Teachers as Leaders

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

 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.

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. 

 At
10:38 this morning, I got an e-message from a mildly progressive group that
sends me regular (requested) e-mails on political and economic issues. The
subject line: Reality Check on Health Care Lies. At 11:01 a.m. this morning I
got a message from one of the women in my virtual book group. Subject line:
Information on the Obama Death Plan.

Now--I
like the women in this book group. I share lots of personal information with
them--my feelings on literary themes, love and life. I respect them. And I can
only assume that the woman who sent the "death plan" forward
(which--to make matters worse--came from her shady-pants congressman) has
strong feelings on retaining her health care. I respect those too.  

While
I was staring at the flat-out falsehoods and phony bogeymen on my screen, and
wondering how much money Big Pharma and Big Insurance are ponying up to
preserve their dominance in perpetuity, another book club member took a deep
breath and hit "reply to all." Hey, she said. This is too important!
We have to get health care right--and we're not going to do it unless a little
civility and rationality can be injected into the discussion.

By
12:01, Book Club Member #2 had been both warmly supported and excoriated
(sample: You obviously live in the
Twilight Zone, you freak
), and the hostilities had enlarged to include a
rundown of the negative impact of Equal Rights Amendment  on school sports (yeah--I know--it never
actually passed--but when you're on a roll, why stop for the facts...). 

So--whom
do you trust?

For
me, that's the critical question on all of the issues alive and bubbling in the
Home of the Free. I have little faith in political parties--either of them, at
the moment--although individual political figures do inspire me to trust. As do
some education thinkers, non-profits, writers, scholars, friends.

At
12:47, I got a link to this blog, wherein the Eduflack wonders what happened to
raging dissent in education policy world. He dismisses certain parties who are speaking now  as chronic whiners (including dissatisfied
Chicago Public Schools parent groups)--and suggests that
people had better start pushing back against favored policy initiatives or they
"will have little ground to stand on
if they want to play 'I told you so' a year or two from now."

None
of this--attack now or lose your right to attack later?--strikes me as
productive talk, the kind of dialogue that might lead us to making better
decisions about education.

At
1:05 p.m., while eating my lunch, I noticed that Heather Wolpert-Gawron had
posted a new blog. Heather is a person whose viewpoints I do trust--not just
because she's a teacher (there are lots of untrustworthy teachers)--but because
she's smart and knows whereof she speaks, when it comes to schools and kids. A
quick clip from Heather's musings (prodded by an article in which Arne Duncan
says it's likely that the swine flu will impact school attendance and wouldn't
it be great if teachers would use this health crisis to inject innovative technology
into their instruction):

But once
again, schools are being put to the task of solving a problem that the other
elements have a hand in creating and solving. After all, families with no
healthcare and no childcare options continuously send their sick children to
school. And the government has never devoted enough funds to develop
deep-seated educational technology in our schools. Yet here we are, a la NCLB,
with a missive and no guidance or enough resources.

The
funny part about Arne Duncan's message? He trusts that teachers will try to do
the right thing for kids, come the great swine flu epidemic.

 It's 4:30, and I'm weary of reading angry e-mail.
I'm wondering whether a country where rugged individualism is celebrated above
other values--where "get them before they get you" is our modus
operandi--can ever elevate mutual benefits to the community over "me and
mine first." Another funny thing: trust in schools absolutely raises
student achievement
.  You know where they
did the critical research? Chicago.

“In schools characterized by high relational trust,
educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together
with parents and colleagues to advance improvements. As a result, these schools
were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In
contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in
their reading or mathematics scores."                  
Anthony Bryk &
Barbara Schneider


Image: seenyaRita, Flickr Creative Commons

 Help
me out here, teachers. When you're weary and feeling small and so on--where do
you turn for musical inspiration? What songs and artists ring your good-teacher
chimes? If you never use music in this way, preferring chocolate, text-messaging
in the lounge, or watching "Freedom Writers" on HBO again, I'd like
to suggest that music has tremendous power to leverage personal and systemic change.
What music is your personal door to hope and sunshine?

