Ken Wright’s teacher-assisting placement was at Westwood Middle School, just west of downtown Grand Rapids. The first time in the fall of 2006 I observed him he was teaching an ESL Social Studies class. He started the class off by saying, “Bueno Dias, como estas?” and then as the class grew a little chatty he said, “Silencio, por favor.”  I immediately appreciated the fact that he addressed the class in their language and he was polite about it as well. Ken had a good experience during that semester.  He was always organized, exhibited a good sense of humor and established a good relationship with his students and the teachers in the building.

By 2008 Ken was teaching at Hayes Middle School in Grand Ledge, Michigan, his first job. This school district was wholly different from the diversity of Grand Rapids Public Schools.  Ken informed me that Grand Ledge was 95% white and had a higher income level than districts inside the beltway that surrounded Lansing. Ken’s teaching load was five sections of 7th grade Geography. There was one other teacher who taught the same load as he did. He had a 5 Themes of Geography poster on the wall and an agenda on the board. The journaling questions for the day were: “How do you resolve arguments with your friends? How about adults?”  Ken referred back to these questions throughout his lesson, which was one on problem-solving.  The main part of the lesson for this day was group work involving 5 different groups of students: Natives, a logging company, animal activists, the Brazilian government, medical researchers tied to a pharmaceutical company and twelve-year-old students living in Michigan.  Before he got the lesson moving the school stopped for the Pledge of Allegiance on the public address system.  Public address announcements had various times throughout the day are the bane of teachers’ existence. With good planning teachers hope for a smooth flow to their lessons but must deal with all kinds of interruptions during the day, planned and unplanned; public address announcements, fire drills, “stranger in the building” drills, knocks on their door to call a student to the principal’s office or guidance office… List could go on and on. Ken mentioned to me that there was a building-wide project where the staff helping the students in learning 100 countries around the world in preparation for an end-of-the-year test.

When the students finished their journaling, Ken had them take thirty seconds to share their ideas on how they would resolve arguments.  Based on their journaling assignment and previous lessons Ken had the class predict what they were going to study today and a student correctly called out “rainforests”.  Ken then assigned groups and the class quickly and with no fuss, moved to their new locations.  He then set a 25-minute time limit and had the students figure out what the time would be on the classroom clock when the 25 minutes had elapsed.  Ken reinforced that he wanted realistic and valid answers and as many answers as possible. He did not want to set the tone for only one possible solution to the problems facing rainforests. He also reinforced that he hoped everyone in each group would participate. With those instructions, he set the class free to get to work and the students engaged in the task immediately.

Immediately he started to move amongst the groups, monitoring engagement and asking questions about their possible solutions.  One group came up with a solution that might cause other problems so Ken told them that they had to have solutions for the problems that their decision caused.  He gave good, realistic directions for the students and the scenarios.  Ken directed his students to look beyond their decisions and try to predict their solutions’ implications.  This assignment was an application of information they had learned in previous lessons.  Some students had their note sheets out from these previous lessons, but many of the students were able to recall the information without the aid of their notes, a great indication that they had truly learned the applicable knowledge and were now in a place where they might apply what they learned. Throughout the process, Ken did a great job prompting groups in thinking about their answers and the implications those answers had to the problems the groups faced.  During the activity Ken reminded the students charged with the task of “timekeepers” to keep their groups apprised of the time left before they had to provide their solutions.  He also assigned a person in each group the role of “peacekeeper” and reminded one “peacekeeper” to find a way to keep the peace without attaching blame to a person.

As the group activity came to an end Ken said, “Listen up”. He only had to say this once and the class quieted. Throughout the day I only heard Ken repeat this signal for quiet twice, otherwise after he said it, all his classes immediately paid attention. Ken had the speakers for the groups stand up, explain what group they represented and why each group cared about the rainforest.  He directed the class to listen to the similarities and differences in the speakers’ answers and then he summarized what each speaker said. At that point he asked, “How do you get others to cooperate with you?”  He asked each group specific questions based on their assigned roles and the students came up with good answers. “Fighting” was a possible ‘solution’ posed by a few groups.  Ken did not dwell on any specific solutions at this time.  He wanted a free flow of ideas.  After all the groups reported and Ken asked some probing questions, he asked the students what they might suggest as a way to stop deforestation.  They quickly responded with multiple possibilities, including tying the lesson to the school’s own recycling effort.

