By Stephen Lazar, on September 1st, 2010
My dream is very simple:
One June, students across New York walk out of a required Regents Examination – let’s say the Global History one, for sake of my dream – having left the entire exam blank. They do not walk out empty handed, though. On their way out, they each grab a copy of the ten-page piece of original historical research they completed over the course of the previous month, which demonstrates that they are ready to succeed in college-level history courses. Perhaps the paper was graded using the tested rubrics from the Consortium for Performance Assessment. The students then gather in public spaces across the state, where they explain to the media and the public that they no longer want to be assigned numbers based on their ability to answer multiple choice questions, but rather that they want to have real and authentic work that shows they are complex, original thinkers who know how to access and evaluate a variety of types of evidence in order to make a compelling argument. They want to show that they are not only ready for college, but that they are ready to be the critical citizens the 21st century requires.
I’ve always been pretty sure my dream is impossible, but when I read this story about students at Hope High School in Providence (which I used to run by everyday when I was student teaching) getting a court injunction to stop the city from taking away block scheduling and their teachers’ common planning time, I am filled with at least a glimmer of hope (pun very much intended).
By Stephen Lazar, on August 30th, 2010
What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.
~ Cobb, in Christopher Nolan’s Inception
The basic theme of the movie Inception is that ideas are incredibly powerful, but that placing them in people’s heads is very difficult. You can’t just put an idea in someone’s head that you want them to have because they will immediately recognize it as foreign and reject it; rather, you have to put more foundational ideas in minds, and then let them grow into larger ideas.
This seems to be an important lesson for those of us trying to change things in schools. We need to get to the ideas that serve as the foundation for the practices we know our students need. As I get ready to return to work this week, this idea of the challenges and power of inception has been resonating in my mind. It hits three questions that have been bouncing around my brain all summer:
- Seven years after I first entered the classroom, what are the two or three ideas I have about teaching that are most worth fighting for and spreading?
- As I become department chair and step into a pedagogical leadership role for the first time, what ideas are going to be most valuable for new and struggling teachers?
- As my school enters its seventh year, how do we spread to new and resistant staff members the ideas that have made us successful?
In other words, what are the ideas that serve as the foundations for good teaching, and then, how do you place these ideas in peoples’ heads and let them grow into philosophies, commitments, and pedagogies? I am not going to attempt to answer the latter question in this post; I don’t have the answer, though I will be exploring it personally and in this space throughout the year. As for the former, I have some thoughts.
Let’s take the example of Standards Based Grading, which I have written about a lot this summer. A basic thesis for SBG might be, “Teachers should communicate clear standards to students, and the only thing for which students are assessed is their level of achievement on these standards” (see Matt Townsley’s blog for a longer, documented version). However, that’s what I want teachers to do, it’s not the idea I want them to have. The idea behind this might be that “All assessment should be formative,” or “Teachers should need to be transparent when they are exerting power over students” or some combination of the two. These are the ideas I want teachers to have, because these ideas can then be transferred to other areas of teaching.
Similarly, another thought I spend a lot of time with is, “High stakes multiple-choice exams should be eliminated.” My advocation for this action is rooted in stronger ideas: “The most important assessments should be authentic performance tasks,” “Transferable skills matter much more than knowledge,” “Depth is more important than breadth,” as well as the two ideas in the previous paragraph. If more people had these ideas, there wouldn’t be a need to have a debate over high-stakes exams.
As I start the school year, here is my very provisional list of what I think are the five most important ideas that I would like be able to plant in more teachers’ minds, Inception-style. These are the ideas than build cities, pedagogies, and the schools students deserve:
- School should not be preparation for life, rather school should be life (paraphrased from John Dewey).
- Teaching is an act of love where we welcome students into our shared world, giving them the opportunity to do things with it unforseen by us (paraphrased from Hannah Arrendt).
- The ability to access, evaluate, synthesize, and communicate knowledge is more important than having any specific body of knowledge.
