How to be a Math Coach

As a long response to Math on the Edge, I have a few questions for prospective and current math coaches. Hereafter, I will use the words "we" or "us" to refer to me and/or to the "teachers who you plan to coach".

Here are nine questions. If you can't answer "Yes" to at least one of these nine questions, then you have no business being a "coach".

Subject Matter Knowledge:

1. Do you know more about math in general than we do?
2. Do you know more than we do about a specific topic in our subject?
3. Have you done research in our field that would prove useful to us in the classroom - a new understanding, a new meaning?
4. Have you spent time creating content that other math teachers have found useful?

Relevant Experience

5. Do you have experience (that we do not have) teaching our subject at the grade levels we teach?
6. Do you have significant experience teaching our subject at any grade level?

 Teaching Techniques

7. Do you know teaching techniques that we do not - new ideas that we could learn from and improve with? Theoretical knowledge is useful.
8. Do you have a lot of experience teaching anything at any level - experience that might inform someone in a completely different situation? Practical knowledge is useful, too.
9. Have you done research into teaching that would prove useful to us in the classroom -- cognitive research into children's learning or a change in the philosophy of classroom management or the use of a new technology that makes a true difference -- to the extent that you know this work, know what we might do to improve?

"Yes" to any one of these? Great. If not, don't expect that any of the people you are pretending to "coach" will take you seriously.

If you said "No" to all of that, you are not a coach ... you are an intern and I am coaching you.  I may learn a lot from you, but only as a test subject or a guinea pig in my experiment.

Coaches teach their teams, guide their teams, or at least pressure them into doing things in a certain way together. These people make the team successful, improve the team. If they don't, they're fired. If this isn't what you think you're doing, don't call yourself a coach.

For 1 - 4.
I enjoy talking to, and working with, people who know more than I do about a topic. My education was in engineering, not in pure mathematics and not in secondary teaching. It is refreshing to have Mike Olinick in to give a cryptography lecture to an auditorium full of high schoolers or Jeff Suzuki to give one on an important aspect in math history.  If I could convince Don Steward to fly over and work with us, that would be very cool. Dan Meyer's a good speaker and a good coach and he has ideas that resonate. These people all have something in common: they've worked with math in ways I haven't. I can learn from them and others like them. Even if their contribution is a different way to work with math, like Fawn Nguyen's Number Talks, or visualpatterns.org - these are people from whom we can learn.

If you haven't worked with math in ways that I haven't, if you don't bring anything new to the table, if you aren't improving our/your instruction in SOME way, then you have to be outstanding in some other way.

For 5-6:
If you don't have any experience, what can you offer me? What are you basing your "coaching" on if you have never done any teaching yourself? The bar is higher for you because my field is so very different and my difficulties and problems are not solved by amateurs and dilettantes.

What do you base your "advice" on, if your sole experience is teaching a existentialism course at a small New England prep school? Your research? Your work as a content aggregator? Your charming personality? If your opinion contradicts my own experience, then you need to really convince me that you aren't just another blithering idiot on the Internet.

For 7-9:
If you can't say WHY your new idea/technique is a good one, then I'm not going to take your word for it. I might implement it in my classes but only after considering how the change will play out, what I might do to measure its effectiveness, or at the very least consider how the class is currently running so I have a clear and concise memory to compare the "after" version to.

If all you have is a "yes" in 7-9, then you're gonna need your research, your "proof" or at least a damned good explanation. I want to see that your research/evidence applies to my discipline and my grade levels. Don't tell me that I need to change my HS math classes based on research done on K-2 students. I look very skeptically on any statistics that include Singapore and Hong Kong, or Finland and Norway.

I understand that I am not completely up-to-date on everything to do with teaching. I'm using technology a lot, in some very interesting ways, and my students are doing things I'd never imagined in the 80s and 90s. I read others in the #MTBoS and I travel quite a bit to hear them speak. But I know there's a lot going on out there and I'm in the middle of a very poor section of a tiny state.

SO, if you're going to come into my classroom and tell me to change, for example, to Proficiency-Based Grading, then you had better understand it yourself. If you are going to tell us to re-imagine our teaching in a certain way, then you NEED to be competent in its variations and minutia.

If not, then you're not a coach, you're a pain in the ass.

DO NOT do as our curriculum coordinator did: raise up a book at the first *weekly* in-service (2.5 hours each) and announce that you had just read this idea in this book and you think we all should do it. If you haven't been trained in ThisWork, haven't done any work in or research in ThisWork and your only teaching experience is as a less than stellar elementary teacher whose "specialty" was social studies ... then you shouldn't be a math coach.

DO NOT speak to a faculty meeting and say, "I don't know anything about what you're doing but I've just been hired for this new job to help you with your teaching. Here is a list of topics that I can help you with by *Googling* them for you", which is what two fresh new admin did.

DO NOT insist that teachers adhere to the practices of your 4th grade classroom when you are attempting to "coach" us in these new ideas that you don't particularly understand. We're all adults and most of us have master's degrees and we average 15-20 years of experience in our fields, some of us more than 40. You're not being cute. You're not being clever. You're being a pain in the ass.

DO NOT walk in and say "I'm the Math Coach" and proceed to tell us nothing new, even going so far as to use material from *my own website* in your presentation (true story).

I could continue but I've got to get back to work.



TL:dr;
Bring something to the table or GTFO.

