Home > Resources > Leadership > The Change Process

A Student's-eye View of School Change

Table of Contents:

• Introduction
• A Day with Brenda

• Suggested Exercise #1

• First Period, Chemistry
• Second Period, Keyboarding
• Teacher-Guided Assistance (TGA)
• History and English, Third and Fourth Period
• Fifth Period, Algebra 2
• Sixth Period, the Zephyr Team
  • Suggested Exercise #2
  • Suggested Exercise #3
• Reflections on the Issues Raised by the Snapshot
  • Looking Again at Group Work
  • Focusing on Cognition
  • Getting Students to Stand and Deliver
  • The Ongoing Need for Time to Plan
  • What Do Students Want?
  • Instruction Leadership
    • Suggested Exercise #4
• Notes

Introduction

In our third visit to Lincoln High School, during the week of November 9-13, 1992, we decided to focus on what happens in classrooms. As we do each time we visit a school as part of the School Change Study, we produced a "snapshot" of our visit, based on our observations in classrooms and conversations with people in the school community--teachers, students, administrators, and parents.

Lincoln High School is a suburban high school located in the south-central region of the country. About 75 percent of the students are white and 25 percent are black; 40 percent come from low-income families. Since joining the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1988, Lincoln has actively sought to implement the nine Common Principles in the school curriculum.

(See Appendix B for a listing of these Principles.) Some of the major changes the school has undertaken have included mainstreaming the special education students; implementing portfolios, authentic assessments, and site-based decision making; and restructuring the schedule to team more than half the students in the school into groups of about one hundred students and four or five teachers.

Instruction has to be the centerpiece of these snapshots, just as it should be the focus of the restructuring under way in all serious Essential Schools. As a way to highlight instruction in this snapshot, a student, "Brenda," narrates the first section. Brenda is not the writer's fantasy. Her words bring together the voices of several students, and the classroom observations rely on the insights of adults as well as youngsters. Brenda is admittedly articulate, serious, thoughtful, and not a bad writer! We hope her insights are not dismissed because she seems so sharp; nearly all Lincoln students are good observers of classroom life. They recognize excellent and poor teaching, and if they sometimes misjudge instruction, on balance they are reliable.

What Brenda observes and reports from her point of view is what the researchers saw and heard. In this snapshot, we use classroom observations and interviews from all three visits to Lincoln, although the bulk of the material comes from our most recent week there.1

Suggested exercises for the reader appear at several points in the snapshot. Originally these exercises were intended for the Lincoln staff as a way of exploring the issues raised by the snapshot. We invite the reader to complete the exercises as well.

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A Day with Brenda

The day in the life of Brenda offers quick sketches rather than exhaustive scrutiny of each period. The point is to provide enough description to provoke rather than overwhelm. What counts most is not our analysis, offered in the second section of the paper. What is important is the reflection that Brenda's narrative stimulates in each reader.

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First Period, Chemistry

Girls at the back of the room talk about bad romances: "If I hate someone, believe me.æ.æ.æ." Julia missed last week's test and tries to negotiate for more time: "I had to watch a video last night and write a paper." Students spread out around the room, filling half the lab benches, each of which has sinks and electrical outlets. Announcements over the intercom: progress reports next Wednesday, dance team auditions after school today, items for the steering committee to Mrs. Taylor by Friday, Bulldog Bank open 11:15 to 12:30 and we can get loans to buy yearbooks, Department of Health requires booster shots, tryouts for wrestling extended.

We move around to get into groups of three and four so we can work on skits we'll give. We have to do a presentation on lipids and proteins, their formations and breakdowns. It's a follow-up to earlier work on reactions between molecules. Mr. Warner gives an example of a news format used for a skit in his biology class:

"Here we are outside the cell wall. I understand that mitosis is about to take place. We have a reporter on-site, inside the nucleus. Dave, over to you."

"Thanks, Chuck. Yes, the nucleus is splitting! Now two, now four."

We don't know the dot structures of molecules, but we'll remember better which molecules react with which other molecules if we make these songs. Our group is using the Brady Bunch theme song. Have to fiddle with it to get the beat right:

There's a story, about a lonely glycerol,
That combined with three lonely fatty acids.
All of them combined to make a triglyceride which is a lipid
There's a story, of three glucoses,
Who were mixing with water of their own
They were four molecules, grouping altogether. . .

Walking from group to group, Mr. Warner stops to see what we've done. "I thought you'd have proteins in there. What about doing something with them?" We agree to use an Addams Family tune for that section. Paula, a cheerleader who works at McDonalds four days each week, kids me for not knowing the tune. I kid her for watching too much television, but I am impressed that she's spent time on the phone with her boyfriend talking about saccharides.

