Classroom Practices That Need to Be Reconsidered

by Robert Pondiscio
January 19th, 2012

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Posted in Teaching | 36 Comments »

Teaching ideas whose time has come…and gone? Courtesy of yours truly and Alice Wiggins, who oversees the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Schools Department, here are common classroom practices that need to go away, be rethought, or curtailed:

1.      Data Driven…What?

An increasingly common feature in classrooms are data walls—bright, cheerful displays that show if students are advanced, proficient, basic or below basic in ELA and math.  As Rick Hess has written, schools have gone from not using data to inform decision making, to using data in half-baked or simplistic ways. Displaying decontextualized data is a prime example.  What exactly do we expect a third-grader to do with the knowledge that he or she is “approaching proficiency” in reading?  If data isn’t being used to drive instruction thoughtfully, what’s the point?

2.      Fiction Only Read-alouds

Fortunately, very few elementary school teachers need to be sold on the benefits of read-alouds.  They’re great for language development and exposing kids to rich vocabulary, since a child’s ability to read with comprehension doesn’t catch up with listening comprehension until about 8th grade. But if teachers aren’t devoting significant class time to nonfiction readalouds, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build background knowledge, which is essential for reading comprehension.

3.      Dumb Test Prep

Decrying test prep as a misuse of class time is a little like complaining that your kids are watching Fear Factor when they could be reading Chaucer. It’s true, but it’s not likely to change anytime soon.  But if we have to waste devote precious class time to test prep, let’s stop trying to teach and reinforce decontextualized reading skills like making inferences and finding the main idea that are content-specific, and cannot be mastered in the abstract.  More effective might be what Dan Willingham calls practice that reinforces the basic skills required for the learning of more advanced skills, protects against forgetting, and improves transfer.

4.      Reciting Lesson Aim and Standard

There’s nothing wrong with standards for planning and focusing lessons.  However, the idea of standards-based instruction is often misinterpreted.  Sure, students should be introduced to what they are about to learn, but having kindergarteners recite, “Through this lesson I will develop phonemic awareness and understanding of alphabetic principles” does nothing to support attainment of this standard or develop these students reading achievement.  In other cases, rather than using the standards to guide instruction on meaningful content, the standards become the instruction. Neither practice is an effective use of limited instructional time.

5.      Overusing Teaching Strategies

Too many classrooms seem to function on the principal that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.  Group work and differentiated instruction are two prime examples.  In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov writes that group work is “as likely to yield discussions of last night’s episode of American Idol as it is higher-order discussions of content.”  Asking frequent, targeted, rigorous questions of students, Lemov believes, “is a powerful and much simpler tool for differentiating.”  Too many classroom practices are used based on a compliance mentality—students are in groups because “that’s what administration wants to see”—rather that because it makes sense for a particular unit, lesson or activity.  Like using data to drive instruction rather than as bulletin board fodder (see above) there needs to be a sound instructional strategy underlying pedagogical choices.  And let’s not even talk about learning styles.

6.      The “Theme of the Month”

It’s standard practice to organize instruction by “themes,” such as holidays, seasons, my neighborhood or foods of the world, for example.  Organize units around knowledge “domains” instead.  A teacher might use the theme “Our Great Big World” in kindergarten to invite children to explore the setting of a story.  But since every story has a setting, that “theme” is arbitrary and doesn’t coherently build background knowledge.  A domain-based approach to “Our Great Big World” might include teaching children about continents, countries, climates and land forms in a coherent fashion.

7.      Reading Comprehension Skills

We can’t say it enough and Dan Willingham said it best:  Teaching content is teaching reading.  The most overused tool in the box in elementary school is reading strategies.  Yes, there are benefits to reading strategies, but there’s no evidence that repeated practice yields additional benefits.  Comprehension typically breaks down and test scores plummet because of a lack of background knowledge, not because kids have failed to master reading strategies.

Guest Post: Politics Driving Math Classes

by Robert Pondiscio
September 5th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 29 Comments »

Today’s post is by Laurie H. Rogers, a member of the executive committee for Where’s the Math? and author of “Betrayed: How the Education Establishment Has Betrayed America and What You Can Do About It.”  She blogs at Betrayed (http://betrayed-whyeducationisfailing.blogspot.com/) where this post also appears.

