On (Teaching) Writing Well

How did you learn to write? Can you point to particular lessons? Particular teachers?  Particular assignments? When did you know you were a good writer? When did your writing achieve voice? When did you develop a discernible style?

Now that you are thinking about how you learned to write, begin thinking about how you would teach someone else to write. What lessons would you provide? What would you have students read? What assignments would you design? How would you teach voice? How would you teach style?

If you stop to think about all things that children need to know to write well, you would likely throw up your hands at the prospects of success. Spelling. Punctuation. Capitalization. Handwriting. Grammar. Sentence structure. Paragraph structure. Organization. Cohesion. Sequence. Narrative structure. Argument. Parallel Structure. Style. Purpose. Figurative language. Subject-Verb agreement. Tense. Point-of-view. Coordination and subordination. Voice. The list goes on and on. And then on top of all the skills, we must concern ourselves with the will to write. Where does the motivation come from?

I think it is a mistake to think in terms of teaching when it comes to writing. Writing well can’t be taught, but it can be learned. We learn to write by reading in a special way. Children learn to write through an apprenticeship to writers. The job of the teacher becomes to help children see themselves as members of the “writer’s club” and to create an environment where students use that membership to develop skill as a writer.

More than thirty-years ago, Frank Smith posited that children learn the complex task of speaking by “listening like a speaker.” That is to say that because children had the motivation, indeed the need, to speak, and because they were made a part of the world of speakers (a member of the speakers club) they learned to speak. Similarly, if we can make children feel like members of the writing club, Smith said, they will learn to write by “reading like a writer" (Smith, 1983).

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to observe a pre-kindergarten class full of children aged 4 and 5 in a writing workshop. After a brief lesson on shoes and the concept of “pairs”, during which the teacher, Mrs. F, skillfully enlisted the help of the class puppets, Curiosity and Bubba, the children were invited to go off and get their journals and write about their favorite shoes or whatever else was on their mind. As would be expected in a class of children this age, some children “wrote” by scribbling, others wrote by drawing, while a few combined drawing with some words they knew how to write.

One child, Jamya, combined a drawing of her favorite shoes with a string of letters and letter-like shapes. She read her story to me and while the “words” were not recognizable to me, she was able to point to each shape and tell me the story it represented. Next, she did an extraordinary thing. This 4 year-old picked up her journal, walked over to the cat puppet, Curiosity, and read her story aloud. Jamya is an author who has found her audience.

Jamya is well on her way to being a writer. She can write only a few words and letters, but her writing has voice and passion. Most importantly, she considers herself a writer with something valuable to  say and she seeks out an audience for her writing in the form of the classroom’s beloved puppet. Jamya has a great writing teacher. Mrs. F has set up a writing environment where young authors can hone their trade.

How can all teachers achieve a classroom environment where children consider themselves authors and where students apprentice themselves to other writers to strengthen their writing? I think the first step is to help students feel like they are members of the writing club, so that they "read like a writer" and apprentice themselves to skilled writers. Students are most likely to feel like real writers if they are given plenty of time to write, lots of choice in what they write about and real audiences to write for.

The Writer's Workshop as conceived and popularized by Lucy Calkins and others out of Teachers College Columbia, provides the ideal structure for creating writers. In this structure, the teacher provides instruction in the form of a brief mini-lesson, followed by lots of time for children to write and confer and an opportunity to share their writing at the end of the session.

It is easy to imagine mini-lessons that focus on the mundane "stuff" of writing: spelling, punctuation, capitalization, grammar, etc. It is more difficult to craft lessons that focus on the qualities of good writing, but it is also more important. Good writing is less about knowing how to punctuate dialogue than it is about knowing how to use dialogue to advance a narrative, reveal a character or foreshadow plot complications. Teachers need to provide samples from their own writing and from the writing of others to show students how skilled authors craft their writing for maximum impact.

In this way, the teacher fosters the ability of young writers to "read like a writer." As more and more examples are provided, students begin to find examples of what authors are doing in books that they read and begin to incorporate these things into their own writing. Along the way, the teacher should help students find "mentor texts." Ralph Fletcher defines mentor texts as texts "that you can learn from." In other words, we want to help children find books that will guide them in developing their craft. When students find a book or author that they love, they can apprentice themselves to that author and find crafting ideas to include in their own writing.

Students then must be given lots of time to write and lots of leeway in what they write about. Just as aspiring adult writers are advised to "write about what you know", so young writers will write best when they can choose to write about those things they know well. What they know about is being a kid and everything that comes from that. They also may know about a topic that they have become obsessed with like dinosaurs or airplanes or horses or baseball. These are the topics around which they can learn their writing craft.

The apprentice writer also needs lots of in-process feedback. Feedback must be regular and timely. Feedback must also focus on the crafting of the message and not on the more mundane aspects of spelling and punctuation. Teachers can help students become apprentice writers by first focusing on assisting the student in crafting the message artfully and later helping to clean up the mechanics.

