Reflections on Teaching

Sometimes I worry that all the emphasis on direct instruction, comprehensive curriculum, and teacher-proof texts has beaten the last bit of initiative out of the latest generation of elementary school teachers. Here’s some background…

First, let me go into the way back machine to how things were in the old old days. When I attended school in the early 1970s, teachers were given text books, with lessons and workbooks. Some of my friends with parents of the hippie-dippy persuasion, went to alternative schools where the curriculum was both teacher, and student created. I was not greatly impressed with what they were learning, or how those schools were run at the time, but I imagine they were like a lot of charters of today, some fantastic, some mediocre, some awful. Now we move up to the old days. Some of those curriculum practices made their way to regular education. I can remember a principal musing about the difficulties of starting teaching in the 1980s when, as she put it, “We didn’t have textbooks, and were supposed to use Math Their Way to create our own curriculum,” she finished up with, “so these teachers today have no excuse for not teaching effectively, everything they need is provided for them with the curriculum we use.” She was wrong, and intuitively knew this because she later observed that there was no way our school would leave PI (Program Improvement) if we stuck to the scripted curriculum. She encouraged us to supplement, omit, and do our own thing, as long as the test scores went up.

I had a student teacher in my classroom for one semester, and will never have the opportunity again due to cuts in Elementary Education programs (who needs teachers when your cutting class-size), a change in demographics, and the fact I teach in an elementary specialty area, and all the candidates are working on a multiple subject credential.

I enjoyed the experience of being a master teacher, cooperating teacher, or whatever term of art they use in your neck of the woods. While I still feel I have a lot to learn about helping to develop the next generation of teachers, the experience did crystallize some concerns I have about the effects that Reading First, and other initiatives have had on teacher preparation and what is expected of people in this profession.

Where do I fall in that continuum? In my state I may have been in the last year of teacher candidates put out by the state university before the onslaught of scripted curriculum hit elementary education. I was expected to create my own study units that were not based on a text, even though the state was moving to a program where they would offer only two possible language arts text for school districts to adopt. It was not too difficult, but it wasn’t an easy task either. I was being prepared to create my own curriculum. This turned out to be a valuable lesson. My first year, we were in the middle of adopting a scripted language arts curriculum, but it was only being used in primary, and I was teaching fourth grade. I created a language arts based partly on the old basel, with workshops, and lit circles for the entire class. It was exceedingly ambitious for a first year teacher who had skipped doing student teaching. Later, when  I was asked to supplement, and change a scripted curriculum so that it better met the state standards, I could do that.

What about teacher who came after me? The student teacher I had was a really great teacher, and likely will exceed my abilities in a number of ways (her assessment skills,  informal and formal , were stronger) she did a great job of supplementing the curriculum to address standards, etc. But, I was frankly shocked when I requested that she create a science unit for the students as part of her work (we hadn’t yet adopted a science text in my district at that time), and she balked. She was fine with a text book, and she could add to it, but if she didn’t have that “structure” she didn’t think she could do it on her own. Eventually, she did a unit on science and did a great job, but if I hadn’t pushed that on her? I have seen other newer teachers since then. Some of them still read from the Teacher’s Edition script when they do direct instruction. They have had the initiative trained out of them. This is not good because while I believe you can be a good teacher with a scripted text, you have to do what Allington observed, and monitor and adjust your instruction (something my student teacher had very good instincts about, btw), otherwise, we might as well just train robots to teach. I also think that when we leave all the curriculum creation to others, we give up ownership of what we are teaching, and may lose our investment in it.

What do you think saps initiative in teachers?

I like to think this blog is pretty ecclectic (although this may be self-delusion on my part). I’ve gotten positive responses to a variety of different posts over the last few weeks from ones where I blogged about brain science and the education of children in poverty (wow, that sounds way too passive — how about poor kids?), to ones about using this blog to involve kids in my observation of their teacher, to one about what I was doing in the lab with kids (response here).

No one ever comes out to say they don’t like my more political posts, but I am regularly told by others that I’m “so political”, which means that not everyone is comfortable with what I have to say. I’m not going to argue with folks about this, but instead let readers know if you love reading about what I’m doing in the lab, but you’re not so crazy about the rest of what I write, there is a simple solution. I put all of my lab reflection posts in one category, “Week in Lab” which you can access in the sidebar, or subscribe to it on RSS. I’m not going to change who I am and what I write about, but I’m if that’s not what you want to spend your leisure time reading, I offer this easy solution.

