Monthly Archives: May 2013

Improvisation, Teaching, and Learning, Part 3 – The Significance of the “And” in “Yes…And”

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAOver the last few weeks, I have been exploring the usefulness of an improvisational mindset, specifically the power of “Yes…and” and the dangers of “No…but” in teaching and learning. In this post, I want to focus on the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and.” Seems kind of trivial, but in actuality, the “and” is the key to this improvisational rule. Without the “and” you have a surface, and sometimes mindless, acceptance of what has been offered. With the “and,” you have the potential to transform the original offer and in the process deepen relationships, solve problems, improve outcomes, and change your status.

“Yes” without the “and” places the sayer in a spectator role as opposed to an actor role. By only saying “Yes,” the person is passively receiving what is being given to him/her. As a result, the original offer becomes stagnant. It does not expand. Taken to the extreme, only saying “Yes” can have dangerous outcomes. There is a passivity in simply saying “Yes.” The ownership and the power rests with the person who made the original offer, and the receiver of the offer is merely approving it. On the other hand, there is a thoughtfulness to the “and” in “Yes…and.” It requires the receiver to not only accept the original offer but to add something to it, to take it to the next level, to put a little of him or herself in the “game,” and to share the responsibility of the success of the original idea. Patricia Ryan Madsen writes, “With the rule of yes[…and], we call upon our capacity to envision, to create new and positive images. This yes{…and] invites us to find out what is right about the situation, what is good about the offer, what is worthy in the proposal.”

The other day, I was writing with three classes of first graders. They had been exploring African animals and one of the ways that the teachers wanted the students to share their understandings of the African animals was through writing acrostic poems. To prime the pump, I first wanted the first graders to find their partner in the other class who was studying the same African animal, and sit down and have a conversation about what they had learned about the animal, using the notes that they had taken. Instead of organizing all of this for them, I challenged them to find their partner on their own – a true ill-structured problem. When I said “go,” the students started milling around, looking for their partner from another class. After about 15 or so seconds, a small group of students came up to me and said that there was a problem. One of the girls said, “you want us to be in pairs, but there are five of us who have the same animal.” Faced with this dilemma, I could have gone down a few different paths. The “No…but” path would have looked like this: in the essence of time, I would have solved the problem for them. I would have pointed to the first two girls and told them they were partners, the next-two girls and told them they were partners, and told the last three girls that they were a threesome and that it was ok. This path would have blocked the proposal that the girls were making – there was a problem that needed to be solved – and instead put me in the position of solving the problem for them. The “Yes…and” path looks quite different. Instead of solving the problem for the students, I said yes to their conundrum and I built on it by asking them to solve it. Now, what is interesting is that the students pretty much came up with the same solution that I would have on my own, but the important thing is that they came up with it. They put their brains in gear to figure it out and then were able to witness the affect of their problem solving strategy. The “and” in this case was putting the responsibility of solving the problem back in the laps of the students.

Employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can dramatically influence the power dynamics within a colleague to colleague or a faculty to principal interaction as well. In improvisation, power dynamics are often referred to as situations of status. Every interaction that we have with others involves the delicate interplay of status. Who has high status? Who has low? Does the status change because of the conversation? The interplay between teachers and between teachers and principals is fraught with status. In order to understand status a bit better, let’s take a look at the situation I described above.

When the students came to me with the problem, they were giving me high status. They wanted me to solve the problem. In this case, having high status was not the ideal position to be in in order for that moment to be a true opportunity for learning. I needed to change the status. I changed the status by employing the “and” in “Yes…and.” By accepting the students’ offer that there was a problem, and then building on that offer by suggesting that they find a way to solve it, I moved myself from high to low status in that situation and gave high status to the students so that they could have the power to solve the problem. Within school situations, it is important to remember that status is not static. It constantly changes, and we can make choices as students,  teachers, and administrators in terms of the kind of status that we have in different situations. In Keith Johnstone’s words, status is “understood as something one does (his italics).”  It is also important to remember that having low status is not a “bad” thing and that having high status is not an inherently “good” thing. Instead, if we are truly embodying an improvisational ethic, we are constantly in tune to the situation and what it demands in terms of status for there to be a positive outcome. Too often, I find teachers desperately trying to maintain high status in classroom situations when it would be better for them to move to low status. I can say the same thing for principals as well. High status is often falsely connected with control and power when really the power and control is associated with the kind of status that you choose to have in a given moment. Our power and our success as teachers rests in our ability to read a situation and determine the kind of status that is needed to move the situation in a positive and meaningful direction.

