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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The Miracle and the Moment (Michele Kerr)

Michele Kerr is a second-career teacher with a master’s in education from Stanford University, with credentials in math, history, and English. She will start her fourth year of teaching in the fall.

My best moment as a teacher–so far–came right after a miracle.

It was the end of the school year. I was teaching a unit on Elizabethan theater in my freshman humanities class, and on this day the students delved briefly into the sonnet. With reading abilities ranging from fifth grade to college-level, they wouldn’t all be capable of close analysis, but that was beyond the scope of my lesson anyway. I just wanted to give the students an hour of listening to and thinking about sonnets, with the hope that they would later be able to tell me later that sonnets had 14 lines.

I’d chosen five poems; three because they are high on the list of Sonnets: All-Time Greatest Hits, making them useful content knowledge (and they are, still, beautiful). The other two are personal favorites that never fail to astound me with their power (and they are, still, well-known).

I played the poems in chronological order. First up were Shakepeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day” and Donne’s “Death, Be Not Proud.” The students listened politely and, when the reading finished, wrote their initial response. Most of the kids wrote for five minutes as required; some of them scribbled a few desultory thoughts and then waited out the clock. The kids then shared their responses in a class discussion. I threw in some literary terms as needed. Things were going well.

Third in line was the Milton sonnet, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” a poem drenched in grief, loss, and longing, a poem I’ve loved since adolescence, a poem that I thought, perhaps, they wouldn’t entirely understand.

And so the miracle.

Ian Richardson recited the poem. I had no projector that day; they only heard his voice. You should click the Youtube link above, to hear it.

When his voice faded away, I opened my mouth to instruct them to write their response….and then closed it again. The kids were just sitting there, stunned.

A good twenty seconds passed before Luke spoke. “Holy crap. That was…..”

“Sad,” Sadie finished.

“Devastating,” Melissa added.

“Tragic,” said Kylie.

“Beautiful,” from Narciso.

“I’m depressed,” said Frank, in astonishment. And….

“Play it again,” said Daniel. The class murmured assent.

I played it again. When it was over, twenty-three heads bent down to write. Many students struggled to tell me that yes, the poem was sad, but that wasn’t the point. What mattered, to each of them, was they got it. They understood suddenly how loss can be so crippling that the dream of its return, the mere memory of happiness, can “bring back the ‘night’ of grief during ‘day’,” as one of my strongest students wrote, when the respite of the dream ends. I still remember another student’s sentence: “Being happy in your dream only makes pain worse.”

And then I told them that Milton was blind.

“Auggghh,” said Annie , holding her head. “So he was dreaming of two losses that came back to him.”

“…and then left. Again,” Armando finished.

The comments came fairly quickly; I jumped in a few times to define “paradox” and point out that the “day” brought back at least two “nights”–that of grief, and that of sightlessness, but for the most part the kids carried the conversational load on that poem for 10 minutes.

I always think of those minutes as the miracle. Was it their response to the poem? My recognition of their response, my decision to keep my mouth mercifully shut (a rare event of itself)? I honestly don’t know. But no sensible teacher would ever plan such perfection as twenty-some-odd adolescents with no particular interest in literature being touched to the core by a Milton sonnet.

Of course, nothing about that miracle improved my students’ academic skills. Some of them spelled “feel” with an a, “wife” with no e’s, and “grief” with two. Had I wanted to push on and ask them to analyze Milton’s use of metaphor in an organized essay, no more than five of the students would have even known where to start, even though they’d written several analytical essays that year.

Moreover, had I been observed by an administrator that day, I would have been dinged in several important areas. I wasn’t helping the students make progress on ELA standards. The students had no vocabulary list to define by reading the words in context. They had no pre-reading guide explaining key concepts. They hadn’t been given specific learning objectives, and had no clear writing template to follow for their responses. The literature was focused entirely on Western lit (four dead white guys, one dead white chick).

I knew that at the time, and know it even better now. I didn’t care.

Don’t get me wrong; I support standards. I believe that state tests measure important information. I want my students to demonstrate improvement, and find it entirely reasonable that schools should be held accountable for student academic progress.

But I’d spent the ELA portion of that year focused on standards-approved objectives. I’d pushed through Twelfth Night, an obscure Indian novel, and Filipino magical realism literature, texts that a number of my students couldn’t understand even if they’d wanted to—and many of them didn’t. I’d assigned them essays that they wrote by rote by design, using the irritating Shaffer chunk method, a routine that the strongest writers found limiting and dull (the rest listlessly followed the rules to write sentences they didn’t mean and hadn’t thought about). Meanwhile, I couldn’t spend too much time helping students remember the importance of spelling “wife” and “grief” properly, or of constructing a simple sentence that expressed thoughts that they did care about, although I did create my own customized SSR/SSW program that gave them time to gain content knowledge and informal writing skills.

All I wanted was a day dedicated to listening to, and thinking about, sonnets that connected the poetry to the history of Elizabethan theater, the larger unit.

