Watch Me Teach

There is so much about this TPA process that is frustrating, and so little that is edifying. My mentor teacher filmed me teaching my three big lessons - the plans for which I submitted to Pearson weeks ago - this week. Yesterday, during my student teaching seminar at the university, I found out that I can actually change the lesson plans up to the point when I submit the TPA on November 6th. This means that I didn't have to drive myself crazy setting up the whole unit almost a month in advance.

The worst part about all of this up to now has been getting through the buildup to these three lessons on these three particular days, while I'm also trying to learn how to teach - getting to know the kids, figuring out the attendance and grading systems, creating the unit as a whole, etc. Now I find out that all of this was unnecessary. In all likelihood the better way to structure this (even if it wouldn't have been quite as honest) would have been to film lessons I thought were probably going to meet the criteria for getting a high score on the TPA, choose my two 5-minute clips, and then craft the lesson plans in retrospect and write the commentary.

The fact that the "right" way to do this was actually the way that interfered more with my learning to be a teacher - the sense of freedom I had as of Thursday, when the filming was over, is indescribable - points to a limitation in the design of the TPA. The fact that the only way to make it conform more to the real rhythms of teaching and learning to teach would be to fictionalize it, at least to a certain extent, point to a more serious flaw.

But what's interesting, now that I'm looking again at the rubric for choosing my two 5-minute clips out of 150 minutes of classroom video, is that the highest points go to teaching students strategies for comprehending a difficult text, not helping the students to comprehend or dig deeper into the text itself. I suppose this goes along with the New Testament dictum, "Teach a man to fish . . . "

Watching all the video, by the way, is excruciating. I look old and fat. I love getting lost in the moment when I'm in the classroom, focusing totally on the students and the content; and now I'm incredibly self-conscious about what I look like. Yet another unedifying aspect of this process.

Lesson planning and justifyin'

There isn't a single teacher at my top-notch suburban school who hasn't said that planning the lessons I am going to be teaching during the first week of October at this point in the semester is ridiculous. How can I possibly know PRECISELY what I will teach almost a month from now, when I am supposed to be videotaping myself teaching it? But for the TPA, that's what I have to do. I have to turn in 3-5 lesson plans (a "learning segment") and an incredibly jargon-filled, 9-page single-spaced "commentary" that is supposed to relate every participial phrase in the plans to some trendy ed-speak. E.g.:

a.   Explain how your understanding of your students’ prior learning, experiences, and development guided your choice or adaptation of learning tasks and materials to develop students’ abilities to comprehend, construct meaning from, interpret, and/or respond to a complex text.

b.   How are the plans for instruction sequenced in the learning segment to build connections between students’ prior learning and experiences and new knowledge?

c.   Describe common student errors or misunderstandings within your content focus and how you will address them.

d.   Explain how, throughout the learning segment, you will help students make connections between textual references, constructions of meaning, interpretations, and responses to text to deepen student learning.

e.   Describe any instructional strategies planned to support students with specific learning needs. This will vary based on what you know about your students but may include students with IEPs (individualized education programs), English language learners, or gifted students needing greater support or challenge.

[Begin response here: ]

This is Question Four of six.

The need to prepare this TPA on such a reality-free timeline has unquestionably delayed my entry into teaching my mentor's full schedule. Because I have had to prepare pretty much half of the semester for the class I'll be videotaping - 9th grade Honors English - and have spent almost the whole week writing up the commentary, I haven't even started in on 11th grade College Prep English and won't be able to do so until after next week.

I built the major aspects of the unit, which I'm pretty excited about teaching, last weekend. It will incorporate both To Kill A Mockingbird and 1984 as well as articles, at least one TED talk video, instruction on writing comparison essays and excerpts from Black Boy, all in an investigation of how we find authority figures we can trust and how we can deal with legitimate authority figures who are untrustworthy. I taught the first lesson in the unit today and was very happy with the student responses to it. But up to now I've been doing nothing but answering all the Commentary questions and I still have one more to do before submitting it, along with the lesson plans for Oct. 1-5 and all supplementary materials, by Monday night.

What makes this whole exercise so frustrating is not just the time it takes away from my learning how to teach (as opposed to learning how to be assessed as a teacher). It's the rigidity of it all. As I guided my students in their quickwrite about authority figures today, I realized that I should add the question of how they define an authority figure and whether trust and respect are a necessary part of that authority. So I added the question, and that's what sparked the most intense responses from the students. EVERYONE wanted to tell the class, "Well, I think an authority figure is a little different from that.  ..." If I hadn't been able to add that question because I knew I was being graded on teaching what I had planned to teach, the students might not have wanted to participate as much from the very start and they might not have learned as much about life and themselves from all the reading and writing we'll be doing together. So this could have been one case in which assessing the teacher meant limiting the teaching. Not good.

