If you know me, you know that I’ve been a long-time admirer of Whedon as a creator, thinker, and activist as well as a fan of his work, particularly Firefly/Serenity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

He sees education as humanity’s greatest hope. Stay around for the final quote:

The enemy of humanism is not faith. The enemy of humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight.

He also offers some insightful comments on gender in his Equality Now acceptance speech from 2006.

Take this op-ed in the New York Times by David Brooks, for example. It’s full of so many reductive, clichéd, and just plain wrong notions that it makes my scalp burn, but he rattles them off as if he actually knows what he’s talking about and has evidence to back it up.

Now, I read his mini-bio, and he sounds like a really smart and interesting guy, and like he probably knows a hellofalot about business and politics. Why do we, as a nation, seem to think that qualifies someone to provide commentary and advice on how education should happen!? (You know the answer already, don’t you?)

Let’s run through a few of his comments, just for fun (emphasis added):

… increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

The bait-and-switch here is infuriating. What is the primary cause of all the "treating students like cattle" stuff, that concerned teachers have been warning and raging against for years? Oh yeah, all that standardized testing … which Brooks will go on to praise:

Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind, we’re a lot better at measuring each student’s progress.

The problem is that as our ability to get data has improved, the education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data has improved, too.

NCLB has done nothing to help us get "better" at measuring progress. We’re measuring lots of things, but we’re no where near getting enough correlation out of any of it to say we can speak confidently about "progress." And our primary method for collecting data right now is to ask kids to fill in bubbles. So no, our data hasn’t improved in any meaningful way, we just have more of it. And therefore, maybe the consequences that teachers (because that’s what he really means) are trying to evade are the consequences of bad data that’s being praised as helpful and reliable.

The thing is, plenty of people (people much smarter and more eloquent than I) have said all of this and more, and have done so over and over again. Still, here it is again in the NYT, and there it is again pouring from the political pulpits, and there it is over there on my TV screen, and …

So I find it hard to scrape up enough energy to have the same argument again. It seems like not enough people are paying attention to the well-reasoned debates. (And they are out there if you look for them, but even those are feeling a bit repetitive lately). I guess that’s because they take time and effort to think through, don’t fit easily into headlines, and don’t make for effective sound bites.

For anyone wondering, I think Zotero is a nice complement to Delicious, not a competitor. I use Delicious to collect all of my bookmarks, for various purposes. Zotero instead competes with services like Diigo, because both allow you to make a copy of the content and add notes and annotations.

While Diigo trumps Zotero in its social aspects,² Zotero definitely wins as a serious research tool. First of all, with Zotero, the pages you save and notes you make are stored on your computer and then synced online, instead of being held exclusively online as with Diigo, which means that even if Zotero disappears down the road, you’ll still have your content. This also means that you can use Zotero offline, which makes it a great tool when your research incorporates old-fashioned things like books and newspapers! Zotero also works with Word and OpenOffice.org to add citations and bibliographies in a huge variety of formats.

1. Only part of this devotion has to do with the fact that it was developed at my grad school, GMU. The other part is that it’s just a great tool.
2. For now, at least. It will be interesting to see how Zotero develops its web application

It’s important to know what sites are being blocked in which schools. I’d be very curious to see what patterns might emerge from this and whether they follow types of schools, socio-economic status, etc.

I also think schools should have to provide a public list of the sites and/or types of sites they block along with their reasoning, and that these decisions should be open for public debate. When I was in the classroom, it would drive me crazy that I couldn’t pull up YouTube or Blogger blogs to share and discuss with students. And two years out, I don’t think those blocks have changed.

We need fewer know-it-alls in education today. We need thoughtful, humble people who are willing to acknowledge their uncertainty and still do what they believe to be right.

I find myself thinking this a lot lately, especially when I read the outpourings of any of the educational think-tanks. This is also one reason I’ve been writing less on this blog: a growing awareness of how little I know coupled with a growing respect for others, Lehmann among them, who are thoughtful, humble, and still brave enough to offer their thoughts for others to consider.

In an earlier post, Humanities and the DY/DAN Method, I linked to Dan Meyer’s blog and his take on assessment and homework in the mathematics discipline as a way to start thinking through similar issues in terms of the English discipline.

In this post, I want to clarify what I mean by “the English discipline” and, related, what I think the goals of an English class are (or should be) at the secondary level. It might also be good to consider what the goals aren’t. This is nothing new or revolutionary, just my take on it all.¹ In a later post, I’ll write about some ways to move students toward those goals and to assess whether or not they’ve reached them.

