 Please join me in welcoming Terry Butts, Nancy Lindblum, and Joan Sobel. I'd like to start by asking our participant educators to react to what they just heard in the presentation and some of your questions, and maybe if they were following the Twitter hashtag in the AFCON. What are the implications of the profession of teaching given what has been laid out? What would you add? What would you refine? Any particular order? No? Hello, my name is Terry Butts, as you can see, and a lot was said in that 45 minutes. Do you agree? Yes, a lot. And I was trying to jot down some notes. And one of the things that I took away from it dealing with what Paul was saying was about the delivery system and I'm paraphrasing how we need to make that shift from the industrial model to what we are now, which is information model. And that has to take place in what Deborah was saying as far as our teacher preparation is concerned. Our teachers are teaching still the same way that we were taught. We're 21st century children, but we're teaching with a 20th century model, we're looking at children knowing facts, knowing information, being able to recall, where now we have to move toward conceptual understanding. And there's a lot of information out there. I don't need to stand in front of a classroom and disseminate information anymore. Pick up any device and there's your information. But now I have to teach children how to make sense out of nonsense. I have to teach children to be creative. I have to teach them to be critical thinkers and problem solvers. That can't be done when we're still trying to teach along with the industrial model where children are setting and getting. Children now have to be involved, they have to collaborate and they have to work together so that they can be problem solvers. Do you want to go next? Sure. Okay. I had a lot running through my mind as I was listening to our speakers. And one, it brought back actually a conversation that I had with my niece just recently. And I had asked her why she had not enrolled in a certain class that she had told me that she was going to enroll in. And she said, well, I asked a lot of students around campus and they told me, if you get this one teacher, you're going to have an awesome experience. And if you get this other teacher, then you're not going to really learn anything all year long. And she said, I didn't want to risk it. I didn't want to risk it. And so I chose not to actually sign up for that class. And I thought about what was said of this idea of having a highly skilled teacher in every single classroom. And then Paul's list that seemed a bit overwhelming to me as I listened. But I was loving, I loved the first one, the idea of a nimble curator of knowledge and content experts and pedagogical practitioners and applying knowledge and personalizing and advocating and inspiring. And I thought to myself, this is so much that we are asking of our teachers, how do we become this? What does this look like? How do we have these highly skilled teachers in the classroom? And as I look back over my experience in the classroom in the 20 years that I've had, my answer is other teachers. Teachers in my experience are the most intelligent, the most creative, the most hardworking and the most compassionate people that I know. And they are experts at what they do and if we can learn from each other and collaborate and learn and grow together and witness what's going on in each other's classrooms and sit down and plan with each other and have these best practices sessions with each other, then we can become this and we can have every teacher be that highly skilled teacher that we need that will have an awesome experience in that class and every class on campus. So I, too, was struck by Paul's list and I was also thinking about Deborah's comments about that rigorous training that teachers need to have. In my school, I provided a lot of support to teachers. Part of my job was to provide support and that was to new teachers in particular. We had two levels of licensure in Massachusetts. People who came in with initial licenses, which meant they already had some teacher training, although very, very teacher training, and teachers who came in on preliminary licenses, which meant they were going to get teacher training through accredited programs while they were actually teaching. I can honestly say to you that the experiences of those two groups were really, really different and the teachers working on preliminary licenses struggled a great deal unless, as you're saying, they happened to be partnered with somebody who really could show them along. My concern with what Deborah is saying about rigor is I look at my own life and I think it took me about eight years to become a really good teacher and the first part of my teaching experience was in a very homogeneous suburban Massachusetts community. So it meant that I could really focus a lot on what it was I was doing in the classroom and frankly the kids were just like me. And then I moved to Cambridge and suddenly there was this whole range of kids and all I could think to myself when I first came into that job was luckily I already knew how to teach because there were all these social and cultural factors that I needed to negotiate. So as I look at even our teachers working on initial licenses who are really quite good, I keep thinking not so much of teacher training as teacher growth and so one of my questions for Deborah would be what is the, what's the amount, what's the kind of guideline, that benchmark for going into a classroom and not doing harm and then what does the growth look like beyond that? And I'll stop there because I could go on and on. I would love you too because Paul's list to me is so right but it's so much. Is this on? Yes? Okay. So the question about, I think you're asking about what the threshold would be for not being, for being able to be minimally responsible. I think we don't like words like that because we have ambitions for really glorious and imaginative and highly skilled teaching and we talk about that a lot. It's really important but that would be a little bit like if we were teaching kids to read and we started with reading very complex text and not thinking about what the stages are toward it and we've done better in subject fields to kids to begin thinking what does it look like to be a reader or early or what does it look like to be doing math when you're six or whatever it is and I think it's a professional conversation among us to say, if that person were teaching next, maybe if that person were teaching the previous grade in whatever school I was teaching would I be comfortable professionally that that person were responsible independently for kids? I have my own list of things but our lists might, we might disagree about the lists although I'd be curious how much we disagree of what should be on that list but for me the question is would we be willing to have that conversation as a profession and stand up for the idea that it shouldn't be okay to be not yet at that threshold so I know I'm not completely answering your question. I would make a list of things that I think happen so often in a classroom that if you can't do them at some basic level you're not going to