Several days ago, someone sent me an article on “teaching math for social justice.” I actually hit my desk while reading it, narrowly missing the cat. I shouldn’t read things like that first thing in the morning. It raises my blood pressure and gets the next 12 hours off to a bad start.

In the article, teaching math for social justice isn’t about math or justice; it’s about pursuing a narrow political agenda in the classroom, through the children. Math is relegated to the wings, used as a vehicle through which the agenda is delivered.

The article was in a 2010 special edition of the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics’ Journal for Research in Mathematics Education (JRME). This issue is dedicated to “equity” in math instruction, “with a focus on power and identity.” After years of advocacy, I shouldn’t be surprised by what comes out of the NCTM, but this special edition still was a cold shock.

The NCTM, you’ll recall, is responsible for the current incarnation of “fuzzy” math, born in the depths of hell in the 1980s. Many NCTM presidents and officers have their name on, and fingers in, today’s “reform” math curricula (including the curricula still sucking the lifeblood out of children in Spokane). Unhappily for this author, some now are involved in federal initiatives related to the Common Core State Standards and assessment consortia.

After decades of abject failure of the fuzzy approach, you’d think the NCTM would reject anything that further detracts from learning math. Instead, this trend to teach math through “equity and social justice” is gathering steam, fostered by social activists, self-interested groups like the NCTM – and well-meaning people who don’t realize the intent. For social activists, the agenda isn’t about “equity of opportunity” or justice under the law. It’s political, sociological activism, designed to move students in a specific political direction based on a particular world view. This activism, masquerading as math, is inappropriate and unhelpful. Read the rest of this entry »

Study Finds Lectures Worth Insulting

by Guest Blogger
June 2nd, 2011

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Posted in Assessment and Testing, Education News, Humor, Teaching | 31 Comments »

by Diana Senechal

I am fond of the old-fashioned lecture. It gives me something to sink into, something to think about. It’s often supplemented with discussions and labs, so students don’t just sit and listen. If it is taught well, it can be intriguing, even rousing, even lingering. I remember those packed lecture halls in college, and other superb lecture courses as well.

But I must defer to research-based research. Research has just shown that certain research-based methods bring greater learning gains in physics than the lecture approach. Sarah D. Sparks describes the study in an Education Week blog, but I got curious and decided to read the report for myself (Science, May 13, 2011, available by subscription or purchase only).

Yes, indeed. Researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver conducted a week-long experiment near the end of a year-long physics course. They found—

Wait—for a week? Near the end of a full year?

Don’t interrupt. This blog doesn’t get interactive until I’m done.

Yes, ahem, as I was saying, the students had been taking a lecture course in physics. The lectures were supplemented throughout the year with labs, tutorials, recitations, and assignments. In week 12 of the second semester, the researchers conducted an experiment with two of the three sections of this course. There was a control section (267 students) and an experimental section (271 students).  The instructor of the control section continued teaching through lectures. The instructors of the experimental section used “deliberate practice”—in this case, “a series of challenging questions and tasks that require the students to practice physicist-like reasoning and problem solving during class time while provided with frequent feedback.

The experimental group did much better than the control group on the test, which was administered in the first class session of week 13. All students were informed that this test would not affect their grade but would serve as good practice for the final exam. (Wait—what? —No interruptions. This is your second warning.) In the control section, 171 of the 267 students (64 percent) attended class on the day of the test; 211 out of the 271 students in the experimental section (78 percent) attended. The control section scored an average of 41 percent on the test; the experimental section, 74 percent. Victory for experimental things! Students in both sections took an average of 20 minutes to complete the test. (All this stir over a twenty-minute quizzy-poo that doesn’t affect the grade? —I’ve already warned you. If you interrupt again, I’m calling your parents).

The researchers state confidently at the end:

“In conclusion, we show that use of deliberate practice teaching strategies can improve both learning and engagement in a large introductory physics course as compared with what was obtained with the lecture method. Our study compares similar students, and teachers with the same learning objectives and the same instructional time and tests. This result is likely to generalize to a variety of postsecondary courses.”

Or, as they put it succinctly in the abstract: “We found increased student attendance, higher engagement, and more than twice the learning in the section taught using research-based instruction.”

