Teachers ​“Rethink” School

No kids were in school. Just teachers. They sat around a table and asked each other: Why do we even need grades?

Grades can be a motivating factor for some students, offered Steve Staysniak. Getting As in school ​“made me feel really good,” he recalled.

Yes, replied Tom James (pictured above with Truman School teacher Cindy Maturo), but they serve to ​“validate a fixed mindset of intelligence”: While some kids get As and feel smart, those who get Ds reinforce the erroneous feeling that they’re innately dumb.

“Grades demotivate learning,” argued teacher Dave Low. ​“Every time your mind goes to the grade, it comes off of the learning.”

The conversation took place on a recent Saturday at Wilbur Cross High School, where three dozen teachers showed up on their day off to take part in a forum called ​“Rethinking School.”

The event was the latest teacher-led training held by Educators for Progress, Innovation and Collaboration (EPIC), a group of teachers that formed two years ago to create a way for teachers to connect with and learn from each other. The group aims to foster more meaningful, teacher-driven training than the standard professional development offered by district higher-ups.

EPIC is ​“exclusively driven by teacher needs, passion, and expertise” — not the typical values considered in the ​“current climate of national school reform,” argued founding member Chris Willems, who teaches at Metropolitan Business Academy.

On Saturday, June 1, Willems and fellow teachers walked—and in one case, skateboarded—down an empty Wilbur Cross corridor towards a table of coffee and breakfast treats, where teachers from different schools got a rare chance to catch up or meet.

They filed into Cross’s vast auditorium to watch School’s Out: Lessons from a Forest Kindergarten, a new documentary by a local filmmaker promoting a radical change in the way young kids go through school. The documentary compares a New Haven kindergarten with a Swiss school, where kids spend their entire kindergarten year outdoors, whittling sticks with knives and stomping in streams instead of sitting in chairs learning vocab. Kids receive no formal lessons in reading or math until age 7. They spend early years building independence, motor skills, confidence, and the social skills that, the film argues, are vital to success in life.

After the film, Low, who runs EPIC and teaches at Sound School, posed a question to his colleagues: “Whose kids have the social skills to navigate the curriculum?”

The room fell silent.

In a Q&A with filmmaker Lisa Molomot, High School in the Community teacher Matt Presser asked if the Swiss experiment addressed the “learned helplessness” that persists in city schools.

“Where did you see more crying and giving up?” he asked.

The discussion ended with a call to support more recess—an activity that’s required by state law but isn’t carried out in every school.

Teachers then broke into small groups in classrooms, where they shared new ideas about how to rethink tests, “flip” classrooms, and empower kids by letting them to ask the questions in class.

Low and Lisa DeRiu (pictured), who teaches social studies at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School, co-led a discussion titled, ​“Rethinking Grading.” The workshop tackled fundamental questions like: ​“What is the Purpose of a Grade?” and ​“Who are grades for?”

Conversation turned to whether grades help kids’ self-esteem.

Cindy Maturo, who teaches social studies at Truman School, said for half of her students, grades serve only to make kids feel worse about themselves.

For the bottom-performing half of the class, those who are ​“stuck at a low level of development,” she said, ​“this grade issue is a huge issue. Their self-esteem is pounded all the time.”

Low, a ​“phosphorescent” thinker who as a union vice-president has promoted new solutions to changing the status quo in schools, agreed.

For the bottom-performing 50 percent of kids in city schools, he said, ​“grading validates their sense of not belonging, and not being valued at school.”

“None of this external motivation works,” said Low (pictured). ​“It works great on ants and chimps, but we’re talking about humans.”

New Haven’s school system ​“ain’t Hopkins,” he said, referring to the private school on the hill in Westville that serves a lot of privileged, high-performing kids.

If grading is ​“not working for the bottom 50 percent,” he said, ​“we’ve got to talk about it.”

DeRiu passed out a dozen articles from other educators tackling this problem. One solution called for ending the practice of giving kids a ​“zero” for a homework assignment they didn’t do. A zero can be nearly impossible to recover from because it sinks the average score for the course.

Another solution, being pioneered this year at High School at the Community, is to switch to a ​“mastery-based” learning system, where kids learn at their own pace, moving up only when they’ve ​“mastered” a specific skill. In that system, kids who fail a test don’t get a zero — they simply take another test when they’re ready.

HSC has revamped its report cards as part of that effort. Instead of As and Bs, kids are graded on a scale of 1 to 4, with 4 being ​“mastery.” The report cards also have lots of narrative about how kids are doing on specific skills, such as plot, characterization, use of evidence, and ability to make claims.

The city plans to spread the mastery-based method to five schools: New Haven Academy, the Metropolitan Business Academy, Sound School, Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School and Wilbur Cross, New Haven’s largest high school. 

Staysniak (pictured) said whichever system schools change to, ​“we have to have students understand the language.” When kids at Metro get their PSAT scores, he said, some brush off the scores because they don’t get the purpose of the test.

The discussion offered some ambitious, sweeping solutions about how to overhaul grades, as well as a cheat sheet offering ​“baby steps to grading reform,” including never giving kids zeros for missed homework, and allowing time to reteach concepts and let kids retake tests.

After the proverbial bell rang, teachers packed into one classroom for a final brainstorming session. They collected recommendations to send to the school district’s central staff. Danny Silverman of Metropolitan Business Academy suggested teachers ask for more time out of their workday for teachers to share expertise with each other.

Another teacher called for replacing an unpopular district data fair with a teacher-led forum, where teachers would share ​“knockout lesson plans.”

Who found the district data fair useful? Low asked the crowd.

No one raised a hand.

Richard Therrien, the district’s science supervisor, who had asked to sit in on the morning’s forum, objected to the framing of the question.

Low said there was no point in asking the question another way, because the opinions were unanimous.

After the forum ended at noon, teachers milled around to continue trading ideas.

“This was awesome,” declared Marcella Monk Flake (pictured). The 35-year veteran teacher, who works with talented and gifted kids, was making her debut at EPIC. A native New Havener who attended city public schools, she said came to the forum for solutions to the city’s alarming achievement gap and ​“criminal dropout rate.”

She pronounced herself ​“reinvigorated” by the morning’s discussion. ​“Just being with other professionals in the district, this is wonderful,” she said.

“The sense of not being alone,” and being supported by teachers from different schools, grades and content areas, ​“is empowering and reaffirming,” said Crecia Cipriano, who teaches French at Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School.

Low said EPIC grew from a group of teachers who were meeting informally in a book group to discuss emerging ideas in education. They realized there was a need to expand the group to reach more of their colleagues.

In conversations with teachers, Low said, he has gathered that ​“one of the main things they’re missing is time to talk to teachers about teaching and learning” Amid all the testing and class prep, ​“we don’t get it.”

“Getting together with other colleagues is not something that happens,” he said. ​“If it’s not going to be facilitated for us — we’re going to facilitate it” ourselves.