Hey John,

Your last post on here where you discuss the intricacies of teaching and learning as a balance makes great sense. These days, the buzz around edu-techers centers around three topics: MOOCs (massive open online classroom), flipped classrooms, and Khan Academy. I’ll try to kill all three birds with one stone (hoping it boomerangs at some juncture) because, while some of us would rather not think about it, the online movement is most certainly here to stay. How schools, districts, and our country choose to use online learning matters lots here.

For instance, at the Celebration for Teaching and Learning 2012, I got a chance to hear him speak. I came in trying to have a measure of objectivity, just taking in the show I knew I would witness. Sure enough, he had a few jokes, a few highlights, and some success stories. That’s good, fantastic. Upon reflection, I realized that any instructional coach who came with their administrator or superior would immediately get asked the question, “So how do we bring that to our school?”

The coach or math teacher would roll their eyes hard and say, “Let me give it a look.” (Full disclosure: I did.)

Alas, Khan’s style of teaching math reminds you of your cousin who tried to give you a bunch of shortcuts and neat tricks to help you pass the next test. In the words of Ilana Horn:

Although learning and achievement are related, they are not the same. Learning happens when students deepen and extend their knowledge of mathematical ideas. Achievement reflects how they are progressing in school. Most educators recognize the imperfect correlation: some students progress without understand, whereas other students understand without progressing.

- excerpt from her book ​Strength in Numbers: Collaborative Learning in Secondary Mathematics​, NCTM 2012

Khan Academy often feels less like learning and more like achievement. What’s more, he gave us a snippet of a classroom where kids used the videos to learn math, then took online quizzes sponsored by Khan to decide whether the student gets to watch the next video. The teacher tracks their individual project and all they have to worry about on paper is whether the technology works and if they get Khan’s jokes. Originally, I understood Khan’s vision for these videos to serve for tutoring purposes and for refreshers for different subjects, and these videos work well for that purpose.

Yet, at some point, it went from a well-meaning and chummy vision for helping on the side to having Sal Khan become the center of learning. My question is simple: if indeed his system of teaching students math is revolutionary, then what is the ultimate difference between what he perceives as teacher-directed learning and Khan-directed learning? I have yet to get a clear answer on that. Can’t a teacher just get neon chalk, turn off the lights, and make jokes too? Can’t the teacher stop, take questions, and go back and do the lesson all over again just like Khan proposes for his videos?

Will a million Khan videos with a million YouTube videos solve 100% of students’ understandings of math? Doubt it.

Thus, the feedback from connected teachers from across the world has been astounding (including the aforementioned video / article). Let me overstate the obvious: if learning and teaching are interrelated, then the quality of teaching ought to reflect the quality of learning. Whether you’re in a classroom of 5000 people, 30, 12, or 1, the person teaching ought to understand their subject enough to anticipate questions, not simply breeze over.

The trend of gamifying our culture has had some benefits in other areas. Weight Watchers uses a points system to discourage customers from eating fatty foods. Nike+ has developed a specialized program (with shoes!) that help you compete against others through exercise. Klout uses equations to help rank people and brands through social media. Games often find themselves in the tools we as teachers use to encourage kids to learn skills.

But there’s a huge difference between what those examples and Khan has evolved into; all those examples only supplement their ultimate purposes. Khan Academy’s mission now includes replacing and / or undermining the expert in the classroom.

Worst of all, Larry Ferlazzo recently mentioned on his Twitter that they’re expanding into computer science, quizzical since some of us have a hard time decoding what he does for middle school math.

*image courtesy of http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2011/11/monkeys-typewrit...

At the Education Week Teacher blog, my colleagues and I have written a fair amount about parent involvement as the missing link in school reform (here are a couple that I wrote). Generally, I agree that the parents of low-income communities have an untapped power that sometimes differentiates between the schools found in our neighborhoods and those in more affluent neighborhoods. I argued that we as teachers and liaisons to the learning need to help the relationship between parents and their schools by taking a proactive stance in all relationships. This works because it prompts the less active ones into action and the more active ones into a positive relationship with the school.

