A Few Notes on AERA and my post for the Education Roundtable called ...Teaching and Laryngitis

I am still in Chicago, well okay....ONLY in my mind.
I'm somehow not yet back in CA, though I'm in body here, but in mind at AERA and listening to researchers/speakers...partly because I decided to look at every piece in their booklet (which is like a phone book of ten thousand pieces of research) and group the pieces.
I want to see how that speaks to me of researchers and their work.
I'm very much enjoying talking to Paul Baker at Education PR connected to AERA.
I'm trying to inform myself and become reflective as a public school educator.
Then I might speak to this as a teacher.

As I do in my classroom context when I want to start firming up what I know...what I do is start actually looking....I'm assessing and making meaning for myself from this and sharing this MY WAY , looking, taking in, counting, grouping, thinking, considering.....
I'm halfway through my counting and I find I have about 35 categories. I am going to tonight, or in the morning, react as a TEACHER to what I'm reading but mid-way through I can say this.....when the charge is made as I read it in a USA Today article, sited in my blog back two posts, that "critics" say the research is not on real issues or if teachers charge too removed or even if it is asserted this is not reaching classrooms, what you have is a fallacious set of assumptions.

What I see clearly is almost entirely (half way through) research arising from classrooms.
That is not research failing to REACH THEM. It is embedded there.
That's a fallacious assumption if you do not get that. Set in what we do in teaching.
I also clearly, like a drum beating, see very relevant issues studied in a wide variety of settings all around improving something or looking at something, seeing what the teaching and the learning is saying. A study of meaning making very often.... embedded in a context of teaching.
I'm sorry to say I have yet to encounter ONE piece that asserts or is even about the things my district is insisting upon in school improvement and saying "researched based or scientific".....it makes me honestly laugh, but I'm not finished. Think about that. A premier educational research group, ten thousand pieces of work , 35 categories I've ad hoc made these groups to look at what kinds of things are being looked at, count, weigh what it "says" and nothing used as "scientific" and a part of the consultants agendas selling to my district as reformative/transformative/proper for school change..... nothing looks like these research pieces. At least half-way through.

Not on "focus walls", not on Directed Instruction, not on taking teachers and forcing them to scripts, not on teaching ONLY WHAT A BASAL teacher manual "tells" you, not on insistence a whole school align so that everyone everyday says the same thing at the same time in the same way, not on removal of arts for the poor, not on restricting time management so the teacher cannot teach science or social studies, not on forcing ELD school wide canned structures that are not embedded in language rich context as is obviously needed, so that all children in a 1st have to for one hour daily do a canned workbook and not with their teacher, not on anything I'm doing, not even remotely......again let me say this clearly.......not the kinds of things I'm being forced to do, not even in the moves in 2nd language instruction either. If I can say anything at all off the cuff now, it would be that CLEARLY we are not even trying to use research that comes from those who are our brightest and best.
I assume AERA would have that. BE THAT, as it clearly is... EVEN I get this.
I see studies related to every big name I know... like Nell Noddings..like so many.

It would appear that we, in my local context don't know a lot about how to go about getting to research. We seem to be commodity buying. It's not a really great idea. We are buying a product that asserts "research" bases. But when you go to a setting that is about putting up your research, presenting to academics...oh...no... what I have to do in my reforming Under Performing place is not here. Not coming out of RESEARCH. At least not the research it would be reasonable to expect.
Hum....Although I see pieces studying this test based culture...studying the kind of process whereby what would to me seem to be a slight of science based research hand is occurring, asking is this "working", see accountability examined as a construct as fruitful or not , I do not see the research I am "told" at work matters on which we are making foundational decisions.
I see that we are failing to get the dynamics of these times.

If, by way of example, the AMA or however they do it, medical field, held a renown conference presenting 10, 000 pieces of cutting edge medical research .....research to inform doctors of how to go or generally what's being learned in their field....and journals further get it to the doctors which is a piece I need to explore, consider further as a teacher...anyway... I surely think that would "talk" in terms of helping decide WHAT research to use , to consider....

So now I am understanding something.

