Helping Black Boys find their Voice

Helping black boys find their voice:  The Power of Thematic Teaching in High School English Classrooms:

What we know:

I’ve taught High School English for over 15 years, and I’ve fought the notion that the classics are “clientele specific.”  In more forward terms you can’t teach the classics if you have a room comprised of mostly black teenage boys.  You shouldn’t because as we know black boys don’t like to read.  The statistics show this to be true.  According to the US Department of Education 85% of black boys are not reading on grade level.  Three out of four students not on grade level by grade three are likely to drop out of high school, thus furthering the school to prison pipeline.  I don’t want to go down the convoluted rabbit hole of why this happens, rather; I would like to offer some solutions to the problem. 

Texts that reach:

As an instructional coach I always tell my colleagues to “pull out your best stuff” for your most challenging students.  As it concerns young black boys, if the text doesn’t “speak” to them they more than likely won’t read it and do the corresponding work.  Listen, we know two things about the classroom; you need work, and they need grades.  As we do this we need to pick texts that resonate with our black boys.  Some scholars and fellow colleagues believe these texts need to be ethnic.  This is inaccurate.  Theme can speak to a reader as loud as race or ethnicity can.  It is important that black boys read black texts, but black boys shouldn’t read only black texts.  The text needs to move beyond academia and into the reality that many young black boys are familiar with.  Even if the theme you’ve selected resonates well, you still have to deal with the fact that some of the boys you have aren’t reading on grade level, yet they have to be able to deal with grade level text complexity.  How do you do this?  You begin with choosing texts that aren’t complex to understand, but have deep thematic implications. 

Fences, The Other Wes Moore, and A Raisin in the Sun:

These texts—among others—resonate so deeply because the authors deal with the DuBoisian (I just made that word up) idea of living behind the veil of being black and American simultaneously. In addition they add the idea of being male with being black and American.  Fences deals with a father raising boys while reconciling his own personal trauma wrought by his father and life in post –reconstruction America.   The Other Wes Moore looks at two black men with the same name; raised in close proximity to one another Baltimore, Maryland, and how the choices they made landed one with a Rhodes Scholarship and the other in prison for the rest of his life. A Raisin in the Sun deals with a husband and father still living with his mother desiring to be more than what he is, and how this ambition blinds him into making poor decisions.  These are just examples of straight forward, easy to understand texts that have deep thematic implications. 

Forming the essential question and moving toward the classics…and by classics I mean Shakespeare:

I would often tell my students at the beginning of the school year, “I love Shakespeare, so we are going to read it.”  Most students are intimidated by the language, so they never reach the rich thematic implications of his plays.  No fear Shakespeare was a game changer for me in that regard.  So much so, students would want to give the original text a try!  Shakespeare attacks so many different topics like:

·         Fate v. Free will

·         Absolute Power

·         Race and White Supremacy

·         Justice

Introduced in the right way, Shakespeare can be a powerful tool for young black boys to see the world.

Hooking boys in:

The essential question to begin a unit is so powerful in this regard.  They don’t have to be complex either.  Who has issues with their dad?  What are your views on race?  Does absolute power corrupt absolutely?  Once again, examples of how to hook boys into their reading. 

If you are prepared for uncomfortable conversations; these can help your black boys find their voice in your classroom. 

As I reflect on starting this blog, I realized a few things.  First, I wanted to talk about the things I care most about when it comes to education.  I wanted to share some things about my first year as an instructional coach.  It was important that this just wasn't a sounding board, or a place where I sounded like a cynical educator.  More importantly this blog should be a resource for all educators no matter the experience level.  Of all of the things that slipped my mind was my story; why I am a teacher, and how I managed to get past that 5 year threshold and stay in education for 17 years.  So here it goes, my story, my journey as an educator:

I'm not sure if I "always" wanted to be a teacher, but I remember enjoying being around kids when I was in high school.  My high school tennis coach and I would do clinics for the Boys and Girls Club in Gary, Indiana my home town.  I enjoyed instructing and teaching the game.  There is no greater feeling than that light bulb moment.  Watching kids have those moments was so fulfilling.  I can't think of a greater sense of accomplishment than pouring into a person and watching them blossom.  I joined Students Exploring Teaching (SET) the next year and added tutoring to coaching kids the rest of my high school career.

