When does Democratic get Chaotic?

I observed a teacher in training making an activity choice with her students the other day. She asked them to complete an assignment, then a student said he would prefer to do another task instead. She responded immediately by saying "okay, how many would rather do what student X just said?" Most put their hands up and she let them do the task that was not prescribed by her. 

A number of issues to consider: 

a. is the teacher mindful of process or afraid to assert her direction? 

b. is the student avoiding responsibility or simply choosing to take responsibility in a different way? 

c. is the teacher letting students override her goals for the lesson or is she anticipating choice AND setting the parameters for reasonable choice? 

d. is the teacher wanting to please or accommodating different but equally valid choices? 

It was my judgment in this situation that the teacher did not think through the implications of letting a student divert the task. It appeared indecisive and lacked justification. 

Inclusive? Holiday Concert

I was speaking to an Associate Teacher today while the teacher in training was winding up her lesson. Mrs. S was impressed with the teacher candidate involvement in the holiday concert last night. The student teacher had rehearsed a French song with the students and led their performance of the song during the concert. But Mrs. S went on to say how difficult it is for her to hope in the future of our schools in view of the direction of inclusion. The word "Christmas" and songs related to the traditional Christmas were not included, but reference to Ramadan and other cultural festivities were celebrated. She mentioned that in her opinion the freedom of access to education and freedom of religion are part of a Christian heritage and set of mores and laws. Why exclude the Christian celebration then? It seems the dominant religion of the past, though having its faults, is now silenced such that the strength of its tenets are lost. 

The Judgment Call

Student teacher Al had the unique experience of working with Mr. P, a grade 8 teacher who had volunteered to take the misbehaving boys in the other grade 8 classes and teaching them all together in his class. His style was democratic and project-based, which seemed to work well with these boys. 
One day Mr. P was away. It was Al's first experience managing the class on his own on his first practicum. A supply teacher came in and the instructions were for Al to do the teaching. The supply teacher would be there for support and of course, for legal purposes as Al was not yet a certified teacher. 
When Al brought the class to the music room to be taught by the regular itinerant music teacher, the boys did not all respond very well. The music teacher Mr. Z's style was more regimented. They typically acted up more in music class because of this. One boy beat the drum while Mr. Z was giving instructions. This prompted a swift "Go to the office!" from Mr. Z and the firm request: "Mr. T (Al), please escort this student to the office! He needs to see the principal for being so rude!" 
Al went into the hall with Jamal. The supply teacher remained in the music room. He made a judgment call. He whispered "I'm not going to take you to the office. Let's go for a short walk and come back to the classroom. I saw what happened. I won't tell Mr. Z. okay?" 
Upon Mr. P's return the next day, Al told him what had happened and how he had handled the situation....
What should Mr. P say to Al? 

Why do I Need to Know This?

For the most part students will go along unquestioningly with the tasks we ask of them. They are acculturated in the system to comply and "just do the work". The occasional question posed "Why do we have to do this anyway?"  can seem disrespectful, even defiant. But I am seeing better now that unless I take the initiative and have the foresight to clearly state at the outset why this lesson or task matters, it is in fact surprising that the challenging question is not being asked more often! 

A good start to a key lesson or unit means stating the BI (Big Idea), the LG (Learning Goal) and the SC (Success Criteria). These three things may seem superfluous when we are in the middle of a busy season of covering the curriculum. But they provide the foundation and energy for raising the level of understanding and motivation. Students have a right to see the relevance of what they are being asked to do. By making a connection to their lives they will be motivated to become more engrossed in the learning. Too often students are detached and disinterested and I as the teacher accept that as normal. As long as I have something to grade and the task is completed, life in the classroom goes on. But the norms of schooling are often at odds with the norms of life-long learning. So it's worth spending an extra few minutes working out the BI, LG and SC clearly and in language students can understand. Without these in place the level of engagement runs the risk of flat-lining or even spiraling downward. It could mean the difference between the appearance of learning and  learning for life. 

