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.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
To Play or Not to Play?
Here are some pictures of my students on our first neighborhood walk the other day.
This is what I love about teaching. Besides good conversations, exciting discoveries, and having fun together, my favorite moments are when we are outside, exploring and discovering, or inside, creating and building.
Don't get me wrong. I also love teaching math and reading. I love watching skills and ideas build and crest and expand. I love seeing those little, measurable things that kids get better at: subtracting, or reading two-syllable words, or spelling. That stuff is fun too.
But exploring and creating and discovering and communicating and collaborating -- that is where it's at.
Here's the thing, though. At my school, we do a lot of traditional teaching. And we also teach about social justice, and the community, and the environment, and we get kids outside, doing hands-on science and social studies.
But, our kids don't do well on the standardized tests. They don't do the worst ever, but they don't do well, not by a long shot. And this despite the fact that we, the teachers, are pretty much killing ourselves trying to find the best ways to teach them.
Here's where it gets tricky. Our theory is that hands-on, interdisciplinary lessons will make kids want to learn. It will engage them, and then when we embed writing and reading and math into those units of study, they will be more meaningful, and students will learn and achieve more.
But it doesn't really seem like it's happening. At least not yet. Now, maybe too many teachers are too new at our school to be good enough at it. And maybe the problem is that the tests are not measuring what we wish they would measure or what we think is most important. But the fact remains that the tests must be taken, and the tests must be passed, and more schools are being closed every year in Boston, and the schools being closed are the ones not doing well on the tests.
Our principal has been suggesting to different teachers, especially those with really struggling classes, that we do less science and social studies. She's scared and freaked out about the tests. She's scared into thinking we need to spend more time on traditional teaching of the 3 Rs, which is not where her heart is as an educator.
Meanwhile, I've been learning a lot about self-regulation from a program I'm working for called Tools of the Mind. Tools believes that kids should have pretty solid self-regulation skills by the middle or end of kindergarten.
Self-regulation means that students can inhibit themselves in order to reach a goal or follow a rule. It means they can remember things on purpose, and learn strategies to help their brains work better. It means they understand why there are rules and ways of doing things in a community, and they follow those rules.
There is a lot of research about how students develop self-regulation. A lot of it comes from make believe play. When little kids play, they learn to follow rules according to the roles they take on. They learn to remember things and act in certain ways according to their characters. They learn language and communication skills from interacting with other children.
The problem is that these days, kids don't play much anymore. We used to play in our neighborhoods, and have older kids who "mentored" younger kids in how to do good, imaginative play. Now kids don't play much in their neighborhoods, and they don't do a lot of imagining. They do a lot of looking at screens.
So Tools of the Mind has kids play, a lot. In pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, they get a lot of practice with playing, from less- to more-structured play opportunities. This helps them develop the self-regulation skills that are essential to success in school.
One colleague of mine is skeptical that we should be doing so much science and social studies with our first, second, and third graders when they aren't so good yet at reading and writing and math. At the same time, she says she thinks our kindergarten is too academic. She thinks they need to play MORE in pre-K and kindergarten, which would give them more of the academic language and skills they would need to do well in school as they got older.
Her son goes to school in the suburbs. In his kindergarten, he plays most of the day. He doesn't do letter sounds or sight words. Instead, he plays in the kitchen an hour and a half a day, his teacher says. At first glance, our kindergartners would look to be ahead of him. But you know that by second grade, he and his classmates will be ahead of our urban students.
There are many reasons they'll be ahead. A lot of it has to do with exposure to language starting years ago, long before they started school. But I wonder how much of it has to do with the time they spend playing, too.
In the second grade, (and third, and fourth, and fifth...) we have many students who don't have self-regulation skills. They can't manage their emotions or their bodies or their minds. We are thinking hard about how and what to teach them this year. Should we do more reading and writing, since they aren't very good at those things? Or should we do role-playing and building, creating a city (since we study neighborhoods) in our classroom, and then writing about it?
Deep inside, I doubt it is best for kids to spend all day huddled over papers on their desks. I doubt it is good for teachers either, for any of our souls. And if it is best for kids to do that, then I can't be their teacher. My best moments as a teacher are my most relaxed, most improvised, most organic moments, when my students and I connect with each other not just intellectually, but also personally.
The test results of last year's third graders are a dark presence in the corner of my mind, though, as I think through these questions. This year's third grade scores promise to be even lower. I am sure our kids need to be playing and talking more when they are younger. The question we are struggling with is what should they be doing more of now? If it weren't for those tests lurking at the end of next year, I would know my choice. I don't have a lot of say over what gets tested, though. Unfortunately, I'm not in charge.
