Crafting Professional Autonomy for Teachers

For the four years I’ve been teaching, I have been a member of the Virginia Education Association, but I haven’t taken an active role despite my desire for leadership positions. I don’t see the VEA as a group of leaders, and I’m not sure that many outside of the organization do either. And why should they? Unlike doctors or lawyers, boards of teachers do not administer their own licensing exams or set professional expectations for their peers.

I think that sometimes teachers live down to the low expectations society seems to have of our profession. I have been irritated by the co-workers who leave right when four o’clock rolls around, but I also recognize that teachers cannot get very much of the personal business of living done during the day. It’s difficult to schedule doctor’s appointments, run an errand at a shop that closes at five, or pick up a sick kid without disrupting the instructional lives of at least twenty-five other people. Juggling these responsibilities are difficult for any working person, but having worked in and out of the classroom, I think that teachers have it worse than most other college-educated professionals who can work from home when they’re sick or take their lunch breaks at times that suits their doctors.

Can we expect leadership from an organization of people who lack professional autonomy? I think the answer is on display in teachers’ organizations' and unions' lack of leadership when it comes to assessments, accountability, and teacher training. In a logical world, these organizations would exist to define and administer these things just as organizations of doctors and lawyers set and advocate for best practices in their own professions. I think it is up to educational leaders to give teachers the power to oversee these domains. Expecting teachers’ organizations to lobby for this power, when teachers have been shut out of gaining power for so long, seems like setting these organizations up to fail.

I think that if groups of supervisors and legislators said “We trust teachers to make professional decisions for themselves,” these organizations would be empowered to create meaningful systems of training, induction, and accountability. We can’t expect the people who have been vilified as “rotten apples” (Time magazine) or “widgets” (Michelle Rhee). It’s up to educational leaders to give teachers their power back.  Until then, I will be looking for professional autonomy wherever I can get it. So, when another professional development day comes around, and it’s the same tired sessions centered around using Google and understanding how stress affects children, I’ll be in my classroom calling parents, crafting lessons, and doing what I think is right for the students in my care.

Is Bad Coffee the Problem with PD?

In class, we were challenged to think about experiences that have made us successful teachers after watching this TEDx talk. I suppose that for this exercise, I will have to suspend my questions about whether or not I am a good teacher, and assume that I am. This may be a topic for another journal entry, but shouldn’t it be clear to someone who has had essentially the same job for half a decade whether or not she is good at that job? I just can’t be sure. I’m not even sure what “good” at this job means right now. Does it mean that my students enjoy my class more often than not? That they pass state-mandated tests? That they come back to visit after they’ve graduated? Most days, the answer to these questions is yes, but there are days when the answer is just as resoundingly no.

On the days when I think my practice answer the questions that matter with a yes, I am usually leaning on two of my most treasured supports: classes and reading about teaching. For the past year, I have been a member of the Central Virginia Writers’ Project. This process-based writing institute has made me think about how to incorporate skills-based instruction in a writers’ workshop format. I have had the support of classmates and other teacher researchers first in a summer class and then in a weekly group meeting. I’ve taken other classes on the art of questioning student, cognitive science in the classroom, and executive functioning. All of them have left me feeling energized and in possession of new tricks for my teaching bag.

I also feel like a successful teacher on the days I borrow lessons from books I have read and loved. Linda Christensen’s work on teaching social justice in the English classroom contains assignment after assignment designed to get kids writing about what matters to them and their communities. Her assignments have resulted in improved student affect and writing growth.

My reading-teaching connection spills over into reading research that has implications for the classroom, too. I find myself able to breathe easier and speak with more patience after reading about studies suggesting that babies living in poverty are subject to so much cortisol flooding their brains that they develop differently. This research doesn’t make me want to hold my students to different, lower standards, but it does help activate my compassion.

