A Veteran’s View of Choices Facing Teachers in Implementing Common Core Standards (David B. Cohen)

David Cohen has been teaching since 1993. He completed a B.A. in English at U.C. Berkeley (’91) with Phi Beta Kappa honors, and earned a Master’s degree in Education through the Stanford Teacher Education Program (’95).  After achieving National Board Certification in 2004, David served for two years as a support provider for National Board candidates.  As one of the founding members of Accomplished California Teachers (ACT), he helped author the group’s first two policy reports.This post appeared in the ACT group blog on January 24, 2013.

The implementation of the Common Core State Standards is underway, and the imminent transition that will affect most American public schools is sparking a wide variety of reactions among educators I know and interact with, or whose writing I read online.  At the extremes are the enthusiastic adopters and the active resistors, and in between, a wide swath of teachers who are still sorting out their reactions as they learn more about the content of the standards and the implications of their adoption.

In my blog, I haven’t focused on the Common Core at length, but the posts I have written remain some of the most viewed here at InterACT.  Looking back at “Common Core Confusion” – written nearly two years ago – I see many of the fundamental issues are still driving the conversation.  The argument for the necessity of the standards has never been convincing to me.  The inclusion of a “recommended” reading list in the ELA standards still irritates me.  Additional problems include the likelihood of excessive testing and the money gushing out of schools and into publishing and testing enterprises.  In that post, I quoted or linked to many of the same key players in the debate right now, including vociferous critics such as P.L. Thomas, Yong Zhao, Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen.

Shortly thereafter I revisited my concerns in a post written in response to a conference I attended: “Common Core Confusion – ASCD Edition.”  In that post, I found myself increasingly skeptical, and linked to other blog posts that I still think are worth revisiting, by Mary Ann Riley and Alfie Kohn.

So, for anyone familiar with those authors and their perspectives, it may come as a surprise that although I agree with their assessments of the key problems in the Common Core, I actually disagree with some of their more recent writing regarding what teachers should do, or not do, as the transition unfolds.  The divide I’m seeing is revealed in the comments and links that have arisen in Larry Ferlazzo’s recent blog post at EdWeek, “Response: Best Ways to Prepare Our Students for CCSS in Language Arts.”  In that post, Ferlazzo offers viewpoints from a number of teachers who are doing exactly what the title suggests, and offering advice to their colleagues.

Like me, and the above named critics, Ferlazzo maintains doubts about the Common Core.  His post begins:

I have been no fan of the Common Core standards (see The Best Articles Sharing Concerns About Common Core Standards). However, one of the key lessons I learned in my nineteen year community organizing career was that, though we should always recognize the tension inherent in “the world as we’d like it to be” and “the world as it is,” living in the former seldom leads to success in the latter. The Common Core is the reality for most of us, and I’ve begun collecting the most useful resources for implementing them.

 And like Ferlazzo, I have reached the conclusion that teacher leaders need to seize this initiative, engage in the transition efforts of our schools and districts, and do the best we can to make the implementation work for our students.  We should also continue to express concerns and criticisms of the standards, and remain hyper-vigilant regarding the problems to follow in developing curriculum and assessing learning.

That pragmatic compromise smacks of collaboration and submission for the most outspoken critics of the standards….Krashen and Thomas responded in the comments on Ferlazzo’s post; Krashen did concede to a small extent, “Yes, if the common core is instituted, help teachers and students deal with it. But that does not mean accept it. The train has left the station but it has not arrived.”

That sounds like a statement I could agree with, but he goes in more forceful terms: “The arguments against the common core are very strong and clearly indicate that the common core will be the greatest disaster ever to hit education. Please see Yong Zhao’s articles and books, Anthony Cody’s blogs on edweek, susanohanian.org, and of course the first few articles at http://www.sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=4.  Accepting the common core as inevitable has the effect of making it inevitable.”

Thomas rejects any compromise: “I cannot endorse any efforts or arguments regarding how to implement CCSS; that is the wrong question.  CCSS is a cash-cow for textbook and testing corps, as well as paid consultants and their professional organizations.”  The “cash-cow” argument concerns me as well, but I think our best antidote is to keep excellent teachers engaged in understanding the standards and … expanding our own capacity to work with them creatively, and more independently, reducing the demand for huge and costly purchases of curriculum-in-a-box, some of which is the same shoddy material we had before with “Common Core Aligned!” slapped on the packaging.

Ferlazzo responds to the comments:

I can think of no realistic political scenario that would stop Common Core from being implemented for at least ninety percent of millions of teachers and students in the United States. I have also not heard anyone else share one, though I am all ears….

Given that political reality on the ground, I think the political capital of teachers, students and their families is better spent on other issues that also affect the working and learning conditions in our schools and the living conditions in our communities — teacher evaluation procedures, adequate funding for schools, class size, parent engagement — just to name a few. In my political judgment, teachers and their allies are much more likely to be able to influence those issues.

In his own blog post responding to Ferlazzo, Thomas writes, “If implementing CCSS is inevitable as Ferlazzo claims and if school, district, state, or federal mandates will continue to support those standards and the related high-stakes tests, teaching is reduced to an act of fatalism, and in effect, teachers are de-professionalized and students are similarly reduced to passive recipients of state-mandated knowledge, what Paulo Freire (1998) labeled as ‘the bureaucratizing of the mind’ (p. 102).”

