Equality 101

Back in the day when I was an excited, enthusiastic prospective teacher my education professors mentioned the concept of co-teaching.  Co-teaching consists of two teachers (usually one general education and one special education) sharing the responsibility for the same group of students.  At first, I was reluctant to accept the idea as a valid method of implementing curriculum because I felt that most teacher candidates enter the profession under the notion that they will receive and maintain a large amount of autonomy in their classroom.  However, as a result of my student teaching experience and several years at my current place of employment I realized how reliant middle school teachers are upon one another as well as administration and supporting staff.  Therefore, when the concept of co-teaching came to my current place of employment at first I felt reluctant, but the reluctancy relinquished after several things fell into place.

First, my “co-teaching buddy” (as we came to call one another) was the special education teacher on my team that I had been working with since I started at my school district.  Secondly, we received a common plan time which allowed us to effectively share responsibilities and involve one another equally in planning, preparation, and to discuss student concerns.  Furthermore, we were able to move several students who required additional support into the co-taught class (I teach 3 sections and 1 was co-taught) which allowed us to adhere to the needs of those students.

Overall, the co-teaching experience was positive since I worked with a person who shared in all facets of the classroom including grading, parent contact, planning, and preparation.  Also, the behavior management in that classroom was as efficient as it has ever been in my career since there were always two pairs of eyes monitoring the students.  As a bonus, there was another adult in the room to laugh at my jokes because in teaching eleven-year-olds my wonderful sense of humor often is all for naught.

This year my school district is implementing the facilitative learning model in place of the co-teaching model.  In the facilitative learning model, a special education teaching “co-teaches” with all general education teachers on the team as opposed to remaining in one classroom.  Since the school district hired a certified teacher as a classroom aide on each team, I will have a co-teacher at least once a week for at least several periods throughout the day.

I was reluctant upon hearing the new concept of facilitative learning; however, it appears to be similar to co-teaching and co-teaching was an excellent experience, therefore, the facilitative learning model should be an excellent experience this year.  Hopefully, the new co-teacher in my classroom will laugh at my jokes.

As a sixth grade Language Arts teacher, I feel that I am not only teaching students literature, writing, grammar and spelling, but also how to be caring and productive citizens.  I attempt to incorporate concepts of character and citizenship into the school year’s first unit.  This unit consists of four stories that all contain main characters at the adolescent level requiring characteristics of courage, perseverance, and help from loved ones to overcome obstacles.  After reading all four stories, we spend the next two weeks working on our “Lessons in Living” projects.

When I was student teaching years ago my cooperating teacher implemented a unit called the “Lessons in Living” project which consisted of reading a story from Maya Angelou and engaging the “Lessons in Living” project.  This project consists of each student selecting four “Lessons in Living,” or four statements that guide the students in their lives.  One statement must be about family, one about friends, one about school and a “golden lesson.”  This statement could be described as the main lesson that the student lives by. This lesson could be about family, friends, school or religion.  After the students select their four statements, they write a short essay defending their choices, roughly one paragraph for each statement.  Next, the students each create a collage for their four lessons.  Usually, I will provide the construction paper for the students’ projects.  Lastly, the students present one of their four lessons to the class.  When implementing class projects, I try to utilize a reading, writing, and speaking element.

When I brought this lesson to my sixth graders, I appreciated how the lesson contains a reading, writing and speaking element.  Also, this lesson facilitates ample opportunities for the students to work cooperatively.  When I first implemented the project, the workload was difficult for the sixth graders, but one year I had the students develop only one statement, paragraph, and design a “mini-collage” on that one statement.  At the sixth grade level, four lessons will take roughly two weeks while a one lesson requirement may take less than one week.

Although I intend to revamp the majority of my curriculum throughout the upcoming school year, the “Lessons in Living” unit is one I will keep in tact.  However, I will change out several of the stories that I have utilized in previous years to keep the unit and concepts stemming from the unit fresh.  One goal of mine is to continually diversify the unit to represent various cultures and subvert the idea that only male characters can go on adventures while female characters struggle with emotions.  This challenge in particular is proving to be more difficult than I had expected it to be.

