Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog: March 2011

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Comments 1 Blog Entry 1

Here are my comments related to the postings that I’ve received in Blog Entry 1 and by e-mail so far. --RBS

ms. a said... I agree that test prep takes away from real learning. On the Daily Show the other day Diane Ravitch said that "no student's favorite subject is test prep." Students can gain the reading and math skills they need to pass basic standards tests without drills of math and reading but instead well created curricula in science, literature, social studies that are designed to give them the reading and math skills they need to be proficient.
I love this idea of focusing on what is GOOD TEACHING and not what is the results on a test.

Reply: My major issue with test prep is it reflects a very narrow test performance rather than the ability to perform in a wider range of situations with thought and rigor. --RBS

Sara Nowak said... I completely agree with you that we have too much testing in our schools. I think it is funny how much time is spent on test prep and practice tests and the actual high stakes test itself. If all of that was removed from schools and teachers had the freedom to actually teach real content rather than practice test problems our schools might end up creating real thinkers rather than a group of students who become proficient at taking multiple choice tests....on the other I don't know if there are enough good teachers to fill our classroom so even if they were granted the freedom to really teach our students would they be equipped and motivated to do so.

Reply: A shortage of good teachers is always an issue. We have to build good teachers. All teachers need to find ways to develop themselves as professionals and intellectuals. Early childhood educators need to know much more about phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, mathematics, content in science and social studies, teaching strategies than most parents. Similarly secondary teachers need to know deeply about at least one content area and its connections to all the other content areas as well as a wide repertoire of teaching strategies. All teachers need to know about learning, children’s learning, assessment, motivation, and practical organization for classroom learning. They need to be professional learners who know applications of what they know in a variety of fields; for instance, the secondary mathematics teacher cannot be only an abstract mathematician; knowledge of how the ideas of mathematics are used throughout many areas of learning and knowing. --RBS

Darius M said... When you design a school that is free of testing, how will you meet the demands of the federal auditors that want to see immediate results?

Reply: We must resist the failing federal programs in education. More of this topic will come up in future postings. -- RBS

Larry said... I agree with a lot of your post, there is a need for reform. Before we remove test prep from classrooms across the country, the significance of the test needs to be scaled down. The test should be used as a measure for the level of support a student will receive and not a determinant on if a student will progress to the next grade level. Their is a tremendous amount of pressure fostered by the push for immediate results and teachers may be uncomfortable with the removal of test prep when the high stakes test is the determining factor on whether their students will move on to the next grade. So, before we do away with test prep, we must change the way we use testing data.

Reply: Good teachers must be able to show that their students are learning without resorting to standardized tests. Parents, teachers, administrators, and children must deliver documentation to the politicians and policy makers that standardized testing is not producing better learning. --RBS

LaBrian said... I want to be the person that says that standardized tests are not a problem and that we must have some sort of method to ensure that all students are receiving a quality education. However, I am a teacher, and I thoroughly detest the methodical way that I have to drill unimportant information into my students. There are many things that I could focus on right now that would be of much more assistance to my students than test preparation.

I work in a low-performing school, and many of my students cannot read. Most of the students who are able to read are below grade level. Then, there are the few who, through the help of their parents, are fabulous readers.

It sickens me that instead of remediating my students (and creating project-based learning opportunities for my high achievers), since there is no way our budget could ever cover an intensive reading program for all students, I am forced to focus on drilling test taking skills and strategies. I have asked countless individuals how they expect children to pass a state assessment when they do not possess the basic skills. As I'm sure you are aware, I get a crazy look. I have also gotten the ludicrous comment, "Well, people have graduated without basic skills, so we just want to make sure that they know strategies that will maximize their scores." I was shocked! All this time, I was thinking that we were here to prepare our students to become world leaders, doctors, lawyers, teachers...to be successful productive members of society. I guess I was wrong. We just want to get them to the next grade so that they can be someone else's problem.

I feel that if teachers are allowed to teach, and held accountable for the GROWTH of their students, many problems in education would cease. If I could remediate my seventh graders now, and the remediation can continue in eighth grade, they might make it to high school, college, adulthood. I feel that my role as a teacher is to engage, teach, and prepare my students for more than a test, a grade, or a subject. If I can't make sure they can READ, I can't do that. On so many levels, I agree with you.

Reply: There is no remedial education without artificial standards imposed without regard to children’s knowledge and ability to perform in real situations (i.e., non-testing situations). Good teachers are subversive of standardized curricular approaches; they know where their students function and how to make continuous progress, but moving a child whose age is appropriate for 9^th grade but who performs on a 2^nd grade academic level is an impossible task of any teacher to tackle in one year – that sort of learning takes many years. The idea of one year of progress in one year is anathema to most learners because many should move much faster and others need motivations and careful teaching that takes more time to learn than average. The idea that teachers in a few hours per day can fill in dramatic gaps between high performing students and low performing students is fallacious. Children need experiences and motivation to use words and ideas, to become literate with narrative and expository writing, to write about their thoughts and experiences, to think algebraically and geometrically, to find technologies that motivate and extend their knowledge of the world, to become active participants in their communities, to develop a morality that functions when some other is not watching, to be reasonably safe and healthy in a world filled with risks and dangers that cannot be eliminated, to counteract intolerance and idiocy based on ignorance, and to solve problems that are not well formed and have many layers of complexity. --RBS

