Phillip C. Schlechty, Working on the Work

Phillip Schlechty suggests that the primary role of teachers is leader rather than of facilitator, as favored by constructionists, or coach, as favored by the Coalition of Essential Schools.

I think this is right. A high school teacher’s main problem in this age of mass education is a lack of authentic engagement by students. Once students are engaged, both coaching and facilitating—not to mention lecturing and assigning—can be quite effective.

To get what Schlechty calls “authentic engagement” teachers need to lead. He points out that the work of teachers has more in common with the work of other leadership professionals such as business executives, clergy, and military officers than it does with the work of diagnosticians or physicians. This is helpful to keep in mind as the medicalization of education continues apace.

The real work for teachers comes into focus when we consider the five patterns of engagement that Schlechty describes:

Authentic engagement. The student associates the task with a result or product that has meaning and value for the student, such as reading a book on a topic of personal interest or to get information needed to solve a problem the student is actively trying to solve.

Ritual engagement. The task has little inherent or direct value to the student, but the student associates it with outcomes or results that do have value, as when a student reads a book in order to pass a test.

Passive compliance. The task is done to avoid negative consequences, although the student sees little meaning or value in the tasks themselves.

Retreatism. The student is disengaged from the tasks and does not attempt to comply with the demands of the task, but does not try to disrupt the work or substitute other activities for it.

Rebellion. The student refuses to do the task, tries to disrupt the work, or attempts to substitute other tasks to which he or she is committed in lieu of those assigned by the teacher.

“Authentic” comes to our lips so easily these days that thoughtful people will hesitate before uttering it, but Schlechty’s list is useful nonetheless. Many teachers, even those in very good schools, are content with passive compliance and ritual engagement. On some days, any teacher would be thankful to achieve a class that was ritually engaged. In countless well-managed classrooms most students are well-behaved and busy with productive work with few or no students authentically engaged. Indeed, honor students can learn quite a lot and do quite well on tests with these levels of engagement.

On some days or for some classes, this is no doubt enough. Our world puts lots of demands on us to learn things, and it’s only sane to comply and to get the rituals down. In the last week I needed to learn the controls of an unfamiliar digital camera, figure out how to use a new preloaded syringe to give myself medical injections, gather background on a political leader that circumstances have dictated I will be working with in the near future, and figure out why my website was taking visitors to random pages after they submitted an email form to us. None of this was done with great passion. I complied with my plight and went through the familiar rituals. It’s how we live now.

But as schools trend toward being ritual centers, they anaesthesize those within them. If young people hit the books only because they want to get into good colleges and get high-paying jobs, they may be deaf to the highest ideals of our culture. If students study only to register higher scores on competitive tests, they may be sleepwalking through the sublime realities less distracted travelers encounter in science and literature. And if we--the leaders--spend valuable class time coaching kids to score better on tests and writing assessments, we are contributing to a phony culture where trophies trump accomplishments. We are saying quite clearly that scores matter more than deep learning.

To get kids engaged in real work is a leadership challenge. In fact, getting good performances from others—helping them find their voices--is nearly always a leader’s most important work. Leaders inspire, coach, share information, ensure emotional support, arrange opportunities and resources, provide scaffolding for aspects of the performance that are still too difficult, facilitate associations with peers and mentors, and arrange recognition for accomplishments.

There’s nothing new about any of this, of course. It’s what good teachers have always done.

But we all know that it isn’t always done. We wouldn’t have to visit many classes in a typical high school to see lots of passive compliance.

What intrigues me about heritage teachers who consistently get high quality intellectual products from students is the skill with which they put before students work that engages them. I’ve noted several factors about that place-based research that students have said are important:

1. It is real work. The projects are organized with a final public exhibition as a mission. The need to have a complex finished product by a specified deadline gives the work shape and energizes the participants.

2. The work is important. Students believe they are preserving history that will otherwise be lost, or giving voice to people who would otherwise be silent. They believe this because their teachers and others aren’t shy about telling them what they are doing is important.