Would you want the doctor using the research on your brain surgery that DID NOT GET TO THE MAJOR AND MOST PRESTIGIOUS PRESENTATION PLACES.
A kind of regional study done by a group with good promotion and package, a nice web-site, good "backers", out there promoting, good sales reps, lots of connected "friends", former Ed. Secretaries maybe. ....okay..... Me, I want the best and brightest brain surgeon using the best research being developed. I'm not giving over my brain to SOMEONE in OREGON who set up their own little "institute" no matter how slick the website. No..I am UNDERSTANDING.

I'm am most grateful for getting to go to AERA. I am going to finish my count and make a few personal observations. However half way through I am heartened.
Poverty, equity, social justice, math, technology are being studied and there is much being done looking at learning, classrooms, teacher reflection. To the tune of on a scale I had never imagined. I rather feel that matters.

I posted the following last night on the Educator Roundtable. This group has been working on issues in education. Its primary thrust is stopping NCLB. I think their site speaks well to why this matters. If you contacted Philip Kovacs and wanted to talk, he would talk to you, treat you respectfully, make it clear a dialog of mutual respect is desired around this issue. I think anyone and everyone ought to give this a try. For kid's sake really. The Educator's Roundtable has a petition there to sign if one agrees. It is very difficult to make voices heard if people will not sign, but I assert a culture of fear keeps many from signing. They have "diaries" there so that people, teachers, parents, etc. can post to the education issues and to their experiences. I need to contribute because as I state in my blog....I am a teacher , working with students and I think my position has allowed me some insights. And I am trying to gain a sophistication to speak to the issues.
And a teacher voice I think should be heard.
I have decided to speak.......and I do so from the heart....


On Laryngitis and Teaching for the Educators Roundtable Diaries

The last time I attempted a diary I was eight and managed four entries. And looking back at that tonight reminds me of how much I felt like I was writing to the universe and no one at the same time.

So here I am. Hello lonely universe.

I'm Sarah Puglisi and I teach in California, in a town called Oxnard, in a hood really. One where many Americans are never going, never seeing and certainly not thinking about. I started teaching 24 years ago coming from West Virginia where I taught art. I went to South Central, survived, taught 4th grade and learned the truths of teaching in an area that "war zone" describes fairly well. There almost no one in America would go voluntarily. One of the truths of my career is that I have seen America's failures, issues, raw edges...in Appalachia, Watts, in immigrant lives in poverty, in hoods, in gang cultures, abuse, drugs, a kind of urban warfare. All hard, all wearing the faces of our children looking to me, looking to our public school for safety, for nets, for hope for futures. We have been serving, my husband and I on a kind of front lines. And I think it is valuable to speak from a position of a public servant to this thing I have done with my life.

I often hear "teachers" represented by politicos or as Susan says "Standardnistas". But something of that representation is so unlike the teachers I know. Something is very wrong in how teachers are being held out as nationwide scapegoats. And I want to speak for myself a bit. In these now named test "failing" places with children's lives a part of my charge, I do know the issues as a teacher with a real voice, one not heard, and I do not care for the kind of solutions or frames of looking being mandated and legislated as assessment based "solutions" to cover for our supposedly poor praxis, in sappy standardized tests taught to in canned curriculum all year long, done to hold me "accountable", and leaving my kids lost educationally in a political game. It is my view that this is a way, as it has been enacted, of furthering and widening a divide so my kids cannot cross to the other side. I'm contending the American Dream is dying at the hands of a corporate/consultant/looting to take over and say one thing while perpetrating another through the mechanism of NCLB. And I'm pretty damn mad about it. Actually.

I then moved, after South Central, to teach a decade in the Salinas Valley-yes Steinbeck country, teaching bilingually 4th grade transition in a migrant town, moving from this experience to Oxnard as my husband moved into administration. We left two years to work in a very small District connected to serving two Native Reservation Schools in San Diego and then returned to Ventura County. So my experiences are not all in one place...and working with many children who sat at the lower rung of socio-economics. A wonderful set of children who have taught me so much I am trying to write this to share with those who might like to know about it.

So during my going and coming my current District where I have worked about 13 years went into Under-performance status failing by a few "points" to make it before of course the bar is raised so high no one will make it...and along with real issues Districts face, then had to deal with the nightmare ones imposed on them in the punitive models of pathology our national leadership inflicted as a mechanism to run everyone to charters- failing to pass vouchers in CA and nationwide. The hard fast and dirty destruction of public school with the rhetoric of care was on the ground and detonating. As a result teachers massively retired, losing my peers stung, leadership jumped ship, people lost ethical compasses, it has been the long hard re-inactment of a kind of "Heart of Darkness". So sad for the children. They ultimately are the ones in the sacrificial role.

