Continuing to Wait for Marzano

February 2012, leading up to the observation: With my observation now inevitable (I pictured my 2^nd-grade self in line for a smallpox vaccination, counting the kids in front of me, knowing there was no escape), I began to reflect on how many years I’ve spent proving myself to myself and to my students.

On my first day as an intern at Raa Middle School in 1976, I dreaded the possibility of failure and of the negative feedback that comes immediately – almost simultaneously with the incompetent act – for every teacher. Naïve, dreamy, idealistic – belly churning with nerves --, I tried as hard as I could to be an effective teacher. I wanted my students to learn something that day and, okay, I admit it, I also wanted them to like me. I also not only wanted to be an effective teacher, I wanted to be perceived as one, i.e., I wanted my effectiveness to recognized and rewarded.

(And, looking back, I’m really sorry, and I apologize to all of those students who, if they lived, would now be over 50 years old, for starting the class by playing Cat Stevens’ version of “Morning Has Broken.” I meant well!)

The same was true for my first day as a Freshman Comp teacher the following fall, and then again for my inaugural day as a college professor facing a Writing for Science Majors class at 8 a.m. in September of 1981.

I don’t know what other teachers are like, but every day of my teaching career, someone has been in my class watching me critically, making a list and checking it twice, causing me to fret and wince over every blunder and, when the class is over, to count the freaking hours until I can get back to that class and make right the sins of yesterday.

Like John Proctor in The Crucible, the magistrate that judged me sat in my heart; there were also typically 25 more external magistrates sitting in my class.

And now, being driven by my inner pedagogical demons for over 35 years -- driven, I humbly acknowledge, to a small truckload of teaching awards bestowed upon me at every stop along the way -- must I now endure an actual iPad-bearing judge with the power to articulate for the world my competency level as gauged by a Marzanometer? And with the power, in theory, to impact my salary and my job security?

Having driven myself fairly mad with these ruminations, I was led to ponder the unfairness of this ordeal on another count. My experience has led me to believe that to be an effective teacher requires a great deal of time and labor. There is no reason to recount here the hundreds of information bits swirling around in a teacher’s brain from the moment s/he flicks the classroom lights on at an ungodly hour in the morning when even newspaper deliverers are sleeping, to the depleted afternoon when s/he wobbles back out to the car, a bundle of student manuscripts nestled in the book bag.

The daily teaching experience is, as a friend of mine said, like racing into a house on fire, looking for people to save. Even young teachers who still have short-term memory can become disoriented, sign the wrong form, hit the wrong key, give the wrong grade, call the wrong name.

For teachers driven to do their best daily, who are trying with all their might to be highly effective, this is a very demanding and sometimes overwhelming job.  

So. Add to this another layer of bureaucracy to one already Everest high; add many more urgent Marzano-related messages and meetings and workshops; add pre-observation and post-observation conferences, and the forms required for each; add the hours foolish teachers like me will spend on that one class that will be observed, at the expense of the other classes and of that aforementioned bundle of student manuscripts.

It isn’t fair, I thought, to make me a less effective teacher by forcing me to prove that I’m a highly effective one.

Waiting for Marzano

In case you are a seasoned teacher and haven’t undergone your Marzanoscopy yet, maybe I can help by providing you with a timeline of what it was like for me in the days and weeks leading up to the procedure, followed by a play-by-play of the Thing Itself, then a reflection on the entire journey.

I may also include a checklist which should be especially helpful now that we know teaching can be both assessed and perfected through the use of weights and measures.

I hope readers will not be put off by what appears to be whining and complaining. I have tried to be honest about the whole thing, and not worry over whether I’m pleasing any particular audience in the process. So, if it is whining, it’s at least genuine and heartfelt whining. This is what it actually felt like to me, a 35-year veteran of teaching.  

Furthermore, in case what follows is so off-putting that readers can’t get themselves to finish it, I’ll give you a brief version of my conclusion: The process is absurd and wasteful, but not without benefits – benefits I seriously doubt were ever intended by Marzano and his fellow rubricifiers.

