Differentiating Between Your Interests and Theirs

There are plenty of things you have to teach, and few of them your students seem interested in learning... how do you bridge this gap?

We were right in the middle of a unit on 19th century American Romance Poets and though I was smitten with the topic it was clear to everyone present that things couldn't get much more dull. I might have celebrated the calm classroom control I was experiencing if it weren't for the fact I had to physically wake half the class up each day when the bell rang. This was not going well.

The fact that Rodney wasn't finding beauty in these words we poured through each day did not surprise me. Nothing had captured his interest all semester so this seemed par for the course. But Rodney ended up saving the day for the whole class, and me, when one afternoon he came up after the bell and handed me a cassette tape. "What's wrong with this stuff you're teaching Ms. Fournel is that it's not speaking to any of us. If you want to hear real poetry, listen to this."

And that's how I met Tupac.

It took me awhile to learn how to listen to Tupac. I was not used to this kind of music and I hadn't developed an ear for hearing more than a repetitious beat. But when I took the time to really hear what Tupac was saying - I could appreciate what Rodney meant. This too, was poetry. And my struggle to reach that conclusion opened my eyes to the struggle my students were experiencing.

From that day on Tupac became part of my curriculum as did countless other musicians, spoken word poets, family storytellers, and visual texts that we will probably never see in the textbooks we're asked to teach.

My students learned more about meter and rhyme, simile and metaphor, irony and symbolism using texts that interested them - than they ever would have using solely the texts that interested me (or my school system).

Sure, I had to photocopy more - and that was a pain because there was never any paper (so I bought it myself). And I sometimes had to justify the music blaring from my room when the principal walked by. But if your ultimate goal is to make sure your students learn, eventually you realize there's no easy way to accomplish that.

You can tap into your students interests by formally surveying them early in the year, or you can simply listen to their conversations and ask them questions to learn more about what they read, what music they like, what natural phenomena they're fascinated by, what their jobs are, where they want to visit, what cultures they're curious about...

Students are so used to us dictating the content they're exposed to in school that they begin to take it like medicine - without much question as to whether or not it's good (or useful) for them. But it doesn't have to be this way and the true fun of teaching comes when it ceases to be a one-way operation. You may very well have a Rodney in your class who has as much to teach you about poetry as you have to teach him.

The news last night made me wonder..

What would a $700 billion 'bailout' for education get us?

If Wall Street's firms are "too big to fail," certainly our school system is too big to fail, too.

What do we learn from the debates?

How many people will be watching the presidential debates this Friday? How many students will be among those numbers?

Of all the TV time these candidates have had throughout this election – the hours they spend publicly debating should be the most important. Though they practice for the debates and deliver much the same rhetoric we hear in speeches and commercials – the very format of a debate requires a level of un-scripted conversation we rarely get to see in a presidential election.

If education is essential to full participation in a democracy, a well educated person should form his or her opinions of a candidate not based upon the latest attack ad, or even an emotionally delivered speech at a recent campaign rally. A well-educated person needs to be able to research the background of the candidate, to assess their experience and how that prepares them for the office, and to hear them speak without a teleprompter on what they really think about the issues.

The presidential debates should be forums for a real glimpse into the personality and thinking of our candidates. As they stand on visual and verbal display we should be able to assess how they perform under pressure, how quick they are to react to a challenge, how honest they seem when sharing an opinion.

But what is a voter to do when even the debates give us another healthy dose of recycled lingo and field-tested sound bites? To truly form well-founded opinions of our candidates we have to work harder than ever to seek out unbiased truths and to separate the facts from the fiction.

This is why it is more important than ever that our students learn the vital skills of critical thinking. Unless we are content to let our votes be dictated by the flashiest, or ugliest, ad campaigns – it is imperative that today’s kids learn how to seek, find, interpret, and use information to make the very important decisions that will determine the shape of tomorrow.