And I might agree with Thomas (and Freire) in the abstract, but here’s the problem: such a transformation of public education could not happen in a vacuum, could not happen solely by the willpower of teachers even if we all agreed with each other, and could not happen quickly – maybe not even in one generation.

Meanwhile, Ferlazzo and I both teach in high schools with over 2,000 students apiece.  I work on a staff of over 100 teachers, and interact with many others around the district.  I help to direct a teacher leadership network with over 300 California teacher members.  The conversations I’m hearing in my school and among peers do include CCSS concerns and criticism, but in my observations there is simply no groundswell of teacher resistance to the Common Core, and I have seen a number of teachers who have favorable opinions of it despite some reservations.  (Thomas points out there is resistance to standardized testing that’s building around the country, embodied most recently in the Seattle teachers who are refusing to administer tests.  I support their efforts, and I would caution administrators around the country to look at the conscientious objections raised not only by Seattle teachers, but also teachers in Chicago, and the broader resistance in New York, led by thousands of school principals.  If the Common Core implementation continues down that path, I doubt the grassroots resistance will take as long to develop as it did with the NCLB testing regimen).

And as for the critics I’ve cited, to my knowledge, none of them is currently a K-12 teacher.  That fact does not invalidate their criticisms, but I think it colors their perceptions regarding a realistic, pragmatic approach, here and now, for those of us trying to serve our current students and schools most productively.

True, I could resist; I could dedicate hours and days to finding and sharing articles, holding meetings, building alliances.  In the meantime, someone will be making decisions about the educational program and policies for my school and district, operating with the state mandate to implement the CCSS.  I’d prefer to be part of those decisions.  If teachers don’t engage deeply in that process, I have no doubt that we will be ill-served by whatever is imposed from above without our participation.  I see more to gain for teachers in approaching this process in a “Yes, and” attitude, rather than a flat rejection.  Yes, we will help implement the Common Core Standards, and we will use the occasion of that engagement as an opportunity to educate our peers, leaders and stakeholders, and become more effective advocates for better teaching, better learning, and a stronger teaching profession.

Persistent Dilemmas That Cling to Teaching

Nearly three years ago I wrote a post on a new teacher’s dilemma. In that post I defined what a dilemma was and distinguished it from a problem. Then I presented an instance of a dilemma in a novice’s classroom and asked readers what they thought.

Since then, I have written about dilemmas often in this blog (see here, here, and here). Because “dilemma” is so  often used as a synonym for “problem” and because these tensions over choices are constant in our personal and professional lives, I offer this older post again to new readers.

I have used the word “dilemma” in earlier posts since superintendents, principals, teachers, and, yes, students face situations that call for difficult choices among conflicting values. So for this post, I offer a thorny dilemma with which readers can wrestle.

By dilemmas, I mean situations where you have to choose between two or more competing and prized values. The choice is often hard because in choosing you end up sacrificing something of value to gain a bit of satisfaction on another value.

An example of a common dilemma might help. One that each of us face is the personal/professional dilemma. You value highly your work and you value highly your family and friends. Those are the competing values. But your time and energy are limited. So you have to calculate the trade-offs between doing more of one and less of the other. You have to make choices.

You map out options: Put in fewer hours at work and more time at home. Or the reverse. Take more vacations and give up thoughts of career advancement. These and other options, each with its particular trade-offs, become candidates for a compromise that includes both satisfaction and sacrifice. If you do nothing–another option–you risk losing out with your family and friends or with your job.

This is not a problem that one neatly solves and moves on to the next one. It is a dilemma that won’t go away. It is literally built into your daily routine. There is no tidy solution; it has to be managed because the compromise you work out may unravel and there you are again, facing those unattractive choices.

With that brief definition of a dilemma, consider the following situation that faced this first-year teacher.

In a culturally diverse high school of 1300 students in northern California, Dorothy Ramirez teaches 10th grade biology. In one of her 5 classes she has 32 students of whom one-third are Latino, one-third are African-American, and one-third are white, Alberto, a 17-year old Latino who has turned in his assignments on time and hovers between a C and D, has begun disrupting the class.

Recently, Alberto began to talk with those around him while the teacher is lecturing or leading a whole-group discussion. Even after Ramirez quietly asked Alberto to stop, he continues these side conversations. On two occasions, she kept Alberto after class for a few minutes to ask if there was something going on to account for his behavior. He said nothing. The next day, he repeated the same behavior during a student presentation and was rude to Ramirez when she asked him to stop. Two other students began smirking and talking to one another while the teacher listened to students give their opinions during a whole-group discussion. Ramirez asked Alberto to leave class for 10 minutes to cool off outside the door and he did. The same thing happened the following day.

Ramirez decided to call home because she feared that she was losing control of Alberto. If this occurred, then it might spread like an infection to the rest of the class. She called his parents and discovered that they speak only Spanish. Since she speaks only English, Ramirez enlisted the help of a Spanish-speaking counselor at school who called home and spoke with the mother. The mother told the counselor that she, too, is having trouble with Alberto, the oldest of her three children and she promised to speak to him.

