The Line

My guest today is Kathleen Cushman, who runs The Practice Project (an initiative of the nonprofit What Kids Can Do, with support from MetLife Foundation). Kathleen Cushman’s new book with the students of WKCD is Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery (Jossey-Bass, 2010). She blogs about the Practice Project at http://firesinthemind.org.

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What makes kids want to get good at something?

Although I no longer have a classroom of my own, I’ve spent the past ten years at WKCD (What Kids Can Do) recording everything I can get students to tell me about what goes on in theirs. And last year, working closely with very diverse adolescents around the country, kids opened my eyes more than ever before.

We were talking about what makes them want to learn. So I started with the simple question: “What does it take to get really good at something?”

From their lived experience, the kids already had plenty of answers. Some of them were skateboarders, or played chess. A lot were really into sports, or music, or art. A couple of them liked making robots, a few acted in plays. They all had something they were good at, even if was simply making it safely home through a dangerous neighborhood.

In what WKCD dubbed the “Practice Project,” the kids and I took apart how all that learning happened. What sparked their early interest? What kept them going when it got hard? What and how did they have to practice? Whose encouragement and critique mattered? When they got really good at something, where did they take it next?

The students wanted to compare their answers to those of “expert adults” in the community, so they went out and interviewed some. Then they pulled out all the common elements of the process of getting good at something. We made our own list, called “The Habits of Experts.”

Still, there was an elephant in the room. It was time to stop pretending and ask: Where in school did kids see those habits fostered?

Did they feel a spark of interest when teachers introduced a new topic or task in math, science, literature, or history? Did schoolwork gradually lead them toward real mastery, despite frustrations? Did class routines and homework really give them the “deliberate practice” they needed?

Their answers—sometimes affirmative, often not—changed the way that all of us thought about what should go on in school. It had to be possible, we thought, for academic learning to unfold in the same way that kids experience when they are working hard at basketball or chess.

Before long, we were filling a book and a blog (both called “Fires in the Mind”) with what these young people could tell us about motivation and mastery. Once we had a common language that made sense of how they “got good” at something, it was easy for us to apply it to every challenge they took up.

I tried out that common language last year when I facilitated a regular “Practice Study Circle” with a group of New York City public school teachers. (Most taught middle school, some high school.) As we talked, we kept coming back to two simple questions:

“What am I asking my students to practice right now? And how am I asking them to practice it?”

That small shift in perspective – toward “deliberate practice” – helped these teachers make small but important shifts in how they organized their everyday lessons, homework, and assessments.

I’m sure you’re already planning for the school year that’s about to start. So what about you? What will you be asking your students to practice? How will you ask them to practice it?

The checklist below might be helpful as you think about what you want students to be practicing in the year ahead, and how you can encourage and support that practice. I’d love to hear your suggestions to make our list better—and your ideas about what else would light kids’ fires.

Our Goals for Practice in Class

A checklist by students for teachers

Do we see the meaning and value in the material you introduce?

• You begin with a story, conflict, or puzzle that goes to the heart of it
• You ask for ideas about how it might connect to our lives and interests
• You introduce us to people whose work involves this knowledge or skill
• You suggest class projects that would help us explore the material
• You encourage us to adapt your project ideas, or propose our own

Do we know what excellent work with this material looks like?

• You show us the work of real-world masters who use these ideas or skills
• You share with us exemplary work by other students
• You ask us for good examples we have seen outside of school
• You write with us a clear rubric describing the qualities of good work

Do we know what to practice so we can put our learning to use?

• You give us each a clear goal that we can expect to succeed at
• You give us the chance to explore the material in different ways
• You get us to tell you what we don’t yet know
• You break what we have to learn into manageable parts or stages

Do you know what we understand and don’t understand?

• You listen while we explain things to each other
• You have us write directions for how to do some part of the work
• You arrange Socratic seminars, debates, and other ways to discuss the work
• You use homework and pop quizzes for diagnosis but not for grades

Do you coach us in what we don’t yet understand?

• You have us play games that involve using the concepts and skills
• You let us explore and discover in groups, through experiments and research
• You have us demonstrate successful techniques to our peers
• Your worksheets are short and give us only one thing to practice
• You pair us up to practice skills together
• You work with us one-on-one when we need it
• You give us time in class for reading, writing, research, and problem solving

Do you ask us to assess our progress and that of our peers?

• You have us assess ourselves based on the rubric we developed together
• You ask us to reflect on what new things we have learned
• You ask us to describe where we need to practice more
• You ask us to suggest what kind of help you need
• You ask us for feedback on how to teach the material better

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Thank you, Kathleen!

