Transformed Learning Ecology

From The Ground Up: Teacher Evaluation As A Cyclical Process

Hey John,

As the year comes to a close, there’s a collection of very bold and progressive teachers voicing their opinions on the hot item of the moment: teacher evaluation. Some of my favorites include Renee Moore’s The Future Is Now for Teacher Evaluation and Michael Moran’s Context Matters. In each of these essays, there’s accurate and nuanced reflection about the profession and, more importantly, there’s a sense that we can’t rely on a random, outside observer handing out standardized tests as a measure of what the kids actually know and / or what the teacher actually taught.

From Renee:

How can we evaluate such rich complexity with all the varying levels of performance and experience they represent across the largest profession in America—with a few five-minute walk-bys and a checklist? Hardly. The old factory evaluation model, which was never a good fit for education, will be even less so as we move further into the potential of immersed learning and interconnected teaching. One principal trying to evaluate an entire faculty whose members practice a dizzying variety of pedagogical skills will be painfully ineffective. Like our students, teachers need assessment of our work based on a combination of measures and reviewers, with teachers taking responsibility for our own professional growth based on mutually established, student-centered goals.

To get there from here will require transformed thinking and some significant power shifts, neither of which, history reminds us, come easily. But I believe we are on the verge of such a shift as teaching finally morphs into a true profession. One of the trademarks of a profession is peer review of each others’ work against high standards established by the profession.

From Michael:

So, what should teacher evaluations look like? They should look like the teacher. They should look like the students and the classroom in which those students learn. Teacher evaluations should look like the grade level, content area, and community the teacher teaches. They should look like the goals that teachers, students, and administrators set for themselves, their classes, and the school as a whole.

The point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of the evidence that indicates teacher effectiveness is dependent on context. Sure, great teachers are great leaders, and great leaders can lead anywhere, but you run into a problem when an art teacher is evaluated on the standardized test results of one grade level in mathematics. Evaluations need to be multifaceted, taking into consideration not only student performance on standardized tests, but the academic growth of students as demonstrated by a portfolio of artifacts, the relationships that teachers build with students and their parents as demonstrated by student and family evaluative surveys, and observations from not only administrators, but peers and master teachers.

Powerful pieces there. Read the rest (and more opinions) here.

We are in a profession that needs voices on the school level discussing teaching. With so much misinformation getting out about the teaching profession, it’s not enough for teachers to stand by and let evaluation happen to that. We ought to shape policy and create our own solutions.

Measuring Student Learning in 140 Characters or Less

Hey John and Jose,

On November 17, CTQ ventured into its second #teaching2030 Twitter chat. The topic for this chat was measuring student learning, and more than 50 people weighed in. Some were familiar names from CTQ’s Teacher Leaders Network (TLN), but others were new to these conversations and to CTQ. A few people who follow me on Twitter joined in. This chat seemed like the start of a much deeper conversation, as we only had a chance to scratch the surface of the topic. Still, the participants shared some amazing insight (You can view the chat transcript here.)

We began this Twitter adventure to give people a place to discuss and add to the ideas presented in the book TEACHING 2030. I have been on Twitter for a bit more than a year and have participated in chats in this format. But this was only the second one I have facilitated. It can be daunting to express yourself in 140 characters, and even more difficult with a complex topic like assessment. That didn’t limit the free flow of ideas, and the format seemed to pull the essential questions to the surface much faster than a webinar or any other longer discussion could.

Participants raised some powerful issues, such as parents’ involvement in assessment, that provoked deep thinking. Commented one participant: “Parents often only see the final grade. We should teach them to focus on progress/what the child has learned.” The opportunity has never been more present to help parents focus on narratives of student learning.

Several in the group offered suggestions, ranging from making the language we use in assessments more parent-friendly to moving toward more descriptive grades. Teacher Dave Orphal tweeted: “If you see your kid act in the play, you don’t need to see their grade in drama class.” Another teacher shared a positive assessment experience: “We had kids demonstrate proficiencies and showed results to parents. And when we had ‘exhibitions,’ parents were invited.” A Tweeter chimed in with a parent’s point of view: “Pre & post tests are excellent assessments! My son and I just had this discussion.”

