The Stories a Classroom Tells

Previously published here on the Harvard Graduate School of Education blog, "Voices in Education."

Many years ago when I was a student in a teacher certification program, one of our daily requirements was to observe the classroom of a different teacher in the school. Many of my colleagues complained about this assignment—sitting in someone else’s class when you have papers to write, hundreds of pages to read each week, and your own class to teach can seem like a waste of time—but for me this was the most important part of the program. I did my student teaching in a large urban high school, and, like any public school, it had a handful of teachers who were in my view exceptional, many that were fine, and a few that probably needed to be in another profession. I observed them all.

It’s obvious that a young teacher has much to gain by watching an excellent teacher, but what is there to learn from an average or even poor one? I challenged myself to learn one thing that I could incorporate into my own practice from every teacher. When I walked into Nancy’s room, a biology teacher in an urban high school, I immediately noticed the aesthetic beauty of the space: lush aquariums along the windows, lab spaces for the students with all of the proper equipment in place, and a multi-colored agenda of what the day’s work would be. On her agenda the words “lab report” were surrounded with an illustration of an explosion like the “BAM!” in a Batman comic book. When she began the class she announced, “The lab report is your chance to express your ideas, to tell everyone what you’ve learned. You want to convey that ‘aha’ moment to the rest of us.” Today, I still begin my classes with an agenda, and more importantly, I hope I convey the same enthusiasm about my students’ work that Nancy did.

Throughout my now twenty years in the field of education, whenever I have sat in a classroom (whether to coach new teachers or to participate in a professional development workshop offered by a colleague), I have always entered the experience with anticipation. Rather than thinking only of what I can offer as an experienced teacher or, worse, having an “I’ve seen it all before” attitude, I ask, “What stories does this classroom have to tell? What can I learn to incorporate into my own practice?” I approach every experience in my fellow teachers’ classes with a sense of inquiry, and this makes my time spent in educational spaces invigorating because I always have more to learn.

In the last few years, as I wrote the book A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts, my colleague Eileen Landay and I applied this approach to writing about education. When we visited schools, sat in classrooms, or taught our own students, we looked for the stories that each group of teachers and students had to tell. Each chapter of the book begins with one of these stories—Flor, who endlessly drew pictures of birds in her English classroom in Mexico; Russell, who wrapped himself up in a stage curtain and wouldn’t come out; Daniel and his students in Brazil, who organized a peace demonstration in their small town of Inhumas.

Stories of success describing real teachers and students provide us with multi-dimensional portraits of what life is like in the rough-and-tumble world of schools, capturing both the beauty and challenges of teaching and learning. As teachers we are inundated by seemingly endless top-down mandates that tell us what we ought to be teaching. What we need much more of is time for teachers to observe and have conversations about each other’s practice. At the policy level we need to dedicate fewer resources to educational experts sitting in rooms developing lists of standards and tests and more toward discovering what inspirational on-the-ground teaching looks like. When Malcolm Gladwell was asked where story ideas for his influential books like The Tipping Point and Outliers came from, he answered that he doesn’t write about famous people or those who hold all the power. He said, “You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story.” The stories that we need to find and tell live in our classrooms. They reside in the daily interaction of students and teachers. If we are to find ways to transform our schools, we must spend more time in our fellow teachers’ classrooms working to understand these stories of true educational change.

Time for Thoughtfulness

Previously published here under the title "Listen to the Teachers" on the Huffington Post.

During the Great Depression Myles Horton and a group of committed educators founded Highlander Folk School. Based on Dutch models of adult education centers, Horton built the school to provide a place where adults who shared a common cause could meet to hash out their ideas regarding how to better organize to promote social change. The first groups to gather at Highlander were workers and labor leaders who organized unions in the South. Later, the school would serve as a fulcrum for the civil rights movement by helping to inspire Citizenship Schools. Teachers from the black communities ran the schools themselves, focusing on teaching the basic skills of reading and writing necessary at the time for voter registration. In Frank Adam's history of Highlander he explains, "From two words—ought and is—arises the tension out of which people will learn and act."

Today's school reform movement is a battle over the "is" and the "ought." Perhaps it's not too hard to agree on the "is"—problems we are facing in our public schools, particularly when it comes to equal opportunities for all of our nation's youth—but what seems to be most debated is what ought to be: what are the goals of school reform and how might we reach these goals?

