andrew plemmons pratt

Part of the TFA pre-institute work involves writing responses to required readings. I’m sharing them here as a way to shed some light on my first steps into teaching.

This first response involves reflecting on the teaching approaches of Aurora Lora, a corps member who taught in an elementary school in Huston—and considering what about her approach seems challenging, surprising, manageable. Ms. Lora’s Story is effectively a new journalism-style novella about her four years at Blair Elementary, wherein each chapter is organized around a central theme, but cycles several times through anecdotes and incidents involving one particular student from each of her four years.

Behavioral issues rob two of Ms. Lora’s students of significant amounts of learning time. For those students, and for others who are well-behaved, she crafts differentiated instructional materials that allow them to maximize the amount of time they have in the school year, address areas of need for each student, and generally capture their academic attention. While Ms. Lora employs a host of effective teaching strategies in the stories that describe her four years at Blair Elementary, I found both her responses to behavioral problems and her individualized instructional approaches particularly striking because they dovetailed nicely and represented techniques that I am sure will require substantial practice before I’m comfortable with either.

Ms. Lora’s two particularly challenging students during her years at Blair are Tanya and Douglas. Tanya learns quickly and is ahead of her classmates, but disrupts classes and after-school tutorials by announcing aloud the conclusion of lesson before their completion and by erupting in to occasional fits of anger wherein she accuses Ms. Lora of hating her. She is “a volatile amalgam of intelligence and impatience.”

Douglas, on the other hand, has been held back multiple times and doesn’t let his classmates forget that he is older and bigger than the rest of them. He struggles constantly with his class work, and his frustrations boil over into outbursts and occasional violence. The resulting suspensions and lost time in class only compound his learning difficulties. Read the rest of this entry »

Homework.

…and not a minute too soon. I was about to use a Borders coupon to buy Teaching As Leadership, having been led to believe that the org wouldn’t spring for the 4000+ copies they’ll need for all the incoming corps members. Pleased they rustled up that money.

iGEM and David Appleyard (flickr.com/igemhq)

There’s lots to love and lots to chew on in this article by Jon Mooallem on synbio in the Sunday NYT mag. Mooallem captures science and spirit, covering the 2009 International Genetically Engineering Machine Competition by following an enthusiastic but under-resourced team of bioengineers at the City College of San Fransisco. That’s right: part-time students at a two-year community college compete with teams from the top research institutions on the planet.

Unfortunately, the CCSF folks can’t get their bacterial battery to work, but the enthusiasm on the razor’s edge of science is as contagious as some of the microbes they’re working with.

Three points. First, undergrads are building these biomachines, crafting new BioBricks of DNA that enable microorganisms to, for instances, change color in the presence of specific environmental toxins. And they are not conducting pure basic research; they are organizing information about to synthesize the basic functions of small life forms—for fun and competition. Drew Endy, the master builder and noted seer of the field, puts it like this:

We have now, in a bottom-up, grass-roots fashion, de facto installed a genetic-engineering curriculum for the future of our field in 120 schools worldwide.

Second, top-flight high schools can’t be that far down the ladder.

Third, the folks at CCSF prove that anyone can get into this, and as other journalists have noted, synbio is coming into the realm of computer programming, a high-powered hobby in which nerdy enthusiasts can do significant work in their own living rooms.

From Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire—you can self-assess your reading proficiency at any grade level with the following simple test:

1. Have you ever secretly read under you desk in school because the teacher was boring and you were dying to finish the book you were reading?
2. Have you ever been scolded for reading at the dinner table?
3. Have you ever read secretly under the covers after being told to go to bed?

The point being that you can do a bang-up job of teaching students the technical skills necessary to absorb and comprehend what they’re asked to read, but real success means helping students cultivate a life-long hunger for knowledge and stories.

I think the current version of this test for myself would go something like this:

1. Have you ever been reading something on the bus, then kept reading as you went up the elevator into the office, and then kept reading after you turned on your computer and were supposed to be working, and then kept going to refill your coffee mug and taken your book along to the kitchen?
2. Have you ever been too engrossed in what you were reading to bother fixing yourself dinner and instead eaten vegetarian hot dogs wrapped in tortillas for the second time in a week?
3. Have you ever wished that you had a reason to read under the covers in secrecy and done it anyway, perhaps using one of those silly travel book lights that someone gave you for Christmas years ago and for which there really isn’t a proper use besides this?

Next fall I will be teaching secondary school English, and in order to be effective I’m going to need to brush up on my math. As I was starting the process of applying to Teach for America, one of the reasons I kept citing for why I wanted to go into education was that effective schools and programs (like TFA) measure whether they’re successful at what they’re doing. This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon in education, but we’re no where near to realizing the full the power of measuring what we do U.S. schools, seeing if it benefits students, and adjusting things accordingly. Fortunately there are a whole slew of districts, policy shops, and nonprofits working on figuring out what we’re not measuring, determining how to measure it, maintain that information, and act on it.

Take this report that my humble employer, the Center for American Progress, and College Summit released last week. The authors explain that while many public high schools have a rigorous college preparation curriculum that includes Advanced Placement classes and the like, smart successful students often make it to their first year of college and find themselves totally adrift, unprepared for the academic expectations of higher ed. High schools, despite their best intentions, often don’t know whether or not they’re preparing students for success in college because they don’t keep track of how those students perform in their “13th” year. Simply put, they don’t measure the outcome of their work. It’s a matter of counting.

Now, building a data system that follows students from secondary school to potentially far-flung colleges is not trivial, but the principle—take note of what you do, measure, and make adjustments to better meet your goals—is one of those simple ideas that made for a lot of successful projects over the past decade.

The business community is generally out ahead on this whole counting and measuring thing, but it’s also worth noting that much of the exponential growth of web-based and social media technologies over the past 10 years is due, fundamentally, to the ability to use computers to measure what people are doing and craft tools and products that fit people’s needs. Google does this, incrementally, billions of times day. Similar story for most everything else you clicked on around the Internet today. But in a whole variety of other fields, counting has been around for decades, and its impact has snowballed in the face of cheap, fast computing, and the basic acceptance that if you want to understand a problem, you need data.

Atul Gwande’s Better offers a terrific tour of how measurement has improved various corners of medicine since the middle of the 20th century. Hospitals have beaten back onslaughts of drug-resistant bacteria by persuading everyone to wash his or her hands and counting the results. The introduction of the Apgar score, which enumerates on a 0-10 scale the health of newborn infants upon delivery, lead to a dramatic upswing the in the quality of care for infants and dramatic upswing in survival rates, which are now about 8 times better than they were in the 1930s. And the 90 percent survival rates for U.S. combat troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan is due in large part to the fact that military physicians diligently record copious information on injuries, treatments, and outcomes—so they can constantly find ways to improve on their success.

The next big step in education and in medicine is to take what we’ve counted, standardize the information, and compare it. That means national testing and data standards for education and interoperable electronic health records for medicine. Fortunately, there’s federal money for both of those projects: $4.35 billion for schools and $19 billion health information technology.