The Irony

The irony is this: I no longer HAVE to blog, and here I am on a Friday morning writing. After all my moaning and resistance, I woke up mentally drafting a blog post. Yesterday I had an experience that had far more impact on me than I expected. I attended the dissertation defense of a colleague and friend.

I expected to come away with some schema of what a defense looks like. I had never attended one and had no idea. That has been the mode throughout this program. Each step is a new adventure. I don't know the lay of the land. But I did not expect to come away as inspired as I was. I knew my colleague would be well-prepared and articulate, but the scope of her study, the depth of her thinking amazed me.

I came away eager to get started on my own research. Up until now, I thought of this as something in the future, closely tied to my schedule of completion. I plan to finish in a year and a half. Eighteen months. Now, this time frame has become the structure to organize my thinking, my independent studies, my application to the coursework I have remaining. I have enough of an idea of my question that I will start today. Everything I do will focus on the end.

Eighteen months from now, I want to be doing whatever a doctoral student does when it is over. Sleeping in. Vegging out on a beach in the sunlight with an umbrella drink. Wondering what to do with all the extra time in a day. Looking out to the next adventure.

There is a quote that I don't have exactly--First you do, then you become. I had to blog before becoming a bolgger, and I will do it on my own terms. I wasn't a doctoral student until I had taken classes for a few years. We grow into what we do. I'm sure it has something to do with cognitive function--we build neuron paths that connect and help us be comfortable with a new behavior. Sometimes we resist. Sometimes it takes a push by a teacher or inspiration from a mentor. It may feel accidental in the beginning, but it becomes more intentional as time goes on.

What next?

"What next?" has been my mantra my entire life. I love the challenges and opportunities inherent in change. New people, new experiences, new things to learn. Thinking about the many positions posted helped me look past this "terminal degree," which has an awful air of finality about it, toward the phase of my career

I do have a tenure track position at MSCD when I am finished and am committed to teaching there two years. I love the teaching, the students, but the element I am least anticipating is being "tenure track". I see the stress and pressures, the political nature of working toward tenure and I simply do not want to go there. It affects the way people interact with each other in a way I never saw--or recognized--in the public schools.

So, University of Guam appealed to me for two reasons: it would be a vastly different setting AND it is a three-year position. When the time is here for me to begin to look seriously, those two factors will heavily weigh in my decisions.

So, what next? Bring me that horizon.

Savoring the Moment

I have been impressed by the level of interest and support I have received from teaching colleagues since I became a doctoral student. After being a mere full-time temporary for two years, it seems I have become "bona fide" by demonstrating my committment to higher education and my undergraduate teaching. I have become a serious member of the community, one of the club. I often have colleagues asking how my coursework is going and when I'll be done. I appreciate their interest and advice.

Today, a colleague asked how it was going. I told her I was about halfway through my program, finishing coursework this fall and just beginning serious contemplation of a dissertation topic. She told me she had her research question when she entered her program, and every course she took she used to contribute to her research and dissertation.

I know we all must approach this in our own way, but I found that a bit sad. For me, the joy of this program has been giving myself time and license to explore topics I have always been interested in without the pressure of quickly determining THE topic. It helps to have an advisor who promotes and validates this philosophy.

I am not on the fast track here, but then I don't have the time constraints many of my fellow-students have. Perhaps this perspective comes from age or the fact that I have already had a wondorous career. I remember a comment made by a seventy-year old gentleman at my "retirement" party. He said, "Your 30-year career seems like your whole life right now, but at some point you will realize it is just one phase of your life." I am discovering what my next steps-my next career might be. Life is very good.

And so, I savor the moment, all the while knowing that soon, the exploration will draw to a close, and it will be time to just do it.

By the way, I have been somewhat open (probably too open) with my blogging struggles. I had help last night when I watched the movie Julie & Julia, where this young lady gave herself one year to cook all 540 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She blogged about it the entire year, and saw both the cooking and the blogging as exercises in mental discipline. OK. That makes sense to me.

A Delicate Balance

I have noticed a trend lately in my undergraduate teacher education classes: increasing numbers of students coming in with documented disabilities that require class accomodations. Many of these are minimal, but more and more I am seeing extensive accomodations needed. I believe I have always been supportive of students at all levels of schooling and I support a student's desire to graduate from college. I also believe, however, that the teaching profession is far more complex than rocket science. Not only does a teacher need the technical knowledge of content and the skill to make those concepts understandable and accessible to the learner, but the human side of teaching requires strong communication, interpersonal skills, and decision-making abilities.

Every child deserves an expert teacher every year of their schooling. In a twenty-year career in the elementary classroom, a teacher impacts around 500 children. When I had a principal justifying to me why they were keeping a ineffective, probationary teacher that they had worked extensively with because they were "going through personal tough times for the last few years", I always had them picture those five hundred children outside their window. I had them tell those children that they knowingly decided to give them a poor teacher. We cannot just think of the teacher--it always must be about the children.

