Effective Teaching

The Rusty Gate

My
friend and fellow Michigan teacher, Cossondra George, recently asked:

Do teachers have a responsibility to
be the gatekeepers of their profession? Can we settle for allowing our
colleagues to give students less than they deserve?

Teachers
ought to serve as gatekeepers for admission into the profession--and until that
happens, we can't lay claim to being fully professional. I'm all for raising
the bar for entrance to teaching (using better tools than SAT or Praxis scores),
and investing more time, resources and research on effective teacher development.

In
the meantime, however, we have teachers who are not doing the job well enough. Some
of them should be gone--tomorrow; others have plenty of untapped potential but
are floundering. No point in repairing the rusty gate granting access to teach
unless we pay attention to supporting teachers once they're in the field.

Struggling
teachers come in two basic flavors: #1) teachers who haven't had sufficient
experience or training to do the job well and #2) teachers who once had the
disposition and tools to be good teachers, but have checked out due to cynicism,
fatigue, bitterness and unforgiving working conditions.

The
first group is not necessarily easier to deal with. In some environments, "professional
development" is seen as an administrative duty, and early-career teachers
are threatened by the idea that their performance might be evaluated and found
wanting. Their daily practice is marked by the overriding desire to keep a low
profile. All teachers--from rank newbies to award-winning veterans--must
consider themselves collaborative learners and practitioners.  All of us are responsible for lending plans,
tips, materials and support to new teachers.

One
thing that can be done by accomplished veterans: asking newer teachers for their ideas, and approaching them as
full colleagues, rather than those who need help. I work with many first- and
second-year teachers who are pretty vocal about observed shortcomings in their
assigned mentors. Most faculties adopt a kind of pecking order. Flattening that
hierarchy--opening doors and sharing uncertainties--can help. Novice teachers
ought to be considered for leadership roles, such as curriculum writing or the
school improvement team, rather than dumping unwanted, time-sucking class
advisories or club sponsor roles on them.

The
second group of ineffective teachers is a different problem. I worked for
decades in a strongly veteran culture, which equated years of service with accrued
power and influence. I eventually discovered that many of the teachers
I saw as jaded burn-outs were once enthusiastic and creative, but had had
their mojo squashed by a culture of anger and perceived betrayal.

For a
teacher trained in the 70s, teaching to a mandated and scripted  reading program feels like being told that the
best lessons in their tool bags are useless, and their judgment flawed. For a
teacher who's spent 20 years in Detroit, bringing in used clothing and peanut
butter sandwiches for neglected students, blaming teachers for the system's
failures now is callous.

Some
of those favorite lessons and teaching methods are useless junk. But--a significant group of teachers who retain
the potential to be very effective in the classroom have found the only
"leadership" role open to them is fighting back against systemic
change through their unions. They need to have their professional experience
validated and acknowledged; they're not going accept either praise or criticism
from someone they don't respect, but they have not stopped caring about their
students' learning.

So there
is an opportunity to salvage good teaching--and valuable contextual
experience-- by acknowledging that veteran teachers have something to
contribute: been there, tried that, learned from it.  We might start by asking dried-up veteran
teachers "Why did you choose to be a teacher?" The ones who say
"June, July and August" can be dismissed. But the ones who say
"I wanted to make a difference in kids' lives" deserve to have their
ideas heard, at least.

An
old friend inadvertently gave me the title for this blog when he let me know
that a true Michigan conservationist and sportsman-Rusty Gates--passed over to
the great fly fishing stream in the sky last week.  Rusty Gates understood that in order to learn
to fish, you had to stand in the river for a time. And so it is with teaching.

Image: Neil Whiteside@Flickr Creative Commons

Platoons! What Are They Good For?

 The
use of military and sports metaphors to describe teaching and learning makes me
crazy. I hate it when teachers say they're "in the trenches." Calling
common standards "goalposts" grates on my sensibilities, as do drills,
recruits, maneuvers, tactics and racing to the top. I can never figure out who's
fighting--or who's winning--or why we're at war to begin with.

 

And
now we've been advised to develop instructional "platoons" in
elementary school, the better to lock and load, pinpointing our achievement targets
with more precision. We can become an elite teaching force, a well-oiled
instructional machine, mowing down mathematical skills like Sherman marching to
the sea, and all that.

 

In
2005, I was teaching music in a K-4 building. I ate lunch with the three fourth
grade teachers, all of whom were smart and hip. I was consistently impressed
with their ongoing conversations about How to Make Things Better for Fourth
Graders.  They shared everything--lesson
planning, materials, moments of instructional illumination, things kids said in
class. In the fall, they started dividing up the lesson creation process, with
each teacher going deeper into one of three subjects in the fourth grade
curriculum--math, science and social studies. They all taught reading at the
same time, using the assigned building-wide program, but they were
experimenting with flexibly sharing their students for mini-lessons around
particular skills and topics.

