Adventures in a Traditional High School

Since my last post, I moved across the country and began work at a traditional comprehensive high school. What I've observed so far may not be a revelation to anyone but me, as I've never worked in a traditional school setting. However, I'm quite literally in shock about how many aspects of this environment just don't make sense. I'll try to describe them here in a way that reflects their absurdity:

• During each 45 minute period, teenagers and adults are expected to engage fully in absorbing information and/or participating in activities that have no connection (explicit or otherwise) to either the 45 minutes that came before it or those that would follow it.
• The chunks of the day are meted out by loud ringing noises, whose volume is intended, one must assume, to cut off any train of thought they might be interrupting.
• Students' behavioral patterns are regulated in innumerable ways, so that they must adhere to appropriate use of speech, restrooms, physical space, movement from place to place, and exercise. Similar behavioral patterns are imposed on inmates in prison.
  
• The vast majority of students' intellectual (and sometimes physical) output has no practical function; its sole purpose is to demonstrate a set of knowledge or skills (as determined by the teacher, often without adequate justification provided to students), after which it is usually discarded.

This is only the beginning of what could be a much longer list. It's been said before that education is the least changed public institution of the last 150 years. It was designed for the needs of industry, at a time when schools were expected to produce factory workers and tradespeople; now, in a country where the vast majority of workers produce no physical objects and do most of their thinking about abstract concepts, our schools are woefully ill equipped to educate most people for their expected futures.

Sir Ken Robinson argues the point masterfully in his TED lecture about the need for schools to teach creativity. He says that, in today's world, creativity is just as essential as literacy, and it should be given the same gravity in schools. You wouldn't believe the number of blank stares I get when I ask my students the last time their teachers asked them to be creative. The implied message (and sometimes even the stated one) seems to be that, in the confines of a traditional school - with all the trappings presented by the bulleted list above - schools aren't equipped to encourage creativity; students will just have to wait for college to get that.

Coalition of Essential Schools: Boston School Study Tour

This week I attended the Coalition of Essential Schools' (CES) Boston School Study Tour. Every time I visit another of the CES schools, I'm reminded how powerful a learning experience it can be to encounter new contexts and new approaches to schooling.

On this trip, I visited the Boston Arts Academy (BAA), a public pilot school that emphasizes the arts through direct arts instruction as well as integration of the arts into traditionally academic subject areas. I also visited The MET in Providence, RI, a publicly-funded "district" of small schools that emphasizes extremely personalized instruction and uses internships as the focal point of the students' curricula.

Both of these schools gave me things to think about; I think I was most impacted, though, by the MET. It is a truly alternative model of schooling that resonates with a lot of the values I've held for a long time but haven't known how to articulate. To give you an idea of the impact it had on me, here are some notes I took during the visit:

"I’m thinking about how to break down walls. Being in a classroom every day is too safe, I get too comfortable, and the tendency to revert back to the ‘default’ is too great. Kids feel it also—people like Andy should be rock stars, but they’re barely passing. The dangers of traditional schooling seep into those kids too.

We need to leave school more. Kids need to have more choices. I need to be willing to have less control. I need to be more transparent and more of a whole person, and I need to encourage students to be that too.

How can I bring these ideas back to HTH? How can other teachers get a sense of this without having seen the alternatives for themselves (that is, true alternatives, not just new names for the same things)? When we always get positive reinforcement from visitors and guests, it’s hard to see through another lens. Even here, amongst the most progressive educators, the questions being asked sound something like, 'But when do they learn math??' so it’s hard to imagine stretching so far outside the box when people are coming from that frame of reference."

