Minnesota Teacher of the Year

I wanted to make a quick post first and foremost to congratulate our new Minnesota Teacher of the Year, Carleen Gulstad. She is both articulate and enthusiastic, and will be a wonderful representative for Minnesota educators! Congratulations, Carleen! I’m very happy for you!

In speaking with Carleen about the future of this blog, we decided that rather than limit it to exclusively the current Minnesota Teacher of the Year, that we could extend an invitation to all former Minnesota Teachers of the Year to participate in posting on the blog. Things get fairly hectic during the year you are the Teacher of the Year, and in this way we think we could expand both the reach and content of the blog. I’ve got piles of notes from this past year, and I’m looking forward to finally having time turn some of them into posts. But more to the point: if you are a past Minnesota Teacher of the Year and would like to write a few pieces on the blog, feel free to contact me at any time and we’ll get you set up with an authoring account. I will stay on as the person behind the scenes managing the blog.

I’ve got a few commitments that are keeping me tied up until the end of June, but at that time I’ll go through this blog and redo the format and focus of the blog. Carleen, of course, will have center stage, but I’ll add a page for past Minnesota Teachers of the Year who would like to post. So check back in early July for more information and a slightly different setup.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about the snap decisions human beings make and their accuracy. The book is a fascinating read that touches on a wide range of subject matter. One chapter of the book, interestingly enough, talks about an experiment on evaluating teachers done by Tufts psychologist Nalini Ambady.

In her series of experiments, random people were shown short video clips of teachers in class. They were then asked to evaluate the effectiveness of the teachers. Although these subjects had never met the teachers they watched, their evaluations showed an amazingly high correlation with the real conclusions drawn by the students who actually took the course.

What gets even more interesting is what the subjects actually saw in later runs of the experiment: random six-second silent video clips. The conclusion, from page thirteen of the book: A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the class for an entire semester.

To be fair, the book seems a bit inaccurate. The abstract for the study mentions six-second clips, but not two-second clips. But in either case, the point is made.

Now, Ambady realized that one could argue that a student’s impression of teacher effectiveness may not represent an accurate assessment of actual teacher effectiveness, so she performed a subsequent experiment (not covered in the book Blink). In this experiment, she measured the evaluations of teacher effectiveness against an actual measure of their effectiveness. Her conclusion: “Students learned more from teachers who were seen in the thin (video) slices as having the qualities of a better teacher.” In other words, subjects were able to accurately measure teacher effectiveness after watching only six silent seconds of that teacher teaching. (More details on both her experiments can be found here, about two-thirds of the way down the page.)

Now this perhaps gets somewhat humorous if you think about all the time, money, and effort that goes into evaluating teachers—whether that be for hiring purposes or for the current discussions regarding Q-Comp and teacher performance pay—but I’ll leave that discussion for others. I’m more interested in this question: What did they see?

What could the subjects have seen in six seconds that could possibly lead them to so successfully measure teacher effectiveness? What do effective teachers consistently do that ineffective teachers consistently don’t do, and how can it be so telling? The article mentions that the video clips included “molar nonverbal behavior”, which refers to movements such as walking, writing, and gesturing. Interesting.

In any case, if you accept the conclusions of these studies, here’s something for us teachers to ponder next September as we start school: In the first six seconds of class on the first day of school your students can accurately judge your effectiveness as a teacher, even if they can’t hear a word you say.

Congratulations to the newly announced 28 semifinalists for the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year honor!

Personally, it was a treat to be able to get a chance to learn about so many wonderful teachers in Minnesota during the first stage of the process. I’ve mentioned this in speeches, but seeing so many fine candidates for the award makes me wish there were a way to cut the distinction up and share it over all the deserving teachers in the state.

A full list of the semifinalists for the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year honor and more details on the award are available on the Education Minnesota website.

A few weeks ago I was invited to give a speech on Myths, Assumptions, and Attitudes in education. It wasn’t a viewpoint I was accustomed to examining. Initially I found myself struggling with the topic, but after a bit I realized that our educational climate is packed with stubborn misconceptions that are incorrect yet refuse to die. Once such misconception is that America’s Ivy League schools are too expensive for the average student to afford.

