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Ways to Encourage Open Discussion of Controversial Topics and
Encourage Self-Teaching With At-Risk Ninth-Graders
in an Ethnically Diverse Language Arts Classroom: A Modest Proposal

Clara Speer

The eventual shape of the following curriculum for a ninth-grade language arts classroom began with feelings of ethnic inadequacy. How does a sensitive Anglo teacher, I have often asked myself (or any teacher who belongs to a different ethnic group from most of his or her students), avoid inadvertently interfering with or offending fundamental beliefs which may be different from her own? To be effective, teachers who work with student writers must continuously monitor the reader/writer relationship, especially in written comments, which can be very different from the face-to-face teacher/student relationship. Writing in ninth grade is largely “sucked from the fingers” (based upon personal experience, even when prompted by reading of literature), as opposed to the summarizing and analyzing which will be required of them next year and beyond. Consequently, virtually all of our interactions with them have the potential of inadvertently setting off the pretty heavily seeded emotional minefield adolescents naturally occupy. When ethnic differences are also present, the challenge is further complicated. I still have not completely worked out any one surefire way to neutralize cultural misunderstanding as a writing teacher, other than to say that I suspect ethnic differences tend to become less important as teachers and students become personally acquainted. A year is a long time to a fourteen-year-old. We are practically family by May. Moving away from the ethnicity issue without dismissing it, I have concluded that the problem of ethnic differences between students and teachers piggybacks upon the developmental realities of adolescence which do not noticeably lose strength as the year progresses.

Academic Setting

All differences in uneven power relationships create tension. Some differences create more than others. An intense experience during the past year with “high maintenance” teenagers, who also happened to be Hispanic, provided me with an excellent setting in which to reexamine the role of teacher/student interaction in the first step of the writing process, classroom discussion. By the end of the year I realized that the following question produced the most useful answers: Do we unintentionally hamper the trial and error (which characterizes good writing at any level) of our adolescent students by imposing our adult perspectives upon their thinking, no matter where we personally stand on the hot topics of the day? The short answer is “yes.” Children are certainly not “us,” a fact too often forgotten by adults when interacting with teenagers who look, and sometimes sound, very grown up.

            Of course we make allowances for youth in writing content because people who become English teachers are inclined to be nurturers. We can, however, either justify the allowances as important to maintaining our sense of balance in the universe (The “Banking Theory” of teaching, which roughly paraphrased states that ‘we give, they take knowledge because we have it and they don’t’), or we can justify the allowances because we don’t want them to stop talking too soon. The second reason allows time for the different lines of reasoning adolescents may pursue (or fail to pursue) in working out the moral conundrums life cooks up for them (or literature, social studies, and science teachers cook up for them. In looking at ethnic difference alone I was overlooking the tension developmental factors can infuse into communication between adult instructors and adolescent students.

            Next year I will be using the following methods in English 9. Because Albuquerque Public Schools are moving toward a ninth-grade academy system, I have had academies in mind while creating this curriculum. The academy structure creates a small school atmosphere in which teachers can discuss the individual needs of shared students and coordinate curriculum as well. Having experienced this type of organization before, I know that additional advantages are derived from students knowing that we know their other teachers and will certainly talk to those teachers. Although I was working with Communications Skills classes in preparing this curriculum, I have modified all four exercises to make them more appropriate to a ninth-grade English class where attention has to be given to literature and grammar in addition to writing. Since Communications Skills is intended to supplement the skills taught in English classes, and I was probably thinking as an English teacher in testing these materials anyway, I see no conflict.

Context and Background

Order Out of Chaos

Some background on how this curriculum began to take shape is in order to clarify what may seem to be a hint of stridence in my point of view on the need for firmly understood role expectations in class discussion. This curriculum is skill, rather than content based, and was inspired by a group of students who were more overtly in conflict with authority than is perhaps generally the case with ninth-graders.

In the fall of 2001 (September 13, 2001, as the World Trade Center continued to burn), I was abruptly thrust into a Communications Skills classroom a month into the school year, in medias res, so to speak. I acquired these classes on a Friday, faced them on Monday morning. I was an “instructional unit” casualty of the “twenty day count,” which triggers the reassigning of teachers away from schools which have lost enrollment, compared to earlier projections. The gradual getting-to-know-you period I had already gone through with my then-former students was not an option. Necessity being the mother of invention, my attention was immediately focused upon ways to reel their attention back to the task at hand and away from the acting-out behavior which had become the daily routine for this group of students. My understanding is that the purpose of Communications Skills is to work on a broad range of effective communications skills, but with these students, I also needed to get them to ever-so-slowly accept me as the teacher who was not going to leave. My new students had endured a string of substitutes, and few of these kids masked their shared hostility for a system that would treat them thus by imposing their collective ill-will upon the latest “substitute.” For some weeks the mood in the little portable classroom next to the football field at Valley High School was not pretty.

            By the end of the year, however, I had come to many very useful conclusions about what works and what doesn’t, particularly with at-risk adolescents, thanks to the often brutally blunt feedback I received from that particular group of ninth-graders. I gained insights in one year that could have taken me many years, if ever, to puzzle out under less intense conditions. The most useful among these conclusions is that the teaching of Communications Skills (including writing, and by extension, a broad range of interpersonal skills needed in other subject-areas) requires the use of antennae by teachers to test the current mood, not just in the classroom, but with individual students, because adolescents are very strongly influenced by their own moods and are not always able to distinguish current mood from more permanent values. Kohlberg and his associates outlined six stages of moral development which focus upon the progressive development toward autonomy, the ability to think independently. According to Kohlberg, we can expect adolescent students to have reached Stage 2. He explains in part:

Conformity is autonomous or based on mutual respect. Manifested in sense of the need to conform to peer expectations, in concern about distributive equality, in the importance of exchange or reciprocity, in the notion that peer vengeance is similar to authority’s punishment, and in the notion that adult punishment is not the ultimate criterion of wrong but is only a painful consequence to be considered in decision making (Colby 320).