Data Point #934 Showing Why Teacher Education is Problematic

I was perusing the blog feed and I come across my favorite source for "interesting" teacher education issues. Okay, most of what he writes seems flawed, but at least he's advocating to "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math", but I digress.

Click to enlarge that image.

It's measures of central tendency from a stack of pennies. How far down the list of values can you get before you reach an inconsistency in the numbers?

How is this a sample of what you, as a real math teacher, would want to show the world as exemplar of your students' work? Why would this page be the one that you put out to the world ... unless you were deliberately showing how you gave feedback, a la @mpersham's mathmistakes.org.

The project itself is a fine one ... I did the same thing when learning to use Fathom, and I plan on using it with my class this year.  But, really, if showing teachers "cool" or useful projects, wouldn't you want to display ones that are at least mostly (>50%) correct?

While this page would be great to show the relationship between sample statistics and population statistics, it's not at all clear to me whether our blogger noticed any of the problems.

Here is the population, if anyone is interested:

Once Again, Jay Matthews

A TFA teacher asks for lesson plans and guidance on how to run a classroom. "How are they supposed to know what works when they have so little experience? Couldn’t the experts get together and give us the best possible guide?"

An excellent question. Education theory runs rampant with this idea that experience taking classes is equivalent to experience teaching them.

So why not tell the new teacher what to do? The answer is, of course, that the new teacher's creativity might be stifled.

"He learned that many teachers, and the organizations that represent them, don’t want ready-made lesson plans. They feel it limits their creativity and turns them into robots doing whatever their department head or the district curriculum chief wants."

AnyQs? Not sucky.

I personally think this is utter crap. Robots? Hardly. When you don't tell people anything and barely train them, you get wishy-washy or useless garbage or dull and dreary. You get barely remembered tactics ("Don't smile before Christmas.") or silly uber-liberal dreck that doesn't work.  You get KIPP drill teams and 10-hours days.  You get "Learning Styles" and Small School Initiatives. You get cooperative learning that never results in learning and assessments that never measure anything. You get "fresh, new ideas" that upend a US History II course to the point that it only covers 1870-1960 for the course. "But they made a wiki" is not an answer.

Normal teacher prep programs give a lot of instruction on how to run a classroom, set up things, deal with students. Despite the fact that I think they're focused on the wrong things, at least they try. There's the six-month student-teaching with an experienced teacher to help sort many of those things out. It's not great but it's better than TFA's 6 weeks in the summer.

You need to help out the new teachers, give them materials and ideas, and essentially walk them through the course.  You can't just HOPE they can come up with good stuff.

A commenter on a previous post said "Questions that fascinate and practice that doesn't suck? You sound like the typical math reformer who holds procedures in disdain, and wants kids to understand what math is REALLY about. How about starting beginning piano students with the Moonlight Sonata?"

When you don't read carefully, you can make the same mistake that "J.D. Salinder" made.(Other than being too clever choosing his "name".)

I believe in practice that doesn't suck ... but I still believe in practice. Drill is useful and valuable, in soccer, music, math, art, handwriting and pretty much any field. Mindless repetition is just that, but practice to the point of correct automaticity is priceless.

Learning is not practice, but practice helps learning. Learning can't begin with Moonlight Sonata because the Moonlight Sonata isn't happening without learning which keys are which, i.e. scales, and learning rhythm and timing, and learning to read music.

You can't start by dropping the TFAer into the deep end of the pool with no training -- sure, some people learned to swim that way, but others simply drowned and their students got crap.

Questions that fascinate are an equally important resource. If they fascinated students last year and the year before, they will probably do so again. They may be pure, raw math and still fascinate. Those UVM problems are not ones that I created, but it sure would have been nice if I had had them early in my career.

I've hated psuedo-context since high-school and so my math classes had tremendous amounts of chemistry and physics in them (I'm a mechanical engineer), but again needed someone like Dan Meyer to clarify and put it into words. Dan Willingham studies and teaches neuro-science. Listening to him has meant that I now have a better sense of why I hated learning styles.

Now we get to the paragraph that got me started. Jay Matthews (right there, you know this isn't going to end well) says in this article,"If you are like me, and preferred learning your job by doing it rather than being told what do to, you wonder why Friedrich didn’t appreciate the freedom of making his own choices."

Why? Why shouldn't the teacher "learn on the job" like the education writer for the Washington Post did? Because the Post won't go bankrupt or fail if Jay writes a crappy column or if he espouses wrong-headed reform or if he promotes KIPP to the exclusion of systems that would actually work for all public school students. Rather, the Post probably loves Jay for his idiocy. It brings more comment, more notoriety, and more readers.

"Maybe Bruce Friedrich raised the lesson plan issue because he was so out of sync with the recent college graduates who were the other Teach for America instructors at his Baltimore high school. He was 40." Maybe, he raised the issue because his preparation was lousy but unlike the other TFAs, he realized it. This, for me, is the true indictment of the program.  TFA preparation is considered perfect unless you've got maturity and knowledge. It's just that the rest of them don't realize how bad it sucks to learn on the job without real help.

Why shouldn't I learn to be a teacher on the job?

Because they're not my kids. This is their only chance of getting high school right.

Forget that at your students peril.

What we have here is a Failure to Communicate.

Education is an awesome thing. What kills it for me is Educrats and Professional Development. Only in Education is it considered a good idea to run a meetings with the following rules.

