Summer Vacation

Who has a summer vacation? I have a packed summer, some of which is education related, and a whole lot that is not.

1.  On July 12 (who’s keeping track?) I will finish my series of hoop jumps…err…classes to get my ELL certificate and clear my California credential.  Know what I learned?  Quality teaching with embedded literacy strategies is what’s good for EL students.

2.  For two weeks this summer, my friend and I are going to co-teach a camp for girls entering 7th grade through entering 10th grade.  We’re calling the camp:  “Raising Our Voices,” and the focus is on self-discovery and empowerment through writing, art, and movement.  It’s an extension of our writing camp last summer, and it will culminate in an exhibition for parents on the final night of camp.

3.  On Sundays throughout the summer, I’ll be co-teaching classes with the same friend for women, giving them tools for reflection and empowerment.  It’s an expressive arts modality.

4.  Currently, I’m sitting on our school’s hiring committee to hire anywhere from 6-8 teachers in elementary and middle school.  The process has already taken two weeks, and I anticipate another two weeks.

5.  Somewhere in the midst of all of this I’m going to work on the integrated units we’re planning for next year.  Cool stuff is happening at the middle grades at my school!

6.  Hopefully I’ll have time to rest and read a bit this summer.  I need to recharge my batteries and get ready for next year!

Authenticity in Teaching

I am on day three of interviews, and as I identify my favorite candidates and hear who my colleagues like as well, one trait is common among the top candidates:  they are authentic.

The degree, credential, and experience of the teacher mattered during the screening process, but in the interview, we want to see who you are as a teacher.  The teachers who have spoken candidly, showed their true passion for teaching, and lit up when they began talking about kids are the ones we like.  Don’t get me wrong–you’ve got to have the chops.  You can be authentic but teach a horrible lesson, and you won’t get hired.  I am talking about the difference between someone who clearly is knowledgeable but seems to be putting on an act and someone just as knowledgeable who shows who he or she is, take it or leave it.

I know many people are desperate for jobs, but in the end, a bad fit is a bad fit.  Be real and trust that what you have to offer is exactly what someone else is looking for.

Hiring Hints

One of the best things about my school is that a committee of teachers does the hiring.  Our principal participates and holds her own interview after we have narrowed down the candidates, then we sit down all together and select who our new teachers will be.  Even though it is summer, and even though it is a lot of work, we have no problems getting enough committee members because we are invested in who our colleagues will be.

This year we had at least 800 applications for our open positions, and it took us nearly a week to print them out, review them, and decide who would move on to the email screen.  We are finally holding interviews this week and hope to have someone hired by the end of next week.

As one of the co-chairs of the committee this time, I had the pleasure of receiving the emailed applications for our upper elementary and middle school positions.  As I printed out the applications then later reviewed them with the committee, some common mistakes among applicants came to light.  If you are looking for a job–teaching or otherwise–make sure you aren’t committing one of these job-seeking “crimes” in order to make it past the first screen.

1. Read the advertisement for the position completely.  Re-read it.  Pay attention to what the skills and requirements of the job are as well as how to apply.  If you fail to follow these directions, your chances of making it past the first screen are slim to none.
2. Do not email the contact person to ask them how to apply for the position when it is clearly written in the advertisement.
3. Make sure you spell the contact person’s name correctly.  After all, it is spelled correctly in the ad.
4. When you email documents to apply, do not send a blank email with just the documents attached.  Write a brief, professional note to the person who is receiving your documents.  It is just common courtesy.
5. If we ask you for just your resume and a cover letter, please don’t send us your reference letters, portfolio, and 15 other documents.  It slows down the printing process, and we won’t look at those materials anyway.
6. Tailor your cover letter to the specific school and position to which you are applying.  We have received cover letters with other schools’ names referenced in the letter, and generic letters touting direct instruction skills while we are a constructivist based school.  We are looking to see if you are a match, and if you do not care to sell yourself to this specific audience, you will not get through the screen.
7. EDIT.  Let me say it again:  EDIT.  Have someone else read your documents to make sure you haven’t left words out, made typos, misspelled things, or–true story, and more than once–failed to finish a sentence.  You are presenting an image, and the image you present with numerous editing errors is someone who does not care or pay attention to detail.  While we’re at it, edit your email as well.
8. Do not email the contact person two days after you sent your documents in to ask if we received them/if we have reviewed them/when you are going to be contacted for an interview.  If we do not answer, do not re-send the email every day or two.  This is especially relevant if the job has not closed for applications yet.
9. The sheer number of applications prohibits us from contacting everyone we do not decide to interview.  If you have not been contacted a week after the closing date, you probably won’t be called for an interview.
10. Please do not beg us to take another look at your application if we have already decided not to interview you.  Desperation is not attractive, and we have already decided you are not what we are looking for.  Begging only confirms our decision.
11. Do a little research on the school and its philosophy, especially if we put our website address in the ad.  You can learn a lot about who we are and what we are looking for if you spend some time on our pages.
12. Do not apply for positions that are not listed, just in case we are hiring.  If we have an opening, we have listed it.  If a position opens up, we will put out a new call for applications, and you will have to resubmit.

