Teaching to Learn, Part 7: Growth

Artists have a way of making art look effortless.  They hide every previous sketch, every old draft, every pen stroke and brush stroke and backstroke that came before the spectacle that you now admire.  For most of my life, artists had me fooled.  I believed that art came effortlessly to artists.  I believed that there were artists – those who “had it,” – and then there were the rest of us.  With lots of hard work we could perhaps approximate art, but we could never become artists.*

Last year, I stopped telling myself that I am not an artist.

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Tonight I’m performing in a show.  It’s the second time I’ve been invited to perform poetry in the past month.  I will try to make it look like art: cohesive, graceful and polished.  I will attempt artistic deceit.  If all goes well the audience will not see the scribbled pages of my pocket notebook, the indents on my couch from ass-hours accrued, the dilated capillaries when I felt the anxiety of having previous drafts scrutinized, the megabytes of hard drive space coded with the recordings I made after hearing the criticism “you read all your poems the same way.”

Eight months ago I had never written or performed a spoken word piece.  Two things happened since.

The first was a shift in mindset.  When I stopped telling myself that I am not an artist, I started improving at something I thought I could never improve at.  I didn’t even go so far as to say that I was an artist; I just quieted my self-doubt enough to give it a try.

Second, I had support.  Lots of it.  In May we started a writing group that meets weekly in my living room.  At first I didn’t want to share my poems.  I wanted to edit my own work, keep it under wraps, and then surprise everyone with my brilliance each time I performed a new piece.

It’s a pretty solid strategy, if your goal is to churn out dull political litanies and abstract sentimentality.  Believing in yourself is a diet without exercise: it only takes you so far.  That adage “you can do anything you put your mind to,” is one part optimism and two parts bullshit.  You need support.

Poetry got me thinking about growth, but teaching helped me understand it.  The school I serve at really believes in growth.  We talk about having a “growth mindset,” for ourselves and for our students.  We use a standards-based grading system that tracks student growth in specific skills, rather than their overall achievement in a subject.  There are no weaknesses, only "growth areas."

At first the growth language sounded like corporate jargon, the kind that wandered into charter schools behind the rush of the reform movement.**   I tend to be pretty wary of anything that hints of corporate culture, so at first I heard it with a fair bit of skepticism.

A poorly written book
that you should read anyway.

The growth language actually comes from a book called Mindset, which is required reading for all full-time staff in my school’s charter network.  The book itself is poorly written, oversimplified and filled with way too many anecdotes that all make the exact same point.  But the point is a really, really good one:

Ability is malleable.  We do have predispositions: genetic traits or early-life experiences that determine your base line for a specific ability.  Still, things that we might think of as fixed such as intelligence, musicality, athletics, or interpersonal skills, we can actually improve, or diminish.

I already believed this to some extent – we all learned how to read at some point; we can all remember a time in our lives when we were more physically fit than we are now – but I always saw a distinction between skills like reading and algebra (skills I thought I could improve at) and skills like painting, poetry or music (skills I thought I couldn't).

According to Mindset author Carol Dweck, the first and most significant barrier to growth is the whisper in our heads telling us with aggressive certainty, “I am not good at this.”  Or conversely, “I am good at this, and I don’t need to work at it.”

It’s a great lesson for my students, many of whom have voices in their heads, and sometimes real human voices, telling them things like, "Black males act violently," or "People from your neighborhood don't graduate high school," or “You are not smart.”  When you already believe these things, a school can easily serve as an environment that reinforces them.

The trick, then, is to talk about intelligence and demeanor and destiny as things that can change.  At our school it’s best practice never to tell a student that she or he is “smart” (or “stupid,” but hopefully that’s best practice in every school).  We don't frame abilities in absolute terms; we talk about them in terms of progression (and sometimes regression).  We talk about getting smarter, something every student can do.  It’s a subtle linguistic shift and a massive cultural one.  We hope it leads to a shift in mindset.

Support is perhaps the more complicated piece of the growth equation, because it can look so many different ways.  For my poetry it’s meant repeated workshops with our writing group.  It’s meant good advice from more experienced writers and poets: record yourself, practice, put it down for a week, write it over.  It’s meant reading other people's poetry.  It’s meant reading books on how to read poetry.  It’s meant sitting down once or twice a week with blank paper and a pen or a laptop.  It’s meant having paper and pens and a laptop and time.

