Decline in Education Degrees

My response to an article on NEA's website about the decrease in number of students graduating in education majors. The link to the article can be found below.

http://bit.ly/1SBgps7

I don't think it's just the pay. Educators have been getting paid the way we have for a long time. The part I think is driving people away or not even driving students towards is the job satisfaction. Being a professional teacher is tough for a lot of my colleagues outside of Belle Isle ( the school I teach at). They are being asked to fit in a one size fits all box, to teach the way the schools have for the past 100 years. They are held accountable for things in which they have been granted very little autonomy to discover solutions for. Everyone from the teachers to the admin are afraid to do anything new and that leaves no hope in the hearts of the teachers that they can make the difference they came to make in the beginning. Students that have grown up in this system hear teachers complain about the low pay and how "crap" the job is and they believe it, and sometimes see it, and don't get involved. This results in less interest in teaching as the years go on, and less teachers. The problem then compounds itself. Students have gone through many an uninspired classroom and have never had a chance to see a teacher throw out the boxes that we are asked to teach in. They have never seen us say "screw it we are going to learn and let the test take care of itself." We are afraid of the scores because we do, in fact, feel the students' scores reflect on our teaching in spite of what we say to the contrary. We are afraid that those scores will tell someone else that we are ineffective or that we suck at our job and we still care what other people think because that's why we got into the job in the first place. We care. When you care, this job drains you down at times because we stand up everyday and do the thing other people don't want to do, and we do it even when we are instructed how to do it. I want to see teachers mobilize to take back the creative, caring, personal side of teaching. I want to see us rally for what's important instead of talking about what isn't. I want to see us change education instead of being afraid that we might not be up to the task of walking into that unknown world of future education. We need to ask ourselves what that world will look like. How do we educate more kids with fewer teachers? We are educated people, that is not an unsolvable problem. We have to step outside the box, keep trembling through our fear, and see that we can't do it the way we have always done it. We are at a time where we will look back and see this as a moment when education shifted, we have the power to make that a positive one. What will we do?

Growth Mindset and Changing the Way We Talk About Learning

I cannot stress enough how important growth mindset is as an educator and parent. It has to go to our core. We have to change the way we speak as adults, that's parents and teachers. When we say "your smart" we are saying that it is inborn and fixed, but if we open ourselves to look at the real effort and energy that leads to learning and not some innate ability, we begin to praise the work and energy. We stop allowing students to stop at not being able to do it and help them realize that it is not "I can't" and is instead it's "not yet." You will begin to realize how ingrained the fixed mindset ideas are in our culture when you begin to try to take away phrases like "your so smart" or "your so artistic" or "your so good at math" or "your good at science." when we are good at something those phrases overlook the real fact of the time we have spent on those things. When we are born we can't do anything on our own, but time and practice gives us the abilities we have today. Learning hasn't changed since those moments, only that we stopped thinking of time as the major factor influencing the amount we know and are able to do.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/withmathican

Restless

The point in my career that I’m at is strange. I work at a school that has allowed me to grow into the teacher that I am. We have a culture at the school that people, including myself, love to work in. We have an administration whose actions and words say, “ you are the professional, do what you do and we’ll get out of your way.” We have tons of parents who support what we do and what we need to do to get their students to the next level. We have incredible science facilities. We have 1:1 Chromebooks in the science classrooms and a non profit board that supports everything we do in our school. I shouldn’t be restless, but I am.

The restlessness is an internal thing for me. Most teachers would gladly take my place in our school. The school is named Belle Isle and like its name it is a beautiful island for teachers and the group of students that find themselves part of the school.

I started teaching because I want to change lives. I feel like I do that in some small way every day. I know the old platitudes about “you never know how you are impacting the kids in the class” and “every small change makes a difference” and all those things people say to teachers when they want to do more. It’s not even that I want to do more. I want to do it differently and more efficiently and with deeper meaning. I want to change education, I want to get in the lives of people who don’t have supportive families at home, that don’t have someone telling them everyday that they are worth something. I want to be in the thick of students who need a teacher/leader/mentor/adult that is passionate about telling them that they are more than the labels and that they are greater than their current reality. I want to show them with my time and talents and teaching that they are people that deserve to have someone care for them and want the best for them. I want to show them a different way of learning, a different way of education. I want to throw out the old model and start over. I believe education changes the world. It changes the opportunities that we have in life. It may not guarantee us a job, but it opens the doors for greater options.

