Classroots.org

Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.

It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.

Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against one another. Significant pieces of our professional identity come from who we think of when we ask ourselves: Who do I want to be? Who do I not want to be? Whose results do I want? Whose results don’t I want?  Students evaluate one another.  We evaluate students.  They evaluate us.  Measures change with points of view, but evaluation remains a personal, human enterprise.  We often run headlong into this challenge in the classroom, where what we value and what students value differs without intentional and prolonged community-building.  I suspect a similar challenge exists in teacher evaluation between teachers and their evaluators.

Evaluation is personal because we view results as shorthand for those who produced them. Consider how often we place students by their grades and test scores; consider how we talk about students because of their grades and test scores and placements.

What if we placed students by interest? By learning style? By mastery of content?

What if we restructured schools to do the same for adults? What if a school system reorganized to better manage its human capital by creating different types of schools where its teachers and students could find success? Why keep putting square peg teachers into round hole classrooms?

Why is our rhetoric all innovation and our funding all conformity? When do we ask radically new questions of the system to help us do the job it says it wants us to do?

We are all impatient for change, because we want results on which we can act. We want a good evaluation so we can evaluate ourselves against others. We’re in a system and entrenched political and media climate that encourages us to do so.  Competition suffuses our schools and our discourse about them. Public schools must be effective so charters are ineffective, or visa versa, so we can act. Teacher A must be effective so Teacher B is ineffective so we can act. Fund this, close that, fire them.

Haven’t we learned enough about either/or? Haven’t we played enough zero-sum games?  Do we want to keep playing Spanish Prisoner with students and test scores? (If you comply now then in X years . . . .) In leaving no child behind, is there no better solution than to leave schools and teachers behind?

Here’s an article that says no, turnarounds aren’t scalable (or maybe they are; links via Eduwonk). Okay. So let’s not turn around schools. Let’s re-organize them to succeed and re-organize our teachers, too. What if every school adopted a mission, and what if every division worked with schools to offer a meaningful choice between effective schools, beyond autonomy zones, but including general curriculum schools? Think of the possibilities for students and adults alike in authentic, passion-driven specialization. Think of the career tracks opened up inside classrooms and schools if novice teachers and administrators had the opportunity to pursue personally relevant professional paths. I want to be a top-notch collaborative special education teacher at the visual arts academy in five years. I want to be a top-notch art teacher helping students create album covers and concert posters at the music academy in three years. I want to be the assistant principal sharing a school-wide vision of scientific inquiry into sustainable living at the STEM academy in two years.  Next year I want to be the coach of students working through the STEM curriculum offsite at a more local lab-within-a-school.  Next year I want to be the R&D teacher inventing new methods that will benefit all learners with students who have mastered the year’s coursework already.

So what does any of this have to do with class roots reform?

First, take up Kyle’s challenge. Connect with a teacher from your PLN and connect with someone in your building. Start a caring partnership. Find the good in one another, acknowledge it, and emulate it. Put aside questions about who you want to be or don’t want to be. Ask new questions. Who are we together? How can we help one another change for the better? Go the extra mile beyond us and them in teacher evaluation. I regret that I have spent so much of my career competing with colleagues in the phantom teaching league of my mind.

Second, ask your leaders new questions. Ask to follow a passion. Ask to let the kids follow their passions. Align the work to standards, show results, and argue that they come from authentic teaching and learning, not from conformity. Ask about the efficacy of leveling. Ask about specialty centers and schools-within schools. Ask about sharing the responsibility for sharing out and scaling up new and successful ideas about how to reach students grouped by something more human than either/or. Invite your PLC to observe something new that’s working; ask for it’s feedback; ask if anyone else is willing to try. If you’ve built the kinds of partnerships Kyle challenges us to build, you’ll find some takers.  Create and advertise your team’s specialties; show others how to develop theirs; recruit and foster like-minded novices.

We can’t go back to the days of closed classroom doors and scatter ourselves to the wind on eccentric pedagogical whims.  However, we can leverage our strengths to create and scale-up classrooms with new approaches to teaching and learning that are authentic to students and politically viable to our leaders.  We can radically differentiate what we do to help students and ourselves, and then regroup in teams, schools, and divisions organized on principles more authentic, lasting, and human than standardized-test results.  Let’s get to the future and ask ourselves how we will organize education when everyone meets every standard.  And if we don’t think that’s possible, again, let’s do something different now to make our students the innovators, entreprenuers, and citizens we all want them to be.

Keep looking up and out and inside whenever the demands of the day let you and reimagine yourself teaching up there, out there, ahead of the curve. Come back with your vision, share it, and evaluate it in performance.

[Editor's note: I've been extremely fortunate in being able to speak and msg with several pre-service teachers this Fall.  Each and every one of them has helped me better articulate my beliefs and practices.  They certainly are colleagues and a great addition to any PLN.  This post goes out to all pre-service teachers with warm regards, fond memories of Fall 2000, and a standing offer to help.]

Dear Colleague,

6.23.08, by aprilzosia

What do you think of when you think of a classroom? What do you see? How are the desks arranged? Where is the work done?  How are people behaving?  Does the room look like your classroom – the one you remember from your youth? Does it look like one from high school or college? Elementary school or middle? Does it look like your favorite teacher’s classroom?  Does it look like the classroom you’re in now while you finish student-teaching?  Does it look like a lab? The band room? A gym?

How do you think classrooms will look in 5 years? In 10? How should they look right now?

When I think of a classroom, I think of rows. I think of the teacher’s desk at the front of the room. I think of the chalkboard and the windows set perpendicular to the students, an irresistible provocation to look away from the board if ever there was one. I think of all these things and fight against them.

