I teach in New York City, ostensibly one of the most successful districts in the nation. Our reforms are second to none. Test scores soar year after year. We buy the best new products and quickly toss out the old. When I began teaching in Brooklyn, I thought I would teach literature and writing. I quickly learned that literature was outmoded and “accountable talk” all the rage. It was once a phrase in lowercase. How it has grown!
You attended school in the bad old traditional days. Don’t deny it. Back then, the teacher lectured while you took notes, read dead authors, and regurgitated dry facts. There was no class discussion. You were never encouraged to think for yourself. It’s a miracle that you read the paper now-or read at all, for that matter.
Today, you would not have to suffer. Schools across the country have purchased and mandated an exciting new type of classroom conversation called Accountable Talk®.
“Purchased classroom conversation?” you might gasp. Hold it! Your question doesn’t conform to Accountable Talk® format. You must phrase your question thus: “It seems to me that you said that schools have purchased their own classroom conversation. Is that what you meant?” Yes, that was my drift.
Coined in the 1990s by the Institute for Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, the phrase “accountable talk” refers to a mode of classroom conversation that emphasizes (you guessed it) accountability: justifying one’s statements, responding to others, and staying within the boundaries of the topic. Beyond that, it is now a brand name and a product. In 2007, the Institute for Learning began displaying a service mark (SM) next to the phrase. In 2008, Accountable Talk® became a registered trademark. In other words, we must now purchase our own classroom conversation-or rather, our district purchases it for us and requires that we place it on our tongues.
What kind of talk have we purchased? Accountable Talk® embraces conventions of so-called academic conversation: starter phrases, social cues, and habits of referring to the text. The basic principle–that we must substantiate what we say-has generally been part of any good class discussion, but Accountable Talk® makes the conventions explicit and requires total compliance with its rules. It is intended especially for children who lack exposure to such conventions of speech. In moderation, it makes sense. But does it really reproduce academic conversation? Or does it require us to give up an element of intellectual freedom: our choice of wording and phrasing, within reason?
Suppose I decided to hold a class discussion without Accountable Talk®. If I admitted openly that it was not Accountable Talk®, I would be flouting district mandates. If I called it Accountable Talk® but didn’t conform to its protocol, I would break trademark law. In other words, teachers are now bound by both district regulations and trademark law to acknowledge and adhere to a particular kind of classroom talk. This should raise some concern and questions if not outright alarm. Our speech, of all things, should be protected from branding and marketing. The Founding Fathers did not foresee that someone might appropriate, sell, and mandate a style of speech.
Trademark concerns aside, I object to a mere three aspects of Accountable Talk®: the accountability, the talk, and the poor prose resulting from the two.
In education, “accountability” suggests a wrongdoing: we are made “accountable” so that we can no longer slip by with poor practice. Why, then, must a good class discussion be called “accountable”? Shouldn’t it be driven by something deeper, like desire for truth, curiosity about the subject, and respect for others? Accountability should not be our highest ideal; it has value and meaning only when higher principles are in place. Those principles present, a class discussion needs no special name. Accountable talk could help us out of a bog; but once we can breathe and walk, we should make full use of our faculties, using the words and phrases that seem best. One does not have to be “accountable” at every moment; there is room, in a good class discussion, for exclamations, tangents, and incomplete ideas.
As for talk, there is too much of it in our classrooms already. Students must constantly “turn and talk”; “peer-edit,” “engage in group work,” and “share out.” They sit facing each other, so that teachers won’t distract them. Students rarely learn how to listen, take in ideas and language, and think independently. Consider, for instance, the “turn and talk” technique. Instead of taking in a story that the teacher is reading aloud, students are instructed periodically to turn and talk about it with a partner. This breaks up their private thoughts and requires them to consult with someone else. One recalls David Riesman’s observation in The Lonely Crowd regarding “that rapid circulation of tastes which is a prelude to other-directed socialization.” Contemplation cedes to buzz. The buzz, in turn, creates a market for talk products, which require services, consultants, and a brand.
Of course there should be some discussion in the classroom, but now it has risen to the status of a petty god. Teachers and students alike must be trained in this sort of talk so that they will practice it correctly. As a consequence, the emphasis is often on the talk itself. Administrators conducting spot-checks want to see evidence of it; they are pleased when they see students turning and talking to their partners. It matters little whether they can recite and interpret Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” or give a thoughtful definition of democracy. What matters is that they are talking. This makes careful, sustained thought difficult if not impossible.
