Teacher Leadership Today

TFA: Sharing the Burden

In addition to the four outstanding teachers whose blogs are resident here on our Teacher Leaders Network website (Bill Ferriter, Nancy Flanagan, Renee Moore and Ariel Sacks), we support -- through our partnership with Editorial Projects in Education -- two other TLN member-bloggers at the Teacher Magazine website -- Anthony Cody and Susan Graham. This six-teacher combo covers an amazing expanse of teaching experience, across three generations of educators, and in settings as diverse as inner-city Oakland CA, the rural Mississippi "Black Belt," metropolitan Brooklyn NY, labor-minded Michigan, the Research Triangle of North Carolina and the D.C. suburbs.

Cody and Graham, both experienced and widely respected National Board Certified teachers, share blogging space at Teacher Magazine with a savory selection of fellow education pundits, including young Jessica Shyu, a former Teach for America teacher who now works as a TFA coach based in the District of Columbia.

For the most part, the TM bloggers do their own thing -- one doesn't often see back-and-forth commentary among them. This week is an exception. In her blog A Place at the Table, Susan Graham politely objects to Shyu's description (quoting a colleague) of a vast group of teacher union members as people who “did not serve the children and families who paid their salaries.” In her post, Shyu shared a poem by TFA alum MenSa Ankh Maa, delivered during an August TFA training in D.C., which ends: "Today we act on our faith and put much of the world on our backs."

In her wise commentary, Graham calls for more unity among those teachers (traditional entry, TFA, or otherwise) who share a deep commitment to educating all children well. While Shyu and her colleagues might agree with such a call, it seems clear that they imagine the community of committed teachers as quite a bit smaller (and perhaps younger) than 26-year veteran Susan Graham does.

One thing my six years of work with the Teacher Leaders Network has taught me: There are highly accomplished and committed teachers in abundance in every public school system in America. And thank goodness for that. Because -- as committed to educational equity and school reform as TFA'ers unquestionably are -- the TFA workforce accounts for less than one percent of the 3.2 million public schoolteachers in America.

To realize their dream of an excellent education for all, the TFA'ers will need many allies. Perhaps, as their movement matures, they will come to see that. And begin to look around them.

-- john norton

A Rose among the thorns

The author of my favorite education quote of all time . . .

"Public education is bountiful, crowded, messy, contradictory, exuberant, tragic, frustrating, and remarkable." -- from Possible Lives

...is now keeping an occasional blog well worth following:

Mike Rose's Blog

A recent entry on "Cognition and Diversity," updated from a summer post at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website, begins:

The issue I want to discuss is intelligence and the broader construct of cognition: attention and perception, conceptualizing, thinking, problem-solving, etc. We tend not to think about this cluster of topics when discussing diversity – unless we’re discussing exceptional children – but beliefs about intelligence are woven throughout beliefs about race, gender, social class, and ability.

Then, in classic Mike Rose style, he writes: I’ll begin with a little personal history.

Deborah Meier has said (writing about Rose's 1996 book Possible Lives): ""Mike Rose is both a critical and sympathetic observer of the texture and sound of classroom life.  He shows us that good schooling is a daily reality in schoolhouses in every part of the nation, serving every kind of child and community."

-- john norton

"How terrible their handwriting is"

Keyboarding, texting and twittering are hastening the decline of penmanship and cursive writing. Do we care? A story in Monday’s Boston Globe highlights a new book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, set to appear in bookstores this Friday, which is National Handwriting Day and -- could it be otherwise? -- John Hancock’s Birthday). Kitty Florey, the book's author, is less worried about “educational damage” than a broken line of communication with the past:

Today we can see Mark Twain's or Charles Dickens's manuscripts or letters, [Florey] said, the marks they made with their own hands. "You can see where they dipped the pen, and the little drips of ink," she said. "My great-great grandchild may have my mother's letters to me; they will be nice artifacts, but she might not be able to read them."

