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Do It Differently, Smarter – Teaching and Learning Is Not Piece Work

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Henry Ford’s assembly line strategies revolutionized industry.  In a Ford plant, all work was piece work – an employee did one task repeatedly as the car chassis passed down the assembly line.  The speed of the “chain” determined work productivity.  Optimized speed of assembly and quality control were the abilities of all workers to do their assigned piece work in a predetermined number of minutes.  The image to consider is a naked car chassis at the beginning of the assembly line and complete and drivable car emerging at the end of the line.  It takes an extreme emergency for the speed of the assembly line chain to slow or stop – it never backs up.

What we should know.

Transfer that image to school.  A 4K child is at the beginning of the assembly line and a graduate emerges at the end of a school’s edu-assembly line.  In the early 1900s schooling took on an assembly line process.  Thank you, Henry Ford and John Dewey, and 1892’s Committee of Ten.  Elementary schools build the chassis and secondary school does the finishing work.  The chain runs 180 school days.  Teachers apply grade level or subject content knowledge and skills to the student as the child moves through the K-12 system.  Quality control is measured by standardized tests and displayed on a bell curve – some children demonstrate a higher quality of education than others, but any student within the parameters of two standard deviations below the norm is promoted and graduated.

Most educators do not like the image or analogy of schooling to assembly line work.  It offends their professional sensitivities.  However, current, and usual school operations look like, feel like, sound like, and are like assembly line work.  If you doubt this, try to change the speed of the school chain, or modify the work done at each grade level or subject along the edu-line.  It should not be difficult to do, but it is.  Try to diminish the school year by 10 days or make it longer by ten days.  The system will fight back and after much argument the chain will remain set at 180 days with its traditional work being done at each workstation.

What to do?

Accept that school is an assembly line and change the nature of the work along the assembly line.  It is the work at each teaching station along the line that matters.

My work with the WI DPI on teacher licensing requirements says that the teaching act is a sequence of six steps.  Each teacher candidate is required in pre-student teaching and student teaching to demonstrate evidence of their proficiency in:

  • Planning – creation of unit and lesson plans
  • Teaching – using a variety of teaching strategies, including explicit teaching
  • Assessment – formative assessment of initial student learning success
  • Reflection – the use of formative assessment data to help the teacher clarify, correct, enhance student learning
  • Adjustment of teaching – tactical use of differentiated teaching strategies to clarify, current, enhance student learning
  • Re-assessment – summative assessment at end of lesson or unit

This sequence is built into every unit and lesson design.  Each step is plain to see and document and verify.

What Makes the Edu-line Different?

It is the emphasis on the three middle points points – assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching – that separates education from piece work.  Henry Ford did not want an assembly line worker checking the effectiveness of their work, stopping the chain for a closer inspection, talking with other workers about how to fix an error in the car’s assembly, or to check for quality after the fix was applied.  We do.  In education, this is what makes good teaching effective teaching.

A child is a very messy car chassis.  Unlike a metal frame, a child moves, speaks, has personality, and individuality.  A child’s mind may still be on recess during a late morning lesson in reading or thinking about lunch while doing arithmetic.  A child may wriggle and moan when called upon to sing a solo or be bashful in showing an art project.  Messy is anathema to assembly line work.  The truth is teaching children is messy work and time effort committed these three essential steps – assessment, reflection, ad adjustment – is how we ensure that every child is a successful learner.

What does this look like?

We need to insist that every lesson and every unit has built in requirements for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Bell curve be damned.  The lesson does not move to re-assessment or to a next lesson until a teacher has demonstrated assessment, reflection, and adjustment and exercised all efforts to ensure successful learning.

Assessment, reflection, and adjustment require teacher time.  These tasks are not accomplished while a teacher is driving to school in the morning or home after school.  They are not accomplished during a teacher’s lunch time.  And they are not accomplished while a teacher is doing daily prep period work.  Interestingly, the number one function of teacher prep time is a bathroom break.  The next most important functions are talking to another adult, checking correspondence, and just taking a break from being on the classroom stage.  The assessment, reflection, and adjustment of daily teaching rarely surfaces in a teacher’s usual school day.  We need to face this reality – daily prep time before, during and after the school day is inadequate for the assessment, reflection, and adjustment of ongoing teaching.

