Fun from Springfield

Once again, I made the trek down Interstate 55 to beautiful Springfield, IL for a Race to the Top meeting. At the meeting, we were able to interact and connect with other school districts who are participating in the program. There were breakout sessions on the Common Core, Performance Evaluation Reform Act (PERA), the 5 Essentials Survey of Learning Conditions, and the Illinois Shared Learning Environment (ISLE). Because we had a team attending the meeting, I went to the common core session, just to see if there was anything that we were missing. My notes can be found here.

Some interesting things from the session included the idea of presenting your community members, BOE, local business leaders, and parents with examples of the work that the students will be doing on the state assessments. It can lead to a great discussion of what work at home needs to be done to support learning, what work is being done at school and the connections that can be made/reinforced between the home and school, and clearly demonstrate the work that teachers are doing with students every day.

The math examples provided are definitely challenging for students, especially under timed conditions. Take a look:

Conceptual understanding
1. Write four fractions that are all equal to 5.
2. Write a number that is greater that 1/5 and less than 1/4.
3. What are two different equations with the same solution as 3(y-1)=8?

Fluency
Mark each of the following as True or False

8*9=80-8
54/8=24/6
7*5=25
8*3=4*6
49/7=56/8

Application
A plate of cookies:

• There were 28 cookies on a plate
• Five children each at one cookie
• Two children each at 3 cookies
• One child ate 5 cookies
• The rest of the children each ate 2 cookies
• Then the plate was empty,

How many children ate two cookies? Show your work.

Given an unlimited amount of time, the above tasks are solvable. Under a timed testing condition, these tasks become more challenging.

A nice resource provided by ISBE is their professional development series that is available on their website. http://www.isbe.net/common_core/pls/default.htm There are differentiated resources available, depending on your foundational knowledge and level of implementation.

Another resource shared is the monthly Common Core News Letter. The series is called Capture the Core and is differentiated by grade level. http://www.isbe.net/common_core/htmls/news.htm

The activity that we did during the session was a modified role playing activity where we were divided into different constituent groups and asked to look at some framing questions through that group's lens. The groups were District Level, School Level, Classroom Level, and Community Level. Below are the main shared points from each group:

1. District Level: Communication is key with all stakeholders. Discuss planning and implementation, what the changes will look like, and demonstrate how instruction will be different for teachers, students, and parents.
2. School Level: Ensure that there is horizontal and vertical alignment within a school and between districts (feeder schools).
3. Classroom Level: Provide immediate feedback to students on their learning. (Was in reference to different diagnostic and assessment tools)
4. Community Level: Design specific times to involve parents (i.e. Open House, P/T conferences). Other suggestions included doing home visits to discuss curriculum changes at key transitions (5th to 6th, 8th to 9th grade) and provide an informative video about the necessary shifts. (e.g. from Bensenville http://vimeo.com/51718107)

Overall, I feel very comfortable with how we have been implementing common core. There are some big changes that some districts will have to make. We are also awaiting guidance from the state to determine what sequence of math and science courses will become the official recommendation (i.e. Traditional vs Integrated).

You want the buck to stop? Stop passing it then!

This post is a commentary on the shifts that are needed in schools in order to make the role of a data coach more effective.

The shift that I will comment on is this:

• Individual accountability needs to shift to collective responsibility

As I was perusing my Twitter feed today, I came across a blog post that was titled This is how democracy ends -- Apology from a former teacher. It was posted by Lisa Nielsen, but was written by Kris L. Nielsen. The title caught my eye because I am a Star Wars fan and I had written a post about the Citizens United decision with a similar title.

As I read through Kris's accounting of the influences on modern education (Common Core, Textbook companies, Foundations (i.e. Gates, Wal-Mart), and politicians) and how it is trying to make everyone fit a cookie cutter mold and that schools will become the factories of which their design was based, I could not help but shudder at the thought of this bleary educational future.

