proximities

If something seems simple, it’s probably not. Like rising graduation rates. On the surface, obvious good thing. But then you look at how we got there…and it’s a much more complicated story. 

It’s too easy to treat students like numbers. Spreadsheets are easier to understand than people. (say it again, folks at the policy-making thrones: “spreadsheets are easier to understand than people…”)

Class size matters. A lot (a lot a lot a lot a lot). A lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot (see what happens when I keep adding words?) a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot (punctuation matters, too, by the way) a lot.

Student trajectories are both stubborn and fragile, especially if the only place we try to improve them is within the school’s walls—which requires a large dose of humility and an even larger one of ambition.

Most of the people talking about “improving teaching” are doing quite little, at a policy level, to substantively improve the supply (quality and quantity) of teachers. “What are you going to do to attract more and better people into the teaching profession?” is the appropriate follow-up. Be relentless with that one.

There’s an important, honest discussion to be had about the role of athletics in public education, and whether or not it they are a net positive for student learning. This is also a discussion that few want to have, so it probably won’t be had. Moving on…

At the end of the day, a lot of good can be done in a classroom. And the further you step away from that classroom, the less certain you can be of that good. Which is why I am incredibly grateful to be going back to the classroom for Year 8 next year.

[one of our end-of-year discussion activities, as students moved peer-to-peer around the room with “speed dates” going through the following reflection]

Last week, I wrote about two important myths that I believe prevent us from truly buying into “culture” in our classrooms and schools: the belief that culture must be established immediately and the assumption that culture should be linear.

But I also opened with this David Foster Wallace quote: 

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace adeptly noticed how innate culture is in our experiences, but also how invisible it is from within. 

This week, I want to broaden the lens to a discussion of how to best make culture visible—lessons which probably exist far beyond the classroom and school walls, too.

Myth #3: Culture should be implicit more than explicit

There are organizations that talk about culture and there are organizations that don’t talk about culture.

Simple, right?

Well, that’s a bit of a misnomer—as pretty much everyone reading this can think of numerous examples of when an organization or individual talked the talk of culture but failed to walk the walk. So to speak.

So maybe we can break that into the following quadrant:

Assuming that we could break each organization into a dichotomy of positive or negative culture cleanly, what percentage would fall into each box above?

I would make the argument that far more organizations are in boxes A and D than B and C. My instinct is that it is quite rare to have an organization that dedicates itself to talking about culture—in good times and bad—that does not foster some positive results.

While many organizations will make mention of culture from time to time, there is a major difference between mentioning culture and embracing it as a cornerstone of organizational success.

And all this applies to the classroom as well as the school.

There are three main obstacles that prevent culture from its rightful place at the center of classroom, school, and organizational discussions:

A. Culture is easy to talk about when the going’s good—but difficult when it’s not

B. Obsession with other data excuses prioritization of culture

C. Lack of authentic belief in culture’s impact

However, for today’s post, I want to focus on A—which I believe is the most notable culprit we must tackle before moving into the deeper, more-nuanced complications of B and C.

In education we talk about culture far too often in August and on Mondays than in October and Wednesdays. Or February and Fridays. On the front end of any experience, before the “going” has a chance to get tough, it is easy to pay lip service to culture. Culture looks great on a blank slate, after all.

However, once the chips begin to fall and problems arise, discussions around culture can feel very threatening.

This school year, I was asked to lead sessions on classroom culture for our school at beginning-of-the-year professional development—and my take was that they went really well! Teachers were talking about the core values they wanted to exist in their rooms, and were even taking steps to tangibly represent them on a daily basis.

But then the school year began, and—as always—it became difficult. And when mentioned returning to these conversations around culture, there was far less motivation for it. It’s much easier to remark that “these kids just don’t care” than to reflect internally about our school culture, right? Even ideas of an anonymous culture survey amongst staff were shot down—and my guess was that this in many ways came from a fear of negative responses.

This is where “talking culture” falls apart far too often. We are more than willing to entertain the notion of prioritizing culture when it is in the abstract—but the inevitable challenges in our relationships and environments demand that we double-down on culture, not abdicate it.

Due to this, I always make a point of taking an October poll right in the middle of the hardest month, asking students to evaluate our classroom culture via our core beliefs—and then I share the results and facilitate discussions with them framed around not only successes, but also areas of growth:

It is rarely easy to click on the “results” button on the survey form for me, as I am quite aware that there will be some feedback that is hard to swallow from my students. It would be much easier to abandon the survey and move on, feigning ignorance and “the need to keep moving through our curriculum.”

The myth that “culture should be implicit” comes from many things, but more than anything it is either an unwillingness or inability to handle the repercussions of explicit culture conversations.

Talking about culture is rarely the problem; not talking about culture almost always is.

And going back to last week’s post, this is why prioritizing culture demands a backwards-design: you have to know not only where you want to end up, but the steps you will need to take to measure progress.

Which leads into the final myth around culture:

Myth #4: Culture cannot be reliably measured and assessed

Of the many gratitudes of my life in working with Arkansas Teacher Corps, first and foremost is how it connected me to the love of my life, Rachel.

But after that, the most important takeaway for me was the realization of how many tools there are to assess culture within an organization—if one is willing to commit to the endeavor.

On our staff, we would review data at each weekly meeting from a poll meant to track investment, mindsets, and attitudes amongst the fellows in the program. At first, this seemed tedious—but over time I saw how impactful it was to have honest conversations about what fellows were feeling. More than anything, I’m grateful for the leadership that was modeled to me in framing culture as a) something that could be tracked quantitatively and b) something an organization needs to hold itself accountable for.

Another anecdote I often share when leading professional development is the experience I had at the end of my first year teaching. After a year in which I was truly proud of students’ academic success, I opened up the “culture survey data” Teach For America mandated expecting to see positive things.

There were positives, but all I could stare at was a single negative: in response to the question “my teacher cares about me,” my number was significantly lower than the rest of my responses. And compared to teachers across the state, it was below-average.

Had this been an anecdotal or qualitative result, I think I would have reflexively dismissed it, but the hard truth was staring back at me: I had failed to create a classroom in which students knew they were cared about it.

Culture can and should be measured, and this includes quantitative measures. Beyond polls directly assessing culture, other indicators should be sought after that add texture to your understanding of your culture (in my room, these include # of positive parent contacts a week, # of students nominated for affirmations, and student discipline data).

I’ve written at length about the various paradoxes in education, and how staying in the classroom has made me more appreciative of education’s complexities rather than clarifying its nuances. The more I learn, the less I know, so to speak.

Nevertheless, if any conviction has hardened, it is my recognition of the role of culture, both within the classroom’s walls and beyond them. I’ve learned that culture is more than just context; rather, it is an input much more than an output—and a significant one, at that.

It is perhaps best characterized by the late David Foster Wallace in his oft-shared commencement address—

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

What the hell is culture, though? In today’s discussions within education circles and on a broader level, culture has become its own buzzword, rendering the term vulnerable to cliche and also afterthought. Furthermore, the invisibility of culture, like gravity, makes it quite easy to dismiss.

—until the apple falls on our collective heads.

In discussing culture, however, I’ve come to see four myths arise again and again, distracting from the intentions of those working to change and elevate the culture within their classrooms and schools (and beyond, as “culture” is not confined to education-speak).

Culture is established day one

Culture is linear

Culture should be implicit, not explicit

Culture cannot be reliably measured and assessed

This week, I’ll focus on #1 and #2; then I’ll follow up on #3 and #4 next week (#fingerscrossed).

Myth #1: Culture is Established Day One

Coming into the classroom through Teach For America, a major emphasis was placed on setting a strong culture from the first minute of the school year forward. High expectations, it was preached, would lead to peak performance—and anything less than 100% would be a disservice to the potential of your students. As new teachers, we were coached that it was imperative to establish an impactful culture as a vehicle to meaningful instruction.

And to do so immediately.

There is a lot of virtue in this mindset: the emphasis on culture was far better than what I’ve typically seen in the average classroom/program, and it forced me to think intentionally about a lot of things I would not have considered before. Indeed, we had to submit our own “classroom culture” plans alongside our curricula, a tangible reminder of how much of a priority culture should be.

The problem, I recognize now, is that the urgency of culture outpaced the pragmatic reality that culture takes time to establish. Especially after seeing example videos of mid-year classrooms of experienced teachers, it was inevitable that there would be a vast chasm between the early classroom cultures of novice teachers and the expectations that we developed for them.

Even in year seven, I found myself discussing my frustration this past year with my mentor: a few weeks had gone by, and the culture within my classroom was a far cry from what we had achieved the year before.

“Well yes,” she reminded me. “It took you the whole year to get there last year—be patient.”

Like always, she was right—even with experience, our expectations for classroom culture tend to eclipse the amount of time we allow for it to develop. Just like the academic skills within our classroom walls, culture should be backward planned, with a vision of where you want to be at the end of the year and an intentional pathway to achieve that vision.

This myth that culture should be set instantaneously is particularly damaging to the self-esteem of educators, who can become disillusioned early on if their classroom does not feel how they want it to. While they should not accept the status quo, it should be kept in mind that classroom culture is in itself a journey, and the most important thing is to identify the needed steps forward to facilitate its growth over time.

For example, one of the values I’ve come to belief deeply in is vulnerability—and creating a classroom culture that not only tolerates it but leans into it as a form of leadership and self-empowerment. Last year’s students were pivotal in showing me what is possible when this value arrives at the forefront of our classroom—but at the same time, it took a full year to build the safety and peer trust as a foundation to make such vulnerability possible.

This year, I tried to be more intentional about scaffolding in the first semester to ensure that all students would get this opportunity, and not just the particular classes that happened to arrive there (like last year). And even in my hardest classes, we’ve now arrived at the point that students are able to to sit at the front of the room and discuss their own strengths and weaknesses, including the implications these strengths/weaknesses have on their lives now and going forward.

Arriving at this point was not a matter of a single activity or lesson design; rather, it required an understanding of what steps we would have to take over the first four months of the year to make such conversations possible—and what they would allow us to build even further towards in the remaining months of the year.

Myth #2: Culture is Linear

Once we get past the idea that our envisioned culture should arrive immediately, the next assumption is that classroom culture will progress in a linear fashion, improving gradually over time without any hiccups or backslides.

However, it is important to remember that any culture is comprised of the various relationships that exist within it; therefore, like any individual relationship, it can be incredibly difficult when progress flattens—or worse, backpedals. These “hiccups” (or worse) are even more harmful to a teacher’s confidence when the expectation is that it will “only get better.”

Rather than becoming disillusioned or panic when a culture that was trending the right direction makes a reversal, it is important that teachers are able to a) recognize that this is a normal part of any year and b) diagnose the cause of whatever is weighing down the culture—ideally with students taking part in this diagnosis—in order to begin making progress once again.

[and c) consider whether this “hiccup” is instead a reminder that culture is in many ways circular, tending from time to time to fold back on itself and its underlying values and inputs; origins are destinations, quite often, if you want to achieve substantive change]

Last year this “culture panic” hit me right before Spring Break with my pre-AP courses. Up until that point, we had been riding one of the most positive waves of classroom culture that I had experienced in my seven years teaching—with affirmation coming from all directions, for me and the students collectively.

Then we began our research unit, and the foundations of the culture we had built began to tremble. By the time students had submitted their drafts for me to review, the room felt empty—devoid of much of the joy and collaboration that we had worked to establish the previous six months.

My first temptation was to feel as if all was lost, and to abandon my faith in the confidence we had built collectively within the room. However, fortunately I was able to begin a dialogue with students to identify a handful of important causes that led to our “low point” of the year: a lack of norms around self-advocacy for support, a failure on my end to scaffold as intentionally as possible to the skills they would need, an over-reliance on digital assignments rather than hard copy sets of expectations, and a collision with a wave of extracurricular responsibilities for students.

That we were able to have these conversations was a testament to the culture we had already built, and afterwards there was even more progress as a result of our transparent discussions with each other—leading to the vulnerability that capped school year so powerfully.

