Posts Tagged ‘Deven Black’

« Older Entries

Essentials of Communicating With Parents

Friday, September 10th, 2010
Tyneham - old telephone

The biggest change I’m making in my planning for the start of the new school year is in how often I will communicate with parents. Communicating with parents requires effort, openness, clarity, and regularity. Let’s examine each of these.

Effort

Communicating with parents is not in the curriculum and not something taught in education classes. Too often, the only times teachers communicate with parents is when something is wrong; a child misbehaves or is injured somehow.  It is important to work at spreading good news, too.

But teachers already have so much to do. Where are we going to find the time to communicate with parents? Build it in to what you already do. Are you on Facebook or Twitter? Start a Facebook list of parents and limit what they can see. One post a week is all it take. Or start a Twitter account and only let parents see those tweets.

And, of course, there is Parentella. Parentella is a private parent-teacher social network. Teachers can create their private online classroom and invite parents to the class. Teachers can post homework, class news, events, and reminders to keep parents engaged in their kids’ educational lives.

Openness

Communication is a two-way street. When information flows in one direction only it is a lecture or an advertisement, but it is not communication. Good communication is about receiving information or other feedback as much as delivering information.

Listening with attention is a skill we ask our students to master and we have to do it also. As we teach our students, listening is more than keeping one’s mouth shut while someone else is talking and it is not planning what you will say. Listening is hearing, processing and considering what someone else has to say. We need to model it in our interactions with others.

Clarity

Like any other area of human endeavor, education has jargon. I wrote a paper as an undergrad in which I speculated that education in a particular field is merely the process of coming to understand what the jargon means. Parents don’t understand education jargon.

Practice clarity. Write and speak in clear, jargon-free English (or other language you share). Don’t sound like an education jargon generator.

One more thing, proofread! My wife is a copy editor and she catches every error in the notes and notices that come from our son’s school; there are far too many and some of the most aggravating ones would have been caught had the writer just read the item out loud. Trust your ears, if it sounds wrong, it probably is wrong.

Regularity

I have a colleague who teaches some children with very challenging emotional and behavioral issues. She is one of the few teachers I know who talks to parents with regularity; she calls the parents of all nine of her students every day. It needn’t be that often, but it is important to contact parents on a regular basis.

When my wife or I would pick up our son at the end of the school day and ask him what happened he’d respond, “stuff.” He’s going to be a junior in high school this year and all that’s ever happened at school is ‘stuff.’  Parents want to know what’s going on in class, what the class is studying, what’s coming up next, and more.

In the past I’ve given the parents of my students my email address and my cell-phone number, and I’ve left it up to them to contact me. This year I’m going to be more proactive. I’m going to email or call all parents at least once a week with general information about school and class events, also with information about all the great work their child is doing. Parents need to hear good news even more than they need to hear all the trouble their son or daughter causes.

Students are Crossing - Buckman Elementary-3.jpg

When I was student teaching in a 2nd grade class, the teacher guided the students in the collaborative writing of a weekly newsletter. Every Friday after lunch, the boys and girls would draw illustrations for the missive. I wonder if that would work in 7th and 8th grade. Hmmmm.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Back to School, Deven Black, Teacher Perspectives | 7 Comments »

The Importance of the Right Classroom Layout

Friday, August 13th, 2010

It is almost the start of a new school year and for the eighth time in seven years I will be setting up a new classroom. I wish I were one of those lucky teachers who use the same room every year and only need to tweak it from time to time. Imagining what my classroom should look like is not easy for me. Here are some of the things I have to think about when trying to put my room together:

I start by thinking about my students and how they learn. I will be teaching four different groups of students. Three of the groups I have already had, so I know how they like to work. One class is self-contained special education where they all like to work as individuals. The second is also special education, but this one half the kids like to work as individuals, and the other half want to be in bigger groups. The room needs to accommodate both. The third class is general education with 30-student class of generally high achieving 7th graders, half boys and half girls. The girls work in three or four groups. Most of the boys like to work independently, but there are three pairs of boys who like to work only in those pairs.

Then there is the fourth class. This class is considered a VERY difficult to teach. There are six or eight motivated students, but there are also several VERY disruptive students among the 30 in the class. I don’t know their learning styles or how they like to work. I just know that after trying several different arrangements, all their teachers arranged the desks in a giant U-shape when teaching them.

Of course, in laying out the desks, I need to make sure to position the laptop and desktop computers so that their screens are shielded from the sun, so they are near the few electric outlets, and also in a way that I can readily monitor what the students are doing.

This used to be a science room so there is an immovable eight-foot-long marble-topped demo-table, complete with a sink that serves as teacher desk and obstacle to desk layout.  There is an interactive white board in the room and I need a table stacked with a stable pile of books on which to put the projector. My nemesis will be the cables that will need to run around and across the floor to connect everything that needs power or communication.

But there are still more things to consider! Student work will need display places, as will the various fire escape paths and other required signage. I’ll also need to find prominent places for the class rules and procedures. Oh. Procedures. I’ll have to figure out how to collect homework (not that I give much) and forms, where to put textbooks (not that I use them much) and the class library. I also have to make the classroom work for me. I like to move around a lot when I teach. I like to be able to whisper a word of praise, encouragement or reprimand in each student’s ear should I want to. And I also want it to look warm, inspiring, interesting and inviting, not to mention organized and easy to clean.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

On August 30th I can get into the room and start trying to put it together. I’ll try to post pictures of what it looks like then, how it changes before the start of school on Sept. 8th, and how it continues to change throughout the year. I’m interested in hearing your ideas, criticisms, compliments and concerns. I need all the help I can get.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Back to School, Deven Black, Teacher Perspectives | 11 Comments »

Echoes From the Past, Learning For the Future

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, had a lot of different jobs before I became a teacher at age 50.

Image by Biology Big Brother via Flickr

Here’s a short list, in no particular order, of my prior jobs:

  • Radio public affairs producer
  • Newspaper reporter
  • Political campaign operative
  • Community organizer
  • Radio news reporter
  • Radio talk-show host
  • Freelance writer
  • Narrator for industrial films and slide shows
  • Commercial spokesman
  • Restaurant reviewer
  • Bartender
  • Restaurant manager

I’ll tell anyone who will listen that I’m a better teacher than I would have been had I started in my 20s because I bring all the experiences of everything I’ve done before into the classroom with me.

While I know that to be true, the specifics of what that means have always been very vague.

Image by MyThoughtsMindMaps via Flickr

I know that my experience as a bartender helped me bring a little real-life math into a special education classroom in my second year teaching. The teacher was telling the students that the way to find the change to be given after a purchase is to subtract the price of the item(s) from the amount of money tendered. While that is technically true, that is not how it is done in the field, especially in places where the cash register doesn’t automatically tell one how much change to give. What really happens is that one starts with the price of the item and counts up to the amount tendered, first pennies and other coins to a whole-dollar amount, then bills.

I know that my experiences as a news and feature writer for newspapers, magazines, wire services and radio influence the way I teach writing. I despise the test-friendly three or five-paragraph essay form many of us teach students; it is not writing in any sense of the word.

I also know that much of my knowledge of how people learn has come from how I was taught in school and trained in jobs and by watching how my employees trained new hires. Still, I thought my belief in the value of trying something new and failing was something I only came to once I started teaching in schools. I thought my attitudes about how principals should run their schools came from contrasting the styles of the two I have taught under.

Silly me. I should have known better.

A new acquaintance decided to check me out by doing a Google search of my name. Lots of stuff came up, including this nugget from my restaurant management days

“Deven Black, long-time general manager of the North Star Pub in New York City agrees. “I’ve made more than my fair share of mistakes, but if I’ve done anything right, it’s that I’ve learned from those mistakes. I seek advice from those around me with more experience and perspective, and I let the good, competent people on my staff do their jobs. It’s a management philosophy that’s worked well for me.” Worked well it has. With Black at the helm for the past fifteen years, the North Star Pub has been one of the city’s most popular watering holes. Black contends managers must respect the limits of their authority. “I think it’s important not to inflate the importance of your role in the business. My job is to ensure that we’re doing the things necessary to be successful. I watch, I listen and I take care of the business end of the bar. That’s my job. The challenging part, like working the bar and taking care of our guests, I let our service professionals take care of that.”

Cheers Magazine, July/August 1999

It has never occurred to me that what I learned as a bar manager would not be applicable to any other part of my life. In schools we divide knowledge up into what we call distinct subjects: math, social studies, language arts, music, science, art, physical education and more. Then we move students from room to room to learn these subjects, reinforcing the idea that math is separate from music, art is disconnected to science.

Learning is learning. Knowledge is holistic. Anything one knows is connected to everything one knows, and it is all connected to everything everyone knows.

We need to teach our students this. Not as a general idea, but as a specific way of thinking about learning, about knowledge, about connectedness. Doing so will change the way we think about each other and the world we inhabit.

Image via Wikipedia

And changing the way we think will change the way we act.

Tags: ,
Posted in Deven Black, Education Policy, Teacher Perspectives | 8 Comments »

Real Consequences of Real Education

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Nobody disputes that education is transformative.  Students come in at the start of the year and are very different by June.  This effect is cumulative. Year after year the students grow and develop.  Sure, they’d grow and develop with or without formal education, but could this society continue if all children grew and developed without specific direction? I think not.

Children aren’t the only ones who grow and develop as a result of being in school for six or more hours a day.  Teachers change, too.  At least this one has.

Six years ago my friends likely would have described me this way:

Very smart, but impatient with others who don’t get things as quickly as he does. Edgy; tense; quick to anger; sarcastic. Stubborn, inflexible, stiff, rigid. Disorganized.

Yes, I did say my friends, all of whom were surprised, to say the least, that I wanted to become a teacher and a special education teacher at that.

Six years later these same friends say:

Very smart. Calmer, but still very alert. Flexible. Open to new experiences and way more patient. Less judgmental. Less sarcastic but wittier. Very generous.

What happened?

I changed. None of those changes were planned, directed, strategic or part of a curriculum.  All the changes are the results of tests, and those tests were anything but standard.  Anyone who has read my writing for any length of time knows that I have VERY low regard for standardized tests; they are a fraud being perpetrated on the American by its elected leaders, none of whom have a clue about how children learn.

Unfortunately, as standardized tests have become more prevalent schools have had to move further and further away from operating in ways compatible with the ways students learn.  Students learn and develop the same way I have grown and developed the past six years, the way I’ve grown and developed through the courses of all my various careers.  I was put into situations where I had to solve problems and learn from the failures and successes of the effort.  Even more important, I was given time and help to figure out why what I did was a mistake or success, and, if the former, how to do it better next time.  I engaged in the process because it was meaningful and both success and failure had consequences that meant something to me.

The noted educational philosopher, Tom Bodett, he of “We’ll leave the light on for you” fame, said, “The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”

More and more it seems we shield our children from life, from having experiences that have consequences, from taking responsibility for their successes and failures.  My great grandparents did hard, physical work and hoped for a better life for their children.  My grandparents did slightly less hard physical work and hoped for a better life for their children.  My parents did more intellectual than physical work and hoped for a better life for their children.  I do purely intellectual work and hope my now 16-year-old son has a better life than mine.

But I wonder if I am helping him develop the tools to do that.

He is great with kids, but he does not want to babysit.  He is big (6’4” and still growing!) and strong, but does not want to do physical work.  When I was a kid I didn’t get an allowance. If I wanted money I had to work for it.  My son gets $20 a week whether or not he empties the dishwasher or cleans the cat littler. When he doesn’t do it, my wife or I do.

Have I failed my son by not giving him larger responsibilities, by not giving him or allowing him to find tasks with real consequences for him?

I’m not talking about punishing him for not cleaning the cat box or paying him to do so.  When I was his age I dropped out of school to work on political campaigns because the election of those candidates and enactment of what they stood for had greater importance to me than parsing Moby Dick.  I was bored in school because it did not have meaning in terms of my needs.

My son is smarter than I am but his grades are worse than mine were even though he attends school every day and I rarely did.  He has grown up in a stable home with two parents that he knows love each other and him.  When I was 17, I moved out and lived on my own to get away from a very difficult family situation.  I had to earn $200 a month for my rent and money for food and clothes and other aspects of life.  My son has gone to camp for part of the summer for the past six years.  This year he is there for the whole summer because he has a paying job, his first. Maybe the $250 he earns this summer as the theater aide will teach him about effort and responsibility, and provide him with tasks that carry meaningful consequences of success or failure.