This is what I love about teaching. Besides good conversations, exciting discoveries, and having fun together, my favorite moments are when we are outside, exploring and discovering, or inside, creating and building.
Don't get me wrong. I also love teaching math and reading. I love watching skills and ideas build and crest and expand. I love seeing those little, measurable things that kids get better at: subtracting, or reading two-syllable words, or spelling. That stuff is fun too.
But exploring and creating and discovering and communicating and collaborating -- that is where it's at.
Here's the thing, though. At my school, we do a lot of traditional teaching. And we also teach about social justice, and the community, and the environment, and we get kids outside, doing hands-on science and social studies.
But, our kids don't do well on the standardized tests. They don't do the worst ever, but they don't do well, not by a long shot. And this despite the fact that we, the teachers, are pretty much killing ourselves trying to find the best ways to teach them.
Here's where it gets tricky. Our theory is that hands-on, interdisciplinary lessons will make kids want to learn. It will engage them, and then when we embed writing and reading and math into those units of study, they will be more meaningful, and students will learn and achieve more.
But it doesn't really seem like it's happening. At least not yet. Now, maybe too many teachers are too new at our school to be good enough at it. And maybe the problem is that the tests are not measuring what we wish they would measure or what we think is most important. But the fact remains that the tests must be taken, and the tests must be passed, and more schools are being closed every year in Boston, and the schools being closed are the ones not doing well on the tests.
Our principal has been suggesting to different teachers, especially those with really struggling classes, that we do less science and social studies. She's scared and freaked out about the tests. She's scared into thinking we need to spend more time on traditional teaching of the 3 Rs, which is not where her heart is as an educator.
Meanwhile, I've been learning a lot about self-regulation from a program I'm working for called Tools of the Mind. Tools believes that kids should have pretty solid self-regulation skills by the middle or end of kindergarten.
Self-regulation means that students can inhibit themselves in order to reach a goal or follow a rule. It means they can remember things on purpose, and learn strategies to help their brains work better. It means they understand why there are rules and ways of doing things in a community, and they follow those rules.
There is a lot of research about how students develop self-regulation. A lot of it comes from make believe play. When little kids play, they learn to follow rules according to the roles they take on. They learn to remember things and act in certain ways according to their characters. They learn language and communication skills from interacting with other children.
The problem is that these days, kids don't play much anymore. We used to play in our neighborhoods, and have older kids who "mentored" younger kids in how to do good, imaginative play. Now kids don't play much in their neighborhoods, and they don't do a lot of imagining. They do a lot of looking at screens.
So Tools of the Mind has kids play, a lot. In pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, they get a lot of practice with playing, from less- to more-structured play opportunities. This helps them develop the self-regulation skills that are essential to success in school.
One colleague of mine is skeptical that we should be doing so much science and social studies with our first, second, and third graders when they aren't so good yet at reading and writing and math. At the same time, she says she thinks our kindergarten is too academic. She thinks they need to play MORE in pre-K and kindergarten, which would give them more of the academic language and skills they would need to do well in school as they got older.
Her son goes to school in the suburbs. In his kindergarten, he plays most of the day. He doesn't do letter sounds or sight words. Instead, he plays in the kitchen an hour and a half a day, his teacher says. At first glance, our kindergartners would look to be ahead of him. But you know that by second grade, he and his classmates will be ahead of our urban students.
There are many reasons they'll be ahead. A lot of it has to do with exposure to language starting years ago, long before they started school. But I wonder how much of it has to do with the time they spend playing, too.
In the second grade, (and third, and fourth, and fifth...) we have many students who don't have self-regulation skills. They can't manage their emotions or their bodies or their minds. We are thinking hard about how and what to teach them this year. Should we do more reading and writing, since they aren't very good at those things? Or should we do role-playing and building, creating a city (since we study neighborhoods) in our classroom, and then writing about it?
Deep inside, I doubt it is best for kids to spend all day huddled over papers on their desks. I doubt it is good for teachers either, for any of our souls. And if it is best for kids to do that, then I can't be their teacher. My best moments as a teacher are my most relaxed, most improvised, most organic moments, when my students and I connect with each other not just intellectually, but also personally.
The test results of last year's third graders are a dark presence in the corner of my mind, though, as I think through these questions. This year's third grade scores promise to be even lower. I am sure our kids need to be playing and talking more when they are younger. The question we are struggling with is what should they be doing more of now? If it weren't for those tests lurking at the end of next year, I would know my choice. I don't have a lot of say over what gets tested, though. Unfortunately, I'm not in charge.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Knowledge is Power, People
On this rainy morning, I went to visit the KIPP Charter School in a nearby town. Charter schools are THE hot topic around here, partly thanks to Waiting for Superman and partly because Massachusetts has dropped the cap on charter schools. Next year will see many new charters in Boston, and the city school system will be losing a lot of money to them.
