Teacher Leadership Today

Martyrdom is not a policy...

Ariel Sacks is a sixth-year English teacher in Brooklyn NY. Her blog On the Shoulders of Giants appears at the Teacher Leaders Network website. In a powerful new post, she writes:

I ran into my former colleague, "Joe," a gifted teacher and leader, who transferred to a KIPP charter school this year. I wrote about him...in the winter, when he was raving about how wonderful it was to teach at KIPP, where everything is so well planned, resourced, organized and implemented. In particular, I was compelled by his statement that it was much easier to progress as a teacher, to spot and address his weaknesses, which had been too difficult to discern in the chaotic environments of other schools that serve high needs populations.

This time the story was different. He looked a little vacant as he told me he wouldn't be returning to his school next year.  I got excited for a minute, thinking maybe he'd come work at my school again.  "No," he told me, shrugging. "I'm leaving teaching. I don't have a plan."

Read Ariel's complete reflection on "A Casualty of the Teaching Profession."

What will $125,000 get you?

Teacher Magazine led their weekly e-newsletter with our most recent dialogue excerpt from the TLN Forum discussion group. The topic: teacher opinions about the NYC charter school that will pay start-up teachers a salary of $125,000 (plus potential bonuses).

The conversation excerpt drew a variety of thoughtful comments from readers. Author Kirsten Olson (Wounded by School) wrote:

“My work in urban schools that are undersupported and staffed by inexperienced teachers who have low expectations for themselves says (to me that) feeling empowered, that you can do it, that your professional surroundings demand very high performance from you, and you will be compensated accordingly, really does change the ground rules of the profession. I hope, like several of the commenters, that this school is successful. It example may begin to say to the public at large how serious the work of teaching is, how much it requires, and what we ought to expect to have to pay for these kinds of skills and attributes.”

Another comment came from TLN Forum member Elena Aguilar, a California secondary teacher and coach who blogs at Edutopia’s Spiral Notebook. Aguilar describes her own history of involvement in an innovative small school -- first the excitement, and ultimately, the exhaustion. “(I)n some ways, I am saddened by models of reform where the unspoken premise is that if we work our tushies off, we can do anything. I know that can happen -- but at what cost? And for how long?”

Both ASCD SmartBrief and the  NBPTS “Accomplished Teacher” SmartBrief featured the dialog, which was Teacher’s most-clicked article of the week. (Free registration)

RIGOR: Is it a word teachers can learn to love?

Nancy Flanagan, popular edu-blogger and member of the TLN Forum discussion group, is quoted at considerable length in a new guide for education journalists with the plain vanilla title Understanding and Reporting on Academic Rigor. It’s the latest in a series of “pocket guides” produced by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, headed by former Los Angeles Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin.

The 32-page guide, co-edited by journalist/blogger Joanne Jacobs, begins with the story “Rigor: It’s All the Rage, but What Does It Mean?”  -- and continues with articles that may help reporters grasp the big idea that “rigor” doesn’t have to involve paddles and primitive pedagogy. The guide includes some brain research (naturally), a piece on rigor in career/tech, and a profile of a rigorous 40-year California teaching veteran (plus his first-person article about rigor in English instruction).

In addition to sidebar comments from notables like Deborah Meier (and two governors), the publication offers up a collection of quotes under the heading “Experts on Academic Rigor.” A few comments by K-12 educators appear under a different heading: “Teachers on Rigor.” (We'll leave it to readers to decide why "experts" and "teachers" are two different categories.)

Flanagan, an NBCT and former Michigan teacher of the year, has a half-page commentary that appears on the inside back cover the report – a good spot, we think, since many of us approach “nonfiction text” by first browsing from back to front. Flanagan begins her remarks this way:

It might be easier to define rigor by noting what it is not: Rigor is not a synonym for ‘harder,’ and it does not mean moving first-grade curriculum into kindergarten, or algebra into the seventh grade. … Rigor means teaching and learning things more thoroughly – more deeply.

The guide is an interesting read -- both to see what journalists are being told to seek out, and as a prompt to explore the idea of “rigor” in your own teaching practice or school. The lead story includes comments from teacher educator Barbara Blackburn, author of Rigor Is NOT a Four-Letter Word, who offers tips to reporters about “what to look for” in their search for rigor in the classroom. She also observes:

“People don’t know what [rigor] means. The teachers I work with are being told they’re supposed to include rigor. It’s certainly the flavor of the month. But teachers all say everyone is telling me what to do but they can’t tell me how to do it.”