No matter how positively a classroom is trending in terms of its culture, there will be bumps in the road—not just for individual students, but for the entire room. How you respond as a teacher to these instances will in many ways define the course of your year, and therefore it is important to anticipate them as much as possible, and to act accordingly.

January was an exhausting month, with a medley of illness and projects and cold weather, and that it is February gives me a chance to come back to the article that has been on my mind almost daily: “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation.”

In the article, the following question-answer sequence left a deep impression on me: 

“Why can’t I get this mundane stuff done? Because I’m burned out. Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it — explicitly and implicitly — since I was young.”

And beyond my own life, it makes me think about our teaching profession as a whole, in which this exhaustion is a very real problem—with very real consequences for students, schools, and communities.

In conversations earlier this year with accepted TFA applicants, a question that came up regularly was "what it takes” to be successful in your first year in the absence of any teaching experience.

My response was quite honest: nothing makes up for experience, but you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to close the gap. That means later evenings and working on weekends when necessary, seeking out additional resources and mentors outside of your district, and investing your whole self into the work.

Hopefully, that response also was self-aware. “What it takes” (let’s unpack that in a few paragraphs) is increasingly unsustainable, leaving teachers—both new and veteran—with two unappealing paths: dedicate numerous hours beyond the actual work day, or be consistently demoralized/reprimanded for “not doing enough.”

Or even worse, “not caring enough.”

The conversation of how to maintain and strengthen the teaching profession has been lacking in both its honesty and priority of late, despite the numbers that cry out for attention. Studies suggest that eight percent of teachers leave the profession each year, and that doesn’t include the additional eight percent who move to different schools. The bigger problem: those who just entered the profession are the most likely to abandon it, with 40-50% of teachers quitting in their first five years.

And yet the higher you climb “education ladder” into positions of power, the more likely you are to find pushes to eliminate teacher protections, destabilize existing schools with unproven aphorisms such as “competition” and “market disruption,” and double-down on the policies—specifically standardized testing—that have caused so much damage in the first place. Non-traditional routes into the classroom are proliferating, but too often these only serve as a stop-gap solution at best.

And an exacerbation of the problem, at worst.

Let’s head back to what it takes to be an effective teacher. There are various skills and mindsets that come to mind (along with those that become trendy each year before being replaced the next with another buzzword, but I digress...), and there are obvious strengths that translate to impactful classroom instruction and leadership. 

But the word that very few will bring up is quite simple: time.

The majority of a teacher’s day is spent teaching, but the inputs that determine the effectiveness of that teaching—curriculum design, lesson planning, assessment review and feedback, parent-guardian communication, etc.—must take place in a miniscule window: roughly two-to-three hours of planning time per week, depending on state and school district. 

And that already far-too-limited window is constantly threatened by mandatory meetings, conferences, and documentation requests. While almost all of these are well-intended, the result is the undeniable: teachers are not provided the time to be as effective as they are expected to be.

And there again the “bad options” occur: spend an increasing amount of time outside of school trying to meet expectations, or accept that not everything that needs to be done will be accomplished—and suffer the consequences.

Burnout occurs for a variety of reasons, but the constant feeling of being ill-prepared or under-supported accrues over years, obstructing the self-esteem and passion that is requisite within this work. Even worse, the “do it because you care for the kids” line is used far too often, adding a layer of shame to teachers who do care.

And then, inevitably, they leave.

In implementing a new research project a few years ago, I was passionate about the amount of rigor and depth this assignment would provide. I delved into the planning process, and dreamed of the final products students would create after a rigorous, authentic learning experience.

And then halfway through, reading the drafts of students who had been visibly struggling to work with the materials and expectations, I faced a fork in the road: only a handful of students were on pace to complete their projects, with the vast majority frustrated or disillusioned.

I could have held up that handful of students, celebrating them in order to show the others that “this was possible”—and berating them with aphorisms such as “giving your best effort” and “showing that you’re committed to your education.” Some students were overcoming the challenges and succeeding, so why couldn’t the others?

Or there was the other route: honestly looking in the mirror and reflecting on the process I had created, and particularly my failure to provide students the time and support they needed to be successful.

I came back to class that next week and extended the deadlines, added needed scaffolding and examples, and shifted my priorities.

I have benefitted throughout my career from co-workers and communities that were willing to support and celebrate me, no matter where I worked. 

This has been a blessing, undoubtedly, but there have been times within these celebrations in which I have sensed an implicit message in this: Mr. Luther is doing this, so why can’t the rest of you? Rather than engaging in a needed conversation, almost always I have found it easier to accept the praise as a validation of my own work and not admit the time, frustration, or disillusionment I have faced at times. 

Each time I have done this, I now recognize that this has been a mistake. 

It is easy to lean into the affirmations of others without acknowledging the difficulty of this work, as well as the way my own circumstances have benefited me--particularly the fact that I do not yet have my own children, giving me the flexibility on evenings and weekends to invest additional time in my classroom. And that even still, despite these circumstances and the too-rare blessings of ample support and praise, I far too often feel burnt out by “what it takes” to meet my own expectations as well as those of others.  

Celebrating and affirming teachers is incredibly important, just as it is for students, but part of that affirmation has to include an authentic acknowledgment of the challenges of this work—and an effort to honestly combat them.

“In the absence of data, we will always make up stories.”

While nearing the end of Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead, I got stuck on this 11-word sentence. A leadership book focused on employing vulnerability and courage to engage individuals and organizations toward a deeper, more-meaningful culture, Dare to Lead is not designed as a commentary on society.

However, can you think of a better explanation for 2018 in America?

Brown employs the conceit as a strategy to examine what she calls our “stormy first drafts,” unpacking the fears and insecurities they are laden with. And in doing so, she arrives at a stunning claim:

“…stories based on limited real data and plentiful imagined data, blended into a coherent, emotionally satisfying version of reality, are called conspiracy theories. Yes, we are all conspiracy theorists with our own stories, constantly filling in data gaps with our fears and insecurities.”

Welcome to America.

Regardless of your political leaning, it is safe to say that the past few years have probably heightened your mistrust of many pillars of knowledge: newspapers, the media, textbooks, and without question social media. Indeed, skepticism is in many ways a prerequisite to existence in 2018.

The data, in our own eyes, has become unreliable—and many of us have begun to fill the gaps with stories.

The problem? These stories are often fueled by “our fears and insecurities” and aimed towards building an “emotionally satisfying version of reality.” The opposite of scientific reasoning, we decide upon the result we want and then seek out a story to justify that end.

This makes sense, too, as Brown writes that “our brains reward us with dopamine (that “aha” moment) when we recognize and complete patterns. Stories are patterns. The brain recognizes the familiar beginning-middle-end structure of a story and rewards us for clearing up the ambiguity. Unfortunately, the brain rewards us for a good story—one with clear good guys and bad guys—regardless of the accuracy of the story.”

We are conditioned towards simplicity, and are much likelier to absorb stories that clarify our existing perspectives rather than complicate them. We are compelled towards the stories “with clear good guys and bad guys” and those that eschew ambiguity.

In a complex world, this means we are swimming against our own current if we want to understand reality. It is important to recognize the way our minds work, and how in many ways the “water we swim in” externally has now been designed to amplify our worst instincts.

Conspiracy is profitable, after all.

The consequences are just beginning to avail themselves, too. Our collective permission towards skepticism has made fragile our grasp with reality, and opened many darker, destructive pathways. It’s not just flat-earth conspiracists, either: the time is ripe for Holocaust denial, anti-vaccination fear-mongering, and bigotry-justifying hate.

So how do we respond?

First off, we need to hold ourselves accountable for our own stories, seeking out the best data we can to inform them and remaining humble in our limitations for understanding. Rather than sharpening the tips of our arguments, we would do better to dull them by exploring different perspectives—particularly from those with different experiences than our own—and looking for shared beliefs and values undergirding them.

We also need to read first with a generous mindset, assuming best intentions until proven otherwise. The presumption of ill-intent shuts down most discussion and honest consideration, so we need to be better at seeking to understand.

From an education perspective (and not just in K-12 schools), we also need to become more collectively literate with digital information, distinguishing between bias and inaccuracy, and refusing to support outlets that darken the truth with intentional obsfucation and conspiracy. Truth needs to matter more.

And finally, we need to remain loving in our own words and actions. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, and any time we descend to the worst around us, they have already won. As Mitch Albom wrote in Tuesdays With Morrie, “Love always wins.”

Quantity tends to erode individual qualities, so to speak, and as years in the classroom pile up (my Facebook timeline is beginning to fill with engagement photos of former students by this point) I recognize how individual events fit into deeper and broader patterns.

This absorbance, in a way, is helpful. It is refreshing and reassuring that, when X event happens, I have several prior examples to refer back to in my response. This is how life ought to work, is it not? With age comes experience, comes comfort, comes habit…

And yet—one of the virtues of blogging (which I’ve admittedly neglected much of this year) is rendering each year as its own entity, comprised of unique phenomena and, consequently, lessons.

With this blessed snow day (on the eve of Thanksgiving Break, no less!), I wanted to take the time to consider the three most important lessons I’ve taken from this school year so far: the importance of innovation, the fixed nature of time, and the balancing of self-care.

1. The Importance of Innovation

The first year with any class or school creates somewhat of a mandate in regards to curriculum: creation. Even though resources are provided (in most cases, but not all), one of the great joys of teaching is the ownership of how to organize and design the learning experiences for the school year.

Simultaneously, however, one of the great time drains of teaching is the ownership of how to organize and design the learning experiences for the school year.

So heading into this year, it was comforting—in part—to rest on the laurels of last year’s designs. Teaching the same set of classes, I had a full set of unit plans, assessments, and strategies from the previous year, most of which I felt very confident about. With a few minor adjustments over the summer, I could just roll it back out for another round of learning, right? And save hours upon hours of planning time in the process.

Quite quickly, though, I was reminded of the same lesson I’ve had to learn many times before: each year begins anew. A different group of students and experiences require intentional adjustment to their needs and personalities; what worked the previous year—even magnificently, with student survey data to affirm it!—can completely flop with another class. And as someone who preaches responsiveness to students and classroom culture, a failure to accommodate/adjust just doesn’t cut it.

And more importantly, the first few months of this year were a stern reminder that part of what fuels me as a teacher is the creation and innovation itself. Yes, it takes additional time—and even risks—but the act of designing and creating embeds a sort of intimacy with the learning experience; energizes the teaching; and parallels the very mindsets we are trying to facilitate within our classrooms.

So lesson #1: always strive to innovate, and remember the power of the innovation itself.

2. The Fixed Nature of “Time”

Building off the previous lesson is another ‘reminder’ lesson—there are only so many hours in the day.

I’ve written at length about the need for teachers, when capable, to step outside the confinements of their four walls and embrace leadership within their schools and communities without forsaking their classroom identities. It is so easy to lose grasp of the pulse of the students and classroom experience when no longer in the classroom, and therefore it is pivotal that organizational conversations are driven in part by those still in classrooms.

And in the spirit of paralleling my actions with words, I tried to accept much more of a leadership role within my district this year: chairing a department and also stepping into a temporary academy leadership role, organizing and facilitating professional development for other teachers, and trying to be much more active in the organic opportunities to contribute that arise within a given year.

However, while I believe that all of these decisions were not only well-intentioned but productive in the larger picture, I am once again forced to acknowledge the simple but important truth that you cannot magically create more time/energy within a given day.

There are some zero-sum entities in life, and each additional opportunity and responsibility I accept has meant shifting or expediting time that would have been spent solely dedicated to my own classroom.

And that takes a toll. This is not to say that students are now running wildly amuck in my room; as a matter of fact, this year has eased into a quite enjoyable classroom culture that, while different, is something to be proud of.

Despite this, I can unquestionably feel the different ways in which I am using my time, and how the “little things”—which are never that little—get rushed or even cut. The quantity of parent/guardian communication. The depth of feedback on student writing. The showcasing of student work in various media. The innovation (see Lesson #1).

There is an oft-implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) concern in education that teachers don’t need to be given “free time,” underscored by reluctance to trust professionals to be professionals. Yet my entire career has taught me the value of time—and also its scarcity—and one important aspect of valuing time is recognizing its limitations.

