Education for the 21st century – Page 7

Laughter is the true test of success

I have a confession. I am a high school teacher who doesn’t care about how many As my students get or how many are on the Honour Roll. In fact, I dislike high stakes tests as much as my students do. If we do have tests, they’re frequently open book. I tell my students that tests test how well you can do tests. And so I do not “teach to the test” but I do teach my students how to do tests. Much of the lesson relates to how to combat test stress.

What do I care about most is how my students feel when they’re in my classroom. This is the most critical indicator of whether my students are learning or not. It’s the ground upon which I build my teaching practice.

On my recent trip to Italy, I was surprised and thrilled when Tullio De Mauro, a former Minister of Education expressed a similar idea. We were in a moderated dialogue during Internazionale a Ferrara 2015 when he said that the evaluation that teachers should be concerned about most is their students’ evaluation of their time in the classroom. We agreed that the physical space of the classroom did not matter as much as the emotional space that was created.

It’s wonderful to have a former Minister of Education in Italy espouse the importance of a hospitable classroom but what will it take to have all current politicians here in North America realize this truth? All across Canada and the United States, the powers that be insist on testing as a way to increase student achievement despite innumerable studies that reveal the failure of this approach. I wonder if anything will change now that the White House recently called for limits on the number of tests that students are subjected to?

I suspect it will take many more years before the stress of tests is a thing of the past for students.

But tests are not the only source of students’ stress in school. Most of us have vivid memories of a whole range of situations and experiences that made school a place we didn’t always want to be. When I was a student, I was frequently afraid or bored or tired even though I achieved many As. Turns out not much has changed over the decades since my high school graduation. A study released last week, reveals that 75% of high school students (Grades 9 – 12) feel either bored or tired or stressed.

The biggest tragedy of this for me is how much we are wasting the creativity of our adolescents. Just when their brains are developing the ability to think abstractly and to be creative, we bore them with forced memorization of facts we already know and that they can instantaneously access on the phones. Despite this travesty, there are growing numbers of teens who are simply going ahead and solving problems we adults had not been able to.

Ken Robinson’s Do Schools Kill Creativity? talk has over 35 million views. Clearly there are many people around the world aware of what we are doing to our students’ creative potential so why do we continue to do this?

My students’ creativity constantly amazes me. I am often in awe of how they respond to assignments where their imaginations have free reign. I love evaluating those assignments because each one is unique, each student’s interpretation an expression of how alike and unlike they all are. When a final exam response includes the performance of a spoken word poem along with a brilliant talk punctuated by laughter, stress and boredom are simply not in the room.

But laughter does not come easily to me. I am by nature rather serious and so I’ve had to work hard at creating circumstances in my classroom where laughter is a frequent and welcome visitor. I have taken a course about laughter in which I learned about how well our bodies and minds respond to laughter. I discovered that laughter is actually quite a serious matter!

In fact, it turns out there is a link between laughter and creativity. The more you laugh, the more creative you are when solving problems. Wouldn’t it be great if students could have a laughing session before each test? There’s a research study that needs to be done!

Each school year many of my students make it onto the Honour Roll, many also achieve the coveted As but what I care about the most is how they felt and how often they laughed when they were in my classroom. They’ll remember that for much longer than they’ll remember what was on a test.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Maybe it’s because the season is changing or maybe it’s because the future became the past this week, but I’ve been thinking about 1985 a lot lately, trying to remember what my life was like back then. At the time I was a teacher in South Africa, teaching in an apartheid-era classroom that was overcrowded and underfunded.

Today I teach in a classroom in a rich province with the second-lowest per student funding in Canada. The biggest difference between my classroom in 1985 and my classroom in 2015 is that back then I used chalk, and now I don’t.

Back then, my government considered me a second-class citizen. Thanks to the Harper government’s C24 legislation, I am that, once again.

Back then, education in South Africa was one of the levers the government used to perpetuate Apartheid and was certainly not meant to open worlds of possibilities to students who were not White.

Today, in the guise of “reform” education is seen as a viable investment sector by multinational corporations at the same time that students are considered as nothing more than pre-workers through policies like the BC Skills for Jobs Blueprint.

It seems that it’s true that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

But there is something that is very different in my experiences as a teacher in 1985 and my experiences as a teacher today.

Back then, whenever I advocated for more hospitable classrooms and a more humane treatment of students, I was met with backlash and derision. The opposite happens today.

Thirty years after my principal, Mr Gulston, told me that my colleagues were “just not ready” for my ideas, I was invited to Italy this month to talk about those ideas. It was an experience that was manna for my teaching soul. I do not think I have enough words to fully express my gratitude, and how humbled I feel about it all.

