All posts in Teacher Professional Development

Nicholas Kristof, Olly Neal, Stealing Books, and Good Teaching

Posted January 23rd, 2012 by Bill

In his most recent Sunday column, Nicholas Kristof again wades into discussing education. This week, Kristof discusses the story of Olly Neal; When Neal was in high school in the 50's, he described himself as a "troubled high school senior" turned reader turned law student turned judge turned member of the Arkansas Court of Appeals.

Kristof opens his piece with a link to a study that used value-added methodology to determine that good elementary school teachers can make a difference.

He then goes on to the story of Olly Neal - and the story of Olly Neal is a great story.

Earlier in his high school career - as recounted in the Kristof article, Olly Neal

remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Later in his high school career, Neal cut another teacher's class and went into the school library, where Mildred Grady also worked. While there, he saw a book with a picture of a scantily clad woman on the cover - The Treasure of Pleasant Valley by Frank Yerby - and, as he didn't want to be known as someone who actually checked out books from the library, he stole the book. He brought it home, read it, and loved it, and returned to the library, where he found another Yerby novel.

And he stole that too.

And then, another.

According to the story on NPR about Olly Neal, Neal "read four of Yerby's books that semester — checking out none of them."

Later, at one of his high school reunions, Grady let Neal know that the supply of Yerby books was no accident. As described in the NPR story:

"She told me that she saw me take that book when I first took it," Neal said.

"She said, 'My first thought was to go over there and tell him, boy, you don't have to steal a book, you can check them out — they're free.'

"Then she realized what my situation was — that I could not let anybody know I was reading."

Grady told Neal she decided that if he was showing an interest in books, "she and Mrs. Saunders would drive to Memphis and find another one for me to read — and they would put it in the exact same place where the one I'd taken was."

And this is one of the ways that great teaching manifests itself: in meeting a kid where they are at, and by providing them opportunities that they are able to reach. At times, great teaching also means taking a look at the rules that are in place, and understanding that the potential success of one particular kid means breaking or ignoring those rules.

Kristof takes the story of Olly Neal and attempts to bend it to support a preconceived narrative.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.

Unfortunately, this interpretation doesn't align with Olly Neal's story. In fact, Olly Neal's story illustrates the weaknesses of the exact types of evaluations that Kristof celebrates.

Mildred Grady was interacting with Neal in her role as a librarian, not in a teaching capacity. In a value-added assessment, Neal's other teachers - and NOT Grady - would receive the credit for any improvements made by Neal.

In fairness, Kristof also says, "there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer." But, no one is really arguing that. We can burn that straw man. This is about the same as someone declaring, "Reducing poverty is predicted to improve the nation's financial well-being."

Of course good teachers are part of the answer. And, of course, fair and rigorous teacher evaluations are part of the process of determining what makes teachers more effective. But, the successes of Mildred Grady - and the thousands of teachers who do similar things in difficult situations - don't fit into the types of evaluations that are being pushed as the cornerstones for measuring teacher effectiveness. Driving to Memphis to buy books for one kid to steal doesn't translate directly into a kid having success on the scantron - but this type of thoughtful, targeted attention is essential to the success of individual people.

I recently talked with another teacher who works in a high poverty school. This teacher works in special education, and their school has been on the cusp of not making Adequate Yearly Progress (or AYP) for several years.

In this teacher's class, there were three children who were on the verge of passing the test. Two of these children had diagnosed special needs, and had a primary language other than English. A third student also had a diagnosed special need and had a primary language other than English, but also had a physical disability, was on the free and reduced lunch program, and had been placed in foster care.

This teacher's principal approached the classsroom teacher around six weeks before the test with some explicit instructions: focus on the kid with the physical disability, and don't worry about the other two.

This administrator had done the math: according to the metric that determined a school's progress, the school would get more points toward AYP if the one student with more pronounced learning disabilities passed than if the other two students passed. In short, if the one kid passed and the other two failed, the school would look better on paper. This administrator had broken down the math on a class by class basis, and was giving his teachers - schoolwide - instructions on how to "succeed."

The teacher, who had tenure, told the administrator where to go. The teacher paid for this "disobedience" in the form of less than stellar evaluations.

So, when people like Nick Kristof call for more rigorous teacher evaluations, we need to be clear that one aspect of tying teacher evaluations to test scores leads to some people attempting to game the system.