The big question is, with fewer restrictions on budget, hiring, work hours, and curriculum (and more money than most schools have access to), will they achieve better results than the city schools?
I know people who think that all charter schools are the work of the devil. Others think they are the answer to education's troubles. The answer probably lies somewhere in between, as is the case with most complex issues -- neither black not white, but instead found in shades of gray.
Here is what most stood out for me at KIPP, which bills itself as a "no excuses" school. As in, being poor is no excuse for poor achievement.
THE GOOD NEWS:
Tight Systems
They obviously have their systems and operations down. This is something many public schools struggle with, because of a lack of administrative time and know-how. Because most charter schools have more administrators than do traditional public schools, and because those administrators divide the workload, they tend to have a lot of systems ironed out. Traditional public schools could do this if they had the funding to divide administrative tasks into operations, curriculum and instruction, and student affairs, the way charters do.
Because expectations are so clear, there is no wiggle room. Students transition from one classroom to another silently. There are few teachers policing transitions -- it just seems to happen that way. I'm sure it took work on the front end, but now it works like clockwork. There are consistent routines for how you raise your hand to answer a question, track the speaker with your eyes, get your homework checked, and put your materials out on your desk.
So much teaching time is lost to messy transitions. That's why good teachers put a lot of time and energy into teaching smooth transitions at the beginning of the year. When the school runs the systems, instead of the individual teacher, it gives the teacher one less thing to worry about.
All of this is implemented with a tight system of rewards and punishments. Or, oops, I mean, incentives and consequences. I have a lot to say about running a classroom with rewards, so that will have to be another post. Actually, I've written about it before. This post outlines my basic philosophy, and how complicated it can be in practice to stick to your guns. Running schools with rewards has a lot of complicated implications, and my wish is that schools would use rewards sparingly. But enough for now about that.
Still, teachers don't have to come up with their own behavior management systems or expectations at a KIPP school because it is all figured out for them. On the plus side, this allows teachers to focus on teaching. On the minus side, if you don't buy into their system hook, line, and sinker, it's not going to work out for you at KIPP.
More Time
I have mixed feelings about having kids in school for ten hours a day. But it doesn't seem crazy the way KIPP does it.
Students have 2-3 hours of reading per day, and one hour of writing several times a week. They have 1-2 hours of math, one hour of science, and one hour of social studies. They also have one hour of electives each day, when they can do dance, needlepoint, Taekwondo, or karaoke, to name a few. They have recess every day, which is pretty unusual for middle school in this day and age.
Honestly, as a teacher, I am always running out of time to teach things as well as I would like to. I am not sure when it is developmentally appropriate to have kids in school that long. And I don't think they should be sitting still, listening to teachers, all day. But if they are engaged in a variety of activities, including arts and sports, I am not necessarily opposed to it. Especially when you think about what it means for teachers.
The teachers are there for 10 hours a day, but they only teach 3-4 hours per day. And, they teach only one subject, to only one grade. So they teach the same thing 3 or 4 times in a day, and only have one class to prepare for. They also have at least 3 hours of planning time each day at school.
On the face of it, 10 hours at school sounds kind of awful. But I almost always spend 10 hours a day at school. Then I do more work at home in the evening. If I had more time to plan at school, and were teaching fewer subjects (which isn't really a model that's used in elementary school), maybe I wouldn't have to work so much at home. And maybe it's more honest to say, you will work 10 hours a day here, rather than pretending teachers only work 6 hours a day.
(With 10 hours, you could have teachers doing all kinds of interesting, collaborative projects too, not just teaching. It gives you a lot of flexibility both for students and teachers. That's one key to keeping teachers in the profession longer.)
Relationships and Success
The Executive Director told us that after their first few years, they analyzed the data about students who left their school. They found that there were three main reasons students leave KIPP: 1) a lack of success in school outside the classroom; 2) a lack of a meaningful relationship with at least one adult in the school; 3) a lack of buy-in from families.
As a result, they increased advisory time and had every teacher offer an elective in the afternoon. This builds relationships between teachers and students, and allows students to experience success outside the classroom. Their building stays open until 9 pm three days a week so they can offer English and computer classes to the families of their students, and they reach out to families in other ways. They have addressed the three major causes of student attrition, and have a stronger school because of it.
THE BAD NEWS
Teacher Turnover
Interestingly, although they have worked hard to decrease student attrition, they do not seem to have placed as much emphasis on teacher retention. On average, their teachers stay for a few years and then move on. Their teachers are young and on the whole inexperienced. It is widely acknowledged that teachers in their first or second years of teaching are generally ineffective, especially when compared to more experienced teachers. So if teachers only stay for 2-4 years, that's a problem for instruction.
