We are kind. We are focused. We are honest. We are brave.

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt
man reading under the covers

Sign of a life-longer reader: still under the covers with a flashlight. flickr/purplemattfish

So much of the pre-institute reading and reflection has been about drawing connections between previous work and our new careers as educators. But stopping to think about what I hope the parents and families of my future students say at the end of my first year, I’ll have to defer to a couple of veteran teachers. After all, one of the most important lessons I hope I’ve internalized at this point is that I’m only going to get good at this if I ask for help from experts.

First, I hope that my students and their families say that I expected a lot from the kids in my classes, and that I worked hard for them in return. I want them to say that I pushed my students to their full potential and broadened their opportunities. Moreover, I want them to see that reciprocal hard work integrated with intellectual curiosity and a respect for the common good. But this morning, a DCPS middle school teacher put it much more eloquently than I can in an NPR commentary. Her students, she said, developed these simple class rules, which lived in bold lettering on the walls of her room: “We are kind. We are focused. We are honest. We are brave.”

I’ve really warmed up to some of the sloganeering that appears around highly effective schools. “Work hard. Be nice,” is the most distilled of the KIPP mottos, for instance. But I could imagine little better after a year in the classroom than a group of students declaring in unison that they are kind, focused, honest, and brave.

Kindness is crucial to building a safe and supportive environment where students help one another and share their knowledge. Focus will come only from investing everyone—students, families, parents, coaches—in the goals and hard work we’ll lay out. Honesty will be an important virtue governing student interactions, but students must also be honest about the amount of effort they must put into their work, and must be honest with themselves about recognizing when they need help. And reaching for academic achievements just beyond their current understanding will require bravery on top of focus. Continue reading →

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Working relentlessly without burning out

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt
Candle burning at both ends.

Twice as long, half as bright. (flickr/gfpeck)

This is the seventh written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). This reflection is on “working relentlessly.”

So I have now absorbed all of the Teach for America pre-institute reading materials. These assignments have inspired, stimulated, and at times filled me with dread about the fact I’ll be standing in front of several classrooms of students come August. Fortunately, nestled in the final chapter of Teaching as Leadership, are some concrete and calming suggestions for how to be effective without burning out like a Roman candle.

I was both relieved an amused to find this advice at the end of the reading course, because saving it for the dénouement, after everything that came before, reinforces what journalist Dana Goldstein calls the “miracle ideology” in education reform. She writes that some “education reformers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, really do seem to believe that great teachers must perform daily miracles of self-sacrifice“—a mentality that creates all kinds of policy sticking points when trying to get teachers unions to adopt policies like merit pay. It’s neither fair, nor a reasonable labor demand, to expect that every teacher perform miracles every day.

Now, I do believe that it will take a significant amount of self-sacrifice to move up the learning curve in the next year or two to gain my footing as a teacher. I’ve “worked relentlessly” before—in college and professionally—but I’ve never spent several months in advance thinking about what “relentless” means. In the abstract, it can be a little overwhelming.

Which is why it was a relief to encounter some level-headed advice in the final chapter of Steven Farr’s text that would have been worth heeding years ago when I was pushing myself to work all the time in college. The basic principle is that you have to manage energy rather than time. I can tell from personal experience that while I may understand this at face value, I may have difficulty internalizing it. Struggling a few years ago to find enough hours in the day (and the night) to work on the student magazine I edited, study for classes, write an undergraduate thesis, and socialize with my peers, a friend with a similar work ethic and heavier class load looked at me when I said that felt like I had to be working constantly and said “parties are important too.” Continue reading →

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Pirate school

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

This is worth sharing:

If you want to be a filmmaker or an artist or a designer, any of those things, that’s like saying “I want to be a pirate.” It doesn’t really matter if you went to the right pirate school or not. How good are you at stealing stuff from other ships?

—Mike Mills

Via somedays & sundays.

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I won’t get perfect, but I will get better

Posted on June 8, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt
close-up of person hold in video camera

flickr/lukeroberts

This is the sixth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). This reflection is on “continuously improving effectiveness.”

I can only imagine that getting filmed on your first day in the classroom is incredibly valuable. Not simply because reviewing that tape can help you make important short-term improvements in your techniques, but because you have that visual record of your baseline for an entire career. I can imagine that as time goes on, I’ll feel from time to time like I’m not making progress, like I’m not improving as an instructor. But then I can go right back to that tape and say, “There’s where I used to be. Of course I’ve gotten better.”

The first of the two videos for this exercise features Colin Seale doing just that, reflecting on a tape of his first day in front of a 9th grade algebra class. He’s good about explaining the rationale behind his rules and the uneven treatment of students he wants to avoid. But he freely admits that he was too chummy, and a student corroborates. He learned the hard way that students will continue to push as the year goes on, looking for any chink in your authority. And when class got out of hand, derailing his lessons, Mr. Seale had to try and veer hard in the other direction.

