A Parent's Big Questions about Education, Part 2

This week concludes my response to a concerned parent, Nanci, who emailed me some questions she has about her children’s schools. Nanci wrote that she wanted to hear what teachers thought of her concerns, so please don’t be shy about contributing thoughts and comments.

In a situation where an administration receives feedback from numerous parents that a new teacher is proceeding with poor teaching, frequently changing deadlines and rubrics, and harmful grading policies, WHY does the administration not assign a supervisor to micro-manage and closely remediate the teacher for the balance of the year?

The school may have assigned a mentor, but in my experience, no one is available to take on another teacher’s work load to the level of micromanagement and remediation. (If a teacher gets fired, that would free up some money to pay someone else to do the job.) Let’s say another English teacher got assigned to me. That English teacher already has a full class load of her own. How is she supposed to really improve my teaching while handling her own course load? Schools don’t usually have teachers with little to do. If that teacher tries to help me, she’s going to do it in half hour bursts after school or during lunch. The problems you describe, like changing deadlines and grading policies, have to do with organization and experience. It is very difficult to really help someone with a month long unit plan while teaching and grading five class sections of your own. Schools have not made the financial commitment to pay for that kind of support for new teachers. I currently teach and live in Central Florida, where the arts keep getting cut and class sizes continue to increase. These administrators’ budget constraints do not allow for a teaching position without a class load to support new teachers. The system in place is old, and it does not respond adequately to the time it takes teachers to learn to meet the needs of 21^st century teaching.

Why do schools NOT have a standardized grading policy? Wouldn't it make sense to universally say that tests are 40% of a high-schooler's grade and that 40% must contain at least 5 tests?

As an English teacher, I give very few tests, so I would rail against such a policy myself. I think school systems are often too big to make such sweeping policies. In my experience, the county system restricted how much of a percentage homework could be and wrote a specific curriculum for each course. In English, the curriculum determined how many major essays needed to be completed each semester. In our department, we standardized how much of the grade each of those essays should be. After the essay grades and the homework grades had been determined, the rest of the average was left to the teachers’ discretion. So for example, a new teacher would be told, “This semester you need to do Essay A and Essay B, and they each should be 20% of the grade. Homework can’t be more than 10%.” The other 50% could be divided up as the teacher saw fit. I’ve actually never had a “test” category at all. I have “Quizzes,” and they usually make up about 10%. I guess if a school told me to have 40% tests, I’d have to call an essay a test. I don’t know for the life of me how I’d come up with five in a semester…

Here’s the thing: I know I’m a good teacher, and that’s not who parents are worried about with grade questions. However, education cannot make rules for the lowest common denominator, or it will lose people like me. Discretion to customize my teaching is very important to me. I’m comfortable with parameters, like curriculum requirements or a grade cap on homework, but if teaching comes in a can, I may not want to do it. I now love the part new teachers struggle with—the planning, the customization, the organizing. Somewhere there are adult people who had me my first year of teaching, and I wish I could go back and teach them again with what I know now. The medical profession has a very long training and residency program; education does not. It doesn’t expect that much training, and it certainly doesn’t pay enough to support it, so sadly for our first students, many of us teachers learn on the job. Learning how to manage a fair and effective class average can be part of that learning curve, and if new teachers had more support, system-wide grade standardizations wouldn’t be necessary. Nanci, your questions go to the heart of the matter. In today’s more challenging classroom climate, are Americans willing to pay for more prepared, more qualified teachers or not?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

A Parent's Big Questions about Education, Part 1

Recently, a concerned parent, Nanci, emailed me some questions she has about her children’s schools. She wants a teacher’s perspective before she pursues her concerns; I’ve addressed the first of her questions here rather than simply emailing her back because I certainly can’t speak for all of education or all teachers. Feel free to chime in!

Why is teaching the one profession where a brand new person is put in charge of 100+ people with little to no assimilation training and -- more importantly -- little top-down evaluation?

I don’t think many other professions put as little money towards their new people as education. The career of teaching has grown more challenging over the past fifteen to twenty years, and the management structure for supporting—or assimilating—new teachers has not changed adequately to meet the new challenges. Student teaching is the primary training, and for a long time, that six month to one year long, unpaid internship seemed sufficient. (In fact, the student teacher pays the college for the experience.) I’m not familiar with a program that pays teachers without designating them a full teaching load. School budgets just don’t seem structured for that kind of investment in workforce. Many districts are responding to the current recession by cutting the arts and increasing class sizes, so a program that paid new teachers modestly while they mastered their craft would probably be the first to go anyway.

