Getting It Right

In a recent speech about education, Obama stated:

In Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school . . . when a school board wasn't able to deliver change by other means, they voted to lay off the faculty and the staff. As my Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, says, our kids get only one chance at an education, and we need to get it right.

"Getting it right" in education is a complicated endeavor and begs the question, "How do we know when we are getting it right?" Is it when all of our students graduate from high school? Is it when the students graduate high school with a set of skills that will allow them to be successful in the workplace? Is it when all of our students not only graduate high school but also successfully make it through college? And then how do we know when a teacher is "getting it right"? Is it really just a reflection of his or her students' test scores?

Over the years I have collaborated with and observed hundreds of teachers in public schools. Here, in my estimation, are some qualities of teachers who are "getting it right":

A demand for high quality work. Deanna Camputaro teaches art at an urban school, and not just visual art; she teaches modern and African dance, photography, theater, and film. Every year she and her students produce a multimedia performance for Martin Luther King Day. They write scripts, choreograph dances, shoot films, take photographs, and fuse it all into a breathtaking show. It is the kind of model work in arts education we would hope to see in all schools across the country. It is work created by the students of the highest quality and Deanna works tirelessly day and night to help the students reach their full potential.

Laughter. I have never seen a successful classroom where there wasn't joy and happiness involved in the learning process. Len Newman and Richard Kinslow taught a class of Newcomers: students who had recently arrived in the United States. These students had never been in an American school before, so Len and Richard, in addition to developing the students' reading and writing in English, created a classroom that was filled with warmth and laughter, every day. The students enjoyed the class so much they made it a priority to go to school, despite their sometimes difficult lives outside of the classroom.

Meaning. The best ideas mean nothing if the students don't care. The lessons we shape for the classroom must involve the lives of the students and matter to them. Michael Paul is a teacher who consistently reads books outside of school, seeks the advice of other teachers, and tries to design that perfect lesson that will reach the students. As a teacher of English to diverse students from around the world, he creates an experience for students that both challenges and resonates with their cultures.

Dynamism. Most schools ask students to sit in a chair for over six hours every day, five days a week.  Great teachers create opportunities for students to get out of their seats and participate in collaborative projects outside of the classroom. Deloris Grant teaches English literature.  Like in many English classes around the nation her students read Shakespeare. However Deloris's students memorize lines, direct scenes, and produce one of Shakespeare's plays. She lovingly pushes her students to do extraordinary work, not only in their seats, but also in the hallways, around the edges of her classroom, and on the school's stage.

These teachers are a few of those who are "getting it right." They teach in a difficult setting in an economically poor town where many students have recently arrived from other countries. The students come from all around the world: Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. These teachers do not see the students' cultural diversity as a deficit, rather as a rich resource. Len Newman teaches English to the students by asking them to tell their stories of coming to America. They learn to communicate in English by constructing narratives about their own lives and telling the community about who they are.

These teachers all work at Central Falls High School, the Rhode Island school Obama mentioned in his speech.  They were all fired recently.  Obama and Arne Duncan point out that such extreme measures might be necessary on the road to "getting it right." I do realize that the teachers mentioned above are only a few teachers in the school. What about the rest? The teachers in Central Falls High School, where I too worked for six years, are like the teachers in every other urban school across the United States. There are some who are exceptional, there are many who are very good, and, yes, there are a few who perhaps are not doing their jobs well. We do need a much more nuanced approach to evaluating teachers, and when necessary, asking those who are not helping the students to leave the profession. At the same time, we need to hold up as exemplars, those that are working in a difficult setting every day and doing an extraordinary job.

Len Newman, Richard Kinslow, Deanna Camputaro, Michael Paul, and Deloris Grant, in a public meeting in front of the Central Falls community (and due to the media coverage in front of the nation), were all summarily dismissed. Each of their names was read out to the community. Sobs could be heard across the Central Falls High School auditorium as all teachers in the school lost their jobs. They will be allowed to reapply. However, all of these teachers I mentioned have been teaching for years (one of the reasons they are exceptional teachers). Will this district hire them back at the highest pay scale or will they replace them with much cheaper Teach for America recruits or young graduates of education schools?  Is this the example we want to set across the country for "getting it right"?

