This writing will start on the firing line at a local gun club and finish on the teaching line in every Wisconsin classroom.

I have watched my friend Buzz when he shoots trap and skeet at the local gun club. Buzz is good, very good. He consistently hits 24 of 25 clays and, when he lets his rhythm and knowledge of wind and clay flight work together, he strings multiple 25s together. One of the things I enjoy about Buzz’s shooting is his preparation. Wing-type shooting is never done on a “wing and a prayer.” Buzz takes excellent care of his equipment and always is prepared to approach the shooting line. When there, he checks wind and light conditions and who else may be shooting. I watch as he sets his feet, works the kinks out of his neck, moves his eyes along the anticipated flight lines, relaxes his shoulders and, after a deep breath, quietly says “pull.” He has just the right amount of tension to cause him to react to the clay, raise his shotgun and make his shot.

His physical set up is similar for both trap and skeet. His mental set up adjusts depending upon his anticipation of trap or skeet. Trap presents a single clay flying away from the shooter. Skeet presents two clays, one coming from the shooter’s right and the other from his left, at the same time. When Buzz is ready and when he is prepared to site his targets, he is a masterful shooter.

Once in a while, Buzz finds that he is able to track the two clays on the skeet line and hit them both with one shot. This occurs with his perfect knowledge of their two flight lines and his experience in predicting that single second when each clay will be in perfect alignment with his shooting position. His joy after this expert shot would be enough to say “that’s it, it doesn’t get any better” if it weren’t for his optimism that he could do it again and again.

Buzz also is the technology director for the local schools. He assures that everyone in the school – students, faculty and staff, and administrators – are prepared with the technological tools to assist their work. That takes me from clay targets to educational targets.

Educational targeting this September presents a much different targeting dilemma for teachers than Buzz faces on the trap or skeet lines. Whereas, Buzz can always assume a “ready, aim, fire” scenario with the knowledge that a small, orange disk will be his target, teachers can only prepare for a scenario of “ready, aim, fire at which target?” Here is the problem – multiple, highly prioritized targets at the same time.

Target One – the last WKCE.

This is the last year of Wisconsin’s statewide WKCE assessment. The first target of interest is preparing children for this fall test. If this is the last year for the WKCE, why is it an important target? The 2013-14 School Report Card and School District Report Card will be based upon these WKCE data. It would be easy to slip past this last WKCE in favor of the second or third targets. However, federal and state accountability structures will use the 2013-14 student achievement data to draw conclusions about teacher and principal effectiveness and instructional competence. Also, this year’s School and School District Report Cards will be based upon this last test and local, public accountability will closely scrutinize the relationship between tax dollars and school results.

Hence, the WKCE must be a target for the first three months of the school year. After he tests are completed in November, targeting the WKCE standards and assessment is history.

Target Two – State Common Core Standards and preparation for Smarter-Balanced Assessments.

The phase out of the WKCE phases in the era of Core standards and new state assessments developed to test child proficiency on the Core standards. Whereas, there are advantages to having a revised and more focused state curriculum of standards and new assessments aligned with these standards, the Core and its assessments are much more complex and cognitively elevated compared to the WKCE standard and tests.

New targets do not mean easier targets to hit. In fact, by design there is a national acknowledgement that student achievement levels on the first of the new assessments will be significantly below student achievement levels on past, older assessments. This reality makes Target Two a very important instructional priority for teachers and school leaders this fall. This reality will cause damage control; how can educators lessen the decline in student performance levels from large differences to smaller differences. Almost no one is anticipating an equal or improved student performance level on the new assessments.

Target Three – closing achievement gaps.

The School and District Report Cards place a very high value on “equity and equality” of education for all children. Much of the data displays the achievements of special groupings of children – special education, English Language Learners, economically disadvantaged, gender – compared with the achievements of regular education children, typically white, English-speaking, middle class and more affluent.

