In case you missed this, Sabrina Shupe and Alexander Ooms had a great thread discussion on a blog post this past week.  I highly suggest you read it.  It resonated with me because it articulated an internal rumination that I have had for years now.

The discourse reminded me about why I entered the teaching profession.  It was to make a difference; it was to continue the social justice work that I had always been prepared for by my childhood experience in Chicago, working with migrant workers who struggled to make a living.  Going to Operation Push gatherings to listen to Jesse Jackson encourage people to continue the good fight.  I wanted to, and still want to promote education reform as a civil rights issue, the civil rights issue of our time.

As a new teacher I embraced my passion and used it to get through those tough first years of teaching.  But as I gained more insight in to the day-to-day challenges of teaching I began to question my efficacy as a teacher.  As a teacher I knew I was doing the right work; my intentions were good.  But was I being an effective teacher?  How would I know?

CSAP came along, as did other standardized assessments.  These assessments allowed me to assess the work of my students.  But it still didn’t satiate my desire to know if I was being effective.  Seven years ago my school began to implement the ideas of professional learning communities.

PLCs are driven by collaboration:  collaboration that relies on comparing the work of teachers of similar courses.  Today, common course teachers will publicly show results of common assessments to identify outstanding work and to identify substandard work.  This work of collaboration allowed me to judge my effectiveness, but more importantly it gave me access to the highly effective teaching practices of my colleagues.  To do this I had to rely on some standardized assessments, like CSAP and the ACT, as well as common assessments produced by our common course team.  I knew the pitfalls of CSAPs and other standardized assessments, but I balanced these concerns with the positive aspects of how they could improve my practice.

For me, Alexander and Sabrina’s dialogue highlighted the contradictions and the wonderful tension between intentions and outcomes.  Neither can operate alone.  Just as theory and practice have to negotiate one’s reality.  I hope I have not misrepresented Alexander’s and Sabrina’s discussion, read it for yourself.  But it struck a chord with me.

Today, public discourse is more about public discord.  We need more thoughtful exchanges, exchanges that provoke one to weigh the reader’s bias against another’s.  Exchanges that allow room for one to depart from an atrophied partisan position.  I hope this site continues to produce these examples of thought provoking exchanges.

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