Ken’s next period was a preparation period. He volunteered that he had a good mentor who meets with him once a month.  He also said that he had good support from the rest of the staff. He mentioned that there was a budget for the amount of paper copies he could make, but the budget did not seem to be causing a problem for his classes. One inconvenience was that there was a centralized printer and that was located in a room two hundred feet away from his classroom. He was also dealing with a computer dinosaur which in 2008 was running Windows 95™ software.  The computer could only run one application at a time, but Ken explained that the district had passed a bond issue involving the purchase of new technology to be purchased for next year. He also said that there had been a huge “buy-out” of experienced teachers the preceding year and there were 40 new teachers in the school district this year.

Ken said he had two formal evaluations thus far, but the atmosphere was informal. He was assigned few extra duties because the administration did not want new teachers overloaded with extra responsibilities in their first year, plus, luckily, the older staff had duties that they wished to continue doing. However, this situation is unlike many school districts where the “rookies” are required to pick up the slack from experienced teachers just waiting for the opportunity to off load duties which they may have done for years. Ken was the varsity lacrosse coach for a combined-school team. They had just won their first match, 8-3. Ken did create and sponsor a Mexican Fiesta in line with his curriculum on the Western Hemisphere.  400 people showed up for this after school activity. There was food and pinatas and it was a great community builder.

A similar situation involving unrequested, but assigned extra duty, occurred in my first year in Kansas when I was assigned the responsibility for running the Senior Prom. If the administration really knew who I was and what my abilities were, I would have been the last person in the faculty who would be chosen to plan a prom. That duty involved a fundraiser which consisted of magazine sales, finding a venue for the dance, organizing decorations with a Prom Committee and finding a band or DJ.  There was nothing in my resume or in my application to the school district that I had the experience or skill to organize and run an activity of this scale. My eventual teaching evaluations that first year did not mention the prom planning or execution but the pressure on a rookie teacher in terms of handling an event of this importance added to the stress of that year.

As the day progressed Ken explained that although his textbook was only two years old, it did not really fit how he taught.  The text was chosen by two teachers who were retiring and was organized thematically. Ken taught Geography regionally so he supplemented the text with resources from the school’s Media Center, the local REMC (Regional Education Media Center) and materials which he purchased from “teacher stores” in the Lansing area. He was somewhat disappointed in the REMC catalog because the descriptions for some of the videos he wished to use did not always match the content on the videos.

I encountered a similar circumstance the second year I was teaching in New York.  We had to order our 16mm films from a centralized location (B.O.C.E.S.) and I was searching for a film that explained how an archaeological dig was organized. The film came in just as I needed it and believing the cryptic description in the catalog, I started showing it to my 7th grade class.  The film started innocently enough.  Just as I had hoped the guide walked out into an open area in a woods, laid down a digging grid and started the dig. Suddenly, the scene shifted to a grainy night shot with naked women and children being lined up for gas chambers at Auschwitz.  I quickly shut down the projector and tried to deflect the eager questions from my young students.  I never took the catalog descriptions at their word again and always previewed the film or video ahead of class time.

Ken found that the supplementary reading materials that came with the textbook focused mostly on lower order Bloom’s questions so he replaced some of those questions with queries from the middle and upper levels of the taxonomy. Ken was also aware that not all of his students were on a reading level compatible with the textbook so he was working with the paraprofessional in making the class more of a team-teaching experience for next year, in the hopes that he would have help in making the text more approachable for the students who were challenged with reading.

Ken’s 4th Period class was his most challenging of the day. There were 22 students in this class, but only 6 girls.  Besides the middle school boys’ atmosphere, there was a student from Southeast Asia who spoke very little English.  Ken did say that the district had just hired an ESL aide to help this student, but the staff still had an assessment to perform on the student’s language deficiencies so Ken was on his own until then.  Ken surmised this student’s reading level at first grade, so, besides an ongoing need for disciplining some unruly boys, he had to help this E.L.L. student in understanding what the lesson was all about. To make things easier for the young Asian boy, Ken assigned him the duty of timekeeper.  With a little help from Ken, the student was able to manage this responsibility with almost no problem. Despite cautioning the class, as he did others, that they were not to entertain any fantasy-based solutions, there were several instances of ideas that were not very realistic.  Beyond those few fantasy suggestions, the class flowed almost as well as Ken’s other classes. Complicating matters was the fact that the middle half hour of this class was lunch period for these students.

During lunch a colleague of Ken’s praised his ability in helping autistic students in the middle school.  Ken explained that the school had a “Link” program, where students were rotated in helping autistic students stay focused throughout the day. Another, older teacher, said he thought history was being revised by the state standards and that much of the Vietnam Era’s problems were being misrepresented or left out, especially those problems which resulted from controls against government power.  Another teacher shared that he thought universities should focus more on middle level teaching and learning. At that time teachers were either certified K-5 or 6-12, with little individual coursework solely focused on middle level teaching and learning.

Back in the classroom after lunch, Ken quickly refocused his students on the lesson.  He congratulated them on their many solutions, but pushed them on how they would carry these ideas into fruition. Through this whole process Ken was able to get the class to narrow their solutions to ideas that might be realistically put into action, while reinforcing prior knowledge from previous lessons. Despite Ken’s initial warning that this class was a “handful”, it was obvious that his classroom management skills were already honed this early in his career.

Ken made some minor adjustments throughout the day, matching different types of questions and different teaching strategies and methods to the separate classes’ needs, while still meeting the objectives of the lesson for all of his students. Ken was not a lecturer.  He was a “conversationalist”.  He entered into two-way discussions with his students which developed an atmosphere of respect for students’ opinions. In this way, knowing that their teacher was listening to their ideas and cared about their responses, Ken’s students remained engaged in the lesson. When Ken asked for critiques concerning other groups’ possible solutions, many hands were raised.  Only once, in his last period class, did Ken have to have a separate discussion with two boys who were spending more time arguing with each other’s ideas rather than seeking solutions.  He pointed out what they were doing and why their behavior was unproductive in a calm, but firm manner and boys returned to their groups and went back to work with no further problems.

Interview, 2008

Defining Success, 2008

Ken defined success by stating the goals he had for his students and himself. He said that he had overall goals for his teaching, goals set by the state standards for his lessons and units and goals he required for himself.

Once you know that you are doing that, not only what they expect, and what you expect, then the students get what you expect of them as well and what the outside (world) expects of the students.  Then it comes to assessing that and seeing if they have actually learned what it is that I am trying to…what the state wants them to know and what I want them to know and the skills that they need to be able to know, and to be able to figure out if they have accomplished that.  Once I can figure out that they have accomplished that, then I know that I have successfully taught them the skills or knowledge they need to know. (Wright, v.t., 2008, p.1).

I asked Ken if his time at GVSU helped him set his own personal goals. He answered in the positive and described his professors as models for his own future teaching. He also said that his personal goal setting was evolving over time in terms of content and professional (pedagogy) knowledge.  He modified some things he thought were important when he began teaching, like, “Do my students really need to know this knowledge?” He was taking notes on his lesson plans about changes for future lessons, always a good reflective practice. Similar to other teachers in this study, Ken did not feel he left college with a clear knowledge of how to assess his students’ knowledge or skills.  Sometimes he taught lessons focusing on upper-level skills, only to find he assessed on lower level skills.  One example was when he modified his multiple-choice questions to include a student’s reasoning for choosing the answer that she/he did. He also told me that he felt that at times he mismatched assessment types when evaluating knowledge and skills gained by the special needs students.  GVSU modified its course offerings after Ken left the university and now offers an assessment class. One area where Ken felt fully prepared by his college coursework was in the area of classroom management and based on what I observed that day I would say Ken was correct.

Content, 2008

Ken said he was fortunate in the selection of his very last elective class at GVSU. The course was the history of Latin America and now he was teaching the geography and history of the Western Hemisphere. He cited another geography course in his college preparation on culture and the theme of culture was a focus in his 6th grade curriculum. His History of Warfare class in college was easily applicable because warfare spans space and time. As far as his broad seminar courses in subjects, he thought just the process in learning how to learn was directly applicable to teaching his own students how to learn.  He thought it would be difficult to tailor all courses directly to a person’s teaching career because there was the possibility that a teacher might teach many different subjects, especially in regards to Social Studies.

