I'm part of a project this year that works with new(ish) teachers on teaching science. One of the science teaching practices we're learning about and trying out is a "Science Talk." A Science Talk is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. You ask your class a question -- a question that doesn't really have a right answer, that perhaps can be interpreted in different ways -- and then, with relatively little guidance from you, your students talk about the question.
In our group, teachers videotape their Science Talks, then bring their videos, with typed transcripts of the conversation, to be studied. We look at tiny portions of the transcript at a time, and we dig into the meaning of students' words. In the midst of talk that can often, in the rush of a classroom, seem unimportant, we find evidence of students' understanding, ideas, connections, experiences, theories, and creativity. We discover concepts we want to return to, we wonder what students meant by a certain phrase, and we are constantly amazed by the depth of their thinking.
Two things most strike me about this work. The first is that this idea, of throwing out an open-ended question, then asking students to explore it together, is not a revolutionary pedagogical practice. This is not a new idea; teachers have been doing this for centuries. However, it is not something we, who teach in this context at this time, do on a regular basis. In fact, the idea is kind of daunting for many teachers. A question without a right answer? A conversation the teacher doesn't control? Many of us have little experience with this kind of teaching, and it makes us nervous.
I also realize that I used to have more conversations like this in my classroom than I do now. When I began teaching ten years ago, we had class conversations about the definition of a triangle, whether balls can move by themselves, how to design a fair experiment, why people have wars, what is the "middle number," whether you need a mother and a father, and where a life cycle begins. I don't think my classroom was unusual in spending time on these questions. These were some of my very favorite teaching moments -- really, they are why I teach.
In the past few years, I have felt less freedom to spend time on such conversations. A constant watchword of our profession now is data. Where are the data? What do the data tell us? The important data in second grade are: what level are the kids reading at? How many words can they read per minute? How many sight words can they read? How many sight words can they spell? How many math facts can they solve in a minute? How many of the students can write an organized explanation of how they get ready for school in the morning?
(I should say that these things are, of course, important, some more than others, and I am not against teaching them. They just aren't that exciting.)
I've inherited (as have the teachers before me) two years of pretty low readers. ("Low readers," I should write, in quotes.) So the "data" aren't very good. Maybe it's because of this, or maybe it would be this way even if they were "high readers" -- we need to spend more time on math and reading instruction. Instruction that helps the data get better, of course. Not necessarily instruction that helps them explore ideas, dig deeply into content, or talk about their thinking.
Because these kinds of conversations are so much rarer in classrooms today, it is really important to give the practice a name ("Science Talks"), practice it a bunch in our classes, and analyze the "data" that emerge from our students' voices. This creates a space for more student talk, for less teacher talk, for more conversation in our classrooms. By naming it, we legitimize it as a teaching practice, and by digging into our students' words and seeing how much richness we can find there, we offer it as an antidote to timed tests, multiple choice questions, and canned essay topics.
Did I say listening to students' ideas wasn't a revolutionary pedagogical practice? Maybe it is after all.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Cheating and other hazards of high-stakes testing
There's been a lot of news lately about cases of confirmed or suspected cheating by administrators and teachers on high-stakes tests. This is, of course, not surprising. When a single measure such as test scores is used to make decisions about school funding, jobs, and whether or not to keep a school open, you can be sure there'll be outright cheating. But there's a much stickier question that arises in this kind of environment, one that's less cut-and-dried than teachers telling kids to change their answers on a test: where do we draw the line between test preparation and cheating? When does test prep render our test results less useful?
I was enthralled, fascinated, and suffering from a bit of an intellectual crush a few months ago when I read Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, by Dan Koretz. (I used to call him Daniel, but now he's Dan to me.) What amazed me most of all was that neither I, nor seemingly most of the education practitioners with whom I work, really understand very much about how educational testing works. These tests are the single most powerful force driving our daily work -- and most of us just accept the conventional wisdom about them without blinking.
Conventional wisdom: tests don't measure everything that's important, but it's too hard to measure everything that's important. (This is true.) Since there's no way to measure everything important, we'll have to just focus on the tests, for lack of anything better. (I've definitely moved more in this direction over the years, but that's a mistake.) The tests do give you important information about how your school is doing -- and if your kids are doing well, there must be a lot of good teaching going on. (Definitely not true.)
Probably the most important thing I learned from Koretz's book was the existence of Campbell's Law. Campbell's Law is, it turns out, is a well-known rule of social science. It states:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Examples in Koretz's book, and in the blog post linked to above, include the unintended consequences of assessing the on-time record of airline flights and the death rate of heart surgeries. When data on the death rate of individual heart surgeons began to be collected and disseminated, in an effort to assess their surgical skill, surgeons became more reluctant to operate on the most dire of cases -- who were, of course, more likely to die during surgery, thereby sullying their statistics. Their statistics improved, but health care for heart patients did not.
When data on the on-time rate of individual airlines' flights were publicized, all airlines' data began to improve, even though individual travelers didn't notice an improvement in their own flight experiences. Why? Airlines began to pad their estimates of travel times, building in time for regular delays. Even if delayed, flights appeared to arrive "on time," and many flights arrived early. (This latter example isn't egregious -- it kind of seems like good planning. The point is, though, that the impression that the data were improving is misleading.)
Campbell's Law has been coming up lately in the conversation about high-stakes testing (which makes me wish I'd written this blog post a few months ago, as I intended to -- now others have beaten me to the punch.) It's essential that schools get good test scores, since their performance on tests is tied to pretty much everything -- so, scores will go up. But increased scores don't mean that students are learning more. It just means that students are getting better at that particular test.
Koretz did a study (which was very hard to do, because no one wanted it done in their district) to measure this effect. In a large urban district, the average third-grade score on the standardized math test in 1986 was a grade-level equivalent of a 4.3. Then, the district switched to a new test. The next year, test scores plummeted to an average of 3.7. For the next three years, though, the scores rose until third graders were again scoring at a grade-level equivalent of 4.3.
