I wrote this blog to document my transformative experiences as a teacher at the Albany Free School from September 2012 to June 2013.
Now that I am working full time on building the Chicago Free School, I just wanted to leave a note here to clarify the place and time that I was writing these things.
My identity as a democratic educator continues to grow and evolve. Many of the questions I had while I taught in Albany have informed our planning for the Chicago Free School, but the further I get from my old traditional-teacher self, the better and more comfortable I feel.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Friday, December 20, 2013
Chicago Free School - Find Us Online
The Chicago Free School is really gaining steam. I just want to drop a quick note here that you can find us online:
chicagofreeschool.org
and on facebook:
facebook.com/chicagofreeschool
chicagofreeschool.org
and on facebook:
facebook.com/chicagofreeschool
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
What's Next?
From the first moments I thought about going to Albany to work at the Free School and learn about democratic education, there was a second stage to the plan. I knew I would want to come back here and start a democratic free school on the South Side of Chicago. The bald boldness of this plan seemed almost comical to me at first but everyone I talked to encouraged me to take myself seriously on this one, so I have been.
Everything that motivated me to change my course as a teacher also drew me back here. I left because I felt like I wasn't giving my kids what they needed - space and support to play, to follow their own motivation, to learn in authentic ways, to get what they needed socially and emotionally and to prepare to be engaged citizens in a diverse and complex world. I still feel an obligation to create the school experience that's missing for low-income kids here on the South Side.
So in the months since I've been back I've been working, in fits and starts, to build a school. When people ask me when we will open, I tell them the fall of 2014. Arbitrary but urgent.
Last night ten educators at a variety of life stages, from brand new teachers-in-training to experiences veterans, crowded into my too-warm living room for the second information session I've given to teachers about democratic free schools and our plan to build one in Chicago.
I say "our plan" because I have a team of co-conspirators now. Former first-grade teacher and current mother Katherine, Kindergarten teacher and fellow southsider Mia, and Cristen, who teaches high school and spent a sabbatical year at the Brooklyn Free School.
I've held one-on-one meetings with everyone from my former boss to the director of a new charter school. I've solicited advice on building codes and fundraising and community organizing. I've learned a lot in a few months. The more I learn, the more ambitious this project seems. But when I speak to individuals, or to groups like the one last night, I find that I usually connect to some hope they would like to feel about the future. This kind of education - simple and flexible and human - and in the current climate, quite radical - resonates with people. What we are building is at this point as much a mini-movement as it is a school, and I am growing along with it.
Everything that motivated me to change my course as a teacher also drew me back here. I left because I felt like I wasn't giving my kids what they needed - space and support to play, to follow their own motivation, to learn in authentic ways, to get what they needed socially and emotionally and to prepare to be engaged citizens in a diverse and complex world. I still feel an obligation to create the school experience that's missing for low-income kids here on the South Side.
So in the months since I've been back I've been working, in fits and starts, to build a school. When people ask me when we will open, I tell them the fall of 2014. Arbitrary but urgent.
Last night ten educators at a variety of life stages, from brand new teachers-in-training to experiences veterans, crowded into my too-warm living room for the second information session I've given to teachers about democratic free schools and our plan to build one in Chicago.
I say "our plan" because I have a team of co-conspirators now. Former first-grade teacher and current mother Katherine, Kindergarten teacher and fellow southsider Mia, and Cristen, who teaches high school and spent a sabbatical year at the Brooklyn Free School.
I've held one-on-one meetings with everyone from my former boss to the director of a new charter school. I've solicited advice on building codes and fundraising and community organizing. I've learned a lot in a few months. The more I learn, the more ambitious this project seems. But when I speak to individuals, or to groups like the one last night, I find that I usually connect to some hope they would like to feel about the future. This kind of education - simple and flexible and human - and in the current climate, quite radical - resonates with people. What we are building is at this point as much a mini-movement as it is a school, and I am growing along with it.
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Back in Chicago - Free School Forever
A few weeks into summer and a thousand miles away from Albany, I am still thinking about the Free School all the time. I hesitate to try to summarize what the experience of teaching there meant to me - as it is I even have trouble giving a succinct answer when people ask what the Free School is.
