In praise of data

Just as our language might be appropriated by the corporate education deform movement, so we might reappropriate our language. This essay critically examines what we mean when we use the phrase “teacher effectiveness.” Part 3 of 3.

I write out of love, resisting fear. I write out of fear’s opposite, love, the only possible antidote to fear. I write out of memory, remembering the process of getting to know my students, remembering learning to set expectations for them, learning to speak directly but never unkindly, establishing safety in a classroom where learning is always a risky business.

After defining the terms and defining their opposites, third, risk wandering across the ribbon of teaching and learning into the unknown, unknowable, getting to know. I write out of memory; I do not remember that drawing student ever again arriving late for class.

The spring of 2007 is etched into my memory. Midway through that semester, news reports of the campus shootings at Virginia Tech broke out just as I was arriving at my own campus for another day of teaching and learning. I sat through an afternoon lecture on Dada, admiring the art historian’s ability to teach, to retain his composure, showing no sign of fear, teaching on the frontlines of our war culture without a flak jacket and with no weapons other than words. I write lacking that composure, decomposing, rearranging the composition.

I write out of love, resisting fear, daring to speak as I dared to speak the fear aloud during that evening’s drawing session.

Until then, my greatest challenge in teaching had been persuading a largely apathetic and narcissistic audience, the first generation of college students to grow up through No Child Left Behind legislation, to actively engage in their learning.

Technology had entered the classroom, from the point of view of the teaching assistant at the back of many a darkened auditorium, where the students were busily engaged in visiting each other’s Facebook pages, surfing for pornography, or texting their mothers rather than paying attention to their learning. The most frequent and oftentimes only question in response to lectures that I found deeply interesting and engaging was uttered with a bored yawn, “Is this gunna be on the test?”

There was the foot-stamper, whose parents had taught her that she could get anything she wanted by whining rather than working for it, “But I wannan A!”

There was the furniture-kicker, expressing his frustration with drawing as a prerequisite for students majoring in fields as diverse as architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, virtual technology design, graphic design, and fine art.

There was the student with a dual major in elementary education, who threatened me with physical violence during a meeting that I requested after he stomped out of my classroom declaring that my writing assignment was “stupid,” challenging as it was to his notion that college writing should consist of five short paragraphs expressing his personal opinions, unsupported by the literature of art history or theory, “If I had stormed out of your classroom, you would know about it. You would be on your knees begging me to let you go.”

Resisting fear, I write out of love.

That spring, I shifted the focus of a collaborative drawing assignment from the product of drawing to the process of collaborating, getting to know by first, naming the problem; second, naming its opposite; and third, crossing those barriers of fear and despair to hope and love by speaking our personal narratives through the practice of drawing. Beneath the superficial apathy, I quickly learned the depth of this generation’s fears and hopes for our shared world. Far from yawning boredom, they became actively engaged in our classroom discussions, those conversations continuing from my classroom into their other classes, and sometimes returning to me via email, my role as teacher shifting to mediator of their conversations. Learning to listen. Paying attention. Getting to know.

My student who started the semester barely showing up to class became the first to volunteer as our brainstorming sessions shifted to drawing, moving in unison with two other students as the three of them together drew a collaborative line, interconnected, intersecting, interwoven. On the last day of classes, we gathered for our final critique, the equivalent of a final exam in a studio course. After class, although the semester was over, the sun was shining, and they were free to go, the students lingered, asking for more stories from my own learning experiences, remembering my teachers.

And when I returned to campus the following fall, my drawing student greeted me from across the quad, “Guess what? I’ve changed my major to art education.”

Based on my experiences, I write urgently, out of love for my country, love of the world, in love resisting fear’s silence, urging that we reconsider the measure of the question of teacher effectiveness by measuring instead the state of the world, measure twice before cutting, creating a reciprocating system of analysis and evaluation based not on data collection, but on written self-reflection and -awareness as we shift along the communicative ribbon of teaching and learning.

In praise of data

Just as our language might be appropriated by the corporate education deform movement, so we might reappropriate our language. This essay critically examines what we mean when we use the phrase “teacher effectiveness.” Part 2 of 3.

I write out of hope, because hope blossoms from despair. Despair comes to us from the Latin desperare, the prefix de- meaning “down from” combined with sperare meaning “to hope.” At the root of despair we find hope. From out of the depths of despair, arises hope.