Kohlberg’s second stage roughly coincides with Piaget’s autonomous stage, at which, Piaget concluded, adolescents achieve the ability to empathize with others and make decisions accordingly. On the face of it, the idea of this neatly reached stage is counter intuitive to many high school teachers, but Kohlberg reexamines the Piagetian interpretation of data, explaining it this way:

These attitudes [adolescent responses to moral dilemmas] may be invoked as a basis of conformity without any really internalized conformity, shared goals, or concern for others. There may be no differentiation between “legitimate” and other needs of self and all may be hedonistically oriented. Needs of others empathized with is based on the degree to which the other comes within the boundaries of the self. Equality is not a norm but a fact. “I and my needs are as good as anyone else’s.” A seeking to maximize quantity of approval by direct instrumental techniques (Colby 321).

In other words, the student who, when confronted, sees nothing unusual about writing a very conventional essay entitled “The Problem of Drug Abuse” when her peer discussions nearly always involve “getting some bud later” is behaving in accordance with Kohlberg’s profile of Stage 2 moral development. She is responding to an unequal power situation in a way that has the best result for her. Because of my own conservative views on issues related to drug abuse, I don’t want to read that essay. Nor do I want to read about the virtues of pot out of respect for her as an individual, so my dilemma is equal to the student’s. But a third option is available to both of us: I could allow her to write about legalizing pot after she first thoroughly researches her topic and considers the needs of her reader, who she knows to be a doubter of her case. If my prior experience with students who stubbornly cling to marginal topic choices is any indication, she will choose another topic--one about which she is willing to see more than one side.

            Continuing to follow the logic of Kohlberg’s interpretation of adolescent moral development, our students are communicating in ways that best suit the needs of now. If, for example, we give them moral situations to contemplate, discuss, then write about which require them to think through causal chains reaching back in time or projecting into the future, and they don’t (today) fully believe in the inevitability of their own adulthood, the result may be frustrating for everyone involved. The written product will certainly be deeply flawed in too many ways to list. So when stressed (as students were in my classrooms last year), adolescents asked to read, think, write, or talk, may not be able to do so in the ways we expect. Any high school teacher who has asked questions about the future plans of adolescents has received the “I’ll be dead anyway” apparently flippant answers from many of them, who may seem to be otherwise well-adjusted.

            The desirability of developing a more open relationship with adolescent writers in order to get them talking before writing is equally important in the written work which follows discussion, so I mention it briefly, even though I am proposing a curriculum which deals only with helping students become better pre-writers. Much research over the last several decades has been devoted to how adult writers imagine the “writer/reader” relationship within their writing. In my experience, the writer’s need for awareness of the reader is more similar than dissimilar between adolescents and adults. Adolescent writers need to master basic grammatical and mechanical skills just as inexperienced adult writers must do, or their writing fails. (Extended discussions of how writers imagine readers are available from numerous sources, including Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, David Bartholomae, and Janet Emig, among the dozens of researchers in this field). Donald M. Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing is intended for college level composition teachers, but his attention to the special emotional needs of entering college freshmen touches upon many of the same issues faced by teachers of alienated adolescents. However, while college students are either on the fringes of or squarely planted on the same adult plain with their instructors, adolescents, no matter how grown-up they look and sound, are developmentally still climbing the ladder. When we engage in the necessary discussion of content with adolescent writers, their moral perceptions are evolving. They are evolving, not absent. Beginning with pre-writing discussion, teachers who recognize adolescent writers as moving intellectual targets can better adjust accordingly and thus avoid comments that undermine confidence, a part of the fragile self which every writer wishes to protect.

We Ought To Be Able to Talk About “It”

            While the legalization of drugs is a health issue, and not a productive writing topic, for the obvious reason that all ninth-graders are juveniles, abortion is a moral issue that is profoundly relevant to their lives. It has, in my experience, always come up fairly early in any discussion of ways to argue effectively. Nevertheless, while some teachers ban the subject, others limit discussion so severely that thinking, then writing about it becomes too difficult. Polarizing subjects like abortion more often than not turn teachers, regardless of their personal views, into cowards, and an opportunity for a young writer to examine a very complex issue goes into the dustbin when it should not. In Beliefs, Behaviour and Education, Roger Straughan observes that “teachers and parents who complain that their children do not or cannot ‘think for themselves’ tend to be those who, in practice, allow least opportunity for children to work out their own conclusions and make their own decisions” (77). Straughan goes on to detail methods for guiding classroom discussions involving morally controversial subjects. He suggests an approach whereby the teacher by choice maintains a neutral role in discussion, protecting the rights of students to hold opposing viewpoints by not revealing his or her personal position (78). As a teacher who encourages open discussion by being open herself (I’m very direct with them about my thoughts on adolescent drug abuse), consistent neutrality would be, for me, unrealistic. But Straughan goes on to suggest several ‘power-neutral’ teaching strategies specifically designed to help adolescents with the idea of moral judgment, rather than with specific subjects. He suggests pointing out in negative terms what moral reasoning is not.

The judgments and decisions with which [moral judgment] is concerned cannot be made arbitrarily, without any reference to general rules or principles, nor be seen as unrelated to other similar situations, nor be viewed as mere expressions of personal whims, tastes or feelings. Moral reasoning is in these respects an ‘impersonal’ matter, though paradoxically it is most frequently employed in making decisions about personal relationships, personal interests and personal welfare (78).

