Easier Said than Done

This morning's musings:
A few weeks ago, I observed a 1st year teacher and colleague of mine as a part of an alternative licensure program through a local community college. I had high hopes about how I would work with my colleague to give pertinent feedback as well as some expectations about changes I thought he should make in his classroom. Then it came time to debrief the observation - for me to deliver my powerful feedback and teaching tips.

The first roadblock was that my colleague and I could barely schedule a time to meet. We had to reschedule a number of times, and in between my observation and our meeting he actually went away to Boston for a conference and came back. When we did eventually meet, it was crammed into the last few minutes before he had to sub for a third colleague's class. Students were in and out of the room, the bell was ringing, I was thinking about the things I still needed to get done in order to teach for the day.

The second roadblock was that I choked. I spent quite a bit of time observing, taking notes, and formulating these notes into an observation form as well as a digestible set of ideas that I thought would help my colleague improve his teaching. But when I sat down, I started flipping through papers and hastily explaining why I hadn't just awarded all "exceeds" scores on the rubric. I hastily ran through my recommendations, and the debrief session ended without my colleague ever talking about what he might actually do to improve his teaching practice.

And now it's over. And now nothing will probably ever come of the time I spent observing, writing, and talking with my colleague. Refining one's teaching practice is a slow, difficult, personal process. It's not that I expected major changes after 1 observation. But I didn't expect to feel like the observation cycle was completely futile either. Maybe it wasn't.

Despite my debacle, there are a few positives that might come out of this situation. I'll do better next time - by scheduling a debrief session in advance of the observation, by carving out at least 30 minutes of time, and by inviting my colleague to reflect on what I've said rather than just listen to me talk in circles. I'm also glad for the experience because I've written before about observations and teacher evaluation as if it would be so easy to do things differently or better than they're currently being done. It's important to remind my self that that simply isn't true. Things could change, but it will require more than a minimal effort from a know-it-all teacher (me) to make that happen - even just in my 1 small school. 

Paperwork

Today was a paperwork deadline day at my school.  And I didn't make it.  I am sick and took the day off, and I just finished writing an email to my boss about how I hope it's OK if I turn in my lesson plans a day later than planned.

It got me thinking about how that would not have been OK in college and got me wondering about whether it would be OK in most other jobs.  My friends have things "due" for their jobs - presentations, reports, etc. - and I'm guessing they would never be able to turn them in as poorly done, as late, or as infrequently as teaching typically allows.  On the other hand, perhaps the types of paperwork that are "due" in other jobs are more meaningful than a lot of the paperwork that teachers end up completing.  Lesson plans are useful, but they aren't - in and of themselves - an indication that student learning is actually happening.

Do I have any good ideas for what would be better?  Perhaps some artifacts of student learning, or surveys taken by students in addition to lesson plans.When I had to do those things as part of my master's degree, I always talked about how they distracted me from my real job - getting up in front of the students and teaching.  I don't really believe that's true.  I think teachers do need to be forced to step back and look at the bigger picture of where they are going with their teaching and then, when a unit is over, how it went. 

  

Daily Wonderings on Teacher Evaluations and Data

Yesterday I attended an event to discuss current ideas about effective teaching and the recommendations for NM's future teacher evaluation system.  Here are the recommendations.  For the record, I'm OK with student SBA performance making up 50% of my teacher evaluation.  I do think, to a great extent, that although test scores aren't perfect, kids who score well on the test also tend to possess even the skills that aren't tested and that will help a student be successful later in life.

What we didn't have a chance to talk about in our discussion, and what I wonder about day-in and day-out, is the "so what?"  What if a teacher gets a bad evaluation?  The evaluations may play the useful role of identifying teachers who are more and less effective, but most schools kind of already know who's who.  Will the evaluations be the documentation that convinces the teacher herself that she needs to be developed?  That gets the ball rolling?  And then WHAT WILL THE DEVELOPMENT LOOK LIKE?  Is there any consensus out there about what types of development will actually make teachers more effective on a day-to-day basis?  Who is going to hold the teacher accountable?  Colleagues?  Principals?  How can teachers help one another become more effective?

It's not going to happen that once I realize that my value-added test scores aren't equivalent to 1 year's growth, I think "oh, I'd better start doing my best now."  I think MOST teachers are already doing what they think is best for their students.  And it's really going to take some work to make a difference in the practice of those teachers who are doing their best and still aren't making 1 year's growth.

I also wanted to remark on something that happened today at my school: one of the college engagement directors ran a report that highlighted all of the students who were failing 1 and then 2 or more classes.  And I was astounded.  Never before, despite having had electronic grade books for years now, has someone in one of my schools run an analysis of students' grades.  How simple and how silly that this is the first time something like that has come across my desk.  And I bet there are many other schools out there that have never run a similar report, or really any report that helps teachers meaningfully look at student data.

