Preview of coming attractions

So I never got around to posting my summer to-do list; I was too busy doing it.  That's probably okay.   I've got a lot on my mind, though, and I've got either ideas or drafts for the following ideas which I intend to write about:

The role of unions in education; possibly an ancillary on organized labor in general (hint: I'm broadly in favor)
Effective teacher and administrator evaluation
Effective student evaluation
The role of journals in my English classroom
Creating community in the opening days of school
Common Core standards and their implementation
Communicative learning in the mixed-level classroom
Technology integration and educational computer programs you'd like to see
Project-based learning

What's on your mind as we pass the half-way point of Summer 2011?

AWWWW!

This is the sort of thing that makes me just love the Internet.



I dare you to watch this and not smile. It's got EVERYTHING that makes a youtube video great--a baby monkey AND an iPhone.

Edited to add: Credit where credit's due: http://gizmodo.com/watch-this/

Some sort of reform position from the union

According to the New York Times, the National Education Association has an official policy on student evaluation outcomes in teacher evaluations: Use them, but only if they're good tests.  The article does a good job of sampling the union's position and laying out some of the big picture of what this means.  (Full disclosure: I am a proud member of a local affiliate of the NEA.  While I'm not a union shill, the casual observer would be forgiven for thinking I was.)  From my perspective, the union's new policy feels like sense, and it resonates with my thinking on the matter. 

We need data to drive effective instruction.  We need good data about educational outcomes for students, and we need good data for educational outcomes for teachers.  (Someday we'll get to have the conversation about data for educational outcomes for administrators and school boards.  But in the meantime, teachers are the proxy for all those levels of the education machine.  And that's to put entirely aside the effects of poverty, parent responsibility, and all the other smoke screens we teachers like to release when people try to look at us too hard.)  This need for data means that we're going to have to include student testing in decision-making at some level; if data-driven decision making is going to be used to improve education, we need good data.

There are two key phrases: the more immediate concern is "good data."  Neither I nor any of my colleagues I've talked to about this (a pitifully small sample size; even if you count my former colleagues at my last posting, the total number of professional educators I've worked with adds up to less than 50, and the ones I've talked to add up to less than 15) trust any of the current assessments.  The disconnect between the assessments and educational reality is simply too great, for a lot of reasons, and it isn't necessarily because the ACT is "too hard."  It's not.  The reality is that assessments sample such a small number of learning goals, and do so in such a cursory manner, that drawing meaningful conclusions is tough.  Equally importantly, the current assessments are not really designed to evaluate the skill of instruction.  The good standardized tests assess really big ideas--critical thinking, drawing conclusions from data, things like that.  But they don't do it in a way that means a great deal.  Colleges have been de-emphasizing their focus on standardized test scores as an admission requirement, even as everybody else ramps it up.  The union's director of teacher quality makes a valid point: the Common Core curriculum might be a starting place for getting better standardized tests.

The second, long-term consideration about data is longer-term political.  I said, "if we're going to use data to improve education".  That wasn't a rhetorical flourish.  As trained professionals, many of us see the value in data (even if we lack the know-how, the resources, or the time to do anything about it).  But I for one don't trust the motivations of many of the people pushing "testing testing testing" as the new standard for teacher (and by extension public education) efficacy.  Many of them have a track record of being distinctly anti-public-education.  These are all the usual boogeymen for this blog: the Mackinac Foundation, private charter school management companies, people who think that a lack of officially-sanctioned prayer in school is de facto a reason to be against public education.  For many of these organizations (cue the "straw man" arguments, and I see your point), data-driven instruction may simply be another weapon to attack public education with.

Conversely, critics of the NEA (and, in this particular instance, I don't count myself among them) could argue a similar thing: In name, the union has accepted testing as part of teacher evaluations, while in practice rejecting any existing tests.  It will be at least a decade before the kind of tests the union wants are available, by which time this argument will likely be moot.  Good practice will show that high-stakes testing doesn't produce notably better education outcomes, and opponents of public education will move on to some other angle of attack.

