It's that time of the school year again. The end? Well, sort of.
Somewhere between the English-teacher-end-of-the-semester-sleep-deprivation and helping with graduation, I start thinking about next (school) year. My husband wonders about me this time of year, when I stagger to the kitchen between batches of final essays and murmur to myself..."Next year I will not (or will)...."
Sitting at my classroom desk (something I only do before school starts and and the end of the year), I start to sort through the remnants of the year, debating what to throw away and what to keep. Which lesson plans are worth recycling? Which student papers do I want to use as examples or study closer? What do to with all those poster boards and displays? Hey, here are those articles I put aside to read later!
By next week, I'll start going through this year's teaching journal and doing more systematic reflection on what worked, what didn't, and why. I'll replay the school year, literally and mentally, measuring it against my original vision. Since so much of my work, including student writing, is now digital, I'll spend considerable time reviewing, archiving, organizing and deleting.
I sort through invitations to various educational conferences, summer courses, and seminars. Of course, any of these I choose to attend, I'll have to pay for out-of-pocket, including travel. Maybe it'll be a tax deduction later. The big question is will any of them help me do better by my students?
Students. I think about them, and wonder how well I've served them this time around. I'll read their end-of-course evaluations, again, and try to see what they're not telling me. This is a small town, so I'll see many of them and their families over the summer at various events and venues. "Oh, my child loved your class!" Coulda fooled me.
I'll start selecting the pieces we'll read, the topics about which we may write, and the projects we'll attempt. I'll adjust my classroom organization: recordkeeping, daily procedures, classroom policies.
The next school year will be running through my head like a movie trailer while I finally get around to what should have been Spring cleaning.
As a former journalist-turned-educator, I was bemused by the spin USA Today decided to take on the Education Sector's recent report of its nationwide teacher survey. Although the survey and the report cover many important topics, the point the editors chose to highlight was "Teachers Agree: Bad Teachers With Tenure Tough to Fire."
I remember the old journalistic truism: Dog bites man isn't news; man bites dog is. From the USA Today headline, you'd think teacher frustration with tenure was the major finding of the survey.
Not.
True, 55% of the 1,010 teachers surveyed agreed that it is difficult and time-consuming to remove teachers who should not be in the classroom. But how did that rate the headline over some of the reports other findings, such as: "Almost eight in ten teachers (78 percent) agree that 'Without a union teachers would be vulnerable to school politics or administrators who abuse their power' '(p.8). Even here in the open-shop South, 65% of the interviewees concurred with the need for union protection. Many Southern teachers voluntarily join one of the major teacher unions, even in places where collective bargaining and striking are illegal, just to get the malpractice insurance and the legal representation.
Interesting to note, the major reason cited by the teachers for this need of union protection is one of the same reasons they identified for keeping bad teachers in schools: the inefficient, ineffective teacher evaluation system.
The authors themselves note that the nation's 3.2 million teachers have wide-ranging views that can't be comprehensively represented in one survey. Still, the report, which deserves a thoughtful read and better coverage, is a helpful step in bringing the views of teachers into the public thinking on teacher quality and school reform.
A great post and a wonderful conversation is going on at the ASCD Inservice blog on Myths That Haunt Students. The article summarizes a session at ASCD led by author Allison Zmuda during which she posed three common myths that hurt student achievement. Most classroom teachers will readily recognize these myths, as the commentary on ASCD testifies.
The one that seems to resonate the most with readers (me included) was that students see learning that comes quickly as a sign of intelligence and learning that requires effort as a sign of their own lack of ability.
This myth is pervasive among students at all levels, including high-achievers or honor students. The students (and parents) in my honors English classes could be the most difficult to deal with about doing multiple drafts, research papers, or other tasks that could not be accomplished or understood quickly. One reason I loved mixed classes was that average and struggling students were actually encouraged to see that everyone has challenges with some aspects of learning. I would (and still) advise parents to be wary if the only grade their child ever brings home is an "A." That's great, if it's earned, but too often it's a signal that a student is not being exposed to anything new, challenging, or complex.
How many students (and not a few teachers) labor under the false notion that fast equals smart? Perhaps it's a response to our times--everything should be available instantly, no waiting. What have we done to help foster among our own children and our students a real work ethic? It takes more than a speech on self-esteem to keep working at that math problem or rewriting that draft; it takes self-discipline.
