What I am really interested in...

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...

-F. Scott

Procedural Display

I recently had the opportunity to attend a talk by researcher and theorist Kris Gutierrez, and she brought up an idea that I have been mulling over ever since. It's a concept that has heavily influenced my teaching, but until her talk, I hadn't yet put a name upon it.

She challenged us to teach in ways that eschew procedural display. This is when students look like they are learning but aren't actually. This is when students play the game of school and give us exactly what we are looking for, doing the absolute minimum necessary for the grades that they want to get. On the surface, their grades, their demeanor in class--everything about them suggests that they are learning what we are asking them to. But the truth is that they are not actually engaging in the material in any meaningful way. They are not actually LEARNING in ways that are long-lasting and life-altering. They are not learning to THINK, only to demonstrate the procedures in our classes that make it look like they are learning.

I was the master of this as a high school student and as a college student during my first few semesters as an English major. By all outside appearances, I looked like a successful AP English Literature student. I earned a B in the class. I did fine on the exams and essays. I participated in class discussions and group projects. I earned a 5 on the AP Lit exam. But the nasty truth is that I didn't read a single book that year. Not a single one. I was able to "succeed" and get the B (which didn't hurt my GPA at all because it was a weighted class) by listening very carefully to the teacher and giving back her interpretations on exams and essays. I learned how to look like I was reading, but I wasn't. I was engaged in completing the work with a minimal amount of effort. To this day I regret the great works of literature that I didn't experience in that class. I only read what other people said about the works but never built my arguments around my own genuine response to a text. And this continued several semesters in to my English major in college (until I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which blew my mind, and everything changed for me).

Now, the question here for me is how to get my students out of the mode of procedural display? I have thought a lot about my AP English lit class and why I was so disengaged. I take it back to the moment that my teacher told me I was wrong because I disagreed with her interpretation of the Brobdignagians in Gulliver's Travels. I learned in that single moment that my ideas about literature didn't have space in her classroom, so I promptly ferreted them away, never to be seen again until they were pried out of me by an astounding piece of literature. As a teacher, I share this story with my students and ask them not to let that happen to them, to call me on it when I shoot down a student's interpretation, to understand why I run my class the way that I do in order to quiet my voice so that theirs have room to speak. But still I'm not totally convinced that I have worked my students out of the mode of procedural display.

I plan to engage them in a conversation about it soon as we start reading our first book together. Procedural display doesn't just show up in Language Arts in conjunction with the study of books, but that is where I think I'll engage them in the conversation to begin with as what I hope will be some kind of inspiration for them to read. Several of them have already told me candidly that they have NEVER read a book assigned to them in school. NEVER. That is daunting. How will these students ever develop the critical thinking that is a necessary literacy skill in our changing world if they aren't READING?????

This brings up a conversation that F. Scott and I had the other day in the office--he'll have to give you the source, but he read recently an argument that the United States is breeding a new generation of illiteracy. People can read/decode anything, but they can't THINK. Those who can't think are doomed to be controlled and swayed by all sorts of nefarious forces in our society, never questioning anything. I'm not sure if I totally agree with this premise, but if it's true, if our school systems are only breeding these critical thinking illiterates who are highly skilled in procedural display, we are in trouble, folks.

And with that I will sign off. I've decided that I do not want to grade on the weekends anymore. I want weekends that are real weekends. The path to that is working my butt off in the week nights to get the grading done. I have 15 more personal narrative essays to get through before I go to bed--working to provide feedback that is real and genuine and not teacher procedural display. That kind of grading takes longer. So I better get to it.

M. Shelley

too much too much!

Okay F. Scott:
I was just looking through my Twitter stream and I got very overwhelmed. I follow a few educational movements (so to speak, edurati for example) and I found myself wondering how I was ever going to be able to make any sort of a contribution to any of these things. There's no time. I spent the whole day today responding to student drafts, and I didn't get them all done. Didn't make the pot of chili I planned so my family would have food for the week. Didn't pay bills (will have to do that tomorrow evening--takes me two hours usually). Didn't get the one house cleaning/organizing chore done that I had planned. Okay, I could have NOT gone to the zoo with my family on Saturday and gotten all of this done. But that doesn't work either. Family first--my husband and kiddo are more important than getting the papers read or the blog updated.

