Up to 15 percent of American children are chronically absent from school, missing at least one day in 10 and doing long-term harm to their academic progress, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.

Sam Chaltain recommended A Place Called School to me at some point last year after a Twitter exchange about making school more democratic.  I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of it, let alone read it.  This book should be required reading for anyone who has an opinion about school reform.  It describes, better than anything I’ve ever read, the complex organism that is a school, and gives clarity about what actually happens there.

For me the “School Designer”

• Goodlad’s list of the “Goals for Schooling in the U.S.” is really useful checklist for things we need to think about, as well as a strong piece of evidence for helping to convince people just how complex educators jobs actually are.  The major goals (each of which has numerous sub-goals):
• Academic Goals: Master of basic skills and fundamental processes, Intellectual development
• Vocational Goals: Career education-vocational education
• Social, Civic, and Cultural Goals: Interpersonal understandings, Citizenship participation, Enculturation, Moral and ethical character
• Personal Goals: Emotional and physical well-being, Creativity and aesthetic expression, Self realization

For me the “Professional Developer”

• On why it is so difficult to help teachers develop more useful pedagogical practices than the ones they were taught with: “One of the most disturbing findings reported in preceding chapters is the narrow range of teaching practices used by the teachers in our sample, particularly at the secondary level…Why? I have suggested three contributing factors, none of which is amenable to simple solution.  First, there is no pressure in the surrounding society to change these practices.  They reflect much conventional wisdom regarding how classes should be conducted.  Second, this is the way teachers most commonly were taught from their elementary school days through college.  Third, their teacher education programs were not of sufficient depth to transcend the conventional wisdom regarding the nature of teaching.  Our data suggests that man of the teachers had been exposed to countervailing notions but not sufficiently to assure their late use (298)

For me the “Advocate”

• This is a great line to have in my back pocket: “Is it realistic to expect teachers to teach enthusiastically hour after hour, day after day, sensitively diagnosing and remedying learning difficulties?  During each of these hours, according to Jackson, teachers make 200 or more decisions”  (194).
• Another great one, that could easily be written today: “Those women–and men–who do enter teaching today work in circumstances that include some gain in their autonomy in the community accompanied by some loss in prestige and status; an increase in the heterogeneity of students to be educated, especially at the secondary level; increased utilization of schools to solve critical social problems such as desegregation; a marked growth in governance of the schools through legislation and the courts; continuation of relatively low personal economic return; limited opportunities for career changes within the field of education; and continuation of school and classroom conditions that drain physical and emotional energy and tend to promote routine rather than sustained creative teaching.  Merely holding teachers accountable for improved student learning without addressing these circumstances is not likely to improve the quality of their professional lives and the schools in which they teach” (196).
• This speaks for itself: “It might be more useful to view Bradford as a sick school, rather than a delinquent or recalcitrant one.  With such a view of a school in stress, we might tend not to demand more accountability from the teachers, but instead to seek ways of helping those in and close to the school set their own agenda for improvement. Obviously, a great deal of support and direct assistance would be required.  In general, perhaps by seeing a problem school as an organism or ecosystem with its several parts in varying states of poor health, we would come closer than we do now to correctly diagnosing and remedying its ailments (86).

Goodlad, John. A Place Called School: Special 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2004.

Responses or questions to any of the notes/quotes are very welcome. 

As soon as I joined the planning team for Harvest, I knew that I had to re-read Horace’s Compromise, the book that made me want to work in schools in the first place (here’s a piece I wrote about Ted Sizer’s influence on me when he passed away a few years ago).  Ten years ago, I was struck by its audacity and radicalism. Today, I’m struck by its conservatism and its prescription given the direness of its prognosis.

For me the “School Designer”

• “For most adolescents, two incentives are dominant.  They want the high school diploma, and they want to respect themselves and be respected.  High schools will be effective to the extent that they design their policies and practices around these two powerful stimuli” (59).
• Sizer reminds me that schools should do four things and nothing else: help students develop skills (through coaching), gain knowledge (by telling), develop understanding (by questioning), and attain decency.
• We need to figure out ways to measure ourselves according to these questions: “Can graduates of this high school teach themselves?  Are they decent people?  Can they effectively use the principal ways of looking at the world, ways represented by the major and traditional academic disciplines?” (131).

For me the “Professional Developer”

• In light of the four things schools do, I need to help teachers set reasonable goals for their classes in these areas, and help them choose the right teaching activities for each goal.

For me the “Advocate”

• All my prescriptive writing should probably fall back on this clear description of what it takes to make schools work so students learn: “Above all, examination of the basic triangle [of student, teachers, and subject/content] will demonstrate the importance of incentives–the fuel that drives students and teachers.  If the goals for students are clear (‘These are the areas you need to master for your diploma’) and relevant (‘Succeeding at your graduation exhibition will honestly demonstrate that you can use your mind and knowledge rigorously and imaginatively’), student energy, much more often than not, will be productively focused.  If teachers are given autonomy and held ultimately accountable for the work of their students — in itself a gratifying compliment — they will perform to the best of their imaginative ability.  Equally important, the career of teacher will become more attractive than it is now.  Talented people seek jobs that entrust them with important things.” (213)

For me the Teacher/Advisor

• “Any school of integrity, public or private, secular or religious, should try to help its students become decent people.  This is an appropriately limited objective: the values that a young man or woman learns to adopt should come from many quarters, among which the family is prominent and the school of lesser influence.  Decency denotes satisfaction of a widely understood and accepted standard and, as such, it is limited.  Going beyond such a threshold standard — that is, setting schools on a course to run out philosopher-kings or moral revolutionaries — is as repugnant as it would be impossible” (121).