Yet I do want to write about some of the ways that my teaching practices changed over the course of my year there. In short I am a completely different teacher than I was. Let me try to break it down:
1. I am so much more relaxed and trusting of the kids.
When I taught in schools here in Chicago, I was often on high alert - ready to intervene when an argument threatened to escalate into a fight, ready to intervene when a bored or frustrated kid did something to create a little chaos, ready to intervene when a kid's misunderstanding suggested that they wouldn't master the assigned objective in the class time allotted. It was always my job to manage everything because the kids were not empowered to manage themselves or hold each other accountable.
But Free School kids know how to resolve their own conflicts most of the time, and when they don't the whole community is there to support a solution. Free School kids are in charge of keeping themselves interested - if a class doesn't excite them, they don't attend, and if they are in the room, chances are they are engaged. Over time I found it was not my job to solve every problem - I could relax and let the kids figure things out. And if I needed more calm or more attentiveness than I was getting, usually all I had to do was ask. I didn't have to battle and I rarely had to cajole. It was extremely liberating and it changed my whole demeanor with kids - I became freer and more fun.
2. I am more patient.
Most importantly, I discovered that in a Free School, class time exists to serve the needs of the students. We were not beholden to standards. We did not need to rush to get ready for a high-stakes test. If it took two weeks to learn something then we could take two weeks. Over time I found that without the time pressures that exist in a typical school, I could be a lot more patient in my teaching. I found myself allowing the kids' more time to make mistakes and think about them and to explore their own methods of doing things. I found myself giving fewer instructions and asking more questions. In short, I started to teach math the way I had always believed was best but for various reasons had never fully embraced. I lost my fear of blank stares. I improvised more. Which brings me to point three:
3. I experiment more.
In a typical classroom, students have little space to move and, because of the size of the class, few opportunities to talk. They are given little autonomy and, as a result, often lack maturity even in situations where autonomy is given to them. Any lesson a teacher plans has to keep these constraints in mind.
I always wanted to teach lessons that involved exciting materials and encouraged students to move around, but in practice this required very careful preparation to make sure everyone could get what they needed without elbowing one another in the face. At the Free School I could throw a pile of manipulatives on a table and say, go nuts. If a student wanted to use glitter and highlighters to present their work, they knew where to find them. If a student wanted to work in a quieter room, it was no problem to let them go unsupervised.
And if I tried a new activity or game or problem and it fell flat or students were confused, it was easy for them to express their confusion in productive ways - to comment aloud and to question me and each other. It was easy for me to re-explain or make changes on the fly.
I know there are teachers in typical schools who do all these great things, and to some extent I always tried to be one of them. But being at the Free School just made it so much easier. There were no longer any obstacles to trying something new.
4. My values are more connected to my teaching.
I came to teaching with a desire to empower underprivileged kids by educating them and helping them to educate themselves. Over time I grew to believe that my work should be explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-queer-phobic, and that I should help kids develop a political consciousness. But how could I best bring those values into the classroom when there seemed to barely be time for human connection, let alone deep engagement with politically charged topics? Especially when I began to believe that certain aspects of my school as an institution were actually reproducing harmful patterns of oppression?
For example, I began to believe that our school's discipline system was punitive in ways that reproduced the worst aspect of our criminal justice/prison system and set kids up to be punished by that system later. But it was hard for me even to acknowledge that belief to myself. Here was a school that I invested a lot of effort to grow. And I needed the discipline system to work so I could teach. Yet I wondered what I should do about the fact that a school I was working so hard to build was in some ways making things worse for kids. I went back and forth between denial, anger, trying to have conversations with the people I worked with and push for change, and wishing the status quo would just work so I could stop having to think about it so hard.
Needless to say that was exhausting. In the Free School, I found a place where staff and students have honest and explicit conversations about values and about anti-oppression on a near-daily basis. Which is not to say that I feel like I have become an expert at teaching for anti-oppression. But I am no longer content to keep quiet about those beliefs in any school where I work. I have come to see that engagement with such topics is both necessary and possible.
4. I am more myself.
I let the kids see my unshaven legs.
5. I am happier and less tired. And I want to go to work.
The school year ended and for the first time this year I didn't feel relieved. I felt sad to go and I felt like I could just keep teaching forever. Now a few weeks later I am back in the classroom helping teach a summer program for students from Woodlawn, and it feels great. I have become so much more optimistic about what kids are capable of when we let them have the autonomy they need to do things for themselves. And even in contexts that are not the Free School, I am able to trust kids. And it feels great.