Finally, all writers, young, old, skilled and still learning need an audience. In writer's workshop the teacher and other students often serve as the audience during Author's Chair sharing time. Great writing teachers, however, need to think of broad and authentic audiences for their aspiring writers. One way is through letter writing. Students may be encouraged to write letters through an in-school post office where they can write to students and teachers in other classrooms. Letters can also be written to the school newspaper, the local newspaper, to local politicians or to school administrators.

Classroom or school-wide literary publications are another way to help children see that their writing is intended for others to read, enjoy and learn from. Magazines like Stone Soup and Merlyn's Pen provide an outlet for student writing, as do local essay contests. It is critical; however it is accomplished, that apprentice authors envision a genuine audience for what they write.

How does all this fit in with the Common Core State Standards in English/Language Arts. The standards lay out targets for what children should know and be able to do in writing. As such, although I could and have quibbled with aspects of the Common Core, they are not horrible. The real danger of the Common Core comes from being closely linked to standardized testing. Standardized tests tend to reward formulaic writing (if they assess writing at all). If the Common Core narrows the curriculum, so that children are taught to write to a standardized test prescription, then the Common Core will have done a great disservice. Those who have crafted the Common Core say that they do not wish to tell teachers how to teach. I say we should take them at their word and teach the way we know will work best for creating writers.

The teaching of writing is alchemical. It involves teachers assisting children to envision themselves as writers for real audiences, helping them discover mentors to guide their development, providing timely instruction and feedback, and then standing alongside as they spin their straw into gold.

All Kinds of Kinds: Evaluating a Teacher

               Evaluating a teacher demands nuance, not numbers.

The Grammy Award winning singer/songwriter, Don Henry, has a song with a refrain that says, “Ever since the beginning to keep the world spinning, it takes all kinds of kinds.” I think the same is true when we look at the teaching profession.  

As a student in elementary school, secondary school, college and graduate school, I have had a few great teachers, many good teachers, and a poor teacher or two. I remember my third grade teacher, Ms. Miyamoto. Ms. Miyamoto was from Hawaii. She taught us to dance the Hula, how to prepare and eat poi, and other basics of Hawaiian language and culture. I remember mostly how she was unfailingly kind. For an 8 year-old-boy in 1955, her classroom was a valuable lesson in diversity and respect for other cultures. Ms. Miyamoto was a new teacher and she had her challenges with what we now call “classroom management.” I am not sure how she would be rated as a teacher today, but for me she was a good teacher indeed.

In sixth grade I had Mrs. Stout. I can say without equivocation that Mrs. Stout was a great teacher. I don’t know how she did it, but Mrs. Stout made every child in the classroom, including the class clown (moi), believe that they were intelligent and destined for great success. The one thing I remember that Mrs. Stout taught us was how to outline. She said we would need it in high school and college. She always assumed we were going to college, even in this working class suburban neighborhood in 1958 where college was far from a bygone conclusion. She made us all feel good about our potential.

In eighth grade history, I had Mr. Laidacker. I doubt that Mr. Laidacker was any administrator’s idea of a great teacher, but he was for me. Mr. Laidacker was strict (some said mean), aloof and totally involved with himself. He ignored the 8^th grade curriculum (American History) and spent nearly the entire year teaching about his passion, The Civil War. And I mean passion. Mr. Laidacker knew more about the Civil War than Abraham Lincoln. And he could tell stories about the war that lit up the mind of at least one 13 year-old in that class. I can still remember in detail the report I did for him on Civil War medicine. Mr. Laidacker was not liked by most of the students in the school, but he is one major reason I became a history teacher. That passion was infectious for me.

I am sure that anyone reading this can name teachers who had similar ompact on them. The point is that teachers who were good for us, as individuals, may not have been good for other kids. But it takes all kinds of kinds in this world and all kinds of teachers to educate a child. Because of this evaluating a teacher demands nuance, not numbers.

The current mania for weeding out “bad teachers” and evaluating teacher effectiveness through student standardized test scores is wrong headed in the extreme. Teaching is one part art, one part science, and one part mystery. One child’s favorite teacher may be the wrong teacher for another child. Evaluating a teacher is a complex process, that certainly includes evidence of student learning, but it also includes many, many more things. This evaluation cannot be reduced to a number on a standardized test or on a rubric. This type of reductionism does a disservice to the complexity of the enterprise.

The evaluation of a teacher requires a knowledge of and sensitivity to this complexity. That is why I consider teacher evaluation to itself be part science, part art, and part mystery. The science is the easy part. Was the lesson well-planned? Were the students engaged? Did the teacher answer questions thoughtfully? Was the objective achieved? Did the students learn?

The art is more difficult. Was the lesson made relevant? Was it differentiated appropriately? Did children feel safe taking risks in this classroom? Did small groups function well? Were routine matters handled briskly? How effectively were problems handled? What is being learned in this classroom beyond the subject of the instruction?

The mystery is even more difficult. Did magic happen in this class? Did students feel cared for in this classroom? Was there an atmosphere of mutual respect? Does the teacher’s passion come through? What students might be inspired by this teacher? Was the joy of leaning evident?