I am not ready to make policy prescriptions out of what has helped me grow or be successful as a teacher. Maybe I’m too much of a control freak to imagine professional development that is completely teacher-driven. Maybe I’m too informed by my experiences of playing hooky from PD sessions in order to work in my classroom. Whatever the reasoning, I don’t know if having teachers select individual readings or classes at larger institutions is the answer to developing our teaching corps.

I do think that we could have professional development that was more tailored to specific contexts. For example, I’d appreciate a day once a month to create collaborative lessons with the other tenth grade English teachers. I would also appreciate a session with an outside speaker provided that speaker was brought in at the request of teachers or in relation to a specific, building-level problem. The bad coffee isn’t really the problem; feeling like time I could have spent in service to my students was wasted is. So, maybe the question for those designing group professional development is this: Will participants feel their time has been wasted? An honest assessment could provide teachers with time to work uninterrupted balanced with group learning that supports building-wide goals. Unfortunately, in my division, I get the feeling that we’re just adding sessions to the catalogue for the sake of numbers rather than meaning. I’d like to resolve to not be that kind of administrator. 

Standards and Evaluation

I’m thinking a lot about some teachers who struggle how to teach persuasive writing. These teachers, who teach primarily low-achieving students, are locked into teaching the five-paragraph essay. As a quick refresher, that’s the basic introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Recently, the Virginia Standards of Learning have required a counterclaim, so that gets thrown into the conclusion in this formula.

My graduate school training and my professional development through the National Council of Teachers of English and the National Writing Project have taught me to reject the five-paragraph essay as simplistic and unhelpful in creating students who are prepared to write in multiple contexts such as work or at college. These teachers argue that the students who need this formula are not going into careers that require writing or to college at all.

How can they know that? My own mother didn’t finish college until she was forty. She earned her masters in social work six years later. I so strongly believe that our job isn’t to decide what students will do after they leave our classrooms. Our job is to give the tools to succeed in as many contexts as possible.

What does this have to do with teacher evaluation? Well, I’ve been thinking of how I might, as a building-level leader, encourage teachers to engage in the sort of professional development and research that guides innovative teaching practice. First of all, I think that I need to take my attitude about standardized tests to any sort of building-level leadership role I may have; They’re here, but we don’t have to like them. We definitely don’t have to teach to them, and if we’re teaching students truly transferable skills, they’ll likely do better on the test than if we merely drill into them test-taking skills.  

But that will only get me so far with teachers (and the superintendent). And it won’t do much to support my own belief in consensus building if I’m operating by fiat from the front office. So, I need to think about building systems to help teachers engage with work about our profession. I think that teacher evaluation portfolios, as recommended by Glickman, would be just the thing! If teachers are able to evaluate themselves on research-based practices and innovation through professional development provided by content councils, teachers are more likely to be able to give themselves permission to ditch the test-taking anxiety and teach kids rather than standards.

Collegial Leaders

In my introduction to supervision class, we learned about a leadership continuum within schools: directive, collaborative, and collegial. Directive leaders give orders and except them to be followed. Collaborative leaders work with others to arrive at decisions. Collegial leaders take that collaboration a step further and empower others in the building to make and act on decisions. 

My Frierian roots and recent research (Glickman, 2002) have led me to believe that collegial leadership should be the goal. More stakeholders should be brought into decision making process so that those decisions are carried out with fidelity. However, I think I have assumed that a collegial school requires a principal who thinks and acts collegial at all times. After more discussion in class, however,  I am not sure that this assumption will bear out once I get down to the hard work of leading a school.

I was really moved by Dr. Z’s story of the algebra teacher who said what she really needed was a lesson plan so she could just go home. I’m not sure what I would do in that situation. In the course of this class, I’ve really owned what it means to me to operate as a big picture thinker. I’ve been able to be more gentle with myself as I struggle with administrative tasks at school because I can see the absurdity of being asked to support the social and emotional development of 124 teenagers. By thinking about the big picture, I am able to celebrate my victories rather than beat myself up for not being able to do all of the work I want to do in a deeply flawed system, and I’m able to prioritize tasks based on what will have the most long-term positive effects for my students.

