Arne Duncan on Ed. Reform

I was reading through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's speeches on education reform. I got tenure after two years and didn't have to do too much to earn it so I read the one on tenure and unions first. This caught my eye.

I linked to all of the speeches below. The over riding theme is that we have to face out tough problems and to do that we are going to have to make some changes. Duncan squarely keeps the focus on children and that is definitely where it needs to be.

Take a read for yourself and let me know what you think.

• adopt rigorous standards that prepare students for success in college and the workforce at the 2009 Governors Education Symposium
• recruit and retain effective teachers, especially in classrooms where they’re needed most, at the National Education Association annual conference
• build data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness at the annual conference of ED’s Institute of Education Sciences
• turn around low-performing schools at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Conference.

Collaboration and Communication

This is a section from the “synthesis” paper I have been working on. It is a first draft and I would love comments and suggestions.

Collaboration and Communication
When we had our first child my wife was in labor for 12 hours. During the 10 hours of that that we were in the hospital we must have seen 15 or 20 people. There was one wonderful nurse, Heather, who was assigned to work with my wife and I. But there were also other key people involved in the birth. Dr. Heidi, our obstetrician was there, of course and there were many other nurses and specialists.

If we compare the day to education Heather the nurse was like the classroom teacher and Dr. Heidi was the principal. The other nurses were like other teachers in the building. The people who drew blood were the specialists. The main difference in how they worked and how a school works is how they worked together. When Dr. Heidi would come in Heather wasn’t scared—she was excited. She would ask questions and make sure that she was doing all that she could for my wife and I. In turn, Dr. Heidi didn’t shout demands or give orders, she conferred with Heather and made suggestions about what might work in given situations. When my wife requested an epidural Heather, Dr. Heidi my wife and I all talked about the positives and negatives. They even suggested an alternative that we tried first. It wound up not working but we were glad we had tried everything before going to the drugs. (Once we went to the drugs my wife was quite happy.)

When our baby was born Heather stayed with us until the next nurse came on. Before leaving to go home she talked at great length with the new nurse and told her everything about us and our baby. The baby was five weeks early but was otherwise fine, vital signs, etc. Only then did she leave us. Since the baby was five weeks early a special nurse was called in. This nurse took a look at our child and concluded that our baby didn’t need extra help so she didn’t need to stay.

The analogies to education are obvious but the key thing we can learn from the medical profession is how they communicate profusely and how they collaborate with the interest of the patient foremost in their minds. As teachers when we collaborate (if we collaborate) it too often becomes a game of who is the better teacher. This thinking needs to go away. The vast majority of teachers are good, just in different ways. We need to lean on the strengths of other teachers to improve in the areas where they are a little stronger.

A few years ago someone told me how much work they had to do over the summer because they were teaching a new course. I asked them if anyone else in the department had ever taught it. They replied that about 6 other teachers had taught the course. It was clear from the rest of our conversation that the teacher wasn’t going to get much help from the other teachers on planning the course. Why? Imagine two dentists working in adjacent rooms. One knows a new tooth whitening technique, the other does not. Would the first dentist tell the second dentist to read about the technique to figure it out themselves? Of course not. So why do we have to behave this way in education.

Someone once told me that a new teacher was hired who had previously taught in Japan. She was told to come up with a lesson plan for a particular unit and said she couldn’t do it. When asked why she explained that she had never planned a lesson by herself—they just don’t do it that way in Japan. Doctors and nurses have learned that their collective knowledge is much more useful when there is a great deal of sharing and communicating. As teachers we need to work in the same way.

Learning

I have been musing about a post on learning--that the focus of education needs to be on learning. It keeps getting longer but the basic pieces are:

• Learning must be the focus of everything that everyone does.
• Hiring must be driven by a need to get the right people on the bus.
• Leaders must ensure that the focus of the school is learning
• Teachers must ensure that they are focusing on the most important learnings every day.
• Collaboration--teaching should not be an individual activity. Teaching should be an activity that is done collectively similar to how medical professionals work as a team to make you better.
• Special education is one tool to help students but there must be other tools that are equally robust to help students.
  

I've been trying to make it post length but it keeps getting longer. I'm thinking that the six things listed above might be a sort of synthesis for what schools and districts need to do to improve.