Merits of Demerits 4: Ben from Philly
Posted: January 3rd, 2012 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 7 Comments »
Ben is leader of KIPP Philadelphia Elementary Academy. He writes:
People often asked this question (do KIPP middle school methods work with Grade K kids) with an understandable amount of skepticism. As I told them, it wouldn’t. We were going to build strong student culture in a way that made sense for our age students, while also reflecting the big ideas that have been the foundation of KIPP’s success for almost 20 years.
He describes various methods, including:
Each classroom uses the same behavior system that is a variation on a clothespin or color system common in almost every early elementary classroom. We emphasize the concept of “turning it around” and students can move their name back as soon as they make good choices, whether that is in five minutes or five hours.
In another blog, Ben emphasizes joy.
As our KPEA student culture vision says:
Students are having fun. They smile and laugh as a regular part of any lesson.
Teachers are having fun. They smile and laugh as a regular part of any lesson.
When you walk into a classroom at KPEA, it feels calm, comfortable, and happy. You want to pull up a chair and make yourself at home.
So joy is important. People should be happy. Got it. Point made, right? Well, not totally, because I’m going to argue too often in education we talk about joy as a means and not as an end in itself.
Read more at Ben’s blog here (culture) and here (joy).
Did I miss the explanation of how your demerit system worked?
Not that I’d ever be interested in it, though. I am really against schools that enforce or define some sort of morally approved behavior, which is what it sounds like.
Back when I was at Stanford’s ed school, I talked to a classmate who was student teaching at a charter that had some form of demerit system, as well as many other school-wide policies, asking him how he liked it.
“Great,” he said. “I’ve joined a friggin gulag.”
All teachers must be on.message. All teachers must buy into your vision–except, of course, they don’t, because they don’t think your vision has any grounding in reality.
What really helps charters more than anything is that they generally get students who want to be there, and can “counsel out” students who don’t really like the demerit system.
That’s why your policies didn’t work with public schools–because they aren’t skimming the motivated kids off the top.
But then, you know this.
Cal-
I can say with 100% confidence, having worked at MATCH, that you are wrong about students generally wanting to be there, and counseling out students who don’t like the demerit system. It’s only anecdotal evidence that I can give, but it’s true.
I also think it’s interesting that you bring up “some sort of morally approved behavior”. MATCH’s demerit system (correct me if I’m off here, MG) ends up placing a much greater emphasis on productivity rather than morality. Demerits are given to get students back on track, focused, and metabolizing the lesson at hand. If anything, a system free of demerits is far more likely to lead to the inculcating of certain morals: faced with a minor misbehavior, a teacher without demerits labels it as “wrong” in order to contain/defuse it, whereas a teacher who has the benefit of demerits can simply rely on pre-existing, agreed-upon standards of productivity.
This productivity, though, might be one of the things that makes demerits so frequently upsetting to students (and teachers, too). A system of “good/bad” is easier to handle for students; if a teacher calls them bad, they can just disagree. Even if your average 9th grader can’t articulate the root subjectivity of his teacher’s claim, he can certainly understand it and replace it with his own, equally subjective, judgment. “Productive/unproductive” is a much more objective split, and students seem to really react to it, both positively and negatively. When a teacher congratulates a student on being productive, the student will know what that means and ideally how to continue it. When a teacher points out a student’s unproductive behavior, it is obvious and (despite the thousands of student attempts to the contrary) pretty undeniable. The cut-and-dried-ness of the unproductive demerit can easily feel rude or embarrassing. I think this is a sneakily prevalent generator of student frustration with the demerit system as a whole.
All this brings me back to the idea of joy at school. Nobody at MATCH wants to increase student resentment or frustration, and I’m pretty sure they’d all be in favor of more joy, at least in principle. The question is, given that KPEA is an elementary school, what could joy look like at a high school? At MATCH? With the focus on the productive/unproductive dichotomy, joy becomes awfully hard to prioritize, especially with so many more tests, assignments, etc. on the line, not to mention the risk of greater misbehavior. Much of the joy at MATCH comes from the care and investment of the staff, and the students definitely draw their greatest happiness at school from being in the glow of that care and investment. Teachers and tutors work to, and in many ways are highly successful at, integrating joy into their instruction. However, is there a way MATCH could build a structured, even mindfully unproductive time for joy?