So, I think it might be hard for me to get down into the weeds. Not only have I never taught math, I just don’t know if I’m ready to respond to a teacher in the scenario above with just a lesson. I want to discuss what in her day-to-day work is causing this feeling of being overwhelmed. What can be juggled more efficiently? What can be discarded in favor of mental health and excellent first instruction?

Rather than thinking of my administrative style existing on a continuum between directive and collegial action, I want to start thinking about a particular approach for a particular moment.

I also want to commemorate this chart we worked on in class tonight to remember that it’s about the right style for the situation rather than forcing a situation to fit my preferred style.

	Direction	Collaboration	Facilitation
Purpose	Skill building	Partnership building	Capacity building
Leader’s Role	Direction Corrective feedback A model Solutions to problems	Ideas, resources Input Influence Ideas/options for decision making	Safe place to self-evaluate Data for teacher decision making Focus that moves the teacher along a growth curve
Teacher’s Role	Follow directions Implement strategies with quality	Participate as a partner Follow through on negotiated decisions	Drive the process Follow through on personal commitments
Evaluator			Coach
Supervisor			Administrator

Long Time, No Teach

Hello, readers! As I've settled into a program at UVA to earn my administration and supervision certificate, I've really let this blog go. I know I have just a handful of readers, but I also know that it has been an important outlet for me to "de-privatize" my teaching experiences. I'd like to get back to that, but I also have to balance the work I'm doing to support my students' learning along with my own. So, I'm going to share a few journals I worked on for my introduction to supervision class I took last semester.

I have a lot of ideas I want to share with you all about teacher evaluations, classroom organization, and some really successful lesson plans you might be able to use, too. Be patient with me, and I'll be back to blogging just as much as I can!

This I Believe

For the past several months, I've been lucky to be part of the Central Virginia Writers' Project. At our two-week seminar this summer, we were asked to write our own versions of a "This I Believe" essay. Not only did this assignment give me a chance to distill some of my own beliefs about why what I do in the classroom matters, my eleventh grade team had already decided to use this prompt as our beginning essay assignment. So, I had a ready-made piece to share with my students as I asked them to share their own beliefs, and here it is for you all:




I believe we have messed up just about everything we can when it comes to public education in the United States. We expect students to learn without showing them what great magic learning can work in their own lives and the lives of others. We expect students to learn for the sake of the economy and not for the sake of themselves, and then we berate them for being so selfish as to skip class or not do their homework.


There is still some magic in elementary school. A dear friend of mine recently inspired her students to design and build their own butterfly garden when they can research, write, and sit in awe of creatures they’ve helped to save.


But the magic is seeping out of the walls of our secondary schools. Students are expected to sit still for forty-five minutes, take notes in the preferred method du jour, dutifully pass tests, and move on to the next subject when the bell rings. If they are lucky, they might get two bathroom passes a semester and a few teachers who have decided not to ride the wave of standardized test hysteria.


I believe that if we trust teachers to design project-based assessments, we will have a picture of where our students are succeeding and where they need more help. I believe if we paid teachers a wage commensurate to the many hours we work above our contracts, we wouldn’t have a shortage of bright, dedicated professionals who are respected by students, their parents, and their communities. I believe if teachers had smaller caseloads, students would receive more meaningful instruction. I believe if we created a ladder for teachers to grow professionally without leaving the classroom, we would see fewer than half of all teachers leave in their first five years of teaching.


I believe if we increased the minimum wage, we would increase student learning. I believe if showed students learning to read and read well means they could visit the moon or the ocean or the next Odyssey of the Mind field trip, we would have millions more finish college. I believe if we put students in small groups according to their interests and not any perceived ability level and turned them loose on a project, they’d learn more than they ever would in any Advanced Placement or college prep class.
I believe in the promise of public education to incorporate us all to a cause higher than ourselves. I believe our schools can be places where students delve deep into a topic and come out better learners, citizens, and people, for the experience.

