Won't somebody think of the children? An analysis of the segregation of Boys and Girls from the perspective of a Parent and Educator

Disclaimer: some facts or details from this post may be insufficient or even inaccurate due to the lack of communication parents are receiving from the school in question. That is part of the point. But I will own the inaccuracies in service to the reflection.

Even at Sea World, educators cannot
escape the call for innovation

The @40ishoracle and I were spending a lovely day at Sea World before the official start of #FETC (a decent conference and the best vendor floor that I have been subjected to in years), when i get one of the stomach churning texts from my wife "call me when you get a few minutes" -- In the modern world of texting, voice communication is at a premium. I immediately delayed my progress to the sea-lion show and made a phone call.

Parents of students in my daughter's highly successful 6th grade class had received a letter from the administration explaining that student safety was of the highest priority and that, due to some recent incidents, the 6th grade classroom would be "clustered" for an indeterminate amount of time. As one parent later put it, "if you didn't know what was going on, you would think maybe someone brought a weapon to school" (or possibly was using a make-believe hand-grenade to fight off evil on the playground).

So, some questions that arose:

1. What was the incident?
2. What does "clustering" actually mean? (aren't any student groups in more than one classroom clustered? Tracking is a kind of clustering, right?)
3. Is this clustering a long-term or short-term solution?
4. Is everyone ok?
5. Why is everyone being impacted by this "incident" if not everyone was involved in the "incident"?
6. Is this the only response?
7. Was my child involved?
8. What should I be discussing with my child as a concerned and supportive parent?
9. Not to be repetitive, but what happened?

Most of the explanation that follows comes second or third hand from the most reliable source that was willing to talk to my wife...namely, our 6th grade daughter:

6th grade boys and girls were involved in a "game" that involved inappropriate touching in one of the two 6th grade classes at the school. The incidents were repetitive, had been going on for awhile, and were, in some cases, not consensual. A student had told another student who had told an adult. (This happened at the end of the week before the letter went out). Related to this timeline, a concerned parent may or may not have called either the Indianapolis Public School security (we have an official e-mail that references the IPS police) or the Indianapolis Police Department.

As is often the case with children, concerned parents, and the possibility of legal action, investigations ensued. The culmination, at least from non-directly-involved parents' points-of-view was the aforementioned clustering solution.

_______

CLUSTERING (from Wikipedia): 

an educational process in which four to six gifted and talented (GT) and/or high achieving students are assigned to an otherwise heterogeneous classroom within their grade to be instructed by a teacher that has had specialized training in differentiating for gifted learners.^[1] ...Within a cluster, several instructional options are typically used, including: enrichment and extensions, higher-order thinking skills, pretesting and differentiation  compacting, an accelerated pace, and more complexity in content.^[5]

_______

Well, that doesn't sound too bad. Except that in this case, the CLUSTER was a euphemism for dividing the 

Went looking for a picture and found a good post

6th grade boys from the 6th grade girls for an indefinite period of time.

• All academic classes are segregated boys from girls.
• "Extras" such as art and music are also divided (there is a whole blog post on these things now being just "extras")
• Students attempting to communicate with other students of the opposite sex in the hallway are called out by the teachers monitoring the hallways with admonitions like "don't talk to them!"
• This has led to some of the girls passing by the boys quickly saying things like "UNCLEAN!" (I love pretentious Pre-teens). Other reaction have included suggestions of adding "Boys" and "Girls" signs to the drinking fountains.

My wife, an OB/GYN (and much more rational person than I am) wrote a well thought-out letter to the teachers and principal of the school outlining the limited information she knew and her reaction:

• This approach seems punitive on-face, particularly if a number of boys and girls were not involved
• While the students involved have been identified as "gifted", they are still pre-teen students with the hormones that accompany that age.
• Healthy and unhealthy sexual habits form at an early age (unhealthy examples include using sexuality as a bargaining chip, objectifying the opposite sex, and victimization) and this behavior presents one of those all-too-buzzwordy "teachable moments" -- she even went so far as to volunteer the services of medical students and/or residents who would be willing to talk to middle school kids.

The response from one teacher was essentially "I agree, but I am not allowed to talk about it"

The principal gave no response.

That was two weeks ago.

