Teaching the Most Challenging Students

It is an early fall day at Windsor High. At the sound of the first warning bell, Bonnie Fineman emerges from her office with an armful of papers and a small cart on which she carries the paraphernalia she will use in her classes. Bonnie is a thirty-seven-year-old English teacher at Windsor, currently serving as the department chair. She is wearing her usual preppy uniform: a pink Oxford shirt, a pair of black trousers, and a pullover sweater. Her hair is cut in a short bob, a schoolboy’s cut. She has an athletic look about her, strong, immaculate, and spare.

Bonnie’s first class of the day is a ninth-grade “college-level class,” a euphemism at Windsor High for classes with students reading years below grade level. Earlier, Bonnie has spoken to me about the class, saying it is one of the most challenging she has taught in all her years in the profession. Some students, she says, are reading on the fourth-grade level; all are reading below average; and many have emotional or behavioral problems that cause constant disruption.

Bonnie tells me she is “really stressed out” this morning; two of the main roads she takes to school were closed, making her morning commute twice as long as usual and delaying the elaborate daily preparations she makes before this first class. On a typical day, Bonnie arrives at 6:30, a full hour before the start of school. Now it is 7:10, and she is just starting to arrange the room for her first-period lesson. Like all her lesson plans, this one is built on an extensive sequence of activities, using a range of materials. She has set up various “stations” around the room, with blank poster paper affixed to the walls and desk clusters around those stations. She has also set up a SMART Board with the intention of highlighting a page from the text. Though she is famous in the department for her tech-savvy skills, today the projector is not cooperating.

“You good with computers, David?” One boy has entered the classroom early, and Bonnie calls to him from the back of room. “Can you get this to play? If you could, that would be amazing.”

David strolls up to the computer and fiddles with it as other students slowly arrive, pushing dreamily through the door and moving around the room. Bonnie greets each one, looking up from her preparations. Each gets a personal comment.

“What? You’ve got a Cape Cod sweatshirt! Wow, that’s awesome. That really takes me back … ”

“Hi, Pablo. Are you feeling better today?”

Two more students enter, one singing falsetto. “Wow, that’s some voice you have!” Bonnie says. “What’s that song?” No one responds to her greetings.

Students begin to take their seats, kicking book bags under their desks, some spreading their long adolescent torsos across the desks, as if stretching out for a nap.

The public address system erupts in a static-y warning: “School begins in two minutes. Please turn off all electronics.” Students take this as a prompt to check their e-mail and do a bit of last-minute texting.

At the sound of the buzzer, eleven students are seated throughout the room, six boys and five girls. Several more saunter in after the bell, including Bella, the special needs aide, hired by the district to help support Bonnie’s work with the most troubled students. Bella circumnavigates the room slowly and then settles into a seat near the front.

The class is behind in its work because Bonnie had been out the week before with a bad virus. Flat on her back with a fever and migraine headaches, she tells me she constantly worried about the time away; would the substitute be able to control the class? Would any work get done? A colleague tells me later that Bonnie fought against the virus for days, showing up sick and in pain until it was clear that her presence was doing no one any good. She took two days off, then passed the virus on to her partner Danie, who is now out from work this week.

“Did you get these journals when I was sick?” Bonnie asks the class, holding up a white and black composition book. The class looks up, slowly raising their heads like sea turtles, but no one speaks. “I see that [the substitute] didn’t ask you to put your names on them. Please do put your names on these now.” She distributes the journals to the students, moving around the room to hand them out one by one. “Ken, do you have a pen or a pencil? We’re going to watch a video clip. Anybody need a pen? Juan, you want to put your name on that? You need a pen? I’ve got an extra pencil here. Yes, you do need to write your name.” Much of Bonnie’s time is taken up repeating the same instructions again and again, as if battering a fist against the stubborn distraction of the class. She does this without any sign of annoyance or fatigue. “You’ll be needing to put your names on these journals,” she says again. “Anyone need a pen?”

“The focus of our class today,” she says, pointing to the objectives written in block letters on the board, “is ‘How do characters become who they are?’” Underneath, she has listed the three hoped-for goals for the ninety-minute session:

1. 1. Understand that – just like people – characters have traits that make them who they are.

2. 2. Write about your character and how you got that way.

3. 3. Read about Spear and determine his character by finding description in the text that reveals his identity.

Bonnie has chosen to begin the lesson with a trailer from the television show Veronica Mars, a series that she thinks will appeal to these fifteen-year-olds, since its heroine is a teenage detective.

“Watch this very short video,” she says, “and then let’s talk about the things that make Veronica Mars who she is.” The trailer speaks explicitly to Veronica’s past: the mysterious death of her best friend, the firing of her father, a former sheriff. The class watches the brief video with varying degrees of interest. At the end, Bonnie claps her hands together. “So!” she says, “what were some of the things that shaped the character of Veronica?” A long silence follows. “She had a friend who died,” says a boy in a Kanye West T-shirt. “Good, Shane, good start,” says Bonnie. “Did you catch any other details? Something about her dad?”

