Archive for the 'Teaching' Category

What Teacher Ed Should Look Like

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 2, 2009 in Higher Education, Teacher Training and Teaching. 13 Comments

Teacher education programs should be selective, rigorous….and free, argues Susan Engel.  In a New York Times op-ed the psychologist and director of the teaching program at Williams College writes that admission to teacher ed programs should include “a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.” 

Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.  First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors. It makes no sense at all to stop studying the thing you want to teach at the very moment you begin to learn how.

Hear, hear.  I’m all for organizing teacher training around subject matter, rather than what Leon Botstein once termed “the pseudoscience of pedagogy.”  But Engel’s not done yet.

Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors. Student-teachers are usually observed only twice during a semester and then given a written evaluation. But young teachers, like young doctors, should work side by side with skilled mentors, getting plenty of feedback, having plenty of opportunities to observe and taking on greater and greater responsibility as they improve.

The key word is that paragraph is “craft.”  It’s common to hear teaching described as an art, a science, or a profession, but seldom as a craft, which has always struck me as exactly the right word.  Like becoming a writer, you become successful when you find your voice. That’s craftwork.  Toward that end, Engel also suggests that teacher ed steal a page from family therapy programs, whose students, she observes, “spend a great deal of time watching videotapes of themselves in action, reflecting on their sessions and discussing the most difficult moments with senior therapists to explore other ways they might have responded.”

Parental [Dis]engagement

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 31, 2009 in Parents and Teaching. 4 Comments

Middle school teacher Mrs. Bluebird loves PowerSchool, her district’s online grading system.  It lets her update students’ grades from home, run progress reports and all kinds of other tricks.   “Parents can check grades any time of the night or day, see that work is missing, and can even get grade updates emailed to them,” she writes at her blog, Bluebird’s Classroom.  “Students hate it because parents can keep a really close eye on what they are, or more precisely, what they are not doing,” she says.

In other words, for home-school communications, it’s the greatest thing since the parent-teacher conference.  Well, maybe not.

The District folks did a survey of PowerSchool usage and discovered that only 20% of the families in the District have ever logged on to PowerSchool.  Let me repeat that…20%. That’s it. 89% supposedly have access to a computer but only 20% have made the effort to check their child’s grades.  That silence you hear is the sound of parent involvement, or, more precisely, the lack thereof.

In response, Bluebird’s principal continues to send home report cards, despite the district’s move to go paperless.  “My team sent home 97 report cards. I had 47 students fail science for this nine weeks. To date, I have not heard a peep. No email, no call requesting a conference, nothing,” she laments.  ”It’s like they don’t even care.  And we wonder why the kids don’t care either.”

[H/T: Blogboard]

One For the Price of Two

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 29, 2009 in Teacher Training and Teaching. 2 Comments

At Teacher Beat, Stephen Sawchuck highlights an intriguing study that shows Los Angeles students taught by Teach For America teachers “outperformed peers who were taught by other teachers—including veterans with many more years of experience.”  The study is another feather in TFA’s cap, but there is one aspect of the study that may unwittingly reinforce anti-TFA criticism.   Note how the methodology is described:

The study included 119 second-year or alumni Teach For America teachers who taught either reading or math in grades 2-12 during both 2005 and 2006 in 27 different LAUSD schools. As a control, the study also evaluated the impact of 1,190 non-Teach For America teachers who taught the same grade levels and subjects in the same schools as the Teach For America teachers.

I’m not surprised that high-achieving, driven and energetic TFA corps members are pretty decent teachers in Year Two, and alumni even moreso.  When you recruit top-shelf candidates, you expect them to move down the learning curve in short order.  But what about Year One?  Having worked with a significant number of first-year corp members, it’s fair to say most struggle.  That’s not a knock on TFA.  First year is a struggle for every new teacher. 

The study is dated December 2008, and Sawchuck notes there’s a reason it’s only coming out now:

Initially, the study was performed for internal purposes. Having provided quite a bundle of financial backing for TFA, Broad wanted to get a sense of how its investment was paying off in terms of stronger student learning. But officials for the group said they ultimately decided to make the study public given the growing national conversation about teacher effectiveness.

The proposition of TFA is that they’re better — or certainly no worse — on Day One than existing teachers.  If they’re solid in year two, but ineffective in year one, you’re essentially getting one good year for the price of two if they don’t stay past their two-year commitment.  I’m not sure that’s a message TFA wants to send. 

