20 Mike Hull
Davison High School, Davison, MI.
One of the questions I asked when interviewing candidates for teaching positions at my high school in Kansas was, “What have you read recently?” I wanted to find out if they were keeping up with their content and pedagogy. If the answer was “Field and Stream” then I would ask specifically what they were reading for continual learning in regards to their profession. Mike hit the right chord when I first observed him during his teacher-assisting semester at Ionia Middle School. Mike asked if I had read an author who wrote well-researched historical fiction and I said that I had not, but that prompted me to search out the book Mike showed me. In further conversations it was obvious that Mike was the kind of teacher I would have hired if I was still in the Social Studies Department at Circle High School.
Mike is another one of my students who returned to his home school district after graduating, Davison High School, east of Flint. He mentioned to me that all of his administrators were former teachers in the district and that Davison liked to hire their former graduates. This was Mike’s fourth year in 2008. He was teaching two classes this year: U.S. History and Economics, but in his four years at Davison he had five preparations. He started teaching the Economics course last year and he did not have much competition from his colleagues wanting to teach this course. It seems that many Social Studies teachers shied away from teaching Economics for some reason. Some of my former students told me that their college experiences with Economics included more theory than practicality and the material was not presented in a way in which future teachers might readily translate the information into classroom lessons. Mike said that when he started teaching the class it was like starting his career all over again.
Mike’s classroom was decorated like many of the classrooms I visited in 2008 and 2015. There were World War I and II model airplanes hanging from the ceiling, a large world map on the wall, classroom rules and consequences, his diploma from Grand Valley State, attitudinal and history posters and some personal effects on a shelf over his desk. Mike had a teacher computer, but he did not have a dedicated projector provided by the district in his classroom in 2008 so he bought one. He already had plans for a Smartboard and individual student “slates” that could interact with the Smartboard.
Mike’s first period class was U.S. History and on this day his students were working on a project involving the New Deal. One group was working on Top Ten Song Titles and they had to write the lyrics for the #1 song and provide 30 seconds of a tune. The second group created political cartoons. They had to provide a storyboard for Mike to review and the cartoons were supposed to depict New Deal agencies. The third group had to create a game, with note cards serving as game cards. The game was to involve New Deal agencies’ names, the role of the agency, its positive effects and the students had to provide rules for the game. The students were given a half hour timeline in order to create and then present their creations. They went right to work. Mike circulated around the room well, sharing examples and brainstorming ideas with the groups.
After about ten to fifteen minutes of discussion the groups quieted in focusing on the work at hand. Mike explained to me that he stole this group project idea from one of his colleagues. He said he had several kindred spirits in the Social Studies department who used project-based learning. While walking through the groups, asking questions and suggesting ideas, Mike displayed a good sense of humor with his students. Close to the task completion time, Mike issued a warning to the groups to wind up their work, which showed good task management on his part. When the allotted time was over all the groups had some kind of product to present.
The first group created a song based on the tune from “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” The lyrics had to do with the Agricultural Adjustment Act and how a farmer was provided the financial support to keep his farm. The second group displayed four cartoons that depicted the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority, The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. The third group had a kind of match game where students tossed a ball to each other and the receiver had to provide information about the work of the Works Projects Administration. All the projects were on point with the assignment and showed some thought and preparation.
Mike’s second period class was Economics. He provided guided reading sheets for this class for student use in digesting the material from the textbook. The text used stories in defining various economic terms such as “opportunity costs” where kindergarten students were trading for various items out of their sack lunches. The term “medium of exchange” was brought into the discussion. Mike broke into an enthusiastic lecture mode and his students were caught up in his spirited delivery. Throughout the lecture Mike interwove the content from the textbook with information from his own solid background on economics and he did it in a way that engaged his students’ lives so they were able to make relevant connections. Mike used references to popular culture, especially movies, with which his students were familiar. While the class was fairly passive during this time, the students were able to answer questions that Mike posed from time to time. Students were able to draw from their own memories of Hollywood productions in providing examples in support of the economic terminology involved in the lesson.
Third period was a little bumpier due to the antics of one student, but Mike quickly intervened, threatened to remove him from group work and the classroom and the student got back on task after a second warning. While the students worked on their Great Depression games, Mike circulated amongst the groups, checking to see if they were on task, providing suggestions and asking questions. Several times he reminded the groups of the remaining time for completing their tasks. Mike told me that he chose the groups based on multiple abilities and the students varying abilities. He used a survey in order to assess the students’ potential contribution to the groups. As the groups presented their ideas it was obvious that they understood the assignment and provided good ideas about how they would go about explaining the programs created during the Roosevelt administration.
