Voices from the Field - lciltd.org · Voices from the Field May, 2014 May, 2014

The Classical Model: Establishing Successful Working Relationships with At Risk Students Through Curricular Changes

By Mary Woods

Voices from the Field

May 2014

Voices from the Field May, 2014

C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 1 4 L e a r n e r - C e n t e r e d I n i t i a t i v e s , L t d .

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The Classical Model: Establishing Successful Working Relationships with At Risk Students Through Curricular Changes By Mary Woods

“Are you getting them all?”: the single most important question my graduate professor, Michael Smith, ever posed to me. And I am still working on it.

The Classical Model For years I’ve been a typical classroom teacher: Romeo and Juliet, research papers, AP tests, SAT vocabulary, etc. Now I’ve started teaching at-risk students too, but I’m not even sure what that word signifies. For some schools, it only identifies students that may not pass the required standardized tests. For others, it means students who may not meet the required credits for graduation. What I do know is that here are these students, some who have failed the same course three or four times, some seniors with no English credit but enrolled in three literature courses in the same marking period, some who passed the exams and did the work but lost credit because they weren’t in the classroom enough, and some who just don’t do any work. And these students know a lot: that I am a teacher and therefore not to be trusted, that the system will screw them over again, that they are stupid and lazy and broken. This is what they’ve learned at school, every day. As teachers, we know what a ‘regular’ classroom looks like: some of us have advanced significantly from desks in rows to desks in squares or circles. We cut down our sage time, use technology, conference when we can, and maybe collaborate in formal collegial groups when our administrations are forward thinking enough to allow time for it. Perhaps I’m being hard on us, but despite our efforts, we still get school-shy students we have to face. I say “face” because they are products of our traditional education practices. They are creations of the system. As teachers, our responsibility is to set all students up for success beyond our classroom doors, but in the words of my most inspiring college professor, we aren’t “getting them all”. For them, the classical model isn’t working. But we have reached a few, and our experiences with them can teach all of us how to reach the ones in our own classes, to maybe prevent the system from perpetuating at-risk students. For me, there’s been the fifth year seniors like Hannah and Xander who failed English I four times without a counselor or teacher suggesting any alternatives but are now successful in community college or the military. There was Jacob the extremely intelligent student who aced the midterm and final but failed the class, who heard voices but whose mother was convinced we could keep him focused if we could just sit with him while he did his work. There was Matt, who read his first whole book and was so grateful when I told him he could keep it. There was Emily, who lived with friends or in shelters while taking her mother to court for child support,



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celebrating one year clean and sober, and applying to colleges for scholarships while completing her senior year by attending 2-3 extra hours of class after school in our alternative program. There was Sarah, the first girl in her family to graduate high school. There was Sophia, the high school dropout who returned, earned all of her credits, and wrote a letter to the governor asking him to raise the dropout age. There was David whose father brought him to this country illegally when he was eleven, who had to work full time to afford the room he rented, and who still tried to earn his diploma. There was Brianna, the fifteen year old girl whose mother died, leaving her to live with her stepfather; she had to leave school for several months, losing credits, but she came back and actually graduated early. There was Alex, the student who took four years to pass his first English course and then earned all twenty credits to graduate in two years, who collaborated with me to design a curriculum for our alternative program. Consider this: how many students fail classes or lose credit because they are incapable of meeting the content standards? More often than not students fail because they don’t do the assignments or show up to learn the material. Showing up, being willing to try, persisting through difficulty, taking responsible risks, managing time; these are skills and habits of mind students need to pass. As Alex explained, students like him are “dealing with issues outside of school making it difficult for them to perform….” They don’t have reliable parent figures or a safe or comfortable home life or strong coping mechanisms. Having access to education is not enough: at-risk students have had access to public education their whole lives, so there must be something else. What we assume parents teach at home, skills like time management and habits of mind, might not be taught to at-risk students. If teachers assign and grade expecting these given skill sets, our at-risk students will continue to fail. This whole child approach of providing students with a wide-ranging education from academics to social skills has been around forever, and still, too few schools offer the comprehensive support at-risk students need. But working with Alex helped me realize the value of the whole child approach.

