The Real Mr. Fitz

Three Words to use to Ordain Teachers

2012-02-03T18:38:00.000-08:00

This past Sunday afternoon I attended the ordination service for a friend who was entering the ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA). It was a beautiful service, and made me think we perhaps need to have an ordination ritual of sorts for teachers, whose work, we tend to forget, is as much a calling as the ministry is.

We seem to have lost the sense of vocation, of sacred calling in our society, but I think this loss is nowhere more prevalent, or tragic, than in teaching. We hear a lot of talk about "elevating" the teaching profession, but this usually means rewarding teachers whose students score well on tests by giving them more money. But making teachers into test score coaches is not "elevating" the profession. Treating it as the true calling it is might.

The rhetoric surrounding teaching is often filled with words like "value added" and "accountability" and "data." We seldom hear words like "vocation" and "calling" and "service." At the ordination service I attended, one of the things the ordained promised was to serve his congregation with energy, intelligence, and imagination.

I loved those three words. If only we would talk less about the data analysis and conformity required to teach, and more about the commitment of energy, intelligence, and imagination that are needed.

I don't think people understand the kind of energy needed to teach well. And I'm not talking only about the energy required to be "on" for six hours a day, the energy required to deal with teaching and discipline and class group dynamics and interruptions and clinic passes and fire drills and insects in the room. The longer I teach, the more I realize that the kind of energy I must try to bring into the room is a steady, unyielding, imperturbable attitude that what we are doing today matters, it's important, and I can help you succeed at it. Students come into the room with so much baggage, so much negative energy. They don't like to read or write. They hate reading and writing. They can't do it. They've always failed at it before. Reading and writing are irrelevant to their lives. They don't care about it. They will resist you every step of the way.

It takes a well of energy and... yes, faith, to stand up to the negativity and apathy many students give off. Faith that what you are trying to teach them does matter, that it will make a difference in their lives, faith that at some point things will "click" and they will realize that learning things in your class will make a difference to them-- maybe even today rather than in the future. It takes energy to get up in the morning and to go in and stand in front of your classes like a steady flame, giving off the message for one more day, for six more classes. You are important. What I'm teaching is important. You can learn it. Learning it matters. I will help you. Some days you seem to make no progress. Some school years you feel you've gotten through to very few. But you keep going, and from somewhere you summon the energy to keep giving off the message. And deal with clinic passes.

The second thing the ordinate was asked to serve with was intelligence. It may sound obvious that a teacher should serve his students with intelligence, but it seems as though the chief activity of intelligence, thinking, is appreciated less and less in teachers. Advanced degrees are devalued. Curricula are made teacher-proof so that the teacher doesn't need to think, only dispense ready-made materials. We want the people responsible for teaching our children to think to do as little thinking as possible.

But aside from the war on thinking (which deserves its own post), teaching demands not just intelligence, but different kinds intelligence operating on different levels. Intelligence about your subject matter and how it works. Rubrics aside, what does it really mean to write well? Tests with dates on them aside, what does it really mean to know history and think about it well? Labs aside, what does it really mean to think like a scientist?

Intelligence is necessary for setting goals, designing lessons and assignments, and choosing materials (or not choosing them as the case may be). Intelligence is necessary for deciding when to stay with the lesson you planned, and when to let the lesson be derailed by the teachable moment. Social intelligence is necessary to find the best way to deal with students-- when to encourage and when to challenge them, when to show mercy, and when to set a firm limit. Intelligence is necessary to try to analyze what is causing some students to succeed and some to fail. Data will tell you who is failing, but seldom why, or what to do about it.

The last word in the trio of words at the ordination, imagination, has all but vanished from the world of education. We discourage imaginative play even in Kindergarten in favor of "structured" play. And even as we take imagination away from children, we consider imagination to be a childish quality. To encourage teachers to be imaginative isn't even on our radar.

Why is imagination necessary to teach well? Imagination is necessary for coming up with new ways to reach hard to reach students and new ways to engage students who learn quickly. Imagination combined with intelligence is necessary for thinking up the project that teaches multiple skills at once. Imagination is necessary for imagining a path from where students are now to where you'd like them to be.

To quote Buckminster Fuller, "There is nothing about a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly." It takes imagination to look at a student slumped down in a desk, hoodie pulled tight around his face, grunting about everything being stupid and boring, and see a potential writer, scientist, historian, or doctor. It takes imagination to see potential in people who seem to be actively trying to kill their own potential.

As a parent, I want my kids' teachers to teach with energy, intelligence, and imagination. Wouldn't you? We should ask ourselves-- is what we are doing to teachers encouraging or discouraging teachers' energy? Are we pushing teachers to use their intelligence or to suppress it in favor of conformity? Are we asking, demanding, that teachers use their imaginations, or are we making them feel guilty for even having imaginations?

What words are we using to describe teaching?

In the sermon at the ordination service, one of the main themes was this: You don't really know the good you are doing. You may never know. You act, and your actions have ripple effects you cannot see.

I know that statisticians are now saying they can track the effect teachers have on their students for years, showing that one teacher raising a student's test scores can lead to X number of dollars in increased income for that student later in life. I don't know enough to refute the validity of the statistics, but I do know that promoting such numbers leads to a narrow and impoverished view of education.

My choice of career has had more to do with my income level than the quality of my elementary school teachers. But all my teachers, in one way or another helped shape my conception of who I am, and of the world around me. I have had the privilege of telling some of my former teachers what they have done for me, but some of them never really knew. When I read a poem, my appreciation is shaped by Mrs. Hughes. When I draw a comic strip, I do it with a talent that was encouraged by Mr. Ross. When I write, I am still bolstered by the fact that Mr. Jacobs found my ideas insightful and wise beyond my years. My teachers shaped and continue to shape the qualities of my everyday experiences: reading and writing, speaking and listening, thinking about life in ways I might not have been able to without them.

We need to acknowledge the mystery at the heart of teaching. We plant seeds, and we never know where they will lead. And that's okay. It's not a way of avoiding responsibility, but of acknowledging the way life is. Even with our own children, we may never quite find out what we've done for, or to, them in this lifetime.

At the end of the service, the ordinate receive his "charge" to ministry. Amusingly, it included the line "Live long, and prosper." If only we had a ceremony where we could give teachers a "charge."

If I were to charge a new teacher, I might say something like this:

You are about to become a teacher, the profession that makes all other professions possible. Take on this task with energy, intelligence, and imagination. Your task will not be easy. You will feel discouraged-- sometimes more often than you feel encouraged. You will feel that your students should show gratitude, and many days they will only show annoyance with you for attempting to teach them. Parents will challenge you for challenging their children to do their best. You will sometimes reach the end of the day and look around at a room full of crumpled up papers and disheveled desks and wonder why you should care if they don't. You will feel like you aren't making any progress. You will feel like quitting.

But there will be other days. Days when the lights suddenly come on for a student or two. Days when a class discussion suddenly takes on a life of its own and students suddenly throw out insights that surprise even you. Days when someone who has said "I hate writing" every day since August mutters, "I kind of had fun writing today." Days when one student comes back to your trashed classroom and helps you clean it up-- and not just in hopes of getting a candy bar.

And you don't know the good you are doing. Students may not realize what they got out of your class until next school year, or next decade, or someday when they have their own kids in school. The value you add is not just future income, but future out-put: what you encourage students to bring to and contribute to the world.

Be yourself. The best teaching comes out of who you are. Be an individual in a career that increasingly wants its practitioners to be drones.

Have faith in what you are doing, and in your students' potential, even the students who seem least likely to succeed. Have faith that what you are doing matters. That's important, because that faith is the light that needs to burn from you, even when you're exhausted, in the face of student apathy, cynicism, and despair.

This matters. This is important. You can do it.

That is the message you must give your students every day. It is the message you need to remind yourself of every day.

Live long and prosper.

A "charge" to teachers.

A Ranking and an Email: Education Deform Writ Small

2012-01-25T19:18:00.000-08:00

This week, an email and a news story caught my attention, and seemed illustrative of the problems that plaguing education right now.

The news story was that Florida has release rankings of its school districts, rating them from highest to lowest, based in large part on their district-wide performance on the state's standardized test, the FCAT. Ironically, the state's education commissioner said the idea was to "broaden the conversation" about education in Florida. Apparently he thinks "broadening" means the same thing as "narrowing"-- as in narrowing our view of successful education to meaning "high test scores." To no one's surprise, lower income, higher poverty counties scored near the bottom of the list. The commissioner indicated that we must stop making excuses for schools with high poverty populations.

Obviously, we want those students to do better, but on more than just tests. But a ranking like this one, where half the districts are going to rank "low" and some poor district is going to be in last place, is going to create winners and losers by its very nature. And that being the case, do we really think our high poverty districts are ever really going to pull themselves out of the basement on such a rating? Are we hoping for the day when our Title 1 schools outrank our wealthiest schools? Is this likely, or even, in the end, desirable?

I can't think of a single good result that could come out of such rankings, including a "broadened" discussion. The only thing such a ranking can do is make some districts that are already doing pretty well feel good about themselves and others to have a huge dip in morale. This is the whole problem with our obsession with data writ small.

The email I got this week informed me that all our school's computer labs are being commandeered from February to May this Spring. The computers will all be reconfigured so that they can only be used for FCAT testing, FAIR testing (a several times a year reading assessment), and State End of Course Exams.

So much for using technology for learning. So much for my students working on Wikispaces, researching online, typing and printing essays during class time, and working on their novellas this Spring. Assessment now trumps actual learning. This is our obsession with assessment to the detriment of teaching write small.

We are obsessed with rankings and data, winners and losers, and we are so busy checking to see if the pale if full, there's no time left to fill it.

Symptoms, Causes, Cures

2012-01-13T17:49:00.000-08:00

This past weekend an older post of mine, my "Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony" suddenly caught on. As of this evening, it has over 50 thousand hits, and dozens of mostly positive comments. A few of the "commenters" made the criticism that I didn't offer any solutions, and other commenters pointed out that finding solutions wasn't my goal in that piece--my goal was to express my frustration. Apparently, in venting my frustration, I expressed what a lot of other people were thinking as well.

But if solutions are what we want-- and I want them as much as anyone--I have one suggestion that is a step toward a solution. My suggestion is a change in mindset.

If you read a lot of the debate surrounding education, people are using data to do two very unscientific things: tell stories and create metaphors. One story goes like this: "Our test scores are low compared to other countries, so it must be the teacher's faults because it's too hard to fire bad teachers, so if we just busted the unions and made it easy to fire bad teachers, we'd be fine." Of course, bad teachers are defined as "teachers whose students aren't getting good test scores." That's one story-- and I'll address that in a later post. What concerns me more today is our metaphors.

The metaphor I particularly want to deal with is a medical one. I think many people view low test scores as a disease, high test scores as good health, and teachers as the doctors who are supposed to fix the problem. I won't even go into the oft repeated implications of this metaphor, that if you send a sick person to the doctor, and they don't take follow the doctor's instructions, then it isn't the doctor's fault when they don't get better. I think that's an extremely valid point.

What interests me about this metaphor is that when we view low test scores as the disease, all our efforts become focused on the test scores. If test scores are the disease, fixing them will fix the child, the school, the system. If test scores are the disease, we must find a systematic cure that will work in every case, and make every "doctor" use that systematic cure. That cure often amounts to attacking the disease repeatedly. With a bad infection, we give repeated doses of antibiotics. With bad test scores, we give repeated doses of skill-drills on the particular types of questions that are causing the disease. As we've discovered with antibiotics, though, overuse can actually make the disease worse.

We are seeing low test scores as the disease, and standardization of materials, assessments, and approaches as the cure, because we must fight disease in a scientific, systematic way. Here's the problem. Low test scores are not the disease. They are the symptoms.

Low test scores are the symptoms, plural, because low test scores are not just a symptom of one problem, but the symptoms of a host of other possible "diseases," and as long as we are merely treating the symptoms, we will never get to the root of the problem. But it's easier to treat this one, easy to identify, easy to track symptom, than to get into the messy, real life work of figuring out how what the real diseases are.

If low test scores are the symptom, what are the diseases? Well, there are lots of educational diseases out there.

If I look at my students who are "symptom free" because their test scores are good, there are certain traits they seem to have that my low-scoring students often don't.

For starters, high scoring students tend to be readers. Low scoring students tend to be non-readers. But even that is a symptom. The real disease is this-- our low-achieving students have boring-itis. They are simply not very interested or curious about the world around them. When I do an "enthusiasm map" at the start of the year, my high achieving students have dozens of interests in multiple areas of life: sports, movies, food, books, hobbies, video games, and classes. My low achieving students have trouble coming up with ten things they are interested in.

My high achieving students read a lot because they are interested in a lot of subjects. My low achieving students don't read because not that much interests them. They look at the world around them and say it's boring, when in fact, the boredom lies within themselves. What if we could somehow inspired our lowest students to be more interested in the world around them the way many of our top students are? It would cure the disease of boredom, and they might become happier, less bored, more engaged, and more likely to sit down and read a book. And test scores might come along for the ride-- the symptom alleviated because the disease was cured.

Some of our students are interested-- but only in a very narrow range of interests, or even in just one interest. But helping a student who is obsessed with drawing manga characters or fantasy football to see that their obsession has connections to literature, writing, math, science, social studies, music, business, art history, and a host of other subjects can make all the difference.

There are other diseases our students suffer from.

Home problems so enormous that school seems like a minor distraction. Poverty so crushing that school is a very low priority. Wealth, toys, and distractions so tempting, so addicting, that school seems like a chore. Depression. Lack of self confidence. Poor attitudes.

Sometimes what looks like an underlying disease may actually be a potential cure. Some students who act out in class because they are bored are actually gifted. Sometimes, as Sir Ken Robinson has pointed out, students' real interests are so stifled by the way we do school, that they act out, or tune out, in frustration. I was obsessed with drawing cartoons as a student. The teachers who did nothing but yell at me to put my drawings away, who made me feel that my drawing was childish, made me shut down. Fortunately, though, I had many, many excellent teachers who set clear guidelines about when drawing was okay and when it wasn't, and who encouraged me to use my drawing in school. Mr. Roach let me bring the comic strips magazines I made with my friends into class, and even to distribute them to my classmates. Mrs. Gottung let me create a packet of dittos to teach the other students how to draw cartoon characters. I think in pictures. That's not a disease. It has been, in school and beyond, the key to every successful thing I've ever done. That trait could have been seen as a liability to my test-score performance and discouraged very early on.

Recent research has indicated that imaginative free play is an important way for children to develop self regulation, imagination, creativity, and problem solving. Imaginative play does not, on the surface, seem to lead directly to higher test scores, and in fact looks like frivolous waste of time. So recess has been cut in favor of more "hard" academic work and more structured play designed to systematically battle obesity. By viewing low test scores as the disease, and good test scores as the highest good and the only worthy goal, we actually end up working against the test scores themselves.

I suspect many high test scores are seen as a sign of educational health, when in fact they are actually signs that bright children are being under-challenged and bored. We don't worry about high achieving kids much; we just pat them on the back for landing in the 99th percentile every year because we're too busy treating the symptoms of our low-achievers.

What if we stopped treating the symptom of low test scores, and looked at treating the real underlying causes of low performance, and, better yet, actually trying to figure out the underlying causes of success?

In health care we have tried to move away from curing disease to creating health. In psychology we have moved from treating psychological problems to studying and promoting happiness with the positive psychology movement. We need to do the same in education.

What kind of students are we trying to create? What kind of people do we want to help them be as adults?

If we want creative students who are interested in the world around them, who read, understand what they read, and make connections, who write with clarity, voice, and insight, who see the beauty and utility and, yes, fun of Mathematics, Science, and History, and who see the connections between all these disciplines and the arts and sports as well; if we want students who are life-long learners, constantly striving to improve themselves, and who can question, think, and bring fresh insights to the things they are studying-- if we want all of that for our students, then we must stop treating the symptoms-- low test scores-- and even go beyond dealing with the diseases of boredom, poverty, low motivation, and distraction.

We must look at the conditions that lead to educational health and make them available to everyone. This is not a call to warm and fuzzy feel-good education. It is a call to a level of rigor and thought that transcends any multiple choice test.

