Cultivating our K12 Mindset

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he lays out the idea that “greatness” and success are primarily the result of context.  People aren’t great by themselves so much as the products of perfect conditions coming together in the right way for the right amount of time.  He presents a number of anecdotal success cases from sports and business that exemplify his thesis, explaining that while these people obviously have done great things, top-tier Canadian hockey stars and business execs like Bill Gates have all benefitted from their context more so than their genetics.  In fact, he goes on to say that things like IQ and physical stature reach a plateau, beyond which they lose their sense of influence to the person’s life experiences.  

I had the most parking-lot moments with Gladwell - I listened to an exceptionally enjoyable version of him reading the book via my audible account while I was commuting to work - while he discussed how this idea manifests when people become aware of it, buy into, and ultimately - in our modern way - try to manipulate it to our advantage.  What he was talking about was the modern breed of parents who are trying to raise children to reach the pinnacle of a self-actualized, socially adored, culturally groundbreaking life through what sociologist Annette Lareau termed “Concerted Cultivation.”  It’s the idea that child raising shouldn’t be left up to chance; if we know what works and what goals we have in mind, let’s put it all together and create the sort of environment and set of experiences that will foster such greatness in our children.  

What this looks like are the lives of children whom we now read so much about these days, those who have pottery classes, sports, music lessons, museum tours, and historical site visits packed between access bottomless technology, stacks of books everywhere they turn, afternoons spent cooking elaborate recipes with their family, international vacations, professionally connected mentors and the philosophical and functional awareness of why it’s important to buy local and organic foods.  These aren’t at all bad things to have, of course, but if this were an old-school textbook, I’d have to have a special boxes on the side of each page with colors an alternate font. 1) This can be taken to extremes with such items as Baby Einstein, activities like toddler beauty pageants, birthday parties on the fields of major-league stadiums and the gentrified and safe trophies-for-all world of helicopter parenting. We should note that these extremes all have their damaging sides that range from mind-numbing screen time and a warped sense of beauty and self-importance to a generation of children who haven’t had the benefits of working through and reflecting on struggling and losing.  2)This is the foundation for the achievement gap.  It shouldn’t be a shock to know that not all parents have the know-how, the means, the time, the money, the connections, or the backgrounds to put these pieces in place for their children.  It’s why there’s a connection between parents’ careers and children’s vocabulary, between life experiences and reading comprehension, and between family income level and students’ success rate.  

It’s why families who have yet to experience success in American schools are less likely to have children who find that success.  

It’s why American schools need to be sure to step up and be amazingly purposeful on behalf of our students.  “They’ll do fine” isn’t good enough, and succumbing to statistics and low expectations is unacceptable.  There are just too many students who are “school dependent,” needing us to fill in the spots where their experiences and families’ capacities create a deficit of one sort or another.  It does, after all, take a village to best raise a child.  Let me, then, speak to a few fixes in our work that need to happen k12, structures and belief systems that I’ve seen become damaging to kids by the time they hit 9-12 and are in our purview to move beyond.

1) Start with a “Growth Mindset.” If you aren’t aware of this idea, Carol Dweck is its champion.  Simply put, it means that all children - and people - have the capacity to grow beyond where they currently are.  It says that everyone has the capacity to produce high quality work and struggle with big ideas, even if some students need more support, time, or scaffolding to get there.  For my own kids, it means that we talk about “still trying” or “haven’t yet been able to” instead “I can’t” or “I’m no good at.” There’s nothing new in saying that people do best when they’re motivated over time to work at something with the necessary supports in place, but we still - for many reasons, I assume but won’t get into here - believe that some can and some can’t and that some deserve and some don’t.  There has to be a culture in our schools that helps students and families know how happy we are to have them there and how important it is for us all to work together at becoming better.  One of my favorite Twitter chats is hosted by Michele Corbat and other great educators on Monday nights at 9est.  It’s called #COLchat and focuses on creating a “culture of learning.”  Click here for my Diigo library page for resources on Dweck and growth mindset.

2) Turn the idea of “failure” into the reality of “struggling.” We should only be doing work in school that’s worth doing, and if it’s worth doing, it’s probably not easy  and probably can’t be finished quickly.  If we force students to work under time constraints, we’re really only assessing what they can do within that amount of time, not what they can do.  If we couple that by saying that we’re going to grade you and move on at that point in time, we’re saying that we’re okay with our students having only done 65% of this or having done all of it with 65% accuracy. If it’s important, that shouldn’t be acceptable.  If we, instead, pushed students to finish all work, to always improve and reflect upon their initial attempts and to not expect things to happen quickly and easily, they’ll be better off for it.  This is what researcher Angela Duckworth calls “grit.” It’s the willing to buckle down, accept a mandate, and work hard to successfully finish a task. Click here for my Diigo library page for resources on Duckworth and grit.  Jessica Lahey has written a lot about parenting and children’s failure as well.  Finally, you can read my blog post on it.

