Teachers Must Keep Learning Too

Essay 8.1

Rookie Teacher Confessions

July 11, 2014 (original publication) · Spin Education

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I was embarrassed by my first two years in the classroom. I was lousy at my job, and even though I had access to the greatest mentors a first-year teacher could hope for, I still screwed up at just about every turn.

What a shame that experience can’t be taught. These were my six worst rookie teacher mistakes.

1. I allowed students to create their own groups for group projects. As a result, groups were almost always uneven with respect not just to work ethic, curiosity, creativity, and skills, but also along gender lines. Not surprisingly, groups also seemed more interested in discussing weekend escapades than focusing on the task at hand.
2. I tried to be that “cool young teacher,” accepting just about any old excuse for tardiness and absences. As a result, students felt they could simply slide by, put in minimal work, and still do well in the course. Often they assumed correctly. Whenever I tried to reclaim authority, or tell students they had to refocus, most didn’t or couldn’t take me seriously. It also didn’t help that at 23 years old, I didn’t make the extra effort to dress much differently. Appearance matters, especially when you and your students are separated by just six or seven years.
3. Similarly, I didn’t monitor bathroom visits. If nature called, I told students to leave class quietly to do their business. As a result, a constant flow of students came and went, supposedly for an understood reason. I had assumed, quite naïvely, that juniors and seniors wouldn’t take advantage of this policy. In teaching, as in most professions, assumption is the mother of all calamities. Students always had an easy out, quite literally, if they didn’t like or understand an activity or concept.
4. I didn’t understand the difference between authority and respect, even as I lacked both in the classroom. Whenever I tried to have serious “talks” with students about misbehavior or poor performances, I tried to invoke a poor excuse for authority. I thought that simply holding the title of “teacher” magically granted me authority, especially when I put on a serious face. Without having earned respect from my students, though, I also hadn’t earned authority.
5. My writing assignments lacked sufficient direction, not just with respect to guidelines about prose and structure, but also on how to properly cite sources. Unclear expectations also enticed otherwise bright, capable students to cut corners. I’m not excusing such behavior, but I certainly placed low-hanging fruit directly in front of them. I’m equally to blame for whatever infractions they committed.
6. I also didn’t help matters by drowning student papers in red ink. I marked every little mistake, to the point where students felt (quite understandably, I should add) that I took some twisted pleasure in pointing out even the tiniest flaws. At times, I also provided comments that met or exceeded the lengths of submissions, making my students feel even more inferior, incapable, and insecure.

All of this wasn’t for lack of listening. I listened intently to my mentors. Still, I insisted on making failure my greatest teacher. Looking back, my actions weren’t too unlike those of teenagers who experiment, even as parents and adults warn against such behavior.

During my first two years, I relied more heavily on my mentors for consoling and support. They never turned me away, even as I neglected to embrace their advice and guidance. They listened to my frustrations and regrets, all the while encouraging me to try again and not give up. Without them, I wouldn’t still be teaching today.

All the same, I only began to transform into a great teacher my third year in the classroom, when I matured a bit and wised up a lot. The experience of repeated failure had made me all the more receptive to learning from veteran teachers. I had also grown smart enough to act upon their advice, rather than just listen to it.

Alas, I wish to apologize formally and publicly to anybody I may have taught during my first two years. Thank you for enduring my failures and shortcomings, and, at the risk of sounding haughty, take at least some solace in knowing that your collective suffering has helped mold me into a terrific teacher.

Essay 8.2

What Teachers Should Learn from Legendary Cross Country Coach Joe Newton

September 8, 2013 (original publication) · Spin Education

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Editorial date note: This essay predates Joe Newton’s death on December 9, 2017; present-tense references reflect the time of writing.

Anybody serious about education reform should stop relying exclusively on teachers, academics, and administrators for ideas, and start looking at how successful athletic coaches inspire and motivate greatness.

Consider the legendary Joe Newton, the most successful high school cross country coach in American history. In over 50 years of coaching, he has led York Community High School in Elmhurst, Illinois, to 28 state titles. That’s one title more than the number of World Series championships won by the New York Yankees. Even this early into the cross country season, the York Dukes are the heavy favorite to claim victory number 29.

Newton has written several books about coaching and running, and a feature-length documentary, The Long Green Line, chronicles his 2005 state championship team.

But beyond all of his trophies and successes, I’m curious to learn from Newton how he inspires such love, dedication and devotion — from his most fit, fastest runner, to his most heavy-set devotee.

