By Paul Sutton, Education Week February 26, 2009
Throughout his now-famous "Last Lecture," the late Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science Randy Pausch talked about what he called the "head fake." It is the idea that learning and education work best when they work on the personal and general levels simultaneously. It’s clear what calculus can teach a high school student. But beyond that learning, a character education lesson on the dialogues between Socrates and Crito can teach critical-reading skills and democratic dialogue, while also teaching personal and social justice and integrity. The study of both calculus and Socrates demands intellectual rigor, and yet these subjects are not valued in the same way in our public high schools.
Character education as a discipline is losing the argument that it deserves the same resources as disciplines affirmed by an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate curriculum. And this is because we have been selling and teaching it wrong. We miss one of the most important aspects of character education, the cognitive head fake, when our obsession with advanced coursework becomes myopic and overshadows the strength both areas could have if working to complement each other in high schools.
As the demands of high-stakes testing grow and ever-expanding achievement gaps continue to ask more of public schools, character education is too often left behind. Money for staffing and programs dry up as budgets shrink. When forced to choose, schools will take academic rigor over team-building, future college success over human interrelatedness. Why? Because all they see in the latter is an intellectual void. Most schools value character education in principle, but choose to cut it first in a crisis because they see more-pressing instructional needs elsewhere.
And when extensive research, such as the "Smart & Good High Schools" study, suggests the need for more, and more-comprehensive, character education programs, most schools and districts will reject the recommendation, seeing it as yet another unnecessary strain on their already stretched school communities. Whole-school initiatives may be noble goals, but in reality, most schools don’t have the resources or the will to go for broke on character education—even if problems such as cheating, bullying, or harassment may be rapidly escalating.
The assumption that a broad-based character education initiative could flow easily from whole-school transformation ignores the reality that change in high schools happens slowly, if at all, and usually in small pockets, not as a whole school.
Educators should start small, allowing a successful "pocket" to expand within the school community. Character education could be taught, for example, through a fully articulated "student leadership" class—a class most schools already fund. Although they are largely underutilized and misused, these classes are dedicated to student activities. They also should have academic goals and expectations, and be open to all kids and valued by the school and the district just as AP or IB classes are—through a rigorous curricular review.
To be taken seriously in public secondary schools, character education must go beyond mission statements and explore ways to connect such goal-setting exercises to concrete learning objectives that challenge students with scholarly content and approaches. To survive, it must compete with advanced courses for full-time-equivalent teachers by embracing high expectations for all kids and proving its worth year in and year out.
As James Traub, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, has said: "[T]he issue is not whether we will have character education, but instead, what kind we will have and what relationship it will bear to the ongoing campaign to improve children's academic skills." Indeed, character education's very survival depends on its quantifiably improving students' academic skills.
A new character education model should be developed around principles that encourage college-level critical thinking and service to community. It should include the following elements:
1. We should teach dialogue and deliberation through Socratic seminars and consensus-building, so that students learn how to communicate with each other in a democratic setting and the ability to judge ideas on the strength of evidentiary support, not misinformed opinion.
2. We should teach core values and beliefs, so that students identify universal truths they are willing to speak for and work from that will guide the decisions they make as leaders and citizens of their communities.
3. We should teach historical models of leadership, so that students will understand that all great leaders are merely standing on the shoulders of others, and that the values of integrity and compassion don’t come easily. Figures taught could range from Gandhi and Lincoln, to the Bible’s King David, to the explorer Ernest Shackleton.
4. We should provide thoughtful teaching of inequity and inequality as they relate to race, gender, and class, so that students can learn how to speak to one another about diversity in a way that creates progress and does not reinforce stereotypes or systems of power and privilege. Students should be introduced to the writings of authors such as Peggy McIntosh, Cornel West, and James A. Banks.
5. We should teach democratic citizenship and leadership, so that students can learn how to use democratic systems to empower and give voice to all participants in a society to make communities more equal and just. Students should be introduced to scholars such as Walter Parker and historical documents such as the Federalist Papers and Washington’s Newburgh Address.
6. Since moral reasoning is integral to these pursuits, students should be taught to think their way through ethical and moral dilemmas and how to make choices that benefit all and that foster the strength of character to persevere through failures. Lawrence Kohlberg’s “stages of moral development” is a great place to start.
7. We should teach ethical and collaborative decision making and problem-solving, to empower students to change dysfunctional systems and communities. This should teach them that problem-solving is not the sole responsibility of one leader or group, but of a whole community working together.
8. We should give students opportunities for practical application of these precepts and practices, so they can test their new knowledge within the community and attempt to make positive improvements. These opportunities could be through schoolwide community-service projects, school philanthropy projects, and various other school improvement projects that encourage all students to participate.
Whether this kind of learning comes through a student leadership or character education class, schools should encourage students to register and attend. Several levels should be taught, becoming increasingly sophisticated and challenging. To maintain standards of academic achievement, students within such a program should be assessed on their ability to produce a high level of scholarly written work and to add quantifiably and positively to the school’s climate and culture through active leadership.
If we are bold enough to change our thinking and accept that character education must become a part of the academically rigorous landscape of public high schools, students taking these classes will benefit, along with the schools that offer them.
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education. Show all posts
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Music helps all students learn.
Need some music in a hurry for your students?
A teacher and musician, Jenny Billard, from Sydney, Australia, at her her The J.E.M. Site (Jen’s Educational Music Site) provides inexpensive music downloads for educators.
Working with children in remote communities in the Northern Territory prompted Billard to implement “creative" teaching techniques like using songs. She needed to catch the children’s interest and make learning easier and more enjoyable.
“It wasn't until some of the grandmothers and mothers of the children visited me at school that I found out that these children were singing my songs all around the community and at home," reported Billard. “Since we had a lot of trouble keeping children at school and interesting them in learning in such a remote area of Australia, this blew me away. Of their own choice, these children were taking learning home with them, little did they know."
Billard finds that younger children respond most positively to songs that are “cheesy and up-tempo," such as rock ‘n’ roll style, which she says are also the easiest to write. The musical and lyrical clichés found in these songs actually give them greater appeal to little ones. Older children prefer more sophistication in their music and often respond better to versions of rhythm and blues, hip-hop, or dance tunes. The “cheesy" songs that strike a chord with kids have an added benefit -- whether you like them or hate them, they are extremely memorable.
“Music is a great motivator for learning!" Billard shared. “Not only does it make you more physically relaxed when you learn, it is fun, inclusive, and more efficient. Obviously, if remembering a song and its words is easier than remembering a set of grammatical rules, then it is far better to learn those rules through song and leave behind the stress of learning where you can. If the songs appeal to the children, then they are more likely to have the songs running through their heads away from school too. It beats homework!"
The J.E.M. Site (Jen’s Educational Music Site) is very new, but Billard has big plans. A current focus is to build the songs teachers most need, so she encourages educators to send song requests to her via the site's “contact us" page.
A teacher and musician, Jenny Billard, from Sydney, Australia, at her her The J.E.M. Site (Jen’s Educational Music Site) provides inexpensive music downloads for educators.
Working with children in remote communities in the Northern Territory prompted Billard to implement “creative" teaching techniques like using songs. She needed to catch the children’s interest and make learning easier and more enjoyable.
“It wasn't until some of the grandmothers and mothers of the children visited me at school that I found out that these children were singing my songs all around the community and at home," reported Billard. “Since we had a lot of trouble keeping children at school and interesting them in learning in such a remote area of Australia, this blew me away. Of their own choice, these children were taking learning home with them, little did they know."
Billard finds that younger children respond most positively to songs that are “cheesy and up-tempo," such as rock ‘n’ roll style, which she says are also the easiest to write. The musical and lyrical clichés found in these songs actually give them greater appeal to little ones. Older children prefer more sophistication in their music and often respond better to versions of rhythm and blues, hip-hop, or dance tunes. The “cheesy" songs that strike a chord with kids have an added benefit -- whether you like them or hate them, they are extremely memorable.
“Music is a great motivator for learning!" Billard shared. “Not only does it make you more physically relaxed when you learn, it is fun, inclusive, and more efficient. Obviously, if remembering a song and its words is easier than remembering a set of grammatical rules, then it is far better to learn those rules through song and leave behind the stress of learning where you can. If the songs appeal to the children, then they are more likely to have the songs running through their heads away from school too. It beats homework!"
The J.E.M. Site (Jen’s Educational Music Site) is very new, but Billard has big plans. A current focus is to build the songs teachers most need, so she encourages educators to send song requests to her via the site's “contact us" page.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
A Dozen Promising Practices: Great Ideas for Great Schools
Twelve techniques, alone or in combination, can have a profound impact on student achievement.
Innovative educational leaders are abandoning the "closed box" type of school for a building that encourages collaboration.
Despite numerous efforts to improve what happens in classrooms, many schools continue to follow decades-old models and roles. The traditional classroom is a closed box, sealed off from access to people, ideas, and experiences beyond its walls. All knowledge is contained in the teacher's head and in the textbooks and other materials inside the classroom. Students sit at desks arranged in rows and work individually. Roles are confined to a strict hierarchy -- the teacher's job is to teach by talking; the student's job is to learn by memorizing. As many have noted, the twenty-first century requires very different kinds of classrooms bearing little resemblance to their ancestors. Here we present twelve tips from leading teachers and exemplary schools around the country that can break down the isolation of the classroom, open up its four walls, and breathe new life into teaching and learning. Many of these innovations introduce new roles for students and teachers and address how time is used during the school day. They all lead to closer relationships between students and teachers and among students themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these practices do not require more funds, if any, but only the willingness to "think outside the box."
Cross-age tutoring benefits both older and younger students.
Peer Instruction
Two or three times a week, students in many schools teach other. Besides the fact that the students are learning from peers who are "closer to their level of knowledge," teacher have witnessed a number of benefits with the method, including many documented by Mazur in his own research. Rather than tuning out long lectures, the students become involved. "The kids love it," Beauvais says. "It gets them talking, discussing. They're much more interested than if you just write something up on the board, and they remember it more than if you just tell them."
Beauvais' experience backs up Mazur's research on his own introductory physics classes at Harvard, as well as the experiences of other college instructors. Mazur found that because students are forced to think through the arguments being developed, they make significant gains in conceptual understanding and problem solving. They can also assess their own understanding of a topic while in the classroom rather than try to puzzle out a complicated concept by themselves or, worse, learn that they don't understand a topic until it's too late -- on the test.
Cross-Age Tutoring
Four days a week, sixteen seventh and eighth graders from Abraham Kazen Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, walk to a nearby elementary school to tutor younger children. The middle schoolers, designated by the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program as being at risk of dropping out of school, are paid $5.15 an hour for their labors, but the remuneration amounts to much more than dollars.
Teacher Cathy Meyer, coordinator of the program at Kazen, says she has seen remarkable transformations of youngsters -- from shy to confident, from uninterested in school to eager to do well, from gang members to respected school leaders. The act of teaching others is empowering, since the best way to learn something is to teach it. The younger students also look up to their older tutors and are eager for their leadership. The Intercultural Development Research Association, which created the program, reports that 98 percent of students in the program stay in school.
Students thrive when working on solutions to real problems with adult experts.
Bringing Local Experts into the Classroom
Throughout New York state, some schools rely on experts from the business and academic world to evaluate student work and to bridge the gap between school and the larger community. At Urban Academy, a small alternative high school in New York City, outside experts -- from attorneys and actors to historians and business managers -- play a critical role in classroom learning and assessment. Students present their culminating project work (part of a performance system of assessment) to a panel that includes experts in the relevant subject. "Outside experts ask questions that teachers might not pose," explains Urban Academy co-director and teacher Ann Cook, "and open up the educational activity or enterprise to the world."
In addition to having local experts work with students in classes and on long-term projects, the school invites a member of the New York community to come and speak with students once a month. At these gatherings, called "conversations," the visitors talk about themselves and answer questions from students and staff. Says Cook: "It's a way of helping students to be more exposed to people with [a variety] of life experiences."
Multiage Classroom
It may mean more work to make sure all topics are covered and each student is learning at an appropriate pace, but teacher Deborah Goodman is sold on grouping students from different grades in one class. In her class of eight kindergartners, five first graders, and five second graders at White Oak Elementary School in Edenton, North Carolina, students learn from each other, and help each other. The younger kids tend to catch on more quickly, and the older kids cement their knowledge by teaching others and becoming leaders -- an opportunity less available in a more competitive single-grade class.
Because she has the same children for three years, Goodman can look at the curriculum over a three-year span and advance the kids as quickly as they are able to master the curriculum. Research on multiage classrooms has pointed to such advantages as allowing for differences in learning styles and pace, giving older children leadership experience, and creating an environment with less competition and more cooperation and nurturing among students.
Cooperative Learning
What cooperative learning is not, says English teacher Pam Hankins, is group grades, with the inevitable loss of individual responsibility that group grading entails. With group grades, she says, one or two kids always do most of the work and the slackers reap the benefits.
In Hankins' sophomore English class at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, students learn essential twenty-first-century skills of working together and training in equal participation -- in a format that allows each one to receive useful feedback on success and need for improvement. "If we don't prepare our students to work in teams, we are selling them short," Hankins says. A likely assignment on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is for a group of students to create a newspaper based on the play -- news, fashion, sports, weather, op-ed, obituaries ("Everybody in Julius Caesar dies," deadpans Hankins). The students work together on assembling a cohesive newspaper and on design, layout, artwork, and even the paper's name (Roman Times and Toga Tattler are favorites). But Hankins keeps track -- through different colored pens, bylines, and other means -- of the work each individual student contributes.
In the seven years she has used cooperative learning, Hankins has seen that a full class participates rather than the one high-achiever who always gets a hand up first, and that students get more excited about the work "because the most important relationships that help with learning are student-to-student and student-to-teacher." Hankins is so impressed with the results of cooperative learning that if told she could not use it in the classroom, "I would go sign up and be a greeter at Wal-Mart."
Class-Size Reduction
Classes with sixteen rather than twenty-eight students "give us time to get to each student," says Marsha Fritz, a second-grade teacher at Webster Stanley Elementary School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. "You can be more specific with each child and pick out exactly what they need to achieve." Webster Stanley is a participant in Wisconsin's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) class-size reduction plan. SAGE provides state funding to help reduce class size to a student-teacher ratio of 15:1 in kindergarten through third grade in schools with large concentrations of children from low-income families.
For three years in a row, University of Wisconsin researchers found that students of all races and socioeconomic levels in SAGE schools outperformed students in comparison schools in all three grades, even when SAGE students started out the school year behind their peers in comparison schools. Another research study found less bullying at SAGE schools.
Fritz says she sees these positive academic results in her classroom. For example, when second graders in non-SAGE schools were given ten minutes to write as many words as they could from memory, they averaged forty-two words. Fritz' students averaged sixty words. Besides giving her students more individual attention, she can give their families attention, too. And when there is frequent communication with parents, they participate more in their children's education and provide information about the youngsters' special needs and interests. "You get to know grandparents. You know whether they have a cat or dog," all of which helps her tailor her instruction to the individual child. Class-size reduction, Fritz declares, "does make a difference."
Team teaching can reduce a teacher's sense of isolation and provide students with two, rather than one, role models and instructors.
Team Teaching
Tina Prary and Beth Henry started team teaching out of necessity, but they kept up the practice because of the benefits to them and their students. Nevada's answer to mandated class-size reduction and absence of extra classrooms was to pair two teachers in a class of thirty-two, thus cutting the student-teacher ratio to 16:1. Prary and Henry were drawn to each other because of similar discipline styles and educational philosophies.
After six years of teaching a second-grade class together, they like the camaraderie and the practicalities of sharing a classroom. Unlike some team teachers, Prary and Henry, who teach at Agnes Risley Elementary School in Sparks, do not specialize in particular subjects. They each teach all subjects with a system so polished that when one teacher is instructing the whole class and the other teacher feels she has something to contribute, she politely breaks in and adds her two cents.
They organize reading and math into two groups, but otherwise all students are taught together. When one teacher is teaching the whole class, the other teacher can provide individual attention to a student or a small group of students -- either for academic or discipline reasons -- or can attend to paperwork or other school matters.
These teachers enjoy having another adult to chuckle over something or commiserate with. In addition, they appreciate each other's feedback on lesson plans, educational theory and research, and individual student weaknesses or strengths. And they believe they provide good examples for their young students of how adults can treat each other respectfully. As Henry says, "It's like a marriage."
Looping
At Sherman Oaks Community Charter School in San Jose, California, the practice of looping -- teachers staying with the same students for two or more years -- helps not only to smooth the bumps of each new year but to build positive relationships between teachers and students throughout the year. After two or three years with the same group of students, the teacher loops back down to start the process again. At her previous school, Principal Peggy Bryan tracked the progress of classes with and without looping and found that student gains were greater in looped classes.
