One of the Last Best Places Anywhere

Cross posting from a blog I wrote in October 2010 for Teach.gov.  Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!

Vermont teachers who need to return to the well for a drink of passion and commitment can do no better than visit the Athenian Hall in Brownington, where they will find a magnificent four story granite edifice high on a windswept plateau, with 360 degree views of the northern Green Mountains and the vast agricultural plain of Quebec to the north.   

Alexander Twilight, preacher, educator, politician, was the first African American to graduate from an American college as well as the first to be elected to a state legislature.  His great stone school, the first granite public building in Vermont, built with his own hands in the 1830's, is the living embodiment of his passion and commitment to education.  One of two schools to serve the expanse of Orleans County, it is now a museum.  The sister school, Craftsbury Academy, still serves students to this day.

The novelist Howard Frank Mosher, in Vermont Life Magazine, Autumn, 1996, wrote:

"I like the way the Stone House still looms up on that hilltop, where the wind blows all the time. There it sits, unshaken and monolithic, as I write this sentence and as you read it, every bit as astonishing today as the day it was completed. What a tribute to the faith of its creator, the Reverend Alexander Twilight: scholar, husband, teacher, preacher, legislator, father-away-from-home to nearly 3,000 boys and girls, an African American and a Vermonter of great vision, whose remains today lie buried in the church-yard just up the maple-lined dirt road from his granite school, in what surely was, and still is, one of the last best places anywhere."

As the first Teaching Ambassador Fellow from Vermont, I had the privilege of accompanying John White, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Rural Outreach, on his recent trip to Vermont, my home state.  On the second day, just a few miles from Alexander Twilight’s great Athenian Hall, we visited North Country Union High School, a school which serves a sixty mile radius and is virtually on the Canadian border.  I felt great pride in accompanying a Federal official to an outstanding school in my state.  

 North Country serves an area in great economic distress, with double digit unemployment and over fifty percent free and reduced lunch.  In Vermont free and reduced lunch is not a true indicator of poverty, because stoic New Englanders are often too proud to accept help.  We can surmise that the poverty of this region is greater than indicated by the statistics.

What did we find at North Country?  Amazingly, given the remoteness and the challenges, we found teachers full of innovation, passion, and commitment.  We found a state-of-the-art Career Center dedicated to preparing students for careers in the trades, business and industry.  We found teachers collaborating in unique ways to integrate high quality academic instruction in the context of programs such as auto mechanics and woodworking in order to prepare their students for life in the 21st century.

As a music teacher, I was pleased to go into a woodworking class and find the students working on building dulcimers.  The teacher had connected with one of the Vermont's finest luthiers for support.  In the High School, we found a math teacher having teams of students measure guitars and banjos to learn geometry, ratios, percentages and understand the difference between accuracy and precision.  When John asked why the students preferred this type of real world embedded instruction, they replied "because it makes it easier."

After John left for the airport I trailed behind to visit the performing arts department.  I met with Anne Hamilton, the chorus and composition teacher who was my instructor when I was trained in the innovative composition and assessment program, the Vermont MIDI project.  This program is a national model for arts and technology.  Like the Career Center, the MIDI Project draws in professional practitioners.  They provide feedback to young composers across Vermont and the nation through technology and the internet.  We walked downstairs to the auditorium and watched the dance teacher, a former Vermont Teacher of the Year, coach dozens of students through an amazing piece choreographed by the students themselves.

I found the underlying philosophy of connecting school with community pervaded the entire school.  Alexander Twilight's vision lives in the work of the dedicated teachers of North Country Union High School and Career Center, where they labor against all odds with joy and passion to keep this remote corner of Vermont "one of the last best places anywhere."

Common Core and Monkey Training

Wrote this before the RTT convening in Boston.  This is where I was - I will write more on this subject  with respect to the convening in the future.

I teach elementary music.  I’ll be touched more tangentially by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) than many teachers, but I do have wide experience thinking about and writing curriculum with reference to standards in both my endorsement areas, music and technology integration.  I don’t have to implement CCSS in my classroom at this point, but as an educator, I'm fascinated. 

The problem with grappling with the details of implementation is that it is important to be able to articulate the big picture, the broad principles which form the basis of the CCSS.  The big picture is helpful both to educators and administrators trying to get a purchase on how to begin the work of CCSS, and to parents and other stakeholders trying to understand the implications for students. 

Standards represent our aspirations for students, which then need to be interpreted through a rich matrix of curricula, increasingly fine grained plans for the delivery of instruction.  There many different types of curricula, such as the political curriculum, the district/building curriculum, the classroom curriculum, the shelf curriculum, the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum, all of which look very different.

