Why Connecticut Schools are Lagging

Throwing Curves has a new post on Why Connecticut Schools are Lagging. For those of us that follow CT education policy, this comes as no surprise. Still, it is nice to see new news sources picking up on what we've know so long.

Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores

Sigh. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.


Published Online: April 16, 2010
Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores
By Debra Viadero

First-year findings from a federal study of 77 middle schools suggest that even intensive, state-of-the-art efforts to boost teachers’ skills on the job may not lead to significant gains in student achievement right away.

The "Middle School Mathematics Professional Development Impact Study," which was released April 6, is the second major experimental study by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences to find that a high-quality professional-development program failed to translate into any dramatic improvements in student learning. A two-year study of efforts to improve teachers’ instructional skills in early reading reached a similar conclusion in 2008.

“What accounts for this somewhat consistent pattern of results? We don’t really know,” said Michael S. Garet, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. His Washington-based organization conducted both studies with the MDRC research group of New York City. “I think what we’re learning,” Mr. Garet added, “is that it’s challenging to make a big enough difference in teacher knowledge and instructional practice to have an impact on student learning.”

The results are already providing some intellectual ammunition for finding better ways to select and retain effective teachers—and shedding those who are ineffective—as the best way to improve instructional quality in schools.

The new study shows that “you can’t change teacher effectiveness very well with the tools that we have, and that you can’t change ineffective teachers into effective ones,” said Eric A. Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, based at Stanford University. He is also the president of the IES advisory board, which heard a presentation on the new study’s findings last week.

But other scholars said it is too soon to issue a verdict on the effectiveness of professional development.

“We know teacher change takes time,” said Hilda Borko, an education professor who is also at Stanford. “The general belief is that it takes a while for teachers to take ownership of change and really incorporate change into their instruction.”

.....

Findings in Detail

By the end of the school year, the researchers found, teachers who participated knew slightly more about rational numbers, overall, than their control-group counterparts, but the effect was not statistically significant. Those slight improvements were most notable on a test of pedagogical content knowledge, where teachers stood a 55 percent chance of getting a question right, compared with a 50 percent chance for their counterparts in the control group. (In comparison, the trainers’ chance of answering a question correctly on that test was nearly 93 percent.)

On the plus side, the training did lead to changes in teaching practice. Compared with the control group, the teachers in the experimental group were more likely to try to draw out students’ thinking by asking students whether they agreed with a classmate’s response, or inviting them to share their mathematical strategies.

The changes in practice were not dramatic enough, however, to translate into student-learning gains on the computer-adaptive tests that students took in the spring. The students, most of whom came from schools where more than half of students qualified for federally subsidized school meals, continued to score, on average, at the 19th percentile on the tests, which were developed for the experiment by the Northwest Evaluation Association of Lake Oswego, Ore.

Mr. Garet said the researchers are now analyzing the results from a second year of similarly intensive teacher training in the same schools, which they hope to publish this year.

If those results show learning gains from the training, they might suggest the need for even more sustained professional development.

“You might need to have pretty intensive professional development all the time, every year, and then slowly get schools into a culture such that the expectation is that you always keep working on your knowledge,” said Sybilla Beckmann, a math professor at the University of Georgia in Athens and an adviser to the study.

The Case With Reading

The results from the 2008 reading study were based on two years of data, but just one year of professional development. That study also differed from the latest one in that it provided in-class coaching, randomly, to only about half the group in an effort to see whether that approach yielded any added benefits for teachers or their students. But that did not turn out to be the case.

The reading study also found that, while the skills of the 2nd graders in the study did not improve, there were some measurable gains in teachers’ knowledge.

For the middle school math study, Mr. Garet said, the researchers tested various possible explanations for why the training had failed to affect student achievement. They ruled out the hypothesis, for instance, that the tests were too hard or too easy for the teachers or their students.

“As you move away from the study itself,” Mr. Garet added, “one hypothesis worth testing would be to see what would happen if the professional development aligned with what teachers were evaluated on.”

Ms. Borko, who is leading her own study of teacher professional development, said it also would have been instructive if the federal studies had measured the quality of the instruction that teachers were getting.

Teacher Training No Boon for Student Math Scores

advice for curriculum committees everywhere

We've got so much going on here in town (posts t/k) that I'm only dimly aware of what is or is not happening at state & federal levels .... so I was surprised to discover this Daily News editorial yesterday while paging through looking at whatever it was I was looking at post-tennis lesson, no less.

I assume this is what they're referring to.

The Regents are authorizing the development of a performance-based approach to teacher certification and inviting – on a trial basis – new entities to prepare teachers for certification. As part of this new approach, the Regents will support the development of new performance-based assessments for teacher certification (including the eventual use of value-added assessment as a component of professional certification), will develop new methods to recruit and retain teachers for high needs schools in subject shortage areas and will allow additional content knowledge demonstrations for prospective teachers to bring new talent into the teaching field.

I'm interested to hear from teachers on this.

