You can teach a dog to do just about anything, but you’ve got to get him to

sit down and shut up first.

Those words were told me by my father who credited his father as the original source.  Having announced my intention to follow in my father’s footsteps as a parochial school teacher at age eight, my opinions of how to manage a classroom began to be shaped at an early age with sentences similar to this one.  Because I attended a small, parochial school in a small, northern California town, I had the, what is now, unique experience of having my father for a teacher not one, but three years in a row (grades 6, 7, and 8), so I had first hand experience seeing how what has become known as The Dog Theory in my family could be implemented in the educational process. Those three late elementary years, together with others previous to them, formed the beginning of a theoretical journey than culminated in a point of epiphany and radical change after reading Learning Circles by Collay and The Educational Imagination by Eisner. What follows is the narrative of that journey.  For a visual of the same journey click here.

Growing up as a Baby Boomer meant that the classroom experience was primarily homogeneous and teacher-directed. All classrooms emptied into a common hallway that led to the outside.  Elementary grade classrooms had desks that were bolted to the ground, which made any kind of grouping physically impossible. Daily schedules were followed without fail, and entire grades moved through each lesson at the same pace and at the same time. Children could, without exaggeration, say that if its 10:30, then we must be having reading.  Students were required to conform to the curriculum rather than vice versa. Children with learning and/or behavior difficulties, unless extreme, were labeled as either unruly or bad.  Teachers gave letter grades at all grade levels. These grades were determined, nearly exclusively, through what was written on paper and turned in. Pencils, books, and paper were the assessment tools of the time.

Moving on to high school, the physical appearance of the classrooms remained fundamentally the same; desks were still in rows, and the teacher was standing in front of the students lecturing about the subject or concept of the day. As in the elementary grades, letter grades were determined, primarily, by written assignments. Grouping was done based upon a combination of ability and achievement. Classes were divided into “X”, “Y”, and “Z” levels. Those in “X” level expected to go on to college, while those in “Z” level classes were offered career assistance in manual labor fields.

The mid sixties brought with them a cultural upheaval in many, if not all, parts of the world. The Beatles debuted on Ed Sullivan in 1964; 1966 became known as the Summer of Love in San Francisco; and 1967 was the Summer of Spring in Prague. Experiments and expressions of personal freedom extended into the educational sphere as well. College professors in teacher preparatory courses espoused teaching techniques that focused on student choice and looser classroom structure.

I walked into an eighth grade classroom with 37 students in September 1972. I recall my first words to them being something like: Hi, I’m Mr. Schmidt, but you can probably call me Wayne; whatever you’re more comfortable with. I know that you’re going to enjoy my class; I’m going to do things differently than you’re used to. I know you all really want to learn, so I’m going to kind of turn you loose to learn. The phrase loose to learn is a quote. And there may have been a groovy, or far out  sprinkled throughout as well. In spite of counsel to the contrary, I was convinced that this was the new and better way to structure a classroom.

Eleven days later, I walked in to the room for what was the beginning of the third week of school and said, OK, last Friday there were three assignments due, and no one turned in any of them. I’m tired of spending too much time telling you all to get to work or to listen to instructions. So, as of today, I’m in charge in the room. Be prepared to sit down, be quiet, and work.

And that was it. I joined the countless thousands of other teacher across the country who conducted instruction in nearly the exact same manner as they had been instructed. My classroom desks were in rows. Curriculum, instruction, and assessment imitated my own educational experience and followed The Dog Theory. The more I read about new learning theories, the more I recalled my first ten days of teaching and the more I dismissed them.  I heard myself saying that the style of education I had received had been just fine for me, so it should work well for this generation as well. While teachers and administrators alike may never have uttered that thought verbally, they did in the way they built schools and organized classrooms. My current school was built in 2001. The pictures here were taken last week.

The Basic School, which I read as part of the DELTA program, was the beginning of a gradual transformation. For the first time, it seemed to me that doing things in a radically different way seemed to make sense. Heterogeneous, grade level, achievement level groupings were all brought into the fore and presented as not just the way things had been done, but rather as the way that students could and would improve their achievement.  Accepted forms of assessment were questioned, and in my mind, often found wanting. I found that more and more, I was wishing that I had done it differently when I was teaching.

But questions remained. The biggest ones were How?   How can these diverse forms of instruction and assessment be incorporated into the physical structure of my school building? How can we schedule this?  How do I convince teachers this will work? How do we convince parents? These are parents who often send their children to our school to receive what is known as a traditional education. The biggest sell job still had to be me.  I taught a period of sixth grade social studies every afternoon and found that, day after day, I was still teaching the same way I had taught when I was a full-time teacher.

Then, what seemed like an unrelated event happened. The School Board asked me to look into starting a foreign language program. However, their commitment to the idea did not have budget, so I was left to begin a program with volunteers doing the teaching.  To compound the difficulties, the Board decided that since the program was to be taught by volunteers, and since it was an experiment of sorts, this portion of the curriculum should not be placed on equal footing with the other parts. Hence came the decision to have foreign language for two thirty minute periods per week. To the Board and to the parents alike, this seemed a near perfect venture.  With nothing to gain and little to lose (my opinion of failure not withstanding) the Spanish program got off to a flying start.

