People that work with me know I often over-do it with slogan-like language.  But usually whats going on with that is that I see a particular recurring pattern of flawed decision-making going on around me (usually in myself as well) and the slogan emerges  as a way to avoid my having to listen to myself argue its underlying logic in conversation after conversation.

“Follow the learner and the learning will follow.”

The strongest counter argument to this one that I can think of is one of my favorite quotes from Emerson (but a quote which I think describes me when I am at my worst as a teacher):  “Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.”  But Emerson’s thinking, here, is profoundly flawed to the point of being insidious.  It is seductive as an idea only because of it’s resemblance to an American football analogy that is profoundly CORRECT:  “Throw the ball not to where the runner IS, but to where the runner WILL BE.”

Follow the learner.  Read the runner’s trajectory, encourage the runner along that trajectory, and make sure that the ball is there for the runner to catch.

And alway err on the side of making the runner stumble forward to catch the ball, not backwards.

“Make the runner stumble forward.”

Two and a half years ago, living on a kind of sabbatical in Nashville, Tennessee, I had direct and intimate experience with The Core.  Unlike most that opine about it, I was forced to read deeply into it and apply it in the context of a real teaching job.  At LEAD Public Schools, for English Language Arts, we used a Core-based curriculum called EngageNY.  Our first book was Linda Sue Park’s A Long Walk to Water — an absolutely brilliant choice.  Park’s book is a very easy read that not only walks the reader through a wide range of cultural contexts but also exposes the reader to a range of literary techniques.  You can look through the first several weeks of recommended curriculum; I defy anybody to tell me that it is any less than a work of collaborative genius.

Is absolutely everything you need in there?  No, but by the time you have studied the logic of how the lessons are laid out, it is easy to figure out what the students will take an interest in and find the supplements you need on line.  For example I realized that the concept of “culture clash” was vital to understanding the book, and that that was a concept that was eluding the students, so I showed them first this footage of Sudanese Sufis in Northern Sudan encouraging them to point out the similarities and differences between their culture and the culture of the Northern Sudanese Muslims.  Then I showed them footage of Dinkas in Southern Sudan — getting them to articulate the cultural gulfs that must exist there, and the likely judgements people might make about each other.  EngageNY offers all sorts of opportunities like this to improvise …

… IF the community entrusts the teaching profession with the power to adapt systems to the dynamic circumstances of a genuine learning community.

But this is not where we are as a profession — not right now.  It’s not where LEAD was when I worked with them.

The Common Core and its extensions, like EngageNY, are being used at LEAD (and probably elsewhere), not as a valuable tool for helping teachers to plan beautiful year-long courses, but as a short-cut device for making the claim to outside entities that the kids are being taught well.  Energy that teachers might otherwise invest in developing materials and making more connections for students they invest in making sure that adherence to The Core is clearly documented:  “You want to know how we teach our kids?  Look at EngageNY.  That’s how we do it.”

We are too obsessed with the idea that being accountable means showing parents and politicians “what I taught” … and then giving the kids some kind of assessment that “shows they learned it.”

Correct, you cannot teach if you aren’t clear about what your are teaching, and whether or not it is being learned, BUT if that is ALL that you care about, you are not teaching.

Your job is to facilitate the maximal experience of success — that is a SUBJECTIVE experience, so by definition, our efforts to make yourself accountable cannot end with “I taught this and we gave this assessment, and got this result.”

As the primary in-the-room decision-maker — your job is to draw the learner’s unique GENIUS out into the world.  (I stole that from my Dad.)

Systems, NOT CONTENT, is where education needs to look to optimize accountability.  LEAD actually had something that they would have argued is a “system.”  We shared Google Drive folders with each other and entered all of our lesson plan information there.

There was a highly involved documentation format where the teacher was expected to connect her/his lesson plan to The Common Core in as many ways as possible.

This format was established by LEAD’s central authority (which they called “NeST” — Network Support Team.  It was an amalgam of templates used elsewhere.  I am fairly sure of that because there were layers of redundant information.  “What was your objective for this activity?”  “What Common Core Standard applies?”  “Which course objective does this apply to?”  “Students will be able to _______”

And strangely, with all of this planning language, there was no environment devoted to post-mortem analysis.  Post-mortem happened around the copier or can’trightnowbutwalkwithme-type conversations.