Beating Burnout - Part Three

Have you ever heard of the April Sours? I hadn’t until this year when I got them big time. A blog post I shared then helped me shake them off and realize there are a lot of manageable things I can do to make my classroom and place of joy where meaningful learning takes place. These are some of my plans:

1. Move to a room with windows. - For some reason, schools built in the 70’s tend to be big on the interior classrooms without windows. For the first time in my teaching career, I’m going to be able to see natural light all day every day! I know this sort of dramatic shift isn’t possible for everyone, but shaking up your space might help you get new perspective.

2. Read, Read, Read - This summer I revisited a lot of my teaching bibles to remind myself of the skills I want to my students to acquire. Planning oral history projects with a social justice component have gotten me excited for the work we’ll be doing. I’ve also revisited some texts such as Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities to remind myself of why teaching matters.

3. Accept That School Can Be Fun - In our work-obsessed culture, we are often content to ask why something should be fun. Learning is work, after all. But it doesn’t have to take place in a drab environment designed to suck the creativity out of every human in the room. I’m doing a serious makeover of my new digs: comfy couches for reading, tables for collaborative learning, and a class pet. I’m watching a friend’s bunny while she returns to graduate school and my students are going to help. 

Teacher friends, what are you doing to make this year your best yet? Non-teacher friends, what do you value about your work? How do you make your workspace a space where you’re happy?

Burnout and Back Again - Part Two

Since I started graduate school, I’d never considered a career outside of education. I’ve been interested in jobs outside of the classroom. Moving into administration provides the only meaningful promotion in schools. Policy work has a sexiness about it while also providing an avenue to have more of a voice in the educational policies that I think make a difference in students’ lives but can’t implement within my classroom. But I never considered that I’d leave education.

Last year, however, I found myself thinking about leaving.  I wondered a lot about other kinds of jobs I could have to attack poverty in our country. I wondered a lot about the kinds of jobs I could have where I went home at the end of the day and that was it -- maybe a few e-mails here and there but not a stack of grading.   

I never applied anywhere, but I did talk. A lot. I had coffee with my professors from grad school; I talked to other teachers to find out what they’d done to overcome similar slumps. A meeting with my awesome principal helped things click.

I confessed to her that I was burnt out. You are? She replied in a tone of voice she might use if she were mildly surprised to learn I was getting over a cold or reading an okay book. I felt like I’d made this big confession: I’m not happy teaching and that’s a problem because I have always been happy teaching. Her response really helped me chill out. And once I did, she reminded me of just how many health issues I experienced in the last year.  

I doubt that my principal was the first person to remind me that this school year was full of bike accidents, shingles, and a bunch of other things I’d rather not list on my blog. But at that moment, my thick skull finally got it: my life outside of the classroom matters more than I have ever realized. I’ve spent these last three years riding the teaching high of the first magical moments in the classroom and figuring out how to recapture them. I’ve picked up every yoga class I could, tried to organize my time efficiently, read all the articles on life-work balance. But I’ve had it all backwards. I’ve been treating my work life and my home life and my friend life as separate entities. In reality, they’re all facets of my life life.

My readers are pretty smart, so you all probably figured this out before I did. Thanks for sticking with me to this point. I know I’ve rambled a lot, but it seemed important to me to tell this story: how I went from loving teaching from the very first day to pushing myself through the day. I started blogging about teaching to show what really happens in our classrooms. To show my work. And this year, my work was to get through the day and figure out how to have better ones for my students.

Burnout Series - Part One

Last year was been tough for me. I got engaged and then married. I had an amazing group of talented and creative students. I began work with an innovative and invested administrative team. But I sure did struggle.

During the worst times, I felt like I was checked out of school. I was doing the bare minimum to take care of my students and finding very little joy in my work. I’d spend my lunch period browsing blogs on line rather than doing the things that used to make me feel invigorated such as reading up on education research or taking a walk outside to clear my head and get ready for the next class.

