John -

It feels so good to be back! I’ve only been able to differentiate day and night by the amount of buzz I hear outside. With my newborn’s eating schedule out of rhythm right now, we’ve gently tried to encourage him to take the 2-3 hours route so we can get some sleep in the intervals.

In your blog post, “Learning How To Be Principled,” you said:

“if [Matt Damon] met Kilian, or some of the other former TFA fellows like Sophia Pappas, Executive Director of the NYC Office of Early Childhood Education, or Jennifer Rosenbaum, Director of Instruction and Performance, he might think twice about refusing on principle. He might decide to use the recognition by the NEA as an opportunity to express a more nuanced opinion that might make a substantive difference [...] his refusal to accept a recognition from the National Education Association on principle makes his passion in Washington look more like a publicity stunt than a passionate belief. It also casts whatever strides towards teacher voice that were gained in D.C. in the shadow of Damon as just another education advocate against reform. I don’t really think this is the case but it puts my own perspective in relief. How can we have strong opinions without arguing for arguments’ sake. In this case, disagreeing on principle actually made him seem less principled to me because he squandered an opportunity.”

Well, first, let me say that I found him fairly genuine at the protest, and the earnest with which he approaches his work solidifies his solid reputation. Having said that, I don’t believe that all their contentions about Teach for America (and other alternative certification programs) are prudent. As someone who graduated from NYC Teaching Fellows, I don’t consider myself unprepared for the classroom. Frankly, some of us can jump in to the classroom and learn on the job for different reasons. It really depends on whether or not the school has the right staff to supplement the perceived lack of training for our newest teachers.

But that’s the equivalent of pulling hairs. I do believe in the idea of teacher residency as a model for training teachers, and that seems to get the most bang for its buck. I also believe that we as a country can come up with a handful of tenets that we of like spirit can come up with that will generate the best achievement for students. When I was younger, I used to believe that having a really small unit of people who believed in about 95% of the same things can get the most accomplished. I used to believe that all the groups I saw running together all believed in the same things and had the same behaviors.

As I’ve gotten older and seen how different movements work, I’ve noticed that, whether charitable or nefarious, the most effective movements have a small, malleable, and memorable set of core beliefs and tenets for their congregation. Obviously, the core team of Teaching 2030 represents that. The diversity in ed-thought reigned supreme over the diversity of experiences, but we all held a few core beliefs that make our partnership so unique. Items like student learning, teacher voice, and social value on education all matter to us, and we always took our conversations (and disagreements) back to that. We never needed reminders about respect, professionalism, and care because it was assumed that we had those three tenets concretely affirmed for us.

Some of this plays itself out in other venues where the amount of people is inversely proportional to the amount of tenets these people can agree upon. Once we strike a nice balance between those tenets. That’s why, unlike my colleagues who look for ideological purity, I can shake hands with a much broader set of people. Like Art Wise. Like Deborah Meier. Like Diane Ravitch. Like Pedro Noguera.

Like Matt Damon. I don’t know what else played into the decision of dissenting against the NEA award, but I wonder if there was more space to discuss the nuances of the alternative certification discussion. It’s my background and I wouldn’t know what to do myself if, after graduating from four years of undergraduate school, I’d have to go through another four years for education. Then again, Dr. Carlsson-Paige, Mr. Damon, and I agree on about 90% of things in education. Actually, Mr. Betlach might be in that boat as well. The passion for education is certainly there.

Let’s find a way to find those tenets we hold dear to us and build from there. I’m sure we can think of something.

Hey John,

As the year comes to a close, there’s a collection of very bold and progressive teachers voicing their opinions on the hot item of the moment: teacher evaluation. Some of my favorites include Renee Moore’s The Future Is Now for Teacher Evaluation and Michael Moran’s Context Matters. In each of these essays, there’s accurate and nuanced reflection about the profession and, more importantly, there’s a sense that we can’t rely on a random, outside observer handing out standardized tests as a measure of what the kids actually know and / or what the teacher actually taught.

From Renee:

How can we evaluate such rich complexity with all the varying levels of performance and experience they represent across the largest profession in America—with a few five-minute walk-bys and a checklist? Hardly. The old factory evaluation model, which was never a good fit for education, will be even less so as we move further into the potential of immersed learning and interconnected teaching. One principal trying to evaluate an entire faculty whose members practice a dizzying variety of pedagogical skills will be painfully ineffective. Like our students, teachers need assessment of our work based on a combination of measures and reviewers, with teachers taking responsibility for our own professional growth based on mutually established, student-centered goals.

