By Mark

It sounds like Tom has a budding pilot on his hands–and he's absolutely right that any good lesson, whether in the cockpit or the classroom, is going to have a lot of the same "pieces."

My boss forwarded me an article that took a different angle on the plane analogy. This connection, though, was not about teaching a young, intrepid pilot. Rather, it was about what happens when the plane goes out of control.

On page of 41 Bryan Goodwin's McREL 2010 publication "Changing the Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most," the author draws an example from the book Everyday Survival by Laurence Gonzales: 

In the early days of aviation, the spin was a mysterious event, a death spiral from which pilots rarely recovered. Knowing that, a pilot who found himself in a spin would bail out if he happened to be blessed with a parachute. And then people began to notice something strange. After the pilot bailed out, the plane would sometimes right itself and fly on until it crashed or ran out of fuel. A clever pilot proposed this: the airplane wasn't at fault. The pilot was doing something to keep the airplane in the spin. Remove the pilot, and you solve the problem. Pilots began to learn how to recover from spins by doing less, not more.

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By Mark

Unlike too many schools, we are in a position to hire. Last week, we interviewed candidates for two positions in my department–one replacing an irreplaceable veteran moving on to retirement, the other filling a new position resulting from enrollment growth. 

In total, we had over 70 applications submitted. 

We narrowed it to the interview pool, and each interview was impressive enough to warrant an offer. That's a good problem to have. 

In a break between candidates, my administrator, fellow humanities teacher and I started talking about how we would answer the questions we were posing to these candidates. We were asking them to deconstruct their lesson planning process, evaluate their own teaching, outline not only their management philosophy but also the practices that they find successful or challenging. We asked about standards, technology, collaboration, pedagogy, parent relationships, discipline…and more.

Obviously, when looking for a job a good candidate will expect to have to put all this on display. A well prepared candidate will have already anticipated this kind of scrutiny and be ready with details about his or her own practice.

And in the past, the reality has been that after the job interview, most teachers are never asked to do that depth of thinking about their own practice. Ever. Again. The interview was the gate, we said the magic words, and we passed through into our classrooms where we could shut the door and be the professionals we proposed ourselves to be in that interview.

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By Mark

When some new idea surfaces in education, it gets acronymized. A general rule: if you want to make a project die, give it a clunky acronym. When the acronym makes a word, it can have subtle positive power (I think of CSTP which comes out as "See-Step"… I look, I move forward) or less subtle negative power (as in the HSPEs–"his pees"–with which everyone has to deal eventually, as opposed to the opposite pronoun which it is best to avoid.) With Common Core on the way the HSPE's expiration date is already set.

That rumination aside, the U.S. Department of Education has released details of its RESPECT initiative which is ostensibly aimed at cultivating teacher leadership, collaboration and potential in an effort to transform the profession and therefore schools themselves. RESPECT is an acronym/acrostic built of the phrases Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching. Cute, a touch contrived, but that's only if you're cynical (which I apparently am, this Saturday morning before coffee).

Let's look at the meat of it. The opening line, "Every child in America deserves a high quality education…" reminded me of the "Don't you care about kids?" question I used to get when I'd vocally oppose our administration's newest trendy initiative. My cynicism started to wear off around page four, and by the end, my gears were turning. 

I see some potential in this. My interest is piqued but any gelling optimism is necessarily cautious. Take a read if you haven't already, (it looks like a 30 page .pdf, but skip the propaganda at the beginning and start around section II…the photos, citations and text boxes bulk up the pagination, so it is actually a fairly quick read).

What do you think? Like my students, I always learn more from the conversation.

By Mark

It seems like a no-brainer. If you want to evaluate my effectiveness as a teacher, you need to look at what I do in my classroom. If you want to evaluate my impact on student learning, you need to look at the work I make my students do and see how that work reflects my students' growth over time.

This is the right way to judge my job performance. But doing it this way takes time, is complicated for my boss (who has to do the same for two-dozen other teachers in two-dozen other contexts), and requires physical and intellectual investment into practices that can sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging (read: it requires change).

Too often in education, doing the difficult, right thing is avoided in favor of doing the simpler, easier to administer thing. When our students do this, we chastise them for cutting corners and missing out on the real value of the work–by doing so they are only cheating themselves, we tell them. When we do this as a system, we are cheating society.

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