Here's the second part of the essay I first posted on March 20, 2015.
***
If you pare down
your concept of teaching far enough, you are left with sequences of behaviors
and routines—with techniques. Technique becomes central to the reformers’
redefinition of teaching, and the focus on technique is at the heart of many of
the alternative teacher credentialing programs that have emerged over the past
decade. Effective techniques are an important part of the complex activity that
is teaching, and good mentorship includes analyzing a teacher’s work and
providing corrective feedback. Teachers of teachers have been doing this for a
long time. What is new is the nearly exclusive focus on techniques, the
increased role of digital technology to study them, and the attempt to define
“effective” by seeking positive correlations between specific techniques and,
you guessed it, students’ standardized test scores. What is also new is the
magnitude of the effort, punched up considerably by a $45 million project
funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to measure effective
teaching.
Because teaching
involves a good deal of craft, I’m all for implementing useful techniques, from
guidance on giving directions to ways to pose a math problem. But given the
technocratic orientation of contemporary school reform, I worry that other
aspects of teaching less easily observed and circumscribed—bearing, beliefs
about learning, a sensibility about students’ lives—will get short shrift.
Techniques don’t
work in isolation. The sequencing of questions, for example, is a crucial
skill, but it depends on the teacher’s knowledge of the material being taught,
children’s typical responses to this material, the kinds of misconceptions and
errors they make, and the alternative explanations and illustrations that might
help them. A teacher can’t ask meaningful questions for long without this kind
of knowledge. In equal measure, the effectiveness of techniques, particularly
for classroom management, is influenced by students’ sense of a teacher’s
concern for them and understanding of them.
When I was
visiting schools in Chicago, I spent time in Michelle Smith’s high school math
classroom. One morning, she was calling her class to order and saw that a boy
who plays the class clown was sitting way in the back. She called him by name,
then said, “My young gentleman, I’d like you to sit up here where I can see
you.” The student groaned, uncurled himself from his desk, and walked to the
front, sauntering for the benefit of his peers. “C’mon darlin’,” Smith added,
head tilted, hand on hip, “humor me.” She watched; he sat down. “Thank you,
sir. I feel better.” With a mix of humor and direction, she had deftly changed
the seating to ensure order in the room—an effective technique for classroom
management.
Imagine, however,
the unpleasant ways this situation could have played out: the student refusing
to move, insulting or threatening her, or stirring up his comrades sitting
nearby. But Smith’s action occurred in the context of a relationship with the
class and with that boy, a legacy of her care and of the learning that goes on
in her classroom. (“Miss Smith,” the boy later told me, “she’s teaching us how
to do things we couldn’t do before.”) Smith knows local culture, understands
the rituals of masculinity and the huge importance of allowing that student a
little space to save face. She has developed a classroom persona that blends
sass and seriousness, and she uses it strategically. Technique works in context
and within the flow of other events.
If you conceive of
teaching as a repertoire of instructional and behavior management techniques,
then you won’t appreciate the kind of social knowledge Michelle Smith
possesses. This pinched notion of teaching combined with a “no excuses” stance
toward low achievement yields a troubling response to economic inequality: the
belief that the right kind of education can overcome poverty. We have a long
tradition in the United States of seeing education as, in Horace Mann’s words,
the “great equalizer” of social class differences. As our social safety net has
been increasingly compromised, we have put the school at the center of our
dwindling welfare state. Even though half a century’s research has demonstrated
that parental income level is the primary determiner of educational
achievement, the reformers hold fast to the demand that schools can overcome
the assaults of poverty. Charter school leader Doug Lemov, whose Teach
Like a Champion has become a user’s manual among reformers, offers a
good illustration. In his introduction, Lemov reflects on the charter school
teachers he has observed:
These outstanding
teachers routinely do what a thousand hand-wringing social programs have found
impossible: close the achievement gap between rich and poor, transform students
at risk of failure into achievers and believers, and rewrite the equation of
opportunity.
