Flying Blind

Each morning before I go to work I look at myself in the mirror. I'm certain I'm not alone in this practice. Without admitting all of the vanity behind why each of us stands there, we can all agree that is is some form of assessment. After that moment, I have found, that we very seldomly evaluate ourselves. The remainder of our days' are on autopilot. Is there a danger in flying blind?

The practice of evaluating teachers was not originated as a punitive process aimed at firing ineffective teachers. It was designed as a system of feedback to better are practice. Yet many of fear the day we are asked to be under the administration's microscope. There is a discomfort in having someone critique what we do. Why? Do we feel something bad will come of it? Are we afraid of the truth (Which by the way for all of you pessimists doesn't mean anything is wrong)?

On the flip side, our students walk into class everyday under our microscope. We evaluate and provide feedback on everything they do right down to calling out without raising their hand (someone just popped into your head). Do we give them the same consideration we want or need during our evaluations? As a mentor to student teachers do you give the same type of considerations when providing feedback? Do you provide feedback (seriously)? Aren't we just trying to better their practice?

The Power of Teaching tool and the Montclair Teacher Evaluation Form are just two instruments designed to provide feedback for your classroom behaviors. Many of your comments defined them as "very different", which is true. While many suggested that the Power of Teaching tool was "better", I feel the true worth of an evaluation tool is how it is used. You can own a top of the line hammer, but if your using it to turn screws you're not going to maximize its potential. I do however, agree with your additional comments which described the Power of Teaching evaluation process as "more specific and objective." Furthermore, you stated that the "Montclair tool is general, while the Power of Teaching instrument clearly defines positive and negative behaviors." It is this quality of spelling out what is an effective teaching strategy and what is an ineffective teaching strategy that makes it a powerful tool. It provides a vocabulary and a language for us to discuss teaching and nothing gets lost in translation.

I guess my point here is that we shouldn't mind stepping in front of the mirror more often. An evaluation of our practice should be a constructive practice which is targeted at bettering ourselves. Coaching even the best of us is necessary for growth. After all isn't that the philosophy behind enrichment?

I have the privilege of evaluating teachers because of my position. It makes me better at what I do to watch all of you. In my opinion, one of the best tools out there for training new teachers is to watch teachers and to be able to provide feedback. Let's not be scared to take off the blindfolds and start the conversations. What do you think?

Tenure?

With tenure in the lime light I have to ask several questions. Please choose and respond to one (or all if you like).

1. What is the purpose of tenure?

2. If you have tenure, could you live without it?

3. Does tenure hurt our profession? How?

4. Governor Christie wants to abolish tenure and the unions want to make the tenure process more rigorous. Who's right?

Your thoughts are eagerly appreciated!

“Industry vs. Education” Are we just spinning our wheels?

Imagine you own a factory that produces radios. You receive parts from all over the country. You notice one day that productivity has slowed down to a point where profits are affected. In fact you are now considered to be below proficiency to sustain your business. Upon investigation you realize that all the parts you are receiving from your distributors were meant for many different types of radios. Your company only has the blueprint for the one type of radio you sell! Moreover, your workers have been working feverishly to try and assemble the radios anyway. This has caused the “gap” in proficiency.

Quick Quiz….Do You?

A. Quit

B. Fire the workers

C. Fire the distributors

I think the answer is clear. At first I’m sure the surmounting work that it will take to reform the problem, would make you want to choose “A” and quit. However, the easy choice here is “C” fire the distributors and find someone who is going to send you the exact parts you ordered. You need identical parts to fit the blueprints you have to produce identical, proficient radios.

Now imagine that your business is education and your trying to produce proficient learners based on standards provided by the Federal Government. The children who you have been told to turn into identical proficient learners have all been sent to you differently by their distributors….their parents.

Should we fire the parents?

Time and time again I constantly hear the echo of criticism that pins the blame of partial proficiency on the educators. Though not completely in the clear here, I think it is apparent in my example that we, in education, face a variable that will always affect the outcome of children.

