The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

As the school year settles into full swing and I find myself more and more immersed in the planning, creating, assessing, and reevaluating of the daily flow of my lessons, I start to feel the pressure of feedback building up on me. I know that the value of learning in my gradeless classroom is much higher than it used to be. I believe that the feedback I give my students is making them into more successful ELA students. But there are so many days I look at the towering pile of work that requires feedback, and I just feel completely inadequate. There are not enough hours, not enough patience, not enough me to go around for all of them. Some days it feels like it would just be so much easier to give a ten-question multiple choice test, run it on the Scantron or through Schoolnet, and call it good. I think these things in my moments of weakness, but I know that I could never be satisfied with that type of assessment for the deep learning I want to happen in my classroom. I know that stu...

It started yesterday at the lunch table. The "progress report talk." When will we send them? How long will they get to bring them back? How many assignments are on yours? How many tests have you given? Who is failing? I got a sick feeling in my stomach, kinda like I used to feel in middle school when progress reports were about to come out. When discussions like these happen, I always feel like the odd man out. It always makes me pause, just for a second, and wonder Is the way I'm doing it really best? Shouldn't I have given a test by now? Surely there's some kid that I should be failing...if they're all doing well doesn't that mean I'm just a slacker, the "easy" teacher? Old habits sure do die hard. It's so easy to get caught up in the assignment trap, especially when the kids are stuck in the finished=grade=done mindset and you can't figure out a great way to communicate progress to parents without putting a number on anything. I...

My 2017 New Year's resolution was to learn a new skill. I take pride in calling myself a life-long learner, but it occurred to me that most of the ways I was still learning were based in reading, writing, and teaching: three things that come very easily and naturally to me, partly through aptitude, but mainly due to many years of practice. It took me a while to decide what I would do, but in February I settled on taking art classes. My son was already taking at our local arts center so it wouldn't be a major disruption in our schedule, and I love art even though I wouldn't call myself an artist. So on the first Tuesday of February 2017, I sat down in the classroom with my brand-new sketchbook and pencils, and set myself up to learn how to do something new. I expected to learn a lot about technique and skill, but I was unprepared for how much I would learn about teaching from watching my art teacher, Miss Martha, in action. From day one, I began to realize how magical the ...

I spent this summer completely redoing my classroom. I figured in the past two years I have completely revamped my curriculum and my grading process, so the only thing left to redo is the physical environment. Go big or go home, right? On my final course surveys, several students commented that I needed to work on changing the physical environment to match the "feel" my classroom had. I knew if several students mentioned it, it was important enough to change. But this post isn't really about that. TL; DR: I redecorated my classroom, and now it looks like this: It is so important to me to establish a classroom culture that will be supportive, nurturing, affirming, and safe for all of my students, so I left school on Friday afternoon in a quandary about how to best establish expectations on the first day. For many years, I was a "go over rules and procedures on the first day" teacher (sometimes on the second and third days too). Two years ago, it was all a...

This is the third post in a series about The Gradeless Classroom. You can read the first post here  and the second post here .  It seems like most of the teachers in the gradeless community (myself included) are filled with an almost evangelical zeal when we start talking about these changes in our classrooms. Going gradeless energized my career at its midpoint in a way few other changes have. And sometimes, evangelists forget to tell all sides of the story. So this post is meant to address that other side; the side we don't talk about as much. The parts that are hard, and the problems that might beset you if you decide this path is for you. Pitfalls My decision to go gradeless was rooted in procrastination. Yes, that's right, procrastination. I hated grading papers with such a passion. I would do absolutely anything to avoid it. And it was in the wake of grading 110+ essays about theme in  To Kill a Mockingbird  that my gradeless classroom began to materializ...

This is the 2nd post in a series about The Gradeless Classroom. Read the first one here . The months following that fateful conversation in my principal's office found me disillusioned with numbers, data, and all of the limitations that come with attempting to neatly place clear boundary lines ("standards") around learning that is messy, noisy, frustrating, and entirely human. The more I pondered, the less I believed that anything at all about the way we do school makes sense. Grouping students by age, norms-based referencing, bell curves, and standardized testing are all leftovers from the factory-reflective system of learning that has been in place since the inception of public schooling. Unfortunately, I have little control over these issues. The one area over which I do have control is my classroom, and I am lucky to be in a school where I am still (mostly) allowed to make my own instructional decisions. I decided it was time to begin making changes. After coming ...

This morning I went to my usual hiking spot. It was the first time I’d been since May. The end of the school year is always crazy busy, and most days I am just too tired to go hike at the end of the day. Then the school year ended, and I got this lingering allergy/ sinus/ upper respiratory thing that just decimated my stamina. In short, when I arrived this morning I felt much like I was starting from scratch. I went my usual route, headed for my usual trail, the Vertical Mile (you can read about it here ). When I got there, I looked up at it, and I just gave up. I turned around and headed back. I knew I couldn’t do it today. Probably not what you were expecting, huh? After all, this is a post about goals, and I pretty much just gave up on mine. So why even write about it? As teachers, we tend to focus on goal-setting for moving forward. We want to celebrate when we meet goals, or our students meet goals, and we tend to get really down when we don’t meet them. But here’s the th...