So that's my suggestion, my first one anyway. Change our mindset: treat low test scores as a symptom not a disease; but then move beyond even treating those underlying diseases to a model we are actively promoting good educational health.

Unless we have a vision for our children that is broader, deeper, higher, and more nuanced than "high test scores," we will never make real improvements-- not even those almighty scores.

For the New Year: A Reminder Why I Teach

2012-01-02T16:24:00.001-08:00

As we begin a new calendar year, which never seems like as big an event as starting a new school year, I want to write a reminder to myself about why I teach. If it reminds you, too, then that's a bonus. Just before winter break, which ends to tomorrow, I had an experience I'd planned on writing about here, but I didn't make the time to sit and actually write about it before Christmas arrived.

The experience came in two parts.

Part 1: I had a rather hectic last with students the last day before break, one that included a student arguing with me about whether part of his essay was plagiarized, and lots of students being too rowdy and making a mess. It wasn't all bad-- it was just one of those days of teaching that left a bad taste in my mouth. If you've ever taught, you know about those days. You come home wondering why exactly it is why you teach. This can be especially discouraging right before a break-- especially Winter Break.

Part 2: To make things worse, I had set myself up to have a lot of grading to do that night. Friday was a planning day, and grades were due at the end of it. I wanted to clean up my classroom a bit, and do some planning, so it was important to me that I go into school the next day armed with all my essays graded. This meant a good two or three hour marathon of grading, which I wasn't particularly looking forward to.

The essays I had to grade were from both 7th and 8th grade. My seventh-graders had written expository "Enthusiasm Essays" about some activity they loved. My 8th graders had a few late "Education Essays" about an educational issue coming in, as well as their "This I Believe" essays of personal philosophy.

I sat in my big leather recliner, pulled out my pack of colored pens (I recommend the Uniball Signo click-top pens-- they are terrific), and opened the first folder. My seventh graders had written with harnessed enthusiasm, articulately conveying their enthusiasms with words. They wrote about creating music on various instruments, or with their own voices. They wrote about creating art, and about playing a favorite sport. They wrote about reading for the sheer pleasure of it, and wanting to find a job some day that would enable them to read. They wrote with such detail, such passion, that they made their enthusiasms tangible. I told them that I wanted to feel the heat of their enthusiasm radiating from the page-- and for the most part, they did just that. I was starting to warm up.

And then I moved on to my eight-graders This I Believe essays. They wrote about faith. They wrote about doubt. They wrote about their lives, for the most part with eloquence, insight, and thoughtfulness. I knew there were several essays I would want my students to submit to the This I Believe website. When I opened the last essays I had to read, the late-work Education Essays, I read and enjoyed them, but one of them stood out. Sara wrote about letting students bring themselves and their own personal interests into class, rather than trying to standardize everyone. She wrote with such maturity, command of language, and quirky voice that I realized she sounded just like a real columnist.

That's what my goal is all along-- to get my student writers to the point that they transcend rubrics, and writing scores, and hit that place where they no longer sound like student writers, or even excellent student writers, but like Writers. Period.

Of course, I realized that when I go back to school in January, I'd have to send her piece to one of the local newspapers.

I closed the folders, threw my Uniball pens in their bag, and got ready to input the grades on the computer. As I did so, I glanced up at the clock: nearly three hours had passed, but I had been so immersed, so completely swept away by my students' writing, that it seemed no time had passed at all.

And I realized that my kind-of-lousy last day before break had been redeemed. Those papers were the tangible evidence of why I teach: to see my students developing interests, enthusiasms, beliefs, and voices of their own. Not to fill a bucket, but to light a fire.

Happy New Year.

How To Make Them Learn

2011-12-09T02:37:00.001-08:00

I recently caught a rerun of ABC's comedy The Middle (a very clever show) in which the quirky, gifted son, Brick, didn't want to go to Physical Education. Rather than forcing PE on Brick, the teacher was allowing Brick to stay back in the classroom and read. Dad went to talk to the teacher about the situation.The teacher, so fresh-faced that Dad accused him of being a fifth grader, explained that he wanted Brick to be intrinsically motivated, wanted him to want to go to Gym. Dad explained that Brick would never want to go to PE, but would be perfectly content to sit and read. Dad said, in essence, We need to make him go. The teacher said, in essence, we need to make him want to go.

The issue of student motivation has sort of gotten lost in shuffle in our debates about education, lost in an avalanche of over 30 different reforms (at my last count), very few if any of which actually focus on what's actually going on with students as opposed to what's going on with data. But student motivation is crucial to everything that happens in education-- including the all-mighty data. If a student wasn't motivated to try his best and instead random guessed, does the test score represent how little he knew, or how little he tried?

What I liked about the parent conference on The Middle was that it neatly summed up two adult views of student motivation: make them do it, or make them want to do it.

President Obama, in his yearly address to students, has repeatedly sent them the message that it is their job to do well in school, whether they feel particularly engaged or not. They need to "put in the hard work it takes to succeed." There is a great deal to be said for teaching our students about duty and responsibility. I think our society has become cynical about both. School, in addition to teaching students content, must by its very nature be a place where they learn how to do things that are necessary but not much fun. That's where "make them do it" comes in.

On the other hand, I don't think there's anyone who would say that schools need to be places of intentional drudgery, designed to break the wills of students, to make them compliant drones who see no purpose behind what they do other than following orders. As a parent, I love to hear that my kids are engaged in learning, are enjoying their classes. That's where "make them want to do it" comes in.

So which way is better-- force or engagement?

To answer that, maybe we need to ask what habits of mind we want our children to develop. With our focus on data and statistics these days, we tend to forget that schools are good for more than creating good test-takers. Schools should be working with parents to help students develop the habits of mind that will make them, not just good workers, but good citizens as well.

What habits of mind are we trying to develop with a "make them do it" approach? Make Them Do It teaches them, at the very least, to follow orders, which is, quite often, a good thing. In general, society doesn't function if we don't follow the rules. If we decide we want to be British for the day and drive on the other side of the double yellow line, the results can be deadly. If we are a cashier and decide in the middle of a transaction that we want to step out for some fro-yo and leave the cash register drawer open, the results can be bad for business. Make Them Do It wants to develop the habit of mind that says, "Life is not all fun and games, and life is not all about my happiness. There are things I just need to do, like them or not." As Robert Fulghum pointed out in one of his essays, being an adult is about doing all the gross things no one wants to do, like dealing with dirty diapers and toilets, dead pets, and that gunk at the bottom of the dish drain catch.

I think there's an important thing to note here, though. Make Them Do It is provisional. It should be temporary. From the student's perspective, Make Them Do It is actually They Make Me Do It. Unless it eventually becomes I Make Myself Do It, it's useless. I think it's important to keep that in mind. I think we have all seen young adults (and not so young adults) who still need to be forced to do everything, even once they are grown. They don't see why they should have to get a job, or move out of Mom and Dad's basement, or do anything other than play video games. They keep getting forced to do everything. They never moved from They Make Me Do It to I Make Myself Do It. In the end, our prisons are filled with people who never quite mastered They Make Me Do It, much less graduated to I Make Myself Do It.

I've had students tell me that the only reason they do anything at school is to avoid getting trouble at home (where Make Them Do It is king). I'll ask them if they intend to continue on in that way, or if they intend to eventually start motivating themselves. They don't quite understand the question. I try to explain: are you going to continue to use Fear of Getting in Trouble as your main motivator the rest of your life? Are you going to go to college to avoid getting in trouble? Are you going to do good work on your job just to avoid getting in trouble? They don't quite get the concept of doing things for any other reason other than to avoid getting in trouble.

This hardly seems like the height of human potential.

The irony here is obvious-- even the habit of mind Make Them Do It must eventually become the habit of mind I Want To Do It, or it is useless. To be a good citizen, a good adult, yes, you must learn to do your duty, to do unpleasant, un-fun things. But you must see why those things are important, and you must eventually motivate yourself to do them. A populace that is only controlled by fear of punishment cannot function: it will either degenerate into chaos or become a complete dictatorship. There's always someone willing to step in to make everyone else do it his way.

So what about engagement? What about I Want To Do It? I think there's a huge place for it in schools. Here's why. I Want to Do It develops habits of mind as well-- habits of mind every, bit if not more important, than the obedience developed by Make Them Do It. You get different results when you work on something because you are thoroughly engaged, fascinated, and enthusiastic about something than you do when its a chore.

Don't get me wrong, I'm talking about engagement, not entertainment. Entertainment is when I add enough bells and whistles and technology and balloons and You-Tube videos and confetti to make it fun, which in the end convinces students that the subject must not have been all that interesting in the first place if it needed so many special effects to jazz it up.

Engagement is different. Engagement is when students understand why something is important and want to figure it out, explore it, solve it, or otherwise experience it. Watching students try to figure out the ambiguities of happiness and success, explore the power definitions have to shape our lives and give or take away power is to watch real engagement at work. My students are currently writing their This I Believe essays of personal philosophy in my 8th grade classes. Essays about philosophy for 8th graders? Yes. No confetti, no balloons, bells and whistles. Just ideas: ideas that matter. It seems to me we've lost the power of ideas, don't believe that ideas are enough to hold anyone's interest any more.

This brings me to an observation I've made as I've taught many different levels of students over the years, from remedial to regular to advanced to gifted: the best students are just interested in things. The worst students think everything is boring. If we want to talk about habits of mind, here's the heart of the matter. If you are a teacher, think about the very best students you ever had. My guess is that most of them were insatiably curious, and enthusiastic about learning to boot. They found things more interesting, and found more things to be interesting, than other students did. Learning was its own reward.

When I think about the students I struggle the most with, it seems to me that their real deficits aren't to be found in statistical data of test scores; their real deficits are to be found in their lack of curiosity, engagement, or enthusiasm for the world around them. Their real deficits are in their habits of mind, and if we could solve those, the other problems might fix themselves. My lowest students tend to say everything is boring, when in fact it may be that they are simply bored and boring themselves, which is not the same thing at all.

My students create an Enthusiasm Map at the start of the school year to get them thinking about topics to write about. Each student writes his name in the middle of a piece of paper and then surrounds it with all the things he can think of that he's enthusiastic about-- food, hobbies, games, entertainment, favorite places, favorite music, favorite people-- favorite anything. Almost without fail, my brightest kids tend toward running out of room and going to a second page. They are interested in so many different things! But many of my lower level students can scarcely find five or six things they are enthused about. They jot down a few ideas and then run out of steam.

Higher level students read a lot because they're interested in lots of subjects in the world around them, so they score well. Lower level kids don't read much, if they read at all, because they aren't interested in much, and we react to this by skilling and drilling them even more on remedial reading skills. Maybe what they really need is for someone to light the sparks of interest they do have into a fire.

I am not blaming the lower level kids. They may have limited life experiences, or a bad home life where their enthusiasms were stomped on every time they showed themselves. I am saying that maybe we should spend more time trying to tap into what kids find interesting, trying to expand their sense of what is interesting, trying to expand their sense of what matters.

I recently had a student announce during a class discussion that she didn't see why students had to study History or Civics. I couldn't quite believe my ears. How do you not get that? How do you not see that our democracy and way of life can only improve or even last if its citizens are aware of its own history, ideals, and processes? Yes, Make Them Do It-- make them take Civics and History whether they can see the point or not. But if they don't eventually see the point, if we don't eventually Make Them Want To Do It, then the whole endeavor may have been pointless to begin with. Do we really want students to say, "Yes, I got an A in Civics, but I still think the whole course was a stupid waste of time"?

It seems to me that our whole approach to education right now is force it on everyone: the government wants to make the districts force the principals to force the teachers to force the students to get better test scores. Make Them Do It. What habits of mind does that approach create? Stress, apathy, resistance to learning. It even begins to kill off curiosity and enthusiasm in the students who have it.

If we want to create the habits of mind that our best students have- curiosity, engagement, enthusiasm-- we need to encourage them in all our students. So many of our students are failing because they just aren't interested in much of anything. They need someone to light the spark somehow. Yes, we need to send the message that school is a duty, that they need to try their hardest, that they need to buckle down and get the work. But we aren't doing our jobs if we stop there.

It seems the two approaches must work together. Yes, there is a time to Make Them Do It, but that is only a means to and end. In the end, we want them to Want To Do It. Brick's dad and teacher on The Middle were both right.

It seems to me that there is only so far you can go on Make Them Do It. At some point, I Want To Do It must come into the picture. You can make a boat get off the shore by pushing and pulling it and forcing it, but it will only go out and start sailing when it can get away from the pushing and catch the wind in its sails.

A Teacher's Letter to Obama: A Lesson in Irony

2011-09-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

The Facebook page Teachers' Letters to Obama offers a lot more than just letters to the president, but I've been thinking for some time about what I would write to the president... or the secretary of education. Or anyone in power who might possibly listen... This is what I finally arrived at as my message.

Dear President Obama,
I am half a year into my twentieth year of teaching here in Florida. I am not sure how much longer I will last in the profession I thought I would never want to leave. I wonder how much longer I can last because as an English teacher, I teach my students to keep a sharp eye out for irony. I practice what I preach, and my irony radar is on full-tilt, bell-ringing, red-strobe-lights-blinking, high alert. The ironies have grown too much for me to bear; I am nearly crushed beneath them, yet people like you seem to be unaware of them. So let me teach you, as I might my students, about Irony. When I use the second person "You" in this letter, I refer not just to you, but to all the "powers that be" in education reform.

Where to begin? There are so many ironies to chose from. Let's begin with the stated goals of education reform. Supposedly, education reform's goal was to improve the public schools. But as 2015 approaches, and the public schools have not achieved 100% success with 100% of its students, it becomes clear that the real goal, all along, was to force public schools into failure by setting impossible goals for them, and then to privatize education. They said one thing: "Let's save the schools." They meant something else: "Let's drive them to their own destruction." That's called Verbal Irony.

Then there's the irony that many teachers voted for you, President Obama, in the hopes that you might turn things around, only to find that you did indeed turn them around-- 360 degrees. You brought us the wonderful world of Race to the Top, which made competition for grants the way to improve education. To compete, states had to push for even more testing and data, and agree to all kinds of top-down initiatives to "improve"teaching. You reversed course, taking what the previous administration had done, and instead of reversing it, reinforced it. This is called Situational Irony.

Then there's the irony we teachers are guilty of. We didn't see what was coming. We pretended that if we just tried harder, everything would be all right, for us, and for our students. Every time more demands were made on us, we simply pushed ourselves and our students harder to meet those demands. Every time we showed improvement, the demands grew harsher. For every obstacle that was thrown in our path, we jumped higher. For every budget cut, we spent more of our own money on our classrooms. We went on believing that at some point what we did would be good enough. In reality, nothing we will ever do will be good enough. In reality, the goal was never to let us succeed, but to close down the public schools. We were unaware of the big picture. This is called Dramatic Irony.

But those are just the Big Three ironies. What really gets me down is all the other, smaller, yet more insidious ironies piling up on top of us.

For instance, the more we succeed on raising test scores, the less likely it is our students are actually learning anything useful, since standardized tests represent only a myopic, narrow, constrictive, binary, reductionist view of what learning is. So as our test scores go up, real learning goes down. Situational.

On a similar note-- we worry that bad teachers wasting tax payer money, so we scrutinize them by using a whole array of testing and data to analyze their effectiveness. We hire testing companies to create and score tests, third person companies to evaluate the reliability of the tests, test security companies to make sure the test is secure, statisticians who know nothing about teaching but create value-added statistical formulas to evaluate them based on data-- all on the tax payer "dime." And who is making sure these companies are actually doing their jobs? Who evaluates the evaluators? Situational.

We accuse teachers, who actually work with our students on the front lines of education because they care about students, of greed. We never accuse testing companies and statisticians of greed. They are obviously in it for the good they know they are doing students. (That last sentence was verbal irony on my part.)

Testing companies actually say that their tests shouldn't be used for teacher evaluations. But they never refuse to supply a test to districts on principle.

Our relentless desire to raise test scores causes us to focus relentlessly on our lowest students. The lowest students are put in "intensive classes" where they are skilled and drilled on test scores. If we actually looked at why our highest scoring students score high, it's not because they were skilled and drilled a lot, but because they read a lot.