So, back to my undergraduates. The professor side of me wants to support student success. The principal side of me knows the rigors of teaching and wants to support those hundreds of unborn little human beings. I wonder sometimes how a student would react in the moment-to-moment challenges of the classroom. Not everyone has the disposition to be the decision-making teacher in the classroom.

I realize that I usually see these undergraduates in my foundations class, the first education class many students take. They have two more years of coursework at this point. I realize I am one piece of the puzzle in which this student works with many professors, cooperating teachers and student teachers. All of us have a responsibility to support and to counsel appropriately. It is a delicate balance--the rights of the prospective teachers and the rights of their future students.

Is anyone asking teachers?

In the March 15, 2010 front-page article, "Class masters", The Sunday Denver Post focused on teacher-effectiveness, recognizing that the teacher is the single-most important factor in the classroom. The article goes on to say, though, that we don't know what makes a "great" teacher "great", and districts don't know how to "impart the skills." to every teacher who needs them.

My first difficulty here is notion that we have no idea what makes an effective teacher. We have a great body of research on teacher effectiveness, including literacy effective studies such as Learning to Read: Lessons from exemplary first grade classrooms, (Pressley and Allington, 2001) and Reading to Learn: Lessons from exemplary fourth-grade classrooms (Allington and Johnston, 2002), and Ruddell's work with characterizing the influential teacher, those identified by former students as having had a profound impact on their academic and personal literacy lives (Researching the Influential Literacy Teacher: Characteristics, Beliefs, Strategies, and New Research Directions, 1997). These studies summarized other studies and added to the body of knowledge, resulting in comprehensive lists of characteristics, attitudes, and instructional strategies of exemplary teachers. We have many lists with much commonality.

Legislation that would create "career ladders" for teachers and provide additional pay for them to share their practices reflects the notion that excellent teaching consists of a set of skills that if "imparted" to teachers will result in excellence. Excellent teaching has been characterized as complicated, personal, passionate act, much like a surgeon who modifies a surgical procedure during a planned operation to successfully solve a medical emergency. No two patients are exactly alike, so no procedure will work exactly the same in every circumstance. No two children in any classroom are alike, responding to every learning situation differently. The highly effective teacher understands this and is able to make countless decisions daily that respond to the personal and academic needs of each student.

By comparing great teaching to "hard-core ponography", hard to define but you know it when you see it, this article depicts exemplary teaching as mysterious and rare, feeding the perception that most teachers are simple-minded slackers who need explicit, scripted instrution. Instead, fifty years of research have demonstrated relative ineffectiveness of such methods. The complicated part of teaching is the selection, organizing and planning instruction that meets the needs of increasingly diverse learners.

The fact that a "Council on Teacher Effectiveness" has a deadline of December to have this evaluation system done for the State of Colorado makes me fear that focus on performance pay, racing to the top, and the desire for a common evaluation system will result in a simplistic, one-size-fits-all, easy to measure definition of "great" teaching that will continue to minimize truly professional teaching.

We know the "what" of exemplary teaching; we lack "how" these teachers were supported from the beginning to develop integration of all the complex factors into a cohesive classroom instruction that intentionally responds to all learners. The teacher featured in the article identified the criticial mentoring, collaboration, feedback and idea sharing from teammates in her first three years. It seems to me that if we can identify highly effective, influential teachers that have earned and command the respect of students, parent community, administrators and colleagure, we have an opportunity to find out what they see as key factors in their development. Expertize doesn't happen overnight, and my hunch is that exemplary teachers will have many thoughts about how they got there--who their mentors were, which support was most effective, and how they continue to learn and grow.

I wonder--is anyone asking excellent teachers how they came to be "exemplary"?

Passion or Discipline?

I have been in a blogging slump. I have been mentally rehearsing, but have found no topic I think worthy of the time it would take me to compose it and for my dedicated thoughtful colleagues to respond to it. I have spent more time analyzing my thoughts about why blogging is hard for me than actually blogging.

I reread my last post, and I realized it was a topic I was absolutely passionate about. Nothing I have thought of recently matches that intensity, and I find without a deep connection, writing seems a waste of time to me. Sending it out to the cyber-universe seems ludicrous. WHO would want to read such drivel?

But then, the reason we are asked to blog is to develop the discipline of critical thinking, reading and writing skills. As with physical exercise, this mental exercise should be regular, if routine. I should be able to take any topic at any time and dissect it, analyze it, argue for or against it, and then take the idea further in some way.

So, is this about passion, or discipline? Perhaps my problem is wanting both.

Finding My Inner Politician

I have never considered myself a political person. In fact, I have long held the belief that we can close our classroom doors and teach. No longer do I believe this.

