Ethical Dilemmas in Accommodating Students

Today, we got pretty deep into a very perplexing and complicated dilemma of public schooling teaching: How far and to what degree do you accommodate the needs, behaviors and preferences of your students? 

I left class totally excited about that conversation and the degree of depth we achieved in it.

On the one hand, we can say something like: Rules are rules. No excuses, no exceptions. If the rules, criteria and expectations are clear and transparent from the start, then the facts are what they are. A democratic society depends upon a set of predictable and consistently enforced rules and procedures in order to ensure that fairness reigns and justice prevails.

On the other hand, we can say: Context matter. Not everyone starts the race from the same place. So it’s not so much about where each individual starts as where we collectively end up. Equality of opportunity means nothing absent equality of resources and means. A democratic society depends upon sharing resources in order to ensure that opportunity is truly equalized.

And so it goes . . . 

Here are some dilemmas.

• Do we accommodate a student who is tardy to our class because she overslept, due to being up late studying?
• Do we accommodate a student who requests to re-take an exam because he was feeling ill on the day of the test?
• Do we accommodate a student whose parents request she be excused from watching Schindler’s List because the family believes that the movie overstates the extent and depth of the Holocaust’s brutality?

In the above examples, I’ve tried to point out the range of accommodation requests that come at us as teachers.  I want you to see that they are all, more or less, ethical dilemmas.

I also tried to write dilemmas that would push me, as a teacher, in different directions. I would probably not accommodate the first, I probably would accommodate the second, and I would have a very hard time accommodating the third--though, if pushed, I would probably view it as an exercise in free speech that I would be hesitant to deny.

My point? I am not “all for” or “all against” accommodation. It really does depends.

But what does it depend on?

I have two pieces of advice here. 

First, know what matters to you. Pick your battles. Things like talking while I was talking, putting your head down in class, or coming in tardy--these were all things that felt disrespectful to me and made the classroom chaotic or uninviting for other learners. I had a very low tolerance for any of these behaviors and was pretty inflexible with them all. 

But, when it came to student work, I felt differently. If I was going to take the time to grade it, I wanted it to be good. Since I couldn’t get to all my student’s work in one or two days, what difference would it make if it came in one or two days late? As long as students took initiative to request an extension, I was usually ok giving it.

This leads me to a second piece of advice. Last week I linked to an article about reliability in grading that mentioned the work of  Douglas Reeves. I think last week’s article made some important points. 

Increasingly, it appears, grades will come to be tied to specific standards. This is already how a lot of elementary schools work, and I think middle schools and high schools might head in that direction as well. Doing so gives us a lot more helpful and accurate information than a single grade that represents a mixture of ability, achievement, effort, attendance and compliance.

When I give a student two extra days to do their best work, am I increasingly or decreasing the reliability of grades as indicators of student learning? When I give a zero for not doing their homework, am I increasing or decreasing the reliability of grades as indicators of student learning?

I’ll return to my sunny optimism and assert that each child is gifted to enrich the world in ways we can only begin to imagine. As teachers, I think we want to act in ways that bring out these gifts, rather than stifling them.

Perhaps, when viewed in this light, the question of accommodation becomes not so hard after all . . .

 

Finding the Special through Assessment

Thank you for a great class on Friday! I am pleased with the level of engagement and collegiality in our class!!

As I have told some of you, I have an interest in European education. I taught for several years in Hungary and I have done research in French classrooms. As we talked about assessment and students with IEPs, it recalled for me some of the things I observed in those classrooms.

We are very used to think about mastery as 90% in the US. Indeed, for us, there is hardly another way to think about what “mastery”--or what an “A”--represents.

It might therefore interest you to know that in France, 14/20 is a very high--even an exceptional--grade (everything is always worth 20 points in France--don’t ask me why). 

I have heard stories about US teachers who spend time teaching in France and are shocked to receive parental complaints about them being “too easy graders.” Americans, it seems, are all too willing to give out unheard of scores, such as 18’s, to their students.

My point? Grading is often a somewhat subjective enterprise.

