Special Nite Cap: Catch Up on Today's Post 9/15/16
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Thursday, September 15, 2016
CURMUDGUCATION: Forest and Trees
CURMUDGUCATION: Forest and Trees:
Forest and Trees
Like many jobs in the world, particularly those that deal with humans, teaching requires focus on both forests and trees.
A teacher faces questions like these in the classroom:
What body of information do I need to convey to my students in a deep and integrated manner that best fits their pedagogical requirements and will most help them take their place as fully-actualized adults in the world?
What instructional techniques can best be used with this particular set of content-based objectives that also blend with and respect the cultural and personal backgrounds of my students while maintaining a whole child approach that helps achieve my global objectives?
But these questions are also part of the classroom world:
What's the most efficient way to get these test papers passed back?
Do I have enough copies of this worksheet?
Can I get Chris to stop jabbing Pat with a pencil?
You can't have one without the other. Focusing on the broad and deep concerns of education is like loving someone deeply and fully and never doing anything about it but sitting in your room and writing angsty poems. A broad vision without an action plan gets nothing done, achieves nothing for the students. But focus too intently on the nuts and bolts and you end up with a technician who completes tasks efficiently, even though the tasks have no real useful purpose behind them. You need a vision of how to get through the next year, and a plan for how to get through the next forty minutes.
Educational amateurs and neophytes often suffer from this balance problem. Beginning teachers may enter the classroom with Big Dreams about Touching the Future and Shaping Young Minds, but with no idea of how to get twenty-five teenagers to keep watching while the teacher writes on the board (chalk, white or smart). I've also seen new teachers arrive with stacks of unit plans and worksheets, ready to deploy them while moving briskly through the textbook, but with no idea of why they're doing any of it except that it's their idea of what teachers do. Each CURMUDGUCATION: Forest and Trees:
Forest and Trees
A teacher faces questions like these in the classroom:
What body of information do I need to convey to my students in a deep and integrated manner that best fits their pedagogical requirements and will most help them take their place as fully-actualized adults in the world?
What instructional techniques can best be used with this particular set of content-based objectives that also blend with and respect the cultural and personal backgrounds of my students while maintaining a whole child approach that helps achieve my global objectives?
But these questions are also part of the classroom world:
What's the most efficient way to get these test papers passed back?
Do I have enough copies of this worksheet?
Can I get Chris to stop jabbing Pat with a pencil?
You can't have one without the other. Focusing on the broad and deep concerns of education is like loving someone deeply and fully and never doing anything about it but sitting in your room and writing angsty poems. A broad vision without an action plan gets nothing done, achieves nothing for the students. But focus too intently on the nuts and bolts and you end up with a technician who completes tasks efficiently, even though the tasks have no real useful purpose behind them. You need a vision of how to get through the next year, and a plan for how to get through the next forty minutes.
Educational amateurs and neophytes often suffer from this balance problem. Beginning teachers may enter the classroom with Big Dreams about Touching the Future and Shaping Young Minds, but with no idea of how to get twenty-five teenagers to keep watching while the teacher writes on the board (chalk, white or smart). I've also seen new teachers arrive with stacks of unit plans and worksheets, ready to deploy them while moving briskly through the textbook, but with no idea of why they're doing any of it except that it's their idea of what teachers do. Each CURMUDGUCATION: Forest and Trees:
A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!
A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!:
A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida
A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida
Within a recent post, I wrote about my recent “silence” explaining that, apparently, post the passage of federal government’s (January 1, 2016) passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that no longer requires teachers to be evaluated by their student’s tests score using VAMs (see prior posts on this here and here), “crazy” VAM-related events have apparently subsided. While I noted in the post that this also did not mean that certain states and districts are not still drinking (and overdosing on) the VAM-based Kool-Aid, what I did not note is that the ways by which I get many of the stories I cover on this blog is via Google Alerts. This is where I have noticed a significant decline in VAM-related stories. Clearly, however, the news outlets often covered via Google Alerts don’t include district-level stories, so to cover these we must continue to rely on our followers (i.e., teachers, administrators, parents, students, school board members, etc.) to keep the stories coming.
Coincidentally — Billy Townsend, who is running for a school board seat in Polk County, Florida (district size = 100K students) — sent me one such story. As an edublogger himself, he actually sent me three blog posts (see post #1, post #2, and post #3 listed by order of relevance) capturing what is happening in his district, again, as situated under the state of Florida’s ongoing, VAM-based, nonsense. I’ve summarized the situation below as based on his three posts.
In short, the state ordered the district to dismiss a good number of its teachers as per their VAM scores when this school year started. “[T]his has been Florida’s [educational reform] model for nearly 20 years [actually since 1979, so 35 years]: Choose. Test. Punish. Stigmatize. Segregate. Turnover.” Because the district already had a massive teacher shortage as well, however, these teachers were replaced with Kelly Services contracted substitute teachers. Thereafter, district leaders decided that this was not “a good thing,” and they decided that administrators and “coaches” would temporarily replace the substitute teachers to make the situation “better.” While, of course, the substitutes’ replacements did not have VAM scores themselve, they were nonetheless deemed fit to A Case of VAM-Based Chaos in Florida | VAMboozled!:
Dismantling Public Education: 1926 insight into 2016 corporate education reform programs and tests | Reclaim Reform
Dismantling Public Education: 1926 insight into 2016 corporate education reform programs and tests | Reclaim Reform:
Dismantling Public Education: 1926 insight into 2016 corporate education reform programs and tests
Dismantling Public Education: 1926 insight into 2016 corporate education reform programs and tests
Teacher, historian and philosopher Will Durant cut through the ideological propaganda of his era and ours. We must do the same, or we and our children will suffer and die in well indoctrinated semi-ignorance and poverty. Civil disobedience and the dissemination of truth are necessary.