I am convinced. It doesn’t matter that all of the students had been learning through lecture, lab, tutorial, and recitation all year long. What matters is what happened in this one week. The present is now. What happened was magical. There was learning. Even more learning in the experimental group—oh, much more—than in the control group. What this means—if you can just hold your horses for a moment—I’m telling you, I’m serious, I’ve got my cell phone here—what this means is that we should expand the findings to other courses. We should expand it everywhere! We should get rid of lectures altogether, or, at the very least, insult them.

Sarah D. Sparks seems to agree with the researchers: “While the study focused only on one section of college students, it gives yet more support for educators moving away from lecture-based instruction.” (One does this just as one might slide away from a misfit at a party.) According to Sparks, this study suggests that “interactive learning can be more than twice as effective as lecturing.” Take that, lecture!

Well, anything can be anything, except when it can’t. But that isn’t the point. The point is that lots of people are excited about this, and we really shouldn’t let them down. If I were to be reasonable about it, I’d suggest that “deliberate practice” of this sort works well when students already have a strong foundation. They need to know what they’re practicing. To get rid of the lectures would be simply reckless. But why be reasonable? Insulting can be fun. Bad lecture! Good experiment! More effective! Chopped thoughts! Research-based!

Diana Senechal’s book, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, will be published by Rowman & Littlefield Education in November 2011.

Building a Better Edsel

by Robert Pondiscio
May 20th, 2011

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Teaching | 22 Comments »

Update:  Kitchen Table Math picks up the thread here and here.  Likewise Diana Senechal, guest blogging at Joanne Jacobs, here.

If you’ve spent any time at all on this blog, you’ve been treated—OK, subjected—to occasional rants about mainstream education reform’s blind spot on curriculum and instruction.  Teaching is a management issue; something to be measured by standardized tests.  And curriculum?  Hey, in the hands of a great teacher, every curriculum is great.  Or something like that.  With charters to build, tests to administer and performances to judge reformers remain largely agnostic, incurious or just plain indifferent about what happens inside the classroom.  This myopia informs policy:  Race to the Top enshrined 19 different fixes for American schools.  Curriculum didn’t make the cut.  If you were in charge of fixing America’s schools, could you find 19 things for your To Do list before you get around to curriculum? Seriously?  

A fascinating email found its way into my inbox last week describing a visit to a high profile, “no excuses” charter school.  The email was written by someone who is solidly pro-reform and strongly pro-charter.   She spent the morning visiting Big Name Charter and pronounced herself aghast.  “The school is fantastically well run, and the kids are on task —- and it is all fuzzery all the time. The reading curriculum is Fountas and Pinnell; the math curriculum is so bad it has sparked parent uprisings across the country,” she writes.

“Teachers aren’t allowed to use direct instruction for longer than a few  minutes; then the students must repair to their pods and discover knowledge. After they discover knowledge, which means solving ONE problem, they return to the rug and explain their “strategies” to each other.  Although the school prides itself on efficient use of time, the students I saw were spending a lot of time doing nothing at all while they waited for the other kids to finish so the whole group could migrate back to the rug.  

“Everything was ordered and timed and assessed, yet the curriculum is crap,” the observer concludes.  

How can this happen, she wanted to know, in a school that prides itself on data-driven decision-making?  What kind of data, she asked, did they use when it came time to choose a curriculum?  Tellingly, she notes it was the one moment where her host “suddenly sounded like a regular denizen of public education.”

“Tests can’t tell you that much about whether a curriculum is good because some of the kids taking the tests might have been tired that day; the only way you can decide on curriculum is to go into the classroom and ask a child a question and get his response. That’s how you “know.”  

“This is a data-driven school, and they don’t use data to choose curriculum,” she fumed.  I wish I could say I’m surprised.  When it comes to curriculum and instruction, a field that can’t reach consensus about anything suddenly treats what children should learn and how they should learn it as settled.  If your primary concern is measuring teacher perfomance, you are assuming–are you not?–that what is to be taught and learned has been established.  All that’s left to do is separate good practitioners from bad ones.

