Sunday, September 18, 2011

No Silver Bullet

Reading an article in today's Globe Gazette regarding the Governor's draft education plan, I was struck by a quote from Representative Steckman in which she claims she doesn't want to overemphasize teacher effectiveness in the new plan.

I respectfully request then to know what factors a) are within government's power to change and b) more significantly affect a student's education. Research in schools shows clearly time and again that the single most important factor in a student's success and growth is the effectiveness of his or her teacher. The second critical factor is the effectiveness of the principal.

If this is true, which it is, then logically what must follow is an accountability system that heavily emphasizes these factors. This system would include the supervisor's evaluations, test scores, things like attendance rates, socioeconomic status of students and other factors that influence the population of students entering the schoolhouse doors. This balanced approach has been used elsewhere successfully, so there is no reason that it should not be tried in Iowa.

No, it's not the silver bullet Representative Byrnes hopes for, but the proposed system is a far cry better than a step and lane promotion system that ignores true standards of effectiveness.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Doctor Who and What He Means to Education

Ever seen an episode of Doctor Who? On BBC America? Not the 1970's Doctor Who with the Donald Trump hair do and the suit on loan from Captain Kangaroo, but the more recent episodes? They're excellent. Thought-provoking, funny, and weaving story threads across multiple seasons.

At the center of the plot, of course, is time travel. The Doctor travels through time in a marvelous phone booth type contraption called the Tardis, and saves lives, has adventures, and grows old very, very slowly.

In the title to my blog I promised to tell you what he means to education. Not a tremendous stretch for the imagination, really. As I stated earlier, central to the plot is time and the mystery of its nature: it bends, moves very slowly or very quickly depending on one's perception, never stops, affects everyone differently and yet similarly, etcetera. What I'm trying to say is that the show forces the viewer to re-examine his beliefs about how time works, how it doesn't work, and what we can do about it.

In education, we are at a tipping point. Teachers' unions are open to discussing significant reforms of the labor protections they've championed for years; Iowa's state director of education has kept the employment concept of "Last In, First Out" in the newspapers for almost a year; our governor plans a significant remodeling of Iowa's traditional educational structure in the next legislative session; nearly 100 districts in the state have moved to a 1:1 computing environment for their students; and college enrollments are booming in this era of information jobs rather than production jobs.

How is a teacher to manage it all? How does a principal manage it all? School boards? Parents? Most of all--students? This is where creative and imaginative leadership comes in, with a hefty dose of common sense to boot.

I believe one of the principal's main tasks is to help those busy parents, students, and teachers view their work in unique ways. To help them understand, sometimes, that giving up some of the tasks that fill our time would actually create more productive circumstances. Understandably, in this modern era of education, many teachers feel like they're being pushed so hard to change as rapidly as the world around them that there is simply no time at all to do everything they'd been doing PLUS incorporate Project Based Learning, or Writing to Learn, or Professional Learning Communities. And they're right: there isn't enough time. That's why we need to drop old time-consuming habits in exchange for the new ones.

In my work, for example, I've followed the good Doctor's example (in a way) by re-imagining the work we collectively do with students by re-ordering time. I've cleared up hours upon hours in the school year by reducing ineffective advisory time so our teachers can take a breath and re-invent our character education program. I've focused the time of our staff meetings to exclude announcements and other items that can be shared more efficiently, so we spend that time learning together. I've moved almost all initiatives, reports, and busy work off of our collective plates so all educators in the building can focus solely on teaching their material and on incorporating significantly more writing in our curriculum.

Is time and its pressures still making its presence known in our work with students? Of course. John F. Kennedy said, "For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life." Our obligation as educators and education leaders is to adapt and continuously refocus our efforts to meet time's challenges, and to take advantage of its riches. This can only be done by letting go, sometimes, of the past and those beliefs and practices that prevent our success. That is part of the prescription for an effective education.

Doctor's orders.