By Tom

Hi there! Come on in! You must be Paul’s mom.

Yes I am. Hello.

You didn’t bring Paul?

No, he wanted to stay
home. I hope that’s OK.

No problem. It’s good to see you again. We met at curriculum
night, but didn’t really get a chance to talk.

Yes, there was a lot
of people that day.

There was. So Paul tells me your family is from Romania?

I am from Romania. But
Paul was born in America.

So you must either be a vampire or a gymnast.

(laughing) I am not a
vampire! They are all from Transylvania! My family is from Bucharest, south
from Transylvania. But I was a gymnast; most of my life until college! In my
country all of the girls they do gymnastics.

Does Paul do gymnastics?

No, he likes soccer.

Not baseball?

Not baseball, only
soccer.

Well, let’s talk about his academics.

Continue reading →

By Tom

I teach fourth grade, which means that my students will turn
ten at some point in the next eleven months. There’s something special about
being ten. In a lot of ways, people are more confident and self-assured at age
ten than they’ll be in a long time, if not forever. When you’re ten, you’ve pretty
much mastered childhood. In another year or so, you’ll be in the throes of The
Awkward Years, and then its adolescence, from where there’s no return. Ten year
olds know a lot, but it’s what they don’t know that makes them so fun to be
around.

CSTP is also turning ten. Like my students, CSTP came along
at a time when those of us in education were getting blindsided by the
stupidity that was NCLB, a misguided law that blamed schools for everything
wrong with education. It was the beginning as the great data bath that has consumed
education for a decade. Then came the current administration, which refined the
blame game by targeting individual teachers, touting overbearing evaluation systems
as the silverest bullet.

As this mess has played out in Washington State, CSTP has
played the role of the adult child in the room, reminding the children
adults that you don’t get anywhere by pointing fingers. You get somewhere by
empowering teachers; by helping them help each other become better. You get somewhere
by encouraging teachers to collaborate and by helping them find a voice and
tell their story.

Like my students, CSTP is young; young enough not to have a
vested interest in the battles that consume so many school reform and
anti-school reform stakeholders. And like my students, CSTP has a long,
promising life ahead of it.

Because I honestly believe we’re at the cusp of something
huge. And I truly think that organizations like CSTP are uniquely poised to
take us there. I think that soon we’ll see a great coming-together of all the disparate
fragments in education. Advances in neuroscience and learning theory will
converge with increased private and public funding and the realization that
every cog in the system is important; every parent, every teacher, every
principal, every lawmaker, every venture capitalist, and – most importantly –
every student. We’ll stop blaming schools and teachers for our shortcomings and
instead of blaming someone new, we’ll realize we can actually solve our
problems by working together. And organizations like CSTP, which have always
had that attitude, will become the drivers of this new spirit of cooperation.

Or maybe I’m just being overly optimistic. Which is what you
get from being around ten-year-olds all day.

By Tom

I went to O’Dea high school, which is a small, all-boys
school in downtown Seattle. Our Spanish teacher, Brother Patatucci, had a unique
way of getting us to do our homework. At the start of class he would tell us to
open our workbooks to the assigned page while he walked up and down the aisles
with a large, thick, leather strap. If your workbook page was finished, he
would move along. If it wasn’t, you had to hold out a hand and have it
strapped. It hurt like crazy, and the only relief was to grab the cool, metal
bars of our desks until the pain subsided.

It was a different era, obviously, and I doubt they still
use corporal punishment, even at Catholic high schools. Of course, you can’t
argue with the results; not only can I order a beer and a plate of tacos in any
Azteca, but I could stand on the corner in any town in Mexico and ask passersby
for the location of the local library. Learning!

I was thinking of Brother Patatucci this summer while
leading a training on classroom management. Most of the participants were
elementary teachers and I felt reasonably comfortable addressing most of their
questions. But one lady was a high school English teacher. And she came there
looking for a solution to a very specific problem: how could she get her
students to do their homework. Her class, she explained, was pretty much
predicated on students either reading or writing something at home so they
could discuss it in class. When students didn’t do their homework – and most of
them didn’t – there wasn’t much for them to do in class. Hence the problem.

Frankly, I was at a loss. I teach fourth grade, and our
solution to homework refusal is pretty straightforward: no homework; no recess.
For reasons I’ve never understood, high schools don’t have recess, so kids who
don’t do their homework simply don’t do their homework. And apparently it’s a
huge problem.

