Third Grade Collaborative Research Groups (Take 01)

I mentioned in a previous post that my class was working on a project in which they would have to think, collaborate, communicate, retrieve information, analyze information, and present their work. The finished project is here: a 13 minute long video. An excerpt from that post:

"My 3rd graders are trying a new kind of research report. Instead of researching for information, they are researching for problem-solving. They have researched to find the benefits and pitfalls of different kinds of energy production. The kids have identified 4 main questions relating to energy production.

1. How can we clean up the coal waste mess?
2. How can we dispose of nuclear waste safely?
3. How can we make solar and wind energy cheaper and more reliable?
4. What other energy sources can we discover?

One of their earlier assignments was to arrange energy sources in a hierarchy of most desirable to least desirable based on five factors: cost, reliability, safety, environmentally friendly, sustainable. Once they did this individually and compiled their results, they analyzed their choices. They felt that it was more important that energy be clean, safe, and sustainable than it was for energy to be reliable or cheap. I questioned them on this using a few scenarios that included not being able to play Nintendo, and while they really do want energy to be cheap and reliable, it was more important to that it be clean, safe, and sustainable.

I am proud of them. Hopeful."

All work is the students. I, their teacher, only provided guidance when asked. This was our first attempt at working on a collaborative video project using new Flip cameras and software purchased via a grant from Unum Provident.

The kids have reviewed the video and created a list of ways it could be better...use a tripod to eliminate camera shake, don't use too many transitions, make sure titles are readable, etc. They even included some tips they will try to remember the next time they work in a group!




Thank you to Unum Provident for providing the $1,000 to purchase the Flip cameras and mp3 recorders. Thank you to Mr. Roseman--TVA Retiree--for teaching us how power plants work and leading us through a thoughtful discussion on energy consumption. Thank you to Mrs. Johnston, our librarian, for being available for questions and references. Thank you to parents who worked with your children (our students) in the evenings!

Book Soup

Shortly after I wrote the previous post concerning rigor in education, Aimee Randolph lent me a book, Teaching What Matters Most by Strong, Silver, and Perini. It has a definition of rigor that I like more.

“Rigor is the goal of helping students develop the capacity to understand content that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and emotionally or personally challenging.”

These authors also declare that how we teach is important, but what we teach is even more important. Choosing a difficult text over an easy one will determine how rigorous the lesson is. That is more specific than my attempt at writing a definition. I suppose another, more general way of saying it is: High Expectations.

In Friedman’s The World is Flat, he talks about the shift in jobs. Many of the conversations he had with knowledge workers and the examples he experienced about globalization occurred from 2000 – 2005. We’re a bit past that now. He mentions a few things of interest in the first couple chapters.

• The world has gone from big corporations and governments having a monopoly on connectivity, networks, globalization, publishing, etc. to small businesses having these advantages to individuals with a PC having them.

• India and other countries are taking up jobs and tasks that can be digitized and exported: call centers, tax returns, some aspects of journalism, reading radiology scans for doctors, just about anything technical.

• What’s not being exported? Manual labor. Adam Davidson from Planet Money—in an attempt to convince his cousin to go to college—finds that manual labor is safe. We can’t export ditch digging, truck driving, and bouncers to China.

• What else is not being exported? Creative, complex tasks. While accountants are exporting tax return work to India, they now have more time to talk personally with their clients: “How should we manage your money? What do you want to have for retirement? What resources can we use to maximize your goals?” Friedman highlights this as a good thing...for CPAs and their clients.

• So what happens to the middle-of-the-road accountant that works for the CPA? We know the CPA can maximize his problem-solving, creativity, and leadership skills by exporting these tax returns. What about the grunts that did it before that don’t have stronger skills? India’s response: We don’t know. The USA is a leader in creativity and innovation, India is a follower. India is picking up jobs and tasks that can be digitized and done anywhere. Since they are following the US, they can predict their future for up to 10 years (they say). Since the US is in the role of innovator and leader, who can predict?

This parallels Tony Wagner’s work in The Global Achievement Gap. (Thanks Heidi for showing me this book!) Wagner interviewed business, government, education, and philanthropic leaders to find out what they need in their incoming workforce.

