By Mark

For almost a decade, half of my daily schedule has been part of an intervention "program" which is aimed at helping kids transition from middle school to high school. I put "program" in quotes because really all it boils down to is a group of like-minded teachers who've managed to advocate for a little bit smaller class sizes, collaboration time, and some flexibility in an elective class period where we can teach what we call "high school survival skills."

We've had to fight advocate each year to keep from losing the things that we know make the program a success. Though we have generally good support from our administration, they of course have to balance our requests with hundreds of other teacher and program requests. The model that we've now developed is rooted in several key philosophies, but one of them is that students need to be taught how to be students. Like in kindergarten, when some of the first lessons are about sitting in your chair and raising your hand to speak, we try to anticipiate and diagnose what fundamental skills a new high schooler needs to survive. Sometimes this means sitting down on the floor with a kid and cleaning out his backpack to help him develop some kind of organizational system. Sometimes this means practicing unpacking test questions or writing prompts by underlining or annotating. Sometimes this means doing a time inventory to help students develop time management skills. Test taking skills, typing skills, reading remediation, math support, active studying skills… the list goes on and on.

What is sad is that when we explain these lessons to some people (including teachers), their response is that kids should already know this stuff and that we are wasting our time.

And then some of them, unaware of the irony, go on to complain about how their students bombed the last quiz or flopped on the last essay.

To me, this illuminates a problem I see again and again, perhaps driven by the testing movement, perhaps not: we are good at teaching who, what, when, where (and sometimes why) but we often forget about how. That how is not how to build an engine or how to use a formula, but how to be a student. Too often I wonder if we assume kids will fill in that gap themselves. I recall many lunchroom conversations with teachers of all disciplines who vent about students not studying for a given test. I always ask "what did you to do teach them how to to study?" For some teachers, that is an a-ha! moment, for others, they dismiss my comment with something like "that isn't my job." I have the same battle with teachers (of all disciplines, including English) who complain about poor quality writing when all they've done is assign a prompt rather than teach how to write.

With all else we are asked to do, spending some time on how to be a student is one piece of the puzzle that I think is sometimes an afterthought, is forgotten, or is even outright dismissed as a waste. To me it is no different than teaching kindergarteners to raise their hands nicely and wait their turn: if we want a behavior to be performed consistently and successfully, we need to teach it and not just assume the kid will figure it out. That includes teaching students how to be good students.

In the last few weeks, and over the years as well, I've sat on numerous interview panels for the hiring of new teachers. Considering the RIFing taking place all around us, and considering that my district is one of the few who is actually hiring this year (due to retirements, growth, and the fact that my building was operating on a very frugal FTE budget the last couple of years) we were lucky, if that's the right word, to have an influx of candidates.

Like many districts, ours has a very strict protocol for interviews in order to help level the playing field for all candidates. We receive a packet with scripted questions, we rate answers, we share our ratings with our fellow interviewers, and so on. I read the same questions over and over, and listened to a good number of lame, vacuous, sound-byte superficial answers (peppered with some good quality concrete responses, thankfully).

There were questions about the candidates' procedures for planning and implementing lessons, calls for examples of problem-solving with parents and colleagues, requests for the candidate to articulate their rationale for organizing scope and sequence one way versus another, and the obligatory questions about standards, high stakes tests, and current EdTrends. 

I found myself thinking over and over again: how would I answer these questions?

Before long, I also found myself thinking: how would my colleagues answer these questions–now, not when putting our best feet forward to earn a chance at a paycheck?

In the interviews, the candidates I was drawn to were the ones about whom I found myself saying "I like him/her because I can tell that the gears are turning, I can tell there is thinking and reflection going on there." I kept coming back to this: I want teachers who think about what they do.

And no, not all teachers do.

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The biggest signal to all of us that the end is near–at least those of us who teach high school–is the playing of pomp and circumstance.

Last year about this time, I posted my message to the class of 2010, and while I tend to be exceedingly cynical about graduation and some of the other (in my opinion) overwrought aspects of The High School Experience (prom, pep assemblies, spirit week…), I do recognize how significant the earning of a diploma can be for kids.

