On the Shoulders of Giants

Guest Post: Kickball Saves The Day

Check out this great post about an "Aha" moment by fellow TLN blogger, Lana Gundy.  (And her previous post on teacher internships here)

This is my first year co-teaching almost the entire school day with in an inclusive classroom (special education and regular education students combined) with minimal pull outs (this is where special education students receive their individualized instruction in a small group).  A large majority of the special education students I teach have been in a self contained classroom in their previous years of education, so I was expecting to have to change my teaching style to accommodate their unique needs.  I also knew that I would have to adjust to co-teaching with another teacher in the same classroom most of the day.  What I wasn’t expecting, however, was to completely transform my teaching of social skills.  

The biggest difference this year is that the students are really struggling to get along with their peers.  After seeing a huge increase in tattling, name calling, and arguing, my co-teacher, Mrs. Merriman, and I started brainstorming ideas to deal with the social problems of our class.  We tried several traditional methods of teaching social skills:

• Reading books about getting along and acceptance
• Discussions about how to be respectful and kind
• Teachable moments about making better choices
• “What would you do?” scenarios
• Modeling how to get along
• Teaching key phrases to say when someone wasn’t being friendly 

And still, there was not much improvement with this group’s ability to get along any better.  Something was missing - and I didn’t realize what it was until this week during a kickball game at recess. 

We’ve been teaching our class how to play kickball at recess.  During the first week, it was still difficult for the students to play nicely together.   So, I started emphasizing that the game was just for fun and I focused on teaching them to play with good sportsmanship.  We taught them to give each other compliments and high-fives when someone made a good play.  We also taught the students to give each other another try if there was a close call.  We also taught them everyone is allowed to play.

The other day, I saw my students do something I hadn’t seen them do all year.   They were playing a game together with out any negative social consequences.  They were respectful, they showed good sportsmanship, and they worked as a team!  They actually had fun together!

It was then when I realized what had been missing. 

We HAD taught our students “all” there was to know about having good social skills, but we forgot to have the students apply the knowledge to their own lives.  And as silly as it may sound, kickball is pretty important in the lives of elementary school students. 

This just goes to show that no matter what you are trying to teach your students or how hard you try, if you don’t give your students the experiences to apply those skills, they’re meaningless.

Lana Gundy teaches fourth grade in a primary school in Peoria, IL.  She is a member of the Universal Leadership Team and is the Gifted Coordinator at her school.  She is also a member of CTQ's Illinois New Millennium Initative, an effort supported by the Center for Teaching Quality to cultivate accomplished, early-career teachers as leaders of practical, effective teaching policy innovations at the state and district levels.

[kickball image: celestevankirk1.blogspot.com]

 

 

Teaching & Learning Are Messy

On my last post, My Kind of Teaching, on constructivist pedagogy, I received this thoughtful response from a veteran teacher, who chose to remain anonymous. I appreciate it so much, because it offers some validation some of my thinking and intuition regarding the thorniest of issues  when it comes to teaching methodology right now. It seems like in the push to be urgently focused on short-term objectives and obsessive tracking of student learning toward a measurable goal (performance on standardized tests), we miss some of the point--how students actually learn. Often messily.  

Thank you, anonymous teacher, for sharing your thoughts here:

I've been teaching for about 12 years now. When I graduated from TC, my advisor told me one thing that I took with me and that guides me still: If the kids aren't doing something, the kids aren't learning.  He meant that the kids should never just be sitting there listening to me talk, they should instead be working on meaningful tasks used to facilitate learning and later demonstrate what they've learned.  So I always plan like this: What am I doing?What are they doing? The reform movement, unfortunately, has been very bad for progressive teaching because it is all about standardized testing or "accountability."  It is not always easy to control for what a student has learned.  Sometimes students learn something completely different than what I intended.  Sometimes, a student learns what I wanted to teach days after everyone else.  Does that make me a "bad" teacher?  This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot lately.  Many times I learn from the kids.  It's an interactive process.  Teaching is messy - that's the beauty of it.  The way kids learn is messy.  I also want to point out that alternative certification programs have brought into the teaching field new teachers who are much more traditionalists overall.  I think this is because there is so much emphasis on classroom management.  There's less focus in these programs on philosophical issues of teaching and learning as well as developing rich curriculum because the teachers have to be up and running in just short weeks.  So at TC we had lots of discussions about what the actual role of the teacher was and what the student brought with them into the classroom.  We were encouraged to let the curriculum take care of the classroom management issues. 

