engagement – Alan C. Jones

In my junior year in high school, I enrolled in a course titled “World Literature.” When I walked into the class on the first day, I expected to be handed a huge tome filled with authors from all regions of the world—Africa, East and South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America/Europe. Although I was certainly no authority on great literature, some authors I expected to read were Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Dickens, Orwell, Austin, and Shakespeare.

I sat at my desk, inspecting the room. What caught my attention were large posters announcing various Shakespearean plays, a model of a theatre, and the teacher’s name written on the chalkboard, “Miss Steinberg.” What was missing from the class was the treaded book cart.

The second bell rang, and in walked Miss Steinberg. What struck me about her appearance was the large black horned claws that seemed too large for a petite-framed woman. Her hair, which was pitch black, was pulled back in a bun. She was wearing a well-tailored suit with no jewelry. Miss Steinberg’s appearance and professional manner left me with the impression that this class was all business. Her introductory comments doubled down on my overall impression and left all of us in class wondering what we had gotten ourselves into:

“Good morning, class. My name is Miss Steinberg. Before going into detail on the goals and expectations for this class, I want you to understand that the title of this course, World Literature, is a misnomer. The only world author we will be studying is William Shakespeare. I will not go into my efforts to convince the administration to change the name of the course. But, be that as it may, I wanted to be forthright with you about the works you will be studying. As you have probably noticed, the room has no textbook cart. Our department’s textbook inventory does not have all the works of Shakespeare. So, I will provide paperback versions of Shakespeare’s plays at a minimum cost. Before leaving class, pick up the reading list from the front counter.

Miss Steinberg then launched into a description of Elizabethan England. Her dramatic descriptions of royalty, poverty, plagues, and wars that shaped Shakespeare’s worldview placed me in a trance-like state—so trance-like that I did not hear the passing bell go off.

As we were leaving the class, Mrs. Steinberg informed us that there were openings in other literature classes if we wanted to drop the class. Several students I walked down the hallway with announced they were dropping the class. In the words of one of them: “There is no way I am spending a year reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. Besides, Steinberg is no joke. I can’t afford a C or D on my transcripts.”

There was no doubt in my mind that Mrs. Steinberg was no joke. I also had reservations about reading all of Shakespeare’s plays. There was something, however, about Mrs. Steinberg’s intellect and obvious love of Shakespeare that compelled me to remain in the class. It turned out that the year I spent journeying with Mrs. Steinberg’s Shakespearean adventure was pivotal in deciding to become a teacher and how teaching should be conducted. It was not so much the particular teaching methodologies employed by Mrs. Steinberg that made each period pass by so quickly. Rather, it was her enthusiasm for questioning the behaviors and motivations of the characters that Shakespeare wrote about.

I can still hear her call out at the top of her voice: “Mr. Jones, what do we have going on here?” What transpired next was not a literal interpretation of a character’s statement but a series of questions or comments from Miss Steinberg that asked me to grapple with characters coming face to face with their failings or pursuing power at the expense of others. There was no hint in these discussions of connections between Shakespearean themes and the politics of the day. However, I often left class seeing parallels between political figures we studied in history and family dinner conversations.

Aside from Miss Steinberg’s ability to incite doubt and stimulate the imaginations in adolescent minds, the usual trapping of institutional schooling—grades, quizzes, tests, papers— was never brought up. We were required to keep a journal that recorded our responses to prompts posed by Miss Steinberg or an open-ended question about what we were discussing. We were critiqued on our performance in different activity structures: debates over character motivations, creating modern adaptations, role-playing scenes, and watching film interpretations.

The critiques, however, were never the usual deficit-based model we all experienced in other classes. Miss Steinberg never made a judgmental statement focusing on what was wrong or lacking. Instead, she had the uncanny ability to focus on what was working for us and how we could augment what was working for us. She also possessed the rare skill of knowing when a particular activity structure was uncomfortable for the class. In these instances, she had a way of moving to a different activity without signaling that an individual or class was in over its head.

Although I was proud to receive an A in the class, what meant more to me than the A, was a comment made to me when she passed me in the hallway: “Mr. Jones, you make an excellent Shylock.” In addition to being an excellent Shylock, the other educational gift I received in the class, one which I only realized later in life, was being introduced to vocabularies and ways of thinking that allowed me to step away from my parent’s vocabularies and ways of thinking into a self-authoring individual. No, I did not leave the class rebelling against my parents. I did leave that class with a questioning mind. A mind that all school mission statements profess to be a goal, but are rarely practiced in classrooms or school offices.