I will respectfully disagree that the Common Core is one of the signs of an impending apocalypse. Working in Illinois, where the previous set of standards were a mile wide and inch deep, the Common Core has a lot of positive potential effects to education, if teachers and administrators only had to worry about implementing the new standards instead of making sure that every student does well on the ACT (Day 1 of the 2 day test mandated by NCLB for Illinois). Unfortunately, the latter is more the case than the former, so I can see what Kris's point is getting at.

Having, personally, eagerly awaited the release of the Next Generation Science Standards, I have a good understanding of the effort of educators who wrote these standards in an effort to directly improve instruction by narrowing the focus to the skills needed perform science at all levels--not merely focusing on a content area, but its connection to other concepts, how science and engineering work together, and a development of critical thinking skills. The Common Core for mathematics and English/Language Arts had many of the same goals.

How does all of this relate back to the needed shift? My other posts related to the shifts that are needed to make an instructional coach effective have been directed at the activities of the coaches, teachers, and administrators. I have discussed the removal of teacher isolation and that will assist with a sense of collective responsibility. Kris makes a very valid point about how all of these outside influences are pushing and pulling on education to squeeze it through a play dough mold. What made me connect his blog post with this shift if who is the individual responsible?

With all of those outside influences, the amazing (scary) thing is that the individual that the outside influences, parents, general community always talk about is the classroom teacher. I agree with what Marzano says about the teacher being one of the largest influences on the learning that the student will do in the classroom, but again, the shearing forces of those outside influences might rip that apart.

With all of the politicians, foundations, and corporations (who must have attended school therefore they know how a school should work) exerting direct influence into the classroom, I think that those people should shift from the individual responsibility of the teacher to a collective responsibility that if we want the entire nation to improve, then we are ALL in this together! It seems like politicians all want to quote Truman and have the buck stop right on the teacher's desk. I say that they need to stop passing the buck.

Convert from consumer to producer

This post is a commentary on the shifts that are needed in schools in order to make the role of a data coach more effective.

The shift that I will comment on is this:

• Adults need to focus less on the teaching and more on the learning

In earlier days, I was a teacher of biology. One of my favorite units to teach was on Ecology. I loved to see the surprise in my students' faces when they learned that the study of ecology and the environment was so much more than a recycling program that gets discussed at the middle school level. One of the most dynamic parts of ecology is the study of energy transfer.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/5060452732/sizes/m/in/photostream/

 

 



My reason for bringing up the food web is to discuss the concept of producers and consumer. A producer, or autotroph, is an organism that can create its own food within its cell via a chemical process (i.e. photosynthesis or chemosynthesis), whereas a consumer, or heterotroph, is an organism that much eat another organism in order to sustain its existence. In the classroom, I would discuss the current carrying capacity of the Earth and how the that could be increased if we all acted as lower order consumers instead of the tertiary or higher consumers in the food web (i.e. top consumer).

Students would then ask if they could be a producer, instead of a consumer. This would indicate to me that we needed to discuss some cellular concepts a little more...

But, when we move from an ecological discussion to one of educational preparation, the environment of the classroom takes on a new look in the terms of producers and consumers. For anyone who has been through a teacher preparation program up through and including the past few years, was taught to have their students be consumers of knowledge in the class.

Teachers, classically, have been taught and prepared to be the smartest person in the room and provide all of the information to students. Even older teacher evaluation models focus on how well the teacher can impart knowledge upon the class and create a sense of order and control of the young people in their room. The focus has been completely on the teaching in the room and had very little do with the learning that is happening by the students. (Take a look at how student grades are entered -- mentioned in my last post).

Recently, there has been a (needed) change in education that teachers need to guide and facilitate the learning of the students instead of directing it. (The biggest challenge to this is that Federal laws and tests that are required.) If this change can be realized in the classroom, then the students will be able to make the change from the consumers of knowledge to the producers of their own learning. This would allow focus to shift from the teaching to the learning.