Category / teacher professionalism

by nflanagan

Direct. Instruction.

When everybody seems to be writing about the same educational topic, like Emily Hanford’s recent foray into what kind of pedagogy we should embrace, I usually think my best bet as a blogger is to read other people’s thinking and commentary, then share the pieces that ring my chimes.

There are plenty of credible, smart, deeply engaged people taking on Emily Hanford’s decision to go after the cornerstone of classroom practice—instruction—since she garnered such success (and fame) in influencing the teaching of reading.

Trevor Aleo and Nick Covington have been tracking the Sold a Story2 Series, poking at its evidence (such as it is) and conclusions. Nancy Bailey gets into the nuts and bolts of the efficacy of multiple models of instruction. You can get some excellent perspectives on the Have You Heard podcast. Even research-critique stalwart Daniel Willingham at University of Virginia notes that some people who object to direct instruction do so because it does not meet their goals for what children should experience at school. And that’s not a trivial consideration.

Despite all this good commentary, the question remains:

What gives Emily Hanford the cojones to believe she’s the go-to authority on how best to teach? And even more important, why are people (not teachers—the general public) giving credence to her idea that instruction can be standardized or scripted or applied right out of the box to any group of age-appropriate students? That’s nuts.

And I say this as a person for whom direct instruction was the expected daily norm, for all 30+ years of my teaching career. You don’t see many band rooms where students discover the best fingering for F# by trial and error or uncover the stylistic richness of music without someone standing on an elevated platform in front of them, giving clear direction. With a baton, no less.

Everything about traditional secondary musical performing groups is based on a direct instruction model, from assessments that measure how close students come to perfectly reproducing what’s on the page, to the endless technical skills required and taught sequentially. And everybody has to get up to speed—for the sake of the group.

My challenge, as a secondary band director, was to include instruction that stepped outside the rehearse-rehearse-perform box. I wanted my students to see where the music they were learning originated, and how music is embedded in our culture. I wanted them to try their hand at creating music, to see the making of music as a rewarding portable skill, available all their life, not just at band contest, football games or concerts.

My most satisfying moments, as a conventional school band director, were not earning top marks at competitions. They were seeing individual kids grow and stretch as young musicians, and finishing a concert with a piece we couldn’t play six weeks earlier, one that a bunch of twelve year-olds had come to love.

Emily Hanford asks how we can get the best results, but her definition of results is clouded by our national love affair with unreliable, competitive educational data and a heavy dose of, for lack of a better term, nostalgic misinformation.

Direct, whole-group instruction has never gone away. It was the norm when I began teaching, in the 1970s, and certainly when Emily Hanford was in school. We used to discuss instruction around student interests, the pedagogy of the oppressed and experiments like Summerhill in my grad classes, but in public schools, it was mostly one teacher in front of the classroom, calling the shots.

Over the course of my career, lots of constructivist, place-based, hands-on, project-based student-focused, yada yada instructional ideas bubbled up. But they never replaced direct instruction, except perhaps in boutique independent schools. What also bubbled up were a dozen ways to turn direct instruction into something often described as participatory—choral responses, turn and talk, and whatever this is supposed to demonstrate.

Once there were videos widely available, you could watch classes perform like trained seals, uniformly declaring right answers after a 60-second turn and talk, performing little verbal routines. Direct as all get out. And, on the surface, kind of impressive. If you wanted to see a class humming along.

But the goal is long-term habits of thinking, not a snazzy formula for repeating right answers. Which is why I am bedeviled by the influence Emily Hanford has wielded. These are educators’ issues, to wrestle and experiment with.  Designing lessons is the fun part of the job. Teaching them is the action research.

In a similarly themed post, Peter Greene quotes Hanford:

I thought about being a teacher in my early 20s and I had a friend who was teaching in New Orleans, and a bunch of her third graders couldn’t read, and she was supposed to design all of her own lessons. And I thought to myself, where would you even start? It was such a stressful job. It was basically impossible, and she eventually quit teaching, as a lot of people do, because we make this job too hard.

Bingo. So stressful! Basically impossible! It made me think of this experience:

A decade ago, I was e-mentoring a group of career-change teachers, who’d been given a retirement incentive from a famous technology corporation with a 3-letter name. The idea was that 30 years in the workforce would provide the content expertise. And Big Corp agreed that novice teachers might need some help from experienced teachers to get up and running. Before they could start, umm, giving back to the community.

One of my mentees was starting his first job as a physics teacher in a suburban school in Connecticut. When he arrived for orientation, he was given the textbook and a blank plan book. He’d already gone to the principal and asked if he was expected to write all his own lesson plans (yes) before he turned to me.

Because he also had an assigned mentor teacher next door, I suggested that Mentee ask this mentor for some guidance on what to do on Day One, and perhaps a few sample lesson plans that had worked next door, in the chemistry room.

It isn’t exaggerating to say that he was outraged. Write his own lesson plans! For the whole year! This would never happen at Big Corp. They would have already designed the optimum protocol for teaching physics to HS seniors, something he could seamlessly follow.

I tried gentle conversations about how you couldn’t write plans for students you hadn’t met. In fact, his basic plan may well need to be tweaked between second period and sixth period. Because kids and classes are different.

I wish I could tell you how it turned out, but Mentee shut our conversations down within a few months. He remained frustrated and angry and said lots of unkind things about public education. Maybe things improved.

