Eduholic

I had a tough time keeping track of my students last Friday because some were silent and others were invisible. Both groups of kids were participants in activities I sponsor at TJ. The silent ones were members of the Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA), who held a day of silence to protest homophobia and then a “breaking the silence” party to go with it. The hard to see ones were members of the UNICEF club, who sponsored a presentation from an organization called “Lost Children” that promotes awareness and education for Ugandans suffering under that country’s twenty-year plus civil war.

Why all the do-gooding? First, you need to grok “8th period,” the unique system for extracurriculars here at TJ. Because we’re a magnet school serving five far flung districts, we can’t hold club meetings after hours like regular schools do. Instead, using creative scheduling allowed by a block system, twice a week we have “8th period,” during which students can sign up for any of over 150 clubs and activities ranging from Namaste (which celebrates Indian culture) to the classic rock appreciation club (two years ago we rubbed elbows with Jethro Tull: did you know Aqualung is also an acquaculturalist?).

This being TJ, the complicated system is fully computerized on a student-designed intranet that allows kids to check and change their schedules at the click of a mouse. There are humans behind this extracurricular Oz, of course, including a full time administrator and a small army of parent volunteers. The school thinks it’s worth it to offer kids a breath-taking range of opportunities to explore interests that don’t fit into the heavy academic curriculum.

GSA is one example. Historically, high school isn’t a good place to be different. While TJ is far less stratified than a normal school (our jocks are nerds, too), girls who like girls or boys with two mommies need a safe place to just be for a few minutes a week. Hence the club. It’s not an especially energetic group, as TJ clubs go. At a normal meeting, kids simply sit around and talk. Except once a year, on The Day of Silence, when they carry a card around to all their classes explaining to teachers and kids why they’re not talking. For this occasion, we also passed out rainbow ribbons and invited students from other local high schools to join us for pizza in the courtyard at the end of the day, where all the kids got together and… talked. Very subversive, the entire thing.

UNICEF is another group I sponsor, or at least try to keep up with. They seem to have taken the saving the world thing literally, and have it in their planners as due this year. Here’s a bit from an email from the club president I just popped open:

So on May 8th and May 16th for B Block we have Mr. Lagon and M. Saade coming. Mr. Lagon will discuss women/child trafficking and M. Saade, water/sanitation issues. Mr. Rosenfeld, could we get either the auditorium or college career center?... On May 8th we also got a break fundraiser reserved. I guess we'll sell pizza + t shirts. Treasurers, could one of you check with the finance office? We need to have the purchase order and such filled out beforehand-- they will order the pizza for us after we fill it out. We also have a break fundraiser Friday May 23rd, Wednesday June 11th,and Friday June 13th. Again, I assume we're selling pizza + t shirts…

I’ll stop now so you aren’t too winded to keep reading. Friday’s event was more of the same, with a rock and roll twist. “Lost Children” is a group that somehow makes saving kids sexy through documentaries featuring attractive American young people who throw themselves into transformative friendships with tragically typical Ugandans.

It remains to be seen if intolerance and injustice are out of business since Friday afternoon. But if you want to bet on changing the world, I’ll take TJ kids pursuing their passions over butterfly wings flapping in China any day.

One thing I know they change is me. Through sponsoring the activities, I’m drawn into the emotional and political world my students inhabit. It is a little weird sometimes to end a work week listening to kids broach social taboos while sitting at 1950s-style one-armed bandits, or a little depressing to take in a video about genocide. Even so, as I drive home on Friday afternoon with my elbow out the window, it’s generally with the feeling that once again, my students have taught me valuable lessons.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Stealing a few strokes at the keyboard as students behind me murmur lines about schoolboys going to school with heavy looks while they comb Romeo and Juliet for motifs. Later in the period it’s a quick review of the 4th quarter calendar with due dates for upcoming projects, and then we’ll watch as ill-fated George Clooney and Marky Mark climb the big wave for the last time at the end of a movie we didn’t find time to finish last quarter.

Tying up loose ends, choreographing weeks to come… must be the end of April, that pause before the real perfect storm (AP’s, SOL’s, and final exams) upends the fourth quarter.

