When Teachers Were Trusted to Teach

High School Students Documenting Happenings at Occupy Wall Street (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I. Teaching and Time

As a middle and high school English teacher, the students I taught passed the state ELA assessments each year. I can recall none who did not.  But those were simpler days, as I was afforded the time to teach and the discretion to fully determine the content of what I taught.  I was able to build continuity across the year alongside my students as my teaching days were largely uninterrupted.  I can recall one time while teaching that an administrator took to the PA system for most of the day calling for classes to come to the auditorium for pictures. It was a litany of interruptions.  This was such an anomaly that towards the end of the day I sent a senior to the office carrying a white t-shirt with our signatures saying we had surrendered.  In those days, teaching was a respected act.

What people who do not teach don't readily understand is that time matters, not just in the number of days allotted to teaching, but also in the continuity of days. Contrary to many of the teaching evaluation rubrics that situate each lesson as a day, I rarely fit learning into a single class period. Rather our learning flowed more like a natural river, less contained. Learning crossed days adding up to what I could not have named at the beginning.  It was iterative. A learning target that matched those outcomes would have been difficult to state as learning was more about the knowledge the community composed, less about any one self.

A day's interruption cost more than a lesson.

II. Testing in Miami-Dade Public Schools

I was thinking about this a few days ago as my husband read the litany of tests that students from the Miami-Dade Public Schools will take this year.  (Here's a link to the testing calendar. You might want to sit down as the testing calendar runs across three pages.)

My students were assessed daily, but tested rarely. There's so much to be learned from students' work products and conversations that I found myself more often pouring over kids' work wondering what caused x to do y and so on--rather than making paper and pencil tests. Students took on assessment as well, establishing goals and measuring progress.  Leaving assessment matters in teachers'  and students' hands though is not the norm in the United States and it seems certainly not the case in Miami-Dade.

Students there will begin the year sitting for the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading Assessment (FAIR). FAIR is a progress monitoring assessment that measures reading comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, word recognition, and syntax knowledge for students in grades 3-10 (11 & 12 as needed) and a separate set of instruments for K-2 children. The 3-10 manual explaining the assessments is 40-pages. By sitting alongside a child and listening to him/her reading, conversing, studying written and art products--I learned about each child.  I can't help but wonder if the researchers who created the progress monitoring assessments for Florida realized how many other assessments the kids would also be taking, especially children performing at levels 1 or 2 on previous assessments.  For those kids the endless series of tests is daunting and disruptive.

Students in grades 3-11  take the FAIR assessment in the fall and they also take District ELA Writing Pre-Test during the same time period. At the close of these assessments it's time for the Interim Assessment Tests (fall) for these subjects:  English/Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Geometry, Biology 1, United States History, and Civics. In the middle of this testing, third graders also take the Grade 3 Mid-Year Promotion assessment. This is part of the series of assessments that include portfolios, which are administered beginning in January. When my husband read this aloud to me I joked that the only thing the kids could put in their portfolio would be tests. Well the joke was more prophetic than funny. The portfolio looks to be nothing more than a collection of reading passage-based tests with the requisite number of narrative and informational texts accounted for a la CCSS and aligned to benchmark standards.  Here's a link to the 26-page portfolio handbook.

This is hardly a portfolio.

III. Making is Different from Taking

I'll stop here as I don't want to belabor the obvious and I want to make two points:

1. the amount of testing disrupts learning in significant ways--ways that those who promulgate testing schedules like Miami-Dade fail to realize; and  
2. what counts as curriculum is not emergent nor can it easily be negotiated as the testing schedule drives instruction. The actual real world is kept apart from school learning when the year is paced and tests are pre-established. A look at the third grade 'portfolio' shows that.

When I think about the students I taught and why they did well there are a number of reasons. 

1. First, they were most often well-cared for children whose housing, medical and dietary needs were met consistently. I realize that since Bush II many of the ed-reform pundits dismiss the well fed child who has a home and whose medical (including dental) needs are met, but those of us who actually work with children know all too well that when such basic needs are consistently unmet, children most often struggle to learn prescribed lessons at school. They are too busy surviving in the richest of countries.
2. A second reason students did well on these state measures is that they more often than not showed up at school able to read. The students who did not, did not do as well. What happens in K-1 most often shapes academic achievement.
3. A third reason is that most students were taught by competent teachers for years before I received them as students and this learning mattered and could matter as the curriculum I taught was one the students and I co-determined. I capitalized on what the students had learned previously as they determined curriculum. One year I had an eighth grade class who decided to run the class as clubs.  Composing can be folded into lots of experiences. We did not need to keep the current world at bay.
4. Students were fairly motivated to learn given that their agency was prized.  
5. Add to that: Uninterrupted time to teach; freedom to compose curriculum as complicated conversations, freedom to collaborate and co-teach, freedom to represent student achievement and the timelines for achievement in idiosyncratic ways; and permission to err repeatedly, repeatedly.

