Mining to Farming: A Paradigm Shift to Close the Gaps

I once attended a workshop with Dr. Pedro Noguera, during which the noted education author and NYU professor of Sociology joked that he still didn't quite have the teaching metaphor that we could all relate to. He tried some sports ones, then moved into gardening, still not quite fully embodying his ideas. I'd like to offer an image used by my former Blake School colleague, Rand Harrington: moving from "mining" to "farming." Rand used this to describe the difference between the hiring process and the staff development process. Hiring is much like mining - you delve into a mountain of resumes, tossing aside anything that's not the element you're looking for. Hopefully you end up with a gem of a teacher. But in the staff development process, you become more like a farmer - watering, feeding, weeding, sometimes pruning, and generally doing what you can to help him or her grow. 


This metaphor seems even more fit to the paradigm shift that must happen in teaching if we are truly to reform an education system that was formulated to create and sustain inequity. After all, wouldn't you call a system in which the goal was to sort and measure, in which the products that don't measure up are discarded, and in which the most resources are allocated to the most productive vein a "mining" system? And isn't a system in which the goal is cultivation to maximize future productivity, and in which resources are allocated according to need more like "farming?" To take the metaphor even further, I believe we need to develop a sustainable farm of education, one that knows that it is part of an ecological community and leverages the relationships within it - as opposed to a monoculture that must apply ever more toxic substances to ensure a harvest of identical and travel-tough, if bland, crops. 

Clues from Language, Links to Mindset
Let's take a look at language that teachers use to see if we can discern the dominant metaphor of their system. Often in conservatory style programs there are discussions about "stealing" students from other programs, leading staff members to "guard" their rosters. Students with latent talent are "diamonds in the rough" who just need "a little polish." All of this implies a mining system where there is ownership of a scarce resource; 
underlying this is a talent mindset - a belief that intelligence and talent are fixed quantities. 

Stanford researcher Dr.Carol Dweck has described this as a "fixed intelligence" mindset. By contrast, her research shows that all the intelligences are able to grow via training and practice. I'm reminded of Kennedy Center Arts Consultant Deb Brzoska's comment, "Show me a 5th grader with 'talent' and I'll show you a 5th grader with private lessons." This became a guiding principle of the admissions process at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics (VSAA). Rather than skill, we looked for passion and excitement about the arts. We knew that where there was a will to grow on the part of the student, we as a staff could cultivate that growth. 

Brzoska, who was the founding principal of VSAA, understood the power of language to direct mindset. She actually fined staff for using the term "My" in relationship to the school. We had a "My-jar" into which we had to place a quarter any time we referred to "My students," "My program," etc. They were "Our" students, and time that our shared students spent in another teacher's class was understood to contribute to their "Growth." All classes in any discipline were referred to "Skills" classes, where students could "Develop" artistic or academic competencies. All of these imply a farming system, undergirded by the growth mindset. This, according to Dweck, is necessary for the development of talent and intelligence.  

But What About the Gap?
What Dr. Noguera was trying to metaphorically describe in his workshop (as well as his book) was a way of teaching that could ameliorate the gaps we currently see.

Yes, gaps, plural. Noguera and co-author A.Wade Boykin brilliantly split the achievement gap into several component gaps so that we can understand some of its complexity. Once the parts are untangled, it is easier to understand how to address each one - and easier to see how many well-intentioned reforms that target one dimension may derail another. Think of them each as a former mine site that needs to be replanted and carefully restored into a balanced ecosystem.These sub-gaps include: 

• the Preparation Gap 
• the Opportunity Gap 
• the Discipline Gap 
• the Parent-School Gap
• the Ability-Performance Gap

For now, let's focus on just one: the Ability-Performance Gap, defined as that place from which students check out. Noguera suggests that to combat this we must make learning more active and relevant. In the schools at which I've had the privilege to work, Arts Integration is the strategy we've adopted for this. And it works. We may have drama, but not boredom. We may have teen anxt, but it's meaningful. We may have what looks like chaos, but it's creative chaos and if you look for it, you'll see both the structure undergirding it and the learning students are constructing within it.


Still, there are arts programs that are vibrantly active and clearly relevant to the few, selected (read: Mined) students within them. Here's where promoting closure of one gap can magnify another. These programs may eliminate any Ability-Performance Gap, but open an Opportunity Gap for students whose "talent" is not obvious at the outset.

Even in programs that eschew the conservatory approach in favor of skill development, hence bypassing the Opportunity Gap, there is a corner of the White, Western-European arts culture that can unwittingly contribute to the Ability-Performance Gap. We often have rules, explicit or unwritten, against "poaching" students from our colleagues' programs. These may not be a holdover from the conservatory paradigm, but rather a nod to diminishing FTE in the arts as well as sensitivity to students' crowded schedules. The gist is that teachers are not allowed to recruit students from others' classes or programs. Sometimes this gets generalized to include encouragement to continue the study of a discipline. I once moderated a heated discussion at a school over one teacher's written comment along the lines of, "I hope to see you in Level 2 next year." While it is unhealthy for kids to be placed in a tug-of-war between teachers, there's a big difference between that and encouragement. That difference is a focus on the student, rather than the program or the teacher. Many successful adults tell stories of that teacher who saw their development and encouraged them to keep on, often just when they were doubting themselves. We owe it to kids to do the same - and then to step back and let them decide how and when to act on our encouragement and possibly that of others. Isn't this just farming at its best? Applying a touch of fertilizer, watering a curious root, pulling a weed of self-doubt? (And don't get me started on heaping up the manure of false praise to keep a student in your program . . . it only burns them in the end). 

As we encourage our students to continue in the active programs they find relevant, we'll be helping to close the Ability-Performance Gap.