Unfortunately in reaching for solutions, we have silenced the voices of those who matter most. We are seeing across the United States—and in many countries around the world—the disenfranchisement of our teachers. Education policy makers at every level—city, state, and federal—have become an oligarchy that ascribes to a few common principles: 1) a school's success or failure is determined by students' performance on standardized tests; 2) it is the fault of teachers when students perform poorly on these tests; 3) if students do not rapidly improve, schools and individual teachers need to be held accountable; 4) accountability, by federal mandate, might involve the state taking over the school and firing all the administrators and teachers, thus "reforming" the school from the bottom up.

Such measures are often justified by policy makers with statements such as "we're doing what's best for the students." However, what they often don't take into account is the fragility of the overall school community, made up certainly of students, but also of teachers, parents, community partners, school staff, and administrators. Education relies on the day-to-day interaction among real people in a shared space. We cannot impose a rigid set of expectations and then believe that our teachers will be able to teach thoughtfully and creatively.

School principal and education writer Debbie Meier describes the critical relationship that exists between the world of the teachers and the world of the students:

Students learn a lot from the company they keep—including the intellectual habits of their teachers. We're never going to get kids to approach science or literature thoughtfully if their own teachers do not have the space or time for thoughtfulness, much less permission to practice it. Adults need to model the habits of mind they want their students to adopt—good judgment, the exercise of reason, respect for differences, a willingness to try new things, and the courage to ask hard questions. But teachers who are "just following orders"—implementing a one-size-fits-all program in accordance with an experimental protocol—are not helping their students learn these lessons.

The National Research Council of the National Academies of Science recently reported that the most important skills students need in the 21st century workforce fall into three categories: cognitive skills, interpersonal skills, and intrapersonal skills. Two of these categories emphasize our ability to relate with others and our capacity for self-reflection and improvement. A system that views its teachers like cogs in a machine is not one that is likely to foster these skill sets at any level.

Through our top-down mandates and ubiquitous talk of "accountability," we are discouraging teachers from fostering creativity and innovation in their own classrooms. Lately, I was having dinner with a teacher at a high school that fired all its teachers and then was "reconstituted," to use the Department of Education's term. I remember walking down the hallways of this urban school many years ago and feeling such a strong sense of community and warmth. I asked him if the school still felt like this after the draconian changes. The teacher responded, "I'll tell you the truth Kurt, the school has lost its sense of humanity."

Yes, we do have a great deal of work to do, particularly around providing equal educational opportunities for students in all of our public schools. In the tradition of Highlander, we must take a critical look at the "is" and find ways to reach the "ought." Also like Highlander we must arrive at solutions by honoring the intelligence, creativity, and the on-the-ground knowledge of the dedicated teachers in our nation's schools. Perhaps by working alongside rather than against teachers, we can shift the educational climate back to a place where the very humanity of the student and the teacher are valued again.

How many continents are there?

Previously published here at the Huffington Post.

As my wife and I were driving home one night on the highway from Merida, Mexico, the capital city of the Yucatan where we work, to our home in Cholul, the small pueblo right outside of the city, we somehow stumbled onto the topic of how many continents there are in the world. I mentioned seven and she indignantly replied:

"Seven! What do you mean seven: there are only five!"

"Five!" I responded. "What are you talking about? What are the five?"

"América. Asia. Europe. África. Oceanía," she said naming the five continents she learned in her elementary school in Merida.

After asking what Oceanía is in English (Australia), I listed the seven continents as I learned them in elementary school in the United States. After futilely arguing for a bit about who was right and who was wrong (luckily we were close to home so the argument didn't have much of a chance to escalate), we promptly looked up the "answer" on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia in English immediately identifies the seven continents. I'm right! But -- wait a minute -- Wikipedia in Spanish presents us with a chart of different possibilities ranging from four to seven with the explanation roughly translated, "In reality there isn't one fixed way to determine the number of continents. It depends on each cultural area to decide if two large masses of earth joined together form one or two continents, and if specifically Asia and Europe or North and South America are one or two continents."

So in fact, neither of us is either right or wrong. The "correct" answer depends on where in the world you were educated and taught to memorize the "right" answer of four, five, six, or seven. Asking our guests how many continents there are has become a fun dinner party game when we have visitors from different parts of the world. If they aren't aware of the varied definitions of what constitutes a continent, a hearty argument always ensues.

