Author: Mr. Chase

Things I Know 227 of 365: You can’t sell accountability, we already own it

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

– Jacques Barzun

In 2006, then-chancellor of NYC schools Joel Klein delivered some remarks tot he Academy of Management in Atlanta, GA outlining the changes Klein and Mayor Bloomberg set in motion in New York.

Klein claimed the aim of the changes was to accomplish “three fundamental cultural shifts”:

  1. To move from a culture of excuses to a culture of accountability.
  2. To move from a culture of compliance to a culture of performance.
  3. To move from a culture of uniformity to a culture of differentiation.

Ignoring for a moment the semantic argument to be made that compliance and performance are not mutually exclusive ideas, I’m interested in Klein’s case that he was moving to true accountability through his policies.

“These principals,” Klein said in reference to the principals who signed documents against their union’s advice, “accepted the challenge and signed performance agreements, explicitly taking responsibility for student performance outcomes.”

The agreement “also specifically spells out the ways we will leave them alone to do their work.”

Klein went on to say the principals had put their “tails on the line” with the agreements, committing to their accountability to student learning.

They bought in to Klein’s accountability measures and they’d signed contracts to that effect in the same way they would have agreed to a car loan or mortgage.

And in the same way as either of those examples, the principals didn’t really own what they’d signed on for.

It was closer than most efforts had likely come to giving principals ownership of their schools, but it wasn’t the same thing.

When Klein stepped down in late 2010, I wonder how many of the principals pulled their contracts out of their filing cabinets to see if they were still accountable for their students’ learning.

My guess would be none.

My guess would be that the principals who signed on to Klein’s initiatives held themselves just as accountable for learning in their schools as they did before Klein took over the chancellorship.

They already owned that responsibility. They showed up everyday to live it and it probably consumed their thoughts before they drifted off to sleep at night.

What Klein was selling wasn’t acceptability for learning. You can’t sell someone what they already own.

He was attempting to sell principals on changing the way schools, principals and teachers go about helping students learn.

That’s an impossible sell.

To make it work, to get Klein’s initiatives off the ground, they couldn’t be his.

The only way to move, to make change, is to share the ownership, not sell it.

Things I Know 226 of 365: The way we talk about teachers matters

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

Michael Gersen had a Thursday Washington Post piece dealing with the current Rick Perry/Michele Bachmann imbroglio around Bachmann’s erroneous assertions about the HPV vaccine.

Given the amount of reading from classes that’s filling my brain these days, I’m surprised the column made its way to my browser.

It wasn’t even about education.

Except it was a bit.

In his lede, Gersen mocks Bachmann’s medical and personal health expertise, writing he’d rather hear from “a blunt, part-time football coach — or whomever they draft into teaching health classes nowadays.”

I wish he hadn’t done that.

As a comedian, I wish Gersen hadn’t gone for the easy joke.

As a teacher, I wish Gersen thought about the negative unintended consequences for his direct or indirect audiences when arguing  Bachmann’s rhetoric could have negative unintended consequences for her direct or indirect audiences.

Sure, the current national tenor in talking about teachers hasn’t exactly raised the bar of respect for those in the classroom.

The effects of words like Gersen’s can ripple in several directions. but two possible ripples (I’ll call them the ripples of greatest velocity) concern me the most.

In the first place, one liners or quips of the sort common from anyone looking to rough teachers up for their lunch money work to lower public expectations of teachers. In this instance, it was those people who choose to coach children or teach them the habits and mindsets of healthy citizens whose worth by perception was chipped away.

In a quick move, Gersen added his voice to those allotting permission and acceptance to the idea that any idiot can teach and those who do are the ones we trot out when we want to exemplify people we expect to know the least.

I have a rather low tolerance for ignorance, and some of the most thoughtful, intelligent people with whom I surround myself are teachers.

I doubt I’m alone in that.

Still, any time we orchestrate jokes featuring teachers as their butts, we work at cross purposes with making certain each teacher in the classroom is the best person we can get. Few people will be drawn to the job from which the public expects little. Few of the right people anyway.