I would dearly love to see different teacher training programs (I'm guessing most teachers would dearly love to see different teacher training programs), and I think David Steiner is the person to do that.

But why does Kendall Hunt get off scot-free?

Or Heinemann?

Shouldn't these folks have to show a value-added value or two?

I guess this is a policy question, really. Targeting teacher-ed programs seems like a good idea to me. At least, it's a reasonably novel idea -- and I think that, historically speaking, a reform effort directed at medical schools may have had an enormous effect (yes?)

Data is good; value-added is good. In my view.

But targeting teacher ed programs and pushing through value-added measurements without reference to New York state's vendor-driven curricula is a different matter.

Have I ever mentioned my rule of thumb for school districts buying curricula?

Buy whatever homeschoolers are buying.

Education Non-Myths

I couldn't resist sharing these maxims from a new blog :
www.incentiveseverywhere.com
whose author I know from a previous book he wrote entitled Power Teaching (it's in the list of books I recommended in a post a few months ago: http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/02/recommended-reading-from-palisadesk.html



What follows is from the "Book of Right", the set of assumptions which will produce learning.

1. Although students come from different backgrounds, and some are much easier to teach than others, what education brings to the student is much more important than what the student brings to education.

2. All subjects are hierarchically arranged by logic and there is a sequence of instruction which must be followed by all but the most exceptional of high-performing students.

3. Reinforcement is a very powerful determinant of student achievement. The main reinforcer in education is the improvement the student sees in his skills. Ill-constructed curricula, the kind found in almost every government school, result in a steady diet of failure for most students.

4. Having a system of education which is not a civil servant bureaucracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for effective education. You can’t do it with such a bureaucracy, but just because you don’t have a bureaucracy doesn’t mean you can do it.

5. Higher order thinking skills are explicitly taught, not fondly hoped for.

6. Methods of teaching are determined by scientific research, not consensus based on experience and sincere belief.

7. Teachers use a curriculum and lesson plans which have been demonstrated to work best and are not expected to create their own.

8. Psychological assessments are used rarely, but assessment of student progress, which means assessment of the effectiveness of teaching, occurs at least daily.

9. Teachers are taught how to teach in detail rather than being expected to apply vague philosophical maundering.

10. Special education is rarely needed because students are taught well on the first go round.

11. If a student does not learn, the blame is not placed on neurological impairment, but on faulty teaching methods.

12. Self-esteem is not taught because it does not have to be.

13. Students are not given "projects" until component skills have been mastered and rarely thereafter.

14. No attention is paid to individual "learning styles" because these hypothetical entities have no effect on learning.

15. Academic success can be measured by reliable and valid standardized tests, although many of these tests are too simple.

16. Students are expected to perform correctly in spelling, writing, reading, and mathematics and it does not stifle creativity.

17. The precepts of Whole Language are not used to teach reading because these precepts are wrong.

18. Students are not expected to create their own reality because this leads to frustration and slow learning.

19. Students are not expected to learn when it is developmentally appropriate but when they are taught.

20. The concept of multiple intelligences is ignored because it has no positive effect on learning.

21. The teacher is a teacher and not a facilitator.

22. The spiral curriculum is not used because things are taught properly the first time.

23. The customer is the parent and the customer must have the economic power to move his child to another teaching situation when unsatisfied.

24. In private education, the cost of education is known. In public education, the cost can never be known because there is no motivation to tell the truth and every motivation not to.

25. The curriculum must be tested on children and provision must be made for mastery learning. Passage of time or exposure does not guarantee learning.

26. Students are not tortured by "creative problem solving" because this is just another crude IQ test and has no value aside from categorizing students yet again. http://incentiveseverywhere.com/2009/10/09/education-non-myths/


I'm not sure I agree that "special education will rarely be needed," because I have observed that students with certain exceptionalities (autism, some LDs, some language impairments) need the same effective instruction but can't benefit from it in an inclusive setting, at least not initially. However, I agree with the general case, that much "special education" is simply ineffective general education, watered down in in a smaller group. As Lloyd Dunne (I think) observed, "It's not special, and it's not education."

All students deserve better.

teach your babies to read, part 2

The persistent reading struggles and failure of nearly 40 percent of all American children, little improved over time, has led to aggressive government-funded efforts in school districts to train veteran teachers in the science of reading. The accumulated scientific findings of nearly 60 years of research gained the nation’s attention with the release of a number of significant reviews and compendia of the research beginning in 1990, but most notably the National Reading Panel report in 2000. The findings call for explicit, systematic teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics, guided oral reading to improve fluency, direct and indirect vocabulary building, and exposure to a variety of reading comprehension strategies. All this attention on veteran teachers begs the question: How are future teachers being prepared to teach reading? In this study, the National Council on Teacher Quality makes a unique effort to learn what aspiring teachers are taught about reading instruction. From a randomly selected, representative sample of 72 education schools, NCTQ reviewed 223 required reading courses, including evaluations of syllabi as well as 227 required reading texts. Schools were scored on how well their courses presented the core components of the science of reading. The findings are alarming. Only 15 percent of the education schools provide future teachers with minimal exposure to the science. Moreover, course syllabi reveal a tendency to dismiss the scientific research in reading, continuing to espouse approaches to reading that will not serve up to 40 percent of all children. Course texts were equally disappointing. Only four of the 227 texts were rated as “acceptable” for use as a general, comprehensive textbook. This distressing trend in teacher training demands attention from federal and state governments, professional organizations dedicated to improving and supporting education schools, textbook publishers, and educations schools themselves. The report closes with recommendations to ameliorate this serious failure in adequately preparing teachers in the best practices of reading instruction.

