Is Teaching an Art or a Science?

by Robert Pondiscio
May 30th, 2012

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Posted in Education News, Teaching | 33 Comments »

That’s the question Dan Willingham poses in a new video.  As you likely know, Willingham is a University of Virginia cognitive scientist whose work focuses almost exclusively teaching and learning.  The video is worth watching, but – spoiler alert! – his conclusion is that teaching is neither art nor science, but “somewhere in between.”  He draws a parallel to being an architect, who understands enough about physics and materials science to design a building that won’t fall down.  But like an architect, a teacher “then also uses creativity and ingenuity to go beyond any strictures that science can offer, to create something wholly original, functional, and enduring.”

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=wJrqM7Rx_FY&amp;feature">http://youtube.com/watch?v=wJrqM7Rx_FY&amp;feature</a>

What is most interesting, and should spark the most informed and intense viewing of the video, is Willingham’s take on how science should inform teaching.

“I think what we know about how kids learn, and develop, interact and so on, can suggest boundary conditions. I mean by that things that, if you ignore them, will likely lead to trouble. For example, if you think that someone will acquire a skill without practice, that’s probably not going to work.  Providing practice for skills is a boundary condition. Another example, most kids benefit a lot from explicit instruction in letter-sound correspondences when they are learning to read, so providing that instruction is another boundary condition. Notice this doesn’t tell you how to implement practice, or how to implement teaching letter-sound correspondences—it just says that those things have to happen. I call these ‘must have’ principles.”

But in addition to the “must haves” there are a series of “could dos.”  In Willingham’s architecture analogy, there are ways to put a window in the middle of a brick wall that protect the integrity of the wall so it’s structurally sound.  But there is no rule saying you must have a window in a particular location, or have one at all.  This allows for a broad range of teaching approaches and activities, all of which could be good, useful or even elegant.  Just like architecture.

“The ‘must haves’ and the ‘could dos’ do not tell you what the house is going to look like.  The ‘must haves’ are boundary conditions, within which there is a HUGE amount of room for variation, and the ‘could dos’ are tools that you can use to help you get there, but you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to, as long as you respect the ‘must haves.’

Willingham is offering up his usual dose of fact-based common sense, but I’m tempted to suggest there might be little agreement on “boundary conditions” for teachers.   The preponderance of evidence may indeed come down on the side of phonics, as he suggests, but that hasn’t entirely settled the issue.  Whole language still has its adherents and repackagers.  Discredited ideas like learning styles remain hardy perennials.   The larger problem, to put it bluntly, is that education  pays insufficient evidence to science.

Boundary conditions in architecture or civil engineering are inherently self-policing.  Violate them and things fall down.  I’m having a difficult time thinking of a set of universally agreed upon “boundary conditions” for teaching.  But this creates an enormous opportunity for the cognitive scientists like Willingham to frame the discussion and offer evidence-based guidance on those “must haves.”  And an enormous obligation on the part of ed schools and programs that train teachers to pay attention.

It will take a whole lot of science to move the field past its self-image as an art, its neglect of science–and the tyranny of its philosophers.

Know Thyself and Nothing Too Much

by Guest Blogger
May 25th, 2012

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Posted in Teaching | 8 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Today’s cultural literacy item: Hubris.

I will allow the main characters from Rick Riordan’s novel, The Sea of Monsters, to define today’s vocabulary word of the day:

Annabeth: My fatal flaw. That’s what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris.
Percy: The brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?
Annabeth: No, Seaweed Brain. That’s HUMMUS. hubris is worse.
Percy: what could be worse than hummus?
Annabeth: Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else…     Even the gods.

Used in a sentence: As graduation draws near, the current eighth grade class has begun to display excessive hubris in their dealings with teachers and classmates.

Fortunately, we are reading King Lear, the perfect example of a man undone by hubris. His story is a convenient conversation starter when my eighth graders get a little too big for their britches. My students may not end up on a storm-swept heath, naked, in the company of a fool and a beggar, but the lessons of Lear’s hubris are relevant and valuable.

But first, the etymology.

