay in the safe life we've built for ourselves. So we’re off to Cleveland, and I can’t wait to get there. I’ll use this blogging space to let you know how it goes…

CC Images:

Change by Alex Calderon

Puzzle pieces-2 by yann.co.nz 

Cleveland by Cfour33

Panic by litherland

Road to volcanoes by Gabriele Nastro

The Art and Science of Teaching

I’ve always been a good athlete. Playing almost any sport, except the ones where I had to be really tall or strong, came pretty easily to me. In high school, I picked up tennis to rehab a soccer injury, and before I knew it, I was the best player on my team. I was so proud when the coach made me the #1 singles player. And then I started losing…to everyone. I found a coach who agreed to hit with me to help me understand my strengths and weaknesses. On our first day together, I hit all my best shots to show him my tennis skills. When I strutted up to the net, I expected to hear how good I was, and instead he told me, nicely, respectfully, and honestly, that I didn’t know how to do anything. I’d never had a tennis lesson before. So I was using every inch of athleticism I possessed, but if I ever wanted to improve, we needed to start at the beginning. He asked me if I wanted to learn how to play tennis, and if I wanted to understand the game. When I agreed to let him teach me, we didn’t start by tracking down difficult shots in the corner, or serving as hard as I could. Instead, he started at the beginning, by teaching me how to hold a racket correctly.

I had a similar experience when I began teaching. At the time, I thought of teaching as only an art. I can’t play the piano or the guitar, but as a young teacher, I thrived in front of the kids. I felt like I could connect with the toughest students; pull inferences and understanding out of a hat, and lead disadvantaged students to the learning I wanted for them. I was an artist, with the classroom as my palate, and the students as the canvas. Then my mentor, over time, nicely, respectfully, and honestly, taught me that entertaining kids and teaching students are not one and the same. She helped me to practice the purposeful shift away from students memorizing what I told them, to students constructing and making their own meaning from the ideas we explored together. My mentor helped me to purposefully practice my teaching, just as my tennis coach had years before. Purposeful practice of specific instructional strategies was my introduction to the science of teaching.   

In my administrative graduate program, Elliot Eisner asked us whether or not teaching was an art or a science? Are all good teachers born to it, or can good instructional practices be learned, practiced, and improved upon? I do believe in an IT factor; a quality that some great teachers have. Those of us who spend lots of time visiting classrooms know that every once in a while we stumble into a room where the teaching and learning is beautiful and it feels like art in the making. But we also know that a school year is a marathon, and plenty of days throughout a school year fall far short of anyone’s criteria of beautiful. Teachers who have IT can connect with angry, shy, brilliant, and struggling students. But IT alone isn’t enough to move student learning forward daily.

I believe good instruction is also a science. I know in urban schools, we give far more credence to the art of teaching than the science. We act like only those teachers with the IT factor can survive in urban communities. But the truth is, it’s the science of teaching that ensures whether or not all students learn. Each year, we hire close to twenty-five first year teachers on our campus of high schools. Many enter our schools like I entered the tennis court in high school or my first classroom, full of confidence. These new teachers are gifted entertainers, talkers, readers, or writers. But they don’t know how to teach, yet.

I’ve learned that new teachers, who are willing, start with practicing the instructional equivalent of learning to hold the racket, improve every year, and become some of our best. Those that believe the IT factor is all they need, either leave on their own, or ultimately we invite them to leave because they can’t meet our diverse learners’ needs.

I’ve spent more time recently thinking about the convergence of the art and science of teaching because my son is learning to swim. Every Saturday, we attend a thirty-minute lesson. His teacher is amazing. Watching her work with my son and the other beginner swimmers has me thinking about what I do and do not see in the classrooms I visit back at school.

