I recently had a conversation with a teacher from Holland and a teacher from Kansas City.
We were talking together about education and the big issues that seem to be at the forefront of the conversations about it in the US vs. Holland. The teacher from Holland indicated that his country discusses the same issues we do--assessment, standards, funding.
I made some crack like, "well, we can't all be Finland, can we?"
He smiled. He acknowledged the view that from the outside that people have of Finland, how people hold it up as THE model for how to do education. F. Scott and I have spent a lot of time actually talking about Finland--the standards are dare I say beautiful and child-centered and exactly what I want for my own kid. The structures in place to train, mentor, and support new teachers are dreamy compared to the anti-teacher rhetoric currently taking over our country.
And then this teacher from Holland told me a few things that started to burst that little halo of perfection I had maintained in my mind around the topic of Education in Finland. The teachers, he explained, are VERY traditional. Though the standards may appear child-centered, the classrooms often are not. The teachers do not innovate or try anything new or out of the ordinary. School is what school has been for years. Also, school there tends to appeal more to the ways that female students learn and think--school in Finland is not working actually for scores of young Finnish males and they drop out, thus complicating this view of how successful their schools are (not as successful as I thought they were if they're not meeting the needs of a huge portion of their students and unwilling to innovate in order to do so).
So what do we do? Of course there are things that Finland is getting right that we aren't, and there are things that we're getting right that Finland isn't. But is there anywhere that's getting it all right? Anywhere we can hold up as THE example?
No. There's not.
We just have to figure out what works for our students in our communities, and we need to cultivate space to learn from each other, from each other's successes and failures across schools, districts, and wider communities (yes, even across the globe).
There is no ONE way to do this. There is no certainty in good education. Test scores are not the ultimate measure of success either. It's all murky and complicated and complex and confusing (because learning is too) (and so is our world)--and if teaching is anything else, we're not doing it right.
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.
Just a tidbit from my reading today. It articulates well the problem with the runaway train of our educational policy today. But how do we fix the problem? Still trying to figure that one out...
“While we see our students as individuals, and while we recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each one, policy mandates often seem to view students through the same myopic lens, treating all students as if they were the same. Yet we know that their differences are their strengths. We know how and when to differentiate our instruction based on the variety of learning styles each student brings to our classroom. We know how to take students from where they are to all they can be. We have to trust ourselves as professionals, hired because we know books, know reading, know writing, know the conventions of language, and know what to do to help each student grow as an individual based on his strengths and needs. We have to continue to work as a professional community to show others what works to keep students learning. Scripted lessons mandating Tuesday’s writing to be the same for each student in every school are guaranteeing mediocrity. We have to continue to learn and grow as professionals who use our voices to speak out against the standardization of all learning” (p. 204).
From Rief, Linda. (2007) “Writing: Commonsense Matters.” Adolescent Literacy: Turning promise into Practice. Kylene Beers, Robert E. Probst, and Linda Rief (eds.). Portsmouth: Heinemann, pgs. 191-208.
I wrote a while back about my daughter's frustrations with the story map homework she had been given from her second grade teacher. I wondered why she was so paralyzed and unable to complete the story map that simply asked for her to list the characters, setting, problem, solution, and mail plot events of a book off of her shelves at home. I did what I could to help her work through it. I tried to convince her that it was okay to have a different idea about a story than her teacher might have. And I was relieved that she got the assignment done.
But I got home last evening and there she sat at the dining room table with a blank story map sitting in front of her. She sat slumped over in frustration; my husband sat next to her at the table looking completely exasperated and frustrated.
Here we go again.
Seeing she was clearly stuck, I invited her to take the dog on a walk with me. As we walked up the hill on the trail behind our house, watching the dog frolic happily along side us, I took her through the same conversation we had last time she got so frustrated by the story map homework. I asked her if she remembered my story as a reader and what happened to my love of reading at school. She told it all back to me--about how I used to love to read when I was younger but grew to not enjoy it anymore by high school. She told me about how a teacher of mine told me I was flat out wrong when I disagreed with her interpretation of a book in AP English. I told her about how this shut me down as a reader for several years. I reminded her that I didn't want this to happen to her.
As we hiked along, I explained how I had thought last time about discussing this all with her teacher but decided against it. This will not be the first time that a teacher suggests there are right answers about a story in her life in school, and I do not want to rush in every year and try to fix it for my kid. Instead, I want to help my kid develop survival skills so she can still do the work asked of her with stories in school AND remain the engaged reader that she has become.
I do not blame my daughter's teacher. The problem is so much bigger--it's more in the unchecked assumptions we all carry with us about what we are supposed to do with stories in school.
So here's what we did. As we hiked, we composed a mantra for my daughter to remember when she did her homework. When we got home, the first thing she wanted to do was write it down--so we did. I wrote one word, she wrote the next and so on until we had written out the following:
"It is okay for me to have a different idea about a story than my teacher does as long as I can explain what I think and why I think it."
