How to measure a teacher's effectiveness

A funny thing happened to me when I spotted a blog posting this a.m.:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/what-makes-for-an-effective-teacher/61565/

In this posting, the author describes in colorful language the upcoming "outing" of bad teachers in LA by the LA Times. What's in store is a public posting of standardized test scores and how teachers rank. Ouch! I found this development disturbing. So I answered this guy as follows:

"Wow! I am a future educator being schooled in the midwest, and I'm taking in all the wild changes around me. Hard for me to believe that we are posting teachers's "effectiveness" publicly, as if this were part of a crime-watch series.

How students fare on standardized tests is often a reflection on their socioeconomic status, and perhaps how diligently their state, district, or school reinforces test-taking. Must we resort to this "got ya" mentality to produce world class American workers? I hope not, or we may force more great people to leave the teaching profession (or not enter it at all).

I'm all for accountability - and perhaps standardized tests should make up one component of assessing teacher effectiveness - but this big stick approach creates a culture of fear and resentment. Trust me, I just left the working world, where "perfect execution" was the mantra. The result: low morale, fear of making mistakes, mediocrity.

We all want high motivation, innovation and fast results in our schools. How about we set aside the politics and posturing and focus on solutions that we can all celebrate? It's our future we're playing Russian Roulette with."

I rest my case.

--Joe

P.S. Technology suggestion: Let's plant a chip in every teacher's brain to measure their time spent on cognitive activities. We can plot that on an x/y axis against time. This will measure both efficacy and efficiency.

What are you doing for your summer vacation?

Thanks for asking.

I've been very busy writing papers which are due this month. I'm trying to get ahead so I can actually relax for a week or two this month. I finally have time to read real live books too, so I am relishing some Faulkner now: As I Lay Dying. Wow, what a whiz he was with dialogue and interior dialogue.

On the sidelines I've been watching the political battles over funding of public jobs such as teachers, firemen, policemen, etc. I am grateful that at least some of our representatives have the courage to do the right thing for this country. The dollars allocated to Michigan are woefully inadequate ($319 MM), but at least there is some relief on the way.

Since our last class on Friday, July 30, I've been giving a lot of thought to what the former MAC'ers were saying about the job market, their advice on getting our portfolios together early, and of course, their use of creativity and technology to keep their students engaged. To me that was a perfect way to end the summer session. It gets us out of the forest, so we can think big picture about how we will use this amazing program to launch our careers as teachers.

In the meantime I'm checking out blogs on technology when I can find them. The latest I saw documents an inner city teacher's frustration with trying to execute a great unit in English using laptops. Unfortunately, he was thwarted by numerous obstacles such as broken laptops, restricted internet access, inconsistency of software loaded onto the machines, and so on. I will definitely take the oft-mentioned advice to connect with the media resource person. Lucky that I will have one where I'm headed. I'll keep my fingers crossed that they have all kinds of under-utilized devices that I can make use of.

Otherwise, thank God for A/C. I melt in this humidity and heat. I am very excited about getting into the classrooms in less than a month!

Rest up, folks.

--Joe

What would you do with $8.7 billion?

A "minor" story the other day on NPR revealed that the Inspector General overseeing government spending for Iraq found that $8.7 billion has not been "accounted for." 15% of the money we've spent on this war was lost. Could someone explain to me how you lose that much money? I mean, how many pickup trucks can you fill with cash to bribe local officials with?

So, I got to thinking. What if that "lost" money could have been allocated to our number one new priority, education? Can you imagine how many teachers would still be employed, how many more laptops could be equipped for youngsters, how many schools we could have saved? All those great ideas out there waiting to be implemented relating to place-based education, school climate, nutrition, etc.? We could have lapped the NCLB bureaucrats several times by now.

Where is the outrage?

I bring this up to point out how upside down our priorities are. OK, I'm done. And now back to our regularly scheduled material...

The article on Gen M was provocative and illuminating. Amazing to think that they are the first generation to be completely plugged in. They have no idea what it was like in the 60's when the big innovations were...drumroll please...color tv, touch-tone telephones and get this, pocket sized calculators.

Ironically, the research indicates that despite all the new gadgets and the speed of information, the M'ers are no more productive than anyone else. Perhaps all this multitasking is not getting us much more than strained eyes and ADHD. I'm not saying this with any glee. Actually, it is sad that some postings tonight refer to a certain loneliness, dare I say alienation from our environment.

