NYC Educator: Getting Ready for Reformy John King's Plan

NYC Educator: Getting Ready for Reformy John King's Plan:

Getting Ready for Reformy John King's Plan

by NYC Educator

The administrators in my building are hard at work figuring out just what the hell they are going to tell us at PD next week. They're looking at Danielson, and figuring out how we can meet whatever requirements the DOE has told them Danielson demands.

Now the geniuses at the DOE, because they know everything about teaching and learning, have determined that observations should take only 15 minutes. Therefore, if Danielson demands kids turn and talk, you'd better have a lesson plan that allows them to do so in any 15-minute segment of your lesson. In fact, allow is not the proper word. You'd better compel them.

UFT says a lesson should be an entire lesson, rather than a 15-minute drive-by. I agree, particularly during a year when we're going to be judged by a system with no more reliability than voodoo. I fully expect Reformy John to agree with Bloomberg, no matter how stupid his ideas are, because Bloomberg's ideas will be more reformy than those of the UFT. So I guess my kids had better be asking questions, using the proper degrees of knowledge and whatnot, or I'll be selling pencils on the corner pretty soon.

This will be a tough feat for me, as I English to people who mostly don't speak it. In fact, because most of my