dkeane's Blog

I plan on establishing my own book study with staff and use some of the posts generated by the group to aid in starting conversations. I will also try to engage several other book studies to take place in the building around topics related to each of our four building goals.

I would also love to continue conversations with members of this group.  Do you or anyone else have another book they would like to use to generate discussion/learning?  One of my favorites is Leading Change by Kotter. Another is First Break All of the Rules by Buckingham.

I do not subscribe to all of what Kohn prescribes, but there is a great deal concerning the use of either the carrot or the stick that concern me. I do not think that students should be taught to look for extrinsic measures for success. We should be encouraging students to do their best rather than being the best. However, we do live in an economy where competition is reality as are rewards and consequences (I really don't believe anyone should be punished other than those who commit horrific crimes)  I think we need to make sure students as well as those we work with, reflect and personally evaluate their own work. I think we would be poor teachers if we did not provide some evaluative feedback and exemplars to help the student judge the quality of their efforts. Comparison, even the use of standardized assessments, is not a bad thing as long as we look at the results as a reflective tool to aid us in our efforts for continuous improvement. Unfortunately we are in a time when punishment and rewards are popular among our constituents. We want to have villans and heroes.  We want to have winners and losers. Wouldn't it be great if as in the early Greek olympics the participant who is honored was not always the runner who ran the fastest, but rather the one that ran the most gracefully?  Or better yet, we were living in a time when instead of building tremendous Olympic stadiums under the guise of establishing a better world we spent that money to feed the millions of starving people around the world and to erradicate diseases which would not exist if medicines which are now sitting in pharmacutical company warehouses were distributed to the masses who can not afford them.

I don't disagree with you, I think that we need to move away from using technology for purely simplistic activities or to allow us the ease of not having to correct worksheets since we have software that will do this for us. My point is that under the current scheduling model, it is difficult to provide the flexibility of time. If we were able to use time more efficiently and purposefully, it would allow for students to use technology to find their own information, verify their findings, and then make new meaning out of the information they have gathered. This could be through the use of the internet or as I am a digital immigrant possibly even a book in the library. I hope that we are not getting to the point in which only computers and the internet are considered technology. Having been a vocational and science teacher, there are many other forms of technology that are far superior to a computer in aiding a student construct knowledge. Computers and the internet or some simulation software might be used, but in many cases there are no substitutes for the actual task (welding is a good example)  sometimes to truly develop an understanding or to master a skill, you have to use the real thing. I know that they use simulators to train almost every conceivable skill in operating military machines, but I can assure you they also put them in the real thing before they send them off to battle. Just las a mechanic has an extensive tool chest to ensure he/she is using the most appropriate tool for the task, so must we as educators be careful we are not encouraging the computer and internet as the only tools  a student places in his or her toolbox.

Changes in the physical environment have been discussed and Fullan would suggest that a simple structural change will not change the culture, but I think when you consider resources, there is not one more critical than time.

We need to shift our paradigm on the use of time in our schools. We still operate on the period model at the secondary level and "chunk out time"  We might not give equal time to each subject, but we are not nearly flexible enough in our distribution. 

Does each class need the same amount of time?  Does each student?

I remember back in the "good ole" flex mod days. Classes met for varied amounts of time, with large groups and small groups used for instruction. Students were in classes for a limited amount of time with resource labs available for those students needing additional time on a subject, while other students can spend the same time either workign on another class or possibly taking another class.  Students were given flexibility as to how to structure their day. 

We tended to move away from this model as we found it very difficult to schedule and we did not like the fact that some students were not responsible in making good use of their time. With the new scheduling software and student management systems which would make monitoring student whereabouts much easier, I think this is a model we might want to consider again. Time is a resource that must be carefully allocated to ensure all students are getting what they need in the limited time avaialable.

@Sarah

Nice summarization.  I especially like the focus on the desired behaviors.  I think that is the key and we have to celebrate changes in our practice prior to when we see results. Getting everyone working together is crucial.  Once you have the herd moving, it is much easier to change directions when necessary. It is breaking that static inertia that is the difficult part.

First Break all the Rules is a great read and for those of you who have not read it, well worth the time.

I think there are a few other points from that book that apply here as well. As Collins states in Good to Great, we need to get the right people on the bus and to go one step further, in the right seats.