Little by little, she coaxes details from the class. Every answer, no matter how truncated or concrete, is praised and repeated, extended and connected. “The dad lost his job; how might that make you feel?” The class is silent, and several boys have turned away toward the door.

“Let’s listen again and think really carefully,” Bonnie says. “I want to see if you can come up with three more details about who she is. You have to be a little more alert. It’s the same thing we need to do when we are reading.” She plays the five-minute clip again. This time, several students are able to repeat some of the facts stated in the video.

“Okay,” Bonnie says after more tugging. “We’re trying to unwrap the character by picking up on little details. That’s basically what we are going to do today, using you as the subject. So open up to the first page of the journal … If it was you and not Veronica Mars, what would the narrator be saying about you? Who are you, and how did you get that way? This is free-writing,” she reminds them, “I don’t care about the spelling or grammar. No wrong answers here. Eight minutes of writing. I’m going to set a timer for you.”

The students look off dreamily or start to write a little. One boy turns in his seat and stares at the bookcase. Bonnie moves around the classroom, leaning over the journals of one student after another. “I’m so impressed with your writing,” she says to a student who has stood up to stretch. “Keep going … Eight minutes, guys. We’re shooting for eight minutes of writing. I’m impressed with the effort I’m seeing.”

Bella leaves the room.

The timer bings, and Bonnie begins the arduous process of coaxing students to share what they have written.

“I saw some of you wrote down stuff like ‘I’m an athlete.’” “I’ve noticed, Shane, you’re diligent about schoolwork.” “Anybody have an event that made them who they are?”

One boy says softly that his little brother died. Another volunteers that his parents are from Jamaica, that they speak patois. Bonnie follows every comment with an expression of interest and gratitude. “Wow,” she says, again and again, “thanks for sharing that.”

The third part of the lesson is to turn the same strategies of analysis used for the video and the free-writing to the text of a story that has been projected onto the whiteboard in front of the classroom. Students in low-level classes often have difficulty completing homework, so assigned novels and short stories are read in the class itself, often at a very slow pace, so that one text may take months to complete.

“Read along either here or on the sheet on your desk,” she says and proceeds to read through the projected page slowly and with some feeling. As she reads, she stops again and again, encouraging the students to note telling details.

“Here’s a clue,” she points to the projected text and notes a phrase embedded in one of the sentences: “‘Like the natural politician he was … ’ What kinds of traits does a ‘natural politician’ have? We’re looking for clues like this.”

A girl with elaborate cornrows leans over to her friend and asks her what a politician is.

“You can do this,” Bonnie says to the class, reading aloud another line from the story. “‘Spear noticed a white girl sitting in the front row.’ What does this tell you about Spear?” A mumbled response comes from the front row, and Bonnie leaps on it. “Good! He’s aware of people, and maybe what about people? Maybe race? Maybe he’s sensitive to race?”

This close reading and prodding for responses goes on for another ten minutes. Then, Bonnie moves to part three of her choreographed lesson, small-group work. She has affixed different colors of poster paper on walls and windows around the classroom, and has stationed desk groups around each sheet. Student are asked to read through several pages and use highlighters to underline suggestive details in the text that might point to key traits in the main character. “I want at least one detail per page, minimum,” she says.

The students turn to the task, and Bonnie begins to move around the room again, praising, pointing to clues, listening attentively. The repetitive instructions begin again. “So what are you doing, Matt? What are we looking for? Who is going to read aloud? What page are we supposed to be on? What are we looking for? Who needs a pen? What’s our focus today? So how does that paragraph tell you something about what Spear is about? Who needs a pen?”

Gradually, the groups begin to focus. “If his father gave anti-white speeches, what does that tell us about Spear?” Some students begin to list one or two observations on the poster paper. But others have grown restless. We are one hour into the ninety-minute class, and two boys are out of their seats wandering around the perimeter of the room. Several more are looking at calculators.

“Don’t just highlight anything,” Bonnie says to a boy who is using his highlighter to cover the page in yellow lines.

The story, by Julius Lester, is about race hatred and reconciliation, and Bonnie must work carefully, she says, to bring these issues to light without sounding pedantic or sanctimonious, while encouraging students to see their own lives and experiences in the text. Bonnie walks over to one of the desk groups near the back of the room. Two of the four students have stood up and are wandering around the classroom. She turns her focus to the remaining two seated students. “Look,” she says, “Marco found a good line here.” She reads what he has highlighted: “‘Spear suddenly found himself groping for words … ’” Bonnie looks up from the book at the two students, who are momentarily attentive. “Who is he unaccustomed to speaking to?” she asks.

“Girls,” says Marco.

“What kind of girls?” Bonnie presses him.

“White,” says Marco.