From almost the very beginning of the year, my grading load felt next to impossible. Figuring out ways to mitigate that really helped me, and I started feeling better. But the joy I’d had in my first two years of teaching dissipated, and I didn’t know how to get it back. I used to come home every evening from school exhausted and impassioned and with a “teacher high” from the sense of wonder I felt at being a part of students growing and learning every day.

In addition to my joy, I also lost a lot of my anger at watching really bad reform policies. I couldn’t muster the same sort of logic and statistical analysis when I saw another cheap, easy, and poorly-designed standardized test coming down the pike. As you all probably noticed, I stopped blogging about ways to craft meaningful and rigorous assessment.

No one event or student or situation drove me to this malaise. My students were just as wonderful. Our administration was really supporting innovative ideas. I was just going through something that happens too many teachers: burnout.

This isn’t meant to be a sob story. I’ll give away the ending here: I got better and some specific things helped. In the next few days, I want to share what worked for me and find out what’s worked (or not) for those of you who teach or have ever been able to work through burnout at a stressful and demanding job. I think teachers don’t talk enough about what’s happening in our classrooms -- the good and the bad. And the whole point of this blog is to change the conversation around teaching.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Happy back-to-school time, everyone! The teachers in my division have been hammering away at new bulletin boards, exciting lesson plans, and team building activities since last Monday. I've really enjoyed my time with my colleagues and was especially impressed with how our division handled back-to-school professional development (more about that in another blog post).

Usually on this blog, I post a summer reading list of books I want to read that summer and hope we'll all read together. I usually cross off two or three of them and then move on. So, this year, I didn't even do that. I knew I'd have to read at least one book for our school's summer reading program and one for the class I took in July. Otherwise, I just let books good books happen to me.

Our school did away with required summer reading where a student writes an essay when we're all back at school a few years ago. I never had to do that in high school, but I understand it was a common practice. We've struggled with wanting to encourage kids to read over the summer but not wanting to squelch any burgeoning love of reading under the heavy stacks of "have to" reading. 

The school's new librarian came up with a couple of ingenious plans. First, she set up student-teacher book clubs. Teachers could select from books we thought kids would enjoy and she facilitated students signing up with a funny video and class visits. We then had two book club meetings in the community over the summer. At one of them, another kid we knew, who had also read the book, stopped by and talked with us, too. Our group read Into the Wild and it spurred a lot of interesting discussions about what it means to be adventurous versus stupid and cruel to your parents. I haven't heard how other book clubs fared. On Friday, we have our last meeting where we'll eat pizza, watch the movie, and talk about the differences in portraying a story across different media.

I also read two great teaching books this summer I want to tell you about. For the Central Virginia Writing Project, I read Penny Kittle's Write Beside Them. This book really helped me refine our writing workshop in my class and create a more structured peer conferencing program. It's definitely an English teacher book. I also re-read Teaching for Joy and Justice which just got me excited as I reminded myself why I got into teaching in the first place: to help students find their voices and project them in healthy ways. I underlined just about every activity in this book. The book's author co-teaches a history/language arts class with her husband, so she's got some great ideas for teachers in other disciplines.

One of my good friends loaned me her copy of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith of One Hundred and One Dalmatians fame. You know those books that you're sort of angry when you're done because you loved it so much and now it's over? This book made me that kind of angry. C also devoured it and he hasn't read any fiction since the last Game of Thrones book came out.

Brigid Shulte's Overwhelmed helped me think about how I buy into the ideal worker culture that privileges face time in the office over meaningful work that we finish before going home to our families. Two of my new academic year resolutions are to stop trying to multi-task and to let go of trying to feel on top of my work. Teaching, by its very nature, is never done. There are always newer bulletin boards to put up, better ways to arrange desks to facilitate student learning, a cool update to make to the class website. I want to do these things. But I don't want to do only these things. I want to write and practice yoga and spend some time camping. I've never been one of those teachers who can leave things at school on Friday and pick up where I left off on Monday. I don't think I ever will be, but this year I'm going to take one weekend day off from work and try to be more efficient the other six days of the week. I'll let you know how it goes.

