Writing Out Loud

Limits

2012-02-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-02-04T12:33:00.000-08:00

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)

2012-02-01T17:45:00.000-08:00

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!

Past as Prologue

2012-01-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

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 ...

2012-01-26T09:41:00.000-08:00

... 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

2012-01-24T18:02:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-21T20:36:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-18T18:58:00.000-08:00

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?

2012-01-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

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 ...

2012-01-11T15:21:00.000-08:00

... 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

2012-01-09T21:07:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-07T13:29:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-04T15:17:00.000-08:00

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 ...

2012-01-02T09:40:00.000-08:00

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

Remembering Hitchens

2011-12-22T07:48:00.000-08:00

I first became a regular reader of Christopher Hitchens as I was beginning a year abroad in Chile in 2003, through a pair of his pieces addressed to the life and work of the literary scholar Edward Said: first, an ambivalent Atlantic Monthly review of the updated edition of Said’s Orientalism, and then, a few weeks later, a touching Slate obituary to Said, who had recently succumbed to leukemia. Living, studying, and volunteering thousands of miles from home—and from anywhere else I knew—constantly tested the borders of my independence and experience, and in the occasional lonely or unscheduled moments of those months abroad I often found myself, for 20 or 30 minutes or more, plumbing Hitchens’s new or old writings wherever I could find them online.

My ability to lose myself in his work would continue when I bought some of his books over the next few years. At one moment, I’d be rearranging my bookshelf; at the next, I’d be flipping open an anthology of his, vowing to snap it closed again; and an hour later, I would have gotten myself accidentally engrossed in explorations of Kipling, Saul Bellow, the death penalty. His command of politics and literature was impressive, his perspectives incisive, and his prose punchy. At his best, he achieved a beauty of both language and analysis that was perhaps most on display when he joined books and politics. Only one such example was his wonderful, counter-narrative Atlantic essay on Churchill, “The Medals of His Defeats,” which I found myself reading and rereading one Christmas vacation. His writing also found a unique register when he was on attack. He could sometimes allow personal slights and vendettas into arguments where they did not seem to belong, but when the target was clear, and the target’s character legitimately at stake, it was a thrilling ride. I practically tore through The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and would again. The fire extended to non-personal matters: he wrote frequently, and devastatingly, against capital punishment.

Pieces like these showed, further, that he could both revel in American ideals while subjecting his adopted homeland to a skepticism for which he was famous. He underwent waterboarding, for heaven’s sake, and found yet more reason to oppose torture. At their best, his writings evinced a concept he once advanced (I don’t remember, and can’t find, where): that the measure of intelligence is in one’s tolerance for contradiction—which indeed he turned into the title of his Atlantic piece on Kipling, “A Man of Permanent Contradictions.” If Hitchens’s views of America and its leaders could be multidimensional, his ardent defense of the Iraq war was at times indulgent, and led him to gloss over both the effects of battle and legitimate criticisms of it. Yet his constant reminders of the authentic threats to organized civilization were a healthy counterpoint to my own opposition to the Iraqi conflict, and more. Reading Hitchens gave me deeper, more nuanced ways of viewing post-9/11 politics. Most of all, it made me skeptical of the widespread skepticism--felt on the Left, and which I’d felt myself--toward American purpose and power.

After a couple years reading his work, I was thus well aware of the qualities of Hitchens’s prose and persuasive power—to say nothing of his brash, biting public persona. But it was a serendipitous meeting with Hitchens in the summer of 2005 that exposed me to a perhaps less prominent feature—his personal generosity.

I was on campus at Stanford that summer doing research for my senior thesis. I noticed Hitchens would be coming to the Hoover Institute as a Media Fellow. I contacted the coordinator of the fellowships: Would the writer be holding any public events? She got back to me: No, he would be here for a week, and would have no such events, but you should keep an eye out for other appearances in the future. Very well, I thought, it was worth a shot, and I sent an email thanking the woman for getting back to me. It was to my great surprise, then, to receive another email, the next day, from this same lady: Mr. Hitchens would be happy to meet with you one-on-one. Please go ahead and contact him at the following email.

I don’t remember where I was sitting when I got this, but I surely catapulted out of my chair. I emailed an introduction, and to at least attempt to justify this meeting that I had not solicited, stated an interest in discussing various topics I’d touched on in school and knew he was interested in: Chilean politics, Kipling, the Iraq war. On the appointed day, when I knocked on the door to the Hoover office he’d asked me to come to, he turned from his computer with his characteristic slight smirk, cocked his head, and intoned, in full throaty British, “It is I.”

This wasn’t going to my normal afternoon, that’s for sure. He stuffed me into his maroon Volkswagen, and before we’d even gotten to the nearby Trader Joe’s to pick up lunch, he was discussing Jefferson and Paine. At his in-laws near campus—where he spent the summer—he kicked off his shoes, padding into the kitchen to pull out the choice of spirits. (It was more than a double-take to see my literary hero in his socks. What can I say? He didn’t look quite poised to confront Islamic fundamentalism at that moment.)

As we sat outside, eating lunch and drinking, I’d lob him a topic and sit back to enjoy the response, emitted between puffs on his cigar. He talked about Kipling’s poem White Man’s Burden, acknowledging the author’s contempt toward the colonized peoples yet elucidating a connection to the way American intervention in Iraq would one day be viewed. He discussed the Pinochet investigations in Chile. He recited some poetry aloud. We were joined for some time by his wife, Carol Blue, whom I found very engaging (in one jaw-dropping moment for me, she came out to the patio, and asked her husband, in my paraphrase, “Sean Penn wants to know what’s better for us, Thursday night, or Saturday?”). When he drove me back to campus a couple hours later, he curbed the VW, stretched out a paw, and nodded at me: “It’s been real.”

While I can’t say our meeting was exactly a two-way conversation—it didn’t take much to get Hitchens talking, and I was happy enough to listen—it represented quite a generous act on his part. I hadn’t asked for a one-on-one, he had plenty going on, I was young. He didn’t have to reach out, but he did; he didn’t have to invite me to his home for a long lunch, but he did. About a year later, when I was considering applying for journalism jobs or internships, I emailed him for advice. Again, there was no reason he should have felt he had to do anything, but he referred me to a contact at Slate.

The personal connection to Hitchens was meaningful, but tiny in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, it made it all the harder to hear of his diagnosis with esophageal cancer 18 months ago. The fact that he could be so battered by a disease—that it might at one point take his life—was so at odds with the verve and conviction I’d seen both publicly and in private. As he confronted cancer, it brought out a new dimension in his writing. His portraits of others—Said, Sontag—had shown Hitchens’s capability to be empathetic, even affecting. But in a series of essays he wrote about sickness and death, he turned those skills on himself and rendered tender and deeply intimate reflections. His June essay in Vanity Fair detailing the loss of his voice ended this way:

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

When I heard Hitchens had passed away, early Friday morning, I was surprised by how socked I felt by it. It wasn’t so much the small personal connection we’d made a half-dozen years ago as the larger impending absence to the world of words. His voice punctuated the Web six, seven, eight times a month. It was a voice not just frequent but muscular, a voice that stood out. And it was singular, a voice that forwarded unique ideas, made unlikely connections, took on unassailable targets. It is not clear who could say the things he was able to say, say them as often as he did, say them as well as he did--or who will.

Next Steps for Adult Learners: A Sequence of Possible Classroom Activities

2011-12-18T14:45:00.000-08:00

Last week, I laid out a concern facing many adult language learners: when you've maxed out the course offerings at one site, how do you find the next class? Especially in a climate of long waitlists at the publicly- or grant-funded programs sought out by many low-income immigrants? At my former small agency, where we could only support a five-month beginning-level ESOL course, the issue of connecting students to "next steps" became so paramount that one of the most important parts of the program became what students would get to do after the program.

Because all of my students wanted so badly to keep studying English once they'd gotten an initial taste, I developed, through trial and error, a series of activities designed to help them do just that. I had a few guiding principles. First, I wanted to elicit students' interest in next steps. I had my own theoretical bases for why it was desirable for students to keep their language-acquisition momentum, and was happy enough to share it, but I tried to maximize their own urgency. Second, it's a big, bad (well, at least long-waitlisted) world. The Boston area, like many metropolitan regions, is replete with agencies, course offerings, and levels of study. Negotiating these thickets in English is hard enough; harder still if one is learning English. I was there to support students. Finally, I made the process iterative. This might be nice: write down three program phone numbers; add water; enroll in intermediate English. But it's unrealistic. The issued needed to be visited, then revisited.

So here's the rough sequence of activities to help students explore--and secure--"next steps":

Pose the Problem: Using the "problem-posing" methods derived from the revolutionary Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, I introduce a "codification" of the problem of continuing English. Usually I show students a picture of a few adults sitting at home, looking downbeat (thanks, Google Docs), with a couple lines of dialogue from each I've typed on the paper: "I used to study English at X location. I called Y program. I'm waiting." I lead students through a five-stage process to uncover the dilemma, make meaning of it, and develop an action plan for the characters. At the end, I ask: What would you do in this situation? And it turns into an action plan for themselves.

Write a Script: Students brainstorm questions to ask a program when they call it, e.g., Is there a cost? What levels do you have? When does class meet? What's your address? Students can usually hit the main ones themselves. Teachers can suggest others they might have missed. I help them collectively edit the quesitons, then pass out a "next-steps" form. They write down the questions, and the form goes in a sacred spot in their binders.

Practice Phone Calls: This is your classic practice asking and answering the questions students have devised. Student A is potential program registrant; Student B is a staff member at the agency being called. It's more fun when students pull out their cells. For those who are ready, it's most fun (and realistic, and challenging) when one student goes into another room, actually calls the other, then holds the conversation.

Bring in a Guest Speaker: In the past, I'd invite an adult-ed mentor of mine, whom I'll call Tim, a highly-respected program director at another program, to visit my class to talk about next steps. He'd talk about "confidence," answer students' many questions (in English!), and recommend programs to look at. Students already have an intrinsic drive for next steps, but this exposes them to another voice to reinforce the message and motivate them. And, it provides them with a connection to a program. I used Tim's visit as a placeholder the rest of my course to connect back to the next steps concept.

Find Programs: I provide students with directories of local English classes, divided by neighborhood. Sometimes this means packets printed from the state Department of Education Web site, or Boston's English for New Bostonians Web site. Sometimes this means directing students to those Web sites, with guidance on how to navigate the search functions. Students fill out a preset worksheet with contact information for four to six programs.

Call Programs: A nice weekend homework assignment: between Friday and Tuesday, call two programs, ask the questions you brainstormed earlier, and write down the answers. Now, some programs' outreach officers speak languages common to Boston immigrants, like Spanish or Haitian Creole. But not always. And few programs have staff who speak languages like Mai Mai or Somalian that other students of mine have spoken. So while students may find they can simply speak their native language when calling certain programs, they'll have to ask the questions in English sometimes.

Share Back: After the first homework assignment, I have students share with each other the information they've heard from other programs. If one student calls a program in Jamaica Plain and there are no intermediate classes, another student can cross that program off her list, and add in a different program that might make more sense. We also discuss how it's going: Are there other questions students should be asking? Did somebody's aunt just get in a program nobody knew about? Do they have more spaces? Often this informal networking is just as important to getting students in continuing education.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat: The next week or weekend's homework is to call three or four more programs.