I was reminded of this at, of all places, my bowling league's annual awards banquet. All of us are 50++ and I'm the only one who grew up in an urban setting. One-by-one, we shared our experiences of growing up, doing daily chores before and after school. For the most part, we did not immediately get any benefits for this work (although there were significant penalties for not doing them), and most of the time, these chores had to be done properly, not sloppily rushed. We reflected on how those experiences carried over into other areas of our lives. School, job, bowling.
Where do today's children get the opportunity to develop a patient, work-at-it-till-you-get-it-done-right attitude? What are we doing in our classrooms to encourage (or discourage) disciplined learning? (In case you haven't guessed, I like that word disciplined.) Disciplined learning is the rich, rewarding, life-changing acquisition and application of knowledge. These are the lessons that stick long after the state test or the marking period.
Often, instruction is done in the style of the exam so that students become accustomed to choosing which of four options is correct on a multiple-choice test, or responding to short writing prompts.
I spoke with an elementary teacher at one such school, recently recognized for improving their scores. Many of her fifth-grade students have become disengaged by the relentless test preparation. Lessons focus on discrete skills in reading and math, while larger thematic units and hands-on investigations in science and social studies have been cut because they do not directly improve test scores.
But these deeper projects give students a sense of accomplishment, allowing them to delve into a subject in depth, and developing their abilities in art, speaking and critical thinking. Losing them is stealing much of the joy — and true rigor — from our classrooms.
I know from my own experiences and those of other outstanding teachers that it is possible to provide such learning experiences for students AND get those much-desired test results. How does it look where you are: Is disciplined (or rigorous) learning lost in our classrooms? (Some might argue it was never there.) Are we perpetuating the speed = smart myth among our students?
Many thanks to Paul Gorski and ASCD for bringing reality (and research) to bear on the crippling, stereotypical educational philosophy that poor people are a monolithic, anti-education human wasteland.
I also appreciate the comments on the article, especially those that "get" what I think is Gorski's main point: It's teachers' expectations of poor children that do the most damage to their academic achievement.
Back when I was student teaching, my supervising teacher oriented me to her class by reciting a tired litany of how the students were from a lower socioeconomic group, and why I shouldn't get my hopes up about teaching them "too much." Her approach was not to teach them at all. She accepted whatever they turned in (this was an English class) and graded it based more on pity than content. Simultaneously, she clearly and verbally held most of the students and their parents in contempt for their "lack of interest in education."
During that same semester, the school was involved in a fundraising effort that required students to bring in sales receipts for purchases their families made at a particular grocery store chain. This teacher sat in the faculty lounge ridiculing these families on their choices (many purchased with food stamps), as in "what business do they have buying X brand, they're supposed to be poor...." That struck a nerve with me because my last year in teacher ed and my first two years as a FULL TIME teacher in MS, my family of six qualified for food stamps and my kids for free or reduced lunch in the school system (and my husband was working full-time at a minimum wage job...what does that tell you about our teacher salaries?). It was her disdain for the children and their families that I remember and that the children perceived in her classroom demeanor.
She was too happy to turn the class over to me and hide out in the teacher's lounge for the duration of my student teaching, which remains one of the best times of my teaching career. Not only did I complete my requirements as a student teacher, but also the students proved themselves capable of much higher levels of learning than they had been given opportunity to attempt. It was not so much that I was all that great a teacher (it was my student teaching semester, after all), but that I took their learning personally. When I looked at the class, I saw my own children, who were all in the same school district and would pass through that same school. How, I asked myself, would I want my children to be taught?
That experience helped shape me as a teacher and has undergirded my teaching practice over the years. To paraphrase Lisa Delpit, we should be teaching other people's children as if they were our own.
According to the Children's Defense Fund, "Every 41 seconds, a child is born in the United States without health insurance. Already this year, we have seen tragic cases of how a lack of health insurance for a child can have fatal results."
Many of the children I teach, and some in my family, are in this situation. Most of the children in this category have parents who are working, on jobs with little or no health benefits, like two of my daughters. As one of them said to me not long ago, "I could quit my job, get on welfare, and at least the kids would have Medicaid, but why should I have to do that?"
