The Fordham Insitute, a non-partisan think-tank in Washington (DC, US) that affiliates with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute, has released a report entitled Whole-Language High Jinks that exposes the misrepresentations of some reading programs which claim to have a firm evidencary base, but actually do not. The report was written Louisa Moats and provides school officials, parents, and teachers advice about how to spot instructional programs that Professor Moats says are only pretenders to the status of being “scientifically based.”
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That’s the title of an article by Joel Best, an academic at the University of Delaware, that is in the 14 April 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Knowing what I know about the problemsome practice of special education, I turned to the article to see what arguments he was going to use in discussing the topic in higher education. As it happens, Mr. Best cataloged a lot of familiar sounding fads in his discussion. Here’s his lead.
I have spent nearly 25 years chairing academic departments at three universities. Department chairmen attend many meetings where the future is unveiled, priorities are articulated, and innovations are announced. Over the years, I have been assured that our university — if not all of higher education — was about to be transformed by the Pacific Rim, assessment, active learning, cooperative learning, distance learning, service learning, problem-based learning, responsibility-based management, zero-based budgeting, broadening the general-education requirements, narrowing the general-education requirements, capstone courses, writing across the curriculum, affirmative action, multicultural education, computer networking, the Internet, water (don’t ask), critical thinking, quantitative reasoning, and I don’t know what else. I have gone on retreats; participated in program reviews; served on task forces; puzzled over mission statements; written five-year plans, three-year plans, and niche reports; and listened to proclamations from pro-vosts, assistant provosts, deans, associate deans, and wannabe deans.
Some of those much-heralded innovations are long forgotten. Others remain housed somewhere on the campus, but I think it is fair to say that higher education hasn’t changed all that much, that none of these ideas proved to be as transformative as their advocates predicted. Compared to their advance billing, they all turned out to be short-term enthusiasms or — more bluntly — educational fads.
Mr. Best notes that fads are not solely the province of higher education. He lists medicine, elementary and secondary education, and business as also susceptible to the plague. What is more, Mr. Best hits the theme of Teach Effectively squarely on the head later in the article. He notes that fads are routinely adopted—and abandoned—before there are careful examinations of their effects. He strongly recommends higher education to “wait for some evidence that [a fad] actually works.”
Link to Mr. Best’s column [subscription may be required].
Sphere: Related ContentA 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.
Sphere: Related Content
Cameron Marlow of the MIT Media Lab is collecting data about Weblogs. If you maintain a blog or contribute to one, you can help the folks there develop a statistical picture of the people who contribute to blogs by completing an anonymous survey. I gave at home. The image is a link.
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!
Sphere: Related ContentIt’s difficult to find a news article that is positive about education, particularly about special education. Here is one that is rather editorial but positive about teaching and taking responsibility for achievement. Thought you might want to take a look.
There is hope for education if you just look
Sphere: Related ContentIn a previous blog, I referred to linking learning goals, instruction, and evaluation. Much has been written about curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and its use in evaluating student performance, particularly in reading. (Click here for a tutorial by Stan Deno).
CBM is useful for connecting learning and instruction and for measuring the progress of students that do not appear to be moving along on standardized achievement tests. Unfortunately, many teachers think CBM requires a tremendous amount of front-end time to develop. It takes no time to use and is a great way to communicate progress to both students and parents.
Fortunately, there are resources for teachers who want to use CBM in the areas of phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, and fluency but who don’t have the time to create their own measures. The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (or DIBELS) system is available on the web and, according to the site, “For the 2004-2005 school year, 7113 schools are actively using the DIBELS Data System, across 2234 districts in 49 states and Canada, totaling over 1.5 million students (K-3).” For more information and free downloads, check out the DIBELS website.
Sphere: Related ContentOk. I’m a reluctant blogger but I’m going to take the plunge. I’ve read the posts on Teach Effectively and want to add my two cents (or perhaps 25 cents).
I am a former special educator at the middle and high school levels. I’ve worked with students with learning disabilities, emotional/behavioral disorders, traumatic brain injury, and Attention Deficit Disorder. I’ve worked in almost every special education environment: co-taught classrooms, resource rooms, self-contained classrooms, and a special school. I am completely convinced (by both anecdotal and empirical evidence) that good instruction and quality teachers make a difference.
In the last four years, I have had two children. Watching them learn, both incidentally and through planned activities, has made me understand how well-planned, quality instruction is vital to a child’s or an adult’s learning. I define well-planned (as many others before me) as instruction that is a series of progressive steps toward a goal. For example, one of the goals for my daughter (she’s almost 4) is for her to be able to write all of her letters correctly. Her teachers have helped her learn to accurately trace shapes that contain all of the lines used to make letters. She colors in those shapes to improve her fine motor skills. She has completed many other activities to hone the skills necessary to write letters. She has practiced each one of these skills over and over again. She can now write any letter you ask her to write—and they are all “in the lines.”
Why am I telling you this? Because this is a perfect example of TASK ANALYSIS. These teachers (or someone involved in developing these activities) have broken the task of writing into its basic components, taught those components, and therefore, the child has achieved the goal of writing letters. The art of task analysis is a lost skill, particularly at the secondary level. Complex tasks such as reading comprehension must be broken down into component steps in order for students to be taught. You can find a very thorough description of how to do a task analysis here
Once completed, a task analysis leads a teacher from instruction to evaluation—did the student achieve the goal? Where are the problems? What does my instruction need to address?
To me, the linking of learning goal, instruction, and evaluation is the only way to teach effectively.
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