Ken described the process of creating curriculum for his students.  The Social Studies staff was working on developing specific lessons and units which tied into the state standards, and the first step they took was in creating a one-page parent curriculum guide. This guide explained the concepts, knowledge and skills the students needed in order to be successful. The staff was creating a unit-by-unit guide for themselves and the students which described the content, skills and resources contained for each unit in the curriculum.  This guide would take the form of a grid, table or chart which would be easy to use for the current teachers, as well as new teachers entering the district.

Mentoring, 2008

Ken thought himself lucky in terms of the mentor who was assigned to him when he arrived at Grand Ledge. This person actually wanted to go through the process of having monthly meetings and ‘check-ins’ for Ken’s support. Beyond the structured mentoring process, Ken said he received great support from the rest of staff, from information about learning opportunities and resources to how to handle discipline problems.

Methods and Strategies, 2008

Ken gained valuable lesson ideas and teaching methods from his time at GVSU.  He cited the Content Methods and Strategies class, the Teacher-Assisting Seminar, when he was placed at Westwood Middle School and the Capstone Course. He kept copies of student-created lesson plans from his college classes, gleaned ideas from his cooperating teachers in his two semesters in the field and many examples of teaching methods and strategies from his Capstone professor.  Ken related that his Psychology course work helped him understand how people learned and he gained ideas on how to implement differentiated instruction based on different students’ capabilities.

Beyond searching for ways in helping his autistic and other special needs students, Ken was challenged by students do not care about learning and often had parents who did not care about school either, or even care about the consequences about scoring poorly on tests or in any area of school.  Ken said it was a little easier in figuring out ways for helping his current students care, since he was raised in a similar area with a similar culture.  He admitted that his experience in an urban setting, with students from different socio-economic backgrounds, made it easier for him in understanding the challenges these students face in their daily lives and, therefore, how to relate to them in his classroom.  I asked him if his time in an urban middle school was beneficial versus his student teaching experience in a suburban setting.  He said it was because he was exposed to all kinds of students from all kinds of backgrounds and that experience gave him a better idea on relating to all students.

Content, 2008

Despite feeling fairly well versed in the content he was teaching due to his college education, Ken admitted that some of the information he taught he had not encountered since he learned it in middle school. He said he needed a refresher, but did not have to learn the information all over again.  He knew the basics and knew how to learn, but there were different teaching and learning standards from when he attended K-12 so he had to bring himself up-to-date. Ken continued finding new resources with which to teach his students, like all good teachers do. He was also not afraid in admitting to his students if he did not know an answer to a certain question. In my experience middle school students are totally capable of asking questions which teachers never thought about asking or answering.  K-5 students usually have no inhibitions when it comes to asking questions, but too often high school students just want to know what they have to learn for the test and the questions are posited in that way. I think many of my college students who were hoping to become teachers never lost their interest in learning new things, no matter if it was on the test or not.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Ken first pearl was for teachers entering the profession identifying who they were as a teacher. He did not start that process of self-reflection until the end of his college career when he was preparing for interview questions and creating a resume.  He started with a list and he suggested questions such as, “What does it mean to be a successful educator? What is it that you want to accomplish in a classroom? What should students learn overall?” (Wright, v.t., 2008, p.9). Ken also suggested networking with other teachers as soon as possible. A college classmate may be a future colleague or know someone who will be a future colleague of yours.  He told people where he was applying and, at times, and for his current position a person he knew, knew the principal at the middle school.  That networking got Ken’s foot in the door.

Ken’s next advice was for a future teacher to realize that they do not know everything or in Ken’s words, “You need to know that you don’t know a lot” (Wright, v.t., 2008, p.10). He addressed the problem that some teachers have in not admitting they do not know everything when asked a question by a student. “…you get a lot of students who, when you say, ‘I don’t know’ and they say, ‘I thought you had all the answers. You’re the teacher.’  You know, that’s not it. You just have to realize that and you start to show that human identity to when you say, ‘I don’t know something’, and they can identify with that so, then especially if you go back the next day and say, ‘I found out what you wanted to know and this is it’, and they say, ‘Wow!  He really did find out and he does want to know’.”

