The Heart of Instruction

In conversations about instruction with student teachers or mentees or other teaching colleagues, it always comes back to the question that is at the heart of all instruction:

Why am I teaching this?

If "heart of instruction" is too squishy, call it "the foundation of instruction" or "the philosphical underpinnings of pedagogy." The point is that all the decisions that we make in a classroom come back to this question.

All the questions surrounding instructional design-- What activities should I use? What questions should I ask? What pacing should I use? How should I direct discussion? What sort of assessment task should I use, and what should it include? -- all of these questions take us back to the heart of instruction.

Why am I teaching this?


Teachers of A Certain Age will remember the years in which we were encouraged to make our lessons relevant. "Make it relevant" is on my short list of Worst Advice Ever, because it assumes that the work has no relevance to begin with. Nobody tries to figure out how to make water wet. The material we teach should matter, and we should know why, and if we do not know why, we shouldn't be teaching it.

My students learn early on not to ask the eternal question "Why do we have to do this stuff?" unless they mean it, because I will answer them. Sometimes I answer them before they even ask. Thirty years ago, I might have struggled with this question, but today I can answer it for every unit I teach. But having an answer is not enough, because not all answers are created equal.

Consider Romeo and Juliet and all the reasons that teachers I have worked with have expressed, implicitly and explicitly, for teaching Shakespeare's classic contribution to the canon.

* I want students to grasp the soaring beauty of Shakespeare's language

* So that students can experience some of the process of turning words on a page into live theater

* The last guy to teach this class had it in his course plan

* So students can some day boast, "I have read a whole Shakespeare play and I know what it was about."

* To understand some of the literary techniques used in the play.

* I love these kids and I love this play and I want to share its awesomeness with them. It will be fun!

* All 9th grade English teachers are supposed to cover R&J

These disparate answers lead to entirely different units, and, of course, a few of them lead to really lousy units, because they aren't answers at all.

Here are some other bad answers to the question at the heart of instruction:

* Because it will be on the test, and if students don't do well on the test, we will all be punished.

* Because it's in the scripted lesson.

* Because somebody ordered me to.

These are bad answers because they don't help inform instruction. They don't give us purpose or direction; they don't help us make choices about instructional design or implementation. They lead to instruction that is bloodless, lifeless, joyless, pointless. They are the equivalent of kissing your wife "because that's what husbands are supposed to do."

It's an issue that's not new or uniquely related to the current reformy movement, but the bad actors of the reformatorium believe that these answers are not only not bad, but are actually admirable and worth pursuing. Why should we teach this? Because people with power say so, and because they'll punish us if we don't follow their orders. We don't need any other purpose other than financial threats and rewards, right?

Yet even the worst of reasons given don't fall to the level of "Because someone will give me money if I do and take away my money if I don't." Reform fails because it doesn't seem to understand why anybody does anything.

Teaching, like life, should have a purpose. Do it like you mean it. Move like you have a purpose. Know why you are teaching this, whatever this may be.Hold onto the heart of instruction.

Note to CCSS Supporter

This morning Rick Hess of AEI featured a guest writer on his EdWeek blog. Kathy Powers is a reading and language arts teacher in Arkansas, where she was teacher of the year in 2011. She offered a defense of CCSS, and there were many things I wanted to say to her. But of course here in Blogsylvania, we like to have these conversations out in public. So here's my reply.

Dear Kathy;

You open by suggesting that some critics of CCSS sound a little overwrought, and I agree with you. There are people out there who feel mighty passionate about this issue, and that passion can lead them to overstate their case sometimes. I think I'm what passes as a moderate these days; let me offer my perspective on your observations.

Celebrating Student Individuality

You say that you are "pleasantly surprised over the high level of sophistication and creativity students have shown in their writing and logical reasoning under the Common Core standards," and that meeting one of the standards about synthesizing multiple texts and evidence to support a point has empowered your students. Then you give some concrete details about what happened when you "tasked my fifth grade students with answering the question, 'How does imagination lead to discoveries in the real world?'" And you described a project that did, in fact, sound pretty exciting. I'm not going to deduct style points for your use of "task" as a verb, but I am going to ask you one simple question:

What the heck did you do before CCSS?

Are you saying that you previously did not know how to do such a project, or are you suggesting that previously your administration would have forbidden you to do this kind of work? Surely you're not suggesting that you could never even conceive of such a project before CCSS came along.

