Cycle Two: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Classroom Communities

The concept of tracking is one I have been familiar with all my life, I am a product of being tracked through my entire K-12 career.  But I never had a face with the name until this week and I’m still not a fan of it.  Below are my top three experiences with tracking from a teacher’s point of view:

1.     Bottom 25% Village

I once had an administrator say she was going to create a “village” for the lowest performing 25% of freshmen and sophomores. 

o      It is well known that low-performing students are usually trapped in a draining cycle of poor academics, low motivation, and even worse behavior. The students who would be members of the village would be isolated from the rest of the school.  As has been seen with tracking, it is typically minorities, and low socioeconomic students who are stuck in the bottom of their school’s data (Oakes, n.d.).

What wasn’t discussed in Oakes’ article was how teachers view being assigned to the low-level students.  Just as the kids lack ambition so do the teachers.  Why would a teacher want to spend 90-minutes a day teaching Shakespeare to a group of students who haven’t mastered middle school level reading? If the teacher knows that she is going to spend most of the classroom redirecting misbehavior why would she want this added stress piled on to a demanding profession (Oakes)?  Wouldn’t you feel like your talent was being wasted by sitting on the bench?

2.     Magnet Program

To attract students to attend one of the district’s low performing middle schools, the middle school became a magnet school.  That school then decided to isolate the magnet program students from the rest of the school – even giving them their own lunch period to keep them away from the “other” students.

o    Let’s face the harsh reality.  If a school is trying to “attract” students then it’s because the institution has a reputation of low-performance and poorly behaved minority students.  There’s no problem with wanting to diversify a school, if it’s for the right reasons.  But when you import a cohort of students solely because they should be better than the students already at the school, and then you segregate them from the rest of the student population by giving them their own lunch period and classes apart from the other students?  This is 2017 not 1957.

Why would you want to come to school if you weren’t one of the chosen ones?  Students who are placed on a higher track tend to receive a better education, higher-quality instruction, an enthusiastic teacher, and more opportunities in the future (Oakes).  Would you be happy if you came to school to learn with a teacher who did not want to teach a class of the low kids?  Then you head-off to have lunch only after the privileged students had theirs and were back in class receiving a more engaging education than you were going to?

3.     Rough Remediation

     A remedial high school math class of more than 30 freshmen of which many of them lack English proficiency, low socioeconomic status, and have learning disabilities.

o     You know you’re grouped in with the problem kids.  None one them like school and their behavior shows it. You know the teacher doesn’t like your class and that other teachers don’t like your type of class either.  Your class was created to get you out of the on-level class for the kids that show promise (Oakes).  You need extra help.  You’ve never been good in math and neither have the students around you.  While it may sound great in theory that the teacher can focus her teaching on students of the similar level, a point that was strongly made by Vivian Yee in this article, but the teacher is of no help either.  She has to juggle every students' needs, manage behavior, and make what you're learning interesting.  You aren’t challenged, the worksheets are  go over the same material you didn’t learn last year, and there’s no reason to try when the leaders of the school don’t expect you to. 

If you substitute the word tracking with the phrase “separate but equal,” you will gain the attention of school leaders.  Yee argues that mixed ability grouping does not work.  Oakes argues that tracking does not either.  So why not try the former?  What do schools have to lose?

Even students are calling to end tracking. 

 If school leaders won’t listen to the research or professionals in the school then maybe they will listen to the kids they serve.  In his TED Talk, Salman Khan mentions that the tools available on Khan Academy for teachers help them track student progress.  This form of tracking shows, as Khan pointed out, that students who were lagging in math on one topic mastered it and the next six topics shortly after (Khan, 2011).  Progress and intelligence are dynamic and fluid.  If we must continue tracking students based on ability then we must continually change their tracks as needed.  With technology, the data used to inform these decisions is instantaneous.  Students who stay on the same track and attend school while sitting idling by will quickly become unmotivated just as letting a car idle for too long on a regular basis will quickly kill the engine.

In Emily Pilloton’s TED Talk she discussed how she and her design team is helping to rejuvenate a burned out public high school as well as the rural county it serves (Pilloton, 2010).  The techniques used in design easily transfer over to how curriculum can and should be delivered in the classroom.  Not only just any classroom but a mixed ability classroom.  If Pilloton can teach a design class to all different levels of students to help build a farmer’s market in town, then teachers can use the same techniques to teach their subject areas.  For instance, designing a classroom climate for mixed-ability leaners needs to be designed with the students and as the students need it to be to benefit them (2010).  Not only does this increase buy-in from students, but students of all levels have a say-so in what they learn, how they learn, and most importantly, that they are included in the same learning as everyone else.

References

Khan, S. (Writer). (2011, March). Let's use video to reinvent education[Video file]. Retrieved July 22, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education#t-1262036

Oakes, J. (n.d.). Keeping Track, Part 1: The Policy and Practice of Curriculum Inequality. Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. Retrieved from http://ted.coe.wayne.edu/drbob/Oakes.pdf

Pilloton, E. (Writer). (2010, July). Teaching Design for Change[Video file]. Retrieved July 22, 2017, from https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_pilloton_teaching_design_for_change#t-1044983

Cycle One: Interpretations of the Meaning and Causes of Failure

Cycle One: Interpretations of the Meaning and Causes of Failure

            I am a failure at video games.  I do not know why – I always have been.  I have found them to be stressful and I do not take the time to read the conversations between characters that inform you of the goal for the next level.  Granted, most video game playing experience I have is Frogger, Barbie World, and SuperMario.  Even with these non-violent, kid friendly games I would tense up, feel anxious, and worry about the time constraints and approaching enemies.