An article in the The New York Times indicates:

A coming swell of baby-boomer retirements is expected to force school systems to hire up to a million new teachers between now and 2014.

If "getting it right" means firing all the teachers in the school, who of our best teachers will choose to teach in urban schools in the next decade?  Central Falls isn't the exception -- nearly all urban schools in the United States are under-performing. Firing teachers across the United States will have a devastating effect on the lives of specific teachers and on the field of teaching in general. Education reformer Ted Sizer always said  the most important relationship in education is between the teacher and the child. As a nation it seems we are only thinking about large sweeping policies and forgetting about the day-to-day work in schools that makes a difference in the lives of our students.

Notes and Links:

Photographs by Jori Ketten and Kurt Wootton

Bob Kerr's article about Central Falls in the Providence Journal.

Rob Deblois's editorial in the Providence Journal.

See Michael Paul, Richard Kinslow, and Deloris Grant in a slideshow in the New York Times.

Read Educator Diane Ravitch's editorial on Central Falls "Obama's Awful Education Plan"

An Incubator of Ideas: Innovating Education, Part 4

I understand why school systems are moving to standardized tests, prescriptive textbooks, and top-down mandates from education leaders. I really do. It's easy and it's relatively inexpensive. If you have a new teacher in a school, it's much easier to give them a textbook, tell them the students are on chapter four and by the end of the semester they should be at chapter eight. Show them to their classroom and everything is taken care of. No need to check on them again unless you hear a complaint from a parent or from another teacher. Similarly, if you want to know how much a student is learning, take a look at last year's test scores and compare them to this year's. So easy. Yet this is not how great schools, teachers, or students are developed. If we want our students to be creative, if we want our students to think deeply, if we want our students to collaborate with each other, then we need to foster the same creative, thoughtful, and collaborative spaces for our teachers. And most importantly, we need to honor the skills of our teachers as professionals who hone their craft over many years and have the capacity, when supported, to do extraordinary work.

Yes, there are poor teachers in every school. But this is precisely why we need to build opportunities for teachers in every school to develop and share their ideas about teaching, so the majority of teachers, who are committed and thoughtful, will help the others to improve their practice. I believe we need to make schools idea incubators, where teachers have ample time to develop curriculum together, exchange best practices, and look at the work of their students consistently over time. Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond writes:

The kinds of changes that society wants and schools need cannot be mandated. They can be accomplished only by investing in teachers’ knowledge and their capacity to make responsible judgments in the complex work of teaching and in the work of transforming schools.

Previously I discussed designing a common vocabulary for teaching and learning across the school. The next step is to organize the teachers in the school into pods. A pod is a group of two to six teachers who teach similar subject areas and/or age groups. This pod will stay together throughout the year and share work with each other at least on a monthly basis and preferably on a weekly basis. At our school, Habla, we only have a few teachers so it's quite easy for us to facilitate the exchange of ideas. I use the word "facilitate" because our job as education leaders is to provide a space and inspiration for teachers to have rich conversations about the work they do in classrooms.

Teachers sharing ideas and talking is not new in education. For several decades a movement called Critical Friends Groups was popular in schools. The idea was that teachers would meet on a regular basis and share ideas. When I was part of one in a public school, I loved the time speaking with colleagues, and yet I found they usually lacked a critical element: purpose.  We would share and talk about student work, we would talk about our hopes and challenges about our students, but I found the conversations didn't build on one another or move beyond the room.

Therefore, when we took on the redesign of a large public school in Providence, Rhode Island, I knew the Critical Friends Group design wouldn't work. We needed as a school to move with more urgency. And yet we knew we couldn't mandate the changes in the school. We needed the creative energy of the teachers, and it was critical to support them as the school developed. Therefore we placed teachers in small groups we called pods, similar to Critical Friends Groups, yet these small groups each had concrete and clear purposes. Since there were about 150 teachers in the school, we appointed a group of teacher leaders, nine teachers who would lead about six pods each. Each week the teacher leaders met and together we developed the goals for the year and structures for facilitating the work of the pods. What is critical is we left the curricular design to the teachers. Using the common vocabulary across the school, they collaborated on developing curricula. As the year progressed we went beyond curriculum to share teaching methodologies, moving from the what of teaching to the how.

