Pro tip #1: Hide quiz answer keys as comments in Microsoft Word

There are some great books out there on improving teaching practice, pedagogy, history of education, ed policy etc. But sometimes the day to day minutiae can detract from grand plans, and what you really need are tips and systems to improve efficiency:

The Problem: you lose answer keys for quizzes OR spend a lot of time making quizzes only to realize you forgot to put in an answer key while you made it OR you are reusing quiz questions from year to year and you know you had that answer key somewhere....

Pro tip: as you write the quizzes in Microsoft Word insert comments on the correct answers.

Advantages:

1. Easy to hide from students, just click Review > Final (to show again click Review > Final: Show Markup)
2. Keeps track of your answer choices between school years
3. Easy to move answer choices around to create multiple versions of the quiz/test - just copy and paste, the comment will move with the answer choice.
4. Easy to pull up if a student misses a quiz and needs to make it up in office hours (all digital instead of shuffling around papers on a desk)

Caveat emptor - this is a part of an occasional series, these are all small ideas, none are earth shattering, but they have been helpful to me. Have other pro tips?Feel free to share in the comments.

How I raised more than $7000 for my students and you can too.

Let's face it. School funding in the U.S. is completely inadequate at the classroom level.

If you want your students to have an enriching, well-rounded, experience the unfortunate reality is that the school budget doesn't usually cut it. What this means in practice is teachers going above and beyond to make it happen.

Here are a few tips that might help:

1. Use DonorsChoose for classroom projects

You already know it's there. You've been meaning to get around to putting up a project... whatever that means. Here's the deal: it is easy. To put up a DonorsChoose project you need to...

1. Pick out what you want (the site added Amazon as an option a few months ago. Now virtually everything is available, they also have some more niche retailers for specific academic projects)
2. Describe what you are raising money for, provide examples of the impact.
3. Hit publish.
4. When the materials arrive have your students write thank you notes and send them in.

Advantages of DonorsChoose - built in fundraising base (people go on the site to support teachers and students already), matching grants can effectively cut your fundraising goals in half or more. It is a 501(c)3, so all donations from friends and family are tax-deductible.

Total amount raised: $5000+ over the past five years.

2. Use Fundly for open ended fundraisers, trips

Fundly is a much more open-ended than DonorsChoose as a platform so you are more flexible with how and when you use the money. This is fantastic for events/projects with open-ended or variable costs (like field trips). However, with a bit more freedom comes a bit more risk for the donor (and no tax break). Basically you can tie Fundly to any bank account, and no one is going to have oversight on how you actually spend the money once it is deposited. As a result Fundly lacks the already present donor base of DonorsChoose and rarely if ever does Fundly have matching campaigns etc.

At Pritzker we raised more than $2000 last year to fund a trip to a national championship ultimate tournament in Cincinnati, OH. We are hoping to repeat the success this year raising another $2000 to go to Ames, IA for the  same tournament.

Advantages of Fundly - allows extensive ties to social media which automate a lot of your fundraising campaign (someone donates and it will automatically tweet/share on Facebook). Also, Fundly allows sub-campaigns, so you can set an overall goal for your team/club/classroom etc. but then individual students, or parents can set up an even more personalized campaign which feeds into that overall goal.

Total amount raised: $2500+ over the past year

3. Tell a story

As Simon Sinek elegantly puts it in his viral TEDx talk - no one buys what you do, they buy why you do it. Quite frankly your family and friends don't exactly care what you are raising money for in your classroom - they do care why you are doing it. What will the project or resource accomplish?

For example: we recently raised $300 for a portable ultimate field so we can roll it out on the public park and play on a regulation space. Fantastic for drills, great for learning the game - but that isn't why people give. They gave because that plastic roll-out field represents a(n only quasi-metaphorical) level playing field.  The project enables my students to compete with the same resources as upper-income suburban and private school students from around the city with whom we compete.

4. Use your network, real first and social too - and students. Not coworkers.

Once you post a new project you have to work to find donors (obviously). The first few projects you start might warrant emails to family and friends, a few keys:

• Tell the story, the why (see above).
• Be as concise as possible. Your project description on the website will have the details.
• Include the donate link multiple times (those fundraising emails from political parties have it right!)
• Include an ask - "If you are able to support my students, even $5 would be a huge help. If you can't, maybe forward this email to a friend who can or post to Facebook/Twitter." 
• Don't email your fellow coworkers/teachers - they are all raising money for initiatives too. Plus, they will see the project when you post to social media.

