Fix The Schools: Reason Saves Cleveland With Drew Carey, Ep. 2

Interesting video about rethinking education.

Teaching at last!

I finally decided that I had to get into a classroom or go crazy, so I accepted the offer from Claremont Graduate School to become an unpaid student teacher instead. They were absolutely amazed that there are still about 6 of us with math credentials who did not land a job.

I am teaching at a good school with a great Master Teacher. I am observing and teaching one class of seniors who need to pass the California HS Exit Exam (CAHSEE) to be able to graduate, plus 3 honors Algebra II classes, which is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. The teacher also has a class in AP Calculus BC, which I am technically qualified to teach, but I'm learning more just watching him teach!

Obviously the part you can't learn from a book is classroom management. This is much harder here than when I taught high school English and German in Denmark 15-20 years ago.) I don't know if Danish students have become like American students, or if the American students are just so much more immature than Danish students. I had reasonable success back then treating them as young adults; I just happened to know more than they did about certain things. We weren't even allowed to contact parents outside of parent consultation nights. Here it's expected. Admittedly, our students were on average 1-2 years older than in American high schools. Does that make that much difference?

One older teacher who is retiring this year told me that he thought the HS students now act like Middle School kids a generation ago (despite early onset of puberty.)  Is it because of parents who coddle kids? (I intimidated something like that in a teacher course and one parent immediately defended her parenting, saying that times were very different now.) I think the difference now is that we hear about every single incident that happens anywhere, so the world seems more dangerous. But I think it is more dangerous if the kids don't learn to stand on their own 2 feet, to take responsibility for their own actions (and learning!) and learn to think for themselves, rather than just think in opposition to adults.

At any rate, I have to learn to wait for 5 very long seconds to get the class quiet. I observed my Master Teacher doing it (after he had timed my "5-seconds" to 2!) 5 seconds is very long! But the kids get the message that you mean it. So I have to learn! I have also switched from writing on the white board (I keep saying "blackboard!") to using the overhead, because then I am facing the students. The Master Teacher uses "Equity Cards" to call on students, which I try to remember to do. I've got to learn their names - a total of about 115 students, not counting the Calculus class! In Denmark I never had more than 100. There is an electronic board in the classroom, which we can use to display PowerPoints, use the document camera, and a lot of fun things I hope I learn. But for the time being, it seems to be best to be facing the students! Once I learn Management, then I can try the fun stuff!

What to do when there aren't any jobs and you really want to teach...

This has been a really frustrating Fall for me. After making my decision to become a math teacher at a time when everyone said that jobs would fall into my lap, and then discovering that that is definitely not the case, I have found classes at Claremont Graduate University both inspiring and depressing - the last particularly when the speaker refers to "your students," of course. But at this point, there are still about 10 of us in secondary math, who do not yet have an Internship position.

So I have bought most of the new books available from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and used copies of a variety of math teaching materials, in particular Core-Plus Mathematics Contemporary Mathematics in Context from Glencoe. I've beeing reading about Sensemaking and learning through Discovery and Problem Solving, which really "make sense" to me as a way to get students interested in what they are learning. Core-Plus, which has units in Algebra, Geometry, Statistics, etc. each year, instead of separate years, looks like a fantastic way to teach math, except that it would be really hard to implement, since any student who switches schools would be lost wherever else they went. That is probably why there are so many used materials on Amazon.

I've also enjoyed the materials I discovered at the website for Geometer's Sketch Pad, which is a fun way to do geometry (and I understand other math subjects.) I found that they have great online resources for their Algebra and Geometry books, including some in Spanish. I also discovered the Prentice Hall Multilingual Handbooks - all available for almost nothing at Amazon. They included glossaries, etc. in a variety of languages, not just Spanish. But evidently Spanish is the only language that districts want to invest in. I just found a letter from a parent complaining about the creative math texts (dating back to 1996.)