So when Bryan and several teachers from that school came to Sherman Oaks, they brought looping with them. They felt more than vindicated in their decision. Because teachers and students don't lose weeks at the start of school getting to know each other, "students know what your procedures are and you know what their learning styles are, so day one, you're off and running," says teacher Sandra Villarreal-Sweeney. The relationship with the students' families also is strong with looping, adds teacher Osvaldo Rubio.
Grouping students into teams at large schools gives them a better sense of belonging.
Block Scheduling
Test scores are up and discipline referrals are down at Space Coast Middle School in Cocoa, Florida. Assistant Vice Principal Timothy Hurd attributes much of the good news at Space Coast, which gets its name from the nearby Kennedy Space Center, to block scheduling.
Instead of six forty-seven-minuite class periods, the school now offers four ninety-minute periods, which include two core courses (one in math or science, the other in English or social studies) plus two electives. Because of the longer class time, students receive a more comprehensive lesson that often includes hands-on learning, such as going outside and measuring the building for a unit on weights and measurements or putting on a play.
The forty-seven-minute period led to traditional lectures and students passively taking notes, Hurd says, which didn't keep them interested and forced teachers to truncate lessons that could have used more time. Student failure rates decreased from 13 percent to 5 percent after block scheduling was instituted in 1996. The percentage of students on the honor roll increased by 10 percent. Test scores increased by 12 percent on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
An added benefit includes fewer discipline problems because less time is spent in the halls moving from class to class. And because students don't take math and science or English and social studies in the same semester, extra books allow students to have a set in the classroom and at home.
School Teams
To value each individual student, build group cohesion, and ensure that students don't fall through the cracks, Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, divides its student population into two houses, each with its own administrator. Each house has about 300 students, who are further grouped by grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) into teams of 100. The student teams are housed in the same area of the school and are paired with a faculty team consisting of English, math, science, and social studies teachers, plus a learning specialist and counselor.
The faculty and student teams spend the year together, both in classes and in a variety of school activities. Parent conferences include all of a student's faculty team. "It's a great way of getting a sense of who your kids are," says Principal Tony Bencivenga. Lunch hours are arranged so that faculty team members roam the cafeteria and make themselves available to their student team members on a more informal basis.
Community service gives students a sense of their place in society and of their capabilities.
Community Service
"What we're here for is to help young people develop skills and commitments so they can create a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world," says Hudson Public Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman. "If we simply look at test scores and don't think about ethics and people's ability to contribute to others, we've lost some of the basic building blocks of helping people understand the common good and what our democracy's about."
The Massachusetts educator backs up his words by having every teacher from kindergarten through high school integrate service learning into the curriculum. Kindergartners take part in an integrated language arts and math project to produce a quilt and books for homeless women and children. Fourth graders target their yearlong environmental science study to protecting local wetlands. Ninth graders develop individual projects to assist the community, such as a workshop for fifth graders about the dangers of stereotypes. "When young people are involved in making a difference to the world at large," Berman points out, "their participation continues far into the future."
Schools Within Schools
Patterson High School Principal Laura D'Anna is a believer in breaking up large high schools into smaller academies. "I've seen the improvements we've been able to make in attendance, achievement, and the dropout rate," says the Baltimore educator.
In 1995, Patterson, with a student population of about 2,000, was reorganized into five academies of 350 to 400 students: the "Success Academy" for freshmen plus academies in arts and humanities, business and finance, health and human services, transportation and technology, and sports. Each academy has its own assistant principal and secretary, as well as teachers for programs such as pharmacy technician or consumer services management. D'Anna also beefed up the college preparatory program, adding Advanced Placement classes and encouraging students to take more language and advanced math.
The academies, she says, meet students' requirements for a relevant curriculum with the potential to land them a job right out of high school or send them to college. Equally important are high expectations and the supportive environment created by being a member of a smaller learning community -- each with different colored uniforms and teachers who stay with the same students for three years. "Kids have to feel like they belong," D'Anna says. "The teachers know these kids. They mentor them. They're there for them in good times and bad."
An overall increase in the percentage of Patterson students passing the Maryland Functional Test, including a jump in math scores from 36 percent in 1993 to 63 percent in 2000, is one confirmation of D'Anna's belief in the schools-within-schools concept. In addition, the dropout rate fell to an all-time low of 1.8 percent.
Innovative educational leaders are abandoning the "closed box" type of school for a building that encourages collaboration.
Despite numerous efforts to improve what happens in classrooms, many schools continue to follow decades-old models and roles. The traditional classroom is a closed box, sealed off from access to people, ideas, and experiences beyond its walls. All knowledge is contained in the teacher's head and in the textbooks and other materials inside the classroom. Students sit at desks arranged in rows and work individually. Roles are confined to a strict hierarchy -- the teacher's job is to teach by talking; the student's job is to learn by memorizing. As many have noted, the twenty-first century requires very different kinds of classrooms bearing little resemblance to their ancestors. Here we present twelve tips from leading teachers and exemplary schools around the country that can break down the isolation of the classroom, open up its four walls, and breathe new life into teaching and learning. Many of these innovations introduce new roles for students and teachers and address how time is used during the school day. They all lead to closer relationships between students and teachers and among students themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, many of these practices do not require more funds, if any, but only the willingness to "think outside the box."
Cross-age tutoring benefits both older and younger students.
Peer Instruction
Two or three times a week, students in many schools teach other. Besides the fact that the students are learning from peers who are "closer to their level of knowledge," teacher have witnessed a number of benefits with the method, including many documented by Mazur in his own research. Rather than tuning out long lectures, the students become involved. "The kids love it," Beauvais says. "It gets them talking, discussing. They're much more interested than if you just write something up on the board, and they remember it more than if you just tell them."
Beauvais' experience backs up Mazur's research on his own introductory physics classes at Harvard, as well as the experiences of other college instructors. Mazur found that because students are forced to think through the arguments being developed, they make significant gains in conceptual understanding and problem solving. They can also assess their own understanding of a topic while in the classroom rather than try to puzzle out a complicated concept by themselves or, worse, learn that they don't understand a topic until it's too late -- on the test.
Cross-Age Tutoring
Four days a week, sixteen seventh and eighth graders from Abraham Kazen Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, walk to a nearby elementary school to tutor younger children. The middle schoolers, designated by the Coca-Cola Valued Youth Program as being at risk of dropping out of school, are paid $5.15 an hour for their labors, but the remuneration amounts to much more than dollars.
Teacher Cathy Meyer, coordinator of the program at Kazen, says she has seen remarkable transformations of youngsters -- from shy to confident, from uninterested in school to eager to do well, from gang members to respected school leaders. The act of teaching others is empowering, since the best way to learn something is to teach it. The younger students also look up to their older tutors and are eager for their leadership. The Intercultural Development Research Association, which created the program, reports that 98 percent of students in the program stay in school.
Students thrive when working on solutions to real problems with adult experts.
Bringing Local Experts into the Classroom
Throughout New York state, some schools rely on experts from the business and academic world to evaluate student work and to bridge the gap between school and the larger community. At Urban Academy, a small alternative high school in New York City, outside experts -- from attorneys and actors to historians and business managers -- play a critical role in classroom learning and assessment. Students present their culminating project work (part of a performance system of assessment) to a panel that includes experts in the relevant subject. "Outside experts ask questions that teachers might not pose," explains Urban Academy co-director and teacher Ann Cook, "and open up the educational activity or enterprise to the world."
In addition to having local experts work with students in classes and on long-term projects, the school invites a member of the New York community to come and speak with students once a month. At these gatherings, called "conversations," the visitors talk about themselves and answer questions from students and staff. Says Cook: "It's a way of helping students to be more exposed to people with [a variety] of life experiences."
Multiage Classroom
It may mean more work to make sure all topics are covered and each student is learning at an appropriate pace, but teacher Deborah Goodman is sold on grouping students from different grades in one class. In her class of eight kindergartners, five first graders, and five second graders at White Oak Elementary School in Edenton, North Carolina, students learn from each other, and help each other. The younger kids tend to catch on more quickly, and the older kids cement their knowledge by teaching others and becoming leaders -- an opportunity less available in a more competitive single-grade class.
Because she has the same children for three years, Goodman can look at the curriculum over a three-year span and advance the kids as quickly as they are able to master the curriculum. Research on multiage classrooms has pointed to such advantages as allowing for differences in learning styles and pace, giving older children leadership experience, and creating an environment with less competition and more cooperation and nurturing among students.
Cooperative Learning
What cooperative learning is not, says English teacher Pam Hankins, is group grades, with the inevitable loss of individual responsibility that group grading entails. With group grades, she says, one or two kids always do most of the work and the slackers reap the benefits.
In Hankins' sophomore English class at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, students learn essential twenty-first-century skills of working together and training in equal participation -- in a format that allows each one to receive useful feedback on success and need for improvement. "If we don't prepare our students to work in teams, we are selling them short," Hankins says. A likely assignment on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is for a group of students to create a newspaper based on the play -- news, fashion, sports, weather, op-ed, obituaries ("Everybody in Julius Caesar dies," deadpans Hankins). The students work together on assembling a cohesive newspaper and on design, layout, artwork, and even the paper's name (Roman Times and Toga Tattler are favorites). But Hankins keeps track -- through different colored pens, bylines, and other means -- of the work each individual student contributes.
In the seven years she has used cooperative learning, Hankins has seen that a full class participates rather than the one high-achiever who always gets a hand up first, and that students get more excited about the work "because the most important relationships that help with learning are student-to-student and student-to-teacher." Hankins is so impressed with the results of cooperative learning that if told she could not use it in the classroom, "I would go sign up and be a greeter at Wal-Mart."
Class-Size Reduction
Classes with sixteen rather than twenty-eight students "give us time to get to each student," says Marsha Fritz, a second-grade teacher at Webster Stanley Elementary School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. "You can be more specific with each child and pick out exactly what they need to achieve." Webster Stanley is a participant in Wisconsin's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) class-size reduction plan. SAGE provides state funding to help reduce class size to a student-teacher ratio of 15:1 in kindergarten through third grade in schools with large concentrations of children from low-income families.
For three years in a row, University of Wisconsin researchers found that students of all races and socioeconomic levels in SAGE schools outperformed students in comparison schools in all three grades, even when SAGE students started out the school year behind their peers in comparison schools. Another research study found less bullying at SAGE schools.
Fritz says she sees these positive academic results in her classroom. For example, when second graders in non-SAGE schools were given ten minutes to write as many words as they could from memory, they averaged forty-two words. Fritz' students averaged sixty words. Besides giving her students more individual attention, she can give their families attention, too. And when there is frequent communication with parents, they participate more in their children's education and provide information about the youngsters' special needs and interests. "You get to know grandparents. You know whether they have a cat or dog," all of which helps her tailor her instruction to the individual child. Class-size reduction, Fritz declares, "does make a difference."
Team teaching can reduce a teacher's sense of isolation and provide students with two, rather than one, role models and instructors.
Team Teaching
Tina Prary and Beth Henry started team teaching out of necessity, but they kept up the practice because of the benefits to them and their students. Nevada's answer to mandated class-size reduction and absence of extra classrooms was to pair two teachers in a class of thirty-two, thus cutting the student-teacher ratio to 16:1. Prary and Henry were drawn to each other because of similar discipline styles and educational philosophies.
After six years of teaching a second-grade class together, they like the camaraderie and the practicalities of sharing a classroom. Unlike some team teachers, Prary and Henry, who teach at Agnes Risley Elementary School in Sparks, do not specialize in particular subjects. They each teach all subjects with a system so polished that when one teacher is instructing the whole class and the other teacher feels she has something to contribute, she politely breaks in and adds her two cents.
They organize reading and math into two groups, but otherwise all students are taught together. When one teacher is teaching the whole class, the other teacher can provide individual attention to a student or a small group of students -- either for academic or discipline reasons -- or can attend to paperwork or other school matters.
These teachers enjoy having another adult to chuckle over something or commiserate with. In addition, they appreciate each other's feedback on lesson plans, educational theory and research, and individual student weaknesses or strengths. And they believe they provide good examples for their young students of how adults can treat each other respectfully. As Henry says, "It's like a marriage."
Looping
At Sherman Oaks Community Charter School in San Jose, California, the practice of looping -- teachers staying with the same students for two or more years -- helps not only to smooth the bumps of each new year but to build positive relationships between teachers and students throughout the year. After two or three years with the same group of students, the teacher loops back down to start the process again. At her previous school, Principal Peggy Bryan tracked the progress of classes with and without looping and found that student gains were greater in looped classes.
So when Bryan and several teachers from that school came to Sherman Oaks, they brought looping with them. They felt more than vindicated in their decision. Because teachers and students don't lose weeks at the start of school getting to know each other, "students know what your procedures are and you know what their learning styles are, so day one, you're off and running," says teacher Sandra Villarreal-Sweeney. The relationship with the students' families also is strong with looping, adds teacher Osvaldo Rubio.
Grouping students into teams at large schools gives them a better sense of belonging.
Block Scheduling
Test scores are up and discipline referrals are down at Space Coast Middle School in Cocoa, Florida. Assistant Vice Principal Timothy Hurd attributes much of the good news at Space Coast, which gets its name from the nearby Kennedy Space Center, to block scheduling.
Instead of six forty-seven-minuite class periods, the school now offers four ninety-minute periods, which include two core courses (one in math or science, the other in English or social studies) plus two electives. Because of the longer class time, students receive a more comprehensive lesson that often includes hands-on learning, such as going outside and measuring the building for a unit on weights and measurements or putting on a play.
The forty-seven-minute period led to traditional lectures and students passively taking notes, Hurd says, which didn't keep them interested and forced teachers to truncate lessons that could have used more time. Student failure rates decreased from 13 percent to 5 percent after block scheduling was instituted in 1996. The percentage of students on the honor roll increased by 10 percent. Test scores increased by 12 percent on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
An added benefit includes fewer discipline problems because less time is spent in the halls moving from class to class. And because students don't take math and science or English and social studies in the same semester, extra books allow students to have a set in the classroom and at home.
School Teams
To value each individual student, build group cohesion, and ensure that students don't fall through the cracks, Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, divides its student population into two houses, each with its own administrator. Each house has about 300 students, who are further grouped by grade (sixth, seventh, and eighth) into teams of 100. The student teams are housed in the same area of the school and are paired with a faculty team consisting of English, math, science, and social studies teachers, plus a learning specialist and counselor.
The faculty and student teams spend the year together, both in classes and in a variety of school activities. Parent conferences include all of a student's faculty team. "It's a great way of getting a sense of who your kids are," says Principal Tony Bencivenga. Lunch hours are arranged so that faculty team members roam the cafeteria and make themselves available to their student team members on a more informal basis.
Community service gives students a sense of their place in society and of their capabilities.
Community Service
"What we're here for is to help young people develop skills and commitments so they can create a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world," says Hudson Public Schools Superintendent Sheldon Berman. "If we simply look at test scores and don't think about ethics and people's ability to contribute to others, we've lost some of the basic building blocks of helping people understand the common good and what our democracy's about."
The Massachusetts educator backs up his words by having every teacher from kindergarten through high school integrate service learning into the curriculum. Kindergartners take part in an integrated language arts and math project to produce a quilt and books for homeless women and children. Fourth graders target their yearlong environmental science study to protecting local wetlands. Ninth graders develop individual projects to assist the community, such as a workshop for fifth graders about the dangers of stereotypes. "When young people are involved in making a difference to the world at large," Berman points out, "their participation continues far into the future."
Schools Within Schools
Patterson High School Principal Laura D'Anna is a believer in breaking up large high schools into smaller academies. "I've seen the improvements we've been able to make in attendance, achievement, and the dropout rate," says the Baltimore educator.
In 1995, Patterson, with a student population of about 2,000, was reorganized into five academies of 350 to 400 students: the "Success Academy" for freshmen plus academies in arts and humanities, business and finance, health and human services, transportation and technology, and sports. Each academy has its own assistant principal and secretary, as well as teachers for programs such as pharmacy technician or consumer services management. D'Anna also beefed up the college preparatory program, adding Advanced Placement classes and encouraging students to take more language and advanced math.
The academies, she says, meet students' requirements for a relevant curriculum with the potential to land them a job right out of high school or send them to college. Equally important are high expectations and the supportive environment created by being a member of a smaller learning community -- each with different colored uniforms and teachers who stay with the same students for three years. "Kids have to feel like they belong," D'Anna says. "The teachers know these kids. They mentor them. They're there for them in good times and bad."