Since then, we get vague ideas from concerned parents who are trying to glean information and from students who are a-buzz with reactions and rumors. The most recent news is that the classes will be reintegrated, but that logistically this cannot happen for at least two weeks since science-project groups have now been assigned! (#edreform snark: This makes no sense. Are there even high-stakes tests associated with the science project? Let's keep our eye on the ball!)

Reflection:

 I do not want this to appear that I am dismissing the "game" or the students who started, participated, or may have covered it up. This can be a serious and traumatic experience and should be dealt with appropriately. Those involved should answer for their actions in a way that respects the severity of the action and the developmental age of the students who participated willingly.

I am also not dismissing the literature on single-gender classrooms. In fact, this has little to do with the research in that area. The school is not making a decision based on a thought-out education policy and review of literature that concluded more effective education occurs in a segregated environment. If that were the case, we would expect to see separation of the 7th and 8th grade classes as well, parents would have been given opportunity to weigh in on the decision and choose whether that was the learning environment best suited for their children. -- This was a consequential reaction. Whether those consequences were a reaction out of a concern for safety or a concern for avoiding litigation cannot be determined.

We do know that the consequence was not out of a concern for the education of the 6th grade class as a whole. The response, lack of communication in the past two weeks, as well as the literal and metaphorical separation from any type of formation or educational opportunity is disturbing but indicative of many trends in education.

Lack Education by Context: 

The use of context acknowledges an individuals background, history, learning style and current situation in order to craft the best learning program. It is the true definition of personalized education. In this case, it would treat students who were tangentially involved differently than students who were directly involved and who may require more in-depth education or even counseling. One can only hope that there is some minimum of context being considered here, but there is no indication of that from the outside looking in.

Lack of Education by Relationship: 

As I have written about in a number of posts, one key to education is the use of relationship to help the learner understand (beyond parroting back answers from a personalized software platform). One concern in the educational reform culture that de-values teachers  in favor of a common curriculum, standardized software metrics, and high-stakes testing is that this essential relationship component is lost and we (students and educators) miss out on key learning opportunities that are indicated by behavioral signs and unique learning moments that arise outside of a lock-step curriculum and its corresponding metrics. 

There are a number of relationships that this current reaction ignores and in some cases attempts to sever: 

• Boys-Girls -- Boys and Girls are shown that their relationships are, at the core, something that can be dissolved with little consideration and that is probably, at some level, a bad thing that should be avoided if not punished. 
• Teacher-Student -- Teachers are once again moved along the continuum from guide to enforcer-of-rules which from the student perspective seems arbitrary and ineffective.
• Parent-School Adults -- Parents are frustrated by the lack of explanation about the thought process behind the platitude of "student-safety" concerns. This makes it difficult to be supportive of the administration and the teachers.

Lack of Education by Reflection: 

Khan Academy notwithstanding, the process of education involves combining new and authentic experiences with past context in a process of reflective questioning and application. While it works in math and world languages and computer programming, this process of reflection is particularly necessary when dealing with inter-personal relationships, demonstrating appropriate behavior, and "figuring out" what kind of person one hopes to be as an adult. When the only message from this incident is "when boys and girls touch each other, there will be consequences for EVERYONE", we have missed out on the most basic form of education, namely being able to talk about the incident with caring adults who are able to guide students, hormones and all, through very complicated feelings and reactions.

Final Thoughts:

At the end of the day, most of these students will be undamaged by their month or so "time-out" from the opposite sex. But the decision making process that led to this separation still deserves examination. If we have moved past making decisions that are developmentally appropriate, we become unable to guide teens and pre-teens through an emotional and confusing time.  if our decisions are no longer those that are educationally indicated, we miss out on key moments that may not come around again (not to mention that we give up the authority that comes from being educational experts in society). Heck, at least if our decisions were made based on test-scores we could have some data at the end of the day (*cringe*)

I am concerned for students who have had one skewed imagery of healthy sexual behavior replaced by a different, but also skewed perspective on gender roles and relationships.

I am concerned that we are so afraid of honest communication, reflection, and context that we are willing to warp our students' social structures on a reactive whim.

I am concerned that, ultimately, our actions reflect those things that we value most and that the values being represented here seem cold and distant from adolescent formation or healthy education.

As a parent and teacher, I am concerned.

Teaching Discourse within Disagreement - A Quora-inspired blogpost

I am an occasional Quora user. I love the concept of answering a question as fully and accurately as possible and having it crowdsourced for accuracy.It is the next extension of Wikipedia. I also feel guilty that I really only feel qualified to answer questions about Batman, BYOT, and an occasional entry on some aspect of #digcit.