You can also download Kathleen’s 5-day curriculum to try your own Practice Project with students, or watch her series of 3-minute videos in which kids talk about practicing everything from ballroom dancing to reading.

Next week’s Word, and the last in The Line’s summer series, is with Mike Doyle, exploring his unique perspective on education as both a science teacher and a former doctor.

You, too, all fall asleep with educational journals bent back double on your chest. Don’t deny it.

We don’t spend enough time writing our own teaching Desideratas: that is, crystallizing our beliefs and our evidence about how and why kids learn what they learn. It’s a shame, because it’s the rock we stand upon. And once we get it clear for ourselves, it’s amazing how efficient we can get at judging what is truly valuable in a classroom, and what is simply the next textbook company’s shell game.

My first pick won’t be any surprise. Ed Deci (and partner in crime Rich Ryan), down the road at the University of Rochester, have worked for over two decades on researching and defining intrinsic motivation: how human beings feel competent, fulfilled, and connected. It’s their work that  first found that extrinsic rewards– money, gold stars, pizza parties, even praise and grades– can actually diminish a kid’s internal motivation to learn. Their stuff has been getting a lot more attention and validation in the past couple of years, and for that I can only dance.

The second is Stanford professor Carol S. Dweck– my editor at ASCD calls her “Dina’s girl” (ha). TOP SECRET PREVIEW: Dr. Dweck’s got an article coming out in this September’s Educational Leadership that nicely summarizes her work (check it out on line September 1st). For those of you who can’t wait, pick up her book (or mooch around on her website)  Mindset, a quick and life-changing read with kid-friendly web quizzes to boot. She’s also got curriculum available here.

The last is a newbie on my radar (mentioned here) who will be guest posting next week–  experienced education writer, action researcher, and good friend of Deborah Meier, Kathleen Cushman.  Kathleen has recently compiled several months’ worth of interviews with almost 200 students about their learning experiences– both inside school and out. She asked them a simple question: “How do you get good at something?”

Their answers comprise Fires in the Mind and additionally (yay for me) Fires in the Middle School Bathroom. I love the way this work dovetails with and grounds the psychologically-oriented, sometimes high-falutin’ science of Deci and Dweck; each reinforces the other.

Oh, and I have two other guys waiting in the wings: Jonah Lehrer, and Daniel Pink. I haven’t read their stuff yet, but they both continue to examine why and how we decide to do what we do– and love what we love, and excel how we excel—- from a metacognitive, brain-based perspective.

So it’s actually five researchers.

Yeah. I’m a floozy.

In this next guest post, Tom Hoffman, intrepid teacher and policy wonk at Tuttle SVC  (I”ll have to ask him what the title of his blog means someday), tackles the publication of teacher scores by the LA Times last week.

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Much of the concern about value-added analysis of teachers, as exemplified by this weekend’s already infamous LA Times feature, comes from teachers and other advocates for urban schools that have been singled out under NCLB and Obama administration policies, with no regard for the increased difficulty of serving low-income, minority students.

However, on the macro level, a value-added assessment would have to have a cataclysmically bad design to actually treat disadvantaged schools worse than they are under straight comparisons of proficiency rates.

The weirdness comes in at the micro level, looking at individual teachers, and, in particular, things may get weird for teachers, administrators and parents under value-added analysis of schools serving not disadvantaged students.

In their article, Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith start by emphasizing the wide range of outcomes based on teacher effectiveness:

Highly effective teachers routinely propel students from
below grade level to advanced in a single year. There is a substantial
gap at year’s end between students whose teachers were in the top 10%
in effectiveness and the bottom 10%. The fortunate students ranked 17
percentile points higher in English and 25 points higher in
math.

Their first comparison of high and low achieving teachers in the same school suggests a divergence of over forty percentile points in the math scores of two classes after one year, depending on their teachers. In this school, the students are starting fifth grade in the mid-30th percentiles.

Whether this accurately represents the difference in the value these two teachers add, I can’t say. It is, at least, a clear distinction.

Their second pair of examples come from “Third Street Elementary in Hancock Park, one of the most well-regarded schools in the district.

Here, you have

“(Karen) Caruso, who teaches third grade, ranked among the bottom 10% of elementary school teachers in boosting students’ test scores. On average, her students started the year at a high level —
above the 80th percentile — but by the end had sunk 11 percentile points in math and 5 points in English.”

Contrasted with Karen, a teacher named Ms. Polacheck had her students gain

“5 percentile points in math after a year in her class, and 4 points in English. That put her in the top 5% of elementary school teachers.”