An overall increase in the percentage of Patterson students passing the Maryland Functional Test, including a jump in math scores from 36 percent in 1993 to 63 percent in 2000, is one confirmation of D'Anna's belief in the schools-within-schools concept. In addition, the dropout rate fell to an all-time low of 1.8 percent.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Seven Brilliant Things Teachers Do With Technology
by Doug Johnson
Here are seven technology practices that just make me marvel and feel proud to be part of the profession:
1. Empower kids with technology. Technology is an amplifier of natural abilities. Brilliant teachers see that good writers become better writers, good debaters become better debaters, good French speakers become better French speakers, good mathematical problem-solvers become better mathematical problem-solvers, and so on, by helping their students harness technology. They do not see technology as a crutch, but as a propellant. Brilliant teachers have experienced the empowering power of technology themselves. Brilliant teachers use good assessment strategies to rigorously determine the quality of technology-enhanced projects.
2. Creatively find and use resources. I can't believe the technology found in some of our teachers' classrooms. And it was neither provided by our department nor stolen (I don't think). Through personal purchase, through parent-teacher groups, through grants, through business partnerships, through parental contacts, through fund raising, and through classroom supply budgets, brilliant teachers amazingly amass digital cameras and clickers and sensors and classroom computer labs. One of our brilliant teachers MacGyver-ed his own document camera out of an old camcorder, plastic pipe, and duct tape. He calls it his Grover (not his Elmo).
3. Make conferencing real-time. Brilliant teachers don't wait until scheduled parent conferences to communicate with homes. Through e-mail, Web sites, online grade books, blogs, wikis, and, yes, even telephone calls, technology gives teachers the ability to make parents partners who help assure students' timely, quality work. They post newsletters, spelling lists, assessment tools, assignments, grades, calendars, discussion lists, and tips. They read and respond to parent e-mails. Most parents want to be involved, but they like knowing how.
4. Put kids in touch with the world. The classrooms of brilliant teachers have no walls. Those teachers "get" the flat world challenge, understanding that tomorrow's citizens and workers will have an advantage if they can work successfully with other cultures.
5. Accept the role of co-leaner. One of the best signs of intelligent people is that they tend to willingly admit when they don't know something. Brilliant teachers not only accept the dismal fact that they will never know all there is to know about technology, they also turn that condition into a classroom advantage by having their brilliant children teach them how to do something techie now and then.
6. Use the kids’ own devices to teach them. Brilliant teachers understand the old Arab proverb, "It's easier to steer the camel in the direction it is already heading." Students are increasingly and unstoppably bringing in personal communication devices -- cell phones, cameras, game devices, iPods/mp3 players, netbooks, laptops, and PDAs. Brilliant teachers know how to use cell phones to poll their classes; create podcasts of lectures for later review; use games to teach difficult concepts; and make "Google-jockeys" of student wireless laptop users.
7. Delight in the discovery, the newness, and the fun technology holds. It's not about technology; it's about finding out and doing "cool" things. We knew that ourselves as kids. Brilliant tech-using teachers have never lost the thrill of doing something new and interesting with these electronic Tinker Toys. They are pleased with their tech-using students and pleased with themselves. Brilliant teachers use technology's engagement (not entertainment) power. Technology is not "just one more thing," it’st a vital experience that brings discovery, excitement, and even fun to the classroom.
Technology won’t make a poor teacher a good one. But it can make a good teacher even better. And it can help make great teachers the ones that students remember for the rest of their lives. I hope you all know teachers who make brilliant uses of technology. What do you see them doing?
Here are seven technology practices that just make me marvel and feel proud to be part of the profession:
1. Empower kids with technology. Technology is an amplifier of natural abilities. Brilliant teachers see that good writers become better writers, good debaters become better debaters, good French speakers become better French speakers, good mathematical problem-solvers become better mathematical problem-solvers, and so on, by helping their students harness technology. They do not see technology as a crutch, but as a propellant. Brilliant teachers have experienced the empowering power of technology themselves. Brilliant teachers use good assessment strategies to rigorously determine the quality of technology-enhanced projects.
2. Creatively find and use resources. I can't believe the technology found in some of our teachers' classrooms. And it was neither provided by our department nor stolen (I don't think). Through personal purchase, through parent-teacher groups, through grants, through business partnerships, through parental contacts, through fund raising, and through classroom supply budgets, brilliant teachers amazingly amass digital cameras and clickers and sensors and classroom computer labs. One of our brilliant teachers MacGyver-ed his own document camera out of an old camcorder, plastic pipe, and duct tape. He calls it his Grover (not his Elmo).
3. Make conferencing real-time. Brilliant teachers don't wait until scheduled parent conferences to communicate with homes. Through e-mail, Web sites, online grade books, blogs, wikis, and, yes, even telephone calls, technology gives teachers the ability to make parents partners who help assure students' timely, quality work. They post newsletters, spelling lists, assessment tools, assignments, grades, calendars, discussion lists, and tips. They read and respond to parent e-mails. Most parents want to be involved, but they like knowing how.
4. Put kids in touch with the world. The classrooms of brilliant teachers have no walls. Those teachers "get" the flat world challenge, understanding that tomorrow's citizens and workers will have an advantage if they can work successfully with other cultures.
5. Accept the role of co-leaner. One of the best signs of intelligent people is that they tend to willingly admit when they don't know something. Brilliant teachers not only accept the dismal fact that they will never know all there is to know about technology, they also turn that condition into a classroom advantage by having their brilliant children teach them how to do something techie now and then.
6. Use the kids’ own devices to teach them. Brilliant teachers understand the old Arab proverb, "It's easier to steer the camel in the direction it is already heading." Students are increasingly and unstoppably bringing in personal communication devices -- cell phones, cameras, game devices, iPods/mp3 players, netbooks, laptops, and PDAs. Brilliant teachers know how to use cell phones to poll their classes; create podcasts of lectures for later review; use games to teach difficult concepts; and make "Google-jockeys" of student wireless laptop users.
7. Delight in the discovery, the newness, and the fun technology holds. It's not about technology; it's about finding out and doing "cool" things. We knew that ourselves as kids. Brilliant tech-using teachers have never lost the thrill of doing something new and interesting with these electronic Tinker Toys. They are pleased with their tech-using students and pleased with themselves. Brilliant teachers use technology's engagement (not entertainment) power. Technology is not "just one more thing," it’st a vital experience that brings discovery, excitement, and even fun to the classroom.
Technology won’t make a poor teacher a good one. But it can make a good teacher even better. And it can help make great teachers the ones that students remember for the rest of their lives. I hope you all know teachers who make brilliant uses of technology. What do you see them doing?
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Should I Let Them Fail?
By Laura Reasoner Jones, Teacher magazine. February 11, 2009
I’ve spent the last week agonizing over my after-school advanced robotics program. How can I prevent what is turning out to be a train wreck in progress? At least two of my five teams of 5th and 6th graders are not going to be able to present anything at our final parent demonstration event, and I need to decide what I am going to do about it. Am I going to let them experience the natural consequences of inaction, or am I going to intervene and fix things? In the heat of the moment, I feel like everything I have ever believed in as a teacher or parent is at stake.
Let me set the stage: I have 11 kids in the advanced robotics program—an after-school club with the goal of exposing kids to Lego Robotics using my grant-funded NXT kits. I did this last year for the first time, and had 18 kids, but only eight of them came back (our school is cursed with extremely high mobility). So I recruited three girls from last year’s Pico Cricket programming class and hoped they would catch up. As a result, my current group consists of eight 6th grade boys from last year and three new 5th grade girls.
I had originally scheduled six after-school sessions of two hours each. But we were all having so much fun that, at the kids’ request, I extended both the length of the sessions and the number. We ended up meeting 10 times, in three-hour chunks, with a final demonstration for parents and anyone else we could scare up. That’s where we are now—coming up on the big demonstration showcase, with two of our five small teams having virtually nothing to show for all this time and effort.
Blame Game
Is this their fault? My fault? I just want them to have something to show, so that they feel good about the experience and leave robotics thinking they might want to explore engineering someday. But I guess I also want to assign responsibility. I feel as if I have met mine. I gave these two teams all the resources they needed—sample programs to use, plenty of time, good food to eat, and two real engineers as mentors (who were very hard to find). So did these kids live up to their responsibilities? No, and that is the problem.
They were supposed to build a robot, any robot, and program it to do something of their choice. Is this so hard? I didn’t think so, based on their performance last year, and the performance of the kids on the other teams around them. But they just could not get it together. They spent weeks playing with the software but would not use any of the canned programs that are great starting places. We (the mentors and I) could not get them to see that you just start with a canned program and then modify it to your heart’s content—there is nothing wrong with that.
When they finally got a robot built and found they could not get the program to work, they were unwilling to either tinker with it or start over, and the time just dribbled away. So, now it is the last week before the demo, and they have nothing. Nothing!!!
A Teacher’s Dilemma
How can I allow them fail? I cannot in good conscience let them stand back and watch all of their friends be applauded and praised by staff and parents. That is not what this after-school program is about. It is about personal success, whatever form that may take. I think about my goals for this project. I want each child to build and program a robot, learning that he/she can do new things and stretch his/her brain into new fields without fear of failure. I want each child to see herself/himself as an engineer, a builder, a creator. And above all, I want each child to feel pride in his/her work.
But personally, as a mother and as a teacher, I also want each child to learn from mistakes, to take risks and experience the consequences of risk-taking. I don’t want to rescue kids. I want them to learn to rescue themselves. In this situation, my two sets of goals have come into direct conflict. I am going to have to rescue them to have them experience success. Not fun. I also think about the goals of the kids who enrol in this program. I think they want to have fun; they are not looking for career experiences. They also want to be able to say that they were “chosen” for robotics—there is a certain cachet to belonging, because they are the “advanced” kids. And, deep down, I think they want to do well—doesn’t every child? So, all of our goals are in conflict with each other. But the only ones I can control are mine, and I have to resolve this conflict today.
Teacher With a Plan
I give this deep thought in the car, at the gym, in the shower, and unfortunately in bed at night, losing sleep over it. But I come up with a plan, one that depends on the goodness of the mentors. Because it is the mentors who are going to do the rescuing, preserving some of my pride, and maintaining the illusion that the kids did it themselves. That way the kids won’t look at me every day in technology lab with the thought that I’m there to rescue them.
Here’s how it plays out:
1. I grab the mentors as they arrive and tell them that their job today is to get these two teams functioning. I remind them that we have one week and if they can help the kids get the robots built, we can get the programming done between now and then. They are in perfect agreement, having watched these teams flounder.
2. I leave them to pump up their teams, and I’m quite impressed at how they handle it. One engineer who has never worked with kids in his life says to them, “Our deadline is here. It is crunch time. Let’s do it!” And the kids just jump up and start to work. Ah, the power of an outsider!
3. While this is happening, I go to each of the other teams and simply ask them if they will help another team when and if they are asked. I am gratified to see faces light up, and to hear assurances that “of course we will.” Even though these kids have set up elaborate forms of competition, with points for how much of each other’s robots they will destroy, they are great kids at heart and want each other to succeed.
It is going to be OK. I can feel it. The two teams build their robots and develop a (rescue) plan. We set times for completing the programming, and they leave bouncing. Life is good again.
Now, if I can just keep them from destroying the robots completely in next week’s competition…
I’ve spent the last week agonizing over my after-school advanced robotics program. How can I prevent what is turning out to be a train wreck in progress? At least two of my five teams of 5th and 6th graders are not going to be able to present anything at our final parent demonstration event, and I need to decide what I am going to do about it. Am I going to let them experience the natural consequences of inaction, or am I going to intervene and fix things? In the heat of the moment, I feel like everything I have ever believed in as a teacher or parent is at stake.
Let me set the stage: I have 11 kids in the advanced robotics program—an after-school club with the goal of exposing kids to Lego Robotics using my grant-funded NXT kits. I did this last year for the first time, and had 18 kids, but only eight of them came back (our school is cursed with extremely high mobility). So I recruited three girls from last year’s Pico Cricket programming class and hoped they would catch up. As a result, my current group consists of eight 6th grade boys from last year and three new 5th grade girls.
I had originally scheduled six after-school sessions of two hours each. But we were all having so much fun that, at the kids’ request, I extended both the length of the sessions and the number. We ended up meeting 10 times, in three-hour chunks, with a final demonstration for parents and anyone else we could scare up. That’s where we are now—coming up on the big demonstration showcase, with two of our five small teams having virtually nothing to show for all this time and effort.
Blame Game
Is this their fault? My fault? I just want them to have something to show, so that they feel good about the experience and leave robotics thinking they might want to explore engineering someday. But I guess I also want to assign responsibility. I feel as if I have met mine. I gave these two teams all the resources they needed—sample programs to use, plenty of time, good food to eat, and two real engineers as mentors (who were very hard to find). So did these kids live up to their responsibilities? No, and that is the problem.
They were supposed to build a robot, any robot, and program it to do something of their choice. Is this so hard? I didn’t think so, based on their performance last year, and the performance of the kids on the other teams around them. But they just could not get it together. They spent weeks playing with the software but would not use any of the canned programs that are great starting places. We (the mentors and I) could not get them to see that you just start with a canned program and then modify it to your heart’s content—there is nothing wrong with that.
When they finally got a robot built and found they could not get the program to work, they were unwilling to either tinker with it or start over, and the time just dribbled away. So, now it is the last week before the demo, and they have nothing. Nothing!!!
A Teacher’s Dilemma
How can I allow them fail? I cannot in good conscience let them stand back and watch all of their friends be applauded and praised by staff and parents. That is not what this after-school program is about. It is about personal success, whatever form that may take. I think about my goals for this project. I want each child to build and program a robot, learning that he/she can do new things and stretch his/her brain into new fields without fear of failure. I want each child to see herself/himself as an engineer, a builder, a creator. And above all, I want each child to feel pride in his/her work.
But personally, as a mother and as a teacher, I also want each child to learn from mistakes, to take risks and experience the consequences of risk-taking. I don’t want to rescue kids. I want them to learn to rescue themselves. In this situation, my two sets of goals have come into direct conflict. I am going to have to rescue them to have them experience success. Not fun. I also think about the goals of the kids who enrol in this program. I think they want to have fun; they are not looking for career experiences. They also want to be able to say that they were “chosen” for robotics—there is a certain cachet to belonging, because they are the “advanced” kids. And, deep down, I think they want to do well—doesn’t every child? So, all of our goals are in conflict with each other. But the only ones I can control are mine, and I have to resolve this conflict today.
Teacher With a Plan
I give this deep thought in the car, at the gym, in the shower, and unfortunately in bed at night, losing sleep over it. But I come up with a plan, one that depends on the goodness of the mentors. Because it is the mentors who are going to do the rescuing, preserving some of my pride, and maintaining the illusion that the kids did it themselves. That way the kids won’t look at me every day in technology lab with the thought that I’m there to rescue them.
Here’s how it plays out:
1. I grab the mentors as they arrive and tell them that their job today is to get these two teams functioning. I remind them that we have one week and if they can help the kids get the robots built, we can get the programming done between now and then. They are in perfect agreement, having watched these teams flounder.
2. I leave them to pump up their teams, and I’m quite impressed at how they handle it. One engineer who has never worked with kids in his life says to them, “Our deadline is here. It is crunch time. Let’s do it!” And the kids just jump up and start to work. Ah, the power of an outsider!
3. While this is happening, I go to each of the other teams and simply ask them if they will help another team when and if they are asked. I am gratified to see faces light up, and to hear assurances that “of course we will.” Even though these kids have set up elaborate forms of competition, with points for how much of each other’s robots they will destroy, they are great kids at heart and want each other to succeed.
It is going to be OK. I can feel it. The two teams build their robots and develop a (rescue) plan. We set times for completing the programming, and they leave bouncing. Life is good again.
Now, if I can just keep them from destroying the robots completely in next week’s competition…
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Are Your Students High-Maintenance?
Tracy McCalla, Education Magazine, February 4 2009
May I throw this away?
Do we have homework?
May we use pen?
What are we doing today?
Do we need our books?
What page did you say we need to turn to again?
What did you say we should do when we are done?
As a classroom teacher, does this sound familiar? My five sections of 8th graders were draining me with the number of questions asked on a daily basis. No matter how clear my directives were, five minutes later students were asking questions concerning what they should do next. In addition, no matter how many times I told them they did not have to ask permission to throw something away or use my stapler or tape dispenser, students continued to ask.
During sixth period one day in November, I counted 19 questions in nine minutes. I realized that I needed to change my students’ behaviour. I told them the truth. They were one of my favourite groups of students whom I had taught during my 21 years of teaching. I loved their personalities, their work ethic, and their behaviour, but I had one complaint. They were high-maintenance.
There are three categories of high-maintenance questions, I explained.
1. Non-listening type questions: For example, I have previously stated what you are to do when you are finished but you ask, "What do we do when we are done?"
2. Functioning-type questions: For example, "Can we use pen?" "Can I use your stapler?" "Where should we put our tests?" The answers have always been the same to these questions, but they continued to be asked.
