Of course, I like ideas and I find it a tad ridiculous that anyone would be lacking ideas when people like me find it so easy to think of them. I suggested to a few legislators that they read Daniel Pink’s Drive for a better understanding of human motivation (at least as far as research tells us), figuring it would be a good place to start. As I mentally returned to Pink’s topic, I found myself generating my own ideas regarding teacher-evaluation and learning, ideas I think far outstrip Governor Daugaard’s proposal, especially in its understanding of people. Pink explores three factors essential for motivating people in creative and problem-solving careers: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Since I think purpose is something inherently wonderful about education my idea focuses primarily upon the first two characteristics (though purpose comes into play). The idea is an amalgamation of things I have seen elsewhere, and it is one I am growing to like, to be honest.

Autonomy

The basis of the plan goes like this. Each year teachers 1) identify an area in which they would like to improve, 2) create a plan for improvement, and 3) work to improve in that area. The area where they need to improve is selected by the teacher (hence, autonomy). It is really selected by the teacher, not a Model-T style where they can study anything they want, as long as it is formative assessment. Is the teacher wanting help on classroom management? Then maybe they’ll read about it or do a series of classroom visits with colleagues who are good at it. Is the teacher wanting to look into a writing workshop? Perhaps the teacher can take a class and read a couple books on it. Is the teacher wanting to increase her knowledge of Shakespeare to sharpen her content knowledge? Then perhaps she should read a couple of his plays and a book or two about the Bard. It is crucial that the area of study is chosen by the teacher, and that the teacher is seen as a scholar capable of guiding this process. Too many of our professional development classes are narrowly focused within a small range of technical skills, and if we were to force teachers to choose particular topics for their learning, we would narrow the possibilities. Take my recent reading as an example: James Shapiro’s A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599. I will never find a professional development class on this topic, yet I learned more from this book that will make me a better teacher of my Shakespeare class than I ever did by taking the professional development classes that have historically consumed my time.

Mastery

The plan I described above is not revolutionary. Through the eight years I have spent at my current school I have seen at least two attempts at such a reflective learning plan, but to no avail. Why? For one, the plans rarely granted teachers true autonomy (see the Model-T reference above). Further, they never supplied the teachers with enough time to allow them to pursue mastery. The purpose was undercut because teachers knew the plans were little better than worksheets that no one had time to complete or examine. The scope of the reflective work was so small that even attempting it wholeheartedly did not lead to mastery.

Accountability, Purpose, and Mastery continued

Part of what I think is missing is a system of true accountability, which actually adds an element of purpose to the pursuit. If, to create a parallel example, I ask students to complete a writing assignment but then do not read it, it undercuts the idea that what they have done has any purpose. I might say to them that the assignment’s purpose is to improve their skills and that my reading it will not alter whether their skills have improved. But what they will likely hear is that their work is not important enough for me to look at. In one sense accountability is a way of tracking someone, of seeing that they’re doing what the authority wants. In an additional sense, though, accountability, if conducted in a respectful manner, shows that the authority cares enough about what someone is doing to be involved in checking it.

This is why I think a system of accountability that respects teachers as scholars would be highly motivational and would lead to more mastery than exists within the current system. In my little idea that I’m crafting here, each teacher completes an inventory of what they are doing to improve through a given year. What are you, as a professional, learning this year? The portfolio, of sorts, is made up of a description of learning and “artifacts” to show that the learning has actually taken place. Artifacts might be samples of students’ work, or they might be a series of reflective journal entries written in response to some books that the teacher has read, or they might be a paper or two that the teacher has written assembling various pertinent research. Hopefully they would be a compilation of all those things, but its precise form should also be flexible, not formulaic (a formula severely undercuts autonomy).

Once completed, the teacher submits this learning portfolio to a panel made up of fellow teachers and an administrator. In a large school I would have a number of panels, in smaller schools, one or two. On a particular panel, I would have five people (including that administrator). Two would be teachers from a pool that is serving on the panel that year. In a bigger school, one should be from the same department as the evaluated teacher. That pool would need to serve for the whole year to maintain consistency, and teachers would be selected for (or, more likely elected to) that position, hopefully putting in place only the most trusted and fair colleagues. Also on the panel would be a teacher more or less drawn at random (every teacher should be obligated to serve on a panel or two through the course of the year) and one colleague selected by the evaluated teacher.

That panel then would listen to a presentation from the teacher where the teacher would describe the learning that took place–essentially giving a tour through the portfolio–and speak to any questions the fellow teachers would have. The administrator, who would have been the one to sit in on the teacher’s classroom as an observer, could share relevant information from the observation that would support or bring into question what was learned. At the end of the presentation, the panel of teachers should discuss with the teacher their thoughts about the learning that has taken place, give a type of recommendation or commendation, as applicable, to the administrator, and then that could be considered as part of the evaluation of that teacher.

In concept the panel is an accountability piece, put in place to verify that the teacher is learning. It provides an intimidating audience, to be sure, but about as fair a one as can be conceived of as well. Theoretically, the simple act of having to tell other people what you’re doing to learn would motivate a teacher to take the learning seriously–who wants to be the teacher who gets called out for taking the easy route?

But such a panel also provides an opportunity for teachers who are working hard to share with colleagues what they have done. How often do teachers in their normal working arrangements get to share what they are doing with an audience who would appreciate it? It does not happen. Some colleagues of mine who just completed graduate school were begging people to come to their final presentations, which were conducted on a Saturday (the presentations were quite good, by the way–much better than most of what I have seen at education conferences). They had worked extremely hard and were proud of what they’d learned, and having an audience for it was invigorating and motivating. Yet the crowds were small and made up mostly of family and close friends. These colleagues deserved more official recognition of their professional work.