As I get older, and am now two years into my second decade of teaching, I have less time and less energy so when I do my job I want to do it more efficiently. I think we work really hard as educators to provide a product that is not very effective for most of our students. I want to be in a place where I can invest in a more open way and be more than a curriculum deliverer who has a few moments here and there to be a person in the lives of the kids. I want to be in an environment where stopping to deal with something in the life of the student is what we do and not an obstacle to what we do. I want to be in a place where school is the community for these kids that supports them, feeds them (physically and emotionally), makes them want to get up in the morning to come be with people whom make them feel welcome and necessary. I want them to feel needed at school when they don’t feel needed by the world.

I’m just thinking here, and I don’t know what this all looks like. The personalized learning thing is a component but it should be focused on personalized. Personalized P.E., personalized art, personalized core subjects, personalized growth, taking young people who haven’t had anything that feel like their own and educating, one could say discipling, them into a world that they would have missed if it wasn’t for us not missing them. I’m restless. I don’t do this for the pay, I do it because even the education that I received allowed me the opportunities and choices to travel the world, grow, meet people, and make my dent in the world. I’m restless. I want to take the idea of the educator to the next level. I’m restless. I want to be part of a whole team of people who are restless to make this world a better place by investing in the lives that need us. I feel restless because…...I feel gifted to do a job that many wouldn’t sign up for and I feel what I am doing is just the safe almost there option. I feel restless because I know where I’m at right now is predictable and I’m a little scared that my anti status quo brain wants that to change. I’m restless because I want deeper education and change and I know that my personality is that I will eventually have to do something about it and that is a little scary. Where are the restless people and the place we need to be with the students whose lives we need to be part of? I know I’m not alone in OKC.

My Personalized, Blended, Project Based, Inquiry, Standards Based, Yeti, Learning Dilemma

The Yeti, a.k.a. the abominable snowman. You hear about him, but like the unicorn and his buddy Bigfoot, there isn't much evidence that there's any truth to their existence. I feel like I'm the educational equivalent of the Yeti scientist. I’ve had so many moments in the last few years where I'm right in the middle of doing what I do in the class and find that my mind is on autopilot. In those moments, the other part of my brain seems to be thinking, “I don’t want to be teaching like this.” It’s not that I don’t want to be teaching, I just don’t want to be educating like I am. I guess I’m sounding kind of cryptic. What I mean is that there are a lot of things “under the hood” that I have managed to find solutions for like assessment and grading. I have become almost entirely digital in my interactions with student assessment and feedback. I have developed a system with a decent fidelity between what the student knows, the score I give them, and the expectation the parents have of what those scores should mean. I have a pretty good ability to connect with the students on a personal level. I have figured out how to navigate standards and develop learning goals and rubrics for them. There are lots of the details that I have figured out, but I can’t seem to wrap my head around personalized learning in the classroom. It bothers me that my class fully meets the needs of only a small section of students. The kids that learn quickly are constantly waiting for the rest, and the kids that learn at a slower pace are constantly being dragged on their faces through this thing we call science education. I have made modifications that allow for students to learn at slower paces by assessing as a form of ongoing digital conversation (in a future post I'll explain how I do assessment). This works for an additional group of students who will take the time to continue the conversation online. For the kids that work at a faster pace, I really have nothing. This whole thing frustrates me most because ultimately this results in people being “bored” waiting, or lost dragging behind. I have spent hundreds of hours online and in books looking for a solution that works for me. Flipped learning only seems to work if you can get students to do some work at home and if they have computers at home to do the work and watch the videos. Seeing as neither of those things seems to be a reality for me, I don’t see that happening. I like the idea of blended learning, which I have some components of, but I can’t quite figure out how to effectively personalize the learning in my class.  How do I provide personal choice to students in a way that is manageable for me. How do I have students in all different places in a blended learning environment, doing inquiry science and discussion, with students having some choice over pacing and direction, project based learning, and hitting all the science standards in the process. Oh yeah, I also would have to do this within the traditional school context. I have looked for someone out there in the internet world that is doing even part of this. I have not found it yet. Where is the yeti? Where are the unicorns of science education? I was talking to my teaching intern today, I need a software that does exactly what Google Classroom does in the way it easily interfaces with Google folders and Google Apps for Education. I need it to interface seamlessly with Google forms for giving assessments. I need it to interface with the students Google accounts to send notifications  when I respond to them in our feedback conversations. I need it to interface with a forum where I can have multiple conversations set up so they can jump in and out of discussions and respond to prompts in a digital community space. I need a way to hand out assignments to all students or just a specific few. I need to be able to group students and move them around digitally. I need to be able to provide the resources for students to progress through the curriculum at their own pace. I need all this because it will allow me to spend the time doing what I do best, sitting down with students in small groups and pushing them when they need it. I need all this so I can get out of the way of students when they are learning faster than I can go. I need all this because the students need to be met with a properly paced science class that works for each of them. A class that gives them the freedom to explore the curriculum. A class that gives me the freedom to work in a way that maximizes the use of my strengths in teaching my students instead of spending the majority of my time educating students in ways that I am less effective and only getting a small group of students to reach their fullest potential. I want to find the educational Yeti.I want that crazy personalized, blended, project based, inquiry, standards based science classroom to exist. I just want to find a couple of footprints to get my hunt back on track. The world of science education would be a better place if that Yeti is discovered.