Nick Kristof justly celebrated the creativity and caring of Mildred Grady. What types of evaluation measure the excellence of people like her? Portfolio-based professional development comes to mind as one option, but accurate, reliable, rigorous teacher evaluations involves improved education policy.

Improved education policy needs to look at education, poverty, and health as equally important elements to be addressed.

What Nicholas Kristof Leaves Out: Discussing the Value of Teachers

Posted January 12th, 2012 by Bill

Nicholas Kristof has a piece in today's NY Times titled The Value of Teachers. In this piece he points to a recent comprehensive study that looks at the earning gains for students who have "good" teachers.

The money quote comes in the third paragraph:

That’s right: A great teacher is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to each year’s students, just in the extra income they will earn.

Kristof buries the fact that the study is based on value-added methodology and conflates student performance on test scores with good teaching. He alludes to value-added in the 11th paragraph, but never actually addresses the fact that test scores and value added analysis aren't infallible.

Ms. Powaga - Fifth Grade, an Oasis in the Desert

The study authors (and this piece shouldn't detract from the worth and value of the study, which merits a read) are clear on this, even though Kristof is not. The executive summary (pdf download) of the study leads with a discussion of value added analysis:

Researchers have not reached a consensus about the accuracy and long-term impacts of VA because of data and methodological limitations.

The researchers conclude that, for their study, value-added analysis is a valid tool, as they look at over a million students from 4th grade to adulthood. As I said earlier, the study is a good read.

However, in his article on the study, Kristof uses false equivalencies:

Conversely, a very poor teacher has the same effect as a pupil missing 40 percent of the school year. We don’t allow that kind of truancy, so it’s not clear why we should put up with such poor teaching.

Truancy and the quality of a teacher are two very separate things. Conflating them here serves a rhetorical purpose (truancy = bad; bad teaching = truancy) but aside from being an interesting rhetorical gimmick, it just doesn't make sense.

The piece also commits one of the standard mistakes made in many pieces about teacher quality: it assumes that there is an objectively "good" teacher that will work for every kid in every class. The reality is (and people who have worked in school with kids can attest to this) different teachers connect with different kids. Sally's great teacher will be Jimmy's average teacher. We're dealing with human beings here, and human experiences differ.

However, the main (intentional?) oversight in the piece is the complete inattention to the elephant in the room in the school reform debate. If a kid comes from an upper middle class or higher in the socioeconomic ladder, they will attend one of the best schools in the world, in the United States Public School System. The "crisis" in public education is not present in high-rent zip codes. So, when we talk about the problems facing public education, let's situate them honestly. They are connected to issues of poverty, and issues of health, and in many cases, to problems surrounding food insecurity.

Kristof alludes to the importance of poverty, but then dismisses the importance of the issue as something that can be undone by good teachers:

we need an array of other antipoverty measures as well, especially early childhood programs. But the evidence is now overwhelming that even in a grim high-poverty school, some teachers have far more impact on their students than those in the classroom next door.

In the piece, Kristof declares that the problems facing education have an "obvious" solution:

The obvious policy solution is more pay for good teachers, more dismissals for weak teachers.

Wouldn't it be awesome if it was that simple? Unfortunately, the realist in me has a hard time believing that poverty and inequal access to quality education can be solved just by giving good teachers a raise. Until we start talking about education, poverty, and health together, as three related issues, the "obvious" solutions will obscure our vision of the hard challenges we need to overcome.

And part of that discussion needs to include what happens to education when good teachers are forced to work under the limits of bad policy.

Image Credit: "Ms. Powaga - Fifth Grade, an Oasis in the Desert" taken by Michael 1952, published under an Attribution license.

Introducing the FunnyMonkey Educator of Distinction Program, Our Foray Into Corporate Teacher Professional AdverDevelopising

Posted August 22nd, 2011 by Bill

This is a big day here at FunnyMonkey (TM) World Headquarters. We are pround to announce the FunnyMonkey Educator of Distinction program, or the FM.Ed.

Not just anyone can qualify for the FM.Ed. To earn a FM.Ed, one must complete our comprehensive training program, which we are currently in the process of designing. In the meantime, we will be issuing interim badges to all educators (interested or not) who:

Are currently teaching; or
Have ever taught; or
Can spell "education;" or
Have walked past a school; or
Like coffee.

