Working in public schools is hard work. Almost every day, headlines about the failures of public schools and the demoralization of teachers fill my news feed. In a time when teacher and substitute shortages mean that every day begins with the challenge of simply staffing each classroom, how can I or any of the other passionate educators in our public schools seriously pursue innovative teaching or humanizing reforms to our complicated systems?
It’s a big ask to expect educators to reform and innovate in complex systems when we’re busy compensating for the enormous gaps in foundational human and economic resources. Maslow suggested in his “hierarchy of needs” that humans can’t seek higher levels of cognitive or moral problem-solving moral development when our basic survival needs aren’t met, and although plenty have challenged Maslow’s emphasis on hierarchy, I can’t stop Maslow’s pyramid from entering my mind on days when we have seven substitute jobs unfilled or when I struggle to walk through a classroom because it’s overstuffed with 35 students and desks.
Yes, it’s easy to get depressed working in public schools in a time of scarcity.
But. Still. Yes. There are moments of hope and glimmers of glory to hold onto. Yes, even in these tough times, on many days it’s the small wins that get me through the day and keep me coming back. And yes, sometimes those same small wins depress me further because I see how many more small things lie between today’s wins and the kind of public school reform I—and so many students and teachers—dream of and deserve.
But this post is about a day when the small wins kept me going and made my day.
When I have a good day as an instructional coach, when I sit down at the end of the day feeling invigorated, it’s usually because of conversations with teachers around small steps that they can take to humanize teaching and learning for themselves and their students. Or, it’s because of time I spend in classrooms focusing on the natural intelligence and beauty in our young people. Small wins like these from a Monday not too long ago.
Small win #1: A picture is worth a thousand questions
At the start of a meeting with a group of science teachers, two teachers voiced their frustration about that morning’s lesson. When a teacher asked her students what they knew about carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, “It was dead silent. They just stared at me. It took forever to pull anything out of them.” They must know something, the teachers said, yet the students couldn’t couldn’t seem to access what they had learned in previous units, classes, or life experiences.
As the meeting continued on to other topics, I looked through the teacher’s slides and shared materials folder to see how they had posed their questions and invited students to surface their prior knowledge. I found a chart with three questions for each type of macromolecule:
- What do you know about [carbohydrates, proteins, or lipids]?
- What kinds of foods are they found in?
- How do they benefit the body?
Sometimes as teachers, we all forget what it’s like to not be an expert in our discipline, to not fluently speak the language of the discipline. In momments like these, part of my job as an instructional coach and research partner is to say, “If it would help me as a 43-year-old citizen who hasn’t studied biology since a college freshman human biology class in 1998, it might also help our students if we…” or “My non-science brain wants more information about…”
With that in mind, I found pictures of foods containing carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids elsewhere in the teachers’ instructional materials, and I added them to a slide on their shared slide deck. At the end of the meeting I circled back to share my idea with teachers that, for me as a non-scienctist, the words carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins don’t trigger as much background knowledge as pictures of foods containing them might. Their students might surface background knowledge more readily if they showed them the three pictures and asked them to label which image of foods were most associated with carbs, lipids, or proteins. Then, they might ask them specifically to think back to health classes, science classes, and things they’ve picked up in the media or from doctors or their families about the benefits of each different kind of foods.
It seems like—and it is—a small thing to remind teachers to use visual cues to connect with students’ schema. These are science teachers who understand how they brain works, so they know that connecting with prior knowledge and using multimodal cues are important for student learning. But when these overtaxed teachers are also subbing during their free periods, trying to communicate with over 150 students and their families, playing whack-a-mole with the day’s crises, and trying to fit meaningful collaboration into the few spare minutes they have each day, it’s no small task to plan ways to activate students’ prior knowledge. When we’re operating in a scarcity mindset of schooling, it is so hard to juggle all the things we know are good for students all the time. These teachers were no doubt feeling the time pressures of the end of the semester looming, and the pressure to finish this learning progression before the holiday break. When I suggested the pictures, the teachers’ response was positive, with a bit of “Of course that would help!” mixed in.
For me, this small win in a Monday meeting helped me feel like a useful persepctive bridge between my stressed colleagues’ need to “cover” the learning targets about proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates and their need to connect with and affirm their students’ existing prior knowledge. It was about focusing on the small things we can do together, even in times of educational scarcity that can feel overwhelming and exhausting.
Small win #2: Seeing brilliance in students
As so often happens, one small win leads to another. That afternoon, as I continued to think about the science teachers’ frustrations and their students’ inability voice prior knowledge in response to their current approaches to questions, I spent time in visiting two of these science teacher’s classrooms. With this bug about scaffolding and schema in my mind, I listened to my colleagues ask questions of their students. As I watched these hard-working teachers reach out using their science vocabulary, their research-based instructional practices, and their genuine care for their students, I also watched a variety of students and their responses.
I saw some students with their heads down, others with their heads up but their mouths silent, others with headphones in or phones out, others walking in late with a practiced air of apathy. And though in the teacher meeting earlier that day, my colleagues had felt disheartened beause students were silent in response to their questions about prior knowledge, watching these students, I thought about that silence differently.