Now, there are test writers who use very sophisticated procedures as they work. Think about the IQ test. Most of the population will score 100. That is going to be the most common score. It represents “average intelligence.” Scores will naturally cluster around that number, with increasingly fewer scores as you move further away (up or down) away from 100. This is the idea of the normally-distributed bell curve.

In such a test, 100 means something fairly objective. 

But in most assessments that we as teachers write, there is nowhere near this level of certainty. I can write an assessment on which the most able student will receive 50/100. Does that mean this student failed? Does it mean the test was too hard? Or does it mean that that 50/100 represents “mastery” for that content on that particular exam?

When I think about assessment, I think about it as an opportunity for students to show me what they can do. My goal as a teacher is to find assessments that best allow me to see what each student can do. To accommodate my tests to their unique skills, interest, and knowledge.

Literally, as a teacher, I want to “catch” students acting smart. That’s how I think about my job.

It’s a different mindset, but one I would ask you to consider. 

Is our job to rank and sort our students, or is it to empower them to do increasingly well on a range of diverse, real-world tasks?

I put a lot of stock on informal, diagnostic assessment. It’s a way of thinking about universal screening. That I am constantly documenting the circumstances under which different students can excel. That I use that knowledge to not only structure up my curricular and instructional decisions, but that I also use it to make decisions about assessment and grading.

I love being that teacher who can uncover hidden potential in my students. That teacher who can legitimately point to outstanding work from a student who may be doing poorly in other classes. Please think about this perspective as you undertake your case studies.

You will be sending me your Case Study Proposals this weekend and I will be responding to them as quickly as possible. By next Friday, January 30, you will need to have done some work toward the next step of the project, the Analysis and Interpretation stage. 

For class next week, I know it says you should bring a paper copy of your Analysis and Interpretation. That is not necessary. Rather, in whatever form--paper, notes on your computer, jottings on the back of a napkin--I would you to bring the ideas you have started to form about your case. Read at least one article that helps illuminate something about your student (use the course library, prior MSU readings, or materials you find on an Internet search), analyze all assessment data you have about this student, and reflect on the functional meaning of the student’s behavior in your class (what is gained by acting this way?). 

These are the next things I want you to send, via email, by Saturday evening, January 31. 

Have a great week!

Having a Growth Mindset

Thank you for the warm welcome you gave me last Friday. I really enjoyed our discussion. I hope you did too.

One of the takeaways from class for me was the importance of maintaining a growth mindset over the course of not only your internship year, but your career. Indeed, of your life. 

Certainly, there are going to be days where we are just happy to survive. Just finishing seems like a victory. As Roseanne Barr once said, “I feel that if the kids are still alive when my husband gets home from work, then hey, I've done my job.” We might sometimes feel the same way as teachers.

But we have to do more than survive. Or to put it more clearly, we must both survive and grow each day of our lives. This is especially so as teachers.

Certainly, in the job interview situation, one question we will receive will key in on this issue. The question will want to know how we came to improve in some area of our practice. 

I suggested that the ideal way to answer this question is  by framing it in positive terms. Something you have come to see as both as an area for growth and as something have gotten very good at. I think framing it this ways helps show that you live within a growth mindset.

If you talk about something you were not good at and were forced, through a situation, to deal with, then it perhaps suggests to me that you are not seeing that the maintenance of growth is the central calling of the profession. 

Having a growth mindset means you are pro-active, it means that you are constantly looking for ways to get better. It means that you are not just passively reacting to what is happening to you, but that you are taking responsibility for shaping your classroom into the most inspiring learning community it can be. 

Answering questions in a positive way demonstrates that you take it as a given that getting better is simply part of the job. That you expect yourself and your students to get better each day. That you don’t need someone watching over you in order for you to be a fellow journeyer on the path toward excellence.

One of the central goals of TE 801 and TE 803 is to help you develop such a growth mindset. We want you to see that you have some control over most situations that take place in your classroom. That though the laws of social interdependence, you are a part of every student behavior. That your own growth as a teacher can also create optimal growth opportunities for your students.