After student teaching and graduation, most new teachers are paired with a mentor once they begin teaching. These mentors, for the most part, are fellow teachers with a full teaching load. I’ve seen programs where mentors receive no additional pay and no reduced teaching load for this role; I’ve also seen programs where mentors have three to five new teachers and receive a $500 stipend for the year. Some schools may provide substitute money so that a mentor can take a day from his or her own classes to observe a new teacher, but how much support a mentor provides will vary greatly by the individual. Also, if the new teacher is a coach or has other extra-curricular responsibilities (as many untenured teachers do), he or she may not be available after school for help. Few mentors want a phone call at 9 p.m. (when many of us planned our lessons that first year) when the mentors aren’t receiving a reduced teaching load or financial compensation for the task. Scheduling conflicts can stagnate many mentor relationships.

In addition to mentors, most schools, because of No Child Left Behind requirements, have school or district-wide training for new teachers after school or on in-service days. I’ve seen good mentors and bad mentors. I’ve seen hiring years where so many new teachers start in one year that even the good mentors have very little time left to offer. School budgets and structure have not responded to the fact that student teaching does not prepare people to the extent it may have at one time. This organizational problem creates a high rate of new teacher turnover, which wears out dedicated mentors, too! One strategy for a parent concerned about a struggling new teacher may be to go to the principal and ask who is supporting this new teacher. By saying, “Gosh, I think Mr. or Ms. So-and-So really needs some more support from what I’m seeing with my child. Who is his/her mentor?” This approach suggests that administration needs to support new teachers, and the concerned parents can seek to contribute questions and issues through that support program. If there isn’t a support program for that new teacher, parents might start to demand that one be put in place…

Most schools utilize lots of top-down evaluation on new teachers. In one school district I worked, I was formally observed every six weeks and informally observed on a weekly basis. My department chair signed my lesson plan book every two weeks for the first year. In education, the problem isn’t the observation and evaluation of new teachers; the problem is that there isn’t really a structure in place to do more than record the problem. Qualified teachers, especially in math or science, aren’t waiting to be called in mid-year to replace a struggling new teacher. If a new teacher has big problems, I can guarantee that the department chair and the front office know about it. It becomes a triage situation, including documentation of the problem and a record of mentoring (see above). Most schools just try to get the new teacher through that first year. However, this strategy does little to help students who have that teacher for that year. If the teacher gets fired for bad teaching in say, February, who will pick up those classes, especially if state testing happens in the spring? Schools cannot afford to have a substitute who may not be a certified teacher preparing students for a state exam.

I realize, Nanci, that I haven’t been very hopeful here. Essentially, I think education needs to restructure its relationship with new teachers, which will take money and community dedication. I can’t say I see that on the horizon, either. In the meantime, we teachers try to help each other as best we can in passing time between classes.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

A Reason to Come to School?

If a student comes to school and cuts my class, I consider that my problem. However, if a student doesn’t come to school at all, I tend not to worry about that kid. Unless I know a student from a previous class or a club relationship, I begin my sense of responsibility when students and I cross into the building. Therefore, Gretel C. Kovach’s “To Curb Truancy, Dallas Tries Electronic Monitoring” in the New York Times intrigues me.

I’ve never worked in a school with a truancy program; in fact, I’ve never given much thought to where the kids are who don’t come at all. I guess I’ve fully turned that one over to the front office. While watching Season 4 of HBO’s The Wire, I felt for the character of Cutty, an ex-con now working in various ways to keep kids off the street. In the show, a middle school in Baltimore uses a couple of temporary custodial positions to hire men as informal truant officers, and Cutty has taken the job. As the HBO episode guide relates:

“Out on his truancy rounds, Cutty learns what his job is really about. The school is only interested in having the kids show up for one day a month in September and October - the minimum attendance that assures each school will be funded for the fullest enrollment. Cutty is incredulous. 'Naw, naw man. School is school,' he says to deaf ears. 'Which one of y'all still needs your September day?' his round-up partner asks the kids in an abandoned lot. Cutty is disgusted.”

This kind of bureaucratic ugliness can crush any educator’s spirit, and I try to stay away from school issues beyond my realm of control as a classroom teacher. I know I don’t have these system-wide answers. However, what would I think about teaching a kid wearing an ankle bracelet? Would I even know? My initial reaction is distaste, not unlike the state senator who “complained that ankle cuffs used in an earlier version were reminiscent of slave chains.” But since I’ve already admitted I don’t think much about where these students are, how much does my personal distaste matter?

