Students Matter

Makes Me Wanna Holler

I've been tagged! Fellow TLNer, John Holland  at Circle Time passed this meme on from Jose Vilson's, "Howl If You Hear Me" post.

Maybe it's because my car needs a new set of back tires, but I've been much more conscious of bumps in the road lately. During this state of heightened sensitivity, I've also been more conscious of the unnecessarily bumpy transitions in American education between different levels of schooling.

First step. My TLN colleagues and I recently explored the persistent problems some groups of children have moving from pre-school or kindergarten to first grade.

Second step. We also had an invigorating conversation among the teacher leaders about 9th grade--in its many configurations around the country: the highest level of middle school, lowest level of high school, or set off (literally) from everyone else in their own buildings or academies.

Third step. In a response to a post on The Faculty Room that commented, among other things, on the contrast between American and European schooling practices, Joseph Scotese wrote: "...my European friends cannot get over how easy [U.S.] elementary and high school classes are--especially when compared to our colleges....They think it is ironic that we expect so much of our students when they get to college--which they felt are as tough as any in Europe...."

Fourth step. Community college has become the Ellis Island to American higher education. Yet, as Kevin Carey highlights, there is a good deal of conflict and confusion around the country over transfer of community college or dual enrollment credits even to four-year universities in the same state (or as Carey points out, on the same block!)

Fifth step. More and more Americans are attending college (as Carey also points out) everywhere. Physically moving from one place to another, taking courses online, more college courses being offered in conjunction with employers, open source courses.... However, many students still find transferring from one college to another to be a treacherous passage, full of hidden dangers (and fees). I could go on with the grad school entry hazards, but you get the idea.

Looking over the entire sequence of steps, it's more like playing dodgeball than advancing through a coherent, pedagogically designed system created for students . Surely, we can do better.

What can we do (or have some of you already done) to eliminate these largely unnecessary roadblocks to student progress at every transition point?

TeachMoore,

...who thinks kids' journey through education is rough enough without having to dodge political crossfire on the way....

Making the Grade (Meaningful)

Click here to find out more about the K12 Online Conference. Everyone's invited; no dress code!

A recent article in USA Today on changes in grading policies brought some much expected reaction from the public.

One of my former school districts, briefly adopted the policy of giving no score lower than 50 on student report cards. The well-intentioned purpose was to make it possible for students who failed earlier in the school year to have some chance of passing should they pull their grades up later in the year. It was a common scenario. Students would glide through the first semester, especially at the high school, enjoying football season, homecoming, and anything other than schoolwork. Then, sometime after Christmas, some of them would wake up (or get shaken up by a conscientious parent) and realize they were not going to make it unless they got serious about their assignments. Setting the floor grade at 50, it was thought, would give these slackards a fighting chance at redemption. One problem with this system, however, was it made the grades at the top and the bottom of the scale worth less.

Of course some students were truly struggling all the way along, but some were just plain lazy.

As I shared with folks over at Shrewdness of Apes, where this same conversation is raging from teachers points of view, certainly, there are problems on all sides of this puzzle. Students who won't do what they're asked, then lie about it. Unethical, unprofessional teachers who grade based on emotions, family history, or the moon phase. I actually reported one former colleague who sat down with coffee in the faculty lounge and went through his empty gradebook at the end of the semester making up grades for each student. (Principal's response: "Oh well, he's about to retire anyway.")

And what can you do with parents like the one who showed up at my house one July evening having JUST learned that her son had failed 10th grade English, and begging me to change his final grade because "he really wants to be in the 11th grade with his friends."  BTW, while she was standing in my doorway crying, the aforementioned son was blasting rap music in my driveway from behind the wheel of the brand new truck his mother had bought him.

That we have these debates about grades and fairness this time every year should tell us something. For one, grades are not the reason for education and are not the motivators of student learning many would like to believe. They are prized by some, but not usually for the right reasons. An on-going challenge in many schools and classroooms is to make the learning experiences more substantive and engaging, and making our evaluations of student learning more meaningful. Raising eleven children, my husband and I never asked "What grade did you get at school today?" but "What did you learn new today?" 

Grades are, at best, muted directional signals: Straight A's usually mean the work is boring and non-challenging, but I'm behaving well in class. F's signal there is a problem, and I need to investigate to find out exactly what it is. My dear, departed, former Army sergeant father used to say: "D's stand for 'didn't do a d--- thing'." C's and B's suggest there's work going on, maybe some real learning, and probably some learning challenges; we (parent and teacher) need to work with student and find ways to support the learning.