“You got it,” says Bonnie. “As a black person, he is not used to speaking to white people … Now, give me just one more example before the end of class. Ninja,” she says to the second boy, now with his head on the desk, “do you know what I want you to do? Can you be the scribe for your group? Can you – ”

The buzzer signaling the end of class interrupts her sentence, and the students are on their feet. Bonnie shifts gears: “Nice job today. Nice job,” she says, as the students push past her with their bulky backpacks. “Nice job, Wayne,” she says. “Call my mom,” says Wayne, whose mother has been called three times for problem behavior. Tell her I’m doing good.” “I tried,” she says, as Wayne walks past her. “She doesn’t call me back.”

As the last of the students exits the room, I feel myself relax. Just watching Bonnie move from group to group, cajoling, praising, admonishing, trying to yank engagement – or at least compliance – out of the group has left me covered in sweat.

***

Though Windsor High School is an integrated school, low-level classes are dominated by minority students, a fact that the administration has recently tried hard to address. In 2012–2013, a controversial episode occurred when a consultant was brought to the school to assess the reasons for the racial disparity between upper- and lower-level classes and to uncover other forms of “white privilege” barring equity in the school. The consultant caused tremendous tension and a good deal of unwanted publicity when he submitted a report accusing teachers of racism. Already perceiving themselves as overwhelmed by the complexity of their work, faculty expressed outrage at the findings, especially when it was discovered that the consultant had received an exorbitant fee for his work. Teachers claimed that the researcher entered the study with a priori conclusions, that he asked leading questions, and that he seemed to have little understanding of what it was like to teach in a real classroom. Soon after, the contract with the consultant was terminated, but the episode left a bitter taste in the mouths of many teachers.

Other strategies for integrating classes have worked better. In 2009, for example, an organization called Project Opening Doors, funded by the Gates Foundation, included Windsor High School in a broad-ranging experiment to increase the number of minority students in Advanced Placement classes. Students who agreed to enroll in AP classes were paid to take and pass the exam, with higher rewards going to higher scores. A student who received a passing grade of 3 on an AP test would receive $100 for each test he or she took. A grade of 4 brought $200, and a grade of 5 brought $300. Students who took five AP tests could conceivably earn $1,500 for simply working hard and studying. Teachers, too, were paid for their results, earning merit fees for every student who passed the test.

Though some felt that the whole strategy was distasteful – paying students to study had always seemed the last frontier in the pursuit of motivation – and the union was uneasy with what amounted to merit pay, the program achieved impressive results. Bonnie says that, since Project Opening Doors, “enrollment in AP classes has quadrupled, and classes are now dramatically more integrated.” “I started teaching AP ten years ago with nine white girls,” says a fellow AP teacher. “Now, we have three sections of seniors and three sections of juniors – and the classes are much more mixed in terms of gender and race.” The monetary compensation part of the program, however, was eliminated two years ago, when the local district failed to raise matching funds for the work. It is not clear yet how this will affect either enrollments or pass rates on the tests.

***

Bonnie Fineman grew up in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, the younger of two sisters in a family of educators. Bonnie’s mother was a reading teacher, and her father was a professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut State University. Teaching was a constant topic of conversation at home. “Every evening, we had dinner together, and all of the conversations were around school. All of the conversations. We almost never talked about anything else.” Bonnie remembers constant stories about the challenges of teaching, “the rants about education, and students.” Her parents’ anecdotes, told with humor and drama, were always entertaining, and they created a sense, from an early age, of school as a world where interesting things happen, for better or worse.

Like many children of teachers, Bonnie herself was a model student, well rounded and fully engaged. Though she loved many sports, volleyball was her favorite, and she played throughout high school. Her second love was English. One of the most important influences in Bonnie’s life was an English teacher, Risa Nitkin, whom she encountered during her junior year in high school. Nitkin, Bonnie says, taught her how to write. “She wouldn’t let anything get by. She was critical … extremely supportive, but critical, and I trusted her. She used questioning a lot. She would ask a critical thinking question and have us go back in the text to really justify our answers. It was more like a seminar-style class. Very high level and challenging.”

Once Bonnie got to college, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, she saw the payoff from Nitkin’s efforts. “Right away, my composition professor in my freshman year said, ‘You’re one of the best writers that we have had as a freshman. You must have had really good training.’” The praise had its impact almost immediately. Bonnie decided to major in English. The reaction at home was more circumspect. “My father asked, ‘What are you going to do with that?’” Bonnie remembers. “That was his first question: ‘What on earth are you going to do with that?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, maybe go into law … ’ And then it just kind of dawned on me that I wanted to go into the field of teaching.”

Having made that decision, Bonnie started going back to her mother’s school, East Rock School in New Haven, observing her, this time with new eyes. She had, in her mother, another ideal role model. Susan Fineman had been named Teacher of the Year in New Haven, and her skill and loving affect had given her, even then, a kind of fame in the city. Former students would stop her on the street, and Susan would respond with warmth and uncanny recollections. “She’d say, ‘Ah, how is your father?’ She remembers every student.” Observing her mother’s impact on children’s lives: “It just became clear to me: yes, this is what I am going to do.”