Following these common sense rules will give you the best chance to making it to the next round.  You have a limited amount of time and ways to make a positive impression on whoever is reviewing your application, so make it count.

Batten Down the Hatches!

We are down to the last three weeks of school which may be the most difficult weeks to teach in a school.  The kids are done, the teachers want to be done, the weather is nice and the last thing we want all want to do is keep working.  This unrest can make even the best students act goofy, and it seems we’re always one eighth grader’s fart away from complete chaos.

The key is to keep working, to set the bar high, and to bring out the most engaging problems to solve.  If my students are busy and engaged, they won’t remember that school is out in another 14 days and start pushing boundaries that have long been in place.  I may be tired, but I am definitely not silly enough to give in.  We’ll work harder in the next few weeks than we have all year.  The goal is to the end the year with students asking, “Already?  School’s out?”

Wish me luck.

Crippled by Compassion

Last week I, along with the rest of my colleagues, got to attend the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ national conference here in San Diego, California.  We moved one of our teacher workdays so teachers could attend because our principal did the math and found that it was cheaper to send the whole staff on a professional development day than it was to send the six teachers who asked to go and hire subs for the two days they’d be gone.

We are working on creating a constructivist math program at our school, and our philosophy is that everyone, not just the math teachers, has a perspective that will help us revamp our program.  So, even though I am an English teacher, I attended and looked forward to learning.

I attended many great sessions and came away with ideas for my own content area as well as math.  I was most excited by NCTM’s process standards that outline the critical thinking required to make meaning of math instead of mimicry as is too often the case.

In a session on the process standards, though, the presenter made a statement that rocked me to my core and absolutely resonated with me:  One of the major issues with American teachers especially is our predilection to rescue kids instead of letting them struggle with the content a bit.  In essence, we’re too compassionate.

Think about it.  How often do we see a kid with a cramped look on his face and rush in to show him how to do something?  What about when they whine and say it’s too haaaaaard?  I get how difficult it is to step back and let them struggle, but I also know that it’s in the disequilibrium that kids have to make sense of things and that’s when the learning happens.  If we do it for them, why would they be persistent with a problem or give it more than 30-seconds?  And how can they become confident, self-directed learners if we don’t ever let them have that experience?  Finally, why would they ever believe that they are able to figure it out if we show them by our actions that we don’t believe they can either?

I’m not talking about not scaffolding instruction or giving input.  What I’m talking about is resisting the urge to fix things for them instead of asking more questions to get them thinking or telling them, “I know you can do this,” and walking away.  For example, this week I passed out four interrelated epitaphs from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters and told the groups to try to piece together the story and figure out the big scandal using evidence to support their thinking.  The scandal is never explicitly stated, but there’s enough evidence in the text to figure it out.  Beyond that, there are a number of conclusions that students could make a case for, so there was more than one right answer.

