I’m leading a faculty book club on Daniel Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? The subtitle is a mouthful: A Cognitive Science Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means For the Classroom. It’s the most eye-opening edu-book I’ve read in quite some time. Each chapter addresses a different core question asked by teachers like. “How Should I Adjust My Teaching for Different Types of Learners?” and “Why Do Students Remember Everything That’s on Television and Forget Everything I Say?” I highly recommend it.

In the chapter on different types of learners, Willingham makes a compelling case that the theory that students are either visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners is bogus and kept alive by confirmation bias— the need to seek support for something we want to believe. When instruction matches a student’s supposed cognitive style (they learn better through seeing images, hearing sounds, or making physical contact with materials), optimal results do not follow. He explains (italics are mine):

Most of the time students need to remember what things mean, not what they look like or sound like. Sure, sometimes that information counts; someone with a good visual memory will have an edge in memorizing the particular shapes of countries on a map, for example, and someone with a good auditory memory will be better at getting the accent right in a foreign language. But the vast majority of schooling is concerned with what things mean, not what they look like or sound like.

This blows a hole in the conventional wisdom about differentiation.

The whole book is not this “Grinch-like,” a comparison that Willingham invites for the chapter on different types of learners. It’s an illuminating and substantive book— all insight and evidence, no fluff.

Get it, teachers.

What might happen if we asked a group of teachers who have consistently demonstrated themselves to be highly effective to “craft a new vision of a teaching profession that is led by teachers and ensures teacher and teaching effectiveness”?

As the NEA recently discovered, you might get the unexpected.

After much examination and debate, the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT) put forward several recommendations, ideas, and challenges, some specifically to the NEA, but also to teacher preparation programs, school districts, state and federal education agencies, lawmakers, and teachers ourselves.

One of the most significant of these recommendations is the call for a National Council for the Teaching Profession to establish a consistent system of preparation, licensure, and certification of all teachers and teacher educators.

According to our report, this “NCTP will work to ensure that each state’s teaching standards are no less rigorous than the national standards. Alignment among state standards will facilitate teacher quality and mobility from state to state” (7).

Few people realize how difficult it is for teachers who are licensed in one state to move and teach in another. In our increasingly mobile society, that is not just an economic inconvenience, it also makes it unnecessarily difficult for schools and districts to recruit and retain teachers their students desperately need.  A coordinated system would end the confusing patchwork of teacher preparation programs and dissonant licensure rules across the country.

The uneven quality of teaching in America is directly proportional to our chaotic and archaic approaches to teacher preparation, certification, and evaluation.  My Teacher Leader colleagues and I, in our book, Teaching 2030, summarized the sad state of affairs at that point:

• Over 600 alternative certification programs offering abbreviated pedagogical training (usually just a few weeks) to novices before placing them in some of the most challenging teaching situations.
• 43 states require teacher candidates to pass some type of written subject area test, but only five require them to demonstrate knowledge of how to teach the subject.
• Only 39 states require potential teacher candidates to do student teaching, and that may range from 8 to 20 weeks (out of the average 36 week school year).
• In most places there are no requirements for who gets to supervise student teachers and no requirements that those supervisors should themselves be effective teachers who know how to mentor new recruits.

 The CETT calls for a coordinated effort, building on work done by other groups and stakeholders in teacher preparation, accreditation, licensure, and standards to weave this disparate but overlapping work into one coherent system that is “consistent, efficient, and cost effective” (7).  In our vision of such a system, teacher licensure would have a multi-tiered system: initial licensure, awarded by individual states; then one or more additional tiers of fully portable national licenses that “certify accomplished preparation and practice” (7).

 An important part of our recommendations on this point was the idea that those who hold leadership (administrative) positions in education and those who work in teacher preparation programs, should be effective teachers and have earned these same certifications. In fact, this entire national certification process should be led by effective teachers.

 Do you agree with us that teaching should begin to function like a true profession?