From the moment she decided to teach, Bonnie also returned to memories of Risa Nitkin. She recites a litany of traits she has tried to emulate over the years: “Trying to have some humor in [my classes] and trying to make connections for students; also that idea of being critical without being judgmental of student work, not accepting poor writing or poor work, but working with the students. I can remember staying after school with [Nitkin], and we would work for an hour on a paragraph. Just one paragraph. And that’s sort of my motto with students, that the work’s never done, you can always revise, I’ll always stay after with you … That’s how she was with me.”

The decision to teach meant that Bonnie would need to go back to school. She enrolled in a master’s in English program at Southern Connecticut State University, the school at which her father taught. That program carried with it the necessary coursework for obtaining a teaching license, including the requisite student teaching class. Once again, Bonnie was lucky. Her teaching placement at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven was with a cooperating teacher, Deborah Hare, who served as a third key role model. Hare was a published writer, whose book Homeboys documented her work as a teacher in the New Haven schools. “I learned so much from her about how to be a teacher,” Bonnie says. “She was very active in the community, she knew all the families, she was close with all the kids, and everything was about forming ‘a community of learners.’ It was all about getting to know the students on all levels. Getting to know who they really were. Acknowledging all of the unique things about her students. And I just saw her doing that, and that ended up becoming something that I really cherished in the classroom.”

Bonnie says that student teaching was by far the best part of her teacher preparation experience, but that the internship was far too short. Her placement, from October to December of that year, hardly served to prepare her for her first real class. Even today, years later, Bonnie remembers it as a flaw in teacher preparation. Students enter into their lifelong work with such minimal experience in front of a class, making the first years of teaching unnecessarily difficult.

Bonnie’s first year was indeed difficult. She applied mid-year for an opening at Warren G. Harding High School in Bridgeport, a position she had heard about through a friend of her mother’s. The school had been mired in political turmoil; the principal had been asked to leave. There were student protests. “When I called the principal before beginning, he said, ‘It’s going to be tough,’ but I wanted to save the world, so I went there.”

Bonnie arrived at Harding in January, already the fifth English teacher hired that year. She says:

Bonnie started looking for another job. She and a friend attended a Connecticut teacher job fair, a massive event with representatives from some of the state’s most affluent districts: Greenwich, Wilton, New Canaan. She ended up being interviewed by Shelton, a small, conservative, and homogeneous district in southern Connecticut. The offer came almost at once, accompanied by an invitation to coach the boys’ volleyball team, a thrilling proposition for someone who loved sports as much as literature. “It was an amazing experience on the coaching end,” Bonnie remembers. “An incredible, life-changing experience.” The teaching, however, was not as appealing. “There was no diversity there. It’s very provincial. No one goes anywhere. Most of my students had never even stepped foot out of Shelton. Even if I took the students on field trips or tried to introduce them to different authors or different perspectives, [the students were still difficult to reach], because of their community, or how they grew up, or their parents.” The sense of entitlement created barriers that were more daunting than poverty. “Eventually, I said, ‘I want to go somewhere where I can be recognized for my teaching, so I can really make that the biggest part of my life.’”

Her next stop was a job in a very different community – the working-class and ethnically diverse town of East Hartford. Bonnie looks back fondly on her brief time in East Hartford. “It was a wonderful school,” she says. “I would have happily sent my own children there if I had children then.” But by this point, Bonnie could feel that her interests and ambitions were changing. She had begun to think about ways to engage her natural leadership skills. During the evenings, she had enrolled in a program for school administrators and received her certificate. The program’s internship placement had been at Windsor High School, and through it she had come to meet the principal and some of the other English teachers in the school. When a position of English chair at Windsor High School became available, Bonnie applied for it with mixed feelings. “I felt I had to make the move,” she says, “but it was with regret. The transition was difficult. I still think about East Hartford with great warmth.”

Because the pay scale in East Hartford was considerably higher than in Windsor, moving meant a sizable salary cut. What’s more, as half-time teacher, half-time department chair, she works harder now than she ever has before. One of the unexpected challenges for Bonnie has been separating the teaching part of her job from the administrative part. Teaching has always been an intense and all-consuming activity for her, and it takes work to bring her full self to her morning classes, knowing that bureaucratic obligations await her after classes are over.

Good time management and long, long hours characterize Bonnie’s day at Windsor High. By 9:00, she has finished teaching her two classes. Then she turns to her work as chair. She is also charged with the supervision of eighteen teachers, work made doubly complicated given new regulations that require vast amounts of paperwork and documentation in the service of “accountability.” “There’s just a ton of paperwork,” Bonnie explains. “It’s always hard trying to manage all the different forms and things that need to be done on the computer. The time I really like is the time I spend with individual teachers on goal setting, giving feedback, giving more feedback. Sometimes I feel that valuable work takes a back seat because the amount of paperwork … checklists and forms.” Bonnie estimates that the documentation takes up to eight to ten hours per teacher per year; for a staff of eighteen, that is 200 hours of work.

