Cycle Two: Challenges and Opportunities in Building Classroom Communities

“Ms. I’m on the D team. I'm not going to college. Only A team kids go to college.”

A student said this to me last winter after we had discussed college in our advising period. A few weeks earlier a different student asked me how she could move to the A team, she said she wanted to go to college and she thought she had to be on the A team to be able to go.

Two years ago when we decided to move to a teaming structure I was excited. We were a large middle school with over 1,000 students in grades 6-8. Creating teams so students could share the same teachers and build a community within their team made sense.  Instead of having to check to see which English teacher (A, B, C, or D) a student had, I would know that they had English teacher D and math teacher D. It seemed like a good way to make things simpler and make a big school feel more like a small one.

When we started this up I, naively, thought that the students would be distributed randomly, much like teachers at a small school end up whoever comes to the school. I quickly discovered this was not the case.  Instead it was decided that we would have four teams. One team would have all the kids who received special education services, to make it easier for the special education teachers to co-teach. Another team would teach all the advanced classes. A third team would take on the English Language Learners so they could provide sheltered instruction and work with the ELL teachers. A fourth team was added for the kids who didn’t fit under those categories. I understood the reasoning behind this, I didn’t like it, but I understood it. It was easier. Next the teams were named: A, B, C, and D. The advanced classes went to the A team. The kids who didn’t necessarily fit into a category became the B team. The students receiving services from special education became the C team, and finally the ELL’s became the D team. If you’re thinking that the names look like the grades the students on those teams were expected to get, you are not the only one.

If you are thinking that this is blatant tracking, again you’re not the only one. There are piles and piles of evidence that show that tracking is not helping our students, in fact it is harming them. Check out Keeping Track, Part 1: The Policy and Practice Of Curriculum Inequality for detailed information.

The article Modern-Day Segregation in Public Schools makes the argument that tracking became a way to segregate schools after direct segregation was outlawed by Brown V. Board of Education, something that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights agrees with and is trying to fix. This article also argues that this segregation is based again on race. I did not see much segregation based directly on race in my school, primarily because at least 90% of the students in the school were students of color. However, I did see direct segregation based on the language spoken at home (which correlates with race) and indirect segregation based on socio-economic status.

This was done at my school primarily to make things easier for the teachers. This is the same argument you will generally hear in favor of tracking. There is some validity to it, tracking can in some ways make some things easier for teachers. That, however, is not enough to justify doing something that is causing harm to our students.

Additionally, I don’t believe that making “things easier” for teachers is the real reason behind tracking. If that was our end goal we would decrease class sizes, hire more paras to assist, pay teachers more, etc. That’s not the end goal behind tracking. The end goal behind tracking is to keep the status quo. To keep our communities segregated and to exclude people from joining the community in our country who hold the vast majority of the power. The 1%. People of color, people who didn’t grow up with money, people who have immigrated here, are not wanted within 1% (or even really the top 20%).

I’m not saying that people in my school were directly trying to keep people segregated and lesson the opportunities they have because of one or more of their identities. Many of the people who are pro-tracking are not directly trying to do this. This does not, however, change the fact that it is happening regardless of intent.

Educational philosopher Gary Fenstermacher wrote that, "using individual differences in aptitude, ability, or interest as the basis for curricular variation denies students equal access to the knowledge and understanding available to humankind." That is exactly the goal of tracking. To deny people access to knowledge and to keep the status quo within communities across the country. It’s time we recognize this and make change so that all students can have equal access, so that all students can go to college if they want to, regardless of what “team” they are on. 

Cycle One: Interpretations of the Meaning and Causes of Failure

Failure. The very word can induce anxiety; cause my chest to tighten and my breath to speed up. Throughout my time in school the goal was always to get as many points as I possibly could on every assignment. Just the letter F inspired fear. The thought of seeing that letter, circled in red, on even one assignment terrified me. I couldn’t even think about failing a class. I was an A/B student. I didn’t get F’s. I was going to college and I wasn’t going to fail. End of story.

That was my life throughout high school. I can’t tell you a single thing I learned when I took advanced chemistry in 11^th grade, but I can tell you I got an A in the class. I don’t think I understood much of it, but I knew how to play the game and how to get the 90 something % on an assignment. The fear of failure was double sided. On the one hand, it got me though school. I graduated with a 3.9 gpa and a scholarship to college. That same fear also prevented me from really learning some of the subjects I studied because I was too scared to risk a lower grade for a shot at deeper understanding.

