Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: Deep Democracy

Sunday, October 21, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

While I was in grad school at Berkeley, I volunteered twice a week at an East Oakland high school, in the 9th and 10th grade English, Social Studies and Journalism classes of two gentlemen I knew. Between them, Mr. Jackson and Mr. O’Donoghue had over 25 years of public high school teaching experience, and they had together created a curriculum that raised the relevance of reading, writing and critical thinking skills by incorporating a creative writing magazine and a weekly school newspaper.

When I first walked onto that campus, I was intimidated by how different the statistics of this inner-city high school were from those of my own suburban New Jersey high school. Gang and drug threats in the neighborhood were very real and hung around just outside the 8’ fences that surrounded the locked campus, metal detectors and armed guards were visible, the school was 90% non-white, and tensions among the large African-Amercian, Latino and Asian populations regularly threatened to erupt on campus.

But, in no time, I felt welcome in the Media Academy, as that corner of the campus was called. It was always a beehive of activity, and Mr. Jackson and Mr. O’Donoghue made it clear to their students that they considered me a legitimate authority figure. At first, I just listened and observed, then moved on to helping with students’ creative writing assignments, and eventually graduated to becoming the teachers’ regular substitute when either of them, which was frequently as the Media Academy grew in reputation and successful statistics.

During a one-week substitute stint, I maintained one of Mr. O’Donoghue’s daily routines: giving a quiz on some articles in the morning’s Oakland Tribune. The students were given 10 minutes to read a section of the paper, and then took a 5-question, short-answer quiz, which was graded immediately to confirm the correct answers. The objective of the task was to encourage reading and familiarity with news writing and story structure.

On Day 1, students hardly bothered to read. Although the questions were quite easy, a large number of students did poorly and didn’t care. Cheating was blatant as the students in section 1 gave the questions and answers to the students in section 2. The students expected this to frustrate me, but they also seemed to expect that there was little I could or would do about it. So, the next day, I changed the questions for each section, which neatly cut off the cheating scam, but now both sections performed poorly and were equally defiant.

On Day 3, I explained the objective again, but still, overall performance remained poor.

On Day 4, I decided to break with tradition in a radical way and explained to the students in both sections what the POINT was. I told them not only that I WANTED all of them to get perfect scores, but that I believed it was POSSIBLE for all of them to get perfect scores. The students gave me a very cool, yeah-right, you don’t shock me look, but the fact that they were silent revealed just how shocked they really were.

I went on. I explained that it was not my goal to have as many students as possible fail this little assignment everyday and that I did not see myself as against them. They were almost disbelieving when I said that I would construct the task in such a way that they were all capable of doing well. Then, I explained how to use the 10 minutes to read, absorb and be able to recall a small number of important facts. I instructed them to spend the 10 minutes reading just two articles, and I gave them the 5-minute and the 1-minute warnings.

Although there was still skepticism in the much improved silence that followed, I was gratified that many more students did read. More gratifying were the smiles and woo-hoos when the quizzes were graded and many more students achieved a 4 or 5 out of 5 vs. the previous 1s and 2s. And, on Day 5, more students were willing to trust the previous day’s experience, read and did well.

This was the first experience that pointed out to me in a real way that if we continue to do the same thing over and over again, why should we expect a different result? But, if we are willing to address our and the other person’s assumptions explicitly, and explain our expectations clearly and honestly, we may be able to earn more trust, reduce negative expectations and increase the potential of success. This experience had a deep and satisfying impact on me, and I remain grateful to Mr. Jackson and Mr. O’Donoghue for lending me their students for my social psychology experiments during those two years.

 

Sermon: Deep Democracy by Rev. Kurt Kuhwald