And meanwhile, as we focus our misguided attention on our lowest students, our highest achieving students, who need to be challenged and pushed beyond what standardized teaching can provide, are still putting up with test prep.

Our value-added models are based on learning gains, so teachers who teach the gifted are sometimes unlikely to show many gains. High level students are in as much need of excellent instruction at their level as supposedly low-level students are. Gifted students drop out at a higher rate than the general population-- in part because they are bored. One wonders if teachers of the gifted will start to drop out, too, to go to a position where they can show more value-added gains.

Apparently business leaders are calling for more creativity in their workers. We are killing off creativity in schools, in both teachers and students, and getting ready for multiple choice questions does not make anyone, teachers or students, creative.
You say you want teachers to be in the profession because they care about students. But you assume they are actually in it for the money and try to bribe them with merit pay.

You say you want excellence, which implies that some teachers can do a better job than others, but then micromanage teachers to make them all the same. You tell teachers they will be evaluated on results, but then tell them exactly how to teach, so that they aren't really responsible for the results.

Great teachers are insightful about their subjects, always seeking to grow, to read, to research, to find new ways to think about their subjects and improve their teaching, so you create a set of Common Core Standards that reduce academic subjects to a series of calcified, petrified skills and make growth, change and innovation all but impossible.

We compare our test scores to those of other countries. Yet Finland, for example, which is the star of international test scores, tests as little as possible, has very few standards, values teachers and pays them well, gives them lots of autonomy and focuses on creativity and project-based learning. So what do we do, upon seeing Finland's success? We test everyone as often as possible, even our preschoolers, vilify teachers, create ever more standards, rob teachers of their autonomy, and discourage creativity in teaching in favor of data wrangling and test prep.

People learn best when they are engaged and happy, when there is joy and enthusiasm in the classroom. We are killing off engagement, joy, and enthusiasm, and replacing them with boredom, blind obedience, and stress.

As an English teacher, I teach my students stories about the underdog standing up for what is right, taking the road less traveled. As a teacher, I am being asked to conform, to do as I'm told, even if it goes against everything I believe about teaching.

When I attend our county's Teacher of the Year banquet, I see videos of students, elementary through high school, saying that their teachers are great because they are "different" and "creative" and "fun." And then we go back to being told to all teach in a "common" way the next day.

On a personal note, I won at my Teacher of the Year banquet a few years back, and I now feel that the very things that made me a winner- creativity, insight, creative instruction, creative assignments-- are all liabilities now. I should teach the way I'm told, using the assignments and assessments I'm given, and keep my mouth shut.

Education Secratary Arne Duncan has said we want a "great" teacher in every classroom. Do we even know what that phrase means? What is a "great" teacher? A great teacher comes up with activities, assignments, and assessments that will engage students and lead to real thinking and questioning. If all my activities, assignments, and assessments are scripted for me, what is left for me to do well as a teacher-- talk louder? You can't have standardization and excellence.

I came into this profession because I love my subject,and I want to turn students into readers and writers, and I have creative ideas for making this happen. If I am no longer allowed to do those things, if I am being forced to be a curriculum dispenser, what options do I have? Leave for somewhere that allows me more autonomy? Where might that be-- a charter school or private school? Could this be what we wanted to have happen all along-- to drive our best talent out of the public schools to other venues? It's already happening.

In all of this education reform going on to improve our schools, the discussion we are not having is this: What are schools for? To create an obedient, pliable work force? To create a good economy? To make our test scores competitive with the rest of the world? Until we figure out that these purposes for schools are too shallow to serve, until we figure out what schools are for, everything we'll do to "reform" education is likely to fail.

I can't think of a single thing going on in public education right now that make me want to stay in my profession. I know of very few, if any teachers who are happy about what's going on. And yet, no one is listening.

The ultimate irony is this: reformers are saying we should put students first. That is what I try to do every single day in my classroom. But I feel the reformers are putting everything but students first: test scores, data, common standards and assessments, value-added models, and standardized curricula are all coming first. Real, flesh and blood students with real problems, hopes and dreams are the last thing on the reformer's agenda.

I hope you will listen. I hope you understand our frustration a little better now. If not, that would be ironic.

David Lee Finkle

You Can't Have Standardization and Excellence

2011-08-25T19:22:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this cartoon from earlier this year says it all. But I feel a need to go more in depth. I haven't seen anyone else deal with this topic.

Florida passed Senate Bill 736 this year, which says that half of every teacher's evaluation, and eventually every teacher's pay, will be tied to the FCAT, the state's standardized test. I'm merely going to mention in passing here that the absurdity of art and music teachers having their evaluations based on Math and Reading standardized test scores: It is absurd. But that absurdity is not the main one I'm going after. There is a larger absurdity afoot.

If I am in charge of the end result-- in this case, test scores-- I need to be given autonomy as to the process which achieves that result.

Let's look at the world of business, since we keep wanting to run everything like one. If I work in a factory, adding wheels to widgets, and I am given the freedom to figure out the quickest, most efficient way to put those wheels on, then I am responsible for the end result, which is lots of wheeled widgets. I might come up with an inefficient system and only put on half the wheels that other workers do, in which case, I get paid less. When there is autonomy, there is the possibility of "merit"-- as in "merit pay." If there is autonomy, I might be able to do something better than you. I might also fail to do better than you. There is risk involved. But the end result is in my hands.

If, on the other hand, World Wide Widgets sets forth a standard procedure and pacing guide for Widget Wheel instillation, which they are entitled to do, they are essentially taking autonomy away from the workers. If World Wide Widget Compliance Officers walk around making sure that no one is deviating from the standard procedure, and everyone is following the same procedure, there really can't be any merit. Everyone should, in fact, get the same exact results, in which case any kind of merit-based evaluation system is, again, a moot point. Because if you are telling me exactly what to do, and I am doing it, then I am not really responsible for the results. You, the Standard-Setter, are responsible. If I can't go above and beyond, then there can be no merit.

Of course, there may also be hidden factory factors that influence my widget wheel effectiveness. For instance, what if you get used widgets, or damaged wheels? Doesn't that influence my results? What if my assembly line machine is older and runs widgets by me more slowly? Those things will also influence my results. But again, if you are giving me a standard procedure for every possible widget situation, I don't have the power to change the result. You, the Standard-Setter, are responsible.

Of course my analogy with schools breaks down, I think, if you view teaching and learning as something more than putting wheels on widgets. I think it is.

The same effect is at work in school, though. I almost long for the days when standardized tests and school grades were all we had to contend with. As long as I'm free to be innovative and creative, to tap into students' interests and do whatever it takes to help them learn, then I can promise you some pretty good results-- even test scores, if you want.

But now with scripted curriculums, and, coming soon to a classroom near you (yours, to be precise), the Common Core PARCC assessments and assignments, teachers are being told exactly how to put wheels on the widgets. Fifty percent of your evaluation is based on test score results. That's absurd enough. But when you are also told exactly how to teach, it goes beyond absurd. If you are telling me exactly how to teach, then I am not responsible for the results I get. You are.

Let me repeat that: If you are telling me exactly how to teach, then I am not responsible for the results I get. You are.

Here is what great teachers do: set goals for learning, get to know their students, select and create materials and activities that will help those particular students sitting in their particular class become engaged so that they will learn. Great teachers adjust their approaches when things aren't working. They are willing to throw out the idea that worked last year, even if it was a "favorite thing," if it isn't going to work with this particular group. They research new techniques and new theories of learning. They think about the nature of what they are trying to get students to do. I guess that's what it boils down to: great teachers think.

But if all my thinking is done for me, if my materials and activities are all selected for me, if I can't adjust my approach because I am supposed to stay "on script," if I can't throw out what doesn't work and add in something new that I've created or researched that will work-- if every instructional decision has been made for me, how am I supposed to excel? Talk louder in class? Present with more enthusiasm? What enthusiasm could I possibly have left?

If you tell me exactly how to teach, then you are responsible for the results. If you tell everyone to teach exactly the same way, then there can be no merit, no excellence, no progress or innovation. I find it ironic that the Common Core Standards curriculum is called PARCC, and acronym that implies sitting still.

We are creating classrooms populated by characters from Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron"-- all differences covered up to create an illusion of equality.

Arne Duncan wants a "great teacher in every classroom." You will not get great teachers by asking them all to be the same. I'll repeat it again: if you tell me exactly how to teach, then you are responsible for the results. You can't have it both ways. If you want to tell me how to teach, then you should take the blame, or the credit, for student learning. If you want me to be responsible, then please leave me alone and let me teach.

I know what I'm doing.

A Summer of Creative Teaching

2011-08-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

This summer I taught for the month of July. And I was blissfully happy. My wife, Andrea, and I tried having our own creative writing camp, which we called "Write Away!" It ran for two weeks (nine days, actually), and then I moved into the second half of my summer, teaching at the HATS Program at Stetson University, my alma mater.

I turned these experiences into a series of comic strips where Mr. Fitz taught a summer "Creativity Class." I tried to capture some of the joy and fun that characterized all three of them. (I almost used the phrase "had in common" but then shuddered... "Common" has become a dirty word for some of us.) In any case, as I head into my 20th year in the public schools on Monday, I thought I'd reflect a bit on the summer, and on its contrast to what is happening to public education.

Our creative writing camp was inspired by a presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English by three teachers from Arkansas who had done a creative writing camp on a college campus there. After hearing about their model, we plotted our own version for months, joining forces with our friend Darlene, a children's theater playwright and director, and searching for venues and trying to figure out how to make it work. We finally found a space in some classrooms at our own church, did a very little bit of advertising on Facebook, by word of mouth, and with a few posters. We got some actual sign-ups, and on the 5th of July we started our own camp with four campers, grades 5 through 8. By the end of the nine day camp, we had seven.

Each day began with a fun warm up that introduced the theme for the day. Our themes included Pirates, Space, Inventors, Nature, and Imaginary Creatures. Andrea had the first "period" of the day, poetry, and taught them that poetry is "words at play." She got them playing around with words, exploring multiple genres.

I took the second section of the day, Fiction Writing. I taught them about the basic building blocks of writing fictional scenes-- description, moment-by-moment narration, and dialogue. They wrote about pitch black planets, out of control vehicles, and aliens talking with humans. They tried their hand at story "grabbers," and played around with basic premises. When we were brainstorming vehicles to write about being "out of control," someone suggested the space shuttle crawler that moved the shuttle out to the launch pad at a very low rate of speed. I said a vehicle couldn't be out of control at such a low speed. Our son, Christopher, who was assisting us, took that as a challenge, and managed to create a ten page long Cold War thriller about Soviet spies on the crawler trying to sabotage the launch. We had out of control lawn mowers and out of control canoes.

After a break for lunch, the writers moved to a larger room up the hall to work on play writing. They not only wrote, but learned about improvisation, creating dialogue in a different format, creating characters, and focusing a scene on a conflict.

After a quick walk around campus to clear our heads, our afternoon finished out with "free writing" time to finish any projects they'd worked on in the morning, or to try something original, in any of the three genres we'd worked in. The students were so conditioned to being told exactly what to write about and how to write it, this section of the day came as a bit of a shock to them. They were not used to being given autonomy, being given the chance to chart their own paths as writers. Eventually they got used to it, though, and settled in to write. Andrea and Darlene and I wrote too, along with the kids, and found we were enjoying and learning from each others' lessons.

At the end of the first day, one of the students said, "I didn't know writing could be this much fun!" How sad that by the end of 5th grade he had not experienced the fun of writing yet.

We ended the camp with a showcase where students shared their writing with their parents and grandparents, and then taught them some of the things they'd learned. We published an anthology of their writing at Lulu.com called Nine Days, Seven Kids, Pencils and Paper.

A good time was had by all.

The following Monday, the third week in July, I moved over to Stetson University for my third year of teaching a week long class called Flash Fiction. This class started in 2009 with five students, plus my son, Christopher. We spent two days working on the Close-Up aspects of fiction writing, narrative style, description, and dialogue , and on the "Long-Shot" aspects, such as plot structure, theme, irony, and character development.

We then spent all day Wednesday brainstorming a plot, using Chris Van Alsburg's "The Mysteries of Harris Burdick" to spur ideas. We eventually cooked up a plot set in 1960's Vermont concerning an ancient Native American tribe, a lake monster, and a ghost the plays the harp. Our outline included a two page back-story, a cast list, and a plot outline broken into chapters. We then divided up chapters on Thursday, and the last two days of the class were spent writing The Spirit of Lake Glimm. Seven people produced a novel in three days.

We repeated the process last year with seven students to come up with The Book of Arkavia, a classic fantasy world quest story in the spirit of The Wizard of Oz or The Chronicles of Narnia.

This summer we expanded to having thirteen student writers, grades 4 through 10, plus my son and myself, working on a book. Although we had gone through the process before, it was still a high-wire act: could we pull it off again, and could we pull it off with this many people? We thought about dividing into two groups and writing two different books, but that created it's own set of problems. We spent Wednesday morning hashing out ideas based on the Harris Burdick pictures. We drifted toward another "collect the magical objects" story, then rejected it. We couldn't settle on a focus. We went to lunch. We came back.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and we still didn't even have a concept for our new novel. I was getting nervous, but I reassured the group by saying, "At some point, someone is going to have the idea, the idea that clicks all the other ideas into place, and everyone's going to go, "Aaaaaaahhh!"

We decided to focus on the Harris Burdick drawings that took place in a house. Why were mysterious things happening in the house? Why was the pumpkin glowing? What was behind the secret door in the basement? Someone suggested that the things going on could be events from fairy tales. Someone else suggested a secret library of old books hidden in the basement. Christopher said, "What if the wall between reality and fiction is breaking down?"

And the class said, "Aaaaaaaahhhh!"

And we were off. We had talked all week about how everything in a story is there for a reason: to move the plot forward, to reveal character, to explore a theme, to create an irony, to foreshadow a later event or be payoff for earlier foreshadowing. We developed a list of characters and described them. We then made a list of fairy tales that could be invading the home of Jared and Paige Henry, our protagonists. We invented a back story concerning two secret societies, the Inklings and the Censors. It soon became clear that we would be touching on censorship and literacy issues, and that one of our themes would be the power of story to change lives. Everything in the story from that point on had to touch on that theme.

You need to picture this taking place in a computer lab. Everyone is sitting in chairs or pacing the room, watching the plot take shape in a Word document being projected on a big screen at the front of the room. I've heard some people say that today's students need to change activities every ten to fifteen minutes. These students were completely immersed in plotting this novel for an entire day and a half. They were just talking and throwing out ideas and discussing what would work or not.

After we outlined and divided up chapters, we all began to write. Older writers helped younger ones flesh out their scenes. Kristine had to write a family dinner scene that turned into the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, so she looked up the original scene from Lewis Carroll online so she could emulate it in her version. I circulated, giving pointers and suggestions to students, one on one, on everything from style to formatting, to proofreading rules.

We worked through lunch to brainstorm a title and an idea for the cover. No one complained about working through lunch. They wanted to work! Students wanted to work. By Friday afternoon, students were finishing. We decided we needed a cover. Annie drew one, and other students decided to draw their own chapter illustrations.

They left, and over the next few weeks I edited the chapters into a coherent whole, ironing out plot inconsistencies that had crept in. We did not begin with a rubric. We did not begin with a multiple choice test. We began with the idea that we wanted to all write a story together and have fun doing it. (I'll post the link to the book later, after the families have received their copies.)

The following week was Cartoon Studio Class. The first part of the week was spent working on original comic strips. This may sound rather light-weight, intellectually. The big word in education right now is rigor. Well, how's this for rigor? We discussed how to create a basic premise, types of irony, types of comedy, writing dialogue, how to frame shots cinematically, gesture drawing, the six basic emotions, how to design characters, how to stage action for clarity of ideas, and... well that's not all. And that's just comic strips.

Animation added a whole list of other concepts. We studied the history of animation, and worked with both hand drawn animation devices and with simple computer animation.

And again, no rubrics. No assessments. No "accountability" schemes.