Teachers plan in pods at Hope High School. Photograph by Mary Beth Meehan

And now this school, Hope High School, like many of our schools across the United States, is in danger of losing all progress. A regressive superintendent, formally from the military, is moving all the schools across the city to the same schedule of forty-five minute periods. He'll take away the time the teachers have to plan. And he'll give teachers the same textbooks and mandated curriculums to teach across all schools at the same time. Why? Because it's easier to do this than to invest in the creative capacity of our teachers. It's cheaper to do this than to pay for the teacher's time to collaborate. We've been there before in education. We've done that. Let's put teaching back in the hands of the teachers.

A Common Vocabulary: Innovating Education, Part 3

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.

The Art of Conversation

Artwork by Melva Medina

Click on the above image for the larger version.

Last semester, in one of my adult classes, Melva Medina an artist and one of my students learning English, created the drawing pictured above and brought in into the classroom. The class was structured around the concepts of storytelling and memory. Throughout the semester we had been reading stories written by Maya Angelou and Sandra Cisneros and we wrote a series of stories about our lives. The students also took photographs and drew sketches representing their memories. It was the end of the class and we decided to put all of our classroom stories into a book.

We needed a cover for the book and Melva volunteered. When she returned to class the next week, I was shocked by the beauty of what she had created. The textures and repeated patterns in the image are remarkable. What I was particularly impressed with was how the image captured the qualities of our class. In some ways it has the ability to convey an educational philosophy even more clearly than an essay.

First, look at the faces. In Melva's classroom there were six students and two teachers (yes, a very small class; that is the beauty of adult education experiences). Everyone is represented by figures that seem to have forms similar to those found in Mayan and Aztec murals. I didn't ask her what her intent was, but it seems to point to the diversity of the students in the classroom -- many or our students are various mixes of different cultures, particularly indigenous and Spanish.

Melva also used the glyph in Habla's logo, a Mayan glyph that is often used when figures in murals are speaking to each other or praying to the gods. Our designer, Lucy Alcalá, had the idea of using it in our logo because "Habla" means "to speak," "to speak up," or " to speak out." We liked the political implications of the name in Spanish because we see it as our role in the community to help people find a voice in different languages and artforms. I find it interesting that this Mayan glyph also has spiritual implications as well, because I believe that teaching and learning a language isn't just a technical act. When we read the words of others who are no longer with us in literature, when we tell our stories in the classroom, we are both listening and reaching out to others. I believe the classroom is a sacred space -- a place where we connect with others and challenge ourselves.

The faces are arranged in a democratic way. There isn't one person who is in authority, separate from the group. All are engaged in a conversation together. The teachers are co-learners with the students and the students are co-teachers with the teacher. This is particularly true in this classroom of adults, where everyone chooses to give up their Saturday morning to be in the space together. When I look at Melva's drawing Brazilian educators Paulo Freire's words come to mind:

In the context of true learning, the learners will be engaged in a continuous transformation through which they become authentic subjects of the construction and reconstruction of what is being taught, side by side with the teacher, who is equally subject to the same process (Pedagogy of Freedom, 33).

This side-by-side positioning of the teacher and the student is critical for any language or literacy classroom. Teaching isn't the transmission of knowledge, rather it is a journey where we walk together down a path.

Finally, the cups of coffee. In all of our classrooms we have coffee, tea, and water available. Learning should be comfortable. I once participated in an education class in graduate school where we shadowed students all day in public schools. As an adult, following a middle school student around, one of the things that caught my attention was how there was no time to go to the bathroom!  There was no place to get a cup of coffee or a snack. I declared in class next week that pubic schools were "biologically unfit." Many years later when we started our own school we made sure the bathrooms were easily accessible anytime and that the students had ample opportunities to eat and drink.

Thanks to Melva Medina for her wonderful work of art (she donated it to our school.) If you are ever in Merida be sure to stop by her gallery downtown named Nahualli, Casa de Artistas or visit them on the web www.artistsinmexico.com.

The Habla logo:

Let Their Voices Boom

Artist Erminio Pinque digitally records a student's story

In the ArtsLiteracy Project at Brown University we formed collaborative partnerships with artists and teachers. The idea was that the artist would help the teacher to learn how to integrate the arts into the literacy classroom, thereby giving the teacher a new way to think about education. The teacher would help the artist structure or organize all their creative energy in a way that might be shared with a classroom of kids or in the community.

