Setting a High Bar for Learning

Setting high expectations and standards means, first, that the department’s curriculum must account for students needing to be prepared to successfully create, innovate, decipher, empathize, connect, compete and persevere within an ever growing international cohort of ideas, ideologies, perspectives and cultures.  We must secondly acknowledge that all of a school’s and district’s students must be included in that success.  The times are too demanding and the stakes too high for anyone to opt out. Finally, we must plan for how to use meaningful assessment data to identify students’ skills, run courses in a way that places them each in opportunities to meet those expectations and establishes means of supporting anyone who needs an alternative and / or additional strategy.

Educators with high standards will have to meticulously craft necessary scaffolds, which I see best being done by having teacher write the curriculum in teams.  First, ideas will have the best chance of getting from being proposals to a written curriculum and then to a taught curriculum.  When the teachers do the planning and creating, they are more fully invested in the framework and less likely to allow students to give up on themselves in times of struggle.  These teams will also serve as the best source of support and feedback loops.  If a class or student is struggling or if a teacher is going to try something new and innovative, it’s often important that they have another set of eyes to help them troubleshoot, prepare and reflect.  Teachers will often rather do this with their peers and then “show off” when administrators come in to observe than get initial feedback from administration.  Finally, creating curricula in teams means that the work will be more cohesive both vertically and horizontally.  Setting up such a system for an ELA curriculum, for example, means that writing standards can both play out in numerous content area classes across a grade level as well as progress from year to year.  Seeing how argumentative, narrative or informational text appears within social studies, science, media-driven, and literary contexts will help students better understand assignments’ designs and therefore meet higher standards than if each teacher had his/her own requirements.

Courses with low expectations have students do work that they can already accomplish.  Educators who want to push their students, though, need to create the means to help all students achieve these high standards.  When teachers and administrators begin by learning who students are and what strengths and struggles they have, appropriate pedagogical tactics can be designed and clearly communicated to students and families.  Simply said, people won’t hit a target they don’t know is there.  In a standards-based learning world, students ought to be fully aware what’s being asked of them.  Educators have to help students understand why they’re learning particular content and skills and what each looks like when completed.  For example, if the goal is to write an editorial piece that’s to be submitted to a professional news outlet, educators must help students find a variety of such articles to read and an interesting topic on which to write their own.  

Finally, teachers with high expectations will design units around open-ended essential questions with embedded formative benchmarks.  Students should be allowed to explore, create, synthesize, and apply the skills and knowledge they’re acquiring instead of stopping at being able to identify, label and define information.  With multiple means and points of ongoing assessment in place, educators will be able to individually support students as needed, keeping the next stage of their work towards high expectations always at Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development.

Teachers' Stress: Reasons for it and Ways to Help

I’ve just come across this understated but extremely timely and important post on the LinkedIn group for the National Association of Secondary School Principals by Dr. Marc Tinsley (@DrTinz) http://linkd.in/1bQfhLy .  It’s a limited survey from one inservice day at a high school, but with a few brief statistics, he’s got me thinking about the connection between teaching and stress level.  As is all too noticeable, issues of teacher burnout, the amount of stress involved in educators’ work and how stress affects people’s general health and outlook are deeply relevant in today’s schools.  It’s timely because the school year’s just starting out - so there’s a chance to help - and important because teacher burnout is unnecessary and a true threat to the quality of teaching in our future.

For starters, please know that I haven’t been a full-time teacher in 4 years, but being a full-time high-school English teacher for 10 years and then an ELA department coordinator and assistant principal lends me a global perspective that I do like to have on issues like this.  Secondly, I know that other professionals within schools and school systems are stressed, but I’m not going to write about them here.  If you want, for example, to read about the clearly overwhelming world of school principals, you ought to read and follow a Blog by John Falino (@johnfalino1), Prinicipal at Dobbs Ferry High School in Westchester, NY, who in this post  http://bit.ly/1bQguCE writes about trying to prioritze his work and links to other people who have attempted to list all that principals do.  It’s a mind-bending task list, but I’m going to focus on teachers.  

