 When we were putting this together, we thought, who's the best framer and moderator? And it didn't take us long to figure out that, really, there was only one person for us today. And that was Dr. David Berliner. He's got this clear voice. You haven't met my children. He's got this clear voice. And he speaks truth to power like few. And people use that term a lot, but it really applies here. David has taught at the University of Arizona in Massachusetts, at Teachers College at Stanford, and a wide variety of institutions across the world. He's a member of the National Academy of Education, the International Academy of Education, and he's the past president of AERA. And he has many, many awards, but there are a few that are really notable. The Brock Award, the Thorndike Award, from the APA for Lifetime Achievement, and my very special. Mine too. The NEA Friends of Education Award. It's okay. If you don't know David's work, let me encourage you, he's recently authored a book, 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America's Public Schools, The Real Crisis in Education. It is something you should read. And joining the panel today, I'm gonna read the formal, but these are our friends, these are people we know, the best of the best. I'm gonna start with Melissa Collins in the middle of the three teachers. She teaches second grade at John P. Freeman Optional School in Shelby County, Tennessee. She has a bachelor's degree from Murray State and a master's, a specialist, and a doctorate of philosophy degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. She's the recipient of several awards and honors, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, and she was an NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellow. And boy, did she teach us. And when she didn't have anything else to do, she got nationally board certified. Gladys Sosa Schwartz is adjunct faculty at Northwood University. And she could call this home in a way. She's nationally board certified teacher with 28 years of experience. She's taught in New York, Indiana, Florida, and Virginia, and has conducted a variety of professional development courses for teachers. In 2006, 2007, she was an NEA Teaching Fellow in the Teaching Quality Department. And from 2008 to 2014, she served on the NEA's Professional Standards and Practice Committee. She is alive with hunger for change, and we're so glad she's joining us. Thank you. And our last panelist, I'm not gonna embarrass him and ask him, you know, where's his Brazil shirt? He was a fellow with the foundation back in 2013 and we've got to know him really well. But today, he's a compliance specialist within the Office of Title I of Baltimore County. And he was a 2012 Maryland Teacher of the Year. But what makes Josh Parker really special is his passion for literacy, especially around African-American adolescent males. He thinks about it all the time. He is a consummate reader and thinker, looking to change what happens in schools in America. This is your panel. Thank you guys. Thank you. I'm delighted to chair the session to be with you all, moderate the comments from distinguished practitioners, but if they're like the distinguished practitioners I've worked with in the past, I won't get many words in edgewise. They have lots to say, but their classrooms always inspire me. I came from a laboratory science, experimental psychology, where I even ran rats for a while, but eventually entered into educational psychology. The father of educational psychology, E. L. Thorndike, told his graduate students in the early 1900s not to waste their times in classrooms. He said, you cannot learn much there. It's also confusing and complex. Well, he was right. It is confusing and complex if you're a novice and a professor at Teachers College Columbia and can't figure out how they work. So I admire those who work in the complexity and the confusion of our classrooms, but the grandfather of educational psychology, which was the philosopher William James, was wiser than Thorndike. He warned about the arrogance of researchers and policymakers who think they can tell practitioners what to do. He said, and I quote, you make a great, a very great mistake if you think that psychology is something from which you can deduce definite programs and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science and teaching is an art and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediate inventive mind must make the application. That's a great line. That's why I wanted to present it. We need intermediate inventive minds to help broker the transition from research to practice, from the hopes and dreams of policymakers to practice, otherwise neither research nor policy ever is going to take hold in our schools, even benevolent policies we have trouble implementing. James also said, a science only lays down lines within which the rules of an art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress. But what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius, the genius of a practitioner. To know psychology therefore is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when that pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation are things to which science cannot help us in the least. William James, 1899 or so. Now I eventually learned to do my educational psychology in classrooms studying teachers and student behavior in real world settings and not just doing laboratory and theoretical work. I found William James to be correct and E.L. Thondike to be wrong. My classroom research led me ultimately to do research on expert teachers, some of which proved useful in the design of the certification assessments of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Two of our panel today are board certified and I do salute you. All three panelists are distinguished practitioners and I am glad we have the chance to hear their voices. Well, how do you get to be so good? How do you get to be recognized as a distinguished practitioner as a board certified teacher? The first thing of course is time. When I did my studies of expert teachers, I would ask a whole bunch of teachers, how long did it take you till you weren't surprised in your classroom? There's an interesting question, is it? Okay, a parent didn't surprise you, a kid didn't surprise you, your principal didn't surprise you. How long did that take? The answer is always three years or more. Okay, that's how long it takes to learn the culture of a school, to not be shocked by a kid or a parent. And then we did studies and said, how long does it take to get scores up on tests? If you had the same test, we use the database in Texas over a million kids. We plotted out longevity as a teacher with score on a test, takes seven years to maximize scores. That's how long it takes to get good at getting the scores up. Three years minimum till you're not surprised, seven years till you get the scores up to asymptote. And so it is an insult for us as a profession to have these six week wonders in TFA come into the classroom and then leave in two years. Okay, they're just screwing up our profession and we should fight a little back. The other thing we faced to become a distinguished practitioner, in any other field, you get to be great at what you do by what they call deliberate practice. So if you wanna be a great golfer, hit 10,000 golf balls. Here, here, here, here, here, that's how you get to be good. You wanna be a great batter, you have somebody pitching to you and you do it over again. You wanna be a great pianist? How about 10,000 hours in practice? What we get is a chance to bomb in a lesson and one year later, we get a chance to try it again, okay? We don't get the chance to do it over and over again till we get it right. So it's very hard to become a distinguished practitioner, an expert in our field unless we reflect a lot, unless we keep notes about what we do and that's what the people we studied did and it helped make them great. Our profession, in the times in which we live, we seem to be watching reform happen to us from afar without the input of the great practitioners that we have in our field. Our profession is insulted by state and federal secretaries of education, judged negatively by the nation's presidents and governors and we see as well teacher pensions being cut, we see teacher salaries that do not keep up with inflation, we find that teachers often cannot afford to live in the communities