This opinion piece in the NYTimes made me think. It's about the economy, but I see parallels to what's happening in education lately too.
Brooks argues: "The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models. [...] Everything is rigorous. Everything is science."
When I saw Ravitch speak about her latest book recently, she wondered how a liberal President could have embraced ideas about education (measure and punish, teacher accountability, wide sweeping top-down measures to control what happens in classrooms, etc.) that were not in essence liberal. I wonder if there's some connection here to what Brooks is saying about the dominate liberal thinking toward fixing our economy, an approach that for the most part excludes "psychology, emotion, and morality"--concepts that he says he would expect in liberal thinking on the economy.
Maybe. All I know is that education thinking at the policy level is heading in the wrong direction. My state is proposing an "assessment system" that will mandate not just a state-developed summative assessment at the end of the school year, but quarterly interim assessments (that's now FIVE state tests each year) and formative assessments that are ongoing. If these are delivered to the schools from the state, by the way, they are actually no longer formative assessments which work (the research tells us) because they are contextual, immediate, and respond to factors that emerge in the daily life of a classroom. And this interim assessment thing--there's no body of research (yet) to show that they work in the ways that proponents claim they do. I just can't imagine that five state tests in a year are going to improve things in my classroom and make my students more successful, even if it does bring up their test scores.
It's like no one at the policy level is actually thinking about this stuff. There's no thought in the realm of "psychology, emotion, or morality"--how might all this testing affect teachers and students psychologically, emotionally, or morally? Who can actually teach and learn when they are being forced to do so? Where's the love of learning?
Without that (a love of learning), there is no learning actually.
Anybody know how to stop this runaway train?
You should read the rest of Brooks' argument and see what parallels you're seeing to educational policy right now. And let me know what you think.
It feels as if the school year just started, and now we're down to four weeks of classes left before semester finals. I'm not sure exactly where all the time went. And the cold weather hasn't really hit here yet (we're waaaaay overdue for our first snow of the year and we're looking at record breaking warmth this weekend) so it doesn't feel like we could possibly be on the cusp of the Thanksgiving break.
The fall musical hits this weekend at our school. And I'm not going this year (even though one of the leads is a student I've had in my class for three years now). Why? I feel overwhelmed, so much so that I couldn't even manage the details of filling out the form for my complementary tickets to the musical.
So overwhelmed that I haven't been here to write for weeks. So overwhelmed that I haven't touched my book proposal on my dissertation since summer.
I discussed this with one of our special education teachers this week in the mail room. The special education teachers have a unique view of the school; due to their role as support system to the students on their case load, these teachers are in and out of many teachers' classrooms. This particular teacher told me that it seems like everyone is overwhelmed this year. We spent a few moments wondering about this together, and I've been thinking about this since that conversation, trying to figure this out.
Are the planets aligned just so? Are the stars broadcasting signals that are disrupting the daily existence of classroom teachers this fall? I wish it were something so innocuous.
I wonder, actually, if we're feeling the weight of doing more and more and more. Around here the abysmal budget situation has raised our class sizes. We're being bombarded across the country (even in the major movie theaters now) with the message that all the problems in education are our fault so we need to prove ourselves in the court of public opinion. Must raise test scores. Must prove our "effectiveness" (even when no one knows how to actually measure that meaningfully). Must raise standards. Must differentiate more. Must document all interventions that we've already been doing as a natural course of being a good teacher. Must do more more more more more.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not against doing many of these things we're being asked to do--like differentiating more and pushing my students toward more rigorous thinking and figuring out how to meaningfully measure my actual effectiveness in inspiring my students to be stronger readers, writers, and thinkers. But the sum effect of all of these messages is absolutely a heavy load that teachers carry around with them, a load that seems to be getting heavier and heavier.
Maybe this is why I had such a hard time transitioning back to school this year. I usually slide happily into the school year, but perhaps this year the load that I had to pick up as I walked back into the school building was edging toward too much for me to handle alongside my job that already requires so much of me to do well?
I hate calling what I do a "job." It's what I do as a human being; it's who I am. I can't imagine my life without it. But all this other stuff...
I'm too busy crying at the same time. Many folks have posted this- I'd like to credit them all. But I'm just gonna' post tha thing. It has been a very looooooong week. F. Scott
Some interesting comments on paradigm shift, school structure, creativity, and divergent thinking.
Thanks to Joe Bower at Love of Learning for putting this up. I love the RSA Animate videos, I even show them to my classes when appropriate. Hadn't seen this one yet. I don't know what I think about Robinson's comments on ADHD, but the general theme is right on.
