We live in a time when our former Secretary of State, in a speech I find utterly mind-boggling, declares our public schools a threat to national security. I'm spending this holiday weekend thinking about the real-life influence-as opposed to cheap politicization-- of public schooling and schoolteachers on children's safety, well-being and patriotism. On Monday morning, I will join the Northport Community Band in a concert at the Northport, Michigan Village Cemetery. And Sunday, in church, I'll share the story of my uncle, Donald Tjapkes, killed at 19 in the first wave of Marines on Iwo Jima, in 1945.

All weekend I'll be wishing for good weather, so marching bands and taps-playing trumpeters across the nation can commemorate the dead-- and inspire their communities.

The piece below is an updated reprint.

I'm not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote:

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

I still believe, heart and soul, in the shining ideals of democracy, however --equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade.

For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in '88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school.

There was never a budget for this--middle schools don't typically have marching bands--but somehow there were always T-shirts, and cold drinks at the end of the parade route. We had a stunning handmade banner that two moms whipped up with lots of lamé and sequins. In my last year, we marched 300 students, on a morning when the sky was a sapphire blue and Air Force jets flew overhead as we rounded the corner by the cemetery.

This took up a fair amount of teaching time. I would get on my knees and beg colleagues for 20 minutes on the Friday before the parade, to assemble five bands into a single marching unit and take a few spins around the parking lot. One year, as I was trying to get the back of the band to master pinwheel corners, the front rank (rambunctious 8th grade trombones) marched right up the sidewalk, opened the front doors, and led the band, playing America the Beautiful at top volume, through the school hallways. By the time I sprinted up to the head of the band (and the principal popped, red-faced, out of his office), marching through the school was a done deal--and became yet another annual tradition.

I was always clear with my students about the meaning and purpose of Memorial Day. They would occasionally whine about how boring America the Beautiful was--Mr. Holland's band played Louie, Louie, right? I explained that they were old enough to dedicate a morning to thanking local patriots and acknowledging the sacrifices made by Americans over centuries. Older people, watching them march by, would be pleased to hear traditional music. It was about respect.

We do this, I told them, to remember and honor those who made it possible for you to live in this beautiful little town, in this safe world. People like my Uncle Don. Or Ray Shineldecker and Joey Hoeker, two high school classmates who lost their lives in Viet Nam. I had lots of funny stories to tell about Joey, who lived around the corner in my old neighborhood--a big, goofy kid who was what guidance counselors in the 1960s called "not college material."

On our last band trip to Washington D.C., after performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I was loading tympani onto the buses as my students toured the Mall. A few girls came running up, calling "Mrs. Flanagan! We found him!" Found who, I asked.

Joey Hoeker, of course--on the Wall. And I lost it, right in front of all those kids.

I thank those who served and sacrificed so I can love my country, and criticize it, too. A hat tip to all the band teachers and student musicians who help make Memorial Day meaningful this weekend. And to hero teachers everywhere--please keep teaching, in spite of everything.

Good job, Teach.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

I heard Gary Stager speak at a technology conference, a few years back. I'd been following him for some time, via his intelligent blog posts and articles--and was very surprised that the room where he was speaking was virtually empty, with maybe a dozen people in attendance. Nearly everyone in the audience came from the previous packed keynote, held in the ballroom next door, called "Free is Good!"

Stager's remarks were provocative and smart. He opened his presentation by noting that, contrary to the fast-talking, extended commercial for Web 2-point-whatever no-cost goodies we'd just experienced, none of those tools was truly "free." Someone's making money, he said. And it's almost a certainty that the someone is not in the classroom, or even an educator. While tech-based tools can absolutely transform learning, most of them are now are serving other goals: administrative tasks, jazzing up traditional direct instruction, impressing parents and soaking up public resources in the name of "innovation." It's not about kids' self-directed learning, at all. Don't be fooled.

I thought about Stager's remarks again--for the hundredth time--today. I got an e-mail asking me to take a five-minute survey for an organization that sends out a free daily ed-news aggregator. After collecting some demographic and job-description data, this question: Are you responsible for purchasing the following for your district? [Radio-button list of materials, services, products that schools typically purchase.] Oh, I thought. Yup. No such thing as free, really.

Teachers are infamous for being scroungers, tinkerers and thieves. We steal ideas from each other--or, more likely, generously offer them to our colleagues, flattered that someone would imitate a lesson plan or fall in love with a tool we designed. We cruise garage sales for used books, and recycle the beanbags from mom's basement as a reading nook.

My friend Dale Rogers has been tinkering with technology in learning for more than a decade, serving his Career and Technical Ed students with continuously updated, custom-designed, web-accessible videos long before flipped instruction and blended learning were hot, marketable concepts. By my reckoning, he should be as notorious as Sal Khan--perhaps more famous, since his production values are better and his content designed by a professional educator.

Dale's actually been doing what Gary Stager described as rare: designing opportunities for students to learn, on their own timetable. If we turn smart teachers loose, they will figure out ingeniously tailored, even elegant ways to enhance learning for their particular students--but none of the experiences and tools they devise are "free." They are generated by investment in instruction and people.