“I’ve got three guys on my team that are like 250 pounds,” Newton says. “They’re out there in front of the whole team at the team meeting. I said to two guys, I said, ‘Look at their bodies. They’re not made for running and they’re out here every day busting their butt.’ I said, ‘I just love guys like that. That’s what our program is all about.’ Then I gave them the old shot: ‘You choose to be average. You choose to be good. You choose to be great.’ Those guys don’t ever score a point for us, but in my eyes they’re great because they come out and they give me what they’ve got.”

As classroom teachers, that’s all we can ask of any of our students. Regardless of whom we teach and what limitations or gifts they bring, we should always aim to help each student reach his or her fullest potential. It’s no wonder that so many students with so many different body types seek Newton’s tutelage. Each wants to become the best possible version of himself. But with between 170 and 200 runners on his team in any given season, I wonder how Newton manages to reach so many kids on such a profound level — and how he’s able to help them accomplish such amazing things.

Newton tells me that he doesn’t have a special secret. “If you’re a fraud, they’ll see through you and they won’t do squat for you,” he says. “But if they know you love them because your personality tells them that, that’s the secret of coaching. They know I care about them and, as a result, when I ask them to do something special, they do it. That’s the secret to coaching.”

That’s also the secret to effective teaching. The best teachers make obvious how much they care — not just about their students’ academic success, but also about their happiness and wellbeing. When I was a student at Brimmer and May in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, teachers cheered me on from the sidelines, attended shows, volunteered to chaperone overnight trips, and even visited me in the hospital. I wanted to repay their kindness and sacrifice by studying that much harder and smarter to succeed.

I too coach cross-country, and I tell Newton that runners whom I also teach almost always give similar effort inside my classroom. He’s not surprised to learn this, or that my most dedicated runners also tend to be the most successful students. As I talk with Newton, I think of one of my stars, an eighth grader who possesses more grit and determination than many adults. He not only runs a 19:01 5K, a gigantic feat for such a young person, but he also consistently earns high academic honors and much praise from teachers.

Newton says that his squad also has the highest grade point average of any team at York. “You would think not, because of all the work: They’re running in the morning. They’re running in the afternoon,” he says. “This is a very academic high school. Yet, our guys are absolutely good students and, above all, good human beings. I’m talking about that constantly. Every day, I’ve got one or two thoughts for the day. It’s nice to be great. It’s greater to be nice. That’s one of my all‑time favorites. I tell our guys that you only get respect when you give it. And if you don’t give respect, you’re not going to get it back. So you better be learning how to give it. That’s good for life.”

Newton cares about winning, but he cares just as much about his teams’ academic successes — and he enforces his expectations. “I tell them all the first day of practice, ‘If you’re ineligible two weeks in a row, you’re not helping our team. You’re done. You’re going back into the classroom and start paying the price,’” he says.

Newton says that his team is full of scholars, willing and able to provide academic support. There’s something to be said for knowing how and when to ask for help, and I applaud Newton for fostering this ideal in his runners. Even at 29, I find that at times friends and coworkers have correctly pointed out that I need to ask for help more often. But asking for help is far from the only life skill that Newton imparts to his runners.

“If you’re in school, you’ve got to come to practice,” Newton says. “If you duck out twice, you’re done. . . . That’s training for life. If you go out in life and you’re tardy three days a week, and three other days you don’t come to work, you’re going to be fired. I’ve got two jobs when I’m coaching. First is physical welfare for all the guys. And second is train them to be a good person, a good human being — the value of hard work and punctuality.”

I’m also impressed with how Newton tells his runners they shouldn’t be afraid to fail.

Too often, well-meaning teachers do too much to ensure that students never fail. But if kids never encounter adversity in the classroom, it’s doubtful they will successfully manage it in real life. Teachers should encourage students to try daring new things, and rethink how failure can turn into even greater, more meaningful success.

After each practice, Newton leaves his students with a thought of the day. He shares with me one of his all-time favorites: “The greatest thing in life is not in never having fallen, but in rising up again.”

Teachers can learn a lot from Coach Joe Newton, who, through showing student-athletes just how much he cares — and he cares a whole lot — empowers them to recover from adversity and failure that much stronger.

Essay 8.3

Fixing Bad Professional Development

Original date unconfirmed · June 30, 2018 (Medium archive) · Medium

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One of the biggest challenges schools face is not just finding time for professional development days, but also finding common ground for making effective use of them.

I hear from all types of teachers, from all types of schools, decrying how pointless and boring such meetings are — and how much they wish they could use that time for something (anything) else. But I also hear from all types of administrators, from all types of schools, wishing that teachers would show much greater pride, enthusiasm, and interest in learning about their profession.

As I see it, both sides share equal blame for making professional development something to dread, rather than embrace.