If you had a time machine and put a team of leading ed reformers in charge of the Edsel at Ford Motor Company 50 years ago, they would set to work energetically measuring the productivity of assembly workers (because we know—we know—that great assembly workers are the most important contributor to success in manufacturing). They would put a bonus plan in place to reward them when sales improved.  And when that failed, they would shut down plants turning out Edsels that sold poorly and build brand new plants.  

To make more Edsels.  

Meanwhile, across town, critics point to wages and working conditions and ask how assembly workers can build better Edsels when they can’t feed their families or afford better health care?  You can’t possibly fix the Edsel unless you fix that first.

Back to Big Name Charter School.  By all available data, the school described above is doing very, very well. That said, the oldest students are still young, and the big challenges lie ahead: Will they avoid the 8th grade slump?  Will they keep their low-income, minority students in the fold through high school?  What then?  

The long view may be slowly, quietly emerging–as it should and must–as the question in education reform.  To their great credit, KIPP recently released a remarkable report on the college completion rates of its students.  It shows “only 33 percent of students who completed a KIPP middle school 10 or more years ago have graduated from a four-year college.”  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be.  It’s slightly better that the 30% college completion rate of Americans at large, and four times better than the average for the low-income minority population KIPP serves. That’s no mean feat. But the feel-good narrative driven by boosters of these schools — high graduation rates, first kids in their families to go to college, etc. – has tended to obscure how bewilderingly difficult it is to fulfill the mission that schools like Big Name Charter have set for themselves—to get kids not through the next standardized test, but on to college and the royal road to upward mobility and productive adult lives.  

How hard is that?  Bear in mind that based on the 2010 ACT test results, fewer than one in four U.S. high school graduates (24%) are prepared to do C-level work or better in all four tested areas.  That’s ALL college-bound students—not the hard-to-serve students typically served by KIPP and other “no excuses” charters, including the one visited by my correspondent.  Seen through this prism, even closing the achievement gap starts to seem like small beer.   It means nothing less (and nothing more) than bringing under-represented students up to the very same level of mediocrity that has persisted across the board for decades.  

The bottom line: There are undoubtedly process problems in American education.  But the biggest problem is the product.  And rather than face up to this, many of our most dynamic and energetic education leaders remain committed to the best possible delivery of the worst possible product.  Billions of dollars and countless energy expended in search of ways to build the best possible Edsel.  
 
I remain deeply impressed by the purposefulness, energy, positive school tone, etc. of the best of the “no excuses” schools.  But to answer the question “Are these schools effective?” will take many more years.  My best guess is that absent a much more rigorous course of study, an end to our obsession with skills-focused education, and getting over our long-standing aversion to a content-rich curriculum, you will over time see a fadeout.  Many of the kids in these schools will do well, and certainly far better than they would have otherwise.   Many more will regress to the mean.  And then we will conclude that the issue is poor teaching, lack of accountability, incentives, unions, the inevitable effects of poverty, lack of parental support and blah, blah, blah.

And no one will think to mention the curriculum.

Known Knowns vs. Known Unknowns

by Robert Pondiscio
April 11th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Research and Reports | 9 Comments »

As a field, education often seems long on beliefs, but short on knowledge.  We might believe that technology or small group work improves student learning, for example.  But how do we really know?

Writing in the Teachers College Record, Dan Willingham suggests education needs a “What’s Known Clearinghouse” to provide teachers with current and accurate summaries of education research, similar to digests available to physicians and other professions.  Isn’t this what the IES’s What Works Clearinghouse is supposed to do?  The WWC summarizes the research literature on various curriculum and teaching methods, but says nothing about basic scientific research that might have implications for teaching.  “For example, basic research on human cognition, or on the social lives of teenagers, or sex differences would seem applicable to educational practice,” Willingham writes. “A teacher might want to know the latest research on how children’s memories work, even if this research has not been instantiated in a particular classroom program,” he notes.

“The need for better information about research is not hard to see. Type “learning styles lesson plans” into an internet search engine and you’ll get thousands of hits. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim is scientific, namely that a learning style is part of the mind’s architecture, that differences in learning styles are well characterized, and that that individuals can be categorized on this basis. The data do not support this claim.”

A What’s Known Clearinghouse, Willingham suggests, “would provide summaries of research on topics that are relevant to education, but are not themselves education applications” such as the role in learning of nutrition or stress or various medications. 