- Teachers’ jobs are to help students learn, not to teach.
- Students learn best through a social constructivist, inquiry-based method in all subjects at all ages and abilities
What am I forgetting? What are yours?
(For an excellent essay on the ideas that are implied by some of teachers’ “worst” practices, read this excellent essay by former NY Teacher of the Year John Gatto, “The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher”.)
By Stephen Lazar, on August 27th, 2010
Over the past four years, I have created, developed, and spread an annual History Day in my school, as part of the National History Day competition. All sophomores and juniors at my school spend five weeks conducting in-depth historical research, which they then present to both our school and general community each February.
My school’s History Day is the accomplishment of which I take the most pride in my teaching career. It is the only event in the year which is attended by the entire school and the only event at my school where parents and community members are invited to view the products of students’ learning. My former principal always told me that History Day was his favorite day of the school year.
Most significantly, it yields the greatest buy-in, interest, and growth in my students of anything I do. Students look forward to having the opportunity to learn about a topic in which they have interest and show off to the community. It has become a rite of passage. Over the past four years, I have had students complete research on a range of topics from the Missouri Compromise to the Spanish Civil War to Septima Clark, often yielding insights and understandings of which I was not even aware. It is the only time in our curriculum where students have the opportunity to complete in-depth, college-level research.
For the students who go on to the city and even state levels of the competition,they have the opportunity to compete with and learn from the best students my city has to offer. It has been a transformative experience for my public school students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, to see that their work is just as good as the almost entirely white and private school students who enter our city’s competition. And I am very proud that two of the past four years my students have won awards at the city level. But I am even more proud that four of my students have used their History Day papers as the writing samples that helped earn them full-tuition Posse Scholarships to elite private colleges. It meant the world to me, and their future to them, that they all felt that the best piece of writing they did in four years of high school was their work on the History Day project.
The rewards for doing History Day are so great, that I think any teachers who are on the fence should take the plunge and do it this year. When I first heard about the competition, I was in my first year teaching in the Bronx. This was not my first year teaching, but it sure felt like it. All the previous success I had as a student-teacher in Rhode Island and a real teacher in Northern Virginia seemed to have gone out the window. I went to my then principal and asked him if perhaps the following year I could do a school-wide History Day. He told me to make it happen that year. I told him that to do that well I’d have to drop everything I had planned for my course and start immediately. He told me that he thought it was what my classes needed. He was right.
Over the following weeks, my students (and myself) worked harder than they had before. The Saturday before our school fair, nearly half my students came in to work on their projects. The night before, I had to kick a dozen students out of my classroom at 8pm. Over 90% of my students presented successful History Day projects at our first fair. Before that, I never had more than 50% of my students complete a project on time. The momentum from History Day carried through the rest of the year. I’m not sure I did anything different from that point on, but the success students felt from successfully taking on the huge project of History Day fundamentally changed their view of their selves as students and our relationship.
By Stephen Lazar, on August 27th, 2010
Dear newly graduated but still unemployed teacher,
I am thrilled you are trying to enter our profession. When I was in your shoes, I told people that I thought that teaching is really the only thing worth doing professionally, and I still believe that. I was lucky, though. When I first interviewed for teaching jobs in 2004, and then again after moving to NYC in 2006, schools couldn’t fill all the open slots they had. It is unfortunate that things have changed, and that with positions being cut around the country, it is very difficult to find a job right now. For that reason, you need to be very sure that you give yourself the best chance possible. Having just completed a search for an open Humanities slot at my school, I hope you’ll avoid some of the mistakes I saw made and follow these pieces of advice:
- Proofread everything you send out.
- While it is fine to send a generic cover letter and resume to each school, be sure you read a job posting to see if the school is asking for anything more. If they do, send it. For example, if a school asks for references, it is probably because they are on a tight schedule and don’t want to have to ask you for them again. Do not write “References available upon request” at this point.
