Top 10 Thoughts On Education

I recently had the opportunity to interview the top ten finalists for 2016 Indiana Teacher of the Year.  Watch out, America!  These Hoosier educators are among the finest!

Throughout a day of sitting with Indiana's teaching best, I heard many good thoughts that warranted a broader audience.  This is what Indiana educators are saying.

Fail forward, or be a success.

This should be on bumper stickers.  We all fail.  Unfortunately, too many people see failure as merely the opposite of success.  Failure is a great learning experience.  When we fail well, we fail forward.  This is why I am one of the founding fellows of The Failure Institute and why I support my friend Jessica Lahey's book, The Gift of Failure:  How the Best Parents Learn To Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.

Ask alumni what you could have done better.

Many of us keep in touch with former students, but do we ever ask them what we could have done better?  We all need space and time away from something to be able to see it clearly.  Once our students have gone on to college or careers, they are in a better place to evaluate their own elementary and secondary education.  This is one I had never thought of, but am eager to implement.

Tests should measure students, not teachers and schools.

Teachers and schools must be evaluated, just as any employee or organization should be evaluated, but such evaluations cannot be significantly informed by student testing.  Note that I did not write "should not be," but "cannot be."  There are many factors affecting a student's performance on a test that are beyond a teacher's control.  It says absolutely nothing about my school or about me if my student fails a test because he or she was unable to think clearly as a result of hunger or worry about an abusive home life.

To be fair, we must also consider what test scores do and do not reveal about students themselves.  When a student misses a question, I know only that the student did not answer the question correctly  I do not know why he or she did not answer it correctly.  The student may have simply forgotten, never known the answer, lacked understanding of the question's wording, had a panic attack, failed to study, or missed seeing that particular question entirely.

Teachers need less required collaboration and more trust to work on their own.

If I have to be told when to meet, where to meet, with whom to meet, and what to meet about, then why did you hire me?  If college-educated adults cannot be trusted to work independently or in collaboration of their choosing, then the fault, dear Brutus, is not in their substandard work, but in careless hiring practices.

On the flip side, leave teachers to their own devices and they will come up with some of the most amazing ideas.  Nobody shares information the way teachers do.  We enthusiastically ask each other questions and share our best ideas and activities.  If you do not know this is what happens when even two or three teachers gather, then you do not know teachers.

Teachers are effective when they are inspired.

We know this is true regarding students, so why it would it not be true regarding teachers?  It has been said that people perish when there is a lack of vision.  Never is this more the case than in schools.  When school leaders work shoulder-to-shoulder with each other, tapping into each other's talents and both casting and sharing dreams, something happens that is the true result of real education:  life.  Just as you can tell a plant by the fruit it bears, you can most accurately assess a school by observing its life or, in some sad cases, the lack thereof.

It's worth it.

Our profession can always get better.  All professions can.  Why would we want education to improve?  Because it is worth it.  Oh, is it worth it!  Setting aside all manner of foolishness, we see education for what it truly is.  It is a most human endeavor, a shared journey of discovery with young people discovering the mysteries and glories of creation and all that humans have come to know about and added to it.  Working with colleagues who understand this, teachers like these top ten finalists and the many others I have enjoyed knowing throughout our state and across our nation, I can honestly proclaim that the calling and life of a teacher are most definitely worth it.

Students Want Challenges

After reading the war writings of Julius Caesar in the original Latin and then exploring some Greek philosophy in translation, our Latin II students bring it all together with a project involving Steven Pressfield's The Warrior Ethos.  They must discuss three of the tenets from the book with regard to Caesar, their own current life, and what they plan to do in the future.

In one of his sections, Pressfield talks about why people join the military or want to be soldiers.  For some it is a rite of passage.  They want to challenge themselves. They want to grow.  Emily, one of my freshmen, chose this and applied it to her life at the moment.

