The 15,000 pupil Stamford, Connecticut school system, ”among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking,” is abandoning the practice, which the New York Times describes as ”an uncomfortable caste system.” But if the Times is so concerned about tracking, asks Will Fitzhugh, why are they silent on “the complete dominance of athletic tracking in schools all over the country?” As unbelieveable as it seems, deadpans the editor of The Concord Review, there is no real movement to eliminate it.
Athletes in our school sports programs are routinely tracked into groups of students with similar ability, presumably to make their success in various sports matches, games, and contests more likely. But so far no attention is paid to the damage to the self-esteem of those student athletes whose lack of ability and coordination doom them to the lower athletic tracks, and even, in many cases, may deprive them of membership on school teams altogether.
Fitzhugh observes that the elimination of tracking is a product of educators who are ”more committed to diversity and equality of outcomes in classrooms than they are in academic achievement.” I would also add that mixed ability grouping on sports teams is not unheard of. The New York Mets have been doing it for years.
If I have three apples, and give you one, how many apples will I have? Better ask someone in the math department.
The traditional one-teacher elementary school model is giving way to a middle school format, with different teachers for reading, math, science and social studies in Palm Beach County, Florida. Some schools will have subject-specific teachers as early as kindergarten, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. Parents and teachers are reportedly ”steamed” about the plan, and are demanding to see research demonstrating the move will help improve performance.
Administrators say there are numerous benefits for the teaching model, such as morphing teachers from jacks-of-all-trades to subject-matter experts. Officials say departmentalization will help schools respond to new state standards and new versions of the FCAT beginning in 2011, resulting in higher achievement among even the most-struggling students. “They are going to have to trust that we as educators are doing what’s right for their children,” Chief Academic Officer Jeffrey Hernandez said Monday. “We are constantly reforming our schools to meet the needs of our students.”
But Robert Dow, president of the Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association, dismisses the move as a “fad” without anything concrete to back it up. “Departmentalization?” Dow asks. “Seven syllables. Gotta be good. No research, but hey! All elementary teachers will be departmentalized whether they like it or not, whether what they do now works or not.”
I can see some benefits to the plan, not the least of which is the tendency to give short shrift to subjects like science and social studies that are not tested. That said, very young children almost certainly benefit from the security and continuity of a relationship of a single teacher.
Candor and straight talk are rare in education, and euphemisms abound, observes Maureen Downey, the education columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. At one level, the jargon can be amusing, such as the habit of referring to one of the buildings at her son’s school as the cottage. “Personally, I would describe the place where fifth-graders attend class as a trailer,” Downey writes. ”But then, I’m not an education professional.” More seriously, she notes that happy talk and edubabble contribute to parental mistrust of schools.
My husband and I once had a 10-minute sidewalk chat with a school consultant working at a local elementary school. After a conversation about psychometrics, scaffolding, formative assessments and zone of proximal development, we walked away asking one another, “What was she saying?” The use of education jargon serves as a defense mechanism, to keep parents at bay and to establish from the onset who is the expert and who is the amateur. It becomes a way to silence questions and squelch opposition.
Downey wonders if ”beleaguered and scapegoated” educators can afford to be honest and forthcoming. ”If principals admit to unhappy parents that a new teacher is not proving effective,” she points out, ”they may also have to tell those parents that they’re stuck with the teacher anyway, since it’s not an easy task to replace staff midyear.”
Back in my ink-stained wretch days, I sympathized with beat reporters whose noses would get out of joint when a “bigfoot” colleague would parachute into town and write a column uncomplicated by reporting or background knowledge. So I can’t help but wonder what the New York Times’ Paul Tough thinks of his colleague David Brooks’ column about the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Tough, as you probably know, wrote the book on the Harlem Children’s Zone. Literally. Whatever It Takes looks at Geoffrey Canada’s mission to change the lives of Harlem’s children by intervening in every moving part of their lives from schools to parenting. But Le Blogosphere is up in arms this week wondering how Brooks came to conclude ”the Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right” in arguing that school-based approaches alone can close the achievement gap. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to support based on even a passing familiarity with Tough’s book.
