Unquestionably, one of the best things I ever did for my students and for my professional career was participating in a National Writing Project summer workshop. The Delta Area Writing Project not only introduced me to effective writing strategies to use with my students, but also put me in touch with several strong networks of teachers, the combined effects of which have made a tremendous difference in the success of my work inside and outside of the classroom.

A recent EdWeek article highlights the NWP and its renewed focus on the importance of writing in developing the thinking skills of students in all subject areas. NWP is part of a grassroots movement among teachers of writing to revolutionize and standardize writing instruction, and to embed writing across the curriculum as an integral part of the education of every student.

Of course, NWP Workshops are not panacea for all that ails American education. A summer workshop can only introduce teachers to writing strategies and possibilities (the work of NWP continues through networking and follow-up long after the initial attendance).  Also, the quality of the NWP experience varies from one project site to another, although the leadership does try to exercise some control over the consistency.

The biggest problem facing the movement is teachers going back into schools/districts that discourage or actually block them from using these highly effective teaching and learning strategies with the students who would most benefit from them, especially high needs/high risk students. Developing thinking and writing skills takes time, and too often these important learning experiences are ordered aside in favor of faster, less effective teaching methods that allow for greater coverage of test material or faster computation of scores.

The EdWeek article also referenced the 2003 Report of the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, which states:

Writing, always time-consuming for student and teacher, is today hard-pressed in the American classroom. Of the three "Rs," writing is clearly the most neglected. The nation's leaders must place writing squarely in the center of the school agenda, and policymakers at the state and local levels must provide the resources required to improve writing.

President Bush has tried repeatedly to cut NWP's federal support; fortunately, even members of his own party (like Mississippi's Sen. Thad Cochran) recognize its value and continue to fight for it. Rather than attack it, the President and his education appointees would do well to study NWP as a model for what could be truly effective educational reform.

As if to answer the question I raised in my last post, I came across this comment by James (aka Mr. J, of The Mind Prepares) on a really great discussion over at The Faculty Room,:

I too have observed how decisions are made on the state and national level, yet it is the teacher in the trenches that has to find ways to implement them. That is one of the reasons I left teaching in the public schools because eventually they were going to catch me dancing around their rules and teaching my students the way I knew would work. I satisfied them by raising the test scores but I did it without their curriculum. Now, due the the bureaucracy, I teach in a private school where I am allowed to do things my way and still keep everything above board.

My question to others about “The Frontline” is: what are we going to do about it? I grew tired of complaining and made a lateral move that only benefits me and the select few students I teach. My state’s teacher’s union is weak and bogged down in their own ridiculous politics, out politicians talk a good game before election season and then suffer from memory loss after. I am tired of complaining and rubbing my woes with others, or closing my classroom door to “do my thing”, or making idle threats of leaving the profession. So I ask other teachers: what are we going to do about it?

James asks the right question: What are we going to do about it?

A good start might be: “A Call to Leadership: An Open Letter to America’s National Board Certified Teachers” contained within a recent report on National Board Certification released by the Center for Teaching Quality. Written by ten of my colleagues here at Teacher Leader Network who are also NBCTs, the full report is their analysis of the spate of reports released recently on the effectiveness of National Board teachers. Although the letter (pgs. 11-13) is addressed specifically to Board Certified teachers, I think there is much in it that all good teachers can agree upon and DO to move us from a place of just complaining or leaving, to one of actually taking charge of our profession.

The authors argue: "It is time for us to begin leading from the classroom, to be our own best advocates for positive change — for policies and practices we know from experience will work. We cannot wait to be invited to the policy table. Nor can we wait for any organization or initiative to guide us, endorse us, or train us. We invite their support, but we must begin at once to find our own voices, to hone our core messages, and develop our own leadership ideas and muscle, both personally and collectively" (12).

They offer six specific steps teachers can take, without permission, to help change both the perception and the reality of the teaching profession.  I especially like the last suggestion: "Design our own collaborative experiences for professional learning and leadership development, creating a robust vision of what it means to be an effective teacher leader and pursuing that vision together" (13).

Another of my favorite bloggers, Ted Nellen of CyberEnglish, shared this quotation (which he also uses with his students and in his signature):

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." --Buckminister Fuller

While I slightly disagree with Fuller, (I don't believe we can change things just by fighting the existing reality), it is within our power to build new models of how to shape policy, how to prepare teachers, how to assess what students know and what teachers do. We have the means and the mediums now to build such models; do we have the will?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Denotation = The dictionary definition.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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