Good Teacher or Bad Teacher

If you are a parent, you know the conversations that go on at the end of every school year. “Who are the good teachers in the fourth grade?” “Has your daughter taken math from Mr Jones? How was he?”

If you want real fun, check out the websites that rate college teachers. Everything from who is a good teacher to who is the “hottest” teacher at the college.

So what makes a good teacher good and a bad teacher bad? Let’s start with the bad teacher first. They are much easier to work with anyway.

A bad teacher really doesn’t care about kids. In a meeting I was in yesterday in Alaska, it was stated, by administrators, that teachers have to identify with and like kids. That makes sense. If a teacher, or an administrator, doesn’t like kids, they should not be working at a school. The schools product is kids. If you don’t like cars, you should not work in a car factory or for a car dealership. Go find something else to do.

And if you don’t like kids then you should not work at a school. Go find something else to do.

There are also those teachers that are just not very good at teaching. Teaching is a skill. Because it is a skill it can be learned. Learning means you have to practice that skill to get better at it. But sometimes, no matter how hard you try, it just doesn’t work.

As much as I thought I was a world-class soccer player, I really wasn’t. I was a decent high school and college soccer player. But that was all. I was actually a much better coach than I was a player. I practiced hard, played pretty much every day of the week for 52 weeks of the year. I played the best I could. It was very important to me to succeed and be good at this. But, eventually, you come to the realization that you have reached the top. And there is nothing wrong with that.  My top is just different than someone else’s top.

The same thing happens in teaching. Some people really want to be teachers. They work at it, study it, read about it, work very hard to make things happen. But their top is different than someone else’s top. And that is just okay.

What you want to avoid, and what schools need to eliminate, is the teacher that just doesn’t care about the kids. They only care about them. It is all about them. They want to teach a certain subject, they will teach it their way and if the kids can’t learn that is just too bad. Your student must not be smart enough or they are just not working hard enough to pass the class. But whatever it is, it is not the teacher’s fault. Or that is what they will tell you.

Not every teacher has to be world-class. They just have to be good at what they do. Some will rise to the top and be praised as examples to their fellow teachers. They will be seen as the “Ideal Teacher” and be awarded Teacher of the Year and other honors. Everyone will ask, “Is there room in that class for my child?” And that is all well and good. But that doesn’t make them a good teacher.

What makes a goo teacher? They care. That’s all. Very simple. They care.

What do they care about? They care about their students. They care about their students’ families. They care about their school. They care about their colleagues. They care about things they should care about. Most importantly, they care about learning.

Notice I didn’t say they care about teaching. That is just the outcome of their care about learning. Good teachers are always learning. They love to learn. What they learn about changes all the time. One year it may be about Native American history and the next it is about Victorian England and the stories of Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t matter. They just love to learn.

Because they love to learn, they teach kids to love to learn. The teachers I remember best may have not been the “best” teachers in the school. But they were the best for me. I had a math teacher somewhere in the junior high years that taught me to love math. He made it fun for me. I used to play games with pennies that he taught me. They were fun, and I learned math. Maybe I didn’t learn processes, but I learned concepts. The problem was, that later math teachers didn’t make it fun so I stopped learning math. I decided I didn’t have a “math mind” after all. Too bad for me.

I had one teacher in college that all he did was lecture. It was a history class. It was the old days and the latest technology was an overhead projector. He would write on the sheet all the notes we were supposed to take. We just had to write as fast as he did. As he talked, you could tell he loved history. And because he did, so did I. I took every class he taught and, for a time, I declared a history major. Though I never finished the major and took another direction, I still see myself as a “history buff.” And because I do and have shared that, my kids consider themselves “history buffs” as well. One just told me that she wants to teach history and has started to school to make that happen.

Learning is fun. When you stop learning you stop living. Teachers are what make learning fun. They are the tool that is used to teach kids to love learning. If you want to know who the good teachers are, ask them what they are learning themselves. That is how you will know. And if they are not learning, then your child probably won’t either. That is the time to ask the principal or the counselor for a change.  