The most important reason the kids did well is that teachers were trusted to teach without having to be perfect.  I learned the value of risk-taking. We were very much a community in which learning was exciting, expected, and desired. I worked with significant educators who mentored me during my early days of teaching. I can recall one observation a superintendent conducted in which I asked 70+ questions in 60 minutes. It was hardly a shining moment. I was a new teacher and at that time teaching was more about what I was doing and less about the learners.  In lieu of a written evaluation, the superintendent invited me to co-teach.  And so we revised the unit I had been teaching about economic scarcity and The Grapes of Wrath and co-taught for a week. He wanted me to learn and believed I was teachable. I learned something about the well-placed question and even more about observing learning.  This experience helped me to begin the important shift from focusing solely on my teaching to focusing on the interplay between teaching and learning.

And so, our value as teachers was not limited to a single state test measure. Value was not determined by student growth objectives. Value was not a number based on a series of evaluations. We were able to teach and learn alongside students and our peers as there was a belief that "people are competent, they have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge" (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, 2005, pp. ix-x). We worked as members of a settled household.

IV. The Matter of Trust & Complexity

It is the absence of trust that teachers can and will do good work that is most daunting, most damning for learners. This is what the ed-reformers simply do not understand or perhaps do not care to understand. In lieu of trusting teachers, learners will suffer.

Instead of trusting teachers to teach and assess, testing calendars and pacing charts like the one from Miami-Dade are imposed. Some years ago I was invited by a central office to confer with the curriculum and instruction staff about their ELA program. There was quite a crowd that afternoon and the assistant superintendent showed me pages of pacing schedules for their 200+ schools that listed what was to be taught, how it was to be taught, and when what was to be learned would be tested. The calendar ran for 40 weeks. Every minute was accounted for.  It was very neat, very orderly, and so very wrong.  I asked why they wanted to plot the year as they did and they talked about poor academic performance and the need to make sure teachers and principals did what was required. These educators posited teaching as a complicated endeavor, not a complex one. 

I suggested that such tight control would lead to less learning as a simple truth, although perhaps uncomfortable,  is that central office cannot create teaching competency through pacing and testing calendars, through purchased products, by retaining children in third and/or seventh grades as a matter of policy, or by mandating homework, home visits, particular lesson or unit plans, etc.

What rests in teachers' and principals' hands deserves our notice, understanding and respect. Anything less will harm children.

I was largely dismissed by the group. After visiting central office and after an opportunity to study with a new 2nd grade teacher, Ms. Sheridan (pseudonym), I would write about professional learning and how it is critically different than professional development. At that time, the school where Ms. Sheridan taught was made to use the Harper Trophies reading program and to follow the 40-week pacing and testing schedule, regardless of what the assessment data yielded.  The march to the end of the 40 weeks was uninterrupted by meaning making.  (Excerpt below)

from Dressing the Corpse (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

In thinking about the countless Ms. Sheridan's I've met, I want to say that we are more than technicians who act out some central office plan.  Ms. Sheridan would have benefitted to have worked in a place that was more like the settled household I was afforded as a beginning teacher and less like an hourly employee at a factory.  The irony is that she will be evaluated as a teacher and the professional environment which shapes her work as teacher will be situated as a neutral entity. This is such folly. (See excerpt below)

from Dressing the Corpse (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

V. A Final Thought

Teaching is a complex act that needs to be supported, not vilified. Investing in teacher work will benefit our children. 

A Message to Parents: Stop Trusting Your Neighborhood Teacher at Your Own Peril

Art Conversation

This is a message to parents, especially parents who send or plan to send their children to public schools as I do. National and state educational policies and practices are systematically replacing trust in public school educators to make decisions with strict and inflexible control edicts.  The result? Limited decision-making, reduction in the arts by overly valuing reading and mathematics, and inappropriate and irrational evaluation systems are destabilizing schools and will result in narrowed curriculum and reduced learning.  One only has to look at what is happening in Tennessee to shudder, while recognizing that what is happening there is heading soon to the state where you live. 

In a New York Times  article by Michael Winerip, he characterized Tennessee's teacher evaluation process as a method that leads educators off a cliff.  Parents, what you need to understand is if your principals and teachers are falling off the proverbial cliff, so too are your children.