I am feeling so depressed about 'school reform' that I've found it really hard to pay attention to this blog. Plus, I'm teaching a prep I haven't taught in a while (Creative Writing- its awesome), so I am as busy as I can stand (aren't we all). Then I ran into this. I laughed my ass off, and it really hits the nail on the head. Diane Ravitch tweeted it.
Posted at Failing Schools, by Sabrina. She rocks, and Failing Schools is now added to our blogroll!
I told F. Scott today that I was fired up to figure out how to get laptops or ipads into the hands of my students. The more immersed I get in the Google universe (or the Googleverse as my students have suggested we call it), the more frustrated I get with the obstacles: having to take my whole class down the hall if I want them all on computers, and having to share this one lab with all of my department colleagues (which means having to sign up to use it well in advance), having a number of these computers nonfunctional on any given day... I could go on. It would be so much better if my students had access to the Googleverse (and any other web 2.0 tools I hope to use with them) at their desks in our classroom.
Up until now, I always knew I wanted laptops in my students' hands. But honestly, before now I didn't know exactly how I would use them. Now I know. I see new ways to use them every day and I get more and more frustrated that I don't have them.
I came across an article in the NYTimes this evening that helps to articulate exactly why we MUST make this shift in classrooms across the country. The longer we take to get our teaching wired, the more obsolete our teaching will become. The article explains this well:
"Even as technology spending in K-12 public education has risen steadily in the last 20 years, student performance — as measured by test results — has improved only incrementally. Meanwhile, children are proving to be wildly adaptive when it comes to using media outside school. They are fervently making YouTube videos, piloting avatars through complex game scenarios, sampling music, lighting up social networks and inventing or retooling (or purists would say, bludgeoning) language so that it better suits the text-messaging pay plan on their cellphones, only to show up to school to find cellphones outlawed, Internet access filtered and computers partitioned off from the rest of the classroom — at least in many cases. Michael H. Levine, who directs the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, acknowledges the conundrum. While there may be sound reasons behind limiting things like Internet browsing and social networking at school, he says, it does little to teach students how to live in the 21st century. It also may contribute to a broader relevancy issue. A 2006 study financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation set out to examine the reasons that almost a third of American public-high-school students fail to graduate with their class. Researchers surveyed high-school dropouts in 25 cities, suburbs and small towns across the country, where they were told again and again that school was boring. The final report recommended, among other things, that educators take steps to 'make school more relevant and engaging.'”
F. Scott helped me brainstorm an email to a key person in our school district to help me figure out how to actually get moving in this direction with my students. I think I'll enlist my students' help too... I'll keep you posted. M. Shelley
I had the opportunity this evening to attend the TEDx Denver Ed event, in conjunction with the current conference for the International Society for Technology in Education.
On the whole this event was inspiring. The talks were all compelling, and the hosts were full of personality. I walked away with thoughts about how I could get my students working on relevant problems in their community in ways that would line up with the curriculum of my course and with ideas about what it looks like to really take a classroom forward using web 2.0 technologies in a collaborative, problem solving, student-directed setting. I walked away with a renewed call for the audacity and courage that it will take every day to bring to reality the meaningful change that I envision for my students. These are good things of course.
But as my husband and I drove home, I told him that something critical was missing from the conversation for the evening, something that I couldn't quite figure out. But it was there, gnawing at me.
We were both quiet for a long time trying to figure out just what that missing component was.
I'll take a stab at putting words to this missing piece:
One of the first speakers, it seemed, had the job of contextualizing the conversation. he talked about how school funding is falling apart, how teacher jobs are getting cut across the country, how high stakes testing is placing the focus on things antithetical to real progress for our students in our schools. But after that first presentation, these issues became (as my husband said) "the elephant in the room." Nobody was addressing these issues in the way I guess I had hoped for.
See, that's what I've been working on in my thinking: we need seismic shift. Massive change. I see what I want my classroom to become, yet I have a hard time getting there. Why?
How might we go about changing a system that is largely the same it was in the late 1800s? How do we convince well-meaning teachers across the country that something actually is broken and needs to be fixed? How do we change the common vision of a productive classroom as one where students sit in rows and silently and passively listen to the teacher or quietly work at their desks?
How do we escape the tyranny of the way things have always been done?
I'm convinced. Our system is broken and we need to fix it. And I want to, yet I bump up against a wall of shared assumptions about what teaching and learning is all about, assumptions carried unquestioned in the minds of my students, their parents, my colleagues, and me. Even though I'm looking for these assumptions all the time in my own thinking, they still catch me and hold me within the bounds of the ways things have always been done.