I like to think of the act of evaluating a teacher as informed impressionism. Just as the impressionist painter, Claude Monet, used thousands of brush strokes to form the whole of a painting of a garden, so the skilled evaluator looks through multiple lenses to gain an impression of the whole of a teacher. This evaluation should be informed by student learning data, but that data is only one part of multi-faceted picture. It must also be informed by multiple observations of teachers working with children and working with colleagues. It is the product of the review of lesson plans, but also the product of conversations with the teacher that probe decision making and the ability to improve through reflection.

In other words, teacher evaluation is not easy and it requires considerable resources in personnel, time and money. The current calls for judging the complex act of teaching through reductionist and faulty value added models and theoretical rubrics are an insult to the complexity of the profession. If we are really serious about understanding and improving the evaluation of teachers, then let’s get serious about just how difficult that task is.

Ten Ways to Make Learning to Read More Difficult

Learning to read is hard work. Teaching children to read is hard work. Educators don't need to make this work harder by using discredited practices while working with children. Here are ten practices to avoid and the reasons to avoid them.

1. Providing Instruction that Lacks Balance

Reading is getting the meaning from text while guided by squiggles on a page. It makes sense that reading instruction requires instruction in how to decode those squiggles and how to get that meaning. Any program that requires an out-of-balance attention to one side or the other of this process is not adequate. Decoding is a complex process of coordinating visual information (phonics), syntax, and meaning. Decoding instruction cannot and should not be divorced from context because the context is a part of the decoding process. Balanced instruction does not mean equal parts of decoding and comprehension instruction, rather it means instruction on a sliding continuum based on student need. The observant teacher adjusts the instruction based on an assessment of student processing of text.

2. Putting Faith in Programs over Teachers

Programs do not teach children to read, teachers do. The wise administration would invest scarce resources in teacher training rather than specific programs. A skilled teacher adjusts instruction based on student need, not on programmatic prescription. No program can be as responsive to a student as can the knowledgeable adult working with that child every day. Empowering teachers to make critical instructional decisions and giving them the support they need to continuously improve performance (not through test scores, but through informed feedback) will improve instruction.

3. Testing Comprehension instead of Teaching Comprehension

Children do not improve their reading comprehension by answering multiple choice or short-answer questions. Reading comprehension improvement comes through the direct instruction in strategies that focus on comprehension including predicting, questioning, summarizing, monitoring for understanding, visualizing, making connections, and adjusting reading rate. Asking comprehension questions may help a teacher assess student understanding, but it does not teach comprehension.

4. Mistaking Difficult Texts for Rigorous Instruction

Except in very limited circumstances (some one-to-one tutoring and buddy reading), children do not improve their reading by reading text that is too difficult for them. The Common Core State Standards' (CCSS) call for greater rigor and text complexity should not be mistaken as a call for children to be reading text that is too difficult for them. Reading instruction should still occur in texts that provide some challenge for readers, but that are not at the frustration level, in other words, in a "just right" book. More complex texts may be introduced to students through read aloud, because listening comprehension is generally 1 to 2 years higher than reading comprehension. To meet the CCSS call for greater rigor, the teacher should focus on rigorous instruction, not more difficult text. For more on this see here.
   
5. Interrupting Real Reading for Silly Activities and Worksheets

Avoid assigning students activities that are not an integral part of their reading while they are reading. For example, do not ask students to look for their spelling words and circle them while they are reading. Don't ask them to find vocabulary while reading. This type of activity actually interferes with the real purpose for reading. Real reasons for stopping reading are based on student choice and comprehension development. An activity like "stop-and-jot" where the student chooses where to stop and what to jot is a genuine reading comprehension activity. Likewise reams of worksheets kill enthusiasm for reading and generally do not reinforce learning. Well structured journal entries or other written response activities are more engaging and more productive.

6. Engaging in Round Robin Reading

Round Robin Reading is the practice of having one child read aloud while the other children (either in a small or large group) listen in. This practice persists today despite longstanding research that shows it is ineffective. Round Robin Reading has been shown to lower the quantity of reading that children do, to emphasize pronumciation over comprehension and to cause discipline and self-esteem issues. For a fuller look at this pernicious instructional strategy you can look here.
 
7. Telling Children They Can't Read Ahead

Sometimes when the whole classroom is reading the same book, or when students are engaged in Literature Circles, students will be assigned to read up to a certain point in the text. Inevitably, some students will finish this assignment and want to continue reading. Let them. We need to decide what is more important, having kids who are motivated and enthusiastic about reading, or controlling kids because it fits better in our lesson plan. Since the greatest single factor in whether students become good readers is how much they read, it would be educational malpractice not to allow children to read ahead. What we can do is make it clear to them that they are not to share with others what they have learned and that they are to focus their comments only on what everyone has read.

