The town of Danvers, Massachusetts can now claim prideful ownership of two great overreactions in American history. The first was the Salem Witch Trials. The second? Banning the word “meep” at Danvers High School.
Read it and meep.
Archive for the 'Students' Category
Some months ago, I challenged teachers to give examples of good classroom uses of Twitter without using the term “engagement.” In other words, is it possible to use the micro-blogging site to extend learning or create understanding in a superior way to other teaching methods? It led to a lively discussion, but I’m not sure I ever heard a compelling answer.
Along comes a recent EdWeek look at classroom uses of Twitter, which describes how teachers “first found Twitter valuable for reaching out to colleagues and locating instructional resources. Now, they’re trying it out in the classroom as an efficient way to distribute assignments and to foster collaboration among students.” Kathleen Kennedy Manzo’s piece also sounds a cautious and skeptical tone, noting the educational effectiveness of Twitter “or the implications those quick, short-form communications may have for students’ thinking and learning are not known.”
The piece reproduces a series of Tweets from an 11th grade history class in Virginia:
teacher From slavery 2 White House, Michelle Obama’s slave roots revealed. Comments please!
7:46 PM Oct 8th from webstudent 1 @fhsush this is really shocking that they traced it back that far and found a tie it really just amazing
8:07 PM Oct 8th from webstudent 2 @fhsush thats AMAZING. times have really changed. that is amazing that they can trace back that far.
8:11 PM Oct 8th from web in reply to fhsushstudent 1 @fhsush WOW! i would have never guessed that. its awesome to see such a connections to slavery in our own White House. amazing
8:19 PM Oct 8th from web in reply to fhsush
I don’t wish to be unkind, but this is not exactly a riveting exchange for 11th graders, although to be fair, 140 characters is not a lot to work with unless you write headlines for the New York Post. Lucas Ames, the history teacher in the above exchange apparently gives students the choice of “participating in the Twitter feed or writing an extra research paper.” (Somewhere Will Fitzhugh is clutching his chest and gasping for breath.)
“These students are not always sure about how to use the Internet to find and filter information, so this is forcing them to do that,” said Mr. Ames, who requires students to submit only school-related tweets. “It’s getting kids who aren’t necessarily engaged in class engaged in some sort of conversation.”
Manzo quotes Dan Willingham extensively in the piece. His attitude seems more agnostic than skeptical.
Like any other tool, the way we make it useful is to consider very carefully what this particular tool is very good at, rather than simply say, ‘I like Twitter, so how can I use it?’ ” said Mr. Willingham, who is the author of the new book, Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. “The medium is not enough,” he added. “People talk about the vital importance of Web 2.0 and 3.0, and that kids have got to acquire those skills. But we can’t all just be contributing to wikis and tweeting each other. Somebody’s got to create something worth tweeting.”
Having started out as a Twitter skeptic, I’ve warmed to it a little. I’ve certainly found it helpful, as Manzo writes, as a way to share resources and keep up with what others are saying and reading. But it’s not very satisfying for anything other than one-way communication—sending or receiving. It’s the equivalent of scanning the headlines of the paper. When something intrigues me, I need more than the headline offers. Thus my challenge to describe a learning activity for which Twitter offers more than student engagement may be a fool’s errand. In the end, that might be the alpha and omega of what Twitter is good at, per Willingham. That’s not nothing. But engagement isn’t learning–it’s a prerequisite to learning.
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell recently got a letter from a fifth-grader at Sayre Elementary School in Lyon, Michigan asking the PhD economist what to do about the economy. Sowell could have ignored the note, or sent back a brief greeting. He had a different idea.
Instead, I replied to his parents: With American students consistently scoring near or at the bottom in international tests, I am repeatedly appalled by teachers who waste their students’ time by assigning them to write to strangers, chosen only because those strangers’ names have appeared in the media. It is of course much easier — and more “exciting,” to use a word too many educators use — to do cute little stuff like this than to take on the sober responsibility to develop in students both the knowledge and the ability to think that will enable them to form their own views on matters in both public and private life.
OK, Dr. Sowell, point taken. Maybe the assignment wasn’t particularly well thought out, but give the kid–and his teacher–a break. If you want kids to understand that writing is a means of interacting with the broader world, there’s little harm in using the power of the pen to try to engage people in positions of influence. Churlishly, Sowell is having none of it.
