You are here: Home / Archives for teacher training

Train teachers like pilots

June 28, 2012 by

Train teachers like pilots, suggests Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic.

Before George Deneault flew Air Force combat missions, he had to practice every skill again and again.  When he retired and became a special-ed math teacher, “he walked into a Virginia classroom cold.”

Before student teachers enter classes, Boston’s Match Teacher Residency program puts them through 100 hours of drills with students and adults acting like slouching, fiddling, back-talking kids. The brain learns to respond to routine misbehavior, so it can focus on the harder work of teaching. The Institute for Simulation and Training runs a virtual classroom at 12 education colleges nationwide—using artificial intelligence, five child avatars, and a behind-the-scenes actor. Some trainees find the simulation so arduous that they decide not to go into teaching after all.

But most teachers in training do 12 to 15 weeks of student teaching with an experienced teacher in the classroom. “Once on the job, most teachers get only nominal supervision, and 46 percent quit within five years,” Ripley writes.

It is time, finally, to start training teachers the way we train doctors and pilots, with intense, realistic practice, using humans, simulations, and master instructors—time to stop saying teaching is hard work and start acting like it.

Is it possible to simulate the teaching experience for people who aren’t really classroom teachers? What would have to be added to the slouching students to make it realistic?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Should teachers learn neuroscience?

June 7, 2012 by

Educators should learn neuroscience, some argue. From Ed Week:

Dr. Janet N. Zadina, a former high school teacher who is now an adjunct assistant professor in neurology at Tulane University, in New Orleans, said more cross-training of teachers and neuroscientists, including lab work for the teachers and classroom experience for the researchers, would help stop the “telephone game” of half-truths conveyed now in the education neuroscience field.

Starting in the late 1990s, teachers began “sending rising numbers of students to be evaluated for conditions they didn’t have, from attention deficit disorder to epilepsy,” says neurologist Judy Willis. Classroom observations showed high rates of boredom and stress, but teachers were “attributing problems to students’ brain hemispheres or to whether they were drinking enough water.”

Drinking enough water?

Teachers don’t have the time to learn neuroscience, responds Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist. “Neuro-myths” should be defused during teacher training, though that doesn’t always happen. Then a central-office administrator should be in charge of evaluating whether a professional development session is legit or snake oil.

The human brain adapts with experience, scientists now say. Very little is hard-wired.

“What we find is people really do change their brain functions in response to experience,” said Kurt W. Fischer, the director of Harvard University’s Mind, Brain, and Education Program. “It’s just amazing how flexible the brain is. That plasticity has been a huge surprise to a whole lot of people.”

Among the “neuro-myths and snake-oil pitches,” Ed Week notes are “programs to improve cross-hemisphere brain communication to teaching practices aimed at ‘auditory’ or ‘visual’ learners.”

I wonder what percentage of teachers believe they should tailor instruction to auditory and visual learners. More than half would be my guess.

Filed Under: Education, Intelligence Tagged With: , , ,

Steel City blues

March 20, 2012 by

Pittsburgh recruited teachers who promised to stay for five years in exchange for training leading to a master’s degree.  Weeks before the start of school, the residency program was cancelled, writes Ed Sector’s Susan Headden in Steel City Blues.  Pittsburgh was laying off experienced teachers and couldn’t justify bringing in new teachers.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

New standards require new ways to train teachers

February 5, 2012 by

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.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Movin’ and improvin’

January 25, 2012 by

Teacher-effectiveness data should be used to help teachers improve, not just to fire incompetents, argues Movin’ It and Improvin’ It! by Craig Jerald, an education policy consultant, on the the Center for American Progress site.

. . . districts are missing an opportunity to … help leverage their highest performers and help teachers with strong potential grow into solid contributors.

The  “movin’ it” strategy uses “selective recruitment, retention, and ‘deselection’ to attract and keep teachers with higher effectiveness while removing teachers with lower effectiveness.

In contrast, “improvin’ it” policies treat teachers’ effectiveness as a mutable trait that can be improved with time. When reformers talk about providing all teachers with useful feedback following classroom observations or using the results of evaluation to individualize professional development for teachers, they are referring to “improvin’ it” strategies. If enough teachers improved their effectiveness, then the accumulated gains would boost the average effectiveness in the workforce.

Smart districts will do both, Jerald argues.

Professional development rarely improves teaching effectiveness and student learning, research shows. “The nation’s school systems spend billions of dollars annually on wasteful and ineffective professional development,” Jerald writes. Yet some forms of training have shown “substantial improvements in teaching and learning” in the last two years.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Teaching math in preschool

December 5, 2011 by

Preschool teachers are introducing math concepts, reports the Wall Street Journal.  The Early Mathematics Education Project at Erikson Institute is training preschool and kindergarten teachers at high-poverty Chicago schools.

At Lovett Elementary School, where the preschool teacher adopted the new methods, math instruction is omnipresent, if not always apparent. It’s there where 4-year-old Jasmine Wilson arranges four Popsicle sticks into a zigzag pattern under the number “4.” It shows up when Cedric Carter mimics the teacher’s syncopated clapping pattern. And it appears when students join a growing line of characters from “The Gingerbread Man” to chase Anasia Simmons around the room.

