NYC Educator headlines this Innovation in the Era of Evaluation.
Critical thinkers who don’t criticize
February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment
‘Adrift’ after college
January 27, 2012 By
People who didn’t learn much in college don’t do well as graduates, concludes a follow-up report by the authors of the controversial Academically Adrift study. Graduates who scored in the bottom quintile on the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a test of thinking skills, were more likely to be unemployed and living with their parents, compared to graduates in the top quintile, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education in ‘Adrift’ in Adulthood.
Thirty-six percent of undergraduates showed no gains in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills,” concluded sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in the earlier study, which became a book. Arum and Roksa surveyed more than 900 of the “Adrift” students to see how they fared after college.
The students scoring in the bottom quintile were three times more likely than those in the top quintile to be unemployed (9.6 percent compared with 3.1 percent), twice as likely to be living at home with parents (35 percent compared with 18 percent), and significantly more likely to have amassed credit-card debt (51 percent compared with 37 percent).
Top-quintile students also were more likely to say they follow the news and discuss politics.
That suggests “the general higher-order skills” tested by the CLA are “real and meaningful,” Arum said.
Though business majors didn’t show much growth on the CLA — and didn’t spend much time studying in college — they were the most likely to find full-time jobs. ”Perhaps it’s going to catch up to them down the road,” Arum said.
Technology can personalize learning
October 6, 2011 By
Brookings is hosting a conference — available live online — on education technology.
Using Technology to Personalize Learning and Assess Students in Real-Time, a new Brookings study by Darrell West, looks at new ways to teach made possible by technology.
Imagine schools where students master vital skills and critical thinking in a personalized and collaborative manner, teachers assess pupils in real-time, and social media and digital libraries connect learners to a wide range of informational resources. Teachers take on the role of coaches, students learn at their own pace, technology tracks student progress, and schools are judged based on the outcomes they produce. Rather than be limited to six hours a day for half the year, this kind of education moves toward 24/7 engagement and learning full-time.
Technology alone won’t remake education, West writes. Schools will need to change their organizational structure and rethink teaching and assessment.
Fixing America’s worst schools
March 30, 2011 By
Fixing “America’s worst schools” is no picnic, even with federal grants, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Most of the story deals with Wendell Phillips Academy on Chicago’s South Side, where 27 percent of ninth graders read at the third grade level or below.
With a U.S. history class of only 10 juniors and seniors, Joyce Randolph has spent weeks discussing: Just how revolutionary was the American Revolution? She asks students to rephrase the question.
Finally she gets a response from one young man: “Did the Revolution bring about significant change?”
“Awesome!” says Ms. Randolph, as she points to another student. “Curtis, what does ‘significant’ mean?”
She’s met with a blank stare. Silence.
Last year, less than 5 percent of Phillips students met state academic standards. Fights were frequent.
Chicago Public Schools gave control of the school — and $5 million in federal turnaround grants over the next five years — to the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL). The principal and all the teachers were fired. The new principal, Terrance Little, rehired only the two ROTC teachers. He instituted uniforms and a dress code, and a zero-tolerance policy for fighting. When he visited Phillips last year, it was a “zoo,” Little says.
“There was food fighting in the cafeterias, and kids were always fighting in the hallways,” recalls Eric Darko, a soft-spoken senior from Ghana, as he builds a complex tower after school for a Science Olympiad. “It was horrible bad. We didn’t learn anything.” This year, he says, things are better. “The teachers are always on time and on track.”
Freshmen now stay at school an extra hour each day. Little also made the grading scale tougher after seeing A students with abysmal ACT scores.
I used to be an AP student on the honor roll, and now I’ve got an F,” says Tyrice McClaren, who is eating an unappetizing looking chicken sandwich from the cafeteria.
The new teachers have agreed to common teaching practices, such as starting each class with a “Do now” assignment and ending with an “exit slip” on which students are asked how well they understood the material. They try to keep their expectations high.
In her class, Randolph uses a “document-based questions” curriculum, which asks students to examine historical papers for evidence. Originally designed for Advanced Placement students, it is a rigorous program that she believes pushes them to think critically. On the other hand, she notes, her class is still on the American Revolution in February . . .
It seems hopeless. Twenty-seven percent of the ninth graders read at the third grade level or below.
Update: Student misbehavior pushes teachers out of the profession,writes Will Fitzhugh. Students who want to learn are cheated, because their teachers have to spend so much time trying to control disruptive students. He wants to push out disruptive students.
It should be easy to send disruptive students home with access to online classes. They’re not likely to learn much, but their former teachers and classmates would benefit.
Phillips Academy’s new principal abolished in-school suspension and boosted the expulsion rate to control fighting and other zoo-like behavior.
Teaching skills without content
February 26, 2011 By
“Emma Bryant” (a pseudonym) teaches at a New Tech public high school — one of 62 in 14 states — devoted to “21st-century skills.” Knowledge? Not so much, she writes on the Common Core blog.
We practice project based learning, utilize the latest technology, and hold to a mission of helping our students acquire “21st century skills.”