3. Future-type questions: These are questions that I am eventually going to answer if you are patient. For example, "Are we getting our tests back today?" "What are we doing today?"
Sensing a fierce competitive nature in my 8th graders, I had an idea. "Let’s start a contest and see which of my classes can ask the least number of high-maintenance questions in 12 weeks. The class who wins the contest will get a two-day holiday from social studies. Instead, they will get to watch a movie and have snacks." I was correct; my students were competitive, and they were eager to start the competition and win. Two days later, after I proposed the idea to my other four sections, we were off and running.
For 12 weeks, I kept track of high-maintenance questions by class periods on the chalkboard. Most of the time, I said nothing but turned around and made a mark under the appropriate class period. Within days of initiating the contest, the number of high-maintenance questions dropped dramatically. On day three, a student called out, "Where do we put these when we are done?" and loud groans permeated the classroom. The positive use of peer pressure was incredible. Students thought before they asked because they did not want to be responsible for giving their class a mark. Listening skills were enhanced; I only had to give directions once.
Students also began to rely on one another to answer questions. Early in the competition, we established the rule, "Ask three before you ask me." With this rule, students could ask other students a question as long as it caused little disruption. It turned out to be the perfect motto for our high-maintenance competition. Although my 8th period class ultimately won the competition by having the least number of marks, all classes made tremendous improvement in reducing the number of high-maintenance questions.
Not only did I see a change in my students’ behaviour, but I also saw a change in my own. I learned that I do not always state my directions or objectives as clearly as I think I do. On various occasions, I heard a student whisper to another student, "She did not tell us what we should do after finishing the last step. Does anyone know what we should do next?" I began to pay more attention to my directives to make sure that I was being precise. Additionally, it caused me to reflect on the directives that I give at the beginning of the year. Perhaps I had helped create high-maintenance students during the first few weeks of school, by not giving specific instructions with constant reinforcement. Next fall I will be more specific with my directives and objectives, and if that doesn’t change their behaviour, we will start the high-maintenance game much earlier in the year.
May I throw this away?
Do we have homework?
May we use pen?
What are we doing today?
Do we need our books?
What page did you say we need to turn to again?
What did you say we should do when we are done?
As a classroom teacher, does this sound familiar? My five sections of 8th graders were draining me with the number of questions asked on a daily basis. No matter how clear my directives were, five minutes later students were asking questions concerning what they should do next. In addition, no matter how many times I told them they did not have to ask permission to throw something away or use my stapler or tape dispenser, students continued to ask.
During sixth period one day in November, I counted 19 questions in nine minutes. I realized that I needed to change my students’ behaviour. I told them the truth. They were one of my favourite groups of students whom I had taught during my 21 years of teaching. I loved their personalities, their work ethic, and their behaviour, but I had one complaint. They were high-maintenance.
There are three categories of high-maintenance questions, I explained.
1. Non-listening type questions: For example, I have previously stated what you are to do when you are finished but you ask, "What do we do when we are done?"
2. Functioning-type questions: For example, "Can we use pen?" "Can I use your stapler?" "Where should we put our tests?" The answers have always been the same to these questions, but they continued to be asked.
3. Future-type questions: These are questions that I am eventually going to answer if you are patient. For example, "Are we getting our tests back today?" "What are we doing today?"
Sensing a fierce competitive nature in my 8th graders, I had an idea. "Let’s start a contest and see which of my classes can ask the least number of high-maintenance questions in 12 weeks. The class who wins the contest will get a two-day holiday from social studies. Instead, they will get to watch a movie and have snacks." I was correct; my students were competitive, and they were eager to start the competition and win. Two days later, after I proposed the idea to my other four sections, we were off and running.
For 12 weeks, I kept track of high-maintenance questions by class periods on the chalkboard. Most of the time, I said nothing but turned around and made a mark under the appropriate class period. Within days of initiating the contest, the number of high-maintenance questions dropped dramatically. On day three, a student called out, "Where do we put these when we are done?" and loud groans permeated the classroom. The positive use of peer pressure was incredible. Students thought before they asked because they did not want to be responsible for giving their class a mark. Listening skills were enhanced; I only had to give directions once.
Students also began to rely on one another to answer questions. Early in the competition, we established the rule, "Ask three before you ask me." With this rule, students could ask other students a question as long as it caused little disruption. It turned out to be the perfect motto for our high-maintenance competition. Although my 8th period class ultimately won the competition by having the least number of marks, all classes made tremendous improvement in reducing the number of high-maintenance questions.
Not only did I see a change in my students’ behaviour, but I also saw a change in my own. I learned that I do not always state my directions or objectives as clearly as I think I do. On various occasions, I heard a student whisper to another student, "She did not tell us what we should do after finishing the last step. Does anyone know what we should do next?" I began to pay more attention to my directives to make sure that I was being precise. Additionally, it caused me to reflect on the directives that I give at the beginning of the year. Perhaps I had helped create high-maintenance students during the first few weeks of school, by not giving specific instructions with constant reinforcement. Next fall I will be more specific with my directives and objectives, and if that doesn’t change their behaviour, we will start the high-maintenance game much earlier in the year.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
The Right Way to Ask Questions in the Classroom
Edutopia, 30 March 2009, By Ben Johnson
Have you ever thought about how silly we teachers can be? When we get in front of students, we present ourselves to be the ones with all the answers, and then after we talk to the students, we start asking questions as if we don't know anything we just talked about. No wonder students get confused!
The Goal of a Question
On a more serious note, as teachers, we need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know everything, and there is no reason to assume that the students know nothing. But perhaps the most important question to ask is, "What does a teacher asking questions to a class expect the class to learn from the questioning process?"
There are a number of things to consider in this scenario. Some teachers might answer that the reason to ask questions is to check for understanding, which benefits the teacher more than the student. Ostensibly, after we have taught a principle or concept, we could ask, "Does everybody understand?" Even though we all realize that students not answering -- or even answering in the affirmative -- may not really understand, we still ask it. Are we aware of how many times we ask this useless question during a day of teaching?
What we really end up telling the students when we ask this sort of question is, "Ok, here is your last chance. If you don't ask any questions, then you understand completely, and I am free to go on to the next subject. Because I asked this fair question, and gave you a fair chance to answer, I am absolved from any lack of understanding on your part." The fallacy with this thinking is that sometimes the students do not understand that they do not understand, and if they do not know what they do not know, there is no way that they can ask a question about it.
The other element about this question is that it is a "yes" or "no" question, which we all know is too easy to guess what answer the teacher wants to hear, and does not push the students into the higher order thinking stratosphere. How do we then go about appropriately checking for understanding? We ask specific questions! Great, you may be saying, but how do we do that? Typically, these are the questions that are thrown out to the class as if they were tantalizing treats to be snatched up by all of the eager students. The reality is far different.
Classroom Observations
If we look at the dynamics of any classroom, it doesn't take more than a week for students to figure out who is smart, who is not, and who doesn't care. What is worse, studies show that after fourth grade, students know how they are perceived and play their roles accordingly. So, here comes one of those hook-laden questions bobbing about the classroom: "Class, if you could stretch string from here to the moon, how many balls of string would it take?" The students who know they are not smart are not going to take the bait, and neither will the students who do not care. This leaves the smart kids as the only ones interested in answering, and almost before the question is finished, they have their hands up with an answer, right or wrong. The other two groups of kids are perfectly fine with this routine. Most likely, they will complacently say to themselves, "Let them answer the questions so I don't have to."
A teacher may defend this practice because the motivated student who answers will help the whole class to learn the answer. That might be true if the whole class were listening, but, when the teacher starts pacing the room and stops to ask a question, if the students know that the question will be open to the entire class, then most likely two-thirds of the class will not even pay it any attention and continue doodling or daydreaming.
I spent the day as a first grader, a third grader, a fifth grader, a sixth grader, and a ninth grader. I followed these students to all their classes. One astounding thing that I discovered is that some students went through a whole day -- maybe even weeks and months -- and never answered a single verbal question! Once again I ask, do we realize how many general questions we throw to the air in the course of a class period? We would be astounded at the results if we simply assigned a student to tally how many of these questions we actually ask each class period. Old habits are hard to break, but the students would love to help you break this one.
Let's say we notice this problem and decide something has to change. "Jeffry, What do John the Baptist and Kermit the Frog have in common?" Several hands slowly recede and all eyes are on Jeffry. Well, some eyes are on Jeffry. The rest of the students just breathed sighs of relief that their names were not called. The question asked is not their problem, and neither is the answer. Some teachers may say that while Jeffry is thinking of the answer, the rest of the students are, too. Wouldn't that be nice? Once again, maybe one-third of the students are thinking about an answer, but the rest are just glad it wasn't them.
So, how do teachers ask a question the right way?
A Simple, Effective Approach
Mary Budd Rowe proposes that teachers simply ask a question, such as, "What do you call it when an insect kills itself?" pause for at least three seconds, and then say a student's name, "Sally." By doing this, all the students will automatically be thinking about an answer and only after another child's name is said will they sigh in relief because they were not chosen. Creative teachers accompany this technique with a system to make sure that every child gets to answer questions in a random fashion. If it is not random, then once they answer a question, they think they have answered their one question and are done for the day.
So, if we are not planning to use TPR to have all the students answer questions at the same time, then at least we should be asking a question, pausing for three seconds and then saying a student's name in order to get the most effect out of questions. However, if we are satisfied with only some students paying attention and learning in our classrooms, then we can continue as usual.
Any questions? What innovative strategies do you use to make sure every student gets a chance to ask and answer questions?
Questions
The best way to answer questions, especially difficult questions, is to get discussion groups to talk. The teacher can walk around the room and listen to discussions and talk to kids who aren't talking or seem to be struggling. This is a great time to engage in a better tailored set of questions for kids who struggle. Listening for answers as I walk around the room, helps me realize the ideas I want the class to hear. Then I can ask a student to repeat that idea in large group and also check the class randomly. Adding a timer is nice. Then think time is guaranteed.
Response boards are great. Ask a question, all write. Have the class stand up.
Select students randomly and have students read answers aloud. Students with similar ideas can sit down allowing the hearing of all ideas in the class. Technology is a great tool in the classroom. As teachers we should all dream of the day when we can have all students respond on their computers and we can read their responses giving kids feedback immediately. Eventually I envision a key pad with questions prebuilt for these kinds of learning discussions, so teachers can respond quickly and effectively to all of the ideas in a classroom. It would be like a live forum of discussion.
What it boils down to is that questioning provides a thoughtful education, where ideas are honored, not spoon fed down your throat so that test scores go up and teacher pay is increased. Let us all hope that education should be about the pursuit of the well being of mankind, so that in the end education helps to promote good for the good of all. Thinking would definitely be required, and I think Socrates would agree
Have you ever thought about how silly we teachers can be? When we get in front of students, we present ourselves to be the ones with all the answers, and then after we talk to the students, we start asking questions as if we don't know anything we just talked about. No wonder students get confused!
The Goal of a Question
On a more serious note, as teachers, we need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know everything, and there is no reason to assume that the students know nothing. But perhaps the most important question to ask is, "What does a teacher asking questions to a class expect the class to learn from the questioning process?"
There are a number of things to consider in this scenario. Some teachers might answer that the reason to ask questions is to check for understanding, which benefits the teacher more than the student. Ostensibly, after we have taught a principle or concept, we could ask, "Does everybody understand?" Even though we all realize that students not answering -- or even answering in the affirmative -- may not really understand, we still ask it. Are we aware of how many times we ask this useless question during a day of teaching?
What we really end up telling the students when we ask this sort of question is, "Ok, here is your last chance. If you don't ask any questions, then you understand completely, and I am free to go on to the next subject. Because I asked this fair question, and gave you a fair chance to answer, I am absolved from any lack of understanding on your part." The fallacy with this thinking is that sometimes the students do not understand that they do not understand, and if they do not know what they do not know, there is no way that they can ask a question about it.
The other element about this question is that it is a "yes" or "no" question, which we all know is too easy to guess what answer the teacher wants to hear, and does not push the students into the higher order thinking stratosphere. How do we then go about appropriately checking for understanding? We ask specific questions! Great, you may be saying, but how do we do that? Typically, these are the questions that are thrown out to the class as if they were tantalizing treats to be snatched up by all of the eager students. The reality is far different.
Classroom Observations
If we look at the dynamics of any classroom, it doesn't take more than a week for students to figure out who is smart, who is not, and who doesn't care. What is worse, studies show that after fourth grade, students know how they are perceived and play their roles accordingly. So, here comes one of those hook-laden questions bobbing about the classroom: "Class, if you could stretch string from here to the moon, how many balls of string would it take?" The students who know they are not smart are not going to take the bait, and neither will the students who do not care. This leaves the smart kids as the only ones interested in answering, and almost before the question is finished, they have their hands up with an answer, right or wrong. The other two groups of kids are perfectly fine with this routine. Most likely, they will complacently say to themselves, "Let them answer the questions so I don't have to."
A teacher may defend this practice because the motivated student who answers will help the whole class to learn the answer. That might be true if the whole class were listening, but, when the teacher starts pacing the room and stops to ask a question, if the students know that the question will be open to the entire class, then most likely two-thirds of the class will not even pay it any attention and continue doodling or daydreaming.
I spent the day as a first grader, a third grader, a fifth grader, a sixth grader, and a ninth grader. I followed these students to all their classes. One astounding thing that I discovered is that some students went through a whole day -- maybe even weeks and months -- and never answered a single verbal question! Once again I ask, do we realize how many general questions we throw to the air in the course of a class period? We would be astounded at the results if we simply assigned a student to tally how many of these questions we actually ask each class period. Old habits are hard to break, but the students would love to help you break this one.
Let's say we notice this problem and decide something has to change. "Jeffry, What do John the Baptist and Kermit the Frog have in common?" Several hands slowly recede and all eyes are on Jeffry. Well, some eyes are on Jeffry. The rest of the students just breathed sighs of relief that their names were not called. The question asked is not their problem, and neither is the answer. Some teachers may say that while Jeffry is thinking of the answer, the rest of the students are, too. Wouldn't that be nice? Once again, maybe one-third of the students are thinking about an answer, but the rest are just glad it wasn't them.
So, how do teachers ask a question the right way?
A Simple, Effective Approach
Mary Budd Rowe proposes that teachers simply ask a question, such as, "What do you call it when an insect kills itself?" pause for at least three seconds, and then say a student's name, "Sally." By doing this, all the students will automatically be thinking about an answer and only after another child's name is said will they sigh in relief because they were not chosen. Creative teachers accompany this technique with a system to make sure that every child gets to answer questions in a random fashion. If it is not random, then once they answer a question, they think they have answered their one question and are done for the day.
So, if we are not planning to use TPR to have all the students answer questions at the same time, then at least we should be asking a question, pausing for three seconds and then saying a student's name in order to get the most effect out of questions. However, if we are satisfied with only some students paying attention and learning in our classrooms, then we can continue as usual.
Any questions? What innovative strategies do you use to make sure every student gets a chance to ask and answer questions?
Questions
The best way to answer questions, especially difficult questions, is to get discussion groups to talk. The teacher can walk around the room and listen to discussions and talk to kids who aren't talking or seem to be struggling. This is a great time to engage in a better tailored set of questions for kids who struggle. Listening for answers as I walk around the room, helps me realize the ideas I want the class to hear. Then I can ask a student to repeat that idea in large group and also check the class randomly. Adding a timer is nice. Then think time is guaranteed.
Response boards are great. Ask a question, all write. Have the class stand up.
Select students randomly and have students read answers aloud. Students with similar ideas can sit down allowing the hearing of all ideas in the class. Technology is a great tool in the classroom. As teachers we should all dream of the day when we can have all students respond on their computers and we can read their responses giving kids feedback immediately. Eventually I envision a key pad with questions prebuilt for these kinds of learning discussions, so teachers can respond quickly and effectively to all of the ideas in a classroom. It would be like a live forum of discussion.
What it boils down to is that questioning provides a thoughtful education, where ideas are honored, not spoon fed down your throat so that test scores go up and teacher pay is increased. Let us all hope that education should be about the pursuit of the well being of mankind, so that in the end education helps to promote good for the good of all. Thinking would definitely be required, and I think Socrates would agree
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Teachers 'fear' smart students
by Caroline Milburn , July 14, 2008 The Age, Melbourne
TOO many teachers fear having very bright students in class because they feel ill-equipped to deal with them, according to a visiting campaigner on gifted children. Rosemary Cathcart, one of New Zealand's leading educators in the field of gifted education, says their lack of confidence is caused by a weakness in the way teachers are trained. Most undergraduate courses do not include gifted education as a routine part of teacher training.
