1. EMAIL from J
Hey JP :) doing better with a week off from school under my belt. I still feel like I'm struggling, and battling students more than helping them... So strange how hard it is to put into action all the theories or strategies I can talk about, but struggle actually doing. Anyhow, I keep showing up, and reflecting, and trying, so I figure I'm learning and may find my stride some year soon. On the job hunt to return to Colorado... Expanding search to consider non-classroom positions/non traditional education/arts positions. Who knows :)
EMAIL 2 Then another from J:
So far the New Year's energy has carried me through a pleasant morning of teaching.
Just relaxing and being myself a little.
Who would of thought that's all it takes :)
J.
3. EMAIL From M who took on a new teaching position close to the Christmas Break:
Hi John!!
I have been so overwhelmed this first week team building, jumping into teaching and learning, figuring out behavior plans, etc., etc., etc!!! I'm sure you know the drill.
Things are going well, I have a few behavior issues that I need to nip but I'm trying out a new behavior plan on them tomorrow. I really am thankful to be doing what I love, and I am reassessing everything I do, DAILY, if not hourly. I thought I would be able to jump in and things would go fantastic... but of course this is my first year, a year of many trials and errors.
The school's curriculum is VERY rigorous and I don't feel like I even have time to catch a mental break. I try to incorporate lots of brain breaks, but I find it difficult with the non stop teaching that occurs. There are SO many staff meetings/plan times/team meetings, etc. My team is SUPER supportive and helping me along the way, SO thankful that I have a fantastic team!
On top of the hustle and bustle of a new class, we have one week before break and the kids are starting to lose it, haha, as to be expected. At least my principal isn't drilling me for too much just yet, and no informal observations have been done, so I'm not stressed with that too! All of the kids have the flu at this school, and wouldn't you know it, I think I'm getting it too!! BLEH! The life of a teacher! I have a decent sized class, 24... I have four more boys than girls. The kids are pretty sweet, and many of them come from disadvantaged backgrounds, but they always want to try their best. Most of my kids are low in reading and math, so that's different for me coming from mostly a gifted and talented background. I have a promethean board, but no other technologies, which is unfortunate... but I can write a proposal in January for some computers, ipad, and ipods...
I think next week, since it is the week before break, I will really go into team building. I tried some things with them, but they seemed bored because they are SO used to routine.
Well, I will chat with you soon! And bother me as much as you want, the more support I have, the better I will feel!!!
:).
4. EMAIL From W, in her second year of teaching Email, January 5th, 2013
My teacher education classes and student teaching emphasized how
important it is for me as a teacher to walk around the classroom and check
on students as they work. One of the important ways students learn math is
by discovery and many of the current curriculums walk students through
problems that lead them to an "aha!" moment of why an algorithm works. As
they are working in teams through this discovery process, my role is to ask
them questions about what they're learning and to guide them without giving
them the answers. So I diligently give students the opportunity to explore
and discover either individually or with classmates as I check-in with them
during class and complete some formative assessment work. I encourage the
chatters to focus and praise the students who don't let an error stop them
from finding an answer.
And then one day, I pulled up a chair next to a student who said "I just
don't get it." I focused on her for a bit and led her through solving
another example problem. And then, another student appeared at my elbow
with a question. This is a student who hadn't asked me a question since the
beginning of school four months earlier. I answered her question and told
her I was so glad she had asked me. As she went back to her seat feeling
like she could work on the other problems, another student came up to ask a
question. These are the students that I had just visited at their tables
and checked the work they had completed. They hadn't asked me a question
when I had checked in with their group.
As I thought about this later, I realized that while my roaming around
the room allowed me to do a quick check-in with everyone, I was both a
moving target that they didn't seem to want to chase down and interrupt but
also that they spent a lot of time waiting for me to come back to them.
Often times, they spent so much time waiting for me that there was no longer
enough class time for them to ask their question. I also believe that I'm
more approachable when I am sitting down at their level then when I am
standing up and towering over them in their seats.