 

There
were about 85 kids in the 4th grade, and their rooms were side by side. By the
end of September, the teachers knew all the 4th graders--and were convinced
that they could do a better job of instruction if they specialized in teaching one
subject, and ran the 4th grade reading program collaboratively, as well. They
drew up an elaborate plan--they called it "switching"--detailing
the benefits.

 

They
didn't make it past the first 15 minutes with the principal, who emphatically
said that parents preferred a single teacher for their young children--a teacher
who would be responsive to a particular child's unique needs. It would also take
valuable instructional time for the kids to move to a new class; when the
teachers explained that the kids would sit tight, and that it would take approximately
30 seconds for teachers to move next door, the principal got huffy.

 

She
said there was research showing that elementary students achieved more when
they stayed with the same teacher all day. At the time, the K-8 movement (a
reactionary response to the maligned "middle school concept") was taking
root in urban districts, keeping kids together all day. And finally, she shot
the plan dead by telling them that she was the decision-maker, and she was
convinced that their plan was nothing more than a sneaky way to make their
lives easier and reduce their personal workload.

 

They
had a second meeting with the principal, and this time the union representative
came, but no dice. Further--the principal had now noticed that the teachers
were occasionally switching kids for reading and put the kibosh on that as
well. One teacher, 28 kids, no switching--and that was that. Because I got to
hear lots of lunchtime exasperation about this situation, I did a quick scan of
research and found one or two old studies that supported the principal's position,
and a couple that supported the teachers' position. What all the research does
say is that the quality of teaching matters a great deal--and that teachers'
relationships with students are all-important. No surprises. But no research slam
dunk for either side of the issue.

 

Of
course, that was just switching, not platooning, which suddenly seems to be all the rage.
There is now a widely accepted theory that elementary teachers' lack of
mathematical knowledge is the cause of our failure to rout and crush the
international competition on math battles--I mean tests. It's worth pointing
out that the research on this is mixed, too--but we're already on the march, strategically
selecting a few good teachers to lead the charge.

 

In
the end, it's just another example of our national faith in tools and
levers--rather than people--to solve problems. The fourth grade teachers in my
school were willing to lead and invested in the outcomes of their simple plan.
That should count for more than snappy language.

Brave New (Charter) World

Let’s
get biases and politics out of the way first. I am a big fan of the charter
school concept—defined as the rich idea that when it comes to schooling, one
size does not fit all, and big monolithic districts do not and cannot serve diverse
children as well as site-directed, purpose-driven, innovative schools. If I
lived in Detroit, I would choose a magnet school or charter school for my
children—and even though I live in a district with fine public schools, one of
my children attended a public school and the other attended a private school. Ideologically,
I’m with Dewey on this one: I want the best possible education for all
children, the kind of carefully chosen options my own children had.

One
more thing: I think that positioning charter schools as the opposite of public
schools, rather than a necessary supplement to public education, has poisoned
the discourse. And—it goes both ways. It’s not just public schools and public
school teachers being skeptical (or downright nasty) in their remarks about
charter schools.  Public school academies—charters—seem
to be bent on repeating the worst sound bites about public schools, whether
they’re strictly true or not, thereby displaying the aphorism that your mother
repeated when you were seven years old: you don’t make yourself look better by
tearing someone else down. 

I
have a number of friends now working in the charter school movement in Detroit,
a city where a handful of good charter schools have begun to flourish and bear
fruit. Last week, they invited me to attend a showing of “The Providence Effect,”
a full-length film depicting a school success story: Providence St. Mel, a K-12
Catholic school on Chicago’s tough west side.

Providence
St. Mel has accrued considerable recognition after parents adamantly refused to
close it on Diocese recommendation, 30 years ago: President Reagan visited,
around the time the “Nation at Risk” report was being crafted, and Oprah
Winfrey has taken a personal interest (and contributed more than a million
dollars). Providence’s outcomes—an average ACT score of 23, and 100% college
admission for graduates—resemble those of well-heeled suburban public schools.
Now, there is an attempt to replicate the “Providence effect:” a charter school
in Englewood, led by Providence graduates and veteran teachers, and based on
programs and principles at the original PSM.

The
screening was part of a two-day professional conference for charter school
proponents and teachers, and featured a panel discussion with Big Names in the Michigan
charter school movement, a State Board of Education member, various business-leadership
types, and the principal of the new Providence charter school. The room was set
up for hundreds of people, but I’m sure the attendance numbers (perhaps 60
people) were disappointing to the organizers. As I was parking on the rooftop
of Cobo Hall, charter school teachers wearing conference badges were flooding
out of the building, recognizable as teachers by their youth, their post-collegiate
dress and willingness to carry a tote bag—plus their “let’s go get a beer”
demeanor.