If you’ve read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, you’ll best understand my introduction’s final point.  In it, he creates a number of words that help to define a life-outlook / religion known as Bokononism.  In this case, we’re talking about “teachers” as what Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon,” a group of people who are referenced together and have some similarities, but aren’t actually similar enough to be measured as a group.  (Think: teenagers, Southerners, Musicians, etc)  Of course, we can stereotype and generalize, but I won’t. For now, I want to only consider those at the top of our profession, those teachers who are fully actualizing their job description and then some.  It’s those who fulfill all philosophical and tactical expectations for the work. Think of the Hollywood movie teacher of yesteryear - before the profession became vilified - and see the stress that led up to divorce, heart failure, jail time, bankruptcy, etc in films like Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Dead Poets’ Society, and  Freedom Writers.  Some of these are fictional  or fictionalized, but there are legions of teachers - some of whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing and working closely with - that are very real and equally in danger of stress, poor health and burnout.  Am I saying that there are teachers who don’t fit these qualifiers?  Yes, I’ve seen them, and I’ve worked with them too.  Some from this group have stepped up and improved their attitude and work while the others...well...not so much, but this is an issue for other times. I’m going to explore a bit about the people who strive to do it all.  

I want to open the dialogue because, as an administrator, I think that we have to work to help alleviate as many pressures as possible.  We must be reflective enough to understand the few tweaks we can do to our outlook, attitude, and systems that’ll help teachers lower their stress levels, which is better for them, their students and the overall school culture in both the short and long terms.

Sources of teachers’ stress, as I see it:

1) The length of the “work day.” While it’s true that school hours aren’t very long, the teachers I know put in almost as many hours outside of scheduled hours as during the day with students.  When we consider paper grading, lesson planning, meetings, communication with parents and room set up, we start to get the picture.

2) Let’s add to the time factor by saying that education - as a profession - is changing at a blistering speed. In order to keep up with the students’ changing needs, the absolute expectation of hitting the needs of all students and the omnipresent expectations of the political and economic machines that now more than ever write our rule book, teachers need to be constantly learning.  What we are doing about that is increasing our connectedness and research.  We’re reading, discussing, trying, and learning about everything from international literary titles to brain research and iPad apps.

None of this is helping teachers relax and get needed sleep.

3) The moral and social justice aspects of the job mean that every moment holds a tremendous amount of emotional weight.  We know what happens to our students if we don’t bring our A game.  Since most excellent teachers are either  type-A people who succeeded in school because of their passions, tenacity and refusal to fail and want the same for their students or they are type-A people who struggled in schools and are going to work themselves to the bone in order to help their students avoid the same experience(s).

4) Weltschmerz is the depression experienced when people’s expectations are crushed by the physical reality of a situation.  There is an alarming rate of new teachers who are leaving the profession within the first five years.   Is it student apathy, deep literacy issues, big testing, unsupportive administration, a lack of strong technology or something else altogether?  Probably some of all of the above.  What I know is that the classrooms, schools and profession they dreamed of is full of things they neither expected nor are prepared for/interested in working on.

5) The most distressing source of stress listed in the survey was student behavior.  I’ve worked in a few relatively calm schools and a few schools with what I call “a lot of personality.”  Our truth, which I guess educators can whine and moan over if they’d like, is that there are a lot of students who need help understanding what affective standards look like in a variety of situations.  They need to practice how they carry themselves in classrooms, hallways, sporting events, restaurants, job interviews, live theaters and a host of other scenarios in the same way that we teach them how to hold debates, clean up art supplies or participate in socratic seminars.  This is such a stressor because 1) Many educators don’t feel as if it’s their job to teach these things, and a lot of students and families would agree.  2) Affective lessons take a long time and a lot of patience before they’re internalized, usually meaning that some students may not “get better” at some things by the end of one year. 3) the tough one is that those of us who accept this as a vital part of what we do, know that the first step in fixing it is to reflect on our own expectations and look at our students with empathy / understanding instead of pity and frustration.  

This may sound troubling, but as a solutions-based administrator, I want us to remember that a lot of these issues can be averted or solved through some top practices around systems:

1) Create supporting systems for all teachers, but especially new hires.  Teachers’ success is important to them, their students and you, so be there for them.  Even if you  don’t see evidence of things going well in their classes, give constructive and specific feedback and examples so that the teacher(s) can grow.  On top of your administration team’s 1:1 time with them, find a way to set up a new hires’ committee, horizontal grade-level teams, vertical content-area teams and time for teachers to see other’s best practices in action.  Don’t forget that you’re a manager in the building.  In my opinion, having employees means that you’re willing to give timely, proactive, sincere and professional feedback, especially if something is going well.  Give them the knowledge and the chance to improve.  