August 2011: During preplanning, I hear ominous references to a new evaluation process and to something called iObservation and to something else called Marzano, which turned out to be someone’s name. I tune most of these out because I am too preoccupied with something called Skyward, a program that would soon be taking hours away from my efforts to be a highly effective teacher (HET). Also, I always like to look forward to the new academic year, and I don’t want to be brought down by this intrusive junk.

October 2011: We are alerted during a Wednesday in-service about upcoming workshops to help prepare us for the Marzanofication of the evaluation process. Some would be for rookies (may God spread his mercy upon them), others for out-the-door old-timers like me. I mentally hit delete on the dates for the rookies and go into denial about the others because I have too many papers to grade and I’m still not sure how to change grades on Skyward.

November 2011: As pre-evaluation workshops begin to proliferate, Marzanophobia (or Misomarzano) sets in. I learn there is an especially long meeting on the horizon, a Marzanopalooza, for old-timers, and I immediately set out to learn the most critical information about it, i.e., is it mandatory?

December 2011: I write a snarky blog entry in which I imagine Marzano raking in the dough from this obnoxious system and roasting his chestnuts over an open fire. I also quickly make a mental list of 39 things teachers do that aren’t part of Marzano’s list of indicators, not even his Super Marzanio list of 60, and wonder if it’s okay to stop doing all of these things in order to better my chances of becoming HET.

January 2012: Finally, I’m knocked out of my denial when, at either an in-service or a PLP, I’m handed a date for my pre-observation meeting with a list of requirements for said meeting and a list of the indicators my observer will be iBalling. I guess I will need to fashion a lesson that allows me to allow her to check “YES” on those babies. Now the worrying and fretting can begin in earnest.

More on Observation Day

Let’s say you’re going to be observed tomorrow morning.

If you go back and look quickly at my early posts on first-day activities and on establishing rapport with your students, and you realize that you weren’t able to do any of that with this year’s bunch and, actually, you never got to know each other and they don’t like you very much, well, you’re probably screwed.

If you overstepped your bounds earlier this semester or played a power card when you really didn’t need to, well, you’re probably screwed again. When you “win” against a teenager, especially in a battle you should’ve let slide in the first place, said teenager immediately begins to plan a re-match, a retaliatory strike. Nothing like seeing you in the vulnerable position of being observed by someone who can play a power card on you to bring out his or her Adolescent Avenger.

Okay, I’m overstating a bit. Most of your kids are probably as forgiving as your pets. Only a few will hold on to a grudge like sweet death. But, hey, don’t tempt them.

Here’s the upside: If your students know you care about them, are pulling for them, are doing your best to be a good, helpful, fair teacher, they’ll team up to make your observation day a success.
If you have advanced notice – and I think you will as that’s part of the new MPMP (Marzano Plan for Merit Pay) – tell them about it and tell them what you need to happen. Tell them to pay no attention to the new grownup in the room. Tell them to keep their focus on you and to follow your cues.

Maybe they should know about the relevant Marzano indicators, and you could even do a little rehearsal: “When I allude to Lady GaGa’s 14-minute video, I’m demonstrating ‘Withitness,’ so act interested.” That way it will be sort of like teaching to the test, something all of us should be pretty much accustomed to by now. And it’ll seem kind of fake and staged. But didn’t you really want to be an actor in the first place?

I admit that back when I was a very young freshman-comp teacher at FloridaState, I’d tell my students what my observer wanted. I knew, for example, that one of these guys thought it was critical to have students from different areas in the room to participate, i.e., he didn’t want only people in the first two rows to talk.

Incidentally, just so you know, it makes absolutely no difference what part of the room student contributions emit from. But back to my story.

So on observation day, introspective students would trade desks with some extroverts so we’d have good, spread-out coverage. It always pleased me to see this shortly after I had thrown up in the men’s room just down the hall.

Be sure to put your goals for the day on the board, and that should put you over the top. More on all of this later. If you have questions, please find a way to get them to me.

"Come watch my pretend class!"

There’s no denying that being observed is stressful, no matter how long you’ve been teaching.

The Boston Celtics’ legendary Hall-of-Fame center Bill Russell claims, during his first few years in the NBA, he got so worked up that he threw up before every game. Later, he said, he got his nerves in check and only threw up before playoff games.

