A Place at the Table

The weather is gorgeous, the flowers are blooming and the porch chair is more compelling than my desk chair. Like my students, I am yearning to be outside. In two days it’s May, it’s May, the month of “Yes, you may . . . open your test booklets and begin.”

OK, that’s not really accurate because we do our testing on-line. But whether it’s paper and pencil or on-line, testing now dominates April and/or May for most schools. We need those tests. They provide verification of learning for students, parents, teachers, school policymakers and all other school stakeholders. The data they provide helps us analyze performance, identifying strengths and targeting areas for improvement. Yet most teachers, regardless of their background, their ability, or the performance of their students on standardized tests, seem to have a gut reaction of resistance to the current usage.

Why? Last week I was re-reading part of Malcolm Gladwell’s BLINK: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. I find it interesting and others find it irritating because it argues with itself about the pluses and minuses of iintuitive decision making as opposed to the importance of information based decision making.

He points out:

…Instinctive judgments rely on experience…….We miss things…..Furthermore a lot of things we try to measure are awfully subtle.

Sometimes teachers rely on experience that is invalid. Some teachers get sloppy. And sometimes what we should be measuring is simply beyond our ability to capture while interacting with a roomful of kids. Sometimes we’re too close to the problem and too engaged in being with a room of children to recognized patterns. We need outside eyes to collect data and drill down to identify strengths and areas for improvement.

But Gladwell also maintains:

We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with all the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.

And it seems like it’s the data, not an understanding of children and their needs that is driving education policy and practice. Type “data-driven instruction” into Google and you’ll get 23,500,000 different responses. Somewhere along the way, with the best of intentions, education policy went astray. Instead of using data as a tool to inform how to better teach students, the data outcome has unintentionally become the fixed variable around which instruction, teachers, and even students revolve.

I hoped Gladwell would give me the definitive answer in his Afterword, but instead he remains uncommitted to a single “right” answer, saying:

I think the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgment is one of the great challenges of our time.

I have a lot of ambivalence about how all of this applies to education policy. Where are the fine lines between what we can prove, informed intuition, and personal opinion? When does statistical information provide clarity and when does it obscure humanity?

Good teaching is a combination of knowledge, skill, experience and reflection. It’s a science and an art. I think we need to trust our instincts, but confirm our intuition by measuring it against data gathered by ourselves and the data generated by others. We know our students’ needs and that is critical because, while they may be data points, they are also people.

In the meantime, it’s May and nerves begin to fray! So take a deep breath, give it your best, and then go out and play!

Posted by Susan Graham at 1:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"It doesn't matter how poor, how tough the family background [or] socioeconomic challenges," Duncan said. "Where students have longer days, longer weeks, longer years -- that's making a difference."

Humm……
So the best school would be one that meets 24/7? Is more better or is it just more?

I find this interesting because just a week ago I was looking at The Washington Post Magazine Education Review which is a popular advertising venue for private schools. You know what? Not one of those private school ads marketed “longer days, longer weeks and longer school years.” Nor did they tout “data driven” programs with “benchmarked assessments” that inform the “accountability system.”

What do private schools market instead? They speak of “creative curriculum” with “child centered instruction” that provides “individualized attention.” This is delivered by “gifted” and “caring” teachers who are part of a “community” rich in “tradition.” If the well educated, well heeled, and well connected who are ready to pony up $30,000 annual tuition want this for their own kids, I wonder why it isn’t a good choice for all kids. Wouldn’t children who have less advantaged backgrounds benefit from this kind education as well?

But small classes are expensive! Besides, there is research that says class size doesn’t matter when the measurement of success is bubble-in test scores. All things considered, the economists, who are making education decisions these days, maintain the return on (public school) investment just doesn’t justify small classes. And really, how much difference do just one or two more kids per class make anyway? So class size continues to inch up with high school classes often having 35 or more students in a section.

What I don’t understand is why longer days, longer weeks, and longer years will solve the problem of poor school performance. It may be true that India, Japan and China have more student contact hours, but that is hardly the only variable that marks the difference between our education system and theirs. Here in the United States, the schedule of many prestigious private schools is more like the 14-week collegiate semester than the 18-week public school semester. Why are the most elite K12 schools and our universities doing well if they have shorter school years?

What concerns me most is this—if we are going to keep kids in school for longer days, weeks, and years, exactly what will they be getting more of during that time? More of what they’ve been getting? Because that hasn’t been working all that well, has it?

Longer school days, weeks, and years are hardly cost neutral. They will carry a hefty price tag for transportation, food service, energy costs, and building and administrative support staff as well as for extended teacher contracts. Urban high schools are plagued by dropouts as it is. It seems unlikely that a longer school day, week and year will encourage at-risk students to hang around Why not invest in the smaller class sizes that are a major draw for private schools? Might this be a better use of resource? Maybe loading up at the all-you-can-eat buffet of education is not the best way to go. A smaller portion of instruction that is thoughtfully planned, well prepared and served in a pleasant setting might be more appetizing and more nutritious. Maybe more is just more.

It seems to me that there might be an unacknowledged perception that we can justify spending for quantity of education, but investment in the quality of the learning experience is an extravagance. After all, those kids are there to learn, not to be coddled. A longer day, week and year provides a measurable investment for dollars spent, but does it provide assurance of a improved productivity? Would a smaller class where distractions are fewer and instruction is more targeted, increase the efficiency of the unit sufficiently to offset the greater operation costs?

Is more better? Maybe, but maybe less can be more too. Some successful charters have focused on quantity of one-to-one contact time and seen positive outcomes. Most successful privates have built reputations for excellence on intimate personalized instruction in small classes.

