The Elephant in the Room at TEDx Denver Ed

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.

Signing off,
M. Shelley

Now that IS a U-turn

The New York Times is reporting on Dr. Diane Ravitch's recent u-turn on No Child Left Behind.

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.

Signing off.
M. Shelley

New Year Thoughts

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.

M. Shelley

Why federal "RTT" reforms won't work...

This is maybe the best articulation ever of why current reform efforts underway in our nation's capital will not work. Funny- it took someone who actually knows education to point it out.

Marion Brady on The One Reason Duncan's Race to the Top Will Fail at Valerie Strauss' Blog at The Washington Post.

Brady says (succinctly) all the things I have wanted to say for years. I think she has it nailed.

Thanks to Schools Matter for passing this along.

F. Scott

So F. Scott said to blog about it

I'm stressed out.

Here's the problem: I'm a member of a state-level committee to rewrite our standards for reading and writing. I've been working with this committee for months. We are up against our final deadline, but we need more time.

Standards documents have never been more high stakes. The results of the assessments tied to them are having more and more real implications for schools, students, and teachers--some even tied to school funding and teacher pay.

That means that standards documents have got to be very carefully constructed: coherent, clear, carrying high expectations for students and teachers. Anything short of this could have catastrophic consequences that we can't even see clearly now.

So why am I stressed out? My fellow committee members and I have built a document that we really want to believe in, but it is not quite there yet. We need more time, and we are not getting it. The whole process has been fraught with unreasonable deadlines and assurances that we would later have the time to do the alignment and articulation work that the document desperately needs.

But we are not getting the support from our department of education to do this right. In fact, I was pretty much told not to even come in tomorrow to work on it--perhaps they think that I'll muddy the process because of my desire to make the document as strong as possible, to do the major big picture articulation with the document that will take more time than the smaller tweaks that the department of education imagined for the document at this point in the game.

It seems that the goal here is no longer on building a strong and visionary standards document that will take my state boldly into the 21st century. It seems that the goal has now become simply a finished document.

Time to get my mind off of this and try to get some grading done.
M. Shelley

What's possible. What's truly possible.

Okay, F. Scott: check this out

http://www.hightechhigh.org/

How does this help us to envision our own move toward 21st century teaching?

M. Shelley

Actually 'Making the Shift'

I have been reading a series at The Edurati Review called "Making the Shift," by Kevin Washburn. I posted about it a week or so ago. He just published part 4, "From Target Future to Teaching."

I have really been interested in the way he conceptualizes what we might do in the classroom. His view has really spoken to me, and to the needs of the young people who show up in front of me every day. But blogging about a new idea doen't mean much. So feeling inspired by the 4th installment, I am going to take a shot at doing it. We are starting a new unit in a course I teach tomorrow. Rather than having a filled in calendar of things was are going to do, read, discuss, and produce, I am going to had out a blank calendar of the next four weeks.

We will do presentations at the end of the unit (form), there is a subject we need to cover (focus), and we have about four weeks to deal with this topic (frame). In this particular class there is already a rubric for presentations which focuses students on the skills of the course. I didn't write the rubric, though I think it is a good one for the course in question, so rather than re invent the wheel, I am sticking with it.

But tomorrow I am going to ask my students, "given that you will have to do a presentation with some of your colleagues in four weeks, and understanding the rubric as we do, what do you need to do to be successful in that presentation, and go from there. In consultation with Shelly on Friday afternoon, I am putting together a list of suggestions for things that might be useful to them, and I have some concerns that they need to address in their plan, but other than that, it is up to them.

I am going to give them a copy of Washburn's Part 3 article, so they know why we are doing what we are doing, and I will present them with the data from their last set of presentations, so they have a sense of why I might have concerns about how they use their time and what they do, but mostly I am going to try to turn it over to them.

And than I'm going to write about it. Not every day, but regularly over the next few weeks. So we will see what unfolds. Stay tuned...