The best system evolves organically out of the classroom and emerges as an extension of how teachers communicate with each other and how they work together.  It needs to be a living breathing learning organism.

Teachers need to stop railing against the system and advocating for particular curricula, and instead need to build the system to their purposes.  The right relations with their superiors and with each other, right relations with their students, and ultimately right curriculum will follow.

Getting along is also not about being culturally sensitive.  Well, cultural stuff can be a roadblock so let’s blow through those quickly….

1. Japanese people slurp more than foreigners do.  (Loud eating is not some kind of micro-aggressive move into your sound space, so get over it.)
2. Same when it comes to sucking teeth.  It tends to mean that someone feels comfortable around you.  It is NOT an expression of contempt or smugness (which in some parts of the English speaking world, it really is).  And you can really hurt feelings if you treat it with contempt.
3. There is a language barrier, so non-verbal things that you do — like dropping a book on your desk or muttering under your breath or laughing loudly or singing or whistling (speaking from experience here) — tend to “mean something.”

And I could go on, but I’m gonna stop there because really, you need to accept that you are going to be yourself.  And yourself was not brought up in Japan.  And from time to time yourself is going to be kind of … well … gaijin-y.  

Be mindful of it like you might be mindful of a waistline that doesn’t look the way you would like or a hair that is prone to drifting out of place, but do not obsess over all those ways in which you might offend people.  

INSTEAD, what you are going for is an impression of you that goes something like, “Yes, well, Peter does always wear that dumb tie, but I love working with him.”  Yes it is a very kind gesture for you to give some thought towards which ties might not be so dumb, but you will never be wearing the right tie.  Focus on doing things to make it fun for people to work with you.  Here are a few….

• Ask about grammar and usage.  It doesn’t matter if you think your grasp of English grammar rules is stronger than theirs (careful with that assumption).  To the extent that grammar is explicitly taught at all in America, it is taught differently in Japan.  Ask about …

• • • SV, SVC, SVO, SVOO, SVOC.  You may have a pretty good grasp of this already, but let them teach it to you.
    • How do you say past-counterfactual conditional in Japanese?  (This is a VERY interesting conversation.)
    • How do you say non-restrictive relative clause in Japanese?
    • Ask about how our use of the progressive aspect compares with the Japanese usage of the “shinkokei.”

• Ask what they are teaching in their classes.  Ask to look at their textbook.

• Ask about a student that you are having trouble with.

• Ask any question that allows the teacher to be an expert in something.

• Notice if they have changed their hair or are dressed differently.  This is fine to do for both genders, and is not considered a “come on.”

• Politics….  Asking about politics is not really a taboo (as many people think) but Japanese politics is just so uninteresting most of the time, that you want to ask something very specific that you yourself could imagine taking an interest in.

• • • So, “tell me about Prime Minister Abe,” — not so great.
    • “Why do Japanese politicians keep talking about changing the Japanese constitution?” — pretty good.

• Religion….  Again, not actually a taboo.  But be aware that generally speaking, what westerners would identify as “religion” does not feature prominently in Japanese culture.  For example, a colleague once asked me to explain the difference between a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim (a distinction which in my culture is given profound significance), and at every turn I was getting these blank stares.

“While on the other hand these people believe that Jesus is actually God … well, a god but also a man … well see there’s this concept of the Father, the Son and the, um … Holy … so anyway … that’s why they kneel and take a sip of wine and eat a cracker … cause …”

• • • So, “what’s your religion?” — not so great.
    • “Why do you think going to temple and getting a fortune is such a big part of Japanese culture?” — pretty good.

• Jokes….  True that jokes don’t translate well across culture.  Not true that telling a joke is a bad idea.  Jokes are a very big part of English-speaking culture, and hearing them is a little like reading Chaucer or Shakespeare:  you get a little linguistic peak at the way the other culture pieces ideas together.  They’re fun.  In my case, I am very bad at telling jokes to other Americans because I tend to crack up before I reach the punch line. — not a problem when your interlocutor isn’t going to find the punchline risible anyway.  

