Mr. K, Dialog #1 Cont'd: Planning Curriculum

How did you build your curriculum? We began to discuss this earlier today. As a teacher with no developed curriculum, I am a little worried about getting thrown into the fire and being expected to have a detailed lesson plan every day. I understand that trial and error is involved, but how did you overcome this? What was your experience like when you first began teaching? In Japan, my curriculum was standardized so students could transfer schools without worrying about how their new teacher was going to teach. This made it a good starting point, but I definitely broke that rule more and more as I became more experienced. You told me that a lot of the readings came from something you read on your own time. I never really thought about that, so I will start asking myself, “Is this something I could use for class?”  By December, I want to figure out an effective way to plan for lessons. 

This is the big one.  I had a conversation with my wife about this to sort out my own thoughts.  To be honest, this was MY biggest bugaboo as a teacher.  Like you, I came to teaching with a wealth of classroom teaching experience for a company, but virtually NO experience creating curriculum.  In fact, I’m not sure I believe they should be the same job – both are INCREDIBLY complex, nuanced, and time-consuming skills to learn and refine, and mastering both is nearly impossible.  I think either could easily be the subject of four years of study in school to prepare for the job, for 8 years total.

Mr. K, Dialog #1 Cont'd: "Teaching in Action"

Over these next few months, I want to discover more of your strengths and skills as a teacher and take some of these skills with me when I have a classroom someday.  One I can think of right off the bat is your ability to “teach in action.” This is a term heavily used in my program about learning how to observe objectively, seeing student learning, and being perceptive enough to know that your lesson is effective or not. You are a pro at this. I realize that textbooks can only take you so far when training to be a teacher and that this skill gets better with experience. I guess I want to figure out how to become more perceptive. What should I be asking myself or to the students to figure out what’s working? How do I ensure all the students are learning during class?

Those are excellent questions to ask, and I think the first step to answering your questions is to KEEP asking those questions – both of yourself, and directly of the students.  Try to cultivate what I like to think of as “classroom vision.”  

Mr. K, Dialog #1: Teaching Academic Independence

Where do I begin? My experience so far in my teacher preparation program has been at the middle school level, so high school is quite new for me. For my first post, I think it would be a good idea to talk about my observations about you, my master teacher.  Then, I think it would be beneficial discuss some goals for our time together. 
I’ve been a little shocked by your teaching style, but in a very positive way. You have a very unique approach that I can tell is highly effective. I would have loved to be one of your students when I was in high school. I’m really curious to see how the students will evolve into scholars from now to December.

2013 - Welcome, Mr. Kandah!

This fall begins a new school year, and I have the pleasure of working alongside my previous mentee, Ms. Do, who is now a colleague at my school.  I hope to persuade her to share some of her experiences as a first-year teacher when she has time.

I also have the privilege of working with another student teacher from USC Rossier, Mr. Kandah, who has kindly agreed to take up the ongoing conversation about the art and craft of teaching with me.

I'll leave Mr. Kandah's first post the space it deserves in the next post!

Dialog #5: Principles for Classroom Management Conversations

Is there a set of strategies that you utilize while coming up with the rationale? If you had to break down the way you manage students’ behavior in the classroom into concrete steps, what would those steps look like? Obviously there are outside factors that contribute to how you approach different students, but how do you incorporate that outside knowledge? And what do you do at the beginning of the school year when you have yet to develop that knowledge?

I think, ultimately, my basics of classroom management come down to the following:

Dialog #5: And ONE more!

• A group of students constantly act out in class. You cannot send them all outside, but they cannot work together. You’ve tried to separate their seats, but they are still disruptive, yelling at each other from across the room.

This is one of those moments when you might need to invoke the power of the masses.  Even if the group is seven or eight kids, they're still going to be out-numbered by the non-goofs in the class.  It takes some building, but establishing a culture in which kids actively monitor each other will take a LOT of the work out of what you do.  I'd give a little bit of preface lecture on "sink or swim" - that all of them affect the success of every ONE of them, and that EVERY student is responsible for every other student in the room.

