From The Education On-Deck Circle

Will Austin, via Michael Goldstein’s blog post yesterday, had a really great post that just so happened to reference Red Sox great Ted Williams and his immortal .406 batting average. Ted reached this mark over the course of 143 games and 456 at-bats in 1941. The next highest batting average since Ted’s feat was George Brett’s .390 in 1980 for the Kansas City Royals. It took someone 39 years to even get within .016 percentage points (roughly 10 hits over the course of a 450 at-bat season.) The only person who comes close to it in my lifetime was Larry Walker’s .379 in 1999 to go along with his fantastic mullet.

Now the logical question is to ask why haven’t more people hit .400 or better since 1941? I think Michael does a great job at pointing out that training has vastly improved the quality of competition in baseball since 1941. The year Ted reached his mark, the top 25 earned run averages (ERA) averaged out to a respectable 3.63.  In 1980, that same average dropped to 3.37. Now that huge dip in ERA leads us to believe that there was a corresponding jump in the quality of pitching that great hitters faced. Also, we know that a large part of that jump is due not to human evolution but to the evolution of training regimens for all players, pitchers especially.

Great, so far we’ve rehashed everything Michael said with a few more statistics, some new names, and a mullet reference. Not useful right? Well I think the relevance here is in how training has evolved. In baseball, it’s not just the overall strategy (thanks in part to the sabermetrics, or the “data” revolution) that has become both more sophisticated and accessible, but also the fundamentals, or mechanics, of baseball that have changed immensely. Batting and pitching coaches are now borderline physics and anatomy professors, not just former players. Baseball has improved the quality and opportunity for not only major league players but also little leaguers to practice well and practice often (indoor batting cages, pitching machines, etc.)  

How about for teachers? I suppose you could say teaching strategies have improved, with the plethora of research on what we should be teaching and when. But really, have we created anything more sophisticated than the “I do, we do, you do” coaching technique to improve the mechanics of teaching? If we have, I’m not aware of it and I’m going to say broadly it hasn’t been effective. No MLB team takes even a polished college pitcher and just throws them into a major league game after they draft them. They often spend years perfecting their mechanics so that they can make it to the show. Case in point, the mediocre MLB player spends 3-4 years in the minor leagues before being called up. Sure, maybe schools don’t have 3-4 years to develop teachers in the minor leagues, but we’ve got to come up with a better way to improve the mechanics of teaching that’s quicker and more effective than just throwing them to the wolves. 

Suggestions?

I never thought I’d weave Allen Iverson, Diane Ravitch and Eric Hanushek into a post, but here goes nothing. So maybe you remember Iverson’s infamous rant about practice, and if you don’t, here’s the link. Basically Iverson doesn’t understand why he, as the star player, is being criticized for not showing up for and/or slacking in practice. Well, practice is really important, regardless of how talented you are because it improves not only your skills but your team’s effectiveness.

Recently Eric Hanushek and Diane Ravitch had an interesting and civil exchange via Andy Rotherham’s Eduwonk blog. After you applaud the civility, I think it’s important to recognize that the two don’t necessarily disagree on the goal of improving our pool of teachers. Rather, they disagree on the conditions necessary to help improve our pool of teachers. I like Hanushek’s proposal in theory - I think identifying the weakest performers and removing them (provided you can replace with people who at the least have the potential to be better performers) could be powerful in boosting student achievement. The question then becomes how do we provide teachers the training, or “practice”, that enables us to make informed  decisions as to which teachers are in the bottom 5-10%. I think Ravitch correctly points out that if we were to employ the “weeding out of the 5-10%” tactic, we need to do a much better job of recruiting and training teachers. Right now it’s easy to tell who’s not performing (as measured by student test scores) but far more difficult to understand why. The “why” a teacher is in the bottom 5-10% is integral to making Hanushek’s strategy work.

In order to merge the two ideas and create a compelling strategy to improve the pool of teachers, we need to nail teacher training and support, of which the concept of practice is really important. The reason Welch’s differentiation strategy (the groundwork for Hanushek’s strategy) works is that GE invests heavily not only in recruiting qualified candidates but also providing the training to succeed. I think creating a practice field for teachers to be able to get “at-bats” outside of a game context is a really important supplement, but it surely isn’t the only method.

What do you think of the exchange? If you believe teacher training is key, what are other teacher training tools/sessions/organizations that have been particularly helpful for you?

So I am going to pause for a minute, stop putting what I think on this blog, and ask for your thoughts. For any current and/or former teachers, I’d love to hear about your experience. I am currently trying to design (what I think is) a cool tool to help teachers practice instruction and behavior management in low-risk, realistic environments. Since I’ve not taught, I need your feedback to make sure I am trying to solve for a problem that you experience(d) and think is important to teachers. So please take 5 minutes to fill out this survey, and definitely send it out to any other current/former teachers. Thanks so much for your help!

