Most teachers are familiar with the term "wait time."  It refers to the amount of time that passes between the end of a teacher's question and the first student response, and in most classes it lasts less than one second.  Mary Rowe, a professor at the University of Florida and then Stanford, came up with a name for this almost imperceptible amount of time and studied the relationships between wait time and students' classroom experiences.  What she found was both expected, for anyone who's made a conscious effort to increase classroom wait time, and amazing.

One thing she found was that in classrooms where wait time was less than one second, student responses mostly consisted of short phrases and little elaboration.  However, when teachers increased wait time to three seconds (just 3!), students spoke between 300% and 700% more words when they responded to questions and participated in classroom dialogue.  I think that when teachers hear about needing to increase wait time in our own classrooms, we sometimes to think of it as just one more task to check off.  But when we think about wait time in terms of this research, it's clear that adding just two seconds of silence after asking a question has measurably profound effects on the classroom's oral environment.

The other finding I thought was really powerful was that an increase in average wait time correlates with a decrease in disciplinary moves.  Rowe's idea here was that when teachers ask rapid-fire questions, kids can't focus on what they're supposed to be learning, which means they get restless and inattentive and have trouble meeting behavioral expectations.  When wait time increases, kids focus more, feel more motivated to participate, and thus misbehave less.  Many teachers worry that increasing wait time will leave directionless gaps during which students will take advantage of a lapse in teacher control and start acting up.  Research on wait time, though, shows that just the opposite will happen.

The article where this research comes from is called "Wait Time: Slowing Down May Be a Way of Speeding Up," which calls attention to how a slight increase in the amount of silence in the classroom (slowing down the conversation) can actually raise the level of classroom discourse (speeding things up).  How cool is that!

Imagine you're having a conversation with someone.  How can you tell that the other person is interested?  What does the other person say or do (i.e., body language, verbal cues, phrases, etc.)?

I ask because part of my project involves designing activities that teach kids conversational behaviors, and I'm wondering if there are any examples I'm missing.

In addition to observing in schools and pontificating about teaching, I've also been traveling around the UK by train and bus with Frances. To take a line from The Castle, one of my favorite movies, "We've seen some amazing things"  Highlights of our time here have been:

The Yorkshire "Green and Pleasant" Dales:

Edin-"Really Old and Would-be National Capital"-burgh:














The Lake "Everest of England" District:

                                                                                                                                 Rievaulx "Beautifully Seclued Medieval Ruins" Abbey:

But what I've enjoyed the most is how easy it is to walk (kind of like hiking, but not a direct translation because there's less wilderness here). Unlike the US, where we tend to put hiking trails in designated parkland (state parks, national parks, national forests, etc.), England has a massive network of footpaths that cross the country, stretching from village to village, leading over hill and dale, and generally making it hard not to put on a pair of boots and go.

A few weeks ago, Frances and I took a bus from Leeds straight to a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales called Burnsall, made up of a pub/hotel, a shop, a church, a school, and a few houses that looked capable of standing for another few hundred years. We didn't need to drive miles out of town to a trailhead with a parking lot; we could start right from civilization and get there without a car. 

From the center of the village, we started to walk! I can't think of many places in the US where you'd be able to do that. Guided by our trusty Ordnance Survey map (a series of maps that cover all of the UK and show every village, road, footpath, stream, farmhouse, and stone wall—essential, since most footpaths don't have destination signs, and also my new favorite toy), we started following a fairly flat path through fields of sheep grazing along the River Wharfe. We then headed uphill to the top of Simon's Seat, where we found a light coating of ice and snow and views for miles around. We went down the other side, past a hidden waterfall, past more fields of sheep, past more beautiful views, past the medieval Bolton Abbey, and into a village where we found a tea room that had excellent scones (although I did have to pick out the raisins).  After tea and scones, we took a bus to a larger town and then a train back to Leeds. 

Let me recap: An eight-mile walk from one village, along a river, over a mountain, and into another village, all without needing a car to get there and all for very little money (just the bus and train tickets and the tea and scones). What's more, if we had decided along the way that we wanted to change course and head for a different hill or village, we could have done so because the density of footpaths in much of England is such that there is a seemingly infinite number of permutations a walking route can take.