- Proofread everything you send out.
- Demonstrate that you know something about the school to which you are applying. My school is beginning its 7th year. We take a huge amount of pride in the work we have done to build this institution and accomplish what we have accomplished. If I am going to take the time to talk to you, the least you can do is read the feature article about my school that I linked to in the job posting.
- Proofread everything you send out.
- What you believe is very important to me, but not nearly as important as what you have done. In cover letters and in interviews, give specific examples of students or assignments you have worked with.
- Proofread everything you send out.
- Don’t be afraid to talk about things that did not go well. I was once a student teacher, too. I know a lot of what you did kind of sucked. That’s fine. What I want to see is that you learned from sucking, and that you did better the next time.
- Proofread everything you send out.
- If you are lucky enough to get a phone or in-person interview, within six hours of that interview, send your interviewer a quick thank-you email. This is important for two reasons. First, when interviewing a lot of people in succession, I might have forgotten half our conversation very quickly. You want to make sure I remember that I talked to you and think about you again. Second, the last thing I want to be doing on my last week of summer vacation is anything related to school. Trust me, I could have very easily only called the people with lots of experience and made a “safe” hire. Of the ten people I interviewed over two days this week, three wrote thank you’s. We hired one, and I promise the other two will be the first people I would call back for another opportunity.
- Finally, and most importantly, proofread everything you send out. And if you can’t do it, find someone who can. I don’t care how good you are, if you won’t take the time to ensure there isn’t a typo in the very first sentence of your cover letter, I am not going to take the time to read the rest of it.
Best of luck in your search.
Sincerely,
Stephen Lazar
By Stephen Lazar, on August 23rd, 2010
The Problem
For a teacher beginning the process of Standards Based Grading (SBG), one of the biggest mental and practical road blocks is the answer to the question, “How am I going to take all these standard based scores and turn them into grades for students?” Here is what my grade book looks like at any given time:
All my grades are on a five point standard-based scale (5=Outstanding, 4=Good, 3= Competent, 2=Approaching Competency, and 1=Unacceptable), where a 3 represents a satisfactory passing grade for the end of the year (whereas a two is satisfactory wt the beginning of the year). Therefore, a 60% is a solid grade in my class, and cannot correspond to a 60 on the transcript, which is a failing grade. Likewise, it is extremely rare that a student will be excellent across all my standards, so a 90% or above is essentially impossible. Yet every nine weeks, I have to provide my students with a numerical percentage grade which goes on their transcripts that must correspond to a traditional grade scale.
In an ideal world, we would just give students and parents direct, unmediated feedback in terms of how students preform on various standards so students can have an honest assessment of their strengths and areas where further growth is required. The unfortunate reality though, is that the overwhelming majority of teachers must report a letter or a number grade multiple times throughout the year.
The solution I will propose here can work in one of two ways:
- Teachers only report grades based on standards on some finite scale throughout the marking period, and convert standards to a final numerical grade at the end of the marking period (which is what I do in my classroom)
- Teachers convert each convert each individual assignment to a traditional number or letter grade, which allows for teachers to try out SBG without completely changing everything they do.
For teachers who are new to SBG or who might want to start by just getting their feet wet, I would recommend starting with the latter option, though I think the former is a more logical implementation of SBG as a system of assessment and reporting. There are other solutions to this problem out there which do the job simply and effectively, more abstractly, or that aim to ensure motivation and high expectations across the board, all for the first situation, but I’ve yet to see anything that can work for both.
The Solution Continue reading Bump & Space: Reporting Letter Grades from Standards Based Assessments
By Stephen Lazar, on August 20th, 2010
The Bronx Lab School has an immediate opening. We actually have the flexibility to hire a history or English teacher for the position. Both positions are pretty amazing opportunities: the history position would be teaching seniors, and would include a senior seminar; the English position would be a senior seminar and 2 sections of 11th Grade English. We are NOT under a hiring restriction, so any NY certified candidate is eligible.