To indicate that you have earned your FM.Ed, just embed either of these badges below on your blog. Also, feel free to add the certificate to your twitter handle, and include it as part of your email signature.

Select the badge that fits best in the space you have available.

16x16:

100X100:

And the best part: once you use these badges, you'll start seeing them everywhere!

I must have been asleep for part of the summer because I missed some great conversations about corporate education/professional development programs for teachers.

Tom Woodward summarizes the crux of the conflict:

That “award” certifying you as a really super X-brand teacher, that free conference registration- these are not things they do for you out of kindness. This is for them. Every single bit of it, bought and paid for. Their return on investment is pre-calculated. If it didn’t make them money, they would not do it.

Reading this makes me think back to 2006 when Discovery Educators Network fired 84 staffers in their education division. According to Discovery, "the positions were unnecessary". Also, according to Discovery:

According to an internal memo sent to employees Wednesday, the division's revenue has grown 350 percent since 2004.

The comment thread on Discovery Education's blog is a pretty good indication of how people felt at the time. The entire thread is worth reading to see how people react when the business logic that drives corporate outreach into education is laid bare.

From Michelle Rivera:

I recently helped sell your UnitedStreaming service to several schools in North Carolina, and I regret that decision.

From Donna Criswell:

I recruited 14 plus teachers in my district to be STAR members.. and some outside my very own district.. all because I believed in the DEN “family”

And really, there is nothing wrong with anything Discovery did. They are a business, and their goal is to increase profit. With revenue up 350% over two years, a simple way to increase profit is to reduce expenses, and people are expensive. But, as indicated in the comment thread, DEN teachers also provided free product evangelizing.

But educators should learn from that lesson. Or from the lesson of Google killing Lively. Or from the lesson of how Apple always releases upgrades mid-summer, while schools need to purchase about 4-6 weeks earlier for budgeting and deployment reasons: then, if these schools want to upgrade and charges these same schools full price for the upgrade. Large for-profit corporations care about education to the extent that caring for education remains convenient, with a reasonably good potential for bringing in profit.

And when we think about how priorities can be inferred from how resources are spent, it's worth looking at how much money Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend on patent litigation alone, relative to what they spend on education. I suspect that the legal teams within these companies are not rewarded with .png badges and meaningless credentials, but with real, actual money.

These companies reach out to teachers because it provides a convenient way to market to kids while maintaining the appearance of social responsibility. They also care about teaching, and the people running these programs are good, intelligent, people, but they are working within a context that is not driven by human concerns. Any good marketer knows that brand loyalty forms at a young age (hey, why else would Joe Camel cartoons be displayed under the counter, where only a five year old would see it?), and tethering the credibility of a teacher to a specific brand just increases the credibility of the brand. Having children use cloud-based products also gives these companies an opportunity to study the interests and use patterns of kids, and that data is marketing gold. And you can actually have teachers apply for this, and the programs are considered a social good? That's what I call thinking different.

And yes, I get that teachers are constantly being called on to do more with less. I also know and like many teachers who have completed these programs. I've even seen some of them teach, and they are people I would be proud to call colleagues. But these programs are a devil's bargain, and deserve to be looked at in the larger context of how we value and fund meaningful professional development.

The main argument I hear in favor of the programs - and these come largely from participants - is that the quality of the program is determined more by the people within it, and less by the brand. And again, that's an argument I understand, but if the value is in the people, you can meet many awesome people at an EdCamp. No corporate branding needed.

Image Credit: "We Don't Need No Steenkin Badges" taken by Thunderchild7, published under an Attribution license.

Unconferences! For All My Friends! Or, Putting the You in Unconference

Posted June 6th, 2011 by Bill

Unconferences, peer-driven professional development, and teacher-centered professional development are all things I would like to see become more widely adopted. With the process of meeting and having an unconference becoming more familiar, and with EdCamp, a new flavor of unconference gaining visibility in the space, I've been thinking about ways that unconferences could become more prevalent as a recognized, even mainstream, form of professional development.

As luck would have it, I tend to think when I cook, and this last weekend was prime grilling weather. So, here are some reasonably well-charred thoughts about how I would love to see K12-focused unconferences grow and develop.

