Tag Archives: teacher effectiveness

No Time For Dull Teaching Tools

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I turn wood on a lathe.  A sharp edge on a steel tool is required to ensure clean cuts expose the beauty of the wood and the shapes I design.  As a rule, I sharpen a chisel or gouge after 15 to 20 minutes of use.  The contrast between using a sharp or dull chisel is apparent when I stand back and examine my work.  Dull tools leave torn and ragged wood fibers, uneven edges, and the appearance of sloppy craftsmanship.  Products I will not display.  Who would choose to use tools that are not sharp?

How does this apply to causing learning?

Professionally speaking, sharp tools also cause better results.  A professional tool is a strategy or methodology used to cause a positive response or to eliminate an unwanted outcome.  Some professional tools are hardened steel, but most are mental or dispositional or best practices for doing the work.  Prospective teachers in their teacher preparation programs learn a variety of pedagogical strategies for causing children to learn content, skills, and ways of considering their world.  They take methods classes and use student teaching to practice and learn to apply the strategies of teaching.  This is an introduction to the tools of their profession.

A teaching tool is the philosophical construct used to design units and lessons of instruction.  Sharply cut designs engage children with questions and problems and ideas that get into each child’s head at the start of a unit or lesson.  Good designs cause children to want to know what comes next.  Every lesson in a unit needs to fit into this pre-conceived pathway along which the teacher uses other specific teaching tools to shape student knowledge, skills, and dispositions for learning. 

Teaching tools include strategies for introducing and engaging children in a daily lesson, leading a discussion with insightful questions, using positive reinforcement to strengthen learning outcomes, or reflection and reteaching to correct or strengthen lesson outcomes.  Drill down on any of these, the use of positive reinforcement for example, for the explicit words, phrases, body language, and context for giving a child reinforcing positive messages.  Each teacher will find their personal use of specific words, a way of saying those words, and a way of looking at a child when saying the words that causes the most positive reinforcement for that child.  This is a sharp tool.  Conversely, using the dull tool of a casual comment leaves a child unsure of the strength of their learning, uncertain that their learning matters, and more likely to disengage.

While there are general pedagogical tools used by all teachers, there also are grade level and subject area tools that are required across the 4K-12 continuum.  Down on your knees physical proximity to a young student works wonders but not so much with a high schooler.  Shared glee with a kindergarten child is not only contagious but an essential tool shaping their young ownership of their learning.  Inquiry and problem-based learning strategies are strong tools for social studies teachers.  Sharply honed lessons with timely propositions, strategic access to resources, time outs for “tell me what you know and what you need to know next”, and opportunities for differentiated presentation of results hook children into being avid learners at all ages. 

Specific tools are used by teachers of children with special education and gifted educational needs.  Some exceptional needs children need tasks and ideas broken down into smaller tasks and ideas with special consideration for sequencing and pacing and reinforcement.  Others require more room for creativity than the classroom and teaching skills and mentoring that push the teacher as much as the student.

And, the universe of teaching tools is constantly being added to and modified, even though we think good teaching practices are timeless.

How often does an educator stand back to inspect the effects of her teaching tools – the sharpness of her teaching practices?  Inspection is a meta-self-analysis of a teaching practice and the individual tools a teacher uses to shape student learning.  It requires taking lessons apart after they are taught for tool inspection.  “What did I say and what did I do?  And, how did students respond?”. 

Once examined, how often do we resharpen our teaching tools?  Sharpening is focusing on the “What did I say and what did I do” that could be reworded to provoke a clearer meaning, a more specific direction, a more illustrative modeling, or a leave a student with a better understanding.  Sharpening is changing unit and lesson designs to ensure that the next time the lesson is taught, the teacher will use these sharper tools.

The children we teach are our products.  Sharp teaching tools cause children to be successful learners and achieve educational outcomes we can be proud of displaying.  Just as in wood turning, dull teaching tools cause dull products.  How often do we inspect – not often enough.

Why is thus?

