Way back, when I signed up to be a teacher, and a science teacher at that, I never imagined the amount of writing I was going to be doing. Yes, I expected to write some curriculum, student assessments, and the like, but I never really contemplated writing about teaching.
Category Archives: Professional Development
The Time to Do the Right Work
As a writing teacher, one of my greatest struggles involves getting kids to understand the writing process. Writing can be frustrating, arduous work. Understandably, then, when a kid puts the last period on the last sentence in the last paragraph, the impulse then is to put down the pen or click "print" and pass that piece on to the teacher.
As adults, we know that the last period is not the finish line, and that often the toughest work begins when the writing is "finished." The act of meaningful revision–the analysis of effectiveness, the cutting and splicing of sentences, the refining of vivid vocabulary–that formidable work often makes the first stages of writing seem simple. We know, though, that the difference between mediocre and exceptional comes with the time invested in revising, polishing, and refining. It is hard work. It is the right work to do, and it takes time. If that work is skimped upon or shirked, the end product will not have achieved its full potential.
When I had the opportunity to present to the Gates Foundation last week, the other presenters and I never met ahead of time to coordinate our message–yet the same point resonated loud and clear: the new evaluation system is the right work to do to improve teaching, schools, and student learning.
And the corollary to that point: doing this work will take time.
The Right Work
As some of you might have seen on Facebook, this past Thursday, December 6th, I had the privilege and opportunity to offer a short presentation and serve on a discussion panel for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Education Pathways meeting.
In the audience were names attached to some of most important and influential groups in public education in the state of Washington–and beyond, since also present were Ron Thorpe, President and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and Washington's own Andy Coons, who serves as the Chief Operating Officer of NBTPS. Walking into a room with leadership from OSPI, the Gates Foundation, the Association of Washington School Principals, CSTP, and numerous other organizations, I was quick to feel intimidated. After all, my main thought during my drive to Seattle was about whether my ninth graders were behaving for the sub–nothing quite so heady as the future of statewide policy.
My comfort zone is much more intimate with much clearer roles: When I walk into my own classroom, I am the expert, I am the authority. It's not that I wield power like a tyrant over my domain, but to those fourteen- and fifteen-year olds, I am the voice they are to listen to, heed, seek for advice, and learn from. I am the teacher: what I have to say matters.
In my eleven years of teaching, as I've ventured little by little into the world of education policy, there are many times when I find myself in a room filled with nicely pressed suits (and me wearing my one pair of decent slacks) feeling just the opposite way as I do in front of my classroom. I think to myself: I am just a teacher. Will what I say matter?
Rigorous Teachers
I typically do not post on other posts. However, a post from Education Week caught my attention and shares a great deal of what I hope for Washington when I think of its future as an education state.
The AFT (American Federation of Teachers) has an ambitious plan and I can get behind much of it.
I found myself nodding my head to was the call for rigorous, and consistent standards in teacher training programs. It is good for students and Washington because everyone gets a stronger teacher. It is also good for the teaching profession because it raises the quality of teachers which will raise the respect the profession gets.
What I need to change
We are in transition.
As a "Marzano" district piloting forward toward implementation of the new teacher evaluation system, I am coming face to face with the kinds of expectations that are going to rattle my paradigm. The instructional frameworks OSPI allowed us to choose from do not represent dramatically different approaches to teaching or schools of thought about how teaching and learning should take place. What the frameworks do establish, though, are specific "research-based" teaching strategies that emerge as valued and therefore expected, since they are named in the evaluation scales against which I will be measured. In Marzano, a few stand out to me: learning targets, performance scales (rubrics), and students tracking their own growth against those scales.
I agree that these are solid instructional strategies: they just haven't always been a consistent and practiced part of my repertoire.
Now they are going to be–or else.
The Mindsets
When I was an undergraduate, I loved having the opportunity to choose whichever courses interested me. Outside of my major, I took everything from calculus to photography to sociology. I also took advantage of another benefit offered: the option to take courses "pass/fail." I engaged this option whenever there was the chance that I would earn less than an "A."
At the time, I justified it from a financial standpoint. I had tuition and housing scholarships which required a certain GPA: a "C" would harm my GPA, but a "P" had no effect on it and I'd still earn the credit. However, in hindsight, I see that this behavior was a sign of something I'm only now starting to understand: my transcript was my identity.
Recently at an after-school meeting, one of our building associate principals shared an article summarizing the work done by Carol Dweck of the Stanford University School of Psychology. The gist: while it is not absolute, there are generally two "mindsets" into which people can be classified–the "fixed" mindset and the "growth" mindset.
