Malaise

Last week my school was evaluated "objectively" by a jury of our peers.

This week we are in a funk. We knew we had our problems, but we have spent so many years comparing our work to that of the other urban schools in our district, that we started to think we were doing a good job. Thus it was difficult to hear that our instructional strategies (which we thought were pretty good) were not up to snuff.

Different segments of the school population are handling this funk differently. Teachers are looking for professional development to improve instructional strategies (which were found wanting), or trying to form informal groups designed to provide the instructional leadership that is missing higher up the pay-scale. Students are being a bit hostile (which is a typical teenage reaction to adults when the adults are less forgiving). And the Administration is planning to solve our instructional difficulties with more administering. That means teachers will be receiving more emails about being rigorous, with more links to poorly written doctoral theses in education, but little in the way of observations or suggestions for improvement.

We all know what needs to happen, teachers must make more of what time they have. We need to spend less time on simple recall of facts, and we need to spend more time on the complex evaluation of those facts. Most of my colleagues take no issue with this. Our funk does not stem from the fact that there is room for improvement in our performance. It stems from the fact that our cheese has been moved again. For years we were told that to do well, our students had to do well on the state mandated tests. We worked hard to improve their performance, and we were broadly successful. Now we receive this evaluation, and the principal, the superintendent, and a broad swath of district administrators all say "DO BETTER" while offering little to guide us. They all begin the process of instituting some sort of minor change at their level that is meant to fix the problem, but they offer very little in the way of actual leadership. Each of my many bosses heard this news and focussed in on some tiny facet of the larger problem to beat into the ground.

Our funk stems from the fact that we have little faith that these efforts will help us become better teachers. We are worried that lots of new paperwork is in the offing, that we are not doing a very good job, that the students aren't getting all they could out of our classes, and we aren't exactly sure how to solve the real issue of improving the quality of what we do every day.

Returning for Accreditation

And thus we return. After a long summer, and a long September, I have returned on the first day of our accreditation visit to discuss the process of proving that your school is still educating kids.

Every 10 years a group of teachers and administrators from nearby schools form a committee to assess our school based on 7 indicators of success. The indicators are complex, and don't bear summary. Suffice it to say, these 7 indicators break down every aspect of a school, and set standards for success or failure. We have been working on our evaluation report for the last 3 years, and as co-chair of the steering committee, I have been partly responsible (without any power) for herding our staff into evaluating ourselves.

In the past month, my co-chair and I have spent all of our free time fielding questions from everyone from the janitors to the Assistant Superintendent of schools. In the past three weeks, every broken ceiling tile and every water stain has been covered up. Bushes that have never been trimmed in all the time that we been in this building, were cut down and replaced. There are literally posters placed over holes in the wall. On a personal note I have had no fewer than 30 conversations in which someone above my pay grade tells me "We take this very seriously." when they haven't even thought about the success or failure of our school since our last visit 10 years ago.

Amidst all of this craziness, with a whole district worth of administration (and that's a lot of administration) putting up tiles to cover leaky pipes, and dragging out tablecloths to cover beat up tables, I am very proud. I am proud of my colleagues. While everyone above us is trying to spruce up a C+ school, my colleagues are trying to actually improve our score. I have been impressed on a daily basis by all of the little ways that our teachers have sought to improve their practice, all of the paperwork they have completed and all of the meetings they have attended above and beyond their contract to ensure that our school comes out of this visit having earned high marks.

More to come...

Learning as a Passive Enterprise

The assumption that learning is a passive process is perhaps the single most entrenched myth I run into on a daily basis. Almost all of my students, and almost all of their parents seem mired in the belief (contrary to years of personal experience) that one only learns from good teachers, that is teachers that are good at the act of teaching itself. According to this model, a teacher either has the skill to spray facts all over the learner in a way that makes those facts stick, or they don't. This version of what I do makes me out to be a kind of pitcher. If I through a good enough pitch, information will bypass the batter (all the available distractions that might interfere with learning), sail over the plate (meaning the catcher/learner will not need to move at all to catch it) and into the glove/mind of a catcher who merely needed to kneel in the right place...

Most of you understand this to be a silly idea. Setting aside the fact that the catcher must get up, get to school, and open his/her glove (none of which is a given)... most of us understand that more is required of the catcher than his or her presence. Unfortunately, most of the discussion of school reform, and many of the school reform efforts in place around the country serve to solidify rather than break apart this myth. When we hear positive news about teachers, it tends to revolve around the idea that a dedicated teacher can produce miraculous gains on test scores in a school year. This assertion, though strictly accurate from a certain point of view, is far from benign. To the extent that a teacher is capable of helping students produce gains, the teacher is almost always skilled at convincing students that what they are teaching has value, and thereby convincing them to aid in its teaching. In this model the teacher is delivering more of a sales pitch than a baseball pitch.

I have realized this summer that my own sale's pitch requires some work, in that I want to show the students the extent to which learning is an active and social process. In order to achieve this, I must break down the myth that if I simply explain things in the right way, students will "get it" and score well on exams. My inclination is of course simply to explain all of this on Day 1, that intelligence is fluid, that learning is a social process requiring of engagement, and hope that it sinks in. Of course then I would be actively promoting that which I sought to destroy.

This is a problem that plagues my teaching throughout the year, how to convince students to find information, rather than just giving it to them. We all know that we learn from one another. We know what it looks like when we do. We know when we are learning nothing. We also know that "Do as I say, Not as I do" is a method that usually fails. So lecturing about being an active participant in learning is doomed to fail; leaving me 5 weeks to figure out a different approach.

How does one manufacture an authentic situation in which a group of people learn that they are integral to the learning process?



That question is not rhetorical, and I would welcome any suggestions.

Creating a Culture of Learning

Last week I attended an orientation for the summer program I work with. While there was a lot of talk about making interventions and changing lives, I tend to screen that stuff out. Teachers can help, but counting on being someone's savior is probably going to lead to quitting. I don't know when making a difference stopped being enough, but apparently it has. I tend to simply tune these kind of conversations out, but this one got me thinking.

I teach hard courses. As a result, I tend to operate on the assumption that all of my students could be working harder. I also tell them this, frequently. In fact, I begin class every year with a stern discussion (lecture) about how hard my class will be, how hard my work is, and how I will be seeking to teach them to be students. It is not an optimistic conversation, and though it seems to work with 70-80% of my students, and 10% of the students just drop the course at that point, the final 10-20% start my course by giving up. My usual response to this has been to push harder on those students thereby cementing my reputation as a bringer of pain.

While I am fine with this reputation, it worries me that a substantial portion of my class is not motivated to rise to the challenge. This year, I am thinking about starting out with a discussion of the value of my material, and the values of meeting the challenges I will present. I am not entirely sure how I feel about this change, but I guess it is worth a shot. I think at the end of the day, it boils down to whether I want to try force kids to be what I think they should, or make peace with what they are...

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.