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 ContentArchive for the 'News' Category
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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’
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’
Over on US National Public Radio’s “The Root,” John McWhorter comes pretty close to getting it right. In “Getting The Best Teaching Tools To Schools” he notes that the much-in-the-news results from the US National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP) simply show the need for effective educational practices. And he points squarely at Direct Instruction as a recommended remedy.
Continue reading ‘Somebody gets it’
Explicit Instruction, a new book by Anita Archer and Charles Hughes, sure gives the appearance of a winner. I’ve only had the chance to read the first chapter, but that and the knowledge that these two authors know their way around both the research about and practice of instruction are enough to convince me to place an order.
Continue reading ‘Looks like a winner!’
The Microsoft folks who bring us the search engine Bing have begun an effort to promote change in US education with REDU. The Web site makes a good case for why there should be concern about education in the US: high rates of dropping out, low rankings in international comparisons, aging teaching force, proportion of children attending schools in high-poverty areas, and so forth.
Sphere: Related ContentREDU stands for rethinking, reforming and rebuilding US education. Powered by people and technology, REDU is a movement designed to expand and encourage the national conversation around education reform by providing information and resources to learn, a community platform to connect, and tools and initiatives to act.
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’