John,

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to jump on a panel at Bank Street College with a few education colleagues (including representatives from Hechinger Report and Gotham Schools) about education and the media. Save for a few questions about my blog (see: teacher voice), the general topics at the panel centered around perceptions of teachers in the media. Teachers on the panel were asked how they felt about the constant teacher-bashing by the Rush Limbaughs and Fox News pundits while education reporters and researchers discussed how difficult topics like value-added measures and teacher working conditions were to fully write for the American public.

One part of the discussion that struck me was teacher preparation. While I have a hard time recalling every bit of the conversation, I remember I mentioned three things (which you’ll probably recognize)

• We ought to have differentiated pathways into the profession, so long as …
• We find ways to ensure that teachers are adequately prepared for the system they’re encountering
• There’s a certain privilege in attending places like Bank Street in the kind of education those students receive that I didn’t necessarily get

I might have gotten under some people’s skin with the last statement, but there’s an element of truth to it. In no way am I suggesting that we only need to come from so-called elite colleges. Actually, I’m suggesting we need to discuss what we consider “elite.” There’s a functional difference between a college with an awesome name but whose students don’t see a correlation between what they learned in the ivory tower and their experience in the classroom. While most teachers surveyed here believe that their teacher preparation program was satisfactory, they tended to trust in-school dimensions of their preparation much more than anything the college can provide. That probably has to do with the fact that many colleges concentrate too much on theory instead of practice.

Thus, the place doesn’t have to be elite in name, but functionality.

I know plenty of folks who graduated from a smaller school, but whose professors gave them the rigorous, thorough foundations to at least get the technical sides of the profession right before they came in the classroom. Things like lesson plans, unit plans, rubrics, assessments, creating independent thinkers, differentiation, and questioning don’t come naturally to people and have to be taught. Some of this stuff requires tons of professional development from inside and outside sources. Walking into the classroom and surviving (!) the first year is hard enough without knowing how to create a critical question from the top of the lesson, but if we’re given the tools and techniques to withstand the culture shock of standing in front of a live audience for 10 months out of the year, then that goes a long way in creating a stronger teaching core.

In a way, educators who believe in this Teaching 2030 vision are, in fact, seeking a secret technocracy, where the merits of our most expert individuals hold more merit than the whims of an appointed few. In this case, the experts happen to be educators, educational researchers, and those who seek to enhance this valuable profession for our students. We can’t rely on the unreliable (i.e. standardized tests) to tell us whether teachers actually matter. We have lots of evidence for things that do matter, though, and one of those is whether people can push out of their comfort zones and into the mode of a professional teacher.

New teachers entering in the profession deserve the best foundation possible, and secretly, we’re going to need a few more technocrats like us.

Mr. Schue from Glee, Wondering If Your Lesson Plan's Got Soul

Hey John,

I remember a few weeks ago when you were upset that a colleague of yours didn’t have their lesson plan book. I winced because, as it turns out, I didn’t even know we had to have one of those things. I played it off because I needn’t be so honest with someone about to get his doctorate. I’ve been experimenting with different modes of lesson plans that at some point, I didn’t really write them daily, but by unit. That’s 140+ lesson plans my first year of teaching to 15 last year. I figured that, because I knew the content so well, I didn’t have to lesson plan too much. I had them all in my head, only filling in activities when I needed to before rushing in to class. I didn’t realize how much I missed lesson planning until last week, when I realized I needed to improve my pedagogy.

This got me thinking about the recent news out of the New York Times. Professors Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum have led a start-up called Narrative Science where they can compile sports briefs and financial reports as if a human wrote them … but they’re not. Instead, over a decade-long study, they’re created software that uses artificial intelligence to replicate a human writer. Kris Hammond predicted that a computer could probably win a Pulitzer Prize and he really hopes it’s his. Naturally, the article jarred me because, for all I know, the names we see in the papers writing our news now are little more than pseudonyms for robots doing this sort of thing.

We live in amazing times where we’ve handed over lots of the “mundane” work to software. Those of us inclined to use lesson planning software, for instance, find it useful to have our state and national standards at our fingertips ready for click and insertion into our headers. We might find an activity from the given curricula and quickly tap into it, and the computer might generate some “appropriate” homework. For some of our less fortunate colleagues, they may get mandated to use a scripted curriculum pre-written for them.