When taken as a whole, most schools and school districts in Wisconsin demonstrate very favorable student achievement. The higher achievement of the high numbers of children in regular education overshadows the lower achievement of the smaller numbers of children in the special categories. New Report Card does not average all the data, but highlights any disparities in these data. In almost all schools and school districts in Wisconsin there are achievement gaps, often large dissimilarity, between children in regular education and those in the special categories even though they all attend the same classes and receive the same general education.

Target Three demands that teachers take special aim at children in disaggregated categories and provide “whatever” instruction is required to cause all children to achieve similar, high results on future state assessments. “Whatever” instruction is any and all teaching that can cause similar, high achievement results for all children.

Target Three is immediately important but will take years to accomplish. It is driven by political/economic accountability measures that are very significant to schools and school districts and these make Target Three very important this fall.

Targets One, Two and Three each are important for teacher attention this fall. Each target will present public results in the spring 2014 and the spring 2015 School and School District Report Cards. Target confusion, anyone?

I think that my friend Buzz would step back from the firing line if he was confronted with a similar problem – trap and skeet at the same time. Clays will be flying in three different directions on two different planes simultaneously. Sometimes, even for the technologically gifted, things must be scratched out in the dirt. I foresee Buzz drawing possible trajectories in the ground with a stick looking for a solution for hitting all three clay with two shots and limited time when he steps to the line. How much time and concentration must he devote to each target so that all targets can be hit? I also foresee many superintendents, principals and teachers scratching out their possible trajectories for meeting the demands of education’s Target One, Target Two, and Target Three this year and in the future with their limitations of instructional time and human effort.

If Buzz misses the three clays and Maggie’s Drawers are raised, a traditional sign of failed shooting, he can come back to the club next week to try again. The clays don’t know he missed and the public is unaware. Buzz is an avocational shooter. However, if educators raise Maggie’s Drawers after failing to hit Target One, Target Two and Target Three, children will know and the public will take note.

Ready. Aim. Fire at all targets. Good luck!

Finding really strong teachers is not easy. Principals and superintendents must look closely at every teacher and teacher candidate to find expert pedagogues.

If a teacher was an onion you would find that, as in a bushel of onions, teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and flavors. As every onion in the bushel is an onion, some are stronger in their onion-ness than other onions, the same may be said of a faculty of teachers. Teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes and disciplines and some teachers are stronger in their ability to teach than other teachers. If you peel an onion layer by layer, the first layers typically are very generic, the next several layers begin to taste and smell more like an onion, and finally you arrive at the core layers, the essential essence, that make your fingers smell and your eyes water.

If you peeled a teacher like an onion, what is at the core of a really strong teacher that causes you to stop because you know without a doubt that you have reached the essential essence of expert teaching? The outer layers of a teacher would expose a formal and advanced education, the result of years of schooling. There would be a paper layer with a state seal that certifies this person as a licensed teacher. These layers are only dressing.

Underneath the externals of a really strong teacher would be layers of humanity and compassion for children. Perhaps there is recognition of earlier life experiences when the teacher realized that helping others was personally fulfilling. There may be the kernel of cognition that teaching is a calling, an undeniable and innate drive that cannot be ignored.

So far, you have not reached anything that is essential. Weak and average teachers bare these credentials. More peeling is required.

The next layers expose a significant difference between an onion and a teacher. The core layers of an onion though strong are cool, much cooler than the exterior layers. The core layers of a really strong teacher are hot, much hotter than what appears in the outer layers. The heat derives from the dynamic energy required to work an expert skill set of pedagogy in order to cause a student to learn. In terms of the physics of learning, the teacher exerts forces intended to move the knowledge, skill sets, and thinking and problem solving processes of a learning student toward a learning objective. Learning is displacement; what was becomes something new. It takes expert work to cause great displacement and this work generates a heat which in turn warms up and fuels future teaching.

