and another view of the landscape...

This one courtesy of Carol Jago in her 2010 NCTE Presidential address: "To Cherish the Interests of Literature" from February's Research in the Teaching of English. Jago says:

"Speaking in a commencement address to graduates of the Stanford School of Education, Elliot Eisner (2006) argued that, 'Imagination is the neglected stepchild of American education. Questions invite you in. They stimulate the production of possibilities. They give you a ride. And the best ones are those that tickle the intellect and resist resolution.' It is a remarkable message to send to future teachers and school administrators who will be working in a country in thrall to testing. Eisner urges us to nurture questions not answers, most particularly questions without easy answers. Many teachers find it difficult to make time for such questions and imaginary play in a school day increasingly devoted to the mastery of basic skills. I worry that the focus on serious certainties may in the long run only contribute to our nation's continuing hard times. Consider the instructional approach of schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens's Hard Times:

'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'

Well, you all know how things turned out in Coketown. Reading literature offers ballast to a Gradgrinding, facts-based education. Stories [...] feed the imaginations of young readers and resist narrative resolution. Such literature is compelling because of, not in spite of, its ambiguities."

Thank you, Carol Jago, for this succinct validation of why I teach the way that I do--mired in questions that have no answers, throwing complexity at my students and asking them to wade through it and find their own thread of meaning that they can then communicate clearly to the world, fighting to convince them that reading literature is the only way to prepare them for dealing with the complexity that their lives will present. They must learn to read their lives to write their future.

And how, please tell me, will standardized tests teach them how to do that?
(still dreading the hours I'll spend over the next few days watching a group of 25 sophomores take the state test...)

--M. Shelley

Our landscape

I've finally started reading a book I've had on the shelf for a few months now: Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, a recent edited volume by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Reif. They invited the leading teachers of and thinkers about adolescent literacy to write about what that means now in the 21st century.

In the introduction, Beers shares the letter that the three editors wrote to invite contributors to participate. In this, I see one of the best articulations of the current landscape in education: "globalization means our middle and high school students will increasingly find themselves living in a world persuasively described in Friedman's bestselling book, The World is Flat. It means recognizing that literacy demands are shifting and becoming more complex. It means understanding that automation--a part of our technological world--will change the landscape of the job market (the grocery cashier in the next decade will be the exception and not the rule). As automation expands, different jobs emerge--jobs that require creating, synthesizing, and evaluating. They will be held by those with ingenuity, imagination, and empathy, those who are willing to take risks and work cooperatively. We should be preparing students for such a world, yet the politicization of education has resulted in a different agenda where a prescribed assembly-line curriculum seemingly asks only that students pass a test. The current focus on high-stakes tests produces students who can answer multiple-choice items but have lost the interest and agility to ask probing questions, to conceptualize our new world" (xii).

Yes. This is the challenge before us. And this is where I'm trying to take my students. But as we head here into two weeks mired in our mandated state testing, I wonder how well the current policy wave will get us there.

M. Shelley

Wisconsin...

Just sharing some reading on the situation in Wisconsin and what it says about the state of the career of teaching in our country today.

Diane Ravitch wrote an opinion piece for CNN this week entitled Why America's Teachers are Enraged.

She wrote a follow up to that piece today, responding to the feedback that she got from readers--most of which she said came from teachers saying thank you for what she wrote, but about 1 in 10 responding in anger about teachers. Read it.

I feel somewhat immobilized by all of this. The tide seems so strong toward scapegoating teachers for problems with our schools that we have no control over. What can I do? How can I effect change in the public perception of teachers? And not because I want the world to be nicer toward me--but because empowering and respecting teachers is the best thing for our students. We are professionals and we need space and support to do our job as well as we know we can.

Maybe this: the Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action.

M. Shelley

The runaway train of educational policy...

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.

M. Shelley

Where did the semester go?

Greetings blogosphere.

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...

--M. Shelley

I'd be laughing harder but...

I'm too busy crying at the same time. Many folks have posted this- I'd like to credit them all. But I'm just gonna' post tha thing.
It has been a very looooooong week.
F. Scott

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.