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Just Showing Up: Supporting Early Literacy Through Teachers' Professional Communities By Gloria Ladson-Billings and Mary Louise Gomez The evidence from their project has persuaded Ms. Ladson-Billings and Ms. Gomez that improving teachers' knowledge and supporting changes in pedagogical practice will be a slow and painstaking process that must be grounded in a specific school/community context. |
COMEDIAN AND filmmaker Woody Allen attributed a large percentage
of his success to just "showing up." His comment reminds
us that some of life's challenges are not about complex or complicated
solutions and processes. Similarly, in dealing with some of the
more intractable issues of urban schooling, we may need to do
a better job of "showing up" for our students. In this
article, we detail a collaboration between ourselves -- two
university researchers -- and a group of primary-level
teachers who are attempting to improve the early literacy abilities
of children at risk of school failure.
We work in a community where public schools are well regarded.
Among its four comprehensive high schools, there are approximately
50 National Merit finalists each year. Realtors brag to prospective
home buyers about the quality of the public schools and point
out how well the students perform on standard measures when compared
with students both in other parts of the state and nationwide.
At the elementary level, the student/teacher ratio is about 22
to 1, and the elementary schools continue to have specialist teachers
in art, music, and physical education. Each elementary school
is equipped with a library that is staffed by a certified librarian.
However, in the midst of all these resources and support, there
are pockets of failure. Some schools in the district serve children
and families who are living in poverty. Many of these children
are students of color or students whose primary language is not
English. The failure of these students to succeed in the local
public schools has been a particular challenge to the school district,
to the specific schools, and to the individual classroom teachers.
Similar concerns about the academic performance of children of
color and children living in poverty have been expressed by school
districts with similar achievement and demographic profiles.1 How can it be that, even in some
of the nation's best public schools, some students regularly and
predictably fail to benefit from schooling?
The school community we began working with is the Bret Harte School.2 It is a large elementary school
serving about 700 students, located on the side of the city that
is home to a substantial number of working-class families. The
homes in the community are older and more modest than the homes
in other sections of the city, and the school also serves a number
of apartment buildings. Many of the children at Bret Harte who
have experienced school failure come from a low-income apartment
community.
Two years ago, we began a discussion with the district superintendent
about how we might collaborate with teachers to help support the
literacy abilities of early learners (K-2). Students throughout
Wisconsin are required to take the Third-Grade Reading Test, a
criterion-referenced test developed by teachers in the state.
Although controversy exists over the validity of the Third-Grade
Reading Test, its designations of below basic, basic, proficient,
and advanced have serious consequences for how students are taught.
Students who fail to achieve at the basic level or above are more
likely to be placed in pull-out programs, such as Title I or Reading
Recovery. Indeed, failing the Third-Grade Reading Test seems to
have consequences that extend throughout students' academic lives
in the district. Our concern, however, was not whether or not
some students were in need of special services, but rather why
students of color and students living in poverty were overrepresented
among this group.
We made clear to the superintendent that we would not be teaching
students or "teaching" teachers. Instead, our work was
based on a theoretical notion that teachers' ability to create
a professional community is integral to improving teaching and
student learning.3 Our work
is influenced by the work of a number of teacher education researchers.4 Instead of using a model in which
external "experts" tell teachers what to do, we are
committed to working with teachers in ways that allow
them to share their own expertise and local knowledge in an effort
to improve their teaching.
Teachers Helping Teachers
We named our project "Teachers Helping Teachers" to
signal the role we expected teachers to play in ensuring their
own professional development and in supporting students' literacy.
Our initial meeting with the teachers at Bret Harte School was
an opportunity to establish the terms of our working relationship.
Seven teachers agreed to participate in the project. They included
kindergarten, first-grade, second-grade, Title I, and Reading
Recovery teachers. We had funding to pay the teachers for attending
monthly meetings and to offer them a biannual stipend for allowing
the researchers to observe in their individual classrooms throughout
the year. We also made clear to the teachers that, if the project
was successful, we would expect at least two of them to join us
as facilitators in subsequent teacher groups in other district
schools.
The model of collaboration we employed involved our asking critical
questions to stimulate conversation. We hypothesized that the
conversations would stimulate teachers to think about their own
work and to make pedagogical changes that would benefit students
who were deemed to be at risk of failing to become literate. In
between the monthly meetings, we (with the help of graduate assistants)
spent time observing in classrooms during literacy instruction.
