On the Shoulders of Giants

When Confidentiality Inhibits Problem-Solving

I spent the day away from my students grading the writing portion of the 8th grade NY State Common Core ELA Exams. I got to grade one short response and one extended response. I've done this in previous years, but given all of the changes in the exam format and the standards being assessed, everyone was paying extra close attention to the way we were were trained to score the questions.

I have some serious questions about what I learned today, but unfortunately, that's about all I can say. That's because I had to sign a confidentiality agreement before the training and scoring began that said I would not share anything I saw or heard today in relation to the scoring of the test. (I wrote about this last year too--Must Teachers Keep Quiet About the Test?)

The way Pearson directs the scoring of writing pieces on these tests will impact the overall scores of our students this year as well as the way teachers prepare students to meet the demans of the test in subsequent years. The state released a rubric for the writing tasks in advance of the test on engageny.org, but the way the rubric gets applied to student work is where the rubber actually hits the road, so to speak, in the standardized assessment of these Common Core standards. 

Here's the problem. These standards are still new and experimental, and so are the standardized tests designed to measure them.  Inevitably, at this stage there are going to be glitches or issues with both the standards and the way they are being measured, especially when the people directly involved with them (teachers and students) did not have input into their design.  It seems that teachers are being forced to comply with new standards and assessments, but not given a forum to offer vital feedback about them and the transition process. 

I don't like being made to promise my silence. I don't understand what purpose it serves either, besides keeping problems out of the light. 

To NY State and Pearson--don't require our silence. Admit that there are flaws in the new system with potential to do as much damage as any other flaw in our education system, and invite teachers and school leaders into the revision process.  

 

[image credit:www.123rf.com]

Common Core Shift--Notes for Revisions

I have been a fan of the Common Core Learning Standards for ELA since I first read them a few years ago. By and large, the Common Core Standards represent a shift that is more in line with what I've always tried to focus on in my teaching. I actually quite like these nicely organized standards that push toward deeper thinking. 

I have a few concerns though. In no particular order, here they are:

• Not everything in the standards seems developmentally appropriate--analyzing author's purpose in the 3rd grade, for example? 
• Only one teacher was included in the team of 60 who wrote the standards. (Perhaps this accounts the above point--either way, it needs to be checked and revised.)
• No mention of poetry writing. How many teachers across the country will stop giving students the opportunity to write poems?  How is this good for kids?
• Fiction writing is downplayed, visible only as couched inside the general concept of "narrative" witing. This lessens our students' participation in a rich literary tradition.
• At least in NY, teachers have not been included in the design of assessments for the CCLS. Instead, Pearson is doing this work. And it shows in the product that teachers are not involved.  Lots to think about and improve upon if the intention is there.  
• Are standardized assessments going to drive the instructional shift toward Common Core? That would leave so much out!  That would be to take a great opportunity and diminish it significantly and unnecessarily. 

I've got a lot more to say about each of these points and I will be exploring them over the next several months. As I said before, I like the Common Core, but, as many educators are saying right now, I'm concerned about implementation. I see a need for some thoughtful revisions.  Can we make that happen? 

[image credit: leaguewriters.blogspot.com]

New State ELA Exam Tests Students' Speed in Reading, Writing and Thinking

Any classroom teacher could have looked at Day 2 of the NY State ELA Exam that was administered last week on Wednesday and known that it was too much for students to complete in the alotted 90 minutes. Unfortunately, it looks like neither Pearson nor the NY State Department of Education saw fit to consult (or listen to) teachers on this.  The result was a test that many students did not finish, which will yield data that does not reveal much about what students can really do when it comes to the new Common Core standards.  (See this NY Times article for reporting on reactions to this test.)

As I looked through the test booklet to process each question, being a careful and not especially fast reader myself, I knew I would have struggled to finish in time. The test presented students with the following tasks to complete in 90 minutes:

• 3 lengthy passages, of 2-3 pages, with plenty of unfamiliar vocabulary for students to probem-solve and complex sentences for students to read and reread for understanding
• 7 complex multiple choice questions on each passage, which required students to look back at the passage and really think about what the question was asking and consider the implications of each answer choice to select the best one. These were not straightforward, "Did you understand what you read?" type questions and answers. There were several questions, for which neither I nor any English teacher on my team, was sure of the correct answer.
• 5 complex "short response" questions which require textual evidence in paragraph form. 
• an extended response to one passage (an essay)

A sixth grade teacher I know--who finds the new CC standards a natural fit to her teaching--said, "If critical thinking is what we're really emphasizing with the Common Core standards, why was there no time given for that on the test?"  Exactly.