I've come to the conclusion that the most important curriculum is the one that the teacher has internalized, enabling minute to minute decisions in work with actual students.  All of those other types just prepare the one that lives in the teacher's head.  In the heat of the moment we can't pull a binder off the shelf to make decisions; we need an internalized plan to guide appropriate instruction.

Hence the significance of the broad outline or principles.

·         The CCSS calls for fewer things taught in greater depth.

·         The CCSS puts greater emphasis on informational texts, which is a type of reading we use in real life.

·         CCSS calls for more persuasive writing and less personal narrative, again what we do in real life.

·         CCSS calls for an emphasis on higher order thinking skills, requiring new assessments that can actually capture them.

·         In math, CCSS calls for the ability to reason quantitatively, not just the ability to perform procedures.

·         CCSS aspires to have students be able to anticipate the next steps in their learning, and therefore be educational actors rather than passive recipients.

·         CCSS calls for higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

I'm interested in the potential applicability of broad principles of this sort in my discipline, music.  My Orff Schulwerk level III movement teacher Brian Burnett talks about how we make kids in into "trained monkeys" in music classes.  By the same token, math students who perform the steps of a procedure but can't ascertain whether their answer is within an order of magnitude of reality are also victims of monkey training.  I ask myself what a Common Core for music might look like.

I'm fond of giving carefully scaffolded composition/improvisation tasks to students as a means of assessment.  A couple of years ago I had a fourth grade class improvise pitches to the rhythm of a poem using their recorders.  The parameters I set were a Do pentatonic scale on G, using G as the home tone.  One of the students asked me if he could use an F.  I replied, "Convince me."  He proceeded to improvise a lovely piece in the Dorian mode, dutifully ending it on G, per the requirements of the assignment.  When he shared with the class, I asked him if there was a note that would be more suitable for the ending than G.  He paused and thought about it, listening inside his head, and replied "D".  I looked at him and said, "You understand the home tone."

Martin deployed judgment in his answer.  My only regret was that in the design of the task I had not provided easier avenues of deploying judgment - I guess we call that reflection.  In fact the other day I gave this same task to students again, but this time invited them to choose their own home tone from given pitch set, which most did quite effectively. 

Could this story be illustrative of how the broad principles of our Common Core aspirations could be appropriately deployed in non-tested subjects?  A rising sea lifting all boats....

Focus On the Learning!

I really appreciate the phrase “student learning.”  Unlike “student achievement” or “student outcomes” it has not yet become a euphemism for bubble test scores.  I appreciate student learning because it enables me to imagine a range of indicators for success in the classroom: true multiple measures.

What can student learning look like?  When you leave my classroom after music class, I hope there is something you can do, think or remember, something that you couldn’t before you walked in.  Perhaps you can perform a song, or you can play a simple rhythmically independent accompaniment; perhaps you made a connection to prior knowledge, or have deepened your understanding of some concept, such as tempo or dynamics, and demonstrated that deepening by using that concept to create a short musical piece.   Perhaps you can finger a new note, or have just acquired some fluency between fingerings that leaves you feeling successful.   In any event, my aspiration as a teacher is that you leave my classroom having grown in some small way as a creative person, as a human being.

I acquired this focus on student learning by going through the National Board Certification process.  This demanding process requires around 300 hours of work at minimum.  You produce a video portfolio and take a tough six part exam on your knowledge of content and pedagogy.  It was in the portfolio process that my brain got reprogrammed to focus on student learning.  I had a candidate support provider who helped me go over my portfolio with a fine tooth comb.  At each stage Dan would ask, “What does that have to do with student learning?”  Eventually it became my mantra.  It has an annoying tendency to slip from my mouth during faculty meetings.  Even if it doesn’t slip out, it certainly echoes around the inside of my brain.

As a union activist, I experience a similar echo effect inside my head as we operate the levers of union influence: negotiations, grievances and so forth.  Our recent foray into Interest Based Bargaining is hobbled by the fact that we are not yet focused on student learning.  Unlike districts that truly achieve Labor Management Collaboration, our contract talks still focus on adult issues, and not student learning.  In the most progressive districts, the adults strive to make the collective bargaining agreement into an education improvement plan.  In my district we have yet to cross that threshold.

In this sort of context, things like behavior and climate become ends in themselves.  We do not want good behavior in our classrooms or great school climate because it’s nice to be nice to each other; we want it because behavior and climate are necessary preconditions to great student learning.  We do not want great working conditions and competitive pay because teachers “deserve it;” again, we need these things to the extent that they promote conditions of maximum growth for students by creating supports for the best teaching and by removing distractions.  Without that focus on the learning as the most vital institutional goal, the school drifts, and climate and behavior, working conditions and pay, deteriorate anyway.

