Choice Theory (37 page)

The girl sitting next to me had paid no attention to the teacher and no attention to me. She was writing furiously in a spiral notebook, and her writing was legible. She was doing something educational even if it wasn’t math. I asked her softly, “Are you going to do the problems?”

She looked at me with surprise. Either she hadn’t seen me or she was surprised that I had spoken to her. She said nothing and went back to her writing. In a polite and interested way, I repeated
myself, “Are you going to do the problems?”

She then recognized my presence and said, “What problems?”

“The problems over there on the blackboard.”

“Where?”

I pointed. “There.”

She looked at them, turned to me, and said, “Oh, those problems.”

She went back to her writing.

After a moment I persisted, “Are you going to do them?”

She looked at me as if this was a strange, somewhat foolish question and then politely said, “No.”

At this point, the teacher was going around the class prodding students, but no one paid any attention to him. In desperation, because my reputation was on the line and the teacher was also watching me, I said to the young woman who continued to write, “How about if you just do one problem.”

She looked at me as if this was an interesting suggestion and apparently liked the way I suggested it, not threatening or criticizing, and said, “OK.”

She did the problem easily and then went back to her writing. I summoned up my courage and said, “Look, that was easy. Why don’t you do the rest, and you’ll have done all the work for today.”

She paused a moment in thought and then said “OK” again. With a little help from me, she did the other three problems.

I then said, “Good, go back to your writing.”

I took her paper with the problems on it, and now I knew what to do. I spent the rest of the class tutoring students one at a time with good results. (And spent the rest of the year at Schwab tutoring students with’ good results.) The bell rang and the students left. I asked the teacher if he saw what I did. He said he had, and I gave him the papers of the five students I had tutored. I asked him what he did while I was tutoring, and he told me what I had seen him do: He walked around the class trying to prod students into doing the problems. I asked him if he had any success, and he said, “None.” I asked him if he would have had more success if he’d done what I did, and then I got the answer that I heard many
times from teachers when I suggested tutoring: “But if I sit down to tutor one student, what will the rest of them do?”

I answered as I always answered, not sarcastically but truthfully, “Exactly what they were doing while you were walking around—nothing. If you had tutored another five, half the class would have done the lesson.” A small amount of tutoring was the key with many of these kids. They needed the personal attention. But we discovered that we only had to tutor them a few times to get their attention, and then they would begin to work by themselves as long as the work made sense to them. Schooling occasionally worked at Schwab if it was easy. The students loved doing things they could do for a while, but if it continued too long, they got bored and quit. They also liked the math story problems but needed some help to get started. What they really wanted was a lot of personal attention, a little conversation, the feeling the teacher really knew and cared that they were there. Most of the Schwab teachers were able to teach in a way that made a lot of sense and were willing to give the students the personal invitation to get started that they wanted.

But the teachers needed personal attention just as much as the students did. They were laboring in a system in which the only attention they got was criticism from people who had no idea of how hard their jobs were and couldn’t do them if their lives depended on it. From the day we walked into that school, Carleen and I expressed appreciation for their efforts. We spent time with them, talked with them, ate meals with them, taught them all we knew, and listened to them. Quickly it became clear that they knew a lot more about what to do than they were doing but did not feel free to do it. It was as if it was wrong to use their skills to teach effectively, to get as personal as the situation warranted, and to give up all but a little schooling—and to stop threatening and punishing.

In addition to her daily sessions with individual teachers and small groups of teachers in her office, Carleen began to meet after school with whomever would come on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons. First the meetings were gripe sessions and
she listened, but gradually she began to ask the teachers what they wanted that they didn’t have now, which gave them the message that she would listen seriously. I attended many of those meetings and told them that we couldn’t guarantee we could get very much of what they wanted, but that at least they should tell us. In the beginning they began to ask indirectly for something that I thought we could help them with: Could they teach the way they felt was best? They seemed afraid that if they did what they wanted to do, it might be against central office policy or a deviation from the prescribed curriculum. Fear again. There was a lot of it at Schwab.

When we asked them what we could do to get them the permission to teach as they wanted to, they said they wanted someone with authority to come from the central office and tell them they could teach as they wanted. No one from the central office seemed to want to come to Schwab. Finally, I called a vice president at Procter and Gamble—that company has a lot of influence in Cincinnati—whose assignment was to help the schools. I told him I needed someone from the central office to visit the school and reassure the teachers that they could be flexible in what and how they taught.

He got someone important to come and reassure them. But the teachers didn’t believe her and told her so; they wanted it in writing. She then sent a letter confirming what she had said, and this was a huge boost for the teachers. This letter was tangible proof that we weren’t just talk. But before they would go ahead, they wanted another letter from the State of Ohio Department of Education, and we got that letter, too. Things began to look up.

The next thing we did was very important. Many of the teachers believed that the students, because of so many years of not doing much in school, were unwilling to buckle down and do some useful schoolwork. To deal with that problem, Carleen and I, with the help of the math department, organized a two day tutor-in for math, their worst subject according to the state achievement tests. We divided the students into groups of ten, each group with a staff member. We had enough on our staff to do this if we used everyone in and out of the classroom.

Carleen got on the phone and went into the neighborhood, the teachers helped, and we got a hundred people to volunteer for the two days. With the math department’s assistance, we put together a special math book for the tutor-in, starting from the elementary level and working up to eighth-grade story problems. It was a huge undertaking for Schwab, but it was intended to show that with personal attention and sensible subject matter, the students would buckle down and work.

