My Non-Negotiables for Great Teaching

Often enough, I'm in conversations about how I know what good teaching looks like, and although I've used effective tools like Danielson's Framework for Teaching and Saphier's Skillful Teacher framework, fulfilling those expectations isn't the answer I go with.  Here's a stab at the big picture of what I consider non-negotiables for great teaching.



An understood purpose
                      (link)

A sense of urgency

                     (link)



Contagious Passion
                      (link)

I'd love your questions, comments, and/or additions? How do you know when you're seeing great teaching?

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Vigor instead of Rigor

I’ve written a good bit about tremendous shifts towards healthier, more productive and more psychologically sound educational practices for our students that can be found in slight shifts of semantics.  There’s this piece about the why we should embrace students’ struggling instead of accepting or even applauding their failures (what’s now very popular).  I also realized - and explained here - how outcomes and standards-based-learning can easily become a daunting laundry of things for students to know and do if we don’t focus on the processes that contextualize, scaffold and give purpose to courses’ content.   

Before I work a bit to convince you towards adopting the spirit of “vigor” instead of “rigor,” I have to say that it’s not an original idea.  Shawn White - @swpax - first wrote about this last year, but lost the post in a blog-host transfer.  He’s an educator I came to respect for his ideas and his warm, welcoming, clear-headed, student-centered and growth-focused tenor.  The fact that we’ve spent a solid amount of time sharing ideas and resources allows riffing on his idea to feel natural to me.  

I read the definition of rigor and sardonically chuckle about how poorly it connects with everything I believe about successful teaching, especially components such as the importance of relationship building, the pitfalls of classroom power struggles, and effectiveness of affording students room for choice and voice in as many aspects of the class as is possible.  On one hand, it’s clear that the “make it more rigorous” camp has had great intentions in mind.  If we think about curriculum and pedagogical goals, we’d include mantras about having high expectations for all learners; having students connect with content at higher orders of synthesis, evaluation, and creation instead of just knowing; and pacing our classrooms so that there’s a sense of urgency around purposeful instruction that maximizes learning opportunities during the school day and potentially afterwards.  There is, though, a dark underside to “rigor” that comes through when we sit in its definition’s quicksand.  It manifests itself in zero-tolerance policies for behavior and late work, courses that are challenging for students because of the sheer volume of work that’s assigned and material that’s covered, courses and programs of studies that put all students into lockstep rituals and trajectories (you can read here about why I’m a Common Core supporter, but poor implementation can do put schools in this category), and - of course - let’s not forget the emotional, logistic and cultural impacts of the big-testing culture. I’m thinking about all three of my masters-level education programs, none of which allowed for a single elective, or teachers who spend endless amounts of time defining, explaining, and assessing the ins and outs of works cited pages’ logistics. I’m thinking about the NCAA, who was unwilling to count a “Film and Literature” course as a required English credit but happily accepted something called “English 12.” All of these are considered “rigorous,” and all of these are considered by many to be good practice.  They just don’t represent the sort of courses I want to teach, cultures I’d like to work in, or agendas I’d like to promote.  

I’m so inspired by the idea of moving from rigor to vigor because while they both start with the goal of strong student growth and achievement, rigor gets there through single-path systems, power hierarchies and student compliance.  Vigor, however, is another story.  If I was going to annotate its definition, I’d highlight the ideas active, healthy, intense, vital, energetic, and - let’s not forget - effective.  What does this feel like in an education system or a class?

It’s a culture that’s still going to ask students to be involved in the heavy lifting and deep thinking that’ll lead to the desired high levels of achievement, but I’d see vigorous schools as those that start with a foundation of respectful relationships and afford students the choice and voice that gets learners excited about their work.  It doesn’t lower standards, but it helps teachers leverage the passions they have for their subject matter in ways that are contagious to their students, contextualizing content with meaning and relevance.  It understands that moving through a curriculum and covering chapters is not the same and engaging with ideas or creating new ideas, so it slows the pacing down whenever possible and recognizes that play, the arts, independent reading, creation, and electives all play a “vital” role in developing “healthy” adults.   It’s professional development for teachers and administrators that looks and feels more like Twitter chats and edcamps than Department of Education lectures and webinars.  

