Ready to Listen

A few years ago I was challenged by a fellow coach to write about my experience as a teacher. In response to the seemingly constant stream of negativity surrounding public education, she had a vision to create a collection of narratives from teachers to show those outside the classroom what teaching is really about. I was fortunate enough to have a group of 8th grade students read my piece and give me incredibly thoughtful feedback to help me improve it greatly.

Over the first few weeks of school I've been engaging in so many rich conversations with teachers about instruction and building relationships with students, I'm reminded of how important writing can be in the relationship-building process. As I enter my 16th year of teaching, I think back to the lessons I learned in my first months of teaching.

Ready to Listen

My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Dianne McLaughlin, was a middle-aged woman with short sun-colored hair and tanned skin that I’m sure spent many days glistening on the beaches of the South Shore. We began each morning with finger warm-ups to get ready for work, followed by morning greetings in at least three languages other than English. Guten Morgen, wie geht es dir is still the only German I know. Our vocabulary journals were filled with “adult” words I was so proud to be learning--debris, superior, reluctant, impermeable. We memorized and recited poems, “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,” enjoyed intriguing read alouds, and wrote our own stories to which Mrs. McLaughlin responded with enthusiasm. When I threw away my retainer on ham and cheese day in the cafe, she turned a disaster into a class dumpster diving expedition. She set high expectations and demanded we reach them. She instilled in me of a love and language and learning. She nurtured without ever patronizing us. Before 4th grade, I had ideas of becoming a hairdresser or maybe a journalist, but after my year with Mrs. McLaughlin I knew for certain the only thing I wanted to be was a teacher who might make one student feel as important and valued as she made me feel.   

A decade after leaving Mrs. McLaughlin’s class, having taken a less than linear path, I was holding  a preliminary teaching license. I waited tables and interviewed at any school that would take a chance on an English major with no education coursework or teaching experience. Finally, in mid-February 2005, I landed the interview that earned me a position as a middle school English Language Arts and Reading teacher. One week I was a full-time waitress and the next I had my own classroom full of students, yet I had little idea what to do in my new role. I met with my patient Humanities Director at the time to ask my burning questions--How do I know what to teach? How long do I spend on each book? What do I say when a student gives a wrong answer? I was all detail and no big picture. She gave me some much needed advice about establishing rules and what to expect from these students who’d had no consistent teacher for months. Before my first day I bought the clothes and teacher shoes to make feel a little more like Mrs. McLaughlin and a little less like the petrified twenty-two year old I was.

Those first few months in the classroom felt like performing on the big stage without of any the rehearsal. Never before had I doubted my own ability to spell common words the way I did once I picked up that yellow chalk from a dusty chalk tray and began to write on the board in front of room full of students. To quell my fears I would chant to myself, They’re not laughing at me. They’re not laughing at me. I think. These students, my first students, seemed older than I remember looking in 7th grader and they were bold. The truth of what happened with their first teacher be damned, they wanted me to know it was they who had forced her out. They loved to talk loudly in homeroom about the many ways they had embarrassed or tortured her. Most stories ended a few weeks into my time with them after I joined the conversation and said with all the feigned confidence I could wrangle, “You should know I don’t scare that easily, I really need this job and I’m definitely not leaving.” 

I listened with deference to my veteran colleagues who cautioned me against idle hands by planning “lessons” that I was sure would fill the entire class period. My skill set as a teacher was far too limited at the time to think about student engagement, cooperative learning structures, or crafting lessons with clear goals and materials that allowed all students to access the learning.  Admittedly, my driving question during planning was, Will this take up enough time?  Reading comprehension questions--lots of them--were a sure-fire way to achieve this goal. On the days I stayed at school grading papers well into dinner time or when a student caught me looking longingly at the clock, willing the period to end, I wondered how I’d ever become like Mrs. McLaughlin, especially with students who seem so disinterested in learning from me.