3. The work is social. Students get to be part of a team that has a mission—getting ready for a public performance. This gives them a reason for being together and things worth talking about. Since they are dependent on each other for how well things work out, what they do matters. Also, community mentors, parents and grandparents, and outside experts get involved with the work. People like being involved in things that lots of other people are involved in

We know that what students learn is affected by the effort they put into the work at least as much as it is by their intellectual ability. A great deal of attention should be paid to the quality of work that teachers provide. I believe that place-based research projects provide one of the most straightforward ways to engage students in real work—work that is inherently important, work that is inherently social, and work that has natural audiences beyond the classroom—and that heritage projects should be a part of the curriculum in every school.

One of the more comical aspects of NCLB is
the Hickory Farms facade on the US Depart-
ment of Education building in Washington,
D.C. The homey little red school house
acknowledges what we all know: kids do best
in human-scale places. We are apparently not
supposed to really notice that vast bureau-
cratic structure looming behind, that repre-
sents the reality of school reform via federal
law.

Why are the politicians in charge of education?

Diane Ravitch asks Deborah Meier a critical question on the Bridging Differences blog:

. . .how did American education fall so effortlessly into the control of Know Nothings from the world of business, law, and politics?

How indeed?

Since schools are politically-governed institutions, why would you expect them not to be controlled by politicians? And as you increasingly centralize their governance, how would you not expect lawyers and businessmen to increase their control, as they have of most other centralized bureaucracies where there’s huge opportunity for gain?

It’s not quite true that these politicians, lawyers and businessmen truly know nothing. It’s just that in a democracy where vast numbers of voters are ignorant or inattentive or both, politics will often be dominated by opportunists who pander for gain. It would take a Know Nothing—or at least someone uninformed by much history— to expect otherwise.

Schools depend on the surrounding community for both their clientle and their staff. Public schools also depend on that community for their governance. Ever since I was a young, reform-minded principal, I’ve been quite sure that the community needs to be the unit of educational change, if we are talking about a public school. As long as decisions are made by elections, it’s nearly inconceivable that a school will operate for long at a higher intellectual or ethical level than the community in which it is embedded. To get the community to do something difficult, such as succeeding at teaching children difficult things, at least a majority of the community will need to see and understand the need for doing hard things.

Lost in a national “community”

That seemed hard enough in the town where I worked. When the size of the decision-making community has been expanded to include the entire nation, as it has been under No Child Left Behind, the difficulty is beyond daunting. No individual is likely to be heard above the roar of institutional voices, speaking through costly lawyers in forums created and controlled by big money. Of course we lose our voices.

At this juncture, those of us who would like schools to be thoughtful places where difficult and meaningful work is the daily task, our choices for getting there seem to be either to educate a majority of the national citizenry to share our vision, so we can get past gridlock or ugly compromises and can get on with the work, or to escape national decision-making (though we may want to keep national information gathering and dissemination) and let folks at the site make most of the decisions, through some system of decentralization.

The most hopeful may be vouchers which could allow a network of private schools where decisions about professional practice could be made by professional educators without undue interference from local politicians. Disgruntled parents would not need to campaign for politicians who promise some axe grinding. Instead, their freedom would be preserved through choice. If they disliked what was happening at school, instead of getting involved in politics they could just change schools.

One danger, of course, is that many private schools would just be local franchise outlets of large corporations offering the educational equivalent of happy meals: cheap, standardized, and gratifying but not very good for you. To be honest, I’m not at all sure this would be worse than what many kids are now getting, and I’m also sure that educational fast food would not be the only offerings on the market. McDonalds has not driven good restaurants out of business.

Be that as it may, we are nowhere near the first choice袀reaching a shared vision of what quality public schools would look likeԢindeed, we may be moving farther from it, judging by the partisan tone of our national political conversation. So the first choice seems, well, impossible.

And if the second choice—a robust national system of private schools—doesn’t quite seem impossible, it does seem unsatisfying, ineffective and unrealistic, at least in the short term.

One initial problem with it is that new schools would be staffed by people from the existing education industry and so would tend to re-create the system we would hope to reform. A lot of ideas about teaching that have been demonstrated not to work (whole language, learning styles, multiple intelligences, portfolio assessments and most thing deemed “authentic” or “student-centered") are, nevertheless, ubiquitous and seemingly as ineradicable as false ideas about medicine that seem so ingrained that even many doctors believe them: we only use 10 percent of our brains or we should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.