“While there may not be studies to evaluate programs and practices borne of this knowledge, there is clear value in teachers knowing, for example, that a great deal of data collected in the last five years indicates that kids are not especially good at multi-tasking, or that, despite what their textbook might have said twenty years ago, the latest evidence indicates that children’s cognitive development does not progress in discrete stages. Such insights can and should be put into practice by reflective educators now, not only in formal programs such as those evaluated in the What Works Clearinghouse, but in the hundreds of decisions a teacher makes each day.”

Perhaps the greatest benefit of Dan’s idea might be making it difficult for hucksters to abuse the term “research-based” in promoting their wares.  It might also short-circuit the endless fads that plague education from getting a toe-hold.  For example, it has become a bromide among 21st century skills faddists that technology “changes the way children’s brains work.”  As Willingham notes:

“Brain change in response to technology is nothing special. The brain changes as a consequence of any experience you have.  Becoming a soccer fan changes your brain. Reading this article changes your brain. Experience with technology is unlikely to change the fundamental processes by which we learn, deploy attention, reason, and so forth. These processes are too hardwired to be radically altered. Experience will yield tweaks, not a major overhaul.”

“The current model of information dissemination–a free for all–is not serving the field well,” notes Willingham. ”There is not an invisible hand guiding the marketplace of ideas towards scientific accuracy. It’s time to try something more proactive,” he concludes.

The End of the Rock Star Teacher

by Robert Pondiscio
February 15th, 2011

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Posted in Education Practice, Educational Policy, Teaching | 40 Comments »

Note: A version of this post appears today on the website of Education Next, which recently asked me to review Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion and Steve Farr’s Teaching as Leadership.   The review of the Lemov will run in the upcoming issue of Ed Next, but is on the magazine’s website today.  A blog post about the Farr book appears here.   — rp.

The first five words of Doug Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, are “Great teaching is an art.”  This is not a promising start. 

Well over three million women and men stand in front of classrooms every day in the U.S.  It is too much to hope for, and always will be, that more than a small percentage of them will be artists, great, bad or mediocre.  The degree to which we pin our hopes for large scale school improvement on attracting artists and rock stars to the classroom is the degree to which we plan to fail.  With an average salary of $52,000—an income level on par with electricians, probation officers, and funeral directors – teachers will not be recruited exclusively from the top ranks of college graduates. 

All is not lost.  After dispensing with those five poorly chosen words, Lemov spends the next 300 pages of his remarkable book completely contradicting his opening sentence, demonstrating in convincing detail that teaching is not an art at all, but a craft—a series of techniques that can be identified, learned, practiced and perfected.  In doing so, he has produced what may be the most important education book in a generation.  His focused, obsessively practical study of what makes teachers effective could—and should—shift the terms of our increasingly vitriolic national debate from “teacher quality to “quality teaching.”  This is no mere semantic distinction.  The difference is not who is in the front of the room. The difference is what that person does.  Lemov’s achievement is to examine effective teaching at the molecular level.   By doing so, he may have rescued education reform from its implicit dependence on classroom saints and superheroes.   It is an indispensible shift.  If teaching effectively is something for the best and the brightest, rather than the merely dedicated and diligent, education reform is finished, now and forever. Read the rest of this entry »

“We Don’t Know What We’re Supposed to Be Doing”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 11th, 2011

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Posted in Education News, Education Practice | 24 Comments »

“We don’t know what we are supposed to be doing, but we are learning about math,” says Thea Burnett, 6, describing her, er, classroom to a New York Times reporter.  The piece, “60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud New Way to Learn,” describes “an audacious public education experiment” in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. 

One should never judge from media reports, even from the New York Times, but it doesn’t sound like the audacious experiment is going very well.

“Across the room, a second teacher, Jennifer McSorley, successfully led the class’s weakest students in a counting rhyme. But when she leaned forward out of her chair to write a word on an easel, a 6-year-old boy moved it, and she fell when she tried to sit back down.”

“’Jahmeer, sit down,’” Ms. McSorley demanded, unharmed but flustered. “I could have hurt myself very badly.” Then another boy ran off to hide under an easel. Someone grabbed someone else’s pennies. The noise snowballed.”

