Alas, I only started but never finished responding to Joseph. At least not as directly as I'd intended to. But it's funny what happens when you let some time pass without racing all over it. Since taking my leave of the high school labyrinth, I've wandered far enough afield to be asked for my thoughts pertaining to a new Montessori school opening in my neighborhood soon. In expressing them, I began to feel I was answering Joseph—but on a different level than I first rushed away from. Below are edited versions of my responses, which seem worth scrapping here if only as a snapshot of where my ed-head is right now. And if there are answers here for Joseph's keen objections, so much the better. The new school will be near his neighborhood too, I think...
I've spent ten years teaching English. Eight of those have been in urban high schools. The abiding lesson I've come away with is that things have got to change about how we're treating our children’s talents. In
Ken Robinson's words, we're squandering them, pretty ruthlessly. My work is dedicated to liberating kids' fullest, most creative selves.
I’ve discovered to my sorrow that it is too often virtually impossible to do that within the confines of the so-called “traditional schools.” My exposure to Montessori methods of education (through research and the experience of my two nieces) has so far shown me a complete, elegant, and time-tested version of what I've spent three years trying to build in high school English classes. My goal has been to draw out the motivation and creativity latent in my students, but untapped and unrecognized, most often by the kids themselves. The hybridized English classes we developed (half in person, half online) have worked well for some and there is way more engagement with literacy overall than I've elicited through more traditional teaching methods. But what I understand now is that our hybridization project would work better if students' creative impulses enjoyed deeper nurturing, earlier on. Why is it that the ones that make the most of my classes seem to have the healthiest senses of their own creative worth from the first day they show up to class? I wish more kids grew up like that.
Where I Am, Where Next
A habit of mind our education professors at Mills particularly emphasized was that of self-reflection. Keeping a journal was encouraged and words like “metacognition” were peppered into lectures with wild abandon. In my first few years of teaching, this rubbed off on me in the form of participation in collaborative teacher research groups. I've also tried to refine my practice through ongoing professional development and collaboration with colleagues around the country. But the most useful manifestation of the reflective habit so far has been
my blog.
After reading some of it, a principal with whom I shared some strong disagreements once told me, “You're very careful about your perceptions of the classroom.” This phrasing stuck with me, because indeed one reason I write about school experiences is to turn matters over diligently enough to learn what I think. Keeping my teaching journal public and transparent has helped me do this more effectively because I get help from students, colleagues, and parents.
However, the most important purpose of writing online is to model the kind of independent thought and writing I hope to see in my students. My goal for them has not been to produce essay-producers, but peers in reading and writing. It can’t be done by telling people to do something that you’re not actively and openly doing yourself. So I would say that in addition to the practice of self-reflection, I'm also proud of the example of literacy I have presented my students.
My questions about how to teach better have been the same for quite a while now. In fact, these are the challenges which I suppose will remain as long as I’m an educator. The common thread I notice is that they’re all ultimately about
attention:
- Where is the balance between learners' need for independence and their need for a structured environment?
- How can I help inspire students' motivation to learn, but stay out of learning's way?
- How can I sustain my concentration better, and how can I become more inclusively attentive to what’s going on in the classroom? How can I help students do this?
These essential questions come to bear in hundreds of situations and interactions per day. Unfortunately, the reason they're the ones that keep occurring is because the environments in which I'm accustomed to working function, however unwittingly, to
distract everyone inside. It's difficult to navigate young adult independence, leave adolescent learning to itself, or assume that exhorting kids to “pay attention” will have any effect, when all those bells keep ringing. They shatter everything.
My niece Julia, at age six, astonished me with a prodigious display of concentration when she set her mind to working out how to build the tallest tower she could. This happened right in the middle of the kitchen floor with the buzzing of meal preparations all around her. It was eerie. You could say
Julia inches from her ear and she wouldn't quite hear you. The concentration muscle I meditate for can't compare to her effortless focus. It’s amazing to watch the towers that careful attention can build.