My students routinely do multiple text writing assignments, and they always have to support their statements with specific text evidence. I've done that for thirty-some years. My honors 11th graders have a research project that requires them to search out primary and previously unused sources to create original writing about local history; I've been doing that for twenty years. (You can buy last year's product on amazon-- custom printing is a new wrinkle). I say that not in the spirit of nanny-nanny-boo-boo, nor to suggest that I'm an awesome educator. I think I'm a pretty average teacher-- and THAT is my point. The work I've been doing is good, solid teaching, but not unusual in the field, and like all the good solid teachers out there, I've been doing it without CCSS. What do I need it for? How will it improve my teaching by giving me "permission" to pursue all the educational goals that I've already been going after?

Iron Teacher

With all due respect, this paragraph is a non-sequitor. You start by saying it's great that all teachers will have the same standards. Then you talk about Iron Chef and proteins. I am not sure of your point. Because all teachers have the same standards, they will now be better suited for a televised competition based on an entirely inauthentic unrealistic situation? Are you suggesting that all restaurant goers in the nation would benefit if federal regulation required all restaurants to serve dishes based on the same limited set of proteins?

Love Local, Teach Global

You suggest here that education is the great mobilizer, that a good education gives students more options to travel far and wide in search of their dreams. You apply this to college in particular; our students need to be ready to compete for spots.

I keep hearing this argument, but I don't really understand the connection. Do we need standards to predict college success? We already know the best predictor of college success, and it's high schools grades, no matter what high school, no matter what local standards. Even the SAT, king of the standardized tests, doesn't predict as reliably.

Do we have a problem with students getting into college who can't hack it? I can believe this might be true, though I think some of the problems are self-inflicted by the colleges. And what I still need to know is, by what process did somebody establish that the standards included in CCSS are the ones that will insure greater college success? I'm willing to be convinced here, but I have yet to see any evidence.

Standards vs Standardized Tests

I have read too many recent articles touting the problems of Common Core when the real focus of the author's frustration was not with the standards themselves, but with the testing process which will be used next year to measure students' learning of the standards. 

I agree (with the understanding that for some folks, "next year" is actually "last year"). People conflate the two frequently. You open by suggesting that some people hate tests because, like bathroom scales, they deliver news that nobody wants to hear. I would agree with that analogy if we assume that the bathroom scale is untested and uncalibrated. We have no reason to believe that the tests rolled out with CCSS measure what they claim to measure. Add the idea of an uncalibrated, untested scale that can get your pay cut or your job terminated, and surely you can see why people get a bit touchy.

You argue for waiting to test and properly implementing the standards, but here's my point-- as long as the tests are high stakes, determining the fates of teachers, administrators, schools and students, the CCSS simply don't matter. At all.

Look, the Core includes standards that we know will never be tested. Collaborative processes. Deep reading of long, complex texts. Things that will never, ever be on a standardized test. When all is said and done, we'll be right where we were under NCLB-- teaching to standardized tests that serve as de facto curriculum, depending on how hard our local administrators want to fight for us.

By Teachers, For Teachers

I agree absolutely that sharing and collaboration among teachers is a great thing. But as with the first point, I don't really see what it has to do with CCSS. Did we need CCSS in order to know how to share? I don't think so.

Kathy, I'm glad that implementation has not been a difficult adventure for you. If I judged strictly by my own experience, I would conclude that CCSS was a pretty harmless piece of bureaucratic ephemera. But I'm reading the stories from around the country. Stories about school systems shuttered and turned over to private charters because test scores are bad. Teachers who are disciplined because they are teaching Tuesday's prescribed lesson on Wednesday. Elementary students becoming discouraged and crushed because they cannot comprehend or meet the demands of their new curriculum. The implementation of that curriculum may be a local failing, or a state-level failing, or actually the fault of CCSS itself, but that doesn't matter to a child who, like any other abused child, assumes that the fault must lie in his own heart or head.

Unlike some of my more strident colleagues, I assume that many supporters of CCSS are pure in heart and intention, sincere in their support. I actually welcome hearing from those folks, because unlike the people who stand to make huge profits from reform, these sincere foot soldiers might be able to show me what there is to love in CCSS simply because I can trust their motives to be pure. But it hasn't happened yet, and it hasn't happened this time. Please understand that I say the following not with bitterness, anger or any metaphorical content. I say it as what I believe is literally true. You do not know what you are talking about.