One speaker this evening asked us to think about how simply layering on web 2.0 applications to our classrooms won't actually change anything if the heart of what we're doing isn't re-imagined and re-designed at the pedagogical level. I agree. That's the crux of my mission. I guess I wanted some help with how to accomplish this mission. THAT's what I wanted everyone to be talking about. Because if we can't accomplish this seismic shift, everything thing we do will just be business as usual and millions of American children will float through school, bored, and exit at the end without the critical skills they need to navigate their complex world.
And how on earth will we be able to actually realize this change within the current context of less funding, fewer teachers, larger classes, dwindling resources, and a country-wide reform movement still beholden to the mantra of high stakes testing, achievement, and teacher accountability?
THAT's the conversation I had hoped to take part in this evening.
I'm glad I was there. I feel honored to have been invited. I just wanted some help on how to shift thinking (in my community and across the country) on the very big ideas that organize the ways we all think about the purposes and practices of school.
Finally I've carved out some time to write what has been rolling around in my head for a few weeks.
I walked in my PhD graduation ceremony a few weeks ago. I finished everything for the program last summer, but my school only runs its graduation once a year. So nearly a year later, I got the pomp and circumstance to make it all feel complete.
The keynote speaker gave what was on the whole not exactly a sunny address. As she looked down at the dozens of graduates, (undergrads just heading out into the world of teaching, seasoned teachers earning master's degrees, and the ten of us receiving our doctorates) she painted a realistic picture of the state of education in America today. She talked about how reform measures attached to NCLB haven't been working. She talked about how the policy being dreamed up across the country will continue this trend. I remember wondering what the rest of the audience was thinking--the friends and family members of the graduates who may or may not know much about the world of education. Did they think the speaker was angry or bitter? Did they believe the picture she was painting of the state of education? I wanted to stand up and look at the audience and shout, "she's right you know! It IS this bad and it's only getting worse! PLEASE get involved. DO SOMETHING! HELP US!"
But I didn't. That would have horrified my mother-in-law more than if I had worn my bright green chuck taylors under my commencement gown. (I did consider that shoe choice, but only for a minute).
The speaker left us with this request: we must be soldiers of love. We must fight for our students and for what we know serves them best in their lives in the complex world they will face beyond school. Me must make our voices heard. This is why I went to see Diane Ravitch speak and why I have told as many people as I can about what she had to say. This is why I work tirelessly with my teaching to offer my students a classroom experience that will prepare them for what lies ahead in their lives. This is why I listen to them to better understand who they are, where they are headed, and how my teaching can help them toward those goals. This is why I write, why I send out articles for publication, why I'm working on a book manuscript of my doctoral dissertation, why I apply to present at a variety of conferences. This is why I wrote my governor and asked him to veto the law the state legislature recently approved regarding teacher effectiveness. I asked him to not only veto this law but take a stand against the current national reform movement, not play along with the Race to the Top money, and be a leader in demanding more meaningful reform. This is why I asked my colleagues to sign on with me on this letter when I sent it to the local newspaper.
The governor still signed the bill into law, and the newspaper didn't publish the letter, but I still need to speak up and fight for what I believe will best serve my students.
Soldiers of love. This should be the name of the counter educational reform movement.
This video has been making the rounds on the internet- It came to me by way of a friend on Facebook. Ah Facebook- occasionally good for something other than sucking your creative soul. It is a really fun animated version of Daniel Pink's talk at RSA. I love creative stuff like this, so I was instantly captivated. In fact, I watched it twice in a row so I would remember his main points. And I immediately found myself connecting his comments on drive, or what motivates us, to the occupations of both teaching and being a student.
Here is the video, some comments from me are below.
Pink identifies three factors that impact what he calls 'drive': Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Oh yeah, money is a factor, but not they way we might think, according to Pink (sorry for the rhyme).
Here is how I think this relates to the lives of teachers (I'll address students in another post when I have a chance- because I think what he says is also important in thinking about the experiences of students). For much of the history of public education- at least in my memory, teaching has been a comfortable middle class job. No one was getting rich, but none of us expected that. We made a living. This was using money in the way Pink identified- teachers made enough money to take the issue of money off the table. In return for stability, teachers lived with the fact that they wouldn't be subject to huge financial reward. For most of us that was a fair trade. Of course the high social prestige of the profession made up for some of that (note sarcasm here), but what was important was that it was a fair living, and since most of use have ambitions other than monetary, that was good enough.