Your central assignment for this semester is the Case Study project. In it,  you have the opportunity to document for yourself and your future colleagues what a growth mindset looks like in your own life. You will have the opportunity to demonstrate the resourcefulness you can bring to helping others in their own educational journeys.

As you think about the student whom  you might want to focus on this semester, consider a wide range of possibilities. There are many ways to think about this. Here are some questions you might ask yourself, just to see if the answers surprise you or help clarify anything. What students are the last that tend to come to your mind when you think of a class? What students seem most open to your influence and assistance as a teacher? Which students are most like you when you were in high school--and which are the most different? 

Remember that you will email me the proposed subject of your Case Study by Saturday, January 24. In about a page of text, you will “frame the case” by telling me about the student, your relationship to the student, what you hope to learn by studying this student, and why this is important to you. I hope you will involve both your field instructor and your mentor teacher in this discussion.

Please let me know if you have any questions! Have a great week!

Kyle

Welcome to TE 803!

Welcome to the home stretch of your teaching internship!  As I say in the TE 803 syllabus, I look forward to walking with you on your journey towards becoming a teacher. I hope we can explore ideas both old and new together, and bring life to them through our practice.

This is the first time I have taught this particular course. I am in my eighth year as an associate professor at MSU. I love living in East Lansing, especially basketball games at the Breslin. I bike to campus each day. The weather here is actually quite nice when compared to where I grew up! In short, I like this place a lot.

I grew up in central Minnesota (Brainerd, for those who have seen Fargo). I went to the University of Chicago, where I was a philosophy major. After that, I taught English for two years in eastern Hungary (see my school here). Subsequently, I taught in northern Minnesota at Indus High School for four years (secondary social studies, k-12 gifted talented, philosophy and cinema courses). I received my PhD in education from the University of Minnesota in 2007.

I am the proud father of three children, Gus (seven years old), Teddy (five years old), and Mary Rose (15 months). My wife, Molly, is an assistant prosecutor for Ingham County. At a time where many people continue to struggle to get by, I feel very fortunate.

This blog is part of my TE 803 course (Professional Roles and Teaching Practice), but all are welcome to read and comment. For more information on my work as a researcher, teacher, and as the Secretary and Treasurer of the John Dewey Society, please visit my homepage: http://greenwalt.wiki.educ.msu.edu/.

Cycle Three Concluding Post: Of Guardians and Dreamkeepers

Hi everyone, thank you again for your work in cycle three. I very much enjoyed reading your posts. 

While I have to promise you that my intention was not to dismay or dishearten you, I feel that, in some cases, that is what I did. If so, let me say I am sorry. And let me remind you that as teachers, one of our primary responsibilities is to preserve hope--for our profession, for our children, and for our society. We are, as Gloria Ladson-Billings says, “the dreamkeepers.”

Nothing in the world has a singular cause--the day of thinking about the world as a pool table is, hopefully, over (well, our politicians seem to forget that sometimes). Striking Ball A in the hopes that it will get Ball B into the corner pocket--well, the logic maybe works for billiards, but not for educating children. 

We live in a world where each event has multiple causes, as well as multiple effects, some intended, others unforeseen. We also live in a world of feedback loops. Not only are there multiple causes for every event, but the event itself evolves in response to the changing conditions around it. 

Stock markets rise in Wall Street not just because of objective economic conditions, but also because the markets in Tokyo and London rose that day as well. In fact, the stock market will sometimes increase because of a survey that consumers are feeling more confident--and that increase in the market will itself, perhaps, increase consumer confidence even more! We live in an interconnected world.

My reason for this little digression is this? 

Do you know one of the major influences on the Finnish educational system of today?

Yes, the United States.

Our country has a tradition of holistic, child-centered education that we can be proud of. I was reminded of this last night, when I entered the East Lansing Public Library, and saw the plaque stating that the library was founded by members of the East Lansing Child Study Group. Yes, people used to get together and talk about child development! The 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s were a time of great experimentalism in education in our country. Dewey was central, but more important were the teachers--many of them early childhood and elementary educators--who led the way. 

