The Role of PLAY in Learning

I just got back from a conference on the role of "play" in learning, hosted by the Progressive Education Network. While most of the attendees were K-5 educators, there were a handful of us who wanted to explore this topic in our work with grades 6-12. I'll start by admitting that I am not exactly the most "playful" adult, and so I knew going into this that I might need help bringing play into my classroom.

Beyond the minor tips and tricks that I acquired from attending, the real take-away message for me was the basic premise of the conference itself: play produces meaningful learning. The things we do when we "play" teach us a lot about life. Playing any game begins with a shared premise and mutually accepted "ground rules," which make it possible for us to feel safe, jump in, take risks, and commit to a common goal. Through simple games like four-square, children learn the roles of leaders and followers, participants and spectators. They learn values like fairness, teamwork, trust, humility.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Dr. Jill Steinberg, professor in the UW-Madison Department of Human Development and Family Studies. She talked a lot about the research that's been done on the cognitive and social-emotional affects of play. She said that "real" play has a lot of qualities that make it developmentally powerful. First, it actively engages the executive functions of the brain, such as abstract thought, planning, and rule acquisition. Second, it is safely chaotic, which increases children's tolerance for unpredictability in later life experiences. Third, it is voluntary and self-governed, which leads to a greater sense of self-efficacy.

I came away with a number of burning questions:

• How can I create a classroom environment at the high school level that implicitly and explicitly promotes play?
• How can I do a better job of communicating the value of play to my high school peers and superiors?
• How can this idea fit into a school culture where curriculum is pre-ordained and relatively static? How can I "make room" for it in the lesson plans?

I also came away with a number of resources I need to explore to understand some of this further. I'll list some of them here.

Brown, Stuart. Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Elkind, David. The Power of Play: How Spontaneous, Imaginative Activities Lead to Happier, Healthier Children. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007.

Leave No Child Inside: http://www.kidsoutside.info

Meier, Deborah, Brenda S. Engel, and Beth Taylor. Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground. New York: Teachers College Press, 2010.

National Institute for Play: http://www.nifplay.org

Singer, Dorothy. Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children's Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

New Publication!

I recently had an article published in Unboxed, the ed. journal of the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. It's called "Race and Ethnicity in an Integrated School," based on the action research project I did for my graduate thesis.

http://www.hightechhigh.org/unboxed/issue5/race_and_ethnicity/

There are some other great articles in the issue, too. My favorites are one about "Family Math" and another about students building autobots. Check it out!

Habits of Mind

As I continue to work my way through Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas, I'm particularly struck by one of the key organizing structures around which the intellectual work done at CPESS revolves: their "Habits of Mind."

From my work at High Tech High, I was already familiar with such ideas, but they were sort of an endangered species in the years when I worked there. Now that I'm seeing them described in Meier's book, I'm reminded how much they resonate with my own values about what defines work worth doing. The six habits that they emphasized at CPESS were:

Evidence: "How do we know what we know?"
Viewpoint: "Who's speaking?"
Connections: "What causes what?"
Supposition: "How might things have been different?"
Relevance: "Who cares?" "So what?"

Once upon a time, HTH had adopted this same set of habits (although they preferred the term "perspective" over "viewpoint"). I think they should bring them back.

I realize now, as I don't think I have done before, that I imply a lot of these habits in the work I do with my students, particularly the first three, although I rarely make explicit the manner in which these habits can be learned and cultivated. The fourth - supposition - is the one I practice least in my own life, and so is not surprisingly the one I promote least in my own classroom.

The fifth - relevance - is the one I think we as teachers do the worst job of addressing with our students. What I mean is that we too rarely have a good answer to the questions, "Why are we learning this?" or "When am I ever going to use this in my life?" Although the relevance of our curricular content is usually (hopefully) clear to us, it's not made clear to students. It's not surprising, then, when students have a hard time applying it to their own work.

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (50). Boston: Beacon Press.

Excerpt: The Power of Their Ideas

Lately I've been reading The Power of Their Ideas by Deborah Meier. One might point out here that my reading selection is about a decade behind a lot of thoughtful educators of a certain ilk, to which I would reply that I was also born at least a decade behind many of those educators. I'm still playing catch-up, so bear with me.