Administrators falter when they…

1. . . . return from an education conference, and without skipping a beat, call for a professional development meeting (or two, or three, or four) to share and inspire others with their newfound enlightenment — all in the hopes of instituting drastic and immediate change. It’s great that they’re excited about sharing, but attending one or two annual conferences does not make one an expert, and acting or being perceived as such only fosters animosity and doubt in their leadership ability. They’re much better off taking time to digest their thoughts, and speaking with others before making any sudden calls for a meeting.

2. . . . expect, after one or two professional development meetings, that teachers finally make effective pedagogical use of their school-issued iPads. Technology is definitely transforming education. However, administrators shouldn’t be naïve or foolish about holding unrealistic expectations. Change doesn’t happen overnight, and a few meetings sprinkled throughout the year won’t do the trick. In all likelihood, otherwise great teachers will continue to struggle, while complaining (and rightfully so) about the lack of vision, leadership, and administrative support. Administrators should consider appointing educational technology specialists, and reducing those individuals’ course loads to work one-on-one with the most needy teachers.

3. . . . rely too heavily on outside education firms or “experts” to run professional development meetings. Certainly, those individuals can have much to offer. But too often, they are former teachers and administrators who have been out of the classroom for 5, 10, 15, or 20-plus years. Simply put, they’ve lost touch with being in the trenches. For the same reason, I place less stock in education authors who aren’t also currently teachers. At Palmer Trinity, an independent school in Miami, Florida, Bruce Musgrave, my former assistant head of school, would ask his teachers to lead workshops and discussions. Accordingly, my colleagues and I felt not only greater respect for the presenters, but also for Musgrave, who entrusted us with being wise enough to educate each other. He often said, “Professional development begins at home.”

Teachers falter when they…

1. . . . always think that professional development meetings are worthless, and that nothing can be gained from attending. Teachers do themselves no favors by behaving like their most apathetic students, and they would be foolish to think that administrators don’t take notice. I have heard of and seen teachers who text, doodle, e-mail, and watch movies, more concerned with any type of distraction than real engagement. They may very well learn nothing. Perhaps they could make much more productive use of their time. Still, not even feigning interest makes them look rude and arrogant — and no matter how many years they have under their belts, here’s a reality check: They’re never above learning something new. Never.

2. . . . assume that professional development days are all the support that’s offered or available to them. As in life, sometimes you need to be proactive and even a tad aggressive in seeking help. Don’t simply assume that help will always come to you. Try as they might, higher-ups can’t read your mind, nor can they always acknowledge your difficulties. If you need help, make an appointment with the respective administrator. If he or she is unhelpful or unresponsive, ask a colleague. If you’re both too busy during the day, find a time to meet after school or, dare I say it, over the weekend. If you’re still too busy, you need to reconsider your priorities or time-management skills — perhaps both. You should want to be the best teacher possible, and that means making some sacrifices, especially if you’re new to the profession. Trust me, it will pay off in the long run.

3. . . . complain rather than offer ways to improve professional development meetings. At most schools, walls have ears. Unless you’re very careful, whatever you say will eventually make its way back to an administrator. This almost always creates more damage than improvement. Be the wiser person by meeting with whoever oversees professional development. Politely express your feelings, but also offer ideas to advance your school’s professional development program. Administrators worth their salt will appreciate your honesty, as well as your interest in helping the school cultivate even better teachers.

Essay 8.4

Why Can’t Public and Private Schools Get Along?

Spring 2016 (original publication) · Independent Teacher (NAIS)

Original publication at Independent Teacher (NAIS) · Read archived article · Source details

At the 2015 Annual NAIS Conference in Boston, Todd Bland, Milton Academy (Massachusetts) head of school, explained what he describes as a misconception about the independent school sector:

When the word private school is named, still for a large percentage of our country, there is not any understanding whatsoever of the commitment that many of us have to make stronger the educational opportunities not just for the students that we serve, but the students who surround us in communities near us.

Bland had arrived at his Massachusetts institution seven years earlier, eager to promote partnerships between different types of schools. His 2015 assertion seemed a direct response to a 2013 Slate article, “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person.” The author, Allison Benedikt, then the site’s news director, wrote, “You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad — but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.” Had Benedikt bothered with some more news digging before writing her piece, she might have emphasized a different point — that a growing number of independent schools are helping public schools, whose students are benefiting from the aid. And this is not merely private schools paying lip service to noblesse oblige.

With many private high schools in New England charging over $40,000 a year in tuition, at first glance it seems natural to ask, “Why bother with public school students?” Independent school teachers have also heard criticism that their sector cares only about the bottom line and that their loyalties lie with those able to pay tuition or make donations. That is a gross generalization, and it needs to perish. Bland makes this case. He says he is passionate about helping public school students learn simply because it is the “right thing to do.”

