As fellow ed-blogger, Joanne Jacobs, recently notes, schools should be teaching the arts for the arts’ sake.

I’m lucky enough to work at a school where I have wonderful colleagues who do exactly this. Mark Roeder is teaching a group of 6th graders who will be engaging in a sculpture project with a final exhibition in Chinatown near the end of the year.

Mr. Roeder’s students will be making small sculptures of an object that is or was important or significant to them at some point in time. The object they’ll choose will be something that says something about them or reveals something about them that they haven’t realized yet. Roeder says that sixth grade is a great time for them to take an art class because they’re not so concerned with their self-image yet and they’ll still take chances in expressing their thoughts, ideas, and experiences. They’re completely uninhibited with the materials for each new project. According to Roeder:

"Every project I have them do is geared towards getting them to look at their worlds like they’re a microscope, small pieces at a time. The more they reflect on their daily lives, the more considerate thinkers they’ll be, and the more considerate they are, hopefully they’ll make better decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities as they get older. I tell my students each and every day that the experiences they have this year, as artists, will make them more interesting people. Being an artist doesn’t require any inherent talent or prerequisite skill. Becoming an artist is a bizarre leap of faith that requires you to say, ‘I am an artist.’ This statement has now defined the nature and freedom of your existence."

While these students have already received supplies donations for their sculptures (microcrystalline wax and carving tools to plan and carve hand-sized wax sculptures), they’re still in need of funds for casting the sculptures at the foundry and purchasing materials to build 30 pedestals for the exhibition. The estimated additional cost of the project remains at a whopping $3500.

So here’s the cool part. Mr. Roeder’s class has already received 45% (that’s 9/20 for those of you 7th grade math students out there) of their goal! That’s already $1560 of their goal.

For those of you who’d like to make a contribution toward this amazing cause, you can do so on this Kickstarter website!

And for those of you who need a little extra push, Mr. Roeder’s class is even offering some pretty sweet rewards.

Check it out.

metspolice: Bruce playing Land of hopes and dreams…it all comes together…Faith will be rewarded!!

What a start! 4 and 0. As a displaced New Yorker, I’m glad I’ve still never given up on my hometown team. After several abysmal years, it’s quite exciting to begin a season in sole possession of first place in the NL East. So I must take a break from the typical education related post and simply revel in some no doubt soon-to-be-short-lived first place glory.

Even if the season is less than 2.5% over, it’s still been a pretty amazing 2.5%.

Diane Ravitch: Louisiana newspaper: Why the rush? Why no deliberation on Jindal plan? dailycomet.com/article/201204…

I knew this would happen sooner rather than later. With (as of this writing) 29,764 tweets, Diane Ravitch’s influence as an author and speaker is perhaps only eclipsed by her influence as a tweeter.

Ravitch is certainly one of the most vocal critics of the education reform strategy currently espoused by prolific education reformers. Perhaps because of this, teachers’ unions across the nation have adopted her rhetoric as central to the fight against what is often termed “corporate reform”, “education deform”, or (in a slightly more personal tone) “Rheeform”.

Two months ago, our union, UTLA, invited Ravitch to come and give a speech about the current state of education reform in this country. What I strongly appreciate about Ravitch is that, despite her 140 character tweets, her reasons and rationales for critiquing the ed reform movement are rational and reasonable. Coupled with the fact that she had the chutzpah to admit she was wrong about many of her past policy positions (particularly when she served in the Department of Education), Ravitch has definitely earned my respect even though I don’t always agree with her (or many of those she chooses to “re-tweet”).

One of the interesting side-effects of Ravitch being as vocal an opponent as we’ve seen to education reform policies, is that by standing so far in opposition to Rhee, Duncan, and Kopp, the distance she creates between herself and them suffices for a nice wide-open middle ground for much discussion and debate regarding what can be done to push forward education reform, while honestly addressing many of the criticisms that Ravitch et al bring up.

If it weren’t for dissent, there would not be much room for middle ground.

