A Tale of Two Teachers

It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times…..

Teaching is really hard the first few years.  I was good at about 20-30% of all of the components of teaching and a mess for the rest.  But when I would talk with other teachers, students, parents, administrators they would always focus on the things I did best.  I was exciting, gave good explanations, motivated students, had good relationships. They would avoid looking at the amount of student engagement I had, how I ran discipline, how I graded, what instructional methods I used.  And deep down I always knew that they didn’t see me at my worst moments. I knew that I was a fraud. When I switched schools teachers and students were less inclined to ignore my shortcomings. I was fraudulent and people were ready to let me know.  It was really hard going from a school where I felt valued and important to one where I felt like I was a disappointment and a joke. I was better at teaching by now and I was excellent at some parts of teaching, but I still had my weaknesses and I still knew about it.  It didn’t help getting pink slipped six times and while we all understand that getting laid off is usually not a personal attack, it still feels like that at times.

My first teaching job I was surrounded by great teachers that were constantly helping me get better, but I was the only chemistry teacher.  I lucked into meeting some all star teachers from around the area and I learned from them as much as I could. And gradually I got better. My weaknesses became areas to improve and my strengths became areas to share with other teachers.  Last year I ended up winning the award for Michigan Science Teacher of the Year. I was really excited, but I could not shake my feeling of being a fraud. I knew there were things I did well but I also was aware that there are so many teachers that are better than me and some by a wide margin.  I still had things that I didn’t do well. So I decided I was going to work really hard at improving until I didn’t feel that way anymore. The award gave me the confidence and the motivation to become worthy of the award I was given. I started really tracking what were the worst things I did and trying to improve them and trying to use my strengths more creatively and I am really proud to say that this year I was not a fraud.  I taught my heart out. I taught better than I have ever taught. From my methods to the results it was all there. And this all culminated in our IB senior banquet last night where I was able to watch my students that have been in my class for three consecutive years. They were amazing and I helped with that. I told my senior students today on their last day of high school, “It wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough.” It was a beautiful culmination that I will always remember fondly.

In Michigan our teachers are to be rated either ineffective, minimally effective, effective or highly effective. Our district laid out their criteria for what would constitute highly effective this year and my jaw dropped.  I hate our evaluation system. All evaluation systems have flaws but ours is particularly mean-spirited in my view. Our district started by saying that in order to achieve highly effective a teacher has to apply to go through a separate process with 5-8 observations instead of 2. There are extra goals, data analysis and teaching artifacts.  I put in my application first of all teachers in the district. I used a piece of flash cotton to simulate me putting my name into the Goblet of Fire when I turned in my form. Next our district requires that in order to get highly effective the teacher must be rated highly effective in all 22 components of the Charlotte Danielson rubric and never be observed at a level below highly effective in any of the 22 components during any of the observations.  This is of course impossible. Mr. Feeney, Mr. Keating and Jaime Escalante couldn’t do this if they team taught a single class of 12 students with five hours of prep time. It’s basically the equivalent of me telling my students that if they feel they’ll deserve an A they must apply and then if they get any question wrong ever in the semester that they will end up at a B.

I don’t know if I met the criteria in the original intent, but if not, I sure as heck went down swinging.  I spent time compiling all of my evidence that I had for my highly effective teaching for all twenty two criteria.  I met every single one of them. I did it. I matched the impossible and I feel great about my teaching this year.  It took so many different components of my teaching that I do well but I feel confident in my work that it is all there.  I was rated as effective. I am still fighting, but it is a battle I will lose. It feels like the school district is putting in writing for the entire world to see that I am a fraud.  I am not a fraud anymore and I deserve better than that. I didn’t in the past, but I do now. And I sit at lunch and I watch teachers that are far better than I am and they don’t apply and it makes me furious.  They are highly effective teachers and they don’t deserve to go through the miserable process that I went through. But they also do not deserve to choose between that and being disingenuous about their talents. They are highly effective teachers that are labelled at a lesser level than they are.  And why? Some of them are new and I see how much further ahead of the learning curve they are than I was at that point. And they should be encouraged by what they do. They are amazing, inspirational and wonderful and they deserve to know that and not be told otherwise. I don’t understand what we get from these evaluations that make them worth this.  

It's time for a better evaluation system

Considerable time and effort are spent evaluating teachers without much to show for it.  Rarely does a teacher excel in teaching and credit their evaluation system for helping them to get where they are.  Evaluation systems rely on overworked administrators that nearly always end up accomplishing compliance rather than effective feedback, evaluation and improvement.  This causes the administrator to rely on a rubric that often is inappropriate. For example, our district uses the same rubric to evaluate my chemistry class as well as physical education, elementary, special education, etc.  The systems on these rubrics are most inappropriate because they evaluate the teacher and classroom environment relative to an expectation. The end goal is the initial evaluation.

I teach science using the modeling pedagogy.  The big philosophical difference between modeling and traditional teaching is that in traditional teaching the student is explained what the final objective or standard is and then this is repeated with variety as the student approaches that standard.  Modeling, in contrast, starts with where the student is. What is the current understanding of this concept and how can this student construct models from their understanding that are revised when the models fail or require change to explain discrepancies.  A big flaw in traditional learning is that by focusing on the final product in lieu of the status quo for the student we build concepts with lots of holes and misconceptions. In a constructivist approach students are more likely to identify and deconstruct these misconceptions.  

