The Test and Educational Ridiculousness

I'm posting this video today in honor of the failed dress rehearsal that happened in my school today during 4th period. By dress rehearsal, I mean a twenty minute interval during 4th period in which every seventh grader in the school signed onto our PARCC Navigation system at the same time to see if our internet could handle over 200 students all connecting at once.  It worked for about a third of the students, but most could not connect.  The only thing that my students learned in my class today is that this test is going to create a lot of chaos.    

We are two weeks away from the real PARCC assessment and it is taking away instructional time for students and collaboration time for teachers.  Administrators instruct us in all things Test, but it is obvious that even they don't like it.  What Joshua Katz in his TED Talk "The Toxic Culture of Education" describes is absolutely true.  Our school is focusing on a standardized test that is setting our students up for failure.  PARCC is creating a toxic culture within our walls and it is a force far beyond the control of everyone.  The Test is unfair and a waste of time.  My school in particular might not even have the resources to allow every student to take this test at the same time.  Teachers expect nothing less than a chaotic week of technical difficulties and stress permeating throughout the building.

Let's take deep breaths together.  None of this will matter in a year or two.  We'll be onto the next best thing in educational ridiculousness.    

The Evanston Mindset

A few years ago, when my alma mater Evanston Township High School decided to reconsider it’s curriculum tracking in a whole new way, a neighbor that was very familiar with local school politics and policy told me, “If this works, Dr. Witherspoon and Evanston are going to be nationally known.”  That prediction is baring fruit as the only public high school in Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago is the subject of a feature article in the National Journal, a magazine that reports on politics and cultural trends around the country.  The story explored Evanston Township’s push to expand Advanced Placement(AP) programs to as many students as possible specifically the embarrassingly underrepresented minority populations.  The Journal cited the most recent numbers from 2014 in which over 88 percent of white students at Evanston graduated after taking at least one AP class while that same number is 44 percent for African-American students.  Such a gap is still way too far for any school that is serious about equality, but there is a change underway at Evanston that seems to be setting the school up for long term success. 

What impresses me most about Evanston Township is its change in mindset led by the school district’s superintendent, Dr. Eric Witherspoon.  His attitude that “you aren’t born smart.  You get smarter,” is spreading throughout every corner of the school.  It’s an attitude that is closely associated with the work of Dr. Carol Dweck and her Growth Mindset.  Dweck’s Growth Mindset embraces the scientifically supported notion that every person possess within them the ability to improve every aspect of who they are including their intelligence, personality, and all other skills.  Evanston even brought Dr. Dweck to come and speak with the staff as part of it’s extensive professional development.  The renown developmental psychologist does not claim that everyone is equal or that every person has the ability to reach the same intellectual plateau, but  growth is innate within everyone.  Her work shows that it is more valuable to praise effort to make you intelligent then the intelligence itself.  From a teacher’s perspective, nothing could be more important for fostering young people into life long learners.     

This mindset is more significant than the AP push itself.  It touches on every aspect of the school’s culture and everyday life.  If you have a message like that coming leaders at top, buy in is much greater for the staff and community alike.  It challenges the notion that we should determine, as Evanston did while I was in school, what a child is capable of when they are at the elementary or middle level of secondary education.  Growth happens at different rates and in different ways for everyone, and school should be a place that is ready to support students whenever and wherever it takes place.  Students should be allowed every opportunity to achieve the highest level of course work possible, which means that schools should not make such life altering decisions about curriculum tracking at such a young age with no opportunity for change in the future.      

One effort by school officials to increase the number of students taking AP classes is the elimination of honors and standard freshmen English classes and the creation of a mixed-honors class for all freshmen.  By mandating that all students participate in the same English classes in which honors credit is available and must be earned in their first year, Evanston acknowledges the fact that schools need to give students opportunity as well as flexibility.  Within the old system, if a student was placed into a regular class as a freshmen, the likelihood of moving up to honors or AP level classes was painfully low.  Witherspoon understands that it is the culture as well as the structure of the school, not the students, that need to be changed the most.

As an outsider without much access to Evanston Township, I wonder how this mindset has impacted non-honors or AP classes within the school.  Even with this movement to expand AP programs and opportunities, there are still many students taking courses of lower rigor.  What are the cultures within those classes?  Are they being pushed towards higher level work?  Are students given the opportunity to move to higher level classes if they choose to put in the effort to do so? What are the expectations of teachers for students in those classes?  What are the expectations of the students for themselves?  