One of the highlights of the trip was conducting a full-day workshop in Florence in a room at Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents), a place that first welcomed and accepted abandoned babies during the Renaissance.

During the workshop I talked about and demonstrated how I try to make my classroom a welcoming space for my students. This includes the occasional dancing! And so there we were, Italian researchers and teachers, putting on our best grooves to UpTown Funk during one of our brain breaks. So much fun!

One of the biggest differences between talking about creating a welcoming space for students in 1985 and doing so in 2015 is that these days I can point to neuroscience for support.

I can refer to research when I talk about the connections between emotions and learning, that learning is primarily a social process, one based on relationship. I wish I had books like Brain Targeted Teaching back in 1985! And I really could have used easy access to organizations like CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning).

Back then all I had was blind intuition until, by some stroke of serendipity, an organization funded by international donors set up a library just a block down the road from the school where I taught.

The organization, SACHED, had a mandate to support in various ways, non-white students studying at universities.

The first time I borrowed a book from that library, it was like a whole new world opened up for me. There were ideas about teaching I had not seen anywhere in my teacher training or in any classroom I had attended as a student. I could not keep the books for long periods though and I could not buy them anywhere since the South African government censored or banned anything progressive in art or literature or academia.

Perhaps then you can understand my being dumbfounded by the fact that, despite the abundance of research on how critically important the creation of a socially and emotionally safe space is for learning, so much of what we do in schools completely ignores what we know.

We know that sitting for long hours is unhealthy for brains and bodies and yet students still sit for 6 hours a day, for 10 months a year, for 13 years of their lives.

We know that most teens are sleep deprived and that they are most alert and ready for learning at 10am in the morning and yet we continue to pile them with homework that keeps them working for hours each night and then insist that they show up to school early each morning.

We know that the next 30 years is going be unlike the last 30 and yet we continue to demand students regurgitate all that we already know instead of nurturing their creativity to explore the things we don’t.

It was a humbling experience to be in Italy, to be in buildings hundreds of years old, to see from hindsight, the unfolding of our civilization, our artistic and scientific knowledge.

I wonder what people in 2045 will think of us when they look back at this time.

Right now, education reform in both Canada and Italy is being driven by economic goals instead of educational ones. In both countries, teachers are under attack, their professionalism being questioned. And in both countries, education is a political football, with students losing the most.

Is it too much to hope that by 2045, teachers then will be able to point to a time now when there was a dramatic shift in public education, when neoliberal reform of schools was rejected and replaced by policies that truly have our children’s future in mind? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if teachers at the middle of the 21st century could point to the beginnings of a second Renaissance, one in education?

This week I watched as election results showed that Canadians had overwhelming rejected the xenophobia of the Harper government. With a new government in place, I can look forward to being an ordinary citizen like everyone else, once again.

I hope that my students, and those I met in Italy, will not only witness in their lifetimes, a radical shift in the structure and functioning of the place we call school, but they will also see the success of social and political policies indicative of the better angels of our human nature.

The past and the future are always present

clock — http://openphoto.net/gallery/image/view/6675

During the recent media hype about the Back to the Future trilogy, I wondered what the Marty McFlys in schools today would find if they travelled to the future, say 21 October 2045. I wonder if they’d discover classrooms just like the ones they’re in today, where students spend much time studying the past and not nearly enough time in classrooms considering how the present may shape the future.

I’ve also been wondering what students in the future will think of what we do now, in our present that is their past. I wonder if they too would want to travel back in time to change the choices we are making now.

To those of us who’ve been here a while, 1985 seems like yesterday. Hard to believe that three decades can disappear so quickly.

The Internet was still three years away in 1985. Video games, new in 1980, were developing quite rapidly. The Macintosh personal computer was one year old. And the hole in the ozone layer had just been discovered.

Now here we are in a world where today’s Marty McFlys carry in their pockets a device that can provide endless video game entertainment and also instant access to all human knowledge, including nanosecond updates of massive, “historical” hurricanes.

Would hurricanes like Patricia have emerged if we had acted on what we knew about climate change thirty years ago?

I worry a lot about the choices we are collectively making today, choices that are already shaping the world of tomorrow. I wish the impact on the next seven generations was considered in all those choices.

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly has to make sure that two people make the right choice in 1955. Marty’s very existence depends on that choice, after all.

What might teens living in 2045 want us to change about the choices we are making today since their existence depends on us?

Students in my classroom wonder about the impact of their choices quite a bit. Most of their concerns are about choices in careers but they also wonder about the big questions in life. One of them asked me this week if each choice we make generated a whole different universe and if there were multiple universes created when other choices were made.

I said I didn’t know.

But what I do know is that in this world now, here, today, we are shaping the world our families will live in tomorrow.

The future, like the past, is always present.