Schooling becomes
the one solution to poverty, the intervention that will work where others have
failed.
About 15 pages
later, however, Lemov offers a reminder of the ugly staying power of
inequality. A former student of his, “the bright and passionate son of a single
mother with limited English,” made the remarkable journey to Williams College.
At college, though, the student’s problems with writing dogged him and were
reflected in a professor’s unfavorable response to a paper he wrote on Zora
Neale Hurston. Lemov tells this story to stress the importance of teaching
students standard written English. But having worked in university programs
that serve students like this one—and having been such a student myself—I find
that this story represents the intractability of inequality: even after the
best teaching Lemov and his colleagues could provide, this young man still
needs assistance at further points along the way. The student will also need
people who understand what he must be feeling: the crushing disappointment, the
possible anger, and the deep blow to his confidence. Schools like Lemov’s might
be able to narrow an achievement gap, improving the scores on
district or state standardized tests, but not necessarily erase theachievement
gap, which requires sustained help of many kinds, including programs that Lemov
dismisses as “hand-wringing.”
The teachers
in Possible Lives worked with significant numbers of
low-income children, and every one of those teachers tried in some way to
address their hardship. They might have drawn in social service agencies, or
participated in church-based or civic organizations or political campaigns
aimed at helping the poor. Sometimes they tried to find resources for parents,
or tutored and counseled their students individually, or spent their own money
and donated food, clothing, and other goods. They taught diligently, sometimes
brilliantly, fought back despair, didn’t let up. “The problems are big ones,” a
young Calexico teacher told me, “but they’re not going to stop me from
teaching.” You cannot be in teaching—or medicine or counseling or the
ministry—without slamming up against failure. These teachers did not rush to
find excuses for their failures, but they knew the trauma poverty brings and
did their work with that awareness. To deny the effects of poverty blinds you
to the reality of your students’ lives, lives you need to understand as fully
as you can to intervene and enlist others inside and beyond the school. I deeply
believe in the power of teaching, but to make teaching the magic bullet against
inequality or to pit it against other social and economic interventions leads
to insular and self-defeating education policy.
***
As is the case
with public school teachers today, many of the teachers I wrote about grew up
in families with modest incomes. Some came from the same region or background
as their students. A small number went to major universities, but most
graduated from smaller state universities or local colleges with teacher
education programs. Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had
taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and
others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and
some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms
shared certain qualities. These qualities emerged before our era’s heavy reform
agenda, yet most parents, and most reformers, would want them for their
children.
The classrooms were
safe. They provided physical safety, which in some neighborhoods is a real
consideration. But there was also safety from insult and diminishment: “They
don’t make fun of you if you mess up,” said a middle school student in Chicago.
And there was safety to take intellectual risks. The teacher was “coaxing our
thinking along,” as one of the students reading Faulkner put it.
Intimately related
to safety is respect, a word I heard frequently during my travels. It meant
many things: politeness, fair treatment, and beyond individual civility, a
respect for the language and culture of the local population. Surveying images
of Mexican-American history on the walls of a Los Angeles classroom, a student
exclaimed, “This room is something positive. As you walk around, you say ‘Hey,
we’re somebody!’ ” Respect also has a cognitive dimension. As a New York
principal put it, “It’s not just about being polite—even the curriculum has to
be challenging enough that it’s respectful.”
Talking about
safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority. I witnessed a range
of classroom management styles, and though some teachers involved students in
determining the rules of conduct and gave them significant responsibility to
provide the class its direction, others came with curriculum and codes of
conduct fairly well in place. But two things were always evident. A teacher’s
authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple
sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing
a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms,
authority was distributed. Students contributed to the flow of events, shaped
the direction of discussion, became authorities on the work they were doing.
These classrooms,
then, were places of expectation and responsibility. As a Los Angeles middle
school teacher observed, “Children can tell right off those people who believe
in them and those who patronize them.” Young people had to work hard, think
things through, come to terms with each other—and there were times when such
effort took them to their limits. To be sure, some students weren’t engaged,
and everyone, students and teachers, had bad days. But overall the students I
talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense
that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were
good places to be. The huge, burning question is how to create more classrooms
like these.
