The little ASTL moments

Many of the biggest or most profound changes that happened in my thinking and reflection on
my practice came from moments that in retrospect seem very smallso small that it is difficult or
impossible to remember precisely the source of the quotation, or even the topic of the main
conversation. Sometimes I cannot even remember which class produced which idea In Inquiry into
Practice, an offhand comment was offered in a reading or classroom discussion to the effect of: if you
arent changing your practice constantly, are you really teaching for twenty years? Or are you teaching
the same year twenty times? Given that I started as a long-term substitute before I started teaching,
there are problem sets I gave out this year that I have done for the sixth year in a row. I can even
remember which problems are incorrect in the textbook, and why, before the students even set about
them. I am slightly horrified with myself as I see myself doing this for a variety of subjects I teach, and I
look forward to spending some time during the Extended School Year this summer devising new
strategies for upping my game in response to the things I have learned. Designing and Assessing
Teaching and Learning pushed me to change up my lesson structures a bit in many of my classes, and I
look forward to continuing to adapt the collaborative thinking routines from that class into routines that
will actually work for the numbers and odd structures of the classes I teach.
Another significant moment for my thinking, though it was a small one, came from what must
have been an off-hand comment in a reading for one of our classes, one so insubstantial that I can no
longer remember its provenance, though I believe it came from Educational Change (it might have been
Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012) . Within the reading, the author noted that the way we talk about school in
and around our students can send powerful but subtle messages about our attitudes toward school in
general. This struck a chord in part because it was something I had argued at my school for a long time.

Many youth-workers in residential settings and schools do countdowns until the end of
whatever program is being offered: therapy, summer camp, school, etc. I learned early on from a
mentor that this is a terrible idea, but was left to define the reasoning for this on my own. Years later as
a teacher, I found myself pestering my coworkers and students not to do this, and had to define my
reasons for doing so. The obvious ones about the problem of this with youths with attachment disorders
came first, but I landed also on explanations like, what kind of message does that send about school
and how we as staff members see it, if were all just counting down until its over? I found sympathy
with our reading then, that said that if we celebrate Fridays and bemoan Mondays too much, arent we
sending a similar message to our students? How can we expect them not to phone it in, when were
making statements or reinforcing the idea that were just in it for the paycheck, anyway?
From the distant pull of last summer, Taggarts (Taggart & Wilson, 2005) classification came
back to me, and I noticed that I was struggling to get my colleagues to see things from the dialectical
level of analysis that was becoming ever more common for me.
A final off-the-cuff teaching moment that stuck in my head came in Educational Change,
wherein Professor Ra paraphrased one of her own professors in response to the oft-repeated canard
that the purpose of education is to prepare our students for jobs in the real world. She quoted, If our
economy is built on the backs of studentsIm not sure I want to be a part of that. I was, as I said,
disturbed, in a good way by that comment, and I spent a good deal of the next week thinking it
through. It reminded me somewhat of the famous Mario Savio speech, wherein he said, the faculty
are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't
mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up
being bought by some clients of the University (Savio, 1964). It always struck me that the education
is for jobs line was deeply politically conservative, even as I hear it constantly from conservatives and

liberals alike (education politics do make for strange bedfellows, after all), and so could I find an
appropriately liberal (for my taste) explanation for the purpose of education?
The more I thought, the more I remembered a recent lecture I had given on the basics of
Marxism to my students, and I had to wonder: if our students have something of an educational capital,
how exactly would one return that from the educational bourgeoisie to the educational proletariat,
being the student body themselves? The answer is obvious: give power over their education back to the
students by engaging them in the learning process(yes, constructivism), making them more active
participants, and helping them to be more actively engaged in education policy and curriculum structure
at the local and state level. I found myself becoming way more political in my teaching than I had even
been before, but it was for the purpose of getting my students to be disturbed, in a good way, and to
get them active in their education. Why does the government teach you what they do? I ask my
government students, and what goal do they have in mind as a result of that? Seeking the answer for
that question is the most passionate Ive ever seen myself teaching, and I hope they got as much from
the conversation as I did.
As a Teacher/Researcher
The PBA for Educational Change, the equity audit and subsequent analysis and position paper,
was I think a liberating moment for me. For years, I had been begging to be allowed on our institutions
research team. At the last meeting before my mentor and principal left last year, she brought me along
to the meeting, but the senior administrators never invited me back. I dont need an invite to do
institutional researchI can set my own agenda, collect the relevant data, and report out the findings
whenever I care to put in the effort to do so. Somehow this had never clicked before, but I feel great
about doing so with the remainder of my time.

