Are there no mirrors in schools?

Education reform makes a cameo appearance in Walter Isaacson's biography Steve Jobs. It left me wishing Isaacson learned more and/or shared more about each man's view of education; yet, that was not the book he was writing. Understanding that these two passages are not comprehensive in their representation of either Gates' or Jobs' thoughts on education reform, I want to focus on one word that makes an appearance in each man's ideal: feedback.

Isaacson writes on page 544 about a meeting between President Obama and Steve Jobs:

Jobs also attacked America's education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until 6pm and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessment should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.

On page 553, Isaacson recounts Bill Gates' visit to see Steve Jobs as Jobs' health faltered:

Jobs asked some questions about education, and Gates sketched out his vision of what schools in the future would be like, with students watching lectures and video lessons on their own while using the classroom time for discussions and problem solving...computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback.

In each passage, the call for better feedback is real. Each example aligns improved feedback with the dexterity of digital tools as well as improved feedback generated by a changed model of a teacher's role in the classroom.

Neither wish is unreasonable, yet it can appear unattainable...in our current model.

The blurb by Gates presumes a model where administrators and teachers are more than competent in several areas:

• using digital tools personally (which may not be happening)
• designing lessons with digital tools (which may not be happening)
• mentoring a student-led model of learning (which may not be happening)

Jobs' notes to President Obama point out few items that also raise a few eyebrows:

• the teachers' unions cover up fractures in its foundation (it blocks growth)
• teachers are not treated as professionals (and I feel the suggestion that we share the blame)
• quality control is a missing component (Jobs often spoke of A players, B players, C players)
• the current arc of teachers are not growing, improving...and, reading between the lines, relevant

I don't necessarily think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs have all of the answers for education, but I do value their ability to assess. I at least want to listen because these innovators have proven that they can look at systems and deliver what it needs as well as intuit its core problems.

So what everything suggested by Gates and Jobs is true? What if deep inside my bones I am fearful that there is truth in their perceptions? It embarrasses me. It gives me pause. 

What the Gates and Jobs quotes don't address is that feedback relies on someone engaged. Feedback is a conversation, not a score. But what I do admire from Gates is that he had the humanity to include the modifier "motivational."

How can we give motivational feedback if we are not competent in using digital tools; not designing lessons with digital tools; allowing students to discuss and problem solve, covering up fractures in our foundation; not acting acting as professionals; too comfortable; not growing or improving?

Are there no mirrors in schools?

The Care We Put Into It

Leadership in education is fragmented. Policy makers and advocates each take a turn at the white board. On the periphery, adults launch into heated exchanges about teaching in comment scrolls beneath news articles. Politicians speak in generalities; their words are little more than eyewash.

None of those people or entities get to make the one decision in education that matters. Actually, none of them can ever make this decision. They are powerless to do it because their power is not built on empathy.

Empathy matters.

You are the only person who can make the one decision that matters and that is a pretty powerful and liberating thing to realize. As teachers, we make innumerable decisions everyday, yet each of those decisions is primarily driven by one, critical, initial decision.

One.

Oddly, the one decision that counts is not policy. The one decision that counts is not curriculum or content. The one decision that counts is not what is wrangled over at Pearson. We have one powerful decision to make.

One.

What type of a model are you going to be?

This one decision trumps all of the decisions made by our government and administrators. We do not have a choice concerning whether we are models or not. We only get to decide whether we will be a good model or a bad model. 

In the ELA classroom, being a good model means modeling reading and modeling writing. To take it a step further, being a good model in a middle school means showing up to events, participating, and engaging with our kids outside of the classroom.

In the ELA classroom, being a bad model means making excuses for not being a reader and/or a writer. It also means making excuses for not showing up to much at all outside of the classroom.

And it makes me wonder about where we came from--about the care that was put into being the teachers we are today. And it makes me wonder about the care that we put into ourselves today that will determine the teachers who we will become tomorrow.