in which they work, we find that teachers cannot always practice their profession in ways that are ethical and efficacious, we find that teachers are asked to support policies that may actually do harm to children, we are told that teachers will be judged by student test scores that are insensitive to instruction and more often reflect social class rather than instructional quality, we see public monies used to support discriminatory charter and private schools and so forth. Almost all these contemporary negative events are done to teachers, not with them and that's the very reason we need unions. This is a chance to hear from those with which William James called those with that happy tact that special ingenuity that promotes high levels of learning in their students. These master teachers will talk about how they became master teachers, the roles of unions and their colleagues in their development and perhaps they will even share with us the secret of how to be successful in such difficult times in which we live. We'll start first then with Josh Parker. So please come up or take the mic there and share with us what you'd like. Glad to be here, hello everyone. What a warm introduction, distinguished panelists, glad to be with you. The always classy and imminent Harriet Sanford who runs this so well. Please give her a round of applause please. That's awesome. I would pause to first say that even though I have been classified as a master's teacher or in the teacher of the year, the state, I'm not sure that I have yet become that fully. I think I'm a trusted teacher. I've been thinking and reflecting a lot lately about what it means to be a good teacher and I used to think that empathy was one of the cornerstone traits but I think trustworthiness is a trait that I think is even more valued than that. Because if a student can trust you then there's so much more that can happen despite the credentials, despite the training. If they can trust you and if you can show yourself to be trustworthy I think that's a good start. So I started out wanting to be Michael Jordan basically when I was a little kid so I wanted to be in an MBA. Unfortunately you have to actually make a team to do that and I didn't have such luck middle or high school or college or elementary school. So I decided to talk about it. Then when I graduated I found that there was not a lot of meaning in reporting who won, who lost and what the end score was. So I decided to substitute teach to make ends meet. But then going to substitute teaching of course I found my passion and calling and went back to school and just started to fall in love with teaching but I would say the first year like many was a blur. I was on the verge of a couple of nervous breakdowns because I wasn't even fresh off the boat. I wasn't on a boat. I mean if you think about it I started teaching without any formal training which is a commentary in and of itself obviously but I started without formal training three days before school started in a conference of middle school in Baltimore. So it was extremely difficult but what sustained me was of course my college preparation noted down with Maryland University but also my own ingenuity. And I liked that he talked about teaching being an art because I was being taught the science but I needed to be taught the art and some of that I had to do myself. So one of the struggles I had early on was teaching African-American males and I thought that that would be particularly easy because I so happened to be one. Now that once again that's my naivete going to the classroom but I was like why is this not working? And I had to find a book that taught me how to teach reading to black adolescent males. There was none that existed that I knew of. So I went to Barnes and Nobles and I was like a light bulb moment. It was the summer after my first year when I was just trying to figure out what was I doing, what just happened. So I go to the Barnes and Nobles and there's a little spine that says teaching reading to black adolescent males. I was like oh really? So I took that out by Alfred Tatum the great and courageous person in that space and that's what started my own internal professional development. And I started reading that and then I read other branching philosophies and articles in that whole space. I read Gloria Ladson Billings. I started reading all of the information and started to interpolate that or integrate that into what I did when I went back to the school house and I saw a tremendous gains but it was from my own personal investment. What I think is not the best thing that happens in some districts is that a lot of that professional development is optional but I think that your own professional development should be required. So I spent lots of time reading and getting better at where I saw my own deficits. I think this is the perfect position to be humbled in. If you come into teaching and at any time think that you have it all you've begun to lose it already. So my humility led me to try to get better and continue to get better even to this day with what I struggled in. And once I continued to do that I started to gain the trust of my kids because I always knew that I cared about them but I actually had the information, the text, the knowledge to help them see themselves in a fully actualized form. Once I had that trustworthiness it extended to my administration and on and on. So if I can say I'm really blessed to be in this field and in this idea and I'm so glad that I didn't make a basketball team because I wouldn't be talking to you today because this is such a better choice than that but it only becomes good when our object is trustworthiness through our own credibility and professional development and that's what has helped me and continues to help me as I continue to talk and teach. We'll wanna take questions from you eventually but I just wanna comment about the first year Josh had which is my point that I made. This is an art and it's not a science. You can learn the science in the universities. You learn the laws of psychology, laws of learning but boy when you get to a classroom that's the art and you have to learn that for yourself. I also wanna make a comment. There was a study by Robin Alexander on education in five cultures, comparative ed. He studied in five democracies. He studied India, Russia, France, England and the US and he went into fifth grade classrooms and spent three months in each of those five countries and he filmed and talked about it, what he found and wrote about it and in both India and Russia, you never saw a teacher try to gain the trust of children. They just stood there and talked. In France, you saw what the French Union has done for teachers, they punch a clock, they take their smokes, they punch a clock and they leave. The French teacher is unconcerned about their kids. In England, you saw more something akin to the United States but in the United States his films show teachers with arms around kids, taking them aside, talking to them, trying to understand their problems, trying to understand if life at home is all right, what they can do to help them, how to gain their trust and they waste a lot of classroom time by somebody else's standard and they're delving into the lives of the children they teach because they understand that without that concern and that trust, you really can't do much of it. So I think it was a really good comparative study and it backs up what you said, Josh. So I will turn now to Melissa Collins and if you would, share with us what you have. It has to be here and I'm glad to be invited by the foundation. I started teaching in... In 1999. And I always wanted to be a teacher. I knew that as a little girl that I wanted to be a teacher. I would play with my friends. I would be the highly effective teacher and there were my students and I can make them learn. But also my father was an educator and he had a lot to do with it but I also noticed that he had given so much and I wasn't sure if I really wanted to do that because I miss my father hugs at night and I saw how he gave so much but he made a difference because he was able to turn things around and I wanted to do the same. And when I first entered my classroom, I thought, oh, I got this. I practiced this. I know what to do. I went to a great college but there was some challenges ahead. In my principle, she so gracefully told me as I would look into other teacher's classroom