By Mark

Unlike too many schools, we are in a position to hire. Last week, we interviewed candidates for two positions in my department--one replacing an irreplaceable veteran moving on to retirement, the other filling a new position resulting from enrollment growth. 

In total, we had over 70 applications submitted. 

We narrowed it to the interview pool, and each interview was impressive enough to warrant an offer. That's a good problem to have. 

In a break between candidates, my administrator, fellow humanities teacher and I started talking about how we would answer the questions we were posing to these candidates. We were asking them to deconstruct their lesson planning process, evaluate their own teaching, outline not only their management philosophy but also the practices that they find successful or challenging. We asked about standards, technology, collaboration, pedagogy, parent relationships, discipline...and more.

Obviously, when looking for a job a good candidate will expect to have to put all this on display. A well prepared candidate will have already anticipated this kind of scrutiny and be ready with details about his or her own practice.

And in the past, the reality has been that after the job interview, most teachers are never asked to do that depth of thinking about their own practice. Ever. Again. The interview was the gate, we said the magic words, and we passed through into our classrooms where we could shut the door and be the professionals we proposed ourselves to be in that interview.

By Mark

I've been having a bit of a problem lately in my classes. 

My students were tasked to create a visual metaphor of the allegory represented in George Orwell's Animal Farm, do research about the "factual" side of their allegorical connection, and assemble this all into an end product that showed their skills at a whole slew of the Common Core State Standards in ELA-Reading-Lit and ELA-Reading-Informational Texts, with each standard accompanied by a proficiency level scale that clearly defined what achievement of the standard would look like.

My problem is that too many of them are earning A's. Even the kids who aren't supposed to. 

by Maren Johnson

The audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in — and stay tuned in — to watch drama.

~David Mamet, playwright and screenwriter

I don't usually get my teaching tips from television screenwriters, but I thought the above quote was worth some thought. If drama has a wide definition--let's say drama is a story resulting from human interactions--then adding drama to our teaching is definitely a way increase student engagement--the "tuning in" that David Mamet talks about above.

Our students often aren't here for the information, they're here for the drama. The students frequently find that drama in the actions of their peers. One of our jobs as teachers? Try to create that drama in our subject matter and class activities. Is drama necessary for learning? No, but it sure can help. Some ways to create that drama? Building teacher-student relationships, and including stories about content matter and school.

Last week at my school, a teacher sent out a link to an inspiring (and dramatic) Rita Pierson video on teacher-student relationships. Some teachers discussed it at lunch, a few other teachers commented by email. Teachers engaging other teachers, all right.  Another example: also last week at my school, a teacher announced "Staff Spirit Day" with the theme of "Hey, I went to college!" We were to wear our college sweatshirts and tell students positive stories about our college experiences.

No college sweatshirt being handy, I donned my high school FFA jacket--yeah, that's right, vocational agriculture all the way. I was part of an amazing high school FFA team--we competed in nursery landscape contests across the state and even made our way to nationals in Kansas City.

The FFA jacket I wore last Friday prominently featured the name of my high school, a neighboring school district to the one in which I now teach. As I was sharing stories of high school and college, one of my current students reminded me, "Ms. Johnson, my grandpa was your high school biology teacher!" Sure enough, which meant that my teacher-student-teacher relationship with this family now spanned two school districts and several generations! Good, we've got some human drama.

This high school biology teacher, as I described to my class, was a colorful character, a former Marine who was able to do push-ups with one arm while suspending himself between two student desks. He brewed coffee in his science prep room and gave us worms to dissect. He retired with the graduating class: the students proclaimed him the "Senior senior."

By Tom White

It's over. My students have prepared for and taken the 2013 fourth grade Measurement of Student Progress. It's now behind us. Let me offer a few observations and reflections, based solely on my students' experiences:

-The adults seemed a lot more anxious and stressed out than the students. Maybe it's because they were so well-prepared. Or maybe because their evaluations aren't riding on the results. Or maybe it's because they're just kids and they haven't learned to take everything seriously yet. Whatever the reason, my students simply came in, sat down, listened to the directions, did the work and read quietly until everyone was done.