Impressions
from the film and the panel discussion:

  • The
    movie has a campaign-film aura—gauzy graduation footage with students
    inexplicably wearing white gloves, bits of talking-head rhetoric, quick-cut
    black and white shots from Chicago’s troubled past, backed by a vocal track of
    adolescents singing. It’s impressive, all right, especially their catch phrase:
    It’s not rocket science. The
    lingering message: anybody with high expectations and tight rules can turn around
    kids destined for the dumpster.
  • There
    is curiously little about instruction in the film; we do see a few examples of
    very traditional classroom teaching. There is a clip of first-graders in a race-to-the-board
    competitive spelling game (the teacher assigning points to teams, a la
    Professor Dumbledore), and a HS math lesson where the teacher puts an equation
    on the board and announces “No calculators!” (which drew a spatter of applause
    from the audience). An elementary teacher models a familiar and effective
    questioning strategy but then suggests that nobody in his circle believes that
    second graders can do work at this level.
  • Among
    the panelists, the principal of the new Providence charter school was most
    grounded in reality. She admitted that while they were on a strong upward curve,
    test scores were still mediocre. Asked how they deal with discipline, she said
    that students were put on a “three strikes and out” contract—if they couldn’t
    abide by the rules, they held a conference with parents to decide if the child
    was a “good fit” for Providence. According to the principal, every child, even
    kindergarteners, has a grade point average (another murmur of approval from the
    audience). Nobody asked about parents who never bothered to come to school, the
    advisability of a five-year old having a GPA before he understands cumulative
    averaging, or where the kid who is not a good fit ends up.
  • There
    was a kind of professional pep rally atmosphere. The panel moderator took
    questions from people who seemed pre-selected, often acknowledging the “great
    work” Joe was doing or the “outstanding leadership” of Mary. There was an angry
    question on why charter schools get less money than public schools, on average,
    from the public coffers. Reginald Turner, the State Board member, clarified:
    charter schools get the same per-pupil allowance as other public schools in the
    surrounding area. And guess what? There aren’t many charter schools in Grosse
    Pointe, where the funding level is high; charter schools are generally found
    where there is dissatisfaction with public education and not much money. And
    they get the same public monies as the other schools nearby—you might even call
    that equitable.
  • When
    asked what Detroit could do as a first step to fix its failing public school,
    the business folks agreed: get new teachers, preferably from Teach for America
    (which one panelist described as “the Peace Corps of teaching,” an unfortunate
    metaphor in a city trying to pull itself out of devastating depression). A
    woman asked what special training Teach for America corps members got that
    would make them particularly effective in Detroit. The panelist replied that it
    wasn’t a matter of training—it was a chance to get “graduates of the top
    colleges” into the classroom.

If you believe U.S. News and World
Report, two of the top twenty Schools of Education are right here in Michigan,
including the long-running #1 in Elementary and Secondary teacher preparation,
Michigan State University, and the #4 public university in the country, the
University of Michigan. There is also a strong network of regional teacher
preparation programs. There is no shortage of highly qualified and skilled teachers
here in Michigan.

Michigan is a teacher-exporting state.
About three-quarters of our best and brightest would-be teachers go to work in
other states (when they can get jobs). Of those who remain in Michigan, a
significant segment gets jobs in newly formed charter schools—because there are
no jobs in public schools. The best new teachers in Michigan? They’re the folks
who went streaming out the door to grab a beer with their teaching colleagues
as I was parking my car.

When
it comes to evaluating charter schools, the key question is always: Compared to
what? Charter schools in Detroit have many potential resources that public schools
do not, beginning with positive public assumptions and PR.

Charter
World is an interesting place, with different beliefs, incentives and catch
phrases than Public School World. It would be a shame to lose the opportunity
to do something truly different with charter schools, relying instead on rhetorical
flourishes and empty myths.

Artsy Smartsy

First, read this--Claus von Zastrow's brilliant, poignantly
hilarious treatise on why public schools and teachers just can't win, posted
last week on the Public School Insights blog. It encompasses the entire range
of criticisms--building yurts with tongue depressors!--and skillfully
illustrates the "painted into a corner" nature of being a public
school advocate these days. No matter what you believe, no matter how
thoughtful your research-based educational practice, someone disagrees.
Probably viciously.

Conflict over the role of the arts in intellectual
development and public schooling is one of the oldest of these squabbles. As a
music teacher, I was pink-slipped six times in 30 years and shifted to a new
position 17 times; I've spent a professional lifetime defending the necessity
of the arts in school curriculum, from every angle. As human beings, we were
created and designed to make representations--in sound, drama, movement and image--of
the things that matter most to civilization. 

People who believe that children do not need well-designed
experiences with the arts to be fully educated are wrong. The evidence comes
from the fact that children spontaneously create art, music, dance and dramatic
play all by themselves, with no education whatsoever--and the all aspects of
human communication, from political to religious to commercial, revolve around
artistic expression. Developing aesthetic discretion is a useful skill, not to
mention a lifelong pleasure.

Yesterday, in the Washington Post, David C. Levy, former
director of the Corcoran Gallery and founder of the New School for Jazz and
Contemporary Music, takes on the challenge of flaws and gaps in K-12 arts
education in America. The piece starts strong--but then Levy jumps on the
knee-jerk teacher-blame bandwagon and claims that  art education is suffering because school art teachers
are lousy artists--"many of them can barely draw." He attempts to
soften this indictment by mentioning that art schools are guilty, too: they
require a "smorgasbord of classes in unrelated media," making rigorous
training and serious specialization impossible. Then, he asserts that the
situation is vastly better for prospective musicians (who have a range of
"elite musical ensembles" with a "demanding meritocracy" to
sharpen their skills).

