By William L. Austin, M.Ed.,
NBCT
Revised September 2019
Background
Many of us came into the field of
education to make a difference. We came to change lives. I am no different
although my path was a little unusual; I came to education after a 21 year Air
Force career to make a difference. I
have had a fair degree of success working with students, parents, and other
educators. I have had an impact, however small, in the lives of the students I
have taught. I entered the career with the excitement and enthusiasm that comes
more from ignorance than experience. I was groomed, encouraged, trained, and
mentored by some of the best teachers, administrators, students, and parents. I
am a teacher and it is a title and a lifestyle that I am honored to have earned.
Leadership and Mission
In the Air Force I was a munitions
specialist responsible for the weapons, missiles, explosives, and pyrotechnics
that our armed forces needs and uses in the defense of this great nation. I was
literally surrounded by thousands of tons of explosives every day for 21 years.
During Desert Storm I was the Production Supervisor for a large contingent of
military aircraft deployed in the Middle East. My job was to supervise the
receipt, safe storage, production and delivery of munitions for combat missions
and for the munitions used in the defense of our installation. I supervised the
work of a large number of personnel entrusted to accomplish the mission. If any
one part of the operation failed, the entire operation failed. We could not
afford to focus on any one area or operation while ignoring the others. I had
to focus on the entire operation that was entrusted to me. I answered to others
above me who had an even broader picture to worry about, who answered to others
above them in a nearly endless cycle of leadership. By now many are asking what
this article has to do with education. Well, the major difference between my
career in the Air Force and my career as an educator is in the approach we use
to get the mission done. In the Air Force my supervisors explained the mission
to me and then asked me what I needed to get the job done. In education I am
told what the mission is by people sometimes miles away, in buildings with no
children, and not asked what I need to get that job done but rather told what I
need to get the job done. In the Air Force if I failed after being given what I
asked for I was removed from leadership. In the field of education, if I fail
because of the people who told me what to do and how to do it, but they didn’t
ask me what I needed to get the job done then it is still my fault. This is the
biggest problem in education today.
Education is about
Connections
The process of educating students is a
one-on-one process, the interaction between one student and one teacher. It is
about a relationship, a connection that can’t be measure or quantified but is
real. Teachers who are unable to make
this connection are doomed to fail and those who make the effort and build that
bond change lives. This is the single biggest determination in whether a
student will be successful or not, yet we put little or no value on this
connection.
Teacher Data
Good teachers don’t need data from national
tests or endless spreadsheets to tell them what a student needs. Good teachers
already know this. When I taught 5th grade my most productive
instruction took place during the first 30-40 minutes of class. Every day when
students walked into the class they were greeted with the dreaded Board Work.
The boards were full of problems for students to work on, questions to answer,
and riddles to solve. What made this unique was that next to each problem was a
student’s name… and after everyone had completed the board work students had to
come to the front and solve their problem… It was mayhem… 20+ students all
trying to solve their problem at the same time yet they loved doing it… The
names next to each problem were not placed there randomly they were there
because I needed to know something or the student needed to see something. It
was meaningful, it was important. Students were allowed to help each other, and
often as we went through the work students would come and explain their answer.
This is real data at work, a useful
application of data. It is individualized, it is teaching. I didn’t need a computer
program that cost thousands of dollars and takes hundreds of hours to maintain
to tell me Johnny needed to practice adding and subtracting fractions. I
already knew that and already had a plan. I was a teacher.
The classroom of today is vastly different
than the classroom I taught in 25 years ago. The change didn’t happen overnight
it was like weight gain, it happened slowly over time and almost nobody noticed
until one day somebody looked into the mirror. In today’s classroom we have
data, lots and lots of data. We have state mandated assessments, we have common
formative assessments, we have reading assessments, we have district mandated
national assessments, we have teacher assessments, we have benchmark
assessments, we have student learning objectives, we have grade analysis, we
have standards mastery data, we have attendance data, we have health data we
are rich in data. Data, data, data. Let
me say right now, for the record, data is not a bad thing. As I said previously
good teachers have always collected data on students and used it to their
advantage in the classroom. Today
teachers don’t have time to use data because they are so busy collecting it.