Students are demoralized, bored, and distracted in school, not because of a lack of interesting methods, but both teachers and students lack, a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons.

(Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of Schooling)

In the forty years I have spent in public school administration, the many hours I spent in offices policies, mandates, systems, finances, legal opinions, staffing, and the crisis of the day. I cannot remember ever discussing the educational goals and values written into school mission statements—what I term the why of schooling.

My prior books on the subject list the following reasons why the occupants of main offices never discuss what kind of public should their school be creating.

The occupants of the main offices are consumed with the managerial details of running a school.
The occupants of main offices assume that the why of schooling has already been answered by state legislators, school boards, or central offices.
The occupants of the main offices see little value in spending time on ivory tower discussions of the way of schooling.
The occupants of the main offices lack the academic training to engage in thoughtful discussions over the why of schooling.

Without a compelling narrative to inspire a reason for schooling the occupants of main offices are unable to develop a meaningful response to the following problems of schooling:

Problem #1: Coherent Response to the Five Fundamental Questions of Schooling

The force behind creating an engaging learning environment is a coherent response to the following six fundamental questions of learning:

What are the goals of schooling?
How do children learn?
What knowledge is of most worth?
How should knowledge be organized?
How should we assess what students understand?
HOW SHOULD WE TEACH?

All of these answers to these fundamental questions depend upon what goals of schooling main offices and classrooms are pursuing. Over the years schools have pursued the following goals:

To educate (what is the meaning of life?)
To emancipate (who am I?)
To join (How do I effectively participate in a democratic community?)
To prepare (What do I want to become?)
To socialize (How should I behave?)

While school mission statements tend to emphasize goals 1, 2, and 3—critical thinking— most school curricula and school organizations are designed to train and follow orders. A school curricular and school organization dominated by credits, seat time, grades, and subjects, responds to the fundamental questions of schooling far differently than a school curricular and school organization designed to develop: agency; a sense of belongingness; an interest; and a critical thinker.

Problem #2: The Problem of Mandates

Every school year occupants of main offices enter their offices with their in-boxes filled with new policies, directives, or mandates that governmental or administrative bodies expect their administrative teams to implement. Most of these mandates involve routine changes to school curricula or school organizations. Some, however, are controversial and draw occupants of main offices into philosophical questions. Take, for example, recent trends in curricular mandates asking schools to emphasize and implement materials specifically designed to advance the concept of multiculturalism.

On the face of it, curricular materials designed to foster the acceptance of different cultures in society and the active support of these cultures by both majority and minority groups would appear to be a value worth embracing. On the other hand, public schools from their inception have favored the goal of cultural pluralism in which multiple ethnic groups can coexist and maintain their unique cultural identities while participating fully in the dominant society.

The problem with such a mandate is which curriculum should a school pursue:

A multicultural curriculum is designed to focus on recognizing and celebrating diverse cultures within a society or should a school pursue a cultural pluralistic curriculum emphasizing the coexistence and interaction of different cultures? This distinction may appear to be splitting hairs, but, at a board meeting, parents may question either approach, and, in the process, raise philosophical questions over assimilation versus integration, loss of identity, educational disparities, and social integration. With such issues, the managerial what’s and how’s of board meetings quickly turn to the whys of schooling.

Problem #3: The Problem of Contradictions

Although rarely articulated in school meeting venues—faculty meetings, parent open houses, board meetings—there are contradictions between what schools profess in their mission statements and the realities of school policies and classroom practices. The most glaring example is the educational value most frequently mentioned in school mission statements—critical thinking. While this value is most often announced from auditorium stages, the goals they list—agency, interests, questioning—disappear in main offices and classrooms pursuing institutional goals and values—standardization, accounting, compliance.

Problem #4: The Problem of Relevance: Connecting the Dots

W. Edwards Deming, the father of TQM, emphasized the distinction between information and knowledge. In Deming’s view, information is not knowledge. Knowledge, according to Deming, is the ability to predict future outcomes and understand the past, requiring a theory or framework for analysis. Information, on the other hand, is simple data without the context or theory to make it meaningful.

In school classrooms, the pedagogical methods teachers employ treat information as if it were knowledge. In the words of Thomas Gradgrind, the teacher in Dickens’s novel Hard Times: “Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

When students question the relevance of the facts they are required to memorize, the common teacher response to these questions is to assure students that they will need these facts later in the course or some distant future—a future that never seems to materialize. The large amounts of information that are transmitted in daily lesson plans and in textbooks align well with classroom-based testing instruments. However, facts alone align poorly with real-world applications that require, in Deming’s words, a theory or framework for analysis or simply put, are shaped by the relationships we have and the situations we are in.

