Teach, Teach!

Yes, I’ve been missing in action for the last few months. I’ve been struggling with the changes/challenges in my life and I have discovered that when things are really tough, I avoid blogging. I guess writing forces introspection and sometimes, I’m doing all I can to just cope with what’s being thrown my way. Sometimes actually thinking it through and analyzing it is beyond me when I’m on the front line.

I’m experiencing withdrawal symptoms. I miss my classroom. I miss the kids. I miss feeling as though I am a part of the life of the school. Perhaps most of all, I miss the feeling of knowing not only what needs to be done, but how to do it.

I also miss being in sync with the rest of the school. In my new job, my busy times are completely opposite of, well, everyone else’s. For example, right now, teachers are completely overwhelmed. We have final exams today and tomorrow, and their grades are due by…tomorrow. I remember the anxiety, the exhaustion, and the relief once it was all put to rest.

In contrast, I have had almost nothing to do for the last week or so. Understandably, professional development is on hold at this time of the semester. Also understandably, anxious parents back off for the holidays (usually), and wait for the new semester to begin before deciding that their child should be tested for (fill in the blank) or that their child’s ________ teacher is incompetent and should be taken to court. However, on our first day back in Jan., I may become a human piñata as my admin team continues to fill up the day teachers mistakenly refer to as a “work day.” So during the holiday I’ll be preparing for an all day fun-fest with teachers who only want to be released to their classrooms to prepare for the semester that begins the next day.

Another issue I’ve been struggling with is that, while I truly identify with teachers and their time pressures, I now see all too clearly the other side of things. Teachers do not have enough time to do what they need to do. This includes grading, planning, collaborating with peers, discipline, communicating with parents, and of course, professional development. But here’s the catch-22 as I see it: Because they are stretched so thin, and because their time is so precious, teachers want professional learning to be delivered as quickly as possible. They come away from what I’ve termed “drive-by professional learning” with only the most superficial understanding of the initiative. Understandably, their implementation is then weak, at best, and generally mere lip-service to pacify the admin and the district. So then teachers believe that the initiative itself is worthless, because their own implementation was weak, and it was weak in part because we gave them what they wanted–minimal training.

So what needs to change:

• We need to choose a horse and stick with it. Our district needs to stop its tendency toward the flavor of the month program and make a commitment to something long term.
• We need to spend more time on the front end fully training teachers so that they not only understand what they need to do, but why–what the rationale is for whatever is being put before them.
• We need to connect the dots for teachers. We need to unify our vocabulary so that teachers don’t feel that each strategy, program, etc., is one more thing. Most of the programs I’ve been trained on this year have been very closely connected, touting similar ideas in different terminology. We need to agree as a district on the vocabulary we will use so that teachers can more easily see that all these elements really complement one another and are all part of one puzzle, and not fifty different puzzles.

If only I ran the schools…yeah, right.

My last post posed the question, “What is success when it comes to professional development?” Today, I experienced true success in a way I never anticipated.

Our school improvement plan focuses on the use of writing to increase and improve students’ acquisition of content knowledge. Many teachers feel that writing is a waste of their students’ time, that having students write in their classes cannot possibly help, and might even hinder, their mastery of the content. One such teacher was, in a friendly way, voicing that opinion to me today. I listened, knowing she meant no harm, but inside two arguments were raging.

On the one hand, I wanted to blast at how truly limited her view of writing was. The other part of me insisted that I had to let it go, that there was no point in trying to win this battle and I would only alienate a colleague who had been friendly and supportive so far.

Some other, previously unknown entity within me found a third option.

Somehow, I managed to calmly express my views (which are supported by much research) that writing can indeed increase student learning, that writing is itself an act that creates learning and that forces students to think and figure out exactly what they have, and equally important, what they haven’t learned. I mentioned the many forms that writing can take in the classroom, that it needn’t, indeed shouldn’t, always be a formal expository essay. I gave examples of other types of writing that might be helpful in a non-Language Arts classroom. And then I stopped, saying, “But of course, you might disagree.”

My colleague’s expression was difficult to read, her mouth fallen open just a bit, her eyes wide.

“I’ve never had it explained to me in that way.” Pause. “What you just said makes so much sense…I’ve never really thought of using writing the way you just described. Wow.”

And then my mouth fell open. Touchdown.

Suppose our goals are to 1) effectively educate students and 2) support and retain good teachers.

A teaching position is unfilled for 3-4 weeks, with a variety of substitutes taking over. Understandably, the classes get more and more chaotic, develop a pack mentality and become a teacher’s worst nightmare.

Enter newly hired teacher: young, inexperienced, fresh out of college and idealistic. Place young teacher in single-wide trailer with 32 students, roughly 20 desks and several tables.

Any guesses as to the outcome?

So we return to the age-old dilemma: If our primary purpose is to effectively educate students, why do we give the most challenging classes to the most ill-equipped teachers? Yes, I know, we all walked through the fire and no one wants to go back there. But really, philosophically, isn’t it a bit like handing over your most important and difficult client to the junior-junior associate?