The next day in biology class, Alberto had another run-in with Ramirez over the same conduct. The teacher called the counselor and mother and they met the following day where it came out that the mother couldn’t control Alberto at home. Ramirez suggested speaking with the father. The mother got very upset because the father works two jobs to support the family and if he finds out about Alberto’s behavior at school and home, the father will beat him as he has done before. The meeting adjourned with no action taken but deep concern over what to do if Alberto causes more trouble in class.

1. Which prized values are in conflict for Ramirez?

2. What are Ramirez’s options in managing this dilemma?

3. Which one should she choose? Why?

Anxious Dreams about Teaching Again and Again

I begin teaching a quarter-long seminar in two weeks. I have been teaching youth and adults for nearly forty years. I am turning 78 next month. And I have had dreams of walking into class unprepared and discussions falling flat; of students walking out of my class. How can that be?

First, I am not the first nor last teacher to have anxiety-ridden dream. Artist and long-time teacher Eric Baylin wrote a song about teacher anxiety cresting at the end of the summer when students return to school. Here are two stanzas of that song:

I dream I can’t control my class. Oh, me! Oh, my!
They laugh; they jeer; and I’m about to cry, to cry.
I wake up with this awful fear
I might have chosen the wrong career.
Teachers have anxiety in the fall.

They’re coming to my classroom to evaluate;
They’ll see through me and realize that I’m not so great.
I hear them whispering in the hall.
I see the writing on the wall.
Teachers have anxiety in the fall.

Or listen to teacher Peggy Woods:

It’s the first day of classes. I go to my class. The students are all there sitting quietly looking at me. I put my bag on top of the teacher’s desk and begin taking my stuff out. I take out my pen, my grade book, the class roster, and my lesson planning book. I look in my bag, but I don’t see the syllabus. I look again. I know I made copies of the syllabus. I’m supposed to give it out and go over it with the students.  I look in my bag again. The copies I made aren’t there. I begin to panic. Did I leave the syllabus on my desk? Did I drop the copies in the hallway on my way to class? Did I leave the copies home? I look in my bag again. The syllabus still isn’t there. I look out at the students. They are all staring at me. What am I going to do??  
 
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t have the syllabus.”
 
The students stand up.
 
“What are you doing?”  I say. The students don’t say anything. They just stand there.
 
“Sit down,” I say beginning to panic. They don’t. “Please,” I plead. “Please sit down.”
 
“We don’t have to listen to you,” a student yells at me.
 
“We don’t have to do what you tell us to do,” another student shouts.
 
“Sit down,” I shout back. The students start moving towards the door. “Where are you going?” I shout. “What are you doing?” I shout louder. “Come back here….”
 

And then I wake up.

So common among teachers, these dreams keep many teachers sleepless especially in the days before school begins.

Second, teachers are not the only ones whose worries surface in dreams.

Doctors do also.

For me, however, it is puzzling. I am a grizzled veteran of the classroom not a new teacher struggling to manage a class and deliver lessons that engage my students. Nor am I working in a poverty-impacted school; I am fortunate to work in well-endowed surroundings with strong graduate students who elect to take my seminar. Finally, I do not work under district, state, and federal accountability pressures to have my students score well on high-stakes standardized tests.

So why does a seasoned professional, a veteran of decades in practicing the art and craft of teaching still gets nervous and dream of doing poorly in an upcoming seminar?

Part of an answer comes being in an helping profession. Teachers, psychotherapists, doctors, social workers, and nurses use their expertise to transform minds, develop skills, deepen insights, cope with feelings and mend bodily ills. In doing so, these helping professions share similar predicaments.

*Expertise is never enough.  An experienced primary care physician facing a chain-smoking patient knows that this high risk behavior often leads to lung cancer—even the patient knows that—yet the doctor’s knowledge and skills are insufficient to get the private equity fund CEO to quit.

Some high school teachers of science with advanced degrees in biology, chemistry, and physics believe that lessons should be inquiry driven and filled with hands-on experiences while other colleagues, also with advanced degrees, differ. They argue that naïve and uninformed students must absorb the basic principles of biology, chemistry, and physics through rigorous study before they do any “real world” work in class.

In one case, there is insufficient know-how to stop a patient from smoking and, in the other instance, knowledgeable science teachers split over how students can best learn science. As important as expertise is to helping professionals, it falls short for not only the reasons stated above but also because these professionals depend upon their clients, patients, and students to learn and become knowledgeable, healthier people.

*Helping professionals are dependent upon their clients’ cooperation. While doctors can affect a patient’s motivation, if that patient is emotionally depressed, is resistant to recommended treatments, or uncommitted to getting healthy by ignoring prescribed medications the physician is stuck.

Teachers at all levels of schooling depend upon students to respond to lessons and learn. Some students, however, are unwilling to participate in lessons. Some  defy the teacher’s authority or are uncommitted to learning what the teacher teaches. Teachers, then, have to figure out what to do in the face of students’ passivity or active resistance.

These predicaments facing even veteran teachers like me mean that all of my knowledge, all of my experience may be insufficient to strike gold in a lesson because I am dependent upon my students. I cannot predict what students will do when I teach. Every time I teach, I have to perform with the fore-knowledge that I may stumble and fall. And that may be why my worries show up in dreams even now.

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How A Taxi Ride Changed My Life (Ed Bridges)

Ed Bridges is Professor Emeritus of Education at Stanford University. His focus on educational administration, leadership, principal preparation, and problem-based learning has earned him the respect of colleagues and students for decades. We have been colleagues and friends for over 30 years. He gave this commencement address June 17, 2012 at the Stanford University School of Education.

