Summer School #3

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! This is mostly a blog where I mostly write about education. Usually, I post some links and commentary about them on Mondays and then later in the week I write something longer about a topic of my choosing. But, it’s summer and we all know that the rhythm and dance of educators’ lives shift in the summer months. Our time becomes more fungible but somehow still can’t fit everything in. Maybe it’s taking on more childcare duties as our own kids are out of school. Maybe it’s finally time to read all those articles and books that have been piling up or to pound out chapters of a long-neglected manuscript. Or, maybe, you’re teaching summer school. Summer school posts are going to be irregularly timed, more personal and reflective, and a bit more casual, befitting the vibes of summer.

In the pews

The first time I saw Lucy Calkins was in church. She was seated with several other speakers in the chancel at The Riverside Church in New York City but, with a nave filled with about 1,500 teachers and administrators, it was clear everybody was there to see Lucy speak. I’m not exaggerating when I say there was a standing ovation as she walked to the pulpit and opened the Summer Institute where I was to begin my time as a fellow at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). People in the audience recorded and took pictures while she spoke. It all had a bit of celebrity to it and I remember wondering what I’d gotten myself into. At the time I had little idea of who Lucy was in the world of literacy and I knew little of the TCRWP curriculum.

I grew up in Georgia, went to school in Georgia, college in Georgia, and taught high school English in Georgia. During that time, I had never heard of Lucy Calkins, the Units of Study, or even of Teachers College despite it being the nation’s top college of education on and off for a century or so. It’s maybe not surprising I didn’t know anything about elementary literacy because I was a high school English teacher. Nor did I know much about colleges of education, their rankings, or education history at that point. It seemed crazy to me that you’d name a school Teachers College, minimize your association with the very prestigious Columbia University brand, and refuse to take undergraduates. There were reasons for these things that I learned later, but at the time it was all unknown to me.

My training in literacy has been entirely focused on comprehension work because there was no expectation that 14-year-old kids would need to learn the fundamentals of reading and writing. I, of course, learned differently once I started teaching and went through a lengthy process of more or less teaching myself about what we now call the science of reading but was, at that time, just called reading. My focus, though, had been on taking what I needed from therapeutic reading curricula like the Wilson Reading System and Orton-Gillingham and adapting them for use with a whole classroom of high school students. This is, in my opinion, still one of the big challenges for the science of reading community. Much of the evidence base justifying classroom practices, the science, comes from clinical and speech therapy settings focused on supporting kids with disabilities and reading challenges. What works in that kind of one-on-one setting doesn’t always work for a class of 30 kids, much less older kids. The adaptations we’ve made for those environments have not been subjected to the same rigorous evaluation as the clinical and therapeutic ones.

Anyway, fast forward eight years and I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I followed my wife to her medical residency program on Long Island, about an hour and a half outside of New York City and learned that the state of New York would not accept my Georgia teaching license. I spent the better part of five months taking state teacher exams, attending various required trainings, and submitting documentation of my work as an educator back in Georgia. I satisfied all the requirements except for one, which was caused by me also teaching special education. I didn’t have enough total years under either English or Special education for them to give me even an initial certification in either subject. Even the people I spoke with at the state certification office felt I was kind of being screwed by this because a lot of that special education time was still spent as the second teacher in high school English classes. They gave me two options: enroll in an degree program that included initial teacher certification — they specifically said it had to be a bachelors, even though I already had one and a master’s degree in education — or enroll in a program that allowed me to take a non-instructional role, such as educational leadership or literacy. School leadership did not interest me but literacy, that was something I cared about deeply.

A quick search, another GRE, an application, and boom, I’m enrolled in a master’s degree program at Teachers College to become a literacy specialist. As part of that program, I was to be a “teaching fellow” at the TCRWP where I would work with the program’s staff to develop the Units of Study curriculum, train and observe teachers in implementing that curriculum, and it turned out, make a lot of copies. My introduction to all of this would be the Summer Institute, a yearly gathering of nearly 2000 attendees and staff all to learn more about the TCRWP’s approach to reading and writing. Again, despite being involved in the nascent science of reading discussion through various online listservs and early social media groups, I hadn’t heard of Lucy Calkins or her curriculum. She wasn’t the “bad guy” in the reading world just yet. I was there to learn more about how to teach kids how to read and my main goal in getting another master’s degree was to figure out how to set up remedial reading for older kids and try to find a way back to doing that kind of work in public high schools. This program would, it turns out, help me with almost none of that.

From the pulpit

Lucy’s speech was largely perfunctory, explaining the overall purpose of the Summer Institute and introducing some of the celebrity authors who’d be in attendance — I got to meet Christopher Paul Curtis and Jon Scieszka that summer. Mingling in the narthex and vestibule after the introduction, I had a chance to chat with some of the attendees and started to get a sense of the importance Lucy and her curriculum carried for these people. These were her true believers and they were all quite jealous that I’d be able to work closely with Lucy. Many of them asked if I planned to become a staff developer. After about the third or fourth person asked me this, I had to ask what a staff developer was.

Now, if you’re a teacher who has moved schools across SES bands or changed regions, particularly from lower funding and support to higher funding and support, you’ve probably had a moment where you witnessed something and thought I didn’t even know that was a thing. I did not know that schools and school districts would hire outside organizations to send specialists into the schools to train and support teachers. This simply was not something I ever experienced as a high school teacher back in Georgia. Every single professional development session I had ever attended was taught by someone from my school or my district. If you wanted to get some other kind of support and development, you paid for it out of your own pocket and on your own time, like I did when I got Orton-Gillingham trained. It just didn’t occur to me that there was another possible arrangement.