This fear of failure is prevalent throughout our society. Inside of schools we work to ward off failure. We have made failure into the ultimate negative. This mindset does not leave us room for multiple attempts at something or for trying something that may or may not work.  We have developed a culture of grade grabbing where students try to amass as many points as they possibly can on every assignment.  

I am now a teacher. It is my job to assess if students pass or fail. That is a power I have always felt uncomfortable with. I can tell you if my student made progress or not. I can tell you if their understanding and their skills have grown. But to say that they pass or that they fail. I struggle with that. If I have a student who goes from earning a 10% on a test to a 50%, I am technically supposed to say that he failed. But to me that’s not failure. The student made 40% growth; he in theory knows 40% than he did when he started. How can we call that failure?

So what is failure? Webster’s defines failure as a “lack of success.” A lack of success. Okay, that definition doesn’t sound so scary, so what’s so bad about failure? The phase “a lack of success” seems innocuous enough and it certainly doesn’t sound like something deserving of a panic attack. A lack of success seems like something you move though and then continue on. Failure sounds much more permanent.

Now, let’s go back to that student of mine from earlier. He went from a 10% to a 50%. Is that a lack of success? I don’t think so. He may not understand or be able to do all of it yet, but I would not call that a lack of success. I would call that progress.

Does this structure work? I don’t believe it does.  

Great discoveries and works throughout history have almost always, if not always, involved failure. How many inventions wouldn’t exist if someone out there was too afraid of failure to take a risk? How many books would not have been written, and songs not sung because someone gave up at the first sign of failure?

What are our students missing while they try to accumulate points? What are our students not learning? There are a wide variety of studies and articles that show that failure enhances learning. I’m not going to make that point here, if you want to read if you can check out Failure Is Essential to Learning or The Benefits of Failure.

So how can we take that and apply it to the context of our schools? How can we provide our students the chance to fail without “failing.” How can we give them those opportunities in a system that grades everything they do?

Giving them this is not simple, tweak one thing kind of work.  To make this work for our students we are going to need to change our very system. It’s time to get rid of the “F” and the meaningless percentages. One way we can do this by moving to standards based grading. Standards based grading is based on the principle that students are assessed on the various standards they need to learn to move on to the next course. Students use a variety of ways to prove that they are proficient at each standard. A key piece of this is that students can keep trying and more towards proficiency without being punished for not knowing something yet.  The article “Seven Reasons for Standards-Based Grading” provides strong support for this type of system, including showing how standards based grading provides grades that actually have meaning and how it gives everyone involved (teachers, parents, and the students themselves) much more information about what the student knows and can do.

I personally would have learned more under a system like this that would have allowed me to fear failure less and learn more in the process. A 94% on a test covering a variety of topics only showed me that I knew how to take a test. It didn’t really show what pieces of chemistry I understood and which ones I still needed to work on. We need to shift to give our students this type of feedback. The failure and feedback that will help them grow and take risks and learn more than they ever thought possible.

Introductory Post –TE 823

Hello all, My name is Rose Pompey and I have been teaching three and a half years. I attended the University of Northern Colorado, where I majored in Social Science/Secondary education and completed an endorsement in Teaching English as a Second Language. I graduated in December of 2013 and started my teaching career immediately by accepting a position teaching ESL at a high school in Greeley. After that semester I moved down to the Denver metro area where I spent three years teaching middle school social studies in Aurora. At the end of month I am moving to the other side of the Denver metro area (the NW rather than the SE) where I will be teaching 8th grade social studies at a middle school in Arvada. All of my time teaching has been spent working with highly impacted populations, including students of color, students receiving free/reduced lunch, English Language Learners, and students receiving special education services.

 Outside of work I read extensively, I have two cats, and I like riding my bike. I also enjoy spending time with friends and family. This year I spent the first week of summer in Washington DC with a group of 8th grade students, which I loved. Two weeks I ago I went to Denver Comic Con with some friends from college and at the end of the month I am moving, so I have been attempting to pack and clean. I am taking three classes, which will leave me with just two more to finish up next summer before I can graduate. I have also been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on hulu, I highly recommend it.

 The number one work of art that situates my values and motivations as a teacher is Star Trek. For those of you who may not be familiar with Star Trek it is a collection of five (soon to be six) TV series and 13 movies. The series is set in the future where the people of Earth live in harmony with races from other planets in The United Federation of Planets. In Star Trek poverty, and even the need for money, has been eliminated. In the words of Captain Picard “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” (Star Trek: First Contact). This is why I teach. I teach so that we can work to better ourselves and our society and move towards something like the federation depicted in Star Trek. I believe that every student has the capacity to learn and the right to an education. I teach to ensure that every student gets access to that education.