Teachers Cheat, Too!

In a school culture where we teachers try so hard to help students be honest (and not to cheat), why then do we hear of more and more teachers cheating themselves?

The answer is simple. More and more (ignorant, ill-educated, ill-informed) legislators are imposing sanctions on teachers–and schools!–where students are not performing yet better on high-stakes standardized tests.

When NCLB was the only game in town, some schools across the country were even shut down because their students didn’t show adequate yearly progress. When Obama announced the voluntary excision of NCLB from the states, we thought sure there would be more states opting out, but that hasn’t proven to be the case. I think it is because legislators still demand standardized-test proof that schools are doing well, and states haven’t come up with alternative measures for it.

I think the direction is clear. At present, many schools base performance pay on student scores. It’s a short leap to setting salaries by test scores, and a small tumble down the precipice to firing teachers based on these scores.

No wonder teachers are induced to cheat. Here are some ways they do it. 

My favorite way for adults to handle these unfair measurements is John Gatto’s Bartleby Project.  In Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the main character handles his daily grind by politely saying, “I would prefer not to.”

Of course, teachers can’t say that, but students can. I wish that Gatto’s approach would become a national movement.

Retiring and my Juvenile Corrections Class

I left college teaching so I could teach in juvenile corrections. What I brought was an arts-based approach to teaching and learning–and what developed has been more than a decade of wonderful relationships with incarcerated kids and with staff inside the facility. If it were not for new state and local strictures which actually forbid me from spending any time in arts instruction “inside,” I’d have a hard time actually letting go and retiring. As it is, however, for the last two years, I’ve been censured and restricted from doing any instruction, and particularly and always, arts instruction. It seems that the new fashion is more and more “answer-the-questions” worksheets–as if half a century or more of research has not proven that to be ineffective at best and perhaps harmful at worst. The research shows that arts-based instruction enhances intellectual capacity and creates positive reinforcement for academics–but evidently the juvenile-corrections educational administrations just do not care. I see arts instruction as a way of opening lifelong doors to rehabilitation and permanent change, and the facility staff has always agreed and supported it. I have tried to be compliant with the educational administration, but just weeks before my retirement, I don’t so much care anymore. What are they going to do, fire me? Of course, I still work to support their educational goals by making sure the book work gets done, but at the same time, I always include some kind of art, music, rhythm, movement or other activity.

Last Friday, after several days of learning basic body percussion a la Keith Terry, 

which I learned at a Body Percussion Conference a couple of years ago, I showed them a wonderful YouTube video by a favorite group, Molodi, and then I taught them a short sequence I learned during the workshop (a brief disclaimer: it was hard for me to learn everything Molodi taught in the workshop, since most everyone there was under 30 and as you can guess, I am certainly not, but taking such risks is what helps me be a better teacher). 

The sequence was a little hard for them, too. We had a good time practicing, laughing, and learning. Afterward, when we settled back down to the books, they started talking to me.

“You can’t retire!” they were saying. “I will give you $100 if you don’t retire! Who is going to teach us if you retire?”

This is about art, music, rhythm, and love. This is about changing lives. This is about relationships. This is sad indeed. But in the long run, retirement is probably the best thing for right now. If you could have been in the meeting where the administrator said, I kid you not, “Teachers, there will be no more teaching!”, then you would know that there is no hope for me left in my juvenile-corrections class. Hopefully after retiring, when we move to warmer climes, I can find another, more supportive venue, to bring the gifts that I have.

How much is too much? Common Core

From what I can read online, one of the big criticisms of the Common Core is that it prescribes too much. Critics feel that good teachers know what to teach without so much detail.

Could be…although I see plenty of Language Arts teachers, for example, just having the students read the offerings in the books and answering the questions. In such cases, the Common Core is certainly a better alternative, because it purports to help students figure things out with critical thinking skills instead of just doing the book/question routine.

At least the Common Core gives students a chance to read and experience the classics. And if a teacher is skilled, students can even understand what they’re reading. That would be a gift! Assessments are another problem, because if higher-level thinking is the criterion, that’s indeed tricky to assess. I guess the potential test writers will have to do some higher-level thinking too.