As graduation loomed it was a matter of deciding what I wanted to teach.  In high school I loved science and history, but I had a passion for books and writing.  English would be my subject of choice.  Ironically enough, everyone told me I would never find a job as an English teacher.  I should go into special education, or science.  I felt very strongly that if I did what I was passionate about that I would find work.  Turns out I was right on that one.

Education was also practical.  I would not consider myself a risk taker.  Writing has always been a love in my life, but as the first in my immediate family to graduate from college it made sense to do something that I liked and something I was good at as a career.  I mean, yeah I could be a writer, but how do you do that?  How do you turn loving to read books into a career?  So teaching it was.

I graduated from Wabash College in 2001, but I did not complete my teacher education program.  I moved back home without my license.  I had a job fall into my lap--sort of--through Gary Urban Enterprise Association first as an after school tutor and then as an Adult Basic Education instructor.  What gratifying work!  We helped ex-cons, high school drop outs, and single moms get their GED.  Some of them went to the work force, and others enrolled in our construction trade program.

As that opportunity ended around 2003 I enrolled in Indiana University Northwest.  The UTEP graduate program allowed me to get my teaching license and complete my Master's Degree.  August of 2004 I started my career in secondary education at 21st Century Charter School @ Gary.

To say that it wasn't what I thought is the understatement of the year!  I thought that my personality and the depth of information I had would change the world.  I didn't know what classroom management was, and I hated the way I was told students had to be disciplined.  I was thrust into leadership as a second year teacher.  It was an absolute honor to be part of a staff to open a school, there were responsibilities there I wasn't ready for.

I left 21st Century in 2006 and started at Clark High School in Hammond, Indiana.  I don't name drop often, but Reid Amones and Veronica Tabon were the best principals I've ever worked for!  I was a bit more prepared for Clark, but it still wasn't what I thought.  It wasn't that the kids were bad--well maybe a few, but it seemed as if they didn't have much of an idea about making good choices.  More than that I felt like no matter how much they liked me or how much they would say things like, "I only do your work because I like you."  They would still get suspended or put out of school and everything in between.  Veronica Tobon told me once, "Teaching is the only profession were you don't see an immediate return on your investment."  I've seen many of my former students over the years who would come and tell me that they got themselves together because of something they remember me saying. 

I moved on the Eggers Middle School in 2012.  The time I was there was an odd time in my life.  It was the first time my personal life actually began to effect my professional work.  I never really got settled in at Eggers.  In spite of my "issues"  I learned more about the craft of teaching the three years I was there than any other time in my career.  I am forever grateful to two people that I worked with there: Vickie Thomas and my boss Rod Poats.  The opportunity to mentor colleagues and work with a process to funnel your pedagogy through was invaluable.

Here I am!  I spent my last 2.5 years in the classroom here at New Vistas High School in Portage, Indiana and now I am the Instructional Coach.  I've won, I've lost, but the fire to educate, and be an agent for change has never left me. 

What's next?  Well for this blog it will be a combination of narrative reflection, and some best practices.

One of the most important aspect of being a reflective professional is applying new learning.  So yesterday I went to the pool and got some fantastic advice, "keep your head up while you swim."  I tried it and had a good swim.  This morning was time to apply my "new learning" to a full swim.  The first thing I found out was it is HARD keeping your head up through an entire swim WOD (workout of the day).  For any swim of crossfit devotes out there my WOD was 3x8-- that is eight sets of three laps (50 yards per lap).  I'll let you do the math to calculate how many yards that is.  Armed with my new learning I set out to swim.  Right around set four or five my head started to get heavy, and I started to slow down.  However, I kept at it and reached my goal.  I got a grueling yet satisfying workout, and felt so great about myself.  The key was consistency.  When we aren't consistent with implementing that subtle change/our new learning we always end up frustrated.  Especially when we are making changes with our classroom management practices.  Hitting bumps in the road doesn't mean we should scrap our new learning; it means we should reflect and adjust.  When implementing a new learning strategy or instructional model is always messy.  It's messy because it takes time to meld our style with the strategy or model.  Most great practitioners have a "style" to their instructional delivery.   Even great practitioners take time to marry their style to a new strategy or model.  Especially when it involves something that is unfamiliar or scary (like...technology).  When you start-stop-start-stop when implementing something new everyone involved in the process is frustrated.  You are frustrated because you aren't getting the resulted you wanted.  Students are frustrated because you promised "it would be awesome" and it's turned out to be anarchy.  Stick with it, and you might just say what I said at the end of my swim this morning: "If I keep doing this, I'll get better."         

