Education is Your Business

Making history matter

Steve's thoughts on teaching U.S. history in a standards-driven environment, as posted on the This Week in Education blog today:

When I think about successful content area teaching, I think about three things: (1) The teacher’s passion for and knowledge of the subject; (2) Making things relevant to kids and their lives today; and (3) Giving kids choices to pursue their own unique interests.

Standards, of course, take a bite out of all three – especially in an area like US History.

Most history classes these days are taught via textbook. I have observed this many times and been victim to it myself on several occasions. Personally, I can’t teach from a book at all; spoils my concentration and gets in the way of my rapport with students. But sometimes that’s all they give me to work with. So what do I do? Close the book, put it down, and try to start with whatever might be rattling around in my brain. And if there’s nothing in there on the day’s topic? I resort to inquiry method techniques and we start making lists of meaningful questions. At least then, we may be able to get something out of the textbook by using it as a reference. (Most of the time, however, most textbooks can’t answer the questions kids most want to know.)

The thing I’m most conscious of as I teach history is my own knowledge of and passion for the topic. Without these, my teaching suffers. I hope not too much; and I do have a nice bag of technical tricks up my sleeve to get around my deficiencies. But nothing beats actually knowing the material and having a personal connection to it that you can sell to your kids.

Again, standards can really take the air out of a teacher’s enthusiasm for their favorite topics.

As for relevance, I will try to teach history backwards. I like to start with the present day and whatever kids seem to know about it. Then I will work my brain to relate it back to what we’re supposed to be covering. History is a set of repeating patterns so it’s usually not that difficult to find present day analogs to past events, even cross-culturally. This approach also plays to my strengths regarding knowledge and passion. I consume a lot of news and this way I get to share what I care about with kids.

Do I cover the standards? Probably not as well as the state would like. But I notice that kids get energized about their world and some even get energized about the past that we’re supposed to be studying. I see this as a big win for everyone.

Finally, I know that giving kids choices is the key to motivating them. Rather than just studying history, I would like kids to do history. This means I teach some of the techniques historians use. My favorite is interviewing. Kids can start as a group by interviewing me about my own history. Then they can begin to think of others they would like to interview from their own lives. Some even come up with topics which may require several interviews. Interviews start with questions and almost always lead to more questions. So we’ll hit library. Librarians love helping kids who come in with good questions already written out on a sheet of paper. Sometimes we’ll use the Internet, too, but I have found this to be a tad inefficient at times given the sheer mass of information available and the ability of kids to sort it out in a timely way. Ultimately, each kid does their own project. Some are related to the curriculum but most are not. They are, however, all related to the kids. And that’s what I care about most.

Have I neglected the standards in this case? Almost certainly. But I’ve also given kids their first taste of real history and what it means to be a real historian.

So what happens to the standards when I teach? They take a back seat to the students. In my world view, we teach students not standards. And therefore, the needs of kids come first. I don’t mind using standards documents as a guide. And occasionally, a standard will give me a good idea or at least clarify something I was already planning to teach. But I will not let a document drawn up by a committee of people who don’t know me or the kids I’m working with determine what I teach. Following standards to the detriment of my teaching and kids’ learning doesn’t make any sense to me.

I want to give interesting lessons to motivated kids on a consistent basis. Standards simply don’t allow for this basic requirement of good teaching.

The problem of social promotion

There's a lot of pressure on schools to keep kids moving from grade to grade, year to year. The result isn't a more rigorous curriculum to arms kids with the knowledge they need. No, it's a system of social promotion that ends up hurting everyone, including the very kids some advocates say it helps.

Steve wrote a great essay on this, which he posted on the This Week in Education blog:

A SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF SOCIAL PROMOTION

Clearly, the practice of social promotion causes many problems. Whether it’s an officially sanctioned process, or one that teachers have merely become accustomed to, social promotion undermines student achievement and teacher morale.

But now let’s look at the situation from where a principal or superintendent might sit. What would happen if we instantly combined high expectations and more rigorous curriculum with accurate grading in low-achieving schools? Over 3-5 year’s time we’d see over-crowded elementary schools and near-empty high schools. Logistically, this is a non-starter. Hence, the culture of social promotion has a practical, albeit pernicious, aspect.

Now, logistical reasons are no excuse for such a heinous practice. But this conundrum does bring to mind a very serious and important issue: we can’t structure out way out of reform. Testing, standards, charters, vouchers, and merit pay are all structural reforms. But school, being the slippery beast that it is, defies restructuring.

Our only hope is to teach our way out.