For 38 years, Milton Academy has run The Saturday Course, an academic enrichment program where students from over 125 schools and 48 cities and towns participate in an array of learning activities. “All you need [to enroll in The Saturday Course] is to have a recommendation from the teacher and a passion and a desire to learn, and you can arrive at Milton at a very low cost on Saturdays for six weeks and be inspired,” Bland said.

Kristan Burke, one of the program’s directors, shared more about the program’s application process, which also involves working with participating school districts to identify high-achieving students who are “excited and motivated to be in a fast-paced learning environment.” Report cards, standardized test scores, and good behavior also factor into admission decisions. Five sessions (of six Saturdays each) are offered to students in grades 4 through 8, with about 1,000 students enrolled throughout the year. The program charges $331 total for each student per session, but financial aid is available. Burke noted, “We don’t deny anybody if they should be in the program.” Affirming the positive impact of the program, Mary Gormley, the superintendent of Milton’s public schools, said The Saturday Course does a “terrific job with providing an unbelievable opportunity to children,” especially students interested in unique subjects.

To see all of this in action, one just needs to take Bland up on his suggestion to attend a session of The Saturday Course, where, during an earlier session, even the snowy inclement weather didn’t prevent around 240 students from attending. In a course titled “Speed Racing” and taught by Jeffrey Cateon — public school principal of Willett Elementary School in Attleboro, Massachusetts — students experimented with physics by building toy-sized racing boats made of rubber bands and styrofoam. Cateon, who has been at The Saturday Course for 19 years, helps students learn through trial and error. “When they ask questions, I don’t give them all of the answers. I want them to be able to discover on their own,” he said. Avoiding answering questions to which students can find answers by themselves leads to students becoming persistent, inquisitive, and open to learning from failure, affirming key qualities valued by teachers in both the independent and the public school sectors.

Susan Barclay, a public school special education teacher at the Thacher Elementary School, also in Attleboro, Massachusetts, provides further affirmation for such private-public partnerships. In her “Bloodier and Guttier” course, kids find out more about the ways living things work. Recently, students were conducting a frog dissection to understand its digestive system. One might squirm at the sight of guts and organs, but the students marveled at the learning. They uttered “Oohs” and “Ahhs,” while looking on mere inches away from the incision. “Here, students want to know everything,” said Barclay, who has been at The Saturday Course since the program’s beginning. As she moved around workstations, students continued to examine their frog’s innards while learning about the digestive system.

Seldom is enough done to foster understanding and collaboration among teachers and administrators from different types of schools. That includes sharing ideas about lesson planning, assessment, and how to integrate new pedagogy and technology effectively into the classroom. All of this is of critical importance, as noted by John Chubb, the late president of the National Association of Independent Schools, the nonprofit organization that represents over 1,400 private schools in the United States:

Today, every school, whether public, public-charter or private, faces major challenges — preparing students for a rapidly changing future, blending technology with great teaching, serving a much more diverse population, living with fewer economic resources, and more. No school or sector has a monopoly on good ideas. It just makes sense for different types of schools to come together and learn from one another.

There is no better way to help break down those barriers than by encouraging and helping teachers gain experience (and comfort) in all types of educational settings, including having independent school teachers lead public school classrooms and vice versa. Coincidentally, when I spoke to them, Gormley and Bland had just returned from a yearly meeting with other school leaders from both the independent and public sectors in Milton, addressing how cooperation can benefit all students from all schools — and even a local college. “We brainstorm and we share,” Gormley says. “I don’t think you’d find many communities that have that kind of initiative.”

Milton Academy is not the only private school helping public school students succeed. In 2005, Punahou School (Hawaii), the largest single-campus private school in the United States, launched the Clarence T.C. Ching PUEO Program, or Partnerships in Unlimited Educational Opportunities. The program “identifies middle and high school students in neighboring public schools with high academic potential but with low economic opportunity.”

James Kapae‘alii Scott, the president of Punahou, noted that Punahou’s summer enrichment program, like The Saturday Course at Milton Academy, is not designed to recruit students away from public schools. Punahou recently received an additional $6 million grant from The Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation to support PUEO — in addition to $3 million donated in 2009. As Scott has noted, “We are blessed with strong demand for entrance, ample resources, and robust fund-raising.”

PUEO relies on the Hawaii State Department of Education for candidate nominations, notes Carl Ackerman, who, in addition to teaching history at Punahou, also directs the program. More than 300 students are enrolled in the seven-year summer enrichment track — from graduating fifth-graders to high school juniors — all at no charge. Several activities also occur throughout the academic year, and PUEO even provides free college counseling for seniors who have formally graduated from the program. “Ninety-nine percent of our kids will actually graduate from high school, which is a huge percentage,” Ackerman said.

