Gary Rubinstein’s TFA Blog

Common teacher mistake #5 — Making the first test too difficult.

It’s important that all your students succeed on the first formal assessment. Even if you’ve conducted enough ‘informal’ assessments that they’ve convinced you that they’ve learned, the students need to convince themselves that they’ve learned, and for them that means success on a test.

When your student do well on your first test, you get branded as ‘good’ and then the students are more likely to be cooperative.

Here are some things to do and not to do to ensure a good performance on your first test:
1) DO collect classwork and homework and check it carefully so that you KNOW the students have mastered the skills needed for the test.
2) DON’T make the test too long. It’s OK if they finish early. I’d rather risk the whole class finishing early and having ten minutes to look over their papers rather than risk having a bunch of students run out of time. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to do in about ten minutes what your class should take forty minutes to do. If you’re worried that your test is too long, cut 1/3 of the questions. It’s OK if some topics get left off the test. If you have a statistically random sampling of the topics you taught, the grade will still be accurate.
3) DO proofread really carefully. Nothing is more distracting during a test than a teacher interrupting to say. “Hey everyone. There are two question 12s. Just call the first one 12a and the second one 12b. And on question 7, change choice B from ‘Benjamin Franklin’ to ‘Thomas Jefferson.’
4) DO make the test on the ‘easy’ side. I know I’m going to get accused of having low expectations here, but when a kid who has generally failed his tests gets a 90, he’s going to be happy. He’s not going to think, “Oh, it doesn’t count. That test was too easy.”
5) DON’T collect the test early from students who have finished. Have them continue checking their work or put their heads down. That way the tests will be in alphabetical order when you check them and they’ll be easier to record and easier to turn back.
6) DON’T put a ‘bonus challenge question’ on the test. It’s better for the student to get more points by re-checking the test than to spend a lot of time on a difficult bonus question worth 2 points. Since I stopped doing the bonus question, my students have been getting better scores.

Some signs of improvement.

There were a lot of good comments on my last post. I’m all for ‘open exchange’ even if people don’t agree with me.

I’m hearing a lot of people say that TFA is receptive to constructive criticism. If that’s the case, it’s a new thing which I’m glad about. My comments stem from a frustrating 10 year period from 1995 to 2004 where I’d submit feedback forms from my workshop that had comments like “These are ideas I never heard before.” I felt that the feedback forms were ignored since year after year, I’d get the same sorts of comments. TFA showed no interest in trying to incorporate any of my suggestions into the curriculum.

As a veteran teacher who is trying to ‘teach’ TFA how to do better, I should not just concentrate on the negative, but also on some of the positive things I’ve seen. Here are some:

1) Something TFA seems to be stressing is getting a lot of data for assessing the students’ mastery of objectives. This wasn’t stressed for a while, and it’s so important to get that feedback so I’m glad to see that incorporated into the institute.

2) A good friend of mine is a principal of a middle school in The Bronx. He went to observe some CMs teaching Math in their summer placement schools. He described to me what their lessons were, and they were really impressive. Full student participation, organized activities, and a post-assessment to make sure that it all sunk in. He hired both of these teachers based on their great lessons.

As an outsider to the institute, I’m not really able to get first-hand accounts of what’s going on there. All I can really go by is what comes back on my workshop feedback forms or what I’ve seen people say on their blogs or as comments to what I’ve written or feedback from my friends who have experienced the institute first-hand.

The secret TFA ‘quit rate’ revealed.

Let me first say that, despite my recent ’suggestions’ for TFA, I think that it is a good organization. I criticize it the way a patriot of the U.S. might when it feels we’re going in a non-productive direction. They do a great job with recruitment and I think that the regional offices do a very nice job with placement and support throughout the year. The two weak links of the organization are the institute and the alumni associations.

