Conceptualizing Classrooms

First, I am finally getting back to this blog, after it has languished in dismal neglect for several months. Big thanks to Ann(e)?, who stopped me at the PCTR Rodeo Beach 20K last weekend to tell me a) she recognized me from my blog and that b) she really liked what I had written on here-- so much so that she had printed it out. Finding out that I had affected someone I never knew had heard of me was a good reminder to get to writing again, because we never, never know how our words or actions can touch someone else.

This post is probably the first of several on the theme of "Classroom Management." I was talking to one of my teachers a couple of months ago and she asked, "Why don't you write a book?" Admittedly, I have thought about this for quite some time, but in the fear of starting an overwhelming project, I think getting moving by starting to post again is a good first step.

Before I start sharing some perspectives on that catch-all, rather annoying phrase, I have been thinking about how we conceptualize a classroom first of all, and then how this impacts our vision of classroom management.

One of my interns said last week that he had given his students a list of what was going to be on the test, and how that had seemed, at first, like it was not being very teacher-like. He understood that letting students know what they were responsible for learning was actually a very intelligent idea, but it went against his ideas about teachers and how he remembered feeling like teachers tried to "trick" kids on tests. To me, this one incident completely sums up much of where I think we need to start when we talk about classrooms. In his experience (and I would guess he's not alone), there was a strong feeling of Teacher vs. Students. This perspective is rooted so deeply in our consciousness, I think we often take it for granted-- but what on earth is this saying about our vision of classrooms and the interactions that should be taking place?

One of my professors said last year that she hated the term "in the trenches," because it implied that schools are a battlefield, and if we conceptualize schools as battlegrounds, there have to be people on different sides, usually teachers on one side, students on the other. I can't think of a more damaging metaphor to operate from-- if I think of my students as "the other side," then any attempt to create happiness in my classroom seems ridiculous.

I mentioned Nel Noddings before, and I bring her up again, with her RADICAL notion that education have something to do with happiness. What if we thought of classrooms as happy places to be? What would a classroom be like that started from the supposition that learning and interacting with other human beings should be a joyful endeavor? Elementary classrooms often seem to have more of this joy--I don't know if it's because younger children have a natural buoyancy that the educational system has not yet squelched, or because the teachers are more pulled in by the charm of younger children than the occasional truculence of adolescents. Either way, I don't remember anyone in my teaching credential program suggesting that teaching and learning should be joyful and enjoyable.

If we start from a "classrooms can be joyful" starting ground, where do we go next?

Stripping classrooms from their monumental weight of tradition and history and biases about what they should be doing or are doing (a herculean task, I realize), we have a group of people that come together in a room every day. If you see people every day, you interact with them every day. Daily interactions breed relationships. Like families, these daily interactions can be sources of support and love, sources which push us to do better and to be better human beings, or they can be a reason that therapists have jobs, because the relationships are filled with hurt and pain. Most classrooms would fall somewhere in between those two extremes, I would argue: they are filled with relationships that are neither horribly damaging, nor lovingly supportive. Most classrooms are filled with relationships that are nearer a neutral ground, yet if we are trying to create classrooms filled with joyful learning, I would argue that our classroom relationships should be a source of joy and support.

To close, I share a story from one of my last years of teaching. At the end of the year, we took some time as a class to let people share if they needed to say anything to the group. One of my students stood up and said, "This class made me happy to come to school in the morning. Sometimes I would wake up and think that I didn't want to come to school, but then I would think about this class and the people in it, and I would get happy." What if every student felt this way about their class?

To ponder...

I started to try and think about what I wanted to write about, and I immediately became overwhelmed by the number of topics I am interested in exploring more in writing. So I'm taking the easy way out. I'm going to make a list right now and then come back and start working from the list.

Current educational obsessions:

1) Connections to the world- why are we so navel-gazing in the US? What stops us from looking at what other countries do/have done with their educational systems?

2) How do we go about shifting the deficit-model thinking that is so ingrained in our educational system?

3) How do we build in the importance of personal growth and changing our own perceptions to the educational system, so that teachers, principals, and anyone working with children are also on their own path of personal growth and improvement. If I'm going to tell a 15 year old to improve his/her attitude, what is there that encourages me to improve my own?

4) When we look at our requirements for teachers, very little focuses on one's relationships with students. True, there is a California Standards for the Teaching Profession on "Classroom Environment," but there is nothing that ensures that teachers know how to build caring relationships with students in their classrooms.

5) Along that same line, nothing in our teacher preparation programs asks teachers to deeply question their own beliefs about who their students are, and the way they see their students. How do we build programs for teachers STARTING from a deep examination of how one views other human beings, particularly poor students of color. The longer I am in education, the more I see how the frame we bring to our interactions with others impacts the situation.

6) Why do we insist on continuing practices in our education system that aren't working? If statistics on drop out rates show that school is clearly not working for a large percentage of Latino and African-American youth, why are we not responding to this by attempting to change the school system rather than hoping these students will somehow "be different?"