Every year, I’ll have a conversation with a talented high school senior who will mention that they didn’t consider applying to a college such as Harvard or Yale because their family couldn’t afford the tuition. For whatever reason, the myth persists that Ivy League schools are solely for the rich. After all, Harvard College’s tuition is over $30,000, and the total cost after room, board, and miscellaneous fees is close to $46,000. How could a middle-class family afford that?

The truth of Ivy League affordability, however, is quite different, and the news keeps getting better. In December of 2007, Harvard revealed a new plan to increase financial assistance to undergraduates by 43%. Students from families who earn less than $60,000 will pay nothing. Even at a family-income level of $180,000, families will only be asked to contribute 10% of their income. The end result is that the cost of Harvard is comparable to in-state tuition at a public university. Yale announced a similar plan this month. Other Ivy League schools have similar plans in place.

The reality is that—conversely—an Ivy League school is a fantastic place to apply if you come from a family of limited means. In many cases, you’re going to get a better financial support package than you would from a public institution.

You’re also likely to graduate with less debt, as Ivy League schools are moving to eliminate student loan calculations in financial aid packages. Even now, Ivy League students graduate with significantly less debt than their counterparts who have attended other institutions. The average debt for a senior graduating from Harvard has dropped from $16,000 to $6,400, roughly one-third of the national average. With this new policy in place, that number will fall closer to zero.

As an aside, the ramifications of this reduced student debt can only help shatter another Ivy League myth that incorrectly assumes Ivy League graduates are focused solely on personal economic gain, and pursue career paths of the rich and glamorous. With much less debt, graduates from America’s prestigious institutions will be much freer to pursue altruistic careers instead of feeling pressure to earn money to pay off their alma mater.

Bottom line: It’s worth a shot to apply to an Ivy League school if you’ve got the marks and the achievements to possibly get accepted. Not applying is the same as getting refused, so go for it. Change your life.

Related reading: Recent Economist Article

Image Credit: blisspix

Being the Minnesota Teacher of the Year has been both the most challenging and the most rewarding year I have spent in education. The three months since my last post in this blog have rocketed by, and it’s hard to think that in only three and a half more months there will be a new Minnesota Teacher of the Year.

The only disappointment I have had so far is that I had hoped to be more proactive with the award in reaching out into the educational community to get involved in issues and groups of my choosing. However, with a full teaching workload and an average of two Teacher of the Year engagements, presentations, or speeches each week, I’ve found my plate full in simply reacting to the various invitations and requests that have come my way over the past three months.

This past summer, when I met Neil Witikko, 1997 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, I asked him what surprised him the most during his year as Minnesota Teacher of the Year. He replied that he had been caught off guard by the amount of time it took to prepare his speeches and presentations. I would readily agree with this. I had assumed that I would develop a set of three or four speeches to give during the year, but what I’ve found is that I’ve had such a wide range of audiences that I have only had a couple of occasions where I felt comfortable using a speech from a previous event. I’ve also learned a lot over these past eight months, and my beliefs about education have constantly evolved during this time. This has led to what seems a perpetual tweaking and revising of my messages.

This is not to complain. The experiences I’ve had have been marvelous, varied, and incredibly enriching. I have learned more about myself and education in this past year than I have in the previous sixteen combined.

The good news is that I finally feel like things have settled to the point where I’ve got a library of messages that I can build from to be more efficient in my speech preparations. Over the past two weeks, I’ve started to feel like I’ve got my life under control again, and I look forward to being a bit more proactive with the award over these next three and a half months. I also look forward to chronicling more of the year’s experiences in this blog as the year winds down.

Time, which usually flies, is simply rocketing along this year. I can’t believe it’s been nearly six months since I was selected as the 2007 Minnesota Teacher of the Year. Already the process to select the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year has begun. The process begins with a six-week nominated period, during which time Education Minnesota accepts nominations.

Anyone can nominate a candidate, so if you’ve had a teacher that has had an impact on your life or whose teaching you greatly respect, nominating them for Minnesota Teacher of the Year is a wonderful way to send them a special thank you. I was thrilled just to have been nominated last year.

The nomination process is incredibly simple. Just go to the 2008 Minnesota Teacher of the Year Nomination page on the Education Minnesota website, fill out the nomination form, and submit it online. Very easy and elegant.

Nominees must teach pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, hold at least a bachelor’s degree and Minnesota teaching license, have completed at least three full years of teaching by the nomination deadline, and intend to teach the 2008-09 school year. A lot of people assume that the award is for public school teachers only, but that is not the case. Any teacher—publicly or privately employed—who meets the above criteria can be nominated.