3. Managing Self-care while Staying Invested

A few weeks ago, I came out of back-to-back meetings that had left me drained emotionally—and then immediately had to take a call with a recently-accepted Teach For America applicant to discuss what the experience was like.

Not one to hold back, I was honest about my mindset: how fragile the trajectory of students can be; how helpless you can feel in watching choices made beyond your control; how easily the pendulum can gravitate away from the best interests of your students and classroom culture (important note: I also made sure to describe the many positive experiences I’ve had in the classroom, so it wasn’t an entire call of miseries).

He appreciated the honesty, and then asked a quite intuitive question: how do you manage the emotional investment that comes with teaching?

The answer itself was not difficult to provide: a strong personal support system (which I’m inexpressibly grateful for Rachel at this point in my life, but in my early years of teaching was comprised much more by other friends/family/mentors), a willingness to prioritize your own personal health, and a strong recognition of “locus of control”—the line between what you can and cannot control, and a refusal to let anything beyond your control weigh on you.

Even saying that, though, I felt compelled the fallibility in that mindset. Vulnerability itself is a powerful tool, and in my early years teaching I too often fortified myself within the walls of pragmatism. To the detriment of my own emotional investment.  

This work is hard. Every individual student has the ability to absolutely floor you, through inspiration but also tragedy. Any teacher can recite the experiences that have kept them awake at night, fretting and praying, and can testify to the variability that defines the job. To stay organized, positive, and energetic within that chaos is almost foolhardy, is it not?

Yet, chaos can be its own ladder—to a better version of oneself. My time in the classroom, and especially the most difficult situations and moments, has lent me empathy and humility that makes me not only a better teacher, but a better person. It is a mistake to close oneself off entirely from the frustrations and heartbreaks of this work.

In one of the most surprisingly-insightful essays I’ve ever come across, John McPhee wrote the following:

Any piece of fruit has a story inside. You could say the seed is the beginning, the plant that grows is the middle, and the fruit that falls is the happy ending. Plant another seed and you can tell it all over again…

Reflecting on the upcoming year, it is easy to cling to this notion. That on first day a seed is planted, and that from this core it springs outward—intentionally and presciently—until the growth arrives at a maturity allowing students to move forward enriched and empowered.

Then you plan another seed the following year, and begin again. Right?

Except there’s another half to that beautiful McPhee quote:

These are lies of course. Stories never turn out that way. Lives don’t neatly fit into three parts. The structure won’t ever follow a straight line. You have to ignore a world of context to pretend a story is that simple. Take an orange.

“You have to ignore a world of context to pretend a story is that simple.”

Take a classroom.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, over fifty million students will head into some sort of classroom in one of the nearly 100,000 public schools across our country over the next month. Out of some combination of habit, mandate and aspiration, students will wrest off the confining freedoms of summer and embark on the next step of their educational journey.

For those no longer in schools daily, it should not take much imagination to consider what that classroom still looks like: desks and tables in rigidly-aligned formations; stacks of the latest textbook editions leering from shelves with their plastic sheens; a chalkboard-then-whiteboard-then-projector-then-Smart-TV at the front of the room (if the bulb hasn’t burnt out); a teacher’s desk tucked into a corner of the classroom, perhaps with towers of paperwork already climbing.

And the clock, hopefully with a functional battery, presiding over all with its quietly resonant tick-tocking. 

Now, of course, the 21st century classroom has ushered in challenges anew and reborn to the traditional concept of a teacher delivering knowledge to students obediently scribbling notes. From socratic seminar to flex-mod schedules to flipped classrooms to online education, the paradigm of what a classroom is now in constant combat with innovative conceptions of what it both could and should be. 

Despite the recent celebration of disruption, though, the classroom in the traditional sense still dominates the landscape. What should we make of that, then?

Certainly, there is something more than nostalgic to the idea of the well-aligned rows of desks aimed at the endearing, experienced teacher—who expertly interweaves their own insights and wisdoms into the curriculum in the most inspiring of manners.

The universality of this construct is comforting, is it not? That in our society we all, in one way or another, walk into classrooms and take a seat for a set amount of time, to pursue a scheduled amount of knowledge, before the sheer absurdity of “adulthood” and its intimidating ambiguities sets in?

The classroom is conceived by many as the vehicle of opportunity. Indeed, none other than Horace Mann wrote that “[e]ducation, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men--the balance-wheel of the social machinery.” From chalkboards to Smart TV’s, embedded in the American Dream is the notion that all children can pursue a foundation of skills and knowledge no matter where they live, or what conditions they were dealt.

A classroom serves this notion, does it not?

…except for that aside tucked into to McPhee’s immaculate description of the orange: You have to ignore a world of context to pretend a story is that simple.

Perhaps the greatest folly an educator can make is to assume that the classroom is the same for each student who enters. No matter how well-sharpened the pencils or well-labeled the desks—and undoubtedly no matter the number of diagnostic exams—it is simply impossible to flatten the classroom into a universal experience for all students. 

And this oughtn’t to be a goal, either.

Students bring their own identities, perspectives, and realities into the classroom each day—layers upon layers of experiences foisted upon them by their various worlds and embarked upon in the meandering, interweaving paths leading up to the classroom door.

The student already labeled “good” and “bright” by all their previous teachers does not enter the same classroom as the student who is now in their fourth school district due to family moves; 

The student who spent half the night awake due to a lack of food does not enter the same classroom as the star athlete already imagining a path to a state championship;

The student already conditioned to carry a planner throughout the day to plan out the week’s homework in the same way their older brother did does not enter the same classroom as the student who keeps checking their phone discreetly to see if grandma made it through surgery;

And the student who has to fear their parents being deported surely does not enter the same classroom as the student recently diagnosed with ADHD as the student competing for valedictorian as the student just shoved into a locker after holding hands with his boyfriend as the student whose mother is the principal as the student who still flinches every time a cop drives by after what happened to their cousin.

You have to ignore a world of context to pretend a story is that simple.

The color of an orange has no absolute correlation with the maturity of the flesh and juice inside. An orange can be as sweet and ripe as it will ever be and still glisten like an emerald in the tree. Cold—coolness, rather—is what makes an orange orange.

One of the personal fascinations McPhee harbors in his essay is the process by which oranges attain their color. He dispels assumptions by revealing how the “orange” is an entirely different color in other parts of the world: in Thailand, for example, an orange is a green fruit, and traveling Thais often blink with wonder at the sight of oranges the color of flame. 

Much of our education system is designed to produce sameness. In his 2010 TED talk, Ken Robinson remarked that “education is modeled on the interests of industrialization—and the image of it.” It should be no surprise, then, that our classrooms far too often resemble this factory-like paradigm. 100% of students will learn _______ is an oft-stated goal echoing from school to school, and proficiency rates found the evaluations of most teachers and schools.

And yet, Mcphee writes, Cold—coolness, rather—is what makes an orange orange.

A classroom, I posit, is defined more than anything by its warmth, too.

The very rigidity of a classroom—intended to build consistency and clarity—can also be its undoing in responding to the needs of its students. If a classroom is cold to the differences and diversities of its students, if it refuses to not only acknowledge but celebrate their humanities, it cannot serve them.

There is something magnificent and sublime about a public school classroom: it is one of the rare places in this country where students of different abilities, backgrounds, and income levels sit amongst each other. As one of my students wrote last year, “We need to better understand others' perspectives to solidify our own and also to understand and empathize with each other.” 

When the voices of students are affirmed in a classroom, then it can be a space of immense learning through the exchange of different perspectives; when authenticity and vulnerability are valued, the classroom can radiate its humanity in the most empowering of manners; and when the world of context that McPhee wrote of is celebrated rather than ignored, then the learning can be not only foundational but transformational.

One of the analogies Ron Clark has become known for is his archetypes of different teachers in a building (and members of any organization or business), which he establishes in his book, Move Your Bus:

The runners

The joggers

The walkers

The riders

In his own words from a 2015 interview, “in every organization you have some runners, and these runners are really trying to push the bus, they work hard, they come to work early, they don’t complain, they really want to be part of something special…then you have some joggers, and they’re kinda not really running, but they do okay, they do their job, but they really aren’t the best at it… then you’ve got some walkers who are kinda being pulled by the bus, and they complain, and they want everyone to go slower because when everyone goes faster, it pushes them to move at a speed they don’t like…but then we’ve got some riders, and the riders have just given up, and are deadweight…”

The basic argument he lays out with this analogy? Schools are not successful in large part because of the walkers and riders (he uses a Flintstones allusion here), and mistakenly have responded to this situation by focusing too much time/effort on these types of teachers. Instead, Clark suggests, the focus should be on the runners—who he believes make a school successful—in celebrating them and hopefully motivating those around them.

Look, let me acknowledge first that almost every analogy and aphorism can be nitpicked to death (and I should also acknowledge that, as a high school English teacher, I have a soft spot for analogies, archetypes and all other manners of metaphorical thinking).

Clark has deservedly been praised for some of the shifts he has brought to the way we look at schools and teaching; however, I think a few grains of salt should be tossed in with this particular analogy:

1. Let’s resist the binary notion of “good” or “bad” teachers.

A pet peeve of mine that has emerged over my first six years of teaching is the simplistic nature of “labeling” in education: “proficient” or “not proficient”; “AP student” or “regular”; “parent who cares” or “parent who doesn’t care.”

“Good teacher” or “bad teacher.”

Clark’s analogy leans into this labeling, categorizing teachers with little attention paid to nuance.

Let’s just provide a brief list of ten different ways teachers can be successful:

1. Designing instructional lessons and units 2. Engaging students within a classroom 3. Making students feel cared about and building trust [this is the most important, btw] 4. Building and maintaining organizational systems 5. Bringing a positive, resilient attitude into the building each day 6. Collaborating with other teachers and staff in meetings and planning 7. Volunteering to take on new projects or fill in for someone else 8. Committing to lead extracurricular activities 9. Investing in the community 10. Advocating for safety and equity

I could go on, but I think you get my point.

Yes, there are “those teachers” who fail to check any of the boxes above—but there are just as few who check all of them. Far more abundant are the teachers who really excel at some of the above, are working at others, and have a few obvious weak spots.

This is why binary labeling is problematic: it implicitly absolves those with positive labels from the important work of growth, and at the same time fails to recognize many strengths of those with negative labels.

Of course, binary labels are also easier, and are much easier to comprehend on a spreadsheet.

But this work is far too important to take shortcuts.

2. “Infrastructure” matters, too.

By no means am I a professional runner. Or even a competitive one.

But I do run/jog quite frequently, and over time I’ve come to appreciate how each route poses its own challenges—but some are far more difficult than others.

As I’ve written about before, running in the summer humidity of Arkansas is a far cry from the breezy Oregon Coast—though even on the coast, you have a much different experience trotting through soft sand versus prancing on the solid ground near the waves. There are those incredible mornings when I get out of bed rearing for a workout, but then the [many] other days where it is quite a grind even to persist at a steady jog. Throw in illnesses, inclines, and distractions—plus the occasional battery dying mid-podcast—and it really is quite a tenuous experience to embark on any “run.”

See, I can do the metaphor thing to.

The point is this: being a “highly-effective” teacher at some schools is much easier to pull off than others. The myth of many education reformers is that all any classroom needs is a “great teacher”—when in fact the particularities of a classroom as well as the school it is situated in often shape the teacher far more determinedly.

My point is not to refute the fact that teachers vary in terms of the education they bring to their students. Rather, it is to emphatically remind that too often context is neglected in these discussions—and that we are doing a disservice to students if we do not have a serious discussion about how to improve the various “contexts” that impact the education we are aiming to provide.

3. How sustainable is it to expect all teachers to “run” all the time?

And the most important pushback, in my mind (while also the most difficult): is “running” as a teacher—i.e. excelling in all facets and giving 110%—sustainable? For an entire year? For a half-decade?

For a career?

Far too often it seems as if the “solution” consists of applying a magnifying glass to the “runners” in a given school and trying to get more people to do the same.