8. Not Allowing Children to Take Books Home

I know, I know. We have limited resources, books are precious and if we allow them to go home, they might get lost. On the other hand, if we allow them to go home, they might get read. And since we know the best way to become a good reader is to read, what we have have here is a cost benefit conundrum. Here is what I suggest. The power and potential of allowing children to take books home outweighs the risk. We don't need to ban books from going home; we need better ways to insure they come back. The first year I taught in elementary school, I ended up owing the library 280 dollars for lost books (I would take them out and give them to the kids and they would forget to bring them back). Then I instituted a policy where every book that went home from my room went  home in a baggie with my name on it and in it. I then solicited the help of parents through phone calls and backpack mail to assist in making sure books were returned. My losses and out of pocket expenses went down exponentially and kids were reading books at home.

9. Tapping Fingers to Decode Words

Some children have difficulty learning to decode words. What causes this is not really known, but it is likely a combination of many factors including perceptual issues, developmental issues, literacy experience and instructional issues. Whatever the cause, these children often find themselves in remedial programs where they receive intensive phonics instruction, sometimes including such activities as tapping out the sounds of words and then scooping the sounds together to make the word. Not surprisingly, these children often get better at word identification activities. What they typically do not get better at is reading fluency and comprehension. The What Works Clearinghouse reviewed one exemplar of this kind of instruction, Wilson Reading. You can find out their conclusions here. It is really not surprising that kids do not become better readers with a program like this. These programs lose the balance I spoke of above. Children who are tapping and scooping are not able to attend to the real purpose of reading - what do these words mean?

10. Interrupting Student Reading

In typical classrooms good readers spend a great deal of time reading and struggling readers spend a great deal of time having their reading interrupted. It is understandable. We see a child struggling and we want to intervene. We want to provide instruction. When we have a group of struggling readers, it may get even worse. More stopping, more instruction, less actual reading. So what happens is like in our society today, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Skilled readers are likely to have hours more time to actually read in school over the course of a month than struggling readers. The strong readers, therefore, get stronger and the struggling readers continue to struggle. Teachers must find a way to insure that struggling readers get plenty of uninterrupted time to just read (on their own appropriate level) and also additional time for continued reading instruction. Richard Allington has some very cogent thoughts on this topic in his book,What Really Matters for Struggling Readers.

So there you have it. Ten ways to make learning to read harder. Let's see if we can eliminate these non-productive practices from our reading instruction.

The Common Core Goes to Kindergarten: How Should Teachers Respond?

One of the chief concerns about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) is that it is not developmentally appropriate for children in grades K-3. This concern is understandable since not one early childhood teacher or early childhood educator was involved in the development of the CCSS. I have discussed my concerns with the CCSS in general here and with the CCSS prescriptions for early literacy here.

In this post I would like to take a close look at the CCSS for English/Language Arts in kindergarten. The key questions to explore will be as follows:

·         What is developmentally appropriate in kindergarten?

·         What should be taught as it relates to literacy in kindergarten?

·         What guidance is the CCSS giving teachers that makes sense and what falls short?

·         How should teachers respond to curricular/instructional demands made on them that they deem inappropriate?

First a couple of illustrative stories. Diane Ravitch has been featuring the voices of teachers in her blog. A few weeks ago she featured these reports from two kindergarten teachers.

            1. I teach kindergarten. The five-year olds have an incredibly tight schedule to keep in our county: an hour of math, hour of science, 2 hours of language arts, half hour of social studies. We kindergarten teachers have had to sneak in rest time and social centers (such as puppets, blocks, housekeeping, play dough) which are so critical to their development.

            They have been forced to sit through the two close readings that go on for three days each and require them to write notes and then sentences to explain what they learned. My poor babies turned in papers with sentences made of fragments from our fact chart we had made, but they hung their heads because they couldn’t read the sentences they’d managed to write. I hugged them, told them they were great, and gave them chocolate. Then I reported that only 4 of my students passed….another poor reflection on my teaching.

            2. I am a kindergarten teacher, stressed to the nth degree from having to push 5 year olds in ways that make my blood boil from the wrongness of it. It is immoral to ask 5 year olds to write facts from a story they are listening to and to write sentences when they are only learning to read & write!!

And then there is this, also posted by Ravitch, where Dr. Joseph Riciotti, a former elementary school principal, discusses what he has observed.

            [E]ducation reformers such as Connecticut Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor don’t seem to think much about what is developmentally appropriate for kindergarten children in the zealous implementation the Connecticut Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Moreover, Commissioner Pryor and other reformers are thinking of how can we get these kindergarten children into college as their main focus. In the place of  developmentally appropriate activities suitable for young children, Pryor and other “education reformers” want these kindergarteners to begin to work on “academic skills” instead of a kindergarten where creative play as well as language and number development use to be some of the central themes of the curriculum for these young children. Sadly, what we are also experiencing with the Common Core Elementary Standards for these very young children is stress as many of these vulnerable young children are not prepared for this level of education.

So what is developmentally appropriate literacy instruction for children in kindergarten? One of the things that makes this question so difficult is that the development of children, especially such young children, is so volatile and individual. There could be 20 different answers to the question in any classroom of 20 five year-olds. This means that more than anything else standards, curriculum, instruction, assessment and teachers must all be flexible enough to accommodate these individual differences. As I will discuss later, in some ways the CCSS acknowledge the need for flexibility and in some ways they undermine this. It seems clear to me from the anecdotes above and what I have observed myself in some kindergarten classes, that the implementation of the CCSS has often lacked this necessary flexibility.