A simple truth is that all educators must be able to make decisions, even faulty ones. To remove decision-making from teachers and principals is to establish systemic failure.  It would be akin to not allowing doctors to make diagnoses for fear they make make errors.  Complexity in many ways requires error.  To be an educator is not an exercise in perfection, something the State of Tennessee seems to have forgotten.  Educators' work is predicated on the complexity of tasks involving relationships, curriculum, pedagogy, learning environment, and assessment. It requires a multitude of decisions.

In Tennessee

As a result of *winning* the Race to the Top grant from the USDOE, Tennessee had to develop and implement a new teacher evaluation process that involved direct observation of teachers four or six times a school year depending on the status of the teacher using a State-developed 6-page rubric and calculation of state assessment results into teacher and principal annual evaluations. Will Shelton, a principal in a Tenneesse middle schools is reported in the NY Times article as saying:

“I’ve never seen such nonsense,” he said. “In the five years I’ve been principal here, I’ve never known so little about what’s going on in my own building.” Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork that he’s stuck in his office for long stretches.
The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year, require Mr. Shelton to do as many observations for his strongest teachers — four a year — as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time...

Michael Winerip concludes:

The state is micromanaging principals to a degree never seen before here, and perhaps anywhere. For example, Mr. Shelton is required to have a pre-observation conference with each teacher (which takes 20 minutes), observe the teacher for a period (50 minutes), conduct a post-observation conference (20 minutes), and fill out a rubric with 19 variables and give teachers a score from 1 to 5 (40 minutes).

He must have copies of his evaluations ready for any visit by a county evaluator, who evaluates whether Mr. Shelton has properly evaluated the teachers.

Below is a copy of the Tennessee rubric.  An observation may be 15-minutes or a full period and the same instrument is used.  To score at the top of the rubric (score of 5 as opposed to a 3 or a 1) the following must be observed and documented.

Tennessee Teacher Evaluation Rubric (Score Point 5)

Standards & Objectives

1. All learning objectives and state content standards are explicitly communicated.
2. Sub-objectives are aligned and logically sequenced to the lesson’s major objective.
3. Learning objectives are: (a) consistently connected to what students have previously learned, (b) know from life experiences, and (c) integrated with other disciplines.
4. Expectations for student performance are clear, demanding, and high.
5. State standards are displayed and referenced throughout the lesson.
6. There is evidence that most students demonstrate mastery of the objective.

Motivating Students

1. The teacher consistently organizes the content so that it is personally meaningful and relevant to
   students.
2. The teacher consistently develops learning experiences where inquiry, curiosity, and exploration are valued.
3. The teacher regularly reinforces and rewards effort.

Presenting Instructional Content

1. Presentation of content always includes: visuals that establish the purpose of the lesson, preview the organization of the lesson, and include internal summaries of the lesson; examples, illustrations, analogies, and labels for new concepts and ideas; modeling by the teacher to demonstrate his or her performance expectations; concise communication; logical sequencing and segmenting; all essential information; no irrelevant, confusing, or non-essential information.

Lesson Structure and Pacing

1. The lesson starts promptly. 
2. The lesson's structure is coherent, with a beginning, middle, end, and time for reflection. 
3. Pacing is brisk and provides many opportunities for individual students who progress at different
   learning rates.
4. Routines for distributing materials are seamless.
5. No instructional time is lost during transitions.

 Activities and Materials

1. Activities and materials include all of the following: support the lesson objectives; are challenging; sustain students’ attention; elicit a variety of thinking; provide time for reflection; are relevant to students’ lives; provide opportunities for student-to-student interaction; induce student curiosity and suspense; provide students with choices; incorporate multimedia and technology; and incorporate resources beyond the school curriculum texts (e.g., teacher-made materials, manipulatives, resources from museums, cultural centers, etc). 
2. In addition, sometimes activities are game-like, involve simulations, require creating products, and demand self-direction and self-monitoring. 

Questioning

1. Teacher questions are varied and high quality, providing a balanced mix of question types: knowledge and comprehension; application and analysis; and creation and evaluation.
2. Questions are consistently purposeful and coherent. 
3. A high frequency of questions is asked. 
4. Questions are consistently sequenced with attention to the instructional goals. 
5. Questions regularly require active responses (e.g., whole class signaling, choral responses, written and shared responses, or group and individual answers). 
6. Wait time (3-5 seconds) is consistently provided. 
7. The teacher calls on volunteers and nonvolunteers, and a balance of students based on ability and sex. 
8. Students generate questions that lead to further inquiry and self-directed learning.

