10 Things I Wish I Knew As A First Year Teacher

This is in response to (a very flattering) request by Joel on his So You Want to Teach blog. He's asking for a list the 10 Things I Wish I Knew As a First Year Teacher.

Man, that was over 30 years ago now. I started as a high school English, speech and drama teacher in a small school district in Iowa in 1976. I was also the yearbook, newspaper, class play and speech contest adviser. My first year's salary was $7,800. We lived in a house that I would not put a dog in today. And I was a terrible teacher.

If I knew then what I know now...

1. Leave your ego at the door. I think I lost my temper at least once a day before I somehow learned not to take student remarks and actions personally and to actually be more mature than the kids I taught. Man, this was really hard. Prepare to be dissed. It comes with the job.

2. Admit ignorance or uncertainty. The best questions to discuss in class are the ones for which you really don't have a good answer.

3. Let the kids teach each other. Your goal should be for your students to do more and more and for you to do less and less.

4. Don't play gotcha on tests. Let kids know exactly what you expect them to know and be able to do. That way you are an ally in their success, not the enemy.

5. Some administrators are incompetent. Be subversive when it helps kids. Make at least one really good friend on the teaching staff with whom to commiserate.

6. The majority of parent complaints will come from extra curricular decisions. Give the school board member's kid the lead in the play. It's not a hill worth dying on.

7. You'll never be able to live on a single teaching salary. Get used to a second job and/or a summer job. Or marry for money.

8. If at first you don't succeed, try a different age group to teach. I didn't like teaching high school students. I loved teaching middle schoolers. I like teaching adults even better. I found elementary children fun, but sort of annoying. Sorry.

9. Lighten up on yourself. Teaching is a hell of lot harder than it looks. Practice will make you better, but never perfect.

10. Some kids will do well because of you; some will do well despite you. You won't reach every kid, but there will always be some kids who will benefit from knowing you. Have faith that you are doing good in the world.

I still get the urge to place a full-page ad in the town paper where I first taught, apologizing to everyone who may have had me as a teacher for the two years I was employed there.

I still might.

My first year school picture. Oh, as a teacher, not a kindergartner.

Is good data-driven decision-making possible?

Is data-driven decision-making possible in schools? I've long worried about it and am glad to hear Chris Lehman echo this concern in his excellent presention (excellent because I agree with almost everything he says?) at Ignite Philly:

Chris, you're singing the librarians' old songs about research and problem-based learning and presentation and authenticity. Great!

But back to data-driven decisions. Why are these nearly impossible to make well at a school level? From an earlier column, A Trick Question:

At last spring’s interviews for our new high school library media specialist, the stumper question was:

"How will you demonstrate that the library media program is having a positive impact on student achievement in the school?"

How did that nasty little question get in there with “Tell us a little about yourself” and “Describe a successful lesson you’ve taught”? Now those questions most of us could answer with one frontal lobe tied behind our cerebellums.

Given the increased emphasis on accountability and data-driven practices, it’s question all of us, librarians and technologists alike, need to be ready to answer - even if we are not looking for a new job or don’t want to be in the position of needing to look for one.

While I would never be quick enough to have said this without knowing the question was coming, I believe the best response to the question would be another question: “How does your school measure student achievement now?”

If the answer was simply, “Our school measures student achievement by standardized or state test scores,” I would then reply, “There is an empirical way of determining whether the library program is having an impact on such scores, but I don’t think you’d really want to run such a study. Here’s why:

• Are you willing to have a significant portion of your students (and teachers) go without library services and resources as part of a control group?
• Are you willing to wait 3-4 years for reliable longitudinal data?
• Are you willing to measure only those students who are here their entire educational careers?
• Are you willing to change nothing else in the school to eliminate all other factors that might influence test scores?
• Will the groups we analyze be large enough to be considered statistically significant?
• Are you willing to provide the statistical and research expertise needed to make the study valid?"

I surmised then that "No school I know of has the will to run such as study."

If test scores are the sole measure of "student achievement," there are indeed some things we in schools can be excellent at doing with data. We can identify individual students who perform below established norms and we can look at groups of students with certain characteristics (ELL, FRP, SpEd) and see how they compare with the norms. We can do trend tracking of such groups.

