What Makes a Great Teacher (cont’d)

In today’s Washington Post online, Jay Mathews runs a beautiful piece by my favorite education blogger, Susan Ohanian, where she describes how she engaged kids when she was a teacher. Susan is much too modest to call herself a great teacher, but she certainly deserves that title.

Here’s how it starts:

Eons ago, I persuaded my principal, who was starting a new school that had a state mandate and funds to be innovative, to do away with remedial reading (I was the remedial reading teacher). We called my room Resource and I announced I was an adjunct of the media center….

* * *

Mind you, I was still the remedial reading teacher–but we kept this secret from the kids. Teachers had a list of students who had to come to the room x times a week to fulfill our obligation to the state. For everyone else (K-6), it was student initiated: A child came when he could persuade his teacher to let him. There was no schedule and there were no bells. If the room got too crowded, as in 35+, I put a sign on the door: “Come back later.” Engineering students from a local university volunteered as on-site helpers, as did two neighborhood moms.

Over time, I found that the kids released from regular class most often were the really bright and those with great difficulties. And they worked well together.

One 2nd-grader was truly the most gifted kid I’ve ever encountered and he just about lived in Resource. I could go on and on abut his projects, most self-initiated. I did have one worry, and so at one point I asked my physicist husband to come in and work with him. “My goal,” I said, “is for Darryl to sit on the floor and wrinkle his pants, maybe even get dirty.” They made slide rules, played with a wind up train, figuring out load, velocity, and god-knows-what. On his own, Darryl made cottage cheese, wrote a letter from Queen Isabella to Columbus and investigated Fibonacci numbers. He also directed a play fifth-graders wanted to stage.

Read the entire piece.

Remember to Say Thank You

I always encourage parents to write thank you notes when they appreciate something that a teacher or administrator has done. (There are a few examples in The Case Against Homework.) Shelli and Tom Milley, the couple from Calgary, Canada who recently negotiated an opt-out-of-homework contract with their children’s school, wrote a beautiful letter to the principal and teachers at Prince of Wales School in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, because they liked their piece in the December 2009 issue of the Ontario Principals’ Council Journal.

Letter to Jan Olson, Ms. Collett, Ms. Dickie and Ms. Miller
Prince of Wales School, Barrie, Ontario, Canada
from Shelli and Tom Milley
January 19, 2009

I recently read your article, Putting a Halt on Homework in the Ontario Principals Counsel Exemplary Leadership in Public Education Magazine. I am writing to applaud you and all the teaching staff at the Prince of Wales School in Barrie, Ontario. Your hard work in examining the research on the value of homework and questioning whether or not it should be required at all must by itself be congratulated but then to go on and spend many more hours focusing on creating and implementing teaching strategies that meet the needs of all students without the use of homework is exemplary. As you are no doubt aware, there is much literature on the subject of homework, but, little or none on how schools can operate with out it. To this end, you have led the way in creating a system that works. As you stated in your article, “We need to stop trying to reform education and, instead, reinvent it”.

Your efforts and methods are influencing hundreds of parents, teachers, educators and administrators not only across Canada and the United States but all over the world. They undoubtedly influenced our family throughout our journey on the matter of homework. The statistics that your school has kept in student achievement without the use of homework speaks volumes. Clearly, you have “got it right”.

As a parent who spent almost three years reading the research, trying to educate our children’s school and others and trying to find a solution for our own families nightly homework pains, I appreciate your time and hard work. I am thankful that my three year journey recently resulted in my children, with our parental consent, being granted the right to “opt out” of homework. We, as parents, now have the right to determine those things that what we believe are in our children’s best interest outside of school hours. Our children and family are no longer stressed from the nightly intrusion of homework – especially graded homework – and we are now able to provide our kids with time to read, time to work on their weak areas, practice math facts, musical instruments, engage in extracurricular and religious activities and what ever else life throws our way. However, opting out of homework is clearly not the optimal solution. In my view, doing what you have done is the only way. Like you stated in your article it places all children on a “level playing field”.

