Movies in School: Seeing Is Believing (Unfortunately)

by Robert Pondiscio
January 5th, 2010

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Posted in Research and Reports, Teaching | 4 Comments »

Good news and bad news about showing movies concerning historical events to students.  The good news is that a film based on a historical event seems to increase student engagement and retention of information.  The bad news is that the information they retain quite likely wrong. 

That’s the upshot of an interesting study highlighted by Dan Willingham on the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  Researchers at Washington University gave undergraduates nine texts, all accurate.   “For six of the texts, there was an accompanying film clip; three were fully accurate, but three had an inaccuracy and thus contradicted the text,” Willingham writes.

Some of the subjects got a general warning about potential inaccuracies in Hollywood movies. Some got the same warning but the inaccuracy in a particular film clip was specified, and the correct information was provided. Some of the subjects were not given any warning at all.” 

So what happened?

Watching the film plus reading a text led to better memory than the text alone, and students expressed greater interest in texts when there was a movie to go along with it.  However, watching the movies “led people to remember the incorrect information at fairly high levels,” says Willingham. “Between a third and half of the time, people answered a question by using the inaccurate information from the movie, rather than accurate information from the text.”

But what about that warning to beware of inaccuracies?  It was only effective if it pinpointed the exact inaccuracy.  A general warning had no effect. 

“Teachers may dislike the idea of using movies in their classrooms that contain inaccuracies, but if they decide to show them to students, they can negate the danger that students will misremember the incorrect information by providing specific information about what is inaccurate,” Willingham concludes.

What Teacher Ed Should Look Like

by Robert Pondiscio
November 2nd, 2009

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Posted in Higher Education, Teacher Training, Teaching | 14 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.”

Trick or Tweet?

by Robert Pondiscio
October 27th, 2009

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Posted in Students, 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.

Rafe Esquith, Excuse Maker

by Robert Pondiscio
August 28th, 2009

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Posted in Teaching | 9 Comments »

Experience, not talent is what makes a great teacher, says the man widely acclaimed to be the nation’s best classroom teacher.  In an interview in Teacher Magazine Rafe Esquith says, “I speak all over the country, and I meet so many great young teachers, and I’m trying to show them that I’m a truly ordinary guy, but because I stuck with it and persevered, I got good at it. Not because of talent, but because of experience!  I’m really trying to encourage a lot of young teachers to try and stick with it and get through those tough times because there are better times ahead if they can do so.”

Asked if every child can be as successful as the kids in his legendary Room 56 at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles, Esquith is unequivocal:

I don’t. I think there are some students where the odds are so far against them because of their family situation and other social issues. But here’s what I do know: There are hundreds of thousands of students in our school district who could be like the students of Room 56, who are absolutely capable, but they’re not being given the opportunity. I do think that the goal should be that we’re going to give every child the opportunity to be the best they can be. Right now, we’re not doing that. And as I always tell the kids, ‘It’s not my job to save your soul, but it’s my job to give you an opportunity to save your own soul.’ I can’t make a kid smarter or better, but I can give them the opportunity to become that and show them how to do that. That’s my job, and that’s a parent’s job creating opportunities.”

Obviously, this is not a page ripped from the no-excuses, teacher-must-overcome-all-obstacles hymnal.  It echoes a bracing moment in the superb 2007 PBS documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans, where Esquith is seen lecturing at a Teach For America conference in Houston.    “I want to let you know that some children should be left behind.  I know, you read your magazine articles, ‘every child is a golden drop of sunshine.’  It’s a lie.  All children must be given an equal opportunity, and our children do not get an equal opportunity.  But once given that equal opportunity, the children have to produce,” he concludes.  Later, offstage, speaking to a handful of young TFA corp members, he goes one step further.  “Anybody who sits in there and goes, ‘I get to all the kids?’ It’s bullshit.  They don’t.’”

Esquith may not be invited to future TFA conferences after his comments in Teacher Magazine.  “The concept for getting some of our very bright students into the classroom is a good one. But to give these folks five weeks of training and throw them into tough classroom situations is questionable to me,” he says. “I’ve had hundreds of TFA people in my classroom, and they’re wonderful. But I don’t think the concept is going to work because nobody is a great teacher after two years.”

