Annual reflection and setting new goals

I have never done this in public, but I think it's worth doing if only to publicly commit myself to some goals and raise my own level of accountability.  Now, as we approach the dawn of a new school year, it's time to lay out specific plans for improvement in my courses and my classroom.

Management Issues

Lateness - With only a 40-minute period, too much time is being lost to lateness.  Moreover, the problem got so bad late in the year with one course that it was hard to determine, even ten minutes after the bell, whether I had enough students to proceed with my plan or to shift course.  I would shift, and then the stragglers would show up.

One problem is that detention does not work.  It palpably does not work, because at the end of the year we still had dozens of students assigned to detention every day.  This is as effective as locking up drug addicts has been in fighting addiction in our country.  Yet we persist (in both cases).

I've spent some time this week reading everything I can find on the subject and it is all the same and it is all unhelpful, because the advice addresses individual aberrant cases of lateness, and a lot of attention is given to tracking and record-keeping.  I am fundamentally opposed to punishing myself for a student's misbehavior.  (That is one reason I don't have my own detention.  Another is that I am too involved in co-curricular activities to be able to drop what I'm doing and see a student after school.)

Phone calls home are school policy and I will, of course, comply.  But I don't believe in them, partly because we have so few reliable ways to communicate with our parents in a timely manner (will have to work on THAT this year) and because I teach seniors.  Parental disapproval and sanctions may be effective, but they are a poor preparation for the phase of life my students are about to begin.  They need to have their own discipline and their own habits in place, unless their parents are going to run their whole lives for them.

Clearly I need to move beyond sanctions.  Many of my colleagues (including many who should know) believe the lateness thing is cultural.  (Incidentally, that should not be viewed as racist.  Many European Mediterranean cultures do not value punctuality, and they are not generally oppressed minorities in this country.)  However, I need not investigate root causes or do some deep character education.  What I need to do is establish that whatever culture my students come from, when they enter my room, they enter MY CULTURE with my expectations.

So I need to be disciplined myself, start the class within a minute of the second bell, disregard who's there and not there, ignore late students when they enter (which I do anyway) and deal with lateness reporting issues later.  I will establish that I will mark absences at the top of the class and that unless they sign the latebook, it will go down as a cut, with the attendant consequences, which are out of my hands.  Hopefully, once it is clear that the class begins when it begins, the issue will diminish.  I only wish that I could flip my classroom so that the entrance was in the back of the room, but that is not practical for a number of reasons.  In any event, I will stop trying to use punishment and shame, and try and establish a social and cultural norm and set of expectations, at least within my own four walls.  Consistency.

This also supports a specifically educational imperative I want to press this year:  that, as we learn to write, we are writing in a specific and separate dialect called Standard Written English.  (Not Standard White English.)  SWE is not the way we speak every day.  It may not even coincide with formal speech.  It is a special, particular language which my students will be expected to use in college composition, and in most written communications other than to friends and family.  It is not a denigration of natural speech, but a commonly accepted and preferred alternate to it, and using it does not signal racism, but simply the employment of a Lingua Franca.

So in both punctuality and form of written expression, we have different expectations in the classroom than you have with family and friends.  Not superior, just different.

Phones - There is little or no support on the ground for a no-phones policy in class, although that is the stated written policy of the district.  Confiscation is not practical and could lead to liability problems, especially without support up the line.  Again, I must establish a cultural expectation, which I will reinforce with by distributing a copy of the page in the district handbook banning phones and having each student sign and acknowledge that.  I know that is no solution to anything, and is frequently an empty gesture, but perhaps it will be a signal that I intend to be consistent with that.  I must not let myself slip and lose heart about reminding students to get the phones out of my sight.  On the other hand, there will be times (I hope) when I will invite the students to use their smart phones in class, as a reminder that it is not that I am a Luddite, but that there is a time and place for everything, and that it is important to be present in the place where one is physically present, and to leave the cyberworld from time to time to be here now.  You know, all zen and stuff.

The Teaching of Literature  - I read an interesting piece this summer about the ascendancy of teaching literature over rhetoric in our high schools, which puts them out of joint with our colleges.  The fact is, I have never formally studied rhetoric, but as a former lawyer, I am familiar with and equipped to teach its application.  And as a reader, I am far more interested in journalism and other forms of non-fiction than I am in literature.

This comports with a district and building initiative to intensify the reading and analysis of short non-fiction on a regular basis.

So a couple of interlocking decisions.  I am not going to attempt to "teach" novels.  I will frame them and contextualize them at the outset.  Students will read them independently, using a schedule I provide as a rough guide.  I am still debating assessment of reading, whether to journal, quiz or other technique. From time to time, students will rotate in leading discussion, a process I will teach, building on what they learned junior year.  There will be the assessment of rote reading in a one-period timed test and a more important assessment in the form of a project which requires synthesis, as I have done historically since I began teaching.  The larger point is that our book of the moment should only occupy one or two days per week.  This leaves two days for writing and two days for everything else.

The Teaching of Writing AND Reading Non-Fiction  - This provides an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.  As mentioned, there is an initiative to stress non-fiction reading.  The plan as it stands right now, is to assign new non-fiction reading each Monday.  (Note to self -- because photocopying must be submitted in advance, must have non-fiction selected before leaving building on Thursday night.)  This can be in class, silently or aloud, partially in class and partially independently, etc. etc., depending on the specific task to be performed in connection with the reading -- analysis, rebuttal, extrapolation.  Then writing based on the writing can be assigned every other week, to be submitted electronically by Thursday.  I must then faithfully review and assess all writing over the weekend and return e-mail it before Monday.  On alternate weeks, students will be re-writing per my comments, to be submitted the following Thursday.  That is, one week write, next week rewrite.  After one semester, and with the use of projections and lecture-demonstrations, students will understand the edit and rewrite process well enough to do peer review, and start to incorporate those ideas about better style into their own drafting.

I have to brace myself to work harder this year and get better at seeing around corners.  At least this year, I've read most of my literature once already.  And the longform work must be interlaced with more short work.

Assessments - More of them, more at higher levels, more rapid marking and return of them.  Last year, my students rarely had the opportunity to benefit from comments.  That must change.

Advanced Placement -  I have ideas about re-formulating the Advanced Placement, starting with administering practice tests within the first week and regularly thereafter.  Earlier classes seem to have been completely sandbagged by the test, and there is no reason for that.  As high level as the class is, at some level it is all about the test at the end.  I am determined to have some 4s and 5s this year.  I will have more to say about this after next week, when I complete my mini-course on teaching AP.

Social Justice in Film  - Very charged up about this new elective.  I have always had trouble designing assessments for electives.  I am thinking of two principal modes at the moment -- having students blog about each film and having a rotating assignment of introducing and giving context to each film.  I will give the student a list of terms, names, etc. which are connected to the film and ask them to prepare 10 minutes for the class.  (Naturally, I will be prepared to back this up.)

Work Deadlines - This year I really want to walk the talk.  Keep deadlines myself and hold students to them.  I must start at the beginning of the year and not accept late homework at all, other than for excused absences.  I understand that students are allowed to re-take tests, but if they never hand in a paper assigned in lieu of a test, can they "re-do" that?  I am inclined to given them the 55 for a missing assessment and then assign something else, rather than give the impression that deadlines mean nothing, and that any work can be handed in at any time before the last day of the marking period.  That was just making me miserable.

I am hereby putting my DC and my principal on notice that my September gradebook may look very scary, but I am confident the situation will correct itself if I remain firm.

Use of the School Website  - As soon as possible, I am getting all my classes to the computer lab, show them my page, show them where their work is posted, give them the Twitter feeds and the Facebook page they can like in order to receive information about all the homework assignments.  It must be clear that if they are absent, excused or not, they are responsible not only for doing the work but for finding out what it is.  I must consistently refuse to answer questions about what the past work was except to direct them to the website.  They must learn that this is how most college courses operate.  The professor will not chase you and scarcely will talk to you about past assignments.  They must assume responsibility.

Apps - Speaking of the school website, I have it on reasonably good authority that a bright high-school level hacker/code monkey could write an app that makes our school website legible on a smart phone.  I would love to offer a prize for a student to do that for all the obvious reasons.  I also want to research free or cheap apps that help students manage their assignment calendars, not to mention college and scholarship application deadlines, which leads me to...