In the course of our time here, we've walked in the Peak District from a village with a castle, past more fields of sheep, over a hill, and into another village. We've walked along the coast from a fishing village to a larger fishing town. And we've walked up Scafell, the tallest mountain in England.

Footpaths, I will miss you!

In the UK, school shootings are so rare (there was one in 1996) that in one class I visited, kids played a math review game that involved pretending to shoot each other when they got the right answer. (This wouldn't really be OK in the US.) But the amount of security British schools have in place, compared to American schools, would make you think the US had never seen a school shooting.

This is the general protocol for entering and traveling around a British school:

1. Find the one entrance to the school and buzz the video intercom.

2. Walk to the reception desk to explain why you've come and which staff member is expecting you. Keep in mind that the reception is in a closed area—even if you want to get past, the locked doors would stand in your way.

3. Sign a visitor log on paper or on the computer (the computer will also take your picture to keep a record of who's entered the school).

4. Wait in the reception area for a staff member to greet you.

5. Staff member uses magnetic fob to open doors past reception and show you to the classroom.

6. If you observe in multiple classrooms, a staff member may not escort you to each one, but you will find that movement through the school is impeded by the locked doors separating each corridor. The best thing to do is wait for someone to come along with a fob to help get you through.

7. When you are ready to leave, you have to pass the reception desk where you came in and sign out either on paper or on the computer.

In summary, British schools make it much harder to enter and move through the building.  That seems like a better strategy than arming teachers.

Teacher: What does la lune mean?

Student: The moon.

Teacher: The moon, good.

Teacher: How did people escape from the Fire of London?

Student: They left on boats.

Teacher: Yes, they left on boats.

Teacher: What's the holiday we learned people celebrate in America?
Student: Thanksgiving.

Teacher: Thanksgiving.

What is happening in these interactions? Do adults speak to each other this way? Why do teachers (and I know I've done this too) repeat the exact same words a kid says? How often does this happen? Is it a problem?

In each of these dialogues (if you can call it that), a teacher is saying the exact same words a child has just said. To be as general as possible, in most classrooms teachers parrot students' responses most of the time. I can't think of any authentic speech situation that that resembles, which makes me think it's problematic. I'm not completely sure why, but I have a few hypotheses:

1. Teachers have louder voices than students and want to make sure everyone has heard what a classmate has said.

2. Teachers want to reinforce the correct answer by doubling the amount of times it's been spoken.

3. Teachers use this as a quick way of positively evaluating student learning.

If #1 is true, then it comes from a legitimate concern. We want to make sure all students hear what their classmates have said because an individual student's response contributes to the shared knowledge base that the whole class can use to access new learning. But by repeating student answers, we give them the insidious message that they don't really need to listen to their peers because they'll hear the same thing again from the teacher. The next time we think the rest of the class might not have heard what someone has said, let's think about some alternatives to parroting: 1. If the student's voice was so quiet that some students may have missed what was said, then encourage that student to say it again at a louder volume (and if this is an issue for enough students, then do some explicit instruction on how to speak in class). 2. If other students were looking away from the student answering, or talking at the same time, then remind them of the expectation that they have to listen to and look at the speaker and have the student try answering again.

If #2 is true, then why not have the whole class repeat the answer together? And maybe this can be a reminder that if we ask too many questions that prompt answers short enough to be quickly repeated, we need to vary our question types so that students can engage with learning at a deeper level.

If #3 is true, then let's think of alternatives. Maybe we can get students to be metacognitive by asking them how they knew, or how they figured out, the answer. Did they use a classroom resource? Did they just remember what they learned yesterday? Did they know the answer from having read a book or having seen a website? Or maybe we don't need to say anything at all? After a correct answer to a closed question, maybe we can build pace by moving to the next question or maybe we can take a few seconds to think of a more interesting, open-ended question to ask next.

Let's just stop parroting our kids. Let's just stop...oh, wait.

A while ago, I wrote about “academic indulgence,” a teaching stance that recognizes students' intellect and accommodates their interests and ideas. At Morton Green Primary School in Bradford, I've seen many teachers adopt this stance toward their students. But first, a little context about Bradford...