So now each day, I walk around and check in with them and then I sit at a
table and make myself available for students on their term and time. I'm
finding that many more students are working on their math problems during
class instead of letting a "stuck" moment stop them from working.
In my 8th grade classes, I have discovered that if I sit at a table and
start to help a couple of students who are struggling with the concepts, I
soon have more students and many of those who misbehave joining us.
important it is for me as a teacher to walk around the classroom and check
on students as they work. One of the important ways students learn math is
by discovery and many of the current curriculums walk students through
problems that lead them to an "aha!" moment of why an algorithm works. As
they are working in teams through this discovery process, my role is to ask
them questions about what they're learning and to guide them without giving
them the answers. So I diligently give students the opportunity to explore
and discover either individually or with classmates as I check-in with them
during class and complete some formative assessment work. I encourage the
chatters to focus and praise the students who don't let an error stop them
from finding an answer.
And then one day, I pulled up a chair next to a student who said "I just
don't get it." I focused on her for a bit and led her through solving
another example problem. And then, another student appeared at my elbow
with a question. This is a student who hadn't asked me a question since the
beginning of school four months earlier. I answered her question and told
her I was so glad she had asked me. As she went back to her seat feeling
like she could work on the other problems, another student came up to ask a
question. These are the students that I had just visited at their tables
and checked the work they had completed. They hadn't asked me a question
when I had checked in with their group.
As I thought about this later, I realized that while my roaming around
the room allowed me to do a quick check-in with everyone, I was both a
moving target that they didn't seem to want to chase down and interrupt but
also that they spent a lot of time waiting for me to come back to them.
Often times, they spent so much time waiting for me that there was no longer
enough class time for them to ask their question. I also believe that I'm
more approachable when I am sitting down at their level then when I am
standing up and towering over them in their seats.
So now each day, I walk around and check in with them and then I sit at a
table and make myself available for students on their term and time. I'm
finding that many more students are working on their math problems during
class instead of letting a "stuck" moment stop them from working.
In my 8th grade classes, I have discovered that if I sit at a table and
start to help a couple of students who are struggling with the concepts, I
soon have more students and many of those who misbehave joining us.
While
my goal is that they continue staying focused and working once I leave the
table, I know that many of them will stop working and go back to chatting.
These makes me more aware of the importance of smaller class sizes or the
advantage of co-teaching or have a paraprofessional in the room.
my goal is that they continue staying focused and working once I leave the
table, I know that many of them will stop working and go back to chatting.
These makes me more aware of the importance of smaller class sizes or the
advantage of co-teaching or have a paraprofessional in the room.
Unfortunately, neither of those are an option in my classroom. So I will
choose to sit at different tables to have different students be the core of
my focus each day and be pleased that for a while, they are listening and
working on math.
Ok-I didn't do any editing. Just wrote (typed!) something I've been
thinking about for a few weeks. I'm going to try this more and hope to see
more students continuing to work.
Wendy, Jan. 5th. email to John P.
choose to sit at different tables to have different students be the core of
my focus each day and be pleased that for a while, they are listening and
working on math.
Ok-I didn't do any editing. Just wrote (typed!) something I've been
thinking about for a few weeks. I'm going to try this more and hope to see
more students continuing to work.
Wendy, Jan. 5th. email to John P.
5. ARTICLE FROM today's front page of The New York Times;
Ergonomic seats? Most pupils squirm in the classroom, by Al Baker. January 5th, 2013 NYT
6. ARTICLE From 1967.....
(Note: I left my classroom teaching position in the summer of 1967 to work as science advisor to the 365 public elementary schools in the Leicestershire Education Authority. My role focused on promoting, encouraging and supporting teachers’ classroom science.
This journal entry was made in the early autumn of 1967, at the end of an environmental education workshop with thirty teachers.)
