Nobody has commented on my blog for awhile, so I'm not sure if I offended someone.  I haven't been commenting on other people's blogs much, either.  So, here are a few updates to explain random things:

1. I'm finishing my master's project.  I've been really excited with how it is turning out, but it has been a bit anti-climactic.  I'm loving the cycle of research - the question, the development, the implementation and the analysis leading back to a new question.  It makes me wonder if I'll someday end up at a university. 

2. I changed my blog background, because the template changed and my CSS overide looked funny.  I hope to change my blog again soon.  I'm just not sure what style to use.

3. I've decided to move down to sixth-grade self-contained next year.  I love eighth grade, but I feel like I'd rather know kids better and with a deeper understanding of each child's learning style.  I'd love to teach other subjects besides social studies.  Any ideas on how to teach sixth grade?

Every year, either our school, our district or the textbook company trains teachers in a new, revolutionary method of teaching reading.  Inevitably, there are PowerPoint slides, CD-ROMS and worksheets that students fill out.  Often, the workshop provider offers a ten-step process for decoding and analyzing text.  Typically, the mode of instruction includes multiple intelligences and cooperative learning.  On paper, it seems fool-proof; a systematic solution to solve our reading problems. 

Yet, each year it fails.  Like the perpetual fad dieter, our school clings to each program only to watch it fizzle by the end of the year.  Our response is always a new fad diet, with more colorful workbooks and prettier CD-ROMS. Unfortunately, kids recieve all the wrong messages.  They believe that reading must be inherently boring.  Why else would the school offer them pizza parties and prizes for Accelerated Reader?  They participate in constant small-group reading, when, in most of life, reading is a silent, somewhat solitary activity. We focus on isolated skills, but students miss out on the simple joy of an engaging text. 

I wonder if the answer to improving reading lies in changing our diet and excercising rather than hoping for a magic pill or a new system.  Honestly, reading has existed for millenia and I'm a little skeptical of anything promising to be "revolutionary."  Our school is constantly buying long, complicated, indestructable reading systems.  Yet, it reminds me of an unbalanced Atkin's Diet or an infomercial for the Bow-Flex. 

For the last three months, I have been training for a marathon.  I've lost fifty pounds and moved into a place where I run sixteen miles on the weekend.  I didn't switch to a special diet, though I am eating less fake food and more fruits and vegetables.  I made excercise a daily priority and ran at my own pace; slowly building up to a seven-mile-a-day regiment.  My motive was not to go on a diet, but to change my lifestyle.  I wanted to sit down and not feel my gut.  I wanted to chase after my sons and not be out of breath. 

What if schools were honest with kids about reading?  What if students learned that reading is challenging, exciting, often perplexing - that it's a dangerous excercise.  Rather than viewing it as a task that deserves a reward or even as something that has to be fun, students might begin to view reading as something powerful and life-changing.  What if students could read work that was controversial and authentic, that engaged their minds in deep questions and conflict?  Like a change in diet, they could move past the fast-food diet of worksheets and into the authentic realm of true literature. 

Maybe I'm too idealistic here.  However, a few years back all teachers had the chance to teach a fifteen student intervention class.  Students would read for the first twenty minutes (in silence) from a book within their level (not unlike when I started running at a 1-mile per day pace) and slowly I nudged them toward harder literature.  They wrote reflections, analyzed the plot and engaged in small-group dialogue about the characters.  Later, we switched to non-fiction.  In the last fifteen minutes of class, I would read a memoir aloud. 

Students began to beg to read silently longer.  Many students brought their books home and would shift into reading a new book every week.  I had no set curriculum.  Instead, I hit all the reading standards for analyzing text.  Yet, by the end of the year, every student moved from Falls Far Below and Approaches in reading to Meets or Exceeds.  We avoided the fad diets and reading became a lifestyle.

This morning I will set up ten blog accounts for students (who couldn't follow directions the first time), reformat my lesson plans (into the district-mandated, heavy-handed format) and figure out how to turn in receipts the correct why (becuase I didn't follow directions the first time. Apparently I'm not all that different from students).  Sometimes I feel that life has given me busy work.  It's as though the teaching profession is run by the same teacher who used to give me stacks of packets and I'd mindlessly fill each one out with the hope that some day we would do something meaningful. 

I want to edit my students' work before they post it to our class blog.  I want to post comments to their blogs and see the nuances in the language they use and the general trends on which issues they find the most important in the election.  I want to search through campaign propaganda, so I can teach the lesson well on Wednesday.  I want to pray for the girl whose dad was shot recently.  I want to develop a more organized way for us to do community service and for me to monitor which students haven't had the opportunity to attend on a weekend.  I'd like to create a feedback document to track how students are improving in writing. 

