Unstuck-Ed

There’s a famous Sidney Harris cartoon that shows two mathematicians near a chalkboard working out some long, complicated theorem. In the middle of the board, connecting the two halves of the formula, is the phrase “and then a miracle occurs.” One of the mathematicians tells the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

See the cartoon here.

We seem to have the same attitude when it comes to teacher expertise and effectiveness. There now (finally) seems to be great agreement that teacher effectiveness is a major factor, indeed the major factor in student achievement. On some level, everyone–from administrators to the policy community and politicians–now seems to acknowledge this, even if they are not familiar with the research on which it is based.

Unfortunately, some of the proposals developed on top of this idea seem to ignore what expertise is, and how it is developed. They leave these critical issues inside a black box. Measuring teacher expertise based on student test scores may be helpful, if done well, but it provides none of the critical insight into how teachers may develop this expertise. Nor can it help schools to know how to nurture these qualities among their faculty; how to create environments in which more teachers can support student success. In a good case, schools will hire teachers from among the most vetted, certificated, and tested candidates, wait for the miracles to occur, and then measure the teachers against test scores to see which teachers are “effective.”

In a worse scenario, however, there are even more alarming problems. First, research points to no correlation between short-term student test scores and long-term achievement. If the evaluations only relate to standardized tests from that particular year, they will not drive the kind of long-term boost to achievement that schools, parents, and states are looking for. Second, any connection to short-term test scores will drive teachers not only to teach to the test, but encourage them to game the system. Third, this approach reinforces the mistaken notion that teaching is a solitary activity done apart from peers, and destroys incentives for teachers to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways.

Who would benefit from the proposal to tie teacher evaluation to student test scores? Students? If a student is fortunate enough to bounce from one well-rated teacher to another, and if a sustainable system somehow evolves (the miracle again) to attract only these top-testers as teachers. Teachers? Perhaps not. If the question of teacher expertise development is left inside the black box, only those teachers who have by luck or craft managed to navigate the system to improve student scores will be clear beneficiaries. But even they will not benefit as much as they could if their own development were being actively guided. The rest of the teachers may not know what to expect, and it is hard to imagine any default benefit. Parents may feel like they are benefiting, but only if they find ways to get their kids into the classrooms higher-ranked teachers. Administrators will get clearer numbers to look at, but their accountability for creating environments that produce good results will go down. Outside vendors, developers of tools like data systems and services like professional development, may do pretty well.

This is precisely the specter that stands in front of us now: that at the very moment the importance of teacher quality has become widely acknowledged, that knowledge will be misused to create another layer of systems which help neither teachers nor students.

The US Department of Education’s recent Race to the Top Fund will provide more than four billion extra dollars for states’ reform efforts, provided that they do “not have any legal, statutory, or regulatory barriers to linking student achievement or student growth data to teachers.” Section C(2) of the guidelines lays out the requirements to tie student data to teacher evaluation, and from there to teacher feedback, professional development, promotion and compensation. There has been a bit of brouhaha about this program in states such as California and New York, which have legislation forbidding the use of student data in teacher evaluation and tenure.

States are, of course, free to write proposals for funding which do acknowledge what we know about developing expertise among teachers: the role of collaboration; the role of trust in schools; the required stance of continuous improvement and self-reflection; the importance of physical environments; and a more sophisticated view of knowledge that recognizes its social, tacit, and generative aspects. Unfortunately, there is no new incentive for states and schools to push in these directions.

No question about it, the Edible Schoolyard garden at Berkeley’s King Middle School is a beautiful place: an acre of land right behind the school, well tended with lots of well-planned growing plots, learning spaces, and resources. But what is the meaning of the garden? What is its role in the school?

You would not be wrong if you said the garden was there to teach children about growing and eating healthy food. But that isn’t the whole answer, and the fact that it isn’t raises interesting questions about how we think about education and educational programs.

I have been involved with a number of teaching gardens over the past 20 years, on both the east and west coasts–which is what made me want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. In every case, the gardens seemed to have a main philosophical rationale, a justification for their construction and staffing and maintenance. In one case, an urban teaching garden in North Philadelphia recreated bits of a local habitat in the middle of acres of concrete and macadam. There, I had the privilege of creating curricula that would help the school’s teachers bring science classes outdoors for high-quality science explorations. Other school and teaching gardens have other themes: butterfly habitat gardens remain especially popular, for instance.

However, in almost every case, the uses that the gardens allow exceed these narrow definitions. One area private school had a small organic garden, with a number of fruit trees, a chicken coop, and beds of herbs and vegetables. Did students learn about growing food? Absolutely. Science? Yes, that too, in both explicit and subtle ways. However, social-emotional learning was a big part of what happened during students’ time in the garden, as well. So students took away much more than simply how to garden organically.

School and teaching gardens have great “affordances,” to use the word as Greeno does. It allows many kinds of interactions among its users, unlike highly constrained school classroom environment.

The Edible Schoolyard garden takes advantage of this, building in relationships between the garden program and the science curriculum; and between the kitchen program and the humanities curriculum. But you can’t reduce the garden to being a subset of the science curriculum, nor the kitchen to the humanities. And I think that makes some school heads nervous: how do you justify these gardens if you cannot easily label their impact? We want to be able to reduce the effect to a simple statement.

I think the gardens’ justification comes in something irreducible, though simple enough: it is the ‘ecological validity‘ of the learning that happens in these spaces that seems to be so powerful. In other words, unlike learning a subject in an artificially constrained classroom environment and then having no idea how to apply it in the real world, garden learning by its nature allows students to see “what really happens” in a big, loosely controlled space.

Whether you are interested in hands-on learning, or nutrition, or connecting schools to their communities, you may want to visit the Edible Schoolyard garden. It is a teaching garden done very well–and a model for many other similar efforts around the country.

Learn more about the garden at the Edible Schoolyard site. Of course, if you live close or can find a way to get out to the San Francisco Bay area, you can check out one of their free monthly tours. If you attend a tour, you will have a chance to purchase some of the related educational curricula and other publications at the end.

Back on their site, you can find standards-oriented classroom lessons, as well as recipes for your own garden or kitchen.

Finally, a few pictures of the garden in the spring of 2009: