Harkness, Texas

It is time, I think, to reclaim the nobility of teaching.

I spent some time over my Christmas break reading the work of William Chandler Bagley. He was an outspoken critic of Dewey, I learned later, but what drew me to him was not this fact. It was his title, Craftsmanship in Teaching, that drew me in. Bagley argues that teaching is not a profession like medicine and law. Those are fields of expertise that are practiced in some way or other for the good of another. Teaching is a craft—a measurable set of skills that the teacher works, like an artisan, to mold and shape a product. That product is a well-educated human being.

This is jarring language because I’ve always thought of teaching as a profession. It’s also jarring because on the surface it reduces students to an object, a thing produced. For all that, there is something that resonates with my experience of teaching here—namely that the teacher has tools and her disposal that allow her to shape her students into something else. If this is what we do, if we are not merely experts in our fields of studies, then there is something to the idea that teachers are involved in a craft rather than a profession.

The reason Chandler elevates what he calls this “craft spirit” is because artisans take pride in their work. They relish what they create and they enjoy the satisfaction of being able to do it well. They submit to the process of mastering their craft. They work tirelessly to improve and perfect what it is they know how to do. In short, they embrace the nobility of the work itself.

Teachers often do not. This is as true now as when Chandler first wrote in the early 20th century. Our public discourse is full such talk. Teaching is by turns an easy option for the untalented and the hardest thing anybody has ever done. It’s a job that demands little and that can be done poorly with impunity, thanks to labor unions. Either that or it means long hours, sacrifice toil, danger, and little pay. It’s either a cakewalk or a drudge depending on who you’re asking.

The narrative of drudgery is intended to counter the assumption that teaching is easy, undemanding work. Every teacher knows this isn’t the case. Teaching is exhausting. Secondary school teaching wears me out in a way teaching college never did. It doesn’t even come close. It does mean long hours and taking work home for many and the pay isn’t perhaps what we would always hope.

But the narrative of drudgery prompts the simple question: why do you do it? And any truly committed teacher can answer that one in a heartbeat. It is the best thing you’ve ever done. You do it for love. You do it for the joy that comes from leading your class and watching them grow.

Even this caveat makes satisfaction sound like a by-product or an afterthought. We sound like addicts. We are people who do a job that no one else wants to do because we don’t have other options or because we are chasing an elusive teaching high. The lot of us sound self-destructive or self-sabotaging. Maybe worse, we sound like martyrs—people who want everyone to recognize the sacrifice we don’t really have to make and wouldn’t if we didn’t have options.

Chandler argues that what teachers need is to reclaim the nobility of what we do. He makes the point that no one will respect us before we respect ourselves. We must have standards for ourselves and one another—and I don’t mean testing. I mean that we must call ourselves and one another to excellence. We must do our jobs and speak about them in a way that impresses the observer and the listener with a sense of the craft of teaching. It isn’t something just anyone could do, after all. No one can do it alone. And no one can pick it up without serious attention to craftsmanship.

In some small way, that’s what I think I’m trying to do here. With that in mind, I’m embarking on a series of Friday reflections that draw out what is good, true, and beautiful about teaching.

One of the features of my class is the Harkness Hall of Fame, reserved for Harkness discussion so awesome, they ought to live on in our collective memory for at least a few weeks. So far, I have inducted five discussions on the strength of their Harkness ovals–an observer form where students chart the movement of discussion by drawing lines to the next person who speaks on an oval chart.

Of the five discussions inducted, four have been freshman classes. The most recent happened more or less by accident. I wasn’t expecting much because I asked them an odd multi-part prompt that didn’t seem very promising.

Who was Tiglath-Pilesar III and what did he accomplish?

Who was Sargon II and what did he accomplish?

This seemed fairly unpromising although it was necessary for the sake of the material. Before I knew what was happening, I was witnessing a positively excellent discussion in which the group moved easily and confidently through the material and arrived at the answers to each question. Everyone participated evenly and the content of the discussion was sound.

This is a sure sign of their progress and they are beginning to develop some real leadership among themselves, which I’d like to write more about soon. But for now, I have two observations.

First, they’ve mastered so many of the basics that it’s now time for me to push them a little farther. I’ll have to think about where to take them next but I think a thematic prompt is probably the right direction.