Why is a laser-like focus on student learning beneficial to children?  It is the best way that educators can express that they care for the students.  If we expect that our classrooms will be incubators of intellectual, artistic and ethical growth, this indicates that we want the students reach their potential.  We all arrive at school with baggage.  To focus on behavior or pay as an end is to get mired in the baggage – all the reasons that we can’t treat each other well.  To put the learning at the center of the institution is to put the student at the center in a truly profound way.

How does this express itself in actual classroom practice?  In the planning process the teacher keeps standards and curriculum in mind.  Not that binder on the shelf, but living curriculum which has been internalized.  I strive to make the constant connection between the activities I select, and the things that are appropriate for a particular cohort of students to master.  For example, I might look at a group of sixth graders and see that they need some conscious experience of 6/8 time, so I plan a series of lessons culminating in an opportunity for them to improvise and/or compose a piece of music in 6/8 time.  I love using a creative act for assessment – to me, it demonstrates true understanding.

Without a focus on standards and curriculum, the focus becomes the activities themselves, and the question becomes not what the students will learn, but what the teacher will do to entertain in order to get through the day.  An activity centered classroom is a teacher centered classroom.

It may seem ironic that the direction of institutional attention to student learning, seemingly external to the self, can have such a salutary effect.  To lose that focus, however, is to lose the soul of the school, and cripple us in the muck of the psychic baggage we carry.  To lift one’s eyes, to see that we can be better than we are, is to express faith in ourselves and in our students.  From time to time we may fail, but it is in the relentless movement towards growth that the members of a school community best express their humanity.  This is why we need to focus on the learning.

How Do You Spell Respect?

Yes, I know this book was published in 2009.  And yes, I know that it's 2012.  Perhaps this book was ahead of it's time and it's moment is now.

Against a policy backdrop of reductionist accountability run amok, The Mindful Teacher by Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley quietly restores a measure of sanity and balance.  This book could not have arrived at a better time for educators feeling under siege.

The Mindful Teacher displays profound respect for the teaching profession by throwing into high relief the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of teaching.  It is a demanding volume that honors the reader by showing confidence in the intellectual capabilities of educators, drawing on the best of the philosophical traditions of both east and west.  The book is more than a philosophical tome, however.  It constantly grounds this elevated discourse in concrete examples of improved teaching practice and better student learning, through six moving case studies of urban teachers, displaying teaching as a profession in the finest sense. 

MacDonald is a teacher in the Boston Public Schools; Shirley is a respected researcher and academic.  Together they pioneered the Mindful Teaching seminars, really a professional learning community (PLC) which is a product of an exemplary school/university partnership.  Dennis Shirley is a rare academic who is humble enough to see the correct role for academics in the education enterprise.  He sought ways to respectfully support educators.  Rather than pushing an agenda on a group of hard pressed urban teachers, he supported a process enabling them organically discover the questions they themselves needed to explore.

The seminars took place over a four year period and yielded ten clusters of questions specific to participants, but universal in character, and an “eightfold structure” which could be adapted to other PLCs with different circumstances.  An example of a question I found particularly telling: “What does it mean to be a teacher leader? How can I help build support networks for teachers in a way that leads to my renewal rather than burnout?”

An essential part of the eightfold structure of the seminars is the role of meditation in creating a space in which mindfulness can grow.  The concept of mindfulness emerges from the Buddhist tradition, and the concept of mindful teaching is advocated in the book as a means of mitigating alienated teaching, a concept borrowed from Marx.  The authors handled the practice of meditation in their seminars in a way that made it accessible and helpful to people from a variety of spiritual traditions.

The Mindful Teacher concludes with an exploration of dialectical tensions in the profession of teaching.  The Seven Synergies are individually necessary and jointly conditions for mindful practice, including concepts such as a caring disposition, professional expertise and collective responsibility.  The Triple Tensions acknowledge the existence of polarities in teaching practice: contemplation and action, ethics and power, the individual and collective.  The faith the authors show in us, that we can hold these tensions in our minds in what Estelle Jorgensen calls a “both/and” synthesis, demonstrates a profound respect for educators as intellectual and spiritual actors.

I was a bit troubled near the end of the book when the authors referred to teaching as a vocation.  As a labor activist, I fight for professional compensation and working conditions, and worry that teaching as a vocation leads us down the path to martyrdom.  But then I realized what The Mindful Teacher had taught me: profession and vocation are just one more tension that can be creatively embraced.  I felt both moved and honored.