Teach Effectively!

Joanne Jacobs covered a story about a professional development consultant advising a teacher to dodge a question about whether introducing calculators will hinder students’ acquisition of basic computation skills. There’s video! With transcription by Wayne Bishop, one of Teach Effectively’s Much Admired Folx, the inanity of the consultant’s response becomes quite clear. If the presenter wasn’t so serious, it’d be humorous, sort of like a parody.

Link to Ms. Jacob’s post.

Over on Reading Rockets Kathleen McLane has an entry about monitoring progress that’s got a good intro and some valuable links. Take a look at it. There’s also video about progress monitoring in action, a link to a Web cast featuring Roland Good, Mary Ruth Coleman, and Michael C. McKenna discussing assessment including progress monitoring, and an opportunity to ask CBM guru Lynn Fuchs questions about monitoring progress (click the dropdown menu to select Professor Fuchs as the target of your question).

In “Schools to Retain Controversial Math Curriculum” Michael Birmbaum reported that a local education agency has elected to continue teaching arithmetic using a curriculum that has minimal evidence of effectiveness. Mr. Birmbaum, who writes for the Washington (DC, US) Post wrote about the decision the school system of a county that is in neighboring northern Virginia and is, in fact, where I attended first through third grades.

Prince William County elementary schools will continue to teach mathematics with a textbook series that has drawn parent criticism and national scrutiny, despite deep divisions in the community over whether students should be given other options.

The curriculum from Pearson Education, “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space,” which is used in thousands of classrooms nationwide, has been debated virtually since Prince William began using it three years ago under the administration of Superintendent Steven L. Walts. Critics say it fails to help students learn basic skills and facts.

Continue reading ‘Keep or sweep?’

Zig Engelmann, principle author of a sweet suite of instructional materials that cover the range from beginning language skills to core concepts in physical sciences, has revised his Web site, Zig Site. If you’ve ever heard of “Direct Instruction” (sometimes said, “Big DI”), you’ve heard of Zig’s work. The new site has somethings new and somethings old. Rather than précis the changes, here’s how Zig describes it:

Starting in 2009, Zigsite is going to have an emphasis on training through videos. The first will be a series of 13 video sessions on teaching English pronunciation to non-English speakers. It will be followed by a series of training videos on teaching our new program, Direct Instruction Spoken English.

The longer printed works on Zigsite include, Rubric for Identifying Authentic DI Programs, Low Performers’ Manual, and the log of the first formal study I did in education—Comparative Preschool Study: High and Low SES Preschoolers Learning Advanced Cognitive Skills. These are constructive. Most of the other works are constructive only in the sense that they help clarify why education has gone basically nowhere in the past 40 years. Only now are educators starting to “invent” some of the stuff we used back in the 60s.

Continue reading ‘Zig site morphs’

Todd Oppenheimer, who wrote The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology, published an op-ed piece in the San Francisco (CA, US) Chronicle recommending that US President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan avoid plans to invest heavily in computer technology for US schools. In “Technology not the panacea for education,” Mr. Oppenheimer argues that promoting technology will not improve US competitiveness.

Rather than promote technology, Mr. Oppenheimer recommends—gasp!—preparing students to read, write, and compute!

Continue reading ‘Tech not’

Gates Foundation 1st Annual Letter

I read with interest your statement about the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (2009 Annual Letter from Bill Gates). Thank you for the efforts of the foundation in so many important areas (global health, agriculture, etc.).

Given my own focus, I was especially interested in your discussion about US education. I appreciate your candor in assessing the successes and failures of the foundation’s efforts in education, as reflected in this quotation:

Nine years ago, the foundation decided to invest in helping to create better high schools, and we have made over $2 billion in grants. The goal was to give schools extra money for a period of time to make changes in the way they were organized (including reducing their size), in how the teachers worked, and in the curriculum. The hope was that after a few years they would operate at the same cost per student as before, but they would have become much more effective.

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school.

Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.

Later in your statement, you rightly emphasize the importance of helping “teachers be more effective in the classroom.” I want to underscore this point, because I consider it critical to enhancing the strength of US education and, thereby, improving outcomes for students in our schools. For students to gain access to higher education, they must have the competence required in foundational areas such as mathematics, written expression, and content knowledge. Achieving that competence requires teachers who employ effective methods of teaching.

