The Importance of FACE Time

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

—Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues”

I’ve discovered a few things this summer, and high up on that list, I have discovered the power of the “one-on-one.” 

The one-on-one is a key sequence from the organizer’s playbook.  Though my own organizing is limited to two years of student activism in college, I’ve snatched the idea for my work on family and community engagement this summer—and boy has it paid off.

A fact sheet from Organizing for America’s Virgina branch revealed the power of meeting people in person, individually.  OFA tracked the outcomes of various forms of reaching out to potential volunteers over a four-month period in the winter of 2010.  They found that only 3% of people talked to on the phone became leaders in the organization, and 6% of volunteers at events.  Folks entreatied through one-on-ones, meanwhile, were converted to leadership roles fully 23% of the time.

***

As I took stock of my summer-long work supporting family and community engagement (FACE) at the Wallace Elementary School in Chicago, I knew that I had something to offer.  I also knew I had to hit the ground listening. 

Part of my mandate to listen was because I am the ultimate outsider to the work: a white, middle-class male not from Chicago, not living in the neighborhood, and not recently a schoolteacher, working with a heavily African American K-8 school on the Far South Side.

But equally a part of my mandate to listen was that FACE work inherently has to be democratic.  Though surely there are many schools that give lip-service to family engagement, for a half-dozen reasons, I don’t think you can meaningfully “engage” families if you don’t listen to their perspectives—and put those perspectives at the center of your work. 

As I developed my summer work-plan, a three-stage process came into formation: Assessing, Assisting, and Achieving.  The first stage: assess the needs, capacities, and perspectives of teachers, school leaders, families, and community members with respect to FACE.  The second stage: capitalizing on what I’d learned in the first stage, assist the various parties in developing engagement strategies—contributing my knowledge and experience with engagement.  The third stage: from the end of my placement forward, it would be up to the school, families, and community to achieve their vision for engagement. 

The currency of the assessing stage would take several forms—attending community meetings, holding focus groups—but above all else, I plunged into one-on-ones. 

***

To carry them out, I’ve broken bread at local diners, met up for coffee at Starbucks, cleared a space in the corner of a library under renovation.  Through the process of more than a dozen such conversations, mainly with teachers but now branching into parents and community members, I’ve honed my techniques into what seems to be a workable set-up.

Before we even broach engagement, we get to know each other—at least on some level.  I’ve learned that a key ingredient of the one-on-one is telling and hearing each other’s stories. 

And it pays to go first, to tell my own story before I put my interlocutor on the hot seat.  I talk about where I grew up.  I put racial issues on the table: I talk about my choice to major in ethnic studies in college, the awareness and passion for social justice I gained from that.  I touch on my experience as a high-school teacher, then an adult ESL teacher, and how that led to an interest in family literacy and parents engaging with schools.  And I express a desire to work together with whoever sits across from me on community engagement.  By going first—and I’ve tried it both ways—I can show my interest in going deep, in being candid.

Then I listen.

One teacher told me about the intentional multiracial housing community she lived in in college.  Another about the ministry she leads.  Another about attending the Wallace back in the day, when it attracted students from across the city.  About the dozen pathways into education they’ve taken. 

Another talked about his high-school days at a strict Catholic school, where they vowed to turn boys into men.  Another about how her very parents reflected both visible involvement (her father served on the Local School Council) and subtle but critical engagement (her mother pushed her learning at home). 

I’ve seen faces open up, start to glow.  Not just about their experiences—also and ultimately, their vision for community engagement.

I usually don’t open my notebook until their personal story is over.  Then I dive into questions about community engagement, and start writing.  It’s striking how much information can be conveyed in merely an hour.  Even my limited stenography, when I retype it into Word later, can run for a dense page-and-a-half, full of insights I might have forgotten if I hadn’t been writing as I listened.

As we talk, I’m jotting notes about the person’s values, interests, and resources.  I’m identifying possible leverage points—attempting to chart Ellison’s sea: I plunge deeper when a topic seems to strike a chord, when the other person really cares about positive phone calls or the nuts-and-bolts of preparing for a parent-teacher conference.  I pivot off a topic when it’s exhausted itself. 

Finally: the commitment.