Celebrate Successes: One morning last spring, a student came into my class early: "I have news," she said, "I have a class for August!" Chances were, she had already told classmates the good tidings, but I asked her if I could put her on the agenda to make sure everyone heard, and celebrated, her news.

Hit the Pavement: I take my students to visit one other program, which in the past has been a well-respected site, located downtown off several bus or train lines, with multiple ESOL levels. Such a visit, at which the program's outreach coordinator presented the course offerings and registration process, gave the concept of "next steps" yet another friendly face, provided a practical option for many students, and gave them practice getting there on public transit. A visit to a local literacy center got at the issue from the other end: most public libraries are hubs for education and job-placement resources.

Discuss Plan B: After a few weeks of this process, I often raise the qustion: what happens if you're put on waitlists everywhere you call? We brainstorm steps: read books, go to the literacy center, take a lighter-level conversation class at the library; call me for more ideas. I make sure everyone has my cell phone number (though not every teacher would be comfortable with this) and office number to call me for more support should they still be exploring classes after graduating my course.

Follow Up Individually: Over the last few weeks of class, in one-on-one conferences with students, I check in with students about their progress finding classes. As important as whole-class activities are to investigate next steps, individual check-ins can uncover particular difficulties or be a space to comfortably suggest new pathways or ideas.

Connect to Curriculum: I haven't done this in every class, but in one course our next steps explorations coincided with a unit on Following Directions (turn left, turn right, where's the restaurant? and so on). I created mock conversation between a student and program staff involving directions from the train to a downtown program. I built it into a Jazz Chant, which students practiced over multiple classes, both to reinforce in a high-energy way what they were learning grammatically as well as to suggest language useful for phone calls. Ultimately, we turned it into a role-play, again with cell phones.

**

As I look at these activities, carried out in this fashion, a few things stand out. First, it takes a lot of time and effort. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's striking how prominent a role this has played in my classroom. Second, there are obvious connections to students' self-advocacy for other resources. The most obvious parallel is to securing free or affordable childcare, a common issue for so many of my past students: just as with ESOL programs, there are eligibility requirements, many suppliers, a variety of ways in which the service is offered, and variation in quality. It might make sense to frame "searching for English classes" more explicitly as "searching for resources in general." Third, the process assumes the need for next steps is universal, and lays out the activities accordingly. In my experience, the need has been universal, but what about when several students have already discovered their next class. Does it make sense to continue to use everyone's classroom time to address the remaining needs of a few students? What would it look like to do some next-steps activities on a voluntary, out-of-class-time basis?

My dear Blog Visitors--what stands out to you? What sounds good? What's missing here? What could be done differently?

The Week's Links: Not Forgetting Poverty & Remembering Hitchens

2011-12-17T05:50:00.000-08:00

A few unfair swipes in this Times op-ed, but the larger point about addressing poverty to help address what happens in the classroom is a good one.

Any number of pieces can be read on the passing of Christopher Hitchens, but Jacob Weisberg's comment at Slate on Hitch's generosity to young people reminded me of a time when I had the very good fortune of seeing that generosity up close. I'll have more thoughts next week.

My To Do List

2011-12-13T21:08:00.000-08:00

Tentative plans, for once all of the last statistics have poured out my ears and I am officially on break ...

1. Write poetry for open-mic
2. Cook something while not in a hurry
3. Eat something while not in a hurry
4. Taper caffeine intake ...
5. ... and, being here, ramp up wine intake. Bet you 10,000 dollars I won't be thinking about regression diagnostics there!

Next Steps for Adult Learners: What's the Problem?

2011-12-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

This past April, I had the good fortune to spend a week in Montreal, bumming around la belle ville, barely missing the chance to use Bixi bike-sharing, and everywhere I went trying to pull together the bits and scraps of French I'd learned in the U.S. (and was learning there): at my hostel, at the grocery store, on the street. I had enough grammar to purchase my share of wine, if too little vocabulary to discuss whether it was any good, to say nothing of follow the conversations that pinballed around my hostel's rather cramped and enlivened dining room once that first (second, or third) bottle had been uncorked.

I got by--indeed without having to fall back on English too often. And I got better. But eight months later, grad school has intervened and made those bits and scraps suddenly seem all the more infinitesimal. It's a situation any of us who has labored through the beginnings of a foreign language as an adult can attest to: three steps forward, a few months off, two steps backward. Language "attrition," as it's known, is only one of a murderer's row of hurdles facing adult language learners. For adult ESOL learners, whose language acquisition is quite a bit more high-stakes than anything I've experienced, it's a big concern. And an issue that raises important questions about helping adult ESOL learners access their "next steps"--how to help them keep studying English once they've maxed out the opportunities within a single program.

Given the demand for ESOL in Massachusetts, it has been heartening to see how many small programs exist in all imaginable corners of the city: in the pocket-sized human-services agency where I used to work, in school-based community centers, housing projects, daycare centers, churches, prisons. There are still the established, state-funded, multi-level programs, but who's kidding themselves? The state can't or won't fund all the demand.

The challenge with storefront programs like the one I worked at is that they may not have the multiple levels provided by the state-funded bulwarks. Students put 6 or 9 months in, then what happens? In my five-month program, students did a number of things to prepare for graduation and the inevitable search for a next course. For more on that, stay tuned. But after a few months, either through the grapevine or formal follow-up, I would tally up the progress of my alumni. The result was usually this: about half were studying English elsewhere, another quarter were looking or were on a waitlist, and the rest I either couldn't get in touch with or had ceased looking for more English.

I wasn't concerned about the 50 percent still studying. These students were the obvious successes of our next-steps preparations. It was the other 50 percent that got me thinking. I hardly expected every student to keep studying English. Life happens, especially for the low-income immigrant folks who came through our doors. In one of many such examples, a student once had to drop my class right after starting because her daughter had a baby. She was now a rather heavily-involved grandmother; English could wait.

I was curious about those three, four, or five who wanted to continue but didn't have the relatively immediate opportunity to. Like virtually all my students, they had entered my program with clear goals for learning English: To defend myself in everyday situations. To help my daughter with her homework. To get a job (or a better one). By the same token, I cannot remember a single student who didn't want to keep studying English once she got a taste of a class. In following up months after graduation, I found that many were waiting for a call back, and many were on a waitlist--often at multiple programs.

That wasn't surprising, given demand in our area. The main adult-education program in Cambridge has a waitlist of 439, a smaller program, 128. In Somerville, the waitlist for the program run through the public schools currently stands at 1011. In Boston, an organization in Chinatown runs to 296, another in South Boston to 211. It was an accomplishment that my students had the motivation and wherewithal to get on those waitlists in the first place. That can't be overlooked. But the waits that inevitably ensued--three, four, five months or more--were a frustration to my old students. And the likelihood that they were squandering to attrition some of their hardwon language skills ought to be a concern to all of us in the field.

Many a student--current or former--complained to me about this situation. Nearing the closure of one cycle I taught, my beginner-level crew teamed up with an offer I wish I hadn't had to refuse: Would I make my next class intermediate-level, and keep them all on board for the next six months? I couldn't, but it only reinforced my efforts to prepare students for what could come next. Still, the mixed results of future groups suggests new ways to think about next steps. Indeed, not every program has the bloated waitlists of the ones I mentioned above. But how do we go about finding out what's available, and where? And how do we get students into those spaces?

I Used to Think ...

2011-12-07T10:42:00.000-08:00

"We need a course where we can pull together what we're learning in our three other courses." --classmate Z.

That course wasn't there for me to take, but as much as often this semester I've tried to pull together what I've learned. In September, facing readings flush with theory that felt far removed from the classrooms I'd taught in and the immigrant parents I'd worked with, I felt like I was being asked to predict weather patterns at 40,000 feet based on how I felt the wind blowing over my face. As time went on, I sensed progress, most notably when I opened my mouth in class, started, "In another class I'm taking, we've been studying X ..." and could make the link back. Taking a reading from class A to integrate into an essay in class B: another good sign. I can't completely make the jump from ground to cruising altitude yet (I leave that for the basketball court; oh, wait). But I'm gaining hops.

I learned a lot about a lot of stuff, from the mundane to the pointy-headed: parent-engagement techniques in districts and charters, Common Core, methods to improve child protective services, promotive and protective factors in child development, how foundations affect school reform, an eye-opening amount of management theory, an eye-crossing amount of stats. On a personal front, I've worked on communication, from how to use hand gestures to voicing dissent in a way that informs new consensus. I've learned how to manage time much better (and only been made fun of for my 15-minute increments ... 200 times plus/minus 100 times by T.). On a professional front, I've had many conversations with folks in numerous fields, to the point that I got an email back confirming an informational interview a couple weeks ago and found myself staring at the subject line thinking: Catie who? Works where? (It was in the email; all's well).

I'm one stats project (speaking of that), two final papers, and three class evaluations away from being done. But taking a moment to glimpse the light ahead, some changes in my thinking. Warning: these are (a) a Sample, (b) Broad, (c) General, and (d) Obvious in some cases. The more nitty-gritty stuff ... well, I'll leave that for my posts on ESOL techniques.

I used to think ... in terms what I saw right in front of my eyes; now I think, not only that way, but also in frameworks, strategies, concepts.

I used to think that business practices were cold; now I think they can inform many types of management.

I used to think of cradle-to-career work in terms of starting programs, a la the Harlem Children's Zone; now I think collective impact might work better in many places.

I used to think of consulting as outside my interests; now I think that consulting assistance has helped spur great initiatives that I'm very much interested in (see here and here).

I used to think about poverty in terms of the experiences of the students in my class; now I most definitely still think about them, but also about funding issues, building support to sustain policy changes, strengths-based interventions, targeting vs. universal, and more.

I used to think that early parenting classes were mainly site-based, or classroom-based; now I think that home-visiting may be the key to making them productive.

I used to think that national foundations were too aggressive in promoting school reform; now I think they have a role in advancing knowledge in the field and, yes, putting their money out there to spur innovation (insert many caveats here).

I used to think a mission statement was crucial to keeping an organization focused on what matters; now I think that's still important, but should also be accompanied by strategic action steps, a theory of change, a theory of action, and criteria for ways to measure those actions.

Oh god, the profs have gotten in my blood. Back to that stats.

2Rev

2011-12-05T12:29:00.001-08:00

Interesting org, worth a look.

BikeBits #1

2011-12-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Spotted on Commonwealth Ave. last night: Yellow stenciled warnings at pedestrian crossings: "Look left for bikes."

The paint was a little thin, but the paint/thermoplastic used for road markings is known to stick poorly on non-new asphalt, and the stencils were quite readable for those who needed to read them--people about to leave sidewalks to step into crosswalks. Boston has gone to great lengths the last five years to make its streets more bike-friendly. From Allston Heights to the Eliot Bridge completely on bike lanes or with road-shares. Left-side lanes on Comm Ave. in Back Bay. Proposed removal of parking spaces to accommodate bike-lanes on Mass Ave. (just in time for me to no longer be using that route to commute; sigh). Lanes all around Dorchester.

It'd be wonderful to get to a point where drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians don't need explicit warnings for us all to coexist, but in a section of the city notorious for erratic behavior by all users, the heads-ups are a welcome sign--literally.

Politico Pith: Choice Thoughts from the State Secretary of Education

2011-11-30T18:41:00.000-08:00

Not gonna say it was quite like seeing Lady Gaga walk into our library basement, but it was pretty cool. Just a few (paraphrased) nuggets able to persist through my stats-addled brain-fog:

We hold school time constant and let learning vary. We need to flip those: everybody to mastery, no matter how long it takes.

