Our Students Need Us

Our Students Need Us

Today marks  two weeks away from students. It is in stark contrast to last week, where I found myself lost without them. How would we approach teaching, without the classroom? Students taught me a few things this week, and reminded me of what my experience should have enlightened me to.

The number one thing we can do right now is connect with our students.

 If you find yourself at a loss about what to do next — wondering how to approach that next lesson or unit. Stop. Connect with your students. At the end of last week, I gave my students a survey via Google Forms. I asked them what they liked, didn’t like, what they needed and how they were. It yielded results that were surprising, heartwarming and reminders of what I should have known all along. If you can meet with them via Zoom for Google Meet, do it. If you can’t, use Google Forms, or even Google Docs to share a message and elicit feedback. Post videos of yourself doing ordinary things. They miss us as much as we miss them.

Some students had family members who were sick. Many wanted to know how my family and I were doing. Most wanted more of one of the assignments we had done — a collaborative Google Form where we had the opportunity to read about all of the helpers in one another’s lives. It helped me to know that the virus had encroached on some students’ lives. As much as we are in uncharted territory, we are in the same space we have always occupied – a place of comfort to our students. Their feedback guided my instruction for this week. I will do the same for next week.

Don’t be afraid. At this point, what could possibly scare us about teaching?

Having met with my students on Nearpod, earlier in the week, for a great experience on current events, I had the smartidea of doing a Kahoot game to practice this week’s vocabulary. Five minutes before the session, my co-teacher reminded me that the game required a Smart Board, in a classroom. I said, “You know what? I can’t let these kids down. I promised I would do this with them.” It failed. Big time. The students could not see the available choices to answer the questions. I invited them to have fun and guess. During each question, I posted who was ahead in the Google Classroom. I told them whomever stuck it out to the end would earn a prize. Four students held. I went on Amazon and had prizes shipped to their homes. Did they learn their new vocabulary words? No. But it was a lesson on confronting failure head on.

Make your own commitment to them.

 With or without my classroom, I am committed to doing what is best for my students. At the end of last week, I thought carefully about what my students needed from me. First, they needed me to acknowledge the work they were submitting to me. I told students and their families I would interact with all work submitted to me. That meant providing feedback, and giving the student credit for his or her work. Second, they need to interact with me. While we are not permitted to meet with students via videoconferencing, I can post videos. I can create what I call “Live Events” for us to meet via Nearpod or Quizziz so we can come together at different times throughout the week. I post everything on Monday so students can plan accordingly. I remain steadfast in my commitment to assess what students need and find a way to provide it. That has always been my mantra.

 Respect where we are.

 Everything I am doing with students respects one certain truth – we are in unprecedented times. What we do with them right now needs to respect and honor where they are, find out what they need, and devise ways to give these things to them. Just like we did, when we were in the classroom. Right now, we have the opportunity to cultivate experiences for all of our students that make the best of the situation we are in, while continuing the love and support we delivered in the classroom. In many ways, this time is the gift of a lifetime. A chance to grow in our practice, and learn more about our students.

With the virus breathing down our necks, possibly impacting those we love, and challenging every aspect of life as we knew it, I hope it is possible to see the light when it seeps through the cracks.

Finding Myself Online

It is day four of being home without my students. We knew this was a possibility. For the last eight weeks, we had been tracking the virus’s movements across the globe. Even in sixth grade, they could see its capacity to replicate itself exponentially each day. Where we are today, home, isn’t so much a surprise, as much as it is a huge loss to all of us. The most common sentiment I see in my Google Classroom is “I miss being at school”. I left my classroom on Monday in tears, knowing it was unlikely that the class with which I had built such a beautiful, in person community with, would ever convene in that space again.

The first day home, I worked about twelve hours to load what I could online for the week. My co-teacher and I decided that we wanted our online instruction to bear resemblance to our in-person instruction. This turned out to be a task far more daunting than I had anticipated. And it is still a struggle in progress. Today a good portion of my day was spent helping students. There was a family in need of food. A student struggling with online access. Finally, the more typical online responsibilities – providing feedback to students for work they had submitted electronically. In hindsight, as I write this, today’s experience mirrors the ebb and flow of classroom life for teachers. More often than not, instruction is sidelined by the needs presented by students that supersede the curriculum. Hunger. Illness. Lack of supplies. Anxiety.