The more important of these is the institute since improper training of new teachers leads to unfortunate students who have to suffer while the new teacher learns ‘on the job.’ It’s unfair to those students. TFA should do everything they can to ensure that this doesn’t happen, but they don’t. For some reason, TFA just won’t hear negative critique. They are very vocal and proud when something good gets said, but they try to hide anything bad. An example of this is the mysterious and secret ‘quit rate.’ It is not public knowledge how many TFAers don’t finish their two year commitment.

Before reading on, everyone think to yourself, “What is an acceptable ‘quit rate’?” Write it down. (That’s a little trick for getting more student activity while doing class discussion)

I’ve always felt that TFA should be tracking this number extremely carefully. I think it holds the key to evaluating how much good TFA is doing. I imagine a bell curve where a certain percent of TFA teachers quit during or after their first year. Now, and here’s the scary part, for every teacher who actually quits during or right after their first year, there are probably two other TFA teachers who had such bad years that they almost quit too. (I was unfortunately in this category) Basic statistics says that as you get closer to the average, there will be more people in each category. That’s where I get my one to two ratio of people who had horrific years that they quit to people who had horrific years that they almost quit. So whatever the ‘quit rate’ is, you should triple it to get the percent of first year TFAers who are very ineffective.

So what is the quit rate? Well, according to a Harvard University study that TFA seems to be proud of because it also shows that over 40% of TFAers stay for a third year at their original school (which is a really great thing to do), the magic number, the secret ‘quit rate’ as revealed on page 16 of this very well researched study is ‘approximately 10%.’

That’s not good enough, TFA. Time to bring the quality of the training up to the quality of recruitment.

Here’s the paper:
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/AERA08.SMJohnson.pdf

A critique of the TFA ‘Classroom Managment & Culture’ booklet.

At the institute they use as a text a series of books that comprise the institute curriculum. Who wrote these books, I’m really not sure. But looking over the 162 page ‘Classroom Management & Culture’ booklet, I get a lot of information about what sorts of things TFA is currently stressing.

I have a copy of the 2006 booklet. It’s possible that this is very different from the 2008 booklet, but I doubt it. (TFA is very slow to change. They have a tendency to ignore criticism.)

I’ll go through the first few pages and make some comments.

Page 1: It’s misleading to lump classroom management and culture as one thing. It implies that you should first establish your classroom culture and then you can focus on management. I’d say it’s the other way around. Plenty of good teachers have management without having established the classroom culture. They then have this CM reflection about how her kids were upset because they were going on a field trip and were not going to learn as much that day. This is very unrealistic. Kids, even really motivated ones, like to go on field trips where they can learn in the ‘non-traditional’ way. Why should this be the first thing CMs read about when they’re trying to tackle the vital topic of classroom management?

Pages 16-17: Here they have a chart with examples of ‘rules to follow’ and ‘rules to avoid.’ The three guidelines they layout are “1) Phrase your rules in the form of a positive statement, 2) State your rules clearly, and 3) Minimize your list of rules (most teachers have 3-5 rules).”

I like guidelines 2 and 3, but I don’t agree with guideline 1. I think it contradicts guideline 2. It’s OK to phrase some rules in the negative. It makes it clear. Look at the examples they have as ‘good’ rules like “Class time is for class activities” and the ‘bad’ rules like “No gum, food, or drink in class. Bring your homework, book, notebook, and pen to class everyday. Be on time. No profanity. No leaving the room without permission.” I think those ‘bad’ rules are pretty clear. There’s only 5 of them also.

Page 19: Here’s a pretty dangerous ‘consequence list’ that they advise.
“1. Warning 2. Short detention after class or school 3. Written plan for
improvement 4. Guardian contact 5. Severe clause: Sent to principal” Any consequence ‘ladder’ that begins with ‘warning’ is going to be a disaster, especially if you post that on your wall or tell them that’s the first consequence. It’s like giving everyone a free pass. Read my blog entry on why you shouldn’t post consequences and watch my video #3 if you want to see how these consequences can backfire.

