Classroots.org

Here are two quotes I’ve been thinking about all day:

in the red #25 by clickykbd

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism – it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
-Conan O’Brien

“The tension between what I’m actually doing in my classroom and what I think I should be doing in my classroom has gotten to be almost unbearable. I don’t believe that I’m preparing my students to be successful in a world driven by innovation and creativity, but the ONLY tangible indicator of my performance—standardized test scores—says that my students are not as “accomplished” as students in other classrooms in our school and district.”
-Bill Ferriter

What I read most in Ferriter’s (@plugusin) quote is his determination not to be cynical, but rather to hold on to his beliefs about teaching and learning despite the compromises we are asked to make daily in the name of student “achievement.”  I don’t know an American public school colleague who doesn’t feel this tension.

What can we do? How can we resist cynicism? How can we go somewhere else?

In response to these quotes, I suggest we lobby for the creation of a red team per school or division made up of

• Teachers of all sorts.
• Students – especially those who struggle and/or feel disengaged.
• Parents – including home-schoolers, private-schoolers, and virtual-schoolers who will rejoin the division provisionally to champion and monitor change.
• Community partners who will invest human and/or financial resources in the team’s initiatives.
• Building-level and central office administrators who get carte blanche from the school board to speak according to the dictates of their consciences.

Each team would ask two questions:

• What’s our objective?
• What’s in the way?

The red team would report to the principal or to the superintendent and the board.  The school or school system would own the objective and dedicate itself to achieving it and eliminating the obstacles to it through a project-based, balanced scorecard approach.

Or we could hang out here for a while longer and risk Coco’s ire.

Teachers: could you do this with students and/or parents in your classroom?  Frankly, the idea scares me, which is probably a clear indication that I should do it.  I’ve asked for feedback before, but not in a way that invites such honesty about my role in presenting obstacles to individual students’ learning.  Stay tuned.

Windows by robynejay

Last week during a bout of insomnia, I watched The Remains of the Day twice in a row. I had never seen it before or read the book, though I dearly love and frequently sniffle while reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day follows Mr. Stevens, a butler, who serves Lord Darlington, an appeaser, before World War II, and a retired American lawmaker, Mr. Lewis, after the war. Mr. Stevens lives inside several cages of propriety. He’s serving an English Lord. Lord Darlington’s new housekeeper, Ms Kenton, challenges him because while she’s great at her job, she also allows herself to be human in the service of Lord Darlington, which Mr. Stevens does not allow himself to do the same. Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton circumscribe romance as their relationship deepens over time, but Mr. Stevens can’t return Ms Kenton’s affection when she expresses it. Ms Kenton leaves and marries a former colleague. After World War II, Mr. Stevens searches out Ms Kenton to invite her back to work for Mr. Lewis. Ms Kenton agrees to a meeting and seems ready to rejoin Mr. Stevens – her marriage is breaking – but then Ms Kenton’s estranged husband shows up to reconcile with her bearing news of their daughter’s pregnancy. On the appointed day of Mr. Stevens’s vacation, Ms Kenton meets him and explains that she plans now to stay with her husband, near her daughter and grandchild. Mr. Stevens barely lets his dismay show, which is the end of any hope he has of winning Ms Kenton back or being able to share his feelings. Even after crossing the country on holiday to find Ms Kenton, Mr. Stevens can’t ask her to return for him. At the end of the day, Mr. Stevens walks Ms Kenton to her bus, wears his half-smile shield, and waves good-bye as Ms Kenton looks back at him, weeping for Mr. Stevens. He can’t, or won’t, find the person she sees.

What resonates for me in this film is Mr. Stevens’s inability to pursue his passion for fear of losing his intertwined job, identity, and self-control. He cannot find a way to reconcile a life of service with self-affirming and self-serving actions and emotions, so he chooses self-abnegation both in losing Ms Kenton and preventing himself from becoming who he might be apart from his role in his lords’ household.

I think of myself teaching between the world of policy and the world I want. I worry that I will always teach in a limbo of well-intentioned starts and fits towards something new without ever making the leap to fundamentally change how I teach or who I am as a teacher. I can see myself waving goodbye to scary and amazing chances to reinvent what a school is and what a school does. I don’t know that I can reconcile the job of teaching with my passion for it.