At the core of a really strong teacher is an internalized pedagogy, the science of manipulating a student’s readiness for learning with learning procedures that cause a student to learn. This harmonized core connects the student to what is to be learned, provides incremental and explicit modeled instruction of what is to be learned, exercises the student’s ability to understand or do what is to be learned until the student can exhibit what has been learned independent of the teacher, corrects errors the student makes in his practice and strengthens correct behaviors while incrementally extending the difficulty and complexity of the student’s abilities, and, finally, connects what has been learned with what is to be learned next. The pedagogy needed for one student to learn successfully may be totally different than the pedagogy needed for another student to learn successfully. A really strong teacher understands the mystery inherent in designing and executing expert teaching.

A really strong teacher stands out from the rest of the faculty. Sadly, as in a bushel of onions where there may be only a few really strong onions, there typically are only a few really strong teachers in a faculty.

Hence, it is the job of educational leadership to be picky.

Select teachers for the children of your school even more carefully than you select onions and other produce. Typical interviewing strategies keep the veil of secondhand information between the interviewer and the candidate. Most recommendations are social and talk around the essence of a really strong teacher.

Spend time getting a feel for a teacher’s pedagogical strength. Invest in the time necessary to personally observe the candidate. Nothing replaces what you see and intuit about the candidate. Video files are close but not good enough.

Verify a teacher’s effect upon all children. Good teachers are able to cause very capable children to learn. Children with distractions are more difficult. A really strong teacher does not stop after the capable have learned but persists until all children have learned. Observing how the teacher engages the distracted reveals the strength of pedagogical skills.

It is a truth that the effect of really good teaching will last a life time whereas the after taste of a really good onion passes in days. Sadly, the effects of average or less than good teaching last about as long as the after taste of an onion.

The following article supports the concept of the expert pedagogue.

“In Pursuit of the Expert Pedagogue” Author(s): David C. Berliner Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 15, No. 7 (Aug. – Sep., 1986), pp. 5-13

Teachers cause students to learn. Let’s expand this. Expert teachers use their mastery of instructional strategies and learning to “cause” all students to demonstrate their incremental mastery of significant and enduring knowledge, skills and problem solving strategies and their capacity to become self-learners.

There was a time when other verbs were employed to describe a teacher’s work. Often the verbs were complex and soft. Teachers hope to… Teachers try to … Teachers attempt to … Teachers design lessons that … The verbs were tentative as there was no clear resolution that whatever teachers might do indeed would have definite and predictable results. It always seemed as if “chance” was inferred in the act of teaching. There is a chance that teachers will … Verbs were purposefully tentative just in case students didn’t learn. In fact, the choice of verbiage opened the door for learning failure or some students to learn while others did not.

In today’s public education, “chance” can no longer be tolerated. The chance of failure has real and dire repercussions for a teacher’s employment, a school’s reputation in the era of choice, and a school district’s accountability to its taxpayers and governmental watchdogs.

Today is a new day. We have the force of mandates. No longer is curriculum, including content knowledge, academic skill or problem solving, a local decision. The majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and mathematics. Although there is debate regarding the proposed CCSS science standards, it is not likely that local control will be the default. Government is in control. Federal funds are tied to educator effectiveness and dictating that each state use student performance data and “best instructional practices” data to evaluate teachers and their continued employment. No EE means no or lesser funding. Republicans have tightly tied the strands of school performance management and funding with school choice. Soft and tenuous connections between teaching and learning leaves too much to chance and teachers, schools and school districts will not survive on chance.

“Cause” is the appropriate verb to describe teaching and learning. It is affirmative and it is active. Teachers are the agents in moving students from NOT knowing or doing or thinking about something new or different to students actually knowing, doing and thinking about something new or different. Teachers teach and students learn. The connection is causation. Students learn because teachers teach and teachers teach to cause learning. It is difficult to conceive of a better word that describes a purposeful connection between teaching and learning.

Merriam-Webster tells us that cause is a transitive verb meaning “to compel by command, authority, or force.” In almost all usages, cause as a verb is related to a perpetrator of action and to a result of the action. Somebody or something takes an action that results in something new or different. When “cause” is used as a verb something happens.

