Three and a half years in the life... leading a curriculum team

I recently resigned from a position I have loved for the last three and a half years--Humanities 10 Curriculum Team Leader (CTL). I'll still be on the team; I just won't be leading it. Choosing to step down was difficult. Before the work I've done with the team gets too far in the rearview mirror, I wanted to capture the arc of my experience here.

When the two Humanities Department Chairs offered me the opportunity to step in as Humanities 10 CTL, I had no idea how central that role would become to my work or how many opportunities it would afford me to work with colleagues all across campus. In the way that Culver’s mission commits to “developing and nurturing the whole individual,” my role as CTL and work nurtured me—it became an opportunity to develop the curriculum and personnel of the department and, by extension, to work with adults across the school. In turn, I experienced incredible personal and professional growth.

For a long while, my favorite meeting of the month was with my Chairs. Together, they mentored me into the CTL position, helped me make several course corrections along the way, advised me on personnel and programming questions, rooted me deeply in the foundational principles of the department’s work, and then gave me wings to develop the tenth grade curriculum and team. They encouraged collaboration among the members of the Leadership Team (the Chairs plus the other level CTLs), and we made strides towards vertical alignment in the department for a more cohesive department curriculum. They set a tone of respect and professionalism, and they could both be trusted.

The revision of the “What is Humanities?” document (one of the foundational department documents) by the 2014-2015 Leadership Team started on a Friday night in April of 2015. The 9th grade CTL and I had a meeting about some Leadership Team work, and that conversation fueled a Friday night revision frenzy on my part that then led to a series of email messages and LT conversations about curriculum design (and revision of the document). What a team that was.

The work of the LT in 2015 was in concert with the development of the tenth grade curriculum.  In 2013, when I first came back to Culver, I was handed a small Amazon box of five books. While the level's curriculum clearly didn't begin with my arrival, I felt I needed to find more direction than what I had in that box. The Writing Program (in its most boiled down form, a common writing assessment given to the entire tenth grade) was in its infancy, and the tenth grade team had no idea what we were doing in assessment design; it was a year of building the bridge as we crossed it with our students in tow. For some assessments, we were modifying the rubric the day before; for others, we were still modifying the test itself the day before (despite our collective understanding of the importance of backwards design).

February 6, 2015 was my first level meeting as CTL. The Chairs had given me three clear targets that I shared with the Humanities 10 Team at that meeting:
• Writing Program 2.0—aligning assessments to reflect the skills and content of the course
• Humanities Units—building units based in a common text/context
• Grading Course Goals

And that day we started moving beyond just the “texts” to actual “units of study.” At the time, we didn’t even have a name for the units—just the titles of the central texts. Our first day of work on a unit articulation started with this question about our Term 3 text and the team’s answers:

The Swallows of Kabul—At the end of a unit of study based in the text of The Swallows of Kabul, what are the key understandings to come from that unit for our students?
• environment and its impact on the characters of the novel
• geography—how to learn about geography
• how people respond to their environment
• isolation—physical and metaphysical, effects on sense of self
• various forms of violence
• Islam—what it is and what it isn’t, define terms of extremism and fundamentalism
• Islam/elements of Islam
• Taliban—what allowed it to come into power
• fundamentalism versus devotion
• metaphor (and other literary devices) and how they function within the work and beyond the work (what are the stories of the characters in the book a metaphor for?)

This was the beginning of a three-and-a-half year journey of Humanities curriculum development for the tenth grade team. Because we all had books, and we had all been teaching books, we started with the books. But we had a lot of work to do to articulate how each unit would contribute to our students’ understanding of what it means “to be persons, understood holistically, and to live human lives governed by human ends” (WiH 1.0).

As the Hum 10 team changed each year, I continued to work with each new team to develop the unit articulations. We went from that first fuzzy list of concepts to well-defined understandings that help students understand the relationship between text and context. We discussed the unit articulations before we taught the units, then we met again at the end of a unit of study to revise them. We vetted supplementary sources for each unit in an effort to expose students to a variety of types of texts within a unit (WiH) and to prompt a deeper dive into the context for each central text. We left space for individual teacher experimentation and autonomy. We became the level that was teaching students “-isms”—imperialism, cosmopolitanism, fundamentalism, globalism.