The Reality Check

Would a plan like this cost money? Certainly. If it would work well, teachers would need time to work on the research and reading that goes along with learning and improving. If teachers were to sit on panels they would need subs to cover their classes (or for the two who are on all the panels, perhaps even an extra planning period–a nice perk for taking on the extra responsibility). With a plan like this I’d be of the opinion that teachers’ contracts should be extended with proportional compensation. That might be expensive, but would it cost as much as the governor’s plan, which, according to an editorial in the Rapid City Journal, is going to be one of the most dramatic increases in education funding in state history? All that money for a plan that likely will not even work?

Ultimately my plan is not about money and I share it not so much because it needs to be published but because the governor’s plan needs a foil; it needs something that by comparison will reveal how empty it is. My “plan” is about understanding what it is to be human and what motivates a human being. We are not computer programs needing a new input or upgrade; we are not hogs getting excited about a bigger cup of Kool-aid at the end of the race; we are people.

As people, we frequently need to be encouraged in our goal of guiding children to lives of quality and purpose, and a good way to motivate us, to encourage us, is to approach our profession with a high view, to see us as scholars capable of and interested in improving and learning. To use Daniel Pink’s framework, it means seeing us as worthy of being granted autonomy, as capable of pursuing mastery, and as requiring purpose in our pursuits. The governor’s plan, with its focus on making it easier to fire teachers and rewarding the very top tier, does not take a high view of our profession. It is pessimistic in its core. Perhaps what he and others might consider doing if they want to motivate teachers to improve is begin by understanding who we are and what we are trying to do.

Thanks for reading.

• Learn on Flickr by Mark Brannan

• $5,000 bonuses each year to the top 20 percent of teachers in each district.
• $3,500 bonus each year to secondary math and science teachers
• No more tenure for teachers

Opinions obviously abound, including this one from Jim Shaw, the former mayor of Rapid City who supports the plan and has apparently been waiting for something like it to be introduced:

Facts show we can do a much better job. The U.S. spends twice as much per student compared to most other countries, but our student achievement rankings are near the bottom.

Daugaard’s statistics point out that student enrollment in South Dakota declined by almost 50,000 between 1971 and 2011, but the number of teachers increased by 869 and other school staff by 3,569.

Daugaard also says spending per student in the state has more than doubled during that time, but test scores in South Dakota have remained flat.

Daugaard articulated what many of us have long believed: Simply throwing more money into education without increased accountability is not the answer.

Personally I was not big on the plan, though not due to specific items but due to its overall assumption about what motivates human beings (and teachers in particular). In reading the newspaper’s description of Daugaard’s plan, I flashed back to the research into human motivation that I read about in Daniel Pink’s book, Drive. In Drive, Pink presents a damning case to the carrot and stick methods of reward and punishment that we so often fall back on, at least in the context of creative and problem-solving pursuits.

In one sense, the observation is obvious. We are not motivated by money nearly to the extent that we believe. Would Gov. Daugaard have come up with a way of solving the budget shortfall without making cuts if we’d simply offered him monetary incentive? Of course not. Similarly, teachers are not going to be motivated to teach better because they might get a bonus. In fact, any teachers who might be motivated by such a bonus would likely be the ones on the very opposite end of the spectrum–in threat of receiving the stick of firing.

A decent salary makes me feel valued and helps me decide whether I can enter the profession. Today, however, I am trying to do my best for my students, but I hadn’t thought about my paycheck until I picked up the newspaper and read about this issue. What that means is that my paycheck is not a motivating factor. A decent salary makes it so I can stop thinking about my salary and focus entirely upon why I am here–teaching students.

There are specific details in the governor’s plan that a person could discuss, but it is the overall approach that alarms me, and I hope as the legislature moves forward to evaluate it, they will consider the wisdom of the underlying principal of attempting to motivate a workforce with carrots and sticks.

This is the message that I sent to my state representatives, whom I chose to contact through email. The responses I received were prompt and thoughtful. The legislative representatives and senators recognized my concern, occasionally sharing it, but also recognized a need to do something, and they were glad that the governor came forward with a concrete idea.

In a further response to a state senator, I chose to highlight a secondary area of concern I have with the plan–its potential effect on the culture of the faculty.

The nature of our education system’s given task is team-driven. As teachers, none of our students are ours alone. We are measured as a school and held accountable as a school. At the high school level I am one teacher of six a student likely has at a given time, and there is a real chance at my school that a student could have as many as 30 different teachers during high school. If that student performs well in my classroom, that is great, but the reality is that I am about 1/30th of his classroom experience here. I am part of a team of teachers working to impact that student’s learning; there is no way to pretend I am more significant than that.

In this way, Governor Daugaard’s plan concerns me in its need to rank teachers–an action that strips away the emphasis on team and clearly identifies who is most valuable and who is not. I have heard some folks express concerns that the plan could stifle collaboration–that teachers will be less likely to share good ideas because those ideas are what might make them part of the top 20%. I suppose this could be true, but honestly, I doubt it would be the case in more than a few rare instances. What seems more likely is that teachers will move through their days and interact with colleagues with the aura of competition and measurement hovering over them, and that kind of unwitting obsession definitely undercuts the team-identity. How can a person focus on students when they’re focusing on themselves?

• “This new hire is pretty sharp. Will she bump me out of the 20%?”
• “The principal popped his head in the door. Was that activity good enough to keep me in the 20%?”
• “I got an advanced class–good. Perhaps then my students’ scores will put me in the top 20%.”
• “She’s been in the top 20% for two years, but we all know she’s not that good a teacher.”
• “I am just not a top 20%, but I’m not a bottom 20% either, so what does it matter?”

If a basketball team had only five players, would the coach rank them all every week, rewarding only the top two players with special recognition and incentive? How would that motivate the other three? How would that help the team? Does it matter whether I’m the second or third best player on the team, or does it matter whether I do whatever it takes to help the team win the game?