The Common Core Language Standards say nothing about students needing to be able to read or write at a certain speed.  My fast readers (students who read significantly faster than I do) had no problem with the time, but even very high performing students who read at a more regular speed or who think a lot about each sentence they write had trouble finishing. A good number did not complete the test.  My students were not the only ones. An elementary school teacher I know reported that just over half of her students completed the test. One of my students with friends at NEST, a high performing, gifted and talented NYC school, told me her friends said only one person in their class finished the test. 

The most unfortunate part of this is that we'll have no real way of knowing how our students would have done, had they finished the exam.  The data won't tell us much about our students' performance on the new types of tasks included on the test.  I don't personally need such data to tell me what my students can and cannot do--but I know the results will be used to evaluate my students' skills, as well as the impact of my teaching.  

Though I have many criticisms about the use of standardized testing to measure teaching and learning, today I simply draw the line at a test that was impossible for many skilled readers and writers to finish. All the test-makers had to do was show some teachers that test... gross negligence, willful ignorance, or just mean? Any which way, students and teachers should not be guinea pigs for high stakes experiments.  

[image credit: www.prevention.com]

 

Extremes of Constructivism and Data Driven Instruction: Dream Meeting?

Fellow TransformEd blogger and co-author of Teaching 2030, Renee Moore, makes an argument in this recent post, Learning Unchained, for getting rid of class schedules and grade levels!  I've heard Renee talk about this before, and, as jarring as this may sound, I totally agree with her.  At the end of her post, she asks readers if we know of schools that have replaced these models with more fluid ones. 

I thought of two NYC schools that are on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of teaching philosophy--extreme constructivist and extreme data-driven instruction. I cannot imagine either model being the optimal answer to Renee's question, but the juxtaposition is quite interesting! 

I'm painting with gross generalizations about these schools here, for the same of argument, but I would certainly welcome clarification on the models from those who know better:

1. Brooklyn Free School: Kids determine the shape of their own education, literally choosing to show up and learn whatever they want, whenever they want, and how they want, with guidance from teachers, and rules about not infiringing on the rights of others. Sounds awesome for a certain kind of kid, but seems too loose for an entire school system. I could be wrong, though. 

2. School of One: Based on the idea of personalized instruction, in response to instantaneous assessments administered and graded through computers. Kids are sorted based on mastery of skills as seen in these assessments and move on to the next skill only when they are ready.  The reliance on technology to teach and assess a large group of kids seems like it could be a limiting factor here, though I know teachers do work face to face with small groups of students. Not sure students have any agency in determining what they learn or how they learn it, and the emphasis on individualized instructionmakes me wonder whether students get experience as members of a learning community. 

But... could we get these two schools talking to each other?! Both models seem to be designed to address the same limitations of traditional schools. What if? 

[image credit: overclock.net]

Good Teaching -----> Good Test Scores?

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about what I would be doing with my classes if the test wasn't coming.  

I recently received this comment from commenter, Becky von St. Paul:

"It's been my experience (32 years worth) that if you teach the curriculum and make sure that students have mastered skills, the test scores come. I know many teachers who fall back on test prep, etc., but these things are truly NOT necessary if you have really taught the kids what they need to know."

I've been interested in the question of whether good teaching really leads to good test scores for some time.  I appreciate Becky's comment and believe what she says must be true in her context.  Though I'd love to believe that good teaching always leads to good test scores, I don't think it's that simple.  

For example, standardized tests--while narrow and blunt instruments (to which I'd say goodbye in a heart beat)--can be reasonably appropriate measures of learning for some students... but not for others. A student who enters my 8th grade class with a 2nd grade reading level should not be taking the 8th grade ELA test.  And good teaching for one year that helps said student grow will not lead to a "good" score on the 8th grade test.  The student could have progressed several; grade levels, but the growth might not even show up at all on the test because the texts and tasks are still inaccessible for the student.  This is where context begins to matter.  How many students do we teach who are in this or a similar situation?  If the answer is a lot, then it will show in the test scores.