I am interested in Montessori teaching in large part because I feel I would be plugging in to a system already built to further the same goals I want to work on. Now that I've seen the reverse, it makes perfect sense to mold a learning environment and corresponding pedagogy to foster concentration. It makes sense to build it with enough structure so that learners enjoy freedom, not license. And the more aware and interconnected kids are, the better they teach each other. At last, school that
makes sense.
How To Work Together
The last time I shared a classroom was when I was a student teacher, so I will reflect on what those experiences showed me. I can also address the kind of teaching partnership I would like to establish with a colleague, but haven't yet had the chance to.
First among the benefits of co-teaching I absorbed as a novice was simply sharing the job of
observation. A classroom in session is a microcosmos where teaching effectively often comes down to one’s degree of awareness. So much is always going on; from moment to moment, what is salient? Two teachers' total attention to the students, and just as critically to each other, can be more than the sum of the parts. The most valuable information I remember exchanging along these lines was usually about subtleties of body language, word choice, tone of voice...This was sharing a classroom in the sense of collaboratively fine-tuning our sense of empathy and becoming more mindful of how we presented ourselves. One might say we were trying to help each other hone social and emotional intelligence. The beauty of this kind of collaboration is that it can grow from any of thousands of interactions a day, even the seemingly trivial. And it often does.
A shared sense of the classroom operations as “open-source” helps, too. I remember sharing units of curriculum, usually novel-based, with my master teacher. In our respective classes, we'd try each others' versions out and compare notes later. There’s a degree to which this type of collaboration feels less relevant to me now, as over time I’ve become less worried about how to plan a way to get kids to make a certain type of written product. Still, there’s endlessly good discussion to be had between co-teachers about how best to structure the students’ learning environment and the best tools to put at their disposal. It is natural for teachers, even new ones like I was, to nestle into certain comfortable classroom arrangements and justify maintaining them beyond their usefulness for kids. Having a professional partner who shares the goal of stewarding the students' school experience helps keep the focus on learners before teachers. It’s more of a macro-scale collaborative lens, but no less valuable than the high-resolution focus on the intricacies of momentary interactions.
The majority of my teaching experience has been in relative solitude. (Collaboration with colleagues in different classrooms, fruitful as it may be, is not the same as co-teaching.) Over time, I’ve arrived at a natural pacing for my own teaching goals: two per year is about right, or three if the targets are modest enough. I mean goals like,
establish more contact with parents,
spread writing feedback around more equitably,
get more student debates going, or
talk less during class; any refinement to my practice can be up for grabs. Specifics aside, I imagine most teachers improve more or less the way I do—namely, step by step. Progress would be much more easily tracked and encouraged in a partnership where co-teachers could “sponsor” each others' individual goals. The kind of mutually supportive practice I’m envisioning would take highly open and honest communication, a willingness to acknowledge one's own weaknesses, and plenty of diligence. It's just the kind of professional partnership I would like to co-construct.
Diversity is best understood above and beyond any quantifiable measure, as a kind of essential “newness” about everybody, all the time. Too often the word connotes little more than the metric of
ethnicity, a beautiful spectrum in itself, but a paltry substitute for the full richness of personal difference we can observe and learn from in our communities.
My first teaching job started ten years ago in a small ESL academy in downtown Ann Arbor. We had students of all ages from all over the world—many were there to prepare for studies at the University of Michigan, but there were also professionals, tourists, refugees, children...It was quite a mix. Since then, I've taught English and ELD in three East Bay high schools, all of them human kaleidoscopes. In this sense my work experience has prepared me for encounters with diversity by deepening cultural sensitivity. (I like to think of my blog as a further way to advance this same goal, through independent scholarship.)
