Two Very Different Leadership Academies

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20130126-160115.jpgI was fortunate to spend the end of January at EduCon, the education conference/conversation staged by the staff and students of Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. It’s a unique educational experience that pushes educators and those who value education to think divergently and learn from one another.

One of the most interesting parts of this experience is the setting. SLA is a public magnet high school that represents a partnership between the Philadelphia School District and the Franklin Institute Science Museum. Students from all over Philadelphia apply each year (800 of them last year!) for 120 positions in the new ninth grade class. Their work is all project-based, and from the looks of things, remarkably student-centered. On my tour, I witnessed ridiculous levels of student engagement and mind-blowing creativity from the students in each class. Students were given the freedom to collaborate, and it was clear that learning revolved around them. It was intended to be impressive… and it certainly was.

A new friend pointed out to me after the tour that I work at “Wake Young Men’s Leadership Academy” and asked how similar the two schools are. I was struck with how obvious this question seemed to be, and yet how it had never occurred to me. My school is in a different category than SLA.

For starters, the Philly school accepts only the best and brightest whom apply. This is how magnet schools were originally intended to be. Students get a unique opportunity to learn in an accelerated environment after demonstrating that they have the necessary skills and maturity. They don’t have to worry about remediation or behavior support specialists because they are an elite public school.

WYMLA, on the other hand, is an application-only school whose students are chosen by a lottery. We are specifically mandated to fill half of our seats with students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are required to match the racial and socioeconomic profile of our district. As a result, we have a significant population that requires specially-designed instruction and lacks basic skills in many areas.

We also have a motivation problem that SLA does not. Their students seem excited to be there and energized by the opportunities. They have a learning community atmosphere that is enhanced by their online activity. Fundraising programs, like EduCon, bring in the money needed to loan every student a MacBook each year. They make a strong case for the power of 1:1 education.

Meanwhile, as a new school, WYMLA has a wide array of technology, as well. We’re not quite 1:1, but close. Yet, our students seem to lack the maturity and self-control to work well in the independent learning environment that thrives at SLA. We spend inordinate amounts of time on classroom management and discipline. Why the big difference?

I won’t chalk it up to population because the SLA student body is racially and socioeconomically diverse. But, I do believe that the nature of their selection process and the standards that they are permitted to establish (for academics and student behavior) set them apart. It is exciting to know that places like Science Leadership Academy can exist, but I am glad to be where I am.

At my school, I have the satisfaction that I am providing enhanced instruction for those who are ready for it while still “making a difference” with the students who would not be able to succeed elsewhere. It’s a unique combination that leaves me appreciating my job more and more every day.

How does your school stack up against SLA?

I’m Not Ready, So How Can My Students Be

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20130126-152835.jpgAs I engage in conversations and listen to panel discussions here at EduCon 2.5, I find myself struck by an important idea:
I’m not ready.

I understand the need to change, and I recognize the ways in which public education is failing our students. I write about what must be done, and I talk about the reforms that are needed. But, when I step back into my classroom, I freeze up. I think of all the obstacles that get in the way of better lessons. I get frustrated about the inadequate resources and the limited time that I have to plan and assess.

And, at least half the time, what actually happens in my classroom is not nearly as progressive and powerful as most people who know me would expect. I fall short of the expectations that I put forth for the world of education. And the reason for this failure is simple:
I’m not ready.

I want my teaching to be more student-centered and more project-based, but I can’t even wrap my head around the time and effort (and mental re-tooling) that would be needed to get there. I get “teacher’s block” and end up falling back on the practices that I started my career with. I fail.

And this is a scary thing for me. I resent my own deficiences and want to improve upon them, so I guess that’s a good start. But it doesn’t do much to ease my worries for the time being. I mean, if I can’t get on board and be the teacher I need to be, how can I expect my students to join this revolution?

Do you feel this pressure? How do you deal with it?

How Teaching Prepared Me For The Zombie Apocalypse

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zombieThese days we live every minute looking over our shoulders for zombies.  The undead are just a fact of life.

When It began, some folks struggled to adapt to the status quo.  They lacked survival skills, or weren’t vigilant enough.  They trusted too easily and tried too hard to work together.  They lacked the ruthlessness that a life on the run demands.  But, not me.

You see, I was a teacher.

In the days before the Zombie Apocalypse, I taught science at a public middle school in North Carolina.  When the federal and state agencies adopted “merit-based teacher assessment”, linking our evaluations to high-stakes standardized tests taken by students once a year, few predicted the effect that it would have.  Sure, many of the “reformers” complained that it would destroy our schools, but no one listened.