Common Core Solves High-Stakes Test Issues

If you are like me, you have despaired of the immovable entrenchment of high-stakes standardized tests at all grade levels. Teachers of tested subjects are so bound by the pressures of high-stakes test results that they often feel they can’t teach their best; they just teach to the test.

The Common Core curriculum solves this.

The whole point of the Common Core is to promote higher-level thinking, problem-solving, true understanding, and being able to apply what you learn. This is directly antithetical to teaching to the standardized test.

Did you know that on average, one in four high school students don’t graduate? And did you know that one in five cannot even read their diplomas? Yet these are students from schools that have passed AYP, which means that a high percentage of all students have passed the standardized tests. Clearly, they haven’t learned; they haven’t learned! Certainly they haven’t understood.

The Common Core requires understanding. True, there is a big lag between the actual Core and tests which address it, and that’s a problem, because students in schools with Common Core may not pass the standardized tests.

But from my point of view, the test results don’t show us much, unless they are formative tests, which only help us to see where students need help. The projects based on the Common Core certainly do show us that students understand.

Conservatives and the Common Core

There’s a state chapter of the Eagle Forum that hates the Common Core. They go to the Legislature every year to fight against it, along with sex education and other conservative issues.

As I understand it, they think that the Common Core will demand that everyone teach material that is offensive and that will corrode the family. They want teachers to have complete freedom in choosing curriculum so that somehow this will keep family values safe.

The irony here is that the Common Core material, which was selected by top teachers all over the nation, is very traditional. If you were to choose material that would actually suit conservatives this would be much of the Common Core. Ironically, if you have read Generation  Me, you know that many young teachers today are members of the Me Generation, many of whom might not have even been exposed to the standard literature works that the Common Core provides.

I wish that conservatives would take time to peruse the common core literature list to see the excellent works provided there. I think they would see that there’s nothing subversive here. Indeed, they will likely see that these are friendly and familiar works that they read when they grew up.

Drum Building Workshop 2013

This last week, and this upcoming week, we are making drums with our lovely Artist in Residence, Stan the Drum Man! Stay tuned for astonishing pictures of drums in progress!

Using Choice for Intellectual Development

The bell rings; go to class. Take out your pencils, write your name on the top right of the paper. Answer the questions (correctly!) in the chapter and turn in to be checked.

All of this produces obedient children and potentially good test scores, but it cannot produce thinkers.

There is a well-researched, brilliant pedagogy (for visual art) that I think can be applied to self-contained classrooms as well: Teaching for Artistic Behavior.

The idea: Teach children basic techniques with varying materials, show how to use for the particular subject-matter projects, and let them choose how to do it.

Choose! Will children choose well? Will they work well?

What’s the choice: give it a try or raise a nation of automatons? Even one day of choice per week, even a morning or an afternoon, compels children to think about what they’re doing, instead of simply and mindlessly doing what they’re told.

Will they fool around? Waste time? Misbehave? Do mediocre work?

The research–and many teachers’ classroom practice–say otherwise. My own experience is that students work hard to reach excellence, far harder than they would otherwise.

If you use art projects to teach academics, students must review concepts over and over in order to include them in the project. This type of review is deeper and more lasting.

Eventually, our students will graduate and enter a world of choices. Many of them fall into serious debt, drug use, sometimes aimlessness. We adults like to blame young people for this behaviors, but what if we have contributed to such behaviors by never helping kids make real choices?

We have the chance to do this in our classrooms. We should give it a try.

Brain Friendly

What happens to your brain when you get stressed?

There may be several possible answers, but the one that is most important for educators and learners is this:

In stress conditions, the neural pathways to long-term and short-term learning are chemically blocked. This means that no matter how much you’ve studied, how hard you try, and how much you want to remember, it’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to remember.

What causes stress?

These days, we live in stress. Kids go to school and eat breakfast loaded with refined carbs. They may have left their mom at home high, hungry, bruised, or worried to death. Dad may have been picked up late last night by the police. Kids may have been watching movies or TV shows filled with brutality and blood. They may have been exchanging bullying texts with other kids. We don’t know, but we do know that they live in an environment drenched with stress.

