Annie Savoy provided us with an educationally sound closing line for many arguments. “…it’s a fact. You could look it up.” (Bull Durham)

We have danced around the proposition that a college degree is the goal of American public education for years. Depending upon the place and time and the audience, the argument has been made that a college-level education is the best ticket to career success. Against that argument many believe that college is overrated and increasingly irrelevant. Or, college is too expensive and the subsequent years of student debt are unacceptable. Or, a technical education provides more powerful employment skills than a baccalaureate degree. Regardless, few have contemplated a well-prepared future generation without their education. Liberal arts education, professional education, technical education – it doesn’t make a difference. An education is a key to adult success. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

There are many variables that correlate with school success, but few are as compelling as the early educational advantage of children with large basic vocabularies. Although pertinent studies connect a child’s vocabulary with parental socio-economic status, the more relevant correlation is that school success is academic and the depth and breadth of a child’s academic vocabulary is a strong predictor of school success. Further, the quality of a student’s vocabulary is not only advantageous for early education but exceptionally advantageous for college and career entrance exams. Gateway exams are unforgiving of candidates whose vocabulary limits their ability to adequately make a response let alone understand the question. Academic gateways are correlated with the aspirant’s vocabulary. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

This being true, why then does vocabulary remain a subject apart in the mandated curricula of most schools? Reading, writing, spelling, language usage – these ELA topics receive the priority of our time and effort and vocabulary is treated as their very poor step-sister. The most commercial reading basals present vocabulary as a preparation for the next story the child will read. Words are treated as isolated words and are the words that the publisher or teacher believes to be interesting or important to understanding the text.

Seldom does instruction teach children the skills necessary for vocabulary building. Studies point to three linguistic skills that propel vocabulary building. http://www.edweek.org/media/proctor-silverman-harring-montecillo2012.pdf Instead of teaching words as words, vocabulary instruction should teach a student to use morphology, semantics and context as skills for building a greater depth of vocabulary. Breadth of vocabulary is a quantity of discrete words; depth of vocabulary is the quality of word relationships. Morphology, semantic and context skills help children understand the words they use as well as the new words they encounter. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

An exception to the few states that are committed to the instruction of vocabulary is the Tennessee Academic Vocabulary project that provides a vocabulary-building manual for Tennessee educators. http://www.tn.gov/education/ci/doc/VOCABULARY.pdf The Tennessee project promotes the linguistic skills of morphology, semantics and context for the instruction of approximately 400 terms and phrases per year. Of these, 131 are prescribed and 269 are to be selected by a teacher.

However, even the Tennessee project comes up short if vocabulary remains the assignment of an English/Language Arts teacher alone. 400 words annually times 13 years of schooling may produce a 5,200 word vocabulary. This is not enough! Every teacher assigned to a child must instruct the vocabulary of their subject, be it math or social studies or music or health or physical education. The Marzano study shows that the social sciences have the greatest number of basic terms and phrases, 4,352 terms as compared with 773 science terms. If left to the language arts teacher singularly, content area special terms will not be adequately learned. If five teachers, a minimal number, teach vocabulary to a child every year for thirteen years they may produce a vocabulary of 26,000 words. This is a beginning considering that an average adult will encounter 88,500 words in a lifetime of reading. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

The real proposition about the educational endgame is not the resultant degree, BA versus AA, but is the quality of the education sufficient to prepare the graduate for a successful future. One measure of this preparation must be a graduate’s ability to prosper in a world that is adding about 20,000 new words every year or one word every two minutes. It’s a fact; you could look it up.

Vocabulary cannot be an afterthought. We need to teach more and more words or our children’s academic health will starve to death.

What should you do when you reach a decision and the decision stinks?

You’ve done it and so have I. We know how it feels and as uncomfortable as it is, we usually understand that we have few options for going forward yet forward we must go. The “it” is living out a decision that was fouled from the get go. Usually we think that we exercise sound planning in considering the parameters of a decision, previewing of what a successful decision should look like, and setting the plan in motion. Usually, the plan takes a trajectory looking like what we projected. Sometimes, it does not. In our experience, when the outcome we anticipated and the outcome we achieve do not jibe, we either accept the outcome with the errors in thinking that caused it, do not accept the outcome because the errors in thinking are not acceptable, or dump the outcome and the precipitating errors and start over again. But, that is us. What happens when it is not us who have a plan that is in the dumper, but a much larger entity like a state agency? Can the big boys face the music and correct a plan that was headed wrong from the beginning? Or, like Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, do they ride the misguided mission right into the ground?