We need to build new organizational structures to ensure that all teachers have the time and resources for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of new teaching.

Intermittent breaks.

The administration provides individual teachers with a substitute teacher for a school day and the classroom teacher engages in assessment, reflection, and adjustment work.  That is the only assignment the teacher has on this day.  Prior to the intermittent day break, the teacher and administrator select the unit(s) of instruction to be the focus of the break day.  They discuss the assessment data to be examined.  The teacher uses this day to make a full evaluation of student learning via the teacher’s observations, existing assessment data, and any personal education plans (IEPs and 504s) for her students.  Reflection is reviewing the lesson plans for this unit(s) and notating parts that were successful and parts that were not as successful.  Reflection also is consideration of the teacher’s expectations for student performance on the assessment(s).  Adjustment is a planning of a necessary lesson(s) that will assist all children to achieve the teacher’s expectations on re-assessment that will follow these necessary lesson plans.

Intermittent breaks assures that all children in the school have continuous instruction AND rotates all teachers into their intermittent day break.  Every teacher in the school is provided intermittent breaks several times each school, perhaps once each quarter.

An intermittent break fits every teacher because the assessment data is the teacher’s data – it is not state assessments that are narrowly academic.  All subject area teachers, e.g., art, music, PE, second language, shop, use their intermittent break to assess, reflect, and adjust their subject area teaching and learning.

Whole school breaks.

The advantage of whole school breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment is that all teachers are available for this work.  The administration places a whole school break day on the school calendar so that parents can plan for a day when children are not in school.  Whole school breaks are scheduled once each quarter of the school calendar.

On whole school break days, all teachers are available for grade level, subject area, special grouping collaboration.  A team of grade level teachers can provide each other with insights and observations and alternative adjustment strategies.

Whole school break days can also be in-person and/or remote workdays.  Whole school break days also contribute the mental health of the school by releasing all students and teachers from the usual routines of continuous school. 

Reduced daily assignments to create daily time.

A school that wants to institutionalize teacher availability for assessment, reflection, and adjustment can build time for these three activities into teachers’ daily assignments by removing one or more classes for each teacher’s assignment.  For example, instead of assigning a teacher to teach five classes per day with one period of preparation time, assign the teacher four classes per day with one period every day for assessment, reflection, and adjustment and one period for preparation.  This requires hiring additional teachers to be assigned the teaching of class periods removed from other teacher’s usual schedules.

Costs – Pay Now or Instead of Later

There is cost to providing breaks for assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching.  One cost is the employment of substitute teachers, or the employment of more teachers.  There is the cost of additional resources for adjusted teaching – the same old, same old will not produce new results.  There also is the cost of institutionalization and constant prioritization of assessment, reflection, and adjustment in the school. 

When considering the cost of hiring more teachers, consider the cost to student learning of not providing consistent time for assessment, reflection, and adjustment.  Because schools are edu-assembly lines, we keep the edu-chain moving until after student failures to learn have piled up and we play catch up trying the remediate students out of sequence with their learning.  We spend more annual revenue hiring intervention teachers, tutorial aides, and assigning students to summer school and other make-up venues than we need to.   Instead, use those financial and professional resources to ensure adequate assessment, reflection, and adjustment of teaching in the real time of lesson and unit instruction. 

The Key Essential for Breaks

The essential element for making an assessment, reflection, and adjustment break successful is an administrator/teacher conversation about the goals for the break.  This is laser focused work on teaching and learning – what worked to cause successful student learning, what did students NOT successfully learn, how can teaching be changed and improved to cause all students to be successful learners, and then teaching using those changes and improvements. 