In our Teacher Leaders Network Forum, we've had several interesting conversations about the decline of students’ handwriting skills. Some of that chat was compiled for this October 2006 post, “The Pros and Cons of Cursive,” at our TLN Teacher Voices blog.  The post drew interesting comments from many educators, including this from a middle grades teacher:

I teach 6th and 7th grade language arts and I require my students to write in cursive. I reteach it at the beginning of the year, and I'm always pleasantly surprised when the quality of the work produced goes up when I require students to write in cursive. It makes them more aware of presentation and helps improve fine motor skills. I am always appalled by how terrible their handwriting is at the beginning of the year, most of which is done in print.

Teacher-author Rick Wormeli, who was part of our cursive conversation in the TLN Forum discussion group, echoed Kitty Florey's observations when he wrote:

A year after my grandfather died, I wore a coat of his that my grandmother passed along to me. He was a wise and compassionate man, and I missed him terribly. I put my hand into one of the coat's pockets and felt something. It was a note he had written in cursive. My grandfather had touched this paper and formed these letters. As silly as it may sound, I felt like he was there, and I was connecting to him.

Wormeli also looked forward, into a future that could have a Writing Gap. "There are a number of us who are over 30 who will be around for another 50 years or so. It would be nice for the next generation to be able to read and communicate with us via cursive handwriting while we're here, on the occasions that we use it."

Image: The earliest surviving holograph letter from Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) dated New York City, 8 October 1853. He wrote to his sister:  "I have been fooling myself with the idea that I was going to leave New York, every day for the last two weeks. I have taken a liking to the abominable place." (Bancroft Library, UC-Berkeley)

A Day of Reflection

To celebrate the inauguration of President Barack Obama, our friends at the Public School Insights blog are featuring comments by Congressman John Lewis, a Freedom Rider during the early days of America's Civil Rights Movement and a close colleague of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(photo: Lewis to right of King at the 1964 New York Summit of civil rights leaders.)

"Schools at all levels should let this be a day of reflection, a day of learning, and a day of service," Lewis told PSI's Claus Von Zastrow. "Dr. King said we all can be great because we all can serve."

Public School Insights and the Learning First Alliance have put together a rich collection of resources and activities in connection with Inauguration Week and the upsurge of interest in civic involvement by K-12 students. See, for example, this interview with middle school teacher Sally Broughton, winner of the American Civic Education Award and Montana's current state Teacher of the Year.

We've Got Some Secrets

“Looks like our readers love a secret,” wrote Teacher Magazine’s online editor Elizabeth Rich when she sent us a list of the five most popular Teacher Leaders Network essays posted at TM during 2008.

All five were part of our occasional series of "Teaching Secrets" articles aimed at helping novice teachers along the road to a successful teaching career. Many veterans enjoy the articles as well and often find them useful in their mentoring work with new colleagues.

Here’s the Top Five list. Each essay garnered tens of thousands of page views, a statistic that’s gratifying to all our TLN writers who have contributed to this Teacher Magazine partnership.

1. Teaching Secrets: Five Tips for the New Teacher
by Cindi Rigsbee – North Carolina

2. Teaching Secrets: What Kids Wish Teachers Knew
by Laurie Wasserman - Massachusetts

3. Teaching Secrets: The First Days of School - Part 1
by Jane Fung – Los Angeles

4. Teaching Secrets: Take Charge of Your Classroom
by Gail Tillery - Georgia

5. Teaching Secrets: The First Days of School - Part 2
by Jane Fung – Los Angeles

As one TLN member noted during our private celebration: “Here's another big secret (to some people, at least) -- the best advice for teachers comes from (drum roll) real teachers. Surprise, surprise!”

You can quickly browse all 100-plus TLN contributions to Teacher (since fall 2006) at this index page on the Teacher Leaders Network website. All the "Teaching Secrets" articles begin with this tag.