The New Yorker: RT @bengreenman: Why there shouldn’t be a new Beatles made up of Beatle kids, at @NewYorker nyr.kr/Hcm5jb

Spring Break means I get to catch up on all of the reading I’ve fallen behind in – most pressing being the entire issue of New Yorkers from the month of March. While certainly not taking a centrist political viewpoint, I find the publication includes some of the most fascinating articles that deal with education (even the ones that don’t purport to even be about education). So if you have some time over Spring Break too, be sure to check out some of my favorites:

• Most Likely To Succeed (How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job?) – Malcolm Gladwell
• Personal Best (Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?)  – Atul Gawande
• Don’t (The Secret of Self Control) – Jonah Lehrer

While I don’t always agree with the conclusions or allusions drawn upon in these articles, they are nonetheless fascinating. Enjoy.

KIPP LA Schools: Closing #KIPPLA4v0 with inspirational messages from two #KIPP alumni! They are why we do this work.

See, this is what happens when you commit to a truly random “Tweet of the Day” – you wind up with tweets you feel conflicted about.

On the one hand, I can definitively say that I’m in full support of the original idea behind the concept of charter schools – Given certain freedoms from larger bureaucracy and mandates, schools can innovate, lead, and make a greater impact on the kids they serve, then take those incubated ideas that worked, and share them with the larger educational community.

On the other hand, what I don’t support about charter schools is that what was designed to thrive on a collaborative process with district schools has largely mutated into a competitive process. Whether or not this is actually the fault of charters themselves or of certain district policies that have literally pitted district schools and charter schools against each other is a debate that is largely irrelevant.

The reality is simply this. While some tout charter schools as the best option for closing the achievement gap and others accuse charter schools of essentially destroying the American public education system, this rhetorical gap is not simply going to miraculously close. What it will take is hard, honest conversations between teachers, families, and leaders to (1) honestly and accurately assess the reality of this divide, and (b) committing to find ways to not merely co-exist, but to mutually benefit each other.

Want a starting point? Try here and here.

Anti Glib: Big money busts Dunn, Soriano, Zito, Wells aim for revival :http://usat.ly/GUcADB #whitesox #sfgiants #cubs #angels #mlb#HashtagMania

I told you so.

The Random Tweet of the Day ends up truly being random. The main reason I followed @AntiGlib is because of his (or her…I’m not really sure) Twitter logo. The Orange and Blue California with the stylized NY logo superimposed over Los Angeles indicates that I am not the only displaced Mets fan in the Southland.

AntiGlib tweets mostly about sports, and most recently, about the failure of certain highly-paid baseball players to live up to the superimposed expectations that go along with high-paying contracts. According to an article in USA Today, these major leaguers both struggled with these new expectations and found them, mostly, to be a burden.

What’s fascinating for me is that this situation is often not only true in sports, but in other fields as well (including education).

Remember December of 2008, anybody?

Teach Plus: Weingarten: People say when there is urgency, you have to break glass. But the key is implementation. No choice but to collaborate #yaleelc

Ummm….I think UFT President Randi Weingarten means “emergency” rather than “urgency”, but oh well.

Regardless of the analogical faux pas, Weingarten is absolutely right. Implementation IS absolutely key. In all of the current rhetoric surrounding teacher evaluation, value-added, and all of the pitfalls and opportunities therein, the biggest obstacle is not whether we can come up with good ideas, but rather can we actually make those good ideas occur.

As a teacher within LAUSD for the past 8 years, there has been absolutely no shortage of good ideas, yet nearly all of the new programs and initiatives that have come down through the system have either faltered, ignored, or been abandoned completely – not because they didn’t make sense (on paper, they did), but rather because the hard job of implementing a system well often results in a useless (or worse, harmful, system).

Case in point. The current teacher evaluation system, affectionately known as the STULL, has not failed because it was a bad idea. It failed because principals were so overwhelmed with putting out daily fires on their campuses, that the amount of time, energy, and effort to thoroughly implement a STULL-style evaluation was not thought to sufficiently move the needle of student achievement enough to justify the enormous amount of time it took. Because of this reality, the STULL implementation became a checklist to simple get through.

In school systems, it’s important consider the fact that implementation strategies and realities cannot merely be considered after policy is developed. Simply put, any policy itself MUST take into consideration and be driven by the realities of how implementing such a system might work.

