What Can Teachers Do?
JOIN THE CONVERSATION—WHAT CAN TEACHERS DO?
Questions to Consider:
1. A number of teachers shut their doors, ignored directives, and proceeded on their own,
whatever the later administrative consequences. What do you think of their decisions?
Would you join them? Would you support them if they were reprimanded? Explain.
2. What do you think of the group’s recommendations? Why?
3. In your opinion, should teachers be involved in planning how schools respond to
emergencies? Why?
Following e-mail exchanges involving dozens of teachers and a New Teachers Network
meeting, Maureen Murphy, S. Maxwell Hines, Sandra Stacki, and I wrote and circulated a
statement on the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the role of
teachers at a time of national or local emergency.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was visiting a student teacher and two members of
the New Teachers Network at a junior high school in Queens. I first learned of events at the
World Trade Center when one of the teachers received a cell phone call from his sister. She was
sobbing because her husband worked on a top floor in one of the towers and she feared he was
dead.
Within minutes, school administrative personnel circulated around the building briefing
teachers and telling us the school was in “lockdown”—no one was permitted to enter or leave.
Administrators and teachers were calm and professional, but clearly there was no broader plan in
place to address what was happening and how to respond to students who suspected something
was going on, heard rumors about catastrophe and war, or simply wanted to know why they
could not leave. Within an hour a crowd of concerned parents were outside the building and
visible from classroom windows. Many were crying.
That afternoon teachers in the New Teachers Network began to exchange e-mail messages.
They described their experiences and fears with each other in an effort to come to terms with
what had happened and to figure out how to help their students understand events. Mentor
teachers from a number of schools in the area and teachers educators also met with over thirty
new teachers for three hours the next Saturday morning.
What emerged from our conversations was a picture of what had taken place in the area’s
secondary schools on the day of the attack and the days that followed. In a number of schools in
the city and the suburbs, students and teachers, alerted by cell phone calls or late arrivals to
school, witnessed the second plane crash and the collapse of both towers from school windows.
In some of these schools, teachers and students discussed what they saw and turned on news
broadcasts to try to learn what was happening. But in others, teachers were ordered to remain
silent and carry on with business in their classes as usual.
Unlike the coordinated emergency services response, each school and district seemed to go in
a different direction. On the following days, some tried to return to normalcy and pretended that
nothing had happened, while others provided counseling for upset students but little else. A
number of schools held memorial assemblies and then told students and teachers to get back to
work. Some schools designated specific subject classes where events would be discussed, while
other schools left it up to the discretion of individual teachers. Many New York City districts
provided teachers with lesson plans. Some of these encouraged teachers to involve students in
open discussion and to challenge ethnic stereotyping. However other plans limited teachers to
responding to student questions with scripted answers.
Not one teacher in our network reported that districts involved them either in discussion of
the events or asked how they thought they should respond to students. All they received were
directives.
In a time of national and local crisis, when they were in the best position to help adolescents
make meaning of events, the professionals most directly connected with young people were
disempowered by our school systems. A number of teachers involved in the network reported to
the group that as adults who know and are trusted by their students, they felt they had to act.
They decided to “shut their doors,” ignore the directives and proceed on their own, whatever the
later administrative consequences. Many stressed they believe their decisions helped to establish
their classrooms as a communities where students felt able to speak out, could depend on each
other, and were safe.
The English educator working with the New Teachers Network put together a package of
poetry to help students understand their feelings and suggested writing exercises that allow them
to express their thoughts and emotions. Many classes wrote letters of condolence to victims of
the attack.
As the social studies educator working with the network, I distributed a simple lesson that a
number of the teachers used in their classes. We divided the front board into four columns. What
we know. What we need to know. How we feel about what happened. What we think should
happen next. Working individually, in groups or as a full class, students filled in the columns and
then discussed what they had written. Our goals were to help students distinguish between fact
and opinion, substantiated information and rumor, and emotion and reason. We challenged
stereotypes and stressed the difference between Islam, a religion of over a billion believers, many
of whom live in the United States, and the actions of one organized group or a few individuals.
We also wanted to lay the basis for a long-term investigation of why the attack took place so
students can analyze underlying and immediate causes, understand why many people in other
countries believe they have been injured by the United States and its allies, and participate in
debate over United States policy decisions. Many of the teachers will have students use the
Internet to collect newspaper articles from around the world on the attack and the United States
response. Comparing reports will help students see multiple perspectives that may be overlooked
by local media.
At the Saturday meeting a young biology teacher asked how she could be involved since
events did not easily fit into her subject area. The group recommended that every teacher press
schools and districts as part of professional development to involve teachers in discussion of
these events and in designing a response strategy that includes lessons for different subjects. The
teachers also felt that whatever their individual areas of expertise, in their classrooms, in
extracurricular clubs, in the hallways, on teams and in individual meetings, they needed to be
there for their students, as emotional supports, as role models, to promote tolerance and to
champion reason at a time when all of us may get swept up in a wave of irrationality.