However, I won’t be developing much of a classroom-ready system in these posts, and don’t have the ability to test it even if I did, since I’m not currently in the classroom. I’m offering my idealistic take based on my experiences and the benefit of a year away. Maybe someone can do something useful with it (which could include proving me wrong).

Of course, trying to define “the English discipline and ways to assess it” in a few blog posts is foolish, or arrogant, or both. Many people, with more brains and experience than I, have spent decades debating this (and centuries debating related questions), and there’s no universal consensus yet. Maybe tomorrow.

On the other hand, I think the ultimate goal of an English class is pretty simple: teach students to read and produce texts. There’s a lot to unpack from those terms, though, and even after all the unpacking, the devil is still hiding in the details of the execution.

Despite all this, I’ll still play the fool, but I reserve the right to revise this later using the phrase “that’s what I meant.” If I’m lucky, the discussion might go further through comments or other reactions.

Skills not Content

English should be approached not as a subject or field of study but as a discipline that focuses on and organizes itself around essential skills rather than a body of knowledge.

The question becomes not “What do you know?” but “What can you do?” After four years in secondary English classrooms, students should — with some skill and with an awareness of the their own ability — be able to read, interpret, criticize, discuss, and produce texts in a wide range of modes, genres and media.²

It’s more important to me that a student be proficient with these skills than that she know about a particular collection of texts, a particular set of terms, or a particular hierarchy of grammatical sins. Of course, this isn’t an anti-knowledge curriculum– skillful doing isn’t possible without relevant knowledge — but the knowledge should serve the mastery of the skills. The development of those skills is central, and everything else should support that purpose.

I think it’s worth quoting Robert Scholes here from The Rise and Fall of English:³

We are not artisans shaping the impressionable minds of our students. We are — or should be — masters of our craft helping others to master it, and human beings of integrity helping others to achieve it in their own ways in their own lives.

I think we may at present be too concerned with teaching the right ideas in the classroom and not concerned enough with teaching the most effective ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

The one thing a curriculum in English must do, whatever else it accomplishes on the way, is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of text.

An advantage of this approach is that it’s scalable and adaptable: given a group of students, discover where their skill levels are and take steps to move them to the next level using texts and approaches best suited for those purposes and those students.

I want to clarify, however, that by “skills,” I do not mean reductive, “back to basics” skills, exemplified by units on “writing an effective sentence” or “nouns and pronouns.” Specifics of this sort are, in my experience, best addressed within the context of larger pursuits, namely, wrestling with texts that are relevant and engaging to the student. Instead, I mean the primary skills listed above: reading, interpreting, critiquing, and producing texts.

Texts not Literature

“Text” includes a variety of modes, genres, and media (film, magazine articles, song lyrics, advertisements, television shows, blog posts, etc.), and texts should be selected primarily to support the teaching of the desired skills — serving as effective or deficient models — while still openly acknowledging (though not “preaching”) the other implications (ideological, cultural, or otherwise) of those selections.

This isn’t to say that the texts should serve only as examples. Texts can serve multiple purposes, and one way to effectively organize them is by topics that are relevant to contemporary concerns and interests. This makes for a dynamic canon, and frees us from the “dead white men” syndrome without denying the importance of those works (see below).

This is also why I believe the texts of “pop culture” are the doorway to further developing students’ competency with writing and engaging their interest in texts of all types. As should be clear by now, I don’t agree with those who believe only “serious literature” is worthy of study. And anyway, to a large extent, “pop culture” is culture, and those things not labeled part of “pop culture” are often in reaction to it. Popular texts (in all varieties) provide the primary lens through which culture is mediated for students, and students are already familiar with and interested in them, which makes them well-suited for study.⁴

While I agree that having an understanding of literary history is important, I also believe that history should provide context for contemporary and personally-relevant concerns. History of any kind, taught in isolation as a collection of facts, is uninteresting and, worse, useless — which leads students to the logical conclusion that history is boring and irrelevant. Of course, understood properly, history is fascinating and vitally important. That’s why we should start with texts relevant to the interests and concerns of the now and help students to situate those texts in historically-appropriate contexts. Any other approach is just an exercise in really slow Googling.

We should also remember that any “literary history” we do tell, even when skillfully told, is still only one way of telling the story of text and culture. This should be demonstrated, over and over to students, and ultimately, we should help students to discover appropriate contexts for themselves, along with the relevant critical and rhetorical moves.