Did I say "rules"? Silly me, "rules" is such a simple word. What we need here is a more imposing word, one that will make us sound intelligent and wise. You could say we need jargon, but jargon is used in other fields to take a complex idea and substitute one word to represent it, to simplify speech by "chunking" a lot of information into a small package. In education, jargon is used in the opposite way - to confuse and impress through sheer bluster.

I give you "Protocol".

Specifically, there are "protocols" in place for our next little gathering:

There are over hundred different protocols developed in the field for educators, all of which assure us that we will collaborate better, with deeper understanding. "Deeper" is an important word nowadays - we want to eliminate the "mile wide and inch deep" education that we've been apparently delivering all this time. We're changing to deeper teaching. And don't forget collaboration.

We'll have a scribe who writes all this on a piece of chart paper that will never see the light of day, and probably won't survive the clean-up at the end of the session. But we collaborated and we found the essence of the text.

Of course, sharing a single sentence, phrase and word is hardly a collaboration and it sure as hell ain't a discussion, so I'm not quite sure how I'm going to be able to refrain from my usual snarky commentary. It's essentially going to be a long day.

Super-Duper Teacher Mentors

Just what we need ... more teachers with slightly above-average ability getting $20,000 to do less teaching and more "mentoring".

President Obama wants to create a “master teacher corps,” starting with 50 math and science teachers who’d earn an additional $20,000 a year to act as mentors, plan curriculum and lead school turnarounds. The administration proposes spending $100 million this year and $1 billion next year to increase the corps to 10,000 teachers, reports National Journal.

And how will we choose these Masters of the Classroom?  I figure that we'll use standardized test scores to select them for inclusion in the program, require them to submit 50-page portfolios of their teaching, including evidence of effectiveness as witnessed by superiors, a minimum of 40 hours of video recordings of the best lessons in their "toolbox".

What does "awesome" look like?
It looks like me, of course.

These subjective, holistic-sounding pieces of evidence will then be analyzed by three panels of master educators using an objective-sounding yet surprisingly sloppy RUBRIC to whittle down the candidate pool to those who are the "top talent", a euphemism for "someone willing to put a family life on hold while cranking out endless reams of drivel in exactly the proper format required."

Amazingly, the winners of this particular lottery will be those who are tallest, prettiest and who are the same skin color as the examiners. And then they'll throw in some others so they aren't accused of being racist or anything. Ethnicity will not be a factor until it has to be one to keep the list of "top talent" from seeming too monotonic.

After the candidates spend the requisite 200 hours putting together the 40 hours of video and another few hundred typing the portfolio into proper format, while grading endless term papers, reading and analyzing daily stacks of exit cards, preparing for and analyzing more standardized test data than the DOE ... then the Board will eliminate 90% of them.

The ones left won't be the best teachers; they won't be the best mentors; they probably won't even be well-educated.  They certainly won't have the personality to mentor their peers without being annoying little know-it-alls.

They'll be great at the trappings of education and lousy at doing the job that they're "paid" for.

Consultant = insultant

And SMBC wasn't even talking about education.

"Best practice", anyone?

Differentiation

I can follow you but
I have no idea why you're so stupid.

I'm just being snarky ...

If we're supposed to differentiate our teaching to each student in the class, why can't Guidance schedule it so that each student in each class is roughly similar.  I know that every kid is an individual and all that, but after 20-something years of teaching I've realized that they fall into groups pretty easily.

Second, if everything is so individualized and shit, why does our administration keep demanding lesson plans - shouldn't we be more flexible than that? I mean, having just ONE plan?

Finally, if that differentiation is really different, how is it that the first two things at Inservice are:

"We've got to eliminate the bell curve. There is no bell curve. We need to flatten the bell curve." and "All kids are proficient. We just have to find it."

If there's no bell curve, then why do we need to get rid of it? If we don't have one, what is the purpose of differentiating our teaching? 

What the hell does "Flatten the bell curve mean? Do we want to have equal numbers at each ability level instead of all the students at the proficient one? 

I was able to understand what incorrect psychobabble he was trying to say even though he was too stupid and confused to actually rise to that level. But all people are equal and we've got to differentiate even in Professional Development, don't we?

"I know you believe you understand what it is you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what I said is not what I meant. " ~ President Richard M. Nixon to the International Press Corps

Wrong on so many levels

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

List of Fail

• Archamendes
• Carried a box of sand.
• "I believe there is merit ..."
• "Take your students outside to write in the mud."
• This guy is teaching college students.
• Who believes in himself and has his writings for sale.
• Archamendes? Seriously? Google broken? Oh, yeah, I remember, you think that education should be "Just in Time instead of Just in Case."  How's that working out for you?

He scratched in sand because it was available, easy to use and cheap. Papyrus was harder to get and vastly too expensive to scribble on. Don't even consider parchment.  I love the intro ... "It is believed ..."  Sorry genius, it is known. Basically, the man did a lot of thinking in his head, aided by scratching in a sandtable or on the ground (the guy would have loved paper).  There is no "merit in his method" because the sand isn't what made him who he is and the sand won't make your college students any better than they are, though it will probably make them worse.


and his name is Archimedes.


Sheesh.

"Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math." Yeah right.

PD Follies - part six, Stepford Teachers

Sometimes people have conflicts. In a school, you can have some real petty politics with people choosing sides and teachers arguing.  There's always intrigue, spite and malice. There's that famous line about educational politics being "so nasty because the stakes are so small."