The War Room - I hope that Coach T and I can hold to Mr. Gregory to his agreement to commit Room 401 to be a War Room for college applications and scholarship applications.  Too much was compromised last year due to students not managing timelines.  We need to support that, to counsel students on their choices and to celebrate ALL THE ACCEPTANCES.  Last year, some got noticed and some didn't.  That's not right.  They are all a big deal, and we have to make them that way.  Which reminds of something else that needs to be different this year...

College Presentations during English instruction time  I need better advance notice of this, and they must be limited.  There have to be other times and places found to meet with seniors other than decimating a graduation requirement course.  Also, I'm putting my foot down on this specifically -- NO CLASS TIME AFFORDED TO FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS.  We don't know what those schools are doing, what kind of financial problems they could create for our students, and they are off-mission for us.  Yes, some post-high-school education is the goal for all Newark Public School students, but AHHS is specifically a college prep school, and our message should be consistent.  Again, there must be other means, other times for the for-profit schools to reach our kids.

Well, that's all I can think of now.  There are a lot of details that are still fuzzy to me, such as the sequencing of my literature units (chronological order did not work), but this reflection was more about architecture than engineering.  Time for the latter later.

Now I've published this and you can all throw it in my weary and bedraggled face in June!

Bless you

Admittedly, my experience as a teacher is not exhaustive. I have only worked in three schools full time and substituted in perhaps half-a-dozen other buildings. But as far as I know, schools never provide tissues. Why is that? We need tissues, teachers and students alike. Without them, we can become germ broadcasters, potentially wreaking germ war upon our community. But though we are provided with pens, paper, markers, scissors, chalk, sharpies, glue, tape, paper clips, staples, staplers and even glitter (not to mention $10,000 SmartBoards and such things) no one sees fit to give us a box of tissues.

Before I became a teacher, working in the private sector, large corporations who employed me provided tissues: Hallmark Cards, NBC and the William Morris Agency all seemed to feel that boxes of tissues were not so damaging to the bottom line that they could not be provided to us employees.

In elementary and middle schools, we can count on concerned parents to bring those tissues in. Everyone knows how drippy and snotty little kids can get. I even offered bonus points to my middle schoolers for a box of tissues. But in high school, I guess we are just supposed to live with being sick and let the mucous fall where it may.

So what happens in high school? Teachers buy tissues and bring them in. This is not a huge hardship. But it makes no sense. The only alternative is disruptive to the class, sending a student to the bathroom to get a stack of rough paper towels, which, over the course of a day of the sniffles, will remove six or seven layers of epidermis from your upper lip. Given the cheapness of the commodity and its importance to basic hygiene, why must it become the responsibility of each instructor?

Am I missing something? Besides tissues, I mean?

Malcolm Gladwell on successful teachers

I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's anthology of New Yorker pieces, What The Dog Saw and enjoyed it just as I've enjoyed all his books. Yes, I know he's a popularizer and he's middlebrow, but I think there is something admirable in taking ideas and concepts that a few high-level experts are working on and bringing their essence to a larger audience where these ideas can be part of the public discussion.

One of his pieces in the book, published on December 14, 2008, and still available in full here, entitled "Most Likely to Succeed" is based on the idea which is central to Gladwell's second book, Blink, further illustrating the notion that we can make accurate judgment about people and their performances in a split second, judgments that are confirmed by longer and deeper study. One of those judgments has to do with who makes effective teachers and why. And many administrators will not be surprised that it walks the line between being attentive to individuation and overall classroom management. Here are the two relevant excerpts. (I realize these quotes go beyond fair use, but I've told you where you can find Mr. Gladwell's entire work, and I think these two portions are self-sufficient within a much larger piece that addresses many topics other than teaching.)

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is “value added” analysis. It uses standardized test scores to look at how much the academic performance of students in a given teacher’s classroom changes between the beginning and the end of the school year. Suppose that Mrs. Brown and Mr. Smith both teach a classroom of third graders who score at the fiftieth percentile on math and reading tests on the first day of school, in September. When the students are retested, in June, Mrs. Brown’s class scores at the seventieth percentile, while Mr. Smith’s students have fallen to the fortieth percentile. That change in the students’ rankings, value-added theory says, is a meaningful indicator of how much more effective Mrs. Brown is as a teacher than Mr. Smith.