F. Scott

The dominant teaching paradigm

Greetings.
As promised, here are my thoughts on why we are often unable to teach literature as we should, or to really, truly, enact any meaningful change in the classroom (such as making space for the kind of professional development that F. Scott wrote about a few days ago).

I've been working with a classic study in the field of education, Willis's (1977) Learning to Labour, to help me explain some of the resistance I got from my students last year during my dissertation study. Willis studied a group of young men, "the lads," whose consistent, overt, naughty resistance to school ended up reproducing the omnipresent class system of their community. Due to the culture of their working class lives, they interpreted school as having nothing of real value to offer them, so their days at school consisted mainly of resisting and opposing anything that the school asked them to do. In so doing, "the lads" made it certain that they would continue along the path toward their working class existence, only realizing at a point in the future how they had missed out on their opportunity to get an education that would provide them other options besides a working class destiny.

One particular aspect of Willis's study became incredibly relevant to my dissertation study. The opposition I got from my students in my classroom was often naughty and characteristic of the opposition of "the lads"--which is what led one of my committee members to suggest I take a look at Willis. But what was most salient toward my dissertation was not Willis's finding about class reproduction, but rather his characterization of a dominant teaching paradigm that organized school in the minds of everyone involved in the study--"the lads," the other students, the teachers, the administrators, and the parents.

Willis argues that embedded in the consciousness of our society exists an understanding of school as essentially an exchange between teacher and students. Students comply with what the teacher asks in the classroom in exchange for something. In the school Willis studied, the exchange was for knowledge, which led to certain qualifications for certain jobs, income, and eventual ability to purchase goods and services. In short, if students complied with what school offered, they would eventually be able to get jobs to support themselves.

In reading about this exchange-based teaching paradigm, I realized that the school where F. Scott and I teach is also, at its center, swirling around a basic exchange between teacher and students. Students comply with what we ask of them in the classroom in exchange for grades. These grades will eventually lead to college admission, hopefully at the prestigious college (whatever that might be for each individual student) that our school community holds as the goal. Over 90% of our students go on to 4-year colleges every year. The College Admission is the end goal, and students need the right kind of grades for that, and that is how we get them to comply with our classroom requests. I believe this to be the case because of how often I hear, "how many points is this?" and "what do I need to do to get the A?" and my colleagues belief that unless we give students a grade for everything we ask them to do, they will not do it. Students are not concerned first about actually understanding; their first concern is about their grades.

Willis's framework becomes powerful though when you consider his argument for how impossible meaningful change is within this dominant, exchange-based teaching paradigm. He examines several other versions of teaching and shows how they are all just revisions of the basic paradigm, and not very meaningful ones at that. At the center of all the reforms he examines, he argues, sits still an offer from the teacher in exchange for students' compliance. What changes in what the teacher is offering. Because the basic paradigm is so completely entrenched in everyone's understanding of school, if what the teacher is offering is too far off of what is expected in the exchange, students will not be able to interpret it as anything but some betrayal of the basic exchange, and then you get the naughty, resistant, oppositional behavior cropping up.

Willis argues that the only way to actually enact meaningful reform is to disrupt the basic exhange-based paradigm. How to do this? Well, you have to make changes to the material structures, organization, and practices of schools that are both evidence of the presence of the teaching paradigm and the defining characteristics of it. The material structures have to do with the physical spaces of the school and how students have little privacy, how their movements are often constrained, and how they don't have free access to all areas of the school (think locked up computer labs, off-limits teachers' lounges, restricted student parking areas, smashed-together lockers, small and uncomfortable student desks, etc.). The organization has to do with how the school day/year is structured (think bell schedules, attendance policies, seat time guidelines, etc). The practices have to do with how school is done in a particular community (think advanced vs. regular tracks within schools, teachers starting and ending class periods at the bells, teachers making all the decisions about the curriculum, etc.). If we want to make meaningful change, we have to make real changes to the material structures, organization, and practices that maintain the exchange-based teaching paradigm.

