Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover | Video on TED.com

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeover | Video on TED.com:

So here it is, a high school math teacher demonstrating how to engage students in creating the problems. This was just what I complained wasn't happening in my math classes in high school.  Math was a torture of memorizing formula and anticipating which formula I would need to pass a test.

Now what you all need to know is that I am NOT a math teacher.  Truth be told, I never really understood much after Algebra.  What I am good at is figuring out what the text is asking for and I did exactly as this teacher suggested and decoded the text book to pass my classes.  Thing is, I knew even in high school that I couldn't actually use math to really solve problems, because I was never actually asked to formulate a problem in school.

As a teacher candidate, I was challenged to teach math and it was the one thing I didn't get great evaluations on during my student teaching.  I still didn't really understand fractions and using the curriculum I fell back on my old strategy of decoding.

As a teacher in an American Indian Tribal school my challenge was to present students with a relevant problem and to try to reason out a way to solve it.  In this video, Dan Meyer uses a problem involving water and a container.  In my case, I wanted to do a beading project and the question was how many beads of each color would I need to cover a particular area that had a defined pattern.  This was a real math problem. As it turned out, it was solved using statistics since the beads themselves were not uniform in size, so I just had to be in the ball park.

 My American Indian students really got into this problem - each one had their own design, so all the problems would have different answers - but the students were generous and we did my problem first.  The project went on to involve how much the cost would be for the materials.  Whether the cost could be recouped with a profit if the piece was sold, or alternately how many powwow prizes would they have to earn before the piece paid for itself.  This resulted in a real decision about going forward with the project or modifying it.  I modified my beading project to be much more manageable, not based on the cost in money, but rather the cost in time.  Oh and I should say, this was a fourth grade project done in 9 weeks in the fall so they would have the winter to complete the piece in time for the spring and summer powwow season.

What I really learned form this video is to take the books and strip down the problem so that students have to talk about it in the same way as we did during our beading projects.  This makes educated guessing safe and useful and provides everyone with the confidence that eventually we will arrive at an answer.  Now all I need is a little more expertise with video and sound.

Substituting for Fun and Profit

 I am new to the teaching profession.  I received my master's degree in 2006 and worked for a year as a 4th grade teacher.  Then life struck, and I had to move to Seattle just at a time when budget cuts and mismanagement made even getting on the sub list nearly impossible.  Thus I made my way into academia and ran a writing center for a local tribal college.  This was an unqualified diseaster.  While I loved the students and the teaching, I hated the politics (politics in Indian Ed being exponentially more complex than anywhere else).  So I was politely laid off and have been on unemployment ever since.
 
I am currently substitute teaching in a relatively affluent public school district.  After almost two years on unemployment, I am grateful to be working again.  When Ii was hired into this district I decided that I would take any job the district offered me.  It became apparent right away that paraeducator jobs in special education had a particular need for substitutes. I have worked nearly continuously in these jobs since the first day of school.  I think some beleive that these jobs are a bit of a come down for a certified teacher with a masters degree.  Although the difference in pay is daunting (almost  a third less than a certified sub job) the advantages have become apparent right from the start.

As a para-sub, I get an opportunity to observe many kinds of teachers, teaching many kinds of things.  It is a real opportunity to evaluate how others teach and learn from great teachers and maybe from some poor ones as well.  I also get to work one on one with some of the most challenging students in these schools.  They have already taught me so much about what works and what doesn't work.  When I have been called to be a substitute teacher in a over full classroom of first graders, I have taken what I have learned with individual students and applied it, successfully, to whole classroom management.

I have also had the opportunity to work with children that I would never work with otherwise; children that are physically challenged or medically fagile.  It was my priviledge to work with a little blind girl in kindergarten.  She trained me in a week just how and when to help her.  I have learned a great deal about all kinds of physical disabilities. Thankfully the children I have worked with have been both tolerant of my ignorance and kind while educating me.  All of this is knowledge I can take with me when I finally get into my own classroom again.

As with most of the country, education has been hit just as hard with the recent economic depression.  That means I may be on the sub-list, eating beans and rice, for quite some time.  I plan on using this time to learn how I can be a better teacher.  I have also learned there is no better place to quietly observe what is really going on behind the scenes in any given school...and that is the really interesting story....

What does it take to fire a bad teacher?

At a recent Save Our Schools rally in Washington DC, the actor and son of a teacher, Matt Damon stood up for teachers and tried to set the record straight about tenure and teaching. A little later on in this interview the interviewer (who I am reluctant to call a journalist because she had an agenda, asked incredibly leading questions and had clearly not done her homework) asserts that it is nearly impossible to remove a bad teacher from their position.  When asked what she based this opinion on, she cited her time as a student in the LA school district.  Much has been made of this interview, but one thing was made clear to me, the public has an elevated the notion of "tenure" to the level of "job for life".  While each state has its own standards for teaching certification and the classification "highly qualified", I thought it was time to set the record straight about how "teacher effectiveness" is determined in our state, whether their is such a thing as "tenure".  Who it applies to and how an ineffective teacher can be removed.

