In less than twelve minutes, National Board Certified Teacher and author Roxanna Elden with humor and candor distills the crucible facing new teachers and their students. I’ve embedded the video below; it’s an extremely worthwhile watch.

Within the TED-style talk, Elden mentions her book See Me After Class, which I’ve read and can attest is a must-have for any new and prospective teachers. She facetiously refers to it as “Hard Liquor for the Teacher’s Soul.”

 Anyway, Elden, a Miami high school teacher who just finished her tenth year in the classroom, is one to watch. My favorite line in her speech: "...New teachers propping themselves up on energy drinks and constantly measuring themselves against a fictional [superteacher] character are a lot more likely to make avoidable mistakes."

We need more teachers with her communication skills. Here is the video: 

The Myth of the Super Teacher from EdWriters on Vimeo.

The teaching profession is in the early stages of a massive overhaul, and many advocates are looking to the medical profession for a model of how to improve the quality and respect for teachers.

It’s been just over a century since the Flexner Report revolutionized and dramatically improved the training of doctors. Here is a Wikipedia summary of its legacy:

• A physician receives at least six, and preferably eight, years of post-secondary formal instruction, nearly always in a university setting;
• Medical training adheres closely to the scientific method and is thoroughly grounded in human physiology and biochemistry. Medical research adheres fully to the protocols of scientific research;
• Average physician quality has increased significantly;
• No medical school can be created without the permission of the state government. Likewise, the size of existing medical schools is subject to state regulation;
• Each state branch of the American Medical Association has oversight over the conventional medical schools located within the state;
• Medicine in the USA and Canada becomes a highly paid and well-respected profession.

Teaching could certainly use such an upgrade. Indeed, in the past two years the teaching profession has been handed several would-be Flexner Reports. Will any of them break through? Over my next several posts I will examine the recommendations and feasibility of three aspiring Flexners:

• From the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE): Blue Ribbon Panel on Clinical Preparation and Partnerships for Improved Student     Learning
• From NEA: Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning
• From the U.S. Department of Education: The RESPECT Project: Envisioning a Teaching Profession for the 21st Century

I’ll also examine key similarities and differences between the medical and teaching professions, including ideas about how one can learn from the others.

Do you think modern medicine provides a useful model for revamping the teaching profession? Comments are most welcome.

What Teaches Make

Taylor Mali’s brilliant performance poem “What Teachers Make” has over 3.8 million views on YouTube. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s a must-see.

Mali, a former teacher and now full-time globe-trotting poet/advocate/recruiter for the teaching profession, has followed up his most successful poem with a book of the same title.  I read it in 2 sittings and it made me feel great— it’s a highly recommended “just-cause” or end-of-year gift for a teacher in your life. 

The small, novelty-sized hardcover is broken into 26 vignettes, with several of Mali’s poems mixed in. The book has heart and Mali’s love of teaching shines through. What elevates What Teachers Make above the next paean to teachers on the shelf is Mali’s irreverence and a keen ability to tell big stories with short word counts. He also gave me a few ideas for tweaks in my own classroom, most notably in the chapter titled “No One Leaves My Class Early For Any Reason.” I do need to tighten up about that. 

What Teachers Make is filled with enjoyable anecdotes and nuggets of wisdom. It’s a light, recommended read. Here’s one epitomizing pearl to from the first chapter, ”Making Kids Work Hard”: 

“[Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger asked an aide to produce a report. The aide submitted his report, but it was returned to him later that afternoon with a note from Kissinger that said: “I’m sorry. This is not good enough.” The aide felt like he’d been busted because he knew Kissinger was right. He made the report significantly better and re-submitted it, but it came back again with a similar note: “This is still not nearly good enough. Now the aide was scared! He canceled his plans for the evening and stayed up all night working on the report. He caught careless errors he hadn’t seen before and added a section of analysis that tied the whole thing together. He felt he had done his absolute best, so instead of just submitting the report as he had done twice before, he made an appointment to deliver the report to Kissinger personally. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I have written this report three times and twice you have sent it back saying it was not good enough. Sir, what I am handing you no is the absolute best I can do, so if it is still not good enough, then I am not the right person for the job.” Kissinger thanked him, smiled, and took the report, adding, “Excellent. This time I will actually read it.”

Two must-reads on the fallout from the value-added movement:

“‘Creative… Motivating’ and Fired”

Top-notch reporter Bill Turque at the Washington Post dropped this barnburner article today about Sarah Wysocki, a DCPS teacher who received praise from everyone she worked with… and then got fired over test scores. The whole article is a must-read, but the thing that leaped most off the page to me was how likely it seems that Wysocki, a fifth grade teacher, was the victim of a sinister consequence of high-stakes testing: cheating. Turque writes:

[DCPS chief of human capital Jason] Kamras said the disconnect between the [excellent] observations of Wysocki’s classroom and her value-added scores was “quite rare.” Most teachers with poor ratings in one area, he said, are also substandard in the other.

“It doesn’t necessarily suggest that anything wrong happened,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just not possible to know for sure.”

Wysocki said there is another possible explanation: Many students arrived at her class in August 2010 after receiving inflated test scores in fourth grade.

Fourteen of her 25 students had attended Barnard Elementary. The school is one of 41 in which publishers of the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System tests found unusually high numbers of answer sheet erasures in spring 2010, with wrong answers changed to right. Twenty-nine percent of Barnard’s 2010 fourth-graders scored at the advanced level in reading, about five times the District average.

