Pruning

The blackberry bush before pruning.

In a recent post in a Brooklyn neighborhood online group I belong to, one of the neighbors lamented finding a bunch of ‘perfectly good’ books tossed away with the garbage near a school clearly getting ready for the start of the school year. This post included photos of the books in question: My Brother Sam is Dead, Sign of the Beaver, and several other titles that were first published in the 1980s or earlier. The response from the neighbors was swift and judgmental – why would an educator or school get rid of books? Aren’t there schools and kids who they could be donated to? The neighborhood prides itself on being bookish and ethical. And at first, there was almost unanimous condemnation of the school and their horrible decision making. Then, the teacher members of the group began to post. Suddenly the tone and tenor of the conversation started to shift.

In my little patch of outside space at the back of my Brooklyn apartment, my older son and I have transitioned from ‘part-time’ urban gardeners to obsessive ones. I’d be hard pressed to tell you why we made that shift, but I can tell you when I realized I became more than a little interested in the green things on our patio. It’s when I invested in my own pair of good quality pruning shears. And I used them. All at once I realized just what people meant when they talked about pruning as a metaphor.

Pruning, the act of removing parts of a plant or tree in order to encourage growth and keep or make the plant healthy, is something that happens through human intervention or nature (animal nibbles, wind, lightning strikes).

As anyone who seriously gardens know, pruning is more complex than just cutting off parts of plants. There are different kinds of pruning and different ways it feels to the gardener as well as different responses it gets from the plant. When I look at teaching, and the endless piles of information, practices, routines, materials, and more that land in educators’ laps every day, I worry not only for the sheer state of overwhelm we are all in, but also the growth of the students. I also know that not attempting to do everything that’s new, that we’re excited to do, as well as the mandates, as well as our old favorites, feels uncomfortable at best and downright painful at worst. That pile of old books found in the garbage of the neighborhood school, as the educators who responded to the post would attest, were just the cuttings from a recent pruning.

But that said, it’s also true that not all school pruning is the same, just like all plant pruning is not. Some is so easy and satisfying to do and other types of pruning almost feels physically painful. As we move into fall both in our schools and classrooms and our outdoor spaces, we are not done with pruning. Knowing the type of pruning and when to engage in it to best affect can make all the difference.

Dead branch pruning

Much like toenail cutting or split-end trimming, dead branch pruning is the easiest and most satisfying pruning of all. It requires no real emotional investment. This thing, which was once living and vibrant is now dying or dead and quite frankly, in the way.

When we look in our schools and classrooms, we also find this sort of pruning straight forward and easy to do, most of the time. Old technology, faded bulletin board paper, dried up markers, dated curriculum – all these sorts of things are easy to chuck into the recycling bin with nary a backward glance. We see immediate positive results from the prune: more space, more time, ability to update and upgrade.  

This is the pruning that most educators feel comfortable with because it is so clear. However, it is also the type of pruning that give us insights into how others view schools. The neighborhood online group is not the first time I have seen that sort of response: what a waste! Isn’t there another, more needy school, that could take those things? That question tells you so much about how schools have become dumping grounds for other people’s junk.  Particularly a belief that schools that serve systemically marginalized and underserved communities, could benefit from the dated technology or ancient books from another more affluent school, who always has the newest and more relevant materials. But of course, that is not the case. All children deserve high quality and up to date resources.

Dead branch pruning ends in healthier plants and the cuttings are either composted or recycled but no one tries to reattach those branches to another tree.

Overgrown/invasive pruning

Sometimes a plant can get out of control. Right now, in my garden we have a cucumber plant like that. It has grown out of its planter and is now wrapping itself around a close-by fence, the pepper plants, and even our glider chairs. At first, we watched it grow in awe. How far would it go? But soon it became clear, it would go as far as we let it. There was no end in sight. It would choke the pepper plants. It would climb the fence into the neighbor’s yard. It would keep the chairs from gliding.

We have that sort of out-of-control cucumber plant in our classrooms too. It could be a management method or an instructional framework or a particular content topic. At first it makes its debut with excitement. We’re so curious to see how far it will go! But then, it becomes clear that it is everywhere and taking over everything. It is choking out whole areas of our day or our students’ learning.

This can be a tough one to prune – especially if it’s something you really love or has had some great benefits (The cucumbers are delicious! I’ve been doing that Reader’s Theater book for years!) But no one thing should take up so much space in our instruction. No matter how beloved it is or how long we have been doing it. It’s helpful to know pruning can be light or heavy. Just a stem or two or a whole large branch. When looking at our instructional pruning it can be pruning a unit so that it moves from 3 months to 6 weeks by removing all the extensions. Or it could be that instead of doing a particular activity every day we include it once a week. Or perhaps we decide we only use this instructional method in these situations. The point is not to get rid of all of it, but rather prune it back to more manageable levels so that other things can thrive.