Last week, I drove across northern Michigan to attend a "free" ed-camp-esque gathering of school superintendents and district technology directors. It was billed as a day of honest conversations about breaking out of old, tired education thinking. The big draw and guest of honor (who left after the opening panel) was Peter Ruddell, one of the governor's informal advisors, head of a self-described "aggressive" government-affairs law firm.

Ruddell pitched a few ideas: giving students who leave high school a year early $2500 in free money--call 'em scholarships!-- plus erasing district boundaries, eliminating costly attendance-taking, and diversifying teacher pay. Offering calculus teachers more than physical education teachers was his example. All of these would free up loads of public resources--which could be used to purchase sophisticated data management programs and services, kicking data analysis into overdrive and making it useful in measuring and rewarding performance.

There was no pushback. Other superintendents talked about "tremendous opportunities" afloat now--surviving the financial crunch by creating "niche markets," shaking off the "victim mentality" and launching new, entrepreneurial startups (with public funds). Taking risks. Taking a stance against unions (a word that drew muttering and groans).

There was, however, a free lunch and free coffee. And a free headache for the ride home. We were asked, as the meeting kicked off, to check our preconceptions at the door. And I have to admit I feel a tweak of--what? not guilt, really--perhaps anxiety over being asked to participate and being both unable and unwilling to abandon my distaste over experiencing what felt like a pep rally for chasing PR and education "wins" on the public dime.

There were some good folks there. I met a wonderful superintendent who has established a set of creative programs--a food service training school for disabled adults, a second-chance program for dropouts that brings technology into a bricks-and-mortar setting where kids are not just supervised but known, a career curriculum that includes fire-fighting and law enforcement courses. Using public resources to build new programming designed explicitly for the community, establishing partnerships with local businesses and public services--that's civic engagement. It's a fine line between being creative to meet kids' needs and seeing education as open marketplace, however.

I was sad to see today that the Network of Michigan Educators, a group of recognized teachers and school leaders that I helped to co-found, almost 20 years ago (using a federal grant) is advertising a "free" summer course, offered by Pearson. I was reminded of the dustup over state school chiefs who traveled to London, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro on Pearson's tab. Strictly for the kids, of course--or as Pearson says, "in pursuit of educational excellence."

I tend to see these Pearson-provided "opportunities" as business as usual--exotic junkets, sample materials, freebie courses and trainings, web tools, lunch and doughnuts. Just more Chris Whittle and Channel One. It never ends.

No such thing as free.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

When my son was in high school, his band teacher used "theory packets" as fill-in work for days when he was absent from the classroom or had something other than whole-group instruction on his personal agenda. These packets were the absolute worst kind of make-work: poor copies reproduced (without permission) from an old college-level music theory workbook, disconnected from the learning goals of regular class lessons, pretty much incomprehensible without prior knowledge and excruciatingly dull.

The best thing you could say about them was that they were--sort of--about music. The worst thing? That they soured students on deeper examination of the intriguingly complex natural and mathematical structures lying under the songs that were so fun to play. I'm not saying that high school students shouldn't learn musical theory--they absolutely should, in ways that would let them use theory as a tool in creating their own tunes, harmonies and rhythms. Mention "theory" to any one of my son's classmates, however--and they envision sitting around in small groups, furtively copying each others' meaningless answers just to be done.

The packets, however, were not the problem. It was the lack of instructional purpose behind them, and the rote, fill-in-the-blank/check-the-papers pedagogical approach. Any teenage garage band with a dozen music lessons between them, combined, conducts far more effective auto-didactic theory sessions every time they get together to play. It goes like this: Hey, dude--listen to this chord! Awesome!

I've been thinking about packets (and their progenitor, worksheets) and why educators speak of them in the same tone Jerry Seinfeld uses for "Newman." Are packets what blogger Lisa Nielsen would sneeringly call evidence that teachers are "paper-trained?" Stubbornly unwilling to let go of the paper-based teaching tools in favor of the Exciting Transformative Digital Future? Digital tools may or may not increase actual learning, but they have certainly generated a lot of self-righteous bloggery and more repetitive, 2.0 Twitter chats than you can shake a virtual stick at.

I got some credible learning mileage out of teacher-created packets and worksheets in my teaching career. Sure, I've seen useless worksheets and packets--sorry, elementary teachers, most of those "summer math packets" were completed the day before school started again in the fall, and didn't stimulate regular calculation practice to keep those skills sharp. But--nice try! You can't begrudge the goal, or criticize teachers for using the tools they have at their disposal.

Every conference or educational gathering I've ever attended--even ed-camp "unconferences"--had some paper-based materials, usually in a folder or notebook. Call them adult packets. And every post-conference virtual learning group/listserv I've led or participated in has folded. Many don't even get started, after contact information is collected.

It's the networking that's valuable--meeting someone, starting a relationship, stealing their ideas, folding them into new understandings. That happens through multiple communication channels. The difference is that adults assess the utility of printed and digital materials they're given and decide whether to keep, or jettison.