In this current teaching climate, it can be tantalizingly easy to keep our heads down and spend our energy just trying to get through the day, employing “No…but” strategies like keeping our classroom doors closed, not eating with our colleagues at lunch, avoiding the principal on the way out the door, and spending inordinate amounts of time talking about things with little to no action. What’s interesting is that keeping our heads down actually doesn’t make teaching, and our lives, any easier. Instead, it has the potential of keeping us in a static status state which impedes relationship building, creative problem-solving, and ultimately joy in our work. We need to constantly fight these blocking urges, and employing the “and” in “Yes…and” can help us do that. What is particularly liberating about emphasizing the importance of the “and” in “Yes…and” in teaching is that it reframes our work. The profession of teaching can often feel like only “Yes” work. We have a curriculum we need to teach. We have standardized tests we need to give. We have demands from parents to meet. We have committees we need to serve on. We have expectations and demands on us that we did not have a hand in making. By employing the “and” we take some of the power and the control rightfully back. The “and” creates a space in all of these demands to put our own stamp on them, to decide how we want them to go, to have a stake in the outcome. In this case, the “and” provides us as teachers a chance to have high status in an environment that attempts to put us in low status. Ultimately, the “and” in “Yes…and” is the impetus for positive change personally, professionally, and even societally.

 

Episode #2 – Amy Lafty on Motherhood, Project-Based Learning, Losing Control, Prom, and End of Year Blues

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Welcome to the second, leaner episode of The Craft: The Podcast about Teaching, Learning, and School. The obsessive goal of The Craft is to capture teacher stories from all along the spectrum of this beautifully frustrating, transgressive, and elemental practice that is essential to the sustainability of society and the world. That’s right, I said it!

In the first episode, we met David Sokoloff, fourth year high school history teacher extraordinaire, teaching in the Philadelphia School District. In this episode, you get to meet Amy Lafty, six year high school, English teacher, teaching in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. She is a journey woman, even though she has only been teaching for six years. Her travels through the Archdiocese are interesting, often comical, and illustrative of how many struggle to develop a career in teaching with the unpredictability of working in certain schools.

We get to hear about what it is like to have a young child and teach, something that is not often discussed in circles outside of close friends and family. Amy shares her challenges with being a young mother as well as the strategies that she has developed to make it work for her and her family.

The Craft would not be The Craft without robust discussion of teaching! In the spirit of sharing the work, Amy takes us into the classroom to hear a bit about a cool graphic novel project she did around Paradise Lost. More and more, Amy is turning to project-based learning to generate the kind of energy needed for enduring understandings. In fact, the pictures that you see here are from two of those projects – the graphic novel project around Paradise Lost and the Grecian Urn project inspired by Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Finally, we also get to hear a bit about her project around Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. If you have never heard of the book, you can check out a sample of it here.photo (3)

All of this talk around designing meaningful projects with students leads us to a wonderful conversation about the importance and difficulty of releasing control as a teacher. Now in her 6th year of teaching, Amy realizes the necessity of letting go of control as a teacher. Easier said than done. She shares with us how challenging that can be with certain groups of students.

Since we are so close to the end of the school year, it seemed appropriate to end the podcast with some thinking on how to make the end of year meaningful, particularly for seniors who often check-out around December! And let’s not even talk about the power of prom to disrupt learning! Amy walks us through that humorous world as well.

Amy shouts out to the Bread Loaf School of English and Arcadia University for helping her become the teacher that she is. You can find information about Bread Loaf here and Arcadia here.

Who will be the next guest on The Craft? Maybe you? Feel free to reach out to me and let me know what you think of the show. Share it with friends and family. Let’s grow this to be an essential part of how we understand what it means to be a teacher in this present moment!

As always, keep learning, keep teaching, keep honing your craft.

 

 

photoA big shout out to Chris Perrin, the DJ behind the music of Perrin & Tonic that is featured on The Craft. Check him out: https://soundcloud.com/perrinntonic

 

What is a Writing-Based Curriculum?

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hillman students 2At the core of a writing-based curriculum is a learning environment where students (and teachers) are writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically together.

This writing practice positions students and teachers as readers, writers, and thinkers in the world.

This writing practice also creates a platform from which students and teachers can design projects with real-world implications. The writing is the work of the project. It is the engine from which products and performances are generated. The work of the class is framed around a question like: what are all of the ways we can write reflectively, creatively, and analytically to help us accomplish real world projects?

This means that writing reflectively, creatively, and analytically is the engine for any and all of the work happening within the class. There are no extraneous, peripheral forms of work. No worksheets. No quizzes. Very few, carefully chosen tests. The goal is to limit or eliminate busy work for the student and the teacher and instead to live a writing/reading life together.