Trick or Tweet?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 27, 2009 in Students and Teaching. 2 Comments

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 web

student 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 web

student 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 fhsush

student 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.

The Thomas Sowell Affair

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 9, 2009 in Curriculum and Teaching. 20 Comments

The letter syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell received from a Michigan 5th grader that prompted him to go off on the boy’s teacher and the education system at large was not even a school assignment. 

A debate in the comments section of this blog on the merits of having students write letter to prominent people–the practice blasted by Sowell–prompted me to put in a call to Jennifer Murphy, the principal of Sayre Elementary School, the Michigan school Sowell cited in his column.  I wanted to ask a simple question: “What was the assignment?”

Two surprising facts emerged:  No one at the school was aware that Sowell had singled them out in his column as as an example of how “our children are frittering away time on trivia, other children in other countries are acquiring the skills in math, science, or other fields.”  Even more interesting:  The letter in question was not even a school assignment.

Ms. Murphy sent the following email explaining how the letter arrived in Thomas Sowell’s mailbox:

There appears to have been some misinformation concerning the letter written by a Sayre Elementary student to Dr. Sowell.

At Sayre Elementary, the Habits of Mind, developed by Arthur L. Costa and Bena Kallick, are part of our district curriculum.  Students work on strengthening those habits both at school and at home.  A Habit of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON’T know the answer to question or problem.  As a school, we highlight one or more of the habits each month, and students are given an optional list of activities that they can do at home to practice those featured habits.  In September, students worked on questioning skills.  One of the optional activities directed students to “Think of an important person you would like to meet.  If you could ask them to try to solve a problem, what problem would you choose?  What questions might they ask when trying to solve the problem?  Make a sign with the name of your person, the problem you chose, and the questions they might ask.” 

Writing a letter to that expert was not a part of the assigned task, although one particular student chose to extend the activity and do so on his own.   The “important person” was kid language for a successful person they admired (in this case, Dr. Sowell) and was meant to have students learn how such a person used this “habit” to help him/her succeed.  In this way, the student can see that habits of mind have a place in the world beyond school.

I wish to make it clear that no instructional time was used for the writing of this letter; it was completed independently of the school, with parent guidance, at home. 

I encourage you to learn more about the Habits through a simple Google search or specifically at http://www.habits-of-mind.net/ .  I have also attached an evaluation tool that can be used as a self-assessment of the habits.

Jennifer Murphy
Sayre Elementary Principal
(248) 573-8500
murphyj@slcs.us

Just Send the Kid a Note Already

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 7, 2009 in Students and Teaching. 17 Comments

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.

Pinocchio Parents (and Teachers)

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 1, 2009 in Parents, Research and Reports and Teaching. 7 Comments

Most mothers and fathers practice “Pinocchio parenting” — teaching their kids that lying is bad while regularly fibbing to them, according to a pair of new studies in the Journal of Moral Education.

Researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of California found that parents who stress the importance of truth-telling to their little ones quite often tell lies to influence the children’s behaviour or emotions, whether it’s an idle threat to make them eat their peas or boost their confidence by praising their ear-splitting saxophone solo.

“Because it’s easy, we just do it,” Dr. Kang Lee of the University of Toronto tells the Globe and Mail. “Some parents may have been doing it for years and they really have no idea they are actually telling lies.”  Lee’s study doesn’t look at the impact of Pinocchio Parenting on kids, but he confesses he’s guilty of it himself.

To quell his son’s habit of fidgeting in his car-seat, the savvy dad renamed the hazard button on his dashboard the “eject” button. If dad presses the button, six-year-old Nathan thinks he’ll be catapulted from the vehicle. “I just put my hand over it” and Nathan behaves, Dr. Lee says.

Teachers in particular are guilty of what the researchers describe as the “confidence boosting lie” — telling students they are excellent writers, for example, when in fact they are average or worse.   Teachers in my elementary school trained in the Teacher’s College Writer’s Workshop were expected to give a compliment to every student at the start of each “conference” and required to record it in our conference notes.   The intended effect obviously was to boost confidence and inspire additional effort.   The danger (equally obvious) was that students might overestimate their ability, slack off, and be set up for disappointment later on.

Willingham: Reading Is Not a Skill

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 28, 2009 in Curriculum, Education Practice, Educational Policy, Research and Reports and Teaching. 29 Comments

Dan Willingham reviews the draft voluntary national standards in reading and sees a problem:  ”Teachers and administrators are likely to read those 18 standards and to try to teach to them,” he notes.  “But reading comprehension is not a ’skill’ that can be taught directly.”

