Wishing for the big picture

Day three went pretty well. There was a flurry of planning between the four of us right up to the last minute. My colleagues wanted to spend the majority of the time on Romeo and Juliet so we needed to re-arrange things. The last minute rush is because of how hard it is to find time to plan together. The teachers get to see each other all day and find moments to share ideas as they adjust our lessons for each class. We shared a wish to have a solid length of time to plan the big picture of what we are doing together.

The mini-lesson built on recent anti-immigration sentiment. Students were pretty vocal about their feelings about unfair it was. I tried to connect their feelings to how Native American might feel, but it seemed to go nowhere. We connected this hatred to the hatred between families in the play. I'm still not sure they see the connections, but just because I don't see it doesn't mean they don't. It could all come together later anyway.

We spent over 40 minutes doing a dramatic reading of the end of Act I. It's truly amazing to watch teachers with deep content knowledge work. They basically have the play memorized so when they perform it, the words flow out seamlessly. They do character voices too. Students take turns at playing either Romeo or Juliet. Watching Dicaprio's version on film brings it all together.

Praxis is a bitch

Praxis is a bitch. Reflection and action. Reflecting on day two, I am kicking myself. I talked too much. The more I saw some students start to shift in their seats or look around, the more I talked. It was a rabbit hole. Typical rookie mistake. My co-teaching colleagues were amazingly gentle in telling me about it later. I sent an email in the afternoon to say that I had been worried ever since class. Their responses were kind, but to the point – just the way colleagues should treat each other. I am so grateful for how much they are teaching me.

Re-reading my first post about this experience, I am also struck by how much it sounds like I think I’m saving the day. This could not be further from the truth! Let’s be clear. I am not the first university professor to return to the classroom to teach. Carole Lee, Deborah Appelman, and Mollie Blackburn come to mind immediately. By letting me co-teach with them, these teachers are giving me an incredible gift. The relationships we are developing and the trust we have are sacred to me. Combined, they have 30+ years teaching at this school. We all bring something important to this work. We are not so much seeking a “balance” as we are trying to construct something new that uses all our expertise in the endeavor. Thinking about today though, I feel like I’ve been a bulldozer. Not to mention that I am just teaching one class every other day. They have 3 or 4 more classes, plus collaborative planning time, support, family group, meetings, after school clubs and who knows what else. I’m a bit like a grandparent. I get to come in for the fun stuff and then go home. I was so stressed about this morning that I went home to take a nap, for goodness sake! I am fully aware of my privilege in this situation.

I did get some interesting feedback about my first posting on Monday that surprised me. In no way did I mean to say that everything was terrible before I came in!! True that I noticed a few kids were more engaged than I had seen before, but it is not the case that they were never engaged or that they were only engaged that day because of me. I know that, as a school, we are still working on having teachers use and post plans following the Understanding by Design framework. But, there are teachers who have been doing it all along, including the three I am co-teaching with. I have said many times that there are amazingly dedicated and caring teachers at East. Please don’t read my thinking about what’s going on as forgetting that.

I thought about not posting anymore if what I write continues to get twisted. I’m simply not good at screening my thoughts, especially on my own blog. I hate workplace politics because it’s such a waste of time and it’s not about the kids. I am always in trouble for speaking out on issues I see as problematic. Like I said, I talk too much. Plus, critical literacy is all about exposing power and how it works to discipline. It also produces. So many of the problems we face in urban education are due to silencing. We just don’t talk about it. Whose interests does it serve to stay silent? Not the kids, that’s for sure.

First day co-teaching

Today was the first day of a long-term co-teaching gig I am doing at East with three teachers in whose classroom I've been observing as part of my ethnography. Over the past months of the ethnography I have shared ideas about my observations and given them some critical literacy references to read. They've been really receptive and we came up with a plan to co-teach. I couldn't be more excited.

I felt like I had been doing a lot of "telling" people about things we need to do. Changing the teaching culture at East is going to take way more time than I thought. I have always been a person who tries to walk like she talks, so ... "showing" seemed a good option. Planning with these three very busy teachers has been great. I decided to use the unit and lesson plan formats that East is asking teachers to use (but they aren't). Planning templates are based on Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design. I am determined to show that we can develop critical literacy projects and still meet any demands the school or the state requires (the template has a space for Common Core standards). It wasn't actually that hard to do and I didn't feel like I compromised any critical literacy principals to write the unit plan.

Basically, we want students to understand that literacy can be used to make changes, that literacy has "designs" on us (thank you Hilary Janks), and that they have power to change injustices they experience. The teachers have helped me understand the 9th grade mindset so I can figure out how to plan. I have been trying to have the teachers see that we can work alongside the students in ways that all of us are changed. I'm impressed with their willingness to take risks. Once students figure out what social justice issue they want to address, we will form groups around different ideas, do some research on the issues, develop social actions, and carry them out. We'll document what they do any way the students want. For example, we could produce a YouTube video, write a letter to the editor or an oped piece, have a flash mob, or who knows what else. I'm planning on developing a website where students' projects will be posted.

