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The Influence of Teachers

March 19th, 2011

Teachers can never declare “Missions Accomplished,” because they are a bridge, not an endpoint, for all the boys and girls (and men and women) who come into their lives . . . . the teacher’s job is to help students build a self, to create the entity that will be constant company for life. That’s why the best teachers listen to students and draw out their thinking, but don’t try to solve every problem. That’s why the best teachers empathize and care deeply about students as individuals, but never lower standards or expectations.

The words above appear on p. 21 of a new book by John Merrow, who is probably best known as the correspondent on education for The PBS News Hour. The full title of the book is The Influence of Teachers: Reflections on Teaching and Leadership. Merrow comes to this book with more than four decades of commitment to and interest in education: when he could not serve in the Peace Corp for physical reasons, he spent two years teaching high school, later taught at a traditional black college in Virginia while teaching evenings in the local penitentiary. Along the way he obtained a doctorate in education from Harvard and has served on the board of Teachers College Columbia, He has covered education for PBS and NPR since 1974.

As a teacher and as one involved in education I found the book well worth the time spent reading and pondering it. I invite you to explore it with me further.

Merrow, who is devoting all proceed of this book to Learning Matters, the production company he heads which actually published the book. Learning Matters was founded in 1995, and is an independent, non-profit, 501(c)(3) production company focused on education.

The book begins with a brief preface titled “Fighting the Last War,” which is followed by the preface. The bulk of the book is in two main sections. The first, Follow the Teacher, has 8 chapters including such subjects as evaluation, pay, training, retention, recruitment, and tenure. The second, Follow the Leader, has six chapters focusing on issues beyond the scope of individual teachers, such as Charter Schools, school safety, the revolving door of school and system leadership, and turnaround specialists. This examination is important because how a teacher functions is often a product of forces beyond her control, such as the context in which she teaches.

Merrow ends with a brief conclusion, about which I will offer more later, but which I will note now was for me the heart of the book.

Teaching is, and should be, a reflective process. In that sense this book is the product of a teacher’s mind, even if Merrow has not himself for many years been a classroom teacher. He, and the members of his production team, have spent countless hours in schools and in classrooms, observing, filming, talking with adults but also talking with children.

Much of the material in this book has appeared previously, and has been reworked to provide a more coherent overall approach. Teachers often recycle and rework material from one lesson into another: for one thing, we do not have enough time to create every lesson anew, for another, we are learning what works and what needs to be modified, and finally, what we should do should reflect our learning from our students. In that sense, what Merrow is doing in this book is functioning as a teacher, with his tv audience and his readers being the students in his classroom. Thus even though some of the material is not new, it is reexamined and represented in light of the overall goal of the slim but effective volume.

In the preface, Fighting the Last War, Merrow presents three historical purposes of school: providing access to knowledge, socialization, and custodial care. He argues that much of the first two now occurs outside of or independently of what goes on in schools, and if custodial care is all that remains – and if technology is not made available equitably to all, we will continue to see students walk away from schools, leading to an annual drop-out rate of more than a million. He argues that many of the battles on education policy is that adults are fighting old wars and ignoring the real needs of the young people in their care. The two paragraphs that end this preface are important, because they help the reader understand how Merrow has, over time, come to view his role as an education correspondent, so allow me to quote them completely from page 8:

Our young people should be learning how to deal with the flood of information that surrounds them. They need guidance separating wheat from chaff. They need help formulating questions, and they need to develop the habit of seeking answers, not regurgitating them. They should be going to schools where they are expected and encouraged to discover, build, and cooperate.
Instead, most of them endure what I call “regurgitation education” and are stuck in institutions that expect them to memorize the periodic table, the names of 50 state capitals and the major rivers of the United States.

There are two additional points I think are necessary to understanding Merrow. First, he tries to let people speak for themselves. Whether he agrees or disagrees, he offers extensive observations of and words from the people we encounter. Usually he will allow diverse points of view to dialog with one another. That does not mean he does not offer an opinion. He does, often forcefully. But he allows the reader to process the materially independently before offering his own thoughts. That strikes me as the approach of an effective and caring teacher who does not attempt to impose upon his students his own opinion, but also does not pretend to be without a point of view. That allows the freedom for continued conversation and disagreement.

The second is simply this, in words printed in bold on a page by themselves, before the book begins:

Dedicated to outstanding teachers everywhere

As Merrow notes at the end of the introduction, the material on “Follow the Teacher” is “generally optimistic in tone and content.” That is because he wants to trust the dedication of those committed to the teaching profession. Thus one perhaps should view the book in that light – the reflection of someone who wants to help those dedicated to the learning of our young people, who offers the observations of a lifetime of covering education, of trying to help those outside of the school context understand the issues that confront those working to further the learning of our young people, be they teachers, administrators, or policy makers.

Merrow tries to be as sympathetic as possible to those about whom he writes, but is not afraid to criticize them when he thinks they are wrong. Thus even though he thinks highly of the commitment of someone like Paul Vallas, who has run school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans, when that gentleman tries to justify why some of the charters in New Orleans are able to cherry pick students and avoid the harder to educate, Merrow writes bluntly, and includes the words of a parent advocate who is opposed to what Vallas is doing:

Vallas is splitting hairs here, because a parent is entitled by law to enroll a child at the school of his or her choice and the school is then obligated to provide the necessary services. Is that blatant discrimination? Parent advocate Karran Harper Royal doesn’t mince words: “That’s discrimination. You can dress it up however you’d like, but it’s really discrimination.” (p. 129)

Some who are in what they have claimed is the reform camp will be unhappy with criticisms like this. Similarly, those opposed to many of the reforms will find Merrow’s positive words about people like Vallas – and Michelle Rhee, another person he extensively covered – more than irritating. Yet they should read more carefully than merely reacting to Rhee’s name. Merrow offers the criticisms of others, such as the union president in DC, George Parker, who pointed out that if you find half your staff deficient perhaps you have a responsibility to offer assistance to overcome that deficiency. Merrow also notes that principals with ineffective teachers already had an effective procedure to remove them before Rhee took over the schools, had they only followed it.

I do not agree with all that Merrow writes. For example, he credits Rhee with changing the frame about how teachers are paid, writing on p. 132 “Largely because of her, it’s no longer possible to argue convincingly that teachers, whether effective or not, should be paid based on their years on the job and graduate credits earned. Largely because of her, it’s impossible not to recognize the absurdity of the current system.” And yet, there were efforts well before Rhee’s tenure in DC to reexamine the structure of teacher compensation, but that discussion is not yet fully defined. This is an ongoing discussion, one not yet fully defined. It might more accurate to say compensating teachers SOLELY on degrees and experience is no longer acceptable, both continuing education and experience may well be part of how teacher compensation is redefined. That is an ongoing discussion, one not as narrowly constricted as the words I just quoted might suggest.