For example, in 2012, all the educational conversation is about revising the teacher evaluation system. And while most school districts have come to some consensus that “multiple measures” – usually taken to mean some combination of observation, student test scores, student surveys, and perhaps another measure – are the new way of the future. Unsurprisingly the biggest argument is how to weight the different components; should test scores count as 40% of an eval? should they count 10% of an eval? might there be some sliding scale?

Yet what is often missing from these discussions of policy is that our ability to implement these systems at scale should affect our initial policy in how we decide to weight certain components. We cannot afford to make these decisions in a vacuum because of what “ought to be”. That is, we cannot, for example, decide that since value-added scores are twice as reliable as observation data, then it’s percentage ought to account for twice as much as observation (which no one, right now, is currently saying – just an example). We must analyze what resources we have as a school system to actually implement these measures well and then (and only then) make decisions about the nuts and bolts of the policy.

Yes, there is an urgency to education policy right now, but that does not give us license to ignore the ways we’ve failed with implementation in the past. If we do so, we are bound to merely repeat the same mistakes. Trust me, no one wants any new evaluation system to wind up as STULL 2.0

The quotes go full-circle.

Edmonth, is quoting Amy, who is quoting LAUSD Board member Monica Garcia, who was speaking at, you guessed it…Edmonth.

Thanks to the 140-character limit, I’m certain that this quote is taken completely out of context. After all, education will simply not solve the problem of the 2012 New York Mets.

But I get that. Twitter is designed to take quotes out of context, and our job as readers, to figure out what’s missing.

So as I finally get back into the swing of this blog again (sorry about utterly abandoning my last series), let me take issue with a few aspects of such a myopic viewpoint (a viewpoint which I’m sure Ms. Garcia does not actually have).

Issue #1: The term “education” is simply left undefined. This is not so grievous a sin except that it opens the door for just about anyone to substitute anything they’d like for the term. “Funding education solves all of our problems”, “Analyzing student data solves all of our problems”, “Great ed policy coming from Washington solves all of our problems”, and “Firing all bad teachers and replacing them with good ones solves all of our problems” are phrases that are not so difficult to justify if one takes this quote axiomatically.

Issue #2: The quote falsely assumes that all of our problems are solvable (which, while potentially true, is actually unknown (and unknowable)) and dangerously implies that where education does solve our problems, it does so very simply.

So, am I taking issue with Edmonth, with Amy, or with Ms. Garcia (only one of whom I’ve met)? Of course not. Odds are that at least two (and perhaps all three) out of three genuinely care about students, families, and schools.

But until the sound byte is replaced by the robust dialogue, we’re doing to be dangerously close to missing the point of why we all got into education in the first place.

Van Halen – Right Now

Now we’ve reached the third post in the “Observer Effect” series, having learned both what the Observer Effect is¹, and the nitty-gritty of why and how it can powerfully co-opt even systems designed with the best of intentions². So before I get around to actually making recommendations about how school systems need to account for the reality of the Observer Effect, it’s worthwhile taking a look at how the Observer Effect interacts with our current system of teacher evaluations and observations.

Recent white papers³, op-eds⁴, and lawsuits⁵ have all shown that, even among people who disagree incredibly, there is a consensus that the current teacher evaluation system is broken. The reality that almost everybody receives a satisfactory evaluation is just the tip of the iceberg (under the surface we find that because of this, no one is helping us get any better).

In conversations will a multitude of colleagues, I’ve found that my bi-yearly evaluation is fairly typical. Namely, I submit a form addressing the ways I will seek to improve my teaching this year, and then, on a predetermined date, an administrator will show up in my classroom with a checklist, and proceed to “observe” my instruction. Finally, a few weeks later, I will take a look at their observation notes, all of which rate me as satisfactory or higher, sign the thing, and then I’m done.

That’s literally it.

Now many have pointed out the obvious flaws in this system, so I won’t repeat them, but what I’d like to do is take a quick look at how the Observer Effect (i.e. how the process of being observed actually impacts the results of my evaluation) interacts within this current system.