What might those changes look like? I imagine school campuses that feel more open and inviting to students with access at more hours of the day and comfortable places for students to hang out. I imagine flexible daily schedules that can ebb and flow with the demands of the curriculum and the individual needs of students--a class can end early if the goal for the day is met or students can work from home on a particular day if there's no need for the whole class to meet for example. I imagine a dedicated effort to include students in more decision making about curricular in instructional issues. Yes, teachers are the ones with the professional knowledge surrounding this stuff, but we should be looking for meaningful places to involve our students in decision making whenever possible and strive to work to put our students much more at the center of their own education. I imagine using technology in powerful ways to better mirror students' lives outside of school and to create more flexible learning spaces.

I tried last year to deliberately offer my students something outside of this dominant exhange-based paradigm, but the expectations about what school is supposed to be in my students' minds, in my colleagues' minds, even in my own mind--kept getting in the way. I know that unless we examine the assumptions we all carry around about school that serve to maintain the basic, dominant teaching paradigm, we will never be able to make real, meaningful change for our students. We have to look for and examine these assumptions so that we are able to truly imagine ways to meet the needs of our students, now and into the ever-changing future.

Signing off,
M. Shelley
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Willis, P. (1977) Learning to labour: how working class kids get working class jobs. Westmead, England: Saxon House.

Professional Development

I think we should have some- don't you?

An observation that struck me recently is this. Often what we do under the rubric of 'professional development' is anything but. Yes, we may have some outside expert, usually in a hotel ballroom with five hundred of your favorite people with you, tell us all about a new way of thinking about some aspect of our jobs. And some of those 'talking head' types can be great. But rarely are such experts presented as a cohesive vision of improving classroom instruction. And there is almost no follow up at all. 

The rest of the time, professional development time is filled with a lot of things that are certainly useful, often necessary, but not at all related to improving teacher's skills. The truth is, that in this industry, the time resource is in such short supply that we are always robbing Peter to pay Paul. During time allotted to PD, we are doing all the other stuff that is necessary to running the institution, department or district, but not actually allowed for in the structure of our working lives. So we need to do that work (curriculum development, team planning, department and committee work), but again, very little of it is concerned with making any of us better at our jobs. 

And that's okay, because meaningful improvement for teachers doesn't really start on days when there are no students in the building. Real professional development is better termed 'instructional coaching.' It starts in classrooms with actual students and real teachers. Yes, there probably needs to be some understanding of the learning goals , and some framework for methodology, but after that it is a pretty organic process. The main problem is that once you engage real instructional coaching, it is time intensive. There needs to be time in the classroom, time for reflection on what happened in the classroom, development of new strategies and the translation of those strategies into actual activities, the deployment of the new strategies in the classroom, gathering of data on the efficacy of the new strategies, reflection, and repeat. 

Other than the time in the classroom, there is almost no allowance in our working day for the rest of the process. Teaching five classes a day, the rest of my working time is spent meeting with students, pulling together material for future lessons, working with colleagues on a variety of issues, all of which are important and need attention, and oh year, grading (which eats the lion's share of my non-classroom working time). I do, of course have wonderful, rich , meaningful conversations with my colleagues about our work, but they tend to haphazard. Stuck in between all the other things. If improving student learning is really our goal (and I think it is), then maybe we need something different.

The last key element is that it can't happen in a vacuum. At least not for me. The word 'coaching' is key in this model. Even Tiger Woods has a coach. No one laboring to improve in their chosen field does so without some assistance, some feedback. We need coaches who really understand teaching and learning, and who appear in our classrooms for meaningful amounts of time, for the express purpose of observing our work, in order to give us feedback that will help us to continue to improve. Those observers need to have a wide base of knowledge, both in teaching strategies, pedagogy, and (at least in my context, high school) a high degree of knowledge specific to the subject at hand in a give classroom (very tough to assess a math teacher if you really don't understand math).

