Practical Theory - Ed-Admin

Leadership Day 2010: Be The Best Version of Yourself

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 21:30:13 -0700

Scott McLeod has, once again, called for a day of posts related to leadership - Leadership Day 2010. While Leadership Day was yesterday, I'm hoping I can extend it to "Leadership Weekend."

For me, leadership is intensely personal. The simple answer to finding your leadership style is this -- imagine the best version of yourself... the version of yourself that deepens your best traits and mitigates your worst ones... and then try every day to be that person. You'll fail a lot. Most days, you're not going to be that person, because that person doesn't exist. You're chasing a ghost that doesn't exist. But the effort to be that person will bring you closer to them. And in doing so, you'll realize that person is a moving target, because you're changing, and that best version of you will change. That's a good thing.

Here's another way to look at it... try every day to be the person the all the people in your charge need you to be. It is the essence of servant leadership. That's a tricky thing, though, because you will lead many people, and people's needs will be different. That's the difference between "all the people" and "each of the people." Worse, you're going to have to figure out what people need from you personally and professionally, and those two things are always in play, and they don't always work in concert. You have to be the person they need you to be professionally, and that means deeply taking into consideration their humanity (and yours), but it means that there are times when what they need from you on a personal level, and what you need to do on a professional level both for the person in front of you and for the organization as a whole are in conflict. Those are soul-searching moments, but the ability to be a good person who can care deeply about the person in front of you while still acting in the best interest of the whole organization is one of the great challenges of leadership.

Robert Pirsig once wrote, "Want to paint a perfect picture? Be perfect and paint what you know." The best advice about leadership I can imagine is "Be a truly good person and lead from there." You'll fall short of being that best version of yourself a lot, but for me, it's the only path to follow.

Technorati Tags: leadershipday10

Difficult Conversations

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:06:38 -0700

I spent too much time this week having hard conversations with many students and parents around some incredibly difficult issues. As I tweeted out at one point, "lately, the things we cannot write about / blog about have been taking up much of my time." We can write about theory and practice and ideas and successes, but we can't write about the things that break our hearts for obvious reasons. But those moments when we try to help our kids and their parents deal with the most difficult things are some of the moments we need the most help, the most guidance, the most understanding, because there is no handbook, and there is often no clear right answer or clear best thing to say.

So we do the best we can, we get council from trusted colleagues, and we work with kids, and we work with families. And then we reflect on our decisions and try to figure out how to be better tomorrow than we were today. As a principal, there are days when I wish there was some handbook, some great big chart with an X and Y axis of issues and severity, so that I could follow the lines and figure out exactly what I was supposed to do, but of course, there isn't, and there can't be, because those kind of proscriptive rules never come with nuance, and short of the situations of mandatory reporting, those moments always contain nuance.

For me, the answer is to never fall in love with my answer... to always question... to always wonder... to always reflect... and to always remain self-critical. I say all the time that we should be humbled before the enormity of what we are trying to do. Weeks like this remind me of that painfully and powerfully... as I am confronted with my own flawed humanity as I try to help my students deal with theirs as well.

Kids are facing a more and more challenging and confusing world. They need us to be the best versions of ourselves we can muster. And that means we have to listen as best we can. And we need to never grow cold to the problems of children, and we can never think that we have all the answers.

I tried to be the best principal I know how to be this week. I sincerely hope I did right by the children in my care. Whether I did or or whether I fell short, I promise to try to be better next week.

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Leadership Day - The Pace of Change

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:27:31 -0700

[Couldn't resist Scott McLeod's call for Leadership Day posts...]

So... I'm going to come at this from a strange place. I think most folks in the edu-blog world would agree that trying to affect meaningful change is frustrating, and at one time or another, we've been incredibly frustrated by the pace of chance -- or even convincing others of the need for change.

But let's assume one is in a situation where the obstacles to change have been overcome, and the need for change has been understood -- then what?

I think one of the most important things we can do at that moment is to be very deliberate -- and even dare I say slow -- in how we manifest that change.