What made teaching great was the abundance of the other three factors. Teaching has buckets of purpose. I have never met a teacher that didn't really believe in what they were doing- it's importance, it's meaningfulness, it's worth. You want purpose, education has purpose. Helping children learn and understand the world around them feels as meaningful as anything one could be doing.
For a long time, education has also had a fair bit of autonomy. Sure, in public education we are (and should be) accountable to our students and communities for providing the collective vision of eduction we are charged with, But for the most part, teachers and schools have had a high degree of autonomy in not only how we do our work, but often what that work actually is. Teachers were invited to participate in the discussion of what we should be doing, and had genuine influence. Further, in our classrooms, we often had tremendous autonomy. Though we were often told the what, the how of our work was mostly left up to teachers and groups of teachers in schools. As long as we met the expectations of our community, we were allowed freedom in how we did what we did. Note that the teachers we revere, both in our own lives and in our mythology, are the ones that exercised autonomy (think Stand and Deliver, Freedom Writers, Dead Poets Society)
And, teaching is hard. Really hard. It is the sort of higher level cognitive work Pink is discussing (I know it is fashionable in some quarters to claim that 'any person with the appropriate background can teach,' but that simply isn't true. It is hard, complicated, and takes time to get competent- a minimum of three years according to most research I have read). So mastery takes work. And we are never done. Over the nine years I have been in the high school classroom I have gotten continuously better, and every time I became aware that I had achieved a new level of competence in some way, it was also apparent to me how much further I needed to go.
So teachers were willing to put up with low social status and the less appealing parts of the job because it provided large amounts of the other things that Pink identifies as key to 'drive.' In many ways it was the perfect job (for the right sort of person). The rewards Pink is describing to produce high performance we actually working pretty well.
However, today what is happening in eduction is changing that. There is less financial stability, so money becomes an issue. I already live with a salary far below the average for my level of education, but the budget squeeze at the federal, state and district level is real and serious. My salary has never held pace with inflation, but it wasn't that far behind. Now we face real changes in the monetary aspects of education. One of my colleagues was literally in tears in her office the other day having heard that our districts 'offer' in this year's negotiations was a pay cut. It not that we are or should be immune from the realities of economics, I'm just pointing out that the game is changing. Money has been put back on the table in education and we are worried. And the stability that we used to trade for the lower salary is no longer. Benefits are being cut or squeezed, teachers are getting laid off in large numbers, and this will continue for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, there are major changes in the other factors Pink discusses. It is, again, fashionable right now to blame teachers for the problems in education. This has produced the most top heavy, top down model of management one can imagine. Teachers are losing autonomy very quickly right now. At the federal, state and district level, more focus is being put on controlling not only the what, but the how of teaching. Teachng is being transformed in some quarters from the cognitively challenging work it should be, into the sort of mechanical, menial labor that Pink says is exactly the sort of work in which the simple reward paradigm does work. Which might not be that big a deal, except that if you remember the best teachers you ever had, they probably weren't the ones who treated their work as mechanical menial work. They treated it like the intellectually complex challenging task that good teaching is. And if you think about the worst teachers you ever had, they were probably exactly the type of teacher that will fit well in the new vision of teaching.
As for the other two factors, education will never lack purpose, but if it feels like the very system you work in has committed itself to making it difficult if not impossible to achieve that purpose, then eventually all but the least imaginative will quit in frustration. And if we turn the job into a mechanical menial function, then there is no challenge in mastery, and that will cease to be a factor.
Now for the editorializing. As if I wasn't already doing that. It is always interesting to me that we (the collective 'we'- read 'that guy who has the Secretary of Education post and many others like him) think that 'business ideas' will save education, but when you hear that, the person saying it does not mean ideas like the one in Pink's lecture (or in the awesomely creative deployment by RSA Animate). No, the lessons of 'business' that we want to deploy in education all come from the manufacturing sector. Efficiency, scale, standardization. A business model with little room for the factors that Pink identifies as key to "drive." Also, interestingly, it is the part of our economy that our leaders continually tell us is not the future for our country. So we are trying to make a system for educating children (which NO-ONE ever says is not of grave importance), who we want to be passionate, autonomous and committed to mastery, using a system which researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago found is unlikely to allow the people who are the delivery system to be passionate, autonomous or committed to mastery. But we really want innovation? We think we want creativity in education? We want teachers passionately committed to the work they do and willing to labor at continuously improving? We could do that. But I don't think that's the direction we are heading right now.