The director was vague in terms of why people leave, except for mentioning that people who don't buy into their way of doing things are asked to leave. He said he would rather have teachers stay longer, and expressed an interest in helping staff maintain a work-life balance. But we didn't really find out what's pushing the teachers away.
Quality of Teaching
So here's the most interesting thing I saw. In about 3 hours of observations, I saw five teachers. I watched a writing class, two math classes, a science class, and a social studies class. All were classes of fifth or sixth graders.
The first teacher we watched was good at what he did. He had a clear learning target that he presented to the students at the beginning of the lesson. (They all do that; it's part of the KIPP way. Teachers work on one target per day, so everyone theoretically knows what they are aiming for during the lesson.) He returned to the target as he taught, giving examples of writing that met the target and writing that didn't meet the target. When students gave a wrong answer, he didn't tell them they were wrong, but instead asked them to expand on their thinking, and asked what other students thought.
It was downhill from there. The other classes we saw were taught by what seemed to be inexperienced teachers (which isn't surprising, given their turnover rates). Students mostly sat at desks, filled in blanks on worksheets, and were called on to give one-word answers. The instruction was dull. A couple of teachers responded with, "Really?" when a student gave a wrong answer, thus prompting the student to quickly say, "I mean..." and change his answer. This gives the teacher no insight into the student's thinking, and gives the student no chance to think more deeply about the question. Math seemed to be drill of very specific skills (they have one "problem-solving" period per week, the rest is more skill- based). "Science" involved filling in blanks on a worksheet while the teacher lectured.
Of course, all teachers teach in this way sometimes, in front of the class, explaining things the students must learn. But this is just one of many, many pedagogical tools at our disposal. My sense at KIPP was that this is the rule, not the exception. The few times I saw kids moving around or talking in small groups, it seemed more like a gimmick to get students' attention than true quality instruction.
In each class, some students had incorrect work on their papers, but the teachers didn't notice. In fact, while students worked, teachers by and large watched the clock, calling out frequent reminders: "Two more minutes!" I saw few instances of teachers conferring with students. I wondered how they knew who had met their learning target for the day and who had not.
(I may be wrong; maybe they know quite well who has met the target and who has not, and maybe they address it later during a tutoring time. They clearly monitor their standardized test scores quite closely. But if a student is doing something wrong in class, and no one catches the mistake and corrects it, how useful is that class time to the student? No teacher catches every misunderstanding of every student, but if you don't talk to your students while they work, you are unlikely to catch many errors.)
The emphasis was very much on management. Order and discipline. And hey, in that environment, you could get all kinds of amazing learning done, with so few seconds spent redirecting students. I am all in favor of classrooms where behavior is not a problem, where systems and expectations are clear. Once you have those things ironed out, though, you are free to do innovative, thought-provoking academics that teach higher-level thinking skills. It was disappointing to see that opportunity wasted.
In the end, at every school, it all comes down to teacher retention. You don't get quality instruction unless you keep and continually coach teachers. They've got their systems down at KIPP, and some of them are good. Like most systems, though, in the hands of good teachers, they work well. In the hands of poor teachers, they work only somewhat, or not at all.
The big question is, with fewer restrictions on budget, hiring, work hours, and curriculum (and more money than most schools have access to), will they achieve better results than the city schools?
I know people who think that all charter schools are the work of the devil. Others think they are the answer to education's troubles. The answer probably lies somewhere in between, as is the case with most complex issues -- neither black not white, but instead found in shades of gray.
Here is what most stood out for me at KIPP, which bills itself as a "no excuses" school. As in, being poor is no excuse for poor achievement.
THE GOOD NEWS:
Tight Systems
They obviously have their systems and operations down. This is something many public schools struggle with, because of a lack of administrative time and know-how. Because most charter schools have more administrators than do traditional public schools, and because those administrators divide the workload, they tend to have a lot of systems ironed out. Traditional public schools could do this if they had the funding to divide administrative tasks into operations, curriculum and instruction, and student affairs, the way charters do.
Because expectations are so clear, there is no wiggle room. Students transition from one classroom to another silently. There are few teachers policing transitions -- it just seems to happen that way. I'm sure it took work on the front end, but now it works like clockwork. There are consistent routines for how you raise your hand to answer a question, track the speaker with your eyes, get your homework checked, and put your materials out on your desk.
So much teaching time is lost to messy transitions. That's why good teachers put a lot of time and energy into teaching smooth transitions at the beginning of the year. When the school runs the systems, instead of the individual teacher, it gives the teacher one less thing to worry about.