Another piece of context that can affect teaching, learning and test scores are the conditions for students at a school and in their home environments.  I've had certain classes and certain years where students' social emotional needs were so high, due to conditions both in the school and outside, that I spent a lot of class time working on skills that would allow students to process what they were going through so that they could begin to turn their attention to academics.  The end result of this work?  Many students grew in their ability to simply be students, see themselves as students, and take an interest in their own learning.  This, in the face of 50% odds they would not finish high school. I taught less traditional academic skills with those classes, but I know they made tons of progress in their ability to self-reflect, problem-solve and collaborate.  For some students, more motivation naturally meant better test scores. For others, much more practice was needed than that year provided for my students to significantly improve the skills that were tested. 

Using a single, narrow test as a measure of student learning--which is still what is being done with these tests, no matter how much proponents of testing speak of multiple measures--supposes that all students need to learn the same things in a year and arrive at the same point.  That pushes teachers to teach material at a level that is often not appropriate for all of their students. It also pushes teachers to adhere to THE curriculum, even when that may not be the most appropriate learning experience for a particular group or sub group of students.  This actually causes many students to get "left behind," by current accountability structures.

Finally, what kind of good teaching are we talking about? Toward what end? Fellow blogger, Bill Ferriter, and NBCT who is highly skilled and committed to teaching his students to be global citizens, leveraging digital media, has written before that despite his success with students around his goal of teaching them 21st century skills, his students' test scores were often not as high as the teacher's down the hall. This was because of the choices he made about what kind of learning was most important. After a while, he began to change his practice in order to ensure good test scores. (He later decided to teach an untested subject so he could focus more fully on the skills he believes are most important for his students' futures.)

What do you think?  When does good teaching lead to high test scores? When doesn't it?

[image credit: findmycompany.com]

Tracking Skills in Isolation: Missing the Forest For the Trees

Today one of my tasks was to create an assessment calendar for the year.  This is a plan for mandatory benchmark and interim assessments to track my students' abilities to perform on distinct sections of the NY State ELA exam throughout the year.  There are three major sections of the test, which we track separately through interims and all together in benchmarks: (1) reading & multiple choice, (2) listening and written response, and (3) reading and written response.  

I don't really have a problem with giving any one of these assessments.  After all, my school has a mandate to raise students' profiency levels, as measured by this test, and we need to do all we can to make sure our students are able to be successful on the it.  The standards being assessed are all important--supporting an answer to a question with evidence, identifying literary devices and so forth.

My problem comes when I look at this schedule of assessments as a whole: its effect on my teaching and what it suggests to students about what matters in their learning.  Between a September diagnostic benchmark, quarterly interims on each section, and a winter and spring benchmark, at least a day of class almost every month must be devoted to test practice, and hours of time to creating the tests, grading them, and analyzing the data.  

Since my time is not unlimited, this means that I do less grading and assessment of other types of tasks and skills.  In fact, these standardized-style assessments are the only ones I'm responsible for collecting data on regularly.  Of course, I can maintain my usual classroom assessment practices, just with a bit less time and encouragement to focus on them. 

So... what's wrong with that?  What's to say that standardized assessments aren't sufficient or even superior to teacher-created authentic assessments, being somewhat more objective and performed without any help from the teacher or other students?  Aren't we getting a more accurate reading of what students have learned in a standardized assessment?  That depends what we are interested in measuring. 

Standardized test questions assess students' skills out of context. This is what makes them more objective and simpler to grade.  However, in life, the ability to apply skills to a specific context is extremely valuable--more so today, it turns out, than one's ability to perform a task in isolation. Daniel Pink makes this point in his landmark book, A Whole New Mind, which warns that machines and cheaper labor forces overseas are taking over tasks that can be done out of context, through standardized methods. The jobs that remain for Americans demand that we apply our skills through the filters of sound principles, careful judgements and decision-making, empathy, cross-cultural competence, creativity and ever-increasing self-awareness.  

It's a complicated world out there, and changing every day.  "Mastering" skills in isolation is sort of like learning to sail a boat without going out on the water.  I don't have a problem with any one day on my official assessment calendar or any one skill assessed. I usually find it interesting to see how kids do and track their progress. But in privileging standardized-type assessments over authentic ones--which is happening all over the country, wherever the stakes are high for the scores--I suspect we are missing the forest for the trees. And, unfortunately, it's the kids who will lose. 

