Last year, four teachers—one at the middle school level, three in elementary school—from District 7 in Wood Dale, Ill., spent a few late afternoons and evenings visiting students at home with their families, the Daily Herald reports. Superintendent John Corbett said the goal was to help with academic performance, but what they think they got, based on anonymous surveys, was a lot more.
“I felt excited, good and great because you came to my house, because you could see my house and I hope it happens again next year,” one student wrote. Not one single comment, in the survey responses chosen for inclusion in the story by the Daily Herald, had anything to do with performance on standardized tests. No one said, as far as we can tell, “Oh, you helped me improve my standardized test scores, and that makes me soooo happy.”
What you see in a picture
Suppose one of these District 7 teachers walked into a family’s home and saw the scene above. She knows the family has healthy food on the table. She sees parents who love their children. She has a sense of where her student lives, that she has a toddler for a sister, who might draw some attention away from her mother, and so on. The teacher would also notice the cleanliness in the house and on the table and of the eating utensils. She’s getting a sense of what her student wakes up to every morning and goes to sleep with every night, the situation in her house.
“I think everything indicates it was all very positive,” the paper quoted Corbett as saying. “Teachers reported a very positive experience, and the board was in complete agreement to continue.” He said most teachers who participated will do so again during the 2012-13 school year, and the district hopes to add a few more volunteers.
This speaks well for the district and its teachers, and although no names were mentioned in the Daily Herald’s story, I applaud them anonymously. It shouldn’t take too long to see noticeable gains in certain statistics, especially since Illinois’s official performance data is being released to schools soon.
But the statistics the state will report aren’t really the point. What we all care about is learning, which is hard to measure on a test, but I can assure you, a great deal of learning took place during these visits. To see kids and their families on their own turf, rather than only in a classroom, where most kids probably don’t want to be any longer than they have to be there, was a learning experience both for the teacher and the student. And the line between who’s the teacher and who’s the student gets a little blurry at this point. It’s better that way.
Teaching is more than the classroom. It involves the community. Especially when the economy is broken. The culture of the teachers is changing. It is changing for sure.
Those are the words of one teacher leader found in a well researched book released in May entitled Creating Solidarity Across Diverse Communities: International Perspectives in Education by Christine E. Sleeter and Encarnacion Soriano (Teacher’s College Press, $52.95). The authors were researching the practice of teachers visiting students in their homes, as well as other practices.
The realities are numerous here: Yes, the economy is “bad” for many people who have stopped even looking for work. Yes, our communities are becoming more and more diverse. Yes, some kids who are struggling at home will bring their problems to school with them and find trouble focusing on school work. Yes, some family situations require intervention, which would never be found out without an actual home visit, and students might never get the help they need.
But what this does, without any math formulas or bubble-in tests, is to create learning opportunities for our children. Learning happens as a natural part of the process when teachers become involved in their students’ lives. They build shared experiences. The experiences aren’t in a classroom, but they create learning all the same. And this is more lasting learning than some math lesson they would get in a textbook or on some Internet site.
Why on Earth would we want to deprive kids of this kind of learning on purpose? Even if we had more districts like District 7 in these trying times, where teachers crafted learning experiences out of thin air, where kids took part in their own learning, we still can’t do it if kids don’t have real teachers. Teachers create these opportunities, these moments in our childhood, like nothing else we have in our lives. And guess what? Kids learn. It’s as natural as the sun rising every morning.
The drive for virtual schools
A recent survey by the Fordham Institute said 32 percent of people thought online schools were a bad idea, and 40 percent of Americans thought they were good but only when used as a last resort for kids who were struggling in traditional schools. I take it this applies to online elementary and secondary schools, where relationships are important, not to online universities in the huge effort known as “Massive Open Online Courses,” now running at several universities, including our nation’s most elite schools.
If that assumption is true, what a short-sighted conclusion Fordham’s report reached, as I brought up in a post on these pages! We see teachers all the time like those in District 7. They have the support of their school districts, their students, and their students’ parents. Even the very, very best online lesson ever written would not produce anywhere near the amount of learning that occurred in one year of home visits. I guarantee it.
In fact, take the thousands of lectures produced by the Khan Academy and combine the total learning that occurred in all of them, multiplied by the millions of people who have spent their time watching them, and you would not equal what happened in District 7 over the course of one year and with much less money. Teachers were paid a stipend, as if they were running an after-school activity like basketball or newspaper. That’s the total expenditure here. And I bet many teachers would do this without any extra pay, once word gets out that it works.
With virtual schools, there’s no way you can get this. You’re basically admitting defeat and saying, “We are not even going to give teachers a chance to create this learning.” Does anybody even think about this for one minute?!
And the situation with those struggling kids mentioned in the Fordham survey is even worse. Research cited in the book I cited above definitely indicates that those kids who are struggling in school, who are learning English as they try to become part of America’s increasingly diverse communities, they are the ones who benefit most from this practice. Of course, they had more room for improvement, but they blazed a trail up that improvement ladder more than would have happened with just online practice drills for a certain type of math problem.
How can we know learning like this is being created out there and still hold on to our Utopian view of online schools? Some kids out there actually like their teachers. They like going to school. And some teachers can and do build memories like this. Making memories is the same thing as learning, folks. Get those brains working, changing the internal wiring, and you build a lifelong learner.