Getting Schooled in School

Metaphorical Madness

Etymonline

Humbling were my first weeks as a fourth grade teacher in 1986. After six years teaching community college students, I was interviewed in August and began work at Center Elementary School in North Highlands soon after the interview.

My principal many years later confided that she had second thoughts about her decision to bring me on board after she had tasted the pudding a few weeks in. And she told me she wasn’t alone. The kids were wild, and the traveling music, art, and PE specialists whispered about unruly behavior from normally well-behaved students.

I agreed my hold on the class had been tenuous, particularly during transitions and small group work. But I had things under control within a month or so. She called me her diamond in the rough.

That first day, I had not been in a fourth grade classroom since the last day of my own fourth grade. I’d not even been in an elementary school that I remembered.

I had never participated in student teaching in the K-12 system; my multiple subjects credential required ‘supervised teaching experience,’ and my submitted materials documenting college teaching were accepted. I included glowing letters of reference from the English Department chairs at Napa and Solano colleges. I still have them.

I could teach. I’d come to believe in myself. I just couldn’t keep a class full of youngsters quiet. My principal observed me at my request: ‘Would you have time to come in and watch me and tell me what I need to do?’ She did. After school I met with her in her office.

Her approach to post-observation conferences was consistent across all three of my precious fourth grade years. First question from her: How did you think it went? Second question: What happened that you thought worked well? Where did you have a problem?

After a long talk, she laid it out: “Have you tried making them raise a hand to speak? They all want your attention. That’s how kids are. They’re not little adults.” She set me up with a school psychologist to understand how to stage class meetings.

She then sent me to a full day workshop on classroom management strategies. There, I learned more about having class meetings, writing classroom rules together, and discussing why those rules are important. Consequences began with a warning and escalated. I learned quickly the value of positive phone calls to parents in the evening.

*

The district had provided a full day of in-services for new teachers in Madeline Hunter’s lesson plan template, your anticipatory set, measurable objective, input, guided practice, independent practice, assessment as I recall. I had never taken a methods course in teaching and appreciated the organizing power of the framework.

Later in my career I would find traces of the zone of proximal development¹ (ZPD) and the Gradual Release of Responsibility² model of pedagogy in Madeline Hunter³ .

There was the HOTS Project⁴ my first year, a cross-school precursor of Teaching Gap-inspired Lesson Study⁵ wherein fourth grade teachers collaborated on design, implementation, and assessment of assignments geared toward higher-order thinking skills. In a future essay I will discuss this experience.

There was the ‘roving sub’ professional development opportunity. We could arrange to schedule half days to hand off our class duties to a sub and go observe another teacher. My immediate needs were math and science pedagogy with an eye toward classroom organization and management; the district had identified exemplary teachers in these areas to serve as mentors.

I think I got a taste of induction long before it became codified in California.

*

I was a bit puzzled when I heard colleagues casually refer to the school as a “plant.” I’d spent college summers working at a “chemical plant” loading bags of fertilizer onto trucks and sweeping warehouse floors. I have a scar from a burn on my back from a speck of potassium permanganate that splashed from a tank, a caustic chemical leaving behind sulfate, a fertilizer, as a by product when purified. The scar still tingles in hot weather.

It’s safe for me to reveal at this late date that I swept up the pink, absorbent compound we spread around on warehouse floors lickety split and then holed up behind a pallet of sulfate bags with a novel until I heard Buddy, the foreman, making his rounds, whistling his happy tune as he always did to announce his upcoming supervision.

Jobs like sweeping a warehouse often meant Buddy had nothing else for the college kids to do until a truck came in for a load of sulfate. So he told us to sweep, and he waited to check up on us until the driver was scheduled to arrive.

Whistle, whistle, whistle.

Stash Vonnegut, grab a broom. (I learned the ropes more quickly in the factory than in the school.)

I read Player Piano surreptitiously in a warehouse. I remember the experience.

You could call the school that believed in me enough to hire me a ‘plant’ in some sense, but it didn’t have the feel of the factory. How wonderful it would have been if by ‘plant’ they meant organic living matter growing from seeds, roots, trunks, branches, limbs, twigs, and leaves.

I felt a heavy weight of responsibility for the lives of children in a way I never had before, a weight that got heavier the more I connected with my kids and their parents and guardians, the closer I came to the realities of their lives, the more carefully I read their writing, the more I listened to them, the more I wanted for them, the harder I worked at ‘checking for understanding,’ the deeper I probed questions of teaching young people to read and write. And I was surrounded by caring, dedicated teachers and a strong, organized principal.

