The Line

And the monthly cross-post. This guy’s on classroom management.

Just a note that I’ve updated the running blog conversations this academic year (finally) with some feedback, so if you felt like your voice dropped into the void, c’mon back for some apologies, coffee and doughnuts.

I’m also shocked– shocked– at how many downloads the rubric has gotten.  Are people interested in my little old handouts? Seriously? I always thought it was my philosophical acuteness and acerbic wit. I’ll put more stuff up if you want me to…

Well, heck– I had just thought I was getting my facts straight when last week I was discussing some new paperwork requirements in our building with colleagues. Who knew it would throw me into a philosophical tizzy that is making my head spin?

Not that the tizzy itself is really anything new– I’ve blogged about the damaging amounts of time and energy it takes to combat a broken school system before. What is becoming new, I feel, is the high-profile social acceptance and encouragement of such time and energy, as if the only hallmark of an effective education is the adult in the classroom– who luckily gets divorced or hospitalized as a result of their work. ASCD is even asking questions this week on how much administrators rely on the “niceness” of their teachers to carry out their plans– and carry the educational day.

And what is the common thread? It is a willingness on the part of people in power, however well-intentioned, to spin their terms such that they strike our most vulnerable spot as teachers: the need to care for our children. Excellence, love, sacrifice, high expectations, and “whatever it takes” all get mixed into a emotive stew, steaming with the implication that if we, as teachers, question any demand placed upon us, place any limits on what we are willing to do as teachers, we are forsaking our duty to our kids.

This is what Chris Lehman has identified as the Martyr Mythology in schools. It’s a unique rhetorical challenge, I think, one that isn’t paralleled in other union situations. Steel workers care about the strength of their product; textile associates worry about how tight stitches and buttons are. But teachers are charged with something far less concrete, and far more emotionally volatile: the well-being of a human spirit. I’m beginning to understand that the depth of responsibility teachers all feel for this well-being is directly proportional to the danger of our being manipulated for its sake.

For as our public school structures crumble further under the weight of what we now know kids need in order to learn, we will not be asked first to change those structures. We will instead be asked to be those martyrs. It’s almost understandable. After all, what is easier? Reworking schedules, curricula, parent relations, community resources, building design, class size, federal funding? Or merely relying on the documented and inexhaustible compassion of teachers for their students?

Scary.

And not theoretical, in the end. The need to sift out this stew has dogged me since my innocent conversations last week. For if I don’t know where I stand, I– or you– will sooner or later find ourselves sitting in a meeting with someone who will say to us, “But these new requirements are good practice. Don’t you want to engage in good practice for your kids?” And I don’t know about you, but I am almost guaranteed to let my heart speak before my head.

So I’m thinking about a checklist: a trilogy of simple statements that will help me fight the Martyr Mythology. Try these on.

1) Good practice is hard practice.

In order to prevent this fact from being used as a rhetorical weapon against teachers, we need to accept that it is true. Even under the most ideal of teaching circumstances– say, a socioeconomically supported, resource-rich class of fifteen students or less– good teaching will always be difficult, because it involves the ever-shifting, daily-changing, half-uncontrollable internal and external environments of a growing child.

To then try to make an argument to your administration from ease — as in, “Practice X is easier,” or “Practice Y is too hard”– may be true, but it’s also very tricky. It opens the door to the spirit-squashing and irrefutable response, “Why are you interested in teaching getting easier? You should be interested in teaching being good.”

The teacher needs to shift tactics here. Having a conversation about “efficiency” might be one way to do this. “Effectiveness” might be another. These are words that sidestep the pit of the Martyr Mythology. They convey the very real concern of whether a practice is practical or sustainable, without allowing the teacher to be dismissed as “tired”, “old school,” or “slacking off.”

2) Hard practice is not always good practice.

I’m sure we can all tick off on our fingers several things we do every day that make our lives more difficult, but don’t enhance our educational efforts for kids. Ask me about our attendance books sometime.

But also included in this category is a subtler form of systemic demand: practice that is essentially good, but is functionally redundant or non value-adding. The teacher who writes daily personal reflections on her lessons– but is also required to do so on the prescribed district-sanctioned form– comes to mind.

Teachers need to be ruthless in questioning and resisting as much of this kind of practice as possible. Our contracts provide some grounds for this resistance. Other situations will require good faith conversations with higher-ups, or finding and implementing solutions that are better than the ones presented to us by our systems.

One way or the other, a good portion of the Martyr Mythology rests on our compliance with hard practice that is not good practice. There’s a one word response to these kinds of systemic demands, however you can manage to say it. No.

3) Hard practice, whether good or bad, is not always sustainable practice.

What is sustainable practice? This is the age-old question.

My union’s answer is that a sustainable practice is one that can be achieved within a seven and a half hour work day. Extend beyond that time frame, and additional compensation of some kind is required: time, benefits, or money.