Sitting here in limbo, I can’t help but cast my eye back to the last time I took a deep breath. In “The Lull Before the Storm” (August 21, 2007) I wrote an existential to do list from this then more silent trailer, which included plans to write a book, change jobs, master technology, and be a better man.

My progress, respectively: sort of, maybe, kind of, and still trying. Here are some details.

1. I could write a book… if I write a book proposal. My dreams of a subsidized writing summer seem to have slipped away in the blur of the school year, but this blog helped me move in the right direction by providing a place to work out ideas about metacognitive practice and lessons that are engaging and multimodal. A title popped out of a fortune cookie over a free lunch with an ASCD editor: Formative Assessment in a Student-Centered Classroom. Real progress was on hold while I worked on my National Board retake, but that excuse is gone. Next step, in theory, is a table of contents and a few sample chapters. In practice, for the next two weeks I’m catching up on night school papers and then the end of the year crunch here at TJ.

2. The Truth Window… I peeked through it at a few independent school head jobs and quickly discovered that I’m not going to slide into the top spot without spending a few years climbing the ladder in other administrative roles. Since then I’ve adjusted my sights and conducted a limited local search. I’m prepared to move if a great job opens up, and to stay in my current great job otherwise. One pleasant discovery is that there is a legitimate hybrid role as teacher-administrator in the private school world that simply doesn’t exist in public schools (though it should).

3. Tech mojo…my kids blogged and wiki’d their way through some Great Books and science papers, and I discovered that tapping into 2.0 really does get qwerty kids to talk to each other. The technology isn’t an end in itself, but it fosters collaborative writing and thinking in a way that good old marble comp books can’t. I may never become a card-carrying 2.0er (microblogging at Twitter seems unlikely given that I can count the number of text messages I’ve sent in my life on one hand). Then again, if a dude who made his students build a dugout canoe with stone tools can do it, so can you.

4. Mo’ better… hmm, depends what day. The latest adventure in parenting involves getting our 7-year old to sleep by himself. Having exhausted our normal repertoire—negotiation, bribery, and yelling—now we’re seeking professional help. The counselor wants us to share “happies and crappies” every night at the dinner table. I’d tell you more about how it’s working but I’m about to fall asleep at the keyboard.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Let it not be said that the NBPTS gods don’t have a sense of humor, albeit twisted. Retakes are due on April 15. I just put the finishing touches on my Reflective Summary, the final part of my do-over. I will soon send off the blue box for the second time. Here I mark the occasion by breaking my own promise not to write about this anymore.

Why not? After all, I also colored outside the lines on my strictly drawn resolution to recycle the same accomplishments as I used last year. Then I wrote about the flaming canoe, being a Teacher-Consultant with the writing project, and this blog. The big change this year was that I scuttled the canoe. Rather than beat my head against the Boards, I decided to agree to disagree with NBPTS on the value of experiential learning, and now my accomplishments comprise being a Teacher-Consultant with the writing project, this blog, teaching a writing class for teacher-researchers, and a contact log.

Another promise I broke was to avoid peer review and extensive revision. Sitting around at monthly meetings of the district support course last year, I got the feeling that too many inexperienced cooks might spoil the brew, and ended up limiting myself to working primarily with only with my course-assigned reader. This year, I hand-picked three reviewers, hoping to triangulate more successfully. Two of my editors were National Board pros, NBCTs with broad experience in the organization and the support world; the last was a total stranger, one of many generous readers of my recent Post piece who volunteered to lend an eye.

One place where I did follow my own advice was in working backwards from solid evidence of student achievement instead of merely narrating lessons from a teacher’s-eye view. I talk a lot more this year about what happens in my class as a result of what happens outside of it—for example, how my blog here on Teacher has led me to use blogs with my own students, or how teaching a course for teachers led me to online collaborative writing tools that helped my kids with their science projects.

Also, as I said I would this time around, I used verification forms and a contact log (both of which I had eschewed last time in favor of what I thought then was more authentic evidence). I think the changes have recentered my entry on student rather than teacher achievement, hopefully enough to achieve my modest goal: 1.8 or bust.

Below, see the difference a year makes. Here is my Reflective Summary followed by a taste of last year’s (rules prevent publishing scored entries). The bottom line, as I point out in the bottom line of the current version, is that the first Entry Four was about me; the revised model is about my students.

