Category Archives: Life in the Classroom

Test Scores and Teacher Evaluation: Now What?

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership

File521431c138930There are few things worse than being fired up and not knowing what to do next.

That is where I find myself with the recent discussion about student growth, teacher evaluation, and the federal government. (Chances are you've already read a little about this from me, Tom, Maren and Kristin.)

But here's where I get stuck. It is easy for me to sit here at my desktop and engage in discourse with my peers about how misguided is the federal position on using one-shot test scores to evaluate teachers. In discussion here, on facebook, on other blogs, and even in old-fashioned face-to-face conversation, I've discovered that there are a lot of very intelligent people talking about this issue. (CSTP even noted that the traffic on this blog has spiked by a couple thousand pageviews in the last few days alone.)

For other issues, I've known to whom to go: my local leadership, state legislators, and so on. With this one, though, I truly don't know what to do next. Conversation needs to continue, for sure. At some point it needs to translate to action, or else this is all just a bunch of cached webpages.

Brainstorm with me, if you will: What can you and I do next? Who do we talk to? Is there hope? And what do we do once we've ignored the people who answer "no" to that last question?

If nothing else, let's keep the conversation going–and invite others to join in.

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Ignore the Feds on Student Growth

Ignore the Feds on Student Growth

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Assessment, Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

File520e39cc23477By Mark

So, we got a warning.

The Feds have sent a letter to the state of Washington indicating that we aren't quite doing what they want when it comes to teacher and principal evaluation. Aside from our crazy approach of taking time to learn, train teachers and administrators, and implement the system thoughtfully rather than quickly, one sticking point appears to be that we are a little too willing to differentiate when it comes to how student data is used to evaluate teachers.

In my opinion, we're right, they're wrong. As it stands, the state law…

  1. Does not require districts to use state test scores in teacher evaluation; this option is a district choice. (In most districts, only about 12-15% of teachers actually teach tested grade levels and content… oh, also see #2 and #3 below that clarify the limits of state assessments.)
  2. Emphasizes evaluating the teacher's professional ability to choose the right assessment sequence to determine student growth, and then set meaningful growth goals for classes and subsets of students based on student needs, entry skills, as well as appropriate content standards. (This is actually weighted more heavily than whether "all the kids pass" the assessments.)
  3. Requires multiple points of data all aligned to the same learning or skill standard, rather than a single snapshot assessment. (Multiple points show a trajectory, whereas a single point captures a moment.)

Like too much policy, the further the "deciders" are away from the classroom, the more out-of-touch the policy is and the more focused it becomes on what is easiest to administer. Which is easier… looking a a once-a-year matrix of test data OR tracking each individual student using targeted skills assessments over the course of time? Duh.

But the right question is which is better?

That, to me, is just as obvious.

Washington: we're doing the right thing. It may not be perfect, but it is better for kids, teachers, schools and communities than hinging everything on a single moment in time.

Lessons in Teacher Leadership

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Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Teacher Leadership

File51cb02ad3388dBy Mark

David B. Cohen at InterACT (Accomplished California Teachers' blog) recently posted an interesting piece about the Teacher Leader Certification Academy in Riverside, California, which got me thinking about my own experience this past year in a newly formed "teacher leader" role in my district.

When I stepped into this role as "Teacher on Special Assignment," the job description was vague. Our district had not had a role like this at the secondary level, and as it was a part-time gig (two periods out of my day–with the other four periods consisting of my prep period and three periods with kids) neither I nor the leadership above me really knew what the work would look like in practice.

In the end, I learned so much this year. I learned things that I can apply in my own classroom, and of course I learned a thing or two about what it means to be this particular breed of "Teacher Leader."

The first thing I learned was to whom I should listen, and why.

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The Post-Game Show: Three Things I learned this School Year

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Life in the Classroom, Professional Development
Photo Jun 9, 2013, 7:50 AM

by Maren Johnson

We're teachers. That means whether we end the school year battered and bruised, or triumphant and victorious, we generally don't have reporters following us around on the last day of school asking us about the highlights in student learning for the year. Replays of key moments in our classroom game are not usually publicly rebroadcast for analysis by a panel of color commentators.