The business world says they can teach the skills necessary to work; they don’t have time to teach people how to think. Wagner distilled the conversations to seven essential skills:

1. critical thinking and problem-solving
2. collaboration and leading by influence
3. agility and adaptability
4. initiative and entrepreneurialism
5. effective oral and written communication
6. accessing and analyzing information
7. curiosity and imagination

How many of these are found in our classrooms?

This reminds me of something my dad told me recently. He said, as a generalization, that the students that get A’s in school struggle the most in the real world, followed by those who get B’s. Some of the most successful leaders in the business world got C’s in school; they learned what they needed to do to get by and buck the system with imagination, innovation, creativity, and adaptability. Many successful business leaders dropped out of college.

That doesn’t mean a C on the report card equals automatic success in the real world. (Let’s talk about grades and the grading system sometime, too, OK?)

In another book I’m reading, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the author discusses how our culture and lifestyle have lulled us into a non-thinking society. I think that is precisely what Tony Wagner and Thomas Friedman are afraid of. There are only so many ditch-digging jobs. The only other jobs we’re keeping are the complex, creative, innovative ones. It is more important than ever that we be a thinking society. In my other blog, Waxing Elephant, I mention my frustration over this idea that our kids aspire to the slacker image; that popularity might be exclusive of intelligence; that social relevance might trump reaching potential.

My 3rd graders are trying a new kind of research report. Instead of researching for information, they are researching for problem-solving. They have researched to find the benefits and pitfalls of different kinds of energy production. The kids have identified 4 main questions relating to energy production.

1. How can we clean up the coal waste mess?
2. How can we dispose of nuclear waste safely?
3. How can we make solar and wind energy cheaper and more reliable?
4. What other energy sources can we discover?

One of their earlier assignments was to arrange energy sources in a hierarchy of most desirable to least desirable based on five factors: cost, reliability, safety, environmentally friendly, sustainable. Once they did this individually and compiled their results, they analyzed their choices. They felt that it was more important that energy be clean, safe, and sustainable than it was for energy to be reliable or cheap. I questioned them on this using a few scenarios that included not being able to play Nintendo, and while they really do want energy to be cheap and reliable, it was more important to that it be clean, safe, and sustainable.

I am proud of them. Hopeful.

Think About It

It came to my attention that one girl in my class advised another girl in my class that she could be more popular if she wouldn’t act as smart as she is. I don’t even know where to begin.

How in the world did the slacker image become something to aspire to? Surely it is some backlash against some generational work ethic, but still. In Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, he describes an event he attended in China several years ago. The event was in a sports arena, I think, and the crowd was going wild. The crowd was not excited over some sports play or rock star; Bill Gates had just come on a stage to address the throng. Friedman realized that in China, Bill Gates is Brittany Spears; in America, Brittany Spears is Brittany Spears.

How is it not cool to think? How did intellect and social status become mutually exclusive in the minds of our kids? And that’s not even the right question. How did we get to a point where we would rather not be thought of as thinkers if it costs us the perception of being socially relevant?

I mentioned John Stonestreet in my previous post. He talked about a book that I would like to read: Amusing Ourselves to Death. In the book, the author delineates the differences between the prophetic writing of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both seemed to believe that technology would create a non-thinking society and not a utopian state. Orwell predicted that people would be oppressed externally—by Big Brother. Huxley predicted the oppression would come from within the culture. Orwell predicted that government would control and limit the information that people would have access to. Huxley believed we’d have a glut of information, an onslaught of news so entertaining, non-stop, and overwhelming that people would not have time to think about any of it. In Huxley’s version, society is so healthy, comfortable, and care-free that no one would risk challenging any of it.

Sounds like Huxley was closer.

And that’s not all. Carl Bernstein wrote “The lowest form of popular culture -- lack of information, misinformation, misinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives -- has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.” Our low culture has become pop culture.

Rainbow Dreams—a blog I enjoy—posted some of the new Dove commercials about beauty. While I question their motives (they didn’t seem to have such a broad definition of beauty when the Baby Boomers were in their twenties and thirties), they do address the caustic nature of beauty thrust upon women and girls. You can even download their self-esteem kit for young girls so that you can help prevent them from swallowing the beauty industry’s kool-aid. Is that really going to work? If we’re not thinking and we’re not teaching our children to think, is a self-esteem kit going to do the trick?

