a site for inspired and aspiring teachers

Going to a conference or an in-service often inspired me, yet putting the new ideas or methods to use when I got back to my own classroom was never as easy as I hoped, nor as simple as the presenter’s words seemed to apply. Over time I realized that learning curves are much longer than I recognized.

I saw others’ hopes dashed too.  Sometimes, a few days after a training session, a colleague would announce, “That doesn’t work. I tried it.”  I do not question my colleague’s honesty. I believe each of them did try the ideas—at least they tried some portion of the idea in whatever way they understood it after an initial introduction. The idea of academic freedom was sometimes advanced here, as in, “It’s my classroom and I am not going to do this anymore.”

This leads me to a word I have recently learned to use in a new way. The word is fidelity. This word is probably familiar to you; fidelity means, according to Webster’s, loyalty, faithful devotion to duty, or accurate reproduction of sounds or images. How does fidelity fit into education? Fidelity means learning a strategy or method so well that we can accurately use it in the way it was designed to be used.

Fidelity is important in any professional, trained and reliable profession. Doctors and nurses follow protocols because these are shown to cause better patient outcomes. Teachers too are being asked to use research-based methods, in order to cause better student outcomes.

These days schools are researching programs, interventions and protocols in order to select approaches that will help every child to succeed. Effort and thought go into these selections, and approaches which are chosen show great promise. Still, choosing is only the first step. If we as educators cannot accurately implement the methodology—with fidelity—the choosing is for naught.

There are at least three steps to fidelity as we implement new methods: investigation, initiation and full implementation.

Investigation- Whatever team is charged with selection of new approaches will do the research. However, each staff member will also need to find out the reasons for the choice, and the details that make up the method. Gaps in knowledge will always result in gaps in performance. Furthermore, even after the new method becomes commonplace, each new staff member, whether permanent, like newly-hired teachers, or temporary like student teachers and volunteers, will also need to be brought to an understand of the purpose, the procedures and the payoffs of the planned approach.

Initiation – This is the ramping-up phase. Start with the assumption that none of us will be very comfortable or skilled the first few times we try the new approach. Lots of co-planning and debriefing after the first several attempts will move people forward to growing effectiveness, and get us past the discomfort.  We should beware of adapting before we have followed the recipe numerous times. Too-early adapting is usually the route to corrupting the original plan. I don’t want my surgeon improvising either, not until she has logged in dozens of by-the-book renditions to be sure her skills are in place.

Full implementation – At this point every participant—all teachers, aides, volunteers and teachers-in-training—have learned about the method or research-based-initiative. They all know what to do, how to do it, and they are actually doing it. Until this is true, no one can say if the idea will work, because it remains a mirage unless all are doing it accurately, in other words, with fidelity.

After fidelity is achieved, then creativity, adaptation and academic freedom properly kick in. Teachers begin to see ways to link the new skills to others, to enrich or build upon this new foundation. But until we can practice our craft with fidelity, the freedom to ignore the protocol would be the freedom to fail our students.

I recently spent time in the company of a new arrival—a month old baby named Galen. He didn’t know the culture or the language of this place yet, but looked around often, as if a bit bemused. My desire, of course, was to make eye contact, perhaps see a fleeting smile of recognition, but that didn’t happen. It couldn’t really, because he had not yet developed that skill.

Because of those days of face-to-face contact, I began to wonder what Galen was actually taking in as we spent time together.  He had no words for anything, not even in his mind. I knew that. Then I began to wonder what I would notice if I had no names for anything and no experience with the items in my environment.

The longer I thought, the more it seemed that he doesn’t even know yet that there are items in his environment. I’m sure it’s a kaleidoscope of colors before his eyes, or maybe just shades of gray, but how could he know that the foreground is separate from the background or that some parts of what he sees are distinct from other parts? He couldn’t—he has not yet touched or tasted various parts of the scene before him, nor has he moved between the parts or manipulated them. He needs to investigate and experiment before he can draw conclusions like that.

Trying to put myself his situation, I attempted to find analogies for what he is probably experiencing. I remembered going to the movies and arriving before the previews. On the screen was a swirl of color blobs, merging and separating in random ways that meant nothing to me but were hypnotic enough to keep me staring.  Perhaps Galen sees things that way—movement without meaning.

Until he names things—a process of separating the whole into parts and using random, yet agreed-upon sounds to stand for each slice of reality, he won’t be able to converse about his world with others. And as soon as he does that, he won’t see things as a total experience any more. He is more likely to pay greater attention to named things and pass over the unnamed sections of his world. Now that I think about it, maybe I do the same.

All that time spent watching Galen led me to consider how much adults have in common with a baby learning about his environment. I taught for a dozen years before an Effective Instruction class gave me words for great numbers of teaching techniques—some of which I had accidentally used, but not replicated in other classes, because I didn’t even know they were each a separate part of my teaching environment. After I named them, I could apply them at will, in any appropriate setting.

And every day, I keep wondering what are the things that I don’t see, don’t name and don’t use, things that are there, but outside my awareness. Reading history books, I shake my head at the blindness of former generations to things that seem so obvious to me. I can feel superior because I know the names of those formerly unknown facts and theories, things that are a part of my reality.

But my sense of superiority is short-lived. I look around and wonder what my blind spots are, what they keep me and my culture from seeing. In fifty years, or five hundred, what will be known that I cannot even see yet?  This question keeps me searching and asking what movements, behaviors and sights around me are significant, yet unnamed, and therefore unnoticed. It makes me seek feedback, new data and theories to broaden my ability to see what is just outside my awareness.

What if the most important question isn’t how to bring standardized test scores of U.S. students up to the level of other industrialized nations? What if the bigger issue is how to maintain and nurture our citizenry’s long-standing talent for innovation, patent-earning and productivity on the world stage.

Last year I heard Dr. Yong Zhao speak at a Michigan Department of Education-sponsored conference. I was startled when he told the audience that ever since the first nation-to-nation test score comparisons were made in the 1960’s, U.S. scores have been near the bottom of the pack, yet, as a nation, we have excelled every one of those years in comparison to other nations–more inventions, more patents, and a significantly higher quality of life.

American innovation is legendary and it has been profitable for its citizens. Yet we know that not all of our under-age citizens are getting the start they need. If they did, it is reasonable to assume we might soar even higher that we have in the past century.

You may enjoy listening to Dr. Zhoa’s somewhat contrarian views in the video you can reach through this link.

When I listen to the business news, I often hear calculations of the productivity of American workers. Apparently it has been on the rise for a number of years. American workers really know how to crank it out.

This led me to wonder about my own productivity. How am I doing? How’re my colleagues doing? How could I figure this out? I decided to do some calculations of my own.

Let’s say I was a beginning teacher. How much would I make? I found a site that offers some clues. At www.teachersalaryinfo.com I can find state by state listings of the most recently available information and it seems that $31,000 is a reasonable salary estimate for many beginners. Businesses always add at least 20% when they calculate the true cost of an employee in order to figure in insurance and other benefits, so by that measure, my cost to the state and my school district would run about $37,200.

So assuming the average school year is 180 days, this means that as a novice teacher I would earn $177.22 per day taught, plus benefits that cost about $34.44 per day. Adding that up shows that I cost $ 211.66 per day.

After these calculations, my question to myself would have to be, “Am I delivering $200 dollars worth of education to my students every day?” But wait, that question is correct only if I am a beginning teacher. If I have ten, twenty or thirty years of experience, I have to ask myself whether I am delivering $300 or $400 or, in some states, even $500 worth of education to students every single day of the year. Whoa! That’s a tall order. How would asking this question change my decision making?

Hmmm. Well, Hollywood movies that cost two hours of class time would need to deliver at least $400 of learning. Do they? Most probably don’t. A few could, if I provided background, pointed out significances, and had discussion questions that truly challenged viewers after the viewing, but I could no longer think of movies as harmless fillers—they are costing a bundle.

How about giving free time for good behavior during the week? Or ten minutes to talk at the end of the lesson? Free time sounds pretty suspicious now because it’s costing valuable learning time. I need to plan my lessons to fill all the time available and make the learning more engaging all week so “time off for good behavior” is less necessary.

How about Jeopardy games that take an hour and cover just 35 convergent questions, especially when part of the students are ignoring the proceedings? I definitely need to rethink that approach.