It's two weeks to the end of the school year. I just spent two hours in which I should have been grading thinking about this, which is perfect anecdotal support for what Pink was saying. But I REALLY have to grade some papers today. Really.
This weekend, I attended and presented at my first conference for the American Educational Research Association. I was stunned at the scope of the conference. It lasts for nearly a week, with conference sessions running all day each day, with dozens of talks going on at any given moment in time. The printed program is a tome (over 400 pages), bigger than a telephone book for many towns across the country. The “participant index” lists over 12,500 names (that’s the number of people involved in presenting at the conference over its several days). The actual “program schedule” starts on page 67 and ends on page 366. With about 8 presentations listed on each page, that’s nearly 3,000 separate sessions with people talking about their research tied to education.
I knew that the conference was huge. I had no idea it was THIS huge. I had no idea there were this many people engaged in Educational Research (think of all the people who attend but don’t present, or the people who don’t go—there are certainly many many more researchers out there with their eyes toward education. I was completely overwhelmed by the scope and scale of it all.
And yet, at the same moment, we have a reform movement in education that is not actually achieving meaningful reform for our students. According to Diane Ravitch (I know F. Scott and I have been talking about her a lot lately, but her argument needs to be heard), the NAEP scores since NCLB has been in effect do not show, at all, that American students have actually been achieving higher scores due to NCLB. Yet, here we go with the same movement toward measure and punish reform and scapegoating teachers. As you know, our state is currently debating one such reform bill (SB191). The movement behind this notion of holding teachers accountable for the failings of a system far beyond their control is wickedly strong. I’m not sure we can stop it, and if we don’t—education in American may change forever.
How many of those 3,000 AERA conference sessions actually said anything about how to achieve actual, meaningful reform for our students? How many presenters made a plea to the audience to get involved, to speak up? (I did, and no one said anything to me about it—neither that they agreed with me nor that what I had said was inappropriate in that context). I feel like my dad here, a man who used to be a Roman Catholic priest and who now gives himself permission to leave a sermon in church if he gets mad that the priest isn’t talking about the big issue of society at the time—like when he and I went to church together the day after the gulf war started back in the early 90’s and the priest sad NOTHING about how the country had just gone to war. It’s like the research community maybe just keeps going along with their ever complex figures to capture conceptual frameworks, with their sophisticated statistical designs to cut across a data set in a myriad of ways, with their well-reasoned criticism of the shortcomings of schools, with their complex survey instruments to measure this or that.
I’m not writing off educational research here—please don’t get me wrong. I know some researchers who are doing very relevant and important work. I just don’t understand how, with so many thousands of researchers there are on the ground in this country, we could possibly be facing the current reform movement driven by policy makers and think tanks funded by huge corporations? Educators have not been asked to participate in the conversation, and now we face the consequences of decisions made without our counsel. It’s just not a time that researchers can ignore this in pursuit of the next idea.
This came from The Durango Herald today. It is a great articulation of some of the problems with SB191. The misconception about tenure among non-educators in this state could use some clarity. Having due process in a job with rapidly changing administrators, parents with unreasonable expectations, and adolescents subject to the vagaries of, well, adolescence, is a necessity, not a luxury.
Most of the controversy and misinformation surrounding this bill comes from the term “tenure." It means only one thing to people outside education - a guaranteed job for life. That connotation, the idea of a publicly funded job for life, stimulates knee-jerk responses.
What the supporters of this bill, including The Durango Herald, have failed to inform the public is that tenure for public teachers in Colorado ceased to exist in 1990. Under Gov. Roy Romer's administration, the Teacher Employment, Compensation and Dismissal Act of 1990 was passed. This law eliminated tenure and replaced it with a due-process clause and created the terms probationary and non-probationary.
Both M. Shelly and I saw Diane Ravitch speak this past week. It was moving, hopeful and profoundly disturbing. It was great to see someone so articulate outline what many of us practitioners have known in our guts for a while now- the current tide in education is taking us places we don't want to go, and I believe will have profound consequences for education and our nation- none of the consequences being good.
Currently in Colorado we face an initiative that is in pursuit of RTTT monies. SB191 attempts to tie teacher and principal evaluation to student test scores. It would eliminate 'tenure' for K-12 teachers in favor of performance evaluations that don't exist yet and haven't been funded. Sidestepping the question of teacher accountability for a moment, one fundamental problem is that this bill (and others like it- see SB6, recently defeated in Florida) is an attempt to impose a large scale solution with little to no evidence to support the efficacy of its methods. Too much of our education policy right now is being driven by 'theories' that have no evidence to support them. See today's article on charter schools in the NY Times for more.