Be it technological reform, pedagogical reform, policy reform, I think the road is littered with too many failures because leaders did not allow most people to follow them.

I had the opportunity to meet Ron Sofo - Superintendent of the Freedom Area School District near Pittsburgh. He's been there for decades, and he and I spoke at length about how he took an initiative and rolled it out over several years... about building teacher buy-in, parent buy-in... about building a broad coalition... about listening and changing. And ultimately, about success.

Granted, most of us don't have years to make change happen, but we also don't have the ability to make mistakes because we rushed.

So some thoughts on how to affect change in a timely, and yet, deliberate fashion.

Know why you are changing... and know what you are giving up by making this change. Every change creates winners and losers, so be sure to think through what you gain and what you lose (thanks to Neil Postman for that framework.) which leads to...
Always ask "What is the worst consequence of your best idea?" Do it for two reasons - one, because if you can't live with that consequence, don't do what you planned, but two, because the process of thinking this through will help you (and your team) mitigate the problems and you won't be as surprised when the thing you didn't think of comes up.
Research like crazy. Who has tried what you are doing? Who has tried something close to what you're doing? Who is talking about it? Who is writing about it? Who says the idea is already crazy? There aren't many truly new ideas in education, so figure out the history of your idea and learn from who has come before you.
Get lots of opinions - Come up with a smart, sensible, honest way to explain your idea and then listen. Listen a lot. Listen to the folks who don't like the idea, and ask them why.
Be honest - Don't oversell, don't overpromise, and don't pretend that the idea is perfect.
Build consensus - If only a few people are on-board with the idea, it won't work. But consensus doesn't mean taking something from everyone and sticking it onto the original idea until what you have is the worst of committee-based decisions. It means listening for the truths in what other people are telling you and being willing to make substantive change when it makes sense.
Know when to move forward. Don't let ideas die in committee because the team gets hung up on the final 5% of an idea.
Set realistic expectations for initial success, and then set up a plan to get there. If it's a tech idea -- get the tech right. (Nothing worse than getting everyone excited about a new innovation and then getting everything but the tech side of it right. It took us a year to get our website even close to where we wanted it at SLA, fortunately, we got enough right that folks kept at it.)
Finally, keep communicating throughout the process.

There are too many reasons effective innovation seems so hard in education. We should make sure that we, as change agents, are thoughtful and deliberate enough to make sure that we aren't one of them.

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Tags: leadershipday09

School Improvement and Coaching

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:14:38 -0700

I've been thinking a lot about coaching lately. Partially, I'm sure, because I'm reading Making Learning Whole by David Perkins (thanks, Gary!) but also because I think so much of the way we learn and the way we set up smart systems can be seen in smart coaching.

When I first became an Ultimate Frisbee captain in college, one of the former captains of the team told me, "Don't try to do everything in a time out. Give everyone three things to think about and nothing more." It was great advice because it was always very tempting to go over EVERYTHING I saw on the field in every time out. But whenever I did that, folks never retained everything, and now everyone walked away with a different piece of what they thought was important.

This became great advice as a high school coach as well... and not just for timeouts. One of things I learned as a coach was not to try to do everything at once. Before every season, I laid out all the skills and concepts I wanted them to master, and then I laid them out across the season -- how I would introduce ideas and then constantly spiral back to them... so that we could build slowly and smartly together. But I also learned how to focus on certain ideas, certain concepts, player by player, skill by skill. And I learned that, whenever possible, connecting ideas together, so that players could see how what they did related back to the whole was incredibly important.

But I also realized that I couldn't teach everything. I know coaches whose teams had twenty plays with multiple offensive and defensive sets, and more often than not, those teams could be beat just by out-executing them. Our teams did what we did very well, and what we did was rarely scripted, but rather we put in systems that relied on players to know what they were doing very well and then make smart choices based on what they saw in front of them.

Yeah... allegory, right?