New Curriculum not meant for BC public schools

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how the new curriculum could be implemented in all the classrooms I know. I could not fathom how a teacher could personalize learning for all 30 of her students when half of them who needed support of one kind or another were not getting it. Education assistants were considered a salary benefit outside of the “affordability zone” during the labour dispute last year, remember?

Each time I tried to imagine what personalized learning would look like in overcrowded classrooms with outdated technology, my mind sent me 404 error messages. Nothing computed.

But, after reading all the commentary about the new curriculum, it hit me! The new curriculum is not meant for the kinds of classrooms I know. It’s not meant for underfunded public schools.

The new curriculum is meant for private schools where there are only 15 students and unlimited resources in each classroom. It’s in private school classrooms that personalized learning would fit seamlessly.

The more I thought about it, the less confused I became. The BC Liberal government has been doing the private school industry many favours lately. We taxpayers provided private schools with $311 million this year. The BC Liberal government has also decided, on our behalf, that private schools should get a break from municipal taxes because government revenue didn’t really need the $5million in taxes that would have been due. And to ensure that the BC Liberal government doesn’t miss any more opportunities to help the private school industry, they’ve appointed a new advocate who will keep the Premier up to date with what private schools need.

The needs of public schools fall on deaf ears. I am astounded that Premier Clark is unashamed of the fact that a newspaper runs a charity that provides funds for schools. A charity started after a teacher’s letter pleading for shoes for her students went viral. I suppose that’s one way we public school teachers can personalize what happens in our classrooms: we can continue to personally provide food and shoes for our students.

It’s certainly personal when we teachers spend an average of $1200 of our after-tax income each year on supplies for our classrooms.

Inviting teachers to collaborate on a new curriculum was a particularly disingenuous move by the Ministry. Insisting that it was teachers who created the curriculum is like saying that the interior designers created Hotel Vancouver. The parameters and budget were already pre-set.

It’s also quite cruel to invite teachers to design the curriculum of their dreams while removing $250 million each year from public school budgets. It’s the kind of move that the Mr Hyde version of the Ministry would make, the equivalent of telling students that they can go on a trip to Disneyland while not providing funding for transportation or accommodation or food or entrance tickets.

If the government sincerely intended for curriculum change to be driven by teachers, it would have involved all teachers in the process. Remember the accreditation process that took up almost 2 years of professional development time in the 1990s? What happened as a result? We have school plans that are aspirational documents because there is no funding to accomplish the goals.

We teachers know exactly what our students need. The skill-sets that teachers who collaborated on the curriculum took to the Ministry exist in thousands of classrooms in BC which is why we have a “world-renowned” education system as the Ministry loves to boast about.

But all our knowledge and skill cannot provide for our classrooms what adequate funding can.

When the Vancouver Sun newspaper shuts down its Adopt-A-School charity because it’s not needed anymore, then I’ll celebrate the new curriculum.

What’s old is new again: thoughts on the new curriculum

pencils — http://openphoto.net/gallery/image/view/22877

If I didn’t know otherwise, I’d think that students in this province were all under the supervision of clones of Thomas Gradgrind who saw students as empty pitchers to be filled with the right type of knowledge. If you read between the lines of the new curiculum, teachers have apparently been stuck in the “content delivery” mode and are in need of adjustment into their new role of “guide, coach and mentor” so that students’ learning can be “personalized”.

I don’t even know where to begin to unravel this fallacy and all the other false assumptions threaded through the entire project.

Let’s start with what I do as part of my job of teaching:

I research, analyze, evaluate, discern, strategize, judge, plan, learn, improvise, lead, monitor, assess, decipher, negotiate.

I synthesize, prioritize, demonstrate, create, observe, administer, calculate, arrange, construct.

I empathize, organize, engage, motivate, support.

And when I’m not doing all that, I guide, mentor and coach.

So I’m completely confused about the emphasis on how teachers need to change their roles in the classroom. What did they think we were doing all this time?

As for personalized learning, I do not know what other kind of learning there is. All learning is personal! That’s the way we humans are wired. We are personal meaning makers, each of us making unique sense of the world around us.

If 30 students are presented with the same information, they will all learn that information differently, personally, based on who they are, where they’ve been, and what they’ve previously learned. Teachers already know this.

I have been giving students course credits for personalized projects since I began teaching decades ago.

I once had a student who hated to read but loved doing graffiti art. To make up for much of all the work he didn’t do in class, I asked him to research the history of graffiti, to plan and present information about all kinds of graffiti and to demonstrate to the class how to do graffiti. He did an amazing job, I would have let him spend the entire semester exploring even more aspects of graffiti art. He could have studied it through geography, law, anthropology and psychology if I didn’t have to also get him ready for the mandatory Grade 10 English provincial exam.