5. Write the thank you.

About a week after every birthday and every Christmas my mom would require me to sit down and do the most tedious of chores. I couldn't play with the present until the "chore" was done. Thank god for that lesson. Gratitude is the most important aspect of this process, first because without your donors your students don't end up with a rich, diverse education. Second, because without gratitude it is unlikely that anyone who donates will do so again. Unfortunate as it might be, with the current state of classroom funding in the U.S. it is likely that you will need everyone that donates now to do so again in the future. Write the thank you.

What tips do you have? Anything work well for you in the past?

Market theory and Chicago Public high schools

Daniel Kay Hertz has a great post up at his website (that was tweeted by WBEZ and reproduced on Catalyst) regarding the market trends for Chicago Public Schools high schools. The major charts of the piece are reproduced at right: basically that when one looks at the district as a whole it appears at least at face value that students and families are choosing to move from schools with lower overall ACT scores to ones with higher ACT scores.

However, when Hertz breaks the data down between charter and non-charter CPS schools things get murkier. Students in general are choosing "better" non-charter schools as opposed to "worse" non-charter schools. But, within the subset selection of charter schools students and families are statistically choosing randomly.

There are a few issues with the way the analysis was done (as I understand it).

1. Including selective enrollment schools in the pool of data will skew results to make it look like there is not much self selection for students to move to the top schools in CPS. This is, of course, patently false. If a parent were able to just choose that their student go to Northside (with a 29) or Whitney Young (with a 27), they would. That is, of course, impossible though because each has an admissions rate of about 12%.
    
2. Using ACT growth over three years would be a much better measure. Comparing the overall end scores on the ACT doesn't as much measure the quality of education received at the school (for a moment ignoring the side debate of test-as-imperfect-indicator-of-learning) as it does measure where the students end up. This sounds a bit tautological, and it is, but take an example: if a student enters Roberto Clemente (neighborhood CPS HS) at a 12 and ends at an 18 - that is a fantastic amount of growth and speaks to the skills acquired during the first three years of HS. On the other hand, if a student enters ASPIRA at a 17 and improves to an 18 over three years, at least by the measure of the test, not as much has been learned.
   
   So, it would be interesting to do a similar analysis on Hertz' dataset sorting by three year cohort growth from freshman EXPLORE to junior or senior year ACT scores. If the market approach is working well, parents and students would presumably move to the neighborhood and charter schools which provide the most growth.
    
3. High school is (with few exceptions) geographically constraining. Some of the explanation for an increase in "lower performing" schools could be the fact that the nearest reasonable alternatives were also "lower performing" schools. In other words the perceived cost-benefit trade off of an hour long commute each way for marginally better (say, 1-3 points) school might seem unattractive. Which would then result in increased enrollments with less attractive schools (test score wise) but more attractive geographically.*
    
4. The ending ACT data has a long tail and isn't always at the forefront of a parent's decision making process, especially for newly started schools. With 48 new high schools in the last 10 years many parents are choosing to send their students to programs without records or results until three years later. Doing some back of the envelope math here, 48 schools multiplied by 4 classes that will enter each of those buildings before ACT scores are published/publicized would result in 192 cohorts of students/families selecting a school based on imperfect or partial data. So, while it may appear that parents/students who chose charter school X or new neighborhood school X made an irrational choice, for 192 sets of those families judging that choice requires a level of hindsight bias. 

Overall Hertz brings up some interesting analysis though, and at a minimum this is a start to a conversation, and an important one. Assuming that some of the mitigating variables could be explained away or solved in the near future (better access to information for parents etc), if the trends identified above to persist it would be a serious blow to the entire philosophy of market-based portfolio management for large urban districts.

The underlying larger takeaway should be this - not all neighborhood public high schools are awful, not all charter schools are fantastic. Far from it on both sides, those who paint either groups with such a broad brush do a disservice to the most important constituency here - the parents and students who need to make a real, difficult and impactful decision of where to spend their high school years.

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* Might be interesting to compare increases and decreases in enrollment with a variety of other factors to see if some have a higher correlation with increased enrollment, such as a the aspects of the 5-Essentials survey.

Correction: an earlier version of this post said that WBEZ had reproduced the Hertz piece, they had in fact only tweeted a link. Apologies for the confusion.

Random endorsement: mobile bike-lane light

A completely random endorsement - bought this bike light for my dad for Christmas (and then one for myself as well). It uses lasers to make a bike lane around the sides of the bike so even when you are riding on a road without lanes it provides a bit more buffer. Also, it only requires 2 AAA batteries. And that it was only $11.

Rode my bike around today feeling much safer (or at a minimum, much more visible).

