davidhildebrand.info

So the uproar seems muted now. I thought it would be a little louder. Perhaps most teachers think this will go away all on its own.

The issue: How are teacher’s evaluations tied to student progress? But this needs to be properly divided into its components. First, the matter of teacher evaluations.

Teachers should be evaluated based partly on effectiveness. This doesn’t seem to need much debate. How we define effectiveness, or impact usually gets some acclaim, though in reality the way this is defined varies as much as the person doing evaluations. Second, the matter of student progress.

This is a little trickier. Do they all start at the same place (“grade level”)? NO. Are they individuals, subject to many different interests, skill sets, and learning styles? YES. Do they each receive the same advantages in terms of family background, social expectations, and resources? NO. Do they all receive the same instructional inputs? NO.

So— how to measure “growth?” I thought this is what I was supposed to decide with my grading system? Wouldn’t the most valid measure be progress towards daily learning objectives? My gradebook, when properly executed, is a range of assignments of varying complexity and difficulty, measured over periods of days, weeks and months. Ideally, students who receive an “A” in my class should be making more progress than those with a “C” (only average). On the other hand, there is a clear difference between those who are average and those who are “F”ailing.

Recently as I’ve been looking at what my students can and can’t do at this point in the year (and being inevitably frustrated), I’ve been looking at it differently than ever before, and thinking that I’m going to completely blow up my system. I’ve never thought my tests were very good measures of progress to the learning objectives I’ve set— probably because they’re pretty difficult. But one thing I’ve always tried to separate was the varying differences between cognitive, academic learning and execution.

Poor behavioral, executive skills are frequently standing in the way of progress towards learning. It’s simple, right? If the student can’t get to class, very often they fall off in large gaps with whatever the learning objectives are. They miss context, they’re not prepared for class, they miss deadlines, they miss explicit content teaching or skill acquisition. Thus I have students who have more gifted skills to begin with who often may fall behind where they should be, all because they are not working, or they are working ineffectively or inefficiently.

So, do m y rubrics accurately reflect this? They need to.

Reading is fundamental. Please.

I’ve really grown aware of the gaps in skill levels lately of the students I teach. In so many ways so many of them are pretty savvy. But less than 20% are reading at grade level for 11th grade, and to think that upwards of 60% I’ve had as students either in 9th, or 10th or both previous grades (**because I’ve used to teach both World History and Government previously, while now I’ve got only 11th grade). All three levels: Basic, Proficient, Advanced.

What they struggling with:

(1) Of course Social Studies vocabulary— many still are challenged with concepts such as “Aristocracy” or state-based vs. stateless society. Sometimes it is a vocabulary issue, sometimes it is contextual and dependent on other related reasoning skills such as economic or spatial (maps), or decision making, or empathy.

(2) They don’t get English vocabulary. Weak-Weak! They lack skills to decode using context, and frankly are either lazy to look it up (really, a Dictionary), or cannot retain, even after English gives them something like 250 vocabulary terms that they must master. Not yet! Examples: “superior” vs. “inferior” (antonyms— many I seem to remember learning in 2nd grade). Sustainable, gratuitous, implication, impact. And while I love how my High School offers (French-less) Modern Language program (including Chinese and Russian), I’m not always sure that we’re doing right to require it for FOUR years. Wait. Thinking, reading, writing skills first in the language they already must use! I know— wait, before someone says learning another language helps you understand your own and begin to master syntax and grammar, etc. “Muy bien muchacha, estoy comprehendo. Estoy afficianado de las lenguas de los chinos (or chinks if you’re Tom Taylor).”

(3) They don’t get the language of nature, the biosphere, the animal or vegetative kingdom. Today in analyzing #641 they variously did not understand “deciduous” (*and it was footnoted with a definition at the bottom), “marshy,” brush,” or “creek-bed.” One class did not know what the word “orchard” meant. This may not be surprising considering most all of the trees they’ve seen growing are surrounded by iron grates and concrete sidewalks, the real underside of “urban poverty,” right? Lack of opportunities to get to nature, let alone back to it.

So, you can imagine how amused I find it sometimes to explain aspects of animal husbandry in the context of American history— say, “why is south Baltimore called Pigtown?” No clue Mr. Hildebrand. Because the countryside within 100 miles drove their pigs into Baltimore through the streets (yikes, Bel Air Road??) to the stockyards which were next to the B&O Railroad siding also near the harbor wharves. Pigs would then be moved through the slaughterhouse and then canned and packed for transhipment, loaded onto the (after 1878 in “reefers” — “what Mr. Hildebrand! Reefer?” “No, refrigerated car.”) Next lesson: why animals driven on the hoof in the west was better than first slaughtering, but worse than loading at railheads because an animal like a cow lost so much weight during the upwards of 1200 mile journey.

Some of this makes teaching fun. Some of it is remedial and tedious. All of it usually adds up to kids not reading. Too difficult to encode what we give to them? Well…in this world of High School, not sure how else we should go towards college prep. Maybe the answer gets to the problem in lower grade levels, that we need to capture their attention earlier??

Don’t get me started on the many other distractions, electronic or other. The fundamental problem is that most kids are taking shortcuts and actually not reading.