On Community Conversations and Glitter

On Monday night, I participated in a Community Conversations event in Dallas. Though it was my first time to attend, these meetings—initially a response to the unthinkable violence in Dallas and elsewhere over the summer—have been taking place once a month since July.

For two and a half hours, a group of mostly strangers—young, old, white, black, Christian, Jewish, atheist, straight, gay, male, female—gathered to talk, to listen, to ask questions, and to seek to understand one another. That evening, we talked about our beliefs. We shared stories about violence and prejudice. We lamented the turbulent political climate. We made ourselves vulnerable, sharing thoughts many of us had never vocalized before. We faced truths about ourselves and one other. No topic was off limits: religion, race, politics, social media, education, parenting, fear, bigotry. We didn’t always agree, but we did always listen and seek to understand.

That evening was a sharp contrast to what I have seen blowing up on Facebook and Twitter in recent months with regard to the upcoming election. People on both sides are spewing opinions as if they were facts, posting and reposting videos and fake news stories as if they were truths, and ridiculing and/or attacking anyone who doesn’t share their political stance. No one is listening. No one is seeking to understand.

According to brain researchers, when people are in a state of extreme stress, fear, panic, or trauma, their brains enters a state of “fight, flight, or freeze” as a means of self-protection. The “upstairs” brain shuts down, and the “downstairs” brain takes over as they enter alarm mode. When the brain is in alarm mode, no learning occurs since self-preservation is the brain’s sole concern.

It seems as if the brains of most everyone in my social media network have shifted into alarm mode. So much anxiety, fear, and panic exist that the thinking parts of our brains have been hijacked by our downstairs brains. Calm discussion and intellectual discourse have disappeared, only to be replaced by angry rants, fearful diatribes, and vitriolic attacks. Sadly, we are hearing the same things from the candidates themselves.

As educators, our classrooms are microcosms of the world. Students of all backgrounds and beliefs gather to be educated. But so much can get the way of that objective. For one thing, many students come to us dealing with a lot of emotional noise and trauma.  Their brains aren’t ready for learning because they’re in alarm mode, always vigilant because they’re never sure where the next attack is coming from. Sometimes, the students’ trauma is due to life circumstances outside of school; other students are living the trauma in our classrooms on a daily basis as they face the cruelty of growing up in a social environment that isn’t always kind or supportive.

Students at Momentous Institute—a lab school in Dallas educating urban children from three years old to 5th grade, many of whom come from trauma backgrounds—learn about their own emotional well-being as part of their everyday curriculum. One technique the students use to help manage their stress involves a jar filled with glitter suspended in a liquid. The students are taught to think of the jar in terms of their own emotional well-being. They shake up the jars and observe the tiny specks of glitter whirling wildly, and they equate that with their own feelings when they’re in alarm mode, when stress, fear, anger, and trauma have taken over. The students learn to watch the jar mindfully and wait for the glitter to settle, just as sometimes they need to pause, take some deep breaths, and settle their own emotional glitter before they’re ready to learn.

Our nation needs to settle its glitter. Our social media feeds need to settle their glitter.

Our students need to settle theirs, too.

We can’t do much to make the myriad of issues our students face outside of school disappear, but we do have some control over what goes on while students are in our classrooms. The efforts we take to build community—to allow our students to interact with, learn about, gain respect for, and grow to trust others who may not be like them—are not wasted. When our classrooms and hallways become emotionally safe spaces for students, we open new possibilities for intellectual and personal growth.  

Since the outside world isn’t setting much of a good example of how to engage in civil discourse, how to discuss a topic, how to weigh multiple sides of an issue, how to disagree without attacking, and—perhaps most importantly—how to listen, we must teach our students these habits ourselves. If a student leaves school with a disposition for empathetic listening and a desire to understand that outweighs his need to be understood, we will have done work that will change his life forever.

My first visit to Community Conversations underscored for me my own need to have dialogue with people who are not like me. By seeking to understand others, I gain empathy for them. I may not change my mind, but I learn more about who they are and where they are coming from. And I see that, even though we may have wildly disparate experiences and be seemingly polar opposites in terms of opinions, we share many basic human needs in common.   

