This Is Not News

As I get ready for the new year, I’ve been having a number of conversations with myself about how to implement the vision of teaching I have in my head. In my head, students take their questions about the world and seek out answers to them, while I provide resources and guidance to help them use the lessons of history to answer those questions. This works perfectly between approximately 3 AM and 5 AM, and then the alarm clock goes off and I face a bunch of realities that serve as roadblocks to that vision. My own limitations are certainly among those roadblocks, but they’re not the only ones. So in an effort to widen the conversation beyond myself and I, consider this post the beginning of a short series.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is the idea of authenticity in education. I like the idea of projects as a form of assessment – have the students create something that requires not just memorization of facts, but thinking about those facts. If there’s creativity and room for individual analysis and expression, then you’re on to something. And if it’s something that the students connect to, that they care about for its own sake and not because the guy with the grade book is telling them to do it, then you have a project that’s authentic.

Now, the roadblock I want to talk about now is that completing a project that requires 1) factual knowledge about a subject; 2) critical analysis of that knowledge; and 3) creation of content is going to require a number of skills. Part of the goal of the project is to help students develop those skills, but one challenge for the teacher is to match the complexity of the project to the skills that the students have. Ideally, you want the project to be near the edge or even slightly beyond the edge of the comfort level, so they have to stretch and build a little bit to get there. Without that, there’s no challenge, and that can lead to boredom. But with too much of a gap, students won’t know where to go, and they won’t feel like they can solve the problem themselves.

This means that the teacher is almost certainly going to have to put some artificial limitations on the project, and those simplifications run the risk of taking the project further away from something that the students feel is authentically relevant to them. Is there a way to get around this? I’m not sure.

When I was in grade school, I played snare drum for the grade school concert band. If you have ever been to a grade school music concert, you are probably familiar with the song Hot Cross Buns. It is a very simple tune that many music students learn when they are first getting the hang of their instruments. Now, whatever goals someone might have when they start playing an instrument, giving a rousing performance of Hot Cross Buns is not likely to be one of them. But learning this song lets you practice reading the music and hitting the notes, and hopefully after a little while you’re ready for something more engaging. I eventually played a few John Philip Sousa marches and a barely recognizable version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” before hanging up my drumsticks.

Now, is there a more authentic way of helping music students get those initial building blocks? Or is Hot Cross Buns (or something like it) just something you have to grin and bear to get on with the good stuff? I honestly don’t know. I suspect that a certain amount of grinning and bearing is necessary, but that could be my lack of imagination.

And to being this back around to the high school classroom, if I need a Hot Cross Buns to help students build their research or their critical thinking skills, how can I get beyond that phase as quickly as possible and let them loose on more complex, and hopefully more engaging, material?

One possibility would be to build out my start-of-year introduction. In World History, instead of starting with australopithecus and the dawn of humanity, I begin with the last chapter of the book and discuss the present day. The Internet and global warming are a little more accessible than cave paintings and the Stone Age. I could try to create a few projects based on researching personal history, and put the focus more on the thinking and the application than the content itself. I might hit other roadblocks, like the assigned curriculum and its associated schedule, but that’s a hurdle for another day.

Zac Chase of Autodizactic.com fame has been asking people to share their thoughts on the purpose of school. It’s one of those things I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and right now it seems like a task I can focus on.

I think school as an institution has two purposes, and sometimes they conflict.

From the point of view of individual student, the school should be a place that provides resources, structures and opportunities for personal growth. When I say personal growth, I mean an increase in the student’s ability to conceive a goal, formulate plan to accomplish the goal, and then carry it out. Some of those resources are purely intellectual. Learning how to read opens up a vast set of resources. Learning how to write gives a student new powers of communication and outreach. Learning about government institutions tells the student what to read about and whom to write to in order to understand or even change laws. Learning about science and math opens up all sorts of other possibilities.

Some of those resources go beyond academics. Some of them are emotional, as students learn to confront and overcome challenges. They experience the benefits of teamwork and, hopefully, the experience of relying on others and being relied on by others. I hope they have the experience of authority figures showing trust and caring for them. I also hope they gain valuable social resources – friendships and relationships that they can call upon in the future to help them achieve their goals. All of these are worthwhile and important purposes of the school for the individual student.

