Troublemakers

Labels irk the heck out of me.

The fact that we label students as "troublemakers" really irritates me, even though I've done it myself.

I've been waiting (why have I been waiting?) to read this one for a bit, and it did not disappoint, as I read it in two days...

The canary and cage on the front have two meanings. The most obvious is from Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and the less obvious is the one that distressed me the most. Miners used to take canaries down in the mines with them, as they served as warnings about the air quality. If a canary were to die, the miners had to get out. When a child is singing loudly, we need to heed that as a warning that something is wrong in this classroom. Most likely, it's the imbalance of power.

Most of what Carla Shalaby shares is about a child's need to feel free - to feel as if they're in some sort of control - to feel HUMAN.

The four students the author chose to focus on were in what seemed to me GREAT schools. She asked the principal to share two teachers of high caliber. And to those teachers, she asked, "Who of your students is the most troublesome?" These are the four she shadowed for a bit - at school, and when possible, at home. What I found kind of amusing and kind of sad is that the behaviors these four first graders exhibited were some of the very same behaviors I see in some seventh graders.

I can see and understand the messages she shares about the young black students not having any adults at school to look to for models. I can see how schools are conforming students to ... basically act white. When I think of my own students, the ones that I lose sleep over happen to be white. My school has a high white population (and I, too, am white). The author is upset about students' exclusion to a different part of the room or a different room altogether. I do not worry about physically excluding students, but I may exclude them unintentionally if I call them out on something in front of the entire class.

What I was really struck by was the conformity we expect of our students.

The author points out that educators want compliance because that's what's expected in schools. That's how we can get our lessons across, and that's how the school culture simply IS.

While she was sharing the stories of the four seven-year-olds, I couldn't help but think of my own students, and I was reminded of a few things:

• Students really don't have much control at school, especially compared to at home. No matter how much we think we have student-directed learning or choice or voice, this book forced me to consider how much I actually control, and how much the school culture actually dictates.
• Many students learn that the culture of school is to listen and obey.
• Some students are simply just being themselves. Their personalities may differ from those of the majority of the class, or else the majority has figured out it's safer to hide or squash their true personalities at school.
• "Different" is often perceived as causing trouble.
• Many (most?) children have a natural tendency to want to learn. What do we do at school that dissolves that initiative? We have a curriculum to teach. I wonder how many times our curriculum is not something each child would choose to learn each day...
• Teachers often pigeonhole children into doing what we do, and doing it how we do it.
• We may have 25 students in class. We don't always make the time to help answer questions from inquisitive minds, and yet we encourage them to be inquisitive. We want them to think for themselves, and when they do, it can cause a disturbance. We want them to be independent, but only under our parameters.
• We need to listen to individual students.
• We need to get to know our students even more.
• We need to let them know when we are proud of them.
• We need to notice and name the good they do.
• We need to see them (or imagine them) outside of school - how does what they're doing in school look like outside of school? Might what they're doing actually help them somehow outside of the school setting?
• Stop labeling students! Making trouble is a verb - not a noun. It's not something to fix. It's something to explore.
• Just because a student is a "good student" does not mean that he or she will succeed outside of school. Compliance does not always equal success. We put so many limits on students in school - how will they succeed when they're left on their own? We want children to find their identities, to figure out their strengths, to be confident, to have a voice in decisions... We need to give them the room to do so - without fear of punishment, or worse, exclusion.

At the end of the book, I still wanted MORE. I wish I could copy the entire conclusion and her note to teachers here. Instead, this will be your advertisement to read this book if you have not yet. The author does not solve our problems with these so-called "troublemakers." She leaves it to us and our students. I have a tiny idea of what I can do when I return to school after this two-week break, and yet I know my students will have to help me figure it out. They have many more ideas than I ever will, and maybe we can get to the root of what they need from me.

My favorite quote: 

How stressful it must be to be a young person in our schools! How unsafe and frightening it must be to wonder - as you witness the next punishment and rejection of one of your peers - if you will be next. That kind of conditional acceptance, subjective belonging, contingent care, must feel terribly threatening to children, whom we know are biologically wired to make illogical choices as their brains continue to develop. They make mistakes and they make bad decisions - don't we all? Especially when we are stressed, feeling unsafe, and suffering?

