This semester, I completed field observations at two
schools (for this and another class) with very different atmospheres and teaching
philosophies: we’ll call one Fine Southwest Metro-Suburban High School (FSMS)
and the other one Intense Selective Enrollment High School (ISE). FSMS is located 3 milies southwest of city limits, beats state levels of ISA proficiency by 1%, and has a demographic makeup of about 50% White, 35% Hispanic, 10% Black, 2% Asian, and 3% Two or More Races. ISE is a large CPS college preparatory school (over 90% of graduates will attend college) with a demographic makeup of about 40% Hispanic, 35% White, 10% Black, 10% Asian, and 5% Other. I was able to
observe some strong practices/norms and disciplinary practices in one of the
schools, and some in the other. To simplify it, I would say that FSMS’s
strengths were in the social and personal dimensions, while ISE’s strengths
were in the cognitive and knowledge-based dimensions.
ISE was ideal when it came
to disciplinary practices of science. The physics teacher I observe uses only
the curriculum from the American Modeling Teachers Association. This means that
she spends zero time lecturing on the board, and all the material is learned
through group work. She presents a physics problem with a novel concept, and teams
of students work to find solutions, writing their work on their team
whiteboard. After they’ve worked on the problem, they all look at the other
groups’ boards and have the opportunity to ask each other questions about why
they did what they did. This is how they introduce new concepts and learn the
material.
A huge strength of this method is that it encourages
the norm of multiple pathways to a correct answer. This is a fundamental piece
of scientific disciplinary thinking that gets lost with traditional lecture
methods to teach problem solving. It also fosters the norm of activating prior
knowledge, because prior knowledge is basically all the students have to work
with when they’re presented new problems. The modeling curriculum also
contributes to the social dimension of learning, in that the students do feel
like they’re on a team with each other, all working together to solve problems.
Other aspects of the social dimension, however, were
not as well developed at ISE. The sheer magnitude of material covered (there
was also nightly homework and weekly quizzes to be assessed and discussed) kept
the teacher very busy, and I noticed that there was minimal time for her to
interact with students on a human-to-human level. This is a shame, because the
modeling curriculum so perfectly sets up an environment in which the teacher is
on an equal playing ground in the discipline. There’s nothing wrong with being
efficient, but at the end of the day, I felt like this class was down to
business from before the bell rang to after it rang, so it was missing that
personal element that helps students fully engage.
As a very different experience, FSMS excelled in the
social and personal dimensions. The physics teacher I observed was spending 2
days teaching a lab that would have been a 10-minute lab at ISE, but this was
because at every turn there was an opportunity for students to interact with
each other, the teacher, and even me. The teacher was admirably open with them,
particularly about the fact that we had actually gone to that high school
together years ago. Murals of previous teachers painted by students hung on the
back wall of the room.
Some of my preferred norms of the personal dimension
were also practiced at FSMS. Three of the four teachers I observed there had no
deadlines on assignments and generous test retake policies. In addition to
that, students were encouraged to draw on and share their interests with the
class, which created higher engagement. For example, FSMS’s zoology class takes
weekly in-class trips to the zoo (FSMS shares a campus with it, so this is
easily doable) each week in which students observe an animal of their choice
within a given habitat, and they come back to the class to share what they saw the
animal doing. As the semester goes on, students start to develop distinct areas
of interest (e.g. one young man always goes to dog-related animals), creating a
classroom in which students value and draw on each other’s knowledge.
The active social dimension of FSMS really does make
it feel like a community, which makes it a shame that the academics were simply
not up to par with ISE. For example, while observing a physics lab at FSMS, I
noticed that about one third of the students (juniors and seniors) deeply
struggled with how to use and read a tape measurer, something that they just
really should be up to speed in. With the exception of the zoology class
mentioned, the classes I observed relied almost entirely on at-the-board
lecturing to cover material, which often falls short in meaningfully engaging
students cognitively.
In my mind, an ideal classroom would draw upon the
positive cognitive and knowledge-based dimensions of ISE and the positive
personal and social dimensions of FSMS. Where exactly this happy medium lies
would probably depend a lot on the school context.
