So why am I writing a book? Books are big. Books are work. But I think it’s time.

At first, the Common Core seemed like just another round of damage in the bureaucratic barrage that has been undermining education since No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Testing and standardized curricula have thrummed as an undercurrent in my teaching for most of the last decade, and I have watched as demands and expectations related to testing exploded. Initially, I underestimated the salvo coming from the Common Core. PARCC results are still not in, but I have watched the faces of students taking this test. I sit in the testing room under explicit orders to do nothing else except proctor, with nothing to do except watch the faces of students taking their tests.

The following words come to mind as I watch expressions flitting across my students’ faces: Detached, stolid, hopeless, helpless, despairing, miserable, fragile, fatigued. Sometimes they tear up briefly, eyes glistening, a drop or two falling down a cheek. A dull-edged melancholy permeates the room now and again, although that mood seldom lasts. Middle-school students don’t do melancholy for long. They lapse into goofy or combative instead. A number of these kids seem angry at the end, ready to fight even if they are not sure who or what they want to attack. A few feel guilty.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Q. I tried,” they say to me.

Others attach blame.

“I didn’t know a lot of the questions. Nobody ever showed me that stuff.” The tone may be distrustful and accusatory.

I have seen students in the past who appeared crushed by the testing ordeal, broken and limp. One year, a student ended up in the hospital for a week when he carved a message in his arm at the end of testing. This year, though, my students appeared less distressed. Some students get used to living in the testing foxhole. They disconnect. Unfortunately, the disconnected don’t put much effort into their test choices. Sometimes I have to make them start over; nobody can answer 40 questions in 4 minutes, especially when English is not their first language.

Eduhonesty: I’m drifting here. I have too many issues in that last paragraph. But that’s why I’ll be trying to document this mess in some written form. My students need help desperately.

The following is taken from Wikipedia:

In statistics, a population is a complete set of items that share at least one property in common that is the subject of a statistical analysis. For example, the population of German people share a common geographic origin, language, literature, and genetic heritage, among other traits, that distinguish them from people of different nationalities. As another example, the Milky Way galaxy comprises a star population. In contrast, a statistical sample is a subset drawn from the population to represent the population in a statistical analysis. If a sample is chosen properly, characteristics of the entire population that the sample is drawn from can be inferred from corresponding characteristics of the sample.

This is the academic definition for the word “population,” a necessary statistical term. Why am I writing about this? I want to further underscore my problems with the current coaching and evaluative system. Yesterday, I looked at a coaches evaluation sheet on what she had observed earlier this year. This sheet was scored 1, 2, 3, and 4 in various categories and subcategories, aligning to the Charlotte Danielson rubric used for formal and summative teacher evaluations. My district required a 2.72 to pass evaluations this year and I refer readers to a March 28th post about a first year, special education colleague who received a 2.70 and lost her position as a result.

My coach had given me a “2” for student use of academic vocabulary. I haven’t checked the formal evaluation numbers, but I recall Lord Vader criticizing me for not using more academic vocabulary during one class. I’d like to observe that pictures of my walls show work on academic vocabulary on all four sides, with word walls and individual word projects. Here’s a sample:

Did we do academic vocabulary? I’d be a travesty of a bilingual teacher if we hadn’t. But that does not mean that my students would be willing to use that vocabulary in front of a virtual stranger. My students are already self-conscious about the deficits in their English-language vocabulary. Research also documents that a silent period commonly occurs in students learning another language. During this time, students may understand a great deal of English but be unwilling to expose their still halting pronunciation and grammar. Looking at the picture above, a student might understand every one of those words and still feel too uncertain or self-conscious to use those words in front of other students, let alone the teacher or a mystery observer.

My reflection on that “2” is simply this: Even without an outside observer, at the pace we were going, with all the new vocabulary we were introducing, my classroom was seldom going to get above a “2” in the use of academic vocabulary category. Even when my students “knew” the right words, they were likely to duck attempts to use their new vocabulary in public. Middle school students hate to be embarrassed. We all do, but that trauma may be at its most piercing in early adolescence.

I want to use the paragraph on top to demonstrate part of the problem. Let’s eliminate words that might be difficult for bilingual seventh graders to understand or USE in earliest encounters. I’ll put question marks by words that stronger students will understand and might be able to use. By now, I have a pretty good feel for what I can expect.

In statistics, a population is a … of … that share at least one … in common(?) that is the subject(?) of a statistical …. For example, the population of German people share a common(?) …, language, literature, and …, among(?) other …, that … them from people of different …. As another example, the Milky Way galaxy … a star population. In contrast(?), a statistical sample(?) is a subset(?) … from the population to represent(?) the population in a statistical…. If a sample(?) is chosen …, characteristics(?) of the … population that the sample(?) is … from can be … from … characteristics(?) of the sample.(?)

