Republican state representative Tim Geitner has introduced a bill in the Colorado House (HB22-1066) that would require all public school educators to post the following:
- A list of the educational materials that the local education provider uses for each grade, subject, and course
- A copy of each survey, nonacademic assessment, analysis, and evaluation distributed to students
- A list of the devices, programs, and software that the local education provider uses that collect student biometric data
- Information concerning the professional development requirements for educators whom the local education provider employs.
"Educational materials" includes written curriculum plans. It also requires each school district to develop a policy on teaching controversial issues (no definition that those) and a process for citizens to report, well, anything that bugs them.
I know. I am broadly summarizing this catch-all bill that has almost no chance of passing. But it's interesting to note that exerting greater control over schools, curriculum, and classroom teachers has become a key issue for Republicans across the nation.
Were I still teaching high school, I would question each general bullet point of the bill as well as the motivation behind all the seemingly laudable calls for "transparency." I am not against transparency, as you might have noted in yesterday's post.
But transparency needs to go both ways. For instance, Rep. Geitner and his wife homeschool their two sons, which is fine, but which makes me think that here is another "sideline observer" taking some shots at public education. Behind each bullet point is a blatant lack of trust on Geitner's part with the message clear: teachers are getting away with something.
There is so much in this bill that captures the zeitgeist of unrelenting criticism of teachers and schools from a large percentage of the community, but one objection I have is about this idea that lesson plans (I assume that is what some "educational materials" cover) must be available to everyone.
I never found detailed lesson plans to be helpful in my own classroom, though I certainly had extensive plans and rationalization for everything I taught. When pressed, as in the case of an administrator conducting a formal evaluation of my teaching (a truly pointless exercise that requires everyone involved pretending that one designated period of one chosen day is representative of a teacher's performance, while also pretending that the former P.E. teacher, now turned administrator, has deep knowledge of the subject matter I am teaching), I could write out a lesson plan without much effort.
Most of the time, however, my syllabus and constantly evolving weekly plans guided daily teaching, and most "lesson plans" resided in my head. I like being prepared but found that teaching became much more fun when I learned to let go of tightly controlled classes where the outcomes were predetermined.
Honestly, everyone sort of "gets it" that a lot of school consists of students writing, speaking or demonstrating exactly what the teacher wants and expects. The longer I taught, the more I valued being surprised -- and the surprises were not always pleasant. Journalism classes are ideal for providing surprises, but I found that mainstream English classes did not have to turn into "call and response" activities.
One of my favorite sports commentators was Frank Deford, now deceased, who shared a radio essay on some aspect of sports on NPR each Wednesday morning. As I often say, sports is about far more than wins and losses and statistics, so non-athletes were not excluded.
I often would listen in the car on the way to school, note his use of rhetoric or argument or narrative storytelling, and decide to share his essay with students.
Once in the office, I would go to the NPR website and download the text of his commentary, reformat it in InDesign, and print a class set of copies. It helped when I had first hour free to provide some time to do this, but the entire operation took about 20 minutes depending on how busy the school copy machine was.
I usually had no time to prepare much of anything specific about that essay but part of the fun was that students and teacher would discover and question and expand and question on the fly. We were off-script and I never knew where the discussions might take us.
My AP Language and Composition classes and I would read the commentary aloud, together, pausing to discuss everything from a challenging vocabulary word to clever syntax to Deford's unique "voice" as a writer (as a reader, as well). In the biz, we call this technique "interrupted reading" and I used it all the time, no matter the course.
Yes, students COULD have listened to the same commentary on the radio as I, but a truth of schooling is that if we expect students to devote the same time outside of class as we, the teachers, do, we are doomed to disappointment.
In the unlikely event that Geitner's disingenuous call for more transparency would pass, I guess I could write down something like: "If Frank Deford's NPR weekly essay contains teachable references and writing strategies, Wednesdays might begin with a 15-minute discussion of said essay. Parents interested in the essays themselves are invited to listen to NPR or read a PDF of the essay on my class website."
In actuality, that is exactly what I did.
But do we need a law to standardize logical classroom management? If not, what underlies this sort of bill?
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