As the conversation winds to a close, I make explicit two to three talents in family engagement that I see in that person.  And I suggest a small way in which they might be able to contribute to FACE strategies.  In some cases, I’ve asked for a commitment on the spot: Would you be willing to teach newer teachers in how to make positive relationships with families in the first weeks of school?

Such commitments get funneled into an action plan, the template for next steps.

***

On their face, the one-on-ones I've put at the center of my work this summer may appear inefficient.  They are, however, purposeful--and purposefully limited, usually an hour, no more than 90 minutes.  And I have explored focus groups as a way to meet with more than one person at a time.

Beyond that, though, the value of the one-on-ones is that they allow me to make a potentially deep connection with the very individuals who will be responsible for carrying out—or not carrying out—community engagement long after my work is done.  They allow an individual’s perspectives, vision, and talents in the area of FACE to surface in ways that they might not in even very small focus groups.  As I’ve come to believe, it’s school leaders, teachers, and families who will ultimately have to do the work: if they are energized about community engagement, if they are the ones to build the strategies, they’ll own them. 

And the hope is—they’ll implement them.  One-on-ones are only the first step in a pathway that requires a lot of hard work.  But they make a very good first step indeed. 

What Matters to Me, and Why

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

Assignment: Speak about your values.

Over the past few weeks, a number of you have spoken about growing up white and privileged.  In the small town where I’m from, that was my experience, too.  My parents are loving, caring, and involved in the community.  But let’s face it: we were more likely to be in a food co-operative than a multiracial coalition.

A month after I graduated college, I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to volunteer with AmeriCorps.  In college, I’d been an ethnic studies major and student activist.  I was drawn to Milwaukee because it was diverse, affordable, and a bit gritty.  I was drawn to AmeriCorps because, before I became a schoolteacher, I wanted to immerse myself in the community.  I wanted to learn about the institutions around me, and about myself.  Little did I realize, living in a white neighborhood, and working in a black one, just how immersed I would be.

When I arrived, I had six weeks to kill before the program.  I went on brewery tours, I bought a bike, I learned about Milwaukee history.  And I settled into the room I’d rented in a two-bedroom apartment, one of six units in a yellow stone building in a neighborhood people had told me was good to rent in.

A month after I moved in, my roommate Helen and I were chatting one night.  She said, “if you ever need something fixed, talk to me.  The landlord, Gretchen, doesn’t like to deal with subletters.  And I’ll tell you something else Gretchen doesn’t like: blacks.”  Ellen went on: one time Gretchen found out she was considering subletting to a black couple.  She told her, “If you ever rent to people with hair like that, I’ll evict you.”

That night, I learned: it’s one thing to read about race, another to feel it pound, feel it sweat.  I went to my room in a daze, wrote down everything Ellen had told me on a yellow legal pad.  That night, and many more nights, my muscles would clench with questions: Should I move out?  Should I stay, and try to change minds?  I had black friends.  Could I invite them over?

I decided to stay.  I decided to take action.  Now, I didn’t end unfair housing.  But I gathered facts, secretly.  I called up a fair housing council, and gave them each piece of the story.  They opened a case—though I never found out how it got resolved.  But as they investigated the practices in my building, I had to interrogate the habits of my mind. 

For Milwaukee is a city with a lot of street crime.  And for many people, the face of that crime is young, black, and male.  That fall, as I’d leave my AmeriCorps job at the Red Cross to wait at a bus shelter on the corner of 27^th and Wisconsin, in a downbeat, black neighborhood, I’d like to say I felt no anxiety or prejudice.  But I’d be lying.

With time, I found my own way to be comfortable.  I talked to friends and colleagues about—my own racial feelings.  I walked around the neighborhood.  I engaged people at the bus stop.  I tried to make peace with my skeletons.  That fall, I learned: It’s one thing to feel open-minded, but another to open your mind and see how you really feel. 

More than that, in my year in AmeriCorps, I learned what structural racism, and personal racial prejudice, look like in living color.  What was the more important lesson?  To take steps to rectify institutional racism?  Or to take a step back and reflect on our own racial feelings?  Both.  And I learned that you can’t deal with one and not the other.  As long as our minds are segregated, our apartments, our streets, our neighborhoods, will be segregated.  I truly believe that, even if we can’t overcome inequality overnight, with time, we can—but it has to start with each of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next Steps for Adult Learners: Collaboration

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a few ideas.

What are yours?

What's My Story?

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?