In the fourth year, Koretz also administered the old test -- the one that, four years ago, third graders had been doing well on. And what do you think happened? While on the new test, the one their teachers had been teaching to for four years, they scored an average of 4.3, on the old test, the average score was 3.7 -- exactly the score their counterparts had originally earned on the new test when it was first used.
In other words, students weren't getting better at math in those four years, even though their test scores were improving. They were getting better at that one particular math test.
So why do we use educational testing? Most of us would agree, I think, that we use tests so we can see what students know and can do: what they are learning. When high stakes test scores go up, they tell us what they are learning in just one realm -- they tell us that they are learning how to take specific tests. Teachers are adjusting the content they teach to match those specific tests, and teachers are passing on test-taking tricks that help their students score better.
If we want tests that tell us what a specific school, or grade or district or country, knows about math, though, high-stakes tests don't tell us much. What amazes me is how little people are talking about this. Campbell's Law is well-known -- but I certainly didn't know about it. No one in my school or my district said, "You know, because these tests have so much tied to them, they don't tell us much about what kids know." Instead, everyone told us we had to do a better job of preparing our students to pass the tests. As if that's why we became teachers.
A month or so ago, I attended (and walked out of) a staff meeting that was purportedly about how to teach our students to answer Open Response questions on the state high stakes test. I thought it might be useful; I had noticed that my students weren't so good at reading a question, understanding what it was asking, and distilling what they knew about the answer into a few sentences. I thought I might get a few ideas about how to help kids write more clearly about what they knew.
It turned out to be a presentation about tricks that help kids get higher scores on Open Response questions, not how to write about what you know in response to a question. The speaker told us important details about how the questions are scored, including the fact that the organization of the response isn't scored at all. All the scorers look for is the right content, so students don't need to worry about writing topic sentences or spelling. "This is just about scoring better on Open Response," she said, "not about being better writers."
Please bear in mind: this woman was brought to our school by our school district. This workshop was a version of one she had attended put on by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education -- yes, the same people who bring us our state test. So, they make the test, they create the benchmarks, they score the test -- and, they teach us how to help our kids do better on the test. Do they want to measure what our students know about reading and writing? Or do they just want better test scores?
I recently took an educational test -- the GRE. And I did a lot of test prep for it. I reviewed a lot of math concepts, things I once knew but have since forgotten. Did I learn them deeply, in such a way that I still know them now, three months later? No. I memorized a few formulas and a lot of tricks, including the fact that, for example, the GRE mostly uses 3, 4, 5 triangles and 5, 12, 13 triangles. (Doesn't that sound vaguely familiar from geometry?)
Was I cheating? Not technically. Did I do well on the test? Yes. Did my performance indicate what I really know about math and can use on a daily basis? Absolutely not.
I'm not advocating that we keep using educational tests, with their somewhat arcane language and strange scoring rules, and don't prepare students for them at all. The risk we run then is that students' test scores will underestimate what they know and can do (which surely happens now as well). But it does seem like a perverted system when we put so much of our teaching time and energy into helping kids beat the tests. All this talk about extending the school day and the school year -- while students in grades 3 and up can spend up to 30 school days a year taking tests (not counting all the days they spend prepping for them). Talk about lost learning time.
Ten years ago, I started out as a teacher who thought "standards" was a dirty word and "testing" was worse. Over the years, my views became somewhat more mainstream, as standards became such a fact of teaching that we couldn't imagine schools without them and testing more and more determined our fate. Now I'm on my way out of the classroom, at least for a year, and I'm coming back to where I started -- disillusioned by arbitrary standards and test results that tell us more about a student's socioeconomic background and test-taking smarts than they do about what she really knows.
I was enthralled, fascinated, and suffering from a bit of an intellectual crush a few months ago when I read Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, by Dan Koretz. (I used to call him Daniel, but now he's Dan to me.) What amazed me most of all was that neither I, nor seemingly most of the education practitioners with whom I work, really understand very much about how educational testing works. These tests are the single most powerful force driving our daily work -- and most of us just accept the conventional wisdom about them without blinking.
Conventional wisdom: tests don't measure everything that's important, but it's too hard to measure everything that's important. (This is true.) Since there's no way to measure everything important, we'll have to just focus on the tests, for lack of anything better. (I've definitely moved more in this direction over the years, but that's a mistake.) The tests do give you important information about how your school is doing -- and if your kids are doing well, there must be a lot of good teaching going on. (Definitely not true.)
Probably the most important thing I learned from Koretz's book was the existence of Campbell's Law. Campbell's Law is, it turns out, is a well-known rule of social science. It states:
The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Examples in Koretz's book, and in the blog post linked to above, include the unintended consequences of assessing the on-time record of airline flights and the death rate of heart surgeries. When data on the death rate of individual heart surgeons began to be collected and disseminated, in an effort to assess their surgical skill, surgeons became more reluctant to operate on the most dire of cases -- who were, of course, more likely to die during surgery, thereby sullying their statistics. Their statistics improved, but health care for heart patients did not.
When data on the on-time rate of individual airlines' flights were publicized, all airlines' data began to improve, even though individual travelers didn't notice an improvement in their own flight experiences. Why? Airlines began to pad their estimates of travel times, building in time for regular delays. Even if delayed, flights appeared to arrive "on time," and many flights arrived early. (This latter example isn't egregious -- it kind of seems like good planning. The point is, though, that the impression that the data were improving is misleading.)
Campbell's Law has been coming up lately in the conversation about high-stakes testing (which makes me wish I'd written this blog post a few months ago, as I intended to -- now others have beaten me to the punch.) It's essential that schools get good test scores, since their performance on tests is tied to pretty much everything -- so, scores will go up. But increased scores don't mean that students are learning more. It just means that students are getting better at that particular test.
