Schools of Thought

I don't understand why first-year teachers are creating lesson plans from scratch. No, check that, let's get more declarative: First-year teachers should not be creating lesson plans from scratch.

The objectives which students need to learn are not brand new. Lesson plans exist from previous years -- tested, premade lesson plans from veteran teachers. It is insanity that we eschew best practices. No other industry operates in this way. Not a single one. It would be like each car company coming up with their own way to build cars.

Now, not every teacher should be teaching carbon-copy lesson plans. They need to be adapted and tweaked and honed to fit each teacher's personal style and the particular needs of his or her class. Not every car company uses the exact same building system -- but they're all based off the assembly line. Nor is there One Lesson Plan To Rule Them All -- clearly, there are any number of ways to effectively teach an objective. So, make all the options available!

I should not be drawing up how to teach multiplication on a blank piece of paper, for example. Teachers have been teaching multiplication for decades upon decades, some of them quite well. Surely, I can be handed a template for teaching multiplication that is battle-tested, instead of my ad hoc, I-hope-this-works system. It's not that I'm adverse to the work, it's that I'm going to be, on average, far less effective at doing the work. That doesn't help the students learn multiplication, or anything else.

I do understand why the system is so incredibly decentralized. Traditionally, schools have been the exclusive baliwick of localities, perhaps more than any other institution. And the classroom has reflected this independence, with the teacher as king or queen of his or her fiefdom as soon as the door closes.

Problem is, that doesn't make any sense. We've already started to acknowledge that fact, with renewed emphasis on common standards and common assessments. Still, lesson planning autonomy is a far deeper-set trouble spot.

Why should I be allowed to teach an inferior lesson when superior ones exist? Not just superior because one person thinks so, but superior as in, they've been used and produced quantifiable results. In addition, it places an additional burden on already overwhelmed new teachers (yet another contributory factor to the abysmal teacher retention rates).

The solution to this is fairly obvious -- online databanks of digitized lesson plans, free and accessible to anyone who wants them. The technology exists to make it perfectly viable; systems that via rating will end up distinguishing those lesson plans that truly work. The ability to actually identify better practices among the sea of plans is crucial. Some lesson plan sites already do exist (http://www.lessonplanspage.com), but they are relatively crude, don't have effectiveness ratings, and are, judging by what I see and hear, underutilized.

Alternatively, recruit a small group of top educators -- 10 or 15 from each grade/secondary subject -- and cull their lessons and start from there.

Additionally, at a local level, districts and schools can engage in lesson plan sharing systems without the logistical hassle. A colleague of mine thinks the only way it will ever happen is with the faculty of a school taking the initiative after deciding they want to help incoming teachers.

There are plenty of options. In any case, predone lessons shouldn't be things that have to be sought out, they should be something readily provided and their use insisted upon.

With 4 million teachers in the American education system, the collective intelligence, creativity and effectiveness could be unparalleled. But we don't reach out to one another in the most basic of functions -- delivering lessons -- and as a result all teachers and all students suffer. Let me say it one more time: There is no reason that I, as a first-year teacher, should ever be creating lesson plans from scratch.

Yet I create nearly every lesson plan from scratch.

What sense does that make?

As you all may have noticed, I haven't been posting here lately. Simply put, I don't have much to say at the moment. I'm immersing myself in reading TFA pre-summer-institute materials and giving myself a crash course in Spanish, so the concrete immedeacy of teaching has superceded policy. And, if I don't feel that I have anything interesting to say, I'm not going to waste your time. So I'm going to take the rest of April off from blogging so I can concentrate on the preparatory tasks at hand, and I'll resume come May 1. Try not to miss me too much!

So while my students were constructing their colonial houses primarily out of popsicle sticks, I learned something:

Jorge's one heck of an engineer. The kid had built his walls with support beam sticks and everything (with no instruction to do so). It was actually a sturdy structure. Best in the class. I probably couldn't have built one better myself.

And that's the tradegy of it all -- that Jorge has talents, but if he never learns to read or write well, his opportunities in life will ultimately be limited. I can see him being pegged as just the type of kid to be shunted into vocational ed., but I've got a problem with that. Jorge, all of 10, or all of 15, shouldn't have his opportunities carved away because the system has, in whatever fashion, failed to get him to where he needs to be, or at least to give him the chance to get there himself. Sure, he (and i'm generalizing the case out now) could probably make a fine auto mechanic or contractor, but what about the opportunity to become an architect? A design engineer? Those are things that take advanced training -- in most cases, college.

I'm not saying, and I've never said, that every kid needs to go to college. Only that every kid needs to have the opportunity to go to college. And I look at Jorge, poor writer, poor reader, bright child, budding engineer, and I think: Here is hope and despair, all within the body of a child four and a half feet tall.

I know now how I'm going to become rich. I'm going to take two pieces of my students' work, frame them, and put them in an art gallery somewhere under the exhibit titled "The Achievement Gap." They might be two pieces like the ones penned today by a 5th grader we'll call Jorge and a 3rd grader we'll call Michelle. The writing prompt was "The most exciting thing I did this weekend was..."