All of this is implemented with a tight system of rewards and punishments. Or, oops, I mean, incentives and consequences. I have a lot to say about running a classroom with rewards, so that will have to be another post. Actually, I've written about it before. This post outlines my basic philosophy, and how complicated it can be in practice to stick to your guns. Running schools with rewards has a lot of complicated implications, and my wish is that schools would use rewards sparingly. But enough for now about that.
Still, teachers don't have to come up with their own behavior management systems or expectations at a KIPP school because it is all figured out for them. On the plus side, this allows teachers to focus on teaching. On the minus side, if you don't buy into their system hook, line, and sinker, it's not going to work out for you at KIPP.
More Time
I have mixed feelings about having kids in school for ten hours a day. But it doesn't seem crazy the way KIPP does it.
Students have 2-3 hours of reading per day, and one hour of writing several times a week. They have 1-2 hours of math, one hour of science, and one hour of social studies. They also have one hour of electives each day, when they can do dance, needlepoint, Taekwondo, or karaoke, to name a few. They have recess every day, which is pretty unusual for middle school in this day and age.
Honestly, as a teacher, I am always running out of time to teach things as well as I would like to. I am not sure when it is developmentally appropriate to have kids in school that long. And I don't think they should be sitting still, listening to teachers, all day. But if they are engaged in a variety of activities, including arts and sports, I am not necessarily opposed to it. Especially when you think about what it means for teachers.
The teachers are there for 10 hours a day, but they only teach 3-4 hours per day. And, they teach only one subject, to only one grade. So they teach the same thing 3 or 4 times in a day, and only have one class to prepare for. They also have at least 3 hours of planning time each day at school.
On the face of it, 10 hours at school sounds kind of awful. But I almost always spend 10 hours a day at school. Then I do more work at home in the evening. If I had more time to plan at school, and were teaching fewer subjects (which isn't really a model that's used in elementary school), maybe I wouldn't have to work so much at home. And maybe it's more honest to say, you will work 10 hours a day here, rather than pretending teachers only work 6 hours a day.
(With 10 hours, you could have teachers doing all kinds of interesting, collaborative projects too, not just teaching. It gives you a lot of flexibility both for students and teachers. That's one key to keeping teachers in the profession longer.)
Relationships and Success
The Executive Director told us that after their first few years, they analyzed the data about students who left their school. They found that there were three main reasons students leave KIPP: 1) a lack of success in school outside the classroom; 2) a lack of a meaningful relationship with at least one adult in the school; 3) a lack of buy-in from families.
As a result, they increased advisory time and had every teacher offer an elective in the afternoon. This builds relationships between teachers and students, and allows students to experience success outside the classroom. Their building stays open until 9 pm three days a week so they can offer English and computer classes to the families of their students, and they reach out to families in other ways. They have addressed the three major causes of student attrition, and have a stronger school because of it.
THE BAD NEWS
Teacher Turnover
Interestingly, although they have worked hard to decrease student attrition, they do not seem to have placed as much emphasis on teacher retention. On average, their teachers stay for a few years and then move on. Their teachers are young and on the whole inexperienced. It is widely acknowledged that teachers in their first or second years of teaching are generally ineffective, especially when compared to more experienced teachers. So if teachers only stay for 2-4 years, that's a problem for instruction.
The director was vague in terms of why people leave, except for mentioning that people who don't buy into their way of doing things are asked to leave. He said he would rather have teachers stay longer, and expressed an interest in helping staff maintain a work-life balance. But we didn't really find out what's pushing the teachers away.
Quality of Teaching
So here's the most interesting thing I saw. In about 3 hours of observations, I saw five teachers. I watched a writing class, two math classes, a science class, and a social studies class. All were classes of fifth or sixth graders.
The first teacher we watched was good at what he did. He had a clear learning target that he presented to the students at the beginning of the lesson. (They all do that; it's part of the KIPP way. Teachers work on one target per day, so everyone theoretically knows what they are aiming for during the lesson.) He returned to the target as he taught, giving examples of writing that met the target and writing that didn't meet the target. When students gave a wrong answer, he didn't tell them they were wrong, but instead asked them to expand on their thinking, and asked what other students thought.
It was downhill from there. The other classes we saw were taught by what seemed to be inexperienced teachers (which isn't surprising, given their turnover rates). Students mostly sat at desks, filled in blanks on worksheets, and were called on to give one-word answers. The instruction was dull. A couple of teachers responded with, "Really?" when a student gave a wrong answer, thus prompting the student to quickly say, "I mean..." and change his answer. This gives the teacher no insight into the student's thinking, and gives the student no chance to think more deeply about the question. Math seemed to be drill of very specific skills (they have one "problem-solving" period per week, the rest is more skill- based). "Science" involved filling in blanks on a worksheet while the teacher lectured.
