A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  We all know the downside of adolescent friendships: teens egg one another on to take stupid risks, to try drugs, drink, have sex, drive fast, and skip class. And those worries aren’t crazy. In one experiment, teenagers were asked to play a computer game that allowed for a variety of moves ranging in their level of riskiness. When teenagers were alone in the laboratory, they played it safe, choosing the low-risk moves. However, when there were other teens in the room, the subjects began veering toward the riskier options. They did this even though the other teens were quiet and did not play the game themselves. It seems that just the presence of peers has a powerful impact on teenagers, and it’s not always a good impact (for instance, when a teen drives faster than she should because her friends are in the car with her). But there’s another way to look at those data. The experiment shows that teenagers spur one another to action, which can be a good thing just as easily as it can be bad. What if being with pals incites a student to try a kind of fiction writing he’s never tried before, or to come up with new interpretation of a historical event?

  Harry Stack Sullivan, a prominent psychologist in the middle part of the twentieth century, argued that preteens use friendship to get relationship practice (how to confide in one another, give feedback, or respond to the emotional needs of someone else). More recently, researchers have shown that friendships and romantic relationships in adolescence provide further rehearsal for adulthood, giving teenagers essential practice for becoming spouses and parents.

  Taken together, the studies make one thing very clear: happiness during the teenage years rises and falls with the success of one’s social bonds. And it’s not only that teens are happier when they can spend a lot of their time with friends. Time spent with friends is often time well spent, because it gives teens a chance to develop skills that are key to a happy adult life.

  Why wouldn’t educators want to build on the emotional and intellectual energy kids at this age provide for one another? Instead of relegating social interactions to the edges of the educational process, why not bring them to the center? If students could talk to one another in class, and if they were encouraged to share personal experiences as a prelude to sharing ideas and knowledge, as they did during Sam’s check-in, maybe their intellectual experiences would seem more vibrant to them, and maybe they’d be less itchy to end class and get back to the hallways, cafeterias, and bathrooms.

  Sam may have stumbled onto the check-in as a way of getting his group started, but he stumbled onto something worth keeping. That first check-in introduced the group to a concept that lay at the core of the IP: in this new model, friendship would become an ally rather than an impediment to learning.

  That first check-in was longer than later ones, and because of the scavenger hunt, the rest of the school’s first period ended while Mirabelle was telling us about her summer. Mirabelle was a lively and energetic student, with lustrous brown hair and blue-gray eyes. She was passionate about various things outside of school (including Project Sprout, which she had worked on since she was a freshman) but not very interested in academics. She had trouble focusing and sticking with things, and though her grades were fine, she often struggled, particularly in math and sciences. She had a self-diagnosed math phobia.

  She was telling us about her trip to Africa when the first-period bell rang. She stopped midsentence, and everyone began to push their chairs back and get up. Tim may even have made it to the door. Then there was a pause. Everyone froze, a little awkwardly, not knowing what to do.

  “No periods here, guys,” I said.

  “Jesus,” said Dominic, in his high-pitched voice. Dominic had long, wavy blond hair and very light blue eyes, and often looked like he was in a daze. His voice was strikingly high and commanded attention in an unusual way, and his adventurousness and fun sense of humor meant he had lot of friends at school. Unfortunately, he was severely dyslexic, and he failed many of his classes. On top of his learning difficulties, he bucked at any sign of authority and was disgusted by arbitrary rules. Until he signed up for the Independent Project, dropping out had been a serious possibility (with his friends and his place on the soccer team being the main things that had kept him in school so far). “We’re like sheep,” said Dominic, and everyone laughed.

  For the rest of the day, when a bell rang, people would cut off in the middle of a sentence or start to put things away and shuffle outside, before realizing there was nowhere else to go. It took us a long time to outgrow the long-ingrained habit of dropping everything at the sound of a chime.

  But that’s exactly why we had a week of de-orientation: so that we could undo some of the bad that had been done, and open up to some new ways of working, thinking, and learning. I believed that all kids could work hard, be curious, be passionate about learning, focus on their interests, collaborate, push one another, teach one another, and be responsible for their education. But I created the de-orientation week because I also knew that they had spent a dozen or more years being told what to learn and how to learn it; being encouraged to work in isolation, to not ask questions out of turn, to not critique peers, to learn but not teach, and being told that being interested in what they were learning was not particularly important. And I figured those twelve years could not be undone in a heartbeat.

  The very first step in de-orientating was to read a children’s story. Mostly I wanted us to do things together, and so for the rest of the week we’d be doing games and exercises. I wasn’t the teacher, I wasn’t in charge, and I didn’t want to lead the whole time. But I knew the transition would have to be gradual. So I thought it was okay to start with me reading a story.

