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.

If I can invest students in these habits and virtues, and if they were to write a note recognizing that, I think that would be a successful capstone to a first year.

But what might that look like for students, in terms of personal behaviors? For that, I’ll turn to the legendary Rafe Esquith and imagine that this note from my students and their families highlights the same habits of “life-long readers” recognized by his students.

“We started reading in other classes that were boring because we were dying to finished the books we had,” my students might write.

“We had to start scolding our sons and daughters for reading at the dinner table,” the parents might say. “Not only that, but we couldn’t get them to go to sleep at night. They were always hiding under the covers with flashlights reading their latest books.”

Because sloganeering aside, part of opening up new opportunities for students means cultivating a thirst for new knowledge, new stories, and new ideas to focus on. It will be hard; it will require focus; but it will be a brave thing for them to do.

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.”

Now, parties per se may not be as important anymore, but the point remains: to be effective in the classroom, you have to attend to your own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, as Farr explains. After hundreds of pages, I was still looking warily at the word “relentless,” and then he offered this definition from a corps member:

Working relentlessly means that you take ownership of the difficult process that is teaching to close the achievement gap, and a part of that is understanding that you hard work is measured in results, not hours on the clock.

The friend with the sage advice about taking time to relax and socialize also worked with me on the college magazine, and while we didn’t always manage the project very well, we certainly poured a lot of time and energy into it. For six of my eight undergraduate semesters, I arranged my class and homework schedule so that I could be at magazine production every Tuesday night from 7pm until 3am. Two major components of that work sustained many members of the staff: the group energy and collaboration that went into making the magazine, and the resulting sense of pride and accomplishment we felt later in the week as fellow students opened up the latest issue to read while eating their lunch in the dining hall. But as a college student, I was still learning to manage time and energy, and when I didn’t sleep or work efficiently on my homework in order to focus on magazine production, arguments broke out, I made editorial mistakes and failed to listen to other staffers, and simply wasn’t as effective at the job I had to do.

During that time, I tended to carry folded pieces of paper in my pocket with messy to-do lists on them. I’m still a list-maker and always looking for the most effective way to generate lists (be they paper or digital), prioritize them, and ensure that I accomplish what’s on them. During a classroom observation a few weeks ago at a KIPP school, I noticed a weekly list behind an English teacher’s desk reminding him of basic responsibilities for assignments, grading, and reporting assessment results to his principal. In the midst of hectic days, it occurred to me that a simple reminder of all the core tasks he had to accomplish could seem daunting, but more importantly, it provided a simple roadmap through was could easily become chaos.

I’m going to need a lot of lists to keep myself on pace to teach well and to do my own homework to meet certification requirements. But if I’m really going to use checklists to be effective, I’ve got to include investing time in my own physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. That might mean daily exercise, reading, or even video games. But from where I sit at the moment, putting those things on the lists and taking them seriously will help ensure that I don’t flame out and fail my students.

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.

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.

Mr. Seale obviously realized that these problems are connected: he could be more effective in the classroom if he found ways of investing students in their work and making clear the effort that it required. And that worked for the student interviewed who admitted to coming in early for help on her homework.

The personal anecdotes from corps members in Teaching As Leadership and the supplemental reading on this issue are fascinating, because they illustrate people committing to getting better at their work by reforming routines and building self-reflection into their everyday work. “Over and other we hear from highly effective teachers that data analysis, reflection, and self-improvement are not do-when-you-can tasks but are built into their routine alongside planning, grading, and teaching,” writes Farr. The corps members in the texts describe taping audio snippets of their class to listen to on the drive home, writing daily about their experiences, reaching out to anyone who could help them improve, and realizing that they will never actually reach perfection as an instructor. “I’m getting there,” they tell Farr.

One interesting aspect of having just left my job as an editor and writer is that a large record of how I improved in each of those roles sits in public on scienceprogress.org.

In order to get better as a writer, I read lots of journalism that I wanted to imitate (though I wouldn’t say that my role at SP was that of a journalist). That meant combing through dozens of email newsletters and tables of contents every week to read science reporting in influential publications, particularly Science and Nature. It meant making sure that I understood the foundations of what I was writing about, often slogging through technical research articles—sometimes many times over. And it meant doing extra homework, including reading my sister’s used biology textbook and handbooks of bioethics research, so that I understood the fields I was responsible for.

So let’s look back. Here’s my first analytical post on Science Progress from October 2007: “On the Newsstand: Biofuels.”

Basically, this is me applying my cultural studies training to a complicated area of energy policy and research. Ultimately, this kind of pop analysis wasn’t the most useful thing for me to spend my time on. Frankly it was silly and embarrassing. Just read the comments. Learned from watching the web traffic and email clicks that it was better for me to synthesize and present information from other experts—either with my own writing or editing and producing content from experts with far more knowledge than myself. On the topic of biofuels, take the interview I did a few months later with a Berkeley researcher. After it appeared, someone passed along an email praising the usefulness of the interview for policy professionals, and knew I was on the right track.

