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2024 Introduction & Reflection
By Beth Carlson, Nationally Board Certified Teacher/English Department Chair at RSU21, Kennebunk High School, [email protected], current MCELA Executive Board Member, and past president of MCELA Having just assigned theme papers to my freshman honors level class, I am feeling hard what Jean M. Davis wrote about in 1990. However, having just come back from the NCTE conference where I attended Sarah Zerwin's workshop on humane grading, I am not going to agonize over my students' grades. I will make comments and offer them a revision opportunity. Zerwin recommends learning progressions, which she outlines in her new book, Step Aside: Strategies for Student-Driven Learning with Secondary Readers and Writers, where she advocates that students should not only do the work but use the learning progressions to track their progress. I can't wait to order this book and read more. The workshop gave me a vision of the possibilities teachers can enact that put the onus of the work on students and then their grades rise out of their effort. Zerwin teaches high school, but she presented with middle school teachers who use this method as well. Rigor, after all, doesn't mean much if students don't have to think about their work again, and–if you can accept a little cynicism here–if they're thinking critically about how to revise writing done by chatGPT, that's progress, too. It's also another workshop (or two) I attended at NCTE. –Beth Carlson, Current MCELA Executive Board Member and English Teacher at Kennebunk High School Blast from the Past, November 1990 By Jean M. Davis Barbara Ellis, formally a Maine high school English teacher and now a faculty member in the journalism Department at Oregon State University, Corvallis Oregon, recently completed her doctoral thesis in a subject pertinent to MCELA members. Ellis has researched the major factors inhibiting English teachers in the area of theme assessment. Ellis speculates at the onset of her study that "most English teachers are not aware of the high cost of assessment's consequences, in terms of dollars, in terms of its behavioral, attitude, physical, and emotional effects in educators themselves." Theme assessment, Ellis notes, cannot be done with a checklist or a multiple-choice evaluation form. Rather, it requires "thoughtful judgment and marks and comments that will be meaningful to the student writer." A teacher with 125 students, spending only ten minutes per composition, will devote at least twenty hours in assessing one theme assignment. Ellis sent questionnaires to one-third of Oregon's high school English teachers. She received responses from 62% of the samples. She asked fifty-eight questions dealing with such matters as the number of years the respondent has been correcting themes, whether emphasis is placed on specific writing skills in each theme, the number of themes corrected per month, the number of hours per month spent correcting themes, the amount of teacher commentary (if any) written on corrected themes, and the teacher's correcting system. Ellis, in her questionnaire, then moves on to more emotional issues involved in the theme valuation: Do you think correcting themes is or is not related to burnout of high school English teachers? How many hours before fatigue begins to set in? Do the demands of the home outside life affect the quality of our theme correcting? Do you think most teachers find theme correcting to be an enjoyable or irksome part of teaching English? Do you or do you not sometimes feel despair in correcting themes when you assign students making the same errors you have pointed out to them in previous themes? Do you or do you not sometimes feel resentment over the workload of English teachers compared to those in other high school disciples? Of Ellis's 283 respondents, 170 have been correcting themes for eleven to twenty years. One hundred seventeen report an average of 21-25 students per class, and most of the respondents assign two or four themes per month. One hundred forty respondents evaluate more than 150 themes per month; 53 respondents estimate that they spend more than 50 hours per month on these evaluations. Ellis's English teachers feel (as do, no doubt, more English teachers) that other requirements of the course leave insufficient time to teach theme writing. Many feel that having a theme reader in one's English department would enable English teachers to assign more theme writing. Not surprisingly, 245 respondents feel that correcting themes is related to burnout of high school English teachers. Two hundred forty-six say that fatigue affects theory evaluation judgment in correcting themes, and 145 say that they can put in two hours at a single sitting of correcting themes before fatigue begins to set in. The demands of home outside life affect the quality of theme correcting in 223 cases. One hundred fifty-six of the 283 Oregon teachers find theme writing to be an irksome part of teaching English. Ellis's thesis concluded with the open-ended response of the survey' participants. While many expressed much self-confidence in their ability to evaluate student writing accurately, one cannot help but see that English teachers are overwhelmed by the enormity of the theme-evaluation task: - "too many other responsibilities to spend time needed to return papers soon." - "I spend too much time agonizing over a letter grade." - "Remaining objective is difficult. Stressed out by paper load." - "I become resentful of seeing my family involved in activities while I'm correcting the last 40 essays!" - "Grading themes requires hours of intellectual alertness that other kinds of grading do not demand." One Oregon English Teacher, in response to Ellis's request for suggestions for beginning English teachers, offered: "'Be a P.E. Teacher."
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2024 Introduction & Reflection
By Beth Carlson, Nationally Board Certified Teacher/English Department Chair at RSU21, Kennebunk High School, [email protected], current MCELA Executive Board Member, and past president of MCELA The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education by Stevenson and Stigler (Simon & Schuster, 1992) documents a large-scale research study which examined elementary schools. As a secondary English teacher, the book was a good read for me, too. I thought the book would be depressing--you know, Americans are slipping in the world market, our infrastructure is eroding, kids aren't learning anything, and it's a downhill ride from here. But truthfully, I feel optimistic. Some reasonable, although controversial, ways of organizing our work are explored in the book. Blast from the Past: November 1992 by Molly Schen, past president of MCELA On the teaching profession. Most of us in the States have little time for interacting with other teachers. Contrast this practice with the Asian norm. During nonteaching time in China and Japan, teachers often prepare their lessons with colleagues in the "faculty room," a spacious room equipped with a desk for each teacher. "How could they collaborate on lessons?" I would ask myself. "Why would one language teacher who is working on a poetry unit want to share ideas with someone who is teaching journalism?" You have probably already guessed the answer. The curriculum is rigidly determined, so teachers are teaching the same thing at the same time. Prescriptive? Yes. Stifling? I thought so at first. Now I'm not so sure. Imagine talking with three colleagues about ways of teaching a particular poem, knowing that tomorrow all four of you will be teaching the poem and that after class you'll share what worked and what didn't. That sounds to me suspiciously like a professional conversation! One Asian teacher reported that a great deal of collegial conversation "is spent talking about questions we can pose to the class--which wordings work best to get students involved in thinking and discussing the material. One good question can keep a whole class going for a long time; a bad one produces little more than a simple answer" (195). What yeasty talk this must be. On grouping practices. Children are not grouped by ability in Asian elementary schools. My stance on tracking is well known (see "A Case for Heterogeneous Grouping" in Jan. 1991 News and Views). "Chinese and Japanese teachers do not adjust the curriculum according to children's ease of learning but emphasize instead that slower students may need to put out extra effort in order to keep up in the curriculum" (103). How students view effort and ability. Stevenson and Stigler document test scores and make classroom observations that reveal wide disparities of achievement between Asian and American children. We've heard that evidence before. Perhaps more interesting are the culturally encoded views of effort and ability. Ask a student the importance of effort and the importance of ability for success in school. According to this study, the American child holds more of an "ability" model, one in which "motivation to try hard depends to a great extent on the individual child's assessment of whether he has the ability to succeed" (102). By contrast, the Chinese and Japanese hold more of an "effort" model, one in which progress "is potentially available to anyone" (103). Think of the implications! What does it take to be a good teacher? The researchers asked teachers to judge which of the following attributes are most important for a good teacher to have: ability to explain things clearly, sensitivity to the needs and personality characteristics of individual children, enthusiasm about teaching, having high standards for children, and patience. In Beijing, the top trait was clarity. In Chicago, the top trait was sensitivity (116-67). These differences are revealing. Stevenson and Stigler describe the Eastern view as one of the "skilled performer" and the American view as the "innovator" (168). That description rings true to me. How many nights have I spent brainstorming a creative, original way to present a lesson? My racing heart quieted when I read the words: "It is hard for us in the West to appreciate that innovation does not require that the presentation be totally new, but can come from thoughtful additions, new interpretations, and skillful modifications" (168). I know that some of my best teaching comes from this moderate approach, but I still feel compelled to invent new approaches, design a jazzy activity, concoct an intriguing prompt--It's exhausting. So? How receptive are we to shifting the very foundation of how we decide what to teach, how we plan our lessons, how we organize students, and the standards upon which we assess our own and our student's achievement? Is it possible to view change as continual improvement instead of as an indication of the status quo? Some teachers I've talked to this fall are tired of changing. Teaching strategies have shifted due to de-tracking, cooperative time, the MEA writing/scoring guide, longer blocks of time, portfolios, and more. Teachers are tired of making adjustments to one thing, then another, and another. "There's been too much change all at once," one teacher said. But–dare I suggest it?–perhaps we're just at the beginning. Frankly, I hope we're just at the beginning. My own vision of schools as learning organizations–for students and teachers alike–has not yet been realized. Has yours? I believe that we can work much more efficiently in concert with another. I believe that the vast majority of our students are capable of speaking, reading, writing, reasoning, and appreciating at much higher levels–with a lot of effort on the part of all of us. Let me know what you're trying this year. Do any of these notions make sense to you? Blast from the Past #1
Northwords, November 2001 Maine was rated number 1 in the nation–the highest performing K-12 education system–by the National Education Goals Panel (1999), an independent, bipartisan agency of state and federal officials charged with measuring goals for student readiness, student achievement, educational attainment, and school climate. The 1999 report, issued on the tenth anniversary of the Charlottesville, VA, gathering of America’s governor’s then-President Bush ranked Maine a high-performing state across the eight goals after examining the state’s performance on a host of indicators. Although Maine students score at or near the top of the nation in Mathematics, Reading, and Science, the statistics are deceiving. One out of four Maine students has not acquired a level of literacy that is acceptable by most standards. We outperform other states. We need to refocus our comparison, elevate our expectations, and benchmark the performance of Maine students against our international competitors. With Maine’s Learning Results as the foundations for improvement, and high expectations and aspirations shaping our mission, we intend to have a public education system of world class quality. Our Analysis of this Blast from the Past This first blast is interesting in light of the 2004 US News & World Report article placing Maine 43rd in the country for education, down from 34th in 2023. Of course, 50% of their criteria is based on a school offering numerous AP and IB classes and the number of kids who score well. It is one measure, but not the only measure of a successful education. On the other hand, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act established eight national education goals to be achieved by the year 2000:
This is a much broader scale and is the criteria used by the National Education Goals Panel that ranked Maine 1st in 2001. It was discontinued when No Child Left Behind became law in 2002. |
Blast from the PastThis year we’re starting a new column in our newsletter: “Blast from the Past.” In each issue, we'll take something from an old issue of our newsletter and republish it here. In some blasts, the adage, "the more things change, the more they stay the same," will be obvious. In others, we'll see just how far we've moved forward–or, perhaps, backward. You can decide. Archives
December 2024
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