I think that while spending time with your star teachers is crucial to move the organization forward, when we are spending time with the lower performers, we need to spend the time helping them hone their natural skills to make them more effective and not spend a great deal of time trying to mold them into something they will never become. (If they don't have any natural skills to build on, you had better change your tactics to encouraging them to get off your bus)

Find their inate abilities and then provide them a role in your organization that will fit with that. It sometimes means putting your content rich, strategy poor teachers with your more "desirable" courses.  I am not meaning to imply that we put our worst teachers with our best kids all of the time, but let's face it, you give your most serious patients to your most skilled physicians all of the time, why not do the same in schools. We often see some of our very veteran and most effective teachers teaching the upper level courses which have the fewest number of students in them most of which really want to be there.  At the same time we put our new staff or lesser teachers with the hardest to work with students (as their parents are much less likely to complain about the poor delivery). These classes tend to have much higher class sizes and fewer resources are allocated to them. Then just like most teachers, we tend to spend the least amount of time working with these individuals as it is not always a pleasant experience for us as administrators.

I agree with Buckinham.  I do not spend my time watering the rocks as I know they will not grow, but I do spend some time with the struggling but viable plants as I want them to, and believe they can, also produce fruit.

I do not, however, ask a corn plant to grow in the rice patty.

@Skip

I would agree with you that they are bored and I think that is where I see a great many teachers shun their responsibility.

I understand the dilema of 30-35 students in a class and trying to individualize in 55 minutes. I would suggest that teachers again are responsible for advocating for change in the system. I have introduced several scheduling alternatives for teachers to review only to have them rejected without even slight consideration as "THEY" will never let us do that. I am not sure who exactly makes up this secret society of "THEY", but I have yet to meet a representative from this group telling my I can not make a change in our school.

I agree with you that changes will need to be made, but I do not think they are impossible to implement in the very near future with the resources we currently have at our disposal.

Again, I believe that we are the influencers, and we have the power to change anything.  This book has given us a number of influencing strategies. Now we are responsible for putting them to use.

WOW!!!!

I just got done looking at your summer reading program. I have to say that I am very impressed.  What a wonderful use of technology and what awesome student comments/conversation.

I am embarrased to say we are doing nothing even close to this in the schools I work in. I can tell you right now, we are going to start. Kuddos to you and your staff.

For those of the rest of you, you need to really look at the site.

@skip

Why do you think kids skip class, sleep, fail to do their homework, forget their pencil, fall asleep, day dream and not ask questions. I have seen very few k-3 grade students who exhibit this behavior. I would challenge that this is a natural response to our failures.  I have seen the same student in two different classes be a model student in one and exhibit all of the listed behaviors in another.

I will go back to my favorite Einstein quote. I am not sure I will get it perfect, but it goes something like this, "I do not try to teach my students but rather provide them opportunities/environment in which to learn." 

I may have not expressed myself correctly in my previous post.  What I meant to imply was our responsibility to ensure we provide an environment conducive to learning. I think we have a responsibility to work with our students to ensure we make adjustments to our teaching to address their learning needs. I don't think we feel we need to adjust our methods to the needs of the students. I think too often we feel we have met our obligation after we deliver our lesson.

I wonder how any of us would feel if the doctor gave us a series of antibiotics and then just expected us to heal as this is now our responsibility. They did their part now we have to do ours. I think that Marzano's work would suggest that a guaranteed and viable curriculum, a safe and orderly school environment and a highly effective teacher in the classroom will trump the parental omissions of which you speak. If we truly take responsibility for our students learning we will find ways to overcome those parental and legislative omissions.

James,

Iwould agree that this is one of the toughest of all the influences particularly in education. I have seen performance based pay systems really tear a faculty group apart.  I have found that there are other rewards that are more readily available to us and far more effective than money. I have used professional development/travel as one of those. Those teachers who are doing some great things in their classrooms are encouraged to attend conferences either as a participant or even as a speaker/presenter. They are sent out to talk to other schools about their programs or to present on a particularly successful program at our school.

I also see a great deal of merit in working closely with some of those teachers as they develop new programs and shifting needed resources their way at crucial times. Although they may not benefit directly from this, it does give them a feeling that what they are doing it important and valued. I love to work in groups of teachers like this as it is some of the most rewarding time I get to spend as a high school principal.

I have read Dufours' books and love the concept. In Keokuk we did a book study on Whatever It Takes and another great book Failure is Not and Option.  I have seen teachers who have made some attempts at working together, but they still don't want to take any responsibility for student learning other than the learning which is supposed to be taking place in their classrooms. I often find that teachers do not even want to assume responsibility for that. The attitude is ussually more that the teacher is responsible to teach and the student is then responsible to learn.

I am not so sure there are that many schools out there that exhibit this culture/behavior.  I know of the examples listed by Dufour et. al. and have read of others listed as model schools by the International Center for Leadership in Education. (Bill Dagget's group)

Do you have any experiences or know of a source which could give me some guidance in the process of building such a culture in a school?

Thanks for the article and the link to the website. I think I will get much of what I want from there.

I thought the story about the ladies working together on a business plan was amazing. I wonder how we can form teams of teachers that problem solve together and take personal responsibility to assist one another in our schools?