Ninety-five percent of our kids are accepted into college, and then about eighty to eighty-five percent will be enrolled. Some kids will drop out of college, and the reasons for that are many, but the biggest is finances — some kids will be admitted to college, but they won’t get full packages.

PUEO students have matriculated at Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Williams, the University of Hawaii, and the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. In the spring, members of the program’s first cohort will graduate from college.

To cover the $14,500 cost per student for seven summer sessions and an eighth year of senior college counseling, Punahou relies on a superior combination of funding, passion, and expertise. But even for institutions that lack one or more of those characteristics, an important truth should be gleaned from what Scott and Ackerman are helping to achieve. It is possible for independent schools to make a difference beyond their institutional walls by helping public school students succeed.

Naomi Matsuzaki, who had retired as principal of Kahalu‘u Elementary School in Kaneohe, Hawaii, agrees. She worked in an impoverished community, where many students reside in neighboring housing or family homesteads and rarely consider the idea of attending college. “Many of these children aspire to just get married and have kids, that’s it,” Matsuzaki told me. PUEO is helping reverse that trend. “Parents are proud when their children are accepted into the program,” Matsuzaki said. “Being accepted into the program not only impacts the child, but their parents, who change their values and goals to help all of their children [attend college],” Matsuzaki said, explaining that this is a challenging adjustment — especially for parents who rely on their children working over the summer for support. “The family really has to make a sacrifice, but they are really committed to making education a priority and finding a way to make this work.” When PUEO launched, Kahalu‘u Elementary could send two new students per year. With more funding, that number is now up to 10.

As if Ackerman didn’t have enough on his plate, he also serves as a director of Private Schools with Public Purpose, which strives to “serve all our students by forming partnerships within school communities (private, public, charter, home-schools), non-profits, foundations, businesses, and any other entity that can support students.” The organization hosts an annual conference to support its mission. Milton Academy and Punahou School are also members of the National Network of Schools in Partnership, which supports collaboration between public, private, and charter schools.

Executive Director Blake Kohn said that after launching two years ago with 50 members, the organization has now grown to over 135 schools. “Strong partnerships are beneficial to all stakeholders,” Kohn said. “Not only do the students and teachers learn from one another, but the schools build solid relationships, and the community as a whole becomes more engaged in the success of all students.”

Kohn’s words appeal to reason, and Benedikt and her article’s supporters should listen. Perhaps then the misconception about independent schools that Bland outlines will begin to fade, and more people can focus on what really matters — helping students succeed, no matter what type of school they attend.

Essay 8.5

A New Twist on a Public-Private School Partnership

June 2016 (original publication) · Independent Ideas (NAIS)

Original publication at Independent Ideas (NAIS) · Read archived article · Source details

Coauthored with Elana Rome

David and Elana: As a newly engaged couple, we give new meaning to the term private-public partnership. For all that distinguishes our work environments, at the end of the day, we return home to support and listen to each other through our challenges and triumphs. We want our students to experience joyful learning. We want to improve our craft. We want to make a difference. We recognize that we share a unique relationship, but we believe teachers in all different kinds of schools can learn from the ways we communicate. Here are some of the ways we learn from and support each other — and our students.

In the Classroom

David: We both believe that modeling is vital. Elana works hard at modeling clear, step-by-step explanations of math problems for students to learn from and emulate. She has convinced me to continue modeling effective writing practices for my students to adopt. I have seen across-the-board improvement, particularly with students who struggled previously.

To me, part of effective modeling means sharing my own work with my students. In American history, for example, I sometimes have students examine papers I wrote as a high school or college student. Meanwhile, I critique my younger self and discuss how I might have worded arguments differently. Thanks to Elana, I feel more comfortable being vulnerable in front of my students, which in turn helps them learn from their own mistakes.

Elana: One major difference between our jobs is that I must teach the Common Core State Standards, while Dave can set his own content goals for his students. As a result, it can be challenging to figure out how to incorporate more project-based learning into my lessons when I know there are only so many days before the standardized tests roll around. The innovative projects that Dave does with his students have inspired me to try new things.

In an earlier class, I introduced a new project that became the driving force behind my statistics unit. Students formulated a statistical question to survey their peers. They collected a random sample of data and analyzed it using the statistics content dictated by the Common Core. I modeled those steps with my own data before my students applied the skills to the data they had collected.

Integrating technology-based skills into the curriculum is another approach Dave models for me. In his government class, Dave had students create mock websites for presidential candidates, building essential technology skills while studying the primary election season. Throughout my statistics project, I taught my students how to input their data into Excel, and then use some of the analytic tools in the software, which is not something most sixth-graders learn.