It was an honor to work with artists and teachers in cities around the world for ten years. I saw talented educators facilitating art making experiences and teaching literacy in schools in Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and across the United States. So when last week one of our teachers, Jessica Robertson, here at Habla asked me to help her create a performance with her students that are between the ages of eight and thirteen, my thoughts went back to a project we did five years ago with a group of educators in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

The artist we worked with, Erminio Pinque, is the artistic director of a performance and puppet company in Providence, Rhode Island called Big Nazo. We were working on a project in Len Newman and Richard Kinslow's classroom. Len and Richard taught a classed called "Newcomers" -- it was a class that helped students who had recently arrived to the United States develop their English and the other skills that were necessary for succeeding in schools in their new country.

The students had been writing stories about their home countries and how they traveled to the United States. Len and Ricard were brilliant at facilitating a language process that enabled the students to write long narratives filled with rich descriptions and dialogue. Now Erminio's work over several weeks was to help the students tell their stories on stage to the Central Falls community. With Erminio, the students developed life-size portraits of themselves using cardboard and paint. They also created set-pieces consisting of the symbols and objects of their stories.

Students with their self-portraits on the stage in Central Falls.

It was time to put it all together, but how would we have students new to the country perform their stories in English, on the stage in front of seven hundred other students and faculty?  Erminio had an idea. He brought in a digital recorder and he recorded the students telling their stories. If they messed up, no problem, he would pause the recorder and let them start again. At home he edited all the student stories and brought "clean" audio versions of the story in next week. He told me, "This is an amazing way for the kids to feel a sense of fluency--we can edit out the mistakes. Then we bring a couple of big speakers in, hook up the digital player, and their voices will boom over the auditorium. The students will sound confident and it will free them up to tell the story with the puppets on the stage."

Last week, here in Mexico, when I was faced with a room full of very energetic kids and a long script they had developed with their teacher, recording it seemed like the best solution.  The students had spent the semester reading stories about "wild things." They wrote their own wild thing story, and now they were working with an artist to create sculptures of the creatures they had designed. The work on the sculptures was taking, of course, longer than expected, and we still had a performance to create. I took groups of students into a separate classroom. We practiced their script once, then recorded it. During the practice session the students were having a tough time concentrating. They were missing lines, laughing when someone made a mistake, asking questions, moving around. However, when I hit RECORD, the students were completely focused. They didn't make any mistakes during the recording session. This brought back to mind the research of Shirley Brice Heath on community-based arts organizations: when the risks are high, students rise to the occasion.

The next class I hoped to add movement to the audio recording.  We gathered the students in our main performance space and I began to give orders. We needed to rush so I thought the best thing to do was to just push really hard and get through the script. Bad idea. Kids this age don't rush through a performance process and I had to learn a lesson I knew already (but need to be reminded of consistently): the students need to own the artistic process. Even though the kids wrote the script, the performance was my idea. I knew never to force the process to get to a product, but here I was, doing it again, pushing, pushing, pushing. After class I was frustrated. I didn't know what to do. The parents were expecting a performance and we didn't have time to create one. I couldn't create a process where students would develop their own performance; we only had one class left.

Then it occurred to me. We have the performance already. Instead of calling the script a "play" we called it a "radio show." We recorded some sound effects with the kids, asked them what music they would like to see in their radio show, and then with a little Garage Band editing on the Mac we had a complete show to present to the parents.

Citlalli Vázquez Medina with her wild thing.

For the peformance, each student presented their wild thing, read a monologue from their characters perspective, and then we played the radio show.We wanted the kids and their families to read together so we gave each family only one script and an amazing thing happened: the kids sat in their parent's laps, and listened and read together. Since the script was in English, and many of the parents only spoke Spanish, the kids translated for their parents and told them the story. It was a touching ending to the semester and we learned some important lessons.

Students sit with their parents listening to their Radio Show.

(notice the wild thing sculptures still on the stage)

What did we learn from this experience?

1.  Pay attention to what others are doing around you. You never know when you will need an idea in the future.  I used Erminio's idea five years later (and used the photo of him recording kids in this blog!)

2.  There is always a solution, and it's usually right in front of us. It requires a shift in how we're thinking about the problem.

