The art of seeing (Part II) The Practice

part one      part three      afterthought

learning at the Brooklyn Museum - photo: Trevor Little

Last weekend I sat on a plane from Dallas-Fort Worth to Michigan, next to a young (11-year-old?) woman traveling 'unaccompanied' from her new home in Dallas to her old home and her (now divorced) father. To overcome the loud twenty-something women behind us who were declaring the small plane "unsafe" and "very scary," we talked. She loved flying. She was going to watch The Polar Express for the "hundredth time" on her little DVD player. She was looking forward to swimming in Lake Michigan. And Texas schools were both "much much bigger" and "much much easier" than what she had attended in Michigan. "Fifth grade there was the same as third grade [in Michigan]," she declared. "I'd done everything before."

A few days before I'd watched an 8-year-old girl climb a massive climbing wall, bottom to top. It was a dramatic lesson for me in perseverance, in mentoring, in scaffolding, in courage.

Emma's Climb. Copper Mountain, Colorado (yes, the room had only a plywood "Murphy Bed")

And yesterday I talked to three boys hunting turtles and tadpoles along Pine Creek just north of Holland, Michigan. We looked at the tiny legs emerging on the tadpoles, and wondered at how turtles could be both so fast and so slow.

I like to watch. I love to watch children and I love to watch learning. So I watch these things everywhere. At skateboard parks and on summer sidewalks. In parks and along beaches. In stores and on playing fields. In front of houses and in restaurants. Anywhere. Everywhere.

As I said in Part I of this sequence, education and capitalism have worked very hard to stop us from seeing as complete humans. We literally live in a world where "very smart" people go around insisting that they are only capable of single focus - that they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. "Attention" - in the Protestant, Capitalist, Rationalist world we live in - means staring at one thing, one person, handling only a single idea or experience at a time. You can't - the experts in The New York Times and on NPR insist - love the wind on your skin and appreciate the music of the incoming tide as you read Byron to the one you are very focused on getting into a highly intimate situation with. The brain, these "smart folks" tell you, can only do one thing at a time.

This is, of course, nonsense. It is the kind of thinking which occurs when people fall into the "science" of measurement completely, and stop observing.

When I observe a school I start by watching how I, and how kids, approach it. I watch how the corridors operate, both when filled with movement and (if) when empty. Empty corridors during a school day speak loudly to me. So do classrooms with one kind of seating, one kind of lighting, or one "teaching wall." I watch the feet of kids in a class. I watch them fidget. I listen to how they talk to each other. I need to see cafeterias and gyms. I need to see from under desks. I listen for the roar of air-handling systems and the buzz of fluorescent lights. I look at hallway and classroom bulletin boards to see if student work is student-designed/student-organized or assignment-compliant. I look at things like references to honor rolls and athletics and ask if all kids are honored or "Lord of the Flies" "choirs" are being created. I listen for the noise of learning. I sniff for the scents of physical activity. I, unlike Marzano and McRel, constantly look for engagement.

This multipli-focused kind of observation helps me to begin to deep map a school.

But the linearity and single-focus of traditional education has, perhaps, robbed you of, or severely limited, your human observation skills. Tens of thousands of hours of single subject lessons, of staring at teachers, of conference sessions divided into "tracks," have stunted the human abilities you had before you entered school. So, if you feel out of practice, here are a few ideas:

Eavesdrop: It's a lesson I've used for fiction writing, but it is essential for learning to observe - getting better at eavesdropping. Sit in a coffee shop, a restaurant, an airport, a park, and listen deeply to the conversations around you. This is how I worked on writing dialogue. I didn't want to sound like some authors where characters make little speeches. I wanted to know both how humans speak and what humans know.

So you need to learn to hear students (and teachers, and the community) when they are not speaking to you, when they think you are not listening, especially when you are not framing the limits of the conversation with your questions. And you can go out, have coffee, and practice this summer.

Look for something you haven't looked for before in a place you've been a million times: Avner Segall, a great Teacher Ed prof who I had for qualitative methods suggested this. So, for his class, I spent about three hours one Saturday watching people check out at Meijer. I was looking for how they interacted with the cashiers and with others in line.

This will build your skills for looking for differing things. Suppose you watched a classroom focused on which students were uncomfortable, or which kids were most frustrated with their technology (often their pens, pencils, paper, and books), or which kids didn't rush out to recess? What might you learn?

What is happening here? Really...

Stare: We're not supposed to do this in America, but you really need to learn how. You need to be able to stare deeply at a group of people and pull in all that you see. From clothing to hand positions, from movement to voice modulation, from body language to eye contact. You need to be able to see your students in all of these details, and a million more.