It’s about students learning because they’re interested and empowered instead of because they’re threatened, coaxed, and complacent.  I’ll riff a bit on a piece from “The Letter from Birmingham Jail” here and ask us if we want to be an extremist for a position, do you want to work towards an education culture that’s “rigorous” or “vigorous.” Think about it.  Your comments and suggestions are welcomed.   

Why I Support the Common Core

I’ve been a supporter of the Common Core State Standards since I first saw them and worked to use them to guide the work I was doing to lead the improvement of an ELA department’s (grades 6-12) curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment work.  Just for some context, I was in downstate NY, and it was the 2009-2010 school year. I had done similar work years before with the Maine Learning Results, but that was a weaker document with a more limited scope, and because of a number of factors, I would find myself doing the same work in another suburban NY district and in a NYC public high school before moving, for family reasons, to Massachusetts in the summer of 2013.  

I have been in a lot of conversations about the Common Core and continue to believe in its potential to combine a lot of efforts in favor of enhanced student learning, but I haven’t yet written about it for my blog.  Since I was personally asked in a FaceBook post by Mass Parents Opt Out of PARCC Pilot Testing, though, I thought I’d give a go at laying out my position. These are mostly generalizations.  Sorry, but I’m not prepared to craft a written version of all that I feel and know about them.  I know it may be tough to do so, but you will have to realize that some of this We’ll start with my concessions:

Even though I support the standards, I know:

- That there are imperfections in them that ought to be clarified and revised over time.  Having these standards in the purview of our legislators makes this way tougher than it ought to be.  I don’t believe that this is any different, though, than the revision process for other versions of states’ standards that would be revised every five years or so.  

- Schools haven’t been given enough time to learn about the shifts and change their work to allow for success with them.  The specificity of expectations are actually much different than a lot of outcomes teachers may be used to using, so there is a lot of work to do when schools shift to the teaching and learning with the Common Core.

- The Common Core is part of a much bigger chunk of work that’s attached to Race to the Top.  Because of that, there is a hot mess of an assessment system coming into American schools that I think we have reason to be very cautious around.  NYs attempted rollout over the past few years stands as testament to that.  

- Even if these tests turn out to be perfect, which I hope all experienced educators know is true of no test(s),  tying the results of the tests to teacher evaluations and school report cards - whether it’s officially through a VAM system or otherwise - is another problem.  There are ways to use student achievement data as a piece of teacher evaluation, but turning the students’ scores into a grade for their teachers isn’t one of them. All this has done is to increase paranoia and decrease the collaborative, trusting spirit that’s needed across stakeholders.  Please read here and here for my suggestions.

- The bump in lexile levels for each grade-level’s reading is a sincere issue.  I’ve been an ELA teacher long enough to know that giving a student texts that are difficult to read isn’t going to make them into better readers.  While I think I had been able to fruitfully scaffold and contextualize the literature lessons, the literacy pieces need a lot more support and patience.  I could, for example, help my students understand what is going on (plot and themes) within The Scarlet Letter, but they would still struggle with reading it on their own.  I think Kelly Gallagher and others are doing amazing work with envisioning new methodologies for ELA classes, but this is a huge shift that will take more time than schools have.

- More money doesn’t always lead to better schools, but I can think think of so many helpful ways to leverage money towards this initiative, mostly involving professional development, collaborative work time, ensuring offerings such as art and music and engineering don’t lose their presence, building classroom libraries, redesigned school libraries and technology.   It’s frustrating to see schools trying to operate on ever-shrinking budgets while we are pouring so much money into the tests and politics of modern education.  