If we are to stand behind the research showing an effective teacher as the most impactful factor in a student’s education, perhaps we should start treating teachers with the respect proportional to that impact.

The second ripple of Gersen’s remark, and those of the same ilk, that gives cause for concern is the erosion of good faith of the teachers doing the work Gersen implies is both simple and easy.

I’ve stood before an assembled class of high school students and facilitated discussions of sexual content in the texts we were examining. That alone was a mine field of possible pedagogical missteps requiring constant awareness and dedication.

I can only imagine the awkwardness, resistance, frustration and discomfort inherent in engaging a room of adolescents in a frank discussion of their sexual health.

Put to health teachers next to one another and I want the one who’s been repeatedly made aware we expect the highest standards of care and knowledge as she works to prepare the students in her charge for the increasingly complex interpersonal world they’ll come to know. Give me that any day over the teacher who reads continual negations of the importance of her knowledge and professionalism. The teacher who has come to realize America’s not expecting much from her as a practitioner and caregiver.

The thing that happens to the latter teacher – the we should all worry about as the ripple effects of remarks like Gersen’s – isn’t that the teacher will leave the profession.

No, we should worry that she’ll listen and realize we’re not expecting much.

Then, it’s no long walk to not expecting much from herself.

Things I Know 225 of 365: Oprah taught me

You get a car.

– Oprah Winfrey

New standards, new students, new schools, but no Oprah.

For the first time since I was in kindergarten, students starting their educational trek through began their school year in a post-Oprah world.

To most, it’s likely a subtle shift. I hadn’t even thought of it until today in class when we were learning about Lawrence Cremin’s concept of the “ecology of education.”

The interaction between educational institutions featured heavily in Cremin’s ecology. As Prof. Lawrence-Lightfoot pointed out, this included any number of institutions. We were, after all, talking education, not just school.

Several examples of these institutional interactions were offered, but it was the Prof. Lawrence-Lightfoot’s calling out of talk shows as redefining our conception of “how we think about talk, public/private boundaries and intimacy vs. voyeurism” that set me reeling.

Though not the everyday fixture in our house that she was in some of my friends’ homes, Oprah had a place in our family. She belonged. In fact, she was the only African American adult with whom I had consistent interaction until I got to college.

Though I remember the highlights of the Christmas shows or the celebrity exclusives or those damned book selections, something more subtle was taking place each time an episode was airing.

While I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because my mom didn’t appreciate the message, Oprah was acceptable.

Some piece of that daily hour of television was worth inviting into our home, though we never spoke of or attempted to agree on its value. Its presence vouched for its value.

And, as Cremin would likely agree, that shifted my education. It altered my understanding of what it meant to talk and the possible public discussion of taboo.

I hadn’t considered it until today, and I haven’t a clue as to the depth, but I know she’s embedded in my thinking the same way Mr. Rogers’s airing of the film on how crayons were made created the first inkling that the things I played with and counted as wholes within my world had once been disparate pieces.

Millions of students began school this year in a post-Oprah world. Though no new episodes will be blaring as they come home to work on or blow off their homework or enjoy their after-school snacks, I wonder at how ever-so-slightly, perhaps imperceptibly, their classrooms, their interactions and their learning will be shifted by the echoes of Oprah.

Things I Know 224 of 365: Ownership matters

And I would argue the second greatest force in the universe is ownership.

– Chris Chocola

“He needs to get buy-in,” someone in class said today as we discussed a case study of a school where those in charge were failing to get all teachers swimming in the same pedagogical direction.

From there, the room was flooded with off-hand mentions of “buy-in.”

Some agreed, some advocated the opposite of buy-in and argued the use of administrative power instead.

I sat thinking for a while.

By the time I raised my hand, class was running short on time and many other voices needed heeding.

What I wanted to say was this:

If buy-in is your goal, if it is what you are shooting for as you advocate change, you are working toward something less shimmering, less amazing than what you imagine when you put your dreams to bed.

What I wanted to reference, as my access was sleeping in my bag, was the idea of ownership vs. buy-in.