Teachers adjust assignments and projects to better suit students’ personal needs. They invite students to personalize their learning. This is not new.

But the BC ED plan doesn’t mean personalization in this way. When the new plan mentions personalization, it actually means “technologization”.

It’s no secret that multinational corporations see lots of profit to be made in the “education sector”. And governments who see themselves as bookkeepers like the idea of not having to spend money on teachers’ salaries when students are “learning” from online courses, sitting in front of their personal computers.

To think that this was a good idea, you’d have to completely disregard all the research that reveals all the negative effects of excessive screen time on the brains and bodies of children and teens. You’d have to also ignore the fact that we are social beings, hardwired to be connected to other human beings. What kind of students will graduate from an education system that has encouraged them to “learn” in isolation of other human beings?

Whenever I take my students to our school’s computer lab, even though they each have access to their own computer, they will gather in groups around a computer so that they can discuss what they’re watching. They like to learn together.

Teachers have been embracing change and innovation long before “21st century teaching” became a buzzword.

If you don’t want to take my word for it, you could ask the superintendent of our district who wanted to learn first hand about what was happening in classrooms. He sent out a request to all teachers in the district, asking to be invited into classrooms.

During his visits, he discovered that there was lots of innovative teaching happening all around the district. He did not come across a single Gradgrind clone. He now has a very clear idea of not only what teachers are doing to prepare students for their futures, but he also knows what teachers need for the work that they do.

A new curriculum is not on the top of that list.

I wish the people from GELP who are behind the “education reform” all over the world could visit the classrooms of even a fraction of the teachers in this province. If they did, they would see that there is no need to tell teachers that students’ learning should be personalized. There is no need to tell teachers to integrate technology into their teaching. Or that they need to prepare students for the 21st century.

They would know that teachers are already doing all this despite a dearth of resources due to massive cuts to funding.

Imagine what teachers could do if schools were funded the way they were when the current graduating class was born.

Students entering Grade 12 next week have the misfortune to have entered kindergarten soon after the formula for funding public education was changed.

They will graduate in June 2016 having spent 13 years making do with overcrowded classrooms, outdated resources, and obsolete technology. Some of them will have waited years to see a school psychologist. Many of them with learning disabilities would have gone through exhausting struggles to get to Grade 12 without any education assistant support. Many of their peers in kindergarten didn’t survive those struggles.

Where was all the fanfare about personalized learning when they needed personal help with their learning?

Why the new curriculum reminds me of a jazz funeral

I wish I could get excited about the new curriculum from the BC Ministry of Education, I really do. I wish I could believe all the hoopla about how the new curriculum is going to prepare our students for their lives as adults in the 21st century. I really want to believe that this time the Ministry really does have our students’ future in mind.

But my mind is filled with too many images that keep popping up like gatecrashers at the new curriculum party.

Here’s one: a student with severe autism who used to have an education assistant to support him for every block of the school day but who now has an education assistant for just one block per day because budgets had to be balanced after massive cuts to school district funding.

Here’s another: a class of 30 students, half of whom need learning support of one kind of another. How will one teacher create and monitor personalized learning assignments for all students in this class?

And another: students who have their one meal each day at the school’s breakfast club, who do not have computers, let alone internet access at home, and who have parents who work two jobs just to keep the family fed and sheltered. What do the changes offer these students?

This new curriculum is being launched in a province that has the highest rate of childhood poverty in Canada. A province that has no plans to reduce childhood poverty. A province where a teacher’s plea for shoes for her students led to the establishment of a charity to support the needs of students in public schools. A province in one of the richest countries in the world.

How can we talk about 21st century learning when so many of our schools could be the setting for a novel by Charles Dickens?

I wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or to cry when I saw an example of how the new curriculum could be implemented for Grade 6 – 9 Science: “Students build a Shelter”. Will children need these skills for when their classrooms come crashing down around them during an earthquake since seismic upgrades for public schools have been delayed for ten years?

Being a teacher public school in British Columbia can be so Kafkaesque. There are so many contradictory messages that emanate from the government, it’s hard to make sense of it all. I am often confused by communications from the Ministry of Education. It seems that there are two different personalities that take turns being in charge at the Ministry, just like in the story of Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde.

When the Ministry is being lead by the Mr Hyde personality, as it seemed to be during the 2014 labour dispute with teachers, it issues edicts that cut a teacher’s daily pay by 10%, it locks teachers out of classrooms during lunch so that they are forced to have their lunch breaks on sidewalks, and it refuses to raise teachers’ wages to compensate for the rise in the cost of living.

The Mr Hyde version of the Ministry guts public education funding while it increases funding to private schools.

It is quite remorseless as it forces the education system into the “affordability zone” while completely disregarding Supreme Court rulings and the Canadian constitution.