It can be hard to know when something requires that sort of pruning. Especially when the overgrown thing is something we or our students are fond of. We can do a quick inventory of various practices, resources, or units in our classrooms to see if we can spot something that could use pruning. Try any of the following to help:

·      Look through your plans for a day/week/month/semester – are you following them? Are there things you never get to? Things you always do?

·      Log how much time you spend in a period, day or week on the things you suspect might require pruning. Be sure to also log other important things and the time allotted to them as well.

·      Scan your room, trying to view it as a visitor. What patterns do you see? What would a visitor have believed you valued most? Least?

·      Ask students what they think the class spends the most time on.

·      Ask colleagues if there is anything you might do/talk about too much.

After doing those reflections, it is likely to become clear if anything needs a trim. It’s important to note that this type of pruning is to help you increase biodiversity and effectiveness in your teaching, not to remove it entirely.

Prepping for a new season

Our Brooklyn blackberry bush lives in a big pot in our patio. Every summer it grows to new heights and wraps around railings. And we let it run wild. Then, it hibernates for the winter and come spring we prune last year’s tall branches to make way for new branches and buds. It’s a strange feeling to cut off those old long branches that are not really dead. But it’s also true that the old branches, while holding a lot of memories, do not produce as much, and often get in the way of our ability to nurture the new.

In our teaching, school years offer many opportunities for fresh and new growth - we have opportunities to prepare for the new season in front of us. When we hang up a new bulletin board, we remove the old work. But for some reason, it can be hard to do pruning that welcomes a new teaching season. Often, it feels better to just layer on the new stuff. Add a new instructional method. Add a new text. Keep all the rest. But, just as if we kept all the old papers on the bulletin board the new work would be difficult to see, when we do not prune anything from the old season as we go into the new, we obscure what is novel. Just as I do not prune every branch to the nub when I prune for a new season, we do not need to prune everything for the new unit, month, or term. We just need to prune the things that no longer serve or will obscure the work that is new. That handy study guide or app that worked so well for the last two units could be an obstacle in the new one. But, that new strategy for sharing with a partner we can leave.

Part of the value of new season pruning is the reflection that goes into it. Considering what didn’t work, what worked well but we do not need anymore, and what is still very much of value is powerful reflection work that will have huge payoffs.

Cutting the healthy to encourage fruit or flowers

Perhaps the hardest kind of pruning for me is the type where I have to cut down an otherwise healthy branch to nudge the plant to bud. As a child, I remember watching my father trim long branches filled with healthy green leaves from our orange tree in California, my heart breaking as each branch fell. He would explain that clipping those branches would signal to the tree to do more growing. And sure enough, new branches filled with not only leaves, but also orange blossoms on track to become fruit would appear. It wasn’t until I started growing my own rose bush in Brooklyn that I saw the value of his wisdom. It was all thick stalks, leaves and prickles. But no roses. It grew taller and more robust but there was nary a bud. When I asked the internet what I was doing wrong, it became clear – I had to trim those thick stalks or canes, so that smaller branches that would grow buds could grow out of those cuts.

The hardest part of instructional pruning is getting rid of things that seem to really work. That we’ve enjoyed and our students have benefited from. It can be difficult to know what otherwise healthy things are part of the reason we or our students are not growing as we should. I know in my own practice I had a particular book I loved to read with students every year. So beloved was it to me I made sure every student had a copy they could keep and annotate in. Students loved writing and highlighting inside their novels. They had lively discussions with each other and got to deep levels of interpretation that I didn’t see the rest of the year. But it was also true that this practice was taking away from reading a wider range of texts, doing more close reading or reading texts that most closely connected to their identities.  While I had a lush and vibrant class, I also wasn’t allowing the new buds to grow. I ended up, painfully, pruning that book. But, in its place, we all gained some incredible things. Students now had time to do deep dives into informational texts that supported knowledge building. They had time to form author and topic-based book clubs. And I chose to continue to include the book as a read aloud – which took what was once a 4-6 week unit that took all our reading time to a 2-3 week spans of time where I only took 20 minutes per period to read and discuss.

Pruning shears for everyone

I suspect almost all of us have things to prune. Some large, some small. And I would be remiss if I did not point out that much like anything, it is easy to get carried away with pruning. Slashing and cutting can open lots of new possibilities and free space. And that is energizing.

But we also want to be sure to hold tight and protect the things that are core to our students’ learning and our instruction. Pruning is life giving and lifesaving. It is a particular kind of cutting that we do when new want to preserve the roots and core.