Monthly Archives: November 2009

Accountability and Reason, In Action (but not any longer.)

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Professional Development

IMG_1444 by Luann

A few years back, some colleagues and I  previewed a new way to look at student work with my colleagues.  I learned more, brought the practice into my classroom, and saw significant, steady growth in my students approach to learning and study habits.  We all learned more, I was given the opportunity to offer this as professional development in my district. Those of us who worked together to implement this practice in our classrooms and departments saw student gains in achievement and engagement. Those of us who made honest use of this practice did, anyway…….but not any more.  Why not?

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Thirty Minute Lunch and Teacher Quality

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Andresr050800123
by Brian

I love my job, but I really hate having to eat lunch in thirty minutes.  It must be nice to be able to meet friends away from work and sit down for a leisurely hour.  But 30 minutes for lunch is just a synecdoche for the larger problem: the traditional 6 period day used in most of our high schools.  It's not only hectic, it's inefficient.  Think of the organizational skills that our students must have to keep track of 6 different subjects every day. And with 125 to 150 students per day, even if I had common planning time with my colleagues in the math department, which I don't, how could I collaborate with them when my time is devoured by my own classroom responsibilities.  The schedule creates isolation, even for brand new teachers who would benefit the most from collaboration. So why do we keep using it?  And what does it have to do with teacher quality?

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Unemployed Parents = Lower Achieving Students

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Current Affairs

Unemployment-line
By Tracey

Maybe having a parent around all the time won't help you in school.  Yesterday's NY Times article, Parent's Unemployment Stress Trickles Down to the Children suggests that it won't, especially when they're feeling stress about being unemployed.  I was struck by this statistic which came from a research study from the University of California, Davis. Fifteen percent of children whose parents lose their job are more likely to repeat a grade.  This is among children of parents with a high school degree.  Another study mentioned in the article reported that the children of single mothers who were unemployed were more likely to drop out of school.  With the unemployment rate at 9.3% in Washington (Sept. 09), this impacts all of us.  

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An Honors Student is __________________ .

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OrientExDining By Kristin

I teach both honors and standard language arts.  For some time now I've been struggling with the concept of what makes an "honors" kid honors?  What makes a "regular" kid regular?

It's certainly not intelligence.  With the exception of some of my regular students who eat so poorly they're kind of out of it, I would say my regular kids are as intelligent if not more so than my honors students.  My honors students are just better educated and more sophisticated.  It's not simply academic skill, since some of my honors students write like third graders and aren't strong readers. It's not motivation, because some of my regular kids get to school despite tremendous obstacles, and some of my honors students do the bare minimum.  Two months ago I started to wonder would happen if I persuaded the counseling office to turn my regular class into an honors class.  Labels matter.  An honors class is like riding in the first class carriage of the train.  Being there gives you status.  Being seen stepping off gives you status, and that feels good.  Am I capable of teaching well enough that my regular kids could succeed in an honors class?  I decided to give it a try.

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Departmentalization in Elementary School?

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By Tom

Mrs. Rooney was my third grade teacher. We spent all day with her, from September through June. She was tough, smart and observant. She knew me well, and was able to tell my parents about all the wonderful things I would accomplish once I began to "apply myself."

Today I teach third grade, and my students endure the entire day with me. I teach language arts, math, science and social studies. And sometimes art.

I'm what's called a "generalist." I have no specialty. I'm supposed to be as good a math teacher as I am a writing teacher. The prevailing wisdom in this country is that children in the younger grades benefit from the stability and constancy of a single teacher who teaches every subject. The prevailing wisdom also holds that once a student enters seventh grade or so, the benefits of having a subject-area specialist outweigh the benefits of having the same teacher all day long.

But that wisdom is being challenged. In fact, up to 20% of our nation's grade school students, some as young as six, are moving from room to room, just like their high school brothers and sisters, taking their classes from specialists.

Why?

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What’s your standard?

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Assessment

100_1104  Student learning has become a contest.  As we look for solutions to the deliberate disengagement of students and ways to help all students achieve, we begin to look at why some aren't, and search even harder for solutions. 

How could each situation listed here be turned into an opportunity for the student to leap the standard and find success?

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Testing “Out”

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Assessment, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

Test By Mark

In the last two weeks, a few things have me thinking about the age old debate over how schools "grade" students. First, in Nevada, there was this discussion about the merits of allowing students in public high schools take exams to earn state-required graduation credit (as opposed to putting in the seat time). 

Second, there were the 28 letters I sent home to students' parents this past Monday updating them that their students were earning a D or F in my English class.