When I talk to Japanese teachers at our client schools, I often get the impression that the foreign teacher is something of an opaque phenomenon.  Don’t resign yourself to that.

Don’t because to operate as an empowered member of the school community, you need to establish yourself as a relatable human being.  This will give you the purchase that you need to shape your role there and establish your Value Proposition.

What do I want to give?

What can I give?

What does the school need?

What does the school want?

What is my Value Proposition?

Each of these is a very different question.  To be truly impactful, you need to master each of them.

A question I ask almost all interviewees is “if you could craft the perfect next job for yourself, pay aside, if you could pluck from the job tree whatever set of full-time responsibilities your heart desires, what would that job be?”

I have to ask a question like that because I want to get a sense of the teachers’ intrinsic motivators.

But after the teacher has the job, and is in the school, after s/he has gotten accustomed to how things work at her/his school and has discovered those ways in which s/he personally connects with the job — that is, after s/he has figured out how to hitch the wagon that is the job to the raw horsepower that is her/his intrinsic motivations — she has to ask a much more challenging question:  what is my Value Proposition?

So let’s walk forward through this thought process with a very typical example of a very qualified English teacher — Bob.

What does Bob want to give?  Bob wants to teach a class where the students read short stories and vignettes from Hemingway’s In Our Time; and the culminating activity for the semester would be that the students each will write at least one short story, with fully developed characters and a compelling theme.

What can Bob give?  Bob has never run this kind of a class.  He has taken this kind of a class, and if Bob is not a deep thinker, he might assume that because he took a class like this, he can teach a class like this.  But if Bob is honest with himself, a more realistic course plan might be to have this be EITHER a creative writing class — where one or two accessible short stories or vignettes is studied as a model — but where the real goal is to get each of the students to produce some kind of written work that s/he would be comfortable publishing.

What does the school need?  The Japanese English teachers at the school do writing and reading work with the students.  They don’t do it in exactly the way that Bob would do it, so maybe he has something to offer them there.  But one thing that is striking about the school is that in spite of the fact that the students have a record of doing very well on English entrance exams, most of the students do not actually believe that they can hear or speak English, and the school is at a loss for how to address this problem.

What does the school want?  The short answer to this question is “just make it fun.”  But if Bob were to really press them on this question, the answers that Bob would get are much more interesting.  For example a lot of their competitors have students participating in debate and speech competitions.  A lot of their competitors have study abroad programs but the school has not been able to get rolling with this program because most of the parents feel that their kids aren’t comfortable enough with English to really gain anything from these programs.  Bob is delighted to hear that the teachers struggle to teach the students how to write compelling paragraphs.  Discourse-level grammar is the main issue, here:  they can teach the kids how to write a particular sentence correctly, but making the correct verb choice so that it fits grammatically with a verb choice that was made three or four sentences away, that is very difficult.  However, the school has a long-standing well-developed grammar-translation approach that the students respond very well to, and it’s hard for them to see where any long-form writing curriculum might fit with what they are doing.

So what should be Bob’s Value Proposition?  

If Bob equates his Value Proposition to what he wants to do, Bob becomes the drunk guy at the wedding that stumbles up onto the stage, snatches one of the band microphones and starts singing “Alison.”

If Bob equates his Value Proposition to what he can do, he is making a much more mature decision — one I see teachers make all the time.  “I know how to set up an activity where students practice giving each other directions, and so that’s what I am going to do because that is what I do best.”  He is not challenging himself, and he is not showing any curiosity at all about what it might mean to connect his skill to their needs.

If Bob equates the Value Proposition to what the school seems to need, then he is just being preachy.  Assuming he knows what the school needs better than the school knows — an interesting stance to take but in the past, ProGEN has come very close to losing clients by sending in otherwise talented teachers that came barreling into the job imagining themselves as resident experts.  Foreign teachers love to criticise the grammar-translation approach, and of course there are reasons to be critical, but if mono-lingual Bob is going to evolve, he needs at least to appreciate that grammar-translation is an approach that he himself would not be able to take even if he wanted to.