Straughan is suggesting that we begin discussions with adolescents, especially when moral issues are involved, by laying out the outer limits of generally shared values, in effect giving adolescent thinkers, who see their own lives as rule-bound, permission to openly discuss controversial issues by first inviting distance. Scary, controversial topics like abortion, according to Straughan, because they affect our society as a whole, require students to think beyond the strictly personal. I’m reminded of a student who, when asked to list things he hates, looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied matter-of-factly, “white people.” His direct, unthreatening manner made it clear to me at the time that his answer conferred honorary ethnic equality upon me. He was speaking from within the strictly personal, overestimating the outer boundaries of that space where only brown people can be trusted. His directness was a strategy, though not a good one, for expressing a deeply held belief that would better qualify as an “expression of personal feelings.” Although clearly ineffective in communicating with me at that moment, he didn’t see the problem because, left to their own devices, adolescents are inclined to embrace solipsism and call it “the whole world.”

            Emotions inform much of what adolescents produce, both verbally and in writing. In a group of at-risk students, virtually all of them either doubt or undervalue the future, a sad comment upon the world adults have made for them. But jarringly fatalistic answers come from many different origins in the murky minds of teenagers, and to disregard emotionally charged discourse (or worse, dismiss it as “dramatic” or “childish”) is a mistake. In A Tribe Apart, Patricia Hersch traces three years in the lives of several Reston, Virginia, teenagers, all of them middle class and white, concluding finally that “we need to look at the journey as much as the destinations,” really listen without judgment to them as fellow travelers who, while they will inhabit for a time the same air space, are never going to quite come into step with us during the journey (364). If now is what is real for them, acknowledging this developmental “now” requires a respectful distance from teachers who want to encourage the sincerest product from young scholars. It isn’t enough to condescend to what is clearly immaturity, an approach which produces very cautious, precocious “paper adult” product like that essay about drug abuse. Much research has been done on the mental and emotional developmental stages of which adolescence is only one (Piaget, Loevinger, Kohlberg, and others), so it isn’t much of a leap to suggest that we read their writing in two distinct ways, the second of which is necessary for developmental reasons.

Guardians of the Language Are Not Guardians of Truth

The first of an English teacher’s instructional roles is as guardian of the language. We are the ones who help them, by virtue of our more extensive life experience and formal education, to divide written from spoken language successfully, a task which is done best as authority figures. The second is as a readers, a more nearly equal role, distinctly different from the guardian of language� role. The idea of “form vs. content” is not new in composition theory, but the two components of writing are divided by much more distance with adolescent writers. The well-meaning tendency in education to approach moral issues in the classroom as if they involved Cast in Stone Values (even if we believe in the shared value idea), which we understand better and can thus dictate to them, overlooks this developmental differential between teachers and high school students, at the very least. The added appearance of sophistication in teenagers, who are sampling values from many different communities, also influences how teachers perceive the writer in the student. It is our job to interact with them intellectually, but it is not our job to shape them into an image we visualize for them. They are shaping themselves, admittedly not always wisely, but they will ardently desire to do it on their own terms anyway. At home they are one person. At school another. With peers yet another. If all of these perspectives are allowed space, we’ll get to see the real developing thinker in our adolescent writers, especially the timid ones.

            While adolescents are being all these different people, they also belong to at least one permanent community: that which is identified by family membership (A child whose family lives in the South Valley of Albuquerque, for example, identifies with that community and shares that community’s values most of the time). If parents and grandparents were sitting in our classrooms, our students wouldn’t be as complicated. It does not necessarily follow, however, that students who belong to a large public high school community will identify with that community, as Ann Higgins discovered in studies of moral choices made by high school students. She presented ‘real-life’ dilemmas to students in a large public high school and to students in what we refer to in Albuquerque as “charter” schools, smaller high schools with students selected for shared interests and/or ability. While a sense of community tended to motivate socially positive choices in the charter schools, large urban public school students, who may consciously and actively reject anything perceived as “identifying” them with the community of the school, rarely approached the solving of moral dilemmas in ways that were judged as “caring” and “responsible” (Power et al 266-96). When I observed my own students recoiling from the idea of being personally responsible for the fortunes of others in an activity we called “angels,” but weeks later found them enthusiastically role-playing courtroom scenes (with “judge” or “attorney” as favored parts), I was witnessing this phenomenon: “angels” were being asked to identify with a high-functioning, community where bad choices can get you killed and sometimes bad things happen to good people. Too much verisimilitude. The role playing of a courtroom, however, took them out of themselves, without asking them to “grow up,” and into the morally uncomplicated, pop culture world of “Judge Judy,” where good prevails and evil is punished. The latter activity, because it involves role-playing within a highly artificial courtroom world, should have come first. The former activity, which confronted them with real-world adult problems, a desirable but much more demanding goal, should be eased into. An apt literary metaphor: Read a lot of Dickens before attempting Conrad.

            The components of this unit all use, rather than try to fight, the self-centeredness of teenagers and their conflicted, shifting sense of power/safety, to help them acquire new skill and sophistication as communicators. It’s not enough to just expect them to reach beyond the tangled values that currently complicate their lives. The professor who once said to me that “we have to remove the humble-pie graduate student voice from your writing,” was talking to an adult who didn’t feel like one in the presence of that particular reader. Our students, by comparison, really aren’t adults, so any advice about the writer’s voice must be carefully worded to encourage honest response, just as the words we choose in class discussions must respect the space between adults and adolescents. We have to put them in a position which validates their right to say what they think, no matter how bizarre or incomplete their thoughts may appear to us to be, before expecting them to even try to assert control over complex intellectual tasks. The grammar, the mechanics, the structure of paragraphs--these are all a different issue entirely, about which we can be very bossy.

Vocabulary: Own the Words First

College English instructors have long bemoaned the low skills of entering freshmen. They star in our favorite urban legends. Until I became a high school teacher (after several years of being one of the bemoaners) I thought the fault lay squarely on the shoulders of high school English teachers (I humbly apologize). Perhaps some of it does, but the problem can’t be that simple. It has been a long time since anyone believed that children’s minds were “empty vessels” to be filled with knowledge, a little at each stop, like a train filling up at railroad water towers. The learner shares responsibility for the success or failure of learning. I have concluded from my own experience with ninth-grade English students that we have to attack their language shortfalls from several fronts. Children, especially older ones, learn best when engaged in the process, so whatever we plan must clearly engage the self-teacher.