Apparently with this school’s demographic, the difference between best and worst amounts to just a 9 percentile swing in English and 16 points in math. The differences between the teachers seems lessened in this context as well: the “bottom 10%” teacher has National Board Certification and is recognized by her school community as a leader
and excellent teacher. The reporters suggest, via anecdote alone, that she may be less academically demanding than the higher scoring teacher.

But what does it mean if the average percentile ranking in one class is 85% one class and 75% in another– particularly if you’re starting at 80%? We know that teacher effects fade out over time. It is easy to suspect that for relatively affluent students with more educated parents and other out-of-school resources, that these relatively small
differences may not have a long-term impact.

Indeed, in twenty-first century America the advantage to sending your child to a relatively affluent elementary school is not so much the test scores– it is the freedom from worrying about test scores.

As a parent myself, I would not want a teacher to look at one of my daughters and think, “OK, how can I get this student from the 85th percentile to the 90th on the test.” Not only because I don’t trust the test in general, and don’t feel that its values reflect my own; not only because I’d prefer my children to have a broader, human education; but also because these tests aren’t designed to draw subtle distinctions at the extremes.

They’re looking for grade level proficiency cut-offs, and, as we’ve seen in New York and elsewhere, just getting that right is difficult enough. They aren’t meant to draw out the highest-level skills that will differentiate top performers over the longer run.

If we follow this path of emphasizing value-added analysis and publishing the results, we may push teachers to chase test scores past the point of diminishing returns, discarding enrichment and narrowing the curriculum for our high-achieving students as much as we have for our historically low-achieving populations.
 

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Thanks, Tom.

For more information on the response to the LA Times story and value-added scores, please go muck around on Larry Ferlazzo’s blog, who has put together a fabulous collection of posts and links on both the article and value-added scores in general  that will leave you thinking, “Wow….this is our magic bullet?”

For the time-strapped, just watch this video from Dan Willingham. And invite your administrators to do so as well. Popcorn helps.   

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And lastly, shameless promotion of the last two Summer Words here on The Line include:

August 31st: “Mastery Tips for the Beginning of School,” from Kathleen Cushman, author of the fabulous _Fires in the Mind_ and its corresponding blog (go give it some love);

and

September 5th: “What is a Professional, Anyway?,” a conversation with doctor turned teacher Mike Doyle, blogging at Science Teacher.

…and then school begins, with Common Core English standards adopted, Race to the Top grants won, state exam cut scores gutted, and, in my own backyard, a brand spanking new building schedule applied. 

Should be a very interesting year.

Race to the Top calls for improved and consistent testing, while New York State passes a law to eliminate key Regents exams– required to graduate high school in our state– because they cost too much to implement.

Race to the Top extols charter schools with extended days and school weeks, while Hawaii implements a four-day school week for lack of funding.

Race to the Top holds teachers nearly solely accountable for the performance of their students, while our Congress nearly rejects a bill that will save hundreds of thousands of teacher jobs and prevent class sizes from shooting up into the 40’s or higher, as well as pay for the cops that make sure our kids don’t get shot on the way there.

Race to the Top has  700 million dollars  in its coffers, while every cent of it is explicitly forbidden to fund stopgap education measures that result from recession-related deficits.

Race to the Top may have been written by John Dewey himself. But it’s going nowhere– except, perhaps, into the pocket of Eva Moskowitz– if we lack the political will to shore up the foundations that make public education possible in the first place.

What ever you think of Rachel Maddow’s politics or orientation, take fifteen minutes to watch her commencement speech this past May at Smith College and ask yourself: is this what you are asked to teach?

Gonna miss this gig, big time.

From guest blogger, former TFA corps, and current Ph.D. candidate in education, Sarah Cannon.

Sarah not only has an insider’s voice, but an alternative one that gets little press these days: unlike the stereotypical TFA member, she was assigned to a rural school on an Indian reservation, many of which TFA also supports.

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It was Thursday of induction and I needed to get through the morning and get on the road. My college graduates late, so I had already missed senior week in order to begin my TFA training. Graduation was Saturday and I needed to drive 500 miles to get there.

But first I needed to interview at my school.

Before I arrived, I didn’t know much about it. The biggest news on the school website was that we were getting new trailers for teacher housing. Only one of the FEMA trailers leftover from Katrina had arrived so far, but the pictures of the school board members showing off the kitchen and bedrooms were amazing.¹

Exploring the website further, I learned that the school was hiring a math teacher. TFA had assigned me to teach social studies, but I had clearance from my supervisor to ask to interview for the math position instead.

When I asked, the old principal looked at me like Christmas had come early. I started explaining my qualifications. Even though I was Sociology/Anthropology major, I had a quantitative focus. I listed the math courses I’d taken, concluding with a “Methods of Teaching Math” course. But honestly, expressing interest was probably enough of a qualification.