How do we then live? …to borrow from Francis Schaffer. Paul writes in Philippians, “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” Stonestreet used several authors to suggest that as we approach culture, we approach it this way. We should use our minds as we appreciate art that is excellent and well-done; that we look for art that speaks truth; that we hold art that is noble. This is, of course, only the beginning of a great conversation.

I use a lot of poetry with my third graders. A couple weeks ago, we were talking about the difference between poetry and songs. On a whim, I offered a quote I heard. (Is this Mark Twain? I’ll have to look it up.) “Anything too stupid to be said is sung.” They thought that was funny and tried it out on some songs. They stood up and with great oratorical presence began to speak Hannah Montana lyrics. It really was hilarious. I asked the kids what the songs were really saying. The response: We never thought about it before.

I hope I never hear that again.

The New Agora

So I’m blogging again. I say that with a present participle as if I am now back in a constant state of blogging. The thing is, blogging began to feel a little too much like navel gazing. I mean, I just talk about myself, which I find to be a dull topic.

A week or so ago, the staff at NPR’s Morning Edition were trying to get Daniel Schorr to sign up for a Twitter account. He said, "It really is another generation. I'm agape as I learn about how people can communicate with the outside world. It somehow reminds me ... of something in ancient Greece, the agora, the marketplace. You come out and you say things at the marketplace and everyone can hear. And every person now seems to be a network."

However, he was quite resistant to it. He asked why people can’t just sit and listen to a President speak anymore without letting their thumbs fly over phone keypads the entire time. He asked why people twitter. Tweets came back within seconds.

bdmckeown: I tweet to circumvent the usual obstacles to staying in touch.

susanellingburg: I tweet for the same reason I read — to know I'm not alone.

mat: No offense, but that's kind of a dumb question. Rephrase as: Why do you communicate at all? Just one more method of doing so.

ultrafastx: because talking to oneself is generally frowned upon these days.

thc1972: why do you go to a good cocktail party? Conversation, viewpoints, gossip, jokes, interaction

MarilynM: for conversation, community and connection. (there's also a lot of humor here.) :)

ckuns: Twitter is the new "water cooler" ... where you read the things you have to know but wouldn't find out otherwise

dirkfitzgerald: I tweet because I am might be missing out on the largest (and possibly) most interesting conversation ever.

EvaCatHerder sent in this tweet: "Given Dan Schorr's long history w/the evolution of news media, what does he think we are losing in web-based media? Gaining?"

"What we are losing is editing," Schorr said. "I grew up and nothing could be communicated to the outside world that didn't go through an editor to make sure you had your facts right, spelling right and so on. Now, every person is his or her own publisher and/or her own editor or her own reporter. And the world is full of people who are sending out what they consider to be news. It may be, it may not be, it may be made up and it doesn't matter anymore. That, to me, is the worst part of this. The discipline that should go with being able to communicate is gone." (NPR)

It reminded me of a comment my beautiful wife made back when we were dating in college. She had just been witness to a long, drawn out circular argument among several communication majors in her dorm. As we walked to dinner, she said, “Communication majors must spend all of their time learning to communicate and none of it learning to listen.”

And this past week, I was trying to convince about 100 teachers to sign up for classroom blogs because of the success I was having in my classroom with them. Many were not even sure what a blog was. “The word ‘blog’,” I said, “is short for ‘Web log’. It’s like a journal; a diary. But instead of writing in it at night and locking it up and hiding it in the night stand, you publish it on the internet for the whole world to see and you let them write in it.”

To which one teacher said, “And why do I want to do this?”

Daniel Schorr and I don’t agree on a whole lot, but I think I agree with him on this. His view was fairly balanced. Sure, it’s amazing that the right to publish now rests in anyone’s hands. But now we’re shouting our heads off. We’re all going out in the marketplace and yelling our stories, and our thoughts, and our ideas, and our vulgarities, and our insults, and what we think is news, and who is listening?

My wife and I were at a nice restaurant a couple years ago and a group of teenagers occupied the table next to us. They all had earbuds in their ears and were hooked up to iPods. One person pulled out the cord from the iPod and say, “Listen to this: I love this song.” Ten seconds of the song would play before the amateur DJ would switch to another song and then another and another. Soon they were all doing it at about the same time. No song got more than 10 seconds of air time. Who’s listening?