6. And more?
I know there are other ways my teaching has changed, but I can't necessarily see them from inside my own body. If any of you out there reading this can think of anything you would like to ask me about this experience, please do ask.
Yet I do want to write about some of the ways that my teaching practices changed over the course of my year there. In short I am a completely different teacher than I was. Let me try to break it down:
1. I am so much more relaxed and trusting of the kids.
When I taught in schools here in Chicago, I was often on high alert - ready to intervene when an argument threatened to escalate into a fight, ready to intervene when a bored or frustrated kid did something to create a little chaos, ready to intervene when a kid's misunderstanding suggested that they wouldn't master the assigned objective in the class time allotted. It was always my job to manage everything because the kids were not empowered to manage themselves or hold each other accountable.
But Free School kids know how to resolve their own conflicts most of the time, and when they don't the whole community is there to support a solution. Free School kids are in charge of keeping themselves interested - if a class doesn't excite them, they don't attend, and if they are in the room, chances are they are engaged. Over time I found it was not my job to solve every problem - I could relax and let the kids figure things out. And if I needed more calm or more attentiveness than I was getting, usually all I had to do was ask. I didn't have to battle and I rarely had to cajole. It was extremely liberating and it changed my whole demeanor with kids - I became freer and more fun.
2. I am more patient.
Most importantly, I discovered that in a Free School, class time exists to serve the needs of the students. We were not beholden to standards. We did not need to rush to get ready for a high-stakes test. If it took two weeks to learn something then we could take two weeks. Over time I found that without the time pressures that exist in a typical school, I could be a lot more patient in my teaching. I found myself allowing the kids' more time to make mistakes and think about them and to explore their own methods of doing things. I found myself giving fewer instructions and asking more questions. In short, I started to teach math the way I had always believed was best but for various reasons had never fully embraced. I lost my fear of blank stares. I improvised more. Which brings me to point three:
3. I experiment more.
In a typical classroom, students have little space to move and, because of the size of the class, few opportunities to talk. They are given little autonomy and, as a result, often lack maturity even in situations where autonomy is given to them. Any lesson a teacher plans has to keep these constraints in mind.
I always wanted to teach lessons that involved exciting materials and encouraged students to move around, but in practice this required very careful preparation to make sure everyone could get what they needed without elbowing one another in the face. At the Free School I could throw a pile of manipulatives on a table and say, go nuts. If a student wanted to use glitter and highlighters to present their work, they knew where to find them. If a student wanted to work in a quieter room, it was no problem to let them go unsupervised.
And if I tried a new activity or game or problem and it fell flat or students were confused, it was easy for them to express their confusion in productive ways - to comment aloud and to question me and each other. It was easy for me to re-explain or make changes on the fly.
I know there are teachers in typical schools who do all these great things, and to some extent I always tried to be one of them. But being at the Free School just made it so much easier. There were no longer any obstacles to trying something new.
4. My values are more connected to my teaching.
I came to teaching with a desire to empower underprivileged kids by educating them and helping them to educate themselves. Over time I grew to believe that my work should be explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-queer-phobic, and that I should help kids develop a political consciousness. But how could I best bring those values into the classroom when there seemed to barely be time for human connection, let alone deep engagement with politically charged topics? Especially when I began to believe that certain aspects of my school as an institution were actually reproducing harmful patterns of oppression?
For example, I began to believe that our school's discipline system was punitive in ways that reproduced the worst aspect of our criminal justice/prison system and set kids up to be punished by that system later. But it was hard for me even to acknowledge that belief to myself. Here was a school that I invested a lot of effort to grow. And I needed the discipline system to work so I could teach. Yet I wondered what I should do about the fact that a school I was working so hard to build was in some ways making things worse for kids. I went back and forth between denial, anger, trying to have conversations with the people I worked with and push for change, and wishing the status quo would just work so I could stop having to think about it so hard.
