The Odyssey Initiative

When I started writing this blog, I had the idea that someday it would lead to a large-scale school observation project: traveling the country in search of exceptional teaching practice and innovative school design. My experience in teaching had demonstrated to me what radically different sorts of institutions go by the name "school" in this country and what wildly divergent sorts of wisdom different educators have collected about how children learn and grow. I wanted to go out and see the range of teaching practices and schooling models at work in America.

My own schemes have gone off in other directions, but my friend Todd Sutler is about to embark on a journey much like the one I imagined two years ago. Along with two colleagues, Todd will "tour the best schools and classrooms in the 50 states to observe and document what is already working in American schools." The three researchers intend to use their findings to inform a new charter elementary school, which they are designing and which is scheduled to open in Brooklyn next Fall. The project, dubbed the Odyssey Initiative, is being funded on Kickstarter and is garnering attention within the education world and in the mainstream media as well.

The Odyssey Initiative and the interest it is garnering within education circles-- some of which is quite mainstream-- underscores a strange divide in the world of education research. In the academy and at the higher levels of policy analysis, quantitative methods are ascendant, and even those scholars who are doing qualitative work often rigidly control their observations, reducing teacher behaviors, for example, to a series of numerically coded gestures and expressions, in order to fit the aesthetics and aspirations of hard science. At the same time, educators and school administrators, even those in the heart of the No-Excuses movement, often make prolific use of open-ended observational methods of data collection. Schools that boast of their data-driven instruction still devote more time to classroom observations than to analysis of test-results. And the preeminent exposition of No-Excuses methodology, Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, is not a would-be scientific analysis of teacher behaviors and student outcomes but a work of close observation and psychological interpretation, carried out by a former teacher.

Observational research is very different from more rigid methods of education research. It requires more art, depends more on the individual impressions and mindset of the researcher. It is harder to generalize from, but often more useful. It can tell us little about universal laws of behavior but can offer great insight into the practice, the techne, of education. It is a practitioner's research method-- and so, it is appropriate that three teachers planning to found a school should use it. I would like to see more education research being done by educators-- for the sake of both the schools and the research.

The Time-Traveling Fashion Reviewer: Observations of an Unusual Sixth-Grade Writing Class

Listening to Each Other
Original artwork created for Dewey to Delpit, by Paris Mancini

This is the first in a series of posts that I intend to write on an innovative literacy program that I've been observing for the past six months at a public school in Chinatown. (Read previous observation-based posts on Dewey to Delpit)

At 2:15pm on a Wednesday afternoon, the students in Amy Piller’s sixth grade humanities class gather on the rug at the front of the room. Some take seats on low, wooden benches, most kneel or sit cross-legged on the floor. A girl with wavy brown hair takes her station at the document camera—the digital version of an overhead projector—and begins to read from the hand-written manuscript projected on the pull-down screen in front of the board. “A Review of European Fashion in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s,” she announces. The writing is her own and the subject just what the title promises, but the approach is novel: the writer has placed herself in an imaginary 17th century English clothing boutique, in which the opulently-dressed proprietor comments on our narrator’s “poor looking, filthy” 20th century clothes, before stuffing her into an elaborate outfit so heavy she can barely walk. (“The women must have to have muscle to carry this elephant on them every day”). She departs the boutique happy with her new finery but worried about her wallet. It cost “a lot of euros,” she concludes. “I figured I didn’t have enough for dinner.”

Quirky and playful as the story may be, like all writing done in Ms. Piller’s class it’s based on detailed research. According to the writer, she used five sources on 17th century English apparel, and the background work is visible in her elaborate descriptions of dresses, wigs, veils, jewelry, and embroidery.

When she has finished reading, the class thanks her in unison for sharing, and it is then that, from a pedagogical standpoint, the really interesting part begins. A cup of popsicle sticks, each bearing the name of a student in the class, is handed to the writer, who moves from her position at the document camera to a seat amongst her peers. She picks a popsicle stick at random and calls out the name written on it. A blond girl in a white t-shirt has been selected, and she pipes up without hesitation: “I really like your piece,” she begins—but she thinks the writer needs to check the thesaurus for some synonyms for embroidery, because that word is overused. She also wants more description of setting—she doesn’t feel like she’s getting a sense of the context.

More on Mensch Prep: "Shave and a Haircut" Like You've Never Seen It Before

[On September 27^th, I posted a description and analysis of the first hour of the first day of school at Mensch Prep Charter School (the name, like all other identifying details, is invented.) This post picks up where that one left off.]

After breakfast is cleaned up at each table, there are a series of coordinated bathroom visits. Then, Mensch Prep's principal^[1], Nonyameko Pertinax (if I have to invent names, I'm not going to invent boring ones), announces that they're going to learn a song. The teaching of the song, which turns out to be "Shave and a Haircut" (sung without lyrics) provides another opportunity to reinforce habits of when to speak and when not to speak in class, and it is a rigorous exercise in that most fundamental component of discipline and maturity—self-control.

The song is taught as a call and response: Ms. Pertinax sings the "shave and a haircut" part, and everyone else sings the "two bits;" but first the kindergartners have to listen to the song with "teachers only," i.e. Ms. Pertinax sings the call and the rest of the faculty sings the response. That's harder than it sounds, because like any well-constructed song "Shave and a Haircut" begs for its resolution. When Ms. Pertinax sings "dum da da-dum dum," many children are compelled to sing "dum dum!" along with the teachers.

Day 1 at a No-Excuses Kindergarten

This post is based on an observation of a No-Excuses charter elementary school, which I conducted a couple weeks ago. You will hopefully be seeing more of this kind of thing on this blog. I will never post anything about a school without the permission of the school's administration. As will often be the case in observation-based posts, names and distinguishing features have been modified in this post to hide the identity of the school described.

Not Until the Arm Drops

When I arrive at Mensch Prep Charter School, at 8:00AM, the new class of kindergarteners is already seated silently at six long tables in the florescent-lit cafeteria of PS xxx, in whose old, brick DOE building the young charter school is housed. The children occupy only a small space in the center of the cafeteria, which is built to seat a few hundred, and they are surrounded on all sides by teachers—the whole first-grade and kindergarten faculty is here, to provide as much adult attention as possible, on this, the first day of school of these kids' lives.

The eighty or so five- and six-year-olds arrived at Mensch Prep about half an hour before me and have already been divided into three homerooms, each named after a prestigious American University—though, in the tradition of No-Excuses charters, the word "homeroom" has been replaced with "cohort."^[1] The students are almost all African-American, with here and there, a white or Hispanic kid mixed in, and they are dressed in uniforms of light blue and navy.

The dean of students is standing in an open space beyond the ends of the tables, addressing the students. Behind her, a sheet of chart-paper is tacked to a column; it reads:

E very bottom on the bench.
A lways say please and thank you
T rash to the middle

Evidently, they're already part way through a lesson on table-manners.