I wonder if there are instances where this is already occuring. I know that at some middle schools in the area, teams of teachers work very closely with one another.  I have not personally had experience working with this model, but it would be something I would be very interested in exploring in a high school setting.

I worked with social studies and language arts teachers in Keokuk and aided them in developing parallel units of instruction with some cross-curricular assessments being developed as a result. It was a very powerful experience.

Do any others have experiences in which teams of teachers have joined forces and also assumed responsibility for student learning outside of a single classroom?  I know that there are interdisciplinary units developed but are the teachers aware of and have a sense of responsibility for the progress of students in other teachers' classrooms.

Dan,

I too would like to be optimistic and really do think significant change will occur in our schools. I sometimes wonder if efforts on changing the school may be somewhat misplaced. We are doing new and innovative things in many of our classrooms, but then when those who retire to green pastures or are shoved out the door are replaced, we are getting a group of new teachers who are often ill prepared to engage in the newest and most effective teaching strategies as they were taught the "traditional school model" in their teacher preparation programs. If we want to see change, we have to work equally hard on preparing our new teachers as we are on changing the old ones.

I had an activity where we were to develop a century high school and then defend our design to get my degree in educational administration. It was one of the best projects I have ever done in my 33+ years in public education. K-32 and counting.  The professor began by telling us to start with a white piece of paper.  Do not throw the hurdles on the track and then decide not to run the race. There are lots of races in which runners face hurdles and still they are able to not only run the race, but finish/win.

I am not advocating to dismantle public schools, but I am an advocate for loosening up some of the restrictions to allow for a new paradigm to be explored.

In my opinion, highly qualified teachers are not selected due to an endorsement.  Many teachers classified as highly qualified due to their degree/endorsements are not highly effective.

Scott,

My comment was meant to be a compliment and a statement of support. My point was that individuals like you who bang the pans together are often a breath of fresh air to many of the rest of an organization whose members know to be flawed or ineffective.  They have always wanted to bang the pans but were never brave enough to give it a try. I would guess that once a leader begins banging, those others will soon find the courage to join in.

I liked the story due to the fact that it lines up with the Culture of Silence issues discussed in another post. There was a great deal of risk involved for the first individual who began beating the pans outside the door of an angry man's house. The violence in the house could have easily shifted unto the "pot banger". The first "pot banger", in my opinion, is not just a leader, but also a hero. The story shows us that by breaking the silence and pointing out unacceptable practices, we can change the culture of our village/school.  I think I will share this story with staff early this next school year.

I use walkthroughs to document instances of implementation. I use the number of instances as a whole and do not point out particular teachers. I share the information with staff as a whole and we discuss it.

An example was the use of a reading initiative we had in the building. I wanted to see staff front loading the vocabulary and using tools from the Reading for Understanding program.  I simply documented in my walkthroughs when these strategies were being observed. I make a walk around the building both in the morning and in the afternoon and visit a number of classrooms during each walk around. I gather the observations and compile them. If after a week's worth of walkthroughs I don't see the strategy even once, I point that out to the staff. I preface it by indicating that I don't want a shift to the "dog and pony show" when I enter the room, I just want to see them doing what they planned to do that day. In pointing out that we all need to be using the selected strategies at some point in our lesson it would make sense for me to catch someone at a point in which the strategy/tool is being used.  I stress to the staff that this is just data and does not really answer my question of the level of implementation, but it certainly does raise some questions. Only through monitored implementation can we expect new learnings to impact student acheivement.

Ihave a lot of teachers that talk to me about room on their plate. The phrase has almost begun to infuriate me. I tell the teachers that if what they currently had on their plate was working, we wouldn't need to add more. Unfortunately, there is a great deal on our plates that just sits there or is "rotten". I think we need to start helping teachers identify things they can scrape off their plates.  They need to be given permission to not do some things that don't make a difference. Unfortunately, we all also need to realize that in today's schools we will be carying a platter not a plate.

I wonder if we played project chicken for too long in schools. I have rarely seen an administrator go to the school board and deliver a presentation declaring "we are in deep shit". I don't know that we lie, but we certainly do try to only report the positives and keep the real problems we are dealing with at school quiet. We tend to try and make bad news seem not so bad.  We don't share our real problems with the school board and so at times we fail to get the resources we need. I have seen bond election after bond election fail because the schools are kept looking nice on the outside and school officials refrain from telling school boards (and thus the public) that the building is falling apart.

I wonder if I were to stand outside of a teacher's room and banged pans when they were lecturing for ninety minutes that might change their behavior?  Classical conditioning at its best.

Dr. Mcleod, I would guess that you love "banging the pans."  What is noise to some is undoubtedly music to others' ears.

Learning is a social process.  There is a story in one of Fullan's books about the Robins and the Titmouse. How adaptation spreads much more quickly in social groups. Again I would advocate for providing an opportunity for teachers to engage in both group and individual learning opportunities and see where they feel the most growth in their own learning.