Ken cautioned future teachers to be aware that there is more to being a teacher than just teaching students in a classroom:  paper work, parent conferences, department meetings, school meetings, district meetings, PTO meetings, breaking down curriculum, grading papers and continuing education.  As far as grading goes, teachers need to learn how to make assignments they can actually grade. Why assign homework or projects where you cannot spend the time in really reviewing the student work, understanding why they succeeded or did not succeed and offering good feedback? Killing yourself and constant grading does not do you any good and if you are not returning assignments in a timely manner, without those assignments truly helping the students learn, then why make those assignments?

Interview, 2015

In the Fall of 2015 Ken was no longer in the middle school and he was no longer a classroom teacher. He was a newly minted assistant principal at the high school. His area of responsibility was primarily 9th and 10th grade students.  His focus was on “higher level” discipline for that age group, as well as supporting teachers in the classroom with instructional practices.

Defining Success, 2015

Ken thought that defining success depended on one’s own perspective.  Teachers should realize that their own individual view on teaching needs to be leavened by their administrators’ views and their students’ views on success. He broke students’ views into several areas: successful students, struggling students, and middle-of-the road students.  Parents’ views also come into play.  Some parents think their child is unsuccessful because the teacher is failing their child. Other parents with struggling students see the help and support that teachers render their children and think the teacher is doing a great job.  Ken admitted that, from a public relations standpoint, the teaching profession had taken a hit lately and his district was no different. Ken’s last view to be taken into account was the perspectives of legislators passing the laws that impact education.

Teaching evaluations also entered into the mix. He readily admitted that student and teaching success went beyond the data from standardized tests. One of the focal points in his new role as assistant principal was discerning a teacher’s ability in establishing strong relationships with his/her students and Ken said he looked at how teachers interacted with students before class. He mentioned the “Capturing Kids Hearts”^[1] program; how teachers meet their students at the classroom door and created a social contract within the classroom. Does the teacher take the time to learn each student’s name in a timely manner? Does the teacher go out of her/his way in making those connections and building those relationships?

Next, Ken looked for purposeful instructional practices. Does the teacher utilize their time in implementing specific purposes based on learning goals? Is the entire class period time and the instructional strategies and methods which a teacher uses aimed at helping students meet those goals? Are the students working on building knowledge, working with that knowledge or showing that they have learned that knowledge?

As far as Ken’s college preparation in terms of his success, he thought that having both urban middle school and high school suburban teacher-assisting and student teaching experiences helped with his success. His experience contrasted with an intern he had while he was teaching in the middle school. That college student was placed in his classroom for an entire year and she only experienced 6th grade students in a suburban setting, with a set group of teachers. He thought his experience was much better in terms of being able to work with different colleagues and different cultures.

Ken was continually surprised between the similarity to students’ and teachers’ beliefs about formal education versus on-the-job training. Both sets of people seemed to think that classroom instruction had little to do with success in learning the job versus experience in the real world.  His comment was that most people, no matter what age, had difficulty describing where they learned the knowledge and skills for success and his observation was echoed in the interviews I conducted.  In a few cases teachers were able to identify individual instructors or courses where they gained specific information and abilities, much like Ken was able to do, but, for the most part, these teachers just knew that they learned it. As I shared the information gleaned from my notes and interviews with the College of Education and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I was able to congratulate some of my colleagues on their influence on past students’ success, but overall, I had to tell everyone that it was a team effort and a combined success. Ken said that he realized he was a successful teacher when his students, their parents and his administrators all agreed that he was helping his students succeed.

Ken attributed some of his success to his attitude and the writings s of Carol Dweck^[2].  If a person goes into a professional development meeting or any learning opportunity with an positive outlook that they may be able to take some idea or skill out of that experience and apply it to their classroom then teaching and learning will be a better experience versus someone who pre-determines that an experience will be negative before it even starts. This mindset reminds me of my first year of teaching.  My principal wanted all the junior high faculty who would be teaching incoming 7th graders to review their grade school records. For me that meant reading through 125 folders, filled with progress reports, behavior reports, standardized test results and the like.  As I started reading through all that data, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the more I knew about my incoming students, the more I would be able to help them.  On the other hand, was all that information a complete description of who that person was? Might I just be setting up a prejudiced view of who that person was and how I might best teach them, without really getting to know the complete person?  I adopted the “grain of salt” view and tried to keep an open mind as I met the students at the beginning of the school year.