Groups read each epitaph and discussed it for maybe a minute before they started whining.  “I don’t get it!”  “What’s the answer?  We can’t figure it out.”  I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I don’t have any clue,” then told them I knew they could figure it out.  After realizing I really was going to make them suck it up and keep working at it, they returned to the text and started trying to work it out.  I circulated among the groups and listened.  When I did speak, it was usually to ask a question to help kids dig deeper in their own thinking.  It took some time, but in each group the light bulb would click on, and the kids would get excited because they would figure out something plausible.

Groups shared their conclusions with each other at the end of it and debated the merits of each group’s result.  And my whiny kids?  To a person, they all said, “Hey, can we do more stuff like this?  This was cool!”  They did something hard and prevailed; I think that’s pretty cool myself.

One of my early mentors gave me great advice that speaks to the issue of crippling kids with compassion.  She told me, “Don’t do anything for the kids that they can do themselves, and if they can’t do it themselves, teach them the tools they need so they can.”  Wise words.

The Next Year Begins in March

Yes, you read the title correctly.  In schools, teachers and administrators already have their minds working on the next school year.  Schedules, staff changes, program changes, things we want to do differently, these are the topics of conversation in staff meetings and the teachers’ lounge.  It’s not that we stop thinking about our current students and what they need, it’s that we’ve gotten to know our kids and have the time and mental space to start reflecting and planning for the next year.  Good teachers never teach the same way twice, and good schools are always looking to build upon what is already successful.

I have been at my school for nearly five years now, and I haven’t had the same set-up or schedule two years in a row.  Next year will be no different:  we are transitioning to a middle-school-wide theme each quarter with integrated core blocks instead of segregated content (except for math, which, until our teachers become more familiar with problem-based math will sit outside the regular core block and be opposite specials classes).  We will be designing units as a team with essential questions and culminating projects that result in quarterly project nights for families to attend.  We also plan to do lots of grouping and regrouping among all levels of our students by interest, mixed grade levels, and skill sets as necessary to facilitate their learning.  It feels like a huge undertaking, but our principal has figured out how to get us extra common planning time two days a week in addition to our individual planning time.  It is exciting!

We go into this process knowing it will be imperfect at first, but we also know we will learn a lot and it reflects what we know about teaching and learning.  Most of all, we believe this is the right direction for kids.

Oh Won’t You Please Come Home?

I love that my kids love to read and that I have the resources to develop a high quality classroom library.  What I do not love so much are all the missing books.  I have estimated that several hundred dollars’ worth of books have gone missing this school year, and no one seems to know where they are.  I have visions of books buried in gooey backpacks or stuffed under dirty clothes in the closet.

I have tried many systems, and I simply cannot devise a system that requires more effort than my daily planning for instruction.  I wish Nancie Atwell would tell me how she made her card system work because I am following her plan, and I am still missing books!  The kids who faithfully record the books they check out on their cards are the ones who return them.  Without standing at the door and demanding kids show me proof they have checked out their books like some sort of prison guard, I don’t know how to make it happen.  I can imagine the joy of my colleagues when their students enter class late because, “Mrs. B. is crazy about her books; she patted me down just to make sure I wasn’t sneakin’ out with any.”

Does anyone have a system that worked beautifully for them that didn’t require hours of management and excessive paperwork?  It is hard to expand one’s library when books have to be continually replaced.  Ugh.

More Doesn’t Equal Rigor

For my current CTEL class, during week three I have five chapters to read and three papers to research and write.  Although I’m starting on them this week (along with the two chapters and one paper due next Monday), I’m wondering when I am supposed to grade papers, attend IEP meetings, plan, and oh, I don’t know, sleep and eat and the rest of that unnecessary stuff.  More importantly, I wonder what, exactly, I will actually remember after the blur of research and paper writing.  There’s no opportunity to go deep and wallow in the information, just time to get enough of a handle on it to say something intelligent enough to collect my A and move on to the next week’s two papers and six chapters.

Forgive my whining; I do have a relevant point here.

I have seen teachers pile on the work and pace in the name of rigor, primarily tasks at the lower end of Bloom’s Taxonomy that do not result in lasting learning.  One teacher I know of had her kids do a three-circle Venn Diagram (good) comparing three world religions, but kids had to collect 100-facts for each circle (bad).  What understandings did kids leave with?  Why 100 facts instead of 8-10 aspects of each religion that kids thought were crucial to understanding the conceptual differences and similarities among the religions?  What is the likelihood of understanding and retention of information in the former versus the latter assignment?

