The Field Trips

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FerryBy Tom White

It was a beautiful spring day in the great Pacific
Northwest; my third graders had just spent the morning meeting their pen pals
for the first time. After corresponding with them for eight months, we were at
Edmonds Beach during a really low tide, looking at all sorts of marine
creatures and getting pleasantly muddy. Now we were on the ferry, having lunch
on the sun deck with our new friends as the boat sailed across Puget Sound. We
got to the other side, disembarked and milled around on the dock, planning to
catch the same boat back so we could enjoy some more time at the beach before
returning to school.

That’s where the ferry worker found me. “Are you in charge
of this field trip?” He looked concerned.

“Theoretically,” I said. “Why, is there a problem?”

“Yes. It seems the Edmonds dock has been damaged. They need
a new part to fix it. It’ll take about five hours before we can send another
boat back across. I just thought you should know.”

No conversation about the invisible realities that affect
teachers’ lives would be complete without bringing up field trips. There’s
nothing I hate – and love – more than taking my students out into the world for
some hands-on learning.

They take an incredible amount of time.

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The Mindsets

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

FWhen 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.

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The Paper

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Current Affairs, Education Policy

By Travis A. Wittwer 8088082266_c5ee72d6ec_n

Paper. A school is dependent on paper. This thin, white, innocuous object has value beyond what is initially seen. Paper marks the flow of ideas and learning throughout the school. It is hard to imagine a school without paper. Yet, each year imagining a school without paper becomes easier to imagine.

Paper is an indicator species for resources in the school. Paper represents the health and strength of the school. Paper is symbolic of other resources within the school such as writing utensils, novels, additional support in the library, or clubs to create school culture. 

Paper, and that for which it represents, is another item I will include on my list of Invisibles. 

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Invisible – Letters of Recommendation

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J04221491By Kristin

One night at 11:30 the phone rang, waking me up.  It was one of my all-time favorite students and she was sobbing.  At midnight her online application for a desperately needed scholarship was due and the librarian, who had promised to write a letter of recommendation, hadn't done so.  If she sent me the link and password, would I write one?  She wouldn't ask except the librarian wasn't answering her phone.

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The Budget

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Books, Life in the Classroom, Literacy

Sale booksAnother invisible: the budget. I spend a lot of time on amazon.com as part of my job. As chair of the English department, I have keep up the inventory of our resources–a key resource, of course, is our store of books. Every student at my school is required to take an English class, and my department budget works out to be about $1.80 per student per year. Granted, once you buy a book you can use it multiple times–but books also wear out, and our department budget also has to cover, among other things, basic supplies like paper, staples, dry erase markers, and the other necessities that my 18 full- or part-time English teachers usually end up buying out of their own pocket when the department supply runs out around mid-November.

When I get an email that we are a class-set short of copies of an anchor novel in the curriculum, I have to find a way to cover that gap. In a dream world, I'd buy library-bound hardcover copies of each novel, which start at about $20 per copy. Scratch that: in a dream world, I'd supply all of my students with e-readers wherein they can interact with, annotate, and easily carry their texts. 

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The Lesson Plans

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Teacher
To plan a
complete and well-designed lesson takes time. Most of us have 30-40 minutes of
prep time per day, yet teach 6-10 lessons per day (at the primary level). Since
that in-school prep time is also the only chance we have to go to the bathroom,
organize manipulatives, or gather materials, not much lesson planning happens
during the school day. Which means that either we do most of our planning on our
own time, or we don't do it and end up winging it.

We need
community members, administrators, and policy makers to carefully consider
where they want us to focus our efforts. How much time do you want me to spend
preparing lessons for your child?

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The Job

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Current Affairs, Education, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development

File5074c0e3670deI 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:

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The Meetings

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Education Policy, Life in the Classroom |

Picture 2By Travis Wittwer

In keeping with October's theme of Invisibles, I share with you … The Meetings, but first, a brief definition. "Invisibles" is a general term for all of the unseen things that teachers do to keep the education machine running. The goal of October is to bring a few of these Invisibles to light so that people outside of the school setting have a clear idea of what it is like inside the school. 

So on to The Meetings as my teaching partner and I have been all week. It started on Monday …. 

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Teacher Fever

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Assessment, Education, Elementary, Professional Development, Social Issues

Thermometer

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.

Fun and Games with Teachscape

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CatchBy Tom White

Last Monday night, many of us watched the Seattle Seahawks
beat the Green Bay Packers with a controversial touchdown pass. Then we watched
it again, and again and again. It was an interesting play; two “referees” saw
the same thing from pretty much the same angle, but while the guy on the left
saw an interception, the guy on the right saw a touchdown. (See Figure A) The guy on the left then deferred to his colleague and they ruled it a touchdown. It was immediately challenged by the Packers. So the refs went off the field to watch it again and talk about it. Three commercials
and 17 replays later, they came back onto the field and ruled it a touchdown.
Seahawks win, 14 to 12.

Four days later, on Friday morning, the faculty at my school
sat down to watch some very different film. We watched Teachscape videos. Our district is
complying with the new teacher evaluation system by using the Charlotte
Danielson evaluation model, and we’re using Teachscape to support it.
Consequently, we get to spend the majority of our professional development time
watching teaching videos and talking about whether the teaching is
unsatisfactory, basic, proficient or distinguished.

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