Black Boys and Innocence

Early in the school year, a little boy named Albert was killed in a drive-by shooting in my hometown. The shooting occurred in the deep hours of the night, and he was where all little boys are supposed to be at that time: in bed, curled up with his cousins in bed near the window-unit air conditioner to fight off the summer heat.

I knew this little boy. He had been my mom's second-grade student during the previous school year, and he was a handful. But he tried so hard to be good, and he fell in love with my one-year-old foster son when we visited, carried him around like he was his own little brother. When he was feeling anxious or angry or sad, he would go to my mom's desk and hug my kiddo's picture to him, calming himself through the love and happiness that he felt when he saw my baby.

And, then, one summer day, he was gone. Just like that.

And why? Because of a feud between families who like to solve their problems with guns.

I remember sobbing when I saw pictures of the bullet holes in his house. They centered around the window-unit air conditioner, the coolest place in the summer heat, the place where parents and grandparents who love their children are most likely to nestle them for sleep during the warmest months.

It wasn't an accident that Albert died that day. It wasn't random.

Nine months later, another black boy has been shot and killed. I didn't mention that Albert was black, did I? But you probably already knew - or at least suspected.

It's dangerous to be a young black boy right now.

Albert was killed because the shooter wanted to kill innocence, to strike at the heart of the family.

Treyvon Martin was killed because the shooter looked at a teenage black boy and could not see innocence. Instead, he saw a threat to his neighborhood, a teenager that he instinctively knew was walking the streets to cause trouble. So, the shooter - a self-appointed neighborhood watchman on a mission to protect the streets - got out of his car, chased Treyvon down, and shot him in his own neighborhood as he was walking home from the convenience store. Nevermind the fact that Treyvon lived in that neighborhood, was a clean-cut student-athlete in the local high school, and was armed with only an iced tea and a pack of Skittles.

Much has been made in the news about the threat of a young man in a hoodie. But I wear hoodies, as do my college students. As do millions of other Americans. It wasn't the hoodie that was the threat. It was one man's fear of what a teenage black boy might be doing in THIS neighborhood at THIS time of night.

So, where do we go from here, those of us who know and love our own young black boys? How do I protect my foster son from people that would hurt him because of the color of his skin? How can I prepare him to live - and not die - in this world? At what point do I - or his bio-parents - need to have that conversation with him, the one where we help him to navigate this world by explaining that walking or driving or sleeping "while black" could be dangerous for him?

I'm not ready for those conversations yet. Right now, I just want to enjoy taking him to the zoo and playing with him on the playground at the park when he's with me. Today, I want enjoy his sweet smile, his kindness and joy and laughter.

Those conversations will come later. But in this world, they can't be avoided.



A mother and her sons talk about this topic on NPR here.

Making Professional Development Relevant

original image from http://www.eatright.org/

One of my favorite parts about becoming a more experienced teacher has been learning to lead - in both my classroom and my school - in new and innovative ways.

There's quite a bit of research out there that supports what teachers have known for a long time: lecture-based professional development, much like most lecture-based teaching, flat-out doesn't work. Especially if the content doesn't directly relate to teachers' classrooms. This becomes a colossal waste of time and money for both the school districts and the teachers.

  

21st-Century Professional Development:

As we move further into a new century, models of effective 21st-Century professional development are emerging. Some recommendations from Tech & Learning include:

1. Workshops that focus on real need...
2. ... and real uses of technology.
3. Learning that is sustained and collegial.
4. Building online communities.
5. Models and mentors.
6. Learning from case studies.

And while I like Tech & Learning's focus on technology integration, I also think that these recommendations line up fairly well with a model that's been in place for a while - that of teacher-inquiry groups.

The Basics of a Teacher-Inquiry Group:

Each teacher becomes involved voluntarily (being pressed into professional-development service doesn't work for this model), and they become part of a group of teachers who are interested in researching a teaching question in their own classrooms. For example, an eighth-grade reading teacher might be interested in seeing how the use of reading and writing workshop in his classroom two days a week might impact his students' writing abilities.

After developing a research question, the teacher creates a teacher-scholar project that would help him/her answer that question. Our eighth-grade reading teacher's question could be something along the lines of "What impact, if any, does the use of reading/writing workshop have on my students' writing?" In order to answer this question, he could collect student writing samples from before, during, and after the period of time that he incorporated the reading/writing workshop into his classroom, whether that's a two-week unit or over the course of the semester or year.

Throughout the semester or year, the teachers involved in the inquiry group meet to discuss what they're observing in their classrooms and what they're learning about their research questions. Groups sometimes meet however many times they determine will be effective, and they often work their way through each person's project in turn. They provide encouragement and support for each other, and they also serve as experts or resources that can be used to develop each others' research in meaningful ways. So, if our eighth-grade reading teacher brought a question about evaluating multimodal student writing samples - perhaps related to writing qualities that should be evaluated - another teacher-scholar could direct him to a resource for P-12 teachers that would help him consider his options.

At the end of the year, teacher-inquiry groups often go on a writing retreat together. These writing retreats vary in length - some are as short as an afternoon, while others span an entire weekend - but their goals remain consistent: to provide a space for teacher-scholars to write and reflect over their classroom research. Often, teacher-scholars will write for several hours, then meet with their inquiry groups to get feedback or to simply touch base. At the end of the writing retreat, many teacher-scholars will have written articles for their district newsletters, graduate courses, school websites, or professional journals. In the case of our eighth-grade reading teacher, he wrote and submitted an article for his professional journal. Of course.

For more information about creating your own teacher-inquiry group, check out these books:

The Art of Classroom Inquiry: A Handbook for Teacher-Researchers (Hubbard & Power)
The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research (Falk & Blumenreich)
Teacher-Researchers at Work (MacLean & Mohr)

Changing Education Paradigms

If you're interested in reconsidering how education works, you might enjoy Ken Robinson's TED Talk, presented here by RSA Animate.

The 21st-Century Learner

What does it mean to be a "21st-century learner"?

According to Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap, there are seven survival skills that our students should be developing in order to succeed in today's competitive (and cooperative) world. They include:

1. critical thinking and problem solving
2. collaboration across networks and leading by influence
3. agility and adaptability
4. initiative and entrepreneurialism
5. effective oral and written communication
6. accessing and analyzing information
7. curiosity and imagination

In addition, Wagner also indicates that today's students have developed a new set of learning styles: learning through multimedia, learning as discovery, learning by creating, and learning through connection to others.

In order to build on our students' strengths and effectively prepare them for an ever-changing world, we must begin to question how we approach teaching and learning.

So, as I throw this question - What does it mean to be a 21st-century learner? - out to you, I also encourage you to consider another one: How do we best engage that 21st-century student in meaningful ways?

Here are some ideas from the field:

And from students:

What do YOU think? What does this look like in your classroom? What would you LIKE for it to look like in your classroom?

Quotation Mark Advice from Grammar Girl