Start with what we have

I recently read a blog post by Chris Lehmann entitled Root Causes and the Save our Schools March. It was a very thoughtful post and clearly shows the sincerity of Mr. Lehmann’s education philosophy. In the post, he describes a classroom he observed and why he supports the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C.

I was directed there by a former collegue’s Facebook page, which shared the link, saying she wished she could work for a principal like him. After seeing who she was talking about, I knew that I would be writing a blog post about it.

You see, Chris Lehmann is in fact a really good principal. He is respected by many educators across the country, including me, as a forward-thinking education reformer. From his school, the Science Leadership Academy, Mr. Lehmann is able to try new things, make observations, learn from his teachers, and spread the word at conferences throughout the country. He is a true education leader. However, it isn’t all about the principal.

Principals have people who give them directives, who have people who give them directives, who have legislators who came up with the directives, who are following the lead of the nation’s leadership who have the ideas behind the directives. It all trickles down. Each individual principal has to make a decision about how much they are willing to put on the line for their vision. At the Science Leadership Academy, administration and teachers have the support of people who are able to provide a bit of an umbrella around them so that teachers can teach the way we all believe they should teach. Even as I type this, I’m thinking that Mr. Lehmann might have a different opinion – maybe he struggles against directives, as well, and just doesn’t make that as apparent to us as he highlights the really great things that happen at his school, and that is how it should be.

Which brings me to the reason for this post.

I listen to educators complain all the time about administration, about standards, about testing, about their students. I have witnessed educators whose response to something they don’t agree with is effectively a removal of good practices from their classroom. They decide to throw out everything they ever hoped for in their classroom and instead sit behind their desk and let their students figure everything out for themselves. While student-centered learning is a good practice, this type of learning is not – same lessons every year in the same sequence with a product of one PowerPoint with 13 slides, etc.

I have seen teachers who leave the profession because they didn’t agree with one administrator. I have seen teachers who turn into the teacher Mr. Lehmann described or the one I described in a post two years ago: Burnout: Trickle or Flood? They focus on what they don’t have. They focus on what they don’t like about their job.

They do not focus on what they do have.

They have students sitting in that classroom who want to learn. Those students have been conditioned to expect the burned out teacher instead of the one with a plan. They also have colleagues who share, or at least once shared, their vision.

Yes, they have standards they must teach. Tests they must proctor. Administrators they must satisfy. But 95% of the time they spend in the classroom, nobody is watching but the kids. They have control over the how in their classroom, even if they don’t have control over the what.

The end result – whether our students master the content – should be what we are focusing on. Any time we spend focusing on the negatives of our job is time we have stolen from children.

All of this is not to say I don’t see a need for education reform. I do. I just have an opinion about how it should come about. In presentations, I will often put  a picture of a mountain up. When it appears, I talk about the approach we have to take when we are tackling a problem and I see this as applying here, so I’ll share:

When we are climbing a mountain, we often lose sight of the top. We can’t necessarily see how to get up there – our view is obstructed by many obstacles and still others that we haven’t encountered yet. Once we get to the top and look down, we can see clearly the path we chose and the obstacles that path offered, but we can also see the path we should have chosen – the one with fewer obstacles – or the one with the kind of obstacles we could handle.

When we talk about education reform. We have to do it from the top down. As long as Washington is doing what they are doing, our states will do what they are doing, our districts will follow, and our principals will have to comply. As educators, we have the choice to either focus on the negatives or instead, to start with what we have. Run with what we’ve been given and make the best of it while we fight the fight from the top down.

I vote for starting with what we have.

What should we teach them?

I’ve been going through a bit of an evolution as a teacher over the last year or two. If we are honest about it, we all go through evolution from the first day we walk into a classroom until the day we walk out for the last time, but I’m talking about major shifts in the foundation of my pedagogical beliefs.

I’m going to confess some things here:

1. I was brought up in a sage-on-the-stage educational culture and I thrived in it. My individual learning style demanded that someone feed me information and I would ingest it and make it my own.

