People doing, etc.

Dina Strasser's take on Chapter 4 of Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching.

She's a better teacher than I am. She's a better blogger than I am, she's a better analyst and applied researcher than I am. And dammit, she's better at sarcasm than I am, too.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 4

Support your students

Jackson starts off this chapter by defining the "Curse of Knowledge," knowing something and being unable to imagine what it's like not knowing it. She suggests that it's one of the big reasons that teachers have a hard time teaching until the remediation stage. Then, she suggests that by having remediation plans without intervening during instruction is tantamount to planning on our students' failure. This, of course, leads to frustration all around.

The mitigation to this--the principle for this chapter--is to plan interventions in to the lesson. In the planning stages of a class or a unit, a teacher decides what students should know. (This is reflected in "standard and benchmarks" and whatnot.) He then breaks that up into smaller bits, steps and stages of learning goals to put together some kind of continuity plan so that he's not just randomly pulling activities out of his file drawer. Then, he builds in learning supports over the course of the unit, so that when students trip up, they have a system to help them keep their footing.

Jackson identifies the following elements of an effective intervention system:

1. The Plan is developed before students begin to fail.
2. The Plan has a red flag mechanism that triggers action--objective, based on learning objectives (not behavior).
3. A concrete procedure is in place such that when the conditions are met (less than 76%, missed standards, whatever), the procedure kicks right in. It's in the letter home, the syllabus, the class's website, on refrigerator magnets. Everybody understands the procedure, what it's for, when it happens. It's not punishment and it's not busywork.
4. Students have shared accountability in this Plan. They have a well-defined job and responsibility for their learning.
   

Jackson suggests a number of interlinking steps to help support students' learning:

• Anticipate confusion. Having once been learners of our subject ourselves, and having taught our subject every year more, we have a pretty good idea where our students will get tripped up. Prepare your students for those moments and have a variety of teaching strategies in your pocket.
• Pinpoint confusion and uncover misconceptions. Know where your students are getting tripped up. She points out that this is tricky, because you can get right answers using wrong strategy. This action step (or whatever it is she calls it) addresses the strategies that students are using, and making sure that they're using the correct strategies.
  
• Demystify the process. The process of education makes sense to educators. We live it, we dedicate ourselves to improving it, we've invested huge amounts of time to thinking abstractly about it. This is not so for student. Help them to understand why they're doing what they're doing.
  
• Gradually remove supports as students improve. Make it clear that some of your "crutch" methods may be necessary now, but they won't be available forever. She makes the point of saying that, rather than changing the learning activities, try keeping the learning activities the same and changing the students' relationship to it. I'm not exactly clear what she means by this, or what this would look like in an WL class, but I get the shape of what she's saying.
  
• Support the learning of students who have already mastered the learning goals. The teacher prep looks nearly the same for this step as the previous. Instead of taking the ambiguity out of a learning objective, leave some of the (learning-goal-relevant) ambiguity in. The students who already know a lot need to learn, too.
  

And in this way, Jackson comes back to content differentiation. These are all things that a teacher prepares for as often as possible. Jackson suggests doing this systemically, making sure that you have this process available all the time.

Our school has an "Interventions" class this year, a class we've been struggling with getting right all year long. We know that we need a mechanism to help students learn content they may have missed the first time, and this year it took the form of a 1-hour-a-day class. We've had trouble organizing the class logistically, re-teaching standards, getting students into and out of Interventions, and keeping occupied those students who don't need to make up standards. This chapter reads like Jackson has been through a number of projects like that. She's taken those experiments and tried to turn them into something.

Never work harder than your students, Cha. 3

Expect to get your students there

The bottom line of this chapter is to have high expectations for your students. Jackson moves very quickly to make a couple of things clear, though: giving students a harder test is not raising expectations. Praising students for mediocre performance is not raising expectations. In fact, she maintains, faking higher expectations until making higher expectations is one of the more damaging practices out there. She differentiates between "standards" and "expectations." Standards are what students need to learn. Expectations are a teacher's belief about how far s/he can take her / his students towards the standards.

[Michigan is working on publishing "content expectations," which is the list of things a student has to know. These lists used to be known as "standards." In neither list is there a measure of how far on this list the state believes a student can get. With this chapter, the terminologies become completely muddled, and are now more or less meaningless (for a given value of "meaningless." Whatever that means.)]

In fact, over half of this chapter is spent defining "expectations." Jackson suggests that expectations are what we think we can help students to learn, combined with how much we value the learning objectives. And the big takeaway line is, "Expectations say more about your own sense of efficacy than they do about your students' abilities" (84). It's not about taking responsibility for learning away from students and putting it on teachers, but it IS about teachers knowing their power (Nancy Pelosi is playing on the Daily Show, plugging her book, and it was too tidy a phrase not to use) to improve their students' learning. She (Jackson, not Pelosi) goes on to explore what it means to have lowered expectations, and where it comes from, and she decides that lowered expectations are a defense mechanism: they "reduce the gap between our own understanding about what good teaching should be and our perceptions about our ability to teach effectively given our current teaching situation" (85). That makes sense--it explains why it's such a common phenomenon, and why it's so hard to get over. Fortunately, she does offer some concrete steps to help.

