10 Top Teaching Resolutions for 2010

Here are my suggestions for 10 things every teacher should resolve to do in 2010:

1. Build classroom community.  Use this fresh start to do whatever it takes to make your classroom into a more caring, compassionate place in which to learn. Hold daily class meetings.  Allow the students to share important moments from their away-from-school lives.  Play team-building games.  Create a classroom cheer.  Role-play/model situations where behavior could be improved.  Smile often.

2.  Forget learning styles-based differentiation; differentiate based on students’ abilities alone.  As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham states, in his outstanding must-read book, Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom, the current scientific research on learning styles clearly shows that teaching to “the ‘preferred’ modality [e.g. kinesthtic, visual, auditory, etc.] of a student doesn’t give that student any edge in learning.” (p. 120)  Only differentiating based on students’ abilities has been shown to have a positive impact on student achievement.

3.  Quit caring about the tests.  Resolve, throughout 2010 and beyond, to never place pressure on your students about any standardized test.  Focus on teaching things deeply and well, and the all-important tests will take care of themselves.

4.  Kill the worksheets.  If you really want to be brave, teach paperless.  If not, at least eliminate the most egregious paper/pencil busywork from your classroom, then go from there.

5.  Get politically and fiscally aware.  Critically look at what the Obama administration is trying to accomplish through its “Race to the Top” stipulations (or, as Diane Ravitch so aptly calls it, “The Race to Nowhere“).  Look at your own school district’s funding situation and email at least 3 suggestions for ways to reduce expenses to your school district’s business manager.  Then dream up at least 3 ways your school district could use its assets more effectively to generate additional revenue, and email those along as well.

6.  If you’re a public school teacher, read and truly consider the points made in at least three books that bash public schools.  I suggest books like Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, and Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

7.  Forget about the noble-sounding-but-ridiculous goal of closing the learning gap.  A much better goal is to work to ensure that every child in your classroom learns more than a year’s worth of material in a year’s time.  If closing the gap was all that mattered, after all, the most effective thing you could do would be to instruct your most capable students extremely badly, letting everyone else catch up to them.  That, of course, is foolishness.

8.  Get tech savvy.  Utilizing technology to its fullest possible extent is no longer optional — it is something every teacher simply must do.  Not sure where to find great resources or where to learn some tech basics?  Start by reading the blog of Larry Ferlazzo and then watch the explanatory videos found at Common Craft.

9.  Replace TV with TED.com videos.  I’ve gotten to the point where I can no longer even imagine watching some one-hour drama on television when, in that same amount of time, I could watch (for free) three of the most amazing speakers in the world present for 20 minutes each on a collection of amazing, diverse topics ranging from education to creativity.

10.  Make learning real.  As frequently as possible, get your students to answer real questions, complete genuine and important tasks, and produce meaningful things for real audiences.

With budget crises and technological breakthroughs both being felt so keenly in school districts across the country, 2010 should be a pivotal year in American education.  Let’s all resolve, as much as it is in our control, to make it a great one for each one of the students whose lives we touch.

“Who was the first governor of Michigan?” (and other random trivia)

Last week, one of my third graders asked me, “Who was the first governor of Michigan?”

My immediate reply: “That’s a good question for Google.” I typed in “first governor of Michigan” and the very first words of the very first link gave us our answer — Stephen T. Mason. The whole process took about 10 seconds.

In that moment, it couldn’t have been clearer: knowing trivia like the name of the first governor of Michigan is worthless. Getting students to see the reasons for and connections between the names, dates, and places from throughout history is what matters.

It’s time to completely redesign our Social Studies assessments. Questions that ask students to memorize trivial factoids must be ruthlessly eliminated (e.g. “How tall is Mount Everest?” or “In what year did the French and Indian War begin?”) in favor of extended-response questions that require students to display a more thorough understanding of the events in question.

It sounds obvious. But most of us persist in teaching and assessing trivia far more than we should.

