We use imprecise language when talking about the time between the first and last days of the annual school calendar. I hesitate to use the words “school year” because a school year is not a year. It is not even close. To paraphrase the message at the bottom of the passenger side mirror of your vehicle, “on the first day of school the last of day of learning is closer than you think.”

PI 8.01(2)(f) of the Wisconsin Administrative Rules states that a school year shall be a minimum of 180 days. Because time is money and school money is largely payroll, school boards seldom seek DPI permission to exceed 180 days. Hence a school year begins with 180 days, fewer than half of the days in a calendar year (365).

The advent of the digital age makes school calendars very visible. One need only tap into a school’s web site to find a display of the annual school calendar. School boards approve an annual school calendar, however this calendar always is constructed using the days instruction is to be provided. “Provided” is a hypothetically legal number and is not close to the number of days of actual instruction.

The rule goes on to say that a maximum of five (5) days of the 180 may be counted to meet the required 180 even if children are not in school. These five days may be used for parent-teacher conferences or be days in which school is cancelled due to inclement weather, the proverbial snow days. Even before school begins, the instructional calendar contains only 175 days.

From this point of 175 days, the school calendar falls victim to the realities of public education. Educational accountability calls for testing and testing takes time. Wisconsin requires all children in grades 3 through 8 plus 10 to complete an annual statewide academic assessment. Most schools use three to four days for mandated fall testing. Secondary schools also use the equivalency of one day each semester for final exams. High school children take the PLAN, AccuPlacer, PSAT and ASVAB tests on school days. Testing usually reduces another five days from the instructional calendar. Now, there are 170 days for instruction.

Just because the web site calendar shows that all other days are available for instruction does not necessarily make it so. Schools are required to conduct safety drills. Most schools conduct one fire drill each month and one tornado/weather emergency drill in the fall and one in the spring. Because schools have been the sites of tragic violence, security drills also are conducted. Some of these are “secure and hide” rehearsals and others practice school evacuation procedures. Public confidence in child safety at school requires these drills and rehearsals. Good school administrative practices distribute these events across the hours of a school day so that children know what to do wherever they are in the school house. Good practices also distribute the distraction these events create. Drills will account for an aggregate of two days of instruction. Now, there are 168 days.

School assemblies are distributed across the annual calendar. Some are connected with specific dates. Veterans Day and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day are examples of an annual historical, cultural observance involving children in school. In-school rehearsals for school musicals, concerts and plays reduce instructional time. In elementary schools, instructional focus wears thin in the days before Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas as those events become in-school class room themes. In Wisconsin, many high school boys are absent in the fall for the opening day of deer hunting season. It is Wisconsin culture!

Class field trips use and lose time for instruction. History teachers make good use of time dedicated for a trip to a regional museum. However, the time required for the history event takes children out of their math and science and language arts instruction as well as art, health, music and physical education.

Assume that two or three days of the calendar are used for school assemblies and field trips and now there are less than 165 days for instruction.

Good and continuous teaching causes children to learn. Good teaching requires the continuous presence of a good teacher. Even though a teacher prepares lesson plans for a substitute teacher to follow in the regular teacher’s absence, the absence of the child’s regular teacher disrupts the continuity of instruction. This does not denigrate the work of substitute teachers. Children, however, respond differently to a substitute teacher and a substitute teacher responds differently to each child. Teacher absences for personal illness and emergencies average five to eight days each school year. Absences for professional training average four to six days each school year. Teacher absence reduces the number of effective teacher-student instructional days to 154.

Equal to a teacher’s absence, if a child is absent from school, the child is absent from instruction. While it is true that class instruction continues in the absence of children every day, the absent child does not receive that instruction until she returns to school. It used to be that when a child was not in school it was because the child was ill. Not true today. Wisconsin Rules allow a parent to excuse a child from school for up to ten (10) days each school year without providing a reason for the absences. The frequency of absences varies greatly child to child, however, perfect attendance is a rarity and most children are absent an average of seven to fifteen days annually.

The number of days for teacher-child instruction now is less than 150. Fewer than 150 is the number of effective instructional days for most children. So, let’s put this calendar and instructional intent into propositional statements.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to add a grade level of reading achievement.

A child has less than 150 learning episodes in which to learn Algebra or Chemistry or World History or Spanish 1.

A teacher has less than 150 learning episodes in which to cause a child to learn the designated Common Core Standards for the child’s grade level.

Together, teacher and child have less than 150 learning episodes to cause the child to perform at a competent level on the next annual state assessments.

Ouch! One hundred fifty is not very many. In fact, 150 episodes is the equivalency of 124 hours of instruction because a school’s class periods typically are 50 minutes in duration. Double ouch!

