Which One Do You Want to Hear First?

The good news is, I got a summer job offer in Chicago.  It trains.  It pays.  It even pays as much as my former job!  And it starts a whole month after school ends, so there'll be some much-needed R&R.

The bad news is, I've got a dog of a cold.  And it's getting worse.

The hard news is, I need to give a speech on My Values in 9 days, and I'm struggling to get ideas on paper that feel deep enough to speak on, but not too detailed that they go for more than the allotted four minutes.  Time to suck on a zinc tablet and think it over.

Week Links: Answer Me This

Bike lanes versus ... Hollwood shoots?

Growing STEM ... in preschools?

Sturgeon swimming in ... the Charles?

Dirty Dishes and Public Transit: [Re]framing the Issue

Second in a series of speeches for Arts of Communication, at the Kennedy School of Government (the first here).  

Assigment: Choose an issue, and creatively employ framing techniques to persuade your audience to your position.  (Overused Metaphor Alert).

T alert.  Every day this week, the MBTA transit system will carry 1.1 million passengers. T alert.  Each of the last twelve months, on-time performance has been above 93 percent for the Red Line.  T alert.  In two short years, nearly the entire system has gotten real-time, GPS data so customers can track when buses and trains arrive.

How many of you have taken the T in the last week?  … Me, too.  How many of you have heard announcements like the ones I just made?  … Me, neither.  Instead, we’ve heard dire warnings from T officials about cutting services and raising the fares we pay.  We’ve heard frustration from riders, who see cuts and hikes as yet another attack on folks who already stand in the cold for buses.

This problem isn’t new.  If you’ve ever been in a relationship, you know what I’m talking about.  Have you ever woken up in the morning, come down to the kitchen, and been faced with a sinkful of dishes?  Your partner left them there.  You get upset, you roll your eyes, you start complaining.  Now imagine the dishes were there because your partner spent all last night making you a home-cooked meal: maybe a pork roast, mashed potatoes, butternut squash.  But here you find yourself, bickering about a few dirty plates.

That’s where we are with the T.  When I’m frustrated with my girlfriend, something I find useful is stopping and taking stock of all the good things we do for each other.  Let’s try that for the T.  When I was about eight, I visited my aunt in Quincy.  She took me on an adventure—to the old New England Sports Museum at the CambridgeSide Galleria: we rode the Red Line in, switched to the Green Line, and emerged above-ground, over the river.  It was my first time taking public transportation.  For years, I’ve been an avid transit user; and as a teacher, 60 bucks a month has always been softer on my wallet than gas and car insurance. Like any of us, I look for service that’s rapid, reliable, and can make renovations for the future.  Sure, I’ve had the occasional frustration.  But those are exceptions in what’s normally an exceptional system.  Most of the time, the meal’s good and the dishes get cleaned.

So let’s stop arguing.  Our dishes aren’t dirty because our partner is lazy, but because the dishwasher’s broken.  The T is 5 billion dollars in debt.  Just like a broken dishwasher, there are many reasons.  Two thirds of the debt was passed on to the system by the state.  And in 2000, lawmakers decided to fund the T with projected sales tax revenue … and then the economic bubble burst.  The result?  Every year, between 20 to 30 percent of the revenue the T takes in leaks right back out—to service that debt.  The projected deficit for next year is more than 150 million dollars.

But if the arguing continues, not only are we not going to do the dishes; our entire relationship will be on the rocks.  As in a relationship, both sides have a legitimate point.  Those dirty dishes probably should have been cleaned, and you probably should have appreciated that pork roast a little more.  It’s fair for T officials to consider cuts and fare hikes, especially given the system’s solid performance.  It’s fair for riders to be concerned about the personal impacts.  