It is an honor and a privilege to be your commencement speaker. After accepting the invitation to be your speaker, I consulted my oldest and one of my dearest friends. Since he had served as the president of four Canadian universities and the Chairman of the Board for the Emily Carr University of Art and Design, I knew that he had listened to many commencement speeches and delivered a few as well. Over a Guinness, I said, “George, what advice could you give me?” He paused, leaned over, and spoke softly and slowly. Here is what he said, “A commencement speaker is like a body at an Irish wake; the organizers need you for the party and don’t expect you to say much.”

I intend to follow my friend’s advice and talk briefly about how my life was changed following a taxi cab ride I took more than 40 years ago. However, before recounting this story, let me preface my remarks with a few things that don’t appear in my bio or curriculum vitae. They provide a context for the important lesson I learned during my taxi cab ride.

Elliott Eisner speaks of career planning as an oxymoron. John Krumboltz refers to professional careers as a happenstance. Both of my colleagues are right as far as I am concerned. To their cogent observations, I would add the words spoken nearly 41 years ago by one of my three sons, then six. At the dinner table one evening, my son said, “Dad, when I grow up, I want to be a baseball player. What do you want to be when you grow down?” How prophetic that question was. Since retiring, my height has shrunk two inches, and I am still trying to figure out what I want to do next.

My professional career certainly had a life of its own. As a 16 year old, I walked across the stage at Hannibal High School in Hannibal, MO to receive my high school diploma. Having received first place in the state for a news story I had written for the school newspaper which I edited, I planned to enter the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri and become a reporter. To offset my expenses, I worked one summer in a shoe factory and another summer as a Gandy Dancer, an occupation immortalized in a song titled, “The Gandy Dancers Ball.” Believe me, it was no ball. During the day we laid railroad tracks in the hot Missouri sun, drove spikes, shoveled gravel, and set railroad ties. At night we slept in box cars on a railroad siding. The closest I came to journalism school was to marry one of its graduates, Marjorie Anne Pollock, who became the reporter in the family. Next month we celebrate our 58^th wedding anniversary and a wonderful life together.

Now let me turn briefly to that fateful taxi cab ride and the lesson I learned that had a profound effect on my life. The lesson I learned concerns choices.

Every choice involves a sacrifice, for oneself and for others. That statement is hardly profound; however, its consequences are. Oftentimes, we are so blinded by our wants and desires that we ignore the sacrifices inherent in the choices we make. My work in the shoe factory and later as a Gandy Dancer led me to appreciate that everyone, regardless of their station in life, has wisdom to share if you bother to listen. Many years ago I flagged a cab in Chicago and began a conversation with the cabby. Here is what he said that influenced my life:

“I wanted a nice home for my family in the city, a summer home on Lake Michigan, and a car for my wife and each of my two children. To afford these, I needed to work two full time jobs. We had the nice home, the summer home on Lake Michigan and cars for everyone in the family. My wife divorced me, and my children would have nothing to do with me. By working two jobs, I got what I wanted, but I lost what I had. What I had was more important to me than what I wanted.”

This cabby, fine man that he was, was so blinded by his desires that he failed to consider the sacrifices for his family and himself. Sadly, this is an all too common mistake.

Equally sad, if I had been riding with the same cabby today, I probably would not have learned this valuable lesson. Instead of listening to him, I would have been talking on my cell phone, surfing the internet with my smart phone, texting, or tweeting.

In light of this cabby’s story, let me ask each of you in the audience and on stage two questions, each one a variant of the same question.

1. What are the three or four most important things in your life?
2. What sacrifices are you unwilling to make no matter what the choice or opportunity is?

These are tougher questions to answer than you might think and even more difficult to act upon.

Not too long after the cabby told me his story, I created a mental list of the things in life that meant the most to me. This list exerted a major influence over my choices for the rest of my professional career:

1. my family

2. my students including teaching and advising

3. my research and writing on practical problems, no matter how controversial they were or whether they were valued by members of the academy

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have added a fourth—my own personal health.

For some reason faculty meetings did not make my list.

Thanks to that cabby, I can enter the check-out line when my time comes with few regrets. I am not estranged from my four children. My wife and I like, as well as love, each other. I have students who continue to care about me as I continue to care about them. I have several really close friends, the kinds who feel comfortable sharing their innermost thoughts and feelings with each other. Strangely, the more I paid attention to the sacrifices and set aside my desire for professional recognition, the more recognition I received.

At every Irish wake, it is customary to offer a toast to the body. Instead, let me offer a toast to this year’s graduates. May you experience success, enjoy your journey, and end your life with few regrets because you did not let your desires blind you to the sacrifices inherent in your choices.

Cartoons: Parent-Teacher Conferences

Anyone who has taught for more than a year in the U.S. remembers those formal occasions when the school invites parents to confer with their children’s teachers during an evening or afternoon. In Canada and Australia, they are called “parent-teach interviews”; in UK, they are “parents’ evening.” Afterwards, both teachers and parents can regale their friends with stories of what went right and what went wrong in those conferences.

