Monday, April 28, 2008

Using the skills of a teacher in my home

Two weeks ago your faithful blogger became a mom. I hope that helps to explain the somewhat random nature of today's entry.

I prepared for becoming a mom in much the same way one prepares to become a teacher. I studied the books. I asked the experts. I took the classes. I watched other moms in action. But as with the first day teaching your first class, nothing really prepares you for your first child like the child himself.

When Leal popped into my world all the classes, mentoring, and preparation gave me confidence that I knew what was going on, but it was my skills of observation, trust of my own intuition, and ability to learn from mistakes that began this slow journey of getting to know my son.

What has surprised me most is the fact that at only 2 weeks of age he has as much to teach me as I have to teach him... such is the student/teacher relationship. We are learning each others' rhythms, patterns, and needs. At this tender and wonderful age it is amazing that his cry can be stopped once I figure out what it originates from. There is such enormous responsibility and power in my ability to do that!

Now I am wondering if this baby cry phenomenon isn't true for all children. Often our students' cries are not audible, sometimes they are just gestures, facial expressions, tiny behaviors... but if as teachers we can unlock the meaning behind these signals - can we too begin to meet their needs?

Over the years I suspected a link between parenting and teaching but I, like so many educators, had been resistant to make that connection. Shouldn't a strong line be drawn between the responsibility of the parent and that of the teacher?

That made perfect sense until two weeks ago.

Today as I think of what it will mean in a few years to entrust my perfect, beautiful, child to the classroom of a teacher who isn't me - I realize that my expectations of that future teacher are just as high as they are for myself. I don't ever want his "cries" to be misunderstood, ignored, or overlooked.

In some ways I'm glad I was a teacher before I was a parent. I think the enormity of the task before me would have been even more overwhelming knowing what I know now. Just as nothing in my life will ever be the same again now that my baby is here - my philosophy of education, my understanding of what it really means to be a teacher, and my expectations for myself as a teacher of my own child and those of others - will also never be the same.

What an awesome job we have as parents and teachers.

We nourish, we grow, we inspire.

We raise the children of today into the adults of tomorrow.

Is there any job more significant than that?

Monday, April 21, 2008

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…

As a new teacher with big ideas and no social life outside of school, I spent much of my first years planning elaborate lessons and exciting projects. Many of them bombed due to my lack of experience with classroom management and my failure to recognize that what I deemed engaging wasn’t always what my students found interesting. But I did develop a pretty killer unit on Romeo and Juliet.

I had a mentor teacher for my first two years of teaching and she was assigned to me by the district through a program designed to halt declining teacher retention rates. She was a veteran teacher with about 25 years of experience. When you stepped into her room it was easy to imagine that she was a creative teacher. There were bright floral displays everywhere, student projects hung on the walls, and colorful cabinets and bins made everything look quite orderly. On closer inspection one noticed that most of the projects were a few decades old, and the bins contained stacks and stacks of worksheets that were all copied a year in advance. So, while my mentor might have been an Inspired Teacher in her past, she’d slacked a bit over the years.

The same year she became my mentor her straight run teaching the same special education English class over and over again was disrupted. Because so many kids had failed the Freshman English exam the previous year, the 9th grade English classes were huge and they gave her one to teach. I was teaching all freshmen that semester so it seemed like a great opportunity for me to learn from my mentor.

She took her mentoring seriously. She left me happy notes at least once a week. But when it came to learning about how to teach she was remarkably silent.

She was required by the district to observe my class once a month and she always had the nicest things to say after her visit. A cheery note would always greet me following an observation saying something like “Keep up the good work kiddo!” It seemed strange that for all the notes she took, I usually only got one line of “feedback.”

When it was time to teach Romeo and Juliet I noticed that my mentor was observing me more than once a month. She spent a lot of time in my classroom and asked a lot of questions about the unit. About a month later it was announced at a faculty meeting that she was chosen to present a workshop on teaching Romeo and Juliet at a statewide English conference. When she gave an overview of the presentation to our staff the material was strangely familiar and completely un-attributed…

My real mentor, my mother, offered her usual response to my outburst on the phone that night. As the oldest child of 3, she has used this phrase many times: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

I think that’s really only true if your imitator admits what he or she is doing. But my experience with my mentor taught me that all teachers can learn from one another regardless of their level of experience.

