Best Practices

I am resistant to the concept of an instructional strategy being labeled as a so-called best practice.  I understand the methods used to derive such a label.  A particular classroom-management technique or instructional method seems to be successful for many different teachers in many different classrooms.  As the number of teachers seeming to have success with the method or technique increases, the technique or method earns the status of "best practice."

Don't get me wrong...  I am not saying that these management techniques or instructional methods are mislabeled or fraudulent.  On the contrary, I love finding new management techniques and instructional strategies that seem to be having broad success.  

My argument is this...  Too often, education professionals search-for, covet, promote these "best practices" as if this technique or these instructional methods are a silver-bullet cure or the holy grail of education reform.  

Do not seek wise people.  Seek what they sought.

Instead of searching for a silver-bullet fix to our classrooms and schools, we should look at the methods by which teachers developed their best practices and adopt those methods to create our own best practices.  Those educational guru's studies different management techniques and instructional methods and found ones that seemed to be working.  This is what we should do in our classrooms and schools.

Teams of teachers who share the same curriculum (all of the 10th Grade English Teachers for example) should research what instructional methods or classroom management techniques seem to be working for their kids.  Ones that seem to be successful should inform those teachers who seem to be experiencing less success in their classroom.  For example, Mr. Jones might ask Ms. Wong, "How did you teach your lesson about Thesis Statements?  From looking at their formative assessments, I see that my kids didn't seem to get it, while yours seemed to do much better.  When I re-teach Thesis Statements to my classes, I would like to try a new lesson based one some of the methods you used."

This is a WONDERFUL conversation teams of teachers who share common curriculum could have.  Together, the team could do their own research based on the performances of their own students.  Together, they can analyze the relative success and needs of their own students.  Together, they can talk about interventions and re-teaching.

What makes this method better than finding the Holy Grail Of Thesis Statement Lessons is this: we all know that classes of students change from year to year.  A lesson that worked gang-busters in 2007 may seem to not be working in 2010.  With a method in place where teachers can do their own professional research on their own classes, we achieve the real Holy Grail of Education (higher performing students).

Creating a method that I describe above isn't easy. 

It takes a major shift in teacher-thinking.  Teachers need to stop thinking that they are a lone professional working in isolation.  Teaching was not developed as an isolated profession because that is how teachers thought we would work best.  Teaching is an isolated profession because in the 1800's there was only the need for one teacher for the community.  In 2010, teachers need to redefine themselves as members of a team of professionals.  The team are all of the teachers that share either students or curriculum.

Teacher teams need to have agreements about some alignment of their practice.  This sticks in the craw of many teachers who push back saying, "Do not turn me into a Wal-Mart employee!"  On the contrary, if teams of professional teachers can agree on what goals should be taught, and what formative and summative assessments will best inform the team of how well students are achieving the goals, then teachers can use their skills and knowledge in designing different instructional methods, management techniques, and interventions for students who are not achieving.

Then teacher teams can have their own research-based conversations and find their own best practices.

One Step Forward – two steps back.

Yesterday, I read the proposed National Standards for teaching Literacy in History/Social Studies.  I was bowled over by how bold and visionary these standards were.

First, there was not one mention, not one, of any fact, historical figure, war, event, or date in these standards.  I think this is a good thing.  Over the next ten years, access to quick and easy information is going to become even more ubiquitous.  In my freshmen history class in Oakland CA, it seems like I am the only one without a phone that can access the Internet.  My students can Google facts as fast and I can ask questions.  Ask them to remember those facts, however, and they seem stymied. 

While their relatively small bank of easily recalled facts makes the digital generation seem less intelligent than their Boomer grandparents, this new generation is intelligent in profoundly new and different ways than any previous.  Notice I avoided a qualitative measurement of “better” or “more” to counter the commonly held description of “less intelligent.”  It’s not that this new generation will beat or loose to their predecessors in the intelligence game – it’s that this new generation is playing an entirely new game.  While it has been the number and accuracy of recalled facts that determined the relative smarts of Boomers and Gen-Xer’s, the digital generation will measure itself based on how individual manipulate information and knowledge to create something new.