What Education Schools Aren't Teaching About Reading (pdf file)
May 2006
National Council on Teacher Quality


special ed teachers not trained to remediate dyslexia
what ed schools aren't teaching about reading

the golden age 1956-1970

A woman here in town gave me permission to post this account of her experience teaching in Manhattan public schools between the years 1956-1970:

As a retired teacher, my experience was in Manhattan elementary schools in the NYC school system. This was a challenging teaching environment since the children ranged from the economically advantaged to the very economically disadvantaged. I taught in East Harlem and later in P.S. 9 on West End Avenue/84th St., two extremes.

We teachers were not indoctrinated in, and certainly didn't teach, the "whole method" system of reading. Most of us went to the City Colleges--City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn, Queens-- and learned teaching methods, materials, and philosophy. Most of my peers had a Masters degree in Education.

We could not qualify to teach in the NYC school system merely by sending for a certificate to show that we went to college. We had to be licensed by NYC, thoroughly tested in knowledge in every area of teaching before going into the classroom. This included a speech test. Any student teacher with an accent, speech impediment or related problem, especially with s, t, d, r, or l, was to be helped by a speech pathologist. FREE! I remember going to Professor Davidson, a leading speech therapist and being drilled with the poem "Jenny Kissed Me" on many 8AM mornings.

The NYC Board of Education issued curriculum bulletins for every grade and in every subject area. These bulletins were uniform for all the boroughs and indicated what was to be taught. I never experienced any teacher who thought they or the students were being stifled. On the contrary, we teachers were as creative as was necessary to do our jobs. I, being a budding artist then, always found creative ways to engage the students in learning.

We were required to make lesson plans for approval. Our lesson plan book was collected every week by our assistant principal. Each lesson had to have a stated goal, a provision for review and reinforcement, procedures or methods, and a conclusion. It wasn't fun making lesson plans, but it made us more efficient, focused, and better teachers.

Why should anyone need "Field Tested" curricula if teachers are properly trained and supervised?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

A quick explanation of that last observation: the writer of this account was responding to my assertion that Irvington should adopt only field-tested curricula.

I read her narrative & marvel. She is talking about the public schools of Goldin & Katz's America:

At the dawn of the twentieth century the United States became the richest nation in the world. Its people had a higher average standard of living than those in Britain, the previous leader. America was poised to ascend further. The gap between it and other front-runners would widen and the standard of living of its residents would cotinue to grow, even when its doors were open to the world's poor. American economic supremacy would be maintained to the end of the century, and beyond. In economic terms, the twentieth century fully merits the title "The American Century."

The twentieth century could also be titled the "Human Capital Century." By the end of the twentieth century all nations, even the poorest, provided elementary schooling and beyond to most of their citizens. At the start of the century and even by its midpoint many nations, including relatively rich ones, educated only those who could personally afford to attend school. The United States was different. Its educational system had always been less elite than those of European countries. By 900, if not before, it had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level not just in primary schools, at which it had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

That the twentieth century was both the American Century and the Human Capital Century is no historical accident. Economic growth in the more modern period requires educated workers, managers, entrepreneurs, and citizens. Modern technologies must be invented, innovated, put in place, and maintained. They must have capable workers at the helm. Rapid technological advance, measured in various ways, has characterized the twentieth century. Because the American people were the most educated in the world, they were in the best position to invent, be entrepreneurial, and produce goods and services using advanced techologies.

The Race Between Education and Technology
by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
p. 1-2

That was then.

Two Tales of the Twentieth Century: A Summary

The history of inequality during the twentieth century is a tale in two parts. The first was punctuated by episodes of declining inequality, some quite sudden and rapid. Stable or slowly rising inequality marked other parts of the period. On the whole, the first three-quarters of the century were years of greatly diminished inequality and lowered returns to education. Americans grew together as economic growth was shared throughout the income distribution during much of the period.

Everything came to a halt in the 1970s.

by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
p. 87

Are teachers today required to include "provisions for reinforcement and review" in their lesson plans? (Come to think of it, what is the status of lesson plans nowadays, anyway?)

My own school district appears to be almost exclusively concerned with understanding. Not just understanding: Enduring Understanding. Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions. It's in the Plan.^*

Actual learning, in the sense of content making it into a child's long-term memory, is assumed.

When, lo and behold, a child fails to recall on tests the material he has "understood" in class, that is a problem for parents to fix.

