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

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.

In her video, Ms. Pahjua is administering reading tests and holding mini conferences with her second grade students about their upward progress on a standardized reading scale. She is warm and encouraging. She has data on previous reading proficiency tests right at her fingertips. But in asking her first student about how to improve her score and move ahead, there is a short exchange about how long the student should be reading every night. The student suggest 10-15 minutes.

“Okay, let’s go for 20, how about that?” Ms. Pahjua replies, “You say 10 or 15 and I say 20. So let’s go for 20 minutes, every single night, and I bet that if you read for 20 minutes every single night, you can go from a 2.6 to a 3.0.” A perfectly reasonable suggestion, but even for a second grader, this lacks enough context to get the student invested. Rather than negotiating nightly reading time on a case-by-case basis, this is a requirement that seems ripe for clear expectation setting, either by spelling out evening reading time in a set of easily referenced class rules, or perhaps even through personalized student reading log.

If Mr. Holloman were running this classroom, I can see the second graders explaining to the camera that they didn’t originally like reading at home at night, but that their teacher called regularly to see if they were doing their assigned work. Eventually, they were reading 20 or even 30 minutes every night because they were reminded daily that it was their responsibility and they wanted to meet the big goals that they had set for learning new words and tackling more complicated books.

This sort of investment could also benefit from the technique that Ms. Mitchell walks her students through: crafting bar charts that track their progress on a series of tests. She helps them connect each point of data to the effort they put into studying for the test, drawing a clear connection between personal effort and academic success. “What’s nice is that this shows you can do it,” she says to one student, pointing at his best score. “This shows you don’t always study enough,” she says, pointing to one that is significantly lower.

Mr. Holloman runs his class like a submarine commander, setting extraordinary expectations but refusing to let a single student slip through the cracks. As he says in a previous video, he is perpetually available for extra help, and as students in the clip for this exercise attest, he doesn’t hesitate to call their house in the evening to see that they’re doing their homework and studying for his class.

That sort of commitment I can easily identify as the mark of an effective teacher. I can less easily identify it as a technique I’ll find natural. What I do know I can do is deploy a wide swath of strategies to communicate class expectations to students and their parents, make myself available to provide help, and track progress transparently. This is one of the first areas where I feel like my experience in online communications will be directly applicable.

Victor Wakefield’s “menu of communications strategies” outlined in Teaching as Leadership (p 70) immediately appealed to my obsession with organizing documents and my experience producing a weekly newsletter. Among other things, Mr. Wakefield issues newsletters tracking class events and assignments; he communicates with parents regularly via email (and through letters for those without Internet access); and he produces biweekly progress reports that parents must sign.

In anticipation, I’ve already started exploring efficient software for producing a regular email newsletter for my classes. But the phone instincts like Mr. Holloman’s, and the unwavering commitment to his students they demonstrate—that’s not something I can prepare for very well at the moment.

Fortunately, I have my own personal data on how my outreach and communication skills have improved in the face of various challenges—reporting for a newspaper, organizing high-profile events, running a magazine. I don’t have a bar graph to visualize the improvements, but I know that when I extend myself, often by picking up the phone to talk to an expert, I often learn something useful and it reinforces the benefit of listening to someone else’s ideas and concerns.

I remember several crucial phone calls over the past few years—to ask experts for insight on new research or even to apologize for a reporting mistake I made—and each one made me better at what I do. That’s a fact I’m confident will apply in teaching as well.