Public education in Wisconsin is undergoing many significant reforms. One major component of reform is the creation of a statewide student information system. The new SIS connects all elements of an individual child’s school life, including the child’s ID number and enrollments, the child’s SES information, grades earned, school attendance, all significant test scores, and the names of teachers who provided the child’s instruction, into one data base.

In the planning phase, it was clear that the state of student information was all over the place. Three vendors, Skyward, Infinite Campus and PowerSchool, were the major players in educational software. Some districts used locally developed software. Some data still resided in teacher grade books and reams of printed records stored in a central closet. Decision makers looked at the state of data affairs and, not liking its disorganization, drafted criteria for contracting with a single software vendor for organization and management of the new SIS. State decision making took its time, in fact, it let the process dawdle for almost two years. Now, the state has a winner! Or, do they? As soon as the plan was launched several years ago, the current stink about the selected SIS vendor was preordained by fundamental thinking that was very suspect.

Fundamentally, why do Wisconsin schools need a single SIS vendor? One vendor can create singular simplicity because all data will be defined, collected, managed, and reported using one vendor’s software. However, when there are multiple component vendors, why just one? What drove this parameter? Even though many inputs advised the benefits of a multiple vendor contract, state decision makers insisted on a single vendor contract.

Fundamentally, when three vendors provided the majority of SIS service for Wisconsin schools, why not set the contract criteria for meeting the design parameters of SIS service and if one or all of the major vendors can meet those parameters, contract with each of those vendors? SIS services in other states use parameters that allow multiple vendors to comply with the state requirements and share in the contract. What is wrong with a preferred vendor contract?

Fundamentally, if the state contract pays the winning vendor $15,000,000 for providing SIS services, what will be the cost of conversion for school districts that currently use non-selected SIS software to convert to the selected software? The greatest SIS cost is not in linking districts to the state, but in organizing and managing all of the initial data at the school and district level. What should a local district do if it has created local effectiveness and cost efficiency by unifying its administrative software for financial management, classroom grading, transportation, building management, student discipline, and special education with a single vendor, but that vendor is not the state’s winner? There always are winners and losers, but why create a system that requires extensive costs in order for the losers to align with the winner? Those districts face very large financial burdens, probably in the $100s of thousands even for small districts, in converting to the SIS vendor’s software and in training all of its personnel to use that software. This is more problematic given that the state reduced the mandated amounts of per pupil allocations for each year of the current biennial budget in order to move Wisconsin from a deficit to a surplus state budget.

Fundamentally, what if the state’s selected vendor does not reside in Wisconsin and the non-selected vendors are Wisconsin residents? And, what if the losers move their operations from Wisconsin to another state where they also do major educational business as a result of losing all of their Wisconsin school contracts? Yes, there always are losers, but can the current state of Wisconsin’s economy lose hundreds of highly paid, technical jobs and believe that the parameters of selecting a statewide SIS vendor were properly thought out?

Fundamentally, what does this model for decision making tell us about future bidding for large state contracts? Will the fundamentals of future plans result in sweet outcomes or stink like the selection of the SIS contract?

What would you or I do?

When I say these words to an adult, “… there is a way of walking with crutches so that your arms hold your weight and not your shoulders,” I can quickly separate those who have experience with walking with crutches from those who do not. Experience creates a defining understanding that can be described or shown but never fully appreciated without having the experience. Women who have experienced childbirth will always hold men at bay by saying “… it’s nothing like childbirth.” That is an experience men can conceptualize but never fathom, thanks be.

Knowing that experience is king in creating a clear understanding of a concept, imagine the disparity among children when we begin talking about a subject that some have experienced but others have not. It is no wonder that the inexperienced give us back a blank look – they have no prior knowledge of what we are trying to describe in words. However, those who have prior knowledge through personal experience leap ahead in their ability to associate our words with what they already know. What an advantage!

