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New standards require new ways to train teachers

February 5, 2012 By 4 Comments

Teachers aren’t prepared to teach the new Common Core Standards, writes Stephanie Hirsch of Leaning Forward in Ed Week.

Because the common core focuses on the application of knowledge in authentic situations, teachers will need to employ instructional strategies that integrate critical and creative thinking, collaboration, problem-solving, research and inquiry, and presentation and demonstration skills. They will need subject-area expertise well beyond basic content knowledge and pedagogy to create dynamic, engaging, high-level learning experiences for students. They will need greater data literacy as we shift from current accountability systems to more granular ways of assessing student learning. And, their leaders will need to champion professional learning in their buildings and back the teachers who coach and support each other.

The traditional “spray and pray” method of professional development doesn’t work, Hirsch writes. What would?

Why not let teachers teach teachers?, asks Nancy Flanagan of Teacher in a Strange Land. “Professional Development assumes that someone knows better than a teacher” what teachers need to know.

. . .  teachers aren’t considered true professionals–and policy is leading us further away from a professional work model. We’re still talking about “training” teachers, rather than drawing on their wisdom.

Finally–probably the most significant reason–professional development is an education market. What would happen if teacher development happened internally, entirely site-based and tailored to particular schools and populations? It would require demonstrated, deep teacher expertise in instruction and curricular issues. Which could shift the balance of power. And it would cost very little.

The GE Foundation is giving $18 million to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit which is working with teachers to develop an online library of resources for teaching the new standards at achievethecore.org.

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When the feds try to fix schools . . .

February 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons from a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America s Schools, edited by Rick Hess and Andrew P. Kelly, looks at what Uncle Sam does and doesn’t do well. Contributors include Ron Ferguson, Mike Smith, Larry Berger, Charlie Barone, Maris Vinovskis, Mike Casserly, Checker Finn, Mark Schneider, Liz DeBray, Pat McGuinn, Jennifer Wallner, Paul Manna, Josh Dunn and Jane Hannaway.

Hess has more in Ed Week on the book and on an American Enterprise Institute discussion on Education 2012: What the Election Year Will Mean for Education Policy.

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UM crafts national standards for teacher ed

February 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The University of Michigan’s TeachingWorks is developing national standards for teacher education, reports Inside Higher Ed.

Aspiring English instructors were supposed to be mastering their craft in the teacher education class Francesca Forzani observed.

Forzani, a former English teacher, looked on in horror as the students spent an entire semester debating what a high school reading list should look like. More contemporary or classical literature? Perhaps multicultural books?

“They never practiced anything as simple as introducing students to a text,” said Forzani, who observed the class as part of an auditing process.

Forzani, associate director of TeachingWorks, said education professors discuss issues and theories but devote too little time to the practical challenges of teaching. As a result, more than 60 percent of teachers say they weren’t prepared for the classroom in a federal survey.

TeachingWorks will stress “leading a classroom discussion, crafting small-group projects and conferencing with parents”  and 16 other teaching skills.

. . . the goal of TeachingWorks is to highlight traits that every good teacher needs, whether the fourth-grade math class they’re leading is in Tacoma or Tampa.

Forzani hopes TeachingWorks’ standards will be used not just by college-based teacher education programs but also by alternatives such as Teach for America.

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Florida vouchers draw lowest achievers

February 3, 2012 By 7 Comments

Voucher schools don’t “cherry pick” the best students, writes Jon East on redefinED.  Students who use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship are among the lowest performers at the low-performing public schools they leave behind, according to a new study (pdf) by Cassandra Hart, a UC-Davis education professor.

Compared to other low-income students at their public schools, voucher students are poorer and earn lower test scores. They’re more likely to be black. They’ve left schools with low scores and high rates of violence. In addition, voucher-using students tend to have few public school choices nearby, but a variety of accessible private schools.

Parents have to go to effort and some expense to qualify for a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, so these are the children of committed parents. However, that commitment hasn’t translated into academic success, Hart finds.

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Is homework worth it? Kids say so

February 3, 2012 By 11 Comments

Jessica Lahey hates homework, but she assigns it — if it passes the Ben test, she writes on a New York Times parenting blog. “If an assignment is not worthy of my own (middle-school) son’s time, I’m dumping it. Based on a quick look at my assignment book from last year, about a quarter of my assignments won’t make the cut.”

Parents are complaining about “horrible homework” burdens, Lahey writes. In Race to Nowhere, which is very popular with affluent parents, filmmaker Vicki Abeles “claims that today’s untenable and increasing homework load drives students to cheating, mental illness and suicide.”

I asked my students whether, if homework were to completely disappear, they would be able achieve the same mastery of the material. The answer was a unanimous — if reluctant — “No.”

Most echoed my son Ben’s sentiments: “If I didn’t have homework, I don’t think I’d do very well. It’s practice for what we learn in school.” But, they all stressed, that’s only true of some homework.

Teachers should be careful not to assign busy work, Lahey writes. “Children need time to be quiet, play, read and imagine.”

 

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KIPP = Nazi Germany?

February 3, 2012 By 55 Comments

In musing about democracy on Bridging Differences, Deborah Meier equates KIPP and other “no excuses” schools with Nazi Germany‘s schools.

What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their “no excuses” ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there’s a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong. . . . Life is never so simple that we can award points for “badness” on a fixed numerical scale of bad-to-good. As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I’d be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives.

KIPP schools don’t suspend students for misbehavior or send them out of class. Instead, they sit in a separate area with the school polo shirt inside out until they’ve apologized to their teacher and classmates and the apology has been accepted. I assume that’s what Meier means by humiliation.

The moral code that equates “being good and not getting caught” baffles me. What is she talking about?

Life is not simple, but surely it’s possible for teachers to award merit or demerit points to students for good or bad classroom behavior without turning into Nazis.

After all, very few schools try to operate as democracies.

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Duncan pushes e-textbooks

February 2, 2012 By 20 Comments

The Obama administration wants an e-textbook in every student’s hand by 2017, writes USA Today.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski and Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants states to use textbook funding for digital learning materials and tablet computers. They’ll jawbone companies to lower prices to schools.

Administration officials say Web-connected instructional materials help students learn more efficiently and give teachers real-time information on how well kids understand material. “We spend $7 billion a year on textbooks, and for many students around the country, they’re out of date,” Genachowski says. In five years, he predicts, “we could be spending less as a society on textbooks and getting more for it.”

While up-front costs for tablet computers are high — new iPads start at $499 — he says moving from paper to digital “saves a ton of money” in the long run. “We absolutely want to push the process.”

Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio said the enthusiasm around educational technology is “magical thinking.”

“I wish there was even 10% as much thought as to what is going to come through these devices as in getting them into kids’ hands,” he says. “It’s not a magic bullet. We need to worry about what is on these tablets while they’re sitting in kids’ laps.”

Karen Cator, the U.S. Department of Education’s technology director, says tablet computers will extend the school day and engage students.

In my school days, I’d go home, finish my homework and read for three hours or so. OK, I was not normal, even among my studious friends. But I don’t think that gee-whiz devices will engage kids who don’t read well. Not for long, anyhow.

On a visit to my mother this week, I picked up a 1945 book on teaching remedial reading that must be left over from her master’s program in education back in the ’50s. (It advocates delaying phonics till second grade, after students have memorized a bunch of sight words.) Among the strategies for motivating struggling readers, the author suggested letting them use a typewriter to write the new words they’ve learned. Kids will be excited by the technology, the professor wrote.

I’m sure that e-books are the wave of the future, but schools should be careful not to spend before they’ve figured out how new learning materials will improve learning.  Do students need an iPad? A Kindle or Nook equivalent? Some new, cheaper device not yet available? Yes, publishers will lower prices to compete for market share, but schools need to make sure they’re not locked into one company’s products or blocked from using free open-source materials.

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If it works for struggling math students …

February 2, 2012 By 3 Comments

Explicit instruction in math — once the traditional way to teach — works for struggling and learning-disabled students. It would work for all students, argues Barry Garelick on Education News.

What Works Clearinghouse finds strong evidence that explicit instruction is an effective intervention, stating: “Instruction during the intervention should be explicit and systematic. This includes providing models of proficient problem solving, verbalization of thought processes, guided practice, corrective feedback, and frequent cumulative review.”.

Also, the final report of the President’s National Math Advisory Panel (pdf) states: “Explicit instruction with students who have mathematical difficulties has shown consistently positive effects on performance with word problems and computation.

Learning disability diagnoses increased for years until the advent of early intervention programs for high-risk students, Garelick writes. Now fewer students are being labeled as learning disabled. He believes effective interventions, such as explicit, systematic instruction, deserve some of the credit.

 

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A teacher reviews her performance review

February 1, 2012 By 20 Comments

An English and journalism teacher for six years, Coleen Bondy ranked as low average in her effect on students’ test scores this year. The value-added scores — based only on her least-motivated students — are “practically useless in evaluating teacher performance,” she writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed.

It’s hard for those who finished high school 20 or 30 years ago, as I did, to fathom the conditions in a typical L.A. Unified high school classroom these days. Classes are huge. Students face overwhelming family and social issues. Drugs are rampant. Students are incredibly disrespectful, testing authority constantly at the beginning of the year. Teachers must be able to get a strong grip on their classes all by themselves because consequences for bad behavior in class are often nonexistent outside it.

. . . Today’s teacher must be highly skilled in her subject matter just to make it into the classroom, more so than at any other time in the history of education. She also must play the role of parent, custodian, psychologist, drug and alcohol interventionist and parole officer, to name a few.

“Society has decided to blame many of its failings on teachers,” Bondy writes.

If teachers can’t be evaluated fairly based on their students’ progress (compared to their previous progress’ rates) and they can’t be evaluated based on classroom observations, how can they be evaluated?

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Teach to students’ commonalities

February 1, 2012 By 9 Comments

Instead of always trying to individualize instruction or teach to different “learning styles,” teachers should spend more time teaching to what students have in common, advise Daniel Willingham and David Daniel in Educational Leadership. For example, all children need factual knowledge, practice and feedback from a knowledgeable source to learn.

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