Elections and Schools

Tuesday is Election Day. I hope you vote. This year I have watched so many political ads that have numbed my brain. And I used to spend my summers working political campaigns and loving it.

Wednesday night I get to meet with a group of young college kids during their Political Science class. The teacher brings me in every semester to talk about campaigning. And every semester I make sure the kids understand where the most important votes for them and their families are.

And it is not for president of the United States.

For me, the most important votes are always at the School Board. My kids spend their days in school. My wife is now a school employee. I have been a school volunteer for 20 years. Most of my taxes in Utah go to schools. The school board affects me and my family more than any other race. So I make sure I know what is happening in the district and how the candidates stand on the issues. And what those issues mean to me and my family.

I talk to candidates, I listen to what they have to say. I ask them the hard questions. I look at records and I pay attention. They have to satisfy me to get my vote.

It is very easy to get caught up in what is happening in the world and in the country. It is easy to forget that what happens in the neighborhood is what is important too.

This election day, make sure you look at the bottom of the ballot as well as the top. Make sure your vote counts all the way down for what you believe in.

You make the difference.

Are you a Helicopter Parent?

First, I have to confess, I am a helicopter parent. Just not in the traditional meaning.

I don’t hover over my kids, I hover over the school.

Both my wife and I get involved at the school and support all the kids. Because we do, our kids are recognized at school and it is easier for us to talk to teachers about what is happening.

Both my wife and I have been at this for 20 years now. My wife became a PTA president the year our oldest started kindergarten. I started working with School Community Councils at the same time. At one point my wife served on three PTAs and was the acting Region Director for PTA. I was serving on three SCCs. Yes, we are involved.

All of our kids have learned it’s okay to have mom and dad in school. They don’t yell at the teacher and make you do dumb stuff. They are just involved.

We attend the meetings we are supposed to attend. We support our kids’ activities like sports and theater and choir and everything else. We buy cookie dough and license plate covers and anything else going on. We even crash dances to make sure everything is okay.

Our kids expect us and they are not embarrassed by our being there.

But we also expect our kids to succeed. We check the grades online to see how the kids are doing. We encourage our kids to meet with their counselor and make sure they are on track for graduation. When we have questions we ask them. And we expect answers back.

We have sent our kids to school with a paper asking their teachers to tell us how they are doing in school. When we go to Parent-Teacher conferences, we go talk to the teachers our kids are struggling with. If we get to the others that’s okay. But we get to the ones that we really need to get to. My kids have halos, but I don’t need them polished at that conference.

Our experience, by being involved, has been marvelous. One of the high points did come at a Parent-Teacher conference. We were setting up the PTSA table in the gym and one of the teachers came up and said, “Let me save you having to stand in line. Here is what your student is doing and this is what I need to have him do.” It was great. We skipped the line but got the information we needed.

Last year my daughter failed a math class. We went to the teacher and asked, “Is there anything she can do?” We did not ask for a change of grade or yell at the teacher and say how could she possibly flunk our daughter. We asked a simple question. Because the teacher knew us and how we work with other teachers she said, “Go online and see if there are assignments she can make up and see if there are enough that if she does them she can pass the class.” We checked and there were enough. We talked to the teacher again and she approved of the work, we got started and our daughter turned them in. When she did, she did not earn enough points so the teacher had her do some other assignments that would make up the points. My daughter did not get an A. She barely passed the class. But that is all she needed and all we were asking for. If she had not, we would have had the teacher help us find alternative ways to get credit for that class.

Why did this work? Because we are helicopter parents. We are involved in a lot of ways at schools. And, most importantly, we have created a high level of trust with everyone at our schools. They know we care. And they know we support them in their quest to educate our children.

And that is all we can really ask for.

What is School Reform?

The term “School Reform” has been around for a while. And, like many terms in any industry, they became buzz words that everyone wanted to use. It made you feel smart and on top of things to talk about school reform.

