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By Patrick Tepoorten
 As the North Branch School District reaches out to the community it is important to note that the education apparatus and the people it serves sometimes suffer from a language barrier. Since it is all but impossible to communicate more than haltingly in two different languages, I, as a public service, set out to navigate and understand the murky waters of education-ese.
After conducting some action research, I was able to establish some baseline data, showing that affective filters were inhibiting a process of additive bilingualism. It became clear that what was called for was some behavior modification.
It was an aha moment.
With my seed idea, I began looking at best practices, but soon realized there were scholastic aptitude issues that would have to be addressed, before decoding could foster a deep understanding. Essentially, a lack of seat time for former pupil units had led to a deschooling. Immersion, combined with a healthy dose of scaffolding, was called for.
Contrary to my initial hope to act as a translator of sorts, it turned out I was suffering from the Lake Wobegon effect, which was a blow to my self-esteem. I chalked up the deficiency to an adverse reflection process and committed myself to inside-out reforms.
In other words, I needed to learn how to learn. I set about finding the least restrictive environment, and setting some power standards. A factory model simply would not do; this called for boot camp, where there would be no dance of the lemons.
In order to reduce the amount of challenging vocabulary, coopetition would be helpful for this learner. So I found others, and a return to the look-say method was embraced as the heuristic solution to the problem, with, of course, plenty of basal readers and name and shame.
Rapidly I was becoming an emergent-level student. With some goal-oriented focus, I would soon reach fluent stage and a place among the talented tenth.
In realia, I found many teachable moments that helped break down others’ word walls. Soon, balanced literacy was achieved, despite frequent scrubbing.
If you’ve managed to complete this column with even the vaguest notion of the literal journey, you have benefitted from an instantiation and with little time on task; give yourself a certificate of completion. You have bridged the zone of proximal development.
Together we can create a sense of community empowerment, and put our high order thinking skills to good use. Or, with a minor behavior modification, educators could switch to English. After all, as Diane Ravitch said in “Ed Speak,” from which the bulk of this column is derived, “Educators must be able to speak clearly and intelligibly to all those who care about what happens in the classroom. It matters not only for the well-being of students but also for the well-being of public education.”
North Branch is better than most when it comes to the abuse of buzz words. But, as it strives to engage its community, it never hurts to remember that people rarely feel comfortable with things they don’t understand. Anything the district can do to demystify public education is sure to help.
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