I am aware of and concerned about criticisms of a “shallow” curriculum,⁵ where the students never wrestle with anything more complex than a cartoon. That’s not what I’m advocating. I’m arguing that the texts students encounter every day are the ideal starting points for understanding and mastering how to read, interpret, critique, and produce texts of ever-increasing depth and complexity.

Workshop not (Only) Lecture Hall

Placing skills at the center of the curriculum requires that students practice the execution of those skills, examine effective and deficient models, receive guidance and critique relative to their ability, and reflect on their own progress individually and collectively. The class then functions more like an artist’s studio or craftsmen’s workshop, where students produce texts in as wide a range of modes, genres, and media as possible, and where the ultimate test is an examination of the work students produce and the processes they used to achieve it.

On the other hand, direct lecture is, at times, appropriate and necessary, particularly when students require information before moving forward and the process of having students discover that particular information on their own doesn’t justify the time it would take to do so.

A few conditions on lectures:

• Make sure a lecture is the best approach. Helping students discover relevant information for themselves can serve multiple purposes: research skills, plurality of opinion, critical reading skills, etc.
• Make lectures focused and brief, because whatever information is delivered through the lecture should be immediately put to use by the students. The more information you present at once, the more difficult it will be to employ (and thus usefully retain) that information.
• There are effective, engaging ways to lecture. Discover those ways and adapt them.

However, approaching a course as a workshop or studio requires establishing an appropriate environment. At least four major concerns need to be addressed if this is going to work:

• Safety: Students must feel safe enough to exert genuine effort and to share the results of that effort.⁶
• Value: Students must feel that their interests, opinions, and efforts are valued by the teacher and by the majority of their classmates. By maintaining rigorous standards for the work students produce, we give value to the work. By allowing legitimate choice in what the student pursues, we give value to the student’s interests and opinions. By actually caring about the student’s success, we give value to the student’s efforts.
• Integrity: Teachers must mentor academic truth and integrity in their approach to students, texts, and the texts students produce, and they must require that integrity in response.⁷
• Space: A workshop approach will not work in a classroom where desks are arranged in long rows with the teacher’s desk taking a position of command in the front or threat in the back. Also, put generally: the space should be arranged for the kind of work you’re doing in it,have the tools you need for that work, and feel like the kind of place you’d actually like to work in.⁸

I realize this kind of environment is not easy to create or maintain, but I still think it’s necessary.

Process not (Only) Product

The workshop model implies a focus on the process, not on the product exclusively. If we believe we have a craft to teach, then the how of this craft is just as essential as the final what. This is true for both reading and creating texts. After all, it is in the doing, not the having done, where learning occurs, so process is where/when all the real work occurs. The products are the aftermath. This is not to say that products should never matter, but from an educational perspective, they matter mainly in terms of what they reveal about how to improve our process the next time.

However, I don’t want to suggest that there is one process to follow (the writing process, for instance). Instead, process merely recognizes that interactions with text, either in their production or their consumption, does not happen all at once. It involves moving from concept to critical investigation to expression to refinement; from reading, to interpretation, to criticism; from disorganized collections, to selection, to arrangement, to presentation.

Therefore, certain responses — from both teachers and students — are appropriate at one stage of the process that aren’t appropriate at another. Students need to recognize this in terms of how they work with texts and how they respond to their own efforts and the efforts of others. Teachers need to recognize this in order to offer appropriate and effective critique and help the student move successfully from stage to stage, skill level to skill level.

All of this is tied directly to assessment, but I’ll say more about this in the follow-up post.

Open not Closed

I mean a lot of things by this. For one, teachers hide too much from their students. English class shouldn’t feel like a sadistic game: the teacher standing at the front of the room, ready to punish, asking students to guess hidden answers to obscure questions without offering any advice on how the answers might be discovered or evaluated, other than by the say-so of the teacher. If they don’t already believe that we know what we’re doing (and so, buy into the game) then they soon become convinced that we don’t know what we’re talking about (and so, rebel) or that they are the hopeless problem (which is expressed either through disdain or despair).⁹

Assuming that we do know what we’re talking about (ahem), then we need to be honest and explicit about the reasons behind whatever we’re asking students to do … which means we need to have reasons, and they better be good. Good reasons are ones that don’t waste students’ time. In part, this means having a clear purpose grounded in sound pedagogy and tied to an appropriate skill. It also means giving them every opportunity we can for them to explore and invest their efforts in topics that matter to them.