Within weeks, the Spanish teacher was frustrated at the lack of a consistent recall the students were experiencing. She came to my office expressing doubt with the effort the students were giving to the class.  Classes met each Monday and Friday, so the consistent reinforcement of knowledge was not taking place. In addition, many holidays fall on either a Monday or a Friday, so often students would go a week without having any reinforcement to their Spanish presentation. Parents became disenchanted with Spanish when they saw the grades their children were bringing home on homework, tests, and report cards. By spring, everyone recognized that the program was a failure and that it would not be continued in that format in the future.

As the year concluded, I announced to the teachers that Any subject worth having is worth having three times a week. Teaching a subject three times a week for twenty minutes is better than teaching it twice for thirty. Those sentences would later come back to haunt me in a most positive sense.

Meanwhile, Kliebard’s book The Struggle for the American Curriculum dedicated a significant portion of its pages to John Dewey. Without saying as much, Kliebard hails Dewey as the foremost educator in the American history; Dewey, the father of teaching across the curriculum. The inroads begun with The Basic School got deeper and I found much of Dewey’s educational theory appealing. But the questions of How cited above remained.

August brought with it the beginning of a new school year. The teachers and I spent two days at a retreat in Tucson looking into parts of our educational process that we had never looked at before. I made the statement again about having subjects three times per week and was asked to justify it, which I did using the Spanish curriculum lessons learned the year before.

As I’m sure most principals do, I ask to see and approved teachers’ schedules within the first couple weeks of school. Those early days of a new school year often bring modifications in daily routines that may or may not be able to be seen when first putting periods to paper. This year, however, was different. Three teachers came into my office, prospective schedules in hand. In some cases, the number of erasures on the paper had worn a hole in the page, lines that had once been clearly marked had dimmed into what looked like faded scribbles made by a child.  The sense of frustration in voices that said, I can’t do it. I can’t fit all the subjects in as often as you want me to. With that, I began to sense myself going back to where and who I had been when I was teaching. All learned from Dewey and The Basic School slowly drifting away.

Eisner talks in his book about The Null Curriculum. He says that what we don’t teach is equally as important as what we do teach. After leaving class the night after we discussed that portion of the readings, I realized that we don’t teach that each subject has finite boundaries, but we act it. We don’t teach that our usefulness for math ends at the end of the period, but we act it. We don’t teach that understanding sentence sense and the basics of writing occupies only a portion of our day, but we act it. And it became clear. We need to blur the lines of curriculum; and now I knew how.

The next morning I went into the room of my third grade teacher and told her that there is no reason that having the students write the answers to their social studies questions in complete sentences could not be both language and social studies for the day. Using a science period to study and write about a bird would be both language and science. And if the study of birds is done on the computer, then it would constitute computer time as well. Writing a story using spelling words doubles how the assignment is used. 

So what does this mean as teachers move through their day? Assessment is not based completely on what happens in a 30-40 minute period; its lines blur throughout the day as students see skill learned in one subject being applicable to what happens in another at another portion of the day or having three subjects at once.  There is freedom from the Excel designed, block schedule. My father’s principal once told him if your schedule says that you’re having math at 10:30, when I come in your room at 10:30, you better be having math. It means that students receive more reinforcement for concepts taught and can see application of knowledge presented.

So, now what? The first major decision springing from this new direction in student assessment happened two weeks ago. At a PTL meeting a parent spent several minutes praising the virtue of the Accelerated Reader program.  I’m quite sure that AR has been implemented in many schools with much success (The public school around the corner from us announced that since it instituted the AR program, the number of books checked out from the library has doubled.). Yet as I looked at what AR is – read a book, take a primarily comprehension test, get a grade – it seemed fundamentally contradictory to the direction we were going as a school. We talked about it at a faculty meeting and agreed with unanimity that we would not pursue adopting the AR program in our school.

Teachers are comfortable with what they do during a day. I’ve seen the number of teachers eating lunch in the lounge grow as they find they’ve got a couple minutes during the day to sit and visit with one another. At faculty meeting Monday morning, everyone agreed that he or she had all “stepped it up” this year, but that it’s really been worth it. Parents are commenting that children are learning and are excited about what’s happening in school. We’ve established a direction that seems to be fundamentally promising.

However, reality does set in at some point, and this is America in the year 2002. No Child Left Behind is in place, standards based assessment is common-place. So, the final piece of this puzzle will be put in place in the spring when we get out test scores back. If AR seems fundamentally opposed to where we’re going, then so does high stakes testing. Yet it’s reality, and we will live in it and with it. I am confident that we will meet or exceed achievement levels and will move more fully into this instruction and assessment paradigm in the future.

Yet this shift in assessment paradigm does not stand alone in the school.  Simultaneous to this examination of assessment is the designing of a teacher performance review tool. Teachers receive two performance reviews per year, and what will be considered successful instruction on the performance review depends largely on what its definition is.

Three years ago, I chose to become the principal of a school in its second year of existence. My primary reason for making this choice was the challenge of laying the foundation of a school that will be educating children for many years to come. I stand at the doorway of what is, without a doubt, one of those defining moments.  I am thankful that this moment of decision will not be guided by some good feeling or new trend du jour but on research, reading and discussion.

The process continues.....

Click here for the continuation.