I was invited to sit-in on some recent interviews in order
to fill two positions at my school, and this was one of the first questions on
our list to ask potential candidates. We
had 14 interviews that day and the most common answer was, “Funding”.
That’s a pretty safe answer.
After all, that’s what we’ve been hearing for a while now. Unfunded educational mandates, deep cuts to
education spending, and teacher layoffs are commonplace stories in the media and
through the grapevine. While I agree
that education funding is a big issue, I wonder, however, if that is the biggest challenge?
I’ve been fortunate in that my current school district has
not replaced the math textbook series for a while (as textbook series are very
expensive) and, at the same time, I’ve been given a little freedom in how I
teach. I decided a few years ago to
abandon the textbooks when we were asked to map our curriculum.
I came into this job as a long-term substitute for 6th
grade math in 2008. When I first came in, the teacher who I was replacing
handed me a binder with lessons that she had created based on the
textbook. It included everything I would
need, transparencies, handouts, etc. I
followed her lessons until the end of the year.
That summer, when I saw the low state test scores in my subject,
I was
surprised that they hired me as the permanent 6th grade math
teacher, with the added bonus of teaching reading to my homeroom students. I simply started to teach exactly the same as I had before
until the principal told us that we needed to map our curriculum. What this meant was that we needed to provide
more information in our lesson plans that needed to be turned into the
office. I complained just as much as
everyone did at the added work. The most
important part for me was that we had to include the state standard with the
lessons. After the first quarter of the
year, it became evident to me why the previous year’s scores were so low. I discovered that I was barely touching the state
standards, but was teaching straight from the textbook.
I quickly changed gears and started going backwards with
lesson planning and instruction. You
see, when many educators are asked to include state standards in their lesson
plans, they look at the material in the textbook, then find something in the
standards that correlates to the textbook.
I started looking at the standards, then found materials to support the
specific achievement goals of each standard.
What I discovered was that the textbook became less and less relevant in
my instruction. That summer, the 6th
grade math state scores were significantly better, scoring almost 20% higher
than the previous year.
Over the years I phased out the textbook and workbook
completely and have used other resources to create lesson plans. My state test scores have only increased and
have hovered around the mid-upper 80%s for a few years. In the high poverty area in which we live and
compared other scores in the county and the district, my scores are near the
top.
Believe it or not, this past year, the sixth grade team (we
all teach reading to our homeroom) has done something very similar in our
reading instruction. Given the fact that
we declined the district’s offer of a new reading series for 6th
grade, I would say that we have now saved the district thousands of
dollars. The 6th grade state
test scores went up this past year for the first time since I’ve been here.
What does this have to do with my original question? We have slashed the budget for 6th
grade math and reading and our scores have only increased. There’s something about that which deserves a
moment of thought. Funding is a
challenge, no doubt, but is funding the greatest challenge or the greatest
excuse?
I offer a different take.
I think the greatest challenge to teachers today is that we have
oversimplified the most complicated parts of education and overcomplicated the
simplest parts. Here’s what I mean.
Assessment is an extremely complex component of
education. We know that students develop
differently, learn differently, and show achievement differently. Instead of assessing in various ways to show
a student’s proficiency, we do it one way- with a standardized test. It’s just easier to put a scan-tron through a
machine to get a number and to assign a level of achievement to that number
than it is to really assess the student’s ability.
Some students would excel with project-based
assessment, while others with essay based, and some would show high levels of achievement
if we could do a portfolio based assessment, or even a musical one… there are a
number of different ways to assess what each learned, yet, instead of
developing a more open (and therefore more complex) approach to assessment, we’ve
simplified it to a series of standardized tests.
Teaching content, however, is simpler than we make it. In fact, in my experience, a good teacher is
a good teacher whether they’re following the latest trend of “research-based”
teaching methods or not. Likewise, a bad
teacher is going to be a bad teacher even if they are following the latest
trend. Most research has shown what many
teachers have been doing all the right things for years, just calling each
component something different- depending on who’s doing the research. I would even submit that it’s not so much how you teach, it’s what you teach that will get you the higher scores on the state
tests.
Now I don’t want to understate the challenge that teaching is, but someone who really knows what they’re doing in a classroom doesn’t
really need more training and they don’t need to prove themselves by
complicated lesson plan directives. I
think all these “research-based” instructional initiatives have overcomplicated
teaching to the point that teachers are afraid to try new things.
We’re afraid that by taking risks in the classroom, it will
result in low-performance evaluations.
We’re so afraid to fail that we’re not willing to break through the box and
innovate in new and exciting ways. I
never asked about abandoning the math textbooks, but once my scores improved no
one cared that I did.
My challenge to anyone reading this is to break through this
year. Do something amazing. Work within your current system, find and
exploit the weaknesses, then break through.
You’d be amazed at what the little successes can do to promote future
ones. If we’re in it for the right
reasons, then we should be throwing everything we’ve got at it and then some-
and that challenge should make it a wild ride.
If you want the same results, just keep doing the same thing
and you will succeed at mediocrity. If
you want to do something amazing, then change course and fearlessly go beyond
where you ever imagined. I have a lot of
growing to do this year, and I am looking forward to the new challenges that I
face. I hope you are, too.
Thanks for reading!