But that isn't what I really want to talk about. I want to talk about education practice that does work, and has evidence to support it. I asked a colleague of mine to join one of my classes this week to discuss a subject on which he is an expert. It was really great to listen to another excellent teacher engage with my students (I only got to hear his discussion with one section, I was covering his class during the other). And it reminded me that we need more collaboration. The power of working together is so much greater than whatever I can muster on my own. The richness for students of their teachers working in concert is an evidence based strategy that has a profound impact for students across several different measures- and has the added benefit of making teacher's working life even more meaningful and rewarding.
So often though, the structure of schools gets in the way. I had to cover my colleague's class so that he could talk to my students. I didn't mind at all, but I wished for a more flexible structure. Even within my department we are so disconnected that true collaboration happens only as a result of extreme effort or dumb luck. I made this moment happen because I felt it was important and worthwhile, but nothing about the way our school is set up encourages this type of work. I have a tough enough time just having a conversation with colleagues from my own department. Trying to work closely with colleagues from other departments is nearly impossible. And I am embarrassed to admit there are new teachers in my building this year whose names I do not even know. One of the things that would really help us in collaborating is time- more time in the day, more unstructured development time, and support and direction. Frankly, I'd like more time just to get to know my fellow teachers. So often the structure of school has us buried in our own little worlds, ignorant of what is happening around us, or worse, competing against each other for resources and support. Collaborating for the benefit of students is unlikely to happen in such an environment.
To come full circle here, collaboration is even less likely if I'm living in fear for my job. What we do for our students is so much more than what gets reported on standardized tests (thank god- have you seen those tests? I have). It's taking a moment to make sure my students hear from the best sources I can muster- especially when one of those sources is only two floors away. Bills like SB191 are really frightening. Ravitch really hammered the point last week that there are fundamental changes happening right now, the effects of which are sure to be deep and long lasting. I am afraid for the future of my students and my colleagues. If you are reading this and you are a voter in Colorado, please take a moment to contact your state representative or Governor Ritter, and voice your opinion. So I bought Ravitch's book, and I am trying to stay positive by doing positive things. Like sharing my classroom with my colleagues, and my colleagues with my students. Which is what I really want to talk about...
The Edurati Review linked to this piece today about the situation in Florida; Florida legislators seem to be making decisions based on things other than what is best for Florida students, despite what the experienced, veteran teachers had to say who testified before them.
I'm sad to say that what is happening in Florida doesn't surprise me at all.
I have been before a deaf legislator in Washington State, where teaching salaries were abysmal at the time. In short, had I been a single mom in those first few years of my teaching career, I would have qualified for food stamps and public housing on my teaching salary. Several of us went to Olympia to speak before our legislators about the issue, and the man actually said things like, "you knew how much teaching paid when you got into it; why are you complaining?"
I currently work in a school district where it feels like teachers' voices are not valued by those who make the decisions at the district level. In some areas, I feel my voice is heard and even sought out at times, particularly surrounding curriculum-related issues. In others--like when it comes to salary issues or contract negotiations, I tell parents and students to speak up because their voices will have more sway on the issue.
We teachers just want to be at the table, helping to make the decisions that affect our students. We work with them every day. We know their needs and personalities. We see ways to make the system work more efficiently to meet their needs.
And on that note... off to grade the 80 papers waiting for me on Google docs (I'm experimenting with paperless papers).
I was trying to think of something to write, but in going back through the mass of stuff I starred in the last three weeks on Google Reader, I found this video. Darling-Hammond's latest book is sitting on my bedside table, and I am looking forward to reading it.
This video really strikes to the heart of so much of what we are doing in education. The solutions we are implementing to our real problems are not based on the solutions that systems we hope to compete with are using. That seems such a huge flaw in our thinking that I am at a loss as to what to say about it, so I'll just let the video speak for itself. The original is at Edutopia.
I drew heavily on Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed in my dissertation, and his thinking continues to influence how I think about my classroom. His description of the banking model of teaching (where the teacher deposits information into students' passive brains and then asks for it back on exams) so describes much of what I have experienced myself as a student. I work every day to offer something different to my students.
I came across today (thanks to Alfie Kohn's Twitter stream) this piece, which talks about Freire's reign as the superintendent of schools in Sao Paolo in the late 80's and early 90's. When Freire took over the school district, it was in great need of reform, and he organized this reform around a democratizing process with four goals:
1) Democratization of access to schooling through construction of new schools and renovation of existing ones. 2) A massive literacy campaign for youth and adults. 3) Democratization of the administration of schools from top to bottom, redefining relationships of power. 4) Reorientation of the entire curriculum.
