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The study of my English 4/Advanced Essay Writing class brings to the fore the phenomenon I have come to call the co-construction of low achievement. That is, the school by its placement of ninth and tenth graders into low-level classes, the teachers by their low curricular and behavioral expectations for those students, and the students by their poor attendance, inappropriate classroom behavior, and/or poor work ethic collaborate in creating low achievement. The process results in a recursive and constantly reinforcing dynamic.
Admittedly, this construction does not begin when the students enter ninth grade: many of them come to high school with well-developed identities as low- and non-achievers. What concerns me is that once they are at our school, most programming and curricular decisions are based on that negative identity and almost everything works to concretize that identity. The way co-construction played out in the school lives of a majority of my Advanced Essay Writing students came to be the impetus to examine by own teaching of the class and a determination both to draw attention to the process of co-construction of low achievement at our school and to call for an examination of how to end that process.
The Gap Is In Our Expectations
Read a related article published by Newsday.
KQED audio archive: High School Honors Programs (requires Internet)
I participated in a discussion on the controversy over whether the inclusion of high school honors programs will lead to segregation. Scroll down to 10 am on Tuesday, July 16 to find an audio link to the radio program.
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First Homework assignment
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Part 1: Introduction to the Class "As much as my students’ positive attitudes about the class and their openness in writing about themselves excited me, I was equally excited about the class because of the challenges and opportunities it offered me as a teacher and a reformer. The class, one of several new senior electives, was the result of the most recent step in our English department’s detracking reform efforts...." - Advanced Essay Writing/First Days
- Personal lives
- Academic lives
- Students' reasons for being in the class
- English class anxieties
- Review of the Literature on the Construction of Low Achievement
- The Setting and The Study
Comparing Ray and Michaela's work
AP English at my school (requires Internet)
View class assignments and examples of student work.
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It is my purpose to chronicle the events of my first English 4/ Advanced Essay Writing class and to draw as clear and vivid a portrait as I can so that teachers of similar classes and urban school reformers will see as I have come to see that that class— brought almost to a standstill by low-achievers and reluctant workers— did not come about by accident. It was constructed over time by the students themselves, their teachers, and the school as an institution.
Read the entire paper (pdf)
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What role does the school play?
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Part 1, Continued: The WHAT of Co-Constructing Low Achievement "As I looked over my grade book at my students’ final quiz (13 F’s) and essay grades (14 F’s), I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Why had some students—even students whom I knew from ninth grade were capable of reading the book—done little or no reading outside the class? Why had students who had done the reading and knew I was counting on them to participate in the discussions been so reluctant to talk? What had happened with the essays on the book—why had so few students taken advantage of the opportunity to salvage their grade by working with their small groups on the essay assignment?" - Advanced Essay Writing/First term
- Reflections and Resolutions at the End of First Term
- Advanced Essay Writing/ Second term
- A Summer’s Reflections: My arrival at the idea of co-construction.
SOAPS strategy
Sample style sheet
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Part 2: The HOW of Co-Constructing Low Achievement "The most disturbing thing for me as a teacher was not what my students— especially those who were doing poorly–had learned that was not serving them but how they had learned it. In studying their personal reflections on their lives as students throughout high school, their interview transcripts, and their transcripts of grades, I came to see that my students had learned to be the kind of students they were..." - The Role of the School and Teachers in Constructing Low Achievers
- The Role of Students in Constructing Low Achievement
- The Role of Students in Constructing Teachers’ Low Achievement
- An Exception: Student Agency in Constructing Achievement
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a, b
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Part 3: Implications - Implications for Me as a Teacher
- Examining Wrong Assumptions
- Learning from Wrong Assumptions
- Implications for the English Department
- Curriculum consistency
- Theory into practice
- Detracking
- Implications for the School as an Institution
- Programming
- Curriculum
- School divisions
- Failure
- Attendance
- Theoretical Issues
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PART 4: CONCLUSION: Reading Public Signs as Coded Messages "In studying my English 4/ Advanced Essay Writing class, I learned a great deal about myself as a teacher and my students and about our interconnected roles in constructing achievement in the classroom. As the research moved outside my classroom, I came to understand how the dynamic of co-construction of low achievement is a phenomenon not limited to my classroom and my department or even to my school. Through extensive reading and talking with teachers from other schools about school failure, I have come to see how endemic to schools the phenomenon of co-construction of low-achievement is—especially in urban and inner-city schools. And I have come to understand how imperative it is that teachers and administrators as reformers take on the challenge of examining the causes of low achievement by examining it through the lens of co-construction..."
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Making Sense of Quinetta and Phillip’s Classes In ninth grade, Quinetta and Phillip took the same kind of English and social science class--untracked ninth grade English and world history. But while she took biology and Introduction to Algebra...he took honors biology and algebra. While she took two classes of PE, he took classes in PE, geometry, and French 1. As a teacher at the school, I see how significant the differences in their schedules are....MORE
Sequences of classes at my school
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Comparing P and Q schedules
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