Teach Effectively!

A subcommittee in the US House of Representatives plans to hold a hearing about the effects of inadequate education on the economy. I’ve gotta wonder whether someone will be able to perform the calculus to ascertain the relative benefits of teaching effectively. Let’s see, if students on average benefit as little as 10%/year from receiving effective instruction, after 13 years—without compounding—they would have 1.3 more years of concepts and operations. I wonder what that would do to the workforce.

The House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies will hold a hearing discussing the “Opportunities Lost and Costs to Society: The Social and Economic Burden of Inadequate Education, Training and Workforce Development.” The hearing is slated for 14 February at 2:00 p.m. and will be held in 2358-C Rayburn HOB. Contact Cheryl L. Smith, Subcommittee Clerk, Room 2358-B Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515, (202) 225-3508

Temporary link.

I dropped an entry into LD Blog about reading fluency that one or two (of the two or three) readers here might find worthwhile. It’s essentially an incomplete catalog of resources about fluency, along with some editorial comments.

I was reading entries on the famous blog by Joanne Jacobs recently when I came across a post about content on which I’ve previously commented. I felt my super-skeptical hackles rise. Here’s Ms. Jacobs’ lead

Without school choice, high standards and good instruction aren’t enough to improve education for disadvantaged students, argues Lisa Snell in Reason. She’s responding to Sol Stern’s City Journal article, Choice Is Not Enough, which has stirred up a lively debate.

Ms. Jacobs accurately represents Lisa Snell’s argument. It’s a lengthy one and there’s a link to it later. But, it made me realize that I’ve not actually stated my view on these sorts of issues. In some senses, Ms. Snell’s argument is sensible. However, standards only provide the measuring stick; they establish the goals in that folks have agreed to those standards are important. Effective instuctional practices are only valuable if they effectively teach what we want. We could design really effective procedures to teach basketweaving underwater, but who places that high on the list of educational goals?

But, Mr. Stern has the right fundamental path: Teach what we want effectively. Don Hirsch proposed a way—community discussion—to identify what we want for goals, but he has been shouted at as if he proposed the actual goals.

In my view, the problem is relatively simple:

1. Establish educational goals through a reasonble process of collegial discussion among the stakeholders and state those goals operationally;
2. Identify instructional processes (i.e., curricula, teaching methods, etc.) that will achieve those goals more efficiently than alternative processes;
3. Employ those processes that pass (2);
4. Monitor students’ outcomes;
5. Modify the processes to fine tune them or discard them when more effective general processes emerge;
6. Monitor the progress of students at the left end of the achievement distribution and provide extra-intensive, evidence-based instruction for them;
7. Repeat repeatedly.

Those who dote on teacher empowerment, choice, vouchers, inclusion, standards, home-schooling, multi-sensory methods, etc. [please add to the list], have focused too narrowly. As important as those topics are, we will only chase our tails if we follow them to the exclusion of the bigger picture.

Link to (a) Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Stern’s, and Ms. Snell’s posts.

O.K, folks, here’s a second installment in the Bogus Bowl. Bogus Bowl I will close Saturday night (9 Feb 08), so jump over there (click on “polls” in the top navigation element) and vote in the first one if you’ve not done so already. Then come back here and vote on this one…. Or vice versa.

In this one, we’re examing reasons that educators give for shirking what I’ve sometimes called the “instructional obligation.” It’s your chance to consider alternative rationales for not teaching.
Continue reading ‘Bogus Bowl II’

In an entry on Life on the Other Side of the Teachers Desk, a writer who identifies her- or himself as “deltasleep” reports on experiences during student teaching. There are several posts worthy of note, but I want to call attention to one about about how inclusion is practiced in the school to which deltasleep is assigned. Deltasleep is assigned to a regular-education 5th grade classroom that includes many students with disabilities.

