The Moment of Truth

In teaching, as in life, I’m convinced that the difference between adequacy and greatness can be defined by lots of small choices:

• Will you give your students thorough feedback on their essays, or will you just give them a letter grade?

• Will you offer extra challenges to your most talented students, or will you focus solely on getting your students to complete the minimum required objectives?

• Will you spend every minute of class time working directly with your students, or will you multitask, answering emails and trying to complete other paperwork?

• Will you personally read all of the books you assign to your students?

• Will you take the time to schedule that extra field trip or write that grant proposal that you know would provide your students with a great learning experience?

• Will you care enough to stay current on best practices in education, whether by taking classes or reading key educational books?

All children deserve to have teachers who are willing to push themselves to be great. 

If you’re not willing to try to be great, please at least have the decency to quit teaching.

School Lunches

A while back, I commented on Newsweek’s list of what it calls the Top 100 High Schools in America.  Tucked in that same issue was this small photo of a lunchroom scene from a school that calls itself YES Prep:

While glancing at this photo, I immediately noticed that this lunchroom actually has a large plant in it.  What a concept! 

Then I got to wondering: why DON’T schools actually provide some dining atmosphere in their lunchrooms?  Why, at most schools, does it feel like lunchtime is either complete chaos or else boot camp (such as one school which made headlines recently for demanding that students eat their lunch in silence)?

What might the spillover effects be (in terms of academic achievement) in a school that made a point to make lunch a genuinely pleasant dining experience for its students?

Quote of the Day

An absolute gem that needs nothing further to be said, from Dr. R. J. Kizlik:

 ”Anything not understood in more than one way is not understood at all.”

Math Game: Factor War

From the popular letsplaymath.wordpress.com blog, I must borrow a great game idea:

“Have you and your children been struggling to learn the math facts? The game of Math Card War is worth more than a thousand math drill worksheets, letting you build your children’s calculating speed in a no-stress, no-test way.”

Here’s the complete post (I particularly like the multiplication versions suggested): Factor War.  First through fifth grade math teachers are advised to read it!

Trendy Changes or Significant Reform?

There’s an interesting dichotomy in schools today: on a small scale, we embrace every little trend that comes our way; on a large scale, however, we are extremely slow to adapt even when the circumstances around us make the need for change obvious.

Once you’ve taught for a few years, you begin to see that educational trends and materials change frequently.  Are you using Guided Reading?  6 Traits?  7 Keys to Comprehension?  Focus Correction Areas?  Everyday Math?  Investigations?  Harcourt Math?  Houghton-Mifflin?  Phonics or whole language?  New math or the basics?  And on and on it goes.

The thing is, most of those ideas would work if you really stuck with them.  But many schools are so hooked on the newest trend that they try something for a year or two, then move on to something else.  Teachers burn out and begin to tire of these constant changes.

But that’s not the worst of it: the most insidious thing that happens when we constantly embrace new, trendy teaching methods is that we satiate our desire to improve our own teaching practice.  In effect, we quit thinking about making significant, substantive reforms to the way we “do school” because we deceive ourselves into believing that these surface-level changes  will make a difference instead.

As a result, we keep running schools that have thousands of students in them.  We keep teaching cursive.  We keep forcing students to spend all day in age-based, rather than ability-based, classrooms.  We keep thinking of technology as just Internet games kids can play once a week.  We keep paying teachers more just for getting older, not better.  We keep lecturing. 

It’s time for all of us to start making fewer trendy changes so that we can focus our energy on true reform.

“I Don’t Get It!”

I think the phrase “I don’t get it” should be banned from all classrooms. 

We’ve all been there.  Usually spoken in a whiny, expectant voice, those four words are the bane of every teacher, as they provide absolutely no insight into what the student is struggling with.  I personally have two favorite responses to “I don’t get it!”:

1.  “What’s your question?”  Forcing the child to articulate a specific question is helpful to both the child (who has to pinpoint where the loss of comprehension is occurring) and also to the teacher (who can now intervene more effectively).

2.  “Great!  Fight with it for awhile!”  This is the type of response I give to a child who has only thought for a couple of seconds before asking for help, or to a student who I am absolutely certain is smart enough to figure things out on his/her own.  The first time I do this, the student is usually appalled that I could possibly think that his being stuck is a good thing, but it develops into part of our classroom culture: getting stuck is a normal part of learning something new, and it should be embraced!

Using these approaches, I find that my students develop more perseverance when faced with something difficult, and they also learn to express what is confusing them much more effectively.

We teachers are a compassionate lot, eager to help.  But let’s not rush in to fix things when our students complain that they just “don’t get it.”