and so she gave me the support that I needed. She was really an instructional leader and we didn't get along at first. I want you to know that with difficult decisions sometimes it's hard to take as a teacher. And she informed me about a process national board. Never heard of it. Never heard of it. And as I looked into the process, I said, I don't know if I can do this, especially entry four, when it talked about being a teacher leader. I said, all I wanna do is work with our children. I didn't sign up to work with all valuable stakeholders. I didn't sign up to have a voice in this. I just wanna be in my little classroom, see my test scores and know, wow, I made a difference. But I went to her and I said, you know what, I wanna do this process but I'm not sure how to be a teacher leader. And as I really looked at entry four, it showed me how. As I started the process, I began to change. I understood that inquiry based learning was what my students needed. I started teaching science when really teachers really focused on reading and math. And I have students now that come back to me and say, Dr. Collins, I'm going off to be a nurse or a bio engineer. And I'm like, wow, I had something to do with it. I didn't make national board the first time. If you look at the statistics, it tells you that only 30% make the process the first time. And also research tells you that if you are a minority teacher at that time, that you are less likely to do it and less likely to make it. And so that was touching to me. And when I didn't make it, oh, I thought my world was tumbling down. And I said, I don't know if I can do this again. My parents would say, you know what? You're gonna finish, you're gonna go home, you're gonna shed some tears and you're gonna get back up and you're gonna try to get it. And I did. And that's where the union came in. They said, Melissa, if you do this process, you're on a couple of points short, we'll help you with your most difficult entry. They paid for me, Tennessee Educational Association, to go to Nashville, work with an association member, gave me the PD that I needed. The next following year, my parents said, don't you touch their computer at school because you cried like a baby the previous year and I need you to support the students this afternoon. I said, okay. And I had my teacher say, I said, you go check. You go check for me. And so I went out of protocol at all. So she checked and I saw congratulations. I didn't know the score. It didn't matter if it was two, seven to five, whatever it was. I knew I made it. Thank you. I ran out in the hallway and she came and she said, you checked those scores, didn't you? And my students say, she won the lottery, I think. She won the lottery. And I did win the lottery, I told them. I said, I'm now an accomplished teacher. I went through a PD where I decided that I wanted to get better for you. And that empowered me, the support my principal asking me and I didn't wanna stop. I didn't wanna shake the spirit of being a teacher leader. And I felt like I'm on the path. I'm still learning to do some things correctly. Yes, I got to meet the president. There was some best, oh, President Obama. Okay, so I know how to have three emotions going on at one time. Shouting, crying and laughing all at one time. And so amazing things have happened to me. But as those amazing things unfold, so did it do for my students. My students wear science lab jackets and I called them junior scientists. And National Board taught me how to do that. Working with the association taught me how to do that. And the NEA Foundation two years ago helped me to face my fears. I had some choice words to say when I had to go up to the mountains or getting in water because I didn't like that. But it was empowering for my students because I can tell them, hey, I took a risk. I take a risk every day for you. I'm trying to work hard to turn this thing around to pack student achievement. And I think it's very important that we all take that collective action into empowering teachers and knowing that it's okay to have a teacher leader in your building. I went off to school to be an administrator. And some people say, why are you in the classroom still with the title doctor? And I say, you know what, I'm happy. I don't need the title. I have a title teacher leader. I don't need to be an administrator because I am making the greatest impact. I am on the front line. And it is my charge to make a difference. And I'm doing that every day. Again, I just annotated a little bit. Melissa talked about her principal having her visit other classrooms. We lead such lonely lives. We don't see the alternatives. And every principal ought to help their teachers visit other classrooms so we can see other ways of accomplishing the goals we all have. Melissa also talked about the professional development process that goes along with board certification. I helped develop our board certification process in Arizona. And even the teachers who got the bad news all said this was good professional development. When you can get bad news and say it was a good process that tells you something really nice about what's been going on. Of course, they were a lot happier the next year as you were when they got the good news. But you also mentioned something about professional development that was important. When we did our studies of expert and novice teachers we talked to a lot of people and we came to a conclusion about the nature of teacher evaluation. The conclusion was that for the first five years it's all right to go into a teacher's classroom, look at their scores and pick at them. Just keep picking at them. I mean, if they don't have the skills you want you gotta pick at them. You have to say you have to go learn this. You have to go learn that. You're not doing enough about taking care of this or that. We had no problems at all agreeing, even with the new teachers, that they needed an evaluation that looked for deficits. But the minute you get a teacher that's there about five years that you've given tenure to, the last thing you want to do is pick at them. What you want to do then is say, how do you want to grow? So we advocated based on our research a two tier evaluation system. One which is deficit oriented in which you say you're missing skills we think you ought to have. And one which is growth oriented which says you're a professional. How can we help you get better at what you do? Instead we keep having this picking at teacher evaluation system. And that's the wrong way to treat professionals who are tenured, who have made it. We need to say, what do you need to learn to be better at your job? That's a different evaluation system and we learned that and it sounds like you felt that same way. And you're very proud of your nationally board certification. And in Arizona all the teachers who get the board certification put their certification up on their classroom wall and we think that's wonderful because you have reached the pinnacle, okay? And so congratulations again to you. Okay, let's move over now to our third speaker which will be Gladys Sosa Schwartz. Good afternoon. I'm so proud to be sitting next to fellow fellows who have been extremely courageous in their journey to becoming master teachers and I'm always amazed at the courage that it takes to become a master teacher. And one of the, there are many, many themes that emerge that are shared by individuals such as my fellow fellows. I love saying that because the NEA has given us the opportunity to have a voice and to be heard. But one of the things is that pursuit of excellence that in our motivation that we all know that it's the most important job and we're gonna do everything that it takes to help our students learn, help them grow, help them become the very best individuals they can be. And I've had the opportunity to work in four very different school districts and four different settings and it really opened my eyes as to how important it is for districts to focus on providing professional development for teachers. Two were not very good at this. It was just sort of a checklist, things that they needed teachers to do, especially beginning teachers, novice teachers, but it didn't revolve around ensuring that students learn. It wasn't student-centered. It wasn't helping teachers become professionals. It was more how-to management, et cetera. The other two were professional development, opportunities that the