We moved on. They found Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee” pretty shallow, after the intensities of the three previous poems. (“She loves him yeah, yeah, yeah” wrote one student, a la the Beatles tune.) But Robert Frost’s “Design” went over very well. Although they weren’t able to visualize the poem’s tableau the first time through, they wanted to know more because on that day, at least, they were beginning to realize that confusing poetry can make sense with more context and information. When they learned the “white heal-all” was usually blue, they asked to listen again.

After the second recitation, I told them to underline the last two lines: What but design of darkness to appall? If design govern in a thing so small. Then I reminded them of the Calvin and Hobbes raccoon story, and the panel that shows Calvin hiding under the bed: “It’s either mean or it’s arbitrary, and either way I’ve got the heebie-jeebies.” They got the connection immediately.

“So was Calvin and Hobbes copying Frost?” one student asked.

“No. They’re both illustrating the same theme. The world can be an unforgiving, cruel place. Is it part of some great plan? Do things happen for a reason–Design, as Frost says–or is it arbitrary and random, as Calvin worries? And which is scarier to contemplate?”

“Does that happen a lot?” asked Alexandra. “Do people write about the same thing in different ways?”

“Funny you should ask. Listen to this song and tell me what sonnet explores the same theme.”

The specific logistics of this lesson were fuzzy until 30 minutes before class, when I belatedly realized that professional recitations were obviously superior to my original vague thought of the students reading the poems to themselves. But the sonnet and this song had been in the lesson since I’d originally conceived of it, several weeks earlier. In fact, the song may have been the unconscious premise of the entire lesson. Still, I hadn’t really expected them all to be familiar with John Mayer, adult contemporary pop crooner.

I was therefore caught entirely off-guard when the opening strums of “Dreaming with a Broken Heart” came over the speakers and the class exploded with energy and excitement. Everyone in the room instantly knew the song and recognized the connection. Some students literally jumped up and down as they realized that over three hundred years earlier, poets had gotten there first, that all those years ago grief and sadness, loss and longing were still best told in verse, not prose, and they began feverishly writing, underlining and circling words to make it clear that John Mayer and John Milton were writing about the same thing.

Looking out over a class nearly incoherent with excitement at their new awareness and understanding, I bit my lip hard to stop from crying and told myself ferociously to just enjoy the gift of a perfect moment.

Like all teachers without tenure, I spend a lot of time job-hunting. Along with the obsessive, hopefully illogical, worry that I won’t find a new position comes a litany of memories, favorite moments I won’t find in any other life, moments when I know I made a difference, when I helped students feel more competent, have more confidence, feel a greater awareness of the world or how it works. And of those moments, this is the one I remember first.

Yet not a second of that moment had anything to do with test scores, with measurable academic outcomes, with improved reading ability, or the correct spelling of “wife” or “grief.”

Do truck drivers, manicurists, and retail clerks need to write compare and contrast essays on sonnets? Probably not. But surely, at some point in the past, our educational system gave truck drivers, manicurists, and retail clerks a sense of the beauty of the world, our heritage, the history of our country–and, ideally, the ability to spell “wife” and “grief.”

Today, our educational system has no interest in truck drivers, manicurists, and retail clerks. All students must perform as if they are college bound. Since most of them can’t perform at that level, regardless of their desires, teachers must spend all their time getting as many students as possible close enough to understanding to fake it on a multiple choice question, to get those test scores as high as possible, even knowing that many students will never gain a real understanding of the demanded material. We can’t teach them what they need to know, and we can’t spare any time to give them knowledge they might find actually interesting, or experiences they can enjoy without forcing them to process it into analysis.

Implicit in the expectations for all students is the belief that truck drivers, manicurists, retail clerks, fire fighters, and all other occupations that aren’t driven by intellect, simply aren’t good enough. They don’t matter. These aren’t lives that might benefit from beauty or poetry, an opinion about the Bill of Rights or, hell, even an understanding of why you should always switch if Monty Hall gives you the option.

Naturally, anyone on the “college for all” bandwagon, reformers and progressives both, would vehemently deny such beliefs. But the logic of their demands is inescapable. Students have no way to step off the college train. They can’t say “Hey, I don’t want to take trigonometry. I just want an interesting math class.” or “No more lab science; can I just take a writing class that focuses on modern ethical issues in medicine?” or “Can’t I just read and write without having to think like an English lit major?” Denying them that choice leaves failure as the only other option. That lack of options betrays the value system at the heart of those who deny education the right to sort by abilities and interest.

Obsessed with ending the achievement gap, our current educational policy pushes everyone down the same college path and then blames the teachers when they don’t get the desired results. Lost in these demands are the millions of students who are doomed to years of boredom and, worse, a sense of inadequacy-lost, that is, until the teachers are blamed, again, for failing to help them achieve more.

And so, many people will read of my miracle and that perfect moment and point out that my students hadn’t improved their skills. Yet I defy them to say I didn’t teach my kids something important that day.