So it struck me: I want to cultivate a voice on things educational. I can't have that voice in all areas that I'd like to. So I have to pick the place and dedicate myself to it. I have to pick the outlet and make it work. Those conversations we have in the office (except for the loopy Friday afternoon ones--those are just hilarious, especially with the cast of characters that stop by the door and throw laughs at us) are significant and thought-provoking. Let's start talking regularly to an audience wider than the two of us and any hapless soul who happens to walk into our office when we're trying to solve all the problems of the world.

Is this blog the outlet? Perhaps. We have one follower. I know her. I told her about us. She's a great follower to have and will respond very insightfully when she's not totally swamped by the dissertation she's defending in a few weeks. We need to get more followers. How should we do that? I have a student who writes a sports blog and he has about 200 people who regularly read his stuff. He advertises his blog on Facebook. We might need to "out" ourselves to some people around us to get folks to start reading. Would our students care to read this stuff? Do we want to go there?

And I need to commit to a weekly blog update. I've had one rolling around in my head since last week. It's about "procedural display" and how to avoid it. Can't wait to read it, can you? :-)

Enough blabbering. I need to go to bed. See you at school.

M. Shelley

Professional Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, why exactly can't we do it?

Wishing for time...

F. Scott

Where's the time?

As a commentary on the life of a teacher in the midst of grading sophomore rewrites, helping seniors through big research papers that are due next week, proctoring state achievement tests, preparing for an all-day Saturday meeting on revising state standards, trying to work through dissertation revisions...

I have not had time yet to write in this blog.

But I'll get there.

M. Shelley

An interesting week

We had one of those weeks last week that seemed like it just wouldn't end.  A late night at school, and just being plain old busy took its toll. Yet in the midst of that, I also had a week of having some really amazing conversations with colleagues. 

Note: while this post was sitting here doing absolutely nothing as a draft, my partner beat me to the trigger by posting on the lack of time. We return you to your, now redundant, originally scheduled post.

The point is, none of the conversations were planned or scheduled, but they produced some amazing ideas about teaching. We are having these conversations continually, but it always feels so haphazard, so last minute. When I do get to translate some of these great ideas into my teaching (and I do try), I don't have the time to really reflect on how they impact my students learning. It's hurry up and get to the next class, next meeting, next whatever, with a never ending pile of papers waiting for the in-between moments. I know plenty of people have demanding jobs, that doesn't bother me. But don't we want our kids to have a bit more?

Teaching is often, though not entirely, a performative job, at least in the context in which we are working (big high school, too many students in the class). Where is the built in time to think? Shouldn't we be doing that? 

The dean of a nearby  college of education, in an article appearing in a forthcoming book, pointed out that the other two performative professions, acting and law, have ratios of preparation to performance far higher than ours. Actors will spend hundreds of hours preparing for tens of hours of performance time (the ratio increasing the more professional the troupe). Lawyers will spend thousands of hours, working in teams, so that one of them can stand fro some hours in the courtroom. In my working day I have 255 minutes of class time, and 153 minutes of non-class time. There is also 35 minutes of passing period time, which for me is talk to students run to the bathroom time. So thats about 4.5 hours of working with kids in class, and about 2.5 hours to do everything else- plan, grade, meet, conference... No built in time to work with colleagues or collaborate, which are the most productive development activities we know of. And lest ye think my day sounds short, I average about 10 hours per week outside of school (read- unpaid) continuing the planning and grading, often much much more (unlike the lawyer I get no bonus for working harder, and unlike the actor, there is no fame for getting good at my job- believe me). Many weeks its much more than that. I am not complaining (well, maybe a little), I just want the time to figure out how to do my job better. But, in an effort to do all the things we are asked to do (which my partner just listed), we never get to the good conversations about teaching and learning. Bummer.

The flip side is that I work with some really amazing people, and we all know that we have the potential to do some amazing things. If we can just get this crazy system to make some room for us to actually be teachers.

Trying to find time to think...

F. Scott