32

Growing Pains and Great Expectations

By Caitlin Corrigan

As part of our professional development sessions at the start of this school year, the faculty at my school participated in a team-building exercise to learn more about our leadership styles. Each corner of the room was labeled for one of the four compass points, and included a brief description of a guiding personality style — action, care, detail, and, the corner I chose, speculation: “likes to look at the big picture before acting.”

Unsurprisingly in a room full of teachers, the corners representing care and attention to detail quickly filled, but us big-picture-speculators numbered only four. We spent most of our time together discussing what we planned to write on our chart paper, completely fulfilling our role as the visionary thinkers who ask good questions, but take a minute to get down to business.

I thought about this activity this week, the last of our first quarter. A last-minute schedule change granted us two half-days for students at the end of the week, which our administration thankfully allowed us to use at our professional discretion, for grading, planning, and, in my case, standing in the middle of my room trying to picture how in the heck I could make things better for my students and me in the coming quarter.

Last year, my first as a classroom teacher in New Orleans, was spent in with the oldest students in our elementary school, the eighth graders. It was a challenging year to be sure — top-heavy district bureaucracy, teacher turnover, and a potent combination of low literacy skills and overage students — but when I turned in the last cumulative folder, I felt proud of what my students and I had accomplished.

This year, armed with new confidence from a year’s experience, I moved down to fourth grade, which proved more challenging than I ever imagined. As I watched students struggle with my oral and written directions, ignore my posted rules and slog through assignments, it seemed that what I learned last year was totally inapplicable. In addition, The Recovery School District, which I wrote about in my last post, “Starting Over (Again) in New Orleans, has adopted an extended school day from 7:45-4:30. This includes a 90-minute planning period, but I still spent the first month of the year feeling as if I was treading water, with never enough time or energy to make all the parent calls, organize all the binders, or grade all the crinkled homework packets on my desk.

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20

It Bears Repeating

By Christine Gralow

Two of my preschool students with autism are currently going through stages of repeating their favorite words and phrases over and over again. Both students repeat lines from their favorite children’s videos and books — stories and episodes of “Dora the Explorer,” “Blue’s Clues,” and “Max and Ruby.”

Amanda repeatedly says, “Benny the Bull,” who, as I was slow to realize after hearing his name dozens of times one day, is her favorite “Dora” character. She has also memorized many of Benny the Bull’s lines from the show, and she repeats them at seemingly random moments. David repeats the word “notebook.” At first, I thought he just really liked the word, or that he was proud of himself for learning it. Then, after he began repeating lines from “Blue’s Clues,” I realized “notebook,” came from Joe’s “handy dandy notebook” in the show. And lest this excessive repetition be blamed solely on TV and DVD’s, one of my former students, who rarely watched TV, repeated her favorite scene from the book “Harold and the Purple Crayon” — “moose and porcupine eating pies!”
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47

Putting Technology in Its Place

By Matthew Kay

At the Science Leadership Academy, we encourage current upperclassmen to participate when we interview incoming students. We prepare these budding leaders to be patient and professional when sitting across from students who are only one to three years younger than they are — and our kids exceed our best expectations. Yet, among the student body, there is one wrong way to answer our questions about why they’ve applied: “I hear you’ve got laptops.”

Our students smile warmly at this, but, despite their training, most reflexively attempt to meet their teacher’s eye. We look back knowingly and continue the conversation, aware that, for many eighth graders, going to school carrying a personal laptop and no textbooks seems otherworldly. Much as they deny it, the technology was just as cool to our current students when they sat across the table. It’s just that with each hour spent in our environment their understanding of what makes a school progressive has matured — and has put the technology in its right place.
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28

The Language of Respect

By Joseph Santini

Respect is the lifeblood of the teaching profession. We depend on parents to teach children to respect us as teachers; we depend on respect to get and keep students’ attention and focus. When I began teaching, I knew that not all my students would have had previous experience with Deaf people. Some of my students, true, were Deaf themselves; others came from families with Deaf people (we call them CODA’s, children of Deaf adults; we also have SODA’s, siblings of Deaf adults.) But some would be students from the community; some would be students who wanted to learn to sign, but some would not. This was part of the public school nature of our institution. I entered our school aware that this meant I’d have to work at earning the respect of different students in very different ways.

At the end of the previous school year, during one quiet class, I was able to work one-on-one with a young Deaf student who’d grown up in a Deaf family using American Sign Language (A.S.L.). Up until that point, he and I had gotten along fairly well, but he’d expressed misgivings about my ability to teach hearing students in the classroom. (Children are fairly blunt!) “They don’t want to learn A.S.L.,” I remember him saying last year — a complaint about the speed with which his new friends acquired his native language. Other days this student questioned my ability to teach Deaf students, too. “Your signing isn’t perfect, because you have to switch between languages. How can you teach me?” I had work to do before I earned this student’s respect.

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16

Playing Roles for a Real Education

By Christina Shunnarah

This past weekend my colleagues and I gave a presentation at the Performing the World conference in Manhattan, which brought together educators, artists, therapists, scholars and activists from dozens of countries who are interested in using performance and drama in a variety of ways. Our presentation was on the role of the arts and performance at our school and how it complements and expands the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (IBPYP), an enriched curriculum that we have been using in our classrooms.

