Category: Reflection

Discipline Lessons II

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

It’s been years since I sent a student from my classroom to the office. This realization came upon me today when I witnessed an altercation between a frustrated teacher and a huffy young man. When I was first teaching, I was afraid to send anyone to the office; I thought such a move would signal my incompetence. It might have, but principals form impressions of their teachers through all kinds of informal observations. They don’t need direct evidence like a string of miscreants in their office to get the picture—although a run of kids like that can’t help but influence them.

No, it’s the other students’ opinions a teacher needs to worry about. Sending someone to the office, if it occurs repeatedly, signals to students that you can’t handle the class. That gives them the upper hand. But sometimes, turning a ruffian over to the authorities is a good idea.

My first teaching position was English 7 and English 8 in a small junior high school in Wisconsin. I was newly married and so young looking that every year I was there, the company that took our school pictures mixed mine in with the students’. I lived about two blocks from the school and walked to and from every day.

My assignment began in January; I was the replacement for a veteran of twenty-five years who left for medical reasons. She was to undergo open-heart surgery and doubted she could return to work afterward. The English department in this school was small—only four teachers—and every one of us was a rookie. That fall, in a gesture of collegiality, the veteran teacher had swapped all of her ace students for the “bad boys” that the new teachers were contending with, so when I came in January, I inherited them all.

They followed me home from school, interrupted during class, threw things, dropped their books on the floor so they thudded loudly, and generally made me feel—and look—inadequate. I caught one boy, who supposedly couldn’t read, avidly studying something he had hidden behind his English book. He was clearly enthralled by whatever was there; I suspected it was not the text. What I removed from his grasp was a dime novel called Nympho Nurse.

I wanted to shrivel up and die right then and there. I am not sure what I actually did, but I know I didn’t have the presence of mind to turn the tables on my young “reader”—to make him the one who was embarrassed. Lacking such finesse, I probably should have sent him to the office so the others could see that I wasn’t putting up with such stuff. But I didn’t.

Instead, my husband chased after the boys who were trailing me home and scared them out of their minds when he caught up with them. That ended the nonsense from those boys; a colleague, a brawny math teacher, silenced the rest when he backed another boy up against a locker one day and read him the riot act. So I was rescued. But I knew I’d have to learn how to control boys like this on my own. I wouldn’t always have the luxury of strongmen on my side and in proximity.

I taught in Wisconsin for another four years, and during that time I took advice from more experienced teachers and put into play techniques I picked up on my own. I discovered that real control came from the expectations I set and from the work of the classroom, not from rules and regulations. I slowly gained the confidence I needed and grew into the authority I wanted.

After a hiatus of several years as a stay-at-home mom, I began a second teaching career in a junior high school in rural Indiana. I remembered my earlier encounters with adolescent boys and hoped being older would ease my reentry into the world of schooling. I hoped I wouldn’t have to send anyone to the office.

I needn’t have worried. The principal at my new school was so physically intimidating that few students ever even risked a trip to his office. He helped me establish myself not because he handled the discipline problems, but because his mere presence in the hallways set a tone that discouraged them.

Mr. Christopher had a linebacker’s build. He stood at the entrance to the school every morning, arms crossed tightly over his chest, scrutinizing every student as each one climbed down from the school bus and entered the building. He always faced straight ahead—if he wanted to inspect you further, his eyes followed you, but his head stayed put: like the Mona Lisa. To be honest, it was kind of scary, even for teachers. It seemed like Mr. Christopher could see into your soul.

The fact is, Mr. Christopher is a kind man with a wry sense of humor. He understood kids well, and usually, a conversation with him had a marvelously reforming effect on those who did end up in his office. He believed, rightly, that kids need structure. If right and wrong are clear, if expectations are spelled out, a child will be supported as a seedling is by a stake in the ground. Under those conditions, a child will stand a good chance of growing tall and strong.

I sent a student to Mr. Christopher exactly once. It was a 9th grade speech class in the early 1980s, and I was videotaping commercials the students had written. (An historical aside here: In those days, kids weren’t allowed to touch the expensive, new A-V equipment. Today, I would gladly turn the filming over to them!) Anyway, the boy whose turn it was to have his commercial recorded held up his “prop”—a book—and began his pitch. The book was entitled The Yellow River by I. P. Daily.