Indeed, the idea undergirding this Web site is that we know lots about teaching effectively. When they have the right tools and use them skillfully, teachers can have effects on students’ performance that may appear to be small but that, in fact, turn out to be changes in trajectory which play critical roles in improving students’ outcome in the longer term.

Students who, during their early schooling, become facile with the decoding aspects of reading, the computational aspects of arithmetic, and the more mechanical aspects of writing will have initial and sustained advantages in learning content later. Similarly, those who master the fundamental aspects of algebra during the later elementary and early secondary grades will have greater opportunities to pursue advanced studies in mathematics, science, and technology. Equipping teachers with the tools and skills to deflect students’ trajectories in these areas will help mightily in improving education.

Based on a large body of research, we know pretty much how to accomplish this. It is clear that systematic, explicit instructional practices (e.g., Direct Instruction) promote measurably improved outcomes for students. And, it’s important for teachers to be able to see the fruits of their efforts. It’s not enough to present lessons and hope that students will do well years later; we need to refocus on students’ progress at a more micro level if teachers are to be able to see progress, and adjust instruction quickly to meet students’ need (curriculum-based measurement or precision teaching). Interestingly, much of this research comes from special education, where the very nature of the population of students requires efficient teaching.

The formula is actually relatively simple:

1. Faithfully implement evidence-based instructional practices and curricula that systematically teach students requisite skills and knowledge from the get-go;
2. Initially differentiate instruction on the basis of students’ prior learning;
3. Frequently monitor students’ acquisition of skills and knowledge as they develop; and
4. Systematically adjust instruction on the basis of students’ learning.

I suspect that a relatively small investment per teacher (say, $5000/yr) in a key area (algebra, for example) aimed at preparing the teachers to provide instruction based on these four principles would yield valuable results. And once those teachers see the benefits to their students, I suspect few will go back to teaching in the comfortable-but-ineffective ways of the past. At the least, this proposition is a testable hypothesis. If one wanted to make a really powerful test, it would be good to focus on teachers from a few score inner city schools.

If you’d like to give this idea a whirl, let me know. Meanwhile, keep up the good works in those other areas.

Regards,

John Wills Lloyd, Ph.D.
John [at] JohnWillsLloyd [dot] com

Jim Wright, who is a school psychologist in New York and an author of multiple sources about current topics in education, has a Web site that some folks will likely find valuable. He calls it “Intervention Central,” and he’s populated it with guidance about teaching techniques. There are specific many specific recommendations, organized according to academic area (e.g., arithmetic, reading fluency) as well as by topic (e.g., RTI, classroom behavior). Mr. Wright has based many of his recommendations on published studies. Link to Intervention Central.

In “Pre-K Can Work: Needy kids could benefit, but only if we use proven pedagogy and hold programs accountable,” Shepard Barbash of the City Journal describes the conditions he sees as required if pre-kindergarten programs are to benefit the US. Actually, he devotes several paragraphs to describing what’s wrong with pre-k education. Noting that many children from relatively less-advantaged home environments come to pre-k with substantially lower verbal repertoires than their more-advantaged peers, Mr. Barbash indicts the perspective of many early childhood educators about these deficits:

Central to the typical early-childhood educator’s worldview are three ideas: that it’s better for young children to learn through play than through work; that children learn best and are happiest when they can help direct the pace and content of their own learning; and that a child’s mental abilities develop at a natural pace that adults cannot do much to accelerate. If a child fails to learn something, it’s not because the teaching is faulty, in this view; it’s because the child is either “learning disabled” or not yet “developmentally ready” to learn it—a notion derived from the theories of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that mental abilities developed in age-determined phases.

From these premises flow a host of others. Pre-K teachers learn that it’s not “developmentally appropriate practice” to seat children at desks; to give them worksheets; to make them work to master the alphabet, letter sounds, and math; to assess their academic skills (medical, dental, and nutrition assessments are okay); and to group them by skill level for instruction (because all children should receive equal treatment and because children learn as much from one another as they do from adults). Many things that parents would call common sense are, for the preschool professional, high-risk activities.

The alternative, Mr. Barbash proposes, is to provide Direct Instruction. He illustrates with anecdotes from his own observations of pre-k lessons. And he goes further, arguing in favor of consistent, systematic assessment of children’s competence during the pre-k years.

Read Mr. Barbash’s article at the City Journal.