Steve Jobs said, "I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product." While Jobs was concerned with the craftsmanship of his technology, we can take the lesson and apply it to teaching.

Carelessness in teaching is relying solely on pre-packaged content--something generated by others for the masses. Carelessness is recycling PowerPoints, packets, overheads, and support material year upon year--so much so that we get caught into what Jobs described as grooves. He believed that once a person reached their thirties they fell into habits that they could not easily extricate themselves from. We become the cliche of the teacher who uses the same overheads year after year. 

We spend the first half of our life creating our habits and the last half of our life our habits make us.

For ELA teachers to reach the standard Jobs suggested for his industry and applying it to teaching--care put into a product--means being readers and being writers. Being a reader and a writer opens the possibility of empathy in our classrooms.

An article on Edutopia, Teaching Empathy: Are We Teaching Content or Students? nails this very point, "You must understand them [students] for who they are and where they are, not for what you hope to prepare them for."

It means investing time outside of the classroom. We can't just rely on the Pearsons and Holt-McDougals to crank out textbooks and support materials and wash our hands of it and say that's that. There is no care in that attitude.

Likewise, we can't just lean on the curriculum from our home districts and brandish the documents as if they are all-inclusive, prescriptive, panaceas to all of the problems in education. That document is brought to life by the teacher and the one critical decision we make. We have to remember that the one decision (What kind of a model are you? Are you a good one? or a bad one?) impacts almost everything that we do and who we become in our classroom. It impacts how we use the curriculum document and what we bring to the table in support of that document.

And we don't get to opt out of making the one decision that matters. Whether we realize it or not, our actions define us. Our actions show our colleagues, administrators, students, and community who we are--a good model or a bad model.

In order to be a good model, we must be readers and writers who collaborate and interact with other good models. Having one without the other does not work well either. Being a good model is as influential as is surrounding ourselves with bad models. We can find both models all around us. We just have to learn how to spot the good ones. Also, beyond our buildings, we can find good models through books and by attending conventions and workshops. The good models are out there. We must be willing to engage by preparing ourselves to engage--read and write.

via Hanna-Barbera Productions

When we learn to see each other as models, we invoke one of the other core beliefs of Steve Jobs: A players like to work with A players. A players cannot stand to work with C players. 

An educational leader and colleague of mine attended a conference where he heard the analogy of schools compared to buses without floors. Imagine your school as a Flintstones type of vehicle where passengers used their feet to run and move the bus. He said the some people on the bus are runners, some lift their feet and cruise along for the ride (happy to be led), and some dig  in their heels and retard any prayer of progress.  They are usually quick to point to excuses, problems, and what is not there rather than focusing on what is there. He said the leader advocated focusing our attention on the runners--the A players--rather than investing energy in the C players, the complainers. The dead weight. He noted that some B players will move into ranks of A players and turn into runners. Some won't. But the likelihood that C players move up to B and then to A is almost unheard of...so why waste your building's resources on bad models?

• Be more than the person who thinks little about their craft outside of their classroom. 
• Be more than the person relying on the worksheets and packets and PowerPoints. 
• Be more than the person satisfied (and relieved) that the thinking and heavy lifting has already been done. 

If we do not, we see ourselves as little more than deliverers of content and our students little more than empty pails to be filled (everyone is a C player in that model). And that is, sadly, the Jobsian incarnation of "carelessness in a product" that can infect our schools.

Demand More than What

A long line of cars, headlights on, carries New Hampshire residents to vote in the primary. It is an image circulating social media this morning. Maybe it is a sign that more American people will vote in the upcoming election.

The image makes me wonder: what type of impulse moves people to make an effort to change?

And where do those impulses reside in education?

For the most part, the middle school experience today looks and sounds very much the same today as it did when I was twelve and thirteen years of age.

However, the anxiety and pressure to beat the world, beat the other states, beat the neighboring districts, beat my classmates, and beat our colleagues was not present in 1982. For all of the gains some believe we accomplish from that structure, I want to point out what has been lost--because we get what we emphasize.

