Past as Prologue

Ten years since I started undergrad, I continue to be struck by how different my current grad-school experience has been.  Submitting papers in … paper form vs. submitting everything to online dropboxes.  Solitary archives vs. group work, group work, group work.  Studying under the West Coast sun vs. … celebrating East Coast days where it at least doesn’t rain or hits fifty in January?

My whole strategy is different now.  Back then, my strategy amounted to how I approached most buffet tables as a youth: grab whatever dishes look most appealing, and don’t look back (okay, I still do that sometimes).  We had distribution requirements, but I was fortunate to satisfy most of them through classes I was deeply interested in taking.  I took up an interdisciplinary major, ethnic studies, that was a dabble of psychology, of anthropology, of public policy.  A year abroad in South America gave me the most powerful experience of my life (especially, as Mark Twain would have celebrated to find out, the non-schooled part of that time abroad), and transected my studies with courses that became the basis for a minor in Spanish.  The most focus came in history, where I took more courses than in any other field and wrote a thesis, on campus labor relations.  Even that last assignment was a pursuit that drew out of a personal interest—in this case, my organizing efforts as a student activist alongside campus workers. 

I was all over the map, and I loved it.  I learned a little about many things, a lot about a few, and thoroughly enjoyed almost all of what I signed up for. 

There have been times as I look back that I wished I’d thought through things more.  I rarely stepped back, as an undergrad, to see what all the work added up to.  It wasn’t that I was undisciplined in my studies—I worked really hard.  But I didn’t consider the benefits to learning a discipline, a particular method with which to approach things (with the possible exception of history; but I took no methods classes).  If I could do it all over, there isn’t that much I’d change, I don’t think, but yeah, a few classes here and there.

While taking classes of interest as a grad student, I’ve tried to also be mindful of attaining more concrete skills and knowledge within certain areas.  I came in with goals: bolster quantitative skills, learn about anti-poverty policy, study cradle-to-career initiatives.  I’ve approached the buffet table differently: rather than grab and go, I try to pair complementary offerings.  I took a very, very intensive stats-class-slash-half-time-job in the fall, and am in … another very, very intensive stats class now.  I studied social policy in the fall, and have an internship in policy for the spring.  I researched a parent-education program in the fall, and am now taking a course on family and community engagement.  I wrote a paper on the Strive educational continuum in the fall, and hope to study similar initiatives in the next few months.

Throughout the experience, I’ve tried to listen to my own questions and concerns and answer them: How do you set up a good parent-education program?  What are the pros and cons of cradle-to-career programs?  And so on.  While I don’t have quite the unbridled approach of my undergrad years, I’ve tried to retain the joy and curiosity that marked those years.  May is fast approaching; when I graduate, I hope I can look back and say I’ve had just enough of the freedom of youthful discovery, and just enough of the discipline of career preparation.

Thinking ...

... about what I want to do next year, and off into the future.  The last time I left school and was looking for work, I talked to almost nobody about the actual jobs I was interested in.  I mean, I discussed prospects with my friends, but I considered journalism without talking to journalists.  I considered teaching without asking teachers the passions and challenges of the work.  I have a lot of uncertainty about where I'm headed--partly because I am slightly risk-averse due to past work that didn't go so well, partly because I tend to get tempted to go down the road less traveled, the road well traveled, and several other roads, partly because I don't always know what I want to do--next year, in five years, in 10 years.  This time around though, I'm bouncing ideas off people: I've talked to people in government, in family-engagement positions, in nonprofits.  What's the work like?  I've had coffee with classmates--just yesterday, a friend of mine made a great case for D.C. (which I'd been skeptical of).  I'm not asking for anybody to give me the answer, I've got to come up with that myself.  But I'm taking the conversation out of my own head.

... about how to stay active this semester.  Five classes, one internship, one job search (which feels like three or four).  My goal last summer was to exercise more during grad school not less, because I knew I'd need the energy, need the sanity, that I get from pick-up basketball, from a bike ride, from a three-mile run.  Last semester, I did pretty well--I'd give myself an A for physical activity (grade-inflation included).  Not sure how it's gonna happen this time around.

... about where I want to live.  That's connected to what I want to do.  And unlike in the past, for me, it's a two-person decision, not a solo act.  Somebody asked me the other where my girlfriend and I don't want to live, what's ruled out.  If you drew a line from Minneapolis to Austin, anything West of that ... not so sure.  Anywhere you have to drive everywhere--probably not right.  Beyond that, more questions than answers.