I think this is what bothers me most--of several bothersome features--in the now-viral "packet boy" video from Duncansville, TX: the automatic assumption that the packet work Jeff Bliss has been given is rote and useless, and he's a genuine standing-on-the-ramparts hero, calling bravely for the democratic education he deserves.

He might be. But we have no evidence of that, in spite of the fact that we saw it on video, so therefore it must be true. Plus--we have multiple visions of what a high-quality, democratic education even looks like, ranging from a Waiting-for-Superman vision of dumping more "rigorous" content into kids' heads (which is what packets generally aim to do)--all the way over to a completely independent, course-here/course-there "unbundling" of public resources in "free" digital learning.

While we're waiting--still waiting, always waiting--for that all-important national conversation about the purpose of a public education, here are a few thoughts on the video:

• The incident is not at all exceptional. This happens in classrooms every day. Sometimes, the kids are right in demanding better of their teachers and schools, and sometimes, the kids are merely mouthy and rude. We don't have enough information to judge.
• Boredom is not the worst thing to happen to kids in high school. In fact, it's avoiding "boredom" that has given us some pretty content-free teaching strategies. Also--kids are prone to calling work that they don't understand boring and pointless, taking the onus off their own learning gaps.
• We know absolutely nothing about the teacher, other than the fact that she keeps repeating "goodbye" as the kid storms out. Right out of every district's teacher handbook, by the way--get the disruptive kid out of the classroom ASAP, without engaging in a futile and public verbal battle.
• Ascribing meaningful political and pedagogical values to videotaped classroom altercations is a dangerous and stupid game. Teachers used packets and worksheets--not to mention videos--long before NCLB, RTTT, the Common Core, flipped and blended learning, yada yada. Kids have been demanding things--more relevant curriculum, more entertaining instruction, more attention--for just as long.

And so it goes.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

It's 1993, at the Michigan Teacher of the Year celebration in Lansing, and I have just been awarded a lovely parting gift: a Digital 286 computer. It sits on a table in the front of the ballroom, beige and boxy, the 12-inch monitor scrolling "Nancy Flanagan, Michigan Teacher of the Year" in bright pink letters. I am thrilled. My first computer!

The program lists the Lansing business that donated the computer to the TOY program, and their representative stood up for a round of grateful applause at the banquet. As I am unplugging the CPU to take the computer home, I notice that it's scratched and dented a bit. There doesn't seem to be a printer, either. The woman whose company contributed the computer appears at my elbow and tells me that their entire office was just outfitted with brand-new 386 models, so they didn't need the old ones--and then asks for the electrical cord. "We can still use that!" she says brightly.

I have just been given a hand-me-down business computer with no printer or cord. Congratulations!

But--I am still thrilled, although it's harder to get the right cord than you might think, and it takes several more paychecks before I can scrape together the cash to buy a dot-matrix printer. Only a couple of teachers in my building have their own computers, and I am geeked about the cool materials I can now produce--although in 1993 teachers were not yet allowed to use the Xerox machine to reproduce documents. That was reserved for the important business of the school office. Teacher-student materials and school newsletters were duplicated on the risograph and ditto machines, which were "good enough."

One of the first things state Teachers of the Year do when they get together is compare goodies. How do individual states honor their best and brightest? Some teachers are out of the classroom for a year, sent around the state to promote specific programs and initiatives. Others never leave the classroom, settle for a chicken dinner and a plaque, paying their own travel costs to make the occasional Rotary Club speech. One TOY I know was offered the use of one of those monster-sized SUVs for the year-- with the logo of the insurance company that provided it painted on both sides. Of course, she would have to insure it and pay for the gas.

That's appreciation, education-style.

A Miami teacher-blogger who calls herself KafkaTeacher recently pointed out that NBC (host of Education Nation) was holding a contest to see which teacher could best integrate NBC's Learn Resources into their classroom practice. First prize was a mouse pad, a thumb drive and a pack of genuine NBC pens--and the Grand Prize was all of the above, plus getting a mention on the program's home page. KafkaTeacher described these prizes as "sucky." On Twitter, a San Francisco math teacher--@cheesemonkeysf--said: This is more like "Hey, what kind of crap do we have lying around the supply room gathering dust?"

Maybe an old, unused computer? Actually, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) suggests, via spiffy infographic, that what teachers would like for Teacher Appreciation Week is a nice (free) digital reward. A tweet, perhaps, or a post on Pinterest. Don't forget to mention DFER in your pin! Or you could nominate a teacher for an online award, and then they'd get a badge.

Well, we don't need no stinking badges. Here's what teachers do need and deeply desire:

Influence. Respect. To have their expertise taken seriously and valued in the creation of education policies and programs. Competitive salaries and benefits. Stability--a moratorium on program churn, a chance to dig in and build learning communities. Articles in mainstream magazines and newspapers that acknowledge the intellectual complexity and difficulty of teaching. TV programs that stress the critical value of public education in building a democratic society. Professional-quality tools, facilities and collaborative opportunities. Did I mention respect?

Teachers want control over their own work. The ultimate appreciation.

