One of the ongoing benefits to my Teach Plus experience is an informal but real connection to other Policy Fellow alumni from around the country. So this spring a book showed up in my mailbox by Jessica Lander (Teach Plus MA) – Making Americans: Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas, and Inspiration in Immigrant Education. When the Teach Plus Indiana folks offered me a free copy of the book I jumped at it, knowing it would have an influence on my teaching and advocacy.
Lander teaches at a Massachusetts high school that serves a population of students that are predominantly recent immigrants. She weaves the stories of her own students into a rich tapestry of the history and struggles of immigrant-origin families as they fought for the right to a public education in America. She augments these compelling stories with snapshots of schools across the country that are breaking the model to innovate and serve their families and students who are new to the country.
I want to steal every single idea, from offering students a chance to study real community issues and write about their findings for an authentic audience, to realizing the value of the experiences of my students’ families and offering family members an opportunity in the school building to share their skills and knowledge and support each other, to changing the way I offer my students a way to engage with geometry or algebra when they are at the same time trying to navigate the world in an unfamiliar language.
For years in Guilford, North Carolina, as elsewhere, many considered the EL program remedial — a class to practice pronunciation, trace letters, sound out phonics, review grammar. But by 2017, Mayra Hayes, after nearly fifteen years as Guilford county’s director for English learners, was still unsatisfied with the district’s progress in serving EL students. Decades earlier Mayra herself had been an EL student in US school, after her family moved from El Salvador to New York. Over her time in Guilford, Mayra had implemented new curricula, adopted education programs, recruited tutors, and crafted professional development. Many students succeeded, but not nearly enough. Yearly test scores crept up in math or reading one year, only to sink back the following spring. Of district students who started in kindergarten or first grade, roughly one in seven remained classified as English learners eleven years later. As Mayra recalled. “The status quo wasn’t working.”
In the fall of 2017, Mayra and her team began implementing an approach born of a bicoastal partnership. More than a decade earlier, two women had teamed up: Berkeley linguist Dr. Lily Wong Fillmore who had devoted a lifetime to understanding how children acquire language and Maryann Cucchiara, a practitioner responsible for supporting many of the New York City’s EL students. Where often EL classes favored simple texts and isolated grammar rules. In classrooms, the duo began demonstrating to teachers how they could use rich, grammatically demanding language—sentences stuffed with dependent clauses, adjective phrases, and compounds. Rather than teach vocabulary and grammar in isolation, language learning would be teased out of studying animal adaptations, immigration histories, and ancient civilizations. Rather than read simplified books, students would analyze articles drawn from Smithsonian and National Geographic and would decode newspapers as well as grade-level books.
In Guilford, Mayra’s team fanned out across the district. They sat in the back of classrooms, conferred with teachers, sometimes even, at a teacher’s urging, stepped in to teach. They tracked down complex texts and helped craft lessons that teased meaning from the sentences. Once a month teachers regrouped, swapping notes and trading lessons. to shrink the miles between classrooms the EL team launched a newsletter: see how students in this class are working collaboratively to deconstruct and reconstruct complex sentences; take a look at how this teacher has made a wall of synonyms using colorful paint sample chips to help students visualize subtle difference between words — hungry, starving, famished. Soon the newsletter was brimming with photos snapped in classrooms, videos of students debating passages, lesson plans constructed by teachers. Slowly, in classrooms, teachers began noticing a shift: Their students, some for the first time, were speaking in complex English sentences, incorporating new vocabulary, asking insightful questions about class texts.
https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/22/10/making-americans
It’s taken me most of the summer to work my way through the book, which is fine because I’ll finish it just in time to head back to school with all the optimism I can hold.
Of course the stuff I read doesn’t just sit still in my brain. Neurons fire, synaptic connections are made. “Ping ping ping”, we call it in my house. Mrs. Dull has grown accustomed to me adding seemingly unrelated anecdotes to our dinner table conversation. Helpfully, I preface the segue with “ping ping ping” and away we go.