The rest of the participants and I tried to offer solutions.
We suggested making the reading material and writing assignments more compelling.
She’d already tried that and was continuing to try it; she’d gone so far as to
asign comic books, and her students still wouldn’t read them. We
suggested making homework a bigger part of their grade. She tried that, but her
students didn’t care. Even when they failed her course, they didn’t care. We
suggested contacting the parents. She’d already been down that path; apparently
the parents weren’t much help. I suggested she just have them do the reading
and writing in-class and forego homework altogether. She’d already thought of
that; in fact that was pretty much the strategy she’d settled upon. The problem
was that by basically doing all the work in class with no homework, she wasn’t
able to move through the required course content and was on-notice by her
district.

Like I said, I was at a loss. I have two high school kids of
my own. Frankly, keeping them on top of their homework is practically my
part-time job. Like most districts, we have an on-line tool that tells parents
about missing assignments. Of course these things only work when people look at
them and care about them. And apparently not everyone does.

Which is why I’m posting this question: how do high school
teachers get their students to do homework?

Please tell me we’ve moved beyond Brother Patatucci.

By Tom

My son and I just returned from a weekend-long college
visit. We went to the University of North Texas, which apparently has one the
best music schools in the country. (My son is an aspiring jazz musician.) It
was a fascinating experience, in which I learned three important things about
college.

First of all, college is expensive—really expensive. You
already knew that, but when it’s your money and your son’s education, you get
to learn it all over again. When I was in school, I thought college was expensive.
And it was. But when I was at the UW in the early ‘80s, college cost about a
thousand dollars a year; it was completely feasible to work my way through with
a decent summer job. Now, tuition costs over ten times that much, and it
actually makes more financial sense for our son to focus on school and try for
an academic scholarship than to work part-time to save money for college.

Continue reading →

By Tom

I’m heading back to the classroom tomorrow for the thirtieth
time. Although I’m not big on looking back, it’s hard not to notice the numbers
that end in zeros. When I started we were still using ditto machines. The
school secretary (not office manager) and the principal were the only people
with telephones. Computers? Our whole staff shared one IBM Selectric.
We also had real chalkboards, real chalk and reel-to-reel film projectors.

Although my own teaching has evolved, I’m pretty sure the
1984 Tom would recognize the older guy. I’m still strict, I’m still structured
and I still write out every lesson plan. I’m also still learning how to do this
amazingly complex job.

And speaking of learning, if I had to pick three experiences
that had the biggest impact on my career and life as a teacher, I would start
with 1993, when my wife and I went on a teaching exchange to Australia. Besides
the weather, the beaches and the kangaroos, what I remember most was the fact
that I went down there with absolutely no materials. I found out what grade I
would be teaching the day before school started. And I did fine. I learned that
teaching isn’t about what you use and what you have in your room; it’s about
the connections you make with the people in that room. It’s not about telling a
kid which page to open to, but it’s about showing that kid what happens when
she opens her mind. A teacher is the person who brings the learning, not the
guy who runs off the papers and assigns the work. I came back home and threw
most of my materials away.

The next big moment came in 1996, when my first son was
born. It was then that I realized exactly what this job is all about. It’s not
that I didn’t already understand how precious and amazing each child is, but it
wasn’t until then that I actually felt it.
Holding that little kid for the first time made me realize what an awesome
responsibility each of us have. And how important it is for a teacher to
connect with the whole family, not just the students.

The third moment came in 2000 when I went through the
process of National Board Certification. Not only was the process itself the
best professional development I’ve ever experienced, but certifying was immensely
validating: I was being told by people who knew what they were talking about
that I actually knew what I was doing. Besides all that, National Board
certification marked the point in my career when I began to reach out and lead
other teachers; a mixed blessing as it turned out, since ever since then I’ve
had to work very hard to prevent leadership activities from impinging on my
true love: teaching.

So now what? I’m thinking twenty more. Seriously. Teaching is
one of the few professions in which you get to take your retirement on the
installment plan. And I’m very good at retiring for about eight weeks at a time. But now it’s time to put the toys away, get the room ready for the kids and get
back to work.

Again.

By Tom

Mark and Maren have both written about the news that
Washington State is in a little trouble for failing to follow the Department of
Education’s guidelines for the use of state tests in teacher evaluations. Here's a small example of how using state tests to evaluate teachers
can have some negative side-effects.