This method has some validity with those who don’t get the training in their ed-schools (and trust me, there’s lots), but should teachers prescribe to this method? At some point, we have to ask ourselves, are lesson plans reflective of a student’s needs and passions or are they just a reflection of a standard communicated to them? When I lesson-plan, for example, I write down pieces of my rationale for how to solve a certain problem, or certain reminders I need to write on the board (“… write down big on the board: “THIS CAN ONLY BE USED IF YOU SEE AN EQUAL SIGN!!!”).

There’s value in honing in one what we need to teach, but does it have to be standardized?

If Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum’s methods become viral, we could soon see lesson plans written with some of the same logic they used to write articles and other texts. My only question is: can computers replicate soul?

John and the rest of my CTQ compadres,

First, I’d like to thank you for all the support. It was an awesome experience, and as the only current classroom teacher to be a featured speaker, I had the honor of expressing the passions that so many of us feel every day with the corporate testing system. Also, I salute you all at the Center for Teaching Quality retreat this week. All those great minds under one roof must be churning out awesome ideas by the bundles. I’ll have to read back on the #ctqretreat on Twitter to follow up on what’s been happening. Believe it or not, I’m at another Common Core training conference, where they’re discussing implementation for pilots in New York City.

While this feels different in some respects, it still has the same view for someone who’s been doing this now for a few years. The 90 or so participants could have been working with each other on creating things and working across schools to discuss this Moses-on-Mt-Sinai document called the Common Core State Standards. I know I discuss this fairly often, but, with the recent events in Washington, DC and New York, I had to further reflect on the work happening in Carrboro, NC.

In times like these, it’s dangerous for a band of teachers from across the country to come together and set a realistic vision for what future schools should look like and laying the bricks for how to get there. Teachers have been rather vocal on the instructional “sea change” lately, and that’s awesome. Despite the limitations of policies like NCLB / RTT, the expanding gap in opportunity for our children most in-need, and the obfuscation of our ever-growing education system, teachers still manage to find ways to solve problems and find answers where there were none. Clusters of people working on everything from curriculum maps that address their students to innovating in the classroom pop up almost every week.

While some of these developments have truly floored me, we must remember one thing: we’re still contractors in the eyes of administration. I do believe that, as teachers, we should feel awesome for their work behind the scenes. Bill Zahner’s respected in his field for making Frank Gehry look like a genius, much the way that we’re going to make David Coleman and his Student Achievement Partners into heroes for education. Then, a dialogue between ClassroomSooth and Paul Gorski happened this past weekend that rattled that preconceived notion again: why should educators not have been at the forefront of developing those standards?

I’m pretty sure we could have freed up our schedules for something that critical.

For that matter, why is it the province of business leaders, government officials, and ivory tower (i.e. the ones who don’t work much with teachers) professors to tell teachers what they ought to teach in the classroom? Listening to people constantly drill into you the importance of these standards becomes a passive experience. Again, people who prefer to be considered professionals are stripped of their autonomy and initiative  in too many ways. As you all have this retreat, I’d like you to keep in mind the role that we individually and collectively play in creating this new narrative where we’re not only building the school from a blueprint set to us.

We’re the ones who have to draw up the blueprint.

I’d like a little blue ink dust in my forearms, and I’m willing to roll up my sleeves. As I know most of you are.

John,

I can’t believe we’re already on Spring Break (whatever “break” means for either of us). With only a few weeks left for New York State’s assessments in English and math, teachers all over my state have mixed feelings about this break. On the one end, it’s probably the most important break we get because we’re so spent from this “crunch time.” On the other end, we’re hoping that our students come back ready to do well on their exams and at least retain enough information so we can just “refresh” them on topics instead of re-teaching them. This is the present mentality we have in New York, all across the nation. In general, the trend towards holding everyone accountable for tests that may or may not measure our students’ actual learning is imprudent at best, yet, because of the environment we live in, we still fall back into this mode of teaching even as we hold these ideals about what testing should look like.

Your piece about iPads in the young classroom reminds me of the power in having technology available to us in the classroom, and having access to such tech is vital for this fast-paced world. It should also shake anyone who believes that they can be the center for all knowledge. It also reminds me that, because of the sheer depth, breadth, and speed of the sources by which students can accumulate [true and false] information, we too have to change the way we see assessment as a direct reflection of the teacher, and more as a reflection of the ecosystem of learning developed for the children.

