Learning to Discuss Hot Button Topics—or Not (online reflection #3)

As a “preservice” (read: inexperienced) teacher, I often am unaware of the pitfalls of certain lesson plans, sometimes even as they are happening. Last week was one of those times when I had to debrief with my MT to fully realize how tricky a situation had become. The unit we are working in is all about “Conflict,” and as such we were doing a Civil Rights history-based week led by our first-year co-teacher. The students were analyzing pictures they had passed around on posters and writing what they thought was happening, if it was more conflict or resolution, and similar other breakdowns. The pictures ranged from Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders all the way to the L.A. Riots of the early 2000s and Ferguson Missouri. At the end, each group was supposed to come up and present what their poster was actually about, and then the kids could discuss or ask questions about them.

In my head I thought it was a pretty good idea, giving them a chance to discuss in a safe classroom environment creates healthy kids who are awakened to ignorance they previously were unaware of. However, what happened was a stark division of the class, escalating to raised voices and extremes on both sides of violent protests being shared, and a bell ringing on a class scattered and confused, with very little teacher intervention to guide them through topics that often get adults confused or heated. Luckily for the most upset student, my MT walked him to his next class and got a chance to debrief and discuss his thoughts and questions with her, but I was still processing. Why did my MT seem so upset at the outcome of the class when it was only a heated discussion? College classes got fired up and people disagreed all the time, and that seems to be okay. After a good talk with my MT, however, I began to realize some of the pitfalls of our period and started thinking of ways it could have gone differently.

What I hadn’t understood at the time was that for these kids, a heated discussion isn’t coming from a well-thought out idea with a sturdy conviction fueling the passion behind it. It is coming from a scared early teenager who is just beginning to see the possibility of an opinion outside of their parents, and a lot of pride and hot air backing that paper-thin ideology up. When they had free reign to counter and shut down each other’s opinions, their defensiveness started flaring up and it went from a productive academic discussion to something that could’ve potentially been damaging to both their ideas and their friendships. So what would’ve worked better, or how did my teachers adjust from first to third hour?

Well the first thing would have been to realize going in that this could become a hot button conversation, so we could have been more prepared. An article put out by Vanderbilt University gives some excellent guidelines for having difficult classroom dialogues that accomplish good goals and keep the class from spiraling out of control. One of the things they mentioned is to have thought through whatever the topic is and what the problems may be ahead of time. In this case it was race and violent protests versus police brutality, but it could just as easily have been something along religious lines, immigration or other political policies, elections, civil liberties, or something you aren’t always expecting that a student has a sensitivity toward. Although you will never be able to predict every difficult topic that will come up in your class, you can be proactive about broaching these topics when you feel you and your class are at a place where you can handle them.

Another of the articles good ideas is for you and your students to establish clear ground rules before starting a discussion, so they know what kind of behavior and discourse is tolerated or expected. Again this takes some foresight, but allowing students to be in the process of coming up with rules such as no shouting over each other, or no attacking the speaker’s character directly can cut down on you having to moderate as much, because they have all agreed to uphold their own rules.

In addition, the article gives different strategies and specific practices you can employ if you would like a more structured discussion. All in all, I think you have to know your kids first and foremost. As we were discussing our talk in the next hour, we came to the conclusion that this age of students were not mature enough to be able to cope with the topic presented without extensive coaching, and many of their situations and demographics made it hard for them to be mature enough to handle it regardless of how skilled the teacher was. In some instances, it is okay to know your limits and not attempt anything you think would do more harm than good to your students, and I think that is hard for me to learn. I want to be able to tackle every kind of lesson, the most cutting edge and important on the social justice scale, filled with meaningful audiences and real-world applications, each and every time. But sometimes, knowing when to reach and when to pull back a bit is a sign of wisdom, and can teach your kids more than a lesson ever could. 

Learning the Importance of My Classroom Library, and My Heart Behind it

At the 2016 KATE Conference, I learned many things. I learned exciting new ways to incorporate both classic and graphic novels into my curriculum, how to boldly ask questions and maneuver my way through my first year teaching, and ways to tackle and become comfortable with ambiguity in the class. However, all of these nuts and bolts paled in comparison to the overarching themes I’ve learned over not only the two days of the conference, but in the last year getting to know some of my classmates and colleagues better.

