'TWAS THE TIME BEFORE COACHING

This week’s blog celebrates coaches and teachers. It comes to you compliments of Carla Cushman, a Supervisor of Coaches in Sumner County TN.
Thank you Carla!
Happy New Year to All

(Photo of Santa and Zoey Biddelman, Steve's Grandaughter)

‘Twas the Time Before Coaching

‘Twas the time before coaching , when all through the schools,
Not a teacher was happy—they all had the blues.

Their lessons engaging and smartly aligned
With standardized testing—No Child Left Behind!

The true joy of teaching seemed lost in the past,
When teaching was fun—in fact, a real blast!

When children had recess and even took naps,
For crying out loud, they could sit on our laps!

Then something happened I can’t quite explain,
Teaching and learning had suddenly changed!

With all of the stress accountability brings,
The teachers withdrew to their rooms and their things.

The benchmarks, the standards, the DiBELing and flexing,
The TCAPs and TVAAS and End of Course testing--

It became all too much for one teacher to do,
So instructional coaches were assigned to the schools.

The coaches were eager to do their jobs right,
They trained and they practiced in daytime and night.

They learned from Steve Barkley the culture must change,
A culture of coaching is the name of this game.

From Jim Knight in Kansas, they found the Big Four:
Instruction, assessment, behavior, and more.

Equipped with their mission and technology tools,
The instructional coaches started changing the rules.

No more isolation or hoarding great plans,
We’re calling all teachers to join hand-in-hand.

Come out of your classrooms and talk to your neighbors,
You’ll find out great teaching has all sorts of flavors.

Come see for yourself, don’t just believe me,
You can meet with your coach in your own PLC!

So thank you to all who have helped raise the bar,
Whether teacher or coach, you’re considered a star!

Together we plan, together we teach,
Coaches and teachers, all children to reach!


Carla Cushman
December 9, 2009

LEADER'S RESPONSE TO "OVERWHELMED"

In the last few months I’ve heard coaches or principals say that their teachers are overwhelmed. I’ve been in PLC meetings where teachers share with teammates that they are just overwhelmed by …students’ needs, paperwork, parent demands, curriculum requirements, etc. Leaders and facilitators often ask, ”How do I respond?”

A look at the word:
o•ver•whelm (ō'vər-hwělm', -wělm')
To surge over and submerge; engulf: waves overwhelming the rocky shoreline.
a. To defeat completely and decisively: Our team overwhelmed the visitors by 40 points.
b. To affect deeply in mind or emotion: Despair overwhelmed me.
To present with an excessive amount: They overwhelmed us with expensive gifts.
To turn over; upset: The small craft was overwhelmed by the enormous waves.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, October 2008- Empathy to the Complaining, on responding to complaints, a common mistake that leaders make is to respond with:

An attempt to personally solve the issue that is causing the teacher the negative feeling
or
A defensive response suggesting, ”It's not my fault.”

Here are some options you might want to consciously practice:
1) An Empathy Statement:
First, empathize with the person's feelings. Second, point out the person's past or future success and/or lead the person in an alternative direction.

This is an overwhelming time of year. The holiday break will give us all a chance to recharge.

Struggling with new mandates is stressful. Have you found any of the new materials that have positively impacted learning?

The role of the empathy statement is to allow the person to feel that they’ve been heard and that their feelings are accepted. Then the refocus allows one to look beyond the emotion and persist or problem solve and change strategy.