be able to get, you're not going to be able to be responsible for the kids that year and it just seems really unfair to the kids and it's too often kids who really most depend on public schooling to be adding things that they might not otherwise encounter and just feels very irresponsible to me so some of them are very mundane that almost seem like they shouldn't have to be mentioned like being able to actually build a relationship with this child that you're interacting with them and hearing what they're saying to you and not talking over them but you know that's basic and you know a lot of entering candidates can't do that they just talk the whole time or they assume the kids are wrong when the kids are saying things that are totally sensible so we can make the list together I just wish that we would be willing to do that. Thank you so much so thank you for your reflections so I have a couple of questions here a couple of prompts the first one is about college and career ready and that's one of those buzz words that we hear a lot about ACT has a number for us that tells us who's college and career ready SAT has a number for us Common Core has a number there's all sorts of notes so what do you think about this conversation about college and career ready what does that look like like what's the meta I don't think it applies to just SAT and ACT scores I'm currently reading the element by I believe his name is Sir Ken Roberts and he talks about multiple intelligences and how we only look at academic intelligence and how students are so ingrained now in trying to beat this particular standardized number trying to reach a particular score an SAT or an ACT so that they can get into a particular college but we have multiple intelligences that those particular tests don't score students are kinesthetic, they're visual they have so many other intelligences that we don't tap into when we're looking back once again at that industrial model of instruction we're not allowing them to be critical fingers and showing their creativity when you put them together in situations where they're able to collaborate with their learning it gives them an opportunity to be what they're going to be one day as workers we don't have a society where you go to work and you sit in rows and you are learning rote factual information what do we do at work hopefully we collaborate hopefully we're thinking about solving some problems if we were being creative in the things that we have to do each day to engage our children that's what it's going to take in order for us to have our ITG preschool so my kids aren't going to be career and college ready for a number of years yet but yet we're trying to start that foundation for them when you're talking to our high school folks maybe they can answer that a little bit better but I see it as being one where we're not only looking at test scores and looking at one intelligence but looking at those multiple intelligences I see it if I want to boil it down to the most simple form I need to teach students how to think it's the basic stance that I take with my students it's not about teaching them knowledge it's teaching them what to do with that how to apply it most recently in my classroom in fact just yesterday okay so most recently in my classroom my students were participating in a debate the debate that they were participating in was on whether succession is constitutional or not so they had sources that they looked at they had some sources on both sides of the viewpoint they then were given the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence they were told to investigate further, find their own information and then to be able to then articulate an argument over it and as I sat and I listened to my students they blew me away it was amazing I could have stood up in front of my students I could have said here's the arguments about why succession is constitutional here are the arguments why succession is not constitutional and they would have walked away and they would have memorized their list and they would have taken the test and they would have done fabulously because they're great kids and then they would have forgotten everything and they would have walked away and I didn't teach them how to think I just gave them some knowledge to maybe dispose of a little bit later when I gave them all of this for them to wade through for them to analyze, for them to be able to disseminate everything and then to form an opinion about it and then to be able to articulate that they walked away from that experience really understanding having a critical thought process analyzing it, learning how to think not just learning knowledge The language of college and career readiness I have to tell you I always hate that phrase because it makes me think that the principal role that we're playing is to prepare kids to be part of our economy not even necessarily part of our democracy so I was really pleased, Paul, when you broadened the definition not to be just economic and you talked about democracy and you talked about people leading families and we began to get to kind of some of the moral and spiritual aspects of education that matters a lot to me because I don't believe that kids come every day to school to get college and career ready I think that's something, it's one of the things that's on their mind if it's the only thing that's on their mind they're anxious all of the time but I do think that everybody comes to school to have a good day and that's different for some kids some kids come to school and hope the good day is they don't get into a fight with that kid that has been giving them a hard time in the cafeteria other kids hope that they did the right homework assignment and they're not going to get in trouble some other kid just hopes like I think of the really anxious kids in my AP class that I'm not going to assign another paper because they already have 13 hours of homework between now and Thursday so I really think that there's a lot more to school than college and career ready part of what worries me a lot of the time especially when we start talking about SATs and I'm so glad that we're talking about the insufficiency of those exams and also about thinking I think that kids really do want to learn I went to a forum that we had in Cambridge a while ago about the achievement gap it was actually a few years ago and it was moderated by Ron Ferguson also from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and he was talking about how important it is to understand that we are all hardwired to learn and some of our work is not to betray our hard wiring and make education I don't know be more something that we do for other people or for other purposes than for ourselves so I'm convinced we can do all of those things at the same time the only other thing I want to say is when we only talk about achievement tests I think we stop talking about the 21st century and all those soft skills that we know are so so important and so I'm excited that Nancy brought up the idea of when you create a kind of context or an environment in which kids can do good thinking and I just want to recommend to you Ron Richard's work on building cultures of thinking because there really are ways to help