As I look through my markings and marginal notes, I find places I agree and places I disagree. The book often made me stop and think, and I would suggest that is a major part of Merrow’s intent. In the section on teaching I found far more that I agreed with. For example, Merrow is blunt that it is time to stop fighting the reading wars, that students do not need more drills in decoding. In an examination of the coverage he did of Teach for America teachers, he notes criticisms by others about the emphasis on control before noting simply (p. 34) “Control was not an issue, ever. It never is when kids are engaged.” He admires the dedication and idealism of TFA teachers, but responds to his own question of what’s not to like with these words:

Well, to be honest, sometimes their teaching is not to like. After all, they are first-year teachers who have had just five or six weeks of summer training and a short orientation in their assigned cities. They make all sorts of rookie mistakes. Occasionally I recognized in them that smug attitude I once exhibited towards veterans. (p. 34)

Regardless of how one reacts as one reads through the bulk of the book, I urge continuing to the end, to the conclusions. In four and half pages Merrow really brings it all together. This is the real reflection, and it is where he challenges much of our discussion about education. Since this is a book on teaching, one paragraph on the first page (177) of the Conclusion is worth noting, since it frames the rest of his discussion:

That’s the dilemma, and the ongoing battle: Are mediocre teachers the heart of education’s problems? Or is it the job itself, with its low pay and even lower prestige? Those two very different analyses of education’s problems are competing for domination, and whoever gets to define the problem is likely to control education policy for many years.

So far, the so-called ‘reformers” have dominated the discussion, because they have dominated the framing, and the media has largely gone along with them. As a teacher and a writer, I often find myself frustrated in attempting to get a differing point of view even considered.

Merrow examines many of the key points of the reform agenda in his conclusion and offers important cautions, such and the unlikelihood of Teach for America teachers to remain in the classroom after their minimum 2-year commitment. He recognizes that we need to redefine what a “better job” would like for teachers. That may include changing the current structure of union contracts. He wants to give principals more authority over their staff, but frames it differently than do many “reformers:”

Teaching will be a better job when principals have the authority over hiring their staff but are savvy about bringing trusted veteran teachers into the process

Similarly, he wants to recognize the importance of teachers in evaluating how students are doing:

It will be a better job when teacher evaluations of students count at least as much as the score on a one-time standardized test.

Both of the above are from the penultimate page of the Conclusion.

The final two paragraphs, from p. 181, make clear how much Merrow values teachers, and how his coverage of education has helped frame his analysis.

Let me take these paragraphs one at a time. The penultimate will sound familiar, since you will encounter words I have already quoted from earlier in the book:

Teaching will be a better job when we recognize that the world has changed, and the job of a teacher is to help young people learn to ask good questions, not regurgitate answers. With the flood of information around them, young people need help separating wheat from chaff. And it’s no longer the teacher’s job to tell them the difference, but to give them the skills to inquire, to dig deeper.

Here I have to note that if our primary way of assessing student learning is by multiple choice standardized tests often of dubious quality (which is why the Obama administration is putting $350 million into two consortia trying to create better tests) our instruction is going to be driven away from the kinds of inquiry about which Merrow writes, because it will not be valued by the tests used to measure “learning” and to evaluate teachers and schools. That is one reason why we cannot eliminate other forms of assessment, including teacher created tests and performance tasks.

In order to truly focus on students, we do need to focus on teachers. And here Merrow’s final paragraph is quite apt:

When teaching becomes the better job as described above, the brain drain will no longer be a problem – and we will likely discover that many teachers now in the classroom have been better people themselves all along.

Teachers operate within a context they do not control. Absent the appropriate context and support, we often do not truly know how good those teachers are, or can be.

We will not improve our schools and how we educate our students without an APPROPRIATE focus on the quality of our teachers. Note that bolded word.

This book helps provide that larger context. Remember the subtitle: “Reflections on Teaching and Leadership.” The Leadership provided teachers can make a huge difference in how effective teachers are. Merrow recognizes that. He also recognizes that we cannot deal with what happens in the classroom in isolation from things like teacher turnover, the training and support given teachers, and many issues not within the control of teachers, individually or collectively. At least, largely not in the current climate.

I look forward to Merrow’s continued coverage of education. I hope he will expand his coverage to include examples of teacher leadership, such as the increasing numbers of teacher led schools which address some of the issues he thinks necessary to make teaching a better job.

In the mean time, this book is useful, well worth the time to read. I think it lives up to those words at the very beginning, so let me remind you of them as I conclude. This book is Dedicated to outstanding teachers everywhere.

Peace.

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NCLB: Change is Past Due

March 6th, 2011

“What we can do — what America does better than anyone else — is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. “

State of the Union 2011

President Barack Obama

Where’s the nation’s educational learning plan for this?

Where in all the nooks and crannies of schools spread across America can we find what America does better than anyone else?

Is it in:

  • the increasing standardization of curricula, assessment and instruction?
  • the hundreds of millions of multiple choice test items that young people take classroom by classroom, grade by grade, school by school, district by district, state by state?
  • state standards that prescribe info-trivia at the most rote levels of recall making for school work that’s easy to measure and cheap to test?
  • the textbooks, worksheets, and practice tests that constitute the nation’s test prep curricula?
  • the accountability 1.0  measures and sanctions designed in the last decade of the 20th century and implemented in the hallmark year of NCLB,  2001?

The Elementary Art of Science

I don’t hear many educators talking about sparking creativity and imagination anymore. I fear budget reductions in school districts all over the nation have left creativity and imagination on the cutting room floor.  The one thing not in short supply happens to be over-the-top multiple-choice tests that have sapped sparks of innovative teaching out of classrooms everywhere.

Despite the pressure to raise scores as a result of mostly sanctions, the last ten years of current accountability sanctions have done little to change student performance against international benchmarks or longitudinally against our own NAEP data. Student data’s about as good or bad as it’s ever been, depending upon IRS Effect at work in a school.

Now the mantra’s pretty much the same everywhere, “Raise test scores or else.” Or else what? Will the educational beatings continue until America’s teachers and kids improve?

Secretary Duncan spoke to the nation’s superintendents recently and said if we don’t “do” something about NCLB,  “In two years, 98% of the schools in America will be labeled failing.”  Really? I think every educator I know said that about ten years ago.This administration’s at almost three years and counting to accomplish the transformation of NCLB ala ESEA reauthorization that was a campaign promise. Congress has sat on changes to NCLB across two administrations. Educators continue the march towards a label of failure even if 99% of the children in their school meet AYP benchmarks.

Change is past due.  It’s time for a spark of innovation and creativity in Washington.  Get rid of NCLB. Make the National Educational Technology Plan the core of ESEA. If the USDOE staff actually was to implement the NETP, its best work, rather than leave the plan gathering dust on a virtual shelf,  America’s learners would get access to what President Obama says our nation needs.

And, our learners and those who serve them might start to design, create, build, experiment, invent, and innovate our way back to what America does better than anyone else.

Engineering and Design

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Posted in Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, High Stakes Assessments, memorize, Uncategorized

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The Environment of Achievement, Part 2

February 9th, 2011

“But hope is not disconnected from action or result; it is the drive that propels action and result. It is not an ungrounded feeling but a belief that action can bring about change.”

Hope is word #1, a characteristic of an atmosphere that enables optimal achievement.

The second: humility.

The dictionary suggests it involves a modest view of one’s own importance.