Watching these teens, my thought was “They don’t have the capacity to pay attention!” I remember buying a CD and bringing it home. Some aunts and uncles and cousins were there, and they were curious about my purchase. I put it in, and we all sat in the living room and listened to the entire album. Can that happen anymore? Should it?

John Stonestreet—a man that graduated from Bryan College with Marcy and I—came from Colorado to speak to our church this morning. He talked about culture and how Christians have a responsibility to be active in understanding culture, to uphold art that is excellent (not low culture) and true and noble. He referenced William Jennings Bryan, the man whom Bryan College is named for. Bryan was a three time presidential nominee, though he never won. He was a skillful orator who would talk for three hours without amplification to crowds of 5,000. Tell me that would happen today! John told us something that surprised me, though. He said, “Attention span is a choice.” Pay attention.

I wrote in an earlier blog that I often don’t know how I feel about something until I write about it. Writing is reflective and it is helpful to me. I wrote in another blog that I am writing for myself, not for others. (If that’s true, why am I publishing online?) There is something about the formatting and the published-look of blogging that makes it fun to write. And I do like it that I know of five people who check this blog, one of whom I am related to, two who are friends in real life, and (wildly) one in the U.K. that I’ve never met (Hi, Katie!) So I am guilty of adding to the shouting-in-the-marketplace noise. And to be fair, I love reading the blogs of these people. I like to hear their thoughts and their ideas and their fears and their hopes. When I check their blog each week, I am disappointed when nothing new is up.

Perhaps I should have started with a present perfect : “So, I have blogged again” instead, because I have. And, I will again. But it might not be this week.

Who Put the Rigor Mortis in Rigor?

Education is prone to buzzwords. A few years ago, “rigor” entered the eduspeak lexicon. It’s confusing, because everyone is sure they know what “rigor” is, but very few educators agree with each other on it.

Merriam Websters online dictionary has several definitions for it:
1: harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity
2: the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness
3: severity of life : austerity b: an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty
4: a tremor caused by a chill
5: a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially : extremity of cold
6: strict precision : exactness
7: aobsolete : rigidity, stiffness b: rigidness or torpor of organs or tissue that prevents response to stimuli c: rigor mortis

Try applying these definitions to an ideal classroom setting. (I do believe I’ve seen some teachers embody rigor mortis.) The definition that seems to have the most universality with teachers seems to be the one about making “life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.” For example, “Instead of completing two worksheets today, you will complete 5 worksheets that I got from the teachers you will have next year. You cannot ask me for help; you will have to use your brain and figure them out on your own.” That’s like the Old Testament Pharaoh telling his Hebrew slaves that now they have to double their production of bricks, and the raw materials will no longer be provided for them. If we need to make our classrooms artificially difficult, why not require them to construct their own pencils each day using only earwax and toothpicks before being allowed to complete their worksheets?

Tennessee has scotch-taped the upper tier of Bloom's Taxonomy to the word “rigor” as their working definition, and they are sending it around with their new and improved standards. If you read some of my earlier posts, then you know how glad I am that our standards have been revised to raise the level of expectation. (If we had standards in hurdling, we would have label our children “proficient” if they could step over a curb.) While our standards used to reside in the lowest of Bloom’s taxonomy, our new standards are rewritten to address Bloom’s higher levels, and this is basically what we are being told that rigor is—teaching to Bloom’s higher levels.

For the most part, I can agree with that. Though, many people have a very pedantic level of understanding when it comes to Blooms. (It could be said that when it comes to Bloom’s Taxonomy, many teachers are still at the “Remembering/Knowledge” level.) I guess my main hesitation with this kind of definition for what we are trying to accomplish in education sits with the word itself: rigor. I’m just not sure it’s the exact word that we need. At least, not on its own. If I may cite my own blog one more time, I once argued with the idea that learning should necessarily be fun or challenging, but proposed that it should always be relevant. If we can bend that line of thought with vague idea of rigor, then I believe we can have a decent conversation about what we should expect of ourselves and our students.