Obviously, my dots and question marks are hypothetical. I am assuming the class knows “sample” and “characteristics” because, by this point in statistics, I better have taught those ideas. They should know “corresponding” and “inferred” as well, but I pulled those words because I don’t think I have ever heard them used in the classroom unless I forced their use. As I noted, bilingual students frequently understand words that they are too afraid to try to say. Sometimes this fear stems from pronunciation questions. More often, they don’t trust their understanding of usages enough to venture out of their linguistic comfort zone.

My students had done little statistics — I wouldn’t be surprised if they’d done none — in their past. A lot of new words attacked them at once when we reached this topic. The above words are the words I would expect them to use in asking and answering questions during the beginning or middle of our statistics section. The blanked or (?) words are the words we would have been tackling as we worked through the section. At the end, some students would have been brave enough to speak at least some of the blanked words aloud.

But unless an observer came in at the end, my class would be academic-vocabulary light. I view this situation as another of the no-wins. In an ideal world, language deficits would be taken into account when assessing student academic vocabulary usage. I did not see that happen. I can only assume special education teachers have encountered similar problems.

Eduhonesty: There’s an easy solution, of course. Don’t teach bilingual classes. Don’t teach special education. If evaluators are going to assign numbers to you based on observations, without considering students’ baselines, then the smart move has to be to find students who are likely to be able to use academic vocabulary well. This argues for abandoning academically-disadvantaged schools for their stronger counterparts. Among other considerations, those stronger schools usually pay better. They even have copy paper, I’ve been told.

(For new readers, my district ran out of paper somewhere around the end of April, leaving teachers to buy their own paper for over a month.)

I just lost a great ending for the previous post and I’m sad. I wrote a concise account of why I felt so negative by year’s end and I’m not sure what keys I pushed, but they were nuclear keyboard bombs. I’ll try to write that post again, but I was reminded that I had intended to work on a book. Blogging sucks up writing time.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2015/06/do_we_practice_what_we_preach.html?cmp=SOC-EDIT-FB

“Do We Practice What We Preach?” This articles comes from Education Week, by Peter DeWitt on June 2, 2015 6:40 AM. Peter must be an early riser.

Our words matter to most of the people on the receiving end of them. Those words that come out of our mouths, especially when we are in the role of teacher, can inspire kids and adults…open them up to new learning and experiences…or close them down to the point that they shut out new learning.

How we talk says a lot about who were are. Our words can show whether we are negative, crabby, frustrated, happy or sad. Some people seem to spend a lot of time in the negative category while others approach life a bit more positive.

Why does this matter?

In a recent survey I posted about the effectiveness of teacher observations, a teacher responded, “In the charter school where I worked previously we were “Over observed” and they would find at least one thing I did wrong in each observation.

What struck me in their response was that they mentioned the school leader would find at least one thing they were doing wrong…not one thing they could improve on…or one blind spot they had in their teaching. Was this a school climate issue? Were the issues that needed improvement seen as things they did wrong? Was that how the school leader said it…or was that how the teacher felt?

The response illustrates how some observations are seen as something done to teachers, and not something they necessarily learn from after they are completed.”

I refer readers to my earlier, May 29th posts about my last observation, which occurred on the final day of instruction. My results were wholly positive, but before I got those results I fell into a state that might qualify as despair. Just the fact of the observation made me feel overwhelmed. Even if nothing had gone dramatically wrong, I picked my own efforts apart until I felt like a complete loser.

This year has had that effect on me.

In fact, I’m not sure anything had gone wrong at all. Two students had done uninspiring presentations, but one of those students had arrived late in the year and had then taken too many days off from school. The other girl did not speak English and hated speaking in public. Those two gave more or less the presentations I would have expected and benefited from having to stand up, even if they did not enjoy the process.

(Sadly I expanded this post and inexplicably lost my work. I regret the loss. I’d explained at least part of the problem clearly. I’ll try to write a synopsis of what I had.)

The question I was exploring was a simple one: What had happened to my attitude? How had I become so negative?

I am not against coaches. I liked my coach. I am not against advice. I gobble up professional development. When I looked at my total hours on the Illinois website, I laughed aloud. I’ve met my quota, that’s for sure. So what went wrong this year? Why didn’t I respond to feedback by saying, “I must get more training!” or “I must practice my nematode dissection!”

Teaching resumes often contain a trite phrase, “lifelong learner,” the equivalent of “results-oriented professional” on business resumes. I am that learner. I take classes for fun. If I have to send all my transcripts somewhere, they float in from eight different colleges and universities in three parts of the country. I’ve been thinking of finding a linguistics class to take solely because I am fascinated by language-acquisition.