Of course, all teachers teach in this way sometimes, in front of the class, explaining things the students must learn. But this is just one of many, many pedagogical tools at our disposal. My sense at KIPP was that this is the rule, not the exception. The few times I saw kids moving around or talking in small groups, it seemed more like a gimmick to get students' attention than true quality instruction.
In each class, some students had incorrect work on their papers, but the teachers didn't notice. In fact, while students worked, teachers by and large watched the clock, calling out frequent reminders: "Two more minutes!" I saw few instances of teachers conferring with students. I wondered how they knew who had met their learning target for the day and who had not.
(I may be wrong; maybe they know quite well who has met the target and who has not, and maybe they address it later during a tutoring time. They clearly monitor their standardized test scores quite closely. But if a student is doing something wrong in class, and no one catches the mistake and corrects it, how useful is that class time to the student? No teacher catches every misunderstanding of every student, but if you don't talk to your students while they work, you are unlikely to catch many errors.)
The emphasis was very much on management. Order and discipline. And hey, in that environment, you could get all kinds of amazing learning done, with so few seconds spent redirecting students. I am all in favor of classrooms where behavior is not a problem, where systems and expectations are clear. Once you have those things ironed out, though, you are free to do innovative, thought-provoking academics that teach higher-level thinking skills. It was disappointing to see that opportunity wasted.
In the end, at every school, it all comes down to teacher retention. You don't get quality instruction unless you keep and continually coach teachers. They've got their systems down at KIPP, and some of them are good. Like most systems, though, in the hands of good teachers, they work well. In the hands of poor teachers, they work only somewhat, or not at all.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Chad
This is a story about Chad, who I already think might be a common subject of my stories this year.
Yesterday we had our weekly reflection period. This is a time we have built in, for the first time this year, for kids to reflect on their work. It is a time to write about what you have learned, what you have gotten better at, and what is still hard for you.
These self-reflection skills are, by the way, pretty sophisticated. Most students need quite a bit of practice and modeling to understand this kind of thinking.
So I made them a sheet to fill out for us to share with their families at conferences tomorrow. It had 3 sentence starters:
As an aside, it was interesting to try to help them pin down what skills they have been learning and getting better at. They can say something broad, like "Math!" But when you ask what it is about math that they are getting better at, they can't remember. "The cubes?" they say. But the cubes, of course, are just the tools they used to get better at something else. Remembering what they were getting better at is hard.
Most kids were pretty accurate about what they still need to practice. Nijon wrote he needs practice with the line (walking quietly in line, he means). That is very true. Diego wrote he needs practice reading the words in his books, which is just what he needs.
Chad, though -- Chad's work was different. His says:
I am proud of being smart in math.
I am better at dancing.
I still need practice with running fast.
For many students, I would encourage them to be reflective about more academic things. The thing about Chad, though, is that he is so tiny, so quiet, so retiring. He is easy to overlook. He looks everywhere, all the time, with big eyes, but doesn't speak. He is shy. Most of the time, if it gets even a tiny bit louder in our classroom, Chad sits there, his skinny shoulders hunched up near his ears, making the quiet sign with his fingers and waving it vaguely in the direction of the noise, his brow furrowed and his eyes wide.
So dancing in front of people is probably hard for him. But we do fun dancing in second grade, and he is getting better at it. Running fast is probably not one of his strong suits, either, I would bet, especially compared to other, taller second-grade boys. And you can tell, from his writing, what is really important to him. His reflection sounds like him.
But his picture was my favorite thing. Under "What is the best part of second grade so far?" he drew a picture of students sitting at desks. Next to the desks there is a big rectangle (our rug, where we sit for meetings and lessons, I assume). And around the rug are names: the names of all the kids in our class.
Once again, Chad was the wise one. The kids are definitely the best part of second grade so far.
Yesterday we had our weekly reflection period. This is a time we have built in, for the first time this year, for kids to reflect on their work. It is a time to write about what you have learned, what you have gotten better at, and what is still hard for you.
These self-reflection skills are, by the way, pretty sophisticated. Most students need quite a bit of practice and modeling to understand this kind of thinking.
So I made them a sheet to fill out for us to share with their families at conferences tomorrow. It had 3 sentence starters:
- I am proud of...
- I am better at...
- I still need practice with...
As an aside, it was interesting to try to help them pin down what skills they have been learning and getting better at. They can say something broad, like "Math!" But when you ask what it is about math that they are getting better at, they can't remember. "The cubes?" they say. But the cubes, of course, are just the tools they used to get better at something else. Remembering what they were getting better at is hard.
