Category Archives: Blog

Veteran Professional Teachers Don’t Grow On Trees

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I am of an age when most of my teacher friends are veterans of several decades in their classrooms.  They are veterans in the sense that their real-life teaching careers span years of daily teaching and working with children in school classrooms.  I like them for their commitment to the time and place of classroom teaching.  Teaching is their calling; more than their job.  Among those veterans also are teachers who are consummate professionals.  Not only have they worked their decades, but they also grew professionally in their understanding and skillfulness as teachers.  They are seasoned and constantly improved teachers.  This is no accident but the result of their commitment to be better teachers over time.  I like them for their time, but I love them for their commitment to the art and science of being a better teacher.  These teachers do not grow on trees.

Better with age applies to somethings but not all.  Sometimes aging is just what it is and things grow old.  Food suppliers label perishables with “Best to use by” dates because food spoils, milk sours, and tastes go flat.  We often hear a person say that something is aging like good wine.  It is interesting that aging without use may improve its value, but once opened for consumption and not enjoyed in its time wine can lose its taste and go bad.  Aging alone is not improvement.

A constant consideration of how teaching causes children to learn and consistent improvement of the relationship between teaching and learning are true measures of veteran professionals.  They enter the profession with a beginner’s tool box of teaching skills.  Year after year they use and test their teaching abilities.  It is perfect and safe to say that the best teaching skills are complex and compound.  One lesson prepares children to learn while another provides foundational instruction.  A next lesson secures initial learning and the one that follows builds more content and skill.  A subsequent lesson is a quick check to substantiate that each child is learning the right things and the following lesson reinforces what has been learned.  Each lesson in turn exercises acquired and refined teaching strategies.  While all of these are described in literature and taught in educator preparation programs, it is only when a teacher uses them in the classroom year after year that they become the tools of a veteran professional.  Veteran professionals grow their complex and compound teaching skills carefully, with use, and over time.

The use of teaching skills is not mechanical and automatic.  Children are a constantly moving target and causing one child to learn does not always equate to causing another child to learn or a whole class to learn.  Each child is her own mystery and veteran teachers mull over options for teaching to find the right instruction that will cause each “mystery” to learn.  They consider and apply complex and compound teaching skills to what each child needs to learn successfully.  Children present themselves as hard and soft targets for teaching.  The hard target is their capacity in learning a school curriculum – prescribed content, skills, and collaborative and collegial relationships.  The soft target is the social-emotional personality of a child that affects her readiness and capacity to engage in learning.   Veteran professionals constantly look at the two-faced nature of children as learners.

This focus is a distinguishing trait.  Where less skillful teachers teach a lesson to the class, veteran professionals teach lessons within lessons to each child in a class.

To do this, veteran professionals have made data their friend and informant.  They don’t wait until the end of a school year or a quarter or even until the end of a unit of instruction to study data resulting from their teaching.  They look at it constantly.  Formative data is collected and analyzed daily.  Formative data directs tomorrow’s teaching.  Summative data is collected in chunks over time and provides a holistic assessment of how well a child or all children are learning an annual or a grade band’s curriculum.  Veteran professionals also look at the emotional data on the faces of each child.  Is this child engaged and learning?  Is this child being properly challenged with my instruction?  Is this child engaging with classmates?  What is happening in the life of this child that affects how she is in my classroom?  What do these data tell me I need to do next?  Veteran professionals have unofficial degrees in child psychology and sociology that are exercised every day in their teaching.

Veteran professional teachers are the motors that run our schools and advance the education of our children.  This was never more apparent than in the early days of the pandemic.  Panic was widespread when school campuses closed, teachers taught from home, and children were at-home learners.  No teacher preparation readied us for this.  Without fail, veteran professionals paused, grabbed the available technologies, and displayed a “we can do this” attitude to challenges that were changing daily.  They adapted, adopted, adjusted, and taught their children.  It is foolish to say that remote teaching and learning achieved the results possible with in-person teaching and learning.  It is praiseworthy to say that professional veterans led the charge in connecting with remote children, providing daily instruction that kept children learning every day of the school year, and made proverbial lemonade from the lemons the pandemic dealt them.