This is where the new National Standards have demonstrated extraordinary vision.  As the volume of information continues to grown from a stream to a river to a flood, users of information need to learn how to be more wary in these now-treacherous waters.  Anticipating this, the proposed National Standards will ask middle school students to be able to, “identify aspects of a text that reveal an author’s point of view or purpose,” and to be able to, “distinguish between fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a historical account.” Later, in the first half of high school, they should be able to, “compare the point of view of two or more authors by comparing how they treat the same or similar historical topics,” and “assess the extent to which the evidence in a text supports the author’s claims.”  Finally, by graduation, they should be able to, “evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, evidence, and reasoning,” and “evaluate an author’s premises, claims, and evidence by corroborating or challenging them with other sources of information.”  Given the amount of incorrect and fraudulent information available on the Internet, these are rapidly becoming survival skills for citizens.

One of the reasons why traditional standards for history have remained dominated by a laundry list of facts is because it is cheap and easy to test the memorization of facts.  Despite all of the uproar over testing, test scores and how these measures should give us an accurate picture of how our children are learning, California spends less than three dollars per child, each year testing.  Given the sheer number of children to be tested and given the current budget crisis that seems to exist each and every year, it is hard to argue against efficiency.  However, it seems reasonable to ask a question, “Isn’t finding a detailed picture of how our children are learning worth more than a latte?” 

“Professional Historians DON’T take quizzes!” is a poster than hangs in my freshmen history class at Skyline High School in Oakland, California.  My students pride themselves on the fact that they have never read Section 4 of Chapter 8 of their textbook in order to answer the six questions at the end of the section and study for a quiz on Friday. 

When my freshmen open their textbooks, they turn first to the index.  This is because when they open the book they are hunting for more information about ancient Mesopotamia to help them understand Hammurabi’s Code, or more information about the Roman Empire to help them understand Suetonius’ description of the water projects undertaken during the reign of Claudius.  They do this work while researching and writing about deep, complex questions such as, “How did the need for a steady supply of water effect the technological, political, economic, and legal development of the world’s first civilizations?”

Real historians research and analyze primary sources.  They determine the relative bias and trustworthiness of their sources and use the information they find to create and publish answers to deep questions.  This is what we train our freshmen to do at Skyline High School and this is what is being asked of history teachers under the proposed national standards for teaching literacy in history/social studies.

Alaska and Texas did not send delegates to create the new national standards.  Texas’s governor decried that no one other than Texans should determine what Texan children learn.

The same day the proposed National Standards were published, Texas’s School Board entered what will become a fierce debate about the state’s new standards for History and Social Studies.

According to a New York Times article on the Texas proposal will, “include a section on ‘the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.’”  Additionally, the article mentions that, “References to Ralph Nader and Ross Perot are proposed to be removed, while Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, is to be listed as a role model for effective leadership, and the ideas in Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address are to be laid side by side with Abraham Lincoln’s speeches.”

While some political conservative may laud replacing what they see as a liberal bias to history with one that is more in line with their values; while political liberals may decry what they see is a biasing of history, I am disappointed on a more fundamental level.  Texan children are still going to be forced to memorize discreet facts about history.  Additionally, the volume of textbook purchased by Texas may give their standards as much, or perhaps more, weight than the proposed National Standards.

The proposed National Standards are a step forward into a new generation and a new area of knowledge and learning that acknowledges the reality of easily accessed information and demands that next-generation thinkers are better prepared to find, analyze, and utilize that information.  In Texas, the school board is squabbling over which set, or perhaps whose set, of discreet facts we make young people memorize.  While Texas remains mired in pre-Guttenberg ways of thinking about education and learning, nationally, we seem be poised to embrace the digital age and prepare our young scholars for the future.

