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

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. 

 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.

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

Before I wrap up here, a couple of thoughts about the Network of Michigan Educators and our mission. Mike Schmidt of Ford Motor Company said yesterday that we need to move from continuous improvement to continuous innovation, in industry and...