January 2, 2013 By 4 Comments

Education Reform: Teachers Have Always Been at the Forefront

By Mary Cathryn Ricker

I was intrigued by Jay Mathews’ Washington Post column that proclaims “Teachers leaning in favor of reforms.” I do appreciate that he points out he has never once written about unions hindering reform, even if he back-hands the compliment with “that is not the same as saying the unions have worked hard to make all teachers more successful in the classroom.”

That is where I part very good company with him.

I appreciate the parsing of teacher’s feelings toward current education hot topics in the research he sites by Teach Plus and Education Sector. As the current president of my teacher’s union in St. Paul, Minnesota it is helpful to learn what teachers are saying and thinking both, individually and locally, and in the aggregate.

However, I have a fairly unique view, as a teacher serving as a local union president and a third generation teacher in my family, which leads me to a couple questions and a couple points I would like to make about teachers “leaning in favor of reforms.”

Supporting Education Reform

Because this research is a snapshot in time, it is impossible to say whether these attitudes captured by Teach Plus and Education Sector are new or not. In my family and in the historic local teacher’s union I have the privilege of serving, these attitudes are not new.

Someday we will have longitudinal research that either proves this group of newer teachers is somehow unique, or it will prove what I have experienced anecdotally: that teachers, and our unions, have always had a bias for improving teaching and learning conditions. Indeed, it was because I saw up close these examples of acting within a union to improve teaching and learning that I ran for president of my union, rather than get an administrative credential or take some other job, when I felt ready to lead with new ideas of mine and my colleagues’.

My Dad, Union President and Reformer

I saw my dad, and his generation, fight for adequate preparation time so I could build on that by advocating for increased professional learning time. His generation built salary schedules that honored years of expertise and graduate specialties so that we could come along and create leadership opportunities that don’t force a teacher to choose between leading or teaching.

The work done by teachers in their unions before me to recognize National Board Certification paved the way for others to design other differentiated pay structures. We can entertain a serious discussion about the AFT’s bar exam idea precisely because of the professional ideas to improve teaching and learning brought to the table year after year by many leaders who have come before us raising the bar for teacher standards over time from high school diploma to some college to a full credential. There wouldn’t be this notion of rethinking tenure, or due process, if there hadn’t been progress from capricious, political, sexist at-will status to fair due process in the first place.

Examples of Union-Supported Reforms

In the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers we have been doing things like:

  • Designing our own alternative licensure program to diversify our profession and fill hard-to-staff license areas
  • Expanding the professional development opportunities we started offering more than 25 years ago
  • Expanding our parent/teacher home visit project
  • Negotiating contract language to strengthen our peer assistance and review program and evaluation
  • Offering alternatives to seniority to protect the integrity of programs we offer our students.

We’re doing all of that with our ultimate goal of making our contract the most powerful document our district has to attract, support and retain a high-quality, diverse workforce that knows how to meet the needs of our students and families.

None of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for the teacher union leadership that came before us. None of it.

I appreciate the acknowledgement that Jay Mathews was trying to offer, but I caution him about painting the last 150+ years of St. Paul teachers (and others) as stagnant, versus a recently discovered fountain of youthful teachers suddenly leaning toward reform. The teaching profession has been evolving since it started. Each generation has added something, built on the work of the generation before.

Teachers have always leaned toward reform except, of course, for those times when we’ve been leading it.

Filed Under: Teacher Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
December 3, 2012 By 6 Comments

Showing Evidence: What Makes Me Sad

By Kathleen Sullivan

As teachers, we are navigating our way through a new evaluation model meant to “prove” that we are conducting ourselves as reliable and responsible professionals and that we are using best practices to deliver content to our students.

Evaluating teachers and administrators is not a bad thing. We do need to show evidence to parents, administrators, and the general public that we are delivering the best possible education to our students.

So why does it make me sad that we are now expected to show evidence that we are doing good work? Because it means that teachers who are innately giving, kind, and compassionate people are forced to gather up evidence of each act of humanity and save them in an evaluation binder.

In one section of this binder, we are expected to gather evidence that “proves” we not only care deeply about our students and colleagues, but that they appreciate us as well. How? By keeping a record of all of our kind acts toward our students and colleagues and collecting hard copies of any appreciative comments directed towards us as teachers.

We must keep a record any time we assist a colleague who needs some help. This shows collaboration. We must save any email thanking us for coming to a school event or doing something we do every day as teachers–staying late to help students, planning a fundraiser to support our community, dropping off supplies and food for a school family living in a shelter. This will be proof that we participate beyond our regular school days.

Not the way I was raised

Why does this part of the evaluation tool bother me so much? It goes against my grain as a person. In my family, we were brought up to do things for others because it’s the right thing to do. The only real “thank you” one truly needs is the great feeling that comes from doing good for your family, your friends, your colleagues, and your community. In my stoic, blue collar family, no one boasted about their achievements or what they did for others.  If someone did, they heard: “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”

My dad was a quiet guy who quietly made a difference in many lives throughout his 79 years. “Proof” came at his death when people lined up to tell us what a wonderful man he was by always doing kind acts quietly, out of the limelight.

It makes me sad to think that teachers now have to ask students to write down any compliments so they can have a record of building student-teacher relationships to “prove” they are reaching their students academically and personally.

We already have reduced students to a list of data points. Now we are doing it with teachers–data that “proves” we are good people, good teachers and good human beings.

“Proving” I am teaching our students well is one thing. Being asked to “prove” that I am a good person simply depletes me.

Kathleen Sullivan teaches 5th grade science at a public school in Malden, Massachusetts. 

Filed Under: Teacher Blog Posts Tagged With: , , , ,
October 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

VIVA Minnesota Project II – Strengthening Our Practice: A Classroom Teachers’ Approach to Evaluation

Download Full Report as a PDF

On October 26, 2012, members of VIVA Minnesota Teachers Idea Exchange II presented their report Strengthening Our Practice: A Classroom Teachers’ Approach to Evaluation to members of Governor Mark Dayton’s administration and the MDE Teacher Evaluation Work Group.

Download a copy of “Strengthening Our Practice: A Classroom Teachers’ Approach to Evaluation.”

Click here to read the recommendations from the report

Filed Under: Full Idea Exchange Reports, Idea Exchange Updates Tagged With: , , ,
October 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What is a Good Teacher?

So much of the chatter in education policy these days is shaped by the goal of getting rid of bad teachers. While that is something we certainly should do, shouldn’t we spend a lot more time thinking about getting as many good teachers as possible into our nation’s classrooms? What about thinking about how to help good teachers become great, rather than the myopic focus on punishing lousy teachers?

The key, of course, is knowing what a good teacher is. I’ve been catching up on my reading lately and came across two recent(ish) studies that will help us make that shift to think about effective teaching.

In “Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning,” the National Education Association (click to download) published the work of its Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching. The report lays out an exciting vision for a teacher-driven public school system. It contains a clear call to elevate teachers’ professional leadership and responsibility and lists specific characteristics of effective teachers.

There’s a lot of food for thought in this report and we ought to spend a lot of time thinking about how we tap into the professional skills and judgment of classroom teachers–not just in their classrooms but in shaping our approach to public education.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration

In The Hangover: Thinking about the unintended Consequences of the Nation’s Teacher Evaluation Binge, the American Enterprise Institute tackles the incredible pace of change in our thinking about teacher evaluation. More than 20 states have put new teacher evaluation laws on their books in the last three years. And, the rhetoric around most of these legislative changes has been pretty dismal. The authors caution that there’s a lot of connecting the dots to be done to make these laws work well and actually have an impact on teaching practices.

Engaging Teachers

At VIVA Teachers, we think the more we engage classroom teachers in these conversations about what a effective teacher looks like, and how you actually measure effective teaching, the more likely our children are to have a good (or better) teacher in front of their classroom.

VIVA Teachers in New York and Minnesota have made some of the same points as the authors of these reports: that teachers’ professional judgment needs to be part of the calculus on effective teaching. That data is indispensable to evaluating effective teaching. In two detailed reports, these teachers outline a clear action plan for professional evaluation of teachers and principals that will help all of us understand what effective teaching looks like.

Filed Under: Current Events & Policy News, Doable, Not Perfect Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Next time, listen to the teachers

Commentary by VIVA Teacher Leader Mark Anderson in the Albany Times-Union.
January 30, 2012

New York’s plans to implement its new teacher evaluation law have been met with outcries from principals, wariness from teachers and legal objections by the New York State United Teachers. All of that might have been averted if state leaders had more fully considered the perspective of educators before developing their implementation plans.

Last January, I was one of a group of teachers from across the state working with The VIVA Project to develop classroom-based solutions for effective teacher evaluation measures. We developed a set of policy recommendations and delivered them to Dr. John King Jr., New York’s senior deputy commissioner of education. Central to our proposal was the insight that the process of evaluating teachers must be tied directly and explicitly to the establishment of a professional learning community within each school and district.

A professional learning community is designed to engage teachers and administrators in continuous dialogue, feedback and support in order to improve teacher performance and, consequently, student learning. Without that, any evaluation process will inevitably devolve into checklists (no matter how advanced the instrument), ‘gotcha’ feedback, and more meaningless paperwork that has no impact on learning.

Our report also advocated for peer evaluations in addition to administrator observations. Teachers bring valuable understanding of the context of a given school, which is especially important in districts where students face daunting academic and life challenges. Working together, teachers can leverage the information from effective teacher evaluations to foster professional development, enhance instruction and nurture student growth and learning.

Without these classroom-based considerations, it is no surprise that New York is encountering this opposition. It has opted for shallow measures of teacher evaluation, such as allowing local districts to use state test scores to account for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

All teachers know that one summative measure of a test score cannot tell you all the information you need to know about an individual student’s personal growth in your classroom. Rather, teacher evaluations must account for student growth based upon measurements that gauge more accurately how much a student has progressed over the course of a school year.

For students who face great academic challenges, such as those with exceptional learning needs or students undergoing acute stress in their home lives, this consideration is paramount.

Policymakers are far removed from the realities and challenges of the classroom. They understandably place great emphasis on measures that are easily definable and quantifiable. But teachers know that ground-level implementation of any policy measure must take into consideration the context of a school and community in order to be implemented with fidelity.

Otherwise, this so-called evaluation is nothing more than a ruse to allow policymakers and politicians to check mandates off their list so they can garner federal money and more easily blame districts and teachers when they fail to measure up on disconnected data points.

Changing the cultures of schools requires much more than simple directives on how to evaluate teachers. It requires an understanding of evaluation measures like those we recommended in our VIVA Project report.

Only then can we build the sort of professional learning community necessary for an authentic conversation geared toward professional growth and improved student learning.

Mark Anderson is a fifth-grade teacher in an elementary school in the Bronx.

Filed Under: Press Coverage, VIVA in the News Tagged With: ,