Adding to the difficulty of the job is the fact that, when she first arrived, she inherited a curricula that was, at best, chaotic. “All different kinds of curricula had been written in different formats, housed in different areas. I couldn’t even ascertain where we were. I decided to just start over and tried to use what we had and draw from it, but it took more than 300 hours a course to write a good quality curriculum document … and then multiply that times seven courses that we wrote … the teachers and I.” Bonnie says that if you look at her schedule, you would see that some days she has three meetings happening at the same time. “Building-level meetings, district-level meetings, Board of Ed meetings at night to present curriculum or data … and being in classrooms from anywhere between twenty minutes to sixty minutes of observing teachers, which is really the best part, but it’s not as often as I want to because of all the other duties.”

Teaching the Strongest Students

Bonnie’s second class of the day is a section of ninth grade “high honors.” She praised this group to me the day before, saying how warmly she feels toward the students, and how attentive and kind they are. Still, she says, there are challenges. Most middle school students, even the brightest, still have difficulty with analytical thinking and don’t know how to develop a thesis statement. “They are very plot oriented.” Bonnie’s goal with this group has been to push them toward critical thinking, toward argument and a higher kind of engagement with the text.

The students are reading To Kill a Mockingbird and gradually “working up” to a writing prompt that will end as a critical essay.

“Good morning, let’s get ourselves ready!” She claps her hands, smiling and looking around the room. “Let’s everyone get out their sticky notes so you can mark passages that are interesting or important.” The sixteen students, seven black, seven white, one Hispanic, and one Asian, move immediately to gather their materials and open their books. One student asks if she can resubmit a paper that received a lower grade.

“Good question, Asia.” Bonnie turns to the full class. “I will always take work back with changes. Why wouldn’t I want you to make it better? If I give you feedback and you answer that, you’ll get five bonus points.”

She has put the organizing question for the day up on blackboard: “Scout: who she is and what has made her who she is?”

In many ways, the format of this class is the same as that for the low-level class – close reading of a selected passage from the book, highlighting key sections, extracting details through close observation of the text. But here, the friendly atmosphere and sense of student engagement is wholly different. Bonnie begins by asking students to brainstorm ideas about the text and the character. Even among the brightest ninth-graders in the school, extracting analytical details is a slow and difficult process. She gives an example, noting how a remark made by Scout suggests she doesn’t like school. Then comes the pressing for critical analysis: “Why doesn’t she like school? What is her teacher like? What does that teacher seem to represent? How might not liking school shape someone’s personality?” As she speaks, she reminds students again and again that this or that sentence or word is important. “Write that in the margins,” she says. “Put a sticky note near that phrase.”

She moves the class into the next stage of the lesson, small-group work. They are to review several pages and then consult with one another, sharing examples of telling details that speak to Scout’s character. The students are grouped into a rough semicircle. Bonnie moves around the classroom as they work silently.

“You want to have some strategies to bring back to the class. I would make sure you have some details to bring to your partners when we are ready to discuss.” “Destiny, you’re on to something here. Now, you and your partner need to find more examples of things that describe Scout’s character.” “Good work so far. Now you have to dig more; it’s below the surface.”

Bonnie squats down to speak to another pair of students, a boy and a girl who have been skirting the delicate topic of racism: “Why is it so unusual that her dad would treat people like that? Be honest. It’s the South … What is Scout starting to notice about the town and the people around her?”

Finally, a student breaks through with the answer Bonnie is hoping for. “Yes!” Bonnie explodes. “Jem and Scout are learning to treat people as equals, which is unusual in Alabama at that time. The first time I taught this book,” Bonnie tells the class, “I realized at the end that the students thought that Scout and her dad were black. I totally messed up. They didn’t realize that they were a white family in the South.”

The second part of the class is focused on getting students to write an introductory paragraph to an essay on To Kill A Mockingbird. Drawing a rough picture of a house on the blackboard, she goes through what is clearly a familiar exercise. “A house has to have a sidewalk that leads up to something.” She draws the sidewalk. “That’s your hook. Then there’s the front door: the main idea, your interpretation of something. And then there’s the doorknob: the way in. That’s the preview of what will happen in the paper.” It’s a bit of a stretch, but students seem deeply engrossed in this exercise. Two boys draw houses in their notebooks.

The class goes to work, in groups of two, and Bonnie roams from student pair to student pair. She praises and pushes, praises and pushes. “Good start,” she says, again and again. “I love that, because we didn’t talk about that. She is a curious child. So where do you think that comes from? Excellent. I like when I go to groups and there are new ideas. That makes me happy.”