Most kids were pretty accurate about what they still need to practice. Nijon wrote he needs practice with the line (walking quietly in line, he means). That is very true. Diego wrote he needs practice reading the words in his books, which is just what he needs.
Chad, though -- Chad's work was different. His says:
I am proud of being smart in math.
I am better at dancing.
I still need practice with running fast.
For many students, I would encourage them to be reflective about more academic things. The thing about Chad, though, is that he is so tiny, so quiet, so retiring. He is easy to overlook. He looks everywhere, all the time, with big eyes, but doesn't speak. He is shy. Most of the time, if it gets even a tiny bit louder in our classroom, Chad sits there, his skinny shoulders hunched up near his ears, making the quiet sign with his fingers and waving it vaguely in the direction of the noise, his brow furrowed and his eyes wide.
So dancing in front of people is probably hard for him. But we do fun dancing in second grade, and he is getting better at it. Running fast is probably not one of his strong suits, either, I would bet, especially compared to other, taller second-grade boys. And you can tell, from his writing, what is really important to him. His reflection sounds like him.
But his picture was my favorite thing. Under "What is the best part of second grade so far?" he drew a picture of students sitting at desks. Next to the desks there is a big rectangle (our rug, where we sit for meetings and lessons, I assume). And around the rug are names: the names of all the kids in our class.
Once again, Chad was the wise one. The kids are definitely the best part of second grade so far.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Inside a Teacher's Brain
There is a powerful image early on in Waiting for Superman that I can't get out of my mind.
A cartoon teacher stands in her classroom, cartoon students seated before her. She walks along the row of desks, stopping behind each child just long enough to open up the top of their brain, pour some knowledge in, and pop it closed again.
Soon, though, countless edicts and policies begin to arrive at her small school, so many that they require most of her attention. Holding her pitcher of knowledge in one hand, she picks up a booklet of policies with the other. With her eyes on the booklet instead of on her student, she opens his head and begins to pour the knowledge -- but, because she isn't looking, she pours it on the floor beside him instead of into his head.
Put aside for a moment this incredibly poor metaphor for good teaching. The image of the teacher with her eyes elsewhere, missing her student, is spot on. Any moment when my "eyes" are on something other than my students is a sub-par moment of teaching. Sometimes those things come from outside the classroom, such as frustrating schedules, unreasonable or tardy administrative requests, or the lack of basic supplies such as paper towels. Other times they come, as the movie suggests, from proclamations and expectations that are overwhelming, hard to understand, or just plain harmful to our kids. These external pressures and stresses take valuable teacher energy away from teaching every day.
The majority of the time my eyes aren't on my kids, though, it's because of my own brain. The number of things a teacher's brain must do simultaneously is staggering. During my first year of teaching, my brain was so full of, "What question will I ask next?" "What should I do about the kid who's picking his nose over there?" "How do I teach that kid to read?" "Why hasn't Jojo come back from the bathroom yet?" that when a student would raise her hand and ask to get a drink of water, I would stare at her, blinking and stammering. "Um, hmmm. Well. Let's see. Can you get a drink of water? I'm not sure." While inside my mind, I wondered, Is this a good time to get water? Should I let her? Will everyone else want water if I say yes? But it's not okay to deny her water, is it? When is a good time to get water?
I spent yesterday morning watching a first-grade teacher with her class at another school. From an observer's perspective, it doesn't look too complicated. She introduces a concept, models it, asks the students to try it, then sends them off to work independently. She manages behavior with a look, a touch, a reminder.
Watching her, though, I knew that what to me looks like a serene morning requires vast effort on her part. While she gives examples from her own life about the kinds of stories they might want to write, she is noticing out of the corner of her eye the student who is playing with her shoelaces. She glances at the clock and sees that she is five minutes behind her plan, which will give them less time for Writers' Workshop or make them late for Music. She wonders if the quiet boy in the front is following the lesson while he looks out the window. She sees a student go to the bathroom for the fourth time this morning, and remembers that she needs to call his family to make a meeting with them. She thinks about how to get the writing materials distributed in an orderly and efficient manner in the next five minutes.
I recently read a piece by Atul Gawande about what goes on in a surgeon's mind, and the kinds of nuanced judgments a doctor must make every day. His point was that these kinds of judgments are not things that can be learned in a class or from a book; the ability to know the right thing to do, and to trust your professional intuition, comes only with experience.
Even on the easiest days, a teacher's mind is in at least fifteen different places at once. A teacher's ability to know everything that's going on in the room, while also holding in her mind the kid with the shoelaces and the parents she needs to call and the student who isn't sure how to start the problem -- this is what Jacob Kounin calls "withitness." (I learned about "withitness" from a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.)