Links Worth Reading

I don’t always agree with Jay Mathews, but this column entitled “Why I have no use for the achievement gap” is outstanding.

What Matters Now, a free e-book compiled by Seth Godin and written by a variety of great authors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers is also well worth a read and can be downloaded at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-2.pdf. I love page 78 as it relates to us as educators.

Finally, Diane Ravitch’s post from today entitled, “The Race to Nowhere,” was also superb.

Is it just me, or might we finally be getting close to that critical mass needed to produce a tipping point, where we might redefine what it means to do school?

One Radical School Budget Solution: Eliminate Transportation

School funding in many areas, including virtually all of my home state of Michigan, is in a crisis right now.

Here in West Michigan, to maintain educational quality, districts have spent $104 million from their rainy-day funds just since spring.  Detroit Public Schools, facing a $219 million deficit and already under the control of a state-appointed emergency financial manager, actually had the audacity to ask teachers to loan $10,000 each to the district, which they would theoretically get back at retirement… with no interest!  And the budget outlook for 2010-2011 looks much, much worse.

Here’s one radical solution: School districts throughout Michigan should quit providing transportation to and from school for their students.  In addition to allowing school districts to maintain their current level of educational quality and also giving districts a cash windfall from selling their fleets of buses to schools in other states, this move would have several other key benefits, including the following:

1.  Ending school transportation will mobilize parents to become politically active. If every school district in Michigan eliminated busing for the 2010-2011 school year, with every superintendent explaining that this was a result of a lack of funding from the state, I think there would be literally tens of thousands of parents protesting down in Lansing.  Firing the school counselor, cutting the art teacher, or increasing class sizes — while all directly affecting the quality of students’ instruction — would not cause a comparable stir.  And we need all stakeholders to get passionate about finding ways to preserve school funding.

2.  Long term, eliminating school transportation could help to eradicate mega-schools with many thousands of students. I’m a “small schools” fan.  Although I think that eliminating school transportation would immediately put so much pressure on the Michigan legislature that the state would find ways to improve school funding, if not, eliminating school busing will make it obvious that schools built from this point forward should serve smaller communities.

3.  Eliminating school busing will force districts to get serious about considering online education and distance-learning initiatives. This is something we should be doing anyway.  Why shouldn’t many of our high school students be coming to school every other day and working online from home half the time?  Without school-provided transportation, parents will be demanding that these types of opportunities be offered immediately.

Having less and less money with which to be all things to all people, school districts need to redefine themselves as places of education first and foremost.  Getting out of the transportation business is a good place to start.

Technology in Education Book Suggestions

Here are two great books that I’ve been reading lately about technology in education — I recommend both highly:

1. The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
From the introduction: “If this book could be shortened to its narrowest point, it would exist as a one-line proclamation that states, ‘Anyone can now learn anything from anyone at anytime.’ ” An excellent book.

2. Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America (Technology, Education–Connections (Tec)) (Technology, Education-Connections, the Tec Series)

I’m always looking for books that further the conversation about maximizing classroom use of technology, so if you’ve been reading anything along those lines, please include titles/links in the comment section below.

If We Build It…

I am convinced that if we, as teachers, created such compelling and powerful uses for technology that the benefits of having 1:1 classrooms could be seen by all, we would have no trouble finding ways to acquire the technology we need to pull it off.

Supplies Needed: folders, notebooks, Netbook…

When I was in high school, it was understood that if you were going to be taking a higher-level math course (such as algebra 2, trigonometry, or calculus), you would need to purchase a certain school-recommended Texas Instruments graphing calculator for about $99 (which is the equivalent of about $150 today according to this inflation calculator). No one I knew ever complained about that rule, and every student in any class I ever took had the specified calculator.

With netbooks selling for $150 or less from time to time on sites like woot.com, I can’t help but ask: At what point does a netbook computer or other internet-connected device become something that schools can simply expect their students to bring to school with all of their other supplies?

Here’s another comparison: in the elementary school in which I teach, students are required to keep a separate pair of gym shoes in their lockers at all times (except when in use). Judging by the looks of the shoes that students bring in, I’m sure many of these pairs of shoes cost $30-$50 or more. When the price of netbooks drops to around $99 (especially with the school getting a discount due to volume), is it really that unreasonable to say that if we’re willing to ask parents to spend $30 to $50 or more on shoes for a class we only have once a week for 50 minutes, we might as well go ahead and ask parents to throw $100 down to buy something that we’re going to use to revolutionize the way we do school?

That, of course, includes one big assumption: that these internet-connected devices are going to be utilized in a manner that causes them to actually have a significant impact on classroom instruction. But that’s what I love most about placing an internet-connected device on the standard supply list. I believe, after buying a netbook (or other device), that the students’ parents will be much more demanding about their purchase being worthwhile, and teachers will be feel much more driven to be sure to use them to their fullest potential.

Rethinking Grades

Grades are the single biggest reason why students begin to hate learning as they progress through school.

I think it’s time to throw out the old A through F system of letter grades entirely. But first, let’s ask ourselves: what are letter grades really meant to accomplish? Are they supposed to provide feedback to the students and their parents? Are they supposed to motivate students to work harder? Are they meant to help us rank students to help colleges figure out whom to accept?

Whatever the intent, the real effects of grading completely undermine what we’re trying to accomplish in school. In the name of grading fairly, many teachers standardize assignments (often using rubrics) when what is really needed are differentiated tasks based on students’ ability levels. Grades take the focus off of effort and improvement and place the emphasis squarely on being better than your classmates. Grades make the focus of all schoolwork extrinsic, virtually eliminating the opportunity for students to find any intrinsic enjoyment from the subject matter they are studying.

If we were purposely trying to completely and permanently squelch our students’ love of learning, we would be hard-pressed to find a more effective tool to do so than our current letter grading system.

Thinking-Oriented Teachers

It’s not just students who need to think. In yesterday’s post I asked, “How much time do students actually spend thinking during a typical school day?” My implied answer, of course, is “not much.” The students are too busy doing things to think as much as they should.

I would argue that the same thing is true of teachers.

Teachers are “trained” — that word is so appropriate here — to use all the latest methods and programs. What if, instead, we simply gave teachers the time and resources they needed to more deeply reflect upon their own teaching practice?

I know pessimists will say that there are many teachers who wouldn’t reflect upon and adapt their own practice, no matter how supportive the situation. I remain convinced, however, that many of the teachers who appear to simply be going through the motions do so because they’ve had their independence and professionalism taken away from them time and time again through what we now call “training.”

Dogs need training. Teachers need to think.

On Being Thinking-Oriented

Pendulum-swinging seems to be one of our most common and pervasive American educational pastimes. As we vacillate wildly from one side of a false dichotomy to the other (should we teach reading via phonics or whole language instruction? hours of homework or none at all?), saner minds usually prevail and find some sort of compromise between the two extremes.

Things get really dangerous, though, when we don’t even notice that we’ve swung to an extreme position in a certain area.

I think we’ve hit that point in the way our current educational system, so full of standards and benchmarks upon which students must prove their mastery, is almost entirely product-oriented. This was a dramatic pendulum swing from the process-oriented thinking that took flight, then was shot down for being too wishy-washy and not rigorous enough, almost a generation ago.

Although I lean toward the process-oriented way of thinking, I think there’s a compromise position between being completely product-oriented and completely process-oriented. Let’s call it being “thinking-oriented,” shall we? Thinking is primarily a process; yet, to mollify both sides, it is often an active task as well — students often do their best thinking when they are actively writing their thoughts down on paper or reading something particularly insightful.

How much time do students actually spend thinking during a typical school day, anyway?

Please join me in being “thinking-oriented” in the way you teach.