After eight or nine minutes, Bonnie shifts gears again. “Let’s review the study questions,” she says. Notebooks come out compliantly, and Bonnie moves the class through the questions they have prepared in advance. Even among this high honors class, there is clearly a vast range of abilities. Some students ask questions that suggest they have barely understood the plot of the story; others offer observations that are sophisticated and sensitive. One can already see the future academic stars, the small band of elite students who graduate from Windsor each year with Merit Scholarships and full tuition fellowships. One of these students, a spindly, bespectacled boy named Dave, raises his hand to offer an insight about Scout’s treatment of Boo Radley. Bonnie has been talking about how the town is afraid of change, afraid of difference. “Maybe,” he says, his voice still high as a young child’s, “Scout is frightened by Boo Radley not only because he’s different, but because she’s different, too. Maybe she sees herself in him, and it makes her uncomfortable.”

“Wow, Dave,” says Bonnie. “That’s a really great insight.”

Bonnie says she sees a clear line of connection between teaching and coaching. “A lot of the things that I prided myself on as an athlete and then a coach are exactly the same things that ended up becoming important to me as a teacher. I started to see the similarities early on and realized, ‘Why don’t I just run my classroom the same way I would run my team?’ Everything that I really learned about, how to lead … It all came from coaching … seeing the coaches that I really admired as a player, so I started trying to emulate them, and trying to emulate them, first in my own coaching and then in my classroom.” For Bonnie, that means trying to create, in every class, the coherence and interdependency of a team effort. Like a coach, Bonnie says, she is constantly trying to “create high expectations for my classroom, make sure I’m measuring [the students] all the time just like I am on the court, using statistics, making sure I provide praise for the people that are working really hard and showing success, teamwork, collaboration.”

***

Bonnie met her future spouse, Danielle Toto, in 2004. Danie, a military veteran, had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. “I still had a tan,” Danie smiles, relating the circumstances of their first encounter at a bar. Bonnie was working at Shelton at the time, and beginning to feel the deep sense of disconnection there that would lead to her eventual resignation. She was impressed with Danie, a real estate agent, from the moment they met – her calm demeanor, her sense of discipline and integrity. Danie, too, was impressed. After their meeting, the two began instant messaging one another. “It wasn’t until we started communicating via IM,” Danie laughs, “that I was like, ‘Oh! This person actually has a brain, and they’re articulate, and they know how to spell!’” she laughs. “So, what attracted me to her was the intelligence.” At the time, Bonnie knew that she had to keep her relationship with Danie a secret from her colleagues at Shelton. “I had nobody at the job who knew that we were together,” Bonnie remembers. “Or rather, I’m sure they knew, but I didn’t talk to them about it … It was extremely uncomfortable.”

“You determined, right off the bat,” Danie adds, “that ‘I am not going in to the next job with people not knowing about my relationship.’ She had made that decision to draw the line.”

In 2006, the year of Danie and Bonnie’s civil union, Bonnie took the position in East Hartford, a community that was far more welcoming. From the start, she made sure that she was honest with colleagues about who she was. It was deeply freeing. “At Shelton, I could never go to a football game with Danie … could never say ‘This is my partner’ or ‘This is my girlfriend.’ At East Hartford, if someone said ‘Oh, tell me about yourself,’ you could.” The same is true at Windsor.

Danie is a small-boned, slim woman with a serious face and a boyish haircut. She has the perfect posture and self-contained aspect of someone trained into fierce self-discipline. Real estate, Danie says, is a job that draws on her skills as a listener, a problem solver, and a behind-the-scenes support person. She sees herself as possessing traits complementary to Bonnie’s, and from Danie’s long description of their differences, it is clear they have spent a good deal of time analyzing and parsing their own personalities, and thinking about how work and home life intersect. “Bonnie’s a workaholic,” Danie begins, “so part of my job as her spouse is to try and recenter her back into being able to say no. She has a hard time saying no. As a department chair,” Danie says, “you need to be able to close the door and get your work done. Bonnie has an open-door policy, and anyone at any moment can interrupt her. But then she is stressed at home, going, ‘I have a million things to do.’ I tell her: You need to be able to close the door and say, ‘This is me time.’ She has a really hard time doing that.”

There are other differences between Bonnie and Danie that make for a strong bond. “Bonnie would rather be in charge,” Danie says, “and I would rather not be in charge … I would rather be the foot soldier than the sergeant.” Bonnie can also be pulled in many directions at once, Danie says, while she is less flexible: “Having control of my day, having control of who I’m with and what I’m doing is important.” Danie sees her role as a partner as protecting Bonnie from her own good nature, her tendency to be everything to everyone.

When I ask Danie what she admires most about Bonnie, she lists four things: first, her work ethic. “Bonnie gets up every day at 5:20, no matter what. She could be sick, she could have gotten one hour of sleep; it doesn’t matter, she gets up.” Second, her generosity: “She never goes anywhere empty handed.” And third, her amazing memory: “She remembers being like an eight-month-old,” Danie laughs. “It’s incredible … She remembers the craziest things.”

“Except to put the wash into the dryer,” Bonnie laughs.