Fourth period was another Economics class. The first thing Mike did was hand out Smarties™ to his students. These candies were typically used as rewards, but he had an idea for how he could use the candy in an explanation for scarcity at the end of the class. Mike set up a conversational tone in his lecture in discussing money and the difference between symbolic trade and bartering. He provided a scenario where kindergarten students were trading items out of the sack lunches and then set his students free on suggesting possible items in the sacks and what items might be traded. The students jumped into the conversation without Mike having to prod their engagement. He explained to me that his eight-year-old textbook did not really integrate with the state Social Studies standards so he had to add or reconfigure some of the information. I noticed that he was not referring to any notes as he lectured, but he did glance at an outline from time to time. As with his other classes, Mike chose examples relevant to his students’ lives so that they might better relate to the economic theory and reality he was presenting. At one point, Mike had his students pull out coins and paper money from their pockets and study the dates on the paper and metal. The oldest date on the paper currency was 2001, but students had some coins that dated back to the early 1960s. Mike was making the point that metal currency lasted much longer.
Now came the scarcity part of the lesson. Some students had been eating the candy throughout the class, while others had barely touched theirs. Mike set up an auction, with the candy serving as money. The class was immediately aware that if they did not have any money/candy left they were in a poor position for the auction. The people who had saved, whether it was “forced savings” or not, were able to meet Mike’s auction prices, but the students who had consumed their candy were out of luck. His instructional objective for this segment of the lesson was immediately grasped by the class.
At the beginning of sixth period Mike explained to me that there were no individual classroom budgets, but only a department-wide sum of money. While there was great collaboration amongst his colleagues on how this money was spent, Mike said that he had to spend money out of his wallet if he wanted or needed certain resources for his classroom. In the early 2000s it was estimated that, on average, teachers were spending 450 dollars a year out of their own pockets in supporting their students’ learning[1]. He also told me that he sponsored the school’s robotics team and that team had won the Eastern National competition three times. He didn’t mention if he was paid to sponsor that team.
This class had fewer students than Mike’s previous U.S. History classes so he had to modify the lesson to fit the fewer numbers and he made that adjustment with ease. The students were on task and engaged and at the end of the hour had produced results similar to his other classes for the day.
Interview, 2008
Defining Success, 2008
Mike’s definition was different from many of the other teachers. He did not immediately focus on developing relationships with his students, but focused on helping students develop clearer meanings of the information they were learning. He described this situation as light bulb moments when the students said, “You know I get it. That makes sense” (Hull, v.t., 2008, p.1).
As for Grand Valley’s role in preparing Mike for success he offered a balanced answer. He appreciated his two different placements in different grade levels with different socio-economic groups. He developed an understanding of the difference between how younger and older students think and how their lifestyles impacted their learning. Mike taught 8th Grade U.S. History in the Ionia Middle School and 10th Grade World History in East Lansing High School. On the other hand, Mike did not think he was prepared for creating his own lesson plans when he started at Davison. While he could study the material and create a good lecture, how that lecture would result in a positive learning experience for his students was something he was ill-prepared to do. In other words, how does a person who loves teaching about content transfer that interest to a young person, who might not be as enthusiastic about Roosevelt’s New Deal programs? Mike’s solution to this problem was for the University to offer more opportunities for future teachers to share lesson plan ideas and how those plans actually worked in the classroom in terms of creating relevant learning opportunities for students.
Mike was also critical concerning state standardized testing system and how those scores impacted teacher evaluations. Despite Davison’s high scores on the state test, he did not see a direct correlation to success in education. Mike’s definition of student success was, “…a student being able to look at the world around them and offer an explanation, not by their ability to give me a whole bunch of facts, things that happened once, a long time ago” (Hull, v.t., 2008, p.2).