Professional veteran teachers do not grow on trees.  They rise out of the recently hired teachers and announce themselves with their attitudes and actions.  School leaders who know that all teachers are not created equally see these young stars immediately.  They have an air of humility tinged with a pride of work connected to the knowledge they can do even better.  They possess and demonstrate an innate capacity to teach that goes far beyond what they learned in college classes and student teaching.  Other teachers recognize them, also. 

These young professionals are drawn to each other in their formative years and school leaders observe that they form their own cadres of peers – they know who they are, no labeling is necessary.  If allowed, these teacher partnerships become the backbone of professional strength in a school.  On many issues, the best school leaders support their developing young professionals and get out of their way.

In summary, every school has its veteran teachers, those who have been on staff for years.  Veteran teachers give schools continuity.  There is a significant difference though between a veteran who has taught the same lessons year after year and a professional veteran who has grown her teaching skills year after year.  It returns us to the characterization of aging.  Veteran teachers who do the same things year after year – they age and add a number to their years of experience.  Their school remains, like them, the same over time.  Professional veterans who constantly grow their skills, behaviors and push for constant improvement cause their school to be, like them, a constantly improving school over time. 

Each conversation with these professional veteran teacher friends reminds me of the school treasures they are. 

Kix And School Are For Kids

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“Kix are for kids” was a slogan for a breakfast cereal in years past.  A simple string of four words made it neat and repeatable.  More importantly, the writers struck a then unique chord by aligning Kix with a target consumer group, kids.  At that time, adults were the constant market of advertising.  General Mills got it right by pointing Kix at kids.  Public education should take note.  “School is for kids” should be our overarching slogan.

The slogan, school is for kids, tells us that in the center of every decision about school should be this concern – how does this affect kids?  How does this improve education for kids?  How does this make school life better for kids?  If there is not a “kid” in the conversation, we need to consider if we are talking about the right things.

What does it mean to put kids at the center of the discussion?  Consider your school mission or philosophy statement.  Most speak of “excellence in student learning”, “promoting student growth”, “preparation of students for the 21st century”.  Teachers, coaches, directors, and administrators are the agents in the mission statement for causing student learning, growth, and development.  Putting kids at the center of the conversation aligns what you do with what you said you would do.  We will still do a lot of adult school business, but even that can be linked to student outcomes.  Discussion of curriculum and instruction should be pointed at student learning.  Employment contracts should be considered as they affect student education, supervision, health and nutrition, and transportation.  Most non-administrative positions can be characterized as contributing to the academic, activity, arts, and academic programs for kids. 

What if every school rule were written for the purpose of enhancing a kid’s school experience and a kid’s daily learning?  Would the rules change from how they now read?  Consider our use of the clock.  We look askance at a child who has to go to the restroom 20 minutes after class begins.  “You should have taken care of business before the bell.”  Say what?  Or, a child who has 15 minutes to eat lunch after standing 10 minutes in the cafeteria line and needing five minutes to return a lunchbox to her locker.  Say what, again? 

Or a child with a child’s brain and immature concepts of problem solving who pushes a classmate in a playground disagreement.  Safety first, we say, not always connecting behavior with executive functions at the child’s developmental level.  Or a child who is so excited to answer a question in class that she waves her hand, her arms, and rises out of her seat.  Calm down, we say, but why?  In so many ways schools are run on adult rules for adult purposes.

The slogan “school is for kids” does not ask children to be teachers, principals, superintendents or school board members or food service, custodians, or bus drivers.  These are essential adult roles.   However, school is not about these people.  They all are agents working to cause student learning, growth, and development – a repeat of an essential statement.   

