Graduation Revelations

Summer vacation has started in earnest, and I have had a lot of time over the past couple of days to mull over post-Graduation conversations.

There is no event at my school (or I suspect most schools) quite like graduation. For one thing, I think teachers experience the finality of graduation in a fairly unique way. Parents build toward graduation for quite some time, but they still have summer together before most of the goodbyes are said. The kids (as many many graduation/commencement addresses have mentioned) are experiencing a beginning as much as an end. Teachers (read me) on the other hand experience graduation as a distinct end. For another thing, everyone attends graduation.

Thus I got to meet (or really talk to) some parents for the first time. There were a number of parents present, who, though I had taught their children for 2 years, I had never talked to. Most thanked me briefly, or discussed their pleasure at meeting me finally, but some really wanted to talk to me. They wanted to tell me that mine was the only name they heard at home, or to say that I was one of a small number of teachers really challenging their child, or asking me not to leave the school.

While touching (I mean like keep doing the job for a long long time touching), I also worried a bit. I am glad that I seem to be making an impact (especially with these students who I will definitely miss), but I might be happier if my impact was a bit less singular.

Graduation Day

It is very early in the morning on Graduation Day, and I am contemplating rigor.

When I worked with Teach For America there was a great deal of talk about making each day count. Given the nature of the challenge (large groups of students who year after year learn less than their suburban counterparts) TFA corps members set goals to produce one and a half years of learning in one year. Often that is the measure of success. Have you taught students what they needed to learn in a year?

At the end of each year, I find myself asking the same question. For some of my students I am certain that I have, but there are always a wide variety of students that I am not so sure of. Reasonable people, with reasonable memories of school, know that they did not learn everything they could in every class they took.

The challenge for teachers becomes that the expectations are changing. It is good that the expectations are changing, as reasonable people with normal jobs are expected to achieve something every day they go to work. Thus, the discussion has changed, moving away from an understanding of learning (kids learn in fits and starts, and only when they are motivated), and towards an understanding of production. I am expected to produce gains on tests.

Few of us can claim (us being the American worker) that we achieve our absolute best everyday on the job. While at my best I might be capable of convincing my students to remember the discreet facts of history, or help them to understand the value of being a citizen, doing that requires a perfect storm of my own energies, the circumstances of class, and the circumstances of the students.

Next year, thanks to the school reform movement at play in my city, I will be judged for the first time on whether or not I achieve my best every day. This makes perfect sense, and I support it, I am just not sure about how to make it happen day after day after day.

I need to make every day count. Students need to learn something, efficiently, quickly and daily, if they are to have any hope of keeping up with their suburban counterparts. The best of us have trouble achieving that, and those teachers are far from the majority.

Motivating students... that is the challenge. I was motivated by parents who gave me a hard time if I got less than a B-. That's why I was a B student, but that rarely translates to my work. There are a million books, thousands of programs, but at the end of the day there is a reason that parents send their teenagers to school after all.

A Good Day

My goal with this blog is to shed some light on teaching for those who are interested in it. As a result, I have tended to discuss serious professional matters, and the gripes many of us have. Today, however was a very good day, and I would like to discuss some of the perks of my job.

Today, a group of twenty seniors colluded to get me good with one of the few pranks I have seen at school that did not amount to vandalism or major school disruption. To be fair, the young ladies who organized the prank had discussed it in my company (they thought they were being quiet) and they enlisted the help of a colleague to get me out of my room for 20 minutes. I knew something was going to happen. But, I had no idea what they were going to do.

So I was not shocked when I returned from lunch (noticing obvious lookouts) to find my window covered with foil (I figured that they were guarding their secret). I was pretty shocked however to find that every other item in the room, computers, tables, chairs, maps, lights, the whiteboard, my chair, all the things on my desk, my desk, the thermostat, the globe, each and every book, and all the windows had been wrapped in aluminum foil. Each student had brought with them their whole household supply of the stuff. There were lots of pictures, and the kids cleaned it up, creating a gigantic foil ball. We spent most of the afternoon engaged in foil ball fights and card games. I left at 5 when the day ended at 2:15. We had a great time, and I had a great day.

