Reflections on Four Years of Teaching With Technology - Lessons

This is the last post of a four part series on the one to one MacBook program my school has.  This post can stand alone, but if you are interested in more detail, read my other posts.

After four years of doing this, I do feel that there are some pieces of advice I could offer and lessons I've learned.  This is purely from a classroom teacher's point of view.  I'm sure administrators and tech people could offer different perspective, and I hope they will comment.

Don't Try to Learn Everything at Once - If you try to make every lesson filled with nothing but technology, you will lose your mind.  Sit down with your objectives and pick the ones that are either the easiest or the most important to incorporate your technology.  We committed to have one "golden nugget" per quarter.  That could be a project the kids could do or a lesson that we would have them collaborate with or a lesson we could flip.  If you do that each year (and it gets easier to think of them, so you increase your pace), you build your tech repertoire.

Don't Try to Reinvent the Wheel - Google is your friend.  If you search for lesson plans using technology on any topic, you will find many tools or kernels of ideas to use.  YouTube is your best friend.  Pick a topic - any topic - and you will find animations, dramatizations, examples.  There is a ton in science, but there are plenty for every other topic as well - even Latin.  I have been amazed by the clarity a video provides.  It takes me 15 minutes to explain the Doppler Effect, but when I show a 20 second video of stick figures and waves, I hear half the class go "Ohhhh."

Get an LMS - If there was one thing we were missing in our first year, it was a learning management system.  Not having a consistent way for students to turn in digital assignments leads to chaos.  Some students want to e-mail it to you (That'll fill your inbox) while others want to put it on a jump drive.  Some want to share it with you in a google doc.  This is a sure way to lose your mind.  We found drop box, hoping that would be a good method, but it is a mess when students forget to include their name (It's not like you can tell from their handwriting), or you have 45 assignments titled "science homework."  The first couple of months with an LMS are difficult because it adds to the learning curve, but it is worth it.  After the first year, every student knows exactly what to do when we say "Go to the Talon discussion board."

Cheer Each Other On - This was the best part of our endeavor.  Every teacher was in the same boat, all trying to row in the same direction.  We shared ideas, successes, failures, suggestions, encouragements, and prayers.  If you have some cynical people, share your successes with them.  Show them one super easy tool that you found.  Most people will come around with just a little encouragement.  If you are trying to do this on your own and it isn't a school wide thing, find another teacher that you can try it with.  If you can't even find that, go online.  There are twitter groups and teacher websites completely devoted to cheering you on in this adventure.  This is worth it.

Be Flexible and Have Backup Plans - The first time you use a new tool, something will happen.  You will have at least one kid who can't log on no matter what they do.  The video might not play on someone's computer even though it does on everyone else's.  There may be a student who tried to submit their assignment and it didn't go through for whatever reason.  You CANNOT anticipate all these problems, so be flexible.  For those issues you can anticipate, have a backup plan.  I have ended my instructions many times with "If that doesn't work, do this."  You will teach a little less content your first year because you will spend a fair amount of time troubleshooting.  That's okay; it gets better.  Trust me that you will never stop needing backup plans.

Keep the Reasons in Mind - You have decided to do this for a reason.  When things get a little nutty, remind yourself that this is important.  You are investing in your students' future.  You are teaching them life skills and modeling life long learning.  You are going to have some tough days, and the kids will see how you respond to them.

Reflections on Four Years of Teaching With Technology - Plateau and Progress

This is part three of a series on my school's one to one MacBook program.  It can be read on its own, but if you want to know the history, read the other two.

As always happens, the first year of a program is when people are the most excited and, therefore, the most invested in doing new things.  The increase you see from year zero to year one cannot be the level of increase you expect every year.  In order to keep increasing at all, there must be continued cheerleading, support, and training to keep the ideas new.  Most of us were really happy with how the first year went, but we didn't bring that same level of enthusiasm to the second year (maybe because we were just tired).  We also implemented a much needed Learning Management System that year, which was frustrating at first because there were some glitches in it.  Because of these issues, the second year was a plateau for us as far as using the technology as more than a replacement for what we had done previously.