I also can relate to your experiences where teachers agreeing with my position being too afraid to voice their opinions due to the repurcussions they would get from members of the other camp.

I have gone so far as to have assigned seating at specific inservices to ensure that some individuals are provided support and that other "nay sayers" are in the minority in the group. TI have found that some of the negative individuals are far to comfortable saying negative things and preying upon those younger more enthusiastic teachers when in their own little group sitting in the back of the room.

I have a picture of the DUKE John Wayne above my desk and often point it out to those young go getters.. It reads, "Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway."  I think one could substitute speaking up for saddling up.

I too loved the point that practice doesn't make perfect. only perfect practice makes perfect. Deliberate practice is emphasized greatly by many of our coaches, but then the same coach when donning their teacher hat forget what they know to be true. They assign 40 problems but don't give any feedback until a day or two later. Formative assessment practices are underutilized in our classrooms today.

I wonder how you provide opportutnities for deliberate practice in areas like conflict management, teamwork, fierce conversation, etc.  I think I may have been in teacher groups where we did this in a fellow teacher's garage drinking beer.  We had some great philosophical conversations which at times broke into powerful debates.

I am from Iowa and I will tell you that feedback is often given, but  not based on previously identified clear learning targets. Often it is intended to be practice, but rather turns into the game. Meaning we tell students the activity is a practice activity to build skill, but then we keep score. How many football games on Friday night are decided by points earned Monday through Thursday of the week?

My next comment is really more sarcasm than anything.  I think I have a social studies teacher in the last school I taught in that was unaware that being a scribe was no longer a career option. His idea of a lesson was kids copying what he had written on an overhead into a notebook he than spent time ensuring reflected exactly what he had written. I tried to explain to him that we now had photocopy machines so this was no longer a real marketable skill, but he insisted that this was an effective way of teaching. What was remarkable was the fact that he made very few comments duing many of these sessions. I was pleased when he decided to seek the greener pastures of retirement, but saddened knowing that he had sucked the passion from learning from countless students throughout his career.

I have a quote on my wall from Albert Einstein.  It reads, "I never teacher my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."  I think it is really in line with many of these comments. I agree that the responsibility for learning lies within the individual, but we have to ensure that we provide the proper conditions in which to learn. I fear that decline in enthusiasm for school between elementary school to high school is a tell tale sign of us not providing these conditions. I would also suggest that this is the difference between the enthusiasm we see in the beginning teacher and the lack of it in veteran staff.
I have teachers that comment all of the time that school is not supposed to be fun. I disagree with them.  Learning whether at school or anywhere else is fun and we need to structure our learning institutions so that students and teachers can have fun learning together.

We advocate to teachers to provide more opportunities for their students to be engaged in their learning, yet we do so in a large room with slide presentations to the entire staff in a darkened room. They have the option of being engaged or as in many schools I have presented, "multi-tasking" by pretending to listen to me while they correct papers.

I spent Saturday with a group of aspiring administrators. I tried to have them participate in table discussions around particular topics (mostly situations I have dealt with over the past five years) . I was pleased with some of the discussion, but troubled when several seemed to continously look at me and ask me what the "right" way to handle each situation was. Like I knew.  We have convinced the adults in the building that there is a right answer and then expect them to allow creativity in the classroom. Don't get me wrong, some answers to complex problems are better than others and there are wrong ways to handle some situatinos, but if we as adults are not able to engage in creative problem solving, how can we expect our teachers to allow the students to do so. Instead of making decisions for the staff and then having sole ownership of that decision, I advocate to let the staff be part of the problem solving process and in doing so take responsibility for the change.

I really think the last paragraph of your post sparked something for me. I am not so sure that if we don't make some very needed changes schools as we know them may very well go away. There are more and more virtual options for schooling that are being accessed regularly. I think colleges may see the effects before k-12 systems. They may already be feeling the effects. They certainly have done more in the past few years to make access easier for their students and tailor programs towards their needs than what has been done in k-12 schools. I think the slowest to respond from what I have seen in my adult years has been high schools. Elementary schools, in many cases, have done some great things in terms of change.  I have heard the saying that elementary teachers care about their kids, middle school  teachers care about eachother, high school teachers care about their subjects and (please don;t take offense) professors care about their own little personal. research project.

We are the influencers.As the book says, if we use our skills effectively, we have the power to change everything.  

As a teacher I spent a great deal of the summer working construction. I agree it is far easier to build something new than to work within the constraints of an existing structure and remodel.

I am for a fresh start, but unfortunately there are far too many who are fearful of change even if they don't like their current position.

Kim,

I too would be very interested in how you have developed this course. Possibly you could share some of the activities and materials you are using with the pre-service teachers.