As I sat through my high school's three hour long ceremony the other night, I was saddened that the ceremony itself couldn't be more about all the kids who were graduating. Instead, we had the typical parade of Valedictorians and Salutatorians. The class and ASB officers got their chance to speak. The athletic teams were honored (again and again, and then a few more times in case anyone missed it) and permutations of the clause "We did it!" were repeated a dozen times by and for kids for whom there was never really any question whether they'd be able to "do it."

Sure, everyone deserves their moment, but as the lists of scholarships for much-deserving students were read, as awards were doled out for high grades and other hard-earned accolades, it saddened me that some of the best stories weren't being told:

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I came across an article about the Federal Way Public Schools (where I had my first job, and I must add, also had a very positive professional experience) which described the current practice of automatically enrolling into AP or IB courses all students who have met minimum state standards.

Thinking back to my childhood, I remember hearing Garrison Keiller's recounting of Lake Wobegon from Prairie Home Companion. At that young age, I didn't follow the satire. Now, that simple line about how all "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average," keeps echoing in my mind as I look at what is happening in some districts as they recoil against cultural perceptions that schools are failing, and in their response, create a situation where they can claim all their students are above average. Federal Way Public Schools are not alone in this movement. I see the seeds of it in my own district as well.

The reasoning behind this movement often seems to be that (1) kids ought to be challenged, (2) AP and IB courses are challenging, ergo (3) all kids should take AP or IB courses. Unfortunately, whenever any opposition is offered, that logical fallacy is then too quickly followed by others: "Don't you think all kids deserve a good education? Don't you think all kids can learn?"

In talking to some of my friends and colleagues who teach AP courses in my home district and in other districts, there is tremendous reticence about the enrollment en masse policies which stack AP kids to the rafters regardless of readiness. Several teachers lamented how they were forced to move more slowly, cover less material, and deal with greater and greater numbers of students entering without the necessary skills preparation, dispositions, or work ethic demanded in an effective Advanced Placement course, all of which resulted in less effective preparation of the students who actually were advanced.

Somehow, it feels to me that the mantra of "all students can learn" is taken to obscene proportions with movements like the one described…with all this stemming perhaps from what is referred to as the "Lake Wobegon Affect" or "illusory superiority" where we tend to overestimate our own or our group's capacity or talent by comparison to others ("We're all above average! We're all advanced!"). I am familiar with a few high schools who require all students to enroll in at least one AP class–and I seriously doubt that is the best educational decision for each and every student. The article about compulsory AP or IB enrollment detailed how around a quarter of the students forced to enroll ended up dropping the courses–likely after damage to their GPAs (and thus their post-high school prospects) and perhaps their morale as a scholar. While there parents can choose to opt their child out of the compulsory program, some parents indicated that it had not even been communicated to them that their child would be enrolled in the advanced programming–let alone that there was a way to opt out.

In our fears of falling behind, and perhaps because we fear being ostracized for seeming to imply anything other than "all students can learn," it seems we're now deluding ourselves into believing that not only can everyone learn, but everyone can be the best learner (or at least that all students can be above average).

I'm all for high standards–but the missing modifier in this "everyone is an advanced student" approach is reasonable; I'm in favor of high reasonable standards. In Federal Way, all students who have met state standards are enrolled into advanced courses; when I look at my students who have met standard and passed the HSPE in reading and writing, I see the kids who have met the minimum standard, not necessarily kids ready to take on the rigorous challenge of Advanced Placement Language or Literature–courses wherein I see even my very best students struggling to earn high marks.

If the program in Federal Way works–that is fantastic. But in analyzing whether it works, it is important that people consider statistics beyond simply the number of AP enrollments and tests taken, which coincidentally (or not) is a primary component of certain prominent "best schools in the nation" lists.

We all know how parent partnerships are so critical to the education of our students. We also all know that not all students go home to less than ideal situations.

I'm lucky that my parent interactions have been generally positive. I tend to try to work with the kid as much as possible before getting a parent involved, whether the issue is academic or disciplinary (which means that by the time the parents are fully involved, most other avenues have been exhausted). Even still, most of my parent partnerships are positive.