I learned fairly quickly that I would probably have to adjust my grand plans of analyzing and discussing classic literature. My students stumbled over multisyllabic words during oral reading, struggled mightily with the vocabulary in our texts and produced writing of simple sentences rife with errors.  Part of this judgement came from my disillusioned account of the kind of work I had been capable of as a 7th grader.  Another part, as I came to find out, came from my total ignorance of my students’ life experiences. 

Just as all my cherished memories of Mrs. McLaughlin’s class have remained vivid, one particularly painful memory from the first few months of teaching has lingered in mind during long, quiet commutes to school, or any time I’m thinking about a student I haven’t connected with yet.  Part of my teaching assignments was to teach the honors reading class. The honors students obediently read the stories and answered the basic comprehension question with efficiency. We ploughed through our Junior Great Books stories and corrected the reading check questions with little enthusiasm. Soon, I realized, I’d need to find more work to fill each class period so I began adding a few open-ended questions to their worksheets that required more writing. 

We read Ivan Turgenev’s story, in which an old man reflects on his younger life and tells the story of himself as a young boy in Russia. As an adolescent, his desperation for his cousin’s acceptance caused him to discard, and later steal back, a treasured watch given to him by his godfather. This one event had a domino effect for the boy and became an event he continued to retell into old age. For my compliant and efficient honors students, I added this open-ended reading response question: 

Alexey was just a few years older than you are now when the watch incident happened but it stayed with him far into adulthood.  Write about a memorable event in your life so far that you think you will still remember when you are an old man/woman. 

When I assigned the question I likely assumed my students, with their barely thirteen years life experience, wouldn’t have much to write about, but I figured it would fill the time. The next day my class returned with their work mostly complete and I offered them the chance to share what they’d written about. I’m sure a few students obliged and shared their work, but I remember only one.

Julia, a tall Mexican girl with brown hair in perfect waves cheerily raised her hand.  For the few months I’d known her, I had rarely seen her without a wide, dimpled smile that shone out through her eyes.  She was one of the first students to make me feel welcomed in my own classroom, even going so far as to tell me I should probably ignore some of the horror stories I was hearing from my other students. In the classroom, halls, and lunchroom, Julia was surrounded by a group of friends who were often giggling loudly.  Paper in hand, Julia walked to the front of the room and I scooted into her seat.

Before she began reading, Julia inhaled and pushed an anxious breath through her lips.  

“My father left Mexico and came to the United States when I was nine.” Julia began. “But I didn’t come here until I was ten. I stayed in Mexico with my mother and brother until my dad was ready for us.  He sent my mom money to help us, but I missed him. One time…” 

Julia paused and stared down at her paper.  Until this point her voice had been strong and steady. 

“One time…” she tried again.  This time her voice held none of its usual confident buoyancy. Julia covered her face with one hand and the paper in her other hand shook back and forth as she sobbed, its quiet flickering the only other sound in the room.  

Here it was, my moment to make a student feel valued and loved like Mrs. McLaughlin surely would have. I froze. I moved not one inch in the chair and stared at my student in obvious pain.  Full of self-doubt, I wondered fearfully, Am I allowed to hug students? Do teachers comfort student like that? How serious is this story? Should I say it’s okay and tell her to sit down? 

It felt like an uncomfortably long time until the scraping of chairs on tile broke the quiet. Two of Julia’s classmates rushed to the front of the room and embraced her. As she continued crying, they wiped her tears, took her paper, and clutched her hands. And then, beautifully, they read Julia’s story of family finally reuniting in the United States after years of separation and sacrifice. The class listened with a respect I hadn’t known 7th graders were capable of until that moment. 

 I wish I could remember what I said following the reading, but my memory has filled in the blanks over the years, Thanks girls. Woah, what a story, or some other pitifully inadequate phrase. I had been focusing on poor spelling, below grade level reading abilities and making sure my students behaved. I was so sure I had knowledge about literature that they needed if only they would take advantage. I had looked at them as below average students, instead of the complex humans they were.  

Julia’s experience and her willingness to share with the class shed light on my naivete about what my students “knew” and also on the power of writing.What started for me as a simple time-filling prompt, gave Julia an opportunity to express something she’d obviously been carrying around in her head and heart. She took a classroom assignment and used it to connect with her me and her peers, and, hopefully,unburden herself of a some pain. 

