The New 3 R’s

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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Just a Tweak? Educator Effectiveness and the Evergreen Effect

Evergreen EffectBy Maren Johnson

Educator effectiveness is where it’s at right now in Washington state. Student teachers are currently filming themselves and analyzing student learning for the edTPA (teacher performance assessment). We have a challenging ProTeach evidence-based assessment for teachers trying to get their professional certificate. Approximately 13% of the teachers in our state are National Board certified. In addition to all of this, we have a new teacher principal evaluation system that is currently being piloted and will go into effect next school year.

Against the backdrop of all these educator effectiveness programs, last week Chad Aldeman, with an organization named Education Sector, released a report titled, “The Evergreen Effect: Washington’s Poor Evaluation System Revealed.” You can read a short summary blog post or the full report. When teachers and administrators across our state are working hard right now to get a new evaluation system up and running for next year, such a report deserves a closer look.

Mr. Aldeman starts by painting the picture of five elementary schools in Pasco. Aldeman talks about how the students perform poorly on state tests while the teachers, despite the low test scores, are almost all evaluated as satisfactory. My fellow blogger Tom White wrote more about this. What does Aldeman not mention? These particular schools in Pasco have 50-70% of their students learning English–some of the highest percentages of English language learners in the state. Our state tests are given exclusively in English—clearly students who do not speak English are going to be at a huge disadvantage. Giving teachers poor evaluations because their English-learning students do not perform well on tests in English is not going to improve student learning!

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A Little Common Sense

Students-cheating-on-exam-219x300By Kristin

Are any of us really surprised by the news that 35 Atlanta Schools district officials and employees, including the Superintendent, were indicted because of cheating on state tests?

Of course we are.  In Washington State we're not so whipped about scores that we can imagine going into a windowless, locked room, being called the "chosen ones," and replacing wrong answers with right. I think it should stay that way.  The line between honorable and desperate isn't so thick we can assume teachers in Washington will never be told to raise their scores no matter what it took – wink wink.  In fact it's already happened.

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The Evergreen Effect: Another Perspective

Images

By Tom White

Chad Aldeman, an analyst and blogger for the Education
Sector, recently wrote about Washington’s teacher evaluation system. It’s an
interesting read. You can cut to the chase by looking at his blog post here,
or if you’re feeling ambitious, you can tackle the whole article here.

His basic point is that Washington State judges an
overwhelming majority of its teacher as satisfactory, regardless of their
students’ achievement. He calls this the “Evergreen Effect” which is a
reference to “The Widget Effect,” a phenomenon in which education policy-makers
treat teachers as interchangeable “widgets,” ignoring their relative
effectiveness.

I have several reactions to his thoughtful piece.

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Keep it Close to the Classroom

File514dbfaa81bd2By Mark

It seems like a no-brainer. If you want to evaluate my effectiveness as a teacher, you need to look at what I do in my classroom. If you want to evaluate my impact on student learning, you need to look at the work I make my students do and see how that work reflects my students' growth over time.

This is the right way to judge my job performance. But doing it this way takes time, is complicated for my boss (who has to do the same for two-dozen other teachers in two-dozen other contexts), and requires physical and intellectual investment into practices that can sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging (read: it requires change).

Too often in education, doing the difficult, right thing is avoided in favor of doing the simpler, easier to administer thing. When our students do this, we chastise them for cutting corners and missing out on the real value of the work–by doing so they are only cheating themselves, we tell them. When we do this as a system, we are cheating society.

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Supporting Academic Acceleration

230280_1018715262167_834_nBy Kristin

I'm the short one in the photo.  That's my boat at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta in 1993, my last year of college at the University of Washington.  This picture wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't be a college graduate, if it hadn't been for someone at my high school who, without being asked by me or my parents to do so, put me in honors classes and on a college track.  

SB 5243 does what some mysterious educator did for me in 1984; it requires that schools automatically place a capable student in academically accelerated classes.  What a beautiful policy.

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The Two-Way Mirror: Watching Colleagues Teach

File514668507da0b

By Mark

Like you probably have, I've read the books, sat through the professional development, and learned the theories. Each time I learn a little, but nothing like what I learn when I get to watch another teacher in action.

Whether it is through video or through actually getting to walk into a fellow teacher's room and just watch, those minutes invested to simply observe pay far greater dividends than the time or money I invest in reading about best practice or watching a fancy powerpoint click away.

OSPI and CSTP, through support from the Gates Foundation, and working on ways to use teacher video as a springboard for meaningful professional conversation in a variety of contexts. The tools being created are literally like being fly on the wall–or like looking through a two-way mirror–into the unmediated workings of a colleague's classroom, a real classroom with its real kids who sometimes aren't on task, sometimes say silly things, or sometimes take a brilliant question to an even more brilliant answer. Hopefully, these resources will be available later this year, but I've had the privilege to be part of designing and piloting some of the protocols that teachers can use to take advantage of the two-way mirror of peer observation.

