A "left turn" in my path towards teaching

After student teaching in Fall '07 and teaching the second semester (both at Bremerton High School), I spent the summer looking for a teaching position within a reasonable commute. I did get ten (!) interviews, and finally was offered a position at the Kent Performance Learning Center. Tha is a "small school" for about 100 high school juniors and seniors who need a more personalized education. It's a demonstration project with participation from a non-profit (Communities in Schools) and some funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. All in all, pretty cool! KPLC is a 50-minute freeway commute from my home.

That same day, my previous employer invited me to come back to work, at a private sector salary. I decided I had to go with the economic security, so I declined Kent's offer.

However, I am determined to continue to teach, and to return to full-time teaching in the next 3-5 years. I have applied for a position at Tacoma Community College as a Mathematics Instructor (Adjunct). Teaching community college students two nights a week would give me great satisfaction, and help me continue to develop my skills as a teacher.

I intend to maintain this blog as I continue to examine teaching through private sector eyes.

My preparation for teaching

I started college at the University of California, and earned my undergraduate degree in Chemistry, with a Math minor, from the University of New Mexico. I worked at Tektronix, Inc. as a process engineer and manufacturing engineering manager making printed circuit boards, and designing and starting up a new factory using the hottest manufacturing and management methods: just in time, self-managed work teams, supply chain partnerships, and statistical process control. I studied business in post-baccalaureate courses at Portland State University.



As production manager at Spectra-Physics Laser Systems Division, I led the implementation of just-in-time and lean manufaturing practices in the assembly of laser bar code scanners for supermarkets. I went to work for their largest customer, Point of Sale Data Systems, Inc. and led their operations in growing from 15 employees to 76 as we provided service and new scanners to Kmart.

I started my MBA studies at Pacific Lutheran University while serving as POSdata's Director of Engineering and earned my degree while leading the operations of the Bremerton Electronic Commerce Resource Center as an employee of the Economic Development Council of Kitsap County. The ECRC provided training and technical support to small businesses who were being required by the Department of Defense to move their bidding and billing activities off of paper and onto electronic commerce.

I led the Bremerton operations of Concurrent Technologies Corporation and eventually transitioned to an assignment as deputy program manager for Supply Chain management. Most recently, I managed projects and contracts supporting the United States Marine Corps, providing them with a rapid-development, globally deployed ground equipment readiness reporting tool.

I completed Western Governors University's teacher preparation program and am continuing toward a Master of Arts in Teaching Secondary Mathematics (5-12). Bremerton High School hosted me for demonstration teaching in the Fall of 2007 , and hired me to teach struggling freshmen and seniors in January 2008.

How are the professional situations of teachers and engineers similar?

Much of what I know about adults working together in industry/private sector is applicable in education, but the vocabulary and prior experience is different. For more details on my private sector experience, please read My preparation for teaching, in this blog.

Like many engineers, teachers question their own abilities to work with other adults.Teachers and engineers are similarly sensitive to criticism (on the one hand) and ill-informed wholesale adoption (on the other) of their half-formed ideas. In software development, the culprits are managers and salespeople; in teaching, they are administrators and board members.

Like engineers, teachers face a workload that is infinite – there is ALWAYS something that can be done to make the program/lesson better, that will better meet the client;student needs. In both professions, the best performers constantly re-prioritize what they must do.

Teachers and engineers are fiercely protective of their time; they defend againse make-work and going through the motions, because they have real work and real progress they could be achieving

Both professions would like to post this sign: “A failure on your part to plan does not constitute an emergency on my part.” But they don't, because it wouldn't be professional.

Schedules are changed/announced by administrators in schools, and by senior officers in the military, with no or very short reaction times given to teachers/developers, and without apology.

Teachers and engineers often feel unappreciated. While teachers, needing to vent, may say, “Administrators treat us like mushrooms, they keep us in the dark, covered in compost,” engineers will express themselves a little more colorfully.

Teaching: Through Private Sector Eyes is an attempt to reassure teachers that other professionals face similar challenges in the area of continuous improvement and on-going professional development. I hope my efforts to share these similarities and to share what seems to work in the private sector to relieve some of the stress. I invite your comments, counter-examples, and critiques.

I very much appreciate the hundreds of teachers I have learned from in the private sector world over the past 30 years, and I am grateful for the assistance I have received and will continue to need in the public school world.

Education's Professional Learning Communities, Through Private Sector Eyes

Professional learning communities are widely described, debated, prescribed, and codified in the literature of education. That's not the PLC I'm writing about. Those PLCs are organized structured initiated empowered and sanctified by school board policy, district priorities, school improvement plans and department goals. I'm not writing about that kind of PLC. PLCs are years in development, maturing and refinement. They have longevity and inevitability. They are rigorous, egalitarian, inviting, responsive, fully documented, ponderous creations. One earns (or is assigned) one's place in a PLC. (link to S Hord)

I'm writing about a different kind of professional learning community, one that is self-structured by the participants, answers to no one but the participants, and exists in response to an urgent unmet student need. These students need and deserve the best we can possibly give them, today. They can't wait for policy to become procedure to become an initiative to drive a goal.

In my most recent private sector assignment, I worked on contracts for the United States Marine Corps, providing them with a rapid-development, globally deployed ground equipment readiness reporting tool. There are many parallels between the kind of software engineering we provided for the Marines, to meet their warfighters' urgent needs, and the kind of professional learning community I am describing. In both cases, there is a more formal, better documented, thoroughly optimized approach that will, eventually, serve the needs of the ultimate benificiary more robustly than the solution we implemented in 2008. In both cases, the implementing teams served two simultaneous purposes. First, to do the best we could for today's Marine/student; second, to lay the groundwork as well as we could for the better, “more professional” solution that is years away. See How are the professional situations of teachers and engineers similar? on this blog for more comparisons.

