The Monolith in the Room

I remember the first day I stepped into room 310 as a student teacher at West Philadelphia High School in October of 1993. Mrs. Merrill's room was neat, clean,  and tidy, but not sterile. There were neat rows of desks pointing at the front chalkboard and her teacher desk. I remember the knot  I felt in my stomach, looking at the room full of guardedly respectful students as they were informed that I would be their student teacher for a few months.

My knots were not solely because of the daunting task of teaching for the first time. It was the rows and rows of students. All summer I had read pedagogy articles about the tyranny of the middle. The fiction of the middle. The top students and the bottom students being left behind because teachers try to teach to the imaginary middle. That wasn't what was bugging me either.

The kids loved Mrs. Merrill. She had been teaching over 20 years at the time, always at West. She was a respected faculty member and community leader. Students knew they were in a welcoming place of high expectations and they did their best to rise to her benchmarks of success. The climate was something I feared disrupting with my "neophytisms" and outside baggage. I was entering urban education, but I grew up in the suburbs. That wasn't what was wrong, though.

I came to teaching from coaching. Bowling. Believe it or not, a year before I started the application process to grad school, I had an epiphany. I hated my cubicle-hell job. I had a degree in English that was not being used and I LOVED working with adolescents so much that I coached 3 youth league sessions each Saturday. I even volunteered to run clinics on Fridays and I even took it upon myself to buy equipment for students from financially struggling families. I coached each student according to his or her needs and according to their readiness to learn what I had to teach them. My gut rebelled to the monolith in the room that day.

I remember interviewing with Jim Larkin, the director of Teacher Education at UPENN's Graduate School of Education. He was brusk, imposing, and intense. He didn't intimidate me, I went to military school and was educated by Viet Nam vets who always gave you the feeling they were only a tick shy of going postal.

"What makes you think you can teach?" he demanded.

 "Sir, if I'm half the teacher I am a coach, my kids will be lucky to have me." I replied staring him dead in the eye-- and I meant it.

That first year of coaching, three of my teams won their local title in their divisions and advanced to win their district and regional titles. They each placed at states and my boys A team won the title. I knew I was good --- call it cocky, confident or convicted of accomplishment based upon performance data, but I was confident enough to hold my ground to a battle-hardened veteran urban educator turned ivy league administrator. I received my acceptance letter the next week.

The rows made the front of the room feel like a stage or, more aptly, a dais. The rows seemed like an audience, not a classroom. I knew I wanted to move the desks out of rows. I wanted to know my students as a room full of individuals with individual needs. How would I broach my need to divide and conquer to an established veteran?

It was nearly a non- issue. Carol Merrill was amazing. She let me try nearly every crazy idea I had and I grew under her mentorship. She gave me my launch. Twenty school year openings later, I'm still in the blackboard jungle. I am still finding new sources of inspiration to keep me fired up and fresh for a new year.

I am not just waxing nostalgic this afternoon. I am remembering why I do what I do and why I need to do more of it. Last week, I was data-mining preliminary testing data from studyisland.com, as a "homework" assignment from our principal, Mr. Terch. What I discovered shocked me. I had fallen trap to the oldest trick to play on a teacher. I believed the label on my classes: one honors class, and four college prep classes. 

If these labels were supposed to accurately identify the students in my classroom, then there was going to have to be a massive rescheduling project to get the kids where they "belonged." There were CP kids who aced the reading benchmark and honors students who completely bombed it. 

If I had only looked at the scores, I would have been horrified and marched into Mr. T's doorway to advocate multiple schedule changes but that was a very small part of the results that surprised me. My classes are the farthest from being homogeneous in ability groupings. The basic and below basic overall scores of my students don't tell the whole story--- some student's strengths are over 90% in one area but they bombed in other ways.

After 20 years, I have some pretty good solutions to these deficits, but I have been wondering the past few days how I can teach and remediate simultaneously.  Nearly one click and my mind came to the conclusion-- the only way students will achieve success, and learn at a pace that is consistent with their readiness, is to completely remodel what English class looks like in my classroom. The solution? Differentiated instruction, based upon the needs indicated by the first benchmark of the year and other preliminary data available to me so far.

My classroom is already physically set for the change. We have tables and no desks-- perfect for flexible grouping, collaborative learning, and micro-managing.

Now for rethinking lesson-planning. Large group lessons will  not serve the needs of my students. According to their benchmark scores and the first two writing samples I have read, their needs are all over the map, so I must teach like I coach bowling--- each according to his or her needs. I know what to do-- I have done it before and met with success, but back then, I only had to turn in a calendar to my supervisor. Fortunately, I have friends that have El Ed and Special Ed backgrounds-- they know how to write this up so that a supervisor knows what he or she is looking at when they come to visit and observe.

Today, we learned about our new responsibilities for the PA Teacher Effectiveness rating system we are now entering. I am a little overwhelmed, but I am more excited than anything. I can't teach a big block in the middle of my room but I can teach a room full of individuals. That's my goal in 2013-14. Tune in to see how it's going.