What earthly good would it do your son to know what economic policies I think should be followed, especially since what I think should be done will not have the slightest effect on what the government will in fact do? And why should a fifth-grader be expected to deal with questions that people with Ph.D.’s in economics have trouble wrestling with?
Maybe he should have written to Kate Gosselin instead? Frankly, if one of my 5th graders chose to write to Thomas Sowell instead of an athlete, actor or musician, I’d be pretty impressed.
I never assigned my kids the task of writing to famous people, but there were a couple of occasions when a little attention from the outside world made my 5th graders especially proud. NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein once sent my class a nice note congratulating my students for completing an ambitious reading project. And back when DFER’s Joe Williams was the education reporter for the NY Daily News, he wrote a piece inspired by letters my students wrote to the NYC Department of Education, offering to help correct a city-issued student code of conduct that was rife with misspellings and grammatical errors. In both instances, it was a thrill for the kids to get a reaction from people in the public eye. It made them feel powerful, and see that their words and work mattered. No harm in that.
Give the kids a break. Take an interest. Write a nice letter back. They’ll remember it for the rest of their lives, and you might just inspire them to greater heights.
The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss has debuted a new education blog. She floats a fun and intriguing idea for middle school reform: Blow up middle school as we know it and turn at least some of it into a “boot camp for life.”
Enough with “academic rigor.” No more projects on the Chesapeake Bay (or whatever body of water you happen to live near.) Stop testing them into submission. How about teaching nutrition and health through cooking classes? Nobody can argue that kid don’t need to learn more, not with the obesity epidemic among young people in this country. An added bonus: cooking can be a great way to teach chemical reactions and other scientific principles. Give kids things to take apart and to rebuild. Yes, bring back shop class. This sparks a curiosity that will drive them to want to learn the math and science necessary to take their tinkering to the next level.
An idea like this is intuitively appealing and makes a lot of sense if — it’s a big “if” — kids have been given a solid, well-rounded curriculum throughout their elementary years. Indeed, if you give kids a good foundation in the early years, you potentially open up an entire range of opportunities in middle school and beyond, of which Strauss’ idea is merely one. But our reluctance to make the best use of the K-5 years contributes to the joyless brand of catch-up ball most middle schools are forced to play.
“The developmental profile of these students–from age 11 to 14–is well established,” says Strauss, “and it doesn’t lend itself to great academic achievement.”
Strauss’s is one of our smartest ed reporters and her blog has jumped quickly from the starting block. See her Q&A with Dan Willingham, which ran earlier this week.
A new survey of college students says social networking makes them more narcissistic. According to USA Today, they also believe their generation is their generation is the most narcissistic of all.
More than half (57%) said their peers used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking. And 92% said they used MySpace or Facebook regularly. Two-thirds said their generation was more self-promoting, narcissistic, overconfident and attention-seeking than others.
I am SO putting this on my Facebook page.
One of the biggest applause line in President Obama’s speech to the NAACP Thursday wasn’t in his prepared remarks–it came when he exhorted parents and children to take full advantage of their educational opportunities and make “no excuses.”
We have to say to our children, Yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that someone in a wealthy suburb does not. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades, that’s not a reason to cut class, that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands – and don’t you forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children! No excuses! No excuses!”
The “Your destiny is in your hands…no excuses” bit was not in the President’s prepared remarks, but both Fox News and the Huffington Post put it in their respective headlines.
In education circles, of course, the “no excuses” meme has become shorthand for schools–and especially teachers–making no excuses for poor student achievement. It reflects the deeply held conviction by some that a school can, should, must overcome all deficits in the children it serves, regardless of outside circumstances. It remains an excellent rallying cry, if not a realistic standard by which to measure teacher performance.
It’s refreshing to hear the standard applied to all actors in the process, not just teachers. The response to Obama’s off-the-cuff remark clearly demonstrates the wisdom of crowds.
When 15-year-olds are writing research reports for Morgan Stanley advising executives worldwide how teens use social media, perhaps it’s an indication that we really don’t neeed to worry about teaching this stuff in school.
By the way, according to the much-discussed report by bank intern Matthew Robson, teens don’t tweet.
“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
All those lesson plans with Twitter? Have you considered 8-track tapes? A Victrola?
