First post of the new year: Nothing to do with school

This post has nothing to do with school, education, pedagogy, teachers, students, legislation, or administration.  I just love this piece of writing.  I'm sticking it here so I can find it later, and in the hopes that my readers enjoy it, too.

Babylon 5, Doctor Who, and World War II

What makes a good school-wide support system?

I've been heavily involved with a new, mandatory after-school program for students with missing assignments.  We call it our After School Assistance program, ASAP.  I think our councilor found that name someplace.  It's kind of like a detention, but instead of getting one for behavioral problems, students get one when they have less than a C- and are missing assignments.  We've been running it twice a week for three weeks now.

[Quick standards-based grading justification of this policy: Obviously, in a traditional grading system, 0's on a homework assignment can kill a student's grade faster than anything.  But if you're in an 80-100% standards-based grade system, missing assignments aren't that big a deal to the grade, so why have a special intervention program just to solve that problem?  My thinking, as an advocate of both ASAP and standards-based grading, is that, in a SBG system, you need a certain level of proficiency to pass the assessment.  The homework, whether it's graded or not, is meant to help you do that.  If you ace all the assessments, you obviously don't need the practice for proficiency.  If you don't, then the homework's extra practice might be just what you need to help you get the standard.]

We started the program before we had all of the logistics worked out, and part of that was because I really wanted to get it started.  Teachers complain about homework assignments all the time.  So even without all the lines of communication being operational, we started pulling students in after school.  For the first few weeks, teachers asked me, "How do we do X?"  My answer was usually, "I don't know.  Let's tell the student and the student's parent that she has to come, and we'll work it out from there."  With a couple of notable failures, that seems to work out.  It's gotten me to thinking about how I would assess this program's achievement so far, and that leads me to ask, what makes a good school-wide learning support system?

So, spitballing: A new program should address a need the school has.  It should not take the place of something a teacher should be doing.  It should not get in a teacher's way, or place an undue burden on the teacher.  It should remove a concern that a teacher has about a small minority of her students, so that she can focus on better instruction for all students--it should deal with small numbers of students with similar learning challenges.  It should not enable the systemic marginalization of a minority student population--it shouldn't keep the tough cases out of sight and out of mind.  It should SOLVE the problem, not just change the problem or make it look like something else or allow the school to say they have a program in place--it shouldn't be window dressing.  Like all things in school, it should have learning as its goal.  Like all things in school, it should be student-directed.  Like all things in school, it should be data-informed.  (I've decided I reject the phrase "data-driven.")  It should help answer one of the key questions: What do you want students to know and be able to do?  (Curriculum.)  How are you going to give it to the students?  (Instruction.)  How are you going to tell when students get it?  (Assessment.)  What are you going to do with the ones who don't get it, and what are you going to do with the ones who do?  (Differentiation; interventions and enrichments.) 

I feel like this program is still in its infancy, as is my capacity to evaluate it.  But I think it still scores pretty well: It definitely addresses a need of our school, and I definitely have the data to show why we need it.  I think teachers get great benefits for the time they put into it: they fill out a form and agree to give students 50% credit for late work, and in exchange they don't have to chase students for work they need to get done.  Students who need extra practice or time or structure get it; students who don't, don't have to sit through it.  We have, I'm guessing, about an 80% success rate: with very few exceptions, students who come to ASAP finish their work that day.  I don't know how many multiple-offenders we have, but my impression is that it's a relatively small number.  In all, it seems like a good school-wide support system.  There are improvements to be made, but it seems like a good start.

Readers, what do you think?  When schools create programs to help teachers do their jobs better, how do you know they're working?

Unions, RTW, and the teaching profession

Full disclosure: I'm a union guy.  If (when) RTW passes the Michigan legislature, I will still pay my union dues.  I think unions are a net positive force, both in terms of economics and in terms of productivity.  If occasionally they end up on the wrong side of history, or defending somebody stupid, or killing the business they purport to serve, well, you can't be right all the time.

