Kansas Needs a Veto

Here is what I sent to Governor Brownback using his "Legislation and Policy Issues" website. 

Dear Governor Brownback:

I am asking you to veto the education bill that the legislature just passed Sunday 4/6/2014.

First, I do not believe the bill is a fair representation of Kansans' opinions on ALL the issues addressed in the bill. I believe that it is, instead, shameful political maneuvering. Each issue should be addressed in separate legislation so that it can receive the amount of concentration and deliberation that such weighty issues deserve.

Second, I am deeply troubled by the "cut the pie into smaller pieces" approach to running our state's budget. Apply this concept to feeding a family, and the result is a starving family. As the family grows and its needs change, more pie has to be provided. Please quit "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

Third, on the specific subject of education funding, the children who are in our schools NOW and over the next few years need properly supported education NOW. Education funding that is based on an economic plan that will take years to come to fruition (if that ever happens) does TODAY'S children NO GOOD. The current funding formula will work if our state's leaders will fund it properly. Please lead our state by guiding the legislature to  pass adequate funding for education using the current formula and passing the taxation necessary to fund it.

Be Logical About The Common Core

The people who are against the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been listening to politicized propaganda, not the least of which is from Obama-haters who simply hate "the Common Core" because Obama supports it.

"But that is illogical," as Spock would say. I am no Trekkie, but it does seem more logical to me to evaluate the CCSS based on their educational merits.

Guess what? The old standards were centered around a "common core" of knowledge and skills that education professionals and our society felt were important for all citizens of a democracy to possess.

The CCSS are centered around that same core of common knowledge and skills. However, the CCSS "kick it up a notch," as Emeril Lagasse would say. These new standards require higher levels of cognition on the part of the student in learning activities.

Education professionals use Bloom's Taxonomy and its revisions as the standard for evaluating the cognitive levels at which students function during a learning activity. ALL levels of Bloom's are important; however, the key here is that the old standards did not require learning at the higher levels, and the new ones do.

The previous standards required students to remember and understand concepts and to do some low-level application of concepts. The excellent teachers were (and still are) having their students analyze, evaluate, and create using their new learning, but the standards did not require this higher-level cognition. Until these types of learning experiences are required, many students will not experience them.

The new standards, which originated through a partnership of state leaders, require ALL students to use new learning at a much higher level of cognition. This results in a much broader and deeper understanding of the concepts, as well as the ability to tackle complex problems intelligently and find or create solutions.

You can find out more FACTUAL information about the CCSS at http://www.corestandards.org/.

Interest-Based Reading with a Purpose

I was scanning my Eduthusiasm Facebook feed, just about to leave it and get busy with my work-related "tasks at hand," when Curtis Chandler's name caught my eye in a post from ESSDACK. His stuff is always good, so I clicked. His article on "hunting and gathering" brought to the forefront a recurring query for me.

Recognizing that there are exceptions to this -- every situation has its specific needs -- I still cannot help but wonder: Why can't we have the students do the hunting and gathering along with or rather than the teacher?

Here's an alternate idea to gathering a bunch of specific pieces of literature and asking students to read them and identify their plots, characters, themes, and "lessons."

Use interests as ONE of your grouping criteria. Then have groups identify a topic of interest they all share. It might be a hobby, a career interest, a hero, a handicap or disease -- the possibilities are endless.

The assignment will be to develop an annotated bibliography of reading materials designed to educate people on the topic. It should include fiction and non-fiction, books, magazines, journals, websites of agencies/organizations, etc.

Then:

1. Have each group identify an upstanding organization associated with the group's specific interest. The teacher can then communicate with an official of the organization to partner with the group of students for the project.
2. Have the group Skype with the organization official to learn the org's purpose and activities. What kind of help does this org need? What knowledge does this org want people to have? What message does this org need to disseminate? Does this official know of books and other resources that are available to help people understand the issue/topic? Who can interested parties follow on Twitter to gain further insight?
3. The group then needs to use the official's recommendations to identify further resources.
4. Eventually, each student needs to bring his/her recommendations to the group regarding which literature to include in the group's final bib.
5. The group then needs to come to a consensus and complete a draft of its bib.
6. The group should then submit the draft to the org official, give him/her time to peruse it, then use Skype to discuss his/her recommendations for the group's consideration (items to leave in, take out; points to add in annotations; etc.).
7. The group decides on its revisions and then submits its final version, sharing it with the partnering org.
8. Is there a local org where the group could present its reading recommendations?

