Saturday
May 31, 2008
Chris Lehmann, the principal of the innovative Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, critiques this glossy video proclaiming the importance of technology in education in his blog Practical Theory.
He worries that the message is too glib:
I’m disturbed by the fascination with connection for connection’s sake that I see in the first few minutes of the video. I remain very, very concerned with the notion that all we have to do is let the kids connect with the world—just like they do on Facebook or MySpace—and the kids will learn...We have to stop just thinking that the introduction of these tools without an incredible amount of planning and forethought will change anything for the better.
He also worries that we risk throwing away the baby with the bathwater:
The technology can be transformative, but only when coupled with a sense of where you are going and why. Let’s not forget the last 100 years of progressive school reform as we look to change schools today. We have to learn from the lessons of the past—we must learn why the progressive school movement lost to the factory model as the dominant educational model in America, if we expect to be successful in whatever the next wave of school reform turns out to be.
Lehmann worries that the video, produced by Pearson, is really just a marketing ploy for its new web-based school products. And he’s probably right.
The video is a symptom, not a cause, of the problems Lehmann is worried about. The video won’t keep anyone from asking the tough questions, but it just might be another indicator that not enough people are asking them yet.
Scott McLeod takes a similar perspective in his blog Dangerously Irrelevant,
Quit offering us wishes. Quit offering us dreams. Quit preaching to us about what is morally right and educationally appropriate. Help us realize, in terms we can understand, what this new thing might actually look like AT SCALE and how we might reasonably get here. Even if we agree with you that this is important, without a vision AND a plan we’re just as stuck as you are.
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Thursday
May 29, 2008
This week’s Carnival of Education features a recent TEN blog post on the perils of ACT preparation, as well as two interesting posts for/about new teachers:
Lead from the Start offers advice to his student teacher, considering taking a full-time teaching job at his high need school. He warns her,
Most of all you have to realize that if you do come to here, you have to buy-in completely to the school and its culture. Don’t do it if you think you need to come because you have to change the way things are done. You will only be disappointed.
Tween Teacher talks about the lessons she learned as a new teacher and defends the role of young, new teachers in difficult classrooms:
It’s not that I don’t agree that more experienced teachers are better for the harder-to-teach class, it’s just that I think that we can’t dismiss the passion and newness and energy that new teachers bring to the table.
Also interesting:
A Voice in the Wilderness offers up even more disturbing examples of product placement in the NY State standardized tests this year. I haven’t heard any complaints about this on Illinois tests. Has anyone seen anything like this here?
Jose Vilson explains why you can’t go on the field trip, even though he thinks you’re an awesome kid.
Dangerously Irrelevent asks a question nobody’s asking:
So what if schools don’t adjust to the demands of the digital, global economy? So what if the schools don’t prepare kids for the 21st century?
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Tuesday
May 27, 2008
The Consortium on Chicago School Research has released the next study in their series on Chicago high schools, this one looking at ACT preparation. The ACT is now a required part of the PSAE, Illinois’ standardized test for high school students.
According to the report summary:
The majority of Chicago Public Schools students are not attaining the ACT scores they are aiming for, which they need to qualify for scholarships and college acceptance… CPS students are highly motivated to do well on the ACT, and they are spending extraordinary amounts of time preparing for it. However, the predominant ways in which students are preparing for the ACT are unlikely to help them do well on the test or to be ready for college-level work. Students are training for the ACT in a last-minute sprint focused on test practice, when the ACT requires years of hard work developing college-level skills.
The full report explores this in fascinating depth, looking at test score data in conjunction with interviews with teachers and students. This really stood out for me:
Most students believe that ACT scores are strongly determined by tenacity and practice. When students were asked in interviews what they were doing to prepare for the test, the most common response was that they were going to try hard… Student perceptions that tenacity, strategies, and practice are what matter most for test scores are reinforced by the large amount of class time spent on practice items, strategies, pep assemblies around the test, and motivational posters… Teachers also tend to believe that ACT scores are predominantly determined by test-taking skills—almost 60 percent believe so. More teachers believe that the ACT reflects testing skills than believe it reflects student learning in their classes.