Why, indeed?
What does it say about our nation that we are unwilling (not unable) to provide health care or at least health coverage for all our children? That, in many places, our children do not have decent, safe school buildings? That the children of the poor are more likely to go to school in buildings that are poorly maintained, poorly equipped, poorly supplied, and poorly staffed?
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
I'll resist the urge to quote the entire article, but here's one of several passages that had me shouting, "Amen!"
"The accountability that people do want is more relational than informational. Americans don't object to using test scores, but they think the scores should be used for diagnostic purposes rather than for punitive ones. Citizens want face-to-face accountability, with educators giving a full account of what happens in classrooms and on playgrounds. Most legislated accountability measures don't create a relationship of shared responsibility. Instead, the laws leave citizens on the outside looking in."
As Mathews thoughtfully develops in this piece, the public (including, but not limited to parents and teachers) have a deeper role in the education of all of our children than just attending the PTA or making sure Jasmine does her homework. As he deftly notes, "The community itself is an educational institution." Raising well-educated children has always required more than what could be done within the confines of a classroom or school day. Even more so as information and social interactions are less and less bound by physical space or time. Wiser parents have always understand this concept and sought out learning opportunities outside the schoolhouse, or exploited teachable moments during the ordinary activities of life.
Before the old proverb, "It takes a whole village to raise a child" became a socio-political catchphrase, it was a heartfelt practice in neighborhoods and towns.The entire community took the raising and teaching of children as a collective responsibility. I could as much expect Mr. Alexander across the street to quiz me on my times tables as I could my teacher. Mrs. Duncan at the corner store was well within her rights to chastise me for acting "unladylike" in public, and would make sure my mother heard of it before I made it home. I, and thousands of other children in our communities, first learned the art of public speaking not at school, but in church.
It was the neighborhood little league team (before the ascendancy of Hummer-driving "soccer moms" and overly-aggressive fans and Dads) where we learned what it meant to work together, never quit, be gracious in loss, and thankful in victory. The local public librarian knew all of us and our favorite books. In its better days, my hometown Detroit Public Schools made sure every pupil attended at least one concert of the Detroit Symphony and visited at least one of the local museums each school year. The deterioration and fragmenting of neighborhoods, along with the dispersion of families (among many other factors) has resulted in the weakening or loss of these community interactions which so richly supplemented children's formal education.
Another high point in Mathews' piece is the reminder that: "Schools were made public for democratic, not pedagogical, reasons. And the educators who administer schools and teach in them are unique among professionals in their historic relationship to democracy." Educators have always had a higher calling than simply to generate a workforce; we were to produce thinking, responsible citizens. However, we were never expected to do it entirely on our own.
Mathews also points out what has come to be a common misperception of the relationship between the broader public and the work of its schools: ""These days, the most common strategies for restructuring the relationship between the public and the schools treat citizens as consumers." Mathews, correctly, points to NCLB and other such school reform initiatives as results of this view.
I would argue further that the push for application of free market principles in the reform of schools is insidiously counterproductive and may actually threaten American democracy in profound ways. Developing a rating system for schools based on flawed, limited testing instruments, then publishing those ratings in a push to get parents to shop around for educational options sounds like democracy in action. In reality, it exacerbates existing inequalities in educational and social resources.
The goal should not be to see how many schools we can close down or force out of business (considering in many places the schools that exist are seriously overcrowded), but rather how many schools we as a nation of citizens can reclaim, restore, and reconnect to the communities from which they should organically grow.
The observance of Dr. King's death always brings mixed emotions in our home. We live two hours directly south of Memphis, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta which is where my husband grew up. He was one of the thousands of lesser known civil rights activists who answered Dr. King's call in their local, Southern communities, and at great personal cost. My husband cannot walk through the Lorraine Motel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Our attempt to visit it with our children was the first time they'd ever seen him visibly shake with anger and cry.
