Teach Effectively!

Over on Marginal Revolution Alex Tabarrok has a nifty observation entitled “Heroes are not Replicable.” He argues that the popular images of super teachers does a disservice because societies can’t clone those folks. Instead, he advocates teaching effectively!

What we need to save inner-city schools, and poor schools everywhere, is a method that works when the teachers aren’t heroes. Even better if the method works when teachers are ordinary people, poorly paid and ill-motivated – i.e. the system we have today.

In Super Crunchers, Ian Ayres argues that just such a method exists. Overall, Super Crunchers is a light but entertaining account of how large amounts of data and cheap computing power are improving forecasting and decision making in social science, government and business. I enjoyed the book. Chapter 7, however, was a real highlight.

I don’t want to give away Mr. Tabarrok’s whole post, so you’ll have to go read the rest of it yourselves. Follow this link to it.

Over on Sound it Out, Joanne Meier of Reading Rockets had a nice piece about fluency that deserves to be read. She describes situations in which the usual assessment of fluency, words read per minute, trumped the sensible reason for promoting fluency in reading: comprehension. Professor Meier’s account aptly reminds me of the importance of keeping perspective in teaching effectively.

We have to be careful to communicate to our students that some of our teaching actions may appear more important than they are. We don’t want them to get the idea that the timing of reading is a race with high stakes. (That’s why we do it repeatedly.) We don’t want them to think that they should obey our directions because it is a matter of complying alone, but that there is a reason behind our expectations (authoritative rather than authoritarian). We want to communicate clearly, so when something like timed readings is the issue, we should treat it matter-of-factly…not quite ho-hum, but surely not like speed is the end in itself.

Link to the Sound it Out article.

Sometimes something that’s passed off as “professional development” just plain isn’t professional. There are, of course, the jokes about Underwater Basketweaving, and such. But there are instances that are beyond that joke. Over the weekend, the ever-informative Liz Ditz had a nifty piece running on I Speak of Dreams that taps this theme:

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Contest For K-12 Educators: The Dumbest Professional Development Experience in Your Career

>>snip< <

So here's a contest:

Write a post about the worst, most vapid, most content-free professional development experience of your teaching career, and leave a link in the comments (or post the whole sorry story in the comments, if you'd like). Maybe we'll learn something.

Link to the post. I’ll be interested in reviewing the entries. I want to see some good ones.

Thanks to the Instructivist, I’ve learned of a series of stories about the trials of a teacher working in difficult schools. Check out the article associated with this lead:

Teaching in the inner city
The Chicago Tribune went into a classroom for a year in an inner-city school to observe first hand the challenges faced by teachers. The result is a gripping three-part series: A TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT: THE TOUGHEST ASSIGNMENT

Link to the version in Instructivist. Link the Tribune original.

The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) is a relatively new group—it has been forming over the past couple of years—that provides another example of efforts to put education on a firmer empirical base. In contrast to the diverse and variable American Educational Research Association, SREE has a specific focus on studies that examine the effects of educational practices and procedures. This emphasis is consistent with the work that such resources as I list under “Web resources” in the sidebar.

The mission of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) is to advance and disseminate research on the causal effects of education interventions, practices, programs, and policies. As support for researchers who are focused on questions related to educational effectiveness, the Society aims to: 1) increase the capacity to design and conduct investigations that have a strong base for causal inference, 2) bring together people investigating cause-and-effect relations in education, and 3) promote the understanding and use of scientific evidence to improve education decisions and outcomes.

To the ear of Teach Effectively, this sounds like good music!

Link to the SREE Web site.

Apparently, the New York (US) Board of Regents, the state education agency oversight committee, has discussed plans to implement response-to-intervention (RTI) procedures for the NY public schools and decided to defer implementation at least temporarily. Rebecca Cort, one of the folks who testified about special education during the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (“No Child Left Behind”; NCLB), presented materials about RTI to the Regents in a September 2007 meeting. However, a statement by the New York State Union of Teachers indicates that at an earlier meeting the Regents slowed implementation of the RTI approach.

NYSUT applauded the Regents decision to move more slowly in efforts to shift to Response-to-Intervention, or RTI, programs to identify students with learning disabilities.