American teenagers pound out an extraordinary number of text messages. We knew this. But a poll reported by USA Today indicates that one-fourth of their texts are sent during class, despite widespread cellphone bans.
The survey of 1,013 teens — 84% of whom have cellphones — also shows that a significant number have stored information on a cellphone to look at during a test or have texted friends about answers. More than half of all students say people at their school have done the same. Only about half of teens say either of the practices is a “serious offense,” suggesting that students may have developed different personal standards about handwritten information vs. material stored on cellphones, says pollster Joel Benenson.
Serious offense? Haven’t you heard? Using technology to get answers isn’t cheating. Dude, it’s a 21st-freakin’-century skill!
USA Today’s Greg Toppo notes the poll’s reported average of 440 text messages a week on average — 110 of them during class–works out to more than three texts per class period. “The findings also reveal a split in perception between teens and parents: Only 23% of parents whose children have cellphones think they are using them at school; 65% of students say they do,” he reports.
Mark Bauerlein has a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Brainstorm blog that should give pause to those whose definition of achievement in public education starts and stops with reading and math scores.
Bauerlein spins a fictional tale of a top Emory University law school student interviewing at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta. Over lunch with the senior partners, the conversation turns toward the older gentlemen’s memories of the Cold War. “It’s not a test, and it’s not planned,” Bauerlein notes. ”For them, the Cold War is simply one of those realities that any intelligent person is familiar with and has some opinions about.” But the overachieving young man has nothing to add and is conspicuously out of his depth.
The others have the tact to move on, but they note the deficiency. It doesn’t cost the young man the job, but the senior fellows make a judgment. This guy, they think, is sharp and hard-working, but get out of his training and he doesn’t bring much to the table. The deeper awareness that makes for a sober judgment and wider perspective is missing…This is the professional value of cultural literacy. It counts a lot more in professional spheres than academics and educators realize. The measure is informal, yes, but it makes a difference in how peers and superiors regard you.
Bauerlein’s piece reminded me of a conversation I had with an unusually bright student a few years ago. She blew away every math and reading test she’d ever taken, but her walking around knowledge of even basic history, geography and current events was virtually nonexistent (Granted, she was a 5th grader, but she was under the impression that New Jersey was a country). Discussing the gaps in her education, I told her, “This is not your fault, but it is your problem.” Indeed, this young lady had done absolutely everything asked of her in school. Her lack of breadth was not something she chose, but something we had allowed to happen to her. If the gaps in her knowledge persist into adulthood, I knew, the world would certainly judge her skeptically, even harshly, for precisely the reasons Bauerlein describes–especially as a person of color from the South Bronx.
Crucially, this was a kid with top scores on standardized tests–one of my school’s rare ”double 4s” in both math and reading. By that measure–but only by that measure–a screaming success story of public education. But what the data doesn’t show, and Baurlein’s piece reminds us, is that out in the real world there are very different metrics at work. There’s too often far less to our current definition of success than meets the eye.
Would teacher quality improve if every year the worst teacher in the building was voted off the island, a la Survivor? That’s the suggestion of Dangerously Irrelevant’s Scott McLeod. His “modest proposal” for improving teacher quality suggests first doing everything possible to create a positive working climate. But since students, parents, administrators and other teachers know who is just going through the motions, he argues, every year they should all get a vote, with the worst underperformer sent off.
If you don’t have a robust teacher evaluation system (or if you’re worried about administrator bias), do it like they do on Survivor: everyone gets a vote and the one with the most votes leaves the island. Administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents – everyone involved with the school gets a vote. Dismissal by consensus. The more that are involved, (hopefully) the less likelihood of a witch hunt. If necessary, modify the master contract to make this happen.
I appreciate the intent of McLeod’s proposal. He’s absolutely right that the larger school community has excellent radar for who is breaking rocks and who is merely going through the motions. That said, his specific proposal would incentivize office politics as surely as test-driven accountability incentivizes test prep and curriculum narrowing. Plus there’s the problem of that long line of great teachers, which is still not forming outside struggling schools.
I once worked in a large corporation where the informal motto was “it’s better to be popular than competent.” It’s not a formula for long-term excellence. Still McLeod’s idea reminds us that there is something to be said for the wisdom of crowds, and that test scores are not the alpha and omega of great teaching.
Recent Comments