 

[image credit: nasa.gov]

Teaching & Learning Are Messy

On my last post, My Kind of Teaching, on constructivist pedagogy, I received this thoughtful response from a veteran teacher, who chose to remain anonymous. I appreciate it so much, because it offers some validation some of my thinking and intuition regarding the thorniest of issues  when it comes to teaching methodology right now. It seems like in the push to be urgently focused on short-term objectives and obsessive tracking of student learning toward a measurable goal (performance on standardized tests), we miss some of the point--how students actually learn. Often messily.  

Thank you, anonymous teacher, for sharing your thoughts here:

I've been teaching for about 12 years now. When I graduated from TC, my advisor told me one thing that I took with me and that guides me still: If the kids aren't doing something, the kids aren't learning.  He meant that the kids should never just be sitting there listening to me talk, they should instead be working on meaningful tasks used to facilitate learning and later demonstrate what they've learned.  So I always plan like this: What am I doing?What are they doing? The reform movement, unfortunately, has been very bad for progressive teaching because it is all about standardized testing or "accountability."  It is not always easy to control for what a student has learned.  Sometimes students learn something completely different than what I intended.  Sometimes, a student learns what I wanted to teach days after everyone else.  Does that make me a "bad" teacher?  This is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot lately.  Many times I learn from the kids.  It's an interactive process.  Teaching is messy - that's the beauty of it.  The way kids learn is messy.  I also want to point out that alternative certification programs have brought into the teaching field new teachers who are much more traditionalists overall.  I think this is because there is so much emphasis on classroom management.  There's less focus in these programs on philosophical issues of teaching and learning as well as developing rich curriculum because the teachers have to be up and running in just short weeks.  So at TC we had lots of discussions about what the actual role of the teacher was and what the student brought with them into the classroom.  We were encouraged to let the curriculum take care of the classroom management issues. 

Also, make sure to read Alfie Kohn's new article, "Poor Teaching for Poor Children," in which he argues that "it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap." Scary, but possibly true. 

[image credit: sophiemazingarbe.com]

 

Turning Crisis Into Opportunity

The Feelings:

As I embark on a much needed week of relaxation and personal recharging, for some reason I am plagued by the feelings I have about the small but significant percentage of students who profoundly missed the mark on our recently finished project.  I am disappointed on some level in both them and myself.  This was a writing unit designed to have multiple ways in for everyone, one of the most accessible studies we will do all year.  It feels particularly *not okay* for some students to have skipped steps along the way, tuned out important directions, avoided the revision and editing process, and turned out work that is less than what they are capable of doing. 

Identifying the Problem:

I know that I've got to put away the stick, stop beating myself up for it.  In talking to a friend about it, I realized that part of my frustration is knowing that if I had worked one-on-one with many of these students, the outcome would have been much better.  So the problem is that I did not give some students the individual attention they needed in order to make progress.

Cause of the Problem:  

What happened?  One important fact is that I now work with 105 students instead of 55.  And I have only 45 minutes a day with each class.  It is not a small difference. So I went about the unit in the same way I always have, and naturally did not reach every student who needed me in individual conferences.  I did not realize I'd have to do some things differently in order to serve every student in my new school.  In some cases, the individual attention should have also come in the form of a phone call home, advising the family that their student had not been keeping up in class.  

Solutions/Next Steps:

All these feelings are here to guide me to make some kind of change.  What I have come up with is this:

• Make a list of the students who were far from meeting my expectations in this project. Share this list with the learning specialist so we can put some additional focus on these students in future projects.
• Create a tutorial section comprised of these students, and propose the change for the week we return from break. (Tutorial is a period each day where we can work with smaller groups of students who need extra help.)
• Go over their work with the students and have them reflect on what happened.  Explain to them they now have a second chance--like a retake of an exam, only a redo of the project.  The semester ends at the end of January. We have a month to redo all the steps of the project using a new topic of their choosing.
• Speak to their families about what happened and the new tutorial.  Keep them updated on their child's progress.  
• Celebrate their success at the end of the month.

