Know Your Students (ELL Ch. 10)

Loads and loads of research suggests and points to the fact that parental involvement can improve student success beyond any other measure. While there are some natural gifts that each student is born with, the support of parents can make or break a kid in many cases. As teachers we are charged with finding ways to involve parents in the classroom and keep them engaged (or get them engaged if they aren’t already). On top of grading, planning, and extra curriculars, this can be a challenge to say the least. Now add onto that challenge that many teachers are trying to engage parents from various cultures and languages. This makes it even tougher, but the reality is that it must be done for the sake of our students.

Chapter Ten of Practical Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners by Ellen M. Curtin highlights ways for teachers to get parents involved of various languages and cultures. While she has some great suggestions, I don’t agree with all of them. In particular, she states that a “teacher knows the cultural traditions of all students” and “teacher understands and has knowledge of dos and don’ts, like: is it appropriate to shake hands? How do I address parents?” (Curtin, 235). Recently I attended a Cultural Competency workshop with other members of the Seattle Prep faculty including our principal and Diversity Director. Through my own reflection and experience in this conference, I somewhat agree with Curtin. While I feel it is essential to try and learn the cultural traditions and dos and don’ts, making assumptions based on knowing these can be dangerous. For example, if I make an assumption about someone based on their race or where their parents are from concerning eye contact then I am simply stereotyping. It is vitally important to know students from a cultural perspective, but also simply on a human level. What does respect look like at their house? How about eye contact? Best way to communicate? And the list goes on and on. The problem is that this takes time and can’t be accomplished in the beginning of a school year. Yet, knowing enough about a student’s culture can’t be done quickly either. It requires us to build relationships with students and in my opinion, this is what leads to a positive impact. When students trust us and respect us (in that building of relationships), they want to learn more.

Capping a Four Year Experience (May 24-30)

The senior seminar class that originated last summer and came to fruition for the first time this year proved to have its challenges. In creating a curriculum essentially from scratch and working with four other teachers, I felt frustrated, tired, and fed up at times. Yet the benefits of this course by far outweigh the negatives.

The idea for the course began with the concept of a capstone for seniors after four years at Seattle Prep. As a Jesuit high school we emphasize creating “men and women for others”, as well as highlighting the five elements of a Profile of a Graduate at Graduation. These elements are: intellectually competent, committed to justice, loving, open to growth and spiritually alive. When a senior graduates, he or she ideally lives out these five elements in their day to day interaction with others. This is our ultimate goal. So how do we create a class that helps students achieve this?

We began with the idea of a class that challenged students to think outside a traditional curriculum. Through much consideration and discussion we decided on the Global Water Crisis as a vehicle to help students determine how they can become agents of change in our world and how they can advocate for something they believe in. While water was the main topic, the class really served as a template for how students could become leaders of tomorrow. We wanted them to see this opportunity, try advocating, and working toward a common goal to help the community. Yet as the class moved toward its end and the students toward graduation, I wondered….do they get it? Will they truly be “men and women for others”?

As I started reading their final seminar projects in which they had present a problem related to the water crisis and essentially find a solution, I had great hope. They did get it! The groups outlined the social injustice related to the issue and advocated on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. Groups came up with creative solutions to local problems dealing with water pollution and disruption. It inspired me to see students, both in their writing and in their presentations, demonstrate how they consciously changed their awareness and engagement with the issue at hand. I feel motivated to begin anew next year, knowing how to improve this course for its’ second year.

Outside the Classroom (April 18-23)

This past week provided a couple different opportunities for me as a teacher that don’t fit into a normal work week. In celebration of Earth Day, our school joins together for an all-school Day of Service in the neighborhood surrounding Seattle Prep. The following day, on Friday, I joined our principal and a few other fellow teachers at a day long conference on Cultural Competence. While both days provided different experiences, they both allowed for great professional growth.

Earth Day at Seattle Prep

As students get older at Seattle Prep, they tend to bemoan the prospect of working outside on Earth Day. After experiencing the laborious nature of pulling ivy and blackberry from the neighborhood (mostly at Interlaken Park), they strive to do anything else! With this in mind – and last year being a rainy day – it inevitably makes for a less than exciting day in many cases. As teachers we feel like we are herding students back and then trying anything to get them to work for just a couple hours. While I went into the day with tempered expectations, I soon learned that just when you don’t expect the best – students surprise you.

The group of juniors I supervised and worked with on Earth Day provided great energy and worked extremely hard.

We cleared a nice section of ivy and blackberry to return the land to its natural state alongside workers from EarthCorps, a local non-profit that works in restoring natural habitats. The second part of our day involved moving piles of mulch to cover the area. When we completed the work, all of us could stare and be amazed at the work we accomplished. The students worked well together and really enjoyed their day. Yet the best part was that we were one group (about 12 students and myself) among 50 or so groups total doing this same work! We literally and physically changed the landscape of our area for the better! I felt overwhelmed and proud to be working at a school involved in this activity and to be with students who truly respected the world around them enough to not complain and get the work done.