It doesn’t make any sense to artificially create obstacles and challenges for our students. On the other hand, rigorous learning is often difficult. The difference comes from the order of thought. Is a lesson rigorous because it is difficult, or might it be difficult because it is rigorous? When trying to teach my students the difference between energy and work, I ask one student to move a pencil five feet and another student to move the classroom wall five feet. Afterwards, I ask, “Who used more energy? Who got more work done?” Moving the pencil five feet is akin to the level of rigor our old standards had. Moving the wall five feet is akin to the types of situations some teacher put their students in so that they can claim their teaching is rigorous.

All right. Enough ranting. All of this to say that I want to share the working definition of rigor that I use in my classroom.

Rigor (n) An expectation that requires students to apply new learning to other disciplines and to predictable and unpredictable real-world situations.

I derive this from a framework that I saw some years ago. It loosely aligned itself with Blooms, as I recall. It was like this:
1. Remember – acquire new information
2. Understand – summarize new learning
3. Apply – apply new learning within same discipline
4. Analyze – apply new learning across disciplines
5. Evaluate – apply new learning to real-world predictable situations
6. Synthesize – apply new learning to real-world unpredictable situations
(Note that the skills on the right are only aligned with the Blooms on the left; they are not explanations of Blooms.)

So, I have created my own little rigor definition using the last three (the higher three) skills in the framework, which is similar (but not the same as) saying that rigor is teaching through the three higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

And, although it is not entirely relevant, I have to say that rigorous teaching and learning is truly fun.

So, Why is Literacy Important?

At the Hamilton County’s Literacy Institute last May, a member of the Public Education Foundation pulled me aside and said, “News Channel 12 is coming. Would you be willing to talk with them on camera?”

The thing is, it takes me just a little bit to reflect on a question and provide an answer that is worth sharing, and that amount of time is somewhat longer than most sound clips on the news. I mentioned this, but I was ignored. It turns out the request for me to speak on camera was not really a question at all, but more of a polite imperative. Trying to get a jump on the thinking process, I asked if we knew what News Channel 12 wanted to know.

“Oh, they just want to hear about your experience here, maybe what you learned this week…”

I sat down with a pad of paper and began jotting out little thoughts. I’ve found that sometimes I don’t really know what I think about something until I write it out.

So News Channel 12 rolled in and set up. I had filled up my paper with blurbs about teachers voluntarily attending professional development on the first days of summer vacation, the exchange of brilliant ideas I had picked up for use in my classroom, how fortunate we were as teachers to be provided with quality professional development by the Public Education Foundation, and so on.

And then I was in front of the camera, ready to converse.

“What is your name and position in Hamilton County Schools?” The microphone swiveled from the interviewer’s mouth towards mine.

“Jeff Paulson, and I am the instructional coach for literacy at Thrasher Elementary School.”

“And…” the interviewer pulled the microphone back, “Why is literacy important?” Again, the microphone.

Why is literacy important? Why is literacy important? My mind wasted precious seconds in bafflement at a question with such obvious answers. One of my many character flaws occurs when I hear a question with an obvious answer—my mind immediately generates a list of sarcastic answers. Sarcasm, I feel, is one of the lowest forms of humor or thinking, and I would like to train my mind away from it. But, why is literacy important?

“Um…” I said. “Uh…gosh…I’m sorry.” Didn’t I just tell this woman that I was the instructional coach of literacy, and I apparently can’t explain why literacy is important? As the sand ran through the timer and the video camera spent digital memory on my blank face, the news anchor shifted from her right foot to her left. I was out of time, so I started in on the obvious answer.

“Literacy is important…because…it’s everywhere. It’s on the internet. Literate people make much more money than illiterate. The number of skilled jobs in this country is increasing, and if we’re going to compete in a global marketplace, we need literate citizens.” Annnnnnd cut.

Rats. I gave the math answer to a literacy question.

As the news anchor walked away, I realized within ten seconds that I believe literacy is important for entirely different reasons. Sure, literate people are essential to a national workforce in a global economy. So what? I didn’t decide to be a teacher because I want to enable students to read menus and write memos. I want students to have the ability to get lost in a really good book. I want students to step into the minds and emotions of characters. I want them to go out and discover the world around them, and when they come home at night, I want them to be fascinated by what other people have learned about the world and shared in the pages of a book. Literature—especially in its broadest sense, encompassing whole fields of arts—is important because it increases the quality of life. And, it’s free.

