Teach Effectively!

Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences seems to occupy a special place in the pantheon of education memes. I was reminded of this when I read “Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius” by Christopher Ferguson. Mr. Ferguson’s essay—it appears in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the news source of record for higher educators—politely explains that sustaining Multiple Intelligences (MI) theory is not a good idea.

Rational analyses of the MI evidence by Dan Willingham and Lynn Waterhouse have shown that there are problems with both the theory itself (e.g., most of the eight intelligences are highly correlated, meaning that they are likely measuring the same “thing” for the most part) and its application in education (e.g., methods based on MI do not lead to better outcomes).

Mr. Ferguson’s essay continues in that same tradition. He makes a strong case for his conclusion that “Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences was a great idea and worth investigating. It’s just not panning out.”
Continue reading ‘Multiple intelligences ain’t’

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.

The US Supreme Court will hear arguments today in Flores v. State of Arizona, a case that captures important concerns about contemporary education in the US. Plantiff argues that English-language Learner (ELL) programs are deficient and receive inadequate funding, violating a provision of a US federal law (the Equal Educational Opportunity Act; EEOA) requiring that states ensure that students for whom English is not a first language can learn how to speak English and, thus, benefit from education.

The class-action case gets its name from Miriam Flores, an elementary student in the 1990s, who had limited English proficiency (LEP) and did not benefit from the ELL services during her primary schooling. US National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg reported Ms. Flores recollections (she is now 22 and a student at the University of Arizona):

“It was quite a disadvantage, definitely,” Flores says. “For example, even when it comes to math, I mean problem solving, they were all in English. So in order to understand, you need to be proficient in your reading in English.”
Continue reading ‘ELLs deserve effective teaching, too’

News sources around the US are abuzz with how state and local education agencies will spend the influx of funds for special education that comes with the US government’s increases in IDEA funding under the stimulus plan.

• Schools getting stimulus aid, but is it too late? from AZ Central.com
• Schools’ stimulus a puzzle from the Daily Tribune – Columbia, MO
• State schools to get $118M from the News Sentinel – Knoxville, TN
• A boost for poor, special-needs kids from the Star Tribune – Minneapolis, MN
• Berkeley Unified Will Receive $2.4 Million in Stimulus Funds Next Month from the Daily Planet – Berkeley, CA

Given that these funds may be pretty fleeting (here today, gone in a couple of years?), how wise is it to invest in more teachers whom the LEAs will have to dismiss or materials that are likely to need replacement in just a few years? I’d say, “NOT!”

Why not invest in staff development, using the two-year span to ensure that virtually all teachers know how to measure progress in easy-but-rigorous ways (e.g., curriculum-based measurement), implement school-wide discipline programs, and present lessons in systematic and (dare I say it?) instructive ways?

Here are some relevant links: Research Institute on Progress Monitoring and Student Progress; School-wide Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports.

According to Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor for the Washington Post, Bill Gates of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation plans to refocus the Gates Foundation’s educational efforts on successful charter schools and improving teacher effectiveness. Good news, at least on the latter matter.

As I developed in an earlier post, the Gates Foundation could do a lot of good by systematically picking off critical subject areas in education (I suggested algebra as a good starter) and upgrading instruction in that area by spreading the use of evidence-based teaching procedures.

Mr. Hiatt’s column does not explicate the details of the Gates Foundation’s plans, but it is encouraging that there is a focus on improving teacher effectiveness.

Read Mr. Hiatt’s column.

E. D. Hirsch, author of several books worthy of mention, provided a column for the page opposite the editorial page of the New York Times on 22 March to which I’d like to call attention. Under the headline “Reading Test Dummies,” Professor Hirsch argues that the problem with contemporary, high-stakes tests isn’t that they test knowledge, but that they test the wrong knowledge.

Professor Hirsch leads by quoting President B. Obama’s expression of concern for developing assessments that “don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on on test.” Then he suggests that instead of discarding the tests, we should change their content.

These much maligned, fill-in-the-bubble reading tests are technically among the most reliable and valid tests available. The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Continue reading ‘Hirsch on reading tests’

Basic Teaching Principles from TIEE

For those readers who do not know about The Institute for Effective Education (TIEE), here is an illustration of why I like what the folks there recommend. I created the accompanying graphic from the mission and philosophy page of the Web site for TIEE. It lists some concepts that I think are at the core of teaching effectively. There is not one statement among those on this list with which I disagree.

These should be foundational concepts for teachers, whether they are practicing teachers or preparing to teach. If schools made their teaching adhere to these features, I predict that those schools’ students would be less likely to fail, would have fewer behavior problems, and would have higher levels of high achievement than the garden variety of schools.
Continue reading ‘tiee org’

For a long time, we have known a lot about effective practices in teaching. Of course, there is debate about whether the specifics are exactly correct, whether some studies have been discredited, or whether the paradigm fits people’s biases. Despite these debates, some general guidelines about effective teaching can be distilled from educational research. Here is one general description of effective teaching practices. I consider it a helpful guide to explicit, systematic instruction. In the parlance I use, this set of features describes “direct instruction” (note the lower-case letters):

In general, researchers have found that when effective teachers teach well-structured subjects, they:

• Begin a lesson with a short review of previous, prerequisite learning.
• Begin a lesson with a short statement of goals.

Continue reading ‘Effective teaching practices’