Outside the Classroom

David: Elana and I both lead students by example in extracurricular activities and help each other see different sides of challenging circumstances. Elana, a talented singer, spends two nights a week rehearsing with two different vocal groups, and has helped direct the school’s annual musical for the last three years.

Meanwhile, I’m a competitive runner and train over the summer months so that come fall, I am in shape to challenge my student-athletes to keep pace. In this non-academic setting, I want my young athletes to know that if they can push through adversity and a manageable degree of pain, they will get faster. I urge my team to transfer this lesson to life beyond the sport. It’s not surprising that my most committed runners are also stellar students.

Elana also helps me care for emotionally vulnerable students. While Brimmer is well-equipped to handle these matters, I hold equal respect for Elana’s opinion and what steps she would take in a given situation. I’m always reassured that she would likely follow a similar protocol — including meeting with teachers, counselors, and parents to decide on a plan of action. This shared framework gives us a launching pad to learn from our schools’ similarities and differences.

Elana: Dave and I talk frequently about our schools’ distinct programs and gain new perspective. Two summers ago, I worked on the team that created the advisory program at Brown Middle School in Newton, Massachusetts, where I teach. The program’s goal is for all students to establish a positive connection with at least one adult at Brown, and to create safe, small cohorts where students feel supported. Throughout the year, we focused on building relationships within a group of 10–12 students, fostering resilience, and developing life skills related to responsibility and reflection.

As we were writing the advisory curriculum, Dave and I talked often about the process. His school already had an advisory system in place, but it became clear that our programs would be very different. Brimmer’s advisory meets as a cohort only once a week and serves primarily as academic advising — which makes sense for high school students looking toward college. Brown’s advisory meets four mornings a week and focuses mainly on fostering interpersonal connections. Discussing the differences between our two schools’ programs has helped us understand why each one fits each school.

Professional Growth

David: We’re both always seeking to become more effective teachers. Elana is often enrolled in a course or workshop to improve her craft. Within the first five years of teaching in the Newton Public Schools, teachers must take a handful of courses. Currently, Elana is enrolled in “RETELL,” or Rethinking Equity in the Teaching of English Language Learners, which is required by the state.

As Brimmer has a growing international student population, I often talk with Elana about ways I might better support English language learners. She shares with me techniques for teaching tiered vocabulary, as well as reading and writing strategies to help students reach their language goals. She has helped me take advantage of optional professional development opportunities that Brimmer offers, including courses in teaching and learning. In June 2016, I planned to attend a five-day workshop for high school newspaper advisers, hosted by the New England Scholastic Press Association.

Elana and her colleagues have taught me about effective classroom management. She is in constant contact with her team, consisting of teachers in the other core subjects who all instruct the same group of students. They meet weekly along with the guidance counselor, inclusion facilitators, special educators, and the assistant principal to touch base about students’ academic progress and emotional well-being. The group also facilitates cross-curricular connections for students, including using English vocabulary words in lessons and in general conversation with students.

As a result of learning about her process, now when I need to speak with a student about a test or assignment, I make the request in private. I’m also communicating more with my colleagues about shared students and how everyone can benefit from cross-curricular cooperation.

Elana: We never stop learning from each other — and our networks. Dave constantly seeks out opportunities to grow professionally, questioning and reexamining the way he teaches and assesses, as well as interviewing education innovators and leaders from all sectors. As we discuss these conversations, I am inspired to reexamine my own practices.

For example, I’m developing more ways to take the focus off grades. I allow students to correct their mistakes on graded homework assignments for full credit and make corrections on unit tests. I have adjusted how I give feedback to serve students better and foster a growth mindset. If my students score poorly on a test the first time around, rather than filling the page with X’s and minus signs, I will write out questions for the students to consider. This encourages students to reengage with the problems and rethink their work, rather than being devastated by multiple red X’s. Overall, my students have responded well to my new approach.

Dave and I also discuss the professional development at our schools. The entire faculty at Brown read excerpts from Carol Dweck’s Mindset. Throughout the year, we used the ideas from the book to frame discussion in our staff meetings. Our district-wide professional development efforts focused on closing the achievement gap. Teachers worked together in project teams to plan and implement systems to narrow this gap. One team implemented a new academic coaching program for struggling students.

Brown’s model for professional development — which emphasizes team-based collaboration to tackle problems and cultivate best practices — is something that teachers from all types of schools could benefit from engaging in together.

We hope our relationship can stand as a model for how educators from all sectors can learn from and support each other to benefit all students. We feel strongly that there is much more that unites us than divides us. Let’s focus on cultivating that unity and sharing best practices that span all sectors.