E-mailed ones

From: Kristy Tsou <ktsou@sthpk-12.net>
To: ewilli@lsu.edu
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:47:18 PM
Subject: 5880 Reply

While I think too much emphasis is placed on test scores and test prep for students in terms of evaluating teachers, I am not quite ready to accept a system that relies on the vagueness of Good Teaching Initiatives. I doubt there are a multitude of individuals in the teaching profession that go to work daily thinking they are poor teachers. Examining materials and becoming involved in multi-media works are investment strategies for students, however, the skills students learn in testing situations will assist those students in a variety of ways in future academic ventures. Furthermore, testing allows-- if done properly--students across the nation to understand their knowledge base and skills set with their national peers. Great teachers can teach material in an interesting manner and test-taking skills simultaneously.

Kristy Tsou
Pre-K Teacher

Reply: Why would you think that GTI is vague when all you’ve read is the introduction? The only way to be a good teacher is to become one; that means setting goals and achieving them for self and students. DO NOT DENIGRATE YOUR PEERS! Support them with good ideas and the intellectual stimulation that gets everyone improving. Administrators should do the same, but they should also follow the processes to remove incompetents from the profession of teaching. Doing the same-old same-old is never enough, so I agree that using multimedia and engagement strategies is a must.

“[T]esting allows-- if done properly--students across the nation to understand their knowledge base and skills set with their national peers. ” – THIS IS WRONG. There is not attempt to understand knowledge as part of the testing process. The current testing mania DEFINES knowledge as the score on the test – something that I completely and utterly reject. I would replace all testing with performance-based assessment tasks that grow out of the lived curriculum in the classroom, but I also recognize that the financial requirements of the testing companies will keep them in business because politicians get chunks of money for their campaigns from those testing companies. --RBS

From: Subash Mohanty <smohanty@sthpk-12.net>
To: Ewilli@lsu.edu
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:46:13 PM
Subject: Comments on Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaking Blog

I pretty much do agree with the idea of,"Teachers who are smart, ............the learner and the background". I do support the idea of the dark side of the education system as well. However there should be some kind of assessment system to evaluate the level of your student learning. Whether you are using technology, or any other multi-modal learning style. These assessments not only say about the student learning but also tells about your planning for future goal. I mean which area you need to focus more than the other, the pupil need, and the focused goal. Whether any topic needs to be re-tought.

Subash C. Mohanty.

Reply: I’m not against assessment or evaluation. They’re necessary. I am against the current testing mania because it interferes with student learning and narrows the definition of knowledge to test scores.--RBS

From: Alicia Kielmovitch <akielmovitch@sthpk-12.net>
To: ewilli@lsu.edu
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:44:12 PM
Subject: Comment for Speaker Blog

This was in response to his 2nd entry: The Dark Side

Hello Mr. Speaker,

I am young teacher in my 2nd year of teaching. I'm alternatively
certified and working at an elementary school in a high-needs community.
I found all of what you said in this entry very interesting, primarily
because I agree with most of what you are saying. Just from my short
time in the educational field, I have already seen way too much time
wasted on test prep and teaching. Instead of teaching and developing
students with ideas, curiosity, and questions, teachers focus solely on
who will meet the standards and who will fail on these state tests.
Legitimate teaching time (or remediation time for those students who
need it) is often sacrificed for test prep and practice test time.
Students live and die by these tests academically. I attended a private
elementary school, because my parents wanted all of those expectations
you stated for me. I was immersed in performing arts and the multiple
intelligence theory from Kindergarten. More importantly, because I
attended private school, I was not subjected to standardized tests until
I attended public high school. As a teacher, one of my primary goals is
to develop the same love of learning that I was imbued with at such a
young age. Not necessarily the love of school, but just the sheer
enjoyment to learn new things. This is something I feel students in my
school lack and severely need.

The place where I disagree with you is how to fix this problem. Because
our educational system has become so entangled with standardized
testing, we cannot just simply tell districts to abandon everything they
have been doing for the past 10 years. That will only hurt the problem
more. Although your solution could be used, we need to figure out a
more long-term solution that will accommodate the status quo and the
possible changes. Unfortunately, this cannot happen overnight, but
through “good teaching” and a slow turn-around from the strict testing
stance, students will begin to celebrate the mere acquisition of
knowledge once more.

- Alicia K.
EDCI 5880

Reply: “[W]e cannot just simply tell districts to abandon everything they have been doing for the past 10 years”. I disagree. I believe that parents, teachers, administrators, and children need to do exactly this. The standardized testing every year and the mania for other tests must be stopped. All of us need to say this over and over again to politicians and district administrators. More and more damage is being done through the overreliance on test that ever before. I’m not interested in the quick fixes and the “one-size-fits-all” solutions that politicians and policy wonks provide (even when they say they don’t want “one-size-fits-all” solutions). --RBS

From: Theresa Griffin <tgriffin@sthpk-12.net>
To: Ewilli@lsu.edu
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:41:54 PM
Subject: Response to Richard B Speaker Jr. Entry 1

I agree that high quality teachers should be in every school. When I speak of high quality, this include teachers who are willing to go above and beyond. I know from experience that nothing can take the place of a warm-body teacher.