That One Kid.

That one kid. That one kid is the one that drives me to get better. That one kid is the one who made me find a better way to grade. That one kid is the one that taught me to find a way to connect. That one kid is the one that is constantly driving me to find a better way to teach. That one kid every year that I can’t seem to reach is the reason why I am the teacher I am today, but even after 12 years I’m still a long ways from the teacher I want to be. In my third year of teaching, I had a student that was failing my class so bad that when he decided he wanted to improve he realized it was impossible. (I never liked traditional grading but I didn’t know how to do it any differently.) This student was the reason I pushed further into questions about why we grade the way we do. This push led to base 50%, then rubrics for assessments, and then full on standards based grading and a level of assessment that I could have never imagined possible. Today I only grade the standards and not a single piece of daily or practice work, and all of that was launched by that single frustrating moment. This mean that I have very few grades in the grade book but every grade is truly meaningful to me and to my students. I’m that one kid that got frustrated with work that was nonsense and just busy work, so I don’t give my students work to do just to keep them busy. We don’t do crosswords, or word searches, or coloring pages, we try to dig in every day and stay engaged. These changes are the easy ones, they just change the structure of what I do, most of it is done before it ever hits the students. The real struggle is that one student whom I can’t seem to connect the learning to in a way that results in better learning outcomes. These are often students that I connect with on a personal level, and they need that, but I still can’t change the outcome of their learning. These are often the students that don’t fit the traditional structured classroom, but yet there they are with no other options but me. Most of the time these students are somewhere on the ADHD spectrum, but sometimes they are not. It seems like every time I talk about this with others the common refrain is, “you can’t win them all,” but I have to refuse to accept this. If I believed that I couldn’t “win them all” then I’m accepting casualties and I refuse to do that. Every year it is these students that push me the most. I watch as many of these students slide along and keep aging up. Every year the teachers know that some day all of it will catch up to this student and they will find themselves a struggling adult as well. I just can’t in good conscience not try to do anything to change that trajectory. Here is the problem though. Every year they come through my class and leave with the same issues and the same struggles they came in and they did not make as much progress as I had hoped. Each year I try to wrap my head around personalizing learning for them, but each year I don’t quite figure out how to pull off what needs to happen. I get stuck trying to figure it out. I spend hours digging through the internet to find that breakthrough. I have begun to see that the solution might lie in a blended learning environment, but I struggle to find what this looks like in a traditional structured school and classroom. I struggle to see how to do this in an efficient way that doesn’t end up taking time away from my family in the evenings after I arrive home. I’m not sure where the solutions lie, but this particular issue has been one that continues to haunt my teaching brain. It seems like the issue lies in individual management of material and individualized grading, but I can’t find anyone out there doing this in a way that makes me go BAM! That’s it! Many days I ponder starting a new school where we can throw out the rules and make it work for that one kid. That one kid needs us to make a better school. That one kid needs us to “win them all,” because that one kid matters. If we can change the trajectory of life for that one kid, we can change the trajectory of life for them all. I have made many changes to my class that have opened the door for more and more students to be successful, but there is still that one kid.

Rule breaking!

