Let it be written, let it be done

I walked outside today, felt the warmth of the sun on my face, looked up and said, "Thank you for this moment. It's nice to see you again. It's been a long time since I've felt your light."

Here in Southeastern Michigan we've had a couple warm days since Spring began, but on those days I've either been dealing with weather/pressure related headaches or I've been stuck inside doing school work.Today was the first warm day I could actually go out and enjoy.

I found out earlier this week that the proposal I wrote for the NCTE convention in November with Kevin English, Amy Watkins, Lindsay Grady, and Dave Stuart was accepted. Our session is called Doing More Isn't Doing Better: How to be an English Teacher and Have a Life. Truth be told, I had an inkling of an idea for this session a few years ago but I was really hoping someone else would come up with this idea and present about this topic because I wanted some answers. Turns out, if you want something done you've gotta do it yourself. So just like Kevin and I took a stance this year that Students CAN Write and learned as we went, so too will we learn as we go about How to be an English Teacher and Have a Life.

I'm starting today. By sitting in the sun, feeling its warmth, and not feeling guilty about all those writing assignments I need to grade and lessons I need to plan right now. I'm choosing to have a life and to be present in this moment rather than worrying about everything that is unfinished. There is ALWAYS something that is unfinished when you're a teacher. And so, my mantra for the 2015-2016 school year and the rest of this school year will be: doing more isn't doing better.

Let it be written, let it be done.

We don't walk alone

Advocating is not complicated...The hard part is doing it alone... It's much easier to face fire hoses when there are like 5,000 of you and you are singing gospel hymns as you walk into those hoses. It is much easier when you are walking with people...

It's not about making the case for advocacy. It's about making the case for you as advocates.

- Dr. Ernest Morrell

Today is Literacy Education Advocacy Day. This is just a snippet of Ernest Morrell's NCTE 2014 Presidential Address. I was privileged enough to be present for this speech and I have to say that it was life changing. Today is a good reminder to all my friends and colleagues who are teachers, and even those of you reading whom I don't know, that we don't walk alone and that we can and should have our voices heard. We just need to find the courage to speak up.

Visit NCTE's website to learn about things you can do to help advocate for literacy education. 

Enough with the lip service

So Campbell Brown continues to make the rounds on TV show after TV show in her crusade to end teacher tenure. Today she appeared on Morning Joe with David Boies, the lawyer who will be representing the parents in the case in New York that disputes teacher tenure. 

Here's the thing: I understand the desire for people to have the debate over tenure and whether or not it's effective. By all means, let's debate it. But when you continue to have a discussion that is one-sided and continually leave teachers out of the conversation, talking ABOUT them rather than with them, then don't give me lip service like, "This is not anti-teacher." Actions speak much louder than words.

Since teachers aren't invited to the debate, I encourage you to share your concerns via social media. Tweet directly at Ms. Brown and Mr. Boies. Tweet to shows like Morning Joe and The Colbert Report. People need to hear our voices. They've been stifled for far too long.

Advocating for students should not mean silencing teachers

I've only just recently become aware of the controversy surrounding former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown and her mission to end teacher tenure, but you can be sure I'm getting myself up to speed after her appearance on the Colbert Report. 

The Colbert Report
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Once again, teachers are receiving the brunt of the media's ire as the conversation revolves around teachers, yet we are not given a seat at the table. So educators must resort to writing tweets and blog posts (sometimes anonymously for fear of their jobs) because no one in the media is inviting us on shows like the Colbert Report to rebut the arguments of non-educators who think they know the best way to educate children. Who needs undergraduate and graduate degrees in education along with years of classroom experience when you have corporate backers with lots of money to tell us how to educate children, am I right?

So since I nor any other teachers for that matter have been invited to the debate that I'm supposedly trying to silence, I must write my rebuttals here on this blog.

Brown stated that 91% of teachers in New York were rated either effective or highly effective despite the fact that only 31% of students are reading, writing, and doing math at grade level. She then followed up those statistics with the question "How does that compute?"  I'll tell you how that computes: it's called "standardized tests are not an accurate reflection of a student's abilities and have very little to do with students and everything to do with politics and money." Education blogger Jersey Jazzman said it more accurately than my emotional diatribe, so I'm just going to quote him directly:

What Brown neglects to mention, of course, is that New York's test scores plummeted this past year when the state changed to Common Core-aligned tests.  Everyone who knows anything about testing knows that New York has been monkeying with the passing rates for years, as cut scores shift for reasons having nothing to do with actual changes in student achievement. 

In her Colbert interview, Brown called teacher tenure laws anachronistic, outdated, and antiquated. It seems to me that in 2014, if a teacher can get fired for teaching evolution as Colbert pointed out, or working for a school and writing a blog post about homophones can result in a dismissal, that tenure is needed now more than ever.