2) Ditch any unproductive and unnecessary asks.  There is so much on teachers’ plate right now with technologies to learn, the Common Core to adapt to, new testing structures to become familiar with and, of course, their students to understand.  If you are asking anything of them that’s not vital and directly attached to student needs, it just needs to go.  Don’t change things for the sake of changing things.  Focusing on whatever is truly needed by students can help you rally the whole school around an effort.

3) Help teachers recognize wins.  Most master teachers I know are hyper-critical of themselves, only seeing what else they could have done and what didn’t go perfectly.  Their students get all the credit for great learning moments, and they give themselves all of the blame for struggles of any sort.  Send notes, send emails, find them to point things out in person and share their wins publically if they’ll let you.  Try to set up faculty-run pd workshop days where those who do things well share with the faculty as a means of recognizing their excellence.

4) Make sure that everyone knows that school is a place where people learn. Nobody is a permanent expert.  We have to allow ourselves, students and teachers to make mistakes and be imperfect.  Do away with any vestige of “gotcha politics” and turn your observation and evaluation system into a chance to dialogue with teachers about how their lessons are or are not helping students meet standards that are set by content masters and grade-level teams.  Especially now that most states have new teacher evaluation rubrics coming on board, we need to ensure that teachers have a chance to understand it and practice adhering to its rubrics.  

5) Get your teachers connected.  This one may be a tough sell in some cases because you’ll essentially be talking with teachers who may already feel themselves stressed, overworked, tired, and annoyed with technology, and you’re going to suggest that they spend chunks of their precious “down time” online connecting with other educators, reading blogs and coming to understand new resources and methodologies.  It may sound counterintuitive, but as Todd Nesloney (@TechNinjaTodd) tells us in a recent post http://t.co/540AVsFydR , “How my PLN (Professional Learning Network) Saved My Career,” connecting with educator from across the country and even the world can be refreshing and revitalizing.  In the same sense as the adage that tells us we have to spend money to make money, it is true for many, myself included, that we’ve had to invest a decent amount of time in order to lend a renewed sense of potential and purpose to our professional work.  The group with whom I’m connected - thanks to John Falino’s influence (see above reference) - is unshakably positive, hopeful, supportive, creative, innovative and insistent that the work we discuss is always done for the benefit of student’s learning.  There are a lot of places for them to go to connect, but I’d have to recommend using Twitter.  I’m going to suggest that administration signs up first as a “walk the walk” gesture.  

What My Job Search is Telling Me About Students' Needs

I’m a professional educator without a position for this year.  For the first time in the past fifteen years, school is starting without me.  I found a teaching position when I was fresh out of school, two department chair positions and a great administration position as my family and I got bounced around during the recession - my wife’s the family “breadwinner.” After moving for what I’m truly hoping is the last time - or at least to my last town - ever, though, I just have not been able to make it happen, yet (I’m still looking and hopeful).

I have a theory about some of the root causes of my current joblessness - besides the literal reason that I resigned my position from 2012-2013 - and would like to propose a fix to our schools to help better position our students after they graduate.  Let me explain my thought process.  I have fourteen years experience in public schools that includes substantial work on innovations and initiatives that cover any facet and reform that has come to public education in the near past.  I have a double major and minor from my undergraduate studies and am essentially at enough graduate credits for two masters degrees.  I am certified in four states for just about any job I could name - from teacher straight up through superintendent - aside from business manager.  What don’t I have?  Interviews.  

I can account for it in two ways.  (Since people rarely if ever get to talk to hiring managers about not getting interviews or not being hired, I don’t know exactly why, but I have theories.)  One, I’m applying for my fourth job in five years.  The reality is that regardless of how sensible and necessary and out of my hands my moving around has been, people may be hesitant. They’d see my resume and say: “Hmmmm…he’s risky…too much movement...he’s not committed...he won’t stay” and never have me in.  In a different day and age, I’d buy that more easily, but in today’s work force climate, I’m thinking that people moving around is more prevalent and more understandable than ever.  After all, a giant chunk of the country has been out of work and had to move for work, right?  It may play a role, but I just can’t see this as my major obstacle.

What is it, then?  The two missing pieces to the puzzle?  

Number 1: not enough solid connections.  I got to interview for three great positions - two of which I got the jobs - because I knew people who knew people and was smart enough to work connections.  People I know even got me in front of interview teams for positions that were essentially filled already just so I could get some interviewing practice.  Please know that there have been a number of people who have offered help and a few who have been able to pass my resume along, but I have very few solid people in my new area (Northeast Massachusetts), making the likelihood of my knowing someone who knows someone who has a job for which they can say “Dave’s your person” very slim.  It doesn’t matter how hopeful the news is about joblessness and hiring trends; there are a lot of qualified people out there, and a lot of them - unlike me - know the people who are hiring.   The LinkedIn model of job searching isn’t fictional.  The more 1st tier connections you have, the better off you are.