His approach was deliberately not about the kinds of top-down reforms that we typically see now that hinge on standardized tests and test scores as the measure of how well things are working. His approach was about local control, involvement of parents, true understanding of a community's needs, and giving teachers more autonomy and freedom to design interdisciplinary curriculum to best meet their students' needs.
It is item number 4 on the list above that most grabs my attention: reorientation of the entire curriculum. This included three steps: the study of reality, the organization of knowledge, and the application and assessment of that knowledge.
In the first step, the teaching faculty would essentially study their students to get a clearer sense of what they were up against in their day to day lives. From this, they would "organize" what they had learned, figuring out what big themes existed in the students' lives. Then they would create curriculum surrounding these big themes, approaching them through interdisciplinary inquiry-based teaching centered on students and using a dialogue-based pedagogy. Finally, teachers would develop authentic assessments to see how well students were achieving the learning goals.
Now think about this--curriculum goals come from the themes and needs of the community, not some set of standards. The benefit? What students experience in schools is actually relevant to their lives and their futures. Teachers are passionate and have intense buy-in to what they're doing because they built it. The drawbacks? If you come from a standards-based, centralized curriculum, high stakes testing as the only way to ensure educational equity position, I'm sure you see all kinds of drawbacks.
Paradigm shift is not easy, but some times it's necessary. Now is one of those times. M. Shelley
I'm glad to see she's finally caught up with what many of us have known for a while.
And now I wonder, Dr. Ravitch, HOW do we fix it? I worry that the train is moving far too quickly down the tracks for us to redirect it. I've never disagreed with high standards and seeking quality teachers. The issue I've had from the start of the NCLB legislation is the high stakes attached to the tests.
And after spending three excrutiating hours today walking around a quiet classroom while 24 sophomores took our state's annual test, I certainly am ready for something different. Even if I can't articulate it very well right now.
For the record, F. Scott and I have committed to posting SOMETHING at least once a week, even if it's just a tweet (you can follow us on Twitter too--look over there on the right).
F. Scott's been tweeting all week. I've been mulling things over in my mind.
I am completely convinced of the need to make some paradigm-shifting changes in the way we deliver education. But there are some significant challenges to doing this within the context where I teach.
For one thing, it's difficult to convince my colleagues that something is broken that we need to fix. By most standard measures, our students are very successful. They test well. They get into colleges. Most of them do just fine. Why on earth would we need to consider changing anything? What's broken?
The answer to this is pretty complex. Within my particular teaching world, students are too heavily focused on grades, the grades they need to get into the colleges that they want. This currency takes precedent over learning. Another problem is that we have many students with unrealized potential--students who come to school because they feel like they have to, but school doesn't offer them anything truly meaningful. They simply go through the motions to get the grades and move on to more interesting things in their lives. And beyond the scope of my school, our world is changing and our schools aren't keeping up.
Making this argument to my colleagues feels daunting; their unshakable belief that what we're already doing is working is one of these invisible yet powerful barriers. Even putting the right words to the argument to help others see it is difficult. But it's something I need to work toward.
The other barrier is somewhat harder to get my head around. It pretty much has me stymied.
I believe in a few powerful tenets to guide my teaching: student choice wherever possible (choice about what they read and how they show me what they know) and de-centering my own ideas and voice in order to make space for theirs. The reading/writing workshop model is a great way to achieve these goals. I teach one section of creative writing right now. On Mondays, students study mentor texts--imaginative writing (novels, poetry, graphic novels, screen plays, etc) that they admire and want to learn from. They choose these texts on their 0wn, and they have the freedom set a mentor text aside if they don't like it. I have one student who has struggled to do much work for me in the senior lit/comp class I teach who has already read four books of his own choosing for creative writing. On Tuesdays, we have some sort of writing activity mini lesson to help students work on some aspect of writing I'm seeing as a need via their polished drafts that come in every two weeks--and then in the remaining time students have unstructured writing time. On block days, we have another writing mini lesson, unstructured writing time, and peer response group meetings. On Fridays, we workshop two students' work on the big screen together. Students read their work to us as they scroll through it on screen and tell us what help they need, and then we talk. The class is moving toward a portfolio assessment at the end of the semester, something that has already been defined so they know what the end goal is. All their work is driving toward that goal.
My students are engaged and excited about their work. I'm totally convinced in the power of this model.