Reach out to union leaders and district officials

EdCamp appears to be more popular among the educators already active on Twitter or other social networks, and they occur largely outside the structure of the organizations in which the participants work. As part of an excellent broader post, Dan Callahan provides a brief explanation of the thought process:

[E]arly on in the planning process, we made some serious decisions in support of our vision of what Edcamp is and should be. Foremost among those was the decision to not pursue PD credits for Edcamp. In these early stages that we’re working in, Edcamp needs the high-energy, hungry for participation crowd. Without those kinds of participants, Edcamp falls flat on its face.

While I understand some of the concerns here, I disagree with the conclusions for an unconference at this stage. To start, the "high energy, hungry for participation crowd" will come regardless, because they want what the camp offers. For the first EdCamp Philadelphia, pursuing PD credits would have been premature, as the nature and value of the event were unproven. However, now that there have been two of these events in Philadelphia, and people can articulate the value of the event, it is time to rethink the value of PD credits.

PD credits would help get more teachers into the mix, and if we have confidence in the model we need to welcome other voices with different viewpoints, and different concerns and needs. If what we want is a face to face meeting of people we know via twitter, then PD credits aren't needed - let's just have a tweetup and call it a day. If, however, we want to move beyond a small portion of professional educators, PD credits would help.

Having PD credits available for unconference-style events creates some additional opportunities that would not exist otherwise. As just one example, if an EdCamp was available to teachers within selected districts on a district-wide teacher professional development workday, teachers could opt to attend the EdCamp as one of several choices.

Also, to be clear: the main reason I am advocating for increased outreach to unions and district administrators is not because their approval or sanction is critical to running a successful K12 centered unconference, or even for current models of K12 unconferences to gain increased popularity. The main reason that union leaders and district admins need to get included into the conversation is to educate them about how unconferences work, and how they are an effective form of professional development. A smart union leader would do well to look at the unconference model, as it provides a clear way for more people to understand the value of an experienced teacher. Veteran teachers have a wealth of experience to share, and the unconference format is an ideal way to do it.

And, if reaching out to district admins and unions can save just one school from the drive-by intellectual mugging of a Willard Daggett, then our work is done.

Encourage more sharing of immediately usable knowledge

Gerald Aungst sums it up nicely:

I seem to be missing the steak, and I’ve been wondering why. It got me thinking about why edcamp still feels powerful and important to me, even though I walk away from many sessions feeling as though nothing of substance actually took place.

Given that unconferences are driven by the needs and desires of the participants, this is an easy one to address: if you want to learn about something, run a session on it. Use the session as an excuse to push your own mastery and exploration of a topic you want to know better. A session designed for teachers to share insights on how they structure their classrooms would be incredibly useful, and it would be made more useful by having students join the conversation.

Another way to help get more immediately useful information would be to give every participant a piece of paper on the way in with the question, "What is the single most useful classroom technique you have ever used?" The sheets could be collected after lunch, and conference organizers could collate and blog the responses. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you want different information, ask a different question.

Or, teachers could just blog about the techniques that they have used in the class, with no EdCamp necessary. If EdCamp attendees interested in gleaning practical tips made a point of asking fellow attendees about ideas and tools that could be implemented immediately - and then blogging these ideas - a body of classroom-tested practices would emerge out of an unconference format.

And, of course, if you are in a session and are at a loss about how to connect the abstract to the practical, ask the room to help you do just that. And then blog about it, so other people can share the knowledge.

Don't drink your own kool aid

People are excited about EdCamp, and that's great, but let's not get carried away.

[T]he edcamp philly crew met at a similar venue, Barcamp Philly. I can not say that I directly learned a single usable thing at that conference but going changed my life. It was meeting Dan, MaryBeth, Kevin, Hadley, Kim, Kristen, Rob and introducing them to my sister Chrissi and Collegaue Nicolae that spawned a international movement in education (emphasis added).

As I said earlier, I'm really glad to see people using the unconference model within education. These concepts have been developed and honed within open source, blogging, design, and software development communities, and they receive continual use within these communities because they work. People within education can learn from this pre-existing practice. The EdCamp organizers reference Barcamp as an inspiration, but current barcamps borrow liberally from practices used in Lightning Talks, Pecha Kucha, Ignite, and Birds of a Feather sessions, to name a few. And this is all good, as we all benefit from using different ways of working and communicating with our peers. But it would be myopic to imagine that unconferences would be as accepted within the education world if these other types of unconferences hadn't been happening in other areas.