As a 7th grade writing teacher, I do not teach any honors or standard writing classes.  All of my classes are “mixed” in the sense that I teach students within the same class that take honors reading and math along with those that do not take any honors classes.  When asked about the label of my classes, I tell students that “All of my classes are honors level classes.”  This is the attitude in which I approach my preparation and this is a big part of the expectations that I communicate with students. 

Each day, a wide range of abilities come through my classroom.  Sometimes, a lot of the times, it is overwhelming for me.  How can I push students to improve who both are struggling to understand a certain concept and at the same time are five steps ahead?  What do you do if one of your students has independently finished a writing project and another student hasn’t written a word and won’t be able to without some serious one on one attention?  These are the types of situations that scare teachers as well as community members into thinking that the quality of the classroom experience decreases with such a wide range of skills.  

I don’t claim to have all of the answers.  I’m still in search of practical ways to reach all students.  I do know that it takes a detailed focus on understanding what your students already know and what they need to know in order to take their skills to the next level wherever that might be.  It takes organization, planning and vision.  It takes collaboration with a focus on student work.  It takes a classroom environment that allows students to all be working on different things or different ideas at the same time.  Most important, it takes a core belief that students are not born smart; rather they grow smarter.  

This is what Evanston Township is trying to do.  I expect that it will continue to draw support as well as criticisms from a wide range of stakeholders.  For me, Evanston is exactly the type of school that I want to work for.  If a school doesn’t believe that change is possible and that all students can learn, what do they believe?  Moving forward, I hope that Evanston will empirically prove that this approach works for all students.  In order to get buy in, they’ll have to show that it helps both students that are taking AP classes that never would have taken such courses as well as students that would have taken them regardless.  They will need to show that they have raised expectations for all students and not just those students on the margins.  They will need to show that the graduation rate increases, the number of students that receive AP credit by passing tests increases, and the number of students that do well on standardized tests such as the ACT increases.  

Good luck Evanston.  You’re in for a wild ride.  Maybe, I’ll join the excitement some day

Tyrannical Substitutes...Not Such a Bad Idea

Advice to teachers: one way to remind your students that you really are a great teacher and not the most horrible person in the world is to take day off.  When you schedule your replacement, make sure the worst possible substitute teacher presides over your classroom.  After only one day of a tyrannical, oppressive adult leading the classroom, they will surely be counting the minutes until you return to the classroom.  They will greet you upon your return with smiling faces and thanks to the heavens that you have returned.  You will be their savior because the only thing worse than a teacher they can’t stand is an incompetent substitute.  It will feel great especially if you teach multiple classes and you get multiple cheers of excitement throughout the day.  Sometimes a little reminder that you are not the worst person in the world, that you actually care about their well being and that some of the things that you do actually are for their own benefit is all they need to reestablish their love for you.  And let me promise you, a little appreciation at school from time to time is all you need to keep your energy and positive attitude alive for days to come.  So if you really care about your classroom, create a little chaos on purpose and reap the benefits for for foreseeable future or at least until you have your next explosion. 

Thoughts on Hope

I was struck by a passage in a novel by Dave Eggers called What is the What.  The main character in the book Valentino Achak Deng, a “Lost Boy” living in refuge in the United States after experiencing unthinkable hardship during the Sudanese Civil War, is telling of losing an important person in his life on his way from war plagued south Sudan to Ethiopia.  Recalling his pain after losing the one person that supported him the most, Deng(What is the What is a fictional autobiography based very closely on the life of Deng) says:

I was so tired at that moment, so bone tired that I felt that I could fall asleep as he did, sleep until my body went cold.  But then I thought of my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters, and found myself invoking [his] own mythic visions of Ethiopia.  The world was terrible but perhaps I would see them again.  It was enough to bring me to my feet again.  I stood and chose to continue walking, to walk until I could not walk(Eggers 218).  