Check out ->  5 LED Bicycle Rear Tail Red Bike Torch Laser Beam Lamp Light

Are you tweeting during the school day??

Short answer: no, of course not.

But the reality is much of the world is active and engaging on twitter during the school day, so how do you (as a teacher) take advantage of what Twitter has to offer without compromising professionally?

A few things that have been useful for me:

1. Use Flipboard to keep track of Twitter users you follow and hashtags

Flipboard is a great app for iOS or Android which acts as equal parts RSS feed reader and social media cultivator. When you get home you can easily flip through the day's top tweets from those you follow (as ranked by retweets and your engagement with those users). This way you won't miss out on that new resource from #sschat or #edtech, and at the same time you don't need to use up some of your prep scrolling through to find something useful.

Hashtags especially can be a huge resource for lessons, links, best practices - you name it. A few I recommend: #sschat, #wrldchat, #edtech. Flip board does a nice job of displaying things graphically so you don't get into the mind-numbing scrolling rut. (Feel free to share other useful hashtags in the comments)

2. Use Buffer to stay engaged even when you can't.

Ruining the magic here, I rarely tweet during the week. Almost all of the link sharing I do on Twitter is done via reading on Feedly/Flipboard and scheduling with the awesome free app Buffer. I do most of my reading (no surprises here) when I have time on the weekends or before I head into school each day from 6-7am.

Installing the app in my browser allows me to easily peg something to be shared on an automatic schedule when I know more of my followers will be online.

3. Use Followerwonk to schedule Buffer posts at the perfect times

Speaking of which - Followerwonk is a neat app which analyzes your followers and predicts the best times to share based on their activity.   This takes a bit of the guess work out of deciding when to post.

4. Use IFTTT to automatically Tweet and Buffer posts from your blog

If This Then That is an extremely simple online optimization tool that allows you to make if-then statements for basically anything online. So for example, I have two IFTTT "recipes" as they call them for when I post a new entry to this blog. The first posts a link to Twitter immediately saying: "New post: " and the second Buffers a link for later in that day or the next day with the prefix: "ICYMI: " (In case you missed it, for the uninitiated).

This is certainly not an end-all-be-all list of social media tips, but they have helped for me!

Fellow teachers - you have any tips to share? Best ways to engage in social media? Share 'em in the comments or feel free to tweet at me @mmccabe.

A primer on Chicago politics?

I'm currently reading American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J Daley - his battle for Chicago and the nation by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor right now and it is absolutely incredible.

I am only 280 pages in (a few months into Daley's second term), and already well-worth the purchase.

I've pulled out a few quotes that I think are interesting or thought provoking (and will continue to do so) here.  A few of the most interesting:

“Look at the Lord’s Disciples,” Daley would later say in response to a charge of corruption in City Hall. “One denied Him, one doubted Him, one betrayed Him. If our Lord couldn’t have perfection, how are you going to have it in city government?”

In April 1917, the Chicago Real Estate Board met and — concerned about what officials described as the “invasion of white residence districts by the Negroes” — appointed a Special Committee on Negro Housing to make recommendations. On this committee’s recommendation, the board adopted a policy of block-by-block racial segregation, carefully controlled so that “each block shall be filled solidly and . . . further expansion shall be confined to contiguous blocks.” Three years later, the board took the further step of voting unanimously to punish by “immediate expulsion” any member...

“Make no little plans,” Burnham, a prominent architect and principal designer of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, advised. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

Anyone else already read this? Anyone else currently reading?

ICYMI: Short blurb in Pitt Magazine

A few weeks ago Pitt Magazine published a short blurb about my work with the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Supposedly you can view the article from the link below, but it looks like the Zinio tech is having issues. The link to the article is here: http://www.zinio.com/pages/PittMagazine/Fall-13/416279352/pg-40

 

TEDx Talk: Connecting communities and classrooms

A few weeks ago I gave a TEDx talk on the writing program we started at Pritzker with 826 Chicago to connect students digitally with writing tutors one on one through GoogleDocs.

Check it out below:



I am happy to answer as many questions as I can in the comments about our work or its impact.

If you are able to, please support the work of 826 Chi financially, or volunteer your time! They are a fantastic organization and have been instrumental in our students' collective success.

Recent press: NCTQ Report

I did some interviews with the National Council on Teacher Quality regarding teacher preparation and education schools (through Teach Plus).

It is all part of a campaign with the release of this study: http://www.nctq.org/dmsStage/Teacher_Prep_Review_2013_Report

Two YouTube videos here:

- http://www.nctq.org/commentary/viewStory.do?id=33672 - discussing academic requirements for teacher prep programs 

- http://www.nctq.org/commentary/viewStory.do?id=33655 - talking about the need for classroom management preparation

At some point soon I hope to post some bigger picture thoughts regarding the study, the implications for teacher prep and the current state of ed schools.