But I do know how a major shift (legislatively boosted, like the Faux Science of Reading) in instructional strategies toward all Direct Instruction, all the time, would turn out.

And it’s not good.

by nflanagan

Mission (Not) Accomplished

I’m seeing a lot of fellow political junkies spending their weekend posting about The Road Ahead. What are the most important issues? Where are the quick wins? Two of my local legislators (bless their hearts, unironically) have asked for input on social media. These are mostly exercises in shooting the moon—everything, everywhere, all at once. So much to do.

But it’s OK. As long as someone mentions education in every one of those rambling comment threads. Because public schools are an evergreen issue, and a fundamental part of healing from our recent insanities. We can do so much better for our public school kids.

Let me say that again: We can—we must—rebuild and (I hate the way this word has been abused, but it’s on point) re-imagine public education.

Thank goodness for Jennifer Berkshire and her partner Jack Schneider, who have kept the flame burning for public schools being an issue that the Democrats should own. (There’s good stuff on their Education Wars site on the new, no-evidence Direct Instruction nostalgia trip, as well.) There’s work to be done, and perhaps, a window of opportunity.

If I have had an overarching life goal—my professional mission, if you will—it would be preserving and enhancing public education as central and critical to the shaping of American culture and democracy.  America needs a strong public education system, for purposes ranging from nurturing civic engagement to building workplace skills to understanding our global world. Not to mention developing productive human relationships—or the range of literacies now required for successful life in America.

Give me a minute to tell you about a classic exercise often used in professional development sessions for teachers: the Four Directions Leadership Compass. I’ve seen this done a dozen different ways, but it’s basically an exercise in understanding that the way you like to work may not be the way other people prefer to accomplish common goals.

In the exercise, participants are asked to identify with one of four groups: North (Action), South (Community), East (Mission) and West (Organization). Profiles of the four preferences are shared—the Get ‘er done, task-accomplishing North, the South teacher who brings donuts to the staff meeting and cares about needy kids—and the West educator with her color-coded files and two months of pre-written lesson plans.

Almost invariably, educators identify as North, South or West. In the questioning and debrief, they identify East as the teachers who derail staff meetings by asking “Why are we doing this?” and resisting change without endless discussion beforehand.

This is not surprising. Teaching, especially these days, is more like putting out continuous fires, running to stay ahead of the next crisis, than gathering to think deeply about our vision for an excellent school that serves all students well.

But. Missions matter. Visions can inspire.

Way too much work done by educators is ticking boxes, test prep, following someone else’s plans, often developed for students that don’t exist, and getting through another day. Besides, having a vision of how much better things could be is only step one. If there’s anyone who understands the disconnect between the visionary and the barely good-enough, it’s public school educators.

In a recent blog, I wrote about my surprise at discovering that the mission statement I carefully discussed and composed with my district teaching colleagues, one that embraced the idea of nurturing caring individuals, had been overturned and replaced with some blah-blah about ‘enabling all students to be independent and successful to the maximum of their potential.’

Of course, we want students to succeed. But defining that success, and our role in pushing students to succeed, remain unclarified by that statement. What it says to me is that it was written by people who believed they could identify the “maximum potential” of students (probably by data) and train them to use that potential for their own benefit. And to hell with the community. And maybe dreams and visions.

The blog led to interesting discussions on my social media outlets, about the process of writing a mission statement. I’ve forgotten a whole lot about my 32 years as a classroom teacher, but I remember writing that mission statement, something required by the Michigan Department of Education as part of a (here it comes) “re-imagining of public education.”

I remember old veteran teachers who saw a mission statement as just more phony reform nonsense being drawn, by a skillful principal, into discussing what brought them into teaching and kept them there. I remember Jack McManus (may he rest) finally saying—Well, in my day we saw public education as a way to build citizens and democracy, to stir the melting pot, and develop appreciation for the American way of life and opportunity.

There’s a mission if I ever heard one.

Maybe—probably—your statement would be different. There’s room for other ideas about what constitutes a purpose for public education. There’s room for action, organization and community. But the mission is the horse that draws the cart. And yes, I am an East.

Illustration credited to Eyes on Meme. If you spent any time in the classroom, check the site out. It’s hilarious and so obviously written by teachers.

by nflanagan

Information vs. Knowledge vs. Application

Let me cut to the chase: You should read Peter Greene’s piece, Teachers Should Know Stuff, if you’re involved in education in any way. Actually, you should subscribe and read all his work, because there is no more articulate observer-explainer of what actually happens in classrooms in American public schools. Plus, he’s funny, in a not-trying-too-hard way.

And teaching school is funny, in addition to being personally rewarding, critical to the health of democracy, and much harder and more intellectually complex than most people think. It’s an intrinsically human job, one that requires adaptability and a sense of humor.

Greene’s piece walks us through any number of Big Questions around modern pedagogy, including teacher preparation (good v. bad), the crushing impact of standardized testing on actual learning, and the vital importance of context expertise. He tosses in a few bits about the fallacy of believing AI is having a positive impact on learning, and the test-driven focus on Skills That Can be Measured vs. Concepts That Students Understand and can apply to their worldview and actual lives.

And he’s right. Teachers have to have deep content knowledge.

I can’t tell you how often, in my own 32 years of classroom practice, I was the Sage on the Stage, rather than the Guide on the Side. Happily, and correctly, so.