What I didn’t know then, what I still can’t wrap my mind around, is that my school had not had a math teacher for the two years prior to my arrival.

Two years.

Worksheets in the gym. A (barely) warm body in the class. Copy the questions and answers from the board, turn it in. You don’t need to learn anything to pass this class. No matter my doubts about my teaching ability, I can confidently say I was better than that.

That is what Teach for America means to me. Bringing people who are asking to teach to schools that have critical needs.

It’s a band-aid solution to a gaping wound. I get that. But, dang, it’s a really good band-aid.

And that’s where the band-aid solution is a problem. Because it covers up so well, popular culture starts talking about how to improve the color and cut of the band-aid instead of the wound underneath.

Sure, teacher turn-over is a problem. I left. I get that. But a two year stint is longer than what my school was getting from many people before they brought in TFA. And for TFA’s college recruits and new teachers two years is a manageable amount of time, not an overwhelming one.

Yes, TFA training is different than traditional teacher training. I spent a lot of my first year feeling overwhelmed and depressed. TFA support existed, but was limited.² The best support from the school was the informal relationships I formed with experienced teachers. But isn’t that the usual pattern?

I get that there’s a huge paternalism in recruiting from top colleges to teach at the mostly minority schools. Is my blonde self that different from the nuns who used to teach at my school? Who told students that their culture wasn’t good enough but white man’s education will make you better?

I’d love it if my school had enough local teachers to not recruit outsiders. It would be beyond great if those ideal experienced teachers we hear about were going to the high-needs school TFA places in. Improving the pay, the support, and everything else to get them there would be fan-ta-bu-lous.

The goal oriented, get down to business, hold the teacher accountable model of teaching that TFA promotes doesn’t jive with everyone. But if forced me to know where I wanted my classes to go and what our progress was in getting there.

And when we got there, we had a reason to celebrate.

I’m waiting for the whole system to have a reason to celebrate.

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1 Sadly the webpage changed before I saved those pictures to my computer.
2 To be fair, my region was understaffed during my first year teaching. The staff size doubled the next year.

I grew up on Reading Rainbow, as many of you might have.

LeVar Burton’s tag line, introducing the kid book review segment of the show, echoed in my head as I figured out how to show off the many incredible educators and education thinkers I have the privilege of knowing. I’d like to start dedicating summer posts to their voices.

My hope is to both cajole guest posts out of them and conduct “interviews” over email, which I will post in their entirety on the blog.

Shortly, then, my inaugural guest post on the controversial Teach For America program from Sarah Cannon, former TFA teacher and current Ph.D. candidate in education.

Check out this move from my home state.

So let’s chuck all the tired rhetoric about narrowed curriculum, lack of creativity, invalidity, and pressure on kids for a sec. Let’s pretend– just for a second– that I believed New York had the most reliable, valid examinations of knowledge in all the world.

And now tell me how to feel about sitting in the library of my school last summer and being congratulated for my passing rates.

Tell me how to interpret my state’s decision as a teacher who has trusted the exam, as it has stood in time, to be something which it’s worth “testing to”– whose results mean something.

Tell me how to explain this to my kids.

Am I missing something here?

UPDATE:  Nope. I’m not. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/casey/7096582.html

I’ll bulk up that story with another anecdote of my own, which involves a colleague calling the state higher-ups to get clarification on whether a particular student could get credit for a certain answer on a state test. The official’s advice apparently was to “flip a coin.”

I thought of the title of this post, absent any context, when trying to sum up for myself the fabulous and highly instructive experience of live-Tweeting and blogging Ed Sector’s recent panel Finding the Link: Teacher Evaluation and Professional Development. After a quick Google search, however, it turned out to be even more appropriate than I knew. It’s the name of a science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, which became a cult classic in the hippie counterculture of the sixties. (Oh, and it’s also a song by Iron Maiden. But I digress.)

I am, in many ways, a big fat hippie. I am often teased by my colleagues for my classroom emphases on personal choice, intrinsic motivation, and the big green couch and lamps I have substituted for desk rows and overhead fluorescent lighting. My tree-hugging tendencies and historical skepticism regarding technology don’t help this perception.

And at the panel, I am sure I merely completed the image when I came in with my dusty Keen sandals, opened my clunky, Post-it-covered laptop, and proceeded to ask innocently the most controversial question of the entire morning.

I say “innocently” because I mean “innocently,” despite being a hippie; come question time, I had no axe to grind.  As my co-blogger Ann attests, I too was delighted by the erudition, caring, and teaching experience of the entire three person panel. Indeed, Scott Thompson of the DC schools logged his TFA time in New York City, and  we were thus able to commiserate over the sorry state of New York’s English exams– only recently moved from January (January??) to May.

