The Orthodoxy of Education: Innovating Education, Part 1

Thomas Freidman writes recently in his OpEd column in The New York Times ("The New Untouchables") about professions whose jobs are potentially recession proof. He calls them  "the new untouchables" and declares that, "those with the imagination to make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs, energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive."  To prepare this untouchable workforce, Freidman claims the challenge will lie in school reform: "So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity." How then do we build schools that help to foster a students' imagination rather than simply teaching them basic skills, and how do we do this at not only a classroom level but at a policy level as well? The educational policies of the Clinton, Bush, and potentially the Obama administration move us away from schools that are innovative. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 placed "standards" at the center of educational reform. The standards for a school are determined by the state -- although under the Obama administration there is talk about moving towards national standards -- and are then handed down to schools by the respective state departments of education. Each state develops a set of tests that supposedly determine if a student have met the learning targets outlined in the state documents. Each year (or most often several times a year), students put aside their classroom work to take weeks of state-mandated tests.

It is true, many of our schools in the United States are in dire need of improvement. So we trust school administrators with this task, and over the last decade, they have been working gradually at standards based reform. My feeling is that this increasing move towards standardization is actually moving us towards a dumbing down of our public education system. I'm reminded of this passage in George Orwell's 1984:

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

This comparison might seem extreme but from working in dozens of urban schools, in several cities in the United States, here are some of the indicators of orthodoxy I have observed:

1.  Walk Throughs. Administrators perform what they call "walk throughs" in a school.  The original intention behind walk throughs was good: open the classrooms and take a look at what is going on inside. Share ideas with other teachers and let the school leadership have a sense of what interesting things are happening in a school's classrooms. Yet what the walk through has become is a way of enforcing accountability. A group of school administrators (usually wearing dark suits) walk into each teacher's classroom. They ask the students what standard they are working on. They expect the teacher will clearly have the matching standard on the classroom board. Often they will dictate exactly what kind of teaching method they expect to see, perhaps the reading strategy of "summarization." They want to see all students reading and summarizing texts, not a bad skill in and of itself, but on the same day, and at the same time?

2.  Scripted Curriculums. Similar to an actor following their lines, the teacher is expected to follow a "script" for teaching. Many of these curriculums tell the teacher exactly what they need to say to the students during the class. Others are a little less dictatorial but still outline exactly which activities, texts, and skills the teachers need to be teaching, week by week, or day by day. Often these are called "research-based curriculums" meaning a multi-million dollar company researched their own curriculums, and shockingly found them to be successful at improving students' literacy or math skills. If you are a school leader dedicated to so-called improvements, you go to a large corporation, buy curriculums for every grade level and every subject area, enforce them on the teachers, provide little training, and then perform walk throughs to make sure they are following them. And there you have it, quick reform.

3.  Test, test, test. Most school administrators and policy makers will expound the virtues of collecting lots of data. "Without data how can you see what is going on in your district and make the necessary improvements?" they will ask. Similarly they offer sessions for teachers in order to use the testing data to improve their teaching practice. This is what our education system is becoming, the collecting and analyzing of data. But what does the data really show us? Does is reveal the student who was suspended from school the day of the test because he might bring down the scores? Does it tell us about the talented artist who sees no sense in taking the test and lays his head down to go to sleep in the auditorium? Even with the diligent students, all they see are an aggregate of numbers. A student's result on a standardized test is only a very small portion (a minuscule part) of who that student is. How does this standardized test reveal the talent of an artist or that student's capacity to lead? How do the aggregate results of a school's test reveal the power of a school's theater program? Even when we see an improvement on the test scores what are we really seeing?  Legendary education writer Jonathan Kozol expresssed this beautifully in an interview with the Annenberg Institute of School Reform ("Segregation and its Calamitous Effects"):

Even when there is a slight uptick in [test] scores, these are testing gains; these are not learning gains. These are a direct result of obsessive teaching to the test. The reason I know this is the following: I follow all these kids — I follow hundreds of kids that I've known in several cities, especially in the Bronx in New York — and the same fourthgraders who allegedly have suddenly made a 5-percent gain in their reading scores don't retain these skills. I meet the same kids four years later, when they are in eighth grade, and they can't write a cogent sentence or read a textbook that's basically written at the fourth-grade level.