I would much prefer to move away from a system of letter grades or scores into more of an evaluative feedback system. This of course would require more time by instructors to prepare and more time by parents to understand (are you listening administrators). It could also be the basis for some real discussion about what children are learning and how, rather than some of the inane fingerpointing that passes for parent-teacher conferences in too many places. This has been tried in some schools with generally unfavorable results. In many instances, parents resisted the move away from a single grade or score, sometimes on the basis that evaluative comments wouldn't help their child get into college. But higher ed institutions have been complaining for some time about the relative uselessness of grades and grade point averages as accurate measures of student ability. Of course, the colleges are fighting their own battles over grade inflation and inequities.

Still, I think it's a battle worth fighting for the sake of students, teachers, parents, and sanity.

Help Your Students; Be a Mythbuster

A great post and a wonderful conversation is going on at ASCD Inservice on Myths That Haunt Students.  The article summarizes a session at ASCD led by author Allison Zmuda at which she posed three common myths that hurt student achievement. Most classroom teachers will readily recognize these myths, as the commentary on ASCD testifies.

The one that seems to resonate the most with readers (me included) was that students: "see learning that comes quickly as a sign of intelligence and learning that requires effort as a sign of their own lack of ability."

This myth is pervasive among students at all levels, including high-achievers or honor students. The students (and parents) in my honors English classes could be the most difficult to deal with about doing multiple drafts, research papers, or other tasks that could not be accomplished or understood quickly. One reason I loved mixed classes was that average and struggling students were actually encouraged to see that everyone has challenges with some aspects of learning. I would (and still) advise parents to be wary if the only grade their child ever brings home is an "A."  That's great, if it's earned, but too often it's a signal that a student is not being exposed to anything new, challenging, or complex.

How many students (and not a few teachers) labor under the false notion that fast equals smart? Perhaps it's a response to our times--everything should be available instantly, no waiting. What have we done to help foster among our own children and our students a real work ethic? It takes more than a speech on self-esteem to keep working at that math problem or rewriting that draft; it takes self-discipline.

I was reminded of this at, of all places, my bowling league's annual awards banquet. All of us are 50++ and I'm the only one who grew up in an urban setting. One-by-one, we shared our experiences of growing up, doing daily chores before and after school. For the most part, we did not immediately get any benefits for this work (although there were significant penalties for not doing them), and most of the time, these chores had to be done properly, not sloppily rushed. We reflected on how those experiences carried over into other areas of our lives. School, job, bowling.

Where do today's children get the opportunity to develop a patient, work-at-it-till-you-get-it-done-right attitude? What are we doing in our classrooms to encourage (or discourage) disciplined learning. (In case you haven't guessed, I like that word disciplined.) Disciplined learning is rich, rewarding, life-changing acquisition and application of knowledge. These are the lessons that stick long after the state test or the marking period.

My TLN colleague, Anthony Cody, raised similar questions in a recent editorial he did for the Mercury News ("Rising scores may not mean students are learning more"):

Often, instruction is done in the style of the exam so that students become accustomed to choosing which of four options is correct on a multiple-choice test, or responding to short writing prompts.

I spoke with an elementary teacher at one such school, recently recognized for improving their scores. Many of her fifth-grade students have become disengaged by the relentless test preparation. Lessons focus on discrete skills in reading and math, while larger thematic units and hands-on investigations in science and social studies have been cut because they do not directly improve test scores.

But these deeper projects give students a sense of accomplishment, allowing them to delve into a subject in depth, and developing their abilities in art, speaking and critical thinking. Losing them is stealing much of the joy - and true rigor - from our classrooms.

I know from my own experiences and those of other outstanding teachers that it is possible to provide such learning experiences for students AND get those much-desired test results. How does it look where you are: Is disciplined (or rigorous) learning lost in our classrooms? (Some might argue it was never there). Are we perpetuating the speed=smart myth among our students?

America the Beautiful?

According to the Children's Defense Fund, "Every 41 seconds, a child is born in the United States without health insurance. Already this year, we have seen tragic cases of how a lack of health insurance for a child can have fatal results."

Many of the children I teach, and some in my family, are in this situation. Most of the children in this category have parents who are working, on jobs with little or no health benefits, like two of my daughters. As one of them said to me not long ago, "I could quit my job, get on welfare, and at least the kids would have Medicaid, but why should I have to do that?"

Why, indeed?