Through my eight years of teaching I will confidently affirm one thing above all others: teaching is quite difficult. A plan that measures and ranks teachers can easily erode confidence that all teachers need–even those who would rank only in the top 40% of teachers rather than the top 20%. I can see such a plan agitating and magnifying teachers’ insecurities and defensive responses to correction and critique, because it places the teachers in a position where they need to think of themselves and their status. I can see it undercutting the true state of our pursuit: a team working to propel the learning of a large group of young people.

Do I have any constructive alternatives? This is the challenge one representative tossed at me, and at this moment I have to admit I don’t have any direct substitutions to mention. I do not recognize some easy tweak to the governor’s proposal that would make it palatable, because it is the underlying approach of the plan that concerns me, and any ideas I would have would admittedly begin by scrapping the plan and re-evaluating the original goal: how can we motivate teachers to improve? It seems to me that much more motivational would be a plan that works to empower teachers to improve themselves and that gives them the time and opportunity to master their profession. I could talk for an hour about a plan like that . . .

And that might be exactly where people like me are failing. The dominant theme I detected in my state legislature’s responses was this: “We can see there needs to be fixing, and no one has any better idea, so this is what we’re going to do.” When the governor presented his plan, I jumped up and wrote to my state legislature to say I did not like it. But before he presented that plan, I never said boo to anyone about ideas I might have to improve our lot.

Duty is a word we don’t use much anymore in our culture outside of Marine commercials, but that does not eliminate it. I think I have a duty as a teacher and citizen to participate more fully in the legislative process; a duty to be not only protective and reactive to legislation that is introduced, but pro-active and constructive about legislation and policies that do not exist yet.

Later this week I think I’ll jot one idea I have, something that fits my qualifications as empowering teachers to improve and giving them time to master their profession. Perhaps it won’t help anything or matter, but it’s better than just complaining.

• SD State Legislature on Flickr by: Paul-W

Possibly due to how obvious my fascination with such books is, a friend recently asked me for some titles to read with his sons when they were gone on a trip. It got me thinking about boys and books and what kinds of titles I tend to suggest when boys are looking for something to read. I thought I’d share a few titles I constantly put in front of my 9th and 10th grade boys when they’re looking for something.

It seems important to mention that I am not talking about “struggling readers” with these–that brings up an entirely different category of suggestions.Neither am I necessarily talking about AP Literature bound students. These are books I find don’t get rejected by grade-level reading ability males in their freshman and sophomore years.

Without further ado, here are 10 books I think boys will like:

Lord of the Flies by: William Golding

Golding has said that he chose to feature boys in this book because boys tend to show the traits he wanted to explore in a more obvious manner. He included no girls because themes of sexual tension were not what he was after. I remember reading this novel in high school and only half joking with my childhood buddy which characters we would have been. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a good one.

Shiloh by: Shelby Foote

This book utilizes the same research Foote uses in his Civil War: A Narrative, but the book is fiction. I listened to the CD from the library this summer and it was one of the best read audio books I’ve heard. It certainly does not glorify war, but it explores it and considers the battle from many angles; that is something I think many guys want to do.

True Grit  by: Charles Portis

Obviously this novel has been adapted for film twice with great results each time. I listened to the book and it was awfully interesting. The protagonist is a girl, so it may not seem manly on the surface, but the themes easily open up conversations about what grit is and why it matters, and most guys can appreciate the kind of grit on display here (I’ve actually read about some interesting research that shows that what we call grit is the single biggest predictor of success for individuals–far more accurate than GPA, extra-curricular involvement, or test scores).

Endurance by: Alfred Lansing

    My obsession with Shackleton is well documented, so there’s no need to recount it here. The book starts slow but gets entrancing before long.

Into Thin Air by: Jon Krakauer

I loved this book. Granted I have always had a fascination with high altitude climbing anyway, but what guy with an adventuresome spirit wouldn’t? This book really brings up questions about how far is too far when it comes to taking risks, as well as questions about what is most important when pursuing a goal. Plus that it’s all true is fascinating.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by: Sherman Alexie

A former student of mine–an American Indian student–told me he was reading this book and that I should read it. I did and later asked him why he liked it so much. “It’s so true,” he said. Alexie captures what it is to be a teenage boy and from the perspective of my student, at least, what it is to be an American Indian boy. There are a couple sections with crude talk, but to be honest, it’s far less crude than what I used to hear in the locker room, and it arguably does much to contribute to the genuine nature of the character.

Friday Night Lights by: H.G. Bissinger

This is about Odessa, Texas more than the games, and many students hate the book because they think it’s going to be an exciting sports novel. If, however, a student is thoughtful about the culture that surrounds sports, he will find a lot here to like.

1984 by: George Orwell

The power struggle in Orwell’s novel seems to be something guys can understand. When boys in my classes begin this book, they usually finish it. When girls begin it, they often quit. I wouldn’t call that a scientific study, but it might make me want to conduct one . . .

The Lord of the Rings by: J.R.R. Tolkein

This isn’t a surprising or shocking title for such a list, but these books are so good they shouldn’t go ignored. Also, since the years of Peter King’s movies are getting lost in the past, fewer high school students have read them.

The Iliad or The Odyssey by: Homer

The textbook excerpts of The Odyssey in our Prentice Hall literature texts have sapped the life from Homer’s work, especially the life that a student would enjoy. When my students hear some of the cut parts–like the battle in the hall that our text summarizes by saying, “Aided by Athena, Odysseus, Telemachus, Eumaeus, and other faithful hersdsmen kill all the suitors.”–they ooh and ahh over them. A decent reader, encountering an exciting translation like Robert Fagles’s, is able to love these works.

That’s my list. It’s far from complete, but these are the 10 that came to mind first. Thanks for reading!

Ben Saunders Walks to the North Pole

Obviously I like adventurers, especially cold weather ones (see my obsession with Shackleton and Everest for further proof). I used Ben Saunders’s talk to fit into my character lessons for this year: greatness is reserved for those willing to endure the pain it takes to achieve it. I pointed out that a valid question is what greatness has to do with us–after all, greatness is by definition something only a few can achieve. Saunders uses the word potential, and I submitted to my students that for each of us, greatness is something we achieve when we’ve reached the top percent of our potential.