I have found myself this week grieving the loss of the teacher, who a week ago, was surrounded by twenty-five faces – some smiling, some angry, some indifferent. I would give just about everything I have right now to have it all back. But I know I am on a search to find me. The me who took eighteen years to become the teacher she was last week, in that classroom, with those students. That me needs to transition fully for the next few weeks and months to an online capacity that honors students in the same way. The teacher who built a classroom that was rooted in agency and authentic learning experiences. I know I will find her online.

In the meantime, I urge all of my colleagues to do the following. Take your time. Honor who you were a week ago in the classroom. Use this window of opportunity to expand your capacity as a professional. And remember, we are all suffering right now. Families are worried about illness. Food. Where the rent is coming from. What we are providing our students right now online needs to be a safe haven for those who have the time and wherewithal to access. We do not know what is going on in our students’ lives right now. But we can be there for them in whatever ways they need us. I told one of the students online today the following: We always want to look for the “silver lining”. There will come a time when you will be running around everywhere, working really hard. And you will be like, man, I wish I was stuck in my house like I was way back in sixth grade… As much as there’s lots to not like, look for the things that are gifts, like being home with your family, with no pressure to be anywhere. But I miss you guys so much!

Teachers, it took you a long time as professionals to become who you were a week ago. Do not be discouraged. What our students need from us right now, more than anything else, is love, encouragement, and online experiences that will make the most of their time at home with their families in the midst of fear and uncertainty. And this is what you have always done –honored where your students were, and what they needed. We’ve got this.

Common Core Review Committee Rated “Ineffective”

It has been almost three months since I first set foot in Albany. I had the best of intentions – to dump the Common Core Standards in New York State and draft standards that are based upon what teachers’ classroom experiences indicate are best practices, supported by what parents know are developmentally appropriate for their own children. Anyone who has followed the process, and reviewed the revise standards will tell you that my mission was a complete failure.

I was warned. Don’t go. Your name will be attached to their “reform” efforts. My answer was the same over and over and over, “If I am invited, how can I say no?”

Twice this summer I went to Albany, with my family in tow, with the goal of doing everything I possibly could to eliminate these standards. I learned two very important things:

• I was chosen to be on the committee because of my anti-Common Core and anti-state assessment position. They did want to hear from all perspectives.
• Most committee members share my perspective, but most are unable to speak their true positions.

Think about it. There are seven hundred school superintendents in New York State. Five have had the courage to take a stand to protect students from fraudulent assessments and developmentally inappropriate standards. That number reflects .7 % of superintendents. This means that the vast majority of educators have been silenced. This is reflected in the committee’s lack of significant action to replace the Common Core in New York State.

What were people like me left to do? I came to the conclusion that we could only do two things:

1. Fight where we could and pick our battles. We fought hard to eliminate the “text complexity” and “grade level text” from the standards. Districts were using this language to restrict children’s access to text, as well as force children to read texts that did not meet their needs. We were adamant about moving play back into the standards for younger children. We also removed examples from the standards so that districts could no longer force teachers to teach the standards in specific ways, regardless of students’ needs.
2. Keep fighting on the outside. People need to BOMBARD the survey. The New York State Education Department (NYSED) claims that the vast majority of people who responded to its initial survey indicated satisfaction with the current standards – that they were only looking for modifications. They used these results to hold the committee to these standards – rather than throwing them out as they should have been.

If you have looked at the recommended changes, and you believe they are largely the same you, are right. If you believe that the state had no intention of making significant changes to them via the Review Committees, you are right. But please keep in mind, the vast majority of teachers in New York State have been silenced by administrators who lack the knowledge, experience and/or fortitude to do what is right for this state’s children.

Those of us who work in the .7% of districts where children come first, and parents who are able to serve as advocates, we must remain strong in our resolve to tell New York State no thank you.

We do not accept revisions to standards that are simply wrong for our children.

We do not accept assessments that do not support the growth of children in our classrooms.

We will bombard the survey so NYSED understands the standards are wrong.

We will refuse all New York State grade 3-8 assessments that fail to drive instruction.

Dear Governor Cuomo, …

Here is a letter I mailed to Governor Cuomo following this week’s work on revising the Common Core Standards:

I spent this week working on the New York State Education Department’s Standard Review Committee. It was an intensive week for a number of reasons.