Page 24: “Some teachers establish their rules and consequences before students arrive and without student input, while others develop them collaboratively with students. Student participation in setting the expectations can increase their investment in them. However, since new teachers must focus on establishing their authority in the classroom, new teachers often find it most effective to develop the rules and consequences themselves in order to communicate to their students firm guidelines for behavior from the beginning.” They then go on with some examples of teachers who have successfully used the ’students help make the rules’ activity. Then they say “Irrespective of the approach you choose …” as if you might decide you should do it in your first year.

They should be more decisive and say that new teachers should NEVER let the students help make the rules. They use weak language like ‘new teachers often find it most effective to’ rather than telling it like it is and saying ‘new teachers should always.’ Letting the kids brainstorm the rules is the kind of thing that works for someone after their first year. I know a lot of good elementary teachers who make that work. But it’s not good for a first year and it should only be mentioned in a book like this as something that should wait until the second year.

I know the argument “When the students help make the rules they’ll be more likely to follow them. If they don’t follow them, all you’ll have to do is say ‘You’re breaking the rules that you created!’.”

If your classroom management depends on the power of irony, you’re in a lot of trouble.

I’m out of steam on this. The booklet isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’m actually happy about that.

Common teacher mistake #4: Too much enthusiasm on the first day.

My first year, I was wrongly under the impression that my task on the first day was to ‘wow’ my class and get their attention.

As good as this sounds at first, it’s the absolute wrong thing to do and here’s why:

When you try to ‘wow’ them, you run the risk of them thinking at the end of the class, “Wow, that teacher doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Students want to learn so they want to be taught by experienced teachers, or at least people who can act like experienced teachers. But experienced teachers are never very enthusiastic on the first day. Why? Well first becuase they are annoyed that the summer went by so fast and they’re back at school for another marathon year. This doesn’t mean that they’re burned out. They may love their jobs. But they love the relaxing paid summer off a little more.

I’m never enthusiastic on the first day. I’m somewhat annoyed. Besides being annoyed that the summer is over, I’m annoyed that I’ve got to do all kinds of paperwork with the students. I’m annoyed at the ‘alternative bell schedule’ that happens on the first day. I’m annoyed that I’ve got 4 kids in period 1 and 40 in period 2 and the counselors had better ‘balance’ my classes soon.

The first day is boring and predictable, and that’s what students expect. I teach secondary so it’s pretty easy to be intentionally boring on the first day since the first day is just one period in each class. If you’re teaching elementary, you’ll have a lot more time to fill, but still, don’t make it too exciting. You’ll reveal how new you are if you do. Remember, the school year is a marathon. Veterans don’t sprint the first mile, they conserve their energy. You want you classes to recognize that you’re acting somewhat like a veteran.

On the first day I like to get the students into their assigned seats (Alphabetical order by last name.), have the students fill out their info cards (no cute questions on them, just the usual stuff), and give a diagnositic individual activity for the rest of the time (so I can practice learning the names). That’s enough for forty-five minutes.

That first activity isn’t intended to be very fun. The way I see it, there’s no way that you’re going to be always able to make an activity that everyone in the class finds fun. In fact, you’ll be lucky if you EVER make an activity that everyone finds fun. So at one point, each student is going to have to learn that there will be times when the activity isn’t that fun, but you have to work on it anyway. And what better way to teach that on the first day than to make something that NOBODY finds fun?

Keep thinks simple, predictable, and risk-free on the first day. It’s like the opening credits in a movie. It’s just the way all movies start and nobody expects anything different. Different makes kids uneasy.

Other things you should avoid since they’re too ‘enthusiastic’ and make kids feel like you’re not a real teacher:
1) The icebreaker — Ice is your friend. It enables you to conduct your first few days more easily. That ice will break eventually, with or without your help. It will break and then it will melt and start flooding the room. Then it will warm up and eventually come to a temperature that will boil you like a lobster. Why speed up that process?