Click.

I stopped the tape, snapped the lens shut, and emerged from behind the camera. Though I said nothing, my “look” was enough. The boy left the room, headed straight down the hall to Mr. Christopher.

It makes me laugh to think about this now. Today, kids who are sent to the office usually aren’t so intimated, and what they are sent for is far, far removed from The Yellow River. However, that was the worst offense in those four years at Southwestern. I must have learned my discipline lessons well—or maybe—no, most certainly—Mr. Christopher was the stake in the ground supporting me. I established a reputation, and after that, I was much less frequently tested.

Young teachers struggling with discipline need to know that with time and experience, things do get better. But that day comes faster if there’s a Mr. Christopher beside them while they grow into the job.

Discipline Lessons I

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

Many years ago, when I was living in Connecticut, an educational psychology professor at Yale, who was conducting some of the early teacher effectiveness studies, hired me to observe and evaluate teachers in a New Haven public high school, one that had been the scene of violence the previous spring. I was in all kinds of classrooms, watched all manner of teachers, and learned very quickly that effectiveness isn’t the exclusive property of any particular teaching style (though some approaches have more potential for deadliness than others).

Tasked with observing the interaction between classroom control and teacher effectiveness, I saw that students in the classrooms of effective teachers—whether they were traditional lecturers or innovative strategists—were deeply engaged in the learning process. Sometimes it was the sheer complexity or elegance of the content that kept the students’ attention, sometimes it was the specific techniques the teacher employed, and sometimes it was simply the teacher’s charisma.

But the effective teachers had control, even when the students were running the show, as in the case of one young English teacher whose students were conducting a mock trial, a culminating project for a novel they had read. She sat on the sidelines, but she was following the action intently, completely focused on the proceedings and on her students’ interactions.

In every case, it seemed to me, the teachers’ control came from a clear set of objectives, high performance expectations, and personal confidence, not from a rigid set of rules and imposed penalties.

Years later, when I was required by my school district to write up my classroom policies and procedures—all the rules and the corresponding penalties—I complied with the request but told the students, orally and in writing, that the whole thing really boiled down to two concepts: Do Your Best and Respect Other People.

Of course, achieving effectiveness isn’t as simple as that sounds.

It starts with confidence.

My student teacher this past spring stood in front of her first class—9th grade—looking, frankly, terrified. The students, mostly boys, none of them “bad,” but all of them squirrely, wouldn’t sit still, talked when she talked, fidgeted with their papers and pens and books (if they’d brought them to class), dropped books on the floor, looked out the window—in short, did everything but sit tall in their seats and pay attention to the teacher. For her part, my student teacher wasn’t signaling that she ought to be paid attention to. Her voice was high, and when she spoke, she tripped along at record speed. She moved all over the place while she spoke to the students, and she constantly looked at me for reassurance or help. Her directions were vague and alarmist: “Don’t do that!” Exactly what the students shouldn’t do wasn’t clear.

In truth, she reminded me of myself in my very first teaching position.

Over the years I learned some tricks—the hard way—and was happy to pass them on to her. Things like:

• Lower your voice; don’t raise it. Students will have to be quiet to hear.
• Stand still when you talk to them—they’ll have only one place to look.
• Make your directions explicit: “Keep your hands on top of your desk and your feet on the floor under it.”
• Deal with disruptions immediately and in private. Most students who disrupt are really seeking attention. If you reprimand them in front of others, they have the audience they seek and will use it to cast you as the villain. Bend down and tell the student quietly what you expect. Even something as simple as changing a student’s seat can and should be done privately.
• Don’t engage in public debates about the purpose of a correction or the rightness or wrongness of one. It is what it is. Turn to the topic at hand. A student who wants to argue can certainly talk to you—after class.
• Don’t be afraid to call parents if a student has been disruptive. The failure isn’t yours: It’s the student’s. Most parents will be your allies, but they can’t help you out if they don’t know what’s going on. So what if the lesson wasn’t as good as it should have been? So what if your directions weren’t clear? Those aren’t reasons to tolerate disrespectful behavior. Parents won’t ask about the fine points of your instruction. They’ll ask what Johnny or Sally needs to do. Tell them.