That's not the way it was when American schools were great.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz


^* the newly approved 21-page Strategic Plan, the one that includes 21st century skills but does not include college preparation

Educating Teachers: Science or Belief?

This is from Children of the Code (I've added some paragraphing)-- the whole interview is called "How Reading Works and What It Does for the Mind".

David Boulton: In particular, what I'm referring to is the way that we educate teachers. We don't take them into a first-person, grounded understanding of this challenge from which to become scientist-learners in their own right, in their practice of it, and they end up subscribing to belief mechanisms.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes.

David Boulton: And in that sense, it's like competing religions.

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Yes, very much so. They respond to the charismatic people they had in teacher education school and they're not given what I would call discipline-based knowledge.

Actually it's not just reading I have an interest in, my other research area is critical thinking. Similar things go on there.

You have teachers picking up knowledge from in-service gurus and teaching reading without a knowledge of phonology or orthography or the history of linguistic change, which I see is one of your interests, and what I would call information processing, cognitive psychology, for that matter, relevant issues and cognitive development. This is what I call the discipline-based knowledge that surrounds reading. Very little of it penetrates into reading education.

The point I make is that this is an unfortunately replicable phenomena. It happens in the area of critical thinking as well. Schools have programs they get, again, from commercial packages, in-service gurus, with no grounding in discipline-based knowledge in thinking and reasoning; and I mean discipline-based knowledge in philosophy, decision science, decision theory, cognitive science - where principles of rational thought are being studied empirically and theoretically by philosophers. None of this penetrates education. So, I think it's a recurring problem.

David Boulton: And the biggest danger that I see as I bump into what you're talking about is that teachers are trained out of being learners. There’s such a difference between belief based on somebody else's knowledge...

Dr. Keith Stanovich: Right.

David Boulton: And actually having an appetite to understand something for yourself, striving into your own learning, and then having access to the kind of resources that will support your learning and keeping it going right through your practice in school with kids.


Dr. Keith Stanovich: Well said. Every component of what you've listed is missing from the educational culture. I couldn't agree more.

Go read the whole interview.

Stanovich's home page

Gladwell on Selecting Successful Teachers

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2008/12/teachers-and-quarterbacks.html

Teachers and Quarterbacks

My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem. There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an enormous non-elite pool to fill that need. So, the response has gone, it's apples and oranges.

Precisely! But of course non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless. What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?

Link to the New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell

Linda Darling-Hammond on teaching as a profession

OK, so I was trying to get the story on Linda Darling-Hammond, who is, with Jeanne Century, the Obama advisor I'm most leary of, and I found this answer to the question of whether teaching is or is not a profession:

In this country, teaching is not yet a profession. A profession really has at least three features. First of all, everyone who is admitted to entry into the profession commits themselves to practice with the welfare of clients first and foremost as their major goal. It's like the Hippocratic oath in medicine. Second, everyone who's admitted to practice in a profession has demonstrated that they've mastered a common knowledge base and that they know then how to use that knowledge on behalf of the clients that they're there to serve. And third, a profession takes responsibility for defining, transmitting, and enforcing some standards of practice to protect the people who they're there to serve. Teaching has not acquired those three traits yet.

Interview with Linda Darling Hammond

That is the simplest and most concise definition of what it is to be a professional I've seen. Ever.

Ruby Payne: Nine strategies help raise the achievement of students living in poverty

Educational Leadership, April 2008, | Volume 65 | Number 7
Poverty and Learning Pages 48-52

Students from families with little formal education often learn rules about how to speak, behave, and acquire knowledge that conflict with how learning happens in school. They also often come to school with less background knowledge and fewer family supports. Formal schooling, therefore, may present challenges to students living in poverty. Teachers need to recognize these challenges and help students overcome them. In my work consulting with schools that serve a large population of students living in poverty, I have found nine interventions particularly helpful in raising achievement for low-income students.

1. Build Relationships of Respect
2. Make Beginning Learning Relational (Collaborative)
3. Teach Students to Speak in Formal Register ("academic language")
4. Assess Each Student's Resources
5. Teach the Hidden Rules of School
6. Monitor Progress and Plan Interventions
7. Translate the Concrete into the Abstract
8. Teach Students How to Ask Questions
9. Forge Relationships with Parents

More detail:
Update:
(a) the following has been misread by more than one commenter. As I understand Payne's work, the point of the "Assess Each Student's Resources" strategy is for the teacher to examine, not assume, the extent of the student's resources in each of the eight domains. Let us take the "physical health" domain--a teacher may assume that the child's vision is excellent, because the child doesn't wear glasses, when in fact, the child's vision is poor and has never been evaluated.

(b) the "spiritual domain". Not to my preferences. However, let us take a non-trivial example: in the United States, a high-school student who had never even heard of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Abraham and his son, Moses, or any of the New Testament stories will struggle in both history and literature classes.