Learning Conferences - A Reading Snippet

At the end of each quarter, during our one-on-one conferences, I learn so many great tidbits from my scholars. This past week (I still have three days of conferring left), I learned that I STILL have to work on changing my vocabulary.  Here was how the conversation went after we talked about her eight point growth for her MAP assessment:

T = teacher / me       S = student

T - Eight points is further than what they predicted would be your score. How did you do on our own class tests?
S - Huh?
T - How did you do on our quizzes in ELA?
S - What? You mean our comprehension checks? Those?
T - (Chuckling, as I realized in my mind they are still called "quizzes," even though we call them "comprehension checks" each time we discuss them this year!! I even wrote about them earlier this year.)

I don't remember how I responded. I only remember that I was embarrassed. Are "comprehension checks" still "quizzes"? I had to look up the word...

Checking for comprehension through brief questions... Yes, I suppose it still IS a quiz. Who am I kidding, calling it a "comprehension check?" No one. I knew this going into it. HOWEVER... This name change helps my students stay calm about their score. It helps them see that this is a check of their comprehension of this ONE passage. It is not a label that will stick with them. When I go one step further to separate out the categories into literal and inferential questions, then we get even MORE information about their comprehension, and we can set goals to minimize confusion for the future.

Here were two goals students could choose from if they were having difficulty with their comprehension:
To improve with literal questions - Find the answer directly in the text and highlight it.
To improve with inferential questions - Find at least two clues to the answer you choose. If you cannot find two clues, you most likely have not chosen the answer yet.

During our conferences this quarter, students were able to use arguments such as, "My last three scores are my best, because I was really focusing on the text and finding the answers there." Or, "I have improved from first quarter to this quarter, because now I can prove that I understand more inferential questions than I have before." I love how our language has shifted over the past year. I love that the conversations are now about learning, and not about letters or numbers. I'll have to remember this feeling and look at it as a goal once a new batch of learners comes my way in August!

The Marble Theory

I finished Paul Solarz's Learn Like a Pirate: Empower your students to collaborate, lead and succeed over a month ago, I believe. It's time to blog about one idea on pages 63-64 that I MUST implement next year within the first week... The Marble Theory.

We've all got these students...
     ...those who do well in our class...
          ...and those who don't do so well in our class.

And the students notice, too. Some egos become more inflated, and others more deflated as the year goes on. I hope, that the more time I spend on Genius Hour-type activities, the more students see that ALL students are skilled, and in many different ways. How do I share this idea with something tangible? How can I embed this idea in the minds of 12-13 year olds? Paul shares this great idea...

"Some students come into my classroom with very low self-esteem, due to low grades or poor performance in school. Others believe they are better than their peers because of past success in school. My goal with Marble Theory is to level the playing field. I want my students to realize that we are all equals with amazing gifts, talents, and interests. No one is better than anyone else. No one is worse. Once they understand we are all equals, increased respect leads to improved collaboration.

The Marble Theory states that we are all born with the same number of marbles in our brains. When we are born, these marbles are just in a big pile, but over time we allocate these marbles into cups. The cups represent our skills, talents, and abilities. We can have as many cups as we need and these cups are extremely specialized. For example, we don't have a cup for reading abilities. Instead, we have several cups for reading: one dedicated to decoding, one for literal comprehension, one for inferential comprehension, one for oral reading fluency, etc. But we also have cups dedicated to dribbling a basketball, drawing horses, telling jokes, and playing the flute.

In school, teachers usually spend time evaluating how many marbles students have in their academic cups, causing children to falsely assume that grades determine how intelligent they are. Kids who have many marbles in their cups dedicated to math, reading, writing, spelling, science, and social studies become known as the "smart kids." Children who have fewer marbles in those cups but more in their musical, athletic, interpersonal, or creative cups are not given the same accolades.

Quote used w/permission

I contend that we are all equal in terms of intelligence and that intelligence needs to be measured differently. Because of grades and report cards, students learn to think of themselves as smart or dumb. Low grades do little more than disappoint and discourage students. High grades often create perfectionists and cause children to become extrinsically motivated. ... "

I would love for students to recognize just where their talents lie. In what "cups" do they believe they have the most and the fewest skills? I will ask students to figure this out in some way. My dream would be to try this with actual Dixie cups and marbles. I don't believe I can afford as many as I'd like, and I'm not really THAT ambitious, so I'll resort to a blank sheet of paper, circle templates (lids off milk cartons) and hole punches - 100 "holes" for each of my 70 students. (I wonder - is there a spray glue students can use to just stick it all on when they're done placing them? Or... should this one be an activity they work on at home??) If the holes don't get punched (a lunch bunch project??), we can resort to dots using markers. These charts can be the start of our "Resident Expert Wall of Fame," where we recognize each other's talents/skills/genius. Heck, this activity can even be part of Dot Day around September 15th!

Update: A high school teacher shares her day with The Marble Theory in this post.