ED Thoughts: Education Views and Support

Today is an inservice day for teachers. The schedule is full of good content, except for the 45 minute presentation by the insurance company (why I’m sitting in Starbucks getting my don’t-fall-asleep-you’re-near-the-front coffee). The first presentation is part of a panel about the new teacher evaluation system that we have been working on and finally adopted. The second presentation is just me and is about my K-12 common language student friendly scoring guide. More on that later.

I’m really excited!

Just a quick update. The Science Goddess has some of her notes from ASCD up at What it’s Like on the Inside. The notes as they are right now are only a page long, but it gives you some neat things to think about. For not being able to go to very many conferences it is nice for us to get a peek at what is going on at events. It’s important for teachers to be aware because these ideas will tend to trickle down to us at some point. There’s some interesting stuff over there.

I have been following her blog for years and it just gets better and better. It is really cool to have seen her do more and more around standards based grading.

I’m off to finish planning and grading!

I’m not an administrator, but if I was, this is how I would look at Professional Development

Professional Development is so important. Training is something that I look forward to, and I want my staff to walk away from the PD knowing that they are better informed and better teachers for it.

As I sit down to look at what I want to do during professional development, I look at a few things

1. New Regulations from the State and Federal Governments- My teachers need to be made aware of any statutory or regulatory changes that impact their jobs or the way I do mine. To the latter, I know that things I do in my office will impact my teachers, and I want them to know why I do something in a certain way so that they don’t feel upset when I make a decision in a certain way because I have to.
2. District initiatives- My district is always doing new things. Not all are earth shattering, but my staff needs to know what is going on pan-district.
3. New things in my school- What am I wanting to see out of my own school? What do I need to do to sell the program? So often my teachers get things handed to them, what can I do to get them invested and then provide long term follow-up for big projects?
4. Cool Stuff- What cool things can I show my teachers and staff? New technology at the ESD? Some cool websites? This doesn’t have to take forever, but why not have some cool stuff?

If it’s a full day of professional development, I need to get some real Starbucks for my staff.

To hold an effective professional development seminar the district must consider 2 things. The first is what the current district goals are (these are set by the DO and the individual school administrators) and second are what teacher goals are. Hopefully there’s some overlap, but concurrent goals aren’t required.

Overlap isn’t necessary. Some teachers don’t care about developing professionally so forget their input, or lack thereof, until they come around.

Other teachers are going to have their own ideas and interests. This should be accommodated as much as possible. How do we determine that? Ask. Set up a Google Form and ask teachers to do 2 things. First, what are they interested in? Do they know anyone who is doing a good job with that topic? (Not required to know anyone, but it may make the organizers’ job easier). Second, are there any teachers or staff that they would like to hear. This doesn’t have to be related to deep-seated professional interests, maybe they’re interested in how another teacher does something (classroom management, homework management, presentations, etc…).

This simple exercise helps to increase teacher buy-in. I’ve been to meetings or conferences where I wasn’t pumped about the topic in every session, but to have a few things to look forward to was nice. So often PD is planned but teachers aren’t consulted directly. By not doing so, we create a vacuum where the folks who everyone considers professionals, aren’t able to give their professional opinion.

Next Post- Determining Administrative Needs

I had a colleague give me a copy of the January 2010 Atlantic magazine. I have had it on my desk at home for a long time because it has an article by Amanda Ripley called “What Makes a Great Teacher?” I was intrigued, but for some reason I kept only reading a the first few paragraphs. This evening, as I sat out back grilling for one of the last times this summer (mmm…BBQ in the summer) I finally took the time to read the article.

I was particularly impressed with the article because unlike many other stories I have read it doesn’t simply put Teach for America on a pedestal. My own thoughts on TFA will be saved for another post, but for now, let’s just say I don’t agree with the assertion that TFA’s methods are the epitome of modern education practice. This doesn’t mean that I think they’re not ok, just not the be all end all of education reform.

Starting in 2002, Teach for America began using student test-score progress data to put teachers into one of three categories: those who move their students one and a half or more years ahead in one year; those who achieve one to one and a half years of growth; and those who yield less than one year of gains. In the beginning, reliable data was hard to come by, and many teachers could not be put into any category. Moreover, the data could never capture the entire story of a teacher’s impact, Farr acknowledges. But in desperately failing schools, where most kids lack basic skills, the only way to bushwhack a path out of the darkness is with a good, solid measuring stick.

I think that using data is important, but I also worry about using it as the sole means of measuring teacher effectiveness so Farr (a researcher for TFA) acknowledging this point is a good thing. Unfortunately, it seems that test data, even if not used as the primary way of evaluating teachers is the part of these evaluations that people tend to focus on. Check out the furor over the LA Times Story that used value-added data (current scores used to project success) and ranked teachers. In that story, scores were what was used and that’s all.

The focus on standardized scores is unfortunate because there are so many factors outside of the teacher’s control that do impact test scores. Please note that I do not believe extraneous factors excuse the teacher from doing everything they can to help their students succeed at anything. Further, teachers should raise test scores. How do I square my belief in teacher raising test scores with my belief that those scores should not be the primary way of evaluating teachers? Probably some amount of cognitive dissonance, but primarily I believe that although test scores are very important, I know that we are not educating a nation of standardized test takers. There are so many more factors to education than the tests.

Some interesting tidbits:

Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.

Pretty clear, but I’m glad that the data backs this up. This year I am trying to increase the recruitment of families. I’m starting with a home survey that will help me get the parents thoughts on what their children need and what has and has not worked in the past.

“Strong teachers insist that effective teaching is neither mysterious nor magical. It is neither a function of dynamic personality nor dramatic performance,” Farr writes in Teaching as Leadership, a book coming out in February from Farr and his colleagues. The model the book lays out, Farr is careful to say, is not the only path to success. But he is convinced it can improve teaching[...]

This is interesting because I think that dynamic performance is very important in the classroom. I’m not saying a teacher has to dress up as characters (ala Herbert Gower in Teachers) or jump up on desks to dive home a point (guilty) because I have had a teacher who stood at the front of the room and spoke…and the students got it. This teacher, although some people from the outside would have sen him as dull, it was his knowledge of the subject and his quirky personality (it was good though, he was super professional and most everyone responded well to this) led to a type of dynamic presentation. A dull teacher will bore the students to death. Tey have to have something that keeps the kids interested.

For years, Teach for America also selected for something called “constant learning.” As Farr and others had noticed, great teachers tended to reflect on their performance and adapt accordingly. So people who tend to be self-aware might be a good bet. “It’s a perfectly reasonable hypothesis,” Ayotte-Hoeltzel says.

But in 2003, the admissions staff looked at the data and discovered that reflectiveness did not seem to matter either. Or more accurately, trying to predict reflectiveness in the hiring process did not work.

What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. In the interview process, Teach for America now asks applicants to talk about overcoming challenges in their lives—and ranks their perseverance based on their answers. Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have actually quantified the value of perseverance.

That information was particularly interesting. Teachers do need to persevere in the face of adversity, so it would make sense that a person who had shown actual persistence in the past would continue to do so.

In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance—especially the kind you can measure—is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement”—a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising.

GPA should be very important, and I tie the latter factor here to perseverance. You have to persevere in order to succeed in something.

Overall, a very interesting article. Right now I am reading Teach Like a Champion. I was intrigued by a NYT article about the author that really got around on the blogs. It has techniques (some of them pretty standard) that the author says efective teachers in his charter schools use. I’m always looking for ways to improve my practice and before too long I’ll write a review of the book before too long.