The children don’t realize it, but they are learning fundamental math concepts such as connecting numerals to quantity, building patterns, and the idea that adding something, or someone, creates a larger number.

Students of Erikson-trained teachers average three to five months more progress in math than students whose teachers were on the waiting list to get into the program, the institute reports. Children who started far behind in math made the most progress.

Jie-Qi Chen, an Erikson professor who helped develop the project, said proper math instruction helps students develop reasoning and logical thinking skills—cognitive building blocks that prepare them to learn any subject. But she said early math gains in preschool can “wash out” if teachers in elementary grades don’t know how to teach it. And unlike reading, she said, which requires little explicit instruction after a certain level, “math cannot be fully grasped without assistance from a well-trained teacher.”

On any given day, 21 percent of Chicago preschool and kindergarten teachers teach math, while 96 percent teach language arts, a 2007 Erikson study found.

Many early-education teachers are “math phobic,” said Jeanine Brownell, assistant director of programming for Early Mathematics.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Got a pulse? You can teach!

December 1, 2011 by

Recruiting anyone with a pulse? asks the Teacher Quality Bulletin. A staffer spotted the billboard off I-35 in Texas.

For-profit, alternative teacher certification is booming in Texas. Standards are low.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

Study: Teacher training rarely helps

November 30, 2011 by

Improving teachers’ effectiveness is the “paramount challenge” facing our schools, writes Robert Pianta in Teaching Children Well, a report for the Center for American Progress. But most professional development has little or no impact. Districts waste thousands of dollars per teach each year on one-day, one-time workshops that teach “awareness” rather than specific skills, Pianta writes. Trainers promote “models that have little basis in what is known about effective instruction, curriculum, or classroom interactions.”

The report looks at “new evidence-supported approaches to professional development that have promise for closing not only the evidence gap, but the achievement gap as well.”

MyTeachingPartner, or MTP . . . uses a standardized method of online, individualized coaching and a library of highly focused video clips showing effective teachers in action that are tightly coupled with a standardized metric for observing teacher practice in the classroom, called the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS.

CLASS and MTP . . .  include models for observing teachers’ instruction in mathematics lessons that are useful in modeling feedback about instruction in the upper grades. There are now professional-development tools that show promise for improving instruction and children’s math skills in preschool.

In early literacy, there are now videos to provide teachers feedback with demonstrable gains for students’ skills as well as statewide models that connect individualized feedback, coursework, and assessment of students’ school-readiness skills in a program of teacher professional development.

In addition, John Tyler’s paper on Designing High-Quality Evaluation Systems for High School Teachers also was released.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Best ed schools make a difference

October 19, 2011 by

Students’ progress can be linked to where their teachers trained, concludes a study of Washington state education schools Dan Goldhaber of the University of Washington Center for Education Data & Research.

“Improving teacher training has the potential to greatly enhance the productivity of the teacher workforce,” Goldhaber wrote in the report.

Overall, only a small percentage of the differences in teacher effectiveness were linked to education schools, but the best programs were much better than the worst. The effects outweighed smaller class sizes or teacher experience. “Hiring a teacher from the best training program could be equivalent to shrinking a class by five to 10 students,” AP reports.

National Center on Teacher Quality is working with U.S. News and World Report to evaluate and rank all 1,400 education schools in the country. NCTQ’s Transparency Central lists all the letters from teacher preparation programs objecting to the review.

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education has urged members not to participate in the “fundamentally flawed” project, reports Teacher Beat.

(The AACTE letter)  also calls the review an “outrage,” a “cause for alarm,” and NCTQ’s tactics “unprofessional.”

If education schools refuse to cooperate, NCTQ will file Freedom of Information Act requests to see course syllabi and hire students collect and submit documents.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

A vote for new math standards

October 7, 2011 by

Common Core math standards are as good as the best state standards and correct common math misperceptions, writes Hung-Hsi Wu, a Berkeley math professor emeritus,  in the cover story in American Educator.

Dr. Wu, who helped write California’s math framework, praises the ”mathematical integrity” and logical progression of topics in an interview with Rick Hess.

The standards teach fractions over grades three to five, giving students enough time to learn and internalize the material, says Wu. He also likes the standards approach to learning negative numbers and moving from middle school geometry to algebra and high school geometry. Delaying algebra instruction till high school is not a problem, he argues.

However, he’s not confident teachers will be able to teach the standards.

. . .  we need better teacher preparation and improved professional development in order to stay educationally afloat no matter what the standards may be. If we cannot get better teacher preparation or improved professional development, then we would be better off with a set of standards that is at least mathematically sound.

Wu is wrong, responds Ze’ev Wurman, another veteran of California’s battle for math standards and a fierce defender of eighth-grade algebra.  Wu changed sides because he concluded “American elementary and middle school teachers are incompetent to teach algebra or prepare for it,” Wurman writes.

“School mathematics in this country is a sad joke,”, comments Michael Goldenberg, a math coach. “Knowing procedures and manipulations and calculations is great for standardized tests (which drive just about every contemporary education deform scheme) but say very little about mathematical reasoning, thinking, and or understanding.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,
«Older Posts
Newer Posts»