Two girls near me ask for help on glucose breakdown. Mr. Warner asks, "What's a form of glucose?" Blank stares. "What about this candy bar?" He picks up one student's breakfast. "What happens to that after you swallow it?" He keeps asking questions. They talk about fuel-to-energy conversion. After Mr. Warner leaves to work with another group, they take out their yearbooks.

Our group goes first. We're happy with it, but Tim says no one else wants to go after us because we did so well. Three of the four of us are cheerleaders; we're used to working together and performing in front of other people. The second group uses cards to stand for oxygen, and they hold hands and then break hands to show bondings and reactions. Stacey in their group is absent, so they recruited Julia fast. The third group reads a story about amino acids and peptides, with Mr. and Mrs. Protein, their son Enzyme, and daughter Amino Acids. Herman reads it all--not too dynamic. Mr. Warner videotapes all the skits. He seemed pleased with how it went. He reminded us, "Next week is water week. Since we've been talking about water from a physiological approach this week, I want you to see water from the environmental side next week." On my way out I saw him with the candy bar-glucose students who did not do a presentation. "I know your mom is sick, but .æ.æ." They are stalling, pretending they don't understand enough to do a presentation, getting defensive and a bit crabby.

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Second Period, Keyboarding

Ms. Stevens' classroom is set up so we all sit at work stations. Each table has four typewriters where four students sit so we see each other without being elbow-to-elbow close. Throughout the hour, she walks from table to table answering questions and looking at our work.

She started this period by admitting that she could not find the papers turned in last Friday, and she immediately gave another assignment: centering material, setting proper margins at the side and top. She repeated the assignment to several tables as she went around the room. Students asked her questions, politely, sometimes calling out, "Ms. Stevens!" without shouting. Everyone had their books open to the right page, and work started after a few minutes.

Ms. Stevens gets along well with us. Like when one boy came in late with a pass, she read it, frowned some, and said, "I am just telling you this for future reference. You miss something important when you come in late." She reminds me of a stewardess--dresses nicely, trim, graceful as she walks around, and polite.

Unlike most other classes, we usually raise our hands here. We can keep reading or fiddling with the machines even when one arm is up. She sees us right away and comes over. Half the time kids want to show off their work, excited at getting it right; the other times they ask a question or say why they're stuck.

At the tables, we talk as we work, not instead of doing work. It isn't always about typing, but often it is. People who finish their assignments early often move around and help a friend.

People don't fool around much in here. Today only a few students daydreamed or worked on another class assignment. Even that boy up front near the end of the hour--the one playing the computer game--had finished his work. We can get up and move around if we want, without asking permission. Right before the bell there's more noise, but it's not as rowdy as some classes with five minutes left. And the litter on the floor in here, it's paper from work we'd done. It wasn't thrown there--it slid off the tables.

It's hard to hide in this class. Ms. Stevens knows if we're not working, and we know she knows. But it's not like we want to hide. One girl finished early this period, and the teacher suggested she be the class file clerk, putting student papers in folders in a cabinet at the side of the room. She wasn't excited about that. Ms. Stevens offered her another choice: working ahead in the book, solving a problem the rest of us will get to next week.

The only suggestion I'd give her is to ask us sometimes why we made the mistakes we did. Usually she gives answers or points out how to do it correctly. If she would take an extra second or two and see where we'd gone wrong, maybe she'd understand better how we think about the assignment. Lots of kids come up with their own logic and ways to do it, and they get locked in. You have to unlearn that old way before you can learn the new way, otherwise you forget and go back to how you used to do it, even if you keep making mistakes.

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Teacher-Guided Assistance (TGA)

Seven black students are here for a meeting of MTRP, the Minority Teacher Recruitment Project. Some are assigned to another TGA, so they get passes from Mr. Stanley. Mr. Stanley teaches an African-American history course. As the black students circle their chairs (we whites are in rows, talking among ourselves and looking on with curiosity), Mr. Stanley says to a boy wearing a Malcolm X shirt, "Do you know what that X means?" "No." "It means unknown. Malcolm X couldn't trace his roots, so he used an X for his last name, just as in math we use an x for the unknown." On one wall is a display of African-American history, with pictures of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. He passes out some papers. One of them reads:

MTRP/FEA invites you to apply for membership.
Purpose:

• To identify minority students (in particular) who have a real interest in a career in education. All students are welcome. To help students become that educator.
  