But what made me think about this was not about teachers teaching kids, but how too many places deal with teacher learning and school improvement. So much about the current school improvement ideas are about trying to improve twenty different things at once, and I don't think that works. It sounds good -- especially because we can all see that there are often many, many problems in schools -- but it rings hollow, because the sum of all those parts rarely add up to a whole.

What amazes me, more and more, is how few schools have a clearly defined pedagogical practice that can be articulated simply and powerfully, and are therefore, even more susceptible to this kind of problem.

Let us think about how we build smart teams and build smart schools. Let us realize that we're better off picking the things we want to do well and then work tirelessly to do those things well. Let's be smart about what we want to be, how we want to get there, and how we get there collectively and individually, and then let's stop trying to go over all the ways we want to get better in a 30 second time out.

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Personal Paradigm Shifts

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:11:42 -0700

Clarence Fisher (@glassbeed) tweeted out the other day:

(Tweet One) Trying to decide tonight whether to get working on my school administrator's certificate. Question for admins:
(Tweet Two) Why do you do it? What's the greatest thing about being an administrator compared to being in the classroom?

I replied:

@glassbeed You get to work on the big picture, which is wonderful. It's a paradigm shift, and it requires a change in thinking about self.

And several folks asked me to elaborate on that second part --

It requires a chance in thinking about self.

That's more than a 140 character response... so here goes.

At its most basic, the skill sets that allow you to be successful as a teacher are not necessarily the skill sets that set you up to succeed as a teacher. For example, any photographic evidence of my desk and office back when I was a teacher / tech coordinator would show a cluttered mess. It was o.k., I have a really good memory and I could put my hands on just about anything when I really needed to. I enjoyed that mess, honestly. I felt comfortable in it, and I was pretty effective in it. However, when I became a principal, I found that methodology didn't work for me anymore. I had to change a fundamental part of the way I worked. There was too much to keep in my head so that a major part of how I worked had to change. I had to become more organized. I had to develop new systems if I was going to be successful as a principal.

That may not sound that much, but for a lot of us (and I include myself in this), how we work often is part of who we are. I loved being that messy teacher. And it wasn't enough for me to say, "I need to be more organized." I had to say, "I have to be a more organized person." Now, I don't leave most days unless I go through the pile of papers on my desk. And moreover, I've noticed that I've changed the way I think about a messy desk. It actively bothers me now, which I never would have thought.

That's a somewhat easy answer, but there's a deeper level of this as well. One of my mentors pulled me aside as I was taking on more administrative roles back at Beacon and said, "Up until now, you've had a lot of success on the faculty being a passionate advocate for your own ideas. Now, your job is to support other people's ideas." That was a shift. There's no question that being a principal -- especially a founding principal -- means having a vision and being able to articulate it passionately and powerfully, but after that, unless you want every idea to come out of your office, you really do need to be able to step back and let others inhabit that vision -- sometimes (even often) in ways you have never thought of.

Those are two examples that are specific to me, but I'd posit that everyone needs to go through this process when they become a principal. Many of us who are teachers have made being a teacher a fundamental part of our identity. And while I don't think administrators should ever stop thinking of themselves as teachers, there is a shift that must happen in the way we see ourselves. It requires different strengths, different skills, to be a successful principal than the skills that allowed us to be successful in our career up to that point. Going through that process can involve a bit of a sense of loss, but it is a necessary thing to do.

So now I'm wondering... for any admins who read this -- do you agree? What did you have to give up or change in self-examination when becoming an admin? And for other folks... what skill or trait or tendency that serves you very well as a teacher could you see being less of a positive thing as an administrator?

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Tags: admininstration

The Grass Is Always Greener

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:03:40 -0700

So I was at the Penn State 1:1 Conference this week. Sunday night and Monday, I was working with administrators from all over the state -- mostly from smaller districts. I was struck by the way they talked about their schools and districts. Principals talked directly to superintendents, priorities were set by administrators who had been there for a dozen years. I spoke to one superintendent about what it was like to be in his job long enough to see the kids who were affected by a kindergarten initiative graduate... and talking about building support for initiatives over a number of years to get the kind of buy-in necessary to do it right. In short, it was the complete opposite of the experience so many of us in urban education have.

