The TeacherSolutions 2030 team

#IknowaTeacher 2012

In the past year we have started to see some movement in how teachers are perceived by the public, especially the media. It is possibly one of the most pressing issues preventing the inclusion of teacher voice in creating the education students deserve. The graphic above illustrates the discrepancy between public perceptions and private opinions of teachers in our country. Join us this week as we help change the narrative about teaching by sharing your stories of teachers who make a difference. You can contribute to the campaign on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/iknowateacher and on twitter using the hashtag #IknowaTeacher.

//

Social Media Renegades


Imagine my surprise yesterday when ABC7 News reported that Chancellor Dennis Walcott had developed a set of social media guidelines for NYC Department of Education employees to follow. For the last seven years, I’ve run amok from what others might consider decency in social media (re: I curse a lot in other platforms). At first, when I got blocked from my private blog, I thought my swearing had put me over the proverbial edge of their sensitive Internet filter. Then, as I began to clean up my act on my eponymous platform, I noticed the filter was lifted for my sight. I win! That is, until my arguments became less curse-laden and more potent.

My site has been blocked since 2010, and I’m honored.

What people don’t see about social media policies is that there are so many exceptions to the rules that they often look sloppily put together, like a CYA umbrella policy from an era where even Bill Gates thought we wouldn’t need as much memory as we do for our hard drives. Like media who only report on the sordid relationships between (a miniscule amount of) teachers and students, teachers and other teachers, and teachers with … themselves. Like principals who don’t understand social media until someone sits them down and says, “When we tweet, we don’t have to actually whistle.” Like parents who don’t actually teach their kids how to interact with other people or with the devices they buy for them.

Like teachers who are any combination of these three.

The premise for social media guidelines seems like an attempt to curtail and dissuade people from using social media to even use it in a way that’s already ethical. People, thus, will likely fall into two camps: the “I’m not going to worry about what they’re talking about over there” or “Social media’s too dark a lane for me to even get to know so I won’t touch it.” The second crowd worries me the most because teachers have a great opportunity to place themselves firmly in the future of their own profession, guiding students in learning how to use the world’s information for more than connecting to friends.

Instead, the entire scene just reeks of regression. That’s why the future of education will take a brand of forward-thinking educator (teachers / principals etc.) with enough deft and savvy to advocate for technology use in the classroom and enough courage (for lack of a more appropriate word) to wrinkle the social media guidelines and them into the recycle bin.

Digitally and physically.

Creating Room for Humanity in Ed Policy

I’ve been in a very meta-aware state since I went back to teaching after being an administrator. The experience of supporting and supervising teachers and then being a teacher again has caused me to re-examine my language as I try to increase quality with the child care givers I supervise now. One shift that has occurred for me is that as I work through minor and major issues of quality I assume good intentions even more than I used to when I was administering full time. I recently had several conversations where I found the need to question a teacher about their practice. In asking the question, “Tell me about why you made that decision?” I am asking a teacher, who had not followed stated policy, to give me a good reason for why she didn’t follow protocol. I learned something from approaching the problem this way. The teacher thought she was doing the best thing for the student. Her answer alluded to individualizing to meet student needs. I reframed the information she gave into the context of what would be a best practice. After honoring her reasoning I found myself offering an opposing view that also would be considered a best practice for the student but respected the stated policy. In approaching the issue this way I found myself helping this teacher find a common ground where she might be open to hearing the official policy and procedure that she had not followed and possibly gaining a deeper understanding for the reasoning behind the policy.

I believe this new way I’ve found of administrating may be closer to the transformed learning ecology we describe in Teaching 2030. It sits better with me than what I found myself doing when I was out of the classroom. From my perspective as an administrator who was delivering, enforcing, and revising policy, as opposed to creating student learning, my patience for teachers who chose to “do their own thing” became thin. Our child development team has prescribed our policies based on Head Start performance standards, best practices, and common sense, with an eye on increasing the quality of services delivered to our students. Darn it, those procedures should be followed, except… And there it is, why policy breaks down, there is always an exception to the rule. Just like there is always an exception to a generalization about any endeavor involving humans. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that when in doubt, follow the policy is good advice, especially for novice teachers but, there must be room for individualization, even for teachers.