100% Language Immersion: The Case Against It

Some 2 million immigrants enter America every year, and about half of them don't have English-language skills.  Many of them--in addition to immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for years--enroll in adult English classes, starting at a beginning level.

If we put ourselves in the shoes of one of those students, what would it be like?  Imagine you are Amina.  You grew up in Somalia, attending school until you were 12 or 13.  You left maybe because you needed to work to support your family, or because your family moved to a refugee camp.  You eventually immigrated to the U.S. in your early 20s, too late to be served by the public-school system, but desperately wanting to get a job, to feel comfortable and get around in the new culture, and to speak English.  Your experience in school back home was fairly positive, you had good relationships with most teachers, but it's been years since you stepped into a classroom, and the literacy skills you built in your native language were okay, but not advanced.  You maybe got some English-language literacy training in a refugee camp, and in the U.S. you're getting familiar with what the alphabet looks like, and you can even understand and speak some words in English.  You're resilient, eager to learn, and ready to set aside the time to do so.

So, you hear about and enroll in a beginning ESOL program that serves mainly, but not totally, African students.  Some of the staff and teachers speak your native language.  Even if your teacher doesn't speak your language, a volunteer tutor placed in your classroom might.  Or another student.  As I wrote last week's post on 100% immersion, it is important for programs and teachers alike to decide what the nature of their classrooms will be: will they be English immersion?  Will some native language be used?  What makes the most sense for you and your fellow students?

The case of Amina is fictionalized, and though it isn't exactly the story of my former adult students, it reflects some of the common scenarios students brought with them to my classes.  A student might well be a former lawyer from Colombia, a middle-aged homemaker from China, a construction worker from El Salvador.  Of course, it's impossible to generalize from a single student, or group of students.  But for the sake of the argument, today I'll come down on this side of the argument: No 100-percent immersion; tap students' native language during class.

In any kind of adult education (and probably education more broadly), a student's comfort is very important.  When a teacher (or tutor) knows a student's native language (we can call it "L1"), he or she can mix that into class, clarify directions, encourage students to discuss a conceptual topic in their own language before getting into it in English.  Done at appropriate times, to an appropriate extent, using the student's L1 helps acknowledge the student's culture, and allows teachers and students to build a closer relationship.  That has humanistic benefits all by itself, but if connecting to a student's home language and culture helps that student's comfort level, that comfort level is also important to language acquisition.  The well-known linguist Stephen Krashen has made the case that a key element to learning another language is your emotional orientation: reducing anxiety and increasing comfort are important.  Tapping the L1 can support that.

The benefits get even more concrete from there--and get into issues of making class mechanics accessible.  Experts say that clarification or some translation in the L1 is beneficial to ESOL learners.  What might that mean in context?  Teachers often use games to support vocabulary learning, but not all students know those games.  I remember vividly that I needed to carefully model how to play Memory, simply because it was new to students.  Once the game got going, students delved into solid English practice.  That's only one example of where using some of a student's native language can grease the wheels of the classroom.

Classroom mechanics, of course, aren't just about games.  My fictional Amina hadn't been in a classroom for years--and American classroom expectations might differ from students' home experiences, anyway--so even small things like organizing a binder or doing homework could seem daunting.  I remember many of my students making many adjustments to being in a classroom.  This isn't to say that organizational matters are the point of class, or that they should take up much excessive time.  There's language to be learned, after all.  But adults I've taught craved ways to get organized and figure out how to manage the movements and norms of a classroom.  There's a lot to making that happen, and the best way to get organization out of the way is to address it directly, and early.  Using some native language can help those sorts of class mechanics go more efficiently, too.

Finally, the appeal to using students' native language is it means you don't have a "rule" and you certainly don't have to enforce it.  Even classes I saw who volunteered 100-percent immersion had trouble actually following through on it.  It would be hard to achieve without some policing--whether policing by the teacher, or peer policing.  No adult wants the focus of her English-language learning to be on whether she can perfectly adhere to some language guideline.  Better to foster a welcoming culture, make mechanics go quickly, and focus on the activities that can help students meet the objective--learning English--that brought them to the classroom in the first place.

P.S. Tune in next week as I argue the other side ...
P.P.S. This post isn't intended to dive into the debates over bilingual education, sheltered English immersion, and the like at the K-12.  But some of the drawbacks (and next week's case for) 100-percent immersion) could transfer.