This is neither practical nor productive. Imagine the coach of the LA Lakers (sorry Cavs fans) telling the rest of his team to play more like LeBron? Any coach who built a system in which only players of LeBron’s caliber could success would be fired on the spot.

Obvious, right? Except that the trends of the past decade of education reform have been to heighten the expectations placed on teachers without providing additional support. They have essentially been demanding more “running,” and the results have been, well…

This. This. This. This. This. 

There is a line between celebrating/affirming someone for “running” and requiring that this becomes the expectation for everyone. The latter can be detrimental to culture rather than uplifting, and can drive people away from a profession already in dire need of supply.

So what do we do with the Move Your Bus Analogy?

This most is in no way meant to denigrate Ron Clark for the impact he has made on education—he has done tremendous work by injecting energy into the mindsets of education leaders and shifting attention towards affirming innovation and positivity in the classroom.

However, as is one of my most common aphorisms on this blog, nuance is required. Here are three addenda I would like to offer to his “move your bus” analogy, based on my commentary above:

Resist labeling teachers, and instead work hard to celebrate individual strengths

“Improve infrastructure”—make it easier to jog/run in schools for teachers

Celebrate and affirm “runners,” but also have a long-term view

Of course we want to raise our expectations for what we deliver to kids on a daily basis. Urgency is a buzzword in education, but it’s impossible to refute the truth that everyone gets one chance at a K-12 education—and we are not doing nearly enough work to guarantee that this is a positive, uplifting experience for all students.

One of my favorite moments as an athlete at the end of the first baseball game of my senior season.

Nearly our entire starting line-up had just finished a long basketball playoff run—meaning that when we jogged out onto the field, it was the first time sporting baseball cleats for us in quite some time. No weeks of practice like we usually would have experienced.One of my favorite moments as an athlete occurred at the end of the first baseball game of my senior season.

Just “lace ‘em up and play ball.”

Facing our rivals down the coast, our experience carried us just enough to fend off the rust (and there was certainly rust); we just barely managed to tie the game up and send it into extras. 

Stepping to the plate in the bottom half of the 8th, I joked with the on-deck batter that it’d really be something if we somehow won on a walk-off in extra innings after we just won several overtime games during the basketball playoffs.

And then I hit the next pitch over the centerfield fence.

However, there was a problem here that I didn’t realize until far too late. You see, the previous season had been outstanding for me personally: in my first serious varsity time, I earned all-league honors with a batting average over .500. I understood my role, which was to make solid contact and get on base so that the talented players behind me could do their job.

The problem with a walk-off home run to begin my senior season? I changed the way I looked in the mirror. Fresh off an offer to continue playing baseball at Puget Sound, I started considering what it would be like to be a home run threat each time I stepped to the plate. Going to the batting cages, I changed my approach to prepare for a new identity as a power hitter.

You can guess how that went.

The batting slump that ensued lasted almost my entire senior season, dropping me out of any all-league recognition and causing my coaches to rightly lower me in the batting order. And though I was fortunate enough to fix things just in time for our playoff run—#2008champs—that season was quite miserable for a vast stretch of time.

Of the myriad, beautiful perversities of baseball—almost all of which hint at some universal truth in this thing we call life—the fact that swinging for a home run is the easiest way to achieve mediocrity is one of its most cruel but also essential.

“Home runs are line drives you just missed,” a coach used to say. He was right.

This extended anecdote is just a long way of getting to the concept that has been on my mind of late: Goodhart’s Law. In one explanation of it, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Once the measure of home runs became the target, everything went downhill.

Of course, baseball is never really about just baseball.

Rather, I’ve once again been considering the implications of our current testing culture in education. As the “high-stakes” of high-stakes testing have outpaced the actual practicalities of many tests, schools have become hyper focused on meeting specific outcomes. 

I.e. targets.

Another anecdote (more briefly, this time): in my second year of teaching, the school I was working at brought in an “outside specialist” to help improve our test scores. Her main action step? “The bubble kids.” She had all of us identify which kids were “either right below or right above the proficiency line” by our estimates, and spent a great deal of time pulling them out for individualized instruction (and motivation, by her account).

Support for the learning of the rest of the kids, I asked?

“It won’t make a difference in our proficiency rate.”

Goodhart’s Law, to a T.

In the growing focus on proficiency rates on standardized exams—taking these “measures” and converting them into “targets”—I often worry that we’ve forsaken so many other crucial elements of education: creativity, student-driven conversations, classroom culture, ambiguity, real-world learning, etc.

Just like when I was foolishly swinging for the fences.

This is not to say, though, that there is no need for measuring. 

Data is an important tool in self-evaluation for all educators—and in no way am I advocating for abandoning such metrics. 

The problem is that we’ve become too narrow in how we label and evaluate students as well as schools, placing simple data points on a pedestal to the detriment of other, more-nuanced and less-quantifiable measures such as culture, self-efficacy, leadership, and character.

Heading into a new school year, this is why it is so important for multi-faceted goals to be established. Here is a screenshot taken from one of my course visions for the upcoming year:

Creating various measures is a strategic way to avoid the temptation of overweighting any individual one. At the same time, mindsets matter, too: the goal needs to be self-awareness and growth, with binaries such as “proficient”/“non-proficient” avoided as much as possible.

This is where the multi-faceted goals are even more important: they give students different avenues to success, building confidence that can carry over into holistic progress.

“In order to learn, you have to be able to listen to others. Without this empathy for others and their beliefs, you will never be introduced to new ideas and perspectives. It is also important to recognize that everyone has different ideas and this should be respected; their beliefs should be valued.” 

This quote came from a year-end survey from last year’s 10th grade cohort. 

The same cohort that increased their scores relatives to the state average in English, Reading, and ELA overall.

Just like coach said, aim for line drives.

“How many books will we have to read and how many essays will we have to write?”

There are two questions that are almost always associated with a high school English class: the reading requirements and the number of essays to expect. And while I addressed the former in a post recently, I want to take some time today to reflect on different considerations I make now when designing, implementing and facilitating a formal writing process in my classroom.

Before launching into an FAQ-style format to work through individual points, I will lay out three overarching mindsets I’ve come to adopt around essays:

One of the most common “thank you’s” I get from former students connects back to rigorous, formal writing assignments (see image above)—they are a core component of college readiness

Formal writing and the accompanying writing processes should not be limited strictly to analytical essays; creative and narrative writing skills deserve ample development, also.

The quality and process of feedback is consistently underrated and therefore underutilized by teachers (something I’ve been trying to improve on in recent years)

Without further ado, here are ten questions that I come back to again and again, and have gained some stronger convictions about since entering the English classroom six years ago:

How many formal essays should I assign over the year?

Should the essay be written in-class or assigned outside of class?

How much structure and support should I give students in terms of graphic organizers, samples, etc.?

What do you recommend as far as rubrics?

Should you require essays to be typed?

How do you grade and give feedback on essays?

How much time do you spend grading essays, individually and collectively?

Doesn’t a formal essay have to be analytical?

Do you typically set requirements for length, word count, paragraphs, etc.?

Do you incorporate peer feedback?

How many formal essays should I assign over the year?

Students should be writing in your class each day, including opportunities to experiment with different styles/structures and to revise/reflect on smaller samples. However, formal essays should take place only if they meet the following two qualifications (from the teacher’s perspective):

Have I provided appropriate scaffolding in both content and skill to warrant a formal performance task?

Will I be able to implement and facilitate an intentional writing process that provides feedback to students in a meaningful way?

Depending upon a host of factors (class size, pre-AP/regular, standardized testing, etc.), the number I typically settle on is 2-3 times a semester (and at least once a quarter) or 4-6 formal essays a year. 

Let’s say you have 120 students—and I recognize that many high school teachers have significantly more—and you assign 6 formal essays over the year. That results in 720 essays that you not only have to grade but also facilitate a writing process for with meaningful feedback. Of course, you will be more hands off with the writing process as the year goes on, but you still run into the quantity v. quality dilemma.

And while my students only have 2-3 formal essays a semester, they are still writing frequently in smaller samples such as one-page reflections to articles and constructed responses that I provide targeted feedback on. This is different, though, than the experience of a formal writing process.

Should the essay be written in-class or assigned outside of class?

Let’s dive into one of the major conflicts of formal essays, I guess: equity of resources versus preparation for college (this also gets into the typed/handwritten question which I’ll address in a bit).

For the vast majority of college writing assignments, students will be tasked with developing and revising their essays without much support and on their own time. However, whenever I assign a formal essay outside of class, I potentially bring two troublesome elements into my classroom: a) disparities in technology resources outside of school and b) parental support/ involvement.

I’ll just be transparent here with what my classroom currently looks like and why, but I recognize there are counterpoints to my way of thinking on this:

We do have in-class formal essays at certain points in the year, but they mainly are built to prepare for standardized testing and/or future AP-style writing situations. I explain to students that it is a very different skill to be able to structure and articulate their ideas in a confined space of time, and I do think there is value in this—however, this structure does little to prepare students on how to navigate a writing process and acquire the skills and mindsets necessary for what they’ll face in college. Therefore…

…I also assign formal essays that can be completed outside of class. These are typically longer and also require students to type their final submissions. Early on in my teaching career, I recognized that there was little I could do to prevent parental involvement on these writing samples (and it should be noted that there are varying levels of involvement, ranging from a quick “proof-read” to situations where I have 100% certainty that a parent/guardian wrote the paper and not the student). This is not a fight worth having as it ultimately will not be won—and it definitely should not prevent you from creating writing experiences in your classroom that prepare students for college.

As far as technology equity, one of the values in our classroom is “ownership,” and I make sure to assign these essays in advance so that students have an opportunity to plan how much technology they will need and to advocate for any resources they’ll require. Of course, this is a wall for many students—and a common takeaway students have from my classes by the end of the year is how imperative it is that they learn to talk to teachers if they need support (and sometimes this is a lesson that has to be learned the hard way). On my end, I do my best to help students chart a course to be successful, which includes recommending steps they could take even if they face technology barriers (and for longer writing assignments, particularly research papers, I create time/space within the classroom to try and flatten the disparities).

Across the board, the most important part of this is to have the entire process planned in advance (including an exemplar and rubric, which I’ll get to); when you are creating components on the fly or last-minute, this prevents students from taking ownership.

How much structure and support should I give students in terms of graphic organizers, samples, etc.?

Another adjustment I’ve made in recent years has been to lean towards providing students with more support in formal essays early on in the year, particularly at the front end of the writing process. This means modeling for them not only exemplar essays that I’ve written but also graphic organizers and explanations of my thought process in how to best use them.

As the year moves forward, students are not provided nearly as much support though, in terms of organizers, and instead are asked to create their own based on what works best for them. And while I continue to write exemplars (which help me self-check the expectations of the assignment before implementing them in my classroom), I usually try to elevate the rigor of my exemplars in a way that challenges students. Exemplars/models can place ceilings on student writing, especially if they are too formulaic—and I try to write them intentionally so that the bar is raised.

Additionally, one of the most important parts of including graphic organizers and samples is that they allows me to support students who may struggle with a formal essay—guided outlines, in particular, have definitely helped my lower-skill students throughout the years to build confidence and successfully create a final draft.

Far too often I’ve seen teachers assign formal essays without a specific end in mind (and early in my career I’m sure I fell into this trap, too), which really entraps students into aiming at an unclear target. I believe with conviction that it is incumbent upon a teacher to have a clear, explicable vision of what a high-performing result would look like before assigning any essay/project—and a failure to do so is not fair to one’s students.

What do you recommend as far as rubrics?

Well, first off, let’s start with a basic imperative: you need to have a rubric. I remember the days of getting back college papers with a random grade on it and a few scrawls, and that just doesn’t fly—no matter how experienced/confidence you are as a grader. Rubrics are a critical tool in helping students to understand the grading process and to consequently have the resources to advocate for themselves.

In my classroom, I try to lean on a standard rubric that I then adjust based on the genre/type of essay—and also one that aligns with the ACT Aspire standardized exam. This standard rubric (which you can see here) has four categories: Analysis, Development, Organization, Language.

