Tag Archives: high school

The Purest Form of Teaching

Posted on by
1

One-on-one tutoring.

I was thinking about that while mountain biking with Lev Vgotsky in Capital Forest recently. Well not literally with Lev, figuratively.

Literally, I was cycling with Lance, one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. Sometimes though even the nicest guys have a devious core. Lance took me on a trail clearly outside my zone of proximal development.

He said it was a relatively mild Cap Forest trail which means I really suck. I went down twice, once I laid it down fairly gently into the dense shrubbery lining the super muddy 18″ wide trail and another I went over the bars. In this pic you can’t really appreciate how much blood is flowing from my knee and ankle under the layer of caked on mud. Badass, I know.

Blud and mud

I told mi esposa, una professora de Espanol, it was like dropping a Spanish 1 student in the center of Mexico City.

One of the central challenges of teaching well is adapting one’s curriculum and methods to students’ widely divergent preexisting knowledge and widely divergent skills. That is what non-educators don’t fully appreciate about teaching.

For example, take a high school swim team with 45 swimmers, 15 or so who swim on a club year round, 15 or so who only swim during the season, and 15 or so who are starting from scratch. What do you do? “Excellence” advocates might suggest cutting the “bottom thirders” but public school teachers don’t have that liberty. So what do you do when some seventh graders read, write, and ‘rithmetic at a 2nd grade level and others at the 12th? Then, for good measure, add in English Language learners, students with special needs, and well, maybe teaching is harder than it first appears.

In one-on-one tutoring it’s easier to figure out what the student knows and can already do, and therefore, it’s easier to adjust one’s material and methods in light of their zone of proximal development. Given that, maybe we should redesign our middle and high schools based upon one-on-one tutoring.

Probably unrealistic because people are so resistant to change. People would protest: we can’t have students coming and going from campus all the time; we can’t have students lose in the community; scheduling would be impossible; we can’t expect administrators, district bureaucrats, and parents to pitch in; we can’t expect students to be responsible and work more independently; we can’t redesign report cards; and we can’t do anything that disadvantages our students in the college application process.

Here’s how it might work. We wouldn’t need nearly as many administrators dealing with crowd control and discipline issues. So we take most of their walky talkies and deputize the majority of them as tutors. Same with district bureaucrats. We also deputize responsible adults in the community to both supervise student interns engaged in service-learning and to serve as tutors. We also ask parents to sign on as tutors in an academic, voc-ed, or life-skill area of their choice—Spanish, math, construction, baking, tax preparation, bicycle repair.

Some parents either won’t be qualified to, won’t be available to, or won’t want to participate, others may volunteer to tutor not just their children, but others too. For citizens that volunteer regularly, we could reduce their property taxes like Colorado did for seniors who volunteered in schools. Minimum expectations for community-based tutors could be detailed and teacher-leaders could design internet-based “how to tutor” modules and train them.

At high schools at least, we would also add in a layer of peer tutoring. Every student would be guided through a process of picking an academic subject (writing persuasive essays or solving algebraic proofs), extracurricular skill (competitive debate, swimming), or vocational ed set of skills (cooking or basic car maintenance) that they would be expected to teach a few of their peers. Again, teacher leaders could design internent-based “how to tutor” modules for students and teach peer tutoring first thing in the school year.

We’d completely rework the traditional bell schedule. At any one time, an expert swimmer would be teaching a beginner how to breath during freestyle, an advanced violinist would be teaching a beginner proper feet position and posture, an accomplished math student would be explaining to a less accomplished one how to solve for “x”. Upper and lower tracked students would interact regularly.

At home, in school libraries, and in community libraries, students would spend about half of their time reading, writing, and preparing for tutoring sessions.

Teachers would spend half of their time tutoring in their specialized academic areas and half as mentors supervising the tutoring network of ten or twenty students who they will get to know particularly well over the course of working with them for all three or four years of middle or high school. Thoughtful teacher supervision of each individual student’s tutoring network will be critical. This approach to teaching and learning would only work if the sum of the disparate tutoring experiences equaled more than the individual parts.

