As many of you know,
teacherken has carried on a conversation about education with Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack over at
HeartlandPac. The Governor was kind enough to post his latest
entry here as a dkos diary that dealt with the issue of education and instructional time.
My response is on the flip.
Governor Vilsack,
Thank you for taking the time to post your questions about the issue of time in education. As an elementary school principal in Oregon, I have a few thoughts about time and public education....
Is time an issue in public education? Absolutely. But I don't think the answer is to add to the 180-day school year. I think you are correct that we need to reflect upon how to make better use of the time we have.
The important question is this: What is actually happening during so-called "instructional time?" This is an obvious, critical question, yet we almost never spend time figuring this out. Around the country, children are in classrooms for over six hours a day, five days a week, thirty-six or so weeks a year. Do we really know what is going on during all of those instructional times? Of course not. I refer you to Paul Black and Dylan Wiliams' Phi Delta Kappan article, Inside the Black Box, who make the point clearly:
Learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms. Teachers have to manage complicated and demanding situations, channeling the personal, emotional, and social pressures of a group of 30 or more youngsters in order to help them learn immediately and become better learners in the future. Standards can be raised only if teachers can tackle this task more effectively. What is missing from the efforts alluded to above is any direct help with this task. This fact was recognized in the TIMSS [Third International Mathematics and Science Study] video study:
"A focus on standards and accountability that ignores the processes of teaching and learning in classrooms will not provide the direction that teachers need in their quest to improve."
In terms of systems engineering, present policies in the U.S. and in many other countries seem to treat the classroom as a black box. Certain inputs from the outside -- pupils, teachers, other resources, management rules and requirements, parental anxieties, standards, tests with high stakes, and so on -- are fed into the box. Some outputs are supposed to follow: pupils who are more knowledgeable and competent, better test results, teachers who are reasonably satisfied, and so on. But what is happening inside the box? How can anyone be sure that a particular set of new inputs will produce better outputs if we don't at least study what happens inside? And why is it that most of the reform initiatives mentioned in the first paragraph are not aimed at giving direct help and support to the work of teachers in classrooms?
So the first problem is this: we don't really know what is going on during the time that we currently
have. Before we understand this clearly, it doesn't make sense to make fundamental changes in the "inputs" (changes in the amount of time, changes in teacher training, etc.). And it
certainly makes no sense to connect some sort of "outputs" (standardized test scores) to current practices, when we don't even know what current practices
are.
Second, there are indications that mere "hours of instruction" increases won't help. Take, for example, the information from the TIMSS 1999 Benchmarking Report, which looked at amount of instructional hours devoted to science and science achievement of 8th grade students:
The data, however, reveal no clear pattern between the number of in-class instructional hours and science achievement either across or within participating entities. Common sense and research both support the idea that time on task is an important contributor to achievement, yet this time can be spent more or less efficiently. Time alone is not enough; it needs to be spent on high-quality science instruction. Devoting extensive class time to remedial activities can deprive students of this. Also, instructional time can be spent out of school in various tutoring programs; low-performing students may be receiving additional instruction.
Here's what I would suggest as fundamental, essential reform for schools with respect to time. Instead of wondering whether or not to add more time to the day or year, look at what we're doing with the time we already have. Build in time in the school calendar for the sort of reflective practice that would be required for all of us to understand the "black box" of what is actually going on inside the classroom.
Build in significant weekly time for teachers to collaborate as grade-level teams, as vertical teams, as subject-area teams. And I'm not talking about thirty minutes here and there to coordinate who's going to borrow the VCR to show the frog movie this week. I'm talking about real quantity time for the kind of in-depth discussions that education professionals always wished that they could have, two to three uninterrupted hours at a stretch per week, at least, where they can discuss student work together at length; where they can team to plan lessons; where they can watch videos of each other teaching and discuss what aspects of a particular lesson worked and what might work better next time. In short, treat teachers as the professionals we expect them to be, and give them the time to do it. I would contend that giving teachers this time to work together as professionals will pay off tenfold in improved instructional practice.
I would also build in significant weekly time for "office hours" for K-12 teachers, with the expectation that they have regular and frequent one-on-one meeting times with their students and their parents, including home visits. Again, if these structures are in place, and part of the daily schedule, the parent-student-teacher connection can be strengthened, which will result in greater student achievement.
Where does this time come from? Here are a couple of radical notions. Believe it or not, some of it can come from shortened number of instructional hours per week. Why? Because if teachers are given more time to work together, learn together, plan together, and reflect together, the time that they spend teaching will result in more effective teaching. Spending 1/2 hour with a good teacher is more productive than spending an hour with an ineffective teacher.
Here's another radical notion: dial way down on the standardized tests. They're absolutely killing us, and for no good reason. You can only dig up a carrot so many times to see how it's growing. At a certain point the mere act of digging damages its root structures to the point where the measurement kills the plant. We are spending far, far too much time on preparing for and administering standardized tests, with only marginal utility at the individual parent-student level.
If districts, states, and the feds have a need to know how students are faring, give us the time to evaluate student achievement with a variety of formative measures that can be a part of everyday classroom work and that can be gathered, evaluated, and presented in a student learning portfolio. When such ongoing classroom measures are conducted with the rigor and planning that would be possible under the time restructuring that I've suggested above, parents, students, and education officials will have a much clearer picture of what students actually know and are able to do well.
I know that the notions of restructuring the school day and cutting down on standardized testing might sound radical; but they're really common-sense practices that are conducted in other countries.
I look forward to being able to discuss these and other educational issues further when I'm able to register at Heartland PAC to continue the conversation. Governor Vilsack, thank you for taking the time to bring the discussion to us here at dKos.
And education kossacks, you know I'd love to hear what you think!