The Writing Program
As we developed the unit articulations to ensure that we were teaching Humanities units, I also pushed the level to design and deliver Writing Program assessments that were in congruence with the skills and content of the level. I also pushed us to develop the assessments and the accompanying rubrics prior to the terms in which we would be using them. Over the course of three years, the level went from major overhauls of the rubric ( versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0) to adjustments (versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3) to tweaks (versions 7.0, 7.1). The rubric was meant to reflect the writing skills we were teaching in our classrooms.

When the ninth grade team made adjustments to their writing expectations, I made sure that the tenth grade team worked in concert with them so that students would experience a more coherent progression through the writing instruction at the levels. When the eleventh grade team made the shift to American Studies with APLAC, the tenth grade team modified the language of the rubric to more closely reflect the language of theirs. I pushed the Leadership Team to have conversations about the 11th grade writing targets so that the work at the lower levels would support students’ transition to the rigorous curriculum of the eleventh grade. When new members joined the team, I onboarded them to the Hum 10 Writing Program and then listened to and incorporated their suggestions for improvement into each assessment and rubric.

We also developed the Writing Program assessments themselves. As each unit articulation was refined each term, the level chose a content focus for the end-of-term assessment that reflected what the level valued in that unit.  Then we revised or developed the assessment from that choice. We weren’t teaching to the test, we were testing what we taught. We all learned more about assessment design.

We evolved the format of the assessments and scoring. I listened to the level’s concerns about the in-class essay format of the assessments, and I developed a proposal for a multi-draft out-of-class essay (OCE) format that the team vetted, modified, and tried. When we weren’t satisfied with the first version of the OCE, we modified the process again. When teachers expressed concerns over the amount of time they were spending scoring other teachers’ essays before then spending a weekend reading and commenting on their own students’ essays, I developed a proposal for a new system of scoring that would still align with and honor the principles of the original Writing Program design while allowing teachers more time with their own students’ essays. After the tenth-grade team tried and liked the new scoring system, the ninth-grade team adopted it, too. And as we developed the assessments, we developed as teachers. Together. And all without tears (no small feat given the culture of the level early on).

Tenth Grade Reading
We also grew as readers and teachers of readers. It was apparent that we all had room to grow in our understanding of the Bard. The level started their “text talks” in the back room of Papa’s on Sunday nights in the fall of 2015. We called it “The Bard and some Brews” and some of us fumbled our way through The Merchant of Venice together while enjoying an adult beverage.  Those Sunday night text talks transitioned to optional Tuesday level talks where we read and discussed each term’s central text together. Eventually, individual level members took responsibility for a term’s talks and planned the professional development experience for their colleagues. In years when we added several new members (e.g. seven of our ten level members were new in 2017), we studied the central texts together. In years when most level members were returning, we studied the unit’s supplementary texts. During one term last year, several members prepared and shared lectures for the team. Over the years, several people have shared that those text talks were their favorite meetings of the week.

We taught Purple Hibiscus one year. And we had a horrible book called The Underdogs on our reading list (so none of us actually taught it). We briefly added Frankenstein back into the curriculum for a year. At one point we had four novels and a play. And then the level determined that four central texts would be ideal; each of the five texts we had were “of sufficient depth and merit to bear th[e] weight”(WiH) of a full term of study, and there were only four terms in a year.  While some at the level wanted to take The Merchant of Venice off the tenth grade team’s slate, The Program Chair and I knew that eliminating it would require a larger discussion in the Humanities department about the role of Shakespeare in the Humanities curriculum. Still, we took a gamble and held the conversation hoping that the level would land on Merchant as one of the four texts. It did.

Since that conversation, the tenth grade has not changed central texts. I did learn from the time that we added Frankenstein to the mix and gave teachers little time to prepare during a June Week (end of school year) discussion, that the level needed to be more careful in making major changes to the curriculum. So when members new to the level asked last year about changing texts, I engineered a June Week conversation through which the team could develop both a process/timeline for text review or selection and key characteristics of potential replacement texts and/or additional central texts. I wanted to help level members feel like they had a voice in the curriculum while also helping us all keep an eye on the guiding Humanities principles.

Essential Questions, Justice, and Rationality 
While a number of essential question combinations had been floating around the department and level for quite some time, as each unit developed, a clear common focus seemed to emerge. Our units all addressed issues related to justice in each of the societies we studied. We formalized the adoption of these essential questions for the Humanities 10 year in the Spring of 2016:

What defines a just society? What creates injustice in societies? What makes it difficult to perceive injustice? What is the role of the individual in responding to injustice?