Our charge, in creating a better future, seems to be to create room for humanity within the policies we craft for states, school systems, and classrooms. More importantly, I think we know how to do this, involve teachers, parents, and students in the process of developing these policies and ask questions like, will this help teachers meet students’ needs.

Image: http://www.bizarresigns.com/funny-signs-2/do-not-remove/

Teaching Lives with You

I know we have said many many times, that teaching is not about the test on this blog. Here is one more example.

I had a student named Leandra (pseudonym) about 8 or 9 years ago. She was a handful and her mother was too. The child was loud, bossy, she often solved her problems physically, and she had a wicked sense of humor. Her mother, Belinda, was the same way but more so. Her mother, at the ripe old age of 22 had a cutting wit, a lovely smile, and a laugh that filled a room. She also had her problems. She had a quick temper and at 6′ 4″ with shoulders wider than my own she learned to plow her way through life at an early age. We had a lot of conversations about life and raising children. Three years later I taught her son, Leander. Both children were named after their father, Lee. He was a troubled sort but he loved her with a passion. He stood about 4′ 10″, he had trouble understanding some things, and he made a rough life. She balanced him with her intellect and he loved her with all his heart and to the best of his ability. I could see how he loved her in how she talked about him. But, this is not a fairy tale.

By the time Belinda brought Leander to me there had been rumors of anger driven abuse that floated through our school about Leandra. I knew Belinda pretty well by then. We had kept up our relationship after Leandra moved on to upper grades.

At my first meeting with Belinda I told her point blank, “You know I love your kids, and I want the best for you and them but, if Leander comes in here with a mark, I will have to call CPS (child protective services).”

“I know Mr. Holland.”, Belinda said. She smiled that smile when she said it, like she was trying to make me laugh.

“I mean it. You know that right?” I said.

“I know, I know,” she said.

That was how we started the school year. Saying what I said was the type of risk I have grown accustomed to taking while working in the inner city. I knew that if I had to call she would know it was me but it was more important that I was honest with her and that she trusted me than that I hide behind anonymity. I could see she respected me for being honest with her. She was really involved with our class in September. I had known her son since he was 1 year old because she used to bring him into our class to pick up Leandra. He had spent a year in our school in a three-year-old classroom across the hall. He was coming to me as a four-year-old, and I was totally pumped to teach him. He was excited too. Mom volunteered in class, came for her parent conference and then it was time for our first field trip to the pumpkin patch at the end of October. Belinda came with Leander and the had so much fun. They seemed really happy.

That weekend a neighbor called CPS because Belinda had lost her temper. Leander didn’t come back to school the next week. Eventually, on Thursday, Belinda told me that Leander and Leandra had been taken to live in a foster home for a while. He never came back to my class. I eventually found out that Leander was at another school with a Head Start classroom. I went over to visit one time but the foster parent had not been bringing him to school.

Belinda told me she had to do community service and attend parenting classes in order to regain custody of her kids. She did. I heard through the grape vine that she had started attending church where she took the classes. She came in and saw me in my class and we talked several times through out that year. She told me she had been abused herself. She said, “You know, its what I know. My dad did it to me so I did it to them. But I’m not gonna do it no more.” Eventually Belinda did get her kids back.

About 2 years ago Belinda came to see me at my office. She told me she had kept her kids, and that she was doing well. She had two more children with her husband, Lee. She seemed pretty happy. I encouraged her to consider going back to school and maybe attend community college. It meant a lot to me that she came to see me. I hope it meant I made a difference in her life and the lives of her children.

Tuesday I got a text from a friend that Belinda had died suddenly over Spring break. She was 30 years-old. That cold fact lodged itself in my heart was not been fully processed. I didn’t realize how much it affected me until Wednesday when I told my family about her. I had had two crappy days of teaching in a row and that isn’t how I roll. I may take a dip in effectiveness but never a nose dive.