September 1967 - At the end of one of my pond-dipping workshops at Foxton Field Study Centre, we put our microscopes and white dishes to one side and talked about what we had discovered throughout the day. The conversation soon shifted to what was and what wasn’t going on in their classrooms Some, I knew, were comfortable teaching ‘hands-on’ science, some weren’t.
One teacher, sitting at the back of the room, told me - and the class - what happened when she asked her 7 year olds to draw an earthworm. A little girl, with questioning eyes, put up her hand and asked: "I've never seen a worm. How big are they? Are they like snakes?”
The other teachers in the workshop smiled – and I was reminded of the apocryphal story I heard somewhere of the young boy who was flabbergasted when he saw a cow being milked on his first-ever visit to the farm. His only experience with milk was in bottles delivered on his doorstep by the milkman each morning.
This isn't so surprising, is it, when you think about it? If you live in a high-rise apartment building you don't have many encounters with worms or cows. But so what? Would it matter if our children grew up not knowing about cows and worms? What relevance have the lives and activities of cows and worms to the urban child who lives in a concrete environment? And, taking this further, does it matter that adults view many small creatures with distaste and pass on their prejudices to their children? After all, isn’t it true that smoldering beneath the surface of many of us are hostile attitudes to nature. Which one of us hasn't trapped and killed a mouse, stepped on a snail, crushed a spider, or swatted a fly?
Well, I think it does matter. Isn't it important that all children have an opportunity to experience the natural world first-hand and to learn about familiar living things that share the world with us? As teachers, shouldn't we provide the children in our care with the opportunity to discover the natural world for themselves, to learn to enjoy it and to appreciate our dependence upon it? Won't that subsequently encourage them to care for it?
For many teachers of young children, nature (creepy crawlies, birds, rocks, fossils, for example) is an invaluable aid for educational purposes, an inspiration for discussion, science, mathematics, language, art, music, and writing. These teachers know that outside the door is a huge outdoor classroom, a place to learn about and to learn in. It needn't be a dense woodland, rich meadow, pond or clear mountain stream (they help, though!). A schoolyard, however sterile, is home to a myriad of interesting small animals. Turn over a brick and you find woodlice, slugs and snails. Standing in silky webs are spiders, hiding under dead leaves are earwigs, centipedes and millipedes. Lurking inside cracks in the wall are tiny beetles. Small animals have big and extremely interesting life histories. Some are easy to keep for study for short periods of time. A friend of mine, a professional biologist, kept a small colony of woodlice in a tobacco tin for a few days, dropping in the occasional damp dead leaf for food. Not, of course, by any stretch of the imagination, a recommended way of keeping small creatures, but it does show what is possible.
If we create appropriate [1] classroom homes for small creatures, think of what our children could learn from observing creepy crawlies at close range. Woodlice, for example, would be ideal creatures to keep in the classroom. They’re easy to find and they’re so interesting, and need just damp soil, dead leaves and shade. Female woodlice mature when they are about two years old and rear their young in a brood pouch under their bodies. When the offspring are ready to emerge, the female stands still, and stretches her front legs out stiffly so that the young can crawl down to the ground. And snails. What wonderful creatures they are, and so easy to keep for a few days. As are spiders, and worms, and millipedes and slugs………………………….
If children are encouraged to find, watch, and understand how small creatures live, won't it help them learn to live in harmony with nature and appreciate living things? And, important for us teachers, doesn't a worm or a spider give us so many ways of developing classroom skills?
Try it and watch how it impacts the children! And your classroom!!
John Paull 1967
7. EMAIL From Education Week........Jan. 5th.
.
..!
6. ARTICLE From 1967.....
From a Teacher’s Diary – September 1967
Come into the Garden, Maud
(Note: I left my classroom teaching position in the summer of 1967 to work as science advisor to the 365 public elementary schools in the Leicestershire Education Authority. My role focused on promoting, encouraging and supporting teachers’ classroom science.
This journal entry was made in the early autumn of 1967, at the end of an environmental education workshop with thirty teachers.)