Our post-game show is a little different. If we want to reflect on the school year, we're going to have to do it on our own. I checked out my schedule for the period immediately following the end of the school year: there's some professional development, a conference, and quite a few bargaining sessions. Other teachers have similar activities.

What's missing from this end of school line-up? Reflection. It really is. There is no time specifically pencilled in at any of my own particular meetings (as far as I know!) for looking back on the school year. That's interesting. I think the reflection is implicit–many of the meetings include check-ins, debriefs, annual reports, and the like–but explicit individual (or group) reflection is not generally an agenda item.

So how will I tell the story of my school year? Well–I don't want to forget about it–each year is remarkable. I've told several of those stories here on this blog, but a few of my stories from school this year are just going to have to remain at school 😉

Some things I learned this year, in no particular order:

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The Problem

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Assessment, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom

AbaacusBy Mark

I've been having a bit of a problem lately in my classes. 

My students were tasked to create a visual metaphor of the allegory represented in George Orwell's Animal Farm, do research about the "factual" side of their allegorical connection, and assemble this all into an end product that showed their skills at a whole slew of the Common Core State Standards in ELA-Reading-Lit and ELA-Reading-Informational Texts, with each standard accompanied by a proficiency level scale that clearly defined what achievement of the standard would look like.

My problem is that too many of them are earning A's. Even the kids who aren't supposed to. 

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Student (and teacher) Engagement: Increase the drama!

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Education, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development, Science
Photo May 11, 2013, 4:04 PM

by Maren Johnson

The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in — and stay tuned in — to watch drama.

~David Mamet, playwright and screenwriter

I don't usually get my teaching tips from television screenwriters, but I thought the above quote was worth some thought. If drama has a wide definition–let's say drama is a story resulting from human interactions–then adding drama to our teaching is definitely a way increase student engagement–the "tuning in" that David Mamet talks about above.

Our students often aren't here for the information, they're here for the drama. The students frequently find that drama in the actions of their peers. One of our jobs as teachers? Try to create that drama in our subject matter and class activities. Is drama necessary for learning? No, but it sure can help. Some ways to create that drama? Building teacher-student relationships, and including stories about content matter and school.

Last week at my school, a teacher sent out a link to an inspiring (and dramatic) Rita Pierson video on teacher-student relationships. Some teachers discussed it at lunch, a few other teachers commented by email. Teachers engaging other teachers, all right.  Another example: also last week at my school, a teacher announced "Staff Spirit Day" with the theme of "Hey, I went to college!" We were to wear our college sweatshirts and tell students positive stories about our college experiences.

No college sweatshirt being handy, I donned my high school FFA jacket–yeah, that's right, vocational agriculture all the way. I was part of an amazing high school FFA team–we competed in nursery landscape contests across the state and even made our way to nationals in Kansas City.

The FFA jacket I wore last Friday prominently featured the name of my high school, a neighboring school district to the one in which I now teach. As I was sharing stories of high school and college, one of my current students reminded me, "Ms. Johnson, my grandpa was your high school biology teacher!" Sure enough, which meant that my teacher-student-teacher relationship with this family now spanned two school districts and several generations! Good, we've got some human drama.

This high school biology teacher, as I described to my class, was a colorful character, a former Marine who was able to do push-ups with one arm while suspending himself between two student desks. He brewed coffee in his science prep room and gave us worms to dissect. He retired with the graduating class: the students proclaimed him the "Senior senior."

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Trust, Power, Change and Risk

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Current Affairs, Education, Life in the Classroom, Teacher Leadership

File5172abe3badc9By Mark

Change is hard, and for change to happen, trust is critical.

I've been thinking often about trust lately–sitting in meetings with administrators as they strategize how to build trust within a staff. In meetings at the ESD and with OSPI, I hear about how cultivating a climate of trust is vital for evaluation to produce growth.

Thus, we have more meetings, use surveys to find the root of the distrust. Still, I have bosses I trust more than others. I have colleagues I trust more than others. 

