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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?