Criteria:

• Real interest
• GPA of 2.5 or higher
• Participate fully in meetings
• Two letters of recommendation from teachers

He also hands out a blank calendar for the fall. "Membership meeting" is the lone entry for November. Mr. Stanley suggests activities for future months: making Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets for the needy, tutoring, writing a newsletter. He explains, "I'm throwing out ideas, but I want you to come up with some ideas." He asks them to think about what they want to do during Black History Month. Most of the ideas are his; TGA is short, and he wants to cover a lot of ground. Even so, the interest is genuine and no one in MTRP goofs off during the twenty-five minutes of TGA.

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History and English, Third and Fourth Period

Our two-hour American studies meets in a big, comfortable area that once was four separate classrooms.

A Glimpse into Ms. Marler's History Class

For history, we're in Ms. Marler's quarter of the suite. There you'd see two full-size, costumed mannequins; each wears an early twentieth-century gown. Across the ceiling there is red, white, and blue crepe paper we put up before the presidential election. Next to her desk is a small, old school desk with a stuffed bear sitting on the seat, wearing a striped hat, and she lets us hold it if we want. On the floor is a wicker basket with our papers in it. On her desk is a lamp shaped exactly like a red pencil, which she keeps on even during movies. It gives a glow to that part of the room--she wants us to feel comfortable to go over there. She doesn't mind if we look through the desk when we need a pen or pencil. She's always concerned about us, not just how much history we learn. Once I heard her tell a visitor, "Students don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

This class began with an assignment to do overnight which we'd finish in class tomorrow with the student teacher, Mr. Taggart. Ms. Marler referred to the "living amendments," the bookmark she gave us that has the first ten constitutional amendments (she likes bookmarks and small pamphlets because we can put them in our jeans and don't lose them as often as bigger books). "Please read the case study, read the ten amendments, and decide which amendments fit in. It may be one or several--look at your bookmark and decide." Mr. Taggart handed out the case study, which was four pages xeroxed from some book, as she continued speaking: "Everybody look up here please. Come on. I want you to take ten sheets of paper at the end of class today, and take twenty-six if you want honors credit. You should either draw or cut out pictures to illustrate the amendments." She reminded us to write one amendment on each page, and told us we could refer to the posters on the back wall that had sample illustrations of the first ten amendments. Mr. Taggart called the roll as Ms. Marler answered a few questions.

Before class, Ms. Marler had divided the room with signs that said, "White Only" and "Colored Only." We'd followed those directions as we came in and sat divided by race. Now the students paid attention as she explained the day's work: "We'll be role-playing today. But first I'd like you to answer this sponge2: Why are the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments called the Civil War amendments?" As a model for the assignment due in two days, she passed around the work of a student last year who had illustrated the amendments. The activity for this day was to take two Supreme Court cases on equal rights, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, and write three things about each one. She said that those two decisions had "changed history. The Supreme Court is like a brick wall, and we'll see how it tumbled down." She then turned the class over to Mr. Taggart.

He asked us to open our textbooks to page 90, and he started to read about civil rights. He went slowly and read with feeling. He tossed out questions--short factual questions which were not addressed to anyone in particular. He used to be a policeman, and he tells us great stories. We can ask him anything. Yesterday we wanted to know if policemen are goofing off when they stay in their cars to eat doughnuts and drink coffee.

As he read, Ms. Marler went over to LaToya and said, "Honey, did you turn in your election notebook last Friday?" She handed out folders to two boys, moved Kevin to another seat because he had shouted, while at her desk Jeff was picking up her clock, claiming it was one minute slow. She nodded and talked to a girl about her grades, then put her arm around a boy as she wrote out a note for him to go to his counselor. She does a lot of work with students as Mr. Taggart teaches. So does Ms. Barnett, who works mostly with the special education kids, although I'm not really sure who's special ed and who's not.

Kimberly turned to Claude and asked, "Why do you call white people crackers?" Claude asked her, "Why do you call black people niggers?" Kimberly raised her hand and asked Mr. Taggart, "Who made up all these names? Like honkies--where did that come from?"

We didn't get into that because just then Ms. Marler announced the entrance of three students who were dressed up as historical figures. Eartha, dressed as Homer Plessy, read several sentences from the back of a sheet of paper. Ms. Marler took his picture. She then explained the meaning of separate but equal, and a minute later, Jim Crow came out. He wore a hat and also read from the back of a card, and again Ms. Marler took his picture. Then Thurgood Marshall came in, read, and walked away. All that took five minutes, and there were no questions from the class (no wisecracks either).

Ms. Marler directed us to page 92 in the book and asked us to write out why the Brown case was a turning point. She told us we'd have the rest of this period to finish that question or work on the illustrations due Friday. We spread out around the room so we had enough space and talked quietly with each other about the illustrations. Ms. Marler told us we'd get extra points if we used markers instead of pencils. Several students finished early, and they went across the suite to join in singing and guitar playing.