Content, 2008
Mike shared a background with Abby Abbott. He had already graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State in social studies and political science, with a minor in history, but no teaching certification. His main purpose for attending Grand Valley State was in achieving that certification. While he did take a few content courses at GVSU, most of his content background came from MSU. He took an African History class while at GVSU and in his lesson this day he brought in the use of cowrie shells as a medium of exchange, a fact that he drew directly out of his content base from that course. Similar to other former students, Mike could not distinguish between courses where he learned the content he was currently teaching. He just knew he learned it in some class in college. Unfortunately, he said that whether he took his U.S. History classes at MSU or GVSU, it always seemed that the courses never reached the end of the syllabus and therefore, his background on such events as the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights Movement was lacking. This lack of background made it more difficult for teachers when the state standards required students to know about these events and the results of the tests directly reflected back on their teachers. If teachers were being evaluated on their students’ content, but the teachers’ preparation did not include the content or how to teach it, how could the teachers succeed? This is a question I brought back to the History faculty. Were we following our own syllabi? Were those syllabi leading to the success of our students in their careers? How much should academic freedom play a role in professors determining what they taught versus the impact on our students’ futures? In Michigan’s case, the high school state history standards, half of the benchmarks were connected to post-World War II events and Mike said he needed to either re-learn or learn for the first time what those events were and their significance in history. In other words, he was learning along with his students. Mike’s solution to this problem was less depth in the college coursework, but making sure to cover the breadth of history and, in some way, tie the course syllabus to the state teaching standards.
Strategies and Methods, 2008
Mike felt that his weakest area when he started his career was the ability to convert content into successful lesson plans through multiple means of delivering knowledge and engaging students. He remembered telling one of his college advisors that he did not like lecturing every day and, even though he was given a packet of 20 different teaching strategies and methods, these ideas were just a list of examples with no substance to it. Mike may have been one of the students, similar to Meredith, who did not have to take the Social Studies Methods course, SST 310. Among the tools that Mike wished he had was ideas on how to remediate or reinforce knowledge and skills if students did not “get it” the first time. Mike thought that GVSU did a great job on teaching the various ways of managing a classroom. He was able to pick and choose amongst many strategies and methods that fit his personality and teaching style.
I next asked Mike if his course work, either at GVSU or MSU, had laid the groundwork for him to think historically. His response was it was not until he was working on his Master’s degree at the University of Michigan-Flint that he had ever heard of the word “historiography”. He thought it was important for students to have the ability to analyze why history is presented like it is and how different viewpoints and cultures influence historical writing.
One of the objectives of the History Department continues to be engendering good writing skills in students. Mike thought he had a good experience from that standpoint. Although he thought of himself as a good writer, he appreciated the time that his professors took in providing good feedback on his writing. He was concerned that his current students in 2008 did not have the writing skills necessary to be successful college students. He knew they struggled with creating a thesis statement and then providing evidence in supporting their thesis. He did not know why his students’ writing ability was not good, but he was working on improving it. Some of the blame for his students’ writing ability Mike placed on students not reading and not following through with reading assignments when he made them. Based on our conversation concerning his students’ preparation for college, Mike had me talk to his classes about expectations of professors for their classes and what students should expect if they chose to attend college.
I next asked Mike what strategies and methods had he gained since starting his career and he related that his most recent principal had started to emphasize differentiated instruction; trying to reach students where they are, instead of making them adjust to the teachers’ style of teaching. Part of this program involved teachers evaluating their own teaching presentations. Mike pointed to his current New Deal lesson plan, which allowed for different groups finding different ways to research and present material. Mike created the groups based on a class survey and his knowledge of his students’ skills, abilities and learning styles in the hope that the way they were learning matched their ability to learn.
Pearls of Wisdom, 2008
Mike’s first response was the need for teachers in knowing how to assess their students. Part of that assessment process was knowing that there had to be a limit on what a teacher had the time to grade. His second point was teachers needed to check for understanding often. It does very little good in finding out students did not learn what they should have learned by the time of the summative assessment. If days and weeks have gone by before the teacher finds out that their students did not really understand what was going on in the lessons, then it was time wasted. Mike cautioned new teachers from the belief that they can “save” every student. That is too much responsibility for one teacher to bear. When he first heard that statement in his college classes, he thought it was wrong to give up on any one student. His experience has taught him that education is a team effort and, although he might not reach every student, there may be another teacher in his school who will make that connection that leads to success. Mike reinforced the fact that people should enter the profession knowing that the financial rewards are not great. In fact, Mike used the words, “You’re going to be poor” (Hull, v.t., 2008, p.11). Teaching, especially in the first few years of a career is a profession of sacrifice. Beginning salaries make it difficult in paying off college debt.