2) Guided problem solving- Here the leader has a more involved role than with just the empathy statement.
I was facilitating a PLC session recently where teachers said they were overwhelmed with “panel meetings” (a presentation to the principal of all their students’ current assessment status) required by the state department for the school’s “struggling school” status.
Statements teachers made:
I don’t have time to teach.
I’ve been here until 5pm for three days and I still won’t be done.
This is a waste of time.
Step 1- I listened…paraphrased …“You’re putting in lots of extra time.” “You want to be focused on your student learning”. Etc.
Step 2- Reality Check…..Is it possible to get the state to change the requirement on the school? (No one saw that as a place to spend their current time or energy) What’s the worst thing that could happen if you showed up at panels with less than all your students’ information ready? (After a long silence and strange looks, they tuned to the principal who said, ”I guess we’d schedule you to come back with the rest of the information as soon as you could”). As we discussed this, it was amazing the “fear” that teachers said they had that “something very bad would happen.” Yet no one had an example of when the administration had ever handled anything that way in the past. Until I had asked the question, they hadn’t.
Step 3- What can we do? I posed two questions, “What can we do to minimize the negative impact of doing the panels? This discussion identified that teachers with good tech skills did the work in ¼ the time that others reported. So, the more tech teachers offered to do a quick modeling/training for the others. We uncovered that the reading coach could print off a report with all a teacher’s scores instead of teachers looking up each student’s individual score. Next question posed, “How can we maximize the value of this activity that we have to do?". A short discussion raised the idea that the report could serve as the focus point for upcoming parent conferences.
Folks left the meeting focused on what to do. My guess is that knowing the worst case will free many teachers to be more productive and most will show up with everything finished.
3) Using the team... In an earlier blog, September 2009, I presented a continuum on the progression of PLC’s from a group of individuals to a franchise to a team. My finding is that when teachers feel overwhelmed their natural tendency is to pull away and seek more individual time as a survival strategy. Leaders need to encourage teachers to “turn to the team” and make the overwhelmed issue the topic of conversation. (I recently was in several schools where principals cancelled PLCs for the week because “teachers were overwhelmed”.) The team will need the skills to turn the conversation from complaining to problem solving. The empathy statement and guided problem solving can be a start.
Leaders who model and teach these skills will be increasing the capacity of their staffs both individually and collectively.

WHAT ENVIRONMENTS ENCOURAGE LEARNING?

Betty Steinberg wrote a commentary, Schools Need a Culture Shift; Bringing Passion, Fun, and Collaboration Back to the Classroom, in the Nov 18, 2009 Education Week where she suggested too many students would describe school as follows:

“It’s drudgery. We sit alone at our desks and silently answer lots of questions that our teachers tell us look like the ones we will see on the state tests. We’re not interested in what we’re doing. We hurry up to finish first, and if we’re done before the rest of our classmates, we get to sit quietly and take out a book or do other work. We follow the rules and speak out only when called upon. We leave for a break only when the teacher tells us it’s time to do so, or when the buzzer signals the end of the class. To get a good grade, we do what the teacher wants us to do. Our sole focus is to do well on the state tests. Quiet, discipline, and following the rules are valued.” (page 24)

I just read a tweet on Twitter from a parent that said: “From one week's absence from Kindergarten, they sent home 20 worksheets for us to do. Torture.”

Thomas Newkirk in a Education Week (Oct 21 2009) commentary, Stress, Control, and the Deprofessionalizing of Teaching, discusses studies which illustrate that lower-status workers experience more stress because they have less control over their work. Workers with a sense of their own agency and control find the prerogative to act made their jobs less stressful.(page24)

Newark states, “When teachers lose control of decision making- when they prepare students for test they have no role in designing (and often no belief in), when they must abandon units they love because there is no longer time, when they must follow the plans designed by others, when they are locked into systems of instruction and evaluation they don’t create or even choose-they will not be relieved of stress. Their jobs are not made easier, they are made harder and more stressful. While some find a way to resist, others acquiesce, though they feel, as one teacher put it, that “the joy is being drained out of teaching.”(page 25)

Students, teachers, and parents with the above view of school will surely find little motivation for the effort and hard work of quality learning.

Several months ago I was preparing to help a school leadership team design a plan for increasing student achievement in a historically low performing school. The principal sent me the improvement plan that they had been required to complete for the state department of education. As I studied the over 25 page document, I realized there was not one statement about what the students should/could/would do. You could assume that the changes being recommended in curriculum, instruction, professional development, and leadership would produce changes for students, but it was never stated. No where did it say "Students will…".

I am afraid that this lack of a description of learning environment and learner activity leaves an unclear expectation for teachers, administrators, parents and most importantly students.

I’m concerned that the same missing message may be present in Race to the Top ,

”We are asking States to advance reforms around four specific areas:
• Adopting standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy;
• Building data systems that measure student growth and success, and inform teachers and principals about how they can improve instruction;
• Recruiting, developing, rewarding, and retaining effective teachers and principals, especially where they are needed most; and
• Turning around our lowest-achieving schools.
Awards in Race to the Top will go to States that are leading the way with ambitious yet achievable plans for implementing coherent, compelling, and comprehensive education reform. Race to the Top winners will help trail-blaze effective reforms and provide examples for States and local school districts throughout the country to follow as they too are hard at work on reforms that can transform our schools for decades to come.”

What do the writers, readers, and decision-makers awarding the funding imagine the students will be experiencing and doing that will take them to the top? If you could invite these possible reformers to your school or classroom, what would you want them to see? Are there reforms needed in your location?