"The reality is that most gifted children are going to spend most of their time in regular classrooms, especially at primary school," says Mrs Cathcart, who is in Australia to speak at the Australian Association for the Education of Gifted and Talented national conference in Hobart. "But because teachers do not have gifted education built into their basic training they will have a limited understanding and recognition of gifted children. I've had a teacher say to me, 'That child must be gifted because her handwriting is so neat,' and another has said, 'We can't let that boy join the gifted program because he's too naughty'.
"We haven't prepared teachers well enough... we need to equip them with the skills to help these children." In Australia, a 2001 Senate inquiry into the education of gifted children found teachers were poorly trained to cater for highly able students, estimated to represent between 5% and 10% of all students. The inquiry found many gifted children were suffering from under-achievement, boredom and psychological distress because their needs were not being met at school. It recommended all state and territory education departments should require teaching degree courses to include at least one semester unit on gifted children, including how to identify them.
• Mrs Cathcart, a former teacher who now runs an education consultancy, led a successful campaign in New Zealand to get the government to acknowledge the special needs of gifted children. Education policy was changed to include a new regulation that simply says all schools are required to identify and provide for their gifted students. The initiative included extra funding for advisers to work with New Zealand schools and a handbook to be sent to all schools.
In Victoria, education department policy documents include the gifted under the umbrella of special needs students. But peak parent groups say the wording is so confusing few schools realise that gifted children fall into the special-needs category. The 2001 Senate report acknowledged the problem and recommended all state and territory education department policies make it clear when they refer to special needs that it includes giftedness. Rhonda Collins, a Victorian parent involved in gifted education lobby groups, says scant progress has been made since the 2001 inquiry and parents hope the newly created National Curriculum Board will introduce a coherent policy.
The 12-member board, established by the Federal Government, is devising a national curriculum, from kindergarten through to the end of high school, for English, maths, history and the sciences. "It's an opportune time for the board to formally recognise gifted as special needs," Ms Collins says. "If it does that it will make it clear that this group of children, through no fault of their own, through a genetic predisposition, require a differentiated curriculum in all schools. "Giftedness occurs across all socio-economic groups but schools are not finding these children in ethnic groups or in Koori groups. Schools tend to still think of gifted children as being white Anglo-Saxons from the eastern suburbs. The focus is on performance instead of the child."
Mrs Cathcart says Victoria's decision to expand the SEAL scheme, a program aimed at bright students in government secondary schools, was a welcome development because research showed it was crucial for gifted children to share regular activities with other talented children. "Otherwise they can feel alienated in the classroom and they can shut down from expressing their ideas, even with a good teacher who tries to differentiate material for them." She tells teachers that having a gifted child in the classroom is a bonus and strategies to engage them also enhance the learning of other students.
"A lot of teachers think that having gifted children in the class means an immense amount of extra work or they can feel threatened if they think the child might ask them a question they don't know the answer to," she says. "I tell teachers not to be afraid of working with these children... there are simple strategies, such as introducing unexpected elements into a lesson, that children will pick up on. We have the opportunity to engage with minds that bring a different kind of freshness and new ideas to our lessons."
TOO many teachers fear having very bright students in class because they feel ill-equipped to deal with them, according to a visiting campaigner on gifted children. Rosemary Cathcart, one of New Zealand's leading educators in the field of gifted education, says their lack of confidence is caused by a weakness in the way teachers are trained. Most undergraduate courses do not include gifted education as a routine part of teacher training.
"The reality is that most gifted children are going to spend most of their time in regular classrooms, especially at primary school," says Mrs Cathcart, who is in Australia to speak at the Australian Association for the Education of Gifted and Talented national conference in Hobart. "But because teachers do not have gifted education built into their basic training they will have a limited understanding and recognition of gifted children. I've had a teacher say to me, 'That child must be gifted because her handwriting is so neat,' and another has said, 'We can't let that boy join the gifted program because he's too naughty'.
"We haven't prepared teachers well enough... we need to equip them with the skills to help these children." In Australia, a 2001 Senate inquiry into the education of gifted children found teachers were poorly trained to cater for highly able students, estimated to represent between 5% and 10% of all students. The inquiry found many gifted children were suffering from under-achievement, boredom and psychological distress because their needs were not being met at school. It recommended all state and territory education departments should require teaching degree courses to include at least one semester unit on gifted children, including how to identify them.
• Mrs Cathcart, a former teacher who now runs an education consultancy, led a successful campaign in New Zealand to get the government to acknowledge the special needs of gifted children. Education policy was changed to include a new regulation that simply says all schools are required to identify and provide for their gifted students. The initiative included extra funding for advisers to work with New Zealand schools and a handbook to be sent to all schools.
In Victoria, education department policy documents include the gifted under the umbrella of special needs students. But peak parent groups say the wording is so confusing few schools realise that gifted children fall into the special-needs category. The 2001 Senate report acknowledged the problem and recommended all state and territory education department policies make it clear when they refer to special needs that it includes giftedness. Rhonda Collins, a Victorian parent involved in gifted education lobby groups, says scant progress has been made since the 2001 inquiry and parents hope the newly created National Curriculum Board will introduce a coherent policy.
The 12-member board, established by the Federal Government, is devising a national curriculum, from kindergarten through to the end of high school, for English, maths, history and the sciences. "It's an opportune time for the board to formally recognise gifted as special needs," Ms Collins says. "If it does that it will make it clear that this group of children, through no fault of their own, through a genetic predisposition, require a differentiated curriculum in all schools. "Giftedness occurs across all socio-economic groups but schools are not finding these children in ethnic groups or in Koori groups. Schools tend to still think of gifted children as being white Anglo-Saxons from the eastern suburbs. The focus is on performance instead of the child."
Mrs Cathcart says Victoria's decision to expand the SEAL scheme, a program aimed at bright students in government secondary schools, was a welcome development because research showed it was crucial for gifted children to share regular activities with other talented children. "Otherwise they can feel alienated in the classroom and they can shut down from expressing their ideas, even with a good teacher who tries to differentiate material for them." She tells teachers that having a gifted child in the classroom is a bonus and strategies to engage them also enhance the learning of other students.
"A lot of teachers think that having gifted children in the class means an immense amount of extra work or they can feel threatened if they think the child might ask them a question they don't know the answer to," she says. "I tell teachers not to be afraid of working with these children... there are simple strategies, such as introducing unexpected elements into a lesson, that children will pick up on. We have the opportunity to engage with minds that bring a different kind of freshness and new ideas to our lessons."
Friday, March 13, 2009
To Repeat or Not to Repeat
A précis of 2006 research paper by Dr Helen McGrath
"Over the last 75 years, a pool of research-based knowledge about the effects on students of repeating a year level has been accumulating. It now overwhelmingly indicates that there are neither academic nor social advantages for the majority of students who repeat a year of their schooling. There is probably no other educational issue where there is such a huge gap between what the research says and the practices that schools continue to adopt.
Paradoxically this discrepancy between evidence and practice has never been more apparent than in recent times when evidence-based approaches are being strongly promoted by educational systems across Australia. The practice of students repeating a year level is widely accepted in Australian schools but there are few statistics available on rates of repeating. Kenny (1991) has estimated that approximately 14% - 18% of all Australian students repeat a year, especially in the first four years of schooling.
Jimerson (2004) and Owens and Magliaro (1998) have argued that there are significant risks for schools in continuing to follow the unsupported practice of repeating students in the face of such unambiguous research which directs otherwise and warn that such practice may constitute ‘ educational malpractice’.
"Over the last 75 years, a pool of research-based knowledge about the effects on students of repeating a year level has been accumulating. It now overwhelmingly indicates that there are neither academic nor social advantages for the majority of students who repeat a year of their schooling. There is probably no other educational issue where there is such a huge gap between what the research says and the practices that schools continue to adopt.
Paradoxically this discrepancy between evidence and practice has never been more apparent than in recent times when evidence-based approaches are being strongly promoted by educational systems across Australia. The practice of students repeating a year level is widely accepted in Australian schools but there are few statistics available on rates of repeating. Kenny (1991) has estimated that approximately 14% - 18% of all Australian students repeat a year, especially in the first four years of schooling.
Jimerson (2004) and Owens and Magliaro (1998) have argued that there are significant risks for schools in continuing to follow the unsupported practice of repeating students in the face of such unambiguous research which directs otherwise and warn that such practice may constitute ‘ educational malpractice’.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Instructional Design Questions
In his book, The Art and Science of Teaching: A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction, by Robert J. Marzano suggests teachers examine the following questions when planning their units of work. Hope you and your teachers find these useful at your school.
1. What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success?
2. What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?
3. What will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge?
4. What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?
5. What will I do to engage students?
6. What will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures?
7. What will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures?
8. What will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students?
9. What will I do to communicate high expectations for all students?
10. What will I do to develop effective lessons organized into a cohesive unit?
1. What will I do to establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress, and celebrate success?
2. What will I do to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?
3. What will I do to help students practice and deepen their understanding of new knowledge?
4. What will I do to help students generate and test hypotheses about new knowledge?
5. What will I do to engage students?
6. What will I do to establish or maintain classroom rules and procedures?
7. What will I do to recognize and acknowledge adherence and lack of adherence to classroom rules and procedures?
8. What will I do to establish and maintain effective relationships with students?
9. What will I do to communicate high expectations for all students?
10. What will I do to develop effective lessons organized into a cohesive unit?
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Final exam
This past fall semester, at Duke University, there were two sophomores who were taking Organic Chemistry and who did pretty well on all of the quizzes, midterms, labs, etc. Going into the final exam, they had solid "A's."
These two friends were so confident going into the final that the weekend before finals week (even though the Chem. final was on Monday), they decided to go up to University of Virginia to a party with some friends.
So they did this and had a great time. However, they ended up staying longer than they planned, and they didn't make it back to Duke until early Monday morning. Rather than taking the final then, they found Professor Aldric after the final and explained to him why they missed it. They told him that they went up to Virginia for the weekend, and had planned to come back in time to study, but that they had a flat tire on the way back and didn't have a spare and couldn't get help for a long time. So they were late getting back to campus.
Aldric thought this over and agreed that they could make up the final on the following day. The two guys were elated and relieved. So, they studied that night and went in the next day at the time that Aldric had told them.
He placed them in separate rooms, handed each of them a test booklet and told them to begin. They looked at the first problem, which was something simple about free radical formation and was worth 5 points. "Cool" they thought, "this is going to be easy." They did that problem and then turned the page.
They were unprepared, however, for what they saw on the next page.
It said: (95 points) "Which tire?"
These two friends were so confident going into the final that the weekend before finals week (even though the Chem. final was on Monday), they decided to go up to University of Virginia to a party with some friends.
So they did this and had a great time. However, they ended up staying longer than they planned, and they didn't make it back to Duke until early Monday morning. Rather than taking the final then, they found Professor Aldric after the final and explained to him why they missed it. They told him that they went up to Virginia for the weekend, and had planned to come back in time to study, but that they had a flat tire on the way back and didn't have a spare and couldn't get help for a long time. So they were late getting back to campus.
Aldric thought this over and agreed that they could make up the final on the following day. The two guys were elated and relieved. So, they studied that night and went in the next day at the time that Aldric had told them.
He placed them in separate rooms, handed each of them a test booklet and told them to begin. They looked at the first problem, which was something simple about free radical formation and was worth 5 points. "Cool" they thought, "this is going to be easy." They did that problem and then turned the page.
They were unprepared, however, for what they saw on the next page.
It said: (95 points) "Which tire?"
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Music soothes the savage beast
Recent investigation into the effects of music on the brain reveals that the brain loves music and that information travelling on musical notes is learned more quickly and better retained for speedy, accurate retrieval. But while the research also indicates that some children benefit more than others from music in the classroom, there has not been much study of how songs, chants, and lullabies influence learning. Songs, poems, chants, and rhymes, for example, made it possible for workmen in the Middle Ages to be organized to build great cathedrals. They have to also be able to assist all our students learn.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Exercise Seen as Priming Pump for Students’ Academic Strides
Case grows stronger for physical activity's link to improved brain function. Vol. 27, Educatiop Week : Issue 23, Pages 14-15
By Debra Viadero
Seven or eight years ago, studies offered mixed results on the question of whether exercise can boost brain function in children and adolescents. Experts are beginning to contend, however, that the case is getting stronger. “There’s sort of no question about it now,” said Dr. John J. Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The exercise itself doesn’t make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn.”
Range of Benefits
Dr. Ratey is the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Education and the Brain, a book published last month by Little, Brown and Co. It draws together emerging findings from neuroscientific, biomedical, and educational research that correlate exercise with a wide range of brain-related benefits—improving attention, reducing stress and anxiety, and staving off cognitive decline in old age, for example. The interest in documenting a link between exercise and learning in children and adolescents comes as trends in physical activity seem to point in the opposite direction. Studies suggest that, with 30 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren classified as overweight, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions.
Proponents of the educational benefits of exercise maintain that the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which puts pressure on schools to raise students’ test scores in core academic subjects, is prompting some schools to cut back on time for physical education classes and recess. Nationwide, Dr. Ratey writes in his book, only 6 percent of schools now offer PE five days a week. “At the same time,” he adds, “kids are spending 5.5 hours a day in front of a screen of some sort—television, computer, or hand-held device.”
With his university colleague Darla M. Castelli, Mr. Hillman assessed the physical-fitness levels of 239 3rd and 5th graders from four Illinois elementary schools. Their findings published last year, in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, show that children who got good marks on two measures of physical fitness—those that gauge aerobic fitness and body-mass index—tended also to have higher scores on state exams in reading and mathematics. That relationship also held true regardless of children’s gender or socieconomic differences.
‘Bowled Over’
Another study published last year, involving 163 overweight children in Augusta, Ga., found, in addition, that the cognitive and academic benefits of exercise seemed to increase with the size of the dose. For that study, a cross-disciplinary research team randomly assigned children to one of three groups. One group received 20 minutes of physical activity every day after school. Another group got a 40-minute daily workout, and the third group got no special exercise sessions.
At Naperville Central High School, ball playing is used to keep students alert in a special literacy class.
—John Zich for Education Week
After 14 weeks, the children who made the greatest improvement, as measured by both a standardized academic test and a test that measured their level of executive function—thinking processes, in other words, that involve planning, organizing, abstract thought, or self-control—were those who spent 40 minutes a day playing tag and taking part in other active games designed by the researchers. The cognitive and academic gains for the 20-minutes-a-day group were half as large. “I was frankly bowled over by the results,” said Catherine L. Davis, the lead author of the study, a preliminary version of which was published in December in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. “It’s like a staircase, which is considered strong evidence for causation,” added Ms. Davis, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
PE Experiment
In the meantime, educators in Naperville District 203, a suburban district of 18,600 students just west of Chicago, have been conducting some informal experiments on their own. With advice from Dr. Ratey, the school instituted what is now called a “learning readiness” PE class where students such as Mr. Bray can choose from more than a dozen heart-pumping activities. The students wear heart monitors, which they check to maintain a heart rate of 160 to 190 beats a minute for 25-minute stretches at a time throughout the week. When the class started in the fall of 2004, it included about a dozen students who were targeted for extra help based on low test scores in reading and teacher recommendations. Reading teachers were also recruited to infuse a bit of literacy instruction into some of the activities. One game called for students to race around on scooters to match words with their definitions written on pieces of paper on the floor, said Paul Zientarski, the school’s instructional coordinator for physical education and health.
After their early-morning PE session, the students joined other struggling readers and writers in a special literacy class designed to give them extra academic help in those areas. At the end of one semester, Naperville educators found, students who took part in both the early-morning exercise program and the literacy class showed 1.34 of a year’s growth on standardized reading tests, according to Mr. Zientarski. The gain for the students in the literacy-only group, in comparison, was seven-tenths of a year. Naperville educators tried the same approach the following school year with an introductory algebra class for students having difficulty in mathematics and saw even more dramatic gains. Students who both exercised and took the extra-help math class increased their scores on a standardized algebra test by 20.4 percent. The gain for students in the control group was 3.87 percent, according to Mr. Zientarski.
The school did not get the same results, though, a year later when the “learning readiness” classes and the literacy classes were scheduled six hours apart. Students who had literacy lessons right after exercising did just as well, but improvements were smaller for students with afternoon literacy classes. That led Naperville Central’s guidance counsellors to recommend that all students schedule their toughest academic classes right after PE. “We now have three years of data showing what we have, and we really think we’re on to something,” Mr. Zientarski added. But district administrators would like to enlist university-based researchers to do more-formal studies before incorporating major scheduling changes districtwide. “We have so many different variables that could affect how we evaluate the course,” said Jody Wirt, the district’s associate superintendent for instruction. “Is it the class size? Or the teachers?”