It's also worth noting that education-related unconferences are nothing new either. Bloggercon, in 2003, addressed education and included a full unconference day. Since at least 2003, the open source labs and meetups that Paul Nelson, Jeff Elkner, Paul Flint, and (starting in 2006) Steve Hargadon, ran at NECC were unconference-like, with the potential for people to engage in inquiry-driven/peer-driven learning. The EduBloggerCons that Steve Hargadon started running - beginning in Atlanta in 2007, and continuing in different forms to the present day - are education-focused unconferences. It's also worth noting that the National Writing Project has been doing unconference-like professional development since the late 70's. Northern Voice has been running strong since 2005.

In short, there's a lot of prior art here. It's all - including EdCamp - good work. But branding something that is both relatively new on the scene, and relatively similar to past and present endeavors an "international movement" is the type of hyperbolic overreach we can do without. Education doesn't need Don King or Don Trump; we need smart people doing good work. Leave the marketing copy for the people who don't have real skills.

Overblown claims diminish credibility. Let the work speak for itself.

Strive for jargon-free zones

I recognize that this is a tall order, but we need to move away from jargon when we describe what we do. We don't need to talk about how we collaborate within our PLN's; we need to describe how we connect and learn from people in informal settings. Retreating into jargon obscures the work and the process that makes the experience valuable.

Along these same lines, any discussion of tools (I love site X or software Y! It's shiny!) needs to be grounded in specific learning opportunities that wouldn't be possible (or as accessible) otherwise. Chasing the horizon is fun, but the run needs to be worth it.

Eliminating jargon and eliminating an initial focus on the tools acts as a sanity check. This also helps make the ideas we are discussing more accessible to a broader audience.

Conclusions

Unconferences will continue to increase in popularity for two simple reasons: they work, and more people are getting comfortable participating within them. With small, targeted adjustments, the current reach of education-focused unconferences can be extended. But, given that the power of the unconference is within the participants, we all have a role and responsibility here. If there is something you want to see happen, step up.

The Disingenuous Arguments Against Experience

Posted June 6th, 2011 by Bill

There are a few different wrinkles in the arguments against seniority-based layoffs, but the point people lead with most frequently is that we need to do everything possible to make sure we keep the best teachers in the classroom.

The argument comes in many flavors, but the quotation below is a fair representation:

I assumed that because my students were proficient or advanced in all subject areas that I would remain in the classroom. Don't school districts want to retain passionate and effective teachers?

However, meeting the stated goal - keeping as many effective teachers in the classroom as possible - does not come directly from ending the use of experience as a criteria in determining how teachers are retained.

People who want to end using experience as a criteria for retaining teachers attempt to make this issue appear simple. However, this oversimplification comes with some baggage. Let's unpack.

Last In First Out versus Teachers as Professionals

The people who advocate ending the use of experience as a factor in how teachers are retained have come up with a catchphrase to identify what they see as the problem: Last In First Out. Renaming the issue is a key factor in all PR/Marketing campaigns, but it attempts to mask the reality that teaching, like most skilled jobs, requires experience as a means to mastery. The publicity campaign against experience is designed to convince people that firing experienced teachers will help us keep better, less experienced teachers.

In other words, they want us to believe that teaching is a job where one doesn't get better over time. However, it's difficult to see where attacking the professionalism and organizational worth of people who have made teaching a career helps improve education, or the lives of the kids who depend on it.

Ending Last In First Out is not the same as keeping the most effective teachers

When teachers are getting laid off, effective teachers are losing their job, no matter what criteria is being used. Any time we are talking about firing a teacher for anything except poor performance, we are talking about removing effective teachers from the classroom. This has nothing to do with Last In First Out, nothing to do with doing right by kids, and everything to do with economics.

People who advocate for ending the use of experience as a factor in hiring and firing decisions often select an individual that appears to prove their point. Of course, a sample size of 1 makes for an emotional story, but that emotional story should not actually be confused with system-wide truth.

Inexperience is not more valuable than Experience

In these simple discussions, the subtext is that the inexperienced teachers are worth keeping, and that the experienced teachers are burnt out and wasting student time. This facet of the conversation reduces both new teachers (young, idealistic, exuberant, energetic, untouched by the system) and experienced teachers (bitter, burnt out, unimaginative, counting days until retirement) to caricatures, but the overall gist is that experience in teaching is not an important asset. And the subtext here is that anyone who has spent more than twenty years teaching must have only done so because they weren't talented enough to do anything else because everyone knows that anyone with any talent either becomes an administrator or changes careers because really, teaching is thankless and the pay sucks.