According to the WA State OSPI site the current tenure laws state that a teacher must teach for two years in an accredited public school before receiving tenure.  What that amounts to is a two year probationary period. After which, a principal has to go through several steps in order to fire a teacher.  The steps include a review and remedial measures that allow the teacher to improve.  None of these measures will take more than a year and if the teacher doesn't improve, they will be removed.  If you look at the private sector, the probationary period is usually 90 days and most employers will review the employee and attempt remedial measures before they fire him or her.  There is legislation being offered at the state legislature that would extend probation for one more year and tie teacher evaluations to student test scores.  So the idea that a tenured teacher has a job for life is simply not true.

The real problem for most new teachers on the ground is that principals have figured out they can hire substitutes for long term assignments, saving their school money on benefits while having complete control over hiring.  Simply put, if they don't like you they can simply replace you with no notice.  The second big problem is, when budgets get cut, it is the new teachers that are let go regardless of their tenure or effectiveness.  This can create a catch 22 for principals with good teams when they have to let go one or two of their best and brightest because they have a teacher who is eligible to retire in a year.  Even if they had the legal option to pick and choose, which option is the least damaging?  Those with tenure get put on the sub list and I think I have already written about how difficult it is to stay in the field when you are making 300 dollars a week and no benefits.

What I ask parents and community members to realize is that we teach because we love to teach.  We believe there should be standards and we want to help every student in our classroom exceed them.  It has become increasingly more difficult to do a job when we can't count on it being there for us from year to year due to spurious unattainable benchmarks for evaluation and budget cuts.   Being a tenured teacher doesn't mean you have a job for life, it only means they can't fire you simply because they don't like you.  In other words tenure only guarantees that you will be treated fairly if your work is called in to question.  If any of you think tenure means "a job for life" just ask any one of the five hundred teachers in this state who won't be back in the classroom this September.

Charter schools in WA....really?

Recently the Washington State political action group “Education Voters” sponsored a meeting to include supporting legislation that would allow charter schools in our state.  We believe that all children should be reading by 3rd grade and all children should have the skills they need to enter and do well in college.  But, and this is a big "but"  the next set of questions will determine whether or not the things we "believe" will make schools work are, in fact, the things that WILL make them work.

First, what are the most important factors in a child's success in school and how do we create an environment in which those factors are amplified and maintained? What skills and knowledge will a student (and a teacher)need to succeed in a 21st century world.  What are we doing to create schools that can efficiently teach those skills WHILE anticipating the needs of the next generation of students.

Research shows that the single most important controllable factor in the success of the student is the quality of the teacher.  Our research has proven it and experience has verified it.  Yet, a teacher candidate is supposed to take on the entire debt of their college education and all subsequent major educational expenses for a position that will pay half what his college colleagues will make in medicine or the law, both comparative fields. There are two remedies for this situation, one is to lower the cost of education so that a teacher’s educational debt is reduced, or we must pay teachers on par with the debt they incur and provide entry into full time employment immediately after graduation, ie: paid internships.

Good teachers get to be good teachers by experience, yet we ask debt ridden graduates to begin their careers with only a college quarter's worth of student-teaching experience.  We all seem to “pay our dues” by being a substitute for a couple of years.  Substitute teachers get no benefits and generally make do on sixteen thousand dollars a year or less.  No paid residency for us. All this is occurring at a time when the price of an adequate Bachelors degree is rising in the double digits every year or so.  Science and math teachers are especially drawn to the private sector since the pay is so much better and the debt for their education can be substantially higher.  Frankly merit pay isn't going to be enough to draw good people into the field.  The costs incurred in educating educators must be addressed on the front end through grants, scholarships and a period of paid internship of at least a year.

When the cost of a BA is over 100,000 dollars and it can take two to four years for a new teacher to become full time employed in their own classroom, a cost benefit analysis doesn’t look good to the candidate.  After teaching two years in our state a teacher is required to take on a course in professional development which can cost up to $5000 and many extra hours of work, while teaching full time, in order to be classed as “highly qualified” even if they have recently received a Masters degree in teaching or education.  Money is needed to help new teachers pay for their education and professional development just to keep the best qualified teachers in the field for more than five years.

Many charter schools are very good. However, there have been notable system wide failures of charter schools. Texas is a good example of what happens when charter schools are not well regulated.  But really, before we decide who is going to administer and run schools, shouldn't we look at creating an environment in which good teachers are trained and maintained?  The fact is, no matter who runs a school or how much leeway a principal has, if there isn't a pool of dedicated life time learner/ teachers to actually teach, than you will not get the outcomes you desire.

