Why Some TFA Alums Undermine TFA

Barkhorn_TFA_post  By Kristin

Eleanor Barkhorn, a Senior Associate Editor at The Atlantic who oversees the Education Channel wrote this piece about how she almost quit after her first year as a Teach For America corps member, but didn't.

Ms. Barkhorn's experience teaching Black children in the Mississippi Delta had the same effect on her that it has had on so many other unfortunately vocal TFA alums – it changed her life, made her a better journalist, opened her eyes to the reality of racism, forced her to summit the peak that was Eleanor's Inner Being and introduced her to her own true self – and this is exactly why so many teachers resist the idea of TFA.

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High School Kids and Homework. Help!

6138By 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.

Little Red Marbles and the Next Generation Science Standards

Photo Oct 11, 2013, 11:09 AM

by Maren Johnson

"Atoms are little red marbles too small to see," responded one of my students when I asked what he knew about atoms. I teach biology, so while atoms are important, we don't talk about them every day, and it was near the beginning of the school year. I asked a few clarifying questions to figure out what he actually meant.

No, he didn't think atoms were LIKE little red marbles, he actually thought they WERE little red marbles, that is to say, little round hard things colored red. Where did he get this idea? Well, to be honest, probably right here at school! We frequently use models at my school to teach about atoms. There's a few demonstration models up to the left created by the crafty physical science teacher at my school. Down to the right you can see a model of a neon atom constructed by one of my chemistry students.

While use of those models results in a lot of understanding, it can also can result in some misconceptions, especially when taken too literally!

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Strengthening the Teaching Profession: Ten Years

Icicle River taken by Mark GBy Mark

Teachers change the world. Teachers shape the future. Teachers make a difference.

Like so many well-intentioned platitudes, over time these can start to ring hollow. When I drove to Leavenworth in 2007 for the NBCT Leadership Conference (then known just as "Sleeping Lady"), I expected a little rah-rah, a little break in that long April-to-June stretch of constant classroom push. And maybe a decent meal in a part of Washington this transplanted Oregonian had never visited.

Instead of teachers change the world, teachers shape the future, teachers make a difference, I got something better. I was shown: Here is how teachers can change the world, here is how teachers can shape the future, and here is how teachers can make a difference.

As corny as it sounds, I left that conference feeling empowered

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Collective Bargaining and Dead Fish: We’re just a bunch of teachers after school



Wild salmonBy Maren Johnson

The last bell rang on the last day of the school year.  I looked around my science classroom. Dead fish at every lab station, the remains of several interesting labs.  Yes, they were preserved, and yes, the students had followed instructions on putting them back in containers, but still, these dead fish just could not sit in my classroom over the summer—they would need to be disposed of properly, and I would be the one who would need to do that. 

During that school year, teachers in my district did not receive any paid time after the end of the year for closing down classrooms, performing check out procedures, and so on.  At the moment the last bell rang, that was it–any more time spent doing those activities was on our own, and unpaid.  Really, the idea that teachers are done with classroom work the moment the students leave in June is absurd.

Soon after that school day, my local association bargaining team, of which I am a member, met in my classroom for a planning session.  As we surveyed the dead fish on the lab benches, the bargaining team talked about how all members have the equivalent of “dead fish”—things that just have to be done after the end of the school year in order to ensure a great start to the next school year.  Surveys and individual conversations with members revealed the same thing—teachers and other educators needed some time at the end of the school year.

When our team put together a list of priorities for the next bargaining season, you guessed it—a paid day at the end of the school year for all members made the list—and we got it! Unfortunately, the term "Dead Fish Day" did not make it into actual contract language–nope, instead we're calling it by the much less imaginative term “M7 day,” named after the “M” section of the contract.

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Student Centered Classroom Management – Part I

By Kristin

I've been teaching a long time, but I think I'm only now figuring out what matters most – creating a classroom my students own, are proud of, and where they flourish.

Last year, my first year teaching a reading intervention class, I threw away almost everything I knew about classroom management and tried to create a room that worked for the most challenging students. Things got a little crazy, and they got a lot uncomfortable for someone who doesn't like loud noises or a lot of jumping around, but I worked hard to adapt.  

What I got in return were moments like this one, and that made it all worth it.

Phone pics 2013 057

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Translation from Finnish

P1040923
The following is a guest-post from Sarah Applegate, an NBCT teacher librarian at River Ridge High School in Lacey Washington. She is passionate about quality information literacy instruction, working with teachers to provide a wide range of resources for students, and dark, bitter Finnish licorice.