If you’re not willing to sacrifice for 120 students, 120 young people that you have never met before, and never meet again, that may not like you, may not listen to you, respect you, that have parents that feel the same way that their students do, if you are not willing to sacrifice for them you shouldn’t do this because it is a struggle. I knew when I left college that teachers don’t make a lot of money, and that I wasn’t going to be a millionaire and that I wasn’t going to own a Ferrari, but I don’t think I really knew the sacrifice that it was going to take. So, you’re going to have to realize that you’re going to have to put your vacations off for a few years. You’re not going to run right out and buy a new car. If you buy a house, it’s going to be tight. Especially in your first year of teaching when they start asking for that student loan money back, there are going to be days when you’re deciding, “do I buy dinner tonight or do I pay the bill?” It’s going to happen and it’s a tough profession and that’s why half the teachers leave in the first five years. You need to know that going into it (Hull, v.t., 2008, p.12).
Mike’s last comment was that teachers need to love their students more than they love their subject. Because of Mike’s love of history, he hoped he would be able to spend weeks on topics he thought important, but the reality was that he often had days or a few weeks at most, teaching things like the events leading up to World War II, the war itself and the aftermath. Mike suggested that if a college student really wanted the time to spend weeks on a particular segment of history then high school teaching was not for them. Better for them to go on to graduate school and teach at the collegiate level than be frustrated by the limited time they would have dealing with complex events in history in a middle or high school classroom.
2015
When I entered Mike’s classroom in 2015, I saw the results of one of the educational reform issues on his white board; an I Can statement written as an objective for the day. Several of the teachers in this study were either directed by school policy or volunteered to write their lesson objectives in outcome-based statements on the boards for each class during the day. The I Can statement this day was: Explain the poverty guidelines. Describe the Cycle of Poverty. Identify aid to poor people.”
Mike’s first period class, which started at 7:25 in the morning, was Economics, a required course made up primarily of juniors, with a few seniors thrown in. Several students were missing that day due to a field trip. Spring time is a difficult time for teachers when it comes to planning lessons due to innumerable field trips and athletic events. Taking the time and effort in making sure those absent students are brought back up to speed is difficult, and only compounded when the field trip advisor or athletic coach is a teacher. Then a substitute has to fill in and the regular classroom teacher either hopes the sub is a good one and the normal lesson plan is followed or an alternative, “sub proof” lesson plan is put in place. In either case, most teachers realize that in many instances the next day will require some remediation, both in subject matter and classroom management.
Mike told me on this visit that he had a Special Education teacher in his room several times a day and those classes were basically team-taught. This teacher was free to interject herself into the lesson plan at any time. Davison’s Special Education program attracted out-of-district students due to the fact that the program was good and several programs in the regular school offerings had received state and national recognition.
Mike’s speaking style had not changed since 2008. He was an energetic and enthusiastic lecturer. His slide presentation was a good mix of text and graphics and he interwove questions into his delivery of information. At one point, while displaying a chart on the screen that represented different income levels and the poverty level, Mike asked his students to put themselves into the chart, lending relevance to the students’ lives and how they related to the lecture. Mike took the further step of comparing the demographics of the Davison School District to the national economic figures. He used multiple open-ended questions in provoking and engaging student thought and interest in the topic. He also referred to a previous day’s lesson when he talked about a major employer for the county, General Motors. For every GM job in Genesee County, 10 jobs were supported outside of GM by subcontractors and other suppliers. Mike’s dad used to work for GM. Before the 2008 Recession, GM employed 80,000 workers in Genesee County. In 2015 there were 2,000. That drop in employment made a huge difference in poverty in Flint, Michigan. A student asked a question that might have resulted in a simplistic, easily understood answer by Mike, but he refused the easy route and explained that the question had multiple, complex answers. All through the presentation, Mike created questions for the students to ponder. He helped them understand that poverty had nothing to do with living in cities like Flint or Detroit, but rural poverty existed as well. Mike referred to a previous lesson where the students had set budgets in a simulation and had to buy groceries. With limited funds, the students found out that they were not able to buy more nutritious foods and that led to poor health.
Mike tied the discussion of personal poverty to politics and shared his own purchasing power in regard to influencing candidates through donations to campaigns. He asked his students if his salary allowed him to sway a candidate’s thinking or help get a candidate elected. If his teaching salary made political influence difficult, what did that say about the amount of influence poor people had? Then he tied the whole discussion back into the cycle of poverty. He held out hope that some people might be able to break out of the cycle but it was difficult. Mike again used his own personal finances as an example as he broke down his monthly and yearly expenditures. If his budget was tight, what did that say about people who could not afford to go to college? They might have skills but they might not have credentials which would allow them a higher standard of living.
