Boys are good at math; girls are good at English

"How it Works" from xkcd.

The American Mathematics Society has just published a paper entitled "Debunking Myths About Gender and Mathematics Performance." What's interesting to me about the paper isn't that it tells us that girls have no inherent disadvantages relative to boys in math classes; what's interesting is that it's able to show correlation between math performance by gender and larger societal forces. The more equal the society at large, the smaller the gap in performance between boys and girls. That correlation compellingly demonstrates that the observed differences in performance are due entirely to perceptions of gender, not anything biologically inherent to gender. 

So when we see girls underrepresented in a high level class in a given subject, what we have to blame is the messages we send to those girls that says "this subject isn't for you" or, worse, "you're at a disadvantage here." Those messages must be erased from our institutions if we want to have students who achieve great things. We need to destroy the institutional structures that hold students back in this fashion; these include stereotypes, teachers' attitudes, and some aspects of the tracking system. And even when we cannot outright eliminate the destructive structure, we need to encourage our young women to see those negative pressures for what they are and to excel despite them.

You'd think that in a progressive school environment filled with varied examples of strong intellectuals, you would no longer overhear statements that tie a student's performance to his or her gender. And it's true that I can't remember the last time I've overheard anybody speculate that a girl wouldn't be as good as a boy in a math or science environment, despite the fact that the stereotype persists in the world at large.

However, I have heard, on a number of occasions, chatter about the difficulties boys have in excelling in English classes. Various aspects of male biology are cited in these conversations: later puberty, difficulty sitting still, inability to understand complex emotions, etc. All of these tidbits sound plausible, and the person making them typically has good intentions, but the statements are just as sexist, unfair, and destructive as a condescending comment that a girl has difficulty with complex mathematics because she has a girl's brain. And no matter how positively they're intended, they become a self-perpetuating drag on student performance.

Stereotype threat is real, and it's one of the greatest barriers to student progress, particularly to the progress of struggling students. Whether the threat comes from a student's gender, race, or level assignment, it pervades every aspect of the learning process. It pushes a student to disengage from the daily work that builds mastery. It turns a failure into evidence of the stereotype and a success into a fluke. It demotivates, disheartens, and delegitimizes our students and their work.

Individual students struggle with maturity, abstract thinking, and complex systems, but generalizing those difficulties to a gender—or any group—is worse than useless. It's wrong; it limits our students; and we need to stop doing it. We need to be prepared for our individual students to have difficulties, but we should not expect them to have a difficulty because of their gender, and we should not excuse that difficulty as a result of gender.

And once we have erased it from our own assumptions as teachers, we need to go on the attack to shine the light of day on institutional and societal practices that create and confirm these stereotypes. Is leveling students so beneficial that we're OK with creating groups of students that we institutionally identify as less capable? Even knowing that by doing so, we're creating a downward pressure on their learning? Do we offer enough extra services to our "B-level" and "C-level" students to counteract our labeling of them as such?

I'm not sure that we do, and I wonder that if we changed some of our teaching models (large classes, teacher-focused learning, etc.), we might be able to reduce some of the need to track students and thus reduce the negative pressure.

AP Scoring Guide

A couple of weeks ago, I had students in both my AP and 10th grade classes write essays based on one of last year's AP Lit Exam essay prompts. This week, I'm asking them to use the official AP scoring guide to score them.

I have to admit some heebies and jeebies over doing stuff like this. It feels like I'm spending class time teaching kids to game the test system rather than investing that time into teaching them how to approach a text honestly and incisively. However, because the AP scoring guide looks for legitimate intellectualism, we can use it (in a carefully qualified way) to look for legitimate intellectualism in our own work and in the work of others.

So without further ado, the guide:

The score reflects the quality of the essay as a whole — its content, style, and mechanics. Students are rewarded for what they do well. The score for an exceptionally well-written essay may be raised by 1 point above the otherwise appropriate score. In no case may a poorly written essay be scored higher than a 3.

9–8 These essays identify an “illuminating” episode or moment in a novel or play and persuasively analyze how the moment functions as a “casement,” a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Using apt and specific textual support, these essays effectively identify an episode or moment and explore its meaning. Although these essays may not be error-free, they exhibit the student’s ability to discuss a literary work with insight and understanding, while demonstrating clarity, precision, coherence, and — in the case of an essay scored a 9 — particular persuasiveness and/or stylistic flair.


7–6 These essays identify an “illuminating” episode or moment in a novel or play and offer a reasonable analysis of how such a moment functions as a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. These essays offer insight and understanding, but the analysis is less thorough, less perceptive, and/or less specific in supporting detail than that of the 9–8 essays. References to the text may not be as apt or as persuasive. Essays scored a 7 present better developed analysis and more consistent command of elements of effective composition than do essays scored a 6.


5 These essays respond to the assigned task with a plausible reading, but they tend to be superficial in analysis. They may rely upon plot summary that contains some analysis, implicit or explicit. Although these responses attempt to discuss an episode or moment in a novel or play and how it functions as a window that opens onto the meaning of the work, they may demonstrate a simplistic understanding. They demonstrate adequate control of language, but they may be marred by surface errors. These essays are not as well conceived, organized, or developed as 7–6 essays.