Esquith, who has a new book coming out this fall, also admits to being “panicked” about the current state of American education:

I think if we continue along the path that we’re going, our greatest days are behind us. But, I still believe we can turn it around. That’s why I’m still in the classroom, and I’m gonna do my best. But as long as we embrace “testing is everything,” and as long as we keep shrinking art programs and physical education programs, we’re not in a good place. Those are the things that inspire kids to do great things, so I hope we keep enlarging them, not shrinking them.

When a teacher of Esquith’s stature and experience says we’re headed down the wrong path, it’s time to sit up and take notice.

Want to Improve Education? Put Your Best Lessons on YouTube

by Robert Pondiscio
March 31st, 2009

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Posted in Education Theory, Higher Education, Teaching | 11 Comments »

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey looks at the collapse of newspapers and sees higher education on the same trajectory.  I’ll defer to Carey on what the Internet might do to higher ed, but I suspect that as long as there is market value in the credential of a name-brand university degree in addition to the actual product of education, elite colleges needn’t worry about filling their freshmen class.  You can only take the newspaper analogy so far: nobody ever got an interview at a job fair merely by being a reader of The New York Times.

It seems to me there is a bigger opportunity, however, to use technology to radically improve K-12 education.  While not every child goes to a great school or has a great teacher, it seems reasonable to suggest that it’s easier–and faster–to get every child in front of a great teacher online than to get a great teacher in every classroom.  

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has just launched YouTube EDU, a service that puts college lectures online.  Great idea.  But how about K-12, Google?  Why not incentivize teachers to create first-rate videos by splitting advertising revenue from each viewing?  This could create a new source of income for low-paid teachers, and a rich trove of material for students.  While it obviously wouldn’t be a substitute for good classroom instruction, it could certainly supplement bad classroom instruction.  Such a resource would also be a boon for differentiated instruction and enrichment during school, homework help or tutoring after school–and a great resource for homeschoolers or parents whose children are trapped in failing schools. 

When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day — millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids — it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students.  Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will teach their kids how to add unlike fractions.  Undoubtedly there are some real gems among them, some that could produce an “aha” in tens of thousands of kids.  In YouTube, the free distribution channel already exists.  Why not take full advantage of it?

Teaching For High Expectations

by Robert Pondiscio
February 23rd, 2009

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Posted in Curriculum, Higher Education, Teacher Training, Teaching | 2 Comments »

Why go to high school when you can go to school high?  In an anonymous piece on the Radio Free Exile website “Bob Smith,” a 59-year old former science teacher, describes how years of getting high while planning his lessons provided him with “insights into the educational process” and other “truly important things about teaching.”  Take, for example, his solution to the problem of how to explain the concept of density to middle schoolers.

Suddenly, a flash of the legendary insight: I just won’t teach density. Not at all. Never again. Now, as first year teachers learn, you teach what they tell you to teach. But as some teachers soon learn, you can teach what you like if everything you do works. I had been pretty successful in all the other areas of science I was teaching, and I realized that I would be doing everyone a favor if I unilaterally declared that piece of the pie dispensable, which I did, and I’m sure that no one ever missed it.

Believing he was at his most inventive and insightful while stoned, Saturdays became the day when Smith ruminated on his teaching, wrote curriculum, made plans, and got high.  “I sometimes laugh to myself when something I’ve designed has gone over well with the students. They would be amazed at the conditions under which the ideas were hatched,” Smith writes.

In fact, I should go so far as to confess that when discussing drugs with students – a requirement of science curriculum in those grades – I have presented to the students the positives as well as the negatives of marijuana use, including ‘reports’ that people often feel more creative and insightful, and that people smoke it because it’s fun. This is an important part of the drug education piece that is always omitted: telling kids why people use drugs.

If you’re concerned about having a teacher like “Bob Smith” giving his fair and balanced view of recreational drug use to kids, fear not.  He’s no longer teaching middle school.  He’s now an ed school professor. 

Higher ed, indeed.

Student-Delivered PD?

by Robert Pondiscio
November 5th, 2008

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Posted in Teacher Training | 6 Comments »

I like Scott McLeod’s thoughtful and often provocative ed tech blog Dangerously Irrelevant.  But I’m a little skeptical about an idea he’s floating.  He starts off a new post with two self-evident observations:  1) Most staff development is awful, and 2) Kids are often technology “experts” on technology.  No argument there. But he follows those ideas off a cliff, proposing a Big Idea:  Have students deliver technology-related professional development for teachers.