How can we shift teaching evaluations from a traditional model to a constructivist approach?  We need much more contact time with teachers. Administrators do not have the capability to accomplish this.  I have had some of the most talented administrators that I could have ever expected and yet I rarely see anything of value from my evaluations.  Instead we should create positions dedicated to evaluation and observation only. If a position was only spent meeting with teachers on prep periods, setting goals with teachers, observing teachers, giving feedback to teachers and connecting teachers the evaluation system improves dramatically.  This changes the evaluations from punitive to feedback and change focus from busy work and compliance to improvement and growth.

Teaching is very isolating.  Teachers are alone in their classrooms for the majority of their career.  Even when teachers meet with other teachers and do professional development it is very easy to continue doing the same things.  But having a quality teacher working with you is a tremendous advantage. An employee that does observations full time will get to experience the strengths of a school and will be able to connect teachers based on strengths, weaknesses and goals.  If a teacher wants to work on assessment, the evaluator will know who does assessment well and can facilitate connecting them. The larger amount of contact time also allows the evaluator to observe the teachers more frequently, more informally and also work on planning.  You would get better consistency by having fewer people doing evaluations and since they would spend more time with each teacher.

This would also open up some time for overworked administrators to spend less time fulfilling compliance requirements and instead have positive impacts on their staff and students.  Currently most administrators can spend their entire day answering emails, attending meetings and dealing with disciplinary infractions. By opening up their time they would be able to work on mentoring programs, developing professional development, being more visible in the school and whatever creative programs they desire to implement.  

I Don't Hate Grading Anymore

I hate grading.  Grading takes so long and marking wrong answers for hours on end after spending so much effort on teaching is an emotional drag.  Grading isn’t just obnoxious because it is redundant, length and often mindless. For high school teachers it can often be used as a tool to shame students, to make them feel bad about themselves and that blame is tough to share and unhealthy to deflect to students and their parents.  

I was listening to a podcast about how we do not remember our memories correctly.  We replace our memories with what we currently believe as often as possible because of how brain storage works.  If you currently are aligned heavily with a set of political ideologies, you are likely to shift your memories towards those same ideologies.  But I couldn’t help listening to this podcast to think about how grading affects teachers negatively. When teachers grade they see the correct answer 170 times.  They even see the wrong answers so frequently that they will often tell the next group in advance of what mistakes they will make. So when a student repeats a mistake it can produce an unhealthy response.  We think of students as lazy or that they don’t care. This happens especially when teachers are put under external pressure from administrators, parents and even the students themselves. And as we continue this year after year we eventually reach a point where it is beyond the teacher to remember what it was ever like to learn the material for the first time.  We shift our memories to think of our subject matter is being so clear and simple that we disconnect from reality.

About six years ago I was going through my files and I found a set of exams from when I was in college studying chemistry.  I looked them over and a multiple-choice question from my advanced thermochemistry class caught my eye. I read a question and saw that I had gotten it wrong.  It was about entropy, enthalpy and spontaneity and I got really upset at myself for getting it incorrect. In fact, I remember thinking how furious I would have been had one of my students, even a struggling student, if they had made the same mistake I had made in my third year of college.  I had taken high school chemistry, AP chemistry and was over 30 credits of chemistry in to my degree when I made that mistake.

I think that moment has prevented a lot of negativity towards my own students as I now can remember with a little bit of evidence that sometimes students know something but struggle with the mechanics of the question, sometimes new information makes us uncertain and sometimes it just takes time to understand a concept.  When students get questions wrong I no longer take it personally. I will never get angry at a student for being wrong or needing more time to understanding something. If a student or parent tries to push an unhealthy pressure on me I feel comfortable deflecting that pressure away and not engaging with them. And I believe I just found the perfect grading system to make this all work.  

I have now been using standards based grading assessments for the past three years in my chemistry classes.  This has been a minor change as it is really just chopping up the test into sections that focus on 6-10 concepts from a unit (examples are on my chem website).  I liked the organization and felt that it improved feedback to students and parents.  But in the past two weeks I have started to add one last feature and I think the slight increase in grading is about to be overwhelmed by the reduction in mental health stress in grading.  Students will now be able to reassess on standards.

The logistics I am currently planning on using involve having students complete a form for any standard that they wish to reassess that focuses on directing students back to what we learned in class.  They can then improve their understanding of the topic and reassess. Reassessments will happen once per week on a rotating after school and lunch schedule that so far has been very reasonable to execute.  The following year I will join with the teacher next door to me so that each of us is only responsible for every other week to supervise students reassessing.

Grading still is not fun, but the last two tests that I have graded I have felt so much more at ease with student mistakes.  It is no longer an omission that will compound as the year progresses, but instead feedback that the student can rectify and incentive for them to reflect on their understanding as well as what they accomplish during class time.  It is no longer an indictment of my teaching but instead feedback to me on what went well and what did not. It is no longer a cycle of two week periods where students rush through material, but instead this allows us to slow down when needed without losing content.