Please do not underestimate the positive influence that you have had and continue to have on parents, teachers, administrators and districts and most of all on the students.

What Makes a Great Teacher (cont’d)

Last week, I posted a piece, What Makes A Great Teacher, and many of the commenters to yesterday’s post wrote about good teachers as well.

In this week’s Teachers College Record, there’s also a very good piece, “What It Takes to Become a Great Teacher.” The author writes:

If we really want good schools, we need to fill them with great teachers. But first, we have to dispense with the tired debate about whether someone is born a good teacher, or whether good teaching is something anyone can learn. That’s like debating whether a surgeon is born a good doctor, or must be taught. Only some people will make good surgeons – they need to be smart enough to get through medical school, have excellent hand eye coordination, and possess the ability to make important decisions under pressure. But no one is a good surgeon without medical training and close supervision from a skilled mentor. The same is true of teachers. Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher – you need to love kids, be smart, have passion and expertise in the discipline you teach, and possess a certain kind of presence and authority that is very hard to learn. But even someone with all these qualities needs training: about how children develop, about how to take a lively idea and weave it into good curriculum, how to make tedious work seem worthwhile to children, how to give students feedback, how to handle difficult children, how to assess what a student has learned, how to talk to parents, and how to keep teaching well when buried by bureaucracy.

Teachers Speak Out – An Open Letter to the Harvard Graduate School of Education

On blogs.edweek.org, I read a really moving letter by 3 teachers to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, asking when the institution will speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

As veteran public school teachers, we are disappointed that the HGSE has not shown the leadership it professes by speaking out against the unprecedented attack on public education. To be sure, there have been courageous voices on your faculty who have defended public schools and the endangered idea of educating the whole child. We know that a thoughtful faculty does not think with one mind, and that there will always be differences about what constitutes the most effective pedagogies or curricula. But we have not heard the HGSE as an institution speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

These issues include:

The over-testing of students, beginning as early as 3rd grade, and the misuse of single, imperfect high- stakes standardized assessment instruments like MCAS;

The expansion of charters through funding formulas that divert resources from those urban and rural public schools charged with educating our most challenged children;

The stripping away of art, music, critical thinking, creativity, experiential learning, trips, and play periods-of joy itself-from schools so that they might become more effective test preparation centers;

The use of state curriculum frameworks-and soon, possibly, national standards -to narrow and standardize our schools, an effort that only encourages increasing numbers of affluent middle class parents to seek out for their children the same private schools that so many “reformers” have already chosen for theirs;

The cynical insistence that all schools be equal in a society whose social and economic policies make us increasingly unequal;

Merit pay proposals that deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching;

And finally, the sustained media vilification of hard-working, dedicated public school teachers.

These depressing developments have intensified over the past fifteen years. They violate the first principles of humane and progressive education, as we understand them.

Read the entire letter here.

A Third Grade Teacher Speaks Out

I received an email from a third grade teacher in Mesa, Arizona. With her permission (I never post emails without explicit permission), I share it with you.

As a Family, We Always Set Reasonable Limits for the Amount of Time We chose to Devote to School-related Activity
by a Third Grade Teacher

For the past 15 years homework has been a frustration to me. I teach third grade and truly resent the expectation that I will plan educational activities for my students to complete outside of the school day. This is time that could be much better spent working with my learners. The only real benefit that could result from homework in early grades is possibly to develop consistent study habits kids will need later on. With a lot of help, the learners may be able to start breaking down larger tasks into manageable parts. Since most parents feel pretty strongly they want homework, I advise them to use a timer and set it for 5 minutes. When it goes off, the activity is to be put away. On the other hand, it is generally a good thing to avoid procrastination, so students are also supposed to use beginning time management and develop a schedule based on their other activities through the week. Really though, for kids up through grade 4, reading aloud and being read to is still the gold standard.

