School starts in one week for me and I am so excited. I have been teaching first grade for 20 years and each year is so very exciting and wonderful, I can hardly sleep at night in the anticipation. There are currently 26 students assigned to our room. It will be interesting to see what “new” accronym will be applied to our teaching. There has been some talk among administration that we should begin PBIS, RTI, and our district will be doing TPEP. Ahhh, why or why do we educators always look so hopefuly to some new inovative idea that will sovle all of our problems?? Have you ever had the luxury of strolling about a book store and paruse the shelves of books written by well meaning people that describe just how, if we would only use this method or intervention each child would learn, all your behavior/discipline problems would melt away and everything would be just fine?
Whenever anyone decides what make a good teacher the conversation seems to never end, there is always one more dimension to consider. There are just too many layers, partly due to the fact that we have so many different types of learners that bring to the class a different culture for learing. There couldn’t possibly be one solution, yet we continue to search.
Some of our teachers went to a training for Read Naturally – well, what say we Teach Naturally. We have a set of clearly defined standards, many districts have taken the time to define what it looks like when a student has met the standard and we teachers are trained on how to teach the concepts and strategies so students can understand and apply the learning – Is it asking too much for policy makers and other legislation to stop complicating the issue of teaching and allow us to do our jobs? Knowing I will have 26, or possibly more, students that look to me for understanding in math, science, literacy, social studies, and social skills, I am aware that I will need to have many and various strategies to engage, challenge and teach them. Once we have met and I get a clear picture of what it is they currently know and can do, I will need to develop lessons that clearly outline the progression of learning that will allow the students to achieve the standards for first grade. They will need opportunity learn, time to practice, authentic, formative, summative assessments with feedback. In otherwords, they will need to know the learning target, and how to achieve the target.It is challenging, but so very worthwhile when they discover they know a new concept or have met a particularly difficult standard.
One year I had a student that seemed to have all the pieces together(phonics, phonemic awareness, etc) that would allow him to begin to read, yet it just wasn’t happening. After several different strageties and approaches, we found a book that was of a rebus style that he really liked and began to read the book – he was so excited that he took it home to show his family how he could now read. When he returned to school the next day, he read the entire book to me – then with a large smile he looked at me as said,”Isn’t it cool how I taught myself how to read?” Yes, that is was very cool! Learning begins with the learner, the key is having the resources and time to know the student and help design a path of learning for that unique individual student, not trying to wrap some acronym that represents a “researched based” program around the student.
Category Archives: Current Affairs
Our Problem is Poverty, not Schools
By Tracey
In continuing with the Save Our Schools March events, since it's still so fresh in my mind, I'm posting the speech Diane Ravitch gave at the rally on July 30. She's not Matt Damon, so you may have missed her. (I was deeply touched by the words Matt Damon spoke and am grateful he came. But, I will assume you won't need me to hear his speech.) Ravitch also spoke at the two-day conference leading up to the rally. Her speech at the rally was shortened dramatically, as it should. What you missed was a historical account of how our education system has been "in crisis" since 1910. It's apparently what we do; we claim our schools are in crisis, and then make irrational decisions about how to fix them. Anyone ever read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine? A hundred years of crises should raise some flags. But, the greatest offender at this point in time, is pretending that poverty isn't an issue.
Stop Digging
By Mark
I came across this Washington Post re-post via A 21st Century Union, a teacher blog rooted in Maryland. The piece in the Post, in a nutshell, illuminates a simple reality about the recent PISA education rankings wherein the US was situated far from the top. The maxim "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" forms the root of the argument.
The hole? The fact that the rest of the world is catapulting past American education on international measures.
What has dug this hole? Kevin Welner, author of the post, states it clearly: we are in the position we are in because the current generation of tested students came of age in an education system dominated by NCLB mandates centered on test-mania. We dug our hole with high stakes tests and an obsession with scores and sanctions.
The result of that test-mania is obvious: we have not gained ground in student achievement, we've lost ground. The proof is in the data. Since data analysis is all the rage in education, we should be abandoning what clearly doesn't work, right? Logic says we ought to stop digging.
Here's the link to the post, it is worth a read. I know I'm ready to put down this shovel.
Collaboration
By Mark
This video was emailed to me by a colleague…if you have a few minutes and are willing to maintain a sense of humor, it's worth a look:
Now, I wouldn't post this if I was just trying to be subversive or funny. In any satire or parody, there is always a kernel of truth (heck, sometimes a whole cob of truth).