Last spring I was in a meeting with the other fourth grade
teachers in my school, along with our principal and the support staff. We were
planning for this coming year. Our principal made the suggestion that we might
want to place all six students who are on an IEP (Individualized Education
Plan) into the same classroom. The reason was simple: if they were all in the
same room, we could deliver support service more efficiently; the support
teacher could come into the room and help those kids, all of whom would be
working on the same lessons, and she wouldn’t have to coordinate with three
different teachers, who may or may not be focusing on the same learning activities.

It made sense to me, and I volunteered to be the teacher
into whose rooms those six kids would be placed. I was willing to “take one for
the team,” knowing that I would have way more than my share of high-needs
students, each of whom performed poorly on their state tests, but also knowing
that those six kids would have a more relevant support experience and the whole
fourth grade would be better off.

Under Washington State’s current (albeit illegal) teacher
evaluation system, I wouldn’t be penalized for having more than my share of
high-needs students. I’m planning to use a classroom-based reading, math and
writing assessment at three different points throughout the year, and I expect
all of my students to show growth, including those six kids who are on an IEP.
I’m not worried at all about collecting this data and showing it my principal
as part of my evaluation. It makes total sense.

However, should the Department of Education get their way,
forcing Washington State to capitulate to their demands, I would be a fool to
do next year what I did this year. Next year I will be evaluated based in part on
a comparison of the number of my kids who met state standard in third grade
with the number who met standard after a year with me.

And that means that those six kids would compromise my
evaluation. It’s more likely than not that those six kids will lower the
percentage of students in my class that pass the state test. Remember, they
didn’t pass their tests last year, when they were in third grade. This year
they’ll be taking the fourth grade test, which is harder. Even if they make academic
gains, they will be taking a harder test, and more than likely they’ll have some
problems. I don’t say that because I have low expectations of these kids. I say
that because all the data that’s ever been collected shows that kids who struggle
one year tend to struggle the next year.

Under next year’s evaluation system (assuming Washington State
bows down to Washington, DC) it will behoove me and every other teacher to start
the year with the strongest class possible. Think about it: high achievers have
already shown that they learn faster than their peers; that’s how they got to
be high achievers in the first place. On the other hand, low achievers have shown that it takes them more time to learn. Sometimes it takes them more than a year to learn what their classmates learn in a year. And if they start out behind their classmates, they can make a year's worth of progress and still not be at grade level when they take their state tests. 

These are not excuses. This is not the "soft bigotry of low expectations." This is simple cause and effect. When a teacher evaluation system is based on state test scores, those who teach struggling students will suffer unfair consequences.

Which means that this is the last time I take one for the team.

By Tom

I went on-line this week to see how last year’s students did
on last year’s state test and it got me depressed. It’s not that they were low
– my  students did better than the other
fourth graders in my school, my district and the state – but what made me
depressed was who scored low.

I had twenty-eight students last year. Each of them took
three tests: math, reading and writing. Altogether, that’s 84 tests. Of those
84 tests, 23 did not meet standard.

But here’s the part that bothers me: twenty-one of those 23
low scores belong to students who live in what New York Times columnist David
Brooks would call “disorganized households.” These are homes where little or
nothing is done to support what I do at school. Bedtime and meal time is
random, homework is not checked or even acknowledged, school attendance is not
a high priority, reading doesn’t happen, and families don’t regularly attend
evening school activities.

Dysfunctional families are common fodder for TV sit-coms.
Think Arrested Development, Roseanne, etc. But there’s nothing funny about really
growing up in a home in chaos.

Children who grow up in these homes tend to enter
kindergarten behind their peers, and it only gets worse. By the time they get
to high school, many are so far behind and so disillusioned by school that they
simply drop out. When I see them in fourth grade, there’s still hope. So I do
what I can to “light their fires,” to get them excited about school or at least
see the importance of school. And to some extent, I’m successful.

But then I look at the data and see that I can only do so
much.

And that’s the great unspoken truth about American
education. We can talk until we’re blue in the face about teacher quality, and
there’s no denying how important that is. But at some point someone needs to
lay out the cold, hard facts: it is nearly impossible for a child to succeed
academically without the concerted effort of a competent teacher and an
organized, supportive household.

And that’s what depresses me.