For my students growth might mean having books at home.  It might mean getting enough sleep every night.  It might mean having a special education or a behavior plan.  Maybe it means having access social services, mental health services, or social and emotional learning.***  Or a character report card.  Or having role models.  Maybe it’s detention or suspension or a stern lecture.  Or having teachers script every single action throughout the day because students are still developing good habits (“line up, hands at your sides or in your pockets, face forward, voices off."  I used to balk at some of the culture and forms of discipline at my school, until I understood that many students actually really benefit from those kinds of supports.).  Maybe it means a hug, or five minutes in the morning with chickens.  There are about 600 students at my school, and every one of them needs several kinds of support.

My favorite form of student support.

So hey, creating an effective school is a hard thing.  It takes at least twice as many teachers and resources as most schools have.  Many supports might be out of reach.

Then there are the complicating factors: TV and stereotyping visual culture, internet, video games, junk food, peer pressure, low self-esteem, family turmoil, domestic violence, a white hetero-male dominant culture, history.  And none of these are limited to elementary school children.

So there's the capital-C Challenge: the world sometimes is icebergs and chasms and shiny, distracting things.  We can take as faith our ability to grow yet still flat line, or worse, regress.  And that's when we need to trust in growth the most.  Those icebergs and chasms and shiny things?  That is the stuff of growth.  At least it can be, provided that we have the support to overcome it, and if we choose to see it that way.

For 23 years when I faced challenges far less dramatic than icebergs - a bad grade, a disappointing track meet - I would do one of two things.  I would internalize: this failure is my fault and I need to push myself harder.  Internalizing is a great way to get better at things and while feeling really bad about yourself.  Or I would externalize: this failure has nothing to do with me so I don’t have to worry about it.  Externalizing is a great way to feel great about yourself - or at least create the image that you feel great about yourself - while never really taking responsibility for improving at anything.

I think I’m not the only person who reacts in these ways, and that’s why I think the “support” piece of growth is so crucial.  When I first began to learn about growth I understood it as "you can do anything," which didn't feel all that helpful.  When I started thinking about it as "you can do anything if…" I stopped needing to make the miserable choice between internalizing and externalizing.  

Instead, I started taking responsibility without being self-deprecating or escapist.  I started thinking things like “Hey, teaching didn’t go well today.  Tomorrow I’ll do more prep before hand, and maybe reflect on what went wrong.  But probably I should ask my co-teacher what she thinks, because teaching is hard and I shouldn’t tackle this problem alone.”

When I think of growth in terms of support, I'm more able to make distinctions between the things that are more in my control and the things that aren’t.  Usually both are involved.  I can practice a poem a hundred times, but maybe the audience is in a bad mood that night.  Maybe sometimes I’ll still be hard on myself about the things that I can control but haven’t really taken a hold of, but I’m also learning that growth can happen whether or not you beat yourself up.

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I'm still very new to poetry.  That beginner's phase where growth only comes in one variety: quick and easy.  As if setbacks never happen.  No doubt I'm approaching a plateau, or a cliff, but so far it's been a steady ascent.

Still, I’m nervous about my show tonight.  I haven’t fully memorized any of the poems I’ll be performing.  It could go really well.  It could totally bomb.  Despite what I’ve written here it will probably feed my ego if it runs smoothly, or I’ll get down on myself if doesn't.  I’m a poet, not a Zen master.

Either way, on Wednesday I will slouch in my living room beside other slouching, aspiring writers.  I will engrave the ass-hours onto my couch.  I will appreciate how far I've come and reflect on where I have still to go, where I will always have still to go.  I will keep my pen moving.  I will remind myself, “Hey, I am an artist.”

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* When I talk about artists I’m speaking broadly: to me, an artist is anyone who designs something – a painting, a lesson plan, a jump shot, a dinnertime meal – deliberately, and with an eye towards mastery.

* Schools in New Orleans borrow quite a bit from the corporate world, which funds quite a bit of what’s going on nationally in school reform.  

* Thanks, Sophie!

~~

New Year's Resolutions

1. Meditate, read and write every day, even if it's just for a few minutes.
2. Give at least one compliment a day.
3. Slam a new poem every month.
4. Start every hard conversation with students with "I want you to succeed..."
5. Break up my routine once a week.  On New Year's Day I walked from my house to Lake Pontchartrain and back and figured everything out.
6. Books reports.  I always forget the things I read, so last year I wrote a couple of one-page summaries of books.  I'm a slow reader, so the least I can do is remember what little I've read.
7. More dancing.  This one is off to a great start.