On the other hand, the Dr Jekyll version of the Ministry mentions the need for teachers to be supported in the work that they do. It seems to value teachers and the role they play in students’ lives.

The Dr Jekyll personality not only talks about placing students’ needs at the centre of the learning process, but also acknowledges that doing so would require many changes that are not cost free.

So, which version of the Ministry should I expect to show up when the new school year begins?

I so want to believe that the Ministry truly acknowledges the “complexity of the teacher’s role” in the classroom. But I just can’t believe the hype until and unless the question of class size and composition is settled.

It would be wonderful if a teacher’s right to bargain her working conditions – the learning conditions of students – didn’t have to be confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada. The fact that it has to be puts a huge damper on all the trumpets heralding the launch of the new curriculum.

I wish all the celebrations of the new curriculum didn’t remind me so much of being at a New Orleans jazz funeral, where joyful music masks a sad reality.

That this image comes to mind is quite ominously ironic since it was in New Orleans that public education was killed and replaced by charter schools with devastating results.

Can we expect the same to happen to BC’s education system which seems to be undergoing a kind of death by a thousand (funding) cuts inflicted by the BC Liberals since 2001?

I really hate being a party pooper but I can’t unsee what I’ve seen during the past 14 years of BC Liberal governance.

Educating Hospitably

elyse drawing — Drawing by former student, Elyse H.

With the summer break nearing its end, I went in yesterday to check on my classroom. I wanted to see how much work I’d need to do to set it up before I welcome students to the first day of school in two weeks time. The floor was shiny, the board sparkling clean, an open slate awaiting the first lessons of the new school year.

The start of a school year has always been like a second New Year for me, and like traditional New Year, I make resolutions. In the past, my resolutions have focused on how to make my classroom a more comfortable place, a space where my students would want to be. At first I tried to make the space more physically comfortable, adding colour and curtains to dull, grey spaces. Over the years I’ve added couches and cushions, a micro-kitchen. I have also tried to make the classroom more psychologically comfortable by adding brain breaks during lessons: dancing, stretching, laughter yoga. Sometimes students meditate, sometimes they nap before lessons.

I have also tried to increase comfort in other ways. Right from the start of my teaching career, I’ve attempted to democratize my classroom. I often discuss the requirements for assignments with students and we regularly negotiate due dates. A few students each year meet with me to discuss underlying issues in our classroom community. We also have a process for dealing with conflicts. But, as I discussed in Lessons Learned, despite all these gestures and my best efforts, my classroom is only sometimes a comfortable place to be for some students.

My resolution this school year is to be okay with that and to check my ego at the classroom door.

Don’t get me wrong. This does not mean that I will stop working to make my classroom a place where students can learn, and a place where they would want to be. It does mean that decades after I first walked into a classroom to teach, I now accept that I have an impossible task: to make the education environment hospitable for all my students, all the time.

I’m sure there’s no need to list all the ways that schools can be inhospitable places for many students. Although the discomforts of students who endure homophobia and racism and bullying are well-known, perhaps less acknowledged is the discomfort of all students who have to sit for six hours each day while someone talks at them. Every year I apologize to my students for what they stoically endure in schools.

This year I will continue to make those apologies with a much clearer understanding of why they are necessary. This year, I’ll be attempting to educate my students hospitably.

Educating students hospitably goes far beyond providing couches, cushions and cookies as I learned in Unlocking the World: Education in an Ethic of Hospitality by Claudia Ruitenberg.

A teacher-host who educates hospitably has far more demands on her than the kind my friend Stephanie had when she hosted a house party recently. All Stephanie did to prepare for her guests was to clean her home, buy some food and send out invitations. During the party, she kept drinks refilled, replenished food platters, and circulated through conversations. Most guests said they had a marvellous time. Stephanie definitely did.

But the kind of hospitality that Ruitenberg proposes in her book requires a different kind of preparation than what teachers normally do during the summer break.

During the summers, if we’re not upgrading our qualifications, then we’re attending conferences or workshops, reading posts on educational social media and revising lesson plans. Although all this preparation takes different forms, it’s essentially focused on increasing our knowledge and know-how.

To make the shift to educating within an ethic of hospitality however, I need to interrogate my identity as a teacher.

I confess that I’ve been quite smug about being a popular teacher. I’ve revelled in being the maverick who does cool things in her classroom. I had grown so accustomed to being told how much students enjoy my classes, that it came as a complete shock this past spring when some students really disliked being in my classroom. Taking their criticism personally, I considered myself a complete failure.

I admit that when students do not get excited about the content of lessons, I take it as an affront, as though I had personally created the knowledge I was presenting.

If I’m to educate hospitably, I must accept that I do not own the knowledge I share with my students. I have inherited it from the millions of people who made discoveries throughout human history. As a teacher, I am just one of many temporary custodians of our collective cultural knowledge. My work as a teacher is to provide some of the keys to this knowledge, to “unlock the world” for my students.

I once had a student, D, who gave me a reality check years ago. I clearly remember him saying to me: “Ms Foster, you know that point in the universe around which everything revolves? It’s not you!”

I remember bursting out laughing at this. It was the most perfect challenge to whatever puffed up position of a “great educator” I had assumed at the time.

In checking my ego at my classroom door, I also need to expect that my students will not be as enthralled as I am about the curriculum and that they will challenge what it contains. Educating within an ethic of hospitality demands that I not only allow those challenges to occur but that I should encourage them. After all, this is how human knowledge has advanced through the millennia – with fresh eyes looking at old truths and seeing something more, something different.

As you can see, this kind of preparation involves a paradigm shift in my role in my classroom. Although I am responsible for creating a space for my students to hopefully be comfortable and engaged in, I cannot expect that they will appreciate all that I have done to prepare for them or that they will like what I have to offer from the curriculum.

In preparing for this new school year, what I bring into my classroom is not as important as what I leave at the classroom door.

There is no place for my ego in a hospitable classroom.

Learning the Words

When I was a child, my Aunt Alma taught me how to read. I still remember the flashcard for ‘red’ written in perfect teacher penmanship. Of course, learning to read happened years after my toddler-self had learned how to name the things I saw and touched. Learning to speak and to read must have been exciting to my child-self, but five decades after I first learned to read, my adult-self was thrilled to learn new words to describe what I’ve experienced in my classroom for the past two and a half decades.

For years when people asked me what I taught, my mind would go blank. Truly blank. It felt wrong to just respond with “English” or “Civics” and so I tried different words. Paradigm shifting. Personal revolution. But even those felt not completely correct. And so I’d launch into an explanation of what I did in my classroom but I still struggled to create a clear picture of what went on there.

When I went to graduate school, I learned many new words that described what happens and what should happen in classrooms. Some of these came close to describing what I tried, or managed, or hoped to do, but none of them were a perfect fit. In a paper about my struggle to find the words (theory) to describe what I saw and experienced in my classroom, I expressed a yearning to find words to name my experiences.

This week, I found those words.

In her book, Unlocking the World, Claudia Ruitenberg provides me not only with the words to describe what I try to do in my classroom but also offers a new lens with which I can look at past classroom experiences, differently.

Ruitenberg suggests that we can look at what teachers do in classrooms as providing a kind of hospitality. She sees teachers as hosts who unlock the world for our students (guests) when we provide the keys to knowledge. But, being a teacher-host in Ruitenberg’s sense is more complex than the commonplace understanding of the role of a host who provides cookies and comfort. Educating hospitably is an ethical task and it’s also an impossible one, with lots of room for the host to fail. ( I found this aspect of her theory especially liberating!)

According to Ruitenberg, a teacher must offer hospitality even to “bad” guests, those students who do not “appreciate” the hospitality being offered. She must expect that the student-guest will not accept the hospitality being offered and that the student-guest may respond to the classroom-home in ways that are not welcomed or expected. But the teacher-host must still offer hospitality, even if the student-guest’s arrival challenges her (the teacher’s) sense of self. It’s the ethical thing to do.

I wish I had known this when I met The Crew. I wish I had these words and terms when I first introduced The Civic Mirror into my classroom. Perhaps being able to name my experiences then would have alleviated some of my distress at the time.

As I read Unlocking the World, experiences I have had throughout my teaching career flashed through my mind and I was able to see them in a new way.

friendship day 2 — Students sharing a potluck meal with a teacher.

The photograph above was taken in 1987 in Durban, South Africa during one my first attempts at trying to make an entire school a hospitable place to be, if only for a day. I called it Friendship Day but if I could go back and change it, I’d call it A Day of Hospitality.

On Friendship Day, the normal activities of the school were suspended and everyone spent time in workshops on topics like conflict resolution and leadership during the morning. At midday we had a communal potluck meal, with teachers, students, administrators and office staff all eating together. After the meal there was singing and dancing and drama skits, all opportunities for students to show skills that are not readily apparent in academic classrooms.

South Africa during the Apartheid-era was an inhospitable place for anyone who was not White. This inhospitablity existed in many forms everywhere but it was particularly pernicious in schools. It was through formal education that the government sought to ensure that all young people of colour would learn their “place” socially, culturally, economically, politically. I’ve written elsewhere about my response to those impositions and don’t want to revisit that here.

When I began my teaching career, I wanted to create a classroom where students would want to be. There were no examples I could follow. No language to describe what I was trying to do. Now that there is, I will look back at the road I have walked, and name what I could not before.