-For some reason the narrative writing prompt was the same as one of the released prompts from a few years ago. That was weird. In a good way, at least for my students, since we used it as a practice exercise a few days earlier. I'm not sure if the test writers goofed up or just ran out of ideas.

-Watching kids take an hour-long test is really boring. I'm used to being incredibly busy for seven hours straight when I'm at work. Boredom is something I only dream about, but when it finally came, it was horrible.

-I find it insulting that teachers aren't allowed to look at student tests to see how they did. There's a lot of useful information in there. I have no intention of changing any answers; I just want to see what the answers are.

-While reading the directions for the math test, I noticed that it listed protractors among the approved, supplemental materials. I stopped the proceedings and sent someone down to the office to get a class set of protractors. I didn't see anyone using their protractor for any constructive purpose, and after the test, I asked my students if they actually needed them. They didn't. Well played, OSPI; well played.

-And finally, this: Like most schools, we did everything we could to maximize our students' testing performance. We rearranged schedules to provide for long, uninterrupted blocks of time, we sent home letters to the parents, asking them to make sure their kids got plenty of sleep, exercise and nutritious food. We provided snacks during the tests, to make sure they weren't hungry. We even ensured that there were no intercom or phone calls in the rooms where kids were testing.

We did it all.

Which made me wonder: why don't we take learning as seriously as we take testing? Why don't we make sure our kids are rested and well fed when they're learning? Why don't we post signs on the doors saying, "Quiet! Learning in progress!" Why don't we make sure kids aren't having recess right outside the windows when we're teaching? And why don't we make sure phones and intercoms don't interrupt our lessons?

I have no idea.

 

By Kristin

You don't have to have a lot of money to have a lot of sense about money.  Say your car is an older car.  If you have good financial sense, you take care of it.  You replace the brakes before you also need to replace the calipers because you know that will save you $500.  You take it into the shop at the first sign of malfunction, because you know that dealing with an early problem is cheaper than dealing with a big problem.  You make sure your tires have tread, because sliding on wet pavement and crashing is expensive.

People with poor money sense end up spending more because they're reluctant to spend.  They go from crisis to crisis, spending more than they can afford and more than they need to.  Our goverment at both the state and federal level is demonstrating a terrifying lack of money sense when it comes to early learning.

by Maren Johnson

I had an outstanding student teacher this year. It was a positive experience for both of us: some lucky school in our area will be very fortunate to have her as their new science teacher. Hard working, enthusiastic, and knowledgeable, she makes the future of the teaching profession look bright!

We don't often get student teachers in our school because of our relatively rural location somewhat distant from college or university teacher education programs. When we do get student teachers, they frequently are completing online certification programs. For prospective teachers in rural areas, or for those who move during their education or need to continue working to support themselves, online learning is often the only option. My student teacher completed an accredited online program with a strong presence in our state.

My student teacher excelled in the classroom. Her clinical supervisor, a retired teacher from our area, provided helpful and supportive feedback, and was definitely an asset to the student teacher's development. The online program's student teacher evaluation system, however? More than a little funky.

By Tom White

For over half a century the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSO) has chosen a National Teacher of the Year from among the state Teachers of the Year. After meeting the president and getting a large glass apple, they get to spend the year traveling around the country representing the teaching profession to large and small audiences.

It’s a huge honor. And even though there’s obviously no way that anyone could select the very best teacher in the country, given the enormity of the task, they always seem to find someone who really does represent the best aspirations and qualities of all of us in the classroom.

This year, for the fourth time since the program started, a Washington State teacher has been selected. Jeff Charbonneau, a science teacher from Zillah, joins Andrea Peterson (2007), Johnnie T. Dennis (1970), and Elmon S. Ousley (1963) as Washington recipients of the top honor.

And it couldn'y happen to a better guy. Jeff teaches chemistry in the same small, Eastern Washington community from which he graduated, but he does a lot more than that. He designs on-line college courses, teaches robotics, coaches the baseball team and runs the drama program. He earned National Board Certification a few years ago and is also his union’s co-president.

And you thought you were busy?

It’s always fun to see someone from the profession take center stage for a while; reminding the world of just how unique and important this profession is. And to have it happen to someone from our state makes it especially gratifying.

Congratulations, Mr. Charbonneau! You do us proud.