Life in high school can seem very stagnant; we follow the same schedule every day and see the same people every day for the majority of the year.  I am craving some of the action, risk, the need to challenge myself, just as this tenet describes of those wishing to join the military.  I need a rite of passage into adulthood that does not involve taking standardized tests.  I want to challenge myself in a different environment than I am used to seeing every day and I want to learn and mature and become a better individual as a result.

There is a move away from high stakes testing for many good reasons.  Some opposed say that this is a move away from academic rigor, yet as my student clearly indicated, this is not the case.  Emily is an intelligent student who it seems has obtained wisdom as well.  In her own words, she wants "to learn and mature and become a better individual."  After fifteen years in which tests have played a far too significant role in life, she has indeed learned something.  She knows what she needs and wants, a proper rite of passage into adulthood that is suitably challenging to provide growth.  She knows that this does not involve testing.

I would argue that our school provides much of what Emily needs.  Ours is a rich curriculum that offers varied opportunities for students to explore their gifts and worlds in which to exercise them.  Yet even we are bound by exams sending the message to students that grades are the most important measure of achievement and the most important of the rites of passage.  We know this is not true and frequently say so, but when our actions do not match our words, students become confused, or worse, believe the message of the exams.  Fortunately some students, like Emily, know that there must be something else.  Hopefully she and others like her are able to explore a world beyond tests as they travel the shared journey of discovery that is true education.

Rising Above, Part 5

This is the fifth post in a six-part series on general education issues.  I was recently invited to be part of a panel discussion after a screening of the film Rise Above the Mark, and these posts will continue that conversation.  This space will not be used for a review or critique of the film, parts of which I agreed with and parts of which I did not.  The film and the discussion it has inspired have, however, brought key education issues into a broader forum, and it is these that I will address in this series.

What is the effect of testing on instruction?

Then Jesus took his disciples up the mountain and gathering them around him taught them saying:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are the meek,
Blessed are they that mourn.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are they who thirst for justice.
Blessed are you when you suffer.
Be glad and rejoice for your reward is great in heaven."

Then, Simon Peter said, "Do we have to write this down?"
And, Andrew said, "Are we supposed to know this?"
And, James said, "Will this be on the test?"
And, Phillip said, "I don't have any paper."
And, Bartholomew said, "The other disciples didn't have to learn this."
And, John said, "Do we have to turn this in?"
And, Matthew said, "Can I go to the bathroom?"
And, Judas said, "What does this have to do with real life?"
Then, one of the Pharisees who was present asked to see Jesus' lesson plan and inquired of Jesus: "Where is your anticipatory set of objectives in the cognitive domain?"

And Jesus wept.

I am not sure when someone first brought this piece to my attention, but it has been a source of laughter and tears among teachers for a long time.  While much of the humor derives from thinking of the disciples behaving as modern school children, I want to focus on the reply of James, for of all the other whining complaints, this is the one that grown adults today seem to take seriously.

One of the questions I prepared to answer during the panel discussion for Rise Above the Mark dealt with the effect of testing on teaching and specifically on lost instructional time.  Rather than rely only on my own experience, I conducted highly scientific research to determine precisely the effect of testing on classrooms around Indiana.  In short, I emailed and Facebook messaged a bunch of teacher friends around the state.  Here are their replies.

[At my school] the emphasis on standardized tests has led to common formative assessments.  I firmly believe (from my own experience and from observing PLCs) that all of this emphasis on "delivering a consistent product" ends up stifling the creativity and therefor the enthusiasm of individual teachers.  If I  want to try something different and no one else wants to try it, then I either can't do it or I have to take the risk of falling behind everyone else.  Teachers in my department often seem reluctant to try anything that helps students learn the concepts because there are so many standards that need to be addressed and they feel they don't have the time.  In the end, all that is tested are basic skills and "what gets tested is what gets taught." 

Students lose instructional time not only in the course that is being tested, but also in other courses.  For instance, quite a few of my ... students recently missed my class because they needed to take the English 10 ECA.  Students who took the Biology and Algebra ECA exams in December also missed classes for other subject areas.  