I have also been observing classrooms - I'm required to observe 25 hours, including special ed and bilingual classrooms, and I've observed more than that now. What I see is teachers doing direct instruction and students doing work sheets. In some classes, text books are stacked somewhere in the classroom, or the students have a copy at home, but they are not being used. The ones I've looked at with my inexperienced eyes seems really exciting, if you want to teach by discovery and problem solving. But kids are learning how to solve problems on work sheets - and on standardized tests. I understand that there are pacing guides at the schools, that decide, for example, that next week all Algebra I teachers will be teaching solving two equations with graphing or substitution. No need to use a text book for that. No need to discover anything, when you can just do problems. Teachers tell me that the enormous textbooks just have too much material in them - and of course they're too heavy to carry around! So all the thought that went into making them (so they'd fit most any state's standards!) is just gathering dust.

To make myself more "hireable," I just did a quick (one month) review of physics and took the teaching qualification exam, CSET Physics III last Saturday. Now I have to decide whether to take Physics IV, to qualify as a physics teacher, or Science I and II (including biology, chemistry, earth and planetary science as well as physics) to be able to be a General Science teacher. Or maybe I'll just use the physics I've reviewed to provide more "authentic" problenms for my students.

Finally, I've been writing a few lesson plans, which are assignments for this semester at Claremont Graduate University - writing a total of 3 lessons that will benefit English Language Learners (ELLs) or students with other learning issues, like dyslexia or autism. I've written lessons that involve discovery and sense-making, since I'm not in a classroom trying to keep up with the pacing guide to make sure the kids do well on standardized tests. I'm afraid that my idealism will hit the dust when I finally do get into my own classroom.

The world we are preparing our students for...

Even more reasons to teach our students to think, not just learn formulas and facts, because they may be outdated by the time they want to use them in their careers!

Propaganda or Education?

I received the following message on Facebook from Friends of the Mountains, which I support for their work against Mountaintop Removal (see my blog Sustainable Rays, for more on this.) But the message here was about a company sponsored field trip and "educational" materials, which are basically propaganda, purporting to demonstrate local history. Now if the Friends of the Mountains come back with educational materials, will Big Coal call that propaganda?  
[Added Nov 1: Here are a lot of teacher resources that tell the other side of the story, from I Love Mountains.]

BECKLEY, W.Va. -- The Friends of Coal Ladies Auxiliary wrapped up its first Coal in the Classroom program in the Raleigh County public schools with a field trip this week.

Its pro-coal curriculum was piloted at a private elementary school last year.

On Tuesday, Stratton Elementary School's fourth-grade class traveled to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine for a firsthand look at an underground mine.

It's the first class in the West Virginia public school system to host the program. With the help of local retired teachers, the curriculum was developed by the Friends of Coal Ladies Auxiliary. Regina Fairchild is the chairwoman.

"We just make it as lighthearted as possible but informative,'' she said. "We just want to educate them about our vital resource in our area and in the United States.''

The program consists of a coloring book that illustrates how coal is mined underground and at surface mines. It also shows how coal is burned for energy we use in electricity. And you can find phrases like "The advantages of coal'' and "Why coal is important,'' as well.

Some environmental groups say the Friends of Coal program doesn't belong in public schools.

Assistant Superintendent of Raleigh County Schools Janet Lilly says they are willing to look at any curriculum from the environmental community.

"We really looked at the curriculum and what they planned to do,'' she said. "We're open to any group that's willing to do the match and present the curriculum, and if there's someone that objects to the curriculum that's out there with the auxiliary, we'd be glad to look at their curriculum, too.''

Raleigh County School Board member Larry Ford says the board also evaluated the fairness of the material.

"We didn't want it to be lopsided,'' he said. "We wanted it to be a generic form of presentations to the kids showing them the history of coal.

"We're not trying to tell them one thing is better than the other. The content standards had to be met as far as their learning is concerned. We're not picking sides, we are here for the education of the students, period.''

Lorelei Scarbro with Coal River Mountain Watch says her organization is working on an elementary school curriculum about alternative energy. She's not sure when it will be finished.

Meanwhile, Coal River Mountain Watch is working with another environmental group called Aurora Lights to produce curriculum for high school and college students across West Virginia, with financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council.