While Mr. Taggart helped us, Ms. Marler spent a few minutes with a reporter from the Courier Journal who interviewed her about the support group she runs during her TGA period for teen parents.

A Glimpse into Ms. Benin's English Class

There are twenty-three students in Ms. Benin's class, sitting at six different round and square tables in a nook next to Ms. Marler's space. The walls of the room are bright and colorful, thanks to several large posters, plants, and artwork. Only one student sat alone; nearly everyone else sat next to someone of the same sex and race.

Ms. Benin spent this hour introducing an activity she really likes: mask making. Several masks done the previous year hang on one wall. She had printed on a large sheet of paper a sentence backwards. There was a lot of interest in the sheet. "Can you hold a mirror up to it?" It wasn't clear to us if she had done it on purpose or not, and we tried to figure out what it said.

Alongside the backward printing she had posted a quote from John Updike: "When you look in a mirror it is not yourself you see but a kind of apish error posed in fiercesome symmetry." Ms. Benin asked Sasha and Jennifer how the mask related to the quote. There weren't any answers I could hear, so Ms. Benin talked for a long time about how all of us hide behind masks in different ways and that we aren't always what we seem to be: "We see different things and faces, and we also see similarities. I bet we'll notice that when we look at your masks."

She passed around one mask, a thick one that held up very well but didn't show as much detail as most other masks. "Why am I showing this one? So you can avoid these errors." She said that a cast is made of gauze and that we would need to be mindful of the warmth of the water and the speed of drying when we make our masks. She told us that we would be in pairs and triads, and that everyone would make a mask of someone else as well as their own. She said the mask making would connect with a week on the state's literature, taught by Ms. Marler, and that at the end of the month, a crew from PBS would be here for the day when we painted the masks.

She passed around more masks. Each girl at my table touched them, put them over her face, and asked about the nose holes for breathing. Ms. Benin asked us to look at the masks and write about how they related to the quote. "I want everyone to write something down now." A few people did but many did not. She walked around, asked a few questions, then a minute later said, "Who has some comments?" Several students mumbled and Ms. Benin said, "OK, someone over here please." One girl said, "The inside is the opposite of the outside," and a boy added, "It's like looking at your own self." Four students had their heads down. Sheheedra asked how strong the mask is. Before answering, Ms. Benin said there was too much talking and she would move people if the noise continued. She talked about a mask that was soft and smooth, and pointed to a mask on the front wall that looks fragile but it is actually strong. "The outer edge is very important. You take strips, get them wet, and go around the outside of the face, start at the lips and the nose and then move to the cheeks and the ears. The mouth can be open or not, that's your choice." People really paid attention when she said that when we make the masks, we have to put Vaseline all over our face. Jason cried out, "That's gross," and Jasmine said, "I ain't doing it." Pamela was the most worried: "Are you sure Vaseline won't make you break out? I thought it got into your pores." Ms. Benin reassured her and went on to describe the ear holes.

We finished with a short worksheet. There was a list of events, like weddings, deaths, and sunny weather. Next to each word we had to write an emotion, and the four choices were glad, mad, scared, and sad. We then had to pick a color to put next to each emotion. These colors were drawn as a bar graph with longer graphs indicating stronger feelings. Then the bell rang and everyone flew for the door.

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Fifth Period, Algebra 2

There were twelve students here today. Our desks form a wide U and students sit at the outer edges. It's not easy to hear exactly what another student says on the opposite side of the room, but it's close enough to be distracting if somebody's chattering. Because many of the chairs are empty, you have three or four clusters of students in the room, which can be fine if they are working together in groups. Sometimes the way we spread out reminds me of a beach--four or five people under an umbrella, others nearby on towels, a few loners, with everyone semi-aware of each other, but whether they talk and mingle is up to them. It's nice of Ms. Hiebert to let us sit wherever we wish, and all of us have found a spot we like.

Class began with a sponge, a review of negative numbers. Here are the problems:

3^2 =

(-3)^2 =

1-(3^2) =

(-3)^2 x (3)^3 =

Even though this is Algebra 2, some of the people here aren't too good on negative numbers. So we started the period with that. Ms. Hiebert and two university students (who visit Lincoln as part of their undergraduate teacher-education program) walked around and checked our work. After a few minutes they used the overhead projector in the center of the room to review the answers to the four sponge problems.

Then Ms. Hiebert told us to look over the homework from yesterday. She asked Juan to go to the overhead projector and draw his answer on the transparency. As he did that, Ms. Hiebert walked around and checked the homework, recording in her grade book whether or not it had been done, then went back to the overhead and told Juan the parabola he'd plotted was correct. She said, "Now we'll look at wider parabolas." This time we graphed x^2-4. She told us to get into groups of four and asked us to factor it, then graph the function, then describe how the parabola differed from y-x^2. Three groups formed, with Ms. Hiebert assigning several students to one small group. She talked to each group and gave out paper.