In any one day, a student would meet one-on-one with an adult in or near their home, with another adult somewhere in the community as a part of a service project or internship, with a few peers in school both as teacher and learner, and with a few teachers both to be tutored in core academic areas and to synthesize what they’re learning from all of their different tutors. And again, in between tutoring sessions, they’d be reading, writing, and preparing for upcoming sessions.

Crazy? Maybe I did hit my head on that over the handle bar number I did.

We Need Smaller and Larger Classes

Posted on by
2

I’m never quite sure how the head high school swim coach will use me, his ace volunteer assistant, until I show up on the deck each afternoon. Lately, he’s been giving me the burners probably because I’m less skilled teaching new swimmers.

Yesterday though, while the rest of the team rotated through four different stroke clinics he gave me two neophytes. Yikes, over an hour, what am I going to do after suggesting one or two things? I surprised myself. The girls and I connected, they made huge strides in what they were struggling with, and the time flew. I listened to them talk about what they were finding most difficult—always being really tired even in the middle of short sets. Then I watched them swim and diagnosed the problem—short, choppy, way too fast arm and leg action coupled with three and four stroke breathing. One asked, “How do I keep from hyperventilating?”

I told them there were four speeds—easy, steady, mod-hard, and hard, and they were spending all their time swimming mod-hard and hard. I got them to slow everything down, stretch things out, and breath more often. Slowing their arms and legs down and breathing more often felt odd to them, but they were thrilled to swim 50 yards without being winded. We also did flip turns and fine tuned race starts which included a lesson on how to wear goggles and tuck their chins so that their goggles don’t come off. They were very appreciative of my help and left practice more excited about the remainder of the season.

Crazily, we have forty-six swimmers, and most days, just four lanes. Those swimmers would have never got the individual attention they needed if I wasn’t volunteering. Working with them so closely reminded me how little imagination secondary school administrators and teachers have when it comes to class size. Irrespective of teachers’ methods and assessment practices, it’s as if 30ish students per class is mandated somewhere in the Old Testament. Thirty students is probably the optimal size for not really getting to know students individually and not using teaching resources as efficiently as possible.

The best elementary teachers solve the class size conundrum on their own. They brilliantly use learning centers to create more personalized learning environments. Their students are constantly moving from working independently, to working at small group learning centers, to whole class instruction.

In secondary schools, 30 students is sometimes too many. Like at swim practice yesterday, sometimes a teacher needs to listen to individual students, carefully assess what they already know and are able to do, thoughtfully diagnosis what they need to truly learn the necessary content and skills, observe, provide feedback, and repeat.

Ours is an outstanding public high school, yet after four years, Nineteen said she didn’t do much writing, and when she did, only one teacher ever provided specific feedback. Writing intensive classes, whether in English or Advanced Placement History, should be capped somewhere south of 30 so that teachers are able to assign papers, read them closely, and provide specific feedback on strengths and next steps.

And sometimes 30 is too few. Obviously, in order to have some classes with 16 or 18 students, there have to be others with 45 or 50. In ninth grade, Sixteen had math sixth period. She’d literally take a test, come home fifteen minutes later, log onto the school website, and announce her grade. Why should a teacher who slides bubbled-up Scantron sheets through a machine on the way to bball practice in less than 60 seconds be assigned the same number of students as the writing teacher who should be carefully marking three and four page essays on a regular basis?

If one’s lecturing, teaching discrete factual information, showing a PowerPoint about the digestive system for instance, and then using multiple choice exams, does it really matter if there are 30 or 60 or 75 students in the “audience”?

Granted, it’s tough to differentiate for 2,000 adolescents at a time in buildings that typically assume standard class sizes. But that doesn’t mean we’re destined to always have 30 students per class, or that each class has to be 55 minutes in length, or that all fifteen year olds are in the same classes does it?

Gap Year

Posted on by
1

Recently The Wall Street Journal wrote about high school graduates who chose to spend a year traveling, volunteering, and/or working before beginning college. This is what’s referred to as a “gap year”.

