If you were to walk into the classroom of a teacher who was outstanding in serving all Of your students, those who might be marginalized, struggling, neurodiverse, or recent immigrants, what exactly would you see? What actions distinguish teachers who are especially effective with our most vulnerable students?
Over the past four years, I have come to enjoy this question immensely, both because it seems so urgently important and because it is a problem. Through my work as director of MIT Teaching Systems LaboratoryI’ve asked the question of teachers, school leaders, coaches, researchers, and experts of all persuasions (think: learning science, instruction, teacher education, culturally responsive teaching, etc.), and it usually elicits more pauses and questions than answers. .
Part of the challenge of the question is that it is easier to think of classroom instruction in terms of lessons or curriculum units rather than moments or actions. I can show you my lesson plans, my binders, my Google Classroom pages, but it’s harder to show you a time when a young person felt challenged, included, or inspired.
So, in the fall of 2019 and winter of 2020, I worked with a talented team of videographers and producers to travel to schools across the country—in Indiana, California, Florida, and Massachusetts—to capture short documentary videos of classroom teachers. We weren’t looking for “perfect” teachers or ideal environments, just real classrooms where we thought we could see special and important work being done.
Our primary guide for looking at these learning environments was a book by Vanderbilt University Professor Rich Milner called Start where you are, but don’t stop there, which offers an opportunity-focused teaching framework. Opportunity-Centered Teaching is the practice of viewing relationships, community-building, identity development, and student well-being as the foundations of rigorous academic learning.
In our summary of that work (also inspired by University of Southern California professors Robert Filback and Alan Green), we see opportunity-focused teaching as a new way to correct four tensions which are often unbalanced in schools: asset framing and deficit thinking, fairness and equality, awareness and avoidance, and context-focused and context-neutral.
For example, it is very common for teachers to see their students through a deficit lens: What don’t my students know and what can’t they do? Now, those are actually pretty essential questions! There are good things we want all students to learn about the world around them, and we need to track student progress toward those goals. But there’s a lot to learn by understanding student strengths: What are my students’ distinctive talents and unique knowledge, and how can they leverage those assets to do great things? Both questions are important to educators, but we tend to think too much about the shortcomings and not enough about the strengths.
Similarly, in schools, we focus a lot on giving all students the same thing (equity), and perhaps not enough on giving every student what they need (equity). We often forget to discuss the real impacts of various life experiences and circumstances. Again, sometimes that’s good; it is a wonderful thing to dwell on the various wonders of what makes our humanity universal. But too often, we simply avoid discussing identity-related topics. In a world dominated by race, class, caste, and difference, we do not do enough in schools to confront these realities candidly and with a mindful conscience.
And finally, sometimes it makes sense to set aside our local contexts and explore the universality of a particular content area, like math, physics, or social sciences. But too often, we fail to focus on our local contexts and explore all the assets that our neighborhoods and communities could bring to our educational mission. Our local histories, the green spaces in our neighborhood, and the extended families of our students offer all kinds of academic connections that can enrich our studies. Of course it’s wonderful to study astronomy and look up at the same stars we all see, but a rich curriculum will also make room for studying the unique issues, people, and history of the neighborhoods around our schools.
These were the strains (lenses, if you will) that we placed in front of our cameras and audio recorders when we visited classrooms across the country three years ago.
In Indiana, Ronni Moore, a high school educational leader, showed us how she listens to struggling students for clues that can help her better serve them. She told us how she went from asking herself, “What’s wrong with this kid?” to ask, “What happened to this child?” We watched her try little micro-experiments with her students: With one student who needed a lot of redirection, she went the extra mile to increase her positive actions, even little things, like, “Hey, I like that jacket,” to build the foundation of a relationship. .
In Florida, Angela Daniel, a high school instructional coach, told us about a lesson from her father: “If you ever want something from a child, charge him first.” From that parental wisdom she followed a teaching practice of naming students’ strengths. “As soon as I see a nugget of brilliance in a student, they get accused a lot,” Daniel shared. He might accuse his students of being kind, brave, or exceptionally bright. In her advisory period, we watched her teach her students how to write a compliment for someone else and then say it out loud. What a great writing message. What an excellent life skill to share. What a great way to generate ripples of positivity in a school community.
In Boston, Neema Avashia, a civics teacher, showed us how she teaches stories of loss and difference in a unit on Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, also known as “Black Wall Street.” If her students learn anything about the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, it’s the destruction of one of the most prosperous black business districts in 20th-century America. In Avashia’s class, the focus was equally on what those entrepreneurial entrepreneurs built, what was created, and what was lost. As Avashia said in the documentary, “If I’m not talking about race, and the way that race is affecting [my students] and their families, then I am blinded to the very real issues that we are all struggling with.”
Probably the most ambitious instruction we observed was at Latitude High School in Oakland, California, where a team of physics teachers led their students in building a set of “tiny houses.” Students designed, measured, and built real, livable tiny houses that could be implemented to address the epidemic of housing insecurity that students saw and felt around them, sometimes firsthand, in their community every day.
We have put all these stories together in a 30 minute documentary called “We have to do something different”. The film weaves together the stories of teachers from across the country and demonstrates how they use these teaching practices in real schools with real students. Again, these are not perfect teachers. They do not have access to exceptional resources nor do they possess abilities beyond their reach. Anyone can learn, perhaps even adopt, the practices and approaches they use with their students.
We hope that educators will watch the film in groups and discuss it. We kept the length to 32 minutes so that educators could view the film and report back at a faculty meeting, professional learning community meeting, or other typical meeting. The free film can be requested at somethingdifferentfilm.comwhere there are also resources such as discussion guides and slides for facilitators.
The film is an optimistic portrait of teachers doing everything they can to make schools work better for all young people. Teachers who have seen the film tell us that they all found some specific movement or approach that they can try in context.
Since much of the footage was shot in the winter of 2020, it’s also a remarkable time capsule. It is one of the last pre-pandemic images captured in American classrooms. It reminds us of what we have lost in the last three years, while pointing the way to a brighter future.