4. Assess Each Student's Resources

School success, as it's currently defined, requires a huge amount of resources that schools don't necessarily provide. Teachers need to be aware that many students identified as "at risk" lack these outside resources. Interventions that require students to draw on resources they do not possess will not work. For example, many students in households characterized by generational poverty have a very limited support system. If such a student isn't completing homework, telling that student's parent, who is working two jobs, to make sure the student does his or her homework isn't going to be effective. But if the school provides a time and place before school, after school, or during lunch for the student to complete homework, that intervention will be more successful.

Financial: Money to purchase goods and services.

Emotional: The ability to control emotional responses, particularly to negative situations, without engaging in self-destructive behavior. This internal resource shows itself through stamina, perseverance, and good decision making.

Mental: The mental abilities and acquired skills (such as reading, writing, and computing) needed for daily life.

Spiritual: Some belief in a divine purpose and guidance.

Physical: Good physical health and mobility.

Support systems: Friends, family, and resource people who are available in times of need.

Relationships and role models: Frequent contact with adults who are appropriate role models, who nurture the child, and who do not engage in self-destructive behavior.

Knowledge of unspoken rules: Knowing the unspoken norms and habits of a group.

5. Teach the Hidden Rules of School

People need to know different rules and behaviors to survive in different environments. The actions and attitudes that help a student learn and thrive in a low-income community often clash with those that help one get ahead in school. For example, when adult family members have little formal schooling, the student's environment may be unpredictable. Having reactive skills might be particularly important. These skills may be counterproductive in school, where a learner must plan ahead, rather than react, to succeed. If laughter is often used to lessen conflict in a student's community, that student may laugh when being disciplined. Such behavior is considered disrespectful in school and may anger teachers and administrators....

The simple way to deal with this clash of norms is to teach students two sets of rules. I frequently say to students

You don't use the same set of rules in basketball that you use in football. It's the same with school and other parts of your life. The rules in school are different from the rules out of school. So let's make a list of the rules in school so we're sure we know them.

8. Teach Students How to Ask Questions

When you have asked a student what part of a lesson he or she didn't understand, have you heard the reply, "All of it"? This response may indicate that the student has trouble formulating a specific question.

Questions are a principal tool to gain access to information, and knowing how to ask questions yields a huge payoff in achievement (Marzano, 2007). In their research on reading, Palincsar and Brown (1984) found that students who couldn't ask good questions had many academic struggles.

To teach students how to ask questions, I assign pairs of students to read a text and compose multiple-choice questions about it. I give them sentence stems, such as "When ___________ happened, why did __________ do ___________?" Students develop questions using the stems, then come up with four answers to each question, only one of which they consider correct and one of which has to be funny.

I highly recommend that you read the whole article. Of course, the Nine Strategies are also useful in all classrooms.


update - Catherine here, parachuting into Liz' post. (I hope she won't mind.)

Just thought I'd put in a link to the Times article on Payne along with a link to my follow-up on oral cultures and direct questions.

Scandinavian Excellence in Elementary Education: Is It Project-Based Learning and Teacher Autonomy, or Other Factors?

How do the Scandinavian educational systems differ from the US? A group of educators went on a fact-finding tour.

A delegation led by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) recently toured Scandinavia in search of answers for how students in that region of the world were able to score so high on a recent international test of math and science skills. They found that educators in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark all cited autonomy, project-based learning, and nationwide broadband internet access as keys to their success.

What the CoSN delegation didn’t find in those nations were competitive grading, standardized testing, and top-down accountability—all staples of the American education system.

[snip]

Kati Tuurala,[snip] credits Finland’s success to its major reforms of the 1970s, which included an emphasis on primary education for everyone in the country. “That’s the reason for our present-day success,” Tuurala said.

In all three countries, students start formal schooling at age seven after participating in extensive early-childhood and preschool programs focused on self-reflection and social behavior, rather than academic content. By focusing on self-reflection, students learn to become responsible for their own education, delegates said.

Barbara Stein, manager of external partnerships and advocacy for the National Education Association, said Scandinavian countries “encourage philosophical thought at a very young age. … Grading doesn’t happen until the high-school level, because they believe grading takes the fun out of learning. They want to inspire continuous learning.”

“My teacher” and “the teacher” are terms of respect, not only when used by the students, but also by the school leader or headmaster. The teacher is most often viewed as a mentor, someone who has both knowledge and wisdom to impart and plays a key role in preparing students for adulthood.

In Finland, for instance, teaching is one of the most highly venerated professions in the country—and only one in eight applicants to teacher-education programs are accepted. All teachers there have a master’s degree.

Go read the whole thing and come back and discuss.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=52770&page=1

I'm thinking that the teacher preparation, and the social learning (social cognition) curriculum for ages 4-7 has a lot to do with students' achievement.

a hamburger fold and a hot dog fold

hamburger fold




hot dog fold


Extra credit if you can guess me what a taco fold is.

my busy day

Today I learned how to make:

• a hot dog Foldable
  

and

• a hamburger Foldable
  

Foldables weren't a new concept to me. I'd been seeing Foldables in the district's new Glencoe math textbooks all year, and of course there was the Folding House Poem Project redkudu managed to squelch at her high school.