Levy's irritating and erroneous assumptions about arts
education pile up; he claims that schools don't stress artistic skill
development, preferring to let kids just "express themselves"--and
that most children begin playing musical instruments early enough to have ten
years of instruction with a competent professional before pursuing a music
degree. Perhaps in some major cities--but not in my world. Levy may well know a
great deal about the professional art and music world, but he's clueless about
the vagaries of K-12 scheduling, hiring and programming and regional support for the arts--not to mention the
nature of teaching large groups of children, where a jack-of-all-trades
artistic sensibility comes in handy, as does a bagful of tricks for keeping
"media" on the table, rather than in the hair or on the clothes.

The vast majority of kids learn to understand the making of art, and to sing, dance and
play an instrument, in a classroom. While there is certainly variance in the
quality of teaching, most arts teachers want nothing more than to develop
skills and excellence in their students, to ignite a musical or artistic
passion that burns well past graduation.  Only three or four in 100 students will pursue
a career in the arts, but all of them need to learn some basic skills, as an
entry point to enriched taste and enjoyment. College-bound high school students
in traditional public schools have no room in their schedules to take a variety
of arts courses--even if their school offered them.  Elementary schoolkids who get a 45 -minute
art class once a week are lucky, indeed. The picture, as Levy notes, may be
gloomy--but let's not point fingers at teachers.

In one of my districts' financial crises, a high school art
teacher who taught jewelry, pottery and graphic design was shifted to an
elementary art job (13 weeks apiece in three K-4 schools). As Fine Arts
Department chair, I was sent to make sure he was "doing a good job,"
since he was vocally disappointed when jewelry-making and graphic design
courses were dropped from the school curriculum. I watched him teach
perspective to first graders, their first art lesson with the new teacher. He
used words like "foreground" and "horizon," explaining as
he went along. They drew houses. Amazing, realistic houses. They were
incredibly excited, and couldn't wait to show their drawings to their parents.

I was beyond impressed, but he was nonchalant.

"Just basic art," he said. ”Anybody can teach
perspective."

Image: Flickr Creative Commons, Jansen Mann

I'd Rather Have a Root Canal

Thanks to guest blogger Christine Gleason, whose story about the what passes for professional learning made the Teacher in a Strange Land laugh out loud. She even provided her own illustration.

By Christine
Gleason

2009 Texas
Teacher of the Year

The
time is upon us where teachers across the nation gather to collectively lose
brain mass--the infamous full-day in-service. I check the clock again and adjust
myself in world's worst chair.  My eyes
roll back in my head.  Time is not
relevant in in-service land.  Break time
is a non-negotiable “ten minutes because we have a lot to cover.”  Lunch is an eternity away.  I lean forward and rest my chin on my
fist.  I roll my eyes. Take away the
table in front of me, cluttered with coffee cups, blank paper and randomly
placed markers, and my posture is in perfect tandem with Rodin’s “The Thinker.”

If
Dante were writing this, the level of hell reserved for in-services would be
right between the heretics and the violent (that’s level 6.5 for the Dante
lovers).  Inferno would be a cafetorium.
Roughly 350 teachers would be helplessly seated on uncomfortable chairs.  The schedule says we're done at 4:00, but we
all know that roughly translates to eternity. 
 

The
objective:  Teachers will become familiar
with the ELL components of…zzzz.

By
hour two, we have covered one slide on the PowerPoint presentation and
completed an activity where we went around the room and got three different
perspectives from three random teachers on the sentence starter “One obstacle
ELL students face when trying to learn English is…”  Deep. 

My
back is killing me (remember the sub-par chairs…) and I am sick of sitting. As
I move to stand in the back of the cafeteria, I look around to see if others
are feeling the same way. I see people shoving all of their markers together to
make swords.  I see towers of empty
coffee cups and juice boxes.

It
is confirmed.  The presenter had lost the
majority of the people in the room. I know this because of the plethora of side
conversations (which involve laughter--and this guy isn’t funny), the body
language of the people who aren’t talking and the pantomimed wrist slashing of
a colleague with whom I make eye contact. 

The
principal slowly walks over to me.  He's
seen me surfing the net on my cell phone and reading an essay.  He asks: do I have the book the presenter gave
us?  “Yes,” I said.  “I have two copies." We make a quick list
of the times the high school staff had ELL training…the last being when the
principal himself trained us.  “Yours was
better,”  I admit.   He chuckles a little.  Of course, a monkey could give a better
in-service than this guy.    

There
are no modifications to the speaker’s delivery as the day progresses.  He continues talking at us. He tells us ELLs
need multiple opportunities to hear information.  “Give them visual cues, rephrase stuff and
have them repeat it back to you” he says.   So where are my visual cues?  The rephrasing?  Small group instruction?  Alternative activities?  Does this guy ever, ever change the tone of
his voice?