September 1967 - At the end of one of my pond-dipping workshops at Foxton Field Study Centre, we put our microscopes and white dishes to one side and talked about what we had discovered throughout the day. The conversation soon shifted to what was and what wasn’t going on in their classrooms Some, I knew, were comfortable teaching ‘hands-on’ science, some weren’t.
One teacher, sitting at the back of the room, told me - and the class - what happened when she asked her 7 year olds to draw an earthworm. A little girl, with questioning eyes, put up her hand and asked: "I've never seen a worm. How big are they? Are they like snakes?”
The other teachers in the workshop smiled – and I was reminded of the apocryphal story I heard somewhere of the young boy who was flabbergasted when he saw a cow being milked on his first-ever visit to the farm. His only experience with milk was in bottles delivered on his doorstep by the milkman each morning.
This isn't so surprising, is it, when you think about it? If you live in a high-rise apartment building you don't have many encounters with worms or cows. But so what? Would it matter if our children grew up not knowing about cows and worms? What relevance have the lives and activities of cows and worms to the urban child who lives in a concrete environment? And, taking this further, does it matter that adults view many small creatures with distaste and pass on their prejudices to their children? After all, isn’t it true that smoldering beneath the surface of many of us are hostile attitudes to nature. Which one of us hasn't trapped and killed a mouse, stepped on a snail, crushed a spider, or swatted a fly?
Well, I think it does matter. Isn't it important that all children have an opportunity to experience the natural world first-hand and to learn about familiar living things that share the world with us? As teachers, shouldn't we provide the children in our care with the opportunity to discover the natural world for themselves, to learn to enjoy it and to appreciate our dependence upon it? Won't that subsequently encourage them to care for it?
For many teachers of young children, nature (creepy crawlies, birds, rocks, fossils, for example) is an invaluable aid for educational purposes, an inspiration for discussion, science, mathematics, language, art, music, and writing. These teachers know that outside the door is a huge outdoor classroom, a place to learn about and to learn in. It needn't be a dense woodland, rich meadow, pond or clear mountain stream (they help, though!). A schoolyard, however sterile, is home to a myriad of interesting small animals. Turn over a brick and you find woodlice, slugs and snails. Standing in silky webs are spiders, hiding under dead leaves are earwigs, centipedes and millipedes. Lurking inside cracks in the wall are tiny beetles. Small animals have big and extremely interesting life histories. Some are easy to keep for study for short periods of time. A friend of mine, a professional biologist, kept a small colony of woodlice in a tobacco tin for a few days, dropping in the occasional damp dead leaf for food. Not, of course, by any stretch of the imagination, a recommended way of keeping small creatures, but it does show what is possible.
If we create appropriate [1] classroom homes for small creatures, think of what our children could learn from observing creepy crawlies at close range. Woodlice, for example, would be ideal creatures to keep in the classroom. They’re easy to find and they’re so interesting, and need just damp soil, dead leaves and shade. Female woodlice mature when they are about two years old and rear their young in a brood pouch under their bodies. When the offspring are ready to emerge, the female stands still, and stretches her front legs out stiffly so that the young can crawl down to the ground. And snails. What wonderful creatures they are, and so easy to keep for a few days. As are spiders, and worms, and millipedes and slugs………………………….
If children are encouraged to find, watch, and understand how small creatures live, won't it help them learn to live in harmony with nature and appreciate living things? And, important for us teachers, doesn't a worm or a spider give us so many ways of developing classroom skills?
Try it and watch how it impacts the children! And your classroom!!
John Paull 1967
7. EMAIL From Education Week........Jan. 5th.
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Quality Counts: Involving Students in School Climate
Student behavior and attitudes are critical to a school's climate and academic success, but often students aren't involved in school improvement planning. Emerging research shows that getting students to buy in to their school can improve trust between students and staff, reduce behavior problems, and increase academic engagement. Yet it can seem a daunting task for educators, particularly with older students. As part of Education Week's 2013 Quality Counts annual report, researchers and administrators talk about how to bring students into the school-climate conversation, from identifying problems to changing behavior.
