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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Study Your Craft

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Education Policy

by Maren Johnson

The auditorium was packed with several hundred teenagers from two school districts when the bell rang for lunch.  No one moved.  The occasion causing the students to sit in place and ignore the bell?  An arts assembly at our school.  In conjunction with a local film festival, our students had watched a movie in their social studies classes and now had the opportunity to hear from the director.  A student asked the guest speaker one last question, "Do you have any advice for aspiring film makers?"   Students wanted to hear the answer, and they weren't going anywhere until they did, lunch bell or not.  Our guest, the award winning film maker Alrick Brown, shared three ideas in response:

1) Study your craft.  If you shake your booty on YouTube, that doesn't mean you're a film maker. If you get a million hits on the internet, that doesn’t mean you’re a film maker. The success needs to be replicable and you get that by studying your craft. 

At first I thought this was some sort of statement against the democratization of art through social media.  Not at all.  Our guest mentioned that the reason he was able to be a successful film maker, making movies in often difficult circumstances in developing countries, was because he studied and worked hard at it: a Masters Degree in Education, followed by two years in the Peace Corps, then a Masters Degree in Film making.   The message of the importance of study and hard work in all careers really seemed to hit home with the students.  Clearly this applies to teachers as well—we need to study our craft!

KinyaRwanda

Video Productions teacher with guest film maker

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When Well-Meaning Policy Results in Inadequate Service

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Tamara Mosar

In the state of Washington if you are an English Language
Learner in-country for less than three years you cannot be considered for
special education services. Unless there is written documentation (key word
there being written)of special education services having been received in the
country of origin or if qualifying tests can be administered in the student’s native
language. There is very good reason for this: English Language Learners often seem
slow to make progress in comparison to their grade level peers. They often
display behaviors inappropriate to the classroom: refusing to answer questions
or make eye contact, hiding under desks, violating other student’s personal
space. All of which should be expected from students not yet able to
communicate in English, who come from cultures where eye contact with adults is
not acceptable, have a different definition of personal space, and often have
post traumatic stress syndrome. So the policy is there to attempt to recognize
this reality for ELLs. To give them time to acquire language and acclimate to
our culture, rather than write them off as SPED.

However the policy can backfire. For example I have a student from Bhutan who in infancy was relinquished by her mother to another family in order to keep her from starving to death like two older siblings. Severely malnourished, this child was taken by the new family to a Nepali refugee camp where after care from camp doctors,the adoptive family notes significant developmental delays. Eventually, according to the family, the camp school places this child in special education courses. When the family arrives in the U.S. the child is placed into an age appropriate grade per policy. Parents alert school personnel to the child's history, request grade level retention, and special education services.  ELD and Special Ed staff attempt to start the identification process but hit a dead end because there are no written records from the refugee camp school-just the parent’s word- that
the student received special education services, and there is no Nepali version of the qualifying tests. Policy regarding qualifying ELLs for special ed apparently cannot take ancdotal evidence from parents in place of written documentation or test in the primary language. Thus, the child was left with only ELD services much to the consternation of the family. 

I now have this student in middle school. A notoriously difficult time to qualify even an English speaking student for SPED services. Especially as this child is studious and compliant-you know, the kid who quietly fails. We may be able to squeak in through a Health Impairment qualification because we still can't get around the primary language testing issue. But it will take time. Time we are running out of. And this is how well meaning policy quietly fails.

What if?

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Images (1)By Tom White

On the way to the grocery store last Saturday I listened to a wonderful essay called “The
Presumption of Decency.” The essential message was that we should presume
the best in people, even if we disagree with their views, and it was clearly
directed at the current presidential campaign. Then on Sunday I read a
column by Eugene Robinson in which he calls for an end to rampant teacher
bashing, specifically to the penchant education reformers seem to have for
blaming teacher unions for the dismal quality of education in our nation’s
poorest neighborhoods.

I couldn’t help but draw a connection between the two and
ask the dreamy question, “What if?” What if both sides of the education-reform
debate stopped fighting and started working together? (And if you don’t think
these two sides are actually fighting each other, it’s time to come down from
Candyland and read Class
Warfare by Steven Brill and The
Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch.)

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Defining Quality Education

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Tamara Mosar

As I followed the Chicago Teacher Union’s strike, getting
past the noise about evaluations, salaries, the right to organize, it became
evident to me the underlying issues point to a conversation about education in
this country few are engaging in. Namely, are we as a nation still willing to
provide a free “quality” education to all children? Now many will tell me there
are numerous people engaged in the Should We Privatize Education debate. I
know. I live thirty minutes from a state that chose to spend a significant
portion of the budget for teachers’ salaries on laptops for every student from
a certain company. But that is not where I am going with this post.

 I don’t think we can enter the conversation of public and political will regarding continued provision
of public education until as a nation we come to consensus as to what
constitutes “Quality Education”. There have been volumes of back chatter
regarding the impediments to a “quality education”: relentless and rising poverty,
bad teachers, bad administrators, bad parents (just once I’d like to hear bad
policy or bad politicians), community violence, limited if any early childhood
education.

But what is “Quality Education”? Does “quality“ mean all
students graduate? Does it mean if a student graduates they are ready to enter
the workforce? Does a “quality” education mean students are prepared to enter college
without the need for remediation in math and English? Or does “quality”
education mean students can demonstrate mastery of subjects in end of course
exams or standardized tests like HSPE, SAT, AP, or IB? Does a “quality”
education include the provision of health care and social services?   Does “quality” education produce a just and compassionate citizenry?

What say you?  Any
takers for this conversation?