Middle Class School- Dalal, Stephen, Emily, Rachel

1. Teacher Attitudes

1.1. Skills are important but understanding and comprehension are the most important

1.2. Instruction and lessons are based solely off of textbooks - teacher rhetorically asks "Do I ever give you anything that is not in the book?"

1.3. Knowledge and content is more important - in a 2nd grade classroom a teacher has students memorize plural forms of nouns instead of explaining or reasoning through it

1.4. Teachers believe that "Knowledge is what is in textbooks." It is made by experts and consists of standard rules and content that should be followed rather than what one discovers or attempts to define for themselves.

1.5. Teachers are family oriented, many starting families and purchasing homes

1.6. "Most teachers can identify the personal characteristics of students that will lead to academic success (Gollnick & Chinn, 2017, p. 96). A third of the teachers grew up in the school's neighborhood and can relate to many of the students' childhood.

2. Curriculum Taught

2.1. In math classes students were given various ways to solve problems. The teachers wanted to ensure that that the students truly understood rather than just memorize the steps to answer it in one way. (13)

2.2. Rather than just focus on facts teachers were expected to include "at least two understandings in either anthropolgy, economics, history, geography, or political science." in order to teach the students more skills, context, and concepts. (14)

2.3. Encourages creative activities and independent research. (14)

2.4. Majority believed they could acquire or make their own knowledge. (16)

2.5. Teachers rely heavily on textbook because that is where the knowledge is. (13)

2.6. Teachers believe that knowledge is made by experts and they decide what the content and standard rules will be. (13)

2.7. "White and Asian students have disproportionately high representation in gifted and talented programs while African American and Latinx students, students from low-income families, and English language learners comprise the majority of the students in low-ability classrooms." (Gollnick and Chinn, 97) This shows that middle class schools might not have as much tracking or inadvertently segregate the students based on socio-economic status.

3. Student Attitudes

3.1. When students were asked where knowledge comes from, many believe that knowledge is "out there," existing in books and libraries, not resulting from their own activity and research.

3.2. When students were asked if they or someone else could make knowledge, nine said no and eleven said yes.

3.3. When they asked how knowledge could be made, those 9 who said yes gave responses like: "I'd look it up." When reporting information in a report they stated:"It's giving yourself knowledge, but not making it. We can't make knowledge, someone has already made it!"

3.4. Many of these students do not have an active relationship with individual knowledge production. They believe that knowledge is "given" and not made by themselves. The knowledge they gain is through "listening and doing what you are told."

3.5. Only two responses indicated a more active approach to knowledge production. One said, ''I'd go around and study things. Different countries" and the other said, ''I'd invent something."

4. The School

4.1. The old wing was built in 1888, the new wing was built in 1924.

4.2. There is a Horace Mann quote on hanging in the front hall: "Knowledge is a possession of which man·cannot be robbed."

4.3. Yard in front, both sides of school is enclosed by large trees, has an asphalt playground.

4.4. The school building is larger than either of the working-class schools and is built of a light-colored stone. The floors are polished wood. The floors are polished wood.

4.5. Approximately one-third of the teachers in the school grew up in the neighborhoods of this and two other nearby schools. Many graduated from a local state teachers college, and a good portion of them now live in the neighborhood of the school.

4.6. Conversations in the teachers' room often revolved around homes, children, television pro­grams, diets, and the fact that state-ordered desegregation of the city's schools was about to occur.

4.7. The school has considerable activity surrounding school events such as games of the school's basketball team

5. Dominant Themes

5.1. Many students believed if you work "hard" in life, you will go far. It is important to work hard in high school so that one can go to college and get a good job

5.2. Understanding why something was correct was more important than the process in getting to the correct answers.

5.3. Knowledge is conceptual and less about "facts and skill." It comes more from tradition, teachers and textbooks

5.4. A sense of "possibility" dominated the culture. There many themes of patriotism through celebrations of American holidays, school plays and the pledge of allegiance.

6. Tracking Evidence

6.1. Gollnick & Chinn discuss tracking and mention that, "Students in the gifted and advanced programs are academically challenged in their courses, with enrichment activities that encourage them to develop their intellectual and critical thinking skills. At the other end of the learning spectrum, the learning environment is often uninviting, boring, and not challenging" (2017, p. 29).

6.1.1. Students at this middle class school rarely get the opportunity to investigate and critically think about different ideas on their own. The 5th grade social studies teacher stated that she has "enough to do to get them to understand the generalizations. They read it [the text], I explain, and sometimes I give them a quiz"(p.15). These students do not get to explore any ideas in-depth, investigate their questions, or critically think about the ideas being presented. The do the bare minimum of understanding the information enough to complete their assessment. the information being taught is not very engaging and does not challenge their intellectual abilities, which results in them falling further behind academically.

6.1.2. Another great example illustrating this idea is that "social studies activity commonly involved reading the text and listen­ing to the teacher's explanations, answering the teacher's questions or those in the text, and occasionally doing a report. Classroom activity rarely involved sustained inquiry into a topic" (p.15).

6.1.3. Students are divorced from the processes of personal discovery, as it is observed in the working-class schools as well.