Janelle Monae Makes a Body Want to Move

I can’t dance, but I wish I could. Someday I hope to take my wife out to dancing lessons as a series of dates, but for now I’ll have to stick to spectating. Janelle Monae’s video is worth spectating . . .

Christmas Worship through Carols

I love Christmas carols and especially love concert choirs. In addition to wishing I’d learned how to dance, learning to sing is something I wish I’d learned to do. I admitted to my students today that it would have been good in high school to take choir–I truly would love knowing how to read music and simply sing the bass line. It wasn’t until later in life that I realized that my vocal range is sufficient for such singing, that music is written for “normal” voices like me to sing in parts . . . Who knew? Anyway, “Once in Royal David’s City” gets a lot of play on my computer during Advent.

Thanks for reading–and watching . . .

Yet even without much desire we knew God was bigger than our imaginations, and we always knew if more children were in his plan for us, he could grow in us a heart for adoption.

I’m no farmer, but by watching my wife garden a bit I have learned the clarity of one thing: if you want a seed to thrive, you have to prepare good soil, and in our yard that requires lots of additives. Looking back on our lives I can see how God prepared the soil for a seed he wanted to plant. Our pastor had preached convincingly on the sermon on the mount, reminding us of the importance of storing our treasures in Heaven. He’d also impressed in us a lesson from the book of Ruth about Naomi, who acted with confident initiative because she knew God’s heart even when she could not know God’s plan. Such insight encouraged our faith and increased our confidence that God in and of himself is sufficient for us and that he is eager for us to move boldly in faith.

With such enrichment of faith occurring, we reacted differently when we encountered the concept of adoption. To stay with the metaphor, our soil was receiving sufficient additives that it could accept and nourish a seed.

Such a seed dropped when I had been reading some things with the kids that caused me to wonder about adoption. It came from out of as close to nowhere as something can come and I didn’t explore deeply, yet the thought that adoption would be a good thing lingered.

For my wife, the seed dropped when she met a woman at a local coffee shop who was adopting a baby from Ethiopia. My wife heard her whole story and came home affected by the experience. We talked about it together but did not decide on anything–it’s not like the clouds opened up and we suddenly sold a car in order to adopt.

We did pray about it, though, and after some time I admitted to my wife that the more I thought about adoption, the more it made sense. That metaphorical seed had sprouted.

For me, the sense it made arose from the gospel, which suddenly struck me as an explicit story of adoption. It seemed like every time I returned to consider the gospel, which is just about every time one opens the Bible, I faced the idea of adoption.

Meanwhile, my wife was doing her own survey of scripture, a survey not of the imagery of adoption but of the practical call to it. The thing that got to us most powerfully was what we read from Deuteronomy (10:17-18), a statement of identification that God gives to the people of Israel as Moses descends from Mount Sinai with the second set of tablets showing the 10 commandments.

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.

Essentially, this is the first thing he mentions to make people know the kind of action they can expect of God. The implication is that we know who God is when we realize he executes justice for the fatherless and the widow.

It is one thing to say the Gospel is explained through adoption. It is another to realize that God loves these fatherless children so much that caring for them is the most significant and exemplary action he takes. In fact, sometimes he’s not even called God, but “Father of the fatherless” (e.g. Ps. 68:5). In our thinking verses like this moved adoption from a powerfully explanatory metaphor to a compellingly tangible example of God’s personality and heart.

Then we discovered more than the example. In the verses where we found many of these references, God commanded the Israelites to care for the sojourners (or aliens, depending on the translation) because “you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” In our ears this echoed other responsive commands, like forgive because you have been forgiven, and love because he loved you first, and we began to feel that burden of response with adoption. We are adopted–what would our response be to that act of caring mercy?

For us, we knew that what we were really considering was adoption: extending our arms and welcoming to our life a child in need of a home. As a response to the Gospel, as a reaction to God’s personality, this is what we needed to do.

There are other reasons why adoption makes sense for our family. Family is very important to us– we’ve committed to living off one income, I am committed to being home in the evenings, and we spend our time primarily with one another. Our best ministry, then, is to expand that family structure where we minister best. Yet ultimately these kinds of things are traits, not calls. These things give us confidence that we are fit for what we are doing; they’re not the call itself. The call comes from our understanding of the Gospel of Christ and the heart of God. The one who has made us children of God and defines himself as the father to the fatherless wants us to defend the cause of the orphan, and we are convinced that adopting a little one is the perfect way to respond to his call.

And now we pray that the Lord will bless us with the grace we will need as we respond to his calling.

Thanks for reading.

———–

• The Light Fantastic on Flickr by: ecstaticist

I fear the over application of relevancy, as I have mentioned often here. The quality of relevance is usually applied to things like the humanities with a wrecking ball–how can a knowledge of poetry or philosophy or theology earn a paycheck? Personally, I think literature is astoundingly relevant. In fact, I think my very goal in the classroom is to help students to discover and savor truth that is stated beautifully and to express beautifully that which is true. What could be more relevant than that?

Yet what if we were to stop insisting that people who simply want “a good job”–who really want training for a particular career–go to a liberal arts college? We might find the frustration over relevancy disappears, because then each learner would be studying something they knew was relevant.

Buy-in is a term some of my colleagues apply to this situation. If we have buy-in from students, then we can accomplish something. If we lack buy-in, it does not matter what teaching initiative or strategy we apply to the situation, it won’t work.

I think about this with my own children sometimes. They are young and just entering school, which means they still think all learning is wonderful. With them, we definitely have buy-in. They’re at the age, too, where parents like me begin asking themselves what they’re going to do if the child wants to go to college. Personally, I don’t know what I am going to do about the financial side of things–I certainly cannot afford to send them to my alma mater–but I have thought a bit about the non-financial side of college. That is, if my children do go to college, it will only be because they want to go. And even then, it will only be because they want to go in order to learn. If as they grow up they lose their buy-in for a liberal arts education, I will not endorse their pursuit of a typical four-year college.