I am attending the New Tech Network‘s annual convention in Dallas this week with a cohort of teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators from my district. The intent of our transition to a problem-based learning school is to deeply engage our students in ways that connect what we do in school to the world around them, and to seek out ways for them to be their authentic selves in the process. So I’m consuming each session through a lens of equity as I learn the nuts and bolts of this change of style.
Our building principal is here and set up a shared Google folder for us all to dump our notes into (seven brains are better than one, right?). And Lander’s book has shown up more than once in my notes as I insert my own prior knowledge anchors to process my new learning.
My sessions:
- Curriculum Mapping and PBL Design
- Identifying and Removing Barriers to Student Engagement In The Classroom
- Using Learner-Centered Agendas to Support Day-to-Day PBL Instruction
- Breaking Down The Buzzword: Using the NTN Culture Practice Cards to Support SEL (Note: I skipped this session as we took this time to debrief as a building team and think about how we could apply our learning to our practice this year).
- Creating Transformative Learning Experiences with Community Partnerships
- Getting Better at Getting Better: An Introduction to Improvement Science
- Bookend Lessons: Teaching to the Learning Outcomes In Your Daily Instruction
- Supporting Your PrBL Practice With NTN Resources
- Notes From The Field: The Current Challenges and Success of Network Schools
- Self-Guided Field Trip to the Dallas Museum of Art (extension of the Community Partnership session)
So obviously that’s a lot to process. And true to my nature I started synthesizing and connecting sessions. There defintely was a common thread in the community partnership and enaging students session. The improvement science session obviously applied to everything. And in a related story, I came in with an open mind, knowing I had a lot to learn about implementing PBL in my classroom. In that regard I had a lot of company.
I sat with a really good group of middle school teachers from Samueli Academy in SoCal at a session on creating learning-centered agendas. That session ended with a “I used to think… Now I think….” summary. One of my new fellow learners said, ” I used to think my agendas were pretty good, but now I feel like I have a lot of work to do in that area.” Same, dude. Same. But we have good company. We’re all here growing together.
In a week of powerful learning, our team debrief on Monday afternoon was maybe the most valuable. Teachers, admins, and an instructional coach all sitting around the same table, all opinions valued, and all having input on how these topics will fit into our goals for the year.
We’re shifting our bell schedule this year from 80-minute blocks on an A/B setup to a traditional 7-period day of 45-minute classes. Our “north stars” are meaningful, equitable instruction, and bell-to-bell teaching, where expectations for learners and teachers are clear. We talked a little bit about what the expectations for lesson components are (for evaluation purposes, and for teaching-and-learning purposes), and how we can implement the learner-centered practices that support PBL into our day-to-day.
And that’s the common thread to this reflection – Jessica Lander examined how we can make school meaningful and equitable for our newest students who face our biggest challenges. And it’s not by scaling back, offering simplistic readers and mind-numbing math worksheets. It’s by intentionally designing rich, relevant activities that are community-connected.
That’s our goal with problem-based learning for our diverse population of students. As one of my Day Three presenters pointed out, the way we talk about what we are doing matters.
As he said (paraphrasing), we’re not “doing NTN”. We want to think about moving along the spectrum of deeper learning. Are we employing student-centered lessons consistently, then moving to developing and teaching multiple PBL units per semester? The New Tech learning objectives are designed to be directly aligned with how the field talks about deeper learning (mastering rigorous academic content, learning to think critically and solve problems, working collaboratively, so forth).
The takeaway from that session, as I frantically typed in my notes, was a great way to summarize the week:
The move to a “deeper learning” mindset is a process. District and building level support and collaboration amongst PLCs and across buildings in the district supercharges the effect of a move towards embracing deeper learning. Sharing materials, sharing big wins and challenges, sharing best practices is critical. You need “cheerleaders” or “champions” in the building to kind of bridge between the IC and teachers in the PLC.
It’s not easy, but it is doable. It’s the education we owe our students. I consider it part of my role as an Indiana Teach Plus Policy Fellow alum, how my advocacy manifests itself in my classroom and in my building. And it’s worth working at, together, to improve.
Tweaking For No Reason 