If this is what I really believe—and it really is—how come this was not as readily available as my name and occupation? Why did I try to create an answer that means little to me? Thankfully, News Channel 12 did not run the footage of me gaping about like a fish. Of course, why would they? It wasn’t interesting or inspiring. It was stale tripe and drivel.

Which brings me to something I mentioned earlier: I often don’t really know how I feel about something until I’ve written about it. And, ironically, right after I became a literacy coach, I stopped blogging and journaling. The demands of this new position wore me out and I had very little time to think, reflect, and write. Perhaps it is not so much that I don’t know what I think about a topic until I write about it; perhaps I simply do not know how I will articulate it until I have gone through the reflective process of writing.

I’ll have to think about that.

Ron Edmunds and Mike Riley

"How many of you have heard of Ron Edmunds?" A Washington state Superintendent named Mike Riley posed this question to a group of teachers at a lunch during a professional development conference. Hardly anyone raised a hand, but I did, proudly.

I turned to the lady next to me, my boss when I contract out for these conferences. "I have one of his quotes headlining my blog." I started to quote it, but I didn't have to finish. Mike Riley had already posted the very one on the approximately 12 by 18 foot smart board in one of Microsoft's luxurious presentation rooms.

"Not many people remember Ron Edmunds anymore...or his 1969 quote." Riley went on to briefly praise what Edmunds had done for education, but he had a problem with the idealistic quote shining down on us.

"I don't believe the majority of teachers today are dispassionate. And, you're obviously not in it for the money." We laughed at the well-worn sympathetic joke, but we were here on our own time...on summer vacation...and most of us without pay. "The truth is, we don't know enough. If we knew what worked--if we knew the silver bullets--we would use them and we would solve the problems we have in education."

And so began one of the most honest conversations about education that I have heard in a long time.

I don’t have Mike Riley’s eloquence, but I really want to summarize some of his points here. The following are from his presentation.

We need to be honest about what we don’t know and stop being so hardheaded in our individual beliefs when it comes to these areas. Conversely, we need to take what we do know and begin honing our practice.

Curriculum standards should not be determined by teachers. They should be determined by experts in the field. For example, scientists should be determining what students need to know in Science. Educators should determine how the content is taught and assessed. Parents and students contribute to the process by giving feedback on their perceptions of effectiveness.

The curriculum needs to be unified from Kindergarten to college. (OK, not a new idea, but it still needs to be done.) As Mike Riley put it (paraphrased) we should start teaching AP calculus in Kindergarten. (Think about it.)

Teachers should be given less autonomy concerning what and how they teach. Standards should be stronger, and research-based pedagogy should be used. Also, teaching has been such a private act for so long; it may need to become more public. (There is one teacher in California that videos every lesson and posts each one on the web for public scrutiny.)

Recent extensive studies show us that technology has done nothing to raise student achievement. We need to treat technology as a tool, not a cure. Technology is an adult tool that we use to aid ourselves in instructing and assessing and that (maybe) students use in completing or presenting work.

A Half Retraction

In an earlier blog, I gave a loose history of American education. I mention this because one of my underlying reasons in writing the blog was to show how integral families and local communities were to the birth of public education in America. I've always wanted to quote myself, so here are three brief thoughts from that blog:

On one side of the pendulum, the federal government might say, “We see the broader spectrum, the big picture. In plotting a course for this country, we recognize certain needs in the global economy and therefore in education.” While on the other hand, parents and local communities know their children, the local culture and flavors, the immediate needs around them.

When you were in school, you probably learned about what the Constitution of the United States says. One thing it doesn’t say, though, is a single word about education.

If you go back 200-some years, you’ll see that schools in the United States were initiated and run by families and churches. Look back a little further, and you’ll find colonists discovering their acute need to educate their children.

Let me add one of my previous (although unstated) arguments for local control in education: government standards are not typically known to be high. Would you buy a tire that simply meets government standards?

And then comes the US News and World Report article comparing state's self-assessment scores with federal assessments. Each state declares a level of proficiency based on its standardized test scores. States also are ranked nationally based on NAEP scores. Every single state thinks it is doing better than the NAEP does. The most comical state ends up being Mississippi, which boasts the highest scores nationwide (according to its own standardized tests) yet is performing the lowest of all states on the national assessment. I cover my mouth when I laugh at this absurdity because my own state--Tennessee--also has one of the largest gaps between state and national perception of performance. It's embarrassing. (Massachusettes, by the way, is not meeting its own expectations, yet outperforms most states on the NAEP. The result is the smallest performance gap.)