            First among the ways in which kids teach themselves is in the acquisition of new vocabulary, especially the abstractions which make complicated explanations more economical. That communicating successfully requires continued openness to new vocabulary is obvious to teachers, but not always approached in ways that are the most effective. Furthermore, without encouragement, many teenagers, even the bright ones who may some day become English teachers, don’t actively add to the vocabularies which serve them well-enough in their cell-phone worlds. An approach commonly used for vocabulary presented at school is all too often allowed to be the copying of dictionary definitions, alien words remembered long enough to take the test, then dropped, casualties of ill-defined educational goals. In defense of this strategy, words out of context are not interesting. Philologists are made, not born, so why do we expect kids to embrace words with curiosity and enthusiasm? Because we tell them to?

            Without sufficient vocabulary, no one is able to adequately explain new experience. To teenagers, the experience that teachers want to hear explained, verbally as well as in writing, may be anywhere from partially (our most successful students) to completely (all too many of them) new, scary, and to be avoided at all costs. So when we try to teach them to explain the motivation of fictional characters or to analyze the causes of the Crimean war, they fumble through badly worded explanations, and we blame their minds, or their motivation, when the problem begins with thought inhibited by inadequate vocabulary. The student who braves uncertainty, dares to attempt the needed new vocabulary, risks a tongue (or pencil) tied up by words not yet owned. The result is frustrating to the student, mystifying to us. But more often than not, the unsure don’t try, choose failure over perceived or real humiliation for not just knowing. It isn’t rational, it’s adolescence. Even the word “rational,” which kids might throw around in discussion of each other’s behavior, requires more of adolescents in discussions which reach beyond the narrow confines of adolescent social life.

Then Define the Outer Limits of Free Speech

After vocabulary, the stumbling blocks become more communal. Adolescents are deeply self-centered, while at the same time craving group membership, an admittedly broad generalization, but one which few high school teachers would seriously dispute. The particular species of approval they all crave is difficult to define, however, since it involves the daily alienation of others as part of the approval process. Too often teachers and others in positions of authority see the lack of empathy in teenagers as a flaw rather than as what it really is: a narrowness of thought natural to this developmental stage, something to be nurtured by teachers to encourage growth. When I was a teenager, adults worried about moral decay. Now we, former teenagers that we are, worry about--moral decay. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

            In this unit I plan to isolate the two adolescent qualities discussed previously, their lack of empathy, which characterizes much of their responses to events beyond their immediate experience, and their self-centeredness which, if left unchallenged, limits them as writers to the narrowly personal. When students are expected to discuss and argue through to a conclusion without giving up, especially over issues of moral uncertainty--which can pop up anywhere, past, present, and future--the developmental peculiarities of adolescence will inform their writing and must be acknowledged. Adult life is full of moral difficulty and complexity, so it follows that teachers should not avoid these challenges with adolescent writers simply because their thinking has not yet completely jelled.

            Although I still remember the classical rhetoric of my own education and continue to teach the practical writing skills I know they need to learn, I have moved away from any attempt to teach them “thinking” as a topic, regardless of how attractive the “empty vessel” approach might seem to be on days when I am tired. How they think before and as they write is an important aspect of the social responsibility they already need in all the communities they now inhabit. But while they can learn more productive ways to think with our help, we can’t teach them these ways. Whether or not their thinking is “forward” looking enough from our adult perspective is at best secondary to whether or not they are actively thinking in the present, however imperfect the written product may appear to be by our adult standards. Harnessing their “adolescentness” is as close as we can get to molding the skills which they will certainly need in coping with the complexities which await them.

            Although the curriculum I am proposing here is intended for use in the ninth-grade language arts classroom, the question of where to “stand” in relation to moral questions when teaching pretty much anything culturally based is common to all teachers, not just high school teachers, not just liberal arts teachers, not just teachers of minority children. My thinking throughout is that the methods detailed here could be adapted to any setting in which students are expected to talk then write about morally complex subjects.

Implementation

The following is a list of the standards and benchmarks addressed by this curriculum. Because it is intended to supplement the literature and composition content of English 9, most standards are addressed.

Strand I: Reading Process

Content Standard: The student develops and demonstrates proficiency with a variety of reading processes to analyze, interpret, and evaluate a wide variety of texts across content areas.

9-12 Benchmark: The student develops and demonstrates proficiency with a variety of reading processes to analyze, interpret, and evaluate a wide variety of texts across content areas.

Performance Standards: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Strand III: Expressive Language: Writing

Content Standard: The student writes effectively for different audiences and purposes (e.g., to describe, narrate, express, explain, persuade, and analyze) using appropriate writing strategies and conventions.

9-12 Benchmark: The student develops and demonstrates fluency and style in writing and a command of writing conventions across content areas to describe, narrate, express, explain, persuade, and analyze for a variety of purposes and audiences.

Performance Standards: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Strand IV: Expressive Language: Speaking

Content Standard: The student speaks effectively for different audiences and purposes using appropriate speaking strategies and conventions.

9-12 Benchmark: The student develops and demonstrates fluency and style in speaking and a command of speaking conventions to describe, narrate, express, explain, persuade, and analyze for a variety of purposes and audiences.

Performance Standards: 1, 3, 4

Strand V: Receptive Language: Listening and Viewing

Content Standard: The student demonstrates, analyzes, evaluates, and reflects upon the skills and processes used to communicate by listening to and viewing a variety of auditory and visual works.

9-12 Benchmark: The student critically evaluates the effectiveness of a variety of auditory and visual works, including multimedia presentations.

Performance Standards: 2, 3, 4

Strand VI: Research

Content Standard: The student conducts and compiles research data, synthesizes findings, and develops an original conclusion to increase personal and community depth of knowledge.