Still, I hadn't managed to pick up on the fact that Foldables are so well-entrenched in the edu-world that we have Big Names in Foldables: people who are to Foldables what Lucy Calkins is to personal narratives.

So my friend J. called and filled me in. We hadn't spoken in awhile. She's gone back to school to get her Masters in education, after which she'll teach h.s. math. We were chatting about the general pointlessness of ed school when she mentioned in passing that her husband had told her he didn't want to hear another word about her coursework because he couldn't believe they were paying money to send her to school to learn how to make Foldables.

I perked up.

"Foldables!" I said. "What is it with all these Foldables?"

J. said her class had just had a quiz on accommodating the needs of English language learners. For the quiz they had to select a quotation from their textbook, write it on one of the panels of their Foldable, and then draw an illustration (or two) that elucidated the quotation.

And that was it. A Foldable with a quotation from a textbook and 2 illustrations. After a couple of years of this they will be certified to teach.

She says the point of the program is to prepare them to teach in an urban setting.


visual learning

foldables
why lawyers burn out
Independent George re: foldables
your tax dollars at work part 2
my busy day
not your father's formative assessment
remembering key concepts in math with foldables
south of the border
Steve H and palisadesk on foldables
homeschooling convention: no foldables

you may have to hit refresh a couple of times to load these pages:
21st century skills in Singapore
the master plan
horselaughs are heard in Singapore
more horselaughs in Singapore

teacher test from the 19th century

Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for June 2/1877

1. Analyse the following, and parse words in italics:
I cannot tell if to depart in silence,
Or bitterly to speak in your reproof,
Best fitteth my degree or your condition.

2. Write the following in prose, and parse the verb awaits:
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

3. Give a brief example of a compound and a complex sentence. Give the rule for the use of the subjunctive mood.

4. Define and give etymology of verb, pronoun, conjunction and adverb. Give example of a defective, an auxiliary, an impersonal and a redundant verb. How many kinds of pronouns are there? Give example of each.

5. Prior has the following sentence. State if it be good grammar. If not, why? If it be, parse the word than:
Thou art a girl as much brighter than her,
As he is a poet sublimer than me.

6. Give rule for forming plural of nouns ending in "y," with examples. Give plurals
of staff, radius, miasma, Miss White, rendezvous, talisman, loaf, grief, seraph, Mussulman, forceps, spoonful, who, beef, s, x, 6, and madam. Also singulars of kine, ashes, banditi [sic], swine, animalcula.

7. Compare chief, much, former, far, forth, next, round, up, ill, full.

8. Give the feminines of abbot, earl, duke, lad, marquis, hero, tiger, nephew, testator, bachelor, wizard and ox.

9. Write the past tense and past participle of these verbs.
Lay, Seek, Sit, Get, Dare,
Thrive, Lie, Set, Light, Loose,
Fly, Flee, Chide, Overflow, Catch,
Lose, Swim, Climb, Drink, Slay,
Leap, Quit, Swell, Burst, Eat.

10. Define metonymy, catachresis, and hyperbole; and state difference between a
metaphor and a simile.

11. Punctuate the following lines:
But when I ask the trembling question
Will you be mine my dearest Miss
Then may there be no hesitation
But say distinctly Yes Sir yes

12. Parse the three "thats" in the following sentence:
He that fears that dog thinks that he is mad.
Also parse the word "but" in each of the following:
There was no one but saw him;
We ran, but he stopped;
All fled but Peter;
If you did but know it.

13. Correct the following:
(a) Although I persuaded the old man, he refused to yield, and I expect he divided his estate between his 3 daughters. His example, though he meant well, is calculated to have a bad effect.
(b) As I laid down I seen the smoke raising over the way.
(c) Whom do you say that I am? or who do you take me to be?
(d) John and James were both there, though neither were invited.
(e) As water is froze easier than alcohol, so riches are easier acquired than a good name.
(f) Between you and I, there is some mystery about that fire last night. Did you hear where it was at? I am glad none of my friends were in the house. I should be sorry if either James or William were inculpated in setting it on fire.
(Letter 194, p. d May 23, 1877)


ORTHOGRAPHY.
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for June 2/77

1. Give etymology of orthography. What are mutes, labials, and liquids, and why so called?

2. Give meaning of the prefixes, ante, anti, circum, quad, proto, oct, trans, sym, and con.

3. Form derivatives of prefer, begin, stop, run, defy, abridge, tie, and die, with the suffix ing or ed.

4. Write a word containing a diphthong, one containing a digraph, and one containing a trigraph.

5. Define accent, and mark the accent on the words inverse, diverse, adverse, reverse, obverse, calcine, piquant, orthoepy, abdomen, acclimated, area, salutatory, accessary, gondola, illustrate, prolix, portent, inquiry, contemplated, expert, extant.

6. Spell the words (given orally)
(Letter 194, p. d May 23, 1877)


ARITHMETIC.
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for May 26/77

Put all your work on the paper and make it explain itself.