In school we are taught to memorize many facts -- seven continents, fifty states in the United States, 1 + 1 = 2 -- but rarely are we encouraged to question these supposed facts. What would happen if we posed each of these as questions? First, we would teach students that the skill of questioning is of equal or perhaps even more importance than providing the correct answers. Students would also learn that having a flexible stance on a particular issue, reconsidering our own assumptions, being able to see something from another person's perspective, and moving beyond who is right and who is wrong, are vital dispositions to have not only for dinner conversations, but for everything from working on a project together, to effectively communicating with your partner, to succeeding in international diplomacy.

Learning that 1 + 1 = 2 is important, and certainly an engineer designing a bridge would argue there are times when finding the right answer is critical. But it's quite fun to think of instances where we might question this equation, even if this moves us from the field of mathematics into linguistics (1 pair of shoes + 1 pair of shoes = 4 shoes or 1 ball of clay + 1 ball of clay = 1 large ball of clay). George Cantor, the inventor of set theory in mathematics during the nineteenth century felt that "in mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems." Teaching students to investigate deeply, to ask many questions, to consider multiple points of view, and to imagine numerous possible answers is perhaps much more important than teaching students to memorize and recite the fifty states. "Why is Puerto Rico not a state? Should it be? Who decides what is a state? What were the territories before they were states?"

Yet we have about 45 million students taking standardized tests across the United States. With this many tests, how can states possibly evaluate complex and creative answers to interesting questions? Open-ended questions must be graded by an actual person which costs significantly more than a multiple-choice answer checked by a computer. As a result of the NCLB act, we as a nation have moved increasingly towards multiple choice exams and, as we hold teachers and schools accountable for the results, classrooms have become places where the right answer rules. This is most apparent in New York City where the Department of Education has publicly released ratings of its 12,700 teachers. Teachers are listed by name and rated solely according to how well their students performed on standardized tests.

Such emphasis on the right answer is a far cry from the legacy of education reformer Ted Sizer who stressed the importance of an inquiry-based education: "Questions are usually more interesting than assertions or answers, and the most appealing questions are those which are genuine -- dealing with matters of manifest importance to the world--and have no easy or total resolution." Perhaps along with asking students to list the four-seven continents, we might also ask, "How and why are continents defined differently in various areas of the world? Based on the multiple definitions of the word continent how many do you think there are?" Such questions will help our students to think deeply and flexibly, which will also help them to negotiate different cultures and ways of knowing. Asking questions places us in the stance of the listener rather than the speaker. And no matter our profession -- teacher, doctor, mechanic, lawyer, politician -- isn't asking the right question usually more productive than immediately offering an answer?

Teaching to Learn

In my English class in Mexico we've been reading To Kill a Mockingbird while examining the history and legacy of slavery in the United States. We came to the part in the novel where Calpurnia, the African-American maid, takes the two white children she cares for, Scout and Jem, to her church in her community. Jem notices that the congregation doesn't use hymn books but rather participates in a call and response where a "music superintendent" sings the lines from the hymn and the congregation echoes the words to the song. Jem is perplexed by the situation and the following scene unfolds:

Jem said it looked like they could save the collection money for a year and get some hymn-books.

Calpurnia laughed. "Wouldn't do any good," she said. "They can't read."

"Can't read?" I [Scout] asked. "All those folks?"

"That's right," Calpurnia nodded. "Can't but about four folks in First Purchase read . . . I'm one of 'em."

"Where'd you go to school, Cal?" asked Jem.

"Nowhere. Let's see now, who taught me my letters? It was Miss Maudie Atkinson's aunt, old Miss Buford--"

I thought it might be interesting to pair this scene with the moment in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he discusses how he learned to read. Since my students in the classroom are learning English I wanted to hear first--before we began reading--how they define the word "learning" and what it means to them. I wrote on the board: "What does the word 'learning' mean to you? How do you define it? Begin with the phrase 'Learning is.'" Now I often ask my students for feedback about how the class is going (what they would like to see more or less of) and I've even asked how they best learn a language. But when I asked them to define learning I received a completely different type of response. The students in my English class range from the age of sixteen to sixty-seven. Here is a selection of what they wrote:

To me learning is to open my mind to new waves of knowledge. It's growing in an intellectual way.

