Advancing the Teaching Profession

How Teachers Will Rock the News in 2012

I may not always agree with Rick Hess—but there’s no doubt that his blog posts are worthy of attention. In “Ten Edu-Stories We’ll Be Reading in 2012,” Rick predicts headlines for the coming year. He foresees increased skepticism of Race To The Top reforms and Khan Academy’s video-based model of education. He anticipates GOP presidential nominees abandoning attacks on public education in a “push for moderates.”

While Rick claims to be a lousy prognosticator, his list is intriguing.

But what’s absent in his list is any mention of teachers. None. Zero. Nada.

This is surprising because teachers have been the coin of the education policy realm for fifteen years or so. Few researchers (or reformers, for that matter) dispute the impact that improved teaching can have on student outcomes. Home and family factors are powerful influences on student achievement, but teachers matter.

So I’m offering my own version of Rick’s list. Sure, it may be optimistic—but we can hope, right?

5] Presidential Candidates Talk Up Teachers. President Obama and GOP presidential hopefuls realize that one in 100 Americans are teachers. Candidates focus less on “getting rid of bad teachers” and more on the positive: preparing and supporting teachers to do their best work.

4] USDOE Spreads Teaching Expertise. Acknowledging the uneven implementation of Race To The Top efforts, the USDOE adjusts its strategies. Rather than merely identifying effective teachers, officials promote strategies to elevate those teachers as leaders and spread their expertise to peers.

3] Policymakers Ask Accomplished Teachers for ESEA Help. Policymakers realize ESEA reauthorization is not in the cards for 2012. They turn to accomplished teachers, including former state and national teachers of the year, to help build public demand for improving the law. The teachers emphasize that the law must build capacity in high-need schools and districts—not just punish them.

2] Reformers Improve Bricks-and-Clicks Model. The Khan Academy’s “flipped” classroom model fails to yield the results reformers have been expecting—especially for at-risk students. In response, reformers invest more in innovative roles for teachers as community organizers, virtual mentors, and connectors to social services.

1] Obama Elevates National Board Certified Teachers. While GOP nominee Mitt Romney highlights TFA recruits who teach for two-year stints, President Obama points to National Board Certified Teachers as committed, accomplished standard bearers for school reform.

Now, I'd rather bet on my favorite college football team (Go Gamecocks!) than wager for the accuracy of this list.

But if we want to get serious about college and career readiness for all kids, the education conversation must shift. We must talk about what it takes to recruit, prepare, and support effective teachers. And I fervently hope that the “we” who are talking are not just the same old chatterers: policymakers, reformers, pundits. I hope that “we” also includes our nation’s most accomplished teachers—whose untapped expertise could transform our public schools.  

When Teachers Speak Up—And Policymakers Listen

By Jessica Keigan 

Jessica Keigan is a teacherpreneur who spends part of her week teaching English at Horizon High School in Denver and part of her time working to improve public schools through her work with the Denver New Millennium Initiative. This post was orginially published on the Impatient Optimists blog.

Last year, Colorado passed a landmark piece of legislation (SB 10-191, the EQUITEE Act) that created a new system of evaluation for students, teachers, and schools in the state. This new law promises to shake up the status quo, inspiring innovation in how we teach students and how we prepare and support teachers.

This month, the Colorado State Board of Education adopted regulations to implement the legislation—with some key revisions.

The revisions reflect the informed voices of classroom teachers and represent a unique breakthrough in my career. I have had many successes in my nine years of teaching, but this was the first time I’ve ever seen my efforts have such a long-reaching and concrete impact on the policies that shape my job.

I hope that it will prove to be a strong foundation for continued work of this kind, both personally and for my state.

The basic premise of the law is that all teachers will be evaluated yearly on a variety of measures to determine whether their non-probationary status will be maintained.

As a member of the New Millennium Initiative, a team of teachers working to transform our schools and the teaching profession, I have spent the past year working with a team of Denver-area teachers to research the implications of the EQUITEE Act on classroom practice.