First, I need to commend the remarkable efforts of members of the New York State Department of Education (NYSED). The work of reviewing the current New York State Standards was organized incredibly well. Operationally, the team that NYSED assembled for this work did an exceptional job grouping committee members by specialty and position (teachers, parents and administrators). In addition, the leadership team provided superb technological and human resource support for all aspects of the task we were given. It is important that this outstanding performance be recognized, especially in light of the challenge the team was assigned.

As a teacher of New York State, I believe in my heart that every single child in this state has a right to a rich and thoughtful educational experience that will prepare him or her for a life long capacity for learning. Our current standard and assessment program makes this an impossible dream. It is clear that socioeconomic status directly impacts the level to which teachers are forced to adhere to these standards and align instruction to the assessment. This is widening the gap between rich and poor in our state. Spending the week with teachers who are from all areas of New York State provided time to think deeply about what the disparate impact of poverty and state pressure to perform on state assessments that measure a narrow slice of the curriculum has on the educational experiences of children in our classrooms. What children experience in their classrooms is directly tied to their own socioeconomic backgrounds. We cannot allow this to continue.

It was evident from the discussions that transpired that the poorer a school district is, the more the teachers are required to teach to the test, the less rich quality instruction the students are receiving. This week I heard stories where teachers have not had students write in journals for years, cases where books have been removed from a child’s hands because it was not on his or her level, situations where teachers have to sneak appropriate books to children, accounts of children who made remarkable gains in reading and writing only to be broken by the assessment and times where English Language Learners have to sit with text they cannot construct meaning of. Teachers are finding themselves in the unfathomable quandary of teaching their students OR protecting their jobs.

We were asked to write standards and ignore the assessments for the time being. We cannot ignore the impact of the assessment, now that we are tying that assessment to teachers’ jobs, and in many cases, student promotion.

In looking carefully, you will see a correlation between poverty and scores on state assessments. Increased poverty is linked to lower scores on state assessments. The lower the students’ scores are on state assessments, the more the school is forced to focus on the limited number of standards that are tested on state assessments.

To help close the achievement gap between rich and poor, we need to close the instructional gap between rich and poor. The only way this can be achieved at this point is by removing high-stakes assessments from the equation. Teachers can use the revised standards that are being developed to provide rich and rigorous instruction for all children. We met Dr. Kyle Snow this week who shared his research that indicates when you craft standards, as they are implemented, they need to be continually assessed to ensure developmental appropriateness. We need to finish revising all the standards. This is going to take time. Upon acceptance by the public and the Board of Regents, only then should they be rolled out to our students without the pressure of teaching to a test. Then can we get back to the purpose of public education — teaching children.

Governor Cuomo, your Common Core Task Force found that we need to engage “New York educators, not a private corporation, to drive the review and creation of State standards-aligned tests in an open and transparent manner.” I urge you to work with our state legislature, the Board of Regents and NYSED to put the brakes on state assessments while the standards are ironed out. At every level of public education, stakeholders will tell you that assessment is driven by curriculum. What we have right now is the reverse. No changes to our standards will be evident, until we remove the current assessment program.

Our existing system is harming the educational process for our children. The premise behind NCLB and ESSA was to close the achievement gap between rich and poor. It is evident that both have only exacerbated the gap while wreaking havoc on all students. Allowing this to continue indicates your consent to widening the achievement gap among children based upon their socioeconomic statuses.

Please keep the momentum of your task force moving forward. NYSED has done an exceptional job beginning the process you requested – revising the standards and assessments. Stop the assessments now so teachers can teach to meet their children’s needs, not the needs of the assessment. They work in opposition to one another right now.

I understand the high-stakes assessment pressure stems from the federal government. But you, as the leader of our state, have a responsibility to protect the children in your state. That responsibility needs to be tantamount to any law passed in this country.

Thank you for moving the task force recommendations forward. Let’s not lose momentum.

The Elephant in the Room

“When there is an elephant in the room introduce him.”

~Randy Pausch

Today was the fourth day of the New York State Standard Review Committee. I began the day, with a little tap on the knee from a fellow teacher deeply committed to ensuring her entire school refuses state assessments so her students can keep learning all year. “We don’t have time in our curriculum to stop for those” she said.

I am still not permitted to share any specifics about the committee’s work this week. What we have are incomplete recommendations that will have to be reviewed by the public, modified where necessary and approved by the Board of Regents. It has has been directed to us that we can’t get rid of the current standards. I can be honest and say that every minute has been spent contemplating how to modify the standards we have, in ways that support learning and protect children and their teachers on state assessments – the elephant in the room.