I
draw one of my colleague’s likenesses on an orange. I take a picture of someone
who's fallen asleep.  

How
can the powers that be expect a room full of educated adults with different
learning styles to sit through six hours of lecture and actually walk away with
something? The content of the book is amazing. 
It's the delivery.

After
lunch, the Assistant Superintendent reprimands us: “We expect the kids to learn
when we lecture to them." 
Translation: “I know this guy is boring. Don’t make marker swords.” 

I
don’t expect my kids to learn in this kind of environment. Six hours of spiel
is too much for any human being. The marker-sword fight and the countless juice
box pyramids strategically set up to hide people texting on their phones should
have given the presenter a clue. 

Teachers
should be involved in what teachers want or need to learn. Clearly this
is not a revolutionary idea.  If we have
to spend money, why not give us the opportunity to become National Board
Certified?  What about an in-service on
how to set up a Professional Learning Community at our school?  Growth opportunities are absolutely
imperative to the success of our teachers, especially those on cruise control.  

And
why can’t the staff train the staff?  I
went to Space Camp this summer and could teach a whole day on Space to the
elementary school.  I’m also a
Smithsonian Ambassador.  Plus, I’m
engaging, relatively funny, and know how to use hands-on activities. And that’s
just me! Think of all the staff members with unique skills...

I’d
love to see multiple sessions going on in multiple classrooms so teachers have
a choice of where they want to go all day long. 
While I’m presenting how to make Water Bottle Rockets as part of the
Science and Math curriculum in one room, my principal could be presenting ELL
strategies in another.  we are exciting
and talented, we know our kids and we are free.

In-service
day is over. I've reflected on what I learned--and I’m off to have a chat with
my principal.  Hope he feels like joining
my PLC. 

Yo! Extremely Bad Idea!

 

I
suppose it was inevitable. When the blurring between reality TV and, you know,
actual reality has encompassed things like marriage, parenting and Hugh Hefner,
it was only a matter of time until schools offered up their students--and their
integrity--for fifteen minutes of fame and $3500 an episode.

 

Tony
Danza--who wasn't even The Boss--appears to be headed for a well-publicized turn
as a fake teacher on a reality show based in a public school in Philadelphia. I
thought Channel One  was bad--and renting
a brand-new school in my hometown as movie set for a stoner flick was
abominable. This is much worse.

Philly
Mayor Michael Nutter is all for it. His rationale? Students might be allowed to
serve as production interns, he says-- and such a reality show will make it
easier to recruit teachers.

"Teach'
represents a unique opportunity to highlight many of our city's dedicated
teachers and administrators, and the talented students they serve.''

Well,
gosh. If the show were truly going to highlight the city's best bona fide teachers,
I'd be all for it. And I'll believe that having high school students work as
gofers on a TV set in their own school is a good idea when I see the rigorous national
content standards for movie production. My thinking runs along the lines of
Philadelphia Daily News' Ronnie Polaneczky who said the idea was:

"...a way
to pimp our kids' education to an unemployed sitcom actor who wants to
kick-start his stalled career on the backs of students who'll be distracted by
cameras and microphones.''

This
is actually something I have experience with; I can offer some first-hand insights
into how this will likely play out with Tony and the kids in Philadelphia:

Some
years ago, I was asked to be a featured teacher in the Annenberg Foundation's
video series on teaching, The Learning
Classroom. It was a project with an excellent pedigree--the series advisors
were highly respected academics, and the mission was sterling: filming teachers
at work, hearing how and why they make teaching decisions, integrating theory and
practice. My segment was Feelings Count:
Emotions and Learning.

I had
several conversations with the producer before they came to film. The plan was
for the crew to spend five full days in my classroom. Don't worry, she said.
You won't know we're even here. I was the one who insisted on notifying
parents, and getting release forms signed--a precaution the producer found
ridiculous.

I
also spent considerable energy devising lessons that would tap into the
emotions of volatile middle schoolers to yield richer learning. My seventh
graders were working on Ashokan Farewell,
a lovely tune that Ken Burns used throughout his Civil War series, most notably during the heartbreaking letter from
Major Sullivan Ballou of the Union army to his wife, Sarah. One of my
students--a young man--read excerpts from the letter, and I shared some
thoughts about how music helps people through milestone moments in their lives.
Students spoke about songs played at a grandparent's funeral--or how they found
joy and consolation in particular songs. It was a terrific lesson, a nice blend
of rich content and relevant emotion.

Unfortunately,
none of that lesson--or any other bits of creative, solid teaching--ended up in
the final segment. At lunchtime on Day One, the producer (who turned my office
into her own personal Disgusting Starbucks) had a little problem. She wanted to
know when they were going to see some reality. The kids were so good. So
polite. Clearly, this was not the way they behaved every day. "I feel like
I'm in Mayberry," she said--and she didn't mean that in a nice way. Where,
she asked, was the emotion?