There is a great list of synonyms that demonstrate this sense of action. They are: beget, breed, bring about, bring on, catalyze, effect, create, do, draw on, effectuate, engender, generate, induce, invoke, make, occasion, produce, prompt, result (in), spawn, translate (into), work, and yield. (Merriam-Webster) These words add color and texture to the image of teaching as an intentional act executed for the purpose of causing learning while maintaining the act of causation.

Attach the power of causation to highly focused teaching strategies prescribed for specific students and learning loses its element of chance. Then, add the persistence of RtI and learning becomes much more certain.

Teachers cause students to learn.

The discussion about public education is blessed and cursed by the fact that most adults in the United States are educated. Let’s investigate several facts regarding this state of affairs.

Fact one is this – most adults have some level of personal experience in a school and their view of education is based on their childhood experiences. On the positive side, this is a good fact. Democracy and a free enterprise economy function best with an educated populace. The nation advanced through the 19th and 20th centuries on the rising wave of the education and training of its workforce. And, the world economy in the 21st century will rest on the quality of education worldwide. Education remains a society’s best investment in its people and it is good to have an educated public.

On the negative side, this is a worrisome fact. Just because a person experienced the student’s perspective of education as a child does not mean that he or she has any insight or wisdom into how today’s educational systems work best. When I was a child, I saw as a child, thought as a child and perceived as a child regarding my experiences as a student. Now, as an adult, I no longer am experiencing public education first-hand, so I cannot automatically say, as an adult, I see as an adult, think as an adult, and perceive as an adult regarding my experiences as a child in school. An adult’s perception of his or her student experiences remain the experiences of their childhood. A child’s school experiences are not adult experiences although most adults overly simplify and summarize their experiences as a school child as if they are as clear as yesterday. They are not.

Current thinking gives great credence to a parent’s right and need to advocate for their child’s education. However, being a parent does not bring an adult any closer to being wise about public education. The wisdom of a parent really is that of two children – their experience as a child plus the experience of their child. Parent wisdom about school is a lot like the advertisement for Holiday Inn Express being a smart choice for the traveling public. “I can be an airplane pilot because I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.” One does not know more about education by being a student; one knows more about being a student.

Back to the facts. Fact two is this – it is very easy and popular today to be a critic of public education. This is very much like a person who drives a car being critical of the condition of local streets. There is a real indignation when the driver who pays taxes for the maintenance of the streets hits a pot hole. Most of the time, the driver is impervious to the street because he does not feel any of its cracks or seams. His car’s suspension and his own sense of a “ride” accept most imperfections in the street’s surfaces. Potholes, however, awake the driver’s criticism of all streets in general, just as a negative report, US math scores do not compete internationally, the high school dropout rate approaches 50% in some urban schools, or a school shooting, awakes the education critic. There is nothing like a pothole or a flash reporting of comparative achievement gaps to get critics’ jaws flapping. Like the seemingly smooth ride on many streets, the daily successes of so many students in so many schools can quickly be forgotten by a glaring statistic or singular event.

As the general public’s judgments about public education are biased by their childhood experiences and their critical eye typically is wagged by glaring statistics and flash events, national policy is further bruised by our governmental leaders’ misunderstanding of the essential and critical element in the quality of student learning – a child’s teacher. Another fact emerges. Fact three – education is not about policy and regulations or about its standards or testing programs. It is is about learning. As a teacher’s purpose is to cause learning, the presence and work of expert teachers is the most important variable in the quality of student learning.

Why, then, do governmental leaders treat teachers as pawns in non-educational political agenda and policy. One rationale for politico-educational game playing is historic. Teachers’ salaries are paid by taxpayers and school tax bills are very significant every January when homeowners receive their annual tax assessment. It is easy to point at teachers as a cause of high taxes or tax increases. Secondly, the tradition in this country is that teachers historically work nine months for relatively low salaries and teachers typically are women. Women work for less and “seasonal” workers should work for even less. Teachers are a caste of public servants.

A second rationale is Republican political-economic policy. Democrats support public education and teacher unions support Democrats. When Democrats are in power, public education is favored. When Republicans are in power, public education is disfavored. Republican governors and legislators find it easy to point at public education as a manipulative for balancing state budgets while punishing Democrats and Democratic support. Wisconsin’s recent history is more than a case in point.