“It seemed very unnatural to put forth all this effort to make order,” he said. The worst consequences of trying to teach without order, however, aren’t about you personally. They’re about the unfulfilled academic potential of your students. Mr. Seale obviously realized this; being able to joke and laugh with his students of course seemed natural, but wasn’t as important as focusing and motivating his them.

Which leads to the more complicated problem that he identifies: explaining to students the importance of achieving, but making clear the amount of effort required to do well. Setting clear rules and classroom structure early is important, but he also says that showing students the big picture about the value of learning and the effort required to earn good grades is another crucial component of motivating students early in the year. Continue reading →

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Of course I remember having you in my class.

Posted on May 11, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

At the beginning of the Great Depression, high school graduation rates in the United States were 30 percent. In 1940, it was 50 percent. This educational leap forward is the lede for David Leonhardt’s piece in the New York Times Magazine on the similar shift during the ongoing Great Recession: more Americans are enrolling in college, and especially in community colleges.

The trouble is that while some 70.1 percent of new high school graduates started college last fall, many people already enrolled in community colleges don’t finish. Leonhardt reports:

Less than a third of all students who enroll in community colleges with the intention of getting a two-year degree — a degree leading to jobs in nursing, auto repair, preschool education — ever do so at any college, statistics suggest.

On top of that, data on students in community college is apparently scarce. A CAP colleague explains that the federal student loan and Pell grant structure is designed to get students enrolled, but does little to track them on their way to a degree or credential.

While that’s unfortunate, it’s not surprising. Lack of data is a consistent problem in many corners of the education system. Another CAP report demonstrates the problems that arise from the fact that most high schools only pay attention to how many of their students move on to college, not how well prepared they were to make the transition. Fortunately, there are success stories of schools that have recalibrated their learning goals to ensure that students aren’t just exposed to college preparation work, but that they actually learn how to do it.

Now TFA is all about capturing as much student tracking data as possible, within the context of a given year. That’s no small order, but the year is the scope of your work as a teacher. What if, as a teacher, you kept track of this information from year to year, and were able to follow your student through the school system to see how they were doing in the subject you taught? And what if the district also kept data on college enrollment, and those systems synchronized with college data. What if, years down the road, you knew what role you and other teachers played in shaping that student’s education?

Complicated, sure, but it’s just text in a database.

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This is how a scholar listens

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

students listening to a teacher

AP/Mike Derer via CAP

This is the fifth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3, 4). This reflection is on “executing effectively.”

Well-executed classroom management can look like fascism. Teaching her classroom how to get up from their desks, for lines, and leave the classroom, Ms. Deshpande does a good job recognizing model behavior and implementing consequences for students that do not follow directions. She even explains why the procedures are necessary: to stay safe and avoid tripping over furniture during the process and to maintain model behavior in front of other classes. The execution isn’t bad, and her attitude is authoritative. But her rationales don’t connect to the big goal for the classroom. She doesn’t connect the reason for the procedures to student learning.

It’s going to take some practice to get over that feeling that building classroom management procedures means playing the role of a taskmaster. I think I can avoid that by taking my cues from Mr. Meli’s clear efforts to connect all of this procedures to the goal that students work hard on getting smart. Shy away from the task of creating that structure and a classroom might end up more like Ms. Williams’s.

Hers is an eighth grade math class, and I will say that most of the pre-institute reading has had a pretty clear middle school focus. It would be helpful to get more suggestions on how to differentiate classroom management for teenagers and older middle schoolers like the ones in her class. Unfortunately, in this video, it seems like Ms. Williams hasn’t implemented the necessary procedures yet. The evidence unfolds in a comical bit of cinematography: a student requests a pencil, she slows her instruction to get him a new one from her desk, and then he moves close into the frame and past the camera to a sharpener, just out of sight. The noise of the sharpener drowns out the already difficult to hear dialogue. The student returns to his seat. Continue reading →

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Shiny magical smartphones and better tracking data

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt
PDA with Wireless Generation assessment software

Wireless Generation student tracking softare. (via CAP)

I noticed on one of my observation visits that the teacher almost never put down her clipboard. On it, she kept a chart that allowed her to track student progress and comprehension, take notes on students who needed additional help after short conferences, and what elements of her lesson plan were working. Over the course of the period, a wealth of information flowed onto a few thin sheets of paper. There has to be a better medium for capturing that data, I thought.

My iPhone came to mind—surely there was some way of capturing what was mostly qualitative information in a digital format that was more flexible and durable than the butcher paper progress charts on the wall. But the first ways I would incorporate a smartphone into classroom instruction are significantly different from the educational games described in a recent Fast Company article, “A Is for App.” While fascinating, the report makes it clear that a there’s a divide between educational technology that focuses on engaging students and educational technology that amplifies the power of a key classroom variable: the effectiveness of the teacher.

One of the key points from the Teaching As Leadership chapter on how to “Execute Effectively” is amusingly blunt: insist on seeing reality. The teacher I was observing was taking notes on the reality before her: were students learning what her lesson was intended to teach?

Effective teachers, writes Farr, are constantly using a variety of methods to capture information about where students really are. “They use brief end-of-lesson assessments, student interest surveys, and objective-mastery tracking systems to get a better understanding of student progress,” he says.

