Failure Rates

I just received an email from our outstanding office manager with a list of students who had been withdrawn from school for truancy (etc.) There was a list of about 20 kids which is only a small fraction of the 650 or so left here. Each of the kids were listed with a withdrawal code next to their names. This comment was at the top of the email:

"I'm sending a list of students that have been W/D this past month. Please look over the list to see if any of them are on your class list..... It should be good news for your failure rate."

I was immediately struck by the last line which was emboldened in the original email too. Why should teachers care about their failure rate more than the fact that these kids are losing an opportunity at life? Why are we reducing human life to numbers like wd codes and failure rates? Our school is usually a last chance stop for at-promise students and when they are withdrawn for truancy, they don't make it back to HS. They are done.

Now, its not our office manager's fault for the language she used (although I did send her a biting response). She only reflects the language of the instructors here. If we are more concerned that our student failure rate is low rather than a student's humanity then something is really wrong.

Does Communication Equate to Attendance?

We have a very high at-promise population at my charter school. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that 90% of our kids are at serious risk for not completing HS. This is the time of the year when it really starts to get scary. It seems that the initial burst out of the gate wears off right around week 5 (we are in week 7 now) and student's start missing class. Early on attendance is up but then they hit a wall. They just stop showing up. So far this year that hasn't been true in my courses, but its still true in other classes on campus. It got me thinking. If I'm getting 80-100% attendance everyday but many teachers are only getting 40-80% attendance everyday, is there a relationship somehow. I've made some formal and casual observations through substituting and observing classes throughout the day and I see this pattern a lot. A theory has started to form..... The teachers that spend a lot of time tracking students academic achievement, which includes knowing almost every detail of their coursework, monitoring grades bi-weekly, and calling home on a regular basis, seem to have better attendance. The kids whose teachers are much more blase about tracking progress and calling home have lower attendance numbers. Well, thats my hypothesis anyway. I wonder if it could be true.

It would be really interesting to break down attendance numbers by teacher and compare that to the amount of time each teacher spends monitoring students to see if my hypothesis could become a theory (shout out to my 7th grade science teacher for teaching me the difference). Too bad I can't do that. Its pretty invasive and calls for a lot of formal judgment on my part and probably wouldn't lead to any change at our school anyway. So for now, I will just continue to watch most students fall through the cracks but hope that the work a few great teachers at my school are doing can save enough. Oh yeah, one of my goals for this year is to stay positive so I'm writing this entry with a smile on face to counter balance the negativity in the last paragraph.

Noticing Some Major Differences in Myself

I have had some paradigm shifts in the last 6 months that have changed a tremendous amount about how I am approaching teaching this year. I'll try to put them down on paper, or zeroes and ones as it is known today, and see if I can express what I feel motivating me every day.

1. I no longer focus on learning my content as much as how to deliver it. I have 100's of history books, geography resources, war volumes, even the lonely economics book in my collection, but I haven't picked any of them up in awhile. I used to read those books so I could get MORE info to share with my kids, as well as broaden my understanding of social studies ideas. Not saying that I won't shift back to reading those things, but right now I spend all my time learning Web 2.0 tools and software programs to deliver that material. This new focus stems from another shift, or crack, or some might say break in my mind.

2. Im no longer going to blame kids for my course failure rate. This is a hard thing to say out loud (can you say something out loud when writing it down?) since it correctly implies that I have blamed kids in the past. I had a 50% failure rate across my 3 courses in the final semester last year. That does not include the other 25% that dropped out or were removed from my classes. The average person failing received less than 10% of all the points in the course. That means that the kids failing just weren't trying. They weren't doing ANYTHING! The last couple years I just figured the rates were like this because our school was known as a place where kids could sleep in, work only if they felt like it, and fall between the cracks when they wanted too, and they did. But I put the emphasis on them, I blamed them for not completing their work, for not organizing their course work schedule, for not motivating themselves, but something has changed. Im holding myself MORE responsible because I know there is a lot MORE I could do to communicate, motivate, and help them organize which are the crucial factors to success in an online environment. Especially for teenagers.

3. Im no longer relying on the face to face component of our hybrid model as the save all. Ive believed incorrectly that if I tracked my online students down when they came into their homeroom courses once a week, I could help them with their problems and get them going on their work. Yeah right. First of all, its rare that a struggling student shows up every week so its hard to keep regular contact that way. Also, its impossible to help all your online kids the way they need to be helped in the few minutes you can actually sit with them in their homerooms. Besides how logistically difficult it is to help kids face to face, one time a week, there is also the idea that we are an online school and I believe in online learning.

4. I love working. I spend a lot of time doing it because, and here is the kicker, Im learning MORE than I ever have before.

5. Individualized instruction for all kids, not just those that have mandates.

i can do MORE

Individualized Instruction Online

To steal a saying from Oprah who probably stole it from someone else, yesterday I had an "ah ha moment." Usually those moments come for people when they hear others speaking or see something inspirational. My moment came when my own words were leaving my mouth. Sounds a little arrogant so far, dont worry, I'll knock myself down in the next couple sentences to balance things out.