Learning is the opportunity to open your mind to other worlds. For me learning is the possibility to grow because you know new things and change your life.

For me it means to share all knowledge, listening to the opinions of people, experts and average people about meaning.

It is making an extra effort and experimenting with something new, making mistakes and being successful in the process to understand.

To take information from outside so you can understand the world.

Learning is the possibility to recreate yourself with other information from outside.

None of my students defined learning as something that happens in school. They all used active words "to take," "to grow," "to recreate," "to share," "to listen," "to make," "to understand," "to experience," "to open" and very few of their responses were about how we might typically conceive of learning as simply the acquiring of information or facts. We typed the words into Wordle and ended up with the following visual meta-analysis of the language they used to describe the process of learning.

Learning

As they read their responses around the room, my first thought was about the rest of the class I had planned, "Will my teaching live up to their definitions of learning?" But then as I listened to them talk about learning, I began to think even more deeply about my teaching in general. For my students, learning, as they define it, must be active: it requires doing rather than just absorbing. Although they did note that information is part of the process, in their view information must open doorways into new worlds and lead then to experiences of transformation or change.

Later that day in class we went on to read a selection from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass about how learning to read helped him find "the pathway from slavery to freedom." In the class we talked extensively about the word "pathway" and how learning is a journey, but one that must be taken as an individual in a community of learners.

After today's class I realize how valuable it was to ask my students how they define learning. All of us, teachers and students, are on different paths. My students come to my classroom voluntarily. They are there to learn English for different reasons. I'm reminded of the mission for Highlander, the school for adults that was instrumental in the labor and civil rights movement. In Frank Adam's book about Highlander he writes,

Highlander’s staff has learned to avoid telling people how to relieve their problems and has concentrated on helping people look to themselves to find their own potential and their own solutions. When Highlander has succeeded at this difficult task, the staff have been teachers who, as Joseph K. Hart said, were able ‘to teach their own capacity to learn.’

Hearing all the ways my students defined learning reminded me that my role as a teacher is to help them, in any way I might, to walk along their own paths, which can be a difficult undertaking in a diverse community of students where their paths might point in different directions. My students'  responses to the word "learning" reminded me the question I should be asking myself as a teacher is not "What do I teach today?" but rather "How  might I help my students to learn?"

The Beauty of Failure

Published previously here at The Huffington Post.

In the now widely-shared commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Stanford, he shares the story of three moments in his life that were transformative: his dropping out of college, his being fired from Apple, and his first diagnosis of cancer. We might perceive each of his examples as a different kind of failure whether they be societal or biological, yet Jobs points out that these supposed "failures" were necessary in his development as a human being and in his successes.

Habla: The Center for Language and Culture recently hosted an education forum with the topic, "Beauty in Failure: Experimentation and Risk in Education." Education leaders gathered from different countries to share their ideas about how failure is an essential aspect of our development as humans and how we, therefore, need to find ways to embrace -- not shun -- failure in our educational settings. Although all educators were speaking from many different cultural contexts, some clear through-lines emerged from the conference.

One area of agreement was that most schools demand constant achievement. Although this is certainly true in today's culture of testing where we measure students, teachers, schools, and districts by a battery of standardized tests, it's important to note that this trend isn't new. Students have been traditionally tracked by various tests including IQ tests and SATs. For decades schools have posted student rankings based on grades in the hallways and given the honor of valedictorian to the students with the highest GPA. At the classroom level, we evaluate our students through daily homework assignments, in-class quizzes, tests, and papers in up to seven subjects. In such an environment, students must strive to get the right answers in numerous micro-assessments throughout the day.

Sam Seidel at the Habla Forum

This demand for unceasing achievement contrasts with the business practices of some of our leading companies. At the Habla Forum educator and writer Sam Seidel, author of Hip Hop Genius, highlighted in his speech different businesses that value time spent "off-task." Pixar built Pixar University, a place where any employee can take various classes in such things as improvisation, drawing, or scriptwriting regardless of job description. Google instituted the now famous "twenty percent time" where engineers spend one day a week working on whatever personal projects they like. Sam asks us to "imagine the kinds of breakthroughs we might see in education if we all got 20% of our time just to experiment?"

