Teach Effectively!

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’

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’

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