Bootcamp

During these first few weeks of School Shaped “bootcamp”, we have had several conversations with different teachers about their challenges, successes, and just general approaches in the classroom. The teachers we have spoken with so far have covered a wide range of teaching backgrounds. Yet whether our interviewee taught integrated science at a Montessori middle school or physics at a public high school, we have already begun to see the same themes arise in each teacher’s experience. As we have identified these different themes and challenges that teachers face, we have discussed and developed our observations into areas of opportunity for improvement.

Accountability

One of the topics that naturally came up over and over during our conversations was an idea of student accountability. Not every teacher used the term accountability; one described students’ needs to feel agency, while another used reflection as a way to discuss the need for students to recognize ways they could improve. However, no matter how it was brought into the discussion, each teacher addressed the challenge of helping students feel accountable for their own work, successes, and even failures. We noticed that the two middle school teachers we spoke with put particular emphasis on the importance of their students developing a sense of accountability for their own work.

Consistency

A few teachers observed that students with inconsistent home lives have inconsistent behavior, inconsistent performance, and inconsistent personalities. A consistent educational experience can help support these students by providing them with much needed stability. Even students without serious issues at home can benefit from this type of support. This consistency can take many forms: within a single class, department, or even an entire school. One teacher with whom we spoke appreciated the cohesiveness that cross-disciplinary practices provided to a student. In her school, students practice certain skills such as as frameworks for note taking and scientific writing that are taught and used in multiple contexts. At this stage, we hope to discover more about what inconsistencies in schools can be harmful to a student’s development, and how to rectify these issues and provide stability.

OutcomesOne area of opportunity that is often contested in the more political realm is a definition of success for students. Policy makers and educational administrators make guidelines for schools and curriculum that teachers are often not just a suggestion, but a requirement that they must follow. In turn, these guidelines usually only have one metric for success. They often do not include whether a school is closing its achievement gap and pieces of the more complex puzzle. The teachers we talked to expressed a frustration reconciling the state and federal requirements with their own goals for their students, providing a challenge creating day-to-day lesson plans. The teachers and students would most likely benefit from some way of seeing how they are performing in regards to the entire system and see how far they are progressing regardless of their peers.

Opportunity

Nearly everyone agrees that each student should be given all appropriate opportunity to learn. This opportunity is not the same for every student. If a student has parents who are uneducated or unable to provide help on homework, that student receives less individualized help that can help them overcome a difficult problem or understand it in their own fashion. The ability to learn is not limited to those who are behind their peers, but also those who are ahead. Many teachers offer problems in addition to the standard set that require delving further into a subject. This method allows those students to continue to learn while their peers work to understand an already mastered subject. Some combination of these is already in effect. All of us have seen worksheets with the “extra credit” problems on them which students work on while a teacher walks around helping those that need the most attention. There is a lot more that may be done within this area of opportunity from reaching students at home in a more fulfilling fashion than homework and within the classroom.

Feedback

A theme that has come up during many of our interviews is feedback for both students and teachers. There are many facets of feedback that seem to be a broken part of the system. In one teacher’s school district, feedback from his supervisors came only once per semester and could have an effect on his salary or his opportunities for promotion. He described it as an “I gotcha” moment of sorts, whereas, he wished that the conversation could be more constructive and candid. He believed that more frequent and meaningful feedback from the school’s administration would help him improve his teaching.

Another teacher discussed the role of feedback given to students as a way of improving their learning. In her experience, she saw students improve their academic performance as a response to detailed constructive feedback. She also observed that the amount of feedback she was able to provide for her students was a reflection of her level of investment in their learning. She lamented when she moved to a larger school, where instead of writing detailed feedback for 30 students, she had to settle for very shallow feedback for 150 students. The need for improvement in this area comes in both terms of quantity and quality. For genuine improvement, both students and teachers need to receive constructive and frequent feedback on how they can progress.