Thinking about Roses in Concrete

On Oct 6-8, I attended a conference called "Strengthening Student Success: Assessment, Dialog and Change", hosted by the RP Group, which is the research and planning arm of the California Community College Chancellor's office.  This post is one in a small series of reflections from that conference.

Our keynote address the second morning was by Jeff Duncan-Andrade, an Oakland teacher and a instructor with the SFState Educational Leadership program.   You can view a version of his talk here:
Hope Required when Growing Roses in Concrete

Some salient moments from his talk:
1) Children exposed to racism, community- or home-violence, poverty and other factors are more likely to receive PTSD effects from these experiences because they are _less_ resilient than adults, but they are less likely to demonstrate these effects outwardly.  The fact that they hide it better creates an illusion of childhood resiliency.
2) Children who have experienced PTSD (post-traumatic, or perpetual traumic stress syndrome) are more likely to be misdiagnosed as ADD/ADHD, which means they may end up in educational and medical situations that exaccerbate, rather than heal, their injuries.
3) Chronically high cortisol levels (due to stress) are associated with Type II Diabetes, Hypertension, Heart Disease and Cancer
4) Black males in the United States are the _only_ group experiencing a general decline in life expectancy; racism is making us literally sick, leading to a disproportionate 83K extra deaths of black Americans than would be predicted by genetics or random factors alone.
5) Hope is the factor which can heal these painful wounds:  material hope, Socratic hope and audacious hope.
6) Teacher, do you do what you are asking your students to do?  Are we reflective enough to be on the painful path with our students?  Stare down the painful path and despite the cost, make the journey again and again.

MyThoughts and Reactions:
I was a K12 educator for 8 years before beginning my journey with community colleges.  In the high schools, when students were struggling, I had, and used, a large set of intervention techniques: calling parents, checking cumulative files, contacting the students' other instructors for insight, conferring with counselors, special education, ESL or school psychologists, asking to check attendance records and pulling the student aside to ask them what is going on.  One of my frustrations at the community college level is that all but the last of that list is appropriate.  There are privacy rules that make most of the other methods impossible, so often, I don't pursue when students are struggling.  I'd come to accept that they are adults now, and they need to own it and self advocate.

The problem is, many of them can't, for many of the reasons Duncan-Andrade mentioned in his talk.  They have spent, and perhaps still are spending, such energy on meeting basic needs that they aren't equipped to demonstrate the skills of a successful student.

Duncan-Andrade's talk reconnected me with some of my passion and roots within teaching:  I'm not just here to guide and to teach and to inspire, but I'm here to help and to love and to help them heal.  While I may not have the same kind of on-campus support system to draw upon, I can begin creating a database of resources to which I can refer students.  I can educate myself about the social services that exist that offer adults low-cost medical care, housing assistance, food, job placement and counseling options on campus, and in the community, so that I know where to send them.  If my school is partnered with an outside agency like the United Way (SparkPoint Center), I can familiarize myself with that as well.

His talk was also timely.  I was recently puzzling over how I can teach the same material in the same manner to two separate populations of students and receive such disparate non-solicited reviews.  One group things I'm top-notch, the other thinks I'm average.  After Duncan-Andrade's talk, answer is clear; the students who find me average need either different instruction, or greater assistance in other arenas so that they can become self-directed learners.  Now I just need to figure out how to offer them that.

Reflecting on Standards

There is a push towards the use of standards throughout the educational framework. At the community college level in California, we are calling this Student Learning Objectives, and may be based on campus wide goals (such as Effective Communication) or on more course-specific objectives. I personally see a need for more vertical communication and alignment around many of these standards. What competency on standards for math, language, and science should I expect my beginning students to have? Drawing from NCLB alone, I don’t come up with very clear, distinct answers.

The new bottom-up movement called the Common Core State Standards Initiative may offer a new approach. Rather than being directed from the federal level, like NCLB, these “national standards” are developed by state leaders, and individual states can adopt them and their accountability measures. My preliminary research suggests that California is “in”. I agree with Kepner (2010) that if this effort is to be effective, there is much that needs to happen before we are ready for national standards. There are a wealth of diversity and preparation issues prevalent across the United States, and I feel that it may first be critical to bring the lowest performing third of the states up closer to the mean of performance. This will require reform across the grade-levels and curriculum, teacher professional development and carefully designed accountability measures.

Like Kepner (2010), I am likewise wary of the possibility that national standards will lead to a lock-step approach. I feel that the best way to avoid this is perhaps by condensing content specific standards, and perhaps group standards around essential questions in a backward-planning approach. (Wiggins and McTighe, 2001) This should still allow some of the teaching freedom teachers typically thrive with.

Personally, I found the Key NCTM Process Standards to be worthy of posting NOW in my college classrooms. Many of my general education students struggle with these skills:
-Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them
-Reason abstractly and quantitatively
-Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others
-Model with mathematics
-Use appropriate tools strategically
-Attend to precision
-Look for and make use of structure
-Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning

Kepner, Henry S. 2010. Educated Opinions: A Math Perspective on the Common Core Standards Initiative. NSTA Reports Vol 21 No 9 (May 2010)

Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. 2001. Understanding by Design. Prentice Hall.