Education Improvement Myths that Need to Die

Do you read Edutopia? I love that George Luca's educational foundation looks for evidence-based interventions and works hard to spread those ideas around. A couple of weeks ago, Mark Phillips published a review of 50 Myths that Threaten America's Public Schools. Phillips highlighted the eight myths that he thinks are most damaging, but he didn't link to the relevant research.

I hope every policy reads the book, but for those of you with a little less time to devote to ed policy reading, I thought I'd share some of the compelling work out there that shows maybe we're not focusing on the interventions that will help the most disadvantaged students.

Myth #1 - Teachers are the most important factor in student learning. Socioeconomic status and parents' education level actually play much bigger roles in student learning.

Myth #2 - Homework boosts student achievement. Research on homework actually tends to be pretty mixed. This coming year, I'm going to try to give students homework designed to help them develop a personal reading practice. I'm interested to see how that goes.

Myth #3 - Class size does not matter. This myth really gets me as I've seen my caseload increase year after year. This increase diminishes my ability to differentiate, and class size could also have an effect on students' wage potential.

Myth #4 - A successful program works everywhere. I think we've seen this not work in nearly every charter model that has yet to be brought to scale. Humans are a difficult variable to control.

Myth #5 - Zero tolerance policies are making schools safer. Researchers have been finding for a long time that automatic suspensions or expulsions don't do much to make schools safer. They also do plenty to increase socioeconomic and racial achievement gaps.

Myth #6 - Money doesn't matter. This did get linked in the Edutopia piece and you should watch it. And read pretty much everything by Linda Darling-Hammond you can find.

Myth #7 - College admissions are meritocratic. Inside Higher Ed found differently when they surveyed college admissions directors in 2011.

Myth #8 - Merit pay for teachers works. Research in both Tennessee and New York City suggests paying teachers to improve students' test taking skills rather than focus on authentic learning have done little to improve either.

Of course, a lot of these studies are based on what a mentor teacher of mine calls the "McDonald's of testing" -- standardized tests that are cheap, quick, and not healthy at all. I'm still trying to figure out how we can get divisions and states to adopt learning measures that are more useful and statistically less noisy. But that's a post for another day.

The Best Three Reasons to Be a Teacher?

I recently heard the phrase "There are three good reasons to be a teacher: June, July, and August." I've heard the sentiment, if not the exact words, before, and I still get just as angry.

Most school divisions around here will end in mid- to late June with teachers reporting back in early August. So, I guess that just leaves us with July.

Some teachers quantify their "earned" summer vacation by pointing out that we work an average of fifty-three hours of week. If you're contracted for thirty-five hours as many teachers are, that's 576 hours we're working past our contracts a year. Those hours equal over eighty-two additional teaching days.

But I think we're not acknowledging something important when we talk about teachers' summer vacations.  I think of a vacation as something I can take or do while still getting paid. As a teacher, however, during summer break, I've essentially been laid off and have chosen to split my paychecks from the academic year up into small enough chunks that I can continue to eat and pay my student loans.

What's the answer to this problem of de-professionalization? Year-round schools (and if that's the case, when do we have the chance to recharge, plan, and attend classes)? Contracts that reflect the time most teachers put into their classrooms? Summer work relating to policy and curriculum?

I haven't found the answer yet, but I know that I'm a teacher no matter the season. 

Why We Don't Need Teacher Appreciation Week

While the PTO breakfast, the Facebook posts, and the e-mails lauding teachers are sincere and heartfelt this week, they all ring a little hollow as I look at my stressed-out students and our overworked school psychologist who bounces between three buildings trying to meet the mental health needs of over 1400 students -- needs that must be met if kids are to thrive in the classroom.

For fifty-one weeks a year, I hear a lot about how teachers are the problem, the school I spent tens of thousands of dollars to go to is garbage (for the record, I felt well-prepared by my program), and tests designed by people who have never worked in the classroom are the best way to monitor student progress and teacher quality. 