9-12 Benchmark: The student analyzes, synthesizes, and evaluates information to solve problems across content areas.

Easing the At-Risk Student Toward Adult Discourse With an Essay at the End

I begin this unit, which is intended to supplement a ninth-grade language arts curriculum, but could occupy an entire semester in a Communications Skills class, by placing vocabulary first in a plan to engage students gradually in the world of adult conversation. At the same time and at regular (weekly or biweekly) intervals, I suggest playing a game called “Quaker,” meant to harness the conversational give-and-take which is often markedly absent among ninth graders and which can seriously hamper classroom discussion. From there I introduce the first of two longer projects, “The People’s Court” and “Angels.” Both projects employ responsible role-playing, but the first is less threatening, less obviously engaged with the “M” word, about which all of us, but more profoundly teenagers, have complicated feelings. With adaptations, “People’s Court” is an excellent way to examine moral issues in literature as well. I have in the past, for example, conducted a trial of Odysseus for his assault on Polyphemus. We created extra characters from an imaginary Greek criminal court system and student participants worked out why (or why not) Odysseus was justified when he blinded Polyphemus, taking into account the Greek moral code accepted at the time. And finally, students are asked to invent a family, but not be the family. Their task is to oversee (hence the label, “angel”) this family, helping it to make productive choices about each other and in relation to the community in which they live. This activity introduces Internet research by requiring students to furnish their family with a community, a home, jobs, and schools.

            The following lessons are all exclusively skill related. A wide range of fiction as well as non-fiction content could be adapted to these exercises as has been previously noted.

First Assignment: Vocabulary

Directions: Complete each of the following steps. Key words within these directions are highlighted to help you remember to take good notes which will be useful to you later on vocabulary tests.

q       Listen during the week to adult conversations.

q       When you hear them use a word which is unfamiliar to you, ask them to repeat it, to spell it, if necessary.

q       Write down as much as you can remember of the conversation in which you heard this word

q       Ask about the word’s meaning, then supplement that meaning by looking the word up if you need to. Do not write down dictionary definitions. Put all of your notes into your own words.

q       On Monday, first thing, each member of the class contributes his or her word to a list on the wall on a large sheet of blank paper. When you write down your word, put your name next to it, because you will be the expert on this word whom others can consult.

q       Each student verbally explains where the word was heard, who said it, and what was said, then explains the word’s meaning.

q       Be sure to take notes during this discussion which you can use on the following week’s vocabulary test. Do not let me see you copying someone else’s notes. It isn’t just cheating. Your own notes are part of your own thinking.

With vocabulary acquisition ongoing, two additional skills, quiet listening and active, but organized argument, are added sequentially. The game of “Quaker” fills the first requirement, and the “People’s Court” the second. Quaker is also an ongoing activity. People’s Court is a separate unit, which relies upon the ‘ice-breakers’ of the vocabulary and Quaker activities. Quaker is itself an ice-breaker for “Angels,” which asks students to invent a family, give it life, then attempt to resolve issues within the family using the skills practiced in the previous three activities.

    Second Assignment: Quaker

I grew up in a large family with parents who loved road trips. Needless to say, our parents developed some fairly sophisticated ways to maintain crowd control in our Volkswagen microbus on trips to a wide range of destinations, including the ultimate trip: Mazatlan, a week-long drive from Kansas City through boring deserts and over precipitous mountain roads. My father used a game (which he probably did not invent) called “Quaker.” The rules were simple: whoever managed to stay silent the longest, won. He would try to get us to talk by carrying on a continuous banter with our mother in the front seat. Decades later, on a day when I was struggling to gain control over a particularly loud, unfocused bunch of ninth-graders, I suddenly thought of the Quaker game and the way it tied particularly to patient listening, a quality seriously lacking among my students. I flicked the lights on and off to quiet the crowd, then told them about my father and his game. I challenged them to a game of Quaker by suggesting that they couldn’t do it, and the new, improved, pedagogically justified game of “Quaker” was born.

            Surprisingly few of my students had any idea what “Quaker” means. A few thought the word had something to do with oatmeal. Looking it up produces “Quaker Meeting,” a meeting of Quaker members in which all members, except those moved to speak, remain silent. So I guess my old man knew what he was talking about. The Society of Friends are an important part of early (eastern) American history, so some time spent discussing their origins and customs is called for and readily available at www.quaker.org.

            In its final incarnation, and when everything works according to plan, this game occupies approximately twenty minutes of class time. Challenged to a rematch, as I often was, it could take considerably longer. After this game has been played a few times, the words “Quaker Rules” in instructions for other activities means “If you want to talk, it must be one at a time and to the whole class, not the kid sitting next to you.”

   Quaker Rules

1. (Optional) March everyone out of the classroom, close the door, wait until all are quiet, then march everyone back inside. [My students insisted upon this step, but it is not necessary with an already quiet classroom.]

2. Everyone sits down, and (Very Important Rule) passing of notes or any other form of non-verbal communication is forbidden.

3. Anyone wishing to speak stands up to do so. The speaker has the floor until he or she sits down.

4. Anyone wanting to speak next must stand, but no more than two people can stand at once. It is considered very cool in this game to defer to another speaker if there is any question about who stood first.

5. Subjects are not limited. A speaker can launch into a new subject or respond to something already said. [Disagreement is encouraged, and adds to the tension, which is good for class participation, just as my father’s front-seat banter gave challenge to the game.] Rudeness is disapproved of but not forbidden. Meanness is forbidden.

6. Anyone who speaks out of turn is excluded from the game. Remaining participants must “shun” anyone excluded from the game. Failure to follow this rule in any way results in exclusion from the game. Shunned people can communicate with each other quietly, but everyone remaining in the game must ignore them or risk being shunned as well. If the shunned speak or in any way interfere with the game, penalty points may be assigned, which put them in a loss position in relation to the total points for the day. [The parameters of non-participant rulings depend on the situation and the judgment of the teacher. With more “challenging” students it is a good idea to follow these rules very strictly.]