If you hate when I gas on about what I’m doing in my lab, you can do the same by looking at or subscribing to the Politics/Policy category.

This is a weird couple of weeks because we have parent conferences (with minimum days) backing up onto the Thanksgiving Holiday. My district is one of the few in the area that still has kids come in during Thanksgiving week, so there is this funny 2-day dog-leg of a week. The schedule is all mucked up as I try to squeeze prep time for teacher into 7 partial days.

Here is what is going on:

Second Graders on Kindness. I’ve been using VoiceThread to capture what we are learning. This week’s focus is on manners for hosts and guests. I added some video from a Flip camera and I’m pretty pleased with the quality.

Third Graders are still working on how we interact with the environment in City Wildlife, but we haven’t been doing much writing or VoiceThread, but they are doing important background work by learning keyboarding via Dance Mat Typing. They will be writing a paragraph on the computer in a few weeks.

Fourth Grade seemed cursed. This is a very difficult age, and this particular group of kids seems to have a lot of emotional lability. I made the mistake of direct confrontation and anger in dealing with one class, and they are trying to make me pay for it. I expect it will all even itself out over time, but it’s likely to be unpleasant for all involved for the time being. That was my part, to add to it, the project I was trying to do on PBS Kids Go! Dont’ Buy It wouldn’t work on Firefox. I had to give them an IE page to make it work. So we had both social emotional, and technical problems in altogether in one big happy mess.

Fifth Grade was my just miss of last week, but it went better this week. I had the kids do Inspiration diagrams to show a season, and most did better with a pictorial representation. I’m going to have them give voice responses next week on the VoiceThread. Their work on Galileo there was pretty good.

Sixth Graders are starting to work on research reports. This week was just topic selection. Each teacher is taking a different approach. One wants a compare and contrast of two civilizations, while the other is asking them to form a question to answer. Going forward, I will be working with them on summarizing and paraphrasing vs. plagiarism. Between times, I’m having them add some information to a VoiceThread:

I was going to write a lot more when I did this post, but I got sidetracked by something I read here in the Bracey Report 2009. I was arrested while reading the account of a child who died for want of dental care, but it was the following paragraphs that left me both breathless, and nodding my head in recognition:

We can imagine the misery of this boy and certainly should consider how much he was able to pay attention in class during  the months of his ordeal. And when his 10-year-old brother with a swollen jaw complained of a tooth ache, it again took months to find an oral surgeon, who found he had six abscessed teeth. There is no press report on how he was doing in school during these months. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, untreated cavities are nearly three times as prevalent among poor children as among middle-class children.

Children with a mouthful of aching teeth can’t concentrate; children who can’t see will have reading difficulties; children who  can’t hear what the teacher is saying will likely look like they aren’t paying attention.

Much of that section of Bracey’s report is about  the effects of poverty on the brain, and its relationship to the achievement gap. This is  based on a study that started making the rounds about a year ago, and some other work as well, showing that poverty has a physical effect on the brain. This brought up the question among those of us teaching in these communities about how deterministic this was. Often when educators bring up arguments like Bracey’s we get asked, well how is that different from the argument that Charles Murray makes? First, he argues pure genetics and is extremely deterministic in his conclusions about how low poor folks and minorities will perform. In I Worry: If Poor People are Stupid, Why Bother? sought to answer this by saying, hey we need to stop blaming the victim, and also asked that we not paint the findings too widely, and make them a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I started to think about was my own experience raising a non-neurotypical child, and how different parents approach this challenge, so I’ll offer it up in the hope it offers some insight.

My son was diagnosed with autism quite late. He was 8 years old at the time of his diagnosis. At that time, I began attending parent advocacy meetings (I strongly recommend FEAT Families for Early Autism Treatment, or similar groups to anyone family that has a spectrum diagnosis), and we began attending parenting classes to learn what to do to help Leroy. I was told at the advocacy meeting that I should get a comfortable car because I would be spending a lot of time driving Leroy to various therapy appointments, and that typically in ASD (autism spectrum disorder) families, mom stays home and takes the child to therapy/home-schools the child/does home therapy, while dad works a heck of a lot to pay for it all. I offer this not just to share the inherent sexism of this arrangement (which we do not replicate in our family), but as a setting for what happened next.

