Education

Just One Example Of What Is Wrong In Education

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

Believe me I have many more than just one, but there is one particular thing that bothers me and that is the misappropriation of proven techniques for learning.  It is really frustrating to see professionals and whole schools say they are doing “reading workshop,” for example, and then nothing they do in class really fits that model except for….well the reading part.

I know good teaching.  I am myself a great teacher (this is me being honest) and I know great teaching.  I work with pre-service teachers to help them become better teachers.  I am not say that these teachers are lazy or inept or that the schools are lazy or lack real leadership–that is a blanket statement and I don’t think it is as simple as that.  While I think this might play a role, what plays a larger role is the bastardization of research-based great practice.  Reading and writing workshop models are what work and often work best for the teaching of critical thinking and the construction of learning.

I have been observing two reading teachers who use the “workshop” model and I say that loosely because there are many things they do that are not and can’t be called reading workshop.  Reading workshop is pretty specific (as is all good teaching) but just to call it workshop doesn’t make it workshop and this irritates me and make me want to scream from the rooftops “This isn’t the way you do it–you are cheating these kids of the education they deserve, need and are expected to get.”  But I can’t do that. That is not why I am here–I am not here to evaluate teaching and to tell the school they are doing it wrong.  I wish I was, I wish I could.  I could fix this–and maybe this make me a hypocrite–but my dissertation rests on me not intervening in the teaching.  You don’t just give kids books, turn on a timer and have them read–that is not reading workshop–that is SSR.

Reading workshop requires thinking and keeping a reading journal, and/or using sticky notes to ask questions of the text and to make predictions–to react to what someone did, said or experienced.  Reading workshop is about teachings students how to interact with texts.  Not just to read and keep track of their reading minutes.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I think that students should be able to read in school for fun and not always as work–but in class for reading workshop–they should be working.  They have many other opportunities to read for pleasure build into their school day and I think that is awesome.  Too often schools don’t focus enough on nurturing a love for reading; but there needs to be a balance between the two.  Just reading doesn’t help students to develop critical reading or thinking skills.

I read very differently depending on the purpose of my reading–shouldn’t students be taught how to determine the purpose of their reading? All reading isn’t just for fun.  When they get to their social studies class or their science class or to high school, they are going to be expected to know how to read texts for different purposes.  I am not saying that this responsibility falls onto the reading teacher or English teacher, but how to read in English class needs to be addressed and taught and just giving kids books doesn’t do that.

I think this irritates me most, because this is happening in an urban school that struggles with student achievement and it seems to me that this is a bit of a cop out on teaching.  These students need to be pushed and challenged and taught–not just left to their own desire to push themselves.  Yet I hear how students are able to do things, they don’t do homework, etc.  Well give them something meaningful and teach them why it’s meaningful.

What this all leads to is the false feeling that we are doing the right thing because of what we label something.  Teachers and administrators needs to hold each other accountable to make sure teaching practices are being implemented the way they are needed and intended to be implemented.    Students deserve us all working at our best and with their best interest at heart–not what is easiest.

What School Ruins

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I am teaching junior level comp this semester at the University where I work and am finishing my PhD.  Because I like to be really busy, I am also spending two days a week each week observing 4 teachers and an noting how they teaching thinking, etc for my dissertation.  Two of the teachers I am observing are reading teachers and two are writing teachers.  How teachers teaching thinking is something that I am very interested in and something I don’t think schools do a good enough job of.  I believe that too often school is what the adults want and not what the students need.

Way back over 10 years ago, I wrote a senior thesis investigating how school kills the desire and love of reading in kids.  I read hundreds of literacy autobiographies written by teachers about their early love of reading and often how school killed that love for them.  This is something that has stayed with me and as a teacher, I tried to remember this as I didn’t want to kill my students love for reading, I wanted to ignite it.  Did I always succeed?  No.  Did I fall into the trap of this is good literature and you should read it?  Yes–most notably with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  Did my students like it?  Not so much.  Did I make it interesting?  I tried.  Did I learn from it?  Yes.  Did my students learn from it?  Absolutely.

I love reading and have always been a reader–but that is nothing that school did for me.  I was the kid who was always reading a book hidden behind my textbook or in my lap (or sometimes passing notes–because so often school was boring).  I don’t remember anything I read in school–except Lord of the Flies.  I don’t remember it because of what we did in class with the book–but because the characters stuck with me.  I connected with them in may ways.  I was lucky that I already had a love for reading when I was in school, because I do know that school didn’t do anything to instill in me a love for reading.