So, I break rules. To anyone who knows me, that may come as no surprise. I don't do it all the time, only when I believe it to be a rule that inhibits what is in the best interest of others, or when its not officially written down (blue hair story).  Ok, so let me justify it before I tell you the rule I broke, or acutally I didn't break it, the students did at my request. So, I want the kids to take over more of their own learning. I want them to learn how to learn using the content of my class. I explained this to them when I was explaining changes to the way things were working in our school with grading and homework and classwork and all the things we have been dealing with as instructors. Anyway, if students aren't going to be going to me to get information, where should they go? Not a difficult question for any of us who grew in the digital age, we google it, or bing it or whatever. We get the information from the internet. There in lies the problem for me. See, I have what would be considered a lot of technology in my classroom for our school. I have 7 computers. Yep, I'm a computer hog. In fact, we science teachers like to hog the computers in our school. So, not a problem right, at least if you only have 7 students or maybe 14 at the most, but I have anywhere from 25 to 28 so that doesn't work too well for impatient middle school kids. So, I explained to the kids that in order for them to do what we need to do, they were going to have to break the rules. I said, " anyone with unlimited data could get their phones out and use them to began working on learning and exploring the I can statements." In the first couple of classes there were students who had both unlimited data and a wifi hotspot and they set up the hotspot for the students that didn't have unlimited data. OH YEAH, I forgot to mention that students and staff in our district are not allowed on the district wifi with personal devices, hence the need for the work around. The kids pulled out their phones (which of course were not in their pockets because we have a no cell phone policy at our school and they are supposed to be in their lockers and not in class) and got to work. I did inform them that we had to be responsible about the use of the phones and not text and stuff because if we got found out "the man will shut us down" and that we will lose the privilege to use them. Guess what? They actually learned stuff on their own. One student came up to me and said, "Hey Mr. Covey, the protons match the atomic number. Did you know that?" I was like "they do, is it like that for other ones or just the one you are looking at?" and I walked away while he went back to his work. Today, our second day on the job like this, I had a girl say, "come here Mr. Covey. We learned something on our own. The Atomic Mass is the same as the number of protons and neutrons added together." They were actually looking at the relative average mass so I asked them what they meant, and what the protons and neutrons were. So they went back to look that up. I walked by later and they snagged me to explain the structure of the atom and how the atomic mass related to the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons. So I asked them how the atom was related to the elements, and it just kept going.  Now, I could have waited until we had 1-1 technology to have the students learning like this or I could break the rules a little and have them doing it now with the technology sitting in their pockets. I think I'll break the rules thank you.

Grades that say nothing! They made me a better teacher.

So, I jumped into a couple of new things. I developed my I can statements for an introductory mini unit on the periodic table, and decided to punch it up to letting the students work towards the I can statements without me direct teaching it. First, why the changes? They have come to expect the 4, 3, 2, 1 leveled assessments from me but were surprised when it started showing up in other classes. So, I decided that I had the ability to explain the changes. Now, I explained to them that this was not some overnight thing that I had cooked up and that this had been rolling around in my head for the almost decade that I have been teaching. The way my class has been set up from the beginning was an attempt to set up a class where a student like me couldn't do well just by playing the game. I want my kids to really learn. I told them about the AP Calc class in high school that I dropped out of after a semester because it was the first time that I had been challenged to learn and have to get teacher help to be successful at and I didn't know how to do it so I just didn't. In the end, after spending a good chunk of class time plotting coordinate points into my TI-81 graphing calculator to make an animation of  an arrow shooting a target, I had to approach the teacher to tell him that I was switching out. Here's what he said to me, and I still remember it after all these years, "I don't know what grade you actually have but I won't give you any lower than a C." Why did he do that? He gave me a C, when if he had assessed my learning would have found that I probably was more on the low end of a D. He gave me a grade because I had turned in work and had completed everything for the class because I was doing it at home trying to figure it out on my own. That's not the worst part. When I went to college and took the math placement test guess what math they wanted to place me in? ALGEBRA! So, somehow I had gotten all the way to AP Calc in high school and could only test into college Algebra. How did that happen. I had a 3.95 in high school and that one semester of AP Calc was the only non A I got. That would say that I was advanced at the curriculum but yet I couldn't even get placed beyond college algebra. You don't even get credit for that, its a remedial course. To this day, I can't get that out of my mind. So, when I became a teacher I committed to make a class where the students left my class understanding the material or they didn't get a grade. I explained that this is why I don't demand that they complete everything, and that all they have to do is the assessments, and I had been saying this to students over and over again for years, but something in this round finally clicked with students. Maybe it was me relating learning in school to learning outside of school in terms of skateboarding and mountain boarding. Maybe it was because I told them that I didn't like formal education and that I wasn't going to go back to school to get my masters until college became less boring scoring and more about learning for the sake of learning. Maybe it was the I can statements, maybe it was the rule breaking. What??? Rule Breaking? OK maybe that's the next post.