From her blog Artichoke released a tunnel of goats into the edu-blog o’ verse, and now I’m off trying to round them up so that we can sort the lost children from the beasts.

I need to digress here briefly to comment on the apparent limitless supply of fantastic characters that appear in Artichoke’s blog. In the last month she has hosted crowds of invisible ducks, alcohol fueled cricket fans, birds swimming south, and retired TV celebrity talking horses. Even SpongeBob and Mr. Krabs have made an appearance. I think these characters spice up her thought-provoking blog by adding a measure of comic counterpoint to the mind-bending questions she asks, so I was happy that she brought Hans Solo, Luke Sky Walker, and a giant Tauntaun along with her to leave a comment yesterday on a disjointed post I wrote about ice fog and my students’ new web publishing project. With remarkable economy of effort, she left Hans and Luke here in Borderland hunkered down in the beast’s intestinal cavity. I suppose George Lucas is done with them now, so here they will remain until they are summoned elsewhere - if they survive this hellish cold.

The goats that Artichoke employed were running loose in a tunnel into which some children had been lost. The imagery led me to think about how similar teaching is to herding goats, who are as likely to go anywhere except where you want them to go if given the chance. Artichoke questioned the uncritical application of inquiry approaches to classroom learning, and recommended that teachers introduce relational and extended abstract thinking challenges into inquiry tasks. She left a link to an article called Using the SOLO Taxonomy that I found useful for answering a problem I’ve been pondering for about 9 years. The article provides a framework for teaching to levels of thinking that are appropriate to a student’s specific background and needs. The SOLO taxonomy defines levels of learning competence for students. With Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in mind, maybe I can use this model to find challenges that are just right for my students.

I spent the first dozen years of my teaching career working with predominantly white middle-class kids from families where a college education was normal. Feeling restless during the early 1990’s I transferred to a school in our town’s downtown area. The jump was far from merely geographical and it has caused me to question everything I believed about myself as a teacher. Previously, my students averaged in the 80th percentile on norm referenced tests. Those who didn’t do well in class were labeled and remediated, but I didn’t feel too much responsibility for their educational limitations. I naively gauged my effectiveness by the successes of all those kids who did well.

The change of teaching venue brought me up short because the classrooms I came to work in had a high percentage of those kids who struggled. The community is warm and supportive, and there is a shared sense of mission among the teaching staff as we work to nurture and heal, as well as teach. It’s been one of the most challenging and enriching environments I’ve ever stumbled into. I confront problems with conventional approaches to classroom practice every moment of every day. There are no easy answers. The tension between authority and freedom is both ethical and practical. Trying to “get the job done” is always tempered by the thought, “and that job is?” because I have to wonder what I’m educating these kids to be and do. So I find myself some days with blood on my hands, thinking about the societal mess I have to clean up.

And that’s another reason to write this all down.

I’ll never forget a moment of sudden insight during the first year working in my current school. I sat on the floor with a group of about 9 six-year-olds in an author’s circle, helping one of them to read his story. He said something like, “On Sunday I was at my grandma’s house and there was fighting and then the cops came.” I thought, “Awww crap! How do we respond to this?” I didn’t even know this kid who was from another teacher’s class. I was new there, remember. But I shouldn’t have worried. Without missing a beat, one of the little boys sitting in the circle said, “I hate it when that happens.” And then two more said, “Yeah.” We had a great little chat about times when adults are unpleasant, and what kids do to stay out of the way. I immediately felt a wave of compassion and recognition of a world view I’d never been shown. It had been under my nose all along, but I’d never been admitted as a member. I can’t leave now.

My efforts to extend the thinking of these students to more abstract levels have persistently been frustrated by their confusion and lack of initiative to seek new opportunities to learn. I used to joke that we didn’t need to work on “higher level thinking” because we first needed to develop the lower level variety. From the SOLO taxonomy I gleaned this: “…teach at just one level higher than the student, and not more than that.” Of course I knew this, but the taxonomy gives me definitions and crtieria for determining what those levels look like. For those kids who are at the prestructural level and hard to differentiate from goats, I can attempt to get them to “use one obvious piece of information.” While for those students who can do that, I will help them relate and connect ideas. Thinking beyond that level involves making generalizations and applying them to abstract principles.

Now I ask whether, for the longest time blinded by my ambition to help students transcend, perhaps I’ve been trying to move them further than they realistically can go at the moment.

Teaching really is a lot like goat herding. What I learned from my one humiliating experience with goats is that when you get them up to the gate, you can’t crowd them or they’ll bolt and run around you back out to the pasture. Hang back and bide your time. Be ready to move laterally to block any that get “ideas” about breaking loose from the herd. Eventually a few will walk through the gate and the rest will simply follow. But that gate has to look like the place to go.