After defining the terms, second, we must define their opposite before we can have any hope of getting to know one another, getting to know the complex interrelations between teaching and learning, getting to know what it means to measure teacher effectiveness. Has our present system of measure proven its efficacy? What does it mean to be an ineffective human being? What does it mean not to be? Are we truly free?

Just as my drawing student taught me the power of praise, I write in praise of data, drawing from the database of my memory one tiny datum, Latin meaning “something given” or daring to give. With something to give, I dare to write out of hope, remembering an earlier encounter with data used to measure teaching effectiveness.

One of my jobs in college was to organize the materials for a graduate level lecture course taught by a team of research scientists. In those days, student evaluations were collected on bubble sheets, the numerical data scanned, and any written comments typed in by a clerk before the results were collated and returned to the faculty for their reflection on their teaching effectiveness. More than a decade later, I still remember one comment from a doctoral candidate in molecular biology at an institution globally renowned for its research in human genetics: “I like Professor XYZ’s scarves.” I extrapolate this datum now to ponder the efficacy of our system of data collection in measuring teacher effectiveness.

What might we learn about teaching effectiveness from this sole comment about wardrobe, style, or aesthetic? Does this praise communicate that the student learned how to be an effective scientist from the teacher’s style of delivery? Or did the student intend the comment as sarcasm, communicating the teacher’s ineffectiveness in training another generation of researchers? Or does this student’s witty communication measure not teaching effectiveness so much as the absurdity of data collection as an evaluation of teaching?

Lacking inflection, facial expression, knowledge of this individual student’s relationship with this individual professor, knowledge of the doctoral candidate’s earlier learning experiences, early childhood development, or future life narrative, we have no way of measuring teacher effectiveness from this evaluation of the professor’s aesthetic. Combined with the numeric data, this comment might communicate this particular student’s assessment of this particular teacher’s effectiveness on a scale of one to five; extrapolated, it lays bare our system of measuring teacher effectiveness.

What is the measure of a teacher? Is a teacher measured a success if his pupils sit in obedient columns and rows and pass a battery of tests in a given subject by selecting answers from multiple choice questions? Is a professor effective if her students ace their exams, perform innovative research, and one day replace her at the front of the auditorium?

Hypothetically, let us imagine for a moment that this professor’s scarves inspired this would-be biomedical researcher to withdraw from his program, become a fashion designer, and produce a line of clothing that shifted the male gaze so our society no longer objectified women, easing the hurdles for women pursuing careers in the research sciences, empowering the girl who grows up to become the scientist who discovers the cure to cancer, thereby changing the world? Of course the cure for cancer will not be found by a rogue scientist working on his own, Professor ABC in his white lab coat with bow tie askew, but by teams of human beings, working in concert, not competitively but collaboratively, communicating with one another, paying attention, listening as the other speaks.

If we extrapolate this qualitative datum received from one doctoral candidate in the research sciences and apply it systemically across fields and levels to elementary education, we learn the three weaknesses in our present system of measuring teacher effectiveness: a) that classroom data is collected for the purpose of data collection rather than teacher improvement, b) that students even in the highest echelons of learning do not respect data surveys enough to provide criticism intended for teaching improvement, and c) that teaching and learning are communicative processes interdependent between student and teacher, or, as my college painting professors taught me, “You get out of this class what you put into it.”

I write out of hope, hoping beyond hope that the abysmal failures of our current state, and the state of debate in education policy will inspire us to reevaluate our system for measuring teacher effectiveness and elevate the status of intellectual pursuit. I write out of hope, hoping that if our policy makers, administrators, and political leaders refuse to listen to the voices of experts in the field of education, hoping they will listen to the wisdom of military experts and get to know your teachers.

In praise of data

“I cannot recall ever having an intelligent conversation in a smart room.” – John Thackara

Just as our language might be appropriated by the corporate education deform movement, so we might reappropriate our language. This essay critically examines what we mean when we use the phrase “teacher effectiveness.” In three parts.

