Legacy as an Educator

As I prepare to deliver a commencement speech for my school, Open World Learning Community (OWL) on the transition from young person to adult (and the role character and culture education play), I have been spending a lot of time thinking about legacy.  I'll post the contents of my speech after I give it, but the basic idea is that whether you can be consider an adult or not can be determined by how you handle your responsibilities (replace adult with professional and you can gauge yourself as a professional against the same standard).  However, I don't see becoming an effect adult the final goal, but instead what I'll call a matriarch or patriarch.  To be considered an effective matriarch or patriarch, or the professional equivalent, you will be weighed by the legacy you leave.

I imagine that many of my readers are are not end of profession educators.  Therefore, the question you need to ask yourself first is "Am I fulfilling my professional responsibilities?"  If not, start there.  Don't worry about your legacy yet!  However, if your a mid-career professional and are taking care of your professional responsibilities then you can start thinking about the legacy you are leaving behind.

There are several ways to think about your legacy.  Most teachers probably think about their legacy in terms of the sum impact on their students.  That is a legitimate way to calculate a legacy, but I believe an incomplete one.  What kind of policy changes have your fought to implement or remove that helped students learn in your building, district, state, etc?  What have you done to help others in the profession that are coming after you to be successful and start a legacy of their own?  What have you don in the community to influence people's perceptions of your profession?  Tell me, what are you doing to build your legacy?

I have been lucky enough to work with some amazing educators in my short 12 years of teaching.  Several of them have left a legacy which I believe will stand the test of time.  I have seen gifted educators also leave and be nearly forgotten, except by a select few who remember vividly their contributions and lament their retirement (but never begrudge them).  And I have seen educators behave in such ways at the end of their careers that it almost gets to the point that there are those that don't want to work with them; that think they maybe held on too long.

If you are an end of career educator, I'd like to hear about how you're cementing your legacy as you prepare to transition.  Are you sticking to your principles as you move on or have you abandoned them?

Donald Sterling in Crew?

My school spends a lot of time on social and character education.  There have been many crises over the years that have come and gone that I have not talked about and somewhat regret.  The most famous was the shooting of Trayvon Martin which I just didn't know about.  We did discuss the Sandy Hook elementary shooting and the idea of teachers carrying guns in school (which I am against).

So, how should the most recent racist comments allegedly from Donald Sterling be talked about?  I know there are many of my students, especially my African American males, will want to talk about this topic.  In addition, there are the abusive relationship aspects of this recorded conversation that is worthy of conversation as well.

The question I pose is: What do other teachers do with crises like these?

Turn-over in a School - How much is too much?

As we near the end of the school year and people start making decisions about what is best for them and their family, my mind always turns to the idea of turn-over. It is a well-established fact that teacher turn-over is high, but what percentage of turn-over is too high for a school to sustain positive growth?  We are a growing school and the influx of new blood is great, but losing talented teachers is a problem. What are your experiences at your schools?  What systems exist to help inculcate new staff to a specific school's philosophy?  Please comment below to help me out!

Teacher-Leadership Finding the Right Balance

As I start down the home stretch of my first year as Team Leader at my school I have been reflecting on how my time spent helping (hopefully) my school become a better place I realize it has come at a cost of making my class the best that it can be.

I spend about 80% of my time and energy on my classes.  I teach the equivalent of 6 different preps (3 a day, blocked over 2 days) and a few of them are classes that I have created that are new this year.  The effort required to run these classes at a high level it exhausting, so for a few of my classes I have been relying heavily on what I did last year.  Any good teacher can tell you that it is the extra touches that you can put on a class that take a class from good to great.  I just don't think I'm there this year.

My question is, what degree of "good" should I accept in order to help the school?  I have instituted several changes that have impacted the school in what I feel are very positive ways.  Is the 20% of my energy put into the school away from my classes an acceptable sacrifice to my students?

I should give a little bit of background in.  First, I teach at a small school so getting an hour or so off to do leadership stuff is not an option.  Also, teaching fewer preps wasn't an option this year and may not be an option in the coming years either.  What is an option is giving up leadership and focusing on my classes should that be the course I decide to take.  I'd love ideas that would help me that are constructive.