4–3 These lower-half essays fail to offer an adequate understanding of the work. They may fail to identify an “illuminating” moment or they may fail adequately to explore its meaning. They may rely on plot summary alone; their assertions may be unsupported or irrelevant. The writing may demonstrate a lack of control over the conventions of composition: inadequate development of ideas, an accumulation of errors, or an argument that is unclear, inconsistent, or repetitive. Essays scored a 3 may contain significant misreading and/or demonstrate inept writing.


2–1 Although these essays make some attempt to respond to the prompt, they compound the weaknesses of the responses in the 4–3 range. Often, they are unacceptably brief or incoherent in presenting their ideas. They are poorly written and contain distracting errors in grammar and mechanics. Remarks may be presented with little clarity, organization, or supporting evidence. Essays scored a 1 contain little coherent discussion of the text.

0 These essays do no more than make a reference to the task.

— These essays are either left blank or are completely off topic.

Dilatory Time

Ron Ritchhart articulates a list of a dozen criteria for "classroom thoughtfulness" in his book Intellectual Character. While I won't reproduce it in full here, since it appears to be traditionally copyrighted and licensed, there were a couple that stood out to be as good principles for teacher self-reflection, which is a big push of mine this year.

There are some high-falutin' ones, but I think it would be interesting to focus on one of the most basic building blocks of class discussion and behavior: "In this class, students were given an appropriate amount of time to think, that is, to prepare responses to questions."

I remember, as a young teacher, having an incredibly hard time with this. I'd come to class with a beloved copy of the text crammed with marginalia, and I'd throw a humdinger of a question out to my students. The weight of my hand would hold the book open at the key page, my ring finger half-obscuring a scratched out comment along the lines of "is this a reference back to the initial images of glass and water?" or maybe a simple exclamation like "whaa?" I'd be buzzing with the kind of knowledge you only have if you really love a text.

And my kids would like the text too, partly because it was great and partly because I so clearly loved it. And most of them had read, too. And all of them were thinking about my question. And none of them would volunteer an answer. After about ten seconds' silence, I'd ask another question, and then another, with a kind of quiet desperation. Then I'd ask an easier, less interesting question. I'd slide in that direction until I was asking something easy enough for a kid to confidently supply a simple answer, and on the discussion would limp. I'd leave the class a bit disappointed in myself. I didn't know then, and I barely know now, that the missing catalyst was time. We cannot love enough to overcome the simple march of time.

I was in year four of a torrid love affair with the text. My students were just hearing its first pickup line. They needed time to flirt a bit if they were going to get something out of the relationship.

Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest. I didn't realize that so many of my problems boiled down to a procedural issue. I had everything I needed already, but I wasn't giving it time. My kids needed not just a passionate, honest question but also a chance to reflect on it. They needed ten minutes to poke through the text for a good quotation and to write about it. Then, their thoughts had a bit of structure and depth, and the kids had a bit of confidence about sharing it.

This technique is so common and obvious that I hesitate to even call it a technique, and most English teachers reading this will have not just figured out the solution before I got to it, but they probably saw the problem coming in paragraph three. But I still think it's worth saying, and I think it's a principle that applies to much harder issues of teaching and learning.

Are your students being given an appropriate amount of time to think? And what are you doing to help them engage in their heads, through their pens, and on their keyboards? Have you given them the ingredients and the time they need to mix them?

Using the AP for Good, not Evil

Is it good or evil to give my AP kids this question (from the 2011 Lit AP) as a blog assignment for today? It's designed for a 40 minute handwritten essay response, so that makes it sort of perfect for a full class blog post.

In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following.

At every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity.

Choose a novel or play that you have studied and write a well-organized essay in which you describe an “illuminating” episode or moment and explain how it functions as a “casement,” a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

In this case, instead of any novel or play, they'll need to answer this question by examining The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, our current text. Personally, I can't tell if I find this question arbitrarily arcane or potentially fascinating—or a little of both, I suppose.

The real question is whether I'm evil enough to ask my 10th graders to grapple with this question as they write about The Things They Carried. At first glance, it might seem a bit intense, but as I reflect on the question and cast my memory over The Things They Carried—easier to cast it now, having read the book six or seven times—I realize that it might be quite helpful to choose single illuminating moments of that text too.

Is it unfair to give 10th graders questions from the AP? No. Is it unfair to grade a 40 minute response to an AP question like they're AP students? Yes, so I won't do that. Will they find it difficult at first to understand the casement metaphor? Yes, and so will the AP kids. But we want them to struggle with difficult, nebulous problems and realize that defining the terms of a problem and struggling through it are part of learning. Parsing things for kids is like cutting up their food. At a certain age, you need them not to choke on it, so you do the cutting, but at some point, you've got to let them grab the knife and give it a whack. You watch them carefully to make sure nothing goes tragically wrong, but you let them do it.

Here's a prediction: at first, they'll ask me what a casement is, not because they're foolish but rather because they're wise enough to know that they need to know the definition in order to parse the question. Inexperience, however, will lead some of them to ask me instead of to read the question critically, so they won't realize that the question defines "casement" both literally as a window and metaphorically as an opening "onto the meaning of the work as a whole."

