Commentary: Spring break teacher musings

A veteran high school teacher ponders random issues from “outsiders” intruding on school decisions to extended learning time.

Commentary: Is collaboration the key to satisfaction?

Job satisfaction among teachers is the worst it has been for decades.  That’s what the 2012 MetLife survey of the American teacher says.

Since 1984 MetLife has conducted a survey of teachers, parents, and students about the teaching profession, parent and community engagement and the effects of the economy on families and schools.  The survey reflects what so many of my colleagues have been saying for the past few years.  The increased scrutiny along with what seems like endless teacher bashing is taking its toll.

But not all teachers feel this way.  A significant number of teachers, even with current economic conditions, are satisfied with their job. I think it is worth looking at those who are satisfied and see what makes them so.

The survey shows that teacher job satisfaction has dropped 15 points since 2009, from 59 percent who were very satisfied to 44 percent in 2011. This is the lowest number in 20 years.  This bit of data will probably generate the most buzz from the education field.  While many may use the drop in satisfaction as proof that the teaching profession is under unfair and intense scrutiny (see Kevin Welner’s post), I hope we can look at the data on those teachers who are satisfied with their jobs and see why they are satisfied.  Here, after all, is clear information as to why teachers are satisfied versus the conjecture on why teachers are not satisfied.

First a note about those teachers with low job satisfaction: according to the survey  teachers with “low job satisfaction are more likely to teach in urban schools and in schools with larger proportions of minority students.”  There is certainly a disproportionate impact of the economic recession and budget cuts in these districts.  This coupled with the fact that urban students and their families have increased their reliance on health and social support services has put high levels of stress on schools and districts as they find themselves filling in the gaps that the local services cannot fill.

Commentary: The Byzantine world of the Common Core

Much of the initial discussion around the implementation of the Ensuring Quality Instruction Through Teacher Effectiveness Law (EQuITEE) has been on the requirement that 50% of a teacher’s evaluation will be based on student growth, as measured by tests. While assessments are important to gauging a teacher’s effectiveness and impact on student learning, we should not forget to focus on the standards addressed in the assessments. Sound instructional practice requires that teachers establish what it is we want students to know and be able to do.  Once this is done, assessments are constructed. So, before we even consider what the assessments look like, we need to make sense of, or “unpack,” the standards.

Have you seen the National Common Core Standards?  It is quite an impressive gathering of . . . well it is hard to say what it is.

According to the Common Core website, “the standards were developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators and experts to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.”  National standards have been written for Math and Language Arts and, as you begin to peruse these standards, it becomes evident that there needs to be some serious translation if teachers are to clearly understand what the standards should look like in classroom practice.

For example, in Language Arts there are four categories: reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  These are then broken into grade levels.  For grades 11 and 12, there are more than 70 writing standards!  Include reading and you have more than 100 standards.

Commentary: Aversion to failure hurts education

Sometimes teachers shake their heads and say, “There must have been something in the water when these kids were born.”  How else can you explain the hard-to-explain trends that evolve in our classrooms from one year to the next?  The trend I see has to do with students’ reluctance to challenge themselves and to struggle through when faced with new content or while applying new skills or concepts.

In conversations with my colleagues, we have encountered more and more students – and parents – who want to switch from one class to another.  Why?  The reasons vary: Their teachers are being mean; the teacher’s style is counter to the student’s learning style (Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences gone haywire if you ask me); the teacher is too negative; the student just doesn’t “get it” in their classes.

Some students who are successful in my class want out, but a majority of the students who want out are not academically successful.  Which isn’t to say they are struggling; rather they give up as soon as they encounter some academic dissonance.  This dissonance is the characteristic that shows you are learning something.

But some students do not see this.  They immediately raise a hand and say “I don’t get it!’  And if the teacher persists in encouraging the student to struggle, the student claims that the teacher isn’t helping them, or they are being mean, or that the teacher’s style is keeping them from getting “it.”

But it is the struggle that causes learning.  And sometimes the student does not get it right away.  It takes more time and resources.  But as soon as a grade reflects a struggle, in other words they don’t have an “A” in class, fingers are pointed at the teacher.  Some of this has to do with our overreliance on an imperfect system of reporting, in other words the letter grade system.

Commentary: New paradigm needed for teacher training

Many years ago, as I navigated my way through different careers before settling on education, I was a truck mechanic for Ford. I started right out of high school prepping new cars and then worked my way into the apprentice mechanic program. I wanted to work on big trucks. The career path – from apprenticeship to journeyman mechanic – was charted and guided by the union.

According to union procedures, you had to apprentice under the watchful eye of a master mechanic. The length of the apprenticeship depended on how long it took for the apprentice to master the craft. For me it took around two years.

