Their Best Learning

I just spent three days consulting in a district in a neighboring state.  At the end of the second day I met with an administrator , as I typically do, to debrief the first two days of my visit.  During this meeting, I was struck by a comment she made.  She said, “It’s not about our best teaching, it’s about how our kids best learn.”  It wasn’t just a clever, pithy remark; to me, it signifies a colossal shift in thinking about teaching and learning.  It’s not about our best teaching and this age-old focus is beginning to change in districts everywhere.  It’s about what they are (or are not) learning.

Embedded in her comment is the notion that our kids don’t all ‘learn best’ in the same way.  That’s one of the shortcomings of the ‘best teaching’ mentality:  unless we design lessons that accomodate diverse learners and put into practice the oft-spoken language of differentiated instruction, our ‘best teaching’ – good as it may be for some kids – may sorely miss the mark for many other kids.

When we all as a community of educators shift our emphasis from good teaching to good learning, we begin to design different kinds of lessons, lessons that reflect “how our kids best learn.”  dven.

Poor Kids

The widespread incident of neighborhood violence and drug usage in America’s inner cities has had and continues to have a devastating impact on her urban schools.  There’s no denying it.  The district in which I work is the nation’s 18th largest district.  Our city has the state’s highest crime rate and the neighborhood in our city with the highest crime rate includes a middle school in which I was recently stationed for 6 intensive weeks as part of LEA Improvement (since our entire district of 180 schools is currently in Corrective Action, as per NCLB legislation).  That is all to say, I get to see the impact of neighborhood crime, violence, and drug use first hand.

But these are all corollary to a more fundamental problem: poverty.  The number of children in the US living in poverty – both urban and rural poverty -  is staggering.  The graph below depicts America’s children living in as compare to the poverty rate of other  countries.

How can the most economically advantaged country in the world permit so many economically disadvantaged children?
I first saw this graph as I prepared a workshop for teachers on Urban Education.  The more I researched this topic, and learned about the incident of students living in poverty, the more I became outraged.  How could this state of affairs have happened in our America?
I don’t have a solution – there is no quick and easy solution.  But as a citizen and especially as an educator who is routinely entrenched in the mess it has caused, I am outraged and think every citizen should be likewise.

The impact of poverty trumps the impact of drugs, crime, and violence.  Indeed, the latter follow quite predictably from the former.  dven.

Thanksgiving & Year-round Schooling

When I was in the classroom, just a few years ago, I always looked forward to Thanksgiving. Sure, it represents the first significant (and well-deserved) holiday break from school, but that wasn’t the only reason. For me, Thanksgiving represented the psychological half-way point of the school year.  Once Thanksgiving passes, it seemed to me, the year starts to really fly by and before I knew it, Spring was upon me.  I realize, of course, that Thanksgiving is a fair bit shy of the actual, chronological midpoint, but it always seemed like half the year was over upon its colorful and self-indulgent arrival.

But it occurs to me that this feeling could change in the event that the resurgent talk of year-round schooling becomes a reality.  What gets me about all this talk is that the proponents of year-round schooling – most often people not in education – act as though extending the school year will, by itself, increase student learning and improve sagging student achievement.

I’ve read the recent NAEP report and I know we’re not doing so well, overall, as a nation in an increasingly flat world.  But more of a bad thing is not a good thing.  It’s just…well….more of a bad thing.  That’s like going to a really bad restaurant which serves really bad food and somehow feeling good about the experience because the portions were really large.

I would like to know from my readers what you think about year-round schooling.  And while you’re responding, tell me:  Does Thanksgiving feel like the psychological half-way point to you?  dven.

Sound off: Teacher Salaries

I recently learned that a typical Supreme Court Justice earns about $200,000 a year.  Judge Judy, on the other hand, makes about $25,000,000 a year.  What is wrong with this picture?!!

The average teacher in public K-12 education earns $54,000 a year.  I won’t even venture a guess as to what the average non-college educated, professional athlete makes in a year.

What would happen, do you suppose, if the average teacher salary in the U.S. was, say, $100,000?  How much greater would the pool of new teachers be?  How and in what ways might this transform our educational system?  How much better would our public schools be?  How would this impact our current, abysmal national drop-out rate, or our society as a whole?  How much more competitive would the U.S. be in the global economy, the same one in which we are slowly and steadily losing ground and falling behind?

There are those who would argue that young people who go into teaching do so for the other more important and significant rewards of impacting young lives. I would not disagree.  But anyone who has been in education for as long as I knows that we don’t always attract the best and the brightest to our field.  Could it be that if young people were paid competitive salaries to teach – salaries comparable to those offered by business or even medicine – we would attract more talent, while at the same time preserve the more nobel aspects and motivations for entering our profession?