D.C. and federal investigators are examining whether there was cheating, but school officials stand by the city’s test scores.

Wysocki’s firing is a travesty; things don’t have to be this way. Can you imagine any other profession where a successful, much-respected team member is sacked by an opaque algorithm that no one understands?

“Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged When Student Test Scores Slip”

In The New York Times, Michael Winerip looks into Brooklyn’s high-achieving P.S. 146 where the school community was shocked to learn that because their already-high test scores evidently didn’t go up enough, revered faculty leaders were rated as bottom-of-the-barrel. Winerip writes:

How could this possibly have happened?

The short answer is: Numbers lie.

And not only do they lie, but they are out of date, in this case covering student test results from 2007 to 2010.

Though 89 percent of P.S. 146 fifth graders were rated proficient in math in 2009, the year before, as fourth graders, 97 percent were rated as proficient. This resulted in the worst thing that can happen to a teacher in America today: negative value was added.

The difference between 89 percent and 97 percent proficiency at P.S. 146 is the result of three children scoring a 2 out of 4 instead of a 3 out of 4.

Would you want your child’s teachers working within this system— one ready to dole out public humiliation over the most arbitrary, minute stat movements?

Who is being educated--- and what are they really learning from this?

Last week the Brookings Institution released a report by Tom Loveless declaring the Common Core standards to be big waste— two years before they even go into effect. The top highlight listed on the report’s website lays it bare:

“Predicting the Effect of the Common Core State Standards on Student Achievement: The Common Core will have little to no effect on student achievement.”

Bummer.

Loveless lays out three “theorized effects” of how proponents believe the Common Core will improve education. They are:

• Quality theory: “The Common Core will raise the quality of education nationally by defining a higher-quality curriculum in English-language-arts and mathematics than is currently taught.”

• Rigorous performance standards theory: “A new Common Core test will presumably end such discrepancies [between state tests] by evaluating the same standards for every state, and these standards are to be more rigorous than those currently used.”

• Standardization theory: “One high-quality textbook— or perhaps a few that are aligned with the same content standards— used by all American students attending the same grade would be an improvement over the status quo.”

Sounds pretty good to all of use doe-eyed educators who have been baffled by the patchwork system out there. But then Loveless shreds those “theorized effects,” wielding NAEP score data with idol-smashing fervor. He writes:

“…[D]o not expect much from the Common Core. Education leaders often talk about standards as if they are a system of weights and measures— the word “benchmarks” is used promiscuously as a synonym for standards. But the term is misleading by inferring that there is a real, known standards for measurement. Standards in education are best understood as aspirational, and like a strict diet or prudent plans to save money for the future, they represent good intentions that are not often realized.”

Sure, standards alone will not lift public education.  But better curriculum and better trained teachers will.  The transition to Common Core standards is a golden opportunity for high-quality professional development centered on improving instruction and better (though unfortunately not fewer) tests. It’s an alarm clock moment for teachers to share expertise around crafting quality curricula.

The standards themselves provide just the spark— they won’t move mountains alone.

I’ve had two full days of PD on “unwrapping” (great edu-jargon) Common Core standards and it looks good to me. I think these guideposts/standards/benchmarks/aspirations will make classrooms better. I’ve pasted at the bottom of this blog (it’s rather long) the ten College and Career Readiness (CCR) anchor standards for writing, as well as the first writing standards, tracked from grade 6 to 12.

It’s smart, noncontroversial stuff. I look forward to my two-year-old daughter Sadie building these skills in her schooling. Declaring the Common Core standards useless or counterproductive at this point doesn’t make sense to me.

The will and the funds seem to be in place for an unprecedented influx of quality professional development. In 2014 we should have good standards, better-prepared teachers, and better curriculum. Why quit before we’ve begun?

Here are the ten CCR anchor standards for writing:

Text Types and Purposes

• 1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
• 2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.
• 3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.

Production and Distribution of Writing

• 4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
• 5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach.
• 6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.

Research to Build and Present Knowledge

• 7. Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
• 8. Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
• 9. Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

Range of Writing

• 10. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

And here is the first ELA standard for writing, tracked from 6th through 12th grade. To my eyes, it builds with logical, appropriate rigor:

W.6.1. Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.

• Introduce claim(s) and organize the reasons and evidence clearly.
• Support claim(s) with clear reasons and relevant evidence, using credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text.
• Use words, phrases, and clauses to clarify the relationships among claim(s) and reasons.
• Establish and maintain a formal style.
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from the argument presented.

W.7.1. Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.

• Introduce claim(s), acknowledge alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically.
• Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant evidence, using accurate, credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text.
• Use words, phrases, and clauses to create cohesion and clarify the relationships among claim(s), reasons, and evidence.
• Establish and maintain a formal style.
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.

W.8.1. Write arguments to support claims with clear reasons and relevant evidence.

• Introduce claim(s), acknowledge and distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and organize the reasons and evidence logically.
• Support claim(s) with logical reasoning and relevant evidence, using accurate, credible sources and demonstrating an understanding of the topic or text.
• Use words, phrases, and clauses to create cohesion and clarify the relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
• Establish and maintain a formal style.
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.

W.9-10.1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

• Introduce precise claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that establishes clear relationships among claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
• Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly, supplying evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level and concerns.
• Use words, phrases, and clauses to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.
• Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.

W.11-12.1. Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

• Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
• Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience’s knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
• Use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.
• Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.
• Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.