Also, make sure to read Alfie Kohn's new article, "Poor Teaching for Poor Children," in which he argues that "it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap." Scary, but possibly true. 

[image credit: sophiemazingarbe.com]

 

My Kind of Teaching

I'm coming out as a "progressive" educator, a "constructivist" even, who believes in developmentally appropriate curriculum and methods that teach "the Whole Child." Why all the quotation marks? Because these terms have somehow been run into the ground to the point of becoming almost unusable.

Maybe we need new words, maybe we don't, but my beliefs about how kids learn have not changed.  The world changes, kids change, tools change--and teaching changes (or should) to meet all of these shifting forces.  But kids still learn through their experiences.

Humans learn by doing and interacting with people and things over time. John Dewey said this almost one hundred years ago, and in 1916, Lucy Sprague Mitchell and the others who started Bank Street College began putting that vision into practice. They created a new model of teaching and began training teachers to observe and understand the cognitive and social development of children and to lead of the kinds of experiences that would help kids develop into strong, thoughtful members of society. (Read a brief history of Bank Street College of Education here.)

Checking out this 1940's video on Progressive Education (see below) sent to me by my colleague, Nancy Toes, I'm wondering, how much have we really changed? 

Important Note: Though I love the above screen shot from this video, the skills of a "progressive" teacher that successfully facilitates experiential learning are far more than just those mentioned.  

In 2011, children are still commonly lectured and drilled throughout their schooling.  The drills are slightly different.  There are more sophisticated tools now.  The content and the way we present it varies more, but the basic roles of the teacher as chief thinker and the student as follower of instructions remain far too prevalent and fixed in time.  

To my knowledge we have never implemented "learning by doing" with consistency, proper preparation, support and follow-through in public schools.  It is disheartening that today so much money and time is focused on whether students got the right answer on a test. And now we obsess over how many got that right answer? What percentage? How much did they grow since the last test according to the data?  All children are required to learn everything at the same time and demonstrate it in the same way--on the same day.  

Kids don't really grow like that.

The narrator in the 1940 video says, "The happiest moment for the schoolchildren of that sterner era [before progressive education] was when school let out."  For too many students that is still the reality, but it is one that can totally be changed--not with fancier drills, but with meaningful experiences. 

[Images are screen shots from the above video.]

Guest Blog: 3 Reasons Why Teacher Internships Work

This month I'm very excited to have my TLN colleague, Lana Gundy, sharing some posts here at On the Shoulders of Giants.  She will be one of several teacher bloggers that will be posting at a new group blog called TransformED! Stay tuned!  Following my last post on what's missing from teacher prepartion, Lana discusses what worked in hers...

Three Reasons Why Teacher Internships Work

I nearly fainted when I read the National Council on Teaching Quality “Ed School Essentials:  A Review of Illinois Teacher Preparation”.  My very own Illinois State University’s “review” was not very good.  In fact, it was deplorable: F!   I know from my own experiences, as an ISU grad, the university has an outstanding Professional Development School (PDS program) and the proof is in the internship. 

*Provided a significant amount of time in a classrooms working with students in an urban environment

The PDS program provides essential classroom experiences for interns.   This allows interns practice dealing with situations that arise when working with a group of urban children.  The intern “takes over” the teaching responsibilities in a cooperating teacher’s classroom for thirty-two weeks.  These responsibilities include: lesson planning,  grading papers, behavior management, parent/teacher conferences, staff meetings, board meetings and any other responsibility their cooperating teacher would have.   

*Great Professors and mentors that know how to support and encourage new teachers

The PDS program changed my life and allowed me to do much more than I ever expected to during my first few years of teaching.  What really made a difference for me during the internship was my professor. The instructors are the variables that the NCTQ’s study didn’t account for.  What the instructors bring to the table is invaluable to the student teaching experience.  Not only did my professor teach my group of interns our university courses, but he taught us how to apply what we learned. 

