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Why "Classroom Management" is Bullshit.

10/27/2017

35 Comments

 
I must have written this blog post in my head a hundred times over the last three months.

A lot has changed for me in the last year. I moved to North Carolina, got married, gained a bonus 8-year-old, bought a house, started at a new school, and got back into the swing of teaching English 9 again, after a three-year foray into teaching middle school Humanities.

I walked back into the classroom this year excited to do some good for my students. I was incredibly fortunate to be chosen as an Apple Distinguished Educator this summer, and the Institute was one of the most profoundly moving and inspiring professional development experiences I’ve ever had.

And yet.

I also came back with some other exciting professional experiences. I got to be involved with John Green’s new book Turtles All the Way Down. Like, my name is literally in the book. With a friend from Malaysia, I created the art that is stamped onto the hardcover of the book. We also have a shirt for sale through DFTBA Records featuring the same logo. It represents a community that had a role in influencing the content of actual book as well, and I’ve had the great pleasure of working closely with and meeting John as well. It’s one of the things I can’t really even believe happened to me.

That seems to be a theme this year.

And yet.

The energy that carried me through this crazy summer of moving and change, and then ADE Institute, and then the creation and launch of Turtles All the Way Down hasn’t been enough to sustain me in my classroom. All of those beautiful things didn’t change the fact that I am vastly underprepared to do the job I’m showing up every day to do.

Because I have spent the last fourteen years of my life believing that I am in control of my classroom. That my job is shoving as much learning into their heads as I can, and that I am the one who motivates them to do that. That my skill and personality and charisma are what make me a good teacher.

And as it turns out, all of those things are bullshit.

Starting with control. I hear people talk about power and control in the context of classroom management all the time. It’s a regular thing to hear teachers talk about how someone “doesn’t have control of their classroom” or how a student is getting in “power-battles” with them over various and sundry things. Hell, I’ve said those things before.

But finish that analogy for a minute. It’s not a room you’re trying to control. They are human beings.

On one hand, we talk about inspiring and influencing and mentoring and caring for students. And then we turn right around and talk about how to wield power and techniques for silencing, managing, and controlling.

We think that if a student isn’t doing well, it must be because they don’t want it enough. That if they are failing, it’s because they just aren’t living up to their potential. That if they would just TRY A LITTLE HARDER, they would be fine.

That’s like waving a dollar at a drowning man and offering it to him, so long as he can somehow stop himself from drowning.

Every time a teacher tells a kid, “Did you READ the instructions? How do you not know how to do it?” picture a dollar waved above the head of someone slipping below the surf for the last time. See that same thing every time you say “Well, they’d be fine if they just sat down, shut up, and tried for a change” or “I can’t make them want to do the work” or “I don’t understand what’s so hard about getting it done.”

Now imagine hearing that a dozen times a day, every day, for nine years.

Imagine how you’d feel about your own ability level. How you’d feel about school. How you’d feel about your teachers. Imagine what you might say or do.

If you read those sentences without truly feeling it, please stop and really put yourself in that place for a minute.

That’s the place I’ve lived for the past three months. I had to live there in order to teach here, because to reach a student, you have to put yourself in their position. And once I saw it from their position, it was really hard to go back to talking about classroom management in the same terms again.

The truth is that kids do well if they can. If they aren’t doing well, it’s because they can’t. Not because they won’t.

If a kid can’t read or has a reading disability, we don’t use punishments and rewards to try to get them to read better. We teach them how to read better. As educators, we finally understand that reading is not just something everyone can do - it’s a complex process that can easily go awry and requires specialised instruction in order to build phonemic awareness, fluency, and comprehension. And treating a reading problem as a problem of motivation is absolutely ludicrous to most people - as it should be.

So why do we look at behaviour differently? If it’s true that kids do well if they can, then why would we use rewards and punishments for students who don’t know how to behave? Or for students who have difficulty with impulse control? Or for students who have difficulty with anger? Or for students who have difficulty with flexibility or frustration tolerance?

If you see those as a different kind of developmental delay, then our use of “classroom control” language, as well as our liberal use of referrals, removals, detentions, and suspensions for students who have difficulty in the classroom, becomes as offensive as giving a detention to a dyslexic kid who can’t read.

I wish I had been the one to work this all out for myself, and I wish that it hadn’t taken me fourteen years to do it. I spent a lot of years frustrated that I couldn’t make students behave and do the work. I punished students who were already doing their best but just couldn’t meet my expectations. I rewarded students who came to me already capable of meeting my expectations.