Kovach writes: “The effort is financed by a $26,000 grant from Bruce Leadbetter, an equity investor who supports the program’s goals. The bulk of the money pays the salary of a full-time case manager, who monitors the students and works with parents and teachers.” I wonder if it is the relationship with this case worker that really makes the difference. It’s not fully clear in the article if the nine students at the featured school are the only members of the program, but Kovach gives the impression that nine students are in a six week pilot program. “The bulk” of 26K for six weeks and nine students sounds like a nice wage for the case worker, not that he or she doesn’t deserve it. I just wonder how that compares to the case loads and salaries of high school counselors.

The article creates the impression that once these formally truant kids get to school, they attend all their classes. Do the ankle bracelet and the focused attention from the case worker give these kids a sense that someone finally will notice whether or not they go to school? What does it say about a school system that can be fixed this way? It makes me want more information, information I could use to prove that smaller school sizes could create schools where kids knew people cared whether or not they showed up without electronic monitoring. To be fair, if I feel like doing extra educational research, it will be about teaching writing or critical reading; as I admitted already, I tend not to take on this kind of school system issue. An article like this one reminds me just how much work and thought has gone into getting my students in front of me. Free public schooling for the masses is some undertaking, isn’t it?

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter

Ah, May is here. My lesson plans get peppered with family tree projects, group presentations, a movie excerpt here and there…The hardest part of the academic year has passed, and now my students and I focus upon finishing these last few weeks cooperatively. Now is also the time of year when my mind begins to frolic in the “do-over” nature of teaching. What will I do differently next time?

Usually, I’ll sit down and write myself a letter, addressed to “Dear Rested, Excited about the New School Year Me.” I’ll write one for each of my preps, filling each letter with tangential details and more than a couple of run-on sentences. I’m the audience, and I know the author is writing after completing a mental marathon. I write about what worked, what didn’t, and what I plan to change. Here’s an excerpt from last summer’s letter:

“If I could teach [students] to look at how their peers use evidence to prove something, it could really save me pain near the end. B. also says they can’t learn everything. I cannot expect to get the MLA mastery I want and eradicate all false logic, too. I don’t really want to take anything out—and how much can I add? ANGEL can print my grade book easily, so I am able to see just how long my semester is: 21 quizzes, 4 timed writings, the research project, 2 essays, 3 drafts, 3 bulletin boards, and 5 additional writing assignments. That’s nutty.”

Pretty insular stuff, I realize, but it triggers my memory when I revisit it. I don’t read the letter until, oh…July, maybe two weeks before the letter comes from school welcoming me back for August and outlining the in-service schedule. I get excited every new school year, and the letter helps me remember where to begin. I teach the same preps over and over again; sometimes I forget my intentions! After reading this letter, I did decide to lose one of the timed writings and add a two day lesson on recognizing and constructively critiquing peers’ use of logic. This year, my letter will have new concerns.

I actually teach summer classes, too, but this ritual of closing out the regular school year helps me relax. Truthfully? I don’t have the energy right now to fix what needs fixing in these units, so this letter to myself helps me put it to the side until I can. Reading my old letters helps me see the progress I’ve made as well. It can be difficult in this profession to see our own growth when the demands constantly change around us, so we need habits where we acknowledge ourselves to ourselves. These letters help me do that…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Late to the Jargon Party

Okay, okay. So I know Marc Prensky’s “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants” hit the world in 2001, but I just read it. I’d heard the buzz words of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” but I didn’t really know what they meant. I think Prensky’s considers his audience Baby Boomers; I’m thirty-five, so I’m not really an immigrant or a native. I guess I’m first generation!

I’m not devoted to Prensky’s theories, especially since by his designations, I’m teaching “legacy content,” namely reading, writing, and logical thinking, for which Digital Natives don’t have a natural taste. Lucky English teachers, eh? He suggests that those of us teaching “legacy content” need to employ “future content,” which involves technology. I didn’t find that earth shattering. However, when Prensky writes: “Today’s teachers have to learn to communicate in the language and style of their students. This doesn’t mean changing the meaning of what is important, or of good thinking skills. But it does mean going faster, less step-by step, more in parallel, with more random access, among other things,” it caught my attention. Elsewhere, Prensky writes: “Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games to ‘serious’ work.” Prensky’s list rings true to me, and I’m trying to give it more thought.