At this point I could rail against the lack of humility we often see in our public personas. I won’t, except to mention its potential influence on our thinking and on that of our students. The message we get from the media: to be successful see yourself as more important/gifted/intelligent/_____ than the next guy, and find a camera crew to capture your bravado. This viewpoint is actually detrimental to a learning mindset.

Why? What does humility have to do with learning?

Humility opens the mind to learning. In Fires in the Mind, Kathleen Cushman makes a convincing argument for valuing as initial motivation for learning.1 We become interested in something new when we value the relationship we have with others who already know something about it (e.g., a son becoming a baseball player like his father), the products we can produce by knowing more than we do (e.g., a photographer who pursues mastering a new camera lens), and/or the satisfaction we get from having our questions and curiosities addressed (the child who tears a computer apart to discover what’s inside that makes it work). We value something other than our previously gained understandings. We place ourselves in the role of humble learner rather than overconfident know-it-all.

Note the implications for us as educators. To create and maintain a learning environment characterized by humility, we need to attend to our relationships with students. (Do I establish relationships with students that enable me to potentially inspire their interests in new learning?) We need to reveal what new learning will enable students to produce. (Do I know how what I teach has value beyond the classroom? and do I engage students in using what they learn beyond the classroom?) We need to foster students’ curiosity. (Do I use the power of questions and “I wonder…” statements to engage students’ attention and thinking?)

Humility makes the mind receptive to feedback. To summarize Daniel Pink in an overly succinct way, the equation for motivating learning is meaning + feedback.2 If valuing initiates learning, feedback maintains the interest and deepens new understanding. But not just any feedback will fill this vital role. A paper returned to a student after three days with nothing more than a “B” or an “84” at the top does more harm than good. Why? Because it sparks a prideful, protective response. Either the student will pretend not to care about the grade (“I know I’m better than you think I am.”) or the student will argue to regain the points that were mysteriously lost (“I’ll prove that I’m better than you think I am.”). Either way the opportunity for learning from mistakes is likely lost.

To be effective, feedback must be part of learning; while the cement of new knowledge or understandings is still wet, the teacher needs to engage students in discussion, offering redirection, encouragement and exhortation, and additional challenge. Instructive feedback should have the goal of enabling each individual student learn as deeply and achieve as highly as possible.

How does instructive feedback contribute to an environment characterized by humility? First, the teacher models humility through the way feedback is given. Dr. Robert Brooks uses the term “we statements” to describe an effective approach.

Second, feedback communicates that error is part of learning and is expected. In Kathleen Cushman’s research, one student suggested that feedback during learning enabled her to laugh at herself and use the error as a prompt for additional learning. Without the feedback, she would have continued to practice her errors and have become frustrated when her progress stagnated. Such frustration often activates a defense response rather than a mindset that accepts and even seeks feedback.

Finally, feedback maintains the correct perception of learning as being endless. We can always know more, understand better, or improve how we do something. Feedback keeps us challenged and helps us avoid feeling like we know all we need to know. We accept the humility that comes with recognizing we never reach perfection in any area or with any topic.

In this area, I’m concerned about students for whom school learning seems to come easily. They often absorb and live by the idea that being smart means not having to put forth effort. This erroneous belief about intelligence has significant, negative ramifications for their learning and achievement.

When working with the teachers, I’m often asked, “What do I do with the students who master the concepts or skills easily and quickly?” A question I use to prompt my own thinking in this area is, “What does the next level of achievement with this concept or skill look like?” I then use the answer to direct my feedback to these students.

Implications for us as educators? We need to be providing students with supportive and helpful feedback during learning. (Am I engaging my students in such conversations?) This includes challenging students to keep learning, keep refining, keep extending their knowledge and skill, even when the immediate task is completed easily. (Do I keep every student challenged and growing? Do I pursue learning myself so that I model the endless nature of mastering new concepts and abilities?)

Humility maintains curiosity (and vice versa). Curiosity is the name we give to the state of having unanswered questions. And unanswered questions, by their nature, help us maintain a learning mindset. When we realize that we do not know all there is to know about something in which we are interested, we thirst. We pursue. We act as though what we do not know is more important than what we do. Humility allows us to question; asking questions keeps us humble.

How do we spark curiosity in the classroom? One of my favorite suggestions and examples comes from one of my favorite teachers, Dr. Judy Willis:

Hoping for ways to energize the next day’s math lesson for her middle school students, Dr. Willis visited a supermarket, seeking an inexpensive item she could display on the students’ desks as they entered the classroom. She settled on a small vegetable, not knowing exactly how she would use it. The next morning, Dr.Willis started teaching the lesson without explaining the radishes the students discovered on their desks. At the lesson’s conclusion, the students asked about the radishes. Still uncertain of the answers, Dr. Willis replied, “Why do you think I put a radish on your desk for today’s lesson?” The students offered several explanations. They connected mathematical concepts with their sensory experience of the radish, making associations that seemed sensible to them. Though Dr. Willis could have “come up with something” to share as an explanation, the students’ thinking generated more connections, and their discovery of these connections fostered deeper understanding and better memory formation. In short, the students were engaged in significant elaboration of the day’s mathematical content prompted by its curiosity-generating pairing with a common vegetable.3

Curiosity, having unanswered questions, propels learning. (Am I making serious efforts to spark curiosity in my students?)

We may think of hope as looking up. However, that should not prime our thinking to view humility as looking down. Humility is looking around, finding out what we do not know, seeing what’s available for learning it, and pursuing it until we become, we produce, or we satiate.

How do we foster an atmosphere of humility in our classrooms, schools, systems? Here are the questions I’m using to prompt my thinking:

  • Do I establish relationships with studnets that enable me to potentially inspire their interests in new learning?
  • Do I know how what I teach has value beyond the classroom? and do I engage students in using what they learn beyond the classroom?
  • Do I use the power of questions and “I wonder…” statements to engage students’ attention and thinking?
  • Am I engaging my students in conversations that capitalize on feedback’s contribution to learning?
  • Do I keep every student challenged and growing?
  • Do I pursue learning myself so that I model the endless nature of mastering new concepts and abilities?
  • Am I making serious efforts to spark curiosity in my students?

What questions would you add?

References

  1. Cushman, K., Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).
  2. Pink, D.H., Drive: The Surprising Truth Behind What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009).
  3. Washburn, K.D., The Architecture of Learning: Designing Instruction for the Learning Brain (Pelham, AL: Clerestory Press, 2010), 45.

Images

humility http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503002139@N01/3710722003

Curiosity http://www.flickr.com/photos/94859200@N00/540245890

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Analyze This

February 6th, 2011

10 education warning signs that somebody needs to heed as this next decade unfolds:

1)   Between now and 2020, America will need to hire more than 3 million new teachers.

http://inform.com/science-and-technology/impact-baby-boomer-retirements-teacher-labor-markets-439094a

2)   More than 40% of school principals will retire in the next decade according to survey data collected by national principal associations.

http://www.elearnportal.com/student-center/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-be-a-school-principal

3)   50% of current superintendents in America do not plan to be on the job in five years.

http://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=17184

4)   Teacher turnover is highest in poor, urban school districts where positions may remain vacant or filled with less than qualified and/or inexperienced  teachers.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/tb/2007/08/24/3336.html

5)   More families are living in poverty and since 2008 this has resulted in increasing numbers of America’s students taking advantage of free and reduced lunch services.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-06-10-schoollunchinside_N.htm

6)   PK-12 public school enrollment will increase about 4.5 million students by 2018.