Teaching is not the type of profession where you can just clock out at the end of the day. It lives with you. Rest in peace Belinda.

Image: http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2010/07/mnar1-1007.html

If The Test Wasn’t Coming … (Part 2)

Even the most professional of us have to worry. In the midst of delicious dinners and good conversation, our day jobs can often worry us to the point where we fidget 72 hours before we even get to see our kids again. Instead of trying to keep some modicum of peace before the storm, we worry about what we have to get done before the big state test happens. The stakes get escalated with our value-added pseudo-numbers posted for the world to see, and reporters purporting that they had to post them because the reports were in their position (they didn’t).

Thus, Ariel Sacks wonders aloud in the midst of our conversation what we would do if the test wasn’t coming. In short, a freakin’ lot.

If the state test wasn’t coming …

I’d teach my students a whole lot slower, helping them upgrade their problem-solving and numerical skills so they could actually be ready for high school.

I would have taken 14 days on transformation instead of the five (rushed) days I spent because I knew I only had seven actual teaching days left. With the way the exams and vacation land this year, we might get a small window to remind them how to solve percents, equations, and angle relationships.

I would spend more time on trips and computer games and less time on counting down until that dreadful day.

I would stop telling most of my colleagues it’s going to be alright, and so long as we try our best, there us little we can do. Except that, due to NCLB / RTT mandates, I do worry whether we’ll be alright and I’m always too hard on myself so I do worry if we tried our absolute best.

I would breathe. Hard.

I would let some thoughts marinate a little more in the minds of my students. Like these.

Taking the #CommonCore to Twitter

Each month our #teaching2030 Twitter chat draws an amazing group of thoughtful minds. This month’s chat on the Common Core standards was no exception.  We posed several questions to these teacher leaders about the implementation of the standards.

Thoughts About Implementation

@dlaufenberg shared three excellent points:

  • I think it is key that we look at standards as opportunities for developing engaging activities rather than opportunities for everyone to step in line.
  • Teachers and administrators need to look to the set of skills students should develop instead of just content.
  • A key is for teachers to feel as though they are part of the process of improvement, instead of being judged.

@Teaching_Keigan concurred with the role teachers must play in implementation:

  • Teachers need time and space to create.  We need to take the first bite.

Thoughts on Formative Assessment

@jaxbeachteach expressed hopes that the Common Core standards will impact assessment strategies in a profound way:

  • I think performance nature of the CCSS will increase formative assessment, more time looking at student work.

@MrBernia enthusiastically agreed:

  • We need STRONG local formative assessments that can show stakeholders data on student progress.

A New Twist to the Chat

@TRackowitz welcomed a student, @jacksonbarnett (my 16-year-old son) to our chat:

  • Speaking of getting into classrooms and participating with the students!

@jacksonbarnett tried to keep up but admitted that this month’s topic was a bit challenging for a high school sophomore.  He promised to prepare himself before the next chat by reading the Education Week Teaching Ahead blog, which provides the framework for our monthly #teaching2030 chats.

Encouraging student voices is exactly what we should be doing.  Students truly are the source of inspiration for us and can help to provide sharp focus on our work. Hopefully we can entice more students to join our #teaching2030 chat next month, April 19 at 8:30-9:30 p.m. ET.

Bilingualism and the Missing Global Connection

Language-wise, some might consider my son really lucky. He has two parents who believe in adopting both English and Spanish as languages that he needs to get by. We tend to use Spanish and English interchangeably, depending on our level of exhaustion and exposure to friends and relatives. He gets English when we wish him a good morning, and Spanish when we have to change him or get him to sleep. We don’t differentiate much in our tone when we use both languages, and he seems to understand compliments paid to him readily in both as well. His mother and father both have Latino descent, and have strong connections to their Spanish-dominant mothers.