Sizer, Theodore. Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.

Responses or questions to any of the notes/quotes are very welcome and appreciated

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a long list of books I meant to read.  As I began planning Harvest Collegiate in January, I found motivation to try to read all of them before we open in September.  I’ve been on a roll, and hope to keep it going.

As I’ve knocked off book after book, I also kept on meaning to write about them, but haven’t found the time nor voice I wanted to use.  I wanted to avoid becoming an acolyte (“you must read this book”) or a critic (“she’s wrong here and right here”), but wasn’t sure what else to say.

So I’m going to try something new in this space, and as I finish education books (and find time to write, which is getting harder these days as I keep a full teaching job while spending a lot of time on school planning), I’m going to just include notes and quotes for myself in the different roles I assume: Teacher, Advisor, School Designer, Professional Developer, and Advocate.  I hope some of this is helpful to others, and would welcome dialogue about any or all of the notes in the comment. I’ve written a bunch of them to get me started, and will post them in the coming days and weeks.  They’ll be in the new “Book Notes” category.

Before I start though, I do want to take on the acolyte role for just one book: I recently finished David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole.  I haven’t been this excited reading a book about education since I first read Ted Sizer’s Horace’s Compromise ten years ago, the reading experience that made me want to get involved with schools.  When Making Learning Whole first came out, I read the introduction and said to myself, “I’m already doing this, so this book isn’t worth my time.”  I was so wrong.  Perkins offers the most complete picture of how we should approach helping students learn I have ever encountered.  It helped me refine my thinking on a lot of things, and more importantly, gives me crystal clear language to use in supporting other teachers.  It is the perfect balance of theoretical framework and practical examples, all backed by research. I hope to ask all new teachers at Harvest to read it before coming in (thanks to Critical Friend Andy for that suggestion).

Making Learning Whole will join Understanding by Design as a book I make sure I re-read every summer.  If you haven’t read it, please do; every student deserves a teacher who has.

Teaching 

I will improve the way I give feedback to students.  Formally, I hope to develop a system to give students feedback about writing that meaningfully a) tells students where they are, b) what they need to do to improve and c) is efficient enough that I can provide frequent and timely feedback to all students.  I also need to make sure I am giving informal feedback more frequently to all students.  (I hope that moving to a Standards Based Grading system will enable these things to happen organically).

My students just completed their last major essay for me, and for the first time all year I made the time to conference individually with every student.  One thing I’ve been working on is being better at naming students’ strengths so they know to keep doing those things.  I think this went really well in conferences, and gave many of my students a much needed boost of confidence heading into college.  I also gave them one concrete next step to take in their individual development, in addition to feedback on meeting our year-long standards.  I think this is a model that I need to use more.

Students will have multiple opportunities to rethink and revise their answers to large essential questions throughout each unit, and will also reflect on and revise all major work.

This was accomplished for all the major work and questions in the past couple of months.

Leadership

The Social Studies Critical Friends Group will meet once a month, and will be valuable for its participants.

Still meeting this goal.  

Advisory

100% of my new advisees will either graduate or earn at least ten credits by June.

Unfortunately, one of my advisees will not meet this goal, but everyone else will.

100% of my advisees will be accepted to college, and will have a plan to pay for it or whatever else they choose to do next year.

Almost there on this goal.

Personal / Professional Development 

At least once per week, I will write and publish a piece of writing about teaching social studies, be it about my practice or teaching in general.

I’ve kept this goal up, though my “publishing” has more and more taken other forms.  

Every two months, I will write and publish a self-evaluation of how I am doing on these goals.

Check. Check. Check. Check.

Next week is National Teacher Appreciation Week, and, as far as I’m concerned, they don’t get nearly enough.

For registration and more information, click here.

Stephen Lazar, a high school teacher, said he was relieved that the department had not gone so far as to ban online communication between teachers and students, as has happened in other school districts. But he said the guidelines showed a lack of understanding about a basic reality: Students often see no distinction between email and other forms of online communication, including Facebook and Twitter messages…

I start every semester of Economics with the statement that the students have been totally shafted by not being taught the most basic theory in their twelve years of education; every choice has a consequence.  That’s why the subject has been given the name “the dismal science”.  People don’t like the idea that they control their own destiny a lot more than they are told, or that they are responsible for their own actions.  However the idea of choice is rarely what’s discussed when Economics takes the stage.  Occupy, the Great Recession, income inequality; all of it becomes politicized to the point that we forget that people make choices and choices have consequences.

Project Respect calls for a three-pronged reform of the teaching profession. It envisions a reorganization of schools that would use technology and aides to put more effective teachers in front of more students, coupled with a longer school day to give teachers more time for professional growth.

To find more effective teachers, it calls for an expansion of entry points into the profession, with a higher bar for earning a permanent position. Finally, it calls for increased compensation for career teachers who both stay in the classroom and take on various teacher-leader roles.

That prong shares much with the insightful prescriptions of the book “Teaching 2030,” written by the Center for Teaching Quality’s Barnett Berry and a group of 12 teachers that included my New York colleagues Jose Vilson and Ariel Sacks.

Establishing a variety of advanced teacher roles, with appropriately high compensation, is a necessary move toward professionalizing teaching in America, and I applaud this move.

Giving highly effective teachers more time to serve in roles other than classroom teachers is an important step toward improving our system. However, it is imperative to remember that the qualities that make me a highly effective teacher are not necessarily those that would make me an effective teacher-leader.

Read the piece here, and I hope some people will join in the comments.