There are some school settings that do embrace a kind of learning where students are encouraged to fail and then try again. One example is Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education that partners teachers in schools with artists who collaborate to design cutting-edge creative experiences for students in Chicago public schools. Another is an international biodiversity initiative led by biologist Dan Bisaccio where students track the foliage and animal life on a small portion of land and report their findings to the Smithsonian Institution's Biodiversity & Monitoring Program. In an after-school organization, New Urban Arts in Providence, RI, youth are mentored by professional artists one-on-one. One student pointed out, "In school, you learn by remembering. At New Urban Arts, you make mistakes and learn from them. In school you just get an 'F' for that."

Rather than valuing short-term assignments, these settings welcome complex, multi-layered projects that students engage in individually or collaboratively. In these projects there is ample room for multiple-drafts, for mucking things up along the way, thinking through difficulties and problems, and then working to get it right. In a recent article in the New York Times, Dominic Randolph, headmaster of Riverdale County School, points out how important the behavioral trait of "grit" is for working through problems, "The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get through failure and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything."

We realized that failure is indeed not always beautiful. Steve Jobs' three examples were traumatic, and after each he describes the experience of feeling lost. Yet, if students and teachers aren't willing to take risks, to try new things, and to experiment, then there is little chance for true growth and learning. When we all have an opportunity to fail, when there are people to support us and gently guide us through our failures, when we have the chance to reflect and learn from our mistakes and eventually reach epiphanies of understanding, then we are learning not only math or history, but how to make the most of all the experiences given to us throughout our lives.

To see information about the next Habla Forum in 2013 click here.

A special thank you to Arnold Aprill, Gail Burnaford, Sam Seidel, Cynthia Weiss, Kathleen Cushman, and Maria del Mar Patron Vazquez whose ideas all contributed to the Forum and this article.

Elegant Teaching

Since my years first as a student and then as a teacher, I always have had the feeling that summer is a time for rest and relaxation. However, in the years since I was the director of The ArtsLiteracy Project and then of Habla, summer has been the busiest time of the year. In the summer we work with teachers from around the world who are on their vacations but still eager to join other educators in sharing ideas and developing in their teaching practices. I do teach during the year as well, but summer for me is a time to offer what I've learned to other educators and to learn from them in return.

This summer I had the opportunity to learn from several extraordinary educators who taught at this year's Habla Teacher Institute titled Travelling Beneath the Surface. The idea behind this institute was that we would explore what it means to teach deeply--to really wrestle with ideas with our students and explore what it means to teach "in-depth" in our disciplines. Educator Ted Sizer uses the term "less is more" to describe how teachers need to avoid the idea that they must cover a body of material (usually extensive) over the course of the year. Rather we as educators should delve deeply with our students into a few topics. In this way we help our students to wrestle with complex issues and think profoundly rather than superficially about ideas and issues.

My colleague Cynthia Weiss demonstrated this by leading the teachers at the Teacher Institute through an intense and multi-layered process of creating collages. To begin, Cynthia gave a brief presentation about the history of the collage and showed different possibilities from artists such as Matisse and Picasso. In this presentation she provoked us to think about collages through the lens of elegance by offering the following definition:

Elegance is the attribute of being unusually effective and simple. Essential components include simplicity and consistency of design, focusing on the essential features of an object.

Typically we think of collages as an assortment of disparate elements, which indeed they are. Cynthia, however, refocused us on the need to approach creating a collage with the idea of simplicity in mind so the collage wouldn't become merely a random assortment of paint and paper.

Cynthia then took us to a classroom where she had prepared a variety of arts materials organized neatly into two stations: a station with various paints and a station with different types and sizes of cut paper. She demonstrated how we might play with the paper and paint to create surfaces for our collages. Then she let everyone go to "just play . . . don't think to much, experiment!" Quickly everyone became entranced in the process of creating the foundations for their collages. As the day went on participants were completely immersed in their processes, losing track of time and even place. As presenters we had other talks and workshops planned, but watching the teachers work we decided to let the day unfold naturally with a focus on only the collage-making (luckily, all the presenters work collaboratively and we have the flexibility to adjust the schedule in any way we see fit).  The day ended and the teachers stayed, hard at work, concentrating on the little world in front of them on their tables.

We dedicated another day that week to collage-making. The co-director of Habla, Marimar, turned to me and said, "What about teaching practice? This is a teacher institute, we need to talk about pedagogy, not just be immersed in an artistic process!"