For the first time ever, it forced me to ask the question, "Why are we not using national standards?"

When I advocated so loudly for local and state control of education, it was under the assumption that we would produce results higher than expected. As Hamilton County Superintendent Dr. Jim Scales says, mavericks don't bring up the rear. It's OK to buck the system if you are going to leave it behind, not if you are going to dawdle.

So, my tune is changing a little bit. Sure, I still firmly believe that families need to be involved in schools watching out for their children; teachers and administrators need to bring innovation and high standards to their classrooms. But, perhaps, if we are really going to produce citizens that can compete globally, then the idea of national standards is a good step in that direction.

Someone once said that a school is 27 classrooms connected by a parking lot. Teachers traditionally have not had time or opportunity to talk, share, or collaborate in any way. I have become fond of saying that no group of isolated teachers will be able to meet the demands in education today. Two heads are better than one, and twenty-seven are better than two. If teachers are isolated in a building and if that holds education back, then the situation would be compounded from school to school, county to county, state to state.

American education was born in many back yards, but it may be time to start a neighborhood association.

Professional Development...

...in every sense of the term.

At a professional development conference recently, I had the opportunity to attend a session led by a woman from the US Department of Education. She is one of about 50 advisors to Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings concerning educational policy and legislation. She was here to gain teacher input concerning No Child Left Behind and to tell us some of the changes that may be in effect as the NCLB law is reauthorized in the near future.

Many people have significant issues with the accountability system. I don't think the law is perfect, but I am not ready to discard an imperfect reform for a return to a completely broken educational system. Special education teachers seem to have more issues with the law than anyone else, and (I think) they have the most justification for their complaints.

At this session, I was so proud to be a teacher in the room. The other participants voiced their concerns in clear, calm, and professional terms. The session leader listened to the concerns, compared them to concerns from other states, and explained when federal legislation was the root of the issue and when it was really a state implementation problem. (She did this so we would know which legislators to contact for advocacy.) The most exciting part came when she explained the changes that were coming about in the law due to previous teacher input. I believe most teachers left more in favor with the law.

Except one. One woman sat in the corner with her needle work and ... I'm not sure what verb to use here. It was more than complaining. She was loud and very rude. She actually hurled insults at the presenter. She would hold the group hostage with long, rambling tirades that made little to no sense and scoffed at every response from the presenter. She looked stupid. She embarrassed herself--even if she doesn't know it--and she embarrassed this profession. What other profession would tolerate such behavior? My third graders behave better than that!

This woman came for professional development? It may be time to start developing more professionalism in this profession. Some teachers really shoot our profession in the foot as they insist on talking during faculty meetings and conferences, coming late to events, dressing in lackadaisical ways, and upholding a culture of negativity. While there has been a general shift towards professional learning communities in schools, there are some tenacious weeds still among us.

With so many products on the market for educators (including an antacid I recently saw designed specifically for teachers, whatever that means), I’m thinking about making a new “weed” killer. Except, it won’t be a spray with which we shoot persistently negative “teachers”. It will be like a health elixir that strengthens tendencies of grace and humility while inoculating against whininess and rudeness. It will drive people to shun incompetence and instill a deep desire for collaboration. Those that refuse to drink the elixir will either breathe it in from the other teachers that become intoxicated with it, or else they will slink away when they realized their attitude is futile.

I can’t tell you what good it does me to have these fantasies!

As a para-postscript, let me discuss some of this elixir’s vital ingredients: grace and humility. Actually, first let me describe what these ingredients are not. Being gracious does not mean being a doormat. Humility does not mean thinking poorly of oneself. Being gracious means treating people better than they deserve to be treated. Imagine a world of gracious people—on the road, in the grocery store, in the workroom, in the faculty meeting, in front of students. Humility is not false modesty. It is simply not thinking of yourself; it is thinking of others first and foremost. What if we all only thought of the people around us and strove to meet their needs and also treated them better than they deserve? Of course, I think we could add a few spices to this elixir: Humor, self-reflection, collaboration, professionalism, and cinnamon.

I think it should be coffee flavored.