The two students who rescued Julia in front of the class also saved me from my inability to respond. I grew up in an Irish Catholic family where crying was either done privately or under the guise of having something in your eye. I may have had a degree in English Literature, but I was utterly ignorant about how to handle such a public display or emotion or how to wrap my mind around a family divided in this way. These two young ladies shared none of my discomfort or awkwardness. They saw a classmate in pain and responded with the compassion and empathy each of us deserves. 

This early failure is one of the biggest “could have, should have” moments in my career and this is why it replays so often in my mind. If only I had had Julia a few years later, I know I would have responded more appropriately and she would know that I value her. 

But of course this can’t happen. So, to Julia I say, I am sorry I failed you in that moment.  

Even more so, thank you. Thank you for preparing me, for helping me have a little more courage when years later a student breaks down in class the morning he learned his mother would be deported. Or when a 6th grade student asks me fearful questions about her pregnancy. And when during a discussion responding to Maya Angelou’s belief that words “get into you,” a student wondered aloud, what makes some mothers love their kids and other mothers abandon theirs?  

I’ll never have the right words all the time. But from you, Julia, I learned that making my students feel valued begins by responding to their honesty with my own vulnerability. From this humbling experience, I learned that providing students with meaningful writing topics can have a powerful impact, and I need to be ready to listen. 

Developing Academic Mindset

 I was first exposed to Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain, about two years ago through our staff book club. We were a small group--just myself, our school social worker, and one 8th grade science teacher--but we had a rich conversation about both the science and the practical application of Hammond's book.  In the spring I decided to dig back in and reread the book in its entirety and I've been carrying it around with me all summer, slowly digesting all it has to offer.

I was particularly drawn to Ch. 7, "Shifting Academic Mindset in the Learning Partnership: Restoring Students' Natural Confidence as Learners." Hammond cautions against teachers focusing on surface level engagement from students in which we try to coax students into being interested in the lesson, hoping that if we do this repeatedly students will eventually develop positive academic mindsets. In reality, she says, we need to first focus on developing our students' academic mindsets in order to help create independent learners. I had never seen the term academic mindset described in as much detail as Hammond uses in the graphic below. One thing I really appreciate about these components is that it requires reflection on both the student and the teacher when one of these components is lacking.

Hammond, (2015) P.111 Figure 7.2

Many Dependent Learners do not have strong or positive academic mindsets and as a result they don’t take the initiative or persevere through challenging tasks as independent learners do.  We cannot, however, attribute lack of academic mindset to social class, race, gender or other parameters over which we have no control.  Part of our job as teachers, in learning alliances with students, is to help students cultivate an academic mindset and believe in themselves as learners.

After reading about the different components of academic mindset, I had an idea to create a series of statements to help students and teachers identify their current academic mindset and maybe identify the areas where they feel stronger or weaker. The purpose of these statements is to get a sense of where students are in terms of their academic mindset to help us determine how much and what kind of work we need to incorporate into our content instruction.  If we fail to acknowledge students’ current academic mindset, or lack thereof, we will not be able to develop independent learners.

The statements are still a very rough draft but I'd love to hear other teachers' thoughts on getting a temperature on students' academic mindsets, the idea of using statements like this with students, or feedback to improve the draft.  Any and all feedback is welcome! 

Checklist for Change

Recently I read a handful of articles dealing with the topic of providing equitable educational experiences to all of the learners we serve. I intentionally sought out pieces that discussed the types of learners I work with most often--learners living in poverty, English Language Learners, learners from diverse cultural backgrounds, and teachers. Teachers may seem an unlikely group in this list, but in my role as Literacy Coach, I think of teachers as a separate group of learners themselves. The article titled, "Equity in Schools: What Administrators Need to Know," was a great reminder for me that whatever we ask our teachers to provide our students--empathy, patience, high expectations, self-reflection--we must first provide this to our teaches. Because I view teachers as the lead learners in our schools, I've come to five changes I'd like to make in my practice and work with teachers. My goal is to make all adult learners in my school feel included so that they have the awareness, strategies, and desire to do the same for their students.  