I have been reading Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy, and in one section Vanauken sings tribute to Oxford University, where he attended graduate school. He and his wife obviously loved Oxford, and his words echo my own feelings about my undergraduate experience. In some ways, I am convinced that if students cannot say that this is their goal during college, they might want to rethink their attendance.

Even at some cost to our time alone together, we had decided from the first to reach out to or draw in all we could of the extraordinary richness of the great university round us. In a way all of us at Oxford knew, knew as an undercurrent in our minds, that it wouldn’t last for ever. Lew and Mary Ann expressed it one night by saying: “This, you know, is a time of taking in–taking in friendship, conversation, gaiety, wisdom, knowledge, beauty, holiness–and later, well, there’ll be a time of giving out.” Later, when we were scattered about the world. Now we must store up the strength, the riches, all that Oxford had given us, to sustain us after. She stood there, Oxford, like a mother to us all with her hands heaped with riches. We could take what we would. (118)

This is full buy-in. This is what success in college looks like. It looks like a student recognizing what a place has to offer and taking as much as he or she can. And if a student is not ready to take what a college has to offer–and I do not include wild parties and large athletic facilities as part of its offerings–then they need to go somewhere else, somewhere where they can gratefully take what is there for the taking.

I had Vanauken there with me at conferences last night, but if I had read that passage to a couple of my parents they would have looked at me like I was a lunatic. Yet the passage would have been appropriate, because the students obviously were not ready to take the heaped up riches of this kind of education, and they and their parents should probably begin a serious search for something those students can buy into. If they don’t find something, they certainly won’t find success.

Thanks for reading.

• The Bridge of Sighs on Flickr by: J. Salmoral

There is much one could say about the idyllic arrangements of one’s family. The very structure strikes me as the closest we come as people to a perfect arrangement. We know each other so well, we love each other so much, and we’re so committed to living our lives together, that we are able to relate to one another more effectively than any other relationship. I am speaking, of course, of the arrangement and the intended consequences of it, not of the broken situations with which we are all familiar.

I think about this because, for me, it’s been a long week at work. I got worked up again, which essentially means I butted up against what I consider to be effects of bureaucracy, and I had a hard time calming down or “letting it go.” A few hours after work, bathed in constant prayer for peace and with my family so clearly helping me to calm down, it occurs to me that the family is essentially the opposite of a bureaucracy. It’s as pure an antonym as I can think of.

Take a simple situation with my son as an example. You see, we are a family that insists upon first-time obedience. That is, if I ask one of my children to do something, I expect them to do it the first time I mention it. I don’t count to three, and I don’t allow them to ignore me and then have me not bother to enforce what I said. One of the most important ways this effects my parenting is that I am very careful about what I tell them to do. If I don’t really mean for them to do something, I do not tell them to do it. I have found this to be freeing for them, because they don’t have to play games guessing whether I really mean it this time.

When my son gets up in the morning and we hang out, he is always too noisy and is always in danger of waking up his sisters before they need to be awake. As a parent who expects first time obedience, if I tell him to be quiet, he should be quiet. But in this case, I know my son well enough to know how difficult such a task would be. The boy is a noise box. I’ll say, “Remember to be quiet,” and he’ll whisper really quietly for about 10 seconds. After a minute, his whispers are up to a normal person’s full volume, and then a minute after that he’ll overturn a box of Legos, having what appears to be no idea that “quiet” means doing things differently not only with our voices, but with our toys too.

Thus, instead of issuing one-time orders in this situation and demanding morning-long obedience, I teach him morning after morning what it means to be quiet; I remind him that the girls are “still asleep” if it has been a while, since their rest is clearly not the first thing on his mind; and along the way I ask him to do a few things that are clear and which he can reasonably obey without any problem.

We have a standard for our family, the standard of first time obedience, but we know our children so well and care for them so much that we are able to examine the fuller situation and apply the standard in a way that honors our son and produces the results we ultimately want. In this case, the result is that our son is learning to be considerate of his sisters and play quietly until they are awake. And by issuing the “orders” carefully, I uphold our standard of obedience.

It seems to me that the ability of a parent (and really, any family members) to take the person into consideration is the big difference between a family and a bureaucracy. I realize considering a bureaucracy next to a family seems almost unreasonable–how can it compete, when it has seemingly no common purpose to a family? Yet I’d say the purposes are not that far apart in some ways, and the way the two different entities approach their duties lends an insight into how we might improve our work in bureaucracies.

Education, of course, is a bureaucracy. Even a small school falls under the authority of its district, which falls under the state department of education, which falls under the national DOE. And as with anything else involving public money, the the departments of education fall ultimately under legislative authority at each level. Someone a couple layers up says something needs to be done in a particular way, and as the idea trickles down the hierarchy it loses its original context and transmutes into a dictate and a mandate.

The loss of that original context and intention in each idea reminds me quite a bit of my reading about knowledge management. In the field of knowledge management, the idea exists that knowledge ultimately cannot be detached from a knower. Thus, if we wish to share knowledge through an organization, we will find that we cannot simply record the knowledge in a data form and pass that data along as knowledge. Once detached from the knower, it loses something important.

The bigger the bureaucracy, then, the easier it is for that knowledge to be detached from the knower, and once it moves away from the original knower, it seems to become something else–a dictate, a mandate, or some other word we have heard before.

Some of this may be due to the telephone-game concept, where the message changes at each level. A colleague of mine pointed this out to me this week. At the top of the chain, an individual we’ll call a Level A worker uses research to make an informed decision about what teachers should attempt to do in their classrooms, perhaps a particular practice. That Level A worker teaches some Level B workers about the research and the practice and asks the Level B workers to pass it down to Level C and make sure that Level C workers are implementing the important practice. Level B then turns to Level C and says, “Do the practice,” and the research and underpinning philosophy behind it has disappeared along the way. Thus, the knowledge the Level A worker wanted to pass along is lost.