Simple things like this, I learned by trial and error. Every one of these scenarios has happened to me—and it was discouraging at the beginning of my career to have to learn what to do, one agonizing crisis at a time. But every time I successfully handled a situation, my confidence increased. Eventually, I wasn’t afraid of my own shadow and wore my authority comfortably.

But it was a bumpy road to that confidence, so my sympathies were with my student teacher. Luckily, she was a quick learner and soon had the classroom under her control. She grew in confidence daily, and before long, she was ready to concentrate on other components of effective teaching. For her, too, discipline became as “simple” as Do Your Best and Respect Other People.

Why We Teach

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

From time to time, a piece of office humor entitled “You know you’re a teacher if…” circulates on the Internet. The ensuing list of indicators would make anyone wonder why on earth a person would become a teacher. For example, these highlights of the profession:

• no social life from August to June
• high susceptibility to chicken pox, colds, sore throats, and flu
• a compulsion to put grades on grocery lists, telephone messages, and junk mail

Funny…but it’s not the real story. The reason why teachers enter the profession and why they stay on is, quite simply, the kids.

• It’s the young woman whose resume landed her a full-time job–the resume you gave up your lunch period to help her compose.
• It’s the math students you’ve driven to Saturday competitions and the art students you’ve entered in contests so they can test their strengths and hone their skills.
• It’s the “struggler” who didn’t like to read, the one you stayed after school to help, who finally confessed when he finished a novel, “This is the first book I’ve ever read cover to cover.”
• It’s the girl who said, “I didn’t have any friends until I joined your club!”
• It’s the student whose lines you listened to over and over until you could recite them yourself–but the play was a success and the student was a star.
• It’s the ones you’ve stayed up all night for to chaperone at the after-prom.
• It’s the ones you’ve monitored early in the morning on “study table”–it kept them eligible for sports and it kept them in school.
• It’s the ones for whom you’ve written college recommendations and hugged when they told you the good news: “I’ve been accepted!”
• It’s the ones you’ve helped in the library when they “couldn’t find anything.”
• It’s the boy who said, “You made me work. You taught me how to study–and now I’m going to college!”
• It’s the child you agonized about on the weekends and lost sleep over at night because no one at home seemed to care.
• It’s the ones who’ve come back from to say, “You really did know what skills I’d need in sixth grade…or ninth grade…or college.”
• It’s the children for whom you’ve been a stand-in parent on Family Nights.
• It’s the ones you’ve helped with computer problems–students who weren’t even in your classes.
• It’s the ones for whom you’ve paid the field trip charge.
• It’s the ones to whom you’ve given lunch money.
• And it’s the light in their eyes and the lift in their voices when they learn how to read, or convert fractions, or understand covalence, or give a speech, or shoot a basket, or play the clarinet, or fix a car’s transmission…

Ask any educator–as I did. Stories like these are the sustaining force in our professional lives, the compensation for those skipped lunches, sleepless nights, and endless piles of paperwork.

It’s the kids. They’re the reason why we teach.

The Last “First Day of School”

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

Some people would say I am nuts. First off, I was too caught up in the mechanics of the first day of school of the second semester—taking the roll, issuing books, assigning seats, previewing the semester, and explaining the rules (Two: “Do your Best” and “Respect Other People”) and what they mean and why they are important—to think about how this was the last “first day of school” I’ll ever experience. (Next year, I’ll be a full-time Instructional Coach.) Then, for the students who had been in my class first semester, I was busy going over the final exam and introducing the work of the week: revising an essay they had turned in at the end of last quarter. I hardly had time to catch my breath between the classes.