Now some methods for checking for understanding are instantaneous, simply, and brilliant: having students simultaneously write answers on small white boards or index cards, signing the first letter of a correct response in American Sign Language. Those results are more ephemeral than any note that ends up on the a clipboard, but part of the point is to make sure that your lesson is effective in the first place and to check for instances where you must re-teach a concept you failed to communicate. Yet what if you could capture those small, rapid checks for understanding and analyze them within the context of more formal assessments? That’s a lot of data you could work with. Again, a smartphone is a tantalizing device because it can handle just such a task. Continue reading →

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Website building and reading comprehension

Posted on April 14, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

This is the fourth written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2, 3). This reflection is on “planning purposefully.”

Have I ever planned at the level of detail outlined in the TFA training materials? No. In fact, I’ve worked on projects far more complicated, expensive, and involving more people than a semester of classroom instruction that have been executed without as much planning as the Teaching as Leadership rubric describes. That said, there are some connections to effective (and ineffective) methods for designing, building, and producing web publications, a process I am familiar with. Moreover, some of the explicit decisions necessary for effectively editing and organizing articles on a web magazine resonate with the necessity for planning explicit demonstrations of reading comprehension skills.

The crucial point of focus in purposeful class planning is of course the “big goal” for student achievement. Hitting a certain level of performance on a standardized test, advancing a certain number of grade levels towards mastery of a subject, etc. Subsequent decisions and resource allocations can be judged based on whether or not they contribute to meeting the goal. In publishing websites or magazines, a clear goal is likewise necessary in order to measure success, make clear decisions about the allocation of time, money and talent, and to design a way to present information to your audience.

In setting out to design the current magazine I work for, Science Progress, the original goal was to fill a gap in the science policy sphere, where there was no publication addressing science from a progressive perspective. That goal presumed a certain audience that included policymakers, academics, journalists, and professionals in the industry and lobbying world. Success shaping the opinions of these audience members is somewhat difficult to measure, but there are useful proxies: web traffic, mentions and references, and policy ideas we publish that are taken up by Congress or the administration. Continue reading →

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Why read? Because being illiterate pays poorly.

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

While making a classroom observation visit a few weeks ago, I jotted notes about several of the posters and wall hangings in the high school English class. One was a handmade poster with national literacy statistics: the percentage of unemployed people with low reading skills, the reading skills of prisoners, and Americans in general. The starkness of the information made me uncomfortable, and I questioned, to myself, the wisdom of hanging it on the wall. But that first impression was totally misguided.

Chatting with the teacher after class was over, I noted how engaged many of the students had been as they talked about character development in Lord of the Flies. I asked how he got the students, generally, to do their reading homework.

At the beginning of the year, they didn’t. “‘We’re allergic to reading,’ they’d complain,” the teacher said. It wasn’t their style. They didn’t want to. So he did some research on how well people who weren’t getting ahead could read, talked about the dismal statistics with the class, and posted them on the wall. The poster was in fact crucial to motivating the students to read because he was honest about the impact a lack of literacy skills would have on their lives. Now many of them did their reading homework.

I didn’t capture the exact stats this teacher had, but The Measure of America has some stark numbers:

  • 14 percent of the U.S. population—that’s 30 million people—have “below basic” prose literacy skills; they cannot understand newspaper articles or instruction manuals
  • 12 percent have below basic document literacy—”they cannot fill in a job application or payroll form, read a map or bus schedule, or understand labels on foods and drugs”

And the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literary has data like this: 51 percent of adults with “below basic” literacy skills were unemployed; only 18 percent with “proficient skills” were without a job.

So reading is important, but being honest about its benefits and the consequences of not being a literate person is equally important.

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In this week’s newsletter: nobody slips through the cracks

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Andrew Plemmons Pratt

This is the third written response to the TFA pre-institute work (responses 1, 2). The focus is on investing in students and their families, with special consideration to a trio of videos (linked below) demonstrating classroom techniques.

My original assumption was that the video material that accompanies the pre-institute work would demonstrate techniques that we should imitate. But it’s clear that learning how to close read the videos will be necessary to critiquing future classroom observations, because while the clips may show components of effective teaching, some of those pieces appear ineffective in isolation.

Case in point: the crescendo of videos for this exercise show Ms. Pahjua using data to demonstrate progress to her elementary students; Ms. Mitchell working with high school math students to graph their progress and reflect on how they can improve; and testimonials from Mr. Holloman’s students, their parents, and his colleagues, about his rigorous expectations and dogged work to wring the best out of every student. The use of data and the visualization of progress in the first two videos are obviously important, but their results may be hard to gauge without more information on the follow-up investment from the teachers.

Mr. Holloman’s chemistry students, on the other hand, describe a teacher who is constantly pushing them to do better. “He wants us to succeed,” one says. Another drops perhaps the highest praise and demonstration of achievement I can imagine for his class: she wants to major in chemistry in college. Continue reading →

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