Our wonderful tech team had read articles about schools that gave up on one to one programs after one or two years due to lack of real growth and were determined not to let that happen here.  Around the same time, we also hired a new media specialist, Laura (the wonderful) Warmke.  She is not only highly versed in what seems like every book ever written; she is also super with technology tools and driven to help you find out how to use them in your class.

Laura and Diane developed a great program for teacher to use as professional development.  It is called Level Up, and it is awesome.  Diane and Laura write "missions" for us to accomplish.  Some of them are as simple as watch a TED talk about education and comment on it in our discussion board.  Others are as complex as classroom flipping, instituting a badge system in your class, or having a skype session.  All the missions are counted as done when you have responded on a discussion board. 

Let me tell you some of the reasons this program is awesome:
1.  You can choose your own professional development.   We aren't all sitting in the same room learning the same tool.  We look at the available missions and choose the ones that will work best for our style and our classroom.  It enables people to be developed at their point of comfort with where they currently are.
2.  You are being cheered on rather than put upon.  The tech team gives you a badge in the teacher's lounge for every mission you complete.  They love talking to you about your missions.  You get great ideas from reading other people's uses on the discussion board, which allows you to incorporate the same tools in your class in more than one way.
3.  It is modeling.  They aren't just telling us to use something.  They are using it to deliver the message.  It makes me want to have missions in my own classes (next year perhaps).
4.  There are prizes.  Prizes are always motivating, no matter how old you get.  At the end of the quarter, we have drawing for gift cards.  The more missions you have done, the more times you name is in the hat.
5.  It introduces you to tools you had never heard of before.  One mission we had this year was to use a tool called Canva - a very cool graphic design tool.  I've had kids use it for projects, and I will never make another bulletin board without it.  I would never have heard of it without this program.
6.  It encourages teacher input.  Many times during the year, a teacher will stumble upon a new tool and say, "Hey, you should have a mission for that.

This program has gotten us off our year two flatline graph and put us back on the upward slope.  Another thing Laura does is meet with every teacher every quarter to discuss how she can help you take your tech integration to the next level.  Because of these discussions, my 8th graders have begun creating a website (which future 8th graders will finish), and next year, my 8th graders will be blogging for the world to see.

I've said it before.  I couldn't go back to teaching the old way.  Now that I see what kids are capable of doing with the world of knowledge at their fingertips, I would never again feel like I was doing my job as a teacher if I didn't give them that opportunity.  Every new tool we teach them i just another way they can be academically and spiritually equipped, challenged, and inspired to impact their world for Christ (which is our school's mission statement).

There will be one more post in this series - what I wish I had known when this all started.

Reflections on Four Years of Teaching With Technology - The First Year

My last post was about the lead up to GRACE Christian School's implementation of E4 - our one to on MacBook program.  Now, I want to tell you about our first year with it because that is obviously where our learning curve was the steepest.

Our tech team and administrators were the most amazing cheerleaders through this process.  When we originally talked about accountability in the committee, it had been suggested that we require a certain percentage of the lesson be tech related.  I am SOOOOO glad we did not go that route.  Instead of presenting this as a required duty, it was presented as an exciting opportunity.  Sean, Diane, Mandy, and Kathie (our principals) were so ready to help in any way you needed that it was unbelievable.  If you had an idea, you could go to one of them, and they would help you figure it out.  We were trained in big groups about some things, but if there were things that only applied to one department or teacher or lesson, one of them stopped by our room to chat about the tool or e-mailed us a link.

In some ways it was like being a first year teacher all over again.  We weren't exactly relearning how to teach, but in some ways we were.  When writing lesson plans, we were constantly thinking of ways we could do the same differently with technology. (Keep in mind, this was our first year; so we were on level one of the SAMR model.  We are reaching for higher levels now).  One of the best things we did was have story time at faculty meetings.  We shared projects the kids had done and tools we had found.  We shared frustrations as well and tried to problem solve together.  I'll post more about that later.