1. Define integer, fraction, interest, discount, power, and root.

2. What effect has multiplying both terms of a fraction by the same number, and why; and why in dividing one fraction by another do you invert the divisor and multiply the terms together?

3. If A's age were increased by its 3/7 its 4/5 and 19, the sum would equal 2 1/2 times his age; required his age. [sic]

4. Multiply 718 by .000018 and divide the product by 27 millionths.

5. 32 men agree to construct 28 miles 4 furlongs and 32 rods of road; after completing one-half of it, one-fourth of the number of men left the company, what distance did each man construct before and after one-fourth of the men left.

6. A man drives 97 pegs on a straight line and spaces them 3 ft. 8 in. apart. What is the distance from the first to the last peg, lowest terms?

7. A man receives $65 interest for the use of $600 for 3 years, 7 months and 15 days. What is the rate per cent.?

8. What is due on the following note?
$1200
Zanesville, O., Dec. 10, 1871.
One year after date I promise to pay to the order of Richard Roe twelve
hundred dollars, value received.
JOHN DOE

9. Give the rule for obtaining the difference of time, having the difference of longitude, and vice versa, and give the reasons for the rule.

10. A square lot containing 54,756 square feet is surrounded by a close board fence 12 feet high. What would the boards cost at $13 per thousand?
(Letter 195, p. d May 27, 1877)


GEOGRAPHY.
Prepared by Jos: Crosby, Examiner, for May 26/77

1. Where does the earth have the greatest diameter?

2. Why do we reckon 180 degrees of longitude and only 90 of latitude?

3. What is meant by the equinoxes?

4. Locate the Crimea, Bombay, Bay of Fundy and the Capital of Mississippi.

5. lnto what three functions is the government of the United States divided?- define each function.

6. Describe the lndus and Niger rivers.

7. Through what waters would a ship pass in going from Duluth to Odessa?

8. Bound France and give five of its chief cities.

9. Name the New England States and locate their capitals.

10. Define equator, zone, latitude and longitude.

11. lnto what bodies of water do the following rivers flow: The Danube, Rhone, Volga, Tiber, Rio Grande, Jordan and Mahoning.
(Letter 195, p. d May 27, 1877)

Sections of a Certification Examination, 1877. Note the civics question ( # 5 ) in a geography examination. The hlahoning River is in northeastern Ohio. Crosby appears to have re-used questions: see "swine" (grammar question #6) and "Lie" (gramnlar question #9) and compare Crosby's comments about the examination given in the summer of 1876 (Letter 133).

source:
Certification in "The Basics" One Hundred Years Ago
John W. Velz
The English Journal, Vol. 66, No. 7. (Oct., 1977), pp. 32-38.
these pages: 36-38
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-8274%28197710%2966%3A7%3C32%3ACI%22BOH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C

Calculating the value of a class: Unsatisfactory Data Transfer Rate

I am paying a bit more than $1.20/minute for one of my graduate school classes. How do I know this? I divided the tuition cost for the class by the number of minutes the class is nominally in session.

To date, on the $/minute metric, I've spent $864. Personal valuation of information received, to date? $125, max.

Well, I've made some friends and/or future colleagues. That's worth something.

On the other hand, it has really sharpened how I think about the airtime I take up in class. Before I open my mouth (which usually lasts at least a minute), I think, "Is this worth $1.20 of my classmates' money?"

On the gripping hand, there's the Ditz Boredom Index. My urge to talk is directly related to how dissatisfied I am with the rate of [information/data] transfer. I realize I am hogging the airtime....

Grumpity grump. But you know, in every training program there are the slog-through bits.

Hmmn, maybe I should write the syllabus I wish I the class had offered, including a more meaningful reading list.

Ed School Disappointment #2*: Endorsement of "Scotopic Sensitivity"

The instructor in one of my ed school classes announced tonight that Irlen-Meares (scotopic sensitivity) syndrome is real and should be remediated for....

Dang.

I'm pretty firmly in the Irlean/Meares/Scotopic Sensitivity skeptic camp, especially as regards the "Incidence studies suggest that 46% of those with identified with reading problems, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, or learning difficulties suffer from Irlen Syndrome and can be helped by the Irlen
Method" claim.

Since I don't have a bomb-proof handle on the alleged 62 studies published in peer-reviewed journals that show improvement, I'm going to keep my mouth shut for now. However, since the link references a web site, and the said website doesn't provide a link to the "review", I'm still skeptical.

And disappointed. I had thought this instructor pretty tough-minded.

*Ed School Disappointment #1 -- the lack of content in the "Intro to the Role" class.

"Do Public Schools Hire the Best Teachers?"

3. Public schools do not exhibit a marked preference for teachers whose academic backgrounds signal strong cognitive ability and command of subject matter. Analysis of the experiences of new college graduates during their first year on the labour market shows that graduates of more selective colleges are no more likely to succeed in obtaining a teaching position (if they seek one) than are applicants from the least selective schools.7 Among applicants for secondary school positions, an education degree is as helpful as a subject area degree. While it is true that schools are more likely to hire graduates with good college grades, there is no adjustment for the overall quality of the institution at which those grades were earned.