Speaking about the difficulty of making progress by increasing parental choice, Ravitch somewhat irreverently points out that

most schools will reflect the dominant ideas of the schools of education, where most teachers get their training, so most schools will adopt programs of whole language and fuzzy math. . . . Most students under a pure choice regime will know very little about history or literature or science.

City Journal

This is what I’ve thought for a long time. Parental choice may be better for reasons having to do with freedom, but I wouldn’t expect it to lead to mass improvement on standardized tests. In the short run, a new charter school or voucher school is unlikely to be fundamentally different than a typical public school. Where would it find people who think and act in ways fundamentally different than their colleagues up the street?

Where are our teaching orders?

So things at the moment look a little bleak. At such times, when there seems no clear way forward, I sometimes finding myself thinking about an odd comment Philip Rief once threw out: “Where are our teaching orders?”

An order is as different from an organization as a team is from a committee. In an order, each member has internalized the principles that the larger order is dedicated to so that, in a sense, each member contains the whole. People are bound together by their shared vision and shared commitment rather than by the formal rules, though formal rules will certainly exist as expressions of the vision and commitment and as a way to remember complex learnings.

A good teaching order would both train teachers and operate schools. The animating vision of the order provides guidance not only for the curriculum, but also for system-wide discipline involving the conduct of teachers and administrators as well as students. Most schools today have adopted the vision of school as a due-process bureaucracy. Students are taught they have rights. Less often are they taught they have duties to any particular social order.

At present, leaders who would create different schools usually need to use teachers trained by the universities into the standard progressive ed vision. Though we do have hundreds or thousands of programs that do some teacher training, the training is usually inservice and narrowly focused, and after a summer institute the teachers return to their various schools, where they are likely to be quite lonely.

Focusing on the work at hand

Even so, I feel oddly optimistic. Maybe because at the moment I have lots of work to do and the school I’m at is at least in comparative terms a sane place. It would be a breach of faith to feel pessimistic when every twenty-four hours a brand new morning arrives, and I have energy.

I also know that the rules that govern our reality respond to us. Many of those laws are, as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman put it, “socially constructed,” and some realities we can change by changing such simple things as the way we walk, our posture and the expression on our face.

At times when we can’t do all we would like to do, it may be enough to be honest with ourselves, to listen carefully, to think clearly and to speak candidly. Sometimes we don’t need to solve problems so much as we need to lose our fear of them and turn away from them to the other things that matter to us more.

We only need to change our minds and all sorts of unsolvable problems vanish. Something is going to change. Keep busy and look forward to what’s going to happen next.

Read Write Web points out that “the most viewed video on You Tube this year was Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’ an examination of predatory female adolescent heterosexuality.” It’s had nearly 67 million views.

It put me in mind of Elizabeth Kantor’s reading of Jane Austen: Isn’t there a father somewhere in this story who will come home from the office or out of his study to tell the little tart to quiet down and control herself?

We all know young girls who’ve been spoiled, succumbing to the princess syndrome, where they imagine all the world exists for them.

Avril mixes it up with street values and turns it into the moment’s successful art form:

Don’t pretend I think you know I’m damn precious
And hell yeah I’m the motherf**kin’ princess

That such a tune would be so successful today doesn’t surprise. The boy in the video is even dopier than Avril and quite a fool. 

The One Book Montana program offers an invitation to all Montanans to read and discuss The Last Crossing.

In The Last Crossing, brothers Charles and Addington Gaunt travel from England to the frontier settlement of Fort Benton in search of their brother Simon. As they struggle to fathom this new and strange civilization, they also gather about them a ragtag posse of outsiders and loners including a half-Blackfoot, half-Scot guide, a Civil War veteran, a single woman bent on revenge, and an American journalist, before beginning their journey even farther North. The novel moves from the colleges of Oxford and mansions of London to the rugged Montana plains, the trading posts of the Canadian wilderness, and the heart of Indian country.

About Guy Vanderhaeghe

Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of several plays, three short story collections and four other novels, including The EnglishmanҒs Boy (1996), winner of the Governor Generals Award for Fiction, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Best book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time Canadian bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, was a finalist for the Commonwealth WritersҒ Prize for Best Book.The Last Crossing was chosen as the 2004 Canada Reads selection. Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.