Let’s stop arguing, and start talking straight.  If you need a new dishwasher, it’s time to set aside a little more money each month to buy the appliance.  It won’t be easy, but we should ask the same of the T.  Remember, it’s public transportation: it’s ours.  We must demand high quality—but be willing to chip in, too.  Let’s ask the T to find creative new revenue sources.  Let’s say no to service cuts. But let’s say yes to reasonable fare increases.  As in a relationship, it’s time to stop tearing each other down, and starting building for the future. 

Right Questions

My family-engagement class had its first guest visit yesterday.  

I'm not usually the biggest fan of guest visits.  I loved this one.

Our visitors were representatives of the Right Question Institute.  They didn't have the right question, but they wanted to help us get there.

It was a night of doing.  Our guests didn't tell us about the RQI so much as they led us through it.  According to Right Question's Web site, RQI

promotes the use of a simple, powerful, evidence-based strategy that helps all people, no matter their level of income, literacy or education, learn to help themselves.

How?  Through a deceptively simple process of getting folks to generate their own questions.  Broken into groups of five or six, we were handed a small paper squares containing four math problems: 3+2=5, etc.  

Hypothetical: You are parents of a first-grader.  This is the assignment.  What are your questions? 

One person scribed.  The rest of us asked.  She wrote.  RQI doesn't seem to have what you'd call a Roberts-Rules-of-Order DNA, but structure us they did: No stopping to edit or judge.  Question is copied exactly as is.  Change statements to questions.  Ask as many questions as possible.

Is my child ready for this?

What was the process that led to teaching this?

Will this be on a test? ...

We were then handed new squares.  They had four math problems, too--the same ones.  This time, though--we were parents of twelfth-graders.  Ask away.

After these first rounds (lasting two minutes), we were asked to do a few more things: change some open-ended questions to closed, and vice-versa; pick our top-three priority queries; and so forth. 

What's the point?  For whom is this?  In our class context, an obvious use would be by a parent coordinator at a school to spark parents to ask questions leading to deeper school involvement or advocacy.  The facilitators suggested that to promote "microdemocracy"--authentic involvement in the institutions that affect you immediately and daily--requires questioning reasons and process and role.  What was the basis for this decision?  How was it made, and who participated in making it?  What can I do?

**

Are we asking ourselves the right questions about education?  

This morning, I read a 2005 piece by a prominent, respected, and mainstream ed organization proposing ways educators and policymakers can strengthen American high schools.  

An eye toward preventing dropouts and getting kids ready for college or career: very well.  

"Global competitiveness ... rigor ... college readiness ... business leaders are saying ... global competitiveness ... the need for workers who can ... including these measures on tests ..."  

Valid things all.

Do I support strong high schools?  Absolutely.  Have I benefitted from rigorous classes? Most definitely.  Is it crucial that kids have the skills to get good jobs in which they can grow and prosper?  Of course.  

But kids are also citizens.  And developing human beings.  Buried somewhere about halfway in, I found "interest" and "hobby."  Pretty sure "joy," "enthusiasm," and "democracy" didn't make it.  Let alone "asking their own questions."  

Most would say that education for economic success is valuable.  And I don't disagree.  But this read like a style manual for a generation of widgets.  Is that the best we can do? 

100% Language Immersion: Why I'm (Slightly) For It

I became a better language teacher when I asked my students to speak only the language they were learning--and did the same myself.  In my brief period teaching high-school Spanish, my students did activities in Spanish.  But I didn't think of them as Spanish speakers--even though they were in an intermediate class!

When I moved to teaching adult ESOL, I didn't just change location.  I changed attitude.  100% English was the name of the game--and it was only a beginning class.  How, and why?

As I've written recently, there are some very good reasons for allowing use of students' native language in a second-language class.  It creates a comfort zone--especially for adults already adjusting to a host of new cultural expectations.  It makes classroom mechanics go more quickly, freeing up space for learning.

At the end of the day, though, I'm still for 100% immersion.*  For a couple reasons.