3.  Never give up and never cancel an event (we debated canceling the performance). We can always make it happen as a community.

4.  Never rush students in an artistic process. If there isn't time for a rich process, do something else.

5.  Don't try to create something new at the last minute. Look at what the students have already created. Use it.

6.  Teaching a perfect class is always wonderful, but it is the worst classes that teach us the most. After those classes pull yourself up and ask, "what can I learn from this, how can I be a better teacher next time I step into the classroom?"

What Ted Sizer Taught Me

Bil Johnson and I present Ted Sizer with a lifetime achievement award from the Education Department at Brown University at the No Teacher Left Behind Conference in 2006 (photograph by Karl Dominey)

When I graduated from college, I was preparing for my first job as a teacher. In college I didn't study education, so my father, then a high school English teacher, handed me three books, The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner, The Shopping Mall High School by Powell, Farrar, and Cohen, and the book that became my favorite, Horace's School by Theodore Sizer.

Looking back I realize how wise my father was in giving me a series of books that framed an overall theory of education, rather than books with titles like "how to teach English" or "teaching in the first year." The books he passed on to me were the books he came to after thirty-five years of teaching; the ideas in these books resonated with him, a public school teacher in Indiana, and pointed to the reforms that were necessary in an out-dated educational system and he hoped that with these ideas I might be able to carry on what he started.

In my first year of teaching, a colleague of mine John Hanlon and I shared Sizer’s passages from Horace's School many mornings over cups of coffee in the teachers’ room. We talked about the teacher Horace in the book, a character Sizer created based on a composite of public school teachers across the United States, and his struggles in the traditional school setting. Through Horace, we imagined different possibilities in our own school. We decided forty-five minute classes were indeed not enough time to deeply engage students in any discipline. We felt it was necessary to combine the separate subjects we taught--literature and history--into an interdisciplinary course called "American Studies." Of course now none of these ideas are new, and they weren't even at that time, but in our little school we presented our proposal to co-teach a new course to the headmaster and he approved it. Over the next couple of years our students learned about the interconnectedness of the disciplines--literature, the arts, history--and at the end of each quarter they “exhibited”--to use Sizer's term--what they knew. They wrote their own "Song of Myself" based on Whitman's famous poem; they interpreted Michael Hess's Dispatches and the history of the Vietnam War through a collaborative performance art piece; and yes, they also wrote essays and took exams, but we aimed for depth of understanding rather than a simple recall of facts.  Our goal was to wrestle with the interconnectedness of the disciplines and to teach them in-depth, honoring Sizer's other important principle "less is more."

Later at Brown I would become one of Ted Sizer's students. Rather than meet in a classroom at the university, he and his wife Nancy taught their class in their home in Providence teaching me another important principle that wasn't in any of his books, "education should feel like home." Later, when I moved to Mexico, my wife and I bought a house and turned it into a school. The living room became a performance space and we transformed the garage into a reception area to welcome parents and students. A carpenter made all of the school’s furniture by hand so that students wouldn't sit in institutional desks and chairs. A school should feel like home, a place to come together as a community, to exchange ideas, to explore the world, and to take the risks of learning in a safe environment.

With Ted and Nancy Sizer, every week, we woke up at 5am and visited a public school in New England to shadow a student. With our student, we attended classes together and shared lunchtime. This is how we learned about our public schools and our education system, not by reading books about education, but rather sitting next to the students, talking to them, experiencing school like they experienced school. This was another principle of Ted's not explicitly in his books, "education needs to be out in the world." We wrote about what we saw in the schools, and when we returned to his home, we sat sharing our writing, creating our own "textbook" for our class from our combined observations.

Finally at the end of the course, I remember distinctly Ted instructing us, "Now it is time for you to show us what you learned. All of you will create a performance together. You are welcome to use our house to plan, we'll pour the tea."  Sizer writes about an important principle of education he calls, "Student-as-worker. Teacher-as-coach," meaning the students must be the ones to wrestle with the heart of subject, through discussions, reading, writing, and what Sizer called “exhibitions of learning.” The teacher’s job is to encourage, inspire, and ask questions. This is a stark contrast from the traditional classroom where the teacher gives the students information in a lecture and asks them to recall a series of facts for a test. In Sizer's model the students become the scientists, the artists, the writers, and the historians, and in his classroom at Brown we became the educators and researchers, and he and Nancy poured the tea.