Our schools--with their wood shops, home economics classrooms, playgrounds, gymnasiums, theaters, studios, stadiums and student government councils--were centers of active community life. Indeed, so much so, that for many small towns, the school was the center of the larger community itself! Even in the world’s wealthiest nations, few have made of their schools what we have of ours. 

I think it is helpful to remind ourselves of this, and to take pride in those who went before us. 

When Dewey spoke of a common spirit to animate the schools, I think he meant this: “Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.”

Our schools used to provide lots of venues through which students could participate, demonstrate excellence, and give back to the good of a community. They were showcases of virtue. Virtue, in its Greek roots, refers back to excellence, in its many forms. As we watch the Olympics, we should be quickly reminded of that. 

It is a beautiful thing to watch young people finding themselves through finding their own unique form of virtue--excellence. As teachers, we  are guardians of a place where that excellence is recognized, honed and put to good use. That is our true vocation, though the public currently needs reminding of that.

Dewey lived a long life. As a child, he traveled from his home in Vermont to Virginia, to see his dad, who was fighting in the Civil War. He almost certainly witnessed the carnage of that horrific event. Later, living in Chicago, and then New York, he was witness to the pain and dislocation of immigrant families and displaced farm laborers, living in settlements, adapting to new ways of living, in a new environment.

Yet despite it all, he remained optimistic. He believed that schools could be sites where the good things in our communities could be leveraged so as to critique and improve those things that are bad. He believed that schools should be safe places, but not places hermetically sealed off from the world around them.

It is my hope that the past can provide some clue about the way in which we might move forward, making of our society one that is “worthy, lovely, and harmonious.” 

Thank you for your work in this course! I wish you a wonderful rest of the summer. Please be in touch if I can ever be of assistance to you. If you plan on coming in for graduation at some point, I hope  you will let me take you out for lunch!

Cycle Two Concluding Post: Honoring the Uniqueness of Each Student

Hi everyone. Thank you for your work over this past cycle. I really enjoyed reading your posts and your responses to each other. Given that this is such a mixed class in terms of the age of the children we work with, and the subjects we teach, I always learn an incredible amount. As one of you noted this week, we stand to learn an incredible amount about teaching by dialoguing across the early childhood, elementary, middle and secondary landscape!

I really want to encourage you, as well, to keep these dialogues going. Often, in a response, someone will pose a further question, or take you up on an offer to to share more about what you are doing in your classroom. I encourage you to respond to any questions or requests for more information that you receive! Often, the best way to continue these conversations is via email (you can access everyone’s MSU email by going to Angel, and looking it up on the class roster). Sometimes, a further post on your blog might not be seen by a reader. So please do consider following up these specific conversations via email! It’s fun to get responses on your writing.

Let me start this concluding post with a longer quote, from Nel Noddings, an education writer many of you have encountered before:

If the aim is justice--to provide all students with an education that will meet their needs--the solution is likely to involve the provision of considerable variety in school offerings and to include material that might contribute to personal as well as public life. Offering a variety of curricula does not mean putting together a set of courses labeled easy, average and hard and then equating  hard with best. It means cooperatively constructing rigorous and interesting courses centered on students’ interests and talents. It means that the schools should show the society that a democracy honors all of its honest workers, not just those who finish college and make a lot of money

Noddings goes on to ask how fair it is to force kids into learning certain subjects that don’t interest them, and then turn around and evaluate them against kids who are interested in such subject (say, calculus, or AP history). The implication here is that tracking itself is not really the problem--rather, it’s our belief that some subjects are more worthy than others, that the fine and industrial arts are unsuited to a twenty-first century education--when in reality, for a large number of jobs, and a happy and well rounded personal life, the exact opposite may be true!

In the above quote, Noddings seems to be writing for high school teachers. She takes the course as the unit of analysis. She talks, that is, about constructing courses centered on student interest and ability.

