How Teachers and Principals Should Collaborate to Improve School Cultures

Attention all educators, principals, and assistant principals (APs): 

         Do you want to effect positive change for your school's culture?

         Do you want to improve your relationship with your colleagues-- specifically, your

         boss, or subordinates?

If you answered "yes" to either or both of these questions, read on! As a new teacher who'd personally answer say yes to both queries, I say it's time that unite!
We all need to make concerted efforts to advocate for school improvements. After consulting with teachers, a cute principal, and college professors for school
administration, I've come up with a handy do/don't guide to getting sh*t done together. Let's do this!

Maverick Pictures/Shutterstock

Do:

• Chaperone that school dance (I know, I know...): 

       Nationwide, the teacher leadership movement is in full swing. More than ever, teachers are
being pressured to step up their game in terms of "showing up" for their schools. By joining
        the PTO, school-improvement committee, or helping out  sporting events, we're showing how
much we care about the the students we service. Believe it or not, principals and assistant
principals really do notice. Our actions can make our building admins care about what we
have to say, which can spur positive change on their parts. Principals and APs have the
power, after all.

                                                                                                      "Sometimes even Yoda has a hard time walking the walk."

Don't:

• Be selfish

        It's true that school budgets are shrinking while teachers' and principals' responsibilities are growing (seemingly exponentially). That doesn't mean;
however, that we should take out our stress on one another, or curl into balls and hide out from our workplaces 100% of the time that we're off the
clock. Lest you've forgotten, let me remind you: The problems plaguing our public schools are systemic. That means there's no point in us adding
insult to injury by being petty. 

Don't:

• Take interest in your colleagues' priorities and capabilities.

        In order to successfully strengthen our professional bonds, we need to know where our colleagues stand. Principals' powers can be far-reaching.
Even if they don't seem to have a say on key aspects of what teachers want to target to improve school culture, in actuality, they probably do. For
instance although they may not be actively involved in district curriculum development, charismatic and impassioned principals can indirectly
affect it. If you're tight with your principal and he or she values you, then they just might express your views on what's working and what's not at a
principal meeting. When confident, respectable school administrators act as liaisons for teachers, the  district personnel take notice. This is when
positive change can occur.

Don't:

• Get too close to your partners in school leadership.

 Clearly, there is a strength in numbers when it comes time to make important changes for a school's culture. At this same time, though, there's something to be said for repeating the age-old mantra of cover your ass. In this situation, I am not speaking about lesson plans or grading, but
instead, I am talking about teacher evaluations. In the district that I work in, teachers are frequently evaluated by their principal or AP. This year,
for example, I am being evaluated, and my evaluator is my AP. If I get too close with her and eventually slip up and say or do something that
doesn't reflect well on me, then our relationship will suffer. Our school's culture would suffer, too.

TL;DR?: 

        Don't be a jerk! If we want to improve our school cultures, we need to avoid bs excuses, and
collectively step up our game.

Are You There, Creative Writing? It's Me, Ms. B

     "Give me a 'P'!" [Hands go up]
     
     What. the. fu---

      Oh no.

        Near-hyperventilating from my rush inside the school administrative classroom, I realize that I've just silently mouthed those syllables in a room full of my colleagues. Even if I did not, my face is very expressive, and I cannot hide my confusion and disdain.   I've arrived four hours late for day one of my training on the "new writing program" that I am expected to learn and teach to students in the fall, and I haven't the slightest idea what's happening.

          This was me back in May when I attended a mandatory "all-day" professional development on the same day that I had to proctor/facilitate RICAS for my students until noon. The training went until 2:40.

         Reading Michelle Kenney and Chris Kindred's article "The Politics of the Paragraph," I felt like they was echoeing many of the things that I think and want to say about "canned" writing programs. As an English teacher who cherishes her relationship with writing all sorts of material, I recognize the positive impact that my teachers had on me throughout my education. According to my memory, at no point did any such writing programs disguised as cheesy acronyms enter my experience. Instead, I fondly recall my time with my English teachers as when they taught my classmates and I a more organic, less "tight" approach to writing.

           Perhaps I wouldn't have such a strong response to Kenney and Kindred's words, if only I weren't in the throes of implementing a "canned" writing program in my own classroom. This one's been adopted by my district, and I do see its value in helping struggling writers to see a light at the end of the research-based writing tunnel. At the same time, however, I have taken issue with the approach since I was first introduced to it back in the late Spring. My biggest problem? It doesn't allow any room for creativity, nor does it include it as an expectation on its rubrics.