For decades there has been no change in the way the American public thinks of the classroom or of what should go on in it. School should be a certain way. Children should be taught as their parents were. A classroom must be orderly to be organized. Unless the work today looks like the work of yesterday, it’s not real work.

Here’s a quick assignment. Go to YouTube, which never lies. Mute your computer (very important step) and watch the first few seconds of this video. Next, watch this video for a few seconds beginning at 3:14. Then move along and watch a few sconds of this video. Finally, check out this video for just a few seconds more.

That’s four decades of popular thought across demographics about what goes on in schools.  If you need more proof, look here and here.  It’s the same for vampires.  How do the set-ups of those classrooms compare to the classroom in your head?

What do those classrooms value? How do their physical spaces constrain students’ possibilities for learning? How do their physical spaces constrain teachers’ possibilities for teaching?

How can you, as an individual teacher, help to change our country’s decades-old view of what school should be, beginning with your classroom?

That’s a tough question for any teacher to answer, but it’s especially important that you ask it of yourself because you are on-deck. Your work will advance new ideas of what school can be or further cement obsolete notions of the same. You will either participate in a paradigm shift or resist it.

Take some time this Spring to reflect on what you know and trust works for kids. Create a vision for yourself of the ideal classroom. Ask for feedback on it from teachers you trust, but don’t be afraid to differ from them. As you interview, be mindful of your vision and find ways to feel out whether or not your prospective administrators will support it. Ask about the kinds of mentoring you will receive as a first-year teacher and the beliefs of your prospective mentors.  Look for support in achieving your vision, not in replacing it.

Set up your first classroom so that it’s default setting allows the kinds of teaching and learning you want to experience on a daily basis. It takes any teacher time to create a new classroom culture. It takes longer to undo one culture and replace it with another after things “settle down.”  You’ll need to make changes once the kids show up, but make those changes based on the feedback students give you.  Share your vision; don’t abandon it.

If you’re interested in technology (and you should be; is anyone out there still texting on paper?), when you’re hired, use F2F social networking to find out how your division filters the Internet and recycles its computers. Find the person who can tell you whether or not you can get the computers sitting in surplus put in your classroom with the understanding that the division will not support them. Find out if you can get Internet connections for them anyway and find unblocked, free, DIY Web apps to replace the expensive software that’s no longer supported on your machines. As long as you can provide a consistent, low ratio of Web-enabled machines to students, you can find the tools you need online for free. Many online tools have great tech support and user forums, as well, which means that you won’t need division staff to mess with malfunctioning programs. In fact, your tech support people will love you and be more likely to help you in the future because a) you’re doing something cool with technology that b) they don’t need to support. Your administrator, too, will point to you as an innovator if you can cobble together a Web-enabled classroom for little or no cost to your school.

You are on-deck, but not in-line to inherit outmoded ideas of what a school or classroom can be. Dream big and count on yourselves and one another to find ways to fulfill those dreams. You’re about to be given a old classroom. Do something new with it.

Relationships come first in a joyful classroom. Students’ success and their enjoyment of it depend on positive relationships at school. Certainly, students need to feel safe around their classmates in order to take the academic risks that lead to meaning-making. Students unwilling to share any of themselves with others will have a hard time constructing personal connections to class content or benefiting from social learning.

neuron disruption by autovac

Students also need positive, personal relationships with content. Relevance is the bridge and the filter between students and all the information now available in the world. Irrelevant content has a hard time making inroads to students’ neural networks of knowledge, comprehension, connection, and experience; whereas, relevant content fits right into comforting and enjoyable patterns and connections of prior knowledge. The squiggly lines of relevance connect the boxy shapes of content.

Of course, positive relationships between students and teachers also help children engage with their learning. However, I wonder if the fundamental nature of the student-teacher relationship is changing. I wonder if we can grasp the change and adapt to it. I wonder if a major shortcoming of the status quo its participants’ resistance to adopting a new kind of relationship between teachers and students.

If what it means to be a teacher is changing, then don’t we have to change our relationships with students?

Teachers have to change how they treat students. Students have to change how their view teachers. Parents have to change their expectations. Administrators have to change their notions of classroom management.

And I’m not talking about coaching. I’m not sure that metaphor fits our most resistant students for whom changing the status quo is most important. In my experience, very few of these students play team sports or respond any more positively to coaches than teachers because both are authority figures. The students we need to reach the most don’t respond well to extrinsic authority, and I suspect that more successful students would rather not have to pretend like they do, either.

Part of me wants to say “conductor,” but conductors carry authority. I don’t know that authority is advancing the profession of teaching. I don’t know that authority is a perk of accountability anymore.

What is something that is decentralized, but organized? A nervous system? An audience? A republic? What captures a teacher’s duties to bureaucracy and responsibilities to individual students? What acknowledges a teacher’s primacy in the life of a classroom while equating it to students’ self-efficacy and success?

Maybe it’s not a new metaphor, but a new definition that I crave. A set direction. A compass bearing. A nod. But we’re in the middle of the messy work of confronting our own outdated educational system and a world set to overtake American accomplishments in the information age. We need an agenda for change. We need a mandate for innovation. We need new assessments to drive new thinking in how we structure school and teach class.

Innovation by Vermin Inc

And we need that agenda to be authentic to ourselves.

In the absence of anything new in the policies, standards, or assessment of the status quo, take a night to define teaching for yourself. Look at your relationship with your profession. Which moments have made your work authentic and relevant to you?

Look back at what you’ve accomplished. Look ahead to what you want to accomplish. Look in all of your work for your best self. How does that teacher do it? How does that teacher plan such authentic, engaging work? How does that teacher spark a smile on the face of that student? How does that teacher communicate with parents and convince administrators that new ideas will work?

How does that teacher innovate, instead of replicate?

How do we become those teachers now? What do we need to get their jobs done? When do we found our republics of change?