The deadline for nominations is November 15, 2007.

I had the honor of giving a speech at the District 287 school year kick-off in late August. I chose to speak about why teachers teach. Click on the image below to see a Quicktime video of the 12-minute speech.

I’d welcome other teachers and readers to share their comments as well. Why do you teach? What brings you back each fall to do what you do?

Below is the text of the speech:

Why I Teach
Since getting this award, a lot of people in the media and private sector have asked me why I became a teacher. Why do I teach? You don’t have much time to think then, when people ask you a direct question in front of a lot of other people. Generally I said the first thing that came to my mind. “Well, I like it.” “I like helping people learn.” “I think it’s important.” But those answers didn’t feel right. There was something missing there, something bigger. Why do I teach? Why do we all teach? The real answer is something that can’t be summed up in a single sentence. I’ve had a chance to think more about this, to reflect on this, on why I teach, why all of us here work with education, we why all teach. I thought I would share with you my answer, with the thought that parts of this answer may resonate within you.

Why do I teach?

I teach because I believe. I teach because I believe that education is the way up and the way out. I teach because I believe that anyone can learn, and that in doing so they can become more than they currently are. I teach because I believe that a society rises or falls in equal measure to the quality of its educational system, and that it’s rare for an educated person to be a killer, a drug dealer, or a rapist. I teach because even after all these years, I still believe in the joy of learning, and that if I do my job right, others can share in that.

I teach because of the influence teachers had on me. I teach because of Will Collins, my high school English teacher, who showed me how incredibly fun learning can be. I teach because of Pete Skipper, another teacher. At a time when I was making a lot of bad choices in life, he took the time to get to know me, to treat me like a human being first, and a student second. I teach because he listened, and in listening so well, inspired me to try to be like him.

I teach because I forgive myself, because somehow I’ve come to grips with my faults, my failures, the kids I lost, the kids who didn’t learn, the kids who never did their homework and failed my class, the broken angry kid that I never connected with. The importance of our job compels me to accept my imperfections, to still care, to still try, to still believe in every single student who will walk into my classroom next week. I can only do that if I overlook past failures.

I teach because of the awesome pay, the perks, the low-stress work environment, and the incredible social prestige that comes with being a teacher. Whoops, that’s from my rock star speech. I remember when I was first teaching and I’d drive to a party in my beat-up, ten-year-old “teacher” car. Talk about a chick magnet. Yeah, baby, I’m a teacher. Come get some! Ok, That’s not why I teach.

I teach because I have found peace in a balance of work and privacy. I will give you much of who I am, but not all of it. I enjoy myself, my family, my individual pursuits. Being a whole person makes me a better teacher, and I am still teaching because I’ve been able to define limits to how much I give, and be comfortable with those limits.

I teach because of the good days, the days when everything works right, when I hear students laughing, when I see students learning. I teach for those special moments, those moments when it all clicks and you see a classroom crackling with energy and focus, when the bell rings at the end of class and catches everyone by surprise, and students look at the clock and say, “Wow, that was fast.” I teach because I don’t need a thank you, a handshake, or a compliment when that happens. It’s good enough for me that it happened.

A few years ago, I was at a dinner party, and acquaintances nearby me were talking about a man that one of the women had starting dating. When asked how the relationship was going, the woman replied that things were going well but she wasn’t sure if it would amount to anything. “He’s nice,” she said. “We have fun and all. I like him, but you know, he’s just a teacher.”

That one hurts. “Just a teacher,” and everything it implies. But the more I think about “just a teacher”, the more I realize this: Just because something is that way, doesn’t mean it should be that way. So perhaps I teach because I hold out hope that if we do our jobs well, with passion and professionalism, that somewhere down the line, a decade or two in the future, the educational climate in the United States will be different, that we’ll have a United States culture similar to that of some Asian countries, where the word for teacher—sensei—is the same word used for medical doctors.

I teach because of the students and their stories. Stories so incredible that they can’t be fiction. Stories of individual achievement and effort that border on heroic.