The school is the brainchild of Shimon Waronker, who won lavish praise for his unconventional leadership in turning around a troubled Bronx middle school.  “The school stresses student independence over teacher-led lessons, scientific inquiry over rote memorization and freedom and self-expression over strict structure and discipline,” the Times reports. 

“But Mr. Waronker decided to try out the model in one of the nation’s toughest learning environments, a high poverty elementary school in which 20 percent of the children have been found to have emotional, physical or learning disabilities. The idea, he said, was to prove that his method could help any child, and should be widely used elsewhere. ‘I didn’t want to create an environment that wasn’t real for everyone else and then say, look at my success,’ he said.”

I appreciate the impulse to break the mold and innovate.  But let me propose a litmus test for innovation, and the earnest desire to prove one’s methods:  Bring your audacious experiments to the children in public schools of Greenwich, Grosse Point and Cupertino.  See if you can sell it to their parents.  If it won’t fly there, think carefully before inflicting it on other people’s children–especially those who already have the smallest margins for error in their education.

Singapore Math Is “Our Dirty Little Secret”

by CKF
October 6th, 2010

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Posted in Curriculum, Education Practice, Parents, Teaching | 42 Comments »

The following guest post is from Barry Garelick, co-founder of the U.S. Coalition for World Class Math, an education advocacy organization that addresses mathematics education in U.S. schools.

The New York Times ran a story on September 30 about Singapore Math being used in some schools in the New York City area.  Like many newspaper stories about Singapore Math, this one was no different.  It described a program that strangely sounded like the math programs being promoted by reformers of math education, relying on the cherished staples of reform: manipulatives, open-ended problems, and classroom discussion of problems.  The only thing the article didn’t mention was that the students worked in small groups.

Those of us familiar with Singapore Math from having used it with our children are wondering just what program the article was describing.  Spending a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in Kindergarten?  Spending an entire 4th grade classroom period discussing the place value ramifications of the number 82,566?   Well, maybe that did happen, but not because the Singapore Math books are structured that way. In fact, the books are noticeably short on explicit narrative instruction.  The books provide pictures and worked out examples and excellent problems; the topics are ordered in a logical sequence so that material mastered in the various lessons builds upon itself and is used to advance to more complex applications.  But what is assumed in Singapore is that teachers know how to teach the material—the teacher’s manuals contain very little guidance.  Thus, the decision to spend a week on the numbers 1 and 2 in kindergarten, or a whole class period discussing a single number is coming from the teachers, not the books.

The mistaken idea that gets repeated in many such articles is that Singapore Math differs from other programs by requiring or imparting a “deep understanding” and that such understanding comes about through a) manipulatives, b) pictures, and c) open-ended discussions.  In fact, what the articles represent is what the schools are telling the reporters. What newspapers frequently do not realize when reporting on Singapore Math, is that when a school takes on such a program, it means going against what many teachers believe math education to be about; it is definitely not how they are trained in ed schools.  The success of Singapore’s programs relies in many ways on more traditional approaches to math education, such as explicit instruction and giving students many problems to solve, in some ways its very success represented a slap in the face to American math reformers, many of whom have worked hard to eliminate such techniques being used.

Singapore Math does not rely heavily on manipulatives as so many articles represent.  It does make use of pictures, but even that is misrepresented. Singapore makes use of a technique known as “bar modeling”.  It is a very effective technique and is glommed onto as the be-all end-all of the program, when in fact, it is only a part of an entire package.  People mistakenly believe that all you have to do is teach kids how to draw the right kind of pictures and they can solve problems.  (In fact, there are now books written that provide explicit instruction on how to solve problems using bar modeling—meant to supplement Singapore’s books. That such books rely on a rote-like procedure is ironic considering that reforms criticize US programs as being based on rote instruction.)  Pictorial representation is indeed a gateway to abstraction, but there are other pathways that Singapore uses as well.  Singapore’s strength is the logical consistency of the development of mathematical concepts. And much to the chagrin of educators who may have learned differently, mastery of number facts and arithmetic procedures is part and parcel to conceptual understanding.  Starting with conceptual understanding and using procedures to underscore it is an invitation to disaster—such approach is making profits for  outfits like Sylvan, Huntington and Kumon.