In no way do we consciously consider the ramifications of raising a child with two languages in terms of his intelligence or market value as an employee. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee of The New York Times, however, still thinks we’re on the right track. Peep the excerpt:

They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual’s brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn’t so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles.

While we should always have a skeptical eye towards new research, here’s hoping this movement towards bilingual education doesn’t die the way the movement towards the metric system. (As a math teacher, I’m still annoyed at having to use inches instead of centimeters.) At this point in education, we’ve only had a passing fancy with other languages. Spanish, French, German, and Italian seem to dominate the foreign language category, but how many people actually learn these languages in their 45-minute classes? For instance, I have friends who took Spanish language classes in high school who can tell me what “frio” and “hola” mean, but can’t ask me what my name is in Spanish without sounding like they’re talking about llamas. (“Como se llama?” is the operative phrase here.)

I wonder if we can push for some sort of foreign language immersion for all of our students.

We can talk about the competitive advantages of having a diversified set of languages that our culture speaks. Our country still takes in millions of visitors a year, each with different languages and dialects we can’t grasp. Globally, our country stands at the low end of the spectrum with just English. Robust and popular as English is, we have yet to tap into the richness of actual literacy because of English’s limitations. Its heavy reliance on idioms and metaphor often conflates communication with others.

More importantly, because these individuals adopt another language, they instinctively connect with others more readily and might make them more empathetic as a result. We could use a little more empathy in schools. Alejandro will have over 60 countries accessible to him in language alone. Imagine how many people he can chat with, relate to, and build whole communities with, and yes, understand.

What it takes to BE as a Teacher

Kazuaki Tanahashi has exhibited his Zen calligraphy world-wide. His striking yet subtle calligraphic creations are grounded in his experience of Zen teaching. He writes, "To me the essence of the brush creative process is mindfulness...the brush helps you to cultivate a meditative state of mind.'

It has been a whirl wind since I stepped back into the classroom. I thought it had been 3 weeks since I started teaching again when I looked at the calendar today and realized it had been 6. Let me first just say that teaching is an incredibly intense career. People who enter teaching are not doing it because it is easy. Being an administrator was much easier than being a teacher. Now that I am both, I barely have time shuffle papers much less care about who is turning in their lesson plans on time (I am). I have been struggling to get up to speed. I spent about 20 hours this weekend getting paper work and filing done that had not been done in a long time. In the meantime, there is one thing that I have noticed about teaching.What it takes to BE as a teacher.

  • I have to be right in my head before I get to school. I do this through getting up a little earlier than I really need to, deciding on a song to listen to on the way to work, and having a decent lesson plan.
  • I have to be prepared to be inspired by my students. Today we taped lincoln logs to the feet of 6 inch tall posable community helper dolls to make stilt walkers like we saw at the circus. Tomorrow we will hopefully write a story about them.
  • I have to be present in the moment. I am always less likely to get frustrated with a lack of student attention if I am fully present. The flip side of this is…
  • Engaging students is challenging but ultimately my responsibility. If I do need to use a consequence in class I need to be matter of fact about it which requires me to …. be present in the moment ;)

When I was acting as only an administrator I can’t think of a time when I needed to get my head totally right before I sat at my desk. I can’t think of a time when I needed to be inspired by the teachers I was supervising. Even if I was, which I was, what would I do with that inspiration. I never really had to be present in the moment at all unless I was working through an emotionally charged issue with a teacher. The challenge in BEing a teacher is to be reflective, knowledgeable, insightful, even keeled, engaging, and creative all at the same.

I think this is the disconnect between those who judge teaching and those who teach. Unless you have ever had to BE a teacher in the most Zen way you can’t really know the expertise that teachers have. It is not the type of expertise where I know more than you do about something. It is the expertise of being something moment by moment.

PS Thanks @TheJLV

Image: http://www.wesleyan.edu/mansfield/exhibitions/exhibition-items/past/kazb...