My best reading teacher can spend hours upon hours with certain students but if they walk in the door at two completely different levels regardless of ability and the concepts and importance are not stressed or valued at home, the progress will be slow and sometimes could reverse itself.

The same can be seen through another analogy, childhood obesity. We, in schools, standardize the lunch program according to Health and Wellness regulations to produce healthier children. So, why do all of our students look different? Why is childhood obesity still and issue? The answer is simply because we cannot control what happens before they enter or when they leave our buildings.

Now I mentioned that we, the educators, are not out of the clear yet. In a true industry analogy, none of us would have tenure. The workers in my example above could just as easily been fired for not recognizing the dilemma of different radio parts. Maybe those workers became comfortable with their perceived job protection and lost sight of responsibility. The same has been said about teachers who have slid into the anti-progressive abyss of tenure. The repeated phrase that is spoken after the start of year number 4, “Phew…Now I can relax!”. Why? Why should anyone, in his or her profession, relax or loose the initiative to grow? How does this phenomenon affect student growth? Moreover, I think in education we do know that we are dealing with students who come to us much different than the next and like the workers in the radio factory, the pressure to keep our jobs makes work feverishly to make the standards fit regardless of if it makes sense.

What about the boss in my industry example? Should he quit or be fired? I was watching Lou Dobbs on CNN a while back. He was doing a story about the exurbanite drop out rate facing our high schools. His angle was that our schools are “failing a generation of children”. His solution was that he would fire all the principals of those schools that had the highest drop out rates and hold them responsible. Now according to the industry model that could hold some merit because a leader should know what’s going on in their organization. However, in industry a leader has the opportunity to deal with nonliving components that can be tailored to fit the desired blueprint. We are not in the business of machines. In education we are dealing with people, which comes with an ethical variable to difficult to control.

Should we be trying to run our schools more like industry? How can we do so when we are dealing with a human factor, which is out of our reach? Can we truly make change or are we just spinning our wheels?

I just give them an extra worksheet when they're done....

What does differentiation look like? Seriously! Is it something you can put your hands on or is it something in the moment. What I do know is that for some teachers differentiation is natural and in the moment and for others it might take some planning. What we as educators need to grasp is that differentiation is most definitely not an extra worksheet at the end of a lesson. While we all hate to hear that we need to do something else, differentiation does not need to be a burden.

I have two examples of lessons that as a teacher I found were prime examples of how some preplanning allowed me to differentiate. Also the preplanning allowed me to not have to put a great deal of energy into focusing on it (then and after). After all, the students should be the ones doing the extra work not the teacher.

The first lesson was a long term project in Science that counted as a test grade (I never gave sit down tests because I feel application of concepts taught, truly demonstrates understanding). The project was called the "Creature Paper." It was given just after we had discussed 6 different systems of the human body. It begged that the student create a creature of their choice and develop a system of the body that reflected each system in the human body that we reviewed. The students were not only asked to invent a system, but justify why that stem would work in the environment that their creature would live and then compare it to the human system that it would be most compatible to (cool right!). They were also asked to draw a picture of each system. As you can imagine I received some amazing products! One of my favorites was a creature that was born in a rain drop and its whole life passed in the time that the rain drop fell (It was intense!) Because in this project I was looking for some basic comprehension of the human body, the design allowed me to gather if any particular student had the right level of understanding and at the same time let any learner explore, at which ever level they wanted, their wildest ideas. Once I developed the lesson it was done! No extra work. No sleepless SAIL nightmares.

The second lesson was a quiz style that came to define me. When students in my class took quizzes, they participated in a unique experience. Quizzes to me should be a formative assessment that gathers quick feedback on whether or not your class got whatever it was that you where teaching over the last week or month. My design was to have all of the desks in a circle. The students wold all take a seat and each would have a question at their seat. When the quiz began they would flip the question and have 2 minutes to answer it. After 2 minutes I would say "Okay.... Switch." At that moment all of the students would stand and move to the seat to right of them and have 2 minutes for that next question (after all if you don't know it in 2 minutes you probably didn't know it!). Each question allowed a student to respond based on their strength, which could have been writing, drawing, diagraming, etc.... In addition I would play music in the background and introduce the artist with some background before we started. This practice awarded me a fellowship from the Developmental Disabilities Counsel for excellence in practices in inclusive education (Not to mention it was a lot of fun!).