I’m not certain when, but a few years ago, I started noticing buy-in as a main descriptor in conversations around project formation. Whether it was planning professional development or building units of study for students, people were worrying about buy-in.

“I like this project. I’m just worried about how I can create buy-in with my kids.”

“This is a great approach, and I’d love to take it to my faculty, I’m just not sure how I can get buy-in with my teachers.”

It came up so often that it started to permeate my thinking.

“A bunch of people are talking about ‘buy-in,’” my brain kept saying.

Enter ownership.

I honestly can’t remember who it was, that pointed out to me a distinction that has doused my thinking in intellectual kerosine ever since.

When making change, when starting the new, when shifting thinking; it is ownership toward which we should work, not buy-in.

Henri Lipmanowitz, former chairman of Merck International and board president of the Plexus Institute, draws a line between “buy-in” and “ownership.”

“Your implementation will inevitably be a pale imitation of what it could have been had you been an ‘owner’ instead of a ‘buyer-in’…” Lipmanowitz writes.

I have trouble disagreeing.

When thinking about larger educational policy or thinking about the workings of my classroom, ownership means more than buy-in.

If the system is working, we work toward ownership.

If ownership is established, I do not need to become a salesman.

If ownership is established, I do not need to worry about customer relations down the road.

If ownership is established, I am not in an idea alone.

If ownership is established, it will take more time.

For the latter, Lipmanowitz has a counter argument. To those who argue the involvement of all players at the inception will take time, he responds, “People that are affected will inevitably be involved.”

The difficulty for the classroom and for the shaping of policy or systemic norms is the paradigmatic norm of time allotment as incremental.

I’ll design the unit.

I’ll take time to show it to my peers.

I’ll explain it to the students.

I’ll teach it.

They’ll have questions.

I’ll answer them.

We’ll struggle as they work to buy my vision.

We’ll get to the learning…

Lipmanowitz’s believe (and mine) is based around the assumption that spending the chronological capital at the outset to insure ownership will smooth the road later on.

“In complex situations,” writes Lipmanowitz of the concept of ownership, “it is the only one that is likely to generate superior results. It requires giving people space and time for self-discovery.”

That’s tough.

That’s worth it.

Things I Know 223 of 365: Everybody has an agenda

Education isn’t part of my agenda. It is my agenda.

– Kenny Guinn

In 1980, Hugh Mehan published a study of children participating in “circle time” in their classroom. Throughout the study, Mehan placed a wireless microphone on the back of students for one hour each morning to document their interactions.

Up to that point, Mehan wrote, classroom community had been studied from the teacher’s perspective. He wanted to se what was going on with everyone else.

Students like teacher, have objectives that they would like to meet during the course of a given classroom event, a school day, a school year. And like teachers, students employ others and their surroundings as contexts for achieving these objectives. The simultaneous presence of students’ and teachers’ agendas suggests that the classroom be viewed as a social activity in which teachers and students mutually influence each other and collaboratively assemble its social order.

In his published findings, Mehan reported interactions between a triad of girls who were talking to one another during circle time while the teacher was attempting to divvy up classroom jobs.

It all happened simultaneously.

Hair combing, securing snacks, discussing play dynamics, they all happened at the same time.

Mehan writes, “All this indicates an ability to monitor and participate in several activities simultaneously, a skill that cognitive scientists have called ‘parallel processing.’”

By teachers in any ordinary classroom, the actions of Carolyn, Leola and Ysidro would be taken as insubordinate. Not telling-the-teacher-off insubordinate, but certainly working-against-the-teacher’s-agenda insubordinate.

They don’t have to be.

Mehan’s point, and the deeper implication of the study is when teachers see “off-task” behavior, it doesn’t necessarily mean the students are off-task. They are on the tasks they deem important. And Mehan claims also on-task with the items on the teacher’s agenda.

This isn’t an argument that children should be allowed to do whatever they want or that their agendas should trump any agenda set forth by the teacher. There’s literature about that, sure, but this isn’t about that.

Instead, it’s about realizing everyone in the classroom has an agenda, and to each individual that agenda is personal and important.

Mehan writes the study’s findings shed light on the fact “that participants to interaction, including socializing interaction, mutually influence each other.”