One parent whose daughters attended both the Flash Fiction and the Cartoon Studio said that her girls came home exhausted every day, yet happy. She could tell their minds were being "stretched." Rigor doesn't have to mean making things difficult and unpleasant for the sake of making them difficult and unpleasant. Rigor doesn't even seem like rigor if it's done in the context of meaningful work.

Why did I enjoy this summer so much? Because, unlike the regular school year, where I must fill Yeats's metaphorical pail, during this summer's teaching experiences, I could instead focus on lighting his metaphorical fire instead. I had no standardized curriculum to follow. I could meet kids where they were at.

It was risky. I wasn't sure what they would produce. I wasn't sure if we would come up with good idea for a model. As Sir Ken Robinson says, creativity means being willing to risk failure. But when you are willing to risk it, you often find your successes are that much more valuable.

So as I head back to school Monday, despite the pressure to get students to perform on tests, despite the pressure to standardize both myself and my students, despite the experts who say creative writing isn't rigorous, and the companies that demand we follow their programs with fidelity (which I've heard referred to as the new "F Word"), this year I will try to bring a little of this summer with me into the classroom. This year I will try to bring creativity, open-endedness, enthusiasm and joy of learning into my classroom.

And maybe I will allow myself to be blissfully happy again. No matter what anyone tries to say about it.

Who Evaluates the Media?

2011-08-03T19:43:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard, Matt Damon, whose mother is a teacher, came to speak at the Save Our Schools March last weekend. The speech itself was excellent, but his later run-in with a reporter has received even more attention. (If you watch it, it's got some language; I only warn you because I've rated this Blog "G.")

I think Matt makes a fair point. Who is holding the Media "accountable"? I think I've probably written about this before, in terms of columnists who pick on teachers, but the wider question here is this: does the Media, and in particular, news organizations, have the moral clout to pick on teachers? I'm thinking not.

There's Rupert Murdock's News of the World scandal. Granted, News of the World was a tabloid to begin with, but it certainly wasn't journalism's finest hour. And then there's the news-media's handling of the Casey Anthony case. Did they show journalistic restraint and principled behavior, or did they jump on the case every chance they got and feed the frenzy surrounding the case to get ratings and sell papers? If you live in Central Florida as I do, you know the answer to that question.

Don't even get me started on the banality of the local news. A breathless preview of an upcoming story announces, "A man discovers a gigantic wasp nest in his yard! Find out why the neighbors are still staying inside!" Um... because they don't want to get stung? Did you really think we wouldn't figure that out?

There is a lot of talk about liberal bias and conservative bias, and lots of finger pointing. When was the last time we saw someone making a concerted effort to stay fairly neutral? To be fair, I think the News-Journal, the paper Mr. Fitz appears in, has been making an effort. Even as they admit they are "right of center," they have acknowledged that the news itself should be neutral. Opinions are for the opinion pages. How many news organizations are putting journalist integrity above the bottom line? (Which relates back to my last post about what motivates us.)

Has the reporting on teachers been unbiased, or has it been a nearly endless bashing of public schools and their teachers? I think it's the latter, and I think the media aren't really concerned about the state of the schools, or they'd look at the issue more closely. It think the media wants to stir people up for ratings and readership, and teachers are easy targets. It's easy to pull out testing statistics that announce what a crisis our schools are in. It's not so easy to look at the nuanced realities behind those statistics, and it certainly won't bring in the viewers and readers looking for easy answers and someone to blame.

And so I think the media goes about its business, trampling over its own principles day after day, almost proud of its offenses. I think teachers are struggling to do the best they can, day after day, knowing they are vilified, knowing that what they are told to do in the name of "education" is goes against their principles. At least I do.

If today's journalism is tomorrow's history, I am fearful. My hope is that at some point, someone will set the record straight, whether it's Matt Damon, Diane Ravitch, or someone else principled enough to tell the truth whether it makes money or not.

Run the Schools LIke WHAT Business?

2011-07-10T15:53:00.000-07:00

This post may not seem to be about education at first-- but bear with me.

Two articles recently caught my eye after I saw them re-posted on Facebook. The first, posted by my wife, is "Driven off the Road by M.B.A.s." It is about former GM vice Chairman Bob Lutz, and his book, Car Guys and Bean Counters. The article discusses the takeover by the auto-industry by "bean counters" who stopped focusing on what consumers really needed and focused instead on the bottom line. The engineers who actually thought about creating quality products were shuffled to the sidelines in favor of MBA's, whose main priority was to cut costs and create products on the cheap, whether they were quality or not.According to the article, this idea has infected nearly all of America business, with only Apple standing out as the consumer/product focused company that works to create quality, not just profits.

After dealing with shoddy American workmanship myself (my little Chevy Aveo still leaks under the dashboard when it rains, despite two trips to the dealership) and with poor customer service (why does Michael's, where I buy my cartooning pens, have 8 registers and only one of them up and running-- to create more profits!), I think I can believe that our too-much focus on profit and not-enough focus on quality could be one of the things dragging our economy down.

The other article was of even more interest to me, since it is about animation, which I am fanatical about, and the collision of creativity and commerce. The New York Times essay, "A Collision of Creativity and Cash," concerns Pixar Animation Studios, which until this summer had an unprecedented string of commercial and artistic smashes beginning with Toy Story in 1995. But this summer, Cars 2 has premiered to a lot of fairly negative reviews, and indications that it may not have much box office staying power. To be fair, I haven't seen the movie yet, but a friend who took her daughter said that it confused and bored her target-demographic audience member. (Though I will grant you that the true demographic is young boys who will persuade their parents to buy Cars 2 merchandise.)

James B. Stewart, the article's author, talks about the key to Pixar's success to this point: taking risks and focusing, not on potential profit, but on the creative process. I have read somewhere that Pixar's John Lasseter once said that every Pixar movie sounds like the worst idea ever. A movie about talking toys? A movie about insects building a fake bird? A movie about an old man flying his house to South America? What? And yet each of those movies was a hit. Stewart quotes Lasseter as saying that their success at Pixar is about "the leaders of the company doing kind of the opposite of what every other company does."

In other words, Pixar has been focusing on the product, not on the profits. Profits came along for the ride because the product was so good. In this way, Pixar has been truer to the spirit of Walt than the Walt Disney Company itself has been since its founder's death.

But now that Disney has officially acquired Pixar, things may change. Stewart talks about a speech given by Disney chief financial officer Jay Rasulo last year called "The Value of Franchises." It talks about calculating creativity to ensure profitability. Cars 2 may be the first victim of Disney trying to exploit the value of franchises-- a movie made for profit, not out of love. Go buy those Cars 2 bedspreads!

So, what's better for business? Focus on profit, or focus on product? I suspect that focusing on profits seems better in the short run, but that focusing on product is better in the long run. And this has to do with our motivations for working, for being in business at all. The car industry and the economy in general are suffering. Could it be because the MBA's have taken over, and money is everything to them, the products have suffered? What if enthusiasm is a better fuel for the economy than greed?

Apple and Pixar (Cars 2 aside) have thrived because money is the secondary concern. The people at Apple and Pixar, are, from everything I have read, motivated intrinsically by what they do. They are jazzed by creating products or movies that their fans will love. The financial success is nice, but not primarily why they're doing what they do. I have read about innovators and artists from all fields talk about their love of their craft-- but not once have I heard one talk about being primarily motivated by money. Bugs Bunny animator Chuck Jones said they made their movies to amuse themselves, not to please the front office people at Warner Brothers. Composer lyricist Stephen Sondheim once did a show with Richard Rogers because everyone told him it would make a lot of money; when it was an artistic and financial disaster, he promised himself he would never do another show that wasn't done out of love for the project.

Perhaps you need to worry about both-- creativity and profits. But there needs to be a balance. That's what was nice about Disney in its Hyperion Days: it had Walt being the idea guy and Roy worrying about money. But Walt the idea guy was the driving force, not Roy the money guy. We've put Roy in charge and told Walt to go sit in the back room.

So what does this say about education? Well-- a few things. One, as I ask in the title of this post, when people say we should run the schools like a business, I ask: Run them like what business? Run them like the car industry and the financial industry? Or run them like Apple and Pixar?

We have examples. The For-Profit Schools scandal is a case in point: money-motivated schools lure their students in and let them go into debt for thousands of dollars of government loans, on which the students later default. The students are in a financial mess, but the school walks away with the money. Many of the country's much praised charter schools have been guilty of various kinds of fraud, from rejecting certain students to make their test scores look good, to nepotism. Aside from scandals, it continues to floor me how many people complain about the price of teachers, but have no problem shelling out millions for testing, testing security, consulting companies, statisticians to help analyze scores and come up with value-added models to help make firing and hiring decisions, and standardized curriculums that promise to raise test scores. Do we really think the people in these companies are motivated by what's best for kids?

As Lucy says as she dictates a letter to the Great Pumpkin for Linus, "Greed makes people do strange things."

I'm not saying all charters or for-profit schools are corrupt, but I do wonder at the motivations that lie behind them. I wonder at the motivations behind some public school employees, too. Are there teachers whose goal is to get tenure and then game the system by doing as little as possible? You bet. And they need to be dealt with. But you can tell who they are without value-added games.

On the other hand, there are people in education, both administrators and teachers, who are there for intrinsic reasons, who are as jazzed about their jobs as Steve Jobs and as excited about the animation they bring to children's minds as a Pixar artist is about bringing a toy to life. Think about it. When you have to put your child in a classroom, would you really prefer a teacher who is bottom-line focused and motivated by the promise of merit pay, who sees her job through the narrow lens of raising your child's test scores? Or would you like your child to be with a teacher who just loves teaching, is creative, and wants to focus not on those bean-counter test scores but on your students actual strengths and weaknesses and academic development?

Do you want an MBA teacher, or a Pixar teacher for your child?

The business people who are saying we need to run the schools like a business have in mind an auto-industry, bottom-line mindset. I wonder if they can even comprehend what makes a company like Pixar really tick. I certainly don't think they understand that teachers just love teaching, and love kids. Why else would we spend tons of our own money on classroom supplies and libraries? Why else would we do so much more than is required of us, and even try to buck the system to try to do what's best for kids? We want money to live on-- everyone needs that-- but we are not in this profession for the money. We are teaching, as the title of a book I'm about to read states, for "love and wisdom."

From a business perspective, it seems, you hand over leadership to the bean-counters at your own peril. When money becomes your main motivator, quality actually goes out the window, along with innovation and creativity. But when you let people who love the business for its own sake run the show, be it cars or computers or animated cartoons... or schools, you get a better product, and profits (or test scores) may come along for the ride.

If you want to run my school like a business, fine. Just make sure it's the right business.

What is Reading, and Can It Be Captured In Bubbles?

2011-06-27T16:58:00.000-07:00

The student came into my room the morning after our state test scores came out. (This was back when test scores actually came out before students went home for the summer.) She looked dejected. "I can't read," she said.

I couldn't remember what her score was, so I asked her. She had either a one or a two--- a score that would get her put in "intensive" reading the following year. "I can't read," she repeated. It was at this point that I noticed the hardcover library book in her hand-- one of the Lemony Snickett Series of Unfortunate Events books.

"What happens in that book?" I asked her. She proceeded to give me a detailed run-down on the events of the book, including insights into character development, and its overall place in the series to that point. And she told me how much she had enjoyed it.

"You can read just fine," I told her. "What you have trouble with is multiple choice questions." And I firmly believe I was telling her the truth.

This past school year, as part of a committee about testing and teaching evaluation, I had to do a lot of research and reading about the ideas of validity and reliability in testing. Reliability (are scores consistent and stable over time?) seems to be a numbers game for statisticians to play, but validity-- validity is another matter. It is as question of whether the test actually tests what it claims to test. And a Reading test obviously claims to be testing Reading. So does it? That depends on how you define reading.

Let's look at what reading is when you take a Reading test.

First, on a Reading test, someone reads to you before you ever start reading. The test proctor (a role I have played many times now-- it's a thrill: "Be sure to make your mark heavy and dark.") reads you a script. The gist of this script is that you will be reading all alone, you will be answering questions, and that you must stay silent at costs. And-- I find this telling, and ironic-- when you finish, you must not read anything else, as in an interesting book you might have brought with you. I'll come back to this point later-- it's important.

Once you are finally allowed to open your booklet for real (after checking it to see if there are any missing or upside down pages-- something I do every time I buy a book) you are presented with a series of texts: short fiction, non-fiction articles, poems, maybe some charts, graphs, or advertisements. After each text or set of texts, you find a set of questions. Each question has four of five choices, but only one of them is right. You must bubble the right answer in the correct bubble on a separate answer sheet. Sounds straight forward, right?

I want to note a few things about this process. One, the reader has absolutely no say in choosing which texts they will read. If they have no interest in Janine's efforts to get into the talent show, or the Amazing Bugs of the Amazon, or the advertisement for the Pringle Family Garage Sale, they are out of luck: that's what they are reading-- take it or leave it. Thrown in with this lack of choice is another issue: background knowledge. Depending on the subject of the piece, your background knowledge may have a tremendous effect on how well you understand the piece. I will understand an article about animation or bicycling better than I would one about, say, auto repair or golf. In any case, someone else chooses what you will read.

Given that you are stuck with these particular pages, which may be of no interest to you, the best thing to do is get through the test as quickly as possible. If you have listened to your teachers, you will read the questions first. This, you are told, will help focus your reading. Before I talk about the general effect this instruction (read the questions first) has on the act of reading, I'd like to point out that many bright students find that some of the questions do not require you to read the text at all: the questions are free-standing.

For instance, a question that asks about a word in context may be easy to answer from the little excerpt in the question itself, as in: "Jeremy found being ambidextrous very handy as wrote his math homework with his right hand and worked on his spelling words with his left." What does the underlined word mean?" Sometimes a student with an advanced vocabulary may already know the word and not even need the context, in which case "words in context," the tested skill, is not what is being tested at all.

But aside from free-standing questions, the instruction to "read the questions" first has a more general effect, or effects, on what reading is. First and foremost, Reading becomes a task in which you answer someone else's questions. If Reading is about answering someone else's questions, then it also becomes clear that Reading is about finding the Right Answers, of which there can only be one for any given question. Reading ,then, is the process of finding out the single right answer to a series of questions about a text. The questions and the single right answers to those questions are not be questioned.

In any case, your whole slant on reading the story/article/ poem/garage sale poster is to answer the questions. You may skim, scan, or rush through the text looking for the pertinent information. Your goal is the find the one right answer for each of the questions. Parts of the text which might, by chance, actually interest you, but which have no bearing on finding the one right answer to a question, are irrelevant. When you have answered the questions to the best of your ability, you leave that text behind, like an empty corn cob, never to be nibbled at again.

And what do the questions ask us to focus on? A narrow menu of main ideas, details, facts and opinions... the wording changes depending on whose standards you are looking at, but they are all pretty much the same.

When the test is over, you will probably never think about those texts again. Unless you found the poster for the Pringle Family Garage Sale so scintillating that you just have to discuss it with someone-- which you shouldn't, because reading is to be done alone and never discussed for fear that it will interfere with test security and thus influence reliability.

So that's Reading from a test perspective. My experiences with it as a student are still fresh enough that I can still picture myself marking those little bubbles with my number 2 pencil, but I also have my own children's recollections as a touchstone as well.

How does the experience of Reading for a Test match up to the experience of Reading for Real, which is of course, the thing that gives the test its validity?

Well, for starters, Reading for Real usually involves having some say in what you read, which usually, in turn, involves reading about things you are interested in. I just finished reading The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Ken Robinson because I found his lectures from the TED website right on target. I am currently reading The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons because I find studies of how the mind works fascinating and illuminating (and in the case of this book, sometimes a little disturbing). I plan to read next a book called The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely-- sort of as an antidote to the Gorilla book. Frankly, I just liked the title. I also plan to read some Billy Collins poetry soon because my wife read some of his stuff aloud to me recently and I thought it was fun. I'm planning on reading the new Steve Berry thriller because I like page-turners with history thrown in, and I'm also thinking of reading Hard Times because it begins with a scene set in a classroom that makes me realize that education reform is nothing new. Oh, and then there's the teacher books I have lined up, including the new Jeff Wilhelm book, Being the Book and Being the Change.