Me? I have never worked a seven and a half hour teaching day in my life. I don’t know any teacher worth their salt who does. On the other hand, I have also never been compensated fairly for the effort required to excel as a teacher– equivalent to the work week and responsibilities of any doctor or lawyer (as they are in most countries in the world, by the way).

So my personal feeling is that even if the union’s punch-card eight hour day approach is laughable, its line on compensation is as good a place as any to start defining what is sustainable. It’s where I might start a conversation about paid release time for the new paperwork requirements in my building, for example.

Teachers will differ on final definitions of sustainability, I suspect. But the only important issue, in the end, is that your answer is not, “It’s whatever it takes.”

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So tell me what you think of those.

And one last note on martyrdom. I have the luck to be friends with a minister who is well-versed in the history of the actual Christian martyrs. He pointed out to me last night that historically, a martyr is always reluctant. She never wants to make the sacrifice demanded of her; she never advertises; and she does everything possible to satisfy the needs of her truth before going as far as to give her own life.

The only people who held up martyrdom as a mass standard of behavior? You guessed it. They were the Church administrators.

Ian, my son, has another one of his double ear infections– unshakable fever for three days, general crankiness, etc. We have a walk-in after-hours clinic up the road from us that knows us by name these days, and normally we duck in and out with a sticker and antibiotics. Today, we had to sit on the floor.

All around us were little people in blankets, pajamas, on the laps of grandparents, lying across chairs. Flu, the doctor confirmed when I asked. On our way out, one little girl was being strapped into a portable bed. Two ambulances waited.

It made me think.

I would be surprised if there were an informed person in the country right now who didn’t know how the US stacked up against the top ranking country for health care according to WHO (France). But how about one of the bottom ranking countries– Myanmar?

Myanmar has no reported deaths from H1N1 as of last week. But what is the top cause of childhood death in that country?

Diarrhea. Yes– that stuff we cure with Pepto Bismol. The stuff we don’t die of here in the US– zero reported mortality cases in 2006– simply because we have access to clean water and decent waste disposal.

And if that doesn’t give you pause about the health benefits of living in America, think about this: If Ian and I had lived in Africa, there is a good chance he could have died of complications from his ear infection. 28,000 people did worldwide in 1990. That’s not counting the massive amounts of disability incurred via hearing loss, the top cause of which in developing countries is untreated otitis media. The WHO considers this such a severe problem that they have developed a worldwide health program specifically to address it.

Imagine. Imagine that your child gets diarrhea, and knowing that he might die from it. Imagine that your son gets a double ear infection, and knowing he might go deaf– because there is not a walk-in after hours clinic five minutes’ drive from your house, or a Target with over-the-counter medication at your fingertips, but a single traveling doctor you can walk to– if you’re lucky– once every few months.

Our current national debate about universal coverage, while absolutely essential, is also a privileged one. There’s no other way to remember it– except to remember it.

Try remembering it this way.

Aw, come on, Bill. Don’t I have enough to do?

My true fear would be that quantity diminishes quality. I don’t usually post until something really moves me, and then it often takes  me an hour or more to put the post together. I’m aware that this  does differ from other edu-bloggers, who take a more Tweet-y approach– but then again, our articulated purposes for blogging are different.

I’m also aware that you are putting forth advice for a collective student blog, versus adult singletons. But here too, do we wish to encourage flash posting? I’m not so sure.  Does gratifying a “digital” audience trump thoughtfulness? You say yourself that kids will struggle to post meaningfully. Why not work within their limits?

And more to the point– why isn’t student analysis of the purpose of the blog (newsy updates, reflective writing, or aesthetic publishing) driving the amount of posts?

What do you think, readers? How often do you post to your blogs, and why?

The first REM song I ever heard. I forgot how good it is. Throw Thoreau and rearrange… I suppose that’s a good chunk of reading and writing workshop, right there.

I don’t have a think tank. I’d like one. Filled with multi-colored fish and waving seaweed. A micro-ecology, at which I can smile with pleasure while I push it gently on its sturdy rollers to entirely block my classroom door. While doing this, perhaps one of the rollers would accidentally sever the phone cord, which summoned me from my classroom duties– during class– five times in one period yesterday. And perhaps behind that barricade of blue, where the water burbles wordlessly we trust you, I could invite some other colleagues to come in and create that second, more common level of understanding that is a think tank.

A delusion, I know. Yet I’d like to share the idea of the think tank with the gentleman sitting across the table from me, also yesterday, at a sub-committee meeting on a new school we’re trying to start in the community. He seemed like a stellar educator– smart, committed– but had some critical things to say about how teachers do not want to get their hands dirty with actually writing creative curricula. “They just don’t want to go there,” he sighed, and expressed relief that our alternative school model would cull the wheat from the chaff in that regard.