district provided that were completely student-centered. And for me, that's critical because if the why, why are we doing this doesn't align with my why, which is to help students learn, to help students become motivated and love school and feel good about themselves. So if there's professional development that's not aligned with those values, it's not as meaningful. Today's professional development is mostly focused on data assessment, reading data, looking at data, analyzing data. That's not to say that's not important, but it's sort of getting away from what is the core job of teaching and it's the students. And I appreciate David mentioning the importance of making sure that teachers are part of the decision-making process for reform efforts. We are the closest to the job that needs to be done. Therefore, we need to have a say. And there are very few opportunities out there for teachers to have a voice. That is why I know we're all very grateful at the NEA for providing a variety of opportunities for teachers to be heard, and that is critical. If policy reforms are to be successful, we have to be part of the conversation because we're the ones with the expertise, we're the ones that have to implement those policies. So for me, becoming a master teacher, and I appreciate the term, but master teachers know we're not there. It's not a destination, it's a process. And hopefully we will continue to grow and become, have more expertise. But the professional development that is student-centered that focuses on helping teachers become professionals and helps teachers advocate for their students, those opportunities are critical. To the districts that I worked in, they worked with local universities to work with teachers, to help teachers become action researchers. And to me, becoming a teacher researcher is critical to helping one become a reflective practitioner to really look at one's practice critically. And if one doesn't do that on a daily basis, then I don't think that one is going to improve much. So any kind of professional development opportunity where we get to be critical of our own practice and collaborate with other professionals and work together to help one another become better, I think that's critical. I think teacher leadership opportunities are also very critical. I also prefer to be in the classroom. I love working with students and it's very difficult for me to go and do other things because my love is working with the students, but like Melissa, I've been sort of given a little bit of courage and pushed to go and do this. And I push myself because I know how critical it is for teachers to articulate and have a voice and take that opportunity to say, look, we know what works with our students. We know what they need. We know this is wrong. We know this is not helping them become better learners and I need to learn how to be strong and stand up and advocate for my students because no one else is going to. So that motivates me to continue to step outside my comfort zone and follow that particular teacher leadership because many people think teacher leadership is becoming an administrator, but any district with the help of the union that helps teachers become teacher leaders in the many different areas, that's really critical because teachers are going to be the ones that are going to help these efforts become successful or not. In any opportunity that we can to provide our expertise, I think we have to take it and we have to speak up for our students. Thank you. Thank you Gladys. Share a few comments again. All of you talked a bit about district professional development, teacher professional development and its impact on you. I had a businessman say that there's no evidence that teacher professional development works and we shouldn't pay for it. And my response was, and I'm going to share it with you because it shut them up, was you just went to your professional meetings and you paid somebody $100,000 to talk to you. Last year it was Hillary Clinton, the year before it was Colin Powell. What the hell did either of them do for your business? Silence, completely silent, okay? We at least go to professional meetings and the stuff is at least related to what we do. They go to professional meetings, pay $100,000 to sit in the audience and hear somebody talk about nothing to do with their business. So professional development is about getting new ideas. It's not about immediate change in the system. So I agree, we need it and we shouldn't let anyone take it away from us. You also talk about students feeling good about themselves. You know, the difference between Finland and Shanghai is palpable. The kids in Finland really like themselves, they like their families, they like their schools. Kids in Shanghai hate their schools, are mad at their families, commit suicide at very high rates because no one's taking an interest in how they feel, okay? We will never be able to have the kind of test scores they have in Shanghai. The reason for that is simple, we care a lot more for our kids, not their test scores and you can't compete on that basis. So, again, given the humanistic side of the American education system, I'll take a little lower test score for having kids that the Shanghai's envy, which they do. You also mentioned about the data-driven systems we have. That's the term that's really made something awful happen in our country. We should be data-informed, not data-driven. Data can't drive anything, data can't inform. And we shouldn't let numbers drive decisions without lots of conversations about what those numbers mean. You also talked about the teacher researcher and how good it is. And here's the most important thing for us to understand about why teacher research and school inquiries by the professional teams are so important. We live in the social sciences and in educational research and nothing can be moved easily from one place to another. If you have a finding in physics in Buenos Aires, it transfers right here to Washington D.C. Physics is physics no matter where the hell you are. You get a finding in Arlington, Virginia, it may not cross the line over to Washington D.C. Because the contexts are different. What we have is an enormous problem in the social sciences in general and in education in particular, of getting findings that will hold in a number of places. So you can't just take it, which is what every superintendent learns. It worked over here, so I'm gonna bring it to this district and of course that superintendent's fired five years later because it doesn't work there. The reason we need teacher researchers is to take good ideas and see if they do fit the context you have. Because there's lots of good ideas whether they'll work in your context or not is a whole different thing. And so I'm glad you brought that up. And the notion of teacher leaders, I can't read my notes, took them too fast. I'll skip, I'll end there. Anyway, I wanna thank the panel for their comments, but we also wanted you have a chance to talk to three of our most distinguished practitioners. So are there any questions out there that someone would like to start with a teacher voice? He's got a microphone there. Good afternoon, my name is Daco Jean Baptiste and I am from Omaha, Nebraska. The question I have to the panelists is, how do you encourage other teachers to go on and get their national accreditation? Well, the first thing I did because I did understand that the process was difficult for me. It was one of those hurdles that I had fallen the first time I tried to get over. I learned how to mentor the process. And so I became a mentor and again, the association provided that training for me. As I learned the process, then I could go to teachers and say, I can support you. I have received training in it and I was able to help them through the process. And then I wanted to be a scorer. I wanted to understand the process even more deeply. And what I do to encourage teachers to do the process is say, hey, you can do this. You can make a difference. When you hear me singing those hip hop songs and transforming them in, having my students do those inquiry based learning, National Board helped me through that process. And if you do this, I'm going to support you. I'm going to hold your hand just like somebody held my hand. And I think it's important as a teacher leader, as you become one, that as you climb up that ladder, you have to make sure, hey, I grab Josh and I grab