Tools for Reporting on Teaching: What to Look for in Classrooms

The Classless Classroom

Jacques Steinberg, The New York Times

April 13, 1997. The New York Times.

Room 3-223
Third-grade teachers throughout New York City are trying to meet Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew's goal for the school year: by spring, all third graders should be able to read on their own and at grade level. Last year, fewer than half of them could. This series visits one class trying to meet the goal.

NEW YORK -- Each fall, John and Jeanne Newhouse tour the city's elite private schools, schools like Trinity and Calhoun and Ethical Culture, and wonder whether they should enroll their son Tyler, who is now in the third grade.

Yet each year the Newhouses, a psychotherapist and a lawyer, have decided to keep him at Public School 75 on West 96th Street in Manhattan, where the other students in his classroom have a wide range of skills: from those still battling to decode one-syllable words to others, like Tyler, who are writing their own short stories with dialogue.

To the Newhouses, the rationale is simple: none of the private schools or gifted programs in public schools that they visited would expose Tyler -- who is white -- to as diverse a population as Room 3-223 at P.S. 75, where no ethnic or racial group is dominant and no child is classified as intellectually superior.

"Put Tyler out on the street," his father says, "and he sees a reflection of what he has in the classroom."

But trying to make sure that Tyler and his more talented classmates feel challenged -- while also seeking to raise the performance of those students who are reading below grade level -- is a task that weighs heavily on their teacher, Ted Kesler.

Each day, Kesler must find an equitable way to parcel out his limited reservoir of energy among the 30 students in his class. Each time he chooses to work with one, the educational lives of 29 others lie in the balance, and each choice is closely monitored: by parents seeking to make sure their child is not short-changed and by the students themselves, ever vigilant for the anointment of a class favorite.

"It's like a magician spinning 12 plates at the same time on those sticks," Kesler says. "You've got to make sure each one has its proper rotation on the pole, and that they all keep spinning."

Sometimes, one drops. And feelings are hurt.

Hyacinth Campbell, a single mother working as a baby sitter and living in Morrisania in the Bronx, says she has been troubled by her visits to Room 3-223 for the monthly "author's celebration," when Kesler reads from recent student essays.

Always, she says, the compositions of the same advanced writers are read -- Tyler is a perennial -- while the struggling writers, including her son, Christopher, must wait months.

"There are other kids," Ms. Campbell said. "I never hear their work."

Kesler is one of thousands of teachers throughout the city who offer an alternative to "gifted and talented programs" -- programs that have recently been criticized by schools Chancellor Rudy Crew for using IQ tests, often exclusively, to virtually lock out minority students.

Kesler does not believe in separating students by intellectual ability, whether into special programs or classes tracked by test scores. Intelligence is but one measure of giftedness, he says, adding that he saw the perils of such tracking at first hand, as a student teacher at an elementary school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

"Five years old," he said, "and the kids in K-4 already knew they were the dummies."

Instead, the classroom should be a microcosm of the city, he says, where students learn to deal with people and their various abilities.

He has, for example, deconstructed Tyler's stories about a talking cat named Al, showing his classmates elements of good writing. But Kesler has also told the class of the work habits of Christopher, who has struggled with his reading but who demonstrated extraordinary discipline by earning a black belt in tae kwon do last fall -- at age 8.

Still, Kesler's main charge this year is to help his students read independently and at their own grade level in time for the standardized reading test that will be administered on Thursday. How does he do it, when one boy trying to master a simple "I Can Read" book might be seated next to a student like Alexander Aponte, who was tackling "To Kill a Mockingbird"?

In truth, it is not always an efficient process.

For instance, although Alexander had the moxie to pick up the Harper Lee novel, he struggled for three days over it before Kesler even noticed he was floundering. For Alexander, it was essentially three days of wasted time.

"I wish I had gotten to him sooner," Kesler said later.

Kesler's is an eclectic approach to teaching reading, where group lessons that even the best readers might find challenging -- using Post-it notes to track a story's main theme, for example -- alternate with others emphasizing phonics, like how the "shun" sound is pronounced in words that end in "tion."

But perhaps the most important work Kesler's students do is on their own, following lesson plans that he has customized for each.

He and the class's student teacher, Hillary Fertig, assist each student in 10-minute conferences, which may occur twice a week for those most in need, and twice a month for those whose skills are stronger.

As he makes his rounds, Kesler must continuously adapt his teaching to each student's needs. It is, he says, not unlike the work of a psychiatrist who sees one patient after another, no two with the same problem. One of his first stops the other day, for instance, was with Christopher, the wiry black belt who had selected "Arthur's Back to School Day," a second-grade book that he could not handle in September.

Kesler listened as Christopher demonstrated that he could not only read the book, but could also correct himself if a sentence did not sound right when spoken aloud. The boy read from page 44: "Arthur ate the cookie. Violet gave him." He then quickly backed up and read it again, this time without pausing for a period that was not there: "Arthur ate the cookie Violet gave him."

"Excellent work," Kesler told him.

A few moments later, the teacher was seated beside Tyler, who was midway through "The Owl in the Shower," a fourth-grade book about a logger from Oregon and his conflicting feelings for a spotted owl that his son had rescued.

This time, the conversation was more substantive, with Tyler telling Kesler that nothing in the book "made me think," and Kesler suggesting that Tyler use Post-it notes to diagram the evolution of the relationship between the father and the owl. "What you're following is a line of thought," Kesler said.

That session went well, but was dogged by several interruptions -- interruptions that many parents seek to avoid in gifted programs. "I'm sorry, one minute," Kesler had said to Tyler, before stopping to reprimand two girls for not reading and another for lying down with her feet up. All the while, another boy tapped aimlessly on the teacher's shoulder.

Is Kesler succeeding in reaching those at the high and low ends of the class, as well as at the middle? The results of the standardized reading test will provide one indication, but already there are anecdotal signs.

Kesler worried aloud last fall that he might not have much time to work with Tyler, given the needs of so many others. But Tyler says he feels he is improving.

"This year, I feel like I'm reading faster," Tyler says. "And I've learned a lot of different techniques I can use to remember what I am reading."

As parents of means who are gambling on the public school system, Tyler's parents are still the exception in New York City. And yet they say they are satisfied with Tyler's progress, and grateful that he is being educated in an environment unlike the virtually all-white schools they attended, on Long Island and in Madison, Wis.

"Ted has really motivated Tyler in a way that's extraordinary," says Tyler's father, John.

And what of Chris Campbell?

His mother, who is attending college part-time, says she can tell when she reads with her son each night that he is improving.

But she said she had hoped he would be able to read books on a third-grade level by now, and wouldn't trip up on words like "mascot," "breathlessly" and "convince," which flummoxed him as he read "Babar to the Rescue" with her the other night.

"Mr. Kesler's paying attention to him," Ms. Campbell said, "but I think he could do it a little more."

While she is pleased that her son and Tyler are friends, Ms. Campbell says she fears Tyler and others on his level are taking time away from her son.

This has not been lost on Tyler.

While he recognizes that being singled out for good work makes him proud, Tyler says he senses a downside.

"One of my nicknames is 'teacher's pet,' " he says. "I don't know what they mean by that. But I don't let it bother me."

From the New York Times, April 13, 1997 © 1997 The New York Times, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of the Material without express written permission is prohibited.