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.

When school became parentis in absentia, educators co-opted the need to understand and respond to student behavior. School was no longer just about reading, writing and arithmetic. Quickly, we learned that when “Johnny was good, he could be oh so good; but when Johnny was bad, he could be oh so bad.” We could handle the good, but the bad has forever been a problem.

You have to be of an age to remember these strategies for responding to bad. School justice was resolved on a child’s backside with a paddle or the sole of a “Chuck Taylor All Star” Converse gym shoe. Teachers, especially male teachers and coaches, acted as the local sheriff and meted out punishment in the hallway or the locker room. Other students observed Johnny going to the hall and heard the smack and silently vowed that they would never be made to assume the position against a long row of lockers. A Chuck Taylor waffle welt lasted about an hour but was remembered for years.

Rights and wrongs were discerned with authority by a principal standing in the office doorway with arms folded across the chest and a serious frown on his brow. A principal’s frown could last for weeks and haunt the cafeteria and playground, as well as be seen looking through classroom doors at bad-doers. Often, the frown was handed down through progressive siblings and felt more like a label than a look.

School discipline in those times and places was abrupt and expected that Johnny would return immediately to the norms of the school. The only kept records were mental and emotional. Paternalistic teachers, coaches and principals dealt with the issue and/or transferred their story about bad Johnny to his pater familias. If behaviors were changed, it was due to a fear of Chuck Taylor or of a delayed justice through the student’s transcript or of what would happen when Johnny got home; if not, behaviors hardened or were stored up for potential review in the child’s adulthood.

Corporal punishment slowly was abolished by legislation and policy in many locales and an era of referral was popular at the end of the last century. When Johnny’s misbehaviors reached an indeterminate number or frequency, Johnny was referred by his teacher to the “specialists.” School counseling fell somewhere inside that indeterminate number and provided assistance in interpreting and “dealing” with Johnny. Counseling validated a need for the services of the specialists. Referral moved the problem from the classroom to another venue and once referred the initiator was relieved of the onus for responsible action. Educator pedigrees became specialized with titled positions, such as school social worker, behavioral disabilities teacher, multi-disabilities teacher, and school psychologist. The era began with Johnny being sent from the classroom for treatment and ended with the classroom being part of Johnny’s treatment.

Today, we address Johnny’s behavioral needs on the mirrored pyramid of RtI and PBIS triangles. Interestingly, no matter the era in which Johnny’s behaviors caught our attention, we faced a common dilemma in each and every instance. Or, at least, we had the opportunity to contemplate this dilemma. “What is Johnny’s choice of behavior about?” Simple question, but the coach in the locker room was more interested in quick law and order and the frowning principal needed to prevent Johnny’s behavior from infecting his classmates and a referring teacher saw a referral as a chance to spend more time teaching good Johnnies. However, “what is this behavior all about?”, remains Johnny’s persistent and haunting issue.

Belatedly, we can count and record all of the efforts expended in dealing with Johnny’s behavior against an often insufficient effort at parsing out the reason for his behavior and treating that reason(s) with a directness and compassion that Johnny may not have been able to request in his own words. This type of response typically must come from the person who deals with Johnny when and where his “badness” is exhibited – back to the educators in the classroom and playground and cafeteria and hallway. This type of response typically is very personal, as in listening to Johnny, letting Johnny’s behavior diminish from his running out of gas, confronting Johnny in non-confrontational ways, being personally direct with Johnny and spelling things out that other students may clearly understand, and protecting others from Johnny’s behavior while not ignoring Johnny. And, most importantly, a persistence and commitment to Johnny that often seems disproportionate to the distributed time devoted to all other children.

In the society of a school, upholding rules and behavioral expectations is a never ending story. In these societies, misbehavior dwells amongst a very large volume of good behaviors. Our professional value is remarkably enhanced when we are able to move Johnny’s or Julie’s behavior from problematic to acceptable. We know that no student must be angel every hour of every day, but we also know that we can help Johnny find his halo by working with him and not on him.

In 1959 I stood in a snowballer’s ambush of my fellow sixth graders on a great winter day. She came upon me from behind and I turned and threw as hard as I could, hitting Miss Knurr in the chest of her thick parka and double-layered sweaters with my best snowball. She demanded suspension, but Miss Phillips had me write “I will not throw snowballs” on tear-stained paper until Miss Knurr huffed out of the office. Then, she told me to stop writing, took my hands in hers and told me how she watched her sixth graders play baseball at recess each spring. She talked about throwing baseballs and games and she smiled the entire time and kept smiling when I apologized to Miss Knurr. Miss Phillips assigned me to dust Miss Knurr’s chalkboard erasers every day after school for the remainder of the winter and that was okay, because in happier times I would have volunteered to dust a teacher’s erasers. I know my story would have been different and properly handled had I hurt Miss Knurr, but Miss Phillips dealt with the facts and not the might-have-beens. Somewhere in that dusty time, Miss Knurr also helped me with fractions and her frown inverted into a smile.

Miss Phillips lingered with me during my 38 years of principalling. She worked to understand me and was not swept up with the mistake of a weenie-armed snowball thrower. All of my Johnnies deserved the best Miss Phillips interpretation I could give them. I constantly wondered, “Who and why are they rather than what have they done now.”

An excellent tool for understanding what bad behavior is about is “Your Can Handle Them All” by Robert DeBruyn and Jack Larson. This resource is delivered as a book or in a quick-action card deck by The Master Teacher.