Mike finished the discussion by offering a ray of hope and how a person might escape the “cycle”: increasing educational opportunities, raising the drop out age from 16 to 18, ending racial discrimination, more support for single moms, increasing employment and leveling income distribution through increasing the minimum wage. At no time did he argue that any of these solutions were easy to be had, but they were potential answers to the problems.
The lesson stopped when the whole school was called by the public address system to recite the National Anthem. I read and hear critics of public education say that no schools say the Pledge any more. My question to those people is how often do they visit their local school or any school, for that matter. In my travels throughout the state of Michigan and in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, New York and Kansas, I have witnessed schools reciting the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily basis, with flags present in every classroom. I believe this false criticism is both uninformed and a way of reinforcing some people’s opinions that public education is failing to instill love of country and dedication to the ideals for which this country was founded. While several of the teachers in this study were critical of some public policies, none of them were political radicals suggesting revolutionary and destructive changes to the nation.
After the Pledge, Mike handed out “Cardinal Code Honor Pins”. These pins were awarded to those students who were able to maintain 3s and 4s for each grading period. A school-wide announcement was made at this time honoring those students as the teachers handed out the pins in every class.
Mike’s third hour class was U.S. History and the “I Can” statement was “Identify and explain the impact of major court decisions from the 1960s to the 1990s”. The class got a little noisy at the start of the period, but Mike’s strong classroom management and control skills allowed him to quickly quiet the class. A student turned to me and said this class was the “History Squad Posse” so they were chasing down historical facts and significance as a group. The “posse” this day was joining in a Jigsaw[2] activity. Mike divided the class into five groups representing five Supreme Court cases; Miranda v. Arizona, Gideon v. Wainwright, Tinker v. B.O.E., Roe v. Wade and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. He handed out informational packets to each of the groups with background information on each case. Mike asked each group to answer the following questions: What happened? What was the issue? What was the ruling? If there was a dissenting opinion, what was it? Mike quickly conferred with the Roe group to head off any personal feelings on abortion and told the students to just focus on the facts of the case and the judicial opinion. He did not want the group to get involved in personal arguments based on their own opinion on the issue.
While Mike was circulating around the groups, asking questions, providing further information and checking for engagement, he stopped by where I was sitting and told me that his father was a union representative for part of his 38 years at GM. Mike was now president of the Davison teachers’ association and he often relied on his dad for advice in dealing with union issues.
All through the hour Mike did a great job, visiting every group and asking questions that provoked deeper thought and more research by the students. It was obvious that he was well-versed in the cases, based on his questions and definitely focused on the key concepts he hoped his students would discover in their research.
There were seven students absent in Mike’s next class; Economics. Mike’s slide presentation had very little text and there was no textbook to which the students might refer. He handed out a printed form of the slides in assisting his students in note-taking. To ease the math computations for the students, Mike took an easily figured $10 per hour and multiplied it by 40 hours a week and then multiplied that times 52 weeks in arriving at the sum of $20,800 per year. For his students, that much money seemed like a lot, but then Mike pointed out that for a family of four, that sum was 25% below the poverty line. Without having the students release any personal information, and in order to establish relevance to their lives, Mike had them estimate their families’ relationship to the poverty level, based on the students’ best guess on their household income. He then said that, based on national statistics, 1,000 students could be in poverty in the Davison School District. After that jolting announcement, he reminded the students of a previous lesson in which the class discussed the impact of loss of jobs due to the downturn of the automobile industry and, specially, the loss of jobs at the GM plant in Flint. Multiple times throughout the lesson, Mike asked his students for further explanations when their answers were somewhat simplistic and asked the class for deeper thought and more complexity in how they processed the information he presented. Later in the lesson, he introduced the idea of Social Darwinism and that philosophy’s impact on political thought wherein those in poverty were blamed for their condition, with little to no examination for how people got into those circumstances. As in the previous class, Mike ended with an upbeat message of how the problems of poverty might be solved.
I joined Mike and his colleagues for lunch in the faculty lounge. There was a spirited game of cribbage going on, as most of the teachers quickly ate their sack lunches brought from home. Most of the conversation was not focused on school, but there was some sharing of problems encountered with a few students during the morning classes. One of the conversations involved Mike explaining the health care options to one of his colleagues. After the recession and the cutback in state aid to schools, many districts were decreasing the amount of money relegated to teachers’ health insurance and, coupled with rising health care costs, that meant more money out of the teachers’ wallets and purses. Later, Mike explained that lunchtime was a way to separate from the school day, a kind of ‘rest and relaxation’ period. He did say that earlier in his career he avoided the teachers’ lounge because he had heard most of the conversation there was negative and he did not want to be infected by that atmosphere. His attitude changed when he realized he needed a break from the physical and mental space of his classroom and discovered that there was more camaraderie versus negativity.
