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.

Wasting Minds: Why Our Education System is Failing and What We Can Do About It
by Ronald A. Wolk
(ASCD, 2011)

Reviewed by Renee Moore, NBCT
Teacher Leaders Network

In a wonderfully well-timed blessing, I received a copy of Ronald Wolk's new book, Wasting Minds. Wolk is the founder and former, longtime editor of Education Week. His well-grounded and thoughtful reflections on the conditions and, more important, on the future of U.S. education echo those of many others looking at the future of education. This growing consensus, small though it is at present, bodes well for our nation and our children. Without a vision, the people perish.

Wolk's contribution to this discussion is particularly helpful because it is so succinctly and directly stated. He divides the book into two parts: faulty assumptions and new visions. He begins with a highly accurate analysis of the problems with our current systems of education, based on his long history of documenting education reform efforts. Wolk rightly notes that because of our tendency to switch too quickly from one reform attempt to the next, we have very little longitudinal information on the outcomes of these prior efforts.

His primary assertion, and one with which I strongly agree, is that "we will make real progress only when we realize our problem in education is not mainly one of performance but one of design" (p. 25). In the current education reform push, we are trying to put better "parts" into an archaic machine engineered to produce what is no longer needed.

Furthermore, education inequality is not just a byproduct of this system but is, in fact embedded, into its very structure. Failure to recognize this has led us to this dangerously circular reasoning: That we can close achievement gaps or significantly improve the quality of education for historically underserved populations of students without completely redesigning the school systems that serve them.

Wolk cites numerous court cases from around the country and the Supreme Court that have declared, "If students are required to meet high academic standards to be promoted or to graduate, then public schools are obligated to provide them with an education that is adequate for them to accomplish that" (p. 89).

Wolk also points out that as we have pushed further and further into reliance on standardized testing, we have moved farther from what knowledge students actually need to succeed in modern life. Employers, as well as colleges, are increasingly pointing out that the skills they need public school graduates to have are not the ones we are measuring in the current state standardized testing. What the expanding role of testing has done is suck tremendous amounts of much-needed resources from school systems. Wolk cites two major studies that put that cost nationally between $500 million and $22 billion.

Wolk's bold questioning extends to another almost religiously held view in today's reform conversation: putting a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. He calls this goal good but impossible. His logic is that in a field as large as teaching, there will continue to be a range of quality, and although we should work harder to eliminate those who clearly do not belong in a classroom, the rest should not only be distributed across schools but, more important, receive ongoing support toward continuous improvement.

Despite misconceptions about the reach of collective bargaining agreements, Wolk correctly observes that teachers actually have very little control over most of the key aspects of our classroom work and school operations. He asks, "How can anyone believe that the goal of placing a 'good' teacher in every classroom can be achieved without changing the conditions in which teachers work—the way schools are structured and operated?" (p. 62). The sad truth is if we did have a highly qualified teacher right now to put in every classroom in the United States, many of them who don't quit or aren't run out for refusing to toe the standardized line may well end up burned out, frustrated, and mediocre.

Summarizing the paradox that has plagued teaching in the United States throughout its history, Wolk concludes, "Although we refer to teaching as a profession, not much about the job is professional. Professionals like doctors and lawyers set their own performance standards, hold their members accountable for meeting those standards, determine to a large degree . . . their own working conditions, and receive compensation perceived to be commensurate with their professional contributions to society" (p. 59). These professional characteristics are denied to the vast majority of U.S. schoolteachers.

Most impressive, however, are Wolk's suggestions about what we need to do to correct many of these problems, and primary on that list is a compelling argument to redesign education around more individualized student learning. This closely parallels the vision of my teacher leader colleagues in our book Teaching 2030 (see the related video and blog post). 

Teachers will more and more become what Wolk calls "advisors who guide students in educating themselves" (p. 101). On the surface, this seems like a radical, and to some even irresponsible, conception of teachers' work. In reality, students and their families are already rapidly moving toward a much more personalized approach to shaping their own learning. Certainly, the incredible growth and influence of social media tools is one driving force in that shift. Another is the growing realization that children do not learn all things at the same pace and in the same way, and that we do them a great disservice when we try to force them into such fast-food-style learning patterns.

Of all Wolk's recommendations, the idea of letting students (and their parents) direct their own learning is the one that may make some in education and policy most uncomfortable. An important aspect of system redesign that would support this is greater use of performance-based assessments. He lists several of the most common reasons more schools and districts have not embraced such assessments. Curiously, two that he does not mention are the higher cost and the more insidious philosophical view that education really should be indoctrination (and that view is held on the left and the right of the political spectrum); therefore, assessment should simply be regurgitation.

In line with his vision of the future, Wolk argues as I have, that we need to do away with the practice of dividing children by age into grade levels, making our learning systems truly integrated and seamless from prekindergarten through college.

Ronald Wolk may prove to be one of many prophets crying in the wilderness of education reform, but as Barnett Berry notes in his prologue to Teaching 2030, "We cannot create what we cannot imagine."

Renee Moore is a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, a coauthor of Teaching 2030, a Milken winnter and a former Carnegie Fellow & Mississippi Teacher of the Year. She blogs at Teach Moore.

[NOTE: Monday, March 21 at 2 p.m. EDT, talk with Wasting Minds author Ron Wolk in a live Education Week chat on preparing students for success in the 21st century. Register for the chat.]