I love teaching and I love writing about it, but it's a challenging duality. The biggest challenge is directing my creativity.  My mind is constantly chasing the next creative endeavor.  When I am really in the groove with teaching, my creativity is always in relation to my classroom, my students, and sometimes my teaching team or a school-wide project. 

Any of those ideas can become material for writing, but writing itself needs some space of its own. Like Virginia Woolf argued in A Room of One's Own--a woman cannot be expected to write while she's cooking and taking care of children in a confined space.  Her writing will suffer.  I always hated that point, thinking it was narrowminded, but there was some truth to it.  One needs mental space to bring the ideas out of the working memory and onto the paper. Space to focus on putting the words together. That process requires as much brain-power as creating materials for a lesson or a new seating plan.  It is difficult to occupy both of those thought spaces at once. 

The work of teaching never ends.  Does writing about teaching help me teach better?  And should that matter?  Teachers need to be able to articulate what they are doing in the classroom, why, and how it's working. The National Board Certification Process is based on this kind of reflection.  So yes, writing promotes reflection, which has value for my teaching.  

Also, as a professional, in the still semi-profession that is teaching, it's also important to me to be a part of a dialogue about the work we do and the policies that comment on and affect aspects of teaching. I wish this last part wasn't true. I'm stubborn and don't like to admit that we teachers are usually seen as second class professionals without valuable ideas and valid career goals. The act of participating in dialogue about teaching does make us more professional, but the fact that we must insert our voices into an environment that is so often hostile toward teachers gives the conversation a bitter tinge-- as well as the overwhelming feeling that this conversation too, never ends. 

Finally, as an English teacher, the opportunity to write professionally for a real audience allows me to speak from experience when I teach writing. There are so many benefits to this. One pretty tangible one is that I have lots of first hand experience with all steps of the writing  process, especially revision, which can be hard for kids to understand.  My writing experience has really helped me to be able to teach students to write nonfiction beyond the 5 paragraph essay and to articulate my reasons for this choice.

[image credit: emich.edu]

My TLN colleague, Marsha Ratzel, pointed me to this post by Ewan McIntosh, that claims, "Collaboration is the key influence in the quality of teaching."  At the same time, he argues that most collaboration doesn't work.  

In my experience, collaboration works, because teachers who engage in meaningful--not surface-level--collaboration, are part of an intellectual community of teachers, even if that community involves primarily just a few people.  Teaching is both art and science.  Looking to both those disciplines, we can see that very few scientists or artists would really be successful without being involved in communities built around the work being done in their fields.  

Scientists know other scientists' work and build on it.  It's not about, "Hey wouldn't it be cool if we worked together on this project so we can say we worked together?" It's more like, "Hey, didn't you try something with this type of material in this type of environment before? How did it turn out, and what would you recommend I use for my project?"  Scientists benefit from each other's experiences and thinking.  This sharing happens both in person and through the reading and writing of articles and research studies in the field.  

Artists I know are interested in other people's art and build on one anothers ideas, both intentionally and without realizing it. There's a conscious discourse going on among artists and including art critics. Artists inspire and support one another, even though they often make their actual art alone. 

Teaching in a collaborative setting has teachers work in relation to one another in discussion, sharing of experience, resources, criticism, failures and possibilities. As long as we have a means to communicate, we do it naturally, because we share common ground and we are interested in exploring our differences. 

[image credits: nature.com, greenprophet.com] 

My wish is that in 2012, there will be no more education policy doublespeak:

It will no longer be acceptable for policy makers to say that they respect and value teachers, who are the most important factor in the education of our children--and then enact policies that fail to adequately train, support and retain teachers.  

It will no longer be acceptable in the education policy world to claim to value teacher leadership and teacher voice on policy issues--and then not utilize their input in crafting policies designed to improve education. It will no longer be acceptable to say that teachers should be well-compensated professionals, and then invest millions in new tests, data systems, and scripted, "teacher-proof" curricula, rather than writing policies that make teaching into a real profession.  