By Mark

When some new idea surfaces in education, it gets acronymized. A general rule: if you want to make a project die, give it a clunky acronym. When the acronym makes a word, it can have subtle positive power (I think of CSTP which comes out as "See-Step"... I look, I move forward) or less subtle negative power (as in the HSPEs--"his pees"--with which everyone has to deal eventually, as opposed to the opposite pronoun which it is best to avoid.) With Common Core on the way the HSPE's expiration date is already set.

That rumination aside, the U.S. Department of Education has released details of its RESPECT initiative which is ostensibly aimed at cultivating teacher leadership, collaboration and potential in an effort to transform the profession and therefore schools themselves. RESPECT is an acronym/acrostic built of the phrases Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching. Cute, a touch contrived, but that's only if you're cynical (which I apparently am, this Saturday morning before coffee).

Let's look at the meat of it. The opening line, "Every child in America deserves a high quality education..." reminded me of the "Don't you care about kids?" question I used to get when I'd vocally oppose our administration's newest trendy initiative. My cynicism started to wear off around page four, and by the end, my gears were turning. 

I see some potential in this. My interest is piqued but any gelling optimism is necessarily cautious. Take a read if you haven't already, (it looks like a 30 page .pdf, but skip the propaganda at the beginning and start around section II...the photos, citations and text boxes bulk up the pagination, so it is actually a fairly quick read).

What do you think? Like my students, I always learn more from the conversation.

By Mark

Change is hard, and for change to happen, trust is critical.

I've been thinking often about trust lately--sitting in meetings with administrators as they strategize how to build trust within a staff. In meetings at the ESD and with OSPI, I hear about how cultivating a climate of trust is vital for evaluation to produce growth.

Thus, we have more meetings, use surveys to find the root of the distrust. Still, I have bosses I trust more than others. I have colleagues I trust more than others. 

And when I sit and listen to my fellow teachers, they likewise lament situations where they do not trust their administrator or evaluators. As a building union representative, I sit in meetings where we talk about erosion of trust, and that the climate of distrust needs to be fixed. We talk about it, point at it, discuss it, and then leave the table waiting for that trust to somehow repair itself.

If I don't trust my administrator to make good choices, there is an assumption about how that lack of trust is to be remedied: If I don't trust you, the only way for trust to be repaired is for you to change.

Bam. There it is.

By Kristin

Last February a Senator from Tennessee proposed legislation that would reduce welfare benefits-  "Temporary Assistance for Needy Families" (TANF) - by 30% if children weren't performing in school. 

"Performing" was defined by one journalist as “Advancing from one grade to the next and receiving a score of proficient or advanced on required state examinations in the subject areas of mathematics and reading/language arts."

The bill is dead, considered too punitive, misdirected, and begging for judicial action to make it out of the Senate debate, but it raises some interesting issues because I think we all saw this coming.  Everyone is desperate to find a way to help struggling students perform better, and various sticks and carrots are being designed to make that happen.

Stories from School would like to welcome Brian Sites as a guest-contributor to our blog. Brian Sites is an alternative educator and National Board Certified teacher, who has earned recognition at the state and national level for his work helping students achieve their full potential at River's Edge High School in Richland, WA. 

This post is an excerpt of his self-publisehd book "Who's Teaching Who? Stories of hope and lessons learned from my first 10 years of teaching" available in pdf format, and free of charge  at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/284848

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The New 3 Rs:    Relationships + Resiliency=  Results

The original 3 R’s (Rigor, Relevance, Relationships) always made sense to me, but I felt as though it missed the mark. To me, I saw an underlying assumption that teachers did not offer enough rigor to their students, and that teachers were clueless about how to teach in ways that make content relevant to the lives of their students. As for relationships…being the third “R” somehow seemed to diminish its importance, as if by somehow doing the other two very well, the Relationships will come naturally.

To me, this is entirely backwards! I see Relationships as the cornerstone of good teaching. Building students’ resiliency is what teachers are supposed to do, but why is it never discussed? My experience tells me that because it is not easily quantifiable, and it is not related to specific content areas, resiliency has been banished from our pedagogical vocabulary.