Teaching that is carefully targeted for students with enough rigor and challenge will always cause a distribution of learning successes.  Teaching that all students succeed at in at their first exposure is undertargeted.  Conversely, if no students succeed in the first exposure, then teaching has been overtargeted.  Assessment, reflection, and adjustment are how teachers practice this sequence – aim, fire, adjust your aim, fire again – instead of our usual fire, aim, fire again

This is effective teaching and effective teaching is not piece work.

Personalized Education Plan as Antidote to Pandemic Education Losses

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Those who believe that all children are resilient and submerging them in the normalcy of school will cure the significant direct and indirect losses they suffered during our pandemic education are looking for coins under their pillow left by the tooth fairy.  Their losses will not be made whole without a clear understanding of pandemic effects and explicit actions taken to remedy those effects.  Anything less will create a bruised generation of young adults we could and should have treated better.

I look at children getting off the morning bus at school and see children who look like any children of any pre-pandemic year.  Part of my observation, I know, is that I want to see children who are wholesome and happy and well in every sense of the word.  Then, I listen to teacher observations and examine the data of students’ returned-to-school learning and I see children who are not what they should be.  They exhibit attitudes and dispositions that are getting in the way of their successful school experiences.  They have gaps in their school skills and knowledge and culture that cause them undeserved yet solvable problems. 

It is inaccurate to ascribe these observations to all children.  However, it is accurate to ascribe one or more of these to each child.  And, that is where our necessary work begins.  Our pandemic mitigations were school- and grade-wide.  We closed school for all children, attempted to provide remote instruction to all children, quarantined classes and grade levels after their return to school, and restricted access to school life and its activities for the better parts of two years.  I attempt no fault finding; the work is not backwards but forwards.  How do we help all children now?

Primary strategy: Personalized Education Plan

The primary strategy for making all children educationally whole and sound from their pandemic effects needs to be an educational and developmental assessment of each child and from that assessment individualized, small group, and whole group remedial treatments. 

Begin the strategy with PEPs for all 4K-5 children, those whose dispositional and learning are most foundational and for whom small group and large group remediation will be most efficient and effective.  Assess and know the extent of learning and dispositional gaps for each child.

  • 5K and grade 1 children lacked 4k and 5K experiences to socialize them to school success. 
  • 4K-grade 5 children lack educational stamina; remote ed taught them turn off and disengage when assignments and experiences required more than they wanted to commit.  Or, when school failed to engage with them.
  • 4-grade 5 children learned to isolate from their pandemic experience; screen time provided their socialization and remains their go to escape when in-personal interactions are required.
  • 4K through grade 3 lacked explicit instruction in phonemic development, structured language and vocabulary acquisition, and progression in reading fluency.
  • Grade 3-5 children display gaps in numeracy arithmetic skills, especially in concepts and automaticity of multiplication, division, and conceptualization of fractions.
  • 4K-grade children lost second language development, musical literacy, and cooperative teaming in physical education.

Creating a PEP for each child demonstrates a school’s commitment to post-pandemic education.  I am not calling out schools who do not take such explicit actions, but I do place them in the tooth fairy believers category.  A PEP requires time and expense to develop, time and expense to implement, collaboration among educators and parents, and a mutual understanding that without explicit strategies children will not overcome the ill effects of their pandemic education.  A PEP is a statement regarding school commitment each child’s worth and well-being.

School-wide Post-Pandemic Plans

Parallel to PEPs for all 4K-5 is the need for school-wide implementation of student dispositional remediation, social-emotional and mental health servicing, and trauma-sensitivity training. 

On their return to school, middle level children advanced grade levels without developing the social and dispositional skills required for middle level and high school success.  Children who were in 5th grade in 2019-20 were 7th graders in 2021-22.  They leap-frogged from smaller, self-contained groupings of students, elementary-trained teachers, pre-adolescent social settings into a secondary schedule of changing classes, subject-trained teachers, academic-oriented instruction, and the milieu of middle level adolescence and puberty.  They went from Earth to Mars without climate orientation.  And, their current school work shows this ill-effect of the pandemic.