Parenting class was interesting because it involved both parents, mom and dad. It was based on ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis) and had us coming up with a behavior we wanted to eliminate in our child, and plan to do that. One father, who had not been as involved as his wife in their son’s treatment, said flat out, “why should I expect him to be able to do this like a normal kid, when his brain isn’t normal?” In other words, why should I bother if he has brain damage. The wiring of the autistic brain is different than neuro-typicals, but the dad didn’t realize that this was not destiny and could be affected by “working” on his child’s behavior. The rest of us spent a good amount of time explaining about neuro-plasticity and how you could affect not just behavior but brain wiring by doing the therapy.

Here are some  of the lessons from I’ve taken from my reading and experiences:

1. Poverty and biology are not destiny, autism shows that early intervention makes a difference, studies of early childhood education can make a difference. The bad news, this takes a lot of effort, and a lot of money. Harlem Children’s Zone targets pregnant moms, and families with kids in strollers, and spends up to $4,000 above what the state provides for each student of school age.
2. We’re all individuals, even poor kids, just like there are different degrees of autism. My son was not diagnosed until he was older because he has a milder form of it. My brother had a classic and severe form that showed signs very early. Some kids in poverty will not have brain effects. Some have more functional families and support systems. Some have more “resilience”. Some get lucky and don’t have as many “stressors”. The studies of brain effects from poverty are about the population as a whole, and really can’t speak to the condition of each individual child.
3. While you need to focus on the individual child, ignoring the context in which they live is really brain dead. Wishing childhood poverty away, will not make it so. Pretending that these kids all start out with the same opportunity is foolish. Expecting schools to erase the income gap without providing significant resources is just cruel, but what do we expect from a society that lets a 12 year old die from an untreated tooth abscess?
4. Just because we can’t erase the achievement gap doesn’t mean teachers get to “phone in” the job. We can still help our students do better, and that does not require us to be miracle workers.

• Finland, Singapore, and the U.S. are on an airplane that’s about to crash…
• The Bracey Report 2009
• Education Policy Blog: Poverty and Brain Development, or, I Worry: If Poor People are Stupid, Why Bother?
• Study: Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains – USATODAY.com

Thank you very much for having me in your IB Theory of Knowledge Class on Tuesday. Here were some of the things that I saw while I was in your class:

1. You started with warmup which was to write down three main points for creating a good presentation for an upcoming project.
2. Speed dating was next. You lined up like you would for a line dance and then shared your topic/three points with a partner, listened to the partner and moved on down the line. Then did another more complex configuration. You then shared what was learned.

I noticed that the activities were focused on short writing and speaking assignments, and you moved around a lot. Your teacher seems to make you do a lot of work, and was not doing as much work himself.

This pattern of having students move around in various groupings is common in well run elementary classrooms, I wonder how typical it is in secondary?

Questions:

1. Do other teachers at Burbank have you move around and do most of the work, or do they do the work?
2. Does Mr. Ferlazzo ever lecture (read material) to you?
3. Do you feel like you learned something in speed dating even though you are repeating yourself?

Mr. Ferlazzo then reviewed the project assignment and reminded you about what you learned about “lousy” presentations when you went to the computer lab. Someone asked what you should do to make sure it isn’t lousy, and he said, “the opposite of what they showed.”  A student questioned the assignment about what is a lousy vs. what is a great presentation. Could you do things from “lousy presentation” elements (a web site) and still have it be a good presentation? What about if you learn from it.

Questions:

1. Would you want to sit through a presentation that had any of the elements in the “lousy presentations” show?
2. Did some people mention elements you would want in a good presentation during the “speed dating” that might help you?

Mr. Ferlazzo kills a lot of trees in his class. He handed out a paper and asked you to create a two-column organizer with the words, invent vs. discover. He then had you write what you thought they were, and do a  pair/share/report out about it. He then passed out articles on Math and whether it was invented vs. discovered. You read, and then did a pair share discussion about your thoughts.

1. Someone said discovered because math is like the alphabet, it just is there, but not all alphabets/writing systems are the same. Our alphabet has sounds associated with it (a = “a” sound), but Chinese writing pictographs do not have sounds but ideas associated with them. Are numbers different? Are they always the same?
2. Is something more “real” if it has a number associated with it. Is an “A” grade for getting 90% or higher on multiple choice tests more “real” than an “A” grade on an essay?

I was very impressed with how seriously you took your work, even though you have a really good sense of humor. Your thinking about the question Mr. Ferlazzo gave was very impressive.

Students reading articles

One student made the mistake of saying “I don’t know” and was referred to Mr. Ferlazzo’s poster that says:

I’m not sure, but I think that…

Mr. Ferlazzo made frequent appeals to you being IB students, what does that mean to you? Do you think that you are more capable because you are in IB? Do you think you should be better than that?