We are good at determining which groups need help. But what comes next is the "gotcha."

Schools are unwilling and unequipped to do controlled studies on the effectiveness of any single intervention over a period of time to improve the test scores of a school or group. The typical pattern is to throw as many changes into a curriculum as possible and hope something sticks.

Let's say our SpEd population is showing low reading scores. A building may well decide to:

1. Increase the use of differentiated instruction
2. Try a new computerized reading program
3. Increase the SSR program

Pretty good strategies, huh? But here is the rub. What happens, let's say, if the groups scores rise. Any one of these interventions may have been effective. All of them may have created some of the improvement. Two of them in combination may have led to the improvement. The Hawthorne Effect might be in play and gains this year, might not be shown next year. Some may be effective, but take more than a year to show results. A completely extraneous variable may have been present (a new teacher or principal, perhaps).

Schools should not be tasked with doing research. This was what university lab schools are (were) for. Every school doing its own research on effective educational practices makes no more sense than every hospital being a research hospital and every student being a guinea pig.

I am not sure what the answer to this problem might be nor has anyone to date given me a good solution to this problem (if even willing to admit a problem exists.)  I do believe that carefully applied valid research can help teachers improve their instructional practices.

It just shouldn't be up to the practitioner to also be a researcher.

Your thoughts?

Facebook - an educational resource?

"Everyone charged with a criminal offence shall be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law". Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of the Council of Europe

Every website shall remain unblocked until proven to be "harmful to minors."
The Blue Skunk

I'm going to visit with our elementary principals' group in a couple weeks. I've (ominously) been asked to discuss Facebook  with them. One never knows the genesis of such a request, but it may center around why our district doesn't block such sites.

Or maybe it is purely academic curiosity. I hope so, but I think I will be prepared just in case.

I don't much care one way or the other if kids have access to Facebook itself at school. I am a very occasional and reluctant user of the service. I just don't get the appeal. (Although now that I am up to 60 friends, I may consider running for public office.) Its value on the surface seems recreational in nature and it's probably a nuisance trying to keep kids from using it.

But I do care that we give all Internet resources due process, just as we would give due process to any library or text book before before removing it from our schools.

For educators who don't use Facebook, it needs to placed in some kind of context beyond the scare stories on Dateline. Here are some things I think my principals ought to know about these kinds of social networking sites:

1. How and why people use sites like Facebook. I think I will show the short Common Craft video Social Networking in Plain English and share the Educause two-page document 7 Things You Should Know About Facebook II.

2. That there may be Informational value to having access to Facebook, and that really, we should be blocking based on content, not format. Along with both Obama and McCain, one of our favorite sons, a first year US Representative, uses Facebook to connect with his constituents:

Shouldn't students have access to this information?

3. Facebook is but a single manifestation of social networking, a means of communication and recreation that today's children are growing up with. Club Penguin and Webkinz are popular social networking sites for the pre-school set. Facebook is replacing e-mail as a preferred method of communication. Even educational gaming is becoming more social, as evidenced by new and emerging products like vMathLive.

4. Schools DO need to teach safety and privacy with all social networking tools. If we don't, who will? Educators need to know that privacy levels can be set on most sites and children need to know how to do this as well.

5. Safety issues need to be put in perspective by sharing reputable information resources such as Predators & cyberbullies: Reality check by Larry Magid & Anne Collier at ConnectSafely.org. report:

"we do not have a single case related to MySpace where someone has been abducted." - social media researcher danah boyd

Recommend the books MySpace Unraveled and Cyber-Safe Kids, Cyber-Savvy Teens: Helping Young People Learn to USe the Internet Safely and Responsibily. Emphasize that "reputation destruction" and cyberbullying are more likely hazards than predation.

Show:

and 

6. It's OK for individual buildings, libraries and classrooms to set their own rules on what is considered "productive" use of school time and technology. But a district-wide block needs to considered by a range of stakeholders after study, not as a knee-jerk response to any single request.

OK, readers. What would you do at a command performance of administrators asking for a discussion about Facebook? Help me out here...

  I just remembered that I addressed this issue a couple years ago, See also Seven Things All Adults Should Know About MySpace at Education World. Duh.