I know, I know.  This is a pipe dream.  But something must change:  approximately  50% of our present teacher work-force will retire in the next decade.  Who will replace them?  dven.

Math Across the Curriculum

There is a push in many schools and districts to adopt Writing Across the Curriculum initiatives. This is not a terribly new idea; indeed, many schools began pursuing this notion more than a decade ago. But more and more schools, suffering from low ELA scores, have begun to realize that reading and writing are fundamental to student success in most every subject. The research is clear that deficits in reading and writing correlate to deficits observed in student performance in other subjects. In fact, I have recently been contracted by a district in a neighboring state to conduct four full-day workshops to their teachers on the subject of Writing in Math.

In a parallel way (no pun intended), I’m an advocate for what I call Math Across the Curriculum, particularly for grades K – 8. While not quite as ubiquitous as reading and writing, math concepts and usage can be embedded in nearly every subject. Math’s relationship to science is clear – and as such, this relationship often overshadows Math’s connection to other subjects like Art, Music, Social Studies and even sports.

As a math teacher, I would love to team-teach a middle school class with a social studies teacher and apply math to everything from voting to social networking. When kids see connections of math to other subjects in unanticipated ways, they come to appreciate it more and math concepts become useful tools in order to better understand our world – instead of a seemingly irrelevant body of rules and procedures.

Additionally, I’d also love to offer a college course to teachers on Math Across the Curriculum, helping teachers of other subjects understand math’s applications to their subjects and explore ways to embed it in their classes. dven.

<To invite Mr. Venables to your school or district to teach your teachers what math lives silently in the course they teach, contact him directly at danielvenables@mac.com.>

90/90/90 Schools

Doug Reeves’ work with 90/90/90 Schools is compelling stuff. For readers unfamiliar, researcher and educational author Douglas Reeves looked at public schools that were composed of at least 90% minority students, had at least 90% of their students on Free and Reduced Lunch and had a 90% or better pass rate on state End-of-Year assessments. He compiled a staggering battery of data on these schools and sought to find out what else they had in common and what they were doing to produce such impressive student results.

He found five basic tenets common to these schools that were correlated to student performance. They are:

1. strong focus on achievement

2. clear curricular choices

3. frequent and multiple assessments

4. strong emphasis on writing in all subjects

5. external scoring of student work

The point of this blog entry is not to expound on these 5 characteristics. Teachers and schools interested in learning more about each of these attributes should go here for a short summary of the research.

The point here is that there are models of excellence for schools that are most commonly low-performing and in many ways operate “against all odds.”  If your school is a 90/90/<90 school, I urge you to take a hard look at Dr. Reeves’ work. It not only shatters demographic stereotypes, it provides hope to teachers who teach every day against the odds, hope that their students too can excel in spite of the odds. dven.

Tough Kids = Low Standards?

For the three years I was an academic coach at two of our district’s lowest-performing high schools I had the opportunity to visit lots of classes. Lots. I estimate having observed close to 700 – 800 math classes.  In this time, I saw some exemplary teaching and I have shared many of the best strategies and activities that I observed with other districts when I consult throughout the southeast. But I also saw some very ineffective teaching; in fact, the reason I was assigned to these schools was because they were low-performing and because classroom instruction was most often lacking.

What I noticed with the ineffective teachers was they seem to have one thing in common:  they didn’t expect much of their students. It was as if somewhere in their careers they decided that kids in these high-needs schools weren’t capable of producing quality work or high-level thinking. With this self-fulfilling prophecy as the backdrop, they lowered their expectations of their students and of themselves to pathetically low levels. It was as if they sold out, growing complacent with shoddy work and being satisfied with any work their students produced. That the same quality of work (or lack thereof) would never be accepted in the more affluent, “whiter” schools did not seem to phase them or even enter their minds.

Was it that they – the teachers themselves – had little idea what quality work was, or that they simply stopped battling kids to do good work? I don’t know. What I do know is that every time a teacher accepts shoddy work and tells kids it’s good, or good enough, we are increasing the achievement gap. And when we do, we contribute to the educational inequity that plagues our public schools. We become part of the problem, perpetuators of the problem, and not part of the solution.

Love to hear what you think…. dven.

<To invite Mr. Venables to your school or district, contact him directly at danielvenables@mac.com>

Homework Blues

(This blog entry topic was suggested by several readers on the TC facebook page in response to A Metablog Entry).