What is point, you wonder?  Well, back to the Junior composition classes I am teaching.  The students turned in their first reading responses to me and the theme was consistent in many of them–“school made them hate reading.”  It makes me sad.  One student wrote that he hated the reading because it was often without point and purpose and seemed pointless to just write about a character and that it would have been much more interesting if he was able to write about what he thought and that if he had to write about what he thought he would have had incentive to do the reading but when he was just asked basic info–there was no incentive to do the reading.  Others wrote of their desire to read being killed by reading books that they didn’t enjoy and or books that they could not connect to.  They wanted to read books that were interesting to them.  They wanted to read–but they hated what they were asked to read.

I am of the belief that reading is reading and that any reading is good.  As a teacher, I believe that we can teach students how to think with nearly any piece of writing–they don’t have to be canonical texts.  The one thing that stands out to me regarding this is that the students don’t have a voice.  That the teachers are at the center.  The content is at the center and students are also the passive participants in their own education.

On the flip side, I am doing my doctoral research at a school and the students are clearly at the center in many ways–especially in terms of reading.  Teachers (especially English Language Arts) clearly want to instill/foster a love for reading in the students.  I applaud that.  But then I find myself questioning where the thinking is?  Reading for enjoyment is great and something we should encourage, but we need to also be teaching our students to think as well.  I think that is the problem in our educational system.  There needs to be a balance.  Student-centered does not mean free-choice.  It means that the students are the ones doing the thinking and creating the meaning.

School should be a place that gives students what they need and to encourage students to solve problems and be actively engaged in their own learning.  How do we get there?

 

Stealing Their Hope, Damning Their Future

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 3 Comments

Last night, I was riveted by Dan Rather’s lastest HDNet show episode “A National Disgrace.”  It’s an expose on the Detroit public schools.  I only caught the last hour on TV last night but will watch the rest of it today on iTunes.  As an educator, this show made me cry.  The one student that they chronicle (that you will see in the clip) is representative of generation after generation of students whose future has been stolen.  Whose hope has been thrown away.  Whose dreams have been smothered.  I know this sounds harsh, but it is time that we are honest about the schools who serve our urban poor.  This is a population with no voice and no power.  This is a population that continues to grow and who we continue to ignore.

Deana (in the above clip) was lucky.  The camera men and production staff were heartbroken for her–she wanted to learn; she wanted to succeed.  They secured tutors for her and helped her with her college applications and explained her financial options (Rather remarks that it is nothing more than a guidance counselor would do) and she got into a four-year college–the first in her family.  This is quite a feat for someone who went to a district where teachers routinely don’t show up and kids can sit in classes without teachers for weeks and weeks and where only ~25% of students graduate high school.

As I was watching this,  I realized this report isn’t just about Detroit Public Schools.  This report is about every urban district and every school that we allow to steal our children’s future.  These are our children.  As a society, we cannot allow this to continue.  We can’t operate from the mindset that “my kids aren’t in those schools, so it doesn’t effect me.”   Because it does effect us.  It affects our countries ability to compete globally.  As our minority populations grow and our white population decreases, our educated class dwindles.  We can’t ignore the education that our poor and minority students aren’t getting.  No longer can we sit by and see these populations as something that can be thrown away.  No longer can we say–“pass them and let the world fail them.”  It is criminal what happens in our urban schools.  I know this first hand.  I taught in urban schools and I supervise student teachers in my own urban district.  I can tell you that what Rather exposes here is reality.  We can’t turn a blind eye.  We are letting generation after generation be damned to a life they don’t deserve.

I have seen teachers who show movies every day of the school year so they can sleep. I have seen teachers do nothing but assign worksheets so they could not teach.  I have seen teachers give up on students because it was too much trouble to care.  We can’t sit by and let this happen.  My kids are in private school and I have said before how lucky we are that it’s a choice and that we sacrifice a great deal to spend that money.  There are more families than not who don’t have that choice.  I shouldn’t have to make that choice for my kids.  If I didn’t live in the city, then I would have different choices.  But I choose to work in urban schools to make a difference.  Every child deserves a quality education.  Every child deserves to reach their potential and to know what their potential is.  Every child deserves adults who nurture them and want to teach them.  It makes me cringe.  It makes me sad.