So today I'll be playing the swim coach who knows his kids can tread water but is asking them to do it in the deep end...as they give their knives a whack in order to find the window.

Update:

The reactions from the 10th graders ranged from quiet diligence to open terror. It was really hard for some kids to trust their own judgment and reading of the question. Will all of them address the question as the AP writers intended? No, but that's not the point. The point is that they do it on their own and that I grade them on what I value here: the attempt to work on their own and confront the text honestly.

Still, I do feel a bit like the swim coach who's watching a kid panic and splutter. Fortunately, no matter how much the kids freak out, the worst case scenario here is a terrible essay, which isn't fatal.

Titles That Don't Quite Make It

Background art: Metz's "Planetary Porpoises."

For the last couple of days, Dan and I have been kicking back and forth a little Twitter game under the tag #TitlesThatDontQuiteMakeIt. We're not the only ones out there playing it, and the game appears to have originated on Salman Rushdie's Twitter. It's been a bit of a distraction from writing college recs (I have something like twelve left to go), and we're having a little too much fun with it. Here's a few of my favorites so far:

Kafka's Mega-Porpoises: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic cetacean."

Joseph Heller's absurdist tale of the Golden Retriever who didn't know where to bring the ball: Fetch-22.

Edgar Allen Bro's "The Telltale Popped Collar."

Shakespeare's Brothello.

Krakauer's Into Thin Hair (truly a harrowing read).

There are lots more on Dan's and my feeds if you're amused and want to read more, and definitely join the game if it sounds like fun to you. Just tag your tweet with #TitlesThatDontQuiteMakeIt and add @tippyunbound and/or @CPTRooster to make sure we see it.

The IQ Fallacy

Too often, we think of intelligence as a fixed quantity, as if we have a certain amount of a magical substance in our heads, and that amount can not be essentially changed. It's a dangerous, damaging, depressing fallacy, and in my experience, it's one of the greatest obstacles to student learning.

David Shenk nicely debunks this fallacy in a 2009 article for The Atlantic. He argues, rather convincingly, that while our genes may theoretically influence our intelligence, our development is a much larger agent in our problem solving ability. IQ is a measurement of a particular set of skills, and those skills can be improved.

Let's not also forget that the IQ test is intentionally narrow in its measurement. It quantifies a particular kind of problem solving, and it does it well, but it makes no attempt to measure intelligence types that are at least as important.

So the next time your student, your colleague, your family member says he's "not smart" or is "bad at that," it might help to remind him that his disposition toward himself or to the subject is much more predictive of his success than the jar of quicksilver ability he believes has been doled out to him by his genes or his creator.

It's not his fault, of course. Western society (and probably others) is absolutely replete with institutional and cultural building blocks that encourage us to think of our abilities as fixed and immovable. Impressive people have "genius;" struggling students are "weak." We separate kids by abilities early in their lives, and we might even refer to some of them as "gifted," as if the others didn't receive the gene as their first birthday present.

This mindset both encourages mediocrity and devalues achievement. A student who demonstrates brilliance in a paper has brought a lifetime of dispositions, opportunities, choices, and yes, talents. But let us not confuse a knack that allows a student to progress quickly for an irreproducible gift that the student has received through some genetic sorcery.

"But," you say, "I have students who work incredibly hard who don't make as much progress as students who do less work. Is that not proof of the existence of talent, raw intelligence, and a gift?" Maybe, and I don't claim to understand every aspect of the interaction between genes, brains, and choices. There probably are starting lines drawn in some ways in our abilities. But I'm also willing to bet dollars to donuts that your hardworking student also has limiting dispositions in his work and that your lessworking student has advantages that have little to do with raw intelligence.

What we mistake for a static gift is actually a combination for factors, the majority of which we can change, and we can influence. Your student has a measurable IQ, but the question isn't "what's your IQ?" The question is "what are you doing to raise it?"

The Grand Design

The Unbound Project has gone from a district-funded experiment to a less formal group of like-minded reformers working mostly on their own time, but that doesn't mean we can't do some real good for this district. The next stage for us is to continue putting our money where our mouths are and to put some of our best conceptual work into practice.

A big part of our central philosophy is our faith in public, formal, specific self-assessment and subsequent collaboration. We do it with the kids, and we do it ourselves. To push ourselves to reflect more formally and specifically, we've developed a large-scale, formal self-assessment for teachers that's designed to help them set up a unit or any large-scale chunk of teaching and then to look back at it afterwards in order to improve future teaching.

It takes you through pre-assessment, setting goals and assigning material, focusing on process, assessing midway, assessing at the end, and connecting the material to the next steps in the class. It tries to help you understand kids' learning as a longer-term process, to push you to put as much as possible into the kids' hands, to shift student and teacher focus to mastery instead of scores, and to encourage all stakeholders to be reflecting on the ways in which habits and process affect outcomes.