His latest blog post at the Washington Post’s education page observes that teachers tend to teach comprehension as a series of “reading strategies” that can be practiced and mastered. “Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way,” he writes. “The mainspring of comprehension is prior knowledge—the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read.”

Prior knowledge is vital to comprehension because writers omit information. For example, suppose you read “He just got a new puppy. His landlord is angry.” You easily understand the logical connection between those sentences because you know things about puppies (they aren’t housebroken), carpets (urine stains them) and landlords (they are protective of their property.)

Policymakers need to pay attention here because this is what those of us who complain about curriculum narrowing are complaining about: the natural impulse to focus on pure reading instruction in an attempt to boost reading scores is self-defeating.  When you see, as Dan does, how “bad readers” look like good readers when they have background knowledge to bring to bear on a topic, the reasonable goal of education becomes increasing the number of topics children know something about.  It may sound smart, even heroic, to focus like a laser on reading instruction, but ultimately the law of diminishing returns kicks in.  You build comprehension by building background knowledge in the reader–not by endless practice in determining the author’s purpose, finding the main idea and making inferences. 

The kids who score well on reading tests are ones who know a lot about the world—they have a lot of prior knowledge about a wide range of things–and so that whatever they are asked to read about on the test, they likely know something about it….Can’t you teach kids how to reason about texts, and thereby wring the meaning out of it even if they don’t have the right prior knowledge?  To some extent, but it doesn’t seem to help as much as you might expect. For one thing, this sort of reasoning is difficult mental work. For another, it’s slow, and so it breaks up the flow of the story you’re reading, and the fun of the story is lost.

And Dan has a line in his post that I wish could be on the wall of every classroom in the country:  “Hoping that students without relevant prior knowledge will reason their way through a story is a recipe for creating a student who doesn’t like reading.”

Ultimately the draft national standards do not serve us well by reinforcing the idea that reading a a skill.  It’s not, Willingham notes:

The mistaken idea that reading is a skill—learn to crack the code, practice comprehension strategies and you can read anything—may be the single biggest factor holding back reading achievement in the country. Students will not meet standards that way. The knowledge base problem must be solved.

A request–no a plea, really:  Forward Dan’s post to every teacher you know.  Tweet it.  Blog it. Put it on your Facebook page.  Do it now.   We’re not going to solve this problem until or unless we see this for what it is.  Here’s the link: Reading Is Not a Skill.  Pass the word.  And while you’re at it, here’s Dan’s video, Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading. 

 

Mr. Wilson, You Lie!

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 17, 2009 in Core Knowledge, Curriculum and Teaching. 2 Comments

Over at Curriculum Matters, Sean Cavanagh gets a response from NEA executive director John Wilson to the Common Core letter about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  It’s an eyebrow-raiser.

This group continues to amaze me,” he said of the letter-writers, “that they would pit core knowledge against 21st-century skills, when our students need both. … I have witnessed first- hand teachers using 21st-century skills and new technology to enhance the teaching of core subjects. To relegate today’s students to rows of desks, a teacher at the front of the classroom espousing content, and a textbook with paper and pencil is to guarantee that our students will be left with the lowest skills and the lowest-paying jobs.”

So a rich, well-rounded core curriculum means kids in rows, and a teacher in the front of the room droning on from a textbook?  Says who?  Visit a Core Knowledge school, Mr. Wilson.  Over half of them are public schools.  You’ll see some dynamic teaching and learning going on, not the picture of 19th century drudgery you paint.  You know what else you’ll see in some of those schools?

Your members.

You’re forgiven for not recognizing them, though.  They’re not standing at the front of the classroom, droning on from textbooks to neat rows of students. 

Here’s what continues to amaze me:  that people who should know better equate a robust curriculum with boring teaching.  And that a leader of our largest teachers union would bash teachers as mindless automatons.

Good Teachers Improve Their Peers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on September 2, 2009 in Assessment and Testing and Teaching. 14 Comments

Having good teachers for colleagues helps other teachers improve.  Common sense, right?  This new study documents some pretty dramatic peer effects.  EdWeek’s Debra Viadero breaks it down for you here.

Attention: Wendy Kopp and Teach For America:  Maybe this wasn’t such a crazy idea after all?