We don't need Teacher Appreciation Day. We don't need Teacher Appreciation Week. If we valued the teaching profession the way our kids and country need us to, people would be aware and appreciative of the teachers working to build knowledge and our economy throughout the year.

Here's my teacher appreciation wish list:

• some type of entrance exam into education school designed by practicing classroom teachers
• a rigorous two-year course of study that includes one thousand hours in the classroom and also courses in classroom organization to help teachers develop the systems necessary for a smoothly-running classroom
• a wage commiserate with the value we add to the economy 
• a national teacher licensing exam, also designed by practicing teachers, that includes plenty of emphasis on using understandings of cognitive development in the classroom
• smaller caseloads so teachers can make meaningful impacts in kids' lives by building relationships
• a decreased emphasis on statistically noisy, poorly-designed standardized tests and an increased emphasis on project-based learning designed and evaluated by master teachers
• room to grow professionally without permanently leaving the classroom. 

I have a lot of other wishes for making meaningful changes to public education. In fact, I keep a running list. But during this teacher appreciation week, I think the list above wouldn't be a bad start. 

The Wal-Marting of US Public Schools

Friday's New York Times had an article detailing the amount of money the Walton Family Foundation has given to charter schools in the last decade or so.  The Waltons inherited their money from Sam Walton who started Wal-Mart -- the store that actively seeks to sell you as much cheap junk from China as possible.

I have to admit that I felt my educator's heart sinking as I read the story. I'm not anti-charter. I hope to lead my own school one day, and I applaud American Federation of Teachers Presidnet Albert Shanker's idea of essentially creating a research and development arm of typical public schools. These teacher-led schools would be an environment to try new and innovative approaches to education with a population that was invested enough in school to leave the typical neighborhood school. Teachers at the charter could take what they learned about their interventions back to their colleagues at the neighborhood school and work together to make sure that all public schools in the US supported all students.


Thanks to the foundation run by the family behind Wal-Mart, however, charter schools have lost their original mission. They've become billed as band-aids to our current education "crisis" and replacements for the neighborhood schools that are painted as failing by virtue of test scores that were never designed to measure what we're using them to measure. They also fail to educate students in need of special education skills and one large charter chain recently sought to oust students with high needs from their home school.

The parents in the story seemed caught in between wanting to support their local schools and believing that the local schools couldn't provide what charter schools can -- including better libraries and technology.

But I'm not a parent yet; I'm just a teacher who sees kids labor in a system that works for them sometimes and doesn't work for them others. I think our public schools could use some visioning and some investment in that vision. We'll get nowhere, however, in creating public schools that educate every child in the US to the highest possible expectation if we let the same people who brought us Wal-Mart bring us the next generation of public schools.

Getting to the "Main Event"

Over the weekend, my mentor teacher from my first teaching job posted a link to this blog post. The teacher implores students to realize that the content learned in school is not the "main event." The teacher argues that the social and emotional learning that goes into getting up, getting to class, engaging with the material and others, and getting the work done is the main event of school.

I think I've always believed that. I nodded emphatically in graduate school when we were told we were going out into the world to teach students not content. I've embraced one-on-one conversations with students about how to change their attitude and believe in their ability to meet adversity with grace (instead of the oft used alternatives of yelling or shutting down).

But I'm not sure I've communicated to my students outside of our weekly community meetings why school's main events are about so much more than grades and sitting quietly for forty-five minute stretches. I'm going to share this blog post with them and discuss what it means to not quit and what support they need not to just make it through these last few weeks of school but to thrive in them. I'll report back on what I hear.

One of my teacher friends with whom I shared this link said she planned to edit out the "grow a pair" statement not for it's "colorful" aspect but because she doesn't want students to see success as gendered. I think Ms. C is spot on, and I'll be doing the same.

