The other day, a friend of mine, a professor who teaches teachers, pointed out that the title of my last post “Added Value” was becoming an emotionally charged phrase among teachers. Why? If you reverse the words to “value-added” and tie it to test scores as a way of determining bonuses for better teachers (as if a bonus would make a good teacher better) it adds additional pressure to do test prep, despite its stifling effect on what good teaching should be. I’m not going to discuss the effect of “value-added” on the teaching profession or the problems with the metrics, as those are different topics. What I want to discuss here is the effect of national educational standards on what actually happens in a classroom and where the added value of a gifted teacher fits in.
First, let me confess, I never wanted to have anything to do with the standards. I KNOW science. I believe that I more than embody the standards in my work. This was only confirmed when I was directed to the standards two years ago by an editor who said that a book of mine didn’t meet them. As I read the science standards, steam came out of my ears. Here’s why: There are eight standards for science: One of them is “Science as Inquiry.” My book was about the growth and behavior of microorganisms in a child’s life. It asked questions and gave activities for the reader to discover answers and insights to the major concepts in the book. The entire book manifested (not told) “science as inquiry.” What was missing in my book? Nowhere in my text for children did I call what we were doing “science as inquiry.” Those words simply did not appear and the editor, who was used to traditional expository writing, missed the point. As it happened, the book also met three other science standards: “life science,” “science in personal and social perspectives, “and “science and technology.” In addition, it met a number of standards in language arts.
If you read the standards, you’ll see that they are meant to be guidelines. “Science as Inquiry” is a very broad criterion that can be interpreted in myriad ways. This is as it should be. There is no pedagogy attached to the standards in any discipline and, in fact, the standards writers specifically say that it is not their job to tell teachers what curriculum to use or how to implement the standards. The standards writers certainly never expected them to be the literal outline for texts for students (which they are, sadly, all too often.) This narrow view of meeting national standards as written has come to mean second-guessing what will appear on the assessment tests making whatever you teach in class a lottery. There is no guarantee that what is “covered” in class will appear in exactly that form on the test and that the kids will remember it. And if “value-added” metrics determine 40 percent of a teacher’s effectiveness, it is no surprise that many teachers, given a choice, opt out of teaching fourth grade, the year of the big bad tests.
Since I have spent most of my life as a writer, a very introspective craft, I have had the time to analyze my own “added value” — what I bring to the subjects I write about. I suggest that teachers do their own analyses of what added value they bring to their students regardless of the evaluations of supervisors and their students’ scores on assessment tests. And if your current teaching situation has got you down, here are a few questions to ask yourself to start the process of self-evaluation:
• What would it take for you to be the teacher you always dreamed of being?
• Under what circumstances do you have “fun” (meaning “engagement”) being a teacher?
• What percentage of your time teaching is fun for you? How can you increase it?
• Outside of the tests you give, how do you know when your students are learning?
• Do you enjoy learning yourself? If not, why not?
• Do you have a problem not knowing answers to a student’s question? If so, what would it take for you to get over this and learn alongside your student?
• How much autonomy do you have in determining how you teach a particular curriculum subject? Are you willing to make a case for yourself to get more?
• Do the answers to these questions shed light on your effectiveness as a teacher?
What would happen in your school if every teacher wrote up an honest self-evaluation of their added value and you shared them with each other? How could that encourage collaboration and a collegial atmosphere between teachers? How could this process add value to the learning culture of your school? Does anyone do this? If so, I’d be interested in what it produces. The insights from such questions just might be the intangible added value that terrific teachers bring to the classroom.
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