Passing the baton …… a teacher's legacy

Thursday, May 09, 2014

8:30 AM

As a retiring teacher, I've recently "reflected" deeply about my 40+ year career in education,  what I've learned over the years, and what yet needs to be done by my future colleagues. As I pass the baton of my career to two nieces and a godchild who have decided to join this noble profession, I want them to know what it has taken to get here, what rewards the profession has had, and the challenges ahead of them.

Thankfully, I've been blessed with having a career that spanned from teaching  Pre-K to teaching Master's degree classes, and I've watched education morph frequently.  Some of these changes were good, others were not, and some have come back again with a different acronym. These are my thoughts on where education has come from,  and where it is currently heading and what future teachers will need to think about.

So to my fellow teachers remaining in the classroom, and to new teachers,  I leave the following legacies: 

 1. The legacy of theories on student learning -  From open spaced classrooms who were coming into their glory during my student teaching experience, to theories about Assertive Discipline now morphed and called PBIS, to Dimensions of Learning, Multiple Intelligences, Content Literacy, Problem and Project Based Learning, Inquiry Learning, and now Common Core, the path to  understanding student learning has been far from boring or plain.  Each theory has improved a piece of the educational process or has changed as the needs of students have changed. 

I suspect learning theories will evolve even more as the nature of learning changes. Technology will enable the use of data mining, to morph learning, and aid both teachers and students.  Although currently, teaching is heavily focused on the data mining and reporting, and it has seemingly taken over the classroom and the media,  eventually the data will also enable individualized learning letting students have input into their learning path, and teachers will become guides on the sides. I challenge future teachers to make sure those paths are strong and correct.

2. The Political legacy -  although I started my career with the attitude that I could never go on strike because it would leave children feeling that teachers have given up on them, my own feelings for the political process have morphed over the years. As I've watched older teachers being pushed out of the classroom by changing their grade level after 30 years in the same one, or by giving them the hardest students to handle, and having a colleague hounded by administration and demoted to an aide because she was unaware that her administrator was lying to the press when the teacher told the truth, my respect for the union and its place in education has grown.  Watching the "language" disappear from the contracts over the years to whittle away at our sick leave and other benefits, has caused me to become more politically active in my older years.

But the hardest part has been watching as politicians have led the movement on bashing teachers by making education dollars the carrot that controls money hungry administrators.  Although their "truisms" seem right (NCLB, RTTT), the  funding machine has gotten into the hands of business leaders who don't understand education.  I remember one motivational speaker during the "education should be run like a business" phase who talked about how he had created a successful ice cream business, but was floored when a teacher asked him " What do you do in your business when the blueberries come to the dock damaged?"  He replied "We send them back." The teacher then replied "We can't send our blueberries back."  Nor do we want to send them back. 

Although these business leaders thought they were doing right by creating foundations, the corporate wheel has taken over and is not allowing enough input from teachers or enough time for their ideas to be tested, researched and tried with real students. Somehow, all the new ideals  (Common Core, PARCC, Teacher evaluations) are being rolled out without norm referencing and criterion testing.

Therefore, I challenge my colleagues to continue fighting politically for things that work, have been tried and tested, and for your own professionalism.

3. I pass on my technological legacy -  while this is my true passion, it is also the legacy that has morphed the most during my tenure.  From using typewriters in high school, to basic computers like the Commodore, DOS based computing, emails sent at 1200 baud, and Archie, Veronica and the World Wide Web,  to the mobile web and the cloud today, technology will have the greatest impact on the educational process. Although all the early changes took lots of time and effort to figure out, the speed of changes today are so rapid that very few people can keep up.  In fact, even the government has the vision of where technology can go, but ran across the major glitches with the Affordable Health Care Act.  However, those same glitches can be avoided if  Usability Studies in Human Computer Interaction theory are utilized before major rollouts like PARCC testing occur. But getting the politicians to slow down long enough to test the tests, and the evaluation system, as well as any future changes, will be your challenge.

My secret passions  are really individualized and global learning. If the learning my students garnered during my Kidlink days using global projects in the 1990's could have been spread more quickly, then 9/11 may have been avoided.  But we were such a small but global entity in the 90's passing on respect for global partners, celebrating similarities and differences, and making students aware of the global community.  With today's tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and mobile apps those global projects have so much more potential for creating awareness of and for other cultures.  Your challenge will be to explore Social media tools, particularly online discussion tools, to enable your students to interact with their global peers. If my 4th grade students in 1998 were able to write a mystery story with students in Denmark and an author in New Hampshire, and have the story critiqued by students in South Africa and Maryland's Eastern Shore, and shared with global peers, imagine YOUR  possibilities now!

In addition, the technology can now be harnessed through Learning Management Systems to enable Common Core to focus and direct skills to individual students, enabling students to progress at their own speed. If teachers can be involved in developing the online curriculums to match the common core, then students who have been exposed to the technology as infants will be able to plow through the skill at their own pace in that digital environment.  Your challenge will be to make sure all students can develop their strengths, but also develop their weaknesses.   You will also need to be sure that the whole child can be developed in spite of the technology.

4. Last but not least, I pass on my time and talent legacy  - I wish I could bottle and pass on the 40 years of patience I've developed over the years while teaching thousands of kids and impacting others through the teachers I've taught or mentored.   Although that is not possible, I can pass on my wish for you to be treated as professionals.  If college professors can take sabbaticals every seven years, why can't teachers do the same?  I've left the classroom several times, each one for my own professional growth in the educational field, and have returned a stronger teacher (in my opinion, not necessarily that of my superior's).  But imagine if I could have left the classroom with the blessing of my district… If every teacher had a 6 month or year hiatus every seven years to grow professionally, interact with researchers in their field, and  had time to analyze their own teaching, what could they bring back to their district and students?  They would feel valued and respected, and further the educational field more efficiently.  Students and other teachers would truly benefit from their experiences.  Therefore, I challenge you to take on the political forces to change society's view of teachers, and fight for the time for your own professional growth.