Certainly, these essential questions directly follow the mandate of the school’s mission to “educate students for leadership and responsible citizenship.” After all our other unit articulation and Writing Program discussions, adopting these essential questions breathed new life into our teaching conversations. How would putting these essential questions in front of our students make shifts to our thinking when we taught? To students’ thinking as they wrestled with the texts and contexts?

The question, “What makes injustice so hard to perceive?” demands attention to the rationality work of Kahneman. The question of what defines a just society demands attention to the work of Mills, Bentham, Rawls, Kant, and Aristotle. We have aspirations to make our sophomores “think inquisitively, critically, and reflectively while demonstrating an understanding of “fast and slow” thinking to enhance interpretive, analytical, and evaluative approaches specific to the humanities,” and to add this layer, we have a lot of additional work to do together as a teaching team.

resign: give up, surrender, abandon, submit; relinquish
The Dean of Faculty asked me if there was some project I wanted to finish or some work that I felt I still wanted to do before I resigned my position as CTL. There are a hundred things I’d still like to do. It can’t be one thing. Being a CTL is a complex juggling job, and I’ve been keeping a lot of balls in the air for a lot of years. And as my best friend would say, “It’s not just balls. It’s a ball, an apple, a sword, a candle, a cat, a bicycle… and you are smiling while you do it.” Dropping them all and walking away in the middle of the act is painful (and promises to be a bit dull).

I’ve been on six different tenth-grade teams in the six years I’ve been in the department. One year, we had ten team members. One year, we had five. Some years, Fellows (our "interns") have been the only additions. Some years, the part-timers at the level outnumber the full-timers. To develop a curriculum while attending to the needs of the teachers at the level is a delicate balance, and I haven’t always gotten it right. But I have always worked hard to keep programming goals in mind to make the best decisions for our students, while also focusing on the colleagues in my care.

Levels of Reading and Wil E Coyote

I can't remember learning to read (so I can't remember being taught to read). I have fond memories of the profound sense of accomplishment I felt when I sat on the red beanbag chair (on their orange shag carpet) in my parents' living room and read out loud (in what I'm sure was the most painfully slow and stuttering tones) Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat. I read. A whole book. By myself (to my poor parents who suffered through every page turn but beamed with pride at the end).

I can remember in high school sitting in Mrs. Rocker's living room next to a fire while eating scones and drinking tea and discussing Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and feeling very adult about the whole experience.

And I can remember taking such pride in the marked-up pages of my books at the University of Michigan that I refused to sell them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. I still have them.

But I don't remember progressing through any sort of levels of reading. Or engaging in different kinds of reading. Or encountering any one text differently from another. Or anyone teaching me how to write notes in the margins of my texts. All of a sudden, I was just at-least-proficient in reading: comprehending what I read, interacting with a text, and knowing when to zoom in and zoom out.

"If to do were as easy as to know what were good to
do, chapels had been churches and poor men's
cottages princes' palaces." --Portia, The Merchant of Venice 

Portia will tell us here that there is a difference, of course, between knowing and doing. When I started teaching at the high school, I "did" long before I "knew." When I assigned reading to my students, I'd say things like, "Close read chapter one of To Kill a Mockingbird; come to class with your book marked up."

It should be no surprise that this kind of assignment produced mixed results. If the results I was looking for were deep understandings of a full chapter of a book and the ability to zoom in on exactly the word or phrase I felt students should note while they were reading while also picking up on all the major themes and ideas AND noting unfamiliar vocabulary, then I got a mixed bag, for sure. Why couldn't my kids all close read? 

The answer is simple: I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't understand that not all reading and writing in texts is "close reading." 

How Zoomed is the reader's Zoom Lens?   
We can't close read everything.
We don't interactively read everything.
We sometimes expect interactive reading while students take on miles-on-the-page reading.

If you disagree with these claims or they don't make sense to you, then this post might be for you.

Miles-on-the-page
I read The Hunger Games trilogy in a weekend. I'd gotten a copy of book one from Scholastic Inc. on a visit to New York, and when I finally cracked the cover, I was hooked. But I didn't close read it. I didn't even interactively read it. I didn't have time; I needed to get to the next page!

In Lemov, Driggs, and Woolway's Reading Reconsidered, this is called "miles on the page" or "quantity reading." And it is a totally reasonable and acceptable approach to consuming lots of text. It also speaks to the idea that "quality reading requires quantity reading. Students must read not only well but also widely and extensively."