We both signed and dated it. And then we came up with a process for her to complete a story map "with very little stress." This we also wrote down, on the reverse of the page that held the mantra:
1) Read the story aloud together and pause whenever it seems a problem comes up in the story. Write the problems down and choose the one that seems to be the most important one.
2) Daughter writes in the characters, setting, main problem, and solution on the story map.
3) Daughter takes a break on the couch. During the break, she explains aloud what happens in the story and Mom or Dad writes down her words. This becomes daughter's rough draft.
4) Daughter uses this rough draft to select the plot events she wants to include in the story map and writes them on the story map.
5) We celebrate: "yay yay yay yippee yippee yippee!"
I wonder what this process will look like when she's in high school and writing literary analysis papers. I wonder how much help she'll still need at that point.
F. Scott and I have just survived the yearly proctoring duties for the state-mandated test. It basically kills two weeks here at our school. We take two full mornings in two weeks in a row and to accommodate these testing blocks, the entire schedule for the week is a mess.
But I can live with that. A little variety in the weekly schedule is probably good for us. The worst part of it for me is "active proctoring."
What that means is that I am unable to do anything but watch the students take the test. I cannot read, grade, write, or work on my computer. I must walk around the room and monitor the students' progress through the test, make sure they are not working in the wrong test in the book, make sure they are not looking at a neighbor's test, make sure they are not doodling instead of taking the test seriously, etc. And even if all students in my room finish a particular test with a half hour left in the time allowed for the test, they all must sit silently until the testing session is over. THEY can read a book. I still must actively monitor what they are up to.
This of course is important. As much as I disagree with high stakes testing, as long as we have to live with it, it's best for our school if these tests go well. So I play along and follow the rules, which makes for a very difficult time for me. I tell the students I would rather be taking the test myself than watching them take it.
But somehow I muddle through. This year I paid close attention to how exactly I got myself through this. Here's my list of things to do to keep one's mind occupied while "actively proctoring" a state-mandated, high-stakes test.
1) Memorize the students' names. I did this during the very first 60-minute test my group of 18 took. When the testing session was over, I told them I knew all their names and they asked me to prove it. So I did. At least it made them smile before we plunged into the second 60-minute test. 2) Wiggle your toes. I did a lot of this. I wondered how vigorously I could wiggle them without anyone noticing when looking at my shoes. 3) Gaze out the window. Look for signs of spring. This, of course, only works if you have a window in the classroom where you are stationed. I did this year, but I didn't last year. 4) Monitor the pencil sharpness of students' pencils and replace as necessary. My students went through a massive number of pencils this year. This meant I had to re-sharpen just about all of them in between each testing session. One student used SIX in one writing test. I took to lining up three or four pencils on his desk at the start of the morning. 5) Collect and alphabetize test books as students finish up. Usually the first student finishes up about halfway through the testing sessions. So this gives me something to do every other minute or so until the testing session is over. 6) Sit, stand, sit, stand, sit, stand (at lengthy intervals). 7) But don't sit in that purple chair. There was a very low to the ground, delicate-looking purple chair in the classroom where I proctored this year. I was concerned that if I sat in it, I might not be able to get up, thus creating a hilarious scene that might distract the students in the room. 8) Compose blog posts in your head. Where do you think this one came from? 9) Take slow laps around the room. Be sure you are NOT wearing the corduroy pants that go swish swish swish when you walk. 10) Examine the student projects posted on the wall and remember to ask your colleague about them. The ones I saw this year were particularly intriguing. 11) As students finish, deliver reading material to their desks if they haven't brought their own. I had a stack of high-interest novels and I enjoyed trying to pick just the right book for students I had just met and didn't know much about. 12) Reorganize everything the box of testing supplies. 13) Drink water at regular intervals, but not too much so you don't end up with a too-full bladder. 14) Re-read the proctoring instructions again and again. I didn't want to mess up. 15) Walk the box of tissues over to over-sniffly students. 16) Clean up the mess under the pencil sharpener. Why? see #4 above. 17) Imagine my seven-year old daughter as a high school student taking a test like this. 18) Sing "Bridge over Troubled Water" in your head. That's what was stuck in my head for some reason. 19) Think deep thoughts. 20) Count how many pairs of Chuck Taylors are in the room (three--one pair brown, one pair gray, and one pair black with red thread). 21) Oh, and of course, watch the students take the test. But avoid making eye contact to lessen the creeper quotient for all involved.
So there you have it. I survived. My group of students this year was particularly awesome. They appeared to be taking the test very seriously and they made the atmosphere quiet and just right to support their peers' ability to take the test as well. And every time I replaced a dull pencil, they whispered, "thank you" to me.
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?