“A zebra is a horse with stripes.” Children who have not seen a zebra can only wonder if the stripes run from head to tail. Is there one stripe or are there many stripes? How wide are the stripes? Is the tail also striped? But, children who have been to a zoo and seen a zebra or whose parents have used picture books to show them pictures of zebras have a clear mental picture of this striped horse.

A child’s quantity and quality of background information is associated with that child’s knowledge of words and phrases associated with that information. Early studies found that children who are raised in families on welfare have about 70% of the vocabulary of children who are raised in working families and about 45% of the vocabulary of children raised in professional families. Each child’s wealth of words is derived from their exposure to the word or picture or real-world experiences.

A child who is raised looking at National Geographic magazines or whose parents have taken him on trips to the mountains or seashore or museums or who has access to many books, especially books with pictures, or whose parents watch informational television, like the Discovery Channel, has an unbelievable advantage over children who have not been exposed to these informational enrichments. Hence, new information can make sense to a child a strong with strong background information and be meaningless to children without such background.

Of course, there are concepts that children cannot experience. To an extreme, space travel is outside their experience. However, children who have read stories about long sea voyages or biographies about explorers or watched science fiction movies have experiences that help them to conceptualize what space travel might be like. Once again, a child without wide ranging reading and viewing will have more difficulty creating a semblance of space travel.

Background knowledge can be separated into information that is “school-based” or academic and information that is “non-school based” or real world. A streetwise child will have a real life advantage over a more sheltered child when both are trying to navigate an urban landscape. However, later life success as measured by career ladders and economic status is much more related to academic knowledge than real world knowledge and children who have stronger background knowledge at an early age have a real advantage in sculpting their pathway along a variety of careers and financial earnings.

That leaves teachers with the challenge of teaching around the deficit in background knowledge or working to backfill a child’s background deficit. Needless to say, teaching around a deficit only makes the deficit a greater obstacle for future learning.

Direct Method – these are first-hand experiences that a child has that provide a direct imprint of information into the child’s frame of reference. Marzano (Teaching Basic and Advanced Vocabulary, ASCD, 2010) identifies 8,007 terms and phrases in 17 subject areas. 2,845 of the terms and phrases are basic and 5,162 are advanced or related to a specific academic subject area. Marzano’s work develops a strategy that will position a child so that she has a quantitative and qualitative working vocabulary that should allow her to meet the needs of academic learning and content area specialization.

Marzano’s six-step approach to vocabulary development has application for classroom teachers and parents at home. The English language has so many terms and phrases that it is impossible to accommodate all of them through direct instruction in school. Hence, school and home can work together to build a child’s academic vocabulary.

Creating a working vocabulary of basic and advanced terms and phrases allows a child without strong background knowledge to close the gap between what they understand and what experientially-rich children understand.

Beyond direct vocabulary instruction, there are a myriad of ways to expose a child to background information. School-based field trips and parent-led family trips yield an incalculable amount of visual, hands-on experiences which are turned into the words and phrases of knowledge. Trips to museums, zoos, monuments, forests, memorials, exhibition halls, demonstrations, aquariums and planetariums, foreign lands, and even outer space are rich with information. And, every child can experience these – virtually.

The most effective and efficient strategy for indirectly growing background information is through virtual means and every school can do this. If we believe that every child can learn and succeed, we need to individualize a curriculum of virtual field trips and simulated experiences for our most background-deprived and grow them into backgrounded children.

At some time in a teaching career, a veteran mentor says something that causes you to pause, think, smile and remember. It happens many times, but each time is a new experience because each time gives you a new pearl to cherish. The greater the smiles, the more frequently the mentor’s words return to illuminate the work that we do.

Mildred Middleton was the English/language arts consultant for the Cedar Rapids (IA) schools for several decades. When I was an elementary student, exemplary writing assignments somehow found their way from the 18 elementary schools to Miss Middleton’s desk and she would show up in the classroom to bestow unbelievably encouraging words and a smile to die for.

Twenty years later in that Iowa district, I was an 8th grade social studies teacher. Miss Middleton met with almost all teachers to talk about the importance of reading and writing skills and good language usage in our varied disciplines. It was humbling to talk with Miss Middleton; she could never be Mildred or Millie to me. I still seemed to look up at her from my second grade desk even though we were talking about vocabulary development for 8th graders. As the years passed, the conversations became more clinical in her mentoring of my teaching.