Now that is certainly one solution, but it is perhaps not the ideal one in many situations (courses are long in duration, and hard to get on the books). In elementary classrooms, it is not even a feasible solution at all.

It seems, then, that we need to scale down our “tracking” efforts, and differentiate at a more micro level--on the level of the unit, the project, the lesson, or even the activity. This is clearly where differentiated instruction comes in. As many of you noted, DI shares certain uncomfortable associations with tracking, and hence, can make some of us quite nervous.

But I don’t think it need to. Tracking got a justifiably bad rap, in my opinion, because it tried to take the infinite diversity of human beings--we are all unique and irreplaceable--and tried to boil us down to three classes (remedial/vocational, standard/general, honors/college-bound), determined along one questionable measure (general intelligence). In reality, given the typical spread in a typical classroom, I don’t imagine that breaking kids into one of three groups even simplifies teaching all that much--even in a class of “gifted” learners, there is still an incredible diversity of ability, interest, prior knowledge, and life experience as it relates to any one particular topic.

This is where I personally tend towards heterogeneous classrooms, heterogeneously grouped, and differentiatedly instructed. To my mind, this is the highest ideal for both democratic social relations and individual human growth.

I learned at least two important things about DI, I think, by reading our blogs this week. Here is a summary of them.

1) Sometimes, especially in the early elementary grades, we may need to differentiate our instruction based upon ability--and therefore group according to ability. This, of course, is not in itself a bad thing. It allows us to spend more time with students who need it, and provide work that challenges all students. This type of differentiation is most common, it seems, for work on the basic skills of literacy and numeracy.

However, and there was a pretty strong majority opinion here, grouping only by ability carries great risks with it, and may mean we have overly narrowed what we recognize and honor in our students (and in ourselves!). Therefore, there should be times in all classrooms where we differentiate instruction based on interests and strengths. It means providing options for projects and summative assessments that vary quite radically in the skills called to complete said project or assessment. We want to watch out, especially in the upper grades, of differentiating assignments by making them more “watered-down” versions of the “real” assessment we would prefer to give to the whole class. The key here is that we honor and challenge, to the increasing best of our ability, all students at all times.

2) Folks who are good at differentiating instruction--who have walked furthest down this path--are really good at observing kids. They do lots of formative and diagnostic assessments. They don’t make a snap judgement based on one measure, done at one point in time. Remember what Khan said in his video--in all of his studies, he noticed students who took a while in the beginning to get through a concept. If we assessed them only at the beginning of our time together, we risk mis-labeling them. For these very same students will be near the head of the class at the end of the unit or course!

Therefore, I was reminded by many of you, that DI is not something we do in the abstract, prior to meeting our students. We differentiated based on the emerging and evolving needs of our students! It’s when we can’t imagine a lesson that could possibly meet the needs of our whole class that differentiation becomes a natural strategy. Therefore, I think, we needn’t stress about DI--are we doing enough of it?? If we are careful observers of our students, then we will quickly learn how much and in what direction we need to differentiate our instruction (and in what types of groups).

I want to end by reminding you that, at bottom, communities are formed when they recognize the multitude of worthy forms of human occupation. We are currently experiencing a crisis in our system, where all kinds of subjects and programs are cut in order to improve test scores in the basics. This, to my mind, is extremely short-sighted. It harms both individual students and our society at large. It sends the message that people who work with their hands are not as worthy as people who manage hedge funds. Reversing this message is something we can start tomorrow, and is a lesson we need to continue to teach administrators, school board members, and politicians who have lost sight of this reality.

Cycle One Concluding Post: Reweaving the Fabric of Life

Hi everyone, and thank you for your work during the course of our first cycle together. There was a lot of wonderful writing--much of it quite personal, quite insightful, and quite moving. Also, there was some excellent blogging. For those of you new to the craft of blogging, I encourage you to pay attention to our peers in class who seamlessly weave their own ideas together with articles and videos from around the web. It makes for fruitful reading and thinking. Again, thank you to you all.