I don't know about you, but no such system exists in my building, or as far as I know, my district. But I do know a boatload of people who are qualified to do this work. One of them shares my office with me, and this blog. Several of them are right down the hall. Several more of them are also administrators in my building. They are the people I talk to every day about teaching- its up and downs, our struggles, the student's struggles, the challenges of the particular material we are working with. I already trust these people because I work with them every day. 

We need to be our own instructional coaches. This may be blindingly obvious, but how often is it really happening? I hear about some schools and districts that have positions like this, at the building or department level, but not very often. My experience has been that after the probationary period, no one has been watching my teaching very closely. As long as my kids don't light the room on fire and no parents are complaining, the system seems to be happy with my job performance. I'm sorry, but that isn't good enough for me. I took this job because I actually care about it. I am not a teacher because I had nothing better to do. I had a professional life before this one (and it paid better). I don't want to spend the next twenty years teaching the same lesson over and over again and blaming the students when they don't learn (we all know someone who fits that description). I don't want that for me, my students, or my own child. 

So what would it take to have meaningful instructional coaching in my building? Not that much actually. It would take time, and that translates into money. But not an inordinate about I think. Especially when measured against all the things that money is spent on that don't actually improve student learning. It would take structuring some time into our day when we could sit in each other's classrooms, some time to work together reflecting on the observations and collaborating on new strategies, and ready access to some pretty low tech gear (a video camera being first in my mind). 

It's not too much to ask is it? Seems so simple. Makes a lot of sense- at least to me. 

So, why exactly can't we do it?

Wishing for time...

F. Scott

Another Introduction

From M. Shelley
I guess you could say that we wanted to start playing around with writing about the ideas that we often struggle through in conversation, and thus, this blog was born.

I'm in my 13th year in the business--the only business that I have really ever known in my adult working life. That means 11 years in the high school classroom in three different states and five different schools if I include my student teaching semester. The other two years were full time graduate coursework for me, where I supervised student teachers and taught methods classes to earn my keep at my university. The graduate degree is still plaguing me as I try to finish my thesis along side teaching high school full time.

I have taught in a wide variety of settings: urban, suburban, semi-rural. And even though each of these settings brings with it a unique set of challenges, there are some things about this job that have been universal for me: I love what I do and I know there is nothing else I'm supposed to be doing, even though it exasperates me at times. The joy comes in dealing with the students. The frustrations come in how everything else often gets in the way of providing an educational experience for each student that will enable him or her to thrive as a human being.

(Hopefully F. Scott and I will remember to focus just as much on those joys in this blog as we do on the frustrations.)

Hello from F.Scott

Ha! First Post.

Well- this will be by way of an introduction. We have, for reasons that will perhaps become obvious, chosen to be anonymous here. We both wanted a forum in which we could discuss the very strange nature of our professional lives, present some thoughts, perhaps spark some thinking. We also wanted to be free to say what we really thought. As in most professions, we all do a bit of self editing as we go through our daily lives. In the politically and socially charged world of education, this is even more so. I hope that here we will be able to address directly that which we do not feel able to address in our offices, departments, classrooms and districts.

I have been teaching in the classroom for about eight years now. Before that I had a professional life quite different from this, though I have always worked with people, often young people, and the general dynamics and skills that inform teaching have always taken center stage in my work life. I never thought I would be a teacher though. I had to take a rather circuitous route to get here. However, now that I am here it is clear to me every day that I was built to be a teacher. Unfortunately, I also wonder every day if I the job I am doing and the way I am often asked to do it is sustainable, functional, and even more if I am really serving the kids that come through my classroom door. 

Where this blog might take us is a big unknown right now. If it serves as a vehicle for larger discussions, more thinking about how we educate our children, what our society wants of itself- then it will have achieved far beyond my ambition. After that- who knows?

Starting hopefully...

F. Scott