Research shows, though, that we can't really multitask. We don't do as well at things when our brains are handling too many ideas simultaneously. This is why my best teaching happens when I have the fewest distractions and stressors. The more students with challenging behaviors I have, the more directions my brain is moving at once. When I have a more cooperative class, I can concentrate on teaching (which is, after all, why I do this work). Even with the easiest class, a good teacher has to know how many of her 20 students are on board with her lesson. This is enough to manage -- too many other distractions take away from your ability to be a skillful teacher.
With time and experience, good teachers learn how to manage everything that is going on in their brains. It's not something you learn from an education school. Some days I am better at it than others. At least now, after ten years of teaching, I know when to let my kids get a drink of water.
A cartoon teacher stands in her classroom, cartoon students seated before her. She walks along the row of desks, stopping behind each child just long enough to open up the top of their brain, pour some knowledge in, and pop it closed again.
Soon, though, countless edicts and policies begin to arrive at her small school, so many that they require most of her attention. Holding her pitcher of knowledge in one hand, she picks up a booklet of policies with the other. With her eyes on the booklet instead of on her student, she opens his head and begins to pour the knowledge -- but, because she isn't looking, she pours it on the floor beside him instead of into his head.
Put aside for a moment this incredibly poor metaphor for good teaching. The image of the teacher with her eyes elsewhere, missing her student, is spot on. Any moment when my "eyes" are on something other than my students is a sub-par moment of teaching. Sometimes those things come from outside the classroom, such as frustrating schedules, unreasonable or tardy administrative requests, or the lack of basic supplies such as paper towels. Other times they come, as the movie suggests, from proclamations and expectations that are overwhelming, hard to understand, or just plain harmful to our kids. These external pressures and stresses take valuable teacher energy away from teaching every day.
The majority of the time my eyes aren't on my kids, though, it's because of my own brain. The number of things a teacher's brain must do simultaneously is staggering. During my first year of teaching, my brain was so full of, "What question will I ask next?" "What should I do about the kid who's picking his nose over there?" "How do I teach that kid to read?" "Why hasn't Jojo come back from the bathroom yet?" that when a student would raise her hand and ask to get a drink of water, I would stare at her, blinking and stammering. "Um, hmmm. Well. Let's see. Can you get a drink of water? I'm not sure." While inside my mind, I wondered, Is this a good time to get water? Should I let her? Will everyone else want water if I say yes? But it's not okay to deny her water, is it? When is a good time to get water?
I spent yesterday morning watching a first-grade teacher with her class at another school. From an observer's perspective, it doesn't look too complicated. She introduces a concept, models it, asks the students to try it, then sends them off to work independently. She manages behavior with a look, a touch, a reminder.
Watching her, though, I knew that what to me looks like a serene morning requires vast effort on her part. While she gives examples from her own life about the kinds of stories they might want to write, she is noticing out of the corner of her eye the student who is playing with her shoelaces. She glances at the clock and sees that she is five minutes behind her plan, which will give them less time for Writers' Workshop or make them late for Music. She wonders if the quiet boy in the front is following the lesson while he looks out the window. She sees a student go to the bathroom for the fourth time this morning, and remembers that she needs to call his family to make a meeting with them. She thinks about how to get the writing materials distributed in an orderly and efficient manner in the next five minutes.
I recently read a piece by Atul Gawande about what goes on in a surgeon's mind, and the kinds of nuanced judgments a doctor must make every day. His point was that these kinds of judgments are not things that can be learned in a class or from a book; the ability to know the right thing to do, and to trust your professional intuition, comes only with experience.
Even on the easiest days, a teacher's mind is in at least fifteen different places at once. A teacher's ability to know everything that's going on in the room, while also holding in her mind the kid with the shoelaces and the parents she needs to call and the student who isn't sure how to start the problem -- this is what Jacob Kounin calls "withitness." (I learned about "withitness" from a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker.)
Research shows, though, that we can't really multitask. We don't do as well at things when our brains are handling too many ideas simultaneously. This is why my best teaching happens when I have the fewest distractions and stressors. The more students with challenging behaviors I have, the more directions my brain is moving at once. When I have a more cooperative class, I can concentrate on teaching (which is, after all, why I do this work). Even with the easiest class, a good teacher has to know how many of her 20 students are on board with her lesson. This is enough to manage -- too many other distractions take away from your ability to be a skillful teacher.
With time and experience, good teachers learn how to manage everything that is going on in their brains. It's not something you learn from an education school. Some days I am better at it than others. At least now, after ten years of teaching, I know when to let my kids get a drink of water.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)