The day before that PBA was due, I found myself running the data on our SOL scores and
proving to my own satisfaction that our summer program was massively short-changing the students
who took it. I wrote it up and took it to my principal, who begged me not to show anyone outside the
school we then set about the task of reforming the program so that the discrepancy was less likely
(though it probably cant be fixed to my own satisfaction, which is to no ones surprise, Im sure). Lesson
learnedshow up with the data analysis in hand, and you can get most of what you want.
My Talk and Teacher Leadership
Heres a case study in how I see the ASTL program having changed the course of my career and
development as a teacher: In January, I got an e-mail from a former principal and mentor, relaying a
request from our accrediting body for speakers for our spring conference. At the time, I was feeling like
my chances of being admitted to PhD programs were slim and I needed things to pad my rsum for the
following year when I intended to apply again (in truth, my first acceptance came in the mail that
afternoon). The theme for the conference was making a difference in our classrooms and they had a
list of proposed topics, one of which was similar to one of the biggest pedagogical problems I face at my
school: how do I teach multiple grade levels or content areas in the same classroom at the same time?
This has been less problematic this year, but in the past Ive had concurrent Algebra 2 and Pre-Calculus
classes, and Chemistry with Physics is a very regular occurrence, not to mention US History with US
Government. I wanted to share some of the ideas, timelines, and lessons I had come up with in the past
with other teachers, and I wanted the other teachers at the conference to give me feedback on what
they were doing with this problem, as well.
I worked hard on the presentation, which came right in between the PBA assignments for
Educational Change and Education and Culture, and structured it well. Somewhere in the design of the
assignment, I started to notice my politics were getting into the presentation: I was including lesson

plans on genocide, human rights, oppressed people and the struggle for independence and human
rights. In my best teacher self that I was trying to present to the best teachers and administrators for
what I do in the state, I was heavily bringing in issues of cultures coming together and social justice. This
had never been a hallmark of my teaching before, but after engaging in more critical reflection on
teaching, culture, and the role of pedagogy in the lives of our students, it couldnt help but shine
through. Additionally, I knew that most of my audience was full of Southern Virginia conservatives, and I
wanted them to feel, as we said in Educational Change, disturbedin a good way.
The talk went well, but was mostly for an audience of administrators, rather than classroom
teachers. I had hoped to present mostly for teachers because I wanted to generate some kind of data as
to what they were doing in their classrooms. I was hoping to establish something of a starting point for
further research into the effectiveness of different practices, or at least what kinds of pressures teachers
were under and how they responded. Unfortunately, my talk was heard by only one or two teachers
who, like me, teach these classes at the secondary level. However, no fewer than five of the
administrators present have so far asked me to repeat the talk at their schools. Ive been invited by two
larger systems to give the talk at their August orientations, and one of our local competitors offered me
a job (in jest, I think). To pat myself on the back a little, as a foundation of a larger point, I was the
youngest presenter at the conference by at least a decade or more and one of only two teachers who
presented, and yet that night at the dinners and parties, I was getting way more attention than any
other presenter had. The larger point is thisthough we have frequently talked about ASTL students as
moving into teacher leaderships positions, it has been hard to manifest that idea in my role that seems
both natural and right. And yet, as I started planning a statewide committee on how to blend curricula
most effectively and to have teachers from all of the schools in our accrediting body to come together
without administrators, just to plan as we know bestit started to really, truly feel like I was
experiencing and exhibiting teacher leadership. Somewhere along the way from being a smartass in