Managing the Troublemaker

As teachers we might be better off expecting a non-compliant student to show up in our classroom rather than dreading a situation where that student comes under our care. There are many reasons for this type of behaviour. An Identified condition such as ADHD, ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), or a range of other causes like attention-seeking behaviour, anger, peer rejection, etc. 

What I've found to be most challenging has been to separate my personal feelings (fear, anger, frustration) from the needs of the troublemaker and the needs of the rest of the class. When I have taken defiance personally I have not been able to feel or show genuine care for the student who has, for example, defied me in front the the class. Caring for the unruly student is not the same as letting him or her carry on with the disruptive behaviour. I can show care for the student as a person while I calmly implement  clear, objective procedures such as redirecting, counting down, restating agreed-upon incremental consequences   (not "to the office!" on the first trigger), and lots of opportunity for deferred conversations ("We will need to chat after class"), I can maintain control of myself and consequently of my teaching goals and students without giving in to negative emotions. 

I need to recognize that most troubled students are carrying wounds from their home environment to school. Obviously, I want to win the battle in order to maintain order and respect. But I have to be careful not to resort to power tactics that only fuel resentment on both sides.  If the student needs to be removed from the classroom in the end, let it be in sync with a consistent attitude of caring firmness. 

Am I Teaching or Babysitting?

I can think of three reasons for not actually teaching i.e. conducting a lesson by talking, demonstrating, interacting pedagogically with the students. One, the students are engaged in a follow-up activity stemming from a lesson already given. Two, I am unprepared or unwilling to teach, so I assign seat work. I am either tired, stressed, or making a political statement that demands being made on me are unreasonable. Three, I believe in the philosophy that students' learning should be self-directed. 

I can accept the first reason, as long as the activity continues to be a meaningful extension of the lesson taught. I can understand the second reason too as there are days that I experience fatigue or discouragement. Not as the modus operandus of my classroom, though. I hope this decision not to teach is incidental, not recurrent. I also understand the third reason, but only when it is done with careful intention and includes lots of interaction and processing checkpoints along the way. The problem is when the second reason is used as an excuse for the third. Busy work is a form of babysitting, so is unengaging seatwork. It takes MORE preparation to carry out student directed learning well, not less. 

Lessons from Losing Oneself

When my student teacher went to her second placement school, she was enthusiastic. Early in her teaching block I observed a creative math lesson with manipulatives and interactive technology. Over  the course of subsequent weeks she shared with me that her associate teacher taught by giving out handouts and requiring the students to do seat work without much of any formal, let alone engaging, lesson times.  I encouraged my student teacher to negotiate with her AT so that she could keep introducing new teaching strategies and trying new things with the students for the purpose of engagement. However, by the third visit I observed a lackluster, fairly disorganized lesson. Then, two weeks later during my fourth visit, the student teacher led the students in an educational game she had personally designed. There was laughter and full engagement from the students. I debriefed with her afterwards. What could account for this recovery from the third visit? She explained that she had complied for a while with the AT's style and expectations of herself and her students. She had begun to yell at the students ( like the AT), give minimal direction to them, keep them in their seats, and not smile. On one occasion a student jokingly held on to the sheet she was collecting, thus provoking a minor tug of war for the paper. This upset her to the point of tears. She felt she had no respect from the students. By conforming to her AT's style and manner she had lost herself. She came to that realization, decided to pull herself back together, and began to prepare and execute lessons she knew she could be proud of. I commended her for her insight and personal recovery. Sadly, many teachers let their ideals and personal best slide over time due to the pressures of the job. In the end, my student teacher demonstrated that giving our personal best in teaching is a choice and that often it flies in the face of the ambient culture. Let's make the decision to persist in giving our best! 

Uglifying Aspects of Collective Agreements

School atmospheres get ugly when

1. the us-them mentality becomes more pronounced. Teachers suspect administrations and boards of "taking away" from their contractual rights and freedoms. This can give rise to bean counting menial things like minutes per week of supervision duties.

2. no matter which government is in power, the money is no longer available to increase pay and bank sick days or maintain small class sizes. Suddenly the government teachers may have voted for is the enemy and strike action becomes the go to strategy to provoke a return to bettering working conditions. Teacher unions make the case that if concessions are made to the government, no matter how small, the "claw backs" will be unending after that. 