Yet, by the end of the year, feedback sent me to a dark place. I expected to fail. Part of that expectation, no doubt, stemmed from my interactions with Lord Vader, my evaluator. If I ever did anything right, he was careful not to let me know. Even when I was aligned to current practices and theory, I could not seem to find a way to get credit. The fact that highflyers in my class (students sent to the dean frequently for disciplinary reasons) were working and helping other students went unnoticed. My fidget activity for a student who started the year pacing the classroom netted me a near-reprimand. Why was that boy using scissors while I was talking!? When I explained the boy’s tendency to abruptly get up and pace the classroom, I believe I got the, “No excuses!” speech. No excuses. No explanations. No hope. Here’s a version of how the scoreboard FELT:

I could not win. The “2” on that board came from my coach. In fairness, she gave me much more positive feedback than that. But a consistently negative supervisor can wipe out all the best efforts of any coaches. Lord Vader always had complaints.

My problems were simple. I needed to be doing whole-group instruction. In one class, the average grade level of my bilingual students, according to the school’s own MAP benchmark test, was third grade. These seventh-grade students had come in at a third-grade level in mathematics. They frequently were not ready for group work. They ALL needed to learn a great deal of what I was required to teach. But I was told I had to do group work. The computers saved me: I found a way to group without losing too much time.

I needed time for remedial instruction. But I was on a fixed schedule. When I said I needed to deviate from that schedule to do remedial work, I was told that my “lack of faith in my students’ abilities” was “disturbing.” (That’s where Lord Vader got his name.) My bilingual students were expected to be doing the same seventh grade work as everyone else in the grade, despite some formidable reading challenges in an age of story problems. They had to take the same weekly quizzes, regular unit tests, and standardized tests as all the other kids. I had a little input in the quizzes and none in the other tests. I was poleaxing my students on a regular basis and, if I complained, the problem was me — not the tests.

I taught furiously to upcoming tests. That’s about all I did all year; I looked at future tests and prepared instruction designed to hit the next set of required problems. Yet the tests bordered on crazy, sometimes. I encourage readers to go back into this blog to look for some pictures of those tests. Let me add a few more.

(There are six ingredients, by the way.)

(On the plus side, students never saw the results of these unit tests. On the negative side, not a single person in my math classes got the pizza problem right. I wasn’t even able to give any partial credit.)

Why was I so negative? I could not win. My students could not do the unit tests. I could not exempt them. The quiz picture was better. Quizzes that were story-problem light might go well. I could meet with them at McDonalds to retest and attack quiz issues on Saturday. Even with quizzes, though, opportunity costs were high. I could almost never find free minutes for desperately needed remediation. We were too busy quizzing or testing.

In the meantime, I was doing my best to maintain resilience in both myself and my students but sometimes the façade was cracking. The day after PARCC testing concluded, I was obliged to give my math classes a unit test.

“Another test!?!” One student wailed. “Why?!”

“I don’t know!!” I almost shrieked back, inflection on the “I” and “know.”

That silenced the class.

“We have to do this,” I went on. I am sure I promised them music and candy for their futile efforts.

They were never able to do any of the unit tests, as the pictures above demonstrate. I never had a unit test that was a win. I gave one or two unit tests where I was able to give maybe “1” point total for a whole class in the story-problem section. These tests sucked up entire class periods, too.

Fortunately, weekly quizzes were based on actual topics under instruction and were determined by the math team as a whole, so I did have a fair number of quiz wins. Quizzes kept this year from turning into a testing bloodbath. The unit tests had been written by outsiders, though, examples of what seventh grade students ought to be able to do according to the corporation that wrote the tests. The corporation set the timetable for their administration, I believe. Those tests were a stream of spectacular fails.

What happened to me this year? Irrational, excessive testing forms part of the picture, a component of the other major problem — one of ratios. Years ago, I read a silly article in “Psychology Today” that posited happily married couples must have at least 7 good experiences for every 2 bad experiences. The male friend discussing the article with me immediately noted that more sex could fix bad ratios. We laughed about these arbitrary numbers, but the idea of that ratio stayed with me. I don’t know what the positive to negative ratio for teaching ought to be. I know that my ratio skewed too heavily toward the negative this year. Lord Vader could use some remediation, but tests made up their own rivets, tightening the chain of academic failures, due less to the lack of background knowledge in my students than to the irrationality of presenting material so far above students’ actual learning levels. Simply put, you can’t do calculus until you can do algebra, and you can’t do algebra until you understand the order of mathematical operations.

Eduhonesty: Tests should be given after material has been presented and reinforced; the opportunity for mastery must precede the exam. When I student-taught long ago, my mentor shared an idea that her teacher-father had taught her: “No one should ever see new material on a test.”

How did we lose track of that truth?