There are a lot of diagrams on the walls, many have been made by students. I couldn’t tell which ones the IB class had made, did you make any of them?

Thanks for letting me visit and take pictures!

The title comes from a trope of jokes about the hilarity that results from dissimilar groupings of people (usually a rabbi, a priest, and a minister). Sometimes the joke is how alike they all are and sometimes, the dis-congruity of groupings makes that joke. That’s how I like to think about comparisons between the U.S. and countries like Finland and Singapore on international tests. The issue came up recently on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog in his response to a particularly brain-dead and specious argument about teacher quality (Do Teachers REALLY Come From The Bottom Third Of Colleges? Or Is That Statistic A Bunch Of Baloney?). I was going to write a whole post just about the comparisons to Singapore and Finland, but I’ve decided to put up links because really all I would be doing is using information easily gotten from the posts of others:

• Tuttle SVC: America : EU :: Minnesota : Finland
  Brilliant and short, it takes apart the comparison of America to the EU (or Finland for that matter). I won’t give away the punchline, just click and have a chuckle.

• My Own Private Finland | LFA: Join The Conversation – Public School Insights
  Where Claus von Zastrow points out the reality of teacher evaluation and autonomy in Finland in contrast to the reality being offered by so-called “reformers”.

• Lessons from the North: A Conversation with Canadian Education Leader Raymond Théberge | LFA: Join The Conversation – Public School Insights
  Claus again on our neighbor to the north, and the great job they’ve done on PISA. Their secret, social services for immigrant families that are centered in the child’s school.

• Learning Is Messy – Blog » Blog Archive » “Are We Fixing the Wrong Things?” By Yong Zhao

  Where visiting administrators from Singapore go to Brian’s Title One classroom to find out how to teach mathematics

• The Return Of Jay Greene And The United Cherry Pickers – EdWize
  Diane Ratvich and other point out that countries (Finland) and states (Massachusetts) with the strongest teachers unions seem to have better scores than places (like Texas) that don’t.

• The Bracey Report 2009
  Bracey takes apart  international score data to show that the U.S. may have lower average scores on math and science, but because we have a large number of students, and we have a large number of students at the high end of the distribution (offset in the average by the large number in the cellar of scores), we have more high-end math and science graduates, than countries that score higer on PISA. He also does a nice job on the breakdown of our scores by school poverty-level which yields and unsurprising correlation.

The next edition of the ELL/EFL/ELD Carnival will be…right here! Any blog posts, including examples of student work, that are related to teaching or learning English are welcome. You can contribute a post by using this easy submission form.

The last edition of the Carnival hosted by Jennifer Duarte and Michelle Klepper is  here, and as always it’s chalk full of useful information for working with English Learners.

Future hosts will include Shelly Terrell at Teacher Reboot Camp: Challenging Ourselves to Engage Our Students on February 1st and Karenne Sylvester at Kalinago English: Teaching Speaking Using Technology on April 1st.

You can see all the previous twelve  editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here.

As I’m starting new units, one of them has offered examples of both success and failure, and some lessons for me. This isn’t one of those big “ah ha’s” but one of those smaller moments of enlightenment that make up the day-to-day practice of teaching, and improving that practice.

The unit is on Astronomy which we started by learning about Galileo. The next part was to transfer what we learned about the findings of Galileo (heliocentrism) and some more information to an understanding about seasons and what causes them. Part one went well, and many of the students got that our solar system is  heliocentric part on a straight up recall basis. The last two slides on the VoiceThread below have some of the students sharing what they learned in pairs:

The second part, on solstices, equinoxes, and seasons, did not go as well. As you can see from their responses, they didn’t get it.

What worked with the first task? First, they read a story in their regular class, then watched a movie on his life with me, so they had it not just once, but twice. The second lesson was  based on a short lecture with images, and a BrainPop video, proving Gary Stager’s point that they aren’t enough, and my point that they should be used as an into or review, rather than alone.  Still, many seemed to abandon a heliocentric view altogether in their written comments, which shows they still don’t have a firm grasp on it. What might help? I think they really need more on how the tilt of the earth interacts with the sun to create seasons, and I think they need more “hands” on activities, where they manipulate and create. I’ll be having them do some work with objects in Inspiration, chalk, lights, and globes in the period before Thanksgiving break to do this.
Link to Astronomy Unit posts
Solstice Take 1
Solstice Take 2