Related to the above, we should encourage student-generated texts that have, whenever possible, an authentic audience, a real purpose beyond the classroom, and a genuine appeal to the students’ interests. It’s here, more than anywhere else, that I see the power of online technologies to benefit the teaching of the English discipline.¹⁰

Another remedy is to provide students with the critical and rhetorical moves they need to help them enter the work of the discipline while making that work as explicit as possible. Too often, we hide the mechanics of “how” texts are decoded and produced. Instead, we should be giving them all the tools and showing them how each one works. In other words, don’t be afraid to be provide formulas with the goal of moving students beyond these formulas as their skills develop. To quote Gerald Graff: “If we refuse to provide such formulas on the grounds that they are too prescriptive or that everything has to come from the students themselves, we just end up hiding the tools of success.”¹¹ On the other hand, please don’t beat up and enslave your students with these formulas: they’re steps, training wheels, meant to be left behind.

Similarly, make the questions of and conflicts within the discipline known to students and invite them into the conversation. Most students love a good fight, so show them some. Don’t know where to start? Select a few articles from either side of the music and copyright debate, then decode the texts, pull out strategies, talk about academic integrity, and away you go.¹²

Finally, we need to help students to recognize why we hold the standards we do for what they produce by inviting them to determine standards based on their own work with texts. This collaborative approach to standards doesn’t mean we’ll have lower standards that vary from class to class. We are (or should be) the master craftsmen and women, and we can guide students to recognize aspects they miss. We can also scale these aspects to their current level of ability. However, if we don’t involve them in this process, not only do we reinforce the “us and them” tension in the classroom (which is even less helpful in a workshop setting), but we also miss an opportunity for students to genuinely practice their critical skills and become invested in the quality of their own work.

Craftsmen not Priests

First, to any female readers: I apologize for the sexist terms, but “craftspeople not priests or priestesses” just doesn’t roll nicely.

This last section is brief, as it wanders a bit from discussing the English discipline specifically to my own ideas about teaching generally. Still, I think these are important.

An English teacher’s primary responsibility is to teach students to work effectively with texts; teachers should not be using texts to promote ideologies — political, religious, aesthetic, or otherwise. I’ve seen rifts develop in a classes based solely on ideological conflicts between teacher and student. To me, this shouldn’t even be a possibility. Certainly, there are academic truths, schools of theory and criticism, and controversies within the discipline that can inform our practice and become the subject of study, but we aren’t there to indoctrinate students into any ideology other than the primary ideology of the discipline: reasoned argument from multiple perspectives.

Additionally, English teachers should be practitioners not just theoreticians — they should do what they teach. That means they should work with academic integrity and be effective readers, interpreters, critics, and producers of texts in a wide range of genres, modes, and media.¹³

Finally, teachers should be reflective observers and researchers of their craft, working from clear pedagogy, not mandates. They should be aware of information relevant to their field specifically (textual theory, history, production, and consumption) and generally (education, learning, creativity, etc.).

What Did I Miss?

These are the principles that matter most to me (except for the ones I forgot, of course). I’ll also admit I never held to these principles even half as well as I should have. They’re not easy, which is part of why I think they’re worth pursuing.

I would appreciate any reactions, here or elsewhere, to this list. I’ll try to connect these principles with specific goals and assessments in a later post.

1. Outside of my own experiences in the classroom, my thoughts have been strongly influenced by Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, Tom Romano, Barry Lane, Don Gallehr, Gerald Graff, Sheridan Blau, Robert Scholes, the National Writing Project, and the many excellent teachers with whom I’ve worked over the past nine years.
2. Robert Scholes calls this a “canon of methods,” and much of this comes from his writing on this subject.
3. These quotes are presented out of order.
4. Related, I’d recommend reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You.
5. Related, see The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic) by Nicholas Carr
6. Peter Elbow wrote about this extensively.
7. Scholes defines academic truth and integrity as: “accuracy in citation, regard for what is already known about our subject, and rigor in situating and interrogating whatever material we are considering” — The Rise and Fall of English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 57.
8. I’ve written about the importance of physical space before here and here. Also consider Michel Foucault’s work, particularly Discipline and Punish.
9. If I’m being kind, I attribute this to a desire to keep things simple for students on the one hand (not confusing them with things they don’t need to know) and to keep things from being too simple on the other (not encouraging their laziness by providing them with the answers). If I’m not so kind, I attribute this to a desire to protect our position of authority by pretending the answers are known and we possess them, to hide the fact that we don’t have a good reason for asking them to do something, or to avoid the embarrassing admission that we don’t know the answer and aren’t sure if anyone does.
10. Blogging, collaborative work, manipulation of image and sound, etc.
11. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003) 11.
12. See Gerald Graff’s Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993).
13. This is one of the guiding principles of the National Writing Project: the best teachers of writing are teachers who write. Also, I wrote about this in “Teaching is Consequential“