The underlying message in articles such as the Times’ is that math education is bad in the U.S. because it is not being taught according to the ideals of reforms—and the reason it is successful in Singapore is because it is being taught that way.  Never considered is the possibility that the reform minded methods and textbooks written to implement them are one of the root causes of poor math education in this country.  Katharine Beals in her blog “Out in Left Field” does an excellent job describing this.

A friend of mine recently admonished me for my criticism of the article.  At least schools are using Singapore Math and it is getting worthwhile publicity, he said.  Fortunately, the logical structure and word problems in Singapore’s books are so good it will work in spite of the disciples of reform.  My friend is right.  If the education community wants to think that Singapore Math is student-centered and inquiry-based and the realization of US reforms, let them think it.  For those of us who know better, it will remain our dirty little secret.

Barry Garelick is an analyst for the U.S. EPA and plans to teach math when he retires this year.  He has written articles on math education in Education Next and Educational Horizons.

Thou Shalt Use Manipulatives

by Robert Pondiscio
September 7th, 2010

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Posted in Education Practice, Teaching | 29 Comments »

“Why are your desks in rows, Mr. Pondiscio?” asked the assistant principal. “You’re supposed to have your students in groups.”

“Why is that?”

“Research shows children learn better in groups.  We socialize intelligence.”

“Sorry?  What research?  Doesn’t it make more sense to have them work in groups when doing a group activity?  Half the class is facing away from me when we’re doing something whole class and I need their attention.”

“Mr. Pondiscio, you should NEVER be doing whole class work!  It’s important to differentiate instruction at all times.  The research shows it’s how kids learn best. And where are your math manipulatives?  They should be within easy reach at all times.”

“What if my lesson doesn’t include manpulatives?  Then pattern blocks become projectiles.”

“Not include manipulatives?  What are you talking about?  The district wants to see manipulatives for differentiation at ALL times.  Kinesthetic learners need…”

“Are you aware that there’s really no scientific basis for the belief in learning styles?”

“Mr. Pondiscio, don’t argue with me.  The district wants children in groups at all times.  They don’t want to see whole class instruction ever.  And when they do a walk-through, they expect to see manipulatives out or in reach.  If you have a problem with that, take it up with the instructional supervisor.”

While I’m making the dialogue up, I had a variations of this conversation more times than I care to remember.  I was reminded of this while reading Dan Willingham’s latest over at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  “For each of the following pairs,” Dan writes, “which will lead to better learning?”

A verbal explanation of a concept
A verbal explanation with manipulatives

A lecture with PowerPoint slides
A workshop where participants produce a product

Trick questions, of course.  There is no one right answer.  Willingham writes:

“Each choice just describes a method of conveying information. What matters is how effectively the method is used to convey the desired content.  Furthermore, some methods fit certain types of content better than other types. And the form-content combination may also be more or less effective, depending on what the learner already knows.”

This, of course, is frequently overlooked at the classroom and administrative level where good ideas too often harden into the only acceptable way of doing things “because it’s what ‘they’ want to see.”  Take math manipulatives.  How could they not help, Willingham asks?

They don’t help when they don’t represent that target concept well, or when they have flashy but irrelevant properties that distract the student. Manipulatives can be great, but they have been oversold. Sometimes they help, sometimes they are irrelevant, and sometimes they actually detract from learning.

“Any pedagogic method can be used well or poorly, Dan concludes. ”Depending on what one is trying to teach, some methods will be much easier to use well than others. Blanket evaluations of pedagogic methods—for example, participation equals ‘active learning’—are inaccurate.”

Abe Lincoln’s PowerPoint

In his blog, Willingham tells the story of being invited to speak to a group of teachers.  But his contract forbade the use of PowerPoint because “the latest cognitive research showed that PowerPoint turns people into passive listeners and that participatory activities such as workshops were better.”

A commenter at Joanne Jacobs responds with this priceless link of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address–as a PowerPoint.