Needless to say that was exhausting. In the Free School, I found a place where staff and students have honest and explicit conversations about values and about anti-oppression on a near-daily basis. Which is not to say that I feel like I have become an expert at teaching for anti-oppression. But I am no longer content to keep quiet about those beliefs in any school where I work. I have come to see that engagement with such topics is both necessary and possible.
4. I am more myself.
I let the kids see my unshaven legs.
5. I am happier and less tired. And I want to go to work.
The school year ended and for the first time this year I didn't feel relieved. I felt sad to go and I felt like I could just keep teaching forever. Now a few weeks later I am back in the classroom helping teach a summer program for students from Woodlawn, and it feels great. I have become so much more optimistic about what kids are capable of when we let them have the autonomy they need to do things for themselves. And even in contexts that are not the Free School, I am able to trust kids. And it feels great.
6. And more?
I know there are other ways my teaching has changed, but I can't necessarily see them from inside my own body. If any of you out there reading this can think of anything you would like to ask me about this experience, please do ask.
Monday, April 15, 2013
Boys and girls
 |
| Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade boys make pizza dough for Friday lunch. |
More importantly, our community allows and supports emotional expressions that kids elsewhere are conditioned to shut off as they grow older. Two boys can sit side-by-side on the couch. Hugging nad crying are accepted. An older boy lends his gym shoes to a younger one. These are ordinary human things that happen and every time I am surprised, it reminds me of how tough and how cruel the schools where I used to work could be. In a place where affection is more unconditional, the kids here have a lot less to prove.
But I still see gender roles playing out. I still see mostly girls with dolls and mostly boys wearing red and blue. I see council meetings where the boys all sit on one side of the room and the girls on the other. Expectations about gender expression are some of the most ubiquitous foundations of identity in our society - kids get ideas about how to be a boy and how to be a girl everywhere. And the world tells them that only by being a boy or a girl successfully can they be a person successfully. And it is easy to imagine that we are having some sort of utopian moment here at school, but in fact the world pokes its head in all the time.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Less Money, More Problems
A number of people have asked me about how the Free School's finances work. The short answer is that they are always squeezed, but lately some developments have stretched money even further.
The Free School gets about 60% of its budget from tuition, which is charged on a sliding scale. (The radical curriculum here, free of standards, standardized tests, grades, and all the traditional baggage, would not be possible if this were a public school.) We don't turn students away based on ability to pay, and in fact because over half of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, we have a very high percentage of families who pay little or no tuition.
The remaining 40% comes from a group called Friends of the Free School, a non-profit that owns several apartment buildings in the area and manages them on behalf of the school, using some collected rent to help fun school operations. We also fundraise like crazy, but most of that money goes for special things like building improvements or class trips.
Because even the maximum tuition is relatively low for a private school (about $10,000), hardly anybody pays the maximum, and class sizes here are very small, even the rosiest budgetary situation involves pinching every penny. If anything should go wrong, the financial situation can devolve into a crisis pretty quickly.
The biggest single item in our budget is teacher salaries. You would cry if you knew how little our teachers make, and I'm not going to tell you for the sake of privacy, but suffice it to say it's not really a living wage. But there isn't much else we spend money on - we don't do texbooks, and we get many supplies donated, so if tuition gets paid late or there are unexpected bills, it jeopardizes the school's ability to pay teachers on time.
Recently a government agency that subsidizes childcare, and therefore funds tuition for some of our families, especially families of younger kids who use after-school care, withdrew its funding. Apparently a form was filled out incorrectly a very long time ago by someone who used to work here. This will get rectified, but in the meantime we are short about a quarter of our tuition.
In meetings people offer to make huge sacrifices - working for less pay. These are teachers who already have second jobs to pay their bills. When someone is out we don't hire a sub, we just reshuffle our schedules. And still it feels like maybe it's not going to be enough.
The teachers who make democratic education happen for these kiddos every day are committed. Any school like ours, which does something radical and different, always has to fight to survive, and everyone accepts that. But I also know that teachers don't stay here as long as they might, because of the low pay and uncertainty. And I think this place, which can be such an oasis of joy in a grim educational landscape, deserves to continue.
The Free School gets about 60% of its budget from tuition, which is charged on a sliding scale. (The radical curriculum here, free of standards, standardized tests, grades, and all the traditional baggage, would not be possible if this were a public school.) We don't turn students away based on ability to pay, and in fact because over half of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, we have a very high percentage of families who pay little or no tuition.