This emphasis on state standards and testing is leading to the Orwellian orthodoxy of our schools, where students are taught not to think: they are taught to take tests.

If we do hope to not move towards Orwell's vision of the future, and more towards Freidman's, we need to begin to think differently from the school to the policy level. We need to think not in terms of standardization but of innovation. We need to see our students not as numbers, but as change agents that can envision a better world.

Note: This post will be the beginning of a series on how to build schools and classrooms that are creative and innovative.

For an excellent brief analysis of the illusion of rising test scores read David Berliner's article "Why Rising Test Scores May Not Mean Increased Learning" in the Washington Post.

What a five year old can do!

Daira and her final artwork

A few weeks ago we hosted a conference at Habla called "Education and the Imaginative Mind." I needed to give a talk at the conference about imagination and I was looking through my file of photographs and my archives of student work for the perfect example. I didn't find it.

Then today, I visited our class of five to seven year olds and there it was, the perfect example of a teacher engaging the students' imaginations ; it's too late for the talk, so instead I'll share it here.

Led by their teacher, Dani Evia Duarte, the students had been exploring the concept of sustainable ecology through literature and art. They read the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax and another book we've found recently The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. The students walked around the gardens of Habla and discussed how they could make the school greener by planting more trees and plants.

Each student painted an abstract, Jackson Pollack-like painting of what they imagined a green world might look like. They then cut up the paintings and decorated a jar with the remaining fragments. "In this jar," their teacher explained, "you will be able to create the green future of Habla. You will plant a seed, and that seed will grow into a large plant or tree. You will have your very own garden and we will watch it grow together."

Now already I loved the concept and the way the teacher was investigating it through a rich mix of literature, science, and art. It was the next step that particularly captured my attention. Dani asked me to take photographs of all the students holding their jars. We printed the photographs in black and white and regular copy paper, and handed them back to the students. Dani said, "Now you get to imagine the plant that will grow from the seed out of your jar. Draw what you think will happen." The students enthusiastically began sketching what they thought the future of their plant might be, or even better, imagined otherworldly ones, strange and wonderful, growing around and out of their photographs.

Habla has been working with Chicago Arts Partnership's creative director Arnold Aprill and Chicago photographer Morris Bowie on the idea of displacement in art making. Arnold Aprill writes:

Moving a concept or story across media, or displacing a narrative across narrators, or across time and space, seems to consistently accelerate the level of creativity and expressiveness of both writing and art-making.

In this example, the students created an expressive painting, cut it up and recreated it in the form of a jar, posed for a portrait with the jar, then remade their portrait again by imagining colors and shapes emanating from the jar and around the photograph. The student's work traveled across mediums and even artists (a photographer captured the image of them holding their artwork) leading to a complex, layered product. This continual remaking and recreating helped to deepen and enrich the creative process and it led to extraordinary work from our young artists.

Daira recreating her photograph

Daira's original image

Five Ways to be a Creative Teacher

Teaching is hard. It's tough to teach kids, teenagers, or adults for several hours a day, every day, every week. It's no wonder we often turn to the teacher's edition of textbooks for methods and for content. It's difficult to find the another interesting poem to teach or to devise a new project that will get at the heart of our subject area.

For me, keeping my teaching fresh and original is an important way for me to stay excited about working in the field of education. I love playing with new ideas and testing new texts and projects out in the classroom to see what will happen.