         So when Kenney and Kindred write that,

               "systems like these encourage students to produce shallow, fast-food versions of paragraphs    

               that don’t allow much elbow room for creativity or critical thinking, yet lend themselves to

               speed grading by a standardized test scorer or an overworked instructor only 50 essays into a

               stack of 160 on a Sunday night,"

         I agree with these writers wholeheartedly. I feel their words reverberating in my gut.  In my opinion, the system that I am tasked with learning and teaching to my students is helpful because it's so formulaic, but at the same time, it's centered on one way to write academic papers. Also, it eats up time that students could spend writing more freely and injecting creativity into their work.

        One of the fabulous takeaways I got from my student-teaching cooperative teacher (this was when I was studying for my elementary teaching degree; now I teach middle school) was that great teachers make time for and place emphasis on students' creative writing ,even when their curriculum doesn't. Tara was my cooperating teacher, and I loved how she made a big deal out of teaching her kids "entertaining beginnings" (AKA "hooks," exciting ways to being a piece of writing). Tara required students to include entertaining beginnings in everything that they wrote that year. When I got my own classroom last year (eighth grade), I did the same and saw my students' writing blossom from dry explanatory pieces to intriguing, humorous, and dazzling pieces. I saw how one student, who I'll just call "H" here, took the concept from our English classroom into science when the science teacher and I decided to have our students work on their state-mandated argumentative science essay in English class as well as in science. The topic was terrible. "Is the Earth round or flat?" was the key question. When I ever read H's essay and how she'd chosen to start it off with the sound of a man falling off a cliff (because, she quipped, he thought the Earth was round), I lost it. I was entertained, but I was also thrilled that she'd chosen to take her paper one-step-further by adding her own creative flair. I think that entertaining beginnings (and figurative language) should be welcome coexist with text-based essays. Last year, I required  students to include an entertaining beginning when they did their research papers on historical topics related to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl, and it was a big success.  It forced the students to do additional research (a Hitler quote here, an onomatopoeia to make the sound of World War II bombs exploding in readers minds there) and push themselves as writers and revise-ers. Thanks to Tara, I even started this blog post with an entertaining beginning. I think it makes for a better read.

         Fast-forward to this year and my personal experience with a dreaded "canned" writing program that Kindred and Kenney refer to. Since I have no say in choosing or refusing to do our writing program, I need to incorporate "entertaining beginnings" and the like into what I teach my students. Fortunately, my autonomy as a classroom teacher (and the support I receive from the two special educators who share the room with me for three of my five English classes) enables me to do what I want with my students, sort of. Narrative writing, according to Teaching for Joy and Justice author Linda Christensen, is also an area that I can exploit (it's part of my school district's curriculum that I'm teaching a bit of now) to help further my students' writing and reading comprehension. "Telling stories from their lives opens opportunities to talk about meaningful, important, sometimes life-changing events with their classmates," she explains on page 61 of her book. While analytical essays written in response to one or more pieces of literature is important, so is narrative writing.

         When Christensen writes about using guided visualization to inspire students to write about their own formidable experiences, I remember the one time that I did that as a student, which was during my senior year of high school, in a University of Rhode Island credentialed creative writing class . I remember how our teacher took us on a quest to "find our inner writer," and I distinctly recall how I pictured green jell-o as a treasure I unearthed during this visualization, as well as how my black cat experienced the journey with me. Christensen's connection reminds me that narrative writing is creative writing.

         In the narrative writing chapter of her book, she details one way that teachers should share narrative writing pieces with their students and engage learners with a free-flowing (not cookie-cutter) writing process that varies based on who is experiencing it. For instance, she says, "Struggling writers need lots of time working one-on-one with a teacher in class" (64). This is obvious, but in a school where I teach 129 students, the time flies by, and often, I find myself delaying lessons to make sure that all students have gotten the hand of their most recent writing assignment. This doesn't go hand-in-hand with the lightning-fast training and instructions-for-lesson-roll-out that I received to complete at my last writing program PDs, but it's what's right.

         I agree with Kenney and Kindred that instructors do a "disservice" to students by using a formulaic writing program as a crutch upon which to teach. For me, the challenge lies in simultaneously teaching this program and teaching writers to get creative, personal, and think "outside the box."

Using Technology with Intention

Here's a word of advice to myself and other educators on effectively integrating digital tools in the classroom: 

Teachers need to be familiar with ways that they can harness functions of individual technologies to communicate publicly and creatively.

I think that Krista Tippett and Danah Boyd have shared solid examples of how digitization can be beneficial for readers and writers. As part of a 2017 On Being with Kristen Tippet podcast episode titled, "The Internet of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Boyd, a technology and social media scholar, says that for younger and younger people, the Internet is, "just there," and Tippett (a journalist) concurs. "For this generation, the Internet is so much in the fabric of things," she notes.

The good news, Boyd reminds us, is that the Internet isn't all bad.