“You are allowed to use the 4 Ms,” she taught me. “The challenges of what your children need to learn will not only change every year but almost every day depending upon the new learning you are introducing and the instruction you are trying to strengthen. In fact, given a single new concept to be taught to twenty children, you may need to contemplate more than a dozen ways of teaching that concept so that all children learn it.” This was long before the age of the Common Core, but her words are all the more relevant today.

“One of the greatest fallacies of teaching is the idea that a teacher, even a highly skilled veteran, knows intuitively and without error how to teach to the disparate needs of a classroom of children. We just can’t do that every day, day in and day out. Some days, we just don’t know or what we think we know doesn’t work as we think it should.

You must feel free to rely in the 4 Ms. Muddle. Meddle. Model. Monitor. The first three of these words roll off the tongue and fourth clanks, but it is the 4th M that makes the first three work.”

She taught me that muddling is the act of acknowledging that you are not clear about how to teach to a certain student or group of children. You may choose any of a number of instructional methods, but at the moment are not sure how effectively these will cause each child to learn. Muddling is the active process of considering the best initial instruction and the best instruction after that.

Meddling is another active process. Meddling is the act of trying out the instruction you have considered, adjusting your instruction, trying another method of instruction, and then considering a chain of instruction that will cause the outcomes your children need. In order to cause a particular child to learn, we may have to modify instruction for that child only while the initial strategy works for all other students. Meddling is adjusting on the fly. If we don’t meddle, then we are stuck with using the first instruction that comes to mind or the outcome of our muddle and nothing else. Often, muddling and meddling are exercised simultaneously to help us create an effective instructional design.

Once a best instructional scenario is apparent, we are obligated to model it to our children with integrity. Modeling is telling, showing, demonstrating, and illuminating what the child is to learn so that he has a clear image of what his own telling, showing, demonstrating or illuminating might look like. Then, modeling becomes sub-modeling as you teach the critical attributes that define the learning. Once a child has clear understanding of the critical attributes, the child will be able to transfer this learning to other situations where one or more of the attributes are present.

Too often, Miss Middleton would say, we just model without examining if what or how we are modeling is appropriate to the outcomes to be learned. Muddling and meddling are how we check ourselves so that we can select the best way to model new learning.

Finally, Miss Middleton taught me about the need to monitor. “You can’t wait to test. Waiting until the test only assures that you will have things to unteach if children do not connect with your instruction.”

Monitoring is looking and listening after you ask a child to show and tell you about their learning. Monitoring is passive – you look and listen to determine the accuracy of the child’s representation of what has been learned. The asking takes place immediately after modeling and throughout the duration of guided and independent practice. Whenever you see or hear evidence that the child has learned an accurate representation of the outcomes you have instructed, reinforce that learning. Whenever the evidence is not an accurate representation, stop. It is time to meddle a bit, model a bit and then monitor again.

“Don’t test until your monitoring tells you that all children have learned an accurate representation of your instruction,” Miss Middleton said.

I smile a lot when I think about Miss Middleton.

School talk. With whom do you talk to share your school doings and air your thoughts? You know – the things that raise your ire or get under your skin and nag on you until you can release their toxin by talking with someone. And, who is the first person with whom you share your successes each day? Irritation and enjoyment are the two faces of our professional work. Too often, the answer to each question is the same – no one.

Teachers are exceptionally vulnerable to the malady of isolated work. We work with children all day. We are in contact with their parents, counselors, principals and other teachers regarding these children so much that we don’t have many in-school minutes for personal conversations. Prep time is precious. After school meetings are pre-focused on standards and assessments and calendared school events. By the close of any school day, we are full of things to talk about and the pressures we face professionally make a frequent conversation a requirement for our personal and career health. We all need our place and time to talk and someone to listen.

Recent legislation has made our profession even more comparative and competitive and collegiality often does not include the sharing of confidences, at least the type of confidences required for soul-searching and elation. In the state’s public report card, what is your teacher effectiveness rating? Is it as solid as the ratings of other job-alikes in your school? Sadly, paranoia may raise its head whenever we share confidences with a colleague or with our supervisor. Are we complaining or bragging? By necessity then we need a true confidante who can hear our inner most thoughts without our fear of liability.