Elementary Education Blogs

Are there high-quality elementary education blogs out there?  In searching WordPress and Technorati, the vast majority of what I find under “education” or “teaching” is either rant-filled or is more of a personal diary than a blog meant for others to read and learn from.  I’m looking for blogs that:

• Are written by a current elementary teacher
• Offer tips, ideas, resources, and/or thoughts about education on a regular basis
• Keep rants and complaints to a minimum, and
• Are not dry (they can’t sound like college research papers)

If you qualify (or you know of a blog that does), please respond!  Cityteacher’s “Teaching in the Inner City” blog is looking a little lonely on my blogroll…

Should Meetings Be Computer-Free?

Found a great post over at weblogg-ed that needs to be passed along:

“Last week at the Personal Democracy Forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a story about how as an “older person” he had trouble with the fact that during his one-hour a week staff meeting, everyone had their heads in their computers. So he decided to ban computers from the meeting, and the next week, everyone around the table was leaning forward, looking much more engaged…until he realized they were all checking their Blackberrys under the table. And then, regarding this state of affairs at one of the most successful companies in the world, he said:

“This is a battle that we have lost, and I think it’s fine. And I think it’s a statement of how important this technology is, and I think it is a permanent change.”

And so there it is. There is really the crux of this. We. Cannot. Win. This battle has been lost, the problem is most parents, and most educators just don’t get it yet. All this banning of cell phones and taking down wikis and filtering out blogs…all of it is our own little Iraq. It’s not working. It’s not going to work. And all these laws that non-technological legislators are proposing are just a last gasp attempt at a “surge” that is doomed to failure as well. More restrictions, more blocking, more battening down the information hatches is only going to drive it all underground and make the world of our kids less safe. And, it will deny us a chance to help our kids develop and employ the literacies they are going to need to succeed in their future.

This is not a battle worth fighting. Let’s just stop.”

It’s an interesting thought.  I know I am extremely peeved when I’m in a class or a meeting that requires me to remain unplugged.  But I’m more inclined to think that Mr. Schmidt’s comments might be appropriate for gatherings of adults, but not for younger students… at least not yet.

Third, Fourth, and Fifth Grade Math Differentiation

Differentiation can and should be utilized in every classroom, no matter the grade level or subject being taught.  I’ve found that teachers’ struggles with differentiation tend to be at their highest in third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade math classrooms, however.  Typically, center-based instruction helps teachers of younger students differentiate, and the gap between students is typically somewhat less at those grades as well.  On the other hand, by the time students get to junior high, class selection plays a role in automatically reducing the gap between student abilities once again, making things more manageable.

So how do we differentiate successfully in, for example, a fifth grade math class?  I suggest the following:

1.  Use pretests.  Break the pretest up into subcategories that align with what you’ll be teaching in this unit.  Any student who gets 90% or higher in a subcategory does not need to complete the regular assignments on that topic and instead goes right to challenge work when you are focusing on that material.

2.  Use tiered lessons.  Break your lesson up into two or three levels of difficulty, with the lowest level being the minimum requirement for your grade level.  Assign students to the level of difficulty you feel is best for them, or allow them to try a few problems from each level to find their best fit.  Each student needs to complete just one of the three levels to officially complete the assignment.

3.  Use technology.  Many online games are easy to differentiate, as they offer a variety of levels of gameplay.  You can assign the proper level to your students or once again allow the students to find their level of best fit.

The biggest problem that teachers usually have is that they don’t have the resources to have enough challenging problems for students who test out of their regular work, so it’s easier to keep everyone at the same basic level.  If you need more problems for your top students, check out the fun  competitions at www.onlinemathleague.com, pick a specific topic of study at www.edhelper.com, or create computation problems at themathworksheetsite.com.  (Even though the computation problems created by that site may not be something you’d want to force-feed to your students too often, they’re better than giving your students something they’ve already proven that they know.)

Whatever you do, do something to ensure that all of your students are working on something they don’t already have mastered.

The Top 100 High Schools in America

This week, Newsweek magazine released its annual list of what it claims are the top 100 high schools in America.  These rankings are determined by dividing the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2006 by the number of graduating seniors at that same school.

You could argue that this ranking system favors rich schools, magnet schools, or special gifted & talented schools, and indeed many of the schools near the top of the list have names like “Academic Magnet High School” and “Science/Engineering Magnet School,” although some surprising schools from higher-poverty areas made the list as well.  But that’s a debate for a different post.

Here’s the thing that struck me about the list of these 100 high-achieving schools:  21 of them failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 2006 according to No Child Left Behind.

Let that sink in for a minute: 21% of the very best schools in America failed to make AYP. 

Let’s compare that to the general population: for the 2005-2006 school year, a total of just 25.8% of all public schools failed to make AYP. 

If the highest-achieving high schools in America fail to make AYP at nearly the same rate as everyone else, can we finally all agree that AYP, as it is currently measured, is meaningless?