As soon as these words crossed my eyes, I thought of another book I’d read about how man experiences the worst of human evil called Man’s Search for Meaning.  In his psychological portrait of an average prisoner of war, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl describes what happens as a result of the loss of hope when enduring struggle and suffering: 

The death rate in the week between Christmas, 1944, and New Year’s, 1945, increased in camp beyond all previous experience. In his opinion, the explanation for this increase did not lie in the harder working conditions or the deterioration of our food supplies or a change of wealth or new epidemics. It was simply that the majority of the prisoners had lived in the naive hope that they would be home again by Christmas. As the time drew near and there was no encouraging news, the prisoners lost courage and disappointment overcame them. This had a dangerous influence on their powers of resistance and a great number of them died(Frankl 76).

These two books, describing different versions of the same story of the human potential for both absolute evil and goodness, capture the crucial nature hope plays when overcoming all manner of adversity.  For they show that hope, though not some sort of magical shield, is an essential ingredients for moving forward in life.  Both groups, the people of Sudan during the later part of the 20th century and those that endured Holocaust, lived through pure evil.  However, Eggers and Dr. Frankl show that those that are willing to keep moving forward with life have a greater chance to fight off all of the forces that stack against them.

My life has known no evil or suffering of the magnitude that these writers describe.  Yet, I am growing more aware of the magnitude of human failures such as injustice, inequality, racism, greed, disease, war and hatred plentiful on every corner of the Earth.  Even my own life, though comfortable by any reasonable measure, is full of challenges and obstacles every step of the way.  So it is with hope that I choose to face each misfortunate or difficulty.  Hope that life will improve, problems will be solved and that people will be good to each other.

I feel compelled to end this post with one more quote from Dr. Frankl that has become a credence in my own life; reminding me on a daily basis that I have the power to choose hope and goodness:  

We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way(Frankl 65-66).       

The Forgiving Teacher

Here I am, trying to be a writer.  In my feeble attempts to keep this unread blog alive, I offer some thoughts on forgiveness and teaching.

It’s almost 4pm on the last day of school before Winter Vacation.  I’m sitting alone in my classroom, almost two hours after all of the students paraded out of the building in celebration of a two week break from school.  They know that this respite will only last for a brief moment in time but the possibilities of endless freedom excite their little hearts to no end.  

Only in the presence of peace and silence of deserted hallways can one truly understand the beautifully chaotic reality of school.  So much happens throughout the day both very much within the sphere of influence of my fellow teachers and I and as well as an overwhelming amount that is not.   At this moment, now that all of the students and most of the teachers have left the building, I am thinking about forgiveness.   

The very nature of teaching requires the ability to forgive.  Forgiveness is a choice, conscious or not, that every teacher must make for themselves on a moment by moment basis.  I have experienced such frustration that forgiveness seemed impossible.  Error is, understandably, constant within the walls of a school.  Kids, just like the rest of humanity, make mistakes.  This is how we slowly discover how the world works.  In the same way that young people possess the ability to surprise and amaze, they just as easily do stupid, irrational, unexplainable things.  Often, these actions are described as disrespectful, rude, ridiculous, or approaching an evil that offers no hope for the future.  Some of these mistakes cause teachers to scratch their head with a kind of hopelessness that leaves them unmotivated and cynical about the youth.  Yet, it is because of this content error that teachers must forgive.     

To forgive someone is to understand why he or she acted in the particular manner that harmed the individual, another student or the entire community in the first place.  True forgiveness is to trust that the intent of the wrongdoer was not malicious or, if it was, then they have learned why the act was wrong in the first place.  It is the responsibility of teachers to show students a way of moral rightness; a compass that always points towards goodness towards others; and behavior that promotes the learning for both themselves and their peers.  We must always remember their youth and they likely don’t know the appropriate way to do things especially within a classroom environment.  My mentor, Sarah Durst, shares with me regularly that as a teacher, I have to teach those within my class everything that I want them to be able to do within my space regardless of how trivial it may be.  Though she refers to the daily procedures and routines of classroom, in a very real sense, she might as well be talking about acting within our community and the world at large.  Gentle reminders such as “You shouldn’t run into this classroom, it is safer and more appropriate to walk calmly and with a purpose,” might go a long way to reducing car accidents in the future or at the very least will give me less of a headache at the beginning of every class period.   

When teachers work to understand why their students act the way they do instead of growing angry with them, it makes true forgiveness possible.  For students come with a backpack of experiences so large that it sways their every move.  Some were shown how to do things the right way and others did not have the same guidance.  No matter a student's previous path, it is the responsibility of teachers to work to help them improve, whatever that might mean for the individual.  This holistic approach to human growth is the beauty of being a teacher and it is something that testing companies have yet to be able to accurately measure.          