What I learned from both gripping anecdotes and calculated data is that books save lives. Books can transform. But their power is increased exponentially when the characters in them are better representative of the students who are searching in them for hope and for meaning. In their own unique ways and from their various perspectives, the two keynote speakers and the panel Friday afternoon all were saying that representation matters, and having diverse and relatable books on my shelf can impact the health, safety, and happiness of my students. For a long time, I believed that because of my deep Christian faith, I would be hindered from speaking about tough subjects with the students because I would rather avoid telling them that I disagree or risk offending someone. What I have come to realize in many ways through the conference is that my comfort level is not the point of life, or the point of teaching. I need to accept and embrace being uncomfortable if it means a better environment for my students, and more compassionate and informed students for the world. Bill Konigsberg, author of many young adult books like Openly Straight, discussed the fact that regardless of your personal or religious views on LGBTQ issues you are able to stock books with those characters shown in a positive light. He doesn’t necessarily agree with wars, but he would still hold those books in his classroom because they can connect with and touch different people. Showing and validating that those identities are real and exist and can still lead healthy lives can really help when students are struggling through the throes of adolescence. It really impressed upon me the importance of having those kinds of titles in my classroom.

Similarly, I had always heard of the lack of diversity when it came to children’s and young adult books, but never really heard just how much it was or the damage it can do to children. When I heard from Stacy Whitman, publisher and editor at Tu Books, that there were more children’s books with main characters who were animals than children’s books with main characters of color I was astonished. Hearing from the panelists really connected the problems that exist with this—a lack of representation creates a lack of connection with literature and can make it harder to engage in the reading. I was so grateful to her to give us resources and titles to help us create a diverse and engaging classroom library for whoever our students are. I liked her analogy of windows and mirrors, we need to give books to our students that reflect who they are as people as well as showing them perspectives they’ve never seen in order to grow their empathy and knowledge.

All in all, I have learned the importance of my classroom library, and cannot wait to begin stockpiling books in the next year. In addition to all I learned, I had so much fun engaging with other English teachers from around the state and the future English teachers I have as classmates. The bonds I’ve made with these people have taught me so much that I know they are going to go out and be amazing teachers for not only Literature and Language, but life and love. 

Learning to Express Experiences in Creative Ways (genre reflection #1)

This is my Genre Reflection for my methods class at Wichita State. It takes an experience I've learned from my placement and tells it in a creative and interesting way. This reflection is in monologue form, or a short scene performed on stage by a single person.

Scene in a Class

Two boys sit across the room from each other. Mentor Teacher is speaking with a “Charlie Brown’s teacher” voice. The boys glance back and forth, clearly disengaged from the discussion, and making vague hand gestures to each other. Periodically, the boys glance to the larger student beside one of them and laugh, making gestures that may signify bullying of some kind and mouthing jokes to one another.

Lights on the class cut to black, single spot on Mrs. Watkins. She breaks the fourth wall and looks frustratingly into the audience.

WATKINS: And in that moment, I felt helpless. The class moved along without me, my mentor teacher explicating on the complexities of assimilating to American culture, and yet I couldn’t get past these two smug teenagers. You see, they sit right across from each other in the u-shaped formation that I saw a diagram of in Core 1. Discipline for the Secondary Classroom calls it “excellent for classroom discussion but an inefficient use of space,” which I was beginning to take issue with. My mentor teacher, highly experienced and innately confident, chose not to dignify them with a response, but I was worried they were starting to attract attention. Do I step in and say something? Let it be? My intervention came to me as an epiphany and at the time felt brilliant. I meandered my way into the center of the U, nodding along with the analysis and encouraging discussion, and just planted myself in the boys’ line of sight. I had magically dissipated the problem, and was thus a paragon educator. Or was I? Because now, the boys were shifting left and right, giggling at this new challenge to their little game. Students beside them were watching my fleeting attempt to assert control and were completely checked out of the lesson. As the bell rang, the class scurried away and my confidence felt like the big swinging boat ride at the amusement park: moving from extreme high to utter failure in a few sweeping seconds. But hey, that’s learning to teach, I guess. You try, you experiment, and you realize what works and what doesn’t. You show back up the next day and you try something new. These boys won’t become my nemesis, nor will they be my defeat. They’ll be back with more games, but I’ll be back too. And one day I’ll figure them out. 