In my as yet unrecorded podcast, I plea for educators to slow things down. Use every technology available, but please please please use it wisely to encourage our students to think deeply, not just react to the latest proclamation on the internet. We owe it to ourselves.

--Joe

Technology is our friend, really...

In my warped mind, I am hearing Mr. Rogers singing "It's a wonderful day in the blogosphere." My mind's eye sees him in his iconic button-down cardigan. He has this huge flat screen monitor with vibrant and varied colors, and he says: "Today, we're going to learn how to make a wiki. Can you say wiki?"

So then I had to show you this old SNL skit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJTb130GR0E

Cut and paste the above as I couldn't figure out yet how to get you there directly. (Hint: one of you group members, please show me how)

You may be wondering what does this have to do with Friday's class in which we learned how to do a podcast? Well, I recorded a really cool voice over (my family didn't even realize it was me) with a sweet music bed, but I had a devil of a time getting the program to work. So yes, still struggling with the technology, but with my dogged persistence, I am going to learn how to be tech savvy. Maybe I'll change my moniker from jazzy joe to techie joe (the teens in my family are giving me a ton of grief about the jazzy - but let's not go there.)

Anyway, I really do love all these new media tools out there. And I'm excited about being able to grab art, music, literature and video clips and paste them right into a program. I'm telling you, this Tech class will be a life saver when we get into the classroom.

Now if I can just figure out what it is that I believe so fervently about education that will inspire me to do a podcast for Friday. Do you think I could do it in Mr. Roger's voice?

--Joe (just plain Joe)

Playing Games

Fellow Night Revelers,

I have been having one of those techno nightmare nights. Looks like I lost a bunch of work on my wiki for 649. In the back of my head, I knew I should have been doing the work in Word, but no, I had to do it directly in wiki and somehow it didn't save. To steal from Mr. Vonnegut, "So it goes."

I read through Mr. Gee's article about video games and learning. I am definitely intrigued by this new paradigm he is proposing: Our content area is not a collection of facts - it's in essence a game that we do. We formulate a collection of knowledge, figure out how to apply it, and poof we have created a new game. I certainly never thought about life and education this way before. I also never credited my nephew who is a warcraft addict with doing anything other than wear his eyeballs out on the path to carpal tunnel syndrome.

But when I went on a couple edublogger's sites, why did I see? On Huffenglish.com I feasted my eyes on an amazing array of creative ideas about teaching The Crucible, developing a rubric for grading essays, former blogs about books like Sense & Sensibility, the brand new Mark Twain autobiography (he/she already had time to read it?), and on and on.

The other blog I visited, land of lolo, had the most user-unfriendly type ever on a too busy background, so I dumped out of there faster than you can say metacognitive.

But back to this game concept - the first blog was playful and full of game-like activities to discover great works and literature and have fun while doing so. Hmm, I thought. All we have to do is free our minds from all this traditional learning that was burned into our consciousness. No small feat there, but my point is that there are amazing resources out there, and we can take advantage of them.

Suddenly I'm all excited again. Perhaps I can figure out a game to help me retype all the info I lost tonight.

I'll head to bed shortly, chanting, I am not a tech weanie, I am not a tech weanie...

Chaos Theory

Ever since class on Friday, I've been fixated on the word "chaos." As Twitter was introduced to us that day, it seemed that the world became infinitely more complicated. All these streams of images and conversations were in the ether, and frankly, I couldn't focus on anything. I had this nagging feeling that I was missing something important, potentially really important.

In retrospect, I started thinking about the so-called butterfly effect, in which you start with similar conditions, with a few slight variations, and in one instance you have someone latching onto webinars on physics and someone else on text messages for spelling. Physics, English, Social Studies, Spanish - the subject doesn't matter.

In the end, we 50 SMAC'ers wind up on parallel but different paths. And we have all these amazing media out there to experiment with. This very blog, Twitter, podcasts, Facebook, webinars, wikis - the possibilities are endless.

Although all this newness in my life at once is unnerving, I am thrilled with the prospect of landing in new territory. Imagine a runaway hot air balloon in which you get to explore every single day! We'll bring the kids along - those who are willing - and we turn chaos into something comprehensible.

Love it or hate it, chaos is here with us to stay. What do we choose to make of it?

Sleep Deprived

OK, it's 10:00 p.m. Blog time. I've been reading the buzz tonight, and cheating seems to be a pretty prevalent topic. My take on it is we don't have time to waste looking for cheaters. Those who do it will one day crash and burn, even if they slip through our net.