Organizing Principles

If I am not for myself, who am I?
when I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

--Rabbi Hillel

As I look back over the years, there are very few classes I took that transformed me, that I could say changed my life.  More transformative were moments I didn't see coming--a volunteer experience while studying abroad, a year volunteering with AmeriCorps after a planned job fell through.

I think I might be taking such a class this semester, though: "Organizing: People, Power, Change."

When I was an undergrad, my last two years on campus, every Wednesday, I attended the weekly meeting of a labor-rights group that advocated for (and alongside) the janitors, cooks, and groundskeepers who kept our campus humming.  Between meetings, I'd write op-eds, do outreach to students, plan events, and the such.  We started a Living Wage campaign--successful after I left campus. We walked picket lines in solidarity with a campus strike.  We didn't have a "leader": there were two coordinators, and everything was shared.  We rotated meeting facilitators, rotated note-takers, rotated op-ed writers.  Our group had people of all stripes: kids from backgrounds advantaged and challenged*, black and white and Latino, gay and straight, men and women.

Rarely in my life have I ever felt so alive as when I organized with them.  On the one hand, we were grappling with concepts of interracial understanding, capitalism, human rights; on the other, we were taking actions that, we hoped, would ultimately lead to direct benefits for the community we studied in.  Against the often theoretical background of being undergrads, we were doing stuff that felt real, that felt like it mattered not for tomorrow, not just to build our careers, but right now.  We had a extra-large dose of idealism, but we did genuinely good work.  We learned a lot--about communities, about ourselves, about commitment.  When I look back on my undergrad years, there are a few things I'd do differently if I could.  Being a student activist is never one of those.  I cherished those moments, and cherished them still.

One of the appeals of this class is that it's a more theoretical backing for organizing work.  Another is that it will let me test ideas of activism, even as I'm considering advocacy work upon graduation.  Another are the exercises: I will actually have to initiate an organizing campaign this semester.  Of all the classes I've signed up for, it feels scariest, hardest.  In the years since college, I've volunteered, I've canvassed for political campaigns.  But it's been many moons since I organized--and when I did, I did it in a group.  This feels like a step out into the wilderness.  I can't wait.

*Update.  This originally said "good backgrounds and bad" till a reader's comment made me take a second look at it and edit it.  Thanks for the input. 

After David Brooks

A few picked-up pieces from a book tour for The Social Animal (paraphrase alert):


Every politician he's ever met has incredible social talents.  But their emotional intelligence stops when it comes to making policy.


People see "reason" and "emotion" as two ends of a see-saw.  They're mistaking emotion for "arousal"--Emily Dickinson was emotional, but she wasn't screaming all the time.  Emotion is the basis for rational decision-making.


Economics has become the gateway between different disciplines because it offers the currency we can understand to communicate--quantifiable, hard stuff.  But it's the soft stuff that determines so much more.


The ed sector is way ahead in acknowledging emotional components.  


When I go to Senators' office to talk about the thing I care about most--early childhood education--they pat me on the head patronizingly and say, Let's talk about the defense budget.  There's a status hierarchy of policy topics.  If it's perceived as being "soft" stuff, they don't want to deal with it.


Great schools like KIPP do both hard stuff (data-gathering) and squishy stuff (relationship-building) more than most.


Colleges should offer marriage courses (featuring Anna Karenina, among other texts): if you have a great job and a crappy marriage, you'll be unhappy.  If you have a great marriage and a crappy job, you'll be happy.

100% Language Immersion: Does It Make Sense?

In the ESOL classes I've taught, I wanted students to be at the driver's seat.  They wrote a Class Constitution (as I've described elsewhere).  They worked with me to develop norms for class.  But I held on to three expectations, posted them on the wall, and preached them when necessary: (1) Arrive on time, (2) Complete homework, and (3) Speak English in class.

As fellow teachers, my old supervisor, and students could attest, I questioned, doubted, revisited all of these.  Against the strong desire to have a class where all the norms were developed by students, these three remained.  Still, the third always bugged me: Was it really right to drop beginning English learners in a 100-percent immersion class?

Looking at it from 30,000 feet, there are two competing ideas.  On the one hand, all teachers must foster a respectful, welcoming classroom culture, and students' native language and culture can be a great foundation for helping them learn a second language.  On the other hand, being immersed in the "target language" (in this case English) to the greatest extent possible is key to learning a second language.