What does it say about our nation that we are unwilling (not unable) to provide health care or at least health coverage for all our children? That in many places, our children do not have decent, safe school buildings? That the children of the poor are more likely to go to school in buildings that are poorly maintained, poorly equipped, poorly supplied, and poorly staffed?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

...with liberty and justice for all

Debt Reduction: What We Owe Our Children

You owe it to yourself to read the recent blog by one of my favorite teacher-scholars, Gloria Ladson-Billings: 'A Letter to Our Next President' at The Forum for Education and Democracy.

She argues brilliantly that what we call the "achievement gap" might more accurately be described as an "education debt" that needs to be paid.The article outlines some of the historical threads that have created the current web of inequality in which so many of our public school students find themselves trapped.

Drawing from history, economics, politics, as well as pedagogy, Dr. Ladson-Billings paints this analogy:

"I liken the yearly exercise of constructing the federal budget to the notion of the achievement gap. Every year public schools publish the results of standardized test scores. At some schools we celebrate and say we have 'balanced the budget.' At other schools we bemoan the fact that the standardized test scores reveal we have produced yet another 'deficit budget.' Again, lurking behind this yearly exercise of producing achievement test scores is the education debt of longstanding inequities and educational disenfranchisement. I believe this debt is historical, economic, and moral."

I hope the next President (and the rest of us) are brave enough to face these truths and pay up.

Redefining Basic Skills

Denotation = The dictionary definition.

Connotation = The common social (often emotionally loaded) definition.

Listening to yet another call for a return to "basic skills" in education, or more often, to lamentations about the lack of proficiency in these skills among our high school students or entering college freshmen (especially as compared to other nations), got me thinking about definitions.

Different people mean different things by the term "basic skills." A basic skill is not necessarily something that is easily learned or easily taught. Basic skills are more often foundational ones upon which other knowledge or abilities are built.

However, even that seemingly straightforward definition can be misapplied, particularly in the area of language arts. Many, many people (including quite a few educators) believe students must learn grammar first, in order to compose pieces of writing. Others think children have to learn phonetic pronunciation of words before they can learn to comprehend the meaning of printed texts. Neither of these is true in all cases. For example, I have a deaf son for whom phonics are useless, but who has amazing reading comprehension. Or consider one of my former students, now a successful engineer, who wrote some of the most incisive prose I've ever read, but couldn't pass simple spelling tests.

My good friend Rose Asera, a Senior Scholar at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), has been studying this issue as part of a project she's been working on called Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). In one of her articles, Pipeline or Pipe Dream: Another Way to Think About Basic Skills, Rose makes two points that deserve much greater discussion and awareness.

First: "The apparent simplicity of the skills in question seems to provoke a simplistic pedagogy: if students don't understand it, say it louder, say it slower! Too often, that is, basic skills courses are taught through drill and memorization of rules. What's missing is any sign of intellectual vitality and engagement..."

Second: "These so-called 'basic skills' are not, in fact, so basic or simple. As the research on literacy shows, the reading process that most of us take so much for granted is highly complex. As we 'decode' a text, we bring to bear a vast reservoir of linguistic and cultural knowledge, connecting new ideas with old ones, figuring out words we may not know, actively questioning what we read as we read it, trying out and refining ideas and conclusions as we read."

I'm sure there are those scoffers who are SURE they know what "basic skills" are and how they should be taught. Many of these people are also suffering from extreme forms of nostalgic fantasy ("Back when I was in school, we all learned...") Before we start labeling today's teachers or students lazy or incompetent, consider how many more facts and skills there are to be learned.

Marion Brady, in the Feb. 2008 Educational Leadership, makes the following observation on the increasing shallowness of curriculum in our schools:

Skeptics who don't think this [trying to cover too many topics in a school term] is a problem would do well to borrow the textbooks in a typical adolescent's backpack and count the ideas their glossaries insist are important. One set of popular 8th grade textbooks covering just four subjects—math, science, language arts, and social studies—notes almost 1,500 important topics. That's for one year, or about 170 actual instructional days in those schools that haven't switched to nonstop reading and math test-preparation drills and even fewer days for those schools that have. It's akin to trying to drink from a fire hose. -- in "Cover the Material--or Teach Students to Think"

How many facts does a child really need to know, and why does s/he have to learn them by a certain age or grade level? (I've camped on this ground before -- grade levels are arbitrary inventions that have nothing to do with learning.) As the amount of information available to us multiplies exponentially by the hour, it's time to redefine what are the real "basic skills" and how best to teach them to the citizens of our present and future.