It's not always the big change....

I finally got up and went to the  gym this morning.  I decided to go for a swim.  As I was swimming, I realized that it had been a while since I swam.  There was someone that was swimming in the lane next to me.  I paused for a breath between laps and he looked over at me and said, "keep your head up, you'll move faster through the water and not be so out of breath.  People forget how heavy the head is when they are in water."  I took his advice and had an awesome swim.  It's amazing how that small change made such a tremendous difference.  Sometimes when we are attempting to shift ourselves that it is the little change that makes such a huge difference!
What small thing can you change that can make a huge difference?
 Is it personal?
Do you need to get to bed 30 minutes earlier?
How about more "me" time?
More time with the husband, wife, or significant other?
Do you need to spend more time with your own children?
Is it professional?
Do you need more "tools" to reach your students?
Should you try to get next to your more "difficult" students?
Maybe be more productive during your planning?
Could you use an outlet to add a dimension to your professional practice (maybe start a blog)?
Maybe you can say hello to your students as they walk into the classroom?

Those are just suggestions of course.  Sometimes we can get overwhelmed by all of these large scale (or what we perceive to be large scale) changes and don't change anything.  Maybe it isn't anything huge at all we need to change.  Maybe you just need to take that first small step.  Whatever the case may be, a small thing could be just the thing to make your "swim" better than you thought it could have been.

Deprogram/Reprogram

I am a high school lifer.  I taught in middle school for a few years, but most of my 17 years in education have been spent educating freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  This year being out of the classroom has led me to an interesting conclusion; teachers and administrators aren’t the only people in a school building that need to change their perception of education.  In fact the only difference between teachers and students is that teachers have sat in rows and taught students sitting in rows.  There have been many times where I’ve heard that teachers need to get out of their comfort zones and innovate in their classrooms.  How often do we consider students need to get out of their comfort zones?  There is a misguided, misinformed notion that if a teacher plans an exciting innovative lesson, unit, or whatever clichéd name you would like to give instruction that students will turn on this magical learning switch.  In the words of Oklahoma State football coach Mike Gundy, “That ain’t true!”  What needs to happen is a complete culture change.  Consider this: high school students have been programmed to learn a certain way since elementary school.  By the time they get into high school they’ve been so programmed to sit in rows and dialog with the teacher for at least eight years.  There are pockets of innovation on the elementary level—probably more so than secondary—but that is still the exception not the norm. 

I don’t admit to having all—or many—answers to all of the questions that plague our educational system.  There are issues with the way schools are funded.  We don’t address how schools in inner cities have been affected by vouchers and public charter schools.  Minorities are left behind at an alarming rate. Even the way school policy is legislated isn’t spoken about the way it should.  The truth is I don’t write, make, or argue policy.  I am a teacher.  I make lesson plans and assess student mastery.  This year, I assist teachers in the planning and execution of effective lessons.  What I can speak on is this lofty idea of deprogramming and reprogramming. 

The classroom hasn’t changed very much since the industrial revolution and that is for a myriad of reasons.  However, the marketplace has changed greatly since then.  Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “We cannot always prepare the future for our children, but we can prepare our children for the future.”  We don’t know what the marketplace will look like in the next four to six years, but we can prepare our kids by teaching them collaboration, flexibility, and thinking skills.  Does this mean more tech in classes?  Does this mean 1:1 or blended learning?  I don’t know.  What I do know is we kids need to know how to work well with other people and problem solve.  Kids need to learn logical and critical thought.  How do we do this?   