Dialog #5: And MORE ...

• A student is not doing his/her work and refuses to talk to you about it because he/she hates you.

This one's mostly about time.  Remember: be in it to win the WAR, not the individual battles.  First off, a relationship should never have the opportunity to get THIS far off-track.  If a kid is starting to "hate" you (the word does not mean, for a student, what it does to you and I - take all extreme statements with a bit of salt, and remember the goldfish rule: kids have a 15 second memory!), you should spot the resentment and the tone issues as soon as they crop up.  

Dialog #5: EVEN More Scripts!

• After calling a student out for not completing their homework to the best of their ability, he/she complains that you are always picking on him/her because you hate him/her.

The response here depends on the volume.  If the kid makes a performance out of it, you have to send him out - politely: "Let's chat outside."  If he's quiet, you can be, too: "Hey - let's chat; do you want to step out so we can keep it private?  We need to work this out."

Once you get outside, you need to steer things quickly back from emo-world to the world of practicality.  This doesn't all need to come out all at once - these are mostly a mix of different messages that all connect:

Dialog #5: More Scripts for Classroom Management

• You are giving a lecture, and every once in a while a student would repeat what you just said in a mocking tone.

This one's easy - stop the FIRST TIME, and respond with shock and awe tactics.  If you know who it is, ask them calmly to leave the room.  If they respond by being upset ("WHAAT?!  I didn't DO anything!"), respond calmly: "Wait for me outside." 

Dialogue #5: Scripts for Building Relationships

We’ve been talking a lot about classroom management – specifically, how to rationalize with students so that things don’t escalate out of control. I know that you’ve already gone over how you would assess certain situations, but I think it would be beneficial for me if you could break down your rationale for the following situations:

• You go over to ask a student for their homework, and he/she retorts with sarcastic remarks. You explain to the student that you are not being unreasonable with your request, and did not deserve to be treated that way. The student gives you an insincere apology, to which you don’t accept. The student tells you that it is your problem for not accepting the apology, and that he/she will not apologize again.

This is an issue of endurance - you lost the battle, but if you're going to win the war, you'll have to stay in the trenches.  Being implacable/unflappable is something that takes time, but the more emotionally stable you can be, the better.

The key when a kid's giving you that kind of attitude is to make the entire discussion about actions:

Dialogue #4: Classroom Management and Establishing Classroom Culture

Last week, after observing Ms. R’s class, you asked me to consider pragmatic strategies on how I would handle the classroom. Honestly, seeing her class terrified me; I couldn’t parse all the variables that I would have to tackle, let alone come up with strategies that might help. However, after some thinking, there are a few things I would like to try.

Dialogue #3: Discussion

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this past week about discussion facilitation. I was trying to come up with strategies and ideas that might help me build an arsenal for effective discussions. When I watch you lead a one, I constantly find myself thinking, “Oh, that was cool. I would have never thought to connect it like that.” I think your biggest strengths are your confidence, your ability to recognize the teachable moment, and your knowledge of the students. The week before last, you had mentioned that maybe the reason behind students’ lack of participation is simply that they do not feel like they know me personally. In trying to think about what I can do since I have yet to develop aforementioned skills, I think you’re absolutely right – students don’t quite trust me yet. With that in mind, I started researching some discussion strategies that might alleviate that distance. My professor gave me a wonderful site (http://www.nsrfharmony.org/protocols.html) and I would like to try some of those strategies in class.

Also, I remember you telling me that you weren’t always good at discussion, which brings me to my next question: how did you become so comfortable and effective? I would love some insight on your past struggles and revelations. What did you try in the beginning that may not have worked? Did you eventually get those strategies to work? Do you run your discussions differently now? And if so, how differently?

Dialogue #2: Unit Planning Cont'd - Assessment

How would I build a progression towards a culminating project/assessment?