Let me now answer the question. What is developmentally appropriate literacy instruction for kindergarten? In order to be developmentally appropriate instruction must take into consideration “age, individual growth patterns and cultural factors” (Reutzel, 2007). In literacy, kindergarten children should learn the following:

·         Oral Language

·         Concepts about Print

·         Letter Names

·         Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

·         Beginning Phonics (CVC words)

·         25 (or so) Sight Words

·         Listening Comprehension Strategies (Reutzel, 2007)

Children should develop these abilities through the following instructional routines:

·         Read-alouds

·         Shared reading and writing (charts and big books)

·         Guided reading

·         Discussion groups

·         Independent reading

·         Interactive writing

·         Independent writing and conferences

·         Word Work (beginning with name charts)

·         Word sorts and hunts (McGill-Franzen, 2006)

And teachers should provide instruction to children through the following:

·         Reading aloud

·         Mini-lesson direct instruction

·         Modeling

·         Prompting

·         Conferring

·         Linking reading and writing

What kind of guidance does the CCSS give us as it relates to literacy targets in kindergarten? Let’s start with oral language. Oral language development is critical to the literacy success of children. Some children come to school with quite advanced oral language proficiency and others do not. This is the beginning of the “achievement gap” because it is often children who come from homes impacted significantly by poverty who have an oral language deficit.

At least one researcher has some concerns about where the CCSS leads us as it relates to oral language development. Fiano (2013) says the following:

            The Common Core State Standards.do not stress the importance of merging the authentic expressive oral language that children enter school with and that of school's more academically focused vocabulary. The Common Core's College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Language outline tightly woven and extremely structured academically based standards for vocabulary acquisition and use. The document presents specifically for kindergarten, “Use words and phrases acquired through conversations, reading and being read to, and responding to texts” (p. 27). Although the anchor standard for language appears to place importance on language, it does not foster expressive oral language development in kindergartners. The standard is more concerned with the institutional academic agenda of vocabulary acquisition rather than centering on the student and honoring the cultural complexity in expressive oral language that each student brings to school (p. 78)

Fiano also cites a concern about how the CCSS can steal time from the oral language instruction children need.

            Teachers need to be more tolerant of student talk in the classroom. Consistent modeling and multiple opportunities for practicing oral discourse in student-led workstations will alleviate off-task behavior by students. Additionally, there needs to be time built in for teachers to observe the language that students are using during independent workstation use (p. 77).

Finally, Fiano will win the hearts of many kindergarten teachers when she advocates for the kind of workstations that were a familiar part of all kindergarten classes pre-CCSS.

            An emphasis needs to be put back on more authentic student-centered oral discourse tasks in workstations. For instance, an oral language or vocabulary workstation might be a kitchen area where students learn and use vocabulary and phrases related to the everyday workings within the kitchen environment, including whisk, temperature, barbecue, and cabinet, and incorporate synonyms for words associated with this environment, such as plates/dishes, silverware/utensils, and market/grocery store. A veterinarian workstation could include chart, stethoscope, artery, and dorsal for students to take care of “injured” animals, and a numeracy workstation might emphasize collaborative student tasks and discussion analyzing and comparing two- and three-dimensional shapes using language to describe similarities, differences, parts (e.g., number of sides and vertices/corners), and other attributes (e.g., having   sides of equal length) (p. 77) (emphasis mine).

I offer one other caveat about the Listening and Speaking CCSS in kindergarten. Under “Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas” we find this: “Add drawings and other visual displays to descriptions as desired to provide additional detail.” Anyone who has taught kindergarten would know that these young children draw first and then write about what they are describing. If they want to add detail they then add to their drawing prior to writing more.

The CCSS groups the areas of concepts of print, letter names, phonological and phonemic awareness and sight words under the heading of “Foundational Skills.” In this area I have no real problem with what the CCSS is suggesting as targets for student learning. I worry; however, that because these abilities are given a separate heading some will interpret the standards to mean that these skills are to be taught in isolation. This would be a mistake. The “foundational skills” should be taught, as all other literacy skills are taught, as a part of a dynamic engagement of students in real reading and real writing activities. Specifically, these skills are taught through read aloud, interactive writing, direct instruction through mini-lessons, guided small group instruction, authentic writing experiences, and structured play experiences in workstations.

As far as reading comprehension instruction is concerned, the CCSS addresses reading in literature and informational text with the phrase “with prompting and support.” I read this to mean that students will learn reading comprehension strategies primarily through teacher read alouds. This seems appropriate to me. It also seems appropriate that students would work with the teacher to create classroom charts of what they recall about a story, or to focus on characters or to recall important information. After this type of scaffolding, students might be invited to see what they can write on their own (probably after they have drawn a picture). I do not see anywhere in the CCSS where they call for kindergarten children to write in complete sentences or be able to read what they wrote as the teacher above recounted her kids were expected to do.