All week I've been thinking about Sartre and Camus whom I had left at the curb a decade or so ago. Now I'm really thinking about man being responsible for his own actions. Oil spills into the gulf (did they finally cap that sucker today?) and we have no one to blame but ourselves. Hey teachers, it's our job to call things out. No politics, no religion. But yes, we can and should take stands on issues to get kids thinking.

I'm outraged - for no reason really. It's the 3 hours of sleep I stole last night after writing a slew of words on school nutrition and my philosophy of teaching. I leave with you with the poignant words of Van Morrison: "Doesn't matter to which God you pray/Precious time is slipping away."

Bonne nuit.

--Joe

Dewey Defeats Truman

OK, I know. That headline was a cheap trick, but I couldn't resist. One of the great all-time moments in American History where the media got it all wrong. But then this picture got me thinking. What would our Dewey (we SMAC'ers can now claim John as one of our own) say about the media's coverage of NCLB? This blind procession of journalists who keep quoting test scores on the rise? Is that all our students are measured by? SAT, ACT, GRE, GPA? How about we measure them by different acronyms: GPS, LOL, BTW, WTF? Or I say we develop a human quotient to measure kids' future potential. I am going to find a quantitative article on this topic, I know it.

I was all jazzed up after our Friday discussions about Dewey and Wikipedia. One part of me resists the pronouncements from Dewey, the other part revels in clear thinking and actual opinions. I guess I'd have to land more on the side of marveling at Dewey's prescient thinking and emphasis on active learning, actual doing. A friend of mine told me the other night that Dewey was probably the best American Philosopher ever. Hmm...now that really got me thinking. He also said that Dewey himself was a legendarily bad teacher. I'll have to goog...er, I mean find a peer reviewed journal to verify that statement.

As for Google and Wikipedia, I say get used to 'em. They will be around for a while. And it's our job as (future) educators to make the most of the tools that we are given. Heck, I could teach with USA Today if I had to. If only to point out that they have a heck of a sports section. And the colors for the weather charts - don't get me going.

For those of you who read my last post about technophobia, note the inserted picture. I almost did it on my own. Soon I'll be ready to find a song on itunes!

OK, confession time: I'm actually a bit technophobic. Every time I upload or download a file, I hold my breath and hope I didn't cause some sort of catastrophe. But I am thrilled to be in this class and have a shot at no longer being a tech weanie. I'm hoping to attain some minor level of tech nerdiness by the end of year. Feel free to call me out on that one.

As for Mr. Dewey, I find him a fascinating, luminous character in the history of education. The article written about him almost seems to deify him as visionary, frighteningly prolific writer, and opinion-maker. I tend to get skeptical with so much hype built around him, but then again, I fall very much into his way of thinking - a Pragmatist as we discussed in Shari's class today. His rejection of the paradigm of teacher as god and students as passive supplicants impressed me. And his linking learning to experience was actually brilliant. Seems kind of obvious now, but a century ago, this was prescient thinking.

After reading about him, I was happy to read his own words. I came up with a slew of questions that I hope we get to discuss in class. To wit:

* When Dewey says that "the school life should grow gradually out of the home life," what exactly did he mean? Is he saying that homeschooling would be the ideal, as long as the children interacted with society?

* Related: Are the values from home life more important that those of society? Is Dewey arguing that the school should be responsible for educating the "whole child?"

* I'm unclear as to what Dewey meant by "symbols." Did he simply mean the alphabet, words, numbers, etc.?

* What was his dig at Sentimentalism? Was he referring to the Romantics of the 19th century, Flaubert's Sentimental Education? Qu'est-ce qu'il voulait dire?

Finally, my disappointment at Dewey's concluding statement for the creed: "the teacher is the prophet of the true God..." I buy into the concept of teacher as social agent, guiding their students and helping to create societal reform, but once he brings God into the picture, I think he way overstepped his boundaries. Just random thoughts from your neighborhood agnostic who believes in a clear separation of church and state.

It's getting late.

--Joe

MAC Talk

This is my first attempt at blogging. After reading others' blogs for a few years, it is time for me to join the community as an active contributor.

I am excited to join the blogosphere. This will be a great stepping stone to a new medium, one that is becoming more and more prevalent today.

Tech Ed may prove to be one of the most critical courses I take in the MAC program. Not that I would value concept mapping and the textbook by Anderson & Krathwohl any less - never!

To my fellow MAC'ers, I hope you are enjoying this gorgeous weekend. I am gearing up for a long walk on Lake Michigan, soft sand against my feet...