The kids get the learning power and social/emotional benefit of being teachers and leaders. Adults and other students learn from the true experts. All we have to do is walk away from our egos and our fear and embrace our mission statements, the ones that say that we all should be learners and say nothing about from whom we must learn. How about it? You ready to start doing this?

How about no?  I applaud McLeod’s premise and agree that we should give kids every opportunity to be the experts.   Letting them be responsible for classroom computer maintenance and training for parents and younger students would be useful and “authentic.”  Perhaps I’m just quibbling about the what constitutes “professional development.”  But training that simply tells teachers how to use tech tools doesn’t meet my definition of professional development.  Good technology P.D. should be focused on effective instruction using technology — technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself – and that is (one assumes) beyond what a student can deliver.  We should be past the point of thinking we’re teaching with technology because we have computers and smart boards in the classroom.

Essential Reading for Teachers

by Robert Pondiscio
October 22nd, 2008

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Posted in Opinion | 1 Comment »

Dan Brown’s memoir of his first year as a New York City teacher, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, is out in paperback.  I will freely admit my bias: Dan’s book resonated with me because his experience as a New York City Teaching Fellow assigned to a school in the Bronx mirrored my own experience so closely.  Still, Dan is a fine writer and Great Expectations is a great read. 

Top 5 Teacher Books, anyone?  Off the top of my head, here’s my list:

1. Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder
I’d pay to read Tracy Kidder’s grocery list. 

2. Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire, Rafe Esquith
Esquith’s essential optimism re-energized me on many occasions.  Try to find even a sentence of “woe-is-me-this-is-too-hard” in his book.  The man’s a saint. 

3. The Essential 55: An Award-Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child, by Ron Clark 
The original New Paternalism.  Go ahead and mock Clark’s highly prescriptive measures, but this book made me a better teacher.  What higher praise can there be?

4.  There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America, by Alex Kotlowitz
Not a teacher book per se, but a first-rate account of childhood in urban poverty. Kotlowitz avoids the tendency to sentimentalize the lives of the urban poor, and his book is all the more powerful for it. 

5.  Ms. Moffett’s First Year, Abby Goodnough
My favorite book about the alternative certification experience before Dan’s came along.

While not a teacher memoir, or even an education book, the one I’d make required reading for any new urban teacher would be Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.  I wish before I’d become a teacher, someone had merely handed the book to me and said, “Just read this. Everything you need to know is in here.”

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

by Robert Pondiscio
September 2nd, 2008

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Posted in Education News | 2 Comments »

Great teaching, not great buildings, make for a first-rate education, says Jay Mathews in the Washington Post. 

Ten years ago, I wrote a book about high schools with golden reputations in some of the country’s most expensive suburbs. They were full of Advanced Placement classes and fine teachers, but I was astonished at how bad some of the buildings were. Mamaroneck High School, in one of the most affluent parts of Westchester County, N.Y., had three 66-year-old boilers that repeatedly broke down and many clocks that didn’t work. La Jolla High School, north of San Diego, full of science fair winners, was a collection of stained stucco classrooms and courtyards of dead grass.

Mathews is right, of course, but while some in education use poor facilities as an excuse for underachievement, let’s not make excuses for miserable facilities either.  I taught for years in a poorly maintined 110-year-old building in the South Bronx, whose construction predated indoor plumbing and electricity and seemed to reject both like badly matched donor organs.  Pigeons roosted in the lighting fixtures if you forgot to close the windows at night.  There wasn’t so much as a slide on the playground.   There wasn’t a playground.  On its best days it was an physically uncomfortable place to go to school.  A few blocks away, the local library remained shuttered for years while it operated out of a trailer.  It’s hard to imagine upper crust Manhattanites abiding these kinds of conditions for long for their children.  Where your treasure is, there your heart will be. 

“It might be better if we spent our money on principals and teachers who inspire, who don’t take lethargy or resentment for an answer,” says Mathews. “Put educators like that in the rickety buildings we have, and stand back.”

Stand back indeed.  It smarts to be struck by falling plaster. 

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