Should kindergarten children be able to read by the time they leave kindergarten? Of course some children will be reading by the time they leave kindergarten, but that does not mean it should be a goal of kindergarten instruction. I believe that all kindergarten children should get the instruction they need in literacy. For some that will be reading instruction, for others that will be getting ready to read instruction. What all students should get is small group instruction with like ability peers to move them forward in their literacy. The CCSS says that kindergartners should be reading “emergent reader” texts by the time they leave kindergarten. In my mind that leaves room for students to be reading at a variety of levels from A to F, just as most kindergartners will. It will ever remain a challenge for the kindergarten teacher to provide small group instruction and give children the attention they need in workstations.

This brings me to my last point for now. I believe that there is a great deal of misinformation out there about the Common Core. My colleague, Cynthia Mershon, discussed this in an earlier entry on this blog here. Teachers must be armed with a deep knowledge of what the CCSS says and what the research says about appropriate instruction for kindergartners. They must resist any call for instruction that is truly developmentally inappropriate and they must insist that curriculum developed in the name of the CCSS not only reflect the CCSS, but also reflect sound instruction.

One place to start would be to insist on the kindergarten workstation as a place that is still vital to kindergarten children’s development. Whether that is because the workstation is a place to develop oral language or literacy or numeracy, well-structured workstations should remain as a part of the kindergarten experience. Structured play is still a path to learning for young children. If the implementation of the CCSS does not seem to support this, then the CCSS needs to be revised, this time with input from educators.

References:

Fiano, D. (2013) Primary Discourse and Expressive Oral Language in a Kindergarten Student. Reading Research Quaterly. Nov 2013.

McGill-Franzen, A. (2006) Kindergarten Literacy: Matching Assessment and Instruction in Kindergarten. New York: Scholastic

Are Teachers Professionals?

How can we counteract the denigration of our profession and demand our place at the decision making table? One way would be to double down on professionalism.

Teachers are currently under siege. Education reformers have targeted teachers as the culprits in what they see as American education’s failure to remain competitive with other countries. Teacher job security, salaries and pensions have come under attack by state governors advancing a misguided reform agenda. Teacher professional associations are vilified as protectors of poor performers. Teach for America is placing recent college graduates with no coursework in education into classrooms after five weeks of training and claiming they are getting great results.

The blog, Thoughts on Education Policy asked the question, Are teachers professionals? Among many reasoned responses, the question elicited this response:

Teachers are not considered to be professionals because they are not. Anyone can become a teacher and it only takes 3 years of playing with paints and learning how to make potato stampers. Teachers are the least (by far) educated of those you tried to compare them to- lawyers, doctors, accountants etc. In many cases teaching is a last minute career choice because people trained in other fields cannot get jobs. I am sick of hearing teachers rating themselves [as professionals]- you have 3 months holidays a year, you are required to work less than 7 hours a day and you only need to train for 3 years and even then the training is at a basic standard.

All righty then.  Do we dare call ourselves professionals in the face of this kind of sentiment?

Here is my favorite definition of profession: a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation (Merriam Webster Online Dictionary retrieved October 26, 2013).

Does teaching fit the definition? Certainly, I believe teaching is a calling. Whenever I ask people why they went into teaching they talk about their love of children, their desire to make a difference in society, the pleasure they get from watching young people’s growing command of challenging skills. Some do say that teaching would allow them to balance a career and a family the way some other professions might not. Most people enter the field because they are called to it. I have encountered many second career teachers, who left a business world they did not find rewarding to teach.

Does teaching require specialized knowledge? Here again the answer is yes. Teachers require specialized knowledge in child development, pedagogy, learning styles, exceptionality, classroom management, lesson design, literacy and much more.

Is the training long and intensive? Well, if we compare the training to that of a doctor or even a lawyer, the answer is no. Teachers can get their license to teach after earning a bachelor’s degree that includes a period of practice teaching. The practice teaching is usually formally one semester, although most schools of education get their pre-service teachers into the classroom for some experience beginning in the sophomore year. From my own experience and from the experience of most teachers I have known, student teaching is intensive. Perhaps it should be more extensive. I doubt that anyone enters the classroom fully prepared and research indicates that it takes about 3-4 years to master the craft.

I believe that teaching easily meets the technical definition of a profession, but many forces keep the public from viewing teaching as a true profession. Among these forces is low pay (never a good route to respect in the US), the number of women in the profession (for ages other professions like doctors and lawyers were male dominated), the characterization of teacher professional associations as unions (think Teamsters), and the fact that all Americans have gone to school and wonder just how hard the job can be. Of course, then there are the old canards about “holidays” off and short work day schedules.

What other profession would have national standards imposed on it without the full participation of the professionals who would be affected by those standards? How is it that the teaching profession was denied a place at the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) table? The CCSS and the supporting materials being distributed with them, the widespread reduction in autonomy that teachers face, the growing movement to put untrained college kids in the classroom and the insistence on tying test scores to performance, all point out that the outside world and especially the education reform world has little regard for teachers as professionals.