At least as importantly in terms of the daily stream of teacher-student interactions is the kind of preparedness that helps me let go of blind spots. I've been astounded by the wild diversity of stuff kids
would write, once they felt they
could. But sometimes I have had to overcome personal bias before seeing the full value of their work. Two students from a few years back for example, Nick and Lauren, had approaches to sports writing that showed me a lot I'd been missing. No huge sports fan myself, I didn't read much of the genre or show examples to my students. How remarkable then, that without any “teaching” from me, these two students used the freedom of writing topics in our class to delve deeply and skillfully in two directions. Nick went after the politics of the big professional sports leagues while Lauren wrote strategical game-by-game analyses of her soccer team's entire season. They kept at their craft, week after week. I hope I helped them; certainly they've been helping many students to whom I've since shown their work.
Teaching Nick and Lauren taught me plenty about writing, but more to the point is that I remember them as the two who woke me up to connections I could share with
all my student athletes that had been hiding under my nose. Learners need to be met on their own diverse terms. What this means for teachers is that we have to remind ourselves to stay open to all the surprising perspectives they can bring to the work at hand.
If you want to standardize people, diversity is a problem. Otherwise, it's something to celebrate. As the written output of my English classes shifted online, for instance, our own evolving writing practice naturally grew into one of the central texts of the class. We read each other. And whether you were a tenth grader in my first period or a senior in sixth, everybody could read anybody. (This was a “virtual” way to diversify my classes' age groups.) My students often told me that their classmates' writing provide some of the most valuable lessons from our class. Encountering differences among peers openly and safely opens a lot of eyes.
People are also diverse in the lessons they'll learn from a given situation. Students' shared experiences, even intensely foreign ones, such as spending two weeks in the Sahel on a rural construction site, still reverberate quite uniquely. I'm referring here to
a trip I had the privilege of chaperoning in April of 2009, with 18 Bay Area high school students. I'd long nursed a desire to visit West Africa myself, and had lots of curiosity fulfilled; however, my most important lesson came from observing the students abroad. Among us four adults, we split them up one evening two thirds through our stay in the village. The idea was to have a one-on-one chat with every kid to see how they were doing and how they expected the trip might change them. A student who'd traveled from California to Mali on a Chinese passport told me he'd been observing the way the villagers shared resources, and drew a comparison to a contemporary scandal about industrial pollution in China’s milk supply. He said he'd started thinking hard about how his home country really operated. One of the most outgoing social leaders told me (with a vulnerability I never saw her display before the group) that she'd learned a different way families could work, and that she'd been reflecting on her relationship with her mom. I suddenly felt I was witnessing growth in fast-motion, and that underneath the work we shared in that village, these kids were developing in countless directions each.
This “diversity of learning” is something I associate most notably with that trip, but also and persistently with what I observe at local service learning events alongside students. For the past five years I've been the faculty advisor for a community service club called
buildOn. My favorite service spot is
Sausal Creek, partly because it's just beautiful. I was there the other week for a weeding session and was struck, as always, by the different reasons kids seemed to attend. Plenty seemed to be there with and for their friends, and I mean that positively. What nicer way is there to learn how to restore a watershed than with pals? And how better to bond with pals than to restore a watershed together? Another reason I like returning is that buildOn hooks the same kids up with volunteer work here repeatedly, so I get a sense of the long-term benefits of service learning. One of the Sausal Creek veterans is an Oakland Tech student named Finn. He gave a talk to the assembled volunteers on the species of plants surrounding us, which were invasive and which weren't, what strategies were in place to restore the creek, and what we'd be doing today to help it along. Later, as we hacked sweatily away at thorny medusas of ivy, he casually offered some insight: “You know, ecological restoration projects can't afford to be seen as paternalistic.” It's amazing, the many directions learning can move people, all from the same starting point.
These experiences tell me that
all communities of learners are diverse, no matter the size and no matter anyone’s origins. And as a long-term witness to the damage traditional school systems do by oversimplifying conversations about our differences, I’m ready to teach in a safer space for kids to grow in all the diverse ways they’re going to.