Why not let students banter in their own language?  After all, they can translate a confusing word, explain an instruction not well understood the first time around.  Because the kind of classroom where students learn more language is one in which they participate in lots of small-group and pair work and use the "target language" (English in the ESOL setting).  The "tidbit" language, small talk, back-and-forth, if it happens in that target language, is very helpful for building skills.  How are you?  What page are we on?  Do you want to go first?  Can you pass me a pencil?  Don't or doesn't?  In fact, it's actually more real than a lot of the language practice that happens in traditional "drills" or speaking activities--the questions are authentic, not out of a book.  What's more, when students go back and forth in the target language, they have to adjust the language they use to help each other understand--that's also a very important way of building language skills.

Any classroom has plenty of anecdotes that show this, but there's also research that makes the case.  One study I read about showed that students who interacted in the target language in small groups "negotiated meaning" many, many times more than those who weren't working in such groups.  It's not side stuff; it's the main stuff.

There's also the familiar slippery slope.  If you set the bar to 100%, there are probably going to be moments when folks resort to their native language.  As I argued in my previous post on this topic, the job of an adult educator is not to police students.  If you ask for 100%, you might get 98%, say--which is pretty good.  Set the bar to "let's speak English 95% of the time"--and you'll probably get 90.  I remember watching my students, who knew they were trying to hit a high bar, force themselves to "take the hard way out"--use the English phrase they thought they didn't remember, ask the English question they thought they couldn't get out.

Isn't it just too challenging to ask beginning (or intermediate) speakers to understand everything in the target language?  In a sense, yes.  God, when I was teaching high school, if I'd tried to explain the complex directions I laid out for vocab games, my students' eyes might have glazed over more than they  already were (amount of immersion was only one of my struggles; sigh).

Hold yourself to 100% target language as a teacher, though, and it can bring out something finer.  The experts say that students who are learning a language from scratch need plenty of pictures, role-plays, models.  It makes for hard work.  Once I adopted 100% language immersion, I had to keep Occam's Razor on hand at all times: what was the simplest explanation or activity available?  What metaphor could I use to display it?  Google Images was also my best friend.  And Total Physical Response, which I found to be an incredibly effective teaching technique.  Lengthy instructions?  Better to simplify the task, and model how to do (perhaps using my favorite: Doug Lemov's I/we/you sequence of modeling).  Detailed explanations of grammar?  Better to structure activities where students listen and observe how language is used in specific settings--perhaps responding physically.  I had to bring my teaching to a higher level in order to bring the lessons to students at the right language level.

This isn't to understate the great things that can come from more complex work.  While the beginning levels of language learning demand a language-rich, yet straightforward atmosphere, I also had positive experiences integrating substantial role-plays into class.  Students might act out being a nurse and a patient at a health clinic.  But to get to such complex work, students first need a foundation of grammar and vocab first, a model of what to do (YouTube being another of my best friends), and support as they do it.

Can there be a place for "safety valves" of native-language use?  Of course.  One semester, students asked to post chart paper on the wall, and write English words they needed translated on it.  Later, the translation could be done.  Teachers who speak a student's native language can always clarify something during class, after break.  Volunteer tutors can sit side-by-side students and intervene when something is just really confusing.  But I'd tend to see these as special exceptions.

At the end of the day, I'm for 100% immersion--slightly.  Done right, it brings out more in students, and brings out more in teachers.

*N.B. As I pointed out last time around, I'm making a point about language use in a second-language program--I'm not making a point about the merits of bilingual education as a whole.  That's a topic for another day.

Limits

This week, a plunge into something new.  I'm interning at the Statehouse working on education policy. Firsts: first time working in a government building, first time walking through a metal detector to get to the office.  We all deal with policy--ramifications, fallouts--on a daily basis.  But--first time dealing with it from the inside-out.

My first day my supervisor handed me a three-inch-thick binder.  Instructions: learn everything you can about English Language Learners.  I put my head in the binder and emerged a few hours later swimming in Whereas this and Ch. that. 