One of my big problems with NCLB was that it overidentified underperforming schools but didn't give states the money to help those schools.

Teacher evaluation has to be based in part on student achievement. It's a common sense connection parents know. Last year she had a poor teacher and hated math. This year she loves her teacher and math's her favorite subject.

If you want to guarantee great turnout at a school committee meeting out in the suburbs, don't propose revamping the reading curriculum--propose changing the school day by 20 minutes.

We just voted to do the first state takeover of a school system, in Lawrence. I was at a school in a different city yesterday, and I was sitting there talking to those people, thinking, We should take over this district, too.

Climbing the First Year Mountain

2011-11-28T13:21:00.000-08:00

This was exactly the time of the school year, several years back, when my first year of teaching started to suck. It isn't news to anyone who's taught: the excitement of getting started quickly turns into survival, self-doubt, even the chills of disillusionment. Many hope to spend a lifetime teaching, but never overcome the early challenges: at least a third of young teachers leave the profession within three to five years.

That's my story. I came to high school Spanish teaching nontraditionally, having been an outreach educator for a year for the Red Cross, making presentations in Spanish to urban school groups. I had a lot of enthusiasm and a great knowledge of Spanish--but little sense of how to teach it, and less of how to manage a classroom of ninth-graders. I eagerly walked through the doors of an urban charter school that served students diverse in economics and ethnicity ... and rather quickly staggered into the abyss familiar to many neophyte educators: I was shifty, and the fourteen-year-olds smelled blood. I was too authoritarian in some areas, but lacked an overall authority in the areas that counted. Bronchitis came for a visit--and decided to stay. I spent many hours preparing a group project on Spanish recipes I knew my kids would love ... only to see it sputter in execution. The kids threw fits, threw balled-up paper, threw my attempts at behavior intervention back in my face. My department head was busy helping not just me, but two other new Spanish teachers, and I was rarely observed in my critical first few months. I had rented a studio to have peace of mind my first year, only to find I really needed a roommate ~~I could come home and drain a fifth of vodka with~~ to let off some steam with after a long day.

These problems were made worse by a spate of self-inflicted wounds: not observing other teachers till the late spring. Not knowing what a truly rigorous classroom looked like. Not examining my own practice enough to get there. Simply and regrettably: not being tenacious enough. I didn't do the thing all great teachers demand of their own students: step up, and get it done.

I was on the verge of quitting, but I did manage to see it through to June. Within a year I was teaching adults. It was a very different environment--I was very motivated to do well--I finally enjoyed myself, and my students finally had success.

But as I look back, I ask myself many questions. From a policy standpoint, how many people out there are like me, having intended to teach K-12 for years but flaming out early? What is the cost to the profession? From a school standpoint, was I just a random example of somebody who wasn't quite equipped for that kind of classroom at that time? How could my hiring school have better assessed my strengths and weaknesses, and either suggested they needed someone of a different profile, or hired me but then provided different supports? How can schools offer key help in multiple areas upfront, without drowning new teachers in advice?

From a personal standpoint, if I could have stepped forward in time, and given myself advice with the benefit of hindsight, what would I have suggested?

Border Remorse

2011-11-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

There are good reasons to be concerned by undocumented immigration and hope for better policy, but I continue to be struck by how incoherent/sloppy/hostile states' responses are in the absence of federal action. Piece from The Boston Globe today on "buyer's remorse" experienced by states that pass legislation:

In Alabama, meanwhile, business leaders and lawmakers are feeling the tinge of a new law written with such haste that no one actually can figure out what it means. According to the New York Times, the law states that an individual must provide proof of lawful immigration status for any interaction “between a person and the state or a political subdivision of the state.’’ Vast government resources are now being used to ensure that local pee-wee football leagues are not filled with undocumented Mexican children.

I visited the border south of Tuscon and in El Paso a number of years ago on a trip exploring border issues. Among many memories in those nine days spent under a larger sky than I'd ever seen, I recall getting a firsthand look at the water jugs placed by humane organizations for folks who would inevitably brave desert heat (and cold) to get to this country. There are humans at the center of the debate, first and always. I also learned how wall-building and border-enforcement had been rather a bipartisan undertaking, from Reagan through Clinton, and how it had mainly had the effect of shifting paperless migration to treacherous mountain regions rather than stemming it.

Despite my skepticism about federal action, though, this is one of those issues where I suspect federal reform would be much preferable to current makeshift state forays into immigration policy. Federal reform historically has been very imperfect, and would be again, but I think there's a fighting chance national senators would be less influenced by the nativist winds blowing at the state level, because of the political realities of the burgeoning Latino vote, which of course matters more at the statewide level than within a single (possibly gerrymandered) district. A state senator can still get re-elected with a hardline immigrant platform, the thinking goes, but I suspect it's decreasingly possible for a member of Congress to. Obama's made some motions toward this; perhaps its something I can hope to give thanks for during a second administration.

Lovin' Bikeful

2011-11-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

Bikeyface:

Love the illustrations, love the voice, love the handlebar mustache adorned with bike lights, love how ... she's both pro-biking and pro-responsible biking!

Cultural Issues: Don't Accuse and Blame, Understand and Respond

2011-11-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

On the political right, it's often popular to chalk up the inequalities of the world to poor people's “cultural factors” or “cultural reasons." Culture of poverty, the culture in schools today, and so on. The left runs from this sort of thing like Herman Cain from a Libya question ("just want to be sure, we're talking about ... culture here?"). But culture does affect folks in poverty, including adult learners, and that has to be kept in mind.

Toward the end of my first, six-month adult ESOL class an interesting phenomenon occurred. Several students had managed to graduate from our English for Employment program without completing resumes. They'd done all the career-awareness exercises in class, but when it came to meeting with my colleague caseworker to write resumes, no dice.

What happened? All of the students had made appointments with our caseworker, but had no-showed. Some no-showed twice. I hadn't tracked this, and had no idea until it was too late. I was confused: my students could arrive bright and early every day for my morning class, but couldn’t get themselves to a single afternoon appointment with my colleague over the course of six months? I had taken the time to sit down with the student, find a convenient time on my appointment software, seen her write the date and time in her calendar? Given her a confirmation card? And she’d gotten a reminder phone call from the receptionist? And still, no-shows?

What's more, these were the best possible students from the 80 who had applied for the class. They emerged from our screening process as the most reliable, most persistent, most able to succeed. And they couldn’t come to a meeting they had no reason to forget, for a purpose—to help find a job—they all swore they cared about.

If this had been just a couple no-shows--the occasional emergency with a student's kid cropping up--I wouldn't have been too worried. But it was a consistent problem of no-showing. Why? Was it a different meaning to "signing up" for things in my students' native countries? Was it the fact that most of my students were used to systems and institutions that don't expect much from them: the public-housing office, the welfare department, immigration? Hard to say, but it seemed there were certain attitudes or approaches among students that deemphasized the caseworker meetings that were the lifeblood of our agency--and, for our clients, the ticket to completing a resume.

I'll admit to a flash of frustration that day as I reviewed all the missed appointments in our appointment log. But most of the frustration was at myself, for (a) not anticipating this might be a problem, and (b) not having a system in place to check that our students were actually following through on their appointments. Rather than point the finger at students and say, "It's a culture problem," I tried to understand and respond. For our next cycle, we tied attendance of caseworker meetings to class attendance. When I made an appointment for a student to see a colleague of mine, I emphasized that it was as important as showing up to class. Every couple days, I checked the appointment log to make sure students were following through on seeing our caseworkers, and if there was a no-show, I checked in with the student to figure out what happened. Every two weeks, I met with my career-services colleague to check on student progress--and we even created individual strategies for each student.

Culture matters. People carry culture with them from their families, their communities, their home countries. They develop cultural responses to the things they deal with every day. As I learned, even if "culture" seems to a be a problem, as educators, rather than accuse or blame, we should understand and respond.

We're Not Not in Kansas Anymore

2011-11-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

Great piece today in the Times about how Hispanics are reshaping ... small towns in Kansas--quite beyond the traditionally immigrant-attractice meatpacking meccas like Dodge City:

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

Fascinating point that the slower pace of small Plains towns appeals to immigrants' because of how it harkens back to their childhood turf. This news--along with the rapid integration in suburbs around many cities--does call into question whether cradle-to-career initiatives that are too rooted in the "inner-city" may be missing bigger trends. It's not to understate the poverty challenges still very much present in central cities, but to point out that the conversation about uplift for all kids can't be limited to Harlem, Pilsen, Watts, Roxbury.

From Dependence to Independence: Building Community Outside of Class

2011-11-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

This past spring, a couple weeks into my adult ESOL class, a couple students came up to me and said, "We'd like to have a Friday Social every week." "Sure," I said. By the next week, a half dozen students were delegating who was responsible for napkins or cutlery and who was on salad duty, lugging in huge plates of food, and hobnobbing with fellow classmates they'd only met a scant few weeks before.

On the one hand, what could be better? We were building a community for folks who often lacked one. My students came from neighborhoods high in poverty in violence, from which most families try valiantly to shield their kids, if not just get out. Some of my students lived in shelters--so they were definitely trying to get out of their communities. Most of my students toiled to raise their families in relative isolation.

Friday Social was a chance to kick back among a newfound group of peers. At the bare minimum, they could let off some steam between learning the present continuous and setting realistic goals (woo-woo!). More than that, the social was a space to share what their lives were like, and learn from each other: What do you do for daycare for your daughter? What's your son's school like?

But I was faced with this dilemma: the student social started running 10 minutes over the 15 minutes which had always been the allotted time, making it tougher to dive into important material after break. And the social was happening all in Spanish--while most of the students were Latin American, one was from Africa. To tackle the language use, I introduced the concept of "small talk," modeling questions you could ask your classmate as you munched arepa: How's your family? Where do you live? I then had different students prepare questions for each week ahead of time.

To tackle the time issue, I brokered an agreement: Social could last 20 minutes (more than the usual 15-minute break), so long as 15 of those minutes were spent speaking English. While I reveled in the organically, student-created nature of Friday Social, I accepted their gracious invitation to eat alongside them, but maintained a low profile. It was their space.

In my constant mission to move students from dependence to interdependence and independence, Friday Social was, unintentionally, a great example both of how an interdependent, out-of-class culture can crop up among adult learners, and of some of the dilemmas such a cultural gathering poses in practice.

At the end of the day, for folks living in poverty, especially immigrants, the chance to build a support network was incredibly valuable. When it comes to moving adults toward relying on each other and on themselves, there are many steps to be taken. But rather than provide my usual list of promising practices, as I have about gaining independence in language acquisition and classroom culture, I wonder what more I could do.

Imagine if students created working groups outside of class to share ideas about public benefits, education programs, and supports for their children? ...

created parent unions for their schools? ...

protested adult-education budget cuts?

These are just the tip of the iceberg. Things I haven't gotten to yet.

What ideas do you have?

Starting Line Item

2011-11-08T17:24:00.000-08:00

Announcement from the Obama Administration today that Head Start funding will be subject to competition. Shuttering centers if they don't show academic progress, directing funds to successful programs.

The changes will require all lower-performing Head Start programs to compete for funds instead of receiving the money automatically. The new benchmarks to determine eligibility will mean some programs that fail to show children are making academic program will lose funding. Grants will be reviewed every five years.