Only in school can less than 150 days or less than 124 hours be called a year.

You bet it does.

Separate your thinking about past practices from your thinking about the future. The dividing line between the two is educational accountability. In the past, educational achievement was the record of how well individual children learned. Some children achieved at a high level and others did not. General accountability in the past was teaching those who could achieve to achieve and letting their high test scores carry the rest of the class by pointing only at the class average. That was the past.

Present and future thinking demands that all children learn and that indicators of their learning are at increasingly higher levels of achievement. The past mean average now is just a statistic of diminished concern. The metric of interest is the qualitative indicator of competence that all children must achieve. To reach these now qualities, teachers must consider all aspects of instruction and learning. Who sits where is a strong contributor to future learning success.

In the past, seating arrangements typically were created to eliminate distraction. Talkers and inattentive children gravitated to the front corner desks of the class room or seats nearest to where the teacher usually sat. Corner desks diminished the number of children the talkers could distract. The seat nearest the teacher was a chair of intimidation. In each instance, the goal was to isolate the talkers and inattentive children in order to diminish their negative activity. This strategy seldom worked. More often than not this special attention only provided positive reinforcement by making their negative behaviors the focus of teacher attention.

Past thinking about seating was about classroom management. Seating alphabetically. Alternated seating by gender. Seating in rows by reading group or other ability groupings. Seating at random. Seating by student choice. In the past, seating was not about qualitative learning.

When I was a K-12 student in the last century, seats or desks were assigned on the first day of school and a desk in each class and classroom I attended was mine for the entire school year. It was the same for each of my classmates. Attendance was taken by noting empty seats. Papers were returned to students by the teacher who placed the papers on the assigned desks. Seating assignments made for good class room management. I was my desk and my desk was me and these were fixed in time.

Today, seating must be a manipulative for causing all children to learn complex and rigorous content and perform higher order problem solving tasks at an elevated and prescribed level. Seating assignments are a strategy for building multiple learning networks and each network is designed to scaffold student learning. Where children sit to engage in their learning activities should be flexible, shaped to the nature of the activity, and serve learning not management. Seating is grouping and regrouping according to changing learning designs.

Some activities lend themselves to children working at independent desks that can be pushed together for collaboration. Desks, however, are very limiting. Other activities make good use of a large table around which children can sit and share. Physically active learning may need more floor space with no seating – children sit on the floor if they need to sit. Hallways are good for this purpose. Quiet and contemplative activities may want floor pillows or soft seats. Where and how children sit or work must be an instructional consideration.

Who sits with whom? This instructional question is more important than where and how. The right mix of children can lead to learning success for all children just as the wrong mix can lead to very different and less successful learning results.

A good seating and grouping decision relies upon the teacher knowing the learning needs and learning style preferences of each child. Who is social and who is not. Who is a kinesthetic learner and who is verbal. Who needs space and who can tolerate close proximity to others. Who leads and who follows. Who is a divergent thinker and who is convergent. Grouping and regrouping using these and other variables allows the teacher to create the right heterogeneous “soup” for learning.

Mixing students heterogeneously calls for assignments that cause children to learn from each other. Seating or grouping paired with assignments that both exercise learning strengths and make children synergize these strengths can raise the productivity of each child in the group. Underachievers do learn from achievers when instructional strategies include metacognitive discussion in which collaborative processes are just as valuable as the conclusions reached. A seating or grouping assignment can turn a child’s talkative nature into a skill valued in oral presentations, a leader into a spokesperson, an introvert into a research specialist. And, the “democratic’ feeling associated with heterogeneous is reinforced when the outcomes of the group are greater than the individual outcomes of its members.

There also are many reasons for using homogeneous grouping. Proponents for children with special learning needs point to the need for children to work and associate with their educational peers. Children who are academically capable and gifted need to work with their capable and gifted peers. Children who are receiving prescribed instruction for special education, ELL or Title 1 needs profit from working with their peers. Parents can be very outspoken for homogeneous learning opportunities for their children. Grouping decisions, however, must remain the teacher’s and be made to promote learning success for all.

Research abounds on the values of homogeneous and heterogeneous grouping. The literature review in the following study provides a good summary. http://www.appstate.edu/~koppenhaverd/rcoe/s10/5710/q1/groupShannon.pdf

Manipulating group membership or seating dependent upon the learning objective is a valuable instructional tool. Fixed seating for classroom management purposes in counterproductive to the mandates for current and future educational accountability. A teacher who understands grouping for learning seldom employs a written seating chart. For class room management purposes, the best place to start a new class period is for children to sit where they ended the last class period. From that point, it is a new day for new learning.