It is a miracle that instruction takes place a all because we always seem to be
assessing students and loading that data onto some management system so people
far from the classroom can tell us what we are doing wrong. And of course these
folks don’t ask us what they can do to help us overcome some deficiency… they
tell us what new commercial program we are going to have imposed upon us to fix
the problem. It seems that if you need a new pencil sharpener in the classroom
there is never enough money, but there always seems to be thousands of dollars
for some new program that someone saw at a conference somewhere. Once that
program is in place it becomes sacred. We are told to get on board or get run
over, we are told to be positive and to “make it work.” We are so busy fixing
one problem that another pops up, so we run to fix that problem and as we
implement yet another program to fix the new problem another surfaces. It is
Educational Whack-a-Mole. We are constantly implementing one new program after
another either imposed by the Federal Government, State Government, District,
or school. We are program rich and teaching poor.
I would never presume to have all the
answers to all the problems in education but as I see it there are a few common
sense suggestions that might go a long way to helping our teachers and their
students achieve the desired results. Will these ideas all bear fruit, maybe
not, will everybody agree, absolutely not, but if we continue on the path we
are now soon we will be so busy assessing and managing programs that instruction
will be non-existent. To make any solutions work it will take the cooperation
of administrators and teachers working together for common sense solutions.
When You Add Subtract
Reducing work allows more time for
instruction. You would be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree with
that. The use of technology in managing a classroom was suppose to make the job
of the teacher easier and therefore freeing up more time to teach. In reality a
lot of the technology we instituted only added work without removing what it
was intended to replace.
Cases
in point are new electronic grade books and computer based student attendance.
Teachers now use Power Teacher to record grades and attendance, but the manual grade
book and blue attendance cards that this new technology was suppose to replace,
are still in use. When we added electronic files we need to stop using manual
record keeping. Many of the curriculum maps and unit plans we use today are
more detailed than the lesson plans that are still required. Some ELA units are
30-40 pages in length yet many building administrators still require teachers
to fill out detailed plans which are, in many instances, just copied and pasted
right from the computer products. When we add something to the workload of
teachers we must take something away or risk losing precious instructional
time.
Information Overload
A pig farmer chided one of his farm hands
who was constantly weighing the hogs, he remarked, “Stop weighing those pigs,
they don’t get any fatter the more times you weigh them, feed the damn things.”
We need to stop collecting so much data. Yes, we need information to effect
change but when the cure becomes worse than the disease then the patient
suffers. When you MAP test three times a year, you benchmark three times a
year, you screen three times a year, you use common formative assessments three
times a quarter, and you assess reading three times a year teachers can soon
become overwhelmed collecting data rather than looking at what the data tells
you.
When data points to a problem, ask
teachers why they think it happened. Don’t over react or over prescribe. In
many cases the problem lies in the teacher not knowing what the student needed
to know or in the way it was taught. I sat with a group of teachers a few years
ago looking at a test question response graph. It showed that 90 % of students
missed a particular question about telling time. We could have just said we
need to double up our instruction on telling time and test our students again
until we solve the problem. Instead, we decided to look at the question. The
question asked which clock showed half-past the hour. The students didn’t
understand the term “half-past” so it wasn’t a problem with telling time but
rather a vocabulary issue. We can solve many of our troubles in the very same
way. Throwing money and programs at a
problem seldom solves the problem.
Positive Movement
Yes, some days we feel like we are
playing Whack-A-Mole but those frustrations can be easily solved with a little
leadership. Solved by asking teachers what they need to solve a problem and
then letting them be and holding them accountable. We are teachers, we’ve got
this.