Effective teachers who read Flanagan’s definition will likely decide that they DO know what rigor is – it's something they do regularly. Flanagan writes:

Rigor is not assigning more homework. It is assigning better homework, open-ended work that pushes kids to think in multiple ways about the tasks they’ve been assigned, provides constructive feedback on their efforts – plus permission to edit, test prototypes, make multiple drafts. Most important, the teacher will not accept work that is less than the students’ best effort. Adding rigor to the curriculum cannot be achieved by moving standards, benchmarks and course requirements around, although those are the first things policymakers think to do.

Teacher Assessment in a New Century

In a refreshing post at his Class Struggle column, Washington Post education writer Jay Mathews gives high marks to the 2008 book by former New York Times education writer Richard Rothstein, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right. Mathews says the in-depth examination of the assessment conundrum  is a "must-read for anyone who wonders, as I often have, how we might replace or augment standardized testing with measures of what is happening in the classroom."

In a recent series of posts at his Teacher Magazine blog Living in Dialogue, TLN Forum member Anthony Cody not only reviews Grading Education but presents a four-part interview with Rothstein, who is also the author of Class and Schools, the influential 2004 examination of high-stakes accountability and social responsibility for student achievement gaps.

Cody is an awarding winning science teacher who now leads a team of science instructional coaches in the Oakland (CA) Unified School District. He writes frequently about issues of school reform in high-poverty urban schools – and about highly effective teaching practices, as he did in this recent post “Recognize Students and Watch Them Grow!”

Rothstein is also the co-author of a just-released book from the Economic Policy Institute, Teachers, Performance Pay and Accountability.

Time to End Teaching Quality Fight & Seek Third Way

In a new commentary published by Education Week, TLN co-founder Barnett Berry, president of the Center for Teaching Quality, calls upon policymakers and education policy wonks to abandon the "either-or" struggle over the best way to select, prepare and evaluate teachers and work together on balanced policies that both increase student success and enhance the profession’s future.

“In the early years of this new century, the fate of teaching in America still appears to be up for grabs. Whether, in grabbing for it, we tear the profession apart remains to be seen,” Berry writes.

“Over the past two decades, researchers of all ideological stripes and methodological perspectives have converged around a view that teachers are the key to whether or not students achieve. Yet little consensus has been reached on how best to recruit and reward teachers, how much preparation talented candidates need, how to use test-score data in assessing teachers, or how long we should expect to retain recruits in teaching careers.”

Are America’s public schools trapped between the front lines of a “not-so-civil policy war, with no possibility of reconciliation?” Berry asks. “Maybe not. I suggest we begin moving beyond the rancorous rhetoric and imagine a future of teaching in which the following conditions prevail . . .”

Visit the Education Week website to peruse the intriguing conditions around which Berry believes school reformers can find common ground. You can also leave comments of your own. If you’re asked to sign in, Ed Week allows registered non-subscribers to access several free articles per week. More information here.

Illustration by Gregory Ferrand for Education Week.

Getting Homework Right

If you want to sort a roomful of teachers into figurative piles, ask about Homework. Last month, a member of the TLN Forum did so in our virtual chatroom, closing her query to her colleagues with “Where do you stand on students working on assignments outside of school?” A day or so later, we had a pretty good dialog piece for our Teacher Leaders Network page at Teacher Magazine. You can tell it touched a nerve by the 16 comments left by teachers (who had 16 different points of view!).

Just this week, Jon Hanbury, a TLNF’er from Virginia, spotted this post at the ASCD Inservice blog (worthy of aggregation, BTW). It offers a smart summary by middle grades English teacher Dina Strasser of Robert Marzano’s research-based take on homework. It’s chapter three in his book The Art and Science of Teaching. Strasser’s Cliff Notes are a great read and also drew some good comments, including a reference to a new study by the Canadian Council on Learning that found little homework benefit for students below about 8th grade – and only then if “new rules” were followed. (Same as the old rules: purposeful and relevant to classwork.)

[If you're curious about the t-shirt, it was spotted by a blogger on the torso of a junior high school student, during a swim meet. The first reason: "I didn’t do my history homework because I don’t believe in dwelling on the past." Last time we looked they were sellling them on eBay.]

21st Century Skills and the Future of Learning

I know of no better way to leap beyond the current debate over whether 21st century “learning” or “skills” are anything different (and therefore worthy of educators' special attention) than to spend an hour exploring the new education trends presented by the Ohio-based KnowledgeWorks Foundation, which they've titled 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning. This isn’t your grandma’s education experience we’re moving into. The contexts of learning are going to be fundamentally different, whatever cries you may be hearing from the core knowledge lifeboats.