Mental ‘Miracle-Gro’
Likewise, scientists are still not entirely sure how exercise primes the brain for learning. But, according to Dr. Ratey, they have some good ideas. Laboratory studies in mice and humans, for instance, show that exercise prompts the brain to produce greater amounts of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, which Dr. Ratey likes to call “Miracle-Gro” for the brain. It encourages brain cells to sprout synapses, which are crucial to forming the connections the brain needs to make in order to learn. It also strengthens cells and protects them from dying out. Other research also suggests that exercise plays a role in neurogenesis, the production of new brain cells, in middle-aged and older adults and in laboratory animals.
“There’s no way to say for sure that improves learning capacity for kids, but it certainly seems to correlate to that,” Dr. Ratey said. What seems to continue to be important, though, is what gets put in those brain cells—in other words, whether students are given complex learning fodder to practice and master. It’s also not likely, Dr. Ratey said, that just any physical education curriculum will produce the kinds of benefits that Naperville saw with its “learning readiness” classes. At the instigation of former physical education teacher Phil Lawler, the Naperville district has been at the forefront of a national movement for the “new PE,’’ a philosophy that promotes teaching students how to be fit and lead healthy lives, rather than focusing on sports skills and game rules.
“No more getting picked last for basketball. No more climbing ropes or playing dodgeball,” said Mr. Lawler, who now works for a Kansas City, Mo.-based foundation, called PE4Life, that trains teachers and promotes the concept nationwide. Mr. Lawler and Mr. Zientarski, for instance, began using heart-rate monitors with all their classes more than a decade ago. They also raised money to install climbing walls and ropes courses in their schools and brought in kayaks and sophisticated exercise equipment that incorporates video games and virtual-reality technology to make exercise more engaging for students.
Traditional sports are still taught, but the games, such as three-on-three basketball, take place in smaller groups, Mr. Lawler said. “This isn’t just a few PE teachers with a wild idea anymore,” he said. “It’s combining what should go on in a quality physical education program with some of the highest-quality research in the world in neuroscience and cognitive science.”
By Debra Viadero
Seven or eight years ago, studies offered mixed results on the question of whether exercise can boost brain function in children and adolescents. Experts are beginning to contend, however, that the case is getting stronger. “There’s sort of no question about it now,” said Dr. John J. Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “The exercise itself doesn’t make you smarter, but it puts the brain of the learners in the optimal position for them to learn.”
Range of Benefits
Dr. Ratey is the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Education and the Brain, a book published last month by Little, Brown and Co. It draws together emerging findings from neuroscientific, biomedical, and educational research that correlate exercise with a wide range of brain-related benefits—improving attention, reducing stress and anxiety, and staving off cognitive decline in old age, for example. The interest in documenting a link between exercise and learning in children and adolescents comes as trends in physical activity seem to point in the opposite direction. Studies suggest that, with 30 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren classified as overweight, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions.
Proponents of the educational benefits of exercise maintain that the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which puts pressure on schools to raise students’ test scores in core academic subjects, is prompting some schools to cut back on time for physical education classes and recess. Nationwide, Dr. Ratey writes in his book, only 6 percent of schools now offer PE five days a week. “At the same time,” he adds, “kids are spending 5.5 hours a day in front of a screen of some sort—television, computer, or hand-held device.”
With his university colleague Darla M. Castelli, Mr. Hillman assessed the physical-fitness levels of 239 3rd and 5th graders from four Illinois elementary schools. Their findings published last year, in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, show that children who got good marks on two measures of physical fitness—those that gauge aerobic fitness and body-mass index—tended also to have higher scores on state exams in reading and mathematics. That relationship also held true regardless of children’s gender or socieconomic differences.
‘Bowled Over’
Another study published last year, involving 163 overweight children in Augusta, Ga., found, in addition, that the cognitive and academic benefits of exercise seemed to increase with the size of the dose. For that study, a cross-disciplinary research team randomly assigned children to one of three groups. One group received 20 minutes of physical activity every day after school. Another group got a 40-minute daily workout, and the third group got no special exercise sessions.
At Naperville Central High School, ball playing is used to keep students alert in a special literacy class.
—John Zich for Education Week
After 14 weeks, the children who made the greatest improvement, as measured by both a standardized academic test and a test that measured their level of executive function—thinking processes, in other words, that involve planning, organizing, abstract thought, or self-control—were those who spent 40 minutes a day playing tag and taking part in other active games designed by the researchers. The cognitive and academic gains for the 20-minutes-a-day group were half as large. “I was frankly bowled over by the results,” said Catherine L. Davis, the lead author of the study, a preliminary version of which was published in December in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. “It’s like a staircase, which is considered strong evidence for causation,” added Ms. Davis, who is an associate professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta.
PE Experiment
In the meantime, educators in Naperville District 203, a suburban district of 18,600 students just west of Chicago, have been conducting some informal experiments on their own. With advice from Dr. Ratey, the school instituted what is now called a “learning readiness” PE class where students such as Mr. Bray can choose from more than a dozen heart-pumping activities. The students wear heart monitors, which they check to maintain a heart rate of 160 to 190 beats a minute for 25-minute stretches at a time throughout the week. When the class started in the fall of 2004, it included about a dozen students who were targeted for extra help based on low test scores in reading and teacher recommendations. Reading teachers were also recruited to infuse a bit of literacy instruction into some of the activities. One game called for students to race around on scooters to match words with their definitions written on pieces of paper on the floor, said Paul Zientarski, the school’s instructional coordinator for physical education and health.
After their early-morning PE session, the students joined other struggling readers and writers in a special literacy class designed to give them extra academic help in those areas. At the end of one semester, Naperville educators found, students who took part in both the early-morning exercise program and the literacy class showed 1.34 of a year’s growth on standardized reading tests, according to Mr. Zientarski. The gain for the students in the literacy-only group, in comparison, was seven-tenths of a year. Naperville educators tried the same approach the following school year with an introductory algebra class for students having difficulty in mathematics and saw even more dramatic gains. Students who both exercised and took the extra-help math class increased their scores on a standardized algebra test by 20.4 percent. The gain for students in the control group was 3.87 percent, according to Mr. Zientarski.
The school did not get the same results, though, a year later when the “learning readiness” classes and the literacy classes were scheduled six hours apart. Students who had literacy lessons right after exercising did just as well, but improvements were smaller for students with afternoon literacy classes. That led Naperville Central’s guidance counsellors to recommend that all students schedule their toughest academic classes right after PE. “We now have three years of data showing what we have, and we really think we’re on to something,” Mr. Zientarski added. But district administrators would like to enlist university-based researchers to do more-formal studies before incorporating major scheduling changes districtwide. “We have so many different variables that could affect how we evaluate the course,” said Jody Wirt, the district’s associate superintendent for instruction. “Is it the class size? Or the teachers?”
Mental ‘Miracle-Gro’
Likewise, scientists are still not entirely sure how exercise primes the brain for learning. But, according to Dr. Ratey, they have some good ideas. Laboratory studies in mice and humans, for instance, show that exercise prompts the brain to produce greater amounts of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, which Dr. Ratey likes to call “Miracle-Gro” for the brain. It encourages brain cells to sprout synapses, which are crucial to forming the connections the brain needs to make in order to learn. It also strengthens cells and protects them from dying out. Other research also suggests that exercise plays a role in neurogenesis, the production of new brain cells, in middle-aged and older adults and in laboratory animals.
“There’s no way to say for sure that improves learning capacity for kids, but it certainly seems to correlate to that,” Dr. Ratey said. What seems to continue to be important, though, is what gets put in those brain cells—in other words, whether students are given complex learning fodder to practice and master. It’s also not likely, Dr. Ratey said, that just any physical education curriculum will produce the kinds of benefits that Naperville saw with its “learning readiness” classes. At the instigation of former physical education teacher Phil Lawler, the Naperville district has been at the forefront of a national movement for the “new PE,’’ a philosophy that promotes teaching students how to be fit and lead healthy lives, rather than focusing on sports skills and game rules.
“No more getting picked last for basketball. No more climbing ropes or playing dodgeball,” said Mr. Lawler, who now works for a Kansas City, Mo.-based foundation, called PE4Life, that trains teachers and promotes the concept nationwide. Mr. Lawler and Mr. Zientarski, for instance, began using heart-rate monitors with all their classes more than a decade ago. They also raised money to install climbing walls and ropes courses in their schools and brought in kayaks and sophisticated exercise equipment that incorporates video games and virtual-reality technology to make exercise more engaging for students.
Traditional sports are still taught, but the games, such as three-on-three basketball, take place in smaller groups, Mr. Lawler said. “This isn’t just a few PE teachers with a wild idea anymore,” he said. “It’s combining what should go on in a quality physical education program with some of the highest-quality research in the world in neuroscience and cognitive science.”
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Cover the Material—Or Teach Students to Think?
Marion Brady Educational Leadership : February 2008 | Volume 65 | Number 5
Teaching Students to Think Pages 64-67
To move beyond rote memorization and use a full range of thinking skills, students need to tackle issues straight out of the complex world in which they live.
So here's today's project, kids. Get in small groups and put together flowcharts tracing the possible long-range consequences of a new state energy conservation law that says you can't use any kind of motorized vehicle to travel less than one mile."
"What about emergencies?"
"Hmmm. Let's say that if you were caught using a motorized vehicle on a short trip and you weren't bleeding and headed to the hospital, you'd be fined $200."
"How about electric scooters or skateboards?"
"They're motorized. It takes energy to charge their batteries. So, no."
"Is being late for work, school, or a doctor's appointment an emergency?"
"Nope. You'll just need to start sooner. Any more questions? OK, then get on with it. As usual, when you think you've done all you can do, we'll combine your work to get as complete a picture of this kind of policy-driven social change as we can."
This is a reasonable and intellectually stimulating educational activity. It deals with a matter of fundamental importance in everyday life—the dynamics of social change. Working on it doesn't require a specialized vocabulary, mastery of new ideas, or even the ability to read.
Generating similar questions isn't difficult: What if consumption of fresh water were limited to two gallons per person per day? What if everyone, no exceptions, had to serve one year of public service after high school? What if a reliable pocket-size voice stress analyzer indicating when someone isn't telling the truth cost just $10? What if global warming raised the average temperature in the area in which you live by 4°F?
These kinds of questions make students think. Why, then, aren't such questions routinely asked in school? Why is such an important aim—to help students think more clearly and productively—so hard to put into operation?
The short answer is that for many people, the main purpose of educating isn't to improve students' thinking skills but to "cover the material" in math, science, language arts, social studies, and other school subjects. Covering the material is, of course, important. To function, societies need various kinds of glue to hold their components together. One of those glues is a language of allusion, a body of information that members share that enables them to communicate complicated ideas in few words. The expressions soccer moms, Jeffersonian democracy, and green technology are familiar examples. When a system of mass education sends students on their way with meaning attached to thousands of ideas like those, efficient, society-sustaining dialogue is possible.
A second reason that covering the material is important stems from the obvious fact that the older generation has answers to some important questions about how the world works. Passing this information on saves the young from having to figure out those answers for themselves, sometimes at great expense and with considerable pain. It's useful to know, for example, that in the past, surplus wealth invested in building railroads between trading centres yielded a higher return than did wealth invested in building weapons, or that rapid social change has often triggered religious fundamentalism.
Covering the material makes good sense, then, in terms of contributing to social stability and transmitting useful, important insights. The problem lies in assuming that these are the main purposes of education. In earlier times, when the rate of social, technological, and environmental change from one generation to the next was all but imperceptible, covering the material was a higher priority. Answers to important questions—such as when to plant, what to do for a sick horse, which berries were safe to eat and which ones would kill you—made clear the desirability of listening to the elders.
We need to accept that what we've been doing isn't the whole story—not even the main story—of educating. For centuries, the central question directed at the young has been, How much do you remember? The proper questions for this era are, What's going on here? Why? Where is it likely to take us and what should we be doing?
The Focus on Recall
About 50 years ago, Benjamin Bloom produced a useful tool for thinking and talking about what's happening and not happening inside students' heads. Working with others, he devised the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives—a summary of specific thought processes arranged in order of increasing complexity. These include such skills as recalling, comparing, classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, relating, synthesizing, valuing, and predicting.
Having words for different thinking skills makes it easy to get a fix on the kinds of thought processes that students are using. Recall seems to play as important a role in instruction as ever. For example, we can reasonably assume that students are being asked merely to recall something they read or heard for a test when teachers closely monitor them during that test to make certain they're not looking at one another's work or using crib notes, cell phones, or other technology. If the assessment required students to use higher-order thinking skills, then teachers wouldn't need to monitor students so carefully to discourage cheating. Student responses would be distinctive rather than uniform, easily associated with individual learners.
Conventional textbooks are all but useless for teaching higher-order thinking skills because they represent the final conclusions of other people's thought processes. The opportunities for complex thinking have been squeezed out of them. It's like giving students completed crossword puzzles to study and then, a little later, giving them those very same puzzles but with empty blanks to fill in. Years of practice make some kids good at storing information in short-term memory, but in this era of almost instantaneous access to a universe of information, that's an appalling waste of good brains.
What's true of textbooks is true of lectures, reference sections of libraries, the Internet, and other tools for passing along information from those who supposedly know to those who supposedly don't. They're massive collections of conclusions and somebody else's inferences, hypotheses, generalizations, syntheses, and value judgments handed to students with some rationalization like, "You'll need to know this next year" or "This will be on the test."
Skeptics who don't think this is a problem would do well to borrow the textbooks in a typical adolescent's backpack and count the ideas their glossaries insist are important. One set of popular 8th grade textbooks covering just four subjects—math, science, language arts, and social studies—notes almost 1,500 important topics. That's for one year, or about 170 actual instructional days in those schools that haven't switched to nonstop reading and math test-preparation drills and even fewer days for those schools that have. It's akin to trying to drink from a fire hose.
The Trouble with Tests
Then, of course, there are those tails currently wagging the education dog—so-called standards and the high-stakes tests keyed to them. Of all the obstacles to improving student thinking, these are surely the most damaging. Teachers and administrators may feel forced to administer them, but doing so means ignoring higher-order thinking skills. The reason is simple. Nobody has yet invented a test-scoring computer program that can evaluate the quality of complex thought processes and spit out meaningful numbers. Do two "good" hypotheses generated by a student equal four "fair" hypotheses or seven "poor" ones generated by another student? How much is one spectacularly original and useful hypothesis, generalization, or value judgment worth? There's no getting around it. The more sophisticated the thought process, the less it lends itself to meaningful mechanical or electronic evaluation.
Machine-scored tests can, of course, ask students to choose a particular hypothesis, generalization, value judgment, or other higher-order thought process from a list of options. But guessing what an anonymous writer of a test item had in mind isn't higher-order thinking.
Some educators may say, "Teaching students to think is important, but they can't think without raw materials in the form of facts, so I'm getting them ready to think." Others may insist that many of their students are incapable of "getting beyond the basics." However, most kids show up for kindergarten already making routine use of higher-order thought processes. They don't need to be taught to think; they need to learn how to examine, elaborate, and refine their ways of thinking and put this thinking to deliberate use converting information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.
The Appeal of the Real
In his 1916 presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, Alfred North Whitehead noted, "The secondhandedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity." We should print these words on banners and hang them on classroom walls as a reminder that students learn to think—by thinking.
Traditional instruction is more concerned with the study of opinions about the real world than with the study of the real world itself. Internalizing others' views requires just one thinking skill—recall. Trying to make sense of one's own day-to-day experience requires the use of every known thinking skill.
This notion has made relatively little headway in U.S. classrooms because, for many educators, the line between first-hand and secondhand knowledge is often fuzzy or nonexistent. Many believe that the important thing is for students to be knowledgeable. Where that knowledge comes from—whether someone hands it to the students or they figure it out on their own—seems to be of little consequence.
Education leaders can take a crucial step toward getting students to use higher-order thinking skills by drawing a sharp line between firsthand and secondhand knowledge. The best way to do this is to focus attention directly on some part of the real world. Every student's first priority is to make sense of right here and now, so most often the best choice of subject matter will be the school itself and its immediate environment. This living, breathing, dynamic slice of reality is big enough to include all major elements of reality, small enough for students to get their heads around, complex enough to challenge every ability level, and accessible enough to enable continuous direct study.
For example, at the middle or high school level, teachers can pose myriad school-focused questions related to every field of study: What kinds of energy power the school? How are these energy sources created and measured? At what cost to taxpayers? At what cost to the environment? What kind of waste does the school produce? Where does it go and how is it processed? What could be done to decrease the school's carbon footprint?
There are hundreds of possible questions related to technology, psychology, sociology, or history. What are the major determinants of status among students? Who are leaders and why? What patterns of behaviour—such as lunchtime seating, cliques, and extracurricular activities—accompany perceptions of status? What's the officially stated purpose of the school? What's the evidence that this purpose is or isn't taken seriously? What kind of statistical information would be useful in understanding the student population? Going back in time, who or what occupied the site before the school was built?