In the three years that SLA has been open, we have had three CEO / Superintendents of the school district, four regional superintendents, multiple changes to our School Reform Commission (a school board of sorts) and even the regional structures have been changed several times. We have seen initiatives come and go, and we have spent a ton of time and energy teaching the new administrations about SLA and what we do that is different than many other schools.

I'd assert that one of the keys to true sustainable innovation is sustainable leadership. We haven't had a superintendent for more than five years since (I think) Constance Clayton in the early 90s. I wonder what that does to the ability to cautiously and wisely affect change. I wonder what that does to teachers and parents and school-level administrators who live through change without innovation.

I have no doubt that there are plenty of days when the problems that the smaller districts face feel as frustrating as the problems we face in urban structures do. However, I admit that talking to the leaders I met at Penn State made me wonder what it would be like to run a school in a smaller district. I'm not leaving SLA or anything, and I'm an urban educator at heart, but I'd be lying if I didn't feel a touch of envy when I thought about how much easier it'd to be to sustain innovation if the support and leadership structures weren't changing all the time.

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Tags: life, education

Consensus-Based Decision Making

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:11:00 -0700

One of the questions that is hardest for me to answer about the path we've walked at SLA is, "Yes, but what about those of us who don't get to start from scratch?"

It's a fair question, and while I believe it is possible -- in fact necessary -- for existing schools to change to become more humane, forward thinking institutions, there's no question that those schools have a disadvantage that we don't have. Although I do always point out that starting a school from scratch, while having many advantages, also means you have to start a school from scratch -- re-inventing every process from curriculum design to the ways by which faculty place orders for classroom supplies when we run out.

But, the more I talked to people about the ways we established norms at SLA, the ways we got everyone to pull in the same direction on curriculum and assessment, the more I have come to believe that the thing that is our greatest strength is the necessary first step for schools and leaders who aren't starting from the beginning.

I really think the key is consensus-driven decision making. I think the only way to really reform existing schools is to be willing to take a broad vision and then let that vision be changed and embodied by all stakeholders... and not just on the big ideas, but on any of the important implementation pieces as well.

So what does consensus-driven decision making look like? First, it's important to understand that it does not mean that everyone agrees with every decision. That's just about impossible, I'd think. What it means is that everyone agrees to live with and abide by decisions, and that everyone trusts the process enough to know that everyone has moments when they give up their sacred cow, and everyone has moments when their idea forms the backbone of what we decide.

Perhaps most importantly, consensus-driven decision making means that when there are disagreements and concerns, those concerns are aired and attempts must be made to both address and ameliorate them. People have to commit to the idea that we'll all sit around the table until everyone feels comfortable moving forward. And people have to commit themselves to being willing to listen and move forward.

This isn't the kind of thing that people learn and trust overnight. It's not something that you can just decide, "O.k., now we're going to do this. Everyone, get on board." I think it requires taking a ton of time. I think it's summer work to get started. And I think it's the kind of thing that can make some people decide to leave when an organization is obviously pulling away from their core beliefs. But I also think it can be something that can make schools healthy, strong places. The upfront work of building consensus can lead to all kinds of amazing leaps forward when it comes time for implementation. It can build trust, and it can build community.

One of the things that people have to realize in this kind of process -- and where it can go horribly wrong -- is that it does require a willingness to build true synthesis of ideas. Where this can go horribly awry is when what comes out of the process is some sort of fifteen-headed monster where to appease everyone, everyone's idea gets stuck onto the main idea until what you have is some sort of completely unimplementable idea that bears no resemblance to the original. For consensus to work, people have to be willing to change. People have to be willing to listen to opposing ideas and find the places of common ground and work from there. It doesn't work any other way.