In other words-- my reasons for reading what I do are both recreational and professional, sensible and idiosyncratic, odd, quirky and perfectly sensible. And they are personal. They are mine. Standardized reading tests quickly turn into standardized reading instruction, and this personal aspect of reading goes out the window. Reading becomes something you are assigned, not something you choose. No wonder so many kids hate to read.

Some will make the case that much of what our students will have to read will be assigned by the workplace, which is a real world situation, and therefore the test is still valid. Well, yes-- to a certain extent. This argument assumes that most of our students will be getting jobs that have no intrinsic value to them and are not innately interesting to them. Most of us, though, attempt to get jobs that in some way mesh with our abilities and interests, and as such, reading done for and on the job are of practical use and are intrinsically useful to us. Even if we get a job that does not mesh with our interests, the reading we do is still practical for something real: if we understand this text, we can perform this task, solve this problem, understand this procedure better. By choosing that job, you chose the texts that go along with it. There is some connection to reality. Our students don't even choose to be in school, much less to be taking a state Reading test. And when they are done taking the test, they aren't supposed to talk about it to anyone and it is doubtful they will ever use the information in any practical or even theoretical way.

And so I repeat: Reading becomes something you are assigned, not something you choose.

Beyond choosing what you read, Reading for Real is a different process as well. There are seldom questions at the end. At work there may be, but again I argue that such questions have practical application. But for most of us who read, most of the time, reading is not dictated by looking at a set of questions and then reading to answer those questions. And we are not constrained by the narrow band of concerns those questions represent: main idea, fact and opinion etc. In fact, when we read for real, we may be looking for any number of things: to be entertained, to be put in suspense, to imagine sights that the most skilled CGI artists could never do justice to, to be shown insights we could never have come to on our own, to put ourselves in someone else's shoes, to find the phrase or scene that suddenly helps us make sense of ourselves or our place in the world.

We read to make meaning. We read, not to rush through looking for pre-programed one-right-answers, but to savor what the author has achieved, to take in all of the text, not just the parts that have questions at the end. We read to come back to our everyday reality a little wiser for the wear. We even go to disagree and become angry with an author-- because there is no one right answer in the world of Reading for Real.

We read to get answers, but also to find new questions. I find it interesting that some books, fiction and nonfiction, are sometimes placing questions in the back pages-- but not multiple choice questions. They are adding open ended discussion questions for book clubs-- because in the real world we can share the questions and not only look at each other's answers, but discuss them, challenge them, and compare them to our own. Reading for Real is both solitary and gloriously social.

And I haven't even touched on the connections that can be made. I find themes and ideas that connect my non-fiction reading to my fiction reading and to poems I have read. I find that books I describe to others have things in common with other books I've read. Ray Bradbury connects to Charles Schulz and Walt Disney and Daniel Pink and Stephen Sondheim and Dr. Seuss and Madeleine L'Engle..

We make students take our tests, and then we tell them they must not read their own books when they are done testing. As I said earlier, I find this ironic and telling. We are so afraid of the power of real reading to lure kids away from the test, that we deny them the right to pick up a book. This, in the name of "reading achievement." What does it say about our priorities as an educational system? But what also, what does it say about the power of books, and Reading for Real, and the hold they still have over many of our students?

Are Reading tests reliable? Probably. But are they valid? Do they represent what real readers do? Do they contain in their tiny sets of empty bubbles all the things reading can do for us? Or do they reduce reading to a race to find the one right answer?

I supposed I could end this post with a multiple choice test-- but I won't.

Standardized Beach Evaluation

2011-05-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

This is a quick post.
Read the following article about "beach ratings" by News-Journal columnist Mark Lane, one of my favorite local writers.

Even when you have a supposedly "objective" evaluation tool to rate something like a beach-- it doesn't work.
http://www.news-journalonline.com/columns/footnote/2011/05/29/3-dots-beach-walking-road-walking-and-base-walking.html
As Lane says, "Beach judging is a matter of taste even when you have a 50-item checklist to go by."

So is "Teach judging."

A Literacy Education Manifesto

2011-04-09T15:10:00.000-07:00

I have been an English/Language Arts teacher for nearly 20 years, and most of what is going on today in education flies in the face of everything I believe about literacy education. Here are the beliefs that are currently taking control of literacy in public education:

The only things that matter in education are things that are easy to measure.
The reasons we read and write are primarily economic: to get into college so we can get a better job and compete in the new global economy.
Reading and writing are primarily about jumping through someone else's hoops.
Dissecting and analyzing the works of great writers is better than simply enjoying them, and better than actually emulating great writers and trying to be one yourself.
Conformity and standardization are more important than individualism and creativity.
For the sake of consistency, anything you do in your classroom should be common with the classrooms around you.
Only the product (summative assessment) counts; not the process (formative).
If it isn't "scientifically" research based, it isn't valid.
Reading consists of applying ready-made strategies to answer someone else's ready-made multiple choice questions about a text you didn't choose and would probably never read on your own.
Writing consists of putting ideas on paper as instructed about an topic you care nothing about to meet the demands of a ready-made rubric so someone you've never met can give you quantifiable score.
Teaching is the dispensing of ready-made materials to the metronome of a pacing guide, in the hopes of raising scores on writing prompts and/or multiple choice tests.
Teachers' personal passions, tastes, favorite stories, ideas, creativity, and insight should be left out of the classroom in favor or research-based programs and strategies.
Teachers should just be quiet and do as they are told. They don't need to think about what they are doing.

In contrast to those ideas, all of which are currently in vogue, here are a few alternative ideas. They are not just my ideas-- I have been given these ideas and had them shaped by individuals too numerous to count, but they form my manifesto:

The only things that really matter in literacy education are things that are difficult or impossible to measure, things like:

           Meaning: the creation of purpose and urgency about what really matters in a student's life;

          Engagement: the development of students' own tastes in reading and voices in writing;

          Experiences: the experimental, tactile, interpersonal, memorable, often unstructured events that            happen in class that are remembered long after "test" knowledge has left the brain;

          Insight: the freedom for students and teachers to have exciting, new, and useful things to say about old topics, and the ability to see new topics in the world around them that others have never really thought to notice.

We read and write not just to succeed on the job and compete, but to explore the very idea of success, and to question our society's idea of it. We read to be affected by what we read-- inspired to agree with some authors, angered enough to disagree with others-- but always shaping our visions of ourselves, of other people, and of the world around us in light of each new book we read. We read and write because literacy can make us more thoughtful as friends, as sons and daughters, as parents, as citizens, and as human beings.
Reading and writing are not primarily about jumping through someone else's hoops, but about discovering our own purposes for reading and writing, knowing how to set our own standards for what we want to get out of the things you read, and what to demand of yourself when you write.
Great writers wrote to be enjoyed and appreciated, not to have their works vivisected, still kicking and screaming, under pads of sticky notes and highlighter ink. Great writers would rather see young writers searching for their own greatness than analyzing someone else's.
Individuality and creativity should nearly always take precedence over conformity and standardization. The very literature we ask our students to dissect (everything from A Wrinkle in Time and The Giver to Fahrenheit 451 and To Kill a Mockingbird) is about the value and virtue of the individual improving society by standing up for himself or herself and the less fortunate. (By all indications, creativity is the wave of the future in business, too, not standardization.)
As for the word "common," (as in common assessments, common curriculum, and common classrooms)-- common can mean not only "shared," but "trite," "mediocre," and "vulgar" as well.
Reading and writing, like life, are about the process as well as the product. A good product is a good thing to keep in mind, but in seeking standardized skills sets, we are looking for the wrong product. We need real products, but the product is not all we need: often it is the process that we learn from, that becomes part of who we are, that we take forward with us into our lives.
Just because something has the word "research" attached to it, doesn't mean the research was of good quality or had anything particularly insightful to say. Any educational program that purports to show improvement through students getting better at that program should be highly suspect. We can tell standardized testing is a good thing because standardized test scores are up? The insight and intuition of the individual may often trump research, and often works better on the fly.
Reading is not just the act of applying strategies to a text you don't care about and then answering questions. Reading is about choosing your own reading materials based on your passions and interests. Reading is, in fact, about having passions and interests. Reading is about making sense of what you read, having your own reactions to it, and making your own connections to life, to your life, to other things you have read or watched. It is about letting what you read move you in some way-- to feel, to think, to act. Even when it is practical reading for some job or chore, you read to take real action, not to just answer questions.
To paraphrase John Dewey, writing is about having something to say, not about "having to say something." It is about the need to say something because you care deeply about the world or about something that is in it. Writing is about wanting to be heard by real people, not just read and rated by an overworked, anonymous scorer. Writing is about wanting to amuse, inform, entertain, or persuade other people about something that matters to you. It is about finding new things to write about that may surprise others and yourself. It is about discovering who you are and what you believe. It is about seeing how your writing can affect other people and the world around you-- in ways that can never be quantified.
Teaching is not checking off items on a list of assessments by the correct dates. Teaching should be an adventure. Each year should be a chance to get to know your students, their needs and enthusiasms and frustrations, to try to find a way to reach them. It's okay to have a goal in mind, but the goal should be about the students, not about the data. I think to myself, "What do I want them to be able to do?" Teaching is about having traditions-- stories you know will work and that you teach year after year-- but it is also being willing to turn your year into a blank slate and start from scratch if that is what your students need. It is about dreaming up the right assignments and exercises for your students. It is about finding just the right essays for your students to read, and teaching your students to find just the right topics to assign themselves. It is about teaching students to find just the right essays and books to read for their own reasons. Teaching should never be completely the same old thing.
The best teachers teach out of who they are-- out of their individual passions, tastes, and insights, and with their own creativity intact. You cannot give away creativity, insight, and passion for your subject if you are not allowed to have them for yourself and bring them into your class. The best teachers teach out of who they are and in doing so help students find out who they are, what they care about, and what they have to say.
When we have a society full of teachers afraid to speak up, who view obedience as their chief duty, we may someday have a generation of citizens who are afraid to speak up. If reading, writing, and speaking are some of our nation's greatest freedoms, how is it then that we expect the very teachers who are the torch bearers of those freedoms to not be free to write and speak about the things they see destroying their profession, disengaging students, and turning literacy into a packaged product by testing companies and publishers?
Reading and writing need to be restored to their true power, not confined to #2 graphite bubbles and the cramped boxes of rubrics.
Our children need to know that reading and writing are what make us who we are as humans and as individuals, that the pen is mightier than the sword, and that literacy is about having the power to change your life, or to change the world.

The Right Words-- What Literacy Means

2011-02-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." - Mark Twain

Everyone seems concerned about the literacy skills of our nation's students. They can't pass standardized reading tests. This is a problem. So we think the way to get literacy rates up is to "skill and drill" students on discrete reading skills and giving them more tests. If they don't pass, we put them in "intensive reading classes" with 90 minutes instead of 45 minutes of skill and drilling them on discrete reading skills. These students miss PE or elective classes-- year after year. We track data with increasingly expensive and complex data management systems in hopes of getting the scores up.

I think before we do any more skilling and drilling and data gathering, we gather a different kind of data. We should look at what our successful, high scoring readers have in common: they read a lot. My own children, in grades 7 and 9 last year, made perfect scores on the state Reading test last year. Guess what? They both read. A lot. Practice for the testing merely bores them. And why do they read? Not just because they love it, but because it means something to them.

Here's a question that I think we should ask every "low level" reader. Can you describe a time you got the right words at the right time from somewhere? In other words, can you tell me about a time you got advice or a good idea from another person, from a book, a song lyric, a poem, a comic strip, a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, or a movie or TV show? What words help you make sense of life, help you make decisions, guide you along the way?

I got this question from Marlo Thomas's collection of essays, The Right Words at the Right Time. She posed the question to a variety of famous people-- everyone from Whoopi Goldberg to Matt Groening-- and got all of them to right essays about their answers. The books makes a fascinating, varied read, and the essays are nearly all examples of vivid, insightful writing. For the past several years, I've asked my 7th grade students to read several of the essays and then write their own. Many of my students each year jump into the task with enthusiasm; it's hard for them to choose which words to choose from the many that have been meaningful to them. Others find it hard to come up with an idea at first, but eventually realize they do have "right words" trotting around in their heads.

But a third group of students, sometimes half a class, cannot think of anything. I will sit with these students one-on-one and say, "Nothing you've ever read in a book has meant something to you, has changed your life in any way?"

"No."

I continue, "No song lyric, movie line, poem, piece of parental advice, friendly encouragement, religious teaching, bumper sticker or T-shirt wisdom, or movie line has ever made a difference for you?"

"No."

"In other words, no words, whether spoken, in print, recorded, videotaped, or filmed or transmitted by mental telepathy have ever meant anything to you?"

"No."

"How do you run your life? How do you make decisions? What guides you as you make choices and choose how to act?"

The answer I get? Usually a shrug.

So, while others are mainly worried about whether students can jump through the hoops of a multiple choice test, I worry about the fact that they are not reading because it has never meant anything to them. To be so disconnected from the power of words to transform your life, help you make sense of it, and help you make sense of your self, other people, and the world at large, is to be less than the human being you could be.

You might say that words mean nothing to them because they can't read. But remember, the advice could have come from any source, printed, oral, or recorded. I would venture to say that the real problem is the reverse: that they can't read because words mean nothing to them.

Instead of making "reading skills" our focus, perhaps we should start with what really matters: reading as the making of meaning, reading as a personal, passionate experience that can have a real impact on how we live our lives. I am literate not because I once passed standardized tests; I once passed standardized tests because I was literate. And I was literate because books moved me, changed me, and helped me live my life.

The Chronicles of Narnia and the essays written by their author, C.S. Lewis, the psychology of M. Scott Peck, the non-fiction musings of Madeleine L'Engle, the scientific works of Carl Sagan, autobiographical reflections about cartooning written by Charles Schulz and Chuck Jones, the comic strips of Schulz, Bill Watterston, and Gary Larson... These just scratch the surface of the books that have brought meaning, and purpose, and clarity, and insight to my life.

Because I was immersed in reading, because my reading (and I would add, viewing of movies and cartoons)meant something to me-- sometimes meant everything to me-- passing a reading test was a no-brainer.

We have reached the point where we view reading for personal pleasure and meaning and engagement as a nice gimmick to raise test scores. What if test scores were merely used as one kind of evidence that students were reading for personal pleasure, meaning, and engagement?

What if low test scores were less of a crisis for us than the fact that so many of our students have never heard or read any words that meant anything to them? Think about that again for a moment. Many of our students have never heard any words that meant anything to them. Never. Words have no impact on their lives. Is it any wonder they can't read and can't pass tests?

What if we made linking every student to words that mean something to them our chief priority? What if every student could tell you about a bunch of favorite authors? What if every student could tell you all about his or her favorite book? What if every student couldn't answer the question, "What were the right words at the right time for you?" not because no words were ever the right words, but because so many words have been so meaningful, it's too hard to choose.
Read more: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mark_twain.html#ixzz1F5hVTstq

I shared some of the ideas in the blogpost in my acceptance speech for county teacher of the year in 2004.

How many reforms can dance on the head of a #2 pencil?

2011-01-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

I was pondering today, as I often seem to lately, why I had a headache. It's not just because I teach middle schoolers that I had a headache. They usually don't give me a headache anymore, frustrating though they might be. They are, after all, middle-schoolers. It makes sense that they frustrate me. No, what frequently causes my headache these days is hearing about a school reform. But I wondered-- why should hearing about one school reform cause my head to hurt? Well, because each school reform that comes along is adding to the pile of school reforms that are already in place.

In the past, I think school reforms had a shelf life of about two years, after which time they expired and were replaced by a new reform. This wasn't a great system, but at least you only had to put up with one reform at a time. You dealt with Open Classrooms until Cooperative Learning came to chase them off. Somehow, somewhere along they way, they began putting preservatives in school reforms, because now they never go away. They can last forever-- like Twinkies-- and are often just as full of artificial ingredients. We don't get rid of them; we just keep piling more on the shelf.