No other profession treats its most experienced professionals with such callous disregard. Experience matters; an experienced educator teaches more than just the students in his or her classroom. An experienced educator can help shape the practice of new teachers, can help train new administrators, and can provide a poise and balance and perspective that comes from living through decades of transformation in the educational world. These assets help students, and they help shape a school culture.

An additional subtext of this facet of the conversation is that a smart, energetic, untrained person is more effective than an experienced, trained professional. This ties into the ongoing efforts and funding of organizations like Teach For America.

Ending Last In First Out will have a negligible affect on recruiting new talent

Another argument against the value of experience is that new teachers won't join the profession because they are afraid they will be fired:

I consistently see newly credentialed teachers obtaining positions but then losing them after just a year or two. After spending countless hours and dollars in graduate school, they wind up working as instructional assistants, leaving California to teach elsewhere or abandoning the profession altogether.

This line of reasoning reveals the divide between the reality of how education is funded and our rhetoric about how education matters. As people are quick to point out, these are difficult economic times. However, they are less quick to point out that, unless you work for one of the companies that helped destroy our economy in the first place, job security isn't that good anywhere. If our goal is to retain dedicated teachers, it seems to make sense to retain the ones who have shown a commitment to the profession, and can in turn pass down what they know to their younger, less experienced colleagues.

If we want to retain new teachers, we need to pay them well, provide them with opportunities for meaningful professional development, and create a legal and social framework that acknowledges that teachers are professionals.

Occasionally, the language around the importance of a talented teacher circles around to how not valuing experience will somehow increase professionalism:

Educators are able to change kids' lives. We need our laws to reflect the reality that teachers are, in fact, those who can.

This is true. Teachers change lives, and the laws passed need to reflect this. But, rather than simplifying the process of firing teachers (at any level of experience) the laws we need to examine are the laws that fund our schools, pay for teachers, pay for ongoing professional development, and pay for meaningful assessments of student, teacher, and administrative growth. These are the laws that need the greatest adjustment. We should focus our efforts on means that allow us to put more teachers in the classroom, not get rid of more teachers with less effort.

This argument is doubly pernicious because it brings the connotation that the current group of teachers are not professional, and that their professionalism needs to be elevated via legislative intervention.

Ending Last In First Out is predicated on the notion that current methods of determining teacher effectiveness actually work

Even the proponents of Last In First Out acknowledge that they have no current method of evaluating teachers. This proponent of ending Last In First Out in Georgia freely admits this fact:

I hope that after this important step, now Georgia will go even one step further to adopt a process that rewards excellence in teaching, borrowing successful performance and evaluation models from other industries. School systems should determine teacher effectiveness through a combination of performance evaluation, attendance, classroom management, experience and extra school responsibilities.

The irony is, the methods that "reformers" want to "borrow" are often of dubious merit. We know how to evaluate teachers, just as we know how to evaluate students. A blended approach that included peer review, self review, teacher-driven learning goals, formative assessment of student progress, summative assessment of student progress, and administrative review would give us a great idea of what constituted effective teaching.

Conversations we are not having

Unfortunately, when we are talking about whether or not experience should be valued, there are more important conversations that are not taking place.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the effects of poverty, hunger, and health on learning.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the folly of slashing spending on education.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about methods of evaluation that work for and empower students.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about more effective means of teacher professional development.

Talking about Last In First Out means that we are not talking about the difficulty of teaching a curriculum you had no role in choosing within an evaluative framework designed by politicians who have little to no classroom experience.

For the reform advocates who want to devalue professional experience, Last In First Out is a great wedge issue because it weakens unions, pits teachers against one another, and gives implicit value to unproven standardized tests - and it can achieve these goals "for the good of the children." However, learning is more complex than that, and the attempts to shoehorn important arguments into talking points and videos does everyone a disservice.

Image Credit: "you're out" taken by .sanden, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Voting As Part Of Teacher Evaluations

Posted January 9th, 2011 by Bill

Over at the Innovative Educator, Lisa Nielsen has a post about teacher evaluation via student voting. My reply morphed into this post.

A student voice in teacher evaluations would be a great thing. Really, creating more mechanisms for meaningful student involvement would be a great thing.