In light of all of this, though, the Common Core Standards themselves, as I’ve said, still represent tremendous opportunities to me and have been extremely helpful guides in the schools where I’ve worked.   Here’s why:

- Content literacy:  I know that a lot of people already include this in social studies and science classes, but far too many still don’t, and the existence of explicit documents that lay out the need for it and its interdisciplinary connections is the catalyst that our students need.  Gone, hopefully, are the days when a few insightful teachers stand by the side of a “literacy coordinator” to say that we are all responsible for our students’ capacity to read, write, and think.  

- Writing is to be done in all grade levels with a variety of audiences, purposes, and styles.  Hopefully, this will mean that the five-paragraph essay written for teachers to read as an assessment of students’ content knowledge - as functional as it can be - will lose its standing as the predominant form of writing that I’ve found it to be in so many districts.  

- Non-fiction reading should have always played a role in all classes, but it hasn’t.  Too many ELA teachers only taught fiction and too many other content area teachers didn’t teach writing at all.  As someone who has always used all sorts of current events and primary source documents to support my ELA classes’ reading, I can say that it works.  

- There’s a clear scope and sequence for teaching grammar and language skills.  I’ve seen versions of this within individual schools, but I’ve rarely heard of such work being effectively shared across schools or with other departments.  Now, all teachers, students, and parents can see what’s expected.  

- I love that it prompts us to help students understand how to find and use the most appropriate technology for whatever particular work they’re trying to do.

- The Standards for Mathematical Practice remind us that math curricula has to be about more than identifying and solving formulas.  Students should know how to think about the math and apply those thinking patterns to other areas of study.  

- I know that “readers response” has a valid place in world of literary criticism, but students don’t need classes and teachers to understand how to react to a text; readers do that naturally.  The reading standards mandate that schools teach students how to identify, deconstruct and analyze authors’ intentions.  This should mean that readers have a firm understanding of topics and ideas before they react to them and form their own opinions.  This skill of listening, considering, and understanding before offering one’s own perspective, is sorely missing from American culture.  

- To add to this, students now must have solid text-based support for the opinions they’re forming.  We are hopefully chipping away with the "I think this is right because I think this is right" mentality that's behind far too much of our culture.

- Have a complete set of standards like these moves all schools one giant step closer to what I feel will be the biggest and most valuable shift that now trending in American education, the use of standards to guide our teaching, learning, and assessments. If all goes well, we will - before too long - be able to know that students classroom assignments and grades are being based on their needs within a course's standards.

As always, I’m interested in any feedback, questions, additions and observations that are out there, so I welcome your comments.  

3 Administrative Non-Negotiables: How I work towards success

School administrators bear the weight of myriad responsibilities.  Our days are filled with diverse questions, interactions, scenarios and tasks.  Some of these happen predictably and can therefore be planned for, but many realities in our purview present themselves organically, with little forewarning.   Schools are living systems, hopefully steeped with a variety of academic, social, experiential, and even virtual experiences geared towards  students’ growth.  No two days are going to look alike and chances are that no solution is going to work equally well a second time without being at least finessed into the specific situation.  Even within this variety and uncertainty, however, there are a few non-negotiable traits that afford me my best chance at success.

Although I am ultimately responsible for everything in a building, I know that I can’t even come close to doing all of the work myself.  Being at my best, then, has always meant actively making use of the unique and innovative talents within my schools.  The first key to my success as an administrator is, after all, my ability to form tightly bonded relationships with the educators, support staff, and other administrators in the building.  These trusting and culture building relationships hinge on three things: 1) I must believe in the faculty’s, support staff’s and students’ strengths and abilities to grow and take on tremendous challenges.  Only then will I be able to sincerely seek out and listen to ideas, delegate efforts, and involve many stakeholders in the decision-making processes.  2) I must be humble enough to know that my job title doesn’t make me the expert in every room or situation I walk into.  Keeping this humility in the forefront reminds me, again, to keep seeking out advice and listening to all stakeholders’ perspectives and ideas.  3) I believe too strongly in the urgent need for everyone to receive a quality education to ever let people out of their obligations, but I do need to empathize with people’s struggles instead of chastise and blame them for coming up short.  Whether I’m working with students, teachers, families, or colleagues, I always want my schools to be places of learning, where we work collaboratively to recognize struggles, identify their root causes and find paths forward.  I take pride in being an administrator who says: “I hear you.  I understand.  How are we going to find a solution?”