Koretz did a study (which was very hard to do, because no one wanted it done in their district) to measure this effect. In a large urban district, the average third-grade score on the standardized math test in 1986 was a grade-level equivalent of a 4.3. Then, the district switched to a new test. The next year, test scores plummeted to an average of 3.7. For the next three years, though, the scores rose until third graders were again scoring at a grade-level equivalent of 4.3.
In the fourth year, Koretz also administered the old test -- the one that, four years ago, third graders had been doing well on. And what do you think happened? While on the new test, the one their teachers had been teaching to for four years, they scored an average of 4.3, on the old test, the average score was 3.7 -- exactly the score their counterparts had originally earned on the new test when it was first used.
In other words, students weren't getting better at math in those four years, even though their test scores were improving. They were getting better at that one particular math test.
So why do we use educational testing? Most of us would agree, I think, that we use tests so we can see what students know and can do: what they are learning. When high stakes test scores go up, they tell us what they are learning in just one realm -- they tell us that they are learning how to take specific tests. Teachers are adjusting the content they teach to match those specific tests, and teachers are passing on test-taking tricks that help their students score better.
If we want tests that tell us what a specific school, or grade or district or country, knows about math, though, high-stakes tests don't tell us much. What amazes me is how little people are talking about this. Campbell's Law is well-known -- but I certainly didn't know about it. No one in my school or my district said, "You know, because these tests have so much tied to them, they don't tell us much about what kids know." Instead, everyone told us we had to do a better job of preparing our students to pass the tests. As if that's why we became teachers.
A month or so ago, I attended (and walked out of) a staff meeting that was purportedly about how to teach our students to answer Open Response questions on the state high stakes test. I thought it might be useful; I had noticed that my students weren't so good at reading a question, understanding what it was asking, and distilling what they knew about the answer into a few sentences. I thought I might get a few ideas about how to help kids write more clearly about what they knew.
It turned out to be a presentation about tricks that help kids get higher scores on Open Response questions, not how to write about what you know in response to a question. The speaker told us important details about how the questions are scored, including the fact that the organization of the response isn't scored at all. All the scorers look for is the right content, so students don't need to worry about writing topic sentences or spelling. "This is just about scoring better on Open Response," she said, "not about being better writers."
Please bear in mind: this woman was brought to our school by our school district. This workshop was a version of one she had attended put on by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education -- yes, the same people who bring us our state test. So, they make the test, they create the benchmarks, they score the test -- and, they teach us how to help our kids do better on the test. Do they want to measure what our students know about reading and writing? Or do they just want better test scores?
I recently took an educational test -- the GRE. And I did a lot of test prep for it. I reviewed a lot of math concepts, things I once knew but have since forgotten. Did I learn them deeply, in such a way that I still know them now, three months later? No. I memorized a few formulas and a lot of tricks, including the fact that, for example, the GRE mostly uses 3, 4, 5 triangles and 5, 12, 13 triangles. (Doesn't that sound vaguely familiar from geometry?)
Was I cheating? Not technically. Did I do well on the test? Yes. Did my performance indicate what I really know about math and can use on a daily basis? Absolutely not.
I'm not advocating that we keep using educational tests, with their somewhat arcane language and strange scoring rules, and don't prepare students for them at all. The risk we run then is that students' test scores will underestimate what they know and can do (which surely happens now as well). But it does seem like a perverted system when we put so much of our teaching time and energy into helping kids beat the tests. All this talk about extending the school day and the school year -- while students in grades 3 and up can spend up to 30 school days a year taking tests (not counting all the days they spend prepping for them). Talk about lost learning time.
Ten years ago, I started out as a teacher who thought "standards" was a dirty word and "testing" was worse. Over the years, my views became somewhat more mainstream, as standards became such a fact of teaching that we couldn't imagine schools without them and testing more and more determined our fate. Now I'm on my way out of the classroom, at least for a year, and I'm coming back to where I started -- disillusioned by arbitrary standards and test results that tell us more about a student's socioeconomic background and test-taking smarts than they do about what she really knows.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Lives of Teachers: Autonomy Versus Control
I have a lot going on right now, but I had to write a post for a project I'm working on about teacher autonomy, so I thought I'd post it here.
Clearly, if we just leave teachers to their own devices, to teach with their doors closed and no supervision, we cannot be assured of high-quality instruction. At the same time, if we ask teachers to be automatons who parrot pre-packaged lessons, they will not be able to discern or respond to the nuanced needs of their students. Being a good teacher requires a remarkable amount of professional judgment, which can only be developed and honed through experience and reflection. Trying things out, seeing how they work, tweaking them, and trying them again is one of the best ways to become a skillful teacher.
I teach at a school that has, in general, erred on the side of requiring less of teachers, of leaving teachers more or less to their own devices. As someone who loves creating curriculum, this has suited me well, and we have ended up with a great deal of creative and engaging curriculum. At the same time, it's not effective in all cases, and we have also ended up with a great deal of misguided and dull curriculum. New teachers are overwhelmed at the prospect of having little guidance; we have not had enough vertical alignment and differentiation (for example, we see teachers in grades 1 through 5 teaching nearly identical mini-lessons in writing! Ah, Lucy Calkins.); and there are times when all teachers, no matter their experience, realize they don't know enough about how to teach a certain concept, and would like some help.
So as a school, we are trying to navigate the space between too much autonomy and too much control. We are asking teachers to documents their lesson plans each week, but in whatever way works for them -- in other words, you plan your week in the way you always have, and you post it online. As long as plans are there by Sunday, you're good to go. There is quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how teams carry this out. And there is definitely more leeway given to experienced teachers. If you have proven, over the years, that you achieve results with your students, others will rarely question what you are doing in your classroom. If a teacher is judged to be struggling, more oversight and guidance come into play -- her plans might be more closely monitored, for example, and she might be asked to explain the thinking behind her plans.
