Navigating the funnel

When students filed in to their Civics class at the end of the day on Friday, there was blood on one of the desks and on the wall. The teacher held his arm stiffly and explained that there had been a fight between two students, that he had intervened, and that he would be making a stop by the emergency room after the school day ended. But now it was time to get to work learning about the legislative process. Life goes on as planned – at least until the final bell rings.

The teacher would in all likelihood be back after the long holiday weekend, if he felt up to it. The two ninth graders had several stops to make before they would return to school, and the decision about when, or even whether to return was most likely not going to include any input from them at all. Whatever had prompted the outbreak of violence, the result would be a loss of freedom, a reduction in the choices available, a diminished capacity to control their own circumstances. It would mean their ability even to make positive choices for themselves would be subject to the will of others.

Adolescence is rough, and sometimes can be dangerous. The teenage years are when we discover ourselves, assert ourselves, formulate dreams and calculate our chances of making those dreams come true. For some of us, it is a time of ever-opening possibilities. For others, it seems to be a frustrating gallery of attractions just out of reach. For all of us, it is a time of dislocation – rapid growth occurring on multiple planes – emotional, intellectual, social, and sexual. And for the first time in our lives we have the self-awareness to experience the growth, and the dislocation, as individuals who are searching to define our own identify.

Nothing is more exhilarating than discovering that we are becoming the people we are meant to be. And nothing is more terrifying.

School is the backdrop for this everyday drama. Sometimes a platform for opportunities, sometimes a prison, school is the common factor. It is the road we all must travel to whatever destinations lie ahead for us. For most of our childhoods, it is the only job we have ever had.

A school that can help an adolescent discover himself or herself, encourage dreams, and help each person find a way to make dreams come true, is a great school. There is no standardized test that can measure the unleashing of individual potential. And yet there is no more important role that a school can play in a young person’s life.

All too often, however, schools exacerbate the frustrations of adolescence. As public policymakers, we value equality, so we mandate sameness. We want every student to learn the same material, pass the same tests, exhibit the same behaviors – ignoring all the while that it is our creativity and individuality that gives human society its energy.

The human race is bursting with potential, and yet at an age – adolescence – when human beings are beginning to find their possibilities, we march them into a kind of funnel. Those who are good at the things that school demands pass through as winners. Everyone who bangs against the sides or fails to pass through at all is bruised at best, or branded as a loser.

The school where the fight occurred last Friday is one of the better ones. The teachers embrace the challenges as well as the opportunities of their jobs with enthusiasm. Many work long hours on campus with extracurricular activities, tutoring, and mentoring before going home to continue their labor of love with planning, communicating with parents, and of course the unending task of grading. The principal believes in the diversity of human talent and in the importance of supporting students in realizing their dreams. She encourages extracurricular interests and offers nearly unconditional support. She likes to say, “If a student wants to do it, we are going to make it happen.”

Even the best schools struggle along with their students to navigate the pains of adolescence. It is an imperfect art, and on rare occasions it may be painted in blood. But it is crucially important. It is the most important thing that schools can do.

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I have completed writing a book on the teaching of history, which should be published soon. For further discussions of the nature of history, the purposes of education, and for news about the forthcoming publication of the book, keep reading this blog.

A personal challenge, a shared responsibility

Thinking and writing about education, synthesizing personal experiences as a student and as a teacher with the many brilliant insights I have read or heard about from others, has led me to an inescapable conclusion. We are doing something terribly important very badly.

The challenge is to find way to educate kids that is both a significant improvement on the status quo and at the same time practical. I believe that we need to rethink on a fundamental level the purposes of education, and reconcile our practices with those goals.

This is a daunting task. Consider the entrenched bureaucracies of schools, the political gamesmanship that steers educational policy, the vast sums of money involved and the powerful actors that will step up to protect their financial interests even at the expense of the people most directly affected by school policies – the children.

But the situation is not all dire. The daunting aspect is the institutional entropy, if not active resistance to any meaningful reform. The aspect that is encouraging is that nearly everyone agrees that some changes need to happen. There are brilliant ideas being generated every day by classroom teachers, college professors, researchers and policymakers, as well as by parents and the students themselves. To be sure, not everyone is on the same page, but this is not an entirely bad thing. It is possible to make meaningful progress on a small scale – as an individual, within one’s own classroom, with one new lesson that breaks the mold, by changing priorities within your own family, by generating discussion within your own community.