As for as assessment, I can't imagine not having assessments. Assessments are valuable tools for finding students instructional levels. But the problem seems to be test preparation. I feel that if the child has been given the best education possible, passing an assessment should not be a problem.

5880

Theresa Griffin

Reply: I’m not against assessment or evaluation; I’m against the testing mania and the time spent prepping for the tests. I want students to perform real tasks as part of their learning. They have to know that the tasks are real and meaningful and become engaged in motivated learning to achieve their performances. How do you know that a child can read at a 3^rd grade level? What does his/her oral performance mean? Why do fluency and accuracy measures fail to provide sufficient information? What else must be included to get a picture of this child as a literate member of a school community? Why must writing be included in literacy development and part of the reading program rather than a separate entity? Why must science, social studies, art, problem solving (mathematical and real life), health, physical education, music, literature, poetry, drama, film, theater, and games be included in literacy development and its assessment? Why must literacy development be included in all content teaching? Why must cultural knowledge and processes be included in all school curricula?--RBS

From: Becky Louque <belouque@stjames.k12.la.us>
To: "ewilli@lsu.edu" <ewilli@lsu.edu>
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:33:04 PM
Subject:

A "good school" is not a building, the playground equipmemt, the amount of technology, or even the types of meals given. A "good school" happens when all stakeholders (students, parents, community members, faculty and staff) work together to achieve a common goal. The goal should be providing the best education for each student to move each and every student to their highest potential.

I believe that God made us all different. It is the teachers' responsibility to find the method in which reaches each child to mold into the person they will become in the future.

We must use all information about children to make informed decisions. Without information, we are "diagosing" students without vital information. This information comes from a variety of sources. Testing should be just a piece of the whole picture.

We need to shape the young minds as best as we can for they are our future. "You can give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime." (unknown)

Becky B. Louque

Reply: I agree with your comments about the good school! “The goal should be providing the best education for each student to move each and every student to their highest potential. ” Testing does not help meet this goal. Time learning, good teaching, and appropriate assessment do strive towards this goal.

I disagree that any tests of the more traditional types need to be used in any curriculum. They are used out of laziness and lack of inspiration. They are used because they have been used before. How do I know what the learner can do with the vocabulary and content if knowledge is defined as a score on a test? Here is my key proposition: knowledge is the ability to use information, ideas, language, and data to perform tasks in community settings. --RBS

From: Donna Jackson <djackson@sthpk-12.net>
To: ewilli@lsu.edu
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:39:14 PM
Subject: Richard B. Speaker, Jr.

I do agree that testing and test preparation is taking too much time away from the essential processes of education: teaching and learning. I do believe that we are focusing more on testing rather than looking at the individual child to see whether or not he or she has made any academic growth. The focus should be more on the child and not the school as a whole.
We are teaching a test rather than teaching a child.
Where should our focus be?
My focus will always be the child.

Donna Jackson

Reply: The main workers in the curriculum are the teacher and children in a learning community. All others are peripheral. While we certainly need clean, well-lighted places for teacher and children to form their learning communities and we tell children their value through the quality of their classroom locations and materials, the key is always a focus on the child as learner rather than the materials and the material environment. If the classroom is impoverished, the community sends the message to the child that she/he is not valued, so the teacher must counteract this message through using observation, engaging activities, and the community as learning resources. No canned material or test will provide the learners with the experiences they need. Engaging the child in learning activities with talk, content, and excitement can lead to motivated life-long learning.--RBS

From: Kim Dunn <kimdunn@abrschools.org>
To: "ewilli@lsu.edu" <ewilli@lsu.edu>
Cc: Kim Dunn <kimdunn@abrschools.org>
Sent: Fri, March 25, 2011 7:28:30 PM
Subject: Posting

We need assessments in order to obtain data. We, as educators, rely on test data to drive our instruction. With no or lack of test, how would we know what to reteach? How would we know if the students are mastering the state standards? I cannot imagine just teaching and not testing. Wouldn't we waste a lot of time if we taught concepts students already knew ? The amount of testing should be determined by the needs of the students. Regular benchmark can be scheduled by districts and any additionally testing should be determined by the instructional leader of that campus.

KJD 5880

Kim J. Dunn, M.Ed

Reply: More is coming up on this. We do not need to rely on test data to drive instruction; we need performance data of a different sort. The score on a test does not indicate knowledge or process. Reteaching should be based on observational data from classroom performances, not on testing data analyzed outside the school. I submit that the score on a test does not tell you whether a child has masters a concept; it merely tells you a score on the tests. We already waste time teaching concepts that children already know because we hold children in grade level material when they could go beyond it with a model of continuous progress. The amount of testing has gotten completely out of hand and other methods of assessment and evaluation need to be emphasized. Regular benchmarks are now being used to hurt children, teachers, parents, and administrators rather than providing them with useful information. The cycle of punishment is having a detrimental effect on child welfare and the allocation of resources. My radicalism is showing and will show more! Of course, tests are punishments!

The teachers are the instructional leaders; administrators are not usually competent in that role because they do not understand curriculum and they are not involved in learning processes. The curriculum is not a program or set of texts, or set of standards; the curriculum is what engages the children and the teacher in the classroom. The ideal administrator would be building a curriculum for the continued learning of his/her teachers which would include performance assessment rather than testing.--RBS

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Entry Five: Why is education NOT a science but a practice?