A Tale of Two Boys

This is a story I have shared before; it was published in a collection of stories by National Board Certified teachers. I like to return to it after days like this -- to remind me why I teach.

Over the course of my teaching career, I have received many awards, but few were as precious or as instructive as Sammie and Stephen. When I met Sammie, he was 18 years old and walking into my 10th grade English class after having spent his entire school career in self-contained special education. His mother had decided that she wanted Sam, who was the last of her seven children, to be the one to  graduate from high school with a diploma. He was actually pretty good in math and some other subjects, but had severe problems in reading and writing. Sam could not write a coherent sentence. Looking back he may have been dyslexic, but at that time our small rural school district had no testing or provisions for that. 

I taught Sammie two consecutive years. Along with his mother and older sister, we developed an individual learning plan for him. Our primary goal was to help him to pass the mandatory state exit exam.This was a young man who had been written off as hopeless by so many people, and for so long, that even he didn’t believe he could actually learn. He would sit quietly on one side of the classroom, writing, while I worked with the rest of the class. His writing was painstakingly slow, and he would make all sorts of facial contortions as he struggled to put together even simple sentences. By the end of the first year he could write a decent paragraph. By the end of the second year, he was ready to tackle the reading and written communication sections of the test. It took three attempts, but he finally did pass.

Stephen  started into a life of crime in 9th grade, right after his best friend, who was also a student in my 9th grade English class that year, shot himself through the head. We watched as Stephen’s already weak foundation crumpled into full fledged self-destruction. He was already 17 (the age when students can legally drop out of school in our state). Then, one Friday afternoon, while the rest of the student body poured into the gym around 2:30 for a pep rally, Stephen begged me to help him write an essay. I remember staring at this disheveled, hollow-eyed kid who had spent the previous weekend in jail, was currently on probation (which was the only reason he came to school), skipped every class except P.E. and mine, and I heard myself saying, “Sure, what do you want to write about?” 

We worked until almost 5 p.m. I don’t even remember the topic now, only that he asked me to pick one.  What he really wanted was to prove, mostly to himself, that he could write an essay. When we finished, he just sat there and grinned at the paper.  He asked me to keep it. The next week, I didn’t see Stephen for a few days.  When he did return, he asked for his essay, and sat in the back of class copying it.  He handed me the original as he left the room. After that, he was in and out of school, until finally, I heard he’d been arrested again. Stephen is in state prison now, and we still write one another.

There have been many Sammies and Stephens. Some of the stories have happy endings, some have sadder ones, and some endings have yet to be written.Taken together, they are blessings for which I am deeply grateful, and the reason I love what God has called me to do.

The Sins of the Fathers?

In an essay for Teacher Magazine, my TLN colleague Laura Reasoner Jones recently and bravely wrote about a Hispanic student in her class and made the following controversial observations:

To me, Eduardo is the personification of the immigration questions facing my local area and our nation today. He and his family live in a small apartment, and he and his sister qualify for free lunch. But his family cares deeply about his education and his behavior, and they support him in all that he does in school.

I don't know if they are here in the U.S. legally, and I really don't care. He is a very intelligent young man who has a bright future, and who has all of the characteristics and values that pundits describe as 'American.' He is honest, hardworking, kind, thrifty, and goal-driven. He deserves to get a good education, and he will make a huge contribution to this country.

Of course, her essay has drawn the fire of those who argue that we should not be providing services, such as education, to illegal immigrants since they are lawbreakers. Well, if that's the case, why do we teach the children of felons here? If someone decides to commit murder, rape, or robbery, why don't we insist that his/her children be removed from the public schools?

Why?

Because it's inhumane and unjust to punish children for what their parents have done.

There are several groups that have been involved in creating the illegal immigrant problem in this country; but the children are not among them. Many are calling for the government to round up the over 25 million people who don't want to leave and deport them. To which I respond: "Don't hold your breath." (Are we talking about the same federal government that couldn't get those people who wanted to leave the coast out before Katrina and still has many of the survivors in toxic trailers?)

While we sort out the mess that's been created, why punish the children by withholding the things that could turn them into productive citizens?  True, our resources are limited and stretched (due in part to our inverted priorities), but one way to address that problem is to create more hardworking, taxpaying, intelligent voters.

Like Laura, I've taught some amazing Hispanic students who may very well have been brought here illegally. But they might also make marvelous doctors, nurses, engineers, etc. if given the opportunity and the choice to become citizens.

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