There were probably two contributing factors here. First, Georgia doesn’t spend much money on schools so the budget to hire a big organization like TCRWP just wasn’t there. In fact, later that year I worked with TCRWP staff developers who were trying to expand their portfolio of schools to Georgia and the Southeast and they complained that none of the schools had the money to buy the full package. They mostly just purchased the curriculum and none of the ongoing PD to go with it. Second, I get the sense that this kind of instructional coaching and support is far more common in elementary grades than high school, in part because the subjects are broken out into discrete disciplines with teachers required to have a degree in their subject. Elementary teachers, because they may cover any and all academic subjects, can’t have a degree or expertise in each and every one, so districts are more likely to send training their way.

Regardless, I was shocked that such arrangements existed and that people would devote time, energy, and resources to supporting educators in their work much less that schools would actually hire such people. An entirely new career path and sense of potential had miraculously appeared in my brain that had never existed before. It was all a bit salvific.

Like a prayer

Off I went, excited to learn more about what TCRWP had to say. My first “class” was upstairs, at the top of a nearly 400-foot belltower. Literally that top row of windows right there.

I’m in this bell tower almost 400ft up in Morningside Heights, where the ground floor is already some eight stories higher than the rest of the city, looking out at the skyline and down onto the Teachers College, Barnard, and Columbia University campus. It was all quite surreal and then I’m running through the Institute’s sessions all over those campuses for the next few days with a bunch of teachers and admins who think it’s the best thing ever. They weren’t all local, either. I was meeting a lot of Midwesterners in addition to MidAtlantic and New England teachers. So, in addition to the institute, many of them are going to Broadway shows and sightseeing. There was something of a festival atmosphere and learning, suddenly and unexpectedly, that I was part of something felt really good. I remember just being ecstatic during my two-hour train ride home that night and having difficulty explaining to Lisa just how cool it was to be part of something like this.

At this point I should pause and say I’m not writing a takedown or a defense of TCRWP or balanced literacy or any of that. I’m not here to say anything in particular about Lucky Calkins, who I would not actually meet in person for another two months anyway. None of that would befit a summer school post. If you must know, I never did go work for her at the end of the program and while most of my experiences as a fellow that year were positive, I got the sense from the TCRWP staff that they were confused about why I would get the literacy specialist degree and become a fellow if I wasn’t already planning to join the TCRWP in the first place. I was an odd duck, in part because I simply had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up. They kind of couldn’t comprehend that and so I always felt at arm’s length to the whole thing.

Still, that first day, that first Summer Institute, it felt like revelation. I want to pause on that feeling of belonging and shared endeavor that the TCRWP was so good at creating because it wasn’t something I was familiar with as an educator up until that point. I’d entered the teaching profession just as the NCLB accountability measures were kicking into full swing and as my state was piloting the Common Core that would be rolled out more broadly in the years to come. Under this regime you learn quickly that you are not collaborating with other educators. You are competing with them. You need your students to outperform their students on the state tests because your job is on the line or bonus pay is on the line or your school admin will be making your life hell. The world of standards and accountability is, in my experience, a profoundly isolating one from a professional perspective.

The feeling, I guess we’d call them vibes today, of the Summer Institute was relentlessly positive and collaborative. Attendees and staff all agreed that we were all in this together, trying to support young kids in learning to read and write. And here’s this university program that is going to send people to a school for months or years on end to help teachers teach better, learn the content better, or inspire their students to achieve more. Yeah, they were paid to do it, but it seemed like they really cared about the kids, the teachers, and the schools. It was a total change in tone from what I’d been surrounded by in Georgia. It wasn’t just belief in the teachers and in the power of a community of educators to make change. These people believed in the kids, too.

One of my biggest gripes about the way school reform works is that it denigrates children. Narratives that create the need for reform also shape our perceptions of children as failures or as incapable of improvement. The work of learning is often removed from the brains of children entirely and placed at the feet of educators. We may joke to our students that we “can’t learn it for them,” but that is usually how reformers portray learning: under accountability policies teachers did, in fact, have to learn it for them. I see this especially from reformers that are thinking in zero-sum or even negative-sum terms. And then here came Lucky Calkins and her acolytes with the message that kids are great. Children are creative and inspiring and just waiting to show us their potential, if only we’d let them. Watching her and other staff developers sit with children and support them in their work, the children’s work, of reading and writing with real conversations about the way a text works or how an author creates emotion was really something to witness. That belief in the children was also a belief in teachers as professionals who could wield expertise and knowledge. In an era when teachers faced mounting deprofessionalization, this was yet another breath of fresh air.

None of this is an endorsement of the Units of Study or the workshop model or anything like that. I feel like I have to include that disclaimer because of how much vitriol is directed toward Lucy and her curriculum these days. As I said, I never did go to work for her even though that degree program was basically 50% a recruitment initiative for the TCRWP. The other half was typical grad courses taught by professors who didn’t like Lucy or the TCRWP. It was all somewhat bi-polar but I think the professors were ultimately vindicated. No, my purpose in remembering my time as a fellow and my start at the Summer Institute is to remember those feelings.

Teachers need to feel good about their jobs, their role in children’s lives, and about their knowledge and skills. I think one thing that’s missing in the discourse today is that sense of positive collective endeavor. We fight about the right approach to phonics, knowledge building, skill work, reading stamina, and so much more and it makes us lose sight of the needs of the people doing the work. Yes, some of those needs will always be practical and logistical. We’ll need to learn new pedagogical techniques or gain deeper content knowledge. We will always have those needs but we should also attend to the need for purpose and the role that having actual professional goals plays in teaching. For all its flaws, spending time with the TCRWP and Lucy Calkins showed me that it is possible to have those things, if only we’d try.