Are Great Teachers Born or Made?

 After reading the NY Times Magazine article here:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?ref=magazine

I ordered the book Teach Like a Champion.  I liked some of the items on the Taxonomy.  I've been using the cold-call questioning technique for years and I like how it gets every mind in the room thinking about the question because every mind in the room is worried about if she/he will be called on.  I like the use of positive classroom management: identifying how we would like children to behave and a right way of being rather than focusing on behavior problems.

I think that the combination of strong content knowledge so that the teacher can provide just-in-time instruction is as important as the ability to manage the classroom environment.

I want to believe that having a rubric of teacher behaviors that are proven effective (or "best practices" as my admin loves to say) will be enough to raise student achievement.  However, I wonder if the article and the book haven't missed a step.  Each of the effective teachers that Lemov studied and identified these techniques from went through a process where by they developed the technique in the first place.  What was that process?  How can we lead our teachers-in-training through a similar experience to develop their skills.

I guess what I am saying is this - My cohort of student teachers all read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, loved it, put our student desks into a circle, and expected that so-called best practice to solve our classroom woes.  Too few of us tried to deeply understand the process by which Freire decided that he wanted his students to sit in a circle.  To few of us wanted to deeply explore our unique teaching circumstances and develop techniques that work with our students. 

Discovery is More Powerful than Instruction

I remember when I was a child carrying rocks in a bucket.  My friends and I were building a dirt and stone city for our matchbox cars to drive in and I was carrying away some of the rubble from our construction.  I was swinging the bucket back and forth and felt that the dirt was pulling away from my hand as I swung the bucket.  Fascinated by this, I swung the bucket faster and higher until I could swing the bucket around in circles without any rocks falling out, even when the bucket was upside down and over my head.

As soon as I got home, I showed my dad my great discovery.  While my physicist father knew that centrifugal force had been discovered long before I was born, he also knew that in my limited experience, this was a new discovery.  All my father did was beam with pride and pleasure that his son had made a discovery and was in awe of the world around him.

Imagine the different experience I would have had if my father had sat me down for a lecture about centrifugal force instead of experiencing my discovery.

Traditional classrooms operate under a broadcast paradigm.  The assumed expert (the teacher, book, film, etc…) imparts information that the student-consumer is supposed to absorb.  Periodically, the route is reversed and the student must broadcast her information back to the teacher for evaluation.  The more the two broadcasts match, the higher the grade.

Unlike Boomers and Gen X'ers, children born into a digital world are not passive consumers of broadcasts.  They may still listen to music or watch television, but they spend far more time than any previous generation interacting with the media they consume.  They don’t listen to the Top-10 on a radio; they create their own custom play list on their iPod.  They don’t channel surf, they surf the Internet. 

Classroom 2.0 should focus on interaction and discovery and forgo broadcast.  In my social studies class, we are beginning to make this change.  Instead of listening to lectures about ancient China, Mesopotamia, Rome, or Egypt, my students interact with primary source documents.  They read Suetonius’s description of the water projects undertaken by Emperor Claudius and the Code of Hammurabi.  They look at aerial photographs of drainage ditches in Italy and satellite images of ancient levees in Mesopotamia.  They do this in order to write an essay that answers the question, “How did the need for water effect the technological, political, economic, and legal development of the world’s first civilizations?”

They struggle mightily with these documents.  They ask lots of questions of me and of their teams.  I have heard, “I don’t get it” countless times.  They have gotten frustrated with me because I wont “just tell [them] the answer.”  There have even been a few tears.  However, when we hit that moment of discovery; when my students get, really get, that they can see the political and economic cooperation among the city-states of Mesopotamia because the levees are vast and intersect with each other; that moment is indescribable.  They don’t need me to tell them that I am proud of them, because they are proud of themselves.  They don’t need me to be proud of them, but I am.  All I can do is beam with pride and pleasure at my students who have made a discovery and are in awe of the world around them.