We spend ample time at the front end of the year familiarizing ourselves with this rubric, and whenever I grade essays I am referring back to a rubric like this. This also allows students to track their writing performance over time—even with variations such as genre, they can see how they did in Language, for instance, over the 5-6 essays in a given year on their self-trackers.

When writing your rubrics, there are numerous examples online to borrow from! Just make sure that you tailor each rubric to the given writing assignment, and potentially include specific elements you will be looking for in the language. For instance, I know that early in the year I try to harp on transitions both between and within paragraphs—and this is clearly explicated in the rubric so support that emphasis.

Should you require essays to be typed?

This gets back to the equity v. college preparation question—but it’s also important to consider that handwritten essays do a much better job of revealing errors in grammar/spelling due to the prevalence of autocorrections in Word/Google Docs.

That said, this once again to your implementation and whether or not you have given students opportunities to access technology if they do not have resources at home. In our district, for instance, students have a great resource in the school library; this means they can handwrite a draft at home and then bring it in to type the final.

I’ll add this, also: students need to build comfort/confidence with both Word and Google Docs, and assigning typed essays is a great way to teach students to navigate the formatting idiosyncrasies of these programs (how to double-space, insert page #’s, etc.).

How do you grade and give feedback on formal essays?

Bingo—critical question.

First off, let me emphasize the importance of how we view feedback as teachers: it is only as good as what your students gain from it. Early on in my career, it often felt like I was just “checking off a requirement” by adding some handwritten notes alongside the final grade; furthermore, students would at best glance over these notes (in my less-than-ideal handwriting) before stuffing the paper in their binder (or even tossing in the trashcan). This feedback served little-to-no purpose and was a waste of time, to be straightforward.

I also know that I get can sucked into the “conventions trap” of grading, which in other words means that I spend far too much time going line-by-line for grammatical/spelling errors and missing the broader, arguably-more-important elements of the essay. Though this may feel more tangible, I would make the case that very few times do students get much from a page filled with red marks—especially if there isn’t a system set up for meaningful revision.

Here are three changes I made this year to my grading/feedback:

Along with the rubric scoring, I include a “Strengths/Areas of Growth” table with equal notes on each side—this places the burden on me of affirming strengths but also helps me target my growth feedback (too much becomes non-effective).

I do my best to type as much of my feedback as I can because a) I type much more quickly and therefore give more/stronger feedback and b) it is both legible and save-able.

Students keep all their formal essays in their own student folder alongside their tracker in my filing cabinet, which allows them to create a writer’s portfolio at the end of the year (more on that later).

I also try to build in opportunities for more targeted revision, such as students self-selecting a paragraph to re-write/strengthen; peer revision can also be incorporated with feedback, but that’s usually earlier in the writing process.

One adjustment I’m considering going forward, however, is when I emphasize my feedback in the writing process. In a conversation with the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, Sarah Wessling, she mentioned how she has tried to identify the “threshold of commitment”: the point at which students, even after receiving feedback, are “locked in” to whatever structure/ideas they’ve been advancing.

This one of the pitfalls of post-rough-draft feedback, especially on longer essays. During research papers this year, I felt quite strategic in having students turn in the bulk of their essay as a draft prior to Spring Break—and I gave thorough feedback following this before final submissions a few weeks after. However, I was disappointed in how many felt satisfied with their rough drafts rather than making the substantive changes I’d suggested. They had apparently passed the “threshold of commitment,” and felt that they had invested too much time/energy to warrant a deeper revision.

My goal this year is to try and conference with students earlier in the writing process, such as having students talk aloud with me through their outlines before they dove too deeply into a rough draft. Of course, in part this means helping students understand that they need to be careful about “over-committing” to any draft—but pragmatism also has a role here.

How much time do you spend grading essays, individually and collectively?

If I’ve done my job creating a solid rubric and form to enter feedback on, it takes me roughly ten minutes to grade an individual formal essay (of average length: 2-3 pages). Especially if I’m familiar with earlier stages in the writing process for a particular student, reading through and making marks is not too extensive of a process—I’m looking for patterns, after all, and not correcting every individual error.

Of course, ten minutes per essay does take a significant amount of time: 120 students x 10 minutes = 1200 minutes or 20 hours per essay set, all of which tend to come outside of school. Alas, such is the plight of an English teacher.

There are some strategies I’ve acquired to make this process more manageable over a school year, however: a) whenever I receive a set of essays, I set a nightly goal of how much I want to grade each evening, b) I set due dates for different classes apart from each other, that way I don’t have two sets of essays coming in at the same time, and c) I try to avoid “singular prompts” in which all students are writing about the exact same thing—this is for my own sake along with giving them more choice.

The time it takes to grade and provide meaningful feedback is important to consider, though, as you plan out the number and schedule of your essays throughout the year. Pace yourself, and be intentional—for the sake of yourself but also your students.

Doesn’t a formal essay have to be analytical?

Not at all. Of course, we do work through formal literary analysis or analytical expository papers during the year—this is a critical skill for students to harness both for their standardized tests but also for college readiness. This also includes research papers, which have their own process that I won’t go into depth here (though you can see an example of the process at this link).

But we should not limit the type of writing that we consider “formal”—too often creative/narrative writing is left out of the discussion or assigned as a one-off task that isn’t given much scrutiny.

I’ve written a lot about this in previous posts, but I always begin the year with a formal narrative essay as it allows students to access formal writing more easily and also helps build trust within our classroom. I also then try to create space for a creative vignette at some point later in the year to interrupt the routine of analytical writing that is built into so many constructed responses.

I still use the same rubric format—I just modify it for the task at hand, or include additional reflections/self-analyses (for the vignette, especially) to help students build other skills at the same time. For those looking for samples of these, just reach out to me like usual at [email protected].

Do you typically set requirements for length, word count, paragraphs, etc.?

I’ve always tried to veer away from specific requirements as far as length/paragraphs, trying to redirect students back to the prompt/rubric as much as possible—it is a skill, right, to be able to create a structure for one’s own purpose and voice?

This was in large part to the many students who have walked into my room who have been taught that essays have ___ paragraphs and paragraphs have ___ sentences. Of course this needs to be pushed back against, but I also recognize the pragmatism of this approach. Especially for timed, in-class essays, I often recommend a strategy for students in terms of how to structure their ideas to best meet the prompt’s requirements; however, I also try to differentiate upwards by challenging students to organize their essay that best suits the purpose of their ideas.

On out of class essays, I’ll usually provide students with two things: a rough estimate of length (2-3 pages double-spaced, for instance) and then an exemplar paper that they can refer to if they need a clearer idea of what that length can look like. On the other hand, I try to be as clear as possible about how length does not guarantee quality.

As far as paragraphs, one of my goals this year was to push students to be more creative in varying paragraph length within formal writing—and I’ll continue pushing towards that next year and beyond, especially for students who are already scoring well on their previous responses. This is one of the reasons that narrative and creative genres can be helpful, too, as they give students a bit more permission to experiment and, in doing so, gain more flexibility and confidence.

Do you incorporate peer feedback?

Such a pesky little question to end on.

Here are the three major walls to peer feedback that I’ve run into:

If students are writing on the same topic, this can greatly reduce the burden of individual critical thinking as students parrot ideas of their peers

If it occurs in the midst of the writing progress, students are often at varying stages at any given moment—so it is difficult to create simultaneous structure

If it occurs towards the end of the writing process, students have more than likely passed the “threshold of commitment” mentioned earlier

That said, I do like to incorporate peer feedback, particularly as a way to affirm our classroom culture of trust and collaboration. Especially as we go deeper into the school year, I try to embed it more often at various stages in the process.

One collaborative activity that I intend to use more this upcoming year is to have students talk out their brainstorming with peers after individual reflection. Especially if I create individualized topics for a given assignment, forcing students to talk out their ideas is a great way to help them visualize where they are heading with their writing—and to consider potential pitfalls or counterpoints that may be pertinent.

An additional collaborative peer feedback activity is to make sure it is targeted, such as a specific paragraph or even sentence (like claim statement). You can also create differentiated feedback groups based on where students are at in the process, though I wouldn’t recommend this until more trust is built within a classroom.

Finally, I do think there is still value in peer review of essays following final draft submissions. It serves a different purpose at this point, but still can be both affirming and productive in terms of students seeing how their peers went a different direction.

Phew.

Before I began my journey into the high school English classroom, my perspective on what “English class” entailed was defined in large part by its anchor texts—i.e. the novels and plays that were assigned (and, far too often in my own high school experience, Sparknoted). This makes sense, Kelly Gallagher notes often in his writings, as it is quite often the experience of teachers to have their curriculum defined by the longer texts they teach. 

A quick and important lesson I learned once I began my own career, however, was that it is often the shorter, supplemental texts that make a lasting impact on students and elevate the classroom’s rigor. There is a reason, after all, that I always begin the school year with a unit absent a novel or play—diving into a handful of stories and poems is an intentional way to frame the mindsets and skills we will embark upon over the year. 

It took a lot more time to reflect through my old files/notes, but I still was able to come up with my six favorite supplemental texts that I have taught over my first six years. Just like last week’s post, I’ll move through the honorable mentions first before going into the most impactful, enjoyable texts that have entered my classroom since 2012!

Honorable Mentions

-“First Grade’ by Ron Koertge—this poem has been a mainstay in my classroom since snagging it from an AP Literature conference, and I have no regrets about the regularity with which I use it. Whenever I introduce how to breakdown and analyze a poem, Koertge’s poem is my go-to: in eight impactful lines, it showcases a bevy of literary devices while tapping into critical thematic elements such as imagination and the role of different “educations” in our lives. It also has the great “grey breath” image that students never fail to get a kick out of.

-“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson—one of the classics, especially from the English teacher lens. While it is far from my personal favorite as an individual reader (“The Ones That Walk Away From Omelas” is by far the superior story, in comparison) it is perpetually teachable—with a climax that both grips the classroom and paves the way to a host of anchor texts and their themes: Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Night, The Book Thief, and King Lear, to name a few. The YouTube film that goes with this is also top-notch, I must say.

-“Shadows” by Lorraine Maynard—I’ve tried to expand the traditional canon in my classroom by looking for more contemporary works, and “Shadows” is one of the best results of that. A first-person narrative about a homeless girl in New Orleans, it does a great job pushing the students to work more deeply into the narrator’s perspective while expanding their empathy simultaneously with their imagination. Rich with devices as well as thematic pathways, this story has come in handy time and time again, especially as I scaffold up to longer texts such as House on Mango Street and I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

-“Proverbs of Hell” by William Blake—one of my most transformative college experiences was a course dedicated entirely to the British Romantic poet William Blake and his collection of rebellious, innovative works. While he’s much better known for “The Tyger” and “The Lamb” (a great juxtaposition of poems that I also enjoy teaching), one of my favorite activities for upper-level classes is to toss the “Proverbs” at them in challenge-like form. Each individual Proverb has its own ingenious meaning, and students are forced to grapple with them in search of their wisdoms. I’ll never forget the first AP class I presented with this task: afterwards the entire white board was filled with their own interpretations, many evincing considerable higher-level thinking skills.

My Top 6 Supplemental Texts:

#6 - “Offensive Play” by Malcolm Gladwell—along with short stories and poems, I do my best to infuse my English classroom with purposeful informational texts. Though this piece has now become dated enough to be set aside, in my initial years this was a cornerstone especially in my classes with lower-level readers. Gladwell does a masterful job pairing the experience of a post-NFLer and his struggles with CTE against Michael Vick’s dogfighting tragedies. 

This piece is meant to be provocative, especially before the concussion/CTE discussion made itself a mainstay in our social consciousness. Consider this line by Gladwell: “In the nineteenth century, dogfighting was widely accepted by the American public. But we no longer find that kind of transaction morally acceptable in a sport.”

I first taught this article in the heart of SEC Country and the town that celebrates its standing as the birthplace of Bear Bryant—and I’ll never forget the look on a senior offensive lineman’s face when he got to the end of this piece. Awareness is a powerful thing—and this article was at the forefront of helping move our society towards a greater urgency in understanding the trauma that football can inflict on the brain, particularly for amateurs without the incentive of a professional salary or even a collegiate scholarship.

