Disrupting Class

by Robert Pondiscio
May 6th, 2008

Posted in Education Practice, Homeschooling, Research and Reports | No Comments »

More than two-thirds of Americans favor using public funds for online courses that enable sudents to take advanced coursework, or to help students in rural schools get access to a broader range of courses.  Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed said they would be willing to let their child take a high school course on line for credit.  The data comes from a new national poll from Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

Curiously, support for online coursework dries up when it’s for homeschoolers. Only 26% favor using public funds to allows homeschooled kids to take online courses; 44% are opposed.  

Might as well get used to online education, because it’s about to explode argues a provocative article in Ed Next by Harvard business guru Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma) and Michael B. Horn.  The two predict that by 2019 about 50 percent of courses in grades 9-12 will be delivered online in their grandly titled new book, “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns.”  While that projection sounds high, even fanciful, Christiansen and Horn point out several assymetrical advantages to online coursework over traditional schooling, especially price and differentiation, that they say make disruption of traditional education models inevitable.

“While estimates vary depending on circumstance, many providers have costs that range from $200 to $600 per course, which is less expensive than the current schooling model,” the authors point out.  “Computer-based learning has another technological advantage that is crucial to its expansion: one can customize it to meet different students’ needs. Currently, according to reports, computer-based learning works best with the more motivated students; over time, it will become engaging and individualized to reach different types of learners.”

 

Poetry Slam

by Robert Pondiscio
May 6th, 2008

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Another sign that not all is lost in education.  More than 200,000 (!) high school students from 1,500 U.S. schools memorized poems and worked on learning to recite them effectively for this year’s Poetry Out Loud competition.   The Washington Post’s Valerie Lewis filed this dispatch from last week’s finals, won by Shawntay A. Henry of the U.S. Virgin Islands for her recitation of “Frederick Douglass” by Robert E. Hayden.

The contest was created a mere three years ago to capitalize on the popularity of rap and hip-hop. ”We are taking the impulse of the electric popular culture and linking it to the masterpieces of poetry,” poet Dana Gioia, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, tells the Post.

 

Teaching Content IS Teaching Reading

by Robert Pondiscio
May 6th, 2008

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Literacy, Teaching | No Comments »

“Teaching comprehension strategies is not the same as equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.” — Sara Mead, Early Ed Watch

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Nice to see Sara Mead at Early Ed Watch pick up on what E.D. Hirsch and others at Core Knowledge have been arguing, that reading is not a skill that exists in a vacuum. All the reading “strategy lessons” in the world won’t help if you don’t have background knowledge to apply to what you’re reading.

Mead weighs in on Reading First noting the IES research released last week “raises serious questions about Reading First’s effectiveness, but it’s worth taking a closer look before writing the program off entirely.”

“Finally, we should ask whether the person who should really be declaring victory here is not Reading First’s critics, but E.D. Hirsch,” Mead notes “This study focused on one indicator of children’s reading performance: student reading comprehension as assessed by the Stanford Achievement Test. The researchers did not assess children’s phonemic awareness, decoding ability, or fluency, for example. That makes sense because comprehension is, in the researchers’ words “the essence of reading.” But it’s also problematic because, as Hirsch has argued passionately in recent years, reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must also have a rich content knowledge that enables them to connect what they read to existing knowledge. (Hirsch is fond of citing an article describing a baseball game as an example here: Poor readers who know a lot about baseball will comprehend the article better than excellent readers who have never seen a baseball game.) Teachers observed in this study spent substantial time teaching children reading comprehension, but teaching comprehension strategies is not the same and equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.”

The way we teach reading—endless focus on comprehension strategies—has limited efficacy as Dan Wilingham and others have shown. If we really want our kids to succeed, we’ll arm them with decoding skills, then a content-rich curriculum that gives them broad background knowedge. Teaching content isn’t something to do after kids have learned to read.

Teaching content IS teaching reading.