Pedagogy

Every K-12 teacher in New Jersey needs to create a professional development plan each year. Teachers pick the types of professional development opportunities they want to take part in. They are required to add at least 100 PD hours every 5 years.

When I was teaching in K-12, it was called the PIP - professional improvement plan. What's in a name? I'm a believer that when teachers improve their skills, it transfers to the classroom. Some of the best activities I participated in were at least partially "personal" improvement.

One of the best programs I became involved with over those years was the poetry program for teachers offered by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

The Dodge Poetry Program was begun in 1986 with a series of poetry in-service days for New Jersey teachers. Those evolved into the idea for a Poetry Festival. The Poetry Program’s Founding Director was James Haba (who was my professor at Rutgers as an undergrad) created the first 1986 Poetry Festival. Since then, there have been twelve biennial Dodge Poetry Festivals, which now routinely attract audiences of 17,000 to 20,000. The Festival is the largest poetry event in North America. (see dodgepoetry.org/festival-2010) The Foundation expanded the poetry offerings to include poet visits to New Jersey high schools and professional development for teachers.

One of the opportunities for teachers offered was called "Clearing the Spring, Tending the Fountain." Small groups of teachers across the state met for a number of weeks to read, write and discuss poetry. The first year that I participated, I asked Jim Haba why there wasn't more discussion about "lessons" to take back to the classroom. Jim was pretty adamant that he didn't want that in the sessions. He believed that if the participants were really involved in poetry as readers and writers, it would enter the classroom naturally. I believe he was correct.

But when we read reports on professional development for teachers at all levels, the assessment of it always points to one goal: improving student achievement.

A post on the blog A Plethora of Technology asked the same question that I ask in this post: Are we wasting our time (and money) with professional development?

A report on how teacher professional development affects student achievement released in 2007 by the Regional Educational Laboratory (U.S. Dept. of Education) contained the disturbing statistic that by their standards only 9 of 1300 professional development programs studied had any value.

The study did show that quality professional development raised student achievement by an average of 21 percentile points.

The conclusion from the report is that professional development is worthwhile, but quality professional development is lacking.

What isn't made clear is what works. What are the components that make for effective PD?

Having spent the past ten years offering professional development for teachers (mostly for higher education), I'll admit that measuring the effectiveness of the transfer of PD to the classroom is difficult. I believe the PD works, but it's hard to provide good evidence beyond anecdotal evidence. I don't believe that any surveys or matrices will give accurate evidence for or against professional development.


Resource: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:LEARNING FROM THE BEST (pdf)

K-12 teachers get training on how to teach in education courses. It's something that separates them from higher education teachers. When I moved from K-12 to higher ed, part of my job was to work with professors on curriculum design and "pedagogy." I was actually hesitant to take that job because I thought that I would not find my suggestions welcomed by all the professors.

I was pleasantly surprised. It's not that every one of the 400 or so professors wanted my help. I couldn't have worked with that many people in any case. But the people who came to me did want help. And what I heard on a number of occasions was "I never was taught how to teach" and "I just try to copy the good teachers I had and not the bad ones." I recall a workshop when we were talking about Bloom's taxonomy. There were about a dozen professors in the session and none had ever heard of Bloom or his taxonomy. They were very interested. We discussed (actually, argued about) knowledge versus comprehension so long that we never made it to the higher order thinking skills.

Everyone who teaches has learned how to teach from the good and bad teachers they experienced as a student. It's not the only training required, but it's there.

I was thinking about this because I went to a bookshelf at home full of teaching books I read in my "formative years" (high school and as an undergrad) and realized that some of those books had a pretty big impact on my desire to be a teacher and how I would teach.

They were not books on pedagogy. They were stories by teachers about teaching. They made teaching seem real to me and I carried them into the educational psychology and foundations courses that were full of theories that made little sense in comparison to what I was finding in my field experiences.

The first Pat Conroy book I ever read was The Water Is Wide which I bought while I was in college preparing to become an English teacher. (It wasn't on any course reading lists.) It seemed like a good choice. It is a 1972 autobiography based on his work as a teacher on Daufuskie Island (called Yamacraw Island in the book) off South Carolina. I also saw the film adaptation, titled Conrack, before I graduated.  (There was also a TV movie version of The Water Is Wide in 2006.)