By Maren Johnson

Educator effectiveness is where it’s at right now in Washington state. Student teachers are currently filming themselves and analyzing student learning for the edTPA (teacher performance assessment). We have a challenging ProTeach evidence-based assessment for teachers trying to get their professional certificate. Approximately 13% of the teachers in our state are National Board certified. In addition to all of this, we have a new teacher principal evaluation system that is currently being piloted and will go into effect next school year.

Against the backdrop of all these educator effectiveness programs, last week Chad Aldeman, with an organization named Education Sector, released a report titled, “The Evergreen Effect: Washington’s Poor Evaluation System Revealed.” You can read a short summary blog post or the full report. When teachers and administrators across our state are working hard right now to get a new evaluation system up and running for next year, such a report deserves a closer look.

Mr. Aldeman starts by painting the picture of five elementary schools in Pasco. Aldeman talks about how the students perform poorly on state tests while the teachers, despite the low test scores, are almost all evaluated as satisfactory. My fellow blogger Tom White wrote more about this. What does Aldeman not mention? These particular schools in Pasco have 50-70% of their students learning English--some of the highest percentages of English language learners in the state. Our state tests are given exclusively in English—clearly students who do not speak English are going to be at a huge disadvantage. Giving teachers poor evaluations because their English-learning students do not perform well on tests in English is not going to improve student learning!

By Kristin

Are any of us really surprised by the news that 35 Atlanta Schools district officials and employees, including the Superintendent, were indicted because of cheating on state tests?

Of course we are.  In Washington State we're not so whipped about scores that we can imagine going into a windowless, locked room, being called the "chosen ones," and replacing wrong answers with right. I think it should stay that way.  The line between honorable and desperate isn't so thick we can assume teachers in Washington will never be told to raise their scores no matter what it took - wink wink.  In fact it's already happened.

By Tom White

Chad Aldeman, an analyst and blogger for the Education Sector, recently wrote about Washington’s teacher evaluation system. It’s an interesting read. You can cut to the chase by looking at his blog post here, or if you’re feeling ambitious, you can tackle the whole article here.

His basic point is that Washington State judges an overwhelming majority of its teacher as satisfactory, regardless of their students’ achievement. He calls this the “Evergreen Effect” which is a reference to “The Widget Effect,” a phenomenon in which education policy-makers treat teachers as interchangeable “widgets,” ignoring their relative effectiveness.

I have several reactions to his thoughtful piece.

By Mark

It seems like a no-brainer. If you want to evaluate my effectiveness as a teacher, you need to look at what I do in my classroom. If you want to evaluate my impact on student learning, you need to look at the work I make my students do and see how that work reflects my students' growth over time.

This is the right way to judge my job performance. But doing it this way takes time, is complicated for my boss (who has to do the same for two-dozen other teachers in two-dozen other contexts), and requires physical and intellectual investment into practices that can sometimes be uncomfortable and challenging (read: it requires change).

Too often in education, doing the difficult, right thing is avoided in favor of doing the simpler, easier to administer thing. When our students do this, we chastise them for cutting corners and missing out on the real value of the work--by doing so they are only cheating themselves, we tell them. When we do this as a system, we are cheating society.

By Kristin

I'm the short one in the photo.  That's my boat at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta in 1993, my last year of college at the University of Washington.  This picture wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't be a college graduate, if it hadn't been for someone at my high school who, without being asked by me or my parents to do so, put me in honors classes and on a college track.  

SB 5243 does what some mysterious educator did for me in 1984; it requires that schools automatically place a capable student in academically accelerated classes.  What a beautiful policy.

By Mark

Like you probably have, I've read the books, sat through the professional development, and learned the theories. Each time I learn a little, but nothing like what I learn when I get to watch another teacher in action.

Whether it is through video or through actually getting to walk into a fellow teacher's room and just watch, those minutes invested to simply observe pay far greater dividends than the time or money I invest in reading about best practice or watching a fancy powerpoint click away.

OSPI and CSTP, through support from the Gates Foundation, and working on ways to use teacher video as a springboard for meaningful professional conversation in a variety of contexts. The tools being created are literally like being fly on the wall--or like looking through a two-way mirror--into the unmediated workings of a colleague's classroom, a real classroom with its real kids who sometimes aren't on task, sometimes say silly things, or sometimes take a brilliant question to an even more brilliant answer. Hopefully, these resources will be available later this year, but I've had the privilege to be part of designing and piloting some of the protocols that teachers can use to take advantage of the two-way mirror of peer observation.