In general, I support the President's move toward competitive bidding, especially in energy and transportation, usually havens of earmark lard, cough cough. Besides creating some motivation for lackluster centers to work better--and it's not at all clear to me that Head Start's mixed outcomes have to do with lack of staff motivation rather than inability to attract and support great staff--I'm not sure how this helps increase the supply of high-quality childcare for kids from tough backgrounds.

Some centers will get better, and maybe get more money, but short-run it implies shuttering more centers. And justifying one's own existence based on potentially hard-to-measure academic outcomes could certainly be a recipe for book-cooking. It looks like sanctions rather than support. I'd love to be proven wrong.

Finally, thank-you-thank-you Business Week for this graf:

Before making his remarks, Obama and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius toured a classroom at the Yeadon Head Start Center. He played with 16 3-to-5-year-olds gathered around smaller circular tables. One group worked on putting together a puzzle, another played with blocks.

Now if that isn't a metaphor for working with Congress, what is?

Occupaideia: The Week's Links

2011-11-06T19:17:00.000-08:00

Favorite tweet this week: anthonyha: I wish it was physically possible to murder one's inbox.

Joseph Stiglitz explains why, when it comes to Occupy Wall Street, he's in.

Things are even getting hot in Louisville, writes Charles P. Pierce, in his awesome new nook at Esquire.

I'll just point out that the Red Sox are still looking for a manager, and I'm still looking for a job for next year.

From Dependence to Independence: Culture Isn't Just About International Night

2011-11-02T12:58:00.000-07:00

Teaching is listening. Learning is speaking. It's a paraphrase from my thick mental file labeled, Profound Things Debbie Meier Wrote. In some iconic sense, teaching might seem to value what teachers have to tell and give. For teaching adults, at least, I'd say it's more about learning how to ask and request.

Last week I discussed how to help ESOL students move from dependence to independence through language acquisition. What about culture? It's not just about throwing an international night where everyone noshes on food from five continents. You can help your students become more interdependent and independent by empowering them in the classroom. Here's how:

Buy-in about class norms: Earlier I've made the case for infusing even adult classes with lessons on skills and behaviors to help students become better ... students. Building efficiencies and norms in the classroom are part of that. Smoother procedures and more minutes on task help everyone learn--not just kids. But with adults, their buy-in must be part of the process. So when you're setting up your class procedures, ask the class for input and use their ideas. One example: Class Constitutions. At the start of each course, I'd lay out a few things I needed from students (punctuality, 100 percent English use, and so on). Then I'd ask for their rules. I'd show them an exemplar constitution from a previous course. I'd provide a few categories: How students help themselves learn. How students help others learn. How to organize materials on the desks. I'd give my students 15-20 minutes to write their own rules. We'd post them--and follow them. Students became responsible for motivating (and sometimes policing!) each other.

Buy-in about what to study: Ask your adults what they'd like to learn. The answers may surprise you. Here are some that surprised me: How to speak English at the RMV. How to understand street signs. Integrate what students need for everyday life into class! It doesn't need to derail accepted ideas about the sequence of English grammar to be learned. But content is moldable--you can shape almost any topic to almost any grammar theme. It doesn't need to derail the level of language you're teaching either: give beginners simple statements for the RMV registration desk, advanced students more complex conversations. Student buy-in for curriculum can be taken much further, though. For one course, I convened a "curriculum committee" of students to meet before class, multiple times, to brainstorm with me how to make the most of ongoing class activities and what new things to try. ESOL students aren't preparing for some pre-ordained high-stakes test. They're trying to get around America. For the most part, they have a good pulse on what they need. Listen--then use your language-teaching expertise to help them get there.

Realia: Two days before you give a lesson on filling out hospital forms, should you make a stop at a nearby medical clinic to pick up forms? No need. Assign students the homework of going and getting realia on their own. Invariably this technique yields an interesting range of items that reflects where students actually go and what they actually need help with. For instance, before a lesson on how to navigate the RMV, a student handed me an impenetrable accident report form. We don't know how to fill this out. Duh. And I thought they just wanted to renew their licenses. Show students an example of what you're looking for before they go find it. And as I learned the hard way: make sure one student doesn't go get a form and photocopy it for the others!

Students as each others' resources: So many of my students came from communities beset by violence, anonymity, and lack of social connections. Many of them had strong family networks--but did they know their neighbors? Visit their local community centers? That was unclear. As much as possible, I encouraged them to become their own network of support and resources. Did I tell them about upcoming immigrant events and parenting workshops? Yes. But I also got them sharing. One example: as my students prepared to leave my program and enroll in a higher-level English class, I had them go through a sequence of lessons on finding their "next step." I provided materials so they could research other English programs. I gave them very structured forms in which to write down addresses, phone numbers, and possible questions to ask a program when you called (is there a cost? when are classes?). For homework, I had them make calls. A few days later, I'd have them share what they had learned with fellow students. I called program X, and they have spaces. Here's the number. At this point, they were doing the hard work, and I was just facilitating it.

These are some ideas--I'd love to hear more. A few final points: all of these areas to develop student interdependence and independence are purposeful. The actual structure of teaching language--from comprehensible input to student practice to performance and assessment--need not change. You aren't handing over the keys to language skills delivery. You're just finding areas to empower student voices and experiences and making the most of them. These techniques are also modeled, guided, and scaffolded. If I had said to my students only, "Write a class constitution," the activity might have taken twice as long, confused half the students, and yielded ten different ways of saying "listen to the teacher, dammit!"

There's always a time to provide a resource or a piece of advice. There's always a time to stand in front of the class and lead a listening lesson. But find the right spots to ask and request, not just tell and give, and your students will get a lot more from the class, from each other, and from themselves.

What's My Story?

2011-11-01T04:35:00.000-07:00

A guest from a DC-based advocacy org came to very briefly present to a class of mine the other day. She started this way:

I'm an alumnus of this class, and I'd like to make connections among other alums. My work in DC is in health insurance. Here's the issue: there are 8 million uninsured children in America. But 6 million of them are eligible for health insurance, just not enrolled. Some states have added a question to school registration forms about health insurance, and quickly been able to identify who needs to be signed up.

Wow. In four to five sentences, she introduced herself. She put her purpose out there. She used two very simple numbers to paint a vivid picture in ways anybody could grasp. And she suggested policy solutions.

Pretty complete picture. One of my goals for the next year (-plus) is to be a better communicator. What's my story, and how do I tell it?

Thrilled

2011-10-30T06:39:00.000-07:00

by the best World Series this side of 2001. Hoping Roger Angell still has enough left in the tank to give us a New Yorker post-mortem. Happy to see Charlie Pierce manning the Esquire politics blog. Frustrated to be trudging through ... snow?!? this morning. Warmed by MelissaCzarnik's tweet that "A Bus full of kids just went by the #occupythehood #occupymke #ows protest screaming 'Scott Walker licks booty.' " That's what we were sayin' all along.

From Dependence to Independence: Language Acquisition

2011-10-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

How can I help my students move away from dependence and toward interdependence and independence?

That's the question I touched on in an earlier post.

The adult immigrants I've worked with constantly talk up the American Dream: they came here to get a better life, better job, better future for their kids. Now, we can quibble about how realistic that dream is. But to help them move toward it means helping them feel more independent and have the skills to be more independent.

How do we do that in an adult ESOL classroom? I see at least three areas: Language Acquisition, Classroom Culture, and Community-Building. Today, I'll focus on language.

Stoking Independence in Language Acquisition: There's a concept called the "Atlas Complex," in which language teachers tend to prance around theatrically, make themselves the center of attention, and constantly treat students to a torrent of corrections and insider hints about the language to be learned. There are definitely times when the teacher should explicitly model things and lead the class. Indeed, I could write a long post on the essentials of teacher-directed task of comprehensible input. I did some of that every day as an ESOL teacher. But in general it's much more effective to move students toward talking and using the language themselves, once they're ready. Some ideas on that front:

Correct where it makes sense to correct. Now, I'm generally a believer in Doug Lemov's concept of "Right is Right," but the limit of that approach in language acquisition is that overcorrecting students can actually impede language learning for speakers at certain levels. More broadly it stifles students' sense that they are co-creators of the classroom experience, a key ingredient of a lively language class. So be purposeful about when you provide correction. I started every class with an active language warm-up (5-8 minutes), and never corrected, because I prioritized getting the juices flowing and didn't want to shut students down emotionally by jumping in. In structured vocabulary and grammar lessons, I did correct, and early--I would rotate and monitor, take notes on trends, and provide feedback. When we did activities like having students analyze a problem in their community, it was about content, not perfect language use. There, I focused on building higher-order thinking skills and let incorrect usages slide. There's a time for correctness, and a time for fluency. Maximize opportunities for students to be comfortable and talking--the more they own the language, the more they're building skills to survive the real world.

Correct in a "least restrictive" way. The special-education concept of "least restrictive environment" is useful in ESOL, too. Students will depend less on you and build their own interdependence and independence if given chances to find corrections themselves. If a situation arises where students correctness matters, and a student says, Does she has a fever? consider moving through this taxonomy to help them find the correct statement:

Indirect correction: Say, Does she ... (drawing out the pause, making it obvious there's a correction needed) or say, Does she has? This prompts the student to reconsider and try again. If that fails, give her another chance, then try ...
Peer correction: Say, Can you ask a classmate? or Can XX help you? or Can you check your book? If that fails, try ...
Guided direct correction: Say, Does she has or Does she have? That final one almost always does the trick. It's also a form of comprehensible input.
As an alternative in some activities, try delayed feedback. If many students are making a mistake, put the options on the board, stop class, and go over them. Nobody feels called out, everybody who needed help benefits, and you've made the error explicit.
That said, You don't need to hover. Often, students will correct each other--if you've created a culture of collaboration (more on that in a later post). This builds interdependence beautifully.
And pick your battles. Even in an activity where correct speech is desirable, nobody wants constant correction. Break down someone's emotional strength and you've broken down their ability to learn--and especially to learn a language. Space out corrections. Keep a pulse on who's receptive to what kind of correction. Depends on the situation.

Up the student talking time (STT). Students learn more language when they work with each other, ask questions, negotiate speech. Few things are as important to linking language learning in class to language use in the world as this step. There are lots of ways to structure a class to do it. Here's one simple technique I've found success with: Two Lines:

Students stand up and form two lines, facing each other.
They do whatever the speaking activity is with the person they're facing--model it first!
The teacher moves alongside the line, listening.
After a minute or two, student pairs perform. Offer corrections if need be. the person at the end of one line goes to the other end, and everybody moves down a step, thus forming new partners.
Students continue the task.
What's good about this? By changing partners, students hear a range of accents. That's a life skill. They're exposed to more speakers who produce more variety of language, which is good for learning new words. Errors have a better shot at natural correction in a classmate pairing. And it's movement, a break from desks.

Correcting when necessary, correcting purposefully, and upping student talking time are all great steps to getting students engaged in the very ins-and-outs of learning a language. There's a lot more to moving students toward independence, but in a language classroom, these hints should help them take a big first step there.

How Much, or How?

2011-10-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

Ooh boy, Nicholas Kristof writing about all the things I care about!

He gets right to the point about how little public funding goes to children under age 5. And to how early investments in children actually have documented cost-benefit pay-offs.

Kristof's also refreshingly frank in taking on Head Start questions. He admits what we've long known, that some gains (e.g. IQ) for kids who go through HS wear off quickly. But he points out that "the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty." Those are really important measures, especially when you consider how repeating grades sets kids up to drop out.