This isn't to propose a false dichotomy, between a 100-percent immersion class and a class where the native language can be used--and in later posts, I'll explain ways the two might be blended.  The fact is, though, that many if not most programs have a contract adult learners sign before enrollment, and how language is used in the classroom and  building is often addressed.  Further, it's natural for language learners to fall back on their native tongue, and a teacher's got to have an approach in mind when teaching: Is this all right, in this classroom?  If so, when?  Or should it be discouraged?

Over the next few weeks, I'll argue different sides of this.  I came down on the side of 100 percent immersion English (with much hemming and hawing, I should note, and allowing some exceptions).  So I'll start next week by revisiting my own bias, and arguing in favor of native-language use in a second-language classroom.

In the meantime, I invite readers to weigh in: What have you experienced in your own language learning?  What approaches do you think might work best?

Week Links: Tomorrow Is Another Day

This week, some glimpses into the future (if not the present) of education:

Nicholas Kristof on how teacher quality impacts test scores and lifelong workplace earnings.  Reading a study by the economists Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Johan Rockoff.  Kristof's willing to carry the evidence a bit further than the authors seem to be, so the actual report is worth a look.  One cautionary piece from the exec summary: "For example, using VA in teacher evaluations could induce counterproductive responses that make VA a poorer measure of teacher quality, such as teaching to the test or cheating."

LearnerWeb is a nifty Web-based system, developed in Portland, that allows adult learners (from GED to ESOL students) to pace their own learning.  Most breakthrough-ishly, students can cycle between online learning and real-life classes or tutoring led by real-life teachers.  It attempts to mimic how most adults learn most things: by doing a little on their own, then taking a class or getting coaching, then doing more on their own.  Endless possibilities, doesn't mean it's a panacea.  Would be intrigued to see how interactive language learning (especially at the beginning levels) happens.  Also, while it creates space for self-directed learning (very adult-friendly), how much can online portals respond to adults' individual needs, contexts, concerns?

And finally, a short but hopeful column at the Boston Globe about Active Minds, which is trying to raise mental health awareness, make talking about such issues okay, and prevent suicide.  Student-led.  More power.

Wondering ...

... if the best place to attack poverty through education is in schools, in nonprofits, or in policy.

... if I should finally give in to the lifelong temptation of working in politics.

.... if there is a place for me in a school, and if so, where?

... when I'll have to finally decide this.

Sharing the Love

I've written before about my fascination with--and questions for--cradle-to-career programs like the Strive Partnership in Cincinnati.  Education Sector just put out a report on Strive, a collaborative effort by countless schools, nonprofits, and businesses to support positive academic achievement for children along a continuum from birth to college completion.

There's a lot that's promising and new about Strive.  To name just a few elements: First, from a partnerships standpoint, universities have taken the lead in new ways.  Strive emerged, six years ago, out of conversations among more than 200 education and nonprofit and community leaders.  Who convened them?  Then-University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher.  It's refreshing to witness the active role of local universities not just in supporting these initiatives, but finding ways to measure their own success in relation to K-12 work.  Second, from a policy standpoint, there is a long-overdue focus on early childhood education--often the forgotten stepchild of ed funding.  Third, from a jurisdictional standpoint, Strive is not just Cincinnati: it also involves the smaller Kentucky cities of Newport and Covington, just across the Ohio River.  And the efforts don't just comprise public schools--multiple parochial schools are actively included in the partnership.

The report covers a lot of the same ground dealt with elsewhere, but here are some nuggets I haven't seen in other reports:

• Strive's shared accountability is both in line with the edzeitgeist in its focus on data, and cuts against it by moving the focus beyond individual teachers or schools
• The Feds' Promise Neighborhoods Initiative, which echoes Strive and is centered on schooling, nevertheless requires that the lead partners of each PNI be a nonprofit or institution of higher education: this "serves to broaden the range of desired outcomes beyond the purely academic to include the developmental needs of student"  
• Sharing data is really, really hard--many partners at Strive "often collect, store, and analyze data in incompatible and disconnected way"; but they're working on improving the scene

The whole report is short, to the point, and free, so it's worth a complete look.

The Week's Links: You Better, You BTR, You Bet

Picked-up edpieces from the edworld:

The Strive Partnership gets still more positive press in a short Education Sector write-up about a report on community-wide education accountability which I look forward to reading in whole.  Strive, Promise Neighborhoods, Harlem Children's Zone, etc.  Will be interesting to see what sort of critiques the report puts forward.  The burgeoning writing on Strive is almost all breathless--perhaps for good reason, it's a cool new model, but one gets concerned with anything that looks (or is portrayed as) too perfect.

