Moving Forward and Not Looking Back

             Last week I attended my first State Board of Education session as a non-voting advisor.  I had such an outstanding experience sitting with the members of the school board and sharing some of my opinions on Common Exams (Measures of Student Learning), Race to the Top, and the new Common Core and Essential Standards.  I had the opportunity to share my opinions both formally at the meetings on Wednesday and Thursday and informally during conversations with school board members and members of DPI.  I am so appreciative that General Statute in North Carolina mandates the advisory positions of two state teachers of the year, the current state principal of the year, the current state superintendent of the year, and two student advisors.  It is so important that those whom educational policy most directly impacts are given an opportunity to share their voices with those making decisions.

                While I attended the meetings, Dr. Atkinson, our state superintendent, posed what struck me as the most interesting question of the two-day session.  It was not an agenda item, but was in response to discussion concerning Common Core standards and Common Exams.  She asked, “How do we move beyond twentieth century artifacts to the twenty-first century?”  The discussion that followed, while brief since we had an agenda to follow, was extremely thought-provoking for me.  Members of the school board brought up important areas that we could examine and modify in order to address the needs of our students today.  Members mentioned changing the school calendar to a year-round model, changing the way we grade students’ work, focusing on project-based learning, and changing the structure of our educational system from a fragmented K-12 model to a more inclusive 0-20 model.  Please note that these were merely discussions about education and not policies to be enacted.  During these discussions, the English teacher in me couldn’t help but to ponder the semantics that are tied into the efforts of educational reform across our country and our state.  Be forewarned, what follows is full of English teacher nerdiness, but directly addresses the culture of reform in education today.  J

                If you look at the word “education,” its origin can be traced to the Latin word educare, meaning “to bring up, raise, or train,” and educere, meaning “to bring out and to lead forth.”  The word “educate” was first commonly used to describe teaching children in the 1500s.  We still have a very similar association with education today: we want to assist in the raising of our students into culturally sympathetic, life-long learners, and we expect our teachers to “bring out” the best in their students and to serve as the guides to help “lead [them] forth” in their educational journeys.  The role of a good teacher does not end when the students leave the doors of that teacher’s classroom, but continues as the students reflect on the skills they gained from the teacher and use them to help navigate an increasingly complex world. 

                Although most people understand the definition and role of education, the semantics that people seem to ignore the most is the difference in reform and in progress.  There is a lot of talk about educational reform in the media, among politicians, and in our communities today.  After our conversations at the State Board meeting last week, I am fully convinced that reform is not what we want.  What we really need to see in our schools is progress.

Think about it: reform starts with the prefix “re-, “which means “back to the original place, again, anew, once more.”  If we want to improve our schools and bring about positive change, do we really want to go back to the educational artifacts of a different century?  Do we really want to rework, reuse, and essentially repeat what we’ve been doing for over one hundred years?  Our students exist in a world where they are inundated with information via the Internet, smart phones, and other forms of instant communication.  Should we really attempt to prepare them the same way we did in the early 1900s when public education first became compulsory and automobiles were only just becoming a primary form of transportation?   This is not what anyone really wants for the future leaders of our communities, our state, our nation, and now more than ever, the world.

                We have become so caught up in the systems that have been in place for a hundred years, that in our efforts to reform public education, we create sweeping mandates that do little to address the fundamental difference: that our students are learning in a vastly different world from the one that many of us once learned in.  We tend to throw money at the problem and withhold money from other areas without really bringing about any true change.  What we really need is progress and not reform.

                Progress comes from the prefix “pro-, “which means “forward, forth, toward the front,” “beforehand, in advance,” and “taking care of.”  It makes sense to structure our educational system around these concepts.  We want our students to move “forward,” and we certainly want their education to place them “toward the front” in a globally competitive world.  If we want to see our students advance, our educational policies must also be forward-thinking.  We cannot continue to be content with looking back to the past.  We can learn from the past, but we cannot dwell in it.  We cannot become a nation of educators that like Lot’s wife or Orpheus look back too much and lose the opportunity to move forward.  We must also be a system that “[takes] care of” our young people in order for them to be the best that they can be.  It is our responsibility to help our students move farther forward than they ever thought possible in order to achieve their goals and dreams.