Society at large also has a purpose in creating and maintaining the school. Bringing large groups of impressionable people together, demanding that those impressionable people develop and display certain skills and traits, and reinforcing certain values over others are all things that schools do in order to mold the next generation and perpetuate the society in question. The way that I have phrased that may sound nefarious, but no matter how much individuality you want to foster, we need some level of conformity or society falls apart, and with it most of human beings’ potential.

Ideally, schools can provide a reflective environment in which social norms can be adopted and re-evaluated at once . . . even if that is an uncomfortable experience for many students, or one that asks them to rethink or even abandon some goals that they may have set for themselves. To reach that ideal, I think it’s necessary to give people permission to disagree. That raises a whole host of questions along the lines of “Can I tolerate someone else’s intolerance?” I don’t have the brainpower to pursue those questions tonight . . . but it would be great if our schools routinely provided the space to do so.

Some of the big news in Philadelphia education this week is the unveiling of the latest draft of a Facilities Master Plan to close some schools and reconfigure others in order to deal with population changes and the departure of many Philadelphia public school students to charter schools. The proposal would close nine schools over the next few years, including the high school that shares a building with the one where I teach. The proposal is much less ambitious than the draft of options that was leaked last June, and high schools in particular still have another study coming on how they should be structured. So part of the much anticipated news is that we should keep anticipating.

One thing that strikes me is how hard it is to juggle the needs of different parts of the city. The news is full of stories of “empty seats” and “underutilized schools,” but there are also a number of schools that are overcrowded because their particular neighborhoods are still relatively stable in terms of student population. It’s not a realistic solution to have kids from the Northeast part of the city commute to a building that has extra classroom space in South Philadelphia. But it’s also not realistic to expect the district to be able to spend a fortune in this political and economic climate to build new classroom space in the Northeast when every headline will talk about the “wasted space” elsewhere. Different areas have different problems, but because they’re part of the same district it’s much harder to solve either.

I was thinking about this in the context of the textbook and curriculum I’m using for 9th grade World History. It’s not a terrible textbook as textbooks go, but I don’t think it’s right for my students. The language and vocabulary are presenting an obstacle to the ideas and content, and when you’re already struggling to make the 6th Century Frankish kingdoms relevant to a hundred 14-year-olds, you really don’t need another obstacle. But this is the book that every school in the city uses, because the district decided to standardize textbooks and curricula for logistical purposes and to accommodate students who may move from one school to another during a school year. Neither of those are bad goals, but the result is a bad fit for my particular students. So once again I’m wondering if my district’s size forces it to adopt solutions that don’t quite work perfectly for anyone in the name of not failing miserably for anyone. And I’m not sure that’s an approach that’s going to create a major change.

Of course, it’s easy for one blogging teacher to say all of this. I don’t have a solution that’s politically and economically feasible for creating smaller, nimbler decision-making units that can better address specific needs. All I can say is that as a citizen I’ve starting thinking about how we need those solutions and I’ve started to try to think about what they might look like.

We spent some time thinking about free will and determinism in my ethics class, and watched a couple of movies that hinge on the idea. To wrap up the topic, I gave the students the following assignment today:

Imagine that you are a lawyer in a court case involving one of the films we watched about free will. You must write a 3-paragraph persuasive argument to make your case. Choose one:

A. You are a DEFENSE ATTORNEY for Howard Marks, the man who was arrested for the future-murder of his wife at the beginning of Minority Report. You are trying to get Howard’s conviction thrown out by challenging the entire precrime system. To make your case, you need to argue that the precogs’ visions are not sufficient evidence that Howard is guilty – Howard still had the power to change his future.

B. You are a PROSECUTING ATTORNEY against Dom Cobb from Inception. You want to prove that Cobb is responsible for Mal’s death even though Mal jumped from the building herself. To make your case, you need to argue that once Cobb put the idea that the world was not real in her head, it was inevitable that Mal would kill herself – Mal had NO power to change her future.

I would probably have an easier time with A than B. I can make the intellectual case for determinism. Sometimes I think I can make it too well. But it’s not something I can fully commit to.