But what really is school reform and what does successful school reform look like?

The answer is…Whatever you want it to look like. That is the best part. There is not one model that will make a school successful. If there were, then all the schools would look alike and we would push kids out the door with a diploma just like a car factory. That would be great for education, but bad for kids. Not every kid is made alike to start with and they should not be alike when we get done with them.

A few years ago I took a group of teachers, administrators, counselors and parents to Washington DC to visit schools that had been turned from failure to success. The visits with the schools was great. There was much learned there that is still being used at my kids’ high school today.

One evening, one of the teachers asked me why I did what I did at the school. At that time I was a self-employed consultant with lots of time on my hands. So, I spent between 15-20 hours per week at the school. My answer to this teacher was, “Because my kids get treated better. And if my kids get treated better, so do other kids get treated better.”

By my kids getting treated better, they did not get better grades or favors from the teachers. But they were recognized by teachers and the teachers knew that the family was involved in educating everyone. What really happened was that my kids got taught better because of what my wife and I did for the school. (My wife was the PTSA president.)

That trip brought school reform to our school. What I mean by that is that we started to look at what we were doing at the school and seeing where the gaps were from where we were and where we wanted to be.

Once we recognized the gaps it was very easy to put solutions into place. And once we had a few solutions in place we started to get support from the faculty. That support resulted in a great deal of trust being created between all the stakeholders at the school. It was no longer “their problem” it was “our problem.” And it became “our solution.”

But trust is very fragile. You have to continue to work at it and nurture it so it will grow.  You do that through communication. The more you communicate the more trust you build. People just want to be kept informed. They wanted to know what was going on.

One of the interesting things that came out of this whole experience was that people really didn’t care if you were an expert in something. That is not where the credibility came from. The credibility came from them knowing how much you cared about something.

That came to the front a few years later after a change in school leadership. That change was a real test for the school to see how they would stick together through what would become a tough time. The school was faced with some situations that were created by outside forces. Happy to say, the trust was still there and people were able to pull it back together. The school took some hits, but there were people that could be counted on to fight to get back on track. And new people at the school learned that there was a positive culture to make things happen led by people who really cared.

What does all this mean about school reform? The reform is not so much in the processes and systems. The reform is in the minds of the people. When changes are based only on the processes and systems you don’t have what you need to sustain the changes over the long haul. When the reform is in the minds of the people you can change anything you want. The trust will get you through.

What happened to being Creative?

My son, Ian, almost flunked kindergarten. His teacher wanted to hold him back from moving on to first grade. And her reason…He colored outside the lines.

Flash forward 15 years and I am having lunch with a former high school teacher of Ian’s. And this teacher is telling a principal how brilliant my son is. How he can do anything he wants and study at any school he wants. How the teacher would give Ian and tech manual and Ian was off and running because he was learning and doing wonderful things.

And he would probably still color outside the lines.

At one time Ian wanted to become a pyro-technician. They blow things up and use computers to do it. And he wanted to work for Disney because Disney does cool stuff. Which they do. Who else would build a Himalayan adventure in the middle of Florida? Or would bring Cars to life enough that people would wait in line for hours to see what Cars Land looks like? That is why he wanted to work for Disney.

I wonder how many Imagineers colored outside the lines in kindergarten.

They have done some studies that show that over time, kids become less creative. We put them in a system and tell them they have to meet our standards of success. And they have to progress at our rate. And don’t get creative about what we say on the test, we want you to say it exactly the way we tell you.

Let me share two examples of what I am talking about. When I started my graduate program I was finishing up my last couple of undergraduate courses. (I was being creative and starting while I was still paying undergraduate tuition.) I had the same teacher in a grad class as in an undergrad class. In the undergrad class I was told what to learn and how and when to repeat it back. Just as I had been told since kindergarten.