I left feeling glad that I was the sort of teacher that inspired this much effort on the part of my students (whether or not I am as successful at inspiring them to read). It is one of the strangest things I have ever admitted, but I left feeling that what I do is valuable because kids were willing to wrap my chair in foil. Obviously, knowing they learned something matters too, but today I was just happy to bond with the kids.

The Source

Here is the source of the questions that were sent to us last week.

As you will see, our year-long reflection is based in large part on a document designed for elementary school gym teachers.

http://www.pelinks4u.org/articles/miller0608.htm

How to Make 10 Poorly Worded Questions into 1 Meaningful Reflection

About a week ago the following email was sent to everyone in my school.

"Hi All,

Attached is the End of the Year Reflection sheet that was discussed in the Department meetings on Monday June 14, 2010. The document is self explanatory but if you have any questions please do not hesitate to see your administrator. Please complete this document and turn it in to your administrator by the close of school on Thursday June 17, 2010. This reflection will be stapled to the summative evaluation at the end of the year.

Administration"

Here is my response...

2009-2010 End of the Year Reflection

To the fullest extent possible, answer the following questions:

1. The most positive aspect of my experience (or an area I showed strength) since my last evaluation (Summative, Formal, Informal, AND/OR Walk Through) has been:

a. I believe that my biggest strength in the classroom is my focus on student self-assessment especially in my AP courses. I have had some success in pushing most of my students to assess their own understanding of the material, craft questions designed to fill in the gaps, and ask those questions. In my AP courses this Socratic Method has largely replaced my lectures, and it has resulted in students who take greater responsibility for their own understanding of the material. Paradoxically, these methods have proven unsuccessful with my lower level students.

2. What changes in my teaching styles are needed to make my students succeed as well as support equity, justice, and respect to all learners in my class?

a. From my perspective, the only way to support equity, justice, and respect for all learners is to maintain high standards in the face of numerous and daily requests to lower them. While occasionally, exceptions may be necessary to ensure student success, for the most part fairness is not achieved through selectively lowering standards as a habit of practice. I need to work harder at maintaining high expectations to ensure that the path of least resistance for the students is success. I think the answer to this is three-fold. 1. I need to decrease my willingness to accept student claims that they don’t know how to do something. 2. I need to increase student accountability for their own success. 3. I need to ensure that each lesson contains information, tasks, and understandings for which the student will be held accountable in order to ensure that students understand that each day is important to their success. These efforts would have a much higher potential for success however if the culture of the building better fit the broad application of high standards.

3. How can I more effectively facilitate less teacher dependency/increase cooperative learning/utilize greater problem solving to promote higher order thinking in my class?

a. In my years of teaching so far the only habits of practice that have achieved lowering teacher dependence have been efforts to raise my standards for student accountability and engagement. In order to achieve this next year I will seek to hold students accountable for what they learned in other classes prior to my own. I will be less willing to answer the statement “I don’t know” with an immediate answer or suggestion of how to do something. Finally I will increase my expectations that students find answers to historical questions through their own research. This will require more scrutiny in grading to ensure that answers are in their own words rather than copied directly from a source.

b. I am not sure how I can increase cooperative learning in my classroom as it is a part of almost every lesson.

c. As with lessening independence, I will utilize greater problem solving skills by increasing my expectation that students will seek to find their own answers before I help them do so.

4. How may I better motivate my students to engage in meaningful and authentic learning both in my class and extended to out-of-school contexts?

a. Given the factual nature of my courses, authentic learning opportunities do not abound, and what opportunities exist I already take advantage of.

b. As for learning out of school, I admit this to be a weakness especially in my college-prep courses and short of increased failures I am unsure of how to remedy it.

5. How do I successfully communicate frequently and sensitively with parents in order to engage them in the instructional program?

a. I call home when there are disciplinary or academic issues. Other than that I find reliance of parents to motivate students is contrary to my goal of student independence.

6. How do I measure success and report it?

a. Through my grades.

7. Two important things I have learned since my last evaluation (Summative, Formal, Informal, AND/OR Walk Through) report include:

a. That expectations for student performance are generally lower than they should be at our school, and it is extremely difficult to maintain my own high expectations without a culture of high expectations throughout the school.

b. My sophomores have extreme difficulty retaining facts, and I am unsure how to surmount this motivation question.