But you'll need to practice this. Perhaps begin in places where anonymity is easy - sport, the beach, a concert. Then move on up to the streetcorner, the playground, the bus or train.

Talk to strangers: Never pass up the chance to hear a new world view. I have learned from many people, perhaps most importantly from my "spousal equivalent" (a Gary Stager term), how to talk to anyone, anywhere. How to really listen to waiters and the people who help me through airports, cops I meet and people sitting nearby in parks, kids I run into and parents I overhear talking about education.

This is essential. We cannot "talk among ourselves" and learn the world. We have to open ourselves up and let the world in.

At EduCon 2010 Pam Moran and I entered Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy and looked in ways I think many others do not. We did this not because we don't think SLA is a good school - it is a great school - and we did it not because SLA chooses its students when most public schools cannot - there is a place for these "chosen one" schools, from SLA to Bronx Science, however little they tell us about strategies for public education. We did it because everyone in every school needs to do this, because all of us can always get better.

So at SLA we noticed the "Apple branding" of the school. We noticed the "No students on elevator" sign. We asked the very smart white-coated students helping with coffee in the school's library if they had coffee and food in the library during the school day. We talked to students about grades and motivation. We asked why the girls never had time to play on the ping-pong table. We wondered why some of the science equipment looked so dusty and was piled up in big heaps. We wandered through the theatre and asked the students about plays. We asked kids to show us their favorite classroom, and asked why they thought it was the best. We hung out with the student tech team.

Did our survey describe the entirety of the school? Of course not. But I think it did add to Chris Lehmann's deep map of SLA, and for a great school leader, the deeper the map, the better the school becomes.

So we need to see. We need to deep map. And we need to learn to pull the world into our brain in the most "ADHD-way" possible.

And then - next installment - we need to understand how our "educational reformers" are not doing that.

- Ira Socol

Chris Lehmann, Alan Shapiro, and sitting on a Philadelphia floor, almost 40 years ago

On a rainy morning back in the 1970s a few students from New Rochelle, New York's Program for Inquiry, Involvement, and Independent Study ("3Is") walked the couple of blocks from New Rochelle High School down to the Mayflower Elementary School parking lot. One student had a mother who taught there. I guess we were old enough to have drivers licenses, yeah, or this tale might have other components than the relevant ones. At the elementary school there may or may not have been a conversation between mother and daughter, and then we piled into a Ford Country Squire station wagon, filled it with gas at a Getty station on North Avenue, and drove to Philadelphia.

We didn't ask any adults about this. There were no permission slips. Not much of a plan. We were students in a different time and in a different kind of school.

Our mission was to visit The Parkway Program, a secondary school like ours, but located in the heart of a major city. We had many similar schools around us at that time, "Schools Without Walls" existed throughout Westchester County and Long Island as parts of, or adjuncts to, public high schools. We had visited them all, even played basketball against them all, but the program in Philadelphia offered us a chance to see how this translated into another environment.

"The whole scene oozed with activity and life and while there was no apparent order to it all, a sense of purpose seemed evident... I asked [the head teacher] if he would identify the kinds of things that were going on about us. His response - quick and unqualified - was to the effect that he had no idea what the activities consisted of, that it was furthermore not his business to know, and that the participants had defined the content, value, and details of their pursuits and were probably doing whatever it was they felt it important to do." - Greenberg and Roush. Philadelphia

Schools like this were notoriously hard to observe and evaluate. There were few - if any - things which looked like "classes" or "classrooms." Students were, typically, not there. And if they were there, what they were doing was either not obvious, or way too obvious (we had a brief hop-scotch craze, and we also had one student, who would go on to graduate from MIT, who entertained himself by running full-speed into the walls).  Most learning took place in projects - individual or group - or through conversations or individual reading, and might take place (in the case of the 3Is) in Alan Shapiro's living room in the evening ("Great Books") or Grand Central after midnight ("Abnormal Psychology") or at the City's Parks Department Greenhouse or the New Rochelle Hospital Emergency Room or City Hall or wherever.

This 'inability to observe' was, I suspect, part of the movement's downfall. Despite incredibly impressive graduation and four-year college attendance rates (far better than the "regular schools"), observers, especially as Reagan/Bush conservatism became the national mood, saw nothing but "kids hanging out, doing nothing." The model was too far from the expectations of political leaders to make any sense.

I thought about all this as Chris Lehmann, principal of Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy (SLA) and organizer-in-chief of the EduCon conference, and I discussed education on a brief post I wrote last weekend from SLA and EduCon. It's a great conversation, which touches on all the difficulties faced by those really trying to help kids learn (as opposed to those trying to test kids, which is a different idea), and all the difficulties of observing and discussing learning.