3. teachers don't want to go on strike, but typically vote overwhelmingly in support of strike action in order to apply pressure on the  board / government and thus, according to union strategy, avoid a strike! When the strike is eventually launched, teachers feel compromised and feel confused about who to blame: the board / government or the union? 

4. the public, especially the private sector, has no patience for the claims teachers are making. This creates in teachers a defensive attitude, and a need to huddle, to resort to group think, and think less for themselves. 

5. although ethically, teachers who disagree with the union have a choice to stand against the majority vote, politically, are afraid to stand alone and speak out on behalf of the needs of the students. 

6. teachers work to rule or because they are demoralized, do the minimum legally required, complain about any requests for additional duties. The school as a work place becomes an "in and out" place, where teachers arrive at the last minute and leave as soon as their teaching day is done. 

7. students are not served. They are tolerated, taught formally, but no extra efforts are made to help them grow beyond the basic expectations of the curriculum.

Teacher in Training Trauma

Lydia was enjoying her practice teaching weeks until her associate teacher was absent due to illness. Her first supply teacher "cancelled" some lessons due to what she deemed to be unacceptable noise levels in the classroom. Lydia was shocked, as the noise level in her opinion was no louder than when the associate teacher was present. She deferred to the supply and asked her what they should do if the lesson was to be cancelled. The supply said she didn't know and eventually let Lydia teach the lesson anyway. 

Then a friend and colleague of the associates began dropping in to check in on things. She began to comment that the lesson Lydia was teaching was not what she should be doing, although Lydia had already received the approval of the associate by email for the lesson in question. 

When the associate returned after a number of days off sick, she filled out Lydia's evaluation report with a number of low performance levels, stating she had a lot to do to improve. Lydia was crushed. What are her options? 

Countering the Almighty Mark

Heard the story of the teacher who said as the student waited for her test results: "You're a 70 percent so it doesn't matter what you got on this test"? How many of our students know they're labeled, stuck based on their average marks? A few are resilient, with enough home support emotionally and sense of self to be able to keep trying without being crippled by poor grades. Many consistently feel they are "stupid" and allow that thought to condition their self-perception. 

Because quantifying student performance is here to stay, what can be done to dull the pain and minimize the negative impact of the almighty mark? Here are some methods and I am interested in your thoughts as well: 

1. mastery learning, where the task isn't complete until it is the very best the student can do 

2. formative assessment overrides summative evaluations: our marks recording should have a few results for each category and a lot of practice tasks that lead up to those few results.

3. stating the big idea for each cycle in terms that the learning goal has relevance to the students' experience. The big idea should answer the question "why should  this be important to me?"

4. selecting content that has intrinsic beauty, appeal. For example, spend the time finding a text to read that illustrates the content of the language we have to teach as well as style, images, topics, point of view that is just fun to read! 

5. designing tasks tare geared to the student's personal interests as well as displaying competency of the required skills  

6. using rubrics that describe the criteria in language the students understands  so that they have a clue as to how to improve without our "professional" interpretation

7. taking the time to write anecdotal, personalized comments on the report card 

8. offering alternative testing procedures besides pen and paper, such as oral questions, multiple intelligence tasks, one on one student presentations instead of in front of the whole class, extra time, etc. 

9. never using the fall back phrase "you have to know this for test". Instead, use phrases like "this is something you can use when....."

10. only testing what you have worked on AND PRACTICED with the students. Resist pulling an old test from the drawer for expediency, regardless of its current validity. 

What Kind of Student Work Should Go on Display?

What's your philosophy of showcasing student work? Do you only put up the best work of the top student performances? Or do you have no problem putting up less than perfect, level 4 work on other merits such as originality or authentic expression of ideas? 

Putting up only the best work gives a good impression to administrators and other teachers. But what does it say to less successful students? Is their expression of ideas and feelings discreditable because it lacks polish? 

Putting up all work that has some merit as a piece of personal expression surely validates the work of students who may have a lot to say but still struggle with form and accuracy of language structures. But is this not to be viewed as glorifying shoddy work? 