A Typical Afternoon in Our Alternative Program

Alex enters the alternative classroom half an hour later than the other students, having spent the time in PE, which he loathes. The room, a regular classroom shared by health and French teachers, is not my own, so I can’t move the desks out of their rows, hang my students’ work upon the walls, or toss a bean bag chair in the corner for comfortable reading. But Alex plops down at the closest desk to the one I use so we can work together. He hasn’t done any work on the project since the last time I saw him, which in a regular class would probably mean yet another zero for homework, but he doesn’t fight me on the work in class. In speaking to Alex’s teachers, all of them will tell you he is smart and understands the content, but he just wouldn’t do the assignments: he didn’t find it relevant, interesting, or authentic. So how could I get him to demonstrate his abilities with the Common Core, on reading closely and analyzing, on researching to solve a problem, on collaboration, on writing, revision, and publishing to an audience? Alex had already taken, and failed, most of the



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courses we offered, so I had him collaborate with me to design a curriculum for our alternative program. It required all of those standards and was not easy, but he made a product other students like him can experience to be academically successful. Today he is building an activities checklist and finding materials to use for the English II unit he’s designing. He needs help breaking down the unit into smaller steps, easily digestible for the average student and set up to create a sense of accomplishment. I get that: Alex is not a trained teacher, and teachers learn to scaffold assignments through time, trial and error. The first step was asking him to translate the writing standards from the Common Core to language a sophomore could understand. He plodded through this very tedious job, but he never complained and did it well. With the actual curriculum creation, he viewed it as a logic problem to be solved. Today, Alex delves right in, although this is not to say he doesn’t need reminders to stay off of Facebook, but finally, after two years, he advocates for himself, asking me exactly what he needs to do for this credit. He also now self-reflects, and I take no credit for this; he sees his siblings following his path, articulates the errors in those ways, but recognizes the process. I think he sees himself coming out the other side. He has come a long way. When I asked him what the differences are between classes he’s failed and those he’s passed, he identified the teacher as the biggest difference. I wish he could engineer positive teacher-student and student-school relationships into the curriculum. Which leads me to the question: is there a way to design positive relationships into a curriculum? Not just in an alternative program, but in a regular classroom?

Bringing Change to Your Curriculum

Each year, I feel as though I reinvent the wheel of my teaching in some way. This year, for Alex and me, and recreating the alternative curriculum, this question centered and guided me. And while figuring out the giant puzzle to unite the pieces of Common Core; district expectations; students’ personal, educational, and emotional needs; and availability of technology into one pretty picture that is both adaptable and sustainable, the greatest challenge has been my willingness to change. Even teachers must continue learning. Teachers like the familiar (why do you think we all stayed in school our whole lives?) and like control. During the process I tried to keep in mind Heidi Hayes Jacob’s empty chair (a constant reminder of the student for whom all this is dedicated) except I invited students to sit in that chair and listened to them, collaborated with them. How else could I create a curriculum to set students up for success (another Michael Smith-ism), especially when teaching students who often don’t believe success, for them, is a possibility? Furthermore, I had to engineer safeguards to ensure this curriculum could be easily and consistently delivered by other teachers (as well as by me).



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All the research says, to earn at-risk student buy in, engineer project and problem-based curriculums. A good project-based unit crafts a sequence of activities and lessons toward, and as an integral part of, a final product, the creation of which is embedded into every activity and lesson from beginning to end. What I love about my at-risk students is that, unlike my honors or AP students, they want to know why they have to do everything. If they get a whiff of busy work, they will call me on it. If the assignments are not highly and obviously connected to the final assessment, not only am I wasting their time doing it, but also I am wasting my time grading it. So designing units with efficiency and a clear process towards preferably an authentic end goal is essential. Alex describes his ideal curriculum as “Condensed to the point of efficiency, but not to the point of info overload for the students.” This curricular engineering benefits all students, but for teachers, it’s often hard to let go of the lessons or texts we love. This is where the Common Core and standards based education can actually help. Let’s go back to Alex’s concern about being overloaded: he thinks a curriculum should be “Easy, but not so much that the students don’t have to work for it.” For Alex, “easy” is synonymous with “achievable”. The key here is a narrow focus on just a few attainable skills preventing students from being overwhelmed and instead helping them concentrate on improving. When designing units, choose just a few standards on which to base the final assessment. With quality backwards design, each of the preceding activities of the unit will align with that final assessment making it easier for students to recognize the relevancy of the tasks and, more importantly, to recognize their own improvement in those few standards. Most at-risk students believe they are not intelligent or capable and their grades fortify these beliefs. (The most common argument I have with students is I argue they are intelligent and they argue how stupid they are.) Their grades, however, more often reflect their work ethic and habits of mind rather than their standards-based abilities. If we think about backwards design, how often are our final assessments created to measure the frequency with which a student does his or her homework? If quality curricular design centers on improving students’ skills and content standards, then shouldn’t students’ abilities in those areas make or break their grades? Too often, whether a student does homework, knows how to manage time, or can persist through difficulty determines his or her grade. This would be fine if we were teaching these skills as the sole standards of the unit. If I’m not teaching a skill, how can I assess it? This isn’t to say at-risk students should be given a free ride on homework, but we owe all of our students the promise that their grades match their abilities on the material of our classes. Just as it would not be fair to ask a physics question in an English final, how can students fail our classes based on how much homework they don’t do? There are alternatives. An easy approach is simply the flip model: I have students practice the skills in class, while I am present to troubleshoot, and have them study the basic concepts at home. This emphasizes the importance of the homework (the students won’t be able to apply or join in if they haven’t done the preparation). I try to weight my assignments so students’ grades match their performance (at the end of the unit) with the chosen and communicated standards.