Is increasing the serving size of the same school experience the answer? I don't think so. Supersizing the school day, week, and year may be more filling, but it isn’t more nourishing, and it doesn’t go down any easier.

Posted by Susan Graham at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

As Colleague and Mentor Program coordinator for my school, I love working with new teachers. The only problem is that I don’t get much business because we don’t have much turnover. When teachers leave our school, it’s usually because they are moving, pregnant or retiring. I barely make the top 10 senior-teacher list in terms of tenure with a mere 21 years. But at 58, I easily make the top five in terms of age.

I have this weird sensation that theNational Commission on Teaching and America’s Future has been reading my mind. While they may not know me, they have been looking closely at teachers like me. Learning Teams: Creating What’s Next looks at the problems and possibilities emerging from the reality that as much as one third of America’s teaching force is within four years of retirement.

Here's a finding worth mulling over:

At the end of their careers, accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems.

I’m one of those highly accomplished Baby Boomer teachers. I love working with my students. I love working with new teachers. I love working with colleagues in staff development. I love writing and researching. I love being a keeper of institutional knowledge for my school and my school system. I love developing my professional skills with experiences such as the Santa Cruz mentor training. My own children are grown, my personal life is in order, my professional network is strong, my knowledge is current, and my skills are refined by practice. I’m not ready to quit. I’m ready to do more.

I'm ready to take on new challenges, but I find that there are few options at this point in my career.Those of us who chose to stay in the classroom in our 30s are now expected to stay in our classrooms in our 50s. But by limiting how we are used, school systems fail to realize the full return on their investment in skilled classroom practitioners.

...It is a faulty and costly assumption to allow accomplished veterans, who have been the beneficiaries of a substantial, long‐term professional development investment, to walk away from their careers just because they are in their fifties. We must develop selection criteria and processes that enable veteran teachers to contribute to schools according to their expertise and level of commitment.

I have no intention of walking away, but I do wonder how long I can keep up my current pace. While my contemporaries are retiring or scaling back, I’m taking on more. Because there is no option for anything other than a full time teaching load or a full time administrative role, I regularly work 12-hour days. I’m not complaining; I do it by choice. But I don’t know how much longer I can work with teachers, address policy issues, and write without shortchanging the students in my classroom, and ethically they are my first responsibility.

In the meantime I dream of being a teacher coach. I fantasize about using those mentoring skills to support new teachers in their classroom as they find their teaching stride and teacher voice. I dream about working with practicing teachers as they move from competent to accomplished. I imagine being there on the sidelines as other teachers discover the excitement and satisfaction of professional leadership.

It is time to build the capacity of teachers to function like professionals whose preparation, practice, and career advancement are seamlessly aligned around a cohesive knowledge base that is focused on improved student learning. We must become explicit and intentional about our efforts to build a seamless continuum of professional growth that begins with teaching apprenticeships and extends to multiple roles for accomplished teachers.

Stakeholders are bound to have concerns about implementation of these Learning Teams, and they are legitimate. I have some myself. Higher ed will worry about being displaced from their role in teacher preparation. School administrators will worry about chain of command and authority over part-timers. Teacher organizations will worry about impact on seniority and pay scales. I worry about who will worry about whether the teacher who was effective in a classroom with children has the skills to facilitate adult learning, because pedagogy and androgogy are not interchangeable.

In the meantime, think of all those gifted veteran teachers have much to offer but have no framework in which to share their expertise. Think of all the fine young teachers who give up because they don’t have a support system to help them develop their skills. Think of all the potential career switchers who walk away because there is no alternative to a traditional teacher prep program. And, most of all, think of all those kids who need all those new, flipped, or veteran teachers to help them learn.

Posted by Susan Graham at 12:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

According to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, new research done at Cornell explains that

The income–achievement gap is a formidable societal problem…. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood. (Gary Evans and Michelle Shamberg)

Their work adds to the body of knowledge of research on poverty and learning which addresses the concern that

There is a gulf between low and middle Socioeconomic status (SES) children in their performance on just about every test of cognitive development, from the Bayley Infant Behavior Scales to IQ and school achievement tests. Furthermore, these SES disparities are not subtle.
(Martha Farar)

This is important news because

Smarts matter in our high-tech age of standardized tests, iPhone entrepreneurs and nanotech venture capitalists. "The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion," as the writer Anna Quindlen puts it.( ABC News)

Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children. (The Economist)

The policy problem is one that economists and other stakeholders are sometimes slow to acknowledge

We know a lot about raising incomes, a bit about improving test scores, and something about moving people into employment; but stress isn’t an outcome we’re very good at affecting. (Andrew Leigh)

In the meantime, everyday teachers see that

Tough times have trickled down to the youngest generation. Many children of today's recession are reeling along with their parents. Some have been uprooted from their homes and schools. Others are pitching in to pay the bills or seeing fewer of the extras they once enjoyed: camps, vacations, sports teams, allowances. The economy of 2009 has reshaped some expectations about growing up. The Washington Post (Donna St. George)

I just can’t help but wonder why this is news. Teachers have long known that far too many children live with more pressure than most adults could bear. We have witnessed its numbing effect on curious minds and its crushing effect on human spirit.

But when classroom teachers have said children who live in stressful conditions have difficulty learning, we were accused of not believing “All children can learn.”

And when classroom teachers said we agree all children can learn, but when they come tired, hungry, and scared about what they find when they go home they may not learn as much, they told us that we needed to "Set high expectations.”

And when teachers have suggested we assess learning in ways that create less stress on children, we were told “You're afraid of accountability.”

Research now seems to be bearing out what teachers have been trying to get across for years. Poverty wears the body, preoccupies the mind, and weighs down the spirit.

Unfortunately, there is little satisfaction in saying “I told you so.”

Posted by Susan Graham at 1:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)