They warned that teachers would shed their collaborative nature, and become cutthroat mercenaries.  We would hoard lessons ideas and supplies to keep a leg up on the others in our building.  We would fight tooth and nail to teach the students with the fewest obstacles to learning, reasoning that we can’t help anyone if we don’t have a job.  And you can’t keep your job if you don’t get those scores up.

The reformers predicted that it wouldn’t take long for the cheating to begin.  Under tremendous pressure to show that all of the work that we did in our classrooms had “value”, teachers would start teaching to the test and eventually just feed answers to the students on test day.  No reasonable educator would put her career in the hands of little Johnny and whether he ate breakfast that morning or felt like doing his best on test day.

Days before the virus broke out and brains became a delicacy, an intrepid education blogger posted his “How to Succeed as a Teacher” list.  It was supposed to be a joke.

  1. Don’t share your best ideas with ANYONE!
  2. When forming teams, make sure that there is always someone slower than you.
  3. Hoard and steal.
  4. Trust no one.
  5. Don’t help those who are struggling, as you will end up suffering their fate.
  6. Do whatever it takes to survive.

It turns out that these are the same skills that you need to escape from hungry zombies.  Lucky for me, I was trained to be ruthless as a public school teacher before the epidemic.  I feel bad for those suckers with “21st Century Skills” like collaboration and soft skills like compassion.  They’re just zombie food now.

photo credit: caliopedreams via photopin cc

Homework: What is it good for?

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Part of the problem with my particular leadership style is that I am very reluctant to tell other professional educators what to do.  I have my philosophy and my classroom policies, and they are free to have theirs.  A big part of my reasoning for this is recognizing that what works for one teacher might not work for another.  We each have a unique classroom–the students, the space, the resources, and our own personalities–and we need to make decisions based on that unique situation.

Homework is a prime example.  I don’t give very much homework.  This is not for the reasons that you might think, such as valuing my students’ time out of class or questioning the importance of this work.  It’s because I don’t trust my students.  I am not naïve enough to believe that when they take work out of my class the work that they return is solely the product of their effort.  Any veteran teacher can list a dozen different factors that contribute to the quality of homework, other than the skills of the student.  As I put it when I am explaining my policies to my students, “I simply don’t know who completes the homework that I assign or what resources he used to do it.”

But, I don’t fault other teachers who choose to assign, check, track, and grade homework.  If they see value in it, and it helps their students succeed, they should keep doing it.

Now, however, comes a new study that seems to reinforce the idea that homework has value.  The authors point to the statistical relationship between the time (self-reported) that students spend on math and science homework and their performance on standardized tests.  It should come as no surprise that students who practiced mindless tasks nightly also did well on mindless tasks administered over hours at the end of the school year.

What is surprising, and easily overlooked, is that when the authors looked at the relationship between homework and grades in class, they couldn’t find one.  As Alfie Kohn points out, this is amazing when you consider that the same teachers assigning the homework are the ones assigning the grades.  Wouldn’t you assume that, since most teachers who assign homework make it count as a portion of student grades, this relationship would be stronger than the one connecting homework time with test scores?

The answer is puzzling, but the data don’t lie.  Taking a “big picture” view of homework effectiveness seems to reveal that it might not be worth the time and effort that both students and teachers are putting into it.

What’s your stance on the value of homework?

photo credit: Cayusa via photopin cc

The 5 TED Talks that Most Impacted My Life

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Now that online TED Talks have reached one billion views, it seems that everyone is sharing their list of their favorite talks.  This got me thinking about the role that these short videos have had on my own life.  I realized that watching them has opened new doors to me, pushed back against my views, and shifted my perspective on many issues.  Here are my five most influential TED talks:

Will our kids be a different species? by Juan Enriquez

As a science educator and parent, this talk really opened my eyes to the possibility that technology could impact the speed of evolution, and that my children might be that different from my generation.

Aliens, love — Where are they? by John Hodgman

There is little that Hodgman creates that I don’t find mercilessly hilarious.

The 4 a.m. mystery by Rives

Possibly the funniest TED talk that I have ever watched, this one has impacted my own sense of humor and the way I use it in my teaching.

How to learn? From mistakes by Diana Laufenberg

Laufenberg is one of the awesome teachers at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, who explains here how failure is an important part of teaching.

Religions and babe by Hans Rosling

Rosling’s way of presenting data graphically is remarkable and it influences much of the way that I teach my students to create graphs.  This is the most recent of his several TED talks.

These are the ones that changed my thinking the most.  What are yours?