So many of our negative interactions with others stem from fear, ignorance, or lack of understanding. This is why creating a safe space, building community, and fostering authentic dialogue should be top priorities in every educator’s practice. If we can learn to listen to one another, to seek to understand others, and to settle our glitter, we can live and learn peacefully together in school and in the wider world.   

Brain Breaks

When you lift weights in the gym, you often need to take a break between sets to let your body rest and reset.  Similarly, when you ask your students to do "heavy lifting" mentally in your class, you should give them a brain break approximately every 15 minutes.  This allows information and skills to settle into the brain while a different part of their brain or body takes over briefly; moments later, students can return to their academic task refreshed and refocused.  

Here are examples of 10 brain breaks you could try in your classroom:

1.  Pause in your lecture every 10 minutes to allow students to explain their lecture notes to a person sitting beside them. 

2.  Brain gymnastics:  Give students five seconds to write the numbers by one as quickly as they can. "1, 2, 3, 4, 5.."  Then, ask them to write the numbers by one as quickly as they can while reciting their numbers by two as loudly and quickly as they can.  (Writing "1, 2, 3, 4." while saying "2, 4, 6, 8, 10.")  

3.  Play a quick version of Simon Says.  If you don't remember how to play, Google it. 

4.  Touch 4 Walls:  When students need a wiggle break, ask them to get up and touch 4 walls in your classroom.  As they visit each wall, they might identify something they have learned, examine something on each wall, or simply say a word or phrase as they touch the wall.

5. Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament:  Ask everyone to stand, find a partner, and challenge that person to a quick game of rock, paper, scissors.  Whoever loses sits down, and the winners challenge another winner.  Keep going until one person emerges as the victor.  

6.  Nose Goes:  This is a quick way to decide which member of a pair or group has to do something (get materials, go first, etc.).  When you say, "Nose goes!", each member of the group touches his or her nose.  The last one to do so is the one who gets to do the required task.   Kids love this.  I know.  It's crazy, right?

7.  What Did I Just Say?  Stop after (or during) giving directions or assignments and ask students to turn to a partner and tell that partner what you just told the class.  Or use other quick neighbor interaction:  (Tell your neighbor what you had for lunch.  Give your neighbor a high five.  Or a fist-bump.  Thank the person sitting behind you for coming to class today.).

8.  Activity Movement:  Place supplies or handouts in corners of the room.  Rather than handing out the papers or supplies yourself, ask students to stand up and get them.  Sometimes, I ask students to send the tallest person, the nicest person, the sleepiest person, etc. in the group to get supplies or handouts for the entire group. You're not a flight attendant; your students can fetch what they need on their own.  They'll appreciate the opportunity to move.

9.  Relaxation Exercises (or Chair Yoga):  Sometimes the brain break can involve just a moment of stretching or relaxation.  Stretching to the ceiling, looking left and right, leaning the head to either side, shrugging the shoulders for 20 seconds and then releasing them, deep breathing, or doing a spinal twist in your chair can get the wiggles out, release the tension, and focus your mind.  

10.  Stand, Sit, and Spell:  Choose a word that represents some content you are trying to teach (i.e., PHOTOSYNTHESIS).  As you spell the word aloud, ask your students to stand when you say a consonant and sit when you say a vowel.  See if you can speed it up.  Or have the males sit for consonants and stand for vowels while the females sit for vowels and stand for consonants.  Try letting them see the word on the screen or board as they sit, stand, and spell.  Then try it with the word out of sight.               

Many of the strategies above seem kind of silly and-dare I say it?-fun.  What's wrong with having a little fun in school, especially when it gets kids mentally prepared to focus back in on brain-intensive work? 

Giving Myself Feedback on Giving My Students Feedback

Imagine the worst football coach ever. He watches his team play a losing season but waits until the very end of the final game to let the players know everything they’ve done wrong in each game. As the team is getting chewed out and lectured, they feel terrible about what they’ve done. They feel like failures (though the scores on the scoreboard also have given them some hint of that all along), some want to quit and never play again, and even if they wanted to change and improve, it’s too late now. The games have been played and the record books are closed.