When one student in a class has a question, I have always found that (s)he isn’t alone, so I would think about not only supporting that one student in the moment, but also how  to adjust the overall curriculum and pedagogical work so that I can improve my work in ways that hopefully prevent the issue from manifesting the next time.  The parallel for my work in administration is to leverage the strength of my building, school district, and professional learning network to understand struggles within my school and brainstorm ways to overcome them.  Systems are strong and the vision I have for schools can best be manifested when I’m smart enough to leverage the collective work, insight, experiences, and resources of a learning community instead of working in isolation.  Improving a student’s literacy experience, for example, used to be considered something for which his/her English teacher was responsible.  By changing the paradigm, however, I can dramatically increase that student’s chances for success through vertical and horizontal teaming and the alignment of curriculum and assessment.  Now I can connect the work being done from year to year and ensure that all teachers are framing lessons with multiple levels of literacy in mind, helping students to access, process and express their understandings and questions about information.  Examples like these continue to prove to me that turning individual relationships into supportive communities is a non-negotiable part of best practices for strengthening schools and helping students.  This perspective allows me to use insights from both distinct, individual moments and large trends from a variety of places within the school to help improve upon the work I’m doing; it’s about being able to see the forest and the trees.  

Finally, I’d add that the clearest truth about work within education is that there are wide varieties of unpredictable factors that will contribute to my days and my planning for the school’s future.  This uncertainty brings a sense of life to the work that is one of my favorite aspects of working in schools.  It’s not a problem I have to deal with, but it does mean that I must be flexible.  While I begin any work with goals and a vision, working in education means that the people I’m serving and the systems within which I’m working will likely present needs, mandates, perspectives and issues that I have to take into account.  Learning is, after all, much more fluid than it is linear.  

Embracing Learning - Mistake Making 2.0

Growing Past Standards

 I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen. - Henry David Thoreau

But to act, that each tomorrow / Find us farther than today. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The very end...it was so sudden. - Fletch

Are we asking the right questions of ourselves? - Leadership mantra

I’ve just finished reading a spot on blog post from @garnet_hillman (The Freedom of Being a Beginner).  If you’re not yet following her work, story, and thinking, she is a co-moderator of #sblchat (Standards-Based Learning Chat, which used to #sbgchat - Standards-Based Grading Chat). She is also a humble, reflective practitioner and a strong, insightful advocate for the growing movement that’s bringing schools away from traditional assessment systems that allow many things to affect a student’s grade (think: assignment completion, timeliness, general compliance, and positive behavior mixed in with content knowledge and skill acquisition) and into a world where only a student’s capacity with defined academic standards will count towards his/her “grades.”  A standards-based program would define specific course-level expectations and - after summative work is completed - denote how far a student is along the trajectory towards mastery.  We wouldn’t average quarter grades together; we wouldn’t have percentages for homework and quizzes and participation and projects in our gradebooks; we won’t even be grading homework because that will be formative work, a chance to provide feedback without giving an actual grade.  

I love it. I’ve been a dedicated weekly contributor to #sblchat for a long time now.  What I love most is that the discussion is always about teachers and schools challenging themselves to grow beyond what they’re currently doing in service of students’ educations, which is exactly where educators’ thinking needs to be. In fact changing the name of the chat speaks to this because going from “standards-based grading says that the “movement” ought to be about our designing curriculum and teaching classes around standards, not just grading students on their mastery of the standards.  Even though the moderators have been very successful at pushing a philosophy and growing the discussion, they were willing to say: “What’s next? What can we be doing better?” And then to realize that this minor tweak to the name actually holds a world of deep meaning to our practice in schools.  