To that end, I'll be publishing sections of the self-assessment, one at a time, and using them to reflect on my real-world teaching. We'll see if the assessment leads to better teaching and have an opportunity to improve it at the same time. There should be other Unbound folks doing the same thing, so we'll be able to see it work across different disciplines. I'll give an overview of it this week and begin posting my real-world results as soon as next week, assuming everything plays out as expected. My plan, as of now, is to use the self-assessment on the first major analytical paper for my 10th graders. It's perfect, because there are pre-assessment elements, discussions of process, midway assignments (parts of the paper), a summative assessment (a full draft and a rewrite), and a connection to the next paper.

You can find our current version of the assessment right here as a Google Doc. I've enabled Unbound members to edit the document and I've opened it up as read-only to the whole world. So take a look, and if you have ideas, leave me a comment.

A Handy Weight Loss Metaphor

When you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't focus on the scale. If you weigh yourself each day and put your focus on the weigh-in, you're going to see fluctuations that distract you from your goal. You might do exactly the right thing with your diet and exercise plan one day, but see your weight go up slightly the next. It might simply be that you're better hydrated today, but it looks like you've gained a pound. You did exactly what you should do, but by focusing on the measurements instead of on the actions, you've undercut your success. You'll experience frustration that will decrease your ability to continue making the right choices for the rest of the day.

Instead, you should have relied on less frequent weigh-ins, or—if you're like me and love playing around with data—you should have averaged your daily weight over a longer period. Then, blips in the data—things that human psychology might overstate or misinterpret—take a more accurate place in context.

I'm sure you saw the grading metaphor coming a mile away. By encouraging kids to obsess over the measurements of academic success rather than the process that leads to it, we undercut their potential. If I want an A on the Lord of the Flies paper in three weeks, focusing on wanting an A and stressing out about it are not productive.  Instead, I should focus on developing and following the daily process that would lead to the best possible performance. I should take notes during class discussion; I should mark quotations during each night's reading. I should plan the paper early, start writing the day it's assigned, and meet with my teacher at least once before the first draft is due.

And even then, the single paper might have glitches that were beyond my control. Or, like the hypothetical hydrated individual on the scale, I might have done something right—like experimenting with my paper's structure—that seems to have moved me away from my goal, even though it was actually a great move for my longer-term growth as an intellectual. If the grade defines my experience, then I've failed. If my work process and my mastery define my experience, I've succeeded.

Believe it or not: it's easier to continue behavior that makes you feel stressed than to follow through on a plan which will ultimately make you feel better and more relaxed in the long term. In fact, in my experience, stress gives students a reason to engage in avoidance behavior, and they often end up doing less work. The work they actually do is less efficient and less useful. It's Psych 101 that the mind will prefer a distraction to a stressful, unpleasant confrontation, and it's Psych 102 that the emotions associated with stress interfere with our ability to reason and remember.  That's the basis of procrastination, and it's one of the reasons a kid will spend ten hours in a week poring over Facebook or grinding out an obscure achievement in a video game rather than spending one hour devoting attention to a simple task that will pay off in happiness and respect down the road.

If you want to lose weight, you need to focus on getting yourself into your running shoes, not on beating yourself up at the weigh-in. If you want to gain intellectual ability, you need to focus on the daily process and trust that doing things right will make you a better intellectual in the long run. Then, the longer term measurements (e.g., quarter grades), can actually make some sense as useful benchmarks of your progress. Mastery may be harder to benchmark than a GPA, but that's where our kids' focus needs to be.

Top-Down Reform is an Oxymoron

In the coming weeks, I'm going to be test-driving a teacher self-assessment system I'm designing with some colleagues, but today I wanted to share an LA Times Op-Ed whose theme is the involvement—more, more accurately, the lack of involvement—of teachers in the school reform process.

While the article primarily addresses national school reform in ways most relevant to failing schools, in exploring the problems with the top-down approach to improving schools, it draws some lessons that absolutely apply to Westport:

Instead of seeing teachers as key contributors to system improvement efforts, reformers are focused on making teachers more replaceable. Instead of involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform, they are being pushed aside as impediments to top-down decision-making. Instead of bringing teachers together to help each other become more effective professionals, district administrators are resorting to simplistic quantified individual performance measures. In reality, schools are collaborative, not individual, enterprises, so teaching quality and school performance depend above all on whether the institutional systems support teachers' efforts.

Now, in Westport, the theme certainly isn't "making teachers more replaceable." There is a substantial honoring of teacher autonomy and quality in this community and in the district's attitude. However, the district is still heavily focused on a top-down approach to improving itself, and that approach absolutely wastes teacher talent and creates more frustration and gridlock than it does substantive reform. The recent issues with the social networking policy are a perfect example of a problem created by "top-down decision-making" when "involving teachers and their unions in collaborative reform" could easily have produced a more sensible, precisely-worded policy to better protect students and teachers. Despite the best of intentions, the top-down approach is doomed by its nature to expend most of its energy in meetings, producing policy changes that often do more harm than good.

The district has launched a "Westport 2025" initiative to examine reform possibilities for the school system. There's some good work happening around this initiative, but it's primarily a top-down, administrative push run by people who aren't in the classroom. There are some teachers on the initiative's committee, but it's unclear what their role really is or what the committee's specific purpose might be.