His words haunt and nag at me. Because, you see, in a given day I’ve heard more brilliant, fun, fascinating ideas from my colleagues– and from my own head– than in the best brain-storming session at TED.

Yet there’s the handwritten attendance sheets, the academic goal spreadsheets, the minutes from team meeting, the hundreds of photocopies, the IEP goal documentation, the phone calls to every kind of parent and guardian, shopping trips out of our own pockets for the supplies schools cannot provide– never mind the ever-enlarging crush of students packed into a room. To pretend that the daily demands of the minutia of a school setting do not outstrip every other kind of organizational model, in both amount and lack of resources, is its own kind of delusion.

The bottom line? My colleagues and I are not automatons. We’re just tired. And no standard of excellence in teaching can be expected to be achieved in any widespread manner without first creating the working conditions under which that excellence may flourish.

Long live the think tank.

Nancie Atwell leaves a detailed and thoughtful comment on her school. My response is below. (NB: revised from a 6 PM post, as I kept thinking and thinking about it tonight.)

Dear Dina,

Your blog has left me both inspired and confused – inspired by the accomplishments and engagement of your students and your own obvious success as a workshop teacher, and confused by the distortion of conditions for teaching and learning at my current school, CTL, and in my previous classroom at Boothbay Elementary.

To set the record straight:

- At Boothbay Elementary, I, too, took just five or six weeks – usually by Columbus Day – to help my seventy-five students learn workshop procedures and expectations.

- At CTL, I teach Monday through Thursday, in an 85-minute language arts block. (I also teach history, and I run the school.)

- I assign my students to write for a total of one hour for weekend homework; this is because I believe Thursday-Monday is too long for them to go without writing, momentum-wise.

- I assign students to read for half an hour every night, seven nights a week. My book The Reading Zone provides the practical details for this assignment and requirements and conditions of my reading workshop today.

- CTL students are not “standard.” On our website, we state that we cannot offer a special education program separate from the classroom; however, we work happily and continuously with mainstreamed students with special needs, including ADHD, dyslexia, and other visual processing disorders.

- CTL’s “detailed application process” is a one-page form, followed by a child visiting the school for a morning.

- The “substantial parent involvement” is is a requirement of two hours of labor each year, which helps us lessen maintenance expenses and keep tuition low.

- Tuition fees cover about 60% of school costs at CTL, which means that I fundraise twelve months a year in order to keep alive a non-profit lab school where faculty develop and refine methods that we hope will make a positive impact in public school classrooms. That’s our mission.

- Finally, in any given year at CTL, I’ve dealt with more problems with parents than in my entire previous public school career combined.

I am impressed with your commitment to your students and to reading and writing workshop; the rubrics you and they develpoed are terrific and likely to be helpful to other teachers. The kids you teach are fortunate; clearly, the work you’re doing will influence them for a lifetime. But I am mystified as to why your accounts of your teaching need me as a straw woman.

Sincerely yours,

Nancie

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Dear Nancie,

First of all, I thank you deeply for visiting the blog and taking the time to write. I am delighted and honored.

No straw woman arguments or distortions are intended by my comments on CTL, and I apologize front and center for any factual errors that I made in my post.

That being said, I still have questions about how the private standing and entrance requirements of CTL affect the diversity and challenges of its student population. I am certain CTL entrance and enrollment requirements are minimal, fair, and well-supported, as you state. However, it still seems to me that it’s impossible to get around the fact that even with the lightest administrative touch, the absence of a special ed program (or ESL program?), the necessary charging of tuition, required parental involvement, and even a required physical visit at CTL all self-select for families and students who are already predisposed to succeed at workshop.   

Most importantly, though, I want to make clear that I bring this up not to malign the school or the workshop model– Lord knows, if I were Queen of Education, I’d have every school look like CTL. I mean only to point out that acknowledging the differences between CTL and, say, Edison High School in Washington DC, is necessary– and not a good enough reason to dismiss workshop as unsustainable.  (I’m sure you’ve encountered that argument before.) In fact it’s exactly because the public schools are not CTL that our need for the joys and strengths of the workshop approach is desperate.  I hope that’s a little clearer.

I do want to quote in In The Middle in regards to how long it took you at Boothbay to teach procedures at workshop, because it’s important that we in the public schools on a quarter system understand it correctly. In your chapter on evaluation (page 225), you state “At the end of the first quarter I couldn’t base grades on progress towards goals because there hadn’t yet been time or an occasion to set them,” and then go on to explain that you based that first round of grades on “good faith participation in workshop.” I took this to mean that the majority of the quarter was spent teaching and practicing the various procedures the children needed to succeed independently in the workshop model. Did I misinterpret?

Again, I appreciate your visit very much. I will hold onto your kind comments for encouragement.