The students in my group were working, the second group was shooting the breeze about social stuff, and the third group looked busy, but they were working individually rather than as a group. In the second group, where two girls were chewing lollipops, the university student was able to get them back on task, but basically he wound up doing the work for them. In that group several girls were still puzzled by multiplication of negative numbers, and one sighed, "I'll be glad when this semester is over so I can leave." Students in the other two groups were moving ahead pretty well. The university student spent all his time with group one--were they trying to keep him there by playing dumb? I didn't know whether they really needed help or whether they acted dense in order to get his attention.

After we all finished, Ms. Hiebert passed out wax paper. She told the class how to fold the paper so the dots, which were already on the paper, hit a line on the paper. We were to crease the wax paper each time a dot hit the line at a different spot, and she asked us to do that ten times. Ms. Hiebert walked around the room as we started working, and everyone seemed genuinely interested in this. After five minutes of folding, Ms. Hiebert asked us to look at the outside crease. "Ms. Hiebert, mine is kind of straight!" Alice exclaimed. "Mine's more like a bowl." "Mine's a big U." Ms. Hiebert drew a semicircle on the overhead transparency and under it she wrote the word parabola as she shushed four students talking to Jim, who'd just wandered in late. There wasn't much discussion; instead she asked us to draw another graph, showing the function y=x^2. We did that for values going from negative two to positive two.

Ten minutes later, she went to the overhead projector and plotted the points. She asked us now to find out where on the graph one half and one quarter would fall. She urged us to estimate. Again she left the projector and walked around the room, giving advice and answering questions. One boy was asleep and two girls were talking about a party where their friend had been kicked out. Back at the projector, Ms. Hiebert plotted a quarter and a half to show how they fit on the curved, rounded edge of the parabola. I think she was trying to correct a misperception that the parabola was a V with straight edges.

Moving quickly, she next gave a homework assignment--two functions to graph:

-y-x^2-4

and y-x^2+4.

She asked us in the homework to explain why we got the curve and she told us to hold on to the wax paper, which three people had crunched up.

I went up to the table in the front center of the room to look through a stack of papers and notebooks; mine will be graded by tomorrow. With two minutes left, eight students were standing near the door talking, and a few boys drifted in and out of the hall.

I asked three friends in this class how they liked it. They said Ms. Hiebert is fair, patient, and helpful. She wants us to learn; we know she cares about us. June told me Ms. Hiebert takes time to explain something if she's lost. "She goes through everything," Stephanie added. I asked June how Ms. Hiebert could improve and all she said was "I really don't know. I like it the way it is. It's not real wild or loud."

The only thing that worries me is that my three friends don't know why we're studying parabolas. Why bother factoring equations and plotting graphs? Whoever uses parabolas in a job? June said we "might need it sometime in life," but she didn't know when. Stephanie thought somebody might "get a job that deals with that" but she didn't know which job.

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Sixth Period, the Zephyr Team

I was a student on the Zephyr team as a freshman, and today I'm with those teachers to write an article for the newspaper about teams. There's a sub for my sixth-period art class so I won't miss much, I hope. Most of the teachers in Zephyr are different from the ones two years ago; as Ms. Campbell said, "We've had a lot of divorces here." They still run field trips and special projects, and as Ms. FitzPatrick told me, "We offer the chance to explore yourself before we shove the great works or algebra down your throat." Many of my friends say they wish they'd had more algebra and other serious work. From what I saw today the team seems like they're trying to emphasize more of that.

Their hour together began with a visit with a parent. Her son saw a doctor recently--he's had headaches--the tests showed no physical problems so the doctor recommended anti-depressants. She's reluctant to see him on those drugs. She's also concerned that he has so few friends. The mother asked the team to keep an eye on him, and the team reassured her that they would, adding that they thought he was pleasant, well behaved, in class.

Then they started talking about a trip to a museum they'll take in two weeks. Because only thirty kids can go at one time, they need to figure out who will stay here, and what they'll do with the seventy-five who aren't out. Should they fill in for each other or get subs? Two teachers wanted to cover for each other by doing two-hour blocks with two large groups, then switching. Ms. Cubberley worried that would interrupt the flow of a new unit. "I'll just be starting genetics. It's rough for me to have kids going in and out; catching up will be hard. This isn't a great time for me to go on an activity binge." She wasn't sure what Ms. Campbell had in mind when she talked about splitting the seventy-five kids, with half in one room for a two-hour math/science and the other half doing a two-hour health/English. Would it be the regular curriculum she'd planned or not? What about equipment? Ms. FitzPatrick volunteered that "I always have a lesson I can pick up and flip in." Ms. Cubberley finally was satisfied that the team wasn't asking her to stop or drop her unit on genetics. They ended up teasing each other. Ms. Cubberley said, "I like how we plan so far in advance!" Ms. Campbell punched her arm and said, "You've got to learn how to wing it, Cub."