Teachers hold the curriculum in their hands every day, and every day they stand in front of the students and work with it. They know what's getting in the way of real learning and what supports it. They see qualitative data every day, while administrators are largely limited to the quantitative data they can gather. It's no fault of any particular administrator; in fact, my experience with the administrative team is that they are good-hearted people who want to support their teachers and make positive changes. It's the nature of the beast itself that's the problem.

If you want to change schools for the better, and if you want to change this district for the better, you need to provide teachers with opportunities to collaborate on reform. They need to be involved from the first steps to the last, and they need to have the time to do so. Yes, that means money. Teachers are already working full-time just teaching the curriculum in its current form. If you want them to work on revolutionizing it, you need to give them the money and the time they need to work on that part-time job on top of their full-time job.

Even more than money, though, it means reaching out and putting the teachers in control of reform. You don't write new policy or curriculum and put it in place and then see if the teachers are upset enough to protest. You need to put your ideas on the table and ask the teachers where they would go with the reform, and you need to compensate them for the substantial amount of time it takes to reinvent a school properly. If the district is serious about reform, it needs to get serious about structuring and funding that reform, or "Westport 2025" is going to produce a lot of good-sounding concepts and little fundamental change.

Mixing Up Instructional Style

I love finding articles that challenge common wisdom, like this recent NPR piece that upends the notion of "visual" and "auditory" learners. I've always thought that tailoring your instruction to an auditory learner, even if he actually exists, doesn't necessarily do him a great service. As long as our central mission is to teach kids how to learn autonomously, catering to their strengths is only one piece of the puzzle. It's just as important to help them expand the ways they learn. An auditory learner should be working on learning better with visuals.

In these first weeks of school, I have kids setting goals for themselves and their year. One girl said that she wasn't very visual and had trouble imagining the details of setting in certain books. She felt it was impeding her ability to enjoy those books and to understand them as deeply as she wanted to. She didn't demand books that better suited her strengths. She recognized that if she wanted to access an important text that didn't play to her reading style, she'd need to adapt. 

So it's great to hear some brain scientists sending us a message that underscores the importance of a varied teaching style. Whether or not the purported "auditory" and "visual" learners really exist, good teaching is going to constantly mix up the ways kids are asked to engage with material. They need to read, to draw, to visualize, to move, to argue, to listen, and to do the million other things a great intellectual does to grapple with a meaningful set of concepts.

And I love that this piece challenges our bias towards the status quo. The human brain always runs under assumptions—without which we couldn't function effectively—but some of the most deeply embedded common wisdom is probably false, so we need to be questioning those obvious things that we take for granted, at least once in a while.

I'm challenging myself this week to mix it up. I tend to rely heavily on writing-as-thinking and discussion as a sort of default mode for approaching a text, but I'm going to challenge myself to get my kids moving, drawing, flow-charting, or carving wax sculptures.

Sample Student Blog Update

Since Google/Blogger has updated its software, some of the important settings are in new places. I've created a new set of blog setup instructions for students on the Sample Student Blog. I'm starting off all my kids in the new interface, but Blogger still allows you to use the old interface, so if you need the old instructions, they're still available here.

Goals Post

The new school year is approaching, and it's time to make a frank assessment of our progress so far and to set some goals for next year.

Here's some we've discussed and agreed to as a group:

We'll all blog on the first and third Wednesday of the month at a minimum. It doesn't have to be a major, polished essay on education. It can be an article with a few lines of commentary or a snippet of a kid's work that demonstrates the success or failure of an assignment. It can be an assignment that attempts to help kids toward our goals. My personal goal here is to write those posts in advance and set them to publish automatically at the same time, twice a month, so my updates are clockwork-reliable.

The students in our piloted classes will build digital portfolios. Last year, I had students tag all of their work so it could be organized and viewed in different ways, but I didn't do enough to have them looking back over their own progress as writers and thinkers. A robust digital portfolio gives you an opportunity to self-assess in ways that are both deeper and broader than improvement that only goes from assignment to assignment.

Along the way to those portfolios, we're going to focus on developing assignments that value the search for the student's thought process. Assignments should set up students for those "aha" moments and ask them to record the key factors that made the moment possible.

We will meet to share and develop assignments that best encourage students towards our goals with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration.

My last goal, which isn't a group one, is to be more concise. I get on a tear sometimes, and I'm not always sufficiently cognizant of the limitations of this format. So when it's time to stop, I should just stop.

Hiatus

Let me explain this long break in posting.

On 4/11, at a School Board meeting, the Superintendent proposed a new social networking policy that included some very broad and alarming language. The Board accepted it, and it became a policy that officially governs my conduct as of 4/12. I posted my last entry on teaching philosophy the next day, since I had already worked on it and didn't want it to just disappear. I did post once after that, but just to share an assignment at a colleague's request.

Here's the language that chilled our willingness to use blog software to continue to discuss school policy and our teaching:

However, the Board will regulate the use of social media by employees, including employees’ personal use of social media, when such use... interferes with the work of the school district; ....disrupts the work of the school district; ...harms the goodwill and reputation of the school district.