Our students immediately took on a new paradigm.  They began e-mailing teachers all the time.  They could have sent us e-mail from home before, but they hadn't very much.  Suddenly, we were getting e-mail from them at all times of day.  I got e-mail questions from shy kids who would never ask them in class.  I got kids sharing links with me if there was something they thought would be cool class.  I had kids sending science memes.  Our volleyball team went to the state finals that year.  A small group of kids, our basketball game announcer, and Sean traveled down with them and streamed the game with commentary.  We got to watch it during lunch and had a watch party for the final game in the evening.  Our students began making videos for chapel.  All of this was in addition to the "on purpose" things we were giving them to do for class.  On Grandparents' Day, we had a family skype their Grandparents into class from England.  We stream the Grandparents' Day performance as well.

I think my favorite story from that year was the streaming of the conference basketball tournament.  Whenever we stream a game, we send the link to the athletic director of the opposing team, so their families can watch too.  For one game of this tournament, we were playing a team out of Fayetteville, a school with a large number of military families.  Because of the stream, some of their dads were able to watch them play even though those dads were in Iraq and Afghanistan.   I didn't even mind that we lost that game because those dads got to watch their boys win.

We all learned a lot that year.  We learned from each other.  We learned from every resource we could find.  It was difficult and crazy and amazing all at the same time.

In my next post, I will talk about the three years since.  We hit a plateau, which our awesome tech team helped us overcome.  More on that in a few days.

Reflections on Four Years of Teaching With Technology - The History

GRACE Christian School is wrapping up its fourth year in a one to one laptop program, so I thought it was time for a bit of reflection. 

It all about this time started five years ago.  At that point, we had a lot of teachers who were incorporating technology with their own devices and buying projectors as we could.  We had about twelve SMART boards in our school, which we were using to the best of our ability (although we didn’t really know the best way to use them). 

I was asked to serve on a technology planning committee, where I found out that we were seriously considering changing everything.  We discussed device options, budgeting, vision statements for the program, and what kind of accountability should be involved.  My role was mostly to insist on training.  The board members on our committee rightly felt that the SMART boards had not been used as well as they could have been in the classroom and didn’t want to make this investment to have it fail.  I reminded them that the teachers who had SMART boards had been given one day of training on the function of the boards and none on how to incorporate them into our lesson plans.  When we talked about devices, I said, “Without training, it might as well be a stone and chisel.”  When we discussed the budget, I said, “There has to be budget set aside for training.”  When we talked about the vision statement, I reminded them that none of that vision could be accomplished if teachers were told HOW to carry it out.  When we discussed accountability, I reminded them that they couldn’t be expected to use it well without training.  I’m sure they got tired of hearing the word training from me, but I felt it was my role as the representative of the teachers. 

The members of the committee were sworn to silence until the plan was unveiled.  In the mean time, projectors and MacBook Pros were purchased for every teacher.  They were made ready by our wonderful tech team (which at that time only consisted of Sean and Diane) in an empty classroom that had new locks and paper over the windows.  You practically needed a secret password to enter that room.  As the day of the unveiling approached, we all got a little excited and nervous.  Diane was going to be chaperoning our 8th grade DC field trip, so Sean would be on his own that day for training.  He was nervous about whether or not people would like the idea.  Including myself, there were about three faculty meetings that were long term Mac users; so we were asked to help people during the training.  All the teachers knew when they came in that morning was that the day would be about technology and that Sean would be leading it.  Sean talked about the importance of increasing our technology usage in 21st century education, showed a prezi about the importance of changing education from the industrial model, and talked about how critical it was that we lead in this area.  Then, I was scripted to ask, “So, how do we do this if we don’t all have the tools?”  Sean announced that everyone would be getting a projector, which was met with minor enthusiasm.  Then, he said, “You may be asking what good a projector will do if you don’t have your own laptop.  Well . . .”  The laptops were hidden in a closet, and I got to help roll them out.  It was super exciting.

We spent that entire day of training, learning how the Mac works, looking at each type of application, and brainstorming ideas.  We got a video message from Diane since she couldn’t get to us from DC.  We obviously had teachers with a wide range of experience and comfort with the tool (one person asked me what it meant to click), but everyone was super on board and willing to learn.  At the end of the day, I hugged Sean and told him how well he did and how excited everyone was.  We knew we were at the beginning of something awesome.

