What would trust look like?

There is a great article in the NY Times from June 5 about the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland (thanks to Schools Matter). They have developed a teacher evaluation model based on peer review. I guess the thing that struck me about the article (other than the fact that the superintendant is turning down RTT money because it would obligate them to give up an evaluation method that actually works) is the level of trust that must exist in that district (which was emphasized in the article).

What would it be like to work in a district where a panel of teachers and principals could work together to make recommendations and evaluations? Sadly, I don't know what that would be like. I am pretty sure we could do it in my building, maybe. But in my district? Don't know.

The superintendent, Jerry Weast, pointed out that it took five years to develop this system. Five years is a very long term commitment in the world of education policy. Ultimately the article left me with mixed feelings. It has been clear for a while that peer review systems are a really effective way to maintain teacher quality (and accountability) while keeping a clear sense of the complexity of teaching and learning. And, if accountability is your main concern, generally peer review does a more effective job (anecdotally borne out by the article) of removing problematic teachers.

The truth is that as well intentioned as most administrators are (an in my experience they are), they are neither trained nor given the resources to do proper teacher evaluations. So the evaluation process, such as it is, becomes shallow and more concerned with making sure people aren't committing the most grievous offenses. But there isn't much support or in-depth analysis in the process. A good evaluation system should be as helpful to the good teachers as it is unflinching about teachers who are struggling. That would go a long way to making any system seem less punitive.

But the level of trust and long term commitment it would take to get there seems overwhelming. How does one build that? How do we develop leaders in all parts of the system that can take us there? What can I do to move us in that direction? And, WHY is federal education policy so completely opposed to doing this? (Duncan is reported in this article to have said to Weast "Jerry, you're going where the country needs to go." The article leaved unasked the question of why Duncan's policies are pushing the country in the opposite direction).

As always, many more questions than answers. Even in the summer.

-F. Scott

Story time with TeacherSabrina

We talk a lot in this office about how to get the message out. We talk about constructing narrative, and how the 'school reform' movement has done a good job of constructing a narrative that is simple and clear (wrong, but simple and clear). And we think, "in what ways might WE work on constructing narratives that are effective in telling our story as educators, that can convey to the public a clear message about the 'school reform' movement and its dangers, pitfalls, and problems."

Then TeacherSabrina just goes ahead and does it.

Papergraders loves you teachersabrina. You rock!



Teachersabrina is at FailingSchools

Frustrations with research

A conversation with F. Scott today sent me into a bit of a tailspin. This and a string of conversations I've had over the last week, hearkened back to the thoughts I expressed a while back after my experience presenting at the American Educational Research Association conference.

I'm taking a great risk here that readers will assume I'm writing off educational research as a whole. I'm not. I'm an educational researcher working to get my doctoral dissertation published as a book for teachers, working to design a study to examine the pilot I'm running with my senior class next year, working to build a life as a K-12 teacher AND researcher. I'm not writing off educational research as a whole.

And yet, I'm frustrated.

I'm frustrated that given the sheer numbers of educational researchers out there, the current educational policy wave driven by people who are not educators is steamrolling any opposing idea. Shouldn't we have been out in front of that movement? Our involvement has been in the form of the well-known researchers who have been invited to D.C. to simply give a rubber stamp to the decisions the policy makers had already made (this was essentially the role I ended up playing on a state-level committee myself). With so many of us on the ground doing research, how on earth has our role as experts been usurped so completely?

I'm frustrated remembering how it felt in the first year of my doctoral program that my practical teaching knowledge wasn't particularly valued--not explicitly by the things people said directly about teachers but implicitly in the way teachers were positioned in the research we were asked to read and study. I'm frustrated by the conversations I had this past weekend with a former high school student of mine who has already had a career as a high school English teacher and who is now a doctoral student in an education program at one of the leading research universities in the country. She wouldn't dare tell people there that she might want to go back to K12 teaching once she finishes the program. But I say why not? Why shouldn't there be more educational researchers working out the context of K12 practice? Why isn't this a valued outcome of a education PhD program?

