In most schools, you can walk into any classroom, and you will see completely different things happening. In some rooms with progressive teachers the students are seated in a circle discussing literature and next door, with a more conservative teacher, the students are seated in rows and the teacher is reviewing the facts they need to know for tomorrow's American history test. The problem isn't the teaching methods. We've all known excellent lecturers and amazing experiential teachers. The problem is that the school is a collection of individual teachers teaching whatever they like. There is no guiding vision. Earlier I discussed the importance of first developing a larger concept for the school: What makes our school different from other schools? What do we as a community deeply value? After developing the vision the next step is to create a common vocabulary for teaching and learning. I learned this from two mentors I had over the years: Deborah Meier and Theodore Sizer. In Meier's book, The Power of Their Ideas, she discusses her experience starting and leading a progressive school in Harlem, Central Park East. In her school they developed "intellectual habits." Meier writes:
These five "habits" include concern for evidence (how do you know that?), viewpoint (who said it and why?), cause and effect (what led to it, what else happened), and hypothesizing (what if, supposing that). But most important of all is the 5th "habit": who cares?
The teachers wrestled with these habits in faculty meetings and devised ways for translating these habits into teaching methods and curriculums.
On a different scale, Ted Sizer developed a list of clear common principles for his organization the Coalition of Essential Schools. At one time over 2000 schools ascribed to these principles and used them to guide teaching in the school.
We also created a common vocabulary for teaching when we started the ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University. Eileen Landay and I developed the Performance Cycle, a set of interconnected ideas that demonstrate a process for fusing the arts with literacy. This Cycle--simple in appearance yet complex in its foundation on educational theories and research--guided all of our lab schools and work with schools in several cities.
With these models in mind, when I was hired to help reform Hope High School, then the worse school in the state of Rhode Island, our first step was to create a common vocabulary for teaching and learning across the school. We restructured the schedule to allow for common planning time for the teachers, a space for teachers to exchange ideas, share student work, and talk about their classroom work. For this to be effective, however, we needed to have a shared vision for what we wanted to see in all classrooms. So we as a faculty began to develop words that encapsulated an ideal classroom environment, a kind of Platonic ideal to strive for. We decided that every classroom should be a place where students create "portfolio work." Each experience in the classroom was guided by a "central question" and a "core text." At the end of the course, students demonstrated their understanding of a concept in the form of a "culminating event." The school then became a portfolio-driven school, full of students and teachers working on real work, rather than a school of worksheets and testing. We defined our school's vision by the words we chose to describe what we hoped to see in all classrooms.
What's critical about this way of working is that teachers and students can interpret and be as creative as they would like within these key concepts. In faculty meetings they can debate what qualifies as a piece of "portfolio work" or what a good "central question" looks like. The common vocabulary inspires original and interesting work on the part of the teacher and the students because the words are generative; they open doors. What's even more important is that the teachers decided on their own vocabulary. They were the ones who set educational policy for their own school.
Compare this to the ways we are telling our teachers how to teach in schools in the United States today. At the state and district (and perhaps soon federal) levels, we are developing endless lists of standards teachers must teach to. Because we lack the belief that teachers, as school communities, can create their own vision and common ideas, we throw stacks of documents at them and tell them "this is what you have to teach." In a school I worked in recently, the teachers were expected to teach to so many standards--state, national, and district--the principal had to give the teachers all the documents digitally, because printing them out would use to much paper and cost was prohibitive economically and environmentally. Conversely, the success of Sizer's, Meier's, and ArtsLiteracy's principles were the complex ideas that were contained in a few, clear words.
Words can inspire or they can oppress. Our role as educational leaders is to guide with words that help teachers and students to reach for the possible. At Habla, the school I run now, we have one word in our reception area, "create." This word guides all the work in our literacy, language, and arts classrooms. It means every day our students and teachers embark on a process where they will make something new, something that hasn't existed before. It means that every teacher and student in the school has a unique voice, and we as school administrators trust them to do their best toward making extraordinary things happen in the classrooms.
Isn't it time we gave our teachers and school leaders the tools to make great things happen?
This is the third part in a series of articles about how we might design innovative public schools. Click on "innovating education" in the sidebar on the right to read all the articles in the series.