In May, our team of teachers released a formal brief ("Making Teacher Evaluation Work for Students: Voices From the Classroom") sharing our ideas about how this law should be implemented.

I consider myself to be a teacher leader and, unfortunately, have sat on numerous committees that seemed to have little influence. But my work with the Denver New Millennium Initiative this summer and fall was an incredibly empowering experience.

During my public testimony, I spoke about how my unique expertise as a teacher helps me to determine how and when my students are growing. I recommend that the voices of classroom teachers should be heard and honored when creating standards that evaluate teacher effectivenes. 

No one is more qualified to comment on a student’s achievement than the person who works with that student every day.

Standardized tests have their purpose as norm setters, but a teacher who knows her students’ unique back stories and learning styles can provide a wealth of information about each student. This information should be included among the data used to measure the success of both teachers and students.

Specifically, we advocated for three important things:

• A clearer definition of the multiple measures that comprise 50 percent of teachers’ evaluation
• A strong representation of teachers in the process of implementation
• An ongoing evaluation process rather than an “event” that happens once or twice a year

The State Board of Education adopted the implementation rules this month. Upon reviewing the final draft of the evaluation standards, I was overwhelmed by how much of the language reflected the recommendations that my team made, in some cases almost verbatim.

I am genuinely excited about the potential for positive change that SB 191 brings to Colorado. In an often sluggish system that balks at overhaul and reform, this is a true game changer.

I am also grateful that policymakers were open to hearing my voice as a teacher. They honored and incorporated the experience and expertise that our Denver New Millennium Initiative teachers brought to the conversation.

I now have new hope that my profession can change—that I (and my colleagues) can be valued professionals.

Teaching Ahead: The Teacher Evaluation System Students Deserve

The education world is abuzz about teacher evaluation reform. Over the last three years, 32 states and the District of Columbia have enacted policies that have changed how those who teach are assessed.

It seems like every day another inside-the-Beltway think tank offers its advice on which state is doing the most to make sure teachers are held accountable for their classroom practice. Most of these reports, like the recent one offered up by NCTQ (that is not us), provide a cursory overview through a very narrow lens. They provide little insight into the significant technical problems, like those experienced in Tennessee’s rushed “Race to the Top” implementation of its teacher evaluation system. Tennessee is struggling to accurately use value-added ratings and assess teachers on student growth measures in non-tested subjects. At the same time, it’s foisting unnecessary paperwork on classroom practitioners.

Commonly heard in NCTQ-esque circles is that "teacher-effectiveness measures don't have to be perfect to be useful.” I would agree in principle with this well-known reform adage—don’t let perfection get in the way of progress. However, as we’ve learned from teachers in Tennessee, a hastily implemented system can affect teachers’ perceptions of their careers. A job they used to “love” can easily become one they “hate.”

For an alternative view of how to make teacher evaluation work for students and the profession that serves them, policymakers might just want to listen to teachers—the people who must implement these new teaching accountability systems.

In our latest edition of Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable, you have the chance to consider how Teacher Leaders Network (TLN) members—a number of whom are now engaged in teacher evaluation reforms through our New Millennium Initiative—view evaluation reforms, and how to make them work: 

• Jessica Hahn suggests that her evaluators ask themselves how they can “develop her as a better teacher."
• Jessica Keigan is ready for evaluations that draw on the expertise of students (and teachers themselves). 
• Ryan Kinser imagines how his evaluation experience will look in 2021. 
• Patrick Ledesma points out that if standardized tests are to be part of evaluation, they must be better. 
• Renee Moore argues eloquently that as teaching morphs into a true profession, we need transformed, not just reformed, evaluation systems. 
• Michael Moran makes the case for how teaching context must be a factor in teacher evaluation. 
• Ryan Niman meets the education genie. One of his wishes for teacher evaluation is to communicate the complexity of his work (and his colleagues’ work) to policymakers, practitioners, and the public. 

