Three Quotes on Identity and the Achievement Gap

I'm pushing the limits of Fair Use but I wanted to post these for my own future reference.

Dr. Camika Royal on Asa Hilliard quoted in Please Stop Using the Phrase 'Achievement Gap'

One of Hilliard's most salient arguments is the notion that the so-called achievement gap between whites, blacks, and Latinos holds white wealthy students' performance as the standard of excellence without interrogating whether or not their performance is worthy of comparison. Instead of asking if how they performed is excellent, the inter-racially comparative nature of the "achievement gap" suggests that blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, special education students, and those receiving free and reduced-priced lunch should do whatever white students are doing.

Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez (originally from East San Jose!) in A "Gap-Gazing Fetish" in Mathematics Education. Problematizing Research on the Achievement Gap, p. 359.

...the (achievement gap) lens sends an unintended message that marginalized students are not worth studying in their own right—that a comparison group is necessary. Such a framing further engrains whiteness and middle-to-upper income as a norm, positioning certain students and their cultures as deviant.

Andrew Solomon in Far from the Tree


Background: Vertical identities are those identities inherited to some degree from parents. They may be genetic but also shared cultural norms. Horizontal identities are formed when someone has a trait foreign to his or her parents and must "acquire identity from a peer group." The book is about parents and children but I think you can also apply this to school relationships as well.

Most deaf children are born to hearing parents, and those parents frequently prioritize functioning in the hearing world, expending enormous energy on oral speech and lipreading. Doing so, they can neglect other areas of their children's education. While some deaf people are good at lipreading and produce comprehensible speech, many do not have that skill, and years go by as they sit endlessly with audiologists and speech pathologists instead of learning history and mathematics and philosophy. Many stumble upon Deaf identity in adolescence, and it comes as a great liberation. They move into a world that validates Sign as a language and discover themselves. Some hearing parents accept this powerful new development; others struggle against it." (pages 2-3)

Vertical identities are usually respected as identities; horizontal ones are often treated as flaws.(page 4)

Wondering how my teachers could have done this, I thought that someone whose core being is deemed a sickness and an illegality may struggle to parse the distinction between that and a much greater crime. Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand. (page 13)

Three quick thoughts:

I used to think that our fixation on the "achievement gap" was a form of microaggression (see this post, this vid and this tumblr) but I've been underestimating the impact.

How much of our time is spent trying to 'fix' a student when what we're really trying to do is make a student more like us?

And with a nod to Dr. Gutierrez, I will give endless blog love to the first person who, in a staff meeting about the 'achievement gap', raises his/her hand and asks, "Yes. What are we planning to do to catch our White students up to our Asian ones?"



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Thanks to Bryan and Raymond for the Gutierrez articles and for the Hangout and Grace for recommending the Solomon book.

Creating Balance: Reflections

This is the second year I've gone to the Creating Balance conference. I've been kicking around a couple of longer reflections but wanted to do something quick while it was still fresh.

First off, this happened:

That's Brian Lawler, me, Avery Pickford, Bree Murray, and Grace Chen at Tacolicious. Earlier in the day, I had Korean tacos and Grace and Elizabeth had french fries smothered in Korean short ribs.  Great people. Great food. Anything else is just a bonus right? It's a strange time to live in where you can go to any conference in any place and know people.


Complex Instruction:

Last time I went through a Complex Instruction strand. One of the things I mentioned is I still saw certain students take over and lead the group. This time one of the teachers at Mission pointed out that what we're seeing is just a snapshot. Sure it might look like one person is dominating the group. But last week it was a different person. He said you need to be intentional about designing different tasks for different strengths. The lesson I saw was about calculating the surface area for three-dimensional shapes and very clearly certain kids took the lead. He said last week they used GeoGebra to explore (something) and I might have seen a different set of kids leading.

If there's something that I need to keep coming back to with CI, it's that we need to actively work to redefine what it means to be smart in mathematics (and science and everything else).


Parent Outreach:
I've previously written about previewing content ahead of time instead of waiting to remediate in order to address status issues in class. I sat in a workshop with two people from the UCLA Mathematics Project who did the same thing but with academic-focused parent nights. The teacher, Brett Davis, would lead a workshop (Wed/Thur night, same content each night) previewing the math his students would be learning for the next 6 weeks or so. He would start with an engaging launch activity and do some of the math with the parents and add a bit of vocabulary. From a practical standpoint, this was mostly stuff he'd be doing anyway so there wasn't much additional planning involved, unlike with the more common Family Math Nights where the focus isn't as academic.

Brett made it clear he wasn't expecting parents to become experts in the math but his goal was to change their relationship with math and to open up lines of communication from parent to student and parent to teacher.


Rochelle Gutierrez

Dr. Gutierrez was the keynote. I want to blow this out into a full post at some point but I'm hoping Bryan Meyer will take care of that first (edit: He did.). If you have access, the latest JRME is all on equity. Until then, three terms Dr. Gutierrez brought up. She called teachers "identity workers." She also introduced me to the term "nepantla" which is Nahuatl and represents something like "the space between" ("the and and or and both and neither"). Finally, she distinguished knowing of your students/communities from knowing with your students/communities. She used the term conocimiento which in Spanish translates to "knowledge" but, if I'm understanding this correctly, has a communal connotation. I'll need a waterfall, a tree, and lifetime supply of incense to work out the implications for all of this.

She also mentioned she teaches her future teachers about "creative insubordination" and how to Play the Game, Change the Game. If you know me, you know I'm more insubordinate than creative so she's one I'm going to need to keep following.

I found her article Embracing Nepantla through a google search.