My own process for tackling this problem includes not just drawing from the vast resources developed by others over the years, but also a considerable amount of introspection and reflection on two decades of working in schools. Over the course of that time, my basic assumptions as well as some of the most important things I “knew” about education have changed. In some cases this was because of new information I acquired through learning what worked in the classroom, reading, and sharing with other educators. In some cases it was because real world experience overpowered some part of the conventional wisdom about schooling, and allowed human nature to show that it will always defeat institutional constraints.

I began as a teacher the way many educators do, with a fairly insightful understanding of how I learn, and a few good ideas about how to teach kids whose learning style matched my own. Over the years, experience brought both wisdom and humility. Everyone is different, and no one person will ever be able to create a system that is effective in teaching everyone. This has to be a collaborative process.

I am nearing completion of writing a book that offers one way to improve the quality of education. It proposes a different approach to teaching United States History, a course that I taught for over 12 years at four different schools and with which I am the most familiar among the classes I am certified to teach. But the core concept of the book is transferable to other subjects as well.

The personal challenge for me is to share my ideas with people who are receptive to them, and share my enthusiasm for reform with people who are willing to stand up and demand change. I hope to provide some wisdom and some guidance from the perspective of one who has lived and worked with these issues for years, but I know that I can’t provide all the energy that is needed.

Ultimately, this is a shared responsibility. I don’t have all the answers, but fortunately the answers are within the collective wisdom of everyone who cares and is willing to speak up. The future belongs to those who create it.

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As of today, I will be posting on this blog every week on Mondays, but no longer on Thursdays. As much as I have enjoyed writing these essays, and as much as I hope you have found them thought-provoking, entertaining, and perhaps even useful, there are only so many hours in every week, and I need to spend a few more of them on other projects – including one I have deferred far too many times for too many good reasons – finishing the book mentioned above.

Controlling the narrative

Students learn. Whether or not we make them learn, whether or not it’s part of a curriculum, students are going to learn. It is human nature. It is a matter of survival. Human beings are not so strong or so quick that we can do without our intelligence and our ability to figure out how things work.

We are rational creatures. Not only do we learn from our experiences, but we also want to understand what is going on in our lives. We all construct a narrative in which the lead character and hero is ourselves. And we naturally want the hero to win.

Human beings need to be in control of our circumstances. We can learn and solve problems. We are the hero in our own narrative. We need to be able to play the role of a triumphant hero … and sometimes that is a problem.

For young people who are just discovering who they are and how to use the power of their own intellect, it is easy to make mistakes. It is even easier to allow their narrative to be written by someone else. When this happens, learning doesn’t stop, but sometimes the lessons they learn are not the most helpful kind.

We hope that the personal development that occurs in childhood and adolescence will produce well-adjusted, contributing members of society. But all of us know that the experience of growing up also produces unhappy, frustrated individuals who are convinced of their own inability to learn. How did these people turn out this way? How did the heroes in their stories become such outcasts?

For a great many of them, the answer is that they learned it in school.

A large part of the culture of schools is the practice of telling students that what they are doing is not the right thing. Whether it is grammar, math, or social behavior, the style of instruction employed by most schools is based on penalizing students for getting it wrong.   We give negative attention to students who make mistakes, do not give nearly as much positive attention to students who correctly follow instructions, and hardly ever encourage students to discover how to learn on their own.

In recent years, there have been some positive moves towards empowering students in how they learn. Constructivist, student-centered, project-based learning models can be very useful in allowing young people to feel they have some control over a part of their own narrative. But state-mandated curriculums and required learning outcomes narrow the opportunities for students to learn.

Students who do not feel successful in school will rewrite their narratives. Instead of the hero being a brilliant scholar, he or she is brilliant at evading responsibility. The hero who can’t succeed within the narrow expectations of the school structure prevails by finding a way to succeed outside of the rules.

Students learn, and if they believe they cannot learn what school has to offer, they will learn how to construct a useful alternative. It defies human nature to think of oneself as a failure. It is good to keep this in mind when we look at the story told in our report cards.  There may be a far more compelling alternative narrative written elsewhere.

Putting the kids in charge

In my last post, I pointed out that students have far more at stake in the quality of the classroom environment than adults do. After all, for adults the classroom is just a workplace – albeit one which most teachers approach with passion and dedication. But for students it is not only that, but also the place where their future success can be shaped as they acquire the skills and knowledge they will need throughout their lives.