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
I got in an argument today with my dad. He's becoming more and more of a curmudgeon these days (can't blame the guy, though).
The subject of our argument had to do with the conversation on Meet the Press this morning between Arne Duncan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich, a trio that has been touring the country to look at schools and talk about what direction education policy needs to take in the years ahead.
I just happened to catch this 20 minute conversation while I was walking on a treadmill in a hotel fitness center this morning. I don't have TV at home, so had it not been for the particular circumstances of this morning, I would never have seen this.
The first thing my dad said to me when I entered his living room later in the day was something that asked me to agree with him that the conversation on Meet the Press this morning was thoughtful, balanced, and thought-provoking.
Well, I had already discussed with my husband this morning over breakfast that this was not exactly my assessment of the Duncan/Gingrich/Sharpton Meet the Press dialogue. To me it was one more example of educational discourse that looks at our public schools only in terms of the extremes (it opened with stats about the public schools in Washington DC--while the stats are true and horribly sad, they contextualized the conversation within a view that public schooling in America is failing all of our kids dismally). There was a good amount of conversation that demonized teachers (without considering the horrible, impossible conditions that some teachers are asked to teach within--a massive failure of our system as a whole). There was anti-teacher union sentiment. There was a promise from Duncan that none of the Race to the Top money would be doled out to any state/district that didn't tie their reform plans to test scores.
In short, it was a group of politicians (with NO actual educators) sitting around discussing the needs of educational policy in our country.
My dad is proud of Obama for challenging the teachers' unions. Now, I'm not exactly the most fervent fan of teachers' unions, but they are there for a reason. Teachers have a history of being treated very badly by their school districts. My dad said to me, "you're a good teacher and everybody knows it--you don't need the protection of the teachers' union." Well, until I feel valued for my experience and expertise by my district administration because I see them placing a priority in all of their decision making on valuing teachers, I will still see a need for a teachers' union in my district. My dad made a sweeping statement writing off teachers' unions for protecting bad teachers. Sure, that happens, and I don't like it--but teachers' unions also protect the rest of us who work unbelievably hard.
I told my dad that so far Obama's educational direction is not really a dramatic change of course from the No Child Left Behind bus driven by W. What we certainly don't need is more mandated testing and holding teachers accountable to test scores. The tests are flawed for a whole range of reasons (see the link below for someone else's take on some of those reasons). I do not oppose higher standards or meaningful, rigorous assessment in public schools. I do not oppose requiring districts to examine their test score data by the sub groups of student population within their school and to use that test score data to identify the groups of students who are struggling the most and find ways to close those achievement gaps. In a nutshell, those are the requirements of NCLB, the most recent revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been around since 1965 and responsible for scores of significant and important educational reforms in this country. What I have a problem with is the mandated high-stakes testing--meaning real world consequences for schools that don't make the grade on test scores.
If the tests were meaningful and rigorous with a minimum of fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice test questions, I might be able to get behind it. But they're not. We do not have a testing industry that can support meaningful tests at the scale that federal law requires. So we're left with the tests that are able to be scored efficiently.
But there is nothing efficient about measuring what students truly know and are able to do. It's a messy, complex, nuanced process. And that--as I tried to make the point to my dad today --is why I had a problem with Meet the Press this morning. There are probably scores of Americans who now think they are more educated in this issue after watching that program this morning. But they have no idea how nuanced and complex public education in America is. There is NO simple fix for reform. Each school and district is its own universe with its own unique community context that spills into the school in myriad ways to affect what happens in classrooms. I happen to work in a district situated in a research university town--you bet that spills into our classrooms. The community expectations are high enough that on the whole we believe our students can achieve. And most of them do. You might not believe what we are able to accomplish here at the high school level with many of our students. F. Scott often says that essentially our students are getting a private prep-school caliber education for free. And he's right.
But that doesn't mean that we can't still do better. And we want to. And pressure to tie all of our reform ideas to scores on our state test is not what will make for meaningful reform. Actually--we'll enact meaningful reform, unique to the needs of our students in our community, simply by working together to work on the problems particular to our school context (an achievement gap for our second-language learners, students in the non-IB/non-AP courses who are generally disengaged from school, an impending doom that threatens to bring budget cuts of 6 to 9 percent next year when we are already trying to manage huge class sizes...).
This was going to be just a short piece to direct your attention to the Open Letter to our President that I came across today in the Edurati Review because I believe it gets into some of the nuance that I thought was lacking from Meet the Press this morning. But apparently I had a lot to say (either that or I'm just avoiding the stack of grading and other things I have sitting here staring at me...).
By the way, speaking of the stack of stuff staring at me--in a few weeks, F. Scott and I have agreed to capture here (as well as we can) a typical week in each of our teaching worlds--all in the spirit of helping others to understand what it looks like to do the work that we do.
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.