Since that day, we have learned so much.  Our kids have done so much.  Our tech team has supported us so much.  It is too much to put in this post, which is already long.  Read all about our first year with tech in my next post.

National Parks Week

It is National Parks Week, and all my students know that I just love national parks.  I even have an entire wall of my classroom devoted to them.  This is a small part of that wall.  It grows every year because my family also loves national parks, and my dad loves photography.  We hit at least one every year.

As a person who is generally mostly conservative, I am prone to think the federal government should not be involved with things unless it has to be.  There are some things that require federal management, like defense.  There are probably some conservatives that wouldn't think parks should fall under federal jurisdiction, but I am not one of them.

If you have ever been to the Grand Canyon, you may understand that it is not just an Arizona treasure but a national treasure.  There are certain parts of the country that should be set aside for everyone to see, photograph, and enjoy.  This is why I am with Ron Swanson (of Parks and Recreation) when he says, "National Parks are the only part of the federal government worth a thing."  I'm with Ken Burns when he says they are America's Best Idea.  Protecting unique and beautiful areas of the country for the enjoyment of everyone in the country is how I like my taxes spent.

In honor of National Parks Week, please allow me to recommend a few of my favorite parks for their uniqueness and/or their beauty.

Yosemite - Yosemite National Park in central California is one of the most stunningly beautiful places I have ever seen.  Unless you are a hiker, you probably won't spend more than a day in the valley itself, but it is close enough to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and San Fransisco to spend some time in the area.  I am not married, but I remember thinking it would be a lovely place for a honeymoon.  If you are a super hiker or rock climber, it has everything.

Carlsbad Caverns - This park is in New Mexico, and it would require quite a bit of driving to get anywhere else.  I am recommending spending a day or two there because of its uniqueness.  While you can take an elevator down to the bottom of the cavern, I really recommend spending a few hours to take the walk down.  It is not strenuous, and it is an incredible way to experience the cave.  The temperature is lovely, and you see things you obviously would not if you just take the elevator.  If you go to Carlsbad, take this advice.  STAY FOR THE BAT SHOW!  I wouldn't have thought I wanted to do this, but it is one of the coolest things I have ever seen.  When a half million bats come spiraling out of the cave at sunset, you will not want to miss it.

Grand Canyon - No parks recommendation list would be complete without the Grand Canyon.  Its beauty and grandeur cannot really be put into words.  Whether the weather is clear and sunny or a storm is rolling in, whether you are there at mid day or sunset, you will get completely different views standing in the same spot.  There are a variety of animals; we saw a deer in the parking lot.  Everyone should experience the Grand Canyon before they die.  While you are there, take a couple of hours to visit Meteor Crater.  It is a state park nearby, and it is quite interesting.  The Apollo astronauts even did some of their geological training there.

Monument Valley - This is not technically a national park as it is on a Navajo reservation, but I couldn't leave it off my list.  Don't take your car down.  The money you spend on hiring a guide be worth the suspension work you will save on your own car.  They do not pave the road.  Monument Valley is the single most impressive place I've ever seen.  Stay until sunset when the monuments turn fiery orange with blue and pink and gold in the sky.  They have a wonderful visitors center, restaurant, and gift shop if you have to wait a while for sunset.

Arches - If I could revisit one park and spend an entire week hiking, it would be arches.  While you can see a lot from your car on the main loop in just one day, you will not get to the truly cool part of arches without getting out and hiking a bit.  Delicate Arch is the image you see on Utah license plates, and takes a couple of hours to hike up to the best view of it.  It is totally worth the hike, but plan your times well.  You don't want to do it mid day in the summer as there is zero shade on the hike.  Drive all the way to the end of the road on the map, and you are a five minute hike from my favorite part of the park - Sand Dune Arch.  I have a photograph, but it doesn't do the experience justice.  The arch is hidden away (kind of inside another rock formation), so all the sand that came out of it as at your feet.  It is so fun to take off your shoes and wander around in this spot.  It is also about ten degrees lower temperature than anywhere else in this park.

Parks Near Arches - Don't have a lot of time but you want a lot of national park bang for your buck.  Bryce Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands State Park, and others are not far from Arches.  Drive another half day to Monument Valley.  You can easily plan a week around Arches without spending the entire week IN Arches.  All these parks are very different from each other, so you get a lot of cool park exposure.

Denali - This park is in Alaska, so I know it is unlikely you are just going to hop in the car or RV and go there.  However, if you like photographing wildlife, this is THE park for you.  Take the wildlife viewing bus ride with the park rangers.  Get near a window if at all possible.  In 8 hours (including lunch), we saw mule dear, big horn sheep, grizzly bears, herds of caribou, ground squirrels (I think - some kind of ground mammal), etc.  The ranger would have been worth the trip even if we hadn't seen anything.  My only complaint about Denali is that I never saw the mountain.  It was pretty overcast the few days we were there.  However, I think that is why the animals were so active; so I'll take the trade off.  I'd like to go back sometime and photograph the mountain.

Yellowstone - When I retire from teaching, I want to work in the Yellowstone gift shop.  This park, located mostly in Wyoming is unique.  I imagine that when people discovered Yellowstone, they probably thought they had wandered into Hades.  Boiling water shooting out of the ground with a smell of sulfur would conjure those thoughts.  Yellowstone is more than just geysers, but you don't want to miss the geysers.  Old Faithful is famous for its regular schedule, but it is not the most impressive or the most beautiful geyser there.  Daisy Geyser is lovely, and Castle Geyser has created an interesting home for itself.  DO NOT MISS GRAND GEYSER!  Trust me on this.  While its schedule is not as predictable, it is worth the wait.  A chat with a park ranger will usually narrow down the time pretty well because those guys know things.  There are also beautiful hot springs, mammoth mineral formations, and stunning waterfalls surrounded by a yellow-walled canyon (hence the name Yellowstone).  They have an incredible variety of animals, from bison to moose (and perhaps a bear or two if you are lucky).  There is almost nothing there you won't want to photograph.

We have seen others, and there are many you might not think of.  Did you know, for example, that Alcatraz is a national park?  The Statue of Liberty is too.  While we are at it, Mt. Rushmore is awesome, but every part of South Dakota that isn't Mt. Rushmore is even better.  Spend a couple of hours at Rushmore, and spend the rest of the week everywhere else.  Lots of battlegrounds and homes of famous people are also National Parks.  America's "backyard" covers 85 million acres.    Visit the park website to plan your next American Adventure.  It is well worth the trip.

Not Helping is Often Helpful

I am writing this blog post specifically to avoid helping students.  I know that sounds horrible, but it serves a critical purpose.  When adults jump in to help students all the time, they never learn to problem solve for themselves.  This produces adults who don't know how to trouble shoot, think critically, or problem solve bigger issues.

I am experimenting with a CBL (Challenge Based Learning) assignment.  Here's the gist.  The students are supposed to imagine that we live in a place with inconsistent access to electricity and figure out what they would do at their home to keep refrigerators and small electrical appliances going.  I brought in a guest speaker who lived in Haiti for several years to discuss the problem and some of what they did to solve it.  I thought the problem was clearly presented until they started giving their solutions.  They included going to war with Cuba to steal their electricity, using an electric eel tank, and using a local volcano.  Then another teacher told me that a student had said I was trying to get them to solve the energy crises. 

We re-booted.  I presented the problem all over again.  I made it clear that we were only talking about something that we (the ten of us in this room) could do.  We have had several work days since then, and they are still having some difficulty being on the same page.  There are nine students, and there has still been so little communication that one students had potatoes, lemons, and pennies while other students were talking about lawn mower motors and solar panels.  I have had to sit here biting my tongue because it is important for them to have this conversation themselves and make a plan. 

It is a tough thing as a teacher to NOT help.  We so often want to teach them what to do.  We so often want to rescue them from themselves.  I actually had to focus on this blog post to keep myself from doing that.

You Are Going to Use This in Life - Just Not the Way You Think You Are

If I had to choose the number one, big daddy, most annoying question any teacher ever gets asked, it is the following:  "When am I ever going to use this in life?"

Insert B-movie scream here!

I hate this question.  Hate it.  Hate. It.  It's not for the reason you think. 

It isn't because I don't have an answer.  I have one - a long, well thought out, complex and beautiful answer you never listen to.  It isn't because you are insulting my curriculum; I totally know you don't all fall down with joy, hoping I'll talk more about the periodic table today.  It isn't because I'm part of a vast conspiracy to fill your head with knowledge you will never, ever need (and I know some of you believe that).  The reason I hate this question is because it reflects a fundamentally flawed belief about why you learn.  You think it is about getting a job.

You think elementary school is about middle school, and middle school is about high school, and high school is about college, and college is about the job you will have for forty years, (and then you will play golf or knit or something for a couple of decades).  If you unpack this thinking, it means that you think kindergarten is about the job you will have in your forties.  Do you see now how absurd your teachers find this thinking?

You learn because you were created to learn.  God put curiosity in the heart of every human being.  From the moment you are born, you look as far as you can look (which at that time is 18" - about the distance to from your eyes to the eyes of the person holding you).  You study that face and learn what a face is.  Eventually, you find your own hands and feet and start learning about those.  When you begin to crawl, you become a Magellan level explorer, and you never once ask how that thing on the other side of the room is going to influence your career.  You just want to learn about it.  You learn color theory by experimentation (mixing crayons).  By the time you are four years old, you are asking why or how something works an average of 400 times per day.  At no point in those 400 questions do you think about the utility of that information.  When you ask your dad why the sky is blue, it is absolutely not because you think one day you will have a job in which that information might be useful.  You ask because you want to know.

Then, you go to school.  The minute you put your butt in a desk, your parents start thinking of everything you learn as a career related.  Worse, they start talking to you that way.  They start using phrases like "use this is the real world" and "use this in life."  I have heard parents of fifth graders ask how the project their child just did will affect college acceptance.  No wonder we have so many kids with anxiety issues.  If I really believed one project would fundamentally change the course of my life, I would be stressed too.

Before I address teacher responsibility in this problem, allow me to rabbit trail for a second on "the real world."  There is no part of the world that is imaginary!  Life does not start at 22.  School is just as real a part of the world as any other part.  It is the part where your child spends many hours of his day and puts a lot of his energy.  Stop making it sound like it doesn't matter at all because it isn't real.

Teachers a part of the problem.  We use the idea of career as motivation to make students learn, and then we are confused when it backfires on us while we teach music to a kid who is going to be an engineer or science to a kid who is going to be a musician.  Teachers, let's model curiosity for our students.  Let's not blow off spelling words correctly because we aren't English teachers.  Let's not make kids think that only math teachers need to know math or that art only matters to artists.

One of my favorite things at GRACE is that our teachers are incredibly well rounded.  We have had teachers who taught math and dance in the same day.  We have a history/science teacher.  I teach both science and yearbook.  One of our English teachers decided on her own to read The Disappearing Spoon, a book about the periodic table of elements.  Our Latin teacher is reading a book about the mathematical history of tracking time.  Our students see teachers across every discipline asking each other questions, not because we have to use it in our job, but because it is interesting. 

Learning is about worship.  It brings us closer to God when we learn about the world and how he created it.  That's kind of standard science teacher answer because it is clear we study creation, but math, art, music, and language are also creations of God.  Let's glorify Him better by learning about His work.

Teachers Cheating - We Have a Problem

I've been casually following the Georgia teachers cheating scandal the past few days.  A year ago, I think there was a similar story out of South Carolina; so if I get the details mixed up, please forgive me.  As what the industry calls a "veteran teacher," I am horrified by just about every part of these stories.  I almost can't organize my thoughts because I have so many.  This blog is really serving more to help me sort out my own thoughts than to enlighten anyone.  Join in my thoughts at your own risk.