I have a clear bias about education. I do not think of education has anything remotely resembling a science and decry the attempt to use terms like “scientifically based” in relation to educational programs. I believe that the Federal programs to control education have all been misguided except of those that have forced desegregation and support for learners with special needs on reluctant local, state, and federal agencies. I support the use of data-driven decision-making and standards in classrooms, but not the testing mania. This all ties in with my conceptualization of education as a practice which skilled, well-trained practitioners should conduct. Good teachers, the skilled, well-trained practitioners education have as their central focus learners and learning, along with a repertoire of strategies for organizing, motivating, and engaging those learners. Good teachers are actively engages in developing their own repertoire of performances related to learners, language, content disciplines, institutions, and culture, precisely so that they can perform in various cultural settings, inside and outside the schools.

I find that the current uses of testing and inappropriate data decisions are narrowing the curriculum and dumbing-down the performances of students in schools because accountability programs are based on punishing schools rather than providing suitable support structures for learners and their teachers. We need schools and teachers and administrators where the question asked is not, “Which students scored a passing level on the standardized test?” but where they ask, “With this profile of scores and behaviors, what hypotheses do we have about the child and how do we provide the best instruction, programs, and curriculum to help that child and others learn?” Furthermore, I am worried about a new creeping resegregation that is occurring through the use of various alternatives to public schools: private schools, parochial schools, religious schools, charter schools, and, the newest type of schools in our country, failing schools.

My bias has come from a background that includes study of mathematics, science, music, linguistics, and philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science, as well as education. But there are other factors as well: for example, I reject religious, mystical, quasi-mystical, spiritual, quasi-spiritual, patriarchal, literary, and simple explanations. Of course, such a statement of rejection implies a need to include these very things as part of the discussion and makes them important for the writer and the reader because they present important cultural archetypes of thought, language, and hermeneutics. I see complexity where others want simplicity. Most policy decisions based on simple rules, I also reject. Differences of context, situation, and personalities are important in application of any rule and within any system, and classrooms are complex social systems despite the tradition of lecture as the sole means of transmission in traditional schooling. Even fairness, justice, and evenhandedness cannot be constructed without historical and autobiographical understanding because perceptions of these qualities are laced with hegemonic complacencies, assumptions (often racist), parochialism, colonial condescension and various autobiographical blindnesses – for we often do not know that we do not know something crucial for a fuller understanding. Furthermore, all systems have holes that cannot be foreseen, and attempts to build a complete system usual lead to more holes that cannot be explained or solved through the rules of the system. Thus, for me, all policies are ad hoc, meant to be modified, and petitioned for waivers of exemption. Even scholasticism cannot evade the incompleteness of systems and their rules, but learning and knowing are the only ways that lead to understanding, even when the conclusions echo Socrates in stating: “I know that I don’t know”.

Some texts deserve close reading and exegesis, but most only receive and merit a light reading to stimulate the mind of the reader to develop thoughts related to the topic and then to push for more thought and interpretation. For the good teacher, the learners contextualized in the classroom become a text that requires close reading and exegesis. The words from the text are internalized and modified from the patterns of the author’s intentions and meaning into the meanings of the reader/thinker going beyond and forward through time. The words of the teacher’s classroom-as-text becomes that data the motivates the teacher’s agency.

My construction of teacher and student engaged in curriculum implies a progressivist and functionalist bias on my part and both reconstructionist and deconstructionist stances. This fits with a stance that holds important the Dephic Oracle’s statement: “Know thyself,” supposedly given to Sokrates in ancient times, but also with a stance that is constantly exploring, inquiring, revisiting, revising, and looking at alternative interpretation while reserving the rights to reject some stances on various grounds including ethical and moral ones. In this, I acknowledge a great indebtedness to Pinar (1994, 1998, 2004) and his colleagues (e.g., Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1997; Reynolds, & Webber, 2004) for their work on curriculum theory and the intellectual stimulation that it exacts. The practice of curriculum must start with the autobiographical and biographical work of the learners and the teacher, not with arbitrary rules and policies from an outside system. Indeed, learners and teachers are the very essence of curriculum; they form the system where learning occurs.

References

Pinar W. (1994). Autobiography, politics and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory, 1972-1992. New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar W. F. (Ed.). ( 1997). Curriculum: New Identities in/for the field. New York: Garland.

Pinar, W. F. (Ed.). (2003). International Handbook of Curriculum Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved September 20, 2008, from Questia database: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=104616065.

Pinar, W. F. (2004). What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.

Pinar, W, Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P, & Taubman, P. M. (1997) Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar W., Reynolds W., Slattery P., & Taubman P. (1995). Understanding curriculum. New York: Peter Lang.

Reynolds, W. M., & Webber, J. A. (Eds.). (2004). Expanding Curriculum Theory: Des/positions and Lines of Flight. Mahwah, NJ: Earlbaum.

Pinar W. F. (1988). "Whole, bright, deep with understanding": Issues in qualitative research and autobiographical method. In W. F. Pinar (Ed.), Contemporary curriculum discourses (pp. 134 - 153 ). Scottsdale, AZ: Gorsuch Scarisbrick Publishers.