However, I've started becoming a little more direct about what I am willing to ask from my "parent partners." I might be overstepping some boundaries, but I figure that after ten years of parents asking me to create extra credit assignments in the last weeks of the year so their little precious can make up the points they squandered earlier in the semester, I might as well try a bolder approach and start making requests of what should be going on at home…not just from the kid, but from the parent as well.

For example, I told a pair of parents last year that they needed to have some backbone and take away the video games and skateboard away from their son. 

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I've long been a fan of Mike Rowe, his show "Dirty Jobs," and the fact that he sheds light upon the backbone of our country: the skilled workers who keep pipes clear, lights on, toilets flushing, and walls square, among many other critical services.

What I particularly admire as well is that he is aware of how American public schools, buckling under the pressures of high stakes testing and the pervasive fallacy that "everyone must have a four-year-degree," have all but eliminated vocational education–and where it isn't eliminated outright, it is marginalized or labeled as "alternative" education. On May 11, 2011, Mike testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, highlighting this very reality and how it threatens the very backbone of our economy, country, and communities.

Though I encourage you to follow the link above and read his whole testimony, there is one portion I want to highlight. He says:

In general, we’re surprised that high unemployment can exist at the same time as a skilled labor shortage. We shouldn’t be. We’ve pretty much guaranteed it.

In high schools, the vocational arts have all but vanished. We’ve elevated the importance of “higher education” to such a lofty perch, that all other forms of knowledge are now labeled “alternative.” Millions of parents and kids see apprenticeships and on-the-job-training opportunities as “vocational consolation prizes,” best suited for those not cut out for a four-year degree.  And still, we talk about millions of “shovel ready” jobs for a society that doesn’t encourage people to pick up a shovel.

In a hundred different ways, we have slowly marginalized an entire category of critical professions, reshaping our expectations of a “good job” into something that no longer looks like work. A few years from now, an hour with a good plumber – if you can find one – is going to cost more than an hour with a good psychiatrist. At which point we’ll all be in need of both.

Throughout his testimony, Rowe refers to the "Skills Gap." This is the very real situation where schools are producing droves of graduates who lack fundamental skills to, as he puts it, do anything that "looks like work."

This is a drum I and others have beaten again and again here at SfS. When we as a system finally realize that more tests, more often, are actually the best way to weaken our country by underpreparing an entire generation for "real work," perhaps we'll value the vocational arts and sciences once again.

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And, of course, I'd love to see Bill Gates teach sentence structure to a class of forty 14-year olds if class size doesn't matter.

In my last post about Teacher Credibility, I shared how my efforts to forge relationships and build trust with my students has resulted in greater success in my recent lessons about everyone's least favorite Language Arts subject: grammar.

This got me thinking about Bill Gates et al.'s assertions about increasing class sizes. Rather than take the standard educator response about the value of connecting to each student blah, blah, blah, I instead thought about sales.

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I loathe teaching grammar.

Every year, it seems that I try a new approach, and seldom does it accomplish what I want it to (improvement in student writing). I'm no expert, and a cursory read of my posts will probably produce scores of errors which would infuriate devout grammarians, but I do believe that by high school, there is merit in helping students see the "interior structure" of the language they use. Knowing that structure, hopefully, helps the strong writers refine and the weak writers give name and therefore understanding to their weaknesses.

This year, my rocky relationship with grammar led me to make a dangerous decision. Last semester, I did not teach it. At all. I responded to student writing and offered revision advice, but I didn't instruct about anything grammar-related. Instead, we focused on higher order rhetorical arrangement (argument, essay, paragraph). Over the course of the semester, I proved to my students through lessons, assessments, and feedback that I knew what I was talking about and knew how to help them. They started intentionally responding to my feedback and advice, and in reflections on their writing processes, I repeatedly saw references to "I never knew this before" or "now I understand." A strange thing happened, then, a few weeks ago when I finally, grudgingly and anticipating epic futility, settled into my hardcore grammar lessons and curriculum.

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