Lots of work to do before this gets to a classroom, but the idea here is interest-based reading and research with a purpose outside the classroom. 

They Can't Cheat On This One

On the next test you give, have your students do the following:

1. Answer the questions as usual, using whatever resources you normally allow.

2. Analyze each question to determine its level on Bloom's.

3. Defend their choice for each question. 

Be sure to let them use any resources they want for steps 2 and 3--especially their cell phones.

Grade all three pieces for quality.

When you return the graded test, have students collaborate to revise some of the test items to raise their Bloom's level and present/defend their product.

Image source:

http://ww2.odu.edu/educ/roverbau/Bloom/blooms_taxonomy.htm

Just Ask A Teacher's Spouse

I receive daily Kansas education news updates from Tony White, Uniserv Director for Kansas National Education Association. Today, he shared this piece posted by Vic DeSantis on Facebook. I felt strongly that this should be passed on. In terms of who reads this blog, this article "preaches to the choir," but maybe some of us can pass it along to the less enlightened....

My Wife is a Teacher
Vic DeSantis

I am a guy who lives for summers. I wasn’t always like this but I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint the exact time in my life where the months of June, July, and August became such an integral part of my happiness.

... You might be inclined to deduce that my yearning for these warmer times is related to a sports season or a passion for outdoor activities; perhaps even slower times at work. In some regards you might be correct but not exactly for the any one of the three multiple choice answers provided. 

You see, my wife is a teacher.

When I met my wife she was not a teacher - she was a student. When we married she was finishing her degree and starting out on her own professional career. To say that I knew nothing about the educational system at that point would be an enormous understatement. In the nearly 20 years that followed I have learned everything that a parent, student, citizen, and spouse should know about the challenges that every teacher faces. Armed with those insights it is difficult to reconcile the carefully framed messages of politicians and privatized education proponents with the realities of life in the classroom.

My wife is a teacher. I’ve never once, in the history of our life together, seen her trading derivatives, speculate in real estate, engage in subprime lending practices, or make exorbitant demands on her employer for an outrageous salary. It is perplexing to me that over the past few years she and her colleagues have, at least in the eyes of many, become public enemy number one. I suspect that a good portion of this misguided angst is directly related to the economic environment; something that she had absolutely no part in creating. Is she without fault? Absolutely not. I have over the years thought that she would have been much better off taking her well-earned college degree and her intelligence into the private sector and guiltlessly accumulated as much wealth and material possessions as possible. Sometimes you just can’t talk sense into these folks.

My wife is a teacher. Instead of making money she decided to make a difference. 

My wife is a teacher. For nearly 2 years she worked diligently to achieve the prestigious designation as a nationally board certified teacher – a designation that came with a small annual bonus. After meeting her end of the bargain, the state pulled the funding.

My wife is a teacher. She has worked for a decade and a half for far less money than her counterparts who are not public employees. She did this satisfied with the proposition that the pay was steady, a small retirement income certain, and the intangible satisfaction of steering the lives of children.

My wife is a teacher. Her income is now in decline. As a reward for her faithful years of service our state has decided that she should give back 3% of her salary towards her retirement. After all they say “this is what folks in the private sector do.” Tack-on another 2% reduction for the expired payroll tax holiday and the hits just keep on coming.

My wife is a teacher. Despite continuous assaults on her take-home pay, she shells out thousands of her own dollars for classroom supplies. She is impervious to the yearly barrage of administrative mandates established by politicians and so-called “educational experts” – she soldiers on.

My wife is a teacher. She is reviled by certain segments of our society who labor under the belief that she is underworked and overpaid. One would think that after fifteen plus years in a professional where a four-year college degree is a minimum entry requirement that most would not begrudge her a $40,000 a year salary. And for those less inclined to the truth, her salary is adjusted to smaller twice-a-month paychecks to cover the summer months when school is not in session.

My wife is a teacher. She is tasked with the enormous responsibility for the care and safety of your children. I’ll dispense with the lengthy analysis on this topic. Two words suffice – Newtown and Oklahoma. Someone please let me know the next time Lebron James throws his body between a child and the working end of an assault rifle and I will hold professional athletes in the same reverence I do teachers.