Pinar W. F., & Grumet M. R. ( 1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

Pinar W. F., Reynolds W. M., Slattery P., & Taubman P. M. ( 1995). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourses. New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar, W. F. ( 1994). Autobiography, politics, and sexuality: Essays in curriculum theory, 1972-1992. New York: Peter Lang.

Pinar, W. F. (1998). Understanding Curriculum as Gender Text: Notes on Reproduction, Resistance, and Male-Male Relations (pp. 221-243). In Pinar, W. F. (Ed.) (1998). Queer Theory in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Available: Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Pinar, William F. (2004) What Is Curriculum Theory?. Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ. Available: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=104633555.

Pinar, William F., & Irwin, Rita L. (Eds.) (2005). Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Lawrence Erlbaum: Mahwah, NJ.

Pinar, W. F. (Ed.) (1998). Queer Theory in Education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates. Available: Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

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Entry Four: Vocabulary

Use your words!

Vocabulary is an important factor in children’s school success, but it is not what most people think. A wide vocabulary usually is developed from parenting situations where a wide vocabulary is present where words and their use is important and both playful and serious. Furthermore, the parents of children with a wide vocabulary usually came from family cultures where words are valued and teach their children the importance of words through their use in conversations and language play. They can do things with words, performing oral tasks and comprehending a wide range of interpersonal situations even when young. These children participate in a rich culture that is both oral and literate; they come to school with tremendous cultural capital. They have an advantage over children not coming from this culture.

When vocabulary instruction is mentioned, most adults think of word lists, tedious and time-consuming dictionary activities, homework, and weekly tests. They also often claim not to remember many of the words on the lists, although a Freudian analysis would suggest that all those encounters with words are there in memory permanently encoded, perhaps scarred over because of the Dark Side of Education.

Why are existing lists of words not useful in teaching and learning vocabulary? Why are spelling and vocabulary books not useful in teaching and learning vocabulary? Why are weekly spelling/vocabulary test ineffective in getting students to become vocabulary learners? Why is having children who perform below 6^th-grade independent reading level use dictionaries as the sole source/method for vocabulary learning? How can the method of having students write sentences with the words be made effective? Why is having 8-10 “new” vocabulary words for a whole class ineffective in producing students who build their vocabularies constantly? Why is memorizing the definitions of words not effective in building vocabulary learners? – I hope you get the gist here without answers of each of these questions from me. The good teacher has children using new words after building the concepts rather than using wordlists and tests. The good teacher uses and has the children using many new words in many difference contexts every day. The children see the words posted in their classrooms. They see the words in the things that they read. They use the words in their oral conversations. They use the words in their written work. For course one important implication about good teaching must be mentioned: every day in the good teacher’s classroom the children are talking, writing, and reading. The children are constantly performing with the vocabulary rather than taking a test every Thursday on the meanings and spellings.

Using the dictionary is a sophisticated skill that teachers should demonstrate at every grade level, and today using online tools like dictionary.com and visualthesaurus.com are mandatory. But the functional use of the abstract definitions in dictionaries usually doesn’t work very well until children read on about the sixth grade level. Why? Because the nature of the thinking that is needed to use these abstract definitions occurs when children are in transition to formal operations (Piaget!), and children still need to talk about the words, see the need for them, play with them, collect them, post them, and use them in a variety of ways to develop meanings. Doing things with words leads to more learning of vocabulary than taking tests, but this is a complex classroom structure not understood by the Dark Side.

So there are many thought experiments that the good teacher needs to consider: How do we teach vocabulary so that children learn the meaning of the words, their usage in context, the interpretation of meaning within specific contexts, and relationships of new words to their various word forms (morphology, i.e., inflections, added prefixes and suffixes, combining in various ways)? Why do most kindergarten through second-grader NOT learn new vocabulary in classrooms? (They do learn new words at school, just not from teachers in classrooms during vocabulary instruction.) How do children learn words? Why do children learn words? What is the purpose of learning new words? Why isn’t it enough to just read the word correctly (in a list or in context)?

An exercise: Develop a computation on how to close the gap between first graders who come to school with 1 million words in their speaking vocabulary and first graders who come to school with 10,000 words in their speaking vocabulary. Make some explicit assumptions about acquisition, leaching and learning vocabulary. How long does it take for teachers this fill this gap between the high and low performing children in vocabulary (and of course that’s only one of the gap issues)? How many words can a teacher explicitly teach in a day? How many words can a teacher explicitly review in a day? What are some strategies to get children to become vocabulary learners and models for each other?

But the problem is greater that just vocabulary. Consider this situation: A teacher gives a child a passage to read. She read all the words orally with 97% accuracy, but she is not able to demonstrate comprehension of what she reads when the teacher asks questions or for a retelling. There is a disconnect between her being able to pronounce the words and her being able to understand the words. Three issues might be involved here.

1) Since attention is limited, she might be focusing all her attention on the words and not the interconnections that are necessary for comprehension. This usually requires work on fluency and different foci for repeated readings. With students reading hard instructional texts, the teacher could try the following:

a. 1^st reading is oral and focused on just saying the words, which some call a mumble reading;

b. 2^nd reading is silent and focused on meaning and comprehension of the big ideas, sometimes with guiding questions or self-questioning;

c. 3^rd reading is oral and focused on reading with expression to a partner.

d. More readings need to be varied for different purposes, and these need to be tailored to the individual reader.