Here’s some of what she does:

• She gets the students excited about both swimming in general and the specific activity ahead
• She acknowledges whatever fear the students bring to the pool, but she doesn’t let anyone focus on that fear
• She has a clear idea of the skills she wants students to practice in each lesson
• Every lesson is a balance between something the students can already do and something they are working to master
• No swimming skill is ever finished being learned, everything is practiced and refined, and improved upon
• There are multiple activities in each lesson, but they are all different ways to practice the same skill
• She encourages, laughs, commends, and challenges the students each and every class
• She makes time to instruct the whole group, but understands individual strengths and weaknesses
• She pushes, and never accepts when a student says they can’t do it
• Every student has the opportunity be successful; and how they accomplish the learning is a little different for each swimmer

At some point in our training most of us take an educational psychology course and study Lev Vygotsky and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Each Saturday, I watch my son’s teacher find his zone. He is nervous at the beginning of every class and so proud at the end of the lesson. His teacher pushes him, meaningfully and purposefully, and I’m watching him learn to swim. His teacher has found the right balance between the art and science of teaching. She absolutely has the IT factor. My son talks about her all week long, and watching her instruction is like watching art in the making. But more importantly, she understands her content and is developing purposeful lessons to push the whole group and each individual student.

I see well-developed lessons regularly. But I don’t regularly see lessons that ensure all students are in their ZPD. Do you? Are you having conversations with teachers and colleagues about how to develop lessons to purposefully push student learning forward? I’ve written before about the hidden contract of urban schools when teachers, students and administrators agree not to push at each other. Watching my son’s swim lessons is a stark reminder for me of how often the school day just happens to our students. Despite our best intentions, students can experience a period, a day, or a week where real learning doesn’t happen. Without a doubt, they are exposed to new ideas regularly, but we have to be far more purposeful about designing learning experiences for students where new learning is the outcome. Attending class and completing seat time towards finishing the day, the week, or the course is not learning. Why does it seem easier to set up meaningful learning experiences for students in the pool, on the tennis court, or on the baseball field, but with those same students, it’s a struggle to set up purposeful and dynamic learning in English, chemistry and history class?

Are you having this conversation at your school? Do you emphasize the art or science of teaching in your community? Is learning about finding each student’s zone of proximal development in your school community? Are teacher teams designing learning opportunities for students in the way coaches help students improve their practice on the athletic field?

The fast pace and relative chaos of each day and the entire year in an urban environment contributes to our efforts to hire teachers who understand the art of teaching, and hope they pick up the science on their own. But growing a good school has to mean investing in teachers to purposefully improve instructional practices. Does your school make this commitment to teachers? Is improving instructional practice a clear component of what your school is all about?

CC images:

Art by viewerblur

Juggling skittles by Jarod Carruthers 

Science ZONE by Jacob Earl 

Swimming Lesson by Eric

tennis veld tijdens de les / tennis court during a lesson by tdietmut

The Circle Game

"This world is too big for me to be trapped here” was one of the lines in the Circle Game, a student written play based upon the Joni Mitchell song of the same name. Students at the Performing and Fine Arts High School (PFA), one of six high schools on our campus were the authors and performers of this tremendous play.

I was in the drama club for a time in high school. I participated in light hearted shows and musicals designed to entertain. We laughed as we performed The Mouse That Roared, and sang our hearts out during The Sound of Music. We attempted to write our own musical based on the Poe story, The Masque of the Red Death, because…well I have no idea why we chose a horror story about a plague to frame a musical. Whatever the reason, the product was, if I may be generous, very weak.

So when I think high school drama, I think escapism. But that’s not what The Circle Game is. Instead, our students shined a light on their own experiences as Hispanic youth going to school and growing up in the inner city. In a thirty-five minute performance, the students addressed stereotypes and reality, and offered the viewer insight into their own experiences and identity.

Here’s a little bit of what these high school dramatists offered the audience:

In the school classroom scene, a disconnected white teacher focused on only one student, who the instructor believed cared about learning, while essentially ignoring the rest of the class. The teacher also tells the audience he’s glad Victor, one of his students, was arrested because life is all about choices and the student chose poorly.

A boyfriend physically abuses his girlfriend. When her friend tries to tell her she deserves better, the victim tells her friend, “I’m never going to college, I’m never going to get out of here. Who’s going to protect me? I need protection.”

One character tells the audience about being followed in stores for being Latino, and of being with his mother while being stopped by police and searched just in case they stole from a store. He remarked, “Society pretends we don’t even exist anyway. So I made a choice to use their fear against them, so I could feel strong”, and then he joins a local gang.