For the tutor-in, there were, besides a staff member, one or two helpers for every ten students. The groups were spread all over the school. The students were told there would be no failure. They should do as much as they could and ask for help if they needed it, which they would get immediately. It was a remarkable success. For a day and a half they did huge amounts of both calculation and then math and did them both reasonably well. This was neither the time nor place to fight the schooling battle; the last third of the book was story problems, and they enjoyed solving them.

The last half day they still worked but not with the gusto of the first day and a half. We should have stopped then, but it didn’t hurt the experiment. The students were relaxed and enjoyed the time to chat with their teachers and helpers. What the tutor-in proved to the teachers is that the students were willing to work in a no-failure, lots-of-help, sensible situation. What we had to do was figure out how to get a similar approach going every day. But the groundwork was laid to do something big.

Carleen continued her one-on-one contacts with the teachers during the day and the after-school meetings. More teachers came, and she asked them over and over what they wanted more than anything else. They told her they wanted smaller classes and no disruptive students. The disruptive students were mostly the overage students—there were 170 of them—some of whom had been in the seventh grade for up to four years. The teachers said that if we could get rid of these students, they could really teach. These students seemed to be the real Stacys of Schwab; they had given up on learning. Yet even these students worked during the tutor-in.

There already was a special program in Schwab for the overage students, but only 75 of the 170 were enrolled and only about 40 of them regularly attended. I asked the five teachers who were working with these 40 regularly attending overage students if they would take all the rest. I said that if they would do so, we could transform the school. I was asking them to quadruple their teaching load for no more money, but they were willing to discuss it.

There was a lot of discussion. They said that they needed two more teachers. Two teachers from the regular staff volunteered. They needed a place. I thought that an old wood shop that was being used as a classroom in the present overage program would be ideal for creating the environment we wanted for the students in the new program. Without their asking, the teachers were given total control over the program; there would be no interference from the principal or the central office. The central office had no problem with this request and was supportive of the program from the start. When I explained the program to the principal, he agreed wholeheartedly.

The old shop needed total cleaning, carpeting, painting, and furnishing. There was $22,000 left in an Ohio State Venture Capital Grant awarded to Schwab to be used for our quality school program. Used sofas, dinette sets, and computers were installed. The room was painted and carpeted. It was furnished this way because I believed the room would not work if it looked like a classroom; these students did not have classrooms in their quality worlds.

Now we were able to tell the regular teachers that what they wanted was going to happen. They were going to get smaller classes, on average five fewer students per teacher, and no overage students. At first, they were both pleased and worried. But the fear of the new was a momentary thing. The seven teachers who volunteered to teach the new program interviewed all the overage students and told them what was going to happen. The students were interested. They wanted to graduate and go on to high school but all had given up on the idea that they ever would.

The teachers, with our support, were free to be creative. They
worked day and night preparing a new curriculum based totally on the district’s required competencies that every student needed to get into high school. Their approach with the students was, Forget all the failure of the past; just show us you have the skills and the knowledge needed for high school. This was to be no free ride.

The program was supposed to start in January but it didn’t actually start until the second Tuesday in February 1995. It was called the Cambridge Program, patterned after the university in England. The large room was to become the commons; five adjacent classrooms were used for tutorials in math, science, social studies, career education, and remedial language arts. The main language arts were to be in the commons.

The first day looked chaotic. All 170 students showed up, but no one knew exactly what to do. In all the seeming chaos, I sat in the center of the room at a table tutoring some students in math. The second day was less hectic; I continued to tutor, now in English. The staff were discouraged, but I was encouraged. It seemed a lot more organized than I thought it was going to be. The students were loud, but I noticed no hostility. Everyone was pleasant, and we never lost that pleasant mood.

The third day there was an act of God. It snowed and the yellow buses didn’t run. Only eighty students showed up in the whole school that day—forty who could walk to school and were in the regular program, and forty from the Cambridge program, all of whom normally rode the bus, who somehow got there on their own. Those forty had seven teachers and one teacher’s aide all to themselves. They did a lot of work that day and loved it. After that day, we were over the hump.

There were no traditional seat-time classes. It was all tutorial, and the students had the choice of what tutorial to go to and when. We said they had to be fair about it, and they were. Before long they had their own schedules worked out. It was the first time any of them had this much choice in school, and they were thrilled. They could change their schedule every day if they wished. Their job was to show us they could do what was required to move to high school.

Individual tests were given, but no one failed because the students were told just to keep working until they could show the teachers they could do the lessons that the teachers were continuing to work day and night to create. As soon as a student finished an assignment by showing the staff personally what he or she had done and it was accepted, the student went on to the next lesson and then the next. There were a lot of competencies, and the students worked harder than they had ever worked in school. As soon as they completed all that was needed for a subject, they were finished with that subject.

These students were now in business for themselves. They knew what to do, they knew they could do it, and it was their choice to do it. If they didn’t do it, they understood they would continue on next year until they did. It soon became apparent that we would need a summer school program to allow most of them to finish. We got permission to extend our Cambridge Program into summer school, and many students finished their requirements. With these students out of the regular classes, the school was quiet and orderly. Our students became polite, even though no one spoke to them about manners. There was no vandalism, no graffiti, and not one hole was poked in the upholstered furniture.