My wife is a teacher. For nine months of every year our family lives in the metronomic cycle of early morning wake-ups and late evening lesson-planning. We revel in the plethora of candies and candles, gift-cards and gadgets that herald the arrival of the “Christmas Break,” and I observe with interest the emotion that a hand-written note from a 1st grader can bring at the end of a school year.

My wife is a teacher. From August to May she had dedicated herself to the interests of her kids and her school. She has prepared and toiled, laughed and cried – and shared one hundred stories about the amazing kids that walk through her door each morning. She has left me wondering in awe how she does so much with - and for - so little. 

It is the summer now – my happy time comprised of the few short weeks that I do not have to share her. My wife is a teacher – she is also my hero. I promise to return her in August.

The BIG Secret to Eradicating "Cheating" As We Know It

Are you tired of all the cheating going on in your classroom every time you give a test? Are your students writing the answers on their hands? Ever-so-slyly looking at their neighbor's paper? Texting the next period's students the answers? Copying and pasting paragraphs from the internet?

Oh good grief, the cheating! What can we possibly do to stop the incessant cheating?!?!?

Well, here it is: Stop giving tests.

That's it. Simple as that. Thank you, and have a nice day.

Huh? You say there is something more to say about it? How about this: In school, we need to quit giving students knowledge and then testing their memory of it. If that's all we're testing, then.....well, we might as well just STOP! Testing, as we all know it (those of us who grew up in the 20th century) has outlived its usefulness.

What we really need to know is, "What do our students have the ability to do with knowledge?" To that I say: How can we possibly know if we just test their memory and comprehension of a set of knowledge and then move on to another set?!?

We need to orchestrate real situations that cause students to develop questions, identify problems, discover challenges. This is what the Common Core State Standards and the National Education Technology Standards are telling us.

AND -- now here is the radical part -- we MUST NOT give them the knowledge.

Instead, we need to give them free, unfettered access to any and all knowledge in the world--access to people (including each other), places, and things. Then, we need to stand back, watch, answer questions with questions, and let them WORK TOGETHER to figure out what they need to know in order to address the questions they develop, solve the problems they identify, and meet the challenges they discover.

And we need to make this happen on a regular, required basis during class, not just at the end of the semester or for extra credit or as an option or as a reward for finishing the worksheet early.

Done effectively, it's intentional, strategical, and orchestrated; and it is standards-based, differentiated, and assessed -- in such an integral way that it's ingenious if not downright devious.

In terms of effort for the teacher, it's front-loaded -- before class starts. It is NOT less work. It is a LOT of work, especially while it's "the new way" -- desirable change requires a lot of work.

It's richly deep, deeply rich, relevant in the eyes of the students, (therefore) engaging, rewarding, memorable.

Assess that.

Down with Either-Or!

"We should not do what THEY'RE proposing -- we should do what WE'RE proposing!"

I doubt it.

Republicans vs. Democrats, legislators vs. boards of education, education professionals vs. parents, teachers vs. administrators, politicians vs. professionals, this paradigm vs. that paradigm....

We probably should think VERY carefully before ever choosing EITHER this OR that.

I am fairly sure of the former as a global statement, but right now I am applying it to all discussions related to education.

Whether the discussion is curriculum, instruction, teacher evaluation, testing, funding, or discipline (Phooey on zero-tolerance policies!), we should be ever-so-leery of any entity that tries to force an either-or choice. There are too many variables within our world and within our student population to boil any issue down to A or B.

Why? Well, if we choose A, then those who would benefit from B suffer, and vice versa. We are involved in an enterprise that fails if collateral damage results from our action or inaction.

We are supposed to do what is best for every individual child. Generalities do not apply in education. We have failed the student who drops out. We have failed the student who graduates high school and cannot read at an adult level (exceptionalities aside). We have failed the student who leaves us having no idea what his strengths and aptitudes are--what he "brings to the table." We have failed the student who goes out into the world without the knowledge and skills necessary to be successful no matter what post-secondary path is chosen.

ANY discussions related to education must begin and end with flexibility, customizability. One size WILL NOT fit all.