So when is saw this question come across my screen:
How can Obamacare be explained in layman's terms?


I was determined to take a crack at it. I sat down to write and opened up a few screens to fact check and when I was finished, I realized that I had not come even close to answering the question. So I never posted.


This was the first paragraph of what i wrote:

Wow. This might be one of the most challenging questions I have seen recently. Urban Dictionary describes "Layman's Terms" as an attempt to "describe a complex or technical issue using words and terms that the average individual can understand" -- I would add to that dictionary that most people who ask the question are seeking "just the facts" without a particular bias or slant, since they often are looking to draw their own conclusions. And even the term "Obamacare" was, and to many still is, a pejorative term for the Affordable Care Act that was meant to imply, among other things, a) that it was one person's idea and  b) a big brother-esque totalitarian solutions (remember the "death boards"?). 

So I scrapped my attempt to answer the question. But that started one of those thought spirals that brought me back to my "Teach the Controversy" series (Part I, Part II, and the PLN-based Part III). This was made even more poignant by Sunday's Mass and the subsequent discussions that happened (I'll get to that part in a second).


Interlude - A Peek Behind the Curtain
I remember one of the more frustrating moments of my Senior year was receiving an assignment to write a research paper. Attached to the assignment description was a list of verboten topics such as abortion, the death penalty, and passing out condoms in school. There were the usual grumbles but the teacher was adamant that these topics had been written about to death. 


A year later, I had the opportunity to do one of my first observations in teacher-training at that high school. During this one week intensive, I got to look behind the curtain into the mysterious teacher's lounge. In classic fly-on-the-wall mode, I got to hear about a variety of things. I remember my shock that teachers knew exactly what was going on in the back of the debate bus (yikes!) as well as who-was-dating-whom and other top-secret teenage lore.


During one of these discussions, the topic of the research paper topics came up. I listened as I heard teachers extol the policy of limiting topics that would cause the student's to lose focus on correct structure, cause arguments that would never be settled, and force teacher's to tip their hand to their own opinions. Through the conversation, it became clear that for all but a few of the oldest teachers, these topics had not been written about "to death" in class -- they had not been written about at all for years!
End Interlude 


I think that we are beginning to reap the results of this policy...and as educators, I think it falls to us to begin to fix the problem -- one controversy at a time.

Fortnight of Freedom:
A Real World "Teach the Controversy" Application

If you are not Catholic, you may not be aware that we are currently in the middle of a celebration, a movement, a protest called the Fortnight for Freedom. This is the name of a series of articles, speeches, homilies, etc. in protest over the Combination of the Affordable Care Act's demand for insurance coverage of certain routine/preventative/health promoting services and an HHS sub-committee's determination that one of those services in the area of women's health should be contraception. You can read the Kaiser Family Foundation's summary here. Note I did not say its unbiased description -- that is kind of the point I am going to try to make -- While I think the summary is accurate and accounts for arguments on both sides of a controversial topic, that is no longer the measure of "unbiased" in American discourse.


Unbiased, has taken an Orwellian shift to mean its opposite. In order to be considered "unbiased" you must now present information from the political, religious or other perspective of the reader.


I sat in church and listened to the homily of my friend and Priest as he explained that this was not an issue of contraception but was an issue of Religious Freedom. More importantly, it was an issue of religious discrimination, since insular churches (predominantly ministering, educating, helping) people of a single faith could be exempt but churches with outreach (read Catholic schools, Catholic hospitals, among others) could not be exempt. -- In a moment i have since come to regret, I walked out.

• I sat on the steps of the parish with my Transformer Prime and began reading the letter from the Bishop that the priest had been quoting -- it outlined the case for religious discrimination. 
• I went back and read the reaction from Church leader's when the coverage was first announced -- very little about Religious Freedom in that context. The concern then was that Church dollars (in the form of payments to insurers) would be used to fund contraception that is against the tenets of that faith -- good point, thought I. 
• Reading further, I found that there had been a compromise made that would force the insurance companies in these situations to cover the full cost of contraception without payment from the Church or the individual being a factored into the cost model.
• I went back to the Bishop's letter written weeks after this compromise. It clearly talked about the church being forced to "fund and facilitate" contraception. No mention of the policy change. The language was now much more nuanced with the vague "facilitate" taking on strange, non-layman meanings and the term "funding" being applied only under that  "if-we-pay-for-thing-A-then-there-will-be-money-for-someone-else-to-pay-for-thing-B" kind of way.