Point blank, educators experience less conversation and consideration about what the research and evidence suggests than they do about what the test scores say. By evidence, I mean what educators see along with what students say. Not just scores and data. Yet our time is often parceled out to talk (almost) exclusively about a long line of numbers from a state or national test. As a matter of fact, it is not unusual to be encouraged to create formal plans for change based on what the scores tell us.

Numbers and scores and rankings. That is what we emphasize.

Many champion that this sort of data is indeed informative and helpful. I do not disagree. It can provide a holistic account of a grade level and a subject area. In other words, we can learn what our students scored weak in.

Yet, "what" can only inspire more what...or what else..."what" is content.

"What" is not why. "What" does not inspire self-reflection much deeper than facts and concepts. "What" can stall at "what"--as in what I must teach more of.

When teachers are encouraged to look at other classrooms, to look at students in a variety of situations, to look at observable behaviors, then we can open up conversation with colleagues about teaching. We can talk about why a decision was made...where did you find that idea...how did prepare...when would you return to that point...and yes, what would be included as well. We can't function or learn without what...but we need so much more than what.

Yet, yet, yet...I struck up conversations with several sets of teachers from different regions of the country (at NCTE in Minneapolis) who shared that talking about teaching with colleagues is often intimidating.

What!?

Have we become so focused on beating everyone and every test in our path that we have lost the art and value of talking with one another?  Talking with colleagues can be seen as a judgmental, threatening, and humiliating. One teacher told me he felt the conversations with his colleagues about curriculum felt like a "witch hunt."

This is the opposite of what our professional conversations should feel like!

This is the opposite of what the relationships between elementary schools and their district middle school should be like. This is the opposite of what the relationship between high school teachers and their district middle school teachers should be like.

When we focus solely on what, it becomes easy to blame. We talk so much about what (content) in education that we have lost the conversation--the beauty of the give and take--about teaching. We have lost collaboration. We have lost the value of what others bring to their classrooms and to our buildings.

The greatest growth as teachers that we can experience starts with listening. By listening, I mean deliberately framing time to talk and listen to what students and teachers have to say: what works for them, why it works for them, what decisions did they make, why did they make that decision, when did they realize x, how did they come to make that change, et al.

Those conversations are not presently valued. No one asks for that research or evidence. In the worst environments, the most teachers are ever asked for are their scores. In the worst environments, the lowest, most uninspired, outcomes are shared scores...without conversation.

Some of the greatest learning moments for me this year have come when I shared audio recordings of my conferences with students. I do not record all of them (impossible) but I record a lot of them on my iPhone and then save them. I have shared some of these recordings with other educators outside of my building and I have shared them with parents of the students.

I learn so much about my kids when I talk with them, and that makes me a better teacher beyond anything the scores tell me. But I learn so much more when I allow other educators to tell me what they hear in those recorded conversations. They can sift through everything in one conversation and mine the gold that sometimes lays buried beneath my concern with everything. In the moment with our kids, we often feel that everything carries an equal weight and significance. Sometimes we miss the best stuff and need others to help us find it.

Yet, we would never know that because we are not encouraged to do it. No one asks for that evidence.

Finally, sharing recorded student conferences with parents exposes history beyond the classroom walls. After all, parents know their child. In many cases, parents have listened to a recording and then enthusiastically isolated a moment in the conference that taught me something new about their child.

And when we learn more about the child, we move closer to being the teacher they deserve. We move beyond the what (content) and move into an inclusive conversations of whys, whens, hows, wheres in addition to the whats.

While tests_________ a. cannot measure everything, b. are imperfect, c. stack the deck, d. are  a fact of life (fill in the blank with anything you'd like),  it is the conversations that we do not share that fails us worse.

When will we expect (and demand) conversations built on more than just what?

From our national standard?

From our state standard?

From our local standard?

From ourselves?