Teachscape: Oh, The Humanity!

Poking around on line during another snow delay led me to the wonderland that is Teachscape.

Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.

Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).

Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--

Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.

The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).

But never fear--

With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.

Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti. 

Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the video surveillance recording to build a local library. And with Venti we... well, we use all the tools in the other two systems plus some sort of rigorous fairy dust

to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.

These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.

We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?

I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.

In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.

Evaluating That

For the past couple of days, touched off (as near as I can tell) by the actions of teachers during the recent Georgia Ice-mageddon, twitter has been flooded by the #evaluatethat hashtag.

If you haven't seen it, go look. What you find is a long list of ways in which teachers do work above and beyond the scope of simply preparing students for a test. A teacher bought a student's family a fan for their apartment during a heat wave. A teacher bough a young lady a prom gown. A teacher paid for a student's physical. Bought books. Took couple to their first restaurant. Bought a family food.

And beyond the looking after physical needs, there are all the emotional items on the list. Counseling students through grief, despair, failure, loss. And the affirmations of a teachers impact. Meeting former students. Getting notes from former students . One of the tweets that will likely stay with me longest-- the students suicide who left a note for family and for the teacher, saying you did make a difference, I just couldn't beat the drugs.

What's the value in the #evaluatethat tag? I don't think of it as a way to get the word out to the non-teaching public. Some of them already know this about us, and some of them won't ever believe it. Some will point out that lots of folks go above and beyond the call of duty, and they aren't wrong. Snow plow drivers, cops, clerks-- there are lots of people out there who do a little more than they have to. I love us, but for me, the gold standard of underpaid, overworked, underappreciated work with humans is still set by nurses.

Of course, part of the issue is the whole notion of "above and beyond." It is true, I guess, that many of these acts are above and beyond the current job description of "being a teacher" (or snowplow operator or nurse or etc). They do not, however, fall outside the job description of "being a decent human person."

It goes back to what's wrong with "college and career ready." Because it is not enough to be good at your job. You need to be good at life. You need to be good at being a human in this world, and that is so much more than a job.

I've maintained for years that teaching is a kind of guerilla warfare, that many of us are fighting in the underground, doing what we can in spite of the authorities. Under the current wave of reformy stuff, this is more true than ever. Education is occupied territory, and we are members of the resistance, not powerful enough to directly oppose the forces that have taken control of our home. Instead, we save who we can when we can, chip away at the occupiers, and work toward the day when we can send them packing.

In the meantime, we have to do what we can to stay in contact with the rest of the underground and remind ourselves what we represent, what we fight for. I don't think #evaluatethat will change much. I think people who are imagining that occupiers will slap their heads and say, "Yes, yes, I've been so blind" are kidding themselves. But for the rest of us, knowing that we are not alone, that other people get it, that other people are also standing up for what is best and brightest, that we are not crazy for thinking that we are in a classroom to help nurture and grow real human people and not to just collect data, read a script and do some test prep-- I think knowing that is golden. Evaluate that, indeed.

Top Down

There are many many many many MANY reasons that top down reformatorium programs are a bad idea. But lets just focus on one for a moment.

Years ago our school had to implement a new graduation project program. Our principal met this challenge by putting a bunch of staff in a room to thrash out the details of how the new program would work. We met and we talked and we talked and we met, and eventually hammered out a whole program for the graduation project.

But we ended up with more than a workable program. We also ended up with a room full of people who understood how the program was supposed to work.

Management training 101 says that you want to give people the illusion of involvement in the creation of a program so that you will also get buy-in. But when you create new programs or reforms from the bottom up, your program creation is also your program training, and that is worth its weight in gold.

Apologists for CCSS keep blaming the various issues on a bad rollout. If only the implementation hadn't been flawed, they say. we would be gamboling through fields of common core daisies. But implementing CCSS from the top down absolutely guaranteed that the rollout would be flawed. The messed-up implementation is not a bug; it's an unavoidable feature.

Top down implementation means that none of the people who actually have to implement the program have any idea of what the program is or how it's supposed to work. Everything has to be explained to everybody, and that's a long process, a process not unlike a long game of telephone.