In my English classes, I was sometimes like that coach. I let my students work on pieces of writing, gave them little guidance beyond the initial assignment and perhaps a skills lesson at the beginning, and then collected their completed papers, which I spent hours of my outside-of-school life grading. It was like a second job, and I was the manager who was writing hundreds of scathing employee evaluations. My students received their grades--usually not as high as they’d hoped for--along with countless corrections and frustratedly scribbled comments explaining how far they had fallen short of my expectations. And that was that. No wonder many students shut down and began to view themselves as failures. I had prevented any hope of a growth mindset taking hold. Except for the most resilient and determined ones who sought help to pull their grades up, most of my students decided then and there that writing was a skill they just weren’t any good at, and they lost all hope for future improvement.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the feedback we give our students. I have yet to find one expert in the field who says that the time and effort I spent writing comments on my students’ finished papers was worth it. I should have known that already. My students had already given me the feedback I needed in the form of crumpled up essays left in the trashcan or abandoned on the classroom floor. They weren’t planning to use my comments to help them improve; mostly, they resented me for writing them.

Several things were problematic about the way I was approaching writing in my classes. First, I had created a culture where the grade was the one important goal. Learning and improvement were not on the students’ radar screens at all. Second, I didn’t realize when the feedback was necessary and welcome: along the way as the students were doing the writing. I should have been working feverishly while my students were writing, holding brief conferences with each student to pinpoint precise moves that would help that student along the way, and I should have spent much less out-of-class time scrawling comments on student papers. Of course, this was often impossible because much of my students’ writing time occurred at home where I was not available for assessment. My class time, I thought, was too precious to waste on allowing students to sit there and write. Finally, I mistakenly believed that it was my job to rewrite my students’ papers for them, to use my expert editing and revision skills to spot and correct every error and to reword, reorganize, and clarify their writing for them. It was a rigorous mental exercise for me; my students, however, learned nothing from it.  

I’m embarrassed now as I think back on some of the types of comments I wrote on student papers. Here are some of the types of things I said and what I really meant:

What I wrote: Why didn’t you [whatever thing you were supposed to have done but didn’t]? We talked about this in class!

What I meant: By “we talked about it,” I mean that I mentioned it to the class as part of my lecture on things to include in your paper. Why didn’t you do the thing I told you to do but never checked to see if you knew how nor even understood what I was saying. Though I didn’t let you do any thinking about this on your own or process this skill with other students, I am still holding you fully accountable for this concept.

_____________________________

What I wrote:  Fragment!

What I meant:  I know the difference between a fragment and a complete sentence, and I have just proven that by pointing it out on your paper. Apparently, you have not mastered this skill, and it’s probably because I didn’t spend any time allowing you to explore this grammatical concept with any guidance.

____________________________

What I wrote:  (I didn’t write any words here; I just circled a bunch of errors, added some necessary commas, and corrected some capitalization issues)

What I meant: Proofreading is the most important thing, and you don’t do it well. In fact, it’s more important than the ideas you are writing about or whether your writing communicates its intended message. Since I have clearly spent a ton of time finding every error and correcting it in red pen, you can just make the changes that I’ve made for you on your original draft and know that your paper will be better. I just hope you’re learning about punctuation and capitalization while you make those changes.

__________________________

What I wrote: Good job! Nice! Excellent!

What I meant: I have access to a thesaurus so that I can give you many positive words that are actually rather vague and don’t let you know what you have done that has met my approval. I hope you’re a mind reader so you’ll know to keep doing those things in future essays.

__________________________

What I wrote: Weak thesis.

What I meant:  You may have noticed that I wrote this on nearly every student’s paper in the class. I taught it. Why didn’t you or anyone else get it? Surely it couldn’t be my fault, right?

__________________________

What I wrote: You need to [whatever I think the student should have done instead of what the student did…].

What I meant: Obviously, I know best, and this has become my paper instead of yours. Writing is a science, not an art, and it’s full of rights and wrongs. What you did was wrong. I’m not going to make suggestions or ask you questions to help you make the best choice; I’m going to issue a commandment.  Your omnipotent teacher has spoken.  

__________________________

I could go on, but I will spare you the gory details.

In hindsight, I could have been more thoughtful about the way I worded much of my feedback in written comments and in conversations with my students. My feedback frequently took the form of “you” statements and commands (“You should…,” “Move this…,” “Don’t…”). In my writing interactions with student writers, I now try to focus on “I” statements:

• “I see what you’re trying to do here, but I’m a bit confused by what you mean.”
• “I’d love to hear more about this.”
• “I am a little unclear about how this quotation relates to the point you’re trying to make.”
• “I generally expect to find a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph of an essay, but I’m not sure which sentence you’re intending to be your thesis.”  