And the find thing is that in time, folks can trust the process enough that the meetings do get shorter. Our recent discussions about capstone have been amazing in that one person comes to the table with a general framework, many ideas are tossed around, and then, folks do come to a point where they trust the process enough to either say, "Hey, I'm going to put some time in on the committee to revise what we've got and represent it," or they say, "I was heard, now, let's see where we go."

It's hard work, and I won't lie, as a leader, I've had plenty of moments where I thought that it would be easier if everyone just did it the way I wanted it done. But I've always been pleased with the outcome of this process... not always right away... but in the end. It means that everyone -- me included -- has to have a strong enough ego to let their ego out of the process. It means that everyone has really be willing to listen. But it means that, in the end, you can get to a point where everyone does indeed agree on how to move forward. And that's how change can start.

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Motivation, Motivation, Motivation...

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 21:35:41 -0700

I think I first came across McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y in a educational administration class. When I read about Theory X, I was struck by the idea that anyone could think this way about management. From the Wikipedia entry on Theory X and Theory Y comes this definition of Theory X:

In this theory, management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can. They inherently dislike work. Because of this, workers need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls developed. A hierarchical structure is needed with narrow span of control at each level. According to this theory, employees will show little ambition without an enticing incentive program and will avoid responsibility whenever they can. The Theory X manager tends to believe that everything must end in blaming someone. He or she thinks all prospective employees are only out for themselves. Usually these managers feel the sole purpose of the employee's interest in the job is money. They will blame the person first in most situations, without questioning whether it may be the system, policy, or lack of training that deserves the blame. A Theory X manager believes that his or her employees do not really want to work, that they would rather avoid responsibility and that it is the manager's job to structure the work and energize the employee.

The problem is that so much of education is defined by Theory X. Much of NCLB is a Theory X model... that schools and teachers somehow are to blame for all the problems of our kids, and if you read the much of the level of discourse about what is wrong with school, and you find Theory X ideas behind much of it.

Michelle Rhee's proposal to pay teachers $120,000 / yr with the caveat that their jobs are then tied to the test scores speaks to this idea. The many districts we see implementing scripted "teacher-proof" curriculum with standardized assessments, in my opinion, is directly related to the idea that we cannot "trust" teachers to work hard in service of their children.

But sadly, as teachers we've created a situation where that could happen in classrooms all over America. How many classrooms have you been in where Theory X was the dominant paradigm? How many teachers tell students that they have to do the work or else... how many teachers assume that the students will only do the work for the grade? When we consider how much the carrot and stick has dominated our classrooms, is it any wonder that this is now becoming the way our schools are being managed?

If we want to move away from Theory X, we have to offer a different vision of our schools. We have to create a vision of schooling that does not assume that accountability trumps responsibility. We have to create a vision of school governance that respects teachers and honors the work they do, while always being aware of how much more work there is to do. And we have to create classrooms where students are taught to value their own work, to understand the relationship between freedom and responsiblity, to understand how to dedicate themselves to an idea, a passion, to their work, not just for a grade, but for the sake of the work and for themselves and their community as well.

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Tags: learning, motivation, McGregor

Expectations of Student Behavior

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 23:09:53 -0700

"We should tolerate flaws in other people in the vain hope that they will tolerate our flaws." -- I don't remember who first told me that, but it made a ton of sense to me.

One of the things that never seems to amaze me is when I talk to teachers and hear them talk about holding students to standards of behavior and work that they would never hold themselves. Ask yourself, in your school, does the teachers with the most draconian lateness policy often show up late to meetings? Does the teacher who makes a big deal about food in the classroom often leave trash all over the faculty room? Do the teachers who have the strictest policies often resist any administrative policies? And how many of us have made it through an hour-long PD session without passing a note or sending an email or daydreaming? And yet, so many schools expect kids to do so five, six, seven times a day. (And how many people -- aside from teachers -- go home from work and then work another three hours at home? And yet, we expect kids to do that every day...)