Parents often worry that gappers will suffer from a loss of momentum and conceivably bail on college altogether. In contrast, I worry that too many over programmed eighteen year olds automatically continue their education without any real sense of self, knowledge of the larger world, or appreciation for the educational opportunities provided them.

I wish far more eighteen year olds took a year off between high school and college to travel; to do service or earn money; to gain financial withitness; to learn about other people, places, and themselves; and to develop an intrinsic (versus parental) sense of educational purpose. Give me a first year seminar full of gappers and I guarantee you our discussions will be even more interesting than normal.

What type of gap year is best, a formal, programmed one, or an informal, open-ended one?

One reader of the piece, Fannahill Glen from Jacksonville, FL, made her preference for informal, open-ended, European-style gap years perfectly clear. I quote:

The traditional gap year is conducive to future success because of its sheer simplicity: You take a backpack and whatever handful of cash you have, and go. It is up to you to forge travel plans, earn cash to live on, and make new friends and travel companions. Teenagers find themselves making industrious choices to do things like harvest bananas for rather small wages, eat fewer meals daily (and only from street vendors) to save money and sleep in hostels where they share toilets and bedrooms with strangers, because it’s all they can afford. Contrast the skills and maturity one gains from such an experience with the American version: Pay a company $35,000, let them find you a cool job in a chic country and work for free for a year, with vacations on the holidays. It’s like the vaunted Year Abroad, without the rigors of a classroom. Awesome, no doubt, but not exactly taxing on one’s intellectual and social development.

The vast majority of American parents are probably too afraid to cut their eighteen year olds loose Fannahill-style. In my thinking, a programmed gap year is preferable to a mindless continuation of one’s education, but like Fannahill, I suspect the loosely structured model provides even more intellectual, social, and educational bang for the buck.

Rethinking Report Cards 1

Posted on by
3

Grade-based report cards are a “regularity of schooling”. Regularities of schooling are those features of school life whose utility we rarely question, such as age-based grade levels, starting school in September and ending in June, and assigning students grades based upon the quality of their work (Sarason). Regularities of schooling result from teachers being far too busy to stop and reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of the daily practices they inherit from the veteran teachers they replace and way too busy to envision promising alternatives.

The question, “Why are we doing this, this way?” is rarely asked, nor the natural follow up, “Is there a better way?” The unspoken answer, “Because it’s always been done this way.”

Similar limits of time result in parallel regularities of consumerism, church life, health care, marriage, and, I suspect, every sector of life and the economy. On those rare occasions when we have spare time to thoughtfully evaluate the usefulness of our personal and work life activities, we tend to fill the quiet empty spaces with television, internet surfing, and related noise/activity.

We aren’t disciplined enough to stop, reflect, envision, and thoughtfully implement promising alternatives to the regularities of our personal and work lives.

Why have grade-based report cards stood the test of time with hardly any variation despite radical changes in the world in which we live? What purposes do grade-based report cards serve? If they were to be radically redesigned, how might teaching and learning be revitalized? What form will the pushback against updated alternative report cards likely take? I begin answering these questions tomorrow.


The Panacea for What Ails our Schools

Posted on by
1

A five-day in a row “Back to School” series.

The panacea for what ails our schools. Depending upon who you read/talk to:

1) more rigorous course requirements (especially in math) coupled with high stakes standardized exams like in Japan;

2) firing incompetent teachers determined largely by students’ scores on standardized exams;

3) wireless laptops, smartboards, smartpens, and related personal technology;

4) small schools.

File these ideas under “one good idea quickly implemented will fix things”. In actuality, reinventing schooling will require decades of intelligent, caring, hard working people piecing together good ideas and adapting them to differing contexts.

But I’ll play along with the conventional way of thinking. The “big idea” that I believe has more potential than the four listed above to serve as a catalyst for medium and long-term positive change? Radically redesigned report cards. More on that tomorrow.