Essay 8.6

What Gordon Wood, Eric Foner and James W. Loewen Told Me About Teaching History

June 24, 2026 · Age of Awareness (Medium)

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“They know who the Three Stooges are,” Gordon Wood told me, “but they don’t know that we have three parts to our government.”

He was talking about American students, and about what he called “the abysmal ignorance of American history.” By the time I interviewed him in 2017, he had spent more than half a century studying the nation’s founding, long enough to watch the country grow no more curious about its own past. Americans, he added, had “never been historically minded.”

Wood would know. He was, after all, the foremost historian of the American Revolution of his generation: a professor at Brown for nearly four decades, winner of the Bancroft Prize for The Creation of the American Republic and the Pulitzer for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and the recipient, in 2011, of a National Humanities Medal from President Obama. The legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar recently called him “America’s greatest living historian.”

I keep coming back to Wood’s observation, though not only for what it says about students. It says at least as much about those of us paid to teach them.

As a veteran high school American history teacher, I’ve grown uneasy about something my profession rarely admits — many of us who teach history have not been asked to know enough of it.

It’s a hard thing to say, and I don’t say it lightly. It comes from years of watching the work up close, in schools, at training sessions, and in the online spaces where teachers gather.

The teachers themselves are not the problem, or at least not the root of it. Most work hard and care deeply about their students. But some of us, I think, have stopped learning the very subject we teach, or never learned it deeply enough in the first place.

I spend a fair amount of time in Facebook groups for history and social studies teachers, and what I see there unsettles me. The conversation runs heavily toward activities, worksheets, and simulations and, lately, AI-generated lesson plans, while the history itself almost never comes up.

Obviously, that’s not a scientific survey. A Facebook group shows you only the people who choose to post in it. Still, it presents a reasonable view of what many teachers prize, and what they prize tends to be method ahead of mastery.

I recognize that a degree is not the same as knowledge. A history major can forget what he crammed for an exam; someone who never majored in it can read seriously for thirty years and end up knowing far more. The second person is the one I’d want in charge.

I recently posted a photo of a T-shirt — sold by the thousands on Amazon, much to my chagrin — that pairs the words “We the People” with the year 1776. I pointed out the obvious: “We the People” opens the Constitution of 1787, not the Declaration of Independence.

Rather than engage the distinction, some commenters waved it off. They argued that since 1776 marked the nation’s birth, any patriotic phrase could fairly be attached to it. That dismissal bothered me more than the shirt did.

The sequence is the entire point. We declared independence in 1776, finished drafting the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and didn’t write the Constitution until 1787. Each step was a fierce, real-time argument over what kind of country we were building. Flatten that out, and you lose the nuance of cause and effect. Wrap everything into 1776, and you treat everything that came after as if it were all but certain.

The disagreement itself did not trouble me; historians disagree for a living. What troubled me was the confidence of it — the certainty behind false or flimsy claims, and what that means for how history gets passed on to students.

Education schools have spent decades leaning into pedagogy, classroom management, assessment, and edtech, all of which matter. It’s also worth noting that a brilliant historian is not always an equally brilliant teacher. But somewhere in there, knowing the actual subject slid down the list, and we ended up with a subset of teachers well drilled in how to teach and out of the habit of studying what they teach. And you can’t teach what you don’t know.

I heard a version of this some years earlier, in 2014, from Eric Foner, my favorite historian and the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. His books have won the Pulitzer, Bancroft, Lincoln, Parkman, and Los Angeles Times Book prizes, and works such as Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution and The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery have reshaped how generations of readers understand the Civil War, slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction. He spoke highly of my profession.

“I respect what high school teachers do enormously,” he told me. “They have a much harder job than we do at the college level.” And he meant it; he had spent years on the road, teaching teachers at conferences and programs.

He was just as frank, though, about a flaw baked into the system. “We have to get away from the idea that any old person can teach history,” he told me, and then described a pattern any teacher will recognize: the football coach who turns up at the front of a history class. “A lot of the history teachers in this country are actually athletic coaches,” he said; students would tell him, “Coach Smith, he taught my history course.”

No one would dream of putting that coach in a French or physics class, Foner noted, yet a history section gets handed over without a second thought. He went on to say, “The number one thing is, you have to know history to actually teach it.” To be fair, I know of several coaches who are also excellent history teachers.

Even the credentialed teachers, Foner added, often show up with “education degrees, which have not actually provided them with a lot of training in the subject that they’re actually going to be teaching.” They learn a great deal about methods, he said, and far too little about the past.

No one said it more bluntly than James W. Loewen, who passed away in 2021.