Action Research Project

For my masters thesis, I have chosen to do an action research project involving my classroom practice, using my own students as participants in the study. I have only begun to formulate the theoretical framework for the project at this point, but I will begin the field research and data collection in the Fall of this year. As an introduction to my research proposal, here is an excerpt from my work so far:

As identity and self-perception are key elements in the development of high school students, one subject often plays a large role in students' understanding of themselves: race. At High Tech High, a school with an increasingly more diverse student body, educators need to understand how this complex issue affects the students' understandings of not only themselves but of their peers and the school community around them. As a teacher of tenth grade humanities, the topics of race and ethnicity arise frequently in the work I do: in our studies of modern world history, my students and I often address issues such as genocide and ethnic cleansing, slavery, socioeconomic trends and their correlation to race, and other sensitive issues. Similarly, in our studies of English language arts, my students and I address issues of identity and self-perception through creative writing and Socratic seminars. Not only do these issues play an important role in my work in the classroom, they also affect the school as a whole by their influence on the development of students' sense of safety and community. Because issues of race and ethnicity are so crucial to my work as an educator in a diverse learning community, I will research the question, “How do students talk about race and ethnicity?” I chose to emphasize talk because it is more easily identifiable than how students think or feel, yet it gives insight into both. In addition, it also addresses a component of the work I do as a humanities teacher: verbal expression. The answer to this question will help me understand how to support the development of students' identities, and also how to create a more inclusive, safe space for discussion of this often touchy topic.

To read up on the rest of this project, as well as related artifacts from my work as a teacher and a learner, visit my digital portfolio: http://teachers.oregon.k12.wi.us/pforsich/gradwork/

Paulo Friere's "Cultural Action For Freedom"

In Paulo Friere's "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom" (1970) he suggests the idea that illiteracy is a form of cultural oppression (a rather risky assertion in 1970's Brazil). To me, this makes perfect sense, since adult literacy rates (and all forms of education, for that matter) almost always follow class lines. It's interesting, too, to read his examples taken from the state-sanctioned reading programs of Third World countries, which sound like not-so-subtle indoctrination more than anything else: "Peter is smiling. He is a happy man. He already has a good job. Everyone ought to follow his example." Some of it sounded frighteningly similar to Orwellian "double-speak."

I also found it interesting how very Marxist his perspective is. To think of educating the workers of the world as akin to empowering them is pretty much directly from the Communist Manifesto. The quotes from the workers about how they feel like they have something to say now that they can read and write were pretty telling; it’s no wonder Friere’s programs were not popular with the “powers that be” in Latin America. As soon as the weapon (a.k.a. the language) that is used against the poor is taken up by them in defense, the oppressors lose much of their power over the oppressed.

I had a serious “a-ha” moment when I got his notion that “marginalization” is not the right metaphor for the disempowered members of a society, since they are necessarily within that society in order to be oppressed by it. Therefore, empowerment is not about bringing them back from the margins, but rather about teaching them the mechanisms that hold them down (or the rules of the “culture of power,” as Delpit puts it).

I had never thought about literacy as a weapon of power before, but it makes a lot of sense to me now. Even in the First World, most of these issues ring alarmingly true.

References:
Friere, P. (1998). The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom. Harvard Educational Review, 68(4), 480-498.

What is differentiation?

After attending a class on "differentiation and inclusive classrooms" this past Wednesday, I was left still struggling with a question that one might think would have been answered by the class itself: What really is differentiation? That question is really a big way of asking a lot of other, more specific questions that I have swimming in my head: what does differentiation look like, how can I do more of it, am I already doing it in ways I'm not conscious of, is differentiation about the teacher or the learner (or both!), what factors inhibit effective differentiation, and so on and so on.

One thing that I took away from the class was the idea that behavior is a factor in differentiation. I think I understand that to mean that, for example, student-teacher interactions should be unique to each student - which, of course, they are inherently - and that our cognizance of how those interactions affect students (academically, socially, psychologically) is crucial to making the most of our relationships with them. This means knowing students well is part of differentiating our own behavior towards them and helping them direct their own behavior in productive, successful ways.

Does this seem accurate? I know I can point to examples in my own class of ways that I have used to motivate certain students that didn't work to motivate others, so is this differentiation? And I can recall the point when I started putting more pictures on my handouts because one of my failing students told me he remembers images better than words (he can still remember the names of painters and paintings we discussed two months ago, but he can never recall what year World War II ended). Is this differentiation, even though it's now a strategy I use with all students and not just him?