CCSS has been even worse than the average top-down implementation because it is so jam-packed with its own jargon. Teachers are sitting through training where hours are being devoted simply to getting everyone in the room to use the proscribed definition of "rigor." Teachers are spending days in seminars about "unpacking" the standards themselves, which is a nice-sounding way of saying "trying to figure out what the hell all this gobbledygook is supposed to mean to an actual classroom teacher.":

With bottom-up reform, everyone has been in the room working on a shared language of shared expectations together. That understanding emerges organically while the details are hammered out. But top-down reform has to be passed down in its entirety, all the way down to the actual words being used. The program becomes like bad stereo directions that are passed down as a xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad infinitum, each one presented by someone who has his own maybe-faulty understanding of what he sees on the bad copy that's been handed to him.

If the most genius edu-whizes in the world came up with the best school reform system ever and tried to implement it this way, there would be tremendous problems. Start with a hackneyed mess of garbled muck like CCSS, and you are absolutely guaranteed a flawed implementation.

George Miller Still Doesn't Get It

Rep. George Miller is a forty-year veteran of Congress, has been ranking Democrat on the education committee, and was tagged by the National Journal as one of the seven most liberal members of the House of Rep. He was even on the ground floor of NCLB. He was elected in 1974, one of the "Watergate babies" who were going to help clean up DC. And he's helped push Head Start and early childhood ed. So if this guy doesn't get it, we must be in real trouble.

This guy doesn't get it.

Last week EdSource ran an interview with  Miller by Kathryn Baron.

Miller was an architect of NCLB, and Baron leads with his surprise that NCLB ever brought us to the land of high stakes teaching to the test. And then he went on to defend testing and accountability, saying that the most important part of the law was the requirement for districts to publish data on how well kids were doing.

"In this education system, if you aren't counted, you don't count," says Miller. You remember how in the first Jurassic Park the idea was that T-Rex could not see objects unless they moved? What we have here is a similar condition-- politicians and bureaucrats who can only see data, not human beings. If people aren't generating data, people suffering from this condition cannot see them.

Testing was intended as a way to measure schools’ progress based on how well their students scored and to show schools where they needed to make improvements. Instead, said Miller “the mission became about the test."

And now I want to shake Miller by the shoulders and ask, "What the hell did you think was going to happen??" But that is a recurring theme of this interview-- Miller requests that people smack themselves in the head with a hammer and then professes amazement that there are all these folks running around with hammer-shaped indents in their foreheads. Rep. Miller, you said it yourself-- if it isn't counted, it doesn't count. If nothing is counted but the test score, how do you expect schools to respond?

Miller was "ruffled" when school districts reacted poorly to NCLB's requirement that 100% of students be above average.  

“School districts and states came in, in the first year, and waved the white flag, and said, ‘We can never make the goal,’” recalled Miller. “Their proficiency was like 7 or 8 percent. I said, ‘Come back when you’re at 70 percent.’”

Miller must be a hoot in restaurants. "Yes, I know I ordered this steak well done, but I figured you'd check back with me when it was rare to see what I really wanted you to do."

Miller has stayed in the ed reform business. He's most recently been busy trying to broker a deal between the state of California and Arne Duncan over testing. Miller wants the state to use the Smarter Balance test in the spring to garner great data for schools.

“My position, I think, is that we should extract the data (from the Smarter Balanced field tests) that we can extract because it would be helpful. I think it would be helpful for teachers. If the kids in your classroom didn’t thrive, what would you change for next year?” Miller said. “And from what the people at Smarter Balanced say, they’ve developed a range of data that can be extracted, and supposedly, if this is a road test, you’ve got to bring something back to analyze.”

I'm flabbergasted. That quote shows not a shred of understanding of how tests, teaching, students or classrooms work. It's not that teachers don't ask what they need to change for next year-- every good teacher does that. But what teacher ever said, "After working face to face with my students, grading their papers, watching them in class, talking to them, and seeing the results, what I really need here is a standardized test that they took on just one day to tell me what's happening in my classroom."

Also, Rep Miller, when you're trying to decide how a service provider's work is affecting its customers, you might want to ask the customers rather than the corporation concerned about its multi-million dollar contract.

Miller likes CCSS, and sees it as just a way to track progress. Freshman year of college is too late to consider whether you're college ready or not. What's oddly interesting about Miller's view of reformy stuff is that he expresses it in terms of what the students need, while being surprised that the laws passed to force certain behaviors on schools have unintended consequences. But it's on the subject of teacher evaluation that Miller drops this bomb:

From the very beginning, this was a question of whether or not teachers wanted to be the architect of the system, or they just wanted to be the tenant.