After I wrote the introduction, I've spent the last 4 days trying to write something intelligible about the subject.   Every tme I think about it, though, I frankly lose my breath at the sheer audacity of what has happened here in Michigan.  I can't be rational about it; I don't see the other side's point of view; Gov. Snyder's justification for changing his position is so flimsy as to be laughable; Sen.  Schuitmaker's assurances that she is not anti-teacher no longer seem like pleasant half-truths, they seem like insults to my intelligence wrapped in stationary.* 

I'm scared for the following reason: every year I have been a teacher, my job has gotten harder, more demanding, and more complicated.  I champion many of these changes, and I think that if there's any work force on earth that should embrace lifelong learning as a professional quality, it should be teachers.  But it's also gotten less well compensated, and the profession is being systematically denigrated.  Public schools are seen as the problem, most notably in situations where poverty is the problem, both with the students and with the public schools.  It's as if I were, I don't know, a butcher, who is told he has to become a surgeon, who will be compensated like a lumberjack, and treated like tripe.  And I feel that way WITH the union protection.

I saw the union as a way to restore some measure of dignity to the profession.  We're never going to be paid what we're worth; we're public employees, after all.  But I get the distinct impression that people resent us for even ASKING.  Look, my job is 30% harder than it was last year; my retirement health care has more than doubled in cost, my pension has gotten more expensive (yes, I know about private-sector pensions going the way of the dodo; maybe if you'd had a union, your employer wouldn't have been able to steal all your money with no guarantee of repayment), I am less likely to retire before I stop being an effective teacher than I ever was before, and dammit, I'm still good at my job. 

But now the official policy of the state of Michigan is that solidarity is wrong.  Unions are not a force for good to be respected, they are a cancer to be broken.  There is no way for me to see this as anything other than a political attack and a battle in the class war.  (The rich are winning the class war, by the way.  I just expected to be able to put up more of a fight for longer.)  And right now, there's no way for me not to take this as a personal insult. 

*During the Great Teacher Purge of 2011, when Michigan passed a state law that made being a teacher much more expensive, I wrote Sen. Schuitmaker an e-mail imploring her not to vote for the package.  She sent me a 2-page typed letter in response, with her signature in actual pen at the bottom.  It was very nice, it expressed her opinions, and assured me that her children go to public schools, and she wants nothing but the best for them.  I believe this; I no longer believe that she thinks public schools are what's best for them.

Longer school days

Thanks to the efforts of a public/private partnership, 5 states are going to experiment with longer school days: 

NPR: Days to get longer at some low-performing schools

This is probably a good thing.  It all depends on implementation, of course, but longer instructional periods should roughly equate to more learning.  If we're going to make longer school days, I for one would prefer to eat into summer break, but that's not my call.  I understand why a district would opt for longer days instead.  Among other things, Secretary Duncan argues that longer school days also helps to keep students safe in districts with lots of violence, like Chicago, his home turf.  That aspect of it had never occurred to me, since I have the great good fortune of coming from a more-or-less violence-free upbringing.

 The thing that troubles me, though, is Sec. Duncan's attitude towards why we haven't adopted longer school days as a national model.  He treats the arguments of teacher compensation and "who's going to pay for the toilet paper" as minor nuisances.  Call me cynical, but when I heard him say that on the radio, I could almost hear his next line: "Teachers have to buy toilet paper anyway; they could just pick up some extra."  I'm not opposed to teachers working harder, working more, working better, working together, working differently, even buying school supplies.  We're all in this to do what's best for kids.  I'm opposed to decision-makers assuming we should do it for free with a smile on our faces, because it's what's best for kids.  During scheduled school times, an administration has the right to tell teachers what to do and where to be, as long as it improves instruction, and with the possible exception of planning period, depending on contracts.  Anything outside of that is kind of extra.  We all know we can't do our jobs well in 6 hours, but there are only so many hours in the day.  Now, if Sec. Duncan would like to wash my dishes....

"The Force isn't real? How about 4 billion dollars?"