So what's to be done?  Well, I can't do a whole lot about public policy right now.  Thanks to a recent vote in the Michigan Senate, my local union has less power than ever to do anything about teacher evaluations.  What I can do is this: use the (pretty crappy) data we have to make decisions about what's good for my students.  Make sure my learning goals are crystal clear in my head, and make sure my formative assessments are as good as they can possibly be.  Get the data that I need myself.  Make sure my class is so hard, when someone throws a standardized test at my students, they don't think twice about knocking it out of the park.  Make sure my support structures are so strong, that all of them get it.  Ray, I think you have the right idea:  What do you want students to know?  How are you going to help them learn it?  How are you going to know if they got it?  What are you going to do about it?  The key questions are the only ones that matter.

(Edited to fix spelling error in the title.  Thanks, Jamie.  Who's the English teacher around here again?)

A brief thought for further consideration

According to research, a great way of teaching background knowledge is to teach key vocabulary.  (Marzano has something rapidly approaching 6 books on the topic.)  It is very possible to know some information or possess some skill without having the vocabulary for it; for example, children from Spain conjugate verbs in the second-person plural imperfect without ever knowing what those words mean.  Another example is a basketball player who knows nothing about physiology or trigonometry, but has a free-throw average of 80%.   It is, however, very difficult to teach a concept without a shared vocabulary.  To give a skill without a vocabulary would involve simply modeling a skill over and over, and having the student mimic it.  To give knowledge without the vocabulary...again, modeling, maybe?  That's tougher, I think.

Portuguese Friday

A student sent me this link.  Great song, cool video, tight execution.

Edited to add a link to the lyrics.

Education reform, unions, first principles

Or, More Questions than Answers

I'm bashing my head against two posts: this one from Shawn Gude, and this one from E.D. Kane.  trying to figure out what it is that bothers me about them.  I agree with nearly everything they both say, but neither of them quite...do it for me.  In 6 Traits writing speak, I would give them a 5 out of 6 in Ideas, without quite knowing why.

Favorite lines:

"Ends are often regarded as self-evident. It’s a bit more complicated than agreeing that, yes, we all want an education system where students are well-educated. Reform discourse needs to include discussions of first principles, end-games, and educational values" --Gude

"[T]here is no doubt in my mind that corporate for-profit charter chains would be a mess; that the influence of the big foundations can create perverse incentives; and that the top-down approach of many reformers is a bad approach." --Kane

Things I have trouble with:

"So I support the unions, I just think they also need to reform. And I support the idea of charter schools and school-choice, I just don’t support the profiteering off of education that some reformers and corporate interests seem to want. I think charters, like unions, can be a great force for progress." --Kane

How do unions need to reform?  He seems to be in favor of all the things that unions do.
How can charters be a force for progress?  What do they bring to the table?  I'm glad that both of these people (much better than me at this stuff) are leery of charters run by for-profit companies.

In the end, we're left with the beginning.  Why do we educate our children?  Do we want to make our students ready for the workplace?  Well, yes, but is that all schools are good for?  If so, then we should probably just go back to apprenticeships as our primary vehicle for education.  That way, the cost is borne by the companies who will benefit from their labor.  If we want our schools to do more for our students than that, if we want students who think about things, if we want inventive, creative thinkers, that's something different.

And, of course, if we want schools to be vehicles by which the children of the rich and powerful remain rich and powerful, we have models for that, as well.

Sudden insights

I'm putting the wraps on SY 2010-2011; it's proving to be deceptively difficult. I'll have a year-end review and a summer to-do list up, probably next week.  In the meantime, a few random thoughts:

1.)  In my Spanish classes, I'm shocked to discover that a great deal of my assessment of comprehension is in fact an assessment of production.  This is not a new problem for me; I seem to remember having written about it before.  I wonder why I haven't done anything about it yet.  Maybe it's because writing tests is hard. (/whine)

2.) This from my friend Qandeel:

I told her she was confusing coffee with crystal meth.