I write out of despair, despairing for my country, for the sickness of the current state of our world, for the state of education and the status of intellectual pursuit. I write out of memory, remembering being a student, being a teacher. Remembering being in that place in between, a graduate student and teaching assistant, both a student and a teacher, a place of measuring and being measured. I write from a place of urgency, writing impelled by recent communications with an academic colleague, who described the situation as desperate and only getting worse, as well as his fear of publicly speaking his opinions. I write out of his fear, writing the fear of a colleague and friend who is white, male, tenured, and afraid to speak. I write from only one of these positions of privilege, and even that position is mutable. I write in fear, but write it anyway. If we live in a state where our intellectuals are afraid to speak, then our country is not free.

First we must define the terms. What do we mean by teacher effectiveness? That your students have learned? That you have had an effect on their lives? That your students have had an effect on the lives of others? What do we mean by effectiveness? What does it mean to be an effective human being? What is the measure of a human being? What does it mean to be free?

I write out of memory, remembering the end of my first semester of graduate school and my first experience facing online data evaluations, a virtual wall of checkboxes to click, and not enough time to click through them. Not enough time as a student, and not enough time as a teacher. An entire semester’s worth of teaching and learning, of reading and writing, of human interaction and sharing of ideas, reduced to nothing more than a numeric rating system and a wall of questions that, more often than not, bore little resemblance to my experiences in the classroom, neither as a student, nor as a teacher. Questions that I, as a teacher and a technologically literate end user, could neither more specifically tailor to my department’s curricula nor edit from my observations of my students’ learning experiences in my classroom to help me better prepare for the following semester; the user interface was not designed to take into consideration all the subtleties of human interaction, the nuances of human communication and human discernment.

Fortunately, at the start of the semester, I had listened to the wisdom of an emeritus professor of education: “Get to know your students,” he implored an auditorium packed with incoming graduate teaching assistants, wisdom repeated by a military interrogator interviewed not long ago on National Public Radio, speaking in favor of communication and empathy as effective means of eliciting reliable intelligence, “Get to know your detainees.”

Getting to know my students meant watching them, listening to them, asking questions, hearing their responses, observing their interactions with each other, observing myself as if from outside of myself in my interactions with them, empathizing with their learning process, critiquing their work, teaching them how to critique their own work and the work of their peers, teaching them how to think critically, which, coincidentally, also involves listening, paying attention, the human ability to discern. So much more subtle and nuanced than simply delivering information, getting to know my students meant paying attention to them as human beings, from one human being to another.

One such interaction involved a young man fresh from high school, a first year college student, who showed up in my drawing studio classroom but never on time, missing my introductions, missing the writing warm up that I used to focus my students’ attention away from their outside distractions as well as to give them practice for writing specific to our field, very often missing my demonstration of the session’s drawing assignment; in other words, he showed up to class, but 15-30 minutes late for the first several weeks of school, and his class participation seemed sullen at best, if not openly hostile, as he struggled with drawing skills, his learning comprehension lagging behind his peers.

One session, as he again sidled into class in the midst of my lecture, I paused, looked at the clock, looked back at him, and spoke to him directly, “You need to get to class on time. You are missing too much, and you’re not going to catch up if this continues,” and then continued on with my lecture addressing the whole of the class, while he scowled and spluttered defensively under his breath. After my drawing demo and as I made my rounds of my students’ easels for one-on-one instruction, I paid attention to be especially gentle with him that day, but still he slipped out early, and I worried that I had ruptured any connection I might have hoped to make with this individual student.

As I made my way home that evening, reflecting on my teaching and remembering my own learning, remembering my own experiences as a first year college student, I shook my head with the rueful laughter of self-recognition, realizing that we despise in others those weaknesses we recognize in ourselves, and remembering, in my struggles to adapt to the rigors of the academic system while juggling two and sometimes three jobs, rarely was I able to extricate myself from the demands of work to make it to class on time. I began to show up when I decided I wanted to learn. Still, I troubled over how to help this student, as no amount of stern lecturing on the importance of attendance from my professors ever inspired me to show up on time.

This student solved that problem for me.

The very next session, waylaid by a question from another student on my way to class, I was nearly late myself. In the midst of arranging objects for still life drawing practice as he raced into the classroom and slid into a seat, sweating profusely, I looked at the clock (two minutes early), looked back at him, and rewarded him with my warmest, most welcoming smile, “Nice to see you.” His facial expression shifted from anxiety and resentment to relief, and he responded with a shy, angelic smile of his own.