This person gets a department chair post over the objections of the members of the department.  That person gets a cushy schedule and glowing evaluations while this person gets slammed and is nearly run out of the school. A teacher commits a crime and the issue is ignored. The principal has an affair with the science teacher's wife causing a divorce. The other principal is committed secretly to a mental institution for three weeks in February; upon her return is even nuttier than before.

The faculty are evenly divided between hardline republicans and softheaded liberals. (I was the token liberal in the conservative camp.) The principal took the liberal side against the "Good Ole Boys," who were also the Upstanding Long-Time Members of the Community. When a G.O.B. can point to the classroom teacher's desk that had been used by successive family members for the last 50 years, any new principal should think carefully about taking on this cabal. This one didn't think. It wasn't pretty.

It got stupid, too. One teacher puts up a sign outside her door: "Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain.  And most do." The other replies with "But it takes a greater fool to say nothing."

Obviously we needed professional development to help teach us conservatives why we were wrong. Enter the

Conflict Resolution Specialist.

She was going to help us teachers get along and she was scheduled right after that infamous, vision statement debacle.  She was watching how we dealt with that and starting setting up.

Anything, I thought, would be better than mindless blathering about the differences between "21st century skills" and "skills for the emerging century." Maybe even conflict resolution training. Anyway, I would be wrong.

We had to role-play.

"If there were aliens flying above the school, how would they recognize the respect you show each other?"

The response:
"They wouldn't, because we would be inside the building and they couldn't hear us." 
"Why do we care what aliens think? We're all adults here and if someone can't handle a little disagreement why would they feel capable of being a teacher?" Which was priceless because the next thing out of her mouth was, "Some teachers feel there is a culture of intimidation here."

That didn't work so well.

We now had to role-play a conflict between a student and a teacher.
"You will be a student who failed a test and are upset that the teacher is keeping you after school and making you miss practice."
"Okay, that's fair. I'm good with that."
"No, you have to be angry."
"But keeping me after school is the right thing to do. I failed and the teacher's trying to help me."
"We're trying to practice conflict resolution. Maybe someone else?"


"All of you stick your stickers on the board next to your choice ... "
"Noooooooooo."

Then, the coup de grace: "One of you will be a girl who wants to use the purple chalkboard. Another a girl who wants to use the pink one. Show me how you'd resolve this conflict." (This gem was said to a burly redneck weighing nearly 350 pounds with a pocketknife hanging from his belt.)
"I don't want to use either board."
"You have to role-play."

This is No Shit. Did I mention that we're a high school?

I hate "professional development."

PD Follies - part five, Mission

Professional Development Follies - part five.

Some time ago, at another school and time, it was decided that we needed to correct our mission. We needed a better one. It was not enough to say "Our mission is to teach."

We are "supposed to be so much more" and so the first hour of the day that supposed to be devoted to some professional development (that inservice from hell) consisted instead of discussing the various important facets of our "mission", arguing over nuances of meaning and whether to mention character and 21st century skills in an increasingly interconnected world.

Did I mention that we were discussing the report from the Mission Statement Development Faculty Subcommittee (no shit, actual name)?

The plan was that when we finished deciding on the perfect length and turn of phrase, the mission statement would be printed, laminated and was to be posted over the door in every classroom. The old mission statement should be thrown away - it being no longer relevant even though it was nicely printed on colored paper, laminated and already posted above each classroom door?

What did we argue about?

One teacher pointed out that we have no schoolchildren here, only "young men and women." This nearly causes angina in the distaff side of the room.  "Why not young women and men?" Right there, you know this isn't starting well.

Our young men and women will have "active and creative minds," and our young women and men will display "a sense of understanding and compassion for others, and the courage to act on their beliefs."

We will provide a "world-class education" with "significant knowledge creation" which is a great ideal until someone (me) notices that no one has actually defined "significant" nor have they defined how we're measuring it. I am ignored in the poetic rush.

"Empowerment" is an important word, too, and apparently "each child is an individual" with a strong sense of belonging to the community. Hopefully, that will stop the bullying and the Halloween pranks. Our environment (it's not a school, mind you) has to be "caring and creative" and we must emphasize the the "whole child," whatever that means.

Of course, it wouldn't be a mission statement in the 21st century if we didn't acknowledge that "all children are creative;" "that all children will succeed," and that we are "all dedicated to higher standards" and a "challenging learning environment" including a mandate to "prepare fully the citizens of the future." "Success for all" is important, and a couple teachers wanted to say that twice in the mission statement, pissing off those who feel that makes it too wordy. ""It's gotta be pithy."


"Crap! We forgot to mention 'building self-esteem' and all of the 'positives relationships' and the 'total development of each child." "Oh, and technology! We need technology in there, too."

"Hold it, this is getting too big."
"Well, I got this one off the Internet. It has 145 words."

Mercifully, this ended after the hour was up and so we got down to the real business of the day. We were "working with" a "conflict resolution specialist" who was going to help us teachers get along. This was scheduled because there was some friction amongst us. We couldn't agree on things and the "tone" of the school was being "denigrated by negative attitudes" of people who didn't instantly agree with anything said.

Ya think?

PD Follies - part four, New and Improved.

Professional Development Follies - part four.

Professional Development is one of those things that light up the stress meters in almost every teacher I've ever known. Bill Ferriter talks about it. So does Mr. Teachbad. Darren needed Google Translate to interpret the Educationese. What's my excuse? I have many things that trigger me and get my back up. the latest is the

Cha-, cha-, cha-, Change

Everything you are doing is wrong.  Change is the only criteria for success.  A few months ago, the states were all ranked.  Vermont got some pretty good scores all around and excelled when dealing with poor kids.  The only score we didn't do well on was "Innovation and Change." That earned us a D+.