Change 1: Brain Change is Possible and YOU matter!
      With roughly 50% of our students being labeled "Economically Disadvantaged," the article "Equitable Education for Students in Poverty Starts with the Teacher," presents many relevant points for the teachers with whom I work. My frequent conversations with teachers echo what Liebtag notes in her article about poverty's impact on children; "...students may come to school tired and hungry, be assertive in their behavior and unwilling to follow along, seem disengaged...it is these behaviors and indicators that educators are often left to navigate, in addition to trying to support students academically."  Certainly not always, but more often than not, when I hear teachers talk about the exhausting work of managing behaviors that have causes too large for them to ever fix, it is powerlessness and sadness that I sense much more than bitterness or unwillingness.  The truth that many, many of our students experience stress from living in poverty is not something we can change single-handedly.  The impact that stress has on our students' brains, however, is a change that we have the power to make.

     The first change I would like to make is to share information with teachers that shows them it is possible to change our brains and that they play a really important role in helping diminish the effects of poverty on their students' brains. I would like to start by sharing some information I learned in course I took about Growth Mindset and Neuroscience. Although their brains may not be impacted by poverty, I would like to share some activities with teachers to help them disrupt some thinking around an area of teaching that causes them discomfort in order to "rewire" their brains and create new neuropathways. My idea is to provide teachers the experience and opportunity to see how their own brain can change so they can believe it's possible for their students.  Secondly, I would like to share excerpts from Paul Tough's How Children Succeed to provide concrete examples of specific actions teachers/adults/coaches took to help diminish the negative impact of poverty and other trauma for their students. Hopefully, this information and experience will help teachers see that they do have power to make positive change for students.

Change 2-4: Addressing Beliefs about and Instructional Practices for ELL students.
Providing equitable education to our English Language Learners is an immediate concern for teachers at my school. Our population has changed drastically over the last 5-8 years, and English is not the first language of 66% of our current student body. While state-mandated RETELL certification has helped provide research and a bank of strategies for teachers, the reality of the changing structure of ELL programs in the school continues to challenge teachers' skills and confidence. Changes 2, 3, and 4 all center around providing more equitable education for our ELL students.

The Edutopia blog post, "Equity for English-Language Learners" cites research that ELL students are often subjected to instruction that doesn't offer them enough opportunities to "[engage] critically though oral or written work."  I am not surprised at all by this finding and I think it comes down to assumptions that turn into expectations which become actions. Last spring, I had the chance to discuss Sharon Draper's Out of My Mind with three 6^th grade female students who were in a book club.  They were outraged at how so many teachers in the protagonist's life underestimated what she was capable of and how much she really knew because of her cerebral palsy.  I asked the girls if they thought it was possible for adults to underestimate kids who don’t have an obvious physical disability.  The girls all nodded and one of the girls told us that when she came to the US from Brazil in third grade the teachers assumed she knew nothing just because she didn’t speak English.  She described her frustration at knowing more than she was able to communicate in English and how she was made to do what she considered “baby work.” Change 2 is about identifying the "bright spots" in our instruction where ELL students are being given valuable learning opportunities.

Change 2: Peer Observation is a great way to learn from colleagues but also to see students you might share in a different context.  I would like to increase Peer Observation among staff, specifically focusing on how many opportunities our ELL students are being given to engage in meaningful oral and written discourse.  For those who may be stuck in the mindset of low expectations, I would like to set up observations of classrooms where teachers regularly offer ELL students these kinds of experiences.  Ideally, we would have follow-up discussions that help the teachers discuss many aspects of the lesson—how the teacher intentionally planned to include the ELL students, which supports were provided that allowed the students access, and data from student talk that showed students interacting deeply with the content.  By observing peers with this focus and parsing out the specific teacher and student actions, hopefully, more teachers will offer more ELL students more rich learning experiences.