Lance and I grab other people and take them with me for the benefit of all students. I think one of the things that I like to do is when I'm working with colleagues is to really compliment them on the things that they do well and to say, you know, have you heard about National Board Certification? You really would be a great candidate to pursue this. And you take a risk because I also did not achieve on the first try. And I think I'm better for it for not having achieved the first try because it really forces you even more. They say that you learn more from success than you do from failure and that is so true. The, obviously, the lesson is to get up and go into it again. But having gone through that process, you can say, look, you might be able to do this in a year but it really might take you two years and that's okay because the more time you take, the better you'll be. But really encouraging your colleagues and complimenting and guiding them towards that particular professional development I think is one of the ways that I've encouraged my peers. And in Arizona, they very often try to do it with pairs or trios from a school. That way they meet together, they talk together, they go to the little support groups we have for them in the state together and it builds a colleague's ship. With a lot of emphasis on, one of you might make it and two of you might not the first year, don't get upset. That's just the way the cookie crumbles, you'll be there okay. So, but having the support of their colleagues in the school is very important. Hi, my name's Tim Cross from Colorado. One of the challenges, and I hope this is on point, as educators where you have a reputation for polish and focus on your craft. One of the challenges that we're certainly facing in Colorado, I think nationwide, certainly in Aurora is the issue of standardized testing. And the confrontation, kind of the juxtaposition of skilled and quality educators saying, I'm being asked to give something that I don't think frankly represents what I ought to be doing, what I ought to be teaching. How would you recommend with your experience handling that? How do you, in some ways, some people are asking to take a stand against it, others are simply trying to manage around it. How are you guys, how would you recommend confronting that, or how have you done it? It's a great question, I think it's very much on point. I'm of the belief, this is just a personal belief, that I'm not sure that we advance the profession fighting against measures to see how well we do with the profession, that's the first thing. So I come from this standpoint that regardless of how you feel about certain tests, it's still a part of what you're asked to do as a way to measure how well you're doing what you're being paid to do. So my conversation, because I've been in these conversations a lot, my conversation is what data are you using, what measures are you using that aren't quantitative, the qualitative, the way that a child feels about themselves after they finish reading, the way that a child then becomes a reader, a lifelong, what other measures are you using to qualify and quantify your work for yourself that you can say, this is what works and this is what I'm viewing, and inevitably, if those measures are true, they will positively impact those other standard tests. I'll talk about it from my example. I talked to you about my frustration with the first year and not really being able to teach well African American males and really much of anybody else's first year is, but I started to tap into, after reading that book, I started tapping to their interests and I started an all male weekly reading group. And in that group, we talked about books that were culturally relevant and appropriate. We read and we discussed and we talked. A lot of pedagogically sound practices. We didn't talk about, at that time, the MSA. We didn't talk about the degrees of reading power and any other assessments that were there. We didn't discuss that. All we did was practice the skills that make for great readers because that was my internal measure. And inevitably, at the end of the year, they went up on those standards, too. So I think when we try to do an either or approach to teaching, we get into trouble because we get into these fights and then the public perception tends to say, okay, teachers are against tests. That's interesting, right? So it's not about being against the test and it's not about being for the test. It's about having that test as just one other point that informs what you're doing but having measures that you believe consistently make for lifelong learners. And we even see that, by the way, in the Common Core State Standards where they start moving for standards for mathematical practice and the capacities of a literate individual. Those are qualitative measures that show that you're teaching as well. So I don't get into the fights personally. I just say, this is a test. This is a requirement of the job. But what are you also using that is verifying your work on a qualitative nature? How are you changing the lives of kids from your own measures to make a difference? And I'll end with this point because I failed to make it earlier. I wanna talk about the unions and how well they can help teachers who first begin like me. So the first year was tough but I did reasonably well or so I thought. And I got some good evaluations and I did my little research over the summer. When I came back to my school, they put me on something known as a professional improvement plan. And I felt just slammed by it because I thought that things were going reasonably well. And in that particular school, and they're great people, but in that particular school, they didn't view developing teachers as their kind of mission. They wanted to know that you could do it and if you couldn't, they were trying to find ways to get you out. So the union came in and was able to stop that and to help them to go through the process of actually developing my capacity. And they also taught me what this means and how I could improve as a teacher. And about six or seven years later, I invited all of them to the Teacher of the Year ceremony and I was able to say thank you for your help. So I think the union can come in and actually help the process so that teachers or principals who believe that their job is to just hire people and hope that they can do the job well, don't continue on in that process but actually make their schools cultures of learning. So at the end of the day, what's gonna save teaching is teaching. And that's really the point. Yep, please. I was very, very conflicted with these tests. And I know that teaching to the test is not good practice. I know that it narrows the curriculum. I know that it kills motivation. It kills curiosity. I know it in my gut and I resisted teaching to the test. But then I thought, am I short changing my students? Am I not preparing them? Am I doing them a disservice by not doing that? So I did a little action research the next year and I felt a little bit guilty because I focused on the test-taking skills and I focused on what was on the test and the students hated it and had a miserable year and I had a miserable year and it was horrible and they did not do any better than when you do, when you just practice good teaching. So like Josh said, if you focus on best practices, if you focus on teaching the student and from where they are to where they need to be and engaging them, I think that's going to take care of the test scores going up as well. I have a comment on that and it's a very important question. The first thing is, does anyone in this room know a single test in any state that has ever been verified that if a good teacher taught a unit of instruction to bright kids, the items that measure instruction in that unit actually changed? There has never been a check that the items used on these standardized tests are instructionally sensitive, but the inference that's going to be made is that the teacher is good or bad. If you cannot prove that those items shift as a function of good instruction, you cannot make the inference that the teacher is good or bad. This is called validity 101. Every test developer in the country is violating the principle if they allow the inference to be made that a teacher is good or bad. Locating the kid in the distribution with that test is a perfectly sensible thing. Here's where the kid is in a distribution. We