I
have painted this verbal picture to my students many times:

Imagine
a well-dressed, prosperous man and woman from an earlier generation, he in topcoat
and fedora, she in leather gloves and a coat with a fur collar. In this black
and white film, they are looking almost rapturously off into the distance.
Between them is a little girl, holding their hands, her sweet face framed by a hat,
tied with a big bow under her chin. They all appear to be speaking, looking
excitedly at something far away. As the camera moves back, we begin to hear the
soundtrack. The family of three is singing--and soon we see and hear that they
are part of a large throng of people, all of whom are singing with great fervor
and pride. The perspective widens; the crowd is massive, and they are all
focused on a single man standing on a balcony. 

The
man is Adolph Hitler. The song they are singing is Deustschland Uber Alles ("Germany Above All").  Songs are powerful, I tell my students. Songs
can unify nations (or 100,000 Michigan fans in the Big House, something that
many of them have personally experienced)--or send men willingly into battle. A
good song can bring tears to our eyes, stir jubilant memories --or make us get
up and dance. Hitler, using cheap crystal radios, effectively turned patriotic
music into a terrible and authoritarian social movement. I saw the film clip
described above at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

How
about a more benign and progressive movement: music to honor and inspire the
work of teachers? Music
to lift their spirits and help them find their common joys? I will be meeting
with a few educators next week to work on a teacher leadership project, and I
want to bring them a mix CD of songs for teacher leaders.

Songs
that I have considered: If I Were Brave,
Have a Little Faith,
and One Love (from
the Playing for Change CD--where all
the songs could be considered germane to teaching, learning, believing in the
power of the human spirit to educate). My friend and fellow traveler Mary
Tedrow sent a link to Born Again American,
a rallying cry if there ever was one. I wonder: is it too political to be
included in a CD of songs for teacher leadership? Then I decide that teacher
leadership is all about politics.

Help
me out here. Please send suggestions for the very best music--a little jazz, a
little country, a little rock and roll--for teachers.

 

Thanks to my
friend Rosemary Woods for the wonderful image, shot a couple days ago in Tucson.

Arne Duncan
likes to lay it down, doesn't he? His recent spate of pronouncements--national
standards as goalposts, more time needed to achieve an internationally
competitive education, an assertion that mayors have the right stuff to improve
city schools--have been fodder for a number of hot discussions at the Teacher
Leaders Network
. And now we learn that $16 billion dollars of newly
manufactured stimulus money will be used to fix our critically ill public schools
by...(timpani roll) generating and analyzing more test data.

So--does
Arne Duncan have even one or two innovative ideas?

TLN members
keep trying to get a bead on a coherent picture of New Directions in ed policy.
After a long, convoluted discussion about why policymakers seem to keep heading
down familiar paths, David Cohen, an English teacher in Palo Alto, California,
wrote this (below). I think it's brilliant, and captures, in 175 words, what's
wrong with the current state of policy-making. David is my nominee for
Unrecognized Person Who Should Be Running Things. He said:

Let me know
if I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.

Compare our
top-performing schools and our weakest performing schools by looking at test
scores, graduation rates, whatever measure you want.

Do you find
that most top-performing schools are running many more hours per day, or more
days per year?

Do you find
that the top-performing schools have that much more, or better data?

Do you find
that they are more likely to have linked student data to teachers?

Do you find
that the top-performing schools have a maniacal focus on test preparation?

No, no, no,
no.

Do you find
that they are disproportionately in affluent communities?

Do you find
that they have greater parent and community involvement, including supplemental
funding?

Do you find
that they have a better trained, higher paid, and more stable teaching staff?

Do you find
that they tend to have an enriched and varied curriculum, including arts and
various other electives?

Yes, yes,
yes, yes.

Then, if
you're a politician, the solution is clear: national standards, longer school
day, focus on basics, more data!