Today we are losing what Ted Sizer saw as the most important relationship in education, the relationship between the student and the teacher.  For the past several years, the United States has been moving away from Ted’s vision towards standardized and antiseptic schools. We give our teachers the same textbooks across all classrooms and ask them to employ identical teaching methods. We administer batteries of state tests to our students. In the media and in policy meetings we sound tough by discussing “accountability” and the need for “urgent change,” encouraging our school administrators to lead with an attitude of going to war rather than educating children. We hold our teachers accountable to state test results forcing all of our teachers to teach to the tests rather than teach curriculums that encourage the kind of in-depth, interdisciplinary thinking that Sizer wrote so eloquently about.

One of the greatest lessons Ted taught us was how to frame policies in ways that are clear and straightforward. He created clear principles for reforming schools that guided the organization he founded at Brown, The Coalition of Essential Schools. These principles embrace complex ideas in just a few words and honor the potential humanity of our schools. They give voice to the teachers and put the students at the center of education. Even though he has left us, it's time to listen to Ted Sizer again.

The Coalition of Essential School’s Common Principles

1. Learning to use one's mind well

2. Less is More, depth over coverage

3. Goals apply to all students

4. Personalization

5. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach

6. Demonstration of mastery

7. A tone of decency and trust

8. Commitment to the entire school

9. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning

10. Democracy and equity

Schools with a Vision: Innovating Education, Part 2

Previously I discussed trends in education that are increasingly moving us towards a more standardized system of schooling and what some of the indicators are of these trends. Because I would rather discuss what is possible rather than what is wrong with the current system, I will outline some concrete suggestions how we might design schools that are innovative, and how our national policies might inspire this reform. We must move back and forth between looking at what the faults are of the current system, and proposing a vision of the future, for as Brazilian educator Paulo Freire writes,

Transformation of the world implies a dialectic between the two actions: denouncing the process of dehumanization and announcing the dream of a new society.

So with Freire's suggestion let's move forward envisioning a public system of education that places innovation rather than standardization at the center of learning.

Recently I've been reading an excellent history of American schools by David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education. Tyack looks at how the school systems in the United States developed from small, one-room schoolhouses to large, bureaucratic systems. He writes about the school reforms of the time:

Efficiency, rationality, continuity, precision, impartiality became watchwords of the consolidators. In short, they tried to create a more bureaucratic system.

Through today's lens Tyack's quote sounds particularly ominous, but during the 19th century there was a need for a more unified system of education. The population of cities was growing at an astounding rate. The small schools in cities, and particularly the teachers, were being overrun by ever increasing populations of students. Tyack points out that in Chicago in the 1860 a total of 123 teachers had the responsibility of educating 14,000 students!  At this time in the United States there was a need for more school buildings, curriculums, books and materials, systems of record keeping, and staffing. Many students couldn't find seats in the local schools and weren't able to attend. Given the rapidly changing demographics, cities needed unified systems to educate all of the students, and so they began the creation of the school districts and systems we have in place today.

Over the last 150 years our school bureaucracies have grown, and our politicians today are pushing for even more unification and standardization of our education systems. What has changed is that we are no longer living in the 19th century. We have school buildings and the capacity to build more. We have a large teacher workforce and teacher training programs in place in every city across the country. Education corporations compete to sell textbooks to school districts and cities allocate hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate contracts. The initial goals of creating bureaucratic systems have been met and what we have now are schools across the country that look exactly the same.

Walk into most high schools in any rural or suburban towns and cities across the United States and you will see the following: a large building built to hold over a thousand students, a range of sports programs and teams (and playing fields and gyms to accommodate them), a maze of hallways filled with rows of hundreds of student lockers, a cafeteria, and a massive parking lot for staff and student parking. Recently I visited a school in South Florida that had not one large building, but three large buildings designed for a campus of four thousand students.