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Letter Grades for Schools?

ImagesBy Tom

As a people, we have a weird relationship with data. On the
one hand, we love to collect it; we love to measure every possible entity from
every conceivable angle so that we can arrange all those numbers in tables,
spreadsheets and graphs. On the other hand, we like to take all those numbers
and distill them down to a single digit. It’s as if we overwhelm ourselves with
numbers and respond by getting rid of most of them.

One of my fourth graders was able to put her finger on it. We
were learning how to find averages. One of the practice problems involved five
kids who went fishing. Each kid caught a different number of fish and my
students had to find the average. Like a good teacher, I started with the concrete.
I had each student build towers of interlocking cubes corresponding to the
fish. When they were done, they all had five towers of cubes standing on their
desks. “Finding the average,” I announced, “means finding the number of fish
each kid caught, if they all caught the same amount. That means we’ll have them
‘share’ the fish. We take some fish from the lucky kids and give them to the kids
who weren’t so lucky. We’ll ‘even out’ the towers until they’re all the same
height.” The answer was six. Then I showed them how to find the same number by
adding up all the fish and dividing the total by five. The answer was still
six.

That’s when Kiran spoke up. “I understand how to do this,
but I’m not sure why,” she said, “Why is the average number of fish more
important than knowing how many fish each kid caught?” Good question, Kiran.

It’s the same question I have about Senate Bill 5328, which
is moving its way through the Washington Legislature. It would require the
state to post a letter grade for each school based on how well their students
did on the state test. The bill's supporters think it will make it easier for parents to figure
out how well their local schools are doing, while holding educators more
accountable for their students’ achievement. I think it’s unnecessary,
simplistic and at odds with the last school-reform law out of Olympia: the teacher
evaluation system.

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Let’s Hijack that Spaceship: The Next Generation Science Standards

Mars Roverby Maren Johnson

The Next Generation Science Standards, like the Mars Rover or even some new and strange
space ship hovering above a farmer’s cornfield, are about to land here in
Washington and in many states across our country.  Our job as educators? Let’s hijack that spaceship. I mean that in a positive way: let’s grab
those standards, make them our own, and use them to improve student learning
and our science education system.

The final version of the standards will likely be released this month, and probably be adopted
soon thereafter by our state.  Some
changes from the earlier drafts many are hoping to see? Hopefully, some increased
clarity in language and a reduction in the overall scope of the standards,
avoiding the “mile-wide and inch-deep” problem. 
As one reviewer said, “We're
here to produce learners, not people who have been exposed to a lot of content."  Possible opposition to reduced scope in
standards? One person mentioned the “Julie Andrews” curriculum problem: what does
an individual want to include? “These are a few of my favorite things”—and it
is not possible to include everyone’s favorite things.

Why do I say the Next Generation Science Standards resemble a new
and strange spaceship?

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It’s Not Going Back to Where it Came From

ImagesBy Tom White

When I was growing up my father was the city manager of
Mountlake Terrace. He was – and is – a cheap man, so when it came time to
purchase some additional police cars, he decided to buy a fleet of four used
checker cabs from a New York City taxi company. Expecting brand-new, top-shelf
Crown-Vics, the police force was not amused. In fact, they made an astonishing
prediction: within months, these cars – which they decided were dangerously
top-heavy – would all overturn. And sure enough, they all did. Oddly, no
civilian witnessed any of these “accidents,” all of which happened late at
night. Fortunately no one was injured.

In the end it was a win-win. The cops got their Crown-Vics
and my father got a great story to tell at his annual city manager conferences.
And at every Thanksgiving for the past forty years. The citizens of Mountlake
Terrace, of course, didn’t win; they had to pay for eight cars instead of four,
but such is life.

I share this story in light of what’s happening concerning
education funding. As we all know, the past few years have been bleak. Class
sizes have gone up and para-educator support levels have dropped. Teacher
salaries have also taken a 3% hit; absorbed and mitigated by many districts with
furlough days, resulting in less instruction time.

Like the cops in my father’s city, teachers predicted that
student learning would pay a price. However, this is what actually happened: 

Chart_009388 - Copy

What you’re looking at is math achievement in Washington
State over the last three years. Reading and science scores have also gone up.
This is not what we predicted or feared. This is definitely not a fleet of
police cars rolling around, upside-down in the streets of Mountlake Terrace.

So what happened?

Let me offer three possible explanations, presented in order
of increasing likelihood:

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