Second, their discussion improved greatly when they stopped using the board.

My classes use the board a lot. Typically they appoint a board note-taker. And this has been really helpful for getting them into the nuts and bolts of the chapter so they don’t stay at the conceptual level and forget to, I don’t know, actually learn some facts.

The trouble is that the board can easily become a distraction. It shifts the focus of discussion. I’m not at the center, which is good, but the class stops functioning as a table at some point.

The boardwork we’ve done is intermediate, I’ve decided. It centers them around the facts and details of the chapter. But when they’ve mastered it, they can elevate their discussion best by putting aside the board and, simply, talking to one another.

More goodness from William Bagley Craftsmanship in Teaching:

And so I repeat that the true test of the teacher’s fidelity to this vow of service is the degree in which he loses himself in his pupils–the degree in which he lives and toils and sacrifices for them just for the pure joy it brings him (or her). Once you have tasted this joy, no carping sneer of the cynic can cause you to lose faith in your calling.

Today my freshman convinced me that we should spend ten minutes watching ridiculous videos on youtube. I went along with it because we just had an assessment–they wrote an in-class essay on evolving ideas about kingship–and we have a test coming up next week. They get stressed. They get tired. They need a little bit of a release.

I had a conversation with a colleague last week about children learning and how important it is for them to learn like children, as children. And I’m glad my classroom is a place where they can be goofy sometimes. And I think it’s hugely important for them to have that opportunity.

I get more work and better quality work from them when we take time to be silly together. It’s a consistent truth. You cannot push them every moment. They will break.

So today we took ten minutes and we watched videos of people drinking hot kool aid and shouting about the pronunciation of the word milk. We had fun. And as a teacher, I don’t think I’ve ever regretted taking a few minutes for that.

Today’s inspiration is from William Chandler Bagley’s Craftsmanship in Teaching, published in 1915. Bagley was a critic of John Dewey. I highly recommend his work.

This morning’s wisdom:

The keynote of service lies in self-sacrifice–in self-forgetfulness, rather,–in merging one’s own life in the lives of others. The attitude of the true teacher in this respect is very similar to the attitude of the true parent.

I’m a day late. You don’t mind.

Crafting questions is a major part of my job. As a teacher in a Harkness classroom, I have to develop prompts that will stimulate conversation and guide students to the understanding of the material I want them to get.

In a way, lecturing would be easier. If I could just tell them what they  needed to know, then they’d know it. Right? Right??

Well, no. Actually. They won’t understand it the same way they would if they figured it out together around the table. And that isn’t going to happen if I don’t write a really solid prompt.

A good prompt should refer students to their texts. It should refer to something thick enough that it takes time to figure it out. In other words, it should not be something they can easily look up or that has a short, simple answer.

Students should be prepared for these prompts by their homework and class reading. In other words, my best scenario is a prompt that students can readily break down into its constituent parts–something I help them with in the lower grades–and can then spend time chasing out all the relevant details.

An example from my class this week:

Describe changing ideas about kingship in the societies we have studied so far this semester.

These were 9th graders, so I led them through breaking this down. We had China, India, and Israel on the table. They spent the rest of the hour getting their heads around the various ways kingship can be approached socially and culturally.

Our conversations around school recently have touched on Bloom’s Taxonomy and the cognitive development of adolescents. You can learn about Bloom here. Learning progresses from lower level skills to higher level:

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

It’s important that we give them tasks they can manage and it’s important that we stretch them into new skills. It’s also important that we think 12-9, by which I mean we need to think about what we want our 12th graders to be able to do and then work on how to build that from 9th grade forward.

This week, I’ve been working a little bit on building from 9-12 in Harkness prompts. If we move from the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy to the top, it should look like this:

9th Grade — Knowledge and comprehension are central to what I work on with my 9th graders. When I’m going over homework with them, I ask plenty of knowledge-level questions. What came next? And then what happened? And many of my Harkness prompts engage comprehension. Last week, my freshman classes spent a long time working on summarizing a chapter in their own words.

Application is their stretch skill. And in fact, my most recent Harkness prompt, quoted above, can be understood in these terms. Asking them to take a look at the concept of kingship in several societies is asking them to apply abstract information across contexts.

In hindsight, I wish I had given them a thick definition of kingship to work with but it still works. This is their main stretch skill.