I was, after all, the best musician in the room, the person who knew how to shape a musical phrase, how to execute a dotted eighth-sixteenth pattern in various musical styles, and how to illustrate fingering options for an in-tune high F# on the flute. Plus buckets full of other musical and technical knowledge that my students needed to make a piece of music come alive, the whole point of being in band class.

I knew stuff. Things that could be demonstrated. Things that a method book or even a video could never explain. I could lead a lively discussion on how ragtime led to swing led to cool jazz and how the rhythms driving the music my students listened to were born in other places and spread by (voluntary and involuntary) immigration.  

Every year that I taught, I knew more stuff. I remained curious about better ways to teach what I knew—both the technical skills as well as the impact of music on American culture and human relationships.

I also—and this is important—spent time thinking about what my students were taking away from my class (besides the actual location of 5th position on the trombone), into adulthood. I’ve met plenty of younger teachers whose own K-12 experiences and college training have left them believing that we can actually measure useful learning in real time, via computer-delivered tests, and that’s our job.

Not so. We can measure short-term retention of skills and bits of information. But the thing about knowledge is that it is applicable and adaptable. It’s not embedded knowledge unless it’s useful to you in some way, over time. It’s just information, to remember or regurgitate, or not.

In addition to teaching band, choir and general music, I also spent two years teaching 7th grade math, one of the places where teachers were encouraged to be guides on the side, facilitating problem-solving using the algorithmic skills students had been taught to replicate.

I can still hear my students’ dismayed voices as they turned the page and saw (dunh dunh duh)… story problems! We were using a constructivist math curriculum, and I also heard from parents on the regular about how they couldn’t help their kids with word-based problems. (Usually because they “weren’t good at math.”)

But word problems ask students to apply the skills we all (sort of) learned. They are about the usefulness of math. Teaching students how to analyze what a word problem is asking them to do is way more difficult than having them replicate an algorithm.

And putting them in small groups to struggle with that process is not likely to yield knowledge, no matter how many facilitating questions you ask. It’s a time-intensive process, nudging them along. Good math teachers (and I wasn’t particularly good) need to know how to turn information plus skills into useful knowledge.

Worth noting: Repeated testing, scripted curricula and pacing charts–the central tools of standardization– often get in the way of developing useful knowledge, the stuff that 7th graders will still be using when they’re in their 40s.

I used to have a principal who, at every staff meeting and public event, would identify himself as the “lead learner” in our school. It was a private joke among the faculty that he found the phrase in some textbook for school administrators and kept repeating it because it seemed cool. In fact, he had a limited vision for student learning, centered around data, rather than enthusiasm, imagination or even the utility of what we were teaching.

 Peter Greene is right: Teachers need to know stuff, especially in an era where information is suspect, misleading and paywalled. When teachers are not seen as experts—or don’t see themselves as experts—we’re in trouble.

by nflanagan

Some Thoughts about National Board Certification

I am a National Board Certified Teacher. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) influenced a big chunk of my professional life and practice, and I remain—pretty much—a fan.

The founding ideas around the creation of an assessment that identified accomplished teaching drew me in, back in the mid-90s. I wasn’t sure, back then, that there could ever be a valid, reliable way to evaluate quality—or inadequate—teaching. I thought it was like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s remark about hard-core pornography: I know it when I see it.

Remember—this was before NCLB, and the advent of mandated testing for all public school children, beginning in the third grade. Some states (mine, for example) had been using statewide assessments for years, but nobody was talking about identifying or comparing teacher effectiveness by their students’ test scores– a ridiculous thought, given all the variables.

I was intrigued by the NBPTS process, and signed up to sit for certification as an Early Adolescence Generalist, paying my own fee ($2500, if I remember correctly) and (kind of recklessly) jumping in. The National Board, in 1995, did not offer an assessment for music teachers, so I decided to teach my 300 middle school band students ‘generalist’ lessons in math, language arts, science and social studies. I would NEVER recommend this, knowing what I learned, but I scored well and became a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT).

Most people, including ed policy experts, university educators and teachers who have not experienced certification do not fully understand the National Board process (although many think they do). It’s difficult to explain, especially to educators and researchers whose entire careers have been shadowed by our national love affair with standardized testing.

The National Board asks teachers to hold their practice up to a set of teacher-created pedagogical and content-based standards, custom-written for various disciplinary and developmental levels. Teachers then reflect on how well their practice aligns with these standards, using videotapes of lessons, student work products across time and written self-evaluation. They also sit for on-demand examinations of their relevant content knowledge. Candidates’ portfolios and content exams were scored by teachers who taught the same subjects, at the same level.

It’s rigorous, and grueling—and often confusing for teachers who have never been asked the deep questions posed by the process: What is your convincing evidence that Student A understands ____? What misconceptions are evident in Student B’s remarks about ______? What other strategies have you tried to build competence in ________? Why is it important for students to have fluency in ______________? And so on, 12-20 pages for each of multiple portfolio tasks.

Many teachers—myself included—say that going through the National Board process was the best, most useful and personalized, professional development they ever had. I became a true-blue believer in the process. I then worked as a Teacher in Residence for NBPTS for two years and was part of a national team that devised the music assessment.

I was working for the National Board in their Outreach and Teacher Leadership departments when NCLB passed, 25 years ago. You could immediately see how NCLB’s foregrounding standardized testing would clash with the things most valued by the NBPTS principles and standards (again, established by actual teachers, not lawmakers, data-crunchers or education publishers).