  The book was Many Moons, by James Thurber. It’s about a little princess who becomes ill, and a desperate king who will do anything to make her better. The princess says that the only thing that will make her well again is having the moon. The king seeks the help of all his most intelligent and powerful men—the mathematician, the magician, and the wise man—and yet none of them can come up with a solution. The king is entirely bereft, until the court jester comes along and suggests the king ask the little princess how to get the moon. The little princess provides an ingenious solution; she says that the moon is made of gold and is the size of a thumbnail, and so the king has the moon made for her. But then the king realizes that she will see the real moon in the sky that night, and again he asks all his wisest men what to do. None of them has a solution, and again the king is completely beside himself, until, once again, the court jester suggests the king ask the princess. The princess deftly explains that, just like when you cut a fingernail and a new one grows back, the same is true of the moon, and everyone is happy.

  I read them that story for a few reasons. First, because sometimes the people who are supposed to have all the answers, like teachers or the wise men, don’t. And sometimes the established methods for gaining those answers (the king asking the wise men, traditional schooling) are misguided. And sometimes, the someone who has the right methods (the court jester) or the right answer (the little princess) surprises us. Most important, it is only through the interplay of those two elements—the clever method from the court jester and the clever answer from the princess—that we can move forward. In the Independent Project, we had to be both the court jester and the little princess.

  We also read the story because I loved the idea of starting this new school on a note of fiction. One of the things we were going to try to achieve in the coming semester was to get all of us, if we hadn’t already, to fall in love with reading. Although I worried that starting with a children’s story would make it seem like I was dumbing things down, or that we wouldn’t be pushing ourselves, my concern turned out to be misguided. Though we read many more books, some of them by Faulkner, Wilde, and Vonnegut, the moon remained, always, our unofficial logo.

  In his classic novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury tells a cautionary tale about the threat of censorship. I have always loved the story, but oddly, whenever I think of it, what comes to
mind is not from the book itself, but from Truffaut’s film version. The movie ends with an indelible scene in which all the characters are wandering around together, quietly reciting to themselves the book they’ve each chosen to memorize. They are doing this as an act of defiance—even if the pages are incinerated, what is on those pages cannot be stolen from them. But the political message of the book was never that vivid to me. Instead, even as a child, I had a very personal interpretation. For me, the scene captured the allure of becoming one with a book. I always imagined each of those characters finding such solace or pleasure in a book that they would literally make it part of themselves. I assumed that those characters felt the way I did: reading was not just a means to knowledge, but a delicious end in itself. I was a college student before I realized that all the other kids did not feel that way.

  And for the last thirty-five years, ever since I graduated from college myself, I’ve been trying to figure out why schools have such an amazing knack for ruining the one activity that is probably most important to the educated mind: reading. I’ve come to realize the main reason is that teachers simply don’t give students enough stories to read. Far too much time is spent on turgid, badly written textbook passages, and not nearly enough time is given over to reading good fiction. It is true that some highly educated people prefer nonfiction, and it is true that by adulthood it is important to read newspapers, history, instructions, essays, and policy statements. But the roots of literacy lie in narrative. Children tell and listen to stories long before they have any sense of the written word. And the way into literacy is through stories—the stories parents tell their children about the past, and the stories children tell one another (some true to life, some completely made up). Research from psychology and anthropology is quite clear on this—everyone everywhere in the world tells stories, and virtually all children like stories. We know, too, that stories are not only powerful and useful for the very young. Narrative continues, even in adulthood, to be the primary way that people make sense of the world and themselves, impart information to one another, and build up a shared culture.

  Eavesdropping on Sam as he planned that first day was a vicarious thrill for me. Long before, in the years when I taught elementary school, one of my favorite parts of teaching was to come up with fresh and intriguing ways to introduce a new learning activity. I wanted to surprise my students into thinking in a new way. I’ve never liked preset curricula, always drawn to the fun of coming up with something new. My ideas for teaching often came to me in the car, at breakfast, or as I walked down to get the mail. They were never very deliberate or studied.

  I am pretty sure that like my younger self, Sam was going partly on instinct. His hunch was that if he read something delightful to the other students, something he loved, he would begin the process of luring them into a new affinity for fiction. He chose Many Moons, I think, because it was whimsical yet profound. I have no idea if it mattered to him that the author, James Thurber, was one of the twentieth century’s masters of prose. But to me, this deceptively simple activity, reading something he loved to his friends, offered a whole new possibility for high school curricula—he was making books the spine of the educational experience.

  It has never made any sense at all to me that although reading is the most important intellectual habit you can acquire in school, students typically encounter only a handful of captivating short stories and novels during their whole four years in high school. Some have argued that as long as kids become real readers, everything else will fall into place. Sam added a twist to that idea, making reading a deeply social part of the day right from the start.

