photo credit: Mark Setchell

Michael Jolley’s post on ‘Testing As a Weapon” led me to a conversation with a high school teacher friend of mine who lives on the West Coast. Sooz began teaching English in a Chicago public high school right after she completed the Golden Apple Teacher Education program (similar to Teach for America). We hardly spoke her first year of teaching, which seemed to consist of working at the school, working at home, crying, and sleeping.  Students fought in the halls and in her classroom, and her principal was ridiculous. Proving the truth inside the teacher movie cliché, the heroine persevered, both students and teacher were changed, new perspectives were shared, and the future became more hopeful. When I began teaching as an adjunct at Baruch, she was well beyond the boot camp years of teaching, and the trial and error, conferences, reading, rigor and resourcefulness she’d put in often made her seem a decade ahead of me in wisdom and skill.

I began the ratio that continued for four years of my time as a doctoral student: much class and mentored time focused on specialized academic study, marginal time talking with friends and fellow adjuncts as I flailed around my first year as a teacher. Sooz was my main resource for teaching advice before becoming a fellow at Schwartz (where talking about our work is structured into frequent meetings).  And we’ve shared more of the same problems than I thought we would, since she was teaching high school and I was teaching college, especially in grammar and writing.

Recently, she told me opinion of “The Race to the Top” and standardized testing. I thought of the difference between her experience in one of the lowest rated Chicago public schools, compared to a high school in a pretty affluent area on the west coast. For the students in a bio-tech program, the innovations and approaches she’d developed in Chicago were ineffective and inappropriate. She adjusted, developed, got to know them, and they got to know her.

But she’s been laid off, due to rather drastic cuts. A teacher who regularly teaches AP classes will replace three other teachers in the English department. That means that one person will teach a greater ratio of AP to regular classes than the laid-off teachers did. How might that affect that department as a whole? How can we judge teachers when we don’t follow these shifting contexts? And, if Sooz goes to a completely different school, with a different culture of students, will that be taken into account?

An Atlantic Monthly article described Teach for America’s research on what makes a good teacher: it argues that the common traits of good teachers is that they consistently redesign their pedagogy. How do you test for this, when it seems like precisely the lack of a rigid system is the key to success?

Sooz is thinking of developing another assessment system, one that she designed and planned to implement next year as part of a continuation of her role as Professional Development Coordinator at her school. Fellow teachers would visit classrooms several times over the course of a year. It is a much more holistic approach than grades and testing, and it combines assessment with collaboration, skill and experience-sharing, which is something many teachers do in an ad hoc way already, too many without much institutional support.