The NBPTS standards were built on the idea of teacher expertise—knowing their students deeply, mastery of their subject discipline, possession of a full pedagogical tool bag—and continuous reflection on evidence of what was going well and what needed changing in their day to day practice.

NCLB, on the other hand, put faith in test scores as the only valid means of comparing schools (and, eventually, teachers)–and allocating carrots and sticks. There were lots of new rules to follow: the Highly Qualified Teacher requirements, for example, wiped out my NB certificate (Early Adolescence Generalist) which honored the classic middle-grades teacher who taught all subjects.

NBPTS was in the process of rolling out a number of new certificates, recruiting teachers to sit for certification, and building financial rewards for NBCTs into state policy and local contracts. They were becoming more corporate, changing a number of policies to streamline the business, something they probably needed to do to stay alive in the new political milieu.

One of the things that was proposed: machine scoring of teacher portfolios and/or content exams. NBCTs were adamantly opposed to the very idea. Many NBCTs, having had the positive experience of going through the process, had become scorers (a job only practicing teachers were allowed to do) in the summer. Others became candidate support providers, working with colleagues to examine their practice, building little communities that studied the standards, videotaping each other’s lessons and having productive conversations about teaching and learning.

The thought of saving money by machine-scoring parts of the assessment was a betrayal of the teacher leadership piece of NB certification—helping colleagues to understand and improve their own practice. Who would embrace an assessment that was evaluated by a bot?  Not teachers whose work had been fairly judged. The National Board later eliminated their Teacher Leadership department. It was not a money-maker.

I left the National Board when they moved to Washington, DC, and returned to my music classroom, but continued, for a while, to help candidates and do workshops with schools or teacher associations that were interested in the NBPTS process. I have many NBCT friends who still do NB work, in spite of changes to NB certification that were less than teacher-friendly. I am now an outside—albeit informed—observer.

Recently, on a candidate support page, the question of using AI to write portfolio briefs emerged. A candidate had shared a draft analysis of her own teaching to an NBCT, who worried that the piece was so ‘well-written’ that it appeared to be composed by ChatGPT. The NBCT encouraged the candidate to think about ways that might make her writing seem more… human.

Now—writing skill is NOT assessed in the National Board process. Clarity of thought, presentation of believable evidence, convincing analysis of student progress—all of these are important, but smooth prose and impeccable syntax, not so much. I was struck by the idea that someone might think about using AI to write what’s supposed to be one’s own rationale and justification for things done as a teacher. The product could only be incoherent, if grammatically sound, slop.

Even worse—and here we have to, unsurprisingly, travel to Texas—some states are now questioning the National Board’s core contribution to teaching and learning: professional standards.

As Peter Greene reports:

 NBTC hasn’t been hugely successful in Texas– only about 1,178 out of 320,000 teachers have the certification. But it looks that’s 1,178 too many for some legislators. Because “tolerance.”

That’s correct. The NBPTS standards, for all ages and subjects, encourage equity and inclusion of all kids and embrace the diverse range of students taught in American public schools. In Texas, they’re trying to yank the very modest stipends given to TX teachers who have achieved National Board Certification.

Because money talks. Not all states offer a financial reward to NBCTs or contribute to certification fees. And many NBCTs are like me—curious about defining the markers of good teaching, convinced that all kids deserve an accomplished teacher. The money is seldom enough to make the 200-400 hour intensive challenge of certification worthwhile.

In earlier days, NBPTS got a lot of bipartisan support—a way to reward hard-working, demonstrably effective teachers that wasn’t graduate credit hours or seniority. Right to work states were fans of paying a handful of excellent teachers a little more cash, knowing that teachers are capitalists, too.

It’s ironic that it might be right-wing politics and AI that damage a worthwhile endeavor to improve teaching. Or maybe the word is predictable.

by nflanagan

Looping. It’s Not New. It’s Not a Panacea.

One of the most enduring truisms about public education is the existence of The Pendulum—the belief that trends in curriculum and instruction tend to repeat themselves, swinging back and forth over time between two distinct, even opposing models.

The most obvious example is the Reading Wars—both the binary presentation (there are two ways to teach reading, and my way is best) and the free-floating hostility toward anyone suggesting that teaching reading isn’t a matter of adopting The One True Way. 

The Reading Wars—a term I loathe—have been heating up periodically for the last century. It’s not surprising that veteran educators who have had measurable and observable success in teaching reading really hate being told that their go-to instructional strategies, honed by trial and error, are wrong.

Here’s the thing about that pendulum: it’s not precisely the right metaphor. Education should embrace experimentation, observation and change. Because students change, and the world changes. What goes around comes around—but maybe with a new twist, or new insight. Not much is “settled science.”

If teaching were a true profession (a topic for another blog), it would be understood as a practice, founded on core principles and knowledge, but built by individual skills and strengths within a particular context.

 Just as with any other profession, there would be the presumption of mastery—that a teacher’s experience is valuable, their judgment based on having fine-tuned their understanding of instructional issues and how to solve learning problems. But in real life, teachers are more likely to be subject to trends and laws and commerce and even political winds.

For example: When everyone was excited about new Chromebooks for all, third grade teachers were told that cursive writing was obsolete. Keyboarding was the future. But—then there was positive research on brain development via cursive writing, and ka-boom. Cursive is back. Unless it’s not.