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SUGGESTED EXERCISE #3 How well prepared is Brenda for the State School Improvement Act tasks that appear in Appendix C?

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Reflections on the Issues Raised by the Snapshot

When Lincoln faculty read the previous two snapshots, they differed in regard to how much advice and direction they wanted each paper to offer. We heard everything from "tell us what to do next" to exactly the opposite. The following observations on classroom life include some possible approaches the school might take, but we hope the reflections here stimulate the readers to imagine other options as well.

All of the following issues arose in the course of Brenda's day, either in her experiences or in her teachers' actions and thoughts. We devote the most space to those points which also emerged from our observations in many other classrooms. The goal is to move from the particulars of one student's day to the larger patterns that characterize Lincoln High.

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Looking Again at Group Work

Group work is the most common instructional strategy in Lincoln classrooms that spurn the old "lecture, lecture, lecture" routine. Each of the teachers profiled in the first section relied on group work.

Although Ms. Stevens spent the least time organizing group projects, the layout of her room encouraged working in groups. Because the assignments were done individually, working in groups was not identical to group work, but there certainly was informal sharing and questioning back and forth, and work did occur. In other classes, the groups were free to move around and settle wherever they wished (overcrowded rooms are rare at Lincoln). Teachers varied in how thoroughly they had trained students in the rules and roles for effective group work, and they differed in whether they kept the same groups throughout the fall or whether they let students pick their own groups. Penalties for not working well together also varied, with most teachers generously offering second and third chances to earn enough points to pass. In light of the prevalence of cooperative learning, it may be useful to revisit this technique from time to time. People who are good at it can become better; novices can gain insights they might not pick up on their own.

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Focusing on Cognition

Group work is often part of an activity which the teacher, or teachers, created. Most Lincoln teachers think of innovative curriculum in terms of units, projects, special theme weeks, guest speakers, field trips, or other discrete packages which they make. Usually these initiatives seek greater student interest, and participation is often considered a reliable sign of success. Did their students listen, attend, join in, and enjoy? Good behavior and reasonable effort reassures teachers that the venture went well.

That is the way teachers plan and evaluate instruction in most schools. The emphasis is on procedures and the level of student satisfaction with the new experience. There is less attention to the difficult question of what is going on inside students' heads. How are they making sense? What are their strategies for learning? That perspective, which asks of all students what a good special education teacher seeks in developing an IEP, is diagnostic. When we asked teachers what they would see if they could peek inside their students' heads, they tended to talk about emotional upheavals or factual knowledge rather than learning strategies or deeper understandings of the logic of their particular field.

Minds learn in complicated ways. Information does not go directly into heads in the same form that it is presented. In the behavioristic era, the emphasis was on the lesson. Teachers were told to plan and present lessons; that was, and still is, a major focus of teacher training. Nowadays, however, it has become clear that designing lesson plans is not the main task. Understanding how students learn the lesson is. Teachers everywhere need to understand the complex ways students actively incorporate information. Teachers must try to grasp the goals students set (not merely the lesson goals the teacher wants them to set); the cues that students actually attend to (not merely those the teachers emphasize); the knowledge that students choose to invoke (not merely the facts that the teacher hopes they'll recall); the actions and speech the students actually express (not merely the behavior the teacher sets as an objective); and the self-monitoring routines students actually use (not merely the ones teachers prescribe).

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Getting Students to Stand and Deliver

Teachers who design student projects often see oral presentations as the hallmark of using one's mind well. When students had to perform in Mr. Warner's chemistry class, their preparation took the entire week. Ms. Marler's skits were much shorter, but they are a regular feature of her classes. Ms. Benin's students learned they would later perform for the PBS cameras.

Other teachers are also explicit about the importance of good public speaking. "You would think you were in Speech 101 at the start of the year," Ted Stewart said of his history classes. Eye contact, voice inflection, answering questions: Ted stresses those skills. He knows that most of his students are unaccustomed to standing and speaking. They are shy, awkward, nervous and lack confidence. Pat Clark collects stacks of newspapers and periodically asks her English class to pick a news article, then rise and summarize the piece. "When I get tenth-graders in the fall, half of them will not stand on their feet and say anything to the class. It's incredibly important that the kids need to know they can speak if they have to--they won't die, the earth won't swallow them up." Nearly everyone who presents earns an A for the day, and the audience gets extra-credit points if they are polite.

