betsy gitelle: January 2011

Goal 1: Be authentic.

Where I Was: Looking ahead, earnestly. I wrote that I wanted to try to be “authentic” in my work toward becoming a teacher, to quiet the ego, to not engage in “false consciousness” or “bad faith,” to behave like the existentialist truth-teller I want to be. I recognized that this would be hard for me because I have a problem with the gift of the gab – and that the gift makes it easy for me to be fatuous and facile. I wanted to use this semester to resist what is easy – and to go for the difficult. I noted that it would be very easy, for example, to think of myself as a “natural-born” teacher, and to feel superior for wanting to help those who are “inferior.” I knew it would be easy for me to jump to conclusions – so I also knew that it would be hard not to. When I started the semester, I was feeling very hopeful and idealistic, and a little hard on myself. I really wanted to get out of my own way.

Where I Am: Looking around, struggling. Since I made the decision to try to start to be a teacher at this relatively late point in life, I have been thinking about what it means to align my outer work life with my inner life. I think back to the Joseph Campbell programs on “The Power of Myth” telling us “to find our bliss.” I think finding our bliss means finding work that is meaningful, that taps into the best aspects of our best selves. Doing this work requires a kind of bravery and strength of character because we will not be able to “fake it.” I thought making the choice to become a teacher would put me on a path to becoming my best self, almost automatically, and that somehow the emotional wholeness of attempting bliss would compensate for the struggle.

I did not foresee how being out-of-alignment with the culture of my fieldwork placement and the culture of the methods classroom would cause me to shut down – clearly making it all the more of a challenge to be my best self. I should have known from experience that when I find myself out of alignment, I tend to shut down. As a middle-schooler, I was enraged by the hypocrisies I saw at school; as a VP at a digital marketing agency, I found myself wondering how I could be spending my creative and intellectual energies worrying about how to sign more consumers up for business cards. In both cases, I could not perform well. Being shut down is the opposite of being brave. I did not imagine that in a school, trying to observe teachers, that I might feel that I had to fake it. This is a different kind of faking than taking the easy way out. I need to be aware of all the places and situations that will challenge me – perhaps more so as a teacher – than I might have expected.

Where I Am Going: Creeping forward, baby steps.

I need to use all the information at my disposal to move incrementally forward and stick to my goals. I must heed the testimonials of the teachers in Ladson-Billings, many of whom work in circumstances much more dire than just being out of place, culturally. I have to find my triumphs where I can. I have to find allies where I can. I have to remember not to be so hard on myself. I have to remember why I am doing this, which is not just about being comfortable, but also: caring about students and helping them learn. Now that I am at this point in the process, I need to be able to tap into my own experience of schooling and remember that an original impetus to try to teach came from my disappointments and failures as a student, and many of those were institutionally-driven. It will be my job to figure out how to defend myself without becoming defensive, and to be vigilant about not shutting down when I am uncomfortable with what the authorities are doing.

Connection to MSU’s Portrait of a Teacher. This goal connects to Standard 9 from the Portrait: “Are reflective practitioners who continually inquire into the nature of teaching and learning, reflect on their own learning and professional practice, evaluate the effects of their choices and actions on others, and seek out opportunities to grow professionally.” I let myself down a few times during the semester, and I could have done better in many ways – but I did muddle through. I also need to remember Doug’s words to me: “The best way I've found to exact my revenge on those who have sought to perform educational malpractice on me is to run my own race and be an excellent teacher despite the type of person they would have me become.” As I learn more about what it means to be a teacher, and as I practice, I will be able to anticipate the triggers that make me shut down. At this point, I do not even know what the students might bring out in me, and as a teacher, it will be my job to model good behavior.

Goal 2: Be on time.

Where I Was: Late. Being late is not good behavior. I wrote: “I have been running late my whole life. I am not going to be successful as a teacher if I am late. I need to be on time in person and with my work. Being late is being entitled. When I am late, I make up excuses. This is a habit of bad faith. I need to break that habit, or better put: I must get in the habit of being on time.” I understood that “being on time” is a metaphor for showing up all in one piece. I understood that “what is attached to this goal: understanding time; prioritizing time; understanding how to distribute tasks across time; observing how others handle their time.” Lastly, I could see that an awareness of time would help me stay engaged in process, and understand the discomforts and learning opportunities of being in transition: “another aspect of this goal: being present, and understanding how to make use of this transition time from being a student to becoming a teacher.”

Where I Am: Still late. In practical terms, I am doing worse than ever. I got a parking ticket because I was late and then parked in a permit-only spot at Nutley High School! I was late on many of my school assignments. I was late picking Sarah up from school, late to class, late, late, incompetently, grossly, self-absorbedly, narcissistically late. Reading Harry Wong helped me understand even more why I need to be on time. Managing the classroom will depend upon my being on time.

Something I realized at Nutley, watching my cooperating teacher browse the Internet, text, and try to get all the grades into GradeBook Pro, is that a key organizing principle of being a teacher is managing time. Being distracted and overloaded makes you unable to enact best practices. Also, the idea of directing a certain amount of energy on specific tasks is connected to how we manage time. If you carry “ten pounds of sugar in a three pound bag” getting where you need to go will be made all the harder.

Where I Am Going: To be on time. I am newly aware of how teachers need to know how to slow things down and speed them up in class. I feel that I am always behind and never going to be able to catch up. Feeling that way will make it very hard to orchestrate how I manage the room. And on a related topic, I need to be able to discern how my students are about time – who is punctual, who struggles. Perhaps externalizing struggles with time will help in the classroom. As our culture becomes increasingly technologically driven and our attention is more and more fragmented, we will need to orchestrate time better. Maybe the students will be able to help.