Here is a list of school reforms. Some are older, ongoing reforms. Some are newer reforms to the now-aging older reforms. Some are brand-spanking-new reforms. All of them, whether programs, systems, or philosophies, purport to fix the problem of our nation's supposedly failing public schools:

Standardized testing
Florida's version of standardized testing, FCAT, and its recent update, FCAT 2.0
Charter schools
Merit pay
No Child Left Behind and Annual Yearly Progress
Race to the Top
Scripted curriculums
Value added assessment
AVID
Professional Learning Communities
Character Education
Smart Goals
Student Learning Objectives
Common formative/summative assessments
End of course exams
Rubrics
Grading reform
Mainstreaming
Coteaching
Outcome based learning
Vouchers
Florida Senate Bill 6 (a sequel coming soon to a legislature near you!)
Proficiency model
Curriculum mapping
Academies
Differentiated accountability
Inquiry learning
Data-driven instruction
Common core standards
Teacher evaluation reform

That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more. (The list is 30 items long, by the way.)

My point is not pick on any particular reforms. Some of the reforms I've listed above, Inquiry Learning for example, I am actually fond of. Others, not so much (you can probably guess which ones). My point is this: most of these things are being done to teachers right now. All at once. It is reformation overload. It is difficult to keep track of them all. Some of them come flying at us with little or no explanation, and by the time we've learned what they are-- here comes another one!

There is a percieved fire, too many feet are trying to stomp it out, and these feet end up stepping on each other.

Everyone is trying to fix education. Would it be too much to ask that we slow down and let one thing work, or not work, before we try something else? Trying to adapt to thirty-some-odd reforms in the midst of trying to teach is giving me a headache.

Day of Blogging on Education Reform

2010-11-22T19:32:00.000-08:00

On this, the National Day of Blogging on Education Reform, I return after a long absence to offer a few thoughts.

Maja Wilson recently posted a piece to the Huffington Post about how she's come to hate the word data-- she compares it to a swear word. I recently journaled about other words I hate-- and then words I love.

Here are the educational words I hate:
Data
Assessment
Formative assessment
Summative assessment
Common
Systematic
Measurable
Testing
Scores
Levels
Intensive
Progress

These words, in isolation, are cold, inhumane, dehumanizing, technocratic, and, at best, uninspiring.

Here are words about education I love:
Creative
Holistic
Human
Observable
Exercise
Artistic
Workshop
Open Ended
Messy
Enthusiastic
Passionate
Fun
Insightful
Authentic
Real
Inspiring

The approach to education that is being forced from the top down on teachers and students is sterile, unimaginative, and stifling. Every time I go to a meeting where one more measure, assess, and classify scheme is unveiled, I end up with a splitting headache-- a headache that goes down my neck into my shoulders and makes my whole spine feel like it wants to split in two. Why? Well-- here's just one example of the irony going on here.

Reformers promote Professional Learning Communities. The object of PLCs seems to be, so far as I can tell, to insure that teachers in a subject area collaborate to make sure no one is being creative and everyone is doing the exact same things at the exact same times. Got that? Now, add to that the fact that reformers want merit pay for outstanding teachers. Here's my question: How can anyone be outstanding if everyone is being forced to teach exactly the same way? How can these two ideas possibly coincide? How?

Wait-- I'm going to take a couple of "Aleve."

I'm back now.

Education reform is not going to work if it alienates our best teachers and makes them think about leaving the profession. I can't tell you how many great teachers I know who are thinking of leaving the profession. I've lost count. And I start to think about it more and more frequently myself. And it's not the students that make me want to leave. Or the parents. Or my principal. I love my school. I don't love what is happening to education right now.

I get great test results-- but I do it by not focusing on testing. I don't focus on data. I don't turn my students into test scores. I treat my students as people, and I focus on real life reasons to read and write. I make writing and reading fun. I am constantly trying to come up with new, creative ideas that will motivate my students and teach them to read and write better in ways that actually matter to them.

Reformers give lip service to wanting great, creative teachers. What they really want is teachers who are motivated primarily on money and who care more about scores than about students.

Here are some suggestions for real educational reform:
Look at data with a "grain of salt," acknowledging its limitations and using it to look at trends, to see what students might need extra help, and not to grade teachers or condemn students to years in intensive classes that make them hate those subjects.
Focus less on what is measurable and more on what is observable. Do you really want to walk on a campus and see students being treated like numbers, teachers teaching in lockstep with each other and focusing on tested skills and standards?

At a workshop at the National Council of Teachers of English this weekend, we brainstormed what we'd like to see at school. Some of the answers: smiles, kids reading books just because they love them (not for points, and not because they had to chose books in their lexiles), creative lessons and projects taking place, student and teacher enthusiasm, student projects and work on display, engaged students... the list could go on.

Put the cart in front of the horse. Test scores should be indicators that the right things are going on in a school. What happens at a school shouldn't primarily be about getting higher test scores.

If education reforms make good teachers want to leave, they are bad reforms. I think I'm a good teacher. I know these reforms make me want to leave.
If education reforms make students hate school, they are bad reforms. My new sixth graders told me they were actually enjoying writing in my class and that they'd been hating it. When did they start hating writing I asked? In fourth grade, when they took the state writing assessment. Over-emphasis on testing kills enthusiasm.
If education reforms kill creativity, which is the skill of the future as Daniel Pink points out, they are bad reforms.
If education reforms dehumanize students and make them feel lost in a system where their scores matter more than they do, they are bad reforms.

True education reform will promote teacher initiative and creativity, as well as authentic learning experiences that focus on student creativity and student engagement. True education reform will honor the fact that teachers are motivated not by quick bonuses for test scores, but by trying to help kids and love of their professions.

True education reformers would listen to teachers, students and parents, not statisticians, politicians, and businessmen.

True education reform would take away my headache and make me happy to go to work each day again.

Tolstoy-ian Teacher Evaluation

2010-08-25T17:25:00.000-07:00

Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (which I've read, thank you very much, but not in the original Russian) begins with the observation, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I've sometimes wondered if I really believed that to be the case, but the phrase has stuck with me. It recently occurred to me to turn it on its head and apply it to teaching.

I might start an epic, thousand page novel about the teaching profession with the line, "Ineffective teachers are all alike; every effective teacher is effective in his or her own way."

And I think this might be just as true as Tolstoy's observation. Ineffective teachers, and I have seen them and had them as a student, all seem like variations on a few weary themes: laziness, meanness, unconcern for his/her students, promoting actual hatred for a subject area instead of affection for it.

Effective teachers on the other hand... how different can they be? Very different. Just think about any effective teachers you had over the course of your schooling, and you'll find that their classrooms might just as well have existed in different universes, the contrast in teaching styles was so vast. My third grade teachers, Mrs. Bittel and Mrs. Gottung, were certainly different from each other, and from my high school English teachers, Mrs. Hughes and Mr. Jacobs. And Mr. Jacobs was certainly different from Mrs. Hughes. I got different things out of their classes because they were different teachers.

Mrs. Bittel was an older teacher with a red hair and a husky voice who I remember as being very caring and very encouraging. Mrs. Gottung, who later retired to become a semi-professional actress, was quite stern about the fact that I shouldn't be drawing cartoons in her Reading class. But after taking my cartoons away to teach me a lesson, she later let me create worksheets for the other students that taught them how to draw characters and create comic strips. I got to draw on the carbon ditto papers! This was an almost unheard of privilege, and I can't overestimate how being allowed to do it raised my self esteem.

Mrs. Hughes, my eleventh grade English teacher was very soft-spoken and somewhat formal, wore high collars, and talked to us about "taking poems apart and putting them back together." (I think these days we're pretty good at the dismantling of literature, but not so much at the putting it back together.) She was very encouraging of my writing.

Mr. Jacobs, who I took for a whopping four classes my senior year of high school, was encouraging but demanding, writing things like, "You deserve to be led around on a leash for a week for the spelling mistakes in this paper!" But he would also thoroughly read our essays not just for proofreading, but for content, and write things like, "You are very perceptive about adult relationships for someone your age." He also gave me scripts and cast recordings when he found out I liked theater and was trying to write plays of my own.

I didn't want my teachers to all be the same. It was their glorious differences that made them effective for me. Some were nicer, some were meaner. Some really good teachers came perilously close to looking like ineffective ones on the surface. Some teachers that looked pretty good on the surface were actually not very effective.

As we talk about ways to evaluate teachers effectively, we need to be truthful. It isn't going to be easy, because it's very, very complicated. We may not like that it's complicated, but it is; we may want it to be simple, but it's not. All of the testing and "value added" measures we are using to try to make teaching measurable are an attempt to make something complex into something simple.

The irony here is that we want our students be able to think critically, not simplistically, and to deal with complex issues in creative ways. Sadly, we seem to be shooting for this ideal by pretending that the complex acts of teaching and learning are simplistic, one dimensional issues instead of complex ones. If we really want education to be a simplistic, easy to pin down endeavour, we should heed Oscar Wilde-- be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

I'm not saying that evaluating teachers is not possible-- I'm saying it's complex. That's one of the reasons the dreaded "status quo" has stuck around for so long-- it was easier than dealing with the complexity. But what we are headed for is merely another way to avoid complexity. By saying that higher test scores are the only result that matters, we are losing an awful lot of what makes teachers great. I do not remember any of my teachers for what they did for my test scores. I remember them for the ways they changed my thinking, my writing, my life, ways that were uniquely their own.

Re-Purposing Education

2010-08-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

I've recently had a dawning realization, one that I haven't heard anyone else out there discuss. I was thinking about Maja Wilson's terrific book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment recently, and was struck again by the idea that the multiple choice test, as developed originally, was designed to serve a "gatekeeper" function.

The original IQ tests, designed by Edward Binet, were at first designed to help determine which children might need extra help. Later, the IQ test was adapted for the purpose of figuring out which soldiers were best suited for which tasks in the army. The ultimate purpose of some of these tests, according to Nigel Brush, was to "rank social classes and races according to their intellectual development." In other words, there was an inherent element of racism involved. The testing was to "rank" students-- not to help them.

In Maja Wilson's book, she relates the history of how the College Board moved from written tests to more reliable standardized multiple choice tests, so that colleges could rank students to determine who was college material or not. The very concept of these tests was to decide who got in and who got left out. One variation of the multiple choice test, the Army Alpha Test, actually led to the National Origins Act of 1924, which created quotas designed to keep out the least intelligent immigrants-- immigrants whose intelligence as a race had been determined by their test performance. Testing could be used to keep people out of colleges and universities, and out of the country. The tests weren't devised initially to be something everybody could pass. They were devised to be so hard only a few people could pass them.

Now we are saying that everyone must pass them. This change is a stunning reversal. One might say that the we have moved from norm referenced tests designed to rank to criterion referenced tests designed to show mastery-- but this is a label. The style of multiple choice question has changed very little, and is the same for both kinds of tests. What was once designed as a small gate to keep people out is now being used as a gate we must shove everyone through-- but we have kept the gate just as small as it ever was. I'm seeing signs that we are starting to crush a few students in our attempt to get them through that narrow gate.

The other reversal I noted came as we looked at last year's test scores at school during pre-planning week. We were looking at our students' test rankings, which go from a Level 5 (the highest) to a Level 1 (the lowest) with a 3 being a "passing" score. At nearly every grade level, in both Math and Reading, the majority of students were in the "Level 3" range. Fewer students has scores of "2" or "4," and fewest of all had a "1" or "2."

I found myself muttering, "It's a bell curve!"

In my era of being a student, and even in some of my college education classes, this "bell curve" was something to be desired. If everyone was passing a test, maybe it was a little too easy. If everyone was scoring high, it was much, much too easy. If everyone scored low, it was too hard. A bell curve met that you had a "Goldilocks" assessment-- not to easy or too difficult, but just right. It meant that you were doing your job. A bell curve was what everyone expected to see-- and indeed is what one sees on a "norm referenced" test that distributes students according to their percentile rank. But now the bell curve is bad. Now everyone must pass, but without making the test any easier to accommodate this requirement. And yet, we are still seeing the bell curve on our critereon referenced test. Could it be that the bell curve just appears in nature, even when we try to avoid it?

Don't get me wrong. I want all children to learn. I try to get all my students to learn. But I don't think we are acknowledging the complete reversal of policy we are experiencing. The kinds of tests that were created as a very high benchmark to keep unworthy students out of colleges are now being set as the bar for all students reach. The bell curve, which used to be a sign of education validity, is now a sign that you are failing many of your students.

If our goals have changed, from exclusion to inclusion, from ranking students to reaching students, shouldn't our tools for evaluating learning change as well? Hasn't Science taught us that the way we look at something often determines what we see?

I'm merely raising questions. I don't have the answers yet. But I think the questions are worth raising.

All Subjects not Created Equal

2010-07-24T07:58:00.000-07:00

Our system is currently obsessed with measurement, with numbers, statistics, and data. I can only assume that the system is being run by a lot of Math People. I have nothing against Math People, though I have never, ever been one. My son is a Math Person beyond compare (but he is also that rarity-- a Math Person who is also a Word Person). In any case, Math People have a certain way of looking at things, and that way of looking at things biases them.

I have come to the conclusion that we are trying to treat all subject areas in school as if they were equal, and, in fact, that we are treating them all as if they were Math. The last time I checked, I wasn't teaching Math-- I was teaching Language Arts.

All our testing is based on a simple premise: The test-meisters ask a question, and give us four possible answers. Only one is right. Choose the right answer and you know your stuff; choose the wrong answer and you don't. Now I am not a Math Person, but it seems to me that this method is uniquely suited to Math, where there is only going to be one right answer.

Not only is there one right answer, generally speaking there is usually a single way of arriving at that answer (which is why we have Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally). In other words, Math is a subject where we want everyone to think in exactly the same way. You must think about the problem in a certain way, and then follow certain steps in a certain order to get the proper answer.

Mistakes are made in Math when you a. misinterpret which steps need to be completed, or b. complete the steps incorrectly, or c. random guess because you don't care which train will arrive in Detroit faster. The point is, everyone who is going to get a Math question correct on a test is going to essentially have to think and do exactly the same things to get exactly the same answer. I'm not putting down Math. I admire Math ability. But that's just the way Math is.

Now let's swing to the other end of the spectrum, which I consider to be Language Arts or Art itself. I teach Language Arts, and the chief areas we test are Reading and Writing. Let's look at Writing first. On most state Writing tests, students are given a "prompt," otherwise known as a "dull topic" to write about. Whereas in Math, everyone must think about problems in exactly the same way, in Writing, thinking about things in exactly the same way is frowned upon. This is a good thing. In recent years, some Florida Schools have been flagged for inspiring children to use formulaic elements in their essays, catchy similes like "I was as nervous as a marshmallow in a campfire," or onomatopoeias like "Poof!" This is bad. Students are supposed to think of their own details-- not just plug generic, prefab details into their essays.

The Writing Test does involve certain similar things happening with all students, and they are clearly spelled out in the rubric: they should focus on the topic, they should be organized, they should use vivid details and good word choices, and they should follow the rules of writing "conventions." And these are, in fact, what a lot of good writers do. (I would argue that these four categories represent a reductionist view of writing, but that's for another post.) Within those categories of writing activity, though, students are not only allowed, they are expected to write differently from person in the next desk, school, or county over from them. This is a pretty big shift from how things are in Math, where only one type of thinking is allowed.

And so Writing is different from Math, and is, to a certain extent, treated as different. But in the end, we slap a number on each essay.

So what about Reading? I would make the case that the flaw with Reading tests is that they treat Reading like Math, as an impersonal, one right answer kind of subject, when in fact Reading is more of a divergent thinking kind of activity. Are there obviously wrong ways to interpret something you've just read? Yes. But is there wiggle-room for interpretation? Yes again. That's what makes classroom discussion of a story or essay so rich. We do our students a disservice when we constantly hammer them with the idea that there is only one way to read something, and that what you bring, or don't bring, to the text as an individual has no bearing on how you read and interpret something.

And what about other subjects, like Science and History, which I view as falling in the middle of the spectrum? Yes, there is the Math element in these subjects: Science obviously involves measurement and numbers; History obviously deals in dates and statistics. But Science is also about the flash of insight that gives us the theory of relativity, or a brilliant idea for a Science Fair project involving Mentos and 2-liter bottles of Diet Coke. Science is about creative problem solving. History is more than just the facts-- it is making sense of those facts, interpreting them. The History teacher I work with assigns a paper about the Salem witchcraft trials that asks them to look at a whole slew of documents, both historical and modern, and then argue what they think caused the witchcraft hysteria. Again-- a similar kind of thought process for each students in terms of reasoning, but many right answers because of different interpretations of the data.