                Finally, artifact has two primary meanings.  First of all, it is “anything made by human art.”  Our educational system over the past one hundred years has been a work of art, a beautiful creation to serve the majority of our citizens and to make our nation stronger.  However, we cannot let education fall into the second definition of artifact, “an object…of archeological or historical interest.”  Artifacts are lovely and should serve as a reminder of where we once were, what we once did, and how far we have come.  Let us not get so caught up in the history of having summers off, of an A-F grading scale, of traditional testing, or of a fragmented K-12 model that we become a nation of relics that serve as a collection of artifacts for other countries who were willing to keep moving forward.   I am not saying that we need to implement all of these changes, but I do think we need to take some time to consider which changes will best move us forward into the twenty-first century. 

                In thinking about the semantics of education, reform, and progress, I think it becomes clear that we have to be willing to make some changes.  Is change scary?  Absolutely.  Is it necessary in public education?  Without a doubt, but only if we are attempting to progress instead of to reform.  So, in the words of Dr. Atkinson, we all need to ask ourselves, “How can we move beyond twentieth century artifacts into the twenty-first century?”  The lives of our children depend on our answers.

Losing and Finding Our Voices

                Think back carefully to when you were in school and you first learned about our governmental structure and the Bill of Rights.  How did you feel?  What did you think about living in a country where freedom of speech is allowed and where our government accepts letters from the people about their concerns?  Now ask yourself, do you still feel the same way today?

               When I first learned about our government in elementary school, I remember feeling an overwhelming sense of pride, patriotism, and confidence in our government.  As I got older and went through high school, my teachers encouraged us to advocate for ourselves and to make our voices heard as part of our democracy.  I eagerly registered to vote as soon as I turned eighteen (and have voted in every election since then, even voting in absentia from Scotland while I was studying).  I also adamantly voiced my opinions about politics, the world, and hot-button issues in society and government.  I left high school feeling empowered and part of the collective whole that could make a difference in this world.  This sense of empowerment continued into college as I joined a campus political organization, attended political rallies, and put my efforts into being a responsible, active citizen of the United States.

                Then, something happened to me towards the end of college that continued into my adulthood.  What happened to me happens to most other adults and is a major problem within our society.  I found that I started to develop more than a healthy dose of cynicism concerning politics.  I still believed in our government and the principles that served as the foundation of our country, but I found myself disillusioned by the Politics that came into play.  Politics for me became a capitalized word, a personified entity that threatened to ruin the democracy that I held dear.  I began to question the systems of bureaucracy both in our government and in other social services that seemed to create too much red tape in order to get anything truly accomplished. I doubted whether the government that was founded “by the people, for the people” was still “for [ALL] the people.”   I lost the belief that everyone’s thoughts and opinions mattered and became disillusioned by the increasing negativity I saw in newspaper articles, on right-wing and left-wing news networks, heard in conversations, and read on different social media sites.  In short, I began to consume the same vitriolic dialogue against which I once stood in opposition.  I, like so many others, began to let the media’s portrayal of Politics devour the possibilities that our country has to offer.  If you still are not sure of what exactly I am talking about, just spend some time reading comments at the end of any news article online or reading updates on Facebook or Twitter.  You will immediately be inundated with the cynicism of a world that would rather complain than attempt to do anything to bring about change.

                Yet, in the past few years, I’ve slowly started to regain my voice.  Part of the recovery of my voice came from teaching my high school students.  As I encouraged them to think inquisitively about the world, to question everything around them, to come to their own conclusions, and to voice those opinions, I recognized my hypocrisy of not doing the same.  Now, there are some places where it is appropriate to share your beliefs and opinions, and I never do so in the guise of an authority figure in my classroom.  I would never tell my students what to think, nor do I ever tell them exactly what I believe in a classroom setting.  If I did, that would stifle their abilities to find their own voices and their own beliefs.  I refrain from sharing my opinions on interpretations of literature as well as politics in the classroom.  But in hearing my students share their opinions and in seeing their passion to make the world a better place, I started to feel empowered again.  My youthful optimism returned and started to overcome my cynicism.  Then finally, when I had to defend a couple of books that were taught in our school at the school level, the district level, and at the school board, I found my voice again.  I valued the opportunities for discourse provided by the conversations between faculty members, parents, students, and school board members.  I carefully weighed opposing arguments and started to learn more about the delicate balance needed in our schools to reach all students.  In addition, I rediscovered my passions, and I found my beliefs.  I regained my faith in the governmental system and discovered that Politics are really what you make of them and how much you are willing to work within the democratic system that our country provides for us.

