Designing Communities Of Learning - Crossing the Catwalk
Many years ago, while I was in university pursuing my undergraduate engineering degree, I supported myself by means of a variety of jobs. In one job, I worked as a framing carpenter for a remodeling company. There is a house I remember particularly, as we were adding rooms and a roof extension to part of it, and the homeowner also owned a black cat by the name of Zak. (Yes, that's actually how his owner spelled his name.) This cat was extremely friendly, to the point of being almost dog-like in showing affection, and he was not frightened by the sound of saws and framing hammers. Therefore he was a source of somewhat comic relief to me and my partners when we took our breaks and ate our lunch. During one afternoon break, we were sitting on the ceiling joists of our unfinished roof and we noticed the cat on the floor beneath, eying us. We wondered aloud between ourselves whether the cat would come to us if we called him. One of us called, "Zak," and lo and behold, the cat jumped up and began to climb the studs toward us, eventually walking on the joists and our recently constructed attic catwalk (no pun intended) until he reached us.
Obviously, this cat displayed behaviors that most people would consider to be atypical for cats. And yet such displays of affection, trainability, and desire for attention are not as rare as people might think. In fact, environmental factors can play a strong role in the development of such traits in cats, just as exposure to humans that are cruel, capricious or unpredictable can train cats to exhibit the behaviors that we deem more usual for cats - such as wariness, guardedness, and an unwillingness to allow strangers to come close.
In the United States, the public school system has conditioned itself to expect certain behaviors of youth, especially youth of color. The public school system has also set itself up to produce many of those behaviors in anyone who is unfortunate to be institutionalized by it. A neat (though unfortunate) example of self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? For the expectation of many teachers and administrators is that our youth are innately hostile and defiant, and therefore incapable of learning or of being taught. In order to confirm this expectation, these teachers and administrators set up an environment which is hostile toward the students it is supposed to educate, administered by adults who act like jailers, who don't know the subject matter they are supposed to be teaching, and who, worse yet, do not know how to show the kids the relevance to their students' lives of the things that are supposedly being taught. It is therefore not surprising that many children of color quickly become skeptical of schooling (if not downright hostile to it), and set their hopes of advancement on things other than learning the skills needed to engage in beautifully good work to meet pressing needs, that they be not unfruitful.
But it is also true that competent adults with good intentions can create environments which reverse the damage done by American public schooling and re-create a generation who possess a love of learning. This re-creation is a necessary prerequisite to motivating our kids to engage in the sustained, deliberate practice which produces expert performance in mathematics. And because deliberate practice is not something that most of us (especially children) naturally choose, motivating our kids to engage in this effort is somewhat like asking a cat that doesn't belong to you to climb wall studs and traverse ceiling joists and an attic catwalk to come to you. It requires a certain kind of cat - or a certain kind of connection between you and the cat. The good news is that a properly designed teaching environment can produce both the cat and the connection.
As the teachers of our North Portland group have looked at the constraining features of our teaching environment, we have come to certain conclusions in imposing our desired design on that environment. Our first conclusion has been that, because we cannot use negative constraints to produce desired performance from our students, we must therefore use a structured positive reward. The reward must be the sort that strongly appeals to a kid, a reward that has a clearly defined set of rules and procedures by which it may be won by a kid's good choices, and that has a clearly defined set of ways in which it can be lost by a kid's poor choices. The immediate feedback provided by seeing how a child's performance affects his or her acquisition of the reward is meant to provide each child with immediate proof that what we are asking our students to do is relevant to their lives. It should also be the sort of reward for which a kid has a fair amount of discretionary control over how he or she enjoys it.
With those features in mind, we created a "Welcome Packet" for students and their parents, in which we laid out our proposed reward system. My next few posts will describe the features of the Welcome Packet, and will describe how it has worked for us over the last few weeks.
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