The following day I traveled to the Cultural Competency training where I gained some great professional development to use in my classroom. The training centered around being able to understand the different perspectives and cultures of the students in our classroom. While I didn’t gain anything new or groundbreaking in terms of the material, the training did provide some great activities to use in helping students understand each others’ various perspectives and cultures. I also thought of my Diversity in Education course and James Banks’ views of Multicultural Education. This training and the work I did in that class made me reflect on my own teaching. Banks describes three different approaches to multicultural education in order of significance and importance: contributions approach, additive approach, and transformative approach. Do I simply speak about various cultural groups contributions or do I include all perspectives throughout units I teach? This is a perfect time to reflect on this dilemma as I begin a new unit for freshmen year. The unit involves the reading of Bless Me, Ultima and the Age of Exploration. I want to work toward a unit that doesn’t celebrate Christopher Columbus and other explorers, but examines the perspectives of all involved including the indigenous people who lived in the New World before Columbus arrived. If I can get students to understand all points of view in this era, I am working toward a transformative experience.

Parents and Student Voice (April 12-17)

The Seattle Pacific Alternative Route to Certification program provides me with a number of ideas and a whole lot of paperwork in order to be a certifiable teacher. Not to mention getting a Master’s Degree! Yet in the process of sorting through documents, taking suggestions from observers, and classes upon classes, some of the ideas came to life in my teaching. This week I used two very different examples of ideas that came from this program that improved my teaching.

The first idea came from the Education Technology course I took back in the fall. In that class, we needed to create a Digital Narrative documenting our belief in the use of technology in education. While I believed all my statements in that particular assignment (I linked to it here in this post), I didn’t necessarily think they would be put into action this year.

http://voicethread.com/share/802748/

I used Moodle for a discussion with my class earlier during a Civil War unit and now I wanted to put the Digital Narrative into action. I assigned my class to complete a Digital Narrative using VoiceThread. They need to choose a topic or person from any of the last three units in American History (Cold War, Vietnam and Civil Rights). My site coordinator liked the idea in that it will allow students to really synthesize their learning. I believe that anytime students can learn in a format unusual or unique to what they are used to, a little more learning takes place. This is my hope for this assignment. (See my example in this post as well).

http://voicethread.com/share/1083480/

While the Digital Narrative will hopefully be a great success, another idea from SPU already proved to be a hit with parents. I recently wrote a short newsletter on the Cold War unit as we began in class and sent it via email to all my parents of juniors. I not only received responses from four parents, but the principal received an email from a parent as well on how appreciative they were of the effort I put in. I realize that with just a little extra work I can really get parents engaged in the classroom, even if they can’t come in physically!

Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.

With a navy blue, hooded sweatshirt pulled tight over his head, he slouches down in his desk hoping not to be called on. Flanked by the overzealous, eager overachiever and the caffeine guzzling, text-a-holic, he is one of the many. The athlete who refuses to show his brains to match his brawns. The class clown hoping to gain attention by diverting it from the teacher. Unique to their class, but not unique to the classrooms of America. They all are wonderfully unique, yet the same to many teachers. These are the student profiles that teachers encounter on a daily basis in 21^st century American classrooms. Full of hope, promise, fear, trepidation and brilliance – all of them. As a teacher it becomes essential to find a way to reach all of them – to make education relevant to each and every one – while not using gimmicks or tricks. This can only be achieved through a solid foundation; it can only be achieved through developing one’s educational philosophy.

As a teacher, if one does enough research, he or she can find educational pedagogy or theory to support a wide variety of philosophies. Thus, it becomes even more important to identify the core values or beliefs that I hold to be most important as an educator. I must decipher which theories and philosophies align with my beliefs. To do this, I begin with my own education. As a graduate of Seattle Preparatory School and Santa Clara University, I spent eight years in Jesuits schools. While learning as a student, I failed to realize the pedagogy behind the content I learned in those classrooms. It wasn’t until I became a Jesuit educator myself that I realized how much I enjoyed the Jesuit approach. This pedagogical story began nearly 500 years ago. As a young worker with the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola began opening schools for his new Jesuit recruits throughout Europe. After a request from the magistrates of Messina in Sicily, Ignatius began opening schools for lay people as well. In a letter he wrote about the

St. Ignatius - Founder of the Jesuits

founding colleges in December of 1551, Ignatius wrote, “Finally, since young boys become grown men, their good education in life and doctrine will be beneficial to many others, with the fruit expanding more widely every day” (O’Neal, 2003). Ignatius and the Jesuits saw that with educated men being able to become lifelong learners, they could make an impact on the world. This idea evolved over the years to involved compassionate and service-based education. As a way to move Jesuit ideals into action in the classroom, the Jesuits created the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm in 1993 (JSEA, 1994).