The Wisconsin budget deficit was repaired by the provision of legislated tools given to local expense-strapped school boards. After state allocations to school districts were drastically reduced to balance annual state spending with lower state revenues, school boards were left with a lop-sided proposition – less revenue and continuing and increasing expenses. Concomitant with reduced allocations, the legislature eliminated the scope and power of collective bargaining so school boards were given the tools to slash health care benefits and post-retirement benefits for teachers thus rebalancing local revenues with local expenses. Reduced revenue plus reduced expenses was not a zero sum game. The real reduction was in the scope of local school programming. Diminished school district budgets typically are balanced by reductions of the districts major expense – teacher employment.

The result of the new political-economic policy has been a tremendous turnover in teacher employment. For the most part, a larger number of veteran teachers have left and a smaller number of inexperienced teachers are being hired. Let us return to fact one and two. From the adult perspective, this evolving educational environment is politically and economically reasonable. From their adult perspective with public education, these are the ways in which adults shape and direct the schools which educate their children. It is an adult view of the world and of the public education they think they remember from their childhood.

From the child’s perspective of their school and education, it is adults being adults and not knowing what really matters. A fifth grade child knows fifth grade and only gets one chance at fifth grade. If the music or the reading or the math program in the elementary school is reduced or the experienced teacher is displaced for an inexperienced teacher, the learning of music, reading or math suffers. Interestingly, there is mathematics to this change in learning. It just is not a momentary disruption or gap, it is geometric. As adults, we remember fifth grade as the year of fractions. Fractions and the ability to manipulate fractions are key to the learning of Algebra. Trouble with fractions is trouble with Algebra and trouble with Algebra is trouble with higher mathematics. Trouble with higher mathematics is loss of performance on international tests and that loss of performance yields one more flash report that is critical of public education. On a different scale, a loss of music or arts programming influences future cultural growth. Loss of reading advancement in fifth grade from narratives to greater amounts of technical reading influences future capacity for understanding and inferring the detailed data required of technical careers.

When adults muck around with public education using their adult perspectives of schooling, they have the potential to create significant unforeseen and unintended consequences. There is every reason for adults who have the power to muck around with public education to invest real time to sit in a child’s desk in a local school, to get the feel of being a child learning as a child and a teacher teaching important learning to children. Real time is not the gratuitous hour-long visit to a local school with standing in a doorway listening to sounds of a classroom. It certainly is not adults sharing stories of their childhood experiences of the secondhand experiences of their children. Real time is sitting alongside a child for the continuity of a lesson and observing learning until the child demonstrates the learning objectives. Real time is sitting alongside a teacher who works through the alternative instruction needed to cause all children to learn. Real time is shadowing various children from different socio-economic strata to understand how life outside of school affects learning in school.

Real time is creating an adult understanding of how important Fact One is. All children must be educated. Real time is creating a clearer understanding of Fact Two. The number of successes in public education vastly outnumbers the flash reports and events that form the daily news. Real time is creating a non-political agenda for education regardless of the party in power. The education of the public is not a revenue and expense equation. Education is an investment in the future of people that pays dividends that greatly exceed temporary disparities in multimillion and multi-billion dollar budgets.

Education is about learning and learning is about people, many of whom are children. Education is about quality teaching and teachers who know how to cause children to learn. Adult decisions about education must include more thinking like and on behalf of real children today than about adults making decisions for adults.

“I don’t want to be my heart surgeon’s first patient,” is a way of saying “experts only wanted here.” Perhaps in the circumstance of heart failure in the high plains of Nevada on a road known as “America’s loneliest highway” a rookie heart surgeon would be a first choice. Other than that event, give me expertise every day.

“I don’t want my five year old to be her teacher’s first student,” is a way of saying the same thing about expertise in teaching. And, the lack of expertise in early childhood education may be as deathly for a child as a lack of cardiac expertise for an adult. Consider the dim reality of decades of living with a poorly ignited curiosity or misshapened reading and writing skills or a disinterest in competence. “Cut out my heart and feed it to the dogs.” (Shakespeare In Love, 1998).