It apparently didn't occur to anyone that if we were doing well and it "ain't broke," we might not consider fixing it.  No matter.  The ranking was not for guided change or change towards an ideal or improvement in any way. In fact, damaging the students and lowering our scores by implementing some change would have increased our ranking.

But enough of the silly think tank. We're ready to get improved.

So we have Challenges for Change, which replaced High Schools on the Move.  HSOTM replaced another failed initiative, and that one replaced another, and so on, and so on.

We had the Vermont Frameworks for Educations, then the Vermont Standards, then the Grade Expectations (but that sounded too Dickensian) so it was modified to Grade Level Expectations. Do all that work and "Happy New Year!" ... Change it all to Common Core.

You've got Best Practices, Master Teachers, Mentors and Peer Coaching, Videotape, Scribes, Verbatim, Class Flow, Curriculum mapping (versions: paper, Word, Excel, HTML, three different online companies), Literacy Across the Curriculum, Literacy Labs, Cross curricular.

Then states started really spending money: technology.  "Laptops for All will kickstart your students" until it won't, computers in every classroom (just 1 or 2 for 25 students), a computer lab, a mobile lab, another laptop program, (Hey! It works in Maine! ... except that it didn't actually do anything positive academically.) Shiny new version of the Office suite every 3 years whether you like it or not, SmartBoards and DVDs and TVs and cable/T1/Fiber Internet, Student Information Systems that tie together thousands of students into one big, unwieldy and ultimately useless mess. But it's all in one place!

21st Century Skills will change the World, unless you believe "Singapore Math Drills will Save the World." "The Chinese will Take Over the World". "India will Outsource our Education!"  Did You Know? "The rest of the world is Coming!"  Which is all well and good until you read that the Chinese people hate their education system (Kristoff, NYT) and want to emulate the American one.

Every one of those NEW! ideas requires time for teacher training and every one starts off during an inservice or professional development seminar. Hours are spent, dragging reluctant teachers through them. We're moving forward! Onward! Upward!

Enough hype and hot air to start an Infomercial Network.

Enough "New!" ideas that you could write a book ... as an object lesson on failed initiatives. The real problem is that most of those great new ideas aren't all that great and they aren't new at all.

I'm no Luddite.What I hate is repeating what has already been done.  I want to stand on the shoulders of giants, take what's been done and go from there. I'm sick of reinventing the wheel.  I do not want to be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Don't put me in a PD and tell me the wonders of an open classroom design.  I'll just get steamed because I've heard this nonsense before.  I can show you a school 20 miles away that was built on this principle and the entire school hates it.  The cubical farm concept - bleah - but my Highly Ineffective Principal actually threw that one at us last year. Another school a few miles in the other direction built open classrooms 35 years ago and still has the permanently installed floor-to-ceiling temporary walls.

The more it was stressed that we were a "High School on the Move," the more stressed I got. With every new and improved "Best Practice," I wondered why no one, apparently, had never thought of this obviously brilliant idea before ... and then after maybe two seconds of thought, realized that it was pretty much what everybody tended to do anyway.


Every time I have to re-enter the curriculum into a new mapping "tool," I feel like screaming.

Every time the curriculum coordinator tells me that practice is "Drill and Kill" while telling me I need to spend time with test prep but that our students don't have high enough scores, I need to watch a Bruce Lee movie.

Every time the school tries a small "School within a School" without actually setting some kind of measurement to see if it worked, I want to go in my room and hide.

Show me improvement, not just change.

I hate professional development.

PD Follies - part three. Guess my age.

Professional Development Follies - part three.

Professional Development is one of those things that light up the stress meters in almost every teacher I've ever known. Bill Ferriter talks about it. So does Mr. Teachbad. Darren needed Google Translate to interpret the Educationese. What's my excuse? I have many things that trigger me and get my back up. Treating the faculty like ...

You're in Third Grade.

Actually, I'm not. I'm a teacher and have been one since before we found out that George Orwell's book was not dated correctly. I'm getting old and crotchety, too, in case no one noticed. (No!)

Treat teachers as adults, please.

I don't think it cute, informative, helpful, or intelligent to hand every one a candy bar and sort us by the type of candy bar. ("Gasp, how clever") . I don't really care if you want us to sit randomly to break up cliques or friends. Those groups aren't why I'm here. Accept who I am sitting with and get on with it.

I'm here to learn something.  

1. Lose the CUTE. 
1. It's early, I'm anticipating being annoyed and YOU just confirmed it. 
2. Speak in your adult voice. Talk with us as peers, not to us as twelve-year-olds. 
2. I'm not here to vote by placing stickers on an easel pad. If the people in the room can't handle a show of hands, they shouldn't be teaching actual teenagers. Stickers to vote with ... don't go there. Try something radical: ask us. If you are worried that this might be too controversial, ask us ahead of time.
3. I don't want a gold star, a free pen or a happy message acted out by the helpers.  
4. I don't want to form a line holding hands and count out loud every other one.
5. I don't want a condescending twit telling me "Good Job getting to your groups so fast." 
6. If you make me do role-play, I will, to the best of my ability, imitate a real student with all of the real or imagined resistances I can think of - your too-clever-for-words gambit will go up in smoke.
7. Do not place a pile of toys on the table and ask each of us to choose one, then explain how that toy exemplifies our approach to teaching. I can tell what's coming and I will choose wisely and sarcastically. Your pathetic attempt to imitate the Rorschach Test is just that. 
8. I'm not asking permission to go to the bathroom.
9. I want something I can take away from all this, even if it's just a handbook.