I find that the urgent often eats away at the important.  Like a parasite, the small things (this survey will only take you ten minutes) take over the important things until I realize one morning that I am missing out on some of the best parts of teaching.  I realize I cannot simply ditch the urgent.  Oddly enough, I'll get in more trouble for failing to turn in lesson plans than for failing to provide authentic feedback on student work. 

This is why teachers end up cheating in certain areas.  Some cheat in lesson plans and just borrow someone else's.  Some make worksheet packets so they can use up instructional time to catch up on paperwork.  Some teachers replace assessing work with a simple check or check plus system.  I don't want to get to that point.  I need to find a way to cheat in the urgent category, so I can spend more time on the important.

Last year, the Solutions Team from the Department of Education offered a long analysis of why our school is failing.  First on the list was "low expectations."  Similarly, when the district hired a man to conduct a climate survey the previous year the number one complaint was that our staff seemed divided according to those with high expectations and those with low expectations. 

The problem is this: every teacher believes that he or she has high expectations.  Mrs. Packetmaster believes that she has high expecations, because her students complete a ten page packet every single day and if they don't they recieve a detention, where they must sit in silence for an hour (What I would give for that Zen-like experience!). Mr. Textbooksprinter claims that he is the only social studies teacher with high expectations, because the students read every chapter and complete every Section Review by the close of the year. 

I, for my part, claim that I hold my students to high expectations.  They engage in higher-level thinking.  They write (going through the entire writing process) at least three paragraphs a day, which they then revise and edit.  We have debates and mock trials where they must articulate multiple viewpoints.  Students meet at lunch and plan service projects and stay and they stay after school to paint murals.  Then again, someone could easily claim that my students are not being held to a high standard - that it's all fun and no drill; that murals are pretty, but they don't help a student learn to read a textbook.   

I feel like our school (indeed our nation) needs to have an open dialogue about expectations:

1. What do high expectations look like?  What would you see in a classroom where teachers expect more out of the students?

2. What can a teacher expect an eigth grader to read?  How long should it take to read ten pages?  What types of questions should a child ask when reading?  Are kids failing to read out of a lack of skills or a lack of motivation? 

3. What can a teacher expect an eighth grader to write? 

4. How often should teachers focus on basic skills and how often should a teacher move into higher order thinking?

In our school, we have one principal and three assistant principals.  It's a large middle school, so I can see the need for a large administration.  However, we also have two Language Acquisition Specialists and two Curriculum Specialists.  The sad thing is that all four of them are great teachers who are now in a position of beauracracy.  Each LAS now spends hours reading lesson plans and developing mandatory trainings.  In other words, creating work so that we can do extra work, all in the name of "student support."  The curriculum specialists spend hours at district meetings and creating graphs of testing data.  Again, so that we can go to more meetings, analyze more charts and have less time to actually teach.

The sad thing is that all four specialists are great teachers and could have a major impact teaching a team of 120 students if they all worked together as teachers.  Instead, they spend hours working really hard in an effor that never produces results. 

If I were an education reformer, the first thing I would do is go to the schools and find every person whose title ends with "specialist" or "coach" or "mentor" and place that person in a classroom at least part time (partly to help the person remember what it's like to be in a classroom and partly in increase learning) and then I would cut every district office staff roll in half. 

Okay, so that's my rant.   

I'm sitting at home right now attempting to turn my own lesson plans into the heavy-handed, district-imposed, board-approved lesson plan format.  Supposedly it follows the Madeline Hunter format (though I remember using her lesson plan format in college and it was different)

My issue is this: I can't fit my lessons into that format.  Sometimes we begin with an anticipatory set, while other days we spend the entire class period working independently on a project.  Often we start with independent practice and then switch to guided practice, then into a direct instruction.  The lesson format changes from day to day based upon what I consider the best possible way to teach my individual class. 

The lesson plan format seems designed for an non-constructivist classroom - something akin to a 1950's room, where desks are in a row and the teacher speaks at (rather than to) the students, who write scrupulous notes and then memorize information long enough to vomit useless facts onto a multiple choice test.  Even the terminology (words like "practice" and "measurable objectives") suggests that education is a learned behavior rather than a conceptual understanding. 

At the heart of this are questions that seem to go unasked: Who knows my students best? Is it the job of an elected official and district office beauracrat to decide how an individual teacher organizes a lesson plan?  Has Madeline Hunter ever met kids like Javier and Raul and Maria and Tyrone? If she doesn't know them, then why should she ever make the decision about how I teach them?  Who is the lesson plan for? Is it a pretty document to make administration happy or is it an organizational tool that teachers can use at their discretion as they ensure their students learn?