It seems to me that the obvious risk is that giving up devoted instructional time for devoted joy time could set back many students, but maybe the deeper risk is that the joy-as-end that Ben describes requires that a lot of agency and freedom be given over to students, way more than might be sensible to give to high schoolers.
So is there a way to work towards joy without sacrificing productivity, tight culture, or direct instructional time?
Cal, Cal,
C’mon amigo. Stanford’s Ed School started and ran a charter. Got shut down by the state last year. In part, I’m told, b/c culture was lax, and teachers struggled to get kids to try hard. Hence low academic achievement. An aspirational gulag, of sorts, for the kids who’d hoped for college.
But then, you know this.
*
Alexis,
Good questions. Don’t know. My sense is:
*Would like to build more robust extra-curriculars. I’m not sure this is exact equiv to “mindfully unproductive joy.” But it’s more what we old people call “fun” in a given day.
*Would like to do more to help individual teachers develop the right, customized approach to positivity or joy. More organic that way.
Ben writes: “Teachers are having fun. They smile and laugh as a regular part of any lesson.”
I think this happens more by attending to the basics. Is teacher relaxed b/c of the interlocking aspects of
a) good relationships with individual kids, particularly those most challenging
b) got enough sleep/exercise
c) curric wasn’t just created from scratch — which enables “b” and “a”
d) automatic neutral-but-firm response to misbehaviors
Add those up, and maybe we can call it “Opportunity For Joy.”
As you know, I disagree about (c), since I think that developing curriculum is the most intellectually stimulating part of teaching, (and the thing that I do best). I wouldn’t give that up, and I think really owning your curriculum makes you feel comfortable with it. Teaching from other people’s material is much, much harder to own.
In response to Alex and MG, I think some down time is cool, as are extra-currics. We built in 2 10-15 minute breaks per day in our middle school. Kids staying in their classrooms and socialize and eat snack, and use it as a free time to use the bathroom. It definitely mitigates a lot of bathroom disruptions in class, and it’s a good way for kids to let off a little steam in an in-control sort of way. I wish we had more time for kids to follow their passions with extra-curriculars. We’re doing more this year, which feels really good, but it’s hard for everyone to find the time to make them awesome.
MG, thanks for highlighting my post. To jump into the conversation here, one point on joy that’s been important for us and I think applicable across grades and school type is explicitly looking for this during hiring. When I watch sample lessons of prospective teachers, I look for how often they smile, how much enjoyment they get from teaching, and how much fun they make learning for kids. We want people who are great instructors, who are firm classroom managers, but we also want people who visibly love teaching because it’s infectious to other staff and to our kids.
“C’mon amigo. Stanford’s Ed School started and ran a charter. Got shut down by the state last year.”
It took me a while to figure out why on earth you would think this was relevant. Then I realized you thought I was setting up Stanford as some sort of high standard. First, you apparently didn’t read my comment closely (gulag isn’t a good thing, y’know?). It’s pretty obvious that I’m saying quite the opposite. Second, my onscreen “last name” is Lanier. You might want to google that first and last name. It’s easier than my explaining how ludicrous that assumption is.
Oh, and third: The school in question wasn’t one of Stanford’s schools.
“In part, I’m told, b/c culture was lax, and teachers struggled to get kids to try hard. Hence low academic achievement. An aspirational gulag, of sorts, for the kids who’d hoped for college.”
You were told incorrectly. And if you assume I am defending the school, you would be incorrect yet again.
Incidentally, only one of the schools was closed down, and it wasn’t by the state. The school district voted out its charter.
That, you apparently didn’t know.
If I follow your response, however, you seem to be saying you approve of the gulag, whether it’s yours or Stanford’s.
But then, I knew that.
Alex, the morality point by Cal is valid. Good and bad is defined in the No Excuses Charter school AS productive/non-productive. Productive = good; non-productive = bad. Economic ideals of students’/workers’ efficiency and effectiveness underpinning this morality, I hope, are obvious.
Additionally, the couching your moral judgments in “productivity/non-productivity” are not “more objective” as you claim. You (the teacher) are subjectively defining the idealized productivity, not the student. I was very productive as a middle schooler; I illustrated an entire ten-page comic during my Chorus class. When my friends read in the back of the room in that same class they were also being productive. Unfortunately, Ms. Slagle disagreed w/ my definition of productivity and I got a B… in chorus.
Let’s not cloak moral judgments in claims of “objectivity” and recognize instead what they are, subjective observations of docility and compliance.