I like this assignment because it gives the students who want it an opportunity for a little theatricality. Even if they don’t have a lot of actual courtroom experience, just about everyone has watched enough Hollywood courtroom antics to have an idea of what they would do. And even though I don’t want to get to the point of saying legal = good, illegal = bad, from time to time I think it’s good to have something more concrete, like “Are you going to jail?” rather than something abstract like “Are you a good person?”

This week in ethics, we’re thinking about the way that society punishes the people who do something that society deems wrong. We may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because even though we’ve discussed a couple of ethical perspectives, we have lots of room left to discuss and evaluate what actually is right and wrong. But it’s not a bad idea to think about the stakes of making decisions about ethics. If we as a society decide something is wrong, what is the best way to respond to people who act against that decision? What are the consequences that come from different levels of harshness? What does the way that we treat “wrongdoers” say about the way that we view people in general?

Plus, since this class is using film to illustrate some of its questions, this topic is an opportunity to watch The Shawshank Redemption, which remains my favorite movie. The students usually respond well to it, too, and getting to see a bunch of people see it for the first time is its own thrill. There’s a scene in the movie where Andy Dufresne wants the warden to spend some money to upgrade the prison library. The warden replies that the public only wants the government to spend money on three things in prisons: more bars, more guards, and more guns. Andy is persistent, though, and gradually builds the prison library into a resource that helps at least a dozen prisoners get their high school diplomas. (He has some other projects in the film, but I won’t spoil those if you haven’t seen it.)

This NPR story about Folsom State Prison (made famous by Johnny Cash) from 2009 shows that conflict playing out in the real world – as we spend more money on bars and guards and guns, we spend less on educating and training convicts for life after prison. Whether that actually makes anyone safer or improves anyone’s life is a very open question. I like using this story because I can play the audio from the original radio story and give students the printed article version, so that gives students a couple of different paths to absorb the information. With the article in hand, I ask the students to answer a set of questions that connect to the prison-and-punishment theme. I also hope that thinking about the questions will help the students think about how the media can construct a story to support certain conclusions. It’s definitely worth listening to the story and thinking about what the story says – and doesn’t say – about the prison guards union.

I’ll put the reflection questions after the jump.
Read the remainder of this entry »

When I think of different ways to set up a learning institution, I usually wind up thinking about Jane Addams and Hull House. The settlement house movement of the late 19th and early 20th century has a lot of lessons to offer us in the progressive education community. That’s not terribly surprising, since Addams worked closely with John Dewey when they were both in Chicago. Reading Democracy and Education is great, but seeing how Addams and her colleagues worked to put that theory into practice is invaluable.

I teach Addams’ “The Function of the Social Settlement” whenever I teach an epistemology class because I like to have my students talk about their vision of their education, especially its practical benefits, and see how that fits with Addams’ vision. There’s a passage that always sticks out to me. She talks about how one of the middle-class, college-educated residents at Hull House wanted to take a group of working-class immigrants from the surrounding neighborhood on a tour of one of Chicago’s museums. The immigrants found it difficult to appreciate the works they saw, because they had no background knowledge of the traditions or contexts involved. – knowledge that their guide had spent a lifetime acquiring. The mistake, Addams says, is thinking you can take someone from culture and background and dump them into an entirely different context and expect them to appreciate the new environment. You can not, she says, throw “a fringe of art” onto a day spent at a factory; you can’t throw it on a life that is not immersed in it or connected to it and expect the art to make any kind of connection.

A fringe of art. I love that phrase. (It’s repeated in her memoir, 20 Years at Hull House.) And I think about it often as I try to put my own educational philosophy to work in an environment that seems ill-fitted to it at places. I believe in the Deweyan, pragmatic ideal of inquiry more than ever. I see the potential for approaches like project-based learning to bring that ideal to life. But as I look at my own practices, I wonder if I am not trying to throw a fringe of inquiry onto my teaching.