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/H22K9MY

So first of all, I’ve got to plug the UVA football program for their win over the U last night. Now granted, they weren’t playing Michael Irvin’s version of the U, but for UVA, a school that would be DOMINANT in a Nantucket sports league (hint, that’s not a bragging right) solid mainstream sports wins are huge for us. So WahooWah!

Now there’s a relevant segue here between UVA’s recent success and teaching. In 2010, UVA parted ways with polarizing head coach Al Groh and brought in Mike London, a guy who had coached under Groh and had done some great things with an FBS team. Now sure Coach London brought a fresh perspective, deeper recruiting ties in the 757 area code, and a ton of energy, all of which are great. However I think the oft-overlooked strength that London brings to the table is the ability to breed confidence within the organization - he not only inspires confidence in his players, but the UVA brass seems to have confidence to let Coach London manage the team in the way he knows best and trust that he will deliver. Now this confidence doesn’t simply stem from past experience or results, but more-so from Coach London’s palpable determination to win. UVA’s confidence in Coach London, especially in the context of a potentially up and coming team in a difficult conference, is nothing to take lightly

Ok, so now the relevance of our confidence in Coach London - last night (while watching the game with some fellow UVAers) I ended up talking with a former teacher and fellow Wahoo, Courtney, about my Greenfield idea. I wasn’t necessarily looking for feedback, but it just came up in the course of conversation. As we transitioned to her experience, she said something that was relatively simple but so important - “I wished when I was teaching that my administration would just support me in the ways that I needed it and then trust me to teach.” At the heart of it, she’s asking for the administration to have confidence in her to be a great teacher and listen when she needs help (i.e. resources, training) rather than only offering a predetermined menu of professional development options.

Now I have nothing to prove or disprove that Courtney was a great teacher, so for argument’s sake I am going to say she was. But I do know that regardless of skill, when your administration doesn’t have any confidence or trust in your abilities, nor listen to your specific needs, the situation is bound for failure.  Coach London’s administration believes that Coach knows what he needs, and when he asks for help they try to provide it. Courtney’s administration didn’t seem to do the same – they told her what she would need when, and over-managed the whole situation. Lesson? Maybe in order to be effective, the organization has to hire thoughtfully, trust their person,  and provide them (to the extent that they can) the resources needed to be effective, and let the person manage the game. What’s keeping the ed space from doing this?

Last Friday morning I listened to a GREAT Bill Simmons podcast on which he interviewed Nathan Hubbard, the CEO of Ticketmaster. One thing I found particularly interesting was their discussion on how sports teams need to better understand their customers so that they can better tailor the experience of watching sports and develop a better ticket pricing model. They were essentially highlighting Paul Graham’s philosophy that “you are stupid until you listen to your users.” Anyone who’s been to a pro sports game in the last few years can certainly attest to the often absurd prices you pay for mediocre experiences. 

So over the weekend I spent a great deal of time thinking about two things: why I am just not that invested in what is a FANTASTIC World Series and who are the users of my Greenfield idea? To recap on my idea, essentially I want to develop a realistic, user-determined simulator that enables teachers to practice specific moves/behaviors in a low-risk, realistic environment to improve their classroom preparedness. Now strip the pre-conceived notions of Top Gun-esque flight simulators from your mind – I want to focus on the problem and characteristics of the experience of a simulation before I think of how I create that simulation.

At this stage in the game, one of the most critical questions I have to answer is “who are my users?”  To this point, I’ve been talking about teachers as a broad category, but I’ll definitely have to more clearly focus on some subset of that group. I think the important thing that I have to keep reminding myself is that I’m not going to blindly choose which teachers (my users) use the simulator. I need to listen to as many teachers, school leaders, and coaches as possible to figure out teachers’ needs and then position the simulator to solve the most prevalent/compelling needs.

So for all of you who are teachers, school leaders, or teacher coaches: what are the most difficult parts of the classroom experience that you’ve dealt with/observed? Which skills do you think are most important to practice to become a better teacher?

So Joy,  another 4pt0’er, had a great blog post yesterday about predicting which teachers will be great. It was based on Fran Tarkenton’s article in the WSJ in which he compares the NFL and education world in terms of evaluating and predicting talent. Really interesting stuff here, and per usual, well written by Joy.

I want to take a slightly different spin to the topic, and use Bill Belichick as my prime example. First to caveat, I am not that New Englander who is blinded by their love of New England sports – I realize that Belichick is an incredibly polarizing figure with his fair of shortcomings. But there are a few things that he does exceptionally well, one of those being his ability to put players in positions that enable them to succeed by playing to their natural talents and tendencies. It seems simple and intuitive, but it’s not done nearly enough.