2. I hated group projects. All a group project meant to me (and still means to me as an adult) was that I was going to do all the work and everyone would get credit for it. This wasn’t, and isn’t, always because nobody else is willing, it is really because I often don’t want to give up control of a project. I’ve gotten better about this in recent years. If I’m in a group of able people, I will gladly let them all decide everyone’s roles and I will fulfill mine and nobody else’s.  But put me in a group of people that seem incapable, and I’m all about doing the entire project myself.

3. This is probably the most important confession/thing I’m willing to acknowledge: just because I don’t like group work and just because I prefer to have someone lecture to me in order to learn, doesn’t mean that I think everyone should be taught that way.

And that brings me to my difficulty with education today. The standardized nature of education today demands that we make a decision – which way are we going to teach students? What specific lessons are going to cover the all-important standards, no more, no less?

I was in a session today at Podstock 2011 where we discussed the future of professional development. When the presenter/facilitator asked us what professional development needs, it was very difficult to answer, because teachers are a diverse set of learners, just like our students are.

What is my point?

Maybe we need to quit teaching standards and instead teach how to learn.

Someone told me today that Kansas standards don’t include ANY history for elementary students. A couple of weeks ago, I found out that Texas doesn’t require students to EVER learn about the dinosaurs.

If we can’t engage students with lessons that focus on things that interest them, what are we doing? If we constantly cater only to standards that some unseen set of people found to be important and we don’t try to speak to a student’s natural curiosity about the world around them, what message are we sending them?

I’ve always been a proponent of major education reform. I’ve often said that what we need to do is pretend like we never knew anything about teaching and start with square one again.

What would it look like?

In today’s connected society, I think it would look like a place where students gathered together based on an interest. They would explore their world in a knowledgeable way because in their early education, they would have learned how to find information, how to discern what was credible and what was not, and they would have learned how to apply that information to completely different situations.

In the process, they might even learn about dinosaurs and about history because they want to know about them. It saddens me to hear experts tell me that classroom teachers no longer have time for lessons that don’t specifically address a standard.

Look it up. The dictionary definition of standard means that it is something ordinary, expected, something someone with authority has come up with.

How can we ever expect to have Einsteins, Newtons, and Da Vinci’s come out of educations that make students adhere to ordinary?

Define “cheating”

As the result of a tweet by Milton Ramirez, a/k/a @tonnet, I visited a blog post by Scott McLeod, a/k/a @mcleod, entitled Geometry homework: Is this cheating?.  It really resonated with me because it discusses a piece of the symptoms I have been trying to find a cure for in classrooms today.

In the post, the author discusses a dilemma in which he found himself, where his daughter was working on Geometry homework and trying to decide whether using help from the internet was to be considered cheating.

My response to this was “if she learned from it, isn’t that the objective?”

I am so tired of education being all about how well students can comply, rather than how well they have mastered the content. I am so tired of teachers who try to keep their students from using the tools at hand to facilitate their own learning. I am so tired of traditions that keep us standing in front of a classroom or sitting behind a desk. I am sick of looking at my own children’s gradebooks and seeing that their grades were hurt by the fact that they didn’t turn in a roll of paper towels or didn’t turn in a progress report with my valuable signature.

I join my students and children in their lament over meaningless assignments and purposeless routines in their classrooms.

The Geometry assignment in question should have included a mandate that students find their own answers on the internet or by asking someone else. The student who finds the answer to a question on the internet should be guided to understand what to do with that information. Teaching a student how not to simply copy an answer but to use it instead to figure out how to work the problem will not only help them immediately, it will assist them in their learning throughout their lives.

I, myself, learned how valuable having the answers can be when I was in college. I took a Physics class and struggled with it. I couldn’t ever seem to “get it” and I finally dropped the class. I knew that I would take it the next semester, so I routinely went to the homework binder that the teacher would leave in the computer lab to look at the answers to the homework, even after I dropped the class. The next semester, I got an A in Physics. Did I cheat? I don’t believe I did, because the homework taught me how to solve the problems and it also taught me the one little piece of the course that I had apparently missed the first time, which shed light on the rest for me.