In conclusion, I challenge future teachers take all of the above philosophies and blend them to make new ones that will further education.  I will be cheering from the sidelines, and hoping that teachers are included in the process and guiding these changes.  Have confidence in yourselves….you  know what needs to be done for students. And hopefully I'll still be around to watch you pass your baton…. :-)

Best wishes,

A Retiring educator,
Cybrscrybe

©2014

From Both Sides Now... Teaching in a Virtual vs. Brick & Mortar School

Defining teaching from Both Sides Now….. As both an online teacher and a face to face teacher, being an integral part of the changing shift of teaching roles has been an interesting and valuable experience. Spending the first part of my career as an upper elementary teacher, dealing with 25 - 30 students at a time, gave me a solid experience as an educator. While I spent at least 50-60 hours a week at the job, including lesson preparation and grading, I loved the close interaction with my students, and teaching across the curriculum. Many times I was able to have the students participate in online projects in the mid 1990’s that had components from Math, Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts curriculums. These projects usually included interacting with other students around the globe. I loved being able to teach global awareness before it was a buzzword. However, even though we had a web page to share our projects, my efforts were mostly unappreciated by my district as no one in administration was yet aware of the world wide web, and couldn’t see the results of our accomplishments. Because I felt that I couldn’t grow professionally in a district that was so far behind technologically, I took a hiatus of seven years during which I worked in higher education in the online learning field.

Eventually, I returned to teaching in K-12. In this second part of my teaching career, my experiences included teaching at 2 different online High Schools, as well as at a brick and mortar Middle School as a computer education teacher. Moving to High School in the online schools was quite a different experience for me. Just the number of students that I taught at a time was enough to boggle the mind of a previous elementary teacher. In my first online teaching experience, I was teaching 600 High School students to utilize the Microsoft Office software for productivity. The learning management courseware was a unique design and very efficient in guiding them through their program, particularly since students were working from home with guidance from parents. As a teacher, I was expected to answer the phone to help students with questions they had with the curriculum. Most students progressed at their own rates, which left me free to concentrate on working with those having challenges with the curriculum. Our courseware included an online classroom where we could meet to talk about concepts, and for me to demonstrate parts of a lesson if needed. The quantitative type tests were graded by the computer, but each course had a couple of projects that had to be hand graded by the instructor. The grading portion of the courses could become tedious at times, only due to the repetitiveness of the expected projects and the sheer number of students. Since I was teaching full time for the company, the workload was very doable. As the school year wore on, I learned to take care of what needed to be done in the evenings, and was able to substitute in a local elementary school as well.

In another online school the following year, my case load was 80-100 students. This was a startup school in the Midwest while I was living on the East Coast. Because the school was just getting off the ground, there were many glitches in the courses that needed to be worked out, as well as several different delivery systems for the content, not as efficient as the previous online school. Eventually it all got sorted out, and our roles as teachers included grading assignments, calling parents and students on a regular monthly basis, holding online classes in an Elluminate classroom, and attending regular online faculty meetings. We were expected to develop additional lessons to supplement the online curriculum to be presented in the online classroom, and keep notes on the students in a student management system.

One of the awesome aspects of teaching online versus in a brick and mortar school was that I never met any of the online students face to face. I had no idea of their race or any other demographic information. In many cases I couldn’t even tell the gender of the student unless I heard their voice on the phone or in the online classroom. And with teenagers constantly changing voices, using that to develop perceptions was inconsistent. Therefore, I had to develop my perceptions of the students based on their work and ability to grasp the concepts taught. I was teaching to their brain and learning ability rather than to their looks or demographics!

At the same time I was teaching in this second online classroom, I had also returned to my previous district to teach Middle School students computer literacy. My student load in this school currently consists of teaching 160 students for 7 weeks, with 5 rotations throughout the year, resulting in teaching all 800 students. The grading and planning load (50-70 hours per week) is very similar to both the online schools and the elementary position. The curriculum is project based resulting in student assignments that need to be individually graded. The current brick and mortar school experience gives me personal interaction with students, albeit limited time with each student (6 1/2 weeks with 45 minutes a day equaling less than 30 hours total interaction time with each student during the year). A good portion of the classroom time is spent in teaching discipline because students see the special area class time as a break from the rigor of the regular classroom. They also use it as time to socialize with friends they haven’t seen for the rest of the day.

Due to the limited time with face to face students, I frequently felt closer to the secondary students I taught online, as I was interacting with them, one on one, in their home environment via phone calls and online classroom on a regular basis. In addition, I wasn’t dealing with their petty quarrels with each other, as their socialization took place in other areas such as team sports, dances, etc. The social activity was left out of the classroom, which allowed us to focus on academics and learning.

As a veteran of Both Sides Now in the online versus brick and mortar debate, I feel confident that the coming changes in education, through current and future planning by educational policy makers, will take advantage of the beneficial characteristics of both environments to make education work best for students.

This Vignette was written in response to a call for papers to be published in an ISTE book.  The paper made it through the selection to the top level, but was not utilized in the end..... here is the call...

Vignette in Response to Theme #6 – The Design and Nature of Teacher’s Work


Over the past 30 years, the average amount of time teachers spend working outside of class on school-related activities has increased nearly 20 percent. How have the roles and responsibilities of teachers, both inside and outside of the classroom, shifted over time? What are the consequences of these shifts for students and teachers? For example:

• Describe how the definition of a “teacher” has changed since you first started teaching. Thinking about your responsibilities and duties in the classroom and beyond, how have the demands and expectations for teachers changed over the course of your career?