Im not really good with labels. I rarely set a course and say here is the name of the course Im setting. For the most part, I just start doing things because I feel something is right, not because of a label or category it fits into. Sounds vague so far, okay, let me clarify.

Back to yesterday. A handful of thoughtful teachers stayed late on Friday to be part of a new Restructuring Committee at our school. Our principal got the idea out of the Model Schools conference he went to this summer. During the meeting we were bouncing around ideas and my principal said something that I felt needed clarifying. Im usually fairly heldback when it comes to these situations because I have a little bit of spotlight fright, but I spoke up. As I was speaking I heard myself saying, "Well, my goal is to provide individualized learning for all my students" or something to that effect. At that moment I realized I had finally found a label for an idea Ive been working hard at developing the last 6 months.

I feel blessed to be part of a charter school, and online distance education, and this is just one of the many instances why. If I say I want to provide individualized learning for all my kids, I can actually do it. All I have to do is be willing and flexible. Here is how it looks right now in my online classes. 3 of my 4 courses are essay and project based. The lessons are written up as projects, but for the most part they are assessments where kids write out their ideas. Beginning this year, Ive told my kids that anytime they see the words writing, essay or review than they have carte blanche how they want to handle it. Ive created a blog where Im posting lots of methods for completing projects and research to help them with options. The only stipulation is that kids have to meet the requirements I post in the lesson, but they can show me they have learned almost anyway they want. See, Im confident in my lessons enough to know the kids are going to get all the literacy and content that I want them to have, I just want them to have options for how to show it to me. I just want them to get excited about doing work because they have found a method for doing it that stimulates them. Does the method matter all that much or does the fact that the student learned something and can prove they learned it the most important requirement for my evaluation?

Charter School Staff Development vs.....

I am now entering my 4th year teaching at a large charter school. The school is a distance ed, online curriculum based education model with a hybrid component(which involves one-on-one mentoring). I will talk more about that later on. Tonight I need to rant about staff development.

Staff development in traditional schools is a joke to almost everyone Ive ever talked to. In my school it's not, not normally. Our school prides themselves on shared decision making between administration and teachers. Normally teachers have a say over the type of staff development we do. For example, when we were really frustrated with a speaker who came to our school 3 times in a year to help us work together better, even though their weren't many problems with that, we voiced our complaints and she was taken off the schedule for the next year. Our admin team, Principal and AP, are very cognizant of not wasting the staff's time, I love that about my school. What made me bring up this topic is what happened today.

1. We start school next Monday. Our school is incorporating an entirely new Learning Management System, which is software that integrates all of the teachers curriculum and courses onto one platform for the students to use. Its brand new to us, we have had 1 full day to work on it since we came back to school this Monday and most of us aren't ready to start teaching kids in this new system.

2. Our school is radically shifting its focus this year. First of all, I love radical, and I love change so I'm all for everything that is happening in our school right now. We are shifting our focus to helping At-risk students become successful learners. Prior to this, most teachers, myself included, gave up fairly easily on students who didn't show much motivation and effort to complete their course work. Maybe giving up is the wrong phrase, but we didn't persistently accost them, we didn't persistently motivate them, we basically said "this student isn't right for this learning model." This year we are changing that, at least I know I am, and admin is pushing the rest of the staff to do the same. "Every student can learn in an online environment" is a belief that has overcome me after watching most of my kids fail the last 3 years. That's quite a turnaround. So, I have a high at-risk population with a high dropout and failure rate, how do I get that to turn around. It starts with me, but I need some tools. Our entire staff needs some tools, so today we spent an entire day of our coveted pre-student time to get staff training in working with At-risk students.

3. We start school in 2 days, kids will be in our classes in 2 days, and we have an entire new platform to learn in order to present students with the material for their best possible education. We also need to get some tools for mentoring students because that will be the key to getting these kids to do their work. If we build relationships with more students, more of them will do their work, and more of them will take and pass the HS proficiencies and our school will live to breathe another year. We are on probation through NCLB right now, really bad probation. We had a guest speaker come in today to give us strategies on how to build those relationships with AT-RISK students, to give us tools to help them, to keep them in school, to get them to pass their classes, to get them to learn something. At least that is how the guest speaker was billed, that's the only reason she would of been brought in to take a full day of our very important first week time, because we really need to learn how to work with these kids.

Conclusion: What did we get? We got a lady who came in and spoke for 6 hours. She did not once mention the words: online, distance education, or At-risk (or any of the alternative terms that mean the same thing). She didn't even recognize the uniqueness of our charter. Her presentation did not apply to our service delivery model. She gave strategies for working in a traditional classroom that maybe applies to 1/4 of the teachers in our k-12 program. It didn't apply to the HS, yet the HS faces the biggest risk of closing down next year. She spoke on fundamental first year teacher ed stuff like Gardner. What did we get? another day of lost opportunity to make our classes better for our kids. Not only that, a little bit of hope is gone. I really wanted some staff development that would help me to become better at my job, especially in communicating with our student population. Motivating our student population. So the key question is, if we are a charter school and can do pretty much what we want when it comes to staff development shouldn't we be avoiding the types of development that cause the staff to say, this is a joke? I was pretty mad when the day started and one of the older teachers said to me "you got to know how to play the game," aren't we in this to change the game?