 

There is nothing easy about forgiveness and understanding.  When experienced teachers advised me to spend as much time as possible “developing relationships” and “establishing mutual trust,” that sounded easy enough when said aloud but incredibly difficult as well as time consuming in practice.  However, knowing who your students are is the first step to forgiving their digressions. We must be responsible for knowing them first and then showing them the right way second.

Ultimately, teachers have little choice if they want to be successful and happy within their chosen career.  Those misfits and management nightmares are coming back to our classroom whether we like it or not.  We can choose to accept them for being imperfect beings with the potential for unimaginable growth or we can write them off forever.  In my second year of teaching, I am not so naive to think that every student can be saved or helped.  Some may be so far along a path of destruction that their eventual demise is only a matter of time.  It is important though that it is not teachers that make this decision.  We are not the judges of who should be given the best education available and who should not.  The forgiving teacher gives every student a chance to succeed regardless of how badly they have erred in the past for they understand that the future is unknowable.

     

A student of mine decided one afternoon that the best action to take when she was upset was to clearly communicate a melody of colorful and vindictive language not often found in school settings.  This in front of an entire class of silent young writers.  She spoke with vigour about how she “didn’t care about [me] or anyone in this school” and she certainly didn’t care what we said or thought.  As she yelled, she stormed out of the classroom with an anger that spoke louder than her words.  

And then when she returned to school, she eventually made her way to my class.  Though I cannot control whether she or students like her came back or not, I possess control over my attitude on how I am going to treat this student as all teachers do.  I welcomed her back into my space after she acted in a way that was completely against every aspect of common decency essential to the safe and supportive classroom environment that I work so hard to create on a daily basis.  

There was no “thank you.”  She showed no obvious appreciation.  Yet, here she was, back in class and I forgave her. 

--AN

Writing Club

Writing Club...writing club…Writing Club….

“Man go fuck your room Mr. Newman.” that is the sound of a once improving but now backtracking relationship. I’m not going to write this kid up.  He gets written up too much and it doesn’t do anything.  Consider this my documentation.    

“I fail at everything Mr. Newman.” That is the sound of a young person with no hope in himself.  

“Is that your version of not giving up Mr. Newman?” That is the sound of a student correctly calling me out on my bullshit.  

“Sit down!” That is the sound of me yelling at a kid who was getting a tissue out of a tissue box.

“...........” That’s the sound of me trying to gain my cool back.  Breathe in, breathe out.  In the through the nose, out through the mouth.”  

“Meeting got cancelled, the parent couldn’t make it in.”  That is the sound of putting off a gathering of a village that might have helped a student succeed.  Maybe not.  

“Sign here please and don’t forget to take your pencils.”  That is the sound of standardized testing.  

“Close those chromebooks while I’m up here talking.”  That is the sound of desperate classroom management.

“This isn’t important for us to know at all.”  This is the sound of a failed delivery of an actually crucial concept or a student that just doesn’t give a shit.  It’s hard to say which is worse.

“Every year, there are only so many students that you can help.”  That is the sound of sage truth.  

“You’re making a difference in that kids life.”  That is the sound of support, friendship, happiness.”  

“That was a great moment for me.”  This is the sound of a retiring teacher realizing the future.  

“How do I get on the soccer team?”  That is the sound of a student that maybe isn’t a lost soul like his grandma said but a soul searching for some meaning.  

Growth Seminar

On a recent post, I attached a link to a video entitled Understanding Talent.  The video is a short animation that describes how people develop talent in a variety of things.  It focused specifically on athletics.  However, the message should be applied to any and all skills that a person wants to develop.  The science shows that talent is something that is developed through hard work and is in no way intrinsic to certain individuals.  Nobody is born to play basketball.  There is no gene for basketball talent.  Those that make it to the top of the basketball world were able to hone their skills through hard work and not some magical stroke of luck that gave them that talent.  