“Perspective was lost. ‘Facts’ replaced understanding; and knowledge , split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.”
Just prior to the Great Depression of 1929, this corporate designed caste system was exposed for what it actually was. The brilliant Will Durant pointed out the main social/corporate schism of that time and predicted what is occurring today.
“The gap between life and knowledge grew wider and wider; those who governed could not understand those who thought; and those who wanted to know could not understand those who knew. In the midst of unprecedented learning, popular ignorance flourished and chose its exemplars to rule the great cities of the world; in the midst of sciences endowed and enthroned as never before, new religions [ideologies] were born every day, and old superstitions recaptured the ground they Dismantling Public Education: 1926 insight into 2016 corporate education reform programs and tests | Reclaim Reform:
When Allies Do What Enemies Cannot - Living in Dialogue
When Allies Do What Enemies Cannot - Living in Dialogue:
When Allies Do What Enemies Cannot
When Allies Do What Enemies Cannot
By Anthony Cody.
This week there has been another round of mean spirited divisiveness aired in the education movement, this time directed at Diane Ravitch. Diane posted a link to an article in Inside Philanthropy that described a corporate foundation that was donating to public schools instead of trying to undermine them, as most philanthropies have been doing.
In the comments on this post her readers raised some concerns – the emphasis on STEM and other aspects of the funding. But a couple of people on another site went farther, and accused Diane of shilling for the company in part because her son has invested in it. Diane responded in the comments on her post:
I was sitting in the park yesterday when I read the Inside Philanthropy article, and immediately posted it because I was astonished to discover a company that gives money to the local public schools.I knew nothing about the company other than what was in the article.I had no idea that my son’s company had invested in it.If I had known, I would not have posted the article.In any event, he won’t make money as a result of my posting the reference.This was a very low blow.
She added:
I will never understand why people who are critics of the same things that I amWhen Allies Do What Enemies Cannot - Living in Dialogue:
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning | Schott Foundation for Public Education
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning | Schott Foundation for Public Education:
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning
The school-to-prison pipeline has been prominent in the education debate for the past several years, and youth, parents, teachers, and communities across the country have put questions of school discipline, restorative justice and implicit bias at the heart of their organizing work. On September 1, Center for Policing Equity (CPE) Cofounder and President Dr. Phillip A. Goff joined us for a webinar, moderated by our President Dr. John H. Jackson, to unpack the latest research and insights on policing and implicit bias in schools.
CPE works collaboratively with law enforcement, school communities, and political stakeholders to identify ways to strengthen relationships with the communities they serve. Dr. Goff takes us back to where his interest in this research all began – his own high school experience. As a solid student, Goff found himself in unknown territory when a teacher antagonized him after missing school for being sick. The three black faculty members pulled Goff aside and said they were glad that it was Goff who was going through this – they’d seen this teacher pick on black students ever since he was hired, but they knew Goff was too strong of a student to be receiving this negative feedback. This experience woke him, and showed him that “if you are not steeped in the language of race and racial oppression, if you don’t have a language for engaging with it, you’ll find yourself often having conversations where you lose the argument, even though you know in your heart of hearts there’s something about it that wasn’t right.” Now, Goff knows the organizing research question – “What causes racial stratification? And can we use the language and the science of psychology to figure out better routes to address it?”
Goff’s research allows us to better navigate experiences similar to his own. He explains that the science shows that the issue is not simply contaminated hearts and minds or a matter of character – racial bigotry can decline significantly while racial inequality persists. The core lesson from the science is this: “attitudes are relatively weak predictors of behavior; situations are much, much better.” Goff explains that we all have implicit bias to various degrees, and thus what we should be looking at are the situations that are more likely to provoke behavior that is influenced by implicit bias.
The majority of Goff’s research focuses on policing, and he studies identity traps and how they influence officer behavior. He explains that as of today, there is not a lot of publicly available data on these topics, and so CPE is building the National Justice Database in order obtain concrete data on police behavior. So far, over 40 national police departments and law enforcement agencies have signed on to participate in the building of the database.
The collaboration between CPE, law enforcement, and school communities proves as positive change forward, together, for gathering concrete research as tools to guide us in a more just direction in the future. A concrete thing you can do right now, Goff advises, is be aware of the risk factors (teachers multitasking, not prepared, not trained, don’t have enough resources, no clear rules or motivation for equity, etc.) for identity traps in your child’s classroom. He emphasizes it is these situations, not simply the attitudes of the individuals, which can provoke behavior influenced by implicit bias. We look forward to learning more from these inspiring and necessary collaborations between CPE, law enforcement, and school communities, as they work together to gather critical data in order to strive for equity within our children’s schools.
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning | Schott Foundation for Public Education:
Webinar: Addressing Classroom Bias to Improve Learning | Schott Foundation for Public Education:
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