By Tom

As a people, we have a weird relationship with data. On the one hand, we love to collect it; we love to measure every possible entity from every conceivable angle so that we can arrange all those numbers in tables, spreadsheets and graphs. On the other hand, we like to take all those numbers and distill them down to a single digit. It’s as if we overwhelm ourselves with numbers and respond by getting rid of most of them.

One of my fourth graders was able to put her finger on it. We were learning how to find averages. One of the practice problems involved five kids who went fishing. Each kid caught a different number of fish and my students had to find the average. Like a good teacher, I started with the concrete. I had each student build towers of interlocking cubes corresponding to the fish. When they were done, they all had five towers of cubes standing on their desks. “Finding the average,” I announced, “means finding the number of fish each kid caught, if they all caught the same amount. That means we’ll have them ‘share’ the fish. We take some fish from the lucky kids and give them to the kids who weren’t so lucky. We’ll ‘even out’ the towers until they’re all the same height.” The answer was six. Then I showed them how to find the same number by adding up all the fish and dividing the total by five. The answer was still six.

That’s when Kiran spoke up. “I understand how to do this, but I’m not sure why,” she said, “Why is the average number of fish more important than knowing how many fish each kid caught?” Good question, Kiran.

It’s the same question I have about Senate Bill 5328, which is moving its way through the Washington Legislature. It would require the state to post a letter grade for each school based on how well their students did on the state test. The bill's supporters think it will make it easier for parents to figure out how well their local schools are doing, while holding educators more accountable for their students’ achievement. I think it’s unnecessary, simplistic and at odds with the last school-reform law out of Olympia: the teacher evaluation system.

by Maren Johnson

The Next Generation Science Standards, like the Mars Rover or even some new and strange space ship hovering above a farmer’s cornfield, are about to land here in Washington and in many states across our country.  Our job as educators? Let’s hijack that spaceship. I mean that in a positive way: let’s grab those standards, make them our own, and use them to improve student learning and our science education system.

The final version of the standards will likely be released this month, and probably be adopted soon thereafter by our state.  Some changes from the earlier drafts many are hoping to see? Hopefully, some increased clarity in language and a reduction in the overall scope of the standards, avoiding the “mile-wide and inch-deep” problem.  As one reviewer said, “We're here to produce learners, not people who have been exposed to a lot of content."  Possible opposition to reduced scope in standards? One person mentioned the “Julie Andrews” curriculum problem: what does an individual want to include? “These are a few of my favorite things”—and it is not possible to include everyone’s favorite things.

Why do I say the Next Generation Science Standards resemble a new and strange spaceship?

By Tom White

When I was growing up my father was the city manager of Mountlake Terrace. He was – and is – a cheap man, so when it came time to purchase some additional police cars, he decided to buy a fleet of four used checker cabs from a New York City taxi company. Expecting brand-new, top-shelf Crown-Vics, the police force was not amused. In fact, they made an astonishing prediction: within months, these cars – which they decided were dangerously top-heavy – would all overturn. And sure enough, they all did. Oddly, no civilian witnessed any of these “accidents,” all of which happened late at night. Fortunately no one was injured.

In the end it was a win-win. The cops got their Crown-Vics and my father got a great story to tell at his annual city manager conferences. And at every Thanksgiving for the past forty years. The citizens of Mountlake Terrace, of course, didn’t win; they had to pay for eight cars instead of four, but such is life.

I share this story in light of what’s happening concerning education funding. As we all know, the past few years have been bleak. Class sizes have gone up and para-educator support levels have dropped. Teacher salaries have also taken a 3% hit; absorbed and mitigated by many districts with furlough days, resulting in less instruction time.

Like the cops in my father’s city, teachers predicted that student learning would pay a price. However, this is what actually happened: 

What you’re looking at is math achievement in Washington State over the last three years. Reading and science scores have also gone up. This is not what we predicted or feared. This is definitely not a fleet of police cars rolling around, upside-down in the streets of Mountlake Terrace.

So what happened?

Let me offer three possible explanations, presented in order of increasing likelihood: