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

The Cheerleader Coach

This post answers one of the questions from the book How Would You Handle It?: Questions For Teachers to Ask Themselves by Aaron S. Podolner.  The book promotes increasing the self-awareness of teachers by answering tough questions in order to improve their educational practice.  

  

Are you meant to be a teacher?  Why do you think that you are?

The first time I taught was as a volleyball coach.  Much of who I am today as a teacher in the classroom is because of the coach that I became early on.  In my first couple of years, a lot of people would make references to me as a “cheerleader” or define my style as  “cheerleaderish.”  This comparison always bugged me.  I have nothing against cheerleaders but my definition of coaching was so much more than this simple generalization.  A coach is a role model, an advisor, a mentor, and a strategist.  A coach is a leader with the goal of transforming a group of individuals into a fully functioning and high performing team.  A coach is a key part of my identity.  It is an honorable title, yet here I was in my first couple of years compared with a group of screaming girls on the sidelines of a high school football game.  Cheerleaders don't even watch the game but rather focus their attention on the crowd.  People did not mean the comparison maliciously but were simply remarking upon a clear observation.  Who could blame them?  There were many comparisons to be made.  However, I wanted to be so much more than that and mentally rejected any sort of association with such a thing as a cheerleader.  

I’ve grown immensely since my first year as a coach.  Over time I came to acknowledge the fact that I was a cheerleader-coach early on and I still am today.  In many ways, I always knew this but it took time for me to be comfortable enough in my own skin to admit to it.  When my team finds success, I am celebrating in a stream of pure joy and unadulterated enthusiasm.  Early on, when my team would be doing well, I’d be jumping up and down and encouraging them from the sideline.  When we struggled, I would work hard to corral them or search for some way to motivate them.  I was intense.  I was full of energy.  At best, I possessed an above average understanding of the game and let my personality do the rest.  I am still all of those of those things today but with a good degree more experience to go along with it.  

The bedrock of that personality is my positive attitude.  Early on, I knew that this was my greatest strength.  It is the characteristic that not only do I think defines me most clearly but is also the one I work the hardest to protect as well as to improve.  Those that study personality psychology debate over whether people are who they are because that is the way they were born or because they chose to be a certain way.  My guess is that it is a little bit of both.  I have a positive self image when it comes to my own optimistic attitude of which I’m not exactly sure when or how it started.  In addition, I make a conscious effort to choose that perspective in almost every situation I encounter.  

 

Though I didn’t appreciate the association with cheerleaders, I did enjoy much of the other praise I received.  People would come up to me at tournaments, people that I had never met and who supported other clubs, to say how much they enjoyed watching me coach.  They appreciated my passion for the game and how I worked with young people.  I would pass these complements off modestly but I’d be lying if they didn’t make me feel some sense of success on the sidelines.  My teams, while not the most successful or the most impressive in terms of wins, always played hard and seemed to enjoy themselves.  It’s hard to say whether this was luck or because of something that I was doing.  I suspect a little bit of both.  

As I grew older though and gained experience, I calmed down on the sideline.  This was as much a purposeful change as a natural progression.  I attribute this calm to a few things.  First, I began to gain more knowledge about the game of volleyball, coaching and most importantly decision making.  It became clear to me that in order for me to start making better decisions on the court, my emotions would need to be controlled to some degree during the game.  Through observing some of the great coaches of sports, calmness under pressure seems to be a characteristic of so many of the best: Phill Jackson, Anson Dorance, Russ Rose and John Wooden.  All of these men stayed calm, communicated clearly with their teams and possessed the clarity of mind to make important decisions during moments of intensity.  This truth was supplemented by all of the reading I’ve done on coaching, leadership and psychology.  Popular psychology author’s such as Malcolm Gladwell and Jonah Lehrer write extensively about all of the research that shows human decision making ability decreases when the body is over-stressed.  There reaches a point in which the body begins to shut down sensory systems and neural pathways when stress becomes too high.  I doubt I’ve ever gotten that worked up on the sidelines but it became clear that if I was going to analyze the game on a higher level, I needed to relax.

This calm also came out of the roles that I played early on.  As an assistant coach, I was forced to take a back seat during matches.  It is actually illegal in Illinois high school volleyball for more than two coaches to stand at the same time. My role during matches was to analyze the serve receive offense of our opponents and anything else about them that could be used to our advantage from in-match observations.  I took notes on each play, charted attack routes and as we progressed through the game was able to make predictions based on the small sample size of information received in a short amount of time.  One reason why I was able to do this was the simple fact that I was sitting down.  I sat down and I watched the other side closely.  Though I did get emotional at times when the game was exciting or close, I was always able to refocus on the opponent and make better judgements than I ever felt I could make.  Assistant coaching helped to relax me as a head coach.  It was a combination of the experience gained, the knowledge learned and the realization that I could influence the game in a very positive way without jumping up and down on the sideline.  One can only sustain that type of energy for a limited time.

Finally, I began to take stats using my iPad from the sideline.  With such an expensive piece of technology in my hands(usually just one) during matches, I could not get as excited as I previously did.  I’m heading into my third season with the same iPad I started with and much of this is because of the fact that I was able to stay cool under pressure and keep both hands safely on the device.   

What became clear was that being a cheerleader coach is in some ways what all good coaches are to a certain extent(though in vastly different ways).  Cheerleaders are the ones that have the organization to get people to do what they do better and with more intensity.  They can motivate the team to play harder or the crowd to root louder in order to accomplish a goal embraced by everyone.  They are always there for a team, encouraging them even in the face of utter defeat and they never lose hope that there is some way that we can turn it around.  Do cheerleaders make tough decisions and provide strategy for the team?  No, of course they don’t.  Yet, I genuinely believe that the most crucial attribute for a coach is that they care about the success of those they are coaching and that is exactly what a cheerleader provides.

My greatest strength as a coach and a teacher, the reason why I was meant to be a teacher, is my ability to encourage and stay positive even in the face of defeat.  Great coaches and teachers have the ability to help their students grow.  They help them to gain skills in their subject but more often than not they help them to grow as individuals.  Growing and learning is tough business.  It causes people to give up what they love and to doubt themselves.  I wouldn’t trade my ability to motivate, to connect, to make kids want to work harder, to see the value in struggling to improve for all of the strategy and decision making in the world.  

My goal is always to grow as a teacher and coach in order to develop all of the aspects that are involved in such a role including my understanding of the game and by ability to make thoughtful decisions based on those understandings.  I must continually remind myself that I am still very young and inexperienced.  It’s hard to say whether I was born with a positive attitude or if the summation of my experiences brought me to this point.  At this point, does it really matter?  What I do know is that I’ve used this outlook to shape every interaction and decision that I’ve made from the beginning.  It shapes the way that I interact with kids, design practice/lessons and carry myself as a coach, as a teacher and as a leader.  The decision making will come as I gain more experience and confidence in myself.  Learning to control my emotions as a coach has helped me greatly in classroom.  Patience is a virtue of mine that is tested every day at school and something I am continuing to develop.  Ultimately, I was meant to be a teacher because I believe that people have the innate ability to grow in anything that they put their mind to.  It provides me incredible happiness to not only watch the process happen but to be a part of such a transformational experience.