Things have been pretty quiet with The Teaching Nomad lately, but that's changing soon. While I have not been writing much for the blog, I have been incredibly busy with some other exciting projects: 

1) My doctorate degree is almost done! I am close to starting the implementation of my mindfulness research in 7 schools in the Minneapolis area this spring. After that, it will be analyzing and writing about my results and putting the final touches on my dissertation.

2) This fall I attended a workshop for entrepreneurs and realized that my work needs to be split into two places.

• Candace Burckhardt Consulting will be the place where you can find information about my education consulting, speaking, and professional development services. I will also be regularly writing and blogging about popular education reform and policy issues. Check out my first piece that was recommended by the popular health and lifestyle website, CTZNWLL, this week: Five Ways to Take Action After the Confirmation of Betsy DeVos
• The Teaching Nomad will switch solely to being about teaching abroad and advice for expat parents in finding schools.
  

I plan to begin creating mini-guides on different regions that are popular with expats and international teachers to help the community with their searches and to inspire more people to travel and learn abroad. 

My first guide will be on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. I will be heading down there next week to meet with school directors and teachers to learn more about school options in Playa del Carmen, Cozumel, and Tulum. 

This week I was interviewed on a topic very close to my heart: salary negotiation!

Check out my interview here on the Bossed Up website -- an organization with a mission to help women beat burnout and achieve career success. 

Afterwards, read about why I chose to give up my offer here, so that I could take a part-time job that better aligned with my career. 

Three years ago I sat in a dorm room at the National 4-H Center at the end of an exhausting summer of leading camps across the United States. I was a few days away from wrapping up our final camp and I had stumbled across the 1930 essay by John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (free PDF). 

​In this article, Keynes predicts that we will only need to work about 3 hours a day by 2028 and discusses (read: warns about) what will happen when we begin to have more leisure time. 

As I read through the article, I was speechless. I realized I was simply working not out of any economic imperative but because I didn't know what to do with my freedom. This quote stuck with me the most: 

​I'd traded my prized teacher's summer off for a few thousand dollars to run these camps, and I had no idea why. I wasn't planning to use the money for anything special. To this day, I have no idea what it actually went towards. 

I put the article away and went on with business as usual: working a full-time role that requires me to constantly be "on" and pursuing my doctorate. The stress of around the clock work has caused me to lose friendships, jeopardize my health, and to forget what brings me joy.

So, I am putting a stop to the madness. I've traded in my full-time role with a great school network to work part-time next year with an equally great special education organization to deliver training and school support. I'm going to start measuring my success not in wealth, but in time. I'm rejecting the status symbol of a busy calendar in favor of reclaiming my leisure time. 

And more importantly, I am taking my teacher's summer for the very first time and plan to do nothing but travel, visit friends, write, and relax. 

Today, under the cover of night, Republicans added a provision to the Wisconsin budget that would allow someone without even a high school diploma to become a special education teacher (in addition to 12 other subject areas) (Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, 2015). This provision would put Wisconsin at literally the bottom of teacher quality standards for all 50 states.

Wisconsin’s education system appears to be on its own dizzying Race to the Bottom as it adopts policies that are in direct contradiction to those of top school systems around the world such as Finland and Singapore. For example, countless research studies have found that teacher quality is the single most important influencer on academic achievement aside from socioeconomic status (Donaldson, 2012). Finland’s teacher licensing standards are actually similar to Wisconsin’s current standards where teachers major in education and minor in a subject area (Sahlberg, 2013). Why would we mess with our licensing standards when they are so similar to the top country in the world in education?  The way to create a great education system for Wisconsin’s kids is through high professional standards for teachers, not by making it possible for literally anyone to become a teacher.

Research shows great school systems give teachers the autonomy to plan and implement lessons and to create their own student assessments (Sahlberg, 2013). Instead, Republican Wisconsin legislators have planned for more state control over curriculum by allowing for state takeover of schools, and increasing standardized testing. This year alone I spent over 30% of my time as a teacher proctoring state mandated standardized exams. I cannot imagine what “learning” will look like as more tests are piled on our children.

Over the past year, I have witnessed what used to be one of our country’s best educational systems continue its downward spiral since Governor Walker took office.  As I look to have children of my own over the next few years, I know with good conscience that I cannot subject them to the mediocre education system that will be in place in Wisconsin. Today, as Republicans continued their assault on public education in Wisconsin, I signed a lease on a new apartment in Minnesota. I promise to remain a faithful Packers fan.  

 
Anderson, J. (2014, October 22). Scott walker has failed wisconsin and minnesota is the proof. Journal Sentinel. Retrieved from http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/purple-wisconsin/280089862.html

Donaldson, M.L.  (2012). Teachers’ Perspectives on Evaluation Reform. Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED539750.pdf

Sahlberg, P. (2013). Teachers as leaders in finland. Educational Leadership, 71(2), 36-40. 

Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. (2015, May 27). Legislative action slides teacher licensing standards toward the bottom. Retrieved from http://dpi.wi.gov/news/releases/2015/legislative-action-slides-teacher-licensing-standards-toward-bottom

 

April is National Poetry Month, so I have decided to challenge myself by writing a poem today. 

Easter Egg Math

$1.99 for 12 doz. 
$5.35 for the PAAS egg decorating kit
8 eager children
1/4 had decorated eggs before
1 parent in each child's life who had disappeared 
1 childhood
How do I calculate their odds for success? 

Ten days ago I wrote the following tweet as part of the #whatif campaign many educators are participating in on Twitter in order to re-imagine possibilities in our field and for our students. 















This tweet has been staying in the forefront of my mind the first week back to school as my students gear up for Round 2 of district mandated NWEA testing. I don't think the public truly understands the sheer amount of time we spend testing at school, so I've added up the hours I have spent/will spend testing my special education students this year. 