8. In planning for the future, one of the things I especially want to keep in mind for an individual student or group of students is:

a. Altering standards on an individual basis can be productive for an individual or two in terms of management and ensuring success for those specific individuals. This is however a dangerous game that leads to dropping standards for everyone if it is not strictly regulated.

9. One goal that I have for myself is:

a. Building factual retention and student investment through increased efficiency in terms of creating an atmosphere in which every student respects every moment of my class, recognizing it to be valuable.

10. An area I would like to discuss with my supervisor is:

a. How to increase feedback on my lesson plans.

b. How to increase feedback on evaluations.

c. Suggestions to increase factual retention/investment/motivation.

Data

Yesterday I attended a city-wide exhibition of school data. City administration prides itself on how successfully we have integrated "Data Teams" into our teaching. (A data team is a group of teachers who share the same courses, that meets regularly to discuss/evaluate strategies based on common assessments). Thus at the end of the year, school-wide data teams provide charts of our data, and explanations of what we did with it.

We were given a form to fill out for our administration to prove that we had attended the exhibition. It asked what we learned. Here is my reply.

I learned that schools in our district have given up trying to show improvement by massaging data, and now simply massage their narrative. In many cases scores got worse and the strategies used were declared successful.

I learned that many schools are proud of dismal results. One high school noted proudly that they had achieved 95% proficiency in the naming of the primary colors.

I have learned for our own purposes, that the data process is not and should not be about this kind of public display. This sort of exposition, especially the narratives declaring success, tends toward claims of success where honest analysis of the scores would lead to claims of failure.

Finally, a rational adult looking at most of these displays could easily see that our standards have dropped precipitously. However valuable the spirit of this process is it has become an opportunity to claim that what we are doing is working... when it probably isn't.

Leaving

It had been my intention to begin this leap into the educational fray with some sort of grand introduction of my principles. I thought that knowing me better might lend some legitimacy to my writing. Events at school however have changed that plan.

It turns out that one of the best teachers at my school will be leaving this year for a job in the suburbs. His departure has created some turmoil at work with people lining up, choosing sides and forming opinions. Rumors abound. I am deeply conflicted about his leaving, and I think it raises a number of concerns for me, and for my school.

Professionally, I know that he needs to do what he needs to do. He started the same year that I did, right at the beginning of a step freeze. We are both 3 years behind where we would be in other districts. If they pay him for his years, then he stands to make a great deal more money next year.

Beyond the money, he rightly understands that our school regularly fails to achieve its potential. Based on our staffing levels, our resources, and the quality of our kids, we should be competing with suburban schools across all measures. In stead we seem to be content with out performing our urban counterparts. Teachers are not supported, or pushed to be better in the ways that we would like. We are often scolded, which would be fine, if scolding had any relationship to improved classroom success. Usually the scolding refers to some insignificant non-teaching task we failed to complete.

In his case, there were a few notable instances when decisions were made, denying him incredible professional opportunities purely for the convenience of the school's administration. The often arbitrary nature of our school leadership pushed him farther than most of us. Though we have all had similar experiences. Trying to make positive change at school often results in inexplicable obstacles thrown up by our leadership, in many cases out of the simple unwillingness to do anything other than what they are doing right now.

Frustration and anger are the natural result of this climate when you actually care about your craft, or the kids, or the quality of the school as a whole. I have often checked the job listings after a scolding or another tiresome meeting. When I step back however, and look at the position I have at the school, and thus I stay.

But that brings me to my personal feelings about all of this. There are a group of us who are are committed, perhaps foolishly to the success of our school. We know we offer something valuable there, and we are not in the majority of adults in the school. He was one of us. The school will be a lesser place without him. MY kids will learn less, so that rich kids in the suburbs can do slightly better at pre-algebra. Our best have been traded for their worst.

So I guess thats it. Professionally and rationally, I respect his decision to do what was best for him. Personally, I'm pissed... at my leaders, at him, at the system and I am realizing that I should have titled this post "Quitting."