Homework has been around since public schools began – longer really, since it was all home work before then. And issues surrounding homework persist to this day. Some educational theorists have suggested that HW may even become obsolete in the coming decade(s); others posit that it will soon be a 100% online experience for students.

The issues surrounding HW vary widely, depending on the context in which it is assigned. In prestigious privates schools (like the one in which I taught at one time in my career), the issue might be that teachers are assigning too much HW and that their hard-working Ivy League-bound students are spending untold hours after school trying desperately to complete it all each night. In tough high-needs schools (like the one in which I also taught), the issue might be that kids simply don’t do HW and to assign it is to find, day after day, that only 10 or 15% of the kids bothered to do it. And there is the middle group who might be interested in ways to get more kids to do HW regularly or in policy advice about how much to count HW, whether it should be collected or just checked and what criteria should be used to grade it.

The advice I would offer to each of these groups would be different; clearly, it is not feasible to address all issues surrounding HW here. What I can offer here are some guiding principles I use regarding HW:

1. I ask myself: Why is HW important in this course? What is the purpose of HW as it relates to this subject? Is it essential for students to master the lesson? Why? How? Is it instead busywork, being assigned because we’re supposed to give HW and they’re supposed to work outside of class?

2. I never assign HW if I’m not 100% positive they can be successful at it. Is their in-class mastery level sufficient so that I am confident that 90% of the kids can go home and do it successfully on their own?

3. I don’t grade HW for accuracy. Even though I send them home to do work at which I am confident they can be successful, there will always be mistakes. HW is a time to practice and practice presupposes messing up here and there. Grading HW for accuracy encourages copying and cheating. I reward effort, completeness and organization but allow for them to be “wrong” in their practice without penalty.

4. I try to include some writing component in at least half of all HW I assign. This is possible in all subjects (remember, I taught math) even if only to have them answer the prompt What was the point of today’s lesson? Be specific. I love using this prompt and have found that it often reveals more about their understanding than the “problems” they may have done. Additionally, this kind of HW component weeds out those who would copy pretty easily.

These principles work well in aiding me in assigning meaningful and essential homework. They work particularly well with low-and middle-ability kids but can be used for all students.   dven.

A Metablog Entry

Sometimes when I sit down to write this blog, I think to myself ‘Man, what else can I write about?‘ I’ve written about so many different issues related to education, told a few stories, rambled on, bantered about, and even got on my own soapbox now and again. (To see any of my previous 33 entries, click here.) And while I love writing these entries (or as Billy Joel once said of songwriting, “I like having written better than I like writing.”), I sometimes wonder if people actually take the time from their busy schedules to read my entries. And if so, I wonder how many people read them, particularly people who read my entries (or the entries of my colleagues) with any regularity.

I suspect many more people read the entries than comment on them, though it would be of interest to me to hear more responses and get a better sense of what people are thinking about my rants.

That said, I appreciate all my readers – comments or not – and would love to hear what topics you’d like me to write about in September. Go ahead. Suggest a topic. Ask a question. I’ll take all the help I can get. And I’ll credit you for your idea or question in my entry. dven.

Socialist Schools?

In all the talk these days about Health Care reform and the vehement opinions on both sides about whether or not we want/need a socialist Heath Care System, I keep thinking how we Americans already have at least two significant socialist systems.

Social Security is a socialist system; people working now pay money to people who once worked, those who are now retired. The government provides for the retired with money acquired by those presently working with the intention of providing money for those currently working later on when they retire, from the income earned by future generations. It’s not like the money we pay now gets put into a high-yield account somewhere and we get our own contributions back later on.

The second socialist system we’ve had in place for the past 100 years is public education. We all pay taxes on our income that goes to paying for our public schools, public schools that are (otherwise) free to all children.

Admittedly, the fact that our system of education is essentially socialist can be an argument for either side of the Health Care debate, depending on how one views the effectiveness of our public school system.

No matter, the system is nonetheless socialist. And it is a two-payer system (if I understand this term correctly) in that parents can opt to pay themselves for the private education of their children. Private schools exist, though fewer in number than public schools, and good old-fashioned capitalism prevails and flourishes in this domain.

I have had the good fortune of having taught in both public and private schools and I see benefits to both. The point is that parents have the choice – though they must still pay into the public system if they opt for private schooling – no one is saying you have to send your kids to public schools.

I can understand the debate over the particulars of the Health Care proposal. What I don’t understand is the fuss over the word socialism, given that the practice is not exactly new or foreign to what we already do in other important areas of our American way of  life.  dven.