The inherent limits of policy strike me right off the bat.  I'm not in an ELL classroom, and most of the briefs and reports I've read don't make me feel like I am.  I'd love to read some organized testimony of teachers: what's it like to do this work?  What do you think the law should say?  I'm sure it's out there for the finding.

Even if policy is informed by the grassroots, how much of current, or amended, policy can reach back to the classroom?  Should reach that deep?

**

It's an interesting way to learn.  Before Wednesday, I knew almost nothing about ELLs.  I know something more about language acquisition.  This is perhaps the most transactual learning I've ever done.  Learning for the purpose of tweaking a bill that has already been written.  Learning just enough, in compressed time, to suggest those tweaks.  Borrowing ideas already in use in other states.  Writing to the constraints of four-page policy memos.  Will it feel liberating, having so specific an outcome?  Will it feel limiting?

**

It was a hard decision to drop my fifth class.  I was already feeling overwhelmed by the workload.  I found myself stringing together 14-hour days, yet still not fully engaging with the work in some courses.  I pulled the plug on an extra quantitative class, in favor of being able to dive more deeply into projects I'm passionate about in other classes.  I think it's the right tradeoff.

The limit to the one-year program is always having to make these trade-offs. 

I already feel better.  I can follow through on having a discussion group for a class.  Talking through readings solidifies learning for me.  I'm excited all over again for this last semester.

**

An observation this year: I miss the grassroots.  I miss my students, my class.  I miss the crafting of lessons, the buzz of carrying them out, the lightbulbs when folks make connections.  The new recruits for the next course.  I loved--love--working with adults to help them overcome the limits of not speaking English.  I miss pushing the limits of practice.

I'm trying to heed the voices of my passions as I answer the $39,500 question: What Comes Next?  I came to grad school because I wanted to touch more than a dozen or two lives at a time.  I came because I saw my students confronting the realities of living poor in Boston and wanted to be part of a movement that could holistically address, upend, change those realities.

Should I go back to a classroom?  I don't think having a foot (heart, head) back in the grassroots need be seen as a limit.  I'd love to do good work on the ground and connect to good work at the 10, 20, 30,000 foot level.  Not sure how.  Still working on the roadmap.

What's the Problem?

For Arts of Communication class, Kennedy School of Government.  Assignment: Deliver a speech stating a problem and proposing solutions.  NB: Constrained by a four-minute max, there's a lot I couldn't get to.  And the story's true--but the name Maria Gomez isn't.

A year and a half ago, Maria Gomez, a woman in her mid-thirties who had immigrated from Peru about a year before, stepped to the microphone in the event room in a small human-services agency in Roxbury.  She stood upright, her black hair pulled back over a pressed white blouse.  She was one of a group of adults graduating from a 5-month, twelve hour a week, English as a Second Language class.  She looked out at the crowd, and said, “When I went to the doctor’s for an appointment with my children, before, I had problems.  Now when I go to the doctor’s, I say, I don’t need a translator.”  In a place more accustomed to the artful speeches of Nanci Pelosi or David Brooks, it might seem curious to highlight the testimonial of a low-income immigrant parent.  Around here, it’s easy to overlook the adults in our community who lack basic skills.  Rather than overlook these folks, though, let’s give them a closer look.  The Roxbury program Maria graduated from was one I started and ran for two years; my adult education experience has taken me into consulting and teacher-training.  So today, I’d like to describe the problem of immigrant literacy—and recommend some solutions.

Maria is not alone.  2 million immigrants enter the US annually; half of them either have low literacy or don’t speak English.  There are many consequences: let me focus on two: our economy—and our next generation.  First, all the research shows, if we’re going to maintain America’s global competitiveness, our workers must get better skills.  To this, some would say, why focus on helping immigrants make a big leap in their skills?  Why not focus on workers who already speak English and have some skills, helping them make the small steps to move up in the economy?  The answer brings me to our second consequence: the next generation.  More and more, our K-12 students are the children of immigrants.  And a parent with low literacy is less likely to pay attention to their kids’ homework or pick up the phone and call their teacher.  The struggle for adult literacy is a struggle for the economy and for our children.  And Maria is a great example of what’s possible: after my class, she kept studying English, got her citizenship, and started a Home Health Aide training program. 