#5 - “The School Children” by Louise Gluck—this poem is a masterpiece of deeper meanings and playful layers, incorporating numerous devices such as symbolism, juxtaposition, parallelism and even a biblical allusion. It is one of my favorites to help students see how the form of a poem can work together with its language to create meaning (and it also pairs beautifully with “First Grade,” which I noted above). 

Along with its teachability, “The School Children” avails an important conversation in my classroom about the role of a school in a student’s life, especially in how it interacts with a student’s family. This past year, I used this poem as an entry point into an end-of-semester reflection on their education experience—with an emphasis on whether or not they felt their voices mattered in the process.

I deeply believe that our classrooms should use content to empower students with the skills and confidence they need to better advocate for themselves, and Gluck’s poem—if employed well—is perhaps the best text I’ve encountered to use as a tool for this. 

#4 - “Distance” by Elizabeth Conway—another foundation that I’ve come to adopt in my classroom is the concept Hemingway’s iceberg (usually represented visually somewhere in my room). There is what occurs above the surface and then the deeper levels of inference students must aspire towards. 

“Distance” is a magnificent display of these layers, and students flock to its depths even after just a single reading. Readers of all levels not only comprehend the story’s basic premise of a family in disarray, but also are able to catch the implications of both character and conflict that are not explicitly provided. 

Once again, I leaned heavily towards teachability with this list—and that is what landed “Distance” into consideration. However, my personal affection towards themes of regarding distance and proximity (which I’ve written a bit about…) makes this one of my personal favorite short stories to bring into the classroom.

#3 - “Let America Be America Again” by Langston Hughes—the poetry of Langston Hughes has again and again served my students, not only to build important skills but also to help them hear important perspectives regarding our country. You really can’t go wrong with Hughes, a powerful writer of the Harlem Renaissance who found a way to speak truth with utter clarity alongside a rhythm that elevated its power.

“Let America Be America Again” is longer than many of his more-famous poems, but its resonance continues to build in current years (and not just because of its ironic pairing with a certain political aphorism from the 2016 election): 

“O, let my land be a land where Liberty / Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, / But opportunity is real, and life is free, / Equality is in the air we breathe.”

The speaker is adamant in both his criticism of and aspiration for his country, and also goes on to unite his experience with those of other oppressed groups. And with the classic metaphor arguing that “the steel of freedom will not stain” and a powerful allusion to the Constitution in its final stanza, this is the type of text that shows just how beautifully language can be used to articulate a lasting creed.

#2 - “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner—just read this short excerpt and behold this story’s greatness:

The road was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance away on top of a hill, coming slowly as if the occupants were watching them. The grandmother stood up and waved both arms dramatically to attract their attention. The car continued to come on slowly, disappeared around a bend and appeared again, moving even slower, on top of the hill they had gone over. It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it.

This story has everything: setting and characterization of the finest quality, thematic depths that can be mined for days afterwards if a teacher chooses, and more than anything the type of suspense that brings students back to what really matters: the power of storytelling.

The Misfit’s final words in the story echo far beyond the reading, too—“It’s no real pleasure in life”—not only leaving students hanging but reminding them of the haunting nature of ambiguity. What better takeaway could there be in an English class, after all?

#1 - “The Mending Wall” by Robert Frost—the origin of “good neighbors make good fences,” this often misunderstood classic (just like Frost’s more-famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”) is perhaps the most intriguing poem I’ve brought into my classroom in terms of what it offers. 

It’s initial line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” quite pointedly names how the barriers humans build betwixt themselves are neither natural nor inevitable—and then the speaker goes onto narrate a rather straightforward interaction between two neighbors who for the sake of tradition alone go about their annual wall rebuilding between their properties.

While acknowledging their differences—“He is all pine and I am apple orchard”—along with the need in certain places for a wall, the speaker then points out how foolish it is to have a wall where they do not need it.

His neighbor’s objection? Tradition—that is what he has been taught, and he leans on this teaching repetitively through the poem’s final line. Frost is quite critical of this (the speaker observers that his neighbor “moves in darkness” towards the end) and surely wants the reader to consider the walls we needlessly construct in our own lives.

Having finished my sixth year of teaching high school English, I wanted to take some time this summer to reflect not only on my practices but also on the content itself. One of the elements of my career that I’m especially grateful for (with the benefit of hindsight) is the range of courses/content I have taught. I have taught everything from 9th to 12th grade English—with both regular and pre-AP/AP sections of each—as well as in alternative learning environments (also, shout-out to that personal finance elective I had as a 5th prep in Year 1 that was explicitly described to me at the time as “a place to put kids”).

Rather than rolling out the same curricula year after year, I’ve had to adjust quite often to the resources available—and though this obviously has taken effort on the front end, I am better off for it now with a much wider grasp of what high school English can look like.

This week, I’ll lay out my top 6 anchor texts that I’ve taught the past 6 years: novels and plays that were the “anchors” of their instructional units. Next week, I’ll instead focus on my favorite supplemental texts, mostly comprised by short stories and poems.

[one important note to include is that these are ranked in terms of my favorites to teach; the list would look much different if I ordered it according to my personal preference based on the text alone.]

Before diving into my top 6, though, let’s briefly move through my honorable mentions that just missed the cut:

Honorable Mentions:

Life of Pi—I ended both of my years teaching AP Literature with Martel’s absolutely incredible piece of literature, one that manifests its themes in a profound manner. This novel allowed for a beautiful discussion on the interactions of differing faiths in its early chapters, and then one of my favorite mini-traditions of taking up the novels halfway through the culminating chapter and its major reveal. The downside: seniors on the precipice of graduating were not quite as invested in the text as I hoped for, and the reveal was good rather than inspiring, as it was for me in my personal reading. Also, similar to To Kill a Mockingbird, there are long stretches in which the text plods without much purpose.

King Lear—of the Shakespeare plays I’ve taught, this one holds a special spot for me. My first year working through this play with AP seniors, I had the great privilege of bringing in my two “Fordyce grandparents” to judge scene performances—leading to the immense pleasure of watching the late Colonel Philips lecture the students about needing to put more effort into their preparation while his wife, Mrs. Agnes, tried to calm him down and celebrate what she saw as splendid performances. The play itself contains many themes and ideas that step outside of the typical themes of the canon--and is an under-appreciated achievement by Shakespeare (and much preferable to Hamlet).

Death of a Salesman/Great Gatsby—this combination unit was one of my favorites early in my career, both contributing to a deeper examination of the American Dream. The range of this pairing fascinated me, with Fitzgerald’s lofty prose dancing through the text’s thorough critique of elitism setting a magnificent foundation for the plodding universalities of Arthur Miller’s play. I couldn’t rank one above the other on this list, therefore, as their juxtaposition has molded in my mind: Jay Gatsby is Willy Loman in too many ways, and vice versa.

Lord of the Flies—this was my final cut, and I stared at it for a good while. Why does this one mean so much to me? This was the first novel that really opened the doors to different lenses of criticism that I could bring into the classroom, and pairing this novel with both Freud and Hobbes gave students a language at a 10th grade level that really did introduce a rigor I had not considered before. This is a truly teachable—if horrific—text, and it made me a better teacher in the process.

All this said, there could only be six. In order, here are my favorite six texts from the past six years in the English classroom:

#6—Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The best love story I’ve ever taught, hands down, and perhaps my favorite text to watch students build confidence in while reading. From the first page forward it is loaded with literary depth: “Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board.” Hurston’s classic beautifully pushes back against the fixtures and systems of oppression in society along lines of race, gender and socioeconomics, but at the same time it forges a protagonist in Janie Starks who discovers herself through the men she interacts with throughout the novel—inverting the typical manner that novels tend to unfold. The nuance and ambiguity in this novel pushes students to reconsider their own simple clarities around life and love, and it is teachable at all skill levels. Like many on this list from here on out, as much of a joy as this was to read personally, it elevated its power for me once I was able to witness it through the lens of a teacher.

#5—Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Accessibility matters when dealing with Shakespeare at the high school level. And even as we (rightly) move away from the one-Shakespeare-play-a-year mindset that has long outpaced its utility, it is important to keep in mind how students can benefit from a text’s reading. Julius Caesar, though, is both relevant and accessible—students can quickly glean the stakes at hand and the camps into which characters fall; they also readily note the parallels between the Shakespeare’s oft-read history and our current society. They also time and time again enjoy the acting out of Caesar’s death. (regardless of how many times the Latin “Et Brute” is butchered…)

However, I also had one of my meaningful teaching moments after a reading of this play during my first year of teaching. We had just read the famous lines, “Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings,” and then considered the role of fate in the context of school shootings (Sandy Hook had just occurred) and the existence of evil in the world. One student had sat quiet throughout the discussion, which was unusual for her, and I left class a bit worried. However, the next day she showed up to school early with an eloquent reflection she had stayed up late to write—one that attempted to reconcile the many paradoxes she was considering the day before.

This is what teaching can be, and should be: giving students opportunities to find their own solutions—and in doing so, their own voices.

#4—The Chosen by Chaim Potok

I’ve done my best not to let recency bias seep too significantly into this ranking (especially coming off such a rewarding year), and I’ve also given more weight to the texts that I’ve taught on multiple occasions.

That said, I couldn’t leave off Potok’s classic novel and its poignant contrasting of traditions in a manner that resonates profoundly in today’s world. One of my personal favorite reads going into this year, I was stupefied to learn that not only was this one of the few full class sets available in our book room but that it had been a tradition to read it for years at Wynne High School. I leapt into the experience of teaching this wholeheartedly, and without disappointment: students rose to the occasion, refusing to let its dense sections of history prevent them from attaching themselves to this amazing story of friendship, family and “fences” (metaphorically—though I’ll talk more about “The Mending Wall” in my next post).

Why this book matters so much to me: it helped shift our classroom this year from norms of tolerance of different ideas to a willingness to seriously reflect on the way identities shape not only our experiences but also our views. Students were able to extract the universal lessons from this book and to transpose them onto their own lives, making the themes real in a way that ought to be the goal of any instructional unit. I was grateful for the opportunity to work through this novel, and cannot wait to elevate it in the upcoming year, too!

#3—The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

This was a book I encountered in Year Four and ran with from there. A poetic, insightful collection of short stories that together weave into a magical novella, this was the first book on this list that I really considered for the #1 slot.

There are two reasons that I absolutely love teaching Cisneros’s classic text: its language and its resonance.

One of the hardest things to do as a high school English teacher is to help students move past identifying figurative language and into the analysis and evaluation of its impact on the text and its themes. There is no better text to begin building these skills than The House on Mango Street, which is rich with its language in an intentional, impactful way.

However, its themes are even more important to celebrate: a beautiful, tragic journey from innocence to experience takes place within the novella, with the depth of its individual stories heightening and darkening the further students explore into it. And along with the serious challenges Esperanza faces throughout the novella, there is also a quite-meaningful tension at its heart: whether to leave home for individual dreams or to stay home to be connected to family. Having taught in three rural communities (and coming from a small, coastal town myself), this question is a powerful one that each student has their own reflections on—endowing the novel with an undeniable purpose in the classroom.

#2—Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

I’ve written extensively about this one of late (here and here), and there’s a full-circle connection with this text in my teaching career: I was notified that it was banned in my district only days before I was to begin teaching it in Year One, and only this year did I get the actual experience of bringing George and Lennie into my classroom. I also think it’s important to note how powerful novellas can be in the English classroom, as shorter texts avail more time for quality in terms of the experience rather than drowning in a sheer quantity of pages.

I’ll be concise in my evaluation here: there is no more gripping book for students to read than Of Mice and Men, and its infamous final two chapters connect with students almost without fail.

That is what gets this onto the list, but “Chapter 4” and its scathing portrayal of race in society—though compartmentalized within the novella’s plot—is resonant in important ways, including the compartmentalization itself. This is far and away the most important section of a novel I’ve ever taught, and that gets this all the way to #2 on this list today.