Most of this book resonates with my former work in a progressive school environment, and a lot of it flies in the face of my experience in a traditional comprehensive high school. Here is an excerpt that succinctly summarizes some of the key ideas this book presents:

1. Schools should be small and highly personal. Where schools are large they should be broken into interdisciplinary houses.
2. Cooperative learning is a key to successful learning.
3. There should be integration of curriculum: history and literature, math and science, etc.
4. Academic periods should be longer in high schools--at least an hour, ideally two hours.
5. High school homerooms should be full-length periods and serve as serious advisory places, and teachers should stay with the same homeroom for two years or more.
6. Fewer subjects, taught thoroughly, are better than lots of courses taught superficially.
7. Decisions about curriculum, pedagogy and scheduling should be made by on-site professionals.
8. Parents should be informed and involved in their children's education.
9. Students should be expected to demonstrate their abilities directly--to "show" what they know and can do. Multiple-choice tests are not a substitute for the real performance.
10. Students should be expected to engage in socially useful work, and should learn about the world-of-work through school-directed work experiences. (Meier 1995)
    

References:
Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas, (65). Boston: Beacon Press.

Student Publication and Teacher Revelation

This last week, a group of my students completed publication of Scatterbrain: A Collection of Memoirs - a book we've been working on together since mid-October. As the title suggests, it is a collection of short memoirs written by the students. Here's the description they wrote for the back cover:

"Many adults wonder what goes through a teenager’s mind. Many teenagers wonder the same thing. Scatterbrain: A Collection of Memoirs offers an insight into the elusive minds of those living in a world that is completely their own, between childhood and adulthood, wanting to make big decisions about their futures yet needing Mom’s help to shop for clothes. These memoirs show their laughter and tears, love and hate, confusion and clarity. From coping with the death of a father and battling an eating disorder to camping, fishing, and traveling with friends, the perspectives that these writers have shared are at once unique and universal. They reveal the hopes of children through the vivid memories of young adults."

We used blurb.com -- a "creative publishing service" as it's called -- to take what would otherwise have been just a 'class assignment' that got written, graded, and thrown away and make it into something with value that extends beyond the school building.

One really fascinating experience that this whole process created occurred two days after the book was finished. As a way to celebrate the beautiful work the students had done, I sent an email to our faculty and staff to tell them about the book and ask them to congratulate the kids.

The next day, a few students told me this had made them really uncomfortable. It wasn't the idea of having their work in public that bothered them (they said they didn't mind strangers or even family reading it); it was the idea of their teachers being able to read it that freaked them out. We had a class discussion about it, but no one seemed really able to pinpoint what it was about this situation that they didn't like.

That night I got an email from a student who wanted to explain things more clearly:

"We all appreciate the project, it is really cool. The issues that we had seemed to be with ourselves. I guess it's scary to put yourself out there, especially to teachers who have always been our 'superiors'. We have always been taught you are subordinate to your teachers and they are there to teach you. It seems really sad, but unfortunately it has always been that way. I think moving out of our comfort zone is something we have to do, and for some people that is a harder step than for others."

She mentions being "taught" to believe in this barrier between students and teachers -- I wonder if it's possible to pinpoint when/how that socialization process happens. I've always felt that fewer barriers is the way to help students achieve more meaningful learning (see my post about the CES School Study Tour), but I know that not everyone agrees with that view. In fact, there are some really stellar teachers here at OHS for whom those barriers seem essential to the way they craft their teaching.

The one piece of advice I had for the authors of Scatterbrain (who are all seniors preparing to go off to college) was that they should begin unlearning some of those barriers now. In college, they'll only get in the way.

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://www.spencerpforsich.com

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??"
  

White Privilege

This week I re-read Peggy McIntosh’s article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” I had read it a few times before, and the point that always stands out to me is the line that reads, “Whites are taught to think of their lives as morally neutral, normative, and average, and also ideal….” I occasionally realize that I have this exact attitude when I recognize that “white” is not really a part of how I identify myself. There is nothing inherently valuable (I seem to have learned) in my race, so I don’t tend to count it among the things that make me proud of who I am. And yet, this is so because I inadvertently see myself as the default, the norm, the “average” as McIntosh says. This was put into stark contrast by my experience in grad school class last week when a colleague – the only person of color in the room – was the only one to include race in her answer to a warm-up icebreaker that asked, “Who are you?”