This is why I find it so fascinating that so few people want to talk about changing teaching. They want to talk about changing tests, changing standards, changing charters, changing unions, changing pay, but they rarely want to talk about the only change that might actually make a difference.

Social promotion is unethical but it arises out of the need for survival. This doesn’t make it OK but it does give us a sense of the magnitude of the problem. It also tells us that social promotion doesn’t exist in isolation. And lets not forget that social promotion exists on a smaller scale in virtually every school in our country – or at least I can say that it has been a part of the “playbook” of each and every one of the 200+ schools I’ve worked with over the last 15 years. How else does one explain the number of high school students who are three, four, or even five years behind?

Smaller and wealthier school districts hide their socially promoted kids by skimming them off into special programs. But in many of our urban schools, the majority of kids fit the description of those who are so far behind that the correlation between their grade level and the number of years they’ve spent in school is meaningless. As such, special programs are also meaningless.

So what’s the answer? Again, it’s teaching. But we can be even more thoughtful than that. If we acknowledge that literacy is the foundation of academic success, and if we acknowledge the brain window for language learning, and if we acknowledge the traditions of elementary school teaching and the natural separation of instructional styles that seems to occur after 3rd grade, we can make simple plans for solid interventions early enough in kids’ lives that strategies like social promotion would be unnecessary.

There are two key places to intervene in a young student’s learning life: at the beginning of 1st grade and at the end of 3rd. It is perfectly reasonable to get kids extra help in the first half of first grade if they are not yet reading and writing independently. And it is perfectly reasonable to retain less successful 3rd graders for an additional year if they have not yet become confident chapter book readers and conventional writers of multi-paragraph essays.

At the same time, we can do several things that make intervention and retention much less likely. First of all, we could concentrate professional development in literacy at the primary grades. Bringing teachers of young children up to speed with the latest and best methods like Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop would improve outcomes tremendously. Second, we can move our most successful teachers to first and third grade. And finally, we can employ the use of high quality early interventions like Reading Recovery for kids who are struggling out of the gate.

The root cause of social promotion is not poor kids, it’s poor teaching. Until we recognize the connection here and actually do something about it, schools with many under-performing children have no logistically sound approach but to pass kids along year after year. This reality does not excuse what is surely a detestable behavior but seeing it for what it is and why it exists should heighten for all of us the importance of making sure our teaching – especially in literacy at the early grades – needs a serious overhaul.

Who's in charge here?

Steve's article from this week's Carrboro Citizen:

Who's minding the school?

By Steve Peha

Do you ever wonder who really runs a given school or district? I do. And I’m in them all the time. For all the sound and fury of testing and standards, what we have achieved is an ineffective accountability system that is at best a pale form of collective wrist slapping, where entire schools must fail for many years before any action is taken — and even then, this action rarely addresses the root causes of failure.

When most people think of accountability in the workplace, I believe they think of personal accountability: How well do I do my job? What does my boss think? What are my responsibilities and how effectively do I deal with them?

But this is not the way it is in the culture of most public school systems.

At the top of the food chain, we often find a superintendent who makes few public statements, rarely takes specific positions on important issues, sets few if any goals and generally leaves the administrative workings of the district to others in the district office.

For their part, assistant superintendents, some of whom have direct management responsibility for principals, also engage in a fair amount of reverse buck passing. Other than “get those test scores up,” meaningful oversight of principals is often minimal.

In many schools where I have worked, principals are typically on their own to do more or less what they want. As long as suspensions are low and teacher grievances even lower, principals often are given wide latitude as to how they run their buildings. Sadly, most fail to take advantage of that to their students’ advantage.

With direct oversight of teachers, principals are the critical fulcrum point in the system. Principals with the skill and the will to make substantive changes can quickly turn around failing schools. But without meaningful personal accountability to their superiors, few principals feel it is worth the risk of upsetting a teacher (or a powerful parent) to do what needs to be done.

For example, most of the principals with whom I’ve met privately express significant reluctance to observe teachers in their classrooms. Even something as harmless as walking down the hallway and peering into rooms for two or three minutes often feels uncomfortable to them. Some don’t know what to look for; others simply don’t want to face the challenges of moving poor teachers toward success — or out of their buildings.

This means that teachers are pretty much on their own, too. Yes, they have to undergo contractually specified evaluations. But as a recent report indicated, many districts show rates of “satisfactory” performance in excess of 99 percent. The teacher evaluation is one of many sham constructs in a deeply flawed collective-bargaining system.