10th Grade — Knowledge, comprehension, and application are essential to what we do but here we also add analysis. Analysis is primarily about breaking down ideas into constituent parts. In my class, this frequently looks like asking students to identify contributing factors or to consider, among the factors presented, what might be the root cause of an event or development.

A prompt for this level would look like:

What factors contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire? Of these, which do you think was most significant?

This is the skill I most want them to acquire at this level. By this time, knowledge and comprehension should come easily. Application should be a developing skill. Analysis is entirely new for them and could at times be a stretch.

11th Grade — On the cusp between 10th and 11th grade, we find synthesis. When they’ve analyzed an issue completely, it is time to formulate a new synthesis. In other words, once you break a problem down and identify factors, root causes, or motives, it’s time to put the pieces back together in a new way.

I think here it’s also worth asking student to imagine what might have been different. What if things had been different at the end of the empire? What if the factors we’ve identified were altered? What could this or that leader have done differently to change the outcome? These imaginative questions seem like they might be productive at this age.

But the heart of synthesis is creative. It’s about putting together an original idea based on the things that have been understood and analyzed already. I don’t think cognitively or educationally that they are ready to do this kind of work until they’ve reached this level. I could be wrong about that but it’s what I think right now.

I would place a prompt like this one in this category:

What was lost when Rome fell?

12th Grade — I don’t teach this level but this is where we arrive at evaluation. They aren’t ready to evaluate what should have happened, what someone ought to have done, or to criticize what took place until they’ve built up the skills described in 9-11th grades.

Evaluation is useless before the issues and events in question have been thoroughly understood.

I don’t teach this level but if I were teaching the Roman Empire at this level, I might ask something like this:

Evaluate whether Diocletian’s Tetrarchy was an effective solution to the problems of the 3rd century. Defend your position.

This is a first gesture toward thinking through the questions I ask using Bloom’s Taxonomy. It’s worth thinking through what we ask because if our questions aren’t effective, our teaching will not be effective. And asking a good question takes more time than it seems like it should.

I just finished watching Life Is Beautiful with my 11th grade classes. For those who haven’t seen it, it’s a tragicomic story about a young boy and his father set in WWII era Italy. The story takes place about half in the ordinary world and half in a concentration camp.

I had never seen it. The concentration camp didn’t seem like any place for humor. Now that I’ve watched it twice, I feel differently about it. It is a brilliant film–a kind of counterpoint to the bleak, gritty realism that charaterices holocaust films. Those films have their place, of course. But this is a film about memory, story, and humor and the way they help us cope with pain, suffering, and loss.

But my post is not about my reactiont to the film. It’s about my class. I teach an 11th grade class called Apologetics, which is equal parts defending the faith and learning the content of our faith. In the bleak month of January, we turn our attention to sin, suffering, evil, and death.

It’s appropriate that we’re addressing this in the dark days of January. It’s even more appropriate for us to take on these conversations now. As our head of school pointed out at our last faculty meeting, in the last 50 days or so, we’ve buried two former students–young men of only 18 and 20–and we passed the two year anniversary of the death of a student who died when she was only 13 years old.

Death is real. It’s all around us. We cannot deny it.

Coping with the grim realities of suffering and death are at the core of Christianity and thus of Christian theology. We’re using the film Life Is Beautiful to introduce the idea of radical evil. From here, we’ll read a bit of Dostoevsky and we’ll talk about the existence of evil as an argument against God’s existence. In fact, I presented it to my class as the only really plausible argument against God’s existence.

We lead students through these questions and then arrive at the person and work of Jesus Christ, since a God who comes to suffer with us is Christianity’s answer to these primal questions.

Our conversations this week were heavy and fraught. Students addressed each other with care. They have at times hinted at more angst than maybe they’re willing to own in class. I’m continually impressed by their honesty, their dignity, their compassion for one another, and their grace. It is a deep privilege to undertake these conversations wit them.

I love Mondays (yes, really). The new week is laid out like blank page. A canvas. A fresh start. A new try. So many possibilities.

Recognizing that I’m in the minority on this one, I’ve decided to institute Monday morning inspiration–a little snippet from something I’m reading that speaks to the soul of classical education.

