In my educational experience, most of my teachers looked and sounded like me and came from similar backgrounds. I never once had to consider whether I would see people like myself represented in the texts I read. And for a long time, with an uncritical lens, I took it for granted that other students had the same experience.

This year, I’m back in the classroom with a grade nine destreamed English class as one of my assignments. I have taught grade nine only twice before, so I suppose, to put a positive spin on things, I have very few preconceived notions about how a grade nine “academic” class differs from a grade nine “applied” class.

I’ll focus on the “destreaming” part of things a bit later because this post is about me struggling with how to do a good job with culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy as a white woman. Not just a white woman, but let’s look at all my other privileges: I’m white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, neuro-typical, and middle-class. I have often felt, and continue to feel uncomfortable when discussing issues of race in the classroom, and I feel like it’s time to interrogate why I feel that way, and why I think it’s my responsibility to do it anyway.

Why I Feel Uncomfortable (an inexhaustive list)

• I’m worried I’ll sound ignorant
• I’m worried I’ll hurt a student’s feelings
• I’m worried I’ll make a student feel uncomfortable
• I’m worried I will say the wrong thing
• I’m worried I won’t have the answers students need
• I’m worried that a student who holds racist views (consciously or unconsciously) will express those views in my classroom and I won’t know how to respond and that will hurt some of my students.

Here’s what I notice when I look at that list: some of these worries come from a place of concern for my students. Some of these worries come from a place of concern about how I’ll be perceived.

Let’s deal with concern about how I’ll be perceived first. If we accept that students have a right to see themselves reflected in texts we teach in the English classroom–and I do believe this–and many of these texts are going to deal with issues of race, sexuality, and gender identity, then avoiding these topics because it makes me feel uncomfortable is centering myself. This shouldn’t be about me; it’s about doing right by the students. That’s pretty straightforward. So my solution will be building those relationships with students, being transparent with them, and letting them know that if and when I make mistakes I will work hard on correcting them.

Concern number two: I’m worried about hurting my students. If, again, I believe that students have a right to see themselves reflected in the texts we teach in the English classroom, then I can’t do that without acknowledging the struggles and issues that students from those diverse communities face–ones that are expressed and explored in YA novels by BIPOC and LGBTQ2S+ authors. The alternative seems to be finding texts by diverse authors that don’t depict trauma or depict them in ways that are clearly fantasy. But doing so doesn’t change the fact that these issues still exist for these young people. And what better place than fiction to allow students to explore ways to deal with the very real issues they and their friends might be facing? What better place than fiction to give students some insight into the struggles of others? So my conclusion here is that avoiding difficult topics doesn’t make them go away, and if the alternative is not to discuss them at all or wait for someone else more qualified to do it, I could be doing more harm to my students than good.

I am doing my best. I am muddling through. I’m going to make mistakes.

This is just me sharing the thoughts that are currently circling my tiny brain about teaching English and assessment and of course… Shakespeare.

I’ve been thinking about “mean girls” lately—more the label than specific people. I’ve listened to colleagues label certain students as “mean girls” and sigh with frustration or sometimes express hurt and anxiety at the thought of dealing with them.

The reason why I’ve been thinking about it is that I don’t see the “mean girl” behaviour even though I teach some of these girls. So I wondered what the profile of a “mean girl” would look like based on who my colleagues identified. They were pretty, popular, had a close circle of friends, asked for things they thought they deserved, questioned things they thought were unfair, formed and reformed alliances, gossiped about their peers, gave “attitude” when asked to do things they didn’t want to do.

With a few minor exceptions, this profile also fits a lot of teachers I know. Usually, the closer the teacher is to the profile, the more they complained about “mean girls.” So what is this?

Is it possible that most of what we categorize as the mean girl phenomenon is actually just resentment and/or jealousy of young women who refuse to just smile politely and accept what they’re given?

I find myself questioning this stereotype that boys are easy-going and don’t hold grudges but girls are mean and catty. Honestly, if I think about a lot of the behaviour people attribute to mean girls and imagine that the girls were boys instead, I don’t think people would even notice the behaviour.

I know this “theory” doesn’t account for all the mean girl behaviours, but isn’t it possible that at least part of it is that?

Unlike many of my colleagues, I really like and am interested in talking about assessment and evaluation. I know that’s the part of the job most teachers hate, but I love it. To be clear, I still hate how time consuming and tedious it is to actually assess and evaluate, but if I feel like the assessment is authentic and really allows students to show what they know, then I find it a lot less tedious.