Innovation, collaboration and critical thinking are stressed, leaving little time for literature, history, poetry, music or theater. The theory is that “most content, after all, can be Googled.”
Roughly once a month we present students with a new project which must result in a “product.” According to our model the more “real world” the product, the better. Real world, meaning the product mirrors what could reasonably be demanded in a corporate setting — from a redesigned company logo and slogan to a promotional video or a press release.
Students work in small teams to complete projects, with each team member receiving the same grade at the end. After all, it’s not about what individual students learn but the final product. Students are assessed on a handful of learning outcomes — collaboration, communication, innovation, work ethic, technological literacy, information literacy and content. Content usually makes up between 15 and 30 percent of a student’s grade.
In a 21st century classroom, “content is a shopping list of rubric indicators to be applied to the product.”
For example, students might work a quote from a short story into a reworded company slogan. Or perhaps they might work with Photoshop to create a company logo depicting an event from European history. They might write a press release in the style of a founding American document or create a user’s manual for a product using a particular rhetorical device mentioned in our state’s English Language Arts standards.
Teachers don’t teach content directly. Students are supposed to learn in teams or on their own with little or no direction from the teacher.
Dialogue, questions, critical thinking, and debate surrounding content are low on the list of things you will see in a 21st century classroom. And so students end up with convoluted ideas about history, a cursory understanding of and appreciation for literature, and a shaky foundation in math and science.
Also see Critical Thinking: More Than Words? in Ed Week’s Leader Talk.
Is our college students learning?
January 19, 2011 By
Is our college students learning? Many college students aren’t learning “critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills,” concludes a new study of undergraduates at a broad range of colleges and universities.
After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called “higher order” thinking skills.
Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Colleges are testing a voluntary accountability system that measures students’ progress and graduation rates.
What tests are best?
September 24, 2010 By
Under No Child Left Behind, tests don’t measure what’s important, writes Susan Engel, director of the teaching program at Williams College, in a New York Times op-ed.
Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: The ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.
Hooey, responds Katharine Beals of Out in Left Field.
Completely absent from Engel’s proposals is content knowledge — unless “dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live” includes things like world geography, American history, and current events in Pakistan. This, despite the fact that the latest cognitive science research indicates that “higher level” skills neither develop, nor apply, independently of structured, information-rich content.
Also absent are such specific skills as penmanship, decoding, sentence construction, foreign language fluency, balancing chemical equations, and finding the roots to quadratic equations.
A good multiple-choice test can measure “specific skills and rich, structured, factual knowledge,” Beals writes.
But Engel wants to measure students’ vocabulary and grammatical complexity by sampling their writing. These are developmental skills, not academic skills taught by teachers, argues Beals.
Engel suggests having children “Write a description of yourself from your mother’s point of view” in order to “gauge the child’s ability to understand the perspectives of others.”
Again, it’s not clear what purpose this assessment serves–beyond identifying who is and who isn’t on the autistic spectrum.
Similarly problematic is Engel’s proposal to measure reading comprehension levels by having children do an oral reconstruction of a story to a “trained examiner.” What about shy children; what about children were struggle to express themselves orally?
Engel’s proposal to measure literacy levels by “testing a child’s ability to identify the names of actual authors amid the names of non-authors” makes sense only if all students are taught a core curriculum including these authors, Beals writes. Otherwise, this testing penalizes socio-economically disadvantaged children.
It seems to me that school tests should measure what’s taught in school to see if children are getting it. Jaden doesn’t enjoy reading and doesn’t know L. Frank Baum from Franklin Roosevelt. Is this actionable information?
Santa is a fake!
September 4, 2010 By
As an example of critical and deductive thinking, I present this 1988 video shot by my husband, John. (The mom is his first wife, Kate, who died in 2004.) Gina is 10, Michael is 7 and Susie is 4 years old. Santa, who indeed is a fake, was hired from the Mountain View (CA) community services department.
PowerPoint 'makes us stupid'
April 29, 2010 By
The U.S. military is hooked on PowerPoint, reports the New York Times. Some are fighting back.
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
. . . Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.
University professors “know that PowerPoint shuts up discussion and shuts down critical thinking,” writes Margaret Soltan of University Diaries. Her post unleashed her commenters’ pent-up PowerPoint rage.
From a professor:
Some teachers put their entire presentation on powerpoint and post it to the web. Result – students download the powerpoints and don’t come to class.
A college student:
At least 80% of my classes revolve around the powerpoint. . . . It is an issue with our culture of “get straight to the point” – literally. the powerpoint – 15 slides with 5 bullet points each dont even given to scratch the surface of some of the more complex problems or ideas that are trying to be presented….
A graduate:
You pay $3,000 for a class to have a professor read bullet points off the slides. It has greatly diminished the capacity for people to actually communicate anything of substance.
Textbook manufacturers supply PowerPoint slides, which cuts the prep time for P3s (PowerPoint Professors), writes a former college instructor. P3s “can get quite rattled when asked an ‘off-PowerPoint’ question.”
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