While her support didn’t improve my practice it did help me feel loved in a very lonely and challenging phase of my life. And for her, I hope teaching Romeo and Juliet my way turned her on to a different kind of instruction and rejuvenated her enthusiasm about being in the classroom.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

How can we better assess what students know?

At Inspired Teaching we believe standardized tests alone are not a sufficient measure of what students know, are capable of doing, and still need to learn.

These are a few of the reasons why:
  • These one-day "snapshots" of student knowledge do not take into account the child who suffers from test anxiety, went to school without breakfast, or didn't get any sleep last night.
  • They are not catered to the particular learning styles of individual children and therefore do not allow every child to perform at his or her best.
  • Because of their standardized format they do not include opportunities for students to demonstrate higher-order problem-solving skills.
  • Most of these tests do not address the needs of English language learners.
But don't we need to measure student achievement so we know how to help students improve?

Certainly.

We just need to use a broader approach to make this happen. There many assessment tools out there that paint a more complete picture of student learning than a standardized test can alone.

These are just a few approaches to “authentic assessment” that our Inspired Teachers use:

Performance Tasks
Example: Students have been studying global warming for a unit in science and they are asked to create a presentation for the Environmental Protection Agency responding to the following prompt: What are 5 things people in the DC metro area can do to solve global warming? Include documentation and evidence to support the proposed solution.

In the classroom, performance tasks like this one ask students to craft individual responses to questions and/or create products that demonstrate their understanding of a concept. The final product in a performance task should demonstrate that students are applying what they have learned in class to analyze a particular problem. It is essential when teachers use performance tasks that their expectations are very clear and that students have a full understanding of how their final products will be evaluated.

Another example of a performance task that is familiar to all of us is the road test you take to get your driver’s license. Your mastery of the concept is evaluated based on how well you actually drive the car.

Portfolios
Example: With the support of an advisor or teacher, once a year high school students compile a portfolio of their best work from the school year to demonstrate mastery of a core set of academic standards and skills. Students create written reflections for each piece in the portfolio explaining the strengths and weaknesses of individual “learning artifacts.” They present their portfolios to a panel comprised of teachers, parents or guardians, and peers as part of a comprehensive assessment of their readiness to progress to the next grade level.

Portfolios, like the ones described above, can contain just about anything from rough drafts and final copies of written work, to videotapes of student performances, to teacher recommendations, graded project rubrics, and reviews. The process for creating this type of assessment varies, but it is recommended that students play an active role in determining what the portfolio contains.

An artist’s portfolio is usually a well-presented collection of her finest work. Gallery owners, show jurors, and potential buyers assess her skills based on what they see in this portfolio. A student portfolio serves the same function. Usually compiled over the course of a year or several years – student portfolios offer concrete evidence of student performance, growth, and progress.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Let’s teach them to make Molotov Cocktails!... or not.

In the summer of 2004 I taught in a program called the Civic Leadership Institute run through Northwestern University. The goal of the program was to take extremely bright high school students away for 3 weeks, plant them in the poorest parts of cities (Chicago and Baltimore), give them service projects to do each day and courses to take on civic leadership each evening, and by the end of the program they’d leave with a passion for changing the world.

The summer of 2004 was an interesting time to be teaching in this program. I spent those weeks with amazing kids and incredibly passionate teachers. The teaching staff was disproportionately liberal (in fact I’m not sure there was a Republican among us.) And with the election months away we spent many of our lesson-planning hours debating the future of our country. The war in Iraq was going badly, and we were spending every day with our kids experiencing the reality of extreme problems in our own country that were going relatively unnoticed.

Part of the Baltimore program included a trip to Washington, DC and my colleagues thought it would be a good experience for the students to arrange a protest outside the White House. I don’t remember what exactly happened politically the day before we were scheduled to go but some bit of news had really riled up a few of the teachers and when I stumbled upon them in the lounge they were talking about teaching their students to make Molotov Cocktails. They were joking of course about this element of the experience, but an organized protest was still very much in the planning stages. Several of them had been part of the war protests in Chicago the previous year and had spent time behind bars for their participation. They were heroes in my eyes, real activists who had put their beliefs on the line in a way I never had.