His closing point is: we can't afford not to fund early childhood. But it's not just a question of how much funding early-childhood gets. It's a question of how programs are run.

Problem is, quality of day-care varies a lot. And overall, the picture isn't pretty--some programs are excellent, others terrible, most in-between. That variation happens even within a government-funded program like Head Start, not to mention in the ever-growing area of private day-care. Are play areas safe? Are teachers well-trained? Are adult-child interactions engaging? These are not side questions, they are the main questions.

Dumping a whole lot of money into early-childhood without ways of ensuring programs are actually well-run won't do much for the disadvantaged kids Kristof cares about. Kids from tough backgrounds need great programs, not just more programs.

The Weakened Links

2011-10-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

Trying to fund linkages is impossible, because it we'd have to deal with too many funding streams--federal, state, and local.

That's what staff members from a foundation that fights poverty in a large U.S. city told me when I asked them if they provide funding to help programs link together with other ones--not just drive funding to single organizations.

Research shows that helping poor people through interventions works best if one intervention leads to another. Nonprofits are notorious for protecting their turf and avoiding collaboration. We're never gonna solve tough problems unless we solve them together. And we're never gonna work together unless we can line up our dollars.

By the way, this was a major foundation with a lot of pull. If they step back from linkage-funding with their hands in the air, that says something.

Shout #1: From Dependence to Independence in the ESOL Classroom

2011-10-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

The home-cooked arepa. The colorful pencil, offered during break. The stuffed doll brought back from Puerto Rico: There was nothing more touching than when one of my adult ESOL students took the time to give me a gift.

After a year of teaching, under almost all circumstances, I stopped accepting them.

Dependence. My students--mostly Latino--had a major cultural predilection to it. Growing up, they stood up when their teachers entered the room, and called them maestros. In the U.S., they were heavily dependent on the social-service safety net. They were women of color taught by a white male. If they had jobs, most worked as housekeepers, where they busted butt and kept their mouths shut. Everywhere they looked, the power differential was against them.

But for immigrants, any pathway to success in the U.S. must be a path away from dependence and toward independence.

Every time students asked me for my opinion during a class discussion. Every time they asked me for my perfect pronunciation. Every time they waited for my approving smile after giving me a slice of cake--built their affinity for me. It filtered their class experiences through me. It made me the source of All Language Knowledge. It made them rely on ... me.

Are there times to accept gifts? Absolutely, and I'll discuss that more in a future post. Are there times to jump in with a correct pronunciation? Sure. In the classroom, is some reliance on the teacher a good thing? Yes, at least at first.

But my students came in with tons of dependence, and didn't need any more from me, that's for certain. So with every subsequent decision, I started asking myself one question: How will this help my students become more interdependent and independent?

It's a question all of us ESOL teachers should be asking ourselves every day.

How Do You Have a Mission and Still Be a Dreamer?

2011-10-14T10:20:00.000-07:00

... or, how do you get nitty-gritty and fuzzy all at once?

Dan Pallotta had a post a few months ago urging missions, not just "mission statements":

Don't waste your advertising space on your mission statement. Use the space to tell people what you've accomplished, or what amazing thing your product will do — use it to show them what mission you're actually on.

And from Steve Jobs's Stanford speech, where he asked himself:

"If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

When I ran an adult ESOL program, I came up with a clear mission statement outlining exactly what my students would get out of it.

The four most important things: 1) Everyday language skills, like how to talk to the doctor. 2) Academic behaviors and skills, like arriving on time to class and organizing a binder. 3) Setting goals that are realistic and achievable. 4) Links to "next steps," i.e. the program they could continue on to after graduating from mine.

I talked about them constantly. I would even say, "I'm on a mission to help them ..." And I focused like a laser on making sure they happened. Did they happen? You bet they did. I wouldn't let them not happen.

But if you focus like a laser, how do you remember all the other things you care about? One class, we tried to get students job placements, and failed. We got them more job-ready, but they didn't have enough English to do more. I saw how hard it was for my immigrant students to change certain parenting habits. I saw how even the many services my human-services agency provided--food stamps applications to immigration assistance--weren't enough to move most families out of poverty. I constantly wanted to expand to more levels of ESOL, but without expanding staff, it wasn't realistic.

I was so focused on what I could do and had to do--and how to do it better. That was the mission.

How did I keep dreaming about solving the bigger problems? I sat on the porch on summer Saturdays reading about language acquisition, or the Harlem Children's Zone. I spent a couple months visiting other programs doing similar but slightly different things. I schlepped to trainings, networked, debated ideas over food and beer. I piloted a bunch of ideas in my program--some successes, some failures. Any way to increase the flow of ideas into my brain--and classroom.

But ultimately I found the day-to-day work, in a one-man program in a small agency, was so demanding that it shut off the really big dreaming. I moved on.

Wherever I land next, I hope I can answer the question, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" with a resounding "Yes." I hope my workplace makes it easy to do that. I hope my colleagues are asking themselves the same question. Nonprofits must focus on doing excellent work every day. It is about the daily impact. It is, at some level, about the next grant. But it has to be about dreaming, too.

NCLB Stew

2011-10-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

Piece at the Times about Tom Harkin's NCLB re-write. Still waiting for more analysis, but I was struck by this quotation from Grover Whitehurst:

“Harkin’s bill would return control to the state departments of education and the local school districts, and they’re the ones that got us into the mess that No Child was designed to fix,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who headed the Department of Education’s research wing under President Bush. “Districts and states have not been effective in delivering quality education to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, so why should we think they’ll be effective this time around?”

Okay, okay, states and districts haven't always taken the lead in promoting achievement. Or rarely. We can debate that. But it's not like NCLB had much to say about instruction and achievement, either, except to set pie-in-the-sky goals of universal proficiency by 2014 and impose punitive consequences (that were actually pretty easy to escape through the "other" option of school turnaround) for those not on track.

The idea that simply raising motivation to get improve achievement was sufficient to get the process going failed on two fronts. First, it left states to fix, fiddle, and nip data to "show" proficiency. Second, it's proposals for creating better options for kids were a) tutoring and b) transfer. Leaving aside whether this is actually an effective way to raise all boats, only tiny, tiny numbers of kids took those up. NCLB didn't deal much with capacity of teachers and schools, nor with good fallback plans.

Harkin's bill may not be stellar--I for one am interested to learn more--but it's slipshod to hold up NCLB as the original, responsible alternative.

ConStrived?

2011-10-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

I had a fascinating conversation Friday with a self-described "instigator" who's helping lead a replication of the STRIVE Together program of the Cincinnati area elsewhere in the Midwest.

Such organizations are modeled loosely off the Harlem Children's Zone and attempt to create cradle-to-career pathways for kids in disadvantaged areas. These Midwestern models differ from HCZ in that they are larger than 100 square blocks and promote collaboration among existing agencies. And their funding is different--I mean, not everyone can be hand-in-glove with Wall Street, right?

Here's what else the Other Midwest Plan has going for it: business, community, and school-district buy-in. Focus on STEM subjects: science, technology, math. Accountability measures from top-to-bottom, including managed instruction and continuous improvement plans. Use of great practices from across the country. Assurance of on-the-ground quality, through plenty of support and professional development for teachers, out-of-school time programs for kids, inclusion of volunteer labor. Emphasis on kindergarten readiness. I took the devil's-advocate pose over and over, and got pretty satisfying answers back.

When what started as a 20-minute call ended at an hour, I thought: Wow, this Other Midwest Plan sounds great! ...

... But is it too good to be true?

The rapid dissemination of the cradle-to-career idea (which I've written about before) is encouraging, insofar as I think it's a good way to frame the movement to achieve legitimate outcomes for kids from tough backgrounds. But it's also a new path full of booby-traps.

A few questions that I think must be addressed:

How does the laudable focus on educational achievement not get narrowed to outcomes in math and English (or, in a better world, math, English, and science)?
How do you avoid imposing so much quantitatively-based accountability that you create (unfortunate but plausible) incentives to "teach to the test," or worse, manipulate data? How do you create broad, fair evaluations?
We know that quality of teaching and adult-child interaction are so important in both K-12 classrooms and daycare. How do C2C programs assure that the consensual, progress-oriented message from movement leaders is not diluted at the grassroots level? More to the point, how do they plan to increase the supply of effective front-line practitioners, especially in an era of fiscal retrenchment?
The C2C approach is warm, fuzzy, and consensus-oriented. It sometimes seems everybody's determinedly on the same page--or at least trying to get there. What if the consensus is wrong?
How do you make room for (Business-Speak Alert) "process correction" or continuous reflection, when you're keeping a good face up to secure grant money and political will?
Many of the major social advances in American history grew out of mobilization and politicization of people at the grassroots. People spoke up and got angry, and things changed (see Civil Rights, women's rights, the Voting Rights Act). Can a movement that is so--in some ways--bloodless have long-term impact?
How do you keep funders and agencies working together? If funding pulled back at some point, or results were uneven between agencies, wouldn't agencies be tempted to steer their own ship again?
Isn't this an idea from Rich White Men for poor people of color?

Jobs and Jabs: The Week's Links

2011-10-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

Among the many, many, many remembrances, Ross Douthat's takes the form of an ironic, grudging concession that Steve Jobs was a revolutionary even for late-adopters like him. The last outpouring of response this big to a death I can remember was when Michael Jackson died. Speaks to the way media and consumer culture have crept into everyday life. The number of people who hadn't had Michael Jackson as soundtrack to some part of their life was like the number who haven't tapped at a sleek Apple product. Not that many.

Speaking of products, neat stuff happening at a tech school in Boston. Can't say I ever went to class in the ... Liberty Mutual Alternative Fuels Lab. But these kids do.

I happen to think Mormons of a certain age have plenty to answer for on their, um, policy platforms, but the loose-lipped accusations of a Rick Perry endorser only make Mitt Romney look more like the Proverbial Adult in the Room, and that's the kind Republicans like to nominate. Not sure how long this 10-gallon hat can stay afloat.

The bigger, more serious point, is how generally accusatory our politics have become. Not just the gaffes on the campaign trail, but all this un-American, un-Christian food-flinging. I just don't think this happened back in the day. Even back in my high-school days, when Clinton was fending off Whitewater and sex scandals, there was at least the shadow (well, sometimes more than that) of a basis for the attacks. Are the instant media the cause, or just a symptom?

Finally, I want comments. I'm not expecting 972 per post, but some would be great. I just changed the comments setting so all you need is a Google account to get in. Hop on board!

NCLB Soup

2011-10-05T13:00:00.000-07:00

If Law A guaranteed 100 percent student proficiency, but was only10 percent implementable, and Law Y shot for only 80 percent student proficiency but was 80 percent implementable, which would you prefer?

Interesting piece at The New Republic by Kevin Carey (Ed Sector) about the Obama Administration's tweaks to NCLB. Basically, takes the moon-shot "everyone achieves by 2014" mandate away while empowering teachers and schools and states to do the things NCLB didn't properly address, like helping students meet stable standards, teacher quality, authentic school turnaround.

Meanwhile, Carey casts a plan among some Republicans to back away from NCLB as long-term retreat from federal spending obligations masking as nostalgia for the good old days when the Feds kept their hands out of the schools.

As far as Obama is concerned, while I never worshiped him as The Second Coming, I voted for him, would do it again, and will do it again (short of some major shift in the political landscape leading to a sudden embrace of Mitt Romney ... oh wait, yeah, I'm voting for Obama). I share many reservations about his term, including some with the still-cohering Occupy Wall Street movement.