The belief that tenacity and motivation are the keys to success is one of the most pervasive themes in American rhetoric, and there’s a great power in conveying that sense of self-efficacy to students. It’s also a convenient message for policy-makers and test-prep companies. It’s simple and it sells.
But if schools are serious about getting students ready for college, this report concludes, it’s time to turn the volume down on that message a little bit, and turn the volume way up on the importance of aligning middle school and high school curricula, aligning high school instruction to what colleges are looking for, and generally improving the quality and quantity of instruction in high schools.
More from the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times.
Full report here [pdf].
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Saturday
May 24, 2008
[via Schools Matter]
Wired Magazine’s blog draws attention to a new Penn State study that found that one in eight U.S. high school teachers presents creationism or intelligent design as a valid alternative to evolution.
From the study:
When we asked whether an excellent biology course could exist without mentioning Darwin or evolutionary theory at all, 13% of teachers agreed or strongly agreed that such a course could exist…
Of the 25% of teachers who devoted time to creationism or intelligent design, nearly half agreed or strongly agreed that they teach creationism as a “valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species.” Nearly the same number agreed or strongly agreed that when they teach creationism or intelligent design they emphasize that “many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian Theory”…
[O]ur data demonstrate substantial sympathy for the “young earth” creationist position among nearly one in six members of the science teaching profession. The teachers who chose the “young earth” creationist position devoted 35% fewer class hours to evolution than all other teachers.
The study concludes:
These findings strongly suggest that victory in the courts is not enough for the scientific community to ensure that evolution is included in high school science courses. Nor is success in persuading states to adopt rigorous content standards consistent with recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and other scientific organizations. Scientists concerned about the quality of evolution instruction might have a bigger impact in the classroom by focusing on the certification standards for high school biology teachers. Our study suggests that requiring all teachers to complete a course in evolutionary biology would have a substantial impact on the emphasis on evolution and its centrality in high school biology courses. In the long run, the impact of such a change could have a more far reaching effect than the victories in courts and in state governments.
So, next step, better science teacher preparation programs. Anyone seen an example of a good program at work?
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Thursday
May 22, 2008
[via this week’s Carnival of Education]
High school teacher Ms. Cornelius is irritated:
Like my new haircut?
I got it from the whirling blades of the latest helicopter parents to hover over my head now that the semester is inexorably subsiding like a California mudslide into the onslaught of finality which is known as “end of semester” time.
The question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is if it possible for Sugarplum to increase his semester average 8 percentage points in the next six school days. Never mind that Sugarplum has never come within sniffing distance of the grade that this parent has suddenly just plucked out of the ether as their “dream grade.”
The end of the year is a tough time, especially for new teachers. It takes practice to stand your ground with parents and students who have switched into desperation mode far too late in the game. It also takes experience to have worked out a grading system that you feel confident defending. (Maybe those check-pluses should be worth 15 points instead of 10...Maybe participation should be 25% instead of 20%, and maybe I’m measuring it wrong anyway… Repeat variations endlessly in your head until you can’t sleep. I may be speaking from experience here.)
Heading into the end of the year, I wonder if TEN readers have any suggestions for both these issues: dealing with desperate parents/students, and making sure you’re confident with your grading system.
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This week’s Carnival at Teacher in a Strange Land features my collection of Teach for America stories, as well as this bizarre TFA-related anecdote from New York, where the standardized test includes essays written in response to a pre-recorded speech:
Today’s ’situation’ told students that they were in a leadership team who has been debating ‘whether leaders should have experience in their chosen fields.’ They were instructed to write ‘a position paper in which you argue that inexperienced people can provide leadership.’
They weren’t even given a choice about which position to take.