Bradford is about ten miles west of Leeds and has long been overshadowed by it. It has some of the highest levels of deprivation (British terminology for low income) in the country, in part because of de-industrialization (same story in so many cities) and because of its distance from major road and rail routes to London and Manchester. Aesthetically, downtown Bradford looks much more like an American rust belt city than a British city. Commerce is clearly lagging, with a disproportionate amount of betting parlors, pound shops, and pawn shops. The amount of multi-lane roads through the center make it less pedestrian-friendly than what I've seen elsewhere in England. And bus travel within the city is difficult because of limited schedules and irregular service. That being said, Bradford has been a home to significant numbers of economic migrants from Pakistan who came for factory work in the 1950s and 1960s, many of whose children and grandchildren still live there.

Back to Morton Green. I've seen teachers listen to a student's response to a question and then ask another student to extend the first student's thought. I've seen activities in which students have to take a position on an open-ended question and then convince their peers to take the same point of view by using language in meaningful and powerful ways. I've seen teachers respond to students with genuine interest in what they're saying (more on this in the next post) and push them to extend their thinking. I've seen students learning from experience that the product of collaboration should be consensus and not dispute.

In short, lots of great things happening at Morton Park.

As a caveat to everything that follows this sentence, I'll point out that I only spent two days observing just two schools in one city in Finland. So while I won't attempt to turn what little I've observed and read about the Finnish education system into a fine-grained, comparative analysis on what makes Finnish schools excel, I will list, in order of personally identified importance, what I think might be some key factors in their success:

6. Finnish orthography is extremely transparent, which means that even more than in Spanish, reading Finnish involves knowing individual letter sounds and putting those sounds together as they are written in a word. Since Finnish kids need less time learning to decode than Anglophone kids, who have to figure out how to claw through digraphs (ch/sh/th/ph/kn), vowel teams (the three sounds for ou), and silent letters, they can progress more quickly to higher order learning. Does anyone else find this a compelling enough reason to adopt Finnish as our national language? English already has plenty of Finnish loan words like sauna and...and…

Check out this article from The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/

And this academic article too:

http://www.elemedu.upatras.gr/english/images/porpodas/Seymour_Aro_Erskine_Porpodas_et_al_2003_BJP.pdf

5. Students and teachers don't wear shoes in the classroom. Instead, they leave their shoes outside and put on socks, slippers, or Crocs (yes, Crocs!). And while I don't think Crocs are the answer to America's educational woes, I do think it sends a message that school, though necessarily rigorous and serious, is a place where kids should be comfortable, happy, and at home.

4. Few Finns cross the street against a “Don't Walk” sign. Finland is of course not the only country where jaywalking is a less than common practice, but I found the explanation for it striking. I'll go ahead and generalize: whereas people in other non-jaywalking countries (and I've heard this from a Swiss person, so it must be true) wait to cross the street because conformity to the rules has value in its own right, Finnish people explain that they will cross against the light only when there are no children present because although adults can judge when the intersection is safe enough to cross, they wouldn't want to model this practice in front of those with a less developed capacity to assess risk. Just one anecdote, but there has to be something there about how a country's bigger people collectively perceive their responsibility toward its smaller people.

3. Finland has more legitimate, socially valued, and economically viable post-secondary options than the US. In addition to traditional universities for students with academic goals, there is also a system of polytechnic schools that offer a route to a trade like carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and forestry—lines of work that are as important as in any country but that have more value in Finland. Instead of facing the choice between college, the military, and failure—a choice often presented in terms that stark to American high-schoolers—Finnish students can see many paths to success. This trickles down to the primary level, where students have opportunities to excel in more non-academic ways than in American schools. In addition to reading, writing, math, science, history, and foreign language (two, since Swedish and English are both compulsory), all kids take craft (woodworking/metalwork/engineering/design), textiles (sewing/knitting), and art. This means that a student who is relatively less successful in traditional academic areas still has opportunities to achieve at school. And because the Finnish education system (and Finnish society more broadly) is structured in a way that offers non-academic post-secondary options, a high-achiever in craft education knows that future options exist within the traditional education system, other than dropping out of school.

2. Teachers generally teach the same class of students from first grade through sixth grade. At the warm and fuzzy level, I can think of nothing more professionally satisfying than getting to spend six years with the class I taught last year. At the quantitative level, research shows that keeping teachers with the same class over several years benefits students in a variety of ways (http://www.ericdigests.org/1998-2/looping.htm), especially when…see below...