7. At the end of twenty minutes, anyone remaining in the game is a winner and receives the full complement of participation points for the day. [How many points are assigned depends upon the grading system of the individual teacher. My standard is 50 pts. per game in a nine weeks that generally racks up around 1000 pts. I assign points for nearly everything.]

Note: Once the game has ended, less structured discussion of topics brought up during the “Quaker Meeting” may naturally follow. The game tends to have a calming effect, so any activity following it tends to be more productive than on an average day.

Third Assignment: The People’s Court

The sheer number of ersatz court shows on TV and movies with lawyer-heroes testifies to the popularity of the genre, lawyer jokes notwithstanding. I have long used ‘trials’ to encourage discussion of various aspects of character motivation in literature, but the role-playing aspect of mock trial is also a very good tool, long used in social studies classrooms to encouragement logical thinking in adolescents. The justification is similar in language arts. All of them have seen My Cousin Vinny, Liar Liar, and other (very) rough approximations of the American judicial system dramatically portrayed, so very little introductory discussion is needed, especially since in this version of “The People’s Court” a deeper understanding of the reality of our judicial system is not an expected outcome, although it would of course not be a bad thing. While in a civics class strict adherence to “the book” is central to the lesson, in “The People’s Court” the fictional court is just a pop-culture device exploited for its power to teach effective argumentation in a fun setting.

            Materials for use in the classroom, such as briefly-outlined rules of decorum and sample cases, are readily available from local bar associations and on the Internet. In my experience, students did not particularly want to create their own cases relevant to their own experience. Sample cases tend to involve adult characters, which may testify to the wisdom of the adults preparing the cases. Teenagers love to pretend that they are twenty-four. Included here is a sample case I created and with which I tested students at the end of the unit (fig. 1).

The People’s Court

There are three teams and a Supreme Court. Each team chooses who will play the principal parts. Arm wrestling was used as a deciding method in my class, but it isn’t the most desirable way to choose.

Judge/Bailiff (Must study rules of decorum, be able to rule correctly on counsel objections, sanction misbehavior appropriately.)

Prosecution Team (Finds strengths in own case, anticipates weaknesses of defense case.)

Defense Team (Finds strengths in own case, anticipates weaknesses of prosecution case.)

Supreme Court (The teacher, or in advanced games, volunteer students who feel confident in their knowledge of the rules of “The People’s Court.” Students who don’t need points may choose this role.)

Everyone in the class must belong to a team. Team members who do not have a time-consuming role to play or who choose not to participate in the trial (for reasons which are respected), must keep score. Anyone else who keeps score receives extra credit for doing so. (See score sheet, fig. 2)

The Rules:

1. Always abide by the Golden Rule (partially covered by Rules of Decorum) when in doubt what to do.

2. Tell the truth.

3. Speak only when it is your turn (remember procedures for “Quaker.”)

4. Follow the Rule of Law in outlining your case. (All obvious laws of this state and city.)

5. The Judge/Bailiff Team begins with 10 points.

6. The Prosecution/Defense Teams begin with 15 points.

7. Appeals to the “Supreme Court” are costly and to be avoided. (2 points off for each team involved.) Grounds for Appeal are:

            a. Disagreements over bench rulings which cannot be quickly resolved by approaching the bench.

            b. Any disagreement between counsel which disrupts the court, at which point the Supreme Court will require an appeal. Supreme Court rulings are final.

8. Winning team on appeal wins back 1 point.

9. The team with the most points when the trial ends--wins. (An important life lesson: It is possible to win the case but lose the game, so it actually does matter how you play the game.)

10. Other ways to lose points:

            a. violation of the Rules of Decorum (1 pt.)

            b. “Lying” on the stand (Not properly learning your character’s facts. Improvising is fine as long as you don’t contradict the existing record of testimony.)     (2 pts.)

            c. Violating the Rule of Law (1 pt.)

            d. Failure to control client or stay in character (1 pt.)

Playing the Game

This game would occupy an entire class period (perhaps requiring continuation the next day) in a conventional schedule, half to two thirds of a class period under block scheduling. Each team has twenty minutes to prepare their case. An egg timer is placed in a central location where participants can check on how much time remains in their preparations for trial. The judge team must study the evidence and prior testimony of each witness in order to make decisions on objections that might lead to appeal.

            Students roughly follow the following script, with embellishments allowed within reason (and within” Quaker Rules”), depending upon their perceptions of what happens in a criminal court. Although my students preferred criminal cases, civil cases would serve the same pedagogical purpose.

            The game begins when everyone is quiet, then:

1. The Judge team leaves the room (if possible.)

2. The Bailiff announces: “All rise.” (Everyone does, as the judge enters and sits down.)

Bailiff: “Be seated. The court of the Honorable Judge _______________ is now in session.”

This the case of ______________v. New Mexico, Your Honor.

Judge: “Who are the attorneys in this case?”

Prosecutor: “_________________ for the State, Your Honor.”

Defense Attorney: “________________ for the defense, Your Honor.”

Judge: “State the case against the defendant, Mr./Ms.________________.”

Prosecutor: (Briefly explains the State’s case, which he has prepared in advance. An extension of the game’s scope would require all official statements to be written down and handed in at the close of the case.)

Judge: “Mr./Ms._____________, what does the defense have to say about these charges?”

Defense: (Explains why his/her client is innocent.)

Judge: (to prosecutor) “Call your first witness, Mr./Ms._________________.

Prosecutor: “I call ________________.”

Bailiff: “Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

Witness: “I do.”

Bailiff: “You may be seated.”

Witness then is questioned by the prosecutor, who does his best to enhance the credibility of his witnesses. Defense cross examines them, does his best to neutralize prosecution testimony. They do the same with each witness, then the defense presents their witnesses, following the same procedures.

