Getting Smart to Do Good: Literacy Lessons that Transform Empathy into Action
In this blog post, Anne Vilen, a writer for EL Education and co-author of Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work that Matters and Learning that Lasts: Challenging, Engaging and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction, discusses how teachers can create lessons that meet standards and are meaningful to students, using Polaris Charter Academy’s Peacekeeper Project as an example.
In his bestselling book Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why, Paul Tough (2016) describes two conditions that enable students to thrive in school and in life even in the face of adversity. First is “connection and relatedness,” a sense of belonging to and being truly known by peers and teachers. Second is “a sense of growth and potential,” which develops when students find so much meaning in the work they are doing in school that they are willing to grapple with frustration and failure along the way in order to do it well. What can Language Arts teachers do to inspire middle school students’ sense of connection and create lessons that meet standards and are meaningful to students? Take these four steps and you’ll be on your way:
- Assign reading that is challenging and meaningful
- Ask a compelling guiding question
- Invite students to think and feel, talk and listen
- Empower students to create and act in their own communities
In this article, we’ll consider an exemplar from Polaris Charter Academy, a Chicago school that is part of the EL Education (formerly Expeditionary Learning) network cited by Tough. At Polaris, teachers Francesca Peck (language arts) and Carrie Moy (social studies) collaborated to build students’ intellectual understanding and empathy as a way to transform this powerful combination into positive action.
Assign reading that is challenging and meaningful
Designing lessons that are meaningful to students begins by choosing a topic and text that challenge students to read critically and that enlighten and enlarge students’ understanding of their own experience. At Polaris Charter School, 91% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. They all have been scarred by the violence and crime in their own neighborhood. Knowing their students’ fears and challenges, Peck and Moy chose to narrow their standards-based topic of American government to a deep investigation of the issue of gun violence within the American justice system. When considering texts, they chose the American Constitution as an authentic non-fiction anchor text and paired it with the novel Monster by Walter Dean Myers (2004). The pairing of texts with deep relevance to students’ own lives was a powerful teaching decision.
Moy facilitated a close reading of the Constitution in social studies class. She taught students to unpack its vocabulary, summarize its explicit meaning, and engage in the debate about interpretations of the second amendment for the 21st century. Beginning with the broad brush of American history provided students with context and the background knowledge to think critically about articles on gun violence in the community and to understand their own role as citizens in a society. It allowed students to “get into the historical problem space” where they could develop contextual historical empathy that would allow them to truly understand the actions of past actors and think critically about the past’s relevance for today.“Over time we realized,” said Ameerah Rollins, a student in the class, “that in a democracy, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, means us.”
Then, in English class, they turned their attention to analyzing Monster, the story of Steve Harmon, a black teenager charged with robbery and murder. Harmon’s story told through fictional journal entries and court transcripts hit close to home; many students had friends or siblings who were affiliated with gangs. It also raised important moral questions about the causes and consequences of gun violence and the ambiguity of resolution through the justice system. Students’ personal connection gave them a reason to do the hard work of unpacking the text’s experimental form and grappling with the disparity between perspectives revealed in the novel’s parallel narratives. By teaching their students to close read for layers of meaning and asking them to provide textual evidence for their inferences about both the novel and non-fiction text, Peck and Moy were doing more than meeting standards. They were also enabling students to think critically about the implications of these texts in their own lives.
Students at Polaris were deeply engaged by Monster because they could personally relate to the character’s experience of prejudice, but through the challenge of close reading they also acquired the knowledge and skills to engage in meaningful debate. “It was as if the students were on the jury or witnessed the crime, or even like they were lawyers,” said Peck, “They could see themselves in the main character’s shoes, but they also argued, is he innocent or guilty? Is he good or bad?”
Ask a compelling guiding question
At this point, Peck and Moy made another critical pedagogical move. They pushed students from simply talking about the issues toward self-advocacy by asking a carefully crafted guiding question: Who’s responsible for keeping the peace? Peck and Moy resisted providing an easy solution to the guiding question. Instead, they posted the question in the classroom and continually referred back to it during lessons, giving students an opportunity to grapple with its complexity as they searched for their own answer. (For more information on using guiding questions to uncover the big ideas in science and history, see Learning that Lasts: Challenging, Engaging, and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction. p. 122–24.)