I don't want to end this rant without acknowledging two things:

• Even though it was the hardest year of my 31-year career in the classroom, being the Michigan Teacher of the Year was an incredible opportunity that opened many doors for me. Most teachers aren't as lucky as I was--and trust me, many teacher awards are more about luck, timing and who you know than highly developed skill in teaching. Every teacher should have the experience that I had, a chance to speak out about education and have people actually listen. And I used that computer for five more years.

• If your teacher says sweetly that she doesn't want material rewards, but would prefer a nice thank-you note or card, don't believe her. But write the note or letter anyway. If you were my student at Hartland Consolidated Schools, 1974-2005, and wrote me a thank-you note, I still have it, in a special trunk. When we moved, two years ago, I off-loaded boxes of teaching materials, file cabinets of lesson plans and dozens of plaques. But I kept that trunk and those hand-scrawled notes. I appreciate them and the feelings that produced them more than you will ever know.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

This is a blog about innovation--that is, innovation in public education. More specifically, creating catchy memes to push "pioneering" thinking while simultaneously attacking the "status quo" (painted as bad, very bad) in American education. Under the benign banner of...innovation.

A decade ago, we were new-millennials, thinking out of the box. Then it was all about Shift Happens, which morphed into mega-excitement around disrupting class--flipping classrooms, embracing blended learning, anointing "Video Sal" Khan as America's best (read: cheapest) teacher. Now, all the flippers, shifters and disrupters have moved to the next big thing: cage-busting.

In Michigan, they're doing this by creating a secret task force--no educators allowed!--to design ground-breaking plans to re-organize and finance public education. Busting out of the cage of equitable funding and investment in quality education. Surging forward to create discount schools--called "Value Schools," kind of like Value City--where the instructional personnel, curriculum and programming reflect the Walton core philosophy: Always low prices.

Before you can disrupt, bust or shift, you have to declare the current system "broken," providing de facto permission to destroy the existing structures. Even if your community has invested in a century of educational infrastructure, incalculable brain-hours, millions of tax dollars and family commitments--with many parts of the system working very well--you must jettison the current regime. Change is good. So out with the old, in with the disruption.

In Michigan, a so-called Skunk Works team was assembled, by aides to Governor Rick Snyder, tasked with:

"...develop[ing] a lower-cost model for K-12 public education with a funding mechanism that resembles school vouchers.

The education reform advisory team has dubbed itself a "skunk works" project working outside of the government bureaucracy and education establishment with a goal of creating a "value school" that costs $5,000 per child annually to operate... The school would seek to maximize the roughly $7,000 annual per-pupil funding regular schools get from taxpayers by applying "concepts familiar in the private sector -- getting higher value for less money."

The Skunk Works was so undercover that the President of the State Board of Education, John Austin, and the State Superintendent of Schools, Mike Flanagan, either knew nothing about it or had been misled as to its purpose. The one educator who was invited, 2011 MI Teacher of the Year Paul Galbenski, an inter-district technology consultant, quit when he discerned the group's actual purpose. The rest of the task force is software developers, technology vendors and charter school operators. And lawyers.

Can you see where this is going?

In the flap following disclosure (via some good reporting by the right-leaning Detroit News), the governor and his spokes-busters hid behind the shield of (you guessed it) "innovation" and suggested that they needed cover to bust free from the suffocating cage of not-for-profit, community-based public education.

But. Isn't a little disruption a good thing? Sure. Innovation in public education is good when:
• It solves a problem, identifying a flaw or weakness in the current system and devising a creative solution.
• It provides a better alternative than what we've got now. Not just a different alternative, but one that users generally agree is easier, more productive--and unequivocally better for the well-being of students.
• It is cost-effective, when given predictable outcomes.
• It taps into the creative spirit of educators, students, families and communities.

At a community forum on Tuesday, sponsored by the local League of Women Voters and hosted in a drama classroom at a local middle school, two State Board of Education members, two local superintendents and a university-based economist assured a fired-up crowd that they were ready and eager to innovate--and had plenty of informed experience with the problems, alternative solutions and budgets faced by Michigan schools. Turn us loose, they said. We have ideas about novel ways to fix things. And we actually know what we're doing.

Some hard information about the secret plan was shared with an enthusiastic, full-of-questions crowd: "Value Schools" would practice selective enrollment to keep costs down. The Skunk plan was embarrassingly "not ready for prime time," because it hadn't dealt with accountability measures, increased administrative and transportation costs. The Skunk Works team's template did not address special education, at all. The plan would devastate an already demoralized work force--teachers--and had no quality control constraints: pretty much anybody could open up a school, including people who were already running demonstrably bad schools.

The Skunk Works group was a stalking-horse development team for another cage-busting reform slotted for rapid approval in Michigan, known as the Oxford Plan, which dovetails with bills currently alive in the Michigan legislature. One local superintendent, asked if he'd spoken with state legislators representing the district about the disruptive "innovations" planned for public schooling. He hesitated, then said: Yes. Both of them. And they're uninformed.

Quote of the evening, from State Board President Austin:
Secret groups are not democracy! You can't fix education without educators--to leave them out is anti-democratic.