Every now and then, a child-based concept is discussed that challenges our traditional orientations to school.  The concept of a child’s biological clock versus the school clock is an excellent case study.  There is evidence that children require eight to ten hours of sleep each night for restoration and reading for growth purposes.  There is evidence that family life is creeping later and later into the evening and nighttime hours.  Supper is later for working parents.  Family activities that are post-supper push bedtime later.  There is evidence that high school children in are not biologically ready for school until mid- to late morning.  Yet, the alarm clock in the morning must sound loudly for a child to be in a school desk around 8:00 the next morning.  For children who have an hour-long bus ride or 45-minute walk to school breakfast was before 7:00 and competition for bathroom time meant that the alarm sounded around 6:00.  The school clock is set on an adult and industrial time schedule.  School employees work an eight-hour day, typically 8:00 to 4:00, that is matched with the work hours of other adults in the community. 

Consider usual school rules and protocols about eating in the classroom, chewing gum during class time, sitting in rows, walking single file, walking in the hallways, allowed recess activities, appropriate school clothing, calling on the first person to raise a hand, reading rounds and waiting for your turn to read your sentence or paragraph, simplification of facts to true and false statements because they are easiest to correct.  The examples pile on – school is organized by adults for adults in the name of kids only.

Interestingly, kids might not change the rules or protocols much, but their conceptualization of rules would change.  School designed for kids would not be a Lord Of The Flies chaos.  In the presence of adults, children still look to adults for guidance and supervision.  Believe it or not, Ripley, but kids want order in their world.  Their orderly world is not necessarily an adult’s orderly world.

This piece is written to push school adults to stop and think about the school they have organized and operate.  Don’t turn it over to the kids but remember that the reason you have the authority and opportunity to lead a school is because without kids there would be no school.

School Choice and Enrollment Leverage in the Pandemic

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Leverage is designed to provide advantage.  Leverage when using a pry bar allows one to lift or move something that is otherwise unmovable.  Understanding the mechanical advantage of a lever helped early mankind build with stone and open the doors of later industry.  Not every lever is mechanical.  School choice uses the lever of money to influence decisions.  Choice is the fulcrum and enrollment and school money are the objects being moved by a parent looking for educational advantage.   

School choices offer parents a personal tool for addressing pandemic education.  It allows parents to examine available options and select the where and how their child will be educated.  Parental choice of schooling is without prejudice; it is a personal decision that is freely made and without subsequent repercussion.  Choice allows a parent to match their understandings and beliefs about the pandemic with an educational option and to re-choose as understandings and beliefs change.  And, re-choose again.

School choice was initially designed to allow parents in schools with chronically poor educational opportunity and achievement to enroll in schools that demonstrably provided better opportunities and achievement.  The idea of choice was to lever a child’s enrollment for improved educational equity and equality.

Like so many things in life, the use of the tool changed.  Choice has become a socio-economic- and political lever.  In some communities, choice re-established segregation from cultural and economic diversity.  In some schools, choice elaborated elitism.  In some schools, choice allowed those who could to leave and left a school community of those who could not leave depleted.  The tool no longer was a lever for educational equity and equality but for personal advantage.

Choice in the pandemic is a political and economic lever.  The power and threat are displayed in the following fashion by a parent addressing school administration or the school board.  “If I do not like your school policies, rules and decisions, I will take my child from your school and enroll in a school where I agree with their policies, rules and decisions.”  Most frequently, the parent is speaking about policies, rules and decisions related to in-person versus remote education and masking versus no-masking. On the face of this scenario, this is school choice.  In the reality of this scenario, this is economic leverage.  My child represents school funding and a parent controls where her child’s funding will be schooled.  A small school with a small economy may not be able to survive many losses of enrollment.  Or, may not be able to withstand the threat of “… there are a lot of families who feel the same way I do and they also will leave this school if you don’t change your policies, rules and decisions”.  A school may fear a significant run of disenrollments, like a run on a bank during a financial panic, that drains the school district. 

As with most things, one action begets another.  The loss of enrollment can diminish school pay roll.  Fewer children can diminish school  jobs.  Fewer children can diminish programs – not enough children for a football team or a school play.  The threat of disenrollment causes leadership to consider these “next” problems and that consideration can temper how leadership responds to the lever of threatened disenrollment.