The IBPYP model is based on inquiry, participation in the process of learning, and exploration. It is learner-driven, not-teacher dominated. Teachers act as facilitators in the learning process and children’s questions and interests are at the center of the classroom. The program originates with the International Baccalaureate Organization, founded in 1968 and based in Geneva, Switzerland. Thousands of schools around the world have adopted IB frameworks.
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Well-Paid Teachers? I’m on Board

By Christine Gralow

When I recently saw an ad for a $125,000-a-year teaching job at a New York City charter school, my first thought was that it must be some sort of phishing scam. Everyone knows teachers don’t make $125,000. My second thought was, “Why shouldn’t we?” After visiting the school’s Web site and reading a New York Times article about the school, I realized it was not only legit, but potentially revolutionary in terms of education reform. So this school year, in addition to my regular special education teaching job, I’ve decided to get involved in the creation of this new school.

The Equity Project Charter School (TEP) will open in September 2009 in Manhattan’s Washington Heights community, and it will aim to enroll middle school students at risk of academic failure. Students with the lowest test scores will be given admissions priority. In order to recruit the country’s top teachers to work with these at-risk students, the school’s founding principal will cut administrative costs and put a higher percentage of the school’s public funding into teacher salaries. He’s also seriously raising teacher qualifications, offering teachers a potential $25,000 bonus, and expanding the school day and work year for teachers. The principal will make $90,000. There will be no vice principal.
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19

Starting Over (Again) in New Orleans

By Caitlin Corrigan

Aug. 29, 2008, marked the end of the second week of my second year teaching at Craig Elementary school, one of nearly 35 public schools that make up the Recovery School District, a state run system created in 2005 to reform New Orleans’ failing schools.

The date had a much greater significance for my students and our city, of course — it was both the three year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall, and the day before Mayor C. Ray Nagin would declare a mandatory evacuation in preparation for what could be “the storm of the century,” Hurricane Gustav.

As we neared dismissal that day, my students buzzed around the wooden shelves that housed their binders of classwork.

“Ms. Corrigan!” asked Nya, “Can I take my work home with me? Please?” I told her no, there was no reason to take anything home. After all, we’d be back in school by Monday morning, right? She held up a crinkled Venn diagram she’d done on a book we read the second day of school, “Score One for the Sloths.” I had put a metallic star on the top beside a bright “A” scrawled large in red marker.

Behind us, the reading corner I’d painstakingly set up and organized by genre and Lexile level was barren. I’d packed the books into boxes set atop the tall metal cabinets in a corner of the room with no windows. In my hand, I held forms for each child that documented their current grade level, class schedule, and enrollment at our school. My students were to bring these forms home, and, if necessary, use them to facilitate speedy enrollment at a new school to avoid the widespread difficulties families had in documenting enrollment following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

“O.K.,” I sighed. “But you have to bring everything back. Got it?” She nodded fiercely, stuffing the page into a tattered Hannah Montana backpack and inspiring other students to do the same.
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63

What’s Behind the Curve

By Kenneth Bernstein

This week my Advanced Placement students took their first tests. The questions were of the type they will confront on the May A.P. examinations. Most struggled. Students who are used to acing exams saw raw scores of less than 60 percent. As a classroom teacher, I can put this in perspective for them by showing them how they did without crushing their spirits. In other words, the raw percentage is not what I put into the computerized grade program. Let me explain why.

Imagine this. You are about to ride a two-wheel bicycle for the first time. Should you be riding with no helmet, no training wheels, and be marked as a failure if you fall? Should I hold students to the high standards I want them to eventually achieve the first time they try something new? I think not.

I acknowledge that I have a real responsibility to challenge my students to meet high standards. But I have an equal or greater responsibility not to discourage them. For better or worse, some students do agonize over every single grade, and I don’t want a poor performance to lead to their “shutting down” or even dropping out of the A.P. class, which they could do.
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40

Telling the Raven

By Doug Noon

For each of the past three years, my students have published their writing on our Tell the Raven Web site. It’s a writing space where we share our ideas with one another, and with other interested people around the world. Traditionally, school teachers have been the primary audience for student writing. But now, Web publishing software offers us a platform from which we can tell our stories to anyone who cares to pay attention.

I began the online writing project with my students hoping that it might broaden their horizons, and encourage them to take an interest in the world beyond our local area. It would be great, I thought, if kids in town could connect with schools elsewhere, including schools in the Alaska bush. I imagined that the Web might serve as a medium for cultural exchanges that would require students to hone their writing and reading skills as they learned to communicate with people in other places, telling about their daily business.
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The Cross-Cultural Classroom

By Christina Shunnarah

In my previous post, “Student in a Strange Land,” I mentioned briefly that our school, the International Community School (I.C.S.), works with a very diverse population of students and families. I.C.S. represents over 40 different countries and 50 languages. One of the communities we serve is Clarkston, Ga., which is home to about 26,000 refugees. It is often said that Clarkston is one of the most diverse square miles in the United States. A community as diverse as this presents a complex challenge: In a place with so many different values and belief systems, what role should an educator play?