I’m on a new schedule, too, so my body was adjusting not only to bells again after the long, languid hours of Christmas vacation, where what I was doing could flow from one hour into the next, but to standing on my feet from 7:30 until 11:08 without a break. I had an hour and a half then to respond to email, eat my lunch, check the front office for incoming mail, and get ready for the last push, my final class from 12:40 to 1:35. And then I was done. Done! I’ve never had a last hour “prep” in my entire teaching career (37 and ½ years). I think I’m going to like this…but time will tell if I will be able to stand the standing.

So here’s the “nuts” part. I spent the last hour of the day writing purpose sentences on the whiteboard. For each class, in kid-friendly language, a statement of what we are learning tomorrow. Kids ought to know what the focus each day is upon and what’s so important about it. So say the current education gurus and the administrators in my District Office.

I absolutely agree. (Unless, of course, you’re doing an activity where stating the point ahead of time would kill the learning activity—but that’s a subject for another day.)

In these 37 ½ years, I’ve written lesson plans that I’ve submitted in advance to the principal and lesson plans that I’ve kept for myself. I’ve kept a daily assignment list on the board so kids could see what was coming up. I’ve issued calendars (Thanks, Publisher) for entire semesters on the first day (I did that today, in fact, in two out of three of my classes). Sometimes—especially in later years—I’ve kept personal curriculum maps on my desk, flow charts of what I’d done and what I need to do, and sometimes I’ve just run by the seat of my pants. I mean, I have been doing this for so long that I’ve memorized my own speeches and know by instinct what comes next and what’s after that and what the ultimate destination is. I’ve even managed to use this last (non-) method and keep more or less on schedule. I don’t think my students have suffered; I think that at any given moment they know what we are learning and why we are learning it. I often start class by saying “My goal for today—or for this week—is…” I think they know.

But of course, I don’t know.

I assume it.

But today I wrote purpose statements on the whiteboard during that last period of the day when I was, for the first time ever, “done” at 1:35. I’m experimenting. In response to the mandate for a better evaluation system for teachers, our district is initiating walk-through observations by administrators. My question was this: How will the principal know what I am trying to accomplish? The answer: It should be written on the board, plainly, in kid-friendly language, not just for the administrator, but for the students—so they will know for sure what the learning target (new jargon word in education) is for the day.

So I did it.

Doing so forced me not just to focus my thoughts, but to articulate them.

On the second day of school, I’m giving the students in my senior composition class the multiple choice part of the final exam. Purpose: to assess prior knowledge for each student. Why? So I know what I need to emphasize in my instruction and so that, at the end of the semester, they can see their growth for themselves—at least in this area. It’s a writing class, so the skill set they’ll acquire extends far beyond multiple choice answers to questions about grammar, usage, and mechanics. The purpose sentence for the next day was easy, though: “To determine what you already know and what you need to learn,” I wrote (kid-friendly language).

For the next class, there are really four learning targets: 1) Kids will collaboratively (a whole lot of skills to be taught there!), 2) write a clear, concise, coherent, and correct summary (Deconstruct that if you will!) of three pages in the textbook. (That’s the content part.) 3) They’ll access two separate but complementary sets of instructions on the internet (What? Read and follow directions? What am I thinking?) and 4) submit their responses to me using the Dropbox on our district’s electronic system (new process for some). I put the whole thing on the board. I mean, I want them to understand that there can be multiple goals for any one assignment or activity.

And the third class? This is my freshman Honors class, the students who will be writing essays for inclusion in a book they’ll publish by May. They wrote comparison/contrast essays at the end of last semester. Now I want them to improve upon those essays. Some had weak introductions; others fell down in the conclusion. Some need to reorder their supports, some omitted a thesis or wrote a weak one, some need more support for their supports, some need less plot summary and more selective detail. We’ll have a lesson on introductions first, using as models some of their own paragraphs (I’ve already picked out the ones that I’ll ask the kids to project onto the ENO Board for others to see.) Then we’ll work on conclusions. That’s probably the day after next. Everyone can benefit from seeing exemplary models, but I’ll devote half the period to working with students individually to improve what’s specific to their particular papers.

I wasn’t sure what to write for this class. There’s so much going on. In the end I wrote “Revise comparison/contrast essays to include a strong introduction (and I listed the components of that) and work in class on individual areas for improvement.”

