Teach Effectively!

A special educator who calls herself “mama t” in her blog and had previously reported that she was ready to bail from teaching, last week wrote that she has decided to stay. Although she is bothered by aspects of contemporary education—especially testing and matter of “highly qualified” imposed by NCLB (often called “nickle bee”; hence the title of this entry)—she has decided to opt for the stability and rewards she gets from teaching.

in the coming year i’ll be taking more certification tests. specifically for: ELA 4-8, ELA 8-12, Reading Specialist, and Librarian. this way, when my current job moves from a resource classroom to a co-teaching situation i’ll be able to get a job in which i can maintain my own classroom or leave the classroom for a library. longterm i would like to pursue a Master’s in Information Science and become a full-fledged librarian.

I hope this works for her. More importantly, I hope that she learns about evidence-based educational practices during her studies. (I have a post about an earlier posting of mama t’s in which she lauds the discredited modality view of learning; I should polish it and post it. I think I got lost with a lead about how she uses “missteach” in the URL and I sometimes use “misteach” in referring to bogus teaching ideas such as modality-based reading.)

Link to Ms. t’s statement about staying with teaching.

The folks at Staff Development for Educators have a Web site that advertises staff development resources. The list of training opportunities describes a mix of methods and topics, including these: “Guided Reading, Four Blocks™, Differentiated Instruction, Six-Trait Writing, Four Square Writing, Singapore Math, Learning Centers, Kindergarten, Reading Comprehension, Discipline and much more….” So, who are these people and what are they offering? Here’s their own description.

Staff Development for Educators (SDE) was founded more than twenty-five years ago by two educators with a revolutionary idea: Teachers learn best from other teachers. Jim and Lillian Grant held their first teacher get-together in a school lunchroom in tiny Temple, New Hampshire, more than two decades ago. Educators gathered from across New England to learn the best techniques from the best teachers in the region.

Since then, SDE has grown to become one of America’s leading providers of professional development resources for PreK through grade 12 educators. Today, SDE provides timely solutions to all your staff development needs, through the combined resources of its four specialized divisions:

I found myself feeling a little skeptical about these practices and the philosophy. So, I skimmed the site looking for evidence about the research basis for SDE’s efforts. Couldn’t find it. Must’ve looked in the wrong places. All I got was testimonials.

Let me apologize if you’ve already thought of this, but…uhm, could this be an illustration of why American education can’t get out of the doldrums? What’s up here? If the product SDE is selling is so good, why not show us the basis (other than testimonials) for its goodness?

Show us your data, please!

Effective instruction has been a central feature of my professional life, a grail I’ve pursued since the 1960s. I started on this quest as a beginning teacher–actually a teacher aide–when I was still in my teens. As a beginner, I was intially enamoured of the pop theories of that time, some of which still resonate with me and are still popular. However, the more I thought about those theories, they seemed to be self-reinforcing. I didn’t see any standard against which I could measure them other than my own internal standards. It seemed like the ultimate game of For-Us-or-Again-Us: If (and only if) you swore allegiance to our theory, your theory was O.K.

I thought my own preferences were just that–my own preferences, not a means of determining effectiveness. I wanted an objective measuring stick. So I began casting about for a meter stick, a scale, a way of comparing theories about education.

Of course, the measure of effectivenes is research validation. I got to that understanding by the courtesy of working with Alice Thompson while at Cal State LA and Steve Sheldon while taking research classes there. Their efforts probably were not aimed at the outcome I sought, but they pushed me to consider important ideas. Abetted by my reading of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, their influence led me to graduate study at the University of Oregon College of Education.

At Oregon I got lucky. I had the good fortune of being advised by Barb Bateman and studying with a group of professors and students who shared my bent. When we applied the effectiveness metric to what was available in education, there wasn’t much that reached beyond the subjective mark. But the conceptual foundation recommended by Zig Engelmann seemed quite solid and the initial data were very respectable. So I started from Zig’s “Direct Instruction.” Although I’d known about DI while teaching in southern California, it became apparent that Engelmann was basing his product development on the same premise as I was basing my academic interests: Compare alternatives and see which most closely approximates the desired outcomes, then refine those alternatives and test them again.

In collaboration with colleagues at Northern Illinois University–especially Mike Epstein and Doug Cullinan, but also Diane Deitz and Alan Repp–I was able to conduct a couple of studies of instructional practices with students with learning disabilities. We learned that it was possible to make a difference in those students’ outcomes.

In 1978 I moved to the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education to work with the faculty of special education on the U.Va. Learning Disabilities Research Institute. At U.Va. I have been fortunate enough to work with wonderful colleagues such as Jim Kauffman and Dan Hallahan–among others–and able to pursue research about how teaching methods change students’ performance.

At present, I am collaborating with Paige Pullen and others (for example, see MyTeachingPartner). Though the specifics vary a tad, the idea is still the same: Identify those teaching methods that produce better outcomes for learners.