Our teaching plc was created mid-year to serve ninth grade pre-algebra students. Three teachers, one right out of student teaching, one with 6 months' experience, and one with ten years' experience, found themselves with about 120 students who needed to be ready for algebra in the fall, and who were failing. We teachers needed to coordinate and learn from one another to get through the second semester. The curriculum was not engaging, student participation was low, they didn't seem to have any math to call on or any confidence in success. Paper and pencil work, which was reading-intensive, supplemented by self-paced (also reading-intensive) lab practice, was not helping students and didn't engage the teachers' desire to excite students, provide hands on lessons, or be memorable for next year.

Over the course of the second semester, we took time to share ideas and student work. We designed and implemented hands-on tasks where students actually constructed knowledge and described problem-solving processes (see separate post: Getting the math off the paper). We energized student effort in completing the lab work. We sustained our own energy and creativity and achieved our goal for students. Many students passed. Many were better prepared for Algebra in the fall.

Our plc differs from Hord's PLC in two key ways: we weren't responding to a program initiated or authorized by "higher ups" and we were opportunistic rather than methodical in our actions.

Here are some other important aspects of our plc.

We made time to work together – but we didn't force it. We appreciated each others' contributions – and maintained ownership of our own classrooms. We offered, received, and asked for help in pacing, alternative explanations, differentiation, and prioritization of content.

We treated one another with good humor, trusted each others intentions, input, and reactions, and presented a united front to students, colleagues, counselors and administrators.

We used face-to-face meetings, voice messages, email, handouts. We saw each other in class, out of class, and after school, in between our many other commitments. We discussed specific students, specific content and specific assessments based on observation, speculation and experimentation.

I belive our plc was just as much an expression of professional teaching practice as a PLC according to Hord. We collaborated, observed, experimented, learned, and consolidated our learnings, to the benefit of this year's students and as a basis for an enhanced approach next year. I also believe that detailed and rigorous planning can co-exist with seat-of-your-pants done-this-before planning.

For a detailed account of how we developed one lesson, please read Getting the math off the page, on this blog.

Getting the math off the page

This is a detailed description (with future links to resources) of how our informal professional learning community engaged students in applying the concept of percent to creating a circle graph that depicted the distribution of colors in a sample of m&ms. For an introduction to our plc, read Education's Professional Learning Communities, Through Private Sector Eyes, in this blog.

Early in the second semester, our students tackled a unit on Percent. Student participation in daily group work, scaffolded by the text, was dropping, there was an increase in distractive behavior, and as teachers we were worn out trying to inject enthusiasm into the artificial and intangible projects offered by the text.

In our meeting to coordinate pacing and assessments for the next unit for our six sections of Pre-algebra, we brainstormed a multi-day process-based project to apply ratios and proportions (Unit 5) to the idea of percents (Unit 6).

Kate: Give them m&ms - have them graph the distribution of colors -
Joy (rummaging in her supplies): Sure, I have these circle rulers [link] ....
Abigail: We'll have to scaffold the work ...
K: - make sure they understand why they are doing each step -
J: and we can give them a rubric ...
A: ...have them revise until it meets standards.
K: - I've got lots of markers -
J: ...see how the graph changes if we combine samples.
A: ...I can buy the m&ms...
K: - worksheets - give me your notes -
J: ...let's be sure to use consistent terminology...

It was a rapidly tumbling conversation, with each of us contributing from our own strengths: creativity, organization and connecting to other math concepts. The worksheets were ready in draft the next day [link to lesson plan], and materials were available and prepared for each section by the following Monday.

As we implemented the unit, we discovered and shared with each other various bits of teaching that were required:

• vocabulary for fractions
• relating the situation to the ratios and proportions we had just studied
• rounding calculations to the nearest thousandth and then to the nearest degree
• vocabulary for the tool
• how to check for errors at each step, rather than at the end when the colored segments didn't add up to 360 degrees or when there wasn't enough room left for the last segment. [photo of circle graph student work]

There were in-course corrections and exchanges of information. Some went by email, some in hallway conversations, or as post-its on a handout left on our desks.

• Be sure to tell them to check their counts before they start eating the m&ms!
• What happens if one color has so few that you can't make the mark in the ruler within the circle?
• Robert was absent/Kelli lost her first page, so I gave them a data set to work with – here it is in case you need to do the same thing.
• Here's an excel spreadsheet I made - you can plug in their raw data and it will calculate all the conversions we're asking for, so you can check the results without having to work them all out yourself.
• Did your kids finish today? I'm having them finish during lab time.
  
• I didn't have them fill out this column, it seems redundant.
  
• Did they realize they could just copy this column from the previous page?
  
• I'm making them use the % and [degree] symbols, not just the numbers.

As we went through the activity, we saved student work and worksheet originals, and emailed observations and ideas for “next time”. These have been compiled into a notebook in our curriculum room so we can use it again with a clear memory of our experience

I was interested to observe that, although we were excited about this lesson and eager to share information about it among ourselves, we didn't really communicate it to others in our department or to our administrative leader. We seemed to think it would be “making too much of it” to put it out there as an example of collaboration or of our performing as a Professional Learning Community.