Suddenly, that was the school policy, and we were really concerned that our work on blogs, wikis, and twitter-style sites might violate this set of rules if our comments could be seen as critical of the district. For example, I've written on a number of occasions on the theme of class sizes at Staples (they are too large), and that kind of statement could be reasonably construed as harmful to the school district's reputation. Perhaps the policy does not intend to prevent teachers from honest, fair criticism of the district, but language is so broad that it does.

Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) affirmed the 1st amendment right of teachers to publicly criticize their school districts. The Supreme Court found that unless a teacher's comments interfere with the performance of their teaching duties, they are afforded the same protection as the comments of a member of the general public.

Despite the fact that the district's rules would not seem to hold up in court, and despite the fact that they were probably not intended to prohibit us from critiquing policies, the new language was enough to chill our speech. Any kind of formal reprimand is pretty crushing to a highly motivated teacher, and nobody wants to get into a legal battle, even if it's one you feel you should win.

There was another major sticking point in the policy for me, and this one had to do with some very broad language surrounding the personal use of social media by faculty members:

Employees are required to maintain appropriate professional boundaries with students, parents, and colleagues. For example, absent an unrelated special relationship (e.g., relative or family friend), it is not appropriate for a teacher or administrator to “friend” a student or his/her parent or guardian or otherwise establish special relationships with selected students through personal social media, and it is not appropriate for an employee to give students or parents access to personal postings unrelated to school.

Good teachers understand the importance of professional boundaries. They protect the teacher as much as they protect the student or parent. I think pretty much any teacher in the district would agree that teachers should not start up inappropriate personal relationships with students or show favoritism to individual students. In fact, teachers need to exercise great care to avoid even the appearance of favoritism. But this paragraph also states in its last sentence that teachers cannot allow students and parents to access their postings unrelated to school, and that's a bit ridiculous if you think about it.

In addition to this blog for work, I have a personal blog on which I post photos and stories. I can understand the district's desire to keep me from promoting it on a school website, and I think we could have a lively debate over whether or not it's appropriate for me to link to it in this post. However, that blog, like this one, is not restricted in any way. Anybody who searches for it can find it, view it, and follow it. Thus, I've given students and parents access to personal postings unrelated to school, simply by doing nothing at all. While the district surely doesn't intend to tell me I'm not allowed to blog about my personal life, the letter of the policy seems to indicate that I have to lock up my entire online life in order to avoid giving students access.

Our Collaborative Team collected each department's concerns and forwarded them on to the Superintendent, who personally met with the team and allayed some of its concerns. He also offered to make some minor changes, most notably the removal of the "goodwill and reputation" language, though he left in "interferes with the work of the school district" and "disrupts the work of the school district." I am not sure what the difference is between interfering and disrupting, but I still find the language chilling to my willingness to engage in frank criticism of district policy. Nonetheless, the Superintendent personally assured the Collaborative Team that the district welcomes honest criticism.

So here's some of mine: it makes no sense to develop policies to protect students and faculty without participation from the faculty. The biggest problem with this policy isn't that it contains some overly broad and confusing language. The biggest problem is that no teachers were invited to participate in its creation, and that's why the final product was so ill-considered and poorly calibrated. The policy was announced several months before it was implemented, and the teacher's union sent it out for legal review, but that was the extent of the faculty's involvement. As a result, the district currently has a policy in place that hinders precisely the initiatives—like this blogging pilot project—that it most wants to encourage.

I don't entertain too many delusions that the heavy hitters in the district hear my little vocem clamantis in deserto here on the second floor, but I do hold onto some hope that, in the future, policies that directly affect teaching might be written with the input of the people who do the teaching.

Visual Presentation Assignment

In Research & Lit, the kids write their junior research paper, and they also give a presentation of their findings to the class in lieu of a final exam. Since some folks in the department were interested in using this kind of assignment in their classes, I'm posting the assignment sheet for others to critique, borrow, adapt, etc.

Right now, I like it quite a lot, but I think I could improve on it. I want to better capture the sense of how important and meaningful it is to develop ideas through the examination of evidence and then to own those ideas by presenting them to a group of intellectuals in written form and in person. The world is full enough of bad Powerpoint already, and I want my kids to be able to wow people with their insight and poise.


Research & Literature
Final Assessment: Visual Presentation

Your culminating activity for Research & Literature will be to synthesize what you've learned in your research into a visual presentation which you will present to the class during the exam period. Think of your presentation as your opportunity to demonstrate all of the knowledge you gained about your topic by discussing the most compelling aspects of your research paper to the class.

You will:
• Create a visual presentation using the format of your choice (e.g., Prezi, Powerpoint, Keynote, etc.) or another visual medium, provided you clear it with me in advance.
• Include: a title slide, at least one slide per major section of your paper, and a concluding slide that summarizes your exploration. You should also include a works cited slide to cite any sources cited in the presentation and any visuals that you use.  You should have a maximum of 12 slides.
• Avoid text-heavy slides. You will not read your slides to us, but use the slides as talking points. In general, the less text you use, the more punch it has.
• Create a presentation that demonstrates your expertise with your topic.
• Find images that present information or illuminate your topic for every slide. Avoid clip art or distracting audio. Emblematic quotes can be pertinent but should not be overused.
• Submit your final project to me by e-mail.

