Engaging Teachers: Charlie Frankenbach
Great education happens in all types of schools in all sorts of places. We had a chance recently to talk with Charlie Frankenbach, administrator and teacher at one of America’s most prestigious schools, The Hotchkiss School in Western Connecticut. There are many things that set elite prep schools apart from other educational institutions. For instance, the five schools Hotchkiss student most frequently attend after graduating are University of Chicago, Georgetown, Cornell, Columbia, and Yale. You are unlikely to find that kind of list in your typical secondary school. As we talk with Charlie, though, we are reminded that great teaching happens when a teacher and his students give and take in a spirit of caring to frame life’s biggest questions.
Charlie Frankenbach talks the language of high engagement. He leads students to find their work challenging and to love the work they find so challenging. We invite you to join our conversation.
Rob: How long have you been at Hotchkiss and what do you do there?
Charlie: I arrived at Hotchkiss in the fall of 1989 originally as a combination study skills and English teacher. Since then, I’ve been the head of the English department a couple times. Presently, I am an English teacher, I coach JV boys basketball and I run a fly fishing co-curricular.
Rob: What led you to teaching?
Charlie: It was completely by accident. My cousin got a job at Choate. I didn't know what boarding schools really were. I said, wow, that sounds kind of cool. So I threw my name in with a placement agency. Loomis Chafee (a boarding school in Connecticut) hired me. My plan was to teach for a year, and then go back to my native New Jersey to work with my father in the family insurance business. After a year of teaching, though, I loved it. I stayed another year, and then I went back to grad school in Indiana and just stayed in it. So, there was no plan.
Rob: Why do you think your students find your classes so engaging?
Charlie: I try to choose material that they'll find somehow relevant and engaging, or material that I think I can make relevant and engaging. I'll use the language of one of my past students: she said my enthusiasm, interest and curiosity in the material I was teaching gave her permission to be equally curious and engaged. I always thought that phrase was really interesting. They are not necessarily modeling what I'm doing, though I'm sure that maybe happens. But there was there was a certain permission granted by the way I approached stuff.
Rob: Can you tell me a bit more about your teaching philosophy?
Charlie: It's meeting the kids exactly where they are. I really liked to teach the honors sections here, with these high flying stars. I would just be humbled daily and try to get out of their way most of the time. But what I really like is returning to the elective courses where there is a real variety of students. One kid might be a post-grad, another sees himself as a STEM student and has no place in an English classroom. I like trying to balance all those kids where they are as a collective too, but also individually, I don't think I've ever gotten tired of that. I just find students really interesting. It's adapting to every kid's needs and necessities in the moment, but also the collective purpose of having a class community that's respectful and attentive to one another and gets to know each other.
The kids are fascinating. They're fascinating texts themselves. So, it's getting to learn about them, to write their stories, either as critical writers or creative nonfiction writers. I often say the one text they can't buy is the text that they'll create over the course of the year when they're around the table facing each other. It's a text I hope they know well. That metaphor makes sense to me because that's the important stuff. When I hear from people I taught 20 or 25 years ago, what they are remembering are moments in the class with the other kids. It's not about line 17 from a certain poem. It's about the experience they had with their peers.
Rob: Is there a particular moment, a particular thing that you like to teach that you know is going to happen every year, and it's just your favorite thing?
Charlie: William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It’s one of my favorite, as gruesome as the title sounds. It's always new every year because of the class that's reading it. And true to form, every year there is always one thing that I've never seen before or never thought of before. Even after teaching it for upwards of 30 years now, certain kids could think that I’m just really dim and it takes me a while to understand a book. But there's always one new question or comment that makes me ecstatic, because I've never considered that about the book before. And that’s happened for the last any number of years! It usually then leads to a writing prompt that I'll use the following year and I’ll cite the student who made the question or comment.
Rob: How do you keep it fresh?
Charlie: I've been doing it a long time and I have to keep it creative and interesting for me so I don't get in a rut. So I'll switch. I’ll switch books, I'll switch poems. I'll switch sections. Next year will be the first time in a while I'm going to go back to a full teaching load. I'll have two sections of ninth graders, a section of 11th graders, and a section of 12th graders. I’m excited about it, but it takes a lot of work because it's a lot of reading.
Rob: Tell me about the electives.
Charlie: This year I taught one called Weird America. It's not all that creative a title. The subtitle is an excuse to get kids to read two really big books that I think every kid should read before they graduate, Grapes of Wrath and Invisible Man. Last year I used a nonfiction book called Salvation on Sand Mountain, which is about Pentecostal snake handlers, a fascinating book.
Rob: How do you lead your kids to love their work?
Charlie: You try to balance being friendly and understanding with holding a certain measure of responsibility and rigor. The atmosphere of the class is trying to get them to know each other from the very beginning. So there is at least a measure of comfort with one another and the rest of it is just to offer opportunities for them to discover themselves as students. Maybe I sometimes go a little bit overboard with praise. I'd rather risk that, because then once they buy that trust or they feel that, I can then return and be a little bit more niggling about, hey, let's shore this up, let's shore this up. And they take that in the spirit of, you're still pursuing the really wonderful stuff, but you're going to have to be held accountable for this too, and so the wall between coaching and teaching slowly erodes.
There was a particular moment with a young man I coached in JV basketball for three years, who I never felt as though I had gotten through to him. Then I taught him in my honors senior English class. I realized after two weeks of teaching that I had been coaching him completely wrong. It wasn't until I got to know him as a student and how he thought and wrote that I realized I had approached him as a player in a completely ineffective way. And I'll never forget that moment of realizing that. That last senior season, I coached him completely differently, and it made a huge difference. Getting to know your students is so important.
I realized that this kid was so deeply contemplative. He relished deeply odd-angled ruminations of the abstract, and his kind of seeming lackadaisical approach to basketball made perfect sense. But until I taught him, I didn't realize that the way he went about basketball was informed by that brain. It wasn't that I wasn't as hard on him. I just explained what I expected of him in a particular space on the floor differently. He was more cerebral.
Then it was getting his teammates to understand that that's why he was like that. So, you are working for years, and then one student threw me for a curve. The next thing you know, we are discussing T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land while you're going through layup drills.
Rob: How do you ensure that your students are challenged?
Charlie: I just give them a lot of prompts, whether it's for a discussion or writing. I encourage them to write their way into a corner and then write their way out. It’s just a draft! So, let's take a look at what you did. It might be one sentence where I'm like, wow, that's the stuff right there. But you wouldn't have gotten there unless you were thinking about this really odd prompt. It’s like you play John Coltrane's My Favorite Things and you say, “what does this music look like?” They're like, “how do I answer?” I say, “I'm just asking you a question. What does it look like to you?” Some prompts like that have led to amazing things. Then, I say, “take that page that you just free wrote, and now analyze this passage from Ellison's Invisible Man. How can you put those two paragraphs together? That's your challenge.” That's really hard. But at the same time, there's no prescribed answer. It’s the transition sentence between those two where you're going to find gold. It's entertaining for me because I don't have to read the same thing every year over and over again. It’s always new.
Rob: We contacted you because you have exceptionally high engagement data. Does that surprise you?
Charlie: I guess. I've always thought that my numbers looked good and I was right. I do a lot of student feedback, so I have a sense that this is working. I guess I was a little surprised. I mean, it's humbling, because there's a lot of wonderful teachers.
Rob: Thanks so much, Charlie. What a pleasure to chat.