A person whose disposition is in the "growth" mindset will relish challenge, recover from failure having learned and applied critical lessons, and "end up" in a different and usually better place from where they "start out."
In college, I was clearly of the "fixed" mindset.
The Job
I was sitting in a conference in another state last week when the conversation got heated.
We had just listened to a very well executed presentation about how to improve assessments so that they minimize the "chance for student error other than not knowing." We'd heard about PLCs and how to make them work. We'd heard about the power of shared assessment rubrics and the value of examining student work. We'd all drunk the kool-aid and sat smiling, basking in the glow of new learning with all its potential for impacting student growth.
Then reality began to crash in. My colleagues from another district (in that other state) began to recognize the vast gulf–the chasm–between the promise of this ideal about which they'd learned and grown excited, and the real resource and personnel limitations they knew they'd face upon arrival back home.
How are we supposed to do this? They pleaded. We're already so busy doing everything else we have to and we don't even have time to do all that–and now there's more?
The answer was obvious:
Teacher Fever
I woke up in the middle of the night, and knew something was
wrong. I was cold, hot, shaking, queasy, everything ached. I stumbled into the
bathroom to find a thermometer and wait…
wait…
yup. A fever. Now it’s definitive. I’m sick.
Like somehow I didn’t know that until after the little
number popped up on the thermometer.
Well, it’s probably just a little virus, or something I ate.
Uncomfortable, unpleasant, but not serious I consoled myself as I curled up on
the floor by the toilet where I would be spending the next few hours.
A temperature tells us our immune system is working. It’s
fighting off the weakness in the body and in a day or two, we will be well
again. Most fevers don’t send us running off to the doctor. Unless they persist…
A fever tells us something is wrong. But by itself, it
doesn’t tell us what is wrong or how serious it might be. It takes a while to
figure out if you need to call in sick, or check into the hospital. Just get some rest, or run expensive tests
using big humming medical equipment. These are the thoughts running through my
head at 2am on the floor of the bathroom.
What does any of this have to do with teaching? Well, since
I’m home sick today, I’m sitting here looking at my school’s MSP scores from
this past year. We, like many schools, seem to have a bit of a fever. Our
scores aren’t where we’d like them to be. They certainly aren’t terrible, but they’ve
declined two years in a row. I guess you would call that a fever in
reverse. Anyway, it appears that we’re a
bit under the weather. However, the numbers that I’m looking at don’t tell the
whole story. It’s a small school. A few kids having a bad day are enough to
change our scores from one year to the next. Listen to the staff conversations about
this, and we all have an idea what caused the trouble. But what we don’t have
is expensive medical equipment that can give us a definitive diagnosis. All we
have is the number on the thermometer.
Do we need more professional development to help improve our
instruction?
Or new curriculum?
Or a new intervention program?
Or new technology?
Or stronger anti-poverty initiatives?
Or maybe a better thermometer?
Maybe the one we have is broken.
After all, in the past few years we’ve changed our test from
the WASL to the MSP, and then changed the administration of that test from
paper and pencil to computer based. It’s hard to compare year to year using an
inconsistent tool. Looking at National Assessment (NAEP)
scores from the past ten years, our 4th grade state scores have
remained relatively unchanged. It
doesn’t seem to matter what we do: which curriculum we adopt, which diagnostic
test we administer, which RtI model we embrace. The scores have not wavered in
the past decade.
According to the Flynn
Effect, we are getting more intelligent over time. If that’s true, then
seriously, why aren’t our test scores rising?
I’m not saying we can’t or shouldn’t do anything to try and
raise student achievement. On the contrary, I think we need to do even more…way
more…to figure out how to level the playing field, provide meaningful,
appropriate instruction, and assess it in ways that aren’t skewed by politics.
If after a decade this fever has persisted, it seems like it’s time to do more
than just keep taking our temperature over and over.
Hope and Fear: New National Board Candidates
One of the projects I am most excited about this year is facilitating a group of National Board candidates. We have never actually had a National Board cohort in my district before (we are a bit small and rural), but this year we have a healthy sized group–Whoo-hoo! Even a teacher from a neighboring district is joining us.
We started our first meeting with a "Hope and Fear" protocol for setting group norms that I got from one of the expert National Board trainers in our state. Participants individually wrote their hopes and fears for the National Board process, shared them, then together came up with norms that would help facilitate the hopes and prevent the fears.
Sparrow vs. Goose
By Rob
One of my favorite summer activities was playing fetch in the park with my dog. After the pooch was worn out we’d sit in the grass and I’d marvel at the swallows that arrive by late morning. These birds would swoop, dive, bank and turn. It was dizzying to see how quickly they’d change directions and commit to a new path.