And they tell me now when polite about it I'm too creative teaching, too thematic, individual and construction oriented for mandated education now. We now must follow the script, be on the same page, same day, nothing I have to offer is of value, elimination of teacher practice for bought "program". In the process I'm watching good be called bad and worse, as in 1984, war/ peace. It may sound like hyperbole but I have recorded faithfully everyday. I think my truth outdoes any hyperbole I could write/invent.

I returned to my District to see it all suddenly there ruining a world with much to offer, I hadn't watched a slower change as my peers, for me we came back and it was a nightmare, it was just another universe...after a couple years of being very isolated in another area (me on leave, my husband a Superintendent) and after being ill with cancer, health complications and let's say it had been a time of being in my own world. I returned to a school system being thrust into the NCLB nightmare and during this time I started writing Susan Ohanian and she, in her kindness, wrote me back. I don't know what to say besides I always start with the top. I have an accidental affinity for bumping into the things I most need. My stories, or I suppose thoughts, are on her site at Sarah's Notes and on my own blog A Day In a Life.
It is at http://sarahpuglisi.blogspot.com
I've spent a year blogging now and reading, learning on-line things. At 47 I'm always learning, expanding my teaching, understandings. But I was driven really to these things by the further destruction of my school, my autonomy, by ethical and school related concerns. I've been dialoging them as I can trying my best to relate the story of one teacher dealing with these changes.
Everyday I wonder where the voices of my peers are...wondering how they cannot advocate at the very least for the children. We work with children in poverty and our voices should be shouting.

This said by way of introduction, I just attended AERA in Chicago where I saw a lot of ed. research. And I'm disaggregating it in my Sarah fashion looking at every piece and categorizing it in my own little way to see what it looks like people are researching. So far this is very heartening as much studies poverty, equity, social justice, technology, reflective practice and so far....studies set in classrooms arising from what we do.....nothing on scripting teachers, removing the arts, removing literature, narrowing the curriculum, mandating focus walls or other items my District has insisted upon as "research based". I am gaining abilities to speak to the issues and determined to do a better job because the students I work with, have always worked with, need the very best we have to offer. And somehow what I see going on...it lacks the luster of giving our best.Actually it makes me wrench.

The most discouraging things are like this exemplar...I forced myself on our School Leadership Team this year...always in the past I was welcome there, but not now. Wanted until it was obvious in the "change" I wasn't going to quietly capitulate to nonsense and I was forced into a status of being treated like a scorned and unwanted stranger. But I'm not allowing this to permeate my being. It is a sad statement on how this entire nightmare was inflicted, to create winners and losers,shunning, nasty actions, unfair and unethical exercises in removing teachers from behaving with community and caring. After reading Nell Noddings just imagine an alternate universe. It's all over the culture I'm afraid anyway..We are losing the heart we had. We are losing our ability to act as a moral compass. We are losing our role as leaders.And so I decided to lead.

And I'm not going without speaking, as I said I got on Leadership to be trained in our 4th year of Underperformance in Ventura county sessions by being forced to listen to someone like John Hollingsworth paid and touted by our county on his Direct Instructional Model and seeing what his "better teaching research" i think he called it TAPPLE might look like. I attended his talk where I sat in stone silence as he used popsickle sticks and numbers to really to force people to reiterate his own dialog in a forced, scripted thing and watched people cooperate and his narrow and ridiculous monkey lab proceed...this is what teacher training in Scientifically based research models is...here...in Ventura County. A kind of dumbing down beyond my comprehension.
Well, Nothing at AERA looked like that. Not that research. No session required adults to speak like chanting monkeys.
Regular, educated, thinking people would not put up with it. Kids surely shouldn't. I am watching public schools and teaching here just become a joke.

And where was the voice of my peers. At that training none said anything. Like this was normal .
And that just worries me because in settings they deem safe to talk, they can see this as asinine, and they say so..

So....I am compelled forward, inadequate...a first grade teacher talking to the issues of watching something I care about more than anything be completely sold....it's just beyond me in one sitting to address the range of feeling and the sound of silence as my days go by.

And so , here I am.