This question of autonomy, in the end, comes down to whether teachers are meeting students' needs. There are certainly a number of ways to teach nearly any concept -- the question is, is your instruction effective, and does it meet the emotional, developmental, and cultural needs of your students? How you figure out whose instruction is effective is, of course, a bigger conversation. It is clear you can't tell only by looking at test scores. It's also clear that it's complicated.
I often make comparisons between running a school and my father's job managing employees at a retailer. I do not agree with people who think schools should be run just like businesses -- but I think there are definite similarities. The process of supervising and evaluating employees at my dad's work involves goal-setting, 360 evaluations, mentoring, and many conversations. When someone is not performing well enough, they talk a lot, they let them know specifically what they have to get better at and how it will be measured, they try to help them get better, and they document all of the steps taken. If it works, great. If not, that person is asked to leave -- including the higher-ups. The bottom line might seem clearer in business than in education -- making money is the goal -- but that's not all they focus on. They look at adherence to the mission and vision of the organization, communication and people skills, risk-taking, etc. And they manage to evaluate all of these things, not only by looking at a number (ie. a test score), but using a more complex system.
It seems like there are things that must be non-negotiable in a school. A teacher must follow and adhere to the mission and values of the school where she teaches. She must meet the developmental, emotional, and academic needs of her student. She must be able to work with colleagues and families. And she must be permitted to use her professional judgment to make decisions about all of these things.
PS. Until recently, I might have talked about adhering to curriculum standards. It's no longer really permitted, in education, to question the validity of the standards, and I do think that having standards, or competencies, that we expect of students is in theory a good idea. But I have a lot of questions about the standards we currently work with. I am reading a book I think everyone should read: "Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us," by Daniel Koretz. (I have such a crush on him.) And he says, "The process of setting standards -- deciding just how much students have to do to pass muster -- is technically complex and has a scientific aura, but in fact the standards are quite arbitrary ... Standards-based reporting provides a very coarse and in some cases severely distorted view of achievement."
So I am more ambivalent about the standards than ever, but try to keep those thoughts to myself so as to avoid being run out of town on a rail.
Clearly, if we just leave teachers to their own devices, to teach with their doors closed and no supervision, we cannot be assured of high-quality instruction. At the same time, if we ask teachers to be automatons who parrot pre-packaged lessons, they will not be able to discern or respond to the nuanced needs of their students. Being a good teacher requires a remarkable amount of professional judgment, which can only be developed and honed through experience and reflection. Trying things out, seeing how they work, tweaking them, and trying them again is one of the best ways to become a skillful teacher.
I teach at a school that has, in general, erred on the side of requiring less of teachers, of leaving teachers more or less to their own devices. As someone who loves creating curriculum, this has suited me well, and we have ended up with a great deal of creative and engaging curriculum. At the same time, it's not effective in all cases, and we have also ended up with a great deal of misguided and dull curriculum. New teachers are overwhelmed at the prospect of having little guidance; we have not had enough vertical alignment and differentiation (for example, we see teachers in grades 1 through 5 teaching nearly identical mini-lessons in writing! Ah, Lucy Calkins.); and there are times when all teachers, no matter their experience, realize they don't know enough about how to teach a certain concept, and would like some help.
So as a school, we are trying to navigate the space between too much autonomy and too much control. We are asking teachers to documents their lesson plans each week, but in whatever way works for them -- in other words, you plan your week in the way you always have, and you post it online. As long as plans are there by Sunday, you're good to go. There is quite a bit of flexibility in terms of how teams carry this out. And there is definitely more leeway given to experienced teachers. If you have proven, over the years, that you achieve results with your students, others will rarely question what you are doing in your classroom. If a teacher is judged to be struggling, more oversight and guidance come into play -- her plans might be more closely monitored, for example, and she might be asked to explain the thinking behind her plans.
This question of autonomy, in the end, comes down to whether teachers are meeting students' needs. There are certainly a number of ways to teach nearly any concept -- the question is, is your instruction effective, and does it meet the emotional, developmental, and cultural needs of your students? How you figure out whose instruction is effective is, of course, a bigger conversation. It is clear you can't tell only by looking at test scores. It's also clear that it's complicated.
I often make comparisons between running a school and my father's job managing employees at a retailer. I do not agree with people who think schools should be run just like businesses -- but I think there are definite similarities. The process of supervising and evaluating employees at my dad's work involves goal-setting, 360 evaluations, mentoring, and many conversations. When someone is not performing well enough, they talk a lot, they let them know specifically what they have to get better at and how it will be measured, they try to help them get better, and they document all of the steps taken. If it works, great. If not, that person is asked to leave -- including the higher-ups. The bottom line might seem clearer in business than in education -- making money is the goal -- but that's not all they focus on. They look at adherence to the mission and vision of the organization, communication and people skills, risk-taking, etc. And they manage to evaluate all of these things, not only by looking at a number (ie. a test score), but using a more complex system.
It seems like there are things that must be non-negotiable in a school. A teacher must follow and adhere to the mission and values of the school where she teaches. She must meet the developmental, emotional, and academic needs of her student. She must be able to work with colleagues and families. And she must be permitted to use her professional judgment to make decisions about all of these things.
PS. Until recently, I might have talked about adhering to curriculum standards. It's no longer really permitted, in education, to question the validity of the standards, and I do think that having standards, or competencies, that we expect of students is in theory a good idea. But I have a lot of questions about the standards we currently work with. I am reading a book I think everyone should read: "Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us," by Daniel Koretz. (I have such a crush on him.) And he says, "The process of setting standards -- deciding just how much students have to do to pass muster -- is technically complex and has a scientific aura, but in fact the standards are quite arbitrary ... Standards-based reporting provides a very coarse and in some cases severely distorted view of achievement."