Our best teachers are almost dangerously self-sacrificing, grossly underpaid, and frustratingly overly trained for what they are allowed to do.

The Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Initiative (NMI) teams should be writing education policy. The latest report by Washington NMI’s teacher-researchers How Better Teacher & Student Assessment Can Power Up Learning offers several crucial insights into the raging debate on assessment.

The whole report is worth a read, but here are a few highlights:

Every high-performing nation [represented at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession] has created a strong partnership between government officials, school administrators, and teachers in crafting effective teaching and learning policies.

We’re a long way from enjoying those strong partnerships. The NMI team of teachers examining policy can hopefully help to build some bridges.

From Katie Micek: I’m envisioning state testing to not be an end-of-year event, but a regular set of smaller assessments that relate to pacing guides set by districts and aligned to state standards.

Done right, this would be better for increasing learning and decreasing the heart-pounding stress that accompanies test season. However, the report does caution that Washington state’s WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) tests were developed constructively with teachers, only to be co-opted into becoming reductive high-stakes bubble tests.

The term “multiple measures” is a big term right now. Arne Duncan endorses the use of value-added test scores (which the Washington NMI report emphatically opposes) among multiple measures of teacher effectiveness. The NMI report spells out what those multiple measures should be: teacher self-evaluation, self-chosen artifacts, peer evaluation, classroom videotape or observation, measures of student learning, pedagogical/subject-area knowledge, leadership, student feedback, parent evaluation.

I like it. It’s like National Board Certification on steroids.                                                            

Perhaps the most illuminating piece in the report, though, is tying student learning to the support of professional learning communities of teachers. The strength of a school lies in its educators’ ability to function as a team. The report’s insight on the power of effective PLC systems is crucial. According to the report, PLCs require: supportive and shared leadership, collective creativity, shared personal practice, and supportive conditions including time and resources.

This is the right way to go. And the all-time expert on PLCs is TransformEd blogger Bill Ferriter. His  book Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year is the road map for how to make this happen. (He also blogs about this stuff all the time.)

The Washington New Millennium Initiative teachers have offered up actionable solutions that take into account the realities of teaching. Their work needs to be shared as widely as possible.

I just read my favorite young adult novel in quite some time: A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie, the first book by teacher-author Matt Blackstone. The story is a journey inside the head of Rene Fowler, a lonely, frustrated, dreaming teenager dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Rene’s voice is distinctive and unique and he leads the reader on a character-driven trip worth taking.

First lines of the book:

Legs are my favorite part. I never snap them off with a single bite. I nibble on them slowly as I work my way up. I crunch bony ankles, gnaw on slender calves. Knees are a delicacy; canine teeth are ideal for chipping cartilage. Thighs - oh sweet, sweet thighs - must be savored, eaten like a sacred drumstick. Thick and long and often hairy, a torso is best swallowed whole. The neck is delicious, but fragile: one bite and all I have left is a tiny head resting on my fingertips.

Animal crackers. They’re a great snack, but they aren’t great company. Real animals make better pets. Dogs are a man’s best friend, but I am allergic to dogs. I am allergic to cats, guinea pigs, ferrets, gerbils, parrots, sheep, horses, and goats. So I chose bugs.

Rene is an exhausting but rewarding protagonist. His story in A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie is best enjoyed in one intense immersion, which is how I used to enjoy my favorite books when I was fifteen.

Rene struggles with navigating outsiderhood at school, an estranged father, a sympathetic teacher experiencing a breakdown, an unrequited crush, and seething animosity for groups of peer villains dubbed “Bigbulletholes” and “Devilblackcoats.” Events take a turn for Rene when he links up with charismatic Gio, and then the book soars in its final act when the two teens embark on an exhilarating if misbegotten escape to New York City.

This book is a winner for teen readers. I wish I’d had it around when I was fifteen.

Blackstone still teaches high school English in the South Bronx. Writing a book that honestly and engagingly portrays students' (and teachers') inner lives = True teacher leadership. 

The whole first chapter of A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie is available here.