When teachers are directed what and even how to teach, they are not using that well-honed judgment. And more teacher judgment means less pendulum, waiting around for what you know works in your classroom to be OK again, or sneaking cursive lessons to your 3rd graders because you saw it help your previous 3rd graders, practicing their cursive in letters to grandparents.

I was amused to see the headline “Charter School Finds Looping Strategy Benefits Youngest Students,” in Education Week. The video article suggests that looping (combining two grades in one classroom, with older half leaving as a new, younger half comes in) is an innovative idea. These are preschool students—3 and 4 year olds—so there’s a lot of happy talk about how the 4 year olds have an extra year of school under their tiny belts, and act as leaders for the incoming 3 year olds.

Especially with very young children, having the same teacher for two years—in a true looping or multi-age setup—could have some benefits. But there was the sense that the folks in this school had found an entirely new instructional concept with amazing benefits.

In the 1990s, I got involved in a one-year experiment in a multi-age/looping classroom in the district where I taught, and my kids went to school.

I learned about multi-age classrooms from Dr. Ellen Thompson, whom I met at a Teacher of the Year conference—she was Vermont’s Teacher of the Year in 1993. Ellen was a strong proponent of flexing the age groupings of elementary students, of really getting to know kids and their families instead of one-and-done. She had been teaching in a three-grade classroom for years and did an amazing, research-substantiated presentation on the benefits of multi-age classrooms.

Back home, my son’s first grade teacher had also been reading about multi-age classrooms and looping (which is how you get multi-age classes embedded in a traditional, grade-by-grade setting). She wanted to try it–and had a 2nd grade teacher who would partner with her.

Now, I loved this teacher. My son was doing really well in her classroom. The idea of having her again next year, in a Grade 1 / 2 looping classroom was really appealing. But there was a great deal of pushback from administrators (because they were in charge of any change) and from the union. Mainly—and this is a very important point—because they’d been trying for years to get rid of split-grade classrooms to even out class sizes.

But they agreed to try a one-year pilot of two multi-grade 1 /2 classrooms. And we were in, although more than one second grade teacher expressed regret they wouldn’t have my son in their class. What happened next was surprising to me.

Parents (who had to agree to place their student in a deliberately structured multi-age setting) shied away from the idea, seeing it as just another split, something they’d been told to avoid if possible. The assumption was that the 2nd graders in the 1 /2 split were “behind.” A mother in the Little League bleachers told me that the multiage classroom was for 2nd graders who couldn’t read, which I personally knew was far from the truth.

None of my son’s friends were in his class. And he never talked about being a leader for his first grade classmates. It turned out to be just another year of schooling. And it made me understand that context—the settled-in assumptions made by an education community—trump lots of innovative ideas. The pilot lasted one year.

So it was interesting to see looping swing, like a pendulum, across the radar again.  I wish them every success.

by nflanagan

Can AI Handle Parent-Teacher Conferences?

Please?

Here’s the actual headline: Teacher-Parent Meetings Can Be Tense. Can AI Simulations Help?

If you’ve waded around in mainstream edu-media lately, you don’t really need to read the article. Its bottom line is predictable, first chastising teacher preparation institutes for not teaching novice teachers how to handle ‘challenging’ P-T conferences, then suggesting that a little practice with a specially designed chatbot will make you ready for Jason’s Mom when she comes in, loaded for bear

To presumably add weight to the core message of the article, the first example shared is that of a former insurance litigator-turned-teacher who finds that simulated parent conferences upped his game, when real parents came in and said their child was misbehaving because he was ‘bored.’

The novice teacher was stunned at how close to reality the simulation was—and (bless his heart) found a way to genuinely listen to parents rather than pointing out that ‘bored’ was not the correct descriptor. Unruly, maybe. Rebellious. Even pre-delinquent.

But of course, being professionally tactful and actually hoping to make classroom interactions better, teachers don’t share their darker thoughts with parents. If they have to give unwelcome news, they use the ‘sandwich technique’ of surrounding unpleasant feedback with positive observations and hopeful solutions.

I couldn’t help wondering, in reading the article, if Former Insurance Litigator had not handled malicious lawyers on either side of insurance claims. Part of becoming a teacher (or a lawyer, nurse, pastor, or the guy behind the register at the 7-11) is dealing with unpleasant feedback.

Speaking personally, the most nerve-wracking parent-teacher conferences I had were very early in my career, when I was 23 and most of the parents I was meeting were a couple of decades older. My experience in professional skills before that was limited to waiting tables and working at Kentucky Fried Chicken, unlike someone who had been practicing insurance law.

But I learned how to listen without judgment. And I learned how to face unhappy parents, and believe in myself as the fully qualified teacher in the exchange. Back-of-envelope calculation of how many P-T conferences and IEPs I was part of, in 30+ years: somewhere between seven and ten thousand (music teachers have lots of students).

Not all of them were warm and fuzzy, but an overwhelming majority were, at the very least, cordial. And perhaps a dozen were memorably awful—way more than ‘tense’—although never in ways that an AI simulation could anticipate.

I actually liked meeting my students’ parents, a lot. Meeting parents is insight into how to teach their children better—it often explains a great deal about why particular kids behave as they do in the classroom. Outsourcing problems in communicating with parents to AI-created examples and model answers is a fool’s game.