I truly enjoy authentic collaboration. In fact, I believe that my freedom to collaborate is actually what has kept me in education this long–if I were isolated in my own classroom all day with my only human contact being with 14-year-olds (who some contend are not quite yet human beings) I don't think I'd have lasted.
Because I get to collaborate and actually team-teach in my current assignment, I have grown as an educator and my satisfaction in my job has grown as well. There is something powerful about working closely with a like-minded educator or team of educators who share common philosophies, attitudes and dedication to increasing student learning. We challenge each other, support each other, and learn from each other. I am a better teacher because I have collaborated. My students perform better because I have collaborated.
Alas, like so many fads in education, Collaboration has become a four-letter-word to some, and I think it is in no small way due to the kinds of situations parodied in that YouTube video above.
“Jersey Shore” is not real.
No, I'm not kidding. It isn't real. Those people auditioned, were hired, relocated into that gaudy house, and then filmed. The episodes aren't real, either… No, I'm not kidding. Those episodes are edited together based on a storyline the writers create by putting The Situation and his crew into situations where the writers know how they will react. It isn't "real."
It is amazing how much convincing it has taken to prove to my freshmen that the Jersey Shore is not real. These are the same kids who have no problem suspending disbelief long enough to just accept that Peter Parker can climb walls when he wears the right spandex suit but who cannot just accept that the animals on Animal Farm speak English and build a windmill.
These conversations help to illustrate a critical shift which ought to be happening in literacy instruction in American schools: rather than studying literary works, we need to be studying literary processes.
- We need to study the process by which 360 hours of Jersey Shore footage gets edited down to 44 minutes for a one-hour weekly episode.
- More importantly, we need to understand the process of acculturation and normalization which occurs in a viewer when they watch entertainment labeled as reality.
- We need to study the process by which lighting, angle, score and juxtaposition are used by news organizations to communicate a message beyond the news.
- More importantly, we need to study the subtle and not-so-subtle biases which shape the decision-making about what makes air and what doesn't.
- We need to help young readers learn to discern which sources on the internet are valid and which are not, and even what we mean by "valid."
Are these lessons more or less important than Shakespeare or great novels and poetry?
As with the television news, whose producers must pare hours upon hours of worthy news into 20-22 minutes of air time (including sports and weather), when we must choose what literacy lessons to keep and what to cull for our limited amount of instructional time, on what should we base that decision?
Building a Hybrid Virtual School
By Mark
A colleague of mine posed an interesting proposition lately. Like many school districts, mine is apparently toying with the idea of a hybrid virtual/brick-and-mortar kind of school-within-a-school. The idea is that the curriculum would be administered face-to-face when necessary and via web interface when necessary, so this colleague of mine was casting out a few lines to see if any of us would bite.
I've voiced interest in participating, but have concerns and questions.
A few years ago, I was part of starting a small learning community "school-within-a-school" of sorts in my high school, and it is still operating, but that endeavor was small by comparison with what my colleague has in mind. I am wondering what models of this kind of hybrid exist, what are the benefits or shortcomings, and what the best course would be.
I'm definitely in the learning stages here. Sure, I can Google it or read some journal articles, but that only gives part of the story.
So, SFS readers and contributors: what do you know, or what advice do you have about building this kind of educational opportunity? If you are a brick-and-mortar teacher, what concerns would you have for a hybrid or virtual school? What hopes would you have?
Grades
By Mark
Every grading period, I engage in an odd ritual. I look over all of my classes and tally how many of each letter grade I've posted on the progress reports. This year got me nervous, as there were an awful lot of A's and only about seven F's out of my five classes of freshmen.
I think this habit of mine emerged a few years ago when I was accused of "inflating" grades when too many of my students were successful (earning B's and A's) and not enough were failing. Ironically, that accusation of inflation occurred immediately after I had begun implementing classroom intervention strategies aimed at reducing the number of students failing my class (which had been the complaint the year before: too many D's and Fs).
This is one of the debates-that-never-end in education: what is the function of the grade? Is it to demonstrate accomplishment of a learning target? Is it to demonstrate compliance with deadlines and classroom expectations? What about the kid who bombs every chapter quiz when we read Animal Farm, but who spends every afternoon for two weeks with me after school preparing for the final test–which he aces? Should he still be penalized for ten abyssmal chapters of poor performance even though he was able to demonstrate his knowledge and understanding in the end? What about the student who bombs the homework assignments in Algebra, but comes in for extra help and ends up flying high on the unit test?