First thought - every study in the known universe says that standardized tests do not show student learning in any kind of meaningful way.  Whether it be Stanford Achievement Tests, State End of Course Tests, or some kind of Common Core / No Child Left Behind federal nonsense, all of these tests can only test the lowest possible levels on Bloom's taxonomy - Remembering.  They do not test a student's ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, evaluate, create, collaborate, or innovate - you know the important stuff we really want them to learn.  They test their ability to remember factual information.  If your child's teacher cares about education, they are teaching them on much higher levels than these tests can possibly evaluate.  Remembering is important, but it hardly seems like what a student should be evaluated on, much less their teacher or their school.

That brings me to my second thought.  I'm in favor of evaluating teachers on their merit, but the scores on a standardized test that only evaluate a students lowest level thinking skills is not the way to determine the merit of a teacher.  Government schools are using this method because it is the easiest method, not the best.  To connect the salary of a teacher to these scores alone is insane.  Here are some examples of why.
1.  When I taught in public school, I taught courses called "basic skills" courses.  That meant about 30% of my students had special needs and were on IEP's.  The teacher next door to me taught honors courses, so about 3% of her students were on IEP's, and a few of those were for high IQ programs.  Our students were given the exact same End of Course test.  Was it really expected that my students would achieve the same scores?  Some of her kids could have made the 99th percentile without having taken the class.
2. There are students who care so little about these tests that they fill in C for every question and then take a nap; that cannot possibly be how you want to evaluate whether that teacher deserves a raise. 
3.  When I taught in public school, I had students who spent the weekend in jail right before taking these tests.  Can we expect a teacher, no matter how great he or she is, to affect the outcome of that student's score?
4.  The same tests is given to students who speak almost no English and native speakers.  Do we penalize the teacher whose students have a hard time understanding the question?  Should she have also taught them to comprehend written English while she was teaching them biology?

The stakes are getting even higher (which is the only explanation I have for administrators getting in on the cheating).  Now, the existence of an entire school might be entirely dependent on how students score on these tests.  The school in a district with a lot of kids at risk for hunger might not be able to exist because its students were to hungry to focus on test questions.  The school in a high crime area might be shut down because students don't care enough about the test to answer the questions with anything more than random letters (or spell out curse words in the bubbles).  These are the areas where the schools are most needed.  Clearly, there is a problem with using the "easy method" of evaluating the people who choose to teach in these most difficult of circumstances.

All of this said, I do not give these teachers any kind of pass for the horrible example they have set for their students.  There is NO EXCUSE for any teacher ever cheating.  We are here to teach them far more than what is on these tests.  We are here to model ethics, responsibility, and citizenship.  We are here to teach them that no matter what the pressures, honesty is non-negotiable.  We teach 24/7/365, and they are ALWAYS watching.  Everything we do teaches them something, and these teachers have taught that a lack of integrity is okay as long as you feel pressured.  What does integrity mean when you aren't under pressure?  If you can't keep your integrity under pressure, please don't choose education as a career. 

In last year's story out of South Carolina, teachers were gathering together in the teacher's lounge with erasers and pencils.  They were holding "erasing parties!"  This. Is. Horrifying.  I can almost see how one teacher, alone in their classroom, could talk themselves into crossing this line, thinking no one would know.  I can almost see a teacher trying to help a kid out while they are taking the test with a hint in the direction of the correct answer.  It's still wrong, but I can see how it could happen.  I cannot fathom what makes a group of educators (including their boss, who should be an additional model of ethics) collectively check their morality at the door.  Was there no one feeling uncomfortable?  Was there no one who said, "Guys, I don't think this is okay"?  For everyone to do this, there had to be some kind of communication.  Was there an e-mail or an announcement, telling teachers to bring their erasers to a meeting?  How can a group of people decide to do this?

We clearly have a problem.  What do we do to solve this problem?  I'm not sure.  I do know that merit needs to be tied to something besides test scores.  I do know that kids need to be taking fewer standardized tests, so there can be time for the more important things.  I do know that teachers who cheat should never be back in the classroom.  I do not know how to make those things happen.