And when I sit and listen to my fellow teachers, they likewise lament situations where they do not trust their administrator or evaluators. As a building union representative, I sit in meetings where we talk about erosion of trust, and that the climate of distrust needs to be fixed. We talk about it, point at it, discuss it, and then leave the table waiting for that trust to somehow repair itself.

If I don't trust my administrator to make good choices, there is an assumption about how that lack of trust is to be remedied: If I don't trust you, the only way for trust to be repaired is for you to change.

Bam. There it is.

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The New 3 R’s

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Education, Life in the Classroom

Stories from School would like to welcome Brian Sites as a guest-contributor to our blog. Brian Sites is an alternative educator and National Board Certified teacher, who has earned recognition at the state and national level for his work helping students achieve their full potential at River's Edge High School in Richland, WA. 

This post is an excerpt of his self-publisehd book "Who's Teaching Who? Stories of hope and lessons learned from my first 10 years of teaching" available in pdf format, and free of charge  at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/284848

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The New 3 Rs:    Relationships
+ Resiliency=
 Results

The original 3 R’s (Rigor, Relevance, Relationships) always made sense
to me, but I felt as though it missed the mark. To me, I saw an underlying
assumption that teachers did not offer enough rigor to their students, and that
teachers were clueless about how to teach in ways that make content relevant to
the lives of their students. As for relationships
being the third “R” somehow
seemed to diminish its importance, as if by somehow doing the other two very
well, the Relationships will come naturally.

To me, this is entirely backwards! I see Relationships as the cornerstone of good teaching. Building
students’ resiliency is what teachers are supposed to do, but why is it never
discussed? My experience tells me that because it is not easily quantifiable,
and it is not related to specific content areas, resiliency has been banished
from our pedagogical vocabulary.

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Double your fun with dual credit! Your Brain on Drugs

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Assessment, Life in the Classroom, Science
Photo Feb 9, 2013, 10:42 AM

by Maren Johnson

 

I'm excited about a new class I'm teaching next year. Yes, it's the honeymoon period–I haven't started teaching the class yet, so I'm still in the thinking, dreaming, imagining period–but hey, it's a good place to be–I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

The new class? It's a "college in the high school" biology class–a partnership between my high school and a state university to offer students dual credit. Students will be able to earn both high school and college credit while taking a class right here in their own school.

The class itself is fascinating. We are going to study the fundamentals of biology while looking through the lens of addiction, psychoactive drugs, and the human brain. We're going to do a series of cool labs, there's an online component, and even an interesting text. The biology of cells, organs, systems, and behavior–it's all there, we're just using a specific, high interest focus–the brain and addiction–to study it.

And why do I have time to think, dream, imagine about a new class? It's because I have a student teacher.

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Matters of Education…and Class Size

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Current Affairs, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Social Issues, Teacher Leadership

Class sizeLast year was my first foray into tromping the halls of Olympia as a novice education advocate. I'm still far from an expert–which was one of my reasons for being so reticent to have a political voice.

I think many of us feel that way. The first step, as always, is just to pay attention…read, watch, listen, make up your mind (and remember, it's okay to disagree with your colleagues, your school, and your union, as long as your disagreement is informed).

WEA keeps an active site that is a good place for your radar to first ping: OurVoice. A few bills of note (and I think they're all still live as I type this…but things can change quickly!)

  • S5588: Restricts use of half-days for professional development, marketed as "changing the definition of 'school day.'" (WEA's take, here.)
  • HB1293: Requires districts to disclose the real costs of testing, which has led parents to ask legislators a question they cannot seem to answer.
  • HB1673: Gradually reduces student-to-teacher class size ratios for calculating state allocations, including provisions for even smaller class sizes in high-poverty schools. According to this document, Washington would need to hire over 12,000 teachers to bring our class size to the national average (we're presently the 4th most crowded). 

While there are other bills (and troubling ideas) out there and various stages of their life cycles, ranging from misguided attempts to businessify the teacher evaluation model that hasn't even been given the chance to get off the ground to others that affect collective bargaining, the class size bill, HB1673, is the one I'm thinking about at the moment. 

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