The cool thing is that we are weaving all this together with the text the teachers need to use as part of the 9th grade curriculum - Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. It turns out there are a ton of justice issues in the play that we can connect to what our students deal with: perceived lack of power of youth, commodification of women as property, teen suicide, discrimination, violence. We'll see how this one goes.

I wanted to also add in some National Writing Project stuff so we opened with a writing reflection. We used Beyoncé's Formation video. They wrote their impressions and we talked about who they thought was her audience, what her purpose was, and what social issues they thought she was focusing on. They were on it. They worked in groups to name justice issues they deal with in their own lives. It took a minute to get them started, but once they got going it was awesome. Even some students who I have seen with their heads down or sitting and doing nothing were engaged the whole 72 minutes. I felt like it went really well. I wondered how the teachers felt about things being much more loose than they usually have it, but they seemed to go with the flow.

The best part ... I asked two young men with whom I have been developing a relationship how I did. They said, "Oh 85-90%."  I'll take that!!

Day two on Wednesday. We're planning on starting with Suli Breaks's spoken word poetry video "I will not let an exam result decide my fate" for writing reflection.

If you have any ideas for critically oriented things to show, read, or listen to for reflections, please let me know.

Wow, how time flies

I can't believe it's been so long since I posted. The work at East has been wonderful, so so so busy, scary, and heartbreaking. I will never be the same again. So much so that I am already worried about going back to Warner once my sabbatical is over. More on that in another post.

To say that we (the UR) underestimated the problems we would face is an incredible understatement. The longer we were there, the more dysfunction we found. To be clear, this dysfunction is not unique to East; it's endemic in urban schools. It is also crucial to say that we have truly amazing teachers, administrators, and staff at East. And the students are fantastic. These are systemic problems: overwhelming bureaucratic practices, deficit views of students and their families, and a "that's just the way we've always done it" mindset. I can't list everything we found because it's too depressing. In spite of all this, this is soul-filling work and great things happen everyday.

The good news is that a leadership change resulted in Marlene Blocker, formerly the lower school principal, taking charge of the building. She is keeping us breathless with meaningful changes that are dealing with low hanging fruit and with long term issues. I am excited to see what she does next.

One thing in particular has stopped me in my tracks.

As my relationships with students, teachers, and administrators at East deepen, I have come to believe that we have forgotten to address basic human needs for love and hope. We have underestimated the levels of trauma our students come to us with and the impact learning about and working with those traumas has on our teachers and administrators.  Several teachers have told me they have no hope or that hope is for suckers. We just have to get better at dealing with the social and emotional foundations of what it means to be human and what humans need to thrive.

I know that “trauma” has been so overused as to become trite these days, but that does not mean that real trauma has not happened. I know that my own experiences with my oldest son Eric and my youngest son Marcus have traumatized me and have traumatized my family. Eric was suicidal. Watching as he was mental health arrested and hearing him scream how much he hated me while this was happening, listening on the phone while Eric was running from police dogs through Highland Park, seeing Marcus at 10 years old being dragged by four armed security personnel at Johns Hopkins to a padded room where he was given a forced Haldol injection, having to pull over on the expressway because Marcus was so violent I couldn’t safely drive, and watching Marcus walk into an adult courtroom in handcuffs haunt me. None of these traumatizing experiences compare to what our students go through, but they have made me realize trauma is real. I am not the only one with similar experiences. Each one of us has traumatic experiences we deal with every day – loss of a family member, family member mental illness, divorce, children with disabilities, and many other experiences of grief and loss.

Rape, physical abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, witnessing violence, committing violence, daily microaggressions, homelessness, miscarriages, having the power cut off, hunger, incarceration, police brutality, bullying, fleeing war torn homelands … are all experiences students have shared with me. People estimate that 70% of our young women have experienced sexual abuse and 40% of our young men. This on top of all the other factors I just named. Chronic, complex trauma - everyday. This is unacceptable.

Teachers have shared losing students they deeply care about to murder, sexual abuse, prison, or drugs. Teaching is an act of love. But when you love students who are traumatized, that trauma also traumatizes you. And our teachers and students face a society that ignores them, except when scores come out, then they are blamed for the failures of that same society. To be clear, “they” are not blaming suburban teachers and students, they are blaming us.

We have only scratched the surface of what’s wrong in urban public education. East is but one example of profound sickness and neglect. As we dig deeper into systems at East to find dysfunction, put out daily fires that seek to overwhelm us, recoil in shock at roadblocks and an uncaring public, we can’t just respond with old practices of increased policing, stricter mandates, or forcing compliance. I think we need to step back, breath, and remember we are human beings who care deeply about the people we work with and about transforming urban public education so that our students can go forward into productive futures. And then take action. 

I know people will say, “There goes Joanne on another soapbox.” Fine. Dismiss me. But it’s not about me. It’s about our students and what’s going to help them develop into authentic, caring, and productive human beings. What I’m saying is we can’t forget the human for the “student.”