Likewise, in my first year or so as a teacher, I’d get so pumped up for a class I’d become almost ill. But by my third year, I only tossed my grits on the days I was observed.

Even now, after a handful of decades, I don’t look forward to it. Why is that? I’m not ashamed of or embarrassed by my teaching. I’m not a bad teacher. I shouldn’t be intimidated if Marzano himself trotted in for a peek. But there’s something unnatural about the whole thing.

People who understand teaching know that what is only a collection of teenagers on the first day evolves into some sort of community after a few weeks, and usually into another kind of community a few weeks after that.

The same sort of thing happens, in microcosm, during each class. There is, in the first minutes, the Great Entrance, a sort of unruly procession of kids shaking off the transitory freedom sandwiched between classes, the conversation bytes as they settle into desks, trading a few last-second greetings or jibes or insults with their friends across the room, the rehashing and reducing – if it’s a quiz day – of a literary masterpiece into hurried simplistic fragments (“Macbeth has Banquo wacked but, but like, his kid gets away and Macbeth totally freaks … ”).

After some order is established, they move into a probationary, wait-and-see period, no one wanting to be the first one to show too much interest. Slowly, a conversation begins and the community, which was alive and well yesterday, rises like a Phoenix from its ashes and class begins in earnest.
What does it take to derail this process? Very little. Once, a first-period student wanted to see how things went in second period, so she dropped by, found a seat and quietly observed. The mood of the class changed. The temperature dropped a degree or two.

An observer, then, is assured of not observing your actual class, especially if she enters once the conversation has begun. This community, this rapport that you’ve spent so many hours building devolves into, to quote Fitzgerald, a “feigned counterfeit ease,” an icy, self-conscious desire (you hope) to please, a collective impulse of (you hope) good intent.

So maybe this is a reason not to be nervous: Your actual class will not be observed. The stuff that has gone badly for you on other days probably won’t today; those spontaneous zingers you’ve fired off with great effect into a sometimes appreciative teenaged audience will be silenced today; if there is laughter, it will be forced or muted or self-conscious, with a look back over the shoulder to see how the observer’s taking this.

Unless you can loosen things up a little, your observer will watch you teach a room full of pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

And speaking of invasion, this whole process feels something like a weird sort of invasion of privacy.

There are a few things you can do to prepare for this bit of artifice, this teaching theatre, and it doesn’t have to include memorizing the Marzano indicators. After a brief commercial break, I’ll be back with some suggestions.

"Indicators" Aren't the Whole Story

Now that the holidays are upon us, it is time for us all to pause and reflect on what is most important to us. And by “most important,” I can only mean attending day-long workshops designed to prepare us for the rigorous new Marzano-based evaluation system which will be used to determine if we can keep our jobs or, if we’re really good, qualify for Merit Pay – the funding of which, by the way, seems awfully doubtful at this point.

Marzano (let’s just say his first name is “Hank”), meanwhile, is probably resting comfortably at home with his family, roasting his chestnuts over an open fire and serenely surveying the material luxuries he has earned by reinventing the ancient Wheel of Pedagogy.

Hank Marzano, of LearningSciencesInternational (all one word with the “i” in “Learning” dotted with a rising sun), has generated, isolated or discovered 60 indicators of, I guess, effective teaching. Many school systems, however, have trimmed those down to, say, 15 or 18 because 60 is – what’s the academic term? – freakin’ insane!

You can imagine my chagrin when I was first introduced to this list at the beginning of my 31^st year of teaching, 36^th if you include my graduate teaching-assistant years. I was overwhelmed with regret. “If only I had known about these 60 indicators in 1981,” I cried out above the din of my colleagues chatting among themselves during the in-service, “I might’ve amounted to something. I could’ve been a contender! I could’ve been doing this thing right all these years!”

To my beloved new colleagues whose generous spirits have softly beckoned them into these unfriendly waters – infested not so much with sharks as with ill-tempered ducks – I cannot blame you if you stay up late at night studying and memorizing the Marzano Indicators and practicing as many as possible in front of body-length mirrors.

But as you proceed through Marzano’s “Domains” and “Lesson Segments” and “Design Questions,” doesn’t it feel as if your gold has been turned into straw?