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In my junior level writing class, I focus all of our reading on models; if my students can’t articulate what makes a product good, how can they do it themselves? For the last unit, I give them the deadline and the genre of writing, and then I ask them what they need to succeed at the assignment. I let them sequence these needs, and they always choose to read models once they realize I will not spoon-feed them a formula. For at risk students in a regular classroom, fostering a metacognitive view of the class’s learning helps them realize the commonalities they have with their classmates. Additionally, if students choose or design the curriculum, those lessons feel more relevant, interesting, and authentic. Another benefit of well-engineered project-based units is that students may not move ahead in a sequence without earlier parts completed. In Alex’s sequence, students had to study models before they could plan their final products. A social studies research paper can’t be drafted until the research is done. In a biology unit on water, students can’t plan their request to the school board for filtered water fountains until they’ve analyzed their tests of the current fountains or of the cafeteria’s bottled water. Failing to finish the project becomes an incomplete. While learning the importance of deadlines matters, choosing to not do the work becomes an easy cop out. A student can take a zero and never have the responsibility to master that skill or content. The focus quickly moves to strategies for averaging a passing grade rather than on actual learning. To shift the focus back, allowing students to revise or retake low scoring assessments can teach them the value of addressing weaknesses rather than ignoring them, demonstrates your faith in the students’ potential to improve (even if their pace is a little slower than others), and creates a culture that values learning skills and content. Our tendency is to punish or shame students who don’t do their work with zeroes, and this method rarely proves successful in helping students master their material.

Improving Positive Student-Teacher Relationships

Some years ago, a graduate who went to college at a culinary institute came back and made dinner for a couple of her former teachers, including me. Ariel had been an AP student for me, but seeing her in the kitchen, doing what she loved, opened my eyes to see her true abilities. Her movements were practiced and graceful; her knowledge humbling. A few years later, I witnessed David, an ELL student, struggle through research and writing for an independent study project. But when he executed the final build, I was fortunate to supervise him in the school’s shop, expertly operating tools and machinery: his movements were practiced and graceful; his knowledge humbling. Since then, I’ve made an effort to actively look for all of my students’ strengths, rather than seek out their weaknesses. Most of us skillfully identify our students’ knowledge gaps and easily recognize their stumbles, whether in behavior or academics, but at-risk students are used to being judged negatively; they know their reputation precedes them. They know they can live up to those expectations. Motivating them is tough, and we have to start by altering our relationship with them. To achieve this in a Public Speaking class, I begin with a unit on interviewing skills so that our first major assessment requires the students to tell me all about the wonderful volunteering they do, their strengths, their jobs, and their potential. Outside of class, I know a student who believes every special



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education student should have the opportunity to write his or her own narrative to include in the IEP. Students want control over how their teachers view them. Imagine if our first impressions of students was like seeing Ariel cook or David build? Alex identifies his relationships with teachers as the single most important component of his success and harbors pretty high standards: a good teacher is patient, persistent, innovative, energetic, relatable, personable, approachable, and authoritative but informal. His demands are high, but are they so unreasonable? To help Alex and other at-risk students, I must be a diehard fan of their potential. Many of my students are surprised when I am not mad at them for not doing homework, but they didn’t skip the assignment as a personal affront to me. We both know they will still need to demonstrate those skills, and there is no escaping that because of the design of the curriculum. My approach is that they will learn, and I will wait however long it takes, but they are not getting away with not addressing the skill or standard. When they trust me enough to share what they’ve created, especially writing, with me, I always point out something good they’ve tried. With formative assessments, the lack of a hard grade on their first attempts with a standard lessens anxiety, and everyone gets goals. Some goals are musts: I won’t allow the student to move on until they do the work well. When conferencing with Sophia about her persuasive letter to the Governor, we talked about how she could substantiate her claims and counterclaims, but she knew we wouldn’t start editing the grammar until she had added more source material. With the end of the year looming, Sophia knew other revisions and editing might need to happen outside of class to finish, but she also knew she was one of the fastest drafters in class and could collaborate with me to customize her use of time. Additionally, she knew we would actually mail those letters, and the Governor would certainly not take her letter seriously if it had little support for her claim that the dropout age should be raised. The reasons for doing those revisions for her audience were transparent, but she also understood she was meeting academic standards, because she questioned me about why she had to do this assignment. Those sorts of questions demonstrate curiosity and investment, not simply attitude. For a shy student dealing with anxiety, asking challenging questions was evidence of her learning and progress. For me, the reward was Sophia carefully opening her personalized reply from the Governor; laying it on her desk, she smoothed its folds and then watched me as I read it. This curricular unit unexpectedly culminated in not only exchanged letters, but also in her participation interviewing a new teacher to work with at-risk students in our alternative program. Both Alex and Sophia had days in which their pending success was not evident. Students may choose to do nothing, but because I try not to make seat time requirements, my students know they are not any closer to being finished for just sitting there. This is the cost of student ownership over the pace, but it does not have to be disruptive to the rest of the class. By always defending each student’s opportunity to learn, I can reason with students about their behavior, but I have to defend their opportunities to learn too. Alex might drift off task, but I would not allow him to distract others. The day after his brother took Alex’s car and crashed it, I accepted that not much academic progress would be made, but we could talk about handling setbacks and managing anger. I moved deadlines around when the one year anniversary of the



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death of Brianna’s mom came around, and we found a way to incorporate her struggles into a college application essay and into her coursework. There is a story behind each of my at-risk students: I strive to earn hearing this story from each of them. I never learned Sophia’s full story, but I know she trusted me enough to try in my class. These sorts of relationships with students does not come from highly emotional group hugs in class, in fact I view myself as more of a coach-figure than a mother-figure, and this works. Students can trust I will not react emotionally to them but be logical and reliable instead. If I want them to view themselves as learners, I must view them as learners, not as potential failures. I try to find ways for them to contribute, even non-academically to start, and I value those contributions, even if they are just really good at handing out papers or erasing the board. Alex was really good at fixing the printer, Brianna could make anyone, even Sophia, comfortable in friendly conversation, and Xander could help me diagnose mechanical problems with my car. Creating success with at risk students takes time and patience. Alex experienced the classrooms of some pretty forward thinking teachers, as have many of my students, but these students require a lot of one on one time and take longer than most to trust the system. Alex took about fourteen months to finally share with me some of his personal issues. His academic work, with me, improved immediately, and he is not the first student to follow this pattern. Nor can I take credit for it. All we can do as teachers is to create the best environment possible, and allow the students to make their own decisions. My dream is that I one day will no longer teach at risk students because they will have found success in their regular classes, from working hard and learning positive habits and experiencing supportive relationships with teachers. In the meantime, neither of us is perfect. When there are discipline issues, because of course there are, I try to figure out what is causing that student to be angry; often I am forcing them to face their own weaknesses and being successful feels impossible. I have to check my scaffolding and pace. Do they understand why I am asking this of them? Do they see how this content or skill or behavior matters? Is there something else going on I don’t see? Hannah told me once that for her, other classes “didn’t work because [she gets] distracted easily and wanted to be kind of like the class clown and interact with everyone in the class....” The only positive attention she got was the laughter from her peers. When she started to “clown” around in class, I knew she needed some guidance from me, because the negatives were adding up beyond what she could cope with. For one of her writing projects, she kept a log and reflection of when this happened and researched coping strategies. When they act up, I am not getting them, but they are communicating an opportunity to learn.



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Getting them all is at least partially about identifying and seizing upon those opportunities. I’m still not sure how to define an at-risk student, because each has his or her own story, but I do know I can learn from each of them, and I think they learn that too. I wonder what other lessons they will teach me, and how continuing to work with at-risk students will continue to improve my own teaching. I should thank them for this. Do I get them all? Not yet. But I hope Michael will be proud of my improvement.

About the Author

A teacher with 12 years’ experience at Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Mary Woods currently designs and implements an online/in-classroom hybrid English curriculum for at-risk students in Central's after school alternative program (Twilight), and she also teaches AP and college prep writing courses. Additionally, she piloted and teaches initiatives for teachers around technology, formative assessment, inquiry, project-based learning, 21st century skills, co-instructing cross curriculum classes, and teacher driven professional development. Her professional education began with a B.A. in English and a M.Ed. in secondary English education from Rutgers University. Mary was recently was honored as a NJ County Teacher of the Year (2012-2013).



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Voices from the Field - lciltd.org · Voices from the Field May, 2014 May, 2014