Of course, this college experience was different from a student’s experience in high school. I was graded only on my performance on summative tests, which I had no way of examining ahead of time. Most students in today’s high schools are graded on their formative work, as well.

Assessing a student’s mastery of a subject should be our only concern.

Sometimes we get so lost in the routines and the traditions that we never take a step back and ask ourselves “what is the point of this assignment?”

The process of learning how to learn is far more valuable than teaching a student how to comply.

Which is it? Same or different?

Through all of my education to become a teacher, one thing was repeated over and over – you MUST differentiate! Differentiate for different learning styles, differentiate for students at different levels of English language fluency, differentiate for students with learning disabilities or physical accomodations, differentiate for students with different life experiences and/or interests – the list goes on.

So why is it that we continue to require standardized testing? What is standardized testing other than an expectation that all students should be the same?

In Texas, the new end-of-course exams come with a promise to be more rigorous, to test the subject areas at a higher level of complexity in order to more accurately assess each student’s understanding of the content. That is all well and good, but when the testing is high-stakes – where the score on the test influences both the student’s grade in the course AND their ability to graduate – why is it that we expect every student to achieve the same level of knowledge in subject areas in which many of them will never develop an interest?

I’m all for making sure that every student can read, write, and do basic math – even basic Algebra – but do we really need every student to understand Algebra II and Physics to the depth at which an end-of-course exam will demand?

The new TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) in the sciences include standards that were never even introduced to me in my education until I started with my Chemistry and Biology for majors classes. Why does every single student in the state of Texas need to fully understand these components?

It seems to me like we are taking a step backward. While I can see the benefit of a student who is actually interested in a career in math or science to have a diploma that reflects that interest and a true level of understanding, I do not believe that every single student in the state should be required to achieve the same level of understanding of these subjects.

Sound off – give me your opinion!

Going Paperless: Journey or Destination?

I had the opportunity to make a very brief presentation to Discovery Educator Network (DEN) educators during a webinar last week. It is part of the DEN “Shining STAR” series of webinars where Discovery STAR Educators like myself can share the things we are doing in our classroom.

Making the move toward going paperless has become a focus of mine this school year, so I shared some of my thoughts about the process. I really don’t know if every teacher can accomplish being completely paperless. I really don’t know if every teacher in a 1:1 school district can accomplish being completely paperless. What I DO know is that every teacher CAN make steps toward becoming paperless. Now is the time to do it. With Earth Day coming up April 22, there has been a push for teachers to make the pledge to be paperless on that day. This pledge isn’t about making sure you’ve made all your copies the previous day, it is about trying to develop lessons for the day that do not require the use of paper and create positive learning experiences for students. To make the pledge, complete the pledge form. This movement was started on the TeachPaperless blog.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting parts of my presentation on this blog with a more detailed discussion of the things I’ve learned through this process. Stay tuned!

What I Believe About Students?

I was reading Martha Thornburgh’s post “Do You Believe Students Can Meet Standard?” in which she challenges educators to make a statement about three things they believe about students. Awhile back, I wrote a post about what I believed about teaching in general, but not about students specifically. Martha’s post got me to thinking — just what did I believe about students? So here goes, I’ve been successfully inducted into this meme and I will be tagging a few people in the hopes the meme will continue:

Three Things I Believe About Students:

1. Every student deserves to be taught. One of the things that really bugs me when my own children come home from school (especially my high school daughter) is when they tell me they didn’t learn anything. Now, I know as a former high school teacher that there were probably things they learned but have already forgotten. But when she goes into detail about one particular teacher who hands them a worksheet when they walk in the door and spends the next hour and a half reading magazines at his desk while students are kept quiet with threats of detention, I believe there is some truth to it. In Texas, seniors have it really rough, because they have usually acquired nearly all the credits they need to graduate and have passed all their exit exams before they even begin their senior year. For my daughter, she will only need 3.5 credits next year before she can graduate. Imagine being in that position, then having to sit in a classroom for an hour and a half doing nothing. Students deserve to be taught. Teachers should teach them.

