A school board trustee hits the nail on the head.

Today's Ottawa Citizen published a very well-informed op-ed piece today about the issues around bill 115.  The piece, written by public school board trustee Pam Fitzgerald makes some excellent points that the real issues of Bill 115 are not really about money or democratic rights but about the educational initiatives that have been launched over Dalton McGuinty's time in office.

Ms. Fitzgerald talks about how changes to processes involving student responsibility (plagiarism, incomplete work), increases to teacher responsibilities (testing, record-keeping, report cards), and the addition of many at-risk and special needs students to the classroom without sufficient support have greatly affected the role and workload of teachers.

Here are three insightful paragraphs from the article.

"Many of these initiatives appear to be laudable but they are frequently implemented with undue haste and perhaps with a sense of political expediency. There is little say on the viability, and the process of implementation and collaboration is frequently lacking.

New initiatives with unforeseen consequences for students, teachers and school administrators often simply serve to stretch teachers to the limit at the expense of time, creativity, and flexibility in the classroom. (my italics)

While it’s recognized that differentiated instruction and a little student autonomy improve learning, teaching itself has become more standardized.(again, my italics) Unlike other professions where a standardized approach might improve the product and despite some improvements in test scores, standardization in education has led to frustration for students and teachers alike. As the world-renowned and well-respected educator Sir Ken Robinson might say, we are using the 19th-century factory model to teach 21st-century minds."

Later on in the article Ms. Fitzgerald makes the point that that the government continues to use a "do as I say, not as I do approach".  Any teacher can easily name a half-dozen policies, programs, or initiatives that fit that mold.  We are to try to provide individualized instruction to our students but the principal wants all teachers teaching the same lessons.    Or we are forced to attend professional development about the value of giving students choices.  We are told that, despite our experience and judgement that some students cannot handle it, we must give all students more responsibility around assignment due dates and then also put in the time and effort to deal with lapses but our marks had better be in by 9am Monday even if exams were only written on Friday.

I could go on for a long time, but I think you get the idea.

In the end, I cannot recommend highly enough that anyone interested in education or the issues around Bill 155 should read Ms. Fitzgerald's article in its entirety.

Why I don't average student marks

A short while ago Janice Kennedy of the Ottawa Citizen wrote a piece about teachers ignoring what she called "educational kookiness". Reading that piece, I realized that she was looking at the process of determining marks for students as if it had not changed since she was a teacher.  In particular, she is assuming the teachers determine a student's final grade by averaging all the marks that student has earned.  This prompted me to come up with an example of why current best practices recommend against using averages to determine student grades.

Imagine that two students have written the same series of tests in a course.  Each test reflects the cumulative knowledge of the student for the whole course at that point.  Student A scores 80% on the first test, 70% on the second test, then 60%, 50%, 40%.  Student B scores 40% on the first test, then 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%.  If we determine final grades based on averages, then both students get the same grade, 60%.  But clearly student B is improving his/her learning while it looks like student A is understanding less and less.  There are more statistically sophisticated methods than simple averages that can be used to try and capture the trend being shown, but they are tricky and have potential flaws.  The reality is that any given statistical method for calculating final grade will have weaknesses, so Ken O'Connor, a recognized expert in student evaluation, offers this as Guideline #6 in his book How to Grade for Learning K - 12: "Crunch numbers carefully, if at all."

So instead of crunching student results into an average, best practices call for teachers to use their judgement based on the most consistent student results, with the emphasis on the most recent.  In the example above, the lack of consistency would mean that a teacher should focus on the most recent results which are 50% and 40% for student A and 70% and 80% for student B.  These most recent results suggest that student A may not have learned enough to pass the course while student B's learning can fairly be evaluated as being in the low 70s.  That is a big difference from giving both 60%.

The wood stove model of teaching

About a week ago I read an article by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail talking about how liberals and conservatives operate on two different moral systems.  The article is based on ideas from Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind (Globe and Mail review), where Mr. Haidt says that liberal thinkers are concerned with care, harm, and fairness but conservative thinkers are concerned with loyalty, authority, and sanctity. 

This struck a chord with me recently.  On Friday I was at a Professional Development day activity looking at restorative practices.  One part of the presentation was comparing restorative practices to traditional school discipline.  The traditional discipline practices were really about authority, and sanctity, with maybe a bit around loyalty.  Roughly speaking, in traditional discipline, if a student does not show respect for authority and those things authority sanctifies, then the student is punished.  A classic example: student swears at a teacher.  The student has shown a lack of respect for authority and the teacher's role, so we suspend the student.  After the suspension the student comes back to class, usually angry about the suspension, while the teacher is still angry at the student for the disrespect shown that has not been addressed.  There is a good chance another incident will occur.

The restorative practices are focused around care, harm, and fairness.  The main thrust is that if a problem occurs then at least one person has been harmed and the fair response is to try to fix the harm as much as possible and restore a working community.  In restorative practices, if a student swears at a teacher then there is recognition that the teacher has been hurt by that.  However, if the student can be helped to understand that he/she has hurt another person and then the student can make honest amends through an apology and/or other actions, then the student can be accepted back into the classroom with no hard feelings and possibly with both student and teacher having a better sense of how to work together in the future.

I feel that I can say fairly that in my experience, discipline that is more restorative around fixing a problem works better than traditional discipline.  If you are treated fairly, cared for, and protected from harm it is quite easy to develop loyalty and respect for authority and sanctity.  But if you are harmed, not cared for, and not treated fairly, it is almost impossible to develop the traits valued by conservatives.

I think an analogy that I heard many years ago fits this situation.  The analogy was the idea of a person telling his/her wood stove "I will give you some wood as soon as you give me some heat".  We all know that a wood stove will not give any heat until we put some wood in.  In the same way, young students will not show respect and loyalty until they have been cared for, treated fairly and protected from harm.

So teachers, the next time you are looking for "heat" from a student think about whether your best choice might be to stoke the stove by offering some caring and fairness first.

Teaching like a champion

I did get Doug Lemov's book Teach Like a Champion and I was very impressed. Before I read trhe book, I had thought that I would already be doing many of the 49 techniques that Lemov was going to describe. As it turns out, I was doing perhaps 6 of the 49.

The bad news is that I have a lot left to learn. The good news is that Lemov has done a great job of spelling out his techniques and showing how to do them in a classroom. The book also includes a DVD of examples of the techniques in use. I have not yet had a chance to look at the DVD, but I will see if I can get to it over the summer.

The interesting thing about the techniques listed in the book is that many of them are very small techniques that might save a few minutes a day. But, as Lemov points out, a few minutes here, a few minutes there, times about 200 days in a school year starts to add up to dozens of hours of extra teaching. And that extra time can easily be the difference maker for your students.

I would recommend Teach Like a Champion to any teacher who wants to improve their ability to reach their students.