What about assignments like making a brochure? Project-based learning is good, but not if it takes an hour or two and all I really ask of my students is to copy encyclopedia facts onto a folded sheet. I need to make my assignments more respectful—challenging students to do things that are just hard enough to be interesting and not so hard that they are frustrated them and give up–the kind of assignment that helps students discover how truly capable they are.

Well, now that I have calculated the economics of academics, I believe I have a personal duty to use every moment of instructional time in ways that are interesting, challenging and result in new understandings in all my students. I sure hope I can be that productive.

When I coach other teachers I am a firm believer in capturing exact moment-by-moment behaviors. Without them, discussion after lessons is scattered and imprecise. Few teachers could accurately recall precisely what was said and done—by themselves and twenty students—over an entire class period. As a coach, I jot down whatever is said by teacher or students during the lesson.

Realistically I cannot get it all, but I can capture a lot by using the same sort of shorthand that got us through college lectures. I also put student responses inside brackets to help me keep things straight. Then I go through the scripted version to highlight significant points and label teaching behaviors for our discussion. By reading the script together, the teacher and I are able to analyze the effectiveness of the teaching and think about possible interpretations of student reactions.

Another useful tool is videotaping a lesson by simply setting a camera in the corner and letting it run. Such videos can be analyzed in depth to assist teachers in owning their strengths more completely and seeing more clearly where improvement is called for. When a coach cannot be present in the classroom, the teacher can still access help by sharing a video in later meetings. Videos also have the advantage of being available for multiple viewings in which we look for different issues during each playing.

The purpose of any post–lesson discussion of script or video is to help teacher build their analytical skills. In this regard, Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a great resource. By asking each teacher I coach to assess facts, feelings, critiques, potentialities, creativity and process before making decisions, the resulting plans are strengthened dramatically.

A coach must trigger change, not by threats, but by persuasion. In my experience, a good place to begin is to identify strengths of individual teachers, then emphasize those strengths and enrich them further. Concurrently, I mentally prioritize any gaps and weaknesses that I see. Alongside the first discussion of strengths, I discuss only one, or possibly two, areas that need improvement. A teacher is not likely to be able to make multiple changes simultaneously, so I point out the most significant issue first, work with him/her to create strategies, provide time for practice and give helpful feedback in order to help the teacher assimilate new habits. Often, if a major problem is solved, other smaller issues improve as a side benefit. If not, less critical issues will be addressed as they reach the top of the priority list which the coach carries in mind.

No coach should suggest improvements based solely on their own hunches or preferences. It is important to stay informed about what research shows will work. For instance, I might ask teachers to work on developing mutually supportive relationships with others on the faculty, not simply because it is my preference, but because research shows that is an important part of building an effective school. This power of this particular approach is assessed in Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for School Improvement. All suggestions made by coaches should also be supported by information about best practices. Why? Because a coach needs to be an informed, objective assistant in the growth process that characterizes good teaching.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the unknown person who decided to put twenty or thirty biographies on the shelves of my fifth grade classroom. All that year I read biographies avidly.

I met Jane Addams, who I remember as a society girl with a limp and a conscience. Though her father wanted her to marry, she founded Hull House because she wanted to ease the suffering of the poor. She started a movement and America was changed.

I was fascinated by Charles Steinmetz, a brilliant electrical engineer of the 1800s. He had a severe curvature of the spine, but never let it slow him down. He did his part to change scientific understanding.

I loved George Washington Carver for his gentle ways and innovative mind. Born a slave and abandoned in infancy, he was raised by a Missouri farmer—but only for eight years. After that he went to town for schooling and worked for a laundress in exchange for board. He was woefully disrespected even after he became a well-known scientist, but never stopped his investigations into ways to use peanuts to meet consumer needs and thus he provided a living for many desperate farmers.

I was huge fan of the all the Roosevelts, but especially Eleanor. Her mother told her she was ugly, she was painfully shy and was orphaned young, and yet, in spite of it all, she became a world leader by hard work and native intelligence.

I remember them all as if I had met them personally. Collectively they taught me hope and perseverance. No matter how many strokes one had against one, or how unlikely success appeared, it was clear to me that time was on my side. I have lived my life with that belief. So I hereby express my appreciation to the book buyer who made it possible for me to draw those conclusions.