Amen.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 6:10 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Imagine you just walked into the classroom of a truly excellent teacher, as she's teaching a lesson. One of those "irreplaceables," perhaps. What do you see and hear? What's on the walls--and the whiteboard? How has she arranged the classroom? What are his students doing? Who's talking--and what are they talking about? What's the prevailing "atmosphere" in the room?

What does good teaching look like?

I used to use this question as a starter exercise in presenting workshops for candidates in the National Board Certification process. There was never a shortage of waving hands or answers: Lots of student work on the walls. No straight rows! Teacher is circulating. Real dialogue. Students asking questions. Room is colorful and inviting. A box for students' portfolios. Students are engaged. Teacher knows his stuff. Kids are on task. Teacher is using technologies seamlessly. No sage on the stage!

The exercise could easily go on for half an hour, as teachers emptied their brains around their personal hallmarks of great teaching.

What was almost never mentioned: What the teacher was thinking--and how he made decisions as the lesson unfolded. Whether the teacher had clear learning goals, and if her goals were important and worth pursuing.

My last blog was on the central importance of identifying excellent practice as a means to improving education, before cooking up disruptive policy shifts. I shared several vignettes of teaching in a KIPP school, described by Gary Rubinstein, and said this: It's axiomatic that good teaching matters (and yeah, I know that other things matter more, but stay with me). So why don't we focus, laser-like, on what good teaching explicitly looks like and what it yields (two different things) and how to get it--everywhere?

A reader said this, in an e-mail: The observer was extremely judgmental - something that I find inappropriate and uninformed. I thought you were talking about needing to know what good teaching "looks" like, but then you shift to an entirely different position: that teachers are the ones who are best able to dissect and analyze their own teaching.

The reader raises a good point. There is no hard and fast template for what good teaching "looks like," and much of what's involved in good teaching isn't visible. Some things that appear to be good teaching, on the surface, are not particularly effective in generating conditions conducive to learning. And it's easy to misjudge "bad" teaching, based on things that turn out to not matter much in what students ultimately learn.

Rubinstein describes some things (a class that turns restless as a teacher fumbles with a video) that might not be indicative of weak teaching, just a lapse in preparation. And other things (an educator offering students candy to complete their homework) that really are evidence of some misunderstandings in that teacher's pedagogical toolkit.

I once taught with a teacher whose room was awash in student work--hanging from the ceiling, lining the hallways--and bright, cheerful decorations, including curtains and soft furniture. She had pre-laminated bulletin boards for every two-week period in the school year, and highly detailed lesson plans (also laminated) listing standards, objectives and materials needed. But her teaching was sterile and rote, as she went through her numbered steps.

And this is why I have some real concern over Bill Gates' ideas about evaluating teaching by putting billions of dollars' worth of cameras in every classroom: you just don't know what you're seeing, until you have a conversation with the teacher and examine the students' work products or listen to their discussions.

Here's an example, from a video shot in my own work with National Board candidates:

A fiftyish male teacher with a buzz cut is teaching a class of middle school students a lesson on an important battle in the Civil War, with diagrams, shapes and arrows, using an overhead projector and accompanying student worksheets. The camera pans to the front row; a group of boys sit transfixed by the strategy of the Confederate army in taking Little Round Top.

A pony-tailed girl who has been "drifting" asks a clearly off-topic question about fashion in the Civil War era--how many hoops in a hoop skirt? The teacher, obviously irritated, snaps: "Is that what I was talking about? Are you getting this? If you're not paying attention, I'm not going to bore the rest of the class by going back."

Ouch. But--before we make a snap judgment about the teacher's effectiveness--we all bark at kids, occasionally, don't we? In thirty years of teaching, there are plenty of things that I wish I hadn't said. Teachers are human.

Beyond that, however--what really mattered in that video clip? This is what a conversation with the teacher revealed:

#1) He had won several awards for teaching history--the proverbial "making history come alive" plaudits-- from statewide organizations. A veteran himself, he was a dedicated Civil War buff, who often took students on field trips to re-enactments. Some of those boys were in this class, which is why he chose this demonstration lesson to tape.

#2) The teacher knew the girl well. He suspected once the camera started rolling, she would ask a random, attention-seeking question, because this was her usual modus operandi. He had learned from experience to nip those lesson-derailing questions in the bud.

#3) The topic of the lesson was firmly tied to a state social studies curriculum standard around important military campaigns in the Civil War.

#4) But--after watching himself teach, the teacher had a kind of epiphany: While he was engaging the boys in the front row, half his class wasn't paying attention at all. His unit on military strategy in the 19th century was a dud to a big chunk of the 8th graders he taught. He had been drawing game-play sketches on these Civil War battles in class for years. It was his passion--but didn't hook many of his students into a greater understanding of the causes and outcomes of the war.

So he made some changes. And that self-analysis is--explicitly--what we hope all teachers will do, and what good teaching "looks like."

What does good teaching look like to you? More importantly, what does it yield?

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Gary Rubinstein wrote a rather extraordinary piece this week where he describes, in some detail, teaching practice in the lone KIPP high school in New York City. There are lots and lots of blogs on What Teachers Do--but what makes Rubinstein's piece so compelling is his deceptively casual but spot-on analysis of the teaching he observes.