Statements such as these put the writer in the driver’s seat and make my comments seem a lot less like attacks. I’m speaking as a reader who is interested in what the writer has to say and is sharing reactions with her. I hope that my reader responses will prompt the writer to think about the choices she made and to consider making some changes to help other readers.

Improving the quality of my written feedback is one step toward improvement, but I think there are still better ways to achieve the results I wanted. If I had been more intentional about providing feedback along the way rather than at the end of the writing process, I could have had small conferences with students to address the aspects of their writing that would produce the most improvement in the moment. If I noticed that several students were experiencing the same difficulty, I could have stopped class for a bit to teach a quick  mini-lesson to address this common issue. Then I could have followed up with any students who needed some individual attention to master that concept as they practiced.

On mornings like today as I leave my car and walk into work, I see and hear the Vines High School marching band practicing on the parking lot across the street. Their director, whose comments I often hear as he addresses his students on a loudspeaker from atop his observation tower, offers excellent feedback in the moment. He’s consistently encouraging but meticulous as he pinpoints his musicians’ point of confusion, gives them some instruction or advice, and then asks them to retry the trouble spot and make the necessary adjustments. I imagine he gets exactly the results he seeks.

I wish I had been more deliberate at offering that sort of feedback for my students when they needed it most rather than waiting until the end and providing them with a lengthy list of problems to address.

Like many teachers, I struggled with assessment and providing feedback and did what I thought I was supposed to do. I wasn’t deliberately negligent and certainly put in ample effort, but I seldom saw the growth and results I hoped to achieve. I needed to remember that I was a coach too--a writing coach--and that timeouts and halftime pep talks were necessary to redirect my students, to pump them up when they were feeling defeated, and to send them back into the game with a plan to lead themselves to victory.

Madeline Meets Curious George

In an old house in Paris

that was covered with vines

lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. . . .

The smallest one was Madeline.

So begins the story of Madeline, a beloved 1939 children’s book by Ludwig Bemelmans. Madeline lives in an orphanage and is watched over by her nurse and teacher, Miss Clavel (You thought Miss Clavel was a nun, didn’t you? It turns out she’s a nurse. Who knew?). In the first of her many adventures, Madeline and her fellow orphans follow a strict daily routine (“In two straight lines/ they broke their bread/ and brushed their teeth/ and went to bed.”), Madeline has an emergency appendectomy, and everyone cries a lot.

Two years later, H. A. Rey created the story of an equally popular character, Curious George:

This is George.

He lived in Africa.

He was a good little monkey

and always very curious.

In the initial book in the series, George is abducted from his homeland by the unnamed man with the yellow hat. True to the story’s title, George’s abundant curiosity gets him into trouble repeatedly, upsetting sailors, firemen, and a balloon man. Eventually, the man with the yellow hat realizes he is ill-equipped to take care of a monkey in urban America, so George finds himself happily residing in a zoo at the story’s end.

Which of the two would you rather have in your class: Madeline or Curious George?

I suspect that many teachers’ initial response is that Madeline would be a whole lot easier to teach and would thus be the more desirable student. Though we don’t see anything about Madeline’s behavior in school in the book, we observe all kinds of cooperative obedience in her daily routine. I’m sure Madeline would never turn in work late, forget to bring supplies to class, nor get in trouble for chatting with her neighbor during instructional time. Many teachers would view Madeline as the ideal student.

George, on the other hand, is a less predictable option. Aside from the fact that he’s a non-linguistic, non-human pupil, George could either be a delight or a terror in the classroom. The book tells us he’s “a good little monkey,” but, in the story at least, George’s curiosity leads him into some situations that would drive most teachers crazy. In some classroom environments, George would be off-task and non-compliant. With the right teacher, however, Curious George would be completely engaged in his learning.

Unfortunately, some teacher’s classes resemble a scene from Where the Wild Things Are. The “wild rumpus” prevents any learning from occurring, creating an environment that would be frustrating to compliant Madeline and that would encourage Curious George to jump into the middle of the mayhem.