  • Every teacher is the product of a teacher-as-student academic preparation program.   The teacher-as-student learns the content knowledge and skills to be taught and the pedagogical tools of teaching.  Colleges and post-baccalaureate teacher prep agencies provide the prospective teacher with an initial toolbox of teaching skills.  Learned and practiced in student teaching, these are the tools a teacher brings to her first classroom.  This academic and sheltered preparation is intended to be adequate for her to be a successful teacher of children.
  • The first year on the job is a test drive of teaching skills.  Just like a new car owner test drives a vehicle that has passed assembly line inspections yet needs to be road tested to create confidence and assurance, a first-year teacher tests her tools against the realities of school and a classroom of children.  Absent mentor observation and coaching, the test driver also is test assessor.  Yikes!  It is hard to make critical self-assessments while trying to steer a test drive.
  • We assume that continuous practice keeps teaching tools sharp.  However, the school year is a constantly moving conveyor belt of units and lessons.  The school calendar does not stop for an inspection of tools, or the effects caused by teaching tools.  A teaching tool literally is used and placed back in the teacher’s toolbox for a next use without dedicated inspection or consideration of its sharpness.  The pace of schooling creates its own obstruction to tool inspection and sharpening.  The calendar presents little to no time to do so.   
  • Each child and class of children is like a new specie of wood to be turned on a lathe.  A teaching strategy that worked well in causing one child or one class to learn may not be as efficient or effective with other children.  Tools are constantly being modified rather than remaining constant, hence sharpening a tool is sharpening a constantly changing tool.
  • Teacher evaluation systems take a broad view of teaching effectiveness and efficiency.  Pedagogical skill is less than 25%, perhaps 10%, of the evaluation process.  Wisconsin’s Effective Educator system looks at planning and preparation, learning environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.  Inspection of effective teaching tools is smothered by non-instructional concerns.  Combine a flaccid EE with the statutory fiat prohibiting the use of student achievement scores on state mandated assessments to describe a teacher’s effectiveness and the sharpness of teaching tools falls out of evaluation conversations.

What to do

When facing obfuscation, don’t go there.  Obfuscation is all the reasons we tell ourselves or others that the status is okay or even very good.  Or, it is the reasons we accept for why we cannot change.  Instead, make new declarations for improvement of teaching tools at the school site level.

Principals need to declare that the conscientious use of universal learning designs is prioritized by all teachers.  If adopting UDL, declare that a teacher’s application of UDL will be part of the teacher’s professional development and professional evaluation.  Tools that are embedded in UDL need constant professional discussion, demonstration, refinement, and critical examination.  Walk the talk of engagement, representation, and action/expression.

Use lesson studies.  Record teachers’ classroom teaching and establish collegial, non-evaluative study groups to provide the teacher with feedback on what they see in the recordings.  When every teacher records and every teacher provide feedback, every teacher grows sharper teaching practices.

In the sequence of professional development make learning new teaching tools, refining teaching tools, sharing knowledge and experience of teaching tools, and evaluating the effectiveness of teaching tools in causing student learning an essential part of the school culture.  Important things in school a given time in the calendar; give discussion and examination of teaching important.

Don’t abide teaching that is chronically not sharp.  I have known some great people, really kind and caring people, people who will do everything asked of them at school, who could not teach a coherent lesson.  They did not have nor did they work at acquiring sharp teaching skills.  Help them find their way to another profession.

The Big Duh!

Teaching children is the most important profession in the world.  It also is incredibly hard.  And, teaching is impossibly hard without efficient and effective teaching skills.  We no longer can assume that skills learned in a baccalaureate program are sharp enough to last a career.  Professional development of our pedagogy needs to be a way of life for every teacher.  If it isn’t sharp, sharpen it.  If it can’t be sharpened, find a new tool.  If professional work isn’t sharp, find a new professional.

Ernie in the Back Row – The Reality of Educational Reform

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“Hey, Ernie! Yes, you in the back row of the faculty meeting where you have been sitting it seems like forever. Do you remember telling us ‘I’ve seen educational changes come and go. All I have to do is sit here and do nothing. I can teach the way I always have taught. It is all a tempest in a teapot and in the end nothing will have changed.’ Were you right? Have any of the reform mandates of the past thirty years done anything to change your teaching?”

In the 1980s and 90s Dr. Madeline Hunter was nationally active helping classroom teachers better understand the connections between learning theories and instructional design. For many teachers, her insights into how teaching using motivation, retention and reinforcement theories, to name just a few, significantly improved the ability of all children to learn and to repeat exceptional learning year after year. For other teachers, Dr. Hunter upset the applecart. Hardcore veteran teachers like Ernie had been using the same teaching techniques that their teachers had used in the 40s, 50s and 60s in their own teaching for years, if not decades,. Dr. Hunter recognized that educational reform was a process that some teachers would engage in gladly, others would learn over time, and some, not many, would be “Ernies.” Ernie was her name for the veteran teacher who was change oppositional. Ernie believed that his tried and true teaching, generally based upon lecture and rote learning, had worked over the ages and would work for him as long as he was in a classroom.

Needless to say, Ernie has seen an eyeful in the last thirty years. Just the intellectual reforms based upon learning and teaching theories have been amazing. Hunter’s Instructional Design. Outcome-Based Education. Understanding by Design. Framework for Teaching. Assessment FOR Learning. Whole Child Education. And, the list goes on. Interestingly, none of these reforms every threatened Ernie’s unwavering opposition to change. Why should they. Ernie observed that no teachers in the 80s and 90s were removed from their teaching positions due to their non-changeability.

Ernie probably sat up a little straighter in 2001 when No Child Left Behind was enacted as a federal plan for reforming public education. It was not the voice of President Bush expounding the urgency for the United States to repair its declining international status in educational assessments. It was not the infusion of federal dollars into Title programs that opened new teaching positions and purchased a flood of new teaching materials. And, it was not state governors extolling their legislatures to adopt NCLB regulations so that state budgets could be buffered with educational dollars. What caught Ernie’s attention was the doomsday clock of Adequate Yearly Progress. No matter the level of reading and math achievement of the students in Ernie’s school in 2001, by the spring of 2014 100% of all students were required to be proficient in state assessments or teachers would be fired and schools were going to close. It was the law.

For the first time in Ernie’s long memory, federal and state leadership said “What you are doing right now is not good enough. Do whatever it takes to meet the mandates of NCLB. If you can’t get the job done, we will fire you and find someone who can.” A mandate with the promise of enforcement was entirely new to Ernie, but as often as he was told “NCLB is the law and it is for real,” he still wondered what would happen if a great number of schools failed to make AYP. Would the Governor really fire all the teachers and take control of all those schools? So, Ernie waited and continued to teach as he always had taught and the academic achievements of his students continued to fall into the bottom of the “bell curve.” By 2007, 28% of all schools were failing to make AYP. The next year 38% of school failed to make AYP and USDE Secretary Duncan warned Congress that by 2011 82% of all schools would fail to make AYP if the rules of NCLB were not changed.

“Ah,” said Ernie. “Told you so.” State after state petitioned the USDE for relief from the AYP mandates of NCLB. “Ain’t nobody going to close schools or fire teachers now,” said Ernie, who had not changed his teaching practices one iota. He knew from his seat in the back of the faculty meetings that “change comes and change goes and, if you are smart, just sit back and do nothing. It will all blow over.”

But. Wait. NCLB did not entirely go away and the quid pro quo of the waivers caught Ernie’s attention. Academic standards were still in, but not the Common Core. School Report Cards replaced AYP and schools would be graded according to student performance in reading and math, attendance and graduation, and the quantitative gap in the academic achievements of mainstream white children and children of color and children with learning disadvantages. And, all teachers would be given a Teacher Effectiveness Index score based upon their use of effective teaching strategies and annual student achievement in reading in math. To top it off, all of this data would be publicly accessible on a statewide data base – the School Effectiveness Dashboard. Anyone in Ernie’s school district could dive into the data to find out how well Ernie’s students performed on the state assessments and how his school principal rated Ernie’s application of the Framework for Teaching.

“Really,” said Ernie. “I have been in my classroom since the 80s and after all the huffing and puffing I am still in my classroom. Let’s wait a little longer and see.”

Ernie was right once again. The state legislature botched the contracting for a statewide data system, renamed and adopted the Common Core academic standards saying “it would be nice if you taught these”, and dropped the evaluative features of the School Report Card system. The Report Card became an annual snapshot with no accountability features.

It may be that Ernie will retire this year. He has been in the classroom long enough to receive a full pension. Actually, it may be that Ernie has been retired for years but did not choose to leave his classroom. After all, his annual salary is greater than his annual pension and regardless of what he did in the classroom he still collected his paycheck. Next fall, we’ll look to the back row of the first faculty meeting of the year. Ernie may still be there. And, if not our Ernie, there still will be other Ernie’s slouched down low in their chair gazing out over a constantly reformed schoolscape that never really changes.