Jorge responds:

"The most exciting thing I did this weekend was... selpt at 5.30 a.m. I met a ghetto mexican named pepito. i also had a party in the pool. That is what i did."

(by the by, being asked by an 10-year-old, "Mr. H, how do you spell 'ghetto'?" is one of the stranger experiences in life)

Michelle, two years Jorge's younger, answers with five pages of clear prose providing with stunningly few errors an almost absurdly detailed account of every hour of her weekend.

We often talk about the achievement gap in terms of numbers or statistics, but it's real, and it's kids in our classrooms. If you ever need a sense of purpose, just visit one for an hour. You'll come away a zealot.

The state of public education can perhaps be best summarized by an 8-year-old we'll call Ashley, a third grader in my morning class who piped up sweetly during a presentation by an American Indian:

"Do you know Pocahontas?"

P.S. I've been too tired to write lately, but I'll try to get a long summary of my week down sometime soon.

So I started teaching my Intersession course today. Intersession is the three-week breaks that year-round schools get in leiu of one long summer vacation, and many kids attend two-week courses taught mostly by outside individuals. I'm doing a course on early colonization, the bulk of which is a simulation in which the kids pretend to be colonists and govern their colony. I have a morning class of ten 3rd and four 4th graders and an afternoon class of four 4th graders, ten 5th graders and four 6th graders.

The morning went great. The afternoon, not so much.

Part of the issue is that not all the 5th and 6th graders signed up for my class (some got put in because another class got cancelled), so they weren't really all that interested to begin with; also, I think the older kids i think have slightly less of an easy imagination, and they realize that they're pretty much being forced to do school during their break, so they're generally resistant to the idea of working hard.

I've got some strategies in mind for addressing the problem, and tomorrow's going to get a lot more interactive and up-and-moving, so I expect improvement in behavior, but I'd like to share this little anecdote:

The class was slightly out of control, just a lot of talking out of turn and talking over other people. Now, I have a laid-back style that definitely isn't authoritarian, so my first instinct is to try to request and reason rather than raise my voice. At some point, one of the 6th graders turns to me and says:

"Mr. H, you gotta be strict! Like Rosa Parks!"

Yes, in fact, the kids were asking me to yell at them. Explicitly. I'd never experienced anything like it. What a bizarre psychology! I understand that they were testing me and seeing how far I'd go, but they had managed to set up a scenario in which if I did raise my voice to regain control, they were in essence getting what they wanted. It was a surreal moment (I did, for the record, have to finally raise my voice and give a stern threat, which did quiet them for a while).

I hate the idea that I have to raise my voice to maintain control of the class; I definitely don't yet have the instincts and anticipation to walk the line between structure and independence. But, hey, that's why I chose to gain this experience before I hit the real classroom full-time.

Teaching -- it's always an adventure.

The big news coming out of Florida is that the Sunshine State is about to become the first the institutionalize a state-wide performance pay program. As reported in the Washington Post:

HIALEAH, Fla. -- A new pay-for-performance program for Florida's teachers will tie raises and bonuses directly to pupils' standardized-test scores beginning next year, marking the first time a state has so closely linked the wages of individual school personnel to their students' exam results.

The effort, now being adopted by local districts, is viewed as a landmark in the movement to restructure American schools by having them face the same kind of competitive pressures placed on private enterprise, and advocates say it could serve as a national model to replace traditional teacher pay plans that award raises based largely on academic degrees and years of experience.

I'm not viscerally opposed to performance pay for teachers, but I'm incredibly wary -- not because I fear the concept, but because I fear the consequence. It's simple psychology that when there's a monetary incentive, people are going to be far more motivated to do what's necessary to achieve that incentive. That's the idea, presumably; teachers will strive harder to teach their students better and have them learn more.

Except that's not quite what this pay-for-performance economic system encourages. Rather, there's a subtle but serious difference -- it motivates teachers to strive harder to get their students to have higher test scores. Those are far, far, far from being the same thing. Current standardized, mostly multiple-choice tests are usually, as I hope I've reiterated enough times over the past year, low-level assessments which don't require higher-order thinking skills (Thomas Toch makes this case succinctly in this report). Florida's FCAT is particularly ridiculous (also here and here), but when 15 states have completely MC tests, we're not talking about rigor across the board.

If the tests are not lined up to assess what we want our kids to be learning -- for one monumental thing, critical thinking skills -- then tying pay to performance on those exams is pure folly. There's already too much pressure on teachers to focus purely on the low-level skills in preparation for high-stakes exams (not that such focus does much good, ironically), but now the proposition is to de facto make those low-level skills the singular goal of teachers.

If there was a legitimate method for assessing teachers -- whether via an authentic assessment which requires the full slate of skills we want our students to have, or some other avenue -- then performance-linked pay would make a lot more sense. That's what I mean when I say that I'm not conceptually opposed to the idea. But right now, given the states' relatively primitive data systems and absurdly inadaquate assessments, it seems like an idea who's time has only begun to glimmer on the horizon. Chasing after its mirage is only going to land us with a mouthful of sand.