A few examples: A teacher who can't get a video clip to run as his pupils lose focus; a teacher who seems to be relying on charm and having students verbally repeat a little joke rather dig deeply into social studies content; a teacher who offers kids candy to complete their homework--and that was in a class that was supposed to be teaching "grit." Yikes.

A particularly interesting example comes from a math class where the teacher asks a good, concept-driven question, then is unsure how long to let kids flounder--or how to move them from going nowhere to going in the right direction. The teacher ends up just giving students the answer--a familiar outcome to a common teaching dilemma.

Rubinstein then says something very important: We can't expect Superbowl teaching all the time. A lot of teaching is going to be merely OK. And any capable teacher who's been in the classroom awhile knows that some days magically flow and connect and other days feel like low-grade train wrecks, in spite of solid planning.

The problem comes when we elevate boring/average practice on a policy pedestal. Why do people assume that a TFA teacher in a KIPP school is offering something special? How many truly skillful veteran teachers are painted as substandard, because they're working in traditional public schools?

It's axiomatic that good teaching matters (and yeah, I know that other things matter more, but stay with me). So why don't we focus, laser-like, on what good teaching explicitly looks like and what it yields (two different things) and how to get it--everywhere? Including traditional public schools?

On any given day, you can read hundreds of articles about Mrs. Johnson's fourth graders Skyping with grade-fours in Scotland-- or Mr. Smith's on-line data collection project on frogs. Exciting stuff, but we have no idea if kids have learned anything. Most of what we talk about as good practice misses that critical dissection of learning--it's simply a description of the activities or the technologies involved. The most important practice-dissector is the teacher herself; what matters is her skill at analyzing what students have actually learned, and her ability to figure out what to do next, based on that analysis.

It sounds obvious, and simple. But it's incredibly complex. Learning is always in the personal interaction. It's about on-the-spot decision-making. It's being specific about what you want your students to know and do--and then being willing to change course in an instant when your best-laid plans aren't working out. Good teaching is not based on a template, a book, a behavior model in five easy steps. You can regiment your way to order, but there are plenty of compliant classrooms where nothing much is happening, intellectually.

In short, before you can create good policy around teaching, you need to know what you're trying to achieve. Lately, we seem to be bent on achieving uniformity and internationally competitive results.

The "product" in American schools used to be good citizens. Then good workers. Now, the product is test scores and being admitted to college. And we're designing policy to achieve those goals.

Think about this: There is almost no education policy in America written to support the creation of genuinely excellent, innovative, place-based teaching practice. In America we seem to think that the right policy has to come first--and effective practice will follow. Worse, a lot of the policy that's in place, from schoolwide directives through state and federal mandates, puts teachers' core work on tethers--pacing charts, test prep, control over instructional materials, preferred teaching methods and techniques. Nationally developed standards, assessments and curriculum suck professional judgment right out of teaching.

We trust policy, but we don't trust teachers.

In response to Gary Rubinstein's piece, Bruce Baker shared some interesting data analyzing teaching in NYC charter schools. Charter school teachers in NYC are younger and less experienced--but are well-paid. They teach fewer students, in smaller classes--and those students bring fewer disabilities into the classroom. Their schools also have more resources.

Even with strong policy supports around teacher selection, class size, compensation and resources, we're just getting so-so teaching. Why is that?

Practice first. Policy to follow.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 7:59 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

A couple of days ago, I had coffee with Betsy Coffia, who ran last November--unsuccessfully--for a seat representing the 104th district in the Michigan House of Representatives. Coffia and I had never met, although we have several mutual friends. We found each other on-line, in a Facebook argument over Detroit Public Schools' Emergency Manager. She liked what I had to say, and suggested we meet.

It was a great conversation. Coffia plans to run again, and asked lots of questions: What did I think about cyber-schools? Charter chains? The value of early childhood programs? Well-known education non-profits in Michigan? Although she worked for a time in a Head Start program, she admitted there were lots of theories and ideas in education policy she found murky.

Then she said this: Wouldn't it be great if there were a guide for legislators to making useful education policy? So here it is:

#1) You don't know education just because you went to school. Even if you were paying attention in high school, your perspective as a student was extremely narrow and is now completely obsolete. Study the issues, which are more complex and resistant to change than you think. Here's a brief list of things that, in my experience, legislators don't know diddly about:
• A cooperative classroom and how to achieve it.
• Formative assessment.
• Impact of class size on daily practice (not test scores).
• Difference between standards and curriculum.
• Special education.
• Research-based value of recess and exercise.
• Differentiation vs. tracking.
• What quality teaching looks like in practice.
• The fact that all learning is socially constructed.
And on and on.

#2) Plan to pay many non-photo op visits to lots of schools. Do things while you're there. Read with 3rd graders. Sit in on a high school government class or small-group discussion about Shakespeare. Play badminton in co-ed gym class. Take garden-variety teachers out for coffee after your visit; let them talk and just listen. Resist the urge to share the "good news" about legislation you're co-sponsoring. Ask questions, instead.

#3) Take the tests that kids have to take. Then you'll understand why "achievement data" and what to do with it are sources of high anxiety for public schools, teachers and students.