Finally, Danie says she admires Bonnie’s natural leadership qualities: her desire to take the reins, to be a role model, to nurture. It is these qualities that drove Bonnie into coaching, then into administration, and more recently into motherhood; Bonnie and Danie have taken in two foster children and thrived on the experience. “Our first foster daughter arrived when she was sixteen years old,” Bonnie says, “after being in dozens of foster and group homes.” Bonnie and Danie parented this young woman until college, watching with deep pleasure when she graduated last year from the University of Hartford. The second foster child arrived several years later, when the girl’s former foster family turned out “not to be a good fit.” “She stayed with us for respite care. We had her at our home on weekends, during vacations and holidays, or, basically, at her request.” This second young woman also thrived under Bonnie and Danie’s care; she will be graduating Eastern Connecticut University this May with a BA in women’s studies.

“Both girls contributed to our lives in very powerful ways,” Bonnie says. “I think we learned how challenging it can be to be parents! I actually found teaching much easier than parenting. There’s so much to consider, as a parent and a spouse. Danie and I had to learn to create a united front about our expectations. It was a tremendous amount of responsibility to provide support, guidance, and structure to two children who had been repeatedly mistreated by other adults, including their own parents. It has been rewarding to see them grow into mindful, thoughtful, and reflective adults.” Attending the older girl’s graduation was deeply moving. “She had great obstacles, but completed her degree with a very respectable grade point average. It was amazing seeing her walk across the stage. It’s humbling when she tells us, ‘You taught me that,’ or ‘I do this because you showed me why it is important.’” Bonnie summarizes the experience with typical clarity. “For me,” she says, “being a foster parent allowed me to evaluate my own values and my own ethical code, so that I had a better foundation to be a good person to others.”

Perhaps because she has thought so much about parenting, Bonnie is attuned to the needs of her students’ parents. She has created a system for communicating with parents that allows for ongoing, open-ended communication – something she feels is critical to the work. “It’s all about how aggressive you are at keeping parents involved,” she says. “What I typically do is make a list of all of the parents, and I e-mail all of the parents weekly to tell them what we are doing in class, give them examples, give them links. I write: ‘Hello parents, here’s what we’re working on, here are some resources. Check the website I just uploaded this thing.’”

A Debate between Colleagues

One winter afternoon, Bonnie sits down with Sam, another veteran teacher in her department, to talk about their different views of the field. Sam has been at Windsor for twenty-three years and teaches both low-level classes and AP classes, though his specialty, he would assert, is working with the stronger students. He and Bonnie are close friends, but they share different views on the school and the profession.

Bonnie starts by complaining that the school – most schools – are too focused on meeting the needs of faculty and administrators, at the expense of students. “There are so many issues, political issues, issues of logistics,” she says. “It’s such a tough profession, it’s so emotionally and physically draining that the focus ends up being on the adults when it really should be on the students – on everything that we can do for the students to help them to be successful.”

“I see the problem being the opposite,” Sam says. “We are so concerned with student self-esteem and student feelings that we create a kind of anti-adult atmosphere in the school. Unlike you, my sense is that teachers are a very low priority in decision-making. No one ever asks, ‘How will this impact teachers? Or how can we make this school a place where adults want to work over the long haul?’”

“I don’t want to discount the importance of the adults being happy and feeling supported,” Bonnie says, “but poor decisions get made by adults – whether they are administrators, whether they are teachers – because it’s just easier to do something that way; instead of really thinking about the students. Here’s an example. I try to work after school with students, every day. But you cannot work with a student after school at all, in any effective way, because announcements would come over the loud speaker about every minute, from the time that the after-school sessions would begin until the buses arrive. Why? Because it was too much to have adults walk up to find students that they are looking for, or too much to write parents and say, ‘Parents, guardians, if you need to contact the child, please use a cell phone, so we don’t have to interrupt instruction.’ That’s what I mean by adult centered.”

“I’d call that policy of interrupting our work anything but teacher-centered,” Sam says. “It undermines your authority and your effectiveness when you are constantly interrupted. It devalues the work of teachers, and suggests that some minor student or parent issue, some announcement about a football game or a missing form, is more important that the serious work being done by the teacher. Schools need to respect teachers’ expertise. The endless paperwork we have as teachers, the uploading of grades and other data that takes huge amounts of time. In a school that was teacher-centered, that kind of mechanical recordkeeping would be seen as a terrible waste of talent. Doctors don’t spend hours on billing and uploading patient information. They hire other people to do that work so that doctors can practice medicine.”