Questions like these require quantitative measures, engaging students with math. Studying the natural and human-made environment demands the rigors of the biological and physical sciences. Schools are also complex social systems, rich in possibilities for research in the social sciences. In fact, any concept in the general education core curriculum can manifest itself in some meaningful way within the boundaries of the school or neighbourhood. Its concreteness will make it memorable and a logical step to study of the larger world.
Real and Rigorous
A focus on real-world issues can alter the entire culture of a school or school system. It enables students and teachers to experience the "meatiness" of the direct study of reality. It's unfailingly relevant. It shows respect for students, who become more than mere candidates for the next higher grade. It levels the playing field by not privileging those with superior symbol manipulation skills. It disregards the arbitrary, artificial boundaries of the academic disciplines. It's easily applicable to the wider world. And it shifts the emphasis from cover-the-material memory work to a full range of thinking skills.
Teaching Students to Think Pages 64-67
To move beyond rote memorization and use a full range of thinking skills, students need to tackle issues straight out of the complex world in which they live.
So here's today's project, kids. Get in small groups and put together flowcharts tracing the possible long-range consequences of a new state energy conservation law that says you can't use any kind of motorized vehicle to travel less than one mile."
"What about emergencies?"
"Hmmm. Let's say that if you were caught using a motorized vehicle on a short trip and you weren't bleeding and headed to the hospital, you'd be fined $200."
"How about electric scooters or skateboards?"
"They're motorized. It takes energy to charge their batteries. So, no."
"Is being late for work, school, or a doctor's appointment an emergency?"
"Nope. You'll just need to start sooner. Any more questions? OK, then get on with it. As usual, when you think you've done all you can do, we'll combine your work to get as complete a picture of this kind of policy-driven social change as we can."
This is a reasonable and intellectually stimulating educational activity. It deals with a matter of fundamental importance in everyday life—the dynamics of social change. Working on it doesn't require a specialized vocabulary, mastery of new ideas, or even the ability to read.
Generating similar questions isn't difficult: What if consumption of fresh water were limited to two gallons per person per day? What if everyone, no exceptions, had to serve one year of public service after high school? What if a reliable pocket-size voice stress analyzer indicating when someone isn't telling the truth cost just $10? What if global warming raised the average temperature in the area in which you live by 4°F?
These kinds of questions make students think. Why, then, aren't such questions routinely asked in school? Why is such an important aim—to help students think more clearly and productively—so hard to put into operation?
The short answer is that for many people, the main purpose of educating isn't to improve students' thinking skills but to "cover the material" in math, science, language arts, social studies, and other school subjects. Covering the material is, of course, important. To function, societies need various kinds of glue to hold their components together. One of those glues is a language of allusion, a body of information that members share that enables them to communicate complicated ideas in few words. The expressions soccer moms, Jeffersonian democracy, and green technology are familiar examples. When a system of mass education sends students on their way with meaning attached to thousands of ideas like those, efficient, society-sustaining dialogue is possible.
A second reason that covering the material is important stems from the obvious fact that the older generation has answers to some important questions about how the world works. Passing this information on saves the young from having to figure out those answers for themselves, sometimes at great expense and with considerable pain. It's useful to know, for example, that in the past, surplus wealth invested in building railroads between trading centres yielded a higher return than did wealth invested in building weapons, or that rapid social change has often triggered religious fundamentalism.
Covering the material makes good sense, then, in terms of contributing to social stability and transmitting useful, important insights. The problem lies in assuming that these are the main purposes of education. In earlier times, when the rate of social, technological, and environmental change from one generation to the next was all but imperceptible, covering the material was a higher priority. Answers to important questions—such as when to plant, what to do for a sick horse, which berries were safe to eat and which ones would kill you—made clear the desirability of listening to the elders.
We need to accept that what we've been doing isn't the whole story—not even the main story—of educating. For centuries, the central question directed at the young has been, How much do you remember? The proper questions for this era are, What's going on here? Why? Where is it likely to take us and what should we be doing?
The Focus on Recall
About 50 years ago, Benjamin Bloom produced a useful tool for thinking and talking about what's happening and not happening inside students' heads. Working with others, he devised the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives—a summary of specific thought processes arranged in order of increasing complexity. These include such skills as recalling, comparing, classifying, inferring, hypothesizing, generalizing, relating, synthesizing, valuing, and predicting.
Having words for different thinking skills makes it easy to get a fix on the kinds of thought processes that students are using. Recall seems to play as important a role in instruction as ever. For example, we can reasonably assume that students are being asked merely to recall something they read or heard for a test when teachers closely monitor them during that test to make certain they're not looking at one another's work or using crib notes, cell phones, or other technology. If the assessment required students to use higher-order thinking skills, then teachers wouldn't need to monitor students so carefully to discourage cheating. Student responses would be distinctive rather than uniform, easily associated with individual learners.
Conventional textbooks are all but useless for teaching higher-order thinking skills because they represent the final conclusions of other people's thought processes. The opportunities for complex thinking have been squeezed out of them. It's like giving students completed crossword puzzles to study and then, a little later, giving them those very same puzzles but with empty blanks to fill in. Years of practice make some kids good at storing information in short-term memory, but in this era of almost instantaneous access to a universe of information, that's an appalling waste of good brains.
What's true of textbooks is true of lectures, reference sections of libraries, the Internet, and other tools for passing along information from those who supposedly know to those who supposedly don't. They're massive collections of conclusions and somebody else's inferences, hypotheses, generalizations, syntheses, and value judgments handed to students with some rationalization like, "You'll need to know this next year" or "This will be on the test."
Skeptics who don't think this is a problem would do well to borrow the textbooks in a typical adolescent's backpack and count the ideas their glossaries insist are important. One set of popular 8th grade textbooks covering just four subjects—math, science, language arts, and social studies—notes almost 1,500 important topics. That's for one year, or about 170 actual instructional days in those schools that haven't switched to nonstop reading and math test-preparation drills and even fewer days for those schools that have. It's akin to trying to drink from a fire hose.
The Trouble with Tests
Then, of course, there are those tails currently wagging the education dog—so-called standards and the high-stakes tests keyed to them. Of all the obstacles to improving student thinking, these are surely the most damaging. Teachers and administrators may feel forced to administer them, but doing so means ignoring higher-order thinking skills. The reason is simple. Nobody has yet invented a test-scoring computer program that can evaluate the quality of complex thought processes and spit out meaningful numbers. Do two "good" hypotheses generated by a student equal four "fair" hypotheses or seven "poor" ones generated by another student? How much is one spectacularly original and useful hypothesis, generalization, or value judgment worth? There's no getting around it. The more sophisticated the thought process, the less it lends itself to meaningful mechanical or electronic evaluation.
Machine-scored tests can, of course, ask students to choose a particular hypothesis, generalization, value judgment, or other higher-order thought process from a list of options. But guessing what an anonymous writer of a test item had in mind isn't higher-order thinking.
Some educators may say, "Teaching students to think is important, but they can't think without raw materials in the form of facts, so I'm getting them ready to think." Others may insist that many of their students are incapable of "getting beyond the basics." However, most kids show up for kindergarten already making routine use of higher-order thought processes. They don't need to be taught to think; they need to learn how to examine, elaborate, and refine their ways of thinking and put this thinking to deliberate use converting information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.
The Appeal of the Real
In his 1916 presidential address to the Mathematical Association of England, Alfred North Whitehead noted, "The secondhandedness of the learned world is the secret of its mediocrity." We should print these words on banners and hang them on classroom walls as a reminder that students learn to think—by thinking.
Traditional instruction is more concerned with the study of opinions about the real world than with the study of the real world itself. Internalizing others' views requires just one thinking skill—recall. Trying to make sense of one's own day-to-day experience requires the use of every known thinking skill.
This notion has made relatively little headway in U.S. classrooms because, for many educators, the line between first-hand and secondhand knowledge is often fuzzy or nonexistent. Many believe that the important thing is for students to be knowledgeable. Where that knowledge comes from—whether someone hands it to the students or they figure it out on their own—seems to be of little consequence.
Education leaders can take a crucial step toward getting students to use higher-order thinking skills by drawing a sharp line between firsthand and secondhand knowledge. The best way to do this is to focus attention directly on some part of the real world. Every student's first priority is to make sense of right here and now, so most often the best choice of subject matter will be the school itself and its immediate environment. This living, breathing, dynamic slice of reality is big enough to include all major elements of reality, small enough for students to get their heads around, complex enough to challenge every ability level, and accessible enough to enable continuous direct study.
For example, at the middle or high school level, teachers can pose myriad school-focused questions related to every field of study: What kinds of energy power the school? How are these energy sources created and measured? At what cost to taxpayers? At what cost to the environment? What kind of waste does the school produce? Where does it go and how is it processed? What could be done to decrease the school's carbon footprint?
There are hundreds of possible questions related to technology, psychology, sociology, or history. What are the major determinants of status among students? Who are leaders and why? What patterns of behaviour—such as lunchtime seating, cliques, and extracurricular activities—accompany perceptions of status? What's the officially stated purpose of the school? What's the evidence that this purpose is or isn't taken seriously? What kind of statistical information would be useful in understanding the student population? Going back in time, who or what occupied the site before the school was built?
Questions like these require quantitative measures, engaging students with math. Studying the natural and human-made environment demands the rigors of the biological and physical sciences. Schools are also complex social systems, rich in possibilities for research in the social sciences. In fact, any concept in the general education core curriculum can manifest itself in some meaningful way within the boundaries of the school or neighbourhood. Its concreteness will make it memorable and a logical step to study of the larger world.
Real and Rigorous
A focus on real-world issues can alter the entire culture of a school or school system. It enables students and teachers to experience the "meatiness" of the direct study of reality. It's unfailingly relevant. It shows respect for students, who become more than mere candidates for the next higher grade. It levels the playing field by not privileging those with superior symbol manipulation skills. It disregards the arbitrary, artificial boundaries of the academic disciplines. It's easily applicable to the wider world. And it shifts the emphasis from cover-the-material memory work to a full range of thinking skills.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
What the Finns Know Shouldn’t Surprise Us (But Does)
Education Week Published in Print: February 20, 2008 By Patrick F. Bassett
While reindeer jerky and lingonberries have yet to become an international sensation, the education system in Finland has managed to gain worldwide attention over the past few years. Test results from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, have revealed that Finnish students routinely outperform those of other countries. And a recent report by the international consulting firm McKinsey & Co. highlights the country’s extraordinary successes. So, what does Finland know that shouldn’t surprise us (but does)? The three key elements for its success, laid out in the McKinsey report and reinforced by my own experiences on a recent trip to Finland, can be stated as the following: (1) Get the best teachers; (2) Get the best out of teachers; and (3) Intervene when pupils start to lag behind.
It’s no great surprise to anyone who works in education that high-quality teachers lead to successful students. According to the Finnish Ministry of Education, all teachers there must have master’s degrees, and only 10 percent of undergraduates, the cream of the crop, are accepted into the teacher-training program. It turns out that, as is true with this country’s Teach For America (which routinely attracts five times more applicants than it accepts), restricted access to a program increases its attraction. In Finland, it’s not the money, but the status and prestige of teaching that attracts the best and brightest to the profession.
We can’t shift cultural perceptions about the prestige of teaching overnight, but we can begin to make strides in this process, an action that will help improve education for everyone. First, we could develop more programs to get the most talented students to pursue teaching as a career, and help them succeed once there. Second, education schools could become more selective in their admissions and more focused on the task of instilling deep subject knowledge in their graduates. Third, all districts and schools could recruit on the campuses of colleges and universities with highly selective undergraduate admissions standards. Fairer compensation would help improve the prestige of teaching, too. As our more highly paid veteran teachers retire, we have an unprecedented opportunity to increase starting salaries so that teaching is as lucrative a career choice as other professional jobs.
A second place where American education falls short, in both its public and private segments, is in “professionalizing the profession.” While there is much talk about and some progress in creating “professional learning communities” of teachers, and also some promise in creating digital communities, as a country we fall far short of the commitments of our competitors in the world marketplace. In Finland (and Japan, too), groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together in a system that includes “rounds” similar to those in the medical profession. Finnish teachers get one afternoon off each week for professional development (substitute teachers included).
Some independent schools here have also recognized the value of this approach. At one school, each teacher must visit a colleague’s classroom three times a year and report on the experience by writing a response to the question “How was my teaching informed by this visit?” The responses become part of a database that all teachers read. At another school, teachers develop videotaped portfolios of their teaching. Combined with journal entries, lesson plans, and samples of student work, such aids allow the teachers to confer with mentors to identify successful techniques that can be shared with other teachers and to identify areas for potential improvement. All U.S. schools could benefit immensely from creating true professional learning communities focused on peer learning, peer observations, and collaborative lesson-planning. If teacher evaluations were linked to engagement in these communities, there would be a huge jump in the professionalism of teaching.
A third factor contributing to success of the Finnish system is its early and powerful intervention when a student begins to fall behind. Frequent diagnostic testing (“formative testing”) at early stages reveals students who need extra help, and the Finns provide it intensively. At one presentation I attended while in Finland, a spokesperson from the education ministry said that education spending there is weighted toward the middle school years: Finland spends about the same as its counterparts in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the lower primary grades (grades 1-5), and a lot less in the upper secondary years (primarily because of larger classes in grades 10-12). But it spends a lot more in the middle years (grades 6-9).
Why don’t schools follow the model of businesses and tap into the global marketplace of ideas that have worked elsewhere?
In the United States and many other countries, this is the time when kids begin to fail and drop out. How sensible is the Finnish model to increase resources at that point to keep kids from the disaster of failing at school. In Finland, there are no dead-end streets on the education highway. In helping students at risk of failure, U.S. schools must move from a medical model (learning disabilities) to a diversity model (learning differences) and reorient themselves to identify, value, and use a student’s strengths as “workarounds” and palliatives to weaknesses. One independent boarding school for girls already takes this approach with its students, some of whom have been diagnosed with learning differences that put them at risk. The school helps students come up with strategies to address challenges, but it also works to identify each girl’s strengths so that she can maximize her potential.
This concentration on strengths, while still addressing challenges, seems to be a good approach for the American education system. One criticism of the McKinsey report is that it focuses on the elements that have been successful in certain contexts, but does not take into consideration the circumstances under which those same efforts have failed. But doesn’t flexibility make sense? With every new administration in Washington, and every hot new trend in education, we hear arguments for full-scale renovation of the system. One-size-fits-all rarely works in individual schools, however, let alone for the entire country. Why don’t schools follow the model of businesses and tap into the global marketplace of ideas that have worked elsewhere? Lingonberries and reindeer jerky may never take the world by storm, but the Finns can certainly teach us a thing or two about education.
While reindeer jerky and lingonberries have yet to become an international sensation, the education system in Finland has managed to gain worldwide attention over the past few years. Test results from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, have revealed that Finnish students routinely outperform those of other countries. And a recent report by the international consulting firm McKinsey & Co. highlights the country’s extraordinary successes. So, what does Finland know that shouldn’t surprise us (but does)? The three key elements for its success, laid out in the McKinsey report and reinforced by my own experiences on a recent trip to Finland, can be stated as the following: (1) Get the best teachers; (2) Get the best out of teachers; and (3) Intervene when pupils start to lag behind.
It’s no great surprise to anyone who works in education that high-quality teachers lead to successful students. According to the Finnish Ministry of Education, all teachers there must have master’s degrees, and only 10 percent of undergraduates, the cream of the crop, are accepted into the teacher-training program. It turns out that, as is true with this country’s Teach For America (which routinely attracts five times more applicants than it accepts), restricted access to a program increases its attraction. In Finland, it’s not the money, but the status and prestige of teaching that attracts the best and brightest to the profession.
We can’t shift cultural perceptions about the prestige of teaching overnight, but we can begin to make strides in this process, an action that will help improve education for everyone. First, we could develop more programs to get the most talented students to pursue teaching as a career, and help them succeed once there. Second, education schools could become more selective in their admissions and more focused on the task of instilling deep subject knowledge in their graduates. Third, all districts and schools could recruit on the campuses of colleges and universities with highly selective undergraduate admissions standards. Fairer compensation would help improve the prestige of teaching, too. As our more highly paid veteran teachers retire, we have an unprecedented opportunity to increase starting salaries so that teaching is as lucrative a career choice as other professional jobs.
A second place where American education falls short, in both its public and private segments, is in “professionalizing the profession.” While there is much talk about and some progress in creating “professional learning communities” of teachers, and also some promise in creating digital communities, as a country we fall far short of the commitments of our competitors in the world marketplace. In Finland (and Japan, too), groups of teachers visit each others’ classrooms and plan lessons together in a system that includes “rounds” similar to those in the medical profession. Finnish teachers get one afternoon off each week for professional development (substitute teachers included).