It wasn't so much the events of the past that agitated him as it was the disappointments of the present, or as he put it: "I went through all of that for what?" It is hard not to be cynical. On the one hand, we now have Black people in almost every political position, but too many of them are acting corruptly and irresponsibly. Our voting rights, bought in blood, often seemed to have purchased us dull figurines rather than shining champions. Meanwhile around us, our communities disintegrate, torn apart by drugs, crime, and greed. However, the battles have been too hard fought, the scares too deep, the casualties too dear, and the outcomes too crucial for us who remain to just leave things as they are.
My husband is particularly distressed by what he sees in our schools. The passionate pursuit of education has been a trademark of the African American community since we were brought here. It is painful today to see so many of our children so disinterested in education, so disrespectful of educators and other elders, and so disconnected from the lessons of Dr. King.
Along with ministering to young people through our church and non-profit organization, my husband has worked with our local school system as a team chaplain, assistant coach, substitute teacher, computer lab facilitator, and de facto counselor for many years. One reason he maintains a presence in the schools is to provide the children with some role model, as in many of our schools today there are few or no black males. A both deliberate and unforseen consequence of school desegregation across the South was the dismissal of many Black teachers, and particularly Black principals. According to my husband, integration for its own sake was never the goal. The fight was for freedom, access, equality: the right to not have doors slammed in our faces, the right to not have to get up or go around back. Integration was a means to secure opportunities for us, and especially, for our children.
Whatever one may think of Barack Obama as a candidate, it is refreshing to see the hopefulness and energy especially among our young people that his candidacy has spawned. Surely, we can find ways to regenerate among them the passion for education in the service of family and community that fueled a historic movement.
She argues brilliantly that what we call the "achievement gap" might more accurately be described as an "education debt" that needs to be paid.The article outlines some of the historical threads that have created the current web of inequality in which so many of our public school students find themselves trapped.
Drawing from history, economics, politics, as well as pedagogy, Dr. Ladson-Billings paints this analogy:
"I liken the yearly exercise of constructing the federal budget to the notion of the achievement gap. Every year public schools publish the results of standardized test scores. At some schools we celebrate and say we have 'balanced the budget.' At other schools we bemoan the fact that the standardized test scores reveal we have produced yet another 'deficit budget.' Again, lurking behind this yearly exercise of producing achievement test scores is the education debt of longstanding inequities and educational disenfranchisement. I believe this debt is historical, economic, and moral."
I hope the next President (and the rest of us) are brave enough to face these truths and pay up.
Connotation = The common social (often emotionally loaded) definition.
Listening to yet another call for a return to "basic skills" in education, or more often, to lamentations about the lack of proficiency in these skills among our high school students or entering college freshmen (especially as compared to other nations), got me thinking about definitions.
Different people mean different things by the term "basic skills." A basic skill is not necessarily something that is easily learned or easily taught. Basic skills are more often foundational ones upon which other knowledge or abilities are built.
However, even that seemingly straightforward definition can be misapplied, particularly in the area of language arts. Many, many people (including quite a few educators) believe students must learn grammar first, in order to compose pieces of writing. Others think children have to learn phonetic pronunciation of words before they can learn to comprehend the meaning of printed texts. Neither of these is true in all cases. For example, I have a deaf son for whom phonics are useless, but who has amazing reading comprehension. Or consider one of my former students, now a successful engineer, who wrote some of the most incisive prose I've ever read, but couldn't pass simple spelling tests.
My good friend Rose Asera, a Senior Scholar at Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT), has been studying this issue as part of a project she's been working on called Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC). In one of her articles, Pipeline or Pipe Dream: Another Way to Think About Basic Skills, Rose makes two points that deserve much greater discussion and awareness.
First: "The apparent simplicity of the skills in question seems to provoke a simplistic pedagogy: if students don't understand it, say it louder, say it slower! Too often, that is, basic skills courses are taught through drill and memorization of rules. What's missing is any sign of intellectual vitality and engagement..."
Second: "These so-called 'basic skills' are not, in fact, so basic or simple. As the research on literacy shows, the reading process that most of us take so much for granted is highly complex. As we 'decode' a text, we bring to bear a vast reservoir of linguistic and cultural knowledge, connecting new ideas with old ones, figuring out words we may not know, actively questioning what we read as we read it, trying out and refining ideas and conclusions as we read."