Miracle of Moment by Kazuaki Tanahashi

The Idea of Falling Back on Teaching

I’d like to specifically address my friend John Holland, who, as many of you found out, went back to teaching. When I first learned of the event, I almost pulled a Rod Tidwell over the phone, I was so excited for him. I knew how passionate he was about teaching to begin with, but sometimes when one grows within their profession, they’re pulled outside of the classroom, ever distancing themselves from the kids they love teaching.

John Holland put his foot into the throat of that idea hard.

What people ordinarily said about teaching (unless they’re truly passionate) is that, if their original profession didn’t work out for them, they’d go into teaching. When prompted further, they may say that, although they’d like to give back to their communities and work with the potential leaders of the future, they have a hard time sustaining the modest salary while fulfilling that passion. It seems that, as the economy has taken a downturn, many people look at teaching as a secure job that provides them with some consistency at least until they figure out what to do with their lives.

A part of me wonders how many in this set of teachers actually end up staying in the job and loving it, and how many of them would actually stay in the profession if they saw it as a profession we ought to highly regard rather than an in-between.

The idea of falling back on teaching, then, is problematic for me because the quality and quantity of teaching (and learning) shouldn’t change depending on unruly external factors. People shouldn’t back their way into this, but run forward and into it with the idea that they’re valued for their expertise and social worth.

John Holland’s move back into the classroom demonstrates this almost to a tee. One might wonder why someone who has so many accomplishments and got the title of “child development specialist” would go back to a simpler title of “teacher.” People who acquire the former title often get even fancier titles, promotions, and salaries. With that comes the knowledge that they become virtually non-existent to any students in their districts. They might have set out to “help kids,” but they never interact with them. Thus, “help kids” often means staring at an Excel spreadsheet all day for only a small differential in salary.

As a math coach, I completely understand; the prospect of losing touch keeps me grounded, too. So when John told me the news, it gave me hope. Maybe I’m not crazy for thinking that John and I would rather interact with students and work on policy. We would rather teach kids lessons and work on district-wide initiatives. We would rather have the fancy title and the more meaningful title of teacher.

Why not both?

Chatting About #edtech from the Middle of the Pacific

I work—and sometimes it feels like I live—in cyberspace. So, this month’s #teaching2030 Twitter chat on integrating technology was my kind of chat. First, the amazing technology that we chat about allowed me to facilitate this chat from Maui. I teach online and have connected with my kids from Maui each winter, New Mexico and even Bahrain. The technology we chat about actually gives me more contact with my students than the hour a day I used to have in my face-to-face class.

In fact, anyone within a cell tower range can facilitate a chat, teach a course, help a student through a difficult concept, instruct a group, or complete any number of tasks that we generally think are only possible in person (or at the very least, at a school or an office). I chatted from an iPad, but I suspect there were participants using devices as small as a cell phone. I can control the time and it give my teaching just in time power I have not had before. No more learning bell to bell. We now learn whenever or wherever we need.

The group who joined us for the chat could be a group right out of the book that inspired these chats, TEACHING 2030. They are tech savvy and understand the impact that emerging technologies are having on how, when, and where they teach and learn.

As we wrote in the book, the best public education solution in the future will combine virtual and face-to-face learning. In that light, we asked several questions about teaching with technology. Many chat participants highlighted the value of technology in their teaching, and I couldn’t agree more:

@MrBernia:There is far more information, and the ability to personalize and learn about what interests you.

@dlaufenberg: technology allows for publishing of content to a broad audience, giving a more authentic exhibition of work

@shighley: I’d like to think that students can be empowered by tech in many of the same ways I’ve been empowered as a teacher

So, with these thoughts and conversations in my mind, I will head to the beach with my iPhone handy in case the twittersphere lights up. This is an amazing time for technology to free up teachers to work any place any time with colleagues or students. Learning how to leverage technology to make learning more powerful and teaching in and out of cyberspace seamlessly is going to be key. With that, we are well on our way.

« first‹ previous…34567891011…next ›last »
Syndicate content