I think it’s really important to, on a regular basis, question our assumptions that form our teaching ideologies even though that can be distressing and uncomfortable and that’s the part that I’m at right now. So let me begin by stating, apologetically, what my assumptions were about assessment and evaluation were:

Assumptions

I assumed that, in general, the best way to design an assessment task was to begin with the learning goals (informed by the curriculum expectations), identify how I would know whether students had achieved those expectations, then create success criteria based on this. Then, I would create/find an exemplar that demonstrated level 4 achievement of the expectations (and if I felt super ambitious, maybe exemplars for the other levels as well). Next, I could have the students co-create the rubric, or I could make it myself, making sure I was using the success criteria identified to develop the rubric so they would know exactly what they needed to do to be successful. If I really wanted to make sure they were successful, I would give them checklists they could use to make sure they were meeting the expectations.

In other words, I would be very very clear about what I wanted students to demonstrate. And I would be very very clear about how they would go about demonstrating this. In other words, I would be as explicit as humanly possible about how students could get a level 4 on their assignment.

What Changed My Mind

I am preparing to be part of a really exciting project for September where I am working with three other teachers from two other schools and we are taking grade 10s from each of those schools who are interested in project based learning. No subjects (although they are earning credits for English, Civics, Careers, Science, and Integrated Arts), no bells, no work sheets. It’s exciting and terrifying, like doing high-wire acrobatics without a net. I plan on blogging more about this in the future now that I know for sure it’s a go.

On Tuesday we had a planning session with other teachers from our board who are engaging in similar projects. We were lucky to get to meet at Innovation Works in downtown London Ontario–a hub of creativity and inspiration. We had several impromptu guest speakers including Kelsey Ramsden, an amazing woman who makes me feel woefully unaccomplished, and two equally impressive guys from Officialize.com whose names I forgot to write down because at that point in the day my brain was fried (it could also have something to do with the fact that my nine month old baby has decided sleep is for the weak). All three of them spoke about the problems they’re seeing in potential employees. They see young people with post-secondary degrees who are very good at following instructions and ticking off boxes but not very good at problem-solving, thinking creatively, or bouncing back from failures.

In short, we have created monsters.

Perhaps that’s a bit dramatic, but I feel that in our attempts to make it very clear to students what they have to do to be successful, we have placed limitations on their own concepts of success. These are hard-working, motivated, bright kids I’m talking about too. But in our attempts to eliminate ambiguity, and make assessment practices transparent, we have created a generation of compliant kids who are trained to give us exactly what we ask for.

But the world needs innovators!

The three guest speakers all spoke about the fact that they wanted employees who took initiative, and weren’t afraid to break the rules. They didn’t want employees who were waiting for list of tasks to complete.

So what do we do? Do we throw out rubrics, checklists, and exemplars? Do we move completely to inquiry and problem-based learning? How do we balance all of this with what we in Ontario are being told we must do according to Growing Success and the curriculum documents?

I have spent the last week presenting to and learning from Danish principals, teachers, and pedagogues (a role we don’t really have in Ontario).

I won’t attempt to summarize everything I learned in this post because it’s my last night in Denmark, but I want to capture a few things now:

The main thing we can learn from the Danes is that if you want a student to be a self-regulating, independent, resilient person, they won’t do that (and yes, I am using the non-gender-specific “they” as a singular pronoun. I do that now) if we create rules for every possible situation, remove all “potentially dangerous” playground equipment, and refuse to let them out of our sight for a second.

Here, children at school can climb trees, play on climbing walls, use knives, and start camp fires. 5 year olds drink out of glass cups and are responsible for carrying them back to the kitchen on their own. There are candles everywhere. Children don’t touch them. Because they’re hot. Children are allowed to work in small groups in hallways, libraries, and other common learning spaces without teachers looking over their shoulders. And they do the work. They don’t misbehave. Because if they did, there would be consequences. Natural consequences.

Danes are much more relaxed about their students. They have rules and expectations, but not about everything. They expect students to learn to make good choices. Students can’t do this if they’re not given any choices.

(or “Breaking up is Hard to Do”)

Grade 12 university level English is a mandatory course for acceptance to university programs here in Ontario as I’m sure anyone who reads my blog knows.

I get the sense, and I’m looking for statistics to back this up, that since I began teaching in 2003, more students are applying to STEM programs at university now than arts or humanities programs. This really hit home for me when, in my grade 11 enriched English course, I listened to one of our guidance counselors survey my class to find out what programs my students were planning on applying to: engineering, medicine, and chemistry, were popular answers while I heard one student say philosophy, and a few others say law.

For the most part, this is not a class where students get passionate about literature or art. It’s a bit of a bummer for me, but I also need to get over it. I still think the arts in general, and literature specifically, have an important place in my students’ education regardless of where life takes them after high school. Literature forces us to deal with the big questions about life, death, love, hate and what it means to be human in ways that more concrete, or “black and white” disciplines can’t. I don’t want to live in a world with people who don’t care about these things or don’t ever think deeply about them. I will always firmly advocate for literature and the arts as being essential to a student’s education.