2) She might not have wide enough background knowledge to comprehend the content of what she reads. This problem requires intensive vocabulary and concept development, usually with real experiences in observation and talk about the things being observed.

3) She is paralyzed by the threat of answering the questions of the teacher. This problem requires the use of alternative settings for the demonstration of comprehension that do not bring about paralyzing stress, or the child might not understand the words of the questions and need instruction on how to answer.

Very often the only way to make sure that the child is doing the repeated reading in a group is to have them reading orally (this is called Choral Reading), and the teacher listening and watching what is going on. Of course, like everything else, children have to be trained to participate effectively. Some children will lag behind the group or pretend to mouth the words, so the teacher has to move around and listen, then diagnose any issues like the difficulty of the passage or specific vocabulary problems. The issue with asking questions is that the child might answer but not understand. Much of vocabulary practice occurs covertly when the child is reading books, stories, newspapers, magazines, comic books, literature, nonfiction, listening to songs, and poetry rather than during explicit instruction and testing activities. Children who know words and how to use them have power, provided the words are embedded in concepts and situations that the children participate in.

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GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Entry Three: What is Good Teaching?

Good teaching is a hard thing to define. But I must make the attempt. Very often good teaching is based on teacher behaviors and their descriptions. I want to acknowledge these, but also spend more time focusing on the learners in the teacher’s classroom. Certainly good teachers need to know the content of what they must teach; however, knowledge of content is not sufficient for defining a good teacher, despite the pressures from the political pundits in Washington, DC.

A typical definition of good teaching includes specific behaviors along dimensions like: technology, communication, diversity, and assessment. The good teacher would use technology for personal, professional, and instruction needs, regularly incorporating software and hardware into instruction and the management of classroom behaviors. The good teachers would use communication in professionally appropriate ways including Formal Standard American English on oral and written communication that incorporate current and appropriate terminology (i.e., vocabulary) in all instructional practices; these communications are effective and designed to implement and evaluate instruction, service, and student learning of Formal Standard American English. The good teacher incorporates knowledge of the diversity of learners and other stakeholders into planning, instruction, and assessment. The good teacher uses assessment techniques to measure students’ needs and abilities, to adjust instruction based on those needs, and to present data on the effectiveness of instruction and learning. Notes these last two sentences at least mention students.

My definition focuses on the engagement of the learner. The good teacher gets the learner involved, providing a wealth of ideas and outlets for that involvement, motivating the learner to be active mentally, verbally, and physically. This isn’t about the cleverness of the teacher, although it requires a very clever teacher thinking about engaging learners in the construction of thought and processes that lead to competent performance in various settings with various contents. The students must demonstrate performances, using knowledge and processes that were not available in their repertoires before. The good teacher forms hypotheses about what the learner knows and does, using theories about learners, learning, and information about the particular learner in his/her situation (school and home). The good teacher designs instruction to test the hypotheses about learners in the classroom and collects observational and performance data from the real activity of the learner – this never needs to be test data, but the occasional test is fine so long as it does not take much preparation time.

Based on the data, the good teacher evaluates the success of the instruction for the individual learners. If it was successful, the good teacher continues this form of instructional activity, modifying it and elaborating on it to provide the learners with additional situational context for the skill; however, if it was unsuccessful, the good teacher forms a new hypothesis about the learner, the learner knowledge and processes, using alternative theories about learners, learning, and information about the particular learner in his/her situation (school and home), and designs new instruction based on the hypotheses, testing the hypotheses not the learner, using observation and performance data from the classroom rather than external tests. The good teacher analyzes a learner’s unexpected response and uses additional communication and other data to understand why the learner responds in that way. The good teacher uses recursion to develop curriculum and instruction that fits the learners in the classroom rather than canned programs, assessing his/her understanding of the learners, their motivations, and their performances and revising them based on classroom performance data, rather than tests (although tests might be a small portion of this data). Some of the decisions of the good teacher are short term, only requiring a few seconds or a few minutes, while others require a full, long-term view of the curriculum and where everything fits into it, including the learning path or trajectory that an individual learner is taking, from the initial contact the teacher has with the learning individually or in a group to the final contact sometime in the future, often nine months later, or beyond. This is the art of good teaching, as practiced by good teachers.

Motivation is essential. The good teacher motivates individuals, groups, and the entire classroom community, including those who are stakeholders but not participants in the classroom (parents, other teachers, administrators, specialists, legislators). The good teacher provides inroads into doing and knowing that entice individual learners into active participation in the complex social patterns of the classroom and the curriculum. The complexities of the curriculum allow the good teacher to give learners choices that bring them into owning their learning and the curriculum. These choices provide learners with aspects of control and decision making that further their development as live-long learners, as participants in their own school, and ultimately, as competent participants in society as adults. Since no two learners are the same, the good teacher designs choices that fit the diversity of learners and their learning needs. The good teacher uses a variety of texts for instruction rather than just one and makes sure that every learner has literature and light reading that she/he has chosen within some guidelines of appropriateness.