How do you strike the balance on this issue? 

Low Turnout Parents' Night

I'm really trying to figure out why so few parents have been coming to "meet the teacher" night at my school. It's not just that they're too busy because I assume they really care about their child's performance at school. But they may be turned off by a triple subliminal message we convey: 

1. Parents' night will be on our terms: before the end of the school day around 3 pm and no later than 8 pm. If parents can't make these hours that's too bad because we are unionized and don't want to go too far in catering to parents' schedules for fear of making too many "concessions" to our employer. 

2. We are guarded and somewhat defensive, armed with marks and percentages to let you know how your child is doing academically.  

3. We don't want to get to know you, so you only have 5 minutes to talk to us before we will move on to the next person. 

Maybe more parents would be motivated to show up if the message was: 

1. We will call you and set up a time to meet with you at your earliest convenience. 

2. We want to hear your perspective on your child's performance in order to gauge whether or not our assessments of your child's performance are indeed accurate. 

3. We would appreciate understanding your cultural and family situation so we are willing to meet you at your home to talk about your child's life outside of school. 

Too radical? Unprofessional risks? Or the pathway to greater student and teacher success? 

Parents versus Professionalism

Recently I read an article in a Toronto newspaper that described parents' reactions to school report card comments as "meaningless". The professional language often becomes a form of edu-babble that has no specific meaning. It is tantamount to using generalities and technical terms to say no more than what anyone could say about any student. Certainly this approach to reporting protects educators from saying something too direct and thus provoking parents' ire. The safe professional way of communicating works against the goal boards of education say they have today to rebuild public trust in the education system. It contributes to further alienating parents from teachers. What is wrong with personal comments written by individual teachers on report cards? Would this more personal, perhaps less "professional" (i.e. downloads from "comment banks") not be more vulnerable AND and more trust-building? 

Oops! Great Recovery in the Middle of a Lesson

The teacher had the manipulatives to teach math and it was a well-organized lesson on fractions for grade 8s: computer with visuals and moveable shapes on the screen, handouts, blocks for students to manipulate and a clear learning goal. The lesson was unfolding seamlessly until she realized that the demonstration of adding fractions using the blocks did not yield the right answer! She carried on by saying "I've done something wrong here" and then refocused the lesson by asking the students to solve the problem: "why didn't my operation using the manipulatives work?" A couple of thoughtful boys came up with the solution: the base, or denominator has to be the same even using blocks, which means that you can't just separate the blocks and add them up separately and get the same result as when they are joined together. 

Example:  a six inch plus a one inch over two five inch blocks joined together is 7/10, but a six inch over a five inch block plus a one inch over a five inch block understood as 6/5 + 1/5 does not equal 7/10, but 7/5 or 14/10! The problem to solve in math became the teacher's problem for the students to solve, and it worked! Nice recovery for the purpose of learning! Instead of a wounded ego trying to cover up, deflect or deceive, this teacher used her mistake to help students learn! 

Parent Teacher Interview On the Defensive

Mr. Robb was in his second year of teaching. He felt confident about parent-teacher night. He had ample data on his students to support the grades they were earning. He was assigned his own portable as the location for parents of his students to meet him. Mr. Drumble, Mike’s father,walked in and smiled. Mr. Robb shook his hand and invited him to sit down, then proceeded to explain his son’s current grade and the highs and lows of his performance thus far. After a minute or so Mr. Drumble interrupted Mr. Robb’s explanations with “Mike hasn’t had a mark this low before. Your way of evaluating doesn’t seem fair”. Mr. Robb was taken aback. He had the results right in front of him. He had explained the results and now he is accused of being unfair! He retorted “I don’t know how you think my grading is unfair. Ask anyone who works here and they’ll tell you I take my job very seriously.” Mr. Drumble went on: “ Are you sure you can’t adjust your weightings so that the marks are more in line with past performances?” Mr. Robb replied “I can’t change what’s been submitted for reporting, but if Mike is not happy with his grade, he can talk to me about doing some extra work to pull his average up.” Mr. Drumble left unsatisfied and Mr. Robb felt like all the hard work he’d been doing was not appreciated.