One commenter, Cheryl Suliteanu on the last post asked this question in her comments:

Jose I lam going to adopt the idea of “anything over three minutes merits a school visit”. One of my biggest concerns is the lack of parent interaction when students move into the upper grades. Having taught primary grades for the last 7 years, and moving up to teaching 5th grade next year, I am going to focus significant energy on maintaining consistent, face-to-face contact with families, even though it’s not currently considered the “norm”. Parents are my partners in educating their child, and I think that parent conferences once a year (our district’s current practice) just isn’t enough.

A step further is home visits. What is your experience with visiting families at home, if having them come to school is a challenge?

When I first read it, I bit my tongue … because I had no response. What does a New York City teacher really know about home visits? We don’t concern ourselves with home visits, and I don’t know why. Actually, I had to stop writing this and ask my fiancee, “Wait, we can do home visits?” I know I read about home visits, most recently from Greg Michie’s Holler If You Hear Me, but I never actually experienced a home visit.

What does it mean when you actually break the seal of the teacher-student relationship and truly entrench yourself in the community? What does it say when you take your best shoes into someone’s house unaware of the conditions you’re walking into and the eventual response the morning after about the visit? Is there a level of respect between all the parties involved, and are there protections for you as a professional walking into your student’s houses? Do lawyers follow us into the house or wait for us outside?

Here I am showing my bias.

In other states, home visits are part and parcel of a teacher’s responsibility, especially for the neediest kids. The entire community knows that they have an expectation that a teacher won’t call, e-mail, or text the parent to replace a home visit. Many of the same principles I discussed in the first aforementioned parent involvement still apply here. We still need to be proactive, and make sure those home visits are worth every minute spent.

Whenever teachers have an opportunity to occupy a space for the purposes of progress, then that’s a good place to be. Teachers can advocate better for children if they actually knew what they come home to every night. Until then, they’re just watching it on TV like everyone else does … and watching it play out in the classroom like no one else will.

Even the most professional of us have to worry. In the midst of delicious dinners and good conversation, our day jobs can often worry us to the point where we fidget 72 hours before we even get to see our kids again. Instead of trying to keep some modicum of peace before the storm, we worry about what we have to get done before the big state test happens. The stakes get escalated with our value-added pseudo-numbers posted for the world to see, and reporters purporting that they had to post them because the reports were in their position (they didn’t).

Thus, Ariel Sacks wonders aloud in the midst of our conversation what we would do if the test wasn’t coming. In short, a freakin’ lot.

If the state test wasn’t coming …

I’d teach my students a whole lot slower, helping them upgrade their problem-solving and numerical skills so they could actually be ready for high school.

I would have taken 14 days on transformation instead of the five (rushed) days I spent because I knew I only had seven actual teaching days left. With the way the exams and vacation land this year, we might get a small window to remind them how to solve percents, equations, and angle relationships.

I would spend more time on trips and computer games and less time on counting down until that dreadful day.

I would stop telling most of my colleagues it’s going to be alright, and so long as we try our best, there us little we can do. Except that, due to NCLB / RTT mandates, I do worry whether we’ll be alright and I’m always too hard on myself so I do worry if we tried our absolute best.

I would breathe. Hard.

I would let some thoughts marinate a little more in the minds of my students. Like these.

Hey John,

As the year comes to a close, there’s a collection of very bold and progressive teachers voicing their opinions on the hot item of the moment: teacher evaluation. Some of my favorites include Renee Moore’s The Future Is Now for Teacher Evaluation and Michael Moran’s Context Matters. In each of these essays, there’s accurate and nuanced reflection about the profession and, more importantly, there’s a sense that we can’t rely on a random, outside observer handing out standardized tests as a measure of what the kids actually know and / or what the teacher actually taught.