Learning to Combat Learned Helplessness (online reflection #2)

Each of my students have their own little personalities and quirks: some love to read graphic novels and give large hugs, some run in yelling about Zootopia and extra terms for President Obama, and others are more reserved and quietly brilliant. However, there are always a couple of students who are more of a struggle to connect with and get excited to see every morning. One of my boys in particular, doesn’t do his work when asked, shows off for the class with his charm and smile, and then spends time asking what he’s supposed to do after not listening to instructions. It is so frustrating to try to help him when he doesn’t put forth much effort to help himself. He seems to be a candidate for the growing epidemic of learned helplessness, or the state of not knowing how to do work without a teacher constantly beside you. This is showing up with kids all over, and I believe a lot of it stems from teachers and parents being unwilling to give up control of their children enough to let them learn to express their own thoughts. If every time a student is struggling we swoop in to save the day, they slowly grow accustomed to just waiting until we swoop. So how can these habits manifest themselves, and what can we do to stop it?

In my research, a lot of learned helplessness didn’t match up with what I was seeing in my classroom. For my student, it seemed almost an act of defiance, a battle of wills to remain looking cool. In an article about the origins of learned helplessness, Jordan Catapano describes it as the students losing confidence in who they are as students, internalizing their failures and feeling like they are bad at all things school because they had a bad grade attributed to them. That, in turn, leads to a cycle where they stop trying. It said we as teachers needed to change the way we relate to students and their grades, setting individual goals and giving positive feedback for effort rather than just the letter grades.

Another article took a less touchy-feely approach, saying that the reasons for the students’ struggles are that teachers are just over-helping and not allowing the students to fall and make their own mistakes. This article recommends to let other resources besides you teach the class, from outside adults to community organizations. In addition, they emphasize the importance of asking questions that dig into why and how they think about their answers rather than just inquiring for the answer specifically. Over all, the freedom to make mistakes can teach students that they have the strength and capability to explore their own original thought away from the structures and aids from the teacher.

So what does this mean for my student? Does he have a deeper emotional issue and fear of failure? Has he just been taught that his work would get done for him by a teacher if he waited and smiled long enough? Or does he truly just not care about doing his work and is content to pass with a C-? I have not figured all of that out yet, but my mentor teacher and I are working to turn every stone and cover every base in order to find out, from trying various strategies in the classroom to conferencing with his mother. I will continue learning what I can about students who freeze up at the thought of independent work, and will refuse to let a student slip through the cracks, regardless of how frustrated they may make me. As my mentor teacher told me today, our job is to give each student the tools and techniques they need to succeed, no matter what it takes. 

Learning Equitable Grading and Confronting Privileges (online reflection #1)

Ever since I was a little girl, I knew that some kids finished work faster than others. Since I’ve been in college, I knew about the push to have inclusive classrooms and the existence of “CWC”s. Yet it took until this year and this much time in a classroom filled with diverse learners and students that I began to question how we graded so much variety in the same room. I wondered who the grading should have been geared toward: if helping those with an IEP or second language would water down the standards for some of the faster achieving students, or if keeping the standards strict would inhibit students having a harder time from ever succeeding?

I started looking online, and as it turns out it was a question many teachers were still grappling with. How much does effort and participation affect students’ grades—and how much should it? According to an article on Faculty Focus about student effort, a majority of college students believe that over a quarter of their grade should be based on effort or participation, while the article rightly argues that it’s near impossible to gauge and objectively grade effort. While I agree that it is frustrating to work hard and not feel rightly compensated by grade, much of the adult world cares about results, regardless of the amount of effort it took to get to that place.

I began thinking on this subject when my students were giving presentations on a reading they had done in groups. Several of the students had read the myth but others had trouble reading aloud and so mostly listened and followed along. Then once the presentations began, my MT told everyone they were required to speak. The student in our class with autism does not currently work well in groups and struggles to speak in front of the class, so he completed his project by himself and explained it to the teacher. I wondered if he would receive full credit or if he would be punished by his disability in the midst of a class of people who do not struggle with some of his particular challenges.