While some teachers are indirectly accountable for student achievement, only those who teach reading and math may feel any real pressure to improve, and since this pressure is collective and weak, given how long schools are allowed to fail, after awhile it becomes relatively easy to ignore.

During my first years of consulting, I would often work in a school for a few days and have the strangest feeling that no one in particular was in charge of what went on there. In the years to come, I discovered that no one is really in charge of many of our schools because there is no long-established culture of personal accountability in education. And while many teachers undoubtedly feel personally accountable to their students, this sense of accountability often pertains more to the quality of their relationships than to students’ academic success.

Strong personal accountability is essential for the success of any organization, team or family. And it is precisely this type of accountability that lies at the root of most problems in education. In many places where I have worked, there really isn’t anyone minding the schools. Day after day, kids show up, teachers teach, principals and other administrators stay in their offices filling out paperwork. Rarely, if ever, do we see well-coordinated and closely monitored efforts at school- or district-wide change.

Not only is no one on the hook for results in our schools, most educators I speak to — from the classroom to the boardroom — feel undirected, unsupported and unappreciated by their higher-ups. This state of affairs must change if we are to see real progress.

All of this simply means moving away from the current collective accountability characterized most notably by No Child Left Behind and state testing and toward personal accountability at the building and district office levels. Curiously, no one seems to talk about the role school board members might play in this all-important change.

Board members may not have much experience in education, but they do have a lot of power — especially the power to ask who’s in charge. They have the power to change collective-bargaining agreements with teachers. They have the power to hire and fire superintendents. They also have the power to assess situations in their districts that no district employee may be empowered to investigate. Most important of all, most board members understand the value of personal accountability; many run successful businesses and families based on this very value. With time and effort, they may even be able to bring it to our schools.

Steve Peha is president of Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., a K-12 education consultancy based in Carrboro.

Culling the herd

The dialog on teacher quality continues over at the EduWonk blog (read entire post here). Steve's commentary is right on:

There are many aspects of ed reform that are patently senseless but one crucial aspect seems to be positively schizophrenic. On one side, we have years of research and the endorsement of people like Bill Gates to tell us that high quality teachers are the most important determiner of student learning and the key to education reform. On the other side, we have people, mostly teachers, who say that it is absolutely impossible (or at least ridiculously difficult) to figure out which teachers are better than others.

As someone who has worked in hundreds of schools and thousands of classrooms, and who has probably observed in some way or another the work of maybe 10,000 teachers, this seems to me a silly argument. Of course we can tell which teachers are better than others. Relative quality can be determined for almost any person or thing or trait.

One trait we use when working in schools and districts is the likelihood of that a given teacher will change his or her practice. We assess this because it tells us who to focus our training time on. We focus initially on “high change” teachers so we can quickly establish models of practice for other teachers farther on down the line.

To do this, we use two strategies: the standard “early adopter” model for consumer buying patterns and a simple multi-rater feedback system. Using these tools and an informal survey of teachers in workshops and in their classrooms, tells us with great accuracy who the most likely teachers are to benefit from training. Once given the training, these teachers tend to get superior results in many different aspects of their teaching.

Can school be fun?

John Merrow, noted education reporter for PBS' News Hour and other outlets, asked on his blog today "Should school be serious fun? If so, how?"

Here's what Steve wrote back:

Can school be fun? School has to be fun. But the fun cannot be added on – like a party or a field trip or an occasional game. The fun can’t be icing on the cake; it has to be baked in.

For example, when we teach reading and writing using the Reader’s and Writer’s workshop model, the fun just oozes out. It’s fun to share your writing with an audience and to hear what others are writing. It’s fun to read books you like and to talk about them with other readers. And it’s a lot of fun watching your teacher model all the things he wants you to do – and sometimes make mistakes in the process.

What’s not fun? Using a textbook. Doing test prep activities. Having no choices over what you study. Being told again and again that you’re a bad student because you keep getting Ds and Fs because the material you’re studying is way above your grade level and there’s no differentiated instruction going on.

Learning, as a natural human experience, is inherently fun. It’s the traditions of school that take the fun out. It’s the mindless focus on product over process and participation that takes the fun out. It’s discovering that school is not about you that takes the fun out. It’s teachers, who have been robbed of the fun of teaching, that takes the fun out.

Making a difference at school

It's nice to go read to kids or participate in career day, but you've got to do more if you want to actually have an impact.

Making more of a difference in schools, today on The Word Factory blog: http://bit.ly/qyPJY

Should states manage testing?