Earlier today, I listened to an episode of This American Life, a WBEZ radio magazine style show hosted by Ira Glass, that focused on a book by Paul Tough called How Children Succeed: Grit, Personality and the Hidden Power of Character.  The theme of the episode entitled Back to School examined the age old question about what students should and should not be learning in school.  Through a series of stories and interviews directly with Tough, one theme was that schools are not focusing enough on teaching students the “noncognitive skills” also known as social skills that truly help people succeed throughout life.

At the beginning of the episode, Glass features a long term study by Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckmen which compared those that simply that dropped out of high school and those that completed high school in the traditional four year manner.  He found that those individuals that achieved high school credit through the GED were not nearly as successful in a variety of ways throughout life including job performance, money earned, college success and quality of marriage when compared with those went through the much longer route of four years of high school.  Heckmen discusses that the GED is established to show that a person who passes this test possesses the same amount of cognitive ability(traditional school skills) that everyone must have to pass high school.  He concludes that the reason for this difference in so many life outcomes is while in school for the thousands of hours over four years required to graduate from high school, students develop a wide variety of other skills that contribute to success throughout their entire life.  These are the qualities that are truly important for someone to learn in high school and not the math or reading skills that we often think are the heart of a child’s education.

After this moment in the show, I was both relieved and troubled.  I was relieved because it gave me a sense of satisfaction that school is in some way important in a person’s life, even if it has little to do with the cognitive skills that they learn.  There was a moment when I thought that Glass was going to reveal that in fact those that took the much less demanding, in terms of hours, GED would do just as well throughout life.  As a teacher, I dedicate my life to the success of children and knowing that there is clear value for students to be in school makes me want to work harder.  However, what troubled me was the fact that nowhere in the curriculum of my school district and I’m guess most others is there a focus on the social skills such as grit, self-control or optimism that are clearly crucial for a person’s ability to succeed both in school but throughout his or her entire life.

When students enter high school in my district, they take a class called “Freshmen Seminar.”  Though I must admit I’ve never seen a syllabus, I’m guessing that it focuses a lot on how incoming freshmen can achieve and gives strategies to reach graduation in four years.  One idea that I know that they talk about is the Growth Mindset.  Students learn what a Growth Mindset is and why it is so important.  They are shown that with grit and determination, they can learn almost anything that they put their mind to.  

My question as a middle school teacher is why are we waiting so long to send this message and what can we do at the younger levels to promote similar ideas?  We spend so much time focusing on traditional curriculums such as Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. At what point are noncognitive abilities developed for all of our students?  There is AVID, a program for students that help them to develop the academic skills necessary to go to college, but this is not something that is offered to all students.  The noncognitive skills, Paul Tough pointed out based on his analysis of current research, are the skills that people have the most potential to improve throughout their life times.  

When listening to the This American Life episode, I found myself thinking about so many of my students that struggle to control themselves, have behavior and emotional problems and cannot find success in the classroom.  Glass interviewed researchers that discussed what early childhood stress does to a person’s capacity to learn and how that impacts their actions within a traditional classroom setting.  Without knowing the details, I am sure that one too many of my students experience the type of hardship every day that would cause their brains to be unable develop naturally.  As a school system, we must do more for all of our students to learn how to learn and how to develop the personality traits that help to overcome those hardships.  What I am advocating for is more of a focus at the younger levels of a child’s education in developing social skills that will be invaluable throughout a lifetime.  Research shows that if a person understands how skill develops and that talent is in no way natural that he or she is more likely to give greater effort because they believe that those skills are indeed possible for them to learn and not some luck of the draw talent distributed at birth.  What if every 6th grader took a Growth Seminar when entering middle school?  This would be more than just a two week introduction but a class that they went to every single day.   What if instead of reading and math intervention classes established to improve scores on standardized tests, we helped students with developing the essential social skills Tough and so many others in the educational research community advocate?

Change is happening in the educational world but like all change, it is slow.  First it takes academics to share their research, followed by policy change and then finally it makes its way to down to the school districts and the schools.  The road is long and is filled with thorny obstacles much of which unfortunately comes in the form of dollars and private interests.  However, sharing this kind of information at the grassroots level is an important part of change.  Those in positions of power within school districts must begin to see the value in helping our students develop as complete human beings and not simply focus on one aspect of their development. Once they do, our curriculums will begin to reflect the type of complete education that will help young people in every aspect of their lives and not just on challenges that require academic knowledge.  Consider this post part of that grassroots change.  Now I just need to gain an audience.