Although SBA data has been used as a reason to blame the teaching profession for the ills of the world, data in and of itself is not something to be feared.  As long as we keep in mind that students are people and not just numbers, we shouldn't be afraid of data.  It can help us see the forest from the trees in a way that day-to-day teaching just can't.

Senate Proposal Would End "Highly Qualified" Designation

Senate Proposal Would End "Highly Qualified" Designation

Hmmm.... I have mixed feelings about ending the need to be "highly qualified" in order to teach a subject.

In my previous job teaching in a rural, hard-to-staff middle school - I saw a career engineer get turned down to teach math, because he was not considered highly qualified. I could see that he isn't highly qualified to handle things like classroom management and curriculum development, but he certainly wasn't lacking in the capabilities necessary to teach middle school level math. I think situations like this do happen and I also think that, up to about 10th grade, an all-around intelligent person has the content knowledge necessary to adequately teach all subjects. Not that the person would necessarily be a good teacher, but there should be a way to prove that you are content-competent without having to go back and take college courses. After all, we don't want to deter potential great teachers from entering the profession.

On the other hand, I don't know that it's a great idea to further lower the standards that it currently takes to become a teacher. The teaching profession should seek to become MORE professional and prestigious, not less so. And part of that comes from who is allowed to walk into a classroom and be called "teacher." Not everyone is allowed to be "doctor," "lawyer," or "accountant," even if they'd like to become one. So, if we are doing away with "highly qualified," what will replace it? How will we ensure that our teachers are more highly qualified in the ways that matter to students?

Study Finds Few Links Between Teacher Characteristics, Performance

Study Finds Few Links Between Teacher Characteristics, Performance

A recent study found that certification, advanced credentials, and experience in the classroom have little or no effect on student achievement on math and reading exams. I'm definitely not surprised to find out that certification and advanced credentials have no effect. And I would think experience would only make a difference for the first few years of a teacher's career. So... what DOES affect student achievement? I know that Teach For America has lots of data about the qualities that a person displays (i.e. highly organized, evidence of perseverance, etc.) and the likelihood that a person will make significant gains (2 years growth) with their students. What else is out there? Most colleges of education and alternative licensure programs don't have the luxury of turning away people who don't possess particular qualities. Neither do most school districts - there simply aren't enough qualified applicants.

So, now that we know what doesn't affect student achievement in math and reading - what does? What that can actually be encouraged for those who are already in the teaching profession? Hours per week spent working? Charting students' proficiency on classroom objectives? Co-teaching? Having a strong school leader?

Having seen my own test scores rise about 30% or so over 5 years of teaching, what seemed to make the biggest difference for my students was 1) Just getting better at teaching... sticking with it past those first 2 years, 2) Talking and caring a lot about test scores and paying attention to what types of questions were asked on the state test each year, 3)More or less forcing students to learn skills/content that they didn't learn the first time I taught it in class (by making them come in at lunch or re-do assignments) 4)Being held accountable by high achieving colleagues, TFA staff, and graduate school professors. But those are just guesses. I really don't know what caused my test scores to improve - and I guess that's part of the problem faced by those who study education. It's easy to see whether or not someone has an advanced degree, but what does "talking and caring a lot about test scores" really mean? And would it necessarily work for every teacher who tried it?

And there's always the question - are the test scores really what we're after? Definitively not. They are an approximation of students' progress toward the real outcomes that we want - success in college, skills necessary to obtain a lucrative career, well-rounded and informed citizen. Yet, we can't let our lack of clarity of exactly what results we want and how to measure those results blind us to the achievement gap that exists in our nation.

So as not to end on a hopeless note, I'm going to cast my vote for #4. I think that we need evaluators, coaches, colleagues, principals, graduate school teachers, parents, etc. inside classrooms - pushing teachers and helping teachers (not blaming teachers) to continuously find ways to help their students achieve more.

NM Effective Teaching Task Force Recommendations

Here are the recently released NM Effective Teaching Task Force Recommendations for evaluating teachers and school leaders. I haven't had the chance to read them thoroughly yet, but they seem fairly reasonable.  The one thing I'm wondering about, though, is that teachers in un-tested (by a Standards Based Assessment) grades have 25% of their evaluation based on their school's letter grade A-F.  I guess that has the potential to get teachers to care about how their school does as a whole, but it seems more likely to de-incentivize working in traditionally low-performing schools.  I definitely think, considering how many low performing schools there are in New Mexico, that we need to create incentives for our best teachers to be working in our most difficult schools - and not the other way around.