She was absolutely right. As you can see from the photographs, the products were stunning, and most of the teachers attending the institute had no artistic background whatsoever. I was interested in how Cynthia, as an educator, facilitated a process that led to such compelling work. What was going on in her head before and during the workshop? What choices as a teacher did she make to help the group reach such a level of quality? The questions seemed to have implications for the larger field of education:

What can we as teachers do, what do we have in our power, to help students achieve excellence in their work?

After we finished creating the murals, in front of all the teachers I interviewed Cynthia about her pedagogy. She pointed out five pedagogical choices she felt were critical for the success of the project:

1.  Modeling for possibility. It's important for students to see models of what might be possible. Modeling might take three forms: showing models from professional artists, modeling the tools that might be used, or providing models of student or teacher work. Cynthia stresses it's important not to show a model and say, "This is what your work needs to look like." Modeling is only a means of opening doors to the imagination to help the students create their own unique work.

2.  Selection and organization of materials. Cynthia limits the materials and colors to help create a common aesthetic across all the artistic products. After the materials are selected, Cynthia organizes the materials into various stations.  This order creates a safe space in which the students can take their own creative risks.

3. Applying a gentle touch. Teacher institute participant Donald Niedermayer used the term "gentle touch" to discuss how he teaches yoga. When Donald's students are attempting a difficult position, Donald gently touches them to help them reach further. Cynthia applies a similar technique when participants became frustrated or stuck. She sits with them at their physical level, praises them for what seems to be working, and then offers gentle questions to help them find the solutions to a given artistic problem.

4.  Reflecting along the way. In the middle of the collage process Cynthia often asks participants to stand back and look at their own and each other's work asking them the question, "What do you notice about someone else's piece?" Another time Cynthia had the participants sit down with their collages to write a reflective piece in response to their visual work.

5. Exhibiting publicly. Everyone knows their work will be part of an exhibit for the community. This helps to build a sense of common urgency as everyone works together towards a clear deadline. In addition, each person will have the opportunity to show and discuss their work with visitors who haven't been part of the workshop.

If elegance is about "being unusually effective and simple," then Cynthia's teaching was a clear demonstration of how teachers can teach the most complex of processes with an intelligence and grace that helps all learners to achieve extraordinary work.

Read more about Habla's annual teacher institute here.

A special thanks to the other "elegant" presenters at this year's institute: Patricia Sobral, Arnold Aprill, Charly Barbera, and Laura Riebock.

Building a School Culture Without Memos, Mandates, or Madness

As a teacher I know how paralyzing an administrative bureaucracy can be. When we're asked to fill out forms, to give batteries of standardized tests, to attend meetings where we are told precisely how to teach, to institute mandated curriculums and write the state standards on the board, we often lose the time and energy to engage our students in passionate and meaningful classroom work. Therefore when we opened a school, Habla, we knew we needed to proceed differently. We wanted to build a distinct school culture but without explicitly telling our teachers and staff how to teach. We sought an organic and collaborative process, but one that wouldn't end in a kind of laissez-faire attitude where there would be no coherence of curriculum or pedagogy from classroom to classroom.

The following is a glimpse at some of the structures we put in place to build a shared culture at our school without resorting to the usual top-down mandates.

1.  Intentional Architecture. When we built the school we wanted it to feel like a warm and welcoming place that invited informal conversations outside of classrooms and encouraged our teachers and students to linger before heading home. We discussed these ideas with our architect and designed a reception area that welcomes everyone to the school and encourages conversation. In addition a large community space in the center of the school provides space for teachers and students when leaving classrooms to mix and spend some time talking before heading home or to the next class.

2.  Design and Art. Rather than tell newcomers what the school is about, we want to show it. A full-scale mural in the community space at Habla demonstrates the school's emphasis on dialogue, community, play, and imagination. We also had our designer put one word in the reception area, CREATE, a word that lets students and teachers alike know that learning at Habla is a creative adventure.

3.  Purposeful Collaboration. Even more important than the physical space is trusting in the capacity of our teachers to bring new ideas to the school. At the beginning of the year the teachers develop research questions they wish to investigate in their own classrooms. Throughout the year they discuss and refine their questions, collect their students' work, and present their findings to each other in the form of a PechaKucha. Much meeting and sharing of ideas occurs in formally scheduled staff meetings, but even more occurs between classes or during informal social events outside of school. To encourage this the directors of the school host all of the teachers for a few dinners a year at their own house.

