Tenacious Teaching

By Alex Benn

What are the superpowers you possess?

Why are some school site administrators such a pain?

Should education researchers be required to personally implement their ideas in a K-12 classroom before they are all

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tenacious-Teaching L.L.C.
• Release date: May 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989957446

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Our classrooms are under siege and teachers are the only ones who can save them. We have allowed kindergarten through twelfth-grade school administrators and the education establishment to undermine our authority and limit our effectiveness for far too long.

We can’t thwart these forces individually. Nor can our unions. Teachers need to emerge from the isolation of our individual classrooms and work together at each public, private, or charter school to liberate our sites from the harmful hierarchies that stranglehold our students and our ability to educate them. We have been saddled with harmful systems designed to meet the needs of administrators, district officials, educational researchers, pundits, and politicians for far too long.

To save our students, teachers need to demonstrate to parents, society, and ourselves that we should be the sole leaders of what goes on in our classrooms.

To do that:

We need a clear, well-defined goal, unmuddied by the political desires of other groups.

We need vocabulary and methodology to analyze and address student behavior designed from the teacher’s perspective, not systems created to meet the needs of administrators and districts.

We need criteria that evaluate teacher effectiveness based on something other than incompetent or biased administrator evaluations and standardized test scores.

We need strategies that truly address inequity, not just pay lip service to it through modified language and historical lessons.

We need systems that allow us to effectively evaluate our own classroom practice, discuss strategies with our colleagues without judgment, and efficiently help those of us who are struggling.

Improvements in teaching practice do not come from being exposed to more and more educational theory, but from repeatedly guiding a group of students in the classroom. Expert teachers possess extraordinary skills far beyond those first beginning their teaching journey. Those who believe that schools can achieve widespread excellence by staffing themselves with poorly paid novice teachers and having unqualified administrators train them have been fooling themselves. Expert teachers understand more about educating students than administrators, education researchers, politicians, and pundits ever will, and expert teachers need to be leaders of what goes on inside our classrooms.

These issues and more are what Tenacious Teaching tries to address. It begins with examples from my own teaching career and describes how those experiences shaped my current convictions. It outlines a foundational framework designed to unify our thought process and proposes a goal for teachers that I hope we can agree upon. It then presents specific methodologies for analyzing student behavior, evaluating our own teaching effectiveness, and measuring progress toward rectifying the inequities that our disadvantaged students face. These methodologies then form the foundation for a detailed classroom diagnostic system designed to help veteran and novice teachers alike.

Once these systems start to take hold, teachers must collectively take responsibility for the success of our peers and the students at our schools. We are the only ones qualified to do so effectively, and we don’t need anyone’s permission to rescue our classrooms.

SECTION 1

THE ORIGINS OF TENACIOUS TEACHING

CHAPTER 1

THE SINK OR SWIM METHOD OF TEACHER TRAINING

How bad was your first year of teaching?

A few weeks into mine, I stood in front of an eighth-grade math class reviewing order of operations when I noticed an 8½ × 11-inch piece of paper being passed between two students. I intercepted it, but it took me a moment to understand what it meant as I peered down at the handwritten list of names. It was a petition to get me replaced, and I could see that almost every student in the class had already signed it.

My stomach tightened. I could feel my eyes welling up. So far things had not been going well for me, and I knew it. I really was trying my best to improve as fast as I could, but the writing of the lessons, grading of the work, the impossible classroom management, and attending teacher training classes two nights a week was all overwhelming me. I thought about ripping up the paper and screaming at the ungrateful students, but instead I handed it back to one of them and continued the lesson without saying anything.

I spent that entire weekend curled up in bed, dreading going back. My understanding wife was thoroughly supportive, and occasionally brought me something to eat and drink. I arrived at school on Monday in a daze with no real plan for how to make things better for either my students or myself.

During that week, the principal came and spoke to the class. He had clearly received the petition and calmly told them that Mr. Benn was a new teacher who was trying his best and that the class should respect him and give him a chance.