So I am more ambivalent about the standards than ever, but try to keep those thoughts to myself so as to avoid being run out of town on a rail.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Writing is like talking
I've been trying to infuse my science, social studies, and math instruction with more writing. At my school, we aren't that great yet at teaching children to write, and the result of our instruction in that domain leaves much to be desired. (I am fully implicated in this problem along with my colleagues -- for years, I've been saying I don't really know how to teach writing.)
Yesterday I decided that, as the culmination of a week of testing minerals to determine their properties, each student would write a short description of one "mystery mineral." Other students would have to use their description, and the clues gleaned from the mineral tests, to figure out which mineral they were describing.
Using our new ELMO, I modeled how to take the results of your mineral tests and turn them into sentences which, when put together, would produce a short paragraph about your mineral. I carefully scaffolded the lesson with 3 different versions of a fun flip-up paper (with a space for the answer inside): one version that only required filling in blanks, another that provided "hints" of what details to include, and a final sheet with only a title.
They wrote things like this:
clear
white
dull
opaque
fingernail
I stopped the class at least 3 times to remind them that good writers explain things so that others can understand, and I gave examples of ways to turn these single words into sentences. My mineral is clear. Its streak color is white. It is dull and opaque. I can scratch it with my fingernail, so it is not very hard.
At the end of the lesson, at least 7 students still had fragments on their papers. Three of these had collapsed in frustration, one in tears. Definitely not my strongest teaching moment -- but one to learn from.
One student, Willy, kept asking me (in a high-pitched whine, I might add), "Why do I have to write it like that? Everyone knows what I mean!"
I came back today prepared for a do-over.
First, I read to them from an adult field guide to rocks and minerals that uses some of the same language they have been learning: luster, transparency, opaque, streak, hardness. I pointed out that the geologists who wrote the book had to write with complete sentences so that other people could understand.
We talked about tests they would take. About being in fifth grade, in high school, in college, and doing science and writing about it. We talked about what if a stranger came in our room, someone who wasn't learning about geology. "What if Ms. Seaborne walked in here right now and you read this to her: 'White, clear, opaque, fingernail. Fingernail!?'" I exclaimed dramatically. "Would she have any idea what you were talking about?"
(Later, I heard two girls talking as one helped the other complete the assignment. Their heads bent closely over the paper, Maia said earnestly, "But Shanaya, if Ms. Seaborne walked in here to read this right now, she wouldn't understand that!")
Then I told them I had a secret to share. The thing is, I said conspiratorially, writing is like talking. If you say what you would say to a friend, and then write it down, you've got it!
I had realized, in my thinking about yesterday's lesson, that trying to figure out what to write on their papers, how to put these ideas into sentences, seemed like a secret code they had no access to. They thought I knew the answers, and they couldn't figure out how I got them. They needed to understand that they had the words they needed themselves, and could access them without my help.
I suspect that this is what usually happens to them while they are writing: A teacher asks them something. They answer with a one-word response, or a fragment of some kind or another. The teacher knows what they are trying to say (we teachers are always automatically translating in our heads, without even noticing that we are doing it), so she restates their sentence: "Oh, you mean...?" They nod, and we say, "Write that down!"
The actual sentence comes from US, not them. So they don't make the connection that the words can and do originate in their own minds.
Some students, of course, make the connection, and start to turn their thoughts into sentences on their own. Some do it automatically; others do it once you've modeled it a number of times; but for others, it seems like magic, not something they can produce themselves.
I had Willy come up to demonstrate. He brought his table of results from the mineral tests. With much drama, channeling a talk-show host, I asked him, "Wiiiiilllllly, what is the observable color of your mystery mineral?"
Predictably, he answered, "White."
"Oh yes," I said. "It is white. But if Ms. Seaborne walked in and you looked at her and said 'White,' would she know what you were talking about? She'd say, 'What is white? Your cat? Your pet elephant? Your house?' How will you say it so Ms. Seaborne would know what you were talking about?"
It took a few tries, but finally he had it. "My mystery mineral's observable color is white."
As he said it, I wrote it. "See?!" I exclaimed, practically dancing around in my effort to keep them engaged. (This is why I'm so tired when I get home from teaching.) "Willy thought it. Then he said it. And then I wrote it. Writing is like talking!"
As we went on, Willy kept answering my questions with just one word. "Wiiiiiillllly," I would trill. "What is the streak color of your mineral?" "White," he would answer.
But if I made him start with my name, he would use a complete sentence. "Ms. Swamp," he would begin. "My mineral's streak color is white."
Each time, I pointed out to the class how Willy thought, then spoke, and then wrote. Because writing is like talking.
At the end, we had a list of sentences like this.
My mystery mineral is clear.
My mineral's streak color is white.
My mineral is glassy and translucent.
I showed them how to cross out "my mineral" and replace it with "it" after the first sentence. I wrote "mystery mineral = it," throwing in a little math for good measure.
In the afternoon, I walked them through it step by step. Each student had a partner, and I made them ask each other (with much drama, of course) the question. Then their partner had to answer, addressing them by name. We did two sentences together, then I asked those who thought they could continue alone to do so. Four students were still stuck, so I pulled them to a side table to work with me.
I ended up with 20 mineral descriptions that sounded halfway decent. The hardest part was when they wrote about the hardness of the minerals. To test hardness, we tried to scratch each mineral with our fingernails, a penny, and then a nail. This gave them an idea about how hard the mineral was. But most wrote sentences like this: "Its hardness is nail." Which doesn't make a lot of sense, but they were following the pattern. So next week, we'll tackle that sentence. What happened when you tested the hardness? How can you explain that in writing?