It’s only a crude measure, of course. A teacher is not solely responsible for how much is learned in a classroom, and not everything of value that a teacher imparts to his or her students can be captured on a standardized test. Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more—and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world—the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like. The school system has a quarterback problem...[This refers to an earlier portion of this piece, describing the problem of recruiting NCAA quarterbacks for the NFL, given that the skill set for quarterbacks in the respective leagues is almost entirely different.]

...Picture a young preschool teacher, sitting on a classroom floor surrounded by seven children. She is holding an alphabet book, and working through the letters with the children, one by one: “ ‘A’ is for apple. . . . ‘C’ is for cow.” The session was taped, and the videotape is being watched by a group of experts, who are charting and grading each of the teacher’s moves.

After thirty seconds, the leader of the group—Bob Pianta, the dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education—stops the tape. He points to two little girls on the right side of the circle. They are unusually active, leaning into the circle and reaching out to touch the book.

“What I’m struck by is how lively the affect is in this room,” Pianta said. “One of the things the teacher is doing is creating a holding space for that. And what distinguishes her from other teachers is that she flexibly allows the kids to move and point to the book. She’s not rigidly forcing the kids to sit back.”

Pianta’s team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom. Pianta stopped and rewound the tape twice, until what the teacher had managed to achieve became plain: the children were active, but somehow the class hadn’t become a free-for-all.

“A lesser teacher would have responded to the kids’ leaning over as misbehavior,” Pianta went on. “ ‘We can’t do this right now. You need to be sitting still.’ She would have turned this off.”

Bridget Hamre, one of Pianta’s colleagues, chimed in: “These are three- and four-year-olds. At this age, when kids show their engagement it’s not like the way we show our engagement, where we look alert. They’re leaning forward and wriggling. That’s their way of doing it. And a good teacher doesn’t interpret that as bad behavior. You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student’s perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom.”

The lesson continued. Pianta pointed out how the teacher managed to personalize the material. “ ‘C’ is for cow” turned into a short discussion of which of the kids had ever visited a farm. “Almost every time a child says something, she responds to it, which is what we describe as teacher sensitivity,” Hamre said.

The teacher then asked the children if anyone’s name began with that letter. “Calvin,” a boy named Calvin says. The teacher nods, and says, “Calvin starts with ‘C.’ ” A little girl in the middle says, “Me!” The teacher turns to her. “Your name’s Venisha. Letter ‘V.’ Venisha.”

It was a key moment. Of all the teacher elements analyzed by the Virginia group, feedback—a direct, personal response by a teacher to a specific statement by a student—seems to be most closely linked to academic success. Not only did the teacher catch the “Me!” amid the wiggling and tumult; she addressed it directly.

“Mind you, that’s not great feedback,” Hamre said. “High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.” The perfect way to handle that moment would have been for the teacher to pause and pull out Venisha’s name card, point to the letter “V,” show her how different it is from “C,” and make the class sound out both letters. But the teacher didn’t do that—either because it didn’t occur to her or because she was distracted by the wiggling of the girls to her right.

“On the other hand, she could have completely ignored the girl, which happens a lot,” Hamre went on. “The other thing that happens a lot is the teacher will just say, ‘You’re wrong.’ Yes-no feedback is probably the predominant kind of feedback, which provides almost no information for the kid in terms of learning.”

Pianta showed another tape, of a nearly identical situation: a circle of pre-schoolers around a teacher. The lesson was about how we can tell when someone is happy or sad. The teacher began by acting out a short conversation between two hand puppets, Henrietta and Twiggle: Twiggle is sad until Henrietta shares some watermelon with him.

“The idea that the teacher is trying to get across is that you can tell by looking at somebody’s face how they’re feeling, whether they’re feeling sad or happy,” Hamre said. “What kids of this age tend to say is you can tell how they’re feeling because of something that happened to them. They lost their puppy and that’s why they’re sad. They don’t really get this idea. So she’s been challenged, and she’s struggling.”

The teacher begins, “Remember when we did something and we drew our face?” She touches her face, pointing out her eyes and mouth. “When somebody is happy, their face tells us that they’re happy. And their eyes tell us.” The children look on blankly. The teacher plunges on: “Watch, watch.” She smiles broadly. “This is happy! How can you tell that I’m happy? Look at my face. Tell me what changes about my face when I’m happy. No, no, look at my face. . . . No. . . .”