A few researchers have examined these annual rites. Sara Lightfoot Lawrence, for example, has written of the inherent differences between goals of parents and teachers. Parents are focused on their individual son or daughter while the teacher focuses on the class of 25 sons and daughters. Moreover, she says:

“Mothers seem to be in subtle competition with teachers. There is always an underlying fear that teachers will do a better job than they have done with their child…. But mostly mothers feel that their areas of competence are very much similar to those of the teacher. In fact they feel they know their child better than anyone else and that the teacher doesn’t possess any special field of authority or expertise.”

When Philip Jackson looked at parents and teachers he saw three major differences between the parent-child and teacher-student relationship (p. 29).

1. Emotional ties are stronger between parent and child and last much longer than teacher-student relationships. Of course, this is not to say that in many instances teacher-student relationship can be strong and lasting. Overall, however, the dominant teacher-student relationship is impersonal in classroom compared to family.

2. The intensity of feelings and intimacy that characterize child-family relationships almost never happen in classrooms. Moreover, the  extent to which in the family children and parents have been exposed to one another and know one another physically and psychologically–the depth and texture of personal history–seldom occurs in classrooms.

3. A classroom is the place where students learn to take orders from non-family adults. “For the first time in the child’s life, power that has personal consequences for the child … is wielded by a relative stranger.”

Scholars have their views of the centrality of parents and teachers in the lives of children and students. So do cartoonists. For this month, I have selected some cartoons and YouTube videos to illustrate the range of parent-teacher conferences and how they reflect the similarities and differences between the parent-child and teacher-student relationship. (Previous monthly cartoons have been:  “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “charter schools,” and “Age-graded schools,” and Students and Teachers).

A New Yorker animated cartoon captures in 22 seconds what some teachers would like to say (but seldom do) about a certain kind of student.

I end with another animated cartoon that lasts nearly five minutes and, for me, was painful to watch.

A New Teacher’s Dilemma*

In her first year of teaching English in a middle school where 90 percent of the students were minority, Elsie had planned a lesson that had students rotating through five stations answering different reading comprehension questions at each one. She floated around from station to station answering questions, clearing up any confusions, and making sure that the students were on task.

At one of the stations, Elsie had written the question: “If and when is it appropriate to lie.” The students at that station were talking about the question when Elsie arrived. Damion, one of the African American students in the group, asked Elsie–who is also African American–if she smoked weed.

“It was obvious that he and several other students expected the answer to be yes,” Elsie had written in describing her dilemma. She said honestly: “no.” She felt, however, that the students thought she was lying. She tried to convince them that she was telling the truth.

The young teacher now saw that she was in a struggle over conflicting values in her new role as a teacher. She had wanted to be a role model–a black woman who had achieved success in school and had not compromised her identity as an African American in doing so. But she had to earn her students’ trust, most of whom were from low-income families yet she was very frustrated by their disbelief of her answer to Damion’s question.

She thought her students held a view of blackness as a culture associated with drugs. Being African American to them meant “doing drugs.” Not “doing drugs” called into question how black one can be.

She was caught in a two-fold dilemma. How much should teachers tell students about their personal lives? In answering Damion’s question honestly had she unintentionally invited him to ask more personal questions? How much personal information is too much? Should she have ignored his question and kept students focused on the station task? This is the first part of Elsie’s dilemma.

The second part concerned her role in challenging her students’ view of race and what “being black” could mean. She was aware of the social class differences between her and students.  In her writing up her dilemma, Elsie said: “How do I push back on students’ narrow-minded/stereotypical definition of blackness, not tell them how to think, but encourage them to think and question, without damaging their self-concept?”

She wrestled with wanting to support them in developing healthy racial identities yet she also grappled with understanding how her racial identity fit into who she was and wanted to be as a teacher. She wrote:

“Because I am black, my black students have ideas about how I should be. When  my words and actions do not match their ideas they reject me as ‘real.’ This creates a problem with students believing that I understand what they are going through inside and outside of school. This disconnect hinders my ability to reach students, to create meaningful relationships and experiences that lead to increased knowledge of self and the world at large, and a drive to take action against oppressive forces.”

What should Elsie do to manage this dilemma? “What I have to do is construct lessons that allow students to see the dangers in binaries, to understand that blackness lives on an ever expanding spectrum.” Elsie recognized that this work “is deeply personal and political … [but] authentic teaching and learning [would] not take place until students and myself take it on.”

The dilemma of identity–Who am I as a teacher?–pinches novice teachers regardless of whether they are raw Teach for America recruits or credentialed through university  teacher education programs. Teachers of color seeking out posts in low-income, largely minority schools often run into situations as Elsie did. Curious teenagers often question the authenticity of their African American or Latino teachers as members of their group. Being a novice and being a teacher of color collide as issues of authority and authenticity become grist for the interactions in  and out of class, coloring how teachers teach and what students learn.

Researcher Betty Achinstein found these tensions and dilemmas when she investigated novice teachers of color. As one Latina teacher told Achinstein:

“Be prepared to have your race be called in question. Be prepared to have your identity be called into question. . . .. I think that’s the hardest part about being a teacher of color at [my school] because I went in, and I know who I am, and I formed my identity. But just because you know who you are doesn’t mean the students are going to accept it. They’re going to play with it. They’re going to tweak it.”

Helping new teachers of color prepare for dilemmas may ease the angst of the inevitable tensions they will face but those tools will neither prevent nor erase the dilemmas.