Based upon the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm (IPP) involves five steps to education: context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation (JSEA, 1994, p. 298). This approach allows teacher to build upon past classes and learning (context), trying out a new skill or lesson (experience), reflecting and group work (reflection), homework or assignments (action), and evaluating their understanding of material from the previous day (evaluation). While the Jesuits created a model that I can appreciate and look to for guidance in developing my own philosophy, it isn’t the only model with a similar approach. In fact, educational philosophers and experts for years valued the “experience” and “context” involved in teaching a lesson much more than the traditional educational format would have one believe. With the focus on standardized tests and the physical structure of a classroom – involving a lectern and desks in rows – it seems as if education really hasn’t changed since the Colonial era. Yet evidence shows that many educators value the IPP approach or something similar.

American education philosopher John Dewey emphasized experience in his philosophical approach to education. He wrote in his book entitled Experience and Education:

John Dewey

“What we want and need is education pure and simple, and we shall make surer and faster progress when we devote ourselves to finding out just what education is and what conditions have to be satisfied in order that education may be a reality and not a name or a slogan. It is for this reason alone that I have emphasized the need for a sound philosophy of experience (Dewey, 1938, p. 91).

With a focus on experience as the central manner in which to educate young people, Dewey in many ways rejected the old educational model. At the same time, Dewey took special consideration of not blindly supporting experience without addressing the questions that would arise from other educators. Throughout his book, Dewey presents possible questions to using experience as the model in education and continually addresses those concerns. While Dewey valued experience in education, he clearly also finds importance in context. In his Pedagogic Creed, Dewey stated: “Education, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. It must be controlled at every point by reference to these same considerations. These powers, interests, and habits must be continually interpreted – we must know what they mean” (Dewey, 1897, p. 78). Dewey believed that teachers couldn’t simply teach all children the same way. He believed in not only the experience, but finding out what students’ talents, interests, and habits are in the classroom. Only though combining these two factors could a teacher truly be effective. While Dewey may be considered the giant of educational philosophy, many others came along before or after who agreed with this viewpoint.

Paulo Freire

Paulo Freire, despite living in a different area of the world, agreed with Dewey on the importance of context and experience in education. While he focused mostly on social movements and ensuring that oppressed people had access to education, Freire accomplished this through this writing on the experience in the classroom and outside as well. In Joy Palmer’s Fifty Modern Thinkers on Education: From Piaget to the Present, she described Freire’s approach. Palmer (2001) states, “Education can help us to understand the world we live in and can make us better prepared to transform it, but only if we deeply connect education to the larger realities in which people live, and to struggles to alter those realities” (Palmer, 2001, p. 130). As teachers it is imperative to not assume prior knowledge or to simply instruct without context. Freire believes that a student will become more knowledge and ultimately a better citizen of the world if they can connect their work in the classroom to the world outside. This can be achieved through an educational approach to involve context, action and reflection. As I review multiple approaches to education, it becomes clear that I value a multi-faceted approach that requires students to not only be engaged but to also reflect upon their involvement in the educational process. I build my philosophy off of the Jesuit approach but alter to fit my personality as well. My approach is “Getting Students up to P.A.R.R.”. In this case, P.A.R.R. stands for prior knowledge, action, reflection and repetition. Through this educational process, the student will then learn skills that will allow them to become a life long learner. 

As many educational scholars point to students needing a connection to material in the classroom, I believe prior knowledge to be essential to education. As I begin a lesson, I spend the beginning ensuring that students understand the purpose and rationale for the lesson. Additionally they must be able to relate to the content and apply it to their experience. This can be achieved through accessing prior knowledge. For example, when I teach a lesson on the Stamp and Sugar Acts of the Revolutionary Era in United States history, I can access prior knowledge in students through a variety of ways. I can compare the experience to protesting some rules at school or I can have them review the prior events in American history up to this point. This allows students to begin their engagement in the material and to begin applying it. After this point, I move toward action. While there are days that I will lecture at the front of a classroom, I really don’t believe that learning can take place passively. If students simply sit in their desks and attempt to take in knowledge that I recite to them, then they will never engage the material fully. It is essential that students interact with each other and construct their own knowledge with my assistance. This is the action step of my philosophy. Other educational scholars agree with this approach. Barry Kort and Rob Reilly (2002) wrote about a new approach to education using this type of model in their article entitled “Restructuring Educational Pedagogy: A Model for Deep Change”. They stated: “The focii of attention shifts to the construction of ‘knowledge’ and to the extraction of meaningful ‘insights’ from the ‘big picture’. When ‘knowledge’ is coupled with a personal or cultural value system, ‘wisdom’ emerges” (Kort, 2002, p. 3). Through context and action, the student can begin to gain skills and knowledge that can transform material outside of the classroom and into their daily lives. Yet this process won’t be complete until they reflect on the experience. 