So often it is our urban schools who get all the attention, but our rural schools face the same problems.  While I argue that a huge piece of this unequal education system we have is tied to race, the other huge piece of it is tied to socioeconomic status.  The poor also have no voice and by poor, I mean people who live in under-developed countrysides who might have great personal resources but as a community they have no status or leverage.

Education in our country is political and about power and it shouldn’t be (just like Healthcare shouldn’t be–that’s another post).  These are kids lives that are being played with and that isn’t fair.  Education needs to put children first and so many of our policies and choices have nothing to do with children and everything to do with the adults.  We can’t wait.  Everyday that goes by that we don’t face head on and fix this problem in the best interest of kids, another generation is doomed to fail and another piece of our economy disappears forever.  The time to act is now.

http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#gahRgreZWgI

Rich Kids Get Taught, Poor Kids Get Tested

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 3 Comments

This idea has been rumbling around my head for years.  As I continue the preliminary work on my dissertation, mentor urban high school teachers and work with charter schools, I find this to be more and more true.  Testing has become the new “reform” movement in urban education.  And not just annual testing–but every 6 week testing.  As a researcher, I can appreciate the need/desire for data.  As a teacher, I appreciate the need for data.  It is the means by which we gauge how our students are doing.  But it has to be contextualized.  When we test just to test there is no context for the student and without context and prior knowledge, the test and its questions are meaningless.

Tests and assessments of where students are and how they are doing, should be formative and not standardized.  This isn’t to say that standardized tests don’t have a place at the table, but they should be the only guests invited.  Too often they are the only guests in urban schools, leaving our poor and too often minority kids being tested instead of taught.  This focus on testing also limits the type of education they are exposed to and leads to a curriculum that is grounded in test prep benchmarks and not grounded in what is good for kids.  There are so many reasons why this irritates me and one of them is that it prevents me from sending my kids to public schools in the city where I live.  There are no options available, charter or traditional, that do not have a central focus on testing and measuring, that I can send my kids to.  This isn’t to say that some of these schools whose central standard of evaluation is testing, do not offer a decent education for kids, but the level of education is dictated and restricted by the testing and doesn’t fit with my kids needs or my philosophy of education.

I hate that there aren’t public school options that mirror my own educational philosophy in my city.  The suburban schools are better on so many levels–because the tests are just part of what happens and most only use the state standardized test and that test doesn’t dictate content or experience.  I also am irritated that almost every new school that opens follows this testing model as though it is the only urban reform that works. It is the easiest urban reform, but not the only one.  I long for a new public school to open that actually thinks about how kids learn and not how to best test kids. If there was a public school option that actually put kids learning first and testing at the end of the line, I would stop paying $14k a year per kid for private school.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that students need to be assessed.  We must know where our students are strong and where they are weak, but there are many other ways to assess a student beyond a nationally normed standardized test.  My son is assessed regularly and both of his teachers can tell me at any time where he is excelling and where he is struggling and his school does not use standardized tests and doesn’t have textbooks–aside from Math starting in 5th grade.  The school produces National Merit Scholars (5 this year).  Yes the school is made up of middle-class and upper-middle class families.  But I argue that I want the exact same things for my kids that all parents want for their kids–a great education.  I want the same thing for my kids that I believe every kids deserves.

The education I have chosen for my kids is not for every child.  I think that is why choice is so important.  Sure as new schools open, they are giving parents a choice but not the level of choice that parents needs.  Some kids need more hands on learning, some kids need more freedom, some kids need strict structure.  We have to have choices, but choice for choice sake isn’t enough.  We need real choices.  We need philosophical choices.  We need pedagogical choices.  We need to work with parents to allow them to pick the best environment for their children.

We need a revolution in education lead by educators and parents.  Not by master marketers,  businessmen and politicians.  Choice must be part of it, but it has to be real choice that offers something different.  Something better.  Something that puts kids first.  We can argue that the good models are the restrictive, extended day charter schools that focus on testing.  But where is the something different to compare them too?  One size does not fit all and if this is the only road we are going to explore, we will end up exactly where we are now, wondering what the answer is and how we fix our educational system.

Crap–I’m going to have to start my own flippin school.