My purpose statements took up half my board space! (I print big.)

So who experiments with teaching strategies on the last first day of school? Me. Because I believe that teaching well is a work in progress. No one is so good she can’t be better. No one does everything right and everything perfectly 100% of the time. We all have room to grow. And if we didn’t, whew! It would be an easy job and our kids would be achieving at levels unparalleled in the world. And we know that neither of those things is true.

So on with the experiment. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know if A) I can keep it up, B) the principal finds it helpful, C) the kids benefit from the explicit statement of the goal, D) it continues to be a challenge to me to focus my thoughts and articulate them, E) all of the above.

Love Happens

~ Sarah Powley ~ 2 Comments

I am an English teacher, but I spend my days drawing triangles and circles: sometimes imperfect ones, but identifiably, these basic geometric shapes.

Once, during college, I created a unit on utopian literature for a hypothetical 12th grade class. I assembled a glorious reading list that chronicled the history of the topic, covered all the major writers, and led my fantasy students to explore related issues in depth. The list was long and comprehensive. But that’s all it was.

My professor wrote a single sentence at the bottom: What will the students do?

I hadn’t a clue. I think they were supposed to learn through osmosis. I wanted them to fall in love, as I had, with the texts and the ideas, but I had no sense of how I would orchestrate that love affair. I just supposed that they would open their books and read—and tumble head over heels into an embrace of what I thought was quite wonderful.

It was another teacher who taught me about the triangle. You start with a clear idea of what it is the students should learn, determine the instructional methods that will best lead them to grasp those objectives, and then assess their learning. Objective, Instruction, Assessment. You don’t test what you didn’t teach, and you don’t teach what you won’t test. A triangle is stable just because there are three points. Introduce a fourth—say, content that is irrelevant or a test question over something you didn’t teach—and you destroy the integrity of your lesson. It’s a simple concept, and though it is second nature to me now, I still keep that triangle foremost in my mind every single day—whether it’s a lesson, a unit, a semester plan, or even a whole course that I’m putting together.

In the beginning, my objectives were limited, even superficial—or they were too grand. It takes time to analyze content and pick out the important concepts. Over time, I learned to identify the gaps in some students’ learning and figured out how to remediate those students while I was accelerating others. I learned to anticipate what every student would need to understand big ideas and then to sequence my instruction accordingly.

I learned strategies that reach students disposed to every learning style, that accommodate exceptionalities, that differentiate for ability, that touch every level of learning–or at least I try to do all this. A smorgasbord of instructional strategies exists, and I still try new ones and invent others as much and as often as my ingenuity, stamina, and the available resources allow.

Finally, I learned to write assessments that match the objectives precisely and to select appropriate methods for assessment. The standardized format—multiple choice—usually isn’t the best way to test depth of knowledge or critical thinking. Essays work often, but not always. Some situations call for performance tests. Choosing the right assessment tool is a learned skill, too.

Crafting the perfect triangle has been the work of a lifetime.

And that’s only the half of it. A student can learn from a teacher who is technically skilled, but a student loves learning when the teacher loves the student, too. The geometry of a successful classroom includes a circle that, like the arms of parents around their children, makes the students feel important and secure, a circle that opens them up to learning.

I have to be ingenious, though. Some students resist being included in the classroom circle. Was the poet Edwin Markham thinking about a reluctant learner when he wrote this: “Love and I had the wit to win/We drew a circle that took him in”?

That’s what I do all day—entice students into the circle. And that’s where the art of teaching lies.

Some would say mine is the task of Sisyphus. True, I start over every single day. Always something technical could be improved, some interaction with a student could have been better. I reflect each night: If I would just…whatever it is…I’d have it!

But. Rolling the rock was a punishment for Sisyphus; for me, it’s a privilege. Sisyphus started over every day resigned, perhaps resentful; I begin each day with hope—because every day, every year that I teach, something wonderful happens: Kids fall in love with learning.

Some people think teaching is easy. You just stand in front of the class, tell them to open the book, and boom: Love happens.

No, you start with a triangle…