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.
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.
Translation from Finnish
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.
The College Visit
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.
CSTP celebrates the big 1 – 0 ! Now where are those talking points?
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?
By 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?
Finally: Growing our Newest Teachers and Leaders
By Mark
I had an amazing mentor my first year of teaching. Fresh out of my M.A.T. program and almost three hundred miles away from my small-town home, she was exactly what I needed.
A great start makes all the difference.
Any investment we can make in a great beginning is a worthy investment, whether for our pre-K kids, our own new students in September, or for those teachers just starting their careers. Of course, resources are sometimes the stumbling block. However, the Beginning Educator Support Program is a way to provide opportunities for early-service teachers. Grant applications are due October 4th… so get those ducks and row them up. Here is the text of a recent email from CSTP about this work:
Districts or consortia of districts may apply now for grants from the Beginning Educator Support (BEST) Program, administered by OSPI and funded by the legislature. BEST provides competitive grants for districts to create comprehensive support for early-career teachers. Specifically, BEST grants provide $2500 per first year teacher, $2000 per second year teacher and $500 for other provisional-status teachers who change assignments. Districts agree to provide a paid orientation for new teachers, well-trained mentors, professional learning for both new teachers and mentors, and release time for mentors and mentees to observe others.
Applications are due to OSPI by 5 pm on Monday, Oct. 4. You can find the application and more information about BEST here - http://www.k12.wa.us/BEST/.
To read the State's Induction Standards go to CSTP's website - http://cstp-wa.org/sites/default/files/CSTP_ind-standards.final_08.pdf
As exciting is the recent news that the state of Washington has been selected to part of a $15 million, three-year grant program from the U.S. Department of Education via the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and which will be collaboratively administered by the powerful trifecta of WEA, OSPI and CSTP in the coming school years. These grants are in part aimed at cultivating teacher capacity as instructional leaders. The name of the program, SEED (which stands for Supporting Effective Educator Development), says it all.
Growth, Part Three: Growing Others
By Mark
One drum I beat constantly is that if we want education reform to work, teachers must be the ones empowered to not only implement the change, but to be the ones who design it.
I often hear about "layers of bureaucracy and waste" in school districts. The comments under the news website articles about education tout the inefficiency and top-heaviness of school systems. That is perhaps the case in some places. Over the last few decades, instructional coaching has been in fashion as a layer somewhere in limbo between classroom teacher and building administrator. In tight budgets, these positions are often the first to go, since their impact on students is not always so obvious and traceable.
To some, coaching or being a TOSA (like I am for .4 of my day) is a stepping stone out of the classroom into administration. That's fine, but I believe that for most of us in that role, it isn't a means to some personal ladder-climbing end. For me, having no aspirations to be in administrative leadership, coaching or TOSA-ing is about supporting classroom instruction.
Logic and research both prove that of all the factors within the control of a school, the one with the greatest impact on student learning is teacher pedagogical skill. If this is the case, the potential power of teacher-leaders in coaching or TOSA roles cannot be understated. With so many demands on building administrators for everything from student discipline to recess duty to teacher evaluation, it is very easy for the difficult and time-consuming work of improving instruction to get unintentional short shrift. In too many cases, efforts to improve instruction manifest as hastily assembled sit-and-get powerpoint assaults or the spending of inordinate amounts of money to fly in some expert to talk at teachers for a day or two about decontextualized theory and the next new curriculum to buy. Missing are the intense and reflective one-on-one probing conversations that demand not only time but strong relationships that likewise require time to develop.
Growth, Part Two: Open to Learning
By Mark
About a year ago I was sitting in a training, titled "Common Assessments, blah, blah, blah" (I can't remember the title).
But it was in that session that I remember, for probably the first time if not in my career then in a long time, actually learning something I thought I could use. Hence, this facebook status update:
I had just finished my tenth year of teaching, and was about to embark on my eleventh and begin referring to myself as "mid-career."
In reflection, it obviously wasn't that I had never been exposed to quality professional development. (Well, maybe…) The change, though, happened in my head. Suddenly, I was at a point in my career where I was mentally ready to learn. Seeing a new strategy was no longer a threat meaning that "the way I teach is wrong." Rather than feel obligated to accept and apply everything the trainer offered, I realized that even walking away with the tiniest applicable nugget was a success.
It was really at that moment that I finally began to grow as a teacher. It started by simply becoming open to learning that challenged me, rather than only being open to learning that already fit into my current view of myself and my practice.
Growth, Part One
By Mark
If you say the word too many times, it starts to sound funny (like if you say "moist" or "pancake" too many times and they start to sound strange…maybe that's just me). It seems like every sentence in my professional life includes that word "growth" in one context or another. Student growth scores, Professional Growth Planning, proficiency growth scales…
I like it. It does something more than grades or labels once did: talking grades and labels felt so static and permanent, talking growth is talking movement. Where I used to talk to kids about "bringing a grade up" (in other words, struggling to move something beyond themselves) now I find myself talking to students about developing their skills and growing toward proficiency. There is a real difference.
I attribute this directly to my professional and personal learning about the new teacher evaluation system.