Some independent schools here have also recognized the value of this approach. At one school, each teacher must visit a colleague’s classroom three times a year and report on the experience by writing a response to the question “How was my teaching informed by this visit?” The responses become part of a database that all teachers read. At another school, teachers develop videotaped portfolios of their teaching. Combined with journal entries, lesson plans, and samples of student work, such aids allow the teachers to confer with mentors to identify successful techniques that can be shared with other teachers and to identify areas for potential improvement. All U.S. schools could benefit immensely from creating true professional learning communities focused on peer learning, peer observations, and collaborative lesson-planning. If teacher evaluations were linked to engagement in these communities, there would be a huge jump in the professionalism of teaching.
A third factor contributing to success of the Finnish system is its early and powerful intervention when a student begins to fall behind. Frequent diagnostic testing (“formative testing”) at early stages reveals students who need extra help, and the Finns provide it intensively. At one presentation I attended while in Finland, a spokesperson from the education ministry said that education spending there is weighted toward the middle school years: Finland spends about the same as its counterparts in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the lower primary grades (grades 1-5), and a lot less in the upper secondary years (primarily because of larger classes in grades 10-12). But it spends a lot more in the middle years (grades 6-9).
Why don’t schools follow the model of businesses and tap into the global marketplace of ideas that have worked elsewhere?
In the United States and many other countries, this is the time when kids begin to fail and drop out. How sensible is the Finnish model to increase resources at that point to keep kids from the disaster of failing at school. In Finland, there are no dead-end streets on the education highway. In helping students at risk of failure, U.S. schools must move from a medical model (learning disabilities) to a diversity model (learning differences) and reorient themselves to identify, value, and use a student’s strengths as “workarounds” and palliatives to weaknesses. One independent boarding school for girls already takes this approach with its students, some of whom have been diagnosed with learning differences that put them at risk. The school helps students come up with strategies to address challenges, but it also works to identify each girl’s strengths so that she can maximize her potential.
This concentration on strengths, while still addressing challenges, seems to be a good approach for the American education system. One criticism of the McKinsey report is that it focuses on the elements that have been successful in certain contexts, but does not take into consideration the circumstances under which those same efforts have failed. But doesn’t flexibility make sense? With every new administration in Washington, and every hot new trend in education, we hear arguments for full-scale renovation of the system. One-size-fits-all rarely works in individual schools, however, let alone for the entire country. Why don’t schools follow the model of businesses and tap into the global marketplace of ideas that have worked elsewhere? Lingonberries and reindeer jerky may never take the world by storm, but the Finns can certainly teach us a thing or two about education.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
10 Ways to Move Beyond Bully Prevention
(And Why We Should)
By Lyn Mikel Brown, Education Week Vol. 27, Issue 26, Page 29
I’ve grown concerned lately that “bully prevention” has all but taken over the way we think about, talk about, and respond to the relational lives of children and youths in schools. So, from our group’s strength-based approach, I offer 10 ways to move beyond what is too often being sold as a panacea for schools’ social ills, and is becoming, I fear, a problem in and of itself:
Stop labelling kids. Bully-prevention programs typically put kids into three categories: bullies, victims, and bystanders. Labelling children in these ways denies what we know to be true: We are all complex beings with the capacity to do harm and to do good, sometimes within the same hour. It also makes the child the problem, which downplays the important role of parents, teachers, the school system, a provocative and powerful media culture, and societal injustices children experience every day. Labelling kids bullies, for that matter, contributes to the negative climate and name-calling we’re trying to address.
Talk accurately about behaviour. If it’s sexual harassment, call it sexual harassment; if it’s homophobia, call it homophobia; and so forth. To lump disparate behaviours under the generic “bullying” is to efface real differences that affect young people’s lives. Bullying is a broad term that de-genders, de-races, de-everythings school safety. Because of this, as the sexual-harassment expert Nan Stein has noted, embracing anti-bullying legislation can actually undermine the legal rights and protections offered by anti-harassment laws. Calling behaviours what they are helps us educate children about their rights, affirms their realities, encourages more-complex and meaningful solutions, opens up a dialogue, invites children to participate in social change, and ultimately protects them.
If we allow kids to speak out, to think critically and question unfairness, we provide the groundwork for civic engagement.
Move beyond the individual. Children’s behaviours are greatly affected by their life histories and social contexts. To understand why a child uses aggression toward others, it’s important to understand what impact race, ethnicity, social class, gender, religion, and ability has on his or her daily experiences in school—that is, how do these realities affect the kinds of attention and resources the child receives, where he fits in, whether she feels marginal or privileged in the school. Such differences in social capital, cultural capital, and power relations deeply affect a child’s psychological and relational experiences in school.
Reflect reality. Many schools across the country have adopted an approach developed by the Norwegian educator Dan Olweus, the “Olweus Bullying Prevention Program,” even though it has not been effectively evaluated with U.S. samples. Described as a “universal intervention for the reduction and prevention of bully/victim problems,” the Olweus program downplays those differences that make a difference. But even when bully-prevention programs have been adequately evaluated, the University of Illinois’ Dorothy Espelage argues, they often show less-than-positive results in urban schools or with minority populations. “We do not have a one-size-fits-all school system,” she reminds us. Because the United States has a diversity of race, ethnicity, and language, and inequalities between schools, bully-prevention efforts here need to reflect that reality.
Adjust expectations. We hold kids to ideals and expectations that we as adults could never meet. We expect girls to ingest a steady diet of media “mean girls” and always be nice and kind, and for boys to engage a culture of violence and never lash out. We expect kids never to express anger to adults, never to act in mean or hurtful ways to one another, even though they may spend much of the day in schools they don’t feel safe in, and with teachers and other students who treat them with disrespect. Moreover, we expect kids to behave in ways most of us don’t even value very much: to obey all the rules (regardless of their perceived or real unfairness), to never resist or refuse or fight back.
It’s important to promote consistent consequences—the hallmarks of most bully-prevention programs—but it’s also critically important to create space for honest conversations about who benefits from certain norms and rules and who doesn’t. If we allow kids to speak out, to think critically and question unfairness, we provide the groundwork for civic engagement.
Listen to kids. In her book Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit talks about the importance of “listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but also hearts and minds.” Again, consistent consequences are important; used well, they undermine privilege and protect those who are less powerful. But to make such a system work, schools have to listen to all students. It’s the only way to ensure that staff members are not using discipline and consistent consequences simply to promote the status quo.
Instead of labelling kids, let’s talk about them as potential leaders, affirm their strengths, and believe that they can do good, brave, remarkable things.
Embrace grassroots movements. There’s nothing better than student-initiated change. Too many bully-prevention programs are top-heavy with adult-generated rules, meetings, and trainings. We need to empower young people. This includes being on the lookout for positive grassroots resistance, ready to listen to and support and sometimes channel youth movements when they arise. We need to listen to students, take up their just causes, understand the world they experience, include them in the dialogue about school norms and rules, and use their creative energy to illuminate and challenge unfairness.
Be proactive, not reactive. In Maine, we have a nationally recognized Civil Rights Team Project. Youth-led, school-based preventive teams work to increase safety, educate their peers, and combat hate violence, prejudice, and harassment in more than 250 schools across the state. This kind of proactive youth-empowerment work is sorely needed, but is too often lost in the midst of zero-tolerance policies and top-down bully-prevention efforts. And yet such efforts work. According to a study conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, youth-led gay-straight alliances make schools safer for all students.
Build coalitions. Rather than bully prevention, let’s emphasize ally- and coalition-building. We need to affirm and support the definition of coalition that activist Bernice Johnson Reagon suggests: work that’s difficult, exhausting, but necessary “for all of us to feel that this is our world.”
Accentuate the positive. Instead of labeling kids, let’s talk about them as potential leaders, affirm their strengths, and believe that they can do good, brave, remarkable things. The path to safer, less violent schools lies less in our control over children than in appreciating their need to have more control in their lives, to feel important, to be visible, to have an effect on people and situations.
Bully prevention has become a huge for-profit industry. Let’s not let the steady stream of training sessions, rules, policies, consequence charts, and no-bullying posters keep us from listening well, thinking critically, and creating approaches that meet the singular needs of our schools and communities.
By Lyn Mikel Brown, Education Week Vol. 27, Issue 26, Page 29
I’ve grown concerned lately that “bully prevention” has all but taken over the way we think about, talk about, and respond to the relational lives of children and youths in schools. So, from our group’s strength-based approach, I offer 10 ways to move beyond what is too often being sold as a panacea for schools’ social ills, and is becoming, I fear, a problem in and of itself:
Stop labelling kids. Bully-prevention programs typically put kids into three categories: bullies, victims, and bystanders. Labelling children in these ways denies what we know to be true: We are all complex beings with the capacity to do harm and to do good, sometimes within the same hour. It also makes the child the problem, which downplays the important role of parents, teachers, the school system, a provocative and powerful media culture, and societal injustices children experience every day. Labelling kids bullies, for that matter, contributes to the negative climate and name-calling we’re trying to address.
Talk accurately about behaviour. If it’s sexual harassment, call it sexual harassment; if it’s homophobia, call it homophobia; and so forth. To lump disparate behaviours under the generic “bullying” is to efface real differences that affect young people’s lives. Bullying is a broad term that de-genders, de-races, de-everythings school safety. Because of this, as the sexual-harassment expert Nan Stein has noted, embracing anti-bullying legislation can actually undermine the legal rights and protections offered by anti-harassment laws. Calling behaviours what they are helps us educate children about their rights, affirms their realities, encourages more-complex and meaningful solutions, opens up a dialogue, invites children to participate in social change, and ultimately protects them.
If we allow kids to speak out, to think critically and question unfairness, we provide the groundwork for civic engagement.
Move beyond the individual. Children’s behaviours are greatly affected by their life histories and social contexts. To understand why a child uses aggression toward others, it’s important to understand what impact race, ethnicity, social class, gender, religion, and ability has on his or her daily experiences in school—that is, how do these realities affect the kinds of attention and resources the child receives, where he fits in, whether she feels marginal or privileged in the school. Such differences in social capital, cultural capital, and power relations deeply affect a child’s psychological and relational experiences in school.
Reflect reality. Many schools across the country have adopted an approach developed by the Norwegian educator Dan Olweus, the “Olweus Bullying Prevention Program,” even though it has not been effectively evaluated with U.S. samples. Described as a “universal intervention for the reduction and prevention of bully/victim problems,” the Olweus program downplays those differences that make a difference. But even when bully-prevention programs have been adequately evaluated, the University of Illinois’ Dorothy Espelage argues, they often show less-than-positive results in urban schools or with minority populations. “We do not have a one-size-fits-all school system,” she reminds us. Because the United States has a diversity of race, ethnicity, and language, and inequalities between schools, bully-prevention efforts here need to reflect that reality.
Adjust expectations. We hold kids to ideals and expectations that we as adults could never meet. We expect girls to ingest a steady diet of media “mean girls” and always be nice and kind, and for boys to engage a culture of violence and never lash out. We expect kids never to express anger to adults, never to act in mean or hurtful ways to one another, even though they may spend much of the day in schools they don’t feel safe in, and with teachers and other students who treat them with disrespect. Moreover, we expect kids to behave in ways most of us don’t even value very much: to obey all the rules (regardless of their perceived or real unfairness), to never resist or refuse or fight back.
It’s important to promote consistent consequences—the hallmarks of most bully-prevention programs—but it’s also critically important to create space for honest conversations about who benefits from certain norms and rules and who doesn’t. If we allow kids to speak out, to think critically and question unfairness, we provide the groundwork for civic engagement.
Listen to kids. In her book Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit talks about the importance of “listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but also hearts and minds.” Again, consistent consequences are important; used well, they undermine privilege and protect those who are less powerful. But to make such a system work, schools have to listen to all students. It’s the only way to ensure that staff members are not using discipline and consistent consequences simply to promote the status quo.
Instead of labelling kids, let’s talk about them as potential leaders, affirm their strengths, and believe that they can do good, brave, remarkable things.
Embrace grassroots movements. There’s nothing better than student-initiated change. Too many bully-prevention programs are top-heavy with adult-generated rules, meetings, and trainings. We need to empower young people. This includes being on the lookout for positive grassroots resistance, ready to listen to and support and sometimes channel youth movements when they arise. We need to listen to students, take up their just causes, understand the world they experience, include them in the dialogue about school norms and rules, and use their creative energy to illuminate and challenge unfairness.
Be proactive, not reactive. In Maine, we have a nationally recognized Civil Rights Team Project. Youth-led, school-based preventive teams work to increase safety, educate their peers, and combat hate violence, prejudice, and harassment in more than 250 schools across the state. This kind of proactive youth-empowerment work is sorely needed, but is too often lost in the midst of zero-tolerance policies and top-down bully-prevention efforts. And yet such efforts work. According to a study conducted by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN, youth-led gay-straight alliances make schools safer for all students.
Build coalitions. Rather than bully prevention, let’s emphasize ally- and coalition-building. We need to affirm and support the definition of coalition that activist Bernice Johnson Reagon suggests: work that’s difficult, exhausting, but necessary “for all of us to feel that this is our world.”
Accentuate the positive. Instead of labeling kids, let’s talk about them as potential leaders, affirm their strengths, and believe that they can do good, brave, remarkable things. The path to safer, less violent schools lies less in our control over children than in appreciating their need to have more control in their lives, to feel important, to be visible, to have an effect on people and situations.
Bully prevention has become a huge for-profit industry. Let’s not let the steady stream of training sessions, rules, policies, consequence charts, and no-bullying posters keep us from listening well, thinking critically, and creating approaches that meet the singular needs of our schools and communities.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Teachers have valued role in stopping child abuse
QUT survey - Teachers have valued role in stopping child abuse
Teachers have an important role to play in identifying and reporting child sexual abuse, a Queensland University of Technology research team say. The team, which involves staff from QUT’s faculties of education and law, said teachers were in a unique position to assist children suffering abuse, but they were sometimes unsure of the action they could take.
Team member Dr Kerryann Walsh, from the Faculty of Education, said teachers were governed by differing legislation in different states, with key differences evident in the legislation of Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales. “We want to find out which state offers the optimal model, or which aspects in each state’s legislation are the best,” Dr Walsh said.
“Most teachers have a natural response of wanting to help their students, but may not know how to go about it. It is a sensitive topic; situations of abuse can be emotional and difficult.” In the first semester of 2008, the research team will ask teachers from randomly selected government and independent schools across the three states to share their knowledge, practices and opinions on reporting child abuse through a confidential survey.
Dr Walsh, who has spent most of her time as a teacher working with abused and neglected children in Queensland, said teachers have a valued role to play to help protect children against all forms of abuse and neglect. “Their valuable and unique knowledge will potentially help policy changes, law reform and teacher training for the future,” she said. Results from the surveys are expected to be released late this year when findings will be presented to participating schools, government and non-government school systems and legislatures.
The project is undertaken with the assistance of an Australian Research Council grant.
The research team comprises of Professor Des Butler (Faculty of Law), Dr Ben Mathews (Faculty of Law), Professor Ann Farrell (Faculty of Education) and Dr Kerryann Walsh (Faculty of Education).
Media contact: Rachael Wilson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1150 or rachael.wilson@qut.edu.au
Teachers have an important role to play in identifying and reporting child sexual abuse, a Queensland University of Technology research team say. The team, which involves staff from QUT’s faculties of education and law, said teachers were in a unique position to assist children suffering abuse, but they were sometimes unsure of the action they could take.
Team member Dr Kerryann Walsh, from the Faculty of Education, said teachers were governed by differing legislation in different states, with key differences evident in the legislation of Queensland, Western Australia and New South Wales. “We want to find out which state offers the optimal model, or which aspects in each state’s legislation are the best,” Dr Walsh said.
“Most teachers have a natural response of wanting to help their students, but may not know how to go about it. It is a sensitive topic; situations of abuse can be emotional and difficult.” In the first semester of 2008, the research team will ask teachers from randomly selected government and independent schools across the three states to share their knowledge, practices and opinions on reporting child abuse through a confidential survey.
Dr Walsh, who has spent most of her time as a teacher working with abused and neglected children in Queensland, said teachers have a valued role to play to help protect children against all forms of abuse and neglect. “Their valuable and unique knowledge will potentially help policy changes, law reform and teacher training for the future,” she said. Results from the surveys are expected to be released late this year when findings will be presented to participating schools, government and non-government school systems and legislatures.
The project is undertaken with the assistance of an Australian Research Council grant.
The research team comprises of Professor Des Butler (Faculty of Law), Dr Ben Mathews (Faculty of Law), Professor Ann Farrell (Faculty of Education) and Dr Kerryann Walsh (Faculty of Education).
Media contact: Rachael Wilson, QUT media officer, 07 3138 1150 or rachael.wilson@qut.edu.au
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