A little girl next to her says, “Eyes,” providing the teacher with an opportunity to use one of her students to draw the lesson out. But the teacher doesn’t hear her. Again, she asks, “What’s changed about my face?” She smiles and she frowns, as if she can reach the children by sheer force of repetition. Pianta stopped the tape. One problem, he pointed out, was that Henrietta made Twiggle happy by sharing watermelon with him, which doesn’t illustrate what the lesson is about.

“You know, a better way to handle this would be to anchor something around the kids,” Pianta said. “She should ask, ‘What makes you feel happy?’ The kids could answer. Then she could say, ‘Show me your face when you have that feeling? O.K., what does So-and-So’s face look like? Now tell me what makes you sad. Show me your face when you’re sad. Oh, look, her face changed!’ You’ve basically made the point. And then you could have the kids practice, or something. But this is going to go nowhere.”

“What’s changed about my face?” the teacher repeated, for what seemed like the hundredth time. One boy leaned forward into the circle, trying to engage himself in the lesson, in the way that little children do. His eyes were on the teacher. “Sit up!” she snapped at him.

As Pianta played one tape after another, the patterns started to become clear. Here was a teacher who read out sentences, in a spelling test, and every sentence came from her own life—“I went to a wedding last week”—which meant she was missing an opportunity to say something that engaged her students. Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn’t turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.

Then there was the superstar—a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. “So let’s see,” he began, standing up at the blackboard. “Special right triangles. We’re going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas.” He drew two triangles. “Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can’t, we’ll all do it.” He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn’t easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can’t, we’ll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who’d evidently missed a few classes. “See what you can remember, Ben,” the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: “I’m going to give you a way to get to it.” He made a quick suggestion: “How about that?” Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. “That’s all right!” He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson—the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer—he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further.

“In a group like this, the standard m.o. would be: he’s at the board, broadcasting to the kids, and has no idea who knows what he’s doing and who doesn’t know,” Pianta said. “But he’s giving individualized feedback. He’s off the charts on feedback.” Pianta and his team watched in awe.

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar. The preschool teacher with the alphabet book was sensitive to her students’ needs and knew how to let the two girls on the right wiggle and squirm without disrupting the rest of the students; the trigonometry teacher knew how to complete a circuit of his classroom in two and a half minutes and make everyone feel as if he or she were getting his personal attention. But these aren’t cognitive skills.

A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans.

Another educational researcher, Jacob Kounin, once did an analysis of “desist” events, in which a teacher has to stop some kind of misbehavior. In one instance, “Mary leans toward the table to her right and whispers to Jane. Both she and Jane giggle. The teacher says, ‘Mary and Jane, stop that!’ ” That’s a desist event. But how a teacher desists—her tone of voice, her attitudes, her choice of words—appears to make no difference at all in maintaining an orderly classroom. How can that be? Kounin went back over the videotape and noticed that forty-five seconds before Mary whispered to Jane, Lucy and John had started whispering. Then Robert had noticed and joined in, making Jane giggle, whereupon Jane said something to John. Then Mary whispered to Jane. It was a contagious chain of misbehavior, and what really was significant was not how a teacher stopped the deviancy at the end of the chain but whether she was able to stop the chain before it started. Kounin called that ability “withitness,” which he defined as “a teacher’s communicating to the children by her actual behavior (rather than by verbally announcing: ‘I know what’s going on’) that she knows what the children are doing, or has the proverbial ‘eyes in the back of her head.’ ” It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness. But how do you know whether someone has withitness until she stands up in front of a classroom of twenty-five wiggly Janes, Lucys, Johns, and Roberts and tries to impose order?

I can say from experience, that "withitness" is diabolically difficult to learn and develop, other than for those naturally gifted ones, like Gladwell's model high school math teacher. But everyday, we go back into the classroom and try to get just a little bit better at relating to every person in that room and giving them the feedback they need to go a little farther.

It is very possible that the toolbox that Gladwell is describing, that awareness of the entire room and of every individual student is not teachable. Perhaps if a teaching candidate has a glimmer of the ability, it can be brought out and heightened. But if a person is naturally socially unaware, unable to read others and unable to relate to more than one person at a time, they may never be functional as a classroom teacher. And none of it has anything to do with earning one more Masters.

When we are asking our students to achieve more along a predefined scale, is it fair to be giving teachers an "A" for effort?