I don’t have a dog in the Broader, Bolder vs. Education Equality Project (”No Excuses”) fight, which represents the quintessential ed reform false dichotomy. Like many such debates, it seems rather obvious (and utterly uncontroversial) to suggest that we need to draw from both sides to get to a solution. But to conclude, as Brooks did, that HCZ proves the “no excuses” case makes one wonder if he even read Tough’s book. As Diane Ravitch notes “there are lessons for American education, but not necessarily the ones that Brooks points to.” Corey Bunje Bower at Thoughts on Education Policy calls Brooks’ conclusion ”flat out irresponsible.” Over at Public School Insights, the usually erudite and articulate Claus von Zastrow is driven to sputtering, “What??!?”
Did Brooks really just argue that the Harlem Children’s Zone’s success supports the schools alone approach championed by “reformers”? That’s like arguing that the Surgeon General’s reports discredit the link between smoking and cancer.
“Brooks joins a long line of national commentators who are turning important conversations about school improvement into a morality play pitting the “establishment” against the “reformers.” In the process, he is promoting false and damaging dichotomies between efforts to improve schools and efforts to offset social and economic disadvantages that contribute to achievement gaps,” Claus concludes.
Just so. But back to my reporter friends. It wouldn’t surprise them to hear a columnist wrote the story one way when their reporting led in a different direction. That’s just the nature of the beast. A columnist’s job is tell you what he thinks; reporters tell you what they found out. Brooks recommends Whatever It Takes in his column. It’s a great suggestion. He should really see what Tough found out.
Mea Culpa: Aaron Pallas did a terrific analysis of HCZ’ test results last week which I overlooked. Do have a look.
No real surprise, given the parlous state of the economy and employment, but NYC’s Department of Education has ordered principals to fill teaching vacancies with internal candidates only. The news has left would-be teachers, including those hired by Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows scrambling for jobs, reports the New York Times. The city will hire about half its usual number of educators from TFA and the Fellows program.
New York schools–especially struggling schools–looking for new teachers will likely have to fish in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, which consists of educators who are unemployed but still on the City’s payroll. In most cases, ATR teachers were working at schools that were shuttered or downsized. However, Gotham Schools notes a report by The New Teacher Project, which found that “teachers in the pool were six times as likely to have been rated unsatisfactory by a principal as teachers who hold positions.”
No matter how you slice it, the hiring pool from which principals can hire has just become reed-thin. “The fact remains that, if the city weren’t forced to pay ATR members indefinitely, perhaps a substantial percentage of teachers could still be new hires (or, maybe, the freeze wouldn’t have happened at all),” writes the New Republic’s Seyward Darby “In good economic times or bad, on financial, pedagogical, and political levels, the ATR is simply unsustainable.”
If you remember your Greek mythology, you’ll recall Cassandra, tragically blessed with the gift of prophecy but cursed by Apollo so that no one would believe her. Think of her while reading Diane Ravitch’s latest over at Bridging Differences.
Here is my prediction: Merit pay of the kind I have described will not make education better, even if scores go up next year or the year after. Instead, it will make education worse, not only because some of the “gains” will be based on cheating and gaming the system, but because they will be obtained by scanting attention to history, geography, civics, the arts, science, literature, foreign languages, and all the other studies that are needed to develop smarter individuals, better citizens, and people who are prepared for the knowledge-based economy of the 21st Century. Nor will it identify better teachers; instead, it will reward those who use their time for low-level test preparation.
“Is it possible to have an education system that mis-educates students while raising their test scores?” Ravitch asks. ”Yes, I think it is. We may soon prove it.”
Cassandra is speaking. Are you listening? Do you believe her?
