Teach Effectively!

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to the National Education Association today, calling on its members to work with him toward the goal of ensuring that “every child in America is learning from an effective teacher—no matter what it takes.”

That’s a noble goal. In my view, it requires that educators shed their allegiance to theory and adopt effective teaching practices. That’s what it takes.

To be sure, there is a lot of emphasis on high-stakes testing. Mr. Duncan even discussed it as one of the four features of his plan for reforming education. The effective teacher idea is another of the four. High-stakes tests (which need reform of their own, in my view—that’s another post) are only part of the game. Another is using evidence to guide instruction.

But even in the absence of results on high-stakes tests and from pristine research projects, educators can ascertain whether they’re using effective methods. That is, we can devise our own means of ascertaining whether teaching practices are effective at a more micro level. In a lot of ways, the process is relatively simple:

1. Identify goals and objectives in objectively measurable terms. How will we know if the students have learned X?
2. Identify the skills and knowledge that students will need to demonstrate mastery of those goals and objectives. What is required to show that a student can competently and independently do X?
3. Devise teaching algorithms for leading students to acquire the skills and knowledge identified in (ii).
   • Model: Demonstrate the skills for the students or tell them the knowledge;
   • Test: Have the students perform the skill or state the knowledge;
   • Coach: Reinforce and correct their performance;
   • Practice to mastery: Have them perform the skill or repeat the knowledge until they are facile with it and can do it under different, increasingly more challenging conditions.
4. Assess students’ competence according to the goals and objectives specified in (i).

Sure, I’ve simplified it here. Sure, the goals and objectives would need to be integrated in a fashion consistent with an epistemology of various subject areas. And, you’ll have to cut me a little slack about my use of words such as “tell” and “correct”; telling would need to include providing materials to read, for example. But the idea is just about as simple as I’ve sketched it here.

The area of early reading has been mapped according to this perspective on teaching. We can say how we would recognize a competent reader (i), what the component skills are (ii), and how to teach those skills. But the to-be-learned material doesn’t have to be elementary level reading. If the area is chemistry and the objectives were conducting an experiment using electrophoresis, I think we could perform a similar analysis.

Of course, the real trick will be to get people on board with such thinking. Mr. Duncan seems to want to do something like that, but he’s talking about things at a much grander scale.

Remarks of Arne Duncan to the National Education Association—Partners in Reform

Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences seems to occupy a special place in the pantheon of education memes. I was reminded of this when I read “Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius” by Christopher Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson’s essay—it appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the news source of record for higher educators—politely explains that sustaining Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory is not a good idea.

Rational analyses of the MI evidence by Dan Willingham and Lynn Waterhouse have shown that there are problems with both the theory itself (e.g., most of the eight intelligences are highly correlated, meaning that they are likely measuring the same “thing” for the most part) and its application in education (e.g., methods based on MI do not lead to better outcomes).

Mr. Ferguson’s essay continues in that same tradition. He makes a strong case for his conclusion that “Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was a great idea and worth investigating. It’s just not panning out.”
Continue reading ‘Multiple intelligences ain’t’

Under the auspices of the Best Evidence Encyclopedia, Bob Slavin and colleagues Cynthia Lake, Susan Davis, and Nancy Madden released an analysis of the research literature on methods for teaching students who are struggling to learn to read, “Effective Programs for Struggling Readers: A Best-Evidence Synthesis.” In the synthesis they report the results of their examination of nearly 100 studies that used randomized or well-matched control groups, lasted for at least 12 weeks, and employed trustworthy measures of outcomes. The results of their review, which include both effect sizes and narrative descriptions of the studies, provide valuable insight into effective methods for remediating reading problems.

Key Findings

Overall, 96 experimental-control comparisons met the inclusion criteria, of which 38 used random assignment to treatments. Effect sizes (experimental-control differences as a proportion of a standard deviation) were averaged across studies, weighting by sample size.

