DaveShearon

Teacher Disrespect

EducationWonk, in a comment left here, gives the most chilling statement of the mistaken view of teachers held by many central office administrators and school board members:

Teachers in my district are no longer called "professional educators."

Our Superintendent refers to principals and above as professional educators.

Classroom teachers are now referred to as "Service Providers."

Personally, I think the school board in that district needs to engage in Job 1:  hiring and firing the superintendent. 

Carnival of Education #8

The 8th Carnival is up over at The Education Wonks.  Kudos to the Wonks for starting and building this.  It's a great way to sample what many who deal with K-12 education daily really think (rather than the thoughts that are often attributed to them by pundits who have no real connection to K-12!!).

The Blueberry Story -- My Take

So, what's the problem with the Blueberry Story?  Why is the experienced, perceptive English teacher's point that schools cannot reject "defective" students inappropriate?  This is important.  It goes to a fundamental misunderstanding of schools that, unfortunately, educators too often accept.

Schools do not manufacture a product; they provide a service.

Teachers are not production line employees; they are professional consultants.

Therefore, schools must be run like professional consulting organizations, not factories.

Students are not blueberries.  The "blueberries" for schools are textbooks, whiteboards, overhead projectors, rooms, desks, computers, libraries, multimedia centers, school buildings, etc.  Just as exercise equipment, courts, sound systems, televisions, showers, whirl pools, saunas, etc. are the "blueberries" for a health club.  Nutritionists and personal trainers are not "blueberries" and, most definitely, neither are the patrons.  For law firms, it's libraries, computers, internet service providers, online legal research, offices, fax machines, etc.  Lawyers, paralegals, and secretaries are not blueberries, and neither are clients.

I believe two things cause many folks to get this analogy wrong.  First, they have difficulty equating students with the clients of other professional consultants because of the hidden role of choice for students.  Students (and parents) don't have an option about going to school, and most have no option about what school they attend.  This is different from health club patrons or legal clients, and it obscures the choices involved.

Students do, however, have at least one significant choice:  to engage, or not.  And that choice is huge.  Learning requires engagement.  In fact, it often requires work.  Or, as Philip Schlechty says, persistent effort through challenges at activities that help students gain knowledge and skills they, their parents, and their community value.  Could we improve our success rate at selling work if we increased the diversity of learning options available to students and their parents?  I think so.  In communities where we don't have much in the way of such options, is the battle lost before it's begun?  I don't think so.  But failing to properly identify the business we are in is one sure way to reduce the odds of success!

Superintendent blogs in public!

Pinellas County Superintendent Clayton Wilcox started blogging March 14 on a site run by the St. Petersburg Times.  Four posts so far, and the first two drew over 100 comments.  The editors of the Times apparently are monitoring for profane or abusive posts, but the very first comment criticized blogging as a use of the Superintendent's time.  How long before free-wheeling school and personnel trashing (it's already started), and possibly trashing of the school board members, mayor, etc. causes some power figure to pull the plug?  I'd put the over/under at 30 posts.

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Effective Teachers

Ms. Frizzle has a post on effective teaching that's powerful.  It addresses two powerful memes that are hurting education.  #1:  Improvement can be achieved through programs (curricula, pedagogies, social services, etc.).  #2: Poor teaching achieves good test scores (the old "standardized testing is killing education").

My dad sent me an issue of Educational Leadership which is all about urban schools. The first article describes a study in which they found that there are three groups of teachers in struggling urban schools - those who blame the children for not keeping up their end of the bargain, those who blame the children's families for the same, and those who don't blame anyone but simply do not allow any children to fail - not by lowering standards, but by showing the children they care, by pushing them to keep working until they meet the teacher's standards for good work, by being there again and again and again. They found that the teachers in the third group often achieved remarkable success with their students, and they found two schools that cultivate that attitude among all the adults in the building, and these two schools are far more successful on tests and the like than one would expect based on results from schools serving a similar population.

Read the whole thing.  It's worth it.

Beyond Bullet Points

PowerPoint presentations are pretty common requirements in schools (and, of course, are ubiquitous in business, continuing education, etc.).  They have been accused of actually reducing the quality of presentations.  One critic wrote:

In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

Cliff Atkinson has written a book, Beyond Bullet Points, that looks like it could be interesting for teachers in this regard.  But wait!  You don't have to buy the book to find out!  He's got a website that includes a blog, and he has just started makeovers of six PowerPoint presentations, including one by Don Shannon on "Writing Effective Objective Test Items."    You can view the original presentation, watch as Don completes and Cliff edits a "story template" as the first step in re-working the presentation, and even follow  an online discussion between Don and Cliff.

Here's a quote from the Beyond Bullet Points blog:

When you treat PowerPoint first as a story structure tool, and later as a visual tool, you too can build a more beautiful body of communication experiences.

The Blueberry Story

Just found The Super's Blog from a comment here.  Neat.  But, ... on it they have "the Blueberry story."  Read it if you like.  It involves a businessman lambasting a group of teachers during "inservice" (really?  how in the world did that happen?).  Afterward, a wise English teacher straightens him out by getting him to see that he can reject bad ingreadients for his blueberry ice cream, but the school cannot reject "defective" students.  I am sure readers of this blog (both of you!) can point out the fallacy in this analogy.

A Super's Comment

Great to have a school superintendent reading this blog.  Unfortunately, her comment to my post on "The Best Advice" reveals that I did a poor job of putting that post in context.  The original post is immediately below this one.  Here's the super's comment:

As a teacher, principal and now a superintendent for 10 years, I find the substitution of "teachers" for the word "people" to be limiting.

If your substitution is to imply that no substantial improvements are going to occur without the teachers, then I will agree.

I suspect you mean more than just teachers.

There are students, parents, taxpayers, elected officials, state politicians, all kinds of "howling hordes" as Jamie Vollmer calls them. As superintendent.....I worry about them all...and it is never enough.

:-)

I know exactly what she's taling about, but disagree with her point.  The reference to "people" in the original quote was to employees -- the creative talent in an advertising agency, to be specific -- not to customers, competitors, board members, regulators, activist groups and all the other "howling hordes" that any business faces.  And, if your initial reaction is that, "Sure, creative talent is important to an ad agency, but you can't expect to get that kind of quality in teachers," then you don't get it.  (Not talking to the super here, she probably does get it.)

Yes, a superintendent who builds a system focused on teacher-led instructional will have to provide "high cover" for that operation.  He will have to defend it against the "roll out a program", "shake things up", "get those teachers into line" mentalities that even business people who should know better have. 

But, after a while, the teachers will take care of the other problems.  Students will be more engaged, learning more, and scoring higher on tests.  Morale will be up in the teaching force, and conversations between teachers at Sunday School parties will focus on new things they are trying to improve learning, not the latest dumb thing some administrator has done.  These conversations will start to re-shape community thinking, perhaps before any of the other changes become evident.

There will still be troubles, and trouble-makers.  But it should become evident in relatively short order that the system is making progress faster than its peers.  And that will be enough.

The Best Advice

"The Best Advice I Ever Got", Daisy Wademan, Harvard Business Review, January, 2005:

No matter how much time you spend thinking about, worrying about, focusing on, questioning the value of, and evaluating people, it won't be enough.  People are the only thing that matters, and the only thing you should think about, because when that part is right, everything else works.

David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide to Shelly Lazarus as she was about to take over as CEO.

Substitute "teachers" for "people."  Think about it.  Do you know any superintendent, other central office administrator, or board member who gets it?  I suspect that some percentage of principals do, and their schools are terrific (at least so long as they're not just worrying about having teachers who are "low maintenance" regardless of value).