Hiring a New Teacher?

As we balance ourselves as teachers between the long slough from winter break to spring break our attentions simultaneously turn to thinking of next year.  From putting together a master schedule to a calendar my attention becomes increasingly divided.  One thing that I have never had time to do is overhaul our hiring process.

There are two reasons I think I have never put too much time into it.  First, as part of a big district our hiring process is somewhat constrained by district protocols.  Sometimes they help, oftentimes they don't.  The bigger problem of me though is the lack of wonderful candidates from whom to choose.  Why would I put a ton of time into choosing between two of three candidates when there is usually a clear favorite?  An obvious cost-benefit analysis that usually turns my attention elsewhere.

However, how would I hire in a situation where I had what economists would call a "thick market?"  I have bandied ideas around in my head, and here are some:

1. What if I had applicants grade a series of tests with known flaws to see if they could identify them and plan to address them?
2. What if I had assessments with names that identified "kids" ethnically, racial, and by gender to look for discrimination there?
3. What if I then gave them the next lesson that ignored the misconceptions and asked for feedback on the lesson to see if they would back me up?
4. What if I had them grade the test, gave them the Learning Targets, and asked them to rewrite the test in a way that better assessed the learning targets?
5. What if I gave them a case study with a difficult behavior and had them call a parent looking to make things difficult for them to see how they would handle it?
6. What if . . . 

So many what ifs.  What would you want to see if you needed to choose from between 100 apparently equal applicants for a job?

Student Homework - Self-Grading with Witnessing

I have done the 3M TWIST program twice.  The first time with a engineer (Bill?) Coggio, who always reminded me of Sly Stallone, and the second with Yizhong Wong, who helped me understand some of the intricacies of dental fillings.  Interesting things, I highly recommend the program if you are in it's geographic region.

When you do the TWIST program you are issued a 3M notebook like any other engineer and are required to put ALL your work into it.  This is for Intellectual Property (IP) purposes and is taken very seriously.  After my first internship, Megan Olivia Hall (2013 MN Teacher of the Year) and I made lab notebooks a requirement in all science classes and taught it to our middle school colleagues as an example of what Doug Lemov calls "Binder Control" in his book Teach Like a Champion.

Things were going well with the lab note books during my second stint with the TWIST program when I was reintroduced to the 3M notebook and reminded of the witnessing requirement.  The witnessing requirement is in place so that you cannot "back date" any findings to establish IP for your company at the expense of another company or individual.  I began to think about the implications of witnessing in my classroom.

My school, Open World Learning Community, utilizes standards-based grading and reporting, so the completion of homework is de-emphasized.  However, the learning that can occur in homework isn't.  So after my second stint with 3M I instituted a sheet (quarter sheet actually, I'll post) where the students had to fill this out AND get it witnessed by a peer or I would not accept it.  The sheet required the students to do some self-assessment, self-grade, and justify that grade to a peer before I would look at it.

The system, like any in schools, requires some pre-teaching and real maintenance early on.  You have to make sure that the students are being accurate and the witnesses are doing their job.  But quickly one of three things becomes apparent.  First, students are typically much harsher on themselves that I would be.  Second, there becomes a list of student witnesses whose opinion you can trust and conversely, third is that there will be a class of witnessers who need extra training.

Like the most successful initiatives time spend up front is well spent for the time savings down the road.  I can quickly scan the homework and hand it back to students just keeping the quarter sheet to record later.  Students do better work because they have to self-grade AND show their work to a peer.  I would love to hear about other peoples systems and modifications to this one below.


Here is the first one the kids in my Intermediate Algebra class get.  It is partially filled out to help them along:

Back to Posting

For those who follow me, and there are almost none of you, I'm committed to posting again in the New Year.  One of the first things I'm going to do is blog about how The Art of War relates to education.

Right now, I'm in a meeting about PBIS.  Which Alfie Kohn doesn't like (to put is mildly).  What do you guys about it?

TMP