*Opportunities to “team” with other interns

The opportunity to work in a “team” setting allows interns to expand their horizons.  Interns are able to discuss what was happening in our classrooms, which allowed us to learn from each others’ mistakes and successes.  Student teachers work together to improve the culture of the school.   Teams of student teachers can achieve more together, than they can independently.

It is not clear from NCTQ’s study what was evaluated to determine that ISU student teaching program was a failure.  I do know that I was prepared for my first year of urban teaching.  I would not give my experience an F.  In fact, I would recommend that all student teachers be required to complete a thirty-two week internship.  So, if NCTQ’s evaluation of ISU’s program is incorrect, I wonder what other programs were incorrectly evaluated also?

Here is the link to see ISU’s video about the PDS program.  Check out Bill Ferriter’s The Tempered Radical post to read more about NCTQ’s Study.  Also on the subject of alternative student teaching experiences take a look at Dan Brown’s Get in the Fracas post.

 

Lana Gundy teaches fourth grade in a primary school in Peoria, IL.  She is a member of the Universal Leadership Team and is the Gifted Coordinator at her school.  She is also a member of CTQ's Illinois New Millennium Initative, an effort supported by the Center for Teaching Quality to cultivate accomplished, early-career teachers as leaders of practical, effective teaching policy innovations at the state and district levels.

 

Context Specific Element of Teacher Preparation Needed

This year, I've worked with a group of fellow alumni of Bank Street College of Education on developing ideas for what teacher preparation should look like in the future. We discussed this along with a parallel group of Bank Street faculty members, as well as visiting scholar, Barnett Berry, to build on ideas from the book he and I and 12 other teachers co-authored, Teaching 2030. 

We pulled together our recollections of what was best about our teacher preparation experience--ie what to keep moving forward--and what was missing.  At Bank Street we had wonderful advisors who led cohorts of teacher candidates make sense of our student teaching experiences, where we got to learn from master teachers.  We also had strong foundations in child development and curriculum building.  These were the essential elements of our teacher preparation experiences. 

There were a few things we felt unprepared to face as we entered teaching. Most notably, we all believed that preparation to work in the specific neighborhoods in which we ended up teaching was very much needed, but we'd had to go about this task ourselves in our own ways.  We agreed that understanding where our students were coming from, their linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and the resources and issues in their neighborhoods is of tremendous value once you're in the classroom. This understanding on the part of the teacher can be the unspoken ingredient that makes the difference between whether or not students trust the teacher and even whether or not the teacher is seen as effective in their early years.  

No part of teacher preparation mentioned above is dispensable. It's just that mentorship, child development, and curriculum are generally understood to be necessary, while understanding student contexts/communities is often not. The image on the left was created in one of our meetings by Bank Street alums Renata Robinson-Glenn, Sam Rosaldo, and Nancy Toes Tangel (with suggestions from the 2030 team) to show the significance and interdependence of these pieces of a students' experience.

Teacher candidates need to be conscious early on about the ways that the teachers must interact directly and indirectly with the communities from which students come.  We thought having alumni share about the contexts in which they teach, how they got to know their students' worlds, and how this informs their teaching would be a good place to start.  In student teaching placements, teacher candidates should be asking questions about this and making observations in the surrounding neighborhood in addition to in school.  

Advisors would make sure that candidates had the opportunity to teach and investigate a variety of contexts during the student teaching.  Then when it was time to apply for jobs, advisors could help teacher candidates make informed decisions about where they wanted to work, including their knowledge of the community in terms of culture, needs and resources, and their knowledge of themselves--what makes me a good match for these students? How long am I planning o stay? What is my level of commitment and how might that affect my students and families' willingness to trust me? These are all questions teachers should consider when deciding on their first job. 

We'd like to see a course, probably taking place the summer before candidates begin in their the first teaching position, devoted to getting to know the school and it's surrounding community--or the various communities from which students come in the case of schools that draw from several neighborhoods.  They would research the neighborhood's history and demographics, find out about community organizations, businesses, and politics.  These experiences would be part of what we call the observation stage of preparing teachers to work with families and communities.  

Ideas on the middle and final stages of preparing teachers for this valuable aspect of our work will be coming in our forthcoming piece on Teacher Preparation 2030.  I will include links and more info. soon.