How can we counteract the denigration of our profession and demand our place at the decision making table? One way would be to double down on professionalism. It is one thing to be a member of a profession; it is another thing to consistently display professionalism. What would a culture of teacher professionalism look like?

1.    The production of high quality work day in and day out. This will mean well-planned and engaging lessons that have clear objectives and clear ways to assess student achievement of the objectives. Providing students with clear, formative feedback that will help them improve their learning.

2.    A high standard of professional ethics. This will mean putting the student first in all considerations, not in the reformy way that this is used as a battering ram against unions. This means never denigrating a child either to his/her face or in the teacher’s lounge during lunch. It also means never denigrating other professionals with whom you work in front of parents or others. One of the great sadnesses of my career in education was to hear teachers say to students or parents that a previous teacher should have taught something and now the class was behind. Professionals don’t bash each other to their clients.

3.    Insisting on a level of autonomy in your instructional decision making. It is the law in most states that the local school board establish the curriculum and that teachers carry it out. Beyond that it is the professional's job to determine how best to deliver that curriculum to the students in the classroom. We must assert our autonomy in finding the best instructional practices to meet the needs of our students.

4.    Maintaining a consistently collegial attitude toward fellow teachers and supervisors. Teachers must show a willingness to share ideas and provide support to junior colleagues and to learn from all colleagues.

5.    Having the ability and willingness to reflect upon instruction and seek ways to improve performance. Improved performance can come from personal research, dialogue with colleagues or from seeking out relevant professional development opportunities.

6.    Meeting deadlines and keeping accurate records.

7.    Maintaining open lines of communication with parents and members of the public.

8.    Being a life-long learner. This means reading the current journals, keeping up with the research and furthering your education through pursuit of advanced degrees.

9.    Treating professional development opportunities seriously and attempting to learn from every such opportunity. Treating professional development providers with respect (as long as they respect you and observe all the characteristics of professionalism listed here). I recently did a presentation to a group of teachers and afterward a teacher who had attended and was clearly a master teacher, thanked me and said she learned something. I thanked her and said I hoped she learned something she could use in her classroom. She then said, “I always learn something at professional development even though I have been doing this for a long time.” This is a professional attitude.

10.  Being an advocate for children, teachers and teaching. This means writing letters to the editor when the local newspaper supports some reform agenda that is bad for kids and education. It means letting your voice be heard when draconian testing policies are put in place. It means helping the public draw the curtain back on the phony “we’re in it for the kids” rhetoric of the corporate reform movement. It means being a cheerleader for all that is right and good about our profession and a loud and persistent scold about all that is wrong.

What do you say? Let’s stand up and speak out for our calling as a profession. We can do it by modeling professionalism, treating each other as professionals and keeping our voices in front of the public as the concerned, knowledgeable and capable professionals that we are.

Valuing the Professional Educator: Toward an Evaluation Plan that Works, Part 2

In an earlier post that can be found here, I argued for a more enlightened approach to teacher evaluation that recognized the value of each teacher and aimed at feedback that is both useful and led to further professional development. Such an approach would include observations, teacher collaboration, and systematic feedback, as well as artifacts of instruction to include pupil progress indicators.

In this post, I would like to add some detail to that proposal. Specifically, I would like to look at what student progress indicators make sense as a part of a teacher evaluation.

The corporate reformers of education are in love with Value Added Measures (VAMs) as a central pupil progress indicator. Value Added Measures attempt to determine the effectiveness of the teacher through student performance on standardized tests. The Gates Foundation’s ambitious and flawed study of teacher effectiveness called for one-third of the measure of teacher effectiveness to be determined through VAMs.

Research, however, does not support the use of VAMs for any significant part of a teacher evaluation. A report prepared for the Governor’s Task Force on Teacher Evaluation in New Jersey by EQuATE (2011), surveyed the research on VAMs and concluded the following.

            Research studies show that the teacher’s effect on value-added scores, based on [standardized] tests, accounts for only 3-4 percent of the variation. Fully 90 percent of the variation in VAMs is attributable to student characteristics and the interaction of learning/test-taking styles with the instruments used to measure achievement. To ascribe a weight to this measure that exceeds its explanatory power would be malpractice at best.

Linda Darling Hammond, et. al, (2011) cited the following concerns about VAMs.

            1. Value-Added Models of teacher effectiveness are highly unstable.

            2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings are significantly affected by differences in the students who are assigned to them.

            3. Value-Added Ratings cannot disentangle the many influences on student progress.

If VAMs are a notably unreliable measure of student progress, what can we suggest that would provide a better picture of student progress? Here is one person’s list of possible artifacts of student growth.

·         Samples of student work showing growth over time

·         Common or locally developed assessments

·         Student work samples scored on common or locally developed rubrics

·         Questionnaires, Checklists or rating scales to measure non-cognitive growth

Examples of student work showing growth over time can include student writing, student journals, classwork or homework assignments, pre- and post-performance on teacher developed quizzes and tests, even sample pages from books read at the beginning of the year and the end of the year.

