3.

Kathleen Cushman’s innovative way to educate teachers: Listen to students

The spotlight in school reform has turned to teacher education. Some reformers believe
that tightly scripted curriculum is the best defense against inadequately prepared teachers.
Some, like Doug Lemov of Uncommon Schools, prescribe specific behaviors without
which even well-educated teachers cannot be effective in classrooms. Some focus on
combating underlying societal problems like poverty and discrimination.

Into that mix, the national nonprofit organization What Kids Can Do, Inc. (WKCD) has
launched a fresh approach: listening to the voices of students themselves.

In nine books published between 2001 and 2010, WKCD writer Kathleen Cushman has
interviewed adolescents around the country about some of the most persistent challenges
that educators face in schools. Stanford University, Harvard University, and the
University of Michigan are among the teacher education programs that use these books to
help new teachers understand the psychology and circumstances of their adolescent
students.

Cushman asked New York City students about the breakup of traditional large public
high schools into “educational complexes” of small schools for WKCD’s 2001 book The
Schools We Need: Creating Small High Schools that Work for Us. The slim paperback is
still in demand nine years later, as the practice of large school breakups spreads
nationwide.

Fires in the Bathroom (The New Press, 2003, 2005) and Fires in the Middle School
Bathroom (The New Press, 2008) both offer students’ “advice for teachers” about
classroom culture. Before she began that research for What Kids Can Do, Cushman asked
new teachers what they wished they could ask the students they faced in urban
classrooms. High school students gave their answers in chapters like “Knowing Students
Well” and “Respect, Liking, Trust, and Fairness.” Cushman and co-author Laura Rogers
organized the responses of middle school students into chapters like “Everything Is Off
Balance” and “A Teacher on Our Side.”

Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery (Jossey-Bass,
2010) goes deeper into student motivation, effort, and mastery of difficult material.
WKCD’s student contributors focused on “deliberate practice,” analyzing how they
learned in areas like sports and the arts, then making connections to academic learning.

In Sent to the Principal (Next Generation Press, 2005), students turned to matters that
school principals usually control, such as dress codes, discipline, and school climate.

Two more books resulting from Cushman’s interviews for What Kids Can Do offer
advice from first-generation college students for others like themselves. First in the
Family: Your High School Years deals with getting into college and First in the Family:
Your College Years addresses making it through to graduation (Next Generation Press,
2005, 2006).