Before I move to a few of my own comments, let me first introduce you to our class. As in most virtual classroom communities, we are an eclectic and diverse bunch in terms of interests and life experiences. We have traveled much. I can’t begin to summarize it all here, but I can give you a brief overview of some of the salient professional characteristics of our class.

We are all teachers.

In terms of geography, we  are currently working in: Webster City, IA; Colorado Springs, CO; Raleigh, NC; Charlotte, NC; Chicago, IL; Houston, TX; and Baltimore, MD. We have several teachers from the east side of the state (with several of you located in central Detroit), and several from the west side. We also have several folks in the East Lansing area, in Battle Creek, and other locales in southern and mid-Michigan. More than a few of you have just finished interning at MSU. Congratulations to you especially!

In terms of subject matter and/or grade, we have: one early childhood teacher; nine elementary teachers; two middle school science teachers, one middle school music teacher, one middle school math teacher, and one middle school social studies teacher; and three high school English teachers, one high school Spanish teacher, one high school science teacher, and one high school math teacher.

Welcome to you all!!

Let’s start with a point that many of you made--success and failure are subjectively-determined. They have to do with the expectations placed upon us, and those that we place upon ourselves. There is nothing essential about failure, nothing inherently successful. It is our expectations and emotional investments that make them so.  As even our most reluctant students seem to implicitly understand, you can’t fail if you don’t care, and if you don’t try.

Nobody goes through life attempting to fail. But what follows from the prior point is that different students are going to define success differently. For some students, especially older ones, making the teacher look like a bumbling fool is success! For some students, especially younger ones, pleasing the teacher is success! However, as we all know, in neither case has anything necessarily educative taken place.

Education, or as John Dewey would call it, transformative growth, is rooted in a type of failure. That is, failure as a source and phase of an enveloping and emergent cycle of inquiry. As creatures, we desire equilibrium, balance, stasis. But we live in a world of change and transformation. We are driven to action--to thought, to communication--by disequilibrium in our environment. A problem or discomfort that is sensed before it is understood or named. Already, some might say, we are in an area of failure--breakdown, decomposition, dysfunction.

Our next moment is the moment of proper viewing. It is, says Dewey, a moment of taking aim. It is a melding of a desired future with life experience from the past, in the name of making sense out of the present. It is the “fusing” of “temporal horizons.” That is, it’s a coming-to-grips. It’s a making-sense. It’s already a step toward the overcoming of failure.

Inquiry is often inauthentic in school settings because this moment is glossed over. Yet this is, as Parker Palmer would note, the moment where fear can most easily creep in, and close down our ability to frame problems in the correct fashion. My fear of others, of the unknown, or of myself--it is those fears that divert a moment of potential growth into one of blind repetition--of an unceasing eternal reoccurrence of the same.

Inquiry is fulfilled when its results are communicated. When we share and listen. When we make meaning together. Where two people are in communion together, when experience becomes shared, I am of the opinion that failure is simply a superfluous concept--it simply is not a part of the picture.

The goal of education, says Dewey, is the ability to extract more joy from future experience. If we live our lives right, if we take failure in stride, and teach our children to do likewise, failure should not only spur us to action in the present, but allow us to live more wisely in the future.

Dewey reminds us that thoughtful inquiry always has a social dimension. It is done with and for others, as well as for ourselves. This is an important point for us as teachers to keep in mind.

Success might ultimately be measured by the consequences of our actions--do they make the world a better place?

So the challenge for us as teachers becomes:

• Can we imagine assessments and assignments that contribute value to society?
• Can we help students to see that their success is tied up in the healthy maintenance of the social and ecological fabric of life? That no one wins when the Earth is damaged, that there is no victor when others are hurt by our actions?
• Can we help students to develop the ability to see that the consequences of their actions may be quite far-reaching, and therefore they best approach their own accomplishments in a spirit of humility and grace?

Currently, as many of you have noted, the larger public, and in particular, politicians and policy-makers, are woefully out of touch with these existential realities of life--with the pain, the struggle and the joy. Our job, as teachers, on one level, is simply this: to remind them all of the way life really is.

Thank you for your work, and good luck on cycle two!