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Last week, during a break from my graduate school education policy classes, I had the opportunity to visit my old school and spend some time with my students from the last two years of my teaching. It was a great day. The excitement and joy of the kids were truly overwhelming.

At the end of the day one of my students, a heartbreakingly adorable girl whose thick Spanish accent is slowly lightening up, told me that one of her former classmates is “mean now.” We talked briefly about this before we had to go our separate ways. Although it was a small moment in the course of the day, it sticks out in my mind now as a reminder of the profoundly multifaceted world of children.

It stands out now in stark contrast to the relatively simple, safe environment of my college classrooms. This week in my class on teacher quality we simulated a panel on teacher pay structure for the Rochester City School District. We grappled with the intricacies of teacher pay and the concerns of different stakeholders as we weighed different benefits and costs. And yet the exercise felt incredibly uncomplicated compared to the ecosystem I used to share with 25-30 children. This disconnect is one I am constantly aware of and working to bridge as I prepare for my transition from the theory of education reform to its practice. (more…)

Much of my coursework and my thinking over the past eight weeks, since I started graduate school, has focused on leadership. This shouldn’t surprise me, since one of my courses has the word leadership in its title. Still, I find this theme reappearing in my Education Sector Non-Profits class as well as the course on Pursuing Teacher Quality. The question of what makes a good leader intrigues me, because I think there’s such a dire need for leadership in education right now. I certainly didn’t witness much of it at any level during my time in the classroom.

While my classes have presented a number of different models and approaches to leadership, one constant seems to be a need for a clear vision. It sounds ridiculously obvious and simple, but looking back on my experience in the Bronx, there was a shocking absence of vision. At the school level, too few principals articulated a clear and inspirational vision for what teachers and students should be accomplishing. Yes, every school is required to have a mission statement, but I rarely saw schools translate this from a superficial document into meaningful action that pulled them together internally toward a collective purpose.

If vision was missing at the school level, it was even more absent from the city Department of Education at the level where it was arguably more vital. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein spoke constantly about the need to close the achievement gap, lower drop-out rates, and raise graduation rates. Their approach was clearly focused on data-driven results and greater accountability for schools and teachers (not so much for themselves). But this speaks to their strategies. It did not lay out a vision, or at least not one that a communities, students, teachers, and school leaders could passionately rally behind.

As I’ve thought about my own teaching, I wonder if I laid out a vision for myself and my students. I know that my driving goal was to prepare my students to pursue whatever path they chose. I wanted to give them the academic and social-emotional skills to succeed against all obstacles. Underlying these ideas was the hope that my students would become lifelong learners, critical thinkers who loved the pursuit of knowledge. Sounds nice, right?

But to what extent did I express this to my students, parents, or myself? (more…)

Last week, during my first week at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, I went “course shopping.” This is a time when practically all the professors give 40-minute explanations or previews of their courses so that students can make decisions about their schedule. As someone who thought I had my schedule all figured out at the beginning of the week this was exciting and frustrating at the same time, as I suddenly felt doubts about all the classes I wasn’t taking. With only two semesters of coursework while I’m here, the stakes feel pretty high for each selection.

That said, the stress of figuring out which courses to take has been far outweighed by the excitement of getting to know my classmates and professors. I have been continually awestruck by the knowledge and experience my professors bring to the classroom. I am equally humbled by the breadth and depth of experience of my fellow students.

In the past few days I met Ronald Ferguson, a man who literally wrote the book on closing the achievement gap; I listened to Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot speak, and literally got chills; I sat in on shopping sessions for about a dozen other professors who have in many ways shaped the direction and discourse on education in this country.

What also struck me in the midst of this exciting and overwhelming period is the need for me to stop and prepare to totally open my mind. During orientation’s opening ceremony, one of the speakers, Joseph Blatt, mentioned the need for us to “put down the duckie.” By this he meant the need for us to shed our biases, our hang-ups and preconceived notions, and open ourselves up to the rich discussions of the year ahead.

Over the past year I have felt pressured to create an ad hoc ideology. (more…)

I can still remember a conversation I had with my child psychology professor during my first week of pre-service training for Teaching Fellows in June 2007. She asked me about my plans for teaching, and I responded without hesitation, “I’m only going to do this for two years. Then I’m planning to move on to journalism.” I’m embarrassed now when I think of myself back then.

I had the best of intentions when I entered the Teaching Fellows, but even as I ended my training filled with nervousness and doubt, I had no real appreciation for the challenge ahead of me. At the end of a tumultuous first year, I felt proud I hadn’t quit but deeply regretful about the classroom I’d presided over.

By the end of my second year I felt a much greater sense of pride, but I knew my work wasn’t finished. The ingenuous idealism I felt two years earlier had evaporated. Now that I understood the immensity of the task of teaching, I had no choice to work until I had mastered it.

Now, two years later, I can see that I was still looking at teaching from naive perspective. While I’ve made important gains each of the last two years, it’s become apparent to me that while one may become a “master teacher” over time, the challenge of growing, developing, and improving as an educator never ends. I could dedicate myself over the next year, or next 10 years, and my growth would never be finished.

It’s with mixed emotions, then, that I am preparing for my new classroom, no longer on the third floor of PS 310, but in Longfellow Hall at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education where I will pursue a degree in education policy and management. (more…)

It always seemed strange to me that one could be granted tenure after only three years of teaching. As we all know, most teachers are still in the process of learning and establishing themselves as professionals in the midst of their third year. So, to give someone tenure before this third year has even finished always seemed odd.

Nonetheless, in a system that does little to recognize performance otherwise, tenure represented a rare milestone of merit, and I wanted it when I was eligible. I was disappointed then when my principal informed me last year that my probation would be extended. She felt I had room to grow with regard to modeling in my reader’s workshop. I accepted this, and when I later heard that, per our superintendent’s directions, tenure was especially difficult to earn for teachers who were new to a school, as I was, I took some solace in the possibility that it wasn’t entirely personal.

Additionally, at a panel on value-added data run by Educators 4 Excellence in November, Sandra Tacina, Director of Talent Analytics for the DOE, informed the audience that in the previous year, teachers who scored lower than 50 percent on their Teacher Data Reports were red-flagged in tenure decisions. I wonder if she realized that this applied to at least one member of the audience. Once again, I took this as a sign that my principal’s decision was partly beyond my control, and perhaps beyond hers as well. I took this as a sign that with the right amount of improvement, I would secure tenure this year.

It was a bumpy road though. I could sense from the tone of observations and informal conversations with my administrators that my confidence was misplaced. Before we even reached winter break, I had a strong suspicion I would not be getting tenure this year either.

As spring rolled around, all teachers up for tenure in my building were asked to submit portfolios for tenure. (more…)

This year was surprising in a lot of ways. When the year began, I felt immediately behind and a little out of sync. This was in part because I started the year with 10 more students than the year before, but I wouldn’t put all the blame on that change. It wasn’t just the number of students that threw me off, but the personalities, performance and behavior of many of my new students. It was clear early on that this was a talkative group, there were more “rebels” than my previous years, I had five students who weren’t speaking English, including three who were brand new to the country, and six students were reading at an early kindergarten level. It was clear early on that this year would be a challenging one, and I admit to feeling a little overwhelmed.

But despite feeling myself on somewhat shaky footing, there were glimmers of hope. There was also a surprising confidence and persistence to try new things and create a classroom culture this year where my students learned to love to learn. This was an exciting realization, the moment when I understood that it was exactly because this year was going to be a great challenge, it was also a great opportunity.

Looking back on this year, there were many highs, and some pretty low lows. At times I feltdiscouraged with my own teaching, a lack of confidence from my administration, and I felt anxious about the needs and progress of my students inside and outside of the classroom. However, I think this past year, perhaps more so than any year prior, I rose to the occasion.

This was a year where I really tried to follow through on my intent to try new things. (more…)

I wasn’t surprised when I came back from my end-of-the-year meeting with my principal, and found my students, as per usual, had gone wild in my absence. My few troublemakers never miss an opportunity to, you know, make trouble the second I’m out of the classroom. Still, I was surprised to find the teacher who had been covering me so upset and emotional.

“I have watched Mr. Brosbe teach you about respect all year and he makes time every week to teach you about respect, and I feel very disrespected right now,” she said.