To get there from here will require transformed thinking and some significant power shifts, neither of which, history reminds us, come easily. But I believe we are on the verge of such a shift as teaching finally morphs into a true profession. One of the trademarks of a profession is peer review of each others’ work against high standards established by the profession.

From Michael:

So, what should teacher evaluations look like? They should look like the teacher. They should look like the students and the classroom in which those students learn. Teacher evaluations should look like the grade level, content area, and community the teacher teaches. They should look like the goals that teachers, students, and administrators set for themselves, their classes, and the school as a whole.

The point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of the evidence that indicates teacher effectiveness is dependent on context. Sure, great teachers are great leaders, and great leaders can lead anywhere, but you run into a problem when an art teacher is evaluated on the standardized test results of one grade level in mathematics. Evaluations need to be multifaceted, taking into consideration not only student performance on standardized tests, but the academic growth of students as demonstrated by a portfolio of artifacts, the relationships that teachers build with students and their parents as demonstrated by student and family evaluative surveys, and observations from not only administrators, but peers and master teachers.

Powerful pieces there. Read the rest (and more opinions) here.

We are in a profession that needs voices on the school level discussing teaching. With so much misinformation getting out about the teaching profession, it’s not enough for teachers to stand by and let evaluation happen to that. We ought to shape policy and create our own solutions.

John,

I must say I appreciated your views on National Board for Professional Teaching Standards in a way that only a non-NBCT can. You brought out an important aspect of finding the appropriate leader for such a prestigious organization: finding the right archetype. Much of the criticisms you laid out, particularly where you call out the leadership for their bureaucratic style, point to the need to create different visions for leadership.

Missing in the dialogue to improve schools is this aspect of who evaluates teachers. People discussed items like common rubrics to use as a lens to limit the biases these evaluators come in with when looking at teaching in the classroom. Doesn’t that beg the question: shouldn’t the person who evaluates the teacher in the classroom have ultimately been an educator themselves? By that, I mean that they could have been a teacher, a principal, an instructional coach, or any level of academic savant in the building, and done so at a competent level.

(Not ironically, “competent” tends to be judged best by the very people who work right next to each other and those learning from those people).

Your choice of Renee Moore speaks volumes of what you believe about the profession. Yes, her voice demonstrates the awesome possibilities of having someone who understands the inner workings of teaching from a policy standpoint that’s ripe with depth about all types of children, not just the ones that stand to benefit from our current policy. She amalgamates the best from the past, present, and future of education, certainly. What we most appreciate about Renee is that she is a teacher’s teacher. I’ve never had a chance to traverse the Mississippi Delta, but I’ll put all my money on the fact that people observe her teaching as the barometer for effective teaching.

Yet, the power of people like her isn’t just in their teaching; it’s in their ability to translate that to those that don’t understand teaching on different levels. Yes, the first step to getting to this point is by elevating the teacher voice to where it’s less like a teachers’ lounge and more like a teachers’ roundtable, with teachers like Renee at the fore. In the comments, I noticed that Renee declined the offer for head of NBPTS, but the prototype makes sense: a person who can talk about the heights of good teaching and can translate that to a captive audience of non-educators and simultaneously has done that which they’ve spoken about to the masses.

While we try and find another one of her [we won't], the future has to push us in a direction where we elevate the profession from within our ranks. We have to lead the charge on these pieces, and if it means we develop the standards internally, then that’s what we’re doing. If it means setting up ways for all these expert teachers to run up to the lead to 2030, then that’s what we’re doing. We can even model this right in our schools, where we’re visiting each others’ classroom not to criticize, but to critique and offer questions.

Thus, when these leaders ascend into positions where they naturally bring forth into positions where they’re not just thinking of teaching in one classroom, but in multiple classrooms. I believe that was the principle, rather principal, premise of having a principal, or any leader really.

p.s. – This was a belated posting for Leadership Day 2011 hosted by Scott McLeod.

John,

Thanks for the high praises. Always appreciated. The event you mentioned is sponsored largely by voices like yours and mine. Here’s something I continually push for in our position as people writing for the future: we need to invest heavily in the teacher voice. My godmother-I-wish-I-actually-had Renee Moore wrote an excellent piece about her emergence as the awesome teacher she is, and the spiritual journey that accompanied that emergence. It shook my heart reading it because it reminded me how important our work to elevate teacher voice is.

As I told you in my last post, I had the privilege of seeing the creators and assessors of the Common Core State [and possibly National] Standards this past week at Orlando’s GE Futures of Education Conference. As I sat there watching presenter after intelligent presenter, it occurred to me that during this process, I had seen only one K-12 educator speak about their experiences in the classroom.  Some districts allowed teachers to offer their opinions, but in too many others, their efforts were ignored or shunned by the very people who should work on teachers’ behalf. While I do believe strongly in building coalitions with non-educators of like interest, I also see how detrimental such a relationship is when the other comes to the table without a decent amount of respect and / or knowledge about the efforts of the teachers on the front lines.

For that reason, our work won’t stop after this weekend. We must continue to insist on being equal partners in the lives of our children. While critics ask why teachers don’t get the same treatment in terms of job security, they often ignore how devalued a teaching professional’s voice gets in the midst of our ostensible leaders. Where I often critique my own union leaders is in here as well. While we pay union dues to assure that we have some advocacy for our rights, I also see where they could teach their own members how to advocate effectively for their classrooms and their schools.

For instance, we need to lend our voices around the instructional pieces of these discussions. We must discuss working conditions, testing, and rights as professionals, but we have enough people that we don’t have to lose our linchpin. We have to continue pushing the idea that, as trained professionals, we will put forth our greatest efforts and continue working towards becoming the best professionals for the 12-20-30-40 students in front of us daily. Even during the creation of Teaching 2030, many of us struck different notes about this realistic future we sought to build together.

But only one thing mattered: our voices collaborated in harmony.

The American public in general trusts their local teachers, and teachers are often ranked amongst the most trusted public servants in this country. We have an audience willing to listen. And they don’t even have to raise their hands for us to call on them. We just have to say things like we mean them.

John,

I can’t believe we’re already on Spring Break (whatever “break” means for either of us). With only a few weeks left for New York State’s assessments in English and math, teachers all over my state have mixed feelings about this break. On the one end, it’s probably the most important break we get because we’re so spent from this “crunch time.” On the other end, we’re hoping that our students come back ready to do well on their exams and at least retain enough information so we can just “refresh” them on topics instead of re-teaching them. This is the present mentality we have in New York, all across the nation. In general, the trend towards holding everyone accountable for tests that may or may not measure our students’ actual learning is imprudent at best, yet, because of the environment we live in, we still fall back into this mode of teaching even as we hold these ideals about what testing should look like.

Your piece about iPads in the young classroom reminds me of the power in having technology available to us in the classroom, and having access to such tech is vital for this fast-paced world. It should also shake anyone who believes that they can be the center for all knowledge. It also reminds me that, because of the sheer depth, breadth, and speed of the sources by which students can accumulate [true and false] information, we too have to change the way we see assessment as a direct reflection of the teacher, and more as a reflection of the ecosystem of learning developed for the children.

That is to say, we become so enhanced in our systems thinking, we use assessments less as indications of how one specific teacher influenced their ability to pass a test and more as an indication of the skills and values that teacher actually taught a student. Does the student think more abstractly now? Does the student have more stamina and focus on problems? Do they inquire and ask good questions more? (Yes, there ARE such things as good questions.) Can the student struggle with problems and use the tools they have to solve the issue? Can they connect discussions they have in the classroom with other things they’ve learned in their own lives?

As teachers, we won’t always need to be Kobe Bryant or Dwyane Wade, the high-scoring, high-flying NBA champions. We can be Shane Battier and still contribute very effectively to any team we drop into. The stats may not show our impact immediately, but the team does better as a result with people like us on board.

Personally, I prefer to be judged on my own growth as a professional, and whether students actually believe in the things I do. At my best, I deliver consistent, effective instruction and have a system in my class in place that leads to concrete class discussion. I make them believe that they can do any math problem given the proper push. I set guidelines for expected behaviors, least of which is sit quietly and do exactly what I say. I’ll assess them weekly, but unbeknownst to them, every assessment I’m giving is all formative, and only when I’m satisfied with their progress do I consider it summative.

Few of us live in a world where our entire lives depend on one solid hour of bubble sheets and white spaces to fill in. We live in a world where we get assessed in our motions, our work ethic, our personality, and our ability to create and innovate. We need people who understand that and prepare teachers to teach the future generation for that future.

This is an assessment we simply can’t skip.