For the past few weeks, some of my GED students have been participating in a workshop that uses improv comedy to teach about job interviewing skills. As someone who’s taken improv in the past, and really loved it, it was interesting to me to see how this played out.
One thing I find really interesting about improv, particularly the process of learning it, is that it has a pretty explicit philosophy about trust and interactional support. For example, if you are onstage, and another member of the team does something you are going to respond to (this is called “making an offer”), you have a few choices as to how to respond. One is that you can shoot the offer down (i.e., your teammate says “I am a penguin,” and you say “No, you’re not.”) Another is that you can shoot the offer down while adding a competing one (i.e., you say “No, you’re not, you’re a gorilla!”). You can also agree with the offer (i.e., “I agree, you are a penguin.”) or agree with it and add something (“Yes, you are a penguin! And you have a milk mustache!”) The first two options, shooting down a teammate’s offers, is actually a big improv faux pas. It might get you some laughs (because conflict can be funny in a limited way), but it also doesn’t facilitate you and your teammates continuing to build a scene together. The third option, just saying yes, is better, but it also kind of stops the scene, because it doesn’t give your teammate anything back to work with. The last option, which is called saying “Yes,and,” is the optimum one, which theoretically is what you want to be doing all the time. You support your teammate’s offer, and give one of your own so that the scene can keep going. The reason “Yes, and” is so important, improv teachers usually say, is that improv is not about one person being funny on purpose, like standup comedy. There is some of that, of course, but the goal of improv really is to get to the kind of funny that happens when a group of people play together without a script. In order for that to happen, everyone has to mentally commit to the interaction as a whole, not just or even primarily to their personal part of it. When I first was taking improv, a few years back, I remember thinking that this is really a code of ethics for how to live in a supportive community. (Of course, the danger of doing this offstage is that many communities are not supportive. While performing in an improv team, or learning as part of one, the nice thing is that it’s kind of required).
For students who live in confrontational environments, I think one thing that makes being in a classroom (or an interview) hard is the fear of losing face. If, in most of your life, admitting to being wrong could be a sign to other people that you’re weak, then it’s really hard to risk giving an answer in front of other students, or to allow a teacher to correct you, or to ask a question when you don’t understand something. By the same token, interviews definitely depend to a certain extent on deference to someone you don’t know, which can feel a lot like losing face. I wonder all the time about how big a role this kind of cultural gap plays in the difficulties some of my students face, and I worry about the fact that it seems so underdiscussed (particularly when the high expulsion rate of young male students of color comes up). Improv seems to offer a neat way to teach students how to switch modes-because it explicitly does NOT say, you are doing things wrong, or, you just need to put up with feeling disrespected to learn things or get a job. Instead, it teaches you to think about the success of the interaction, rather than the success of your role in it. It still is a switch, obviously, and it can’t apply to all situations, but it seems to me like an empowering way to rethink the appropriateness of conflict. And the truth is that every group of students (even those who are less often in trouble because their ideas of culturally appropriate behavior match their teachers’) could probably use a way to do that.

As a student, it is pretty safe to say I loathed science.  I couldn’t find much to enjoy in simply reading about the way the world worked, and I wasn’t too fond of step by step experiments that left little to the imagination.  I am, without a doubt, a kinesthetic learner.  I need to explore, create, and do before concepts can solidify in my brain.  Children are naturally curious.  Don’t believe me?  Spend a little time with a three-year-old.  “What’s that?”  “Why are we walking this way?”  “How did those dots get there?”  As educators, especially in science, it’s our job to cultivate that natural curiosity, not stifle it with worksheets and step-by-step instructions.

One of the best things you can do for elementary and middle students (and likely all students, though I’m no expert in secondary education) is allow them the opportunity to explore, make mistakes, and discover.  One of my favorite lessons for doing this is called “Egg Drop Soup.”  The setup and materials needed are relatively simple, and my students raved about this experiment for months.  Often, they’d ask if we could “do that egg experiment” as a reward or during indoor recess.  In fact, upon completion of the experiment the first time, my fifth graders applauded and said, “Thank you.”  Needless to say, I went home that night feeling like I’d done my job that day.  Read on for materials, lesson ideas, and resources.

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On July 21, the NAACP and a group of other civil rights organizations released a framework for using the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization to promote genuine educational equity in this country. The brief they presented can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B36JWPh1Vfr7OTc3ZWI0NDctODVlMC00N2I2LWExNmItZmIyZGEzY2E5Yzlm&hl=en&authkey=CNG2pP4E&pli=1

For anyone interested in educational equity, it’s well worth a read. I won’t discuss all of it here, but I’m really heartened to see the bugaboo of the Obama administrations educational reforms (i.e., the degree to which they disproportionately impact and disadvantage communities of color) discussed seriously in a national forum.

Two of the things suggested in this document seem particularly interesting/great to me. One is the basic recommendation that states be required to have some mechanism for ensuring equal funding across schools, and that those states that don’t be required to fix this before receiving federal funding. In my view (and I’m pretty sure in the view of most teachers out there), this has been a glaring omission in the Obama administration’s discussion of school quality. Sure, you can imagine that school quality is a function of the quality of faculty and administration-but the truth is that even the best teachers are going to have a hard time teaching in a school which just does not have access to basic resources. Not to mention the fact that underfunded school districts can rarely hire the best teachers, because they can’t pay enough (and because under the current reforms teaching in an underfunded/underachieving school lowers your chance at job security significantly). It seems less flashy to provide resources than to fire teachers, but I think it would cut much more effectively to the root of the problem.