Happily, there are expert teachers just as there are expert heart surgeons. Two examples of real people.

Ms. Lucas is the liveliest, most engaging, most informed and the most professionally introspective of teachers. How else could higher level mathematics be the most popular and most productive series of courses in a college preparatory high school? “I teach; therefore, I am,” is her credo. Using her finely tuned Hunteresque (Madeline Hunter) instructional strategies, she frames a lesson both in what students already know and what they are about to learn, presents and models instruction, and works the board using old fashioned chalk with reasoning and logic that turns on student lights of understanding. Then, she flips the responsibility for learning with demanding problems for student resolution. Finally, she grasps a student by his intellectual nose and won’t let go until he properly makes a coherent mathematical statement. Then, another student’s “nose” and another until all students have mastered the lesson. Interestingly, her strongest skill is her listening. For all of her excitement and energy, she can be very quiet as she listens to how a student’s mental processing has led to that student’s resolutions. Then, surgically, she assists the student to strengthen or break down, rebuild and strengthen his mathematical thinking.

Ms. Lucas is an expert because she knows that education is about learning, she knows how to treat students as individual learners needing personalized instruction, and she knows how to make higher mathematics curious and once she has tweaked her students’ curiosity they are committed to learning.

Ms. Thomas caused her Kindergarten children to be excited. Who in their right mind wants to make five year olds more excited than they naturally are? An expert teacher does. Tradition-bound colleagues become tightlipped in Ms. Thomas’ classroom. It appears chaotic. Learning centers on rounds of carpeting overlap one another. There are bins of crayons and pencils and scissors and tape everywhere. Children do not have to search for instruments of creativity. Although she has 14 students there are more than 35 chairs and airbags for children to sit on in different places around the room. Learning is not about sitting in one place doing one thing in unison with others.

She sings when children enter the room each morning. Children sign many of their lessons regarding letter sounds and sight words and early numeracy concepts. Children solo all the time and the class applauds the soloist. “Adam, tell us about the picture you have drawn. Use these four words somewhere in the story you tell us.” Applause. “Katie, pronounce these words. Tell us why the vowel at the end of the word is silent.” Applause.

Ms. Thomas sits on the floor with a cluster of children while other children work at tables or on the floor behind a book case. Without appearing to look, she knows what and how those outside her cluster are doing. In a few minutes, the cluster finishes, she moves to a small chair at a table and a new cluster forms around her. She listens, asks questions, praises, comments and directs and moves on. Hugging is prominently displayed in Ms. Thomas’ classroom. Usually it is a small child running to her, wrapping small arms around her knee, getting a pat on the shoulder or back and then moving toward a learning center that has drawn the child’s curiosity.

First, second and third grade teachers know which of their children were in Ms. Thomas’ Kindergarten. They fidget more than other students, volunteer more, are more verbal and typically demonstrate better reading, writing and arithmetic performances. They still hug, but not as often. And, they sing to themselves.

Ms. Thomas is an expert because her classroom is a display of early childhood development. She incorporates learning inside movement and song and experiences of the moment. She expects and promotes diverse learning needs from her children and acts in ways that celebrate the unusual response. She is the oldest Kindergartener in the classroom.

The quality of teaching in school’s faculty exhibit quite a range of skill sets. At a minimum, there are teachers who are about the work of teaching. But, they do not cause significant learning. They lack the skills of diversification and personalization, a constant focus on significant outcomes, and the pedagogical skills to refine academic understanding and skills until all children are able to perform the targeted outcomes. School leaders know the different capacities of their faculty members. They know who is just teaching and who is causing learning. They also know that a ten year veteran may have no more skills than a first year teacher because there has been no discernible growth in expertise – the tenth year looked just like the first year, good enough for initial employment.

Is there room any longer on the faculty roster for a teacher who cannot cause learning? Given a choice, should a patient in need of heart surgery be provided an expert or a name preceded by Dr.? And, should a child…