We're all walking around with at least a master's degree and most of us have seen this new idea before. Treat us like the mature adults we are and we'll help you through anything that goes wrong. We'll go easy on you and forgive the graphs that are missing axis labels, or the grammatical mistakes in the PP slide. If your phone rings, answer it. We'll keep ourselves busy for the two minutes it takes you to apologize and and talk to your wife.

Piss us off and we'll be irritated and irritating all day. I'll point out that your brand spanking new idea is just like that one we heard about in professional development 18 years ago. I can usually even find the paperwork that went with it.

I'll ask for the supporting research and for actual names and links so we can read it, too. When you show me THAT GRAPH, I'll ask you for the details. "What's the vertical axis? How was it measured? Is this in a demographic similar to that we have here? What was the demographic?" I can even sound sincere and interested when, in fact, I'm ridiculing you.

And one other thing. I CAN read, you know. I don't need or want you to do it for me.

PD Follies - part two, Death by Verbiage.

Professional Development Follies - part two.

Professional Development is one of those things that light up the stress meters in almost every teacher I've ever known. Bill Ferriter talks about it. So does Mr. Teachbad. Darren needed Google Translate to interpret the Educationese. What's my excuse? I have many things that trigger me and get my back up. Here, over the next couple of days, are some of those triggers. Mr. Teachbad's List contained Major Peeve #2:

Powerpoint Death Slides.

There is <sarcasm> nothing more thrilling </sarcasm> than settling in, readying myself to take some notes, and then watching the presenter click open a PowerPoint slide covered with words.

 

As Tufte says: "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely." Here's the thing, people. I can listen and take notes: I had lectures all through college. I also had homework for which I was required to read and highlight, and then take notes. I'm okay with taking notes. MY Notes.

The problem with most PP is we are combining two separate and incompatible entities - a lecture and much reading material, densely packed and illegible, slammed together with cliched or cartoony graphics, interspersed with every transition possible.

Presenters, it seems that ...

• Graphic design is an Art that you do not possess.
• Public Speaking is not one of your skills either.
• You have graphs riddled with errors.
• You have abysmal spelling. Right down there with your grammar.
• You need to buy a clicker. Do not have someone tapping the SmartBoard to advance slides.
• You have a 200-word minimum per slide.

It's a PRESENTATION and it needs to be PRESENTED, not read. Stop right there and think about that. If you don't know it cold, inside and out, then you don't belong on stage.  Watch a TED presentation, like this one by Hans Rosling. Notice that he is presenting, not reading. If the presenter is reading his own slides, then everyone should walk out and collect a copy of the "notes" on the way.

Sure, Rosling's a pro at this and all the TED presenters are pretty awesome, but come on, the district is paying a grand or two for your time today. Spell check and grammar check are simple. If you've given the same talk before, grammar and spelling errors are inexcusable.

Stick with the fundamental designs if you aren't a PP wizard. You should be able to present the material without PP. The PP is visuals: icing on a knowledge cake, the froth on your Guinness.

If you want me to read it, then give it to me ahead of time, in a form that I can read. Paper is acceptable, but really, can't you give me a pdf so I can save and reference it? (Especially if the presentation is about using technology, you know.)

Don't get all huffy and defensive.  I want to read it at my leisure, not at the speed you choose. I also want to review it later. I have a very good memory but it's nice to use my computer's "Search" function, too.

For example, at the beginning of this year, we had a bullying workshop. The people were setting up and I wandered over with a thumbdrive and asked if I could have a copy of the presentation - for later review and for notes. After getting all huffy and asking "Who are you?", she refused. (Like the general public was coming in and demanding to see her bullying presentation.)

This was information we were getting recertification credit for, and fulfilling an important state requirement for, and we couldn't get the information in any way other than paper handouts. I still have those handouts in a file at home. A simple pdf would be much more useful.

PD Follies - part one, the Blind.

Professional Development Follies - part one.

Professional Development is one of those things that light up the stress meters in almost every teacher I've ever known. Bill Ferriter talks about it. So does Mr. Teachbad. Darren needed Google Translate to interpret the Educationese. What's my excuse? I have many things that trigger me and get my back up. Here, over the next couple of days, are some of those triggers.

The Blind Leading the Blind.

When I went to get my commercial driver's license many years ago, I was faced with a guy who drove these vehicles every day. He knew the ins and outs, knew the laws, knew what was important and what had to be memorized for the test and then filed away. An expert who was teaching? How quaint.

How many times have I been in the room and the HIP, Highly Ineffective Principal, (thanks for reminding me, Richochet!) or an AP would get up and present as definitive fact a half-remembered workshop from the summer?

Too many times.

The more it was stressed that we were a "High School on the Move," the more stressed I got. With every new and improved "Best Practice," I wondered why no one, apparently, had never thought of this obviously brilliant idea before ... and then after maybe two seconds of thought, realized that it was pretty much what everybody tended to do anyway.

"We need to create A School Within a School."
"According to the Latest Brain-Based Research, students need to write about their feelings."
"I want all of the teachers to begin differentiating all classes with respect to the three Learning Styles."
"We're buying netbooks for each fifth grader because Maine did it and had the biggest gains in state history."