I say that I see myself as the default. In fact, McIntosh suggests that the reason I can see myself that way is because my position of power in society allows me to have that perception. If I wanted, I could enumerate the ways in which my profile represents not the default, but rather the top of the power totem pole. My racial identity would be at the top of that list, and here's a partial list of others:

1. I’ve never thought I was disadvantaged or missing out on anything because of my gender.
2. Financially, I’ve never wanted for anything substantial (even now as an adult).
3. It is legal for me to marry the person I love in any state. (See article on "Straight Privilege" for similar points along these lines.)
   
4. I can travel almost anywhere in the world and be fairly confident that I can find people who speak English – my first (and only) language.
5. I am not the first in my family to go to college.
6. I am not the first in my family born in the U.S.
7. My doctor says I’m physically and mentally fit. I have health insurance that pays for her telling me that.
8. I can walk into most affluent neighborhoods and not feel out of place. (This one is the product of many of the above points combined.)
9. I get most of my religious holidays off without having to request them.
   

I want to stop here to note that I originally intended this to be a list of the ways in which my profile does, in fact, represent the type which is perceived as normative and average in the us/them dynamic of which McIntosh speaks. It wasn’t until I had written about half of the list that I realized I was actually making a list of the social advantages of my power position. (I added the second sentence in the paragraph above once I had made that realization.)

At the CES Small Schools conference (see my post about the 2008 Winter Meeting) last month, I listened to Camilla Greene talk about the stages that many white, privileged educators must go through in order to become effective advocates for change in school systems. The first step, obviously, is awareness. One of the next steps, though, is often guilt and shame. I admit that I'm still (in many ways) working through this stage, but I can see the progress I've made and the ways in which I am starting to envision my position of privilege as a powerful tool for enacting the change I hope to see. As Dr. Anthony Clark (Deputy Superintendent for Instruction, Innovation and Social Justice for the San Francisco Unified School District; also an affluent, white male) said, he encounters colleagues of color who often tell him that they've been saying for ten years the same things that he says, but when he says them, people listen.

References:
McIntosh, P. (1988). White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. Wellesley: Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

Access and Engagement

In her book Access and Engagement (2000), Aida Walqui describes the myriad factors that contribute to the success (or lack thereof) of immigrant students in schools. When reading her work, I found myself feeling pretty helpless as she described the various factors that impede their success – family support, immigration status, previous academic achievement. These enormous factors are more or less entirely out of the hands of teachers, so it leaves me feeling like we are attempting a hopeless task in some ways.

On the other hand, she does mention a few things that contribute to student success on the part of the school and the teacher, such as support in second language acquisition, social challenges, and in some ways educational continuity. She mentions programs such as Project New Beginnings (a "newcomer program for newly-arrived adolescents"), which seems to use many strategies that can be successful, but in some ways these programs may also stigmatize the immigrant students within the greater social context. It’s this stigmatization that we should avoid as much as possible to help what she calls the “enduring” and “situated” selves coexist in a healthy way.

One thing that stood out to me in her book was the idea of “noninterventionist” parental support (passive means of supporting academic success, such as providing a home environment conducive to learning, as opposed to active support in the form of phone calls to teachers and visits to the school). I don’t think I had ever considered this kind of support as a contributor to student success, because I just assumed that students who do well without the apparent involvement of the parents were able to do so because of inherent motivation or greater understanding of school expectations. However, I do appreciate the implication of this idea, as my home growing up was certainly a place conducive to being academic and productive, whereas certain friends’ homes lacked that atmosphere and were consequently poor places to study.

This ties back to Kozol (see my post about his book Savage Inequalities) in that, just as homes can have that atmosphere, certain schools can be more conducive to being academic than others. The “75% equal” schools he describes (pp. 175-180), with differences in teacher pay, books, facilities, and resources, are less likely to be able to achieve the desired atmosphere than other schools and are, therefore, less likely to allow students to be successful.