***
What if reform had
begun with the assumption that at least some of the answers for improvement
were in the public schools themselves, that significant unrealized capacity
exists in the teaching force, that even poorly performing schools employ
teachers who work to the point of exhaustion to benefit their students? Imagine,
then, what could happen if the astronomical amount of money and human resources
that went into the past decade’s vast machinery of high-stakes testing-—from
test development to the logistics of testing at each school site—if all that
money had gone into a high-quality, widely distributed program of professional
development. I don’t mean the quick-hit, half-day events that teachers endure,
but serious, extended engagement of the kind offered by the National Science
Foundation and the National Writing Project, by university summer programs in
literature or science or history, by teams of expert teachers themselves.
In such programs,
teachers read, write, and think together. They learn new material, hear from
others who have successfully integrated it into their classrooms, and try it
out themselves. Some participating teachers become local experts, providing
further training for their schools and districts. Electronic media would
facilitate participation, connecting people from remote areas and helping everyone
to check in regularly when trying new things. These programs already exist but
could be expanded significantly if policymakers had a different orientation to
reform, one that honored teaching and the teaching profession. Distributed
professional development would substitute a human development model of school
reform for the current test-based technocratic one. And because such
professional development would enhance what teachers teach and how they teach
and assess it, there would be a more direct effect on the classroom.
Imagine as well
that school reform acknowledged poverty as a formidable barrier to academic
success. All low-income schools would be staffed with a nurse and a social
worker and have direct links to local health and social service agencies. If
poor kids simply had eye exams and glasses, we’d see a rise in early reading
proficiency. Extra tutoring would be provided, some of which could be done by
volunteers and interns from nearby colleges. Schools would be funded to stay
open late, providing academic and recreational activities for their students.
They could become focal institutions in low-income communities, involving
parents and working with existing community groups and agencies focused on
educational and economic improvement. Such schools already exist, and an Obama
administration initiative called Promise Neighborhoods awards grants to local
programs and agencies that provide health and social services. But the
provision of services is conceived as an add-on rather than an organic part of
school reform itself, and the services are awarded by competition to only a
percentage of the neighborhoods and schools that need them.
My proposals do
not address all that ails our schools, and what they cost might be better spent
on other ideas that are in the air. But they do move us away from the current
model of reform and closer to the immediate needs of teachers and students. The
proposals assume that our schools have talent to be tapped, and that the
physical and social burdens of the poor are a drag on achievement.
As with the
current reform programs, these proposals would draw on government and
philanthropic funding and on large, sometimes distant, organizations such as
the National Science Foundation. But the interventions would be adapted to the
needs of particular schools and communities by local teachers and social
service providers. The writing of narratives or a study of water-borne
organisms would play out differently in New York City versus the Mississippi
Delta.
Surveying the many
unsuccessful and hugely expensive attempts at school reform in our past,
historians Tyack and Cuban observed the same mistakes being repeated over and
over again: top-down remedies, grandiose claims about the latest technology,
disdain for teachers. To improve our schools, we need to be informed by
knowledge gained from many days in the neighborhoods surrounding them and from
many, many days inside the schoolhouse itself, learning from children’s
experience and the full sweep of a teacher’s work. This is what contemporary
school reform has failed to do.
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Once again, you hit the nail on the head. Now I am engaged in a doctoral Educational Leadership program (postsecondary), and I am the sole faculty member amongst my cohort of 12, many of whom hold leadership positions (deans, etc.) I am the only voice that speaks for the importance of that relationship that faculty forge with students in the classroom. Whether we discuss "performance based funding," SB 1456, student affairs, "cultural capital" or any of the myriad of topics that engage my colleagues, I am fundamentally convinced that students will succeed only when they recognize that they are respected and that faculty make an effort to understand where students come from. You can mandate many things, but you cannot mandate what matters most.
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