This was no factory. This was a school.

I so loved the hours in the classroom. After the first waves of turbulence passed wherein I wanted to quit every day, so inadequate did I feel, I loved driving to the school, pulling in the parking lot well before the break of dawn. MacDonalds opened at 5:00, and their coffee packed a punch.

I would walk in, sit at my desk, and read and respond to writings my students left the day before in my inbox for feedback. They were required to submit at least one piece per week, leading to at least one structured, fairly brief, documented conference with me, but submissions were overflowing. They enjoyed writing. I enjoyed reading their work, especially the variety of genres they experimented with, and I let it show in word and deed.

When they were ready for my formal response on a piece, they submitted a penultimate draft with a note telling me what they wanted feedback on. Teaching them how to ask for meaningful feedback required them to identify for themselves problems and opportunities in their drafts, a strategy and habit of mind best taught through teacher modeling.

As I read their work, lights came on in the windows of nearby rooms. Colleagues came early and stayed late, all of them to a person dedicated to their kids. Since those years I’ve spent a lot of time in elementary classrooms as a reading specialist, an ethnographic researcher, a student-teacher supervisor, and a demonstration teacher (this topic will be the focus of a future essay), and I’ve found this fulsome devotion to children to be the norm—with the occasional brutally stark exception that proves the rule (see my essay titled ‘Jim Experiences Learning to Read as an Adult’ for an exception).

I’ve seen the nature of the teacher’s devotion to young humans, the stage wherein they quickly sprout new branches and limbs and leaves to gather light from future suns, change as individuals transition into the middle and high school, the precise location of the great disciplinary divide, the academic Rockies. The ground shifts. I can say this because I taught middle school English for two years (a future essay).

It begins in middle school. Access to disciplinary ways of knowing starts to shape access to academic futures. Disciplinary knowledge becomes fragmented in time and space within the plant. Formal concepts are organized in taxonomies. Still, when kids do become little adults, when teachers rotate on the axis of GPA-infused tough love, college admission on the horizon, remarkably committed teachers are still the norm. The norm is strong. The force is with us.

*

To this day I believe I could have happily spent the next thirty-five years in fourth grade.

In my classroom, fourth graders wrote all day. The biggest challenge for me instructionally was to create conditions for real audiences to read their stuff, especially beyond the classroom. I actively worked to dissolve the examiner audience, the red pen, the metaphorical literacy hall monitor. But writing isn’t real without some kind of audience.

Structure, grammar and syntax, orthography, and punctuation are subject to deep and surface social, cultural, and linguistic rules and regulations that must be learned and followed in both academic and real world settings, but counting and highlighting errors simply doesn’t teach anyone anything about writing. As Graves taught me, firsthand contact with an authentic audience where a writer finds out what happened when a reader took up the writing—that’s the moment of electric shock.

At first I made due with the students themselves as audience. I taught them to distinguish between a) presenting a rough draft to a small group and b) publishing a final copy during Author’s Time, the time when a student by prearrangement occupied the Authors’ Chair and read a piece to the class. Seeking feedback to roll into revision was different from publishing a piece for celebration—and for negotiated evaluation.

My second year I devised two strategies for integrating parents, most of whom worked during the day, as absent presences, phantoms, in the classroom audience—the Daily Parent Paragraph and the Parent Reader Program brought written feedback to the class from their collective set of parents (another future post). My third year expanded the reach to get parent readers engaged across the grade levels.

In the tradition of Donald Graves, Lucy Calkins, and Nancy Atwell, my kids learned to write in daily writing workshops, protected time in the school day, by telling me what writing projects they wanted to tackle. That was the assignment. I had one rule: Everybody has to participate.

I set up classroom magazine groups with student editorial boards who worked with writers to publish articles about pets, skateboarding, music—topics and foci determined by the boards in consultation with the publisher, Mr. Underwood. Editors had to write a letter of interest in the job with ideas for the magazine to me. Class-made magazines could be checked out from the class library and taken home. Copies of issues were made available to students in other classes in the school library.

The 90-minute writing workshop held every M-Th from 9:00-10:30 began with a mini-lesson followed by a status-of-the-class where I called each child by name and listened to progress reports and statements of intent for the day’s writing: “I’m going to work on the Space Ship in my Back Yard. I need to get some ideas. I want to have a conference with Brad and Laura to get some feedback on some details.”