Big changes take time. They are achieved by blending many small changes through consistent and conscious effort overcoming innumerable obstacles arguing for the status quo until an aggregate of change is accomplished. Big changes are hard to accomplish because personal commitment to change is even harder to maintain than the many small, individual efforts required for a large-scale change.

Hence, commit to small changes. They are easier on the body and soul. And, incrementally they cause very large results – one at a time.

Teachers say to me, “There is tremendous pressure on us to improve student academic achievement. And, every day we receive information about another new professional development venture guaranteed to cause students to learn more or learn more efficiently. There are so many ‘do this’ advertisements that it makes my head spin.” Then, they ask the important question. “If I only did one small thing differently, what one thing should I do that would help my students to learn?”

Here it is. Spend more time checking all students for their understanding of what they think they heard you say or saw you do before they launch into an assignment. The essential words in that statement are “what they think.”

Sadly, a classroom of students frequently is as attentive as small children playing baseball. Picture nine children on a baseball field. One or two players are informed and skilled and focused on every play. In the field, they have their eyes on the batter ready to field a ball hit their way. Other players stand in the right position, have their glove on the hand they catch with, but may be drawing their name in the dirt with the toe of their shoe when the batter swings. And, other players are watching clouds or turning like a top or have dropped their glove on the ground so they have a softer place to sit. There also is this kind of variance in the classroom even though all children may be sitting in their chairs looking toward you.

Elementary-aged children? Yes. The above descriptors may not read like the children in your classroom. It is because elementary children can at least look as if they are attentive. Innocent-faced tykes wanting to learn while their minds are on breakfast, recess, the Ipad game they played before school, and wondering what worms do at night. They wiggle loose teeth and try to pinch dust motes that float across their desk. A few hang on their teacher’s every word. More need help in focusing on what the teacher’s words mean because their wonderful little minds are constantly thinking their own thoughts.

Secondary students can be a totally different inattentive lot. The difference between elementary and secondary students is that the inattentive middle schooler or high schooler may not care how they appear to you. While the academically-focused students give you their more mature, note taking focus, the inattentive may be looking out the window, turned all the way around in their chair looking at someone in the back of the room, or sitting with their heads down on their desk tops not looking, not listening and not caring. Others may resemble the seemingly attentive elementary student – sitting up and looking at you while they are texting on a phone in their hip pocket.

Checking is checking for readiness to do the activity of learning.

Checking means asking all children to give back to you the directions that you gave to them so that you know they not only heard but listened when you described or demonstrated what they should do next.

Checking means having all children write down the steps you provided – step 1, step 2, step 3.

Checking means having all children tell, show, list, or illustrate individually or in groups. Checking can be social as long as the outcome is a demonstration of their understanding.

Checking means that you listen, watch, and observe demonstrations of what all children think they heard you say, do or write.

Checking means that you have the opportunity to correct any aspect of their misunderstanding prior to their work. It is so much easier to correct misunderstandings before children begin to work rather than during or after. Waiting just five minutes means that children, acting upon what they thought you said, may have focused on the wrong ideas, made mathematical mistakes, or assumed something to be true that isn’t and committed their time and effort on a wrong pathway. When learning children start with mistakes, you must not only give them correct information but you must also neutralize their mistakes and this neutralizing business is not only time consuming but may not be effective. Mistakes and wrong information have their own lifetime and can reappear later because the mistakes are in the child’s short-term memory and will compete with the correct information.

In each of the above checking statements the word “all” precedes children. It is easy to ask a student who you know to be attentive to recite the directions for the class assignment. However, to stop with an attentive child’s response is to enter the swamp of time and effort correcting misunderstood directions. Check all children by engaging all in your demonstration of understanding and then randomly watching, listening, observing for correctness. This is worth the few minutes it takes to accomplish and will breed improved attention practices over time.

So, the one little thing to do that will have huge positive results is to check what children think they thought you said for did before they start reading, writing, solving math problems, start a game, begin group work or even walking down the hall to music class.

Check. Listen, watch, observe. Confirm or correct. Then, worry about the next little thing to do differently. Together, these small little changes can make a large difference in how well children learn.

This writing will start on the firing line at a local gun club and finish on the teaching line in every Wisconsin classroom.

I have watched my friend Buzz when he shoots trap and skeet at the local gun club. Buzz is good, very good. He consistently hits 24 of 25 clays and, when he lets his rhythm and knowledge of wind and clay flight work together, he strings multiple 25s together. One of the things I enjoy about Buzz’s shooting is his preparation. Wing-type shooting is never done on a “wing and a prayer.” Buzz takes excellent care of his equipment and always is prepared to approach the shooting line. When there, he checks wind and light conditions and who else may be shooting. I watch as he sets his feet, works the kinks out of his neck, moves his eyes along the anticipated flight lines, relaxes his shoulders and, after a deep breath, quietly says “pull.” He has just the right amount of tension to cause him to react to the clay, raise his shotgun and make his shot.