Yes.

And.

The study serves as a reminder that teachers face the task (perhaps their first agenda item) of persuading each student in a class that the teacher’s agenda is worthy of student attention and perhaps even adoption.

It’s a tough sell all around.

Citation:

Hugh Mehan, “The Competent Student,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 11 (1980), 131-152.

Things I Know 222 of 365: I want to build stuff

Teachers would have to be knowledgeable about experience, academic knowledge, and learning, knowing these territories as well as mountain guides knew theirs.

– David K. Cohen

I haven’t built anything in a while.

My friend Vanessa is in the Technology in Education program here. Each of her classes is shaped around a semester-long project in which she and her classmates work together to complete a project in which they build an education object for use or consumption in the bigger world.

My semester is shaping up to be consumptive.

I’ve read a couple hundred pages of scholarly work in the last few weeks and written a few briefs analyzing and reacting to what I’ve read. My brain is exploding with ideas, questions and intense moments of “Oo, I want to try that right now!” As I said in my last post, it’s pushed me to put all this thinking down on the record for when I’m able to put it into practice – a sort of daily diary or my reading diet.

Vanessa’s is shaping up to be iterative.

She’s pitched projects, formed groups and started building wireframes of the project she’s heading up. She’s working on leveraging funding for the pieces of the project that exist outside her wheelhouse and finding a home for it in the wide world when all’s said and done.

I just finished reading “Teaching Practice: Plus Que Ca Change…” by David Cohen from Contributing to Educational Change: Perspectives on Research and Practice. Cohen examines Deweyian educational reforms and why they appear to have stalled or gone sour since the 1950s. In his analysis, Cohen writes, “…teachers must take on a large agenda: helping students abandon the safety of rote learning, instruct them in framing and teasing hypotheses, and build a climate of tolerance for others’ ideas and a curiosity about unusual answers, among other things.”

Various pieces of Cohen’s list of necessities for “adventurous teaching” are in place, but I wonder where the building and teasing of hypotheses will come in.

Vanessa’s cohort is building real things. They’ll be creating, failing, taking apart and re-building all semester.

I’m curious as to how much of that I’ll be doing outside of the sterile protection of case studies.
Ideally we’d be building the institutions we all had in mind when we applied in the same way a student would learn math and design by building structures with authentic purposes.

At heart, I realize the difference between Vanessa’s program and my own. If any of the groups in her classes fails, it is to the detriment of their portfolios. If those in my cohort were to fail at any type of authentic adventurous learning, the impact would extend beyond our own personal failures.

Still, we got in the door. And, for almost a decade, I’ve been trusted to experiment and iterate responsibly with my classroom as a playground without harming the students in my charge.

Let us build schools or systems of professional development. Start by letting us ask the questions that lead to the problems. Then, guide us in forming both the structures and understandings surrounding the solutions of those problems.

Some of this comes from the stagnation I feel in not creating unit plans or working to help run a school this semester.

All of it helps me to understand how it feels for students of any level when we ask them to put down what is real in their world’s and trust us when we promise that what we ask them to do will be important in the future.

Things I Know 221 of 365: My brain’s all stormy

He only earns his freedom and his life Who takes them every day by storm.
– JoHann Wolfgang von Goethe