The wind left my stomach. To me, this was the same death knell speech that every sports team makes before firing their coach. The principal turned and left the room without saying anything directly to me.

A week later, he granted the students’ wish. I wasn’t fired, but all my classes were changed. My eighth graders were all given back to their extremely popular teacher from seventh grade. I was given his seventh graders, and I restarted with an entirely new group. It didn’t go much better for me with them, but at least there were no mutinies.

I have now taught for twenty years, but I was already forty years old when I began. I had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and an MBA, but I had been perpetually dissatisfied with my professional life. Teaching had always been an idea in the back of my mind, but the low pay and the credentialing requirements had always dissuaded me.

My outlook on life changed, however, when on September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center towers were attacked. I had grown up in Manhattan and as an adult had lived just a few blocks away. At the time, I was working at a construction firm in Los Angeles, and as I sat in my office that morning staring at my computer screen and the billows of dust now miles away, I decided I had to do something more meaningful with my professional life.

I told my wife, and even though we had two young daughters to think about, she supported me. By the next fall, I had passed my subject matter tests, was accepted in a credentialing program, and had landed a job at Richard E. Byrd Middle School, which had been only one of two schools even willing to consider a novice teacher like me. I started teaching and attending teaching classes the exact same week.

I hadn’t been in a noncollege classroom in over twenty-two years, and my privileged kindergarten through twelfth-grade schooling in Manhattan and New Jersey had hardly prepared me for managing the behavioral problems I now dealt with daily. At the time, Byrd Middle School had no dean of discipline and only two counselors for over 1,500 students, despite having many discipline issues, including numerous fights, and a stabbing after school. During those first few years, I often sent kids out of class, but since there was no administrator or dean specifically in charge of handling such students, they usually just sat in the outer office of an assistant principal until the next bell rang and they were sent on their way.

Before I became a teacher, many people had told me that I excelled at concisely explaining complicated material, but now I was clearly failing to get through to my students. They kept shouting out, I don’t get it! but seldom had any specific questions about what they were missing. I soon realized I don’t get it was a not-so-secret code for I think you’re doing a lousy job of explaining this crap and if you don’t do something to help me, I am going to quit! A lot of them were quitting on me.

Many of my students had special needs, but I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to do with the pages and pages of information in their Individualized Education Plans. These documents took the special education teachers a long time to prepare, always contained a lengthy analysis of the student’s situation and had individualized goals, but the resulting accommodations always seemed the same: Preferential Seating, Shortened Assignments, Additional Time to Complete Assignments. I was doing all that, yet none of it really seemed to make much of a difference.

At least the special education students had the resource teachers who aided them in their regular classes to go to for assistance. It was the regular education students with behavioral problems who really seemed to be doing the worst. Some of them had far less attention, self-discipline, confidence, prior knowledge, and cognitive skills than the special needs students. How could that be?

I went to the counseling office, pulled out their files, and read their report cards from earlier grades. Their current performance was seldom an anomaly. I read the same comments over and over: He needs to pay more attention, She needs to put in more effort, He needs to learn self-control, and so on. Was it even possible for me to meaningfully improve their behavior?

As a result of my struggles, I seriously doubted my own instincts, and started blindly implementing anything and everything my credentialing professor and administrators were suggesting. The big push at that time was placing students strategically in groups and letting them struggle with material on their own instead of lecturing. Don’t be the sage on the stage was the mantra of the moment. This seemed to make sense, and I started implementing a lot of group work. One day, two of my best and nicest students raised their hands simultaneously.

No disrespect, Mr. Benn, said one of them when I arrived at their pod of four, but we’re going to take an F grade today. These two boys don’t do any work and just copy everybody all the time. Since it won’t really affect our overall As in the class, we’re done trying to help.