It is important for me as an educator to have a cultural awareness of the students’ lives and backgrounds. Without this awareness, my sensitivity and compassion for each child would not be able to develop. My studies in anthropology have helped me view life through a cultural lens. But what is culture?
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24

The New Village

By Matthew Kay

Last week, four of our upperclassmen raced each other down a very public flight of stairs. I smiled and waved them on, despite the many important eyes that turned to follow their movement. There would be no stopping them anyway — these students were drawn by the irresistible light of celebrity. When they reached the bottom, they gathered around the special guest and, giddy for autographs, attempted conversation. One asked for his phone number. She received it, and two of the kids got warm bear hugs.

The guest was renowned intellectual and author Cornel West. The stairs were in the newly renovated Franklin Theater, part of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. The students were juniors at the Science Leadership Academy. They were invited to serve as hosts for the Institute’s “Politics of Slavery and Race in America” lecture. As a bonus for taking tickets and guiding people to their seats, they were given free admission to the event.

The kids took advantage. Throughout the event my phone was buzzing against my hip — text messages from the students asking questions about the experts’ discourse. One was a strong reaction to someone in the audience asking the panel what to do with kids that don’t understand the civil rights era. “But we do!” the message read. Later, one of my colleagues bought each kid a copy of Professor West’s book, “Race Matters,” and they handled the texts with reverence.
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106

The Special-Needs Kindergarten Crunch

By Christine Gralow

It’s the third week of pre-school. Kids are still settling in, and many are still crying when their parents drop them off in the morning. During these first weeks of school, pre-school teachers do a lot of waiting and wondering — waiting patiently for the separation tears to end and wondering what fascinating young characters will begin to emerge in this year’s class. My students’ parents, however, are already thinking about next year — they’re worried about getting their kids into kindergarten.

As a pre-school special needs teacher in New York, I’ve learned that the city’s culture of cut-throat competition extends to kindergarten admissions. And from that, an unexpected part of my job has evolved — providing psychological and emotional support to parents as they undertake the daunting task of finding an appropriate placement for their child. Securing a good spot in an oversubscribed New York City kindergarten, whether public or private, is difficult enough for most parents. But for the parents of children with special needs, it is especially challenging.
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20

Creating Alliances

By Joseph Santini

When one of my younger students turned out to be unable to focus in class for a week — choosing instead to harass other students by cursing and calling out during class with wild abandon — I first tried speaking with her about the problem. When that failed I tried giving her time-outs. That also failed, so I sent her to the principal’s office with a note. I was at my wits’ end when I made my way down to the fourth floor at the end of the day, burdened with papers. The first couple weeks is always rough.

I know I must have looked frightening because when I turned the corner my assistant principal started as if she’d suddenly found herself in the middle-school version of “Night of the Living Dead.” She asked what was wrong: I explained. She listened carefully, head turned half-downwards, hands peaked in front of her lips. Her response was short, but meaningful.
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26

Totems of Respect

By Doug Noon

Education policy in recent years has emphasized individualistic aspects of learning. A focus on accountability and achievement testing, giving priority to “results,” has promoted a view of learning as a competitive enterprise, responsive to incentives and sanctions. But this businesslike vision of schools ignores something of great value that schools also have to offer — membership in a community. Schools are people, too.

A totem pole at Denali Elementary School in Fairbanks, Alaska. Photo by Doug Noon.Totem pole; Denali Elementary.

Each year at Denali Elementary, we retell the story of the totem pole that stands in the middle of our schoolyard. It is remarkable that we even have a totem pole here in the interior of Alaska because totem poles are a cultural tradition of the Northwest coastal Indians, 1000 miles south of us. A local Tsimpshian carver from Metlakatla, Bert Ryan, worked with some of our sixth graders in the spring and early fall of 1997 to carve the totem pole. The pole itself tells a story, a story that was given to us by Bert, and is retold each year by three sixth graders at an assembly during the first week of school.
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52

The Campaign in the Classroom

By Kenneth Bernstein

As a teacher, I always find it easier to keep my students focused when they can see the connection between what they are studying and their own lives. Those that read newspapers (few) or watch the news (not a majority) are already connected: after all, the federal government is our largest local employer, with many parents and siblings working in various branches. But many neither read or watch the news unless I push them, so I have to find other ways of making those connections. One effective way is inviting guest speakers involved with or covering the federal government to our class. Another is to examine the impact of federal policy on the lives of the students and their family. Both are a regular part of my instructional approach.

I am shameless. When I encounter someone who I think might be of interest to my students, I ask, even beseech, them to come to my classes. In the past I have had such journalistic notables as David Broder of The Washington Post, Candy Crowley of CNN and Chuck Todd of MSNBC, as well as campaign and congressional committee chiefs of staff and candidates for federal office. After the elections my students will hear from two House members from other states. I have parents who work in the government, in politics — or cover both as journalists — and some who are lobbyists. Several have already agreed to come, but that is later in the year. When I let students know that we will have such visitors, it can encourage some to learn more in order to better engage in dialog with our visitors.
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