Many will recall the “Map of Future Forces Affecting Education” published in 2006 through a KnowledgeWorks partnership with the venerable The Institute for the Future, a 40-year old nonprofit research center specializing in long-term forecasting. Since then, KWF leaders have made presentations on the Map at many major conferences, piquing some interest but perhaps not reaching a larger audience because of the Map’s “strange factor” (visit and you'll see what I mean).

At the new Forecast website, the map metaphor has been moved to the background in favor of a more user-friendly tab/jump approach – although KWF considers the 2006 Map on ongoing resource. They explain:

The first Map helped all those concerned about education to engage with the future, and, as a result, make better decisions in the present. The 2006-2016 Education Map is still relevant, but the trends presented have evolved and deepened over the past few years. The 2020 Forecast represents both new trends and the evolution of the themes from the 2006 Map.

We encourage you to review key documents and research from the 2006-2016 Education Map as they are still valid and meaningful in the context of today’s world and the 2020 Forecast.

The new website's presentation is designed around these themes: Knowledge, Economy, Society, Systems, Organizations, and Self. The content is also more proactive, with many paths leading to recommended activities. To offer a single example, clicking on Society reveals this question: "Your sense of community and your own identity are changing in a global society. How will you shape our shared world?" Click on Learn More and you find the Driver of Change labeled "A New Civic Discourse," with appropriate discussion and action resources. To the right you'll find related Trends you can explore. Here's KWF's summary of the Civil Discourse change driver (the unusual terms can all be explored as well):

The convergence of participatory media culture, diverse diasporic movements (the formation of dispersed populations that share common roots and identity), and frameworks for creating new commons (bottom-up means of managing shared resources) set the stage for re-articulating identity and community in a global society.

Education will find itself a contested resource in the crossroads of these forces of change. It will become part of the civic discourse in multiple new kinds of public forums and spaces as “educitizens” make visible the status of schools and of educational decision-making, resources, and activities in their communities. School administrators, district level staff, and teachers will need to learn how to communicate and interact in a bottom-up world of engaged educitizens. (emphasis added)

That's something different, don't you think? The Future of Learning homepage includes a link to KWF’s previously established “The Future of Education Is Here” blog – which has shifted its emphasis to news and commentary that relate to the Forecast. If you’re still fond of paper and ink, you can order a print copy (up to 150) at no cost, or download and print yourself.

There are so many fresh and challenging perspectives in the Forecast content that it’s better to point you toward it than try to summarize very much of it. I’ll leave you with the homepage teaser:

A Radically Different World

If you think our future will require better schools, you're wrong.

The future of education calls for entirely new kinds of learning environments.

If you think we will need better teachers, you're wrong.

Tomorrow’s learners will need guides who take on fundamentally different roles.

As every dimension of our world evolves so rapidly, the education challenges of tomorrow will require solutions that go far beyond today’s answers.

As America sets out to spend hundreds of billions on school innovations and “reforms,” how many education and policy leaders are even aware of the carefully considered trends and issues embedded in this Forecast? I hope it’s more than the perhaps too-cynical observers of eduworld like myself might predict.

-- john norton

Image: Transliteracy, from the KWF website.

The Times Are Always Changing

The issue: How has teaching changed in the last 25 years?

The date: On or about April 15, 2009

The setting: Three sagacious teaching veterans, representing nearly 80 years of teaching experience, are poised at their keyboards for a real-time interview orchestrated by some cutting-edge Web 2.0 software. No problem. Defying the digital immigrant stereotype, each weathered professional is an experienced blogger and cyber-networking enthusiast.

The interviewer: Teacher Magazine editor Anthony Rebora.

The participants: Anthony Cody (Oakland CA), Nancy Flanagan (Hartland MI) and Susan Graham (Winchester VA) -- all National Board Certified Teachers and members of the Teacher Leaders Network.

The first question: The recent MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, based on a comparison to past surveys, found that teacher satisfaction has increased markedly over the past 25 years. Has this been your impression? What do you think accounts for the change?

Here’s a snippet from each teacher’s response:

Flanagan: Teachers have more and better guidelines for teaching now—the standards movement and the spotlight on state curriculum benchmarks have made what to teach clearer… In a small town…(w)e had a stable teaching force, good materials, and were able to hire selectively… Most teachers I know are happier—the job feels more structured, but in a good way.

Cody: I honestly found myself a bit mystified by that result. Perhaps that is because I am working in an urban district, where the survey found consistently less satisfaction and optimism. In my district we have a pretty high turnover rate, about 20 percent a year, and No Child Left Behind has made a lot of teachers feel huge pressure to do test prep.