To wit, now I’m thinking about testing windows. In Virginia, middle-school students take Standards of Learning (SOL) tests at the end of a course – either at the semester or at the end of the year. Many middle schools therefore schedule semester-long science and social studies courses. Students take either science or social studies first semester; take an SOL test in January, and then switch subjects and test again in May. The idea here is that students have a better chance to retrieve content shortly after learning it than they do later. If a test item asks a student to recall a piece of content from September, the student has a better chance to do so in January than in May. Dedicated educators invested in students and learning find ways to embed this content in meaningful work so that students hold on to their learning regardless of the testing schedule’s emphasis on short-term retention.

No middle school in Virginia that I know of runs semester-long language arts or math courses because of AYP. Educators want students to have the most time possible to master spiraling skills in advance of taking tests that determine schools’ fates. It makes sense given the current national agenda and testing systems. It’s not that science and social studies don’t have rich traditions of investigation, interpretation, and discovery; it’s just AYP.

I wonder if we could free up middle schools’ scheduling and management of human capital if we risked differentiating testing windows.

What if incoming 6th graders all took reading and math tests in September as pre-assessments for grouping?

What if students who passed the test took the rest of the year for project-based, inquiry-driven local and global learning partnerships?

What if any 6th grade student who passed the first test could elect to take the 7th grade test at the semester, and the 8th grade test at the end of the year? Why not give that student the opportunity to earn 2 test-free years of learning without built-in limits?

What if 6th grade students who did not pass the test were given the same chance to re-test in January, or again at the end of the year? If the stakes are so high for schools, why not generate some student buy-in through choice and self-determination in attacking standardized tests?

What if we took the hit on a 6th grade entrance SOL and then didn’t test students who “failed” again until the end of 7th grade, or until the student and his or her teachers felt he or she was ready at the semester, end of 6th grade, or beginning of 7th grade after a summer school experience acting as proxy for year-round schooling? What if we traded off 6th grade testing for more prep time for – and success with – 7th and 8th grade tests? Would teachers under pressure to cut out everything but the tested curriculum find ways to enrich learning for student sentenced to remediation if they had more time to prepare for tests? Would federal and state governments bless a system of curriculum and assessment that recognizes schools’ strides in student growth by weighing 7th or 8th grade AYP over 6th?

Differentiating scheduling by differentiating testing windows would take a significant investment of student, teacher, counselor, and administrator time at the beginning of the school year, but the strategic scheduling, teaching, and learning made possible by such differentiation might reward the risk. Certainly the approach would help justify larger class sizes of students already exited from testing and smaller class sizes for those still working to demonstrate their learning on standardized measures.

Differentiating scheduling by testing windows and early passes might also allow an administrator to assign personnel to areas of instruction in which they excel, which carries its pros and cons in terms of teacher efficacy versus an over-specialized work force. It might be too daunting a change, it might be made moot by policy, or it might turn out that the number of student exiting testing requirements would be too small to justify a differentiates testing scheme. Nevertheless, I struggle with holding students who have surpassed a curriculum captive to it, and I struggle with asking students to face three tests in three years per assessed subject area if differentiation by testing and time could provide the desired results from one test.

I’m not a big fan of these questions I’ve been asking. I would rather ask questions like, “How can we become co-learners with students in the cloud-classrooms of School 3.0?,” but how can our testing system provide more opportunity than limits? What core standards have a chance of making schools more relevant to students who aren’t participating in their creation? What national agendas mired in the spent oil of an industrial educational system have a chance of changing our country today?

It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to make learning relevant to students. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to favor innovation over replication. It remains up to teachers and the leaders who support them to push back against the system, to play with schedules that provide access to learning, not just to curriculum.

Maybe this can be teachers’ new role; maybe this can be the purpose of teachers’ social networking and professional development; maybe this can be teachers’ legacy after standardized tests are gone: in partnership with students we create relevance from the nothing that exists without it. Let the Fed and the SEAs and LEAs own the sound and fury of curriculum and testing. We create relevance. We celebrate discovery. We connect context and identity. We learn together.