Invariably, I want two types of physical assignments out of students: annotated, analyzed, and well-understood core texts, and a coherent, complete, well-structured essay (hopefully, with some individual insight or thought, depending on the student).  Rhetorical analysis begins with structured questions that guide students through the process explicitly, then gradually involves new concepts, and finally slowly removes supports.  

Since this post is already a bit huge, please feel free to ask if you'd like me to go into detail about each of the skills I list below.  Ultimately, I think core skills for any course should be able to be broken down to a list of around 10~15 foundational procedures kids need to be able to perform reliably ON THEIR OWN.  Content is all well and good, but practicing academic skills until they're intuitive will allow students to access content on their own, ultimately, and in 9th grade, there is nothing more crucial than close-reading, structured writing, discussion, and note-taking skills.

Dialogue #2: Unit Planning

While reflecting on that lesson, I asked myself a series of questions: How would I develop a unit of study? How do I even begin to think about what lesson to start with? How would I build a progression towards a culminating project/assessment? What would prove to me that my students have learned what they needed to learn? How do I assess whether I’ve done my job? Despite having designed lessons for my program, I still struggle with these questions. Then I began to think about the obesity unit. How did you decide on that unit? How did you introduce it? How do you facilitate discussion so that students are engaged and really thinking? I love the idea of an obesity unit as well as a narcissism unit because I think it’s accessible for students, but I don’t really know how I would even begin to design such units.

Wow - you're tackling quite a lot there.  I'll try to parse that out and handle each question.

How would I develop a unit of study? How do I even begin to think about what lesson to start with?

I think the best advice for planning lessons is the same advice I was always given when writing: “write what you know.”  I tend to plan lessons around concepts, ideas, debates, and issues that I’ve heard or read something about, seem relevant and interesting to students, and have related materials I think students could access.  I read a lot of news articles and listen to radio material regularly, and so things that could potentially work in class come to my attention without having to stumble out of my regular routine.

Start from what interests YOU.  I’m able to lead discussions and explain examples about the topics we’ve handled in class because I’m interested in and passionate about them – I wouldn’t TRY if I weren’t!  Also, my lessons may seem polished and well-planned (or at least well-executed, as I would NEVER identify planning as one of my strengths!), but that mostly comes from having played with the various topics, materials, strategies, and structures I now use in class regularly for a number of years.

I’ll try to address your question about approaching planning for you by walking through my process. 

Dialogue #2: Discussion, Lesson Structure, and Error-Focused Practice

For the evidence selection discussion, I thought that I had an idea of what I wanted the students to learn, but when they began to ask me questions I realized that I wasn’t comfortable with the material at all; I didn’t know how to explain it to them! During your lesson, you took the discussion in directions that I wouldn’t have thought of using explanations that I hadn’t thought about. I liked those explanations over my own but when I tried to implement them the way you did, I simply couldn’t. I felt myself mentally and physically tensing up. I was afraid; I didn’t want to fail the students.

Discussion may be one of the most difficult, but also most productive, skills that I’ve developed as an educator. 

Dialogue #2: Planning, Practice, and Depth of Instruction

Co-planning with you has been a big learning experience – I have a hard time with thinking on the fly in front of the class. I think this is because I have yet to develop those set of skills we always talk about. I like to have some structure to fall back on because I honestly don’t know how to keep a lesson going without it. I also should have been more honest with myself – and with you – about my comfort level with the content.

Co-planning with you has been a HUGE lesson for me, as well, and again I offer my sincere apologies for failing to think through your needs as a student for this week’s lesson.  I’ve come to a place in my practice where I have what sometimes feels like an instinct for my own lessons and pacing; as you’ve seen, I make a lot of adjustments on the fly and freely shift up lesson structure daily, sometimes from period to period and sometimes even in the middle of the lesson.  

I teach STUDENTS more than I teach CONTENT, and that tends to mean I’m very interactive – I do a lot of room comprehension checks, and if things aren’t going well, I have a few different ways in which I’ll modify to meet what the room seems to need.  There are ways in which this approach is very weak – the same lesson very rarely looks the same way twice, and I often have a hard time articulating why.  In many ways, it’s one of the reasons I thought this blog might be useful for BOTH of us – I wanted to be pushed to articulate my rationale for my strategies, and I also wanted you to have a forum where you could really pin me down about how and why I teach the way I do.