The image at the top of this entry is the Chinese symbol for crisis.  It includes two characters: one for danger, and the other for opportunity.  Moving beyond my instinct to beat up on myself for the failure of some of my students, I hope that by embracing the information I now have about them as an opportunity to change something, I can bring them out of the danger zone they are currently in with their education.

[image credit: austincc.edu]

Paperless

Though the work of a teacher is never ending, there are several things my school does with technology that make my day run more efficiently, thereby saving time.  Maybe I'm just not good with paper, but organizing the paper flow of a teacher's "office" has always been difficult for me and often sent me in circles looking for something.  Check out these paperless options.

1. Laptops.  Instead of a teacher's lounge with desktops, like many schools have, or a few desktops in the classroom, each teacher is loaned a laptop for the year.  The school is new, so the laptops are new Macbook Pros, and they are fast and reliable. (Each year the school brings on new staff, so the cost in any given year of this isn't so far from the cost of maintaining and updating a computer lab at the school.)  

2.  Gmail accounts.  Every faculty member and every student at the school has an email with their first initial and last name on the school's google server.  This makes it easy to email anyone without hunting for their email.

3. Google Docs.  Every meeting agenda is sent out ahead of time as a Google doc.  One person at the meeting takes notes on the Google Doc.  Action steps are easily accessible, and the doc can be updated at a subsequent meeting without anyone hunting for their notes.  I used to have a HUGE binder full of notes and handouts from meetings. Now I just have my laptop!  This means that I cannot forget where I put notes or handouts.  It also means that everyone has the notes, not just the facilitator. 

4. Google Calendar. If I want to meet with someone, I check their schedule in Google Calendar and invite them to a meeting, or vice versa, instead of hunting through confusing schedule documents that are often not accessible to me anyway.  And if I want to sign out the laptop cart for my classes?  Each laptop cart has it's own calendar.  I just check to see that it's not already "busy" and invite it to my classroom!  This much quicker and more reliable than walking to a central location in the school and check through the one existing copy of a paper calendar in a binder.

5. Teacher Pages.  As part of our school's google server sites, each teacher has a page for his or her classes.  We update the homework and provide other helpful information for our classes.  Not every student has internet access at home, but the majority do, so this is an easy way to help students and parents stay on top of the work. The google site has limited capabilities, but is extremely easy to work on as opposed to some other school sites I've tried to use, such as echalk.  

6. Gradespeed.  I've been using an online Gradebook for a while.  For anyone not using one, it takes about 15 minutes to figure out how to use and it is a huge timesaver.  If your school doesn't subscribe to one, there are sites you can use yourself that cost less than $50 a year.  But what I like even more about how my school uses Gradespeed is that we take attendance on it.  I have my laptop open on my desk.  After the first five minutes of class I enter attendance.  That means if a student comes late to my 4th period class, I enter it into Gradespeed, and the school can easily access data about which students are chronically late to class and at what points during the day.  Detention is assigned to students who are late a certain number of times in a week.  I also can't count the times that I filled out (or forgot to fill out) the old paper attendance sheet and then couldn't find it when the attendance person came to collect it--that could easily become a lengthy disruption to a lesson (again maybe I'm just not good with paper).  Gradepeed and other online grade books can be set to send automatic email messages to parents about lateness or missing homework.  I've never used those features, but would be interested in trying at some point.

7. Google Spreadsheets for Parent Phone Log. Instead of every teacher having his or her own way of logging parent contact, there is a form that becomes data in a spreadsheet that I fill out when I make parent phone calls.  I just enter the name of the student, my name, whom I contacted, the reason, the result of the conversation, and press submit.  Somehow, typing that information seems much easier than filling out a graphic organizer by hand or finding the students' note card and recording notes on the conversation.  I'm actually faster at typing now than hand writing...

8. SchoolNet.  This program allows multiple choice tests to be scanned and graded electronically.  It does take some time upfront to load a test into it, but it eliminates the grading of anything that can be done in the multiple choice format (you can do short answer or essays, but have to grade them yourself, then enter a score for that question on a bubble sheet).  I think I will need to address this more fully in another post.  Of course, I don't give that many multiple choice tests. But, for example, practice state tests can be given and graded immediately.  You can link each test question to a state standard, and get data about how students scores in relation to specific standards.  Finally, using that feature, I'm working on a way to grade student writing on a rubric I've created, then creating a "test" where each category of the rubric is a "test question" tied to a standard.  Then I can plug in students' rubric scores for each test question and have data about how students perform on different areas of their writing.  That will help me track their growth as writers throughout the year.  This is still a work in progress for me as a timesaver, but the capabilities of SchooNet open up a lot of opportunities--and why take time to do something a computer can do faster?