Hey,
David--thanks for letting me swipe your quote, and sorry about the picture. I looked
through 35 pages of Google images. There are more guys named David Cohen than
you'd think.

This blog--the first in a series on testing--is written by guest blogger and Teacher Leaders Network member Marjorie Larner, an instructional coach and facilitator in Colorado.

"Now that the Data Quality Campaign has put
data quality on the map, we need to work together to leverage this work and
push it to the next level by using data to drive reform.
The path to real reform begins with the
truth - and we must keep facing the truth and finding the answers until
every classroom has a great teacher, and every child has an education that
prepares him for college, for work, and for life."
 Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Data
Quality Campaign Forum
.

What is Secretary Duncan using as the basis
for this truth he says we must face? What does he
think constitutes data that
is evidence of the truth about
education to prepare children for college, work and life? We have been immersed
in data-driven instruction and decision-making. Some schools are now wholly devoted
to producing good data, defined by standardized test scores. Students’ success
or failure depends on test performance, with perhaps a nod to graduation or
attendance rates. Secretary Duncan calls for "data driven school reform"--while
President Obama acknowledges that using standardized test scores as the measure
of good or bad teaching creates other problems.

These kinds of public statements demand a
definition of specific outcomes aligned with instruments that gather valid,
reliable and relevant data--all  kinds of
evidence of student progress toward agreed-upon outcomes. Those of us working
in the field now have an opportunity to offer advice and ideas based on our
real work experience--because as of this moment, we are still committed to standardized
tests.

Here's a story about a school I worked in
many years ago. Their test scores were very high. One year, all 3rd graders got
a perfect score in reading, but the numbers for writing were weaker. In the
following years, the district used this information to launch a required
school-wide focus on writing. We gave the kids the message that they were weak
in writing, and needed to improve.  We also
paid for a few released test items ($7 for one student’s response to one item),
to analyze these weaknesses. We realized that the students were all proficient
and advanced on the actual writing samples. It was the multiple-choice
questions, where they had to choose an answer with no context, where they lost
points. What did this tell us about the data we had used to “drive” our
instruction for several years? They knew how to apply the rules to actual
writing, but their actual “weakness” was choosing between tricky
multiple-choice answers on isolated rules for writing. Should we spend less
time teaching them to be writers, in order to work on testing strategies for multiple
choice? Should we drill them on memorizing the rules? What would this do for
them, in their lives as writers? What effect would this kind of teaching have
on their skills and motivation for real writing?

I have now been working for two years in a
school that is based on a big vision for every students' active participation
and positive contribution in the 21st century world. Measures on standardized
tests are inadequate to assess the internalized habits, dispositions, skills
and knowledge that we see our students developing: capacity for leadership,
creativity in overcoming constraints, active willingness to help others, issue
analysis using multiple perspectives, belief in their own responsibility and
agency, ability to build a case or analyze another's argument. It is not easy
or simple, nor could it be standardized to hold teachers and students who were
not committed to this particular vision "accountable."

But I have seen students challenged and
inspired to work hard, investigate, create, strive for greatness in all
subjects--and still not consistently score well on a test.  I feel a very deep responsibility for these
children’s growth and well-being. After ten years of accepting accountability
for test scores, with increasingly narrowed results for kids, I now feel passionate
about communicating the truth of what it means for our students’ future
prospects if we continue to rely on standardized tests as the measure and
definition of success. We need to learn from our experiences with the limits of
standardized tests. We must develop strong alternatives for gathering evidence
of progress, aligned with a clear vision of who our students will become, what
they need to know and be able to do as a result of their years in school. 

 As an educator with a background in
qualitative assessment, it breaks my heart to see children’s
abilities and
potential reduced to test scores, their days in schools reduced to test
preparation, teaching reduced to scripted lessons and canned curricula. The
truth about data? I'm frustrated, and it's not because I do not believe in
accountability, rigor or quality teaching-- but precisely because I do.

Image: TEST/Sidelong/Creative Commons

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