From Renee:

How can we evaluate such rich complexity with all the varying levels of performance and experience they represent across the largest profession in America—with a few five-minute walk-bys and a checklist? Hardly. The old factory evaluation model, which was never a good fit for education, will be even less so as we move further into the potential of immersed learning and interconnected teaching. One principal trying to evaluate an entire faculty whose members practice a dizzying variety of pedagogical skills will be painfully ineffective. Like our students, teachers need assessment of our work based on a combination of measures and reviewers, with teachers taking responsibility for our own professional growth based on mutually established, student-centered goals.

To get there from here will require transformed thinking and some significant power shifts, neither of which, history reminds us, come easily. But I believe we are on the verge of such a shift as teaching finally morphs into a true profession. One of the trademarks of a profession is peer review of each others’ work against high standards established by the profession.

From Michael:

So, what should teacher evaluations look like? They should look like the teacher. They should look like the students and the classroom in which those students learn. Teacher evaluations should look like the grade level, content area, and community the teacher teaches. They should look like the goals that teachers, students, and administrators set for themselves, their classes, and the school as a whole.

The point I’m trying to make here is that a lot of the evidence that indicates teacher effectiveness is dependent on context. Sure, great teachers are great leaders, and great leaders can lead anywhere, but you run into a problem when an art teacher is evaluated on the standardized test results of one grade level in mathematics. Evaluations need to be multifaceted, taking into consideration not only student performance on standardized tests, but the academic growth of students as demonstrated by a portfolio of artifacts, the relationships that teachers build with students and their parents as demonstrated by student and family evaluative surveys, and observations from not only administrators, but peers and master teachers.

Powerful pieces there. Read the rest (and more opinions) here.

We are in a profession that needs voices on the school level discussing teaching. With so much misinformation getting out about the teaching profession, it’s not enough for teachers to stand by and let evaluation happen to that. We ought to shape policy and create our own solutions.

Mr. Schue from Glee, Wondering If Your Lesson Plan's Got Soul

Hey John,

I remember a few weeks ago when you were upset that a colleague of yours didn’t have their lesson plan book. I winced because, as it turns out, I didn’t even know we had to have one of those things. I played it off because I needn’t be so honest with someone about to get his doctorate. I’ve been experimenting with different modes of lesson plans that at some point, I didn’t really write them daily, but by unit. That’s 140+ lesson plans my first year of teaching to 15 last year. I figured that, because I knew the content so well, I didn’t have to lesson plan too much. I had them all in my head, only filling in activities when I needed to before rushing in to class. I didn’t realize how much I missed lesson planning until last week, when I realized I needed to improve my pedagogy.

This got me thinking about the recent news out of the New York Times. Professors Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum have led a start-up called Narrative Science where they can compile sports briefs and financial reports as if a human wrote them … but they’re not. Instead, over a decade-long study, they’re created software that uses artificial intelligence to replicate a human writer. Kris Hammond predicted that a computer could probably win a Pulitzer Prize and he really hopes it’s his. Naturally, the article jarred me because, for all I know, the names we see in the papers writing our news now are little more than pseudonyms for robots doing this sort of thing.

We live in amazing times where we’ve handed over lots of the “mundane” work to software. Those of us inclined to use lesson planning software, for instance, find it useful to have our state and national standards at our fingertips ready for click and insertion into our headers. We might find an activity from the given curricula and quickly tap into it, and the computer might generate some “appropriate” homework. For some of our less fortunate colleagues, they may get mandated to use a scripted curriculum pre-written for them.

This method has some validity with those who don’t get the training in their ed-schools (and trust me, there’s lots), but should teachers prescribe to this method? At some point, we have to ask ourselves, are lesson plans reflective of a student’s needs and passions or are they just a reflection of a standard communicated to them? When I lesson-plan, for example, I write down pieces of my rationale for how to solve a certain problem, or certain reminders I need to write on the board (“… write down big on the board: “THIS CAN ONLY BE USED IF YOU SEE AN EQUAL SIGN!!!”).

There’s value in honing in one what we need to teach, but does it have to be standardized?

If Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum’s methods become viral, we could soon see lesson plans written with some of the same logic they used to write articles and other texts. My only question is: can computers replicate soul?