In observance of National Teacher Appreciation Week, swark.today is featuring profiles of area teachers on each day of the business week.
When she was made the team leader a few years ago of Prescott Public Schools’ grades five through eight English program, Paula Bell found herself in the role of ruthless enemy of wasted time.
“We want to make sure we’re teaching the right thing,” she told me during an interview in her classroom, which resembles a cozy British estate’s home library with its dark wooden shelves heavy with books. “If you are teaching things that are not relevant to the Common Core curricular standards, you’re wasting time.”
She and the other teachers gathered to make an honest accounting to one another of what they were teaching. This was a course of action recommended by the educational consulting company Solution Tree. The company’s tutorials, Bell said, “tightens a lot of strategies and [provides] ways of streamlining the way we teach.”
The meetings to bring this about weren’t always comfortable, but something needed to change. “Every year it was broken,” Bell said. “But we kept doing the same thing, wondering why we weren’t getting different results. We took a hard look at what we teach and how we teach it, and got back to the essential standards.”
Instead of being asked what they were teaching and providing a book title, Bell and her group changed things so that teachers presented with that question now named specific sections of standards being taught. Information about the content of the book would be less important than the skills to be mastered by the student for their grade level.
“We had some real hard meetings at first,” Bell said. Teachers had to “show . . . what you do and why and see whether it aligns with what we need and if it doesn’t align, it need to go in the trash can. Everybody was mad, and then we all just got glad and did what we had to do and we’ve become a much better group for it.” (These meetings, the processes leading to and the actions taken afterward earned Bell’s school the right to call itself a PLC school, PLC standing for Professional Learning Community.)
Speaking of bags, gone were meaningless activities like Paper Bag Book Reports, in which students wrote book reports on paper bags to be hung on classroom walls. It did not survive the series of questions it was put to. “What does that do? How does that help a student learn how to read better. . .? So we’re wasting two, maybe three, weeks, maybe a month on this project that has taught kids nothing in terms of what they learned about the characters, or how do the characters evolve? Why did the author use that specific point of view? What can you tell me about analyzing the conflict or setting? Would it change if we did it from here? Instead of looking at those types of things that provide a deeper meaning of a text, we’re going to color a paper bag?”
Another casualty of the process Bell led was the teaching of up to 25 vocabulary words a week. The practice of students memorizing the spellings and definitions of long lists of unrelated vocabulary words had to go. “We want to go deeper than that. There’s a reason authors write and it’s not so you can spell the word hospital correctly,” Bell said. Now the time that had been devoted to lists of words is used in developing the students’ abilities to draw sound conclusions from texts.
Still, vocabulary is not neglected. Bell points out that educational researcher Robert J. Marzano, whose work has focused on ways to improve the quality of teaching in public school systems, established that for a student to learn a new word, they must hear and see that word used five different ways. If the student must learn at a pace of 25 new words a week, there would be no time for them to see/hear the word in five different settings. In light of Marzano’s finding, a focus on five words a week is more realistic and more likely to allow the words to linger in students’ memories.
Bell said she is seeing the evidence right now of this leading to her students being more confident prior to their taking the ACT Aspire test. “I’m pulling back words that we did back in September, October, November, but then they say ‘I remember this.’ And it’s like the angels have started singing and they start reciting and I say to myself, ‘I actually taught something.’
Bell’s crafty narration about a subject as abstruse-seeming as curriculum review make it clear she has real teaching chops. It makes sense, too, that her first degree was in journalism. That’s just one of the stops along the way to her becoming a teacher in Prescott.
She grew up in Greenbrier, Arkansas, then acquired her first degree from UCA in Conway..
“I kind of fell into it,” Bell said about her career in education. “I did not start teaching right out of college. I went to college to be a journalist . . . and worked a lot of different jobs after that. I started raising my children . . . stayed home a while, then got into the Department of Human Services.” When she found after seven years there that she was “topped out and stuck there,” someone told her she ought to consider becoming a teacher. “I didn’t think I could do that,” she said.
But still, she made her inquiries. “I just made a couple of phone calls, and in two weeks I was teaching fourth grade in Benton, Mississippi, a little private school with ten or 12 kids in a class. I did that for seven years,” she said. She later taught in a public school in Yazoo City and then in Mabelvale, Arkansas, where she taught the historical fiction book “Fire From the Rock” by Sharon Draper, which features a lead character who is one of the Little Rock Nine, the first group of Black children to enroll at that city’s formerly all white Central High School. She led her students to a field trip to downtown Little Rock, where scenes from the book took place.
“Many of the kids that I taught at Mabelvale had never been as far as downtown Little Rock,” Bell said. “It was a pretty big deal for them. Plus, it helped the kids make the necessary connections from themselves to the real world which is so important in reading comprehension.”
Bell landed at Prescott Middle School upon marrying a man from nearby Gurdon. While living in Greenbrier, teaching in Little Rock, Bell admitted she had to look up Gurdon on a map when she began dating her now husband who is from Gurdon himself. The quality of his writing during their chats, she says, kept her interest in him despite him being from a town nearly two hours from where she lived. “He didn’t use the tiny baby i when he meant I,” she said. So he was good reading.
Indeed, it is reading she calls “the backbone of everything we do,” but in her classes Bell said she hopes to persuade the students who ask why they have to read and write so much when they count on being million-dollar athletes that chances are they won’t go on to the pro leagues. “If you make it, great, you can come back and give me your autograph. But you’re going to have to feed your family. Maybe it’s sports, but let’s have a backup plan.”
Bell also sees the importance of preparing her students for the world as it is. This includes behaving appropriately in tense interactions with others. “I try to explain to my kids that sometimes, even when you don’t like it, you have to be quiet and follow instructions, even you’re not doing wrong and there is no reason for someone to be telling you what to do. Sometimes that’s just the way life is. It’s ok for the kids to wonder what’s up, but they should ask later, not when they’re being threatened.” Bell said.
After Bell worked to recruit more students to a pre-AP class she was teaching, she found this inclusivity also led to more voices represented during the discussion of controversial novels like Walter Dean Myers’ “Monster,” a 1984 novel depicting the inner thoughts of Steve, a teenager about to be put on trial for accessory to murder because he acted as lookout during the robbery of a convenience store. “Kids at this age need to understand that poor choices can follow them their whole life. This novel is good for that.” Bell said.
The teaching of critical thinking is also important to Bell. She describes explaining the need for students to go beyond simply cutting and pasting from articles they find on google and instead exercising judgment about where information comes from, then using it to support their own ideas. “Research is not cutpasting. Research is reading and understanding and learning from that to create your own opinion,” she said.
She has now been at Prescott Middle for six years and will see her responsibilities increase next year when she will take up the post of Reading Specialist, providing interventions to struggling readers.