When I interviewed him in 2013, Loewen traced the steady bloating of the history textbook to the same failure Foner had named. The fat books, he said, “meet a certain need, but it’s a need that should not exist,” the need of teachers “who are not, first and foremost, teachers of history.”

Then he made it personal. Holding up his book in front of an audience, he told me, he joked that he might have subtitled it Revenge Against Coach DeMolin, after his own high school history teacher back in Illinois, who was really the basketball coach.

“He knew full well that he didn’t care how he taught American history, that the school system didn’t care,” Loewen said. The man was “hired and fired on the basis of the won-lost record of the basketball team,” and history was simply somewhere to park him. The cost, Loewen said, fell on everyone, the rest of the department included, but “most of all, of course… the poor hapless students.”

When I floated the idea that the door-stopper textbook had become a crutch for teachers who either didn’t know enough history or couldn’t be bothered to build their own lessons, Loewen agreed on both counts, though he wouldn’t let the teachers shoulder the whole blame. They should have been hired in the first place, he said, only if they had majored in history or a related discipline.

“You cannot imagine somebody teaching physics who never had a single course in physics in college, or somebody teaching math who never had a single math course in college,” he told me. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Loewen was describing teachers who never learned the subject in the first place. There’s another version of the same failure, though, and it may be the more common one: the teacher who learned it once and then let it slip away. Picture a biology teacher who stopped following new research the day she left college, or an economics teacher who never opened another journal. We’d find it alarming. Yet a history teacher is rarely expected to stay current, and almost never helped to do so.

Our understanding of the past is constantly changing. Reconstruction looks different now than it did thirty years ago. So does westward expansion. So do immigration, labor, slavery, and the founding itself. A teacher still working from notes scribbled two decades back isn’t lying to the students, exactly. But we must not simply hand them a past perspective that has gone stale — or was never quite right to start with.

Thin knowledge does more harm than getting the occasional date wrong, of which I am also guilty. A teacher who doesn’t really know the material can’t respond to nuanced questions, weigh one source against another, feel where the genuine knots are, or separate a living argument among scholars from an outdated myth. That teacher’s students get a depleted, outdated education while being trained to memorize, repeat, and never ask why.

I have heard history teachers say repeatedly that they want students to think like historians. It’s a noble goal, but it does not happen just because we hand out a document and march students through an inquiry worksheet. Real historical thinking requires knowledge of the material itself: context, chronology, cause and effect, and the ways historians have argued about the past over time. Without that, teachers are not helping students discover the truth about America’s past. Unfortunately, they are more likely to repackage old myths in a newer language.

To be fair, many of us juggle five classes, multiple preps with over 100 students total, a sport to coach after school, and a paycheck that isn’t enough — all while trying to spare time to be with family and friends. Tell a teacher buried under all that to go be a working historian on the side, and yes, you are going to sound ridiculous.

But the work doesn’t have to be burdensome. I can’t help but feel that more of us could read a history book now and then, follow academics who know the field better than we do, and ask, once in a while, whether the lesson we have taught for years still holds up.

For his part, Loewen spent a career showing what that looks like — arguing with the textbook instead of reciting it, putting real documents in students’ hands, sending them out into local and family history, asking them not what happened but what they would have done in the moment. “Don’t teach the textbook,” he told me. “Teach history.” Students deserve a teacher who knows more than the textbook does, who understands that history isn’t a tidy bundle of symbols and slogans but a living, contested, unfinished thing. If that’s a tall order, so be it. Teaching history has always meant more than teaching well. It means knowing the history you teach.

Foner, for all his sharp words, was hopeful about what good teaching really requires, and unconvinced that any gadget could stand in for it. “There is no substitute for a good teacher,” he told me; the bells and whistles missed the point. Asked what mattered most, he didn’t begin with method. “The number one thing is to have a real passion for your subject,” he said. “Real enthusiasm, passion, and to be able to convey that to your students.” Knowledge and love of the subject, for him, were one and the same. “The key thing is really to love the subject, to be able to convey that to your students, and if you can do that, I think you’ll be a great teacher.”

But passion has to rest on something. And history, Foner told me, “is never stable.” He went on, “There is no such thing as the final truth about any aspect of history. It’s constantly being re-evaluated, rethought, new perspectives added.” A teacher who quits learning, in the end, has nothing left to stand on — and students can tell right away who knows their stuff and who doesn’t.

Wood understood that better than almost anyone. When we last spoke, he reflected on how far his own field had ventured. “We know more about the American Revolution now than we ever did 50 years ago,” he said, “and we’re not going back. We’re not going back to what we understood. We know too much.”

Whatever a teacher absorbed years ago is no longer where the scholarship sits. The least we owe our students, and the memory of Loewen and of Wood, is to try to keep up. However imperfectly, I know I do.