Let’s be reasonable, though. If we disregard the accountability, talk, and trademark, Accountable Talk® is a fine idea-except that it isn’t. Its emphasis on process results in bad prose. In a typical Accountable Talk® discussion, students put great effort into their beginning and ending phrases. A student might comment: “I would like to add on to what Jeremy said by saying that the picture shows a covered wagon. Does anyone care to concur, challenge, or add on?” The student thus conveys: “the picture shows a covered wagon” but adds twenty-two extraneous words for the sake of compliance. No one notices; it all sounds good. Checklist conditions have been met. The sentences, replete with verbiage, sound “academic.” We can all go to sleep. But some of us stay up late remembering the fiery, pithy, lovely language we love. Such memory offers hope: it has no trademark yet.
Diana Senechal teaches theatre and ESL at P.S. 108, an official Core Knowledge school in New York City. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova appeared this fall in a new volume, The Junction.
I was about to gag on what I thought was a transparent infomercial for … I’ve forgotten the term now. But I skipped to the end and happened to glance at your last paragraph.
So, we think alike. No, I didn’t grow up in the environment you described; but I’ve seen so many “programs” hawked and lauded for money.
Contrived curriculum is a drain on the system, an insult to adequate teachers, and a crutch for the lesser.
Comment by Gene — January 4, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
OK, Diana, I agree with you on the forced and phony nature of “accountable talk.” And the idea that a specific type of conversation (what Lucy Calkins likes to call “conversational moves,” perhaps in a nod to basketball?) can be trademarked or copywrited is comically absurd.
Like you, it bothered me immensely that teachers, and more pertinently supervisors, were satisfied to hear a 5th grader say “I disagree with Jose” or “I’d like to make a text to text connection” without regard to the quality of the diagreement or the relevance of the connection thqt followed. It’s a paint-by-numbers way of teaching; we consider ourselves successful when our kids merely parrot back these hackneyed phrases.
But in thinking about your piece, I started to become aware of a flaw in my own logic. I’m a fan of the “SLANT” method used to great effect in KIPP schools. You teach students how to conduct themselves in a classroom through explicit instructions: Sit up, Listen, Ask questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the speaker with your eyes. So why does it strike me as a good idea to teach that, while it irritates me to explicity teach kids how to engage in a conversation about books?
Comment by Robert Pondiscio — January 4, 2009 @ 6:09 pm
The verbal equivalent of killing a fly with a heat-seeking missile! The method assumes that teachers are drones and students are drones-in-training.
Comment by Babbie — January 4, 2009 @ 6:27 pm
A couple of thoughts… Part of me finds it deeply disturbing that its possible to trademark packages of ideas, and that school districts buy them.
If you have an idea, you write a book and copyright it. People buy the book, and put the idea to use. Maybe you provide supplementary materials that show how to apply the teaching idea to specific situations, and districts can buy those. But I find anything else creepy a bit creepy — a world where education moves closer to commerce than scholarship. Is the next step charging teacher who use the phrases with out buying the product with trademark infringement?
There also seems a big difference between SLANT and what Diana describes with AccountableTalk. SLANT is a mnemonic for some pretty basic ideas — and (as far as I know) no ones tried to trademark it. I wouldn’t mind an acronym for the basic things you need to do in academic conversation (it might benefit my students…). But its the actions behind the phrases that matter — not the phrases themselves — and SLANT has nice simple phrases for the actions its looking for.
Comment by Rachel — January 4, 2009 @ 6:36 pm
Diana,
Am I correct in presuming “It is intended especially for children who lack exposure to such conventions of speech,” translates out to; it is meant primarily for inner-city or ESL students?
It appears you’ve been forced to use it and concluded, “…it’s a fine idea-except that it isn’t.” Is that a correct observation?
Guess I’d have to see it in practice before I’d pass final judgment on it but based on your entry it could be a challenge to pass muster in my playbook. It appears to be more work than it’s worth and it also appears to take valuable time away from other more meaningful learning experiences.
As a brief aside and probably outside the parameters of Accountable Talk, it sometimes appears people adhere to this very practice even in (informal) blog entries. Have you ever observed same?