But he has initiated many "tweaks" that could have positive long-term impacts, like changing funding formulas for usually earmark-riddled energy and transportation sectors, this NCLB work, RTTT, and so on. In that sense he has been more manager than leader--despite the oratory skills we all know. Is it enough to be a President of "tweaks"? No, and that may spell doom for him come next November. But worth watching the long-term impacts.

Reviewing Homework: Thoughts for the ESOL Classroom

2011-10-03T09:27:00.001-07:00

The Usual Good Stuff from Coach G on the limits to reviewing homework.

Coach whistles teachers for two main offenses:

Rotely reviewing and correcting problems: if everyone got a question (or all of them) right, teacher-led rehash is a waste of time and spark for student disruption.
"Disc jockey" review, where they ask the students what questions to go over. Kids ask to go over questions they actually got right as a ruse to fool around, and the quiet kids never pipe up.

Let me add a few nuances for the adult ESOL classroom, which fit in two main categories: Correct, Collect or Act Out? and Let It Be.

Correct, Collect or Act It Out?

How or whether to review homework depends on what the homework is for:

Some homework's formative, helping students develop skills on the way to larger objectives, and it's probably a good idea to make sure it's correct. For that I'd heartily recommend Coach G's suggestion that you put answers on the board and let students work through their errors. Or my own ESOL-specific technique--see below.
Some homework's preparatory. What do I mean? It's not just practice, but a building block for a classroom activity. A key in any language classroom is what's called "information exchange" tasks, where some students have information others need, and they speak in the target language to share that info. Bare-bones example: A homework could be, "Write 5 sentences describing yourself with adjectives." The students bring it in, a volunteer reads the sentences out loud (without saying the author's name), and in teams the students guess who the classmate is. For this sort of activity, I recommend you collect the assignment, help students make corrections over the next couple days, then do the activity. That assures the activity is based on legitimate input, not someone's error-riddled scribbling from the night before.
Finally, some homework's performative. Students work on a big or small project, and the final homework assignment is to prepare it for presentation. No need to correct here (well, a peek over their shoulders is probably a good idea!). Let them get up (or get in groups) and act it out.

Let It Be

Is there ever a time to just let students review the homework, regardless of whether you know how well they did it? Trying to muster some words of wisdom ... yes. In an immersion language classroom, it's great. Remember that middle-school German teacher who just drilled you to death on grammatical forms? Guess what? You actually weren't learning as much as Ms. Mickeltickel told you you were. Rote drills have a place ... but a limited one.

Turns out that we develop a lot of language skills through "negotiating meaning." All those little phrases like "Repeat, please," "Excuse me," "Did you hear that?" "What's next?" "Can you help me?" "Okay," "Right," "Give me my stapler back!" And so on. In an immersion class, in small groups, students are forced to use a ton of this "small stuff."

Unless you're pretty sure everyone got the homework completely right, in which case there are plenty of other techniques to get 'em talking, taking five minutes to review the homework serves two purposes at once. And since review often occurs early in class, it's a good, low-stakes way for students to get their tongues and brains working in the language.

There's plenty more to say about homework review. Cold-calling. Breaking students into groups to review one section, then share out. Collecting homework for quality control and direct feedback. But the big questions to always remember are, What's it for? and in a language class, Can I use review to get kids talking?

Balls and Strikes: The Week's Links

2011-09-30T14:19:00.000-07:00

Um ... considering all the talk this baseball season about expanding the postseason to five teams, the bottom two having a one-game showdown for the Wild Card, thus reviving the Moribund Pennant Race, what does the final-day theatrics say about that?

Interesting piece by Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate about why the Administration might let the health-reform law go before the Supreme Court sooner rather than later. She quotes Peter Suderman:

If the mandate is upheld, Obama will claim constitutional victory, and argue that Republicans pursued a frivolous challenge in service of political gain. If not, he'll presumably argue that the challenge itself represented a partisan attack by political foes who aren't interested in fixing the health care system and that America's court system has become hopelessly biased by an extremist conservative judiciary that's in the thrall of the Republican party.

And a wonky piece at The New Republic surprisingly makes me feel optimistic about the dwindling of the death penalty, in practice and in law. Didn't know they'd dropped so precipitously, for a lot of reasons. Of course, that DP still exists at all is to say that it persists as an idea, problematic in a country that stakes much of its global swashbuckling moral authority on ideas.

Finally, I only buy electronics that make me bare my teeth and growl FIIIIRRRE. As in this. The name sort of beats you over the head, but at least you can't accuse them of mixed metaphors. Appealingly low-cost. And appealingly making me want to get one and walk down the street with it humming "ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm on ..." or "we didn't start the ..."

Eight Is the Loneliest Number

2011-09-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, a statistic just comes out of nowhere and knocks me down. The share of GED recipients who actually complete college once they've started (now, there's a conversation for another day). The Red Sox' abysmal September record (now, there's a conversation for ... oh wait, there might not be another day).

Yesterday's stunner? A number (from the 90s) showing that only 8 percent of public investment in education is spent on children birth-to-5.

Everything we know says that kids cognitive, emotional, linguistic development has a huge, lifelong impact. Why don't we fund 0-5 better?

Now, I understand: the public K-12 system is a 500-billion-dollar gorilla taking up much, much more than 8 percent. A lot of birth-to-five life happens at home. The private-public balance for daycare is more on the private end than in K-12. The "Head Start didn't work" perception is out there--even if it's not entirely true. But it's still shocking how little our society invests in arguably the most important five years of life.

For society at large, I think it comes to down to this: perception of crisis. Major foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton zealously fund all stripes of K-12 school reform. These initiatives are problematic in many ways, but I think they've caught fire among donors because of the obvious crisis of American high schools. Open the paper and you read about this-or-that failing school. Turn on the news and you get a steady diet of "kids these days'" troubles with drugs and gangs. Employers are finding that young adults can't do the job. Colleges are finding freshman can't do the classwork.

But there's very much a 0-5 "crisis," as well. Toddlers with health problems, kids who haven't seen letters or heard enough talking at home, and on and on. But this crisis is much more silent. It has to do with complicated genetic-environment interactions beyond the grasp or interest of policymakers. Further, three-year-olds who are falling behind aren't marauding the streets in gangs ... they're just not getting right kind of attention or discipline from Mom or Dad. And even if kindergarten teachers can already see the negative outcomes, these outcomes aren't blaring over the news or failing in droves out of Stats 101 at Your Local State College.

So we don't intuitively grasp early-childhood issues the way we do with older kids. Even if we did, where would the political will be to act? Kids don't vote. Parents of poor, at-risk kids don't either.

Just yesterday, I heard a former advocacy worker say: You have to kiss serious politico butt to get lawmakers to give money to early childhood. I don't want to be mired in pessimism, but how do we change this?

The Right Stuff: Skills and Behaviors Beginning ESOL Students Must Have

2011-09-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

In "Teaching Students How to Be Students," I recommended a few steps for helping students learn the skills and behaviors they need to be successful in your classroom--or any future classroom they might step into.

Since Monday is a good day for Serious News, let me be clear: these are not quick fixes. If it took two minutes to show students how to organize a binder, and they could do it perfectly after a single observation, every teacher would do it. But everybody doesn't do it.

So in signing up for a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, it is a huge help to know exactly what skills and behaviors matter in your class, your grade, your level.

I came up with a brief taxonomy of topics for Beginning ESOL learners. I thought. I sketched ideas. I begged, borrowed, and stole from fellow teachers. Here's a sample of our results--some language-specific, some adult-specific, some transferable to any classroom:

Beginning ESOL Skills & Behaviors

1) Puncuality

Being on time
Having your materials out before class starts

2) Academic Habits

How to listen to classmates
Tracking the teacher
How to find directions on a worksheet, and where to write your name and the date

3) Behaviors

How students or the teacher should get the class's attention
Transitioning efficiently into groups
Working patiently and productively with other students
Listening to instructions, and repeating them back
Using extra time effectively if you've finished an activity early
Self-advocating in class: I don't understand. I need to go to the bathroom. Pass me the scissors. I can't come to class tomorrow.

4) Homework & Studying

How to use a "dialogue journal"
Completing homework fully and to the best of one's ability
Where, at what time, and with what materials to complete homework
How to space out studying for a test, and identify what to study
Getting help vs. copying an answer
Practicing for a performance assessment
Identifying a teacher's feedback, and whether it's positive or corrective; responding to it through questions or corrections

5) Classroom Materials

What an organized desk space looks like
How to organize and maintain an effective binder
Dating papers
Having all the necessary materials: pencil, eraser, notebook, binder with divider

6) General Functioning, i.e. The Other Stuff

Asking for clarification about directions
Methods to support your own learning outside class
Evaluating personal strengths and weaknesses
Asking the teacher or a classmate to resolve a difficulty
Getting/making up missed work
Finding a class buddy to save papers and provide notes if you're absent

I know, I know. Many of these seem to warrant a big, blinking "Obviousness Alert." They weren't so obvious to my students, though. Most of these I didn't include in the program contract: that was a fast path to forgetting them. Instead, I rolled them out gradually and in a very carefully planned sequence. Each topic got a "mini-lesson" that incorporated visuals and metaphors and had students actually practicing or preparing for the skill.

This list could go on and on.

What are the most successful techniques you've used?

Out Standing in the Field?

2011-09-23T14:20:00.000-07:00

Took a lot of field trips today:

11:15: Interview at an organization that facilitates policy-changes to strengthen community-college outcomes

1:00: Met with the co-director of an upstart parenting program that is explicitly trying to be small and focus only on early-parenting--while linking with other resources to help low-income parents give their kids a successful life

3:30: Met with a social-entrepreneur/student who's poised to launch an organization that would connect poor schoolchildren with wraparound services for their families, to help remove barriers to learning and change the "conversation" about how schools operate

It's a good thing at my age you don't need to fill out permission slips!

By my count, that's 1 existing "linkage" program that's very big and supports front-line work, 1 new front-line program that supports linkages but wants to remain small, and 1 new linkage program that works at the front lines and wants to be big.

If you followed that, I bet you can tell me where the pea is!

Two lines of argument I'm constantly thinking about (in a very, very reduced form):

1) We have enough organizations and enough services. To help disadvantaged folks, we just need to connect them better from one program to another.
2) Poor people shouldn't have to run from program to program to meet their needs. Give them one-stop shops with all services under a single roof. Found a new org that does it all. Or add another program to round out your org.

What do you think?

Speaking My Language

2011-09-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Does a parent's low literacy affect their child's language acquisition?

That was the question that came up yesterday in a class I'm taking. I'm neither a linguist nor a developmental psychologist, but I have plenty of experience helping parents with literacy and language acquisition. In hearing the question, I thought: Absolutely not. At least, it shouldn't have to be that way.

First, defining terms, "parental low literacy" entails a struggle in one or more of the pillars of reading, e.g. decoding, fluency, phonemic awareness. (In their own language, I mean; a lot of folks struggle to read English while learning to speak English, and the two are connected, but that's for another day).

Many of my adult clients have had low literacy in their native language, but they were all fluent speakers of their language. And there's no reason their children can't pick up language well, too. The parent needs to use a lot of "parentese"--real words, phrases, and sentences tailored to the child. Lots of back-and-forth with the child, even if it's responding to their babbling with words and questions. High-pitch, slow cadence, overemphasizing some words. That's not all you need for language acquisition, but it's the bedrock.