Here are my five strategies for keeping my teaching creative and stimulating:

1.  Teach to the Unexpected. Education around the world is moving increasingly towards standardization. Teachers are required to teach the same content in the same way. School districts ask students to produce the same results. Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind in the United States, this way of thinking about education is being exported to other countries, particularly here in Mexico. In contrast to standardization, what excites me about education, is the possibility of what is to come. I love to introduce a literacy or arts project, and see how my students will respond differently, each in their unique way; it is precisely that sense of excitement about the future that keeps me engaged in the educational process with my students. The other day in class we read the Langton Hughes's poem "Aunt Sue's Stories." After reading about Aunt Sue's stories, "right out of her own life," I asked my students to think of stories that are from the distant past of their families, stories that have been passed down for generations, stories that seem larger than life, and may or may not be true. We told these fantastic stories from generations ago in Mexico, stories that seemed to leap off the pages of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novel. I would love to teach this class again a million times, because the lives of students are never boring, and so, neither should our classrooms be.

2. Read. There are many times throughout the week when I would rather just relax and watch a movie or a television show, but my best ideas for teaching come from reading diverse books. The key for me is reading a bit every day, from different genres: popular magazines, graphic novels, classic texts, or books about education. At the moment I've been jumping from a copy of the magazine Ode someone lent to me (found a good piece about traveling open roads, a unit I teach with my Advanced English students) to Pedagogy of Freedom by Paulo Freire (Paulo Freire is one of my primary authors I turn to to reflect on education) to Moby Dick (I like to revisit  books I loved in the past.) For me, this jumping around from book to book exposes me quickly to a wide range of texts and I often think of ways to use them throughout the year.

3. Collect Idea from the Internet. I find the best way to do this isn't just to randomly search via keywords. For instance, if we're exploring Where the Wild Things Are with the kids at our school, typing this into a search engine usually reveals activities that rarely get at the center of the text. The most inspirational sites come from recommendations from friends (and usually the ones that are younger than I am). Here are three of my recent favorites:

Six Word Stories BibliOdyssey Learning to Love you More

4. Collaborate with colleagues. When I teach with an extraordinary teacher, I learn what they do best, and I try to absorb these qualities into my practice. My colleague John Hanlon, early in my career, taught me how to structure daily lessons. Deb Christenson shared with me her passion and knowledge for teaching a subject rigorously. Len Newman taught me the importance of storytelling in the classroom, and artists like Erminio Pinque, Robert Possehl, and Mary Beth Meehan showed me how to create rich artistic processes for students in the visual arts. It's important to find as many opportunities as possible to teach with colleagues, from day-to-day teaching to collaboratively presenting at conferences. By working together, we grow together.

5. Observe. Many years ago, when I studied to be a teacher, we were required to shadow teachers in different schools for a day. It's easy to see how we might learn from a great teacher, but sometimes I would also have to follow a teacher that wasn't so good. In order to make the best of the situation, I always observed with an eye on the positive. Instead of thinking "How much longer am I stuck here" I thought to myself "What is one thing I can learn and take back to my teaching?" In the many years of sitting in classrooms and visiting schools since I've always observed my surrounding with an eye towards learning. It can be the small things that I take back with me. The other day in a classroom I loved the art tables the kids were working on, so I took pictures of the table and I plan to give them to a carpenter to make the same tables for classrooms. In some of my other posts on this site you can see some other ideas of observed while visiting schools in Mexico.

In the lobby of our school a sign on the wall reads "CREATE." This word in our entrance reminds all educators and students, we, as a community, have the power to shape the day's experience, to make it one of inspiration, rather than standardization.

Trash as Art

When I visit a school or classroom, I never focus on the negative. In any institution we can always find many things to complain about. In every school around the world, there are good teachers doing often extraordinary work. If we pay attention, if we take the time to look, we can learn lessons that might help us to be better teachers in our own classrooms. This space is a way for me to share some of these practices I am discovering in Mexico and in other educational spaces around the world.

Loyola is a wonderful school here in Merida, Mexico. It was founded by a group of parents who were frustrated with the other schools in this community. Most of the public and private schools here adhere to the old model of education that views the teacher as the font of information, standing in front of the classroom, lecturing and checking to see if the students have adequately memorized the facts. In one school we recently visited, the principal of the school walked into the classroom, all of the students respectfully stood at their chairs. The principal announced "You may be seated." He then began to call on students, one at time, at which point each student quickly jumped out of his seat. The principal noticed they were studying math, so he began to ask respective student a series of questions related to geometry, "How many sides does a trapezoid have?" He gave a disapproving look to those students who got the answer wrong, and said something like "Good, Ana" to those who answered correctly. The students were rightly terrified.