My third year of teaching writing workshop-style, I had a dozen children writing novels, working on them late at night and on vacations. The third grade teachers were by then teaching workshop-style, we had collaborated on a kid-organized school newspaper, we were doing cross-age writer response groups, and my kids were inviting community stakeholders to poetry readings with refreshments. The last cohort I taught had had a year of Author’s Time under their belts before they came to me.

I hated standardized tests, partly because they intruded into the classroom like the FBI in a predawn raid, mostly because they were worse than useless. The ritual test prep, the school wide notes to parents emphasizing the importance of these “test scores,” the anxiety of the kids, the cajoling to make sure students got a nourishing meal and a good night’s sleep the nights before test days—

I wondered what might happen if the school took three weeks and pumped up the reading and writing of the kids—poetry readings, readers’ theater, cross-age writing workshops, Oral Language fairs, authors visiting more than one day for a book signing and an assembly. We had one night of Science Fair, three weeks of standardized testing frenzy.

Achievement tests violated the assumptions of what would come to be called in measurement theory “consequential validity,⁶” the assumption Miles Myers’ embedded in his 1980 pamphlet on direct writing assessment, with samples of student work accompanied by his feedback to the writer—teach the writer, not the writing.

Assessment, to be worth its salt, must speak to the future, not the past. It must strengthen the writer with information, not reward or punish for past weakness. It must never bring learning to a halt for three whole weeks. Guba and Lincoln’s proposal for doing constructivist evaluation as opposed to positivist evaluation is an excellent starting point for whole school assessment work.⁷

*

I did find one valid use for findings from the editing subtest of the standardized language test in my third and final year of teaching fourth grade, an instance when the test convinced me of the value of a teaching strategy. Let me set the table.

I’d made headway in teaching students to use punctuation not just conventionally, but stylistically and semantically. Peer teaching worked like magic.

I conferenced and planned with selected students who had the interest and motivation to take the podium and teach a class mini-lesson in various punctuation practices (one of my students became a class expert in the semi-colon that year). Although I now believe that many practicing teachers decide early in life to teach, at the time I learned from my kids just how strong the desire is. I should have known. Laura became a sought after peer conference partner as many of her peers worked to become semi-colon afficianados after she taught them how she was using it in her own writing.

Fifteen years ago I received an envelope in the mail with a community newspaper clipping announcing Laura’s college graduation with a degree in English and a desire to teach writing. In a quote she explained that “in fourth grade we had this thing called writer’s workshop” that made her set sail on the sea of literacy instruction.

That final year I used a modified version of a James Moffett strategy: As an exercise, I asked students to write a letter or paragraph about a suggested topic or a topic of choice using no punctuation. Set it aside.

Then they would read their text aloud to themselves, speaking in a quiet voice, listening for intonation, and add periods or question marks. There was a beautiful buzz in the room. (We had studied the relationship between punctuation and intonation contours in speech—at terminal syntactic juncture the pitch of the voice falls for a period and rises for a question mark.)

Then peers paired up, exchanged papers, and listened to peers read aloud the punctuated passage to test the goodness of the punctuation.

Through the year we did a lot of ‘punctuating unpunctuated texts’ in reading and writing periods—a paragraph from a piece of literature (Charlotte’s Web provided excellent paragraphs) without punctuation treated with the same protocol as a paragraph written by the children.

That year—on the editing subtest—my kids performed so well that I presented a workshop for colleagues on punctuating unpunctuated texts as a reading and writing instructional strategy. Editing is an essential element of writing, one which perhaps is measurable to some degree by multiple choice tests,

*

After I left fourth grade, I began work in a doctoral program. In time I would learn about Taylor’s scientific management model of mass production from the late 19th century and its impact on the industrial revolution with bleed through into education. I’m no expert here, but the model involves things like time and motion studies, task analysis as a prerequisite for efficiency, standardization of best practices and more—all aspects of empirical management of routinized production.

Who could argue against scientific management as a mindset likely to bring about a desired outcome on a massive scale when a widget is the outcome? Does this hold when human learning is the product? Perhaps—learning to proofread and edit texts. Who could argue against the use of measurement strategies to achieve efficiency and effectiveness?