The Br(y)(i)ans

Brian Lawler and Bryan Meyer led a session. Bryan has blogged the main focus so I won't recap but it was mainly on the tensions involved in launching a problem. This is something I definitely struggle with. How do I respect the ideas and motivations of my students without leaving any science on the table?

I enjoyed the dynamic between the two of them and want a professor to adopt me.

Lawler casually mentioned his pre-service teachers write a PBL lesson that they have veteran teachers implement in their own classrooms and then get feedback. I want more information about this.


Elizabeth wrote about a session I shared with her and Brian Lawler.


Random Presentation Feedback

If there's one piece of advice I kept leaving on feedback forms it was "Know your audience." I'm at a conference on social justice and mathematics. I think there's a certain amount of savvy you can expect from this group and we don't need to spend the first 45 minutes discussing why creating mathematical identities are important. And in such a focused conference, you'd want to up the level on a Day Two presentation.

Your final slide should show your contact information.

I was on Twitter the other day blasting the Jigsaw strategy. David Coffey rightly pointed out that it had good uses. I agree but I think if the ultimate goal of the jigsaw is "summary," you're probably doing it wrong. There's a big difference between splitting up 4 articles and having you summarize them and splitting up 4 articles and having you analyze a scenario based on how you think your author would respond.

I don't think I'm a fan of audience participation in the beginning of a workshop ("discuss at your table and share....."). It feels a bit false and flat. I know the presenter is not doing anything with our input because the slide deck is already created and I've got the handouts.

As a teacher, I can gather input from my students in the beginning and use it to help influence the next few weeks. In a one-shot 90 minute session, the presenter is coming in and driving the bus. The presenter should respond or clarify and listen to anything the audience has to add, but they are not changing course entirely.

Also, and I know I'm guilty of this with my students, I think I'm sometimes being tricked into offering a "wrong" answer so the presenter can use that as a launching point.  I'd much rather respond to something the presenter said towards the middle or end of a workshop.

Status Change

I'm at the Creating Balance conference and have been thinking about status. I'll write more about the conference later.

I've got two things to share, one classroom and one schoolwide (neither are original to me) that I think help address issues of status.

Classroom:
Robyn Jackson had an article on ASCD where she describes a red flag system she used to immediately catch kids as soon as their grades fell to certain levels. I would like to think one day I'd be organized enough to pull something like this off but today is not that day. One thing I liked was that she would preview the lesson for some kids. I know I fall into the trap of just catching kids up and I liked this immediately.

The hard part for science was that so many times I couldn't really preview the content well. We'd be developing a concept in class and it was hard for me to figure out a regular schedule where I'd be able to preview content ahead of time without giving away what he or she was supposed to be figuring out.

Where I modified this to fit was with classroom behavior. If you're a science teacher you know that when you have a lab, there are some kids who you have to just sit on. As soon as you get a lab going they're mixing random chemicals together or wandering around to talk to friends or whatever.

For about 10 kids I started previewing our labs. The day before a lab I'd ask some kids to stay after school and then spend about 10 to 15 minutes showing them the equipment they'll be using and making sure they knew how to handle and use it. I'd show them what their eventual setup would probably look like and some common pitfalls. I'd let them know what they were trying to figure out and, depending on how much I could give away, preview/review some content.

Status change right? These 10 kids didn't start off lost and immediately could contribute something valuable. For half the kids it was magical. They were like new students. They were in there leading the way. I took secret pleasure in watching the low status kid instruct the future valedictorians on how to use the overflow canisters or admonishing someone for grabbing the beam on a triple beam balance. There were another three who would start off well (the parts they had previewed with me) and then start to lose it when they got into new territory. Two kids it didn't matter.

Overall, really good bang for the buck and, just as a teacher, I've had a nice mental shift from always looking for how to review to also looking for ways to preview.


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School:
A couple of years ago I went to visit a nearby school. They dedicated themselves first and foremost to principles of community and it showed. They do this sixth grade orientation that I shared with a teacher at my (former) school and she started it up. She, by the way, is a far better teacher than I am. I take zero credit for this other than sharing the idea.

The middle school first works to identify fifth grade students who are at risk of dropping out, mentally or physically. They invite those students, perhaps a dozen, to a three day orientation a week before any other 6th grader starts school. Those students are all assigned an adult mentor and they're shown around school and introduced to the quirks of middle school life. There's a bbq on the last day and the parents are invited.

Here's the part I love. On the first few days of school those students get a special (colored shirt? a giant button? I can't remember) that identifies them as someone that other students should ask for help. For example, a huge thing for sixth graders at that school is how to open their lockers. These students know because they've been practicing. Again, status change. At the old school, I was the dummy. Here, I'm someone who other kids ask for help. The adult mentors check in from time to time but the bulk of the work is accomplished in those first few days.

At my school, the teacher in charge also teaches the Leadership elective (they do rallies, dances, fundraisers, etc) and she monitors them as sixth graders and tracks them into the leadership elective as 7th graders.

When I first visited the school, the principal reported that since starting the orientation (perhaps 6 or 7 years at that point) every single kid involved had been able to participate in graduation ceremonies after their 8th grade year.

I can't tell you how much I love this.

Our default action for an incoming at-risk fifth grader would be to schedule an extra "intervention" class. In other words, a student comes to a new school and the first thing we do is confirm that his/her status has managed to follow along. And yes, I'm looking directly at you Ms. High School Counselor who gives our outgoing 8th graders math support, reading support and no electives as freshmen.


Addendum: Bree just wrote about a presentation she did at the same conference addressing issues of status.