The Impact of My Teaching

"Do you want to have an impact on the educational outcomes for the children you teach? Raise your hand if you do. Of course you do!" Wednesday we received professional development about effect size and Visible Learning strategies.

I can't help but think of Taylor Mali, and how it feels to make a difference at a time when so many students are suffering. After two years of surviving a global pandemic with over 80 million cases in the US with nearly 1 million dead. It's been two years with teachers doing their best with no formal training or background on remote education, or how to recover from it. It's been two years of an unstable economy with disporportionate impacts in marginalized communities (those students whom we teach). In the years following George Floyd's murder, and the racial uprising where everytime I saw the local news I saw the faces of my students at protests, young people being assaulted by police.

Have I healed from this? Of course not. We haven't given ourselves the time to even begin to heal; yet my county has not stopped high-takes testing. Just this week my students sat for a county mandated writing exam which is a special requirement to receive their diplomas. It's literally called 'The Gateway.' Reader, you're savy - so I'm not even going to bring up the equity issues with those aforementioned marginalized students and families who have survived COVID-19 to now be gatekept from graduation. We are teachers who have not healed, unable to do the healing work alongside our students as we all pretend it's business as usual. 

The PowerPoint slide changes, and the speaker presents with "what we already know" because those of us who have been around a long time already know about Visible LEarning for Literacy by Fisher, Frey, and Hattie (2016). We were told that the biggest factor with the greatest effect size was Collective Teacher Efficacy. While this is true, according to research, CTE is the greatest influencer of student achievement, we were told that this comes soley from dutifully doing the learning cycle and having belief in the inevitable success of using Visible Learning strategies for outcomes. While I agree, I don't think that this is the whole story - the same way I feel about test data.

We were then shown scores from a team who had implemented this process with fidelity. The data was organized by the last three big district standardized tests: the fall interim, fall final, and spring interim. There were vertical columns which listed the number of students in the following four categories: beginning; developing; proficient; and distinguished. It was clear that across the tests students were moving or "leveling up" in category. Very few students were still beginning, and most were now proficient. The course team was never named.

"This is the impact of their teaching - it's clear here in the numbers. They took a risk, they believed, and they did everything I asked them to, and look at the data. Numbers don't lie."

Then I, along with my course team, was given our data.

"This is the impact of your teaching."

"What do you see? What do  you wonder?" 

Well I wondered how we could have been having a professional development that discussed teacher efficacy and then treat teachers this way.

In Language Arts, so much depends on the passages selected by the county office for the test, or the way questions are worded, or the vocabulary of distractors (or correct answers). So much depends on the two years we're actively still trying to survive. So much depends on the interpretation of that red wheelbarrow. That's meant metaphorically, but I think it makes a great symbol for this very reason: interpretation.

And yes, I do want students to be prepared for ALL kinds of passages and questions. I want literacy skills that transfer. I want students to be able to ask critical questions more than I want them to be able to answer them by selecting the correct multiple choice answer. Our students contain multitudes. Literacy is a way to access that. To insult my students or my teaching in saying that test scores are my impact? I do not believe that this was the intention of the professional development, or the person presenting and coaching. The timing, mere days before Spring Break, in a year that has been so desparately hobbled together in an attempt to keep the wheels on the bus, it felt very tone deaf.

I've got students READING BOOKS for the first time since elementary school.

I have students ENGAGED in learning and being a part of our classroom when they normally skip their other classes. I wish that what we are doing well got attention too.

Do we need to work on instructional strategies that maximize effect size? YES.

Do we need to continue to reflect and change how we move in CLTs to continue to be actionable in adjusting our instructional practices? Yes.

Do we need to get uncomfortable in order to grow for our students? YES.

Is data important? YES.

I want my students to leave my classroom with a love of reading and a belief in their ability to grow their literacy practices. I want them to feel empowered and to see literacy as access to a power they can wield. I could make a list of practices that devalue literacy, democratic literacy practices, and ways to make students feel powerless and ineffective. Many of them would revolve around centering their worth on standardized multiplechoice test scores. Our students are more than test scores, and so are we.