One Test I Love

Tests are supposed to be a sampling.  The idea is this: Because it is impractical to test the whole domain of knowledge and skills that we hope a child will learn this year, we will pick a random sub-set of the domain of all skills and knowledge and test the child on those.  If the child does well on the sub-set, then we hope to be able to infer that she would have done roughly as well on learning the whole domain.

One can think about this as sipping the soup.  Because it is impractical to eat all of the soup to see if all of it is good, we stir the soup and taste just a spoonful.  We infer that the flavor of the spoonful is a good representation for the rest of the soup.

Extending this analogy, a good test is the spoon and the domain of all of the skills and knowledge taught in the class is the soup.  When we attach high-stakes to the test; when we teach to the test; when we designate the standards that are tested to be PowerStandards then we are, in effect, spending our time worrying about the spoonful and neglecting the soup.

In Oakland Unified School District, we have an exam that does just that.  It is the 10^th and 11^th grade History Writing Assessment.  The district expects that every sophomore and junior learn how to interpret primary source documents and create and argument answering a deep question on a topic in history.  The topic is randomly selected from the body of topics that students study.  In the summer, teachers organize the document set and write the question.  Our idea is that the job students doing analyzing the documents and writing the essay will be representative of the job they would have done on any topic from their class given an appropriate set of documents.

Not only does this assessment pass my spoon test – it really does give us a representative sample by which we can infer the performance of a student about any topic covered in the class – it also is authentic.  It is the work that real historians do.  Real historians don’t read chapter 5 section 3 of a textbook.  Real historians do not take quizzes on Friday nor do they take test at the end of a unit.  On the contrary, real historians search for primary sources, they read and interpret them, create an argument, and they write.

Teacher Compensation and Retention

Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA's) are the contractual agreements between teachers and their school districts. Without changes to these documents, then school reforms will remain framed by the agreements of the past.

Perhaps the stickiest issue is teacher compensation and job security, In nearly every CBA, teachers receive strong job security in return for low compensation as compared to other degreed professionals. For example: I've been teaching in California for 14 years, I have over 90 post BA graduate units, but no advanced degrees. I make low 60k a year in salary. This is lower than most starting salaries for degreed professions. Typically starting salaries in business is between 70-80k. BUT after two year, like many teachers around the country, I become a "permanent employee." This designation means that if my school wanted to fire me, the administration would have to follow a highly-regimented process that would likely take 1.5 to 2 years. My union would fight them all along the way. Most school districts do not want to take the time, the energy, and the political capital to fire a teacher whose only fault is mediocre or poor teaching. This is VASTLY different that being called into Trump’s office and having the boss point a finger at me and say, “You’re fired!”

After reading Bill Ferriter 's article called Performance Pay Will Kill Our Schools, I started thinking...

How much money would teachers need to make to take job-security out of future contracts?

Starting salaries of $70,000? Top salaries of $150,000

Starting salaries of $100,000? Top Salaries of $200,000

What would it take to make teacher compensation look more like professional compensation, meaning that teacher are earning similar dollars as other starting professionals fresh out of school with an MBA (in my mind an MBA=Teaching Credential)?

Would governments and boards of education be willing to pay this kind of compensation if it meant that they could get rid of the 10-15% of teaching professionals who are duds?

Would teachers be more focused on doing a good job if their performance review could lead to promotion or the loss of their job?

Is this conversation a third rail is for teachers' unions? Can unions discuss it among ourselves and clarify our thinking before we go public?

If teachers were being paid top dollar – would we then agree on an evaluation protocol that is robust and linked to student learning? I’m not talking test scores here – I’m talking about training school administrators to have use robust system of agreed-upon classroom learning targets:

· X% will achieve these learning targets as shown in these products

· 100-X=Y% will not achieve the learning targets and will have received this intervention protocol with this report listing agreed upon modified learning targets and products.

· Y% will achieve their modified learning target results as shown on the modified products.