The remaining 40% comes from a group called Friends of the Free School, a non-profit that owns several apartment buildings in the area and manages them on behalf of the school, using some collected rent to help fun school operations. We also fundraise like crazy, but most of that money goes for special things like building improvements or class trips.
Because even the maximum tuition is relatively low for a private school (about $10,000), hardly anybody pays the maximum, and class sizes here are very small, even the rosiest budgetary situation involves pinching every penny. If anything should go wrong, the financial situation can devolve into a crisis pretty quickly.
The biggest single item in our budget is teacher salaries. You would cry if you knew how little our teachers make, and I'm not going to tell you for the sake of privacy, but suffice it to say it's not really a living wage. But there isn't much else we spend money on - we don't do texbooks, and we get many supplies donated, so if tuition gets paid late or there are unexpected bills, it jeopardizes the school's ability to pay teachers on time.
Recently a government agency that subsidizes childcare, and therefore funds tuition for some of our families, especially families of younger kids who use after-school care, withdrew its funding. Apparently a form was filled out incorrectly a very long time ago by someone who used to work here. This will get rectified, but in the meantime we are short about a quarter of our tuition.
In meetings people offer to make huge sacrifices - working for less pay. These are teachers who already have second jobs to pay their bills. When someone is out we don't hire a sub, we just reshuffle our schedules. And still it feels like maybe it's not going to be enough.
The teachers who make democratic education happen for these kiddos every day are committed. Any school like ours, which does something radical and different, always has to fight to survive, and everyone accepts that. But I also know that teachers don't stay here as long as they might, because of the low pay and uncertainty. And I think this place, which can be such an oasis of joy in a grim educational landscape, deserves to continue.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Opting In and Opting Out - Part 1 - What Makes Kids Interested?
This morning we watched a movie during junior high math class. We are studying geometry. The students have also taken a resurgent interest in origami lately since Mike Barry, who usually teaches the little kids and is an origami enthusiast, has been subbing for Bhawin. The movie we watched is called Between the Folds, and it explores different origami styles and methods by examining the work of some of the foremost paper folders. It also touches on the connections between origami and math, science, engineering, and other forms of art. It is one of those slow but mind-expanding documentaries.
J was bored throughout. He was unfocused, restless. He got up several times, leaving the room and coming back, sitting on the floor, playing with his phone. He asked to leave. J doesn't need my permission to leave, no consequence will befall him if he leaves - and yet, I didn't want to endorse him leaving. I was somehow not comfortable giving him permission. Maybe he sensed my agenda and that turned him off further, I don't know.
Later it was time for our virtual trip to South Africa. Virtual trips happen once a month - we all get together, pretend to fly to a country (we watch youtube clips of airplanes touching down at each particular airport), watch videos and presentations, and then eat the food of that country for lunch. I always enjoy it, especially the lunch. But again, J complained. He didn't want to go.
J is certainly not the only student who resists certain activities. He is a relatively mild-mannered kid - if he doesn't want to do something, he protests a bit but it is hardly a big deal. But still I noticed that in these situations it was hard to get him interested.
Since coming to the Free School I have been thinking a lot about opting out - that is, what happens when kids chose not to do things. Especially things that other schools would make them do, with the belief that those learning experiences are necessary. I have a lot of questions, like, what happens if a kid always opts out of learning something that is important for them to know? Are we doing our job in educating them? Why do kids opt in or out of a particular activity? How can we create conditions that encourage kids to opt in to learning and get the most out of school, without coercing them?
First and foremost, kids opt out of things that are not interesting to them - "this is boring!" is a common refrain. But in interacting with J today, I realized that it is often not necessarily the activity itself that determines whether a kid is interested. That is, we can't just think about creating "interesting" activities. We have to ask, how to we foster kids to be "interested" in general.
The quality of being interested varies a lot by kid, not just with respect to which activities they like and dislike, but in general. Some students at our school find a million things to engage in. Some find only a few, but engage very passionately. But some kids seem a bit adrift - they are frequently bored and it is hard to get them interested in anything. And I wonder, is this okay? Should we just let it unfold? Should we let the students come to their learning completely on their own terms? Or should we try to create conditions that foster engagement?