2) Demonstrate the rules by having the students role-play what it looks like when someone’s obeying the rule and what it looks like when someone is disobeying the rule — I don’t need anyone seeing what it looks like when someone disobeys my rules. Especially if they do it in a funny way.

3) Behavior contract — It’s a waste of time. If they’re going to ignore your rules, they’re going to ignore your behavior contract. And you’re going to have to deal with the 40% of student who don’t bring them in.

4) Inspirational speech — It reveals that it’s your first year and doesn’t really inspire them. It worries them that you’re not going to be able to control them and that they’re not going to be able to control themselves. Not very inspirational. (See my post on ‘investing’)

P.S. Thanks to all the CMs who have e-mailed me or posted nice comments. It really means a lot to me, especially after 13 years of TFA telling me that there’s no advice that I can give to the CMs that they haven’t already learned at the institute. I’m supposed to be meeting with a high ranking TFA person later this summer, and I’ll be sure to show him these notes.

Common teacher mistake #3. Overusing cooperative learning.

Cooperative learning is a great tool when used properly and when used in moderation. Unfortunately some schools have ‘bought in’ to this method so much that teachers are actually mandated to seat their students in groups at all times. As a teacher, I’d like to be trusted to decide when I want my students in groups and when I want them in rows. This kind of inflexible rule by an administration takes away the underrated ‘independent work.’

The most common way teachers claim to use group work, all they are really doing is having students work on an individual activity, but to do it ‘in groups.’ This is better than the students doing it individually because of ‘peer tutoring.’ Since the teacher can’t be in more than one place at a time, this enables students who are following to explain to the students who aren’t. The argument goes that if at least one student in each group gets it, that student can teach it to the others.

Well, that might sound good, but if you’re teaching a lesson and you’re hoping that 25% of the students understand, you’re not doing a very good job. When I give an activity, I hope that I’ve explained it well enough that nearly everyone has no trouble completing it.

And you can have peer tutoring without seating the students in groups. If you have good enough classroom management, you can establish a dynamic where students, while they are trying to work independently, are permitted to ask a neighbor for help. That’s the dynamic in my class and it works great.

The ‘real’ way to make a cooperative learning activity is to make a task that really requires a group to accomplish. These activities take a very long time to create. When you make a good one, though, it’s a great feeling. Usually something goes wrong when you make an ‘ambitious’ lesson like this and then you’ve got to make notes so that when it comes time to do that lesson again next year, you’ll have improved it.

The two problems with cooperative learning are assessment and management.

When students work in groups it is very difficult to determine if everyone in the group is learning. Often the weaker students just ‘ride the coat tails’ of the stronger ones. And it’s not because those weaker student are lazy and don’t want to work. It’s just that the stronger ones answer the questions before they get a chance to process them.

Later on, when it’s time to test them, individually, you realize that the group work interfered with your ability to assess.

The oversimplified answer is, “Tell each group that you’re going to pick one student to explain an answer and then the whole group will get that grade. Now you’ve got peer pressure to work for you.”

I’d never do that. It’s really unfair to punish a student who understands the work just because he wasn’t able to successfully teach his group mate the material.

I have used incentives like, “The group that gets the best average on the test will get some extra credit points,” but I try not to punish groups that aren’t working well together.

If you’re teaching a skill and you really want to be sure that everyone learned it, you have to move them back into rows at the end and have each student do some individual work that you can collect and grade.

The other problem is management. The oversimplified response is, “Kids will be less likely to be off-task when they work in groups. You see, they want to talk. So you give them permission to do what they want, but now they’ll be talking in a productive way.”

Sounds good, but it’s a lot harder than that. They want to talk about the party they went to over the weekend. And by permitting them to talk, they have trouble resisting the temptation. It becomes a managment issue that takes an expert to prevent and handle. Haven’t you ever been put in a group (maybe during the TFA institute) where you were off-task? And you’re an adult.