Dialogue #2: Accountability and Mastery-Based Grading

These past few weeks have been extremely eye opening, especially after teaching my first lesson. I struggled a lot this week in terms of planning and implementation of lessons. A couple of weeks ago, we talked a lot about teaching students life skills. Mainly, holding students accountable for their actions.

“If you're not teaching them that they need to be aware of their own actions, responsible for them, and trying - they don't have to be succeeding, mind you, but just TRYING - to fix what they're doing wrong, then NOBODY WILL CARE OR HELP THEM. That's the truth” (Low). 

My experience with this age group is that they’re transitioning from child to adolescent; they have yet to realize that their actions have consequences. I have always cut the students some slack because in my mind, they are still learning to be adults, which takes time. I do a lot of handholding and our conversations have made me realize that I’m just enabling them, and that enabling ultimately hinders their development. Because of this, I really wanted to emphasize a strict deadline for assignments while creating lesson plans. I had to set aside my desire to be liked by students and consider what they needed; regardless of whether it was something they wanted. But how do I hold students accountable for basic, life skills such as labeling assignments correctly and turning them in on time without giving them constant failing grades? Should content understanding outweigh the ability to follow directions? Obviously not, but how do you make it count?

It’s fine to be a bit lenient in your first year – it’s hard not to be.  Everyone who commits to the profession, with few exceptions, tends to do so because they’re fond of kids; otherwise, there are few reasons to pursue the career.  I find the mastery-based grading strategy of separating assignments into “practice” and “performance” assignments a useful strategy.  Our school mandates a 70/30 percentage point weight category for practice and performance assignments, and for me, that’s a perfect split for 9^th grade. 

Dialogue #1: The Work-Life Divide and Classroom Realities vs. Ideology

However, I think the biggest take-home message has been your distinction between work and home life. I have always struggled with how I can cater to my students’ needs without sacrificing my own. I think your advice and encouragement to take time when I need it has been the biggest lesson this week. But where do you draw that line? When do you decide that you need to shut your phone off, or leave the classroom for the day? How do you tell a student that you need to leave and take care of yourself when they are asking for more help?

One of my greatest frustrations with the ideological mindset in education is something I would, for lack of a more politic name, describe as "the calling."  

Teachers are, in effect, given the responsibilities of a CEO: we have 120~300 employees whom we are responsible for directly managing, both professionally and personally.  We must create a mission and vision for our company, and a culture that will drive us towards those goals.  We must personally create all of the strategies and systems that make business possible, and are responsible for monitoring their success.

We can not fire our employees, many of whom do not even want the job - or to do the work, since the currency we pay in is not of value to them, currently.

But regardless, we are treated as, at best, middle-management.  Oversight is critical, intense, and demands demonstrable top-performers - in both numbers and employee satisfaction.  Pay is little better than for a line worker, though the hours usually run from a minimum of 50 to upwards of 90 a week.

Dialogue #1: Relationship-Building and Discipline

The relationship you’ve built with your students has really resonated with me. I think above school/classroom culture, differentiation, discipline, etc., relationships are key. I want to learn more about how you’ve formed those relationships. How do I get students to respect me as their teacher, but come to me as their confidant? I believe that your grading system is so effective because you’ve already built that relationship. Your students don’t seem to be afraid of the grade, but afraid to disappoint you. At the beginning of each class, you approach them the same way I’ve seen motivational speakers approach their audience. I’ve never considered doing that before, but I think it really plays into fueling your students’ enthusiasm for the day. To be honest, I don’t know if I would come off as genuine and empowering as you do; especially if I were to try it exactly the way you do it, but it is definitely something I want to explore further.