Whoa!  At this point, the nature of school governance is completely distorted.  No school policy, rule, or decision can be made without the implied threat of disenrollment choices by those who disagree.  And, if the threat of disenrollment choices become the “decider” for future policies, rules, and decisions, governance for the good of the school community will be governance for the happiness of a few.  When the threat of the disenrollment lever works to change school policies, rules, and decisions, fear of disenrollment choice becomes the modus operandi – anything and everything done in the school may elicit the disenrollment threat.

The best response to such attempted leverage is this – and, make the best educational decisions and life goes on.  A school that is consistently focused on the equity and equality of educational opportunity and achievement, including the health and safety of all within the school, needs to stay the course of its policies, rules, and decisions.  These high ground qualities will sustain a school through the turmoil of both the pandemic and pandemic behavior.  Parents who persist in using school disenrollment as a lever for personal advantage or preference are not seeking the enduring qualities of opportunity and achievement inherent in public education.  They are into the self-serving politics of “I want what I want and if I cannot have what I want I will leave”. 

Wish them well, as life in the school goes on.

Perspectives – Seeing Micro-Differences Blinds Us To Our Macro-Agreements

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Look at an object through a windowpane.  Now, close your right eye and look at the object.  Then, close your left eye look out the same windowpane.  I just did and the object, a car down the street, appeared when looking with my right eye but disappeared when looking with my left eye – blocked by the side of the windowpane.  The object moved to the left or right depending on the eye I used.  If asked whether there was a car on the street, my answer of “yes” and “no” would have been equally correct.  Perspective matters and there are many of those differing perspectives in our world today.

Thomas Paine wrote, “To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead”.  Mr, Paine, I beg to differ.  We each are able to use the power of reasoning and because your fellow man does not reach the same conclusion as you does not mean that he is not using his reasoning.  He may have a different perspective or lens through which he understands the same facts you understand.  You might has well have written, “Any person who does not agree with my reasoning must be dead”.

Perhaps Mr. Paine meant, “It is easier to give medicine to a dead man than to change the conclusions of a man who sees the world differently than I see the world”.  In his day, a person who was loyal to the Crown was just as righteous as a person who was a patriot of the revolution given their different perspectives and reasoning.  Righteousness depended upon how you viewed a revolution.  They each saw the events of their times from a different perspective.

Today, we see differences of perspective in how people consider our local, state, nation, and world issues.  We tend to apply labels, like Paine’s Patriot or Tory, to people depending on their perspective.  Some labels are partisan, republican or democrat.  Some labels are ideological, liberal or conservative.  Some are issue-based life, pro-life or pro-choice.  Some are very contemporary, vax or anti-vax.  Some are school-specific, phonics-based or whole language.  Some are fringe, Proud Boys or Antifa.  Labeling gives us a quick recognition of our different perspectives of the world.

Too often, focusing on perspective results in micro-differences and blinds us to our macro-agreements.  When we isolate and focus on our different perspectives we tend not to see the larger world and the many issues upon which we may agree.   

My most differing friends each want orderliness in the checkout line in the grocery store.  They want roads without potholes and bridges without detour signs.  They want safety on the highway and at city intersections.  They want the option to come and go as they please.  I have seen the most conservative and liberal of friends hold the door open for an elderly lady.  And, equally grumble about the price of gasoline.  Last evening, I saw friends of different perspective sitting on a hillside with their respective spouses and friends enjoying a free, public concert.  Without prejudice, their heads bobbed and feet tapped to the same music.  There is a lot upon which we agree.

Finding the macro-agreements can allow us to understand the micro-disagreements.  I am reminded that those loyal to the Crown and those faithful to the Stars and Stripes have been staunch allies over and over again since Tom Paine’s day.