The change was at the grad level. There it was, “Steve, tell me your thoughts and opinions and ideas and defend them.” It was like I suddenly had a brain because they class I was taking was a 500 level class rather than a 400 level class.

The second example was working at a two-year college. All the students were required to take a class in computers. They were taught Word and PowerPoint and things like that. One day I walked by the window of the class my son was in. And I could see from the back what the students were working on with their computers. And I could see what the teacher was teaching because her computer screen was projected at the front of the class.

She was teaching some part of Word. But the students were someplace else. There were at least 25 students in that class and only two were copying the teacher. The rest were doing other things on their computer. Why? Because they already knew what the teacher was doing. They were in the class because it was required for graduation.

But here is the real problem. You could test out of the class. But the test was not based on getting the right answer to the question. It was based on using a specific keystroke to get the answer. It didn’t matter that you knew a shortcut, you had to do it “their way.”

Does that sound as stupid to you as it does to me? The kids knew how to get the results, but they had learned another way to do it. Instead of rewarding them for their success, we punished them for their creativity.

We need to stop telling students, “This is how you get there.” We need to start to say, “This is where you need to get to. How can you do that?” Let the kids learn. The chances are they will find very creative ways to get there.

What would have happened if someone had told Thomas Edision that you couldn’t make an electric light…And he believed them? What would have happened if someone had told the Wright brothers that man couldn’t fly…And they believed them?

What if

 someone told you something like that? Would you believe them? I hope not.

Who should run the School District?

Tough question to answer. But with new movies coming out about education and parents taking over schools, someone needs to answer it. So…here goes.

First, you have a superintendent. This person is hired to run the day to day operations of the district. They are typically, but not always, a career educator. They usually have multiple degrees, all in education, along with a career that has taken them from teacher to assistant principal to principal to district something to assistant superintendent to superintendent. In other words, they have been the rounds and worked their way to the top.

Second, you have an elected school board. Usually parents, they come from all walks of life and their experience with school usually started with the PTA or other volunteer organizations. In Utah, they have often been involved with the school community council. Someone has told them there is an opening and since no one else is running and they have experience at the school level, they should run. They would be really good at that job.

So, who runs the district? The professional or the amateur? Those are your choices.

Here is my take. The district is under the direction of the school board. They are elected and they are the ones held responsible and accountable for what happens at the schools. They are not professionals, and that may be the best thing about them.

The superintendent should direct the daily operations of the district based on the vision and direction of the school board. He is their employee, not the other way around. He should share his ideas with the board and they should use him as a resource. But the ultimate direction of the district should come from the school board, and not from the superintendent.

That runs opposite of what most educators would like to see. The best example of why this would be the way to go is known in the business world as disruptive innovation. You can check the case studies on why a US Steel dies while a Nucor Steel takes over. US Steel listened to its customers and Nucor Steel looked at the marketplace. US Steel did nothing wrong in the business sense and made good business decisions. Nucor Steel just created a new way of doing business that was better than US Steel. They win.

The same thing is happening in education. Take for example the use of technology in the classroom. Many districts think putting more computers in meets the need. But today’s student uses a reader, a phone, a tablet to access information. And we tell them those tools are not welcome in the classroom. Why? Because we are scared of what will happen if they use them. Today we are finding out that what happens when they use those tools is called learning. The way they have learned how to learn.

Following the school boards vision and mission gives you the chance to try something new and innovative. They are not from education so they do not see the same limits that many educators do. They come from different careers and lives and they bring that to the board and to education. Their ideas should be leading the way.

That doesn’t mean you take away the superintendent. They are the ones that take that vision and the innovation and finds a way to make it work in the classroom. Too many times we see the superintendent stop the innovation or slow it down until it gets forgotten. The key is to find the superintendent that is looking forward and wants to make things happen. Then the board has a friend that not only supports the vision but takes it to higher levels.

Districts have two choices: Stay where they are and get the results they are used to or jump on the train and move out in front on education to really make things happen. That is what the board is elected to do.