For today, I offer you this reflection from Stratford Caldecott:

The process of education requires us to become open, receptive, curious, and humble in the face of what we do not know. The world is a fabric woven of mysteries, and a mystery is a provocation to our humanity that cannot be dissolved by googling a few more bits of information.

From Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education (Brazos Press, 2009)

In a previous post, I describe the group essay I assigned to one of my 10th grade classes. They were asked to write a five paragraph essay on the history of Hagia Sophia. They had to work as a group as produce a single essay for a single grade.

This was intended as an exercise in building teamwork. This group struggles a little bit with listening and building on one another’s comments in discussion. Our conversations are disjointed. This is something I’ve been trying to address.

I asked them to revise the essay first and foremost because what they produced was a clear picture of what’s wrong with their discussion. They handed in five unrelated paragraphs. Each one was decent enough but it didn’t come together. I wanted them to see that and to work on fixing it.

As an added benefit, though, I think they learned a valuable lesson about the writing process. As they began to rethink their essay, they started with the thesis but found that they couldn’t produce a thesis unless they knew what they wanted to say.

To my delight, that quickly turned into a conversation about what they had actually said.

Like most beginning writers, they have a strong tendency to get bogged down in the first paragraph or the thesis statement and get stuck there. Not only that but they often become too attached to what they originally wrote in that first paragraph and either can’t or won’t revise it to reflect what their essay actually says.

As a writer, I do find I must begin at the beginning. It’s how I think. But I’ve also learned to regard anything I originally set down as provisional (at best). I was pleased to hear them decide to figure out what they said before they rewrote their thesis.

With that in mind, they turned to the body paragraphs. These paragraphs were an interesting lot. A mixed bag. A bit of a motley crew, really. I listened as they struggled to decide what to do with what they had written.

They started by editing spelling errors and obvious mistakes. Then they worked on varying their word choices–there’s only so many times you can call a building “magnificent” in a five paragraph essay.

Then someone asked an incredibly important question: What is this paragraph trying to do?

This is a question every writer should ask of every paragraph she sets down.

The initial reply came quickly as someone rattled off the content of their original outline. But they quickly realized that stating what the paragraph was intended to do wasn’t enough.

That’s when someone asked the next most important question of the hour: What does this paragraph actually say?

And from there: What should it say?

I didn’t give them enough time to revise the entire essay fully but once these questions were on the table, they recognized the need to scrap the first body paragraph entirely and rewrite it. And they managed to produce a tight, well-structured paragraph of five sentences, every single one of which contributed to the whole and followed from the lucid topic sentence.

I saw real improvement in their interactions with one another from the first day they worked on this through the last. The final revision session, in particular, was characterized by cooperation and the free exchange of ideas. I was proud of them. We’ll see what carries over into discussion.

In the meantime, they’ve experienced revision in a new way, I think, and I’m eager to encourage them to recognize how much time and how much thought went into shaping just that one paragraph. And to encourage them to apply that level of thought and care to their future papers.

I’d conclude that the exercise was a success. Definitely one to hang onto for future classes.

In a traditional classroom, students are required to pay their attention to the teacher. This is certainly true of my class, as well. They need to listen when I’m giving instructions or if I clarify a point. But it’s more important, ultimately, that they listen to each other, since they learn primarily by interaction with one another and not by listening to me. And I’m finding it a little tricky making that happen.

One of the struggles of transitioning kids from a conventional classroom to Harkness is decentering the teacher. They’re accustomed to making the teacher their focal point.

I spent weeks with my freshmen trying to undo this. I admonished them to talk to the table and not to raise their hands to be acknowledged and then I removed myself from the circle. At first, I would walk around the table. Later, I stationed myself behind my desk in the corner.

This was largely successful but what I find now is that some of the time, in some of my classes students still aren’t really talking to one another. They direct comments “to the table” but there is still a sense in which they are throwing out a comment in order to be counted for participation. They’re not talking to me exactly but they are talking so that the observer will give them a hash mark.

What I want is a conversation in which they listen and respond to one another.

Assigning the group essay was my first attempt to correct this dynamic with one of my classes but what I think I need is a really solid exercise that forces them to listen to each other. The kids who struggle with this know it, I think. But I’m not sure they know what actually listening to each other looks and feels like.

We’ll see what I come up with and of course we’ll see whether it works!