Unpopular opinion on Mike Miles’ changes from HISD teacher

I’ve been teaching in HISD for ten years (kindergarten and first grade). My school is not an NES campus. So I can’t speak to anything that goes on at NES campuses. However we have adopted the NES curriculum and systems.

My unpopular opinion from the very beginning has been that I really LIKE all the changes that have been made.

Curriculum: soooooooo much better than what we were working with before. What we used to have is a Unit Planning Guide (UPG) that were LITERALLY hundreds of pages long. A unit lasted 4-5 weeks. The UPG contained lesson ideas for the unit. So many ideas and so much information that we were supposed to read through, and then use all those ideas to create our own lesson plans, and slide decks, and checks for understanding (CFU). The daily CFUs in the UPGs were very low quality and often incomplete.

Lesson planning took ages because the UPS were so excessive. They were formatted in such a way where you couldn’t copy and paste from the UG into your lesson plan. They didn’t provide actual lessons, just tons of ideas for lessons. The different pieces you needed each week were spread throughout. Quality lesson planning took HOURS every week. Every week I would cry to my boyfriend “why don’t they just give us the damn lesson plans?!? Why are we all having to independently write our lessons and create our own slide decks each week?!? Why can’t they just tell us what to do?! Just hire a couple people who write great lesson plans and slide decks and give it to all of us?”

And that is exactly what has happened under Mike Miles. The lesson plans and slide decks are provided each week. All we have to do is read them beforehand. The slide decks are provided every day. We just have to download and present them. No, I don’t love every aspect of them, but it’s 10,000 times better than spending 5-8 hours outside of work each week to do it myself.

Something I hear a lot is that he is a a republican plant sent to ruin HISD so that more money will go to charter schools. I don’t know about that, but what I do know is that the curriculum is NOT conservative. In the kindergarten ELA curriculum, for example, there is a unit on native Americans where we teach students about different Native American tribes, where they lived, their culture, their foods, their art. Some tribes only have a couple lessons. Other tribes might get a whole week.

There is a unit about American history which includes lessons about important presidents (with quite a few lessons on Obama), people like Frederick Douglass and MLK, and even touches on slavery (obviously it’s not super in-depth at the kindergarten level).

There’s an art unit where artists of all different genres are highlighted including Van Gogh, Frida Khalo, Georgia o keefe, and more. I mention all of this to say that this is exactly the curriculum that my liberal friends would hope is being taught.

In addition to the slide decks, the checks for understandings (CFU), now called a demonstration of learning (DOL), are so much better quality and are provided for each lesson. No more having to create it ourselves.

Teaching methodology: we are leaning heavy of what are call “multiple response strategies” or MRS. Briefly, they are designed to increase engagement from every student and keep lesson interactive by limiting teacher talk. When we are evaluated, we lose points if the students are sitting quietly and listening. For a top score, evaluators want to see a noisy classroom where there is a lot student talk/engagement. This is exactly what I would want if I were a parent or student.

District policies: one change is that teachers are required to keep their doors open. While I would prefer to keep my door closed, honestly, it’s because I don’t want to get in trouble when we are not on task (haha). Frankly, some teachers were getting away with a lot of goofing off when the doors were closed (e.g. peppa pig and paw patrol all day while the teacher is talking on the phone with their friend). So while I don’t love the policy, I would implement it if I were the boss.

Another big change was the policy on absences (I.e. excessive absences will get you fired). Again, some teachers were truly getting away with murder knowing they wouldn’t get fired. You can’t be an effective teacher if you are absent all the time. And it puts a lot of strain on the other teachers and employees having to cover for the absent teacher. Also, this is in line with every other job in the world so I don’t sympathize when colleagues complain about this policy.

Finally, I support performance-based pay. Enough said there for now.

I’m gonna stop here because this post is getting pretty long. Feel free to ask questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my ability. Simply put though, do I think the schools (or at least my school) are better (more rigorous) now than before Mike miles? Yes. Would I send my child to an HISD school? Probably.