I'm sure there are those scoffers who are SURE they know what "basic skills" are and how they should be taught. Many of these people are also suffering from extreme forms of nostalgic fantasy ("Back when I was in school, we all learned...") Before we start labeling today's teachers or students lazy or incompetent, consider how many more facts and skills there are to be learned.
Marion Brady, in the Feb. 2008 Educational Leadership, makes the following observation on the increasing shallowness of curriculum in our schools:
Skeptics who don't think this [trying to cover too many topics in a school term] is a problem would do well to borrow the textbooks in a typical adolescent's backpack and count the ideas their glossaries insist are important. One set of popular 8th grade textbooks covering just four subjects—math, science, language arts, and social studies—notes almost 1,500 important topics. That's for one year, or about 170 actual instructional days in those schools that haven't switched to nonstop reading and math test-preparation drills and even fewer days for those schools that have. It's akin to trying to drink from a fire hose. -- in "Cover the Material--or Teach Students to Think"
How many facts does a child really need to know, and why does s/he have to learn them by a certain age or grade level? (I've camped on this ground before -- grade levels are arbitrary inventions that have nothing to do with learning.) As the amount of information available to us multiplies exponentially by the hour, it's time to redefine what are the real "basic skills" and how best to teach them to the citizens of our present and future.
Ah, Spring! Snow melting, birds chirping, and buds sprouting -- not to mention the beginning of mandatory state testing season in most public K-12 schools. The climate in higher education is also showing signs of change, as pressure for greater accountability begins to show up more and more, particularly in the accreditation process.
I have spent most of the past year as the point guard on our community college's reaccreditation team. This is my first such review at the college level, but I have participated in several in the K-12 sector (both as a member of a review team and of a candidate school). What's been interesting to watch is how uncomfortable many people in higher ed are with things their elementary through high school counterparts have come to accept as standard operating procedure.
Academic deans and professors outside of the Colleges of Education are having to learn a new language: student learning outcomes, multiple assessments, standardized tests!
Remember, college professors are used to basking in "academic freedom" -- which means most of them get to teach what they want, when they want, how they want, and pass or fail students as they see fit. Turning in a syllabus to your department chair or dean is not the same as turning in weekly lesson plans to your principal or having a checklist of objectives to cover this grading period. This freedom is a cherished right in the academy, and the pressures to be more accountable are seen by many as a direct threat to that right (or is it a privilege?). The vast majority of college faculty have had no pedagogical training at all and methods of teaching and assessment are all over the map.
Gerald Graff, President of the Modern Language Association, touched off a small war with his Feb. 21st piece at Inside Higher Ed called Assessment Changes Everything. Frankly, I agree with Graff that too many colleges and professors have fallen into the trap of elitism (through both admissions policies and sloppy teaching) that Graff calls "Best-Student Fetish" and describes as "a symptom of the increasingly obsessive competition among colleges for the cream of the high school senior crop."
Graff continues: "The more I thought about the Best-Student Fetish, the more perverse its logic seemed: It is as if the ultimate dream of college admissions is to recruit a student body that is already so well educated that it hardly needs any instruction!"
I've had numerous discussions with college colleagues who whine about the "unprepared" students arriving in our classrooms. This would be an easy and tempting trap to fall into in any teacher's lounge, but it begs several questions. First, why do we act as if we are unconnected and unresponsible for the education of children all along the K-16 line? (Nod to my Carnegie colleague, Kati Haycock, of Education Trust) Second, as statistics tell us, not everyone finishes high school, at least not directly. Not everyone who finishes high school is in the top 5% of the class. Especially here and at other community colleges, students are going to arrive with varying levels of abilities, experiences, and skills. That is why we call this thing we do teaching.
Education Secretary Spellings, through the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, made it clear that the Administration wanted to bring public colleges and universities under the same type of scrutiny in terms of output and student performance that it has applied to K-12 via NCLB. Certainly, college instructors should be wary of the type of problems that NCLB (and some of the ir-rationale behind it) has spawned. However, colleges, like all levels of education, should be willing to ask some hard questions about what we are teaching, why we are teaching it, and whether students are benefitting from what we do.
Renee Moore has 15 years of high school English classroom experience in Shelby, MS and Cleveland, MS, as well as teaching credits at Mississippi Delta Community College.