have a 10,000 scores, here's where the kid sits. That's a legitimate inference. The kid sits there. Whether that's a function of good or bad teaching cannot be made. The tests have never been done to show that. If you allow yourselves to be judged by a test that cannot show whether you're a good or bad teacher, you're making a mistake. That ought to be part of the protest. When I talk to teachers, I keep telling them, this is a little bit humorous and a little bit serious. I say every fourth night you're home grading papers. Don't. Buy a rubber stamp. Hit it with, you can do better. Nice work. Just don't do the papers, okay? And on that night, you go to the Republican Club. You go to the Democratic Club. You go to the Lions. You go to the Rotary. You go to the Women's Auxiliary of the Moose. You go wherever the hell you can go and talk to them about the life in schools under this test regime that cannot show your competency. If they wanna know if you're competent, let them look at your portfolio. Let them look at what you have done. Let them look at your classroom tests. Let them observe in your classrooms. These are the ways you judge the competency of professionals, of artists, of craftspeople. You don't use a standardized test that has never been checked for its ability to make an inference about a teacher. Oh, if I may, I wanna add one other thing. I spend a lot of time with the measurement issues as an educational psychologist. And what I've been telling people is that teachers change the lives of kids every day. Josh mentioned that. And you all mentioned what you do with your kids. Your goal is to change their lives. Your goal, that's something you do. Getting performance on a test stop is more a function of family income, family neighborhood, the cohort at the school and a lot of other things. You can make a little difference in test scores. You make huge differences in the lives of kids. So to judge you by your test scores is where you make small differences. To judge you by the lives your students live is where you're trying to make a difference. And it matters. There's lots of books out there. Tom Barone's book, Touching Eternity, shows you follow up with kids 20 years after they had a certain teacher. They talk about that teacher sitting on their shoulder guiding their behavior 20 years later. That's not showing on a test. Test scores are a narrow band you have to work with. Changing the lives of kids is something you do every day. And you have to take credit for that and let the test scores just, just let them go. Could I weigh in, David, really quickly? So I'm Julian Vazquez High League. I'm on the governing board of the foundation. Good to see you all. So just quickly, I wanted to respond to some of your comments. So Walter Stroup, who is an educational psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, which is the institution I just recently left for Cal State, has conducted work on the Pearson exams in Texas. And what they found is that 70% of that exam art is insensitive to instruction, which means before that kid sits down, 70% of what's gonna happen on that exam is locked and loaded to happen, which dovetails perfectly with what David is talking to. Now, here's the dirt on this conversation, which is that that particular professor is taking a lot of heat from the University of Texas because Pearson gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to that institution to conduct research and for some faculty to perform as consultants. So you see this sort of feedback loop that you're getting. I think the other important thing to think of is I was thinking the other day to myself, I read a blog, Cloaking in Equity, and I'm thinking about a new post about high-stakes testing. I was thinking to myself, when was the first high-stakes exam that I took? You know, I was a child in the 70s and 80s. And I thought the first high-stakes exam that I took was the ACT, my junior year of high school. But we've trained a whole generation of kids that think that this testing paradigm is normal and okay. And I think one of the things we have to think about is what are the alternatives out there? Because we know the high-stakes tests are problematic. We know they've perverted what's happening in schools. And so there's some really interesting examples that we wrote about in Ed Week about different formative and summative assessments. Linda talked about this, where how many jobs do you go to where you sit down and do multiple-choice work? We do project-based collaborative work in most learning situations, right? In most work situations, but not in our learning situations now in education. So in Ed Week, we talked about some of the different places, some of the different districts where they're doing these summative and formative assessments that are based on project-based collaborative work because that's the real work we do as individuals and human beings in our society. So the thing is, it's not that when we talk about reform, we wanna encourage the reformers to reform their reform. Even though as we learned in China this summer with the fellows, high-stakes tests are not actually reformed. They've been around for 2,000 years and they've been using them for 2,000 years to sort societies. So actually high-stakes tests are really successful and what they're designed to do, which is to sort the society and guess which kids are getting sorted in Texas and everywhere else. So the bottom line is that there are alternatives reform in the reform. There are alternatives on the ground that I call the community-based assessments where you, the experts that are on the ground in the schools are conducting the assessments of the children. So just know there are reforms out there. We can say, you know, high-stakes tests are not very valuable. They're the reliability and validity for what they say they're to be used for. They're not designed to do so and what they are designed to do, well we know what high-stakes tests are actually doing. Somebody else? Yeah, one in the back. One in the back there, so hi. So first I just wanna say congratulations on your accomplishments and thank you for your very thoughtful and hard work to the profession. We're sort of curious over here at this table, Joshua, about what might have compelled you to become a compliance specialist with the Office of Title I. I'm just very, very curious about that. You use the term compel very loosely. I would say this. There are about three reasons that are living and breathing in my house that compelled me, number one. But number two, I wanna say this. Because when I left the classroom and I miss it every single day, you first sort of leave the classroom, at least in my experience, when you become a state teacher of the year. It's kind of an enlargening of your base. You start to speak at different places. You start to be exposed to different things and you start missing the kids even more in that. And I know it sounds kind of paradoxical but that's kind of how it works. And then beyond that, I was a person that was really against the whole central office, leaving the classroom idea and I still am to a degree. But I'm gonna tell you something about being in the central office. I think teachers would do well to actually go through that for a cycle because you learn certain cultural skills and certain practices that actually will help you when you go back in, which is my goal. So I wouldn't throw any shade on the central office because there's a lot that I've learned about the infrastructure because when you're in the classroom, you think that the problem is classroom-related. When you get into the central office, you get a systemic. So when you can go back into the classroom or hopefully as an administrator, you start to understand how you can actually move the whole practice forward. The central office was the first place where I found out about feedback loops. The central office where I first found out about how to create infrastructure for data and for professional development. And I started talking about things in a cultural aspect. When I was in the classroom and even a teacher of the year, I thought that teaching was so important and it still is. But I started to understand that the culture and climate of a school impacts everything and everyone in it. And you can't learn that until you remove from it. So the biggest reason were three people that live with me, my wife and my two beautiful