If you’ve let your classes spiral out of control, you may have to become like Max in Maurice Sendak’s story:

And when he came to the place where the wild things are

they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth

and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws

till Max said “BE STILL!”

and tamed them with the magic trick

of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once

and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all

and made him king of all wild things.

Whatever “magic trick” you have to employ to get your classes under control is a necessary first step to creating an environment conducive to learning.

Once you’ve maintained order, your students could be learning in one of two states:  compliant or engaged.

Compliant students are doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re behaving. They are following directions. They are completing their work. Compliant classrooms look a lot like Madeline’s orphanage with all the students in straight lines going through the motions without much excitement. The motivation for student compliance may be fear and coercion, a desire for an extrinsic outcome like a grade or reward, or simply a “cooperate and graduate” mentality. There’s rarely any passion or excitement in a compliant classroom, but there’s no chaos either. It’s preferable to the world of the wild things. It’s not, however, a place where Curious George is going to thrive. In fact, George will likely be pigeonholed as a troublemaker and will be singled out for his off-task behavior.

Engaged students are excited about what they’re learning. Their motivation is likely more intrinsic; they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing because they are involved in learning that is interesting, worthwhile, authentic, and valuable. External rewards are not required because the students want to be doing what they are doing. There is an entirely different vibe from a compliant classroom. It’s probably a little noisier and more energetic than Miss Clavel’s roomful of dutiful girls, but the noise and energy are focused and purposeful. Curious George, whose curiosity would be a detriment in other classroom environments, would learn most successfully in this scenario. So would most students.

I invite you to take a moment to observe your students during class. Where do they fall on the continuum between compliant and engaged? What steps can you take to move them closer to a state of engagement? Here are a few suggestions:

• Open-ended rather than closed-ended questioning and learning tasks
• Authentic work about authentic content rather than “fake” activities that don’t transfer to the real world
• Structured collaboration rather than individual work or unstructured “group work”
• Student-driven inquiry rather than teacher-determined outcomes
• Creativity rather than rote learning
• Honoring student voices and opinions rather than rewarding students who do exactly what you’ve predetermined they’re supposed to do
• Opportunities to take risks safely rather than suffer the “gotcha” repercussions of being incorrect
• Emphasis on the intrinsic rewards of inquiry-based learning rather than insistence that everything be graded
• “Fun” activities that are directly linked to the learning outcomes rather than unrelated, fluffy fun and games
• A playful atmosphere rather than joyless conformity

By fostering George’s natural curiosity and making Madeline feel safe to be herself, take chances, explore, and immerse herself in authentic learning, teachers can win with every student.

The One-Week WICOR Challenge

One of the best ways to take AVID schoolwide and promote top-quality learning for every student in every classroom is to pay attention to the strategies you’re using to engage your students. By taking my One-Week WICOR Challenge, you can become aware of how frequently and consistently you’re using AVID’s five components of instruction (writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading) with your students.

How do I take the One-Week WICOR Challenge?

I’m glad you asked. Simply make a chart, one for each prep you teach, with the days of the week and the five parts of WICOR on it (or you can use mine here). As you go through your week, take note of when and how you address each of the five areas.

For instance, if your students read an article, discuss it with a partner, and then write a summary of what they discussed, you’ve just used reading, collaboration, and writing. Write what you did on your chart.

This link will take you to a printable handout listing many aspects of WICOR, just in case you want some clarification of the types of strategies that fall under each category.

What do I do with this once I’m finished?

You don’t have to do anything with it. The AVID police aren’t going to storm your classroom to ask for verification of your WICOR activity. What I’d suggest, however, is that you use the chart as a self-diagnostic to guide you in planning for your class.

Good instruction addresses all areas of WICOR, but some teachers have a hard time including all of them in their lessons. If you notice that you’ve had two days in a row with no student collaboration, perhaps it’s time to work in an activity--big or small--that allows students to talk with a partner or trio. If you discover that students seldom write in your class, consider asking students to write a few sentences to summarize what they’re learning and hand it in as an exit card. When test time rolls around, if you’re not doing it already, think about helping students understand how to study for your course--an act that involves organization of time, materials, and content as well as inquiry.

If you discover that you’re using a balance of  WICOR strategies routinely in your class, pat yourself on the back and know that you’re helping campus efforts to take AVID schoolwide. Your students and your AVID Site Team will thank you!