What I’m waiting for is the AI-only conference, with parents accessing teacher avatars who give them a synopsis of what’s in the gradebook, and run surveillance film of the kid’s behavior in the classroom.

So efficient! So cheap! And that’s what we’re going for, right?

by nflanagan

Let’s Pay Teachers Overtime

The title of the article made me laugh out loud: Should Teachers Get Overtime?

Subtitle: EdWeek Readers have some thoughts.

I’ll bet they do. Fortunately, the readers who responded to EdWeek’s LinkedIn poll obviously had some experience in teacher compensation, not to mention common sense. Because the answer to this question is obviously that teachers ought to be paid fully professional salaries, since it’s a professional job. Starting now.

Back in 2007, I took part in a teacher-led consortium that explored teacher pay. We followed the time-honored education practice of saving the world one white paper at a time, and produced a thick, glossy report filled with suggestions on how to pay teachers for their special skills and performance, enhancing recruitment and retention. We firmly rejected the common belief that paying teachers for their students’ test scores would do anything good for education–but allowed that the single-scale salary schedule had some flaws and might be tweaked.

Mostly, we were looking for ways to pay experienced, proven educators enough to honor their hard-won expertise and, over time, give them additional leadership responsibilities without forcing them out of the classroom. There were 18 “recognized” teachers in the group, union and non-union, and we didn’t agree on all aspects of what professional compensation looked like, other than the fact that teachers were significantly underpaid for the service they provided to their communities.

There was one thing we all agreed on, however: teaching is not, never has been, a 9 to 5, punch in and out, job. Teachers generally get extra compensation for teaching an extra hour (giving up contractually granted planning time)–or for coaching, and other after-school programming.

But–as commenters on the EdWeek piece noted–if we were to, say, offer teachers money for staying late to read 150 essays and provide written feedback, or to grade dozens of constructed-response math tests, districts would run out of money by October. Or, as one cynical commenter noted, teachers would quickly be forbidden to do anything above and beyond, because it would be deemed too expensive. So–counterproductive.

It’s worth noting that our report on changing teacher pay for good reasons was written nearly 20 years ago, and while there have been a handful of alternative compensation models since (and also plenty of glossy reports), even EdWeek–seriously, one assumes–is still asking readers if teachers should get overtime.

Bummer.

by nflanagan

Hate Definitely Has a Home Here

If there’s one question on the minds of my friend group these days—old friends, fellow teachers, new acquaintances, anyone paying attention—it’s this: How can anyone, let alone a third of the population, look at current events in the United States in the past year, and believe that we are on the right track, doing OK, making our people and nation stronger?

I don’t really have to spell it out, although I am mindful of Rachel Bitecofer’s principle: repeated negative messaging works in elections—because voters will  only be mad about what we tell them to be mad about.

So here’s the bottom line: we are in real trouble, as a nation, on dozens of fronts, beginning with the fact that we are being lied to—vicious lies, filthy lies, heedless lies—on the regular. Even teaching the truth about history and science in ordinary classrooms, museums and national parks has been explicitly forbidden, plaques removed, educators silenced.

Teaching has never been easy, but it’s really a miracle that so many fine teachers are still in the classroom and finding some satisfaction in their work there. According to an EdWeek Research Center survey on teacher morale, teachers described their feelings about teaching as a very lukewarm positive—a +13 on a 200-point scale, ranging from -100 to +100.

Last year, teachers were slightly more positive, at +18, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the world’s most important and rewarding profession. Interesting nugget: teachers in Arkansas reported the highest morale (+24); Pennsylvania, the lowest (+1). Make of that what you will.

Which is why I loved reading Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy.  Macy, who also wrote Dopesick, a book that helped me understand opioid addiction, travels to her hometown of Urbana, Ohio, once a thriving town with good schools and a solid middle class. She was looking for reasons that people there voted—three-quarters of them—for Trump.

Among her heroes, the people who are still seeking to preserve what’s good and healthy in a failing Midwestern town, are teachers. The teachers she interviews, and whose work with and dedication to Urbana’s public school students is fierce and clear-eyed, are one of the last walls between kids making headway in life, and disaster. 

Macy also remembers the teachers who helped her get away from a working-class background with the help of Pell grants, talent and a lot of luck. Her siblings were not so lucky—one of the most painful parts of her narrative are conversations with her brother and sisters, and her niece who suffered from a stepparent’s abuse.

It is through these conversations and seeing how despair and the empty promises of preachers and politicians impact the down and out, that I began to understand who votes for powerful liars, and why.

It also helps explain why Americans hate each other:
The Pew Research Center finds that 53% of American adults describe the morality and ethics of our fellow citizens as “bad” (ranging from “somewhat bad” to “very bad”). In the 24 other countries polled by Pew, most people called their fellow citizens somewhat good or very good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the United States is Canada, where 92% say their fellow Canadians are good, while just 7% say they’re bad.

Macy does a superb job of weaving anecdotes and memoir about growing up in a town that feels very familiar to me, also a Midwestern girl. She analyzes just what went wrong, much of it having to do with international trade, the dangerous equity gap, decades of negative political messaging about welfare queens. The demise of empathy, and the rise of right-wing pole-barn churches with fundamentalist men at the pulpit. Greed. Racism. Sexism.

Although the book won a number of awards (and was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books in 2025), I found the comments from readers enlightening. Either people loved it, finding that it deepened their understanding of just what is happening in the forgotten little towns across the country—or they hated it, believing Macy is encouraging people to talk to the enemy.