Guests:
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This webinar will be moderated by Sarah D. Sparks, staff writer, Education Week.
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8. ARTICLE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES January 7th
Poor report cards on schools. Page A10.
Here we go again.........
Recent efforts to read the tea leaves for insights into education policy bring to mind a somewhat unsettling analogy to Sovietologists of the Cold War era. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, expert commentary focused on divining the inclinations of top leaders by poring over speeches and public documents, looking for nuance in inflection, finding clues in who said what to whom and where.
Today's hyperfocus on President Barack Obama, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and a few key members of Congress similarly tries to distinguish feints from genuine commitments, hints from tactical spin.
And, with education having played a relatively minor role in the 2012 campaign, with Arne Duncan expected to continue as secretary (at least for now), and with federal budget battles, health care, and other national concerns likely to divert attention from education issues, it's easy to see why most projections suggest—with a few minor changes in nuance and inflection—essentially more of the same.
But while changes in the White House will be subtle, the fundamental landscape of education politics has been shifting steadily beneath our feet. This has occurred along three major fault lines. Two of these are reasonably well recognized, although not yet fully mapped or understood. The third has implications that are just as great, but because it has been almost totally overlooked, I want to give it due attention here.
The first fault line involves centralizing shifts within the federal system that have increased the role of states and the national government relative to localities. The second involves shifts between the public and private sector, increasing the role of for-profit and nonprofit organizations not just in providing educational services, but also in acting as interest groups in the political arenas in which education policies are determined.
The third and least-recognized fault line involves the relative erosion of school-specific decisionmaking and the reabsorption of education policymaking into general-purpose politics and governance. I refer to this as "the end of exceptionalism" in American education. Normally, the concept of exceptionalism focuses on ways that institutions, norms, and political practices in the United States differ from those in other nations, usually delivered with the implications that the United States is better, favored by God or by fate. In referring to education exceptionalism, I'm focusing not on the differences between education here and in other countries, although differences, of course, exist. Rather, I'm highlighting differences within this country between the handling of education and the handling of other major domestic policies. Education is becoming more like other domestic-policy areas, and this has important implications about how the future politics of school reform is likely to unfold.
Education policy in the United States has traditionally been seen, and treated, as different and distinct—a thing apart. Traditionally, compared with decisions in most other important areas of domestic policy—the economy, welfare and income support, family policy, civil rights, and most questions relating to the environment, transportation, and crime—decisions about public schools have been highly localized and largely consigned to special single-purpose governance structures such as school boards and state boards of education. This is changing, in a slow but steady arc.
"Education is becoming more like other domestic-policy areas, and this has important implications about how the future politics of school reform is likely to unfold.”
Mayoral control has been the most visible manifestation of the shift. Since 1992, when Boston switched from an elected school board to one appointed by the mayor, several other large cities have expanded the role of their mayors in running school systems. This includes some of the most high-profile sites for school reform, such as New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington. (Other cities where formal mayoral control has been under discussion include Bridgeport, Conn.; Indianapolis; Milwaukee; Newark, N.J.; Los Angeles; Rochester, N.Y.; Sacramento, Calif.; and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.) Mayoral control is supported by proponents of school choice, test-based accountability, and investment in education technologies, who see mayors as more receptive to these reforms than school boards with their historical allegiance to teachers' unions and their investment in maintaining the status quo.
The growing role of general-purpose government and politics, however, extends beyond mayors to other elected executives, beyond the local level to states and the national government, and beyond chief executives to legislatures and the courts. So-called "education governors," particularly Southern governors who saw improving schools as a key element in promoting economic development, began to assert a more muscular role in education policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Increased interest by governors has been accompanied by state constitutional and legislative changes that have increased their formal power over education policy.
