Experiencing Cognitive Dissonance by Reading about Standards, Creativity, and ELA

I’ve been thinking about what happens when knowledge coalesces. You know—like when you learn a word you never heard before, then suddenly it pops up everywhere. Like this year, my 5th time through The Scarlet Letter, students asked about a word I didn't remember ever encountering before: nugatory. Last night it popped up in a Jeeves and Wooster video I was watching with my husband. (I almost missed it, because in a posh British accent it sounded like "nuga tree.") Sometimes those connections are easy, magical, and exhilarating to discover, and sometimes they take a lot more work. That's how my professional development reading has been this week.  

First, if you are a 5th-12th grade English language arts teacher and you have not yet read Kelly Gallagher’s book In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom, run out and get it now. If you haven’t read him before, it is a great introduction to all the rest of his past books, and if you have, it is just as important—adding new ideas (specific assignments as well as philosophical developments) while reviewing old ones. Definitely motivated me to add his new book out this year (co-authored with another of my ELA gurus, Penny Kittle) to my to-be-read list. It seems most of the rest of the online ELA community is reading this summer, but I think that will have to wait until next summer while I give this one some time to work its way into my pedagogy. Gallagher begins and ends with the title, traveling in between the themes of what is good about the current standards and where they fall short, encouraging teachers to stay true to “what works” in growing students into mature readers, writers, speakers, and listeners by supplying many examples from his own (continuing) classroom experience of 30 years, informed by his continued growth, plans, and adaptations to circumstances.

After my last several professional development books on broader topics—instructional coaching, standards based grading and assessment in the differentiated classroom, and creativity—all important and stretching topics—this was like speaking my mother tongue again after traveling to exotic lands and wrapping my tongue around learned sounds and syntaxes.

A little metacognition here—I think it is important to watch myself encounter some cognitive dissonance as I evaluate, synthesize, and apply some texts that both reinforce and counter each other--because it's exactly what I hope my students experience in my classroom. That happened for me with the book on standards-based assessment in the differentiated classroom that I responded to last week here, and 2 new books—Gallagher’s specifically on ELA teaching, and Tony Wagner’s 2012 best seller Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World. 

Standards are important, but none will be perfect, and they will come and go, so don’t get too attached. Gallagher gave me official permission to use what is helpful about the current standards, and to go beyond, when that is in the best interest of students. That freed me from a guilt riptide of standards adherence and documentation I was feeling from Fair Isn’t Always Equal. On the agreement side, Fair Isn’t Always Equal also emphasized articulating the goals and providing a variety of ways for students to get there, and to ascertain that they have. (Gallagher suggested 4 alternate, “In a perfect world” standards for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. His standard for reading is “What percentage of your students can walk into a bookstore [or visit goodreads.com] and know where to find books that interest them?” [188]). The book on creativity intersected with both the book on standards-based assessment and on what works in the ELA classroom in several ways, including the question of how to create standards, rubrics, and assessments for creativity, and what that looks like in the English language arts classroom. Wagner addresses that in chapter 5, “Innovating Learning.” Here are 2 places where Gallagher directly addresses those concerns: 

“It is through literature, [Judith] Langer notes [in Envisioning Literature 1995], that ‘students learn to explore possibilities and consider options; they gain connectedness and seek vision. They become the type of literate, as well as creative, thinkers that we’ll need to learn well at college, to do well at work, and to shape discussions and find solutions to tomorrow’s problems’” (59).

“Standardization rarely leads to excellence. When the curriculum is narrowed into a sameness, when we adopt a ‘one size fits all’ approach, creativity suffers and students whose talents are not valued by the tests risk being marginalized. At a time of globalization—when it is crucial that we nurture creativity and intellectual risk taking in our students—this latest round of tests is having the opposite effect by standardizing our students. Instead of ‘racing to the top,’ our students are traveling in herds” (187). (I am fortunate to teach at a private international school where standardized testing of the standards is not mandated, but where PSAT, SAT, ACT, and AP scores are still a currency that makes college more accessible.)

So I am still working on synthesizing all these thoughts about the role of standards in nurturing creativity as well as the skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in the English language arts classroom. But life is growth, so it’s good that I’m still growing. And it’s good that there are a few more weeks until I need to work this all back into my classroom. 

How are you making connections and growing this summer?