That being said, if 85% of my grade 12s have no intention of studying English literature in university, should I still be teaching ENG4U the way I do?

For example, in ENG4U, I teach Hamlet. I love Hamlet. So my reasons for continuing to teach it are partly selfish. If pressed though, I would say that while I think it’s good for students to know the basic story of Hamlet and the key issues the play raises, I don’t think it’s important for them to be able to quote lines from the play or even to be able to do a close reading of a soliloquy (please don’t make me return my BA for saying so). I think that learning to make meaning from a particularly challenging text is an important skill, but that doesn’t logically support me covering the play in as much detail as I currently do. In fact, I’ve been paring down the amount of time I really spend digging into to the text over the past four years or so. But I still do the whole thing. I still spend at least 4 weeks studying the play–although I’ve moved from reading and then watching to doing a combination of both, to mostly watching and reading specific passages to compare a director’s interpretation to the primary source. But really, I don’t think any of this is necessary. I think I could probably cover the same expectations in about a week or two.

So what should I focus on instead? And how do I break up with Hamlet without turning into Ophelia and drowning myself in a river?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a while since the fun and silliness of “Brevity is the Soul of (t)Wit,” an experiment using Twitter to present Hamlet. When we did this back in the spring of 2011, (!) Twitter was really just coming into its own and we were just discovering how we could harness that tool. Over the March Break I thought, hey, wouldn’t it be cool to try to present Hamlet over Twitter? I and those who joined me for the ride, learned a LOT from the experience. You can discover what I learned by clicking through this presentation (it will also show you how I adapted the exercise for my students):

There will be a few changes this time around:

1) We’re doing a comedy (although it gets pretty dark at times) Much Ado About Nothing.

2) I will create and retain access to all the Twitter handles (Why? I might want to use them again in the future)

3) I’m not going to use a separate webpage to curate this material, instead I’ll make a page on this blog.

4) We’ll use a hashtag this time as well as a list. The hashtag is yet to be determined. I’m open to suggestions.

How can you get involved if you are interested?

If you want a role in our play, I’ve created a call sheet:

All you need to do is give me your real name, Twitter handle, and email address.

What are you committing to?

1) Researching your role and the general plot of the play. Know what your background is, your motivation, and how you relate to the other characters in the play. You don’t need to know the original text inside and out. Using a student-friendly site like Shmoop will be enough.

2) Using our group calendar:     to stay synchronized with the other actors. In the calendar, I’ve indicated when events should happen by. I’ve also given you a summary of the events of the scene. If you’re planning on tweeting about time-sensitive stuff, I recommend you co-ordinate with the other actors through direct messages, but please only use the direct messages to coordinate tweets. There’s no point in staying in character in direct messages since the general public can’t see them.

3) Focusing not only on tweeting what happens on-stage in the play, but also on what might be happening off stage. This is one of the most powerful parts of this exercise: There are literally no small parts. You can tweet as much as you like whenever you like–even if the summary for a particular scene doesn’t involve your character. Your character still exists when he/she isn’t on stage!

4) If you would like to create multimedia content and share that in a tweet (a picture, video, link to other content), you are welcome to do so.

5) I would encourage you to watch the Joss Whedon film version of Much Ado About Nothing. It gives the right feel for what I’m imagining for the play–BUT we tweet in modern language.

6) You’re also committing to being respectful and courteous in your behind the scenes conversations with other actors (that should go without saying, but I’ll put it out there just in case.)

I’m hoping to get started by next Saturday, but if I have to change dates I will.

One final note: I would like to share this project with my staff and high school students. Our tweets are public anyway, so I’m not sure that the fact that I want to share with my students will change your the way you plan your tweets but it might so I wanted you to know that up front.

Any questions? Contact me on Twitter! I’m @danikatipping

I find the first few weeks of school the toughest. Generally my students are wary of me and so they are reticent to offer ideas in class discussions and afraid to take risks (even on tiny assignments that aren’t being marked) because they’re so deathly afraid of making mistakes. I get that. They’ve spent years learning that mistakes are the worst things they can make in school. It takes time to get them to trust me. But it’s still frustrating.