The take-home message of all this is that we need a good road map of where we are and where we are going with our students. This is nothing new. What is different is that we are asking the important questions in a medium that allows for real-time conversations among a diverse population. Twitter has been described as a great force for democracy. To pose a question and have a large group of educators, policy folks, and parents probe, think, and answer is both democratic and powerful.

Though we didn’t have time to answer many of the questions posed that night, we have started a conversation that will. Twitter is an amazing format for elevating teacher voices and spreading great ideas and, yes, answering tough questions. The value of the medium is in the diversity and number of the participants. Your voice, your ideas, and your questions are all important. I came away with a dozen new strategies to improve student assessment in my classes. It amazes me that this all happened within the limits of one hour and 140-character tweets. I hope you can join our next #teaching2030 Twitter chat—on teacher evaluation—December 15 at 8:30 p.m. ET.

Do Your Lesson Plans Got Soul?

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?

Teacher Voices, Like Yours and Mine

John,

Thanks for the high praises. Always appreciated. The event you mentioned is sponsored largely by voices like yours and mine. Here’s something I continually push for in our position as people writing for the future: we need to invest heavily in the teacher voice. My godmother-I-wish-I-actually-had Renee Moore wrote an excellent piece about her emergence as the awesome teacher she is, and the spiritual journey that accompanied that emergence. It shook my heart reading it because it reminded me how important our work to elevate teacher voice is.

As I told you in my last post, I had the privilege of seeing the creators and assessors of the Common Core State [and possibly National] Standards this past week at Orlando’s GE Futures of Education Conference. As I sat there watching presenter after intelligent presenter, it occurred to me that during this process, I had seen only one K-12 educator speak about their experiences in the classroom.  Some districts allowed teachers to offer their opinions, but in too many others, their efforts were ignored or shunned by the very people who should work on teachers’ behalf. While I do believe strongly in building coalitions with non-educators of like interest, I also see how detrimental such a relationship is when the other comes to the table without a decent amount of respect and / or knowledge about the efforts of the teachers on the front lines.

For that reason, our work won’t stop after this weekend. We must continue to insist on being equal partners in the lives of our children. While critics ask why teachers don’t get the same treatment in terms of job security, they often ignore how devalued a teaching professional’s voice gets in the midst of our ostensible leaders. Where I often critique my own union leaders is in here as well. While we pay union dues to assure that we have some advocacy for our rights, I also see where they could teach their own members how to advocate effectively for their classrooms and their schools.

For instance, we need to lend our voices around the instructional pieces of these discussions. We must discuss working conditions, testing, and rights as professionals, but we have enough people that we don’t have to lose our linchpin. We have to continue pushing the idea that, as trained professionals, we will put forth our greatest efforts and continue working towards becoming the best professionals for the 12-20-30-40 students in front of us daily. Even during the creation of Teaching 2030, many of us struck different notes about this realistic future we sought to build together.

But only one thing mattered: our voices collaborated in harmony.

The American public in general trusts their local teachers, and teachers are often ranked amongst the most trusted public servants in this country. We have an audience willing to listen. And they don’t even have to raise their hands for us to call on them. We just have to say things like we mean them.

When Public Actually Means Transparent

John,

Thanks so much for re-igniting this conversation around public schools. Right now, I’m typing to you from sunny Orlando, FL, the site for the General Electric Developing Futures Conference. It’s a week-long conference, and this year’s theme surrounds the ramping up towards the Common Core Standards. Each of the districts represented here has a heavy stake in the success of the CCSS and the transition to this new set of standards may usher new types of summative, high-stakes assessments for all these schools. Speakers like David Coleman (from my state) and Katie Haycock of Education Trust have already spent a great deal speaking on the lay of the land in terms of what policymakers see as an effective framework for how school districts should run.

While this conversation floats around, there is still a tangible fear of what’s to come. In the interest of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, I’ll say that the math Common Core State Standards have serious potential to refocus us on core concepts that really matter. Teachers will inevitably have to fill in the gaps in terms of approach and implications for students’ real-life applications. Yet, standards only go as far as the policies and assessments let them. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the tangible end of No Child Left Behind, surely a policy that could signal the closure of hundreds of public schools if we allow that to happen.

2014 ends NCLB and ushers in CCSS, a symmetry I’m not comfortable with.