I
explained that it took months of hard work to build a functioning community of
65 12-year old musicians. She didn't buy it. She needed to see some
conflict--somebody crying would be ideal. On Day Two, the production crew moved
from my classroom to the hallway, hoping to catch a fight or a breakup.  The producer went to the principal, asking for
permission to film all the kids. At a quick after-school staff meeting,
permission slips for the entire student body were distributed. I shared my apprehension
with the rest of the teachers. Some of them were concerned--but others were
hoping for a visit from the camera crew. "You're not the only good teacher
in the building, you know," one said. "Some of us would love a chance
to be on TV, too."

It
was a long week. The worst moment occurred on Friday. One of my 8th graders had
been out of school for several weeks, undergoing treatment for testicular cancer.
He came back for a quick visit, and was surrounded by friends, trying to figure
out what to say to another teenage boy who has a life-threatening illness. As I
hugged him, I heard the cameras whirring. They followed him into the band room
and filmed his interactions with friends attempting to be cool, and his own
struggle to describe his illness without telling them where his cancer was, or
what procedures he had undergone.

I
would never have interrupted these painful but essential conversations--but I
sure as hell did not want them exploited. I told the producer later that we had
no release form, so they would have to scrap the film they were salivating
over. We did not part on good terms. While I do appear in the video series,
none of the things that were important to me were captured or highlighted.

One
can only wonder what the producers of a reality show will find compelling. And
whose education will be compromised.

Bestseller: They Only Get What They Deserve

I have been fooled before. Back in college, all
the girls in my dorm were devouring Love Story, admiring plucky, foul-mouthed
Jenny and secretly wishing to find their own Ivy League hottie with a trust
fund (which—trust me—was a stretch for girls raised in the flat farmlands of
mid-Michigan). By the time the well-thumbed copy was passed to me (with the
spine broken at the scene where Oliver-n-Jenny studied philosophy and
Renaissance polyphony while intertwined on the couch…sigh), I could not wait to
read it.

Major letdown. Not just the insipid, teen-romance
writing—it was the sloppy thinking. Love means having to say you’re sorry
pretty much daily. And wasn’t it cheating to kill off the main character rather
than deal with the inevitable dreary stint in an ugly concrete apartment
complex while the formerly flush Oliver IV paid off crushing law school debts?

My roommates thought I was a snob and a cynic. By
the time Bridges of Madison County was the book du jour, and the talk of B
lunch in the faculty lounge, I knew better than to publicly assert that even Clint
Eastwood couldn’t save this turkey. I’m OK. You’re OK?  Not OK, as far as I was concerned. Nobody
ever moved my cheese. And don’t get me started on Da Vinci Code. 

Here’s the thing: I actually like romance,
mystery, pop psychology, and pulp fiction of all kinds. Maybe I am just Not
Like Other People—the book-buying segment, anyway. I’ve developed a reflexive
bias against best-sellers and books that are recommended by too many people.
And so it was that I decided not to read Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest
foray into looking at patterns and data that reveal unexpected things about our
habits and beliefs.

I liked Gladwell’s Tipping Point, but didn’t see
it as revelatory gospel. I read his piece in The New Yorker last December which
started a mini-tsunami of blogs defending or refuting the idea that teachers
were born, not made, so meticulously screening prospective teachers and educating
them in pedagogy was a giant waste of resources. I thought he
missed—totally—the point of all the research done on “with-it-ness,” the human
qualities that make teachers effective. Suggesting that we hire almost anyone
to teach, then let them sink or swim depending on their innate ability to give
kids useful feedback, keep the good ones and boot the rest, didn’t sound like
an outrageous, brain-stretching concept to me; it sounded all too much like
what we actually do.

Last week, I found myself with a delayed flight,
dead iPod and no reading material. I popped for a hardback copy of Outliers.
And I liked it—I really, really liked it. And thought that the key ideas in the
book have serious ramifications for lots of traditional schooling practices.

His data on the kids who make the top hockey teams
was priceless (and vindication for parents who red-shirt their
kindergartner, hoping to make him the biggest kid in the next class). As a
musician, I totally get the concept of 10,000 hours of practice trumping
identified talent; the most promising kids in the 6th grade beginner
band were routinely outstripped in the 8th grade by kids who had a
stronger desire to be a great players and lugged their horns home to
practice every weekend. Gladwell's stories about regional differences and
cultural-ethnic heritage are ideas embedded in stereotype—but also observable
in data. That differences between spoken words for numbers between Asian and
Western nations might impact the way children think about mathematical
operations makes perfect sense.

And this:

"Because
we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto
the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write
people off as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too
dismissive of those who fail. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and
by “we,” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t. We could
easily take control of the machinery of achievement. But we don’t. And why?
Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual
merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to
write as a society don’t matter at all."

Gladwell spends most of the book—using layers of
evidence and data—proving that point, which has even more profound, even
damning, implications for the things we take for granted in American education.
All those tests we give to second graders, to figure out who is “gifted?” All
the honors classes, the scholarships, the awards, the select choir and the
rigorously winnowed travel teams? Not about talent or ability at all, even if
we were able to truly measure talent and ability.