In addition to his many awards, Vanderhaeghe has received acclaim in the U.S. Richard Ford has called Vanderhaeghe simply a wonderful writer,Ӕ and Annie Proulx says The Last Crossing deserves honors and the widest readership. Guy Vanderhaeghe, one of North AmericaӒs best writers, is at the top of his form.

Of the 2007 One Book Montana selection, Vanderhaeghe commented “I am astonished, enormously pleased, and a little abashed at the choice of The Last Crossing as the 2007 One Book Montana selection. My historical fiction is a tribute to the intimate connections and shared history that existed between Montana and Western Canada in the 1870s. This great honour suggests that they continue.”

(The above information is from the Montana Committee for the Humanities website)

Join an online discussion

Heritage Project teachers will be discussing the book on their listserv beginning November 2. You can sign up for this listserv on the TeacherLore website.

If you order your copy of the book by following the link below, 4% of the purchase cost will go to the Montana Heritage Project.

There was mention of the Montana Heritage Project:

Their Montana Heritage Project in public schools was unique, bridging generations, and changing children’s understanding of their place in the world. Unlike many from other places, they were accepted fully as members of the Montana community.

Mainly, though, the piece is about how giving and responsible and modest she was. It talks about the incredible success of the corporation that she and Art built, and then it talks about their quiet and innovative philanthropy. It’s quite moving. At a teacher institute in Great Falls where we were surrounded by senators and such dignataries, I remember Liz and Art politely but definitely disengaging from the VIPs who wanted their attention so they could seek out classroom teachers from the Heritage Project to get up to speed on what was really important to them. We can also remember numerous times when she overcame the disease that afflicted her last years to show up at events where our kids would be—always smiling, always cheerful, always gracious.

Truly a class act. We miss her.

October 18, 2007
1:30-5:00
Montana Historical Society

Take your students on an expedition to that most exotic of places: the past. Visit the dusty roads, mining camps, railroad towns, raw new cities, homesteads, businesses, churches, firefighting camps, and cattle drives of Montana in 1910.

Experienced Montana Heritage Project teachers invite all interested classroom teachers to join them as they discuss their plans to take their own students on expeditions to 1910 as well as their plans to create a book of student writing about life in Montana 100 years ago. The workshop will be led by Christa Umphrey (Editorial Director), Sarah Zook (MHP Director) and Michael Umphrey (author of The Power of Community-Centered Education).  This workshop will give teachers the background they need to participate.

It is open to any classroom teacher, though the emphasis will be upon high school history and English teaching. OPI renewal credits available.

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Here’s the webpage for the 2007 Montana History Conference. We’ll meet Thursday afternoon, October 18 in what will function as a formal launch of this year’s 1910 Expedition. We’ll have teacher packets on hand for teachers new to the project, and experienced teachers will be available to talk about how to do it.

It seems a little fortuitous that the Society has chosen an image from 1908 to promote the conference.

By the simple expedient of conceiving of teaching units as projects that students accomplish, learning becomes a story. This means that students become characters with goals who must respond to what they encounter, using what they already know to solve problems, stretching and rearranging what they already know to accommodate new information, and then pulling everything together by articulating a coherent version of what has happened for an audience that matters to them.

We have designed the ALERT processes to guide teachers in giving their units a narrative structure by leading students through research projects. The processes lend themselves to the most important research-based instructional strategies.

Using the ALERT framework helps avoid the characteristic danger of project-based instruction: it easily degenerates into a more or less arbitrary sequence of activites. It’s not unusual for inexperienced teachers embarked on high-interest projects to lose sight of what they are trying to accomplish. Seeing that students seem energetic and engaged, even happy, it’s easy to rationalize away nagging memories that once there was a curriculum or to take comfort in vague standards. One of the writing standards for Montana states that “students write for a variety of purposes and audiences.” What activity, however poorly conceived, would not meet that standard, so long as it included jotting of some sort?

To avoid this, projects should culminate in student work that is carefully assessed to be sure that it meets real standards. If students embark on local history research projects, for example, they should expect to finish essays that cite multiple sources, that are written in standard English with few surface errors, that demonstrate enough complexity in syntax and thought to provide real insight into the topic, and that display some of the grace and style that delights readers.