Reflecting on the material and the student’s own experience becomes an essential aspect to my educational philosophy. After experiencing the learning process through a given lesson, students are required to reflect on the learning that took place. Too often reflection gets interpreted as journal writing or sharing in small groups. This isn’t my purpose. My aim is to have students be able to identify why the lesson matters to them or to history, what is significant about the lesson, and why they need to learn the material. This allows students to attach meaning to the learning. Instead of simply taking notes on why I think the material is important, I strive to have students identify this key to the process. Often this can be achieved through written assignments, but also can be done more informally through class discussions or small group work. Reflection provides students with the necessary discernment period to capture the meaning of the lesson. Without this process, students would superficially learn the material but would not truly engage in the acquisition of knowledge. After this step, students must repeat the process. This does not imply that students must repeat the same lesson over and over, nor does it mean they should repeat learning the same facts, dates, or names. It does mean that students absolutely must repeat the process and the skill work gained in the process. For example, if my students work on creating thesis statements concerning a topic in the Middle Ages unit in freshmen history, they will follow the whole P.A.R.R. process. They will access their prior knowledge, not only of the Middle Ages, but of creating thesis statements. As they think about their prior work, the students will begin creating these statements and even get feedback from others through the action step. As they complete their thesis statements, they then reflect on how they did in the process. Could they have done better? What would they do differently? As we move to other units such as the Age of Exploration, they practice the skill of thesis statement creation again. This ultimately not only gets students up to par, but creates life long learners in the process. 

With an educational philosophy built upon the repetitive process of acting and reflecting students learn to appreciate the acquisition of information rather than going through the motions in school. The more meaning students can attach to their learning, the more they seek opportunities to learn in the future. As Dexter Chapin describes in his book Master Teachers: Making a Difference on the Edge of Chaos, teachers choose their profession in many ways to experience these moments of connection that students experience. He states: “Everybody has moments of success, but teachers see it every time the kids’ eyes light up when they see and understand something never seen and never understood before” (Chapin, 2009, p. 12-13). As students reflect on their action and experience, they attach meaning. Through this process they see that learning is something that they achieve, not something that happens passively. They DO it. Thus in many ways learning becomes a part of life through my educational philosophy. It doesn’t exist solely in a classroom. In traditional African Education, learning and life are not separated. Timothy Reagan points this out in Non-Western Educational Traditions: Alternative Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice. He states: “Education, then, in the traditional African setting cannot (and indeed, should not), be separated from life itself. It is a natural process by which the child gradually acquires skill, knowledge, and attitudes appropriate to life in his or her community” (Reagan, 1996, p. 19). While non-Western educational traditions may differ in many ways, they approach the purpose of education in similar ways to my philosophy – to create learners for life. Our processes to get there may be different, but the end result is the same. Ultimately this should be the goal of any educator at the elementary or secondary level. Hopefully this leads to an adult who will access their prior knowledge, act upon it and then reflect on the meaning. My goal is for this process to begin in high school and to continue for the rest of their lives. It can be best described by Mortimer Alder in Reforming Education as writes, “I would hope that somehow the feast of knowledge and the excitement of ideas would be made attractive to them, so that when they left school, they would want to go on learning. In school they must be given, not learning, for that cannot be done, but the skills of learning and the wish to learn, so that in adult life they will want to go on learning and will have the skills to use in the process” (Alder, 1977, p. 249). Any educator would be pleased with that. 

References 

Alder, M.J. (1977). Reforming education: The schooling of a people and their education beyond schooling. Boulder:  Westview Press. 

Chapin, D. (2009). Master teachers: Making a difference on the edge of chaos. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Education. 

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier Books. 

Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. School Journal, 54, 77-80. 

Glassman, M. (2001). Dewey and Vygotsky: Society, experience, and inquiry in educational practice. Educational Researcher, 30 (4), 3-14. 

The International Commission on the Apostolate of Jesuit Education. (1994). Ignatian pedagogy: A practical approach. Washington , DC: JSEA. 

Kort, B. & Reilly, R. (2002). Restructuring educational pedagogy: A model for deep change. The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

O’Neal, N. (2003). The Life of St. Ignatius of Loyola. 

Palmer, J.A. (Ed.). (2001). Fifty modern thinkers on education: From Piaget to the present. New York: Routledge. 

Reagan, T. (1996). Non-western educational traditions: Alternative approaches to educational thought and practice. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.