The elephant in the room is the state assessments’ impact on our children. It absolutely cannot be ignored. Each of us here, in a variety of ways, has made it very clear that state assessments have had a monumental, detrimental impact on children.

How? These are experiences teachers and parents have described this week:

1. State assessment scores used by the state to threaten school teams, causing all instruction to be test-driven not student driven.
2. Multiple episodes where a teacher has to sneak a developmentally appropriate text into a child’s hands because the test driven culture in his school demands that all students read texts that are deemed “at or above grade level.”
3. A parent who is told that her son cannot read more complex books because he has maxed out at his grade level.
4. Schools that no longer teach narrative writing because “it is not on the assessment.”
5. Children with special needs who have worked hard the entire year, only to be “broken” when they have to take an assessment that contains passages whose text complexity is nowhere near where these children are in motivation, knowledge and experience.
6. Situations where English Language Learners (ELL’s), in their first year in the United States, speaking no English, are required to work with grade level texts that they can make no meaning of.

We must remain steadfast in our mission. We will not rest until teaching serves children not publishers, financiers  nor politicians. It is time to show the elephant where the door is and get back to teaching…

 

 

 

 

Fearless advocates, this is for you!

“Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.”

Chinese Proverb

         Today was the third day of the New York State Standard Review Committee. It is late. It has been a struggle to determine what to say. I wanted to discuss the tension between going narrow and deep to support learning and going an inch deep and a mile wide to protect students and their teachers from being harmed by state assessment. Additionally, I contemplated the true root of our woes in teaching English Languages Arts – instruction that has been so decimated by ninety-one different “learning strands” and ill-conceived, grossly mismanaged assessments. I began to review the side conversations I had with teachers throughout the day and into the evening. In the hours since I sat down to write, something startling has transpired.

The work we have done over the last several years is beginning to pay off. Those of you who have given hours, weeks, months and quite possibly years of your time to fight the harmful reforms to public education need to rest assured. Your work is getting noticed. Teachers all around me here are speaking up. Teachers working on this committee are deeply passionate about teaching, and the children they teach. The vast majority I have spoken with fall into one of two camps: teachers who are fiercely advocating for their students in the open, and those who are fiercely fighting behind the scenes because they have been silenced.

To protect teachers, I do not want to get into specifics. But teachers are rising — from beginning to ask why we are doing what we are doing, saying no to administrators when what the state “wants the school to do” is on opposition with what the student needs, to advocating for their entire schools to opt out of state tests for years. It is extremely evident to many teachers that the standards and the assessments to measure student progress have nothing to do with learning. It is clear, that this understanding resonates with a great number of people.

Those of us who can speak candidly need to keep doing so with whoever will listen.        We have made tremendous headway. We have a large army of teachers who are fighting every day in a myriad of ways to advocate for their students. These teachers are supported by a growing body of families who realize something is terribly wrong. Many more are open to join this fight knowing that they are not alone.

Thank you so much for standing for our children in any way you can. This is a monumental task where every piece matters.

The Cycle of Standards, Instruction and Assessment

“Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.” 

~Jonathon Kozol

         Today was the second day of the New York State Standard Review Committee. In total, sixty-eight people responded to my survey. This feedback is combined with a letter Stronger Together Caucus (ST Caucus) sent to the Board of Regents and the New York State Department of Education regarding the need for clear concise standards that included assessment limits for students and teachers. Once again, I sat with this feedback before me, as my grade level band and sub-group looked at specific standards.

We have been asked to refrain from sharing specific details of our work because right now it is all a work in progress. Ultimately, our recommendations will be made public for comment before these recommendations are brought to the Board of Regents (BOR) for review.

There are big ideas that are swirling around in my mind. I am eager for feedback from parents and colleagues.

First, as a society, what do we want the standards to do? I am genuinely curious about what people think of standards. What do they mean to people? What do we expect standards to accomplish?

Second, how do we ensure that assessment of progress toward reaching those standards remains directly connected with instruction? Do we seek a narrowing of standards that will streamline assessment? Do we maintain more holistic standards that leave more room for instructional freedom?

Finally, and most importantly, how much do we trust the teachers in our children’s classrooms? If we agree that standards, instruction and assessment are parts of a continuous cycle through which all learning takes place, then who do we trust to craft and implement these pieces?