Volleyball and French

Today I saw a great lesson taught to grade fives on how to play volleyball. As the lesson unfolded from learning simple tasks to the more complex, I started to see parallels to learning French. 

Bumping = precise pronunciation

Setting the ball = speaking using the correct verb endings

Rally = mini dialogues 

Serving = starting a conversation 

Spiking = impressive vocabulary 

Any other parallels? 

Learning Goals that Don't Matter

In the Minds On introduction of your lesson, if you mention the Learning Goal for the lesson, you will give your students a sense of what is to be accomplished, to be sure. But what do you say? If it's something like "Today, we are going to learn about...." or "Our goal today is to talk about...." or "In this lesson, we are going to learn how to...", are you doing anything more than setting them up for fact-finding, amassing information, or covering an aspect of the curriculum? How then do you UNcover the curriculum to probe into questions relevant to the student's thinking and experience? You can have a great attention grabber to get your students to focus at the beginning, a series of colourful and interactive things to do and a crisp review session at the end of the lesson to cap it off, but why is any of this important? In order to gain any hope of getting your students to think more deeply and be genuinely curious about the lesson content for reasons that matter to them, try setting up the learning goal of your lesson so that it is threaded through with an open-ended question like "Why do you agree or disagree with...?" or "What personal experience have you had that is like....?" or "Design your solution to this problem". Two things may happen as a result: your lesson will be designed around a question or problem that builds, and secondly, you may hear fewer questions like "do you want us to...?" or "how many do we have to know?" Hopefully the lesson will shift from what they are supposed to know to get marks to finding out for themselves the answer to a question they care about.  

A Case of Ethical Cheating

The school system does not always support the best interest of students. My colleague told me one of her courses was maxed out and some students would not have been able to take the course until the following year. The course is a compulsory one and these grade 11 students would be forced to take the course with grade 10 students. The teacher went to the administration to say she was volunteering to take all 28 students ( 3 over the maximum of 25 for that type of course). They referred her to the union rep. He said this was not allowable. Undaunted, she went to the Guidance department and worked out a scheme whereby the 3 extra students would be officially registered and actually sitting in another course and classroom, but she would give them the work for her course and work with them ( and the teacher) individually. Then Guidance would change the course code from the alternative course code to her course code at the end of the semester. A brilliant example of putting students first and cheating the system ethically, don't you think? 

How Far Will You Go to Help?

Sophie was my grade 11 student last year. She is bright and capable. Due to absences, personal issues with drugs and an overinvolved relationship with a boyfriend, she did not complete the course expectations and lost the credit. This year, her science teacher did not allow her to pass that course because Sophie submitted her final task past the due date.

She now wants to leave high school but is short one credit for her OSSD. Guidance sent her to our department to redo the final task of the grade 11 course she failed last year (she handed in her final task past the due date last year). This was happening after the exam period this year and one day before all marks were due for reports. She was prepared to work all day, follow the instructions and complete the task well. Would you go along with this? Why or why not?

Teacher Staying Power

How do we keep the passion alive over time + pressure + changes in the classroom? After 28 years of teaching I can think of five things:

1. My passion for helping students learn overrides bureaucratic pressures. When I'm required to do a host of tasks that mitigate the freedom to teach, I keep helping students front and center in my motivation.

2. My commitment to who I am and my values. This keeps me undivided within when system values (political, administrative) demand compromise. Even if I stand alone and true to who I am I will be less likely to become cynical or demoralized than if I let the system change my values.

3. The desire to keep learning: workshops, writing teams, school-wide events, higher education. These give me new ideas and help me reevaluate what I'm doing and why.

4. My focus on the students as people. I want to respect each individual in spite of behaviours and pressures. Caring about students keeps me going when I have to deal with unhealthy behaviours. Also, if I'm enamoured with the content of what I teach and miss caring for the students as people, that love of content will not endure. Loving people does.

5. Creating memorable experiences for the students. Trips, fairs, creative projects, festivals....these all energize me and the students with more authentic learning experiences than sitting in desks!