Bailiff: (As each witness completes testimony) “The witness is dismissed.”

            After each side rests its case, the judge and his/her team retire (to the hallway, if possible) to deliberate a verdict. They have ten minutes. When the judge team returns, the court is again called to order by the bailiff, and the judge explains the thinking behind his/her verdict, then pronounces the verdict.

            If there are objections, they are put in the form of an appeal, and the “Supreme Court” makes the final call. It is bad for everyone’s point scores to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Fourth Assignment: Angels

With the vocabulary assignment, students gain control over (and responsibility for) vocabulary building. This is a good first step into the more academically demanding world of high school. Next we add “Quaker,” which is best described as “enforced listening.” We’re almost ready to be good lawyers. “The People’s Court” uses play to teach argument, but also a sense of accountability. Participants argue back and forth over issues of right and wrong under the umbrella of a structured rule system: the law. The tendency toward harsh black/white thinking in adolescents suits them well within the courtroom setting. From practice with moral judgment (“The People’s Court”), ideally engaged in several times as a way to open them up to a more socially responsible approach to communication than the tense world beyond the classroom door, successful “play” with a broader range of moral issues becomes the next big step.

            The final task in this unit, a definite challenge to the moral imagination, will be to invent and give life to a family from a position of omnipotence. The assignment is called “Angels,” and participants must hold to a general moral code implied by this title. As I previously discovered by attempting to implement this idea first instead of last, complex moral judgment is required in the unrealistic level of control an “angel” has. The assignment can occupy anywhere from a few weeks to an entire nine-week period (which I would recommend in situations where time allows.) By the conclusion of this curriculum, students have moved from the preliminaries of interacting with adults to an activity which requires them to formulate their own imaginary adult world, then make it work. All of the activities in this curriculum assume that adolescents begin to willingly communicate as if they had entitlement within the adult world only when they begin to recognize the possibility of their own place within that world.

Introducing the “Angels” assignment to the class Students are divided into groups of 5-8 (depending upon the size of the class). Each group decides on a name for the family they will “supervise” and gives first names, ages, and relationships to the members of the family, which must have at least as many members as is in the group of “angels.” (My students also insisted upon giving their “angels” names, I suspect as a way of distancing themselves from so much “goodness,” which isn’t particularly cool in the ninth grade.)

First Writing Task: Each angel composes a written description of his or her family member, including both what this person looks like and what this person is like as a human being, including both good and bad qualities, described objectively. Before attempting this description, the angel constructs a time line for a typical day in this person’s life which is handed in at the same time as the narrative description. Length of narrative to accompany timeline: 100-200 words in one or two paragraphs.

First Research Task: Students choose an occupation for the adults in the household and a city for their family to live in. In the computer lab or at home as a homework assignment, angels divide the task of researching the following: occupations, including salary ranges, housing (appropriate to the family income), school districts for the houses they have located, climate, pets, and transportation appropriate to the family’s income (teenagers love cars, so don’t allow too much time for researching possible “rides” for the families).

Each family begins a folder on the results of their research.

Second Research Task: Each group of angels is given a challenge by the instructor, appropriate to the family that has been created. (Examples: a family living in Miami might have to cope with a hurricane, a family with only one breadwinner, a carpenter, might have to cope with an occupational injury, or a family with several teenagers, might have to face the financial drain caused by fender benders, which result in expensive repairs and will affect their insurance status, etc.) Using the Internet, students research how to cope with the calamity that has befallen them.

Final Writing Task: Students are assigned an essay of 300-500 words in length (fig. 2), a report on the life of the family member they are responsible for. Point of view is third person and the “angel” stays within the character of their angel throughout (an omnipotent narrator who is able to “get inside the head” of his or her assigned family member to describe the family from that character’s perspective). They have all the material within their family folder to work with. Each student is given a rubric describing how the final essay will be graded (suggested rubric, fig. 3). Students are encouraged to be creative with this assignment. Possible variations: A team which works well together could write a “book,” with a chapter devoted to each member of the family. Authors who prefer working independently can write newspaper articles about their family, which would require consulting other members of their group for information. Students not as interested in writing can write a more conventional report, detailing as much as they can about their family member in relation to the rest of the family. In my experience, few students confine themselves to only one family member by the end of the project, unable to separate this person’s experiences from the rest of the family.

Score Sheet for the People's Court

Essay Assignment for “Angels”

Directions: Write a story (300-500 words) about your family, especially about the family member over whom you have been watching You can earn extra credit by doing a dramatic reading of your story.

Content and Style Suggestions:

1. Consider including in your story people interacting in ways that express one or more of the following human characteristics:

greed generosity

disloyalty loyalty

shyness gregariousness

lying honesty

selfishness        self-sacrifice

cowardice courage

2. Carefully weigh your word choices: gratuitous profanity will seriously hurt your grade. Profanity in dialogue is not forbidden, but discouraged. It is forbidden everywhere else in your story because the best narrators are calm and articulate. Thoughtfully chosen words and interesting detail are always good practice for writers.

3. Choose a setting for your story and describe it. If your reader can visualize the place, the story is more interesting.

4. Consult the information in your family file to give your story depth.

5. Be prepared to answer questions about the people in your story. (The research was done cooperatively, so be sure you communicate well with the other members of your group if you need information for your story.)