Change 3: Looking at Student Work Protocols and Double scale of Criteria

A major concern I hear from teachers of ELL students is how to assess what the students know.  They’re receiving messages about holding all students accountable to the same high standards which sometimes leads to using the same assessment rubrics, out of fairness, but then often times teachers feel as if students get over-penalized for limited English skills.  Of course, this leads to a great conversation about the importance of being clear about the true goal of the assignment—writing skills or content knowledge—but in the meantime, the idea of “double scale of criteria" to separate out the language skills from students’ understanding of the concept is one I’d like to explore more.

We are fortunate to have Professional Learning Group time built into our schedule, two days per six day cycle, and we are comfortable using protocols. Before asking teachers to use a double scale of criteria, I would like to support the practice by using Looking at Student Work Protocols, such as the Atlas Protocol, in the Grade level team PLGs.  These teams are made up of 4-5 teachers of all different contents who share the same students.  I would like to use the Atlas protocol to look at ELL students work to have the teachers uncover what they can tell that the students do know and understand about the content from the work.  The process of discussing and listing all the students do know, will help dispel assumptions about ELL students' content knowledge.  As a group, we could help the teacher create a rubric that accounts for all the content criteria he/she expects to see in any students’ response.  I could see using the WIDA “Can-Do” statements to help build a languages skills rubric that can be reasonably expected from a student at each level (1-5).  Each teacher in the team could create a double-scale of criteria rubric for an upcoming assignment and bring student work back to the team to evaluate using the criteria.  Hopefully, this practice will reinforce high expectations for ELL students and communicate clearly to teachers and students their content knowledge.


Change 4: Listening to Students and Teachers
Several years ago our UDL Team put together a student focus group of about 45 students.  The group was reflective of our school's diverse population and the students met periodically with members of the UDL team to discuss their learning experiences in the school and how to make learning more meaningful for them. I would like to recreate this feedback group, but focus mostly on the students in the ELL classrooms--this would include the ELL students and the non-ELL students who are in class with them. Initially, we could give the students a survey with some questions about their experiences and then use their responses to guide a conversation. Additionally, I would like to have a focused discussion with the teachers of ELL students, both the ELL teachers and the content teachers who are also SEI endorsed, to hear their perspectives on teaching ELL students. It would be interesting to share with the teachers some of the anonymous feedback from the students to see if there are any common themes.  Ultimately, the point of this change is to just listen to what the people who are most impacted--the students and teachers--have to say about the success and challenges they face so that we can make more informed decisions.

Change 5: Engagement and Feedback Strategies 
The Hanover Research Brief titled "Closing the Gap: Creating Equity in Classrooms" provides a Checklist for Responsive Instruction with explicit teacher behaviors. I appreciate that these instructional strategies, categorized into three groups--engagement, learning environment, and feedback--are applicable across all content, grade-level, and cultural backgrounds.  I can think of many teachers who employ a number of these strategies as part of their regular practice but who may not be able to articulate this to a colleague because it has become such a normal part their practice.  Although this tacit knowledge can sometimes be difficult for a teacher to point out, if you talk with the students of those teachers, it becomes quickly apparent that the students take note of all the small gestures that make such a big difference in how students feel in a classroom.  Rather than passing this list checklist onto teachers and saying, "Reminder, to be culturally responsive you have to do these things.", I would like to enlist a group of colleagues in my building, such as coaches and administrators or the Instructional Leadership Team and review this checklist.  As a small group, I would like us to select a few strategies, for example, "Welcome students by name as they enter the classroom."  and commit to employing this strategy with adults first.  This might mean greeting your colleagues by name when they enter the building in the morning, come into the teachers' room when you are there, enter a PLG meeting, etc.  After we've chosen the few strategies and talked about how that might look for adult to adult interaction, we could start implementing them and make note of our colleagues' responses to us over time.  This sounds like a very small change, but I believe it takes these consistently small actions over long periods of time to build trust and create a climate where everyone feels valued.  At the very least it is hypocritical, maybe impossible, to hold teachers accountable for creating this climate for our students when it does not exist among adults.