Hubris comes from the Greek hybris, or “wanton violence, insolence, outrage,” specifically as that insolence is directed toward the gods. Mortals who are presumptuous enough to strive for godlike status have hubris, or are hubristic. I asked the students to come up with as many examples of hubris in literature, and they came up with:  Achilles, Odysseus, Voldemort, Arachne, Niobe, Phaeton, Icarus, Dr. Frankenstein (and by extension, Provis, or Magwich), Lear, Macbeth…the list on my white board went on and on.

I teach in a K-8 school with fairly rigid rules, a dress code, and high expectations for student character and conduct. The core virtues of fortitude, temperance, justice and prudence are part of daily discussion in most classes.

Despite this rigorous education in character, it is the nature of teenagers to test. When they are ready to move onward and upward – to high school, to college, to whatever is next – they push authority figures away and and feel around for the boundaries of their new territory. It’s only natural; challenging authority is a part of their process of individuation. I have my own teenager at home and I see it happening in our household. My friend, author Ann Cannon, once told me that out of her eight boys, her most dependent child had the most traumatic process of pulling away from her. If I accept her way of thinking about this process – and I do, she’s a wise and experienced mom – the deeper the attachment, the more pushing away my son will have to do in order to become his own man.

The teacher-student relationship isn’t that different from the parent-child relationship, and I have found that the more they trust me, the more likely they are to involve me in their testing. It used to bother me, but under the “it takes a village” hypothesis, I’m happy to help out.

I’m no child psychologist, but I think students test their teachers because they know they are safe with the teachers who care about them. They push us away because they know we will still be here when they return to their senses.

And when all is said and done at the end of our journey through middle school, I receive the most heartfelt graduation hugs from the students who have had to learn the most difficult lessons. The boy I had to suspend for cheating, the girl I helped through a family meeting about her self-injurious behavior, the boy who refused to speak to me for two weeks because I called him on his excess of hubris. These are the kids who test my mettle as a teacher.

And the ones I will miss the most after graduation.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.


Hot! Popular! Swears Like a Longshoreman!

by Robert Pondiscio
May 23rd, 2012

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Posted in Education News, Literacy, Teaching | 9 Comments »

If you’ve read more than a handful of young adult (YA) novels, you’re probably well past the point of being dismayed by the thematic darkness and swear words.  A new study by Brigham Young University professor Sarah Coyne finds that on average, teen novels contain 38 instances of profanity between the covers or almost seven instances of profanity per hour spent reading.

But the number of curse words is less interesting than who’s got the potty mouth.  The characters who swear the most tend to be rich, attractive and popular, Coyne found  “From a social learning standpoint, this is really important because adolescents are more likely to imitate media characters portrayed in positive, desirable ways,” Coyne tells Science Daily.  Scholastic blogger Morgan Baden puts it simply:  “all the cool kids are doing it.”

This is not the first time the content of YA fiction has come under the microscope.  Recall the Wall Street Journal a year ago published a piece which eviscerated the genre, noting that “kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18.”  The medical journal Pediatrics published another bit of research by Coyne six months ago that found a link between profanity in media and teen aggression, Science Daily notes.

Scholastic’s Baden defends the blue language in YA books “where the characters are so vivid, and so well-written, that I couldn’t imagine them speaking any other way than the way the author chose them to speak.”  The readers of YA novels, she points out are “in the process of forming their identities, and sometimes that includes testing out ways of speaking and exploring just how much impact their voices can have.”

“F— it,” says the website Jezebel, which its signature insouciance.  “Let’s just be happy that kids are reading at all and not get our panties all twisted up about the fact that the books they’re choosing to consume accurately reflect how their friends actually talk.”

Easy to say, but woe unto the teacher who fields the angry call from a parent that starts, “My daughter says she chose this book from YOUR classroom library…”   Realistic fiction? Literary quality? Yeah, good luck with that.

Should there be warning labels on YA novels?  Shrink wrap them and put them on the highest shelf? “Unlike almost every other type of media, there are no content warnings or any indication if there is extremely high levels of profanity in adolescent novels,” Coyne says. “Parents should talk with their children about the books they are reading.”