One-to-One Tutoring by Teachers: ES=+0.38 in 19 studies
• Reading Recovery: ES=+0.23 in 8 studies
• Other programs: ES=+0.60 in 11 studies

One-to-One Tutoring by Paraprofessionals and Volunteers: ES=+0.24 in 18 studies
• Paraprofessionals: ES=+0.38 in 11 studies
• Volunteers: ES=+0.16 in 7 studies

Small Group Tutorials: ES=+0.38 in 11 studies

Classroom Instructional Process Approaches (low achievers): ES=+0.56 in 16 studies
• Cooperative Learning: ES=+0.58 in 8 studies

Classroom Instructional Process Programs with Tutoring (Success for All, low achievers): ES=+0.55 in 9 studies

Instructional Technology (low achievers): ES=+0.09 in 14 studies

Salvin, R. E., Lake, C., Davis, S., & Madden, N. A. (2009). Effective programs for stuggling readings: A best-evidence synthsis. Best Evidence Encyclopedia: http://www.bestevidence.org/reading/strug/strug_read.htm

Peter R. Orszag, Director of the US Office of Management and the Budget, posted an entry in the blog for his office that emphasizes points I make on Teach Effectively. Here’s the lead

Building Rigorous Evidence to Drive Policy

One of the principles motivating the President’s Budget is that, as a nation, we haven’t been making the right investments to build a new foundation for economic prosperity — and we need smarter investments in education, health care, and social services.

But, in making new investments, the emphasis has to be on “smarter.” Many programs were founded on good intentions and supported by compelling anecdotes, but don’t deliver results.

This is good stuff. “Smarter” is a worthwhile emphasis. Good intentions are the pavement for just about every reform in education, but that doesn’t mean that the path goes in the right direction. The path has to lead to better outcomes for students. If a path hasn’t been proven to go there, then educators should go a different way. So far, the “educational investments” are mostly words, so we’ll have to see how they evolve, of course.

Meanwhile, here’s a suggestion: In education, we need some way to reward practitioners who employ evidence in determining their actions. That means we need objective standards (not just what people say they are doing) for assessing the degree to which practice is guided by evidence. Then we need to collect the data about those folks’ (buildings’, local education agencies’) practices and their students’ outcomes.

Link to read the entire entry.

What if students could declare an intention to enroll in college and take an accelerated course of study during high school so that those who qualify could exit high school earlier than ~18 years of age? To be sure, the standards for qualifying would have to be rigorous (serious competency tests, perhaps created in collaboration with colleges and universities).

Would such a policy create strong incentive for intensive study as a way of escaping some of the drudgery of HS? Would it be counter-productive because students would miss too much growing-up time? Would it make HS less fun for other students, as there would be fewer peers? Would some HS teachers object to losing the students whom they find the most fun to have in their classes?

Speaking to researchers attending a conference sponsored by the US Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that educational reforms should be be predicated on research about effectiveness.

“Education reform is not about sweeping mandates or grand gestures,” Duncan told the group of researchers who conduct research for IES, which is an independent section of the Education Department. “It’s about systematically examining and learning, building on what we’ve done right, and scrapping what hasn’t worked for kids.”

Continue reading ‘US ED Secy Duncan: Effectiveness data should drive reforms’

Go there!

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has launched a new Web site. The Coalition is another of the several organizations that advocates employing evidence in making decisions about social policies, especially decisions about programs aimed at improving citizens’ outcomes.

The Coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, whose mission is to increase government effectiveness through rigorous evidence about “what works.” Since our founding in 2001, our work with key Congressional and Executive Branch policymakers has helped advance important evidence-based reforms…. A recent independent assessment of our work found that the Coalition has been “instrumental in transforming a theoretical advocacy of evidence-based policy among certain [federal] agencies into an operational reality.”

Continue reading ‘Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy’

I’m a fan of paying teachers way higher salaries than most receive now. I’m wary of tying compensation directly to student test scores, but some connections between the two are probably warranted. The Equity Project (TEP) has taken a different tack on doing so. TEP hopes to lure teachers who have been selected for something akin to effectiveness by paying high salaries.

Elissa Gootman of the New York Times covered TEP in a story entitled “Next Test: Value of $125,000-a-Year Teachers.” TEP is an ambitious effort to create a school where pre- and early-adolescent students receive instruction from selected because of the putative quality of their teaching. The aim is to “to put into practice the central conclusion of a large body of research related to student achievement: teacher quality is the most important school-based factor in the academic success of students, particularly those from low-income families.”
Continue reading ‘Will high pay yield high outcomes?’