I'm really eager to get the answers to these questions. I don't know how to point to my own practice and say, "Yes, that is differentiation," or "This project/lesson/assignment needs to be better differentiated," so it's difficult to replicate what works well and/or revise what needs help.

The "Six A's" Strike Again

Recently, my partner Anne and I have been working on a project called (Art)ifacts - a study of modern art, through which students design and execute their own original paintings using painting materials that they produce with their knowledge of chemistry. I mentioned it earlier in my blog when discussing the planning stages and my consideration of the "Six A's" in that process (see The "Six A's" of Project-Based Learning). One thing I discussed in that post was that we were considering having students interview professionals in the field about the world of contemporary art-making. Well, we did it, and it was a big success.

We've had students interview professionals in the past, but under much more restrictive circumstances - video taping, making sure entire groups of students could be present, etc. - and so the authenticity of the experience was compromised to an extent by the conditions of the assignment. This time, the assignment was much less structured: to interview someone who makes a living doing something art-related (e.g. professional artists, museum curators, gallery owners, etc.), and then write a 1-2 page reflection about the experience. Students were not required to record the interview in anyway, and the range of possible interviewees was left as open as possible. The resulting reflections were striking:

• "The whole experience was really eye-opening..."
• "This was a very valuable experience; I never thought I would learn so much about art."
• "Talking to someone who actually does art as a living really teaches you more about art than just learning about it in school and taking tons of notes."
• "She went through my sketch book with me, giving me insight on a professional artist's view...It was very interesting to hear her ideas of my work."
• "This has been one of the best experiences that I have had."
• "I think getting out into the real world and familiarizing ourselves with adults and the bigger picture is kind of what our school is about. I'm glad I got to be a part of this, especially because it was so fun."
• "This whole thing was a really positive experience for me. I'd do it again in a second."
• "The most important thing that I realized during this interview is that you have to love what you do."
• "It really taught me a lot about the art world versus just learning about it through a lecture...But then again, that's what High Tech High is all about, taking a more hands-on approach."

It was great to read these comments, because it fortified my sense that what I'm doing with the kids is working. The funny thing is that this assignment was almost an afterthought - it got tacked onto the project after almost the whole planning process had been completed. As it turns out, it seems to have been one of the most significant experiences we've been able to provide our students this semester. It just goes to show that sometimes the most meaningful lessons are also the simplest.

Blogging as a Teaching Tool (Revisited)

In my last post about blogs in the classroom (January 27, 2008), I mentioned that one obstacle I've encountered in using blogs in the classroom is how to get our blogs to be something more than just a homework assignment. Writing in a way that is inviting to a broader audience (people outside of our class/school, non-students, etc.) has proven to be difficult to overcome, but I've slowly made headway toward getting students to do this more effectively.

First, I showed examples of posts from last year's students. Then I gave examples of "professional" bloggers' work. Then I showed my OWN blog. While each of these got us a little bit closer, I still had a number of students whose writing sounded a lot like "Today in Spencer's class I worked on my project." I didn't seem to be getting through to them that, if I didn't know them personally or know about their school work, I would have no idea who this Spencer guy is or what the heck their project is about. This kind of writing automatically precludes a readership outside that immediate context.

What finally worked best was just to let them start writing (seems obvious, but I didn't get it at first). After about a week of posts, I was able to pinpoint who understood our new objectives and who still struggled. Sharing the work of those who "got it" with the rest of the class was really exciting because I finally saw some light bulbs turning on in their heads. These trailblazing posts were the model around which the rest of us could shape our work.

Here are some examples of the students' blogs:

• "The truth is rarely pure and never simple"
• "Philip Guston: An Abstract Expressionist"
• "Did you know that pigments are toxic?"
• "Art - Industrial Revolution"
• "Let's Talk About Impressionism! Yay!"
• "Quizas??"