Recommended reading, especially for successful
people who see their advantages as 100% deserved.

Merit Badge

 

Happy
Fourth.

What
truths seem self-evident to educators in the year 2009?  Are all teachers created equal?  Which of their rights are still unalienable? Life,
certainly--but who gets to pursue happiness or feel liberated, these days? It's
hard to follow your bliss when unemployed, and studying the indicators that currently
constitute effective teaching is the antithesis of liberty.

There
were fireworks over Jonathon Alter's June 15 Newsweek column in which he
declares that the key to fixing education is figuring out who can teach and who
can't (and asserts that teachers are born, not made). This good teacher/bad teacher
schism should be glaringly obvious and embedded in policy creation, he says,
but is currently obscured by educrats who "remain fiercely committed to the status quo."

OK.
Raise your hand if you know anyone, anywhere in the land of free, who's
fiercely committed to bad public schools. Right. There are educators fiercely
committed to improving dreadful schools, of course. Some parents are appropriately
loyal to the public schools where their children thrive--and some are determined
to preserve a status quo that lets them send their children to exclusive
schools with individual attention and rich curriculum, while other people's
children get 5 hours of reading and math, plus test prep. I don't think that's
the status quo Jonathon Alter is referring to, however.

There
will never be equality in outcomes, but we can pursue--relentlessly--equity of
opportunity for all American students. Part of that pursuit will be a
continuous improvement strategy for the coalition of willing, effective
teachers (who are made, and refined in experience, not born).

I'm
not writing to shake another finger at Alter, however. I'm here to praise an
earlier column, on a "misplaced faith in the meritocracy"--an
interesting (and kind of schizophrenic) contrast to his natural-teacher
argument. In the June 1 Newsweek, Alter writes warmly of his father, a member
of the Greatest Generation--the men and women whose social, economic and
workplace values were also refined in experience, often during wartime and while
they were very young. He contrasts these solid citizens with the whiz kids who
represent the meritocracy in the 21st century, who are:

...shaped not
by war, but by college. To win the battle for admissions, fellowships and the
other totems of success, they needed not bravery or proven leadership, but
test-taking skills and a specific kind of cunning that's come to be confused
with "merit." Obamaworld is loaded with these exact types...policy
wonks who have experienced little in life but sound unfailingly articulate and
confident about their elegant economic models. 

Obama's faith
in data and in his ability to reach the "right" policy answer will
not be enough for success. That's because every expert opinion is the product
of the biases and backgrounds of the experts. He needs some people around him
who, in LBJ's words, have "run for sheriff."

Absolutely.
Perhaps someone who's been successful on genuine battlefields in education
ought to step in, and point out that a true meritocracy in teaching is earned
in trial by fire in real schools. And that putting whiz kids, armed with
test-taking skills and academic cunning, into classrooms, assuming that their high
SAT scores and elegant policy solutions will save the day, is not a viable
long-term strategy for cutting out the rotten spots in the status quo. Perhaps
we should be pairing whiz-kids newbie teachers with the teacher equivalent of the local
sheriff. Maybe we should pair them with educators whose biases and backgrounds resemble the
those of the students in non-meritorious communities.

Malcolm
Gladwell, who seems to be developing a new peripheral career as an education
spokesperson, in his keynote to the National Educational Computing Conference,
reiterated his "effort trumps talent"  idea. Ten thousand of hours of practice makes
perfect. You can't short-cut the development of a teaching career. Made, not born.

Image: Drexer Shift-Drifter, Flickr Creative Commons

Warped Soul of an Old Machine: The Technology of Tracking

 

Tracking
is a technology. You can't plug it in, but--like 3-ring binders, twelve grade
levels, and the agrarian calendar--tracking is an educational technology. A
device dreamed up for the purpose of making schooling more "efficient."  A tool.

And
just as a man with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, school technologies
are often considered the "obvious" solution to every dilemma we face
in schools. Many of these durable cogs in the vast education machine date back
to the era when poor immigrants were flooding city schools at the same time the
industrial age promoted a technical approach to everyday tasks. Everything from
traffic management to measuring the intelligence of army recruits could be done
better through science--and many of these efficiencies were translated into
educational practice as the system expanded.

We
seem to have a national compulsion to sort, identify, select, test, standardize,
compare and compete in our schools. Intellectual growth, unfortunately, does
not automatically thrive via classification or homogeny. Human learning is neither
predictable nor controllable, and doesn't happen at a consistent rate. Students
respond in different ways to varying content, disciplines and instructional
models--not to mention different teachers and emotional states.  Lots of bad education policy has been created
by people who assume that uniformity is a great virtue. And even more bad
policy has been instituted by folks who believe that the way they learn best is
the way all people learn, or should learn.

And
so it is with tracking, the technological solution to the non-problem of having a roomful of learners
who don't know precisely the same things.