States manage their K-12 testing systems. They determine what passing is, what questions get asked, everything. And there are some serious problems with the set-up, as Steve Peha points out in a comment on the EduWonk blog:

Letting governors and state legislators set educational standards in their own states is a bit like letting the fox guard the hen house. Much research has shown how state politicians have chipped away at rigor over the years, and Mr. Jindal’s latest attempt is no exception.

A few years ago, I worked extensively in Arizona, one of the “tough” states requiring that kids pass reading, writing, and math tests to qualify for high school graduation. The year before the law was to go into effect, they dropped the requirements for a passing score more than ten percent. Then, the following year, they created a formula whereby kids who didn’t pass tests could still graduate through a combination of attendance, grades, and test prep classes. As a result, only six kids failed to make the grade that year, demonstrating clearly that it is indeed possible to leave no child behind if we can only figure out the correct mathematical formula that lowers the bar far enough.

State testing must be conducted by independent organizations with no political or financial stake in the outcome. What’s more, we already have good models of this practice in the NAEP, SAT, and ACT tests. Whether one likes these tests or not, it is hard to dispute the fact that they are all regarded as more reliable than state tests.

I’m not a big fan of testing. But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it right. Too much hangs in the balance when our tests are subject to manipulation by shortsighted politicians who care more about their approval ratings than they do about the fate of children in their states. It takes courage to reform education. And few of our political leaders seem to have it.

To read the original post and other comments, go here.

Why we can't just fire the bad teachers

With state budgets being slashed all over our nation, teacher contracts are in the news almost every day. One particularly hot-potato topic is firing bad teachers. Not a bad idea in theory -- we see it played out in business all the time. But in education, there aren't aren't well-qualified educators waiting to enter the classroom. So the result will more not-so-great teachers replacing other not-so-great teachers, or higher class sizes. Neither is a solid solution.

My colleague Steve Peha offers some excellent insight on this issue in a comment on the EduWonk blog. Here's part of if:

"Whenever we have a highly visible labor negation in education the issue of teacher tenure is front and center. If we could only fire bad teachers, we think, everything would be just fine. But I’m not sure it’s quite that simple.

"First of all, we can already fire bad teachers. It’s just that few principals and school districts have the guts to do it. True, it can take a while, and maybe cost a little money, but the best principals I know never even have to go that far. They get rid of bad teachers simply by talking with them. Nobody wants to be a bad teacher. And a bad teacher, once identified, rarely wants to stay in her current position. At one school where I worked last year, a principal succeeded in encouraging 17 sub-standard teachers to leave. And not one of them had to be fired."

You can continue reading it here:  http://www.eduwonk.com/2009/06/going-green-2.html#comment-85579.

If teacher contracts are an issue in your district, and I imagine they are, you'll want to read this.

Investing in teacher training

There's a lot of talk about improving student achievement by improving teachers' effectiveness. And you'll get no argument from me on that. But as someone who's been working in schools for five years now, I can tell you that most teachers tell me they're woefully unprepared to meet the needs of their students. Yes, the ones that are furthest behind are the hardest to help, but it's just as challenging for some teachers to keep their high-performing kids engaged. We simply don't do enough to help teachers be successful in terms of effective and efficient practice or basic classroom management.

Heck, in our state, most of the funds for professional development have been slashed to help make up for a huge budget shortfall. This not only hurts teachers, but it punishes their students for the mistakes of free-spending legislators.

Steve Peha makes the case for more investment in better teacher training in this comment on the Eduwonk blog today: http://bit.ly/xR7PP.

ACTION ITEMS:

1. Read the piece.
2. Write your district and school board and ask them to look at how teachers in your area are trained.
3. Lobby for more effective teacher training.

Fixing the high school drop-out problem

Colleague Steve Peha had a great opinion piece in the 4 June 2009 Carrboro Citizen. Here's a taste:

Thanks to Bill Gates, the National Governors Association, and some good old-fashioned honest accounting, most folks are well aware of the fact that about a third of our kids don’t make it out of high school on time.

This is unacceptable. But so is most of the thinking behind improving the situation.

For some reason, the piece isn't on the paper's web site, so I offer it to you here. Read. Learn. Do.

Are charter schools "all that"?

There's been a lot of chatter lately about charter schools, including Education Secretary Arnie Duncan saying he was a "huge fan" of them just yesterday on NPR's "Talk of the Nation". But are they all they're cracked up to be? Not so much, according to my colleague Steve Peha.

You can read his views on the topic on the Eduwonk blog: http://bit.ly/ZjJ3z.