The Next Step

The first series of “From B106” memos of this year dealt with the new teacher evaluation system.  Admittedly, many of the following entries took a rather meandering course on more scenic educational routes.  For those of you who read them, I hope they were helpful.

For the last memo of this school year, I want to return to the topic of our Teacher Evaluation and Development System (TEDS).  As you know, for the past semester a K-12 committee has been meeting regularly to review and revise TEDS for next year.  The process was excellent—and difficult.  I wish you could have heard the discussions and the give-and-take as teachers and administrators from all walks of the HSE district worked through the handbook and rubric page-by-page and even word-by-word.

I know you would be impressed with the thoughtfulness, the professionalism, and the passion brought to the table during this time.  Soon TEDS version 2.0 will come your way.

As a preview, I offer these observations and one suggestion:

• Format: The format of the new Teacher Effectiveness Rubric (TER) is much more user-friendly.  Many of the indicators have been clarified and lined up horizontally across the page.  If you start with the “Effective” column and read to the right and left, you will see the progressions and gain valuable insight on what constitutes best practice instruction in HSE schools.
• Shortened and Combined: The TEDS Handbook has been shortened considerably.  When you first received the handbook last year, many of you felt overwhelmed with the enormity of the document and of the tasks described in the document.  After going through the full process this year, your understanding and stress level has changed—I hope.  When you see the reduced version of the handbook, you should feel even better about where we are now on this journey.  More importantly than reducing the actual size of the handbook, Domain 1 (Planning) and Domain 2 (Instruction) have had competencies either combined or removed in attempt to both clarify and to emphasize those instructional practices deemed most essential.
• Content: By now you know the direction we are heading as a district and as a school.  You hear repeatedly about HSE²¹, about 21^st Century Skills, about the importance of higher order thinking, and about literacy skills across the content areas.  You will find that the tweaks and changes to the TER are ones that reflect the importance of these topics.

My Suggestion: Take Time for Reflection

Take some time this summer to read through the new TER.  Do so when you have no pressure of deadlines, no students walking through the door, no lessons to prepare, and no papers waiting to be graded.  Note where indicators have changed and emphasis was added.  Then pick one competency as an area of focus for the coming year.

Don’t try to do everything at once.  Instead pick an important “next step.”

This could be area of strength you want to build on, or it could be an area of growth that you think is significant.  Over the summer, consciously and subconsciously, start thinking and planning for next year.  Let it percolate in your mind for a while.  Perhaps you should do some reading or writing, or perhaps you need to process internally.  Do whatever works for you, but come into next school year re-energized and with a good idea of where you want to focus your time and professional energy.  It will be good for you, and more importantly, it will be good for your students next fall.

Have a great week, HSE, and then have an even better summer. 

Phil

One last quote:

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.  –John Lubbock

The Invisible Gorilla

Even though it is a complete contradiction of terms, you may have seen the “Invisible Gorilla.”  This less than two-minute video clip is part of a psychology experiment and includes three people dressed in white shirts and three people dressed in black.  They move rapidly around the floor, passing a basketball to each other randomly.  The audience is given the task of counting the number of passes completed by people in white shirts.

In the middle of all the moving and passing, a full grown man in a gorilla costume strolls into the middle of the action, pauses, thumps his chest, and moves off screen. 

The interesting part: Half of the people who watch the video are so caught up in the task of counting passes, they fail to notice the gorilla at all.  To be honest, I was one of those pass-counters.  To this day, I can’t believe I missed seeing a large primate walk across the screen for a full six seconds.  When I watch the clip again, the gorilla is so obvious that I’m embarrassed to admit I missed him the first time.

I’m sure there are many lessons to take from watching a video like this, but I was reminded during this past few weeks about the importance of interacting with students and parents using fresh eyes.  It is easy to come into interactions, especially difficult interactions, with preconceived notions.  When we do this, we may miss some things that are important, even some things as large as a chest-thumping gorilla.

We tend to see what we expect to see and hear what we expect to hear.  Maxwell Maltz, who has been around for quite a while but still has some interesting views, recently wrote, “There is no such thing as immaculate perception; what we see is what we thought before we looked.” 

The challenge for us is to stop the frenetic pace long enough to “see.”  In another irony, the first step to seeing with fresh eyes may be to listen.  Real listening can’t take place in a hurry.  We have to avoid relying on our preconceptions.  To paraphrase Maltz, we hear what we thought we would hear before we listened. 

This is a time of year when you are going to get phone calls and emails from parents, and students will stop by, often worried about things that in an ideal world would have been taken care of a long time ago.  If you have been teaching for a while, you likely have an enormous memory bank full of similar conversations that take place about this time of year.  This is a terribly busy time of year for everyone, and it is easy to mash the reality of now with the memory of past conversations.

