Evidence-based teaching methods for helping students who are at risk for school failure or who have disabilities.
Mr. Hal Bowman is advertising professional development opportunities for US teachers. They’re promoted with the lead, “Teach Like a Rock Star.” Here’s the main content of two e-mail messages I received:
Sphere: Related ContentPrincipals from coast-to-coast are sending their teachers by the boatload to attend Teach Like A Rock Star.
Is it unconventional? Definitely.
Entertaining? Absolutely.
Effective? Beyond belief.
Continue reading ‘Teach like a rockstar, legend’
The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, which covers many different social programs in addition to education, announced the publication of an electronic newsletter that should be of interest to some readers. The current issue of RIGOROUS EVIDENCE Newsletter: Distinguishing Effective Evidence-Based Programs from Everything Else doesn’t have much that is precisely on point for education (though, check the entry about a teen pregnancy program), but one can bookmark the on-line site for the newsletter and check it regularly as a potential source for trustworthy content about effective educational methods.
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Until 31 January 2011, one can download a copy of Funnix a tutorial program for teaching beginning reading skills just for the asking. Yes, you have to submit a name and an e-mail address, that’s the catch.
Funnix, authored by Siegfied Engelmann, Owen Engelmann, and Karen Davis, is composed of 120 30-minute lessons delivered via compact disk on a computer. An adult coaches the child as she learns fundamentals of decoding (e.g., letter-sound correspondences, blending), practices reading words (lists, sentences, and passages), and develops basic comprehension skills (e.g., literal connections). Children answer some questions verbally, click answers to others directly on the computer, and write responses to others in workbooks. The adult monitors and provides feedback. (The package includes materials guiding the adult’s support.)
Continue reading ‘Funnix is free for a few more days’
If you’re interested in understanding why “most of what you see advertised as educational advice rooted in neuroscience is bunkum,” slip on over to LD Blog and catch up with a post about Dan Willingham’s recent entry explaining what educators need to know about brains.
Sphere: Related ContentMy colleague, Robert McNergney has a post on Education News entitled “Small Ball: Small Teaching” that captures an important idea: Pay attention to the details. He based his brief essay on an enquiry from a student about whether he had read a well-known book about baseball, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael M. Lewis, about the Oakland Athletics. Mr. Lewis documented the success of an approach to assembling a team that was predicated on systematic analysis of less-glamorous achievements rather than the flashy, headline-grabbing statistics; in place of subjective judgements about players’ talents, the Oakland general manager, Bill Beane, employed modern statistical methods to find players whose achievements were correlated with higher numbers of wins and fewer losses.
Professor McNergney argued that, indeed, the analogy applies to teaching as well.
Continue reading ‘McNergney: Small teaching’
The education press is abuzz about the release of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 results, so it’s a good time for some semi-snarky speculation about excuses for the less-than-stellar relative scores for US students and about proposals we’ll be hearing or reading regarding what the US education system should do to correct underlying problems leading to those scores. Here’s a start. Feel free to add your own in the comments. (For bonus points, drop in references to news stories, letters to the editor, and etc. where people actually express one of the prototypical positions!)
Continue reading ‘PISA results as Rorschach’
In its announcement mechanism, Top Tier Evidence, the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has given another boost to that venerable intervention, the Good Behavior Game (GBG). Top Tier Evidence judged a combination of the GBG and a special academic curriculum to meet nearly all its standards for a “Top Tier” classification, failing only the standard of having been tested in multiple sites.
The GBG was originally reported by Harriet Barrish in a masters thesis while working with Mont Wolf at Kansas University in the 1960s. Others—particularly Shep Kellam at Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues—recognized the utility of the practice and studied it more extensively. Professor Kellam and his team conducted a large-scale study in Baltimore and from that study and follow-up reports about it and others, the Top Tier Evidence folks have drawn their analysis.
Continue reading ‘GBG recognized again’
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Where reformers ought to be aiming
Over on Ed Excellence, Robert Pondiscio published an editorial entitled “The Fierce Urgency of Eventually” in which he argues that those reform efforts that ignore curricular and instructional issues present less-than-timely and -helpful alternatives at the very time when US education needs immediate, substantive change. Mr. Pondiscio presses his case for doing the hard work of specifying what students need to know. He wants reformers to talk about—get ready!—curriculum, teaching, and learning!
Sphere: Related ContentContinue reading ‘Where reformers ought to be aiming’