1. Teachers are smart. It almost doesn't seem worth taking up valuable internet real estate with this obvious proposition, but I'll go ahead anyway...kids learn more from smarter teachers. There are of course many ways to be smart, but Finnish teachers are more capable in math and literacy—the key subject areas that schools around the world teach—compared to their international peers. According to the article below, written by one of the big names in studying the quantitative value of teachers, if American teachers were as smart as Finnish teachers, American students would move half a standard deviation on PISA, an internationally administered test that measures the cognitive ability of high school students. 

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/PDF/Papers/PEPG14_06_Hanushek_Piopiunik_Wiederhold.pdf

This article in Smithsonian paints a bigger picture of Finnish education than what I've offered here:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-schools-successful-49859555/

In many classrooms (and I include mine in this generalization), opportunities for academic student talk often end up with students speaking in parallel at an escalating volume.  When I ask students to turn and talk about what might happen next in a story we're reading, one student might turn to a classmate and say what he thinks, his partner might then make his prediction, and the "conversation" would be over.

In order to make student talk more productive, many teachers post a chart on the wall that lists "Rules for Accountable Talk," containing the conversational tricks that adults use: "I agree with you because...," "I disagree with you because...." "What do you mean by that?" and "I see what you mean, but..."  I've seen these phrases work in certain classrooms, particularly ones where students have heard actual people saying these things.  They tend not to work so well in classrooms like mine, where students mainly hear Spanish at home and where, for those who do hear English, they tend not to hear it spoken this way.  Students in this kind of classroom can certainly pick up these tricks, but they need to be taught how to use them in a more explicit way than just seeing them posted on the wall.

Here's one activity that teaches "I agree" and "I disagree" more explicitly and that I plan on including in my final project:
1.  Divide students into pairs and name Student A and Student B.
2.  Give each student 3 wooden blocks of different shapes and a paper plate as a building area.
3.  Tell Student A to put down one block on the plate.
4.  Explain that Student B now has two choices: leave his partner's block where it is and add a new block to the piece, or move his partner's block..  He can say, "I agree with you and I'll put my block here."  Or he can say, "I disagree with you because I think it looks better here."
5.  Explain that Student A has to accept whatever Student B does with the blocks, at which point Student A can make the same verbal choice as Student B.
6.  Students continue taking turns placing blocks until they have used up all 6 blocks.

The idea here is that the blocks become a metaphor for a conversation, in that a successful conversation is a series of utterances in which each utterance responds in some way to the one that preceded it.  This activity also gets at the notion that a good conversation is organic and doesn't necessarily have a predefined objective (your partner may move the block you originally placed and that's OK).  This stands in contrast to the mode of parallel statements that many children (and some adults!) easily fall into, in which one conversation partner's speech has no bearing on the other partner's.  Obviously there are more conversational tricks than "I agree" and "I disagree," but it's a starting point.  After leading this activity several times, the teacher would then make the metaphor explicit by asking a question that students have to answer with a partner and reminding them to speak and act just like they did when they were building with blocks.

Frances and I are in Finland right now, visiting some friends we know here.  On Monday and Tuesday I'll be attending a workshop on the Finnish education system, visiting some classrooms in a city called Tampere and attending sessions on what makes the Finnish system THE BEST IN THE WORLD.  It seems that most Finns don't actually like to talk about it in these flamboyant terms, but jump on the Finnish education fetish train with me and read this article in advance of the workshop:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/17/highly-trained-respected-and-free-why-finlands-teachers-are-different

More than a handful of people have asked me about the differences I notice between British schools and American schools.  I could answer that question by describing pedagogical differences, differences in classroom management, the fact that British classrooms tend to be much more multilingual than American classrooms, among many others.  But I think the simplest answer is...tea.

Every school I visit offers me a "cuppa" tea the moment I walk in the door.  And the offers of tea usually continue throughout the day...when teachers break while their kids are at playtime (recess), at lunch, when the kids go to afternoon playtime (recess), and basically any time I pass near the staff room.  At one school I believe I was offered tea six times over the course of  a six-hour school day!  And there is an infrastructure for the amount of tea consumed: there is always an enormous hot water boiler, the size of a microwave, bolted to the wall right above the sink in the staff room; and many schools have these large sacks containing a bushel of tea bags.