Crazy tests colored my view of this year. As my attitude sunk lower, I became less receptive to some undoubtedly good advice. As I watched my students’ faces while they struggled with these tests, I wrote off a great deal of what administration wanted to say to me. The saddest part of the tests above was the fact that students kept trying to answer questions, kept filling in blanks, when writing “IDK” would have been an honest and, I believe, better use of their time.

P.S. The special education teacher had the same problems I did. She complained to me. I provided moral support. She also retired at the end of this year. We both agreed. We love the kids. We love teaching. Whatever we were doing this year, though, that’s not teaching, and we don’t want to do it anymore.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/06/the-kindergarten-testing-mess/

I recommend the above article. I’ve never been in that particular set of trenches, but I listen to elementary colleagues and it seems as scary in their neck of the woods as it is in mine. The Data Monster keeps gorging on America’s children. That monster needs to be slain.

Overall, I do think my principal did a very good job. The testing pace was completely nuts, but the state demanded data. She had to produce data. Oh my, did we produce data. We were drowning in data. I turned in my last, mostly-nonsensical bubble tests on the day after school ended.

At the high end of the learning curve, though, I believe we also saw some solid results. The low end fared much more poorly, but perhaps that issue can be addressed next year.

Eduhonesty: I can’t blame the woman at the top for this madness, not in these uncertain times. If she’d tried to go against the data flow, she would have been fired or at least let go at year’s end. We live or die by numbers nowadays — whether those numbers reflect true gains and losses or not. She delivered the numbers.

“In three weeks, we gave PARCC, AIMSWEB and MAP tests and a unit test. We probably gave a CFA, too!” My coworker said.

The mind does boggle. For readers who don’t know, PARCC is the new attempt at a standardized, common core-based, national achievement test. AIMSWEB and MAP are benchmark tests to track student growth through the year. The unit test was a math test, very loosely based on what we had been able to teach. (We tried to teach to that test, but there wasn’t enough time.) A CFA is a common formative assessment, otherwise known as the weekly quiz that frequently took most of my 82 minute teaching block for some students, although others happily blasted through that quiz, not necessarily because they knew the answers.

I had a great assistant principal once who had never taught a single hour. His degree was in psychology or something. I think he’d been a counselor. I have had other administrators with little classroom experience or with inapplicable classroom experience. Teaching in a suburban 3rd grade classroom does not prepare anyone to be principal of an urban high school, for example. While I hesitate to add any laws or mandates to a system that’s already groaning under the weight of government interventions, I do believe that administrators ought to have a decade in the classroom. I’d settle for seven years. Two or three years should not be enough; almost anyone can survive two or three years in a classroom, whether they can teach or not and, currently, these struggling teachers can then go into administration to escape their inability to manage their classrooms.

Eduhonesty: Despite that great assistant principal, I feel that education has too many generals today who have never fought a real battle. Worse, many generals fought that battle and chose further higher education and then administration as a way to escape their losses. Theory is no substitute for long-term experience.

As it stands, some administrators are scrabbling out of college with shiny new degrees or certificates and about as much sense of direction as a kid lost in a corn maze.

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really
know about what they imagine they can design.”

~ Friedrich A. Hayek (via Bob at bob@lakesideadvisors.com)

I just lived through a year of theory, much of which did not work and some of which was patently absurd. When told “we do not do whole group education,” I sat in the meeting with the other sheep, nodding. Maybe some of the new teachers actually thought abandoning whole-group education was a good idea. When you’ve heard the theory but never tried alternatives, how do you know what works and what does not work? In my district last year, experiments were not encouraged. We were all supposed to be doing the same lesson plan at the same time, regardless of class composition or background knowledge.

I guarantee readers that Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Finland have not abandoned whole-group education. I sat in a South Korean classroom for a morning once. Not only were they doing whole group instruction, students were taking down copious notes from that single lecturer who never once tried to make his material “fun.” They filled pages as I watched a rather soothing scene of fixed concentration and nonstop work. They also took a long recess to play ball.

Eduhonesty: Some of our recent educational struggles are of our own making. Kids can listen to lectures, take notes and then study those notes before taking tests. They do this all over the world. I am not saying that group work may not also have a place in any week’s lesson plan, but prescribing how lessons must be taught has perils. Some populations do much better at group work than others. The more background knowledge students bring to their groups, the more likely that groups will be successful. In the absence of background knowledge, the groups out of earshot may (probably mostly do) end up discussing whether Diego is going out with Marisol, or the Chicago Bulls roster needs new talent.

Obviously, someone has to be imagining and designing lessons for the classroom, but theory that does not appear to be producing results should not be forced upon teachers. I have a radical idea. Perhaps we could let teachers imagine and design their own lessons?

Administrators ought to determine curricula, align those curricula to standards and ensure that their districts are delivering the material associated with the curricula. They should not, however, tell teachers how to teach.