Pat Clark thinks about educational reform, including Coalition Principles, more than most people in American high schools, and she recognizes the risk of generously encouraging students: "Kids can exhibit without really having mastered much of anything." However, the sheer effort the students make seems praiseworthy to her and deserves reinforcement: "If you finally see a kid who hasn't wanted to stand up, get up and exhibit something, you are going to give him a great grade just because he put on a show, drawing from his inner resources."

Speech could be a worthwhile curricular focus for the ninth-grade teams. Gaining the confidence to talk in front of others is not a trivial accomplishment for many freshmen, and it may be the prelude to other forms of serious work, including good writing and reading. The challenge may be to keep pushing until the expectations come close to those of high school debaters, who go beyond brief statements of personal opinion or factual recall to analyze, cross-examine, draw from their own research, and in other ways marry confidence with the habits of persuasive argument.

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The Ongoing Need for Time to Plan

The expansion of teaming holds out the promise of more and more thematic units, interdisciplinary work, and other creative curricular designs that honor the Coalition's notion that less is more. Some of that hard work has already begun, with the older Zephyr and American studies teams examining essential questions in their curricula. The newer teams made a few promising starts last fall, but usually their earliest accomplishments were better communications about individual students, in which they shared important facts and insights about particular kids everyone knew.

Most Lincoln teachers think that the key to curricular change is time. Many discuss the topic of time in terms of a second planning period, when the team could focus on instruction. Without that extra hour, teaming is doomed to be teaming in name only, they predict. There have been lively discussions of future schedules. Do student course needs and the school's staffing levels rule out a second planning period for all? What trade-offs would be necessary to get there? It would also be worth asking how individuals and teams that have enjoyed a second planning period made use of the bonus; what did they achieve?

If a second hour cannot be secured, how might teams nevertheless use time to develop curriculum? A three-year, $200,000 grant offers many chances for release time and days off, and some teams have begun to make good use of that opportunity. Others have found a few minutes over breakfast or lunch, and a few went to a teammate's home for a working dinner. Occasionally devoting individual planning time to team issues is another option sometimes used.

Perhaps the major source of time is the common four-hour block, when the teams could creatively reschedule the students they share. If it is time for the English teacher to grade portfolios, give her two days without classes. Have two hours for work on political cartoons, then use two hours the next day for literature. Let the Zephyr kids devote all four hours to building their hot air balloons for their Derby unit. There are many possibilities, and some teams have begun to explore ways to break free of the fifty-five-minute lockstep.

There is less discussion of the role of departments and disciplinary expertise within the teaming structure than there is of schedule. Teaming encourages the Coalition's "teacher-as-generalist" Principle, a notion easily misunderstood to mean that everyone has to teach absolutely everything. Some innovators at Lincoln feel that departments are obsolete. Others believe that as the school stretches to meet the State School Improvement Act (SSIA) expectations, there will be subject-specific challenges on which teammates will be less helpful than department colleagues.3 How departments and teams will connect is not clear so far.

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What Do Students Want?

Not all students welcome adventuresome instruction that takes them a step or two beyond where they might otherwise go. Some of them are not bashful about telling teachers to back off. When Mr. Krug began the term with some ambitious projects, his class said, "Are you sure you're teaching chemistry for high school students?" When Ms. Cubberley expected problem solving from her Zephyr team students, they said, "We don't want to do anything where we have to think." Openly and subtly, students try to strike bargains to minimize the demands they are asked to meet.

Yet many students resent classes that seem too easy. Listening to the students, it is clear that they respect teachers who do not waste time, who expect learning to occur, who are organized rather than chaotic. They dislike anything that suggests they are being treated like middle-school kids. It is also evident that they want learning to be fun, notwithstanding a prejudice that it can't be real learning if it's very fun. They appreciate teachers who care about them, who give consideration to and understanding of their non-academic as well as academic needs, without pampering or babying them. Lincoln students want their classes to be relevant, to have a purpose that promises to be useful later in life. They often have mixed feelings about traditional teaching methods. Although they appreciate variety, projects, group work, and movement in class, they also see homework, textbooks, rote memorization, and drill as the marks of demanding instruction.

One result of those widespread notions of appropriate teaching is that many students can be satisfied at a level that may not equip them for the analytical reasoning expected in the SSIA exams. Teachers have to fight many students' regrettably low self-assessments, as well as the students' conventional ideas of what entails good teaching and what constitutes legitimate demands on them.