We need to add meaning and relevance to what kids learn.  There is much debate about the relevance of learning styles.  Although we might feel more comfortable learning a certain way, if there is something that we truly want to learn because we truly want to do it our brains have this way of adjusting to the modality in which the information is presented.  Consider this: Why are some students still uninterested and unmotivated when using all of these different learning activities?  They aren’t interested in the content being taught.  There are times where you have students that are simply compliant because they are respectful to the teacher and don’t want to get in trouble at home.  We still have too many students across demographic lines that are graduating from high school and not able to complete any post-high school training.  We have too many schools still instructing kids in too many rows with too many teachers not wanting to be trained in different teaching techniques. 

Let’s tear down walls in our schools—literally and figuratively.  Although the State of Indiana wants to roll out this career pathways agenda with too many questions unanswered, it is a sound and logical concept.  Does education have to take place in a classroom?  Why can’t a student be immersed in several different things to choose a career path?  Maybe a good idea would be to research countries that are innovating in the realm of education and try to do what they do.  To do this we need to deprogram both our students and our teachers.  

The best laid plans...A Culture of Change pt. 4

So you are in a new position.  This new position gives you some sphere of influence.  You can be an agent of change to your school's culture.  Then the work begins and you see the line inspired by the Robert Burns poem is true: "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."  Most of what you have planned to do in your new position isn't going to work based on the clientele you are going to work with.  Outmoded thinking would lead one to believe this is an indictment on the clientele.  If people continued in this modality of thought; we wouldn't have any teachers in low-income/high poverty areas.  When you want to foster change where you serve people, it isn't the people that have to change; it's you.  If your program, ideas, or vision won't work with the people you are serving, you have to change.  Maybe things will evolve so that your vision can be implemented; until then you have to meet people where they are. 

This was such a lesson learned for me.  At the beginning of the year I had what I thought was a well formulated plan based on a vision I had for implementing this new teacher support program.  I was going to look at school wide data and created math and English goals based on our data.  Those goals were going to lead to student-centered instructional strategies to meet these goals.  It all sounded grand and splendid; then I got into the soup and found out my clientele wasn't quite ready for that level of support.  As I began to speak with my colleagues, I found their immediate needs to be quite different from my vision. 

So now I have all of this new information.  What do I do with it?  I had to model the one important foundation of education I wanted all of my colleagues to use; the data had to drive the instruction. Therefore, our weekly meetings have taken on more of a methods course.  There are so many inexperience colleagues making the transition to teaching and they don't have the theory depth that most lifers (like myself) have that we've gone in depth about intentional planning; using data to drive instruction; how to question to engage students among other things. 

Personally, this had to be okay with me.  One thing we know from research is if teachers aren't engaged in their content their students tend not to be engaged either.  I took this on as a challenge to improve my colleagues depth of knowledge.  Once their comfort with the foundational elements of instruction improve then the more rigorous parts of the vision can be implemented. 

Creating a Culture of Change Pt. 3

It's always important to understand an important characteristic of change; it's undeniable.  Change happens whether you participate or not.  As it relates to a school, if you aren't willing to change you just might be looking for another place to work.  That might be a bit forward, but it's true none the less.  The irony about change is when you try something new you just might find out you like it more than you thought.  

That's what happened in our last weekly professional development.  There was a lot of scuttlebutt that there would be some push back because teachers would have to teach a lesson to their peers.  Long story short colleagues that gave the push back told me that was the best weekly PD we had all school year.  One colleague said it best, "It's funny that we were so nervous in an environment where we would be supported."  That was the take away for me.  Someone understood the goal; mutual support.  

There are too many "teacher islands" in schools.  There are too many great educators doing too many great things in their classrooms for there not to be more great things going on.  We do our awesome things and keep them to ourselves, or we struggle in an area and don't ask for support because we don't want to see incompetent.  As a younger teacher I was struggling in a particular area so I emailed all of the teachers in my department.  A veteran in my department came to my room with some resources.  After I thanked the teacher what was said next was tragic.  "You shouldn't email everyone like that; they are going to think you can't teach.  Just come to me if you need help.  They don't think people need help."  

What we are finding out, however; is teachers observing other teachers is a powerful tool to help classroom management.  According to Education World the is benefit for administrators, teachers, and the school as a whole.  Teachers become more reflective with administrators; teachers begin to collaborate with one another; and conversations become more about student achievement instead of student behavior.  As our professional learning environments evolve I encourage you to take time and observe you fellow colleagues.  You just might be missing out on some cool stuff.