“It’s all about instruction.” People involved in school reform often say this, meaning that raising student achievement depends on improving the quality of instruction. I’ve said it plenty myself in several years of work in education law and policy, most recently at the Boston Plan for Excellence. But that was before I spent a year teaching math at Brighton High School in Boston.
Actually, I still think improving public schools is all about instruction. But I found out that a teacher’s life includes many things other than instruction. Indeed, on some days school felt like it wasn’t about instruction at all. It was about out-of-control student behavior that pushed teaching to the back burner. But even when students cooperated, their learning levels were so varied, and often so far below grade level, that it was hard to know what to teach. Finally, as I looked around for help, I discovered that schools- even the teaching profession itself- are not organized to be all about instruction at all.
So it may still be all about instruction. But it won’t be easy.
When I entered Brighton High in the fall of 2000, I was not naïve about the Boston schools. I had visited a lot of schools, and I knew about student performance in the city. I knew that the most recent MCAS scores showed 90 percent of 10th-graders at Brighton High failing the math exam. And I was going there to teach 10th-grade math.
Nevertheless, I was looking forward to talking to students about mathematics. I read through the textbook I was going to use and got excited thinking about basic concepts and what they mean, how to explain them. The way you could use a graph, with its x- and y- coordinates, to represent pairs of numbers seemed powerful and revelatory.
Reality came crashing down on Day One. “Absolutely brutal,” I wrote in the diary I kept that year. “I am exhausted, in a minor state of shock.” I recorded running from class to class (I was teaching in three different rooms during other teachers’ free periods), almost losing my voice, barely eating all day and not even noticing. “But what was really tough,” I wrote,”was all these kids.”
Ah, the kids. I was encountering, of course, the famous unruliness and alienation of kids in inner-city high schools. It wasn’t really all the kids. But there were enough students talking to each other, refusing to work, shouting rude comments at me or at one another, that teaching took a back seat to crowd control.
For the first couple of months, I struggled to establish a routine–a culture–in my classes: When you come in, start work on the exercise projected on the screen; never be afraid to ask a question; remember, you’re the first class of 10th-graders who have to pass the math MCAS to graduate. These were some of my maxims. There was more breach than observance, but even some observance meant a chance to do math rather than behavior modification.
The real goal was to get the kids intellectually engaged with the subject, whether geometry or MCAS prep, which were my two courses. I was too new a teacher to invent novel lesson plans, so I relied on thorough preparation with the materials at hand. And I tried to inspire as much class participation as I could. Motivation was too low and discipline too shaky to do much of the group work and hands-on exercises so often recommended by education writers. But I did hope to introduce students to the satisfaction of problem solving and to the internal logic–even beauty–of a mathematical system like geometry. What I didn’t figure out for several weeks was that many of my students had no idea what I was talking about.
This began to dawn on me when I gave a geometry test. My students took the test very seriously, though I had to give a couple of zeros for talking. (One of the year’s fascinating discoveries was that, for all their resistance to order and disdain for authority, a test was enough to get the vast majority of students working intently–and silently–until they exhausted their knowledge. I ended up giving a test every week, largely because it was the best way to generate the serious individual effort I knew was central to learning math.) The test covered several weeks’ worth of material, geometry basics like the characteristics of lines and points with a bit of algebra mixed in. The problems were provided by the textbook publisher, so there were no big surprises. The average score was a dismal 47 percent.
Reluctantly, I gave up hope of proceeding through the text on a plausible schedule in favor of what seemed more important: actually mastering something before moving on. We spent the next full week reviewing for a makeup test on the same material. As I graded the retest, my heart sank. One class improved slightly, the other did a bit worse. The average score overall was once again 47 percent.
It was pretty clear that many students weren’t learning anything at all. I began to see that some had never grasped the most basic concepts of math. They apparently had not been learning math for years.
The conceptual missing links could be as basic as subtraction. On my very last day at Brighton, I helped a girl review for a makeup test. A geometry problem we were working on eventually boiled down to a line segment divided into two unequal subsections. We knew the lengths of the segment and of the longer subsection, and we needed to find the length of the shorter subsection. I helped her draw a diagram, and showed her she could find the length of shorter section by taking the full length of the segment and subtracting the length of the longer subsection. She did this with her calculator, then measured the subsection with a ruler. She was intrigued to find that the answers were the same. The problem wasn’t that she hadn’t memorized subtraction tables; she did not understand what subtraction represented and why it was used.
While her case was extreme, many other students could not work comfortably with place value, decimals, negative numbers, or variables. In any class of 30 kids there would be no more than 10 who had enough command of the basics to excel in, or even struggle through, geometry. When I looked at the overall results of the second geometry test, I said to myself grimly, “I don’t know how to teach math, and they don’t know how to learn math.”
Where does a teacher turn to learn how to teach? This is a question relevant for all teachers, even those with the training and experience I lacked. The challenges, both to manage behavior and to develop techniques of instruction that can jump-start educational progress after years of stagnation, are too great for any teacher on his or her own. One way to find the answer might be in a faculty intensely focused, as a cohesive unit, on developing techniques of instruction that are equal to a challenge shared in common. One way might be for teachers to give each other feedback based on observation. Without such observation, learning to teach is like getting driving lessons by cellular phone.