Contrast that first post with one of the recent short features I penned on a federal court ruling in a gene patent case: “Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property.”

This piece didn’t represent any original reporting (all the major outlets were covering it, so what could I add?). But it did weave together the key legal and scientific information with the policy questions, linking along the way to SP content that experts had written on the issue of intellectual property rights for DNA. I’m proud, not embarrassed, to read this piece over, and I know it was effective because a legal expert in the field went out of his way to write and say so.

Reading that old post may be like watching a video of myself on the first day of school, but I know from my experience at SP that I can continuously improve. I was light years away from being where I wanted to be at that job, but I was always getting better, and that was satisfying.

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.

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.

Chasing these examples with a long, well-edited video capturing Justin Meli’s classroom management techniques emphasizes several points in boldface type. A short clip of Meli in the classroom was the most gripping of the videos included with Amanda Ripley’s Atlantic article on effective teacher training, which I wrote about at the PopTech blog.

Here we have the same authority that Ms. Deshpande displayed, along with recognition for appropriate student behavior. But to this Mr. Meli adds clear thanks for students who raise their hand appropriately, showing them respect as equals in the classroom enterprise. He also encourages applause for groups of students who successfully followed procedures. He is firm when necessary, referring students who’ve completed their “do now” work to the instructions telling them what to work on next, all the while taking care of other classroom business.

But he also makes it very clear why they need the procedures. Teaching his third graders who to sit up straight, face forward, and fold their hands for “active listening position,” he explains the scientific reasoning behind the procedure. Studies show that in the position, students efficiently absorb the most information, he says. He then asks students to demonstrate it and tells them when they’re going to use it.

In a December classroom visit, I watched a teacher reward effective classroom behavior with a complicated ticket system, but I was so caught up in other questions about the class I forgot to ask how it worked. Mr. Meli explains his particular ticket system in this video, and it has an elegant simplicity that I imagine working well for elementary students.

In recognition of good performance, students get a ticket with their name dropped in the “super-duper” jar. When Mr. Meli needs a specific task requiring responsible execution taken care of—taking paperwork to the office, for instance—he will draw one name at random from the jar. The more tickets in the jar, the greater a chance any one student has of being picked. The wisdom is three-fold: incentivizing good behavior, taking care of administrative tasks, and creating a real-world example of how probability functions.

Mr. Meli also emphasizes the fact that students “choose” to break rules. First rule infraction is a warning. Second warning is a loss of learning time and a stint at the timeout desk where he or she is reminded of what they’ve done by copying an apology to the rest of the students. The system is simple and transparent, but more importantly it demonstrates his clear commitment to drawing vectors from every structure in his classroom to the goal of getting smart.

The teacher I observed in December phrased this a little differently, referring to her seventh graders students as “scholars,” and explaining that scholars listened carefully and worked diligently on the tasks before them. The vocabulary appealed to me immediately because it reemphasized in virtually every instruction she provided that every student can be a scholar, because a scholar is defined by actions, not anything innate. Scholarship is the result of malleable intelligence. It also connected to a clear goal that I feel viscerally about: the need to help students become critical thinkers, clear communicators, and powerful rhetoricians. The definition of scholarship that I know from graduate school and the professional world is after all one in which the content of your arguments is often eclipsed by their presentation. The students who learn both have the tools to succeed in college and beyond.

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.

Now, in her article, Anya Kamenetz explains some impressive instructional tools, especially the TeacherMate, a cheap handheld device that elementary school children can use to practice math and reading skills that align with lesson objectives. A Chicago South Side elementary teacher explains:

the software on her laptop lets her track each student’s performance. Once a week, when she plugs each student’s TeacherMate into her docking station, she downloads a record of their game play and generates reports for herself as well as for parents. Then she sets the precise skills, levels, and allotted time for the upcoming week. The programs are synced with the reading and math curricula used in the school — right down to the same spelling words each week.

This is to what I’m imagining: fine-grained results that test individual student understanding of specific lesson objectives, safely and flexibly stored in a digital format for export and analysis. Kamenetz reports that Arne Duncan is a fan of the platform and the company that makes the software and designed the device, Innovations for Learning, has seen the tool adopted in 500 schools in 15 states. All very impressive.

But the article makes it clear another premise that companies in the education technology space rest upon is that smartphones, OX laptops, and learning software, “are tools for expression and connection, not just passive absorption,” unlike Sesame Street and, apparently, teacher instruction. And this is where things start to get wish-washy. “A system built around tools that allow children to explore and figure things out for themselves would be radical for most developing-world schools, which emphasize learning by rote. In the United States, which is currently so in love with state curriculum benchmarks and standardized tests, it could be just as hard a sell,” writes Kamenetz.