There is a large portion of the instructional calendar dedicated to preview/review for standardized tests.  As a result, it has also caused teachers/departments to reduce some of the content of their teaching, thus removing some of the more engaging topics they can often get students excited about learning.  It is not uncommon to hear even gifted teachers say things like, "I would love to teach this, but it's not part of the test."

Other than an inconsistent and unreliable way of evaluating teacher performance, I have seen little in the way of positive feedback toward instruction.  Although most standardized tests do segment questions into general content areas, this information is not actionable in helping teachers identify what areas of instruction could be improved.  This is compounded by the fact that scores are rarely available in a timely fashion that would allow the data to help the student who took the test.  At best, the standardized test scores could only improve future instruction and have little to no bearing on the student whose scores are being considered. 

[Testing] wears down students, reducing their concentration on other tests.

Here is how important testing is to me.  I would forget to do it if I did not write it down.  This actually happened when I was student teaching.  I had been so engaged in the actual work of teaching that when I glanced at the calendar and saw the end of the term approaching, I flipped out over the realization that I had forgotten to give any tests.

Yes, we want students to synthesize, to pull together their learning in meaningful ways, and there are many avenues to enable this.  Tests, especially the standardized kind, are but one of those avenues, and too often they are more like dark, scary alleys where true learning is mugged.

I am reminded of a part of Cicero's first speech against Catiline, delivered in November, 63 B.C.  To motivate the senators against what he saw as a clear and present danger to Rome, he recalled a past time when Roman virtue was made of sterner stuff.  "Fuit, fuit ista quondam in hac republica virtus...."  "There was, there was once such courage in this republic...."  Taking my stand behind the lectern instead of on the rostrum, I would echo those words.  There was, there was once in our state and country the recognition that testing was merely a tool, and only one of many.  There was an acknowledgment that it should not direct the teaching.   There was a reason why kept testing in its proper, subordinate place of modest importance, and I will let the words of a colleague speak to it.

Individual test results aren't really being used to help the individual student.  Good teachers are consistently collecting data/information/impressions about their students.  It is these individual classroom assessments that are most helpful in terms of day-to-day instruction.

I have rarely had a surprise from a test.  I know my students.  I do not take attendance by calling out their ID numbers.  I know that Maddie and Keeler are the ones who are absent.  We interact as people do.  We know each other.  Because of our daily interaction in meaningful tasks, I am not surprised by their performance on an exam.  What does surprise me is the lengths to which adults will go to diminish the time for students and teachers to walk together on the shared journey of discover that is education.

Getting Off Track

We are behind in our A.P. Latin class, which is a typical condition for us.  There are certain lines we must cover, certain concepts we must explore, and as it was last Friday, certain grammatical concepts we must review.  Yet for all that, we are reading Vergil's Aeneid, an epic poem the depths of which I have not yet discovered, despite having taught it for longer than my students have been alive.  It is a magnum opus dealing with love and hate, life and death, dreams inspired and hopes crushed.  It is, as with most Roman art, a distinctly human work.  Do you think for one minute that with such a work in the hands of thoughtful young people about to launch into the epic of their own lives I would not indulge their thought-provoking questions just stay on the syllabus?  Not on your life.

We were at Book I, line 521, in which the hero Aeneas catches sight of a friend whom he believed dead about to speak to a foreign queen.  Of this man Vergil writes, "Maximus Ilioneus placido sic pectore coepit."  "Ilioneus, the greatest of them all, began to speak thus with a calm heart."  Nick, a football and rugby player with a Shakespearean vocabulary and the poetic soul of Shelley, observed that pectore also means "chest," and thus began our discussion of why the word can also mean "heart."  Will, a young man also studying for the International Baccalaureate exam in Latin, then asked why Vergil would have referenced the heart as the seat of emotions, since there is evidence the ancients saw the liver as our emotional source.  This gave me pause, as I did not at the moment recall that the origin of this notion lay with Galen, who lived more than a century after Vergil.  We reflected on the parallel expression Vergil likes to use, ex imo corde, "from the depths of the heart," which uses the word for the actual heart muscle.  The conversation flitted from student to student, and then I paused again and uttered a statement that made all heads turn.