I stared at the students and started to object, but then cut myself off and turned away. The two girls were entirely correct about the two boys. The way I had implemented group work had allowed the boys to get credit for work they hadn’t done and material they hadn’t learned. The truth was, however, that the boys were both so far below grade level that it seemed like there was no way they could do the work on their own.

They weren’t the only ones. Many of my middle school students didn’t even know their multiplication tables from third grade. Wouldn’t it be better to stop everything and make sure everyone had mastered the basics before they were once again passed on to the next grade? But how could I do that, still meet the needs of those who were further along, and teach the plethora of material that needed to be covered before the year-end standardized tests?

Many of my students seemed to give up so easily. I vividly remember being stumped by math problems in school, getting frustrated with myself, and through sheer determination and trial and error figuring them out. Why weren’t more of my students that way?

I tried to motivate my students by demonstrating the practical aspects of what we were learning. I incorporated relevant real-life products and situations into my lessons, but those efforts seemed to have little positive motivational effect. Worse, these lessons often veered off into off-topic conversations about which real-life products were each student’s favorite.

Then one day, a girl raised her hand. When are we ever going to use this, Mr. Benn?

I stared at her with dismay. We were learning how to calculate percent discount. You’re never going to buy anything on sale? I asked rhetorically.

She glared back. I’d rather pay full price, than deal with this shit.

I shook my head but understood what was happening. Since the student was struggling, she was searching for a way to dismiss the material as unimportant. She had seized on the never going to use this argument out of frustration, not out of any real thought. No one ever questioned the usefulness of what I was teaching when it was easy. Somehow, I needed to find a way to remediate my students’ missing prior knowledge before launching into the grade-level material or they were never going to understand any of it.

Frequently during my first year, I thought I was going to be fired and many more times I wanted to quit. More than once, I packed all my personal possessions into the back of my Jeep Cherokee, went to the principal’s or assistant principal’s office, expecting them (or me) to finally utter, This just isn’t working out. They (and I) didn’t, and to their credit, my administrators inexplicably seemed to believe that things would get better. I had my serious doubts.

Midway through that first year, the school district changed the rules on teacher credentialing and the popular teacher who had taken over my mutinous eighth-grade classes was temporarily forced to leave (despite his total competence), but because I was in a registered credentialing program I was allowed to remain (despite my total incompetence). A retired engineer was hired to replace the popular teacher and he left after the first day. A young, new, eager teacher was hired to replace the engineer. He also struggled with my former students but seemed determined to stick it out. Later in the year, I saw yellow police tape crisscrossing the young teacher’s doorway. I peered inside and saw white foam all over the chairs, desks, floors, and ceiling. A student had ripped the fire extinguisher from the wall and sprayed it all over the room. That was the young teacher’s last day. I knew that could have easily been me.

CHAPTER 2

THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY

Fast-forward eight years and things were thankfully going much better for both my students and me, and in 2010 I was awarded the Platinum Apple Award for teaching. The nominating letter was written (without my knowledge) by a group of resource teachers who had been in my room on a regular basis and had seen how much of a difference I had made with our students. Other recognitions from the district soon followed based on the improved test scores of my students.

I still had a lot to learn, but what happened during those eight years? How did I improve? What made the difference?

I was incredibly lucky to survive that disastrous first, and even my second, better but not yet competent, year. Today, with so much pressure on teachers to get test scores up, and parents demanding that we be fired for even the smallest misstep, I have no doubt that if I started now, I would’ve been asked to or forced to leave.

Looking back, how did I manage to recover and grow? It wasn’t my teacher training classes. Most of my improvement came well after I had finished my certification. It wasn’t the many teaching advice books I read. I kept trying to follow their suggestions, but it was too difficult to decipher which of their numerous ideas was the most effective, efficient, or important, and most authors seemed unwilling to winnow them down. It wasn’t professional development sessions at school. Most of those seemed to either fit someone’s idealized agenda of what teaching should be, instead of realistic, practical advice, or seemed more suited for other grade levels and/or subjects.

My growth was mostly due to