THE FINAL PROBLEM: Student Discipline

The problem that dogs school organizations is how to work with students who do not conform to the norms of institutional schooling. School administrators address this ongoing problem with institutional responses: discipline codes; parent conferences; suspensions; detentions; time-out rooms; and demerits. In the last decade, schools have moved from looking upon student discipline as a matter of poor parenting or biological proclivities of different age groups to a variety of explanations for student misbehavior: attention-seeking, learning difficulties, unmet emotional needs, lack of social skills, power struggles, problems at home, medical issues.

While all of these explanations are reasonable as far as they go. What they all ignore is the inconvenient truth of institutional schooling: schools are boring. In John Goodlad’s seminal study of classroom practices in thirteen high schools throughout the country, he describes what a boring classroom looks like in practice:

[I saw] the teacher explaining or lecturing to the total class or a single student, occasionally asking questions requiring factual answers; the teacher, when not lecturing, observing or monitoring students working individually at their desks; students listening or appearing to listen to the teacher and occasionally responding to the teacher’s questions; students working individually at their desks on reading or writing assignments; and all with little emotion, from interpersonal warmth to expressions of hostility.

(Goodlad, A Place Called School)

If students are not engaged in what is occurring in the classroom they become disruptive. Changing the inconvenient truth of schooling asks school administrators to “self-author” a narrative composed of three parts:

PART I: Schools are boring

Openly admitting to the reality that the design of the school organization and the organization of curriculum align well with institutional goals, but, fall short of creating a learning environment that would fully engage children and adolescents. Included in Part I of the narrative are specific organizational and instructional strategies administrators and teachers will pursue to address one or more of the problems of schooling listed above.

Part II: What does an engaging learning environment look like?

Throughout this narrative school administrators must describe what teachers and students are doing in a learning environment where students are socially, emotionally, and intellectually engaged. There are many descriptors for engaging learning environments. The answers to Elliot Eisner’s list of questions listed below could serve as a template for designing a school organization that places the goal of creating engaging learning environments ahead of the enforcement of institutional goals.

Part III: The HOW of creating engaging learning environments:

Once the why and what of engaging learning environments has been established, the final paragraph in the narrative would describe specific changes to the school organization and curricular design that would develop engaging learning environments. Listed below are the four areas in a school organization that would signal a change in what goals and values classrooms would be pursuing:

The budget
The curriculum
The master schedule
The training regime—professional development

WHAT IS A GOOD SCHOOL: EISNER

(Eisner, E. W. (January 01, 2001). FEATURES – What Does It Mean to Say a School Is Doing Well?

Phi Delta Kappan, 82, 5, 367)

1. WHAT KINDS OF PROBLEMS AND ACTIVITIES DO STUDENTS ENGAGE IN?

2. WHAT IS THE INTELLECTUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE IDEAS THAT THEY ENCOUNTER?

3. ARE STUDENTS INTRODUCED TO MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES?

4. WHAT CONNECTIONS ARE STUDENTS HELPED TO MAKE BETWEEN WHAT THEY STUDY IN CLASS AND THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL?

5. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO YOUNGSTERS HAVE TO BECOME LITERATE IN THE USE OF DIFFERENT REPRESENTATIONS FORMS (i.e. various symbol systems that give humans meaning)?

6. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES DO STUDENTS HAVE TO FORMULATE THEIR PURPOSES AND DESIGN WAYS TO ACHIEVE THEM?

7. WHAT OPPORTUNITIES TO STUDENTS HAVE TO WORK COOPERATIVELY TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS THAT THEY BELIEVE TO BE IMPORTANT?

8. DO STUDENTS HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE THE COMMUNITY IN WAYS THAT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THEIR INTERESTS?

9. TO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS ALLOWED TO WORK IN DEPTH IN DOMAINS THAT ARE RELATED TO THEIR APTITUDES?

10. DO STUDENTS PARTICIPATE IN THE ASSESSMENT OF THEIR WORK?

11. DO WHAT EXTENT ARE STUDENTS GENUINELY ENGAGED IN WHAT THEY DO IN SCHOOL?

Tag: engagement

“Mr. Jones, You Make an Excellent Shylock”

“The WHY of Schooling”