Friendship day 1 — There are 5 teachers in this photo. Can you spot them?

Lessons Learned

camp jubilee — Camp Jubilee, Indian Arm, B.C.

“I feel like such a failure”, I said.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“This has been such a difficult semester. I feel like I haven’t done a good job at all.”

C looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, his one hand still holding the bag of ice to the back of his head. We were sitting on a dock while he recovered from having injured himself an hour before during an outdoor teambuilding activity. In the forested area further away from us, he had fallen in such a way that he cut open an inch of skin on his head. He had been bleeding and so the First Aid attendant had advised that he not continue with the day’s activities. He didn’t seem to be too disappointed to be here, talking to me as we looked out on a scene of ocean, tree-covered mountains and blue sky.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about”, he said. “I’m having the best semester I’ve ever had in school! Everyone loves this class. There are so many things I would never have done if it weren’t for this class. I would never have spoken to A, for example. And he’s so funny! He makes me laugh!”

“But”, I said, “I haven’t used many of the tools in my toolbox. There’s so many things I normally do that we haven’t done.”

“You don’t need all those tools. You just need the one you’ve been using to get us to all to talk to each other and enjoy being together. And look at this, look where we are! Everyone loves this field trip!”

On any other day, having a student injured, bleeding, on a field trip would be a teacher’s worst nightmare, but C’s injury turned out to be a gift in disguise for my battered teaching soul. We could not have had this conversation were it not for his fall.

At that point, just weeks before the end of the school year, I felt defeated. I had been struggling all semester with an impossible class and it felt like nothing I did worked at all. I felt like I could not meet the needs of an extremely academic group of girls while I dealt with consistent disruption from a group of boys we called The Crew. (More about them later. C was not a member of The Crew.) Students engaged in feuds with other students in the class and those with learning disabilities had no education assistant support. There had been days when I did not recognize the teacher I became under the strain.

We must have sat talking for about an hour, and all the while he told me what he appreciated about being in a class that I thought I had completely failed.

When I later reflected on what he had said, I realized that I had not so much failed as I had forgotten what I intuitively knew: teens crave connection.

Helping students to connect to and with each other and to create a classroom community is central to all that I do. It’s the focus of all activities in the first week of class, and it’s the common handle on all the tools that I use. Having connection as the crux of my curriculum was initially a reaction to Apartheid’s forced separation at the beginning of my teaching career but, 26 years later, there is a different reason for its importance: the most technologically connected generation in history is ironically the most psychosocially disconnected.

Susan Pinker’s book, The Village Effect, cites several studies that point to the critical importance of real world, face-to-face interaction for everyone, but especially for teens who may experience “Facebook depression” even though they have thousands of “friends”. The studies paint a bleak picture of the effect of screens on the lives of teens.

I have very little technology in my classroom. I don’t have a Smartboard. I don’t want one. There is no way that I can technologically trick my students into consistently paying attention to things that they see as irrelevant to their lives. The content of the curriculum stands no chance in competition with the drama unfolding on social media and the novelty and brain rewards that video games provide.

Many education social media sites list suggestions for how teachers can add more technological tinsel to their lessons. It can be quite overwhelming to sift through them all, wondering whether I should “flip” my classroom or use tablets to teach storytelling. There are so many ways we can add bells and whistles to try to dress up course content in an attempt to hold students’ attention.

But, in my experience, the attention that teens want and need, the kind of attention they value and appreciate, is the kind that doesn’t require a battery or a wi fi connection.

The Crew knew this too.

The Crew 1 — The Crew. Photo courtesy J Newman

The Crew are a group of close friends who got into my class after the shop class they really wanted was cancelled. Right from the start, our relationship was troubled. They would not stop talking to each other during lessons. They were constantly late to class. They seemed uninterested in anything that the rest of the class was doing. Some of them were suspended from school more than once. Most of them were sent to the office multiple times. But, at the end of the semester, all of them said they had had the time of their lives.

I admit that having them in my class felt like the ultimate test of my teaching life.

After 26 years of teaching, I had slipped into a kind of complacency. I had created a successful menu of strategies and activities. My class was popular and I admit I felt a bit smug about that. But, that smugness tempted fate and along came The Crew who taught me a new lesson about connection that I did not know.

You’ll notice in this photo that they’re all dressed quite similarly, as though in uniform. This was not by design. They were surprised when we pointed it out to them. I would often tease that they behaved like the Borg from StarTrek: multiple bodies with one mind. But they were nothing like the Borg in temperament. They were kind, and generous. Very funny, and very forgiving. It didn’t matter how often they were banished, none of them ever responded in the stereotypical way a hurt or angry teen might respond.