Using the framework from the last post, we notice the following process of the Observer Effect:

1. Principal wants her teachers to effectively teach students.
2. Principal announces observation procedure (submitting a form called a “planning sheet”, a 30 minute observation, discussing and signing the form).
3. Me, hearing about this type of observation, considers my options
4. Options are some combination of (A): Thoroughly prepare a planning sheet, in which I’ve thoughtfully considered how I want to improve this year. Ask my principal to observe my most challenging class. Ask for specific ways of improvement in the post-conference. Or (B) Fill out a “jargony” planning sheet, with words like “scaffolding”, “multiple-modalities”, and “student outcomes”. Have my principal come during my easiest class. Simply nod and smile at the post-conference, and sign my name, breathing a sigh of relief knowing that I won’t have to repeat the process for another two year.
5. Observation/Evaluation occurs.
6. I as a teacher, demonstrate a certain level of mastery of the teaching profession.

A couple of notes of the reality of the Observer Effect.

First, my performance evaluation (the outcome) is largely a function of which of the options in Step 4 I take. The fact that I know that I’m being observed, and I know how I’m being observed actually affects the results of my observation.

Second, and more importantly, the specific option I choose is largely a function of the observation content (“How rigorous will my observing principal be?”), its form (“Will this evaluation actually help me get better?”), and its result (“How much weight will this observation play in my future career?”).

The Observer Effect guiding my decisions leads me to pick Option B (question 4 above), simply because my principals are typically too overburdened with running the school to be extremely rigorous, my evaluation won’t help me get any better as a teacher, and has virtually no impact on my future career. Time after time for me, it’s Option B.

So in summary, the point of this post of connecting the Observer Effect to the current evaluation system shows that not only is the current system flawed, but that the Observer Effect (i.e. teachers knowing how the system is flawed) actually exacerbates the situation.

If we’re going to improve evaluation (which everyone and their mother says we should be doing), we’ve got to design a system which does not ignore the reality of the Observer Effect in observation and evaluation.

More on exactly how to do this in the upcoming posts!

Stay tuned.

1. http://blogs.hunsbergermath.com/1141/2012/02/03/the-observer-effect-a-prologue-part-1-of-6/
2. http://blogs.hunsbergermath.com/1141/2012/02/06/the-observer-effect-an-abstraction-part-2-of-6/
3. http://widgeteffect.org/
4. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/teach-plus/the-war-over-teacher-eval_b_1162891.html
5. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/suit-filed-to-make-la-teacher-evaluations-include-student-data.html

Bach – Ricercar A 6

On Friday, I began this series¹ by introducing a phenomenon known as the Observer Effect.

To recap, the Observer Effect describes the fact that the mere act of observing or measuring something actually affects what we are observing. We also saw that the Observer Effect is not inherently a bad thing, especially when we desire a certain outcome to be measured, and the act of measuring it actually helps achieve the measurement we want. The classic example of this in the classroom setting was announcing an upcoming test, in the hopes that the test will not only measure student achievement, but that by merely announcing it, student achievement will be improved because many students will then study.

Today, we’ll take a step back and look at the general form of the Observer Effect, including the mechanisms by which it occurs. [Disclaimer: This post, as the title suggests, is fairly abstract, though not at all difficult to understand (i.e. it may satisfy your inner geek). If you are denying your don’t have an “inner geek”, then I strongly suggest skipping this post, and re-joining in with Part 3.]

To restate the Observer Effect in a different way, it makes sense to begin with the classic question “If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” The answer is, of course, “yes”, however, the sound that an observer hears it make is different than the sound it makes when no observer is present².

So our question for today is, what is the general form of the Observer Effect and how does it change that which is observed, whether physical changes (like the tree in the forest), or behavioral changes (in a classroom setting)?

To ease this meta-view, lets first look at the specific, then generalize. The following chart explains (using the “giving a test” example) how the observer effect actually works.

• If we care about the way that Johnnie considers his options upon knowing that he will be observed, we MUST, we MUST, we MUST, take great care in designing HOW observation occurs, as its effects trickle down.

2. Sound is literally air molecules vibrating in patterns that strike our ear nerves and transmit sounds to our brain. Physically standing next to the falling tree changes the path that these air molecules vibrate in towards the ear, thus changing the sound, even if unnoticeably slightly. Being in a forest to hear a tree fall is similar to seeing how waves in a lake hit the short differently depending on whether or not they are traveling around a moored boat.