Very sincerely,

Dina

The secure link to this file is below. Take, tweak, share. The categories were my invention, but all other wording you see here is the production of group draft on a digital projector while I edited and typed according to class input. This was not purely democratic– I chose a day where I saw all my classes, ran the first class’ draft through the second class, the second class’ draft through the third, and so on, calling it a day by the end of school at 3:30 PM– but it worked. What you see here, then, is a pure kid take on what they believed successful behavior looked like in each of the arenas I wanted to assess.

This was the rubric I then gave back to them on the following Monday, asking them to both rate themselves and give themselves percentages.  The latter was for the sake of our rubric-unfriendly report card, otherwise I would not have included it.

You will find some small errors in it, as I did, too late– I think the production of it drained my editing energy– but nothing that changes the essential meaning of the document. You’ll also note that is purely behavioral. This is deliberate. In the workshop model, it is essential to frontload procedures and behaviors, so that the kids can be “set free” to work productively later while you then add in content mini-lessons and conferences. Nancie Atwell managed to take an entire quarter to focus on procedural knowledge when she pioneered workshop at Boothbay Elementary in Maine. I get five weeks max, or important people start to question my rigor. I do the best I can. It seems to be working. More on that later, perhaps, when I get a chance to think about the perfect “Workshop Procedures in Five Weeks.”

The kids invariably found better and more precise wording for a number of things on the rubric, including my favorite: that “2″ level effort on “Writing Workshop” could include someone dealing with interruptions with good intentions, but “unnecessary actions.” I can see that kid clear as day, can’t you? “Dude, you HAVE TO BE QUIET, OK? It’s WRITING WORKSHOP! GEEZ!”

Enjoy.

http://www.box.net/shared/3efkxtqz8c

My first response to Doug on our joint reading workshop blog, Reading Free. Text below; original can be found here. We’d love your comments here or there. We like green eggs and ham.

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Dear Doug,

Finally– in so, so many ways. First “finally”: finally climbing out of the thicket of familial and school challenges to get back to blogging in general. Second “finally”: finally answering your first post here, Doug, and once again, thank you for agreeing to this exciting joint venture. Third “finally”: I think it speaks to the inherent quality of the workshop model that even with the craziness of the last few weeks going on, I finally feel like I am doing something worthwhile with my students’ precious time.

Precious, as you know, because our classrooms are not the delightful white and yolk cradled so carefully by Nancie Atwell’s own school, where she has designed the schedule around the model, and not vice-versa. Consider, for example, that she sees her students– no more than nineteen– for at least 90 minutes every single day for language arts instruction. Consider also something that I just learned from our literacy coach, who studied with Nancie in 2008: kids have Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday to complete substantial reading and writing at home. Consider also that although clearly the Center for Teaching and Learning does not seek out gifted students or discriminate financially, its population still self-selects for involvement, commitment, and “standard” students by a) being a private school that has a detailed application process; b) not having the financial means to address special needs, as they themselves state on their website; and c) requiring substantial parental involvement from the get-go.

So, then– precious, because we see our kids for so much less time. Precious, because our kids leave our rooms and enter a swift, unforgiving current of school culture to the very contrary of the principles we espouse through workshop. Precious, because our kids are so massively diverse in their needs, and so large in their numbers, and so often unsupported even at home.

And this, I would argue, is precisely why workshop is so important in the public schools. A public school does not make workshop unfathomable and unworkable. It makes itself the place where an oasis of personal choice, differentiation, meaningful instruction, and physical comfort like workshop is needed the most of all.

We’re five weeks into the model now, and I had my 100+ students rate themselves on a rubric to assess how successful they felt at the work. I reviewed each rubric with the student, and made adjustments to their self-assigned percentages in conference with them where necessary. I could count on one hand the times I did this. No student rated themselves below a 70% on one or more of the rubric elements, and those students were only a handful.

And I AGREE with them, Doug! They *are* silently sinking into their self-chosen books. They *are* producing 3-5 pages of draft on personally meaningful topics every week. They *are* engaging in daily, lively discussions of poetry. My high-needs IEP kids are working up to snuff. My ESL and former ESL students are indistinguishable from their peers.

Now, all that being said, we are now jumping into the far more instructional (versus procedural) form of workshop, and things may be very different in another five weeks. But I don’t think so. And here’s why: because workshop has let these kids know that their choices matter; that their voices mean something; and that workshop curriculum which is more arbitrarily taught still has a rationale.

In otherwords: workshop has bought their trust. And once you have the kids’ trust, I am discovering you can do nearly anything you like with them.

Could your next post reflect on how workshop and trust intersect in your classroom?

I’d also like to hear about the top major challenge you’ve got going. Actually, maybe we could make this a regular part of our posts back and forth: the workshop Challenge Du Jour. What do you think?

Yours,

Dina