Visiting The School
Adapted from Teach Our Children Well (Calfee & Patrick, 1998)

It is easy to criticize schools at a distance. Once you step inside, things become more complex. Even in the most successful schools, you quickly become aware of how busy everyone is. The label may be public school, but except for special occasions like September open house and back-to-school nights, the public is seldom there. To really understand education, you need to visit classrooms. This sounds simple, but it isn't.

Our aim here is to help you make sense of what you see. You can visit after school or during recess, when classrooms are empty, when teachers and principal can talk with you, when you can study the environment. But the real insight comes from a room full of students. A surface view easily equates quiet with learning and noise with a lack of discipline. But quiet can also mean boredom, and noise can signify genuine learning. Here are a few guidelines for making informed about this familiar but foreign territory.

Three things to look for in the classroom: the physical environment, the voices, and the explanations.

Look At The Physical Environment

First, watch the walls. Teacher and students share the same small space six hours a day, five days a week. It's like visiting someone's home for the first time. You note room design and color scheme, artworks and artifacts, furniture and books. You form an impression.

What are you looking for here?

Visual graphics can tell the tale directly and obviously. Webs, weaves, story graphs, and other READ structures can instantly give you a handle on student thinking.

Are they immaculate teacher portraits or messy student efforts?

Is the work organized or chaotic?

Do you see only finished products or a succession of activities?

Individual papers or collaborative efforts?

Displays for students or grown-ups?

Do the wall displays stress learning, or management?

If the dominant chart is titled "Classroom Rules," this signals an emphasis on control.

If instead you are overwhelmed by words and labels, then you are in the midst of a literate community If you see lots of writing, if student compositions are strung from wires stretched across the room, if you feel overwhelmed by the outpouring of "stuff," then you are on the scent of critical literacy

Second, How is time spent?

The daily schedule can be informative. If the subject matter changes on a regular basis-Reading, 8:30 to 9:15; Spelling, 9:15 to 9:30; Recess, 9:30 to 9:45; Writing, 9:45 to 10:15; Mathematics, 10:15 to 11:00-you have stumbled on an artifact of the assembly-line era.

Look at more than walls, of course. Public schools are public, so go ahead and explore. If you are impressed with neatness, then you are probably not in the presence of the "works in progress" that indicate active learning. Construction is a messy business. Teachers, brought up to value neatness, are understandably uneasy with this concept.

Third, Look at the instructional materials.

Do you find a plethora of worksheets asking students to do little more than mark the right answer or fill in the blank, or assignments requiring students to wrestle with a blank piece of lined paper?

Do you see desks stacked with textbooks, or with literary stories, anthologies, adventure tales, magazines, newspapers, how-to-do-it books? Is there a classroom library? What about pictures, which can be worth thousands of words?

Listen to the Voices

Words-spoken words-are critically important. Who is talking, who is listening? Research shows that teachers do most of the talking at all grade levels, but increasingly so at the later grades.

Teacher talk certainly has a place, but students must also be encouraged to raise their voices and express their thoughts if they are to learn to use language to solve problems and to communicate.

The teacher's job is to shape student conversation into significant discourse and to orient casual comments toward problem solving. If you think this is simple, try to recall your attempts to initiate conversations with your own children-"What did you do in school today?"

Listen to the questions. Assuming that most come from the teacher, what are reasonable answers? If "Yes/No" is the only choice, then the foundation for meaningful dialog is slim unless followed by "Why?" Multiple-choice questions-"Was Mary's hair dark or light?"--don't open up much territory either. Nor do leading questions like "Don't you think that... Open-ended questions are much more stimulating.

Listen also for the big picture:

 How does the teacher organize the discourse?

Does the teacher lay out a framework that invites students, individually and collectively, to absorb themselves in the topic?

Finally, listen for signs of enthusiasm and motivation. Do students seem sincerely interested in the work, or are they going through the motions?

Ask for Explanations

Feel free to take the initiative. Sometimes you find it impossible to talk with anyone, and that's a signal in itself.

In contrast stands the classroom where you are welcomed by teacher and students, where the flow of events opens to include you, where you are invited to join the activity.

Classrooms are busy places, and some activities (e.g., standardized testing) forbid interaction. Some times are better than others. The first and last two weeks of school are stressful. Mornings are better than late afternoons, Wednesdays better than Mondays or Fridays. But the essence of critical literacy is communication. The genuinely open classroom offers an environment in which students see visitors as an opportunity to display learning rather than as a distraction from it.

When you get a chance to talk with students about their work, a few simple questions go a long way:

What are you doing?

Why are you doing it?

What are you learning from it?

Not exactly rocket science, but quite revealing.

If you can manage it, a few moments of conversation with the teacher can reveal a lot. In fact, you have learned a lot about the classroom if the teacher agrees to talk with you during class. It means that he or she has the confidence that the students can handle themselves. The noise level will probably rise; individual students may raise their hands or come up to the two of you. How does the teacher handle these matters?

Your questions for the teacher can be similar to those for students:

What's happening in this lesson?

What are your purposes?

How is the class coming along?

If you have already scanned the environment, you can inquire about specific instances. If you find evidence of connections and common purpose, you have found a winner.

Listen for sounds of enthusiasm. When you "catch the spirit"-when virtually every teacher speaks with professional pride and personal fervor about their students, their colleagues, their school, and their community-then again you have found a winner. Teaching demands incredible energy. The chief rewards come from helping children achieve their learning potential