And that sums up the problem pretty nicely. Despite devoting numerous lessons this year to respect as part of what I call “The Peacemaker’s Program,” many of my students still show no signs of truly grasping the concept of respect for others. In addition, my school unveiled a initiative called Respect for All, part of a city anti-bullying campaign. This is on top of the existing anti-bullying efforts my school had in place.

So, suffice it to say, my students have had a few opportunities to learn about respect, talk about respect, and roleplay respectful behavior. Nonetheless, problems with respect persist. There are times when students don’t respect property. There are times they don’t respect each other. And there are times they don’t respect teachers. Is teaching respect an impossible task? (more…)

My first year of teaching was a constant struggle. Classroom management was my biggest problem, but I struggled with many of the other fundamentals of teaching. While I often look back at that first year as a personal failure, I know that I ended the year a much more effective teacher than I began. This was due in part to constant self-reflection and assessment, but I owe most of my improvement to my mentor, my instructional coach from my masters program, and working with an AUSSIE literacy coach.

The extra pair of eyes and many years of experience that each of these women offered gave me an opportunity to analyze my strengths and weaknesses with a fresh and helpful perspective. My mentor, a fifth-year teacher taught me many basics of classroom management and lesson planning. My instructional coach helped me understand what differentiation meant in terms of classroom practice. My AUSSIE coach helped me get a better grasp of the workshop model and guided reading.

Each of these relationships was focused on observations of my teaching and conversations about how to make it better. They were also all predicated on trust. I knew that each of these people were coming to my classroom to help make me a better teacher so I could help all my students learn.

I can’t help but juxtapose these experiences with the formal evaluations I had during my first year, and since. I had two formal observations in my first year of teaching, both rated satisfactory, and with minimal actionable feedback. In my second year I had only one formal observation, rated satisfactory, but without a post-observation. At the end of that second year, I had to rely heavily on my own assessment of my abilities based on my own reflections, student test scores and general feedback from peers. Based on this inexact measurement, I felt I was doing a pretty good job.

When I landed at PS 310 after being excessed, I realized quickly how many gaps there were in my self-assessment. (more…)

Another round of state testing is behind us, and after years of supervising the tests, I still can’t believe how mentally exhausting it can be just to walk around and watch my students take them. I proctor third-graders designated as English language learners, so I’m watching over some of our grade’s most struggling students. This makes the experience of administering the test exceptionally harrowing.

Going into this year’s English Language Arts and mathematics exams there was a lot of buzz about the increased rigor. It wasn’t the first time we’ve heard these rumors, and in the past they haven’t exactly panned out. So I was a little skeptical that this year’s test would prove any different.

This year’s ELA test didn’t seem especially difficult compared to past years’. The format was different, extending over three days instead of two, and including more open responses in place of an editing passage. The open responses, while simpler, were still a major improvement over the basic editing passage third-graders were responsible for in the past. Still, having seen the fourth-grade tests, and essentially preparing my kids for something similar, I thought this year’s third-grade ELA exam wasn’t a huge step up in terms of difficulty.

But on this year’s math exams, I did notice an increase in the number of questions that required more critical thinking and maneuvering through a problem-solving process. There were multiple two-part problems and there were a few questions that tested students’ understanding of how to use certain math process, rather than just their mastery of rudimentary skills.

I was happy to see this shift, even if it might mean my students score lower, because it lessens the benefit of teaching to the test. (more…)

Not long after I wrote about my hopes for my students to feel confident and well-prepared for this week’s New York State English Language Arts exam, I went to bed and immediately began my own battle with test anxiety. As soon as my head hit the pillow my mind started racing with recollections of past ELA exams.

What I remembered was the overwhelming feeling of helplessness, while walking around and watching certain students struggle. I remembered that quiet voice screaming inside my head, “No! No! Go back and re-read! The answer’s right there!” Or, “Please don’t change your answer. Please don’t change your answer.” Or, “Why aren’t you using the strategies we practiced?!”

But ultimately my anxiety and sleeplessness was unimportant yesterday as my students entered the classroom. Finding a way to alleviate their test anxiety was my only goal. Still, as we went through a number of my test day rituals, I couldn’t help fight the nagging question, was it all a waste of time?

The students started the day with a few Ritz crackers and juice. This start was less about alleviating test anxiety, and more to make sure all my students had food in their stomachs.

After that, I tried a basic priming exercise. (more…)