There's definitely something to be said for all this tea-drinking.  Because it's hot and because you almost never see to-go cups, it forces teachers to stop and breathe for a few minutes in between parts of the day instead of rushing to get ready for whatever lesson is coming next.  It also makes you feel like you're staying at a bed and breakfast, and who doesn't like bed and breakfasts?

Teachers need to be academically indulgent.  I'm not sure if I'll stick with that term in the long run, but it seems to fit what I've been thinking about lately.  Let me explain.  For those of you just joining in, I'm using my Fulbright grant to study how teachers and kids talk to each other.  There's a longer explanation in the sidebar to the right, but I'm basically interested in the idea that what teachers say (or don't say) matters and that teachers need to be more conscious of the verbal tools they choose to use in the classroom.

Recently, I've been thinking about two brief student-teacher interactions (one from yesterday in the UK and the other from several years ago in the US) that are helping me figure out how to describe the kind of teaching that involves making the right verbal choices to support learning:

Interaction 1
A class is looking at a photograph of a tiger with its mouth open.  Students are asked to write down similes about the tiger that could eventually be used in a short story.  When students share their similes, they all describe the tiger as scary.
Student 1: It has teeth like blades.
Teacher: Ooh, very scary. 
Student 2: Whiskers like a spider's legs.
Teacher: Good, I'll write it down.
Student 3: It has whiskers like old ladies' hair.
Teacher: Oh, that's great, that's beautiful!  But does it make the tiger sound fierce?  Would I be scared of a little old lady with white hair?  No, let's think of different similes.

Interaction 2
At the end of recess, a child comes to his teacher with a rock he found on the playground.
Student: Look at this rock.  Can I bring it in to show the class?
Teacher: That's really interesting, but we're not studying rocks anymore.  Leave it outside.

In both of these cases, teachers saw success and then changed the terms.  In the first example, the teacher hadn't said anything about the similes needing to make the tiger seem fierce.  If the teacher had used the same flexible thinking as his student, he could have acknowledged that the "old ladies' hair" simile was taking the discussion in a different direction and asked if anyone else could think of a simile that made the tiger seem vulnerable.  In the second example, every teacher can relate to the feeling that there is so much to teach in the course of a school day that we just don't have time for Roberto to share his chunk of asphalt when we're supposed to be learning about water.  But thinking a little more flexibly, why not invite the rock into the classroom and allow Roberto a few minutes to share his find at snack, or the line at the bathroom, or dismissal to teach the class not only that you can still think about what you've learned earlier in the year but that your curiosity and connections and intellect and academic engagement have value.  When we we tell Roberto to leave the rock outside, we unintentionally say, "I wasn't that interested in rocks in the first place.  But we're studying water now, so bring me a puddle and then I'll be happy."

So for now I'm using the term "academically indulgent" to describe a teacher that sees his students as intellectuals with ideas to be indulged (and also nudged along toward some learning goal) instead of as adversaries whose rocks and other wrong answers insidiously prevent us from getting through the lesson.

Multiple-Choice Question
What would you say when, after finishing a unit on cartography two weeks ago, a student asks, "Can I make a treasure map?"

A.  We do social studies at 3:00.
B.  We learned about maps two weeks ago.
C.  Sure, at indoor recess you can find some paper.  Why don't you see if anyone else would like to join you?

For the next seven weeks, I'll be spending Tuesday afternoons with a Year 4 (third grade) class at Daleview Academy, teaching a unit called "America: The Biggest, Bestest, Red-White-and-Bluest Country on Earth."  That's not really the title, but I am teaching a unit on America, weaving in geography, anthropology, political science, and semiotics, as I proselytize for the lost colonies across the pond.

I started today's lesson by clearing up a misconception that the United States is also called Central America because it's in between Canada and Mexico.  I decided to just show where Central America really is and not explain that the US would never stand for being named in relation to the other countries around it.  WHAT IS THIS?...SOUTH AFRICA?...NORTH KOREA?...A WHOLE COUNTRY OF WEST VIRGINIAS?  NO, we're the United States of America, front and center where we ought to be, like when you go down the marker aisle at Staples and they have the Sharpies right in the middle and the off-brand markers that dry up before the end of a yard sale poster way off to the side, because who wants those when a single Sharpie could take you all the way through at least your next five yard sales.  THAT'S RIGHT, WE'RE LIKE A CHISEL-TIP SHARPIE, WHICH GIVES YOU MANY OPTIONS FOR LINE THICKNESS.  Alright, I think my new remit as American ambassador to Leeds may have gone to my head.