Examples of common assessments could include establishing a reading level using a recognized format such as DRA or Benchmark, or assessments developed at grade or department level designed for all students in a particular grade or course.

Rubric scored work may employ national or state rubrics used for determining writing quality or locally developed rubrics designed to assess student ability in a range of performance tasks.

Ideally, measures developed to assess non-cognitive factors related to student growth can be developed locally, but many commercially developed questionnaires and checklists are available.

In this vision of an evaluation model, the teacher takes the lead in gathering materials over time that demonstrate student growth in the classroom. This material is then shared in a collegial give and take with supervisors. The teacher has the opportunity to demonstrate effectiveness and the supervisor has the opportunity to provide feedback and make recommendations for continued growth.

Does this model demand time of the teacher and the supervisor? Absolutely. Does it demand time for teacher colleagues to develop common assessments? Yes. Is it idealistic? Perhaps. More importantly though, it values the classroom teacher as the best observer of pupil progress, the local supervisor as the key audience for this information and provides a more reliable measure of teacher effectiveness than that darling of the reformers, the VAM. Most importantly, these suggestions have the potential to impact student learning in a positive way.

References

EQuATE (2011) Creating a Better System: Recommendations for a Systemic Approach to Improving Educator Effectiveness. Report Delivered to the New Jersey Governor’s Task Force on Teacher Evaluation.

Darling-Hammond, et. al (2011) Getting Teacher Evaluation Right: A Background Paper for Policy Makers. Research Briefing, AERA

What is Good Teaching?

Google the question above and you will get thousands of hits. There is no shortage of opinion and no shortage of research into the topic. Most recently, the most comprehensive study of what makes for effective teaching was conducted by the Gates Foundation. Millions of dollars were spent to pin down the answer and the results were published in the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET). The Gates Foundation claims to have figured out what makes a good teacher (Washington Post, January 8, 2013). It should surprise no one that, even with all that time, energy and money, the MET got it wrong. They made the classic researcher mistake; they went in with a presupposition and then they proved what they wanted to prove.

            While the MET project has brought unprecedented vigor to teacher evaluation research, its results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems. (Rothstein and Mathis retrieved from            http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-MET-final-2013)

            Although we don’t question the utility of using evidence of student learning to inform teacher development we suggest that a better question would not assume that value- added scores are the only existing knowledge about effectiveness in teaching. Rather, a good question would build on existing research and investigate how to increase the amount and intensity of effective instruction. (Gabriel and Allington, Education Week, November 2012 | Volume 70 | Number 3)

            So, rather than having figured out what makes a good teacher, the Gates Foundation has learned very little in this project about effective teaching practices.  The project was an expensive flop.  Let’s not compound the error by adopting this expensive flop as the basis for centrally imposed, mechanistic teacher evaluation systems nationwide. (Greene, J. retrieved from             http://jaypgreene.com/2013/01/09/understanding-the-gates-foundations-measuring effective-teachers-project/)

So what is good teaching? As Jeffrey Mirel (2009) has said, “Teaching is an incredibly complex and difficult enterprise.” Establishing a universal set of criteria is extraordinarily difficult. Here is my list, open for debate, of course, but based on a reading of the research and 40 years of experience watching teachers teach.

·         Good teaching causes all children to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students to learn how to learn

·         Good teaching helps all students believe in themselves as learners

·         Good teaching is informed by deep content knowledge

·         Good teaching is informed by deep pedagogical knowledge

·         Good teaching is engaging

·         Good teaching is nurturing

·         Good teaching communicates a passion for learning

·         Good teaching communicates ideas clearly with relevant and memorable examples

·         Good teaching communicates high, but appropriate, expectations for learning

·         Good teaching happens in well-managed, orderly classrooms

·         Good teaching is well-planned

·         Good teaching provides on-going formative assessment of student learning

·         Good teaching provides occasional summative assessment of learning

·         Good teaching is made better through the  information gained from assessments

·         Good teaching is driven by skilled questioning

·         Good teaching is about caring for students as learners and as human beings

·         Good teaching is about attending the sporting events, concerts and activities of students

·         Good teaching is informed by good listening

·         Good teaching is about flexibility

·         Good teaching is about good humor

·         Good teaching is about sharing expertise with colleagues

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through reflection

·         Good teaching is about constantly improving teaching ability through professional development

·         Good teaching is about constantly looking for ways to improve

·         Good teaching is about including parents in the educational lives of their children

·         Good teaching requires training and experience

For anyone to think that this complex task can be reduced to a number that measures a person’s “value” as a teacher is absurd in the extreme.  I would like to see a measure of the “value added” of a caring teacher who attends her students sporting events, or the teacher who spends all weekend designing engaging lessons, or the teacher who provides a kind word to a child having a difficult day. These things are the “stuff” of teaching and they cannot be measured simplistically.

What do you think? I would love to hear what you would add to the list above.

In my next post, I will outline my thoughts on a teacher "valuation" approach that aims not only at assessing practice, but improving it. Yes teaching does matter and good teaching matters a great deal. Assessing it should be in the hands of people who know something about it.