#4) Be picky about what you read, listen to and believe. Media is not fair and balanced, and in an online world, information and sexy, upbeat storylines are for sale. At the very least, read both sides, with your crap detector on full alert. Consider that media often enshrines flat-out lies in the public consciousness simply because they're a good headline or the deliverer is charismatic.

#5) Examine your assumptions. When teachers roll out unsubstantiated chestnuts ("no wonder he's the way he is--just look at his parents!") it's lounge talk. When elected officials say clueless things, voters pay attention. For example: " Incompetent teachers are being allowed to teach and substandard service is being tolerated." Whatever your deepest convictions about unions, teacher pay, urban poverty or kids today, check those biases at the door. It's your job to represent everyone in your district, not just the people who agree with you.

#6) Follow the money, not the party. A lot of what's happening in ed "reform" today is centered around taking advantage of the large, previously untapped market of K-12 education. Before you get on any partisan policy bandwagon, just for the thrill of passing a law, ask yourself: Who really benefits from this? Who loses?

#7) Remember you were elected to create policy that represents your constituents' goals and desires, not ALEC's. Even if the pre-packaged legislation is slick and convenient, and the Koch brothers are willing to fly you someplace warm with golf courses--do the work yourself.

#8) Be like Rob Portman and change your mind and your public proclamations when the evidence is convincing. Changing your mind--if you do it publicly, and don't try to sneak the shifts past voters with tap-dancing and weasel language--makes you stronger, demonstrating that you have confidence in your own core values and leadership. Diane Ravitch altered her views, and earned herself a few million devotees, after all.

Corollary: Admit when you don't understand value-added methodology, the reason STEM is so hot, or constructivism in mathematics education. There is nothing more pathetic than a legislator trying to act like he knows something by tossing out a few buzzwords.

#9) Big and bold gets headlines, but tinkering around the edges gets results. Want to raise teacher quality? Don't endorse firing the "lowest" quintile, publicly rank-ordering them in the newspaper, or bringing in untrained but photogenic Ivy Leaguers. Do it the old-fashioned way: careful recruitment, building teachers' skills and knowledge, investing in their capacity and leadership over time.

#10) Honor our democratic foundations. Public education is the most democratic of our institutions, one of our best ideas as Americans. Public schools may be tattered, and behind the technological curve. But systematically destroying the infrastructure of public education is a profoundly selfish and immoral thing to do. Don't be that legislator.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Regular readers of Teacher in a Strange Land know that I loathe sports/education analogies. Equating the Common Core to "having the same goalposts," for example, or the desirability of "box scores" for teachers--it's all Grade A ball-park baloney. Hot-ticket sports are entertainment and education is something else entirely. Both fine in their own right, but really--apples and watermelons.

So it was discouraging to see this headline: Right to work explains why Tom Izzo makes more than a French teacher. And even more discouraging to read the piece, by political strategist Ken Braun, which suggests that Michigan State's Tom Izzo is worth every penny of his $3.5 million dollar salary and Michigan's new RTW legislation opens the way for teachers to start raking in six figures. His example is the "best French teacher in the country"--call her Ms. LePew--who could start her own online video-lecture franchise, hiring cheap and replaceable face-to-face underlings, providing schools what they need, French-wise, just as Izzo gives Spartan fans what they're looking for.

The analogy doesn't work on any level, and the piece probably would have sunk like a stone, beyond the fact that it's just in time for March Madness, and people in Michigan are likely to read anything with Izzo's name in the title.

A column about excellent pedagogy in world languages would never have drawn upwards of 600 comments, either. In fact, the teaching of languages is so disrespected that the Michigan legislature currently appears to be in the process of dropping a requirement that all students have experience with world language instruction for two years. The reason seems to be that "career-ready" workers needed for our economic future aren't likely to run into anyone who doesn't speak English, here in the home of the brave. So much for 21st century global awareness.

Here's what's wrong with Braun's argument:

#1) Tom Izzo, contrary to the first sentence, is not an educator. He's a basketball coach. And honestly? I don't think anybody's contribution to American society is worth $3.5 million. (Bill Moyers, maybe.) Salaries, especially in the United States, have never been commensurate with societal value of accomplishments. Unfortunately.

#2) Excellent teaching is not a process of presenting unforgettable, dynamic lectures. Doesn't work in first grade or middle school--and not for high school French teachers, either. Nor can low-paid surrogates "proctor" or "tutor" kids to authentic learning in the physical absence of the teacher. Good teaching is many things, but all of them are based inextricably on a teacher's knowing her students personally, understanding their strengths and gaps-- and demonstrating a commitment to their learning. It's an interactive process.

Anyone can watch an engaging TED-talk prototype and pick up a few ideas or facts. But that's not teaching and it's certainly not learning. Learning involves doing something--deconstructing ideas, practicing skills, using feedback, assessing progress, applying knowledge to problems--and a couple dozen other possibilities. It's not an information dump.

#3) Izzo is the right coach for the Spartans. He may not have been a winning coach for the Cavaliers, a jump-to-the-pros opportunity he considered a couple of years ago. Likewise, it is impossible to determine who the "best" French teacher for any given school or even any student might be.

