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Archive for the 'Musings' Category
Does all the verbiage about the ills of education make you wonder about the reasoning skills of educational reformers? Well, it does make me have questions. I practice resisting the urge to walk away when people start attributing educational underachievement to problems we educators can’t change (poverty, for example) or to features of schooling that are like nibbling on one’s napkin rather than eating food (e.g., walls height in classrooms).
I also get a bit incensed when folks go after teachers as the bad people in the equation. I find it foolish to suggest that education simply needs to raise pay to attract more qualified people into classrooms; it is an admittedly biased sample, but there are lots of smart people going through U.Va.’s (and similar) teacher education programs. (Sadly, too many teacher education programs fill their students’ thinking with Pop-Ed bologna.) And even though I talk about dysteachia and dyspedagogia, those are references to practices, not to the people—and some of the worst cases of dyspedagogia probably can be observed in the professoriate at schools of education!
Anyway, I am glad to report that a couple of my colleagues argued a coherent case about the importance of curriculum in the effects of teaching in an editorial for the New York Daily News. In “The teacher quality conundrum: If they are the problem, why are kids gaining in math? Curriculum design is key to reform,” Dan Willingham and David Grissmer use evidence and reason to explain that it’s not the teachers per se, but the teaching that matters. I encourage people interested in sensible reform of education to read it.
Sphere: Related ContentLate in July of 2011, Robert Carroll published Skeptic’s Dictionary for Kids, a complement to his long-standing Skeptic’s Dictionary. He reported that he created it after a twelve-year old told him she found the entries in the original “hard” and “too long” and a ten-year old wanted more pictures.
Like The Skeptic’s Dictionary, the SD for Kids defines words and tells the reader what scientists and skeptics think about whatever is being defined. The first version has 45 entries from abracadabra to zombies written for kids 9 and up. I recommend that kids first read the page About the SD for Kids and then read the entry on scientific skepticism.
I recognize that it’s a little off point to note the publication of Mr. Carroll’s site here on Teach Effectively, but I hope most readers harbor enough skepticism to recognize the potential utility of helping students develop a healthy sense of scientific literacy of their own. I’ll put it in the category of “content learning.”
I regret that Mr. Carroll used the “hard” and “more pictures” rationale for writing the for-kids version of his work. I’m glad that he’s introducing kids to thinking hard, though. That’s important. There are too many kids growing up with the mushy reasoning of advertising and the dodgy logic we see regularly in—sigh—education. A little scaffolding is O.K.
Summer’s coming to an end. Lots of folks are back into the school year! I hope anyone who hasn’t previously done so will resolve to employ effective teaching procedures rather than those that just look good or sound nifty.
Sphere: Related ContentAs a parent of a child with reading problems, what would you think if a nearby college or university offered a special summer reading program that sounded especially promising? What if you went to a Web site branded with the university’s trademark “logo” and saw well-produced videos with testimonials from parents and phrases such as these: “Your child will get excited about learning to read, and the program will lay the foundation for a strong start in reading and school?” And, your child can benefit in as few as 10 hours!
Would you be tempted? Over on Reading and Other Learning Disabilities, Professors Howard Margolis and Gary Brannigan are skeptical about the possibilities. They explain in their post, “Rutgers University’s 10-Hour Summer Reading Program: Serious Concerns.” Writing for the team blog, Professor Margolis, reported his skepticism about the claims after reading a mailer describing “a summer reading programs [that] would quickly ‘turn poor readers into good readers.’”
Continue reading ‘Something odd going on?’
Sphere: Related ContentI’m using a capital T for Teachers, because I’m referring to those who put their students’ learning first, who adopt evidence-based teaching methods, who let scientific findings be their guide to teaching. They are heros. They are going against the tide, and they deserve lots of support.
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’
My 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’
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’