Before we should implement something, shouldn't there be at least one person who completely understands it? Perhaps we should rename this one as the "As Seen on TV" Initiative because it looks cool and shiny, no one understands it fully, it costs a lot (plus shipping and handling) and invariably doesn't work. Any of you suggesting we call it the "iRenew Initiative" can be quiet back there.

I'm not getting behind this nebulously defined initiative until someone clears it up and explains it. "You're being obstinate because you don't want to be a team player. You argue about every initiative."

Sorry. Got to do better than that. Argument by Accusation - not valid.

What happened to "Education"?

Joanne Jacobs has a piece on evaluation programs that are looking to videotape teachers as they give lessons and then "Go Look at Tape." The issue seems to be that

More than 99 percent of teachers are rated satisfactory by their principals, reports a study on “the widget effect” by the New Teacher Project.

and this is somehow "bad," hence the need for overhaul. While I would argue that you need to improve the system so that middle-managers (Admin) can appropriately rate, measure and evaluate their assembly-line workers (teachers), I'm not sure that going to videotape is much of an improvement. If the Principal can't see the "errors" while sitting in the class, how is he supposed to make anything out of the 17th such review, even if he did have the time. Well, they have an answer for that ... Gates figures we'll pay outside evaluators who will somehow be able to see what the highly paid admin can't or won't.

The Gates Foundation is developing a new model, with the help of social scientists and teachers, reports the New York Times. Outside evaluators analyze videotapes to determine whether teachers are teaching well.

We've got money for outside evaluators? Pretty cool. I'll sign up. What gives you the idea that I'll be any more or biased/petty/superficial than the current system? The fact that I'll be able to rewind the tape? More likely I'll fast forward through it. The fact that I don't know the teacher so I'll be more honest? More likely, I'll make a snap judgment and move on.

You know we'll pay for training out of our RTTT money or something, hire bunches of consultants to teach teachers to evaluate other teachers who are trying to teach students. Pretty amazing, ain't it?

Hundreds of teachers will be trained to review 64,000 hours of classroom video. They will look “for possible correlations between certain teaching practices and high student achievement, measured by value-added scores.”

Let's say it's 800 teachers - that's 80 hours of tape to watch, per person. Asking a lot? I can't even spend that much time watching TV or movies in a month while sitting mindless and half-comatose. I'd need to be unemployed to look at 80 hours of tape multiple times and evaluate someone.

But here's the crux of my complaint ... those correlations. I've had students who completely and utterly bombed in class but did well on testing. I've also had plenty who did well in my class, well in the next couple of classes, had a great high school career, and then a great college career, and are now cranking out 6 figure salaries ... but didn't do well on testing. How do I know they did well? They told me.

Since when did value-added scores on NEAP mean an education? Since when could anyone figure out what I do that "works" by watching 10, 20 hours of videotape? Really? Do they know me? Since when did someone watching a few hours of video actually have a clue as to what went on and who and how the students were effected? Ten hours of video? That's two days. Does anyone here think that I couldn't fake it for two days and mess around the rest of the year if I was of a mind to?

I didn't think so.

Jargon means something

It's been said before and it bears repeating. Jargon ("the language, esp. the vocabulary, peculiar to a particular trade, profession, or group") is used to make communication simpler and more precise.

Except in education.

Education "experts" use jargon to make simple things sound complicated, to change the inherent meaning of words and to appear (I guess) smarter than the speaker actually is. Education experts further abuse the English language by changing the meanings of simple words to either "be cute" or to obfuscate.

In what other field would a person who was speaking to a room full of professionals, requesting that thoughts and questions be "captured" (written down on sticky notes) and that the sticky notes be then attached to the "Parking Lot" at the back of the room (a large piece of paper decorated with an elementary school cartoon of a car and the words "Parking Lot" in large, multi-colored letters.

Teachers will never be taken seriously as professionals until we cease to find this clever, cute, or anything but demeaning and puerile.

What Teachers Need from Administrators.

Dangerously Irrelevant has the beginning post of a series on what teachers want from administrators. Though I agree with some of this gentleman's points, there is some contradiction in what Brian Crosby says.

I agree with him when he wants teachers to have more say in professional development. No wasted meetings. This should be obvious, but isn't. Admin who haven't taught in years should temper their advice. Schools should hire teachers and then expect them to be teachers - stop second guessing all the time. Accountability is good if you allow the teachers to teach. If you require they follow a script, then hold the script accountable.

Absolutely: Change for its own sake is stupid. Adopting the gee-whiz Fad of the Month from a summer admin workshop while instituting a new math curriculum, new science curriculum, and new Common Core Standards only ruins any chance of knowing whether any reforms were successful. Maybe it's a science mindset, but you should only change one variable at a time if you want to isolate cause.

"Research" in education is often inapplicable to the school. Apply with care. Read the damn paper before you try to implement the hype in the newspaper report of the University press release of the heavily hedged Executive Summary. Don't expect the 150 college students in the study to behave in the same way as your high-schoolers.

When you make changes, you should be "experimenting" properly. Measure before and after. Have a control group. Add your data to that of the study. Isolate variables. Either track the proposed change scientifically or accept the fact that you are playing Russian Roulette with kids who won't get another chance at a high school education.

I'm not so thrilled with the idea of 2 weeks in the beginning of the year for planning - seems like too much and wouldn't be well used by the faculty. It's a nice idea in theory, but details go out the window at first contact with students. Besides, I like having the summer.