This was a lot more complicated than the homily made it out to be. The homily was a call to arms, complete with a concluding litany-of-saints invoking images of people being forced to say prayers in homes with darkened curtains and underground Eucharist.

My wife, an OBGYN and much better writer than I am, wrote a letter outlining her reaction to the priest and he asked if we could have dinner. After a wonderful evening with chatting, fellowship, and a good meal, we sat down to discuss.

Let me repeat that last line, it's important: We sat down to discuss.

• We outlined points of view. 
• We repeated what each other said to be sure that we understood it. 
• We spoke with passion about our feelings, but not dismissive of the passionate feelings of others. At one point, my wife was reading the language of the final rule, the priest was reading documents from the Bishops at USCCB.org, and the Google TV, was showing the news articles during the shift in tone from the funding-issue to the religious-freedom issue.

We identified areas of common ground and areas of further discussion. We talked about actions that could be taken to address the larger issue of a corruption of human sexuality. We learned from each other.

In a broader context, we talked about the polarization of politics, religion and society in general. We talked about confirmation bias and echo-chambers, where we dismiss that with which we do not immediately because there are always hundreds of sources that confirm our belief, so how could we be wrong? We talked about raising a generation of children without the ability to see past their own perspective.

Reflection

As educators, we have to embrace the opportunities for controversy. In those moments and those topics lie the opportunity to teach the fundamentals of discourse and persuasion. To teach how to dissect the biases of our own perspective and work with people from differing points of view on finding common ground. 

Gary Stager, at #ISTE12, chastised educators who force students to "make presentations on topics they don't care about to audiences that don't actually exist". We need to listen to this truth. Teach the controversy...better yet, let the students teach the controversy while we guide them on the fundamentals of finding accurate information, deconstructing claims and identifying evidence and flaws in logic, and building consensus with people who did not already agree with us.

Will this increase standardized test scores? Probably, but that's not why we should do it.

• We should do this because it is too easy today to live in an info-laden world where everyone agrees with you.
• We should do this because students need a place and an environment in which they can learn to ask questions, disagree, and change the minds of other while being open to having their own opinion change
• We should do this because it might be the most important 21st century skill.

Let's stop having students write about "safe" topics they don't care about. Let's stop hiding behind a bland vernier of unbiased objectivity that no student believes anyway. 

We have a month left until school begins...let's start changing the world.

Practically Applied: A Month of Creation in #digcit

As educators, we need to bring back the curiosity that is
natural early in childhood. Unlearning the routines may help

One of the struggles that I have had teaching computer classes and even adult professional development over the years is the artificial nature of the exercise. While there are a few notable exceptions and tried & true lessons, the teaching of computers is typically taught as a series of artificial "problems" and walk-through solutions. Students for the most part recognize this and go through the motions to a greater or lesser extent depending on how much they value their grades.

Thus, when we decided to recast the curriculum for Computer Applications as a course in Digital Citizenship (#digccit) based heavily on the ISTE National Education Technology Standards for Students, one of our implicit goals was to make the student experience more real and more relevant. We had some ideas on how to do this: let students drive the agenda within the NETS forward through co-planning the areas to be covered, create a hands-on environment with real experiences whenever possible, integrate the students' own technology into the course, and make connections between the skills and content in the class and its application outside of the course.

The Rough Map for #digcit. The teacher resource room
has two large white boards for planning -- #win

But despite this ambition, when you frame a course based on themes like social media identity awareness and effective communication using technology...you end up with a lot more time in the semester than when you are teaching a series of push-button steps at the pace of your slowest learners. (Note: I credit the individualization that #flipclass affords me for a lot of this added time as well)

So we made the decision to step back even further...and give the last month of class to the students.

Context: 

Brebeuf Jesuit runs a modified-modular schedule. In practice, this means that in a typical five-day week, my class will be 4 times: 2 40-minute periods and 2-one hour periods with a one day break (plus weekends).

The course has built-in discussion time where students bring in articles on technology trends, news, or events that they have discovered and share with the class. The ultimate goal of this portion of the project is to give student an opportunity to analyze claims and evidence made in articles as part of the information literacy practice. In practical terms, it means that one day a week becomes "discussion" day.

