Here’s the Chicago Sun Times essay by reading specialist Erika Bolte as yet another teacher tells the world how public education matters and makes a difference for our children. Erika explains how the teacher team at her school helping a struggling student to catch up.

While pundits worry about large-scale standardized test scores, good teachers continue to help one kid at a time. We must keep telling the stories of how teachers make that difference so that community members – taxpayers – come to understand the hard but rewarding work that educators do, and become willing to give it more support.

The teacher voice campaign marches on with more essays in the Chicago Sun Times. Read and enjoy these outstanding pieces:

• Mitch Lazarus, on in-depth attitudinal strategies that help kids become successful
• Robin Rickert, on classroom community that helps kids grow to be caring adults

NOW, CHICAGO TEACHERS! SEND US MORE ESSAYS! WE NEED TO BUILD PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF OUR IMPORTANT WORK.

Contact me for more info, or to send a draft – [email protected] Tell a story of a powerful learning moment in your classroom, or a student who changed and grew. 550 words max.

OK, so I’ve been absent from this blog for a really long time. But I’m back and seeking more Chicago Area Teacher Essays!

I got plenty busy finishing my new book, From Inquiry to Action, on helping students to identify issues in their school or community, research them, and take action on them. This kind of curriculum not only powerfully deepens student engagement and learning, but develops them as leaders by having them take the leader NOW, rather than in some unlikely future. More on that at the NCTE convention and when the book comes out in the winter.

Now, about the teacher essays: In case you haven’t run across them, the Chicago Sun Times has been publishing teacher essays once every two to four weeks. But as the school year ended, teachers grew extra busy and my supply of essays ran out.

SO I NEED MORE ESSAYS! The authors must be Chicago-area teachers. Maximum length 550 words. I seek stories of exciting classrooms and/or struggles to help a struggling kid. No whining or name-calling. The purpose is to show the public the valuable work we do, to counter all the de-valuing of teachers and public education.

If you’re not a Chicago-area teacher yourself but know one, please encourage him or her to write. Email me at [email protected] and I’ll forward the guidelines. Essays should be sent to me at that address.

Do it now!

Everyone should read in the Chicago Sun Times the latest teacher essay that tears testing apart piece by piece. Fifth-grade Chicago teacher Rachel Schwartz explains how the test fails to help children learn, causes them mental anguish, eats up days that could be devoted to learning (on top of the other tests that Chicago imposes), and doesn’t even align with the Common Core. And Rachel doesn’t rant educationese. She includes a vignette of a real student’s experience, to help ordinary non-educators understand what the imposition of this badly-designed testing means for our kids.

This is the 16th teacher essay that the Sun Times has published over the past year. WE NEED EVERY MAJOR NEWSPAPER IN THE COUNTRY TO BE RUNNING STORIES LIKE THIS.

Belleville, Michigan teacher Jason Strzalkowski explains what our work really is and it is not tests. Read “I Love My Job. Really.” — a succinct and affirming essay on Nancy Flanagan’s blog, “Teacher in a Strange Land. Strzalkowski explains how he helps his high school history students “navigate poverty, reputation, academics, and self-worth on a daily basis.” And once he’s listed all that he does, he points out that “None of what I just talked about is on a standardized test.”

So please share this fine piece with everyone you know!

We’re excited to announce that the Chicago Sun Times teacher essays are back, with an excellent piece by 3rd grade teacher Evelyn Pollins explaining very concretely how teaching reading oriented to the Common Core destroys kids’ love of books. It’s on the paper’s website as well as in the Monday 3/22/15 print edition.

The series had paused for several months while the paper’s editors were consumed with covering Chicago’s mayoral election battle between Rahm Emanuel and Chuy Garcia (to be decided in a run-off April 7th). This itself is a major education story, with Rahm attacked for having closed 50 schools in primarily black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

The essay can be hard to find on the web, since the Sun Times website isn’t very user-friendly. So just tell your friends to Google “Evelyn Pollins Chicago Sun Times.” Oh, and don’t be shocked to see just above her essay a picture of a message to parents about how great the Common Core is. Go figure!

The 2015 Illinois Writing Project Teacher Leadership Institute focuses on both writing instruction and strategies for teachers to take formal and informal leadership roles in their schools. It’s scheduled for July 13-28, with an after-school pre-meeting in May and a followup gathering in Sept.

Teachers who speak up for supportive policies for our work and kids’ learning need to be both strategic about using their voice and effective in our own classrooms. This summer institute, widely recognized for its quality and engaging experiences, is for teachers of all grade levels as well as for coaches and teacher leaders who are promoting effective practices in their schools.

Go to the IWP website for more information and an application form.

Good morning! We may be snowbound here in Chicago, but I’ve uploaded to YouTube two new videos with teachers stating what matters in their classrooms. You can view one here and the other here.

The pictures were taken in a session scheduled for the purpose at last November’s NCTE convention. Sonia Nieto spoke to inspire us, and then people wrote their statements on placards, used their phones to snap pics of one another holding their placards, and emailed the pics to me. I then tried my hand at editing them into a video. There are free editing programs that enable one to do this pretty easily (it’s time-consuming though, I’ll admit).

With so many voices, mandates, and tests undermining public schools, this seemed like one way for educators to speak up and tell about what’s right in their work. So what if teachers everywhere did this and flooded YouTube with their stories? You should try it!

WHOA! Four Seattle area teachers decided to truly speak up, testifying to their school board about the agonies that are being visited on their students and themselves by the Smarter Balanced test that is pointlessly discouraging everyone, and declaring that they’ll refuse to give the tests in the future. As you’ll see from their account and their statements, they organized this very carefully and smartly, with a large number of fellow teachers in attendance. Several others came forward to speak as well, including a candidate for the state legislature.

Since time was limited to 3 minutes per speaker, the teachers planned their parts to go in sequence. Their statements were measured but passionate, as you can see by reading them: Becca Richie’s statement, Judy Dotson’s statement, Julianna Dauble’s statement, Susan duFresne’s statement. Several quoted Martin Luther King: “Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.”

And Susan DuFresne explained in her account that both they and the other teachers present experienced a real sense of empowerment and professional pride.

It appears that there are indeed caring teachers who simply cannot remain silent when they see children being psychologically and developmentally hurt, whether their jobs are threatened or not. Let this be a lesson for the rest of us.

Please enjoy reading yet another fine teacher portrait by Peter Smagorinsky and published on Maureen Downey’s “Get Schooled” blog for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Smagorinsky emphasizes first grade teacher Becky Cross’s use of laughter in the classroom, in contrast to the Dickensian sooty-factory approach to education that has become current. In light of her leadership and mentorship of other teachers, Ms Cross was asked to become an assistant principal, but she turned down the offer in favor of staying in the classroom.

People across the country, you should all be writing such portraits of outstanding teachers and submitting them to newspapers everywhere. That’s one way we can counter the negative stereotype of public education today.