Which is a strategy that has not worked, commenters say. Unless we fight back—the “pound the negative message” model—we keep losing ground. Forget people in your past, your family. They’re the ones who voted him in. The enemy.

Who’s right?

I looked for a photo of Beth Macy and discovered she’s running for Congress in a ruby-red district in Virginia. It’s apparent to me (if not to her readers) that she’s willing to fight hard against the damage to our democracy.

She’s also right about teachers—especially those with the courage to stand up for truth, for the kids they serve, no matter their prospects. Donation sent.

Here in northern Michigan, an elderly gentleman who’s spent his life working for progressive causes was so upset about seeing Barack and Michelle Obama portrayed as apes that he called his neighbor, offering to fund signs to place around our small county, saying HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. She honored his request, designing and ordering signs.

During this process, the gentleman died. The signs will be ready next week, and planting one at the end of my driveway will be both advocacy and memorial. What I’d really like to see is a couple of those signs posted around our local school. Because that’s one of the few places where hate speech and hate actions are actively discouraged and prohibited.

Read Paper Girl.  If you’re like me, you’ll love it.

by nflanagan

How about a Pause on the Race to Embed AI in Schools?

I haven’t written much about AI and education, for several reasons.

First, there are already many people writing compellingly and with considerable expertise about the uses and misuses of AI in the classroom. Some of those people will show up in this blog. Follow them. Read what they write.

Also, some years ago I developed a reputation for being a cranky Luddite. I wrote pieces about the downside of the ubiquitous online gradebook, accessible to parents 24/7, and other uses of computer programs that added to teachers’ workloads and didn’t fit with the important content and skills I was teaching students (lots of students) the old-fashioned way. The real costs of “free” programs and apps, no matter how glittery and hip, seemed obvious to me. Why didn’t other educators see this?

This came to a head when I was invited to be part of an online panel on ed technologies. Presenters sent me the language they planned to use to introduce me—did I approve? I confirmed, and then they messaged back: the bio had been created by ChatGPT. Ha-ha.

Finally, I haven’t written much about AI because I just find it hard to conceptualize how it could be useful in the classroom. In other fields, perhaps—with a lot of caveats, oversight and suspicion—but it runs contrary to the essential purpose of teaching and learning. Doesn’t it?

It’s never seemed right to let machines do the ‘thinking’ or ‘creating’ that is better done, or at least attempted, daily, by children. In short, I don’t get it. Maybe that’s because I haven’t been enlightened? So—shut up already?

I think many, if not most, practicing educators are in the same boat: Unclear about what AI actually is, and what use could be made of AI tools in their vital mission to make children independent thinkers, evaluators and creators.

For starters, who’s cool with Big Data collecting info on our public school kiddos’ engagement with their products? NEPC Report on digital platforms:  

‘While educators may see platforms as neutral tools, they are in fact shaped by competing interests and hidden imperatives. Teachers, students, and administrators are only one market. The other market involves data on performance, usage patterns and engagement—data flowing to advertisers, data brokers and investors, often without users’ knowledge or consent.’ 

A pretty good synopsis of what AI is, from Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo:

“AI is being built, even more than most of us realize, by consuming everyone else’s creative work with no compensation. It’s less ‘thought’ than more and more refined statistical associations between different words and word patterns.” He goes on to make the salient point that the AI “products” being produced that will be “privately owned and sold to us.”

Doesn’t sound like something that schools need to quickly embrace, what with all our other problems, like teaching kids to read, rising absence rates and budgets stripped of our ability to feed children a nutritious breakfast and lunch.

Add in the environmental concerns and rampant intellectual property theft to teachers’ uncertainty about dumping more new, unvetted toys into an already-crammed curriculum. So I was thoroughly surprised to see the AFT get on the “AI in the classroom!!” bandwagon.

Why not take a pause—let’s call it a shutdown—on the race to embed AI in our schools? Why not sort through those competing interests and hidden imperatives? We’ve been bamboozled by climbing on attractive but ultimately damaging educational bandwagons before. Just who wants us on this one?

Well, scammers. And the folks who turned DEI into something to be avoided. Clueless Tik-Toking middle schoolers could up their game with AI. And right-wing edu-site The 74 says educators can save six hours a week by using AI to make worksheets, tests and exit tickets. Really? That’s an awful lot of worksheets.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to approach this transformative technology with great caution, holding fast to the evergreen principle of teaching and learning being a social endeavor? To look at the available research before being bedazzled by something new?

‘Participants, mostly undergraduate and graduate students, who constructed essays with the assistance of ChatGPT exhibited less brain activity during the task than those participants who were asked to write on their own. The AI-users were much less likely to be able to recall what they had written and felt less ownership over their work. Independent evaluators who reviewed the essays found the AI-supported ones to be lacking in individuality and creativity.’

If you want to read better pieces on AI, many are hyperlinked in this blog. But here are a few folks whose words and thoughts come from places of deep knowledge and experience:

Audrey Watters, the best Ed-Tech thinker on the planet, for my money.

Pete Buttigieg, who thinks ahead of trends. Stop worrying about when he’s going to run for President and start absorbing his ideas on politics and relevant policy. Including AI.