#1—I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” 

There is a tension one faces as an English teacher, especially at the high school level: how intentionally do you lean into the most powerful/difficult of topics. It’s important to challenge students to reflect on these topics, but at the same time the classroom should be a place where students feel safe/comfortable.

This book pushed me as a teacher, and even now—with it ranked high atop my list (and also high atop the “most banned” list across the country)—I am hesitant when considering when it should be inserted into the curriculum. Angelou’s inclusion of the rape she experienced is far and away the most difficult portion of a text I’ve ever brought into the classroom (I always assign it as an optional homework reading, giving each student an opportunity to opt out).

And yet, I have seen students find their own power in reading this memoir, and far too many have told me afterwards of this power for me to look away from it. If any book needs to be read right now at a societal level, it is this one—if for no other reason that the honest ferocity of its words in rendering an important image of America and in particular how innocence is fragile in its presence: 

“Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware. And the worst part of my awareness was that I didn't know what I was aware of. I knew I knew very little, but I was certain that the things I had yet to learn wouldn't be taught to me at George Washington High School. ”

Right in line with national trends, Arkansas is now officially experiencing a major shortage of educators across a distressing number of areas:

“LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KATV) -- The Arkansas Board of Education reports "critical teacher shortage areas" for the upcoming 2018-2019 school year. The subject areas projected to lack teachers include Art, Chemistry, Computer Science, English/Language Arts, Family & Consumer Science, French, Journalism, Library/Media, Mathematics, Middle Childhood, Music, Physics, Social Studies, Spanish, and Special Education.”

Of course, the immediate concern of this shortage is the question of how to get a qualified teacher in front of each student in the state by August. There is an understandable pragmatism in this short-term urgency: empty classrooms are a problem, particularly when students are in desks awaiting instruction.

However, I think it’s important to take the time to consider the deeper consequences that this shortage may have already been wreaking upon schools in Arkansas:

A Shortage Not Experienced Equally

A statewide shortage should not be assumed to be an equally-felt problem. As the map above indicates, there are vast differences in the levels to which teachers are compensated district-by-district—and this is just one aspect of the disparity.

Due to the reliance on local property tax revenue for school funding, districts in wealthier areas are afforded far more resources despite the fact that they serve fewer students coming from low-income background who often require more resources and support. These areas also tend to have more employment opportunities for significant others, access to higher education locations, health care services, etc. This is also why I’d be willing to place a confident bet that a far higher percentage of teachers in the lower-paying/under-resourced districts commute in from out of town.

And this shortage is pouring gasoline onto preexisting disparities.

Back in 2013, I wrote about the following hypothetical hiring scenario:

“Let’s say there are three schools: School A (top-performing in a wealthier suburb of Little Rock), School B (average-performing in a normal town) and School C (struggling in a town with a similarly-struggling economy).

School A posts the two job openings over the summer and right-away snatches up two of School B’s top educators.

School B then posts two more job openings along with the two it originally posted. All four of these openings are filled by School C’s best teachers.

School C? It originally was worried about finding capable teachers who were certified in the necessary areas to fill the original two spots. Now it has to fill six spots and just lost some of its most reliable teachers.”

The fact that the shortage is now hitting stronger, more stable schools may bring a feeling of universality, but the reality is that schools in less-resourced areas are reaping far greater consequences. The slight increase of hiring burden for some schools scales to existential crisis by the time it hits the schools of greatest need, both in terms of hiring and retention.

Increased Turnover and Instability

This leads to the new reality in many schools: annually facing a significant number of positions to recruit and hire for.

Once again, there is the immediate urgency of trying to fill an entire staff. Particularly in remote or lower-paying districts—and especially in lieu of a statewide shortage—this baseline task is far from easy. Even with the advent of the APPEL program (which scales up the ideas of Teach For America and Arkansas Teacher Corps), there are numerous districts across the state right now still actively searching for teachers to fill out its staff.

Even assuming that all schools will eventually hire for all their positions by August (important note: they won’t), there are deeper challenges this increase in turnover inflicts on schools and students.

Acclimating a new teacher into a district and all of its systems, traditions and community resources is not a quick process. Beyond the day-to-day minutia, it quite simply takes time for a teacher to become a part of a school and a community.

And with our growing recognition of the power of culture and relationships within a school, it is important to note how much harder it is to build a community identity within a school that constantly is having to replace its leaders. This also severely impacts students, many of whom have adopted the expectation that their teachers—even the ones they have good experiences with—will eventually leave.

Finally, once again it needs to be said that this instability is not felt equally across the state. Districts with fewer resources deal with a far greater cycle of turnover annually. And it therefore ought to be a priority to get a better grasp of how this manifests across the state.

Here are three data points that I think are important for the state to ascertain from each school/district going forward:

What % of teachers do you have on staff for the 2018-2019 school year who are new to the building/district?

What % of teachers do you have on staff for the 2018-2019 school year who have taught in the building/district for at least three years already?

What % of teachers on staff for the 2018-2019 school year live within the area the district serves?

Mapping out these data points would tell a far more nuanced story of the teacher shortage and how it affects different districts and regions of the state.

Undermining of “Teacher Quality” Emphases

The last thing to keep in mind is how detrimental this shortage is to many of the policies that have implemented over the past decade that focused on teacher quality. A significant emphasis has been made on identifying underperforming teachers, often with the implied sentiment that the best way to improve schools would be to remove teachers “who are not getting the job done.”

At least in terms of raw numbers, the attrition is happening. According to a report in 2016, the percentage of teachers quitting within their first year of teaching jumped from “6.91 percent in 2007 to 16.03 percent in 2015”—an 132% leap. Add in the fact that “Nearly a third of all teachers in the state quit teaching after only three years,” and the exodus is quite apparent.

In a snowball-like problem, the teachers who do stay often have to weather the additional burden of the turnover, such as instability year-to-year in terms of assigned courses, increasing classroom sizes, and a lack of resources for their own development. Couple this with the pressures already added to teachers in recent years with greater emphasis on standardized assessments and modifying curricula to include technology, and even teachers with strong passions and commitments may reach a limit.

[and as someone who has chosen to move schools twice now, once for personal reasons and another for professional reasons that I have already written about, I don’t write this reflection from a pedestal--in fact, the shortage in a way empowers teachers with more opportunities to move to situations that are better for them, and I recognize my role in adding to this turnover]

Let’s get back to the original point, though: the national emphasis of the past decade has been to focus on the quality of teaching, but in doing so it may have significantly reduced the supply into the teaching profession. That same 2016 report showed that “the number of people seeking teaching degrees in Arkansas has decreased 50 percent over the last five years.”

There’s a basic supply-and-demand issue here: if you don’t create a supply into the teaching profession, the notion of trying to get “bad teachers” out of the profession holds no water as there is little guarantee of finding a better replacement.

And on a broader level, the fact that the shortage of teachers has reached a critical level severely undermines numerous systems meant to support and strengthen the ranks of teachers.

Unless we take a step back and consider how we substantively reverse course to get a far greater supply of potential teachers—and not just with stopgap solutions like alternative licensure programs—we are going to be plugging holes in leaking ships for the foreseeable future.

“Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.” —Philip Roth

Teacher-summers are persnickety things: the need for recovery from the sheer exhaustion of a given school year and its myriad emotional arcs; the ambiguous-yet-regimented “development,” both required and self-sought (the latter almost always yielding more fruit) for the upcoming year; the desire to make the most of “summer” juxtaposed against the desire to make it last; and the careful balancing of travel and staying, of work and relaxing, of reflection and planning.

One of the traps that I often fall into with more time is a frustrating dalliance with “the news of the day”: afforded the opportunity to pay more attention, I inevitably recoil at all the ills of our society—forced and unforced, though “unforced” probably just needs further examination to identify cause and culprit—and my mood suffers. I’m supposed to feel outrage (the outlines tell me so, after all!) but I am much more likely to ebb into torpor.

And then there’s the humidity.

Summer in this region of the country requires an intimate relationships with air-conditioning. To leave our apartment is to dare the misery nature wreaks, so it is often easier to stay inside (an antithetical summer construct for a boy who grew up in the Pacific Northwest). The car is no different: to continue enjoying the artificial atmosphere within my sedan, whereas to step outside is to allow my “bubble” to become corrupted with the weight of heat and sun.

The baseline context of summer, therefore, is a clinging to Wi-Fi and A/C—and the futile scattering of attempts to escape both. Not exactly a recipe for bliss.

(escape does happen though)

And then there was this week. 

The recent deaths of Philip Roth and Anthony Bourdain shook me in subtle-yet-substantial ways. You see, up until notifications popped up on my phone, I really had spent no time consuming the content they created. Despite their significant place in our culture, I had partaken precisely zero of Roth’s and Bourdain’s work.

And up to that point, this did not bother me. There are far too many “contents” to consume in our 21st century society (and, it should be noted, too often the privileged voices of those like Roth and Bourdain have crowded out lesser-known and just-as-valuable voices). However, “grass is greener” works so much more powerfully in its nostalgic form, and of course this led to me trying to at least understand what so many had loved—and what I had missed out on.

“If I am an advocate for anything, it is to move,” Bourdain said. “As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.”

If “stationary-ness” is the baseline context of my summer, then this was the slap-in-the-face reminder I needed: an appreciation of movement, in all its meanings and connotations.

Of course, I am fortunate enough to have the time and resources to move—and an amazing best friend who can help me explore. And my summer is by no means empty: a healthy spread of professional development, part-time work with incoming teachers (see pic at bottom), and several trips with Rachel to learn (the National Memorial For Peace and Justice), to enjoy (Dauphin Island) and, most importantly, to be with family and friends (Seattle/Newport trip in mid-July).

But movement means many things on a simpler, more intimate level. It means not staying fixed in one place, including ideologically, and both examining and re-examining the ways in which I understand the world.

This means pushing against “reacting” to the the news on my Twitter feed and Facebook timeline, and instead reflecting on my own understanding of the topics. 

It is frustrating to me to see such sudden and forceful impulses towards reaction on both sides of the aisle to the many issues our society is reckoning with: immigration, free trade, international alliances (and lack thereof), etc.

If stereotypes are forged upon incomplete, insufficient stories of others, then perhaps a similar force is driving our tribalistic adherence to group-think. In lieu of humility, context, and knowledge, we simplistically check the scorecard and see which “side” we ought to align on.

Then we click our caps lock button and post/share.

The challenge: resisting the inclination to react and instead reflecting not only on what we know but why we know. This means exploring difference perspectives, contemplating the principles underlying the issue, and deepening our knowledge of context—both present and historical.

Yes, this does take time. But also movement, in it’s own way.

This is what patriotic citizenship not only suggests but demands, especially in today’s moment.

And I find myself grateful to have the time to pursue this movement.

Then what of Roth, you might ask? Well, I’m already through American Pastoral with several others on queue (feel free to send recommendations), and I’m fascinated yet haunted by Roth’s poignant observation of American nostalgia. As a country, we cling to artificial memories of our country just as desperately as I lean against the A/C while typing this—and we far too rarely ascend to the humility needed to productively consider the challenges we are confronted with.

To perceive reality soberly is step 1, Roth seems to suggest, if there is a ladder to societal recovery: “He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach — that it makes no sense.”

As I have written before, our response too often to life’s complexities is to react with simplicities, to hope that our volume will alleviate the utter insufficiency of our ideas’ substance.

Though bleak, Roth’s writing stubbornly worked to unravel this inclination and expose the long-term consequences of the ticking-time bomb of the deceptive stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Truth is inevitable, ultimately, and even vengeful.

And yet.

At the National Memorial For Peace and Justice, which commemorates the horrific legacy of racial lynching in our country, a quote amongst the hanging tombs reads, “We will remember / with hope because hopelessness is the enemy of justice.”

The humility to see reality and the courage to choose hope despite it.

Sounds like movement worth aspiring towards.

Most people know the “ending” of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: George recounting once more all the dreams he and Lennie shared, and then making the tragic, inevitable decision to end his best friend’s life on his own rather than at the hands of others.

“George killed Lennie!”

[watching students encounter this moment is one of the difficult privileges of a high school English teacher]

Yet there’s another page in the novel.