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2018/sec1b.asp

7)   No data have been collected in a decade but the National Education Association estimates that school facility infrastructure improvements needed are in neighborhood of $322 billion. Report Card Grade: D

http://apps.asce.org/reportcard/2009/grades.cfm

8)   Arts education and funding declining over last decade, mainly due to budget cuts to public education.

http://www.gse.harvard.edu/blog/news_features_releases/2009/06/on-the-chopping-block-again.html

9)   Despite decades of focus on improving literacy rates, we as a citizenry read about the same as we always have.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69

10) By 2018, America will need 3 million more college graduates for the workforce than we’ll graduate.

http://chronicle.com/article/Number-of-Workers-With-College/65948/

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Posted in Achievement Gap, Basic Skills, Education Reform, Education spending, Leadership, Literacy, Pam Moran, School Finance, state financial crises, Uncategorized, urban education

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Teaching 2030: an important book on teaching by teachers

February 5th, 2011

this is slightly modified from the original which appeared at Education Review

Berry, Barnett, and the Teacher Solutions Team (2011). Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools — Now and in the Future.

In all of the public discourse of what we need to do to fix public schools and educate our young people for the future, one set of voices has until now been conspicuously absent. It is the voices of teachers.

This new book, put together under the auspices of the Center for Teaching Quality established by lead author Barnett Berry, and with generous funding from the MetLife Foundation, is an important attempt to include the voices of teachers in helping frame the discussion of how we address our educational needs.

Those of us in classrooms, unless we choose to be oblivious, recognize that our profession needs to be redefined. We lose too many good teachers from classrooms because too often the only path for professional and financial advancement is through administration. In the meantime, we see the students arriving in our classrooms changing as society changes. Often we are prevented from changing what we do in order to meet them where they are. We know this has to change.

This book is the product of an extensive discussion among professional educators. Much of it was conducted online. The final product list 12 authors besides Berry, all themselves notable classroom teachers. They are the ones who sat down with him to put together the book as we have it. But that final product also included material offered by others in online discussions through the various arms of the Center for Teaching Quality, especially its Teacher Leaders Network, of which I am member. Thus while I was not part of the actual author group, I appear 3 times in the work. I do not think that disqualifies me from examining the work and encouraging others to read it.

The teachers participating in this endeavor collective bring a diverse set of experiences to it. Renee Moore taught English high school students in the Mississippi Delta, where she now teaches at a community college. Ariel Sacks and Jose Vilson teach in New York City middle schools. Laurie Wasserman has almost 30 years as a teacher of special education. After a distinguished career in a classroom, Shannon C’de Baca has spent a number of years doing online education. Jennifer Barnett now functions as school-based technology integration specialist in rural Alabama. Kilian Betlach is a Teach for America alumnus who was well-known as a blogger and is now an elementary school assistant principal. Carrie Kamm is a mentor-resident coach for an urban teacher residency program in Chicago. Among these and others in authoring group are winners of State Teacher of the Year (including one finalist for National Teacher of the Year), Milken award winners, Lilly Award winners, and so on. All have experience in trying to improve the teaching profession beyond the reach of their own classrooms. One finds a similar range of diversity and an equal amount of accomplishment in the 33 teachers who are also thanked for their contributions in the online discussions in which we took part.

In addition, those functioning as authors were able to participate in webinars with a number of outstanding experts from across the nation, including on expert from Australia.

The result is a book rich in insight, analysis, and suggestions for the future, one that has already received praise from many notables associated with education and teaching. Of greater importance, it is a book that will speak to a wide range of audiences: those who prepare our new teachers, those who administer our schools, those who make policy, and most of all, to those of us who teach now or may teach in the future.

In his Prologue, Barnett Berry makes a couple of key points that help a reader understand the thrust of the book. The authors

…have come together, in harmony if not always in lock-step, about an expanded vision for student learning in the 21st century and for the teaching profession that will, in myriad ways, continue to accelerate that learning. (p. xiii)

They get to this point by examining what works now in order to describe what will likely work and be needed in the schooling of the future. The vision “emerges from a student centered vision” that takes advantage of new tools, organizations and ideas. It is based on four “emergent realities”:
1. a transformed learning ecology for students and teacher
2. seamless connections in and out of cyberspace
3. differentiated paths and careers
4. “teacherpreneurs” who will foster innovation locally and globally

These rely on six levers for changes: 1. engaging the public in provocative ways
2. overhauling school finance systems
3. creating transformative systems of preparation and licensure
4. ensuring school working conditions that they know promote effective teaching
5. reframing accountability for transformative results
6. continuing to evolve teacher unions into professional guilds

Each of these levers and each of the realities could be a separate volume. Thus the authors cannot fully explore the dimensions of each, yet they provide more than enough to lay out a vision that is clearly possible. In part that is because of the experience they collectively bring to the task, and what they have absorb from the webinars and from the exchanges with each other and with those who participated in online discussion.

The aforementioned Prologue is titled “We Cannot Create What We Cannot Imagine.” It is followed by two chapters that can be considered introductory:
1. The Teachers of 2030 and a Hopeful Vision
2. A Very Brief History of Teaching in America.

The next four chapters explore the four Emergent Realities, each in some specificity. For example, Chapter 5 explores the 3rd of these Emergent Realities, Differentiated Pathways and Careers for a 21st-Century Profession. In just over 30 pages the authors explore four subthemes:
1. Outgrowing a One-Size-Fits-All Professions
2. Redefining the Professions for Results-Oriented
Teaching
3. Teacher Education for a Differentiated, Results-Oriented Profession
4. Professional Compensation for Differentiated Profession

After these four chapters the book spends almost 40 pages exploring the six policy levers of change before concluding with Taking Action for a Hopeful Future, with a subsection on “What You Can Do to Build a 21st- Century Teaching Profession.”

Perhaps the power of the book can best be understood through the notion of “Teacherprenuerism” as it is explored in Chapter 6. The term first appears near the beginning, with the idea of teacher entrepreneurs serving in hybrid positions that don’t easily fit the normal way we classify teachers. Allow me to offer the paragraph from p. 7 which first presents the idea in some detail, after setting the stage by reminding us how already teachers, many National Board Certified and comfortable with using the tools of the web, are de-isolating teaching and offering cost-effective ways of propagating exemplary teaching practices:

The fruits of those labors have been realized in 2030. About 15% of the nation’s teachers – more than 600,000 – have been prepared in customized residency programs designed to fully train them in the cognitive science of teaching and to also equip them for new leadership roles. Most now serve in hybrid positions as teacherpreneuers, teaching students part of the day or week, and also have dedicated time lead as student support specialists, teacher educators, community organizers, and virtual mentors in teacher networks. Some spend some of their nonteaching time working closely university- and think tank-based researchers on studies of teaching and learning – or conducting policy analyses that are grounded in their everyday pedagogical experiences. In some school district, teachers in these hybrid roles earn salaries comparable to, if not higher than, the highest paid administrators.