                As North Carolina Teacher of the Year, I view my title as one weighed with great responsibility.  I feel that now more than ever, I must not be afraid to let my voice be heard.  But, I am also aware that my voice now must be the voice of more than just myself: my voice is really the voice of the other educators in North Carolina and the voice of our students and their parents.  If I want to make my voice strong, I must listen to the voices and ideas of others, so that I can craft a voice that resonates across the lines of politics and frequent media perceptions to find the possibilities that lie before us in our state. 

                This rediscovery and redefinition of my voice is both terrifying and thrilling for me.  My responsibilities as North Carolina Teacher of the Year must serve as my guide and will sometimes take me beyond the comforts of my life when I allowed my voice to be hidden.  Today I took my first step: I addressed and mailed forty letters to the governor, members of the Senate, and members of the House of Representatives.  The letter was a collective effort created by a team of teachers of the year across the state of North Carolina.  We hope that our collective voice will help bring about positive change for our students in North Carolina. 

                Finally, I want to encourage everyone reading this to develop their own voice.  Let’s drown out the negativity of the cynics around us and rediscover the voice of the child or the young adult who once wanted to change the whole world and found hope and promise in the governmental system. Let’s stop complaining and start fulfilling our civic duties.  Once we find these old voices within, develop them with our maturity and years of insight, and find viable ways to express them, we can achieve so much more than we ever will if we never seek the opportunity to speak and let our voices be heard.

This One Time, At NCCAT…We Turned the World Around

            With a title like that, this post has a lot to live up to. I want to preface this post with a disclaimer that no American Pie-esque adventures happened at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT) in Cullowhee.  What did happen consisted of seventeen outstanding teachers, the majority of whom were Teachers of the Year from their districts, including six regional finalists, meeting at the top of a mountain to hone their leadership skills in their classrooms, in their schools, and in their communities.  Each teacher left feeling empowered to return to his or her school district and work on implementing positive change to help reform curriculum in our schools, improve teacher morale, and most importantly, impact the lives of the students we teach. 

            So often when you hear people talk about NCCAT, you hear them talk about how rejuvenated they feel when they return, how delicious the food was, and how much fun they had being with other teachers.  While those descriptions do describe NCCAT, the experience is about so much more than these more surface-level descriptions.  I think one reason why so many teachers speak about NCCAT in generalizations is that the experience touched them in too profound of a way to completely verbalize those experiences to others who were not there.  Therefore, it becomes much easier to talk about the tangible experiences that all people can understand—educators and non-educators.  Today, I want to put forth my best attempt to describe what NCCAT is really about.

            The one word that best describes my experience at NCCAT is “OPEN.”  Both of NCCAT’s campuses are in open, beautiful, serene, natural surroundings—the mountains and the sea.  The openness of the locales is further fostered by the openness of the instructors to shape and mold the agenda based on the needs of the teachers who are there.  The experiential learning style of NCCAT encourages and fosters this fluid scheduling.  We completed every activity planned for us during the week, but our questions, concerns, and other professional objectives were also valued and inserted into our schedule in order to give us the best possible professional learning environment. 

            Not only was the environment open, but the required homework we had to complete prior to attending, the activities, the reflective writing, and small group discussions helped to foster an open mind in all of the attendees.  If you arrive at NCCAT (or anywhere associated with education) with a closed mind and are unwilling to open it to new possibilities in your classroom, then you are really going to miss out on a critical component of teaching—you should never stop learning.  Every person in attendance during my week at NCCAT left with numerous ideas about ways to connect with students, parents, and other educators.  We learned how to lead by being a part of a team, how to facilitate and encourage support from others, and how to provide essential feedback and foster relationships to help all of our students succeed.  These are concepts that all teachers know on paper, but once you actually experience these concepts, it suddenly seems much more important to implement them in your own classroom.  It forces you to take theory and turn it into practice.