We are attempting to treat everything as if it were math-- and everything is not Math. Not being a mathematician myself, I have possibly drastically underestimated how much creative thought goes into higher Math when you start using it for real purposes-- say in Science.

We need to realize that everything isn't Math, though, just as not everything is Language Arts. As my wife, Andrea, and I discussed this subject this morning, she pointed out that you wouldn't want a standard measure for all accountants, doctors, lawyers, and journalists. You want your accountant to be good at Math and have some knowledge of tax laws; you don't necessarily want him too creative. A doctor who is too data driven and Mathematical my not look enough at the whole person in diagnosing a problem. I have seen and read about too many people who had a drug thrown at them by a doctor who completely missed what the real problem was. A lawyer represents a delicate balance between the factual/analytical and the creative/verbal as they balance legal issues with making a convincing argument. And journalists are supposed to give us "just the facts," but if they do so in such a bland and lifeless writing style that we skip the article to head right to the Funnies (not that there's anything wrong with the Funnies!), he isn't doing his job as a writer.

Everything isn't Math. There is certainly a place for Math, but when we try to view everything through a mathematical lens, we get a skewed perspective, just as we would get a warped view if we looked at everything only through the lens of art and intuition. Our students need to be able to use multiple, and often overlapping windows on the world around them, and with the statisticians in charge, they are often being given only one.

I am not saying I am "against accountability" which is the mantra I keep hearing from the pro-testing crowd every time someone criticizes testing. I am against only having one way of looking at everything. Some things can be measured, but others can only be observed. But that's a topic for next time.

Let's Vilify Teachers!

2010-06-18T16:07:00.000-07:00

A while back I posted a letter in the Orlando Sentinel in response to a story about teachers taking more Mondays and Fridays off than other days. In reply some retired businessman who viewed himself as the epitome of the Puritan work ethic slammed me for the things I said. This week my wife wrote a My Word comparing the problems of public schools to the education problems at Hogwarts in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series.

The first reply she got online was negative, all in favor of the testing, and implying that teachers don't like accountability. I wrote a reply (although my wife assured me that I did not need to defend her honor) about why teachers don't like the over-emphasis on testing. The first "replier" wrote back to say, "Sounds like the problem isn't the test, it's the teachers." This is as if to say, I guess, that I am a problem teacher. I mentioned that I get high scores, but I guess that isn't enough.

I replied, The only thing I can conclude after reading the other replies here is that there is nothing a public school teacher could do that would make them happy. We're not saying to get rid of the testing entirely-- just emphasize it less and realize its limitations and pitfalls. I understand, there's weak teachers out there. Yes, it should be easier to get rid of them. But that's no reason to vilify all of us. I don't think anyone is really listening to what teachers are saying, and the union doesn't always speak for all of us.

Is the only good teacher a private school or charter teacher? If you have qualms about the test obsession, does that make you a bad teacher? I don't think so.

I doubt I'll get a reply, but it seems that a lot of people have taken on this attitude: if you are public school teacher, you are part of the problem, especially if you have any kind of problem with the testing programs and "accountability" schemes. Here is the stereotype I'm getting, in broad strokes, from this kind of online comment-poster.

Public schools are failing because of teachers. Teachers are at fault. They are lazy, and they go into the profession in hopes of an easy, big paycheck and no accountability on the job. They don't really care about kids, they don't really care about learning, they don't really care about their subject areas. They just want to assign a few assignments, grade a few papers, get paid a bundle, and have job security and summers off. Teaching is easy, and bad teachers are untouchable. If there are any good teachers, they have fled to private schools or charter schools.

Public school teachers are uniformly bad, but if there were any, here's what they would look like: they would obey orders without question. They would drill students on test skills till they can pass those tests, even at the expense of their loving or even tolerating the subjects they teach. They would not think for themselves. They would not teach children to think for themselves, because you can't give away what you don't have.

I don't know exactly where these people are coming from, but that seems to be their attitude. I have a question. Do teachers have the power to evaluate other teachers? Do teachers have the power to fire other teachers, or even put them on notice that they are doing a bad job. If there are "bad" teachers in schools, it seems to me that it is the fault of the administrations that keep them there, not of the other teachers. It is not as difficult as it used to be to get rid of a teacher.

I really wish people would stop vilifying teachers and join in real discussion about what good teaching is and what good teachers do. I wish they'd stop assuming that if we don't like testing we don't like to be held "accountable." I hold myself to a higher standard than any standardized test. But the teacher haters won't listen to any of that. No matter what we say, no matter what we do, we are the problem.

What Really Matters ISN'T Data

2010-06-16T19:41:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted. The last month or so of school I was heavily involved in working with my 8th grade classes on creating and publishing novellas on Lulu.com. Between three advanced/Gifted classes, we published-- I think-- about 13 or 14 short novels. Most students worked in groups of their own choosing; some worked alone. What was consistent was their level of engagement. Every group spent days on end planning and hammering out the details of their characters, back-stories, settings, and plots. None of them are great literature, but they are all attempts to tell a longer story and make all the pieces fit together-- something most of them had never done before.

This account of my busy-ness is more than an excuse for not having blogged for awhile-- it is a segue into the blog itself. I'll circle back around to the novellas shortly, but first I'd like to leap back a bit earlier in my year with my 8th graders. As part of a unit about the media and its effects upon us, its users, we read an essay this fall entitled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" by Nicholas Carr. This evening I finished Carr's book-length expansion of that essay, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. The irony is not lost on me that I am blogging, on the Internet, about a book that suggests the Internet has the capacity to turn our brains to mush. The book expands on and gives more evidence for the ideas expressed in the original essay: the Internet alters our brains with repeated use by turning us into skimmers and skippers instead of deep readers; the people who have developed the technology of the web often see the web as superior to the human brain. There are other ideas as well-- it is well worth reading. But what I found most satisfying, most telling, is his epilogue. He talks about reading a small story about a British educational testing firm that is introducing an automated, computer-based writing assessment program. The company is a "subsidiary of the media conglomerate Pearson"-- which I believe is the same company responsible for he current tardy FCAT scores debacle in Florida. According to Carr, the computer scoring program eliminates "human elements" like fatigue and subjectivity in the scoring of student writing.

As I said in my post "In Defense of School," we are heading toward a program of "reading and writing like substances" that bear very little resemblance to real literacy. The computer grading of writing has been for me the very epitome of the bottom-line, data-driven thinking that is dominating education. It is fake writing on a fake topic for a fake audience to get fake feedback. There is no human element at all, except perhaps the human frustration of the students forced to sit through such a "writing" test. It makes me want to scream, but that is where we are headed. In my district, some schools already use a computer-graded program, sometimes more than once a week. When I criticized the program in my local newspaper in an op-ed piece, I was afraid I had offended a friend whose school uses the program. But her response was, "You didn't say anything that wasn't true." She knows the program isn't the best thing they can offer their students, but they feel it brings those writing scores up-- and that's what it's all about, isn't it?

Well, no. Real writing is not and never will be about fulfilling the requirements of a rubric. Real writing is not and never will be something a computer can grade. ReLeah Cossett Lent, who did the forward for my new book, told me a story about a school using a computer scoring program for writing. One student wrote about time travel, and the computer marked her down for having poor organization because the events weren't in chronological order. Real writing is about people having something to say, saying it well, reaching an audience, and having an effect on people.

Nicholas Carr, in addressing the issue, wonders, "would the Edexcel software discern those rare students who break from the conventions of writing not because they're incompetent but because they have a special spark of brilliance?" He then answers his own question: It wouldn't. My only disagreement with Carr here is that he assumes that students who can break from conventions to do something brilliant are "rare." They don't have to be. But when close-minded adults grade students according to a five paragraph, cookie-cutter formula, they get rarer. When computer programs score students' essays, and we start tailoring our instruction to meet the demands of the machine, those brilliant students may become extinct. Humans should be running our writing programs, not machines. Is that so difficult to understand?

Every time my students write I see signs of that brilliance, because I let them actually express themselves. When my students wrote their novellas, the the creativity in the room was palpable. One group wrote a thriller set in a toy store. Another wrote about a murderous pizza delivery boy. There was a civil war romance, a murder mystery on a space station, a fantasy about stars that fell to Earth, and a thriller about a boy who discovers he's in witness protection . . . and the list goes on. They were not writing to please the demands of a machine, but to please themselves and their real, human readers.

We are in a dangerous place right now, I fear. We have become reductionist about everything. Reading is a way to get a score. Writing is a way to get another score. When reading and writing become mere scores, they no longer have the power to change our lives, to change our minds, to change the world. Turning writing into a piece of data robs it of its power, which I think may be what the powers-that-be want. People who don't think for themselves, who have had their brilliance beaten out of them by machines and the people who program them, are easy to . . . control.

My own children will be beyond school age when Florida rolls out its computerized end-of-course exams in a few years, exams that will no doubt include computerized writing scores. I wonder if I would even let them take a computer-scored writing test. I think I might have to pull them out of school first. And in the meantime, within the next five years, I could find myself in the position of getting my students ready for the computer writing test. Who knows better what good writing is-- me, or a computer program? Apparently, we are preparing to opt for the computer, and that may be when I have to opt out myself.

Merit Pay for Pundits?

2010-04-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

After reading the Orlando Sentinel's and Mike Thomas's increasingly opinionated and vituperative columns in support of Senate Bill 6 (now vetoed) and merit pay, I've had to ponder how merit pay would work for a newspaper columnist. Thomas and other pundits are very big on "measuring" teachers' success. How do you "measure" a columnist's results, I wonder.

Would you look at whether the column improved sales of the newspaper? How do you isolate that result? Many factors influence why people buy or subscribe to a newspaper. Aren't there too many variables to make it clear what one columnist did for sales. Say you could determine that a columnist did, indeed, improve sales. Does it matter whether the columnist is saying anything valid or merely being sensationalistic and controversial just to score more sales? In the "results only" world favored by the education reformers, the end justifies the means, so only sales would matter, no matter the quality or truthfulness of what the columnist says.

Or we could make merit pay for columnists parallel what it would look like for teachers. We should survey the columnist's readers and measure how many of them agree with the columnist. If not enough readers agree with the columnist, he has not done his job of convincing he people. His journalistic credentials should be taken away and he should be hurled from the profession. No Reader Left Behind.

Every day teachers not only teach, but try convince resistant learners that learning is worthwhile. I cannot guarantee that my efforts will succeed with every single student any more than a columnist can guarantee that he will get every reader to agree with him. But I keep trying, and I'll bet more of my students are convinced by my persuasive techniques than are the readers of the average columnist.

In Defense of School

2010-04-17T08:22:00.001-07:00

If kids have learned, they should be able to pass a test about what they learned, right?

This simple premise seems to be at the heart of nearly every education reform scheme currently on the market. Teachers teach, students learn, students take a test, and the effectiveness of the teacher is determined by how students did on this one test. It's so simple- almost elemental in its simplicity-- that I can understand how seductive a concept it is.

Really-- isn't teaching as simple as that? Teach and test. Teach and test. They learned it or they didn't. You taught well enough or you didn't. Measure the results. If students don't pass the Test, then learning did not occur, and the teacher is to blame.

I have tried to explain to people why this teach and then test system is unwise, but until recently I had a difficult time of it.

I found the solution to my rhetorical dilemma not in a book about teaching but in a book about food. I recently read Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, and as I read it, I found myself thinking that its concepts don't just apply to food-- they apply to education.

Pollan's premise is fairly simple. We have, for the past few decades, tried to use science to improve how we eat. We have tried to break down food into discrete nutrients and elements, both good and bad, to be either sought out or avoided. Currently, omega 3 fish oils, fiber, and certain vitamins are good; trans fats, sugars, and carbs are bad. Or I think they are. It might change next week.

Because of this focus on discreet elements within foods, the "whole food" no longer matters. What matters is what the food contains. This obsession with nutrients, combined with a desire to make food that will last longer for shipping and self life, has lead us to be consuming a lot of what Pollan calls "food-like substances." For the past several years, I have been guilty of this dietary crime. Every morning before school, in the name of saving time, I have been drinking Carnation Instant Breakfast drink (now called Carnation Instant Breakfast Essentials Complete Nutritional Drink). This product contains 20 grams of sugar and ingredients like pantothenic acid and copper gluconate. I don't think it's food. It is a food-like substance. But it is supposed to contain all the nutrition of "a complete breakfast!" I have a few more packets left, and then I'm going cold turkey, I think.

In any case, Pollan insists that much of what we eat is not, strictly speaking, food at all. He also makes the case that we are constantly confused by what is good and bad for us, because we are basing all our food choices on "nutritionism"-- the science of nutrients. He claims that the beneficiaries of this confusion about food are the food industry, scientists, and journalists. He says all three parties "stand much to gain from widespread confusion surrounding the most elemental question an omnivore confronts"-- i.e., what to eat. He espouses eating what he calls "whole foods," and gives a list of guidelines for good eating at the end of the book.

Before I take these ideas about food and apply them to education, please don't think I've given away Pollan's whole book. He gives away his main ideas himself on the cover and the first few pages-- what's fascinating are the details he uses to back up his claims. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Now-- how do the ideas from In Defense of Food apply to school? Well, the parallels are quite striking.

First we have become obsessed with teaching discrete skills-- sometimes called standards-- at the expense of looking at the big picture of how a student is being educated. Nutrients become skills or standards, and Nutritionism becomes what I will name Standardism. Only the standards matter. To make sure we have the proper nutrients-of-the-week, we isolate those nutrients and pump them into food-like substances like Carnation Instant Breakfast Essentials Complete Nutritional Drink or Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. Food-like substances make health claims, but are actually bad for your health. To make sure we are getting our standards in easy-to-measure isolation, we pump those discrete standards into standardized tests, and into the test-preparation materials that go with them.

So instead of teaching real reading and writing, we teach discrete, measurable reading and writing skills, what I call "reading-like substances" and "writing-like substances." You may ask what the difference is, but there is a world of difference.

Standardism turns reading into an activity where you read a "text" and then answer a series of multiple choice questions. There is only one right answer. Your personal connection to, resistance to, or like or dislike of the "text" does not come into play. Reading is about using discrete skills to answer questions for which there is only one right answer.

Real Reading is about not just understanding the low-level meanings for which there is only one right answer. Real Reading is about making a connection to the text, understanding that there is more than one correct interpretation, and that real understanding may happen on multiple levels at once. I recently taught Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to my Advanced and Gifted eighth graders. The discussion we had could not be captured on any kind of standardized test. They made connections to our current society, to their own lives, to other essays and fiction we'd read earlier in the year, and to movies they'd seen. We analyzed how one scene in the book could play out on multiple levels. When Montag is forced to burn down his own house, it works as plot, character development, theme, irony, figurative language, and symbolism all at once. And my students "got" it. When they finished reading the book and wrote reactions to it, some of them were less than enthusiastic about it. They are, after all, middle school students. But some of them wrote things like, "It made me appreciate the fact that I am free to read the books I want," and "I am going to start reading more books!" The book had made them think about life, and about the power of words.

Making reading all about discrete, measurable skills takes away the real power of reading, the power of essays and stories and poems and novels to have an effect on us, to change our lives, to make us better people. Standardism actually undermines our students' capacity to think independently and to resist ideas they disagree with. In that sense, it actually undermines real education, and perhaps even weakens democracy.

Standardism does similar things to Writing. The Standardism approach to writing is this: We will give you a rubric that shows you what good writing is supposed to be. We have defined good writing and made it scientifically measurable. We will give you generic topics that you don't really care about (gum chewing, school uniforms, snacks in class) and have you persuade or inform an imaginary audience. Your writing will not actually affect anything. Your goal in writing is to move higher on the rubric scale. We will give you some tricks and techniques that will move you up the rubric. You do not have anything of your own to say, and your writing will have no affect on the world or on yourself.