My own two children have special needs, so we never experienced the bordem factor. But what I have told parents with this concern is this: If your student consistently rushes through work then it has clearly not been attended to in the standard I require in class. To me it really doesn’t matter how much work a student can complete within a study session. But whatever they do, it should be with focused attention and best efforts-and the student should remain on some learning task throughout the assigned time period.

As for my children, the same rule applied. As a family we always set reasonable limits for the amount of time we chose to devote to school-related activity. And sometimes this had to be modified. I do want to share this with your parents who suffer homework tears and frustration. Below is a summary of what I have written and turned in to my principal and every one of the childrens’ teachers (who also happened to be colleagues):

Dear Teacher,

We value your dedication to your class and applaud you for maintaining high expectations for student achievement. We have read and understand your homework policy.

Note that per our child’s IEP support services recommendations and in response to our family’s need, we wish to advise you we may not always elect to complete requested assignments or homework, especially on weeknights.

We acknowledge our choices may result in missing assigments negatively impacting outcome scores. We understand that you are required to evaluate students against grade level standards. You have our full support to record our child’s progress according to your professional judgement.

Putting a Halt on Homework – Barrie, Ontario, Canada

In an article in the December 2009 issue of the Ontario Principals’ Council Exemplary Leadership In Public Education, Jan Olson, the principal of the Barrie, Ontario, Canada school which eliminated homework last year, and some teachers from that school, write about their experiences with no homework and why adopting a no homework policy is sound policy.

It’s too bad that so few principals have taken the steps that Olson, and Christine Hendricks (a principal who instituted a no-homework practice at her school in Glenrock, Wyoming) have. Both of those principals discovered benefits to their policies that they didn’t expect. In Olson’s case, students’ grades and test scores increased and he believes it was due to the emphasis placed on teachers working more closely together and working on effective teaching strategies, rather than sending work home with the students. in Hendricks’s case, she found that students came to school better rested and more eager to learn, and that there was a significant decrease in negative interactions between teachers and students.

You can read the article here. (Permission to reprint this article was received by the Ontario Principals’ Council. The original article appeared in The OPCRegister, Vol. 11 No. 4.)

TED Lecture – Self-Discipline, Motivation, and Responsibility at Work

Last week, Jan Olson, the principal of the Barrie, Ontario, Canada elementary school that abolished homework, told me how much he liked this TED lecture by Sugata Mitra. Mitra, a professor of educational technology, conducted several “Hole in the Wall” experiments in India, where he left computers embedded in walls in areas where kids had never had access to computers, education, or the English language, and returned later – sometimes hours, sometimes months – to see what had happened. It’s fascinating!

Watch it here.

What Makes a Great Teacher

Last month, my daughter’s tenth grade math teacher told me that when students fail his tests, it’s his fault, not theirs. He takes it as a sign that he needs to figure out a different way of teaching the material.

You’d think that’s a no-brainer, but I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard a teacher admit it was his duty to ensure that students learn the material. Too often, I hear that students are lazy, aren’t paying attention, need tutors, don’t do their homework, or that the curriculum is too broad and there aren’t enough resources.

He’s the best math teacher my daughter’s ever had. She thinks math is fun for the first time in a long time. Her teacher could have been featured in this article in The Atlantic Monthly, “What Makes a Great Teacher?”

Continue reading “What Makes a Great Teacher”

A Parent Speaks Out – Arlington, Virginia

I received an email from a parent of two high schoolers in Arlington, Virginia, where she articulated the problem with schools that never seek feedback from either students or parents. She wrote:

I recently read the book Cure Unknown on the Lyme epidemic and was struck by a quote from Jonas Salk. He talks about discovery in science resulting from “entering into a dialog with nature.” The truly gifted teachers seems to understand inately that educating a child requires having an ongoing dialog with them. And they continually adjust “instruction” in response to the discoveries they make as they learn from their students. Somehow schools need to find a way to ensure that ongoing dialog occurs so that teachers truly work with students and parents to support learning.

Continue reading “A Parent Speaks Out – Arlington, Virginia”