Here's
my worst experience with tracking, from the early 80s, when I was teaching one
section of 7th grade math. The 7th graders were divided, using reliable assessment
data from 6th grade state tests, into five tracks: Honors (which was Pre-Algebra),
Advanced, High/Low Basic, and Special Education. I taught Low Basic. Every 10
weeks, we gave a common assessment (from the math text) and moved kids from
track to track, based on their scores-- in theory, a system that would allow us
to continuously fine-tune our stratified instruction, and use the
"motivation" of quarterly opportunities to move up to higher tracks. Even
though students were not studying the same topics at exactly the same time, the
assumption was that since we were all following a sequenced curriculum, but
differentiating the pace and amount of practice, kids who mastered something in
September (or 6th grade) would still know it in January. That turned out to be
not true.

After
the first 10 weeks, 16 of my 30 students qualified to move up--two went all the
up to Honors--and I got 16 new kids who'd struck out in the higher tracks. With
every 10-week shuffle, I got dispirited kids whose math egos had taken a
beating, and had to convince them that they could indeed re-master ratios,
probability, negative integers or whatever had stopped them in their tracks.
Approximately a third of the kids got moved around every quarter. By the final
quarter, I had only 6 of my original kids (one of whom confessed that he
deliberately blew his quarterly move-up tests so he could stay with me).

It
was hard on my Basic kids, who felt that they'd been written off, early in the
game. But it was hardest on the kids who started out in Honors, then drifted
downward all year, ending up in Basic. Tracking did much more than impact egos
and the social system--it made a muddle of instruction. My Basic kids were
constantly saying "I already learned this"--even when their tests
indicated that they were clueless. In each of the four quarters, my group--scientifically
selected for uniformity-- had superstars and laggards. And students continued
to need different ways of learning critical content and skills.

There
are a number of education critics who believe that differentiating learning in
mixed-ability groups is not truly workable. I know that it is, because I've
done it, for decades. You start building equity by demanding excellence from
everyone, rather than trying to figure out who might not be "capable"
of excellence, or how to stretch achievement data over a curve rather than pushing
everyone as far and fast as possible. Everyone should get the good stuff--the
most rigorous content, their teachers' confidence that high levels of learning
are within reach for all. There are more insidious beliefs hidden by the
practice of tracking. But let's not go there--because that would be giving the
creaky obsolete technology of tracking more power and attention than it
deserves.

Remembering: A Seniority Moment

It's
natural for me to think of my dad on Memorial Day. He was a proud veteran of World
War II, a tail gunner in the Army Air Corps, serving in the Pacific theatre for
the duration of the war.  He enlisted
early in 1942, at age 20, inspiring his younger brother, my Uncle Don, to lie
about his age so he could get into combat, too. My dad made it home but Don did
not--he was killed in action, in the first Marine landing on Iwo Jima, February
1945. He was nineteen years old.

I
don't think my dad ever got over the terrible loss of his brother; the war was
a powerful influence on his character and thinking. Most of the life lessons I
learned from my dad sprang from perceptions born of his wartime experience:
Have confidence--you're as good as anyone else. We live in the best country in
the world. Tattoos are OK only if they're memorial crosses. Freedom is worth
any cost. Buy American. And--the Palmer House (where he and his unit did their
radio training) is the best hotel in Chicago.

When
my dad came home, in 1945, he was diagnosed with "battle fatigue."  The discharging physician recommended a job
that involved physical labor, independent work without constant supervision,
and friendly colleagues. My dad got a job delivering bread. He became a Teamster,
and was a loyal union member until he died, in 1980, of brain cancer. Another
lesson from my father:  The union keeps
us strong, and watches out for the little guy. When I joined the teachers'
union, in 1975, nobody was more pleased than my dad.

According
to my father, there are people with money and control, and there are people
whose assets are loyalty and community. He did not go into battle, or survive
having his plane shot down, for the benefit of the rich and powerful. He fought
for the rights of ordinary Joes to make a good living for their families, to
live in a country where their contributions were honored. The union was there
to protect justice for the working man.

I
thought about my dad when I read "Is Seniority Best Practice?" in the
Stories from School blog. The
blogger, Kim, shares her dismay over losing so many fine new teachers with
budget cuts in WA, and asks "...with all of the pressure being put on
teachers to meet professional standards through reflection and best practices,
shouldn’t the teachers who are doing that have some advantage?"

I know
what my dad would have said:  Seniority
protects loyal workers, when their bosses can replace them with someone
cheaper. And in a brutal economy, it's often difficult to determine whether
employers are valuing quality practice or merely seeking the lowest price.

Still--in
a profession critical to building human capacity, shouldn't exemplary practice
be rewarded above all else? In teaching, there must be a balance between
excellence and mere longevity. We owe that to our children, as much as we owe
fair employment practices to workers.

John Adams  said: I
was a warrior so my son could be a farmer--so his son could be a poet.  I would hate to think that my dad got up
every morning at 4:00 a.m., lugging heavy bread racks when he was 58 years old,
so that I could turn my back on fairness. But don't the blessings of liberty
include the right to an affordable, high-quality education for everyone--the
21st century ticket to opportunity? Isn't that also a right worthy of
sacrifice?

My father was also right
about the Palmer House: it's magnificent.

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