Coyne’s study appears in the journal Mass Communication and Society.

“We’re Where We Need to Be Right Now”

by Robert Pondiscio
May 15th, 2012

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Posted in Core Knowledge, Curriculum, Education Practice | 14 Comments »

John Merrow of Learning Matters filed an important ten-minute piece for the PBS Newshour last night, looking at elementary reading programs.  Merrow and his producer Cat McGrath visited three different schools in and around New York City: one that teaches with basal readers, another with “balanced literacy,” and one of the New York City schools that is piloting the Core  Knowledge Language Arts curriculum.

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=bM3y3H1tPcg&amp;feature">http://youtube.com/watch?v=bM3y3H1tPcg&amp;feature</a>

The piece is well worth the ten-minutes it takes to watch it (a transcript is available here) and it nicely underscores a the differences between the Core Knowledge approach and the others, particularly in the over-reliance on reading strategies in balanced literacy and basals.  That could pose a problem as reading instruction shifts to comply with Common Core State Standards:

AMANDA BLATTER, principal, Public School 109: We now have level libraries that are nonfiction in all of our classrooms. So the curriculum in reading and writing is now aligning to the Common Core standards.

JOHN MERROW: Just like the students using basal textbooks, these first-graders are learning reading strategies.

AMANDA BLATTER: We’re teaching comprehension strategies such as main idea, author’s purpose, inferencing, cause and effect.

JOHN MERROW: In balanced literacy, comprehension is a skill, something to be practiced, like a jump-shot or dance steps.

It’s unfair to harp on a single soundbite in a TV interview, but the idea that you can be “aligned to Common Core standards” simply by adding nonfiction to a strategies-driven, read-what-you-like approach to literacy is a broad misinterpretation of what CCSS is all about.   The Standards are largely silent on the works of literature and knowledge domains children are expected to learn, but quite clear that there “must be a well-developed, content-rich curriculum consistent with the expectations laid out in this document.”

“Building knowledge systematically in English language arts is like giving children various pieces of a puzzle in each grade that, over time, will form one big picture. At a curricular or instructional level, texts—within and across grade levels—need to be selected around topics or themes that systematically develop the knowledge base of students. Within a grade level, there should be an adequate number of titles on a single topic that would allow children to study that topic for a sustained period. The knowledge children have learned about particular topics in early grade levels should then be expanded and developed in subsequent grade levels to ensure an increasingly deeper understanding of these topics. Children in the upper elementary grades will generally be expected to read these texts independently and reflect on them in writing. However, children in the early grades (particularly K–2) should participate in rich, structured conversations with an adult in response to the written texts that are read aloud, orally comparing and contrasting as well as analyzing and synthesizing, in the manner called for by the Standards.”  (p. 23 CCSS ELA Standards)

“When I look at what the expectations are coming in with the Common Core learning standards,” says Joyce Barrett-Walker, the principal of PS 96, the Core Knowledge school featured in the piece. “It seems that we’re where we need to be right now.”

Basals and balanced literacy?  Not so much “What is clear is that basal readers used in three-quarters of our elementary schools will have to make significant adjustments to comply with the emerging Core standards,” Merrow concludes.

Between the Idea and the Reality

by Guest Blogger
May 8th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, No category, Teaching | 16 Comments »

by Jessica Lahey

Twice a year, we formally assess students’ writing. I hand out a prompt and grading rubric about one week before the date of the assessment in order to give the students time to organize their thoughts in advance of the prompt. They then have two class periods to write their essay. It allows us to create a portfolio of writing samples from about second grade on, and the assignment also gives them some practice writing timed essays in class. Usually, the prompts are expository, based on the literature we have been reading in class – the mid-year assessment was about Great Expectations in the seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in the eighth – but in the spring, when the flowers are blooming, birds are singing, and attention spans are short, I opt for a more creative topic.

This was the prompt I handed out last week:

Crossroads Academy’s core virtues curriculum is a central part of your education. Just as your education in math, literature and science informs your academic development, your education in the four core virtues informs your moral and social development. For your essay, please choose one of the virtues – justice, temperance, fortitude, or prudence – and write about a moment, experience, or event in your life when you relied on your education in the core virtues to guide you.