We must do more to recognize best teachers

Washington, D.C. has the right idea tonight.

If you want to turn around a school system you can not only focus on the worst - you must seek out, recognize and retain the best teachers. Tonight the DC Public Education fund will recognize some of the best teachers in the city. Seven teachers will each receive an award of $10,000 during a reception at the Kennedy Center. Further, to their credit the front page of the DC Public Schools website publicizes the event (to which every teacher rated "Highly Effective" by the IMPACT system is invited as a guest of honor).

This is just the latest in a series of right steps DC is taking.

Over the last two years with a new collective bargaining agreement taking effect DC's best teachers have seen substantial pay bumps - some collecting bonuses over $10,000. As a side note, teachers opt-in to this system. Otherwise educators follow the routine raises that come with years of service and tenure like most cities current contracts.

Do I point to DC as a perfect model? No. But they have the right idea here: recognize the best teachers. Pay them more.

There have been other small steps forward recently - the Fishman Prize from the New Teacher Project  awards $25,000 for some of the best teachers nationally. The Fund for Teachers gives recognition through competitive grants for teachers seeking out professional development. Here in Illinois the Golden Apple seeks to recognize great teaching. The White House's Champions of Change - Educators event was as good a use of the bully pulpit as I have seen. But it is not enough.

Other professions have lists like, "Top 100 Super Lawyers of Pennsylvania", or "best doctors in Chicago", or "best dentists in Chicago" or "best lawyers of Chicago" and on and on.

Nationally we are losing great urban teachers at alarming rates. Locally, here in Chicago we are losing all teachers at staggering rates as well (fewer than 50% of teachers remain at their current school more than 4 years).

This, regrettably is not a new topic of discussion; here is Nick Kristof in March 2011:

Moreover, part of compensation is public esteem. When governors mock teachers as lazy, avaricious incompetents, they demean the profession and make it harder to attract the best and brightest. We should be elevating teachers, not throwing darts at them. (link)

That advice was evidently not taken by most.

Take a cursory glance at the web sites for a few major urban school districts - Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City. Not only is it difficult to find information about or announcements of celebrations of the best teachers - it is difficult to find information about any teachers. How does that make sense?


CPS central office, further, is not the only culprit in this failure to recognize the best teachers. The Chicago Teacher's Union website is similarly lacking information about the organization's finest teachers. Large and leading charter management organizations in Chicago are in the same boat - the only information about teachers are on bio pages or in the context of recruiting teachers to apply. This doesn't have to be so.


Every district in America should have regular, genuine and very public efforts to recognize the best teachers in their system. Events like DC's Standing Ovation for Teachers tonight need to be institutionalized and widespread. I hope that Chicago can take a page from DC before this school year is out.

We can, and will, and should haggle over how best to determine which teachers are the finest. But, perfect should not be the enemy of good here.

There are many things in education and ed reform that are contentious to discuss and difficult to do. This is not one of them - that the best teachers deserve our recognition.

I have been disheartened lately that the entirety of the ed reform conversation in Chicago seems centered around the worst schools, the worst teachers, the worst districts. I can't help but think that if we  continue to seek the worst, we will find the worst.  Chicago Public Schools needs to start looking for its best.




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A Post Script - DC's policies and climate seem to be not only aimed at retaining the current excellent teachers but also attracting some of the best from around the country:

• Katie Lyons won the Fishman Prize this year. At a recent Teach+ event she announced she was moving to DC.
• Julia King was a national Sue Lehman Award winner (recognizing the best teaching nationally for Teach For America corps members) when she taught in Gary, IN. She has since moved to DC and was named the DC Teacher of the Year.

I don't know either personally well enough to say that DC IMPACT or the sort of recognition above led directly to their decisions to move there, but I can't imagine it hurt.

I would love more anecdotal evidence about teacher experiences with the new DC contract, or moving to DC as a result of the contract.




Links:
- DC Teaching Excellence Award winners - http://www.standingovationfordcteachers.org/about-standing-ovation/2012-excellence-award-winners/
- DC teaching contract - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/education/big-pay-days-in-washington-dc-schools-merit-system.html?pagewanted=all
- 2012 Fishman Prize - http://tntp.org/fishman-prize
- Kristof: Pay teachers more - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html
- McKinsey study: http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education/Closing_the_talent_gap.pdf
- Whitehouse Champions of Change - http://www.whitehouse.gov/champions/educators