The other men show up to the scene just afterwards, finding George sitting, shaking. Curley, full of bravado; Carlson, full of questions. But Slim—the man George opens up to earlier in the novel about his own lack of family and how much his friendship with Lennie means—is the one who knows how to support George, who comforts him and leads him away from the fallen Eden.

And then Carlson delivers the final words of the American classic:

"Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin' them two guys?”

The themes within Of Mice and Men have been taught countless times, in myriad ways: the uncertainty and isolation of a migrant worker; the benevolence and danger of innocence; the marginalization and dehumanization of other-ness, whether by gender or race or disability; the necessity and cruelty of the American Dream.

Still, in my second go-around with Steinbeck this year—and this time as a culminating text for the year—I felt an itch to tread elsewhere, to mine for a difference perspective.

Enter Brene Brown and vulnerability.

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen,” Brown writes in Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead.

George’s courage to “let himself be seen” by Slim early in the novel had its own reward, as Slim was able to support him towards the end. In a novel overflowing with other occasions in which vulnerability was not reciprocated with affirmation (ex: Carlson’s inhumane killing of Candy’s dog; Candy’s subsequent refusal to acknowledge Crooks’s plea for empathy; Curley’s Wife desperation for an attentive ear with Lennie), the final page seems to underscore how rare and important this vulnerability was.

And is.

So while we still moved through our normal routines with the novel—examining the depth of its characters and the brutal impacts of its setting and themes, and ultimately assessing students’ knowledge not only through a written exam but also via a powerful round of literary panels (listen here and here)—we aspired for something, well, more.

“Begin with the end in mind” is a concept often brought about in instructional planning for teachers, a concept that emphasizes working backwards from the intended skills and knowledge you want students to attain. It makes sense: you need to know what you want students to end up learning before you begin deciding what/how you should teach.

But this year I aspired with an additional, more-foundational “end in mind”: classroom culture. As I wrote about in my previous blog post, we began the year with a commitment to five core beliefs, one of which included “We believe all persons are valuable, and strive to understand perspectives that are different than our own.”

Our final unit would assess this core belief and our overall classroom culture in a severe, undeniable way.

Believing in Brown’s message that true, impactful leadership requires a willingness to be authentic and engage intentionally in vulnerability, I asked students to complete the dual task of writing and presenting a narrative with some aspect of vulnerability. 

Here’s how I went about doing it, and what occurred:

Step 1: Designing and Modeling

In Daring Greatly, Brown defines vulnerability “as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” Building off this definition, students were tasked with creating a 500-word (precisely 500 words!) and presentation that showcased one of those three elements: uncertainty, risk, or emotional exposure.

One of the tenants of this assignment was that vulnerability means different things to different people, and that there were so many ways to go—none of them wrong. My suggestions included a challenge students had faced/overcome, a person in their life who mattered a great deal to them, or an issue they were truly passionate about.

However, I also knew that I needed to model for them what this would look like. As I have many times as a teacher, I wrote my own exemplar essay in which I recounted experience of hearing of my dad’s stroke while on the other side of the country. I then made my own presentation to my classes, talking about how I still struggled with my decision to leave my previous school, and how I still feel partially guilty about where I teach now. My voice cracked as I spoke about this to my students, and it was probably the first time they had seen me abandon my positive, confident persona.

The introduction of this activity—which included Brene Brown’s TedTalk and hard copies of the expectations and rubrics for each part—was important with students being asked to take the risk of sharing their own vulnerability. Especially with my own modeling, a foundation was laid for students to chart their own course from.

Step 2: Presenting and Listening

Students were given lots of freedom for their presentations: they could have artifacts or pictures to present; they could stand or sit, as long as it was at the front of the room; and they could even present on a different topic than what they wrote about. Only a month earlier, they had each delivered extensive, formal presentations on their research—but this task, with its freedoms and flexibilities, was more intimidating for most.

Each day of presentations (no more than five presentations were scheduled for a given period) the rest of the students were randomly provided index cards with a name of a presenter on it. The “listeners” for that day were tasked with writing a note of affirmation to whomever presented, which would be returned to that presenter the next day of class along with my own feedback/affirmation.

From the first day onward, the students exhibited courage and authenticity across all presentations. Students shared the fear of asking for support in school and the struggles with procrastination; they shared the difficulties of losing a close family member or having to straddle divorced parents; they shared the immense pressure placed upon them by others, as well as the even-more-immense pressure they placed upon their own shoulders; they shared struggles with dyslexia and social anxiety and panic attacks, some visibly fighting through these battles the entire time they were presenting.

Through it all, their peers listened attentively and compassionately. When tears were shed or pauses needed to be had, there was endless patience. And more than a few times I watched them celebrate each other quietly immediately after, expressing the pride and inspiration they felt.

Step 3: Affirming and Reflecting

Up until this year, I took the responsibility of affirmation upon my own shoulders almost exclusively: it was my role as the classroom teacher, I believed, to make sure every student was affirmed.

I still believe this—but my mistake was to assume that I was the one who had to do all the affirming.

Our final activity took place in the school library, with all forty-three narrative essays (some with names removed, if the students felt more comfortable this way) were spread across tables from one end of the room to the other.

The expectations: take a colored pen and move silently from table to table, reading each other’s stories and writing notes of affirmation for thirty minutes.

Not a word was spoken in either class as the papers began to fill with comments full of inspiration and compassion. Even in my high-energy class of twenty-eight, a pall-like silence engulfed the space—made almost sacred  by their commitment to vulnerability.

“Without affirmation, vulnerability is fragile,” I said afterwards, expressing my pride in every single one of them. “But with affirmation, vulnerability is one of the most powerful forces in our life.”

Some direct feedback from students:

Students wrote the following in their post-unit survey:

Understanding different perspectives only helps deepen everyone's character even more […] It is difficult to see everyone as valuable and value each other's different opinions, but it is very important to learn.

I got to share something to people that I wanted to tell for a long time.

I believe that it helped us all grow as people and to discover our identity, not just as a student, but as our own person.

To see that emotion really allows one to see that we aren't alone and even though we don't see them right away there is always someone there for us.

I believe that I learned to be open with other people and that it pushed me to be more confident in myself.

[students also were given a chance at the end of the year to rate their classroom on our five core values: effort, growth, rigor, empathy, and impact. Compared to first semester, one core belief elevated itself above the others in our closing weeks: empathy (4.62/5.00 average). #numbersdontlie]

My Own Reflection

This year has reshaped my own expectations of what can occur in a classroom in different ways, ranging from collaborative learning to celebrating student writing to embedding systems throughout the classroom. 

But to see students display courage and compassion in this final month—building upon the values and beliefs we had developed throughout the year—was one of my proudest experiences in six years of teaching.

[their faces beamed when I told them this.]

Our last video/discussion of the year: Chimamanda Adichie’s lesson of “the single-story,” and how dangerous it is to rely on incomplete understandings of those around us--and how critical it is to speak our own story.

This unit (fully outlined here) gave students the opportunity to share their own stories with each other--an independent challenge, but also a chance to collectively appreciate the resilience and diversity within their classroom. And to see each other more completely.

In a world with increasing tendencies towards isolation and negativity, it is critical that our classrooms and schools push back intentionally, arming students the mindsets and skills to lead with empathy and authenticity. 

This is not an easy thing to do, but it is necessary. 

“I’m staying in here,” I then told them on the final day, as we stood in our closing circle, “but you’re going on together for your final two years of high school.”

I reminded them of the most impactful line separating people in our world, according to Brene Brown: there are those who have a strong sense of worth and belonging, she said, and those who struggle for that sense of worth and belonging.

“Help remind those around you of their worth,” I said, eyeing the minute hand as the bell was just about to ring. “And don’t forget your own.”

It is imperative that our classrooms not only help build up students’ conception of their self-worth, but teach them the importance of affirming the self-worth of their peers. 

To add a bit of context to my introit from previous posts (Vol. 1 and Vol. 2), one of my “meta” growth goals this year was being more open/confident talking about my experience and identity as a teacher. Of course, over the years I have posted quite frequently about the happenings of my classroom and my own reflections on my journey—however, I don’t think until this year I really turned the page towards celebrating specific skills/ideas/impacts on a regular basis.

There are many factors behind this, but ultimately it comes down to a deeper, more-clarified conviction I’ve arrived at: my impact as a potential leader is directly tied to my identity as a classroom teacher, and it is up to me to channel the joy and passion I get from my job to try and extend its reach beyond just my four walls.

Yes, this means more blog posts to come—and I appreciate sincerely the forum/feedback many of you provide for me; even the idea of a potential audience helps drive me to not only be my best self but to also project that same self, authentically but also confidently.

Did Well: Classroom Culture (inside our four walls)

My growth as a teacher and person since August 2012 (#redbugshoutout) has been far from a linear progression, doubling back quite often amidst various ambiguities and paradoxes.

However, if there is one thing that has deepened with clarity, it is my belief in the power of classroom culture to drive student learning—and pretty much everything else.

Going into a new school added a new challenge to this: no one knew who I was or what Teach For America was; I was just the random new teacher who they may have seen running through town a few times over the past couple years.

Nine months later, students spent the final section of their final class period standing in a circle, taking turns expressing appreciation for each other and the classroom as a whole—for the willingness to stay positive, “for the chance to learn more about each other’s stories,” and for the way “[they] had grown as people, not just as students.” #peakculture, right?

I really believe three changes to my classroom this year helped elevate our culture to a new level:

Values/Core Beliefs Shaped Everything—there were a lot of elements of my classroom that I brought from previous experiences, including our culture wall and the values attached to it. What was different this year was how we spent time each of the first days of class talking about one of our five core beliefs—which were also listed on each student’s desk. Whenever something happened in class, I did what I could to tie it back into our beliefs—and all survey questions, peer nominations, etc. targeted these beliefs as well. The unity this brought to the room for students but also for me was clarifying and consistent (so, like, the opposite of everything the NFL is doing right now), and I know that this was the foundation of much of the positivity that occurred this year.

Collaborative Learning Drove Everything—as I reflected on in a previous post, we brought movement/collaboration into the room in a whole new way this year, thanks in large part to some excellent professional development I received over the summer from Kelly Gallagher, TFA’s Rural School Leadership Academy, and Kagan Learning. I won’t expound in detail here, but I do think it’s important to name the important connection all of this had on student culture. The ability to work with each other early on through collaborative learning set the stage for much deeper empathy and vulnerability later on, and also set a norm in our room: students could look forward to being engaged, being positive, and being interactive. While this took additional planning time, I recognize now how critical it is to a positive classroom culture.

Narrative Writing/Activities Began Everything—in past years I’ve moved narrative writing to a backseat, but this year (along with other culture-building activities) we leaned into narrative writing as a way to build relationships within our room. Scaffolding up to a formal narrative essay, students wrote and shared about their identities/experiences early and often, and as a teacher I was able to model this with exemplars which also gave students insights into what drove me as a teacher. This allowed the foundation of our room to be built upon authenticity, and hearkened back to my first years teaching when I made similar emphases. Relationships drive everything, and it was so important to embed this priority into our first unit.

Do Better: Classroom Culture (outside our four walls)

Wait, whaaat?

There’s a point to this: there isn’t a getting there of classroom culture, especially if you see it as part-and-parcel with school culture.

No matter how much good existed within my classroom’s walls (and there was plenty of room for growth, too, as I reflected upon in my previous two posts), ultimately my students spent 1/8 of their school year in my room—and that’s not counting advisory, enrichment, lunch, activities, etc.

Part of new understanding this year is to refuse the physical barriers of the classroom and to try and influence outside of it: building positive relationships with adults as well as students, engaging and collaborating with fellow teachers, and advocating for what students need in other rooms than my own.

This is not an easy task—especially as a new teacher to a district—but I am proud of the seeds that were sown for it intentionally this year. Rather than just keep my head down and focus on my own room, I began to initiate conversations with others about their classrooms; I created a toolkit of strategies to improve relationships with students and celebrate them; and I was given the opportunity to lead the English department and serve on our school leadership team next year.