Whatever you teach and wherever you teach it, there are resources and allies around you that you have probably never noticed. I first learned this during an in-service.

“Inventory your community!” the speaker said. “What is in and around your school? How can you connect with it? Who is nearby? How can you solicit their involvement?” The suggestion changed my outlook and helped me to teach differently and better.

One of my first outreach efforts involved an elderly couple who walked the halls for exercise every afternoon about four o’clock to avoid icy sidewalks. The man was slightly stooped and the woman fixed her white hair in an elegant Gibson girl style. As I speculated about their age, I wondered if they had family stories about the 1930s, the era I was getting ready to teach.

The next afternoon I watched for them and went out to introduce myself. I asked if they had any stories about the Depression and whether they would be willing to talk to my students about them. They agreed immediately.

A few days later they were telling my sophomores how President Roosevelt closed the banks just days after their wedding. They described scrip, unemployment, WPA construction projects, and creating meals with other couples in their building based on the meat left over at the butcher shop where one of them worked. They told stories for 45 minutes and then let the students ask them questions. I recorded them and showed the tape to classes who missed the “live” performance.

I realized other teachers were resources too. A teacher who emigrated from Pakistan described how people apply for a visa, sell their possessions, and come with the only two suitcases in order to meet the U.S. requirements. A teacher from Vietnam described fleeing the Viet Cong with nothing but the clothes on his back; this changed students’ views of the 1960’s.

The oak relief carving on the War memorial in the lower hall was a visual representation of FDR’s Four Freedoms speech, so we walked down to look at it and the speech was suddenly easier for students to understand and remember. The names inscribed on the memorial were those of former students. We took down the names and looked them up in the yearbooks the school librarian had stored in the back room. Tenth graders looked up the school activities of long ago students just their age who went on to serve and subsequently die in World War II.

This research spread to the downtown library, city directories and phone calls by some students to people with the same last name as the war dead in search of information about “their” guys.

Soon I moved beyond the school itself. The senior citizen housing up the hill was within walking distance. I arranged with the manager to recruit seniors who would be willing to be interviewed about World War II. I had my students develop interview sheets and we visited the center for a two hour field trip that required no busses at all. We wrote short stories based on the interviews and went back for a reading.

Walking in the opposite direction took us to a city cemetery with gravestones that listed deaths as far back as 1840. There students did rubbings, math problems about life spans and developed plots for stories based on ideas gleaned from epitaphs.

Then I checked the distance to the branch library using my odometer—1.3 miles. This meant that the public access radio and television studios on the second floor of the library were also within walking distance. The public television center provided free orientations and low cost training for videotaping, editing and directing. I applied for a grant to cover training costs and began to build a media cadre. Any student who went to the orientation I scheduled on a no-school day was eligible to get free tuition to the public television classes. I was amazed when 22 kids showed up on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving!

I found helpful individuals too. A local realtor coordinated an essay contest for Memorial Day. A local business recruited volunteers who helped students develop their writing skills. People willingly brought in their scrapbooks and shared memorabilia and artifacts rarely seen outside museums and the students responded eagerly. Best of all, it wasn’t hard or time consuming, yet it brought new excitement into my teaching and re-energized me.

So, the take-away message is that assessing all the resources in your building and neighborhood can yield a wide variety of people, activities and approaches that you can use. You can enrich whatever subject you are teaching in no-cost or low-cost ways that bring the real world into your lessons.

How often do you hear the word impossible tossed around, especially in schools? It sometimes masquerades as “That’ll never happen!’

I have been thinking a lot about the word ‘impossible.” The word is a trickster. When people say something is impossible, it sounds as if they are predicting the future, but in fact, they are describing only the past. When someone declares something impossible, what they are really saying is, “That seems unlikely based on my past experiences,” or “I have never yet seen that happen,” or “I don’t expect that will occur.”

Careful thinking reveals that impossible things happen every day, but, once they happen, they instantly fall out of the impossible category and are transformed into the ordinary. In past centuries, self-powered vehicles, flying machines, moon landings, electric lights–these were the stuff of fantasies, but now they are completely ordinary and unremarkable. What we currently think of as impossible is usually whatever hasn’t happened yet.

