Going through the motions of middle school reform

STRUGGLING TO TEACH DIFFERENTLY AT ALTON PARK

(Editor's note: Alton Park Middle School is an inner-city school in one of Chattanooga, Tennessee's poorest neighborhoods. This piece was written in the Spring of 1995 .)

"In middle schools generally, and in middle school reform in particular, teachers and administrators base too many decisions on unsupported assumptions and gain comfort from merely implementing any reform initiative. In an environment rampant with second-guessing and desperate for optimism, it is natural for teachers and administrators to want to feel good about new efforts to improve their skills or better serve students. However, if we really want to serve students well, we will make greater efforts to ask hard questions about the results of our reforms, and whether students are performing better because of them." -- Hayes Mizell, Assessment in Middle Schools, June 1994

by Barnett Berry

Seventeen energetic students line up to enter Ms. Jones' (not her real name) 6th grade class at Alton Park Middle School. They look eager to learn. Mrs.Jones' orders are loud and clear.

"No talking in line, make sure your shirts are tucked in," she barks. A student whispers, "One word in the line and you are in detention."

Ms. Jones' military-like discipline seems a little out of place at the beginning of class where the students will spend the next 90 minutes involved in a Socratic seminar -- the method chosen by the Chattanooga schools to help students hone their analytical thinking by participating in a structured but lively group discussion of important topics.

The classroom is comfortable and the walls are decorated with student work, mostly poems and short essays. Each student quickly finds their seat at tables arranged for small group work.
"Make sure your pencils are sharpened, be quiet, and get to work on your short shot," Ms. Jones instructs her students. "Short shots" are mini-activities designed to reinforce a particular language or math skill that students have been learning. Middle school classrooms across the district use them at the beginning of a class period. One important purpose of the "short shot" is to drill students on material similar to test questions they are likely to encounter on TCAP -- Tennessee's annual spring testing program. TCAP is the state's (and the school district's) primary method of judging student achievement and school progress.

The students busily get to work on an analogy that relates to a recent unit the class did on Egypt.

* * * * * *
ANALAGY: CHATTANOOGA: TENNESSEE = EGYPT: (AFRICA)
PYRAMID: TOMB= GRAVE: (COFIN)
* * * * * *

The students are expected to provide the correct words in the parentheses, but Ms. Jones soon writes in the answers for them, without discussing the relationships between the words or even what an "analogy" is. None of the students notice (or point out) that Ms. Jones has misspelled "analogy" and "coffin."

A visiting teacher who has come to help Ms. Jones with the seminar doesn't mention the mispellings either. She tells us later that "the 6th grade seminar program is outstanding here--we are making good progress and even our test scores are better."

But on this particular day the seminar is far from the kind of activity imagined by the district's seminaring advocates, who have been working for several years to spread the seminar approach from the city's Arts and Sciences and Liberal Arts magnet schools to all middle schools in the system.

"Let's go over the rules of seminar," Ms. Jones orders in a loud voice. The students dutifully chant in unison, reading from a poster tacked to the wall.

"We are courteous."

"We listen to one another."

"We share our point of view."

"We avoid sarcasm."

"We learn together."

"We focus on the common text."

"What does common text mean?" asks Ms. Jones. No one answers.

"It means we stay on the main idea ," she says. Then she asks LaShonna to read today's "common text," a poem called "Until I Believe In Me."

The eight-line poem begins, "God gave me many talents and a choice of what I can be. But I will amount to nothing unless I can believe in me...But my dreams will be empty wishes until I believe in me..."

"Well," Ms. Jones asks, "Do you believe in yourself?" The class is silent. Slowly, a few answer "yes" quietly.

"Do you think that if you believe in yourself then you will do well on TCAP?" asks Ms. Jones. A few students mumble. Tonya asks, "What do you mean?" Patricia answers, "If you believe in yourself and if there is a hard question on the test you will still try."

It soon becomes apparent that today's lesson is not about analyzing a text and using the text to build group problem-solving and complex language skills. It's really an attempt to somehow boost Alton Park's TCAP scores which have been depressingly low every year.

Ms. Jones' seminar style is less "socratic" than it is a "call and response." As quickly as a question is asked, an answer is provided, and another question is put forth. No attempt is made by Ms. Jones or her visiting colleague to help students "see connections" in what they say and what is described in the text (however weak it may be as a discussion starter).