It seems to me that this is why so often a top level worker steps in and calms things down after a change or mandate has moved through a system and created a ruckus. The mandate moved through apart from the knower, and the knowledge was not communicated until that knower addressed the effected workers him or herself.

Yet knowledge moving down is not the only direction where we must be concerned in a bureaucracy. In a family, that anti-bureaucracy, I have a need to pass knowledge down to my children just as a manager has a need to pass knowledge down to those he’s supervising, but that is not where the communication stops. My children are not a batch of inanimate receptors. They are dynamic persons with unique needs, goals, and skills. In learning about them and evaluating them, it is crucial that I do not attempt to pry their knowledge from its context.

I might say that one of my children lacks skills with abstraction. Her sister tried to spell a word for her to give her a secret clue that we were going to eat ice cream (otherwise Little Brother would have known and not eaten his dinner) and she refused to attempt to picture the letters in her head. My analysis that she lacks abstraction skills might be accurate, but it would also be unfair not to consider the person who is not abstracting. That child was barely five years old at the time, meaning that such abstraction might be too tricky for her stage of development. She could have read the words if written, however, so perhaps she simply did not like the game and didn’t want to play along–a very likely scenario considering this particular child of ours. Those factors make me unwilling to draw judgment on her abilities with abstract thinking just yet. I value my daughter in this way by considering her, the knower, and her knowledge together. Ultimately, it is valuing the person that is important.

A week or two ago a friend of mine related an incident in the news. He said that a principal of a school in New Hampshire had confiscated a flag from a student because it could be used as a weapon. This friend likely heard the news on a conservative talk show, which I am guessing means the story was framed under the idea that schools are unpatriotic. While I understood why someone would interpret the story in such a way (considering the pledge of allegiance lawsuits of a few years back), I immediately interpreted the story in a different way.

My first reaction was to figure that the principal in question was just like the thousands of principals all across our country who are trying to do their jobs and enforce the rules that have been given. Ultimately, a serious portion of their job is to enforce rules–they are much closer to referees than coaches, if one wanted to make an analogy for their work. Yet it sounded to me like this principal was doing precisely what a bureaucracy does that a family can avoid–he did not seem to consider the person as much as he considered the rule, the mandate, or the standard. It did not matter if the boy had been bringing the flag to honor his dad who had been deployed six months to the day, the rule was the rule and while on school grounds he couldn’t possess something that could be used as a weapon. (I should emphasize that I have not read the actual news event and don’t know why the principal took the flag–it’s not really the point of what I’m saying.)

Without considering the person and the context, the authority dishonors that person and, in a sense, dehumanizes him or her. I use de-humanize intentionally, because the exchange considers less of the human and more of the external conformation to the rule or formula for acceptable behavior.

Mandates and rules are big deals and I do not mean to dismiss them, especially when management’s primary responsibilities are to ensure that such regulations are being followed. Yet when regulating, managers must remember they are regulating people, not mandates. Unfortunately, it takes a good deal of courage for a principal or manager to view the person instead of simply viewing the mandate. It is courage that will reap dividends, however, because such an approach not only honors people, but more effectively reveals the truth of a situation.

Say a teacher is showing a lot of movies in a class. The principal has noticed this pattern after walking through the department a few times and is confident that the teacher has exceeded an appropriate quantity. How should that principal then address the situation? One way would be to write a note informing the teacher that films are not a central part of her curriculum standards and she needs to stop showing them. Another would be to wait until the teacher’s evaluation comes up and mention it then. Either of those options would enforce the rule, but both approaches seem a bit detached and do not particularly honor the person. Additionally, though the teacher might stop showing movies, it is unknown whether that teacher has improved her practice by not showing them or simply inserted an alternative waste of time that is harder for the principal to detect.

Another approach might be to open a conversation with that teacher about the films and find out why the teacher has been showing so many. Such a conversation might reveal that the teacher has been overwhelmed with papers to grade and has found that showing a movie prevented students from creating more papers that added to her pile; or perhaps she did not value the literature curriculum particularly and decided to show movies as the primary method for teaching story. These cases would present vastly different situations. In the first one, the teacher doesn’t need a reprimand but rather some mentoring about how to balance and manage student paperwork; in the second, the teacher has a philosophical approach that might be inconsistent with the goals of the subject being taught, which could lead to a parting of company. Either way, the person is honored in the exchange and the truth is discovered.

A bureaucracy’s greatest weakness is its impersonality. Too often at work I find myself referring to Orwell’s 1984 and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, finding that the “This is the way it is, it’s what the rules are and it’s our job to follow them, no matter how strange they seem” approach to my work is similar to the mentality of those who flourished in Oceania and the Soviet Union. When I encounter frustrations, things I believe to be wrong, I should just chill-out, play the game, jump through the hoop, and then those above me will leave me alone and I can live a nice, mellow existence.

Perhaps that’s what I should do, but I just am not ready to live that mellow existence. I get worked up about the bureaucracy at work and holler against it like I’m the last Who in Whoville, desperate for someone to hear me. I am convinced that it is possible for someone to hear me, too. In the Soviet Union, the giant system was the work of dictators. Here, we do not live in a dictatorship, and I am hopeful that somewhere up there in the levels above me, people work who have the courage to blink their eyes and break out of the trance of bureaucracy, people who have the courage to consider the person before the mandate.

After all, those people above me have families. That means they know how to work with people and value them as the humans they are. Perhaps they just need someone to remind them.

Thanks for reading.

Yet recently I found myself cringing about having someone come into my classroom, and I am no more excited about an administrator doing my evaluation than any other teacher, even a non-tenured first year one. I was a bit surprised at myself when I realized how opposed I was to having this visitor, and I’ve been giving some thought to what it is that bothers me about it.