The number of states in which the governor appoints the chief state school officer tripled between 1968 and 2005, and the number in which the governor appoints all members of the state board of education increased by more than one-third during the same period.
Presidents have dabbled in education off and on through the years, but the 1980s provided an inflection point. Ronald Reagan came into office pledging to shrink the national government's involvement in education, but the 1983 "Nation at Risk" report
commissioned by his secretary of education had the paradoxical effect of raising the pressure on presidents to take a leadership role. The three presidents who came after Reagan—George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—gave more than 2 ½ times the relative emphasis to education in their State of the Union addresses than did the seven who preceded them.
commissioned by his secretary of education had the paradoxical effect of raising the pressure on presidents to take a leadership role. The three presidents who came after Reagan—George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush—gave more than 2 ½ times the relative emphasis to education in their State of the Union addresses than did the seven who preceded them.
As executives delve into school issues, the legislatures they deal with also become increasingly engaged. While the attention to education by governors and presidents frequently spikes, my review of congressional and state legislative involvement suggests that lawmakers have been steadier and more hands-on in their role. And in a complicated way, the courts, as the least politically attuned branch of government, played a key role in opening the way for elected executives and legislatures to get more involved. It was the courts that tackled, and to some extent tamed, issues of racial and class equity that had made school politics a hot potato too volatile for risk-averse politicians to take on.
Is the end of exceptionalism something to celebrate or dread? On the negative side, as issue-specific arenas lose some of their monopoly over education decisionmaking, key decisions are being made by officials who have less detailed knowledge about education, less hard-wired commitment to education, and more pressure upon them to meet a host of other demands on the public purse.
But there are opportunities also. In particular, general-purpose politics, because it encourages multi-issue coalitions, might be more responsive to the need to take into account nonschool factors—concentrated poverty, public health, social services, and the like—as levers for improving educational attainment and reducing achievement gaps. And general-purpose governance institutions, because they encompass a broader range of agencies, might have the fiscal and administrative capacity to bring about a more comprehensive approach to education.
The institutional shifts will not on their own determine which policies will be pursued over the next four years. But they are altering the battleground on which competing visions of American education will be fought, both day to day and over the long term. For these reasons, this particular fault line—the end of education exceptionalism—has the potential to be more consequential than any recalibrations by the White House based on changing fiscal context, political strategy, or lessons learned.
Combined Measures Better at Gauging Teacher Effectiveness, Study Finds
Student feedback, test-score growth calculations, and observations of practice appear to pick up different but complementary information that, combined, can provide a balanced and accurate picture of teacher performance, according to research released today by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
A composite measure on teacher effectiveness drawing on all three of those measures, and tested through a random-assignment experiment, predicted fairly accurately how much high-performing teachers would successfully boost their students’ standardized-test scores, concludes the series of new papers, part of the massive Measures of Effective Teaching study launched three years ago.
drawing on all three of those measures, and tested through a random-assignment experiment, predicted fairly accurately how much high-performing teachers would successfully boost their students’ standardized-test scores, concludes the series of new papers, part of the massive Measures of Effective Teaching study launched three years ago.
“If you select the right measures, you can provide teachers with an honest assessment of where they stand in their practice that, hopefully, will serve as the launching point for their development,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education in economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who headed the study.
Basing more than half a teacher’s evaluation on test-score-based measures of student achievement seemed to compromise it, the researchers also found.
Another piece suggests that teachers should be observed by more than one person to ensure that observations are reliable.
The findings are among dozens from the final work products of MET. Together, they are billed as a proof point for the three measures the foundation has spent years studying.
Even as they praised the project’s other insights, some scholars debated the strength of the findings from the random experiment. One glitch: Teachers and administrators didn't always comply with the randomization component, making it harder to interpret the findings.
“We can only be certain that it’s a valid predictor of future test scores for those teachers who complied with the assignments,” said Jonah E. Rockoff, an associate professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, who has studied teacher-quality issues using economic techniques. Mr. Rockoff was not involved in the study, but reviewed early drafts of the randomization.
Taken as a whole, the final MET findings provide much food for thought about how teacher evaluations might best be structured. But they are not likely to end a contentious, noisy debate about evaluation systems, and they are almost certain to be intensely debated, in part because of Gates’ separate support for advocacy organizations that have already staked out positions on teacher evaluations.
(The Gates Foundation also provides supports for coverage of business and innovation inEducation Week.)
Weighing Measures
The $45 million study, in progress since 2009, is one of the largest and most extensive research projects ever undertaken on the question of how to identify and measure high-quality teaching. It involved some 3,000 teachers in six districts: Charlotte-Mecklenberg, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsboro County, Fla.; Memphis, Tenn.; and New York City.
Earlier studies released by the MET project had examined three potential measures of teacher quality: observations of teachers keyed to teaching frameworks, surveys of students’ perceptions of their teachers, and a value-added method, which attempts to isolate teachers’ contributions to their students’ academic achievement. Researchers examined the relationship of each measure to students’ scores on state standardized tests; to their scores on a more complex, project-based series of tasks; and to their perceptions of their teachers’ instructional strengths and weaknesses.
Each of those measures, the earlier papers stated, had positive and negative traits; some were more reliable over time but less predictive of how much teachers would improve their students’ achievement.
One of the four new papers examines different ways of weighting those three measures. It found that those that relied the most heavily on state standardized-test scores appeared to be counterproductive. Those composites tended to be volatile and were also the least predictive of how students taught by those teachers would fare on the more cognitively challenging tasks.
Yet weighting schemes that put the most emphasis on teacher observations were the least predictive of gains on the state test scores, it says.
In all, the study says, those that use a more equal mix of components, including between a third and half based on value-added, couple better correlations to the outcome measures with improved reliability.
In a way, the findings indicate that there is no one “best” way to weight the measures; instead, that decision will depend on what policymakers most value, whether state test scores or other outcomes.
Randomization
From the beginning, one of the foundation’s key goals was to subject promising measures to “validation” through a randomized experiment.
Though infrequently conducted in K-12 education because of logistical problems and expense, random assignment allows researchers to eliminate sources of bias not accounted for using traditional statistical techniques.
The Gates project, with its reach across six districts and thousands of teachers, offered an unusual chance to test the ideas at a scale not seen previously.
For the randomization, researchers in 2009-10 generated estimates of teachers’ performance based on composite measures using data from the surveys, prior test scores, and observation scores. Within individual schools, the study randomly assigned a class of students to each of the participating teachers in particular grades and subjects. After a year, then, researchers compared those teachers’ actual performance to the estimates.
The results were examined in groups based on the teachers’ predicted performance.
“Because of the random assignment, we can be confident that we identified a subgroup of teachers who caused achievement to happen,” Harvard’s Mr. Kane said. “It’s sort of a big deal to be able to say that.”
In general, the groups of teachers identified as being more effective were in fact so in reality and produced results on par with what the measures had predicted. They also improved student performance not just on traditional standardized tests but also on the deeper, project-based tasks.
Student attrition and other factors, including the refusal of several schools to carry out the randomization despite agreeing to do so, led to relatively high rates of noncompliance. About 66 percent of students in Dallas stayed with their assigned teacher, but only 27 percent of students in Memphis did.
To account for the noncompliance, researchers used a statistical technique known as “instrumental variables” to adjust the results. The technique is widely used in the social sciences.
Scholars had different opinions about how far those findings could be extrapolated to the K-12 field at large.
“These results could still be based on a very selective group of teachers,” said Jesse M. Rothstein, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has often been critical of the MET findings. “I would love to see a lot more investigating of just who was and wasn’t complying, and why they were left out.”
Douglas N. Harris, a professor of economics at Tulane University, in New Orleans, added that the study didn’t address some other potential sources of bias. For instance, the study’s authors also acknowledge that the experiment is limited to comparisons of teachers within, but not across, schools.
