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 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 Maren Johnson

 

I'm excited about a new class I'm teaching next year. Yes, it's the honeymoon period--I haven't started teaching the class yet, so I'm still in the thinking, dreaming, imagining period--but hey, it's a good place to be--I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

The new class? It's a "college in the high school" biology class--a partnership between my high school and a state university to offer students dual credit. Students will be able to earn both high school and college credit while taking a class right here in their own school.

The class itself is fascinating. We are going to study the fundamentals of biology while looking through the lens of addiction, psychoactive drugs, and the human brain. We're going to do a series of cool labs, there's an online component, and even an interesting text. The biology of cells, organs, systems, and behavior--it's all there, we're just using a specific, high interest focus--the brain and addiction--to study it.

And why do I have time to think, dream, imagine about a new class? It's because I have a student teacher.

by Maren Johnson

You've never seen science standards like these before. There's a big change coming to science education in Washington state and in much of the rest of the country, and if you want to have a say in it, the time is now. The final public draft of the Next Generation Science Standards is now open for review and will close on January 29, so give those standards a glance! Read as much or as little of it as you want--all feedback welcome. With a strong integration of science and engineering practices with traditional science content, these new standards are challenging and thought provoking. Washington state is very likely to adopt these later this spring, possibly in March, so now's your chance to weigh in.

I've had a few different opportunities to discuss this draft of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS): once in a charming rural cafe with a group composed mainly of local science teachers; once in an urban conference room with science education professionals who were primarily not teachers; and on Twitter at #NGSS and #NGSSchat--check out those hashtags!

So what did people have to say about these standards which are radically different from what we have now in both form and content?

By Maren Johnson

Way back, when I signed up to be a teacher, and a science teacher at that, I never imagined the amount of writing I was going to be doing. Yes, I expected to write some curriculum, student assessments, and the like, but I never really contemplated writing about teaching.

By Maren Johnson

A press release, an op-ed, and a television interview—what’s up with all the media on Washington state assessment? Our Superintendent of Public Instruction just released a new proposal: reduce the number of exit exams required for high school graduation from five to three. This proposal shows concern for mitigating some of the negative effects of large amounts of testing on the Class of 2015, sophomores I currently have as students. Specifically, the number of math exams would be reduced from two to one, and reading and writing would be combined into a single exam. In science, however, the proposal would still move forward with a brand new graduation requirement this year focusing on biology. This means that not only will our state’s sole high school science exam be in biology, but the emphasis on biology will also be increased by making that exam high stakes.

Randy Dorn cited some excellent reasons for the overall reduction in assessments, saying “too much classroom time is devoted to preparing for tests, taking tests and preparing to retake tests.” He also noted the high cost of Washington’s assessment system.

However, there is another factor besides cost and time that comes into play here: assessment drives instruction. When there is a single high stakes science assessment, and that assessment is in biology, then chemistry, physics, and earth science will be neglected. An alternate idea: we could keep administering our existing biology EOC, which would satisfy federal requirements, but delink the biology EOC from graduation. Eliminating the graduation requirement would relieve the current pressure on schools, which, in many cases, is distorting high school science education to emphasize biology. Delinking the biology exam from graduation would also save a considerable amount of money in remediation, retakes, and rescoring. Most expenditures in education hold out some promise of benefit: this expenditure is actually detrimental to science education in our state by marginalizing chemistry, physics, earth science, and STEM.

by Maren Johnson

In my district, we adopted a new framework for teacher evaluation, UW CEL, and I learned a new phrase: Teaching point.  What's that, you ask?  Learning target, learning goal, performance expectation, lesson objective, power standard: while they each have an important nuance of meaning, they all refer to what students should understand or be able to do by the end of a certain period of time.

Posting those learning targets every day so they are visible to all?  Yeah, I've never done that, for a variety of reasons.  However, I have repeatedly heard that all three frameworks in our state are based on research, and hey, I want my students to learn, so when I read in our district’s framework rubric about daily posting as one possible way of communicating learning targets, I figured--I'm game, I'll give it a try—and I have been posting these in class for the last two weeks.