I teach because of a kid in my Japanese class a few years ago. A kid who comes from a background with every statistical indicator for a troubled life. Single mom. Low income. Living in an apartment. Minority. A kid who has never met his dad. A kid who comes up to me as a freshman in Japanese 1 a few months into class and says, “I want to go to Japan. How can I do it?” I point him to the scholarships that are available to Japan, but I mention that you’ve got to be good at Japanese to get one. This kid gets to work. And he works. And over the course of the next few months he works more than I’ve seen anyone work at anything. At times it was painful to watch, because this is a kid who had to grind things down by effort, who really had to work to get it. By the time scholarship applications are due, he’s got a solid A in Japanese, and I thought he had a decent chance to get one. He came in a few weeks later, at the point of tears. He didn’t get the scholarship. I thought it would be impossible for him, for anyone, to try so hard for something and fail, and have the strength to try again, but he did.

The next year he came back, worked just as hard, applied again, and failed again. This time, I asked him to ask the exchange organization, Youth For Understanding, if they could give him some areas to work on for next year’s application. He came back and said they thought he could work on his English writing in the essays. I asked him to show them to me. After looking at them, to put it politely, they were right. He needed to be a better writer. I offered to help him over the summer with his English writing. I figured that I could email him an assignment once a week, and that he could do the writing in the upcoming week, and that we could go over that a couple of times in the summer. What happened instead was that I’d send an email with about three or four hours’ worth of writing to do on a Monday afternoon, and he would invariably send it back to me the same day, fully done. He wanted this thing that badly. By now, I was noticing things about him that hadn’t been there before. He was learning faster. He was getting concepts more quickly. Simply put, he was getting smarter.

You can’t apply for the scholarships as a Senior, so his Junior year was his last chance. Once again, he worked incredibly hard. Once again, he applied. Once again, he came back with tears in his eyes. But this time, they were tears of happiness. He won.

He spent a full year in Japan, came back, and graduated from high school. Last fall he got accepted to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Next week, he’ll be entering his sophomore year. That’s why I teach.

I teach because of a nervously trembling Alternative Learning Center student who stands up in front of the District 287 board and talks about how she is emailing her new friends in China, because Paul Bennett and Bill Jepson—despite being told they are crazy for even attempting such a trip with “those kind of kids”—take a group of ALC students to China over spring break, and in doing so change kids’ lives forever. I teach because of the embarrassed smiles on students’ faces when John Awsumb stands at the door to North Vista at the end of every school day and enthusiastically sends each student home with unique words of praise and encouragement, because he knows the power of words, and that one word can sometimes be enough to tip a life to the good. I teach because of the tears of joy in students faces at a graduation ceremony at Ridgedale Alternative Program, tears that bear witness to the incredible power that arises when an entire staff believes that all good teaching centers on human relationships. Yes, I teach because I’m surrounded by so many great teachers.

You can call me “just a teacher”. I’m still going to teach. There are days when I fail miserably at what I do. There are days when I lose my confidence, days when I get bone tired, days when I get overwhelmed, stressed, and struggle. I am still going to teach. I’m still going to bring it every single day because in the end, one smile, one laugh, one more kid who gets through high school, one more kid who gets into college, can wipe away all that frustration in an instant. These are not our accomplishments, these students that achieve because of their determination and intelligence, but in the deepest corner of my heart, I teach because I allow myself one small indulgence, one small indulgence that lets me believe that perhaps some of those smiles would not have existed if I weren’t there, that perhaps one former student with a degree, a good job, and a happy family, might have traveled a lesser road if I had traveled a different one. And that’s enough for me. I teach because somewhere, deep down inside, I’d like to think that sometimes, just sometimes, we make a difference.

I always compare Labor Day weekend to the that silent spot at the top of a rollercoaster, right before the coaster makes its first big drop. The stark contrast of pace in a teacher’s life is never so pronounced as it is on that September weekend before the first classes start.

For me, I always have a mix of nervousness, fear, and excitement on that last Monday night. I think some of the fear comes from a heightened sense of how important a good start to the year is. All teachers will tell you how important the first week is, and how important the first month is. However, the more I teach, the more I’ve come to realize that September is even more important than I ever imagined it to be. Everything is magnified in September. So many elements of the class take shape: pace, energy, focus, motivation, belief, work habits. Knowing how important the start is always gives me a bit of a knot in my stomach as things start out, because if things go well in September, generally they’ll be going well in April and May. Mess up September, and you can be looking up at a long year.