children. But I am very, very appreciative that I have been there for just these couple of years. He goes, I have learned something invaluable. When I return back, I want to be an administrator who is an administrator but also who can come in and teach and co-teach because I understand both sides now. I understand the inside the classroom piece, the co-teaching model, which I also did in the central office. But I also understand that there has to be an infrastructure for success that you have to build systemically and deliberately. So that's the reason why I'm a compliance specialist. But I have very much enjoyed the work of working with principals and understanding just how stressed a lot of them are to be honest with you, but just how hard it is to run a school extremely well. So I think it's been very valuable for me. Even though it wasn't necessarily my first choice, but it is very much helped me and it will help me in my next move. I would like to make a comment on that. When I visited Australia, I discovered a system that we should emulate. They call it secunding. I'd never heard the word before. They take teach, when they have a new project, let's say they wanna put in a standard-based reform, they would not hire professional bureaucrats. They would get 10 teachers and say, here's what we need to do. You're secunded to the State Department of Education for two years. You get your regular teacher salary, you get the credits on the salary schedule, and we pay you extra if we have to take you into Melbourne or someplace else and give you a living allowance. But we want the reforms, we want the new things, to have the voices of the field to help shape it. And that is exactly why they work so well there. I mean, we have professional bureaucrats, some of whom have never been in a classroom or forgotten what a classroom looks like, and that causes tension. You're freshly out of a classroom. You know what they look like. You're intending to go back. But if we had a system where someone could say, will you come join us for two or three years? We'll pay the extra costs that are involved. We'll keep you on your salary schedule, and you go back when you're ready. That's a much saner system than the one we have. If I can add to what you're saying was a powerful point. This is something that I work with the National Network of State Teachers of the Year. We talk about these different pathways of re-imagining the teaching profession. And I'll talk to my wife about this last night. And she said, gosh, I just wish there were a way that you could support us as a husband and a father, but stay doing what you love. I said, you know, the perfect position for me would be something that has not yet been standardized across districts. I'd love to go in and teach my kids for half a day in the professional development and make the kind of salary that could help support a family. And a lot of principals or a lot of men, no offensive women, a lot of men have to make that decision and a lot of skilled teachers have to make that decision. And it becomes either or you have that teacher guilt, you know, that you're like, I left my babies, but what about what's at home? And that's real. But to your point, and I'm glad that you brought this up, the people that need to make the decisions are those that are from the classroom. That's the very definition of teacher leadership. And what I have found, even with people who come in and their desire, even in undergrad, is to be principals, bypassing the entire process of learning what it means to struggle and fail with kids. And what happens is when you struggle and fail with kids and that whole iterative process of learning and growing and teaching, you tend to be more empathetic and intentional in dealing with adults. So you understand there is a learning process and you can't expect adults to perform without professional development, which is kind of what we start falling into. So I think it's a very profound point that you have and why I'm glad that I'm here for now, but ready to re-engage. Bob Peterson from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And first of all, thank you, panelists. Josh, your most recent remark, I really agree with you in terms of me viewing teachers, really good teachers leaving. We need a career pathway that keeps people in the teaching profession to provide that leadership, for sure. But I do want to push back a little in terms of your definition of teacher leader, because I hear what people are saying is that we can be inspiring, you certainly all three are, in terms of getting other teachers to pursue the kind of professional development, individual development that you've exemplified. But I also think that teacher leaders, we have to define as advocates for better practices within our school. And Josh, you talked about the need of having cultures of learning within our schools. We all agree with that. You gave the example of teaching with culturally relevant books and so on and so forth. My concern though, if we don't advocate against some things, there's not time in the day to actually do the culturally relevant teaching. It might be a basal reader that is culturally insensitive. And if we just say, well, we're gonna do this and we're gonna squeeze in the culturally relevant stuff on the side, it might work for you as a highly motivated teacher, but for the vast majority of, especially new teachers coming in, they're gonna just follow the basal and we won't have that. And I give another example. I mean, in terms of students, we have situations in Wisconsin where young students are engaged in data chats where the little kids are asked to increase, how much percentage do you think you can rise in the next map test that you're gonna take? To me, that's rather insane. And it's having celebrations of those kids who perform well but leaving out others. That's nationwide that's happening. And I think teacher leaders should speak out against that and say, look it, we wanna talk to kids about their learning, but let's talk about how many books are you gonna read this next month and then celebrate the books that children read. Similarly with teachers, and I'll wrap up. I, this is not a, it's, what can I say? I'm just talking. And the, you know, what Linda Arling Hammond said today was about the need for performance-based assessment. I know in Milwaukee several decade and a half ago, we had a whole regime of performance-based assessments. Writing assessments where the teachers had to get together in groups and with rubrics grade them. Science assessments where kids did science experiments and again, teachers came together in rubrics and graded them. That was developing a culture of learning amongst our teachers. Now it's more computerized testing, people individually get the data. But I'll tell you, what happened before is teachers learned a lot. It was professional development. You learn from your colleagues. That's why we have to, as teacher leaders, to think, advocate for different forms of assessment that build on both what children really need to know and help teachers for professional development. Thank you. Good comments. Good questions and statements. It is important that teachers do have a voice. But did we take policy one-on-one in college? Did he name it? No. And I think the first time that we hear about having a voice is through the union. And I can say that the union would tell me, Melissa, go on Capitol Hill. And I'm thinking, what am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to say it? And so there's something that the union can work on. Getting teachers, providing them with support where they learn how to be solution-oriented. I learned that through Teach Plus in America Chiefs, other organizations. And now I can go talk to the governor about what impacts me and what's working for teachers and what's not. And so it is important that teachers say, hey, we're testing students to death. And we shouldn't be teaching to the test because students are more than a number. They are someone who can make a difference and impact this world and they deserve a world-class education. And so you are correct. We do need to have a voice. We need to be at that table, but we need to know how to do it. And I was just gonna say that that's a role that the union can really play in helping and supporting teachers and championing teachers, but helping teachers become advocate for their students. And I know the dilemma of, if