In a meeting recently, my building principal asked that we teachers consider whether our grades were measuring behavior or achievement.
Later that same day, a good friend and colleague of mine shared a revelation he discovered from a guest speaker who came to visit with his department. That guest speaker, Dr. Frank Wang, shared many worthwhile ideas, but the one which seemed to resonate with my colleague was the very example I mention above: what if a kid struggles during the unit, logs a few F's in the gradebook, but ends up showing mastery by the time the summative assessment rolls around? Dr. Wang suggested that the constant ongoing entering-of-grades in effect de-values the learning that is the ultimate goal of education but instead rewards kids who "get it" quickly and penalizes kids who "get it" a little later than others–even though they still eventually "get it."
I'm wondering: are the letters A, B, C, D, and F part of the problem in education today?
Someone Please Give the Whole Story
By Mark
I am just old enough to remember Paul Harvey, and the "rest of the story."
Eve Rifkin, at our Arizona partner Stories from School has helped flesh out the "rest of the story" on that annual USNews "Top Schools" list, and it is as if she was reading my mind.
Between Waiting for Superman, Oprah, Education Nation, Obama's charge to raise the bar, and the resulting present (and I pessimistically argue ephemeral) empassioned focus on education in this country, it is clear that the whole story has not been told in far too many instances. Here is my take on the untold halves of the many stories told in the last couple of weeks…the rest of the story, if you will:
1. Unions oppose merit pay not to protect lazy teachers but because no one can come up with a fair and reliable way to assess teaching "merit." Issue number one: test scores don't work because not all teachers are in tested disciplines.
2. Those other countries who post great education stats? Their systems are different than ours. Some screen out special education kids. Some have separate vocational tracks which are conveniently not part of their data. Many in those systems lament the fact that the kids they produce are test-takers, not thinkers.
3. Weighing myself will not make me lose weight…I've being weighing in for years and the number is only going the wrong way. Testing kids more will not make them learn. In fact, testing actually takes up instructional time, the loss of which not surprisingly has a negative effect on test performance.
4. American schools held up as models of success always have the following by comparison to the mainstream: extra funding or an enrollment screen or both. These models are neither replicable nor sustainable in other schools unless those schools also get extra funding or an enrollment screen or both.
5. Every child can learn, but not every child will. To blame that solely on teachers or on students is yet another heinous oversimplification of the complex problems facing education, educators, students, and families today.
The rest of the story? I'm sure there's even more. I'm tired of hearing half-stories in the sound bytes mainstream America turns to as it's source of facts.
Should Math and Science Teachers be Paid More?
By Mark
An article in this week's Tacoma News Tribune points out that in the state of Washington, high school math and science teachers get paid less, on average, than teachers of other disciplines. The assumption–not backed up by research or widespread observation–is that math and science teachers are lured away to more lucrative careers in the high tech industry and therefore do not stay in teaching as long.
Besides that, this study by Jim Simpkins, Marguerite Roza, and Cristina Sepe and produced by the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education raises several valid points about teacher compensation. However, it is what the study does not include that concerns me most.
And How Did I Do?
To steal from Tom’s post a few days ago, I too wonder “How I did” this school year. Since my evaluation was likewise “satisfactory,” I thought I’d consider the question how a state government might: through test scores.
Colorado has joined with a few other states (Florida and New York are among those with plans in motion) to tie a teacher’s continued employment directly to test scores. It appears that student test scores must comprise “at least fifty percent” of the evaluative criteria for teacher tenure and retention. If improvement is not sustained, a teacher can lose tenure and risks being fired. That would certainly align with an “unsatisfactory” review…potentially sparked by poor test scores.
As I read the article, it stated clearly the bill calls for teachers to demonstrate student growth. I’m not familiar with the Colorado assessment system, and a half hour of wading through the web didn’t net me many answers. I’m a skeptic of that word growth, however. Something tells me we’re not talking about a preassessment in September and a postassessment in June, which is the only kind of assessment of growth I’d feel comfortable tying to teacher pay and continued employment. The old argument of comparing apples to apples is key. If we’re comparing apples to oranges, then ready the court for appeals.*
In a once-a-year test situation, how can growth be assessed? Let’s trace it out and play the how I did game by considering my students’ performance on the recent High School Proficiency Exams (HSPE) in reading and writing and previous years’ Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) tests.