His parents haven’t done that and neither has his high school.  I think we’ve failed him in an important way.

Has education or the pursuit of it transformed you in a tangible way?

———————————————————————————————————————————–

By Deven Black

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Deven Black, Teacher Perspectives | 7 Comments »

A Career’s Worth of Lessons in 917 Words

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010
Prof. Owlson
Photo Attribution: PacoAlcantara

The end of the year is a special time for teachers. It is also an odd time. It is one we look forward to yet approach with some sense of apprehension, regret and longing.

Let me take those in reverse order. The longing is for the chance to retain those students we now have to say goodbye to.

My eighth grade class this year was very difficult. I missed the first five weeks on school due to an ill-timed knee injury and from my return on for the rest of the year it was a difficult relationship. Now that the year is at an end I am finally connecting with some of those students. I would love to have another year with them now that we have finally come to understand one another.
Not only did I miss the first five weeks, I was totally new to teaching eighth grade, to teaching general education students and to teaching social studies. I regret that I was not a better teacher for them.

As for the apprehension, that comes from one of the classes I will have to teach next year. This year’s seventh grade class was described, in an uncharacteristic bit of restraint from my colleagues, as the class from hell. Or perhaps that should be Hell. Or HELL.

They were a very challenging group. This year I was the only teacher in my academy not to have to try to teach them. I will not be so fortunate next year.

While I am not looking forward to them, I am looking forward to another year with this year’s sixth grade class. I will be their homeroom teacher as well as their social studies instructor.I have just completed my sixth year of teaching. I have taught a different subject, different grade level or both each year of my career. Next year I will have to know another new curriculum but at least I will already know the students I will have to teach.

One of the imperatives of the current education change (I refuse to call it reform) movement is to get rid of those teachers they deem to be ineffective.

I fear that I am one of those teachers.

But it is not my fault. Well, not totally my fault.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising every time we fall. Confucius.

Here’s why.
  • Effective teachers are those who have passion. I have passion.
  • Effective teachers are those who constantly strive to improve. I constantly strive to improve.
  • Effective teachers know their curriculum well and understand that they are not teaching it, they are teaching students. I know I am teaching students not curriculum, but I don’t know my curriculum thoroughly, at least not as thoroughly as I would after teaching with it a couple of years.
It is generally thought that it takes a teacher somewhere between three and five years to develop the competence and confidence to become a highly effective teacher. I should be there but I fear I am not.
I am likely not as good a teacher as my friend and grad school classmate Katy who has been teaching third grade in the same school for six years, nor am I likely to be as good as my friend Richard who has two years less experience than I but has taught the same subject and grades for his whole career.
Not me. My principals have had me teach a different grade, a different subject, or both each year of my so far six-year career.

When I was a student teacher I worked with a woman who had been a second grade teacher for twenty-four years. She was very good at teaching second grade. It is almost impossible to develop deep competence when one is confronted with change all the tine and I wonder how my host teacher would have done had she suddenly had to switch to fifth grade. I want to be an effective teacher. I try to be an effective teacher. I yearn to be an effective teacher, but circumstances far beyond my control have gotten in the way.

This is another problem with things like merit pay and judging teachers based on their students’ test scores; teachers need to be given the opportunity to succeed and the circumstances to take advantage of that opportunity. I am fortunate to have a principal who understands that it takes time to learn a curriculum and how to present it well. He has given me effective support when he can, but he gives me something more important, something I try to give my students.

He gives me room to fail without consequence to me. He understands that I will make errors; that I will have lessons that fall flat and create units that don’t quite accomplish what I wanted and thought they would. All he asks is that I reflect on, analyze and try to learn from my mistakes as well as from my occasional successes.

He thinks I am a good teacher because I try hard, learn constantly, question everything, and model for my students the process of getting up, dusting oneself off and trying again if things go badly at first. He understands that while many people can be good teacher or good students, no one will take the risks necessary to be great if only given one opportunity for success.

He doesn’t believe in high-risk testing, high risk observations of one-shot assessments. He believes that if given enough time, enough support, enough structure and enough opportunity everyone can succeed.

Even me.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Deven Black, Teacher Perspectives | 16 Comments »

« Older Entries