The subject turns to ability grouping. Bonnie is a fierce defender of mixed grouping; Sam is not. “I’ve been in those types of schools that are highly, highly tracked, like four or five levels,” says Bonnie. “I’ve always felt that the classroom environment is much richer and much more collaborative and inviting when you have all different kinds of students in there. With good planning, it can be done, and it can be done well, and it’s not insulting to them. I understand that there are students who could potentially, as people say, ‘bring the rest of the group down,’ but if you manage the classroom well, it shouldn’t be a problem. If you plan well, it shouldn’t be a problem. Frankly, I find it very insulting to students when we say, ‘Oh, you’re all the students who are scoring really low, so you’re not capable of working with other students who may be are scoring higher on things.’ I think they can, and I think that they can contribute in valuable ways, whether it’s their own experiences, or maybe they’ll have an ‘aha!’ moment and be able to contribute in other ways. But I find it insulting, I think it is very difficult to get those groups motivated, because they know, they’re very aware of why they’re in there. I think there is good evidence that they can learn from each other. Students who are very capable are going to continue to be very capable. You can enrich the classroom in other ways for them, but there are lots of methods that you can use to have lots of different students working together.”

“I wouldn’t be able to teach if the classes weren’t tracked,” says Sam. “While I appreciate everything you say about the benefits of heterogeneous grouping, your comments seem very idealistic to me. There are students who, even with great coaxing, simply do not want to work hard. There is no question in my mind that those students compromise the quality of a class. It’s painful for me to watch how they undermine the energy and enthusiasm of those who want to work. While I agree that there is an imperfect mechanism for placing students in levels, I disagree that levels be erased. Base the levels on motivation. Say, ‘Anyone can take an honors class if they are willing to work hard, regardless of test scores or earlier measures.’ I could accept that. My success with AP is based on that premise. Many of the students whom I encouraged to take AP were ones with incredibly low PSAT scores – like 300, 350 in English. But if they are motivated, fine. If they stop being motivated, please then leave. Don’t drag us all down with your negative attitude.”

“I think that schools in general have a hard time dealing with behavior problems because they are so complex,” Bonnie says. “It’s really hard sometimes to figure out what the root of it is. Is it academics? Is it things going on at home? It could be so many different things. It’s just very complicated to deal with behavioral problems and to have the supports in place – enough support and enough variety of support – to really help students who are having behavioral problems. I do think, though, and I can see it in my colleagues’ classrooms, if you have an engaging class and you have a really interesting lesson, then those behavioral issues tend to diminish, or at least they are a lot less as opposed to a lesson that’s not really very engaging. So, that’s sort of the first course of action for behavior. But it’s this whole line, do we punish a student and say, ‘You’re not behaving, so now you can’t be in the classroom’? which in some cases is what they want (they’re trying to avoid learning). The whole climate of the school can set a tone. If a parent walked into the building and visually saw the low-level classes, I could imagine why it would be perceived as racist. We have such a diverse school, and yet my entire college-level class (the lowest level), every single student in there is African American. Every single student. And one Hispanic boy. So, if a parent peeked into a classroom, that’s what it looks like. And why is that happening? It could be academic; it could be behavioral. But if its academic, then we are really doing something wrong because there is no way that the black students should all be in the lower level classes. And if it’s behavioral, we have to figure that out too. Teachers and administrators, we’re doing something wrong.”

“Whenever I speak to you, I feel very old-fashioned,” Sam says. “I really appreciate what you’re saying, and I believe deeply in diversity. Excellence means diversity. But I don’t think I should have to fight to keep students engaged and attentive. To me, a great class is a great literary discussion. It’s about the poem, the text. It’s about teaching kids to derive meaning and pleasure from literature, to turn them into lifelong readers, literate human beings. I think that between the memos and forms, the technology expectations, the behavior problems in the lower-level classes, and the bad press calling Windsor teachers ‘racist,’ all teachers are at great risk of burnout. I’m a veteran teacher with almost thirty-five years in the profession – so I am, to some extent, protected by my own savvy, by my ability to look at things with a detached eye. But a new teacher coming in, fresh out of school, might well find the job completely overwhelming.”

“I’m more hopeful than you,” smiles Bonnie, “that a new generation of teachers will be able to find the balance. I’m optimistic about that. I’m optimistic, in general.”

***

In the fall of 2014, Bonnie accepted a position as a district coordinator for language arts, K–12, a position that dramatically increases her salary but means she will no longer teach. The decision was difficult for her, but the offer seemed to fast-track a goal that had been emerging for some time: an ambition to lead and a desire to fix things in a bigger way. “Honestly, I saw it as my opportunity to try to improve instruction across the district,” she says, “and so, even though it’s going to be a challenge because I will miss teaching, for me, the more important factor was, ‘What can I do to impact education on a larger scale? And what can I do to have more impact?’”

Down the road, Bonnie thinks she might like to become a principal and, perhaps, teach some courses at the local university for student teachers. She is keenly interested in teacher education, too, and has many ideas about how her own training could have been improved and how she could make it better for other new teachers entering the field. But for the meantime, she says, “I’m passionate about this school system, about the kids, about the incredible power of diversity. And I believe I can have an impact on making things better.” Bonnie admits that the downside, of course, is that a passionate teacher, with ambition to lead, has nowhere to go but outside the classroom.