Lest one think that a pie in the sky belief about the future, several members of the team that wrote this book – and several of those who like me served as additional resources – already partially function in this fashion. The book posits a day where such teachers would not only be known to wider audiences of parents, community and business leaders and policy makers, but would be respected and listened to. Some of those participating in this process already have that kind of respect, for example, Renee Moore, who has served on the boards of both the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and as the first educator still in the classroom on the board of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (California). John Holland has served as a classroom teacher, a blogger for the Pew Charitable Trust blog Inside Pre-K and moderates an online community of accomplished teachers. Others have similar experiences of attempting to create hybrid roles where they can leverage their expertise and knowledge while remaining at least partially classroom based. They use their experience to project to the future they envision. The process has begun already, but the authors are talking about something more than selling one’s good lesson plans on E-bay. As John Holland notes in Chapter 6,

The combination of self-publishing and the use of the internet as a platform for communication has already given rise to the “communities of practice” around topics ranging from lessons in how to teach fractions to using brain research to perform the teaching act as the highest levels. Teacherpreneurs will increasingly be leaders in these communities, which will stretch far beyond the confines of their school or district – a virtual domain where they are able to impact the profession on a large scale. (p. 143)

As more teacherpreneurs appear they will serve as a primary agents in developing connected learning. As we get more teachers who have greater facility in using the power of the web, not only will teachers be less isolated, but the nature of teaching will begin to change, and radically, as Emily Vickers notes

Teachers will, in fact, be orchestrators of learning – a concept we talk about today, but one that will force itself upon most everyone who expects to be a teacher in 2030. (p. 145)

In part this will be because students will be accustomed to different ways of obtaining information. We are already seeing this among our current students. They know how to quickly obtain information, although we may still have to guide them in how to evaluate the information they obtain. They are comfortable building websites and increasingly also putting together wikis. It is incumbent upon the educational professionals to adapt what we do not only to meet our students where they are now, but also to anticipate how much this will change the nature of what we do. Teacherpreneurs will be key to a successful transition to a new approach to education.

We still have a way to travel to even come close to such a radical rethinking of the teaching profession. The book points out how much we already know, and how we can begin to move in such a direction, even if the path may change over the next several decades from what even the most imaginative of our current teachers can foresee. A key to this is that others with whom teachers interact will need to rethink how they do their jobs. Administrators will need to spend more time in classrooms, even teaching, and most certainly embrace the idea of teacher leadership. Unions will need to rethink how they serve the teachers who are their members, being more open to diverse roles and with those diverse roles different models of compensation. Policy makers will have to be willing to support and invest in the development of the kinds of hybrid roles necessary to implement the kind of teaching we will need. University-based teacher education will have to change, being more connected with what is happening in classrooms, and working together with community-based organizations, as education moves to be more firmly integrated in the communities in which are schools are located.

There are the first five points listed in the concluding chapter. By themselves they represent a major rethinking of how we have been approaching education and teaching. There are examples of these kinds of changes. I teach in a school that serves as a professional development school for a local state university, and we have had an increasingly close relationship between those who serve as mentor teachers and the university faculty. The next step is for more of those who are skilled mentors moving into a hybrid role where they not only mentor within their own classroom, but perhaps serve as adjunct instructors in the university environment, overcoming the artificial divide between learning about teaching and learning how to teach.

For this to work requires three additional points, also covered in the final chapter. The communities must become more involved, helping encourage the new roles of teacher-leaders even as administrations and unions have to redefine their relationship with one another. Parents and students must be willing to advocate on behalf of the effective teachers, providing the support that will enable teacher leaders to help redefine the conversation about teaching.

Most of all, teachers will have to step out of the isolation of their individual classrooms. They will

… need to band together to document their professional practice and assemble both empirical evidence and compelling stories about what works in their classrooms and their communities – and, therefore what matters most for public policy. (p. 210)

The book is intended as a starting point for ongoing conversations. The authors do not presume that they have imagined every possibility. They want to encourage further discussion. They encourage people to visit them at either of two websites, that of the Teaching 2030 social networking site and by connecting with other teachers from the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millennium Institute.

I am as I write this in my 16th year of teaching. I have been a participant in the discussions of the Teacher Leaders Network for the past few years. I have gotten to know electronically a number of the authors of this book, and have been fortunate enough to meet both Barnett Berry and John Holland. I know how seriously all of the authors take the profession of teaching, and how much they already give of themselves to try to make the teaching profession a more effective way of serving our students, which is ultimately the goal.

For too long the voices of teachers have been systematically excluded from the public discourse about education. In part this book serves as an important corrective, or at least the start of one.

I am not only a teacher, but also one who engages in policy. Like the authors, I wear several hats besides that of classroom teacher. Here you encounter me as one who regularly writes about books on education in order to encourage others to read them. Like many of those who authored the book, I regular write online about education. We are bloggers; it is part of how we connect with one another.
Our expert teachers are a resource that we should value beyond what they accomplish in the classroom, as important as that is. We need to tap their expertise and insight, we need to hear their voices.

If you read this book, you should get a sense of not only how important the teacher voice is, but also how much we all gain from including it in the discussions.

What the authors have proposed is in some ways radical. It has the promise of moving us in a far more productive direction in how we approach the future of teaching. Since I am in my mid 60s, it is unlikely I will still be teaching in 2030. Several of the authors will be. They are helping reshape the profession to which they are dedicating their lives.

I feel as if I should end with the voice of one of the authors. Each offers some closing words at the end of the final chapter. The last are offered by Renee Moore, whose work I greatly respect. It seems appropriate to end this review as the book ends, with the words she offers on p. 214:

We stand on the cusp of a great opportunity to end generations of educational discrimination and inequity, finally to fulfill the promises of our democratic republic. I believe the noblest teachers, students, and leaders of 2030 will be remembered by future generations as those who surged over the barriers to true public education and a fully realized teaching profession – while myopic former gatekeepers staggered to the sidelines of history.

I too am dedicated to improving the teaching profession for the benefit of the students entrusted to our care. It is because I am that I fervently hope Renee Moore is right. Read this book.

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Save Our Schools March – who we are, part 1.

January 30th, 2011

Last Sunday, January 23, I introduced you to Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, where I told you that

For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .

* Equitable funding for all public school communities

* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation

* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies

and that the date of the event was July 28-31, 2011.

Starting today, I will begin to introduce you to some of the key people organizing the event, and explain why we are committing our time and energy to this important effort to save our schools.

Today I would like you to meet Katherine Cox.

From our About page you can learn that

Katherine McBride Cox, who grew up in Louisiana, initially began her career as a college English instructor. She recently retired after 35 years as an educator in Arizona where she was a classroom teacher, an elementary principal, and a high school principal. She developed a nationally recognized career education program for 5th and 6th graders called Window on the World. She taught self-contained gifted students for eight years and later worked with at-risk middle school students. She also served as an instructional coach, coaching other teachers. She serves on the Information Coordination Committee and the Blogging/Social Networking Sub-Committee.

I asked Katherine why she was volunteering in this effort. She told me the following:

When No Child Left Behind was passed, I was not as wise as others.