Every once and while the teaching gods shine on us. My wife is a teacher of special education children. She returned to teaching in the 80s when the last of our three children enrolled in school. In the mid-70s I changed from a classroom assignment to a schoolhouse assignment as a principal and in the 90s took an assignment as a superintendent. My wife and I talk about schooling every day. We talk about teaching. We talk about teaching that seems to work and why and teaching that seems to fail and why. We talk about children and their learning needs. She talks about hers and I talk about mine. We talk about the good, the bad and the ugly of our school days every day.

For the past 15 years we have held our daily talks in our hot tub. Nice! Interestingly, we installed the tub for just this purpose – our place to soak and talk. We enjoy the dual benefits of a hot soak that releases the physical tensions and a school talk that releases the professional tensions. We think that the place for our talks needs to be completely separable from a school house; the kind of place that cannot be found where we work. It doesn’t have to be a hot tub, but for us it is.

Why is daily conversation important? Because the history and tradition of classroom work isolates a teacher and in the 21st century we can no longer afford to be isolated.

When Ichabod Crane taught the children in a small hamlet in New Amsterdam, he was THE teacher. There were no other teachers within miles. Master Crane roomed with a local family taking his meals at their table and sleeping under their eaves. He walked or rode his horse alone to the schoolhouse and back each day. Master Crane did not speak of his day at school with anyone and few would have deigned to talk with him about his teaching. What did they know? THE teacher determined what was to be learned, how it was to be learned, and who did and did not learn what was taught. He lived a life of professional isolation.

Schooling did not change for more than 200 years albeit urban communities built large schoolhouses where many Master Cranes taught and lived in much the same fashion as Ichabod. Master Crane could have walked into any rural or small town school and been extremely comfortable with the professional life he found there. And, his professional life would have been very similar as a large school teacher who was singularly responsible for children in a classroom in a large building of many classrooms.

I well remember my grandmother’s small one-room schoolhouse near Fennimore, WI, where she taught in the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. A county superintendent visited her school site once each month, but on a daily basis she worked as a faculty of one. She also primed the pump each morning, ate lunch with her K-8 students in the school yard in good weather, and swept out the classroom each afternoon. My grandmother was widowed in 1946. When I visited my grandmother during the summer, she was eager to talk about the children she taught and I thought that I may well have been the first person to hear many of her stories. I heard each story over and over again because she was eager to talk about her work.

In the 1970s I was part of several school faculties with as many as 80 to 140 teachers in each school. Children came to room 223 where I caused them to learn English/language arts and world cultures in double class periods. There were four other teachers with this assignment for children in the 8th grade and we taught in classrooms spotted around the second floor of the four-story school. We teachers punched the clock in the main office each morning, taught our classes, ate lunch and took our prep periods in the teacher’s lounge and work room, and punched out each late afternoon. Professionally we wore the school’s black and orange colors and told jokes and stories to each other as we supervised the hallways, but I cannot remember professional discussions related to children, teaching, and learning. Certainly, we shared staff meetings and curriculum meetings, but those were “sit and get” meetings. No one asked important questions and or divulged important insights or professional dilemmas. It just wasn’t done.

Today, we must. Individually and collectively we must share by talking, expose by divulging, listen so that we can resolve, and work out our and our colleagues problems so that we all can improve in our profession of causing children to learn. The fate of public education rests on our ability to do so, if not our careers. We cannot afford to work in isolation of each other.

Hence, the hot tub. What is said every night in the hot tub stays in the hot tub and every morning my wife and I are able to return to the challenges of the work we love free of insignificant angst and fortified by a conversation that bolsters our good professional practice. We each tell colleagues in our respective schools about our daily hot tub talks and are encouraged by the increasing number who are finding their own time and places to talk and persons who will listen. In most cases, their conversations are sprouting up at home with a spouse or significant friend. For others, conversations are blossoming at school with fellow teachers who are willing to stay after hours and let down their professional hair. Several are texting each other about their work and one or two have created blogs to share their thoughts.

The isolated teacher needs to be as anachronistic as Ichabod Crane. Find your hot tub place and time to talk and a person to listen and prosper.