___________________________

*The dilemma that Elsie described, I adapted from Anna Richert, What Should I do? Confronting Dilemmas of Teaching in Urban Schools (Teachers College Press, 2012).

The Puzzle of Student Responsibility for Learning*

Physicians, psychotherapists, social workers, and professors–the helping professions–are responsible for the expertise they share with their patients, clients, and college students. But expertise is insufficient. Patients, clients, and college students are  responsible for getting better and learning. That is the two-way street of the helping professions.

*For a chain-smoking patient, a primary care physician knows that this behavior has a high probability of leading to lung cancer—even the patient knows that—yet the doctor’s knowledge and skills are insufficient to get the CEO of a private equity fund to quit. While doctors can influence a patient’s motivation, if that patient is uncommitted to getting healthy by ignoring prescribed medications–the physician is stuck. Getting better requires patients to take responsibility for improving their health.

*For clients in therapy, recognizing they have problems and working to solve them is part of the therapeutic bond they forge with a therapist who asks questions and provides support and acceptance. To get better, clients take responsibility for solving their problems.

*In higher education, professors give lectures and conduct seminars. While there is some talk of holding professors accountable for what their students learn, that rhetoric has yet to move beyond words. Undergraduate and graduate students are expected to learn what professors teach.

Yet in K-12 public schools, for teachers, another helping profession, the reverse is true. For the past quarter-century, responsibility for student learning for been put completely on the shoulders of teachers (much less so in parochial and independent private schools, however).

And that is the puzzle. How come K-12 public school teachers are expected to take full responsibility for student learning and in the other helping professions that responsibility is either shared with clients and patients or absent?

For more than a quarter-century,  federal and state policymakers, major donors, and business leaders have built a reform-driven political machine that places responsibility for student learning squarely on teachers. That potent political machine legislates (e.g., state curriculum standards and tests, No Child Left Behind). It distributes monies to states and districts (e.g., cash bonuses to high performing schools, federal Race To The Top competition for billions of dollars; Gates Foundation support of districts working toward identifying factors of teacher effectiveness). It measures and evaluates school and teacher performance holding individual teachers responsible for student learning (i.e., test scores). Penalties for poor school and teacher performance are closed schools and reassigned or fired teachers.

The super-glue that holds disparate reform-minded groups together in this political machine is the assumption that students’ mediocre or failing performance is due primarily to teachers’ efforts. Recall the common explanations for low student performance over the past few decades: lousy curricula, improper instruction, and teachers’ low expectations. No surprise, then, that reformers driving this machine believe in teachers taking full responsibility for student learning (i.e., test scores). When they do, then teachers would work harder on matching curricula to lessons, improve instructional methods, and raise their expectations. Students, then, would score better on tests.

Given these assumptions focused on the teacher, students are hardly motivated to work hard except in those instances where students do take responsibility for their learning. Such places do exist in cities, working-class suburbs, and rural towns where students do their homework, participate in class, and improve their reading, writing, and math skills. Consider those high achieving schools that have waiting lists of parents to sign up their sons and daughters and garner media headlines in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, and other big and small cities.

In these schools, principals and parents make clear that students are to act responsibly, do academic work, and treat one another respectfully. They have both incentives and supports in place to help students become responsible as teachers fulfill their professional commitments.  Both students and teachers are held accountable by the norms of the school community and a school environment with well developed resources that support both teachers and students. Such schools and districts, however, are the exception.

Thus, the fact of the matter is that loading upon teachers full responsibility for student results, as has occurred in the past few decades, is deeply flawed. Without mobilizing students’ knowledge, skills, and behavior to share responsibility for learning and providing supportive workplace conditions for teacher learning (e.g., professional development, collaboration), the current crisis crippling the confidence teachers must have in themselves as helping professional and the deteriorating trust between the tax-paying public and their schools will  persist.

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* I want to thank David K. Cohen for his thoughtful and careful analysis of teaching over the years. See his Teaching and Its Predicaments (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

How Classroom Life Undermines Reform (Mary Kennedy)

Mary Kennedy is a professor in teacher education at Michigan State University. She has written extensively about teaching, teachers, and assessment of teaching. This post is taken from pp. 1-3 of her 2005 book How Classroom Life Undermines Reform (Harvard University Press).

I never understood the phrase “knowing everything and knowing nothing” until I examined my knowledge of teaching. Like most educated adults, I knew everything, and yet nothing, about teaching. The “everything” part of our knowledge has to do with what teaching looks like. As children, we spent many days sitting before teachers. As adults, many of us have visited our own children’s classrooms. From these experiences, we have a sense of the variety of ways in which teaching occurs, and we have a sense of what counts as good teaching or bad teaching. Some of us also have strong views about what teaching should look like, and some of us become education reformers, devoting substantial energy to trying to improve teaching.

But reforms typically fail, forcing us to acknowledge that although we know a lot about what teaching looks like, we know almost nothing about why it looks like this. We don’t understand why teaching seems so intractable to reform efforts, why teachers seem to ignore the guidance offered to them by so many concerned groups. Most American teachers are highly educated and highly dedicated. They are members of professional associations, receive various kinds of continuing professional development, and have access to textbooks and other materials. They care about their students and work long hours preparing their lessons and reading their students’ work. The question we have to ask is this: How can it be that people who are well educated and committed to their work engage in practices that receive so much criticism?