They then had to listen to a speech by-you guessed it-Wendy Kopp, about why she started Teach For America. In the speech, Kopp talks about how her lack of experience served to her advantage when creating Teach For America…
This is the New York State exam, blatantly plugging this!
First of all, they forced the children into the position of defending a ‘lack of experience.’ They didn’t say- agree or disagree. They instructed the students to agree with what they were going to hear.
Then, they told them to accept the concept of sending teachers with no experience into their schools. It’s good for you.
How dare they?
I actually like the idea of asking students to write about education reform. It would be great to get student perspectives on innovations like TFA or charter schools. But (a) it’s a standardized test, so anything interesting the kids write will be shipped off to the super-secret test scoring location and never seen again and (b) it’s only worth doing if you actually ask the kids for their opinion instead of assigning it.
Also worth checking out:
Anthony Cody at Edutopia and Susan Graham at Teacher Magazine blog about my favorite topic, the empowerment of teachers and of the teaching profession.
UPDATED TO ADD:
More on the TFA essay question here, including a somewhat depressing (to me, at least) example of a high scoring essay.
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Monday
May 19, 2008
Nancy Flanagan, a member of the Teacher Leaders Network, pointed me to this YouTube video by a North Carolina special ed teacher. Fed up with the contradiction between NCLB’s stated goal of all children meeting state standards by 2013 and the state’s norm-referenced (i.e. bell-curved) test, he decided to speak up.
As he expected, he was suspended and asked to resign. Nancy wonders,
[I]s this sweet, shambling guy in a T-shirt the person we want telling our story, explaining the paradoxes of teaching, testing and caring about kids? Doug doesn’t seem to be grandstanding, and this video is not what you’d call impressive rhetoric or razor-sharp analysis. Still, he seems like a regular guy, telling a common sense tale of frustration driving him to definitive action.
The video interests me less because of its connection to last month’s test-refusal stories than because it makes me speculate about the amazing potential of a highly democratic medium like YouTube as a forum for teacher activism. I’m sure it doesn’t all have to be the kind of activism that gets you fired.
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Sunday
May 18, 2008
[via This Week in Education]
Teach for America is experiencing an unprecedented surge in applications. About 24,700 seniors applied this year, up from 18,000 last year. Only 3,700 of them will be placed in classrooms.
What I wonder, is if this signifies any kind of increase in the number of college seniors who want to be teachers as opposed to the number of seniors who simply want to be in Teach for America.
I guess I’m not really wondering. TFA is prestigious. Teaching still is not.
A former TFA teacher, guest blogging on Eduwonk says,
Teach for America recruiting efforts are “surging” because TFA treats prospective corps members like professionals rather than missionaries. I’m not sure how attracting engaging, intelligent, and driven people to the career who might not otherwise consider it became a bad thing. Mastering the art of teaching is a career-long challenge. The first year corps member’s bigger immediate hurdle is reconciling TFA’s personal touch with the pervasive unprofessional treatment accorded most stakeholders in their school systems --- their faculty colleagues, their students’ parents, and, most of all, their kids.
Perhaps this disconnect is why the author left teaching to become a doctor.
Meanwhile, the author of the excellent teacher blog Teaching in the 408, a TFA alum, recently announced he is resigning. Check out his blog, and his tongue-in-cheek description of the imaginary new TFA recruit who will likely be replacing him.
Jake’s a smart guy, worked hard all four years on an interdisciplinary American Studies/ Sociology/ Econ degree he designed more or less himself. He can tell you a lot about the changing face of the American worker, and how film has reflected, driven, and (re)created our (mis)understandings of the American proletariat...Last summer, Jake did some volunteering at an outward bound program his girlfriend was all jazzed about...Let’s hope the smart-and-excited-trumps-experienced gamble pays off.
Another great teacher (well, actually principal) blog, Practical Theory, continues to explore why why fabulous, bright, committed teachers are still leaving in such great numbers.