2. Every student has a button. Sometimes it is hard to find, but it is there. Every student in that classroom should be treated as a potential GT student. They should be given opportunities to expand and explore their lessons. They should be given opportunities to teach the class and the teacher something new. They should have hands-on activities, technology-rich activities, collaborative activities, and mind-expanding activities. A classroom should be nearly paperless, as students learn to navigate their 21st century world. Every student has it in them to become successful and thrive. That student sitting in the back of the room shooting spitballs at the ceiling needs something — he or she needs the teacher to find what it is that will make them say “wow”. It is difficult, but the reward of seeing that light turn on in a student’s eyes is well worth the effort!

3. Every student wants to learn. Yes, I believe that students want to learn. Otherwise, why would that student whose parents really don’t monitor their lives continue to show up every day? Why would my daughter come home complaining that she didn’t learn anything? Why would they get excited by a good lesson? Because they want to learn. It is human nature to be curious and to want to understand the world around us. From the beginning of time, we have been exercising that nature. Society brings us up to believe that the better educated we are, the more successful we will be. Our students want to learn, they just want to learn in ways that are relevant and engaging to them.

Join me in this meme. If you have a blog, write a post about it and link back to this one. If you don’t, add a comment here. I’m interested to see what other educators believe about their students.

Tag, you’re it!

Steve Dembo
Lee Kolbert
Chris Lehmann
Martha Thornburgh

Big Question #5: A Good Alternative?

I recently read an article in the Katy Sun online (read the article here) about alternatively certified teachers in Texas. As an alternatively certified teacher, I am always interested in the opinions and ideas expressed regarding this certification process.

The truth is, I think the process needs some “tweaking”, although I also believe it is a good program. The certification process I went through was rigorous and I believe it prepared me better than other programs I could have chosen to go through.

There are two problems inherent with the alternative route, as I see it:

1. More mature (I don’t want to upset my fellow oldsters – oops, I did it anyway!) alt cert teachers will discover that they have difficulties adjusting to this completely new job market. We are used to merits getting us somewhere and upwardly mobile paths to leadership. We are accustomed to processes making sense to the bottom line and people being accountable for their own action (or inactivity). When we enter the education arena, we find our jobs on day one to be the same job it’ll be in year 20, and we also find that the teacher next door who “drills and kills” gets paid on the exact same pay scale we do when we struggle over each student and over each lesson. On the other hand, younger alternatively certified teachers, who have very little experience in any job whatsoever, may find that they are ill-prepared to work anywhere, let alone in the education world.

2. The alternative certification process doesn’t require us to do any student teaching. The program I went through required many hours of “observation”, which I believe helped me immensely. I’m glad I didn’t go through one of the programs that didn’t require this, but I also feel like those hours of observation could never compare to the student teaching requirements in traditional education degrees. Being thrown into a classroom on my first day of teaching, with nobody standing beside me, guiding me, was daunting. It was plain scary. Somehow, I managed to make my students think I knew what I was doing – and eventually I think I did know what I was doing – at least as much as any teacher can.

What changes need to be made to the system, then? I believe there is a need and a usefulness for alternatively certified teachers. Often, these teachers are of high quality, although they tend not to stay in teaching for long. Is it because, like me, they begin to miss the hierarchy and structure of “real world” employment? Do they long for opportunities for personal growth that are not available in the education world?

Perhaps a required student teaching gig, like the traditional education degrees, is warranted. Surely a restructuring in education jobs themselves is in order. But how?

What are your thoughts? Don’t worry about offending me – if you have a thing against alternative certification, air it. Let’s get this discussion going!

Big Question: What are your thoughts about alternative certification?

Big Meme, errr Question #4

I got tagged by Terry Shay on this and after giving it some thought, decided to post my response and keep the meme going. I actually figured out a way for it to fit into the nature of this blog, as well.

First, the question: Looking back on your life, what was the “worst job” you ever had that ironically helped prepare you to one day become an educator?