The study I describe shows how classroom events appear to teachers and how routine conditions of classroom life often dictate teaching practices. It reveals that teachers are not unaware of reform ideals, and indeed are sympathetic with them. But they also have to attend to many other things, simultaneously orchestrating time, materials, students, and ideas. They must finish a lesson by 11:33 so that students can be in the cafeteria at 11:35. They must make sure that all students are on the same page, digesting the same ideas, gaining the same understandings. They must make sure that the right diagram, chart, or globe is readily accessible to show to students at exactly the right moment, and that the handouts students will need are also nearby. They must be prepared to respond to individual confusions, misunderstandings, and tangential observations without distracting or boring the rest of the class.

They must also be prepared to have the entire plan disrupted or defeated by some unforeseen event. Someone from down the hall may enter the room and interrupt the lesson midstream. A student may poke another student or ask a question that other students don’t understand or don’t care about. The projector may break, or there may not be enough copies of a handout to go around. Though such distractions appear everywhere, schools seem more susceptible to them than other organizations. Perhaps because schools are teeming with children, they are subject to much higher levels of distraction than most other organizations. And in schools, distractions are not merely temporary setbacks; they are obstacles to intellectual progress. They get in the way of good teaching. All these interruptions and complications can distract teachers from the thread of their own thought and make it harder for them to present coherent lessons. Ironically, schools are places where sustained thought is rare.

These difficulties provide an explanation for our long history of failed reform efforts in education. Reform movements have come and gone for decades without much visible impact on teaching practices. The problem is so widely recognized that historians are now chronicling these movements. Yet reformers continue to try, and others continue to generate hypotheses to account for the failures. Perhaps teachers need more knowledge or better guidance; perhaps we need to change their values or their dispositions. The sad fact is that most reforms don’t acknowledge the realities of classroom teaching, where both God and the devil are in the details.

Some Thoughts on Teaching and Music (Kenneth Bernstein)

From his profile as a blogger at Daily Kos : “Kenneth J. Bernstein is now proudly 65 years young, teacher in DC metro area, Quaker liberal – and still passionate about learning with his students.”

Some thoughts on teaching which were occasioned by a recent conversation where I was asked if I thought teaching more of an art rather than a science.  I responded that the question was a false frame, and was asked to explain.

My explanation comes in part from my background and formal education in music.

I think what we are seeing in education is neither art nor science, but the attempt to turn education into an engineering problem.  In engineering, it is of course important to have rigorous standards.  In manufacturing the ideal of exactly the same interchangeable parts is an important component of mass production, which provides consistency, and may even save on cost.

But students are not, and should not be, widgets or other manufactured outputs.  They are absolutely unique individuals, and should be respected as such, even as we try to assist them in growing and developing and learning how to learn.  Please note that last phrase – learning how to learn –  we thereby empower them to lifelong learning that does not depend upon a formal school/educational setting.

Is music composition an art or a science?   Is performance of a pre-composed piece an art or a science?  Is the improvisation one sees in jazz, which is part of fulfilling the continuo of many baroque works, which was originally what was done in the cadenza of a concerto, an art or a science?

The answer is, as far as I can tell, both and to a lesser degree neither.  It is both because it is not an absolute dichotomy.  If I compose and have in mind how the piece is going to sound, there are elements of science – harmony, acoustics, timbre, the range of instruments or of human voices – but by itself that does not a meaningful musical work create.  I might create a work that technically follows the rules of strict counterpoint or sonata allegro format, which is performable by the instruments and/or singers for who it is written, but is absolutely boring.  It is then equivalent of much of what we are seeing happen as a result of ‘reform’ in American education.

There is more.

When I play a piece of music previously composed, I have material with which to work:  the printed music, with notes, dynamics, perhaps even fingering.  I also have knowledge of the capabilities of the instrument.  I could mechanically move from the sheet music to the sound production, which I suspect would be a boring performance for any listener.  Or I can engage with the music, perhaps discovering something new each time I play it.  In preparing to perform, I am likely to take apart the music, try different things, reflect (perhaps subconsciously, perhaps fully consciously) on the differing results.  In a sense one could see the lesson, no matter how well defined, as the notes and the students as the instrument(s) being used – except this puts the students into perhaps too passive a role.

In improvisation, one has some idea – perhaps a theme, perhaps an outline of a musical idea – and works with that, making changes as one goes along.  Each time one improvises on the theme the result is somewhat different, which makes it scary, even as it is potentially exciting.

Yet even these images are but partial descriptions of the process of classroom teaching.

There is another role in music, and it is that of conductor:  there is pre-written music, there is an ensemble of instruments and/or voices, and the conductor is attempting to get all to work in common for a common purpose, an interpretation/performance that has a vision.

Getting closer to teaching, but still not quite there.

There is music – the lesson plan.

To a degree there is performance – both by the teacher and the class

The teacher has the responsibility similar to that of the conductor.

But there is, and always will be, some degree of improvisation, and not merely by the conductor/teacher, but by every member of the ensemble/classroom.

The analogies are far from perfect.  I understand that.

What I am trying to describe is the nature of the productive classroom environment, at least as I see it, as I have read in research, and – of greatest importance –  as my students have given me feedback.