I'm frustrated by a conversation last week with a doc student currently in the program I graduated from. He is the editor of a state-level language arts journal that reaches hundreds of teachers in our state, and he has a hard time convincing his doc student colleagues and professors to submit to this journal. Maybe it's not a top tier research journal, but why not have your work read by TEACHERS? Sometimes it seems that we researchers write for each other, present for each other, work our butts off just to impress each other. Do teachers, administrators, and policy makers read the top tier research journals? Sometimes it feels like the goal becomes the most elegant research design, but I want to know how that affects the lives of the students in my 4th period class?

You know what I really want to do? I want to build a research cooperative located right here in the high school where I teach. I want to secure funding so that I can teach maybe 3 classes instead of 5 and have time dedicated to doing the research too. I want funding for some of the other teachers in my building too who are doing amazing things that they should be studying and writing about. I want to cultivate a voice, a presence, and find a way to speak to those who really matter when it comes to designing the contours of students' day to day existence in school. I want to find the best avenues for reaching these decision makers and cultivate a place for voices from the realm of practice to speak and have a seat at the table. Maybe we could even start a journal, something unlike anything that is out there.

But the question is how--how to accomplish this? Who would give us money? Would our school district support us?

Lots to think about.
--M. Shelley

What if?

You'll be seeing a lot from the book I'm currently reading, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, edited by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. This book is becoming highly relevant to the work I need to do to contextualize the pilot the district has supported me in running next year with my seniors. In short, in order to more effectively differentiate to meet my students' needs, I'll be able to work with attendance in a flexible manner. There will be some days where not all of my students will need to be in class, thus making it possible for the ones who work well independently to do so and giving me more time to work one-on-one with the students who need more of that kind of support. It will be a hybrid online/face time course with a strong web presence to keep everyone on the same page.

I'm excited about this, but I want to approach it well. I want to know exactly WHY I think this might work. I want to know what to look for to see if it is working. And in the end, I want to be able to say with some certainty whether or not it's an approach worth repeating and exactly why. I've got a student teacher this semester and a bit more time on my hands to read, so hence my obsession with this book. I imagine I'll be using this space here to capture some of the passages and thoughts from the book that strike me as critical in my thinking about this pilot project.

So here's today's contribution (actually, I had intended to post it on Tuesday--but as F. Scott already indicated we had a crazy week here with state testing AND parent/teacher conferences). Kylene Beers wonders:

What if students sometimes worked independently and other times worked with others in their school community, local community, state community, or across the globe? What if schooling valued multiple intelligences and the curriculum were dependent on technology and multimedia? What if authentic assessments were more important than multiple-choice state tests? What if asking the probing question were valued more than providing the correct answer? What if students were required to do some sort of service project or community work and what if learning content in the textbook were not substituted for figuring out what to do with that content? What if school were the place where students found their voice, discovered how to think, and saw that what they did and believed and thought mattered? What if school were where students learned a lot (not all, but certainly a lot) about being a part of a democracy, a contributing part? What if school were a place for figuring out, where trying mattered at least as much as adequate progress, where learning proceeded at each student's level and pace instead of lock-step pace? I think if those things happened, then a high school diploma might mean something, and the something it would mean would be far different than what it meant in 1986 or 1996 or even today in 2006. (11)

So yes, what if? I love this vision of the potential the high school education. This vision might better engage more students, thus making school something real and relevant and worth their time.

We need more people wondering what if? and imagining other possible worlds for our students' lives in school.

For now, signing off--
M. Shelley

Sir Ken Robinson at RSA Animate!

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.

Time to get wired

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

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

Sir Ken Robinson at TED- We need a revolution.

Yes, yes we do. I love listening to him. Hope you do too.

-F. Scott

Armies of Educational Researchers Afoot

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.

--M. Shelley

Linda Darling-Hammond on what other countries are actually doing.

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.

-F. Scott

Freire beyond the classroom

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

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

Invisible yet powerful barriers

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.

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

Real change?

I'm supposed to be writing a paper (the same paper I've assigned to my students to show up in rough draft form tomorrow). Procrastination sets in so I'm writing, but here instead.

In conversations with colleagues over the last few days, I've gotten to a place where I feel somewhat stuck. Or maybe overwhelmed.

It's one of those times where I feel like I just want to shut my classroom door and do my own thing despite what the rest of the school is doing.

But unless there's some way to enact real change in the rest of the school, I will not be able to realize the hopes and visions I have for my students.