One of the only things that remain in paper form is student work. What would it be like if every student had a laptop and internet access at home?  I know some schools and districts around the country are doing this.  That will have to wait for another post.

 

[image credit: faqs.org]

How Students Measure Great Teaching

 

 Lately when it comes to education, the country has been focused on the goal of measuring good teaching--and I think most people would agree that it's not an easy thing to do.  Some (such as Nancy Flanagan of Teacher in a Strange Land) have noted that teachers have been mostly left out of the process, though we are known to play the single most important role in a child's education.  There is another group of key players that has had even less voice in how we measure good teaching: the students.

My virtual colleague from the Teacher Leaders Network and blogger at the DailyKos, Kenneth Bernstein, brought this AOL News article by Kelly Middleton to my attention.  There, students were surveyed about what makes a great teacher.  Their responses (copied below directly from the article) are quite interesting:

 

• Know us personally, our interests and strengths
• Let us know who they are as individuals
• Smile at us
• Encourage us to participate in school activities
• Spend time beyond class time to help us be successful in their class
• Give us descriptive feedback on assignments
• Tell us why
• Share how what we learn is connected to real life
• Apologize when they make mistakes
• Give meaningful work
• Are energetic, enthusiastic and enjoy their job

As I prepare for a new school year, this list is a welcome reminder to me of what matters most to many students.  As Ken pointed out, students did not cite raising their test scores as a major factor in a teacher's quality.  That in itself is no surprise to me, nor does it necessarily discount the value of test scores in measuring student learning... however, if we only look at test scores, it seems we are discounting the students' experience.  

Much of what the students listed would go under the category of building positive student-teacher relationships.  However, it seems there is little movement to encourage teachers to build better relationships with our students.  On a very qualitative level--though I wonder if we could get some numerical, survey-based data on this--I feel that the focus on data and test preparation has created a new kind of distance between today's teachers and students.  

Educators in New York regularly refer to specific students as numbers: "She's a 1; he's a high 2..." etc.   And as I spend more time looking at student work for data on what percentage of the class has mastered standard X and deciding how to respond, I have less time to give meaningful qualitative feedback on student work, which is something students reported to be valuable in the above list.  

The nature of high stakes testing and all of its consequences makes working in a high need school (and maybe other types of schools, though I'm not sure) much more stressful than it was when I started teaching 6 years ago.  Are we smiling less?  That might be worth studying as well.  

Extra-curriculuar activities are being cut in city schools and nationwide in place of more math and ELA instruction, so there are fewer activities to encourage students to participate in.   Teachers are often discouraged from spending time on meaningful work that might not apply directly to standards measured on state tests. Remember, tests only measure what can efficiently be standardized.  That leaves out a a great many areas of meaningful academic work (writing fiction and writing poetry, in my discipline, for example).  

Students value a teacher who tells them why.  My guess is that the answer, "Because it's on the test," has become much more common and will continue to do so as long as test scores are the go-to measure for teaching and learning.  This is not to say that tests do not provide valuable data for us about student learning.  I just think that, for lack of a better way to measure good teaching, the country is going too far in the use of test scores.  

As I look at what the students say makes a great teacher, I worry we may be we may be discouraging the development of such warm and thoughtful teachers.  It seems like so much energy is going to distract us from these things: smiling, words of encouragement...there is no guidance in that direction from those policies which seek to guide us teachers.  

 We also must not forget that we have a staggering national high school dropout rate (close to 50%).  My friend who teaches in Oakland at a second chance school, for high school students who've already dropped out and want to come back, did some research on her students' experiences that led to their dropping out.  Overwhelmingly they had felt all alone in their education, lacking a strong relationship with any adult at school.  Ability and time to form relationships with students needs to be given some formal value.  If we constantly measure learning outside of any real context, we are really going astray of what our students need, which is real connection--both to academic content and to their teachers.   

[image credit: http://www.daisakuikeda.org/main/educator/edu/edu-04.html  This website is very interesting, about a model of education called Soka, which is based on positive relationship between teacher and student.]