And let's not fail to see the irony in the fact that Brown founded a group called the Parents Transparency Project, yet she is choosing to ignore transparency about the people who are funding her efforts to end teacher tenure. Once again I will quote Jersey Jazzman:

And that is precisely the problem: the debate about tenure is now dominated by telegenic partisans who have no knowledge of education policy and won't reveal their funders -- all the while, the voices of teachers are excluded. 

I encourage you to read Jersey Jazzman's entire blog post because it is incredibly enlightening.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that in her crusade to end teacher tenure to rid the system of ineffective teachers, the people Brown and her "educational" crusaders are likely to end up hurting are passionate, caring teachers like these:

Changing the narrative -- one story, one workshop at a time

The impetus for this blog came as the result of taking a class with Dr. Cathy Fleischer at Eastern Michigan University called Writing, Public Policy, and Public Writing. This week, I had the privilege of attending a workshop called Telling Our Stories/Raising Our Voices: From Anecdote to Action. This workshop took the material from the aforementioned class and condensed it into two days. One would think that since I already took an entire semester-long version of the workshop that I wouldn't feel the need to attend, but one would be wrong. Condensing the material down into two days really helped remind me of all the important lessons I learned in the class, and also motivated me to keep working at changing the narrative of how teachers are portrayed and treated in this country.

Working with all those passionate, proactive voices in the room reinforced in me the need for educators to speak up and speak out against the ways teachers are framed by the public.

Since the material was condensed, I will give you a shortened, bullet-pointed version of the things I learned, or had reinforced in the past two days:

• There is another narrative of education out there other than what the popular media is selling and we as educators need to work to have that narrative heard. 
• Marshall Ganz developed the concept of public narrative -- the story of self, the story of us, the story of now -- as an impetus for advocacy (to see a perfect example of public narrative at play, watch Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention).
• Change starts with a single story (the story of self) and finds a way to relate that story to others (the story of us) in order to appeal an urgent need to the public (the story of now).
• How we frame our issues to the public is important in how we are perceived -- taking an affirmative (rather than a negative) stance is always preferred.
• Once you have an issue and know how to frame it, it's important that you cut that issue into something smaller and more manageable. For example, if your issue is the negative affects of standardized testing, which is a huge issue with many different angles, a way to cut the issue is to appeal to parents that it takes away too many weeks of valuable instructional time.
• As hopeful and idealistic teachers, we want to tackle Big Topics, but starting small and gradually working toward making bigger change is a better strategy and more likely to lead to success. 

I shamefully admit I was really struggling with an issue I wanted to tackle in this workshop. I had a mind block that, "Well, I already did all of this in a semester-long class so I don't need to do it again," which was a really unproductive way of thinking since the last time I checked, the vitriol aimed at teachers these days is still going strong, if not getting worse. So I owe it to my profession to speak up and speak out.

Once I got passed that mind block and started to talk to my fellow workshop attendees, as well as a great conversation I had with our fearless leader, Cathy Fleischer, I decided that I wanted to tackle the topic of the need for administrators to see the importance of autonomous professional learning for teachers. In my role as social media coordinator at NCTE, I see this as an important issue because I know that so many teachers pay their own way to annual convention despite the fact that registration, transportation, and room and board is REALLY expensive on a teacher salary. But teachers pay those expenses because they know what a valuable experience it is to attend. I would like administrators to see why teacher-led PD as well as PD that teachers seek out on their own is much more valuable than district-mandated PD.

One of our tasks in this workshop (along with the class I took last year) was to create an "elevator speech." A 30-60 second quip about our issue and why it's important. Learning to be succinct can be a challenge when you're taking about a topic you are passionate about, so this was definitely a difficult but worthwhile exercise. This is what I came up with for my elevator pitch: 

An empowered, knowledgeable faculty leads to a student population that sees the value of education beyond the classroom. Part of the formula in empowering teachers is to not only give them autonomy in their classrooms, but in their professional learning as well. Rather than looking at professional development as an expense, what if we instead approached it as an investment? (1) The question many administrators might have then is, "What if we invest in these teachers and they leave?" My question to you however is "What if we don't and they stay?" (2)

Overall, the workshop was not only worthwhile but also encouraging to see so many educators who felt like they now have the tools to make their voices heard. As stated above, there is another narrative of education that deserves and NEEDS to be heard and we, the educators, need to tell it.


(1) Miller, Donalyn and Susan Kelley. Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer's Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2014.
(2) I wish I could take credit for the cleverness of this last line, but I actually stole it from this tweet from Sharon Porter.