Over the summer when I can get some distance from the daily mental burdens of grading and classroom management, I like to ruminate about how I teach. (I’ve always joked that my summer lesson planning always goes so well because my imaginary students love everything!) I see Prensky’s list as a challenge, and I’m going to brainstorm how I can make some “style” changes to better communicate with my sometimes restless natives:

• Going Faster and Less Step-by-Step—My gut instinct is “No way!” If I go faster, I’ll sacrifice depth and cause confusion. However, if I think about going faster by going less step-by-step, I realize that I already try to do this. I don’t try to hold every student to the same step in a process at the same time (at least not every day). I try to design units with multiple tasks that students can move through as they get to them. Like a water park where three different slides dump into the same pool, most students end up in the same place even if they took various steps to get there.

• Going More in Parallel and Multi-Tasking—This concept goes in place when I remove the step-by-step process. So okay, maybe all the vocabulary words for a chapter don’t need to be written out before we begin that chapter. See? I’m flexible! I really need summer to plan for this kind of teaching because it requires me to have lots of things prepared ahead of time. Essentially, when I begin a unit, I need to have all the steps already prepared because students will hit various steps at various times. (Although I do build in what I think of as anchor points, places where we convene together, say for a mini-lesson from me or for a test.) I also find it challenging to figure out what to do with the students who finish first, maybe a full day before other students. Do I “reward” them with extra work? Let them play solitaire while the principal walks by? Start the next unit and accumulate a week off for the end of the year?

• Going with more Random Access—I recognize Prensky’s validity on this point. My students do not think as sequentially as I do when they look for information. It’s probably impossible to organize a unit this way this first time I teach a new prep, but once I’ve made it to the end of a unit, I have a fair idea of when students have questions and what resources they’ll need. Instead of providing students with a packet of directions at the beginning of a unit, I’m going to use my web site enrichment for my classes to make FAQ-style directions. (Hard copy directions can be re-organized like this, too.) This fulfills the “just in time” learning for natives who like to find what they need in the instant they need it, as opposed to being given a complete packet and told to flip through it for their answers.

• Using more Networking—I know my students like to work together, but I don’t always want to see collaboration. It frustrates me when I give short answer questions and three kids write identical responses; in fact, I watch them pass around one kid’s notebook as each kid copies it. The trick here is designing lesson elements where students collaborate on problem-solving but then separate again for written assessment. I know it’s as old as the hills, but I love Think, Pair, Share. If I ask students to write before they collaborate, I can cut down on the copying. Maybe I’ll try to get them working together without seeking a written product at the end of the session…

• Using more Instant Gratification and Rewards—This concept makes me a little queasy because it feels like I’m catering to a baser appetite (Am I longing for the old country, Prensky?). I teach critical thought through close reading and careful writing. My “legacy content” and I are the anti-instant gratification. Does passing out Jolly Ranchers really help? Sigh. Alright. I have created some computer-based games (using these great game shells) and use some web-based tools for rote grammar/punctuation and MLA/plagiarism practice. These online drills help me differentiate and give students instant feedback. I try to return written work as quickly as I can. I’m thinking about using student email more to give frequent positive feedback during the week (although I’ve heard that email to today’s student is already passé.) I’m still crazy enough to want students to find reading the fiction and poetry we cover its own reward.

Quite obviously, I need to give each of these elements much more thought. I don’t think Prensky has all the answers, but I did think his list gave me a lot to think about this summer.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Reminder to Self: Process not Product

My students often “quilt” their writing with lists, phrases, full sentences, and even paragraphs they find on the Internet. Because they might find the same exact paragraph on five different websites, they confuse the paragraph with the research category of common knowledge. This confusion leads directly to unintentional plagiarism, and I work hard to ensure all my students only plagiarize on purpose don’t plagiarize. In our recent poetry wiki, students needed to find three resources on their poet’s biography. Per the instructions in our textbook, I directed students to read over each source and take notes on important details. After internalizing the information, students should put the sources away and write a summary from memory. Next, students should edit their summary for dates, titles, etc. by referring back to their references.

After completing this process, students put their summaries through Turnitin.com. The students’ results lit up with color like a rainbow. This too-small sample shows how the student text (on the left) is highlighted when it matches something on the Internet (websites listed on the right):

Hmmm. It turns out that many students could not bring themselves to write a summary without looking at the resources. I struggle to explain that while the facts are common knowledge, the written expression cannot be copied without credit. “You need to write it in your own words,” I’ll say. “I don’t know any other way to say that!” they’ll exclaim. Now, I may live to see a time when common knowledge includes written expression, but until that day, I want to keep working at this clarification. Also, writing a summary in original language is a good method for me to assess students’ reading comprehension, just like I do when I ask them to translate Shakespeare’s dialect into today’s speech. I decided that all those quilted summaries needed to be re-done.