In 1931 the first issue of Recent Research in Education was published, coalescing years of burgeoning activity in the science of education. In 1933 an issue with a review of the literature on testing and measurement appeared with 467 citations⁸. According to Coffman (1985), entries in the Education Index under the heading “Evaluation” dwindled in the 1930s but increased in the late 1930s and 1940s as concerns intensified around learning outcomes beyond knowledge and recall. Benjamin Bloom waited in the offing.

*

The metaphor of the scientifically managed factory has been invoked by education reformers across generations to index a cruel and dehumanizing approach to schooling, turning schools into conduits of symbolic violence and the social reproduction of inequality. It is a formidable rhetorical weapon in the arsenal of progressive thinkers who take John Dewey seriously. I’ve used it myself, and I thoroughly get its attraction from the outside looking in.

In the 1950s, a tidal wave of young people shaped the emergence of the community college, and the freeways between K-12 schools and higher education were constructed. Collins (1977) reported in The Credential Society that high school attendance increased 10% per decade over the middle decades of the old century. Disciplinarity defined and limited learning pathways, specialization prerequisites impacted both elementary and middle school, resulting in curricular fragmentation from the ground up.

Disciplinary knowledge became the core learning outcome of our educational system. Literacy seen as an autonomous phenomenon, a bundle of cognitive apps that work in uniform ways to transfer knowledge as a commodity from textbooks to minds, reduces demands on labor in school. Teach students to process texts autonomous. Plug and play. Gaining academic knowledge (learning) is accomplished autonomously through reading assignments. Unfortunately, it ignores the phenomenological elements of the ideological model (see previous post on autonomous text).

These days territorial curricular maps are morphing into interdisciplinarity, which will morph again into metadisciplines of interlaced interdisciplines afforded by machine learning. Microdisciplines will proliferate as well.

Schools need to be well managed with ultimate responsibility for learning carried by students.

But what, exactly, can be automated, simply assigned and tested? Schools as we have them were invented. Managing them means managing tools, machines, equipment, fire extinguishers, custodians, professional development plans, buildings, cafeterias, gyms, busses with drivers, curriculum offices, curricula, models of effective pedagogy implemented with fidelity, spring concerts, basal readers, signature assignments before we used that phrase, graduation requirements, teachers’ aids, teachers, specialists, Advance Placement Tests, principals and superintendents to accommodate ever increasing numbers of bodies in seats…

Efficiency, automation, textbooks, chapter tests, lesson plans, quality control, percentile ranks, student placements, grades, time on task, seniority, good-better-best products—these elements in the 1920s needed measurement and set the stage for IQ tests to manage outliers and standardized tests of achievement to manage the great unwashed. The overwhelming, sublime reach of the factory model into schools is undeniable and may have been indispensable historically. And routinized protocols are absolutely necessary for certain processes.

Yet when I actually got a job as a teacher in an elementary school, when I got up in the morning to drive to work, I didn’t feel like I was driving to put in my eight hours at the chemical plant. The activity at the factory felt alien to that at the school. At school I felt as though I were doing something bigger than me, I was a part of an ancient, voluntary guild doing significant and noble work. Teachers are remarkable people. I felt lucky to have found my way to Center Elementary for reasons having little to do with a paycheck.

*

We need a new metaphor, something like schools as nests in trees, a tree metaphor that draws life to schools from roots in communities with well-educated arborists in charge. We don’t have a metaphor that works. I’m out on a limb here, but I don’t see a way to eliminate scientific management from schools. We need a new shared metaphor that puts management in its place as an enabler, not an objective monitor in a white coat or an FBI agent.

We need a metaphor to guide us collectively not as a tool of critique, but as a way to learn to harness the ancient instincts of devotion to young humans teachers find in their beings early on to support intellectual, physical, aesthetic, political, social, emotional, ethical, and cultural growth among coming generations⁹.

Any ideas?

1. https://libraryfaqs.worc.ac.uk/faq/226642

2. https://books.emeraldinsight.com/resources/pdfs/chapters/9781787694484-TYPE23-NR2.pdf

3. https://wvde.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Classroom-Lesson-Design.pdf

4. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Needed%3A-Better-Methods-for-Testing-Higher-Order-Quellmalz/2b0e93706824be685c9a22708e0b33a990f04612

5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11858-016-0787-7

6. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1006964925094

7. https://wmich.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/u350/2014/constructivisteval.pdf

8. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED338670

9. https://www.amazon.com/Schools-That-Work-Where-Children/dp/0205456359#:~:text=Praised%20as%20the%20most%20accessible,expert%20teaching%20in%20the%20classroom.