The Large Hadron Collider and My Quest for Inspired Teaching

For the past several weeks I’ve been daydreaming about the Large Hadron Collider. It’s the world’s largest particle accelerator – designed to help physicists study the smallest known particles that make up all matter.

I don’t currently understand the first thing about the various wonders this 100 meter long machine is designed to find, but I am fascinated by their names: The Higgs Boson, an extra dimension, dark matter, the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang, Quark gluon plasma, antimatter, the Beauty Quark, cosmic rays…

My family has been quite puzzled by my new infatuation. I pretty much failed physics in high school and science has never been my strongest subject. So why this sudden obsession with particle physics?

It took me a bit of reflection to figure out the answer to this question, but now I know.
I’ve been working in education and school reform for the past decade and never before found such a perfect metaphor why I wake up every morning and still hunger to do this work. You see, to me, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic example of what people can do when they make the most of their innate desire to learn. It’s the largest machine in the world – and it was created exclusively to find the answers to questions.

Think about all the time, money, and creative energy that went into creating such a monstrosity.

Do a quick search of the web and become overwhelmed by the ecstatic chatter of scientists who cannot wait to begin exploring what the LHC is going to find.

This is hunger for learning in giant, incredible proportions.

Through my years spent in schools and in the company of passionate change agents I have often heard the doubtful voice that says our society is not built to handle an entire population of well-educated individuals. There aren’t enough colleges, enough jobs, enough career ladders to accommodate so much brilliance. They use this logic to explain away a lack of progress, a resistance to change. But the LHC is a splendid example of the fact that such nay-sayers are mired in a failure of imagination.

If every kid had an Inspired Teacher, and grew up to be a radically creative adult, take a minute to ponder the tremendous things human beings might invent to answer every question that comes to mind.

A Conflict - Without Resolution

I never actually heard the racial epithet that rocked my classroom, but the fallout from that single hateful word was heard throughout the entire school.

It began with two high school students, one white, one African American - both young men. The actual incident involved an innocent piece of paper that ended up on the ground and the accusation that it landed there on purpose. Something so simple, hardly even the hint of a spark. But it took little more than a spark to fuel a fire that was always lurking in the embers of this rural southern school.

The white boy threw the verbal Molotov cocktail.

It's been nearly ten years since those boys hurled their desks to the floor, threw punches at one another, ended up suspended, and stirred up anger and resentment among their peers. But I still spend nights thinking about what I might have done to prevent the conflict, and what I should have done afterwards to see that it was resolved.

The school where I was teaching had been for "whites only" until desegregation laws forced a change. Though it had been decades since the laws went into effect, my fellow teachers could tell harrowing stories of their days as the first class of African American students to step across the threshold. In a poor rural county where the farm owners could easily trace their ancestry back to before the Civil War, the scars of slavery and its aftermath ran deep, even in 2000. It was rumored that this county still housed an active branch of the KKK.

This history that clung to the mini-skirts and jerseys worn by my students baffled me. I was new to the south, new to rural life, and blissfully unaware of the complexities of living and learning in a historically racist community - thanks in large part to my upbringing in the Bay Area of California.

But in retrospect all of this is an excuse, one I use to comfort me when I think about that day in my classroom. It's vital to understand the context in which our students exist, but it's not okay to use that knowledge as an excuse for our inability to help them function there.

You see what's missing from the story I've told so far is me. Where was I? I was standing in the front of the room, frozen with panic. And after the immediate smoke had cleared, I actually tried to go back to my lesson. I'm not proud of one second of that story. I'm deeply disturbed that it happened in the first place.

It was my job as a teacher to create a classroom community that was safe from that kind of hatred. And though I am not naive enough to think I could undo decades of entrenched racism in a single semester, at the very least I could have made the effort to have courageous conversations with the students about this reality in their lives. After the conflict I should not have pretended like it didn't happen - for that only furthered the hurt. I should have found a productive way to talk about it with my students so we could determine as a community how to prevent such a thing from occurring again.