By Tom

On the last day of school, I gave my fourth graders an extra
recess for the first time all year. At one point, a girl walked up and said, “Mr.
White, what’s your dream?” We talk a lot about dreaming big and working hard to
catch those dreams. It was an interesting question.

I thought of all the dreams I once had: centerfielder, park
ranger, milkman, wide receiver, ophthalmologist, sail maker, ski bum. Those had
all come and gone, some more quickly than others.

Then I thought about some of my colleagues; people with whom
I had come into the teaching profession and many with whom I had gone through
National Board Certification. A lot of those people seem to have “risen up the ranks;” and moved into leadership positions as principals, administrators, instructional
coaches, and things of that ilk.

Then I thought of myself. Here I was, doing the same job I
started doing 29 years ago, and working at the same school for the last
twenty-five years. Was there something wrong with me? Am I not dreaming
anymore?

Actually, no. There’s nothing wrong with me. And I am still
dreaming. I have looked at other options within the education profession. If I
wanted to, I could become a principal, an administrator, a coach, or whatever.
But I don’t want to. I simply prefer to teach than to support those who teach.
Not that there’s anything wrong with those other people. I have nothing but
respect for those who choose to support those of us who teach. They are
important and necessary.

But they aren’t teaching, which is what I want to be doing.

Which is why I looked at that little girl right in the eyes and
answered, “My dream is to teach fourth grade in Lynnwood, Washington.”

“But you’re already doing that.”

Exactly.

By Tom

The National Council for Teacher Quality (NCTQ) just came
out with a review
of America’s education schools. And it’s caused quite a stir. I spent most of
the first day of my summer vacation sifting through it, and I’ve got several reactions.
But before I get there, a quick word about my own perspective: For the past
eight years, I have served on the Board of Examiners for the National Council
for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). In that capacity I visit two colleges
of education each year, collaborating on a standards-based report, which
eventually leads to the accreditation. (Or, in some cases, doesn’t) NCATE
accreditation isn’t universal; many states require it, although some states –
like Washington – let colleges decide whether or not they want to pursue it. Every
state, however, does have some form of standards-based accreditation for higher ed programs.

Now for the NCTQ review.

Continue reading →

By Tom

My youngest son has expressed interest in pursuing a career
as a pilot. He turned 14 last month, so we gave him a flying lesson for his
birthday. The lesson was last Saturday and it was wonderful. But before I tell you
all about it, let me digress for a bit.

Thirty years ago, as I was starting my teaching career, the
big, new book that every teacher had to read was Madeline Hunter’s Mastery
Teaching. This was the dawn of Instructional Theory into Practice, better
known as ITIP. Hunter’s “innovation” was the seven-step lesson plan, which she
gleaned from studying thousands of effective teachers and analyzing what they
did. It was a no-nonsense approach to lesson planning and instruction, an
approach that’s worked for many of us to this day.

Let’s get back to the airfield. My son sat down with his
instructor. I forgot the guy’s name, but he started off by asking my son
whether he’d ever been in a small plane or not. “There it is,” I thought, “Pretesting;
he wants to know what my son already knows.” After that he pulled out a map of
the Seattle area. He took a toy plane and showed my son where we would be going
and exactly what he’d be doing in the plane. In other words, he was stating the
objective.

Then he pulled out a giant poster of a cockpit. He explained
the controls and some of the gauges and dials that would be important on this
trip. This was important, new information; otherwise known as input.

After that we went out to the plane, and the instructor led
my son through the pre-flight checklist and got us both buckled in and set up
with our two-way headphones. Then we took off.

At first they both had their hands on their steering wheels (actually
they’re called “yokes”) and the instructor helped correct my son’s attempts to
steer. But he gradually released control as my son gained confidence. It was a
textbook example of guided practice. After about thirty minutes, my son was
flying the plane himself; turning, going up and down, you name it. It was
awesome. It was independent practice.

The instructor took over for the landing. Apparently that’s
where it gets tricky. After we landed, he sat us down to go over the flight, celebrate
my son’s success and tell him what the next steps would be. It was closure.

Now I don’t know if flight instructors read Madeline Hunter
or not. I doubt it. But I do know that effective instruction is important to
them. It’s actually a matter of life and death. And when you get right down to it, good teaching is good teaching, whether it's in a classroom or an airplane. 

The bottom line,
however, is whether or not the student learned something.

You be the judge: