Kids with Differences- Part 1 Problems

I take on differences kids bring to with them to our classrooms and how we struggle with them.  Later episodes will turn this on its head and be about what we can learn from giving good attention to kids differences and how learning might flourish for all when giving the right kind of attention to difference.    

In this episode, I talk about retention, grouping, and kids who blow up the classroom.  Do share comments and questions.  

Thanks for listening

From the episode:

We have to be honest about what we can do and what we cannot do.  I have had too many conversations with teacher friends about how impossible their work is.  We have to say no to requests that set us up not to be at our best, that does not serve all kids and just as importantly damages us, makes us unsure, makes us feel like we are bad teachers.  This is a challenge because power structures in schools are very real.  But we need to not think of ourselves as workers in schools doing teaching work with principals as bosses, we need to think of ourselves as teachers, the main engine of the work of schools.  Engines that drive good learning, drive the mission of the school, purposefully and intentionally built to do good work.  But you as the engine of the good work of schools needs to be given the right maintenance, the right attention from all who need your good work.  When you are not cared for, when you are put to the wrong tasks, you cannot do what you have created yourself to do well, teach.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, thanks for listening. Thinking about the differences kids bring to a classroom. We could think about these differences as a problem or a useful challenge or as a wonderful opportunity. In this talk I will take on differences as a problem. I will save the goodness of useful challenge and the sweetness of wonderful opportunity for future talks. Differences in a classroom can be a problem, totally fair. It is not easy to teach a common curriculum to students who come to their learning in very different ways. When we have students in very different places in their learning, it is a struggle to bring them all to a satisfactory place. Teachers will often tell me of teaching a grade level where some kids are years behind and others years ahead. This comes up most often in literacy and in math. I have worked with a middle school language arts teacher where some of her students read at the third grade level and others are approaching college literature. She lives with the expectation that she should teach all of them well and grade level appropriately. She has been given an impossible task. Most of us believe we should try to reach all of our students. My personal motto has long been if they come through the door as my student, I teach them, and I teach them as well as I am able, all of them. That's a hard promise to keep, and I have not met my own promise too many times. But that ethic of care, that responsibility is something most of us carry. The problem is that we can be especially hard on ourselves when we believe that our teaching is failing some students, not the teaching that moves and grows them. We need to be more forgiving and put our martyr mirror back in the closet. It is a reasonable expectation to teach some range of students. Grade levels are institutional inventions. Kids don't come in tidy grade or age level boxes. You know this from your own experience. I heard from an expert on math education at a conference recently that a reasonable range of difference for our good teaching is two grade levels above or below what we define as grade level. How many of you can say that that range of difference is what you have in your classroom? The first problem is with the idea of grade level. Grade level is meant to be a marker of assumed prior learning and ability for students coming into your classroom. We have many bad fixes when students are not in a reasonable span of prior learning and ability when they come into a grade level class. The one that has been worked and reworked for generations is what we call retention. Think of the history of that concept. It is called retention now, but it used to be called being held back, and before that called flunking. The word retention sounds less terrible, but retention is still a stigma. Something is wrong with a child that they don't fit in the grade level system of our schools. I have taught hundreds of students, I retained one student my first year. Still wonder if that was the right decision. Never retained another. The other response to differences in learning and ability as a problem is grouping. I have, like most of you, experimented with different grouping structures. As much as grouping might seem a reasonable approach to managing differences, grouping comes with stigma as well. Kids know what each group means. They know that they are being defined as behind or ahead by how the groups are organized. I will offer a hard truth here, one that some may disagree with. Kids in the lowest groups are too often taught as if they are broken somehow, not in ways that recognize their capabilities. Alternatives are tricky. My mother in law Joyce formed an alternative school for the years kindergarten through third grade, and there were no grade levels. Kids moved to what was being taught by interest and appropriate ability. Not easy, but a reimagining of grade levels. As a kid in fourth grade, I experienced being moved to a sixth grade class for reading time. I didn't quite get it, so they moved me to a fifth grade class. The trouble with kids moving to other classes is that they lose a sense of place, a home with their peers and with one teacher. But there is another kind of difference, not