As I looked at the young man who remained silent while he watched his teacher’s every move, tracked the responses from his classmates, indepedently complete work at a high level, and ignored the kid next to him who was on his phone, I wondered what kept him silent. Maybe he’s a student who learns better through listening, maybe I caught him on a quiet day, or maybe he would speak up in just a few minutes. But I also wondered whether this young man—or another in the room—might hold a sincere but erroneous belief that he has no useful knowledge or experience in his head, heart, and life that could allow him to particiapte in the class.
Unfortunately, too many of our students see no connection between the knowledge and experiences in their lives and the knowledge that counts in school. These students might truly believe that there is no place for them or their voices in our schools. And so what looks like apathy, hostility, or ignorance may be instead a tragic and damaging failure to communicate across cultural, generational, racial, experiencial, linguistic, social, or other modes of meaning-making. Watching this silent but attentive young man made me think about how educators can leverage culturally sustaining pedagogies to cultivate students’ genius, as Dr. Muhammad writes, and encourage them to be their ratchetdmic selves, as Dr. Emdin writes.
I turned to observe another student, a young woman who eagerly shouted out an answer—or three—to every question the teacher asked. Most of her answers were only tangentially related to the question, but she kept trying, tossing out another possible response, waiting for the approving “Yes, you’re right!” from her teacher. Instead, she kept getting a variations of “Not quite…” responses from her teacher. The tilted head, the “Well…”, the “That’s part of it…”, the pointed look at another student who might have the right answer.
This young woman was seeking approval more than she was seeking deep thought about the questions her teacher was asking. I thought about all the teachers and questions that came before this interaction that had taught her that school was a guesssing game and the prize was a correct answer. I started thinking about how I could partner with this young woman’s teachers to help them ask questions that go beyond right or wrong answers and to help this student and her peers’ feel comfortable thinking and processing rather than guessing. I started calling up my mental library of resources about going beyond the initiate-reply-evaluate (IRE) discourse pattern that Mehan identified over 40 years ago and is still so common in schools todat. I started thinking about how these science teachers and I might continue to work together on asking questions that go beyond right and wrong answers and that help them draw on their prior knowledge.
As I walked back to my office, I thought about these young people, with art and music in their heads, games and strategies in their hands, networks of social relationships in their hearts, and powerful skills in their lives outside of school. Despite teachers’ genuine belief in them, many of our students have not developed a habit of consulting their prior knowledge to help them process their learning—not because they don’t have prior knowledge or powerfal mental assets, but because we educators have not effectively taught them how to access their experiential and intellectual riches. And many of our students may not feel safe wondering, processing, or thinking when they understand school as a hunt for right answers. We need to teach them to open their mental drawers of knowledge, and we need to be transparent about when we want them to acess prior knowledge and how we want them to wonder through new information.
This small win didn’t involve an action—yet. The win, for me, was being energized by observing the seeds of brilliance in our students. The win was about beginning to hatch a plan to collabote with teachers to capitalize on students’ strengths instead of lamenting their silences or wrong answers. The win was about enjoying the luxuries of observation, collaboration, and reflection that my job affords.
This win for me will, I hope, eventually lead to a win for students and their teachers. Stay tuned for more on this line of thinking in future posts.
Small win #3: An invitation beyond, and several teachers say yes
My third small win on this December Monday was a simple, joyful reminder: educators want to learn and try new things that will reach students and honor their identities and interests, even in our educationally challenged times. Earlier that month, I had had a conversation with one English teacher about how to make literary analysis more relevant by looking at real-world examples of where real writers and citizens use literary analysis skills. I had ordered a few copies of Beyond Literary Analysis for the teacher and a few colleagues, and as I started delivering the books, I thought, “Hey, I should ask all the English teachers if they’d like a copy!”
So on this same Monday, I sent an email to the rest of the department, inviting them to join in and request a copy. Within minutes, I got four more enthusiastic yesses from my colleagues, and soon after I heard verbal interest from everyone in the department.
Yes, even in times of educational scarcity, our school is filled with educators who want to keep learning, innovating, and growing. Take that, Maslow.
Small wins, or still so far to go?
Seeing these as a win means taking a process-oriented, mindful mindset: “This is how we change school: Add up small step after small step until we remake school into a place where all students see the value of their knowledge and are empowered to use and grow their voices and skills.”
But seeing these steps as a defeat mean taking a different mindset: “Each small step is good, yes, but… we still have so far to go, and the distance between where students are and what they need only continues to grow. Gloria Ladson-Billings started writing about culturally relevant pedagogy over two decades ago and classroom discourse research has been critiquing IRE questioning for over four, so at this rate, we’ll never catch up in a meaningful way. Our schools will never be enough for the brilliance and the needs of our students.”
Some days I’m convinced these are wins, that these smalls teps are the only way forward. And some days I am exhausted in the face of the enormity we need to change. But in the end, I think I need both the “small wins” and “so far to go” mindset. I need the fire and anger and urgency that come from knowing that we have so much unused knowledge about accessing, honoring, and growing young people’s innate abilities. But most days, most moments, I need to write down, celebrate, and share the small wins that I get to be a part of each day. Because if I’m seeing these small wins, these small moments of praxis, these small steps forward toward more humanizing education even in times of scarcity, I know others are too. And that is enough for this moment.
Kate Lechtenberg, PhD 