Revisiting Oz

Revisiting Oz:  Finding the Sweet Spot for Struggle

Years ago, I attended a late-night showing of the classic 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz at a movie theater in Austin, Texas. My most vivid memory of the experience occurred during the final minutes of the screening.

You’ve probably seen this movie, but in case you need a refresher, I’m talking about the part where Dorothy has accomplished her mission by melting the evil witch and has returned to Oz to let the wizard know that he can now send her back home to the black-and-white but considerably safer world of Kansas. When the wizard proves to be bogus and reneges on his promise, Dorothy is nearly inconsolable. Just as things seem completely hopeless, suddenly the familiar pink bubble floats down from the sky, signaling the return of Glinda, the Good Witch of the North. Looking like a living blob of cotton candy, Glinda, waving her wand erratically, glides over to Dorothy, who approaches her in a state of panic.

       

“Oh, will you help me? Can you help me?” Dorothy cries breathlessly.

Glinda the Good smiles at Dorothy--as if unaware of all the poor girl has gone through since the two last chatted--and says in her sing-song voice, “You don’t need to be helped any longer. You’ve always had the power to go back to Kansas.”

To my surprise, at this point during my movie-viewing experience, the audience burst into a unified “boo,” and several people shouted out expletives directed toward Glinda.

I thought the unexpected audience reaction was hilarious. It had never occurred to me to question or judge Glinda’s assistance, but it does seem like this so-called “good” witch is a bit cavalier about the entire situation and ought to be brought up on reckless endangerment charges or at least forced to pay for Dorothy’s future therapy bills.  

Looking back at this scene today, I’m struck with several thoughts related to the work we do as students struggle in school. The extent to which we let students struggle is a tricky balancing act. In our attempts to find the sweet spot of struggle, we move between several extremes.

Scenario One:  If We Only Had a Heart

When Glinda shares with Dorothy that she possessed the power to go home all along, the scarecrow, horrified, asks her, “Why didn’t you tell her before?”

Glinda replies placidly, “Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.”

           

That response could be interpreted in a few ways. On one extreme, we can view Glinda as a hard-nosed stickler who was teaching Dorothy a valuable lesson. By leaving Dorothy to her own devices to walk great distances in sparkly high-heeled shoes (those didn’t look like slippers to me) and battle an evil green nemesis who tried to kill her by fire, deadly poppies, and flying monkey attack, the good witch was simply toughening Dorothy up, allowing the young girl to face the hardships of life and, hopefully, learn from them.

There are times as teachers when we move to this extreme. If you’ve ever caught yourself assigning work “because it’s good for the kids” or withholding clemency  “because they need to learn that life is tough,” then you are guilty of this.

           

The only reason for assigning work--classwork or homework--is because it’s necessary for students to master the objectives of the course. If that’s not the case, we try to justify our barbarity to ourselves by saying we are making our class more rigorous when we are actually just subjecting our students to cruelty.

           

There’s no need for teachers to teach students the lesson that life is hard. If they haven’t learned that already, life will provide plenty of opportunities for them to learn that in the future. The “life is tough” objective is not in our state standards. I looked.

Dorothy lived on a farm in Kansas during the Great Depression and didn’t have parents. I’m pretty sure she knew that life isn’t easy. She didn’t need a woman with a high pitched voice and a crown to help her learn that.

Sometimes we have to step back from our rigid ways and reclaim the heart of teaching, remembering that we’re here for the kids and should help them succeed rather than making them appreciate everywhere else that’s not school.

Scenario Two:  If We Only Had a Brain

On the other end of the spectrum, we can view Glinda as someone who made Dorothy suffer unnecessarily (and smiled about it after the fact). Our inclination is to rescue the Dorothys of the world so they don’t have to struggle.

If you’ve been teaching for more than a day, you’re well aware of the phenomenon of the helicopter parent, the one who swoops in to save their child before the child has any opportunity to struggle and problem-solve for him or herself. These rescue attempts come from a good place: the heart. Parents love and care for their kids and want to give them all the support they’re able to provide.  

Sometimes, we are guilty of same thing as teachers.