While several of the models said they could live just on what they earn from the show, it shoots only two or three days every three weeks. [Deal or No Deal - Television - New York Times]

As long as models make six figures for holding briefcases (or athletes make seven figures for chasing balls around) while police, fire fighters, and teachers struggle to pay bills, there will be no “cure” for the anti-intellectual movement or the dearth of dedicated, skillful teachers.

For point of reference: I taught in Prince William County, a large and mostly-affluent suburban school district.

On Being Supported

I’m not sure the people who proclaim the not-supportedness could even articulate the nature of this not-supporting or how it could possibly be rectified.

I felt unsupported in my job, and I can articulate a number of ways this is so: over-crowded classrooms; administrators uninformed about what the teachers they supervise even do; unfunded initiatives; teacher recommendations about school decisions, county curriculum, and county tests routinely ignored; parents’ desires trumping the conclusions of teachers; etc.

To be fair, there were also a few ways in which I was supported, but that side’s the short stack.

On the Pay

I’m paid pretty darn well relative to my peers, and certainly well enough for an unmarried fellow whose biggest expenses after rent continue to be whiskey, books, and college loans.

That’s great for teachers in their first few years of teaching, but it’s not a model for a successful profession, and it doesn’t help keep people in the profession, especially when people continue growing up and doing things like getting married, taking on mortgages, and having kids. The set pay scale with its small steps and the minimal raises from additional degrees is a recipe for a young workforce with little depth. Couple that with tenure and whoever does stay has little reason to work hard to improve performance. Which is exactly the system we have.

On Being a Good Teacher

I’m not happy unless I’m being the teacher I see in my head, but the process of finding that guy and living as him no longer makes me happy.

Teaching is (or should be) a profession, and professionals should feel that drive to become effective in their field. Unfortunately, there are so little external reasons to do so, and so many external hindrances, that it’s made absurdly difficult for teachers. The students make it hard sometimes, too (see below). Still, teaching is a profession … but it’s only a profession, not social-work, not surrogate parenting, not volunteer-work (despite the condescending commercials and “just work harder” films).

Much of the difficulty here is how much teachers must rely on themselves to first clarify what the ideal should be and then find ways to realize that ideal in practice. That’s another part of what teachers mean when they say they’re “not supported.”

First, there’s no set of professional standards that are commonly recognized. Also, there’s no support (or driving force) for teachers to keep moving toward that ideal.

For example, my school offered $300 a semester for continuing education. That’s about one credit. And the majority of “inservice” offerings were a joke. I’ve never understood why public education does so little to support the continuing education of its teachers.

Here’s another example: the administrator who supervised and assessed my performance as a teacher had no background in my discipline, rarely observed me more than once a year for half an hour, and couldn’t discuss, with any real competency, best practices in relation to my curriculum. Teachers in the same discipline were as stretched as I was, with no common planning time, and so with limited ability to help each other improve.

On Being More Than a Teacher

the kids are, in the words of Don DeLillo, “an open wound of need and want.” There is no free time, no mental energy, no chunk of your finances that cannot be poured in that gaping [wound] like the most potent of Hydrogen Peroxides, a pouring that fuels the kind of consumption that only reinforces the pouring, justifies it, encourages it, emboldens future pourings and the expansion of the pouring into a variety of other areas.

Which is also what I think is meant by the assertion that teaching should be a profession, not a calling. It’s also why the complaint that teachers cannot and should not be responsible for all of this is legit. Teachers are there to teach … or should be. I don’t mean teachers should be heartless, or shouldn’t take the needs and concerns of students into consideration, but teachers can’t heal these open wounds and still teach all the things they’re required to teach. Teachers end up trying to fill wounds that they have no business and no real ability to fill. This is a societal problem, not solely an educational problem.

Best of Luck

I’m always conflicted when I hear about another good teacher leaving the classroom. Part of me is saddened by the loss students in that school will suffer but probably not realize. Part of me is hopeful that the teacher may find identity and fulfillment somewhere else. Part of me is angry that the system keeps grinding up effective teachers and forcing them to leave what should be one of the best professions around.

I still miss teaching … sometimes painfully so. I’ve never missed the educational system. Not once.