His physical set up is similar for both trap and skeet. His mental set up adjusts depending upon his anticipation of trap or skeet. Trap presents a single clay flying away from the shooter. Skeet presents two clays, one coming from the shooter’s right and the other from his left, at the same time. When Buzz is ready and when he is prepared to site his targets, he is a masterful shooter.

Once in a while, Buzz finds that he is able to track the two clays on the skeet line and hit them both with one shot. This occurs with his perfect knowledge of their two flight lines and his experience in predicting that single second when each clay will be in perfect alignment with his shooting position. His joy after this expert shot would be enough to say “that’s it, it doesn’t get any better” if it weren’t for his optimism that he could do it again and again.

Buzz also is the technology director for the local schools. He assures that everyone in the school – students, faculty and staff, and administrators – are prepared with the technological tools to assist their work. That takes me from clay targets to educational targets.

Educational targeting this September presents a much different targeting dilemma for teachers than Buzz faces on the trap or skeet lines. Whereas, Buzz can always assume a “ready, aim, fire” scenario with the knowledge that a small, orange disk will be his target, teachers can only prepare for a scenario of “ready, aim, fire at which target?” Here is the problem – multiple, highly prioritized targets at the same time.

Target One – the last WKCE.

This is the last year of Wisconsin’s statewide WKCE assessment. The first target of interest is preparing children for this fall test. If this is the last year for the WKCE, why is it an important target? The 2013-14 School Report Card and School District Report Card will be based upon these WKCE data. It would be easy to slip past this last WKCE in favor of the second or third targets. However, federal and state accountability structures will use the 2013-14 student achievement data to draw conclusions about teacher and principal effectiveness and instructional competence. Also, this year’s School and School District Report Cards will be based upon this last test and local, public accountability will closely scrutinize the relationship between tax dollars and school results.

Hence, the WKCE must be a target for the first three months of the school year. After he tests are completed in November, targeting the WKCE standards and assessment is history.

Target Two – State Common Core Standards and preparation for Smarter-Balanced Assessments.

The phase out of the WKCE phases in the era of Core standards and new state assessments developed to test child proficiency on the Core standards. Whereas, there are advantages to having a revised and more focused state curriculum of standards and new assessments aligned with these standards, the Core and its assessments are much more complex and cognitively elevated compared to the WKCE standard and tests.

New targets do not mean easier targets to hit. In fact, by design there is a national acknowledgement that student achievement levels on the first of the new assessments will be significantly below student achievement levels on past, older assessments. This reality makes Target Two a very important instructional priority for teachers and school leaders this fall. This reality will cause damage control; how can educators lessen the decline in student performance levels from large differences to smaller differences. Almost no one is anticipating an equal or improved student performance level on the new assessments.

Target Three – closing achievement gaps.

The School and District Report Cards place a very high value on “equity and equality” of education for all children. Much of the data displays the achievements of special groupings of children – special education, English Language Learners, economically disadvantaged, gender – compared with the achievements of regular education children, typically white, English-speaking, middle class and more affluent.

When taken as a whole, most schools and school districts in Wisconsin demonstrate very favorable student achievement. The higher achievement of the high numbers of children in regular education overshadows the lower achievement of the smaller numbers of children in the special categories. New Report Card does not average all the data, but highlights any disparities in these data. In almost all schools and school districts in Wisconsin there are achievement gaps, often large dissimilarity, between children in regular education and those in the special categories even though they all attend the same classes and receive the same general education.

Target Three demands that teachers take special aim at children in disaggregated categories and provide “whatever” instruction is required to cause all children to achieve similar, high results on future state assessments. “Whatever” instruction is any and all teaching that can cause similar, high achievement results for all children.

Target Three is immediately important but will take years to accomplish. It is driven by political/economic accountability measures that are very significant to schools and school districts and these make Target Three very important this fall.

Targets One, Two and Three each are important for teacher attention this fall. Each target will present public results in the spring 2014 and the spring 2015 School and School District Report Cards. Target confusion, anyone?