3) Students’ learning is about them, not about us.  If you haven’t yet read Daniel Pink’s book Drive or at least seen the RSA video and/or the TED talk about it, do so.  His research pushes us to lose our extrinsic motivators and help students realize that the learning they’re doing in school will make their lives better. Extrinsic rewards such as praise, money, prizes, etc. diminish the value of and respect for any task that’s beyond generic and menial.  They need to driven by their own interests and sense of purpose.  This is a big one, so I’ll break up the amount of places we detrimentally steal the scene from the stars of our show, the students:

• Grades - I will get into it a bit in my final point (4), but anytime we have students working for a score or a grade, we are most like doing short-term damage to the quality of work and long-term damage to the level of investment a student has in school work.  This, by the way, fully includes standardized test scores.  Make a goal around improving vocabulary, skill around variety of sentence structures and poetry analysis, not raising test scores.  Alphie Kohn has been spot on about this psychology for decades now.
• Avoid approving or giving praise to work until after the student(s) has self-assessed and spoken to next steps.  It’s better to agree with students who like their work or further support those who don’t than it is to become the arbiter of good and bad, right and wrong.
• Allow for as much student agency as possible when it comes to class.  What processes, products, structures, etc. can you be flexible with?  In today’s world of technology and well-researched place for artistic/creative expression, it’s more possible than ever for students to put a personalized spin on the learning they need from our classes.  Try using a project-based, essential-question driven approach to curriculum design.  If you’re going to draw lines in the sand, be sure they’re important and be clear with the students regarding why they have to do something a certain way.  Remember Mark Twain here: “Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.”  ELA gurus Nancie Atwell and Kelly Gallagher have written extensively about the power of choice in curriculum.

4) Personally, I think the engine behind all of this is the move to standards based learning and grading.  You may have also heard it called competency based learning, mastery learning or achievement grading, but it’s all the same.  If educators can identify what we want students know and be able to do (cliche by now), we can help them understand how these standards have become pivotal to a desirable future (read: Career and College Ready) and work with them to unpack experiences that will help them “know,” “comprehend,” “apply,” and “create” as a path to show mastery.  I don’t want this to sound easy to implement, but it’s a pretty quick and logical jump away from the traditional system in which teachers use relatively esoteric codes (grades) as a form of feedback that isn’t comparable across teachers or helpful for the students’ actual growth.  It’s champions include Rick Wormeli and Ken O’Conner.    I’ll also add in that I’ve been a part of an amazingly informative Twitter chat that’s full of resources about Standards Based Grading.  Every Wednesday night, at 9est, Darin Jolly and a host of other really reflective and insightful educators get on to #sbgchat.  

The bottom line is that we need to - in the best, most positive way possible - jump on board with accepting the mission to concertedly cultivate our students’ experience for their best interests.  Knowing that this sort of affective education - the one that brings hearts, minds and actions on board - takes a long time, we have to start with our K or pre-K students and work relentlessly with our students through high-school graduation if we are to succeed.  It’s about the right messaging in little moments equally as much as wholesale systemic changes.  So, get connected and work with as many educators as you can.  Our schools can be better.  Our students need them to be.

Try Bringing These Qualities to a Teacher Interview

Hiring teachers is the absolutely most important thing I can do for my students and school as an administrator.  My top hopes:

- Kind disposition: Teachers need to embody the truth that students, their families, and their futures are our work.  Our job is much more than building relationships with students, but very few students learn at their best from a teacher with whom they have no relationship.  Being kind is where those relationships begin.

- Content knowledge: Teachers need to be well versed in their content area’s body of knowledge and skills.  Historically, 6-12 ELA has used book lists as a form of curriculum, writing in course catalogues that students will be learning titles such as Great Expectations and The Things They Carried among other titles during a year.  This approach is fading, though, because the Common Core makes it clearer than ever that the foundation of our work is based on literacy skills more so than knowledge of specific literature.  Of course there are some books and authors that many teachers have found students really enjoy and are excellent fodder for teaching certain skills (think: The Outsiders or Romeo and Juliet), but if it’s the literacy skills on which we’re focusing, students need to read a lot of books and texts that they’re going to be invested in and investigate deeply.  Our idea of “content knowledge,” then, has to include not only a breadth of literary knowledge that both fills the cultural canon and touches and inspires the hearts and minds of modern students, but also the pedagogical toolkit needed to masterfully craft the literacy lessons. After all, I’m hiring a teacher to connect with students, not a poet, a critic or an editor of literary anthologies.

  

- Top notch collaborators:  Educating students is very difficult, uncertain work, and the best way to surmount its trials, which we all experience at some point, is to work together towards solutions.  My preferred teachers will collaborate with colleagues and administrators about everything they do, asking for advice and sharing resources as much as possible.  They also must be interested in accepting families as school partners, which these days means opening up multiple lines of communication, including websites, blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and message boards on our SIS as well as connecting with phone calls, emails, face-to-face meetings and volunteer opportunities.  Students with families behind them have the best chance of success, so we must work with them. Finally, modern teachers ought to be collaborating with students.  An increased amount of choice around content, process and product can bolster engagement, foster perseverance and increase students’ capacity with critical thinking skills.  Creating a class in which the teacher collaborates with the students and then allows them to productively collaborate with other students means that this teacher’s students will more likely be active participants in the course instead of passive recipients of material.  

- Humble, reflective practitioners:  Nobody is absolutely perfect all of the time, and any perfection we enjoy tends to slip away quickly if we try to rest on it.  Educators all want their students to continually get better, and I want the same from the faculty.  In today’s world, where everything is so new all of the time, nothing is as fruitless as working with professionals who want to complain that their “tried and true” methods aren’t working anymore. I actually like to ask interviewees about the last thing they’ve learned about teaching, what it is that prompted them to learn it, and what they intend to learn next.

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.