“Go back and say that again in your own words,” I said in my best gentle, but firm voice. My students and I get on pretty well, so nobody laughed openly. A few students held my gaze as if to say, “Really? You are really going to make me do this again?” They returned to their seats and punched out words while plugging in less effective synonyms. “Her many accomplishments include” became “Her several achievements include.” I explained that they needed to do more than punch out words; they needed to change the syntax, too. Wearily, students converted the strong, active voice sentence structure they’d borrowed from the Internet into weak, passive, meandering phrases. “Born in Akron, Ohio in 1952, Rita Dove earned many honors” became “Rita Dove was born in the city of Akron amidst the year of 1952 in the city of Ohio.” By now, I am bleary-eyed from reading draft after draft. My head feels fuzzy as I realize that students have finally met my goal of genuinely paraphrasing, only now their language is weaker than their usual prose. Since I’d backed myself into a corner, I had to concede that students had met my goal even though I wasn’t satisfied with the results.

As I discussed the mess I’d made with a friend and mentor, she pointed out that I’d focused on students fixing a ruined product, born of a corrupted process. “You can’t re-spackle a wall,” she said. “You have to start over.” Her point works with my love of cooking metaphors, too. If I bake a cake with a corrupted process, say forgetting the eggs, I can’t fix that cake. I need to throw it out and start over, getting the process right the second time in order to get a better product. I needed to have students throw out that corrupted summary. I needed an alternative process, another assignment, a do-over, to give students a chance to apply what they’ve learned. I didn’t set my students up to succeed when I asked them to fix their broken products. It’s a lesson I’ve learned before, but I didn’t see it coming this time. The process means more here than the product, and I needed to build in process-repetition. On the one hand, it exhausts me to think of creating a second assignment, but let me assure you, the energy I wasted doing this exercise poorly cost me more…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Gettin' Wiki with It

Personally, I like Wikipedia. It has nearly replaced the Internet Movie Database as my go-to resource for determining where I’ve seen that actor playing the criminal on Law and Order or for determining the nutritional value of lentils. I worry, however, that my students don’t seem to understand the vulnerabilities of an open source tool with open editing privileges. They trust Wikipedia as an authority on everything, an honor I’m uncertain the tool deserves no matter how much I like it.

For several years, I’ve tried to explain my concerns to students. I’ve even showed students how I can edit a page with erroneous information and advised them to enjoy Stephen Colbert’s discussion of Wikiality, but I could tell I didn’t make much of an impression. So I decided to incorporate creating a class wiki into my new poetry unit despite the fact that I haven’t used that function before; treading into unknown technological problems seemed a worthwhile cost to shifting my students’ comprehension of what an open source wiki really means.

This week students reached the publication stage of our project. Each student picked a favorite poem from a selection and wrote a personal response to it. Then each student researched and wrote a short summary on the poet’s biography, complete with some recommended websites for further reading. Students turned in each individual assignment in hard copy for a grade. Once all that work had been recorded, students started the wiki. I have thirty students and only four poets. If a student posts first to the poet’s wiki, he or she can put his or her entire biography. However, if a biography is already there, students need to edit it with additional information from their own research or with changes they think would improve it; they repeat this process for the recommended websites, too.

As students built the collaborative wiki, they started to raise their hands for me to come over to their individual computers. “Where do I put my name?” students asked me one by one. “How will people know what I wrote compared to what other people wrote?” Over and over, I explained that wikis don’t provide individual authorship credit, that students' words would be combined, changed, and edited by their peers into a group effort. Now, I can’t lie. Students did not gasp, slap their foreheads and say, “Why I didn’t realize these resources could be so variable! Is verification by consensus really wise?” They took my answer quietly, with a little nod, and repeated, “So I don’t put my name on here. No one puts a name…” Then they got back to work. To me though, it feels like my point finally got through. I think the experience of participating in a wiki has deepened their understanding of the tool in a way I wasn’t successful in explaining with words or examples. As a matter of fact, I plan to ask students to fill in a “Before I thought a wiki _______, but now I think a wiki _________" kind of statement to really zone in to what they’ve learned. Starting a class wiki intimidated me, but I’m seeing real benefits to the risk.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher