Web/Tech

Teacher Wall is the Social Network Teachers Have Been Waiting For

Teaching can often feel like a lonely job, but there are nearly 4 million of us in the U.S. plugging away at it everyday.

Having trouble getting your first-graders to transition from recess to class? Want some tips on how to teach the concept of density of middle-schoolers? There are many thousands of other people dealing with the same thing. Teacher need to connect with each other and the technology exists to do it.

Teacher Wall, backed by the Gates Foundation, is it. The press release describes it:

The Teacher Wall is a virtual town hall that gives teachers an opportunity to talk about the things that are most important to them--from challenges to "A-ha! moments," from lessons learned to job satisfaction, from curriculum to parent engagement. The topics tackled on the Teacher Wall showcase a wide range of voices and provide teachers with a chance to interact and share with one another, all while adding to the conversation on America's schools.

Hooray! One of the first features on Teacher Wall is a section asking teachers to describe successes they’ve achieved. At the Center for Teaching Quality retreat, I offered my two cents for Teacher Wall.

  

Maybe throwing this video out into cyberspace will help me connect with other AP Lit teachers. Or other teacher-writers. Who knows? Teachers are not facing challenges or earning their successes alone. This virtual resource will enrich students’ education by connecting teachers to one another. This is exciting stuff.

One Report, Many Revelations on Teacher and Student Assessment

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.

How to Graduate From College

Here is the recipe of high-impact levers for how to help students become first-generation college grads:

  1. Academic Rigor & Curriculum (Can they hang in there in their classes?)
  2. Social Skills (Do they have grit, self-discipline, tenacity, relationship-building, bureaucracy-navigating, networking, etc. skills?)
  3. College Matching (Are they pursuing and picking a school that is right from them?)
  4. Financial Aid (Can they pay for it all the way to graduation?)

FSG Social Impact Advisors developed this list and it makes sense. Commencement was last week and soon my former 12th-graders will scatter across the country as eager-eyed college freshmen. I can’t stop thinking nervously about whether they have these four tentpoles in place.

The data is terrifying. In 2006, a blockbuster report on Washington, D.C. students revealed:

  • 9 percent of D.C. high school freshmen graduate college within 5 years of graduating high school (compared to 23 percent nationally)
  • In Wards 7 and 8, only 5 percent of high school freshmen finish college within 5 years of graduating high school— and most of those are girls.

My school delivers numbers far above these horrendous averages, but we’re still nowhere near satisfied with many kids not finishing college. These stats were called to mind when I read Rick Hess’s interview with Richard Barth, CEO and President of the KIPP Foundation.

KIPP recently released a report stating: “As of March 2011, 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school ten or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college… KIPP’s college completion rate is four times the rate of comparable students from low-income communities across the country.”

Hess asked Barth how to raise those numbers. Barth’s response echoes the findings I listed above:

“The number one thing is academic rigor. We've committed to going kindergarten through twelfth grade in KIPP schools across the country. The original cohorts that we just [reported upon] only got fifth through eighth grade. So [we're going to] start with our kids earlier and stay with them longer. The second thing is we've got to do a much better job of finding the right match when it comes to college. We are sending too many of our kids off to campuses that have low graduation rates. We know that even at each level of selectivity, there are schools that have a much higher graduation rate than others. So we're convinced that one of the simplest and clearest things we can do is to form partnerships with colleges that are doing a better job of not just taking kids, but seeing that they finish. We also think we can do a better job of making sure our KIPPsters are better aware of the financial costs of college and are preparing for that.”

Barth is right. FSG is right. These four areas are where K-12 must focus.

The courage to change | Powerful Learning Practice

"Instead of a teacher-centered, textbook based Biology classroom, I shifted mine to a collaborative learning network. Instead of lectures, my students researched each unit. Sometimes individually. Sometimes in groups. Often they were responsible for teaching their peers. For in-class assignments, they often had to apply their knowledge to solve problems. Additionally, we created our own on-line textbook. How did it turn out? I’ll let you be the judge"

via plpnetwork.com

 

Take the time to read and think REALLY hard about the ideas being put forward over at Powerful Learning Practice Network by real teachers on the true cutting edge of education reform.

Then share it.

Cathie Black is Out in NYC: My Video Interview

Michael Bloomberg should not have changed the rules and run for a third term as mayor of New York. But he did and in his arrogance, he appointed a corporate crony with no experience in public education (as a student, parent, educator, or leader) to lead the country's largest public school system.

Fiasco. Cathie Black stepped down today. Students and their families in New York are the real losers for this vacuum of leadership. Here's my fake interview with Black, created when Bloomberg gave her the job. The video takes on a new dimension now that it's clear that this whole episode was a foreseeable disaster, not "superstar management."

 

 

Keeping Teachers Around (ANIMATED VIDEO)

Teacher recruitment is a hot topic in education policy. Last month I attended an Education Writers Association summit in New York, hosted by the Carnegie Corporation, on issues related to teacher quality, and the topic of teacher recruitment had its own panel. (See my teacher recruitment rant here.)

The teachers in the room raised a key issue that wasn't getting airtime: How do we keep our current talent? Good teachers are leaving the profession in droves. I've included some of my thoughts on this in the cartoon below. For a more polished argument see this excellent 3-part essay on teacher retention by teacher-blogger and fellow EWA summit attendee Stephen Lazar at GothamSchools.org.

 

Read This: Competitive Grants Do Not Help Rural Schools

The Rural School and Community Trust reports that in its most recent round of Investing in Innovation Grants (known as i3), the Department of Education "offered up to two bonus points if they included programs or strategies aimed at the particular challenges and needs of rural schools.

The result?

Of 49 recipients chosen, only 19 even claimed that some aspect of their grant would apply to rural schools, and most of those were not developed by or for rural schools, but were simply vague references to adapting innovations designed for urban settings. "Only two proposals are designed to operate entirely in rural schools."  Here's the link to the full story and report:

Taking Advantage: The Rural Competitive Preference in the Investing in Innovation Program: Rural School & Community Trust.

Rural schools exist in a context that is fundamentally different from the urban context that draws most of the attention of education policy makers and scholars. Certainly, rural students and educators share many challenges common to the education process everywhere. But they also face unique challenges. Those are the challenges that proposals claiming the rural competitive preference in i3 were supposed to address. With only a few exceptions, they did not. Open competition is not the best way to encourage educational innovation in a rural context.

Yet, President Obama says Race to the Top is the "most influential education reform of our generation," and it should be the model for ESEA reauthorization?  Guess those who aren't big enough or well-financed enough to compete just get left behind...

Best and Worst of Teaching in 2010

We did it. It’s winter break.

The lurch to the holidays is traditionally one of the hardest stretches of the year— the wastelands of early November and March are the up there too— but it’s all over now. We made it!

I’m about to take a few days away from classroom thoughts. I’m not going to worry about the midterm exams and study guides I have to create before January 3. Or my formal observation that happens the week we go back. Or my seniors who are melting down at the crux of college application season.

 It’s a sweet feeling. I started watching Breaking Bad, and it’s extremely good. I’m reading a novel— City of Thieves by David Benioff— purely for pleasure and I’m relishing every page. Today I slept till eight o’clock. Eight o’clock!

But before I let myself go into an interim period of mental hibernation, I want to take a glimpse back at 2010, and invite you to do the same in the comments section. As teachers, reflection is our lifewater.

BEST 3 MOMENTS TEACHING

  1. My students performing scenes from Henry V onstage at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. They completely impressed themselves after initial murmurs at the start of the unit that it was an impossible mission.
  2. Distributing copies of the senior class literary anthology to which all of my students had contributed.
  3. Finding out one of my top students had been accepted to his dream school, USC.

Observation: All of my favorite moments came at the end of the year. For most of the year you plant seeds, and the fruits rarely show until the end, after the end, or out of your sight.

WORST 3 MOMENTS TEACHING

  1. Realizing that I had not adequately kept in touch with a parent whose kid was failing. The parent gave me an earful and I deserved it. The focus should have been on the student who had fallen down on her responsibilities, but I muddled the situation by not being on top of my end.
  2.  Drawing significantly lower than hoped-far attendance at parent-teacher  conferences.
  3. Witnessing one of my favorite students experience a complete academic collapse.

Observation: Some things are out of my control, but I need to do everything I can to encourage kids on the fringe. When I don’t, catastrophe ensues and I’m a complicit party. It feels awful.

BEST EDUCATION BOOKS

  1. The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
  2. The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond
  3. A Set of 35: Notes of Those Who Made It by the SEED Public Charter School Class of 2010

BEST STUFF TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2011

  1. Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools… Now and in the Future by Barnett Berry & the TeacherSolutions 2030 team of brilliant teacher-heroes.
  2. The American Public School Teacher: Past, Present and Future, a comprehensive volume drawing on 50 years of education data and featuring commentaries from a host of stakeholders, including yours truly. More information to come as publication nears.
  3. Race to Nowhere, a documentary film on pressures plaguing our teens 

What was memorable in your 2010?

 

Counting Down to Teaching 2030

I can not wait to get my reading paws on Teaching 2030, a visionary book project from a team of teacher-heroes at the Center for Teaching Quality.

The book aims to offer the clearest path forward to a better reality for students and teachers in the next 2 decades. Without incendiary, sanctimonious rhetoric (Michelle Rhee-style) or the ideology of edu-privatization (Bloomberg), the TeacherSolutions team blends exhaustive data analysis, on the ground experience, and out-of-the-box thinking to arrive at their smart, much-needed proposals.

I’ve read bits of the project, and even contributed a short piece on my charter school, as it came together, and now we are only 3 short weeks away from the January 9 publication date. Here are the vital areas that the team addresses to whet your appetite.

  • Creating a dynamic and flexible learning environment for students and teachers, and powerful new ways to define and measure school success;
  • Transforming public education through digital technologies while reinventing brick and mortar school buildings into 24/7 hubs of community support for students and families;
  • Re-imagining teaching as a well-compensated career with many pathways, assuring that every child has qualified and effective teachers and that teaching expertise is constantly spread, in and out cyberspace;
  • Establishing a new leadership force of 600,000 “teacherpreneurs”—classroom experts who continue to teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, policy researchers, community organizers, and trustees of their profession.

Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System was the education book of 2010. The TeacherSolutions team, led by Barnett Berry, has delivered the education book of 2011.

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