It is a poor, run-down island which has no bridges and little infrastructure. He has trouble even literally communicating with the islanders, who are nearly all Gullah who were directly descended from slaves and who had little contact with the mainland or its people. I couldn't imagine that I would ever teach in a situation like Conroy, but his struggles to find ways to reach his students, aged ten to thirteen, came back to me a number of times when I was teaching students in a suburban middle school years later.

Conroy (called "Conrack" by most of the students) also battled the principal and the administrators of the district because of his "unconventional" teaching methods. Luckily, my battles were minor compared with Conrack's. Maybe I was more conventional. But, I learned from his story something about which battles were worth fighting.

I know I saw the film To Sir, With Love before I read the book. Say what you will about that pop classic, what I took away from it was that some teachers that really cared about what they taught could make a difference. Of course, when I saw it, I was 15 and had an English teacher that I thought was the greatest teacher ever. Big influence.

My first year teaching, I taught the book To Sir with Love to ninth graders. Tough book for ninth graders to read but it worked. I made them call me "sir" while we read it. We did some of the lessons in the book. We learned about British English and the differences in schools here and there. We watched the film. I tried to explain mods and rockers, Lulu and The Mindbenders - and I couldn't just click on Wikipedia to do it. And we talked a lot about what made a good teacher.

I looking at the books on the shelf and as I paged through Up the Down Staircase and The Way It Spozed to Be, I realized that none of the books were anything like the actually teaching experiences I ended up having in my 35 years in classrooms.

In The Way It Spozed to Be (from 1968), James Herndon writes about his first year teaching, in a poor, segregated junior high school in urban California. I thought his ideas for teaching reading in a poorly equipped school were innovative. He gets fired at the end of the year for poor classroom management. I read that one the summer before I started my first year teaching.

Luckily, I also read Herndon's second book, How to Survive in Your Native Land, that summer. That one is about his next decade teaching and he's successful and Vonnegut-funny about it.

It's important for all teachers to give some thought about the where, when, who and how of their teacher training.

Today I am doing a presentation at the NJEDge.Net's 11th Annual Faculty Best Practices Showcase (at Seton Hall University) on rethinking feedback.

Instructors spend many hours giving feedback to students on paper, online and in face-to-face interactions. But feedback is often underutilized, misinterpreted and misapplied by students.

In my session, I want to talk about a hybrid model of feedback. I wil be talking about how the specificity of the message and a student's prior experiences affect the transfer of feedback. My model is a variation on what is sometimes called 360-degree feedback because it is multisource assessment where the feedback comes from all around a student. That model contrasts with the traditional performance models of "downward" feedback from teacher to student or "upward" feedback where teachers are given feedback by their students.

The 360 degree feedback model is best known for its use in human resources or organizational psychology and it has its detractors.  In the work setting, it means that feedback is provided by subordinates, peers, and supervisors, as well as self-assessment and, in some cases, feedback from external sources such as customers and suppliers or other interested stakeholders.

It is something that I find can be used for instructor-to-student and student-to-student (peer) feedback situations.

There are three books that I revisited in preparing the presentation (though they don't appear explicitly in the presentation itself).

What Great Teachers Do Differently is a book that looks at specific things that great teachers do (that others do not do). Feedback is part of that, along with having high expectations for students that really matter, and how the great teachers filter differently than their peers.

Feedback needs to change in some ways for different kinds of assignments and based on grade levels and subject areas. A book that talks about choosing the right feedback strategy and adjusting your feedback to different kinds of learners (successful students, struggling students, English language learners...) is How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.

A good rubrics book for higher education teachers is Introduction To Rubrics: An Assessment Tool To Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback and Promote Student Learning
 Though rubrics are not the only way to give feedback, they are a good way to train students to give and receive constructive criticism. The book talks about constructing rubrics, types of rubrics, and ways to use them. It's good that this is a student-centered approach to rubric development because some teachers avoid rubric use because they see it as more work for them.

One of my main points in the my "Feedback 360" presentation is that too much feedback in classrooms comes only from a teacher to students.

Do we really need to make a case that teaching literature in the 21st century is worthwhile? A colleague gave me a copy of an article titled "The Case for Literature" by Nancie Atwell from Education Week that says we do.