Hmm.  This bears thinking about.  First reaction: Good on him.  He sometimes does some surprisingly grand gestures with his oodles of dough.  Second thought: $4bn buys a lot of education reform, for good or ill.  And Edutopia is a solid resource for teachers looking for best practices.  It's big on (the right kind of) collaborative learning, game- and project-based learning, learning for everyone, and formative assessment.  So, despite the potential for an incestuous donation of $4bn from him to his own education organization, there are worse ways to make a big splashy gesture towards kids.

George Lucas will donate Disney $4 billion to education, HuffPo

Changing everything

I think I’m a pretty good teacher.  Most of my students like my class.  Most of the ones who don’t, don’t for all the right reasons.  “He speaks Spanish too much,” “he does something EVERY DAY,” that kind of thing.  Barring extenuating circumstances, all of my students leave my class a little better at Spanish than they came into it, and on my best days, they leave a little better at life, too.  So when students come back to me after a long break, or even a long weekend, and say, “I don’t remember anything,” I just sigh.  For a while, part of my solution to that was more homework.  Now, of course, what I hear is, “I don’t remember anything.  And I didn’t do my homework.”  So I’m always looking for better ways to make thinkgs stick. 

To that end, I went to a training on Friday for a world-language teaching methodology called Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS).  It blew my mind.  For non-language teachers reading this, hold on for a little while--there’s a little bit of education theory at the beginning, but this isn’t really an article about pedagogy.  It is about change and professionalism and being scared.  It’s also a little bit about faith and whatever the opposite of faith is--doing the impossible because you’ve been shown how and why it works.

I have a pretty straight-up communicative language acquisition methodology.  That means that I think the underpinning of good language instruction is comprehensible input: you have to give learners examples of the new language that they can understand.  You then repeat this process ad infinitum.  Whatever level your students have, you speak to them just a little bit beyond that level.  My rules for providing comprehensible input are these: 

1.)  Give students examples of key vocabulary in lots of different contexts: visual, audio, read, written, spoken, heard.  That will give them a variety of hooks for their learning to latch on to. 

2.)  Value comprehension above production.  Babies get to listen to a language for 3 years before anyone expects them to do much more than grunt.  We educators don’t have that long, but we can still be mindful of the way the brain learns. 

3.)  When you do ask for production, making oneself understood is more important than grammatical correctness.  Verb conjugation charts and grammar lessons and noun-adjective agreement and subject-verb agreememt are important aspects of the language, because they make communication easier and better.  But in terms of speaking, they’re less important than getting the main idea across.

4.) Above all, translate as little as possible.  As little as possible, for me, turns out to be like one word in forty.  Draw a picture, act it out, dance, show a video or a cartoon clip or a song, anything you have to do to get students to understand WITHOUT telling them the English meaning.  The brain creating meaning is what language learning is, so the key to language learning (so my thinking goes) is to have the brain creating that meaning for itself. 

TPRS starts with the same base assumption: language learning only occurs when the brain creates meaning out of new language.  It then flips it on its head.  It translates absolutely everything.  You don’t introduce a new word without telling a student what it means.  The theory is that having to create new meaning is more work than the brain needs to do, and it gets in the way of REAL language learning, which is processing the meaning over and over and over until it becomes natural.  Instead of becoming a crutch, the translations become a spring board for creating meaning, which happens by processing a small amount of language (say, one sentence) in a lot of different ways, over and over until it is automatic.  Blaine Ray, the presenter at yesterday’s conference and the first developer (I think) of this method, likens it to practicing the piano rather than learning grammar, or even learning vocabulary.

---

The differences between what I think works and what I saw on Friday are subtle, but profound.  Apart from the differences of view on translating, there’s an issue of vocabulary.  I try to cover a vocabulary set--people in school, buildings in town, the doctor’s office, for a total of 10 to 20 words--with accompanying practice activities every 2 or 3 days.  In a school year that averages out to about 3 words a day (not including verb conjugations), for a total of some 500 words the students know well, plus some 1000-2000 extras that they’re expected to understand but not be able to produce.  (Those numbers are arbitrary and based on personal experience, not research.)  TPRS promises that at the end of Spanish 1, you will know 150 words.  The good news is that they’re the most commonly occuring 150 words in Spanish, and you will know them like crazy.  There are other important differences, like the role of students in the class and what it means to be proficient at a language, but I need more time and experience to process those.