The above paragraph notwithstanding, the lesson went quite well.  After looking at a map of the United States and discussing what we noticed about the shapes and names of the states, the students rotated around the classroom to six stations, each representing a different state (New York, Florida, Texas, California, Colorado, and Alaska--sort of a "best of").  At each station, students saw two photographs, one of a person welcoming them to that state and the other of the state's most salient landscape.  Students documented their "travels" through drawing and writing and then came back together to describe similarities and differences between the states they visited.  Most kids had prior knowledge about New York, and some had heard of Florida, but this activity gave kids a better sense of the geographic diversity in the US and helped them understand why questions like "What's the weather like in America?" and "Are there mountains?" are tough to answer.  Next week's lesson will ask students to make comparisons between similar landscapes in the US and the UK (i.e., New York City/London, Rocky Mountains/Scottish Highlands, Miami Beach/Brighton).

At the Park Road Primary School (name changed) in Bradford, teachers use a standardized gesture system called Makaton (www.makaton.org).  It's a set of hand movements that teachers and students use to facilitate communication.  Unlike a true sign language, Makaton gestures are used in conjunction with speech because it's geared for English language learners and other students who may need a bridge to spoken English.  Teachers have been trained in it and seem to use it pretty fluently, especially in the younger grades.  Lots of ELL kids use it as well because it seems like it boosts their confidence to participate in a class discussion taking place in English.

Train stations in the US and the UK resemble each other in that they both have trains running through them.  They also sell food.  That is where the similarities end.

American train stations are organized around the assumption that passengers will arrive no more than 30 seconds prior to their trip and will leave the station no more than 30 seconds after their arrival.  Those of you who have gotten to South Station in Boston or Penn Station in New York oh, say, five minutes early, and looked for a place to sit while waiting for your train are probably either still looking or have already resigned yourselves to a semi-permanent condition of hopelessness that may begin to creep into other aspects of your lives.  In short, there is basically nowhere to park your keister in many large, big city train stations, and I believe this is for one of two reasons:

• Reason 1: Train station architects have seen too many action movies and assumes that instead of waiting patiently for the train and then ambling aboard, most passengers will arrive while chased by bad guys, cinematically sprint through the station with little regard for the sunglass racks, postcard stands, or Sbarro chafing dishes that may get carelessly rearranged in the process, and leap onto the train just as the doors of the 5:06 to Washington are closing.  
• Reason 2: Municipal governments know full well the sordid acts (only some of which can be discussed on this blog because this is the internet, after all) that can take place on a seat at a train station (everyone's got a fetish, be it for molded plastic or stainless steel) and have tried to eliminate any fodder for depravity by systematically removing the seating so sympathetically incorporated in the original design.

So you stand, watching the departures board until your platform is announced, and then run frantically onto the train in an inelegant imitation of the imaginary passenger described above in Reason 1.  And then you get to where you're going, at which point your needs are covered for the next 30 seconds.

But suppose you are laden with heavy bags and might need to get both yourself and your earthly possessions out of the station?  No luggage trolleys, but there's always the dragging option.  Maybe you want to grab some reasonably healthy food before going home?  Sbarro offers three of your five a day in the shiny food section of the pyramid.  And what if you don't happen to live at the train station?  Outside of a few major cities in the Northeast, you could try walking, find a cab, or wait for the twice-a-day bus service.

So how great is Great Britain in the area of train stations?  As much as people here complain about the state of rail travel, the answer is very.  Train stations in the UK generally give you the feeling that the person responsible for their design may have once met a real, live human.  Stations may not be beautiful, may not have climate control systems, may not have Sbarro, but they address human travel needs 30 minutes (not seconds) before departure and 30 minutes after arrival. 

