Notice! Multiple Interpretations Possible
How a professional learning session around Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" influences my approach to teacher collaborative discourse
Robert Frost first published his poem “The Road Not Taken” in 1916 via a collection entitled Mountain Interval. I must admit, I’m a bit of a Frost fanboy, so I’m definitely not unbiased in saying I find him one of the most compelling 20th century poets. This is primarily due to the potential for radically different interpretations of his poems from a surface, literal level, or from a “deeper down in the well,” figurative level.
Part of the ELA Content Leader program in the state of Louisiana is a nine-day professional learning sequence around use of curricular materials called ELA Guidebooks. I was a participant in this continuing professional development (CPD) sequence in its inaugural year—through a kind of backwards pathway that I may write about at another time. The goal of this CPD sequence is to train teachers around Louisiana’s literacy goals and their associated instructional shifts, and then orient teachers to use of the ELA Guidebooks materials:
Shifts in ELA / Literacy
1. Complexity: Practice regularly with complex text and its academic language.
2. Evidence: Ground reading, writing, and speaking in evidence from text, both literary and informational.
3. Knowledge: Build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction.
As I’ve written about before, at the conclusion of my participation in this sequence, I became a facilitator of the same sequence of professional learning for the following two school years. This rich experience allowed me to work with diverse teachers and leaders across the state of Louisiana in developing and refining understanding of the instructional shifts, and building capacity to better implement teaching and learning in partnership with the ELA Guidebooks materials.
Policy-wise, the state of Louisiana has intended to cultivate turn-around trainers in the sense of flipping participants into school-based experts who redeliver the professional learning sequence to teachers and other faculty and staff in their districts and at their school sites. As the aphorism goes, I may have learned more about the shifts and use of quality instructional materials by redelivering these materials than my original participation in the sequence—not to discount the exceptional quality of the CPD I experience that inaugural year (in fact, I think there’s a participant quote regarding the quality of the training in the materials linked above that I provided as a participant).
When redelivering the material for those two years, there is a Robert Frost sequence facilitators guide participants through. This was always the most challenging bit of the sequence to facilitate, and in our facilitator teams during prep, we’d quip about how hard it was, and really support one another with attempting to refine how we delivered this session. The intention of that hour-long piece was to bring participants through the Reader’s Circles—a method of close reading text analysis that moves from observations of author’s choices to derivation and analysis of meaning. Furthermore, another desired outcome was to have participants accept that, through close reading of author’s details, and letting the text take center stage, it is possible to alter our interpretations of a text.
The particular hour of the training I’m referring to starts with a reading about misinterpretations of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”:
Frost’s poem turns this expectation [that most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be] on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.
As facilitators—since this section was so challenging—our supervisors and leaders would really make a point to visit our sessions to support us with delivery. I’d stumbled through (though I can be harshly self-critical) this session two or three times before, but I distinctly remember a group I led at the Teacher Leader Summit in New Orleans. Our coordinator stepped into the room when I was facilitating this session—towards the end of the sequence once we’ve led participants through a close read, inviting them to revisit their previous interpretations of the poem.
I found myself, at that moment, in a bit of a challenge. Deeply held beliefs over a long period of time are very difficult to unseat, and as the Paris Review source above outlines, the ubiquity of a pre-framed Frost interpretation, as well as the popularity of its use in teaching and learning, have entrenched a certain, flowery, positively connoted reading of the poem—one that is in contradiction to what the text on the page is actually expressing. So, at that moment, participants were challenged to unseat this belief, and I was engaging in what was probably a debate about the “right” or “more justified” interpretation of the poem.
This can be kind of testy, and my recent reflections on the relations of dialogue and dialectic, as well as both/and, have inspired me to recollect and reflect upon those Frost moments. It was like we were facing off about who was “most right” with their interpretation, and both myself and participants became defensive in those moments. My coordinator who stepped in, though, made an expert move. She jumped into the discourse and helped us zoom out a bit by saying something to the effect that the goal of this session is not to get participants to accept an alternative interpretation, but for participants to accept that an alternate interpretation is possible and justified by evidence in the text.
I keep thinking about this in context of current education debates, as well as global debates about health policy. Through my recent experiences teaching case method, and engagement in some polemic about curricular materials use, I’ve come to an understanding that really challenging decisions—those most appropriately borne by leaders—tend to have multiple justified positions, and multiple potential next courses of action or consequences. This is what puts those decision in the purview of leaders, this is where established procedure may no longer guide thoughtful decision making, and this is where bringing ideas and projects into dialogue can be most purposeful.
I’m taking it as a personal and professional project to keep this aspect of reconsideration, this awareness of the potential for other justified conclusions, positions and interpretations, at the core of my work in education and around teacher collaborative discourse for 2022.