For those who could use a scholarly lesson on policy implementation in education, you might want to return to the 1970s RAND change agent studies. Transforming teacher evaluation, like most complex teaching policies, will require what Milbrey McLaughlin called “mutual adaptation” from those who enact and those who implement.

Is it not time to pay more careful attention to the implementers? Is it not time to consider policies that not just remove constraints to more results-oriented teacher evaluation, but policies that enable teachers to teach more effectively and serve students as they intended to when they entered teaching?

Keeping Score: What the Teaching Profession Can Learn from Baseball

By Paul Goodland

Paul Goodland is a peer evaluator in the Empowering Effective Teachers (EET) program in Hillsborough County, Florida, and a member of the Hillsborough County New Millennium Initiative. The following post was originally published on the Impatient Optimists blog.

I evaluate teachers for a living. When I visit a classroom, I watch a lesson, discuss what I observed, share recommendations, and get additional feedback from the teacher. This visit—along with a principal’s evaluation—determines about 60 percent of the teacher’s “annual effectiveness rating.”

The remaining 40 percent is determined by a complex calculation of students’ progress on an annual test, as compared to the performance of students with similar characteristics.

This is a far better system than has ever been used before. But it is just a baby-step in gauging teacher effectiveness.

Baseball is a great analogy for teaching. Baseball works, in part, because the aim of the game is simple: to score more runs. Anything that improves the team's chances of scoring more runs is valuable. Anything that decreases it should be reduced or eliminated.

In baseball, managers make decisions based on a huge amount of statistical analysis (now called sabermetrics), thanks to technological tools and ready access to data. In the past twenty years, in fact, baseball has been transformed: the impressions and conventional wisdom of tobacco-chewing, road-warrior baseball scouts has been replaced by the results-oriented, proven effectiveness of sabermetrics.

Sabermetrics only exists because baseball statistics are "open source." We all have access to them. For many years we didn't. In the 19th century, baseball aficionado Henry Chadwick made value judgments about which statistics mattered. He created a scorecard highlighting those few measures—and his system was used for about a hundred years. Then people started challenging his assumptions, like the idea that "walks" aren't important, and baseball statistics took a huge leap forward.

Do we have all the statistics of teaching? Is the profession transparent? Do we have access to the data? The answer to all of these questions is “no.”

How badly would baseball talent be misjudged if only five of the 180 games that a team plays between March and October were considered? What if the players knew that two of those games were formal evaluation days? Would they play differently?

It isn't enough to just read the box score, watch three to five games, and pick the all-star team. You need to consider the whole game, and the whole season.

So how do we collect more and better statistics?

Clearly, we must bring what happens in the classroom into the light of day. We must develop meaningful statistical processes that correlate to teacher effectiveness—and give us a comprehensive view of it.

At the same time, it is important to balance this with the imperative to treat teachers as professionals.

Teachers deserve autonomy and the ability to do their jobs unimpeded. When it comes to classroom visits, for example, there should be clear rules to ensure they occur in a limited and non-disruptive way.

In baseball, isolated measurements can be wrong. Umpires miss the call sometimes. Similarly, many teachers are concerned that a measurement or subjective assessment of their effectiveness will be inaccurate. There is good reason to question the way things are done and to improve the metrics.

Still, accurate pictures of teaching quality can be developed over time. A bad call eventually gets balanced by an equally unfair good call. A batting average (or more importantly, an on-base percentage) emerges.

For the sake of the many teachers who teach effectively every day, and for the sake of the kids in classrooms where teachers do their jobs effectively only a handful of days each year, I hope we get the rest of the statistics soon.

Teacher Whisperers Wanted

By Alaina Adams

Alaina Adams is a National Board Certified teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to teaching high school English, she serves as a cognitive coach and professional development coordinator at the Phoenix Union High School District and the Arizona K12 Center. You can read her blog at Stories from School AZ.

In my endeavors to elevate the teaching profession, I am fortunate enough to be part of the work that the Arizona K12 Center crafts around vision, leadership, learning, and technology in education. Recently, I was chosen as one of 20 teachers across the state to work as part of a TeacherSolutions team designed to improve teaching and learning in Arizona. This work will be based on the framework outlined in TEACHING 2030. On November 16th and 17th, I spent some time with Barnett Berry and CTQ staff to dream, play, and plan.

As my group explored teacherpreneurism and a future of innovation, phrases like "a league of extraordinary educators" and "teacher whisperers" playfully came up in conversations. At the end of my last day with the team, I found myself returning to an Outlook mailbox full of the current realities of teaching that I "have to" deal with. I'm frustrated that I don't have more cognitive coaches available to help advance my practice. I'm also frustrated that TV shows and movies (like Jersey Shore and The Horse Whisperer) will earn more money in one shot than I'll ever make in my entire career as an educator. To clarify my thoughts, I ended my day by posting this comparison between "horse whisperers" and "teacher whisperers."

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Horse Whisperer: Horses that have suffered abuse from people or been traumatized through an accident may develop changed behavior that their owners find difficult to deal with, or may even result in the horse being labeled dangerous.

Teacher Whisperer: Teachers that have been traumatized by things like excessive testing, narrow teacher evaluation, misuse of national curriculum, data-driven instruction, stifling teacher accountability, elimination of tenure, competition for funding, punitive school labels, "education reform," and misguided philanthropists may develop changed behavior that some may find difficult to deal with, or may even result in the teacher being labeled dangerous.

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Horse Whisperers spend years studying the horse and its behavior in natural surroundings. They learn to read the silent but incredibly powerful communication we call body language.

Teacher whisperers, given appropriate release time, can study the behavior of teachers in their classrooms. There, they can study body language like the elevation of voice, eye-rolling, head flopping on the desk, and sporadic tears to understand a teacher’s entire language of communication to best gauge their needs.

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Horse Whisperer: Young horses that had received little handling but were destined to be riding horses, for example, were once trained to work using quiet, brutal methods of coercion. This system was called ‘breaking.’ ‘Making’ a horse is preferable to breaking one.

Teacher Whisperer: Probationary teachers that received little mentoring but were destined to be classroom teachers, for example, might have been ones hustled through subpar certification programs. This system is called ‘fast tracking.’ ‘Making’ a quality teacher is preferable to rushing one.

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In some public demonstrations, a horse whisperer will stand in an enclosure, which a young untrained horse is released into. The horse’s natural instinct is to fight or flight. The whisperer becomes the herd, the safe place to be, by his use of body language. First, he sends the horse away; he has not yet invited it to join his herd! He drives the horse forward and keeps him away.

In some school districts, only one teacher whisperer stands per campus, of unreasonable sizes, in which un-mentored teachers are released into. The teacher’s natural instinct is to sink or swim. Though the teacher whisperer becomes the safe place to be, he or she is often busy corralling other un-mentored teachers, and the un-mentored teacher-in-immediate-need is often driven away.

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Horse Whisperer: During this training period, the horse's body language is clearly visible to people watching. The horse whisperer approaches as if he or she has all day to stand there. The result is a clear understanding that can be successfully built on. No shouting, no fear, no pain. A calm and positive mutual understanding provides a sound basis for true partnership between man and horse.

Teacher Whisperer: Given ample exposure to teacher whispering methods, teachers can change their body language and perform better on evaluations. This process can take several weeks or years. It is always approached as if the teacher whisperer has all the time in the world to stand there. No shouting, no fear, no pain. A calm and positive mutual understanding provides a sound basis for true partnership between teacher and whisperer.

Summary:

The horse whisperer does not perform tricks. He, or she, uses the oldest language in the world in order to read the horse and communicate with the horse, combined with equine psychology, to achieve partnership.

The teacher whisperer does not perform tricks. He, or she, uses the oldest language in the world in order to read the teacher and communicate with the teacher, combined with human psychology and compassion, to achieve partnership.