Next, the reason I think it fits this blog: Sometimes the only way to keep your sanity as a new teacher is to reflect on and evaluate the reason you became a teacher in the first place. It can be a rejuvenating experience to remember the event or series of events that led you to education. This is usually how it was for me. I would remember the times I felt like a real teacher . . . meaning I’d gotten through to somebody.

Which brings me to the last thing I’ll do with this post, which is to answer the question and keep the meme alive. As I contemplated the question, I tried to really pinpoint some magical event in my life that told me I was meant to be a teacher. The first time I remember wanting to be a teacher was about second grade or somewhere around there. Prior to this time, I always said I wanted to be a nurse, just like my mom. However, one of my big sisters destroyed that dream for me when she pointed out that part of nursing school was having to change the dirty diapers of babies. (as if she really knew what nursing school was all about). It was later that same day that I focused my dreams on being a teacher. Little did I know that someday I’d be changing the dirty diapers of babies without the benefit of learning a trade . . .

Off and on through my education, I encountered teachers who made me start to believe I really did want to be a teacher. These educators were the ones that were really great teachers and remain my examples of what a teacher ought to be . . . Polly Potter (4th and 5th grade), Mrs. Keast (8th grade history), John Brown (9th grade Earth Science), Mr. Ratzloff (9th grade Life Science), Janice Smith (10th grade English), Sheila Lisman (11th grade English), Del Knauer (12th grade English), Gary Hughes (12th grade Government and Russian History). It was interesting, each year I had a teacher like this, I decided that was the grade I would teach when I grew up.

Lots of things happened as I became an adult and my dream to become a teacher didn’t materialize for quite some time. It wasn’t until I was going to college as a non-traditional student that my Biology instructor, Joyce Selsor, saw in me the potential for becoming a teacher, that I began to really pursue becoming a teacher. By that point in my life, I had become cynical and all of my hopes to become a teacher had long since diminished.

Even after Mrs. Selsor encouraged me, I wasn’t sure. I think that what convinced me was the “worst job” part of the question. I was a Supplemental Instruction leader for General Biology during my sophomore year of college. This meant that I planned short tutorial-type lessons designed for small groups of 5-8 people. I took my job seriously. One day, towards the end of the school year, a group of three students who had been very dedicated to showing up to all of my sessions approached me. One of them, apparently the designated spokesperson, said, “we just want you to know that you really helped us. You are a good teacher.” To which I thought . . . “Can someone pull this hook out of my mouth?” and as they say, the rest is history.

The truth is, although I’ve left the classroom for the moment, I’m finding that it is exceedingly difficult to stay out of the classroom. Before you make any decisions about whether or not to remain a teacher, reflect on what got you here and ponder what it really means to you to be a teacher.

I’m tagging a few people, Lee Kolbert, Tom Turner (where are you, man?), and Marie Coleman. You’re it!

Big Question #3 is Teaching Truth #7

I was sitting in my car on my regular commute – well not-so-regular in that I was going home early enough for the commute to last about 30 minutes instead of 65 – but I digress. Anyway, I was sitting in my car, thinking that maybe Cruel Shoes needed to go on hiatus over the summer when it occurred to me that I actually still had something to say this year which would actually be very timely right now.

Recently, as the school year ends, I’ve heard a lot of reflection from the teachers in my network. Now, one of the most important things a new teacher can learn and do is reflection. If we get too immersed in what we did and not on what we accomplished in the doing or what more could be accomplished in the revision, we become ineffective teachers (in my opinion). I’ve also heard from several teachers who, like me, have decided to leave the teaching field (or have they? – but that’ll have to be another post).

I read an entry on Teaching in the 408, which is a great blog by a teacher who was very effective and a great teacher, but who didn’t think, at the end of the day, that he had been the teacher he wanted to be. This set off a little bell in my head, reminding me of how I felt during my last weeks of teaching as I reflected on my performance. What had been my goals? What goals had I succeeded in attaining? In what goals had I miserably failed?