Maria's an example of someone with low skills who found a solution.  The bigger problem is, we’re not serving enough people like Maria, and we’re not serving them well enough.  That’s a two-fold problem: capacity and quality.  First, capacity: Right here in Cambridge, go down Mass Ave about a mile to the Community Learning Center.  Their waitlist is 434 people long.  Statewide, a study in the 90s verified there were 15,000 people on waitlists for ESL.  That means months or years waiting for a seat.  Second, quality.  According to a national evaluation, a third of all adult ESL students leave class within the first two months.  Why does somebody drop out?  He doesn’t feel like he’s making much progress.  Or programs hold classes during the day—and that’s when his job is.

Let me move to solutions.  The adult literacy field needs something like what the Celtics have needed for two years: to get bigger, and get better.  First, the bigger part.  Proposing more funding for anything is a tough sell these days.  But an investment in education is a down payment for our economy and our kids.  That argument may not carry the day everywhere, but it sure does in some places.  Indeed, right here, in his recent State of the Commonwealth speech, Governor Patrick proposed building workers’ skills, in part through increased funding for community colleges—which happen to be a key bridge to higher skills for many immigrants.  That wisdom for investing in the future should be extended to adult ESL.  But an alternative to government support are public-private partnerships.  In Chinatown, the Asian American Civic Association goes into Tufts Medical Center, and offers three levels of ESL for hospital employees.  It’s good for everyone, and Tufts picks up the tab. 

           

           Some will ask: why make a system bigger when it hasn’t proven its effectiveness at current scale?  To address that serious concern brings me to my second solution: Should adult-education get bigger, it must get much, much better.  That third of students who drop out?  We need to get them to where Maria got.  The best solutions will probably come from the dedicated teachers who understand how to work with adults.  But here are a few of my ideas: locate ESL programs in K-12 schools, and provide daycare.  Increase professional development for teachers to provide an engaging curriculum that students like and learn from.  And make sure students are in the right classroom in the first place.  Increase assessment when students start class—what does Maria already know?  What does she struggle with?—and get students in a class with others at similar levels, so they aren’t lost, or bored.  Those are a few ideas: there are many more. 

           As future policymakers, I ask you: when the conversation turns to education, please think of it beyond just K-12.  Think of adults, too.  As citizens, I ask you: when we talk about immigration, let’s move beyond culture or who doesn’t belong.  Let’s move the conversation to the skills everyone needs.  Let’s move the conversation to how to help more people get those skills, and help themselves, their children, and our entire economy.  Thank you. 

Modest Proposals (for Family Engagement)

Adapted from a class activity on engaging families of children aged 0-5.  Assignment: Develop a slogan and talking points to be used by the Secretary of Education to promote literacy and learning development.  What our team came up with, in 25 minutes, minus the snazzy poster:

Get Active: Read!

Books are for babies too!

            Even babies can benefit from regular exposure to shared bookreading.  Reading to your child teaches them how to listen, associate words with meaning and helps their overall language development.

Ask!  Point!  Talk!

            When your child is old enough to talk, ask them questions about what you’ve read.  Point to the words on the page.  This helps your child learn their letters and prepares them for preschool.  Let them help turn the pages of the book.  Talk to your child about what is happening in the story, what the characters are doing and what they think will happen next.  Don’t forget to hold your child on your lap while you read so they learn in a nurturing space.

Libraries: Free and Friendly!

            Where can reading happen?  Your public library provides a completely free, safe space for your child to take a book journey.  Library cards are free and allow you to check out books and take them home.  Your child can also listen to storytellers read books to them with other children in your community.  With thousands of books to explore, your supply will never run out.

Early reading experiences help unlock the gift of lifelong learning for your child!