See, I really truly want to figure out what it means to teach language arts to high school students in ways that will meaningfully prepare them for success in our ever-changing, complexifying world. The jargon for this is 21st century skills. What does it mean to create a 21st century high school?

I am willing to chase this question, even if it means I have to throw out everything I've done before and remake my classroom and my teaching.

But I'm not sure my colleagues are equally willing.

When I get little glimpses of what is possible--of cool ways to integrate technology to get students more engaged, of interesting potential for doing cross-disciplinary work, of the options that begin to surface when we consider putting aside the daily/weekly schedule that currently rules our lives in the traditional American high school--I get excited.

But these are changes on the level of paradigm shifting.

Paradigm shifting is really, really difficult.

For now, I feel somewhat stuck within the boundaries created by the ways the community where I teach defines the purposes and practices of school. There are definitions about these things--about what students do, about what teachers do, about what is supposed to be happening in classrooms, about what a day at school is supposed to look like--that we all share and buy into, that we live and exist within, that are as invisible (yet omnipresent) to us as the air we breathe. So within that context, it's really hard for me to make the real change that I would like to move toward.

So there is where I feel stuck. It's such a daunting prospect (paradigm shifting--questioning the air we breathe) that I don't even know where to start.

Signing off (to write that paper I need to write)--
M. Shelley

A 'pick me up...'

I spent the last two days at the National School Board Association T+L conference in Denver. Other than the blizzard in Denver this week, it was a really invigorating time (though I guess you could say that the blizzard was invigorating). There were too many interesting ideas to list them all in one post, but there were some themes- at least for me.

Project based learning came up a lot, in several different contexts. It fit nicely with the thinking I have been doing about "Focus, frame and form." (Updates on that little experiment are forthcoming). Using technology (it was the T+L conference after all) as leverage to engage our students in the larger world, project based learning feels like something I have been headed towards for a while. I was mulling classroom ideas over to myself while listening to several presentations- always a good sign.

Frans Johanssen, author of The Medici Effect, who spoke on Wednesday morning, was everything you might hope for as a dynamic and engaging speaker. He definitely comes across as a guy you'd want to hang out with. His message about the nature of innovation was powerful, as was his admonition that we must be willing to fail in order to innovate. How often do we think/hear/feel that in our working lives? Rarely if ever, though it seems obvious once you think about it. Note to self- how to you say that to students? How do we encourage them to take risks? How do we make a place that's safe to take risks? In our school? In our classroom? In our own heads?

All the presentation addressed innovation, breaking barriers, learning that is meaningful to our students. It was great to hear/participate in some really rich conversations. I was also sorry that so little of this thinking is part of our national dialogue about education. No one in Denver was talking about testing. Everyone was talking about assessing in meaningful ways. Sounds like semantics, but it isn't. There is a difference.

Finally, this conference is, at least ostensibly, about technology. But much more of the conversation was about learning. Yes, up on the main floor three hundred companies were waiting to pitch you software, hardware or services that were technological in nature. But I had way fewer conversations about 'stuff' than I anticipated. It isn't about stuff. It is about what we want kids to know or be able to do, and how to get them there in a way that works.

So back to home. And tomorrow, back to school. I'm tired, but in a good way. With a bag full of ideas that I will have to sort through. Try a few out, maybe fail a time or two?

-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

Actually 'Making the Shift'- Update 2

Oooooof. A week or so into this experiment. There are a lot of things I could comment on here, but the main thing to think about right now is my own reaction to the change in dynamic. I (we?) are so used to having not only the control, but also the responsibility, for what our students do. I was really feeling a lack of both this week. I wanted to jump in and start telling them what to do. My teacher brain was screaming, "Oh no, they might do the wrong thing!" The impulse to be the one in the room 'making things happen' was pretty powerful. As much as I was able, I refrained.

In both sections the students had planned to 'have discussions' this week. Both groups decided that they did want to read from the text as a way of gathering some background information, and then have a discussion in class. On the day of discussion, I came in to the room, and rather than taking 'center stage' as I might normally do, I just sat in back and took attendance. The students sitting near me in both classes we watching to see what I would do, but for the most part the group happily ignored me.

In my first class (a bit smaller and harder to hide in), a student asked me after a moment, "aren't we having a discussion today?" I tried to keep my response as neutral as possible. I think I said something like, "I believe that's what you had put on the calendar." She got the point and immediately enlisted some of her fellows in organizing the class (the classes are filled with motivated honors students, so their willingness to take initiative is pretty high). That class launched into a discussion that lasted almost an hour.