Getting collusion from the classroom participants in the organization and function of the classroom is essential. The good teacher understands the dominance hierarchy among the children in the classroom and uses it to support the functioning of the classroom society. If the alpha male and alpha female of the classroom work with rather than against the teacher, the social networks in the classroom function to support learning and competent behaviors. Bullying is stopped, and most behavioral problems are solved provided the instruction and materials of the classroom are appropriate to meet learner needs.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Monday, March 21, 2011

Entry Two: The Dark Side of Education

Conformity! Conformity! Conformity!

Much of the American rhetoric of education is about the ameliorative effects of education. All politicians support education. Usually political cant from both the left and right is produced by those who have been successful in traditional schooling and want to make more people like themselves. Their pervasive attitude is that schools provide a curriculum where one size fits all, despite years of lip-service indicating that this does not work. Most teacher, administrators, politicians, and parents want their children in high academic tracks; they have acquires a level of cultural capital and they want their children to have advantage of that capital. They all want students to perform well on standardized measures and move through learning at the same pace because they were born in the same year. They want them to wear uniforms so that they look more uniform and any deviation can be stomped out.

Political thinking about education is flawed magical thinking that has schools running learners through the same program year after year without attention to whether it meets their needs or provides optimal learning. It considered them all the same and expects that they can all perform the same at all times. Its greatest flaw is the idea that all children are at the same place when they enter school and that teachers (who are all the same) should be able to provide all learners with the same experiences and get the same results. This is close to insanity because no one has begun to consider the initial conditions where each child starts and how to provide optimal instruction for every learner, except classroom teachers. Furthermore the only ones who can provide optimal instruction and learning conditions are teacher, and only good teacher at that! Social justice, upward mobility, and multiple routes to access education are common in U. S. thought by both conservatives who tout programs like The Great Books and high educational rigor and liberals who tout choice of non-canonical literatures and developing the “whole child”.

A more sinister view of education comes from the work of Basil Bernstein, Pierre Bourdieu and others related to the purpose of education. They claim that access to cultural capital is a limited resource and that the real purpose of education is to reproduce the status quo of the elite class through limiting access to cultural capital, except to a very few who are used by the elite to show that the schools are meritocratic. This idea borders on a conspiracy theory of the purpose of education, which I will call the DARK SIDE.

The DARK SIDE holds to the idea that the main purpose of education is to discriminate against those who do not perform in the standard way that the schools and their evil or ignorant political masters define as appropriate. The child must be molded into an automaton, performing in the roles chosen by society and conforming, obeying all sources of authority, while demonstrating performances of quality and exceptional ability on demand for the edification of society to achieve access to cultural capital and, of course, wealth. Significant proportions of children must grow into adults who are docile, obedient, and conforming. Only a small elite group should be allowed access to further education because it is only merited by the most outstanding of learners. Inevitably these most outstanding of learners come from homogeneous privileged classes, except for a small number of others who are used to show that education is meritocratic.

Analysis from the DARK SIDE holds that both liberal and conservative approaches come from a fundamentally flawed understanding of schools as institutions and children as learners, but there is nothing that anyone can do about it because of the social fabric of civilization and the hierarchy of social animals like humans. Most Americans believe that politicians are for school improvement; most politicians believe that they are for school improvement, but they don’t know enough about schools and organizations to get beyond their autobiographical experiences with classrooms from elementary through high school and into college. They don’t understand the difficulties built into human-based services, and generally they fear change. The result is a system of testing that hides its real purpose: to ensure that those not from the privileged classes are validated in schools that are deemed successful and that most learners not of privilege are relegated to a constant turmoil in failing schools that focus more and more on control, testing, and punishment for poor performance.

The DARK SIDE proposes schools are designed to control learners, make them accept their position in society, and provides teachers who are novice interchangeable widgets who can be fired at the administration’s whim. Most of these schools start with children who are seen as deficient and unable to perform. Their language is vulgar and non-standard. These schools tend to have middle and lower class children and teachers. A sizeable percentage of children in these schools are identified as needing special education. Very few students in these schools are identified as gifted or talented, even when the display the same behaviors as children who receive this designation elsewhere. The curricula of the schools within the DARK SIDE tend to foster uniformity and suppression with a focus on whole group activities, based on external guidelines that do not allow any flexibility. Any expressive performance or natural behavior of learners is repressed and punished, if it strays even a tiny bit from the “high cultural standards” of the task masters. Students are encouraged to pass tests and to review the same material over and over because they are constantly viewed as misunderstanding; their curricula tend to be limited to reading and mathematics, with approval for rote performance rather than thinking or application or creativity. Teaching methods tend to feature drill and practice focused on test rather than knowing and learning. These students are encouraged to apply to mediocre and failing high schools, and college is seldom mentioned. The child who diverges is seen as a nail that must be pounded down with all the rest.

What we’re doing now, under the regime of the DARK SIDE, is re-segregating our schools and school-age population according to social class, race, and gender. The hierarchy of schools from top to bottom has independent private schools (the most expensive), other private schools, parochial and religious schools, public charter schools, various public magnet schools, regular public schools, and failing public schools.

What should we do? The large-scale reforms are failing. They need to be replaced with more small-scale innovations that are based in communities led by good teachers and excellent administrators who know teaching and learning and the community life of the children at the school. Good teachers need to take leadership roles in this process and show their expertise. Good administrators need to participate in this process while letting teachers work together to build cohesive curricula that foster child development in all academic and social areas.