My master teacher, a crusty Chicago Sicilian guided me through the process, just as he was taught. He was short on theory and long on practice. So it went for two years. First I assisted him replacing clutches, brakes, and engines. Then he assisted me as I worked. Finally he left me alone to practice. All along the way he gave me feedback.

I wouldn’t call it the most nurturing experience. He had a knack for throwing Sicilian cuss words at me (which I occasionally conjure up today when needed) and he had a tendency to take the better paying jobs, leaving me with the jobs that paid less and involved more grunt work. But because of him I was able to move through my apprenticeship quicker than most. I took away from that experience the insight that I learn by doing and with plenty of feedback.

Governor should lead urgent, post-Lobato talks

A Denver District Court judge has ruled that the state of Colorado is not fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide for a “thorough and uniform” school system.

Let me rephrase that statement: Our children’s rights are being violated! In any other instance, if the words children, violated, and rights were uttered in the same sentence there would be an outcry and over-the-top coverage by news organizations. What has the response been so far from our elected officials?

The state has said it will surely appeal the decision to the State Supreme Court. Governor Hickenlooper has stated that any changes to the state’s funding should be lead by a grassroots effort. The governor, speaking at the Colorado Association of School Boards last Friday–just hours before the decision was released–was asked how he could use his popularity to change the state constitution. He said: “The only way I know to change something like the state constitution…is to go out to the people and listen as hard as we can…Don’t start with a presupposition that we need to raise taxes or that we need to fund this or that.”

I think his presupposition has been made for him by the courts. And instead of waiting for a grassroots effort to lead the change it should be led by the governor.

Opinion: Why “Gen Y” teachers supported SB 10-191

In the Spring of 2010 I testified, with some other teachers, to the Colorado House and Senate Education Committees in support of SB 10-191, a bill that included major changes to the way teachers and principals are evaluated and retained.  I was one of a few teachers supporting the bill who had more than five years of teaching experience.

The fact that most of the teachers supporting the bill were less experienced teachers did not go unnoticed by legislators sitting on the committees.  Every time a teacher would introduce him or herself to the committee an opponent would be sure to ask how much experience he or she had.  (They failed to ask me how many years I had been teaching. Sixteen for me.) It was obvious that the opponents of the bill felt that less experienced, or younger teachers, did not have any credibility.

The assumption by opponents that more experienced teachers were against the bill had some merit.  Anecdotally, and in my exchanges with colleagues, I would agree that the less experienced and younger teachers were more favorable towards the bill. The opponents of SB 10-191 were valuing the years of teachers’ experience, which these days, flies in the face of many reform advocates who devalue veteran teachers.  Were the legislators operating off an assumption that the younger, less experienced teachers did not know any better?

Why the generational divide among teacher on SB 10-191?

I could never put my finger on why a divide existed between the various generations of teachers on the merits of SB 10-191.  There are some stark differences in how the older, veteran teachers view their profession in comparison to younger, less experienced teachers.

Does choice make board districts obsolete?

A few decades ago school board members represented not only the schools in their respective districts but almost all of the students as well.  Almost all of the students living in the school board member’s district went to schools in their district.  This was not always true, especially during the integration movement on the late 70s and 80s in Denver.  But in general, our school boards represented their constituents’ students as well as the schools in their district.

With the recent movement towards choice, has the traditional representation model of school boards changed?  Does it need to?

Differentiating between ‘expert’ and ‘experienced’ teachers

As my district navigates its way through the implementation of standards-based grading and learning, I have been reviewing research on feedback and its impact on student achievement.

John Hattie, a New Zealand researcher, has done some meta-analysis studies on the role of feedback in the classroom.  I have blogged before about his conclusions.  I went back to Hattie recently and stumbled upon a paper he presented to the Australian Council for Educational Research Annual Conference.

The paper identifies the dimensions and attributes that differentiate between expert and experienced teachers.  Immediately you can see that Hattie controls for the “confound of experience.”  Hattie allows for experience and then asks what makes the difference between excellent, or accomplished teachers, and experienced teachers.

Hattie finds five major dimensions of excellent teachers.

Collaboration: The missing link in reform?

Well, here it is, “The Missing Link in School Reform.”  That’s the title at least to a very intriguing article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.  The sub heading to the article states “In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaboration.”

Personally, I have known for years now that collaboration is key for schools to be successful. This is based on my own experience at my school, and it has been touted by educators like Rick DuFour and his take on Professional Learning Communities. But now we have some good empirical evidence to support this.

The authors of the study looked at more than 1,000 fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in the New York City Public schools between the years 2005 and 2007.  The authors contend that when struggling math teachers engaged in conversations with their peers, as opposed to district experts or even principals, their students’ academic success increased by 5.7 percent.