The same applies to people. We mistakenly believe the unusual is impossible. If I describe a homely, painfully shy girl and whose mother neglected her and then died when she was eight and whose alcoholic father died two years later, we might pity her. If I said, this girl will become a world leader, listeners might snort, “Impossible!” Yet, I have just described Eleanor Roosevelt. She became First Lady of the World and is almost single-handedly responsible for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela was in prison in South Africa for 27 years—more than 10,000 days. On any one of those 10,000 days, if anyone had declared, “Someday, Nelson Mandela will be president of South Africa,” people would surely have hooted, “That’s impossible.” Yet we all know that the impossible happened.

I am sure that the school principal who called Thomas Edison “addle-pated” would have thought it impossible that Edison would ever amount to anything, let alone become the greatest inventor in our nation’s history. When Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s was in high school, the likelihood of his becoming the head of a huge corporation seemed small. When he dropped out of high school, most people would have deemed it completely impossible, yet it happened.

Why are we are so eager to be bearers of bad news? “You aren’t that talented,” You don’t have the skills/persistence/connections/scores/grades/aptitude for that,” or even “The world doesn’t work that way, buster.” Except, sometimes it does. One of my students, an artist, was colorblind. It seems self-evident that artists cannot be color-blind, but that isn’t true. He is making his living today in southern California as a graphic designer. So it turns out, the impossible isn’t.

If I pointed to a young mixed-race adolescent male being raised by his grandparents, a young man who didn’t look all that ambitious and was thought to be an occasional drug user, would a good future seem impossible? Would observers identify him as a future president of the United States? In Barack Obama’s case, no one saw it coming, but it came anyway.

He and the others above illustrate an important point. Within each human is a seed that can grow, even grow to greatness—as long as we don’t starve it, stomp it or stunt it. When we say, or think, “Impossible!” we are starving hope, stomping dreams and stunting growth. We need to stretch our beliefs and learn to see that each person’s dreams and ideas are actually future realities, no matter how unusual, unpredictable or “impossible” they may seem when we first hear about them.

Not long ago, I read a study by Campbell (1990-91) that gave me some food for thought. He found that expert teachers sustain themselves by remaining positive no matter how inadequate their work environment may be. It occurred to me that we could all adopt the personal norms of Campbell’s interviewees and make them into our personal mission statements to help us find our own greatness.  Based on Campbell’s findings here’s the thinking I believe will see us through:

Hold onto a sense of mission. It brought us to teaching. It is what makes teaching the best profession on the planet. We need to seek out and interact with people who nurture our sense of mission. Avoid those who pour out cynicism and undermine our belief in our students’ potential or our own talents.

Whenever we reach a goal or master a skill, choose another. Our goal is to improve continuously, and, if possible, dramatically. This continuous learning loop keeps teaching fresh, exciting and challenging. Let’s not miss the fun.

Pay attention to both intellectual and emotional growth—not only in students, but also ourselves. Fear and grief, anxiety and disgust may visit us at any age and they will interfere with our forward motion if they are not dealt with. Recognizing the issues, whether in ourselves or our students, comes first. Then we can seek solutions and appropriate assistance.

Notice and build on our own power to get results. Put another way, notice base hits and home runs and forgive those strike outs. Results that lead to student achievement are the ultimate goal of all of our work. As we make progress toward our goals, our growing efficacy becomes self-rewarding and propels us even further.

Build a personal peer support system and use it. We can never find all our blind spots alone, nor will we ever have all the answers. We can’t even formulate all the questions in solitude. We are community-oriented creatures. Let’s work at creating a supportive climate at every level—home, school, and community.

Maintain professional autonomy. We aren’t robots designed merely to improve test scores–never will be. We are trained professionals who make reasoned decisions and carry them out vigorously. Conquer fear and do the right thing.

Ignore impediments to good teaching—they will never disappear. Focus energy on those things that will make the most difference for us students and our students. Make work a stepping stone not a stumbling block.

Every new experience teaches us more, even the experiences that seem awful at the time. We can adjust our thinking like the teachers in Campbell’s study did and plow forward with determination to do the good work we know we are capable of. Let’s do it.

Campbell, K.P. (1990-91, Winter) Personal norms of experienced expert suburban high school teachers: Implications for selecting and retaining outstanding individuals. Action in Teacher Education, 12, 35-40.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!