We collected field notes of our observations and shared summaries
of those notes with the teachers. We did not intervene in the
classrooms, but we were available to do tasks assigned by the
teachers (e.g., reading with individual students, examining student
work, and so on).
For the first monthly meeting, we assigned the teachers to bring
a list of those students about whose literacy they were most concerned.
We were not surprised to find that the names the teachers brought
were overwhelmingly those of students of color and students living
in poverty. However, we deliberately refrained from calling attention
to the students' minority or socioeconomic status. We believed
that early in the process of collaboration we needed to assure
teachers that we were not judging them or suggesting that they
were exhibiting aspects of racism or discrimination toward the
children in their classrooms.
Some five months passed before the teachers acknowledged the pattern
of school failure. After looking at data from the school's literacy
test, one of the teachers remarked that the school wasn't doing
very well "with the African American boys." This statement
about the pattern revealed by the data needed to come from a teacher.
The teachers had to own this problem, and we had to establish
an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect so that teachers would
feel safe talking openly about race and class discrimination as
they worked toward improving children's literacy.
Our strategy was to allow the teachers to talk frankly about their
students and to encourage them to think about what capabilities
the students might have. We asked them to consider the question
"What strengths does this child have?" This question
provoked the teachers to think about what resources the students
already possessed. Thus it was not unusual for a teacher to say,
"Well, she really likes to listen to stories," or "He
can remember lots of details in a story." By letting teachers
identify these strengths, we wanted to help them see that their
students did have something on which to build.
During the school day, we spent time in selected teachers' classrooms,
observing their literacy teaching practices.5 We carefully documented those practices so that
the teachers could see how their practice might appear to others.
Our field notes were summarized and presented to the individual
teachers for their review. Often teachers brought information
from these summaries to the monthly meetings. However, the analysis
of individual teachers' literacy teaching practices was never
the primary focus of our work. Instead, we were attempting to
see whether helping to create and support small professional development
communities might lead teachers to make the kinds of changes that
they felt were important to improving children's literacy.
We structured the monthly meetings around a critical question
for teachers to ponder. We recognized that many of the teachers
in the district used a "literature-based" approach to
reading. However, not all of the teachers understood what such
a practice entailed. A number of the teachers did things that
looked procedurally like a literature-based approach
to literacy. They introduced students to well-written, lively
illustrated trade books. They permitted children to make their
own reading selections and to read with reading buddies. The children
were encouraged to write about their books and to make illustrations
to accompany their writing. This strategy seemed to work well
for those students who already knew how to read -- mainly
the white students from middle-income homes. However, the children
who lived in poverty and the African American children who lacked
phonemic awareness were often at a loss as to what to do with
the books they selected other than look at the pictures.
After having observed this practice in the classroom, we asked
the teachers to respond to the question "What did you teach
in reading last week?" To our surprise many of the teachers
struggled to articulate what they actually had taught in
reading during the previous week. Teachers spoke in detail about
various writing activities they had conducted and about the stories
they had read aloud. But they could not tell us what reading instruction
they had conducted. The only teacher who was able to describe
the previous week's reading instruction was a teacher who had
been considered by many of her colleagues to be "old-fashioned."
Her reading instruction included a variety of word-attack strategies,
comprehension exercises, and guided reading. The revelation that
many of them were not teaching the students (particularly
those most in need of instruction) to read became a crucial turning
point for the group. Unlike Woody Allen, these teachers found
out that they were not even "showing up" for the children
who needed them most.
Changed Classroom Practices
Although we were not trying to change the practice of individual
teachers, we have begun to see how listening to one another's
struggles and solutions can serve as a catalyst for changing ways
of thinking about students who have experienced school failure.
Such changed thinking can change practice. Because many of their
students were experiencing success in early literacy, it was easy
for teachers to forget the few who were not. Typically, such students
were referred to specialists (e.g., Title I or Reading Recovery
teachers), and teachers assumed less responsibility for their
literacy.
It also became clear to us that students who received academic
services from a variety of professionals were more likely to be
confused about to whom they were responsible and for what. For
example, at one of our early meetings, the Title I teacher told
a classroom teacher that she had directed a student to follow
a particular procedure. The teacher commented that she had told
the student something different. Soon the reading specialist chimed
in that she had told the student something altogether different
from the first two, and finally the special education teacher
admitted that she had requested that the student respond to a
fourth set of directives. "No wonder he looks like a deer
caught in the headlights," replied his classroom teacher.