PALS Testing: 3 hours a year 
NWEA Testing: It takes myself and one of my assistants ten days straight to test all of our students each time we take this test. This equates to roughly 180 hours of my time each year. 
AIMS Web Testing: Our district mandates that I progress monitor each of my special education students in both reading and math on a biweekly basis. This roughly equates to 60 hours over the course of the year. 
WKCE Science & Social Studies Tests: This took me 5 hours to give. 
WAA: This took me about 4 hours to proctor. 
Smarter Balanced Assessment aka Badger 3-8: This is a new test, but the students have to take it individually. The average time for a non-special education student according to the Smarter Balanced folks is 7 hours per students. Typically, my students take at least 50% longer than their peers, so I will schedule about 10 hours for each of my students. It will be proctored to 15 kids on my caseload, but fortunately some of my assistants will be able to help, so my guess is about 75 hours of my time. 
Dynamic Learning Map: It is super unclear how long this test will take for my student with cognitive challenges, but I did have to sit through 3 hours of training on how to proctor it. My guess is it will take about 4 hours to proctor. Total hours of my time: 7. 

Total hours of testing: 334 hours. 

Now, here's the super scary part. I work with students for six hours a day, so let's see how many days I spend administering tests compared to teaching core academic or social skills. 334 / 6 = 55.6 days. Students come to school for 180 days, so a little over 30% of my time with them is spent testing. Pretty incredible. 

It's time for me to go back to school and that can only mean one thing: required district "professional development". When I first started teaching six years ago, I was shocked by the veteran teachers who rolled their eyes and talked in disgust about professional development. Now I have become one of those same veteran teachers who hates this time of year. 

Is it because I think I know everything? No, absolutely not. I'm going to school for a doctorate in education right now. I read the latest education research every night with glee. My life is spent talking with colleagues about ideas and watching the latest webinar on things like visual schedules and digital icebreakers for back-to-school (which I'd recommend trying this year). I love improving myself professionally.

The reason I hate back-to-school PD is because 80% of the time (this isn't hyperbole...see below) it doesn't focus on the actual needs of our students or what teachers feel they need to know. For example, I got my school district's professional development calendar, and here is a list of the sessions I am required to attend: 

Day 1:
- Review of Evaluation Cycle (learning how I'm going to be evaluated...something that doesn't actually help me improve as a teacher AND something our administrators don't even understand)
- Writing PPGs and SLOs (same as above)

Day 2: 
- General district stuff including awards and announcements, an update on our insurance, union meetings, 2.75 hours to work in our classrooms, and our elementary open house. 

Day 3: 
- Staff meeting for TWO HOURS, PLC meetings (something I actually find useful because I started my own PLC with a colleague and we use this time to work on the latest tools for developing communication in nonverbal students), and the Elementary Smarter Balanced Assessments Training

Summary: Only 4.75 hours will be devoted to actually improving my classroom and skills as a teacher (done by collaborating with another teacher). The remaining 21 hours (82%) will be spent either talking about being evaluated, random nonsense I could read in an email about the district, or how to torture/give even more standardized tests. 

Yes, I understand that it is important to teach our staff about their evaluations, upcoming tests, etc., but these things could be done in other ways, and I truly wonder if the amount of hours we spend talking/training on these things really has any causal impact on student achievement. 

PS - Don't even get me started on the horrible professional development many paraprofessionals receive. Waah! 

Today I was thinking about Robin Williams and also about advice I was asked to give to a new special education teacher when I came across this quote from the movie Patch Adams: "You treat a disease, you win, you lose. You treat a person, I guarantee you, you’ll win, no matter what the outcome." 

This quote sums up what I have learned is most important to the success of my students. I have never had two students whose disabilities were alike despite sharing similar categorical labels of autism, ADHD, learning disabled, etc. Every child's interests, learning styles, and needs are vastly different, and remembering the person first and not the disability is the most important step to creating a great classroom and plan for each student. At times, it can be scary to read the labels on IEPs and evaluation reports and wonder how a particular student will ever be helped, but if you focus on treating each student as a unique and special person, then the rest will come much more easily. I promise. 

One of the things I love most about the new Common Core standards is its focus on non-fiction texts. Don't get me wrong. I love teaching great fiction, but I know that my students will probably need better non-fiction skills to survive college and in the workplace. Part of teaching non-fiction is introducing students to the different parts of non-fiction books, so they can gain information in an efficient manner. 

One way I have been teaching this over the past few years is by relating the parts of non-fiction to the parts of the body. 

First, I have students grab a big piece of paper. They find a partner to trace them on the paper. I don't tell them anything else and ask them to put it away to build their anticipation. Next, we do a KWL type activity where I ask students to tell me what they think they know about non-fiction. These two parts are it for Day 1. Over the course of a week, I begin to introduce the parts of the non-fiction and we put them on our "bodies". I start with the beginning of a book and discuss that each book has a title, author/illustrator, and title page. These are all things that get put on the head. On the neck goes the Table of Contents because it is the gateway to the rest of your body (book). Next we skip down to the feet and learn about the glossary and index. These come at the end of books and help support our body (book). Finally, we begin to cover all that makes up the "meat" of the book on the main body including chapter headings, keywords, maps, drawings, photographs, charts, diagrams, labels, etc. 

I think the multi-sensory component of drawing and visualizing each part really helps give meaning to students. Every time I have taught non-fiction parts this way all of my students have scored a 100% on their assessments, so I'd highly recommend it to other teachers. 


P.S. - Shout out to Lori Desautels, my student teaching advisor, for inspiring me to try this idea my very first year of teaching. It's been a staple activity ever since. I'd highly recommend checking out Lori's website called How May I Serve You. It has great insights for teachers.