My Vexing Issue

      My vexing and persistent problem at the high school level is an overabundance of standards to cover in too little time.  As mentioned in my last post, there are 127 basic math standards required of the Common Core at the high school level.  These need to be covered before juniors take the state assessment at the end of their junior year.  (This current is the SAT's, but will soon (2015) be replaced by the Smarter Balance test.) Our performance as teachers, and as a district, are interpreted in light of these test scores.  127 standards equates to covering one standard about every four days.  Since we use block scheduling, that means that every two classes, students should be covering another standard. There is no way to consider this mastery!
     Searching out a solution from what other educators have to say about this left me with no clear cut answers.  Some educators just acknowledge that there is no way for them to cover everything well, so they spend more in-depth time on some topics, and skim over others.  Others said that they viewed the Common Core as having too little rigor, and should be much more demanding at the high school level.
     Having to teach everyone, and not just those who excel in math, I gravitate towards agreeing with the first set of educators.
     I did run into some interesting articles about teaching math in a more integrated fashion, as apparently 90% of the world does, instead in a "layer cake" fashion, where topics are separated into Algebra 1, Geometry, and Algebra 2.  Through integrating the topics, statistics and geometry are woven into algebra, and creative problem solving is more deeply encouraged.  Real-life applications make much more sense by incorporating statistics and data analysis throughout the curriculum.  Also, I think these would better mirror the approach of the Smarter Balance test items that we are soon to see.
    

My Take on the Common Core

       I have done more reading on the Common Core this week than ever before in my life, much beyond our few required readings.  I was completely unaware of most of the debates circling around the Common Core.  But my own view of the Common Core, before my research in this class, was simply the burden it has brought in the last two years on an individual level.  By departments, we have spent our time aligning our curriculum to the Core, and tried to figure out how to cover every last standard in mathematics in just three years (there are 127 basic math standards at the high school level).  This has lead to a just a bit of stress at times!
      So, not a big surprise, my view of the Common Core before this was rather negative.  However, after quite a lot of research, I can see a few positive things about it.
      One thing I began to realize, in my interview with my district's curriculum coordinator, was that before standards appeared (NCTM, Maine Learning Results, the Common Core), there was no "standard" for teachers.  Each individual had to kind of guess what to teach each year.  Ever since I started teaching, we have always had standards to follow (first the Maine Learning Results, then the Common Core.)  So I can't quite imagine what it would be like to not have any standards.  But for teachers who have been teaching a long time, they remember when they didn't have that additional guidance.  So, in comparison, I can appreciate a little better what I now have.
     I think the Common Core has more to offer than I first thought.  And I think that if it is treated as a good set of standards to refer to, as opposed to the ultimate, end-all for exactly what we should teach every day, then we can perhaps find some balance.

Digital Scribes

            Two things struck me as I read Chapter 11 in our book, Curriculum 21, in the section on students as contributors on the “digital farm”.  First, I really liked the notion of having an ongoing class blog that students are responsible for contributing to daily.  Each class, a different student writes the blog, where they write a summary about what was learned in class that day, including diagrams (very useful in math!)  I went onto Darren Kuropatwa’s linked website and read his article, which goes into much more detail about student scribes, called Distributed Teaching and Learning.  Very interesting.  I can see the potential for using this in my own classroom.

            Also, under the next section in our book titled “Researchers”, it describes a Goggle tool where you can create your own subject specific search engine through Google’s Custom Search Engine creator (www. google.com/coop/cse/).  You can eventually have a very specific search engine with only reputable resources, like government databases or scientific organizations.  I didn’t know that anything like this existed out there!  I know, just from my research on our comparative education project last week, that there is a lot of different type of resources when searching for a specific topic, some good and some bad.  I think it could be very useful if we could limit this to credible, specific resources for our students.

Test Results Not Used Punitively?

 “Finally, these countries do not use their examination systems to rank or punish schools or to deny diplomas to students. Following the problems that resulted from the Thatcher government’s use of test-based school rankings, which caused a narrowing of the curriculum and widespread exclusions of students from school, several countries enacted legislation precluding the use of test results for school rankings.” (from the article What Would It Mean To Be Internationally Competitive? by Linda Darling-Hammond.)

Finally, an approach to testing that makes sense!  Amazing that these well-performing nations don’t use testing to rank or punish schools!  Instead, test scores are used to help inform decisions on improving curriculum.  And for many of them, testing decisions are based at the state and local level, with teachers participating in the creation and grading of assessments.