That is to say, we become so enhanced in our systems thinking, we use assessments less as indications of how one specific teacher influenced their ability to pass a test and more as an indication of the skills and values that teacher actually taught a student. Does the student think more abstractly now? Does the student have more stamina and focus on problems? Do they inquire and ask good questions more? (Yes, there ARE such things as good questions.) Can the student struggle with problems and use the tools they have to solve the issue? Can they connect discussions they have in the classroom with other things they’ve learned in their own lives?

As teachers, we won’t always need to be Kobe Bryant or Dwyane Wade, the high-scoring, high-flying NBA champions. We can be Shane Battier and still contribute very effectively to any team we drop into. The stats may not show our impact immediately, but the team does better as a result with people like us on board.

Personally, I prefer to be judged on my own growth as a professional, and whether students actually believe in the things I do. At my best, I deliver consistent, effective instruction and have a system in my class in place that leads to concrete class discussion. I make them believe that they can do any math problem given the proper push. I set guidelines for expected behaviors, least of which is sit quietly and do exactly what I say. I’ll assess them weekly, but unbeknownst to them, every assessment I’m giving is all formative, and only when I’m satisfied with their progress do I consider it summative.

Few of us live in a world where our entire lives depend on one solid hour of bubble sheets and white spaces to fill in. We live in a world where we get assessed in our motions, our work ethic, our personality, and our ability to create and innovate. We need people who understand that and prepare teachers to teach the future generation for that future.

This is an assessment we simply can’t skip.

A Vision of Teacherpreneurism by Sunni Brown

Hey John,

Thanks for giving such solid perspective on the present confusion with the term “teacherpreneur.” After our retreat this weekend to the Center for Teaching Quality’s headquarters, I had plenty of discussion with the rest of our co-authors on this topic, one I didn’t want to touch up until a few months ago.

The term “teacherpreneur” was wrought out of the conversations about professionalism of the teaching profession. Frankly, the binary conversation about the current state of our unions need not be. For instance, I’m not sure why our current union can’t simultaneously create more opportunities of agency for individual teachers and still fight for the basic rights of the collective. I’m a strong proponent of an elevated teaching profession, but it has to be done in a supportive environment for creativity.

This is not one of them.

Thus, the term “teacherpreneur” gets mixed up with terms like “education entrepeneur” (see: Rhee) instead of what it’s intended to do: allow teachers to create their own opportunities while still serving in the classroom. If we continue to perceive the teachers as the hired help (Renee Moore’s a genius), then we’ll continue to get treated as such. It’s amazing that, even as the ideas in the book gain traction with futurists and unionists alike, we’re still having a discussion about whether teachers should be compensated better. We discuss Finland now as the epitome of success for their superior assessments and 100% union membership, but don’t recognize that they also compensate their teachers well above living expenses. Why, then, do we still chastise those teachers who discuss compensation in the context of advancing the profession?

Because too many people still consider teaching as nothing more than an advanced degree in babysitting. And people usually have very fond memories of getting babysat.

Now, I’m not in favor of merit pay because that term is too loaded in the current environment of test scores, and even the most convoluted formulas project a 35% margin of error over a 4-year period and an 11% margin of error over 10 years. Instead, we need to consider better evaluations and evaluators, too. We can develop better ways of assessing teachers while minimizing the biases our current supervisors may or may not have about what constitutes good teaching. We can speak up about matters other than education and still be considered educators.

We have to create the narrative now, not just a counternarrative.

Or maybe it’s a matter of the name itself. If even our most intelligent colleagues are getting confused about the intent of the message (usually without a remote understanding of the context from where it comes), then we can only expect where the general public might confuse this term. Then there’s the present possibility of these ideas getting in the wrong hands instead of the people who need to occupy this third rail. Those of us entrenched in the work know how vital our work will be for advancing the profession we both love. Teacherpreneurship isn’t for everyone, but these can be the agents of change needed to push the envelope for those who think simply adding more responsibilities on a teacher’s plate is a sustainable model for schools.

Teacher leadership is the present. Teacherpreneurism, or whatever we call it, is a part of the hopeful vision for the future.