Again, I think honesty is key.  I don't lie to my students - even when a lie would be convenient or politic.  I speak to them the way I speak to adults, and I hold them to the same expectations.  Because they know they can trust me not to treat them as intellectually inferior, just experientially disadvantaged, they tend to be willing to come to me for advice on personal matters (which can sometimes backfire - especially in regards to the work/life divide, which you mention below!).  

Student-Mentor Dialogue #1: Honesty and Growth Mindset

After observing your class this week, I’ve been forced to reconsider a lot of important aspects from my own education. My classes revolve around pedagogy, ideology, and strategy. However, the real meat of the equation often goes missing – the classroom application. Because let’s be honest, discussion can only get you so far; you can’t feel the heat in the kitchen if you’ve never taken over to cook. I’ve come to discover that teaching does not follow one, strict recipe, but variations of that recipe to suit the taste of the individual.    

As a young educator, I acknowledge that many of my developed ideals are just that – extremely idealistic, but not necessarily realistic. I am aware of my impressionability, but I no longer think of it as a weakness I must overcome. To me, knowledge is dynamic, and to be open-minded is to constantly grow. However, my goal by the end of this experience is not to completely revamp my own beliefs, but to refine them from gained experience – whether mine or someone else’s. ‬

This is an incredibly positive and sensible outlook, of course.  It's also the foundation of all education - if you don't believe in knowledge as a dynamic or shifting thing, this isn't the career for you.  With that said, I hope you know I don't expect to agree - I hope we can productively and honestly search for a practical middle-ground in both belief and practice.  As I always tell my kids, teaching is at the top of the pyramid of learning - thank you for being willing to teach me!

The greatest thing you have done for me so far has been your open and honest conversation. You bring a realistic perspective to the profession that I have not gotten anywhere else. You are not afraid to disagree with the norm, and I find it extremely eye-opening. You approach your classroom with a positive intentionality – forcing students to recognize that success comes from growth, and that everyone has the ability to learn. I truly admire that, and hope that I can somehow replicate that sense of “I can” in my own classroom.

One of the texts our campus has been working from this year is a book titled The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.  The primary dysfunction identified is a lack of trust, that leads to a lack of ability to communicate honestly.  The book draws a strong distinction between the false sense of "harmony" fostered when a team isn't comfortable being direct, and the sometimes UNCOMFORTABLE communication only possible when real trust has been established.  

Introductions!

My name is Michael Low, and I teach a 9th grade Speech & Composition class and a multi-grade Leadership class at KIPP San Jose Collegiate High School in San Jose, California.  This is my first year at KIPP, and prior to this fall I taught for four years at a public high school (the Multicultural Academy of Scholarship in Chicago) as an English and Japanese teacher.  Prior to that, I taught for five years for a private reading enhancement program called the Institute for Reading Development all around the US, working with classes of students from Kindergarteners through adults.  For more on my background, feel free to take a look at my LinkedIn profile or simply download my resume from my website, lowslanguage.com.

This year I have the fortune to work with a Student Teacher who is working on her MA in Secondary Education with USC Rossier School of Education.  As I told Ms. Do, I was interested in working with a Student Teacher for two main reasons:

• First, I owe much of my own understanding of the art of teaching to my mentor teacher and the experiences I had during my year working with her at the University of Michigan.
• Second, as reflective and deliberate as any teacher can be, there are a number of “invisible skills” in teaching - things instructors do every day, without recognizing their actions as a practiced skill or procedure - that are the crucial difference between success and failure.

I asked Ms. Do if she’d be willing to work with me on this blog in order to help us both: her, as student, in asking the questions she needs answered, and me, as mentor, in being as explicit as possible in explaining what I do and why I do it.

In posts, Ms. Do’s contributions will be represented in block quotes, followed by my replies.  I’ll preserve hers in the type she uses most, Times New Roman, while my text will be typed in Arial.

Whether you’re a mentor, student, or just someone involved in the profession, I hope that our conversations about the how, why, and what of running a high school classroom can be as useful to you as they are to me.  Please feel free to comment, as one of the best ways to learn is an active dialogue!

Without further ado, I'll lead into our first post.  Enjoy!