Things will vary.  Certainly with students beginning a course there may be more direction –  it is the equivalent of learning one’s scales, or how to transpose the clef between what is written and what one hears (particular important to those of perfect pitch, I might note).

The teacher is simultaneously composer, performer, conductor, improviser and audience.

If students are to learn how to take ownership of their own learning, they will also have to learn how to do all of those roles, some more than others, depending on where they are in their learning.

As a teacher with 30 or so students in a room for 45 minutes, I may have to make several hundred decisions during the course of one class period.  I will have to adjust what I may have planned depending upon what the students bring to the “performance” or “composition” –  the class is, after all, their learning opportunity and in some ways they shape it as much if not more than I do.

Is teaching a science or an art?   Great art often involves large amounts of scientific knowledge that is assumed and transformed by the creative vision.  Art without fundamentals often is a mess, and does not express in a way that can be comprehended by others.

Thus teaching is both science and art, yet something else.

Great teaching is a co-creative process that empowers the students.

There is a Buddhist aphorism that when the student is ready the teacher will appear.  Those of us who are classroom teachers must be present for that moment, yet also help the student become ready.  Then  we simultaneously become co-learners, learning from our students what they need from us, which may vary greatly between classes and among students within classes.

Just a few thoughts on teaching.  At least of my understanding of the process as I have lived it over this and the previous 16 years of public school classroom teaching.

Peace.

Speaking to Teachers and Policymakers

Larry Ferlazzo, a Sacramento (CA) high school English/social studies teacher and blogger, interviewed me recently.  The advice I offer teachers and policymakers here comes largely from my 14 years as a high school history teacher in urban schools, 20 years of teaching I have done at Stanford University, and 7 years I spent as a district superintendent.

If you were going to offer teachers three key pieces of advice that you think might help them to stay in the profession longer and be more effective educators, what would they be?

1. Re-pot yourself every few years.

Teaching is energizing but also exhausting work. When teaching you spend the rich intellectual, physical, and emotional capital that you have accumulated over the years on students. Because of that draining of your capital, for yourself and your future students you need to re-invest in yourself by doing what expert gardeners do with favorite potted plants.

Because plants can become pot bound, that is, the roots of the plant become cramped and form a tightly packed mass that inhibits growth they need to be re-potted in different soil and larger pots so they can flourish. Yes, re-potting entails risks and often causes stress but staying potted in the same place means little growth, even death.

For teachers, re-potting may mean shifting to another grade, tossing out old lessons, introducing new ones, taking a short or long break from the classroom and doing something else that engages one’s passions.

Effectiveness in every people-serving occupation requires developing relationships with those served be they clients, patients, parishioners, or students. In teaching, the building and sustaining of relationships with children and youth prepare the soil for learning. Such work, over time, drains one’s energies and commitment. Renewal—repotting—is essential.

2. Take intellectual risks.

Because teaching is repetitive work—as is doctoring, lawyering, and engineering—a certain monotony creeps in over years. Sure, the students each year differ and they add the spice of unpredictability to what occurs in classrooms but inevitably daily routines become familiar and taken for granted. Altering predictable classroom routines, introducing new subject matter, experimenting with different time schedules for activities, trying out new technologies to enhance student learning—all are instances of taking risks.

Yes, failure may occur but teaching well means accepting that from time to time falling on one’s face is not a tragedy but—you guessed it—an opportunity to learn how to do the task better next time around. Losing the will to take intellectual risks is a telltale sign that teaching fatigue has set in and the routines of teaching have triumphed.

2. Speak out.

There are so many reasons why teachers do not speak out about teaching, student learning, school procedures and district policies. From fear of retaliation to sheer exhaustion at the end of the day to working at another job or taking graduate courses to caring for family and friends to inexperience in writing or speaking publicly—all are reasons teachers give for letting others speak for them. What many teachers forget or underestimate is the credibility that they have with parents, voters, and students when they do speak out about teaching, learning, school policies, and leadership. I read many teacher blogs and applaud them for taking this avenue to express themselves. More teachers need to speak out on the issues and the daily life that they experience. Being union members is, of course, important but no teacher can depend upon a union or association to do all of their speaking for them.

So voicing publicly one’s thoughts about teaching, learning, school routines, policy struggles, and, yes, even school politics is a way of re-potting one’s self and taking intellectual risks.

And, speaking of three pieces of advice, what would suggest to many people in the school reform movement, such as Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee?

*Before recommending any reform policy or making a grant aimed at altering teacher behavior in classrooms, include an historical impact statement (no longer than two single-spaced pages) of earlier similar reforms (what happened to the reforms? Why did they succeed? Fail? What conditions were in place? Missing?)

*Recommend only those policies (and grants) aimed at changing teachers and classroom practices that you, as reformers, would want for the teachers of your children and grand-children.

*Dial back hyped policy talk about what a new policy will achieve for teachers, students, and the larger society (e.g., online instruction for K-12, Core Curriculum Standards, charter schools). Over-promising results while under-estimating the tough difficulties principals and teachers face in implementing new policies is the pattern that reformers have followed for over a century. Speaking honestly, directly, and publicly about what a new policy aimed at teachers can and cannot do would not only be refreshing but give credibility to proposed policies and grants.

*Publicly advertise the theory of change (or action) that is embedded in any recommended policy that is being pushed and funded.