I think what I’m going to do is this: take time over break to see what’s left to teach. Pick the content I least look forward to teaching. Push aside my anxieties and biases against it. Imagine each one of my students learning about it joyfully. Take notes on what students are learning and how they’re learning it. Build a resource or unit from those visions of engaging, inspiring work. Gather materials. Call in favors. Make it work. Try it and see. Find out where it goes. Not be afraid.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about authentic audiences for my students’ work. Most often, a teacher is the immediate audience, though not always an authentic one. Parents, too, are an traditional audience for student work, but their authenticity waxes and wanes with their children’s relationships with them. Because of communications technology and social media, friends – and strangers, too – are becoming a more authentic audience for our students’ work inside and outside school as they text, “friend” one another, and post media. Taking advantage of students’ media savvy and enjoyment of social learning has therefore become one way to foster authentic engagement with content in the classroom.

B&S Fans by acb

But what about teachers? Who is our authentic audience, and does our behavior reflect its primacy in our professional lives? For whom do we perform teaching? Recent #edchat about standardized testing and the nation’s discourse about President Obama’s speech to students have turned on the house lights. From the stage we can look out and see our students, but also their parents and our leaders, law-makers, and tax-payers.

Our act requires many types of improvisation. When we see a great idea, we have to adapt it to our circumstances. When we see a students’ needs, we have to differentiate instruction to meet them. When we hear our parent’s and policy-makers’ and public’s shouts, we have to decide what we stand for and how we stand for it.

In this light, in so many ways, neither Obama’s speech (see: Reagan) nor the talk about it are new. Our students, parents, and leaders call for us to act in conflicting ways all the time. The sound and fury of public discourse is really a repeated call to us in our moments of history to decide for ourselves what we value in our work and to act in accordance with our decisions instead of in compromise away from them. At the very least, our moment asks us to push teaching and learning past the tests and to make them personally meaningful for our students. No generation, president, or political party has gotten this right. We won’t get it right unless we face up to our own responsibility to reform classroom practice.

A dear principal of mine began every year encouraging us to work smarter because he believed we couldn’t work any harder. I hear him every time I read a blog post celebrating a teacher’s sense of accomplishment at getting all the students lined up and silent in the hall.

Rules will not eliminate the achievement gap. Orderly lines of complacent children will not improve graduation rates. Standardized tests will not stand the test of time. Our best measure of success will be our students’ lives, not their scores, and the lives of their children. If we don’t find ways to make learning matter to students now, the next generation will have the same views of school and the same mistrust of teachers.

Democratic nominee Barack Obama by Wa-J

Whether we watch Obama’s speech during school on Tuesday or not, our real task is to make what we do as authentically engaging to students as this debate has been to us. We need to switch places with the students and let them perform work inspired by their talents and passions. We need to broaden students’ sense of audience and introduce them to mentors and coaches who have better ideas than we do about how schoolwork connects to the professional lives students want to lead. We need to teach in a way that seems authentic to students who are no longer the audience, but the performers.

The purpose of school shouldn’t be to teach kids how to live inside or outside the lines of a police state. If a school’s grounds and halls need to be patrolled for safety’s sake, then by all means patrol them, but in any school classrooms should be oases. Learning should be a refuge. It should take work to learn, but the work should be joyous and different from the fear-coerced compromises too many students have to make to survive physically, mentally, and emotionally. Teachers: we can’t meet every kid’s every need, but I remain convinced we can do more individually to change the way we teach to address students’ needs for safety, belonging, liberty power, and, yes, fun in the classroom. If we believe in the American Dream, if we believe in rugged individualism, and if we believe in a future where government is smaller because it is truthfully needed less, then it’s time to stop looking for students and parents and tax-payers and policy-makers to change the world. It’s time to change our classrooms, aquí mero, and to prove right the trust we want to teach and learn joyfully with our students in the brief time we have with them. Do right by today’s students, and their parents and children will thank you for it. Decide, teach authentically, and don’t be afraid.