Public Impact and other reformy non-profits relentlessly campaign to give the "best" teachers more students, as if improving education were a simple matter of rationing, lopping off "low-performing" teachers and exposing more kids to the so-called superstars. There is, however, little evidence that actual learning--the useful kind that sticks--can be linked to some kind of Amazing Teacher Fairy Dust. The part of the equation that's overlooked is the nonstandard one-to-one relationship between teacher and student, persisting through trials, errors, edits, experiments, etc.

#4) Tom Izzo does not lecture to hundreds of college basketball players, as Braun suggests Ms. LePew should do, spreading his basketball effectiveness far and wide. He's only in charge of 12 guys, and has a staff of auxiliary coaches--a "class size" and budget that would make any K-12 public school teacher weep. He gets to boot head cases and miscreants. Even Izzo, who recruits top basketball talent from all over the country and offers teenagers major perks (like instant fame and a free education, should they choose to value that), gets variable results.

#5) Braun's case is predicated on false measures of success. In sports, winning games is the only metric that matters. Other qualities in a coach, like close, guiding relationships with players or graduation rates, come into play for winning coaches only. The nicest guy in the world doesn't keep his job if the team isn't winning. And when the team is winning, the things people are willing to overlook are truly mind-boggling.

It's different with K-12 teachers--and should be. Teachers bring much more to a child's experience than the mythical celebrity educator whose students "jump a whole grade level just being under her sway." How do we know when Ms. LePew is effective? She doesn't have personal contact with her thousands of students, so we can't ask them, or their parents. You know what we're going to rely on, don't you? And what will have to happen so she gets "winning" data every year?

Sparty on.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

So y'all know what STEM is, of course. Conversations about whether STEM's "engineering" component is just a convenient vowel or truly another gaping hole in the shabby American curriculum are long past. Everybody's talking STEAM now--A is for Arts. STEAMed up! That's the ticket!

My friend Sam Chaltain recently tweeted that, maybe, what we really need is STREAM-- expanding the acronym to include Reading. (Welcome back, reading!) Actually, I tweeted back, isn't STREAM what we used to call a "well-rounded" education?

But--thinking it over--I was wrong. In addition to science, technology, reading, engineering, arts and mathematics, any definition of a complete educational package would have to include social studies. And stop your sneering. "Social studies" is a perfectly good umbrella term for an incredibly wide-ranging collective of knowledge and competencies--despite its recent, policy-driven depreciation in the curricular pantheon.

Here, off the top of my head, are some of the things that fall into the realm of social studies: History, political science, geography and culture, religion, psychology, anthropology, humanities, government, economics, philosophy, archeology, sociology, and topics in social theory like globalization, health care, justice, wealth and poverty, ethnicity and gender. Not to mention education.

In fact, if the process of becoming educated-- the competencies necessary to live as a productive, even successful human being--were organized into four equal "core" categories, it's hard to see how you could pack all essential human understandings into one quartile division, called "social studies." Can you be a thriving American citizen without some knowledge of the law, political models, cultural norms, human relationships and the revolutionary formation of our nation? Isn't that at least as important as a working affiliation with algebra?

How did social studies sink to the bottom of the curricular heap? And why?

When Michigan adopted a "merit curriculum" in 2006, demanding that every high school graduate meet rigorous disciplinary requirements, one of the selling points was this: prior to 2006, the only legal requirement for graduation from a public high school in Michigan was a course in civics. This fact was presented as proof positive that MI school curriculums were stuck in a darker age--perhaps a time when we imagined the central goal of public schooling was creating good citizens. How archaic!

So now, we're shaving time from social studies and science to focus on raising math scores. We have Common Core State (sic) Standards for Language Arts and Math, and a draft of Science Standards--but no formal standards for social studies. Qualitative research in the social sciences has been pushed aside in favor of quantification. And there's a national call to de-emphasize stories that illustrate the human condition, the personal narrative, in favor of facts and data.

Curriculum does change over time. Wade around in the Committee of Ten Report from 1893, when Latin and Greek were the preeminent subjects and higher mathematics an afterthought, if you want to see how our definition of essential content has shifted. Then take a look at The 13 Most Useless Majors, from Philosophy to Journalism and see what's being valued these days--the enlargement of human understanding vs. comparison of starting salaries. No contest.

It is possible to construe this lack of interest in social studies and humanities as a dark and deliberate goal: If we don't teach our children democratic values, appreciation of individual worth and dignity, or the essential importance of building community--well, then there will never be a revolution against power and resource hoarding. Let them eat tests.

A less intentional--but still sinister--reason might be the fact that as a nation, we still have no clue, let alone consensus, about the purpose of public education. Is it building democratic equality? Job training? Credential collecting?

Until we have that straight, there is unlikely to be a backlash against quantification and standardization. I don't foresee Rupert Murdoch funding a campaign to restore civic education. It's ironic that Arne Duncan calls education the civil rights issue of our generation in a time when elementary teachers don't "have time" to study civil rights.

Social studies. Don't leave school without 'em.

Posted by Nancy Flanagan at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend