Passport

In twelve years of high school teaching, I have never taken any of my classes on a field trip.

I’ve studied Of Mice and Men with scores of freshmen yet never shepherded them to the Steinbeck Center. Eleven different Public Speaking classes; zero public speeches attended. My World Literature pupils, who break down the Renaissance at length and culminate their work in a historical research paper, never set foot in a museum. Is there a sordid tale of grand plans squashed by a savage administrator with a callous disdain for anything that put her legal arse at risk? Sadly, no. I’ve never even considered a field trip as a component of any curricular unit. While exploring how to build a school’s instructional program and the culture to support it, I’m compelled to reflect on my own instructional patterns.

Why haven’t I taken any of my students anywhere in a dozen years?

Westmont High School hired me in the summer of 1999, and my orientation as a novice teacher dovetailed with our entire faculty’s orientation to the state’s new curricular standards. I spent much of my first two years of teaching unpacking the new English standards and using them to set the course of my courses. My English 1 class, especially, zeroed in on the standards, and all my projects and papers were built around them. I remember feeling the standards supported my educational work, rather than overwhelming it, and I discovered that connections between the department’s list of required texts and the skills embedded in the state curricula were easily forged. Consequently, I’ve often felt bored when staff development lauded such brand-name strategies as “Big Ideas”, “Essential Questions”, “Curricular Mapping”, and “Enduring Understanding by Backwards Design.” These processes already lived in my repertoire; they blossomed as very natural outgrowths of the initial standards-based lesson-planning riddle.

Unfortunately – or perhaps inevitably – the development of teaching strategies for implementing these carefully crafted lessons was stunted when my district’s instructional focus was hijacked by Program Improvement in 2003. Even though our PI status resulted from a specific subgroup’s participation rate – and the data seemed to indicate one site was primarily responsible – our superintendent panicked. She took to overhaul curricula and instruction in one heavy-handed swoop. Our prelude to the school year involved every teacher being handed a copy of Robert Marzano’s Classroom Instruction that Works with a firm mandate to “do what the book says!” The inservices that followed reinforced the theme but never explored in depth exactly what the book said or how exactly we could or should follow it. With vice principals and department chairs committed to following this shallow mandate, the school’s culture devolved to pointing and wagging fingers. Our California school felt a lot more like 17^th-century Salem, complete with administrative John Proctors visiting classes with clipboards, tallying the signs of Marzano, and then posting a public list of the most Marzonic teachers. We stopped just short of passing out scarlet letters in faculty meetings, but the culture soured and sank to depths that we’re still recovering from.

By contrast, I couldn’t help but chuckle when we whizzed passed Marzano in our graduate class. Years later, after really studying his research, I’m a big fan of his work. First, he strongly advocates a reduction in standards, a thorough editing of the obese American curriculum. His book Classroom Assessment and Grading That Work notes that our math textbooks attempt to cover nearly double the number of topics that German math books include and 3½ times what Japanese books cover; our science books are 900 and 400 percent more dense, respectively. This certainly supports the need for a strong vision in our schools that can act as a meaningful curricular filter. Moreover, his “top nine” strategies for instruction – the way we addressed them in class, not the way my district introduced them – actually comprise a great primer, especially for young teachers. They should be listed on the first page of the BTSA handbook for novice educators, and they should be the first suggestions out of an administrator’s mouth when a teacher seems stuck in his/her practice. Thus, the two sides of the cultural coin are characterized by Marzano’s work – a focused set of standards that form the basis of instruction, plus an environment wherein sound pedagogy can be safely solicited and shared. Collaboration time for teachers must be allocated, but for such a culture to truly thrive, administrators need to be equal participants in that dialogue about classroom instruction that works. Relying on just a book and a clipboard poisons a school’s culture and kills any attempt by teachers to ask and answer their own essential questions.

Once the dialogue is established, however, the challenge of maintaining practices according to the standards-based blueprint comes to the fore. The administrator’s role seems to center around three A’s: assessment, access, and accountability. I bristle a bit at the last term, which is frequently bandied about as a thinly disguised code for “drop the hammer on bad teaching”. Bruce Wellman and Laura Lipton actually suggest a shift away from systems of accountability on the second page of our text Data-Driven Dialogue: A Facilitator’s Guide to Collaborative Inquiry. They advocate a shift towards systems of responsibility. That’s a crucial difference. Sure, there may be times when instructors need to be disciplined, but if we want a faculty to embrace a new culture, the means of law enforcement won’t fit the bill. Parents may drag their children to church (or synagogue or temple or mosque) when they are young, but if those kids stop attending as adults, those practices will not be culturally embedded. Similarly, the best education practices must be independently embraced by every faculty member. Carrots and sticks won’t get you there. In addition to support, quality administrators affect a persuasive culture that entices teachers to build their own potential. The case study of “Kelly” and her test data frustrated our group, as no clear achievement trends were present. However, we approached the fictional faculty meeting as an opportunity to present tools for data analysis. That’s one way to build that persuasive school culture, for an analytical spreadsheet is really nothing more than a means for reflection upon one’s own practice. Many districts mandate that teachers use a data-driven feedback loop of some kind, but few understand that most teachers need real help and training with this. Teaching is a performing art – an exercise in communication. Even the math and science teachers may not be familiar with the kind of statistical breakdown necessary in order for assessment to truly inform instruction. Uploading assessment scores to an obscure website serves zero instructional purpose, yet this is how my district has tragically approached such data for years. A brief tutorial in a simple organizational tool like Excel could empower teachers to take greater responsibility for their own assessments.

I cannot recall if this activity came early or late in class, but the groupwork surrounding the Teaching Profession Standards seems now to be a perfect final exam. Perhaps I’m a sucker for anything standards-based, but the CSTPs certainly provide a nice foundation for any school. The first standard, which our group tackled, definitely brought the essential question front and center. What makes good teaching, and how can you spot it? How can you tell that students are engaged on a regular basis? You might remember our poster of the ideal classroom – a box with lots of windows and doors, where the world floats in and out continuously like a restless wind. Students bring in their past experience and carry new learning out into their future. The morning newspaper informs lessons more than Marzano’s canon. Instructional ideas fly through the windows in both directions – shared, adapted, tried, and tested by several teachers at once. Bad ideas fly out the window just as fast. Great schools buzz with this kind of traffic, and the quads and cafeterias pulse with discussions that students cannot leave in their classrooms. Despite reputations to the contrary in many places, schools should be the most relevant and exciting place for every student. It should be the one place where young people receive clarity and achieve insight about their lives, and great teachers make that happen no matter what the standards.

I’m proud to say that, during the last five years especially, I’ve successfully followed this model in most of my work. I credit my experience teaching World Literature with building this mindset. That class gave me the opportunity to bring new cultures, new points-of-view, not just new thoughts but new ways of thinking into my classroom. I connected to more students because, perhaps for the first time, their culture and their reality were made relevant in the literature they read. Our syllabus became a passport that transported us into the Mexican revolution, the eight-fold path of Buddhism, the Renaissance and the Reformation, Dunsinane castle, the Russian revolution, Hitler’s electoral campaign, Auschwitz, and Africa. In celebrating each stop on our tour, we came to understand how these works illuminated today’s barrio, today’s propaganda, today’s sitcoms, today’s bigotry, and today’s cinema.

I suppose that’s why I’ve never taken my students on a field trip. We travel enough in class.