If you’re trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I’ve had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
Michael Jordan
I once studied walls. After I heard a high level administrative team focus on what they saw on the walls on a quick ‘walk through’ of a school building and classrooms. With their few minutes to evaluate the billing, they wanted to see organization, consistency from classroom to classroom, and good models for student work. At a turnaround school, the teachers told me that after they posted all the required charts, there was literally no room left for anything else.
The administrators insisted on a word wall in every classroom. But this was not the kind of word wall we had once worked with teachers to create where kids posted words they learned by choice or walls with examples of student work and anchor charts of student thinking and ideas in progress. So, I had to acknowledge that “word walls” had evolved from an innovative practice where students posted words they had learned and ‘owned,’ to standardized, often publisher created, lists of word families, prefixes and suffixes that was now a rule.
At that moment, I understood the significance of who controls the walls and how they look. What were the possibilities we could find if we opened up our thinking about how to use wall space even when micromanaged by others? Would there be a way to find space for students on the walls in their turnaround designated school. In the teahouses of China past, patrons like to write poems or short essays on the walls–a precursor to graffiti?
So I studied walls. Students are obviously surrounded by classroom and hallway walls so the message of what is on them is important. How can we think of this?
First, I found endless poems, stories, sayings and a variety of uses for walls. Where walls exist, people often want to leave their mark. Walls are built to protect, to keep an enemy out, or keep inhabitants in. Sometimes a wall is climbed to allow a different view.
A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau has an apartment overlooking the Western Wall. Every day when she looks out, she sees an old bearded Jewish man praying vigorously. Certain he would be a good interview subject, the journalist goes down to the Wall, and introduces herself to the old man.
She asks, “You come every day to the Wall. Sir, how long have you done that and what are you praying for?”
The old man replies, “I have come here to pray every day for 25 years. In the morning I pray for world peace and for the brotherhood of man. I go home have a cup of tea, and I come back and pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth. And very, very important, I pray for peace and understanding between the Israelis and Palestinians.” The journalist is impressed. “How does it make you feel to come here every day for 25 years and pray for these wonderful things?” she asks.
The old man replies, calmly, “Like I’m talking to a wall.”
I recorded what I saw on the walls in one 6th-9th grade school where 2/3 of items hung on the walls were hung there by students. The students’ presence in the school dominated.
Student Work
- Save the World requests
- Projects
- Art Work
- Student-led events
Team Building
- Mentoring with 9th Graders
- School Service
- Community Meetings
- Advisement Activities
- Celebrations
Academic Support
- Homework help
- Grade checks
- Locker clean out
- Tutoring
- Conferences
School Business
- Portfolios & Artifacts
- School Service
- Special Events
- Reflection Activities
- Core Values