This means that no matter how hard they try to remember (and how hard we try to help them), the neural pathways are blocked, and it’s not going to happen, at least not very well.

How can we restore the neural pathways? For this, we have to replace stress chemicals with pleasure chemicals, such as dopamine and endorphins. And how can we do that in school?

Joyous surprise: our brains produce these pleasure chemicals with physical exercise and arts activities. Some schools, following the brilliant research in the recent book Spark, incorporate strenuous physical activity in the morning, sometimes throughout the day.

Lacking that, every classroom teacher can do one important thing: use arts activities to teach the academic core standards. Even very simple activities such as drawing or painting a science concept or vocabulary list can replace stress chemicals with pleasure chemicals.

Happily, these types of activities also reinforce learning, since they require higher-level thinking to produce them.

That’s my alternative-learning tip for today and for always: teach with arts activities.

Charter Schools I Love

If I were a young teacher, I’d work hard to set up an arts charter school.

There’s a cool one on the other side of the mountain here in Utah. On this side of the mountain, we are rather culturally deprived and certainly have far fewer funds than over there. The funny advertising slogan someone came up with is “the other side of Utah,” which we translate to mean, “the backside of Utah.” It certainly feels that way much of the time.

The arts charter school of which I speak is a great model. They practice performing arts, theater and music, during most of the day. There’s time provided during the day, and also provided after school and evenings, to do online core subjects. What a great way to do high school! What a great way to grow up!

There are many models of arts virtual schools. I like the idea of using cross-curricular instruction to teach the core, which is the model of Waldorf schools. There are Waldorf charter schools which do this very thing; two of my grandchildren attend such a school. Although they aren’t purist Waldorf schools, I think the adaptations they have to make to be charter schools, such as having certified teachers, are all good. Similarly, you can find Montessori charter schools which utilize this positive and humane approach.

For the science and technology charter schools, the reviews are mixed. This is because it’s very hard to find a large enough population, with the commitment and academic vigor, to sustain good work over the long-term in rigorous subjects.

We don’t particularly hear about athletic charter schools, but there are issues surrounding athletics, mainly that charter schools sometimes recruit and use top athletes that don’t attend their schools, and there is not enough regulation over that.

Measuring by academic achievement, there’s no good argument for thinking charter schools are better than regular public schools, but for these types of specialties, the arts, which are the birthright of all children but which are being cut in many schools, hurray for charters which will keep arts alive!

Online Charter Schools

Many states have enacted legislation that allows secondary students to take some online classes in lieu of their regularly scheduled classes.  Of course, this is often disliked by school districts, who lose per-pupil funding, which goes to the online providers. In addition, this generation of students often has a hard time actually staying with these independent courses and often fail to complete them.

The same problem goes for online charter schools.

It’s one thing to get all excited, leave your brick-and-mortar school, and enroll in an online charter school, most of which are using curricula prepared by commercial companies, and which curricula are generally quite good. It’s another thing to log on every day and complete the day’s assignments. Taken one bite at a time, these assignments are doable, though doing a full high-school schedule, for example, may take the typical five or six hours you’d spend in a regular school, especially if you are not a quick reader. Because of the nature of online learning, you need to be able to read quite well and type pretty quickly. You need to be an able test-taker as well, since the assessments are largely quizzes and tests, though in many courses, you will write short essays as well. In some courses like art and PE, you’ll have offline assignments that you then submit online.

For those students with academically-agressive parents, those with committed homeschool parents, those with stay-at-home parents, this can work, if the students are also intellectually alive and personally committed. Online schooling works well for them, as well as for students who are performers of some kind, since they can travel and still do their work.

These days, sadly, there are not that many of these types of families. Students with stressful family situations, and that includes many of us, do less well, and students also often deliberately choose to work full-time and ignore their online work. These count as dropouts at the end of the day, and since online schools are still under scrutiny to see how they work, the dropouts trouble virtual school administrators, both personally and statistically.

It’s sort of a catch-phrase, that virtual courses are the future of education. In theory, what could be better? Students can take a huge spectrum of courses, far more varied than could be offered in any particular school. Still, in practice, maybe it’s not educational nirvana, not yet.