“Policy makers decided that if they invested in very skillful teachers, they could allow local schools more autonomy to decide what and how to teach —a reaction against the highly centralized system they sought to overhaul.”

I feel like finally, there is evidence to back up some of the things that I know many teachers have been thinking for quite a while: that more and more emphasis on standardized tests, with punitive results for low-performing schools (and students), is not right.  It doesn’t make our students better learners.  And it doesn’t make us better teachers.

I ended up reading an article this week (not posted for this class, just on a random website) on parents around the country beginning to “opt out” of standardized testing for their children because of the stresses they could see it was causing their youngsters.  They also were distressed at the amount of time spent in the classroom preparing for the test, that could be better spent on more engaging activities.  I wasn’t aware that this is a growing trend, but I can understand, from the point of view of a parent. And I wonder how long it will be before the pendulum swings back again?

The Myth of Charter Schools

The Myth of Charter Schools

Having just read the article by Diane Kavitch, The Myth of Charter Schools, I am left with a number of conflicting emotions.  First, I did see part of the movie Waiting for Superman a while ago.  I remember the children waiting in a big auditorium with their parents, waiting for their name to be drawn to get into the charter school of their choice.  I remember the tears and trauma of the students who didn’t make it.  And I have to agree with Diane’s conclusion – couldn’t they have humanely sent out letters to those involved, instead of putting them through the pain and anguish of the lottery?  (It reminded me in a small way of the lottery in the Hunger Games…the need for a public audience.)

I guess I have never thought of Charter Schools much before this year.  I wasn’t aware of the huge debate around them.  I am a great lover of statistics and details, though, and I really appreciated the statistics she included in her article.  Only one in five charter schools show the extraordinary results proclaimed by many charter school proponents.  That means that 4 out of 5 do not.  Only 17 percent performed better on math test scores as compared to a matched public school, whereas 37 percent performed worse than a matched public school. 

I know that one issue in our district this year is that we have a small number of students leaving for two different new charter schools in our area.  One is a high school with an agricultural focus, which sounds wonderful.  The other one was started when a nearby town fought against the closing of their local elementary school.  I know that they used a lottery system to help with placement, so not everyone who applied got in their first year.

Both of these are noble causes.  I hope both schools end up being in the top 20 percent of the charter schools.  Our students here in Maine definitely deserve it.

I also was unaware that “for-profit” organizations see charter schools as business opportunities, and are “advancing an agenda of school privatization.”  Where is any governmental oversight?  How can we have organizations that are “mostly funded by the government but controlled by private organizations?”  I don’t know enough about these to understand this part of it.  

US students not as far behind internationally?

Two interesting articles on how US test scores are not as far behind internationally. 
Find links here: 
    1) http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
    2)  What do international tests really show about U.S. student performance? (from the Economic Policy Institute website)

Playing ‘Catch-Up’ with Developing Nations Makes No Sense for U.S

Wonderful article by Yong Zhao!  I added his webpage/blog to mine: http://zhaolearning.com/

Isn't it funny that whil some in the U.S. are pointing to great education in China, many of those in China who can are educating their children here in the U.S.?

     I read an interesting article in the ASCD website called "How to Survive Education Reform Without Losing Your Job, Your Ideals, or Your Mind" by Gary Rubinstein (linked here http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/jun13/vol70/num09/How-to-Survive-Education-Reform-Without-Losing-Your-Job,-Your-Ideals,-or-Your-Mind.aspx ).  As a teacher who has seen a number of reforms and mandates come and go over the years, I appreciate the encouragement this author had to offer.

He starts by noting that he has seen many reforms over the years, and then talks about the Common Core and new "performance-based" teacher assessments to decide if we are doing a good job teaching.

"But this latest onslaught feels more ominous. For example, we keep hearing that teachers are finally going to be held accountable for their "sins." When we hear it enough, we begin to wonder whether we really are a bunch of lazy sloths whiling away the hours until our big fat pensions become ripe. I want to reassure teachers, particularly veterans (particularly myself!), that we will survive this latest epidemic, just as we survived the bird flu and Y2K."

I myself have had this feeling of being under attack in the last couple of years, being asked to account for every last standard of the Common Core in mathematics.  At the high school level, we have over 180 standards to be covered before students take the SAT's their Junior Year. (Students are not required to take a 4th year of math.)  As a department, we thought about this deeply this last year.  Technically, students have 60+ standards a year to cover.  That means they should be showing "proficiency" of a new standard about every 3 days!  We decided this was next to impossible, but have had no direction from above at this point.  So I appreciate his comments below.