• Is it that I earned certification in a highly involved program and I’d had my fill of classroom observations through that year?
• Does it have to do with the years of courses I have taken without time to test out the ideas I developed during those courses, and I want to be left alone to experiment?
• Am I becoming a cranky old teacher who wants to be left alone since I know generally what I’m doing and don’t want someone to throw recycled jargon at me?
• Is it that I do not want to be evaluated, even if that is not what the person is trying to do, on the basis of a short visit?

Maybe.

I think it might also have something to do with the manner in which a few ideas have trickled down to me the last couple years.

Let’s say for an example that my district read a study that found that sitting in circles could be beneficial. Circles foster conversation between learners and openness to their ideas. It takes the symbolic emphasis off the teacher and forces the teacher to rely on different classroom management techniques to control the classroom. The district then conducts a series of professional development opportunities to communicate this to faculty. It then follows it up by checking into classrooms to see if the desks are in circles (I am, of course, making all this up).

Now the teachers want to make sure they stay on the good side of the people with the power to evaluate them, so they put the desks in circles. Never mind whether some of those teachers have been able to foster conversation between learners and openness to their ideas with the desks in other shapes–what is being looked for are circles, and therefore if the teachers want to make their lives easier, they’ll simply do circles.

I know it’s an imperfect analogy, but I need a concrete illustration to point out how this kind of initiative can put a teacher on the defensive. If a teacher has been doing something great for years, something admirable and worthy of emulation, it does not matter because it does not match the formula. That teacher could easily feel these two things: 1) what I am doing is apparently not good enough, and 2) fidelity to the formula is the easiest way to please those in charge.

When I as a teacher am feeling like observers of my classroom might be walking through the door with specific lenses–the lenses of an initiative that has grown trendy, like my hypothetical circle of desks–I am hesitant to hear what that person has to say. I do not want someone to see that my desks are in a circle but miss all the things I was already doing to produce the same effect that the circle was intended to create. If someone is going to come into my room, I want that person to have a firm grasp on our purpose; I want them to be be able to see what is going on in light of that overall purpose, despite what topics are trending on the Twitter feed of educational professional development.

Maybe my observer from last week was not coming with that lens, of course (I have no particular reason to suspect it); maybe it could have been a wonderful opportunity to have someone take a clean look at what I am doing. The thing is, I have seen this pattern of lens-filtered, formula-driven thinking so frequently that I am coming to see it as the default mode of observers. Until I see otherwise, I am protective of being put under that analysis.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, I decided to forgo the chance of having a visitor. I suppose I’m more of a cranky old man than I had realized before.

Thanks for reading.

• “Like I was going to trespass” on Flickr by: cmaccubin

My best attempt was a journalism workshop that my freshmen did last spring. They wrote a series of pieces and we did it within a two week stretch. At the end, they handed in what they had completed, though I’d encouraged them to hand them in as we went, so I could review their work for them. I liked it, sort of. The final result involved their messing around too much and too many students handed me piles of articles on the last day (or after it, as the cases proved).

This summer I attended a class on writing workshops taught by a colleague in my district and I peppered her with every question I had stored up over the previous years. I felt slightly bad for the other teachers in my class, since I commandeered the class as my own personal learning experience and essentially adopted the instructor as my personal tutor and sounding board, but I was so determined to get this right that I did not care what other people thought.

The end result is what I am testing out this year. I took every writing assignment I was planning to assign through the quarter, plus a couple new ones, and put them on one sheet of paper (and one webpage, of course). I counted the number of Fridays in the quarter (for this first one there are six, not counting the first week and a three-day week in October) and made each one a due date. Then I assigned students one fewer writing assignment than the number of weeks in the quarter. Thus my sophomores will hand in five writing assignments this quarter and will get one week off. Each week they must hand in one assignment (minus, of course, the week off, which they can use when they want).

We have a block schedule where I see them every other day for 95 minutes, so every class we will spend 30-40 minutes in writing workshop. If they do not want to write, they can read, but they must be doing one or the other. Homework for other classes is forbidden.

Essentially this is what my colleague in the district does, and I really like it, so I’m hoping it succeeds. If I keep up with it my students will write significantly more than I have had them write in the past, which is important to me. I will read more of their writing, giving more frequent (albeit less detailed) feedback, and they will be able to choose what they work on, when, even as they have to take responsibility for getting things completed on time and staying on task.

Consequently I have been enjoying the task of creating interesting writing assignments. For this year I’ll reuse lots of them (juniors will write the same things as sophomores for example), but I anticipate developing enough in the coming year that I’ll have mostly unique assignments for each grade level.

Here are a few of the ones I have created so far. Feel free to steal them if they’re helpful in your classroom.

Thanks for reading.

Targeting Kids’ Desires

In an interview about affluence in America, writer John De Graff described his observations after attending some marketing conferences, explaining how businesses view children as “cash crops” :

If you go to some of the marketing conferences where marketers talk about how to reach kids, it’s pretty chilling. They use terms like owning, capturing, and branding our kids. They say, “If we don’t own, capture, and brand these kids by the time they’re 18 we may never own, capture, and brand them.”They talk of parents as being gatekeepers that they have to get around with ads that promote what they call the “nag factor” in kids. They are now spending 20 times as much (not 20% more-20 times as much) to target kids with advertising as they were as recently as 1980.

We heard one marketer say, “Anti social behavior in pursuit of a product is a good thing.” He meant by that that ads that promote rude and anti-social behavior among kids would make parents look like fools and fuddy-duddies were useful ways of getting to the kids to sell products and get around the parents.

Please respond to De Graff’s comments with your own perspective. Use your own experiences and observations to share to what extent you agree or disagree with his observations. This should be 350-600 words.