I first encountered Atwell in 1989 after her book In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning came out. I was teaching in a middle school for a decade then, and was hungry for some new approaches that could get me to ride the second wave (decade) where so many teachers wipe out.

In the article, Atwell begins:

A few weeks ago, I received an urgent e-mail: The National Council of Teachers of English is looking for volunteers for an ad hoc task force whose charge is to gather evidence about why literature should continue to be taught in the 21st century. Apparently, the worth of book reading had become an issue among the work groups that, behind closed doors, were writing the K-12 “common-core standards” that promise to shape curriculum in U.S. classrooms. Given that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is dominated by test-makers and politicians—representatives from the College Board, ACT, Achieve, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association—I was dismayed, but not surprised, that the NCTE was finding it necessary to lobby on behalf of literature.

What I remember from the book (which I have not looked at in at least ten years - I passed on my copy to the next generation when I "retired" up to higher ed) mostly was concerned with writing. Serendipitously, I was working yesterday on a student workshop that I doing this week on "The Reading/Writing Connection" so the article and my recollections about Atwell's book were all clicking together well.

My imperfect mental notes that I took away from her book would include these:

Conference with students about their writing and reading.
Use more mini-lessons and think of them as "whole group" writing conferences.
Teachers as writers. Model good writing. Not things you write in class. Go home and do homework and bring it in like you ask them to do - and share things that don't work too.
Teach more contemporary and young adult literature and less of the canon. (more on that later)
Test out your rubrics with your own writing. Teachers often assign things that are far more difficult than they imagine because they never actually attempt the assignments on their own. It's a lot easier to say "write a sonnet" than it is to write a sonnet.
Writing workshops. The class IS a writing workshop.
Kids like memoir and poetry if it is used as a way to talk about their lives.


Nancie Atwell says in her article that in this move to question the value of teaching literature "The irony—and tragedy—is that book reading, which profits a reader, an author, and a democratic society, is also the single activity that consistently relates to proficiency in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress."

She is critical of the "canon-obsessed camp of Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch Jr." who she feels are "either unaware or dismissive of the glories of contemporary literature." I taught a lot of young adult literature and I never have seen students at any level so into their reading as my middle school students. One of my former students (now also working in higher ed) told me recently that her daughter (who attends the same school where I taught her mom) was reading S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. Her daughter was experiencing the same joy and pain from that perfect little novel that my students did when they read it so many years ago.

When I started teaching that book, it was already ten years old, but it held its grip on my middle school students for all the years I taught it. I knew the book over, under, sideways, down. My original paperback copy has almost as much marginalia as printed text. My students didn't want the book to end, and they wanted to read anything else she wrote, so my class library (another Atwellism) had lots of Hinton paperbacks. When the film version came out in spring 1983, my students that year (I timed assigning the book to precede and conclude just before the release) already had a very detailed film in their mind. I met many of them "unofficially" at the local movie theater the Saturday night it opened. Today I might be officially reprimanded for doing that. After the film was over and the tears were dried, we felt like we should have had a rumble outside - but instead we walked across Route 10 and got ice cream at Friendly's, and critiqued the film. No one could top the book version for my students, but Francis Ford Coppola had come pretty close.

Atwell says that she can "draw a straight line from particular authors of excellent young-adult fiction to particular authors of excellent fiction for adults" and I see that line very clearly too. Copper Sun by Sharon Draper to Toni Morrison. Gary Paulsen's Hatchet to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. Readers of YA novels by Nick Hornby and Michael Chabon are very likely to take on their adult novels at some point too - perhaps years later.

I didn't teach only young adult fiction. One of my most successful literature units in grade 7 was one that paired The Outsiders with our reading of Romeo and Juliet and the Shakespeare research project. One year I recall that in my end-of-the-year poll, Shakespeare beat out Hinton for the top spot.

And I can stilll recall some of the very heated discussions at the end of the year when I asked them to create and defend table seating arrangements for a party (they chose: wedding, sweet 16, bar mitzvah etc.) where all the characters from our reading were attending. Would you seat the greasers with the Capulets or the Montagues? Would Pony hit it off with Juliet? Could you imagine the problems if John from Paul Zindel's The Pigmanwas seated with Hinton's Dallas and Tybalt? Is Scout too young to hang with Johnny Cade - because I think they would really get along well? In those last hot, New Jersey June weeks of school when everyone was packing up textbooks, we were "reviewing" every book, character and plot from the entire year - though I might have been the only one in room 107 that realized it - and I sure didn't mention it to my students.