In many high schools where students lack a strong academic work ethic, the "dumbing down" negotiations between students and teachers often take place in classrooms filled with the least able, who get a steady diet of films, worksheets, silent reading, and other exercises designed to keep the peace without totally abandoning the illusion of serious work. That is rarely the case at Lincoln. The special education students often take demanding math and science courses, and if some teachers are baffled on how to teach a vast range of abilities, others are pleasantly surprised by how many special-needs students put forth effort and behave well. After a rocky first year of total mainstreaming, the ECE services seem to be much improved this year.

What about the kids in the middle, the students who are not varsity athletes, handicapped, gifted, or in other ways exceptional? In most large American high schools, they lack strong allies such as coaches or savvy parents. They are not rowdy. They pass their courses. These students are the spectators in the stands, not the players. They are free to pick and choose from a curricular smorgasbord, but receive little individual advice on what to take.

At Lincoln, it may be that the "unspecial" students are better served than they would be elsewhere. They benefit from the individual attention which teaming encourages. They are helped by the extraordinary efforts of the Youth Services Center staff, who offer crisis intervention and social services. And some students may feel special by virtue of the new public safety program, which seems to be privileged in regard to class sizes, budgets, priority in creating the master schedule, and so on.

In the opinion of many Lincoln teachers, the most able students are not stretched as far as they could be. Although this upper end is modest in size (approximately 30 percent of the graduating seniors go to either a two- or four-year college), it is not absent. These students were among the critics of teaming last spring; they foresaw fun and games which would not prepare them for college. Extra credit and honors work is often defined as doing more of the same assignments everyone else has, and advanced placement course work is unavailable. What complicates the situation is that students of the caliber and drive of Brenda rarely protest or transfer. They are fairly satisfied as long as their classes are reasonably stimulating.

If the students are the "customers," as many Lincoln teachers like to say, where is the consumer movement for different goods and services? Some Lincoln students yearn for more, others would be content with less, and a few are not sure what they want or need. Monitoring change or gauging quality solely by the level of student satisfaction will therefore yield imperfect measurements. Ignoring customer wishes, on the other hand, has never worked well, either in industry or in schools. This dilemma is a major challenge for schools which try to raise expectations while competing for students in an open-enrollment marketplace.

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Instructional Leadership

There is a wide array of views as to how the front office should coach individuals and teams. Some teachers think the administrators are already too directive, sure of where the school is headed and determined to get there. Others consider the administration not directive enough, especially in regard to the day-to-day operational details, particularly scheduling and discipline. The administration sees itself as quietly refocusing, redirecting conversations, occasionally nudging, advising, listening, encouraging, and cheering the risk-takers.

In some ways, the administrators' style resembles the style of those working in higher education: Give the faculty considerable freedom and autonomy; alert the entrepreneurial teachers to grants and other external resources. Be patient, don't insist on early evaluations, don't punish early shortcomings and false starts. Make decisions democratically, and trust committees to plan and implement change. Many Lincoln faculty welcome this approach, and they seem to have the energy, imagination, intelligence, and collegiality to make good use of invitations and opportunities to innovate.

A test of this leadership style may be the way novices and other newcomers to Lincoln come to understand and support the changes now under way. The school has a rare opportunity this year. One third of the faculty is new. Many of the staunchest skeptics and saboteurs left last year. Do the newcomers know what the overarching mission of the school is? Do they understand to what ends teams are the means? Do they see how the various initiatives started at Lincoln in the last seven years fit together? Do they grasp what SSIA seeks? Making sure the new recruits are first-rate will go a long way toward creating the instructional improvements the school wants.

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Notes

1. During the week, we interviewed twenty-seven faculty members and administrators, talked with six teams of teachers, observed two team planning periods, interviewed twenty-four students (individually and in groups), and observed thirty classes (each researcher stayed with two teachers throughout the week). Maxwell and Wenger transcribed their tapes, with editing and analytical commentary, and Hampel took detailed notes on his tapes. A long memo from Laraine Hong reviewing her 1991-92 work helped shape the second section of this snapshot. Two teachers wrote first-rate journals for this project, and Ted Stewart ably coordinated and scheduled our visits.
2. A sponge is a brief thought-provoking activity that opens the class.

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The Lincoln research team was headed by Robert L. Hampel, professor at the University of Delaware and author of The Last Little Citadel (1986). The other members of the Lincoln team were Laraine Hong, a former elementary and college teacher, now working for the Bellevue, Washington, school district and author of a forthcoming Teachers College Press book recounting a stormy year in her elementary school; and Neill Wenger, a cognitive psychologist who has taught in elementary school, consulted for the Pew Foundation, and is currently co-authoring a multimedia textbook.

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This resource last updated: June 10, 2002

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