Education Reading for the Weekend

At the beginning of the year, a student told me that he didn't believe that our public schools are more segregated than they were in the years following Brown. This in-depth article in The Atlantic proves it's true. I wish they'd focus more on the ways in which de facto segregation have affected students in other parts of the country rather than assuming we have a regional problem, but it's an important read nonetheless.

I missed this important debate in the New York Times about parents opting their kids out of testing. I look forward to thinking about the implications of those choices. 

The American Statistical Association came out against the value-added method of evaluating teachers based on their students' test scores on the grounds that the data provided by standardized tests doesn't actually measure teachers' contributions to student learning.

Finally, I got to guest blog at the Curry Blog last week. Thanks, Curry folks!

Have a great weekend! Try not to grade too many papers.

What's the Right Level of Parental Involvement?

In this week's Sunday New York Times, Professor Keith Robinson and Professor Angel Harris examined ways in which parental involvement had the greatest impact on student achievement. Their work defined student achievement as standardized test scores and grades. While I think that our students and policy makers both need a more nuanced understanding of achievement. I haven't figured out exactly how to quantify it (but that's a subject for another post entirely), and there is still much to learn from the data we do have.

Harris and Robinson found that "observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it." The pairs research also suggests that parents had similar levels of involvement regardless of race which can hopefully lay to rest the old canard that some racial groups care more about eduction than others.

So, how should schools engage parents in ways that will help students become successful? Students from all backgrounds often seem to struggle with seeing their thirteen years of public education as a gift and investment in their futures. Parents can provide wisdom and help students develop positive feelings toward school. Parents can also model respect for teachers and their wisdom as professionals who sometimes see sides of kids not on display at home.

Teachers, what are some of the most meaningful parent interactions you've had? Parents, what do you need from schools to be able to support your children? Do you think we'll ever be able to bridge the divide between home and school?

Costa Rica: Day 7 & 8

Hola, familias! Sorry for the radio silence. Our Wi-Fi connections haven't been as seamless as we assumed they would be. But, we have had a great couple of days to share!

Yesterday, we headed to the beach at Manuel Antonio National Park. 

We made some new friends. 

And ended the day with an amazing sunset. 

Today we set out for San Jose, but first stopped for a nature walk at another national park. 

The guys are standing in front of BIG roots. 

Can you spot the monkeys? 

After a few stops for lunch and shopping, we made it back to our original hotel in San Jose. We've seen some spectacular aspects of Costa Rican flora and fauna, met cool folks, and played a lot of cards. But we all agreed this afternoon that we're ready to be home. See you tomorrow!

Costa Rica: Days 5 & 6

Hola! I'm sorry we didn't get the chance to update y'all yesterday. We have some fun zipline pictures to share, but they're on another device. Look for them soon! 

Today we left Monteverde and headed for the Pacific. On the way we stopped for a crocodile tour. 

We motored down the Tàrcoles river. 

And our crew was ready to see some crocs. 

At first we saw mostly birds -- over thirty-one types. These are some snowy egrets or las garza nibosas in Spanish. 

We eventually found a few crocs, and Captain Santiago fed them some chicken. 

When we stepped off the boat, we were greeted by some traditional musicians. 

After all the excitement on the river, we made it down to the Pacific. 

We wnt into town and peaked in some souvenir shops before returning to play in the pool and enjoy anothe delicious Costa Rican meal. Tomorrow, we'll spend most of the day playing on the beach. 

Until then, buenas noches! 

Costa Rica: Day 4

I Today was a day mostly of travel. We left La Fortuna this morning and headed west. 

For our first activity, we planted trees at a reserve intended to restore biodiversity in Costa Rica. 

Afterward, we went on a nature walk and saw lots of beautiful plants. 

Some bougainvillea with another unidentified flower. 

Our guide explained the symbiotic relationships between plants in the cloud forest. 

We climbed to the top of this tower to find an amazing view. 

Tomorrow we're off to zipline and find other adventures. The weather forecast is great for where we are. Buenas noches!