One of the things I love about SLA is that we try to remember everyone's humanity -- teachers and students. We talk about the things that frustrate us... students handing in stuff late being top of the list for many of us, but when we do, we try to remember how many deadlines we miss ourselves. Remembering the shared humanity of everyone in the building can really lead to putting in place policies that are humane. We must expect our students to work hard, we must expect our students to learn to make deadlines -- we must set the bar as high for our students as we set it for ourselves, but we must also remember to set up structures that help students when, inevitably, they sometimes miss the bar. We should do so if for no other reason than we hope someone does that for us when we fail.

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Tags: compassion

Recruiting Teachers

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:07:49 -0700

Over the past few years, many administrators have asked me how SLA has such an incredible faculty, and while I think there are many reasons, not the least of which are the colleagues that you get to work with and the edu-blogger network that has made SLA more well-known than the average high school, I do think there are some things we do are replicable for schools that are looking to both get more candidates for teaching positions and find teachers more aligned with their school's philosophy in their candidate pool.

Write a job description of your school that speaks directly to the mission of your school. For example, the first qualification we list on the page (after needs to be certified) is "Must believe we teach students before subjects." Don't be afraid to turn-off some teachers with it if you feel that it will excite the teachers you want.
Increase your reach using online tools -- I believe that teachers will move to go places where they are valued. For progressive schools, I strongly suggest the Coalition of Essential Schools Job Board, but I know of schools that had success using the EdWeek job board also. A principal here in Philly has had success using Craigslist too.
Don't forget about the ed schools. We reach out to education schools near and far. They have alumni lists, job fairs, departmental list-servs, and they have lots of teachers looking for jobs.
Get out to job fairs -- send teachers, send students, send parents, send admins, but get to job fairs.
Have an interview process that is designed to ask teachers to think about the things that matter most to you. A lot of schools design the interview process to find the "best" teacher, but I think that's a mistake -- I think you want to find the "best fit" teachers. So design an interview process that allows teachers to show you how their vision of education fits with your school's vision of education -- and include teachers, students, parents in that process.
And then, of course, walk the walk of the vision of your school so that the teachers you recruit feel validated and excited by their choice. That's the hardest part.

I do believe that -- just like with students -- if more teachers found schools that matched their teaching and learning styles, we'd have a lot more success in our schools. And I think those teachers are out there -- especially all those who are leaving the system frustrated -- who could make our schools better. I hope someone finds this helpful.

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Tags: recruiting, teachers, school_reform

Pot-Luck And Believing in Your Community

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:22:49 -0700

I start this post with an apology to Zac Chase -- who I gave a lot of (mostly good-natured) grief to as I worried about whether or not a new idea would work.

Last night, we had our 9th Grade Back to School Night. Zac had the idea of splitting up Back to School Night so that the 9th Grade parents could do a potluck dinner where they could sit with the other families in their advisory and eat and talk with them. They could meet with their advisors for the first time where it's not a report card conference. It was all fantastic theory, but it as it got closer, I kept seeing all the things that could go wrong -- parents might not bring food.... the conversations may not happen... it meant two Back to School Nights, which is taxing for staff... it was more planning at the start of a school year with a million things going on... new parents often are looking for a Back to School that feels like something they recognize... the list goes on. It's a classic administrator trap -- which is looking for all the reasons you shouldn't do something, rather than looking for the reasons to do something.

But we'd committed to doing it, and while I was worried about it, we were going to make it as special as possible. A lot of people, from Zac to me to Home and School parents did a lot of planning. Upper class students ran around after school to make sure the place looked great. We got the schedule of events to everyone. And I worried.

And then the funny thing happened -- parents came. They bought food. They sat together and shared stories of the first few weeks. They talked about why they came to SLA... or how they found out about it... and advisors talked and listened and learned about the families their students came from.