The trick to teaching young children is figuring out all the steps we take to do something, and then breaking those steps down even more, into their smallest parts. Which, for grown-ups who do these things (like counting, reading, and writing) automatically, is very hard to do. But it's also what makes it fun.
Yesterday I decided that, as the culmination of a week of testing minerals to determine their properties, each student would write a short description of one "mystery mineral." Other students would have to use their description, and the clues gleaned from the mineral tests, to figure out which mineral they were describing.
Using our new ELMO, I modeled how to take the results of your mineral tests and turn them into sentences which, when put together, would produce a short paragraph about your mineral. I carefully scaffolded the lesson with 3 different versions of a fun flip-up paper (with a space for the answer inside): one version that only required filling in blanks, another that provided "hints" of what details to include, and a final sheet with only a title.
They wrote things like this:
clear
white
dull
opaque
fingernail
I stopped the class at least 3 times to remind them that good writers explain things so that others can understand, and I gave examples of ways to turn these single words into sentences. My mineral is clear. Its streak color is white. It is dull and opaque. I can scratch it with my fingernail, so it is not very hard.
At the end of the lesson, at least 7 students still had fragments on their papers. Three of these had collapsed in frustration, one in tears. Definitely not my strongest teaching moment -- but one to learn from.
One student, Willy, kept asking me (in a high-pitched whine, I might add), "Why do I have to write it like that? Everyone knows what I mean!"
I came back today prepared for a do-over.
First, I read to them from an adult field guide to rocks and minerals that uses some of the same language they have been learning: luster, transparency, opaque, streak, hardness. I pointed out that the geologists who wrote the book had to write with complete sentences so that other people could understand.
We talked about tests they would take. About being in fifth grade, in high school, in college, and doing science and writing about it. We talked about what if a stranger came in our room, someone who wasn't learning about geology. "What if Ms. Seaborne walked in here right now and you read this to her: 'White, clear, opaque, fingernail. Fingernail!?'" I exclaimed dramatically. "Would she have any idea what you were talking about?"
(Later, I heard two girls talking as one helped the other complete the assignment. Their heads bent closely over the paper, Maia said earnestly, "But Shanaya, if Ms. Seaborne walked in here to read this right now, she wouldn't understand that!")
Then I told them I had a secret to share. The thing is, I said conspiratorially, writing is like talking. If you say what you would say to a friend, and then write it down, you've got it!
I had realized, in my thinking about yesterday's lesson, that trying to figure out what to write on their papers, how to put these ideas into sentences, seemed like a secret code they had no access to. They thought I knew the answers, and they couldn't figure out how I got them. They needed to understand that they had the words they needed themselves, and could access them without my help.
I suspect that this is what usually happens to them while they are writing: A teacher asks them something. They answer with a one-word response, or a fragment of some kind or another. The teacher knows what they are trying to say (we teachers are always automatically translating in our heads, without even noticing that we are doing it), so she restates their sentence: "Oh, you mean...?" They nod, and we say, "Write that down!"
The actual sentence comes from US, not them. So they don't make the connection that the words can and do originate in their own minds.
Some students, of course, make the connection, and start to turn their thoughts into sentences on their own. Some do it automatically; others do it once you've modeled it a number of times; but for others, it seems like magic, not something they can produce themselves.
I had Willy come up to demonstrate. He brought his table of results from the mineral tests. With much drama, channeling a talk-show host, I asked him, "Wiiiiilllllly, what is the observable color of your mystery mineral?"
Predictably, he answered, "White."
"Oh yes," I said. "It is white. But if Ms. Seaborne walked in and you looked at her and said 'White,' would she know what you were talking about? She'd say, 'What is white? Your cat? Your pet elephant? Your house?' How will you say it so Ms. Seaborne would know what you were talking about?"
It took a few tries, but finally he had it. "My mystery mineral's observable color is white."
As he said it, I wrote it. "See?!" I exclaimed, practically dancing around in my effort to keep them engaged. (This is why I'm so tired when I get home from teaching.) "Willy thought it. Then he said it. And then I wrote it. Writing is like talking!"
As we went on, Willy kept answering my questions with just one word. "Wiiiiiillllly," I would trill. "What is the streak color of your mineral?" "White," he would answer.
But if I made him start with my name, he would use a complete sentence. "Ms. Swamp," he would begin. "My mineral's streak color is white."
Each time, I pointed out to the class how Willy thought, then spoke, and then wrote. Because writing is like talking.
At the end, we had a list of sentences like this.
My mystery mineral is clear.
My mineral's streak color is white.
My mineral is glassy and translucent.
I showed them how to cross out "my mineral" and replace it with "it" after the first sentence. I wrote "mystery mineral = it," throwing in a little math for good measure.
In the afternoon, I walked them through it step by step. Each student had a partner, and I made them ask each other (with much drama, of course) the question. Then their partner had to answer, addressing them by name. We did two sentences together, then I asked those who thought they could continue alone to do so. Four students were still stuck, so I pulled them to a side table to work with me.
I ended up with 20 mineral descriptions that sounded halfway decent. The hardest part was when they wrote about the hardness of the minerals. To test hardness, we tried to scratch each mineral with our fingernails, a penny, and then a nail. This gave them an idea about how hard the mineral was. But most wrote sentences like this: "Its hardness is nail." Which doesn't make a lot of sense, but they were following the pattern. So next week, we'll tackle that sentence. What happened when you tested the hardness? How can you explain that in writing?
The trick to teaching young children is figuring out all the steps we take to do something, and then breaking those steps down even more, into their smallest parts. Which, for grown-ups who do these things (like counting, reading, and writing) automatically, is very hard to do. But it's also what makes it fun.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Teach less, but teach smarter
I've been doing a little math today.
I've been calculating how much time I work, and of that time, how much I spend teaching.