When I started teaching at the high school level, I had a lot of ambitious dreams about allowing my students to use the technological resources at their disposal to research the world around them, identify problems or areas of confusion, and then figure out what historical events in the curriculum connected to that present-day question. The reality that I’ve come to face is that many (not all) of my students – like many of the people in the world – don’t really care about how the world around them works. They don’t want to take it apart of fiddle with it or tweak the settings to make it function a little better. They just want it to work so that they can get back to doing what they’re doing. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this in a lot of cases. I believe Apple has made about a kajillion dollars satisfying this desire in technology users. But it makes it harder to find that initial point of curiosity that can serve as the launching pad for an investigation.

Starting the inquiry is only part of the question, of course. The next issue is, once a student has found a problem to investigate, how can the student do so in a fruitful way? Here I find a difference between the way I think about inquiry and the way my students think about inquiry. My approach is to start gathering sources, to read and listen and watch things until I have gathered a body of information. Then I can look in that body of information for facts that connect together and try to tell a story about whatever I’m researching. Of course, I began my career as a student long before Google; heck, long before Yahoo and Lycos. For many students today, the path to inquiry begins with typing a question into a search engine and ends with copying the first hit onto their paper. The more I read about the iPhone 4S and Siri, the more I expect that teachers in a few years will be requiring their students to talk into the smartphones rather than keep them hidden at all times.

While I appreciate the convenience, I also think there’s something to be said for doing things the long way and understanding the knowledge that you’ve built. So I’m trying to teach my students the skills they would need for inquiry the long way – close reading of texts; broader keyword searches; finding and summarizing main ideas; outlining; evaluating media sources; and plenty of others. By the time I’ve really helped students practice and build some of these skills, I barely have enough time in my district-mandated schedule to squeeze in a project or two, especially if I’m trying to make a connection to events in the contemporary world that don’t quite have a spot on my planning and scheduling timeline. It’s hard to tell if there’s real inquiry happening, or just a fringe.

I will certainly continue to refine my own practice. As I build better relationships with my students I hope I will see more opportunities for genuine inquiry into subjects that they are about passionately. But I also believe that this is way beyond any one teacher. There are schools around the country that build a culture of inquiry from a young age, but there aren’t enough. We need to create more, to help students find the spark of education-for-personal-growth early and then build the skills and habits to help that spark grow. If we do, I think we’ll be pleasantly surprised by what we discover together.

Gotta get back on the blogging bandwagon, and I’ve been mulling on this one for a while.

It just so happened that I heard two very different visions of a teacher’s role in planning lessons and curricula in the same day. I was reading Mary Beth Hertz’s blog entry about planning the technology curriculum at her school. She specifically mentioned how she was able to refine and improve that curriculum as she got to know her students better and she increased her own understanding of who they were and what they needed. She moved from that experience to a general need for administrators and policy makers to provide a greater role for teachers in the planning process.

Know that we are professionals whose expertise is children. Let us use what we know about our students and about teaching and learning to craft a curriculum together that best meets the needs of our community. Let us have input into the document. Foster conversations across grade levels about skills and concepts students need to have or understand to be successful. Stop calling purchased reading series and social studies textbooks ‘curricula.’

It’s a good post, and I recommend you read the whole thing. It certainly fits with my own sympathies and my own vision of a teacher as a guide, someone who can draw on his or her own experiences in order to help students create learning experiences for themselves. I’m in my third year teaching World History at Parkway, and I think I’m just starting to get to know my students, my colleagues, my textbook and myself well enough to put together resources and a plan through the day that will be helpful to the students and build skills they need. (Notice I didn’t say anything about being a guide and creating learning experiences there. That’s a post for another evening.)

But the same day I read that post, I was talking to a colleague in the staff room. This colleague has a variety of experiences in and out of the classroom, and his argument was that one reason why teachers feel so burdened and exhausted is that they have multiple responsibilities, all of which could serve as a full time job. There’s knowing your content. There’s planning the lesson. There’s delivering the lesson. There’s all the stuff that we call classroom management, and there’s all the stuff that goes with assessing students’ performance after the lesson. How in the world can someone design 180 high-quality lessons a year on a part-time schedule, and then have the energy to go out and deliver it? A corporate presenter might spend weeks or even months honing a single presentation, but what teacher has that kind of time? We’re workshopping the whole thing as we go, doing a couple of live dress rehearsals and hoping that we come up with something good enough to get a return engagement the next year.