I know I come off as grumpy in these posts. Remember: I like a good group activity. Some of the best lessons I’ve ever done have had group work in them. I’m just aware of how difficult it is to manage and to ensure that all the students really learned. It’s so important that all the students leave class thinking, “I learned something today,” and with group work, if you’re not an expert manager, it’s hard to ensure that.

What’s the #1 selling book in the ‘Classroom Managment’ category of Amazon.com? Give up? Well, as of today, I’m proud to say, it’s my ‘Reluctant Disciplinarian.’ You can have the content for free, however, on YouTube. I posted the workshop I presented at TFA institutes from 1995 to 2004.

Here’s proof of the milestone

Here’s a link to the list if you don’t believe it. (It might drop out of #1 by the time you look, but it will still be up there pretty high, I hope)

It chronicles my first two years of teaching. The first year was pretty bad, which is why, I guess, TFA doesn’t acknowledge the existence of the book. (Though the New York City Teaching Fellows buys a copy for every Fellow) Even though I went on to teach for a long time, I guess there are a lot of CMs who have similarly bad first years and then quit after that year or leave after having a better second year, and TFA doesn’t want to give their critics fuel. I think that giving the ciritcs fuel is OK as long as the book also helps new CMs avoid what happened to me.

Here’s the YouTube player. It’s an hour. If you’re in a rush, just watch parts 3, 4, and 5 for the main points.

The ‘evolution’ of the TFA institute.

You’d expect the 2008 institute, eighteen years after the first institute at USC, to be very different and superior to its 1990 ancestor. As someone who was around since the second institute, and who had the opportunity to participate in fifteen consecutive institutes from 1991 until 2005, I’m in a good position to discuss how the institute model got the way it is, and whether or not it is the result of years of subtle refinement.

Some questions I’ll try to trace the answers to:
Why is the institute only five weeks long?
How did they come up with the collaborative model?
Who staffed the institute before there were any alumni?

Here’s the story: The 1991 institute at USC was six weeks long. So was the 1992 one at CSUN Northridge and the 1993 one at UCLA. Working at these institutes were respected professionals from around the country. My ‘CMA’ was a teacher with twenty years experience. My friend had a ‘CMA’ who had been a principal for ten years. There were some really respected people in education who were the ‘deans.’ One of them, Paul Nash, was about 75 years old and wrote the article about education in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Since these institutes happened in LA, where they have ‘year round’ schools, each CM was assigned to a real school and a cooperating teacher. Depending on the teacher, some CMs, like me, got to teach by myself for the entire seven weeks. I taught three classes of 34 every day. Unfortunately, some CMs only got to watch their cooperating teacher.

Then TFA almost went bankrupt. Maybe it was their high institute payroll. They did a lot of mismanaging of money. For example they flew the entire 1991 corps out to the 1993 institute to ‘graduate.’ I believe that they owed a lot of money to some of these California schools so they had to create a very ‘no-frills’ institute in Houston.

So in 1994 they had to throw together a new, cheaper, model. The first thing they did was cut the institute to five weeks. Then, since Houston did not have year round schools, they created a summer school system. Since there weren’t enough kids to give each CM his or her own class, they made these collaborative groups of four. Some of these classes had less than twenty students in them. Since there were now alumni, they got rid of all the ‘seasoned’ experts and had all the trainers be alumni.

Years passed and people forgot that there was ever a time with a longer institute, with very seasoned trainers, with each CM getting to teach full classes. It just seemed like the way it’s always been – but now you know it wasn’t always that way.

Then, in 2001 they started ‘franchising.’ So there was a New York institute based on the Houston model, and now there are five institutes. Each is based on the Houston model which was based on operating with very rigid constraints with very little money.

But TFA isn’t broke anymore and it’s time to revisit what the major components of the institute are. Why not add another week to the institute? Then instead of having 17 days of student teaching, you’d have 22. That’s about 30% more student teaching. Also, why does practically everyone have to be an alum? Surely there are some experts out there who did not go through TFA that are very worthy of respect. Finally, why not make it a big priority to find a way to give each CM an opportunity to stand in front of a group of 34 students?