Kozol leads me to wonder about how High Tech High plays a role in this system. So far we have been able to keep our schools small enough to provide mostly individualized attention to students who need additional support, and we certainly foster an atmosphere of studiousness and professionalism that will help channel our students toward being “governors” rather than “governed.” However, as a school of choice I wonder how many students who have not yet been taught how to gain access to power will be likely to apply in the first place. If none of those disempowered students are being served by our schools, then we are only sifting out the ones who have learned how to “play the game” and separating them from their peers who haven’t (instead of using the former to uplift the latter, as I think we hope to do).

I hear this criticism from friends of mine who work in other schools in San Diego - that the existence of our schools makes the job they do harder. The only vaguely satisfying response I’ve gotten to the accusation that HTH schools only “skim off the top” and lower the mean for neighborhood schools is that it’s more a question of long-term vision than immediate results. If what we do works, eventually school districts and legislators and communities will see that it works and understand how to implement some of what we do to make the whole system a little bit better. In the meantime, though, it will likely get worse.

An obstacle getting in the way of that process of uplifting all schools, though, is that, because we are successful, we attract students and families that already have access to power and influence and successful schools. It’s the same concern as the KIPP schools mentioned in Tough’s article (see my post on the "Culture of Power") – if students who don’t need us are attracted to come here, it leaves less room for the ones who really do (and who are likely to be the first ones muscled out by power and influence).

Now I feel like I’ve talked myself in a circle and I’m again feeling a bit hopeless. I really believe that what we do works, but at times I wonder who it really works for. And as our student population continues to diversify, it seems like we’re losing our sense of how to keep doing what we do (as evidenced by growing numbers of students in summer school – the bulk of whom are minorities – as well as the growing number of students being held back, being put on academic contracts, etc.). The fact that the ethnic composition of students on IEP’s seems to reflect the power dynamic only reinforces some of my skepticism.

References:
Walqui, A. (2000). Access and Engagement, (4-22). McHenry: Delta Publishing Company.
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers.

Savage Inequalities

While it's on my mind, I wanted to share a bit from a book sitting on my shelf right now. In Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities (1991), he aimed to expose the very separate and very unequal state of schools in America that, with the support of the courts' gradual degredation of Brown v. Board, perseveres still today. The following passage stood out to me:

“The parents or the kids in Rye or Riverdale [two notably affluent communities in New York]…may well tell themselves that Mississippi is a distant place and that they have work enough to do to face inequities in New York City. But, in reality, the plight of children in the South Bronx of New York is almost as far from them as that of children in the farthest reaches of the South.

All of these children say the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Whether in the New York suburbs, Mississippi, or the South Bronx, they salute the same flag. They place their hands across their hearts and join their voices in a tribute to ‘one nation indivisible’ which promises liberty and justice to all people. What is the danger that the people in a town like Rye would face if they resolved to make this statement true? How much would it really harm their children to compete in a fair race?”

A colleague of mine recently pointed out his frustration with the fact that Kozol has been writing books like this for years without ever attempting to offer solutions to any of the problems he exposes. But maybe some of us need only to be reporters - to shine the klieg light on the truth - so the dissemination of the knowledge we report can inspire others to action. (Which reminds me, thanks to my good friend Ephraim for lending me this book.)

References:
Kozol, J. (1991). Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown Publishers.

The Culture of Power

I recently read an excerpt from Lisa Delpit's book Other People's Children (1995) in which she talks about what she calls the "Culture of Power." This is, essentially, the culturally inherited values/norms/expectations that allow children of the dominant culture to be more successful in school than children of marginalized cultures. She says that the former receive constant implicit reinforcement that allows them such a greater level of success, whereas the latter need to be explicitly taught the "rules" of power in order to be allowed access to them.

Reading her work led me to think a lot about how this is at play in my practice at High Tech High. One way in which the culture of power is apparent in the classrooms of HTH is through the difference in the performance of “village” students (students from within the High Tech schools prior to high school) versus students who came recently from other schools. The class of students I currently have includes a number of students who were in the inaugural 6th grade class at High Tech Middle five years ago, and the degree of socialization into the “High Tech High Way” that they exhibit is pretty extreme. To observe the difference between those students and the students who were new to the village last year is pretty substantial. As some of my colleagues put it, the former have “drunk the Kool-Aid” – they understand projects better, they work more cooperatively in groups, they are able to budget their time more effectively, they verbally assert their ideas and opinions with greater ease, and they demonstrate other similar academic skills that make them more successful than the students who don’t yet have those skills.