Comment by Paul Hoss — January 4, 2009 @ 7:15 pm
Diana,
I checked your link and I have to ask why you hate those sweet kids on their web site. Don’t you want them to learn through incentivicing “effort-based” learning? Don’t you have high expectations? If there is too much talking, why not borrow from the professional development and hand out clickers? Click once to “concur” and twice to “add on.” Once you’ve socialized your students, there may be no need to “challenge.”
The last time I read an article and thought it was a spoof, it was about schools that were using electronic devices so that students could hear over the dim. But if the NYC schools did that, they could digitally monitor your classes to make sure you are properly enforcing, I mean implementing, accountabilitytalk.
Unless you’ve been in the classroom, its hard to believe these incredible “reforms.”
Comment by john thompson — January 4, 2009 @ 7:21 pm
Robert, I believe a key difference is that SLANT refers to physical gestures, not to words or phrases.
I am cautiously in favor of something like SLANT. It all depends on the implementation. It might be a little unnerving if overdone (I think of a posse of cats watching a ping-pong game, tracking the ball with their eyes), but given some wiggle room it sounds fine. It doesn’t cross into speech, nor is it trademarked, as Rachel pointed out.
Now, words are a different matter. Yes, we usually follow unwritten rules of speech. Yes, some people need the unwritten rules to be made explicit. This does not mean that such rules should be applied to all situations, let alone turned into a product or bundle of services.
A Daily News article from 2003 tells about a math coach who, in the name of “accountable talk,” criticized a veteran teacher for praising her students without explicitly justifying the praise. According to the article, the district superintendent, citing “best practices,” explained that “compliments should be accompanied by explanation and should foster interaction between the teacher and among students” (this is a quote from the article, not from the superintendent herself). Klein later supported the math coach, though he acknowledged that the situation “may not have been handled deftly.”
Granted, it is important to explain to students why they did a good job or not. But sometimes the reasons are self-explanatory, and sometimes it is fine to simply give a word of praise. It is absurd and insulting to tell teachers they can’t say “good job.”
Someone might say, “That’s not what Accountable Talk is really about.” Well, in that case, where’s the public information about it? In 2007 and earlier, you could find descriptions of Accountable Talk on the Institute for Learning’s website. Now those descriptions are gone. You have to obtain the information from a district website, and to do so you must log in. Yes, if you sleuth around, you can find definitions and descriptions on the Internet, but you shouldn’t have to hunt for them.
Comment by Diana Senechal — January 4, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
Paul,
Your translation is accurate, I think. It seems AT was originally meant for children from low-income or non-English-speaking families. Then districts mandated it for all ages and subjects. It turned out that many teachers and administrators hadn’t encountered this sort of “academic” discourse before (or found the mandate confining), so the “trainings and tools” came into play.
John, thank you for bringing up effort-based learning. Here’s a quote from a 1998 article by Lauren Resnick (founder of the Institute for Learning) and Megan Williams Hall, “Learning Organizations for Sustainable Education Reform” (Daedalus 127:4):
“Educators in knowledge-based constructivist schools will need a thorough familiarity with content and pedagogy, as well as an effort-oriented belief system, to take them beyond the associationist paradigm. They will need to know how to create classroom environments that motivate effort, socialize intelligent habits of mind, and foster talk that is accountable to established knowledge and accepted standards of reasoning. Because few teachers or principals have been prepared to function in an effort-oriented system grounded in knowledge-based constructivism–much less to be held accountable for the high levels of student achievement that are expected in such a system–they too will have a right to expert instruction.”
Comment by Diana Senechal — January 4, 2009 @ 9:47 pm
It might be a little unnerving if overdone (I think of a posse of cats watching a ping-pong game, tracking the ball with their eyes), but given some wiggle room it sounds fine.
Actually, one of the more unsettling descriptions of a KIPP class I’ve heard came from someone praising it, and how well focused the kids were… The praise was that when a group walked in to observe a 5th grade class none of the students took their eyes of the teacher. To me that crossed the line from teaching self-disciple to squashing natural curiosity.
Comment by Rachel — January 5, 2009 @ 12:04 am
Diana:
I find two things instructive in this discussion. One is the different reaction to AT and SLANT (which may not be officially trademarked–but it is an integral part of the KIPP franchise). I suspect that this has more to do with a comfort level in expecting students to comport themselves in a way that traditionally communicates attention the teacher than to utilize similar behaviorally based criteria to evaluate interaction with the curriculum.
