By Kristin

When I saw this poster it made me laugh out loud, partly because it's true and partly because when I face where we are as public educators I can laugh or cry. 

Here's where we are: there is a clear, definable line between students who are successful on tests and students who are not, and that line divides children not only on the basis of academic achievement but of economic status and race.  Poor children don't do as well.  Do I want to cry because the injustice of a broken system feels bigger than me, or do I want to cry because the dirty secret is out?  

Continue reading →

This year, I only have 44 students–all 9th graders. 

I'm still working full time, but half of my day involves work as a TOSA, guiding teachers on peer observation learning walks, assisting with PLC initiatives, and other near-the-front-lines work. While this work does require preparation, meetings, and organization, it does not require me to curl up with a stack of papers to grade after my sons have gone to bed (or before they've gotten up). Having only two English classes this year will be a far different experience… previously, five hours of student contact time each day meant as many hours each day of outside-of-my-contract-hours planning, assessment, and feedback. 

It's just part of the gig, so don't read that as a complaint, but rather as a statement of reality.

Part of my role as TOSA is to help with the implementation of the newly mandated Teacher and Principal Evaluation project (TPEP), and again and again I hear from both teachers and administrators that their top concern about this new initiative is not its content, aims, or potential.

It is about time.

Continue reading →

By Kristin

This summer I saw something very similar to the chart you see here. A principal was explaining how she gathered and analyzed student data, and how that data drove her administrative decisions.

You can see, if you click on the chart, that Teacher B didn't do so hot.  Because a teacher's reputation precedes him, what's going to happen if parents find out about Teacher B's scores?  Will they request a class change?  Will they complain?  Test scores are scary for teachers because they don't tell the whole story, but they tell an important part of the story.

Continue reading →

1. There is typically a positive correlation between effort and results.

2. Success in high school has surprisingly little to do with how smart you are.

3. Don't accept an opinion just because it is the first one you learn.

3a. Don't discount an opinion just because it contradicts the first one you learned.

4. Make sure that you don't confuse what you know with what you think you know.

5. It is perfectly okay to not know things, as long as you don't stop there.

6. You should make it a habit to question what you think you know and believe.

6a. Changing your opinion about something important, especially when you are faced with new information, is not a sign of weakness.

Continue reading →

My living room floor is covered in books, bags of play-doh, math
manipulatives, files, and papers. The kitchen counter looks about the same. So
does the table, the sofa, my bed. Summer is ending and it’s time to get those
lesson plans straightened out to start the year. I could do this at school, but
my classroom is in a dark basement with no windows, and the sun is shining.

I’ve spent quite a few hours this past week searching Pinterest and blogs,
going through old plan books and files, reading  teacher’s guides, and of
course navigating my fancy new Common Core app for just the right mix of beginning of the
year lessons. I’ve also spent a lot of time reflecting on how we make these
decisions.

Continue reading →

By Tom White

As I understand it, the primary form of professional development in Japan is something called Lesson Study; a model in which a team of teachers collaborates on the planning and delivery of a lesson. One lesson. The whole team decides on a topic, picks a lesson and then plans it. Once the lesson plan is complete, one member teaches the lesson to a group of students while the rest of the team studies how the lesson plays out. Their focus is on the students’ interaction with the learning activity. After the lesson, the entire team compares notes, analyzing and reflecting on the lesson. This debriefing session usually evolves into a revision of the lesson, to be taught by a different teacher and observed again by the rest of the team. Only when they’re satisfied with the lesson does the team move on to a different lesson.

It’s important to note that during the observation and the debriefing, the focus is always on the lesson, not the teacher. Furthermore, the lesson is always referred to as “our lesson.” And rightly so, since it was crafted by the team, not the teacher who presented it. This makes lesson study an extremely “safe” way to get teachers out into each other’s rooms and talking about teaching.

I love Lesson Study. I’ve used it in my own school and I’ve help get it going in other schools. What I particularly love is the focus on The Lesson – the most underrated element of teaching; the singular point in which the teacher, the school and the curriculum come into direct contact with the student.