So where does interested-ness come from? In adolescents I notice that in some cases kids who have had difficult experiences outside of school have trouble engaging in school. It might be connected to the hierarchy of needs - it's hard to focus when basic physical or emotional needs are unmet. It might also be connected to experiences of stress and trauma, since those can lead to "hypervigilance" and an inability to focus on anything in particular.
Still, some kids who are not immediately interested can be provoked if you engage with them one-on-one, talking to them about the topic at hand. Others become interested if they see peers engaged. Others respond to hands-on presentations or humor. As teachers, we think a lot about how to make the material engaging. But I also want to think in the longer term, about how to support kids so that they will engage spontaneously, without so much song and dance from their teachers. I want them to be able take on their own learning projects on topics that they care about.
At the Free School, one way we foster interested-ness is simply by letting kids run with their passions without too many interruptions. Kids get to experience what it feels like to be deeply engaged for a long period of time, and they discover that a particular topic often has surprises lurking beneath the surface. However, we haven't succeeded in getting all of our kids to really feel this thrill or seek it out.
I would welcome comments from others about what you have notice about kids who seem interested versus those that don't.
J was bored throughout. He was unfocused, restless. He got up several times, leaving the room and coming back, sitting on the floor, playing with his phone. He asked to leave. J doesn't need my permission to leave, no consequence will befall him if he leaves - and yet, I didn't want to endorse him leaving. I was somehow not comfortable giving him permission. Maybe he sensed my agenda and that turned him off further, I don't know.
Later it was time for our virtual trip to South Africa. Virtual trips happen once a month - we all get together, pretend to fly to a country (we watch youtube clips of airplanes touching down at each particular airport), watch videos and presentations, and then eat the food of that country for lunch. I always enjoy it, especially the lunch. But again, J complained. He didn't want to go.
J is certainly not the only student who resists certain activities. He is a relatively mild-mannered kid - if he doesn't want to do something, he protests a bit but it is hardly a big deal. But still I noticed that in these situations it was hard to get him interested.
Since coming to the Free School I have been thinking a lot about opting out - that is, what happens when kids chose not to do things. Especially things that other schools would make them do, with the belief that those learning experiences are necessary. I have a lot of questions, like, what happens if a kid always opts out of learning something that is important for them to know? Are we doing our job in educating them? Why do kids opt in or out of a particular activity? How can we create conditions that encourage kids to opt in to learning and get the most out of school, without coercing them?
First and foremost, kids opt out of things that are not interesting to them - "this is boring!" is a common refrain. But in interacting with J today, I realized that it is often not necessarily the activity itself that determines whether a kid is interested. That is, we can't just think about creating "interesting" activities. We have to ask, how to we foster kids to be "interested" in general.
The quality of being interested varies a lot by kid, not just with respect to which activities they like and dislike, but in general. Some students at our school find a million things to engage in. Some find only a few, but engage very passionately. But some kids seem a bit adrift - they are frequently bored and it is hard to get them interested in anything. And I wonder, is this okay? Should we just let it unfold? Should we let the students come to their learning completely on their own terms? Or should we try to create conditions that foster engagement?
So where does interested-ness come from? In adolescents I notice that in some cases kids who have had difficult experiences outside of school have trouble engaging in school. It might be connected to the hierarchy of needs - it's hard to focus when basic physical or emotional needs are unmet. It might also be connected to experiences of stress and trauma, since those can lead to "hypervigilance" and an inability to focus on anything in particular.
Still, some kids who are not immediately interested can be provoked if you engage with them one-on-one, talking to them about the topic at hand. Others become interested if they see peers engaged. Others respond to hands-on presentations or humor. As teachers, we think a lot about how to make the material engaging. But I also want to think in the longer term, about how to support kids so that they will engage spontaneously, without so much song and dance from their teachers. I want them to be able take on their own learning projects on topics that they care about.
At the Free School, one way we foster interested-ness is simply by letting kids run with their passions without too many interruptions. Kids get to experience what it feels like to be deeply engaged for a long period of time, and they discover that a particular topic often has surprises lurking beneath the surface. However, we haven't succeeded in getting all of our kids to really feel this thrill or seek it out.
I would welcome comments from others about what you have notice about kids who seem interested versus those that don't.
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