America is trusting TFA to produce 3,700 new teachers who will be able to teach 200,000 students this year. TFA owes it to those students to do everything possible to prepare CMs for this challenge.

OK. So now you might be thinking, “Aren’t you the guy who is known for having such a bad first year that you nearly quit / got fired / had a nervous breakdown? How can you say that training was better back then?” Well, the training still had a lot of problems. Maybe having all ‘experts’ isn’t good either since they can’t remember how hard the first year can be. I think that had I gotten to meet some actual alumni they might have been able to scare me a little into not being so overconfident. I’m not saying the old model was perfect. But after 18 years, I think the current model still needs a lot of improvement.

“Are you a new teacher?”

Some kid is definitely going to ask you so what are you going to say? What most new TFA teachers incorrectly think is the best way to answer this is to exaggerate the seventeen days (or hours!?!) of practice teaching during the institute. To me, this is like bragging about your girlfriend in Canada.

It’s not the right thing to say because when you eventually make a mistake that reveals that you must be a new teacher, then you’ll be not only a new teacher, but a liar.

The best way to answer the question is to confidently look the student in the eye and say, decisively, “Yes.” And then a half-second pause with an implied, “(and what’s it to you?)”, and then back to whatever you were talking about. Students respond to decisiveness, even from a new teacher.

If they follow up with, “How old are you?”, you just say, “No more personal questions,” and continue.

How can you instantly assess your whole class?

As you teach, you want to continually assess if your students are getting it. You don’t want to wait until you are grading the test to realize that half the class was lost. But in-class assessment is difficult.

The least effective way to tell if your whole class is getting it is to ask “Are there any questions?” Just because this question is met with silence or, my favorite, a chorus of about ten kids saying “Nooooo,” or asking “Does everyone get it?” followed by a bunch of kids, but not all, chanting “Yeeeeeeeees”, does not mean that the class is with you.

A lot more effective is to make up a question and ask a random student. If the random student gets it right, there’s a better chance than if you just call on the kid with her hand flailing. (At the bottom of this post I have a cool way to use Excel to generate a random name list)

If you really want to know if everyone gets it, you should ask one of the weaker students a question. If that student knows it, it’s likely most of the class does. I like the random student better since I don’t want the weaker student to think I’m picking on him.

But the best, and most fun for the students, way to instantly assess your entire class is to get a class set of mini-white boards. These are the greatest. You give each kid an 8 by 11 white board with a pen and a little eraser. Then you ask a question and have the class write their answers and hold them up. It’s like a game show.

Of course these questions need to be pretty low level on Bloom’s Taxonomy questions, but that’s OK. It’s still a great tool. These board aren’t even expensive, yet I’m the only teacher at my school that uses them. I’m not getting any money from this company, so don’t think that I have any motive besides helping out new teachers when I say that for $30 you can get 30 boards, 30 pens, and 30 little erasers (far superior than paper towels) from www.markerboardpeople.com

It can be annoying to distribute the materials so I have some big ziplock bags (or another brand, again I have no sponsors for the blog), and put six pens and six erasers in each bag and then just give the bag to the first student in each row.

I have these boards and I use them, though not as frequently as I should. I think I’ll make a goal to use them more next year. Ironically, I think that in the very old days (by this I mean the 1800’s and not 1991 when I started teaching) that students had individual chalkboards that accomplished the same thing. Still, you don’t see enough of this great, and cheap, tool.

Here’s the technology tip for making a random list of your students names:

Put your student’s names into column A of a spreadsheet. Assuming there are 34 students, go to the 35th cell of column A and paste:
=INDEX($A$1:$A$34,0,ROUND(34*RAND()+1,0))

Paste this into as many cells as you want down column A and you’ll have enough names to last you. A nice thing abou this list is that it will include ‘repeats’ so that students don’t think they’re ‘off the hook’ just because they got called on. (It’s always funny when I’m picking from the list and the same kid comes up three times in a row)