Unfortunately, schools rarely provide this level of support for their staffs. Teachers work largely in isolation from their peers, cut off from the dialogue, knowledge, and accountability that supervision in other professions–law, for example–routinely offers. For teachers, the learning process is incomplete and intermittent, suggesting a discomforting parallel to the experience of many students.
I knew I would face that kind of isolation as a teacher, but nothing could prepare me for what I encountered in my assignment to teach MCAS prep, my other class, which was given in addition to the regular math course because of MCAS’s increased importance as a graduation requirement. No one had ever taught the class before, and there was no textbook, no curriculum, not even a course outline. There were some test-prep books from other states, old copies of the MCAS, a couple of classrooms of 10th-graders, and me, a first-year teacher.
The task of figuring out what my students needed and how to give it to them was gargantuan. And while I did find help, for which I remain grateful, it was too little for the job at hand and too specific to work in other situations. Through official channels, I was assigned a mentor teacher. He met with me weekly and was available on the phone whenever I needed help. His advice was insightful and practical. Unfortunately, due to the contractual and administrative procedures for appointing mentor teachers, the one assigned to me worked at a different school, and he was not able to watch me teach more than a couple of times during the whole year.
I made connections with other educators at odd moments, in odd places. Because I used the rooms of three other teachers during their free periods, those teachers would see bits and pieces of my classes from time to time, and I asked them for advice. A couple of times, a colleague generously gave up a free period to observe my teaching. And I would sometimes find my department head or principal in his office after school, and sit down to debrief. Their occasional observations of my teaching would often lead to useful discussions. But they were managing too many crises and too many people to engage intensively with any one teacher about instruction.
In this way, I discovered important sources of advice and moral support. They did not, however, amount to any kind of systematic induction into a profession. In the end, I was alone in a roomful of students, figuring out my craft as I went along. After every class, when the bell rang and everyone left, I would find myself wondering what I had said, what it had sounded like, and what had been going on in the different corners of the classroom that was, however nominally, mine.
To their credit, the Boston public schools and Brighton High were attempting to provide additional avenues for professional support focused on instruction. But these efforts were incomplete, and often took a back seat to other priorities. For example, Brighton’s math department met twice weekly. This represented a level of organized collaboration that went beyond the traditional high-school arrangement, in which teachers’ non-teaching periods would be duty-free or taken up by hall monitoring or other administrative duties. These meetings could have provided some opportunity for collaborative professional development. But mostly we talked about who would get graphing calculators or how certain tests would be administered.
The other professional development time in our calendar was formally allocated to issues unrelated to instruction. While I was there, Brighton High was preparing for reaccreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. As a result, the 18 hours of professional development time that could be scheduled flexibly was used for committee meetings and for drafting the multiple reports and self-studies the accrediting body required. I suppose reaccreditation serves some useful purpose, but no one became a better teacher during those so-called “professional development” hours.
In a way, living through a year of teaching in an urban public school reaffirmed my belief that schools really do need to be all about instruction. There is no pedagogical challenge greater than teaching these kids in these settings. And the demands of teaching in these schools are too ambiguous and too sophisticated for anyone to succeed going at it alone in a classroom. Teaching may be the key, but teachers need help.
My view broadened a bit as well. Daily battles with student behavior showed me that good school cultures are as necessary as teacher training in improving instruction. Schools can’t be all about instruction unless school culture–really, kid culture–allows instruction to take place. That means getting kids to channel their resentment of authority and their impulse to kick back and socialize into activities that, at the very least, don’t subvert the learning process.
At Brighton High, I learned at least one other big thing about education. Along with the agony and exhaustion, I experienced some of the deep joy that teaching offers. That joy comes from building relationships of trust with the students and from the occasional signs of educational progress. On November 1, according to my journal, a girl “who can’t stop talking and just giggles when I ask her to stop” raised her hand. When I called on her, she derived a formula for the sum of the interior angles of a polygon. Meanwhile, most of her peers–those who were paying attention–were asking, “what’s a formula?” Later, she told me she liked English, not math. But her strong reading skills helped her to understand mathematical syntax and, I believe, to deal with abstraction and definitions. She seemed to enjoy her growing mastery of what we were doing. Perhaps she liked me, as well. In any event, she started coming after school to work with me, and she became one of my favorite people at the school.
By mid-January, I turned some kind of corner. It was hard to define: There was still plenty of nutty behavior in my classrooms, but I had gained a little more sway over the students. Perhaps the more significant change, however, was how I felt about them. No longer terrorized by the thought of facing them assembled in unruly rows before me, I could genuinely find something to like in each of my students, and I was quite fond of many. They began to show more friendliness as well, and this made everything easier.
I left my year of teaching hopeful about these students and the many fine adults who work with them. While I’m afraid a fair number of students did not learn much in my class, some made clear progress. I could see it in their work. And I took some satisfaction in the decline in the failure rate on the 10th-grade math MCAS at Brighton High by 30 points (to 57 percent) last spring, even though this drop was paralleled around the city and state, and clearly had something to do with the students’ response to a test that actually “counts” for graduation.
But I also left sobered by how distant a teacher’s life is from being “all about instruction,” and how distant schools are from that goal as well. That distance is the road we are traveling toward education that really works for all our kids.
John K. DiPaolo is associate general counsel at Edison Schools in New York City.