Seeing the world through my own eyes, I always thought I had been an ineffective teacher. I felt like I had set out to be a teacher who could make a difference in a kid’s life. I felt like I had set out to be full of information and excitement and could pass that on to my students. I felt like I had dropped the ball – opting for classes where I would follow the questions of my students into a territory not planned for, though just as scientifically relevant as what I HAD planned for. If my students came in asking me about what alcohol does to their brain, then I spent a class (or two) having frank discussions with all my students about what it really does to a teenage brain, peer pressures, parent misconceptions, etc. Did that follow the state-prescribed formula for a successful science student? No. Because of this, I constantly felt like I was a fraud and that if someone walked into my classroom when I was showing a video of a girl crying about how she’d lost a friend to a drug overdose, I’d be booted out because it wasn’t on the TEKS (stands for Texas Wants You To Teach This) for the science I was teaching.

I also keep remembering an episode of Twilight Zone that had a retiring teacher on his last day reflecting on what a miserable teacher he had been. Former students long gone and deceased (usually because of some heroic action) miraculously appeared in his classroom to tell him all the lessons learned in his class that had made them the heroes they became. We can’t truly know how we did until years later, if ever.

Now that I’m out of the classroom (or am I?) I realize how much I WISH education could be about discovering new things because we WANT to. About finding out what makes a student’s brain engage and catering to that miracle to stimulate them into lifelong learning, rather than cramming enough information about many things into their brains in the hope it will stay with them long enough to pass a test.

What is Teaching Truth #7?  Good or bad isn’t in YOUR eyes, it is in your students’ eyes.

Listen to what your students say. Listen to what other teachers tell you your students are saying about you. Don’t worry so much about what the state has to say, or even what your administration has to say. Teach like you mean it.

Why did I call this a Big Question? Because I want to hear from you. What do you think makes a good teacher or a bad teacher? Help all of us to understand where we stand.

Big Question #2: What Do You Believe?

I recently found myself with a few minutes of leisure and wandered over to my RSS feeds where I found that one of my favorite bloggers, Lee Kolbert, had been really busy since the last time I wandered over to RSS Land. One of the articles she’d written really hit a chord, so I’m taking up her challenge, writing my thoughts, and tagging a few people to get their opinions.

Lee’s post was inspired by a tag she’d received challenging her to state what she believes. Since the spirit of this blog is all about truths, I thought it would be appropriate to follow her lead, so here goes .  .  .

What I Believe

I believe that education needs a complete overhaul. I’m not talking a simple change in pay scales, additional training for teachers, or new support positions being created. I’m not talking about having tiers of teaching positions so that teachers can have more opportunities for leadership roles. I’m talking about the entire education community stopping EVERYTHING, pretending like we’ve never taught before, and coming up with a NEW PLAN.

I believe that students deserve to enjoy their education. I believe that teachers deserve to enjoy teaching.

I believe that standardized tests set students (and teachers who have high stakes in them) up to fail.

I believe that if I teach science the way I really want to teach science, instead of teaching to a standardized test, my students will learn and retain far more knowledge than if I “drill ‘em and kill ‘em.”

I believe it is more important for a student to get excited about a content area than for them to memorize information that can be easily found in a journal, dictionary, or manual.

I believe “assessment” can be a dirty word.

I believe educators who focus on the words rigor and relevance or scope and sequence instead of focusing on what they MEAN to a student have missed the boat.

I believe there is such a thing as too much technology in the classroom. Having students complete an assignment involving technology for the sake of technology is wasted time. Using technology as an integrated tool to expand a student’s knowledge is imperative.

I believe teachers should focus on what they know, intuitively, to be the “right” way to teach. Most of us become educators because we have an amount of natural talent in the area of imparting knowledge on others. If we let ourselves be herded into the cookie-cutter “ideal” that our principal or district thinks is the way to go, then we have eliminated our usefulness.

I believe teachers like STAR Discovery Educator, Diana Laufenberg, who instills in her students a true love of nature and thus, the science and history behind it, do more on one weekend field trip to impact their students’ success than many other teachers manage in a full school year.

I believe that it is okay to hug a student who needs to know someone cares.

Okay, I’m realizing that I could go on and on, so I’ll stop and let YOU comment here with what you believe – or post to your own blog and tag this one. I’m also going to think about who to tag, so be warned!