At a school board meeting tonight, proponents of mask and no-mask will speak from their perspectives.  There will be disagreement.  There also will be decisions about school enrollment made depending upon the outcome of the discussion.  The greater agreement is that we get to have different perspectives, to speak our minds, and to make personal decisions based upon our perspective.  The greater agreement is that all children need their education.  The disagreements are real and, in the greater scheme, are okay.  Children will be educated.  We will work things out, because we are not dead and refusing the medicine, but living in a reasoning community where we have and always will have different perspectives.

The car is still down the road even though I cannot see it when looking with one eye closed.  Such is perception.

“When You Know What Is Right, Try To Do It” – A Mantra For Leadership

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“When you know what is right, try to do it” was often used as a sign-off by the late Bruce Williams, longtime radio talk show host.  It is a mantra that should be a constant beacon for guiding school leadership.

School is a complex intersection of competing interests, sometimes harmonious but mostly not.  There are mandates and demands, wants and needs, and a myriad of human personalities.  One may believe that school is a one-way street, a set of rules and regulations without exception, and too often a monolith without compassion – it is none of these.  School is a human organism made up of you and me and the entire school community.  Consider all of a school’s populations converging at the place called campus and any school becomes a Times Square at rush hour every day.  Regardless of the size of the school or community, any decision made at this intersection can be complex and complicated.  Leadership tries to find a “right thing to do” pathway through the congestion that results in a sound decision and action.  Mr. Williams’ words provide a consistent flashlight for leadership.

“How can this be”, a reader may ask.  “School is simple.  It educates children.  The law is straightforward.  Children between the ages of 5 and 180 are to be in school.  The profession is ancient.  Teachers teach and children learn.” 

Gadzooks, were it that easy!

Let’s look at three examples of complex issues.  The annual school calendar.  Student use of cell phones in school.  School mitigation protocols during the pandemic.  Here’s looking to you, Bruce Williams.

Some decisions are very complex, but resolve once leadership makes a decision.  For example, the first day of school.  It is just a date on the calendar, but it causes annual debate because so many are vested in the calendaring of a school year.  In our state, the school start date is after September 1 as a protection of the tourist industry.  However, school sports begin in mid-August, an adjustment that creeps earlier in that month every year in order that spring sports do not extend too far into June after school is dismissed.  School leaders try to explain that school does not begin until the first day of classes, but families, coaches, school maintenance staff, and principals know that school really starts on the first day of fall sports practices in mid-August.  And, the last day of school is not the day classes end in May or June, but after the last scheduled event of the spring sports season.  The calendar is a complex issue with assorted legitimate vested interests and leadership needs to acknowledge and fit all interests into a decision.  It is not easy to decide “what is right” because so many school staff, school families, and local businesses are in conflict on their “right”. 

Oh, and then there is spring break.  Pedagogically the break should be between the third and fourth quarters of the instructional year.  Traditionally the break has been attached to the Good Friday and Easter weekend.  Economically the break wants to be before airlines and resorts and hotels in the south change from winter to summer rates.  School assessments say that the break should not interrupt the annual schedule of statewide assessments and college preparatory ACT and AP examinations.  The sport schedule again speaks up and says the break should be after the winter sports state tournaments.  Complex?  Do you think.

I hear Mr. Williams and respond with “when it comes to the school calendar, comply with state mandates, prioritize school instructional and assessment needs, and school programs”.  Right is creating a calendar that allows the school to achieve its educational purposes.  Criticism of such a calendar will arise, but when school programming is the deciding factor, leadership has done what is right for children in school.

Now, how about something more challenging.  Cell phones in school are today’s chewing gum, only its more complicated than a pack of Wrigley’s.  At face value, school is not opposed to chewing gum or cell phones.  Both are inanimate, do not pose safety risks, and are small enough to be unseen, most of the time.  It is what children do with chewing gum and cell phones that raises them from innocuous to troublesome.  The chewing of gum became attitudinal.  The sound and sight of gum smacking chewers looking at a teacher while smacking away pushed some teachers over the tipping point.  And, the incessant wad of dried gum stuck under desks and table tops is so disgusting.  Hence, the right thing to do:  “no gum chewing in my classroom”.