Beyond that, the amount of language and kind of language the child hears has a big impact on their cognitive development. Lots of words, and not just commands or admonitions, but speech about the past, future, colors, objects, emotions. Mixed with songs, which are a great way to teach cadence and introduce children to rhyme. The more of that you get, the better those kids' brains as they head to school!

And at home, it can happen in any language--Somali, Spanish, Mai Mai, you name it. The development is the key.

We know that kids from tough backgrounds come to school having heard fewer words, and less of a variety. That affects their learning. Their parents may tend to have low literacy, but that doesn't mean the latter caused the former. If your mom's got low literacy, it doesn't doom you to low language acquisition--as long as there's a healthy serving of good, solid "parentese."

A final note: The question for policy-makers and nonprofits is, How do we help parents help their children pick up language? In a way that's respectful, cost-effective, and reaches the parents most in need of help? How do we increase the supply of high-quality childcare that's brimming with language enrichment? Going forward, there's a whole lot I'd like to say about that.

Method Man: Teaching Students How to Be Students

2011-09-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

How do you teach someone who hasn't been in a classroom in decades?

When I've taught immigrant adults, that was my daily battle. Some students' notebooks poured avalanches of unorganized papers. Other students, coming late to class, executed preening runway-worthy entrance walks that might have made last night's Emmy ratings soar. Others would circle multiple answers on a multiple-choice question on a test.

At least, that's what happened my first year.

So I watched, learned, and adjusted. It wasn't enough to teach English, take students to the public library, and help them build career awareness. I needed to teach them how to be students. How to be students. A dash of skills, a pinch of behaviors. What do I mean? Having all your materials--and only those materials--out before class. Transitioning to group work. Asking for help. Finding directions on a worksheet--harder than you might think when it's not your native language.

The list goes on and on (as you'll see in a future post!). And as any bedraggled kindergarten, 6th-grade, 10th-grade, or college-freshman teacher can tell you, teaching someone how to be a student is a must at every level of education.

So here are some general tips. Look for a future post on ESOL-specific ideas:

Wield Occam's Razor: Find the simplest way to teach the concept. When I had my adult learners set up a desk-organization system, I showed them a picture of a messy desk, and a picture of a desk with a few key materials neatly organized. "What's better?" I asked. I guided them with questions. They wrote rules. It took all of 15, 20 minutes. It was the right visual, and the right question.
Speak their language: When I needed to teach my Latino immigrant students sequential goal-setting, I started with something they all understood: cooking dinner. First a recipe, then ingredients, then pots and pans ... and so on. They were hooked--more important, it helped them frame the concept.
Tap their knowledge: Introducing ninth-graders to a binder system? They've probably done something like it before. Or at least some have. Make the connection.
Target misconceptions: Asked to circle one of two options on a listening exercise, some of my adult learners, if they were having trouble, would circle both. Hedging your bets--great for Vegas, perhaps. Not such a great test-taking strategy. Once I wised up to this, I started modeling exactly how to answer the question before the test. I'd make a big show of circling both possible answers, then clearly demonstrate that you could not do that.
Explain "why": Especially with adults. With kids, depends on the situation. If you're going to have systems and processes in class, it helps to lay out the reasoning. Not always, under all situations. But sometimes it can go a long way.
Repeat, repeat, repeat--and gradually lessen your role: Call it what you like: At Bats. Larry Bird taking 1,000 jump shots a day because he knew someone else out there was doing the same. The first 80 times I had students put papers in their binders, I walked them through it while holding a binder and doing it myself. Gradually I eased up and let them do it--but only when I knew they could.

Friends, we're not just teaching content. Pick the key "student skills" and drive them home. It'll make your class that much more efficient. And your students' futures that much brighter.

NFP, HCZ, QED?

2011-09-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

I was born into luck.

I had healthy, well-educated parents, married, and stable parents. Dad had a good job, Mom was a dedicated and ardent community activist. My mom wouldn't have even thought of drinking when she was pregnant with me. They had the means to support having one more kid--my little sister--two years later. I grew up near parks, not power plants. There was no lead paint within sight or touch. From the earliest moments, I was loved, read to, and played with--not just by my folks but by aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers.

Am I thankful? You bet! To try to make such positive fetal health behaviors, early parenting, and stable life pathways more prevalent for mothers who didn't have the background of my own, enter the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP). I've been reading about it a lot recently.

For someone like me who's very interested in the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) and programs like it, the NFP raises some big questions.

First, the NFP in a nutshell: It was a plan developed in the 70's by a developmental psychologist to make the conditions I benefited from more widespread for kids born to poor, teenage mothers in Elmira, N.Y., and later Memphis and Denver. The backbone of the program? Sending nurses into the homes, from early pregnancy to a couple years after birth, to talk, teach, model, counsel, what it took to be a good mother.

The results? Less abuse and neglect, less use of public assistance by the families, and more involvement from fathers. Many effects still showed up in kids when they were fifteen years old. RAND found major cost-savings for the kids whose mothers were most at-risk and felt most helpless. A flurry of similar programs emerged, and political leaders were quick to find and implement in their own cities and states.

Teaching parenting is important. Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone have taken that cue, and added to it: good early parenting should lead to good pre-school, to good K-12 education, to good social-service supports.

But there's an issue with this cradle-to-college "conveyor belt" now being replicated nationwide through the Promise Neighborhoods. The very psychologist who developed NFP, David Olds, found that benefits to his parental supports were only for the at-risk mothers. Secure families who got the supports didn't need them, and were a cost loss from an investment angle. Olds's warning: making services universal may cover some families that don’t actually benefit, diluting resources that at-risk families most need.

By keeping kids on the “conveyor belt” perpetually even if some of them could prosper by graduating out of it—cradle-to-college may threaten to “dilute” services at each level of its continuum. Most of the families in these program's zones would probably be called "at-risk." But maybe not all of them. With scarce resources to fund the kind of childhood I got, that's a reality worth examining.

Right Seating = Great Learning

2011-09-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

In "Sweatin' the Details," I wrote how the minutiae of classroom setup (presented nicely by Coach G) isn't just good for reducing distractions. It also reduces time-wasting. Every minute matters: over the course of a year, the amount saved by cutting an inefficient transition can multiply into whole class-periods.

When I started teaching adults, they set up around a "Great Table": three tables shoved into one, with a dozen students seated around it in. Problem was, if students against the back wall wanted to write on the board--let alone work with a different student or use the bathroom!--they had about 3 inches to squeeze out of their chair, then had to clamber over three classmates, finally huff-and-puff around the corner of the table. D'oh!

In setting up a classroom, anybody can think about what management-types call "task design": what are people doing, who are they working with, and where are they located?

Here are some tips for classroom setup for adult learners, based on a single "task-design" question: What do they as learners, and you as teacher, need to do?

The teacher needs to room to get to each chair to assess students' when they're working, or help them when they're lost. Spread out tables, and leave enough room so you can access each chair. If you've got a tight space then leave room to lean over a table toward a student.
Students need to turn to classmates and immediately form pairs and groups of three. Make sure nobody's seated alone. Or at the corner of a table several feet from classmates. Make sure their chairs are roughly turned toward each other--or at least can be turned that way quickly.
Students need to stand up, move, and form new groups. I've taught classes up to three hours long. Like kids, adults benefit from movement breaks. In an ESOL classroom, they'll also benefit from hearing different accents and working with classmates with different skill levels. Make sure they have enough space to pull out their chairs, all at once. Have students designate a good place for bags and umbrellas during class. Against a wall, hanging from hooks--anywhere but under their chairs. (And as any Harry Wong-reader can tell you, don't forget to practice how to transition during the first couple weeks.)
Each student needs space for her binder, notebook, textbook, and workbook--and arm space to write. Together with students, determine what an "organized" desk or table ought to look like, and make it part of class expectations. Keep all the dross (food, bags, phones) off the table. If somebody needs a lot of space to write, make sure they're not crammed in.
Students might need to get up to check for work in their "absence folders," sharpen a pencil, or get scissors or highlighters for a group activity like scissors or highlighters. Keep these things nearby, and organized. Even better, teach students when to get them, and how.

Some of this "design" is in how tables are set up. Some is in where the students sit on a daily basis. Some is how you train them, and what your (and their) expectations are. I wouldn't recommend seating charts for adults, but you can always say, "Hey, since Janet's absent today, why don't you join the other group, Nora?" A good nudge goes a long way. And once you have a good setup that everyone feels comfortable with, you'll be thankful the rest of the year.

Ten Years

2011-09-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

Under a bright blue sky we couldn't help but comparing to that distant Tuesday, my girlfriend and I walked through Boston yesterday, from the T station across the Common, through the throngs of people sunning and playing frisbee, past the arepas vendors and t-shirt stands, across to the Public Garden, with its families spreading out lunch and swan-boat tours gliding into the blue water, where we headed toward Arlington Street and finally to the 9/11 Memorial.

A clutch of police stood to the side of the semi-circular, low stone monument bearing the names of the 200 state residents who perished that day. Bouquets, and cards and photographs and children's drawings, adorned the cement in front of it. We dutifully moved out of the way as a woman came through to add her own flowers. Beyond the memorial, on a small plot of grass with a newly-planted tree in the middle, were nearly 3,000 short American flags, placed in the turf that morning.

We spent a good while by those flags. One does not suspend honesty in the face of remembrance. Any single flag was a small, humble scrap of fabric on stubby wooden pole--hardly "banners," to be sure. But collectively they imparted much more, three thousand flags curving and flapping with each light breeze, like leaves rustling on tree branches. Their black shadows shifted and fluttered across the grass, the shadows of paper cranes. The stillness and immutability of death each flag represented belied by this: they looked ready to take off.

Social-psychology research shows that even for "flashbulb" events like that of 9/11, our memories dissolve just as much as they do for mundane happenings. As we walked, we found it healing to fill in the details of the day. We moved through some of the past week's stories, invariably featuring tales of heroes--the financial-firm security guard who seamlessly ushered hundreds of staff out, only to turn around and go back upstairs to check for anyone left behind ... the fighter pilot who boarded an F-16, loaded only with blanks because it had just returned from a training run, prepared for a kamikaze mission should one of the hijacked planes approach D.C. ... the imperishable coordination of the United 93 passengers, for which we have at minimum an untouched Capitol to thank them for. To recount, correct, fill in gaps was both minor and major.

We also shared our dark associations: the cringe when seeing jets take their routine but low flight paths over cities, the slight stop in the throat when boarding a plane. All traumas leave scars, the scars always persist through such associations. Our national consciousness has suffered much disunity in the years since 9/11, but at a biological level, in our collective cringes and twinges, we will be united probably forever.

We are also perpetually united in this: it could have been any of us. This attack that targeted civilian populations, and indeed was partially undercut by the very civilians on Flight 93. September 11 memorials are unique among our heritage in that they honor fellow civilians. Each flag in the Public Garden exalted a regular individual. In those stubby banner-ettes we saw our peers, buried somewhere or reduced to ashes, yet somehow greater in death. Each remembrance that evoked an individual moment of bravery, by those dead to say nothing of by those thousands of living rescuers and responders, seem to transform our negative heritage into something positive, something unifying, something, indeed, very much worth caring about.

A Long Day, and Decade: The Week's Links

2011-09-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

A touching remembrance of 9-11 by Scott Simon heard on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

From Leon Wieseltier:

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done.