I have some unique data on this because, since September, I've been keeping track of all my work time. Since I'm half self-employed, I need to track my time for some projects. Since I was tracking my time for some projects, I figured I might as well track my time for all my projects, including my classroom teaching. I like collecting data.
Because I'm teaching half time, I have extra energy for teaching. On a daily basis, I have been more prepared for my students this year than ever before. On my teaching days, I'm working longer hours than I used to when I taught full time because I know I only have to sustain that pace for 2 or 3 days per week.
So I'm operating under the hypothesis that my ratio of non-teaching to teaching hours is an accurate model for what an elementary school teacher ideally needs to do in order to be well-prepared to teach. I don't think my hours are an exaggeration -- I think they represent what good teachers would do if they had the time and energy. I tend to be a quick worker, and I've been teaching for a decade; if anything, less-experienced teachers might need more time to be well-prepared than I do.
(This exercise is based on the assumption that teachers are not just following a scripted curriculum but are tailoring published curriculum guides to meet the needs of their students; looking at their students' work and re-teaching as necessary; and designing entirely new lessons or units as necessary. It also includes some "big picture" work in terms of creating overviews of units for the year and grading, but it doesn't include the instructional coaching I've been doing for my school.)
To calculate my hours with children, I figured out the full-time load at my school, which is 25.5 teaching hours per week -- those are contact hours with children.
In 9 weeks of school (discounting partial weeks), I have worked an average of 33.5 hours per week. Double that for a full-time teacher, and that's 67 hours.
On average, 1 hour of teaching requires 2.7 hours of my time.
Maybe I do a little more than half-time work, because I have to spend time communicating with my job-share partner, catching up on missed meetings, etc. So let's be conservative, and say that a well-prepared, full-time teacher works between 2 and 2.5 hours for every 1 hour of teaching. This includes planning, looking at and responding to work, communicating with families and colleagues, writing report cards, holding family conferences, and meeting with supervisors, coaches, and colleagues.
If every hour spent teaching requires 2.5 hours of a teacher's time (1 hour to teach and 1.5 hours to prepare and follow-up), then a full-time elementary teacher at my school teaches for 25.5 hours a week and needs 38 hours of prep time, which is equal to almost 64 hours of work per week.
Let's say I'm working too hard, and better teachers work less than I do. So we decide to round down and estimate that to teach 25.5 hours in a week requires an additional 25-30 hours of prep time. That's still 50-55 hours of work a week.
In my contract, I have to be at school for 35 hours per week. 25.5 of those hours are teaching. Less than 10 hours are for prep time -- and 45 minutes per day are meant to be a lunch break, which means I have only 5 hours of designated prep time.
Obviously, this set-up doesn't make sense. We can't teach well for 25 hours with only 5 hours of preparation. So teachers work extra hours: a lot of extra hours.
Clearly, this is not a sustainable model in the long run. The days I teach, I am working between 10 and 12 hours per day; on weekends I work a few more hours. This gives me little time, on work days, to exercise, cook, spend time with friends or family, do errands, or relax. It follows, then, that to be a skillful, full-time teacher, is not a realistic career option for many people as the job is now designed. And, let's face it, we need many people to be able to do this job and, preferably, to be able to do it for quite a few years, since beginning teachers are not great teachers.
Let me outline an alternative. Today I was looking at a typical teacher's workload in a charter school opening next fall in Boston. Teachers will be required to be at school 45 hours per week, far more than is required at my school now or at other Boston public schools. But they will only teach an average of 16 hours per week. Even if you add in additional responsibilities, such as lunch duty, tutoring, or committee meetings, that's still significantly more than 1.5 hours of non-teaching time (ie. preparation and follow-up time) for each hour of teaching.
It turns out many other countries do things this way as well. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States has more hours of teaching time than any other OECD country. (This while many people are demanding that we increase the school day!)
According to the OECD, in the United States, primary school teachers spend an average of 1097 hours teaching per year. Secondary teachers spend slightly less (about 1060 hours per year). In Finland, a country of late much-lauded for its educational achievements, primary teachers teach an average of only 677 hours, while secondary teachers teach about 570 hours. Japanese teachers teach between 500 and 709 hours per year. (These countries' school years are also longer than the US school year, so this means even fewer hours of teaching per week.)
With all this extra time spent teaching in the US, what results do we have to show for it?
And for those who want students to spend more time in class: Finnish students spend the third lowest number of hours in school in a year, as compared to other OECD countries. (Data for the US are missing in this category, since the numbers vary from state to state.)
Similarly, according to a 2010 Mathematica study (see pages 12-13 of the Executive Summary), while many charter schools in the US require longer school years and longer school days, the data do not indicate a correlation between time spent in school and increased achievement in math and reading.
Clearly, the number of hours spent in school is not the variable that determines student achievement.
Many teachers and their unions are against longer days at school. A longer day that means more time teaching, and no significant increase in prep time, would indeed be disastrous. But if longer days mean there is an acknowledgment of how much time it takes to be a good teacher, and results in less teaching time and more time for lesson preparation, professional development, and collaboration, then I'm not opposed to a longer day. In fact, it seems more honest; no one can say that teachers don't work long hours if their hours are visible to everyone, instead of the uncountable hours we work now.
(Just to muddy the waters a bit, it does not appear that other countries require more non-teaching time than the US. US teachers have an average number of non-teaching hours at school.)
Obviously, the answer is not more time spent teaching and learning, for students or for teachers. It's not that we need to teach more, it's that we need to teach smarter. And teaching smarter means investing more time in training teachers and in allowing them to collaborate, plan, collect data, and hone their skills. The answer is not for teachers to fill even more poorly-planned minutes in front of a class; the answer is that teachers should teach less, but teach better.
Thanks to my trusty research assistant, who knows off the top of his head where to find the resources I need, and can put his hands on them quickly.
I've been calculating how much time I work, and of that time, how much I spend teaching.