Number 2: the specificity that employers are free to now ask for when searching.  I don’t want to say that “transferable skills,” those Common Core and common sense nuggets of being analytical and literate, communicating well, working with teams for a variety of purposes and audiences, etc. aren’t valid.  Job seekers need to have general skills and a solid background. I’d even say - in my case - that people think it’s great that I’ve taught elsewhere and had roles close to the one for which I’m applying.  Ultimately, though, big whoop.  You and two hundred others communicate well and build capacity in work teams.  It’s just not enough any more.  I’ve seen hiring committees pass on veteran middle school teachers because they have no 9th grade experience.  World history teachers won’t necessarily get invited in for American history interviews.  Suburban teachers don’t get interviewed for urban jobs and vice versa. Forget about leaving education...not even education businesses want educators; for them, it’s all sales, marketing, psychometricians, and software architects.  

For me, I have a PLN that I’m continuing to build, a LinkedIn profile I’m solidifying and a number of local connections I’m trying to make.  I figure that some patience, some luck and a few good mojo dances will eventually put me in a good position.  For our students, though, here’s what I’m suggesting:

Internships / Apprenticeships:  As soon as possible, students need to be given the chance to work in a field of interest.  We should be giving businesses tax breaks to host local students for flexible periods of time so that they can learn skills, understand the type and amount of schooling that would actually be necessary for that job and also leave it if they aren’t interested.  I’m also not talking about a week or two at the end of senior year or a day with professionals in the building; I want my kids to work a lot, and early on.  Can they go to a workplace instead of taking an elective or two?  Can we realize that minimum wage jobs aren’t nearly as important as career-training apprenticeships and get them out of the mall stores?  Seriously, I’d pay my kids the crappy wages myself so that they can spend summers and weekends working for free with a professional whom they respect.  If they have work in a retail shop, be sure to help them understand the business as well as the importance of greeting customers.  In the same sense that all of k12 academics should include at least pieces of literacy development, all work done by secondary and college students should have a career-training focus to it.  Schools ought to be helping students make those connections, learn from those experiences and plan their higher-ed experiences around them.  Doing this would both give students the specific skills employers want and the human connections that are mandatory for their eventual job search.  Are schools keeping alumni chains going to help students find the most appropriate connections?  Do our schedules and credit systems keep students locked into our buildings to be in a class whose credit they need for graduation instead of at a workplace they could use to jumpstart a career?

Changing a lot About College: There are increasingly fewer people who are going to be able to afford college and earning degrees the way we did.  Higher ed needs to place marketable job skills at its forefront while offering workshops/audits/experiences and other creative, interest-driven, non-mandatory options for liberal arts and “exploratory” courses that are now being required as gen-ed credits.  With even state schools dipping well into the 30,000/yr range in places, it’s just not sustainable.  How many years of a graduate’s life do we really feel ought to spent paying back the cost of being exposed to Early British poetry, Egyptian folklore, or some disconnected 100-level business course?  If graduates really need those for a position, they’ll know that early enough and take those courses.  They don’t need to be required.  Remember that employers are asking for increasingly specific skill sets.  Those classes may need to be invented.  

Finally: self-promotion. In 1988, I graduated high school from a highly reputable school in a highly reputable school system that was sending hundred of students to college every year (around 550/graduating class) and dozens upon dozens to top tier universities.    While I was afforded the chance to take a number of college-credit-bearing courses that eased my gen-ed load, there was no mention of SAT prep, no assistance with writing application essays, and no career days or college advice being given.  There were people from the universities who came in and spoke to small groups, but that’s about that.  Now, of course, schools are almost ubiquitously helping students do all of these things.  The needs are shifting, though.  Every recruiter to whom I’ve spoken now tells me that I need - on top of the connections and specific skills I’ve already spoken about - a media presence and profile(s).  What should we see in senior year of high school? A media course that helps students understand the importance of and actually creates personal blogs, websites, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter accounts and whatever other professional portfolios may be a part for prospective career paths of the student’s choice. Yes, many of these may appear pretty empty at first, but at least there would be a template for students to begin filling in.  They’d know to add work experience as they’re getting internships or at least to get internships that would give them good experiences.  