I love grading these essays. The students take it very seriously, and I am fascinated by their perspective on the core virtues, character education class, and the way students rely on the virtues to guide their actions.

The essays were sublime this year, and I loved reading all of them.   But this one…this one stuck with me. I was impressed with the writing, but I was also deeply disturbed by my part in her ordeal and the lessons that she and her classmates may have taken  away from the experience she describes. The author, Tea Levy, and her parents, have given me permission to share her words. Tea hopes that her words will help educators understand what end-of-year awards assemblies feel like from her seat in the bleachers.

The Problem With Awards
In seventh grade during one of the last weeks of school, everyone headed down to Bancroft to attend the “culminating final assembly.” At the assembly, awards were given out to the students who had earned them during the year. I watched as nearly all of my classmates walked down to the podium to receive awards, but when the awards ceremony was finally over, my name had not been called. One of the teachers asked everyone who had gotten an award to come to the front of the room to take a group picture. When all of the award-winners had left the bleachers, three of my classmates and I were the only ones left sitting. The experience was devastatingly humiliating for me, but through my anger, I learned the importance of perseverance and optimism.

When my name was not called during the assembly, it made me feel inferior, as if my hard work had not been recognized, and my efforts wasted. I had done the very best I could on the National Mythology Exam, studied hard for the Grand Councours, and prided myself on my Latin poem, but after that morning the significance of all that seemed greatly diminished.

Suddenly I was angry. Angry with my teachers for creating what seemed to me at the time to be an exclusive and competitive atmosphere, but also angry with myself. I couldn’t understand why I was unable to be good enough to win or why everyone else seemed to be so much better than me. Optimism helped me cope with my anger. I had to remind myself that if I wanted to redeem myself, I would have to maintain a positive attitude. I reminded myself that the only way to have my efforts recognized in the future would be to remain as unfazed from this incident as possible and not limit myself based on my experiences.

The optimism I used to overcome this obstacle was linked closely to perseverance. My self-proclaimed failure gave me a new motivation to succeed that would push me through to the end of middle school. I wanted to prevail against the odds and become the perfect student. I quickly realized how unreasonable this goal was, but my desire to have my efforts acknowledged never faltered. I worked harder and concentrated harder and my work paid off. The first trimester of 8th grade I received my first straight A report card. This achievement made me feel as though my perseverance had been noticed, and I was elated.

Although I still look back on that morning with dissatisfaction, the experience taught me many things. First of all, I acknowledged the fact that they couldn’t give prizes to everyone without making the whole thing seem like a joke. But more importantly, I realized how much I wanted my efforts to be rewarded and that I have the power to ensure that they are.

Jessica Potts Lahey is a teacher of English, Latin, and composition at Crossroads Academy, an independent Core Knowledge K-8 school in Lyme, New Hampshire. Jessica’s blog on middle school education, Coming of Age in the Middle, where this piece also appears, can be found at http://jessicalahey.com.

The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

by Robert Pondiscio
May 7th, 2012

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 102 Comments »

“As a policy wonk, I push for high academic expectations for all students,” writes Scott Joftus in Education Next. “As a father, however, I find that what matters most to me is that my daughters are happy in school.”

“Over more than 20 years in the field of education—including two with Teach For America—I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father.”

Joftus’s wonk side believes “student learning flourishes in classrooms that include students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds.”  However, as a Dad, he admits to getting angry when a troubled kindergartener disrupts his daughter’s class and forces the “talented, but inexperienced” teacher to spend more than half of her time trying to keep this boy on task.

“I feel for children like him; my company works with schools and districts to improve outcomes for these kids. But I was angry. The other children were clearly uncomfortable. His disruptions reduced learning time for my daughter, and seemed to steal some of her innocence and excitement about school.”

Commenters on the Ed Next blog offer both praise and criticism for Joftus.  “Teachers have been fighting policy wonks who have been destroying the happy learning environment for decades,” writes one.  “But you don’t listen, it is only when it becomes personal that you reconsider your opinions and admit the possibility that teachers have been right all along.”  “Had you guys listened twenty years ago, and respected our wisdom on safe and orderly schools, this educational civil war would not have had to happen,” observes veteran teacher and ed blogger John Thompson.