Garnet’s blog post insightfully prompts people to let go of the need to know everything in lieu of embracing our development as learners.  We ought to do this for ourselves and our students.  The expectation that we - and oftentimes students - already know everything and the following anxiety of being a “failure” if we’re caught not measuring up to that expectation have proven to be toxic to the learning environment in our schools and culture.  We are at a place now where too many people feel that they can’t admit to having to learn anything.  Whether or not we accept standards being set by national and state groups, I’d bet we can all accept that there are outcomes we’d like to reach, levels of achievement we’d like to attain, skills we’d like to master, and content we’d like to know.  It’s the process that we’re now struggling with...and it’s this process I’d like to suggest putting front and center.  Garnet alludes to it by saying that we have to give ourselves the freedom to be beginners at things, that we ought to embrace the discomfort of uncertainty because uncertainty is actually a signal that we’re learning.

So I want to suggest another shift forward...in semantics, something I really like to talk about because I think there’s power in purposeful messaging.  For example, in this post I wrote about education’s newly minted love for “failure” needing to use the word “struggle” instead.  I also changed my own messaging after reading a post from @swpax on using “vigor” instead of “rigor.”   

  

So, I want to think about a new message...a new tag-line that’ll express our (certainly mine) interest in focusing significantly more on the lengthy process of learning than on short moments that prove our abilities.  Once we stop haggling over who writes the outcomes or standards, we’ll realize that 1) they aren’t actually changing all that much (e.g. reading, speaking and writing is still reading and writing.  In fact, read this post about Indiana’s dropping the Common Core) and 2) we can’t expect anyone (students, teachers and otherwise) to meet those standards without the right culture and processes.  I wish PBL didn’t already mean so much to so many because “Process-Based Learning” is what I’m striving for.  In my opinion, focusing on the process of learning would positively affect everything we do.  We, after all, spend 98% of time going through the process of learning, whether it’s a good faulty process, and the assessment (time proving our abilities) at the end is just so quick.  

A culture driven by the learning process would include a class that helps students understand where they are on a particular learning journey so that they’re aware of what they’ve accomplished and what’s next to be learned.  I got my own kids’ “standards-based report cards” yesterday and learned that they’re “excelling at the standards” in almost all areas.  That’s great, but there are months left in the year.  Now, my question is “What’s next in the process?” I also realized that there are some habits my kids need.  These might show up as only “meeting” or “approaching” the standards, but they instead ought to have been organically included in “the process” of learning within the path toward the standard.  Why am I being told about this struggle now instead of hearing that my kids have been working harder on certain things before now? Because the school - and all of our schools - are spending more energy on where we want to go instead of how we’re going to get there.  

It’s a curriculum process that leads a teacher to know (s)he needs to teach students how to use word processors and internet databases before assigning a research project because those - and many more things - are necessary parts of the process that must take place before “meeting the standard” can ever be a reality.

It’s essentially analogous to “showing your work” in math class.  If we were nailing all of the answers to modern students’ needs, I’d say that maybe this is overboard. Since we’re far from it, though, we need to be more transparent about where our issues are...somewhere in the process.  

It’s a society that says wanting all students to meet high expectations is only selling public relations bullet points unless there’s a viable plan that changes the methods and resources we access as means of getting everyone there.

If I think back about first reading Garnet’s posts and finding out that she loved the idea of standards-based grading, I have to wonder how her blog might currently read differently if she evaluated herself by outcomes instead of allowed herself to grab onto process and grow over time.  I want us to follow this model and own not only that growth mindset, but truly shift our focus beyond the standards to adapt the laser focus on what it takes to reach them.

As good as standards-based learning is, as much of an improvement as it represents, I think we can do even better.

Am I missing something?  Taking something too far or too seriously?  Making no sense at all? I’d love your feedback.