*****

Please know that I love the liberal arts and what I refer to as National Geographic science (really interesting stuff that may or may be applicable to anything; it’s just interesting).  I studied literature, psychology and theater in school.  I taught high-school English for 13 years. I don’t want to demean it, but in a world where more choices have to be made by more people regarding what can be done and what has to be put aside, I’m worried about whether or not we’re doing right by our k12 and higher ed graduates.  If we say that graduating high school and undergrad are important but see that now additional certifications and degrees are required to get into the workforce, we need to be very careful about the importance of things we’re asking from them and the way we allocate increasingly limited resources.  

Using Google Forms and an iPad to increase efficiency with observation systems, including Danielson's FTT

Let’s start with admitting that I could use a bit of a marketing lesson when it comes to using kitsch to help get people onto the blog.  Truthfully, I tend to get very practical when it comes to titling files, folders, tags, etc. so that I’m least likely to lose them in what’s become a happily voluminous store of resources.  I can also say that although I have a bit of theory to get to throughout this post, practicality is at the essence of this post, so I think the dry, functional title is perfect.

If you’re curious about the essentials of my beliefs on teacher observation and evaluation work, read my last post here here.  The work I’m explaining helped served a definitive need in my supervisory roles, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle that I’ve laid out in the other post.    

I am a huge fan of collaboration when reflecting on what’s working - and not - in classrooms.  As a teacher, I shared a double-period class for a large chunk of my career.  Even with a partner and a close-knit grade-level team, I still wanted my principal and AP to come in to see and comment on what we were doing.  They never came, but that was before principal evaluations and accountability took hold and before teacher evaluation was so politicized.  As a department chair and assistant principal, I’ve worked hard to get into classes and offer observations, feedback and supportive reflections as much as possible; I was never able to make it in as often as I’d like - or as often as some of my teachers needed.  What I’m going to explain comes in the context of both my believing that observation and evaluation systems can inform the improvement of teachers’ practices and the reality that many places, like NYS, are mandating that administrators are in classes more often than many of them currently are.  Turning all leaders into instructional leaders is a huge shift.  For some, who have always been more operational leaders, it is going to be a logistic and a philosophical shift.  For those who have always seen themselves as instructional leaders, being able to give enough specific and usefully collected feedback to make an impact on instructional efficacy has always been tough.  Hopefully, this effort via Google Forms will be able to help.

In February, my eyes lit up when I saw this Blake Konny (@blakekonny, of leadministration.com) post about using Google Forms to help with teacher evaluation.  He essentially lays out a method of to create a Form that observers can fill out anytime they go into a classroom.  The results would populate a spreadsheet - as all Google Forms do - and the embedded script would automatically send an email with my observation notes to the teacher who was just observed.   Wow.  Slam dunk.  To an extent...

This tool won’t / shouldn’t:

- be the only tool used in observing teachers

- replace narrative descriptions about what happens inside classrooms

- work very well without follow-up discussions

- do you much good unless you adapt the form to your school’s needs and expectations

- work without a bit of work.  It’s great once you get it going, but watch Blake’s video carefully.

This process will:

- allow you to adapt any of the forms here to your school’s observation expectations

- serve as a starting point for more adaptive conversations regarding teachers’ practices

- allow you to sort information over time by department, grade level, individual teacher, observer, etc, so that trends can be established and PDs can be tailored to individual’s needs.

- quickly collect a good amount of information  

- get feedback to your teachers as quickly as possible

- track observation data across a year’s time to help with seeing improvement for the purpose of yearly evaluation writing.  

So, in addition to Blake Konny’s amazing instructional video about how to set up the forms and the emailing script, he provides a version of the form that he’s used with his school.  I will include my templates as well for you to copy and use.  What you’ll need to do is go under the “file” menu and click “make a copy” so that you can use the form for your school with your teachers’ emails.  

The first template, which you’ll find here, includes some items that I took from Blake and some items that stem from PD work we did at my last school.  This second one, though, is the piece I think you might be most excited about.  I set up a form with reference to all of the language from Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching.  Personally, I think it’d be a lot to observe at once, but you could go to classes with a focus on a particular domain or two and have this very nicely track your data.   Most of NY and a lot of states and districts around the country have adopted the Framework as their observation rating tool and system of teacher-practice benchmarks.  Now that I’m in Massachusetts, I should begin crafting one for the new rubric they've just adopted via Research for Better Teaching.  