I wish I had read Lost at School sooner. Though I’m sure the full impact of its truth hit me like a speeding truck because of how much difficulty I’ve had this year.

Since implementing Collaborative and Proactive Solutions in my classroom (and my home), my job went from “Is this even survivable?” to “I can probably make it to the end of today in tact” to “I can do this. And so can they.”

So I’m resurrecting this blog to chronicle the trip I’ve taken from teaching in the richest county in California to one of the poorest schools in North Carolina, and how CPS has made me a better teacher than I’ve ever been.

I want to tell you how you can help students who are failing everything else, and have for YEARS, who have hundreds of referrals and suspensions, who don’t even believe they’re capable of learning, and help them see themselves are capable human beings.

Who just happen to be getting an A in English.

Who are learning how to problem-solve.

Who are learning what to do when they need help.

Who are learning how to deal with frustration.

Who believe me when I tell them that we’re in this together.

​
35 Comments

Pay Attention: The Way Anxiety Shapes Our Students

1/11/2017

12 Comments

 
Lately, many of my students have started a new hobby: solving Rubik's cubes.  They like to do it as fast as is humanly possible and they have everything from the standard 3x3 or 4x4 to really strange versions.  I usually don't see them; it's more common to hear the rustle from below the desk or table.  To be honest, the noise is seriously annoying to me as I'm incredibly noise-sensitive.  But I've never stopped students from solving Rubik's cubes during class, and that's not because I'm especially tolerant or nice.  

I don't stop them from solving the puzzles during class because I understand why they need them: solving Rubik's cubes help them to calm the monsters that constantly pull for attention and gratification.  These puzzles give them the element of control over a strong emotion: anxiety. 

If you asked me what the number one problem facing my students right now, I would say - without hesitation - it's anxiety.

It didn't used to be this way.

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Fact Checking a Post-Fact Society

11/15/2016

12 Comments

 
I can't tell you how many times I've heard a student say, "I heard/read x" where x is something totally crazy.

Like Harambe getting twenty thousand votes in the presidential election.

And I'm so tired of dealing with all these crazy facts.

So it's time to do something about it.  I'm calling it Google Search Challenge, and we're doing it every day until my students' reaction upon hearing x is, "Hmm.  That doesn't sound right.  Let me look that up."

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3 Reasons Ze Frank Should Be Part of Your Classroom

5/17/2016

8 Comments

 
Recently, I applied for the Google Certified Innovator program.  This was my application video.
I admit it: I love Ze Frank.

So what does that have to do with teaching?

Well, what we do as teachers is about relationship and community.  And while I'm not much for the cult of personality around the teacher being the Centre of The Classroom, most of us become some variety of stand-up comedian because we have a built-in captive audience.

And Ze Frank is the master of cross-curricular real-world relevant collaborative projects.

His audience made the Earth a sandwich, asked people to dress up vacuum cleaners in human clothes, tracked down a random guy (only known by his first name and his voice, and his audience found him in TWO DAYS) and made him a series of remixes of and a music video for a song he wrote called "Whip Somebody's Ass," made purposely ugly myspace pages, and so much more. 

So how can you harness the power of Ze Frank's collaborative projects?

First, copy them.  

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Stuff I Wrote

5/11/2016

18 Comments

 
For a year, I wrote for Teachability.  I was paid to write regular blog posts about teaching, Flipped Learning, and technology.

After Teachability went under, I realised that these blog posts had disappeared into the ether.  

​So I posted them here!  See? I HAVE been writing more than it seems from the state of my blog in the last few months.

Here is a list of posts:
Rethinking Homework, part one
​Rethinking Homework, part two
​Leveraging Social Media To Build Relationships in a PLN
Why Google Draw Should Be Used in Every Classroom
Revamping Lit Circles 
8 Parts...of AWESOME
Teaching Research Like a Football Coach
Why I Won't Tell My Students the Answer
Making Terrible PowerPoint Presentations
Why I Look At Instead of Looking Away

​Hope you enjoy.
18 Comments

Why I Look At Instead of Looking Away

5/4/2016

7 Comments

 
When I went away to college, the stuff I knew about the world and how it worked could have fit on the back of a postage stamp and still had room to spare.