In regulations adopted over the summer, the Regents agreed to delay phasing out the IQ discrepancy model for K-4 students in determining reading problems until July 1, 2012. Originally, the State Education Department recommended prohibiting the discrepancy model to measure learning disabilities for all academic areas effective in 2010.

If there’s a reader from New York who can clarify (with pointers to relevant documents), please drop a comment or send a note. I’d like to know what’s going on. What are the facts and the arguments?

Link to the materials Ms. Cort presented. Link to Ms. Cort’s March 2007 NCLB testimony, in which she argued that RTI should be focused on improving general education more than on identifying students who have Learning Disabilities. Link to the NYSUT statement.

In a letter to the editors of Online Athens (GA, US), Eric Schmidt challenged an earlier letter that suggested that testing of students’ learning discriminates against students who have different learning styles from those required by the tests. Mr. Schmidt argued against Alyssa Sosinski idea that students who have a given style, particularly those who might be considered kinesthetic learners, are inappropriately assessed by usual paper-and-pencil tests.

Ms. Sosinski contended tha “Study after study shows this specific subculture is more likely to comprise kinesthetic learners, who learn best when carrying out physical activities, and is also likely to comprise more creative learners. Since the standardized tests are not written for kinesthetic learners, this may be why those children score so low – not because they don’t know the material.” In his rebuttal of this idea, Mr. Schmidt cites the work Dan Willingham that regular readers of LD Blog will recognize.

It’s a popular but unproven notion to think the dominant “learning style” of a student is important in teaching them best. As Daniel Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia, has written, “Because the vast majority of educational content is stored in terms of meaning and does not rely on visual, auditory, or kinesthetic memory, it is not surprising that researchers have found very little support for the idea that offering instruction in a child’s best modality (learning style) will have a positive effect on his learning.” Instead, cognitive psychologists emphasize the importance of teaching in the content’s best modality.

Links to Ms. Sosinski’s letter and to Mr. Schmidt’s letter. Link to Mr. Willingham’s article entitled “Do Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners Need Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Instruction?”

Mr. Willingham and I have a publication on a slightly related topic, the ways that neuropscyhology can affect education, pending in the new journal entitled Mind, Brain, and Education.

The US Department of Education released results of a study examining how the current incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (“No Child Left Behind”) has affected the quality of the faculties in US schools. The report, entitled State and Local Implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, Volume II: Teacher Quality under NCLB: Interim Report (2007), is lengthy and detailed. Here is a snippet from the executive summary:

Based on findings from two federally funded studies-the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under NCLB (SSI-NCLB) and the National Longitudinal Study of NCLB (NLS-NCLB)-this report describes the progress that states, districts, and schools have made implementing the teacher and paraprofessional qualification provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act through 2004–05. Generally, the studies found that:

• Most teachers met their states’ requirements to be considered highly qualified under NCLB. However, state policies concerning highly qualified teachers varied greatly, both in the passing scores that new teachers must meet to demonstrate content knowledge on assessments and in the extent to which state “HOUSSE” policies give existing teachers credit for years of prior teaching experience versus emphasizing more direct measures of content knowledge and teaching performance.
• The percentage of teachers who are not highly qualified under NCLB is higher for special education teachers, teachers of LEP students and middle school teachers, as well as for teachers in high poverty and high minority schools. Moreover, even among teachers who were considered highly qualified, teachers in high poverty schools had less experience and were less likely to have a degree in the subject they taught.
• Although nearly all teachers 1 reported taking part in content focused professional development related to teaching reading or mathematics, a relatively small proportion participated in such learning opportunities for an extended period of time. For example, only 20 percent of elementary teachers participated for more than 24 hours in professional development on instructional strategies in reading; 2 only 8 percent received more than 24 hours of professional development on instructional strategies in mathematics.
• About two thirds of instructional paraprofessionals were considered qualified under NCLB, but nearly a third (28 percent) did not know their status or did not provide a response to the study questions. Most paraprofessionals reported working under the direct supervision of a teacher, but some Title I instructional paraprofessionals indicated that they worked with students on their own without close supervision from a teacher.

Link to a page from which you can secure a copy of the executive summary or the full report.