More doesn’t mean it’s more rigorous, it just means it’s more.  Bloom’s is one of those key pieces of learning from education programs, yet I see so many lessons and activities that never get past the application level.  When teachers look to “challenge” kids or be perceived as rigorous, they assign more problems or more work instead of going up the Bloom’s scale and making kids really think about what they have learned to integrate it into their existing framework of knowledge.

Personalized Research Paper

I have never understood the English teacher who assigns topics for research papers and then spends the rest of the unit having to fight for students’ interest and help them learn all the skills that go into the research process.  That’s an uphill battle I dropped a long time ago, and the results (and my reading material) have improved tremendously.  This year the results were especially good, and I feel like I have a solid handle on it.

The way I see it, the research process is the same no matter what the topic is, especially at these introductory levels.  Research skills like MLA documentation, thesis statements, organization of ideas, and actually researching aren’t all that fun on their own, so it’s essential to create an authentic and engaging need to know.

This year my eighth graders created a Big Question to research regarding the high school they were planning on attending next year OR about the two or three high schools they were considering.  One student actually researched different instruction styles to help her make a decision, investigating project-based, alternative, and traditional education.  Questions ranged from Is High School X or Y the best fit for me?  to What opportunities for my future does High School Z have for me?  The topic was timely, and the kids wanted to know more about their new schools since they have been in our very small, very close school since first grade.

My seventh graders could choose any topic to create a Big Question about.  Questions included, “Is fast food really a value?” and, “Are Wal-Mart’s business practices ethical?”  One girl investigated the culinary influences in America, someone investigated the impact of energy drinks on health, and another girl made an argument for vegetarianism.

What I did not hear throughout these units was complaining.  Kids were excited and engaged by their topics, and because they wanted to do well, they were more thoughtful and attuned when we had to cover such eat-your-spinach topics such as internal citation.  They had real questions and a need to know, and that made all the difference in the quality of their work and their understanding of the research process.

Stop Playing Politics with Learning

How long would you give your child to learn a second language?  By learning a second language, I mean being able to speak, read, write and listen to it fluently.  They need to be able to acquire new, complex information with abstract terminology in this new language as well, as they are going to have all their classes in that language.

How long for your child?

One of the most important facts I have learned through my ESL classes is that the student’s proficiency is his native language strongly influences his ability to acquire a second language.  Students who come to this country with solid reading and writing instruction in their native language tend to pick up English at a more rapid rate than students who had little or poor quality schooling in their home country.  I had a young woman who entered my classroom directly from Mexico who’d had excellent schooling and some English experience who quickly learned social language and had just a little difficulty accessing academic language, mostly for concepts that were new to her.  However, a student who had entered with little or no literacy experiences would have barely been tapping into social language.

Another thing I have learned in-depth is the degree to which politics has influenced our schools with regards to ESL instruction.  There’s a lot of, “Those people are here, they should speak the language!” sort of conversation, and few people seem to want to heed the extensive research that students will acquire English better if they continue instruction in their native language.  Not only that, but the result of bilingual instruction are bilingual students, certainly a positive for our country.  However, bilingual programs are generally not funded and are the target of politics and the perception that all non-English speaking people in this country are here illegally.

NCLB requires students to begin taking high stakes tests after three years of instruction.  Teachers are blamed for their low test scores, but the fact is that it takes four to ten years for students to reach the sort of proficiency that puts them on an equal playing field with native speakers, with the low-end of the spectrum applying to students with solid literacy proficiency in their native language.  No amount of requiring teachers to receive ESL training changes that timeline, but that’s the approach in my state and it doesn’t make me any less accountable for my ESL students’ scores.

How quickly would you be willing to have your child be held accountable for her learning via state tests in another language?

Let’s stop playing politics with learning.  The kids are here no matter how anyone feels about that, so let’s stop the politics and do what’s best for kids.