I remember being so relieved when I had a professor who would listen to my dumb questions, then not only would she answer them, but she had an ability to make me feel like OF COURSE it wasn’t a dumb question, and it was SO GOOD that I asked and she was SO GLAD to be the one to get to explain it to me!

She was my first mentor.  The first professor I didn’t just like, but aspired to BE like.  The way she taught is actually a prototype for how I teach now.  I don’t believe I’m as good a teacher as she is, but the good things are largely stolen from her (and others...I don’t discriminate about people from whom to steal).  She taught me about geography, about the middle east, about gender roles, about the global south, about American political systems, about foreign policy, about physical geography, about the Israel-Palestine conflict...and so much more.  From her I stole my now-frequent response to a student question, “Hmm.  That’s a great question.  That would be really interesting for you to look up and tell us what you found!”

The notes I took in her class are by far the most useful thing I’ve taken away from the 16 ½ years* I was educated.  I actually remember specific lectures and conversations from her classes, even though they happened almost 15 years ago.  Her classes were the only ones for which I actually studied.  I mean, I even organised study groups with my classmates.  

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she had been my 6th grade teacher.  Or 10th.  Or any year before I could legally vote.

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Lessons in Empathy From Internet Strangers

4/5/2016

2 Comments

 
A few weeks ago, I started something new. 

Every trimester, I like to change up my daily routines a little.  Membean Monday, Explosion Wednesday, and Finishing Friday are all year-long, so I make Tuesday and Thursday something different.  

For T3, the English skills are around persuasive writing and speaking.  But something I've noticed all students need is empathy.  So how do you build empathy into a course?

I tried two things.  First, I added "Thankful Thursday" to the rotation.  I give every student a post-it note, and ask them to write a note to a classmate, thanking them for something.  Then we watch a video for "Random Video Thursday" and we discuss the topic of the video.  The topics are things like brain science, friendship, music and anything else I feel like would make good conversation.

Those are the students' favourite parts of the week.

But it wasn't enough.  


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2 Comments

Making Terrible PowerPoint Presentations

12/21/2015

1 Comment

 
I make no secret of the fact that the core of most of my lessons are stolen from Jon Corippo.  His overall philosophy is teaching like a football coach: lots of repetitions at game speed, tons of feedback, and pushing for mastery.

One of the best is called Bad PowerPoint.  It starts with stand-up comedy, and ends with students presenting truly terrible slide decks using truly terrible presentation technique, with classmates scoring them collaboratively using BINGO boards.

So often we require students to give presentations without first teaching them how to do it well. At best, we lecture them about what good presentations are, often in ways that violate those elements of good presentations!

But, as my first mentor in the teaching profession reminded me often, there is a big difference between “teaching” and “telling” students.  ​

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1 Comment

Why I Won't Tell My Students the Answer

12/15/2015

2 Comments

 
Today in class, a student brought a tripod up to me to ask how to attach it to a camera.  I said, “I bet you can figure it out. Here’s one hint: there’s a piece that comes off.”

He sighed a little in exasperation, but sure enough, he played around with the buttons and settings and discovered that he could, indeed, figure it out.

When I was in high school, if I wanted to know something, I either had to look it up in a book, or ask a teacher.  Both of those things required being in a specific place at a specific time, and if I wanted to know something when I wasn’t in that place at that time, I was out of luck.

Today, students have more information at their fingertips than anyone has in the entire history of the world.

And they still ask questions for which answers are easily searchable on the Google machine.

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2 Comments

Teaching Research Like a Football Coach

11/11/2015

4 Comments

 
When I started teaching over a decade ago, most of my colleagues still required more print sources than web sources.  We taught students how to use the library, both at school and in the local community, and had them write out their citations by hand, using an MLA style guide.  We still had a card catalogue.  

Clearly, a lot has changed since then.

But what hasn’t changed is the approach most teachers take to teach research skills.  Teachers expect students to master the incredibly complex research process that involves: finding and vetting credible sources; choosing a strong research question; using evidence appropriately; citing sources and preparing a Works Cited page; drafting strong paragraphs; and finally, writing an appropriate introduction and conclusion that put the research in context as well as succinctly relates its importance.  Students get one shot at all of that, then move on.

Is it any wonder that students need to be retaught research skills every year?

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    A completely incomplete record of three years spent flipping my high school English classes with my cross-country collaborative partner, Andrew Thomasson. But after a decade in high school, I made the switch to a new gig: flipping English and History for 6th graders in Tiburon, CA.

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