It is what children do with cell phones, like gum, that is the problem.  Children divert their attention from what is being taught and what they should be learning to what they hear, see, and do on their cell phones.  For some children, it is attention to school work or attention to the cell phone, and it is clear that in most classrooms there can be only one focus for a child’s attention.  Hence, the right thing to do:  “no use of cell phones in my classroom”. 

Once again, it would be nice if doing the right thing were that easy.  Children have learned to text on a phone while the phone is in a pocket of clothing.  Cell phones kept on a lap during class time are, unlike the smacking of gum chewing, out of sight of the teacher.  Worse by far, some children are belligerent enough to not turn off the ringer of the cell phone and will answer a call or text in the middle of class as if they were in their bedroom at home.  This is a straightforward challenge of school authority.

Is the proper decision, “no cell phones in school”.  This does not fly for many parents who want their child always to have access to their parent.  Truth be told, this access is a good thing, even for school purposes.  It does not fly for parents who insist their child is responsible and should not be punished because other children abuse the use of cell phones in school.  It even does not fly for the many lay coaches and activity advisors who are not teachers and use texts and e-mail to communicate during the day with their athletes, actors, and activity kids.

Mr. Williams would wisely add, “… every decision has unforeseen consequences, so be careful about your decisions”.  Is it really a good idea to collect each child’s cell phone at the beginning of every class in order to prevent any possible in-class use of the phone?  Collection and redistribution create their own problems.

Hence, the right thing to do:  “keep your cell phone turned off and put away during class time.  Respond only to the abusers.”  Mr. Williams’ advice tells us that the right thing is to protect teaching and learning time and to assure that the protection does not give rise to new and unanticipated problems.

Last and certainly most, not least, is the issue of pandemic protocols in school.  Remote education, limiting group attendance, and masking being three focal points.  The right thing to do is always to protect the health and safety of children in school.  The question arises, what should school do when some parents support protective school actions and some parents oppose the steps taken to create this protection?  The question is exacerbated when the protocol is “either/or”.  Early in the pandemic, school campus was either open or it is closed, the number of people gathering inside for a school event was either limited or it is not limited, and people in school either wore masks or they do not wear masks.  By their nature, either/or issues immediately create oppositional groups and pandemic protocols are the perfect examples of oppositional issues.

From the school leadership perspective, the right thing to do is to protect the most vulnerable people in the school from a school-based spread of the virus.  The vulnerable include those who are immunocompromised, those over 60 years of age, and those not eligible for vaccination.  Closing the campus does this in a large and complete way.  Limiting the size of indoor gatherings to create social distancing does this arbitrarily.  Requiring everyone to be masked does this in a very personally demanding way.  Each of these three protocols has definite anticipated and unanticipated reverberations. 

The most prominent argument has been “who makes the decision to protect a child – school or the child’s parent?”.  Some parents want complete school protection and other parents want only the protections they choose for their child and they may choose none – no campus closure, no social distancing, and no masks.

Mr. Williams, help!  Interestingly, Mr. Williams also was a prominent financial advisor who was neither a risk seeker nor risk adverse.  “Everything has risk, so what is the worst that is at risk”, he might ask on the air and then listen to the caller enumerate.  “Don’t risk what you cannot afford to lose” was a common follow-up and that is where school leadership enters the issue of pandemic protocols.

The right thing to do is a “no child will die or suffer serious health damage due to a decision I make” decision.  Leadership can risk the loss of parent opinion and even a parent’s removal of their child from the school.  Leadership can risk the anger of people who cannot attend a basketball game.  School can risk the “I hate wearing a mask at school” complaints of children and employees.  Leadership can risk being forced out of their job or recalled by the electorate.  These can be outcomes of leadership doing what they know is the right thing.  But, risking the life and health of children – not on my watch leadership says.  All other arguments shrink to “I want what I want”. 

Determining the right thing to do and then sticking with that decision is like standing in the middle of a busy intersection as traffic passes by.  Unnerving is understatement.  But, conviction in a “do the right thing” decision is a bulwark against those who want leadership to do less.