My MT has been teaching for several years and is an extremely well-read and well-researched educator. I have been so impressed with her dedication to not only help each student individually but to be best practice and data driven in her curriculum and instruction. In my emails with her about this subject, she said that she believes “grades should be completely objective and quantitative so that they never become a weapon nor reward.” She emphasizes quantitative data and tracking measurable goals for the students to be able to be compared not only against their past selves, but against the rubrics she makes for each assignment and objective. One of her ways of making differentiation work is through broad or interpretative rubrics. For example, if the rubric says to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of the short story, many students will write up all of their answers, while some may write half and deliver the rest orally to her or one of the other teachers in the room.

Sometimes this can lead to subjectivity, but she strives to look for measurable change and things she has seen that can be tracked and recorded when it comes to individual goals.  Many times these goals can come from an IEP, and thus must be strictly adhered to. This link  gives many helpful tips and examples on how to co-teach with a special education teacher, as well as how to carry out modifications in grading and testing for students with differing needs. The takeaway from my research and discussions have been that emotion should be taken out of the equation as much as possible, but that reasonable expectations and empathy are still needed.

I am glad that I have been confronted with this question about grading and equity now, because I know I will have to deal with it the rest of my professional career. It was too easy for me to ignore the grading policies and not worry about it as a student because I was privileged enough not deal with learning struggles in certain parts of school. Learning how to help and accommodate students with such wide ranging abilities has been such a good experience for me, and I look forward to continually becoming more sensitive and data-collecting in the future. So what do you think? Should the effort and abilities of the students be taken into account, and to what degree? What challenges does individualizing create in the grading sector?

Enjoying the journey,
Mrs. Watkins

Learning my Students and Coworkers

Well, week one is almost in the books. I've been to inservices, teacher work days, and my first interactions with my students. To be honest, even with the information overload and weight of responsibility, I walk down the hallway smiling every day as I leave. It is so exciting to be a part of a faculty that is so committed to bettering their school, its reputation, and the students it sees every day. I think so far I've learned more than the kids have, but even in the first couple of days they've begun asking questions and engaging in the learning my Mentor Teacher has carefully thought through. I'm glad she has such a good sense of where she is going with each of her lessons and is confident in her students' abilities to learn, especially with our large diversity of learners and their strengths and weaknesses.

In the first couple of days, I have learned about accommodations we can use to help our student who has autism. My teacher looped up with him this year, and describes him as an incredibly smart and funny kid who is just very cautious to let in new people and trust them. Seeing how hesitant he was to talk to me intimidated me at first, but I can't let students slip through the cracks in my own classroom, and I need to learn how to work with all kinds of students now. One of my goals this year will be to build a relationship with him that will enable me to speak encouragement and success into his learning without overwhelming him.

Another unique feature of our room this semester is the amount of colleagues and support present in the room. Between my Mentor Teacher, the Special Education Teacher, ELL para, a one-on-one para, and me, it's a full house. This could challenge me to make sure I take initiative in interacting and working with students, since I could easily stand in the back and still know students will be worked with. It also can make me feel a little more pressure when teaching or working with the class since there are so many adults in the room who may have done a better job than I just did. However, I am choosing to look at it in a positive light, remembering that more adults per student just means a greater attention to each student's personal needs and goals, and more opportunity for small group activities. My goal for this year will be that I learn to better collaborate and have positive professional relationships with each of the women in the room.

Obviously I have goals of becoming more confident in classroom management and being an authority on literature and my subject, but these are some of the more specific things that I've been pondering for the week. I have been so happy with my placement thus far, and can't wait to be back in a couple of hours!

Always teachable,
Mrs. Watkins

Learning to Blog

Welcome to the adventure that is Mrs. Watkins' teaching brain! This is my test post because today I learned many new skills, and creating a blog is one of them. Some others would be where the restrooms are at my new school, what the name of the administrative assistant is, and how many composition notebooks we'll need to give our students on the first day of school. I'm so excited to get going on the most intense year of learning in my life, but to be honest I can get a little overwhelmed. Here's to a wonderful adventure of learning how to teach eighth graders, and seeing how much those same teenagers teach me!