Arizona is one of the most poorly funded states in the nation as far as K-12 education goes. I was glad that we would be getting additional monies.

It took me awhile to see that we had made a pact with the devil. Standards actually were lowered because the state had to make the new state tests easier year after year in order to get enough students to graduate. The tests became meaningless, yet schools were ranked according to their test scores.

In order to get the excelling label, principals were telling teachers to drill and kill on the subjects tested – reading, math and writing – and to neglect science, social studies, p.e. and the arts. In the past, at least 75% of our students were on grade level or better. Now I could see that the top 75% of our students were getting a worse education than these students had received before NCLB.

As a high school principal, I could see a train wreck heading down the track. If freshmen had not had 4th grade geology – the rock cycle, including sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rock or 5th grade human body systems — were we supposed to introduce these concepts for the first time to freshmen in biology and physical science classes?

Learning became tedious for students and teachers alike. No longer were we attempting to ignite fires in the minds of our students. I ended up retiring in December of 2009 and set up my website, In the Trenches with School Reform.

I began following teacherken on Daily Kos, as well as bloggers such as Anthony Cody, Nancy Flanagan, and Valerie Strauss. I continually said in my blog – I’m tired of talk. Others like me have been talking and explaining for years. It’s time to take action.

Anthony Cody and Victoria Young made contact with me and eventually I was asked to join this group. I was delighted to be asked to help.

I had spent 35 years as a teacher and principal trying to make our schools better and better. For a long time, I believe I succeeded. After NCLB came along, it seemed that my life’s work had been for nothing. Everything I had helped build was dismantled. For what? I knew that we had fallen into the rabbit hole where everything is upside down and nothing makes sense.

I’m in this battle to take our schools back and make them better. But first we must wrestle them away from the likes of the Michelle Rhees and Bill Gates of the world – and the grip of the federal government.

Katherine is just one those dedicated to the well-being our our students and health of our public schools who has stepped up to the challenges we face.

We ask that you join us in supporting Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, July 28-31.

You can see who has endorsed us (and there you can find out how YOU can endorse us)

You can contribute to help us.

See how YOU can help us in this effort.

Thanks for reading.

Please consider helping let others know about this effort.

Help us Save Our Schools.

Peace.

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The Environment of Achievement, Part 1

January 24th, 2011

Three words grabbed my attention. Ideas that can make the difference between a t-ball novice and A-Rod, between nephew Johnny’s string recital performance and a Yo-Yo Ma concert, between the weekend jogger and Paula Radcliffe.

No, not age, not time, nor even practice. (Though all these play a role.)

For decades, researchers have pitched their tents in one of two camps: either nature (i.e., genetics) makes us who we are, or nurture (i.e., environment) does. For every study claiming to capture the flag for one camp, a counter study contends that it retains the banner.

In The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk argues that the interaction of genes and environment produces the individuals we become. Environment, contends Shenk, plays a leading role in how genes are “expressed.” But let’s set the science and the debate aside for now and simply consider what allows ability to reach its fullest potential.

This brings us back to those three words. They appear in the opening of David Shenk’s book, and they should play a leading role in education: hope, humility, and determination.

Word #1: hope. Of the three words, this one gets the most negative press. Cynics point out that hoping never made something happen nor brought anything into existence. Some even suggest hope is damaging, viewing it as wishful thinking that prevents the action needed to generate change.

Such arguments fail to look behind results; they fail to consider the causes of observable effects. They’re akin to arguing that the pleasure of a warm fire on a cold night is unrelated to, and certainly not dependent on, the match used to ignite the flame.

But hope is not disconnected from action or result; it is the drive that propels action and result. It is not an ungrounded feeling but a belief that action can bring about change. No great change has ever been attempted without hope, even if the belief was never voiced.

The dictionary associates several concepts with hope: expectation, belief, desire, good. I’d add another: resilience. Here’s why:

Resilience involves maintaining hope despite failure. Set-backs in life are inevitable, whether one is trying to strut across a narrow balance beam or learn to balance lopsided equations. Response to setbacks makes the difference between progress and stagnation, and hope motivates forward movement. Students need to learn to remain positive, believing that hard work can eventually overcome most setbacks and that the effort can yield beneficial and satisfying results. Relatedly…

Resilience involves embracing failure as an element of learning and progress.Hope can endure difficulties when the difficulties are seen as revealers of weaknesses that can be targeted and tweaked. Once recognized, weaknesses can become the focus of the efforts that lead to eventual success. (If students are not failing—encountering challenges—in your classroom, their learning may be minimal or even non-existent.)

David Shenk shares a compelling illustration. Basketball great Michael Jordan would use informal, pick-up games to work on skills he knew were his weakest. While others in these games relied on doing what they already knew they could, Jordan analyzed his setbacks, identified their causes, and then worked to correct them. The hope of eventual success made failure something to seek rather than avoid.

As teachers, we have a critical role to play in helping students perceive failure correctly. The feedback we give students can make the difference between failure that focuses effort and failure that is fatal to further attempts.

Finally, resilience involves being able to change direction. Failure is easy to repeat. You simply do the exact same thing you did previously while expecting the result to be different. (I believe this was Einstein’s definition of insanity.) It takes effort to consider alternative approaches and to maintain the hope that making such changes can yield better results.

To help students grow into individuals who do not view failure as fatal, we must nurture their spirits, helping them maintain hope, especially when learning is challenging.

Some questions I’ve been pondering lately include:

  • How resilient is my hope in the face of challenge?
  • How do I convey hope when my students face challenges and obstacles?
  • Is my classroom/school/district a place characterized by hope and its accompanying momentum?
  • How am I modeling resilient hope?

What questions would you add?

Images
  • Shape of a hoper http://www.flickr.com/photos/36613169@N00/449902272
  • Shahab http://www.flickr.com/photos/11037770@N00/297719275

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Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

January 23rd, 2011

Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

For the future of our children,
we demand the following . . .

* Equitable funding for all public school communities

* An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation

* Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies

* Curricula developed by and for local school communities

Those the four key demands of an important initiative on public education.

It is geared towards a gathering in our nation’s capital,
It is geared towards a gathering in our nation’s capital, July 28-31

We want your help and support.

Here’s our website

Let me tell you more, including why I am involved, and you should be as well.

This is an outgrowth of efforts by many educators to have our voices heard in the discussions over education policy over the past few years. When Anthony Cody established the movement of Teachers Letters To Obama, we got the support of thousands, but in conversations with the Department of Education, including with Secretary of Education Duncan, somehow we were not listened to, but rather talked at.

Let me share from the About Us page of our website:

Getting to this point has been a long journey. For the last few years, thousands of teachers and parents have been calling for action against No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and, more recently, questioning Race to the Top (RTTT).

Teachers, students, and parents from across the country have staged protests, started blogs, written op-eds, and called and written the White House and the U.S. Department of Education to try to halt the destruction of their local schools.

Numerous efforts have been made to get U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama to listen to US – the teachers, parents, and students who experience the effects of these disastrous policies every day. WE know that NCLB is not working. Unfortunately, it has been almost impossible to make our voices heard. Although we have the knowledge, the expertise, and the relationships with students that make education possible, we have been shut out of the conversation about school reform.