Graham: In my own situation I sometimes hear veteran teachers longing for "the good old days" when they felt they had stronger connections to the community (before we) moved from a small rural/suburban to a metroplex suburban system over the last 15 years... (I)t does surprise me that teachers feel better. Could it be that while we are expected to have high expectations for student performance, we might have lower expectations for our own work place satisfaction?

Read their complete answers and their responses to other key questions inspired by the recently released 25th anniversary Survey of the American Teacher, at this Teacher Magazine webpage. You can join the conversation by contributing to the Comments section, which already features some meaty replies by other teaching veterans.

Image: cover of Time Magazine, October 10, 1983

Still Ready to Rock and Roll

In a fresh post at her A Place at the Table blog (Teacher Magazine), TLN Forum member Susan Graham highlights a new report urging America not to waste the advanced skills and knowledge of veteran teachers. Her post is appropriately titled “Not Ready for the Rocking Chair” and it perfectly captures the feelings of so many 50- and 60-something teachers whose spirit is strong even if their stamina is faltering a bit. Sample this excerpt:

Here's a finding [from the report] worth mulling over:

At the end of their careers, accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems.

I’m one of those highly accomplished Baby Boomer teachers. I love working with my students. I love working with new teachers. I love working with colleagues in staff development. I love writing and researching. I love being a keeper of institutional knowledge for my school and my school system. I love developing my professional skills with experiences such as the Santa Cruz mentor training. My own children are grown, my personal life is in order, my professional network is strong, my knowledge is current, and my skills are refined by practice. I’m not ready to quit. I’m ready to do more.

I'm ready to take on new challenges, but I find that there are few options at this point in my career. Those of us who chose to stay in the classroom in our 30s are now expected to stay in our classrooms in our 50s. But by limiting how we are used, school systems fail to realize the full return on their investment in skilled classroom practitioners….

In the meantime I dream of being a teacher coach. I fantasize about using those mentoring skills to support new teachers in their classroom as they find their teaching stride and teacher voice. I dream about working with practicing teachers as they move from competent to accomplished. I imagine being there on the sidelines as other teachers discover the excitement and satisfaction of professional leadership.

Be sure to read it all. With nearly a third of American teachers expected to retire in the next four years, we should be asking ourselves how we might convince the best and brightest Baby Boomers to stick around and support the best and brightest New Century teachers.

Effective PD in a Time of Budget Cutting

Browse through the latest issue of Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook (Spring 2009), published by Education Week and Teacher Magazine, and you'll find a number of Teacher Leaders Network Forum members providing commentary and expertise on the theme Charting Effective Professional Development in Tough Times.

The lead article, “Reinventing Professional Development in Tough Times,” includes quotes and perspectives from TLN founding member Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, a popular presenter on 21st century learning topics, who believes that "the growth of interactive Web technology fits in perfectly with the current professional development environment because it can reduce costs, and it's the way schools should be moving anyway."

TLN'er and Teacher Magazine blogger Anthony Cody authors the article, "Putting Teachers in the Driver's Seat," which carries the tag: "a professional development coach says teachers themselves are the best PD resource." Cody recommends several teacher-driven PD ideas that don't have high price tags, including Lesson Study and collaborative teacher research. The common theme: teacher leadership. Of course!

In "Bring on the Books," reading maven Donalyn Miller describes the PD power of  book-study groups driven by the professional interests of teachers. Donalyn, author of The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child, provides all the tips and additional resources you'll need to launch a professional book club or study group of your own.

One of the new Sourcebook’s centerpieces is an interview with TLN member Dayle Timmons, former Florida Teacher of the Year and a teacher/coach at Chets Creek Elementary in Jacksonville. The teaser for the article reads: "A distinguished educator describes her school's resourceful and collaborative culture of teacher learning." The introduction goes on to say:

A passionate advocate of ongoing professional development, Timmons keeps a highly-respected blog, Timmons Times, that provides a glimpse into the life of a school in which teachers are virtually immersed in collaborative learning activities. She writes about teacher wikis, video-lesson studies, weekly classroom-tech tutorials, grade-level working sessions, book clubs, and more. Her school, she says, has developed "a supportive, caring, risk-taking kind of environment where people [feel] comfortable to grow and learn and make mistakes."

Dayle begins the Sourcebook interview with a statement that's sure to win hearts and minds: "Our philosophy is that professional development should be embedded within the day. It shouldn't be something that we have to do outside of the school day or that has nothing to do with what we're actually teaching."

In addition to these TLN-related articles, the Sourcebook offers a news story on the promise and problems of online professional development, a commentary by Tamara Fisher on budget-minded PD for teachers of the gifted, a list of PD websites that are particularly content-rich, and a strategic guide to writing grant proposals (“Got Grants?”) that can bring additional PD dollars into your education community.