In short -- it was the best part of the evening. I'm sure the parents loved following their students' schedules, and I know how passionate and inspiring SLA teachers are when they talk about their classes, but as lovely as that part of the evening was (and I did manage to hear most of our teachers talking about their classes), the highlight was watching our new families make themselves part of our community along side students, teachers and returning parents. And the food was amazing too.

So, at a time in the school year when it would probably be really easy to fall back on what we know works -- and the time of SLA where we are starting to be able to say, "We've done it this way in the past" -- it's important to remember to keep trying new ideas. And it's important to be able to see the best reasons to do things, not just think of all the reasons not to. And it's important to have people on faculty who are willing to experiment and dream big and see ideas throught. And it's important to know how to nurture those people and their ideas. And it's also important to remember when, as principal, you just get out of the way and let the moment happen, even when you're worried.

And the best thing is that by doing that, I got yet another reminder of how much I love the community of SLA... and how much I can believe in the strengthen of this community we've built, and how everyone -- teachers, students, parents -- are so invested in bringing in the new class of SLA teachers and students into that culture.

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Tags: SLA, leadership, innovation, community

Measuring Learning

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:33:41 -0700

Seventy-five comments into a thread, Dan Meyer asks a really important question:

I got my 07-08 Geometry results back yesterday and they were not acceptable. Too many kids listing along at Basic levels, not enough kids rising to Proficiency. My question to so many commenters here: what would you have me do with that data?

As a principal who is both against standardized assessments and also very much measured by them, here's what I'd do:

First, let's work under the assumption that I've watched you teach, and I feel that you are a good teacher.

I would take the scores and compare them to grades. I believe that the multiple data points that go into making up a grade give us a richer sense a student's learning. So the first question is this -- Is there a correlation between student grades and scores? If there is -- or if there isn't -- what does that tell us?
The next thing I'd do is ask you for your assessment: Most importantly, what is your assessment of how the students learned Geometry? How does that line up with what the scores suggest? What surprised you? What was what you expected?
If -- as I would think -- you were surprised by the scores and you honestly feel like there was deeper learning than the scores suggest, then the question is this: Is there a disconnect between the way you're teaching the skills or the process or just the language and the way the state test assesses the learning? This raises several more questions:
1. What are the assessments that you did in your classroom that would lead us to believe that the learning was more successful than the tests suggest?
2. If we believe that your methods are successful, what do we do about the tests? Given that they are the coin of the realm, we cannot ignore them, so are there modifications we need to make? Can we make them without harming the learning you see going on?
3. There is something going on in your class if your sense -- based on the work you see every day -- is that the scores really are not reflective of what they've learned. Is there something going on with the multiple opportunity style of assessment that you're doing such that on a one-shot test the kids aren't able to replicate their learning? Do you need to just take two weeks before the test to do some explicit teaching on how the way they've learned can translate to a test? Do you need to give them more opportunities during the year to take tests that mimic the structure of the state test?

Much of test taking is about the skill of making sure your knowledge and skills translate well on the test. The hard part, I really believe, is making sure that the learning you see every day in your class is measured on the tests, especially if you don't teach in a pedagogical fashion that is in line with the state assessment. And I really do believe it's important to tell us that the tests tell us something, but they don't come close to telling us everything.

Anyway, that's what I'd do.

[Update: Gary Stager takes a whack at answering Dan as well, and his answer is brilliant and paradigm-shifting and highlights why he's one of the best thinkers we've got.]

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Tags: danmeyer, high-stakes tests, assessment

Teaching and Shortcuts

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 22:18:23 -0700

Inspired by Dan Meyer's latest video:

dy/av : 008 : behind the scenes from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

As usual, Dan gives us a great piece, and as is often the case, he uses the structure of the video to "bury the lede" on purpose. Dan speaks about how difficult it is to both create these short films and how difficult it is to craft smart, thoughtful, engaging lesson plans. And, in the "aha" moment, he speaks about how easy it would be to take short cuts -- in both lesson planning and film making, and how you have to make that choice every day. And that choice -- whether you choose to go all the way or take shortcuts -- is easier to make with each day you make it.