So here's the thing--there's a "but also" there. Reading Reconsidered doesn't think of miles-on-the-page reading as one "type" of reading but rather as one component of supporting the growth of young readers. We need our students reading. A lot. They mention that the "time that we allocate to 'reading' [in our classrooms] is in fact spent talking about reading, say, or talking about topics brought about by reading. Less often is that time filled with actual reading: how many road miles students really log with reading is an open question."

So number of pages students read matter. And if we're asking our students to "interactively" or "close read" those pages, they won't cover as many miles. We need to invite them to zoom on out and hit the open road in a book.

Attentive/Interactive
Early on in my teaching, I don't think I was asking my students to do "miles-on-the-page" reading very often. But I was assigning a "miles-on-the-page" volume of reading to them and then asking them to do an entirely different level of reading altogether--attentive reading or, in the language of Reading Reconsidered, Interactive Reading. Interactive Reading (IR)  is when "a reader engages with the text by underlining, marking up key points, and summarizing ideas in the margin."

This! is what I think I wanted my students doing when I was assigning the first chapter of To Kill a Mockingbird. 

Lemov et. al. argue that "in high-performing literacy classrooms, simple habits--how your students mark up text as they read and how they hold a discussion that honors different interpretations--allow inspiring and rigorous instruction to thrive." They also argue that strong literacy programs have a "system for making up" that is "consistent--there [is] a way students [are] taught to do it--but each student mark[s] up different things."

In the school where I work, having teachers collaborate together to create a system for making their thinking visible in IR might be one of the most significant steps we can take in creating cohesiveness in our reading pedagogy. If freshmen coming in learn a system, then sophomores use that system (and expand the tools in it), we'll have a culture of students who understand 1) that there are different levels of interaction with a text and 2) how to make their thinking visible when reading. (Incidentally, the creation of the system alone would be a profound professional development opportunity for the teachers involved--it's really useful for teachers to discuss what they are looking for when assessing student reading; it forces a lot of exciting and important discussion about the teaching of reading.)

Teachers can assess student understanding in their IR notes in the margins of their texts. That's a post for another day, though.

Close
Zoom on in. This is the geek out moment for most literature majors. Give me a half a page of text in Things Fall Apart, and I will mark up every word. I will go from the page level to the paragraph level to the sentence level to the word level. I will notice how many times the main character, Okonkwo, is referred to as fire, flame, ash, smoldering. I will note connections to earlier and later pieces of the text (because I've now read the novel at least fifteen times). I will interpret every Igbo proverb in the margins of the text. The end result of my close read will likely be that there will be more of my writing on the page than there will be of Achebe's.

That's close reading. Lemov and his colleagues define close reading carefully as "the methodical breaking down of the language and structure of a complex passage to establish and analyze its meaning. Teaching students to do it requires layered reading and asking sequenced, text-dependent questions; and it should end whenever possible with mastery expressed through writing."

A "complex passage"--that's not a whole novel. We can't close read a whole novel. We can't even close read a whole chapter without "layered reading." Multiple readings.

And layered readings generally won't happen in a student's dorm room (at least not my student's dorm room) without a very carefully structured set of questions and directions. Most of my students haven't developed the skills to just "close read" without any additional guidance. And that additional guidance takes a lot of planning. This is another opportunity for teachers to collaborate.

Implications--Wrestling Points

• Volume matters. It matters because developing readers should be reading a lot. Regularly. Teachers need to be mindful of how much volume they are assigning (and whether or not their assignments are allowing students to just read). And if volume is the point, then we need to let the students know that is the point, and we need to assess their reading accordingly. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't assign miles-on-the-page volume.
• A successful IR program requires collaboration among teachers in the creation and implementation of a system, and that level of collaboration will ultimately benefit the students in any given program as they spend less time learning the system and more time in the practice of actual reading. 
• If asking students to do Interactive Reading, then don't expect a close reading level of comment or analysis. 
• Close reading requires significant planning on the part of a teacher when working with developing readers. How will we 1) choose the passages and 2) find the time? 

A Final Note

In Kathryn Schulz's excellent TED Talk "On Being Wrong"  she shares the metaphor above for what it feels like when we're wrong. We're Wile E Coyote in the moment before he looks down. We're hanging in mid-air because we haven't realized that we aren't on solid ground any more. But in that moment, being wrong feels remarkably like being right. (And it doesn't make us any less wrong--it just means we don't know it yet.)

 It occurs to me that this is an apt metaphor for trying to grow as a teacher of reading. I don't often get to feel like the roadrunner. And the more I study this area, the more I believe that we're all the coyote. The point, it seems, is to be willing to look down. Often.