7) Where's the joy? Nel Nodding's book, "Happiness and Education" explores this question. I think about many classrooms I have sat in, both as a student and observing others, and I'm unclear on why a group of people coming together (because really, at the heart of it, school is a group of people in a room together) needs to be a painful experience for anyone.

Ok. There are some starting questions. Expect more on these topics as time goes on....

Honoring how we got here...

I have recently re-entered a yoga phase. I love yoga. It's like mind and body therapy all in one. I also think it's highly applicable to oh, say, everything, and I am constantly finding connections with yoga and work or yoga and relationships or yoga and the world.

Another reason I have started doing yoga lately is to help heal a knee injury. The physical therapist said part of the reason the knee was hurting was due to very tight hip flexors, so I have been doing yoga like a madwoman in order to try and open them up. I am a very goal-oriented person and I can do yoga with great enthusiasm in pursuit of a goal (my knee getting better). In the middle of one of the poses, the instructor remarked that it was very important to honor where your body was at that moment. She said that it took a long time to build up all that tension and it wasn't going to go away just over night. I had worked hard for that tension-- hours of sitting, stress, unbalanced exercise-- it didn't just happen.

This struck me for some reason. I tend to see where I want to be much easier than appreciating how what I have done has gotten me where I am. I could be much kinder to myself (and to my body) while moving forward on the stretching plan. I'm not saying I don't want to keep working on opening my hip flexors-- I do--but perhaps I could appreciate the stress I have been through or the adverse conditions that my body has had to endure to create this tension.

Then I thought of the classroom. Some of the students whose behavior is the worst come in with metaphorically "tight" hip flexors. Through lots of different experiences, they have learned a certain way of acting in the world, just as my hips have learned a certain way of being tight. Generally, we focus on how to immediately change the student, but we don't honor all the things that have happened (whether we know them or not) to lead to the student acting out. We see how we want students to be much easier than we usually find it to honor them where they are in this moment, but if we don't do this, we don't see the tremendous amount of work it took the student to get to wherever they are. And it did take a tremendous amount of work and struggle for any student to get to where they are-- it's a struggle to be a human being, a fact that we all too often lose sight of in the classroom (and probably in the rest of the world as well).

I am not suggesting that students are not encouraged and supported to learn different ways of acting in the classroom, just as I would not want my hips to stay tight. Tight hips lead to injuries, and students acting out usually ends up emotionally injuring someone-- often him or herself. It has to do with how we frame the behavior of the student in front of us-- do we focus only on how the student needs to change or do we see him or her as a person who has worked very hard to get to this point and appreciate all that effort, even if it didn't help in this situation?

Too many ideas....

Unbelievable. I finally get myself to the point of setting this up, and then I'm totally stuck because I have so many ideas, I don't know where to start. Do I start with a more fluffy post? A diatribe? A research-based query?

Well, perhaps I shall start with things that are On My Mind as of late, thanks to my program. One of the best books out there on education and learning is the National Research Council's How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School. You can read the entire book online for free by following the link.

The chapter we read for homework this week was Chapter 6: The Design of Learning Environments. The chapter says first that learning environments must be learner-centered, knowledge-centered and assessment-centered (assessment used in support of learning, not as the punitive standardized test commonly associated with the word assessment), but that the classroom and learning are always situated in the larger community, and that students' learning should relate to their experience in the larger community.

A related question that has come up several times in another class is how school benefits or relates to students' lives right NOW. I talked to a teacher recently who said their school was having a major problem with truancy. Threats of grade lowering, etc., made no difference-- students were not interested in being in school. I was a "good student" (i.e., a student the system was made for) and I have many memories of sitting completely bored in class, writing notes to friends as often as I could. Was I engaged with school all the time? No, but I was programmed enough to stay in class because the thought of getting in trouble outweighed the temptation to walk out of class. What if students are not so programmed?

If schools were run like businesses and did not have captive audiences (i.e., students could choose to stay or leave), many schools would fail immediately. I am not advocating creating a three-ring circus every day in the class, or classrooms that are purely entertainment for students, but what responsibility do schools have to create learning opportunities for students that they can use NOW? If students came to school and felt every day that being at school enriched their lives, or taught them something they could take and use that afternoon, how much more motivation might they have to attend school regularly?

Stepping back one level, how do we then balance the juxtaposition of state mandated learning outcomes with student needs and interests?

Wherefore yet another blog?

Why start yet another blog? I already write a trailrunning blog-- what need have I (or the world) for another?

I have thought about starting this blog for a while. I am currently in a doctorate program at UC Davis, and I discovered last year when I started my trailrunning blog (one year ago today, to be precise!) that I do much more writing and I sharpen my talents more if I think someone besides myself might read what I have written. (Even if no one else reads it, I will craft the sentences with slightly more care, thinking a reader--any reader--is paying attention.)

I am passionate about many things-- education, justice, kindness, personal growth-- the list goes on. I will use this space to explore the connections between all these ideas, and if it becomes a space for others to connect on the same topics, so much the better. I am also interested in exploring different tools to explore these areas, and I know if I don't "have" to publish something, I won't.

So welcome, gentle reader, whomever you might be. May these writings (mine and anyone who feels inspired to comment) create more connection in our world.