We, like all teachers and parents, want better schools. For our children’s sake, we are organizing to improve our schools – but not through the vehicle known as NCLB. It has been a disaster. Although there are various opinions about the many issues involved with school reform, it is now time to speak with ONE VOICE – that is, No Child Left Behind must not be reauthorized. We reclaim our right to determine how our children will be educated. We are organizing to revitalize an educational system that for too many children focuses more on test preparation than meaningful learning.We demand a humane, empowering education for every child in America.

Where we are today is due to the efforts of many people. Diane Ravitch had the integrity and the courage to speak up when she saw first-hand the unintended consequences of No Child Left Behind. Jesse Turner (Children are More than Test Scores) walked from Connecticut to Washington, D.C. in support of public schools. The list of those who have inspired us goes on and on.

Ken Bernstein (teacherken), Nancy Flanagan, Anthony Cody, Rita Solnet – so many people began to step up, saying, “It’s time to do something.” And here we are in January 2011. With thousands and thousands of voices shouting, “No, no, no” to NCLB and RTTT, and with few policymakers listening, we say, IT IS TIME TO TAKE ACTION.

I am honored to be a part of this group, although there are others doing far more than am I. They include university professors, retired principals, teachers, parents, educational advocates.

Our list of endorsers can be seen here, although it is hard for us to stay up to date, as more and more people involved with education, well known and ordinary people, step up to support us.

We are planning a four-day event. It will include a gathering near the White House. It will include workshops and addresses based at American University. Diane Ravitch has already agreed to speak to us.

Those of us involved in doing the work to prepare for this are doing it on top of our other responsibilities, because we believe in its importance. We are working with a professional organizer who has previously helped organize similar events in DC for non-profits. We understand what we have to do for permits, we have reserved space for both the demonstration and for the conference.

But now we need more.

We need support.

We need endorsements.

We need more volunteers.

We can surely use contributions.

Look again at some of the major names in education who have endorse this

Diane Ravitch

Deborah Meier

Alfie Kohn

David Berliner, past president of American Educational Research Association

Yong Zhao of Michigan State University

Kenneth Goodman, emeritus at U of Arizona

Sam Meisels, President of the Erickson Institute in Chicago – an expert on early childhood education

Note the leaders of parent groups:

Julie Woestehoff of PURE in Chicago

Rita Solnet of Parents Across America

Mona David of New York Parents Charter Association

we have former state teachers of the year

we have university professors

we have film makers

we have ordinary teachers and principals

We have much of the leadership of Rethinking Schools

we have ordinary folks who care deeply about what is happening to public education

We are not being funded by the Gates or Broad Foundations.

We do not have the access to media of Davis Guggenheim with Waiting for Superman, or Michele Rhee being on the covers of Time and Newsweek

We have something far more important. We have the voices of those most committed to public education and the student in all of our schools, including charters.

We need more.

We need you.

Please consider how you can help.

You can contribute

You can sign up to stay informed.

You can volunteer by emailing our volunteer coordinator at elwaingortji at cbe dot ab dot ca

You can pass on the information about Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action to others – via email, Twitter, Facebook or other means.

Thank you in advance for anything you can do.

Remember:

July 28-31, 2011

Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action

Peace.

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Why Great Teachers Quit: And How We Might Stop the Exodus

January 20th, 2011

If teachers, parents, school boards, administrators, community members, and lawmakers can listen to each other and work on this problem together, we can lessen the tide of teacher attrition, ultimately improving the learning and working environment in schools for everyone. (p. 156)

Those are the final words of this new book by Katy Farber. Depending on what statistics you use, we lose up to 30% of new teachers in the first three years, up to 50% in the first five. Some clearly should not have been teachers in the first place. But others bring the passion, knowledge and, at least potentially, the skill we need for all of our students. Some of those we lose early in their career are already great teachers, others are potentially so. The reasons that cost us these teachers also cost us those later in their careers, who all recognize are great.

This book can help us begin to address the problem.

Katy Farber was mentoring another teacher at her school in Vermont when that teacher quit after only two years. She was stunned. Her mentee was enthusiastic, creative, and the kids loved her. Farber decided to study the issue of teacher attrition, why we lose so many so early, and in the process began hearing consistent messages from teachers across the country. This was also at a point in her own professional career that potentially represented a cross-roads for her:

A perfect storm of difficult parents, a new principal, and a new teaching partner brought many of these issues to the forefront for me (p. xiii)

This book is something you can choose to sit down and read through, but the design makes it clear that there are other approaches you can take. After the various introductory materials, there are eight chapters, followed by a brief set of Final Thoughts by the author, a list of references, and an index. Each of the eight chapters focuses on a specific area that is a source of tension and possible disillusionment for teachers. In order, these are

1. Standardized Testing
2. Working Conditions in Today’s Schools
3. Ever-Higher Expectations
4. Bureaucracy
5. Respect and Compensation
6. Parents
7. Administrators
8. School Boards

Each chapter presents a real-life scenario, drawn from Farber’s contacts with teachers through conversations, posts on blogs, emails, and other forms of communication. The scenarios are followed by discussions containing thoughts from additional teachers, as well as a list of suggestions Farber describes as “practicable, applicable recommendations for administrators and teacher leaders” (p. xvi).

It is fair to say that while there is no one single reason causing teachers to leave the profession, a large number of the reasons that influence them, and which Farber explores in this book, could be generally classified as experiencing a lack of respect. That lack of respect applies to skill, knowledge, work conditions, salary, treatment by administrators, and treatment by parents.

Let’s focus on working conditions for a moment. Teachers have far less flexibility for things like bodily functions and meals than do most menial workers. There are also issues with unhealthy buildings, use of toxic substances to clean. There are real issues of safety. Imagine you have a college degree. Now imagine you may have to go three hours without being able to take a bathroom break, or that you may have a lunch period as short as 15-20 minutes to yourself. That is the real world of conditions for many teachers.

Or consider this. A significant proportion of teachers, particularly at the elementary level, are female. If they are starting families, and wish to breast feed an infant, is there any provision for a teacher to express milk during the school day? Or is our solution going to be that we are going to exclude nursing mothers from being in the classroom, even though we might thereby diminish the pool of highly qualified and effective teachers?

Farber offers thoughtful comments from teachers on all the topics she covers. Because the impact of testing is perhaps the most covered of these, I will not explore the valuable material she offers on that topic. But we should not avoid exploring the related topic of ever-higher expectations. Even without the imposition of such higher expectations, responsible teachers already feel crushed by the demands on the time they have. Increasingly, the demands “are not directly related to teaching students” which as Farber notes, is often the main motivation for teachers to be in the classroom. She also writes:

This state of affairs is exhausting and dispiriting. Many teachers shared that they simply don’t have enough time to do everything that they feel they should be doing. And it is eroding their personal and professional lives. (p. 44)

The advice offered by veteran teachers is to set limits, as one experience suggests to no more than 9 hours of school-related work daily. Yet this can create conflicts for those really dedicated to their students. If, for example, I were to limit my workday to 9 hours, of which 7.5 were in school, how could I conceivably read and correct papers from the vast majority of my 192 students in order for those corrections to be part of a meaningful learning experience? Do I limit the amount of work I assign in order to keep up with it? Do I shortchange the feedback to which my students are entitled? Do I allow the responsibilities of effective teaching to consume time that should be available for things outside of my school responsibilities? None of the three choices is truly acceptable, yet in reality for many teachers such are the options from which they can choose. Choices like this are just one example of the pressures that many good teachers experience, and that can help drive them from the profession.