As the basis for these steps, she quotes Jim Collins's book Good to Great (one of my principal's current favorites) quoting Admiral Jim Stockdale: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end--which you can never afford to lose--with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be (Collins, 2001, p. 85)" (Jackson, 2009, p. 89). She breaks this into two parts-- "Adopt an unwavering faith in yourself and the importance of your work" (91) and "Confront the brutal facts of your reality" (95).

Part of the "unwavering faith" involves teaching philosophy; why did you become a teacher? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Part of it is more pragmatic: walk the walk in your classroom. We can all sit on our blogs and bang out, "I believe all students can learn, that teamwork is more effective than individual work, that homework needs to be utilized carefully, that extrinsic awards are counterproductive," or whatever was in the most recent professional development article we've read. But it's totally different to say those things than to actually utilize group work, to give meaningful homework assignments, to never give out candy for performance.

Confronting the "brutal facts" involves more self-knowledge: what are you good at? What teaching strategies are you currently using? Then some knowledge of situation: What is the teaching task at hand? What's challenging about teaching this time in this place? (Jackson tells a story about trying to teach Shakespeare to a group of, erm, students she didn't naturally connect with.) Then some judgement: are your current strategies up to the task? If not, what can you do about it?

Jackson ends the chapter with the admonition that you have to attend to both of these parts. Faith in yourself is a necessary condition for improving your teaching, but not a sufficient condition. Knowing your situation without tending to your philosophy is a recipe for burnout. And, ultimately, once again, know that your expectations for your students are really your expectations for yourself.

People doing pt. 2

Dina Strasser's take on Chapter 2 of Marzano's Art and Science, over at ASCD Inservice. I'll be eagerly watching to see if Marzano continues to speak.

Dina Strasser's other blog. I haven't had time to look through it yet, but I've liked her on ASCD. Looking forward to less "assignment-driven" blogging.

To find her first chapter, you can click on the "Teaching" tag on the left of ASCD's website. You can also click here for this humble blog's link to the first chapter, and Marzano's oracular response.

Metablog: Tried the Trackback link instead of the other link, the wossname, the Permalink. We'll see if I show up.

Update: It didn't like the TrackBack link. Updated to fix.

People doing what I do, better than I do it

At the ASCD website, Dina Strasser works her way through Marzano's Art and Science of Teaching. She's posted her blog entry on the first chapter.

I tried a similar exercise this past summer. I'm looking forward to reading the work of someone who's good at it.

UPDATE, 21 Feb: Marzano speaks. This is actually a pretty cool format--it's like listening to a really fascinating conversation, with a computer right next to you that cites the speakers' sources as they talk.

I'll try to keep abreast of Dina's (etiquette check: is it okay to refer to someone I've never met by their first name? Politeness in World 2.0 is so weird.) blogging and Bob's responses. (Can I call him Bob?)

Never work harder than your students, Preface and Intro

The preface has some inspiring words and what certainly seem like keen insights into the development of teachers. Jackson defines what she calls the "master teacher mindset," a way of thinking about and looking the craft of teaching which exemplifies really effective teachers. The defining point seems to be that instead of looking for hard-and-fast answers to questions that arise while teaching, a master teacher understands that asking the right question is the more important act (2). She suggests that all teachers can be master teachers with practice, a sentiment with which I certainly agree.

The introduction reminds me of nothing so much as a quiz in Cosmo. (Erm...or so I'm told.) You answer the questions, you give yourself a score based on your answers, and then the test tells you who your true love is, or what your ideal profession is, or whatever those tests are supposed to tell you. Or, in this case, what level your teaching practice rests at. I rank in as a practitioner, the third stage of four in this hierarchy of professional development, by exactly 1 point. As you can probably tell by my tone, I'm always a little skeptical of such things; it's like a horoscope. They're vaguely enough worded that they could apply to anybody. Some parts of the "practitioner" description are very accurate, but others are not. (I flatter myself that I have a pretty high awareness of both my skills and areas of needed improvement).

Having said all that, Jackon's primary objective in giving the quiz seems to be to initiate self-reflection and increase self-awareness. This reflection seems like it's going to be a key to Jackson's book, and I don't think it's something that can be over-practiced. So despite the teen-magazine feel of the beginning of the book, Jackson's purpose in the book seem to fit pretty tightly to my motivation for reading it.