            From what I am told, the anxiety I feel while playing a video game is the same response produced in some, if not most, students when it comes to school and exams.  Why am I the opposite: lover of traditional school and coward of the game console?  We will never know.  But why most students love video games and sports but hate school was clearly evidenced by James Paul Gee (2005).  
Sixteen.  
Gee evaluated sixteen different principles of video games that make them attractive that are found in the real world, but not in school.

            My instruction could be modified to incorporate some of the learning principles found in video games to make high school level math more engaging.  Truth is,  I hate to sound like a broken record, but I must teach to a standardized test.  This limits the time I can spend on each topic and how I teach it.  This is true to a certain extent but to another, it is also an excuse.  With the wide access to technology, there is no reason why a student should not be able to start an assignment from where it was last saved (2005).  If in class the student has proven he has mastered factoring trinomials with a leading coefficient equal to one, why should he have to go home and do it again?  With the right use of technology, this student could challenge himself in the same way the Challenge and Consolidation principles work (p. 36).  This student should not have to remain stuck on the same level of homework as the rest of his classmates if he has already beat it. 

            Part of the reason why students fail in school is because school has become too easy.  I believe a vicious, and possibly sub-conscious, cycle exists.  For instance, say I teach Algebra 1 and I know my students have a rigorous, complex, high-stakes, standardized exam to take at the conclusion of the school year.  Looking at student data from the previous year, I see that most of my students are not working at grade level.  I then believe that they will not do well on the exam, so I break down my instruction to become something they can master but not at the level needed to be proficient for the test.  Students know this.  They know when their teacher believe and challenge them.  They also know when the teacher is counting them down-and-out and therefore “dumbs things down” (Terry & Irving, 2010). 

            This may be a reason why kids also love to play sports and buy-in to what their coach’s techniques and instruction.  Look at the brief list of life lessons commonly learned in sports.  Why are these lessons not part of a teacher’s daily objective?  While it is important for students to be able to exercise critical thinking when applied to quadratic function applications, isn’t it equally important that they learn how to be the bug when you’re not always the windshield (Depta, 2015)?  It could be possible that students are failing school because teachers have been teaching the student and not the child.  Kids have been kids their entire lives: after school hours, the weekend, and summer breaks.  They are students part-time.  Most of them probably do not know how to be a strict academic but they are experts in living life as a child.  Childhood they will not fail at, but being an academic, when not supported properly, they might.

            Continuing this note, I feel teachers/administrators often discount student opinions because the former are adults and the latter are kids.  But if teachers are considered the experts of their own classrooms, and not legislatures, then shouldn’t kids be the experts of their own education?  This might be why teachers quit and students fail.  Legislatures make decisions pertaining to a teacher’s career and school leaders make decisions pertaining to a student’s education.  Both are external factors.

            But let’s look at the internal.  The intrinsic motivation and natural curiosity we have within ourselves.  Look at the children discussed in Sugata Mitra’s TEDTalk The Child-Driven Education (2010).  This experiment is the epitome of “if you build it, he will come” from the film Field of Dreams.  If schools are built, and if computers are placed in walls, then students will come to learn (2010).  
This does not mean just build a school, fill it with computers, and let students research whatever they please.  
To maximize the potential from this situation would require thoughtful planning on the educators’ end to make sure a classroom environment is created that encourages facilitation of learning in which students are interested.  
Athletes do not go to a baseball field to learn how make a baseball bat.  If that’s what happened at stadiums players and fans would not return.  Part of the reason why students fail and are not their public school’s biggest fan is because they are not given the kind of education they want.

            To support Mitra’s research and findings, I found a video clip from The School of Life explaining the difference between success in school and, later, success in life in the workplace.  The success Mitra’s students found did not always occur during school hours or through a structured, standard-aligned lesson.  The argument is valid that given the way our schools are designed, success in school does not translate to a productive, easy, professional life.  However, after reading through some of the comments on the video clip, I found the responses profoundly explaining why.  Some comments worthy of being noted are posted below.

References

Depta, L. (2015, June 3). Life Lessons We Can Learn From Sports. Retrieved July 15, 2017, from http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2484221-life-lessons-we-can-learn-from-sports

James Paul Gee. (2005). Good Video Games and Good Learning. Phi Kappa Phi Forum, 85(2), 33 - 37.

Succes in School vs Succes in Life [Video file]. (2016, July 18). Retrieved July 15, 2017, from     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Egxm5QuW9o

Sugata Mitra. (2010, July). The Child-Driven Education. TEDGlobal 2010.

Terry, N. P. & Irving, M. A. (2010). Cultural and linguistic diversity: Issues in education. In Colarusso & O’Rourke (5^th ed.). Special education for all teachers (pp. 110-132). Kendall Hunt Publishing Co.