On the whole they stayed pretty on topic. I noticed that, especially given the nature of the topic they were discussing (the formulation of knowledge in the social sciences), they raised and discussed some pretty complicated ideas. This class has been doing this with my direction for almost a year now, so they have had practice and some modeling and coaching, but it was still pretty cool to see them try it on their own. After a few minutes they realized that

I just wasn't going to say anything, so they ignored me.

It was really tough to keep my mouth shut, especially when I heard things that were factually incorrect or not well though out. Several times the group shied away from engaging an idea because the voice asserting it was particularly aggressive, even when I could see some pretty significant disagreement in the group as a whole. It was tough not to play 'referee' or my normal role as devil's advocate, especially in the face of ideas that deserved more interrogation than they received.

I kept track of how many members of the class participated- in a group of 22, six voices carried the majority of the conversation, nine participated at some level, and seven did not speak. Of those who did not talk at all, I would say four of them were engaged, but just chose not to speak, and the rest seemed outwardly disengaged (though it can be very tough to tell- just because they look like they aren't listening does not mean they aren't tracking the conversation.

Other than my own struggle to keep my mouth shut, I actually found it quite relaxing. On the whole the discussion was at least as good as an average discussion led by me, and in some ways perhaps more genuine. While it was hard not to immediately jump in when I heard something I thought was 'wrong' the group seemed to work through those moments on its own, more or less, and I almost always heard the 'right' or more accurate information at least raised. I also found that I had the time to observe the class much more carefully than I do when I am leading the discussion. I was much more aware of who was engaged, who was participating, who seemed totally checked out.

When there were only a few minutes left in class, and the conversation was winding down, several students turned to me and asked essentially 'how did we do?' I shared some of what I wrote above, and then asked them how they thought it went. On the whole they seemed pleased. I told them that I would be asking them for ideas on how they could make it even better when we were done with this unit.

Trying this experiment has raised what I think is a major issue in education (for me). When we talk about teaching/learning, are we talking about what occurred in the classroom, or are we talking about what the students take with them when they leave. We all know the dynamic of 'covering the content' in which we make sure that whatever material we feel beholden to is exposed in the room. But we also know that there is a great distance between that and what students actually retain. Engaging my students in their own sense of responsibility for learning certainly seems like it will up their level of learning. But my urge to make sure everything is 'covered' in class is pretty powerful.

I will have to wait and see how they demonstrate and difference understanding on the next assessment, which is next week. They, of course, is the real proof here. I plan to video the presentation so we can digest them as a class. But so far I have to say that the class experience seems a lot more genuine. There is less 'playing at school,' on all our parts. That has to be good, I think.

Actually 'Making the Shift'- Update 1

So- two days in. What an interesting experience! I teach two sections of the same course, and the most startling part of doing this so far is that the two classes have VERY different characters. Not really a surprise, but still interesting. One class is very gung-ho- move ahead, what do we need to do next. The other class wants to spend more time ruminating on data from their last assessment (I gave them scores from their lat presentation as part of our planning today).

I really like just asking them what they want to do. I expressed in both classes that it might be really easy to decided not to do anything, and take the consequences (Luckily, there are honors level classes with highly motivated students- ultimately they do care about their grades quite a bit). I told them I would let that happen if they wanted, but expressed concern about the consequences to them. Since they have almost a years worth of experience in this course, they understand much of what we do and how it relates pretty clearly. As I said in my original post, this is also the class that is closest to this model already.

Both classes wanted some time to work as a large group, obtaining a deeper understanding of the larger subject, and both groups wanted time to work independently on their particular topics in the larger subject. They asked me to do some direct instruction as it relates to the concepts embedded in the rubric, but after that they wanted to direct their own learning in the form of discussion and some looser classroom activities.

By far, the best moment for me came yesterday, at the end of the second class. A student who is generally pretty quiet, though always very engaged was leaving the room after the bulk of the others had left. As she slung her over-large backpack over her shoulder she looked at me and said, "this is actually the hardest thing you've asked us to do so far, isn't it?" I nodded an affirmative, but inside I was jumping up and down. Yes!