Are teachers ready to help students navigate chaos?

Are teachers ready to help students navigate chaos?

How can teachers help students grapple with the chaos surrounding us?

Too many aspiring teachers lack sufficient knowledge and preparation to guide students through these tough times

No matter whether elementary teachers return to physical or virtual classrooms, this will be a year for the history books. Even kindergartners have plenty of questions about the presidential election, the pandemic and the movement to end systemic racism.

What’s less clear is how prepared elementary school teachers are to put these seismic events into context.

More aspiring elementary teachers failtheir professional entry exams on the first attempt than pass them, a rate unheard of in other professions. The rate of failure for aspiring Black and Latinx teachers is even higher than for aspiring white teachers, making lack of content knowledge preparation yet another obstacle to the diversification the teaching profession so dearly needs.

This problem has been created in large part by institutions’ failing to acknowledge that elementary teachers need to acquire specialized content knowledge — not just professional coursework — to be effective.

Many working on an elementary education degree are given free rein to take whatever general education course interests them, and one called The Sexual Revolution of the 1960sno doubt proves more compelling to the average college student than a course entitled From the American Revolution to the Civil War.

A look at the courses required by teacher preparation programs reveals scant attention to the broad social studies knowledge aspiring elementary teachers need to provide essential context to world events. At most of these institutions, the deficiency is not about a lack of sufficient credit hours. Instead, it’s a failure, first, to diagnose knowledge gaps at the point of admission to a teacher preparation program, and second, to narrow choices available to aspiring teachers with demonstrable gaps in their knowledge.

Not until the end of their preparation, with most of their coursework under their belts, do most aspiring teachers find out what they don’t know — a rude awakening when they get back the results of their state’s licensing tests.

Some teacher educators have pushed back at me on this point, asserting CONTINUE READING: Are teachers ready to help students navigate chaos?

Teacher Tom: To Remind Us to Keep Inventing it for Ourselves

Teacher Tom: To Remind Us to Keep Inventing it for Ourselves

To Remind Us to Keep Inventing it for Ourselves

I've never written about the day I became a father. I think about that day and often tell parts of the story, but so far I've not found all of the words to do so, if words are even adequate. What I need to say is too complex to express in my normal way. Maybe it requires a novel. Maybe it requires poetry, sculpture, or painting, or it's possible that the way to say what I need to say hasn't been discovered yet.

Those of us who have spent our lives around young children, are familiar with their creative struggle to express themselves. It's part of the process of learning the language, of course, so the conversational short cuts and "good enough" putty with which we spackle our day-to-day adult conversation is yet to be learned. Children regularly find themselves thinking thoughts or having feelings for the first time and they need to communicate about them. Without being able to make use of the cliches upon which we adults rely, they must invent a way of saying it.

An excited five-year-old once replied to an adult who had off-handedly asked, "How are you?" by replying, "This day has a powerful, huge, even big magic in it!"

A three-year-old described an accidental lever she had made on the playground in the form of a chant: "Push down, go up, push down, go up, push down . . ."

Another preschooler, playing with a wine cork in a tub of CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: To Remind Us to Keep Inventing it for Ourselves

Mitchell Robinson: A Teacher's Summer (Off) Story… | Eclectablog

A Teacher's Summer (Off) Story… | Eclectablog

A Teacher’s Summer (Off) Story…

I got an email from our school’s business manager on Friday at 5:11pm with an “emergency request” to complete a new required training module. The deadline for completing this module? The following Monday morning.

As usual, the “system” didn’t allow me to even start the training module–some sort of IT glitch I assume–so I called the business manager, who was still at her desk on Friday at 5:20pm. She told me she couldn’t fix the problem, but would call the IT department to “look into it.” When I reminded her that this delay meant it was pretty unlikely that I’d be able to complete the training module before the Monday morning deadline, she assured me it “was no big deal,” and “not to worry about it.”

So, I wasted 30 minutes trying to responsibly complete an “emergency request” that couldn’t be completed due to tech problems–on a Friday after the close of the work day, during the first summer I haven’t worked as a teacher since the mid-1980s.

Like me, most of these teachers have not been getting paid this summer–but they have been expected to…

• be available for countless Zoom and Google Hangout meetings, often with only a few minutes advance notice
• respond to an endless string of “reply all” email messages with requests for immediate CONTINUE READING: A Teacher's Summer (Off) Story… | Eclectablog

Strummin’ on the Old Banjo | Teacher in a strange land

Strummin’ on the Old Banjo | Teacher in a strange land

Strummin’ on the Old Banjo

About twenty years ago, I served on the team of teachers who crafted the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Certification assessment for music teachers. The 16-member team was carefully drawn from an array of music education specialists, with an eye toward balance. Balance between K-12 and higher ed, vocal and instrumental music, male and female, geographic—and ethnic balance.

Everyone on the team took the work seriously. All of us were experienced master music teachers. We were trying to lay down valid and reliable assessments that could measure a music teacher’s pedagogical skills and content knowledge. It was good work, based on a set of standards drawn up by another diverse national team of teachers.

The National Board Certification process has changed since then—we were the first teachers to tackle these tasks—but the assessment consists of portfolios of the candidates’ classroom practice, including videotaped lessons, and a set of on-demand content assessments. It was our job to design the assessment model, then provide alternate items so the assessment could be used for many years.

The content assessments were designed to be rigorous—for example, composing, in 30 minutes, a short piece of music for specified instruments, voices, key and time signatures and in a prescribed style. If you’re not a music teacher, that might sound impossible, but music specialists compose and arrange music to fit their musicians all the time. A music teacher who couldn’t sketch out a quick composition meeting certain parameters could not be considered accomplished.

In addition to assessments around music teachers’ curricular knowledge, rehearsal CONTINUE READING: Strummin’ on the Old Banjo | Teacher in a strange land