Up until about four weeks ago, I was keeping a sticky note on my laptop with a running list of post topics I wanted to tackle in this yearlong endeavor to document what I know as I know it now.
About two weeks ago, that list started another life in Evernote as I attempted to design a workflow that would sync across my devices.
A few stray thoughts started piling up in the journal I’ve been keeping for the last few years. Crossing a few pages, they’re tangential verbal doodles on this or that topic about which I’d like to firm up my thinking in some sort of public space.
Early last week, I found myself making a bulleted list of four ideas for TIK on a paper towel in a friend’s kitchen.
Yesterday, I wrote an idea on the back of a receipt.
Today, across three chapters or journal articles I’m reading for classes, I’ve jotted down half a dozen post ideas.
This is all to say, my brain is stormy.
It’s frustrating and wonderful.
A few minutes ago, one of my SLA students who’s now in her freshman year of college asked me if it was weird to be a student instead of a teacher.
I told her not really.
Over the last eight years in the classroom, I worked hard to maintain a reflective practice and to build a habit of learning and information grazing that would continue to push me to think about what it was I thought about teaching and learning and how they relate to education.
This space, this next nine months of my life are going to be a whole other kind of heffalump.
What was a piece of my day sandwiched between unit design and grading has become that which consumes my day.
I am a consumer of information on a scale at which life would not allow over the last few years. There wasn’t space in either my brain or my day to eat as many ideas as I have over the last 48 hours.
While I love it, I’m also realizing the requirements of shift this new new environ of intellect brings about.
As the head of a classroom, the ideas with which I was playing spread out over days or weeks. Expounding on project design for my students meant I was able to speak to it over the entirety of the process. “Here’s my idea,” I could say and follow it up with, “here’s the plan,” then, “here’s how it’s going,” and finally, “here’s what happened and what I would do differently.”
For all of the demands inside and outside of the classroom, I was able to ruminate on ideas to a different extent.
Starting now, I need to switch gears.
The ideas are coming at me at light speed now. If I’m not diligent at marking them and my thoughts on them down as they arise, I’ll miss them.
Not yet in this archiving of my mental stance on ideas has it been so key to keep track of what I know (or what I think I know).
Time to cull the paper towels, receipts, Evernotes, journal entries and the like. I’m sitting at the onset of a perfect storm. It would be a shame not to get pictures for later.

Things I Know 220 of 365: There’s history here

20110906-105626.jpg

My first trip to Philadelphia to interview at SLA, I arrived a day before the interview. I wanted to walk around a bit and get to know the city that might be my home.
Walking around without yet having my bearings, I turned a corner and there was Independence Hall. Right there.
My first inclination was to turn to the strangers walking down the street next to me and shout, “Do you know what that is? Do you know what happened there? And they just left it out in the open for everyone to see. That building is where we took some of our first steps to being what we are!”
A moment’s glance revealed that these folks were more concerned with their current conversation (which I assumed to be ahistorical) than they were with recognizing the past Winthrop which their presents were being presented.
I get that same feeling, still, when I visit home in Springfield and am confronted with all things Lincoln.
However imperfect, these places hold my attention as fixed moments in time when the impossible was made possible.
I hadn’t had such a moment hear in Cambridge.
Even sitting in Harvard Yard last week, watching tours of prospective students on tiptoe rubbing the boots of John Harvard’s statue, it didn’t occur to me.
I was in the middle of moving and course shopping and figuring out where to eat.
My present was cluttered.
This morning, it is dark, cloudy and drizzling in Cambridge.
The high temperature is not expected to head north of 65 degrees.
I decided to walk to campus. The walk is almost exactly the same distance I walked each day from my house to SLA.
As I rounded Memorial Hall, among the throngs of other students making their ways to class, the bell of Memorial Church sounded the hour.
I stopped.
I stopped to be in and of a moment.
No matter the work being done here now, no matter the imperfections of the system, I am of this place now.
However tacitly, I am connected to its thread of history.
Christian advised me to keep the “wide eyes” as long as I can.
I think I’ll do that.

Things I Know 219 of 365: A good start is asking what we’re orchestrating class to do

Designers think everything done by someone else is awful, and that they could do it better themselves, which explains why I designed my own living room carpet, I suppose.

– Chris Bangle

Wednesday, we had out first class meeting of Professor Elmore’s A-341 Supporting Teachers for Instructional Improvement.

Much of the class was directed toward establishing class norms and getting a general sense of whom we were learning with. While I loved it (we were moving around, meeting one another, having purposeful conversations and reporting out), it was one question that stuck with me as the defining moment of the class.

In describing what would drive our teacher observations for the class, Elmore asked, “If you were a student in this classroom and you did what the teacher asked you to do, what would you know how to do?”

The simplicity of the question reminded me of why I’d been drawn to apply to the course during shopping.

What’s more, Elmore wasn’t asking us to make judgements about the legitimacy of any of what we observed. He was asking us to observe.