"We are told that the old state standards were "a mile wide and an inch deep," implying that we were all racing through every topic without savoring any of them. Although it is true that a lack of time requires me to cover some topics only superficially, I have covered some topics in extreme depth. It's a matter of prioritizing to fit a nearly unlimited set of topics into a limited amount of time.

The Common Core standards have not eliminated the need to choose how much time to spend on this lesson or that one. There are still too many topics to cover, so we'll have to continue setting priorities and covering some topics in more depth than others, just as we've always done."

Having had similar experiences, I greatly appreciate his candor here.

His last warning:   "The gravest threat posed by all these reforms is that they encourage teachers to forego real teaching for test prep. This will, ultimately, hurt students. As teachers, we cannot fall into this trap. "  

I agree wholeheartedly!  I can see the pitfalls ahead in the coming years, but have feel encouraged that others, who have seen much more than I have, see a light at the end of the tunnel (and it's not a train!)

It takes some getting used to...

     "Changing curriculum is about changing your mind first and then forming some new habits and routines as you abandon old ones."(p.211)
      I loved this chapter on Habits of Mind! The author states that our curriculum should be a curriculum of "processes", giving students "practice engaging with complex problems...and conflicts whose resolutions are not immediately apparent."(p.212)  The 16 habits of mind apply just as much to adults as they do to students.  They are the basic life skills we would like all of our students to take with them when they go out into the world.  As we encourage these habits of mind, students become more and more self-directed, flexible, and able to persevere.
     As the author says, for teachers to truly affirm the Habits of Mind in their own lives and classrooms, administration must also adopt the same Habits.  Both teachers and administrators need to "learn how to become better coaches for critical thinking."(p.222)  I would love to see a systematic approach to this in our entire school system, from the top on down.
     The shift in learning from knowing the correct answer to "knowing how to behave when the answers are not readily apparent" (p.223) is very thought-provoking.  I can see this would involve an entire change, for many of us, in our manner of teaching, and the life-long benefits to our students could be incredibly far-reaching.

Challenges to Myself

Our students of today are miles beyond us in technological knowledge.  I see this both as a drawback (on my part) and a challenge.  I think that the book's distinction between a "digital native" and a "digital immigrant"(originally coined by Marc Prensky) rings true. (p.200)  I know that I am an immigrant, a "stranger in a strange land".  Much of the learning of technology that comes naturally to my young daughters is difficult and painful to me, requiring hours of tedious practice on my part.

Some of the wonderful innovations mentioned in this chapter have begun to be used at my school.  We have interactive Smartboards in most of our classrooms and projectors in our ceilings.  Over the last few years, I have created hundreds of interactive documents, which are extremely useful in mathematics for students to be able to write on.  However, I have only recently started to embed short video clips into my instruction.  I would like to challenge myself to find one short relevant clip to start each class, showing how the math we are doing that day is used in the real world.

I would like to add a wireless mouse, so that I could roam through the room while students are working, and still control the computer.  Never worked with one of these.

I also like the idea of taking pictures or videos of my students during class that I show on the big screen at the end, showing some of their learning processes and collaborations.  I can see how encouraging them to self-critique themselves and their peers can lead to more in depth understanding.

I have used Google Docs this year for the first time, to post assignments and link videos for students to view, but this is the first time I have thought that I could use this as a method to receive student feedback on a particular assignment, much like we have done in our shared Google Document this week.  I don't know how this would work with teenagers, but I can see that the prompts I choose could form some good discussions, before students even enter the classroom.

And lastly, we were just informed that when we come back in the fall, our students will have one-to-one computing.  In the past, we have had cumbersome laptop carts that needed to be signed up for in advance, often two or more weeks before we needed them.  I know that one-to-one opens up many possibilities for the classroom, but I can't begin to see how I might incorporate them daily.  I look forward to investigating this further!

New School Versions

Curriculum 21: Chapter 4

"What if schools gave teachers and teaching teams the option of 3 or 4 full weeks to go into depth on personal projects, research investigations, creative generations of digital projects, and onsite visits?"(p.66)

     This quote from our book started me thinking this week:  what if?  What if we actually had time - continuing throughout the year - to plan collaboratively with our fellow teachers?  What if we could reach across the curriculum on some project, like bioethics or genetics or world history, incorporating disciplines of math, science, English, art and the like?  Would our students not be so much more engaged, with topics spilling over into many realms?  The pull of Project Based Learning, that many of our highlighted schools have embraced, runs through my mind again and again, drawing me in.  I can see the potential of so much within my own school.  

What if?