The truth was that they tried really hard to behave but that was like asking a fish to fly. They all had high kinaesthetic intelligence and it was extremely difficult for them to sit in a classroom all day. Amongst them is a competitive wrestler, a Bhangra dancer, two bodybuilders, three competitive soccer players, and a few artists.

Although students can leave my classroom at any time for a brain break, and The Crew frequently did, they still spent too much time being in a space that was not comfortable for them. I knew this yet felt quite helpless about doing much about it.

I felt like I was the proprietor of a successful restaurant that had seen lots of success over the years by keeping a basic menu that was tweaked regularly. And now I was faced with a group of patrons who seemed to want nothing on the menu.

But I was wrong.

Here’s what two of them said at the end of the semester about their experiences:

H: [This class] has been the most educational experience I have had. In this course I learned many new things about myself and developed skills and abilities that will forever help me in my future. This class was an unusual class. We learned to see things in many ways and through different perspectives. Through all these experiences I learned a lot about myself and became a more responsible and independent individual. This course always made me think beyond my limitations and really expanded my mind.

J: After realizing what we were doing was bad, and had a negative impact on others, I attempted to change myself a little bit. I started to … clean my act up by considering the feelings of others. I decided that even though it was late in the semester, there was time for change. I was able to start participating in class as much as I could and I took the opportunity to become prime minister of [our Civic Mirror country]

J, the leader of The Crew, was twice elected Prime Minister of the class’s simulated Civic Mirror country. His government was responsible for the country receiving the highest Civic Mirror ranking of all my classes over the past 8 years.

P, another member of the crew, got onto the Honour Roll for the first time, joining J who got on for the second time since Grade 8.

The entire Crew passed the provincial, standardized exam.

The Crew taught me that I didn’t need to worry about the menu. It was just fine.

C was right.

Re/drawing the System

how to help you draw — http://www.imcreator.com/free/art-music/sketch

I don’t know how to help you. I know what you need but I don’t know how to get it for you. You’re an artist. You see the world through a cartoon lens. While I talk, you draw crazy creatures. You should be in an art class, all day, every day. Instead you are slotted here to study what you’re not interested in.

Next to you sits your friend who loves to dance. She skips class often, finding it unbearable to sit for long hours each day. I don’t know how to help her either. I wish I could have her submit a dance instead of an essay on what it means to be Canadian.

Every now and then I find a fissure within the restrictions of the curriculum into which I can slip assignments that allow you to creatively show what you know. But those fissures are few and far between, crowded out by what has to be done to prepare you for the mandatory government exam.

I know that you want to learn. I know you want to think about more than what’s in the textbook. I know you want to be able to create the things that roam around in your imagination.

I know you are numbed by the mediocrity of daily routines in the classroom.

I would love more than anything to be able to completely change them for you. To redraw the boundaries, or perhaps to erase them.

But it doesn’t matter how innovative I can be with what I teach, we are both still caught in a system that resists transformation. Its very structure stifles.

The San Diego zoo is the most innovative in the world, recreating natural habits for the animals, but it is still a zoo. There are still walls that restrict and confine. No matter how innovative teachers are in classrooms, for as long as you are examined and tested and age-batched, nothing has really changed.

If I could design your learning experiences, I’d have you spending time with all kinds of artists, shadowing them through their day, helping when you can. I’d have you teaching younger children what you know. I’d have you sharing what you know with other students, with parents, with your community. And every now and then I’d have you tell me what you’ve learned about yourself through all that you did so that together we could plan what you should do next.

You once asked me why teachers asked so many questions, why you had to answer so many textbook questions. I used to have an answer for that. I used to say that you needed to know the answers so that you could be an informed citizen, understanding why things are the way they are today.

But I realized that that is impossible. How are you supposed to memorize all that has happened in the past, from all the different points of view that are witness to today’s news? Your brain is simply not designed to do that. If you wanted to understand anything at all happening in the world today, there are a myriad ways you could find out. A few swipes on the device in your pocket can take you anywhere that human knowledge is.

So my answer to your question is that I don’t know why you are asked so many questions. I don’t know why teachers ask you questions whose answers they already know.

What I do know is that you’re going to have to know the stuff we adults don’t know: how to live in a world of climate change; how to have an economy that does not destroy the environment; how to make a living in a way that feeds your soul; how to find love, and how to find where you belong.

You certainly don’t belong here, sitting in classrooms for six hours each day, desperately trying to feign interest in what a teacher is saying.

Where you do belong is in a school that is more like a library, a place you would go to exchange information with others, a place of conversation and connection, a place where teachers are like midwives, supporting students to become who they are meant to be, helping them to find their place in the world.

Just as you turn those images in your mind into pictures on a page, I wish I could transform my ideas of what schools should be into reality.

I wish I could draw the way you do.