Reflective Summary 08

The most effective aspect of my work outside the classroom in impacting student learning has been my ten-year involvement with the Northern Virginia Writing Project (NVWP). Through my connection to this organization I learned how to make a student-centered classroom focused on writing. Also, I have developed the habits of a reflective practitioner that allow me to constantly improve my teaching through self-examination and through rich dialogue about pedagogy with colleagues. Last, the NVWP has helped me grow as a writer myself, which lets me communicate what happens in my classroom and informs the way I teach my students.

Placing students at the center of a writing classroom means learning is individualized and each student discovers that he or she can be not just a learner but a teacher. This has a profound impact on their learning in my class and beyond. When Brad comments about his own writer’s notebook that “Overall, [it] has really had a positive effect in all that I do, not just English class,” this shows that writing project techniques like freewriting and writing to learn have helped him gain confidence in his own ability to write and to think. When Xinyi and Nicole collaborate on a paper and afterwards are able to explain that, in order to create and argue persuasively for a thesis they must consistently use evidence for support, make an effective “hinge statement,” and organize a convincing argument, this shows me that they have internalized lessons about writing that will stay with them long after they forget the details of their topic.

Reflective practice is another skill which the writing project has helped me to develop that has a strong impact on student learning. I habitually record my thoughts before, during and after a lesson, and gather data on an ongoing basis to inform these observations. On my blog, colleagues from around the country respond to my thoughts on best practice and share theirs. Another aspect of reflection that I noticed in compiling Entry Four is that I do a lot of surveys and reflective assessments with my students. The comments my ninth graders wrote about their own blog use are examples of how I gather information from my students which helps in assessment and shows me how to change future lessons to be more effective. I am also teaching metacognitive awareness, in other words the ability to analyze one’s own patterns of behavior and achievement; through this studentes not only learn specific content, they learn how to learn.

Considering the patterns evident in my accomplishments, I can see several things I want to do to further impact student learning in the future. In my contact log, I noticed that almost half of my contacts with parents involved attempts to respond thoughtfully to concerns or to foster communication about specific needs and progress. I want to maintain a high level of accessibility to help kids who are struggling, but I’d like to broaden my contacts with parents to solicit even greater participation in the language arts program. One way to do this might be to create assignments that require students and parents to work together, like oral history interviews or a shared book. Another way that I can better open-- and keep open-- lines of communication, is to use techniques like blogging to establish two-way communication with parents that will provide specific information about the language arts program on an ongoing basis and outline steps for parents to support their children's language development.

Finally, to further impact student learning in the future I will continue to seek opportunities for professional collaboration. While teaching and taking part in courses with the writing project, I learned about wikis and google docs, online tools that let me experiment with collaborative writing with my students. This retake entry also shows how I both teach and learn from colleagues. When I didn’t achieve board certification on the first try, I was discouraged. Sharing my process with a public audience fostered dialogue and brought support. I took advantage of the advice I received and also sought out a range of feedback. The difference is that last year’s Entry Four was about me; this year’s version is about my students.

Excerpts from Reflective Summary 07

...I conceived the canoe project originally because I wanted students who were more comfortable IMing one another about chem problem sets to have the visceral hands-on experience of swinging an axe. They did, and it was true that taking these academic superstars out of their comfort zone forced collaboration, problem-solving and ultimately, provided a richer understanding of themes in history and literature. What I did not anticipate was how strongly this experience would enrich my own relationships with parents, colleagues, and the community, nor the degree to which these connections would augment student learning. In some cases, an informal connection with a parent helped one student achieve greater success in the class; in other cases, I found that reaching out to experts, like the scientist from the tree lab or my own colleagues—in other words, being an active learner alongside my students—resulted in curricular opportunities that let us all see the project in a new light.....

Finally, my professional writing informs my teaching, and therefore has a direct impact on student achievement. I talk to students about their writing not as a grammarian with a red pen, but as a fellow writer who struggles to reach a given audience under specific conditions, or, at other times, to simply discover what he is feeling. Writing is thinking, I contend, and often ask students who want to carefully organize all their ideas before setting pen to paper, How can you know what you think before you write? For me, the question may well be, How can I discover who I am as a teacher before I write? The answer to this question lies in the four entries of this portfolio.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I played hookey yesterday for 30 million dollars. (Technically, I was lobbying for federal funding for the National Writing Project on Capitol Hill.)