“The relationship of cognitive psychology to classroom teaching is like the relationship of physics to engineering,” writes Dan Willingham in his latest over at Britannica Blog. “Knowledge of the mind gleaned from cognitive psychology experiments will not tell teachers how to teach children, any more than knowledge of physics can prescribe what a bridge should look like.”
Just about every teacher at some point tries to trick their students into learning something by making it “relevant” to students’ interests. You might be surprised to learn that I don’t think much of this technique. I love cognitive psychology, so you might think, “Well, to get Willingham to pay attention to this math problem, we’ll wrap it up in a cognitive psychology example.” But Willingham is quite capable of being bored by cognitive psychology, as has been proved repeatedly at professional conferences I’ve attended. Trying to make problems “relevant” can also feel forced and artificial, and students see right through the ruse.
So if content isn’t the way to engage students, how about your teaching style? Students often refer to good teachers as those who “make the stuff interesting.” It’s not that the teacher relates the material to students’ interests-rather, the teacher has a way of interacting with students that they find engaging.
When we think of a good teacher, we tend to focus on personality and on the way the teacher presents himself or herself. But that’s only half of good teaching. The jokes, the stories, and the warm manner all generate goodwill and get students to pay attention. But then how do we make sure they think about meaning? That is where the second property of being a good teacher comes in-organizing the ideas in a lesson plan in a coherent way so that students will understand and remember. Cognitive psychology cannot tell us how to be personable and likable to our students, but I can tell you about one set of principles that cognitive psychologists know about to help students think about the meaning of a lesson.
The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories-so much so that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as “psychologically privileged,” meaning that they are treated differently in memory than other types of material. I’m going to suggest that organizing a lesson plan like a story is an effective way to help students comprehend and remember.
First, stories are easy to comprehend, because the audience knows the structure, which helps to interpret the action. For example, the audience knows that events don’t happen randomly in stories. Second, stories are interesting and engage listeners more readily that other formats, even if the same information is presented. Lastly, stories are easy to remember.
I’m not suggesting that teachers simply tell stories, although there’s nothing wrong with doing so. Rather, I’m suggesting something one step removed from that. Structure your lessons the way stories are structured, using the four Cs: causality, conflict, complications, and character. This doesn’t mean you must do most of the talking. Small group work or projects or any other method may be used. The story structure applies to the way you organize the material that you encourage your students to think about, not to the methods you use to teach the material.
We’ve all heard anecdotes about accomplished people who struggled in school: Albert Einstein failed his first college entrance exam. William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize for Literature without ever having accumulated enough credits to finish high school. And Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comics had his illustrations rejected by his high school yearbook. Doing well in school is not an absolute prerequisite for later success. Still, teachers naturally want all students to get as much as they can from school. How can we optimize school for students who don’t have the raw intelligence of other students?
Americans tend to view intelligence as a fixed attribute, like eye color. If you win the genetic lottery, you’re smart; but if you lose, you’re not. In China, Japan, and other Eastern countries, intelligence is more often viewed as malleable. If students fail a test or don’t understand a concept, it’s not that they’re stupid-they just haven’t worked hard enough yet. There is some truth in both. Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work. This belief in the malleable intelligence for students has many implications for classroom teachers and should play a role in how you administer praise and talk to students about their successes and failures.
There is overwhelming evidence that there is a general intelligence. It’s usually called g, short for general intelligence. What exactly is g? It’s not known. People suggest it might be related to the speed or the capacity of working memory, or even that it’s a reflection of how quickly the neurons in our brains can fire. Knowing what underlies g is less important than knowing that g is real. Having a lot of g predicts that we will do well in school and well in the workplace.
Still, if intelligence were all a matter of one’s genetic inheritance, then there wouldn’t be much point in trying to make kids smarter. Instead, we’d try to get students to do the best they could given the genetically determined intelligence they have. We’d also think seriously about trying to steer the not-so-smart kids toward intellectually undemanding tracks in schools, figuring that they are destined for low-level jobs anyway. But that’s not the way things are. Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.