Secondary children, especially, demonstrate a turn-it-off disposition in their return to school regarding school procedures and classroom requirements.  Their

  • rates of tardiness and absenteeism,
  • defiance toward cell phone rules,
  • lack of assignment completion, and
  • non-compliance with teacher direction

 are off the chart compared with pre-pandemic secondary children.  These are pandemic effects and must be treated as effects that can and must be remediated.  Children were largely non-directed and independent while in remote education.  They learned habits that are not serving them now.

Administrators and teachers must carve the time and resources from the already packed school calendar and school budgets for individual, small group, and large group treatments.  We will not achieve social and emotional wellness without making new school-wide, annual processes and systems for teaching all children these dispositions.  And, creating improved systems for identifying children who are S-E stressed and mentally unhealthy. 

Schools do not have and are not authorized to have full mental health services.  Yet, in rural school communities, especially, distances between homes and services make school new mental health centers.  We need collaboration with county health services and private mental health providers if we are to create necessary post-pandemic treatments for children.

Imagine how these children will fare in their post-secondary world if they persist in behaviors caused by the ill effects of the pandemic.  They and our community deserve our commitment to remediating the ill  effects of their pandemic education or our community and nation will be feeling these ill-effects for decades to come.

What to do?

Start with PEPs for each 4k-5 child.  Start with individual, small group, and large group strategies of remediate the pandemic effects that your assessments reveal.  Start with a commitment and investment in direct and explicit actions that will make all children educationally and developmentally better.  Start with whole school training so that all faculty and staff are attuned to how today’s children are different than yesterday’s.  Do not believe tooth fairies will make all your wishes come true.

Summer – School’s Necessary Fifth Quarter

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I always smiled when Click and Clack, as NPR’s “Car Guys”, welcomed listeners to the third half of their hour-long radio broadcast.  The “third half” was how they partitioned and used their time on the air not about the  arithmetic of three halves making a whole.  In a like manner, summer is an educator’s fifth quarter.  After the four quarters of a school year are completed, summer is the interlude, the fifth quarter for professional reflection, analysis, and  planning. There is scant time in the four quarters of a school year for these three activities because daily teaching is all about meeting the immediate needs of students – it is on-demand work.  The fifth quarter is all about review, consideration, and design. 

In earlier blogs, I have made the professional case for teachers to be calendar year employees not just school year.  Today, I let the needed work of education provide the argument.

The case for reflection.  A wonderful young teacher in our school district assembles and makes an online posting every Monday of the coming week’s school activities.  The weeks of May and early June are loaded to the gills with events – school for all ages is non-stop, on-the-go motion.  The spring musical and spring sports schedules, grade level trips to Madison and Green Bay, the spring music concerts, Senior Banquet, and graduation make the days and evening of spring a mad dash to the finish line for teachers.  It is acceleration into a quick and final deceleration – and the school year is over. 

On her weekly postings of school events there is no time designated for reflection on the school year soon ending.  There is not one minute of a school day invested in our teachers’ retrospection about the 2021-22 academic year.  Everyone is engaged in the forward motion of ending the school year. 

Incorporated in the definition of a professional is the capacity and commitment to being reflective about one’s professional work.  Candid reflection affirms the good practices leading to positive outcomes and leads to improvement or elimination of weaker practices.  Professionals are reflective yet our school provides no time for reflection.  We need to make professional reflection a planned reality in our school year of days.

The case for analysis.  Earlier in May our students sat for their spring assessments.  Elementary children completed the spring end of their annual universal screener assessments.  Elementary and middle level children completed their spring ACT Aspire assessments.  High school children took AP exams and final whacks at the ACT.  Every child in our school was tested, some multiple times.  All of these were calendared on our weekly announcements.  What I didn’t see was scheduled time for reflection and analysis of these data.  Nada.