Several minutes later, Ms. Jones asks-referring to the text for the first time in the lesson- "What does the poem mean by empty wishes?" Several students answer, but no one refers to the text, and again, no attempt is made by Ms. Jones or her visiting colleague to assist them in doing so, despite Rule Six: We focus on the common text.

"These are all very good answers," Ms. Jones assures the students, without trying to help them understand why their answers are "good."

If students lose enthusiasm for a question, another one is posed. "What are your talents?" asks Ms. Jones, referring to the first line in the poem. No one answers. About 20 seconds pass. Still, no one answers.

The visiting teacher jumps in. "Lets do round-robin, we want to know your talents." A round-robin appears to be a routine to get all the students "around the room" to respond.

"Let's start with Mark," Ms. Jones suggests. "Come on Mark, we can't hear you. I sure hear you in the halls everyday."

Mark responds that his greatest talent is "flipping."

The next student says "drawing." The next, "basketball." Then others respond with "running," "football," "running," "playing Sega," "art." The one-word responses continue around the room until everyone speaks.

The exercise has drifted far from the ideal of "socratic seminaring." Instead, it's taken on the characteristics of a group therapy or counseling session. Not once has a student referred to the text. Not once has there been an attempt by the teachers to help the students elaborate on their answers, especially in terms of the poem's content .

The class shifts into another mode.

"Let's now write our own poem," says Ms. Jones. "Let's call it 'I Believe In Me'." The students dutifully pull out their paper and pencils. No directions are provided. No specifications for developing a poem are discussed. No connections are drawn between the exercise and the "common text."

The students write quietly and proudly. Several show their papers to Ms.Jones and two students read their work to the class.

This is why I believe in myself
I believe in myself because I
can do what I want
to do without them
telling me what to
do. This is why
I
Believe in
myself
and
I like to
use my talents
in football, basketball
and that is why
I believe in
myself

-- Mark

I believe in myself
to be a footbal star
so I can accomplis my dream
and be one of the greatest
football stares every. So I can
get rich. An give to the poor
so they can accomplis
their dream. That is why
I believe in

-- BJ

The students' work reveals that they have been taught some aspects of poetry. And the poems reflect something important about the lives they lead. The teachers and the students think the seminaring went well.

"This was a good seminar," the visiting teacher commented to us as we left the room. "The students had a chance to express themselves and they wrote."

"I liked the class because I could write," Mark whispered as he left the class.

But so much was missing from the lesson. First of all, the lesson was really a superficial attempt to motivate students to "get up for TCAP"-- as if "getting up" would somehow make it possible for the students to answer more math or social studies questions correctly.

(The class took on an aspect that we often see as teachers and schools try to raise the level of academic conversation with their students: the lessons often turn into self-esteem sessions aimed at convincing students they're as good as anybody. And there's nothing wrong with self-esteem. Combine a good dose of self-esteem with a solid academic base and you can go a long way.)

Both teachers had some training in Socratic seminaring. In fact, records reveal that they have had more seminar training than most middle school teachers. But the activity we observed had little in common with true seminaring.

Both teachers are considered good teachers at Alton Park. And perhaps they are -- our limited visit did not give us enough information to make a sweeping judgment.

Like many of their colleagues at Alton Park and in other schools, they struggle to teach differently. But the school and the district -- like most across the nation -- have yet to create the kind of critical review system necessary for seminaring and other innovative teaching strategies to take root and grow.

Chattanooga is moving in that direction. The district's Socratic Seminar Study Group has just begun a series of district-wide seminars where all teachers work with the same "common text," sharing some planning time and discussing the results. The district has plans to review the results of this seminar school-by-school and make some judgments about the progress of the Socratic seminaring program. Unfortunately, several months have passed since the first districtwide seminar took place, and the review has yet to take place. Everyone is very busy.

For reform to take root and grow, the reviews of seminaring (and other innovative classroom practices) must be regular and be subjected to intense (and in some cases immediate) scrutiny by those who know how it should be done. Without this kind of review, school reform has no chance to succeed.

America's public schools have never lacked for good ideas that could improve student achievement. Where efforts have failed so many times before has been in the doing -- in providing the follow-up support that is critical when people are trying to change.

If the leaders of the Chattanooga public school system can't break this cycle, they too will fail.

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