And I think that Dan has hit on something really important in several respects that extend beyond the individual teacher and the choices s/he makes every day. Here's a few things that he has me wondering:

When we think about the individual teacher, we can certainly argue that if teachers just kept at it, they'd reach that magical tipping point where it gets easier and they wouldn't need to take shortcuts.
But that's not working. We've got way too high a percentage of people leaving teaching in the first five years -- does that mean we can infer that the moment when it becomes sustainable for the typical "at-risk of leaving" young teacher happens after five years?
Given that many, many teachers are not able to sustain the choice that Dan is arguing for -- given that the shortcuts (or leaving, the ultimate short cut) are so enticing for so many teachers -- what's wrong with the system that creates that?
How can we change the system so that more teachers are rewarded for not taking the short cuts?

Dan's video is excellent as far as it goes. But if being a great teacher is only achievable by Herculean effort, we're going to always struggle to create systemic reform. What do we need to do to make it easier for more and more teachers to always make that right choice toward careful crafting of curriculum?

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Tags: dan_meyer, school reform

A Whole New School

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:00:47 -0700

My latest post over at The Faculty Room is up. It's in response to Scott McLeod's Leadership Day 2008 call, and it's entitled A Whole New School:

What is Good Technology Education Leadership?

(Use back of page if necessary.)

Ive been grappling with this question because the question itself is so vast that to answer it in a blog post seems somehow impossible.

The simple answer is that good technology educational leadership is no different than good educational leadership; that the choices we make with technology education should be deliberate, thoughtful and in line with the overall educational goals of our organization.

Read the rest over there.

Connect the Dots

chris@practicaltheory.org (Chris Lehmann) — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:35:39 -0700

The last few days brought two blog very important blog entries for those of us who really think about the sustainability of a teaching career. Kilian Betlach (TMAO) of Teaching in the 408 has announced that he's not coming back to his school in September and Pete Reilly over at the District Administrator blog writes about ex-teachers' attitudes about the profession. Suffice to say, when those ex-teachers compare their new jobs with teaching, teaching comes up short.

We all know the stats that say 40-50% of new teachers leave teaching within the first five years. Now, TMAO hasn't announced whether he's leaving the classroom or just his school, but even a casual reading of his blog gives plenty of reasons why he may be leaving the classroom.

The Pete Reilly article is really worth reading because it speaks to the ex-teachers' feelings about teaching. Those teachers felt overworked, under-prepared, under-challenged, and under-appreciated. Now, granted, these are the teachers who did leave, so it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that they found more satisfaction in their next job, but the data is staggering in how overwhelmingly they felt what they felt, and given that we are losing teachers in such staggering numbers, we need to pay attention to the reasons why.

One of the questions I've started asking when I present is this -- "How is it that we have so many idealistic, intelligent, dedicated people in our schools and yet have so many problems in our schools?" We have to start questioning the system that cannot harness all this energy and intelligence.

Too often, the rhetoric of schools does delve into the heroic martyr teacher succeeding against all odds. That's not sustainable. That's not even useful.

We have to create school systems where teachers are valued, where we support young teachers, where we find ways to ensure that teachers at all levels of their career are given the opportunity to continue to grow and learn, and we have to find ways for teacher to reach the highest of expectations - their own expectations and others - in ways that allow them to work fewer than 70 hours a week. It wouldn't hurt to pay a living wage, too, but honestly, teachers know what the money looks like, and while it's a problem, I'd venture to say it's not the biggest problem. Class size, teacher load, lack of collegiality, lack of support, the sheer massive effort that excellence in the profession takes, day in and day out... all those loom much larger in the minds of the people I know who have left the profession.

The sooner we recognize that if we want teachers to treat our students with an ethic of care, we have to create school systems that treat teachers with an ethic of care. If people don't believe that for ethical reasons, they should realize it for practical reasons, because if we keep on with our current model, we are never going to get enough of the teachers our students deserve.