A mother returning home from a minimum wage job, exhausted, trying to talk to her son, and with fear in her voice asking “Are you going to end up like your father…dead?”

A senior girl receiving her acceptance letter to Brown University, without a scholarship, and believing she cannot go.

A gang member believing the only way to help the people he loves is by stealing money to pay the rent so his family isn’t evicted.

“I love my mom, but I can’t end up like her. I’m going to make something of myself. This world is too big for me to be stuck here.”

The play ends with a character potentially continuing the cycle of poverty when she learns she’s pregnant, and a gang member, who also happens to be a son, and a friend and a boyfriend, dies in a senseless act.

In the end, an actor looked out at the audience and asked if we, the audience, were putting them, the characters into our circle.

My eyes filled up at the end, in part because of the content, but mostly because the entire auditorium erupted with applause. All five hundred students in the audience cheered, and stood up to give the actors a standing ovation. For thirty-five minutes, we witnessed raw honesty; and the audience knew it. This play spoke to our kids, because it was an honest look at all of their lives. Every character represented someone in that audience. And it certainly wasn’t escapism, because so many of our students don’t feel like they can escape their lives.

It made me so happy to see a play that reflected our students’ experiences and it made me so sad to see our students’ experiences reflected in this play. The short scene in the classroom was painful to watch because the students were showing us what they feel in our classrooms. It was difficult to watch student beliefs about teacher instructional practices and lack of connection with students, acted out on stage.

I hear lots of talk from adults about kids who don’t care, and who are disengaged. But I also see teachers reading novels that they love, but that don’t speak to our students. I talk to frustrated teachers upset because so many students miss their first period class. But I also see older siblings dropping off younger siblings at school because parents are working the night shift and aren’t home or awake at drop-off time. I see angry boys fight, and I see the same young men cradle their mother, sister, or grandmother in the most tender moments.

We each have our own perspective on why students are or are not learning or engaged. But the students clearly have their own ideas too. And I think that’s easy to forget sometimes. It was heartbreaking to watch students tell us about what shapes who they are in this play. But it was so uplifting and wonderful to hear the strength in their voices as they told their stories.

That line, “this world is too big for me to be trapped here” reminded me of the book A Hope in the Unseen. I’ve written about it before in my contribution to blogs for educational reform. In the book, Ron Suskind, a Wall Street Journal writer, discussed a belief and a faith in having something better despite the words of those around us that “we can’t”, or “we won’t”, or “why bother” as a “hope in the unseen.” (Suskind, 1998). He retells the true story of a young man’s journey from the inner city to Brown University. Cedric, the main character defined the unseen as “a place, a place I couldn’t see yet, up ahead… an imagined place that I’ll get to someday (Suskind, 1998, pg. 330).”

All our kids, those up on stage and those in the audience come to school each day filled with that hope. Sometimes they wear it on their sleeves. Those that do are easy to reach and connect with in the classroom. But most do not. Their hope is hidden deep within them, and sometimes they’ve forgotten how to find it. It’s hidden beneath the fear and anger and frustration of feeling like life is happening to them and around them, instead of for them. Hope is hard to find in many of our students. But it was there for everyone to see up on that stage on Friday. Despite our students’ shared experiences of poverty and feeling forgotten and uncared for by society, they dream of a better day, of choices and of opportunity.

As the students cheered, I thought about how brave the kids were to write and perform this play. I often think about the courage it takes to teach and lead in inner-city schools, but I forget sometimes about the courage it takes to come to school every day, when a hope for something better seems out of reach. Our kids have courage, and strength, and dignity, and hope. It’s our responsibility to connect with them and turn that hope into action and results. I am so proud to work with and for our students, but we have so much more to learn to ensure we do better and are better as leaders and teachers on behalf of our students.

CC Images:

Let’s start the show by David

Performance by Dark Botxy

Magdalina Sara Jungck, as a School Teacher by Wisconsin Historical Images

ParentsPstcrd_060910.jpg by Carolyn_Sewell  

Reflection. By Colin Wu

…Hope… by ĐāżŦ {bad contact, no biscuit}