[This was updated after original posting to add the Eduwonk post]
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Thursday
May 15, 2008
As the year draws to a close, some of you may be considering looking for new jobs for next fall. Perhaps you’re moving, perhaps you want to try a new grade level, perhaps your current school just isn’t a good fit.
Math teacher and blogger Dan Meyer is looking for a new job, and has put together his dream criteria. Here are a few from his really interesting list that particularly stood out to me:
Dan’s readers had a variety of comments and suggestions that are also worth reading, including:
TEN readers, what advice might you give to someone thinking of changing schools?
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Wednesday
May 14, 2008
This week’s Carnival of Education at Instructify features not one, but two posts from TEN: Elitism and Middle Ground on Learning Styles. A few other great posts from this week’s Carnival:
A Voice from the Middle presents a unique way to assess students: let them answer questions they pose themselves, and base the grade on both the importance of the question and the thoroughness of the answer.
A New York City student writes that he understands why it’s important to learn how to take tests...but that he would rather have test prep contained in a single required class, so that subject area teachers could go back to teaching real content.
Scholastic Scribe is lingoed out and wonders if it’s really true that “By Adding Value to the Concept of our Worthiness as Educators, we can Hit the Ground Running without putting all of our Eggs in One Basket.”
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Monday
May 12, 2008
Golden Apple Fellow Jane Artabasy has been doing a lot of thinking about the upcoming election. In recent weeks, she has been particularly upset at the use of “elitist” as a major criticism of Obama, and in this post, she argues that an elite president is exactly what we need.
Here’s a dose of the obvious: we need to get this next election right. With record numbers voting in the primaries, it appears our citizenry understands the immediacy of this moment and this choice. Teachers and former teachers are particularly well-equipped to help the process along.
Even as spin, distraction, dissimulation, and fear mongering grab center stage during the campaigns, we can hold candidates and media accountable by urging ideas of substance, creativity, and even nobility in the last months of what has been an exhausting, if exhilarating, electoral season.
Teachers are inherently a skeptical lot, not a natural base for the Kool-Aid culture of 21st century electioneering, with its cynical, smarmy manipulation of language. As a start, how about the most recent “word du jour:” elitism? Only an intellectually bankrupt political system would dare to twist such a perfectly good noun into a pejorative, a negative, a mortal stigma. Webster’s defines elite as “the choice or most carefully selected part of a group...” Sounds to me like the perfect baseline description of a president.
If Senator Obama is elite, or Senator Clinton, or Senator McCain, shouldn’t that be a very good thing, or at least cause for celebration? Don’t we dearly need an Oval Office resident who’s a whole lot smarter than most of us? Someone incredibly educated, with a nuanced global awareness and the wisdom to bring a strategically beneficent vision to the complex diplomatic demands of our age? In the context of our anguished times, an elite might be a breath of fresh air. An elite someone in the Oval Office might be the only hope we’ve got left.
There is a larger point here unrelated to the election, as well. Last month, I linked to a post by a teacher of gifted students critiquing the culture of education schools:
In short, there is a relentless tide of mediocrity in schools of education, one that’s nearly impossible to swim through...You learn to be mediocre. You learn that not to be mediocre — to strive for scholarship, to insist on a level of academic rigor — is...viewed as useless or pretentious.
Does our profession truly suffer from a commitment to mediocrity? Are teachers frightened of being labeled “elitist”?
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Saturday
May 10, 2008
Recently, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright made a speech in which he suggested that black and white students inherently learn differently. NPR’s Tell Me More explored that statement with two education professors, Pedro Noguera and Janice Hale.
The conversation goes back and forth, with Hale defending Wright’s statements with her own research on the learning styles of African-American children, while Noguera worries that this kind of race-based reductionism will lend credence to claims that black (and Latino) students are inferior to white students.
Noguera’s point is that it is very easy to twist evidence saying that kids of different races learn differently into a terrible argument that kids of different races are inherently inferior.