It will no longer be acceptable to say we should have less high stakes testing, because high stakes testing is inappropriate for children, and then continue to make the stakes higher.  It will no longer be acceptable to say that teachers should work in teams and colloborate professionally for the benefit of students, and then create policies that have teachers in the same building compete for bonuses for raising test scores, or pit schools that serve similar populations against one another over test scores, which discourages the sharing of best practices. 

It will not be acceptable to say that our nation's children need a well-rounded education, and then allow arts programs to be cut or non-existent across the country, including in cities like New York, famous for their arts and music. 

It will no longer be acceptable for education policy makers to select schools for their children that emphasize critical thinking skills, discussion, conceptual and project based learning, and boast thriving arts programs; schools that celebrate and trust their expert, veteran teachers--and then advocate for anything less than that for children of the poor. 

[image credit: litpark.com]

This month, I've been working with my 8th graders on a journalism study of the neighborhood surrounding our school, which I wrote about last year in Edweek.  This is an adaptation of a study I have done with students before in East Harlem and Crown Heights before this.  In each school community, the methods are more of less the same, but the dynamics of the experience and the findings are unique to the students and the neighborhood. 

This year, it was a chilly morning, when students conducted their original surveys out on the border of Park Slope and Sunset Park, Brooklyn.  It was 9am and potential survey participants were busily hurrying to work.  Students approached adults, asking them to please take their surveys, but many shook their heads and kept walking.  

As the day got later and the sun got stronger, more people were willing to take the survey, and students got excited every time they were successful. But still many adults turned the students down--something I had not encountered so much in the other neighborhoods. (Here are links to Part I and Part II of the process in Crown Heights in 2009.)  

In some cases, students realized that the adult they were asking did not necessarily speak English, which was a real barrier to participation.  A few shook their heads and said simply, "No English."  One eighth grader noticed, "Hey, our data is not going to be accurate, because we can only ask the people who speak English." 

At that point, some of our Spanish-speaking students realized there was a simple solution to this problem, and began approaching pedestrians in Spanish with more success.  It got even better when Spanish-speaking students started translating for non-Spanish speaking students to help them get more participants in their surveys, which is what is happening in the picture on the left.  

I was especially happy to see this because I've noticed that many of my Latino students--who make up 35% of the 8th grade student population--seem to avoid speaking Spanish in school.  Unlike the bilingual middle school I worked in in East Harlem, where Latinos were a majority and regularly spoke Spanish, English and Spanglish to one another, my Spanish-speaking students are shy and even embarrassed to speak the language.  I assume they do this in response to English clearly being the language of the majority and the language of their academics, aside from Spanish-language class.  

The day we conducted the surveys around Sunset Park, knowledge of Spanish became a powerful tool for success on the project.  It became a way of connecting with and learning from more people, allowing us all to gain a more complete picture of the realities and perspectives of the community. Finally, among students in our diverse school, the experience sent a strong message of the value of bilingualism.

The education world is a big place.  Having explored some interesting reaches in and around that world, and at times having spread myself too thin, I've recently come back to the idea that the most important work I can do is in my classroom with students.  Nonetheless, it doesn't work for teachers to do their work with their heads in the sand, so to speak, ignoring the wider world of education research and policy that continues to dicate and influence aspects of our teaching, our students' lives, and our career paths.  It is equally necessary that policy makers, researchers, and others involved in education outside the classroom are in constant dialogue with teachers and school leaders so that their work makes sense and can have a positive impact on students.  

So I've been playing a lot in my mind with the balance between the classroom as the single most important place in the education world, and the need to be in dialogue with others in education, who occupy different spaces and roles, but nonetheless are pieces of the same puzzle. If we all really want a first rate education system in this country, then we need to communicate effectively about it. Communication takes time and effort.  

Writing this blog has been a good way to be both in my classroom/school community and in conversation with a wider educational community.  Here, as in many of my fellow teacher bloggers' sites (Check out TransformEd for a feed of our collective voices), the two worlds don't seem so divided. 

[image credit: canstockphoto.com]