A big sticking point for me is the reform contradiction and I felt that his message lost its way.

Saying "Changing course constantly is very bad," he wants to stay away from the Summertime Fad and avoid jumping on the research-based fad. Then he wants to explore non-research-based pedagogies (i.e., fads), change to 21st century tech and wants his admin to "BEG for creativity and innovation." Which is it?

"Creativity and innovation" are euphemisms for "summer workshop fad" except for frame of reference. Is it always a fad if your admin proposes it but realistic and wonderful if it came from your own 6-hour workshop? Brian is tripping down this staircase.

Forcing Teachers to Read: Useful or just a Time-Suck?

Scott Macleod, over at Dangerously Irrelevant, wonders if we should require teachers to read the RSS newspaper: Should we require school employees to have RSS readers? He and his reader community created lists of rss feeds:grade-level and subject-specific blogs.

I'm great up to this point. Most of these blogs (I haven't read them all so can't say about all) are good people with good experience writing well and intelligently. But then Dr. Macleod goes a little off the end when he thinks about the next step ...

1. Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?
2. How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
3. How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?
4. Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on ...

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?

No,
Not by much,
To brainwash them some more - haven't they already read these blogs as part of their classes?
and YAY! Another meaningless credit for meaningless professional development!
 Then there's time and viewpoint.

Time? I get to school at about 7:15. I start the computer, which takes maybe 15 minutes to complete, and then load a firefox folder of bookmarks - the things I do everyday like check my and the school's calendar for games or meetings, read email (I only do it once at the beginning and once at the end of the day) update the SAT problem of the day, open the gradebook. I am checking that all my first classes are ready - emergency copying, bookmarking the text. I check my school mail box on another floor. I get my caffeine. Classes start. During my prep period, I prep. During my classes I teach. After school I help students, go to a game or go home. When do you suppose I should spend an hour on my school computer reading an RSS feed? How pissed off would the taxpayers of my community be if they knew that I spent that time surfing the internet every day?

Viewpoint? All the blogs listed are definitely opinionated. The viewpoints are not ones that I agree with all the time. I don't care to have my principal, who knows little about teaching and basically nothing about math and less about educational technology, decide what things I must read daily. I would hate to see what he would require I read -  he already photocopies pointless articles (FYI) and forwards joke emails. The upshot is that so much of his correspondence is junk that it lessens the importance of the rest of it.
 Suppose I read Right on the Left Coast, which is not on the list, but not Dy/dan, which is?  What if my blog were required reading instead of this Macleod's?  Or Theo, or Moonbattery, or Breitbart or Malkin?

Overload.  The list for math has 31 blogs on it.  If you overload people with this much new educational thought and trivia during a time when they can't process it, you will lose much more than you possibly gain. "Even though it could yield great results" - but it won't.

I see it far more likely that any time allocated will be spent with BostonHerald's Red Sox feed than on head-in-the-sky education dreamers who can save the world instantly if you only do .... this.  Does anyone really think that updating a facebook profile is a good use of a teacher's time?

Macleod seems to have plenty of time during the day to read, relax and tend to his presence on the web (he lists a Blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Twine, Delicious, Digg, Gmail, Skype, coComment, Technorati, Wikipedia), but I have other interests, i.e., teaching. I have precious little time to browse during the day and I don't care to waste it reading Macleod's recount of some conference he went to.

In the evening, which is when I do my reading, I can read and consider, answer and comment -- but certainly not under my principal's eye. Of course, that's also when I tend to my own life, virtual and otherwise. I volunteer my programming time and server space for a bunch of websites, maintain this blog and my own, keep track of my own facebook account (which the students do NOT have access to) -- have a life, such as it is.

I might even grade papers or (GASP!) watch a game.

Professional Development Hell

I had to do some PD the other day and was once again stunned at the limited knowledge of so many math teachers. TI-inspire had some terrible little app running that didn't really work properly but was purportedly able to help students correct their misunderstanding of some simple math ideas. One of these: what happens to area when you double the radius? Take a 7 inch circle and drag the radius out to 14 inches and see what happens to the area.

"I don't get it. What's that mean -- area = 1.66E+2 inch² - what's the E thing?"

I guess we know why so many students have misunderstandings about math.

College studies.

I can't resist reposting this from Maggie's Farm. It makes no sense to me that parents will actually spend their hard-earned money for this kind of stuff. They should make a deal with the kid: "We'll help with a practical major. If you want to waste your time and your money studying garbage, we won't stop you."

Boo-hoo Studies

Why don't colleges just collect all of the grievance study groups and put them in one department. Fat Studies, Anorexia Studies, Queer Studies, Women's Studies, Hispanic Studies, Black Studies, Indian Studies, Transexual Studies, Lesbian Studies, Klutz Studies, Oppressed Studies, Ugly Studies, Not-Too-Smart Studies, Too-Short Studies, etc.

You could call it Boo Hoo Studies, and in it you could sequester everyone who expects college to cater to their narcissism instead of teaching them about bigger, better, and more important things than themselves. Baby bottles in the coke machine, over in that department.

Eventually, they will need to include one more increasingly marginalized and disenfranchised minority in Boo Hoo Studies - Regular People Living Without Grievance. RPLWG just can't get a break these days, can they?

I figure that you could include all the Education Majors who don't actually get a degree in anything except "Bulletin Boards and Presentation Techniques."