Again, some of us are naturals. We do it without a second thought. However, in a time when less support is being offered by the district to support our most advance students and students who need the most support, we need to develop a classroom model that will both address their needs and not give us more work!

Help us out and share! How do you differentiate?

How do you grade your students?

With our lengthy subjective report cards coming up, this recent article entitled "No More A's for Good Behavior", caught my eye. Even though the article focuses on middle and high school, I thought it contained many interesting points that I could relate to my grade level. One statement that I found interesting was a pivotal debate: Should students be rewarded for being friendly, prepared, compliant, good school citizen, well organized, etc. Or should good grades represent exclusively a student's mastery of the material? Do you grade your kids for compliance or for mastering the course material? The article mentions that A and B students were not the ones who were gaining the most knowledge but the ones who had learned to do school the best. What do you think?

Something else that I found interesting was that one middle school is giving "knowledge grades" based on calculating the average of test scores. And "life skills grades" based on work habits, attitude, effort and citizenship.

These are just a few of the interesting topics from this article. I encourage you to skim the article too. It may open your eyes and help you decide what is really most important when you are filling out those lengthy subjective report cards next week. Again, how do you grade your students?

Diane Conahan

4th Grade Math Teacher

iPad Launching!

On Monday, 5H went to the Planetarium at Glenfield to enjoy Mr. Miller’s presentation. During these trips I always think the best part is that children who never or rarely have a chance to get out of the city zone get to see what a night sky without pollution or city lights looks like. They see a starry night the way it was before human beings overpopulated and obscured that view. However, as time has gone by since we began these yearly trips, our students have become less impressed by something they just view and I think they’ve come to expect more interactive technology.

What a surprise when we got back from the Planetarium and the class realized they would be playing with iPads! After a short talk from Dr. Putrino about how the iPads should be handled, we went right into a space app. I had found this application when I got the opportunity to play with the iPad over the weekend. It was more like obsession than play time, really, but when I realized I had to actually feed my son and take care of other basic human needs, I was able to have the iPad wrenched from my clenched fingers.

During my play time, I found an app that actually shows you the night sky in sections according to where you point the iPad. You wave it in a figure 8 and it coordinates itself to your hemispheric location. When you move it across a ceiling or the sky if your outside, it shows you the constellations in that particular location. It also shows you the planets if they are in that range. In addition, there are options to read about the different planets through a wiki-like window and you can turn the less brighter stars down to make it look like a city night sky - only showing the brightest stars. You can even zoom in with your fingers like an iPhone or iTouch.

I went on to show them a few more apps having to do with geography and how they can play games together. My favorite one being PenduGeo - a game of hangman with all the countries in the world that can also be played in a mode that allows you to make up your own words.

There is so much potential for the use of this new technology. I would love to use it as enrichment. They are also great for reinforcement of basic skills with flashcards that can be used for any subject. There are apps for dictation, writing, reading aloud, spelling and drawing. Research is easy with the Wiki apps and access to the internet. Another great thing about them is the incentive for good behavior. I’ve always found putting the carrot before the cart to be much more effective with classroom management or behavior issues. If any of you have any other ideas, please share!

Needless to say, the children had a wonderful time and were excited to know when we could use them again. So am I!

Alice Hermida

5^th Grade

Science & Social Studies

Romp-a-"Room To Play" .... Will We Pay?

As the budget season progresses, we are hearing a lot of very different recommendations from our Board of Education appointed committees. Several have stirred up some philosophical debate. One that has started to create some controversy and conversation, is an issue very close to our school. The recommendation is to move towards a half-day Kindergarten. I ask simply, "How do you think moving to a half-day Kindergarten will effect the district?"

Principal

Dr. Joseph A. Putrino Jr.