The National Endowment for the Arts has reported that only 30 percent of students in middle school read every day. I'm not a big defender of standardized tests, but when I read that, according to the NAEP, 70 percent of U.S. 8th graders in 2007 read below the "proficient" level I don't understand it. What happened since I was in that classroom? They don't read well because they don't read enough.

I taught a college reading class last fall and I saw it there too. They don't read outside of class for pleasure, and too many of them don't read for school either. We are losing them.

It seems that the Common Core State Standards Initiative is fine with pushing writing in the classroom, but without the reading and literature connection, I think the writing will fail. It's like coaching the defense but not the offense, or teaching them to draw or paint or play a musical instrument but not looking at paintings and drawings or listening to other musicians.

There's no pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. I heard on NPR that the PBS program Reading Rainbow ends its 26-year run this week. on Friday. The show started in 1983 and has been hosted by actor LeVar Burton. It has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children's show in PBS history (beat out only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers).

The shows always featured a children's book that launched some adventure with Burton. One of LeVar's signature lines was to say "But you don't have to take my word for it." That was the lead-in to a segment where kids gave their own "book reviews" of books they enjoy.

The official story for the show's demise is that they just can't get funding. But John Grant, who is in charge of content at WNED Buffalo, Reading Rainbow's home station, says that another reason is a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. He points back to a change in the Department of Education under the Bush administration towards a focus on phonics and spelling.

When the show was developed in the early 1980s, the question to ask was "How do we get kids to read books?" The current reading research prefers to ask "How do we teach kids to read?"  It makes the assumption that kids don't have basic reading skills, Getting them to have a love of books can come later - and from some other source.

If I had to take sides on these two approaches, it would be a tough choice. My gut feeling is to go for the love of reading. If a kid loves to read, she will push forward through the skills and keep reading, and nothing makes a reader more than reading. Of course, if a kid can't read or reads poorly, why would they love the activity?

An easier stand for me to take is on the side of Reading Rainbow. It was a good program. It was gentle and real and it served a purpose. I can't see that there is no place for it anymore. In fact, if there truly is no place for encouraging the love of reading, it bodes badly for the teaching of reading.

Do families still sit down to dinner together and have conversations about what everyone did that day?  We tried to do that with our kids. Of course, they were stuck with two parents who were teachers, so we were inordinately interested in what was going on in their classes.

Last month, Will Richardson wrote a post saying that he hoped that his own children's stories about school will change. He hopes that the stories will be less about grades on tests and tonight's homework.

He posted his mental list of the types of questions he is hoping they might be able to answer - here are a few:

What did you make today that was meaningful?
Who are you working with?
What surprised you?
What did your teachers make with you?
What did you teach others?
What unanswered questions are you struggling with?
What do you want to know more about?
What made you laugh?

Though there are some significant ideas there about creating, collaboration, and teacher interaction, I found most of them too big. I imagine my own sons groaning at some of the questions. They would be really hard to answer, and what would come from asking the question for the fifth night in a row and hearing, "Nothing" again?

He poses questions like: What’s something your teachers learned today? What did you share with the world? What did you learn about the world?

So, how often do these things happen in your classroom? If it is every day, you are doing a great job, but I expect you are in the minority. 

Years ago, I had a conversation with my friend's son Brian who was about to start kindergarten. He was very eager to start school. I asked him what he wanted to learn about in school. He said, "I want to know about ghosts and where they come from. And I want to know how airplanes fly and how I can fly like a bird." I smiled. And I thought, he is going to be very disappointed in school.

Well, this past month, I saw pictures of Brian on Facebook getting his first "white coat" at the beginning of medical school. I don't know if he ever found out what he wanted to know about ghosts and flying, but something worked in his classroom experiences.

Maybe the most important thing about those questions we ask our children or our students is that we ask them. Asking students to reflect on what they are learning is something I find extremely important. Richardson's questions are good ones, but they are ones that a teacher would ask. When there are no answers to those questions, isn't it a reflection on the teaching rather than the learning?

I hope kids can come home and answer some of his questions. It would mean the classroom is changing. I also think teachers should ask these questions about their day. The unexamined lesson isn't worth teaching.