· 100-Y=Z% will not achieve their modified learning targets and will have received this secondary intervention protocol with this second report listing newly agreed upon modified learning targets and products

· ETC…

Wikipedia in the Classroom

This is a shared post. The sections in bold come from called Rethinking the future of learning institutions: 10 principals by John Norton, published in October of 2009. Specifically, this post is looking at the principal of "De-Centered Pedagogy." from that article. I am writing about it here because it reminded me of a discussion I read sometime back about the relative usefulness of Wikipedia as a source in historical research. The non-bold sections are my thoughts on Mr. Norton's ideas.

In secondary schools and higher education, many administrators and individual teachers have been moved to limit use of collectively and collaboratively crafted knowledge sources, most notably Wikipedia, for course assignments or to issue quite stringent guidelines for their consultation and reference.26 This is a catastrophically anti-intellectual reaction to a knowledgemaking, global phenomenon of epic proportions.

To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self destructive.

Schools and teachers are banning sites like Wikipedia because they do not fit well into the traditional paradigm of assumed authority. In that paradigm, knowledge is something that is created my accepted experts. Students and amateur spend years reading the knowledge of the experts. As the student or amateur grows in experience, then she/he can begin to take a more and more active role in questioning, then challenging the acknowledged experts. If the student or amateur become good enough at questioning and challenging, then she is allowed to engage in some supervised information creation (writing her thesis, dissertation, or scholarly articles) if the community of acknowledged experts accepts her, then she is admitted into the club and is allowed to continue to create knowledge.

Wikipedia is not an accepted authority of information – often the information is biased or factually incorrect, especially for recent, evolving, or emotionally charged subjects. As such – Wikipedia is not a proper resource in a world ruled by the assumed-authority paradigm.

On the contrary, it a world defined by the community knowledge-making paradigm, Wikipedia is an acceptable and attractive platform. This new paradigm will gain momentum once enough people have grown up and been trained in thinking about knowledge as something we create in community instead of being trained to think that knowledge is something that one finds in authoritative sources and only acknowledged authorities have the right to create new authoritative sources.

Instead, leaders at learning institutions need to adopt a more inductive, collective pedagogy that takes advantage of our era. John Seely Brown has noted that it took professional astronomers many years to realize that the benefits to their field of having tens of thousands of amateur stargazers reporting on celestial activity far outweighed the disadvantages of unreliability.

This was a colossal observation, given that among the cohort of amateur astronomers were some who believed it was their duty to save the earth from Martians. In other words, professional astronomers had large issues of credibility that had to be counterpoised to the compelling issue of wanting to expand the knowledge base of observed celestial activity. In the end, it was thought that “kooks” would be sorted out through Web 2.0 participatory and corrective learning. The result has been a far greater knowledge, amassed in this participatory method, than anyone had ever dreamed possible, balanced by collective and professional procedures for sorting through the data for obviously wrong or misguided reporting.

If professional astronomers can adopt such a de-centered method for assembling information, certainly college and high school teachers can develop a pedagogical method also based on collective checking, inquisitive skepticism, and group assessment.

In a classroom governed my the community knowledge-making paradigm, students will be trained in skills rather than in knowledge. Students will have to know how to find information; they will have to know how to evaluate the reliability of that information; they will have to be able to understand the effects of bias and how to determine the bias of an information source. Then they will have to learn the skills of working in a knoweldge-making community: how to analyze and synthesize information to create knowledge; how to correct the information used my other knowledge makers and accept corrections from other knowledge makers; how to respectfully debate when there is disagreement in the community as to the reliability of information the communities analysis and synthesis. Finally, participants in the knowledge-making community will need the skills to publish their findings and conclusions in various media.

This post is an example of the very kind of learning that Mr. Norton is writing about. Net gen'ers will be manipulating pre-exisiting information to create and publish new understandings and new knowledge. In doing so, they will challenge our traditional paradigms about what it means to be a well-educated person.