we say we're against the testing regime and we don't want scores, then we're accused of not having or wanting high expectations or being accountable. And we need guidance on shifting that conversation in the language that we need to use so that we're not viewed as people that are against accountability or testing, but we need to, that's how the union can support teachers in my view is helping us advocate for students and against this testing regime that's going to kill curiosity. It's gonna kill motivation. It's going to not help our most vulnerable students learn. And we know that they have phrased this whole testing, high stakes testing under, this is to help underprivileged students learn and what's happening is completely the opposite because they're the ones that are falling further and further behind. They're being demotivated. They hate school. They're gonna drop out in even larger numbers and now that teacher evaluations are tied to test scores, teachers are now, we're in a different place where now we're saying, oh gosh, I'm gonna look at you and I'm not going to like you very much because I know you're gonna make my score go down and it's creating an environment of us versus them and it's not pretty. And I think that we need help because we're not policy experts. We're instructional experts. We're teachers. We're willing to stand up and to advocate for our students but we need guidance on how to do it and we need that support. Just a comment on that. The Houston teachers, which they're using a value added model system for a number of years, the Houston teachers talk of the money kids because they get bonuses if they get a good VAM score and the money kids are middle class kids with middle distribution scores because they're the ones who can rise the most so they get the money and the ones they don't want in their classrooms are English language learners and gifted kids because the tests have no top, the gifted kids don't grow. You can teach gifted kids anything, they get it but it won't show on the test so the teacher won't get a bonus. So the whole testing thing is being misused and teachers and unions have to stand up and say, look, we're not against being evaluated. To give an account never requires numbers, okay? When I ask my kid to give an account of something, I don't ask him to give me some numbers. You mean account of what happened? Tell me a story, show me some evidence, come into my classrooms, look at the work my kids are doing but it doesn't have to be a test score to be accountable to the public, which we need to be. Good afternoon, my name is Tim Kowns, I'm from Springfield, Massachusetts and I have to weigh in on the whole testing thing. I've been at this for 43 years. When I started the middle school that I taught in had four shop teachers, three home and career teachers, two and a half music teachers, two art teachers. Today that school, one art teacher and it's the testing mania that has done that. If it's not tested, it's not value. The tests are a crooked yardstick as well. Criteria reference, fixed target. You know, the fifth child they were talking about? In Massachusetts we have what we call gateway cities, Springfield is the second poorest gateway cities. Our kids are starting developmentally delayed compared to the kids that they're being compared with. They could grow twice as much as a kid in a wealthy community. They don't hit the target, they're a failure. It's harmful to kids, but the most insidious thing I've watched over the last 25 years or so is when art teachers, music teachers, shop teachers, home and career teachers retire, they're not replaced. We're not educating the whole child anymore and it's the testing that's driving that. These people have forgotten that if a kid is into shop or cooking, those are pathways, music, art, pathways to reading, pathways to math and science. We're doing serious harm to these children. The social, emotional, spiritual and physical growth is every bit as important as the academic growth. And without it, the academic growth is not worth a dime. So we do need to stand up, brothers and sisters, and turn this thing around. We have to have time during the school day to get away from our lesson plan and deal with issues that are about the human growth of the children in front of us. Teach those skills, those character skills so that when they leave us, they'll be good citizens, good mothers, good fathers, good neighbors. That's what we need to do. That's what we've lost with this testing mania. And we know it. My colleagues in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, even in the wealthier communities, this testing mania has taken the joy out of teaching for the teachers and the joy out of learning for our students. And we have to start, as it was said early, speaking truth to power. I'm not sure much needs to be said after that. I agree with what you're saying. That stuff is really important. I'm gonna talk to you from my perspective. I try to marry the two, which is to say, I use my text as an opening for conversations that were rich and engaging based on their ability to comprehend deep and meaningful things from that text. The best example I can give is I had, it's my 30-year teaching, and I had students that were considered low-functioning, low-ability students. So they were given, of course, the remedial program. And so, after going through weeks of that and them not appreciating that, and me not appreciating that, I pulled out my favorite text to teach ever still to this day, which is A Raising in the Sun. And if you ever read A Raising in the Sun, it's a pretty rich and dense text, but there's art, there's soul, there's humanity. And then we started actually just reading it without any prep work, no background knowledge, none of the pre-reading strategies. And they just began reading it, and they started to take on the characters of Walter and Ruth and all of them, and the entire atmosphere was charged, and it was amazing, and there was synthesis, and there was a synergy that you can't even, it was powerful that you couldn't touch it. And those are the experiences that I think we focus on in the developmental and transformative nature of teaching that are related to our kids. And whatever the tests do is what the tests do, but invariably, when we focus on what matters, what doesn't matter, it improves as well. So that's kind of what I've tried to do with the whole testing. I've not been an advocate of all this testing, but I've been an advocate of kids being better by what I am instructing on them to do. And I use my text as an entryway for those conversations that change kids. So I agree with you, I just think we got to find some sort of middle ground here. That's got my perspective. And again, I would like to comment. I mean, obviously the testing determines who's smart, okay? And when we narrow who's smart to a test score in a reading and a math test, we have just taken away the lives of two thirds of the people in the country. You have to narrow the curriculum, okay? So when Josh tries to bring in some other stuff, he still has narrowed the curriculum a little bit because he has to get those test scores up. When you narrow the curriculum in a society like ours, which is characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, the VUCA world we're living in. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And you get all of our 55 million students alike as best you can. You've just doomed the nation because what you have is not the breath of knowledge, the breath of skills necessary for a VUCA world, okay? Think of it like evolution, okay? Who survives when the environment changes? The ones who have the genes that adapt. The ones with fixed genes die, okay? So if you think of the world as a VUCA world, volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and you're narrowing the curriculum, you're committing national suicide. And we have to get that argument out that we need all the possibilities of achievement in lots of different areas and lots of different ways to achieve in order to be sure our nation really has some people capable of the changes necessary as the environments shift on us. So I'm with Tim on this one. It's a suicidal mission we're on with this narrowing of our conception of who's smart and what's worth knowing. Someone else? Well, we're just about at the time then. So I think why don't you join me in thanking our distinguished practitioners?