In lighter news, a pretty good eight years for Esther Vergeer!

For/Gainst

2011-09-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

Great, short, pithy post by Sara Mead at EdWeek. The gist is, the debate between "charter schools" and "traditional public schools" is beside the point.

"How can public policies ensure a supply of good schools—charter, traditional, or something else—to meet the needs of kids in each community in our city?"

Reminds me of what Deborah Meier once wrote, and I seriously paraphrase: great public schools have more in common with great private schools than they do with poor public schools. And the inverse is true.

The bigger point, though, is our compulsive need to divide things into either/or options. It's a fine approach when there truly are only two options (Obama vs. McCain). Otherwise, it's a great way for people to stop thinking about the details of an argument and simply race for the labels. For the unions in Wisconsin, or against them? Love Sarah Palin or hate her? Think Obama is the Second Coming or Un'Merican Socialist? Yankees or Red Sox? (Oh wait, that may be a fair one ...).

You understand these divisions in the soppy world of national punditry, but when it comes to the next generation of children? Let's leave labels behind and get to the root of the issues.

Sweatin' the Details

2011-09-05T19:21:00.000-07:00

Ah, nice to think of sweating as the summer inevitably turns into fall, isn't it? But this time of year is when the sweating begins, at least for teachers.

Coach G's got some characteristically insightful thoughts on student movement within classrooms. The gist? Naturally steer students toward the least disruptive ways to sharpen their pencils, staple their packets, and throw out their trash. You do most of the "policing" ahead of time and you get to do less policing in class.

Tactics like this are the meat of what I'd call the "every-minute-counts" strategy. It doesn't just apply to individual students' behaviors, but also to group movements. Students should know how to form groups and transition to different parts of the classroom.

Do the math: an extra 30 seconds spent transitioning as a class, times four times per class, is 10 minutes a week. Times 35 weeks a year? That's 350 minutes wasted preening, slouching, slinking. Or the equivalent of about seven class periods. For each class! Figure out where you need students to move, and when, and how, and teach it, starting at week one.

Movement strategies are great for minimizing disruptions by individual students. Combine that with strategies for groups, and you've got: more teaching time, and more on-task.

ACE In the Hole: The Week's Links

2011-09-02T11:14:00.000-07:00

Over at The Informant, writer-prison inmate Richard Gilliam--inspired by this Paul Tough piece in The New Yorker--discusses the benefits of treatment for early childhood trauma.

Rick Hess on Steven Brill. He basically says, "define your terms"--it's too easy to toss around "pro-reform" and "anti-reform" without specifying exactly what either might mean.

The universe (well, at least this corner of it) seems to be telling Elizabeth Warren to jump into the race.

Finally, forget about those pesky SATs and admissions interviews. High school students seeking the Least Rigorous and Horniest colleges (among other discernible traits) can direct their browsers this way.

Need-to-Know

2011-08-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was thinking about my adult students. We picked them carefully: there was an interview for our program. Invariably, they'd say:

"I want to study English to defend myself in society, help my children with their schoolwork, and get a better job" (in some cases, just "get a job"!).

Got me thinking: what are the ten most important qualities I possess? And what the heck might that have to do with my adult learners? If you'll pardon this tooting-of-horn moment, here's what I came up with:

1)    Bachelor’s degree
2)    Second language
3)    Writing skills in my first language
4)    Computer literacy
5)    Transportation know-how and access to my job
6)    Experience working with diverse folks
7)    Diligence
8)    Punctuality
9)    Networking skills
10)    Critical thinking

The results? One credential (the diploma). One concrete skill (the second language).

And eight--count 'em, eight!--of what I'll call "work skills." I've got a further breakdown--if you're uneasy about so many divisions, rest assured--it's for the sake of the argument!:

Learnable soft skills:

Writing
Transportation know-how
Computer skills

Experientially-based soft skills

Working with diverse people
Diligence
Networking
Critical thinking
Punctuality

Most of what we learn, we learn by experience. Equally important, though, may be a single credential. So families in poverty--the kinds of families I see--would benefit from a range of experiences that give them access to model behaviors: punctuality, good family health and nutrition, parenting ideas, and so forth. But they must be on track to a realistic, meaningful credential.

And that’s the problem with some of those parent-volunteer positions. The ones where you help out in the lunchroom or on the playground. It’s experience, but it’s not likely to stretch you. And it may end up being a dead end.

Our adult learners want to be on-track to college. They want to be on-track to good jobs--or at least some paying job! We can help them get there. But we've got to be honest about the skills they really need--and help them build those skills.

Why Are We Funding This Stuff??

2011-08-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

"Why Are We Learning This Stuff??"

When I was in K-12 education, a colleague of mine who taught biology posted that on his wall. Beneath it he stapled up articles on "science in the news." Whatever you needed to do to sell 15-year-olds on the wonders of mitochondria, right?

In my own adult-ESOL teaching, I've done a similar thing, less explicitly. After a few weeks, our students start setting goals. "Ha!" you might say, "'Goal-setting.' Three syllables. Can't be that hard, right?" Well, it was three syllables like "debt ceiling" or "health reform" were three syllables.

Actually, it was really hard (I know, because many of my fledgling lessons in this area flopped). What is a goal? What is a realistic goal? An academic, professional, or personal goal? How do you make it specific? Not too vague ("help my family"--whatever that means) ... but not near-term either (brush my hair tomorrow).

Once students had worked through several lessons, they wrote their own goals. Different types of goals went on different-colored sticky notes. These were affixed to a poster. Every day I saw it. Every day the students looked at. Why are we learning this stuff?? That was why.

But if you're a funder, an agency head, an elected official, you have a different question: Why are we funding this stuff?? Sure, ESOL matters to the everyday happiness and prosperity of students, but how does it fit in a bigger policy framework?

28 percent of Boston's population is made up of foreign-born individuals
In the last two decades, Boston's immigrant population has increased more than 50%
Forty-five (45!) percent of children 0-17 in the city are children of immigrants
One out of two adult immigrants in Boston struggles with English or lacks a diploma
In the early years, how parents interact with their children, read to their children, manage their children's behavior has a big impact on whether those kids are passable or great students years later
In the school-age years, parental engagement is HUGELY important to student learning
Adult ESOL classes can help parents in two areas: First, how to enhance their young children's literacy. Second, how to speak English they can use to stay in touch with teachers, principals, tutors, and coaches.
There's demand. Parents are tremendously eager to help their children. They'll engage with most who want to help them do this. Those parents who aren't working (and it's a lot these days) often crave classes to improve their literacy skills. The waitlist in Boston for ESOL class stretches into the thousands.

In other words, for many parents, especially immigrant parents, I think you can draw a line from the education they receive in their new country to the educational outcomes of their children. Are there a thousand other factors? Yes. Are there a million exceptions? Yes. But that's why we need to fund ESOL programs--especially in family literacy. And sooner rather than later.

Ed Reform, The Autumn of the Patriarch's, and more: The Week's Links

2011-08-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

Over at Reuters, Steven Brill gets into some of the weeds of the ed-reform debates. Check your facts, everyone!

God knows what the future holds for Libya. But here's Christopher Hitchens on the Qaddafi endgame, including a little backhanded compliment to the Administration for its "leading-from-behind" strategy. And an interesting piece in The New Republic on the Colonel's oil-money propping-up of wretched insurgents the world over. Spread the filth.

And a tantalizing sample of Lewis Hines photos here. It's can sometimes seem easy to dismiss the idea that Obama often channels from MLK, of a moral universe gradually "bending" toward justice. But in looking back at all the tiny, laboring, urchin-like children, you've got to appreciate how far we've come in that regard.

A Thousand Points of Light ...

2011-08-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

Or at least the promoters of Harlem Children's Zone-style anti-poverty programs would hope. As a tentative fan of the HCZ approach, I was heartened to see the Feds launch the Promise Neighborhood Initiatives granting process in 2010. A remarkable number of organizations applied for planning grants. But what is more remarkable is the number of much smaller programs trying to replicate parts of the HCZ.

To take greater Boston as an example, there are three actual PNIs that got grant funding: the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, Community Day Care Center of Lawrence, and the United Way of Central Massachusetts. Beyond that, Cambridge launched Baby U, and I hear that a housing project in Somerville has something similar in the works.

Needless to say, this raises at least two immediate questions:

1) Does the HCZ approach work? If not, then the rapid rate of replication seems misguided.
2) Let's say it does work. Then, where does it work? Under what settings? Should it reproduce rampantly, or is it simply one among many anti-poverty approaches?

Not sure anyone's asking those questions.

In Session

2011-08-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

Something that will become familiar in This Space over the next few months will be the classes I teach. So that you're not dropped in unawares, here's a quick tour of what I do.

For the past few years, I've been an adult educator, teaching ESOL. When I introduce myself at social occasions that way, I can pretty much guarantee to be asked: "What the heck does 'ESOL' stand for?" Given a minute to guess, most people come up with "E" and "L," but the whole bit is "English for Speakers of Other Languages." (The old name was "ESL," or "English as a Second Language," and why it changed is a discussion for another day.)

A few nuggets:

I've taught beginning, intermediate, and advanced speakers--though mostly the first
Before I worked in a small educational program, but I'm hoping to move onto something larger
My students are immigrants
Most are women
We cover language basics, plus things like setting life goals and visiting the public library
Sometimes we've even had time (or, ahem, grant mandates) for other themes: career awareness, literacy, how to engage with the school system

Why does this matter? Two reasons:

First, my students and classes are my looking glass. Working with them shapes how I view most much anything else when it comes to education and poverty.

Second, I'm going to be talking about it in This Space. Disclaimer: Privacy matters, so I will fictionalize. At the very least names and neighborhoods. Circumstances, too.

Summer Reading

2011-08-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

This summer has brought, among other things, National Park vacation, a few MLB ballgames, and so on. But what's a long, hot, lazy summer without a book list (and thirty-eight Web sites telling you what should be on that list)?

My recent reads from the ed/policy end of things:

Teach Like a Champion (Lemov)
Proust and the Squid (Wolf)
In Schools We Trust (Meier)
The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Ravitch)
When Work Disappears (Wilson)
Rules for Radicals (Alinsky)

Sitting next to the proverbial beach-chair, gathering sand:

American Project (Venkatesh)
The Flat World and Education (Darling-Hammond)

Justice for All? (Galloway)

Give me my iced tea back!!

First Pitch

2011-08-17T12:03:00.000-07:00

Why am I here? I've been writing for a while, but most of it hasn't been made public. Publicly, I've been prowling other people's blogs and posting when I'm moved to. After much prodding, I've decided to start this blog, open up this space.

What can you find here? A few things:

Reflections from the ground: I'm an adult educator (most recently coordinating an ESOL program for low-income immigrant parents). I work with the exact adults that people are talking about when they reference "parental engagement" and start programs like The Baby College.
Links of interest: There is SO much info and SO many discussions out there re: education and policy. I'll link to what's piquing my interest.
Explorations: My number-one interest are programs like the Harlem Children's Zone. And the Promise Neighborhood Initiatives (PNIs--get ready for a lot of that acronym coming your way). Such programs raise as many questions as they answer, or at least they ought to. I'll dive in where I can.

I'd be impressed if this fledgling space led to vitriolic comment wars, but, hey, you can never be too sure, right? Thus, when you comment, please keep it thoughtful and constructive.

Welcome and happy reading!