Here’s the upshot:  TPRS is EXACTLY in line with my learning goals.  It gets the job done.  Students understand Spanish, they speak Spanish well.  After two 30-minute practice sessions, Blaine had a room full of new learners reading a 1-page story in German.  By the end of Spanish II, his students were taking the AP test and having success on it.  It’s creating language learners.  However, it cuts directly across the grain of my thoughts on how to get it done.  The question then is this: Am I a good enough teacher to do what is demonstrably best for my students?

The question of course answers itself.  But it is MUCH scarier than I would have guessed.  I consider myself a professional.  I learn new teaching techniques all the time. I pay close attention to what works and what doesn’t and change my instruction accordingly.  I try really really hard to synthesize seemingly contradictory best-practice theoretical requerements.  But this--this is a whole other kettle of fish.  Adopting a straight TPRS curriculum will mean all of the following things.

1.)  My curriculum work over the last seven years will be essentially meaningless.  The TPRS curriculum is based on acquiring the vocabulary most useful in most situations, and not at all about mastering communicative tasks.  My learning goals and practice activities, my carefully constructed classroom management system designed to encourage respectful student interaction in Spanish, all of my work to adapt Marzano’s framework to a language class, all out the window.  And just when I was starting to get it to work well.

2.) The state standards--a list of some 70 things that a student is expected to do by the end of Spanish II--are essentially meaningless.  The standards which I thought were central to learning--the interactive-mode standards--are actually the least important.  All of the culture is going to change, too, and I have no idea how.

3.)  I’ll have to start TRANSLATING.  I cannot emphasize enough how big a change in thinking this is.  I imagine this is how hard-core Catholics felt after Vatican II.  That is not in any way hyperbolic.  I’ll have to accept that what I’ve always thought was best, isn’t.  For the benefit of my current and future students, I’ll have to accept that I did less good and maybe even some harm to my past students.

4.) There is so much uncertainty.  The uncertainty is not in the numbers, nor in my personal experience, but in dedicating myself to a whole new way of doing my job.  Waking up tomorrow morning will not mean the same thing that it did on Tuesday.

All of this change and personal discomfort, and for what?  Is what I’m doing so damaging that I can’t keep doing it?  Some of my students are very good, and they’re not always the best students.  So, back to the question: Am I enough of a professional, enough of a teacher, to change everything, up to and including the questions I ask myself about my day’s progress? 

The question answers itself, really.  I’m going to try to look at a different way.  I now have a methodology that I hae seen work, with enough step-by-step elements to it that I can do it consistently, and enough flexibility that I will still have room to react to my students’ needs.  That sounds like a good day's work to me.

Career paths for teachers

In an interview with Education Week (paywall), 2012 National Teacher of the Year Rebecca Mieliwocki argues against traditional pay scale steps and columns.   Instead she prefers a model of advancement with a clear career path laid out, in which skilled teachers don't necessarily just go through the motions or become administrators.  As they become teacher leaders, master teachers, and veteran teachers (I think she was kind of spitballing with the names), they would have a different responsibility set and a different pay scale to go along with that.  She also talks about her position is not so different from the one espoused by the unions, unless one has a cartoonishly simple understanding of the union's position. (She's not as condescending as that, though.) 

I like the idea of having a career advancement path, but I'm also leery of who would write the rules.  This kind of change would be hard to get right, and the consequences on a school-level could be pretty harsh, on teacher morale if nothing else.  Hmm.  It will be interesting to see if anybody has already implemented something like this, and how it works for them.  Mieliwocki says that 90% of schools are run on the step-and-column system; I wonder what the other 10% are doing.