But students aren't "clients" any more than teachers are "service providers." That type of pseudo-business language infests some of the conversation about education reform. Education is not a point of sale, and rhetoric suggesting otherwise simplifies the relationships that can and do exist between teacher and student.

Students do educate themselves, but a teacher isn't just a piece of the furniture, or a salesperson. A good teacher - one attuned to the differing needs of students in their classrooms - knows how to reach individuals. And accordingly, not every student will be a good match for every teacher, and vice versa. And we need to have an evaluation system where that reality is okay.

While voting as one element of evaluation seems like an interesting idea, I'd rather see a system where students expressed themselves using actual words. Voting implies a pre-selected set of options that actually limit the range of their expression.

And, of course, any evaluation system that has just a single facet is flawed by design. And as a final note, I would love to see teacher evaluation include elements like developing, collaborating on, and releasing open content.

Image Credit: "Vote" taken by Vaguely Artistic, published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

Assessment

Posted August 15th, 2010 by Bill

One way of changing education is to change how we assess learning.

This isn't going to be a post about standards, but we need to start with them to get into the center of the discussion (this is not to say that standards are not a subject worthy of close consideration; rather, they are just not the main focus here, today).

Standards define curricular goals and objectives.
Textbook companies prepare packaged materials that are "aligned to the standards." These textbooks, in theory, are designed to address the curricular goals and objectives as defined by the standards (and for fun, ask a textbook rep to demonstrate how their texts "align to the standards." Ask them to define the process by which the texts are "aligned to standards." Then, get out the boots, and enjoy the hijinks that will ensue).
Student learning is measured by a standardized test that claims to assess a student's base of knowledge as measured against the standard.
The "quality" of a school is determined (in part or in whole) by how students have done on the test. Test results can be a key factor in closing down schools.
The "quality" of a teacher is determined (and in many of the merit pay schemes, teachers are rewarded or punished) based on student scores on these tests.

So, let's take an enormous, completely unjustifiable leap of faith and assume that the standards actually define something meaningful, for one reason and one reason only: this post is not about standards, it's about assessment.

When a curriculum is defined by a pre-packaged text, teachers and students are relegated to content consumers. Teachers get the text; they deliver the text; they test on the text, and teacher effectiveness is tied to how students perform on the test that purportedly measures how well students "know" the content that has been delivered to them. Any process used to "learn" the material is overshadowed by the means of assessment that defines the experience, and defines one's success or failure within that experience.

It's also worth noting that in lower performing schools, there is more motivation to stick with the "proven" or "traditional" route of using a standards-aligned text, as this provides a level of cover and plausible deniability should a school not meet growth goals. In an environment where sanctions accompany low test scores, using alternative means of working with kids is equated with gambling with kid's futures - unless, of course it's happening under the auspices of TFA, KIPP, or a charter school. Higher performing schools - where socioeconomic level appears to play a role - tend to have more freedom to experiment, largely because the threat of sanctions for "failure" is missing.

This is why serious discussions about assessment are a necessary part of the dialogue around improving education. What would an educational environment look like where, in addition to or instead of a standardized test, students had the opportunity to show their mastery via two portfolios: one defined by the school, and the second defined by the student?

The process of building a portfolio (ie, of crafting the assessment) is also a learning process. Selecting and justifying elements in a portfolio requires a level of critical, reflective thought that is not present in either preparing for or taking current standardized tests. It's a more efficient means of mastering both material and life skills than the assessments that currently claim to measure those skills.

What would teacher professional development look like if a teacher was assessed on how they provided feedback on student work? What if teachers developed professional portfolios that included curriculum they developed, modified, collaborated on, and/or shared? Most teachers create curriculum on a regular basis as workarounds for sections of the text that are weak or not suited for their classroom; what if creating and sharing these units was made an explicit requirement for growth and development as a teacher? What if this ongoing creativity and collaboration was a factor in assessing an educator's professional growth?

These shifts are possible now; they require a change in how we look at assessment, which potentially could inform changes in what and how we teach.

Changing assessment is hard. Generally, more individualized assessment takes more time. From a business place, it's hard to plan a "disruptive" business around this because you can't really streamline the time required for good feedback. The challenge (and therefore the opportunity here) is to make tools that simplify and streamline creating portfolios of work that demonstrate learning. The benefit - especially when compared to other forms of evaluation, and certainly to standardized testing - is that the process of creating and justifying the artifacts that demonstrate learning is also a process that supports and reinforces learning.