differences in skill or ability, but differences in how kids come to their learning. We came to call this learning styles for a while, but that was a problem from the start. A student's learning style is not a prescription for how they should be taught. Tailoring all to a student's learning style deprives them from learning how to learn in other good and worthwhile ways. Learners have a lot of potential in them. We should open up that potential and not restrict our work with them to some essentialized notion of who they are and how they learn. We think much more about neurodiversity these days. In the past, kids whose thinking worked differently than most were segregated from the greater number of students who were understood to be more what we call normal. There is more effort to be inclusive, and that is better for everybody. A couple of years of my teaching I had students in my fifth grade regular egg class who were autistic. We were working at full inclusion. A wonderful woman was a full time assistant for those students. I don't know that I did well by the autistic students in my class. I learned a lot from the experience. One was a gift from my other students. I was out one day and a substitute teacher took over my class. I came back the next day, and one of my regular ed students came up to me right away. She told me that the substitute had used the word retarded when confronting one of the regular ed students for misbehaving. The student telling me this was really offended, plainly concerned for her autistic peers in her class. I later confronted the sub about this, and he no longer came to our school. What I learned was that all my students were learning about neurodiversity because of this inclusion, learning the kind of care and consideration we should give to all the ways people come to their learning. I am no angel. In a later year the school principal came to me and asked me to take on a special needs student who was displaced from another program. I said that I would be happy to, provided that the student had the support of an aid. The principal said no, the child would not have the support of an aid. I said I would not take the student on. It would not be good for that student or for me. There are many good things I am able to do in my teaching, but I am not all things, and I am not a savior. What that student needed was the right circumstance with a right capable teacher. That was not me. This takes me to another challenge for our teaching when to say no. We don't do that well. I know you want to do right by all of your students, but you alone are not the right teacher for all kids. That's just the truth. Some of you have had a kid that just blows up sometimes. I have seen this happen in visits to classrooms. I've heard tell of kids who harm other kids or the teacher, kids who destroy things in the classroom, classes that have a standard evacuation policy should one kid blow up. Yes, the teacher and the other kids leave the room as if it were a fire drill, leave the one child alone in the classroom and have the principal come to do something with that child. Not good. When I talk with these teachers, I always ask how this is allowed, and they tell me it's the rules. The child needs to be observed, kept in a regular egg class as much as possible. I may be on the wrong side of things, but this seems all wrong. In an effort to maybe do right by one child, one dangerous and out of control child, the kids in a classroom and their teacher must suffer and at times be harmed. I go back to the lesson about neurodiversity that my student taught me. What are the kids in these classrooms learning? They might be learning that including some kids is not good, that they are not safe and that school has made it that way. To me it is plain that some students need something very different. They need a kind of care and support that will not simply appear when they are placed in a regular egg class. I worry that what is really happening is that schools don't know how to do that work for some kids, or just don't have the people or resources to do right by that hard kit. Schools rightfully lean into inclusion these days for the many different ways kids come to their learning. They lean heavily on classroom teachers to make this happen. There is so much more thoughtfulness and training to do right by a diversity of students. But it is unfair to assume that a classroom teacher can do all the right things by any student. Too often it is expected that the classroom teacher is somehow superhuman and can do right by all kids. Tie this to teacher's own sense of obligation to do whatever it takes for all kids, teacher as martyr, and you have the mix that sets up the possibility of the wrong kid in the wrong class. I get back to saying no. We have to be honest about what we can do and what we cannot do. I have had too many conversations with teacher friends about how impossible their work is. We have to say no to requests that set us up not to be at our best, that does not serve all kids, and just as importantly damages us, makes us unsure, makes us feel like we are bad teachers. This is a challenge because power structures in schools are very real. But we need to not think of ourselves as workers in schools doing teaching work with principals as bosses. We need to think of ourselves as teachers, the main engine of the work of schools, engines that drive good learning, drive the mission of the school, purposefully and intentionally built to do good work. When you are not cared for, when you are put to the wrong tasks, you cannot do what you have created yourself to do well, teach. Take care of yourselves. Your teaching will be better for it, you will be better for it. Thanks for listening.