Once classes start, however, I’m reminded of how much I like the energy of the classroom. So many of my concerns about the nuances of classroom management can be addressed most effectively if I simply focus my energy on making my classroom fun, challenging, and engaging. This isn’t to say that classroom management isn’t important—it’s incredibly important—but it’s always a powerful realization for me the degree to which effective classroom management centers on engaging classes, and I always seem to have to relearn this each fall in order for the knot in my stomach to vanish. This year has been no exception. As we enter the second week of school now, my fear and nervousness have largely faded away, and I can concentrate on teaching.

My Teacher of the Year responsibilities have shown me a different side of education—a side that is incredibly exciting and rewarding to experience—but the core of my experience is still the classroom, and it feels good to be back.

Whoops. Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve updated. With the flurry of activity at the end of school, things got fairly busy during the first half of June. By the time things wrapped up, I was fairly spent. After a week of playing with my children, entertaining visiting friends, and watching some movies, I’ve gotten back to work this past week.

This summer I’ll be working on a new online Japanese course for Northern Star Online, revamping our two existing online Japanese courses, teaching Japanese online, and helping some Chinese teachers learn about constructing/teaching online courses. These projects started in earnest this past week.

This still will leave quite a bit of time still to spend with family, recharge, and enjoy myself. As a teacher, I love the revitalizing that I can do during the summer months. I try to swim outside on a daily basis, get outside as much as possible, and spend a lot of time with family and friends.

Teacher of the Year events are relatively light in the next two months, but pick up again around the middle of August. I did have an interview this past week with Plymouth Magazine, who will be doing a feature article during September. Early in July, I’ll be doing a seminar on Active Learning for a group of administrators at Intermediate District 287.

I’ll be traveling on vacation this upcoming week, but am aiming to write more consistently in a couple of weeks. I still have a list of topics I’d like to address and a half dozen or so topics I’d like to wrap up.

I’ve spent some time in the past week over at Scott McLeod’s Dangerously Irrelevant blog. I’m impressed at the consistently interesting posts he puts up. This week, for example, is Change Week. It focuses on elements of technological change in K-12 education. This post is a good example of the quality of stuff he puts up. It discusses elements of the spread of innovation through a group or organization.

I would argue that one of the biggest obstacles to technological innovation in high schools is the current work conditions in schools. Class sizes have crept to extraordinarily high levels in many schools, putting extreme workloads on many teachers. Based on experience and observation I’d say that the average high school teacher has at most one hour of contract time per day that is free (after responsibilities such as meetings, phone calls, helping students, etc., have been addressed). During this time the teacher must prepare and grade for an average of five classes. With class sizes often exceeding 35 students, an hour is hardly enough time to cover this. This leaves scant time to play with technology, unless the teacher is willing to do so on his or her own time.

The complexity and transience of technology create more obstacles for a teacher. Learning the necessary skills to use a new piece of software and create lessons for it can take a significant investment of time for an already overloaded teacher. Furthermore, this investment is top heavy. It can often take 10-20 hours of work before a teacher will have anything tangible and ready for use in the classroom. Also, good teachers develop units and lessons they can design once and use numerous times. Technology-based units, however, are never finished. Software and websites often change, and change quickly. Maintenance time must be factored into development plans. I’ve seen teachers work hard over the summer building online courses reliant on external websites, only to then see the teachers struggle to put out fires over the course of the school year as websites move, disappear, or change links.

As another example, just this winter I trained a number of teachers on the excellent (and at the time, free of charge) QuizStar program, which is a website that allows teachers to set up class lists online and build online quizzes for them. This is a slick, easy-to-use program that teachers can dig right in and use. Several teachers (myself included) were building libraries of quizzes for use in their courses. Then, this spring QuizStar changed to a fee-based format ($36/year for individual teachers). Argh. Our district didn’t have money to pay the fee. Teachers who weren’t willing to pay out of their pockets felt that their work in learning the program and building up quizzes was largely wasted, as they no longer could access their quizzes without paying the fee.

This doesn’t mean to say that technological change can’t be implemented in schools. It can be done and it is being done. But I think that the strategies to implementing change take careful consideration, and often it is this level where technological innovation in schools goes askew. At some point in the upcoming week, I’ll try to outline some of the strategies and programs that we’ve found effective in implementing technological change at some of our Alternative Learning Centers in Intermediate District 287.

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