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Troy Cantrell
RCOE / Cycle 5
9 May 2016

Cycle 5:

Reflection and Application

What can I say about Cycle 5?

For me, Cycle 5 began with

a feeling something like desperation; tasked with reflecting upon

my own professional development, and asked to choose my own area
of need, the answer was simple and immediate:

I need help!

My

4th period students had become so seemingly indifferent,

thoroughly apathetic, lethargically unmotivated, and drearily
uninspired, that I contagiously felt the same way.
Classroom teaching, in its day-to-day practice, can be all
too isolating.

Conscientious teachers greet their students at

the door at the beginning of each class, the bell rings, the door
closes, and teacher and students enter into their particular
microcosm, a unique classroom culture, each with its own spoken
and unspoken rules, tolerances, vocabulary, and expectations.
Rare is the moment, especially at this school, when teachers and
students have occasion to see how they do things in an alien
country by observing their respective peers just down the hall.
Thus, when things were not working here in Room 205-Land, and all
of my ideas motivated my student to do effectively nothing, I

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took an exotic excursion to Room 218-Land and made diplomatic

overtures to their charismatic leader, Mr. Gabriel De La Cruz.
Chairman De La Cruz is that unique animal who can somehow
lead a vocal teachers union opposing the administration, and
still be openly favored by the administrators.

He is able to

pull off comments, jokes, and classroom lessons that are

prominently led off by provocative, slightly risqu, video clips
from Americas Got Talent and Saturday Night Live that would
surely put an administrative reprimand letter in most other
teachers files.

In contrast, President Cantrell is an

unlikely Special-Ed teachermiddle-aged, often cerebral, mostly

of moderate politics, perceived as white (despite being of mixed
ethnicity), and still beholden from his younger days to the freespirited, day-at-the-beach surf culture of Southern California,
which usually offends San Franciscos censorial, intolerant
political correctness and puts me consistently under the
administrative microscope.

In a number of other ways too, Mr. De

La Cruz is many things I am not: a General-Ed teacher, young,

Pilipino, unsubtly, almost radically, liberal.

When I decided to

work with him, I imagined that we might be seen as something of

an odd couple; but then, as they say, only Nixon could go to
China.

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And so it was that the collaboration between Mr. De La Cruz

and myself, and the joining of our classes into essentially one
community of students, all working on the same assignment, on the
same due date, has proven to be a success.

Following the

templates Mr. De La Cruz adopted from research at UCSF, our

students took social studies out of the textbook and into the
real world.

The students were assigned a survey project that

differed in scale, but not in kind, from those undertaken by

university graduate students and professional social scientists.
As previously described, the students first were shown
inspiring examples of similar projects which students undertook
at Bay Area high schools in similar communities.

Second, they

were allowed to choose their own areas of interest and topics of

research, the only real requirement being that the issue they
chose had to be one affecting the community; they were also
allowed to define community as they so wouldsome focusing on
classes in the social studies department, some on the first,
second, or third floor classrooms of our school, others on a
grade level, still others on the adults and regular student
clients in the wellness center.

Third, they conducted

quantitative surveys of their community of choice, crafting the

questions themselves and tallying the results.

Fourth, they

pulled out a small focus group from the survey respondents and

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conducted personal interviews therein to illicit nuanced,

detailed, and qualitative responses to the topic at handa sort
of exit poll, as it were.

Fifth, they had to put the

quantitative survey results, and qualitative focus group

responses, together and analyze all the data to give it meaning.
The sixth and final step, now in progress, is to present all of
the synthesized data in a cohesive, creative, and public showing,
wherein they can speak articulating on the results of their
research, using it to suggest a call to action and possible
solutions to the problems they have investigated.

The students

are encouraged to be original, engaging, and creative in the

means of their presentation: some are doing Power Point shows,
some are doing school-wide posters for an awareness-raising
campaign, and some are considering creating Internet videos and
websites.

All in all, it beats the hell out of a traditional

Scantron-bubbled final exam on the causes of WWII.

Beyond the rather ambitious parameters of this project, and
regardless of ultimately how successful the students may or may
not be, this collaboration for me was a success, both in going
through the process itself and in its results.

To wit, I got to

work with another colleague who practices several techniques in

his class which I can adopt in the future: for example, he starts
each Wednesday class with 5 minutes of mindfulness, complete with

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yoga meditation cymbal; he does a fishbowl exercise, wherein a

group of students will have an out loud discussion circle, ringed
by the remainder of the class on the outside who will take
observation notes and then switch places; he plays low-volume
contemporary music on his classroom speakers while the students
are working; and, of course, he openly accepted working with his
more experienced, but somewhat burnt-out, colleague down the hall
on a fresh and interesting project.

Taken together, all of this

amounts to some of the most practical, immediate, and relevant

professional development in my career.