I do believe we need access to information to make informed decisions, and as a former director and actor, I admire the ability to memorize information, poems, and facts, but to shape our entire education system around discrete bits of information, particularly today in the digital age when we can access all the information we need, quickly and easily, seems ludicrous.

However, at Loyola, the students were often huddled around a project, working together, towards a collaboratively decided solution. Parents started the school and so the school is governed by parent work groups, each with a different focus--community outreach, green spaces, sustainable ecology, student recruitment, and curriculum--to name a few. But it wasn't in the large vision that I was most focused on, but rather the details that, when added up, make up a school. In the previous two posts I mentioned two, but there is another worth noting: trash turned into art.

The art teacher at the school Regina said to me, "We don't throw away anything, we reuse everything, and make art out of it." A group of teachers and I were visiting classrooms and we noticed plastic bottles lined up on windowsills and bookshelves, all filled with different colored water. We asked the art teacher what they were for and she responded, "That's an example of how we reuse everything. As the year progresses students based on their contribution to the community, earn first the bottle cap, then the bottle, then finally they fill the bottle up with water of their favorite color. Finally, the students choose a tree in the area in the courtyard to hang their bottle on." She pointed out the window.

Next to the art room was a little courtyard, with a garden the students had planted, and sure enough, trees filled with glistening bottles of water.

Ser Para Los Demas

"Ser Para Los Demas" (to be for others) is a sign posted in every classroom at Loyola, an elementary and middle school in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. As I walked around the school, and looked in the classrooms, I noticed the many classrooms didn't have the desks arranged in the traditional rows. Students were situated in groups of four, working together on various projects. I visited the arts classroom and there was a girl who had very little social control. She talked incessantly and demanded the teacher's attention. The students didn't seem to mind. They focused on their arts activity which was developing a passport to visit the country of their dreams (including designing and making their own rubber passport stamp).

Loyola's philosophy is based on that of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits. The Jesuits believe it is important to live with humility and to dedicate one's life to being for others. As I spent the day at this school I could see this philosophy in action. It reminded me of work I did in a Quaker school. We didn't have janitors to clean up for us, because it was our responsibility to take care of ourselves and each other. In the United States education system, there is always a stark divide between religion and education. Even in our education programs in universities, we study educational theorists and researchers, but rarely do we turn to religious institutions, and the schools that have grown out of their philosophy, to seek the solutions for how we might better educate our youth. Certainly we could use a little more "being for others" in both our public schools, and in the world in general.

Compromisos

Compromisos are an essential part of the daily life of Mexican schools, one of these things the teachers and students of schools here take for granted. Because we grow up with them, because they are a part of how we define schools, we often don't see clearly those things that are extraordinary about our cultures way of educating children. When I grew up in the United States, every elementary school classroom in our public school had a piano, and most of my teachers could bang out a few notes on it. Our day would often begin with a series of songs. I never thought about this much before, but it is quite amazing to start every day singing songs with your teachers and your classmates. It's simply one of those things I never paid much attention to.

Compromisos in Mexico have that same taken-for-granted quality. It's just part of how things work. Compromiso roughly translates to "promises." At the beginning of the school year, the students have a conversation about what they promise to each other, to the school, and to the teacher. They collaboratively develop a list of the compromisos, every student signs them, and they are posted in the classroom.

What strikes me is how different they are than the typical rules that teachers tell their students on the first day, "Keep your hands to yourselves" etc. The compromisos are much more gentle, they are a way of defining what the ideal community might look like, viewed through the eyes of a child. They are a vision of a utopia we might reach as a little society.

Note: I first heard about Compromisos from Professor James McLaughlin from Florida Atlantic University. Professor McLaughlin has spent many years in Mexico, observing classrooms around the country, and bringing teachers from the United States to exchange teaching practices with Mexican teachers.