I don’t know if my students even remember the day. I’m certain they never think of the lesson as an important moment, much less a miracle. But I am also certain that in that moment, all of them understood—some for the first time—that they could understand and empathize with great poetry. They realized intuitively that art could explore themes and ideas using metaphors so powerful that artists return to them time and again over centuries. They learned, too, that this knowledge had value and meaning to them—not because it made them better readers or writers, or got them better grades, but simply because that knowledge led them to a better understanding of beauty….and so, of life.

And it is of moments like this one that teachers think of when they say that education is more than a test score.

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.

____________________

* 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).

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.

Teachers as Classroom Policymakers: The Case of the Kindergarten

Watching a policy travel from the White House, a state capitol, or a big city school board to a kindergarten teacher in her classroom has been compared (see my post September 9, 2009) to metal links in a chain, the children’s game of Telephone, and pushing spaghetti. Classroom teachers at the end of the iron-forged links in a chain convey military images of privates saluting captains and duties getting snappily discharged. The telephone game suggests miscommunications that ends up in hilarious misinterpretations of what was intended by the original policy. Pushing strands of wet spaghetti suggests futility in getting a policy ever to be put into practice in classrooms. Which metaphor, then, best describes going from adopting a policy to putting it into practice?

The truth is that for each metaphor actual examples of policies do fit the image. Yet other instances of teachers implementing policies fail to fit. There are other metaphors that better match the wide variation among teachers when they put policies into practice–and variation is a stubborn fact of organizational life. One is the street-level bureaucrat.

Street-level bureaucrats are police officers who decide whether or not to give a traffic citation, social workers who determine what kind of help a client needs and where to find that help, emergency room nurses who decide which sick and injured need immediate attention and which ones can wait. Include also teachers who determine whether to stick with the lesson plan or diverge when an unexpected event occurs. All of these professionals work within large rule-driven organizations but interact with the public daily as they make on-the-spot decisions. Each of these professionals are obligated to follow organizational rules yet have discretion to make decisions.  In effect, they reconcile the dilemma of  obligation and autonomy by  interpreting, amending, or ignoring decisions handed down by superiors.

Consider kindergarten teachers. Most primary teachers have been trained to see young children holistically as growing human beings needing work, play, and nurturing as necessary ingredients to develop into educated and healthy youth. Teaching the whole child has been a guiding principle central to early childhood programs for nearly a century. Since the early-1980s, however, the standards-based curriculum, increased testing, and accountability policies have flowed downward pressing early childhood educators to make kindergartens into boot camps for 1st grade and preschool programs into learning the alphabet and counting numbers.

In the policy-to-practice metaphor of the linked chain, one would expect that most kindergarten teachers, feeling strong obligations to school superiors, would have altered their child-centered pedagogy and embraced the new policy by relying on direct instruction while completely abandoning learning centers, comfy reading corners, and free choice time.

For the metaphor of the telephone game, one would expect most kindergarten teachers to have received instructions on implementing standards-based and testing policies from top officials, district supervisors, and school principals. Those instructions and guidance on their journey to kindergarten teachers would have gotten increasingly distorted. These distortions would result in huge variation among kindergarten teachers in implementing these policies ranging from major shifts in pedagogy to minimal alterations in daily lessons to outright mistakes.

The metaphor of pushing wet spaghetti raises different expectations. Because of the futility of the task, adopted policies meander in and out of schools occasionally entering classrooms. Here, kindergarten teachers are fully autonomous and once they close their doors, they do as they please.

None of these metaphors from complete military-like attention to rules to complete freedom to implement a policy capture most kindergarten teachers’ practice at a time when they must cope with dilemma-filled tensions arising from reconciling their obligations to implement state standards-based policies and their beliefs in child-centered practices. And here is where Lisa Goldstein’s study of streetlevel policy enters the discussion.

Goldstein’s research on four kindergarten teachers in two high performing urban schools within a Texas district details their different actions in coping with state curriculum standards stressing academic preparation for first grade, annual tests that specifies what kindergarteners were to have learned, and their professional and personal beliefs about what five year-olds should be doing and learning.

What did she find out after observing and interviewing the teachers for two years?

“From Ann’s refusal to use the language artsworkbooks to Liz’s holiday celebrations
unit and from Jenny’s either/or literacy block to Frieda’s commitment to her
students’ self-esteem, all of these teachers’ curricular and instructional decisions
were actively shaped by personal understandings of the state standards and DAP
((Developmentally Appropriate Practices derived from the National Association of Early Childhood Education), informed by strategic knowledge and careful thought, and considered in relation to the needs of the particular children in the class and other contextual
factors. Every policy decision was unique and deliberate and reflected attention
to obligations, desire for autonomy, and the use of professional discretion.”

These kindergarten teachers blended developmental practices they had done for years while attending to what their district and state standards required five year-olds to learn by the end of the year. They translated their beliefs in the whole child and many experiences with primary children into hybrid practices that mixed “developmentally appropriate” activities with direct instruction. In short, these four teachers in two schools made policy by creating mixes–they were street-level bureaucrats that hugged the middle.