"The poor kid doesn't know which one to pay attention to."
The professional development meetings were becoming a way to increase
the communication among the teachers so that they could better
serve their students.
Other changes we have observed as a result of the teachers' participation
in the monthly meetings are shifts in the ways teachers talk about
children and their families and alternations in the sense of responsibility
they feel for ensuring that all students learn to read, write,
and speak well. During our early meetings, the teachers seemed
intent on venting about the students and their families. We learned
about which students came from households in which the adults
were unable to provide basic necessities. We learned which children
might be experiencing various sorts of trauma -- a parent
in prison, homelessness, family dissolution. These issues dominated
our early conversations with the teachers. However, by consistently
refocusing the dialogue on students' learning, we became more
successful at helping the teachers talk about their students'
academic needs and strengths.
At one group meeting, for example, one of the teachers talked
about her ongoing struggle with a youngster. The student seemed
to have little in the way of family support, and his own frustrations
with failure were prompting him to act out more in the classroom.
In exasperation the teacher commented, "I just can't teach
this child!" An uncomfortable silence came over the group.
Pronouncements such as this had previously been glossed over,
and other teachers would redirect the conversation. But on this
day one of the other teachers said, quite emphatically, "You
don't mean that. Of course, you can teach that child!" This
kind of within-group accountability has created a sense of empowerment
that cannot be imposed by the get-tough sanctions that many current
reform efforts entail.
At another group meeting, we invited someone from the district
research department to bring a copy of the data from the school's
reading assessments. Prior to this meeting, the teachers had simply
been told that the standardized test scores were available in
the office, or they had picked up a local newspaper to see how
the schools ranked in relation to one another. Previously, little
or no consideration had been given to using test scores to diagnose
students' strengths and weaknesses so that teachers could develop
appropriate curriculum and instructional strategies to improve
achievement. Granted, since large numbers of students in the district
do well on such tests, there was not much precedent for using
the tests as tools to improve teaching and learning. However,
the observed pattern of failure among poor students and students
of color required the teachers to begin to see the tests for what
they are: tools that can provide some baseline data for improving
schooling. We wanted the teachers to move away from the antagonistic
position that the tests were an indictment of their teaching and
to begin to ask questions about how such measures might be more
useful to them in their work.
The first look at the test data was disheartening. All the identified
students were performing significantly below grade level. All
the African American students had performed poorly on phonemic
awareness. All the socioeconomically disadvantaged children had
performed poorly on comprehension. One of the teachers let out
a sigh of despair and said, "Our children are just so low."
However, within a moment or two, another teacher remarked, "It
doesn't matter how low they are right now. [It was then October.]
What matters is where they are in May, and that's our responsibility."
Once again, we were amazed at the way the context of a small,
intimate, and ongoing professional community created opportunities
for support and encouragement that would have an ultimate payoff
for the students.
Having the teachers identify the students about whom they were
most concerned gave us (and them) somewhere to focus. Teachers
understood that, when we came into their classrooms, we would
be looking at what was happening with the identified students.
The added attention we were giving those students probably made
teachers feel compelled to pay more attention to them also
-- to "show up" as teachers for them. Even if we
were unable to visit a classroom in a particular month, the teachers
understood that their contributions to the group conversation
needed to begin with a discussion of the progress of their at-risk
students. They needed to be able to discuss how they, as teachers,
were "showing up" for students who typically fall through
the cracks.
Linda Winfield's work on teachers' beliefs about students placed
at risk is instructive in helping us understand the kinds of strategies
teachers may deploy to deal with student failure.6 According to Winfield, teachers believe that
students who are not achieving can be either improved or maintained.
Teachers who believe that students can improve have an orientation
that suggests that, regardless of students' past failures, something
can be done pedagogically to raise their academic achievement.
Teachers who believe that students can only be maintained see
the school's role as avoiding "slippage." Instead of
pushing a student to higher academic improvement, such teachers
are preoccupied with making sure that the student neither loses
ground nor proves to be a disruption. Winfield also contends that
teachers see this dichotomy of improvement versus maintenance
as something for which they are responsible -- or for
which others must assume responsibility.
The teachers who believe that students at risk of school failure
can improve and that they as teachers are responsible
for that improvement are called "tutors." They take
time each day to work with the students individually to make sure
that they receive the expert, individual help that the teacher
can give. The teachers who believe that students at risk of school
failure can improve but that it is someone else's responsibility
to foster that improvement are called "general contractors."