Passing Along an Activity

In his book Summer of ’98, Mike Lupica writes about how he learned to love baseball from his father and how he then shared that love with his own children:

Baseball is something that is passed on. . . . I go to all the sports events with my children, all the time, and I would always rather take them to the ballpark, and they would rather be there than anywhere else. I hope that one of the reasons is because they are there with me.

I cannot tell you for sure why baseball is passed on the way it is. . . . It was something I shared with my father, and still share today. It was a special language we had . . . A love that fits inside of a bigger love, like a ball in a mitt.

Consider your own favorite hobby or activity. Think about what makes that activity interesting, and how you and others have come to participate in it. Write at least 400 words about how you have come to love your favorite leisure activity.

Reflection on war and stories

Shelby Foote, who is famous for writing a three volume history of the Civil War, once said the following:

All good literature about war is anti-war. If you are celebrating the glory of war, you’re writing trash . . . because the truth is it’s more bloody than it is glorious, and the pain and the suffering are a far bigger part of it than the patriotism and the glory.

Consider books you’ve read or movies you’ve seen about war in light of Foote’s comments. What is your position regarding the telling of stories about battles or war?

Make this 450-700 words.

Reaction to Youth Sports

Please read this article called “Where elite kids shouldn’t meet” and react in a paper of your own. Use information from your own life and observations to react to the situations that Tim Keown is crying out against. What is the problem as he observes it, where have you seen the problem, and do you think it is a problem? Make this 300 words, minimum.

Descriptive story of your summer

A number of my students have declared that the essence of summer is freedom. If this is the case, please consider your summer and a time where you either felt particularly free or a time when you failed to experience that freedom. Describe that time for us. Make the readers feel like they’re there with you. 450-500 words.

Short story for kids

My children often come in to visit me. Suppose that they were here today (this year they’re seven, five, and three years old) and asked you to tell them a story. They love suspense, they love humor, and they have wonderful imaginations. Whether you use those things or not, the key is that they love a good story. Please write a story that you might tell to them. Keep it between 300 and a 1000 words.

Reflection on money and evil

Many of you have heard the saying that money is the root of all evil. In a book I read about the history of America before emancipation, for example, Daniel Walker Howe makes an observation that highlights how money is what was behind much of slavery in America: “Slave children represented capital gains. So a respected Virginia planter could advise his son-in-law in 1820, ‘A woman who brings a child every two years [is] more valuable than the best man of the farm.’”

Please explain or show to what degree you agree with the statement that money is the root of all evil. Use examples from life, history, or even literature to explain your opinion. Make it 450-700 words.

(In case you’re wondering where the quote comes from, it is actually a common misquotation of a verse from the Bible–1Timothy 6.10, which says “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils,” but the misquote has become better known in our culture than the original.)

Most Beautiful Place in America

Please describe what you claim is the most beautiful place in America. Make sure your piece appeals to three of the five senses, and make us as readers feel like we are there experiencing that place. Make this piece 300 words, minimum.

Character Narrative

Please invent a character and then tell a story in that character’s voice (that is, in first person). To introduce us to who is speaking, please include two lines at the top of your page explaining (in third person) who your character is. Then skip a line and begin your story. Make this piece 300 to 750 words.

Dialogue

Write a one page “story” that consists of dialogue between two characters. If you’d like, use The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a model for how to capture an exchange between two characters. This should be a concrete example of indirect characterization. 300-750 words.

Technology and Manners

Is our technology ushering in a new era of rudeness? The web journal Slate sets the stage:

With smartphones appearing in millions of pockets and computer screens mediating more and more of our interactions, the question of what’s rude has rarely been in greater flux. Technology and social media have connected us in astounding ways, but they’ve also given rise to etiquette dilemmas [last century's etiquette experts] never could have imagined.

Please chime in with your own opinion about what is polite in the use of technology 300-750 words.

Pine Needle Article

Write an article for the school newspaper, The Pine Needle, reporting on a school related event or activity. See details for writing this narrative report online. Realize you’ll need at least one quote from a person who was at the event you are reporting on.This should be between 250-600 words.

Pine Needle Personal Essay

Write a personal essay for publication in The Pine Needle. See ideas at the Pine Needle’s staff wiki for more ideas about what would work. This would need to be 300-1000 words.

The Purpose of Sports

Is there a broader purpose or reason for participating in organized sports? Explain in a minimum of 400 words.

To get you thinking, consider reading Rick Reilly’s column, “Let’s Keep Rolling,” where he sings the praises of four former athletes who spearheaded the retaking of United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. They resisted terrorists’ attempts to crash the plane in a populated area and forced it instead to crash in a field in Pennsylvania:

There certainly were more passengers among the 33 on board who planned the insurrection and stormed the cockpit, but we know about these four. All of them jocks. All of them with the physical and mental training to rise up when all seems lost.

_____________________________________________

Images:

• Writing Workshop 1 on Flickr by: Ant Smith
• Recording Memories Version 2 on Flickr by: e_walk

Yet for a teenager it cannot feel too good to be given a title intentionally meant to contrast with their great grandparents, the Greatest Generation. In his introduction to The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction Alan Jacobs observes that many of his students have come to believe a bit of the hype regarding their generation’s intelligence: “Told over and over again that they can’t read, they begin to wonder why they should even try.” Perhaps they can’t read as well as their grandparents? Perhaps they have been so distracted for so long that they aren’t that smart? Perhaps, when it comes to things Shakespeare, they’ve got no chance in adding to the world’s fill of insight?

I’ve got one word for them if they think that: Hogwash.

Sure, we could do things better in education and our students could certainly learn more than they do. Sure, we could all benefit with a little discipline regarding these contraptions that surround us. But also sure, with a little discipline and effort, the difficult can be possible. Just ask Danny MacAskill:

My students are going to read Shakespeare, and I predict they’re going to love it. They’re going to understand it; they’re going to memorize part of it; they’re going to bring something insightful, and maybe even new, to the text.

I love my job. May the year begin.