Huh? Why is structured learning the opposite of creativity?

Education that quashes student creativity is obviously no good. Kids should experiment, express themselves, and learn from a diversity of perspectives. But leaving room from student creativity and ensuring that they can comprehend complex passages of text or sift information from word-based math problems are not mutually exclusive.

Simply put, a lot of stories about innovation in educational technology are overshadowed by the myth that the way we teach now is suffocating students and their only salvation is in devices that will make them digital artists and publishers.

I think all students should learn to be digital artists and publishers. Just throwing the tools at them isn’t going to do that. Using technology to leverage good teaching seems like a better approach.

Contrast the educational quiz games model with one that expands the power of teachers to collect and analyze data from their existing lessons. That’s the focus of a successful company not mentioned in the Fast Company piece called Wireless Generation. Here’s a summary from my CAP colleagues that makes the clipboard and pen system sound downright medieval:

The company’s core program is software, which allows teachers to use a handheld device—rather than paper—to assess and collect data on their students. The data teachers collect can be used to immediately create web-based reports on individual students, classrooms, schools, districts, and even demographic subgroups. The better and more immediate data allows teachers and administrators to easily monitor student progress and tailor their instruction to students’ needs. The online nature of the data also allows teachers with similar classroom issues to find each other and collaborate on solutions. Because they can track students’ progress over time, it is easy to see what is working and what’s not.

The company makes its mission clear right on its website: “The test for any Wireless Generation product or service is always: does it really help educators to do their jobs?” The assumption being, no matter how good the software or hardware of our new magical learning devices, teachers are not going to vanish from classrooms any time soon. So innovation in educational technology should make the most of their work, especially since effective teaching is so highly correlated with student achievement.

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.

These questions were crucial because without a clear idea of what we wanted to accomplish and what we wanted to measure, we might have built an accompanying website that didn’t present content in an accessible manner or move ideas where we could measure their influence. (Indeed, some of these factors changed over time and those problems arose; many we addressed by changing the site.) In fact, many web publications make the mistake of designing a site without starting from the content it will contain—in essence building a house frame without thinking about the interior floor plan. This is just like instructional razzle-dazzle that ignores learning goals.

For instance, a common design planning approach to mocking up a website is to create a page layout and fill areas where text will go with blocks of placeholder “dummy” text—often Latin from a Cicero speech that begins “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.” The problem with this is that while it creates a nice page to look at, working with dummy text ignores the primary function of the page: to provide content to your readers. Without real text and images, you can’t know if you have made your columns too wide, left too little space for photos, or if you’ve foregrounded the key ideas presented in your features.

Doing this well does involve a considerable level of detail work that spans editorial and development. Websites (like this blog) run on top of “content management system” software that groups posts or stories into “content objects.” A content object in most instances is an abstract grouping of all the components that make up an article: the headlines, body text, associated images, as well as the little blurbs used to promote the articles around the site and the tags or categories that group it with similar articles in an archive. Working out the appropriate model for these objects seems akin to translating curricular standards into learning objectives: it’s a process that has to happen early in the planning process that patterns a great deal of subsequent work. Hence getting it right is important.

Part of what interests me about the abstract process of planning patterns for website content is that it exposes some of the individuals steps to creating effective content itself. If you can’t write a set of pithy headlines and blurbs that draw readers in or pick a provocative image that evokes the main idea of an article, then it’s likely that the main idea of the piece isn’t clear. When I edit articles, I make explicit decisions about how to present main ideas in the opening paragraphs and then translate that same language into the headlines and summaries of the article that will appear around the site. This is itself a reading comprehension strategy: I am deliberately engineering context clues for readers, labeling and marking keywords and ideas.

Even as I was reading about reading comprehension in the literacy materials included in this exercise, and the potential for demonstrating to students the processes and habits of effective readers, I realized I was underlining these suggestions in the text. This was one of many strategies I could model. But more importantly, the recognition of my own habits is a foundation upon which to plan strategies that develop the student habits I want to see. That is, observing myself will be a way to visualize and map the strategies students should learn and demonstrate when it comes to reading comprehension.

That said, I’m intimidated by the open-ended question of how to choose among instructional strategies. How am I to know that presenting one concept will be more effective as a lecture instead of through a more complicated cooperative learning activity? I suspect experimentation will be necessary, and that means designing lessons in such a way that I can document the effectiveness of one approach, try another, and compare the results. When you’re building a website or sending an email, a lot of this information gathering can be automated, tallying site visitors or click-throughs. But perhaps effective grading and traffic strategies can come close.

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.

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.