Hopefully by now you have a sense that that book will connect you with the real experience of real teachers. The structure provides not merely their reactions, but a context from which those reactions flow, as well as material that can help ameliorate some of the problems that are contributing to our losing some of the teachers we really want to keep.

Just that justifies purchasing the book as a valuable reference tool. But that is not all one gets from this book. The final four pages of text, 153-156, are under the title of “Afterward: Final Thoughts” and these pages bring together final conclusions from the wealth of material Farber has provided. There are three sections, titled respectively, Why Teachers Teach,: To Educational Leaders, Policy Makers and Politicians; and To Teachers. In the first, Farber tells that most teachers look beyond the challenges discussed in the book.

They tend to be idealists. They strive constantly to improve their teaching, public education, and the lives of their students. It is our responsibility as citizens, educational leaders, parents, and politicians to support them in doing so. (p. 153)

In the 2nd, directed to those who are not teachers but have a great influence on education, Farber offers 4 points, the last of which is this:

Elevate the dialogue about public education by infusing your comments, thoughts, and ideas about education with respect for the hard work that teachers are doing in America. As you may have noticed from this book and several others like it, teaching is no easy task. Before making broad and sweeping pronouncements about education, think how your comments will forward the goals of educating children and supporting teachers. (p. 155)

Speaking as a teacher, were the public dialogue about education more respectful about teachers, we would likely be less resentful of others who do not understand the task of teaching and seek to impose “solutions” without regard to the real welfare of the students who are our primary concern.

Farber concludes with words directed towards teachers. You have already read, at the very beginning of this review, her final words. In this final portion of the book she refers to words by Jonathan Kozol about making the classroom “a better and more joyful place than when [the students] entered it” (from his Letters to a Young Teacher). Kozol also reminds us that we cannot let our concern for professional decorum overwhelm and suppress our very human need to reach out to and comfort our students. Farber concludes her quoting of Kozol with words from p. 208 of that book directed to teachers: “A battle is beginning for the soul of education, and they must be its ultimate defenders.”

Farber wants teachers to remember why we got into education, to reconnect with our beliefs, use those to fuel our energy. Or as she puts in the final sentence of her penultimate paragraph on p. 156: “Remember your core beliefs about life, learning, and teaching, and then let them guide and refresh you.”

For public education to properly serve our students and our society, we must focus on quality teachers. They are the most important in-school factor. We certainly do not want to discourage the best of them, to continue to see them leave the profession out of frustration.

This is a book by a teacher, with words of teachers, about teachers, and about the challenges they face. It can remind those of us who do teach why we do so, not only to reconnect us with our core beliefs, but also to motivate us to speak up beyond our individual classrooms on behalf of the well-being of our students and the ultimate success of public schools.

The book is also something that others concerned with education should read with care, if for no other reason that no meaningful improvement in public education can occur without a solid and continuing cadre of dedicated and committed and highly skilled teachers. Insofar as politicians, policy makers and others ignore that, they will undermine the possibilities of any meaningful reform.

We can no longer continue the ongoing loss of skilled teachers. It costs too much financially. It costs even more in lost learning and benefits to our society.

I highly recommend that anyone concerned about the future of public education read and absorb this book. That would be a good start towards turning our discussions about educational policy in directions less destructive of the core of skilled teachers we have but we are losing.

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Civil Discourse: It’s Common Sense

January 9th, 2011

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

U.S. Declaration of Independence

Events occur, as did the mass shooting in Arizona this past weekend, that remind us a culture of civility does not come without explicit teaching in the home, our schools, and every community in this nation. While we don’t know all the facts or motivating factors, serious discourse among citizens from all walks of life has led many to reflect this weekend upon the vitriol that dominates the political rhetoric of our nation.  We know that this rhetoric influences and cues a culture of disrespect.

However, parents, educators, and leaders from all sectors of a community possess the potential to form a powerful teaching team to help young people learn the art of civil discourse, especially when holding a dissenting opinion or when confronted by others who hold different beliefs or perspectives. The hallmark of this great nation has been our inalienable right to a liberty that includes being able to speak our piece without fear of imprisonment, retribution from our government, or loss of life or liberty at the hands of those who may not agree with us.

“ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

1st Amendment, Bill of Rights Ratified June 21, 1788

Our nation’s powerful words, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, define a set of beliefs in us: the American people. We believe ourselves to be models for freedom throughout the world. We believe ourselves to be a people who will defend the rights of others, even when we disagree with them. In protecting that right for some, we protect that right for all of us.

I believe the vast majority of Americans value civil discourse because the language of respect helps us weave together the fabric of America’s communities. Civil discourse is the hallmark of adults who care enough to state their opinions publicly and boldly- but with respect. Civil discourse represents the best of communities of responsibility, whether in the real world or in a virtual network. In responsible communities, people care enough to speak up. They also understand their behavior determines the community’s culture that will be created and honed over time.

We are a nation facing critical issues politically, socially, and economically. Such times create emotions of fear, anger, and frustration. Those emotions spill over into our communities and tear at the fabric of responsibility that’s essential for its members to feel safe. We have become used to hearing and reading daily attacks both publicly and anonymously at the national, state, and local levels. These attacks have lowered the bar for any standard of civil discourse representative of opinions on both sides of political and social aisles.

However, we are a nation that’s grounded in hope and perhaps we can get back there if we can see our way to work together. There’s a bipartisan movement afoot in Utah to establish a cultural shift towards civility. For several months, my friend and colleague Dave Doty,(@canyonsdave) superintendent of Canyons District in Utah, and I’ve been discussing a need for more positive models of civil discourse in every area of society. It appears that he lives in one state that has leaders willing to do something about it.

We, who have responsibility for raising and teaching children, must consciously and consistently model a language of respect even when we disagree with each other. We need to teach our children that dissent and respect can occur in the same sentence. But, civility isn’t solely an issue of public schooling. We educators are part of the solution, but we aren’t the only solution. Civility begins in the home. It’s modeled in the community. And, it must be supported by everyone; religious leaders, political leaders, and arts and entertainment leaders. Media personalities need to step up to the plate and take responsibility for shifting the culture, too. If we don’t all do our part, then shame on us for talking the talk of civility for a few days without walking the walk for the long haul.

Do we want a nation where people can confidently speak up and share different opinions? Do we want schools where children can confidently engage in discourse about different perspectives from their peers and others? Do we want communities where people confidently consider a diversity of perspectives from other citizens? If so, we all need to start leading from in front for civility. Everywhere. All the time.

Thank you, Utah, for setting a tone that leads the way.

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Posted in Forum for Education and Democracy, Pam Moran, reason, School Community, Sphere of Influence, Uncategorized

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