I encourage you, however, to look with fresh eyes and listen with fresh ears.  While it is true the conversations are eerily and maybe even disturbingly similar to many you have had in the past, for the student or the parent, each conversation is brand new.  As much as these interactions may sound and look the same to us, we may miss something truly important, the equivalent of 100-pound gorilla walking across the screen, if we rely on preconceptions.

If you want to see the invisible gorilla, use this link:  The Invisible Gorilla

Bring it home strong, HSE.  Have a great week.

Phil

Shall We?

Words are interesting.  Sometimes they clarify; sometimes they confuse.  This is particularly true when it comes to legislation dealing with education.  Since the topic of this memo is the recent Common Core legislation, I shall attempt to make it as clear as possible—with emphasis on the word “shall.”

In the past few months, several bills were presented to address Common Core State Standards.  Senate Bill 193, which was going to put a “hard pause” on the CCSS, did not pass.  To add to the confusion about these standards, however, the state legislature did pass House Bill 1427, which has the dubious and contradictory distinction of being labeled both “pro- and anti-Common Core.” 

Anti-Common Core

According to Church, Church, Hittle, and Antrim, House Bill 1427 states that the Indiana Department of Education “may not continue to implement Common Core until it receives and considers two reports.” 

1.  A legislative study committee will submit the first report, which must compare existing Indiana standards with common core standards and consider best practice in developing and adopting the standards. The study is due November 1, 2013.
2. The Office of Management and Budget will submit a second report, which will concern the implementation costs to the state and the state’s school corporations to adopt common core standards

Pro-Common Core

After receiving these reports, however, the bill goes on to say:

“[IDOE] shall implement educational standards that use the common core standards as the base model for academic standards to the extent necessary to comply with federal standards to receive a flexibility waiver under 20 U.S.C 7861.   However, higher academic standards may be adopted that supplement or supplant the common core standards. . .”

The best we can tell at this time is that we are on a soft pause (as opposed to a hard pause) until two reports are received and considered, but we shall implement the Common Core State Standards in some form or other.

Don’t Be Shall Shocked

Regardless of the clamor, confusion, and verbiage, the course we have set as a school and as a district is a good one.  We have a four-year plan to update curriculum maps and scope and sequence documents.  We will continue to work on best practice instruction that includes a heavy emphasis on improving literacy and higher-order thinking skills in all content areas.  We will continue as a school and as individuals to learn and grow along with our students.  We will continue to build on our strengths.  

In other words, we will continue our journey.

Whichever direction the winds of change blow Indiana schools, this approach shall serve us—and our students—well.

Have a great week, HSE.

Phil

A few confusing quotes:

•  I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.  --Robert McCloskey
•  I’m not confused.  I’m just well-mixed –Robert Frost
• If confusion is the first step to knowledge, I must be a genius.  –Larry Leissner  

From Duh To Head Slap

My wife was telling me recently about one of those Duh Moments she experienced while figuring out the schedule for Cumberland Road Elementary School for next year.  Duh Moments are times when something, in retrospect, seems so simple and so clear, but it stays just out of the reach of understanding for a long time.  It is when you know you should know but you just don’t know.  Did you have to read that line twice to understand it?  If so, you just experienced a much less frustrating cousin of the Duh Moment.

For Lisa, after multiple attempts at arranging rooms and teachers using the whiteboard and sticky notes, a single word in the conversation turned on a light bulb.  It was the right word at the right time.  The Duh Moment was replaced by the Head Slap of Understanding.  Sticky notes lined up neatly on the whiteboard, blood pressure dropped, and all was good for the CRES Roadrunners.

Persistence in May

We have all experienced this phenomenon.  (Unfortunately, I can testify that these moments don’t get fewer as we age.)  Students, especially in May, seem prone to Duh as well.  My guess is that you have experienced this in your classroom as recently as this past week.  Concepts that seem simple for some students simply aren’t for others. 

Overcoming Student Duh can feel frustrating for teachers—no question about it.  It may take repeating or rephrasing or a whole different approach altogether in order to turn Duh into Head Slap.  In the classroom, this is called Responsive Teaching.  It is taking students where they are and sticking with them until they succeed.

Maybe This Time

The entire introduction above is background information and a way of encouraging you to be persistent right now, especially with those chronic underperformers.  Undoubtedly, you have been monitoring student progress all semester and are growing frustrated with some students.  It is highly likely that you have some (many?) students who are underperforming.  We have four weeks left of school.  There is still time for many of these students to improve performance levels and learning.  Even if you have been knocking your head against the wall, the attempt you make now may be the one that brings the Head Slap.  It may be the right word at the right place at the right time.

During this week, as you are working with students individually or as they are coming into your room or leaving it, give it one more shot.  Find a private moment and encourage those borderline or underperforming students.  Let them know that you are available to help and that it is not too late to make a change. 

At Hamilton Southeastern, we don’t give up on kids.  We may not “get” them all at once, but we do get them one at a time.  For each one we do reach, it makes all the difference in the world.

Have a great week, HSE.

Phil