Ms. Beitler Goes Back to Chicago, Part 2

Students in Ms. Gluckman's class color the layers of the earth.

The emphasis in science is on the dynamic earth.

Students performed an experiment with food coloring to see how heat energy causes motion.

The library in Ms. Gluckman's classroom.

In my previous post I wrote about how I spent my Monday morning, visiting the Ancona School and seeing two Montessori classrooms.  After I left Ancona I got on the 55 bus and rode west for about forty minutes to the Gage Park neighborhood to visit my friend Laura Gluckman's sixth-grade science classroom at Sawyer elementary.  My neighborhood is relatively diverse, primarily white and African-American.  As I rode the bus to the west I passed through neighborhoods that are all African-American and then into Mexican-American neighborhoods even further west.  Chicago's racial segregation is striking - cross Western Avenue and the neighborhood demographics shift suddenly.

The building that houses Sawyer Elementary is one of many in Chicago that were built around the turn of the 20th century.  They tend to be large and echo-y, with high ceilings and wide hallways.  I have taught in two such buildings and the space is more imposing than friendly, although teachers do their best to make a welcoming environment with displays of student work and bulletin boards in the halls.  Sawyer has about 1,900 students.

I climbed many stairs to the third floor and found Ms. Gluckman's room as lunch was ending.  Students eat in classrooms because the cafeteria is not large enough to accommodate all of them together.  Lunch is delivered to each room in large plastic bins.  Students were noisy but it was a cheerful buzz.

Students transitioned to their next class and a group came in for science.  I counted twenty-seven students, far more than the fifteen I had seen in Sylvia's room.  Students collaborated in groups just as they had in Sylvia's classroom, but they needed to stay in their assigned seats.  The classroom was too crowded to allow much moving around.  They started class with a warm-up that asked them to name the layers of the earth in order and tell which was the thickest.  All of Ms. Gluckman's students are english-language-learners, and some of them did not at first understand the directions.  Ms. Gluckman explained to a few students one-on-one, and others solicited help from their classmates.  One boy sat with a blank paper until I sat next to him and helped him.

Most of class time was spent coloring posters showing a scale model of the layers of the earth.  Students used proportions to figure out how thick each layer should be.  I asked students questions about the layers of the earth and found they had a lot to say.  They knew the center of the earth was hot and had high pressure and they knew there would be no air to breath if one tried to journey below the surface.  During an activity reading from the textbook, which I expected to be dry and dull, students asked many lively questions, speculated on answers to each other's questions, and were generally very engaged.  Ms. Gluckman wrote down questions that students raised in a notebook if they could not yet be answered.  Many were about earthquakes - can the Earth's crust crumble?  Can it break?  Ms. Gluckman took their questions very seriously and I could tell this encouraged them to keep asking more.  Despite the fact that many students in the class had limited English, they were all eager to speak.

A second class came in and did an experiment about the movement of heat using hot and cold water and food coloring.  Unlike my Amandla kiddos, who would have needed careful supervision so as to avoid turning food coloring into a weapon, these students were independent and respectful of one another.

The last part of the last class involved students getting up to talk to partners around the room about heat.  At the end of the activity, Ms. Gluckman asked students if moving around made the room warmer.  I had noticed the cold in the room but I thought it might be due to a broken heating system, but Ms. Gluckman told me that because of budget cuts, the heat had been turned off.  Lucky for us it was a warmish day for November, but no amount of kinetic energy on the part of the children could really offset the cold.  This was one of those moments when I felt angry.

Ms. Beitler Goes Back to Chicao, Part 1

Students in Sylvia's Class Prove and Disprove Conjectures

A nice meeting space for older students.

Some students in Sylvia's class matched cards with equivalent fractions and percentages

Students complete independent projects investigating social issues using statistics and graphs.

I came to Chicago for last Saturday's Teaching for Social Justice Curriculum Fair.  I attended this event once before and found some useful resources, but this time I was especially impressed by the energy of everyone there.  We saw inspiring speeches by parent and student activists (I'll post video if I can find some online) and I sat at a table chatting with people about the Free School.

Since there were only a few days between the fair and Thanksgiving, I decided to stay in Chicago and take the time to visit the classrooms of some colleagues.  My first stop on Monday morning was the Ancona School, a Montessori school in Hyde Park.

I first visited the pre-school classroom where my housemate Rachael used to be the assistant teacher.  The current assistant is her friend Gilad, who I had met several times.  What Rachael and Gilad had described to me about teaching pre-school using Montessori methods sounded very intriguing.

I was immediately impressed by how relaxed the children seemed.  The first part of the morning was devoted to a story about animals in the Sonoran desert.  Some kids were a bit wiggly as you would expect of three-year-olds, but they remained calm and didn't cause major disruptions.  There were between twenty and twenty-five students in the class.  As Gilad read the story, Myriam, the head teacher, greeted students who were arriving.

The classroom space was not extremely large but was very carefully arranged.  There was a big rug in the middle surrounded on all sides with stations where students could do various activities.  A small desk held writing materials.  Miniature couches and chairs were stationed near bookshelves.  Other tables were arranged near blocks and math manipulatives.  I could see that this school had resources and also that the teachers took great care in arranging the space.

After storytime the students sang songs in Spanish led by Myriam, and then a guest teacher came in and led movement activities.  Then it was time for the students to choose their work, which is at the heart of the Montessori method.  Students were called on in turn and told Myriam what they wanted to work on.  Some students pulled out boxes with pattern blocks or letter shapes into the middle of the carpet, others found a station around the room.  Students were quiet but not silent, and seemed calm and interested in their work.  I mentioned this to Rachael later and she said that one main goal of Montessori teaching is to help students develop this relaxed concentration.

After observing the pre-school classroom, I went up to see a fifth-sixth grade math class taught by my friend Sylvia.  Pictures of her classroom are shown above.  The class I observed is called I-Math, which happens for students once every three days as a supplement to regular class time. During this independent math time,  students finish homework, have time to complete projects, study for skill-based quizzes, and work on the computer using a program called Scratch or Geometer's Sketchpad.

Again I saw the same relaxed concentration as in the pre-school.  A few boys had trouble settling into an activity but most students got right to work.  Students did not have the same level of choice that they would at the Free School - Sylvia instructed them on what work to start with - but once required work was complete students also had their own projects to do.  Students seemed to take ownership in their work and to go about it happily.

Again I saw that the classroom space was very supportive of students' learning - there were whiteboards for them to access to write on together, plenty of table space, six computers, and a meeting area. 

It used to upset me to visit schools with such rich resources because it just underscored the extent to which my own students, almost all of whom were living in poverty, were being underserved.  This time I was able to put those feelings aside enough to appreciate what I was seeing.  But those feelings are not gone.  They re-emerge at other moments.  In my next few posts I will tell you all about visiting some very different Chicago schools and what students experience there.