Rick Hess touched on this topic in his piece about turnaround leadership, but this is a topic that I think is relevant to more than just turnaround schools. Belichick does a great job of creating systems that enable guys who were previously seen as underutilized talents (Wes Welker) and putting them in positions to succeed. Sure, he’s also had guys like Tom Brady who are in the top 1% talent-wise, but his ability to get results out of even average role players is absolutely uncanny. 

But how much of Belichick’s success is his own talent vs the opportunity to work with a management team that gives him the leeway he needs to deliver results? Imagine Belichick in Washington or Dallas where management dictates the system within which the players should succeed? I doubt he’d have the same success he’s had in New England.

So maybe instead of worrying how to predict an individual’s success, we should shift more towards how we create schools that capitalize on the strengths of their teachers? What effect might that have on not only recruiting and training teachers, but teacher’s ultimate levels of success?

So for those of you who gave me feedback on my idea, thank you - I really appreciate all of it, and would love to get more. The harsher the better. So keep it coming. 

Elliott Witney gave me some particularly helpful feedback over the weekend on the idea. They way I initially posed the problem, it read as though teachers just didn’t have the set of critical skills (especially at the onset of their careers) to be effective. I don’t think this is necessarily wrong I - it’s simply not specific enough. It’s more about how it’s incredibly difficult in a classroom setting to develop specific, individual skills/behaviors then pair them together as needed depending on the situation. So hopefully this makes a little more sense and gets closer to a problem statement:

Teachers, especially new teachers, struggle to teach effectively because the diversity and volume of demands from the classroom  prevents teachers from being able to practice specific skills/behaviors independently of one another before gradually pairing skills/behaviors with situations.  Allowing teachers to practice these critical skills/behaviors in risk-free*, realistic simulations designed to engage specific combinations of skills/behaviors could greatly accelerate their classroom preparedness. 

What do you think?

*Now for a little clarification - by risk free I mean able to “practice” on kids without there being any student (e.g. standardized tests) or teacher focused formal evaluations. 

So as part of the 4pt0 Leader School Program, I am working on an idea for an organization that I hope to actually launch. I’ve been focused on the issue of teacher training/education technology, and want to get your feedback on a potential problem statement:

Teachers, especially new teachers, struggle to teach effectively because they are required to develop and hone multiple critical skills simultaneously in high-risk environments. Allowing teachers to prepare for the classroom by practicing these critical skills in risk-free, realistic simulations could greatly accelerate their development. 

It’s rough, but give me your feedback. 

So I have to first take a moment to recognize the epic collapse of my beloved Red Sox. I’m not going to make excuses or play the what-if game, as both as futile at this point and way too speculative. All I will say is thankfully the Yankees lost. 

Yesterday the NYT ran an article evaluating the effectiveness of classroom software curricula, the backbone of the “blended learning” movement. Now I realized that blended learning can be an inherently nebulous and oft misused term, so take a look at a definition that I think is particularly useful and accurate from Ed Elements. The article had the potential to be incredibly helpful since it was seemingly intended to be evaluative. There’s some great research out there on blended learning landscape, for example a report from the Innosight Institute, but little on what works and why. 

So I started the article with high hopes, thinking maybe this will finally be a helpful evaluation. Sadly, it ended up being one on a long list of my unfulfilled wishes (much like a Red Sox World Series victory in the same year my Yankee-loving best friend had his first child.) Sure it describes the efficacy of the studies used to evaluate the different pieces of software, talks about which had statistically significant results, blah blah blah. The process for your evaluation and high level results, for all intents and purposes, is true but useless information.

What it doesn’t get to is why each piece of software is or is not an effective tool in delivering instruction. Isn’t the when, where and why of the effectiveness of blended learning software the real point of interest? Let’s assume that we all agree that blended learning isn’t a silver bullet (hopefully have some head nods.) Let’s also agree that we’ve researched enough over the past 20+ years to know that kids have different methods of learning dependent upon a whole slew of factors (e.g. financial resources, home environment, nutrition, etc). So then why are we so concerned with the simple does it or does it not work at broad levels? That really doesn’t tell us much at all, especially from a practitioner’s point of view. Wouldn’t it be better to actually understand which software works best dependent upon the kids and the school environment. 

I think of the firing of Terry Francona in the same way. We all know the infamous Boston Herald headline of “the best team ever”  which seemed like bad juju from the beginning. And we all know the epic collapse in September, during which the Buffalo Bills had a longer winning streak than the Red Sox. All this to say, it’s easy (and accurate) to conclude something went wrong - I don’t need to be Bill James to know that. But until we know what went wrong and why (whether it was beer swilling in the locker room or John Lackey’s bloated ERA) it’s really hard to say what the right move, including firing Francona, would be the best move. All we know is that we finished 90-72 (not terrible but not great) and out of the playoffs.