We are living in a nearly miraculous time of change.  The growth of knowledge has exploded and the discreet skill sets that are needed to navigate in the business world are changing so fast that the role of schools as teachers of reading, writing and arithmetic will fall woefully short of what is needed.   We can't teach every subject (or software) a student may need to succeed fast enough.  We are going to have to train self winding life long learners who can respond agilely, think critically, work collaboratively and adapt to changing environments.  Schools and teachers are not prepared to train children in those important soft skills.  Interpersonal and collaborative skills, listening, speaking and critical thinking have only recently become priorities in an academic culture that has stressed competition and individual accomplishment over collaboration and innovation. While learning in the private sector has taken giant leaps into the collaborative models of working groups, elementary schools, even charter schools, driven by high stakes testing, are teaching as if students lived in the world of 30 years ago.  In order to remedy this, we must question every assumption we have about schools from what to teach and when, right down to the brick and mortar.

What teachers learn has to be looked at as well.  Schools, especially elementary schools become insular and fail to take into account what is happening in the rest of the community.  Often innovations in business and technology never come into the minds of educators until a student is in secondary school.  One example is that our technology is all based in base  2 mathematics, yet we don't teach base 2 until the middle grades (if at all) and we don't give it enough time for the students to really learn to use it.  How do we teach good listening skills, good collaboration skills and integrate those with critical thinking and interpersonal skills that will serve our students in the data driven innovation hungry world we live in today? Should we still be teaching in an environment that separates children by age or should we group children developmentally?  What about the brick and mortar school?  Is going to school becoming obsolete?  Virtual schools and homeschooling is rising, but what other options are out there that haven't been tried yet? 

The other thing teachers need is support.  They need the support of parents and administrators who understand that just because the way they learned is familiar and therefore comfortable it may not be the best thing for their children. It is a brave new world out there and the greatest obstacles to educational innovation are the cultural biases of parents and the community.  Public schools need better public relations.  Amazing things are happening in the field of education, research that is challenging all of the "common sense" assumptions of the past 150 years.  Change is scary, especially to a generation that has spent 12 to 16 years learning in an outdated system. If innovations are going to be accepted by the tax paying public, the state and the school districts are going to have to do a much better job marketing them.  Even when schools work, the public perception is that they don't, and this misapprehension has caused very good alternative public schools to be converted back to the old model. 

Yes, charter schools are part of that conversation of scary changes, but if teacher support and training isn't firmly in the center of the table, we will simply be trading one outdated system for another.

Reality Check: Education 2011

Just two days ago, National Public Radio did an article on how deeply angry teachers are about the misperception of the public about teachers and schools.  Teachers have always been something of a punching bag for politicians who have nothing better to do than run down our school systems.  This is especially evident when a politician has no clear mandate. I believe the thinking goes something like this, "Since our schools are perceived as really bad, any politician can use school improvement as a step up to office."  As with many things, the simplistic and highly politicized answers that have been put forward to improve conditions for schools and make for more successful student outcomes have fallen far short.  Part of the reason for this is that the perception of the public is not congruent with conclusions of good research and experience.  What I propose is that we look at the one factor that research has shown, over and over again, is the most important in student success, namely good teachers.

A 20 year study done by the Federal Department of Education determined that the single most important factor in student retention and graduation statistics is the quality of the teachers.  But what, you ask, was the government's response to the high rate of drop outs and the low graduation statistics?  Was it more money for teacher candidates to lower their student loan debt, or budgets for professional development?  No.  The response was to pass federal legislation directly affecting every school system in the US targeted at punishing and closing down low performing schools without providing a single dime of federal money to go along with this legislation.  In fact, it mandates that the states must pull money from these low performing school districts if the schools do not improve enough in a three year period.

This strikes me as totally backward for many reasons.  First, the United States does not have a school system, it has thousands of systems with wildly different needs and rates of success.  What works in New Orleans may not in rural Alabama. Second, the spotlight is put on what isn't working, while ignoring high performing traditional and non-traditional schools, such as those in Harlem.  It is time for teachers to look at what is working in their classrooms, in their schools, and in their districts and make a lot of noise about it.

Third, teachers need to make the public aware of the amount of time and money they invest in staying current and building the best environment we can in classrooms that are often technologically or even architecturally inadequate.  Teachers are required to receive and maintain a high level of professional training and continuing education that often puts them into the same kind of debt as doctors and lawyers, but their average salary rarely tops $50,000 a year.  Lastly, there is great research being done on the links between brain science and learning in universities all over the world, but most teachers have no access to this research and no time to learn or put new techniques into practice. This makes teachers work harder, but not smarter.

I intend to use this blog as a bully pulpit for all the valiant teachers, courageous administrators and innovative school systems who make the right decisions for the right reasons and get the best results despite pressure from State and Federal governments.  Teachers make a huge difference in the lives of people, just ask Oprah Winfrey, or Barak Obama.  It is time for us to push back at all the misperceptions and bad information.  This is what I intend to do.  I hope you will join me.