Which brings me to the question I asked. How are teachers supposed to trust innovations in evaluation, particularly those pushed by Race to the Top, when flawed, easily manipulated, one-dimensional standardized test data can comprise so much of it? I meant this not as a challenge, but a genuine query to policy-makers who obviously knew this stuff inside and out.

I used the the terms “buy-in” and “deal-breaker,” unfortunately, and wish I hadn’t (despite John Thompson’s kind comments to the contrary here).  I was oblivious to the obstructionist overtones of the terms, and they cost me some good will, I’m afraid, even if they did stir the conversational pot.

Brad Jupp responded that true team members don’t use those terms in collective problem-solving situations.  His frustration with incendiary rhetoric and blunt political scheming was obvious, and frankly understandable. (A year or two ago I myself was so disgusted with our union’s state-level politicking that I actively investigated going it alone as a non-unionized teacher. Things got better, thank goodness.)

But Brad also hastened to reassure us that decent teacher evaluation takes nuanced approaches to data, making sure that our “worst fears” as teachers were not realized.

My colleagues, on their blogs, have now each taken their turn on what their personal “worst fears” are, in response to this panel. Ann worries about the lack of locality in teacher evaluation. Wookie Kim discusses the long-term disadvantages of rolling out potentially half-baked programs.  Tom tackles jaded teachers bailing out mentally on useful PD.

And me? Well, here are my worst fears.

I fear that I will be held responsible for the effect of murder on my students.

I fear that Jesse Rothstein’s elegant analysis of the vast problems in value-added data will be overlooked simply because the model is better– marginally– than the initial proficiency measurements used in NCLB.

I fear the curricular and emotional impact of high-stakes exams in which students have no real exercise of autonomy or value placed on effort, as delineated in peer-reviewed research of Ed Deci, Richard Ryan, and Carol Dweck.

I fear the national duplicity and rampant “gaming” to which standardized exams are exceptionally vulnerable, and which has been thoroughly documented by Diane Ravitch, the eminent education blogger Eduwonkette (now a tenure-track professor at NYU), and David Hursh at the University of Rochester, amongst others.

I fear the changes on my own exam next year: a call for increased rigor has resulted in mainly adding more multiple choice, possibly the most outdated method of assessing knowledge there is besides phrenology.  New York also changes the cut scores on our exams nearly every single year and has questionable scoring procedures, to put it mildly, so it is impossible even to compare one flawed set of data to another parallel set.

I fear that Wookie Kim’s wise observations on the lack of evaluative training and time for our administrators will trickle down necessarily into an uneducated over-reliance on the “snappiest” assessments of teaching: that is to say, a set of numbers. This happened to a colleague who was hauled into her admin’s office to explain her “low scores,” only to have to explain that several of the kids assigned to her roll were pull-out special ed students, and not instructed directly by her once.

I fear that national assessments are not far behind our movement for national standards (the English version of which I analyze for the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development here).  This will not only potentially increase the amount of invalid and unreliable testing which occurs in currently tested subjects, but may require such testing to be developed for most or all subjects.

I fear that the implications of Harvard University’s recent study on the collegiate use of SAT scores are lost on policy-makers, right when they should be having the most impact. What does it mean to propose increased testing K-12, when arguably the most prestigious university in the nation has decided that admissions should be test-optional?

And finally,  I fear that all the well-supported and logically sound skepticism on the use of standardized data that I have listed above is dismissed as simply a knee-jerk reaction to save my paycheck. As one commentator in the panel audience put it: “I don’t understand why teachers need to be convinced that achievement matters.”

She’s right, of course: it does matter, and it made my heart ache to think that such a statement could even be made. In that spirit, let me issue a tripartite request to all the stakeholders here, as the hippie stranger who asked the question in the first place.

Help me, first, develop a truly nuanced, rigorous, performance-based evaluative process for KIDS. The work of evaluating teachers is then almost automatically completed– yes, and completed with “buy-in.” (Whoops, sorry. I mean, “confidence in assessments that have face and content reliability and validity.”)

Help me then finish the work by replicating and tailoring that evaluative process for myself. For there is no discernible difference between teacher as professional, and teacher as successful learner, nor should there be.

And most of all, if we are serious about real and collective problem solving, as Ed Sector and their three panelists are, then please– do not assume that fear, hunger for power, or other base instincts drive our decisions about children on either side of the policy/practice debate. Do not let us condescend to one another, and cover it up as criticism– or compassion.