Slow learners are not dumb. They probably differ little from other students in terms of their potential. This should not be taken to mean that these students can easily catch up. Slow students have the same potential as bright students, but they probably differ in what they know, in their motivation, in their persistence in the face of academic setbacks, and in their self-image as students. I fully believe that these students can catch up, but it must be acknowledged that they are far behind, and that catching up will take enormous effort. How can we help? To help slow learners catch up, we must first be sure they believe that they can improve, and next we must try to persuade them that it will be worth it.
I have several suggestions in my book, including 1) praise effort, not ability; 2) tell students that hard work pays off; and 3) treat failure as a natural part of learning. Points 2 and 3 are nicely made in this You Tube video titled Famous Failures:
Try to create a classroom atmosphere in which failure, while not desirable, is neither embarrassing nor wholly negative. Failure means you’re about to learn something. You’re going to find out that there’s something you didn’t understand or didn’t know how to do. Most important, model this attitude for your students. When you fail-and who doesn’t?-let them see you take a positive, learning attitude.
“How can we expect to train the next generation of scientists if we are not training them to do what scientists actually do?” This sounds sensible, even insightful, but students are not cognitively capable of doing what scientists (or historians, writers, mathematicians, etc.) do. It’s not just that students know less than experts. As I’ll describe, what experts know is organized differently in their memory.
Even the greatest scientists do not think like experts when they start out. They think like novices. It’s not possible to think like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. Does this mean we shouldn’t ask students to write a poem or conduct a scientific experiment? Of course not. (Some great examples and ideas for history can be found at the National History Education Clearninghouse). But we should understand the difference between the thought processes of experts and novices.
Accomplished mathematicians, scientists, and historians have worked in their field for years, and the knowledge and experience they have accumulated enables them to think in ways that are not open to the rest of us. Thus, trying to get your students to think like them is not a realistic goal. “Well, sure,” you might be thinking. ” I never really expected that my students are going to win the Nobel Prize! I just want them to understand some science.” That’s a worthy goal, but it is very different than the goal of students thinking like experts.
Real scientists are experts. They have worked at science for forty hours (or more) each week for years. Those years of practice make a qualitative–not quantitative–difference in the way they think compared to how even a well-informed amateur thinks. It will surely not surprise you to learn that experts have lots of background knowledge in their area of expertise. But the expert mind has another edge over the rest of us. The information in long-term memory is organized differently than the information in working memory. We can generalize by saying that experts think abstractly. When confronted with a classroom management problem, for example, novice teachers typically jump right into trying to solve the problem, but experts first seek to define the problem, gathering more information if necessary. Thus expert teachers have knowledge of different types of classroom management problem. Not surprisingly, expert teachers more often solve these problems in ways that address root causes and not just the behavioral incident. For example, an expert is more likely than a novice to make a permanent change in seating assignments.
Seeing things abstractly enables experts to home in on important details among a flood of information, to produce solutions that are always sensible and consistent (even if they are not always right), and to show some transfer of their knowledge to related fields. In addition, many of the routine tasks that experts perform have become automatic through practice.
Sounds great. How can we teach students to do that? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not exactly cheering. The only path to expertise, as far as anyone knows, is practice. One other interesting factor: Great scientists are almost always workaholics. They have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high.
So if we can’t get students to think like experts what’s a reasonable goal? Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help. Experts create. For example, scientists create and test theories of natural phenomena, historians create narrative interpretations of historical events, and mathematicians create proofs and descriptions of complex patterns. Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it. A more modest and realistic goal for students is knowledge comprehension. Student may not be able to develop their own scientific theory, but they can develop a deep understanding of existing theory. A student may not be able to write a new narrative of historical fact, but she can follow and understand a narrative that someone else has written.
The views, conclusions and opinions of authors, contributors and commenters on the Core Knowledge Blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Core Knowledge Foundation.
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