Real Writing, on the other hand, is about having something to say and wanting to share it with people in hopes of moving them, changing their minds about something, or getting them to act. I even count on-the-job writing about assigned topics as real writing, because it is serving a real purpose and needs to communicate real ideas to real people. Real writing involves thinking about how what you have to say determines how you will say it, and how you will organize it. Real writing is about expressing ideas that really matter to you. It is about observing what real, published writers do and trying to emulate them, rather than writing to a cookie-cutter formula and using a bag of tricks to move up the rubric. Real writers don't think about rubrics. They think about how well this piece of writing has conveyed the meaning they wanted to convey. Real writing can be a journey of self discovery, can help you figure out your place in the world. Again, Real Writing is about the power of words. Standardism teaches students that they have nothing to say, and that their words will affect no one and nothing. It is both bad education, and bad for democracy.

One note-- please don't tell me that "they're just students and have nothing to say. " Go talk to some real middle-schoolers. They have plenty of opinions, and they need to test them out to see if they are valid or not. Real writing is one of the only places where students can try their ideas on for size or take them for a test drive. The only students I've met who claim to have no opinions are the ones who have been crushed under standardized prompts.

Food-like substances are making us overweight and diseased. Reading and Writing-like substances may be leaving our students with underdeveloped minds that are disconnected from the power of words.

And just as our confusion about food benefits scientists, food manufacturers, and journalists, our confusion about literacy benefits scientist/statisticians, test/textbook manufacturers, and... journalists. Statisticians have a lot to gain from the constant measuring of supposed progress. Test makers are making a killing off of the testing craze that has swept the country. And journalists and pundits within journalism get to write story after story where they talk about "student achievement" (or the lack thereof) to sell newspapers and magazines. The powers that be say teachers have a vested interest in the status quo. I would make the case that scientists, test-publishers, and journalists have a vested interest in "reform," and not because the reforms will benefit children.

The cover of In Defense of Food has a very simple message: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. This is where my analogy breaks down a bit.

By saying "Eat food" Pollan is saying that we should eat real food, not food-like substances. In that, the analogy holds. Most of what our students read and write in school should be the real deal-- reading and writing with a real purpose. "Not too much," doesn't relate to real literacy-- I think that you can never get enough real literacy. I would apply "Not too much" to relate to testing. Some testing isn't bad, if we understand that it's not supposed to be the whole diet. As far as mostly plants-- well, I'm not sure what literacy activities count as plants, but I would say maybe they're the things that offer the most benefit and the least harm to students' minds.

If you look at the students who score the highest on the tests, they score high not because of test prep, but because they engage in real literacy, and the skills gained spill over naturally into the test results. When testing, Standardism, becomes the main concern, we lose the real literacy that makes students truly successful and lose both the true literacy and the test scores.

We are giving our kids Instant Education Essentials and hoping that the influx of standards and skills will make them educated. We need to give our students some fruits and vegetables, literacy that is real, purposeful, and meaningful. Pollan makes the point that when we get our food from corporations, we rely on rules and regulations to make sure our food supply is safe.

When all our educational ideas are handed down from the government and corporations, we must rely on rules and regulations and "accountability" to be sure it's good. Pollan recommends going to the farmer's market for real food, grown locally. Pollan says that in a "long food chain" (where food goes a long distance between where it is produced to where it is eaten) "Farmers can loose sight of the fact that they are growing food for actual eaters rather than for middlemen." Food becomes impersonal. In a short food chain, he says, "eaters can make their needs and desires known to the farmer, and farmers can impress on eaters the distinctions between ordinary and exceptional food." He says that as soon as you make food personal again by shaking the hand that feeds you, "accountability [there's that word! -dlf] becomes once again a matter of relationships instead of regulation or labeling or legal liability.

The politicians and test-makers and pundits want it to be all about rules and regulations and measurement. But true accountability comes when I shake a parent's hand and let them know what I'm doing for their son or daughter to help their particular strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, no top down scheme can create a truly great teacher. Only the personal desire to help students grow for real can make you a great teacher.

Unless we give our students real literacy, we risk making our kids tune out and drop out of school more and more, and, worse, having the ones who stay be good citizens in the worst possible sense: unquestioning drones who know they must obey, and that for any given question there is one right answer.

Between Episodes 4 and 6

2010-04-17T08:16:00.001-07:00

With Senate Bill 6 vetoes and temporarily out of our hair, we have some breathing room-- I hope-- for discussion. If anyone cares to listen. My next few posts will be about the issues that we should be discussing, and how they actually impact both students and teachers.

I feel as though with this veto passing, we have blown up the first Death Star, but somewhere out near the forest moon of Endor, another one is being constructed. The Empire is going to strike back...

But this is not a war of spaceships, lightsabers, and clone troops. This is a clash of ideas. We need to make sure our ideas are not just seen as defending the "status quo." We need to bring fresh insights to the table, because if we keep saying the things we've been saying, no one will listen.

After all, the Empire of Testing keeps saying the same things over and over, and that's why we've stopped listening ourselves.

So here I go, with my small contribution to the discussion. May the Force be with me.

Right Brain vs Left Brain-- We Need a Whole Brain

2010-04-08T18:03:00.000-07:00

The current battles raging in education are really battles between the two halves of our collective brain. Or maybe that's wrong. Maybe it's a battle between Whole Brainers and the more limited Left Brainers.

Years ago I learned about the differences between the two hemispheres of our lumps of gray matter when I read, and did the exercises in, Betty Edward's terrific book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I got a crash course review of those brain traits when I read Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future recently.

In case you've forgotten, the Left Brain is logical, sequential, verbal, analytical-- it sees the parts of things. The Right Brain is more spatial, more wholistic, and sees relationships between things, the meaning of things. Left sees the little parts of the picture; Right sees the Big Picture.

Left brain tends toward the bottom line, toward measurement, toward proof. It wants the correct multiple choice answer. That there might be more answers than the A, B, C, and D presented is not something that occurs to the Right Brain. That there could be more than one right answer is also foreign to Left Brainers.

And so Left Brainers have taken over school policy-- from the political Left and Right. We talk about measurement, and progress, and measurable progress. Everything is about data, numbers, and statistics. Left Brainers are really following the old philosophy of logical positivism: If I can't prove it, I don't believe it.

But if Daniel Pink is right-- and I think he is-- putting all our eggs in the Left Brain basket will leave our students with an impoverished view of reality-- and possibly an impoverished future. His premise is that Left Brain jobs, which have dominated our ecomony for decades are being automated by computers or outsources, and that the wave of the future is Right Brained jobs that focus on things like design, story, empathy, and meaning-making.

And so depriving our kids of the Arts and limiting them to a Left Brained analytical, multiple choice version of "student achievement" isn't only bad philisophically-- it's bad ecomonically, too.

The Reformers' attempts to remake American education lack vision, because their Right Brain prejudice has left them without any Big Picture. They think education is just to get you a better job. Right Brainers know that it is also to make you a better person. Left Brainers' myopia has also left them with a basic misunderstanding of what motivates people. In their Left Brain, bottom-line world, people are only motivated by money-- something you can measure. But as Pink's other recent book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us points out, many of us (and I think many, if not most, teachers) are motivated not by money, but by the sheer love of what we do.

Left Brainers don't understand this. They are motivated by money.

Scientists have just been catching up with this truth about motivation in recent years, but artists and writers have known it forever. This past summer my wife and I were in a local production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play You Can't Take it With You. We did this production for the love of it. Our kids helped backstage, too: our son rigged fireworks to go off and our daughter was the designated "kitten wrangler." The play is essentially about a family of Right Brained free-spirits, the Sycamores (played by yours truly and my wife Andrea), who run up against a Left Brained family, the Kirby's. Mr. Kirby is a stock broker. The Sycamore clan consists of a fireworks maker, a printer, a ballet dancer, a playwright/painter, etc. The families don't exactly hit it off.

In the end, the grandfather in the play (played by Andrea's cousin!) gives a speech about the need for us to do what we love and love what we do, as the "Life is Good" shirts say. The Right Brainers win out, and even the stuffy Mr. Kirby looks like he might dust off his saxaphone and start playing again-- his childhood dream.

As education moves toward more and more measurement and less and less joy, maybe it's time the Right Brainers find a way, not to wage war on the Left Brainers, but to remind them that we need both halves our brains, our whole minds, to succeed in life-- not just the half that's easy to measure.

When Teachers Are Temps

2010-03-26T18:36:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today as I looked around my classroom-- what would my room look like if I thought I might get fired any time during the next five years due to low test scores? Would it make me more committed to my profession, or view it as temporary work? Would it make me think about the long haul, about investing in my school and in my own professional development, or would it make me think only about test scores and keeping my job.

I painted my room two tones of blue with a sponge roller a few years back. It's quite striking, if I do say so myself. It creates a neat environment. If I thought of myself as a temp worker, it would still be beige.

I have a tall library shelf in my room brimming with paperback and hardcover books for my students to read. I have purchased them with my own money from the Scholastic Warehouse and library books sales. If I were uncertain of my future in teaching, that shelf would probably be empty. No-- I would never have asked for that shelf to be put in my room in the first place.

I have crate of copies of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury that I purchased with teacher lead money from the state (for once, a good idea) and with, again, my own money. I bought them because I believe that the book is important and will help my students grow as writers. Would I have bothered if I thought of myself as a commissioned employee whose main task is to boost test scores?

I have another shelf full of professional books, reference books, and teacher resource books. Again, virtually all of them I purchased myself because I considered myself a professional-- in for the long haul. Would I have bothered to get all of those books, if I thought a couple years of dipping test scores were going to cost me my teaching certificate? I think you know the answer.

We hear about how tenure keeps bad teachers in the profession. We don't hear about what it does for good teachers. I feel secure enough about my job to want to invest in it. I am grateful for the opportunity to do a job I love, so I invest in making my classroom the best place of learning it can be.

I view teaching as a profession-- as a lifetime commitment, as a calling. They are asking me to consider it a mere job. I think of my classroom as a learning environment that I shell out my own money to create. They are asking me to think of my classroom as a room that I am in-- for now-- if I can keep those scores up.

My room would be a beige, book-less bore if I thought of myself as a temp. Please don't tell me you are elevating the teaching profession by changing it from a Calling to a job.

Questions Matter More Than Answers

2010-03-25T17:53:00.000-07:00

Senate Bill 6 has passed the Senate and has gone to the House. What has been heartening this week is how many people outside of teaching have actually started standing up and saying how this ridiculous it is to make everything about the test.

They say basing our evaluations as teachers on the test will help sort out the Bad Teachers, as if there is some kind of Secret League of Bad Teachers. The thought that has occurred to me as I think about my own children, who easily pass the tests with flying colors and always have, is that for me, a bad teacher is precisely the one who worries about test scores too much.

I don't want my children in test preparation classes. I want them in classes that will make them think, challenge them, inspire their imaginations. I want my children to learn more than bubbling in correct multiple choice answers. I want my children to have nuanced thinking. I want them to see both the shades of gray in the world, but also the places where the things are definitely black and white in a moral sense.

Our children have always passed the tests, not because of any test prep their teachers have done, but because their teachers have made them excited about learning, and because our home is a place of books, discussions, books, jokes, word play, and thought. When test scores become an end in and of themselves, the things that actually make for good test scores go out the window.

Is it possible to have high test scores and be a Bad Teacher? I would say yes. If you put test scores above real writing, real reading, real thinking, real reasoning, real science-- then you have your priorities all wrong. If you get high scores but leave your students cold to your subject, you are a bad teacher. If you get high test scores, but your students have never been touched by a book or written something that really mattered to them, then you have failed. If your students can bubble the correct answers nearly every time but can't think for themselves, then their educational system has failed them.

I just finished teaching Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to my Gifted/Advanced 8th Graders. What happened in their heads and in my room when we were discussing that novel cannot be measured on any "instrument." The ideas we discussed, the connections they made, the questions they asked-- these are what learning is about. In the book, the girl Clarisse McClellen says that the schools pound answers at them, but no one ever asks questions, and compares the school of that future society to so spouts pouring liquid down funnels, and the teachers saying it's wine when it's not. I asked my students what that made them think of, and they said, "FCAT."

Asking good questions is often, very nearly always, more important than find the "right" answer. I don't want my students to learn the testing game and think it's an education. I want my students to ask, "What does it mean to be educated?" and then to find answers. The most important things can't be captured on a standardized test.

As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

How do we measure whether teachers are teaching good questioning? Good question.

Senate Bill 6 Would Have Doomed Me

2010-03-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

If Senate Bill 6 has been around back near the start of my teaching career, I probably wouldn't be teaching today, 17 years later. I'd like to think I'm worth having around.

Senate Bill 6's proponents want to make it easier to get rid of "bad" teachers, defined as teachers who don't improve test scores. The sponsors seem to be operating on a paradigm that children are just beautiful blank slates to be written on, or else dry sponges waiting to soak up knowledge. If they aren't learning, then someone isn't bothering to write on them or drench them in knowledge. They fail to realize that some slates are far from blank, are, in fact, already written all over with anti-education messages. And some sponges are downright resistant to soaking anything up at all.

Early in my teacher career, I landed a job teaching ninth grade Language Arts at a rural school. After two years of semi-employment, I was thrilled to finally have a job. The thrill wore off quickly, especially when the designated spokesperson for the ninth grade class came forward to inform me that the ninth grade class, as a group, had made one teacher either quit or get fired every year since Kindergarten, and I was next. (As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.)

What followed for the next few months was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. I was spit on when my back was turned. Students brought hog urine (used by hunters to throw animals off their scents) and sprinkled it around the room. They set off stink bombs. In a Godfather-like move, someone left a severed chicken head in my room. When I had a sub, my grade book was taken and thrown in a boys' restroom toilet. My license plate was stolen off my car and thrown in a ditch. Every class period was a struggle to get through. I was sworn at across the campus by various students-- every single morning. I had not done anything in particular to these students. I was just "fresh meat" to them and they were out to get me. I was nauseated every morning going to work and exhausted when I left.

I asked their eighth grade teacher how she had handled them. Her reply: "I went home every night and cried."

"Oh," I said. "I'm already doing that, and it doesn't help."

I had supportive administrators who helped me get through the year, and ten years later I was a county teacher of the year. Many of the activities that won me the award were things I invented to try to reach those students during that horrible school year. They were effective lessons, but those students didn't care a thing about learning. They were too busy plotting the best place to put a stink bomb. With a different set of supervisors, I might have been blamed for what I now see was a horrible circumstance beyond my control. If my job had been dependent on their test scores, those students would have "Christmas-treed" (random guessed) the test just to get rid of me. Getting rid of me was their stated goal.

The people who put forth pieces of legislation like Senate Bill 6 have no idea what some teachers are dealing with, and for all their calls to have "excellent teachers" and get rid of "bad teachers," I don't think they would know good teaching or bad teaching if they saw it.

If I'd been a new teacher under Senate Bill 6, would I have been fired for incompetence? Probably. Would I have been fired for not raising test scores? Undoubtedly. I would have been completely at the mercy of the stink-bomb brigade. Would 17 years' worth of students missed out by not having me as their teacher? Definitely. And would that have been a loss?

I'd certainly like to think so.

Some things can't quite fit in the frames

2010-03-18T17:03:00.001-07:00

This blog, which I hope to do weekly (we'll see) has been spurred on by the fact that I can't always fit everything I want to say about education into my daily comic strip, "Mr. Fitz." Somethings overflow and need a different kind of treatment. I have also recently had a crisis, partially brought about by Florida Senate Bill 6, which seeks to tie teacher salaries to test scores. My crisis has been this: am I sick enough of what they are trying to do teachers to try to leave the profession in disgust?

Turns out the answer is no. I feel called, in the most old-school mystical kind of way, to teach. And I feel called to defend teaching, real teaching as opposed to test-prep, from those who seek to destroy it. And I am defending teaching not just for the sake of teachers, but for the sake of students everywhere. The standardized testing craze narrows curriculum and changes our perception of what teaching can be and should be.

Hence this blog-- a place for me to, I hope, be a voice of sanity and reason in a world where both ends of the political spectrum have gone crazy for "accountability."

Don't stop reading the strip though-- I'm hoping the two formats will compliment each other.