Talking Fast, Not Sensibly

by Robert Pondiscio
March 24th, 2010

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Education Practice, Essay | 15 Comments »

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”  Henry David Thoreau, 1854

I was reminded of the above quote from Walden while reading Diana Senechal’s thrilling cover story in the new issue of the American Educator.  Diana is a familiar figure to readers of this blog, but she arrives on the broader stage of education thought with her essay, “The Most Daring Education Reform of All.”  At one level, it is a skeptical look at the “clamor for newness” that marks education reform generally and the specific focus on “21st century skills.”   

           Far too often, the 21st century skills argument carries a tone of urgency, even emergency: We no longer live in a world of books, paper, and pen. Children grow up surrounded by digital media. They can communicate with peers around the world; they can find obscure information in seconds. Yet they are unprepared for the jobs of today. We still treat them as passive recipients of knowledge; we still drill them on facts that they could just as easily Google. If we do not act now, we will lose our global competitiveness—so everyone who cares about our future should jump on board. Employers need people who can create, solve problems, work together, use technology, and think critically. We must make our students critics, innovators, and team players; we should teach them to communicate in the broad sense of the word by infusing their coursework with blogging, recording, filming, texting, collaborating, and tweeting.

But Senechal’s purpose is larger, and she’s not merely raging against the schlock of the new.  The root of generations of ed reform fads is the assumption that schools’ primary objective is “to meet the demands of the day,” she writes.  And that assumption must be questioned.   

          At its fullest and best, education prepares us to be with others and apart, to enjoy the life of the mind, to survive and prosper, to bring up new generations, to act with integrity and conscience, to pursue useful and interesting work, and to participate in civic and cultural action and thought. If schools try to be up to date all the time, then they are reduced to chasing fads and obeying the whims of the market. Part of the schools’ work is to help prepare students for their future occupations, but they do not achieve this by scurrying to meet employers’ demands.

Critics will be tempted to dismiss much of what Senechal has to say as a mere defense of traditional curriculum and teaching.  But they do so at their own peril.  Creativity and innovation, the oft-cited goals of contemporary education require knowledge and practice, she observes. “When we take them too lightly, we encourage and even celebrate shoddiness.  Mediocre creation abounds, as does false innovation,” Senechal writes.  She illustrates this with a particularly pointed anecdote:

          Once I attended a professional development session where we were told about the power of the Internet as motivator for students. The speaker cited the example of a student who, as a result of a blogging project, had become excited about poetry and started posting her own poems on the school blog. I took a look at the poems that evening, Googled a few lines, and saw that all but one were plagiarized—not from first-rate poets, but from websites that featured sentimental and inspirational verse. Why was this not caught earlier? Anyone paying close attention to the poems themselves would likely have suspected that they weren’t hers (the language was an adult’s, and hackneyed at that). The presenters were genuinely excited that the Internet had motivated a student to write; perhaps they chose not to judge the poems lest they interfere with her creative process. This is the danger: when we value creativity (and technology) above the actual quality of the things created, we lose sight of what we are doing and why.

Diana’s piece reminds me that education, and especially education reform, tends to be thick with people that – there’s no nice way to say this—simply don’t much care for education.  It is a means to an end, something to serve the “larger” goals of economic, political, or social progress.  Senechal reminds us that not only is this a dispiriting way to view education, but ultimately, it’s a self-defeating one.

                When the frenzy over 21st century skills passes—and it will—students will see that their opportunities depend largely on their knowledge. Many will graduate with blogging experience, but those who can write a strong essay on a Supreme Court case will be better prepared to enter the fields of history, law, or journalism. Many will have online science portfolios, but those who have studied calculus, read parts of Newton’s Principia, and can prove Kepler’s second law (for example) will be much better prepared to study physics at an advanced level. …The ability to make a YouTube video or podcast will mean little in the long run, if the other things are absent. Moreover, those technologies may be obsolete in another few years, but literature, science, languages, mathematics, history, music, art, and drama will stay.

Ultimately, Diana’s piece is not a rebuke, but a challenge to rise above mindless fealty to the “claims of the present” and “seek out excellence, nurture it, defend it, and live up to it.”  To make change, but to do so  thoughtfully, she concludes, “may be the most daring education reform of all.”

Brilliant stuff.  On a day when most of the education world will be examining the latest NAEP scores, and using the data — the data! — to defend or decry various policies, programs and “theories of action” it is good to be reminded why we get out of bed in the morning.  Or why we should.

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