Hale’s point is that in being so afraid of this twisted use of the information, we are doing a disservice to black children, who could benefit if only teachers were prepared to teach them where they are.
In the end, the argument I found most compelling was Noguera’s reminder that:
There is a great deal of diversity within groups. Not all black children learn the same way, not all white children learn the same way. There are a lot of individual differences. We also know that most children learn better when there’s active learning.
It reminds me of the ongoing debates over Ruby Payne’s work on teaching children in poverty and over Leonard Sax’s insistence that boys and girls learn differently.
In all three of these very similar debates, I always find myself wishing that someone was synthesizing the positions into a carefully reasoned middle ground. Because while I lean toward agreeing with Noguera, Hale had some interesting and important points. And while the works of Ruby Payne and Leonard Sax strike me as dangerously reductionist when considered in isolation, I also find elements of truth in the things they say.
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Thursday
May 08, 2008
[via District 299 and the Associated Press]
A new study by Education Sector continues to break down the image that teachers are opposed to evaluation, interested in protecting bad teachers, and disinterested in professional development.
Some findings:
Only 26 percent of teachers say that their most recent formal evaluation was useful and effective in helping them to improve their teaching. Seventy-nine percent support strengthening the formal evaluation of probationary teachers. And nearly a third of teachers (32 percent) say that tenured teachers should be evaluated on an annual basis.
And…
Teachers say they would support the union taking an active union role in improving teacher evaluation, supporting and mentoring teachers, guiding ineffective teachers out of the profession, and negotiating new/differentiated roles/responsibilities for teachers.
Download the full study here. [pdf]
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This week’s Carnival of Education links to a continuation of the conversation from last week about Carl Chew, the Washington State teacher who refused to administer his state’s standardized tests. This week, Larry Ferlazzo puts Chew’s actions in the larger context of civil disobedience:
I think performing civil disobedience outside of the context of a strategic campaign is indeed often, to use the words in Bill’s post, “arrogant” and “egocentric.” At the risk of sounding too harsh, I think it’s much easier to refuse to give a standardized test then to do the day-to-day and face-to-face organizing of listening and agitating people to develop an effective campaign for more accurate and just student assessments.
Also mentioned, this series in the Columbus Education Association Blog (which featured TEN in its Carnival a few weeks back), examining the legacy of the Nation At Risk report.
The CEA Blog has been fortunate enough to acquire a slightly used Flux Capacitor and retrofit a union-made car for the trip of a lifetime. We asked a number of edu-bloggers the question “What would the American educational landscape be like today if A Nation At Risk were never released?” and loaned them the time machine.
Three have already appeared, all are fascinating. (Eduwonkette’s, Leo Casey’s, and Ed Muir’s.)
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Sunday
May 04, 2008
In this guest blog post, Greg Michie, a Golden Apple Fellow, invites us to consider our role as educators in the national debate on immigration.
During my years teaching 7th and 8th graders in the Back of the Yards neighborhood on Chicago’s south side, I avoided decorating my classroom with motivational posters.
“Success is 99% hard work.”
“Education is the key to every door.”
“When I let myself dream, anything is possible.”
Common as such platitudes are on school walls, I figured they’d ring hollow to my students’ ears. Many of the kids I taught had seen poverty and hardship up close. They knew the world was more complicated than feel-good slogans could convey.
Still, I did my best to make my classroom a place of hope. I tried to help my students see college as a real possibility down the road. And I tried to impress upon them that, clichéd or not, working hard and doing well academically would give them more options after high school.
Turns out that I lied.
You see, most of my former students are from Mexican immigrant families, and some—more than I realized at the time—are undocumented. So even if they remain focused, stay out of trouble, study, and graduate from high school with exceptional grades, going to college is still a long shot at best. For many, it’s simply not possible.