            One of the most impactful experiences with these concepts occurred during an experiential learning activity based on some of the classic team building exercises: getting all members across a series of stones without ever having a stone without a foot on it, moving a tennis ball by pulling on a series of strings to support it, etc.  For each activity, two team members were placed at a distinct disadvantage—one was blindfolded and one was not allowed to speak.  Upon completing these challenging exercises, we reflected on what we experienced.  We all realized that we devoted our time to the person who was blindfolded to help them with the task, but almost always ignored the person who could not speak.  Think about how true that can be in a classroom with students or in a school among coworkers.  We often devote our time and efforts to the students or coworkers who make it clear that they are having difficulty or are incapable of completing something without assistance.  There are so many other students and coworkers who need assistance, but are unable to voice their needs for different reasons, whether due to a disability, fear, shyness, or lack of information.  We all started to reflect on the students and teachers who don’t always speak or get to speak in our lives, and thought about ways that we could reach out to those people so that they do not fall through the cracks.  It was only through an open mind that we were able to examine the flaws within our own practices as teacher leaders.

            The last area where we learned to be open was with our hearts.  I don’t know if our group was particularly united due to increasingly low morale and a feeling that teachers must unite together in order to change some negative portrayals of teachers in the media and in legislation, but everyone was so open with their struggles, fears, concerns, and accomplishments during the week.  We laughed, we cried, we hugged, we conquered a whitewater rafting trip as a team, and we broke through one-inch thick pine boards with our bare hands to symbolize our desire to break through our personal barriers to success.  I heard teachers share concerns about devoting more time to their students than their own children; teachers who were struggling to take care of aging, ill parents; teachers who were adopted at an early age; teachers whose children were recently diagnosed with different spectrums of autism; teachers who were debating about leaving the profession or moving to another state; teachers who grew up with a parent in jail; and teachers who suffered from severe illnesses during the past year and felt guilty for not being with their students. 

As we shared our stories, I immediately thought of how different and how similar we all are.  Our personal experiences are not unique just to this group of teachers, but can be found among teachers across the state.  Perhaps most significantly, this range of backgrounds also represents the diverse students we serve in public education in North Carolina.  Inspired by our mountain surroundings, I couldn’t help but to use the metaphor of a patchwork quilt to describe the teachers at NCCAT, the teachers in North Carolina, and the students and families we serve in this state.  Like the varying fabric squares on an old-fashioned patchwork quilt, each educator brings a unique backstory, a unique set of skills, and a unique pedagogical goal to the hodgepodge of public education.  Our students and their families also bring a unique story, culture, and set of needs.  It is only through our unified effort that we can stitch together all of the disparate pieces into a true masterpiece—a masterpiece that is one finished product but also recognizes the true beauty in allowing each piece of cloth to bring its own irreplaceable contribution to the greater educational fabric.  Being at NCCAT made me realize that while we certainly need accountability and consistency in education, we also need to recognize and make the most of the varied strengths that we all bring to the masterwork.

Finally, I would like to end with the words of the song we sang at NCCAT that truly represent what we all took from our experience there and our goals as we return to our home school districts:

            “ We come to the mountain, the mountain, the mountain

              Go back from the mountain,

              Turn the world around.”

Greensboro Grimsley High

On June 9 I sat on stage during the seventh graduation at Grimsley High School that I have attended.  I had an exceptional view of students as they walked across the stage and received their high school diplomas.  As these students that I taught in a variety of classes walked across the stage, I felt a little like I was graduating with them.  I felt the same mixed feelings of excitement and fear of the unknown that many of them experienced Sunday night.

Grimsley High School has really been a home to me.  After teaching for a semester at Rockingham County Middle School, I found myself as a very new lateral entry teacher at Grimsley High School.  When I first arrived, we were a school in transition.  We found ourselves precariously placed on the edge of a tradition of academic excellence but also with the unknown before us due to redistricting within our county and due to administrative changes.  During my first two years at Grimsley High School, I served under four different principals, and I witnessed firsthand many new teachers leave our school and the profession because the struggles seemed too difficult to overcome.  The edge of the cliff of change seemed too dangerous, too frightening, and too steep. 

For those of us who stayed, we formed a sense of community.  The teachers rallied together and offered support and social opportunities both inside and outside of school.  We informally collaborated across departments and formally collaborated within Professional Learning Communities to reach out to all of our students.  Slowly we began to build a bridge over that chasm below the cliff and began to find a way to give our diverse, varied population the best possible education that we could.  In the end through our construction and reaction to these changes, we formed a community of educators, students, parents, and alumni.