My first instinct on hearing this was to rebel. How many teachers have I heard complain about the scripted lessons they have? How many already don’t feel like they have the respect, trust and freedom to ad lib where their judgment tells them it’s appropriate to do so? This was taking authorship and creativity out of the teacher’s hands, and I couldn’t see how it could be a good thing.

Then I thought about actors. Their whole job is to take someone else’s words and ideas, infuse life into them, and make them their own. I thought about the fact that my musical tastes tend toward singer-songwriters, and I often give the act of interpreting and performing a song short shrift in favor of emphasizing the writing part. There’s got to be a place for this in education somewhere, some way that we teachers can tap into the brilliance of really good lesson planners the way an actor can tap into the brilliance of Shakespeare.

I think there can be, if the planning talent is there. I would never script a teacher’s lessons word for word. I would give more teachers the freedom to deviate from a plan or a timeline if they thought it was appropriate. But there is a real skill in assembling a plan and the resources to pull it off. I’m especially thinking of things like simulations or related activities. I’ve been working for years to design a good simulation of a run on the banks, and just like game design and other forms of design, it is tough to get all the pieces in the right order. I never feel like I have enough time to get every single piece lined up. I’m going to keep trying and I like the challenge, but the time it takes me to get this bank simulation right is time I can’t spend doing something to make the French Revolution come alive better. There’s a tradeoff that comes with designing from scratch.

I really feel that tradeoff when it comes to my Ethical Issues class. I’ve been designing and redesigning it from the beginning since the day I started at Parkway. And designing a high school course is nothing like designing a college class. When I design a college class, I pick a text or two, assign the readings, put some lecture notes together and then walk into class and improv the discussion based on what the students are interested in. There’s no improv in high school, at least not my high school. Every lesson needs to be structured from beginning to end down to the last question and the final activity. I am just now figuring out how to take the ethics content I’m familiar with and present it in a way that can connect to a high school audience that has no prior philosophical experience. And I am exhausted. Sure, it’s a feeling of success to be getting somewhere with the course, but it’s a limited audience. If I were at a different school with a different culture or a different group of students, what I’m doing now wouldn’t work. If I handed my notes and lesson plans to another teacher from my school, he or she would probably feel lost. There’s no way to scale up my specific adaptations, which means someday I’ll be reinventing the wheel again.

As I think about the pros and cons, I’m generally OK with that. But I’m pretty sure I’ll be throwing some cover tunes into my set list in the process.

So in the ethics class, we watched The Matrix to set up the problem of skepticism. (Side note: I remember teaching my first Philosophy class in fall ’99. As I lectured on Descartes, a bunch of students told me about this new movie that was totally an example of what Descartes was talking about. I scoffed at first, but they were right. Once it was so cutting edge. Now my students laugh at the cell phones and Keanu’s kung fu poses.)

I decided to follow up with this Wired story from a few years ago about Ray Kurzweil’s belief that in the not-too-distant future we’ll be able to back our brains up as computer programs. I’m still trying to help my students work through the article itself, but it does set up an interesting way of looking at the mind-body problem. If you can preserve the “information” parts of who you are, even without the more obvious physical aspects, are you still you? That there are people working on this even today is a nice way to take the philosophical question out of the abstract. Plus I still have somewhat fond memories of doing my undergrad thesis on the philosophy of AI. 🙂

These days, I admit, I fear that even if we could transform ourselves into intelligent programs, we’d just have to spend all of our time updating our drivers. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Apple will come up with iMind.

President Obama announced the long-anticipated waiver policy for No Child Left Behind on Friday. If you’re not an education policy wonk/geek: The No Child Left Behind law requires that all schools demonstrate that 100% of their students are meeting state standards by 2014, or else the schools will be considered to be failing. Besides the label, there are various consequences that can come from this label, including loss of funds or a requirement for administrative and staff shakeups. So no one wants to be labeled as failing. States have been setting targets each year for how many students should be meeting the standards. As we get closer to 2014, those targets are rising quickly. For example, in Pennsylvania this year, a high school must have about 80% of its 11th graders score “Proficient” or “Advanced” on our state standardized test, the PSSA. Next year, the target goes to roughly 90%. The year after that, it’s 100%. Very few schools are hitting that 90%-100% range, so education officials in states all over the country have been crying out that the targets need to be revised.