 Academic Feedback

1. Oral and written feedback is consistently academically focused, frequent, and high quality.
2. Feedback is frequently given during guided practice and homework review. 
3. The teacher circulates to prompt student thinking, assess each student’s progress, and provide individual feedback.
4. Feedback from students is regularly used to monitor and adjust instruction.
5. Teacher engages students in giving specific and high quality feedback to one another.

Grouping Students

1. The instructional grouping arrangements (either whole class, small groups, pairs, individual; heterogeneous or homogenous ability) consistently maximize student understanding and learning efficiency.
2. All students in groups know their roles, responsibilities, and group work expectations.
3. All students participating in groups are held accountable for group work and individual work.
4. Instructional group composition is varied (e.g., race, gender, ability, and age) to best accomplish the goals of the lesson.
5. Instructional groups facilitate opportunities for students to set goals, reflect on, and evaluate their learning.

 Teacher Content Knowledge

1. Teacher displays extensive content knowledge of all the subjects she or he teaches.
2. Teacher regularly implements a variety of subject specific instructional strategies to enhance student
   content knowledge.
3. The teacher regularly highlights key concepts and ideas and uses them as bases to connect other
   powerful ideas.
4. Limited content is taught in sufficient depth to allow for the development of understanding.

Teacher Knowledge of Students

1. Teacher practices display understanding of each student’s anticipated learning difficulties.
2. Teacher practices regularly incorporate student interests and cultural heritage.
3. Teacher regularly provides differentiated instructional methods and content to ensure children have the opportunity to master what is being taught.

Thinking

1. The teacher thoroughly teaches two or more types of thinking: analytical thinking, where students analyze, compare and contrast, and evaluate and explain information; practical thinking, where students use, apply, and implement what they learn in real-life scenarios; creative thinking, where students create, design, imagine, and suppose; and research-based thinking, where students explore and review a variety of ideas, models, and solutions to problems.
2. The teacher provides opportunities where students: generate a variety of ideas and alternatives; analyze problems from multiple perspectives and viewpoints; and monitor their thinking to insure that they understand what they are learning, are attending to critical information, and are aware of the learning strategies that they are using and why.

Problem Solving

1. The teacher implements activities that teach and reinforce three or more of the following problem-solving types:  Abstraction, Categorization, Drawing Conclusions/Justifying Solutions, Predicting Outcomes, Observing and Experimenting, Improving Solutions, Identifying Relevant/Irrelevant Information, Generating Ideas, Creating and Designing.

Instructional Plan

1. Instructional plans include: measurable and explicit goals aligned to state
   content standards; activities, materials, and assessments that: are aligned to state standards; are sequenced from basic to complex; build on prior student knowledge, are relevant to students’ lives, and integrate other disciplines; provide appropriate time for student work, student reflection, and lesson and unit closure; evidence that plan is appropriate for the age, knowledge, and interests of all learners; and evidence that the plan provides regular opportunities to accommodate individual student needs.

Student Work

1. Assignments require students to:organize, interpret, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information rather than reproduce it; draw conclusions, make generalizations, and produce arguments that are supported through extended writing; and connect what they are learning to experiences, observations, feelings, or situations significant in their daily lives both inside and outside of school.

 Assessment Plans

1. Assessment Plans: are aligned with state content standards; have clear measurement criteria;  measure student performance in more than three ways (e.g., in the form of a project, experiment, presentation, essay, short answer, or multiple choice test; require extended written tasks; are portfolio-based with clear illustrations of student progress toward state content standards; and include descriptions of how assessment results will be used to inform future instruction.

Expectations

1. Teacher sets high and demanding academic expectations for every student.
2. Teacher encourages students to learn from mistakes.
3. Teacher creates learning opportunities where all students can experience success.
4. Students take initiative and follow through with their own work. 
5. Teacher optimizes instructional time, teaches more material, and demands better performance from every student.

Managing Student Behavior

1. Students are consistently well-behaved and on task.
2. Teacher and students establish clear rules for learning and behavior.
3. The teacher uses several techniques, such as social approval, contingent activities, and consequences, to
   maintain appropriate student behavior.
4. The teacher overlooks inconsequential behavior.
5. The teacher deals with students who have caused disruptions rather than the entire class.
6. The teacher attends to disruptions quickly and firmly.

Environment

1. The classroom:  welcomes all members and guests; is organized and understandable to all students;  supplies, equipment, and resources are easily and readily accessible; displays student work that frequently changes; is arranged to promote individual and group learning.