"This is why I do not like tests."

I explained that in our current obsession with using methodology from the natural sciences to assess the value of what takes place in this most human of enterprises, education, our tools are incapable of capturing the truth.  What test could I give that would accurately take stock of the scintillating discussion that had taken place over the previous fifteen minutes?  We could count the number of students who actually spoke during that time, but if we did that, then the conclusion would be that the exercise was a disastrous failure, for fewer than fifty percent had spoken.  Jess, a thoughtful young lady, observed, "Yes, but everyone was thinking."  Of that, I have no doubt, but I do doubt that any of the Olympian powers-that-be in education would accept sparkles in teenage eyes or pensive expressions as data.

Yong Zhao, internationally renowned scholar, author, and speaker on education, posted recently about our suicidal obsession with attaining educational excellence through authoritarian means.  He is right, but since education is a human endeavor, conducted by people with people about the discoveries and creations of people, it must be about life, and I cannot go down the path of death, even if it were to lead to 5s for everyone on the A.P. exam.  My student Jess said it best at the end of the period.  As the bell rang to dismiss our class, the next to last of the day, which was a Friday and a day when many expect schools to get little of value accomplished, she stayed to say thank you.  She thanked me for allowing our class to get off track and to discuss matters that truly matter.

Why Did You Hire Me?

Why did you hire me if you don't trust me to do my job?  If you thought I was a professional with the required skills to make me worthy of hiring, then why do you not give me the required, trust-based freedom to do my job?  If I am as poor at my job as your top-down, micromanaging of my professional life indicates, what does that say about your hiring practices?

I recently read an article about technology in the classroom, which is a common topic these days.  Even more run-of-the-mill was the use of Finland as the starting point in the discussion.  Yet what made this article truly important was not its provocative title or anything on the first page, which pretty much told us what we already know.  Page two contains the gem.  The article cites a post on Finnish education author Pasi Sahlberg's blog that identifies the two basic things the United States must get right if it hopes to learn anything from Finland:  teacher trust and teacher training.

Let's acknowledge a few things up front.  I teach with an extraordinary department chair, Traci Rodgers, who works hard to help her teachers do the jobs for which they have been hired.  My school and my district have been incredibly supportive of me and mine.  We all know this is not universally the case.  Let us also admit that it is entirely possible to make a bad hire.  The person looks good on paper, has a great interview, but just does not work out.  It happens.  It is also possible for a person to get worse over time for any number of reasons.  Even those who do not get worse can and should improve.  Yet does a system built on distrust of teachers, one that proves it assumes teachers are doing a bad job with its requirement of endless reporting, observing, evaluating, and testing, really help anyone?  

Consider for a moment a famous scene from the classic film Cool Hand Luke.  In this scene the boss of a prison gang informs the men that they may have some privacy as they answer the call of nature while

working along a road, provided that they keep shaking the bush that hides them.  One of the prisoners takes advantage of this, but even as he shakes the bush, one of the prison bosses fires a rifle in his direction.  At last the bush stops shaking and the guards rush over to discover that the man has tied a string to the bush so that he could shake it at a distance as he made his escape.

Education is a most human enterprise, yet it can feel inhumane in the extreme when professional, caring, and creative adults live under the cloud of such distrust.  As the Cool Hand Luke scene illustrates, a sufficiently motivated person can get around such measures, and in what should be a humane environment like education, these measures serve mostly to discourage and drive away the best and brightest.

Sahlberg does point out that the trust and respect given to Finnish teachers derives from the high level of their preparation.  Perhaps that is what administrators and legislators do not trust.  They do not trust the institutions that have prepared their employees.  If that is the case, then let's have that conversation.  What must stop is a demeaning, punitive system of so-called accountability that seems to have but one actual effect, a hemorrhaging of educational leaders from the profession.