That’s because current U.S. law dictates that the estimated 65,000 undocumented students who graduate from U.S. high schools each year are not eligible for federal work study programs or loans to help fund their collegiate studies. Their immigration status also precludes them from receiving many private scholarships, and they cannot work legally to support themselves through school.
But legislation known as the DREAM Act would change that. The DREAM Act would allow undocumented students who entered the U.S. before the age of 16, have lived here for at least 5 years, and demonstrate “good moral character” to become legal residents on a conditional basis when they are accepted to a 2- or 4-year college or university. The conditional status would allow students to get work study jobs, receive federal loans (but not Pell grants), and seek legal employment. In short, it would make college a real possibility.
Unfortunately, the DREAM Act failed again last year to become law, a casualty of the contentious broader debate over comprehensive immigration reform. But the struggle for its passage continues, and teachers and educators should be a major voice in the conversation.
Write your senators and representatives. Educate your colleagues. Let them know that we need to take action to support undocumented youth who’ve been in this country much of their lives doing the right things.
These are kids who have worked hard. They’ve grabbed hold of their educations. And despite evidence around them that sometimes mocks their devotion, they’ve continued to believe in the promise of America.
Question is, how much do we believe in them?
Our answer will speak volumes about whether the dreams we propagate in schools are the stuff of reality for undocumented students, or simply fodder for a poster on a classroom wall.
Gregory Michie teaches in the College of Education at Illinois State University. He is co-editor of City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row, to be published this summer by The New Press. He is also the author of Holler if You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students and the co-author of See You When We Get There: Teaching for Change in Urban Schools.
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Thursday
May 01, 2008
This week’s Carnival of Education links to a great set of writing about education all over the web (including a post right here on TEN!)
Most interesting to me this week was Bill Ferriter’s take on Carl Chew, the Washington State teacher who refused to administer his state’s standardized tests.
I think that refusing to give the state test is a pretty arrogant and egocentric thing to do...To willfully ignore the methods selected by elected officials essentially says that we don’t respect the values of the communities that we serve.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of testing at all...In many ways, testing has destroyed what I do in my classroom each year, changed the dynamic of teaching and learning completely, and has done far more damage that it has done good.
But it is a system selected and believed in by the people who pay my check. And (in theory) it’s based on the values and beliefs of a group of people that go far beyond me. For those reasons, I choose to honor and respect the system even though I don’t totally believe in it.
He follows up with another post here.
Other Carnival entries to check out:
Larry Ferlazzo’s further tips on classroom management. (A follow-up to what I posted here).
TweenTeacher suggests that building confidence is an essential test prep strategy.
Learners Inherit the Earth criticizes an alt-cert teaching fellow program for perpetuating an us vs. them dynamic between fellows and veteran teachers at their school.
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An interesting debate on the role of social justice in teaching pits Bill Ayers against Sol Stern on Eduwonkette.
Bill:
So a brief word on schools and social justice: all schools serve the societies in which they’re embedded—authoritarian schools serve authoritarian systems, apartheid schools serve an apartheid society, and so on. Practically all schools want their students to study hard, stay away from drugs, do their homework, and so on. In fact none of these features distinguishes schools in the old Soviet Union or fascist Germany from schools in a democracy. But in a democracy one would expect something more—a commitment to free inquiry, questioning, and participation; a push for access and equity; a curriculum that encouraged free thought and independent judgment; a standard of full recognition of the humanity of each individual. In other words, social justice.
Sol:
We need a professional code of ethics for teachers, a Hippocratic Oath if you will, that makes clear that our public school classrooms are not laboratories for social and political change, with the kids serving as guinea pigs. Perhaps Stanley Fish put it best: “Teachers should teach their subjects. They should not teach peace or war or freedom or obedience or diversity or uniformity or nationalism or antinationalism or any other agenda that might properly be taught by a political leader or a talk show host.”
I recently posted a call for teachers to make a greater commitment to working for social justice. Slightly different from teaching for social justice, but still related. As a teacher, how do you make your decisions about doing both/either/neither?
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