I had gone to EduCon and been uncomfortable. Nothing wrong with that in itself. I write a lot about the mismatches between schools and students, teachers and students. One size never fits all. And, I did find SLA students to be comfortable with their school, happy with their school, happy with their learning environment, which is what matters. It may not have been my vision of radically different education, but I'm not sure that SLA claims to be that. Others, perhaps they are very well meaning educators desperately looking for "an answer" and grasping at anything which looks successful as their "model," will see SLA and EduCon as a 'Nirvana,' but - that's "reader response," not school claim or design.

School in session, circa 1975

But what had struck me, especially on Twitter, was that when I said I wasn't comfortable at EduCon or that I had questions about SLA, a flood of educators told me that what was wrong was my behavior. You can see that in a couple of the blog comments (not from Chris) as well. You can also see the flip side. People, perhaps including myself, blaming the environment for the entirety of the mismatch. And that is an old, old conversation.

Student: "This school sucks." Educator: "No it doesn't, it's just your attitude." If you wander school corridors, as I tend to do, you will hear versions of this conversation all the time.

So, as Chris and I talked, talking out an initial face-to-face conversation which went something like this: Chris (walking down the hall): "Ira, aren't there any sessions which seemed interesting to you?" Ira (sitting in the hall): "Chris, you know I don't go to classes." - perhaps you've heard versions of this in your schools - I begin to think about how we see learning.

I had come to EduCon from a week walking schools with teachers and some students. We had "done rounds," going classroom to classroom, looking at spaces and what was happening inside them. And I realized how rarely teachers "share practice" like that.

And then I thought way back, way back to that rainy day in the 1970s. And I wondered how often our students really "share practice"?

So when we arrived in Philadelphia and climbed the stairs to the Parkway Program's home base, we found something which looked as different from our space as might be imaginable. They occupied an old 1950s style office space. We occupied a never-used-as-intended third floor cafeteria. Their's was dark and complex, ours was horribly uninteresting - so blank as a space we called it "The White Room."

But when we sat down in a circle on their floor, and began to talk, we found our common ground. And we talked about all the things which were 'really great' about this kind of school, and all the things which were 'really hard.' We started with surface things. We wished we were downtown like they were. They kind of wished they had some school facilities - gyms, etc - which we had around us. We all struggled to figure out what we were doing, and why. We all understood the liberation which came when we were freed from "industrial schooling."

Parkway watching, 1970

And then it got more complex. We all had different kinds of pre-high school experiences, and we talked about how those might have shaped our sense of the "possible" were it not for the interactions we had in our schools. We talked about - yes, we talked even though we lacked the right words - about what peer-to-peer unstructured learning was like. We talked about carrying the skills which had often gotten us in trouble K-8, into this new kind of learning space and using those skills in positive ways. We asked how they used resources - teachers, businesses, museums, institutions, the city... and compared that to how we did the same. We talked a bit about the future, and we were all vague - our education was not career driven - but we all suspected that we'd avoid traditional classrooms at all costs.

I think, without getting into "meta" jargon, we, by sitting down together, we're deeply thinking about our learning. We all did this anyway. We attended schools where every bit of our education was not just under our control, but had to be created by us (Alan Shapiro's oft-used quote: "You don't like it, do something else."). I was the one who decided that I needed 'non-reading English' and rode with the midnight WVOX news guy for a few months, learning writing without "writing" and reading without "reading" and editing via audio. I was also the guy who decided that classes just did not work, and so, I had to come up with something else.

But there's something about sharing those ideas of how we learn, sharing them beyond our comfort zone, which sharpens the understanding. And somehow, before we ended up challenging the Parkway kids to a "New York v Philly Home and Home B-Ball Series," I think we all had a better sense of what learning meant to us. Because we had held it up against various mirrors and lenses, and seen it in new ways.

Which is the same thing I saw when teachers showed each other their classrooms - classrooms in action. Which is the same thing Chris Lehmann allows to happen when he lets people wander SLA, and when he lets people doubt what they see. "I forgot to take it down afterward," Chris said about the elevator sign which bothered me, "My bad. It should have come down after the weekend because I agree, students should not have the Thou-Shalt-Nots all over the building. And I've probably walked by that sign three dozen times." Learning via seeing through others eyes. Through seeing yourself reflected in others eyes.

In the end I think this is about what Postman and Shapiro and Weingartner and others called, "Learning how to learn." And it is about letting kids find their path to that.

If I think back to that Country Squire, there were kids in there reading Siddhartha, and Franny and Zooey, and Das Kapital. There were magical musicians and gifted mathematicians. There was me, the storyteller who never read anything, and one friend who mostly just drew pictures. It didn't matter. We knew how to learn, and we were a learning community.

And that should be exactly what we want for our kids right now.

- Ira Socol