kids think and a lot of that is about building the academic language that allows them to express what they're thinking and talk about it with other kids I think your comments are so very important because as a policy trained policy analyst when I sit down and I look at any particular policy often what comes to mind is the NAEP score that particular test score that's what people see as college or career ready you know how many students receive certificates from the cosmetology program but maybe we should be thinking not about this as college ready or career ready but citizen ready so one final question and we only have just a few minutes here three minutes so give me those 30 second answers are you ready so Dr. Ball issued a challenge she issued a challenge that was we need to sit down and think about how to do this otherwise there's other folks that are going to do it for us right and so the question that I have here that Montell Williams gave me is how should teachers think of themselves or position themselves as advocates for the profession when engaging those outside of it what are the implications for that shift or those who say they're inside of it but are really outsiders to the profession what do you think about that who wants to go first? I'm not going first this time I've used all my cookies so what can we do to be advocates I'm going to give you another little story this summer my brother-in-law said to me I am sick and tired of seeing all the posts on Facebook from teachers and I said what are you talking about he said they're talking about how hard their life is and how everything that they have to do and oh my gosh the countdown to summer and here it comes right and I said oh that's awful right I mean this is what we're putting out there as teachers then I worked with another teacher this summer and he showed me a Twitter campaign that they were doing in their state and it was what teachers do over the summertime and all teachers were tweeting out pictures of them at PD they were tweeting out pictures of them working with students they were tweeting out all of the positive things that we do for our students during our off hours in all of those times that we're there and I thought to myself now that's what we need to be doing that's we need to be positive advocates where we can put these campaigns out there to show what it is that we actually do for students in the classroom outside of the classroom on our free time but we need to be constantly aware of the public around us and being able to be those positive advocates for what we do and how we stand up for children I think it's incumbent upon us as faculty and institutions of higher education that we mobilize our knowledge too I've been thinking about this as a personal advocacy ecology that's how I think of it is my own ecology of advocacy but what do you think the implications are of teacher organizations but also you individually having this advocacy ecology I know I promised you no hard questions in our conversation he said oh we won't ask you anything really hard what do you think about that I mean essentially what are the implications of a shift where educators are at the forefront I mean look at the secretary of education right are we putting educators at the forefront of our conversations about education policy and reform right any thoughts on that no we're not and I think educators unfortunately are not informed we have a new system that's coming down in my state for evaluating teachers and value added measure and all those things I'm sure you heard those terms and the number of teachers that didn't know what was about to happen to them personally and professionally was astounding and we can't impact policy if we don't know policy and often times that's what's happening people are dictating to us what needs to be done because we don't know or we know but we don't speak up for what should be done we have the boots on the ground as we were saying in our table earlier but the folks who have no idea of what is happening in those four walls are the ones that are making policy for us we have to be our own best advocates but we can't do that if we don't know policy how can a bill be passed that directly impacts you and you have no idea that it was even happening you're not informed we can't be our own best advocates if we don't know what's happening I want to add in that I don't think that every teacher is born as a leader either and I think that teacher leadership is something that we need to train within our teachers I think that we need to actually teach them to step out of their classroom that we need to teach them to stand up for education and that is something that we as a profession have not done a good job at is to actually giving teachers the tools they need to be able to be that advocate for the teaching profession then one final I just want to say in the state of Massachusetts where we have a very proactive association I think unlike your state Terry we often knew about things that were coming down and our leadership met with us and there was a lot of conversation so I actually think we were treated quite professionally however I also think that often teachers are so busy with their day to day lives and the expectations that parents and other people have of what they're going to be doing that they sometimes can't be as politically active as they might want to be so I don't quite know how to manage that people who are teaching all day long have a lot of papers to correct and a lot of parent emails to respond to so one final question from Dr. Rebel and then Harriet Sanford is going to come with some gifts all I wanted to say in response to that is I think what we strive for and I appreciate Joan's comment I think we've done a pretty good job at this in Massachusetts of doing reform with the field rather than to the field although it hasn't been perfect in that regard but I do think if you step back from policy over the past 20 years much of it nationally and in most states has been done to the field rather than with the field and the field has to take some responsibility for that itself in other words if things are being done to you you have to organize to respond and this is an association in which it's all about organization but I do think that coming together and the hard conversations that allow associations of teachers where there are very divergent opinions to come together with one voice to speak up about matters of policy this kind of thing is critically important no child left behind was done to the field the unions kind of I would argue sat on the side and that happened and so now if we want to go forward with a new vision I believe there's an opportunity for teachers to shape that new vision I personally happen to think it's not so much talking about the teaching profession primarily but it's talking about what children need to be successful which secondarily leads you to talking about what teachers need in order to be successful with children but I think this idea of having teachers take the lead, assume the position assume a voice in the conversation in a place at the table argue and advocate for kids and by way of doing that you get to talking about teaching and the teaching profession thank you all