These are all skills and strategies that we explicitly teach to students, particularly in 6th and 9th grade classes, through benchmarks and scaffolding. We model how to communicate and cooperate in groups; we set intermediate deadlines to help students understand the pacing of a long-term project; and we practice discussion skills through Socratic seminars, mock trials and debates. This kind of explicit instruction in behaviors that support academic success is similar to the kind of “rules” which Delpit enumerates and which schools such as KIPP provide to their students (see Paul Tough's "What It Takes to Make a Student," for a further discussion of the KIPP schools). As an aside, KIPP's "SLANT" approach feels so incredibly prescriptive that I can’t imagine being that kind of teacher, but I understand why some students might really benefit from it.

In spite of our complex socialization process, somewhere along the line some HTH students do not develop these skills to the same degree as others. As I think of the students in my own experience who are less successful at applying these skills, the faces that come to mind belong mostly to working class students and students with IEP’s. The latter may stem from the additional challenges that some students with learning disabilities face when it comes to organization, focus, and articulation of ideas. One thing I know I often struggle with is how to support those students so that they may be better able to enact the same strategies as their more successful peers.

The question of why working class students struggle with these skills perhaps comes from a difference in communication strategies employed by students of different socioeconomic backgrounds. As I perceive it (from my limited experience), more affluent students are often taught from a young age that speaking up, disagreeing with adults, and having opinions are behaviors that are rewarded – all of which are skills I know I personally value in my students. Meanwhile, many students of working class backgrounds are taught that respect for one’s elders and waiting one’s turn to speak are very important values. Those students – at least from what I see in my own classes – will usually answer when asked a question, but won’t tend to volunteer information or advocate for themselves when they are confused or need help.

In Tough’s article he references statistics to back up these observations, although I suspect that this is the kind of subject where I could easily find data that tells me the exact opposite is true. But regardless of the numbers, I still have a lot of learning to do in order to better support all my students in their acquisition of the kinds of skills and "rules" that will make them more successful later in life.

References:
Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children, (pp. 21-26). New York: The New Press.
Tough, P. (2006, November 26). What It Takes to Make a Student. New York Times Magazine.

Intersession 2008 (part 2)

As mentioned in my earlier post (Intersession 2008), I recently taught a two-week intensive course called The Art of Social Protest. In it, students chose from a variety of media and created socially conscious work about a variety of topics of relevance to them. Because students received a pass/fail designation for course, there were several issues paramount to its success. One was student choice: because the grade was not an issue, it was clear from the beginning that students' most significant motivating factor would be their intrinsic investment in the work they were doing.

As a result, the issues and media students chose for their work vary greatly: a surrealist film suggesting the social pressures felt by girls to look a certain way; a surfboard mural depicting extinct species of frog; a dystopic short story about censorship; political comics on global climate change; punk songs about racism and the government; and a collage protesting the depiction of women in shojo cartoons - just to name a few. By and large, the pieces students produced were successful in their aims. I've posted a few examples below.

Lora, "Shojo Collage"


Beth, "Bob Dylan"


Lisa, "Scared of Growing Up"


Beth & Mari, "Somewhat Surreal"


For more student work or information about Intersession, visit my Digital Portfolio (http://teachers.oregon.k12.wi.us/pforsich).

Student Voice

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I want to work harder at including students' voices into the process of designing and implementing projects in my class. One way I have tried doing this recently is through comments.

At HTH, semester grade reports are accompanied by teachers' narrative comments about each student - usually consisting of a brief summary of the work our team did that semester, a few comments about the students' strengths and areas for improvement, and then a goal or two that the student should consider for the future. For many teachers, this process feels a bit like writing notes next to the letter grade on the last page of an essay: the student is going to look for the letter grade, knowing that he doesn't have the opportunity to revise his work, and he will possibly never read the comments. The comments, then, feel pretty meaningless.

