A movement to modernize teaching: Kareem Farah

This month, we are learning from Kareem Farah, co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project. Kareem is working with teachers, schools, districts, and states throughout the nation to change the way that they teach to be more engaging for students. Excerpts from our conversation are below.

Q: The September Kappan included an article about why teachers are leaving the profession. What we learned is that teachers are leaving because of a sense of disconnect between what they want to provide for their students and what they feel they’re able to provide. Kareem, have you heard that concern from teachers before?

A: I have heard that concern, and I’m overjoyed that there’s an article articulating it. An educator comes to the profession with a goal of helping students at a broad diversity of learning levels and social-emotional needs. You get there, and you spend the majority of your time putting out fires and feeling overwhelmed and frustrated by conflicting requests and needs. And you aren’t equipped with the resources to do your actual job.

The majority of educators that come to our program have 14 years of experience in the classroom. They are burning out because they feel like they can no longer accomplish what they intended to accomplish in the profession.

Q: Your program, the Modern Classrooms Project, is trying to reshape the way folks think about classroom instruction. Please tell us more about yourself and your work.

A: I spent all my years as a high school math teacher in communities that served students with a broad diversity of learning levels and social and emotional needs and a lot of trauma. But we were not deploying models of teaching that responded to students’ needs. We were using one-size-fits-all approaches that weren’t designed to cultivate mastery or differentiate instruction or create a sustainable profession. So I designed a new approach in my classroom. Today, we train teachers on that approach.

Q: What are you trying to encourage today’s teachers to do that’s different from the past?

A: We wanted to create learning environments that were student-centered, where students were legitimately in the driver’s seat of the learning experience. And we want the educator to spend nearly all their time in one-on-one and small-group interactions doing the hardest part of teaching, which is differentiating for both the academic and social-emotional needs of students. That’s when you address true learning gaps. That’s when you build real relationships.

We wanted to create learning environments that were student-centered, where students were legitimately in the driver’s seat of the learning experience.

It’s a poor use of our time and of students’ time to talk at them through a lecture format. That was not when students were engaged. It was when most behavior issues happen, and it was exhausting. We realized we could eliminate lectures by using little videos. We did that so we could unleash self-pacing in our classrooms. Students need to be appropriately challenged and supported, and the only way to do that is to understand that some students need more time on some skills and some students need less time on some skills. When you eliminate that bottleneck of live lecturing, you unleash the capacity to let students be at different spots in the learning sequence.

That was all in service to mastery-
based or competency-based grading, which is just the fundamental idea that a student should not move from skill one to skill two because it’s Wednesday and not Tuesday. They should do it because they actually understand the previous skill. My co-founder, Robert Barnett, and I built that model in our classrooms. And then we created this organization in 2018 because it was working for us, and we felt like it was right to share it with other educators.

Q: What does the ideal classroom look like? Could you give us a visual of what you’re going to see when you walk in?

A: When the bell rings, the teacher is probably going to bring the group together, not to lecture at them, but just to state the overarching goals and the lessons they are tackling. Then they release the students to go and learn. At that point, you’re going to see the definition of controlled chaos. A portion of students might be starting a new lesson by watching an instructional video and taking notes. Another group of students will be working on the activities associated with a lesson: One group might be working on lesson three, another on lesson four, and another on lesson five. Another portion of students who’ve tackled all the introductory materials and activities in a lesson will be working silently to demonstrate their mastery. The teacher is likely sitting at the teacher station in the central part of the room and calling on groups of students based on their performance on the activities in the mastery checks and having small-group and one-on-one discussions to actually address student needs.

Students are working on both different parts of lessons and on different lessons. The range is not going to be particularly wide, meaning they’re only self-paced for one or two weeks at a time. Everyone’s on the same batch of lessons, the same theme of lessons, but at different spots. The students have all the resources and systems and structures in place. They have a checklist that clearly articulates the expectations and goals. For their self-paced learning, students know where to access and turn in assignments, pick up their computer, get support from their teacher, and demonstrate mastery. The controlled chaos is designed to ensure teacher time is focused on one-on-one and small-group instruction.

Q: How does this system align with state requirements around standardized assessments and pacing guides and all of that?

A: We can debate whether pacing guides are useful, but if we have them, there should be flexibility. If you are a leader and you’re saying, “On Tuesday, lesson 5.3 is happening in every single 6th-grade math classroom in this district,” I encourage you to loosen your constraints. That’s not the point of pacing calendars. They should be a set of general guides around how educators are supposed to be moving through content and curriculum.

Educators need a certain amount of flexibility to make important judgment calls in the classroom. Those judgment calls shouldn’t be, “I’m just going to teach 4th-grade math instead of 6th-grade math today” or “I’m going to come up with my own curriculum.” But they should be able to say, “Hey, none of my students understand these two skills. I just need to spend a little bit more time on it. It might mean we’re not going to hit all 11 skills in this unit. We’re only going to hit 10. But they’re going to understand those 10 skills.”

Some students are ready to push forward through the content, and some students are not. When you create a rigid learning environment, you’re not just hurting the students that are academically struggling and need more time, you’re also hurting the students who are able to move forward to learn new skills.

Q: What are the outcomes that you’re seeing with teachers that are transitioning to your model?

A: We did this awesome study in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University where we asked educators in the same building who used the model and those who didn’t use this model these questions: Are you able to help students catch up? Can you serve all learning levels? Can you use data to drive instruction? Can you work closely with students during class? There was a massive difference between educators who leveraged a traditional approach to instruction and a Modern Classrooms approach to instruction. A Modern Classroom teacher can do research-based best practices better than their peers. They’re also happier. We found that 85% Modern Classroom teachers said they enjoyed teaching more, 78% said they found it more sustainable, and 95% said they plan to adopt the practices in perpetuity. They had stronger relationships with students, and students said that they felt more supported and connected to their educator. And in case studies in some of the communities where we had a high level of saturation, you saw big gains in test scores.

Q: How do people get involved in this movement?

A: We’re an opt-in only model. Movements can’t be forced. Movements have to be things that people opt in to.

If you like this instructional approach and want to learn more, the first place you should go is our free course at https://learn.modernclassrooms.org and join our Facebook group with 15,000 teachers just collaborating all day long. And if you’re a leader, or even a teacher, and you really want to get the most robust experience, we run a really cool mentorship program where we pair fabulous implementers of our model with educators who are seeking to learn about our model, and they go through a robust asynchronous mentorship program to design their own Modern Classroom.

There is more robust training available at a cost. But you don’t need to do that if you don’t have access to those dollars. We have lots of great material available free for anyone who wants to join the movement.

Kareem Farah is the CEO and co-founder of the Modern Classrooms Project. He earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis Missouri, and later received a master’s degree in secondary education at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. As a math educator in Hawaii and Washington, D.C., he taught math through a blended model in which students accessed content through his self-made videos. He co-founded the Modern Classrooms Project to empower teachers worldwide to redesign their classrooms around blended, self-paced, mastery-based learning.

 

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This article appears in the November 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 3, p. 58-59.