Co-Founder, Challenge Success Senior Lecturer at Stanford University
When
I was a high school English teacher, I longed to know whether I was truly reaching my students. Were they falling in love with poetry and literature the way that I did when I was in high school? If they weren’t exactly falling in love, did the works spark empathy as students encountered characters and worlds far different from their own? Could they read critically, ask good questions, and write cogently about how the stories related to their lives? These questions eventually led me to graduate school where I studied student engagement. For my dissertation, I conducted an ethnography from September to June where I shadowed five students who had been identified by school leaders as “engaged.” I attended a full day of classes each week with each student, went to after school activities, and talked about the students’ experiences and connection to learning. What I found was a bit depressing: many of these so-called “engaged” students were actually just going through the motions of learning. They were “doing school” – playing the game, acting their part to get the grades and test scores they believed they needed to be successful – but not retaining skills or knowledge. They were obsessing over performance rather than mastery, often at great cost to their mental and physical well-being. Eventually I used this research to help launch Challenge Success, an organization that partners with schools, families, and communities to broaden the definition of success and to implement research-based strategies so that all kids are healthy and engaged with learning. At Challenge Success, we share the CTTL’s belief that the best way to improve outcomes for students is to collaborate with teachers, school leaders, and families to translate and use research to inform policies and daily practices. We know that research has to be relevant, accessible, and applicable to the people who work directly with kids, and that all of these stakeholders need time, resources, and plenty of support to be able to effectively translate the research into practice. In our work, we partner directly with teachers, helping them to apply evidence-based best practices to truly engage students in learning; to implement authentic projects and alternative assessment strategies; to think critically about homework practices; and to facilitate student balance and well-being within the school environment. We share research with families about protective factors known to promote physical and emotional health for youth, including the importance of maintaining daily playtime, downtime, and family time, as well as the critical importance of sleep. We help school leaders collect student and parent survey data to assess their school’s strengths as well as specific areas to consider targeting for change – for example, the bell schedule, homework policies, or student wellness programs and practices such as advisory and mindfulness. We invite everyone to consider broader definitions of “success” and explore how we communicate the values we cherish such as life-long learning, connection, critical thinking, kindness, and purpose. We encourage all of our constituents to engage in their own informal research, collecting evidence in their classrooms, schools, and homes to inform intentional change and better support our kids on their various paths. Like the CTTL, we know that every school community has different needs and priorities, concerns and goals – a different narrative, or story, to tell. We advocate listening carefully to these stories, considering them alongside other data, and identifying research-backed strategies that can be implemented to maximize benefits to students, both immediately and for the long-term. We encourage teachers, students, and school leaders to reflect on those change efforts (both big and small) and share their stories of successes and challenges with others. By engaging in this cycle of both using evidence and contributing to evidence, educators also model the engagement they hope to inspire. We are honored to introduce Volume 4 of the Center for Transformative Teaching and Learning’s “Think Differently and Deeply.” The articles compiled here illustrate the power of storytelling to create change. They concretely demonstrate how research can be applied directly to classroom practices to make real, intentional changes to benefit students. These stories help us to broaden our understanding of “research” and “data” and show that this work is “do-able” and even potentially fun. We hope you’ll find this volume as inspiring as we do and consider it a call to action.
Denise Pope, Ph.D., is co-founder of Challenge Success, a Senior Lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School of Education and co-author of “Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids.”
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