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

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.