The other thing is that if one accepts student interaction with the curriculum, and with other students, as things of value AND also accepts, as Resnick and Williams Hall seem to suggest, that teachers are not really “there” yet in being able to teach in this way (not having “a thorough familiarity with content and pedagogy, as well as an effort-oriented belief system, to take them beyond the associationist paradigm” in schools across the board, or in low income neighborhoods), the development of “products” to put this in place seems to be more natural and less malevolent.
I have just been reading Linda Darling-Hammond’s comments in the December PDK. She points out that in Finland–through commitment and policy enacted a couple of decades ago–most teachers are Masters prepared in both content and pedagogy. That far exceeds the baseline expectations in this country–where we have just “grandfathered” through HQT regs a number of teachers whose primary content credential was that they had been teaching (out of their credentialled field) for a number of years. Diana–you have a PhD in your content area. How many other teachers in your school can claim this. There are in fact disciplines that are taught in the upper echelons of higher ed that have to with things like “justifying one’s statements, responding to others, and staying within the boundaries of the topic” that guide academically oriented discussion. Without some knowledge of this, classroom “discussion” can easily turn into free time, or some “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” sort of excuse for poor discourse.
Personally, I would prefer to uplift the education and experience expected of every classroom teacher, beyond that of a BA granted to to the bottom feeders of every university in the nation. But, in the absence of this (which is where we stand currently), how would you propose that we ensure that the students in school right now get something better than what they are getting?
Comment by Margo/Mom — January 5, 2009 @ 1:58 pm
Margo/Mom,
Who says that listening to the teacher is not “interacting with the curriculum”? It can be an intense and rewarding form of interaction. Of course students shouldn’t sit and listen all day; they should have opportunity to speak and put concepts into practice. Yet conversation (even on topic) does not necessarily signal interaction with the curriculum, nor does quiet listening signal passivity (SLANT or no SLANT).
As I said, I am cautiously in favor of something like SLANT, provided it is not overdone. I have not seen it in action. A decent idea can become brilliant or awful in practice, depending on the implementation and its place in the larger picture of education. Too often, when mandating this or that model, districts make it just a bit too important in relation to everything else.
The underlying principles of AT have been with us since antiquity. There is no need to make a package of them or dumb them down. No protocol should become so rigid as to make our thoughts and speech worse than they might otherwise be.
If we want teachers who are better educated (and I’d love to be better educated), then we need more emphasis on subject matter in education schools, as well as courses in education history and philosophy. We need PDs on poetry, history, geometry, logic, art history. We won’t enrich the school environment by making everyone talk in a certain way and pretending that way is golden when it is not.
In Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (part 1, chapter X), the protagonist writes:
“You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed — a palace at which one will not be able to put out one’s tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one’s tongue out at it even on the sly.
“You see, if it were not a palace, but a hen-house, I might creep into it to avoid getting wet, and yet I would not call the hen-house a palace out of gratitude to it for keeping me dry. You laugh and say that in such circumstances a hen-house is as good as a mansion. Yes, I answer, if one had to live simply to keep out of the rain.”
Comment by Diana Senechal — January 5, 2009 @ 7:56 pm
I think on of the surest ways to guarantee that we don’t get a better educated teaching workforce is to opt for the shortcut of packaged, “teacher proof” solutions. Teachers who need more education don’t get more education, they just get “training.” And educated and thoughtful teachers feel insulted and patronized.
Comment by Anonymous — January 6, 2009 @ 12:54 am
This is indeed alarming. Why would a school pay good money for this kind of thing? Why would a school subject teachers to this kind of thing?
In trying to analyze just what I don’t like about this, I find I need to back up just a bit, to my perspective on the nature of teaching. I have concluded over time that the ability to teach comes primarily from just a few mundane sources. First there is the teacher’s intelligence and knowledge. Second there is the teacher’s verbal ability. And third there is the teacher’s social skill and knowledge. All three of these factors are wide spread in the general population, or at least the educated general population. If this is the case, then it would follow that you can take any person with a decent education and normal verbal and social skills, give them a class and general instructions, and expect reasonable results. That, indeed, seems to be generally the case. What we might call “common sense teaching”, in other words, is not only the general rule for teaching everywhere, but it works okay This perspective does not say that results will be optimal, though the results normally improve a lot with experience. And it does not say that there is no potential improvement to be gained by learning about pedagogy. But it does say that poor pedagogy has little to add. My perspective is that poor pedagogy is all we have had coming out of teachers’ colleges for a hundred years. The state of teaching is not optimal (nothing ever is), but the state of teaching is not awful either. The state of teaching is not awful because intelligence, knowledge, verbal ability, and social skill will go a long way for a teacher. (These factors also go a long way in parenting, also.)