I have a confession. 
I am a “Finnophile” (“one who
loves all things from Finland”) and a “ChauvaFinn”
(“one who displays excessive pride in Finland”) yet I hold an American passport.
 My friends and colleagues will
tell you that since I returned from a Fulbright study in Finland in 2011, I
have sought out every opportunity to reflect upon and share what I learned and
observed during my research on the Finnish education and library system.  Some might say I sought out TOO many
opportunities- during casual dinners, on long runs, and while watching our kids
at the park,  to share memories,
insights and observations from my time in Finland. While embracing my Finnish obsession,
I have continued to reflect on what I observed while in Finnish schools and
libraries. I have constantly considered how schools in Washington could learn
from Finnish education practice and translate them into Washington state
settings.

On September 21, I was finally able to make connections
between what I had learned and observed in Finland through a Finnish Education
Conference, funded by the US Department of State with support from CSTP and
WEA. We gathered 50 teachers from Washington to hear and think about what makes
Finland’s education system work and how their approaches could be used in
Washington state schools. I brought together four US Finland Fulbright
teachers, as well as two Finnish teachers, to speak on how Finland organizes
their education system, designs and delivers instruction and trains their teachers.
During the morning, participants were able to learn about Finnish education practices
and in the afternoon, teachers a chance to “translate” what they had learned to
their own teaching context and plan for potential implementation of Finnish
practices in their Washington state setting. What we translated has some promising implications for us in our schools – read on to see what we cooked up.

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The College Visit

CampuseditSBy 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.

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CSTP celebrates the big 1 – 0 ! Now where are those talking points?

Photo

by Maren Johnson

We’ve got something unique here in Washington state in terms
of education organizations that work with teachers.  Yeah, we have some great districts, state education agencies, unions.  In
addition to all that, here in Washington, we’ve got an independent nonprofit
with a focus on teaching—and that organization, the Center for Strengthening
the Teaching Profession
, is celebrating its ten year anniversary this month!

So what does CSTP do? 
Just a few of the activities:

Community Dialogue
and Advocacy.
  What’s different about
CSTP advocacy training?  No talking
points provided!   Whether online or in
person, CSTP advocacy training gives teachers the opportunity to develop their
own messages for their own audiences, whether that audience is local, state, or
national.  At an advocacy training
before a recent legislative session, one teacher, a tad frustrated, asked, “Where
are the talking points?”  The facilitator’s
response: “The talking points will be better if you, the teachers, develop
them!”

The communication is not just limited to speaking—writers’
retreats (and this blog!) have given educators the opportunity to develop writing
skills.

Teacher Leadership.
Very frequently, in K-12 school cultures, the term “leadership” is used
interchangeably with the term “administration.”  The Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession
has worked to expand that definition with the development of the Teacher
Leadership Skills Framework.

The NBCT Leadership Conference, one of CSTP’s
signature events, has been a launchpad for many newly certified NBCTs to not
only hone leadership skills, but also to develop their own personal network of
statewide teacher leaders. 

CSTP doesn’t just strengthen the teaching profession, CSTP
strengthens individual teachers.  One
teacher recently said, “There’s a whole lot going on besides what is
going on in my own little classroom, and CSTP helps me learn about it.”

Research.  CSTP commissions research to help all sorts
of agencies and organizations better understand teaching and learning, as well
as support for teaching and learning, in Washington state classrooms.

And hey, the audience for all this is definitely not limited
to teachers!  CSTP pulls together
instructional leaders of all sorts in work such as helping train and
support the Instructional Framework Feedback Specialists for our new state
teacher principal evaluation system.  In
another example of working with administrators and teachers across the career
continuum, CSTP developed a module designed to help principals better assist
new teachers in their buildings. 

Advocacy, leadership, and research?  It’s been an amazing ten years.  So where is CSTP going in the next ten?

Should We Be Doing More to Catch Cheating?

091227-g-airportsecurity2By Kristin

As Linda Shaw points out in this piece, Washington State officials aren't doing much to catch possible cheating on state tests.  Instead of spending $100,000 on "erasure detection," looking for answers that have been erased and replaced, Washington puts its energy into training and making it easy for whistle blowers to report any irregularities or suspected cheating.  Should we be doing more to catch cheating?

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