"Journey up Coal River'' includes lesson plans such as "What is mountaintop removal?'' and "Public health impacts of coal mining,'' and includes links to pro-environmental Web sites such as ilovemountains.org, according to Jennifer Osha, founder and president of Aurora Lights.

"What I really wanted to do is for college students to engage in the complexity of this issue and really use their own ideas and what they're interested in to feel to what parts they most want to engage in,'' Osha said. "We also provide them with resources both academic and activist that they can come and learn about what's happening.''

Osha also questioned the fairness of the Friends of Coal curriculum, but Fairchild says it's appropriate for elementary school students.

"Our curriculum is balanced. For heaven sake we're talking to third- and fourth-graders,'' she said. "You're not going to get technical and you're not going to talk numbers.''

(I added the links to the text.)

Value-added evaluations

I've been following along on the discussions of how to evaluate teachers, and how using kids test scores doesn't show appropriately how well a teacher teaches. After all, disadvantaged students just have so much against them to be able to get good grades, goes the argument, so teachers can't be held responsible for students not doing the work.

But an article in yesterday's LA Times Superintendent spreads the gospel of 'value-added' teacher evaluations proves to me that standardized test scores can be a legitimate way to evaluate teachers. In this case, it isn't the actual scores that are used, but a ratio of individual student's scores over time, which will show students' progress in relationship to themselves. Studies have shown that teachers really do affect students' progress, and that their effect can be measured. If a whole class gets much better Value-added ratios, then the teacher must have had something to do with it. If some improve and some don't, it is probably the students' own effort and not the teacher that makes the difference.

Maybe not surprisingly, the students from underachieving school actually show the most progress (since a tiny improvement is huge related to very little) while good students from privileged schools have a hard time showing much improvement at all, since it is related to a much larger base number.

Personally, I would like to be able to see how my teaching affects my students' improvement. I could use it as a formative assessment that tells me to try harder.

I could see how various students perform to understand in which ways I am successful, and where I need to try different methods.

The concept is vaguely like a grading system I developed years ago for a class in Denmark which could vaguely be compared to a continuation high school here. They only received final test scores for their record, so I was free to give them formative assessments any way I wanted. I invented a system with arrows: up if students did better than usual, down if they had slacked off. Initially, of course, the better students didn't like getting a down arrow while someone who did far less got an up. But gradually they figured it out, and used it to motivate themselves to do even better. At the same time the students at the lower end were not getting F's, but were getting encouraging up arrows. The dyslexic student I started the system for had been given up by previous teachers. But she went from what would have been F's to a final test grade of about C!

Knowing where I'm doing well and where I need improvement would be great. And if it turns out I'm not a good teacher anyway, I don't want to inflict poor teaching on students who deserve better.

However, another article on the same page Judging teachers: Much of what you thought you knew is wrong reviews a few misconceptions about teachers' effectiveness, for example:

Teacher experience matters. Although teachers are generally paid more for years of experience, research suggests that instructors show dramatic improvement in their first few years and then level off. Teachers with 20 years of experience are often no more effective than peers with five years.

Teacher education matters. Schools routinely pay teachers higher salaries for obtaining master's degrees. But several studies have found that educators with advanced degrees do no better than those without (with the possible exception of high school math teachers) - my emphasis.

So maybe if I teach 5-10 years I will be able to encourage, motivate and stimulate my students, and then leave before I get too set in my ways and lose my enthusiasm! Another misconception from the list needs to be taken with a grain of salt - and good sense:

Class size is key. Research suggests that modest changes in class size, such as decreasing it by four or five students, has been shown to have little to no effect on student learning.

Adding a single student or two to 25 might not make a difference, but adding gradually until you get 35 or 40 students will most likely show a great difference over time (which would also be reflected in Value-added scores.) Don't use that as an excuse to push more students into classrooms designed for far fewer students. Teachers need to be able to move about the room, get close to students (proximity is a major element in classroom management!) and there has to be room to move desks into different configurations, for collaborative learning groups, areas for special purposes, etc. A classroom is not a lecture hall!

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