Teach Effectively!

In Bogus Bowl V, the voting is pretty close. However, more respondents say that the most bogus reason for professors failing to teach prospective teachers effective methods is that they “don’t want to stifle future teachers’ creativity” than any of the other choices. However, it’s not a runaway; that explanation has garnered only about one third of the total votes. another reason—they “say that using research-based practice is only one small part of what future teachers need to know”—could catch and pass the leader with just a few votes.

Bogus Bowl V is only open for a little longer. If you’ve not voted yet, jump on over to it and cast your vote for your favorite.

Over on Weapons of Math Destruction, Oak Norton and Bob Bonham have another fun cartoon. It shows a police officers examining an outline on (presumably) a street; the caption begins, “Common sense was seen fleeing the crime scene….”

Jump over there and have a look at it in a higher resolution.

The US What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) announced the availability of three additional intervention reports. In none of the three cases was there sufficient evidence to permit the WWC to draw conclusions about the benefits of the practices.

Breakthrough to Literacy is a curriculum for students in preschool through third grade that introduces them to a book-a-week throughout the year. The book serves as a focal point for classroom activities with whole group and small group instruction. The curriculum also offers independent learning activities, including computer-based instruction, that allow students to progress at their own pace. Read the WWC’s Breakthrough to Literacy intervention report at http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/reports/early_ed/btl/.

Mathematics in Context is a middle school mathematics curriculum for grades 5 through 8. The curriculum teaches students to explore the relationships among different domains of mathematics (such as algebra and geometry) and to develop strategies for reasoning through problems, encouraging students to collaborate on problem solving. The WWC’s Mathematics in Context intervention report is available at http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/reports/middle_math/math_context/.

The New Century High Schools Initiative is a program designed to improve large, underperforming high schools by transforming them into small schools with links to community organizations. The schools choose a curriculum that has a theme or career focus, such as engineering, health science, or theater. Each school partners with a community organization that can participate in curriculum development, school management, after-school activities, or other operational aspects of the school. To read the WWC’s intervention report on the New Century High Schools Initiative go to http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/reports/dropout/new_century/.

Dan Willingham’s video about the lunchmeat “learning styles” (LS) has generated lots of discussion in the proverbial blogosphere. Matthew Tabor has a post with links to six sources. It’s pretty interesting that so much of the buzz about the video has focused on the putative auditory-visual LS. Dan pretty expressly aimed at an extended list of the things early in the video. But, A-V’s the one he used to make the points, and that’s probably good, because it’s probably the most popular of the bologna approaches.

Over on Ken’s D-Ed Reckoning, I dropped a comment on his post (and his post provides a good exposition on the subject of LS. In my comment, I promised to post an image showing the relative benefits of basing reading instruction on auditory-vs-visual LS. styles. It’s at the right. The yellow columns are standards for (left to right) weak effects (0.2), modest effects (0.3), pretty good effects (0.5), and outstanding effects (0.7). The purple bar is the effect size (0.144) that Kavale and Forness (1987) found when they analyzed 39 studies (205 effect sizes) of modality-based reading instruction.
Continue reading ‘More discussion of Dan’s LS video’

The Reading First Federal Advisory Committee has prepared a document entitled “Response to the Reading First Impact Study Interim Report” and has sent it to US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. It should be appearing in the next few days for public download on the Web page that reports the committee’s actions.

This is the report that I described in a post last May and about which I had another post 5 May.

Reminder: I am a member of the Reading First federal advisory committee. I am not, however, speaking for the committee, my fellow panelists, nor the US Department of Education here. Note, however, that the committee publicly endorsed this document in a meeting held last week.

The US What Works Clearinghouse recently released a new publication summarizing research about teaching literacy skills to adolescents.

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) invites you to look at our newest practice guide, Improving Adolescent Literacy: Effective Classroom and Intervention Practices.

This guide provides five specific recommendations to improve literacy among adolescents in the upper elementary, middle, and high school grades.

Designed for teachers and other personnel who have direct contact with students, the guide presents strategies that have the strongest research support and are appropriate for use with adolescents.

Even though I’m a bit wary of the WWC analyses these days, this document appears to have been reasonably thoughtfully done. Here’s a link to download the pdf of the document.

Here’s blurb about a new recource that’s available from the IRIS Center at Peabody:

The IRIS Center is pleased to announce the posting of a new STAR Legacy Module: PALS: A Reading Strategy for Grades 2-6, a revision and expansion of the PALS section of The Reading Blues: Strategies to Help Upper-Elementary Students Move from Struggle to Success.

When Mrs. Nash, a fifth-grade teacher and recent transfer to Miller Elementary, learns that her new school’s reading scores have fallen below the proficient level, she begins the search for a research-validated approach through which to improve her students’ reading skills. Soon, Mrs. Nash discovers PALS, a peer-assisted learning strategy. Join Mrs. Nash as she learns how to implement PALS in her classroom. To view PALS: A Reading Strategy for Grades 2-6, please go to http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/pals26/chalcycle.htm.

As always, we encourage you to share all of our materials (http://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/) with Your colleagues and students.

My colleague Dan Willingham produced a brief video explaining why basing instruction on learning styles is bologna. Here it is:

Here’s the YouTube link for Dan Willingham on Learning Styles and here’s a link to Dan’s Web site where one can learn plenty of useful things. Also, see the extended discussion on D-Ed Reckoning.