The one thing that’s frustrating me the most right now is that I teach an enriched grade 11 English class, filled to the brim with very bright, high achievers (and a few very bright underachievers). My take on an enriched class is that my students complete the same summative assessments as the other grade 11 classes, but they get to design their own formative projects. I give them lots of guidance on this. We’re very clear about their learning goals and success criteria. I give them exemplars. But so many of them would rather just do worksheets because they would rather be bored and guaranteed a good mark, than engaged and risk a not quite so good mark. EVEN THOUGH this is formative, and the major marks come from the summative assessment. Insert coaching analogy:

It’s like I’m coaching a cross country team (because that’s actually the only coaching I’ve done), and I give the athletes the choice between running laps on a track or playing a new game, and they all choose the laps because they’ve done it before.

Problem #2 and this one really bugs me. The students have chosen to take enriched grade 11 English (Or their parents chose for them which is another problem altogether), and yet when asked to choose a novel for their independent studies, many of them only want to read YA fiction or airport bookstore murder mysteries. You know, books with simple plots, simple characters, and unimaginative writing styles. Now before I get gasps of horror from YA fiction apologists, I like YA fiction. I love the Divergent, and Hunger Games series. But these books do not challenge my students. And that’s the problem.

Many of them don’t want a challenge. Many of them have expressly said “I want an easy read.” They don’t understand the pleasure of the challenge.

Many of my students have been told they are bright, and talented, and gifted since they were in grade 1. I feel that, as a result, many of them also believe that learning should be easy. They should never experience frustration of any kind when learning. I want to tell them that frustration is a part of learning–that, if you are not persisting in the face of a challenge, you’re not really learning anything.

I think many of my students aren’t interested in learning. They’re interested in grades.

And so I’m frustrated, which I suppose means I’m also engaged in a challenging learning process.

I’m generally a pretty happy person (I think. How do you measure that?), but I do often enjoy wallowing in a good b*tch session. Yesterday, for example, my classroom computer took so a half hour to load and then I couldn’t actually access the internet. It made me so angry and I spiraled into an anger cycle of increasing fury: Oh great, the internet won’t work! It probably never will! Why doesn’t our school board have better infrastructure? How am I supposed to do my job??!! Now some of these concerns are legitimate, but dwelling on them doesn’t do me or the students any good.

Then yesterday I watched the following Ted X talk at an elearning staff meeting:

Of course this message meshes very nicely with our board’s current focus on having a growth mindset. And it’s a very simple message: Success is not the road to happiness; happiness is the road to success. But that sounds a little to trite without elaboration:

Many of my students are labouring under the impression that if they just work harder and get better marks, they will be happier. But as Achor states in the video, we keep moving the goal posts, and we’re never actually satisfied. But if we instead reverse this formula and begin with a positive mental outlook, we are more productive, more creative, and more focused. The key of course is establishing that positive mindset.

Achor mentions specific strategies that, when used for 21 days, helped rewire brains to start scanning for the positive things in life, rather than the negative. The specific strategies were journaling, random acts of kindness, exercise, meditation, and gratitude.

So after watching this video and discussing this with my students, I asked if they’d mind if we gave it a shot–starting each class for the next 21 days with something that trained our brains to focus on the good. Like taking the first two minutes of class to send a nice note or text to someone, or spending two minutes just meditating. Or stretching. The cynic in me is embarrassed that I’d even consider this but the optimist in me figures, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” It costs us nothing to try.

So I’ll keep you posted!

Hello world,

I’m back! I’m not going to dwell on the “it’s been a while since my last post” stuff because who knows? It might be a while until my next post. I won’t say I haven’t had the time to blog. I’ve been busy, sure. We all have. But frankly my head hasn’t been filled with educational musings for a while. Partly because of the new dude in my life (His name is Leif and he enjoys puppies and throwing his food on the floor), but also just because I started to get…bored by the whole “techie English teacher” persona I’d been wearing for the past seven years.

But I’ve had a year (and a bit) away from the teaching world (although I still taught a course online and wrote curriculum for eLearning Ontario), and my mind was mostly focused on new jargon like “baby-led-weaning” and “sleep training”. I think it was a good reset for my brain.

As I prepare to return to the classroom I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around leaving my tiny bff in daycare, because even though I know the daycare is full of kind, professional, highly trained people, they’re not me. They’re not the person who loves him and knows him better than anyone else in the world (other than my husband of course).

But that feeling is what’s going to make me a better teacher. Because now I see all my future students through the eyes of a parent. And I want to be the teacher that I would want my own son to have. I want to be a teacher who is  doggedly persistent when it comes to encouraging kids to reach their potential. I want to be the teacher who takes her professional development seriously. I want to be the teacher who has high standards for her students and makes them believe they can achieve those standards.

But more importantly I want to be the teacher who is patient and compassionate and treats each child with dignity and kindness, even when I’m tired or frustrated or even angry. Because that’s what I’d want for my son.

I know some incredible teachers who don’t have children of their own and they managed to figure this out long ago, but it took me a little longer to get here.

Wish me luck!