Invite students to think and feel, talk and listen
In order for students to feel a sense of connection and move toward, in both understanding and action, they need a trusting, respectful, and inclusive space to engage with multiple perspectives. In EL Education schools, students participate in a daily class called Crew where they circle up with a small group of peers and a teacher to discuss personal and academic challenges with the goal of learning new strategies to overcome them. At Polaris, Crew was a natural place for students to apply what they’d learned from their reading about justice to their own lives. But Peck and Moy also created a safe space for personal discussion in the regular classroom. The important thing for any teacher is to provide a structure that ensures the teacher is not always the dominant voice in the classroom.
Empower students to create and act in their own communities
In order for empathy to be a stepping stone into action, students need to have a stake in leading change. Once Polaris students realized that they themselves were responsible actors, they wanted to go further. With the support of their teachers, they invited local peacekeepers — experts on the causes and consequences of gun violence and community activists to share their answers and stories. Students circled up again to listen and used the same sentence starters to gather more information.
Then Peck wisely asked her students, “What can we do with this information?” Instead of asking students to write an academic essay, she pounced on the teachable moment to propose that students — working in groups of three — interview local community activists and write a book about them. Each biographical sketch would need to use evidence to defend the claim that the person described deserved the title of peacekeeper according to students’ own definition (the writing standards behind this assignment are explained in Models of Excellence: The Center for High Quality Student Work, Illuminating Standards video). This was the kind of writing that mattered to students. The prospect of community leaders and public officials reading their work motivated them to attend to valuable writing lessons, including interviewing, writing a compelling lead, and organizing ideas in narrative. Along the way to becoming authors, students photographed the people they had interviewed, had deep conversations about audience and book design, and decided they wanted to educate and unify their neighbors through action as well as writing.
With the support of teachers, school leaders, and community activists they had invited to be speakers in their classrooms, these seventh graders organized a city-wide Day of Peace. To promote it, they collaborated with nearby high school students to film and edit public service announcements about the event. They wrote letters and sent emails to persuade local radio stations and newspapers to air their announcement. (For more information about the project see Polaris’ Peacekeepers project.)
For these students, writing was a way to activate the definition of peacekeeper that they had created based on their reading and listening. In other communities, students will find other solutions to other pressing problems. The key is for teachers to offer a challenging and relevant text and follow it with a meaningful task. Student Ameerah Rollins captured that when she said, “we get better [at school work] to get smart for a purpose.”
Beyond immediate academic success, projects that combine literacy, empathy, and action foster character habits that underpin students’ resilience and agency in the future. Two years after their seventh-grade project, one of the students who had been in the class was shot and killed while walking home from school. The incident sent ripples through the school community that especially unsettled the fifty students — now freshmen in dozens of different high schools — who had participated in the original Peacekeeper Project. When Peck and Moy offered an overnight lock-in at the school to get students back together, forty of them showed up.
They spent the night sharing stories again, this time of high schools where they felt alone, suspect, or at risk of violence and failure. Then, as they had in seventh grade, they turned their stories into action plans. “Students put charts on the wall and wrote down what they needed to succeed in high school — help with algebra; a friend to call them; a reminder of not to get tempted. Then other students added their names and committed to providing what was needed,” recounts Peck. “They came together to build a support network, to help each other as a community.”
Many teachers can recall one time when their instruction inspired students to make different choices. The trick is to know how we did it, so that we can do so intentionally and consistently. Tough’s book, grounded in extensive research on how students learn to thrive, and the Polaris case study suggest that winning strategies include challenging students with a meaningful text, asking a compelling guiding question, generating appreciation for multiple perspectives through structured discussions, and empowering students to become change agents in their own community.
Anne Vilen is a writer for EL Education and was formerly a middle school language arts teacher and school administrator. She is co-author of Transformational Literacy: Making the Common Core Shift with Work that Matters and Learning that Lasts: Challenging, Engaging and Empowering Students with Deeper Instruction.