An excellent presentation will:
• Present both your perspective and the most relevant information you gathered in your research.
• Clearly synthesize the scope of the argument yet focus on only the salient points.
• Seamlessly use the visual medium to aid audience understanding.
• Use succinct, eloquent, clear, and varied language.
• Be free of mechanical or grammatical errors.
• Focus the class efficiently.
• Demonstrate thorough rehearsal of the material.
• Move through the material logically and with smooth transitions between sections.
• Demonstrate professionalism both in the quality of the slides and in the demeanor of the presenter.
• Convince us of the merits of your perspective and the reliability of your research.
• Conclude efficiently.

A nation engaged in real reform?

Finland's Educational Success? The Anti-Tiger Mother Approach

Apparently, Finland's educational system focuses on developing teacher talent with competitive salaries and programs, and then they get out of the way. They don't pretend standardized testing is the be-all and end-all of teacher performance measurement, and they don't track kids. Sound familiar?

My favorite quote? Glad you asked:

You don't buy a dog and bark for it," says Dan MacIsaac, a specialist in physics-teacher education at the State University of New York at Buffalo who visited Finland for two months. "In the U.S., they treat teachers like pizza delivery boys and then do efficiency studies on how well they deliver the pizza."

One caveat: there's a little bit of an apples and oranges problem when you compare a nation like Finland to the US. Our problems are very different than theirs, and they have an across-the-board investment in education that makes their adult population pretty different than ours. So not everything Finland does for their kids is automatically good or automatically something that would work here. But there's certainly some food for thought.

Conferencing

The English Department put together a few videos of our teachers' conferences with students. It's one thing to hear that the English Department at Staples is built around the idea of revision and one-on-one conferences with students over their papers, but it's quite another to see it in action. Having time to work closely with a student really allows you to troubleshoot in a very particular, specific way. Even more importantly, it allows you to highlight students successes and strengths so they can branch out and expand. There were three videos shown to the Board of Education at their April 4 meeting, and I'm including them here.

Pilot Project Status Update

At our department meeting yesterday, Kristin and I gave everyone a quick update on our work and our aspirations. We've got a lot of balls in the air —a lot of plates spinning on dowels? a lot of pans on the fire? a lot of taxis running out of our dispatch hub? a lot of metaphors for this particular situation?—but we focused on three areas: the changes we're making to assignments to foster authenticity in the work; the changes we're making to class structure in order to foster intellectual exchange; and the broader reforms we're looking at for the school as a whole.

To keep things fresh, I used Prezi and excerpted bits and pieces from our blogs and from of my students' blogs. The kids' blogs show a brief intellectual exchange between students developing their own paper topics for J. D. Salinger's Nine Stories. For me, this is a quintessential example of a way to take a useful, time-tested, traditional assignment—the analytical paper—and give it greater authenticity by having kids develop their own topics through intellectual exchange with other students. Harry takes his ideas, which are still a bit unformed, and compares them to Emily's. Her thinking sparks him in a new direction, and he develops an idea that goes quite a bit deeper. Emily, meanwhile, is engaging in the same process with Bridget's thoughts, and the chain continues on beyond the little window I've given you here.

Then, we moved on to some thoughts about broader reform sparked by our visit to the Ross School. We're still engaging in the tough questions about integrating project-based learning and assessment while not losing the strengths we already have. If you work from the assumption that the kids' curricular year is already packed to the gills with useful stuff, it becomes quite a challenge to decide what can be streamlined or cut in favor of something new and potentially better. The better you're doing, the less easy it is to pick something to cut or to find more time for something innovative.

Guess the play!

EDIT: It's Hamlet!

I had a little lightbulb, so I took the full text of a Shakespeare play and made a Wordle of it. I used a find/replace function to remove all the names and common words like act, scene, enter, exit, etc. I also took out some of the more obvious words that might give the play away instantly. I was wondering if the big picture view most frequently repeated words would give insight into the play, and I think they do. I'm also wondering if people can guess the play based on this kind of visual analysis. Anybody want to take a guess in the comments?

Wordle

I found a fun tool today. It's mostly for amusement purposes, but it does get me thinking about the different ways we can visualize concepts. Wordle takes whatever text you give it (in this case, all the posts from my blog) and creates a word cloud out of the whole thing. It's similar to the tag cloud I keep on the right hand side of the blog, but instead of just looking at my tags, it looks at every word I've written. Interesting to see a non-scientific representation of my thoughts. It almost feels like these are the concepts that most concern me (though they're not a perfect representation).

Re-form

The central pillar of what we've been doing with our pilot program is a faith—a hope? an assumption?—that our best ideas and practices will find traction in the school's policy and direction. The optimism coexists with a highly realistic sense of the practicality of institutional change. When it comes to changing directions, even moderately sized institutions are like aircraft carriers at full steam.