My purpose at the moment is not to bash teachers’ colleges, but to make an argument against any kind of “scripted” teaching. I’m not sure if what Diana describes is best labeled as “scripted”, but it certainly does seem to qualify as something very close to it. It sounds like teachers are not supposed to use their common sense, but instead are supposed to do everything in a prescribed way.
Is it more important to correct a child’s speech, or to pay attention to the message? I have faced this question often both as a teacher and as a parent. I think most everyone would agree that it depends quite a bit on the context of the moment. Those who argue that student’s assigned writing should never be subjected to red ink are in quite a minority. At the other extreme those who say that a sobbing child should get his grammar and usage correct before we should ask him what he’s sobbing about, are also in quite a minority. But in the middle of these two extremes there is room for honest disagreement about optimal response. So we must make judgments. We must make trade offs. What prepares us to do a good job in making those tradeoffs? How about intelligence, knowledge, verbal skill, and social skill? How about common sense?
As a math teacher I make many trade offs everyday. Should I give a quiz tomorrow or not. A quiz can be valuable for learning, but it has a cost in class time. I have to make a trade off. Should I explain example 5 in today’s work, or does that take up too much time. Should I spend more time on topic A, or move on to topic B? Should I assign five problems for homework, or ten? Should I write a test problem this way, or modify it in that way so as to make it more understandable? Or if I do it that way am I defeating the purpose of that test problem. The trade offs are endless. I presume all teachers make these trade offs all day every day. (Parents do the same, don’t they? Could “scripted parenting” ever be made to work?) What prepares teachers and parents to make all these trade offs? My answer is the same as always – knowledge, intelligence, verbal ability, and social knowledge and skill.
So what, then, is the role of pedagogy? I’m not sure. First we need some pedagogy. By that I mean we need a knowledge and analysis of what actually goes on in actual classrooms everyday. (I’m talking about the other guy’s classroom, of course. I know what goes on in mine.) I have been complaining for years that we don’t get this from ed school. And when we do get it, from whatever source, will it be something that we can write into a script? I don’t know, but my intuitive guess is that it will not lead to a script. Rather it will help us make trade offs. It will not dictate those trade offs, and it will not, in most cases at least, obviate those trade offs.
From this perspective then, “Accountable Talk” sounds like a very bad idea.
So, good luck, Diana! I have no idea how to deal with sort of thing. Keep us posted.
Comment by Brian Rude — January 6, 2009 @ 1:05 pm
“Teachers who need more education don’t get more education, they just get ‘training.’ And educated and thoughtful teachers feel insulted and patronized.”
It seems to me that one contribution to the lack of professional respect accorded to teachers stems from this kind of thinking. I have heard for over a decade that teachers in the school my son attends (and there have now been several) are not “trained” (or educated) to “handle” the kinds of problems that my son has. He doesn’t have terribly unusual problems (low-incidence). He has some run of the mill (albeit intensive) disabilities. I don’t get this kind of response from any other kind of professional that I interact with. If a doctor is not adequately trained in their patient’s disease, they confer, make a referral or seek out the information needed. What is most astonishing is that in the decade or more that my son has been in school, and diagnosed (along with many others) with his particular disabilities, neither teachers nor administration has seen educating teachers as a need. Officially, the district cannot tell teachers how to allocate their required professional development–it’s in their contract. If the school sees needs, they have to provide training OVER and ABOVE the number of hours that teachers are required to accumulate. And then they still have to coordinate with the union. They actually did provide 3-4 days of (free)PD during the school year (days without students). They had to move the days to the middle of the week to keep teachers from getting sick on those days. I think that they finally gave them up. And even then, teachers had a menu of selections top choose from.
It strikes me as singular that given these kinds of realities, teachers can claim that they “don’t get” the education that they need. To hear some teachers talk, every teacher spends two to three months every summer getting educated. And yet I cannot have an intelligent conversation with any teacher in my child’s school about the requirements of either IDEA or NCLB, about the things that they are teaching and why, or how to accommodate common disabilities in the classroom. The conversations that we do have frequently break the “rules” (as I understand them) of Accountable Talk (trademark). Opinions are not supported by fact. One opinion is as good as another (everybody has one–is a part of a fouler quote from a school principal). Factual information presented by parents is dismissed as opinion (and teachers at certain grade levels are supposed to be able to teach this stuff). First year teachers are unchallenged (by other teachers) in throwing things around such as “in my professional judgment” as if s/he has acquired sound judgment in the walk through the front door.
Given these kinds of uneven sets of experience and education (although all are regarded as having the same value), scripts can be very useful learning tools. Some adults grow up in environments that detach them from their emotions (and responsiblity for their own emotions and actions)–leading to a tendency to throw blame around and not recognize feelings. A standard counseling mantra for these folks is “I feel X when you Y. What I need is Z.” Certainly this begins as stilted and forced, but it provides a needed scaffold to break away from such habits as “I feel like you…” or “You make me feel…”
I really don’t care that someone was able to make a buck by packaging something that should be available in other ways. I do care that there is something (lots of things) missing in most of education as we currently know it. I would love it if teachers stood up as a profession and took the lead in forging new (or old) paths to improvement. I just don’t see that happening.
Comment by Margo/Mom — January 6, 2009 @ 2:50 pm
It’s like complaining that Wikipedians banned you for repeatedly trying to add a story about this one time milk came out your nose to the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_(drink) . Or complaining that the rules for a meeting aren’t exciting enough. Or that toy stores sell Toss Across, which is basically tic-tac-toe with bean bags and really you could make that yourself in about 5 minutes.
Comment by Dave — January 6, 2009 @ 4:41 pm
Or that toy stores sell Toss Across, which is basically tic-tac-toe with bean bags and really you could make that yourself in about 5 minutes.
But if you knew your employers spent thousands of dollars buying Toss Across for all teachers, and told you that you couldn’t use your homemade version because it wasn’t compliant, you might get a bit grumpy.
Comment by Rachel — January 6, 2009 @ 8:46 pm
Margo,
I feel your pain. Your son’s schooling appears to be a common thread in many of your posts (there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that). The school and its teachers should be able to provide a reasonable degree of remediation for your son, at least to the point where he is developing strategies to deal with his disability(s). If they are not, you should arm yourself with an advocate, someone well versed in the intricacies of IDEA. The cost of this individual can sometimes be passed onto the district. Please don’t hesitate to keep us posted on how he’s progressing.
Paul Hoss
Comment by Paul Hoss — January 7, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
Paul:
Thanks for the advice–I have in fact had a number of advocates over the years. What I have come to realize, however, is that unless the district is able to improve conditions for all kids, and particularly for kids with disabilities, the pay-offs from individual advocacy are going to be limited. The accomplishments of one battle typically have to be refought again and again in each new grade, or each new school. And sometimes, believe it or not, it’s not the disability that is the problem. I recently spoke to the psychologist in a charter school who said that she had a hard time evaluating kids with emotional difficulty labels who came to her. Most of the behaviors that had caused them to be identified simply were not occurring in the charter school environment. This didn’t mean that they didn’t have learning difficulties–but it appears that attention to the learning difficulties–or the different environment–resulted in different behavior.
Comment by Margo/Mom — January 8, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
Diana and all,
I happened onto this discussion which is more than eight months old after doing a Google search for ‘where has IFL been effective.” I’m trying to find out, to understand why our district is spending so much time, energy and money on Accountable Talk, Clear Expectations and the other service marked words of IFL. We have CFC coaches, which means we have ‘content focus coach coaches.’ This is Wordspeak!
I think districts do it because the IFL ‘training’ is actually administrator training and ‘training’ for teachers so that they can more easily be administered. It’s about creating the appearance of knowing what you’re doing in an arena, urban public education, where it is very difficult to keep track of what’s actually happening.
The problem for us is that the district is spending staff development money and class size reduction money to finance this administrator training. In one of Resnick’s articles she says that it will be necessary to adjust funding streams and teacher pay in order for IFL to be successfully implemented. Resnick and her devotees truly believe that bringing their industrial process control management methods to public education is a good thing. If only our kids were just widgets.
Comment by Dan McGuire — September 10, 2009 @ 12:07 am