mine and others classrooms who was saying things just to rile people up, I ended up forming something
of the beginnings of an ad hoc PLC among disparate teachers in the far corners of the state, and I can
hardly wait to see where it leads this summer.
Mr. Last Year Teacher
I wrote briefly in my Autobiographical Study about a book that I cannot stop reading. I found it
tucked away in the books app on my iPad and to this day I have no idea how it go there (likely
downloaded and immediately forgotten from a post in a teacher forum, though googling has yielded no
results). The book is Mr. Last Year Teacher (Gracy, 2013), and as it is self-published, it is both full of
idiosyncrasies and impossible to trace online. It is written from the perspective of a teacher in his fifth
year, as I am, who is certain that this must be his last year of teaching, as I also now am certain. Gracy
teaches at a Catholic high school in California and wrote weekly updates to his friends on his thought
process, pedagogy, and philosophical musings about teaching. He compiled these weekly e-mails into a
narrative that traces three fourths of a school year as he wrestles with ideas about behavior
management, student rapport, teacher responsibility, and how to fit into a faculty full of people who
probably shouldnt be teaching, but are.
In short, he takes different levels of analysis to the job, and is motivated by his status as a last
year teacher to do so unflinchingly. From his perspective, he is both an insider and an outsider with
nothing to gain or lose. As I said before, I think this has a quality somewhat like the quote, falsely
attributed to Camus, Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee? Instead, Should I quit teaching, or
Deciding to quit, or to get up every day and teach, forces you in either decision to account for your
reasoning for so doing and to closely tie your practice with its theoretical underpinnings.
By now it should be clear that I feel that I have a similar perspective on my teaching practice, as I
am three short months away from leaving the classroom, perhaps permanently. This position has given

me a similarly nothing to lose mentality that has enabled me to take more risks with lesson planning
and structure and with my place within the politics of the workplace.
Going Forward
As I am leaving the classroom in August, the opportunities I have to continue to progress in the
direction I have been going are somewhat different from the usual ASTL student. However, I dont think
that that means I am permanently done with our particular blend of inquiry, global-mindedness, and
best practices.
Of the classes I have signed up for next semester, the one I am most excited for is Comparative
Education. We discussed education and its relation to culture extensively in ASTL, of course, but I am
excited to dig more deeply into the ways in which cultures inform and produce different education
systems and norms in different countries throughout the world. In this sense, I intend to keep moving
forward and exploring the theme of education and culture in the next year. Perhaps I will find an excuse
to travel abroad and study those education systems directly, if I could be so lucky.
As mentioned above, I dont think I am quite finished yet in working with our accrediting body
and the corps of schools that work with it in Virginia. Another class I am taking this fall will be on
managing large sets of educational data, and I am aware that our body has a quality services committee
that has a data set in dire need of cleaning up. I intend to offer my services to the committee, if, as I
presume, the class will require me to take some hands on approach to the topic with real data. And as I
said before, I think I will continue to work as a teacher leader by creating a PLC (what Ive wanted to do
for a long time for our schools) of likeminded teachers beyond just my own school in order to work on
issues related to curriculum in our classroomsthe invitations for such a project are already starting to
come in, and Im eager to do as much as I can while I still can.

References
Armstrong, E. A., & Hamilton, L. T. (2013). Paying for the Party. Harvard University Press.
Gracy, C. (2013). Mr. Last Year Teacher.
Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school.
Teachers College Press.
Savio, M. (1964) Sproul Hall sit-in address. Retrieved from
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariosaviosproulhallsitin.htm
Taggart, G. L., & Wilson, A. P. (2005). Promoting reflective thinking in teachers: 50 action strategies.
Corwin Press.