The second thing I thought was very smart in this framework is the provision for community involvement not only in turnaround processes for low performing schools, but in the education system itself. This would require the federal government to get input from the community BEFORE taking punitive action, so hopefully bringing consideration of some of the problems with closing a school down, before it happens. Maybe more importantly, though, the civil rights organizations who wrote this document recommend an investment in parent education programs that would inform parents of their children’s educational rights and more generally empower them as participants in the school system. This again seems to me like a good dose of common sense. A lot of rhetoric about parental responsibility gets tossed around in school reform discussions, but the difference between responsibility (as a moral category) and know-how is never discussed, as far as I’ve seen. As our education system becomes less equal and more competitive, increasingly the kids who succeed are the kids whose parents know how to work bureaucracies. This is not a natural or moral human property, but a learned skill-and the degree to which policy makers seem OK with disadvantaging kids whose parents don’t have it seems pretty awful to me. Education, as this document says numerous times, is a civil right for all people in a democracy. It shouldn’t matter what your parents do, what they’ve learned, what the color of your skin is, or where you live. Things in the US don’t seem to work out that way, unfortunately, but if this framework were taken seriously, I think it could go a long way towards fixing that.

I’ve been seriously contemplating going back to school to get a PhD in social studies education. The lack of critical thinking being taught in inner city public schools is frightening and social studies as a core content area is being overshadowed by the “need” to up test scores in the more “important areas” of English language arts and math. As a social studies teacher and coach, I am shocked again and again how ill-prepared urban students are to make thoughtful, tough decisions, debate controversial topics, and fully understand the power of voice as citizens of our country.

The public school system is effectively deepening the socio-economic and racial divides between students who have and students who don’t. Students in affluent suburbs are being schooled in critical thinking, analytic thinking and historic writing. The low-income students I work with are not. And so we are bringing up a demographic of disempowered, superficial Americans who cannot differentiate between Fox News and MSNBC. Or between Jerry Springer and Larry King. It’s pretty pathetic.
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Twenty years ago today the first President Bush signed a landmark bill into law for Americans with disabilities known the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  According to the United States Department of Labor’s website, this act “prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, public accommodation, communications, and governmental activities. The ADA also establishes requirements for telecommunications relay services“.  While the ADA certainly does not mean that the battle for equality for people with disabilities is finished, the bill took an enormous step in the right direction. In terms of employment and accessibility, the ADA laid some groundwork for a system of checks and balances to ensure equality for people with disabilities.  Obviously the battle for equality for people with disabilities still rages on and the ADA is not perfect despite the various amendments that have been made to it over the decades, but the most significant part of ADA is the government’s attempt to raise the American public’s awareness of, respect for, and expectations of people with disabilities.  Unfortunately, it did take a country as wealthy as the United States until 1990 to take this step, but our government finally took that step.  Personally, the ADA and the future amendments to the ADA have brought me some comfort having a sibling with mental retardation.  As she toils in the workplace like the rest of us I feel better knowing that there are some layers of protection ensuring that my sister gets more than a semblance of fair treatment in the workplace. Read the rest of this entry →

I suspect that anyone who works with students and standardized reading tests of any kind comes up against “application” questions every once in a while. For my GED students, these questions tend to be the hardest kind, and as a result I’ve done a lot of thinking about how we learn or don’t learn to make inferences. Most of us see inferring as something that kids learn naturally, the same way they learn to talk and walk, but it turns out that this is not true. Or rather, that it is true, but that doesn’t mean that the kind of inferences the GED asks for are the same ones that my students have learnt how to make. Inferences are actually the product of a process of categorizing, separating important or meaningful information from what doesn’t seem important. If you’re a kid who’s been often read to, particularly using the kinds of books that standardized tests value and focus on (i.e., the white middle class American canon), whoever reads to you has usually modelled inference by showing you which facts are important in that kind of story. Think about the last time you read to a two or three year old, if you’ve had a chance to do that. On every page you probably say to the kid, “Now what is the pig doing? He’s cooking-what room do you cook in?” That’s how kids learn to infer.

My students do in fact make inferences in their everyday lives, since that’s a space in which they know what facts are and are not important. But they often haven’t had literary inference modeled for them very well, or very often, and as a result, they often can’t do something that, to most teachers, seems like it should come “naturally.” Since I realized this (by dint of reading about how kids learn to read), I’ve done some hard thinking about how I make inferences, and how to model that so my students can imitate it. It’s been a tough topic to think about because I’m so used to making inferences when I read that I’m almost not aware of making them at all.  What’s seemed to work so far is to break things down into steps. Today I tried asking students to first list the characteristics of Character A in the play we were reading. Then I asked them what kind of job Character A could do well, other than the one she had in the story. This last question is the kind of GED question that my students routinely get wrong or don’t know what to do with-but because their attention had already been drawn to the details they’d need to answer that question, they all came up with good answers. The trick now is to have them remember on their own what kinds of details go with what kinds of questions, but I was excited that breaking the inferring process down into steps seemed to work. It’s scary to me how often even teachers assume that what’s easy for us is just plain easy, or what comes naturally to us is just natural. It can have all kinds of consequences in the classroom that I’m rarely aware of until some sort of problem makes me sit up and pay attention

What is a virtual field trip?  A virtual field trip is a similar to a Web Quest or a compilation of pictures for students to navigate through on a computer. Virtual field trips can get students out of the classroom without ever leaving their desks. Read the rest of this entry →

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