Admittedly, this will be difficult for me. I’d imagine it will be difficult for everyone in the class.

I like the idea. I like the shift in focus from what the teacher is doing to the student experience.

As Elmore pointed out, the process starts not from a standpoint of “Here’s what should be going on here!” but one of “What’s going on here?” And, it starts from moving to the perspective of the student.

Starting out in the classroom, I asked myself, “Would I want to do the assignment I’ve just created?” It was a simplistic question.

Moving forward, I’d collected student responses to hundreds of assignments and had a better idea of the varying perspectives in my classroom. As a result, I felt I was designing assignments more likely to pique my students interest.

It wasn’t until moving to SLA and working with the unit planning template of Wiggins and McTigh’s Understanding by Design that I was asked to unpack where I wanted my students to head in what they were able to know, do and understand as a result of their time in the classroom.

Sparks of Elmore’s question could be seen in my review of student work, assessing how closely the students had come to reaching my goals for the unit.

This isn’t quite the essence of the question.

The question asks for a more complex and paradoxically more simplified observation.

When designing the flow of a given class period, what knowledge or abilities was I helping my students to have at that class’s end?

I wonder how classes would change if all teachers stepped into their classrooms tomorrow, mindful of that question.

Moving forward with the course, I’m curious to see and hear the variety of responses my classmates and I have to that question as we observe the same classes.

Things I Know 218 of 365: ‘College- and career-ready’ is backwards thinking

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

– Carl Sagan

I mentioned a few days ago that I took issue with a couple of the questions asked at our new-student orientation. Not took issue in the torches and pitchforks, storm the castle, sense, but issue just the same.

One of the facts shared with us was the percent of students in the new class who are the first in their families to earn a bachelor’s degree (16%).

To set that in perspective, we were then told that only 27.2% of people in the United States of have a bachelor’s degree. To this, there was an audible “hmmmm.”

When we started discussing things at my table, I was interested in how readily we accepted the notion that a bachelor’s was to be expected, the mark of success or making it or acceptance.

I wondered who else in the tent wondered at the idea that what was likely expected for somewhere near 84% of us was out of reach, had slipped through the fingers or was uninteresting to 72.8% of those in the country.

It started me thinking on where I stand regarding college education.

I read Will’s post to his kids his acceptance of their choices later in life if they choose not to go to college, and I remember thinking how much care his words contained.

It didn’t get me going as to whether or not I would write a similar post if I had kids.

But of course I have had kids. For only 180-days at a time, but they were in my charge just the same.

And it’s interesting how what I wanted for that first class at Sarasota Middle shifted by the time I saw my last classes at SLA.

I hadn’t known enough kids when I started teaching to realize that college wasn’t the path for everyone.

I only knew me and knew that it had always been my path.

With that limited understanding, I applied my logic to my students through my teaching practice. I taught them as though the preparation of school could and should only be geared toward preparing students for college.

In doing so, I underserved and under appreciated those students who were learning and growing into remarkable adults, but who weren’t on a trajectory that would lead them to a bachelor’s degree.

Somehow, they and I were failing. I couldn’t see the flaw in my logic because I didn’t know what I was doing.

By the time I was helping to counsel my last group of kids at SLA, I knew better (though not nearly completely) how to see my students and listen to understand where they were interested in heading.

Yes, the vast majority were on their way to 4-year colleges, and many of them will secure degrees beyond whatever paper I finally settle with as a the terminus for my education.

For those who needed something different, whose paths called for what was other than dorm living, ENG 101 and lecture hall classes, I’d started hearing them and realizing they were heading to lives by way of roads I’d never seen.

That was tough.

Still is.

Yes, I know the financial impact a college degree can have on a person’s lifelong earning potential.

I’ve also seen the emotional and financial impact a degree earned out of obligation and not desire can have on a person’s lifelong living potential.

Much attention is being paid as of late to whether or not our students are college and career ready by the time they graduate from high school.

It seems to me, that perhaps we should be paying attention to making more and more diverse colleges and careers so that they have at least a possible shot of being student ready.