Senior Seminars are a double-time class with complete freedom to choose a topic about which students will be passionate. This class meets daily, in addition to a 4 hour block on Thursdays to allow for weekly field trips. This is an opportunity for a great teacher to create your dream course. We have a really great group of seniors this year who would be a pleasure to teach.
Interested candidates should email teach@bronxlabschool.org with a resume, references, and a cover letter that includes your idea for a senior seminar and an explanation of why you would be a good fit for Bronx Lab.
About Bronx Lab:
The Bronx Lab School, an open-enrollment public school in the North Bronx, is entering its eighth year. Through our commitment to authentic project based assessment, inquiry based learning, and creating a collaborative professional community that knows and supports students as individuals, BLS has graduated over 90% of students in its first three graduating classes. 100% of our graduates have been accepted to a range of colleges and universities, including thirteen on Posse scholarships. For further insight into our school, this article from The Australian newspaper is a good place to start: http://bit.ly/deE3G3 (though our principal has changed since publication, and the teachers’ ages that were reported were all wrong).
By Stephen Lazar, on August 16th, 2010
By Stephen Lazar, on August 13th, 2010
When I decided to get back online a few months ago, I decided to just start writing rather than worry about designing the webspace in too much detail. With summer nearing its end, I’m realizing I might never get around to that part. At the very least, I’m glad to finally have a blogroll up. To the right, you’ll find some of the blogs I enjoy reading most. I’ve divided them into two categories:
- Comrades are blogs and websites of people or groups who I tend to find myself nodding along with as I read their work. They’re a source of great ideas, as well as comfort in knowing there are other likeminded people out there.
- Blogs that Challenge and Expand My Thinking are people coming at things from a different perspective from me, be it in terms of pedagogy or subject matter, which force me to rethink what I do from different perspectives. While my comrades are a source for shared resources, it tends to be an occasional post from one of these blogs that give me epiphany moments that really help me grow as a teacher.
There are a lot of other blogs I’ve only just started reading which will undoubtedly be added over time. I’d love to hear from other people as well – what are the blogs you read that challenge and expand your thinking?
UPDATE: I realized I spent a lot of time going through all the new blogs I’m reading, thus forgetting the smal handful of blogs I’ve been reading the past 4-6 years that are still active. Doug’s, Chris’, Darren’s, Susan’s, Dan’s, and Will’s blogs have all been added. Among other things, I’m amazed they’re still going strong after all this time.
By Stephen Lazar, on August 10th, 2010
Being a teacher is not about “teaching,” it’s about making students learn…
I spent two straight hours today dictating notes on Communism in the USSR and China. Students finished the session with 18 notes cards filled with bullet points for terms that could appear on the Global History Regents Exam next Tuesday, along with pictures and movements for each to help them remember the terms. Here’s what I (more or less) told them when we were done:
I’m sorry we ran out of time today, because it means you haven’t learned anything. It’s great that you have all these notes written down, but until you re-read the information, teach it to others, compare and contrast it, apply it to new situations, and, finally, analyze and assess it through writing, you will not have learned a thing. Learning is doing, and you haven’t done much today. We’ll start with that tomorrow.
Today I “played school” (the phrase is not mine, but it’s been years since I read where I’m stealing it from). I pretended to “teach;” the students pretended to “learn.” My classroom would have looked good to anyone watching through the window, and perhaps, my students might even do well answering some multiple choice questions on the info next week. In fact, my class looked like 90% of those I sat through in my high school. But nothing of any lasting value happened today, because my students didn’t really do anything meaningful with the facts they wrote down. Fortunately, the state exam that will determine whether or not they graduate will not hold them or me accountable for this.
By Stephen Lazar, on August 9th, 2010
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About Me I teach students at the Bronx Lab School Social Studies and English. I am a progressive educator, a reader, National Board Certified, and a union chapter leader.
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