Another complication of time management is how the creative process affects it, causing the lag time of gestation, or swallowing the time that disappears when you are in “flow.” I will need to be sensitive to the time that I need to prepare for class time; I will need to be sensitive to how much time I need to recover; and I need to know that the choices I make about time will affect others in my community. Perhaps most importantly, I will need to be aware of when my students are in the Zone of Proximal Development, when they are ripe for learning. Seeing this and grabbing that moment is key to teaching, as is knowing when the teachable moment arises. If I am not in control of my time, I will not be able to be available and flexible.

Connection to MSU’s Portrait of a Teacher. This personal goal ties to the Portrait’s Standard 8, to “Create a community in the classroom that is nurturing, caring, safe, and conducive to learning.” Part of what I want to be able to do is “activate” my educational philosophy, and that means creating a safe space for all of us to learn in. “Creating a space between stimulus and response” – the theme of my philosophy of education paper for this class– means being on time. Being able to learn and teach requires time and space (and an unclogged filter) – so I must learn to be on time. One issue that I need to figure out is what I want my policy to be regarding late assignments. I have lots of thoughts about deadlines (yes, I do think they are crucial) and the interactions we have with students about our expectations. I truly want to “walk the talk” so I do not want to be late to my classroom – ever.

Goal 3. Find Out How Teachers Assess Learning.

Where I Was: Curious. My goal was to “Ask teachers I meet in Kearny and Nutley – respectfully – how they know what and how their students learn. See how these answers tie to theory.” Assessment must be an integral part of effective instruction, and the way that teachers assess – even in the MAT program – varies widely. I am curious about how intentional teachers are about their assessment practices and how what they learn through their assessments affects their teaching strategies. I am also concerned with the way that assessments must happen across time. One-shot static assessments are at odds with the ways that students must distribute tasks across time to get the most out of reading and writing.

Where I am: Exploring. After reading Chapter 5 from our class text, I posted to my journal a message that I would want to give my Language Arts students about my goals for teaching and assessment: “I want you to be the best learners you can be; learning is a process of growth: we need to measure it; here is how we will measure it; there will be no surprises; you will earn your measurement – you can direct your growth…. Please grow, students, and show me that you have. Also, you will be instrumental in telling me how I am doing as a teacher, so please tell me how I am doing.” This message does express how I would want to employ assessment practices in my classroom – as the constant stream of output from the processes we are engaged in the room.

I did ask many teachers about their assessment practices during the course of the semester and many of the answers I received were unsatisfactory. My cooperating teacher, predictably, turned to the tests and quizzes and GradeBook Pro and told me that the answers were all right there, (I did not bring up a discussion about valid and reliable measures at that point, another example of bad faith). But the Spanish teacher I met on hall duty did tell me something interesting. One day years ago she walking around her classroom during a group activity,

and she happened to pick up an index card. One of the students asked her, “Are you keeping track of our discussion on that index card?” A light-bulb went off, and she realized that she could track the students’ performance as it was happening by recording it. When I saw her in the hall, she showed me her gradebook where she marks a daily participation grade for each student. After years of fiddling, she says she has her method down to a science. She uses a 4.5-grading scale to assess participation and she enters a number after each class for each student. When students are absent, they are to write a 60-word essay about what they were doing during class time (even if it was sleeping because they were sick) and Peg uses this score to stand-in for the participation score.

This method reminded me in some way of the five-question five-point surveys that Ana Maria would give us before and after class last semester. Some of these surveys were about level of interest in the content; some were about attitudinal changes. Whenever Ana Maria conducted a survey, she would tell us the results of it the next class, and also explain how the results would inform the discussion. These surveys provided information about each of us; about the class overall; and about Ana Maria’s performance.

Where I am going: toward the data. It shocks me that teachers still use pencils and paper to collect data about student performance and classroom dynamics. I imagine myself walking around the room with a headset and tablet. That index card could be instead an interactive device that we use to measure interest and skills. Students could be using these tools as well to register their own impressions of the instruction and their assessments of their peers. “On a scale of 1 to 5, how much did your reading partner inform your understanding of George and Lennie’s relationship?” (Well, maybe not, but something like this.) I think there can be all kinds of ways to create an environment where we are all measuring performance all the time, implicitly and explicitly. These tools, distributed to teachers and students, could take the place, eventually, of high-stakes, one-shot assessments. Generating useful data and mining it mindfully could well be essential keys to best practice.

Connection to MSU’s Portrait of a Teacher: This goal ties to Standard 7 from the Portrait: “Understand and use multiple forms of assessment to promote the intellectual, social, and physical development of learners and to inform instruction.” Last night a principal of a middle school visited us in Methods class. I asked him how he assesses his students to know what they have learned. He said that the best way he knows to measure student learning is to have a discussion with them. This did not surprise me. My grandfather was a historian and a professor, and was known for administering oral exams. This is one practice I would like to emulate. I would love to be able to integrate Socratic Method, oral exams, written work, and tons and tons of data to help me measure my students’ growth. I would also like to use the discussion of collecting and interpreting data for measurement as one of the essential questions that informs my practice. Doing so will require me to be brave, be authentic, use my time wisely, and use assessment for reciprocal learning.

betsy gitelle

Sunday, January 30, 2011

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Thursday, January 27, 2011

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Friday, January 21, 2011

Testing is Where Teaching and Learning Intersect

To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test
By PAM BELLUCK

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