We assume teachers have time in May and early June before the last day of school to reflect on their school year and the end-of-year data.  But when?  Time for teachers in the last quarter of the school year is fully subscribed.  Then, the school year is over.  Classrooms are closed and teachers depart for the summer. 

As of this date, no data meetings have been held in our school for the analysis of spring assessments, evaluation of each child’s fall to spring growth, or the effectiveness of our instruction.

If not now, when?  An organized reflection and analysis of instruction and learning is placed on the back burner of school life until late August and the return of teachers for a new school year.  The summer “quarter” is reserved for summer school and vacation.

Does this fly in the face of what we know is best practice?  You bet it does!  We know that mental retention is influenced by “meaningfulness”.  When information is compellingly meaningful we pay attention to it.  When information is current and relevant we pay attention to it.  When information affects our ongoing work we pay attention to it.  Postponing the reflection and analysis of spring assessment data until late August treats these data as irrelevant to our teaching and learning. 

We know that August is “ramp up time” for the start of a new school year.  The scant time in our August in-service days is loaded with getting classes, classrooms, and new colleagues ready for Game Day – the first day of school.  Inserting data analysis into the week before school starts leaves every teacher in the room wishing they were somewhere else getting ready for Game Day.  Analysis of SY 21-22 data the week before Game Day is lip service to data analysis.  Administrators and teachers alike know this for what it is – not meaningful and not productive.

The Fifth Quarter – Oh, the good we could do with time outside the school year calendar.  First, a fifth quarter is outcome-based not time- or place-based.  Work time can begin at 9:00 or later.  Work place can be at school or not – how about a coffee shop.  Shorts and sandals or whatever is the garb of the hour.  We know how to do remote and work from home and this fits well into a fifth quarter.

The critical attributes are the reflection upon our work and the analysis of our data each directed at an informed planning for the next school year.  In our small, rural school, fifth quarter should mean a  reflection and data analysis on a student-by-student basis resulting in an informed plan for each student’s teaching and learning in the next school year.

Fifth Quarter For All – The fifth quarter is all about school responsibility and accountability.  It applies to all school faculty and staff.  Food service, cleaning and maintenance, transportation, guidance and counseling, athletics and activities and arts – every facet of the school enterprise benefits from fifth quarter work.  We focus so much attention upon teaching and learning that we tend to ignore the other necessary work that makes a school function with efficiency and effectiveness.  Fifth quarter review, consideration and design improves the next year’s work of every school worker.  Too often it takes a seismic event to change practices in transportation, food service, and maintenance.  Instead, allow thoughtful and timely review and consideration change the design of that work.

Commitment to a Fifth Quarter – School boards need to commit dollars to the fifth quarter; the boards are buying professional time.  Administrators need to commit responsibility and accountability to the fifth quarter; making time and resources available and engaging with teachers in the reflection and analysis.  And at the end of the fifth quarter, the administration is responsible for ensuring that the quarter’s work shapes teaching and learning in the fall of the new school year. 

Even though review, reflection and design are inherent in teaching, if they are not explicitly constructed in the school calendar, they fall to the wayside of passing time.  And, then we wonder why one school year feels like the same old, same old of the previous. 

Victory Dance in the End Zone of the School Year

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After all the children have left school on the last day, close your eyes, smile, and hug yourself.  You deserve the moment.  Few outside the profession understand the emotionality of the end of a school year.  Don’t explain yourself, just make your private celebration.  Puff your chest, professional educator, and do your personal victory dance in the end zone of the school year.  Job well done!

Media makes a big deal of showcasing college football each Saturday in the fall of the year.  There is hoopla and fanfare, banners and cheers, and pumped-up excitement.  In all honesty, I say to Kirk Herbstreit and Lee Corso, television’s game day impresarios, “welcome to a teacher’s world 180 days of the year”, only without anyone watching.  From the first day of school to the last, each instructional day of the school year is “game day” because when a teacher walks into a classroom it is like the Wisconsin Badgers entering Camp Randall Stadium.  Children expect their teacher to show up with a game buster of a lesson plan every day of school.  They expect a teacher to excite their learning, make each child feel like an academic winner, and, in the evening of the day, every supper table awaits a child’s retelling of the glory of their school today.  When that happens, and it happens all the time for a professional teacher, school really is “game day” and the teacher is the star of game day.