Work for both the student and the teacher revolves around:

  • Sharing stages of a project or piece;

  • Providing feedback;

  • Discussing reading; post-product analysis;

  • Strategizing next steps;

  • Incisive mini-lessons that help to push a project or piece forward;

  • Guest-lectures;

  • Intentional fieldtrips;

  • Echoing skills and concepts that are being developed;

  • Spontaneous challenges that help to deepen the learning;

  • Practice in a skill that needs to be developed in order for the students to do an aspect of a project;

  • Conferencing with individuals and small groups.

All of this work is meant to embody the genuine habits of mind and body of writers out in the world and to avoid the dangers of schoolification.IMG_3487

A few thoughts on schoolification

Schoolification is when we take a real-world practice (e.g. writing), and we remove any of the real-worldness out of it. Here are some classic examples:

  • Having students come up with their thesis statement before giving them a chance to figure out what it is that they want to write about through actually writing

  • Making an assignment for writing a poem where most of the line is written for the student, and they just need to complete the line

  • Making students read a book that they don’t like

  • Limiting the writing of a paper to a rough draft and a final draft

  • Providing no time for feedback on in-process writing

  • Providing no feedback on writing before the piece is turned in

  • Making work ‘easy’ so that there is no conflict, no difficulty, no struggle

  • Designing work to only be graded by the teacher

  • Limiting reading to whatever is provided by the school (e.g. textbooks)

  • Having students memorize literary terms

Part of the purpose for a writing-based curriculum is to engage in the real world of work and learning. We want to attempt to make our classes fit seamlessly in that world. And since we are designing ELA classes, and writing should be at the center of ELA, we want to design experiences that position our students and ourselves as writers out in the world doing the real work of writers:

  • Reflecting in writing about their life and their work

  • Reading a heck of a lot and writing about that reading

  • Writing a lot! Everything from a fleeting thought to a fully fleshed-out piece

  • Collecting stuff that can be used as fuel for writing and projects (research on topics, images, other writing, lists, doodles, print material, etc.)

We know from the literature that is out there about the writing craft that writers engage in these four habits of mind and body: they reflect, they write about what they read, they write, and they collect. These four habits feed off of one another, making it possible for writers to create poems, short stories, essays, plays, speeches, etc.

As we developing writing-based curricula, we don’t want to limit our conception of who a writer is to the taken for granted examples: poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist. We should certainly be these kinds of writers in the classroom, but we should be a whole host of other kinds of writers as well:

  • Website developers

  • Novelists

  • Journalists

  • Bloggers

  • Tweeters

  • Editors

  • Hackers

  • Biographers

  • Folklorists

  • Sociologists

  • Memoirists

  • Orators

  • Debaters

  • Urban planners

  • Screenwriters

And in our classes, we need to design ways for these different kinds of writers to reflect, write about what they read, write, and collect in order to generate interesting forms of work in that particular genre.

Redefining the work of the teacher

When teaching revolves around designing learning environments where we are living a writing life with our students, our orientation to the work of teaching changes as well. Our focus in a writing-based curriculum is to create environments where our students and ourselves can be many of the kinds of writers that I list above. This means that we, as teachers, need to develop a sense of and be open to the kinds of work that these kinds of people do. We scour resources to tap into what makes these kinds of writers tick. We look for media that captures these different kinds of writers discussing their craft. We look for anything that can help us embody the practice with our students. We want to become these kinds of writers just as much as we want our students to do the same.

We then think creatively about how the classroom environment encourages these ways of working for ourselves and our students.  In a traditional ELA classroom, teachers grade papers. In a writing-based classroom, teachers focus on designing opportunities for students and themselves to share their work for feedback and then to publish that work out in the world. In a traditional ELA classroom, all of the students are doing the same thing at the same time. In a writing-based classroom students may be doing different things at the same time according to where they are in the project. In a traditional ELA classroom, the teacher is the primary source for feedback and evaluation. In a writing-based classroom, everyone is viewed as a resource for feedback. In a traditional ELA classroom, the only time something is shared is at the end of the process. In a writing-based classroom, work is shared in process to determine next steps and to gauge impact.  In a traditional ELA classroom, the language of learning is predetermined and given to the student. In a writing-based classroom, the language is co-constructed through the work.

In this kind of a classroom, the teacher removes him/herself from the center of the experience and instead becomes a co-reader, writer, and thinker with the students, bringing his/her own work into class for feedback. The teacher is involved in and is as invested in the project that the class is doing at the time. The success of the project is dependent upon the teacher in a fundamentally different way to a traditional ELA classroom. In a writing-based classroom, the teacher spends energy pushing the work outward in the world rather than inward into a grade.

IMG_3482In the next post, I’ll speak to skill development within a writing-based curriculum as well as provide some examples of writing-based curriculum in action.