What Doesn't Meet the Eye

Appendix: The Tripod Project

The Tripod Project is an outgrowth of the research upon which this paper reports. It is a response to the first three of four recommendations listed in the section titled Implications for Policy and Practice: (1) assume no motivational differences, (2) address specific skill deficits, (3) supply ample encouragement routinely, and (4) provide access to resources and learning experiences. The Tripod Project is organized to harvest and share teachers' best ideas regarding ways of succeeding in the classroom, especially with nonwhite students and children from low-SES households. It also is consistent with emerging best-practice ideas about professional development and instructional leadership.²⁸ The goal is to enhance school-level capacity to attend to all three legs of the tripod—content, pedagogy, and relationships—by effectively addressing five generic tasks of social and intellectual engagement in the classroom. In addition, a research component aims to refine one's understanding of the ways that particular classroom conditions affect achievement among students of particular racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Literatures as diverse as business marketing, social work, innovation diffusion, child development, and group process have developed theories and descriptions of the tasks entailed in achieving and sustaining cooperation among people who share particular contexts and must work together to achieve their goals. Scholars in each separate literature have discovered the same five tasks.²⁹ The period during which a particular task seems to be the most salient is the stage identified with that task. However, each task has implications for each stage. In addition, there may be backsliding: A task that was mostly resolved can become the most salient again if conditions unravel.

For the Tripod Project, I have adapted these ideas to characterize five tasks and stages of social and intellectual engagement in primary and secondary school classrooms. The basic idea is that students will be most likely to excel if the following conditions are met:

1. Students begin the semester feeling trustful of the teacher and interested (instead of feeling mistrustful and uninterested).



2. Students experience a good balance between teacher control and student autonomy (instead of too little or too much of either).



3. Students are ambitiously goal-oriented in their learning (instead of feeling ambivalent).



4. Students work industriously in pursuing their goals for learning (instead of becoming discouraged in the face of difficulty or disengaged due to boredom).



5. Teachers help students consolidate their new knowledge and, thus equipped, students are well prepared for future classes and life experiences.

The Tripod Project is organized around a series of five schoolwide faculty meetings—one for each stage—all of which have the same basic structure.³⁰ Each schoolwide meeting leads to work in smaller groups of volunteers where teachers share ideas to expand and refine their repertoire of strategies for succeeding with each respective task and stage. The volunteers seek and find opportunities to report their ideas and experiences to teachers who are not yet as involved in the search for ways of improving.

The next few paragraphs describe briefly how the project addresses all three legs of the tripod and responds to the three recommendations listed above (i.e., assume no motivational differences, address specific skill deficits, and supply ample encouragement routinely).

Stage 1: Trust and Interest Versus Mistrust and Indifference. This stage begins on the first day that students arrive in the classroom if not before. Teachers try to signal to students that the year is going to go well, with respect to all five tasks, while students begin developing impressions regarding the teacher's caring, competence, consistency, and respect for students. At this stage, teachers share ideas on establishing good initial rapport with the class and getting off to a good start in which students feel respected, encouraged, and optimistic.

Stage 2: Balanced Versus Imbalanced Teacher Control and Student Autonomy. This stage begins soon afterward, as students focus on how seriously to take the teacher and the class and how much autonomy to relinquish in compliance with the teacher's rules and regulations. If the teacher seems firm but also caring, competent, consistent, and respectful, the class should find it easier to achieve a good balance between teacher control and student autonomy. At this stage, teachers share ideas concerning ways of being firm enough to establish and maintain order in the classroom without using heavy-handed methods that might make students fearful and withdrawn or oppositional. These ideas include ways of giving students incentives and choices that promote their dignity and foster a sense of responsibility for helping the class to work well as a community.

Stage 3: Ambitiousness Versus Ambivalence. This stage comes on gradually as perceptions develop regarding how feasible, useful, and enjoyable success is likely to be. All three legs of the tripod (content, pedagogy, and relationships) are important, and all four of the recommendations listed above are useful for teachers to keep in mind. Concerning the first two legs of the tripod (content and pedagogy), the feasibility of success depends upon the teacher's content knowledge and pedagogic skill to explain the material so that each student can understand it, given the student's current skill level.

Feasibility also depends upon the student's willingness to ask for help, which is key if the student needs personal assistance from the teacher in order to be successful. A student who views the teacher as uncaring, incompetent, inconsistent, disrespectful, or too controlling is likely to be ambivalent about seeking help from the teacher; a teacher who feels emotionally disconnected from a student or class may send discouraging signals regarding the willingness to provide help. Let me emphasize again that the teacher's knowledge of content and pedagogy are important. However, because of the way that relationships and encouragement affect motivation, help seeking, and help giving, ambitiousness may be difficult to achieve if teacher-student relationship issues that should have been resolved in Stage 1 and Stage 2 remain largely unsettled.

Assuming that such issues are largely settled, sharing among teachers during Stage 3 concerns ways of helping students to understand both teacher and student roles in making success feasible and enjoyable. Teachers share ideas with one another about ways of helping students to make plans, develop strategies, set goals, and adopt generally ambitious orientations toward achievement in particular subjects and classrooms.

Stage 4: Industriousness Versus Disengagement. This stage is the period for following through on the ambitiousness cultivated during Stage 3. The challenge during this stage is to sustain a high level of industriousness and, if this fails, to recover from whatever discouragement or disengagement setbacks might cause. Ideally, the ambitiousness cultivated during Stage 3 will persist through this period when the focus now is on industriously performing the work to make success real. However, if there are setbacks that cast doubt on whether success is truly feasible, if the lessons seem irrelevant or excessively boring, or if relationships among students or between students and the teacher deteriorate in the classroom, students may become discouraged and disengaged. The Tripod Project embodies the presumption that capacity to recover—to be resilient—depends on how deeply students and the teacher care for and trust one another and how well the balance of teacher control and student autonomy is being maintained. It also depends on the level of commitment to success that the teacher and students together achieved during Stage 3.

The sharing among teachers at Stage 4 focuses on ways of making success feasible, enjoyable, and relevant for all students. Some teachers review student work together and talk about patterns of misunderstanding and ways of responding to such patterns, including ways of explaining particular concepts that students find difficult. Some teachers collaborate in reviewing detailed data from standardized exams that may hold clues for where instruction needs to focus. Some teachers trade ideas about ways of structuring lessons and homework assignments and share ideas about ways of showing students that particular topics really do connect to real life. Some teachers talk about ways of diagnosing classroom dynamics, so that peer pressures do not interfere with each individual student's industriousness and commitment. In addition, some teachers share ideas about ways of spotting students who are becoming discouraged because of failure or disengaged because of boredom; teachers also discuss ways of helping such students to recover their industriousness.

Stage 5: Consolidation Versus Irresolution. Coming toward the end of the school year, this final stage is the period for helping students to truly own what they have learned. Ideally, teachers will help students understand the scaffolding by which their learning in the class builds upon what they knew before and also the ways that various facts, ideas, and concepts in their lessons relate to one another. Teachers will talk more than before about the ways that the lessons can help students in real life and the reasons that trying to digest and remember what they have learned is important. Sharing among teachers at this stage concerns ways of motivating and helping students to see connections. Like Stage 3 and Stage 4, much of this sharing is among teachers who have very similar teaching assignments and face similar challenges and opportunities in the classroom.

In the process of sharing ideas and searching for new insights, teachers will find themselves strengthening each leg of the tripod in their own classrooms. This year is the pilot year for the project. Progress is under way, and mechanisms are being designed for sharing ideas among schools and across districts.³¹

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