On the other hand, the TPA student manual provided a good laugh. Here it is, the third week of the semester, I'm supposed to have planned out my lessons for a month from now, and the manual suggests I might want to confer with my "cooperating teacher" (why isn't she being given the dignity of mentorship?) a good two months in advance about the videotaped lessons. Hmmm. That would have put us in July. Thanks for the advice, Pearson.

Context for Learning

This is the first information form I need to fill out and submit to Pearson for evaluation. It has questions that even my mentor teacher couldn't answer, like what percentage of students in the class I'm planning to teach - Honors 9th grade English in a suburban school - gets free or reduced price lunches. But it also includes factors that every teacher should know, like who is on an Individualized Education Plan or who has a "504" (which refers to the section of the law that provides for accommodations to be made for students with physical disabilities or Attention Deficit Disorder), as well as questions about which textbook we are using and whether there are any curricular or other limits on what I can teach.

The form is a little confusing to fill out. At the end of every question, there's something that looks like this:

[Begin your answer here.]

I couldn't figure out whether I should write it in red, or start after the red text. Eventually I decided on the latter; hopefully it's acceptable.

I have to admit that the deadline for this, as well as the deadline for my complete set of lesson plans one week later, has crept up on me. It looks like I'll be writing the lesson plans on my birthday and submitting them on the day my daughter sings in the synagogue choir for Rosh Hashanah.

Assignment for "Assessment" class, NYTimes article review

Review of New York Times article:

“Move to Outsource Teacher Licensing Process Draws Protest” (6 May 2012)

“On Education” blog entry by Michael Winerip

This article describes the refusal of 67 out of 68 preservice teachers at the University of Massachusetts School of Education to submit their Teacher Performance Assessment videos and detailed lesson plans to Pearson, the textbook publishing company administering the Stanford University-designed teacher evaluation program. The education students say that their professors, who, like our own College of Education supervisors, observe them in actual teaching situations, “can do a better job judging their skills than a corporation that has never seen them.”

The article is, to a certain extent, an expression of opinion. In the very first sentence, author Michael Winerip calls the TPA an aspect of the “corporatization of public education in America.” He goes on to characterize the UMass protest against the TPA as “quaint and ridiculous.” However, the article also involves factual reporting. Winerip interviews the protesting preservice teachers and their professors, as well as representatives of the TPA, for his piece.

This is the only NY Times piece to have appeared on TPA, so I do not know what, if anything, has come of the UMass protest. Much of the article is devoted to concerns about the parents’ permission of students who appear in the TPA videos to be videotaped. This issue seems to have been resolved at our university thanks to instructions that we either follow our mentor teachers’ school policy in this regard or use CoE-developed permission slips. But I learned a great deal about the “back story” of the TPA program by reading Winerip’s article.

For instance, I found out that Pearson’s bid to administer the Stanford program was the winner in a field of six because the company was the only one to provide seed money for field testing. It had nothing to do with the quality of Pearson’s teacher education offerings, which in my own experience has been middling at best and occasionally outright dubious. Pearson will charge $300 from future preservice teachers in the “more than two dozen states” that have committed to adopting the TPA, but will pay evaluators only $75 per teaching assessment. One of the protesting students at UMass, interviewed by Winerip, wonders whether this is sufficient compensation.

Personally, I don’t wonder about that at all. I know for a fact that it isn’t.

I am a former journalist who is beginning a new career as an English teacher. I used to be paid $75 per “news brief,” and I remember exactly how much time I put into writing those articles. It was rarely more than 45 minutes, and usually about half an hour. That wouldn’t even begin to cover the amount of material the TPA student participants are being asked to produce (20 minutes of videotape alone, plus pages and pages of lesson plans, reflections, student work and reactions to it). 

And as far as I know, the Pearson evaluators do not even have the accountability measure that I had: multiple layers of editors proofing my work. Because they are being paid per grade, and not being compensated for their time, there is no incentive for these evaluators even to watch the full amount of video submitted by students, much less to pore over the rest of the documentation.

My experience working for The Hollywood Reporter, a trade paper for media industry professionals, also tells me that Pearson will be making about a 200% profit on every TPA test. After paying the evaluator, who is a freelancer and therefore gets neither job security nor benefits of any kind, Pearson’s only costs will likely be maintenance of their website and online support services. These factors cannot cost more than $25 per student, and since there will probably be tens of thousands of “customers” every year it may come to considerably less.

Many of my suspicions about the TPA, which were aroused when I learned during our student teaching orientation that the program would be administered by Pearson, were confirmed by this article. I too believe that public education is in the course of being privatized, or in Winerip’s word, “corporatized.” In fact, I believe that the widespread “denigration of public schoolteachers,” as Winerip puts it at the end of his piece, is part of an overall strategy to turn true public education – schooling in individual neighborhoods that prepares students to be responsible, capable adults who contribute to society and the economy – into the political equivalent of Welfare. 

In many major metropolitan areas, young people from low-income and/or high-crime areas already constitute the vast majority of public school students. By instituting policies that punish “ineffective schools and teachers” without mentioning the fact that one is actually punishing these students and the neighborhoods in which they live – students and neighborhoods that already bear the brunt of burdens like the general availability of guns and severely addictive drugs – the “education reformers” are dismantling America’s public education infrastructure in order to build a system in which private companies like Pearson can take an ever-growing slice of the huge public education pie.

Pearson’s move to invest in the TPA program could be one example of this. In the name of providing a “more objective” assessment process for education majors (one which, incidentally, indicates a lack of respect for education professors’ evaluation abilities as opposed to those of other university-level academics), this private corporation is gobbling up the market for preservice teacher testing in at least half the country. The next step will be to apply the TPA (and I find it significant that it is not called STPA, or Student Teacher Performance Assessment) to all of America’s three million teachers. By making its initial investment in the field-testing phase of the TPA, Pearson may very well have solidified its position as the future Microsoft of teacher evaluation.

Pearson Fearsome?

According to this NY Times article from May 6, the people Pearson is hiring to evaluate my Teacher Performance Assessment video and my 7-page, single-spaced lesson plan are going to be paid about $75  for their efforts. I know EXACTLY how much effort I would put into a $75 assignment, because that's what I got paid writing 200-word articles for The Hollywood Reporter. If it was done in 20 minutes I considered myself lucky; half an hour was about average; and if I spent more than 45 minutes on it I was furious at the world. I'm going to be submitting 20 minutes' worth of video to Pearson, so if the evaluator watches the whole thing I'll be stunned. The first three minutes have to be fabulous, I'd say - and as for the lesson plan, my guess is that it hardly counts for anything at all.

The devil is in the details, as usual. Having outside professionals evaluate teachers and teaching  licensure candidates based on video and lesson plans sounds like a great idea, but if you're going to charge the teachers and candidates $300 for the privilege of being evaluated this way, you've got to pay at least half of that to the evaluator.

Higher One is SO annoying!

Because I was gone for much of the summer, I had to reapply for a Higher One card in order to get my student loan refund since my university says it will no longer mail paper checks. I received the new Higher One card yesterday and just went to the MyOneMoney website to register it. The company claims that you can EITHER have your check directly deposited into a Higher One account (which you're supposed to open for that purpose) OR have the check direct deposited at another institution with a 2-3 day delay. What they don't tell you is that you have to print out and snail mail the request to have the check deposited in your regular checking account.

I have enough checking accounts to keep track of, and I'm almost done with student loans anyway, so I went through the whole procedure. But it's incredibly annoying, totally unnecessary and environmentally unsound. I just paid my regional taxes with an electronic ACH request from my checking account, so I know perfectly well that this is just a way to get new college students (who probably don't even have any stamps at home) to open an account with Higher One.

I plan to complain to the university, and I hope Higher One goes out of business very soon.

Teacher Performance Assessment

Yesterday was the big orientation meeting for my student teaching experience, which starts next week. We were introduced to the latest education flavor-of-the-month, the Teacher Performance Assessment project. This will involve submitting incredibly detailed lesson plans and producing about 15 minutes of video of me teaching the plans, as well as student work, my feedback and reflections on the entire process.

I've been fascinated by the subject of teacher evaluation since my first semester as a post-baccalaureate education major, and I heartily approve of a more comprehensive method than the geeky, tooth-and-claw capitalistic and ultimately unfair "value-added" calculus. My reservations are as follows:

• The pilot program is being run by Pearson, a for-profit textbook company that has made a decidedly inferior impression on me after three semesters of using its education software and textbooks; and
• Inevitably, teachers who are good at making interesting videos will get higher scores.

This second point is probably more relevant, given the current position of education "reform" as a political football. If personnel decisions like raises, hiring and even firing of teachers grow to be dependent on the TPA scores, we may see a cottage industry grow up of dynamic education filmmakers producing videos "guaranteed to get you at least a 3" out of a low score of 5.

This is, of course, not at all the idea. But I'm all for the principle of having a variety of sources for teacher evaluation, so I'm going to focus this semester's blog entries not so much on my student teaching experiences per se as on my preparations for, and experiences with, the TPA.