Rocketship schools CEO John Danner admits to similar cognitive dissonance when sending his kids to school.  “However, I would challenge you as your kids grow to think more about how those skills jibe with rigor,” he writes. “Rigor is actually a form of compassion. A teacher who expects a lot of their students prevents them from feeling the frustration your children feel now, but much later in their school career.  The real problem you are seeing is that your child’s teacher has high expectations but doesn’t understand how to differentiate.

Loftus’ tale serves to illustrate how regrettably wide the gulf can be between policy ideals and classroom realities.  The policies Loftus has worked to support–standards, improved teacher quality, enhanced learning time for strugglers, et al. –  are laudable, but risk melting into insignificance in the face of teachers overwhelmed with a critical mass of disruptive children in her room.  I don’t have any data on this, but I suspect that far fewer parents than wonks tend to lay the problem of learning time lost to disruption at the feet of teachers.  It is easy to say, as Danner does “differentiate.”  It is difficult, and always will be, to expect every teacher in every classroom to have the training, expertise and experience to handle every challenge offered up by 25 free agents in their classrooms every day.

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

Second Thoughts on Pineapplegate

by Robert Pondiscio
May 4th, 2012

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Posted in accountability, Assessment and Testing, Education News | 15 Comments »

Writing in his TIME Magazine column, Andy “Eduwonk” Rotherham offers up a largely exculpatory take on Pineapplegate.  The media jumped all over a bowdlerized version of the test passage, he notes.  New York state officials should have been clearer in explaining that nothing makes its way onto standardized tests by accident.  And in the end, Andy writes, what is needed is “a more substantive conversation rather than a firestorm” over testing.

Very well, let’s have one.

In the unlikely event you haven’t heard, a minor media frenzy was ignited a few weeks back when the New York Daily News got hold of a surreal fable, loosely modeled on the familiar tale of the Tortoise and the Hare, which appeared on the just-administered New York State 8th grade reading test.  In the test passage, a talking pineapple challenges a hare to a foot race in front of a group of woodland creatures, loses the race (the pineapple’s lack of legs proving to be a fatal competitive disadvantage)  and gets eaten by the other animals.

Rotherham points out that the passage picked up by the paper was not the actual test passage, but a second-hand version plucked from an anti-testing website. “The passage the paper ran was so poorly written that it would indeed have been inexcusable,” he wrote.  Perhaps, but the correct passage wasn’t exactly a model of clarity and coherence either.  Indeed, the fable’s author mocked the decision by the testing company, Pearson, to create multiple choice questions about his story on a state test.  “As far as I am able to ascertain from my own work, there isn’t necessarily a specifically assigned meaning in anything,” Daniel Pinkwater told the Wall Street Journal. “That really is why it’s hilarious on the face of it that anybody creating a test would use a passage of mine, because I’m an advocate of nonsense. I believe that things mean things but they don’t have assigned meanings.”

Ultimately the real version of the test passage was released by the state to quiet the controversy.  But it did little to reverse the impression that this was a questionable measure of students’ ability.  Rotherham’s big “get” in Time is a memo from Pearson to New York State officials detailing the question’s review process as well as its use on other states’ tests as far back as 2004.  The message:  nothing to see here, folks.  Show’s over.  Go on back to your schools, sharpen those No. 2 pencils and get ready for more tests.

“Standardized tests are neither as bad as their critics make them out to be nor as good as they should be,” Rotherham concludes.  Perhaps, but they’re bad enough.  The principal problem, which Pineapplegate underscores vividly, is that we continue to insist on drawing conclusions about students’ reading ability based on a random, incoherent collection of largely meaningless passages concocted by test-makers utterly disconnected from what kids actually learn in school all day.  This actively incentivizes a form of educational malpractice, since reading tests reinforce the mistaken notion that reading comprehension is a transferable skill and that the subject matter is disconnected from comprehension.   But we know this is not the case as E.D. Hirsch and Dan Willingham have pointed out time and again, and as we have discussed on this blog repeatedly.