4.  Artist as Inspiration. At our school we hired a full-time teaching artist whose primary job is to collaboratively plan projects with teachers and co-teach with them in their classrooms. The artist's role is to serve as an agent of creativity. Our teachers often have a rough idea of  a project they'd like to do but don't know quite how to go about bringing it to its full realization in the classroom. Having an artist to explore possibilities with helps the teachers to crystallize their own ideas and call upon the expertise of another to consider different ways of doing things. Our experience has been that a skilled and experienced teaching artist on staff increases the quality of the work across the entire school. In most schools such a position might seem like a luxury, but it was one of the first positions we hired.

5. Structuring Learning Around Big Ideas. Our curriculum is flexibly shaped around a set of big ideas for each semester that include the following: large concepts, learning outcomes, written products, core texts, and culminating events. The learning outcomes are the only fixed aspect of the curriculum and few outcomes are essential every semester so that the teacher can focus on them in-depth and give them the time they deserve. Although there are suggested core texts and culminating events, the teachers are free to adapt and change the curriculum in anyway they see fit in order to reach the learning outcomes. For instance, a learning outcome might be for students to write a narrative in the past tense. How  students reach that point and what experiences they have is entirely up to them and their teacher.

6.  Visible Teaching and Learning. All of our teachers and students are consistently finding ways to document and present their work. Another of our teaching artist's roles is to help teachers consider new ways to share their work with each other and with the public. Recently in a presentation for families our teachers digitally documented  what happened in their classrooms and presented the products and the processes of their students. Watch one of the videos below.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/26125191 w=400&h=300]

Three Kids Transform into Animals from Habla Center on Vimeo.

As I noted in my last post, two years after opening the school we feel we've developed a shared, common culture of what teaching and learning looks like in our classrooms. We are a small school with a small staff and one that does not have to report to any larger administrative bureaucracy, but I do believe that many of the structures we've put into place can be scaled up to larger schools and might provide alternatives to many of the demoralizing ways we are treating our teachers under the guise of school reform.

Building a School Culture

Last year we were sitting in a staff meeting at our school Habla discussing how we might better induct new teachers into the culture of the school. This quickly led to the question, "What exactly is the culture of Habla? How would we put it into words?" Over the years I've seen how policy makers and education leaders think they might create a shared culture by developing lists of standards or principles or by publishing documents that they think will influence teachers' practices in the classroom. Many of these well-meaning attempts burden teachers with a labyrinth of documents that seem to have little application to the classroom. However, in some cases when these frameworks are straightforward--like Ted Sizer's essential school principles, Debbie Meier's Habits of Mind, Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, or the ArtsLiteracy Project's Performance Cycle--they can be useful. They can help us define our practices as teachers or give a sense of what a school culture might look like.

In our staff meeting we discussed the possibility of retreating to our computers and writing our version of "The Habla Core Values" or some similar document. We decided to try a different approach. We had a faculty meeting coming up soon with our teachers, and we thought it a much better idea to seek the wisdom of the group, to ask them to find the words to describe what teaching and learning looks like at our school.  We were stunned by our teachers' responses. Habla is just over two years old. Three of the teachers out of twelve had only been at Habla for two weeks and most had worked at Habla less than a year.  Here is their unedited list:

 

I was recently impressed again by the creative work of our teachers. At the beginning of the year each teacher in our school, with the help of Arnold Aprill at CAPE, developed research questions about their own practices. Throughout the year we met, discussed their questions, and the teachers collected evidence in the form of videos, photographs, student work, and ethnographic documentation that demonstrated their thinking around their questions. Last week all of our teachers presented in the form of a PechaKucha, where they showed 20 images and discussed each one for 20 seconds. Again, the culture that we hoped to build when we opened Habla was clearly present through all of the presentations as teachers discussed arts-integration, dialogic education, documenting student work, authentic classroom experiences, meaning-making, and building links between the worlds of the students and the classroom.

After two years, the shared sense of culture that we hoped to create among all our teachers at Habla had been realized, but we reached it not through the methods that I see most schools currently employing.  My next post will begin to investigate how it is possible to create a culture in a school in ways that value the creativity and intelligence of the teachers.