I posed the question:

What would be wrong with empowering students to make and enforce their own rules governing behavior in class, and allowing teachers simply to teach?

And simply by phrasing the question that way, I acknowledged one of the major roadblocks to this approach. Classroom management has traditionally been in the hands of the teachers. Adults are not only the source of knowledge and the model of behavior, but also the enforcers of rules. This paradigm is so ingrained that it is almost unimaginable to suggest that we do things differently. We can’t simply say, “Let’s try it a new way.” Instead we proceed on the premise that the current paradigm works – that things are fundamentally right with having adults in charge – and we ask, “What would be wrong with changing things a bit?”

But it is important that we put that premise aside. We can hold on to the idea that adults are the ones responsible for making knowledge accessible to students, and keep adults in their role as models of behavior. But let’s imagine a scenario in which adults have no role in making or enforcing rules. And let’s ask not what’s wrong with this idea, but instead let’s ask how to make this idea work?

Gentle readers, I am truly improvising an answer here. There are in classrooms across the country lots of lessons in self-government and circumstances in which students have some authority to make rules under adult supervision, but I do not know of any model in which students authentically run the classroom environment without adult oversight. We are in the realm of theory informed by common sense as well as imagination. I would like very much to have the benefit of your ideas.

But here is what I have so far ….

First, students must feel that they are truly in charge of their environment. It will only work if they take their responsibilities seriously, and they will never do so if they believe an adult will come along and overrule their decisions.

Second, students must create any rewards or punishments to be administered by their peer group, not by adults. In other words, there should not be a situation in which an adult is called upon to step outside his or her role as the conduit of knowledge and model of behavior to become disciplinarian.

One caveat to this principle is the real world consideration that adults have legal responsibilities to the children in their care. In certain extreme situations, they will have to step in. But what this means in our new paradigm is that the circumstances that require adult intervention should be clearly understood by everyone involved, and students must feel confident that adults will not step in unless absolutely necessary.

Third and perhaps most importantly, students must be motivated to create an environment that is conducive to learning. Learning is, after all, the primary purpose of school. In order for students to do this on their own, they must believe in the rewards of learning. Without this core value, the environment that students create may be agreeable to them in many ways, but it will fail in providing the very thing they need the most.

What do you think? What are your ideas about how to make this work?

Who’s in charge here?

No one has a greater interest in the quality of life in the classroom than the students. Think about it. Not only is it a matter of having the kind of day-to-day environment that is uplifting and inviting – students and teachers alike have a vested interest in that goal. But for the students it is also the forum in which they will gain knowledge and experience that will serve them for the rest of their lives.

For adults the stakes are not nearly as high. True, they share the desire for a pleasant, productive work environment. But for adults who are paid to be in the classroom, part of the job is to endure whatever unpleasant aspects of the environment need to be endured in order to accomplish the greater goal of educating the kids. The classroom should not be organized for the teacher’s convenience or pleasure. The classroom should be designed in such a way that students have the best possible opportunity to learn. The teacher’s pleasure in the environment should be an ancillary outcome, not the primary goal.

Students know better than anyone what kind of environment is conducive for their own learning. And students know what external factors act as distractions. Despite our best intentions and years of experience with our own learning, adults can only make assumptions about what will work for students. It is the students themselves who are the experts.

So let’s put that expertise to work. Let’s put students in charge of creating the classroom environment. Let’s allow those who have the most at stake to make the most important decisions about schedules and social behavior in the classroom. Let’s allow the students the freedom to learn on their own terms.

Is it possible this could work? It certainly is a nontraditional approach

But schools have traditionally been organized in a way that maximizes administrative efficiency at the expense of learning. Why not turn that formula around?

This is a serious question, and it calls for serious discussion. I want to know what you think.

What would be wrong with empowering students to make and enforce their own rules governing behavior in class, and allowing teachers simply to teach?

Am I crazy or is this the obvious solution to many of the problems with schools today?

Authority

Americans have always had a complex relationship with authority. It is a feature of American culture that extends from our roots as a people and is rife with contradictions that are alive in the modern classroom.

English Puritans in the 17^th century bristled under the authority of the Church of England, and so they came to North America to set up a community that operated under their own rules – a system that was far more rigid and intolerant than the one they left behind. The conventional version of U.S. history holds that the founders of this repressive social order were seeking “religious freedom.” But high school history courses seldom fail to mention Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson – two early settlers who were expelled from the Puritan colony for espousing divergent views on religious authority.