When we enter helicopter teacher mode, we look at our students as poor, fragile souls who deserve pity and constant rescue. We coddle and give thousands of second chances (which are actually third, fourth, fifth chances, etc.). We hesitate to ask students to step outside their comfort zones and try things on their own because we are concerned about how they might react if they are not successful. Again, all of this comes from that good place; we have the heart to make each student feel safe in a world that often seems dangerous and daunting.  

If we step back for a second and use our brains, however, we see that this rescue mentality stunts growth in whatever areas we are assisting students. By saving students when they forget something, we hinder the development of responsibility. Solving problems for them prevents young people from growing the capacity to problem-solve on their own. And shielding students from opportunities to speak publicly, answer questions aloud, and wrestle with a difficult intellectual task keeps them at their current level of competence perpetually.

Scenario Three: If We Have the Courage

While I think Glinda the Good Witch was a little too hands-off in her approach to Dorothy’s lesson-learning, Dorothy did learn some good skills during her journey. Was Dorothy’s assistance-free struggle worth it? Or should Glinda have just sent the poor girl home from the outset of the story and saved her from the difficulty? The sweet spot for struggle lies somewhere between the two extremes.

In our classrooms, the best thing we can do is allow students to struggle with a safety net and visible assistance at the ready when students falter. We have to have the courage to let go of our tendencies--whether it’s to teach a harsh life lesson or to circle the helicopters for rescue before a struggle occurs--and become what Jessica Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure, calls “autonomy-supportive” educators.

In her book, Lahey is writing on the subject of parenting, but what she says still has relevance for our lives in the classroom. When we support our students’ autonomy, we develop a true growth mindset for ourselves and for those we teach. Lahey offers some parenting tips that translate well into teacher practices:

• Encourage from the sidelines.
• Praise students for their effort, not for their inherent qualities.
• Make sure your students know you like them, regardless of their success or failure.
• Allow for mistakes but guide students to learn from them.  
• Value mistakes as much as successes.
• Support students’ feelings of frustration and disappointment.
• Allow students a chance to struggle with a problem before you provide solutions or answers. Talk with them about how they’re solving the problem and guide them to find a solution through questioning.  
• Don’t offer extrinsic motivators in exchange for behaviors.
• Don’t overwhelm students with unsolicited advice and direction (we see it as “helping;” they see it as nagging).
• Give feedback--and give it in the moment when students need it.

I’ll return to the topic of feedback in a future blog because I think it’s such a vital part of what we do as educators.

Providing thoughtful assistance at the moment when students need it is the best way to guide them to success. If Glinda had loaded Dorothy with tons of advice on the start of her journey, that advice would likely have fallen on unreceptive ears since Dorothy--like many teens--wouldn’t have viewed the advice as meaningful at the time. On the other hand, if Glinda had waited until the end to point out everything Dorothy did wrong (like we do when we offer exhaustive feedback on a paper after the grade is in the gradebook and the student can do nothing about it), she would deserve to be booed by audiences. If only Glinda had popped in for a coaching conference with Dorothy at several stages along the journey, the young girl would have felt more confident, could have developed a more thoughtful strategy for success, and probably wouldn’t have done so much shrieking and crying.  

It takes an act of courage for us to let go of our long-entrenched practices to do what research tells us is best for our students. Finding that sweet spot for struggle isn’t easy. For many, becoming autonomy-supportive will require that courage, as well as some heart work and some brain work.           

Whose Team Are You On?

Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Whose Team Are You On?

When I first started teaching, it was me against the kids every day. We were on two separate teams. Sometimes, we drew battle lines over disciplinary issues: would I manage to get them to sit down, shut up, and do their work, or would they take over the classroom and derail learning completely? At other times, we were on opposing academic teams. I set traps, built walls for them to climb, threw obstacles in their way, and bombarded them with tricky questions and daunting challenges to see whether the students could master the content I was trying to teach them. Some of them managed to learn in spite of my efforts to frustrate and thwart them.

I thought I was doing the right thing, that it was the teacher’s job to present challenges for his students. I believed that making my class more rigorous--which I defined as being excruciatingly difficult and exhausting--was the hallmark of my excellence as an instructor. I reveled in my ability to find flaws in student work to justify bestowing a less-than-perfect grade. I told my students things like, “I don’t give 100s on essays because no piece of writing is ever perfect,” and I believed I was being motivational rather than kind of a jerk.