If, by the way, you're looking at the three links above and wondering why they brought you to blank spreadsheets, that's what Google Forms will populate once you fill out the surveys. You will first have to make your own copy of the forms. Then, if you click on "Form" and "Go to Live Form," you'll see the survey that'll eventually be on your devices' homepage so that you can fill it out while in classrooms. Here's what each of those spreadsheets looks like in survey form:  

1) Blake's 2) My original 3) Danielson's FFT

I’ve brushed over two bits of technology that I was already somewhat familiar with.  If you’ve never used a Google Form, I can’t say enough about them.  They’re really easy to use and - of course - fully integrated with Google Drive, meaning that everything’s (the form and spreadsheet) right there for future access.  Here are a few links to read and watch first if you’d like.  To get the survey onto your iPad or iPhone is also only a few quick steps away.  From the “form” menu, use “send form” to email it to yourself.  Open the link from the device you’ll want to use and follow the instructions here to put it onto your phone’s home screen.  It’s the same for an iPad, but the “Share Button” is just to the left of the URL bar in Safari.  Yes, by the way, I believe you’ll have to open the link with Safari in order to save it as icon on IOS.  I don’t have one, but - as described here - doing this on an Android device seems easy enough as well.

Bringing Teacher Evaluation Back from the Cliff

Teacher evaluation is a miss in far too many places because of the level of interference it puts in the way of effective teacher observation and the absolutely necessary, formative feedback and professional growth that ought to follow.  I want to lay out some ways observation and evaluation can look if it is done correctly, some reasons why evaluation so often gets in the way, and one strategy that I’ve created - with substantial help from @Blakekonny, whom I first conversed with as part of my Twitter PLN, but was also able to hook up on  the phone to finalize my work - to help increase the amount, timeliness, and specificity of the data my school had from observations.

Teachers’ observation (formative) and evaluation (summative) ought to be a combination of interactions, reflections, and  conversations that lead to the improvement of teachers’ craft and yes, ultimately, improved students’ learning.  The information teachers get about their work ought to come from as many sources as possible and be tracked conveniently so that it can all be juxtaposed.  Picture a collection of data gained through discussions, observations, academic assessments and reviews of the teacher’s body of work that is generated by the students, colleagues, parents, and administrators that inhabit that teacher’s professional world.  Both goals that teachers set for themselves as part of the system in which they’re working and the norms/expectations established by administration ought to serve as guides for the feedback.  It’s a place where items including the wording of essay questions, pacing of curricula, contributions to grade-level meetings, classroom environments, use of technology, proactive family communications, peer support, depth of meeting SMART goals, and the amount of HOTS put to use in a class are all effectively collected and tracked and discussed, and reflected upon.  All of this, by the way, ought to be done with a frequency that reflects teachers’ needs, milestones throughout the year, and yes, some level of seemingly arbitrary regularity for good measure.  

How are we missing the boat with teachers...simply by adhering to our failed philosophy of measuring what we claim is the objective attainment of teaching standards without speaking enough about teachers’ growth.  In today’s climate, with the volumes of research we are now looking to utilize - from Dweck’s work on mindset, Pink’s work on motivation to mastery grading, technology, pbl, etc, etc, etc - we have to know that all teachers are going to be less than perfect with at least some of these things.  It’s a perfect example of too much, too fast, but too bad. While it’s true that the amount of research in our culture is greater than ever and that most of the initiatives’ implementation is being done for the benefit of our students, the system’s put so many things forward at once that we can - if we want to - catch most teachers not doing something well at any given moment.   I hope, by the way, that that’s not what we want to be doing.

To make matters worse, we claim to measure growth against our teacher standards/protocol, which almost always top out with items that are admittedly “aspirational,” meaning that the bar has been set to mark professional habits that turn the S, M, and A of SMART goals into jokes.  I was once told, for example, that my content knowledge didn’t portray the “depth and breadth of expertise” that it should.  When I asked how many texts and by what authors, time periods, and cultures I should know in order to be considered “advanced,” I was told that it’s just something that can be sensed, that there wasn’t a list of any sort, even though the particular class and curriculum being observed was considered thoughtful, thorough and well-organized.  I was told that “everyone needs to be growing at this.”  This is a problem because people are going to be less willing to grow and try if their work will always be considered sub-par; it’s the same reason so many struggling students just drop out.  Could you imagine a classroom teacher not giving A’s to student writing unless it gets accepted for publication by someone outside of the school community or telling students that they’ll only get Cs in physical education unless they get drafted by a college?  Raising the bar, fine.  Having aspirations, perfect.  But they can’t be the foundation for success.  

In my humble opinion, teaching is an imperfect activity.  The best of my own classes and all classes that I’ve observed in my 14yrs have had some level of flaw, something that ought to have been done differently, something that could be improved.  A teacher’s skill, in my opinion, is being able to not only proactively minimize those flaws, but also - and most importantly since there will always be something - recognize and improve upon them afterwards.  The perfect teacher in my model is one who puts accepted best practices to use, is able to recognize what is and is not working well in class and can identify needed next steps to improve his/her teaching and the students’ learning.  What do I do to create the environment in which this is possible?

1. Clearly identify practices teachers are expected to be implementing

2. Make sure that these practices either come from sources identified by those people for whom we work and/or are well-researched best solutions to identified needs of the students and/or the school.  There is very little, if any, room for my “pet interests” these days, and a less-is-more mindset helps me keep things off the table.

3. Provide as much context and support as is initially available and ultimately necessary for teachers to understand the initiative and substantially begin and thrive throughout his/her journey.  

4. Give and discuss frequent  and specific feedback.

5. Always repeat observations that don’t go well.  

6. Work vulnerably, meaning that I model struggling openly

7. Evaluate teachers on their willingness to consistently come to an understanding and increase facility with expectations.  Nobody’s learning is done, so a teacher who says (s)he has nowhere to grow is my biggest worry.  

8. Give my observation feedback quickly and then offer time for discussion so that it’s always used formatively.  

9. Allow the evaluation cycle to include teachers’ own goals.  The “relevant” piece of smart goals keeps this from being scary, and the intrinsic motivator is great for morale, the sustainability of a positive school culture, and as a model for teachers’ work with students.

Keep tuned in, I’m working on a follow-up post that’ll explain how, with the help of @Blakekonny, I put iPads and Google Forms to use to help my team’s efforts with using walk-through observations and Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Teaching to improve practice.

What EDU ought to learn from going to camp

The other night I went to my kids’ camp’s parent night and was truly floored, personally and professionally, but what I felt emanating from the counselors, directors, CITs, and - of course - campers...JOY. I’ll give you a bit of context so you can picture it a bit.  The night was essentially a run down of lip-synced songs from Disney’s Camp Rock.  Each group (broken up by gender and age) had a song/dance on a stage with the actual soundtrack playing.  There were 5 kids doing some actual speaking as a means of giving the story and transitions.  A bit over a hundred kids.  Place packed with parents.  The show ran from 6:30-8 and then the pool was opened up for the kids to swim until 8:30ish, all after a full day of camp and before this morning’s start to another full day of camp.  It was hot, high 80s and humid.  Aside from the directors, none of staff were out of college and/or experienced professionals in any form of caring for children.  

Here’s what I saw that made the educator in me just stand up and take note:

- Everyone was excited to be there.  Period.  While at schools’ back-to-school nights, I’ve heard pretty consistent grumpiness about the long day, this event was about celebrating the relationship between the kids and the camp.

- Every staff member there knew each of my kids names and greeted them with high-fives as we walked around.

- All of the compliments we got were about the effort that they’ve been making to meet people, get involved, and improve and/or how hard they’ve been working at something and/or the pride that they’ve been showing in their work.  Nobody spoke to us about measured accomplishments.

- The night’s show was a great example of differentiation.  Everyone performed.  Period.  Some definitely had big roles and, yes, some kids were in the back lines of the performances, but all kids were on stage.  The younger kids had simpler songs, simpler dances and people on stage to help, but nobody considered it “cheating.”  The girls’ groups had cuter dances with more twisting and “gymnastics.” Some of the boys’ groups literally ran up and down the aisles getting high-fives from the families as they went; that was dancing for most 7-10 boys.

- The night ended with all of the camp staff forming lines on either side of the exit’s pathways and literally cheering, clapping, laughing, and high-fiving each camper and family as they walked through.  People left camp that day feeling fully loved and energized.  

Listen, I know school isn’t camp, and I don’t think it ought to try to be camp, but I do know that my kids love going every day and that they are getting better at tons of things like swimming, diving, team sports, archery, and making friends.  I know there are definitive outcomes schools ought to be helping students meet and that teachers work a lot harder than camp staff.  At the end of the day, though, I also know - and was reminded by this night at camp - that schools need to find a way to integrate as much joy and acceptance as possible.  It is a truth in learning theory, after all, that students will gravitate towards scenarios and activities that make them feel valued.

Semantics Matter

I fully believe that educators and parents do what they do because they see their actions as serving students' best interests.  I don't want to come across as being critical of an idea or of the people excited by it.  Trust me, I understand that this post stems from a bit of my own psychosis around words and two things I've come to know about them that make our choices so important: 1) they hold emotional weight 2) they slip into our consciousness much more easily than they are taken out.

Here, I'm hoping to process an idea that seems to be gaining a lot of ground because there are numerous educators and writers I deeply respect hoping to change our reaction to the idea of "failure."  These are bright, passionate people who are bold enough to stand up in the middle of our world full of helicopter parents, social promotion, ubiquitous trophies, baby leashes, and hot-content warning on coffee to say that failure is not only okay, but that it would actually benefit students in school if we let them fail.  Wait, did I read that correctly?  Are these people - many of whom have become highly inspirational to me via my Twitter PLN - now siding with those snarky, traditionally minded teachers I've know (and been in my past) who promote students' "right to fail" as a means of justifying the idea that the onus for student failure lies solely on the student?  Could they be agreeing that students being left on their own to fail is a valuable way of preparing them for the "real world"?

No.  That's not what they're saying, at all. It's a semantics issue that I'm having with the use of the word failure, not a disagreement about what's good for students.  Spoiler alert: I'll explain - up front - why we agree.

People - students and toddlers and adults - grow the most when they're allowed to work through issues, problems, tasks and questions. Valuable learning experiences are just that, the end result of long, varied, complex and often repeated attempts at finding and/or creating a path/process that may or may not actually result in a new idea, accomplishment, understanding, ability, friendship, etc.  Defining learning is a lot like defining Democracy...it's messy, murky, unpredictable, frustrating, inclusive, time-consuming and absolutely important and necessary.  What we've done in our modern world is to sanitize this process, thinking that safe, sanitary, and time-efficient means are better the version of learning I've just described.  Many systems that don't respect process have done things like this, in fact.  Examples include 1) the way we gentrify neighborhoods with chain coffee shops and t-shirt stores because the product and profit are more comfortingly predictable and 2) our urge to pass top-heavy legislation because it's what Thoreau called "an expedient," the quickest way to the end.

And we've essentially turned public school into a place where students are way too often expected to show up with facility in the academic, social, and technical skills and knowledge schools require instead of coming to us to first learn them.  Replacing the organically murky and unpredictable learning processes with three ideas, however, leaves our students at a significant disadvantage.  The truths we're hoping have worked and will continue to work? 1) All students are going to learn curricula in a given amount of time within a given system of experiences in a pre-determined given order.  2) The things we teach aren't meaningful enough to insist that all students gain proficiency in them, or even finish them in many cases. 3) The system will not accommodate the needs of individual learners nearly as much as is necessary.

This is where "failure" comes in.  The system doesn't work, and the idea of failing and/or being a failure has become an entrenched feature of the psyche that runs it.  It's used to say that kids don't measure up, that they haven't done what's necessary (whatever that may be), and most importantly - that their chances of doing anything about it are done and gone.  In our schools, "failure" is something that's either come and gone or has happened so often that it's become a defining characteristic of a student as in "(s)he is a failure."

It is not currently seen the way my educator/PLN friends want to see it defined when they say it's good for kids.  They want the failure that Thomas Edison talks about when he says - and I'll paraphrase - that every time he got the light bulb wrong, that was one less thing he had to try on his path to getting it right.  Or the amount of missed shots that Michael Jordan says helped him to make the ones for which he became so famous. They want failure to be something from which our students will bounce back to try again using different starting points, materials, or methods.  They want failure to remain part of the organic, messy process of learning.  They don't want parents, coaches and educators to swoop in anytime something get rough for kids.  They want to promote Dweck's "growth mindset" and Duckworth's "grit."

I do, too.  I just think we shouldn't say that failure is good for kids.  I want us to call it "struggling" instead.  I know, revealing my point is as anti-climactic and semantic bound as promised, but I still think it's important because I don't want to have to explain it repeatedly.  Let's let the traditionalists have their "failure" and come on board with the benefit of having students "struggle" in classes.  It's going to beyond wait time to a place where they are compelled to work out problems and questions with classmates and look up information to add to their thinking.  It's the place where they come to us with an answer, find that their solution is wrong and then prompted to figure out why?  It's a place where students feel comfortable learning instead of being embarrassed because they don't know something.  It's like I tell my own children, who are 5 and 8, instead of saying "I can't" or "It's too hard," we say "I'm still trying" and "This is tough.  It takes a long time."

And that's where I want their heads to stay.