The experience made me feel a lot closer to our government than I ever have before, even though I’ve lived nearly in sight of the Washington Monument for much of my life. I also figured out where all those smart girls named Sloane and Jordan who took perfect notes and graduated five years ago ended up.

The NWP, at least its Northern Virginia site, is a professional development organization that has changed my teaching life. Going through the Summer Institute at George Mason in 1997 profoundly altered my relationship to the profession by teaching me how to do and use freewriting, writing groups, and writing to learn. Each time I’ve been to the well since – taking or teaching classes, writing with and about teachers-- I’ve come away refreshed.

So I was happy to join a few hundred other like-minded folks from the 200 sites across the country yesterday to try to convince Congress to give us our annual allowance. They’ve done it every year since 1991, making us the longest running PD program in the country. Universities and local districts also kick in to fund local programs, “leveraging” federal dollars.

Other talking points: there are 7000 current Teacher-Consultants out there, each of whom spreads the gospel to 14 colleagues annually. Thus 92,000 teachers nation-wide are Project-influenced, reaching one out of three kids across the country. I could go on (thanks to a useful set of talking points provided by the research group that helps us study the organization), but you get the point.

It’s not just about spewing statistics, of course. The key to good lobbying, we were instructed, was to “tell our story.” For a bunch of teachers trained to scribble meditatively in marble comp books while sitting under trees, that part was easy. Finding the offices where we were supposed to do it among the imposing marble corridors or via the warren of underground tunnels proved slightly more challenging.

Somehow we gee-whizzed our way to five half-hour appointments from Rayburn to Cannon, meeting each time with “education aides” whose job was to greet us, accept our flyers, and later pass along our pitch to their boss in what we imagined was a terse meeting that might go something like this.

Aide: “Next, we had a group of teachers from The Natural—wait, the National Writing Project.”
Congressman: “What’d they want?”
A: “$30 million for Fiscal Year 2009 and your signature on a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter.”
C: “Who’s the sponsor?”
A: “George Miller, Sir, the chairman of Education and Labor--”
C: “Course I know Miller. Did we sign it last year?”
A: “No sir, I don’t believe so. But you did vote for funding for the past three years.”
C: : “We just got hammered on those NCLB numbers, didn’t we?”
A: “I have that right here. [Flips papers.] There was a 12% increase in reading and math at schools with 43% free and reduced lunch--”
C: “Sign the letter. Do you remember where we put that scale model from the Navy guys that were in here the other day? Send it over to my kid’s school for that auction thing, and when’s the oversight hearing…”

We didn’t get behind any closed doors, of course. But the aides we talked to, while showing varying degrees of interest in those stories we were supposed to tell, were sharp young women (by young I mean very early twenties, except for one) who took careful notes and seemed concerned to know who else had signed the “Dear Colleague” letter of support.

Despite their similar demographics, all aides were not created equal. My little group particularly liked Jim Moran’s, who it turns out had gone to TJ, the high school where I teach, and had written 53,000 words of a novel on her laptop during her morning commute. (In fact, in all five meetings either the aide herself had gone there or we discovered some other TJ connection. For example, during a quick handshake with the one Congressman we actually saw, Randy Forbes, we found out that his daughter’s boyfriend had been the student body pres.)

We really didn’t like Jim Webb’s aide. We figured that Webb, himself a writer of some repute, might be willing to sign on, but after a half hour wait she spent all of the five minutes she gave us listing reasons why Senator Webb probably wouldn’t get to the letter and next time could we call her and fax it over in advance (we’d done both) and did she mention how many letters like this they get every day? She didn’t even show us into a conference room as several of the others did, which at least made us lobbyists in the literal sense of the word since we took our brief meeting outside the door of Webb’s office in the Russell Building.

At the end of the day, as I metro’d home in my blazer and tie, I felt as I had all day a strange sense of wonder at being out in the regular world instead of in the perpetual never land of school. So this is what it feels like, I thought, swaying gently as the train crossed over the Potomac River on my first and perhaps only day as a Washington lobbyist.

Posted by Emmet Rosenfeld at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)