The decade prior to the Revolutionary War was marked by tax protests, petitions, demonstrations, and occasional acts of violence. But during most of this time even the most vocal dissidents considered themselves loyal British subjects. They weren’t trying to overthrow their government, just cut a better deal for themselves.

Americans like mavericks, rugged individualists, pioneers. We admire those who step around the rules – from a distance. We don’t have much time for those who challenge the system itself. How is it that we can admire outlaws and yet support the very laws they flaunt? It is because of the way we were raised.

The American educational system is designed to force feed conformity to young people who are in the process of discovering themselves and exploring their potential. Because it is based on a mass-production model, school requires uniformity in behavior, and uniformity in work product. It is fundamentally at odds with the revolutionary spirit that we are taught was instrumental in our country’s founding. We are taught that the mavericks, the pioneers, the outlaws are American heroes – the ones who bring about innovation and reforms. Then on the sound of a bell we have to report like trained animals to our next class, we line up single file to go to the cafetorium, and beg permission to be excused to perform basic bodily functions.

For kids growing up in the system, it is very easy to reach the conclusion that school is the enemy. If we ever want to achieve the kind of individuality that adulthood promises, the kind of freedom that apparently is our American birthright, we are going to have to escape the shackles that bind us to the plastic chairs with laminated desktops that imprison us for seven hours a day.

Escape can take several different forms. For kids who are good at performing the assigned tasks, school can be a source of positive reinforcement. All that is required is to play the game, accept praise when offered, and take advantage of opportunities that are available to students who conform to expectations.

For kids who struggle with learning, with behavioral requirements, with any number of social and developmental issues, school can be a waking nightmare. Instead of using the school experience to build confidence and the skills required to work within the system, these kids develop tools to avoid taking responsibility for the tasks that they cannot or will not perform. They become outlaws, but not American heroes. Their form of protest works best if it receives the least notice. They do nothing to reform the system itself. More troubling is the fact that they do so little that will help them to succeed in life.

We need school to be an empowering experience. We need to resolve the contradiction between celebrating individualism in history classes and enforcing conformity in daily life. We need to encourage kids to become the best that they can be without forcing them to become outlaws.

The question is, how to do it.

Lost in the crowd

Halfway through the class, Cody strolled through the door.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“I was at the ice cream social,” he replied. “You heard the intercom.”

There had been an announcement over the intercom an hour earlier that students who had participated in the Homecoming planning committee were invited to have ice cream in the cafeteria after the last lunch period had ended.

“Yes, I heard the announcement,” I said, “but you still need a pass to come to class late.”

“Just ask Mr. Jones, he can tell you I was there,” Cody said, taking his seat.

I sighed. “Cody, it is your responsibility to be in class on time. If you have an excuse for being tardy, you need to show it to me. I didn’t get a list of students who were invited to have ice cream, and I have no information about when students were dismissed from the cafeteria. If you are late to class, you need to have a pass. You know that is the way it works at this school.”

“Just ask Mr. Jones,” Cody insisted, not moving from his chair.

“I don’t know who Mr. Jones is, Cody. It is your responsibility to account for your absence the first 20 minutes of this class. It is not my responsibility to research whether your story holds up. Now, go get a pass.”

Cody was playing a game that is fairly common at large schools – getting lost in the crowd. He was counting on the likelihood that it would be too much trouble for anyone to bother checking whether he was in the right place at the right time. It is a game that has a high probability of success for the students who play it, at least at schools like the one where I worked and that Cody attended.

Built just a few years earlier to accommodate 1500 students, last year it had an enrollment of over 1800. Beautiful in appearance when empty, its flaws were evident to anyone who experienced it in use. Its hallways and classrooms bulged with students throughout the day. Its design included numerous corners and alcoves that broke up sightlines and made it easy for students who got out of class to hang out in the hallway for extended periods of time without being seen.

But the physical plant was only the backdrop for the real problem. The school was just too big to be efficient. Up to a point, there is a certain amount of sense in operating a larger school. There are economies of scale – efficiencies that are possible by consolidating tasks, particularly in administrative positions – that can’t be managed in a smaller institution. But here, the tipping point for greater efficiency had been passed a long time ago. The administration was stocked with more people than I had ever seen at one school, and they all seemed to be overworked. Yet at the same time, it was extremely difficult for a new teacher to find out which administrator handled which areas of responsibility and who could answer which questions.