Lucian Truscott, who writes about many things and made me understand why AI may ultimately fail: The men who run the big AI companies would do well to think through what they are doing with all those big buildings and all that electricity they consume. The “answer,” such as it is, to what they are seeking to accomplish may not exist, or it may be simpler than they think.

Educator Alfie Kohn, who points out that those most receptive to this technology are the people who know the least about it. This piece made my skin crawl.

My friend Peter Greene does a better job of debunking AI crapola than anyone I know. I credit this to his decades of classroom experience, during which he Paid Attention to Things—things more important than launching new products and making the big bucks.

So why should anyone pay attention to what a tech skeptic writes about AI in schools?

Because we’ll all be lured into making photos come to life, or relying on a questionable AI answer to an important question, or laughing at Russ Vought as Grim Reaper. Sticky and fun, but ultimately shallow, inconsequential.  Not what school-based learning should be.

Earlier this year, on a day when I made a (delicious) strawberry pie, I clicked on a song-writing app. Give us some lyrics, and a musical style, and we’ll write a song for you.

Here is my song: Strawberry Pie. Sticky and fun, but not much effort on my part.

by nflanagan

Political Violence in the Classroom

In November of 2016, right after Donald Trump was elected for the first time, seventh graders at Royal Oak Middle School were captured on video shouting “Build that wall! Build that wall!”  in the school lunchroom. It drew immediate attention and media coverage, but like all once-shocking incidents, quickly faded from public view.

As events of the last week unfolded, it struck me that the blurry kids in the video would now be about the same age as Tyler Robinson, the man who shot Charlie Kirk. Were they now part of the cluster of young white men who spend all their time online, getting radicalized? Do they follow Nick Fuentes or hang out on 4Chan?

Or—best case scenario—had they merely been immature, clueless, early-adolescent jerks whose irresponsible, harmful “prank” of insulting and perhaps scaring classmates of color, was made clear to them by a community of teachers and parents? In one of the news clips from 2016, the Royal Oak Superintendent talks about how the perpetrators will be dealt with summarily, keeping in mind that youthful mistakes can be learning experiences.

Exactly.

Clueless early-adolescent jerks are a regular feature in middle school teachers’ clientele. Kids do dumb things. In between teaching students about the Bill of Rights and single-variable equations, teachers do double duty as both role models and arbitrators of appropriate behavior.

Because—despite the persistent myth that teachers should just spout content and inculcate skills, nothing more—learning happens in context. When some part of your class feels rejected, afraid or angry about being harassed in the cafeteria, nobody learns. Much of what we absorb in school are lessons about right and wrong. Civility and respect.

Things that weren’t on the lesson plan–no matter how old your students, or which subject you’re teaching. School is where students learn to deal with personal differences, taking turns and not always getting your way. And teachers—witness the illustration for this blog, just posted by a friend in a series of photos of her classroom—create materials, lessons and discussions to that effect, right out of the gate, even though it’s often considered not their job or, any more, none of their business.

We are at a point, this week, where teachers in twelve states have been fired or suspended for making remarks online about Charlie Kirk’s murder. In some states—you can guess which—state officials are inviting anonymous tips on teachers who may have said something in class that offended somebody, although the veracity of who said what, reported by students, then routed through parents, has to be uncertain at best.

Not to mention a giant waste of time at the beginning of the school year, as teachers are trying to build community and trust. Nor is any of this reducing the likelihood of the most politicized and terrifying violence in our classrooms: school shootings.

While teachers should absolutely keep their partisan loyalties to themselves, speaking about political violence is speaking about current events. As Brittany Page says:

“Political violence” isn’t just a conservative activist getting murdered.

Political violence is a Supreme Court that gives the green light for people to be stopped and detained based on their perceived race or ethnicity, what language they speak, where they work, and where they happen to be standing.

It is found in a society that tells you to start a GoFundMe to pay for your life-saving healthcare so your family doesn’t go bankrupt when you draw the short stick.

Click on the link. It’s a powerful piece, proof that we are all wading around in political violence every day, no matter how much they want us to shut up about it. It’s evil. To pretend it doesn’t exist makes it even more dangerous for all of us, including children.

How did we get here? Jonathan V. Last, at The Bulwark, said this:

‘Things have changed and it’s not hard to pinpoint the moment when the normalization of political violence re-emerged among our political elites. To pretend otherwise would be to hide our heads in the sand—to deny the plain political reality of the moment. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. Times change; people change.‘

The best part of that quote comes at the end. Times do change. People do change. And I would assert that changing people for the better happens in good schools, every day. Not all classrooms, not all playgrounds, not all teachers—but public schooling is an overall force for good, for a better, healthier nation.

In my time in the classroom, there have been regular encounters with politicized issues, from shootings to 9/11. In 1988, one of my students lost his father over Lockerbie Scotland, enroute to Detroit via Pan Am Flight 103, which was carrying a bomb planted by a Libyan citizen. Did we talk about that? Yes. I also know his pain was ultimately mitigated by the simple act of going to school each day.

Robert Reich: ‘If you examine our history, you’ll see that the core of that identity has not been the whiteness of our skin, or the uniformity of our ethnicity, or agreement on religion, or like-mindedness about sexual preference or orientation.

The core of our national identity has been the ideals we share: our commitments to the rule of law, to democratic institutions of government, to truth, to tolerance of our differences, to equal political rights, and to equal opportunity.‘

Every clause in that last paragraph ought to be taught every day in every classroom in America. It’s the antidote to political violence.