The challenge is how to take a similar model and place onto the other class that I teach. It seems like it would not be a problem to figure out. Students still choose mentor texts, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on what genre we're working on. Students still have unstructured writing time each week, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on our current set of writing goals/objectives. Students still work toward some kind of end-of-semester assessment, only structured around the specific outcomes in the curriculum for this course. Students still workshop each other's work. Seems simple, right?
No. It's not so simple. Not at all. My brain is having the hardest time figuring this out. The barriers?
I teach on a team. In my department and school, that means we are pretty much on the same page, at least oriented toward the same outcomes for our students. We're pretty much working on the same (or similar) projects at the same time. We're dealing with the same books. It's all about securing a similar educational experience for students who take that class regardless of who is teaching it.
My department is on a quest to acquire enough copies of the major texts taught in each class so that all sections can teach those texts at the same time. If all eight sections of a particular class are all teaching Gatsby at the same time, for example, where's the student choice? We're literally putting in infrastructures that contradict the tenets that focus on student choice and de-centering the teacher's ideas/voice to make room for the students'. Instead, shouldn't we be building libraries of texts that grab and hold students' attention and challenge them as readers and human beings?
I teach with a group of Language Arts teachers who seem to operate on the notion that our ultimate goal is teaching literary analysis. This means practices that coerce students to read, that dictate how students should read and interact with a text, and that control the ways students write in response to texts. Yes, we do teach many classes that are controlled by the scope of AP and IB exams which do essentially drive toward literary analysis, but even in those courses there is room for practices that remind students that we read because we are human beings and we want to learn more about the human experience and there is room for practices that center on student choice. Conversations that question the practices I listed above are difficult and highly charged; I learned in my first year in the department to pretty much avoid questioning anything.
But maybe I need to start questioning again. I'd love for everyone to read Edmundson's Why Read? and for us to talk about it. He essentially makes the argument that traditional literature teaching methods place theory between students and texts, that we are by default teaching students NOT to engage in literature as a human being. They read like analysis machines. Reading is busywork.
Any how, it's because of these barriers and others that I'm sure are yet invisible to me that I'm having such a hard time figuring out how to make the shift. In essence, it's a paradigm shift from the idea that every student needs to be doing the same thing at the same time (reading the same book, working on the same paper, etc) to the idea that students will actually be more engaged if they are able to make choices to drive the focus of their work. I'm certain that the approach to have every student doing the same thing at the same time is about efficiency and managing lots of students in a day, but this model holds back students who would soar if given space and it doesn't provide the extra support others need who feel like they are constantly struggling to keep up. There is certainly a better way.
I just need to figure it out, despite the invisible yet powerful barriers that seem to come up and get in the way of being able to see the solution clearly.
It's back to work tomorrow after a glorious two weeks off. My daily schedule has included sleeping until nine, exercising with a hike or walk or run, reading to my six-year old daughter, having time to cook lots of good food, enjoying time with friends and family, watching the season 5 X-files dvds I got for Christmas into the wee hours, and not even thinking about school.
But now that school is imminent, I'm thinking about it again.
I entered into the school year in August with high ambitions about the change I wanted to inspire at my school including a move toward 21st century teaching a learning by galvanizing a group of my colleagues around the goal, a cutting-edge partnership with the local university, a sharpened focus on just who exactly our students are and what they need to be successful in their future world. With only half the year remaining, there's been pretty much no movement toward any of these goals.
Not for a lack of trying on my part.
The problem is that the game has shifted. We are in a budget crisis upon our governor's announcement that he will cut millions from the state education budget. What that means for our school is that we are likely to lose 5 or more teachers next year. We will need to cut back on some programs. I hoped we would take this as an invitation to innovate. And a group of us met as a think tank of sorts to come up with ideas for how to look at things differently for next year.
Some great ideas surfaced, but I realized later why I left this think tank meeting feeling somewhat disheartened. The focus of the conversation was not where my mind wanted it to be: I wanted us to put our students at the center of the conversation--who are they? how do we meet their needs? how do we prepare them for a future we can't see quite clearly yet? Instead, the content of the conversation focused on saving money in a million little outside of the box ways.
So what to do? I find myself right back where I've been many times: working my influence on the small sphere that I can. That means I will focus on the change I can enact for my students in my classroom.
The issues of the greater system that I work within are so overwhelming that I just don't know where to start. I become immobilized. And frustrated.
But maybe it took this two-week hiatus to help me remember where to start, where I've always started... ...with the students who will sit in front of me once again on Wednesday.