I’ve not even started teaching yet and I’ve already got a real curveball! “Inclusion” is a special education term used to describe the process of providing special education students with the “least restrictive environment.” This typically means that a special education student attends a “typical” class.
TN classrooms(and probably others) have found a way to circumvent this by dumping all of the special education students in a grade into one class. Teachers call this the “inclusion class.” I find this practice totally abhorrent, as it is clearly a way to circumvent a law designed to help students.

I am surprised by this policy. I have to wonder to what extent deltasleep’s characterization of the situation represents it accurately, but if there is such a policy, it doesn’t align with sensible plans about promoting students educational outcomes. I hope that deltasleep will get a chance to (a) determine whether this actually is TN policy and (b) examine the effects on student learning and behavior closely and objectively.

Read the full entry and others at i>Life on the Other Side of the Teachers Desk.

Over on Cal Teacher Blog Kevin Bibo had a nice post 4 February 2008 identifying and explaining important foci for teaching. It’s worth a read:

I don’t write much about the nuts and bolts of teaching. Mostly thats because I feel like its already been covered… extensively. But I do think that there are four major areas that ALL teachers should focus on if they desire to be effective in the classroom. Those four areas include: relationship, management, instruction, and assessment.

Link to the entry. Mr. Bibo, who I think was once an English teacher and now teaches technology applications for high school, has many clearly written and often sensible posts. While you’re there, check one that I sometimes refer to in my classes, “Spoon-Feeding Students.”

The American Enterprise Institute will hold an event entitled “What 2008 Holds for Research in Education” 7 February 2008 in Washington (DC, US) at which policy analyst Rick Hess will lead a discussion of his book on how research affects educational policy. Here’s part of the hype for the event:

In a bold departure from previous federal programs, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that federal dollars in education be steered toward programs and practices proven effective by scientific research. In 2002, Congress passed the Education Sciences Reform Act, which created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to support and fulfill that requirement. With the reauthorization of the IES approaching in 2008 and the reauthorization of NCLB still pending, it is an opportune time to assess where we stand and what lies ahead for educational research. How has scientific research influenced policymaking and education research in the past six years? How can federal policymakers encourage effective interaction between research, policy, and practice?

At this event, AEI director of education policy studies Frederick M. Hess will present findings from his new book, When Research Matters: How Scholarship Influences Education Policy (Harvard Education Press, 2008). Susan Fuhrman, president of Columbia University Teachers College; James Kohlmoos, president of the Knowledge Alliance; Gerald Sroufe, director of government relations for the American Educational Research Association; and Grover “Russ” J. Whitehurst, the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, will join the discussion.

I hope that the discussion will be more than (a) a re-counting of Mr. Hess’ book and (b) a disagreement along political lines. I fear I shan’t make it, but I hope that some reader who does attend will provide a report of the proceedings.

Date and time: Thursday, 7 February 2008, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM.
Location: Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

To see the announcement go here. There is a link for registration on the announcement page.

In “Out of the Office and into the Classroom: An initiative to help principals focus on instruction,” Holly Holland describes an initiative aimed at promoting school principals as instructional leaders. Writing for the Center for the Study of Teaching and Policy at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA, US), Ms. Holland reports on using administrative managers to handle some of the routine work of a school that usually falls on its principal, freeing the principal to visit classrooms. Here’s how the Wallace Foundation, which is funding the project, describes it.

For many principals weighed down by the time demands of bus schedules and budgets, improving instruction too often takes a back seat. This brief journalistic account describes how schools in nine states are testing a new position, called School Administration Manager (SAM), whose job is to help free principals of many of these administrative distractions and allow them to spend more time on instructional matters. The goal of this promising new approach, pioneered by the Jefferson County (KY) Public Schools with Wallace’s support, is to hire a SAM to assume operational functions, track the principal’s time to see how much she is spending on instruction, and provide coaching to ensure that the principal actually becomes more focused on instruction.

Continue reading ‘Principals’ roles’