I have some unique data on this because, since September, I've been keeping track of all my work time. Since I'm half self-employed, I need to track my time for some projects. Since I was tracking my time for some projects, I figured I might as well track my time for all my projects, including my classroom teaching. I like collecting data.
Because I'm teaching half time, I have extra energy for teaching. On a daily basis, I have been more prepared for my students this year than ever before. On my teaching days, I'm working longer hours than I used to when I taught full time because I know I only have to sustain that pace for 2 or 3 days per week.
So I'm operating under the hypothesis that my ratio of non-teaching to teaching hours is an accurate model for what an elementary school teacher ideally needs to do in order to be well-prepared to teach. I don't think my hours are an exaggeration -- I think they represent what good teachers would do if they had the time and energy. I tend to be a quick worker, and I've been teaching for a decade; if anything, less-experienced teachers might need more time to be well-prepared than I do.
(This exercise is based on the assumption that teachers are not just following a scripted curriculum but are tailoring published curriculum guides to meet the needs of their students; looking at their students' work and re-teaching as necessary; and designing entirely new lessons or units as necessary. It also includes some "big picture" work in terms of creating overviews of units for the year and grading, but it doesn't include the instructional coaching I've been doing for my school.)
To calculate my hours with children, I figured out the full-time load at my school, which is 25.5 teaching hours per week -- those are contact hours with children.
In 9 weeks of school (discounting partial weeks), I have worked an average of 33.5 hours per week. Double that for a full-time teacher, and that's 67 hours.
On average, 1 hour of teaching requires 2.7 hours of my time.
Maybe I do a little more than half-time work, because I have to spend time communicating with my job-share partner, catching up on missed meetings, etc. So let's be conservative, and say that a well-prepared, full-time teacher works between 2 and 2.5 hours for every 1 hour of teaching. This includes planning, looking at and responding to work, communicating with families and colleagues, writing report cards, holding family conferences, and meeting with supervisors, coaches, and colleagues.
If every hour spent teaching requires 2.5 hours of a teacher's time (1 hour to teach and 1.5 hours to prepare and follow-up), then a full-time elementary teacher at my school teaches for 25.5 hours a week and needs 38 hours of prep time, which is equal to almost 64 hours of work per week.
Let's say I'm working too hard, and better teachers work less than I do. So we decide to round down and estimate that to teach 25.5 hours in a week requires an additional 25-30 hours of prep time. That's still 50-55 hours of work a week.
In my contract, I have to be at school for 35 hours per week. 25.5 of those hours are teaching. Less than 10 hours are for prep time -- and 45 minutes per day are meant to be a lunch break, which means I have only 5 hours of designated prep time.
Obviously, this set-up doesn't make sense. We can't teach well for 25 hours with only 5 hours of preparation. So teachers work extra hours: a lot of extra hours.
Clearly, this is not a sustainable model in the long run. The days I teach, I am working between 10 and 12 hours per day; on weekends I work a few more hours. This gives me little time, on work days, to exercise, cook, spend time with friends or family, do errands, or relax. It follows, then, that to be a skillful, full-time teacher, is not a realistic career option for many people as the job is now designed. And, let's face it, we need many people to be able to do this job and, preferably, to be able to do it for quite a few years, since beginning teachers are not great teachers.
Let me outline an alternative. Today I was looking at a typical teacher's workload in a charter school opening next fall in Boston. Teachers will be required to be at school 45 hours per week, far more than is required at my school now or at other Boston public schools. But they will only teach an average of 16 hours per week. Even if you add in additional responsibilities, such as lunch duty, tutoring, or committee meetings, that's still significantly more than 1.5 hours of non-teaching time (ie. preparation and follow-up time) for each hour of teaching.
It turns out many other countries do things this way as well. According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United States has more hours of teaching time than any other OECD country. (This while many people are demanding that we increase the school day!)
According to the OECD, in the United States, primary school teachers spend an average of 1097 hours teaching per year. Secondary teachers spend slightly less (about 1060 hours per year). In Finland, a country of late much-lauded for its educational achievements, primary teachers teach an average of only 677 hours, while secondary teachers teach about 570 hours. Japanese teachers teach between 500 and 709 hours per year. (These countries' school years are also longer than the US school year, so this means even fewer hours of teaching per week.)
With all this extra time spent teaching in the US, what results do we have to show for it?
And for those who want students to spend more time in class: Finnish students spend the third lowest number of hours in school in a year, as compared to other OECD countries. (Data for the US are missing in this category, since the numbers vary from state to state.)
Similarly, according to a 2010 Mathematica study (see pages 12-13 of the Executive Summary), while many charter schools in the US require longer school years and longer school days, the data do not indicate a correlation between time spent in school and increased achievement in math and reading.
Clearly, the number of hours spent in school is not the variable that determines student achievement.
Many teachers and their unions are against longer days at school. A longer day that means more time teaching, and no significant increase in prep time, would indeed be disastrous. But if longer days mean there is an acknowledgment of how much time it takes to be a good teacher, and results in less teaching time and more time for lesson preparation, professional development, and collaboration, then I'm not opposed to a longer day. In fact, it seems more honest; no one can say that teachers don't work long hours if their hours are visible to everyone, instead of the uncountable hours we work now.
(Just to muddy the waters a bit, it does not appear that other countries require more non-teaching time than the US. US teachers have an average number of non-teaching hours at school.)
Obviously, the answer is not more time spent teaching and learning, for students or for teachers. It's not that we need to teach more, it's that we need to teach smarter. And teaching smarter means investing more time in training teachers and in allowing them to collaborate, plan, collect data, and hone their skills. The answer is not for teachers to fill even more poorly-planned minutes in front of a class; the answer is that teachers should teach less, but teach better.
Thanks to my trusty research assistant, who knows off the top of his head where to find the resources I need, and can put his hands on them quickly.
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