Nowadays, I’m embarrassed by the Me vs. Them mindset I promoted during my early years in the classroom, and I apologize to any former student reading this for the damage I may have unintentionally inflicted on your developing psyche.

In the world of education, we should be on the same team.

We all want the same things, right? Student success. Learning. Growth. Preparedness for the future, whatever that may entail. Those are lofty aspirations, and I think students deserve not to have to play on a team by themselves to reach them. Life certainly provides plenty of obstacles without teachers throwing more into the path. Why wouldn’t I want everyone to succeed? Why would I be delighted that only a few, if any, were able to rise to my high standards?

When I worked on abandoning the adversarial approach, I found that the result was a classroom where inquiry was at the center. I strove to cultivate a curiosity along with my students--to wonder, to ponder, to explore, to examine, to dissect, to question, and to try things out. I stopped being the guy with all the answers and started trying to be the one who guided students to ask questions instead.

My approach became a bit conspiratorial. There was a mission to be accomplished, and we were going to work together to figure out how to do it.  No longer was I the enemy. I was inviting my students to join me as we tried to escape the wiles of others:  John Donne,  William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, the guy who wrote the AP World History textbook, the creators of the AP test, the many ancestors who cobbled together the insanely tricky English language, artists who created works of art without telling us what they mean, and the State Board of Education.  This shift in attitude--from opponent to teammate-- changed the entire tone of my classroom, turning it from a hive of agitated bees to a learning community working together cooperatively to succeed. We developed a true growth mindset.

Often, we even learned for the sake of learning, rather than for a grade.  Here’s an example to clarify this shift:

ADVERSARIAL CRAIG:  We’re about to have a graded discussion over the novel we have finished. I am going to be grading each time you speak. I will rate the quality of each response, and write your score on my chart. You’ll earn points each time you speak. If it’s an insightful response accompanied by a specific quotation and page reference from this 416-page book, you will receive more points than if you offer an answer with no support. If you don’t speak at all, you’ll receive a zero for this major assignment. Any questions? No? Begin! (maniacal laughter like a cartoon villain)

REFORMING CRAIG:  Since we are going to be writing some interpretive essays later over this novel. I thought it would be a good idea for us to talk about our different interpretations of the text. I often find that I understand things better when I talk about them with other people. You came up with some questions about the novel yesterday in groups, and I want to use those questions as the basis for the discussion. You may find that the questions you prepared lead to other questions as you begin to explore the answers. I encourage you to go back into the text whenever possible because that’s the only place where we can get an idea of what the author was thinking, and unsupported opinions are like untested hypotheses in science. They need more investigation. You’re going to want to take notes in your Writer’s Notebook about what people say because you’ll probably find some ideas that will help you when it comes time to write the essay later. Make sure you listen more than you speak and that you make others comfortable sharing their ideas.    

I always try to provide a “why” for anything I’m asking students to do so that they’ll see a tangible benefit to participating in the activity. In the above case, the “why” justifies my not taking a grade on this. We are discussing to learn, and while we are learning, we may not be ready to be assessed. In fact, I think in this instance that assessment would only add pressure to the discussion and would cause students to focus on their own contributions rather than working as a class to wrestle with the ideas in the text.

My reforming view of what a classroom should look like involves the teacher in the role of a coach or mentor. Sometimes, I break from an activity to have a huddle to discuss strategy. We debrief often. We review past performance. And we set future goals.

I wish I could tell you that this was an easy shift to make. Unfortunately, many years of schooling and my natural pickiness and perfectionism (some would blame it on my being a Virgo) have made it hard to unlearn my hard-nosed teaching practices. I have had to be intentional about my team realignment, but noticing the change in my students’ dispositions has helped me in my struggle.

When I work with teachers on AVID’s WICOR strategies, I find that the I, inquiry, is a little different than the other four letters of the acronym. While we might “do” writing, collaboration, organization, and reading, inquiry is more of a philosophy than a strategy. We don’t “do” inquiry; it’s how we do everything.

Abandoning the me vs. them approach helped establish a culture of  inquiry in my classroom. The students and I are on the same team, and we are always questioning ourselves, the thoughts of others, the ideas, and the world around us to make sense of things.

Class should be a pep rally, and we should all look forward to a winning season where we can celebrate our many victories together.