As I sat on the stage at graduation and saw such a diverse group of students graduate, I felt proud to call Grimsley my home.  I knew that I will always be a Grimsley Whirlie (even though no one really understands what a Whirlie is unless you’ve been there…a Whirlie is a state of being).  Like the students graduating that night, I knew that this year would mark the end of my current journey at Grimsley High School as I step out into the unknown and travel the state as North Carolina’s Teacher of the Year.  Like them, I was sad to leave my home, but excited to venture into the future.  Perhaps, most importantly, as I looked out at the students, parents, and coworkers in the Greensboro Coliseum, I realized the most important concept of home: it is a place where you can always return, whether in your heart or in person. 

Tears filled my eyes as I sang the Grimsley Alma Mater for the umpteenth time since I arrived at Grimsley.  However, this time the words rang truer than they ever have before:

            All hail to thee,

            Our Alma Mater strong.

            We’ll pledge our faith and love and loyalty,

            Greensboro Grimsley High.

Thank you Grimsley High School for being such an important part of my life, and know that you will always be my home. 

For the next year, my home will broaden to include all of North Carolina, and like our graduates, I step off the stage into the world beyond, eagerly awaiting what the future will have in store for this Whirlie.

Assessing the Assessment

                Today I finished grading my last student assignment this year.  As I finalized my students’ grades, I pondered over my personal views of assessment.  The truth is I HATE GRADING.  I love planning exciting, engaging lessons.  I love giving students valuable feedback about the quality of their speaking, listening, writing, and reading skills.  I love using assessment as an instructional tool to help me determine what students need more of and what they need less of in the classroom.  But, I HATE GRADING.  I hate the sometimes seemingly arbitrary numerical grade that is assigned to a student’s work that can, for some students, seem like a number that is assigned to their sense of worth.

                  In this age of high-stakes testing and a more materialistic society, extrinsic factors are often more motivational than intrinsic ones.  How do you explain to students, parents, other educators, and stakeholders that learning is about the process more than the outcome? Furthermore, how do you communicate that a grade is not an indicator of self-worth?  These questions plague me at the end of every school year.  Whether calculating grades for my grade-focused International Baccalaureate students or my inclusion English II students, I observe the different ways that each student deals with the concept of grading.  Some students are devastated not to receive an A in a class, while some students celebrate merely passing.  Some students use a failing grade as justification for giving up, while others use the failing grade as motivation to change their study and attendance habits.  In this educational world centered on testing, I can offer no concrete, clear-cut solutions, and can only provide general inquiry.  Fundamentally, I think inquiry is the best way we can teach our students to understand their grades.  Now, I do not advocate inquiry in the form of “Why did I get such and such grade?” or “What can I do to get an A?”  Instead, I advocate the inquiry that comes with reflection. 

                  I would love to see us shift our focus in public education away from grading and onto assessment and feedback.  Just as I would like for my students to view grades as a starting point for thoughtful consideration about what their strengths are and what areas they need to improve, I also view each school year as an opportunity for reflection and growth.  While I do receive some “grades” in the form of teacher observations, parent communication, and peer and student feedback, the most useful tools for reflection come from my own assessment of these outcomes.  I ask myself, “What worked well?  What could I do better next year?  What do I need to change?  What new resources do I need to reach out to my students?”  The key point in my personal assessment is that I consider multiple measures of mastery for myself, and I always put the ownership of my actions back on me.  Even when assessing why the student who missed forty-five days of school failed, I still have to ask myself what I could have done differently.

 I want to teach my students the same strategies for viewing grades and feedback.  I want to see them shift their focus from “Why did you give me this?” to “What can I do to improve?”  I try to provide these opportunities for self-reflection as a part of major essays and assignments, but I often see students diminish the importance of self-reflection as just “filler” or a “waste of time.”  What they are really concerned with is the grade that I will assign them on the final product.  Thus, we come back full circle to the necessity of grades, even though I absolutely HATE GRADING. 

 Unfortunately, as we continue to focus on numerical and letter grades with EOGs, EOCs, Common Exams, and School Report Cards, I don’t know if we will ever be able to shift fully to a system where assessment is more important than grading.  In keeping with the spirit of inquiry, I would like to pose a few questions for you: How do you feel about grading?  What purpose do you think grades serve? Please post your comments and see if we can get a discussion started on grading!