In almost every way the opportunity to turn our kids onto social activism was incredibly exciting, but I knew there was something wrong with this protest plan. The kids would have jumped on board in a heartbeat. They would even have loved the thrill of getting carted off and fingerprinted for their role in a protest. But I knew they would have been doing it for all the wrong reasons.

In a summer program, away from their parents, their preachers, and their communities, my kids were searching for sage adult advice to help them put the poverty, neglect, and inequity they were experiencing in perspective. Tempting though it was to provide my own perspective when solicited, I was conscious that these students’ parents, preachers, and communities had entrusted me with their safe-keeping, not their indoctrination into my own belief system.

I talked this over with my colleagues and after passions had cooled a bit they all agreed. Even though I knew we’d made the right decision, I went to bed that night feeling like I’d disappointed myself.

Had I just killed an experience that would have led these young people to become the greatest political leaders of our future?

Had I pro-actively diffused an important spark of passion for social justice?

But then I remembered the huge political movements of the past and the way that those with the power of experience and knowledge can easily persuade those without to believe in agendas that lead to both good and terribly bad outcomes. That summer it was my role as a teacher to provide my students with the space to develop their own beliefs based on their own experiences and knowledge.

Years later I know that many of those students went on to be leaders on their college campuses. They ran service learning spring break trips, majored in political science and sociology, led student activism groups, and joined political campaigns.

They will be future leaders, but I like to believe they will do this because it is a path they have chosen, not one we as teachers forced them to follow.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Even Superheroes Need to Sleep

I’ve never met a teacher who signed up for the job because he or she wanted to be mediocre in the classroom. Everyone comes to that position from a slightly different place but when you ask teachers why they chose to teach, you tend to get some variation on one theme: to make a difference in the lives of young people.

That’s a pretty lofty career aspiration if you think about it. It’s right up there with a doctor’s wish to make people well, and a fireman’s wish to keep people safe. So it’s not really surprising that many find teaching to be a stressful job. When you wake up every morning determined to make a difference in the lives of children, all the obstacles of the day that try to divert you from that goal can get a bit overwhelming.

Even if you don’t visibly let yourself sink beneath the pressure, your body may be the first to let you know it’s feeling the stress. I remember one very stressful spring when everyone in the building seemed to want me to do something and I was trying desperately to sprout new arms and heads to accomplish everything on the list. My colleagues frequently remarked that I was shockingly calm and relaxed considering all that was going on. I told them I was feeling fine.

But then my eye started twitching.

It was the kind of twitch your eye does occasionally, just a simple muscle spasm, except that it happened almost constantly, all day, for a week. I ignored it. The feeling was unusual but not painful or particularly unpleasant and I had stacks of papers to grade, a student leadership conference to plan, the prom to oversee, and the tests to prepare for. I thought everything was going fine.

Then I talked to my mom on the phone. “You’re stressed out and overly tired,” she said. I rejected this observation and asked her how she could tell. “You’re talking really fast and I can hear the tiredness in your voice, trust me. You need to get some sleep.” My mom has been a teacher for fifteen years, and she knows me very well, so hiding teacher-stress from her was not going to work.

“But I have so much to do! I have enough work to pull an all-nighter and then some,” I whined into the phone. That’s when she gave me advice I’ve held onto ever since. “You’re going to be less productive trying to work when you’re tired than you’ll be with a good night’s sleep. All that work will still be there tomorrow and its completion is not life or death. Put some of those papers you’re grading in the circular file cabinet – no one will miss them. You have to take care of yourself before you can take care of your kids.”

She was right. A good night’s sleep cured my twitching eye, and the kids never even asked about those papers.

When you’re trying to “make a difference in the lives of young people,” it’s easy to convince yourself that you don’t need to spend time making a difference in your own life. But if you don’t, progress towards your ultimate goal will meet the limitations of your own body and mind.

After all, even superheroes need to sleep.