Will this mean that, by the end of NCLB, the schools that open up will become charter schools by default? All signs point to yes. If so, then the general public will not only have a right but also a necessity for transparency for both of these two movements, irrespective of whether business leaders privately fund these efforts or not. If we’re getting into this new movement of questioning, then the general public will not only need to know what it means for how teachers will teach concepts. We will have to create environments where doors are more open, scary as that sounds. I’m interested in making schools public institutions, and the farther we lean from that movement, the more we will perpetuate some of the problems that plague our schools now.

This also means that we’re going to have to re-discuss what an education means, a discussion we ought to have sooner than later. Personally, I believe that we should have schools that teach students to a level that they will succeed no matter where they end up, not simply for a career, but for life skills. I’d like to help students reach their highest human potential. But that can only happen after we’ve built the bridge from the rigid data-driven expectations of Thorndike acolytes to those of us who want the second coming of John Dewey. This is the best time possible.

I urge you and everyone to consider more transparency in the way we teach children, not just in how we operate as an organization, but also as change agents for the millions in front of us daily.

A Glimpse Into Shared Responsibility for Assessment

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.

Online Courses Still Need Aligned Teachers

Glossy Robot with Magnifying Glass

John,

In the interest of going to something less controversial than teacherpreneurism, I was hoping to address the rise in online classes for students in K-12 systems. Everyone agrees with the approach of online classes and thus, I should probably stop blogging here.

Except that it’s not so simple. For some reason, people still believe that, once we put computers in front of students, we can remove teachers from the equation and thus never have a question about teachers ever. We undermine questions of teacher capacity by eliminating teachers and all our national edu-problems are solved. All the great online teachers I’ve met, most of whom I’ve met through our book writing, can still do a great live lesson in front of any given audience.

I believe in differentiated pathways for learning, and in many ways, we need to dissolve our ideas of time spent in the classroom or grade levels instead of advanced life skills our students need. In a New York Times piece written recently, the writer discusses how a student dropped a question into Google, got an answer from Wikipedia, mimicked the language of the article, and e-mailed it to her teacher. Will the Googled learner learn how to ask the right questions or simply repeat what others have said with no context? Will the Googled learner develop their own methods for self-investigation or rely on the vast amounts of misinformation on the web as their determinant?

That’s where the teacher comes in.

Transformative pedagogy is so critical to the 21st century that we can no longer accept that we the teachers are the epicenter of all things educational. However, the one thing we can accept responsibility for is teaching students how to learn. The rigors of our most growing fields demand that we push students to learn those skills even when we have no idea what’s on the horizon. For content teachers and generalists, it means very similar things in that, no matter what the content is, there’s a certain set of skills that every student must use irrespective of whether they’re doing it on an iPad, a computer, or with a pencil. Teachers don’t have to be gatekeepers anymore, just mentors and experienced guardians.

Just today, I had the privilege of listening to Linda Darling-Hammond speak to a few of us involved with the Common Core performance tasks here in NYC, and she told us a quick story about her teaching days here. As she was teaching 12th grade English, she realized that some of her students in the back of the classroom couldn’t read. She discarded teaching the Dewey Decimal system unit in favor of teaching kids how to read, and was chastised for doing so. Now that the Dewey Decimal system is irrelevant, we still see the value of reading. While we’re reframing pedagogy for what’s necessary in the 21st century, we’re also making sure we delve deeper into the more critical skills from the past and present that our students need now and in the future.

As Barnett Barry would say to us, online learning and in-person learning is a false dichotomy. Learning can happen anywhere. It often depends on who the teacher is, and if they’re the closed-source programmer who only lets students perform certain functions, or the open-source programmer who helps others build upon their own code so they can develop their own operating systems.

Popping The Old Accountability Bubble For The Common Good

John,

You bring up really good points about attribution error in your latest. Realistically, anytime you have a system of accountability, you have to wonder who benefits from that system of accountability. Without more involved parties in the decisions, you end up with a plethora of one-way mandates and little discussion. It brings me of this new byproduct of President Obama’s Race To The Top: The Common Core Standards. I’m not sure where we’re running in this race, but I’m somewhat intrigued by these new learning standards. It certainly has its flaws; critics have called many of the standards vague, and people who haven’t read it immediately dismissed it as prescriptive. One of my blogger friends, JD, said that we should disregard the CCSS (Common Core State Standards) because of the current myopia with accountability and test scores. I agree to a certain extent: if people think that a test at the end of the school year can accurately determine the breadth and depth of knowledge my students know about any standards, that’s dangerous for the execution of any mandate, no matter how well-written.