Respectful Culture

1. Teacher-student interactions demonstrate caring and respect for one another.
2. Students exhibit caring and respect for one another.
3. Teacher seeks out and is receptive to the interests and opinions of all students.
4. Positive relationships and interdependence characterize the classroom.

Poems for Two Voices

Deconstructing the Rubric

There could be important and valid reasons for not actually doing many of the indicators on the rubric during a particular lesson.  For example, let's take a look at the first domain, Standards and Objectives and imagine we are observing a first grade teacher eight weeks into the school year.  The teacher has selected a poem that is culturally relevant for some of the students and is engaging them through choral reading.  As such, some of the students have relevant prior knowledge, but not all. The teacher does have the students share relevant experiences connected with the poem in order to heighten everyone's anticipatory knowledge.  She does this knowing that such method is in violation of the Common Core State Standard's privileging of close reading.  The poem does not readily connect with other disciplines, but is one that many of the children have expressed joy in reading.  The teacher has determined to not display the state standards as she has noticed that the amount of print it takes to display all of the standards on a board in the classroom tends to visually confuse her most fragile readers as they are acquiring alphabetic principle. As this is the first day reading the poem, the teacher understands that not all of the children will achieve mastery and has selected the method of choral reading in order to provide scaffolding so that students can be successful with manageable amounts of print and that natural differentiation will occur via the method. The teacher expects the children to experience the joy of reading, match voice to print, and share in the camaraderie of working together.  She does not expect her expectations to be characterized as demanding (the children have been on the planet for 72 months), but rather are intentionally invitational. The teacher does provide oral feedback to the children in the way of praise and corrective rereading, but does not include written feedback (Indicator: Academic Feedback, #1) as she knows the children would not be able to read meaningful evaluative remarks.

The Tennessee Rubric imagines a particular classroom context and fails to account for thinking that does not comply to a singular vision of excellence. It privileges amount as an indicator of excellence which is simply faulty.   For example, in the domain of thinking the difference between average and excellent performance is the number of thinking 'types' the teacher teaches.  One could well argue that teaching two different types of thinking thoroughly may be considerably less effective than teaching one well. Because the rubric privileges quantity, such differences would not be taken into accounting.

In many ways it is shocking to read the rubric as its limitations are so glaring and yet it remains an instrument that will be used to determine who remains a teacher and who does not.


Evaluation Based on State Test Results

In addition to the rubric scores, 50% of the annual evaluation is based on students' results on state tests. Tennessee's answer to the question 'What test do you use to evaluate teachers' performances when their students do not take a state test?' is pure folly.

...the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores. 

For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring. 

Even though this makes no logical sense, teachers and principals will be evaluated using this faulty method. The first grade teacher who may have taught none of the students in fifth grade will nonetheless have the scores from a single measure account for 15% of his/her rating. This is the brainchild of our elected officials.

Distracted, Demoralized

As parents, I don't think it will take much imagination for us to think about what this new evaluation system is doing to principals, teachers and by extension--our children.  At best, the educators must be distracted.  At worse, they are not only distracted from teaching, polishing their own craft, attending to their charges, and learning--but also they are demoralized.  The plan clearly communicates its distrust of principals and teachers.  Mr. Shelton is not trusted to know what is effective work.  Instead he is required to use a rubric that is cumbersome and faulty. Teachers are being normed by the faulty rubric and over time will be normed by students' performances on a single state measure--students who they may or may not even teach.  How students perform on a state measure (single test) is complex. For example, two years ago, my son developed seasonal asthma and was hospitalized for a week that coincided with state testing.  When he returned to school he had to take the state testing makeups.  For the previous three years he had scored advanced proficient on the state measures.  When his scores came back we were not surprised to that his scores dropped to proficient and partially proficient.  We understood why as he had returned to school and was heavily medicated.  His performance the next year showed significant increases.  It would be wrong to assume that one set of teachers had 'failed' him and miraculously another set had helped him to soar.  Contexts, such as hospitalization and medication, are not accounted for in these evaluation plans.

Parent Power

As parents we hold a lot of power collectively. We need to let our elected officials understand that our children cannot afford distracted and demoralized educators.  We need to let our officials who we elect know that they are answerable to us, the citizens and that we are not satisfied with faulty rubrics, absurd evaluation schema, and distrust. We need to let the faculties who teach our children know that we trust them--not to get it perfect, but to keep it real, kind, intellectually and developmentally appropriate, and relevant.  We want them to be risk takers.