All that’s true, as far as it goes. But lately (the last couple of decades or so) what has interested me more has been what lies beyond teaching skills and information, crucial though these are. If school lasted only an hour or so a day, it would be fine if classes aimed only at transferring some information from text to student. Here are some basic facts about American history. Here’s an introduction to human anatomy. Here are the thereoms of Euclidian geometry. And so on.

But because school goes on more or less forever, especially for high school students involved in activities, an informational curriculum isn’t enough. Kids have other work to do besides gathering facts. Adolescents are in the midst of identity formation, which means they are drawing on their narrative intelligence to establish what their deepest beliefs are going to be, what values they are going to use as guides, what they are going to take as life goals, and how they are going to present themselves to others. Nearly all of them need quite a lot of help in doing this, and some of them, especially those from disordered families, need such help desperately.

A narrative approach to teaching allows teachers to present oodles of information, but it also allows young people many chances to develop the narrative intelligence they need to live, as poet William Stafford put it, in “all the little ways that encourage good fortune.”

When teachers engage students in difficult projects to accomplish work of real value to their communities, several things are bound to happen. Students are going to experience frustration, they are going to encounter obstacles, and they are going to run into trouble. If they persist and endure, they are going accomplish something significant, even if the stated goal of their quest isn’t completely met.  If the project and its final product are public, they are going to see themselves reflected in the eyes of an audience, which is going to influence their sense of identity. And if they have identified at the outset a group of people who will benefit from their work, they are going to encounter gratitude and fondness for being the kind of people who help.

When teachers head into a project knowing that these things are going to happen, and that they are happening by intent and design, they will know what to say to a kid who has just spent hours going through the 1916 “archived coroner’s reports, confined prisoners registers, the sheriff’s day book, the judge’s docket, and judge’s report” at the county courthouse looking for information that, she now knows, isn’t there. The teacher knows what to do. It’s a teaching moment. The information that might have been in the courthouse was never of paramount importance. What is important is that the young woman learn cheefulness and optimism, being helped to see that a dead end isn’t at all a failure but merely a step in the process of being thorough, and it should be followed not by giving up but by a new plan and a feeling of satisfaction that one more chore is in the past and therefore the future is brighter than ever. The story of how diligently she pursued every possibility, many of which didn’t pan out, will be an important possession when the project is over.

Experienced heritage teachers know how proud students become of their “failures,” once they have persevered and had some measure of success in spite of them. People with lots of narrative intelligence know how the stories of lives unfold, and they make good choices when faced with plot complications.

There are many such understandings, which take the form of stories, that teachers who undertake difficult projects will have chances to teach, both through example and exhortation:

1. Good news often looks like bad news when we first catch a glimpse of it on the horizon. If we react out of fear or anger, our fears and anger get justified. But if we concentrate on what else we can do, serendipity occurs. Things look dark before the dawn, but you can get through such times. Each student will have a chance to see himself or herself as a person who undertook a difficult task, overcame obstacles, and persevered to success.
2. You can’t accomplish much by yourself, but when you work as part of a team huge things can be done without anyone having to do more than they have strength to do. Pulling off a large-scale research project and sharing it with the community through digital storytelling at a heritage event is a big deal, and when it is over students will have worked with interviewees, community mentors, staff, and each other. Independent students may learn to be patient with students who need more time and support to get things done. Irresponsible students may learn that they let the whole group down when they flub things.
3. You can get people to care about you by putting your talents and time at the service of work that benefits the community. The combination of creativity and care opens lots of doors to us. Our opportunties increase. We have more and more moments of intimacy and a stronger sense of our power to affect those things that affect us.
4. Critical thinking about traditional values is seldom as important as learning from them. Academic standards are one example of traditional values. They are useful guides that can help us learn more about truth, beauty and justice, if we will submit ourselves to them. A well-crafted essay, for example, will have accurate and telling insights, it will unfold gracefully, it will be fair to the people it talks about (whether they are living or dead), and it will give credit where credit is due. These are not trivial or schoolish concerns--you could build a civilization on them. To learn to write such essays, we need to work constantly on our character, overcoming our natural tendencies to cheat or take shortcuts, to follow well-trod paths even when they angle in the wrong direction, or to puff ourselves up by putting others down or by stealing credit for others’ accomplishments.
5. Some processes take not just effort and passion and force but time, so you have to be patient.