But this is a subtle point, and one that is often buried beneath the time required to assess portfolio-based projects versus the time required to process a standardized test. Ironically, the quest for efficiency in assessment has occurred at the expense of efficiency in learning.

School Closings

Posted March 13th, 2010 by Bill

In my first teaching job, I worked as a classroom aide for special needs students in the first through third grade. The students in our class were mainstreamed whenever possible, but they all spent a substantial portion of every day in our class. During the school day, we maintained an academic schedule, and we attempted to give our students a solid grounding in both the academic and social skills they would need to make it as part of a mainstreamed class.

And it was difficult work - it was not atypical for a fight to break out after one student called another student's mom a whore, or for a social exchange to break down into a screaming match over someone not sharing blocks.

But one thing I noticed stuck with me: before a vacation - even something as short as a long weekend - student behavior was more out of control than usual. And when I asked the students about it, they would deny it. But in the days leading up to a vacation, at the end of the day, they would do just about anything not to leave. One student would want to finish their math work; another would take forever to get his coat. Sometimes, a kid would intentionally act out; the time required to actually get in trouble would keep them in school longer.

In this job, I had the good fortune to be mentored by an outside learning specialist, an amazing educator named Jim Keefe. Without his support, I would have drowned; and even on the best of days I still felt largely under water. When I asked Jim about vacations and behavior, he laughed. "Yeah. They hate leaving. School is the most consistent place they know."

And I think about this now as we talk about mass firings of teachers, about school closings becoming a more regular part of the landscape of education, and about federal education funding tied to improvement programs that can lead to public schools being handed over to private companies.

From a certain perspective, closing schools and firing all the teachers and the principal feels right. Hey -- if the kids weren't learning, these teachers must not have been doing their jobs. Get 'em out! Firing people looks decisive, and it appeals to our sense of justice. As Bill Maher says:

...blame the teachers, what with their cushy teachers' lounges, their fat-cat salaries, and their absolute authority in deciding who gets a hall pass. We all remember high school - canning the entire faculty is a nationwide revenge fantasy. Take that, Mrs. Crabtree! And guess what? We're chewing gum and no, we didn't bring enough for everybody.

To state what is hopefully obvious: the school system needs improvement. Data needs to inform the way we teach, the way use curriculum, and the way we create policy. The status quo is not good enough, and even if the status quo was excellent, part of maintaining excellence (in education or really, in any system) is to never stop looking critically at things you consider important.

But as we start to close schools in an effort to improve schools, I remember the kids I taught in my first teaching job, and how they had a hard time gearing up for a long weekend. And I wonder what we know about educational outcomes for students whose academic experience includes surviving a school closure. Do students in these schools get a better education as a result of having their school closed, or their teachers fired? What data is there that looks at rates of college attendance, rates of college completion, average salaries, etc, and compares these students to their peers in other comparable schools? Given that the results of school closure as a means of school improvement appear to be mixed at best, can we say that there is even a correlation between closing low performing schools and improving student educational outcomes?

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference. In this speech, he said:

States and districts have a legal obligation to hold administrators and teachers accountable, demand change and, where necessary, compel it. They have a moral obligation to do the right thing for those children—no matter how painful and unpleasant.

This logic assumes that states and districts actually have the answer, and that the "best" solution has not been achieved simply due to bad execution. You cannot compel something you don't understand.

And, by this same logic of "doing the right thing for the children-no matter how painful and unpleasant," if accountability is our yardstick, why should the firings stop with teachers? If a school is failing, why not fire all of the administrators at the school district? The school board? The mayor? The head of the state Department of Education? The Federal Education Secretary him- or herself?

It is very fashionable to speak about corporate-style management in schools; in general, I don't think it makes much sense, especially given what the corporate world has foisted upon us in recent years, but I recently came across one model that could inform how we approach turning around failing schools. When the FDIC takes over a failed bank, a team of professionals trained in the process of turning around banks descends on the bank. Once on site, they spend weeks or months working through the transition. You can hear about this process from a piece on This American Life (skip to Act Two: Unbreaking the Bank). The story of closing a bank is oddly, almost disconcertingly, emotional. As both our financial system and our educational system lurch away from the precipice, I would like to see our schools treated as humanely as our banks.