[snip]

2. Changing the incentives facing school administrators might lead them to reconsider their priorities when hiring new teachers. The private sector, despite paying salaries substantially below those in most public school systems, employs disproportionately many teachers with strong academic records. This appears to be due, in part, to the greater emphasis on academics within these schools. Increased parental choice in the public sector might have similar results.

by Dale Ballou (pdf file)

I've always wondered why, here in Westchester, Ivy Leaguers & people with Ph.D.s, etc., are teaching for lower pay in private schools instead of for higher pay in the public schools.

Teacher Burnout: Blame the Parents

From the New York Times Wellness Channel:

Teacher Burnout

While the data come from German schools, the researchers note that many of the demands of teaching, including disruptive students, high expectations from school officials and close scrutiny from parents, are universal.

The issue of teacher burnout is important because American schools today are experiencing high levels of teacher turnover as baby boomers retire and new teachers leave the field. According to the most recent Department of Education statistics available, about 269,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million public school teachers, or 8.4 percent, quit the field in the 2003-2004 school year. Thirty percent of them retired, and 56 percent said they left to pursue another career or because they were dissatisfied. The National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future has calculated that nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone.

Here are some sample quotes, but you should go read the whole shebang (128 at last count)

• Parents with complaints should be restricted to the principal’s office, and not allowed to barge into classrooms. A parent who interferes with classroom teaching should be required by law to spend 5 days in jail. Taken to jail from the classroom in handcuffs by police.
• I have been far more affected by administrators who leave the teaching ranks after a couple of years without ever realizing what becoming a teacher requires or who fail to work with and inspire teachers.
• Quite often parents come to school to fight, not for their children, but to win the battles they lost when they were young. The sense of entitlement, joined with self-righteous anger and administrators who fear nothing more than a phone call to their boss leave teachers with little choice but to “try to make overly demanding parents happy.”
• In our neck of the woods, the most difficult part of teaching in dealing with indulgent parents who don’t necessarily want to put in the time to actually be involved with their kids’ education, but, blame the teacher when the kid fails to perform.
• Parents are just as bewildered and concerned as teachers as to how to deal with the maelstrom into which their children have been dumped, and the disappearing resources.
• I often would say that if the children boarded at the school Monday through Friday, what a difference we would see in attitude AND results.
• What about parent burn-out caused by non-responsive and arbitrary teachers and administrators? This works both ways!
• If parents get involved, it’s their fault teachers are burned out. But if they’re not involved, it’s their fault the teachers can’t teach their students to read. No matter what happens, it’s always the parents’ fault - apparently expecting teachers to teach kids is an unreasonable expectation; it is up to the parents to make the teachers’ classrooms run well.
• In my 36 years teaching elementary grades, demanding parents have rarely been a problem. In fact, I’ve enlisted parents as classroom helpers and am extremely grateful for the time and support they have contributed. The BIG problem has been and continues to be the idiocy of state and district bureaucracies, whose infinite wisdom declares that even schools with good test scores enter “Program Improvement” status so we can boost the numbers.

Cheryl vT on action research

"Do ed schools give good training, at all, in how to do action research??"

This probably depends on the ed school, but in my experience, the training on action research was abundant -- ridiculously abundant. Here's a good pdf that explains action research:

This paper explains the birth of action research back in the '70s:

"Education practitioners questioned the applicability of scientific research designs and methodologies as a means to solve education issues. The results of many of these federally funded projects were seen as theoretical, not grounded in practice" (page 14).

To me, this is the red flag... Examining your own practice in a thoughtful, meaningful way is great -- and hopefully all teachers conduct this reflective research as a matter of course.

But educators shouldn't simultaneously dismiss the (admittedly scarce) solid quantitative research out there because it's "too theoretical." In my view, that's educational malpractice...and sadly very common in ed school.

Generally speaking, I'm not inclined to spend a lot of time bashing the 1970s just because....because I'm not. No particular reason.

But there's no question the decade produced a number of very bad ideas, Exhibit A being constructivism. It wasn't until recently that I understood what constructivism is in the broad sense of the term. Constructivism is what progressive education became after it encountered postructuralism.

Traditional progressive ed (now there's a neologism for you!) probably wouldn't have been to my taste, but I would take it any day over constructivism.

Cassy T on ed school

I received my BS Ed in May 2006, as a second career. I was not the oldest in my cohort, but the great majority were in their 20's. The school program was quite strong, although the advanced math education class was a sad example of what is happening in elementary education.

I was in a cohort of 15 or so students, and I was the only one who could actually do the math that the prof was showing us the ed. strategies for. She was a nationally certified curriculum adviser with a PhD. and kept telling the class: "You need to know how to do this math, I'm not here to teach you math." "You need to get some more math education before you step into a classroom."

She was amazed at how poor the student's skills were, although it was her first University level class. I wonder if her expectations have since declined.