Various points

*Credit where credit's due. He probably isn't the first or the only current user of the phrase, but the incomparable Glenn Greenwald uses that title when he wants to get out a number of things on his mind. I can only aspire to emulate his dedication to his task, and I will never be able to emulate his knowledge and skill at his job. For the moment, I'll settle for emulating his Web 2.0 mannerisms. Each of the points below is worthy of its own posts, and each of them has a post in the works. But they're itching and urgent. And, honestly, I don't know where to begin with them.

*The limitations of reflection. Sometimes, after really hard days, I look at the disaster I wrought upon my students and hope that I didn't do them any lasting harm. And I think to myself, "I love my job. I love my students. I love my subject matter, and where I work, and my coworkers. I believe unwaveringly in T. Roosevelt's notion that 'Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.' I think about this stuff all the time. It has occurred to me that, many years from now, thinking about teaching might not be a bad job. All the time I plan and I consider and I research and I write. And this is the best I can do?" And I despair. Then I go home and I think about how I could have done it better.

*Systemic thinking, or, the teacher as low-level bureaucrat. I'm not very good at thinking about systems. I don't do well at making arbitrary decisions and then making other people do them. I can weigh pros and cons and make a decision based on the results just fine, but if I have to pick between 5 equally good choices, and then make 140 people a day go with it, I get sort of stuck. This is a tremendous downfall as a teacher. Turning in student work, passing back student work, transitions between classes and useful but less-than-exciting paperwork are all really important systems. However, they're pretty much arbitrary--I decide what I want to happen, and then I ask my students to do it. My memory tends to take a back seat to my knee-jerk decision-making process (which, incidentally, is why I write down my lesson plans and try to follow it like a playbook). So these (and other) systems, which could really make my life and that of my students much easier, if I really designed them well, tend to be ad hoc hand-me-your-papers-no-wait-don't kinds of things. It probably frustrates my students, and it certainly limits my efficacy. So I'll try to stick to one system for the rest of the year, and redesign the whole thing during the summer. I'm getting better at it, and I can prove it, but nothing works as well as it should yet.

*Iterative standards. A lot of standards in World Languages are iterative--you have to perform the same communicative tasks in a number of contexts in order to get credit for the standard. By my way of thinking (and there's a lot of thinking still to be done on this), a student can get credit for these standards in one of two ways--either through summative assessments, administered shortly after instruction / formative assessment / reteaching / etc.; or through an as-yet undesigned, week-long final exam that really tests a student's ability to perform all six major communicative tasks in a variety of contexts (16 after two years of high school Spanish, according to the state's Standards and Benchmarks document). This seems like an impossible contrast to me, and I don't know why. I have a hard time envisioning permitting a student to pick and choose which sections of the final exam they want to take; in contrast, the final exam would have to be really long in order to test all communicative skills in all required contexts (or even a reasonable facsimile of them). I guess I'm just having a hard time picturing the logistics of this. (See "Systems thinking," above.)

*Teacher dispositions, positive behavior support and ACTFL. My quadrennial issue of The Language Educator, a publication by the ACTFL whose core objective normally appears to be to provide universities with MEd programs an outlet for their extra ad revenue, has a couple of genuinely interesting and, dare I say, useful articles. One of them is called "Another piece of the language learning puzzle: Why teacher dispositions are a crucial aspect of student success," by Maura Kate Hallam. It ties high expectations into student achievement, mentions a few ways people are studying it and teaching it, and encourages teachers to be more aware. (It also cites the National Board definition of teacher disposition; sounds like a good basis for student review of classes. Elsewhere in the issue they publish the full list of NB standards for WLOE.) A lot of things about the article are interesting, but one in particular caught my eye: They quote a Latin teacher as saying, "[...] TESA [Teacher Expectations and Student Achievement] addressed the affective side of teaching, which is often easy for young teachers to forget about as they worry about content. Experienced teachers always need reminders about what makes a positive climate." It's true that we can forget about staying positive, and that there's more to teaching than the list of standards. Teacher disposition, like behavior reinforcement, seems to take a back seat to measurable content advancement in the contemporary classroom. But, like behavior reinforcement, if you don't have it, the content is meaningless.

*Never work harder than your students. It's the title of a book by Robyn R. Jackson. It's another "how-to-be-a-better teacher" book from ASCD. I have a copy on loan from my principal. As I work through it, I'll keep the post posted.

*Celebrate good times. Each of my students has made huge progress this year, and our school community is starting to feel like an actual community. People (not just faculty and staff) are coming together to create positive social events. Just as could be expected from a group of people with a common goal and a common geography, we're all starting to row in the same direction, even if we're not always stroking on the same beat. My high school Spanish classes are getting better and better all the time, not just at Spanish, but at school. They're taking some lessons which (let's be honest) start out a little superficially, and often really turn them into something worthwhile.

Edited to fix typos and subject/verb agreements.