And by golly, you can sit!  You won't find chaises longues or high-backed leather (or even pleather) armchairs, but you will encounter pieces of horizontal furniture that the British call "seats."  When your train finally comes (often late, as a helpful reminder that the UK is not Europe) and you arrive at your destination, you will find that someone has clearly gone through a flowchart of the needs a human might experience after stepping onto the platform.  Laden with heavy bags?  Here are luggage trolleys.  Oh, but they probably cost a pretty penny.  Not so; a mere one pound deposit will do the trick!  Feeling peckish?  Yes, we offer food that shimmers like Sbarro's finest, but you could also try the station's miniature versions of chain grocery stores that sell produce, dairy, baked goods, dry goods, and meat at prices that match the large supermarkets.  And if you don't live at the train station?  Well, hop on a bus to the destination of your choice in this medium-sized English city.  OK, I'll just stop first to buy three long novels so I can enjoy the wait until this evening's bus departure.  Quit dallying, the bus is coming and if you miss it, you may have to wait up to 15 minutes!

In 2011 Lawrence Public Schools, a chronically underperforming school district, was placed under receivership by the Massachusetts State Legislature.  This process meant that the state appointed a receiver to take over responsibilities from the superintendent and the local school board and make decisions about how best to reform the city's schools.  As one component of reforming the city's schools, the receiver gave administrative control of some of the worst-performing schools to educational management organizations (EMOs, which are essentially charter networks) so that they could replicate models of effectiveness and turn around these schools.  I work at one of these schools, and for more on this you can read a brief New York Times editorial from last June.

But as interesting as this may be, what, you may ask, does this have to do with education in England?  Well, it turns out that when schools in England fail for too long (actually a much shorter time than they would be allowed to flounder in the US), control is taken away from local authorities and given to academy trusts (kind of like charter networks).  These academy trusts turn the schools into academies that replicate models that have proven successful at other schools in the trust.  Sounds kind of familiar, huh?  For a good summary, see The Economist.

Last week, I got to spend two days at Daleview Academy (name changed), which had been failing for some time (although, as mentioned previously, not as long as it would have been allowed to fail in America) and was turned into an academy about three years ago.  In many ways, it's quite similar to my school in Lawrence: high number of English language learners, low levels of family academic achievement, located in a neighborhood that has seen waves of immigration from different countries, a transient student population, administrative discussions driven by student data, and a dedicated school staff that sees the big picture in the work they accomplish.  In some ways, it's not: stronger social safety net for families in the UK's welfare state, huge linguistic diversity (upwards of 20 languages in a single classroom and no majority language, as opposed to Lawrence where you mainly just find Spanish), and kids learn to speak English with a Yorkshire accent.  Overall, a really good experience to see a school that's thousands of miles across the ocean from Lawrence but that could really be down the block.

Oh yeah, and really interesting kids who, like inner-city kids in America, have this edgy, pushy, almost frantic desire to learn that comes from a place of shear pride for all they have to share and sincere wonder at all they do not yet know.  How could you not want to teach students like that?  Here are some snippets of conversations I got to have with them:

• Students: Are you from Spain?  France!  Your voice is from Scotland!  No, Wales!

• Student: Do you know John Cena?  He's from America.

• Student: I know you're American because you sound like Willy Wonka. (not sure if this was a reference to Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp)

• Student: Do you have friends?
• Teacher: Yeah, I have lots of friends, but most of them don't live in Leeds.
• Student: No, do you watch Friends?
• Teacher: Yeah, I like to watch that show.  It's really funny.
• Student: You look and sound like Ross.

A Non-Alphabetical and Uncategorized Phrasebook (abridged)

• add (plus): Five add four equals nine.

• subtract (minus): Five subtract four equals one.

• multiply (times): Five multiply four equals twenty.

These actually makes tons (tonnes) of sense since they name the operation in the number sentence instead of naming symbols like plus and minus.  Children are also less likely to say things like "I have to solve this problem by plussing five and four."  Since I'm much more used to the American phrasing, there's a growing list of British kids who look at me dumbfounded when I try to "help" them with their maths (see below).

• maths (math): We're going to start learning fractions in maths today.

There is, however, no such thing as readings, histories, or sciences.

• inverted commas (quotation marks)

• full stop (period)

 

• sensible: Push in your chairs sensibly!  Be sensible when you play your maths game.

I can't think of a good translation, but this is a brilliant (brill) catch-all for making the right choices throughout the day.  I hear teachers use it about as often as I say "expectations" in my classroom, which is to say that they use it a lot.