I shared what I was doing with a fellow teacher—and we had a very animated discussion (raised voices in the copy room!) about the pros and cons of posting learning targets and how this might or might not fit into teacher evaluation.  I will say I put some thought into how and when during my lessons I was going to post these targets and discuss them with the students.  I knew that for many lessons, about the last thing that would be helpful would be to have a posted learning target at the beginning of a lesson. 

by Maren Johnson

I attended an amazing conference in Seattle this week, Excellence in Education: Washington State and Finland. We learned about some great things going on in Finland, we learned about some great things going on in Washington, and I experienced some culture shock.  Was it the differences between Finland and the United States that struck me?  Well yes, there was that, and that is what got me started thinking about culture.  However, instead of international differences, I was thinking about some of the cultural as well as philosophical differences between education groups in our own Washington state: differences between people who are in the classroom and those making policy decisions guiding classroom work; differences between policy makers and those doing education research. How to overcome those differences and build on them?  Keynote speaker Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of Finland’s Education Ministry, said, “So much of what we do in Finland, we have learned from American researchers and educators.”  He then very provocatively said the difference is that in Finland, they actually implement that research!  Here in Washington, we need to get those research<—>policy<—> implementation links tightened up, and yes, those are double-headed arrows: information needs to flow each way!

There are some vast historical and social differences between Finland and Washington—an education system cannot just be transplanted.  However, Finland has not always been an education high performer—it languished in the mid twentieth century—but over the past several decades, as Pasi Sahlberg said, “Finland has improved a lot, while the rest of the world has improved a little bit.”  This improvement can be traced to policy decisions.  What are a few of the Finnish Lessons we might learn?

by Maren Johnson

This month on Stories from School, we are trying to expose some of the "invisible" work that teachers do--the things in teaching that may go unseen by others.  Unfortunately, what I have to write about is not at all invisible--rather, it is all too often in our way!  Science teachers, Career and Tech Ed teachers, and other teachers of project and lab based classes spend much of our time functioning as equipment managers--not the most glamorous duty, but a duty, indeed, it is.  You can see a few of us in the photo off to the left, and yes, we are hamming it up for a Homecoming spirit day dressed as Industrial Hazards, but you get the idea--our equipment is large and can be hard to handle.

What are some of the “invisibles” that come with all this equipment?

It's a new school year.  I'm teaching biology and chemistry, classes I have taught for years.  This year, however, there is something new--this year, for the first time, my tenth graders are required to pass the Washington state biology end-of-course exam in order to graduate.

My concern is that a high stakes exam that focuses only on biology narrows the curriculum to the detriment of chemistry, physics, and earth science.  The problem? 

by Brian
 

About a year ago I wrote a post on the idea of using "value-added" as a tool in teacher evaluation.  The Seattle Times weighed in recently with an editorial endorsing it, and encouraging "retrograde union leaders" to quit opposing attempts to link teacher evaluations to student learning.  As a local union leader I cringe at being called retrograde, but I'm getting used to the Times anti-union bias.  I am not opposed to looking at student progress as part of an evaluation system. That makes sense. What I do think is important is that the weight placed on any test score used for evaluative purposes must be commensurate with our confidence in the reliability of the test.  In my high school last year 84% of the students met standard on the Reading HSPE, 91% passed Writing, 42% passed the Math portion, and 43% passed in Science.  In Reading and Writing our students did significantly better than the state average; in Math and Science we did slightly worse.  But look at those numbers.  Is it really reasonable to believe that the same students that do so well in Reading and Writing are so terrible in Math and Science?  Or to believe that somehow the language arts teachers in the state are far and away better teachers than their colleagues in math and science?  Is it possible that the tests might not be fair?  Isn't it possible that the bar has been set at the right level for Reading and Writing, and far too high for Math and Science? 

By Mark

An article in this week's Tacoma News Tribune points out that in the state of Washington, high school math and science teachers get paid less, on average, than teachers of other disciplines. The assumption--not backed up by research or widespread observation--is that math and science teachers are lured away to more lucrative careers in the high tech industry and therefore do not stay in teaching as long.

Besides that, this study by Jim Simpkins, Marguerite Roza, and Cristina Sepe and produced by the University of Washington's Center for Reinventing Public Education raises several valid points about teacher compensation. However, it is what the study does not include that concerns me most.

By Mark

Let me be clear from the outset: I'm not here to argue about whether Obama's speech is good, bad, ugly; propaganda, motivation, or mind control. There are too many unproductive shouting matches going on about that elsewhere on the web. Missing from those shouting matches is reasoned discussion of what I think is a more important question with a much larger impact on what I do as a teacher.

The controversy about the broadcast of Obama's "work hard" speech has precipitated some interesting responses from school districts across the country, ranging from the superintendent of schools in Tempe saying all teachers shall show the address and parents are "not allowed" to opt out, to districts like mine who instructed teachers to get parent permission before showing the speech. These policies have an impact on classroom instruction--much more of an impact than the speech itself--because it brings up the question about how schools should handle politically charged and divisive content, and what the school's role is in mediating that content for students.

Many an educator who attempts to make content relevant will want to connect to current events. Whether its genetic engineering, military endeavors, alternative energies or health care, it is easy for a curriculum to turn into a volatile tinderbox, because these topics and others have clear political implications.

How should schools handle hot political topics?