More on innovative practices outside of New York City: Just came across this report on the Fund for Teachers website.



Fund for Teachers is an agency which, among many things, provides $5,000 travel grants to teachers looking do professionally enriching research. Many of the grant proposals are total boondoggles -- visiting the islands (and beaches and cafés) of Greece to get of better sense of the locations depicted in the Odyssey, say. As I was told in a recent information session, the Fund believes that anything that rejuvenates and inspires a teacher's classroom practice is justifiable just so as long as teacher can supply a good story and the receipts to account for the monies spent.

This proposal, however, appears to come from a teacher in a similar predicament as the ones writing for the CCC Blog. Eager get away from mere mathematical test prep curriculum to one focusing cognitively demanding tasks, the teacher, from the Bushwick School of Social Justice, secured the travel funds to visit various conferences dedicated to novel teaching methods and several west coast community college districts purporting to be on the cutting edge of instructional innovation where mathematics is concerned.

As the teacher notes in the after-action report, however, the community college world has its own grant-biased language problem. What started out as an effort to observe "innovative instructional practices" at work to turned into a due diligence exercise in B.S.-detection.

"I went into this journey expecting to be wowed by innovative mathematics teaching practices happening in different community college settings. Instead, I was stunned by the realities of what is not happening," writes the report's author. "A math class at North Seattle Community College purportedly addressed students’ anxieties about math in addition to working on skills. But, when I sat in on that class and talked to the professors who taught it, I saw nothing but traditional, rote teaching. Yet, in Portland, where they were not claiming to do anything that radical, I encountered a network of educators truly empowering their students and promoting authentic growth."

As the report goes on to state, the teacher, who describes herself as "ignorant and idealistic" at the time of the proposal's writing, hasn't lost her initial idealism. What has happened, however, is that she has come way with a more realistic awareness of how difficult it is to seek change in system which in which the easiest thing to do is do things the way they've always been done and simply slap a new name on the effort.

"I leave this fellowship committed to prioritizing the types and frequency of the questions I use, the worthiness of the tasks I ask students to tackle, and a curriculum rich with real world thinking," she writes.

One of the union reps at our school just shared via is Facebook feed this story about an Oklahoma high school switching over to a "personalized education" format.

Basically, the incoming freshman class at Chickasha H.S. will monitor their own progress in school. They still have to meet the state-mandated 6 hour, 30 minute daily attendance requirement is fair game but once inside the building, it appears, the choice of topics and study strategy is up to them. No report cards, just monthly updates. The primary role of the teacher is not so much to teach lessons as to act as a concierge/tutor/research librarian -- helping the kid move through assignments and assessments in the shortest amount of time possible. The building will be kept open from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. to account for variability in student (and teacher) schedules.

The actual details are, I'm sure, a little more restrictive than I'm making it out to be. This is, after all, a taxpayer funded institution with a boatload of rules and regulations limiting just how much "freedom" this personalized educational model can accommodate. At the same time, however, you get the sense that the brains behind this shift are doing the same sort of hard thinking that a lot of us teachers are doing when we look at classroom management practices designed to meet the needs of a 1950s or 1960s-era economy? In other words, in an era of declining technology costs and near ubiquitous Internet connectivity, shouldn't students be better served learning how to control their educational identify? Shouldn't they have the freedom (within strict guidelines) of what to study, how to study it and how to communicate their level of understanding to the adult world?

A co-teacher and I are clawing our way to the semblance of this type of model in a team taught Geometry class. The plan (at least on my end) is to post the list of Common Core Geometry standards, linking a lesson, worksheet and set of challenge problems to each, and then have students check off the box and move on to the next item once they feel they've attained mastery.

From the perspective of teacher working inside a system that doesn't offer a personalized anything, the primary challenge is the mind shift. Basically, you're asking a student who has been trained to sit quietly, take notes and follow the teacher's model in 6 other classes to self-direct in your class. More than a few students are happy to sit and wait 10, 20, 30 minutes even until being told what to do.

From the perspective of a student unexpectedlyencountering such a system, there is reason to be hesitant. For one thing, the teacher is being paid to teach and, until you walked into this particular room, teaching involved standing up in front of the class, putting things on a chalkboard or SmartBoard and directing activity. Secondly, there's the challenge of not knowing where to start, how to self-monitor or at what point to say, OK, I get this.

Finally, there is also the plain fact that, when it comes to math, many roads lead to Rome. Many teachers in my school are quite effective teaching in the traditional rows and columns classroom format, especially when it comes to preparing students for the New York State Regents exams, and one thing I've lamented is that, the more personalized the tasks become, the less group training you can provide on how to take decent notes, how to use the calculator as a reasoning tool -- all the "in between" instruction that aids math class longevity as much as content mastery.

This is a conundrum I've been pondering heavily over the last month and one I hope to post about in the spring.