This view, which leaves the DARK SIDE behind, is that schools are designed to improve functionality of the learners and the community in which they live. Most of these schools start with teachers who believe children are bright and capable, and their language is fluent and creative, but often not Standard Formal American English. These schools tend to have middle and upper class children and teachers (although this need not be the case). Only a small percentage of children in these schools are identified as needing special education, and the categories of special programs are most often for gifted and talented students. The curricula of the schools tend to foster individual creativity and productivity with a balance of individual, small-group, and whole group activities, many tailored to the individual or group of participating students, using a wide range of materials and multimedia. The performances of learners are celebrated as natural and important. Students are encouraged to excel and study more advanced topics because they are constantly making meaning; their curricula include the full range of disciplines with ample time. Teaching methods tend to be active and engaging. These students are encouraged to apply to elite high schools and to go to college. The child who diverges is seen as a flower that must be nurtured to maintain creativity and develop excellence as a unique individual.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Entry One: Starting Off

I decided to start blogging about issues, problems, and successes in education. This blog will focus on what I consider the only essential ingredient in our schools today: GOOD TEACHING. More than anything GOOD TEACHING requires good teachers – teachers who are smart, know content in the areas they teach, know about teaching, know process for implementing good learning activities in their classrooms, know about the children they teach and children in general, focus on learning that takes place in their classroom, and have the tools to engage learners in high levels of learning whatever the age of the learner and the background. I will probably also talk about the DARK SIDE of education and try to balance the problems that grow out of the negative aspects of education. I think that teaching is an essential art form that needs outstanding practitioners. This blog is my location for contributions to a Good Teaching Initiative (GTI) that seems missing from much of the open public discourse today.

As part of this blog, I will take on the testing establishment because I believe testing has gotten out of hand. I am not one of the growing number of people who want to emulate Nancy Reagan’s drug policies and just say no to tests (for instance, see the Bartleby Project at http://bartlebyproject.com/, which I have joined and follow). I believe that there must be some tests, and government assessment of student progress is a viable government function given public funding of education. I believe the greatest problem with the testing establishment is that it replaced the centrality of the teacher, teaching, and learning with the centrality of the tests. I believe that the testing establishment in its rush to make money is setting up all teachers as interchangeable replacement parts rather than building good teachers into great teachers. Testing and test preparation is taking too much time away from the essential processes of education: teaching and learning.

Furthermore, both the liberal and conservative approaches to schools are failing. Why? Liberals believed that throwing money at the problems and letting the schools develop professionally would work. Conservative believed that testing and various accountability programs would work. The liberal approach relied on the goodness of people involved in the schools and the lack of corruption and hypocrisy of the political, labor union, and educational systems. The conservative approach relied on the business-industrial-military-prison model for quality in the schools. We are left now with an increasingly wide gap between the schools that are appearing to succeed and those that are appearing to fail, but appearances are deceiving. We have a long trail of federal interference in education. The problem here is that NONE of it has succeeded in making better schools, better teachers, and GOOD TEACHING.

I do believe that governments should establish policies regarding education. These policies should be focused on providing fair, equitable access to good teachers in high quality schools. Every school should be clean, well-lighted, well-supplied, and accessible for every child. Every child should have access to instruction that helps him or her learn to maximal capacity. Every school should have space for its children to work and play. Every school should have access to books and technologies that provide children with information about everything that is know about every aspect of the world and every book ever published. Every school should have classrooms with multimedia capabilities that allow the teacher and the children to transform the classroom into any environment conceivable: so students studying the rainforest can be inside that environment with its sights and sounds, so students studying Rome can be in ancient Rome and hear Julius Caesar address the senate, but also view the city today. Children should meet: various bacteria in magnified environments on surfaces and in organs of the body; coelacanths in deep sea habitats; Pythagoras studying mathematics on Sammos, Egypt, Babylon, and Sicily; Sokrates and Plato discussing philosophy in Athens; Darius the Great preparing for war on the Greeks; Chin Shi Hwangdi surviving assassination attempts in his palace and organizing the first Chinese dynasty; Lincoln making the Gettysburg address and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation; Washington at Mount Vernon and accepting the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown; Atahualpa Inca struggling with controlling an empire against Spanish invaders; and various people living in difficult times with different professions, as well as read about them. But paramount is for every school to have good teachers who can guide learning and provide cutting edge teaching tailored to learners based on classroom assessments and performances.

I'm ready to outlaw test prep time from the classroom. I call this the "Good Teaching Initiatives" (GTI) for now. GTI needs a teacher-by-teacher revolt with support from children and parents; and we need to let administrators know that no time will be spend on test prep because it interferes with children’s real learning in the classroom. Then we need parents, teachers, administrators, and school after school to let the legislature, the governor, and the president know that the test prep time should be eliminated from every curriculum and replaced by good teaching and learning activities. If the president, the governor, and the legislature are unable to comply with GTI (i.e., enact it into law and reduce the testing burden), then all schools and teachers should refuse to administer any tests, but go on teaching better and better with the students performing real tasks to demonstrate their competencies, rather than tests. This is a core of an idea that needs to be spread; I'll probably work on elaborating it further. Maybe we should design a school without tests. So this blog is about GTI.

Good Teaching Initiative Richard Speaker Blog

GTIrbs.blogspot.com

Entry One: Starting Off