Thus we are looking at a 12 days for complete student control:

Students have been operating in a flipped-classroom environment, thus they are used to operating with some level of independence during the class as the assignments and context are given the night before and projects and work time are used in class with the teacher giving most guidance 1-on-1.

Experience:

Students were given a review on the elements of #digcit and the NETS-S. They were walked through a reflection of the types of activities and experiences they had encountered for the last semester. They were encouraged to identify the "lights and shadows" of the semester.  They were then told that this reflection should serve as the lead in to their next assignment: The Pitch

The Pitch: Students were asked to write a memo explaining a final project. The project should deepen their understanding of some portion of the themes covered before. If it used similar tools, they should be enriching the use, exploring new ways or techniques.

Students were also encouraged to create workflow timelines for how they would use the class. These timelines were to incorporate conversations with teachers from other disciplines, so that if there were integration activities in other classes, the Computer Science classroom became the instructional lab complete with brainstorming partners and guidance in all-things-geeky.

When it became clear he needed two hands...

...a truer collaboration was created.

The operations of the day mirrored the conduct of the #flipclass. Students worked independently, but often shared work that they were doing with others:

Struggling to make magic with MotionPaths

• One student helped another film his step-by-steps for solving a Rubik's cube. These clips were edited and tied into an instructional website complete with diagrams created using AVIARY and GoogleDraw.
• The entire class would occasionally stop and stare at the student who decided to test the limits of PowerPoint MotionPaths.
• Another student, struggling to build an interactive game, got help from another who used Photoshop to tweak the shading, lighting, and perspective of game elements.

Check-ins were made daily with the teacher. As necessary, the focus was drawn back to the student-created objectives and the identified connection to a standard or element of #digcit. Very little time was spent off task for almost all students. Students who were consistently off task began to panic as the final project deadline drew closer.

Reflection:

At the end of the day, students were comfortably drawing applications from work they completed in class to the standards and norms of digital citizens in an authentic way. That alone justifies the time spent.

Things to improve: 

Putting Teachers in the Loop: Teachers in other areas were not prepared to have students come to them with a month to go saying "will we have any opportunity to integrate technology into our assessments? I need it for my computer class". Some of them were actually pretty upset, as if we were sitting in judgement. So, what was originally another assessment opportunity, became a "take the time if you need it..we'll be here to help."

Incorporating Language: The focus on #digcit and NETS-S, while there from the inception, was not an explicit part of the language of the classroom until late in the semester. It felt tacked on to the project by some students and took more discussion than necessary to draw the themes through all the previous work after the fact.

Reflections: Increasing the number of formal check-ins (written) as part of the ongoing reflection might help improve the overall quality of work. What was fascinating was that, as expected, some students were aiming for the minimum quality to get X-grade. But since there was no real clear rubric (beyond -- enrich what you have done previously, connect it to a standard you care about, be excellent) then the students kept tweaking and improving based on the quality of work they were seeing from other in the room. Some projects were completed very early but went through three or four informal drafts!

Adaptation and Struggle: There is some struggle with time and...well...struggle. It is not uncommon in this environment for students to hit roadblocks and the need to walk away, do more research, talk through the issue. For someone used to working in technology or any environment that is not mechanical repetition, this is the essence of value. But our students don't know that. As one student put it in her final reflection:

"I would have taken more time to outline how I was going to make the game. I had a lot of "malfunctions" throughout that it took me a little while to figure out what the problem was and then how to fix it. If I had planned better and worked more in an order some of the problems could have been avoided."

It is difficult to explain to a student who is not used to this environment that the struggle cannot likley be planned away and that the results from it are of a better quality, from a learning perspective, than having an experience with no "malfunctions" at all.

Achievement Unlocked: We needed to build in time to showcase the work of the students who worked right up to the deadline.

In the end, this may have been one of the most useful twelve days of the year. The projects had ownership. The standards were a natural part of the learning process and not an afterthought on an evaluation form. The creativity was inspiring. And all it took was handing control of the class over to a bunch of Freshman.

Creativity = Freedom within Structure*

This final project, created by a student who self-describes as "struggling" with the final project,
uses over 30 photos, some drawing, lots of filters...and a touch of creativity. 

*You should have seen the Final Essay :-)