The way I handled the conflict in my classroom was no different from how my peers had been handling it for years. The fact that it happened in my classroom was nothing unique to me - it happened in other classrooms all the time. But as a teacher I had the power, and I would argue the responsibility, to play a role in history not repeating itself. I taught English, but I probably would have made a greater impression on the lives of my students if I had focused more on teaching the skills of conflict resolution.

Teachers, like all other people on this planet, learn from their mistakes. But because we work with young, impressionable human beings - there are greater ramifications when we make those mistakes.

Today the young people from that class are in their late-twenties. They are out working in the wide world, making lives for themselves and leaving impressions on the lives of others. When I think of my old students I find that I don't wish they remembered reading Thoreau or Hughes or even that they are writing in personal journals. Today all I wish is that they they are kind.

Open Letter to the Presidential Candidates

What follows is an open letter we sent to the presumptive candidates in July - urging them to make education a top issue in the campaign and in the policy agenda of the next president of the United States.

Dear Senators McCain and Obama,

Though there are many issues in this election, few are more important to the future of our country than education.

Center for Inspired Teaching is transforming education by investing in teachers. Our work with thousands of teachers, through courses, mentoring, and whole school partnerships over the past 13 years has proven that teachers are the solution. They are where the rubber meets the road in our schools. Yet all too often teacher quality is not the focus of school reforms. Improving accountability systems, establishing programs to attract new teachers and retain experienced ones, and encouraging new curricula are all valuable strategies in and of themselves, but they will accomplish little if we are not simultaneously investing in the quality of our nation’s teachers.

Inspired Teachers like Carolyn Wells prove this point. Carolyn teaches second grade in a school where less than 30 percent of students are reading on grade level. Her school tried every intervention you can imagine to get kids reading: after school tutoring, new textbooks, less recess, more testing. But what Carolyn noticed was that none of the one-size-fits-all strategies were working for her class filled with 22 individuals. So she came to Inspired Teaching looking for new ways to reach the students who were struggling to keep up. She took an Inspired Teaching course in which she learned to teach vocabulary through movement, to tap into students’ imaginations through storytelling, and to let her children’s various interests guide the reading material – not the chapters in the textbook. She applied what she learned in the classroom and at the end of the year she had the highest reading scores in the school. Carolyn was the solution, and there are hundreds of thousands of teachers out there just like her who have the potential to change what happens in their schools.

With this in mind, as you continue to develop your education agenda Center for Inspired Teaching asks you to consider the following:

1. If our nation is to remain strong and healthy, it is time to establish a higher, and more meaningful, standard for student success. It is not enough for young Americans to do well on standardized tests that assess a narrow set of basic skills. Rather, the graduates of our K-12 system must be prepared to engage fully in civic life. All of our children deserve a rich, relevant, and rigorous school experience that prepares them to think critically, demonstrate understanding, solve complex problems, and apply their learning to the challenges facing our communities.

2. A higher goal for students requires a new role for teachers. It is time to redefine the role of the teacher in the United States from deliverer of facts to developer of future citizens in our democracy. Redefining the role of the teacher will require rethinking our policies and practices in the areas of teacher recruitment, preparation, and evaluation. The effectiveness of an excellent teacher cannot and should not be measured by credentials or test scores alone. Rather, teacher quality policies for a strong democracy will encourage fresh approaches to evaluating what matters: the quality of actual classroom instruction, and impact of that instruction on students’ abilities to be active, productive citizens.

At Center for Inspired Teaching we know there is tremendous potential in our nation’s classrooms. We are calling on the next President of the United States to push for comprehensive education reform that addresses the needs of the new global economy. In order to be successful this reform must include a strong focus on teacher quality. We urge you to bring the challenges we identify above into the current political debate so that the potential of our teachers can be turned into practice.

As you craft your education policy agenda, we would be honored to share with you our years of experience in schools and classrooms and our advice on the best and most effective way to reform our schools.

Sincerely,

Aleta Margolis
Executive Director
Center for Inspired Teaching