  One day during de-orientation everyone had to teach the group something. Mirabelle taught us how to make sandwiches, Tim taught us how to give a good massage, Sarah taught us how Pixar animates its films, and Dominic taught us how to whittle a spoon. Many of them had never really taught anything to other students. They had all given presentations before, but that’s very different from real teaching. Usually, when you give a presentation in class, the purpose is to test how well you know the material. But in our case, we had to make sure that, by the end of the lesson, each of the other seven students could actually do the thing that we were teaching. The real test here was how well the group learned.

  Teaching was something we were going to be doing a lot of in the coming semester, so I figured it would be good to start with simple skills like making a paper airplane. Better to start by teaching something simple very well than teaching something complex poorly.

  Then, after each person taught the group, everyone else had to go around and make one truly negative statement about that person’s teaching.

  “Tim, you did a lot of demonstrating, but you didn’t let us practice it enough—it’s difficult to learn just from watching.”

  “Sarah, you used a lot of jargon that maybe you know well but we don’t, so it was tricky to follow at times.”

  Giving a peer harsh criticism is really hard, especially within a group you don’t know very well. But if we were going to push each other and hold each other up to high standards in the coming semester, we needed to start practicing giving and receiving tough feedback.

  Over the last ten years or so, whenever I visit a school, I’ve noticed that on some wall the administration has put up a mission statement, a list of goals, or a motto identifying key values. Some say “Try your best” or “Aim high”; some say “A love of learning” or “Mutual respect”; and some include a focus on citizenship. Though the proclamations vary somewhat, there is one thing they all include in one version or another. Every single school espouses the idea that they are a “community of learners.” Though I see that written everywhere, here is what I see when I actually visit classrooms: a roomful of young people watching a teacher, a whiteboard, or a computer screen. However, a group of individuals all learning at the same time from the same source does not constitute a community.

  I have seen many classrooms where students are invited or commanded to work together—sometimes pairs are poring over a math sheet; sometimes teams are building models of molecules or planning a presentation on a period of history. They are working together, helping one another complete a project. Here is what I virtually never see: students actually learning from one another. So it’s not totally clear to me what makes those classrooms of people communities of learners, rather than just groups of students.

  Becoming a community of learners takes deliberate work, effort, and practice. As every teacher knows, it’s challenging to teach someone else something. Sometimes you know the material so well you find it hard to make it easy for a novice. Sometimes you don’t know it well enough to explain it (or show it) to another. Knowing what to say to help another person improve her work is tricky. Trickiest of all is learning how to get real help from others. When teachers give criticism about a paper, test, or presentation, students can either tune out (as many do) or listen. When they listen, it’s usually for one of three reasons: they feel they have to, they want a good grade, or they genuinely want to improve and trust the teacher to help them do so. Either way, most students assume that they must accept feedback from the teacher.

  Here’s what they don’t learn from such interactions: how to be part of a group of people who learn together. I have noticed in my classes at Williams that it makes students very uncomfortable to challenge one another in a serious way. They think it’s rude, or that it will in some way interfere with their friendships outside of class. And yet, by the time they graduate, if they don’t know how to actually be part of a community of learners, they will stagnate.

  It seems to me we give children far too much practice taking feedback from authority figures and not nearly enough practice giving and getting feedback from their equals. But I’ll be honest. When Sam told me he was going to insist, that first day, that everyone say something negative about the other students’ teaching, I was thinking, “Oh, Sammo. That’s not gonna happen.” He was so idealistic. He didn’t
know how intellectually reluctant most kids are. They’d rather be quiet than go out on a limb. Students wouldn’t want to seem “mean.” The kids from AP classes, I was sure, wouldn’t want to make the vocational students feel bad. The kids with bad grades wouldn’t want to sound pushy telling a smart kid what she did wrong. They were probably all so sick of criticism, the last thing they’d want was to create any themselves. I thought, “You’re gonna hit a wall with this one, buddy.”

  On the other hand, I agreed with him that for the school to have any lasting impact, students would have to learn how to learn from one another. And when he described the particular students in the group to me, I suddenly realized something else. By giving one another feedback about their teaching, they would all step onto common ground. Whoever was doing the teaching (smart kid, struggling kid, A student, near dropout) knew more than the others about his or her topic. And none of them had ever been teachers before. Here was something they couldn’t do without one another, and which none of them were particularly good at to begin with.

  Since we were going to spend the first part of the semester working in the sciences, I designed a game related to asking questions. For most of us, for most of our education, questions had been discouraged. They were often disruptions, especially when a teacher felt pressured to cram through a lot of material in a short period. Answers reigned supreme, and if you could get the answers without asking questions, then you were really ace. Further, to the degree that questions had ever been encouraged (perhaps more often when we were younger), they were treated as peripheral, a necessary shortcut to an answer—“Feel free to interrupt with questions.” “There’s no such thing as a bad question.”