Incisive post at Eduwonk on Boston Teacher Residency teachers' effectiveness, and how it relates to larger rhetoric about in-district vs. out-of-district approaches to teacher development.   btr vs. tfa and what it says about standards, bigger issues, etc.  as always cuts to the bone.

Coach G has a good piece on the role of making errors.  Whole set of other implications for ESOL classrooms, but that's for another day.  Time to go outside and play; it's like 30 degrees warmer than usual for the 30th straight day.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

Helping connect students to next steps, so they can avoid language attrition, is an important consideration for adult ESOL learners.  Especially if they're studying in one of the many small programs cropping up in urban areas, which may be nimble but don't always offer a full continuum of classes.  In my former one-level ESOL program, students undertook a sequence of activities to seek out and get enrolled in their next class.

That's all well and good.  But how can different programs collaborate to help learners at one connect to classes offered at another?

As I discussed in my first piece in this sequence (linked above), mammoth waitlists await many adult ESOL learners in my state (Massachusetts), and others.  Thus, the best way to assure a student moves on to intermediate English after finishing beginning level would be to increase funding--but this isn't the place to discuss that.  Just because most programs are filled to capacity, and have four, five, or six months' worth of names waiting to join, doesn't mean there aren't gaps in enrollment that could be filled by students, if only they knew about them.  For instance, every year there are numerous classes at numerous sites find themselves in August looking for students to fill their remaining spaces for class in September.

"Collaboration" is a watchword in the nonprofit and human-services sectors, but how is it converted from platitude to practice?  It seems worthwhile to point out that collaboration is not a mere parntership, but the actual pooling of labor--co-laboring--or a joint effort to achieve a unified end.  In putting collaboration into authentic practice, a promising model is the Strive Partnership, which is a cradle-to-career educational initiative in the Cincinnati area.

Strive has advanced a model of "collective impact" built on five key principles (as wonderfully detailed here):


(1) a common agenda built on shared understandings of the problem and of actions to solve it; 
(2) shared measurement systems to assess and report effectiveness, arrived at by a consensus that ensures continued alignment, accountability between organizations, and the opportunity for participants to learn from each other;
(3) undertaking of mutually reinforcing activities in which each agency focuses on activities it can do well in coordination with other agencies' actions;
(4) continuous communication in which leaders must meet regularly and over the long term to build trust, develop a common language for their work, and keep open channels for communication; and  
(5) a backbone support organization to provide a range of supports for the initiative, from staff time to help with technology and data. 

There are many challenges to implementing such a system, but Cincinnati educators believe they are seeing some results, five years into Strive.  What could be applied to the adult-education sphere to ensure students successfully move from one program to another without seeing their language gains slide backwards?

Here are a few ideas.  It's a brainstorm: doubtless I'm leaving things out, and doubtless some of these have been tried already:

1) Draft a vision for ESOL students: What does the field hope to impart to students?  What different types of students are there, and how should their needs be met?  What do students themselves want?

2) Define success: In a given urban area, leaders could get together and outline what success might look like for different types of learners.  They could decide when to revisit these goals, how to assess their progress, and how to make corrections if students aren't benefiting from the collaborative work.

3) Communicate through Twitter: 160 characters is enough to say where a program's located, say how many spaces it has for its next classes, and link to its Web site.  Educators who may not have the time to wade through dozens of emails about job postings, professional development, and the like on adult-education listservs could get feeds of tweets targeted to issues of outreach.  This could also be done on modified listservs set up just for outreach coordinators, through Facebook pages, or the like.

4) Make the most of literacy collectives: In many areas of Boston, literacy collectives meet every month or few months.  Representatives at these meetings could bring and share lists of students who are about to leave one program and need a class at another, and actively follow up with them.  Rather than opening doors to whoever walks through, the process would guide those students already in the pipeline.

5) Use funding to incentivize collaboration: Money could reward and follow programs, or collectives of programs, that demonstrate a commitment to helping students connect to continued language support.

Just a few ideas.

What are yours?

What I Did Over My Winter Vacation ...

Southern France: could hardly believe I was there.  Espresso, red wine, delicious meals, rented bikes.  A few shots from an amazing Christmas:

Daily market in Nice

Options: Pretty decent

Ville Franche

Eze Village

Sunrise over the Mediterranean