For instance, she notes, for children who have access to social media, it provides an unstructured outlet that they probably crave in the face of their "over-scheduled" lives. Also, while memes and emojis may seemingly undermine the writing and reading techniques that educators push on students, they can actually be rather deep, expressing more than plain text. 

During Tippett and Boyd's conversation, they reference "Ferguson," the 2014 incident in Ferguson, Missouri when a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

She mentions #ifIwasshot, a Twitter hashtag that someone created after Ferguson. #ifIwasshot plays on how the media tends to show certain pictures of black people then they're victims of gun violence. Basically, it exposes the fact that some media outlets identify black victims of gun violence with less polished/dignified photos than others, even though these outlets have the better photos at their disposal, too.

Here is one example of the hashtag in use (Would the media show the left photo or the right one?):

“There’s a lot of beauty in memes. There’s a lot of beauty in watching people try to amplify things that are messy via social media," says Boyd. Looking at #IfIwasshot, it's clear that she's using the word meme loosely here.

In the interview, Boyd says that (just like with memes) there is value in digital languages, including text messages. This reminds me of a book that I'm reading called Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List. which was written by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. This 2007 Y.A. novel frequently includes symbols that can best be likened to emojis. As a reader, I think that these symbols help me to engage with the story because I have to make more connections in my head in order to decode them. Sometimes, they are cut-and-dry, but other times, you have to look closely and actually think about it.

Here is an example of a page from that book. Here, the world symbol in the top paragraph is obvious, while I actually had to squint to see the tornado icon that Cohn and Levithan put into the same sentence.

If readers have trouble making out the symbols-- like I did with the tornado icon--, then they must use context clues to figure out their meanings. Either way you spin it (tornado pun intended!?), when they're use appropriately, digital symbols and creations are beneficial for readers. As #IfIwasshot demonstrates, they can also promote important discussions about touchy political topics.

Welcoming More Stories and Emotions in English Class

As a new English teacher, I'm grateful for all sources of good advice and support for my job. I am emergency-certified for my role, and teaching outside of my domain of elementary education is no piece of cake. Aside from my professors at Rhode Island College (R.I.C.) and colleagues. Interestingly enough, some of the best resources I've encountered in my middle school English education career are my R.I.C. course reading assignments. This week's readings for one course that  give me some more specific, actionable guidance on becoming a better teacher.

One of the things I've learned from three of those readings is that, although argument writing can be dry as hell, it doesn't have to be.

In Chapter 3 of Linda Christensen's Teaching for Joy and Justice book, she describes how she has her high school English students "story" their essays (Christensen 130). The example that she gives is related to the our country's massacre of Native Americans. To "story," she explains, writers back up their written assertions and arguments with information from memoirs and stories, instead of embedding scholarly quotes only. In her example, she writes that students should, "use the stories from the Native American memoirs and biographies we studied in class."

I think that it helps to gives voice to people whose words are muffled, and it gives power to people who may otherwise be powerless. Judging what her student ended up writing in that paragraph, this practice can also makes essays much more interesting to read. This student went directly to the source (someone who'd suffered for speaking her Native American language at a boarding school) for her paper, rather than rely on secondary reporting of it.

Something else that Christensen teaches her students to write are strong introductions and conclusions. I like how she encourages writers to to add some creativity and excitement to her their essays by injecting some entertainment into these paragraphs. I especially love the anecdotal introductions that she allows her students to write, as well as how she wants to make her students' papers end on a high[-energy] note. For the anecdotal intro (page 141 of the book), one of her students connects how African American men are portrayed as hardcore sexual cheaters in Their Eyes Were Watching God to her own experiences hearing friends talk about how "men are dogs."

I think that both of Christensen's approaches for ramping up student engagement in their writing. I think that they connect to something else that I read this week that I found useful for my job. In her article titled, "Emotion and Intellect: An Unconventional Pair," Cait O’Connor challenges the notion that the best writers "divorce" their individual experiences, opinions, and feelings from their writing. I agree with her that impersonal academic writing and quashing students' emotionally-charged behavior in class do a disservice to our young people in schools. It's common knowledge that when you suppress your feelings and ideas, they build up and eventually boil over. Instead of suppressing our learners, we should be welcoming them.

O'Connor writes:

"Allow students to be angry, upset, sad, and emotional in their authentic writing. Because if they’re one or a few of these things when they write about an issue they care about, it’s probably because it affects them personally. And who are we to taper down their experiences, especially if those experiences have to do with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and ageism?"

Here, she brings up another reason why teachers shouldn't welcome and promote voice and thought in in all of their students' writing: Doing so is basically the same as telling students that their suffering was warranted and shouldn't be addressed. I agree with Christensen here 100%.