The way my partner and I make comments feel more meaningful for us and for the students is to have "student-led comments," in which the students write some notes about their progress and performance over the course of the semester and then we augment them with our own observations. Having the students take this opportunity to reflect on the work they've done is useful not only to us as teachers but also to their parents, who (in some cases) rarely get to hear their children talk about school in quite this way.

The process of including student voice in our comments doesn't end there. Today, as a warm-up activity at the beginning of the period, I gave everyone back their comments and our responses so they could read them before their parents get them in the mail. Then I asked them to write their responses to our responses to their comments. Some students took the opportunity to challenge the constructive critiques we had offered; some asked questions of us; and some thanked us for the complimentary things we had written. One student said, "I appreciate the opportunity to hear your perspective on my work ethic, because in general I'm a pretty self-conscious person." Another said, "I disagree that I've become more mature since last year; I know I need to keep working on my school attitude." A third student said, "You wrote...the best things I've ever read about myself. I stand complimented."

The exciting glimpses that comments have allowed us to see of our students on a truly personalized scale have helped us to know their aspirations, their motivations, and the way they really see themselves.

Other ways I've been working to incorporate student voice in my practice include student-generated rubrics (which my partner Anne and I have done this week with great success), one-on-one conferences to set project expectations/goals, and discussions with my classes about issues concerning the school outside my classroom. Usually, it is during these activities that I feel the most connected to the students and the most effective in teaching them the skills/information that will be useful to them beyond high school.

CES Small Schools Network - 2008 Winter Meeting

This reflection taken from my notes at the Coalition of Essential Schools' San Francisco conference on equity in the classroom:

"Sitting in a conference about equity in schools, hearing Camilla [Greene] remind us to 'call a sham a sham,' I am literally holding back tears as I think about how much harder I need to work to address these issues, how much more of myself I need to give before I can really make the difference I want to make. I feel ashamed that the only students in my class who are failing or close to failing are students of color. What am I perpetuating by allowing this disparity to exist in my classroom?"

The State Standards...

In our class last night (HTH 216 - Advanced Project Based Learning), someone made an off-handed comment about the state standards and how they play in to project planning. The two Explorer Elementary teachers shared a look of confusion as the rest of us sort of brushed it off (see Carlisa Endoso's comments on my post "Talking with a colleague about PBL" - I started to respond to Carlisa by adding another comment to that post, but it seemed like a conversation worthy of more than a footnote.)

Carlisa mentions that at Explorer Elementary, she feels incredibly supported in her efforts to be creative and have curricular freedom, but that ultimately it's the state standards that drive the teachers' thinking about project ideas. The ideological perspective that supports teacher autonomy, freedom and creativity is definitely something Explorer shares with the other schools in the High Tech family; however, it seems like the starting points are different.

I think the reason why the High Tech teachers glazed over the discussion of standards in our class last night is because standards almost never come up in conversation in the HT schools. We are encouraged to worry more about doing exciting, rigorous curriculum that we think is meaningful and worth doing - and to worry less about coverage of standards. Most of us find that, when we do this, we hit a good number of the standards anyway. (In language arts, for example, a great number of the standards refer to skills, not information, so our humanities teachers' typically skill-oriented approach jives pretty well with that.) The reason why they still come up in articles and other materials that are distributed outside the HT community, as Carlisa noted, is that we understand standards to be a reality all teachers have to accept; if what we do is going to be of value to teachers who feel pressured by standards coverage, they need to know that our methods can be applicable to their situation.

That being said, it seems to me that most teachers who are told to teach "to" the standards find this task stifling and overwhelming, which puts them in a frame of mind totally contrary to being creative with their practice. Rather than a system of accountability, then, it creates a climate of mediocrity. I'm excited to hear that Explorer has found a way to use the standards as a jumping off point for truly engaging teaching practice, and I'd love to hear more about how they manage to do that.

My favorite HTH example of "coverage" of the standards was when Jeff Robin did an art project with his class that covered all the standards for visual art in only one week. His conclusion: "If you make anything it is still better than studying standards."

To visit Explorer Elementary's website: http://www.explorerelementary.org
To visit Jeff's Digital Portfolio: http://jeffrobin.hightechhigh.org