“Huh?”, Herbstreit and Corso may say.  “Where is the action and glory and jubilation of scoring winning touchdowns?”.  Non-educators don’t understand.  All that glory and more is in the face of each child when their “I get it” light is switched on.  It is in the sound of every perfect note played or sung in a music room, each perfect geometry proof flashed on a smartboard, every concise five paragraph essay, and every perfect angle cut on a band saw in the shop.  And it reverberates when an “I got it” child tackles a next challenge.  Their success begets their new successes and that is the glory of game day at school.

I encourage professional educators to celebrate the close of a school year and honor all the winning achieved by children under their instruction and direction.  In The Natural, Roy Hobbs dreams of walking down the street and hearing people whisper, “There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was in this game”.  For the next several decades, whenever the children you taught gather in their class reunions, you will be their Roy Hobbs.  In their hearts and retold stories, they know who made a difference in their lives.  Celebrate your year of game days.  Smile and dance with the knowledge that all your children know – you earned the celebration.

Being What We Teach

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Schooling in the pandemic exemplified what Tom Paine labeled, “…these are the times that try men’s souls…”.  Every educator was Paine’s “summer soldier” called to perform a duty – being the kind of teacher, staff member, and school leader they were not trained to be – and they performed valiantly. 

On the best of days, the task of sustaining continuous teaching and learning for all children was difficult and on the worst of days it was almost insurmountable.  No one was trained for studio teaching of remote students on their laptops, pads, and phones.  No one was trained to make and deliver school meals to children at home.  No one was trained to make on-demand decisions of opening or closing schools, quarantining classes of children, or masking or unmasking.  No one was trained to say “this schoolhouse is closed – you cannot come in”.  Yet, school faculty, staff, and leaders did what needed to be done.

We teach our children to be problem solvers – we were.  We teach our children to use evidence and data to make decisions – we did.  We teach our children to be collaborative and collegial – we were.  We teach our children to be flexible and adapt to new challenges – we were.  We teach our communities that the education of all children is essential – we delivered.  We teach our parents that school and home are partners in child development – we upheld our part.  We teach our children that sometimes we cannot make everyone happy, but we can try our hardest to make them understand – we tried.

In educational theory, we know the best driver for doing our best work is our personal intrinsic motivation.  I point to intrinsic drivers – our intellectual, emotional, passionate, and compassionate reasons that compel us to action.  During our trying times, each educator’s intrinsic motivation was the difference maker.    Schoolyard signs declaring educators as “essential workers” caused smiles of recognition, but these words did not get us up in the morning.  Honking horns and texts of encouragement were background appreciation.  An intrinsic motivation is an intangible that lives in a person’s soul, or it does not.  Although the theory of transitioning from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation reads well in our education textbooks, it only works if a person can be intrinsically motivated.  Without debate, pandemic educators possessed an intrinsic “trigger” that moved them into action even when doing so put their personal and family safety at risk.

At the closing of every major battle, not just military, there is a deceleration in the frantic work of struggle accompanied with the realization that “I survived”.  The struggle mentality does not stop, it eases away.  The heightened risk of serious illness and death has subsided although there are still surges of danger.  The coming down from months of working “above and beyond” built both a resilience and a fatigue and each must be recognized – honor the fatigue and celebrate the resilience.  In our opened schools with optional masking and other mitigations and our paralleling ongoing positive covid tests with measles or chickenpox, we look at each other as survivors now returning to our usual work lives.

No medals are awarded, and no banquets are held.  Yet, professionally we look at each other as stronger educators and our schools as worthy places for what we achieved.  We were what we teach our children to be and as time passes our graduates will appreciate this truth.  The intrinsic calling to be an educator of children prevailed.