When I look at those 28 letters, there are really only probably seven kids getting the low grades who I think genuinely have not yet exhibited the minimum language arts expectations which I have at this point in the semester and thus "deserve" the F. The other 21? Missing assignments. I'd bet dollars to donuts that those 21 would pass an on-demand-test of minimum language arts skills and content, and I have few concerns about next spring's state tests for those kids, even though they are presently earning Ds and Fs in my class. They've been able to show me that they have the skills through classroom work and other assessments, some of them far exceeding the standards from the very first assessment–yet their grade is an F.

I know that this discussion is almost as old as the model of education present in most public schools today, but how do you as a teacher reconcile the necessity of "grades" and the reality that grades do not necessarily reflect actual skill in a content area? 

Are these kids earning failing grades due to a lack of content knowledge and skill or due to a lack of ability to submit complete work on time...which incidentally is not one of my content area standards? Is the idea of a mastery test (in lieu of seat time) really out of line? We put so much stock in those one-time snapshot tests to assess school and teacher effectiveness, so why not a one-time snapshot test for a kid who has the skills but doesn't want to spend 90 hours this semester in a class which will penalize him for poor organization, not a lack of skill?

The 10,000 Hour Test

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by Brian

I generally don't like articles that begin by saying something like the Obama administration's Race to the Top will fail.  My default position is optimism, and I don't want it to fail.  But I read an article like that today that made a lot of sense.  

Marion Brady, writing in the Washington Post says that it will fail for a reason no one is talking about: A curriculum adopted in 1893 that grows more dysfunctional with each passing year.  I teach math, and when my students ask me why they have to do two-column proofs in Geometry, I tell them we settled that question in 1893.  We do it because that's what we do.

You should read the whole article, but here's the money quote:  

"There are, however, some things Congress and the administration could do.  First, they could stop basing education policy on the opinions of business leaders, syndicated columnists, mayors, lawyers, and assorted other education "experts" who haven’t passed the 10,000-hour test-10,000 hours of face-to-face dialog with real students in real classrooms, all the while thinking analytically about what they’re doing, and why."

I recently participated in the NBCT Symposium where we were asked to prioritize how to allocate the money to implement the reform package encompassed in ESHB 2261.  While I appreciated the opportunity to contribute, I could not help but reflect that there was no one on the Quality Education Council, that could pass the 10,000 hour test.

And I remembered a New Yorker article byJames Surowiecki about Toyota's success.  He titled it The Open Secret to Success, which it is.  Toyota has defined innovation as an incremental process, fueled by the suggestions of workers (teachers?) on the factory floor.  He says Japanese companies get a hundred time more suggestions from their workers than U.S. companies do.  So instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, Toyota moves down the field by making short and steady gains.

We can do that in education too, if the real experts, the teachers who have passed the 10,000 hour test, are increasingly involved in the process of planning reform, not just implementing top-down decisions.


What happened to Study Hall?

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Education, Life in the Classroom

20091003-old-books By Mark

He's a middle-of-the-bell-curve kind of kid, affable and hard working, but his strongest efforts tend to net him Cs at the very best. 

He's not into sports, and is always telling me about his truck that he's working on at home. He's got a good mind for literature (my content area) and when he really puts effort into it is a better-than-average writer. 

But, he's not the most organized. The only thing keeping him from a higher grade in his English class is that he's missing a few assignments here and there, bombed a few vocabulary quizzes for lack of studying, and didn't take well to the recent unit on poetry.

And he's probably not going to graduate from high school on time. He's a few credits short already, as a junior. He knows his problem: he can do the work, but when he leaves school, it just doesn't get done. Chores on his family's small farm and tinkering under the hood of his or any number of other local vehicles…the joys that make his face glow when he talks about them…take up all his precious homework time when he should be doing his geometry or poetry or history homework.

We've already had some lively discussion here about the importance of vocational ed and trade skills in our public schools, so that's not my angle here. This young man could conceivably graduate from high school with the required math, science, English and history. He's not averse to the requirements for PE and art and CTE. He's capable, and there are ways to make up those credits. In our building, in addition to all the named requirements, a student must also take a total of 6.0 credits of general electives in order to graduate.  Many use these for foreign language, higher level math and science, extra arts and music, or other specialized courses that interest them. We do have two periods of woodshop and vehicle design, but that's about all we can fund and house.

With all due respect with my colleagues in arts, CTE and upper division maths and sciences, what this young man needs isn't more of those in his schedule.  

He needs study hall.

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