5th period U.S. History started a little unsettled, but after several attempts at focusing the students, the class got to work. Mike’s last attempt in focusing the students was the potential ‘threat’ of lengthening the school year, based on Mike’s connection to the Superintendent through Mike’s union position. In other words, “if you do not settle down, then maybe school will have to cut into your summer vacation’, and that got this class’s attention very quickly.
Mike told me in an earlier discussion this day that during the last textbook adoption he championed the idea of using the History Alive! curriculum[3] across the United States[4].
…we’re getting to the point where education is suddenly turning into something that you are ashamed to be a part of and it shouldn’t be that way. This should be the best job. This should be the job that everyone wants to do because of the honor and the nobility and the opportunity to help so many people (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.2).
Mike thought that if teachers were only allowed to be left alone to do their jobs, instead of all the outside interference by people who do not know teaching and what it takes to be a good teacher, then education would be better off. Despite the public and political criticism, Mike still thought people needed to go into teaching, but people also needed to know what they were getting into when they chose a teaching career.
Dealing with Stress, 2015
Mike wished, for his sake and that of his wife, that he was better at dealing with stress. His method of dealing with the stresses of the job was compartmentalizing; separating school from home. That was hard to do since good teaching requires grading and lesson planning at home, unless you stay after school for hours after the contract day. Good teaching requires making telephone calls and emails to parents when they are home from work to answer the calls or get on their home computers. Mike realized that compartmentalizing was not working when he started missing events in his children’s lives, like soccer and baseball games, for the sake of his job. He knew he had days when he wasn’t at his best and might have lacked the enthusiasm and passion that he exhibited both days I visited his classroom. He knew it happened and he knew his students saw it in his teaching. Good teachers want to do what is best for their students, but, without a careful life balance, that mental investment grinds teachers down and is a contributing factor in teacher burnout.
Motivation, 2015
Mike’s motivation, and reward, came when he ran into students after they graduated and were out in the ‘real world’. When those students admitted that Mike challenged them, they acknowledged that his class was hard, but they learned valuable information and skills, that was all that Mike needed to keep motivated to do his best. He knew that not all of his students thought his class was beneficial for ‘real life’ and he knew that he was not every student’s favorite teacher but he thought that for every former student who shared some positive insights into Mike’s teaching, there were others he did not contact who thought the same thing.
Strategies and Methods, 2015
Technology. Mike reinforced that beginning teachers needed as much exposure to technology use in the classroom as possible. He thought that student cell phones were under-utilized. He cited simple things like having the students pull out their phones and set alerts for upcoming tests, but also using the many teaching applications which were readily available for cell phones. He promoted the idea within his department for using shared drives in the cloud where students are able to access the documents they needed for class. Mike said his district was working on “1 to 1” computer use, in other words a computer for every student, but they weren’t there yet. The district was on the cusp of buying inexpensive laptops on carts instead of textbooks. The district assistant superintendent would rather the district be a leader in technology use versus playing ‘catch up’ with the rest of the county.
Outside of technology, Mike was involved in a new program of standard-referenced grading[5]. This idea is based on mastery learning and meeting levels of proficiency versus some kind of holistic grade. Mike was a part of a pilot project for his district, along with 6 or 7 other teachers, for the next year who were instituting standards-referenced grading in their classes. Mike’s main point, whether it be learning new technology or new methods of assessment, was that teachers should be open and prepared for change in their profession. The days of using the same methods and tools for an entire teaching career were gone.
Continuing Learning, 2015
Mike was not a big fan of professional development on a large scale, but said that small group opportunities were more profitable for him. He thought that most professional development at this time was focused on meeting state mandates and it wound up being a paper chase, just checking off the boxes created by the state and federal government versus truly improving learning. Mike’s advice to future teachers was to be open-minded concerning professional development, depending on how they apply what they learned. He also said that teachers had choices when it came to how they wanted to develop professionally and they should choose the path that best fit their interests. Mike also knew that beginning teachers faced a problem if they pursued a Master’s program before starting their careers. That degree made a new teacher more expensive and probably less likely to be hired as someone fresh out of college with no graduate credit hours.
He considered himself a first adopter for many educational change and reform ideas, whether it was technology use or changes in how students were evaluated. While he knew that some teachers did not look forward to change and would rather do things as they have always done them, Mike wanted to be part of the change. For those teachers that resisted, they might see the merits of what Mike did in adopting new methods and means of teaching and learning or those teachers would eventually retire and make room for new teachers who were educated in the new methods.
After two or three years into his career, Mike decided on a Master’s program. Part of his motivation was the increased salary as graduate hours meant moves across the salary schedule. While he considered a Master’s in Education or Educational Leadership, like many of the teachers in this study, Mike was fortunate that the University of Michigan-Flint created a new Master’s in Social Studies Education. He loved graduate school and thoroughly enjoyed having deep discussions about the content. He also enjoyed the fact that many of his courses allowed him to directly translate that work into lesson plans for his high school students. His teaching changed. Classes in Economics and Economic History helped with his decision in beginning to teach Economics in his high school. It also changed his approach in his U.S. History classes. Whereas much of his focus prior to his graduate program had been on military and social history, now he infused more economic history. He thought this approach was different from other teachers who taught U.S. History and his students noticed the difference and found Mike’s approach as offering a different perspective than they usually encountered.
Evaluation, 2015
Mike said his district usually waited a while before adopting changes dictated by the state, due to continual changes to new programs that come out of Lansing. Davison was using its old evaluation instrument, with some tweaks, in order to meet the new evaluation guidelines versus throwing their whole system out and starting from scratch. The district still met the letter of the law so there was no problem with the state. Mike knew that the current instrument would probably need to be changed as the state guidelines approached some final form. His problem, as other teachers commented, was the inconsistent application of the evaluation instrument. Based on conversations with teachers in the district, there were some administrators who teachers definitely did not want to evaluate them and some administrators who teachers definitely did want to be evaluators. Another concern of Mike’s was the student growth component. Based on a recent conversation with one of his colleagues, it was apparent that some students did not take state standardized testing seriously and were either lackadaisical in their answers or just penciled in the bubbles on a random basis, despite entreaties from the teachers and administrators about the importance of these tests. Even if there is a formula for ferreting out those types of answers, the results still reflect poorly on the teacher and his/her evaluation. Mike’s opinion was that the tests were inherently flawed and, even worse, they were a one-time snapshot of student learning. He recounted the example of one of his A students who took the test and did poorly. She was upset with the outcome. Mike said she had one bad day versus her other 89 great days so why should she and her teachers be punished for the bad snapshot? Mike was also concerned about the grade levels in which the tests were given. His third grade son took the state test so a 9 year old’s score would dictate a teacher’s evaluation? Mike knew that his son was bored during the testing and just started filling in answers. Even though Mike was disappointed in his son’s behavior during the test, he was nine years old. Mike thought actual student performance, such as standard-referenced grading was a much better approach for assessing students and evaluating teachers.
Mike was also critical in the changes when evaluations happened. At first, formal evaluations happened every year for three years and, if at the end of the third year, a teacher was rated highly effective they would then be evaluated every other year. When the state changed the guidelines, the timing of evaluations changed. The word “multiple” was being interpreted to mean “more than one”. In previous years Mike received many good evaluations to the extent that his room was not visited often. That was not the same for teachers in trouble and, as union president, Mike’s experience showed that these teachers, for good or bad, were receiving many more visits. If those visits were based on a process of teacher improvement, then all well and good, but if the visits were designed as a way of accumulating a record for release of a teacher, that was a whole other circumstance. Mike said that most of his administrators were committed to teacher improvement, providing training for those teachers who needed it and supportive and constructive feedback through evaluations, but that wasn’t always the case. Personally, I have been privy to conversations where administrators have said, “Here is our opportunity to get rid of dead wood.” I have no idea if those instances of dead wood were true cases were teachers needed to be released or where there were personality conflicts and evaluations were used as punishment. Throughout my career I have witnessed both sides of the issue.
Mike had no problem with the instrument itself, but he doubted if all the criteria on the document could be successfully observed in just a few observations. In that case, he thought that administrators might be using anecdotal information for a basis of filling out the detailed form, information such as teacher and student conversations about a teacher versus personally observed information. If they heard good things and no complaints from other teachers, students and parents, it must be that a teacher was doing a good job. If those complaints resulted in more constructive observations with the eye toward true teacher remediation and improvement, then Mike had no problem with administrators using anecdotal information for the reason for increased observations. In Mike’s case, he appreciated the written feedback which accompanied the evaluation form. He acknowledged that the workload for his administrators has increased tremendously. There were 282 teachers in his district and 15 administrators. The administrators were very busy with just that component of their job and their whole job description required many more duties and responsibilities.
Mentoring, 2015
Mike had a great mentor teacher when he started his career at Davison. They “developed a good professional relationship to the point where (they) frequently designed lessons and activities together” (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.5). They had similar views on education and goals. Mike said his district attempted to have mentors in the same department and in the same geographic area as a new teacher. Part of the geographic location was that closeness allowed for informal conversations on a “day by day, hour by hour situation” (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.9). Mike did not have an opportunity to be a mentor himself by 2015, but he did think he had the ability in influencing other teachers due to various programs and pilot projects with which he was involved.
Pearls of Wisdom, 2015
“No one writes a lesson plan the way I was taught at Grand Valley” (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.11). No teacher has the time for writing a formal lesson plan for every day. Mike thought that practice was simply a hoop for jumping through a college course. Teachers need to find a template that really works for them, and not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach for lesson creation. His district did not have a required template for formal evaluations, which is not true for all districts. As noted in some of these stories, teachers have to hand in lesson plans on Friday for next week and those plans have to follow district guidelines. I butted my head up against my first school district on this issue. The high school administration required a detailed lesson description, with cognitive and affective objectives, written into the tiny squares in the teachers’ lesson plan books. Early on, due to my poor small penmanship I started writing my lesson plans out on notebook paper and then inserted or stapled those sheets of paper into my plan book. That was unacceptable to the administration, even though I included far more detail on those sheets of paper than the little square box allowed. I went back and forth with my department chair and finally the administration realized I wasn’t being pig-headed and I was offering far more detail than most of the other teachers. They still required a small description in the box, but I did not have to jam so much into it. From then on in my career in New York and Kansas I put my lesson plans on sheets into my plan book or in a three-ring binder.
Mike typed out his lesson plans, which he updated from time to time. He thought overly descriptive lesson plans, similar to the scripts I witnessed some districts use in Michigan, were far too inflexible in allowing differences between classes and the students who comprised those classes. Mike said he practiced differentiated instruction when possible and that creating a lesson plan on a daily basis which coordinated with all the possible student learning abilities would be near impossible. No matter how he reached his students his end result had to answer these questions: “Do you understand the content? Do you understand the concept?” (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.12). He did not care how they were able to get to that point, as long as they did and he could effectively measure their success.
Mike thought grading homework and other forms of practice was punishing students. If they were truly practicing, then students should not necessarily get all the answers correct. Done correctly, mistakes in practice should result in remediation and not punishment.
Mike cautioned future teachers that they should know how to write a test before they start teaching. He was not a big fan of multiple-choice questions. Mike said it was difficult writing those types of questions that really display what students know on three levels; easy, medium and difficult. His high school district used the same summative tests in all the similar classes and set 78% as the goal for each level of knowing. Mike said it was really easy identifying a poorly written test, but very hard constructing a good one and the only way of consistently achieving good assessments was practice over time and, like some many things involved with teaching, that takes years of experience of doing it yourself.
Mike’s last pearl was delivered with a laugh. “Don’t assign an essay test just before Spring Break” (Hull, v.t., 2015, p.13). When he started his career, he told his colleagues he was doing that and, instead of presenting an argument for why that was a bad idea, they let him go ahead. Mike spent his Spring Break grading essay tests because, of course, there was no reason why he shouldn’t hand back those essays when the break was over. He was not against essay tests, but he was against self-punishment and he knew that the time off from school, especially as the second semester was beginning to wind down, was important for a teacher’s well-being.
At the end of the interview I asked Mike if there was anything else he would like to say and he reiterated a thought he expressed to me at an earlier time. It was important to love the content you teach, but first and foremost, teachers have to love teaching young people. There are times when the last thing students need a particular day is a deep discussion of some historical event because their lives have been turned upside down but some personal experience. On those days, it is important for a teacher to understand what is impacting their students and have the flexibility in responding to their needs, whether it be a world-shaking event, like a pandemic or 9/11 or a personal tragedy, like a classmate dying in a car accident over the weekend. Good school districts provide a means of dealing with events like those, but the first line of empathy and compassion stands or sits in the classroom with the students every day. He said that a good sense of humor was paramount. Teachers must be willing to laugh with their students and laugh at themselves because teaching creates situations where teachers fail and that failure needs some positive support, as in, “That was really dumb on my part. Let’s laugh about that and move on.” There is enough stress in teaching on a daily basis without taking every moment too seriously and laughter helps to relieve that stress.
Feedback/Errata