This is how you will be graded:
How realistic and detailed is your story?
How convincing is your story?
How well have you pooled your group’s ideas and used individual strengths to help each other?
How careful were you in editing your paper for grammatical and technical accuracy?

fig. 3                             Grade Sheet for “Angels” Essay

Author_____________________________
Title_______________________________

Check this grading scale for each of your scores:

1-19: Ask for help/explanation of this score
20-23 OK for your age
24-30 Skilled to very skilled__________________________________________________________   out of 30

Title fits the content of your story                                                          _____               “
______________________________________________________________

Grammar:       Subject/verb and tense agreement                                 _____               “

                        Complete sentences                                                       _____               “

                        Good use of punctuation                                                _____               “______________________________________________________________

Detail (This is how you make your story long enough)

                        Description makes a clear picture                                   _____               “

                        Story is complete. Enough information
                        to make an interesting story.                                           _____               “______________________________________________________________

Paragraphs used effectively to organize content.                                     _____               “______________________________________________________________
Style: Varied sentence lengths and styles, important
            to making your writing sound like good talking.                             _____               “______________________________________________________________
Essay is carefully edited for spelling and readability.                                _____               “______________________________________________________________
Essay handed in on time.

            (Late essays lose 10 % per day late.                                              _____              “__________________________________________________________________
EXTRA CREDIT for typing.                                                                                                                _____ out of 10______________________________________________________________
270-300=A
240-269=B
210-239=C
180-209=D                                                                             Total_________

Documentation

(*works cited)

*Colby Anne, and Laurence Kohlberg. The Measurement of Moral Judgment. NY: Columbia UP, 1989.

Detailed research methods, more than needed in gaining understanding of Kohlberg’s research, but also a vast list of moral judgement practice cases.

Coles, Robert. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989.

A terrific storyteller himself, Coles goes into depth on the value of literature in moral education in medical schools. Very insightful, easily relevant to all education.

---. The Moral Intelligence of Children. NY: Random House, 1997.

Coles is a psychiatrist, has written extensively on the moral development of children and adolescents. Many good suggestions about literature and pop culture in moral teaching.

Coles, Robert and Timothy Dugan. The Child in Our Times. NY: Brunner/Mazel, 1989.

Discusses pressures on children these days, suggests educational approaches to classroom discussion of moral issues.

Cooney, Timothy J. Telling Right From Wrong. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1985.

Controversial because of the methods used to get it published, Cooney has many useful observations about morality, especially with his distinction between primary and secondary codes.

Corson, David. Changing Education for Diversity. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1998.

Study of the problems encountered in diverse classrooms, especially in moral education, and proposals for change.

---. “Lying and Killing: Language and the Moral Reasoning of Twelve and Fifteen-Year-Olds By Social Group.” Adolescence. Summer, 1984. 473-482.

Examines the deeper meaning of word choice in expression of moral reasoning in adolescents across social class.

Frank, Ivan Cecil. Building Self-Esteem in At-Risk Youth: Peer Group Programs and Individual Success Stories. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 1996.

Anecdotal study of at-risk adolescents in programs designed to raise self-esteem.

*Hersch, Patricia. A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence. NY: Ballantine, 1999.

In teenagers’ own words, what it’s like to be them. Worth reading, lest we forget.

Killen, Melanie and Larry P. Nucci. “Morality, Autonomy, and Social Conflict.” Morality in Everyday Life, Melanie Killen and Daniel Hart, eds. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. 52-86.

A brushup on Piaget for teachers long out of college. Discussion of "peer relations" is about small children but no less true with adolescents.

Kohlberg, Laurence and Charles Levine. Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. NY: Karger, 1983.

Extended discussion of Kohlberg’s theory as it stood in 1983.

Langford, Peter E. Approaches to the Development of Moral Reasoning. Hillsdale: Erlbaum Associates, 1995.

Langford, Peter. Concept Development in the Secondary School. NY: Croom Helm, 1987.

Informative study of developmental relationship between content and concept learning in adolescence.

Power, F. Clark, et. al. Laurence Kohlberg’s Aproach to Moral Education. NY: Cornell UP,              1989.

Evaluation of the just community approach to moral education.

Power, F. Clark and Daniel K. Lapsley. The Challenge of Pluralism: Education, Politics, and Values. Notre Dame, Ind.: U of NDP, 1992.

More on the just community approach to moral education in urban America.

Rich, John Martin and Joseph L DeVitis. Moral Development in Adolescence. 2nd ed. Springfield, Ill: Charles C. Thomas, 1994.

Very short summaries of Havighurst, Erikson, Packer, and Hoffman moral development theories. Useful as a review or as an introduction.

Sichel, Betty A. Moral Education: Character, Community, and Ideals. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.

Traces history of cognitive development research, looks at influence of a sense of “moral community” in moral education.

Simon, Katherine G. Moral Questions in the Classroom. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.

Much of her research was done in religious schools, but enough time is spent on general issues of moral education with adolescents to make this book very useful.

*Straughan, Roger. Beliefs, Behavior and Education. London: Cassell, 1989.

Thoughtful look at the role of rules in education. All three books are written in straightforward narrative style.

---. Can We Teach Children to Be Good? Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1982.

Close look at the role of teacher authority in moral education.

---. Philosophical Issues in Moral Education and Development. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1988.

Collection of essays on the subject.

Thomas, R. Murray and Ann Diver-Stamnes. What Wrong-Doers Deserve. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Includes “oppinionnaires” presenting moral dilemmas for peer research. Details a study done with low income students in large urban school.

Walker, Lawrence et al. “Reasoning About Morality and Real-Life Moral Problems.” in Morality in Everyday Life, Melanie Killen and Daniel Hart, eds. Cambridge: CUP, 1995. 371-408.

Very detailed study presenting moral dilemmas using Kohlberg’s study methods. Interesting discussion of “moral exemplars.”

Internet resources for setting up The People’s Court: “Bradley University Mock Trial” 25 June                2002. <http://www.bradley.edu>

Detailed trial procedures intended for college students, but much of it adaptable for use with ninth-graders.

“Center for Civic Values.” 25 June 2002. <http://www.civicvalues.org>

Cases for New Mexico mock trials in previous years available at this site for a modest price.

greed	generosity
disloyalty	loyalty
shyness	gregariousness
lying	honesty
selfishness	self-sacrifice
cowardice	courage