Did I miss the meeting where teachers were invited to be the architects for ANY of this??? Did I miss the chapter in The Reform Saga where teachers walked away from the table, or refused to come to the table, or stole the tablecloth and silverware. Hell, did I miss the part where teachers were even allowed into the room to wait on the table??

The root source of much teacher opposition to evaluation under the current system has been precisely because we had NO opportunity to be the architects, meet the architects or even wave at the architects as they drove by on their way to the table.

Miller is retiring. After the ACA became law, he felt he had done everything he wanted to do. His retirement plans are unclear, but at the very least this interview is a warning for everyone who thinks electing liberal Democrats will improve the reformy climate in DC.

College Ready

One of the linchpins of proof among CCSS supporters is that Kids These Days are not ready for college. This is generally expressed in scholarly tones as "X% of college freshmen were in need of remediation" (and in more rhetorical tones as "OMGZZ!! The college freshmens are soooooo dumb that they need undumbification classes to be in the college!!") And this is proof that We Must Do Something, with "Something" defined as "slap CCSS into place."

Time for a lesson in metrics. This legendary unreadiness is usually expressed as "need remediation" which is turn is measured by "percentage of students taking remedial classes." Remember that.

This always sounds sciency because it comes out as number, but trying to pin down that number turns out to be a challenge. The National Center for Education Statistics has a paper that looks at those numbers for 1999-2000, 2003-2004, and 2007-2008, and while it breaks them down a variety of ways, the overall conclusion is that 1999-2000 was worse than either of the other years sampled, and all of the numbers hovered around the twenties, low or high. But this article from Chicagoland says that over a third of students entering college need remedial help, based on 2008 stats from the government-- same as the previous report. A Harvard professor looking at a 2003 study comes up with one third as well. The Inside Higher Ed Bridge to Nowhere report throws around a 30% number. And I would swear that I recently heard 46% tossed into the remediation soup as well. Most of these sources do not compare the current figures to any from the alleged golden age of non-remediation. So can I at least suggest that the numbers are "controversial" or "contested" or maybe even "pulled out of a variety of different orifices"?

I'm not a scholar in the field. But as a high school teacher I have a buttload of anecdotal evidence that might explain this trend if it in fact exists (which I will concede it very well might).

Explanation #1. The college admissions process.

We used to tell our students, "You need to take college prep classes and do well in them if you want to get into college." We still tell them that, but they laugh at us as if we had just told them that sasquatch will eat them if they don't do their homework.

They laugh because every one of them knows somebody who barely passed non-college prep classes who was still cheerfully accepted into a college. Because at least in PA the college-age market is shrinking dramatically, and colleges are suffering dire financial straights because they can't find enough parents to cut checks enough searchers for higher knowledge and wisdom.

So when a local college prof starts in on "How can you send us these kids" my reply is always, "Look at his courseload and his grades. We told you exactly what you were getting. You accepted him anyway."

Explanation #2 College fund raising.

Funny thing about remedial courses at most colleges. They don't count as credit toward graduation. You do have to pay for them, though. So the more times a college can convince Joe Freshman that he "must" take Remedial Composition or Math or Hygiene, the more extra money they can bank.

For at least a decade I've been hearing stories about perfectly capable students who were told they must take a remedial course. Every once in a while they say, "No, I don't" and it never hurts them a bit. But imagine how many impressionable freshmen, alone in a college office without parental backup or sufficient knowledge of the system, are not able to stand up for themselves.

So have colleges start giving away remedial course for free, just to help their students succeed. Check what the enrollment numbers are like then. At that point, you can get back to me. In the meantime, remedial coursework is a great moneymaker for cash-strapped colleges.

Explanation #3 Marketing

We've been telling everybody that they just have to get a college education no matter what. It has been great marketing. It has brought lots of young folks into the market who are probably not well-served by the market. Meanwhile, America needs welders. Mike Rowe has been doing brilliant work on this issue. Bottom line-- we should stop heavily recruiting people who are 250 pounds and 6'6" to become jockeys.

So I can believe that college readiness is, kind of, an issue. But you'll notice that none of my proposed causes can be addressed by a national one-size-fits-all top-down-imposed curriculum.

[Update: Let me correct this an omission, because I do know better-- in many fairly significant ways, the reform movement has made things worse. For instance, standardized test writing is an abomination and teaching it undoubtedly makes students less ready for college. Just so you know I know.]