The Private School Myth

Posted on by
4

Consider this excerpt from a Jonathan Mahler NYT article about Tiger’s return to golf:

On six separate occasions, he (Jay Williamson, 43) has finished the season without a strong-enough record to keep his eligibility for the PGA Tour and been forced to earn it back at the tour’s grueling 108-hole qualifying tournament, known as Q-School. Williamson has never won a PGA Tour event. Nevertheless, thanks to golf’s soaring purses during the Woods era, he has managed to earn more than $5.5 million during his 15-year career. “I certainly don’t live like a king,” he said, “but I do have three kids in private school, and that’s probably a direct result of Tiger.”

Williamson’s quote is symbolic of the American public’s belief that private schools are inherently superior to public ones. As an undergrad, I worked part-time for two years in a public elementary, taught for four years in public high schools in Los Angeles, one year at a private high school in Ethiopia, and attended both public and private universities. As a teacher educator, I visit schools all the time, mostly public ones. If I’m an expert about anything, it’s secondary education. My daughters have spent 30% of their schooling in privates and 70% in publics.

It’s easy to understand why people subscribe to the private school myth, we’re conditioned to believe “you get what you pay for”. But truth be told, that’s not always true and private schools are not inherently superior to public ones. There are good, bad, and mediocre public and private schools. Good publics are better than mediocre privates. Based on my experience, you’ll find a larger proportion of  truly outstanding teachers in publics. There are  lots of solid private school teachers too, but they have the wind at their back in the form of smaller classes and often required, built-in parent/family involvement.

In fifth grade (middle schools in Olympia, WA are 6th-8th grade), daughter one made her first independent decision of consequence when she decided she wanted to attend a local private independent school for the “academically talented”. Me, “But all your friends are going to Wash.” Her, “I’ll make new ones.”

There were a few minor and one major benefit of her private experience. Among the minor benefits, she was given more writing assignments than her public peers and received more detailed feedback on her compositions. The school also did a nice job using small group projects that engaged the students. The major benefit was her five or six closest female friends all cared equally as much about doing well in school. As a result, there was serious positive academic momentum. They spent a lot of time in the evening completing projects over the phone at the exact time a lot of middle school girls are dumbing themselves down in the hope of appearing more attractive.

The downside of her experience, and many private school students’ experiences, was the homogenous nature of the student body. Everyone was high achieving, most students were upper middle class and white or Asian-American. As adults we know that our success and happiness depend as much or more from our people smarts than our book smarts. When will my daughter and her friends learn to interact thoughtfully with young people different than themselves? Isn’t interpersonal intelligence part and parcel of being well educated?

This brings to mind a related myth, that public schools are inherently more diverse than private. While probably true in the aggregate, with tracking, or homogenous ability grouping, we end up with schools-within-schools. In other words, there are multiple Olympia High Schools, one that my daughter and her friends attend that consists largely of Advanced Placement courses and another for everyone else. Some public high schools have three or more schools-within-schools.

The public-private school water is far muddier than most people realize.

Rollercoaster

Posted on by
Reply

Teaching high school taught me that adolescents can be living, breathing rollercoasters, up one day, down the next. After awhile, I learned not to take the inevitable dips personally.

Which takes us to the other day and my facebooking seventeen year old. “Why are you trying to talk to me?” she asked staring at her laptop. My bad, I’m an awful dad for being interested in last night’s field trip to Seattle.

Fast forward a day. . . the rollercoaster standing in the kitchen, studying page four of my Tacoma Broadway Center for the Performing Arts pamphlet. Gaelic Storm.

I throw caution to the wind. “Wanna go?” “Yeah!”

Surprisingly, she doesn’t get any better offers during the week.

We hit traffic, arrive five minutes late, run through downtown T-town together, and buy two of the last tics.

For the next three hours nagging, tension, and adolescent angst were replaced with clapping, laughing, and singing. Irish music has always moved me in inexplicable ways and seventeen is a talented violinist on a piano playing tear. She was transfixed by Jesse Burns the group’s fiddler who shredded from beginning to end.

Wonderful concert made better by the company.