The standard way to do that would be for Congress to revise the law. NCLB is not actually a brand-new law that was signed in 2002. It’s a renewal of the Elemental and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (and a package of amendments to other laws), which established a lot of the policies through which the federal government provides funding to states and school districts. The ESEA needs to be reauthorized every five years, and that reauthorization is an opportunity for Congress to make significant changes in education if it sees fit to do so. The ESEA came up for renewal in 2007, but Congress has not been able to pass a new version of the law. So the initial targets are still in place.

The law does give the Secretary of Education the authority to issue waivers to states from the law’s requirements. It does not say on what basis those waivers should be given. So the Obama Administration, especially Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, has been saying for months that if Congress did not pass a revision of the law, the Department of Education would start issuing waivers to states that met certain criteria. Republicans in Congress, and plenty of people of every ideological persuasion outside of Congress, have claimed that this is an overreach – the president should not be able to tell states that they don’t have to follow a federal law because they’re doing something that he likes better. Obama has not been deterred, and on Friday he announced that states could begin applying for the waivers.

I have to say that I do not have the principled objection to this executive action that others in the education community do. If Congress didn’t want these waivers to be given, they could have left the waiver power out of the 2002 legislation. If Congress wanted to set the terms under which the law would be revised, they have had almost five years to do so. It’s the role of the executive branch to figure out the best way to implement the laws passed by Congress, and that often requires the executive branch to determine certain rules, regulations, and requirements. If we as voters don’t like the way that a president uses that power, it’s our job to vote him (or someday her) out of office.

But while I think that the Obama Administration is right to take some action on the question of NCLB requirements, I am leery of the specific requirements that it is setting for states to get the waivers. I do not know what details are being given to education officials, and all that I have to go by are the president’s speech on Friday and the fact sheet issued by the White House. They emphasize that in order to get the waivers, states must show that they are developing “college and career ready standards and assessments,” systems of “differentiated recognition, accountability and support” and new methods of “evaluating and supporting teacher and principal effectiveness.” In that sea of buzzwords, there’s a lot of potential for bad ideas.

I have been crabby about the ways that education standards and objectives are phrased for a long time, but rather than get into detail, let’s jut note that “citizenship-ready” isn’t in there anywhere. You can get a degree or work at a job without having the skills and the understanding to be a good citizen. But too often we don’t write our standards in ways that point to what we need to build our communities.

The recognition, accountability and support measures are incredibly vague, but I assume that the districts and states that are going to have to write these policies know what the administration has in mind. From the fact sheet, it looks like the system is supposed to take students’ income level into account somehow, which could be a good thing depending on how it’s implemented.

And then we get to evaluating teacher effectiveness. The headline controversy there, as it should be, is going to be on the use of standardized test scores to determine who the good teachers are. Based on what the Obama Administration has done with the Race to the Top program, I am not hugely optimistic on that score. I also worry about whether we have enough consensus on the definition of “good teaching” to make such evaluations possible. In my more optimistic moments, I think that good teaching is something that can be recognized by people who take the time to observe a teacher and group of students over a sustained period of time, And then my pessimism wonders how we are going to find the time to do that when so many schools are stretched to their limits because of budget cuts and other factors.

The devil is in the details, and we don’t have many of those yet. I fear that we are at the beginning of another well-intentioned misstep in education policy, but I dearly hope that I am wrong.

Trying to figure out the best way to give feedback to students after their first shot at an assignment. We go over and talk about subjects in class, but I know that can be tough to absorb. I could write comments on everyone’s work, but I’m not sure how much I can fit in the margins and how many times I can write similar comments before my own brain explodes. I’m trying to put together a study guide that’s basically answers to all of the exercises so that students can compare their answers to mine. I’ll post the guide on my class wikispaces and Google Docs collection. It requires the students to take some initiative, but they can go through the material at their pace, and then come back to me with questions if they’re interested. I’m going to use this tool when I have the time to make the guides, so we’ll see how it works.