Because schools serve children who deserve a safe environment in which to learn, they need to have a sense of community, and that requires both personal accountability and institutional memory. Schools that are too big for anyone to know more than a small fraction of the students cannot foster personal accountability. For most students, the adults they pass in the halls might as well be strangers they would pass on a public sidewalk. The best these schools can do is to create a draconian system of hall passes and crowd control that buries everyone in more paperwork and has nothing to do with education. Schools that are too big for any one person to know how everything works or even what everyone’s job is cannot take advantage of institutional memory. It is too fractured. People spend too much time investigating how to solve the problems that crop up instead of simply dealing with them. Those schools lose any sense of continuity, of family. No one belongs there; they simply go to work there.

In large schools, it is easy to get lost in the crowd, easy to be overlooked, easy to trade away an opportunity to learn for a moment when no one is telling you what to do.

Achieving autonomy through education and the development of good habits should be the goal of every student, and schools should be designed to help students achieve that goal. Students deserve the individual attention they need to develop competence in the areas that will be crucial to their success as adults. Devoting time and energy to crowd control is a misuse of talent and limited resources – something schools can ill afford to do. It turns teachers into policemen and students into faceless suspects. That is not the lesson we need to be teaching.

Empathy in learning

Empathy is the ability to understand on an intuitive level how another is feeling, the attitude that person has toward his or her experiences, or the intellectual framework that shapes what the other is thinking.  Empathy of a form of communication that does not rely on words, and often serves as the medium for information that cannot be effectively reduced to words.  It is different from sympathy, which is simply a harmony of feelings, or more specifically the feeling of compassion for another who is in distress.  Empathy is a type of bonding between people that engenders trust and enables further and deeper communication.

In the art of teaching and learning, empathy is essential and is at the same time vexing.  In traditional education, we pass information through words – carefully constructed expressions of abstract concepts, time-honored formulations of big ideas, lessons for life rendered on the canvas of our common language.  We teach history through written records.  We teach science and math through problem-solving experiences, but in the end this quest for answers is described in very concrete terminology.  When we teach literature, we explore the artistry of words – the power of these everyday fixtures of our lives to move us beyond the everyday to a different plane.  But empathy exists on a different plane, and it does not rely on the power of words to take us there.  Empathy is not subject to grading rubrics and cannot be measured on standardized tests.  Yet its presence in human interactions may make the difference between real learning and forced compliance.

Learning is an interactive experience, and it can occur strictly between the learner and a body of information.  But humans are social creatures, and schools are public forums.  Furthermore, even in the case of solitary, self-directed learning, our motivations are often shaped by our relationships with others, and by our anticipation of future interactions with others.

The two most recent posts on this site (Learning from trust, A safe place to learn) have been about the importance of empathy in the school setting.  In the stories conveyed in those posts, the message is that a teacher who establishes a level of trust and common purpose with his students is far better able to reach these learners on an intellectual level.  But it is not enough to recognize empathy as a kind of gateway into more effective instruction.  Empathy not only facilitates communication, it is communication.

We understand each other not just through words, but also through the rhythm and pauses between those words, through actions, through facial expressions.  We form first impressions.  Sometimes cultural context or social programming causes us to react to superficial appearances more quickly, but very soon other signals come into focus.  There is a vast unspoken vocabulary of gesture.  A person may lie and get away with it in writing, but doing so face-to-face is not nearly as easy.  In appeals of the verdict in criminal trials, lawyers may argue that a judge’s rulings were incorrect as a matter of law, but may not argue that the jury was wrong in forming its opinion about the witnesses’ testimony.  It is a well-established principle that the only people qualified to judge whether or not a witness was telling the truth are the people who were in the room who could hear the tone of the voice and see the look in the eye.

Understanding others leads to greater understanding of ourselves.  It enables us to see the world through eyes and ears that have a different vantage point, and yet we can grasp the meaning of what another perceives.  Empathizing with success allows us to enjoy the thrill of another’s victory.  Empathizing with fear allows us to share in the emotion, but also enables us to offer ways to cope with it.  Empathy allows us a broader experience with life, and ties us more closely to the fabric of human society.

Teaching and learning is a shared human experience.  The quality of that shared experience can determine the quality of the learning.