Liam Julian, who writes for the Fordham-sponsored Education Gadfly, has an editorial in the 20 December issue that amounts to a call for employing Direct Instruction. In “Check yourself before you wreck yourself,” Mr. Julian writes about the utility of checklists. He explains that when doctors use specific, scripted methods they are not criticized for doing so, but that many educators complain about scripted instructional methods.
Continue reading ‘Liam Julian on scripted instruction’
Monthly Archive for December, 2007
TMAO, who blogs at Teaching in the 408, has a post discussing the semi-professional position into which many teachers feel they are pushed. TMAO proposes that abolition of some constraints (e.g., tenure) and adoption of some form of merit pay will help professionalize teaching. To be treated like a profession, though, teaching will almost certainly have to adopt some fundamental professional behaviors. As TMAO notes, some form of accountability is required. Also, professional decision-making is needed.
I’m reminded of Doug Carnine’s paper, “Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices (And What It Would Take to Make Education More Like Medicine),” in which similar sorts of issues are discussed. However the thrust there is more toward the decision-making side than the pay-advancement side.
Link to TMAO’s ledge post and to a PDF of Doug’s paper.
Sphere: Related ContentI was pleased to happen upon a Web site entitled The Concord Review. The folks there—principally Will Fitzhugh—pitch the idea that academic excellence should be treated just as well as athletic excellence, so they have a varsity team of high school history writers. According to the home page, “Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere. We celebrate varsity academics.”
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Gül Dölen and Mark Baer
Photo by Donna Coveney
Professor Mark Baer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who studies how brains change as a result of experience, and his colleagues have identified bio-chemical factors (mGluR5 and FMRP) that, when re-balanced in mice bred to model Fragile-X syndrome, correct multiple defects associated with mental retardation and Autism. Here’s a snippet from the MIT press release:
Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have corrected key symptoms of mental retardation and autism in mice.
The work, which will be reported in the Dec. 20 issue of Neuron, indicates that a certain class of drugs could have the same effect in humans. These drugs are not yet approved by the FDA, but will soon be entering into clinical trials.
Continue reading ‘Correcting MR and Autism’
Sphere: Related ContentThe Chronicle of Higher Education officially broke the news today of a substantial effort to bring qualified people into teaching. Under the headline “2 Fellowship Programs to Award Millions to Prospective Teachers” there is a story about a state- and a national-level program.
Let’s hope that the people who go through these programs receive preparation in how to recognize and implement effective teaching methods. It’d be shame to have them trained (arf! arf!) in the usual namby-pamby methods that have so dominated education in the 40 years I’ve been watching it.
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After a competition last spring, the US Department of Education awarded a project to AIR to host RTI4Success. The Web site for that project recently became available. It has few resources at this time, but it’s likely to grow.
Sphere: Related ContentEarlier this month, the US Department of Education convened a meeting of people interested in employing response-to-intervention procedures to improve the education of students who are struggling to attain academic and social competence. Teams represented state education agency and related others from each US state.
The purpose of this meeting [was] to provide training, information, and planning time for educational teams working on the implementation of early intervening services and response to intervention instructional approaches.
The RTI Summit has three primary goals:
- To gather teams of key State education leaders and selected state affiliate organizations to learn about components and models of Response to Intervention (RTI).
- To assist States in scaling up comprehensive models of RTI in their schools and districts.
- To help States develop a state plan for implementing RTI and provide information about accessing various federal and state resources to assist with implementation.
Link to the Web site for the summit. Check under “resources” for some potentially valuable information about related Web sites and current research projects.
Sphere: Related ContentLast spring a small group of my colleagues and I corresponded about the idea that the number of children with reading problems predicts the need for prison beds. In “Internets, Help Me Find A Citation! Does Any State Include Education Data in Estimating Future Needs for Prison Capacity,” Liz Ditz asked for help with that same popular idea. I sent her some notes from a search that I’d conducted last spring on the topic. Although you can read my notes there, the short of them is that there’s a lot of talk about the idea, but not much data. So, why not get some data and examine the question?
Continue reading ‘Predicting imprisonment from reading data’
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