So this is not a simple case of an uproar based on bad information and sloppy damage control.  What Rotherham misses in a somewhat strident defense of standardized tests and testing is that we are suffering generally from a case of test fatigue. The entire edifice of reform rests on testing, and while the principle of accountability remains sound, the effects of testing on schools has proven to be deleterious, to be charitable. Thus the conditions were ripe for people to overreact to perceived absurdity in the tests. And that’s exactly what happened here.

Was the story was blown out of proportion by some people playing fast and loose with the facts?  Perhaps.  But the facts, once they became clear, were more than bad enough.

Love a Book? Don’t Tell Your Kids!

by Robert Pondiscio
May 3rd, 2012

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Posted in Parents, Teaching | 8 Comments »

When you were a kid, did you ever read a book that changed your life?  Well, don’t tell your kids if you want it to have the same effect on them. “Remember how a parental recommendation was the kiss of death when you were a kid?” asks legendary children’s author Judy Blume. “That hasn’t changed — no matter how well-deserved the kudos are.”

Blume made the comment at the recent LA Times Festival of Books.  I’m mightily inclined to agree.  One of my teaching pet peeves has always been the tendency to wax rhapsodic over books and make our kids feel that they are somehow missing out–if not outright defective–if they aren’t as enraptured by a well-loved book as we are.  In a world in which kids can immerse themselves in “Call of Duty” and “Halo,” telling them “reading is magical” like telling them they should love spinach.  Don’t tell them. Show them.  Class readalouds of a compelling book have probably done more to spread the notion that reading is enjoyable than any earnest talk about the power of books to take us on journeys in our minds.

Other bits of advice on engaging readers from Blume, per the Huffington Post.

“As great as you think those nostalgic old book covers are, get your kids the new editions. The covers will draw them in. They want the new stuff.”

“Before you give your child the beloved book, leave it lying around the house, preferably on your nightstand. Then, when your daughter asks about the book, tell her that you picked it up for her, but now you’re not sure she’s old enough for it.”

“Try not to be judgmental of what your child is reading and don’t censor their book selection.”

Blume “hates it when books list what age reader the book is for.” She remembers pulling an illustrated copy of Lysistrata off the shelves when she was about 12, notes HuffPo. “She was very curious about the adult world and books gave her a look into that world.”

In an unrelated post, Dan Willingham notes that teachers are avid readers who “love books not only for the purpose of reading them, but as physical objects.”  He links to a section of Reddit called BookPorn.  Amazing pictures.  Enjoy.  But don’t tell the kids.

How to Make Kids Hate Reading

by Robert Pondiscio
May 1st, 2012

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 12 Comments »

Building reading instruction around comprehension strategies is not only ineffective, it also takes the joy out of reading, writes Dan Willingham in his latest blog post.

The UVA cognitive scientist has long argued that while reading strategies have some value–principally in helping students understand that what they read should have some communicative value–it’s a huge mistake to think of reading comprehension as a transferable skill that can be learned, practiced, and applied to any text.  Practicing reading strategies ad nauseam doesn’t confer any particular advantage.  Data are hard to find on just how much time is spent in practice on “finding the main idea,” “determining the author’s purpose”  and other such strategies in the average classroom. “But whatever the proportion of time, much of it is wasted, at least if educators think it’s improving comprehension,” Willingham writes, “because the one-time boost to comprehension can be had for perhaps five or ten sessions of 20 or 30 minutes each.”

Moreover, Willingham notes that the wasted time “represents a significant opportunity cost.”   Why? Because building reading instruction around strategies “makes reading really boring”:

“How can you get lost in a narrative world if you think you’re supposed to be posing questions to yourself all the time? How can a child get really absorbed in a book about ants or meteorology if she thinks that reading means pausing every now and then to anticipate what will happen next, or to question the author’s purpose?

If one of the goals in reading instruction is to develop a love of reading, strategies instruction is not merely unhelpful, but counterproductive, he argues.  “Reading comprehension strategies seem to take a process that could bring joy, and turn it into work,” Willingham concludes.