They take responsibility for the finished product, but they search
out knowledgeable others to provide the specific pedagogical support.
The teachers who do not believe that at-risk students can improve
-- the teachers who believe that they can only be maintained
-- and who also believe that they as teachers are responsible
for that maintenance are called "custodians." They are
the teachers who find a way to keep struggling students in their
rooms and quiet, typically doing such busy work as worksheets
and puzzles that fail to challenge their intellect or improve
their skills. The teachers who do not believe that at-risk students
can improve and who believe that those students' maintenance is
someone else's responsibility are called "referral agents."
They see their role as finding someone else (e.g., the special
educator, the Title I teacher, the reading specialist) to teach
the students.
Winfield's rubric is helpful for looking at schools that are organized
in traditional ways, with each teacher working alone and in isolation.
However, the development of a professional community makes public
those activities and behaviors that were once private. No teacher
in our group could come in month after month and respond to our
questions about supporting student literacy by reporting that
he or she had sent Shaniqua or José to someone else. The
public conversations and supporting documents served as testaments
to whether or not teachers really were "showing up"
for those students in most need of help.
We have also been able to track changes in the teachers' attitudes
over time. We recruited teachers who wanted to participate in
this project. We realized that the financial remuneration might
be an incentive for some teachers, but we knew that the money
would not be enough to sustain them throughout the process. One
of the teachers seemed not to have much to contribute to our monthly
discussions. This teacher was often impatient to leave and sometimes
made excuses for missing parts of the meetings. However, when
we began to focus on the progress of one of the students in her
classroom, she started to contribute more to the group and began
to incorporate more of the group conversation into her practice.
Our observations helped us to see that this teacher was using
a variety of effective practices to manage her classroom and that
she took a strong interest in developing a wider repertoire of
effective teaching strategies.
After spending a week at a reading conference, this teacher came
back enthusiastic and happy to be able to share some of what she
had learned with our study group. "I really felt like I understood
what I need to be doing to help the children who are struggling,"
she said. "Right now, the work in this group is helping us
along, but after a while when you guys are gone, we'll become
keepers of our own vision." This expression -- "keepers
of our own vision" -- became a metaphor for our
work with the teachers at Bret Harte. The professional community
that was forming at the school was a way for teachers to begin
to take both risks and responsibilities.
After we and the teachers had worked together for almost 18 months,
the scores for the Third-Grade Reading Test were released. For
the first time in recent memory, all the target students at Bret
Harte met the standard. The good news of the improved test performance
was announced on the school's public address system. The principal
telephoned one of the researchers at home that night and purchased
a cake to help the faculty celebrate. We had no magic formula
to share. The primary teachers had been willing to engage in a
long-term professional development effort aimed at ensuring that
the students who often are forgotten would receive regular and
deliberate attention during the literacy instruction.
Expanding the Circle
Beginning with the 1998-99 school year, we expanded our project
to two additional schools with demographic and academic profiles
similar to those of Bret Harte. However, instead of both researchers
working with the professional communities in the two new schools,
each of us has taken leadership responsibility for one of the
schools and asked one of the Bret Harte teachers to accompany
us. Our intention is to expand the growth of professional communities
throughout the district by developing enough teacher facilitators
at these three schools to allow our withdrawal from the schools.
What we have noticed at the two new sites is that each new effort
places us right back at square one. Once again, we listened as
teachers shared a litany of problems about the children. We heard
about a child who rolled on the floor and refused to participate
in classroom activities. We heard about another child who seemed
to come apart at each and every transition. The move from opening
exercises in the morning to reading activities was always a battle.
The change from reading to music resulted in a tantrum. The requirement
that the student attend the Title I classroom meant tears and
sulking.
Once again, our role was to redirect the teachers' conversations
toward the students' strengths. One teacher paused for a long
time when she was asked about one of her student's strengths.
Finally, she said with a smile, "He can ride the bus!"
This comment seemed out of context. However, the teacher pointed
out how complex the public transportation system was in the city.
It is a system that depends on a central transfer point. All buses
come into the center of the city and go back out again to various
parts of the city. The teacher further commented, "I'm a
grown woman, and I don't know how to ride the buses in the city.
He can do it, and he's only 7 years old. That tells me that he's
an intelligent little boy. He just doesn't know how to read."
