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.

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.