I did some consulting with the Colorado Department of Education in the Colorado Reading First (CRF) department in 2005-2006, my one year of “retirement”, simply because I didn’t know what else I was going to do. It sounded interesting and I saw some names I knew from the reading community on the roster. CRF philosophy is based on the model that was interpreted from the National Reading Panel Report of 2000. During my first training session, my first thought was, “What has happened to reading instruction?” I looked over at one colleague I had known for years and she was watching me. The parameters and restrictions, the basic definition and philosophy of reading were very different from beliefs I held and I knew she held.

Out of curiosity, I went ahead and served as an “advocate” who visited three schools in far corners of Colorado to monitor their implementation of the Reading First grant. To get this grant—big money--these small, rural schools had to use a recommended , very prescriptive CORE program in a 90-minute direct instruction, whole group setting, assess and progress monitor, and have staff development training (in how to use the program and the assessment tools). What I did not realize at this time was that while relatively few schools applied for and got the CRF grant money, many schools across the nation adopted the precepts of Reading First on their own.

I loved being in the schools, of course, and found the administrators and staff truly had children’s best interest at heart. They wanted to increase reading achievement. The administrators felt that some ineffective teachers became better using the programs because they were actually teaching something. And I observed t expert teachers who knew a wide range of instructional strategies were actually able to balance the scripted program and differentiate for the kids who were beyond the scripted instruction or not yet ready for it. One teacher had book clubs at lunch and after school and pulled extra groups throughout the day.

After one year, CRF restructured the advocate program and we were all “RIF’d”. At that time, three years into the CRF grant, schools were showing very little growth on CSAP. They were showing growth on DIBELS, the assessment tool, but that growth did not carry over to comprehension measures.

I applied to teach at Metro, and found their definition of reading was very close to mine. But, I was preparing students to teach in many schools that were being required by district or school policies to implement instruction more reflective of CRF. I was reading everything I could on the National Reading Panel Report and Reading First trying to reconcile this new view of reading with the view I had held for so long.

Here is how I currently express the difference: educators who come from a definition of reading as a set of discrete skills that add up to reading believe in starting with what children do not know. I call this the “glass is half-empty” model, the deficit model. This is the definition of reading as stated by the National Reading Panel.

Educators who come from a definition of reading as a complex process believe that readers use all the information available to them in different ways to construct meaning from the text. The skills are tools used to access meaning. In this model, the “glass is half-full” model, teachers begin with what the child knows and builds upon that knowledge to teach what the child does not know. The intervention with the most solid success rate is Reading Recovery, which is based on this model.

I was asked to remain on the CRF “Leadership Team” and have attended meetings for the last few years. Often, I am the only person with a “reading is meaning” philosophy in the room. Over these years, and with my growing base of knowledge, I have begun to speak out. I can no longer not speak out. My favorite moment was once when the group was lamenting that in CRF schools, students were actually reading less. My comment was, "Perhaps we are teaching children to read, but not teaching them to want to read." You could of heard a pin dropped as they all looked at me.

Last Friday, I attended the second-to-last CRF meeting. Federal funding for Reading First was discontinued in 2008 after an independent study found that Reading First money, nationwide, had very little impact on tests of comprehension achievement. RF schools made gains on the assessments they used such as DIBELS, but not on state tests. Six million dollars over 6 years. And no growth. In Colorado, schools have dropped out or been dropped, and the final carryover money is being used for a small number of schools until September when it is all gone.

I sat next to a state senator at this meeting, as congressional representatives are always invited and frequently come. This was her first meeting and when she asked why the funding had been cut, the answer given by the director was that the program had been sabotaged for political reasons by the a national report. I turned and said to the senator, and reiterated, “Six million dollars nationwide and it did not improve scores on a test of reading comprehension.” I stated that if we had one-size-fits-all children than a one-size fits-all program might work, but kids are not cookie cutter versions of a child. They do not need to be taught the same way. The senator asked if there were other ways to teach reading, and I said, oh yes, there are many ways, and the expert teachers are those that know and use all of them depending on the needs and strengths of their students.

There is a growing body of research and writing that responds to the mandates. Elaine Garan (2002) says, “The NRP is not just some pesky little mosquito buzzing in our ears. It is Godzilla and it has its foot on our heads. Like it or not, we must deal with the findings of the National Reading Panel.” (Resisting Reading Mandates: How to Triumph with the Truth, Heinemann, p. 5.) She goes on to say that this is no longer a “pendulum” that reflects different philosophies. She has reluctantly “come to the realization that the true motives behind the current state and federal mandates for education are blatantly political and shamelessly financial.” (p. 87).

Can I do anything? Perhaps not, but I must try. I remain an optimist and believe that reason will out at some point. I want to do everything I can to make a difference. I have started a follow-up letter to the senator letting her know that there is a very active group reading community in this state and invite her to our conference. I am going to restate the need for looking at a wide body of research on what works in reading instruction. I am going to offer to sit down with her at any time and bring some of the leaders in the field. I plan on using the information in this letter as I write other congressman. I have gotten a spot on the CCIRA Legislative Committee. I have joined a group of district literacy leaders and college educators. For the children and their teachers, I have found my inner political side.