The primary purpose of Lesson Study is the creation of good, tested lessons. That’s why they do it in Japan, where Lesson Study originated during the post-war years. Lesson Study in America also yields quality lessons, but in my experience, the real benefit is the incidental learning that goes on throughout the entire process. As teachers discuss every part of the lesson, they each call upon their experience and training to come up with ideas to share. They listen to each other and debate the possibilities, all the while refining and expanding their own philosophies and teacher tool-kits, thereby benefitting the rest of the thousand-or-so lessons they teach each year. It’s extremely
powerful, especially with a mixture of young and “seasoned” teachers.

Despite all this, Lesson Study hasn’t really caught on in America. This doesn’t surprise me, and I can think of at least three reasons why it hasn’t – and likely won’t – take root in this nation.

First of all, Lesson Study is too gradual for our country. Productive, professional discourse notwithstanding, Lesson Study’s output of two or three quality lessons per year is simply too glacial for a nation that prefers “school reform” over slow, sustainable improvement. We don’t want our low-performing schools to simply “get better;” we want them to “turn around.” Unlike Japan, we want Results Now. In regards to professional development, Japan joined a gym, while America invented liposuction. Ironically, Japan – plodding along with Lesson Study – has become an educational superstar, while American schools, despite our Results Now mentality, haven’t changed a whole lot over the past twenty years.

Besides that, I don’t think there’s enough trust in this country between groups of stakeholders that teachers, working without an administrator or without an “expert” are actually “working.” I recently worked with a group of teachers in Washington D.C., facilitating the formation of two Lesson Study groups. The biggest concern they had was protecting the process and their work from their principal, who they felt would want to either influence their lessons or turn the “study” into another form of evaluative observation. This makes sense, considering that principals are under intense pressure to increase test scores. PD time is precious, and it’s hard to justify squandering it on something that won’t yield immediate, measurable changes in data.

Finally, Lesson Study is simply too simple and too cheap for America, a nation that doesn’t take any professional development model seriously until Corwin Press has had its way with it. It’s not that you can’t find a book about Lesson Study – you can; but you can also reread the first paragraph of this post and save yourself $24.95. It really is that simple. Lesson Study is the minimalist’s model of professional development. The haiku of PLC’s, if you will. In fact, the teachers with whom I was working in D.C. had, within the first hour, and without so much as a binder, figured out the basic process and begun adapting the model so it would work in their school. By the second hour, they had formed their two groups and were working on a set of norms that would guide their meetings. By the fourth hour, one group had starting planning a lesson in which their students would use primary documents dealing with the Iroquois Confederation to write historically accurate recipes using the foods available to the Native People. The other group was working on an activity in which students would look at global patterns of lactose intolerance and make connections to the history of colonialism.

Very cool lessons; but what was even cooler were the conversations they were having: What constitutes a primary document? What’s the operative difference between guided and independent practice? What’s the biology behind lactose intolerance? Why is there so little health data from
Somalia? Should we let the students try to make sense out of a color-coded map before or after we tell them what the colors represent? What exactly is an anticipatory set? How could different tribes eat such different foods and still get adequate nutrition? These discussions, focused on both content and pedagogy, happened without either an expert or an administrator.

Lesson Study is the epitome of high-quality, job-embedded professional development. It’s simple, powerful and effective. It gets teachers talking about their craft and it gets them into each other’s rooms to watch each other teach.

It’s perfect, and it will never catch on in this country.

It’s too bad.

Tamara Mosar

The start of the school year always has me thinking about how I will measure student progress/acheivement and how to share that information in a way that allows students grow as learners. Most years that means I'm re-examining rubrics, re-tooling and preparing to set up student portfolios. For years my district has been looling at Stiggins and how do we assess to promote learning. Accross the state a number of districts are moving to standards based grading. Something Kristin brought up recently.

Philosophically I like standards based grading. I think it offers teachers, students, and families a far more clear and objective picture of learning taking place. Much in the same way TPEP has potential to be a powerful tool for porfessional growth, standards based grading has the potential to be a powerful tool in student learning when accompanied by timely actionable feedback. But there are issues.

Continue reading →