Unfortunately, it's much harder than just spinning the wheel to port, and the metaphor breaks down here anyway. We don't just want to nudge the aircraft carrier. We want to reorganize the sailors, redesign the engine, and refit the hull. Ever try to swap out the propeller of your carrier without slowing the ship down?

We got to visit the Ross School, and what they have is the kind of school you'd end up with if you had a billionaire benefactor and could build from the ground up. Even the architecture matches the ambition of the educational mission. They have a cultural history curriculum that's the core of each year, and science and English classes are content-connected to that cultural history. Your science, English, and history teacher all get together to discuss cross-disciplinary projects, so you don't end up bouncing from class to unrelated class all day.

They also rely on project-oriented assessment throughout their curriculum, all the way from elementary school up through a culminating senior project at the end of high school. Students are involved even in the assessment of their own projects, typically by developing their own rubrics early in the process.

So after this day of being bombarded with very cool ideas and best practices, we're left with the daunting task of thinking about what we can bring back to a school that's structured fundamentally differently. How do we replicate what's great about the interdisciplinary class structure when are class sizes are literally twice as large as Ross's? And when we have 450 kids in a grade instead of 60? And when we have a tracked curriculum?

Sometimes I despair about discussing meaningful, substantive reform when it would almost certainly require at least a modest reduction in class size. The district is actually talking about reducing the teaching staff, so it can feel hopeless to discuss a more student-centered approach when I'm imagining my class of twenty-seven eleventh graders growing to a class of thirty or more.

Still, we soldier on, right? This community has a strong history of supporting its educational system, and investments made in class size, reform, and better teaching more pay for themselves on a dollar-for-dollar basis in the long run by increasing property values, lowering crime, and upping students' earning power. And they also pay off in non-economic ways that are harder to measure and more elusive, like happiness, better options for schools and careers, and the satisfaction of a life steeped in knowledge.

Nihil Novi

"Nihil novi sub sole..." (Ecclesiastes 1:9, Biblia Sacra Vulgata).

There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9, NIV).

There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know (commonly attributed to Ambrose Bierce).

Recently, we had an English department meeting in which the concept of "21st century" skills was kicked around a bit. It got me to thinking: what are the things we want to teach that are actually bona fide skills unique to the 21st century? Very few of them are going to turn out to be 100% brand new. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that none of them are truly new. However, many of them need to be freshly prioritized or even rediscovered, and a few are simply so rare in the general population and so hard to teach that they need to be attempted over and over with the hope that they begin to stick.

So what things need to be freshly invigorated in today's high school curriculum?

Citizenship: Voting and advocacy are hardly inventions of the 21st century (pretty sure the Greeks had lobbyists), and neither is Yellow Journalism (the 1890s saw the first iteration of the kind of shoddy journalism we still see today). However, we do live in a highly partisan era and an era in which we're saturated with information that does not organize itself with the most accurate facts at the top. So we need to focus a huge amount of attention on teaching kids how to sort information, how to assess its credibility and bias, and how to draw strong conclusions from evidence instead of warping evidence to support their preconceptions. That last one is incredibly difficult, since the human mind naturally creates cognitive biases, and learning to identify your own is, by definition, always a challenge.

Nuance: One kind of cognitive bias is the human mind's resistance to nuance. It wants answers, black and white clarity, good guys and bad guys. In many situations, it's quicker and easier to think that way, but life's most difficult questions are difficult precisely because they're not manichaean. They require us to search our world and our souls for answers, and we cannot ignore our responsibility to teach kids how to approach these questions openly and honestly.

Education in Metaphor: I borrow heavily from Robert Frost's "Education By Poetry" for this concept, but I think his 20th century sentiment—rather 19th century, actually—still speaks loudly for the 21st:

They are having night schools now, you know, for college graduates. Why? Because they have not been educated enough to find their way around in contemporary literature. They don’t know what they may safely like in the libraries and galleries. They don’t know how to judge an editorial when they see one. They don’t know how to judge a political campaign. They don’t know when they are being fooled by a metaphor, an analogy, a parable. And metaphor is, of course, what we are talking about. Education by poetry is education by metaphor.

Though I'm working off a version later published as an essay, Frost first gave this talk exactly eighty years ago in February 1931. No matter how many times I find predictive wisdom in the words of an old master, I still feel that little thrill like a static shock.  We have to teach kids to interpret metaphor—and rightly under the umbrella of metaphor are all sorts of rhetorical and expressive forms of language—so they can "find their way around" in contemporary literature and life. If you cannot use your skills in logic and metaphor to spot a false analogy when you see one, you will find it very difficult not to be driven about like a sheep. The shepherds have developed some very sophisticated tools.

The last 21st century skill that's frying my brain on this fine morning is the ability to articulate and defend your ideas. If we're going to teach kids to develop ethical, honest ideas from their analysis of complex evidence, we had better darn well teach them how to stand up for those ideas and communicate them clearly. That means teaching them to write clearly and teaching them how to contribute in groups of all sizes and compositions. They need to be able to work with a partner towards a common goal, to play the role a small group needs from them rather than insisting on doing things their own way, to stand in front of a group with or without visuals and props and inspire respect.

So there may be nothing new under the sole, but there's definitely always something new in the soul, eh?