What you will also find in every one of these high schools are curriculums and courses that look exactly the same. There is the 9th grade English class that reads Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet, and House on Mango Street and the Algebra class with a textbook of endless problem sets (with answers in the back!) There is the biology class that will diagram the cell and talk about the process of photosynthesis. There is the foreign language department that will continue to teach the to be verb and the music department that will generally be made up of the marching band teacher and the choral music teacher (except for urban schools; these last two departments have usually been cut). The predictability and homogeneity of schools across the United States demonstrates exactly how successful the move towards a "one best system" has been. Yet as Thomas Freidman points out in his article, The New Untouchables, we are now moving into a world that is very different than the one one hundred years ago. We need students who are able to work with and collaborate other people in a variety of industries: doctors, architects, carpenters, plumbers, teachers, entrepreneurs. Student also need to be able to think in innovative ways, solve complex problems, and creatively and critically navigate the barrage of information available.

It is now time to move from the homogeneous schools to ones that are centers of innovation. Rather than building schools that look the same, we need schools that are unique. The first step in this is creating schools with a vision. Educator Bil Johnson points out that most of the schools we have today have the exact same "mission statement" on a banner in the front entrance that reads something like, "NAME OF SCHOOL seeks to develop critical thinkers and responsible citizens. Our students will leave with the skills necessary to compete in college and in the world." What we need today is much more choice and diversity in public education in the United States. Some of the most extraordinary schools I have visited are schools with an arts focus (a great example is the Boston Arts Academy) and I don't think it's having a focus on the arts that makes them special places. It's because they actually have a vision that students, teachers, parents, and school leaders can be passionate about. There are many charter schools and innovative pilot schools with different foci. Some focus on marine biology, others on technology, and others on the humanities. Some are known for a traditional approach to education--students in uniforms and an emphasis on discipline and order--others value a constructivist, progressive model of education--interdisciplinary classrooms and project-based learning. We are a diverse nation filled with citizens from different cultural and religious backgrounds. We need schools that reflect our diverse citizenry by offering a multitude of learning experiences. Such schools with unique visions will pave the way for the kinds of innovative, creative, and global thinking that will be required in the future.

A Magical Education

Julieta with her Inside/Outside Book

The teacher of our 7-11 year old students, Karla Hernando Flores, asked me to come into the classroom and talk to the kids about the vision and history behind our school, Habla. I'm used to talking to parents and adults about Habla, but how do I talk to a group of kids that are learning English in a way that they will be interested and understand the mission of the school from their point-of-view? Wouldn't it be great if everyone, in all occupations, had to explain what they do to seven year-olds; it forces us to cut through all our work-related jargon and, instead, find the essential words that describe what is at the heart of our work.

The students in Karla's class were making books as art objects. Robert Possehl, a fantastic bookmaker and multi-media artist, visited Habla from Chicago to teach at our 2009 Teacher Institute. Robert taught our teachers how to make different sizes and types of books from paper (see Robert's work at the Teacher Institute here). Karla's students were now making books about the inside and outside of Habla. They took photographs of their favorite parts of the school and wrote about their experiences. My job was to help them see Habla from a historical perspective.

So now I was in front of twenty students, all looking up at me expectantly. I knew I couldn't use my usual default words to talk about education - words like progressive, multidisciplinary or collaborative - so instead another word came to my mind: "Habla is about magic," I said.  I knew the kids in this class loved Harry Potter and other fantasy stories, so it seemed like "magic" was the perfect way to capture their attention, but as I talked, I realized that it is true, an imaginative and creative school environment is magical.

I explained, "Look at the world around us, look at the trees, the flowers, outside. That is magic. The Bible says God created the world in seven days. The Mayan creation myths you've been studying talk about how man was created from corn. So out of rough materials, new things are formed. Life is created. That's what you are doing every day here at Habla. When you put words together to write something, that is magic. When you take paint, paintbrushes and paper and create an image, that is magic. Your teacher doesn't know what you are going to make. I don't know what you are going to make. Maybe even when you start you don't know what you are going to make. But you start to create and by the time you are finished you have brought something new into the world, just like the trees grow and the flowers bloom."

Education for me, at its best, is a magical experience. I love seeing a group of new students enter the classroom. They've never been in the same space before, and over the course of several weeks they will get to know each other, begin working together, telling stories, writing, and creating. At the start of the class we don't know the journey each student will take, but it is our job to help them along their collective journey and find their voice in language and in art.

Click on each book below to see a larger version and read what Romina wrote about magic.