Yet, I look at our state’s current batch of standards and see a huge opportunity for all involved to transform the idea of accountability that benefits all involved. For one, after several reviews of the document, I prefer this for a couple of reasons:

  • It’s better designed / suited for classroom teaching.
  • There are less standards to cover.
  • Simultaneously, we’re asked to cover the few topics we have in more depth.

Bonus points for the multicultural contributions of the reading lists in the literacy standards. As a math teacher, I’m ecstatic that I’m only covering about 2/3rds of the material currently covered. As someone who’s tired of following pacing calendars to a tee when I know my students still struggle with topics from 2 grade levels earlier, I clamor for and appreciate getting more time to expound on topics important for success in future levels of math. I love showing multiple approaches to topics so I can develop deeper understanding for the students who don’t get it the minute I put the topic on the board.

Yet, under this climate of skewed accountability, we risk losing that richness of understanding by determining that the assessments for these standards will function in the same capacity as the ones given by the test, as one-dimensional gauges for student and teacher performance.  Anyone with a basic knowledge of schools knows the three pillars for teaching: standards, pedagogy, and assessment. The standards and the assessment are book-ends to the complex experiment of teaching. Yes, external factors matter (poverty comes to mind immediately). Yes, people outside of the parent-teacher-student paradigm matter.

But everyone involved has a stake in mitigating the factors that prove destructive for our young children, and much of that is systemic. Here are three quick cultural things we can fix that policymakers should know before we arrive at the 2014 mark for Common Core accountability:

  1. Give us time, and lots of it. When education policy leaders first announced the Common Core Standards, the messages traveled at light speed through district leaders and superintendents that principals, teachers, and coaches needed to integrate the standards into the curriculum well before even the individual states had ratified the document and revised it under their auspices. It’s a helpful exercise for some of us ed-geeks, but the average teacher gave a collective shrug because it came in the middle of the school year … while we’re still under the old standards. Under this, we should also include granting us liberty from current accountability systems in this transition period.
  2. Let us figure it out first internally. Time and again, the most powerful experiences for teachers don’t come from higher-ups telling us what to do: it comes from people within our PLN demonstrating for us the processes behind the standards. Let us ask ourselves “What’s the difference between our old standards and our new ones?” or “How does any of this transform my teaching? What’s my focus now?” These questions come better from the people we know still breathe the air of the collective student body, not people who occasionally drop by. Speaking of which …
  3. Walkthroughs should be put on hold until 2013, and be given new rules to boot. The #1 weapon outsiders use to criticize a school is the walkthrough. After a few minutes in a building, they believe they have a pulse of the entire school systemically. Maybe some people do, but the majority of us don’t. Thus, it’s important for people who decide to walk through to make careful observations, and ask careful questions without judging them subjectively.

Regulation is important to any institutions’ vitality, but if we regulate the wrong facets of the institution, we create chaos within it. Let’s make the Common Core standards mean a new face for how we view teaching. Flaws and all, the standards represent a means for us to grade against the standard and not based on arbitrary political whims.

In many ways, John, the Common Core Standards represent a shift in national education discussion. If we carry the same biases we had before, we might as well show the groundhog his long, overarching shadow, cast over another long season of excessive focus on bubble sheets.

Sidewalks For Kids

Go home blissed out with the kindness high!

In the book, Teaching 2030, we discuss the new learning ecology in schools of the future. This learning ecology includes distal influences such as policy and funding and proximal forces such as community infrastructure and blending the purposes of schools and community services. Most importantly teaching in 2030 will acknowledge and influence the quality of students’ experiences as they are affected by these factors. A friend of mine, Kindness Girl, has started a quasi-national movement to let students know that their communities want them to be successful. This is especially important in VUCA communities (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) where students are not sure if they really have the support of their neighbors. The weekend before school starts parents and local communities head out to their schools use sidewalk chalk to bolster their students’ confidence and start them out on the right foot for the school year. So grab some chalk and let your community feel you care about kids.

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