And if Bob equates the Value Proposition to what the school says it wants, then he is no-longer a decision-maker.  Whatever else a teacher is, a teacher is a decision maker.  Whatever Bob does, it needs to connect in some way with what he wants or he will not do it well.

To truly deliver value, Bob need to respond enthusiastically to those places where what the school wants connects with what Bob can do.  Bob needs to take what the community wants, marry that want to what is immediately feasible, find those places where what is feasible resonates with what he wants to give, and then he needs to make sure, at any given moment, that whatever he is doing is fulfilling a real need — adding value that the school would not be able to generate without him.

Your Value Proposition, as a teacher, is that thing that you add, given the unique needs and wants of the school — which would not be added, were you not there.

Flash forward, shaving this morning, and listening to the news:  Physics professors are now deciding that lecturing is “obsolete.” (There is actually a pretty interesting article on this here.)  Physics professors have proven in controlled experiments that students in physics seminars retain a lot more of the material when they are given opportunities to actively engage with it in a collaborative problem-solving context….  This is news….

Anyone seriously involved in education knows that teachers are not dispensers of knowledge.  Kindergarten teachers have known this since back before we called them kindergarten teachers.  A kindergarten teacher has no choice but to start with an assessment of the learner’s needs and with some sense of where the learner is. 

Is the learner tired? 

What interests her right now? 

Where do those interests need to pivot in order for me to reach a meaningful objective with her? 

What can I do to harness her intrinsic motivations? 

How is the learner creating meaning?

For the kindergarten teacher, centering on the needs of the learner is the only option.  Kindergarteners have no “student-ness” paradigm that you can rely on.  

Yesterday was a Father’s Day event.  My wife had told me that my son’s current teacher (we’ll call her O-sensei) is not liked by the parents.  A teacher myself, that made me instantly O-sensei’s friend. 

O-sensei was lovely.  She played the piano exquisitely.  Her activities ran like clockwork, and when speaking to the room, she was warm and radiated intelligence in a way that reassured us that she knew what she was doing.  My son, Dana, had drawn a picture of our family that was posted on the wall.  Strangely, Dana’s picture did not look like a cloud of truck exhaust fumes.  It is VERY hard to get Dana to follow through on activities like that — either he’ll be completely disinterested or he’ll throw himself into it completely, and draw something completely different from what you had asked.  So I was intrigued.

I asked Dana to show it to me and talk about it with me, and he didn’t feel like doing that. 

Dana had also made me a Father’s day gift — a foot-high cardboard me in a tie, with a stand that O-sensei explained to everyone was for holding mail.  My tie, my pants, and my shirt were different from all of the other daddies’ ties, shirts, and pants.  I THINK Dana had done some of that coloring

Dana is EXCEEDINGLY hard to keep on task with anything.  He’s never disruptive, but if you are not engaging him directly, he tends to drift off to the side; that’s just where he is these days.  And that’s where he was for this lesson. 

From 1:30, to 2:10, the activity was for the daddies to make a sea creature with the kids.  O-sensei gave the daddies explicit instructions as to how this was to be done.

And now I understood.

M-sensei — Dana’s kindergarten teacher last year — would send Dana home with crumpled stuff that Dana had definitely made himself. 

Order often fell apart in M-sensei’s room. 

But I chose this school because of M-sensei.  She was directly engaged with each kid and Dana flourished because the crumpled stuff  was his, and it was obvious to me that where Dana’s interest flagged, M-sensei found ways to re-engage him.   If there was a moment in the school play where somebody needed to jump up and scream something, Dana owned that part.

There were other teachers present during O-sensei’s lessons, but they were all effectively outside the room.  The room was O-sensei’s exclusive domain.  I figured out who O-sensei’s assisting teacher was only because that teacher ducked in and out when it was time to arrange for a group of kids to bring the attendance paper down to the office. 