I think that my friend Buzz would step back from the firing line if he was confronted with a similar problem – trap and skeet at the same time. Clays will be flying in three different directions on two different planes simultaneously. Sometimes, even for the technologically gifted, things must be scratched out in the dirt. I foresee Buzz drawing possible trajectories in the ground with a stick looking for a solution for hitting all three clay with two shots and limited time when he steps to the line. How much time and concentration must he devote to each target so that all targets can be hit? I also foresee many superintendents, principals and teachers scratching out their possible trajectories for meeting the demands of education’s Target One, Target Two, and Target Three this year and in the future with their limitations of instructional time and human effort.

If Buzz misses the three clays and Maggie’s Drawers are raised, a traditional sign of failed shooting, he can come back to the club next week to try again. The clays don’t know he missed and the public is unaware. Buzz is an avocational shooter. However, if educators raise Maggie’s Drawers after failing to hit Target One, Target Two and Target Three, children will know and the public will take note.

Ready. Aim. Fire at all targets. Good luck!

Finding really strong teachers is not easy. Principals and superintendents must look closely at every teacher and teacher candidate to find expert pedagogues.

If a teacher was an onion you would find that, as in a bushel of onions, teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and flavors. As every onion in the bushel is an onion, some are stronger in their onion-ness than other onions, the same may be said of a faculty of teachers. Teachers come in a variety of sizes, shapes and disciplines and some teachers are stronger in their ability to teach than other teachers. If you peel an onion layer by layer, the first layers typically are very generic, the next several layers begin to taste and smell more like an onion, and finally you arrive at the core layers, the essential essence, that make your fingers smell and your eyes water.

If you peeled a teacher like an onion, what is at the core of a really strong teacher that causes you to stop because you know without a doubt that you have reached the essential essence of expert teaching? The outer layers of a teacher would expose a formal and advanced education, the result of years of schooling. There would be a paper layer with a state seal that certifies this person as a licensed teacher. These layers are only dressing.

Underneath the externals of a really strong teacher would be layers of humanity and compassion for children. Perhaps there is recognition of earlier life experiences when the teacher realized that helping others was personally fulfilling. There may be the kernel of cognition that teaching is a calling, an undeniable and innate drive that cannot be ignored.

So far, you have not reached anything that is essential. Weak and average teachers bare these credentials. More peeling is required.

The next layers expose a significant difference between an onion and a teacher. The core layers of an onion though strong are cool, much cooler than the exterior layers. The core layers of a really strong teacher are hot, much hotter than what appears in the outer layers. The heat derives from the dynamic energy required to work an expert skill set of pedagogy in order to cause a student to learn. In terms of the physics of learning, the teacher exerts forces intended to move the knowledge, skill sets, and thinking and problem solving processes of a learning student toward a learning objective. Learning is displacement; what was becomes something new. It takes expert work to cause great displacement and this work generates a heat which in turn warms up and fuels future teaching.

At the core of a really strong teacher is an internalized pedagogy, the science of manipulating a student’s readiness for learning with learning procedures that cause a student to learn. This harmonized core connects the student to what is to be learned, provides incremental and explicit modeled instruction of what is to be learned, exercises the student’s ability to understand or do what is to be learned until the student can exhibit what has been learned independent of the teacher, corrects errors the student makes in his practice and strengthens correct behaviors while incrementally extending the difficulty and complexity of the student’s abilities, and, finally, connects what has been learned with what is to be learned next. The pedagogy needed for one student to learn successfully may be totally different than the pedagogy needed for another student to learn successfully. A really strong teacher understands the mystery inherent in designing and executing expert teaching.

A really strong teacher stands out from the rest of the faculty. Sadly, as in a bushel of onions where there may be only a few really strong onions, there typically are only a few really strong teachers in a faculty.

Hence, it is the job of educational leadership to be picky.

Select teachers for the children of your school even more carefully than you select onions and other produce. Typical interviewing strategies keep the veil of secondhand information between the interviewer and the candidate. Most recommendations are social and talk around the essence of a really strong teacher.

Spend time getting a feel for a teacher’s pedagogical strength. Invest in the time necessary to personally observe the candidate. Nothing replaces what you see and intuit about the candidate. Video files are close but not good enough.

Verify a teacher’s effect upon all children. Good teachers are able to cause very capable children to learn. Children with distractions are more difficult. A really strong teacher does not stop after the capable have learned but persists until all children have learned. Observing how the teacher engages the distracted reveals the strength of pedagogical skills.

It is a truth that the effect of really good teaching will last a life time whereas the after taste of a really good onion passes in days. Sadly, the effects of average or less than good teaching last about as long as the after taste of an onion.

The following article supports the concept of the expert pedagogue.

“In Pursuit of the Expert Pedagogue” Author(s): David C. Berliner Source: Educational Researcher, Vol. 15, No. 7 (Aug. – Sep., 1986), pp. 5-13