“There are a lot of ways in which there could be a nonrandom assignment of students to teachers,” Mr. Harris said. “They’re studying some elements of that, but not others.”
Teacher Observations
In yet another new finding, the researchers dug deeper into observations of teachers. Using a subset of 67 teachers in the Hillsboro, Fla., district, they investigated ways to improve the consistency of the scoring of their lessons, including by using more frequent, shorter observations and multiple raters.
The researchers found that having different raters score observations of teachers’ practice may be a key component for the observations systems. Raters’ first perception of a teacher's practice tended to influence how they scored additional lessons taught by that same teacher, the study found.
Nearly all teachers scored in the middle categories on the framework studied, the four-tiered Framework for Teaching, a popular tool created in 1996 by consultant Charlotte Danielson, rather than at the top or bottom ones. The researchers struggled to interpret that finding.
“It could be that observers are simply uncomfortable making absolute distinctions between teachers,” that paper says. “It could be that the performance-level standards need to make finer distinctions. Or it could simply be that underlying practice on the existing scales does not vary that much.”
Mixed Reception?
Nearly every work product released by the MET researchers thus far has been contested to some degree by observers, and the most recent results are likely to be no exception.
“They see this as proof that the more equally weighted, combined measure is superior, but they omit all discussion of the expense and difficulty of collecting the classroom observations and student surveys,” said Jay P. Greene, a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas. Mr. Greene contends that earlier reports from Gates have veered too far into advocacy.
By contrast, the American Federation of Teachers, whose leader has had an on-again-off-again rapport with Mr. Gates and with the MET project, seemed to embrace the final studies.
“The MET findings reinforce the importance of evaluating teachers based on a balance of multiple measures of teaching effectiveness, in contrast to the limitations of focusing on student test scores, value-added scores, or any other single measure,” AFT President Randi Weingarten said in a statement.
10. Sunday NYTimes
Great article: The Parent-Teacher trap by Sara Mosle
10. Sunday NYTimes
Great article: The Parent-Teacher trap by Sara Mosle
11. My baseball batting lesson went well. Everybody paid attention because they wanted to know what the bat was for. Over the break I set up a contact group with all the parent e-mails that I have. I started sending out homework alerts. I explained that I do not accept homework the same day it is assigned. If they finish they are expected to take it home and show their parents. I attach a pdf of the homework so the parents can print it out if the students don't bring it home or see what it looks like. I have been concentrating more on the students that are working. As a result of both of those efforts I am having significantly more students doing the work.
I was feeling really good about the relationships going in a positive direction. A student asked me Friday, though, what color and make of car I drive. I trusted him and didn't want him to think that I didn't trust him so I told him. Saturday I found that I had a flat tire. Unfortunately I thought the car was shimmying back and forth because of the snow on the roads so I didn't check the tires until the flat one had been completely destroyed. There is no way to tell now whether there was a pinhole, a slow leak or the air had been let out. Officially I still trust the student and consider it a coincidence, but I suspect he is baiting me, trying to get me to accuse him of something without sufficient proof. He wants to accuse me of being unfair. Whether he or anyone else did anything to the tire I can't do anything without more proof so I am going on like it was a slow leak that got out of hand.
I get a lot of complaints from the students that I am being unfair. They say I am the only teacher that won't let them get a drink without using one their two bathroom passes for the trimester. I try to tell them that it is a school rule, but I am finding that other teachers are letting them do that. The 8th grade teachers got together right after the break and decided to let the students bring backpacks to classes so I had been doing that. Then we got an e-mail from the principal saying that we couldn't let them bring backpacks so I started doing that. The students were very angry at me because they thought it was my rule. I finally showed them the e-mail from the principal. They still blame me. The frustrating thing is that I see no end in sight. I know the rest of this year is going to be this way. If the rest of my career would go smoothly I could make it through this year. I am afraid though that I am going to fight this for the next 20 years. I'm going to take it one day at a time though. Take care.
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