At one of the new sites, a primary teacher focused our attention
on a Latino child named Fernando, the eldest of the three children
of a young neighborhood couple. Throughout the fall and early
winter, the teacher bemoaned Fernando's immaturity -- his
continual talking with neighbors and constant moving around the
room. For many months, other teachers in the group responded to
the complaints with bemused smiles, indicating their quiet support
-- they, too, had students like this one.
As the weeks passed, the teachers began to take up an "asset
model" of looking at children, and one winter afternoon,
another teacher responded to the complaints, "You know, Fernando
always is smiling. He seems happy in school. I think he loves
you as his teacher." Fernando's teacher's mouth dropped and
her eyes widened. "Hmm," she said. "He does like
me, doesn't he?" Then she blushed, recognizing that her comments
may have led others to think that she did not like Fernando.
Clearly, "showing up" means more than teaching children
the skills of reading and writing; it means personally investing
in their development as readers and writers.
On another occasion, a teacher in the group began talking about
how many of the children struggling to learn to read and write
at the school were children of color. We had hoped to open this
conversation numerous times earlier in the year. However, each
time someone would initiate a question concerning race and achievement,
others would look away, subtly change the subject, or shift about
in their seats, signaling their discomfort with the topic. Seated
at the table in each of our meetings was a white teacher with
her toddler baby who came to nearly every meeting because of the
complexity of scheduling late-afternoon day care. Swallowing hard,
and smiling at her little son, the teacher said:
I think a lot now about when Trenton goes to school. How will teachers treat him and talk to him? They will see an African American boy. Maybe they will see a child who they believe can't do things. If they knew me, and he went to this school, Trenton would probably be okay; everyone would say, "Oh, that's Callie and David's son." David smiles at me when I tell him I think this way. He thinks I am just waking up to what he has always lived through as an African American. But what if Trenton goes to our neighborhood school and people don't know us? What will happen? How will people think about him and teach him? What will they expect? I think about it all the time, and I think about us as teachers, how we think about other people's kids.
That day, because we had been talking together for so many
months and because Callie's voice broke and because we had been
passing Trenton around, kissing his soft cheeks and feeding him
bits of fruit and cookies, it was hard to ignore her plea and
our responsibilities. We talked softly and slowly, uneasy with
our unmet obligations, willing at last to take them up, bit by
tiny bit.
Recently, we began planning a second year of work at our two additional
sites. At one planning meeting, the teachers came ready "to
take action." "Last year," one teacher said, "we
talked a lot about what worried us about our literacy program
and which children weren't making progress. This year, we need
to make a plan. How are we going to make changes across all of
our classrooms? What is important to do?"
That morning, we laid plans to:
As the meeting broke up, the teachers smiled at one another. It felt good to take action together on behalf of children's learning. It felt a little scary, too. We recognized that there was much to be done and that there were only nine of us on a very large staff, working with dozens of children struggling to learn to read and write. While it remained unspoken, the idea that we would be showing up -- together -- heartened our group.
Concluding Thoughts
The work we have done with these teachers is obviously more complex
than just sitting around holding monthly conversations. Our own
theoretical, philosophical, and pedagogical perspectives have
shaped the way we have approached this work. And one assumption
that undergirds our work with the teachers is that one of the
major causes of children's academic failure is the failure of
teachers to teach them. We believe that no teacher sets out to
be unsuccessful with certain students. However, we have seen teachers
compensate for their initial lack of success with poor children
and children of color by literally ignoring them. By spending
more of their time with the more successful students, teachers
can convince themselves that those students who are failures are
not really their responsibility. The failing students fail because
their parents do not read to them or listen to them read or even
care about their education. Sometimes, telling ourselves these
stories about the children creates enough of a space between the
children's failure and our own efforts that we can pretend that
we have done our best for the children.
We also believe that the only way to improve the quality of teaching
and learning is to improve teachers' skills and abilities. Thus
we see professional development as the linchpin of school reform
aimed at raising academic performance. No amount of standards,
benchmarks, and high-stakes testing can bring about school improvement
without attention to teacher quality. We believe that teachers
have to be active participants in their own professional development.
And we cannot expect that one-shot, one-size-fits-all workshops
directed by "expert" consultants can produce the kinds
of changes in pedagogical practices that will support student
learning.
The evidence from our project has persuaded us that improving
teachers' knowledge and supporting changes in pedagogical practice
will be a slow and painstaking process that must be grounded in
a specific school/community context. We also know that the very
first step in changing teaching practice is in helping teachers
learn to "show up."
