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.