• fuss: Don't fuss while you're putting on your coats!  You hurt your knee and you didn't even fuss!  You don't need to fuss when you hear a loud noise.

Again, I can't think of a translation that encompasses all the uses of fuss, but it's kind of like messing around while maintaining a British reserve.

• dinner (lunch)
• tea (dinner)
• supper (a light bite late at night)
• pudding (dessert)
• canteen (cafeteria)

Apparently calling the midday meal lunch and the evening meal dinner is considered posh.

• sir (an unknown man): Ask sir (referring to me) to help you with your maths if you get stuck.



Every classroom I've ever seen (including many in the US and a handful in the UK) has a set of rules posted in a fairly visible location.  The phrasing of these rules may differ from one school to another, but they generally convey the same message: be kind to your classmates, respect adults, try not to hurt people or things, and raise your hand.  Any child who has spent more than a day at school knows that in order to ask questions, answer questions, or share a story about the cupcakes at his sister's birthday, he has to raise his hand.  He may forget this rule when the excitement to share becomes too much to bear, or when the teacher takes way too long to acknowledge the patiently raised hand, but the rule is there and the child knows that hands are for raising.  One school I visited made me question just how universal that last rule might be.

A bit of background before continuing...In most classrooms in the US and the UK, the majority of teacher-student interactions can be described by the Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE) model, sounding something like this:
Teacher: How does Ferdinand feel when he gets taken to the bullfight in Madrid?  Pedro?
Pedro: Sad.
Teacher: Good job.
The teacher initiates the interaction by asking a question, waits for the student's response, and assesses the response by using a binary evaluation system of right or wrong (think Wolf Blitzer's "Good thing, bad thing?" on CNN).  Dialogic teaching is an alternative model, in which the teacher's question initiates a dialogue or conversation that gives students opportunities for thoughtful speaking, active listening, and deeper thinking.  Within a dialogic model, this is how the above teaching moment might go:
Teacher: How does Ferdinand feel when he gets taken to the bullfight in Madrid?  Pedro?
Pedro: Sad.
Teacher: Tell us with a complete sentence.
Pedro: Ferdinand feels sad when he goes to the bullfight.
Teacher: Pedro, ask Rachid for a word you might use instead of sad.
Pedro: Rachid, do you have another word?
Rachid: Depressed.
Teacher: Pedro?
Pedro: Ferdinand feels depressed when he goes to the bullfight.
Teacher: What in the story makes you think that?
Pedro: I think that because he has to leave his mom.
Teacher: Now that we have one piece of evidence supporting how Ferdinand feels, turn to your partner and identify two more pieces of evidence...Karly, what evidence did your partner share with you?
Without going into too much detail, let's just say this second interchange is a little different from the first one.

Back to the hand-raising rule.  In Barking and Dagenham, a far outer borough of London, the Peter's Bridge Primary School (name changed) serves a housing estate (British for "the projects") with high levels of deprivation (British for high crime, high poverty, and low educational attainment).  The school population is about half White British and half non-White, with large numbers of relatively recent arrivals from Africa.  Over the past ten years, Peter's Bridge has undertaken significant work to raise student achievement by subtly changing patterns of instruction.  Teachers at Peter's Bridge have largely moved away from IRE instruction and have fully bought into a dialogic approach to teaching.  Because of this, classrooms feel and sound different from a typical elementary school and most of them have this rule, surprising to an outsider, posted just as visibly as the other rules:

This is a No Hands Up School.

The adult will always say the name of the person they would like to speak when they ask a question.

We do not call out; we join in with the conversation.

Remember to wait for a gap.

Welcome to my blog!

I am spending four months in Leeds, England to research primary education in the UK as part of the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching program.  In addition to auditing two classes at the University of Leeds, I get to spend my time in schools observing teachers and students, transcribing the language they use in the processes of teaching and learning, and organizing ideas for my final project (more on that as it unfolds).

As an extra perk, I also get to explore the UK with my lovely wife, Frances.  Leeds is almost equidistant between London and Edinburgh, which makes it really easy to get out and about to see as much of this "green and pleasant land" as we can.

Hope you enjoy the blog, and please comment with questions/ideas/suggestions/opinions/airings of grievances.

Leeds, Yorkshire's only Gamma-level (that's the one after Alpha and Beta) world city