M-sensei always had an assistant in the room with her, as well as, I think, a third person from time to time that happened to be available.  I’m thinking her colleagues just plain liked working with her.

For O-sensei, working as a team like that, clearly involves more variables than she can safely expect to control.

O-sensei was the classic example of a teacher whose primary concern it is to create the impression of transparency, while being opaque to observers, and impervious to critique.  She was impeccable in keeping to the clock, she articulated her intentions to the class in such a way that — while Dana, and most of the kids, wouldn’t understand them — the parents and teachers present would.  My Japanese isn’t good enough to do this, but I know just how my feedback session would have gone if she had been one of my teachers….

PETER:  “I notice that Dana’s drawing of his family looks pretty much like everyone else’s drawings of their families.” 

O:  “I felt it was more important that Dana get the satisfaction of completing something.”

PETER:  “Would it have been acceptable to you if Dana’s attempt at drawing his family ended up looking like a cloud of truck exhaust fumes?”

I ask questions like this, not because I know the right answer but because the reaction I get is often telling, and I am pretty sure that the answer that I got would have been something like this:  “Theoretically yes, and we do activities like that sometimes, but I had different objectives for this assignment.”

She was centered on the need for the wall of family drawings to look good.

She was centered on the need to execute all of her planned activities within the span of what, granted, was an important observation.

She was centered on making sure that every decision that she was making would have a plausible argument in its favor, were it to be questioned.

M-sensei — in contrast — was a work of art, welling up with tears at every moment where she saw a kid take initiative and apply him or herself.  M-sensei was a mess.

But kids are messy, and the only thing that M-sensei was centered on was the needs of her learners.

Dana learned.

If something is going wrong wrong, that means either …
a) you have misunderstood the needs of the individuals that comprise the room, or
b) you have ignored, lost, given away or misused your decision-making power.

Learners communicate need and the teacher makes decisions accordingly.

This is obvious? Right, so that means, don’t do this….

“Alright kids, today, we need to cover talking about the future, so I am going to give you time to talk about the future with anybody you want to for 5 minutes.”

Two mistakes …
a) The teacher has chosen an arbitrary and vague area of concern (probably determined by a syllabus or a textbook). Nothing of the learner’s needs are involved here at all, unless by chance.
b) The teacher has made one decision — not do take any responsibility for the next 5 minutes.

Anybody that has had at least 20 minutes of experience teaching kids (but also if you work with adults, and take the work seriously) knows that the activity described above doesn’t work. Still, I see experienced teachers run activities like this all the time. The rationale is very simple: it LOOKS “student centered.”

Students-centeredness doesn’t happen simply by letting go of the steering wheel. To be ANYTHING-centered, there needs to be a center. There needs to be a decision-making locus. That is YOU.

Yes … yes … yes … okay … you want also ultimately to empower your students to make decisions and take initiative, but there is one person whose job it is to make — WHO IS GETTING PAID to make, WHOM PARENTS ARE ENTRUSTING with making — decisions, and that is you.

When things seem to be falling apart — and if you are doing your job right, pushing the envelope of what your kids can do and what challenges they can handle, they will — when your class begins to lose its direction, before playing a Mr. Bean video, before saying to the class, “eh … uh … okay discuss,” ask …
a) Do I know the needs? What am I doing to determine the needs?
b) What decisions have I made so far, am I making now, and do I need to make in order to connect this lesson with those needs?”

So recently when teacher teams express concern about ways to keep their content consistent across their classes, the solution that I often find myself proposing is a regime of shared Exit Tickets. That way the team has a common reference point, while still allowing individuals to vary their teaching styles and play to their respective strengths. Situate a rack of hanging folders somewhere in the teacher’s room and you got yerself a shared database!

Of course … if all the kids had Chromebooks, they could enter their Exit Ticket responses that way, that would of course obviate hanging folders.

Or heck — given that pretty-much all kids have some kind of access to internet-connected devices — rather than waste class time, have them complete their Exit Tickets on the train home.

So then Exit Tickets might also serve as a gentle way to encourage your school towards loosening restrictions and investing in technology that will make for a more fluid more pervasive engagement with the kids.