My gold appeared decades ago – possibly before Hank was even born – when a teacher’s deep love for the words imprinted on the wispy, onionskin-thin pages of the Norton Anthology of British Literature inspired me to follow his gaze to those pages and follow my heart to a life of teaching and learning. Then, as I’ve recorded in an earlier post, my journey almost immediately took me into the presence of another mentor who gave me, not 60 indicators, but 1 simple maxim that “You can’t teach’em if you don’t love’m.”

You most likely have a similar story. Don’t abandon it. Repeat it to yourself like a mantra throughout the endless holiday workshops ahead. Don’t let the soullessness of this enforced quantification of a most human gift sour your resolve to do what you love. Stay with what brought you here and you’ll be nurturing and encouraging students long after Marzano’s obnoxious little checklist has been deposited into the dust bin of pedagogical history.

How Grading Is Like Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Here’s the short version of how to keep grading from being a disproportionate pain for you, your students and their parents: Have clearly articulated standards, help your students meet those standards, provide enough feedback to explain or justify your grade, be flexible enough to admit when you’ve made a mistake and do all you can to relieve anxiety about grades.

It is unfair, dishonest and misleading to give C- work a B or vice versa. The grade is a flimsy shorthand effort to tell the student where she stands, how near or far she is from mastering the course content. Your comments, written or otherwise, about the grade tell her what she needs to do to achieve that mastery, and they tell you what you need to do to help.

A higher grade than she deserves will boost her self-esteem, make her mom happy and make both of them leave you alone so you can grade the rest of your essays, but now the whole process has become a waste of time, as big a lie as our cynical students already believe it to be. A lower grade than she deserves, on the other hand, can be pretty devastating, especially if she is actually working hard in your class.

So if you are going to be your department’s new Ms. or Mr. Hardass, you must provide the stepladder to help students reach your lofty standards. Just telling them to work harder is no more effective than a basketball coach telling his players to play harder while they’re receiving a 78-21 shellacking. You must tell them specifically the areas in which they need to improve. If you’re teaching an honors or AP class, you’ll almost certainly need to tell mom, too, because she or her beloved spouse will be in touch. How much time, during that hectic first year, do you want to spend in parent conferences?

If you are planning on being Ms. or Mr. Easy-A, well, don’t. Some of your students will be driven, highly motivated workaholics in training, and they will have dang well earned that A. They won’t appreciate the goofball sitting next to them getting the same grade for that junk he scrawled on the way to class. To make matters even worse, on rare occasions the goofball will put his heart into an assignment, for once just completely investing himself in it – maybe because you’ve finally assigned something that interests him – and then be so excited to learn that at long last he has earned an A … only to find that pretty much everyone else did, too.

Clearly, you have to get this grading thing somewhat right, but you can’t try to fine tune it too much. As a new teacher, I spent far too much time agonizing over the most accurate grade for an essay. I would actually be grinding my teeth over the distinction between, say, a C and C+. I’d refer back to the rubric, if I had one, compare the essay to others I’d given Cs or C+s to, maybe even ask some of my fellow equally clueless colleagues.

This turns out to be a huge waste of time. You have to acknowledge that evaluating writing is an inexact science; that their other grades in your class will correct the inconsistency in this one; that their future happiness turns out not to be directly related to the grade they received on a particular essay; that if they’re unhappy with the grade, they may be moved to come talk to you about it and therefore learn much more than they would’ve from your comments alone.

Memories Are Made of This

Dear New Teacher,

It must’ve occurred to you by now that you are locked into a curriculum designed by lawmakers elected by the wise citizens of the state, lawmakers who know far more about pedagogy than the human beings who have devoted their entire adult lives to its study and practice.

Consequently, it is your job simply to prepare your students for exams. If they pass these exams, it will show that you are a successful teacher. This means you can keep your job. It doesn’t mean much more than that.

Yawn. And just think: You gave up being a systems analyst for this.

On the other hand, these students will only take this class from you once. The arc of a kid’s life has placed her in your hands, in no one’s classroom but yours. You have one shot at offering this young person something valuable that in some way emanates from the combination of you, the kid, and the course.

Many other teachers could’ve helped little Bobby pass those standardized tests. What is it that you alone can do?

Love and best wishes,

Doc