SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Good News, Bad News

This video will likely turn out to be a sort of a Rorschach Test for our commenters. It’s the amazing message left on the answering machine of an Australian high school. On the one hand, the school is apparently unwilling to cheat its students out of a real education. On the other hand, the message betrays a staggering level of contempt for its students’ parents. Does the one outweigh the other? Let the debate begin!

A Queer Dilemma

In opening up the topic of a lesbian teacher who believes she lost her job because she was a lesbian, we want to make it clear that some of our best friends are lesbians. While it is clearly swimming against the tide to defend the school in question (see the comments to the linked article), we nevertheless don our bathing suits and dive right in. 

The most effective schools (see the body of research known as the “effective schools research”) are known to have a clear school mission. Among other things, the staff in these schools share “an understanding of and commitment to instructional goals, priorities, assessment procedures and accountability. Staff accept responsibility for students’ learning of the school’s essential curricular goals.”

If a school is forced to employ a teacher who is not fully committed to its mission, its effectiveness is compromised. Is this good for the students? We’re just asking….

Early Learning, er Kindergarten Daycare, Passes

Yesterday, I attended the Queen’s Park press conference announcing the passage of the Ontario Full-Day Learning Act.  This law will bring all day kindergaren to Ontario starting this September with about 600 schools that have been identified as high needs.  When fully implemented, all Ontario schools will have full-day JK/SK and the requisite before and after daycare.  The daycare is supposed to be offered on a cost-recovery basis, but the province will subsidize lower-income parents.

During the press conference, Education Minister Leona Dombrowsky said “Parents are the primary educators of their children.”  Really?  You’d never know it.

Parental Choice and Kindergarten Credit are two grassroot organizations that are against this all day pressure.  They were at the press conference and were interviewed here.

The cost of this program has already gone over the initial $1.5 billion estimate, with more announced funding of $51 million for “stabilization” of child care centres and and another $12 million over the five years for the existing in-school child care centres to accomodate the younger children.  The press release also states “the program will be supported by a team of teachers and early childhood educators with approximately 26 kids per classroom.”  Wonder what that will cost?  I visualize the press release now: “Ontario ECEs to join CUPE Local”.   I also see a big red balloon with dollar signs ready to burst.  One school board estimates their “cost-recovery” cost is higher than most families’ current day care.

If the whole point of an early learning program was to give at-risk kids a leg up on their higher SES peers, making it universal will only negate that effect.  If every kid gets the same head start, then what’s the point?  The gap will surely remain. 

There is still lots of confusion over whether or not families will have a choice of keeping to the half-day or not.  This was not clearly articulated by the Minister.  From what I could gather, the only choice parents would actually have was to either send their kids or not at all.  Many boards will have difficultly offering a half-day option and the pressure will be on for parents to go full-day lest their kids “miss out” on anything.  I say miss out on what?  The chance to have your nap on the floor with 26 other kids?  

Better we make sure that effective primary grade reading and math programs are in place to make sure kids learn what they need.  Better that we give mothers and fathers meaningful choices over how their kids are educated. 

Remember This

A Non-Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma touched on the importance of long-term memory in learning. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. has written a great deal on this topic, especially with regard to the value of teaching a common foundation of cultural knowledge. Here’s an excerpt from his seminal book Cultural Literacy: What every American needs to know (p. 61).

“Probably the most dramatic illustrations of the knowledge-bound character of human skills came from some remarkable experiments conducted by Adriaan de Groot, a Dutch psychologist, who described his findings in a book entitled Het Denken van den Schaker (literally, ‘the thinking of chess players’). De Groot discovered that chess masters are astonishingly skilled at remembering and reproducing chess positions after a very brief exposure to them. The subjects in his experiments were players of various abilities, as indicated by their official chess rankings. In one experiment, de Groot displayed for five to ten seconds a chess position from an actual game in which twenty-five pieces were left on the board. The subjects were asked to reproduce the position from memory. Grand masters performed this feat with 100 percent accuracy, masters with 90 percent accuracy. Weaker players were lucky if they could correctly place five or six pieces.

“Then de Groot varied the conditions of his experiment in one respect. Instead of placing the twenty-five pieces in positions from an actual game, he placed them on the board randomly. The results were unexpected. All his subjects - grand masters, masters, class A players, and class B players - performed the same as novices did, placing only five or six pieces correctly. This experiment has been duplicated in several different laboratories, and structurally in several other fields, including algebra, physics, and medicine, always with the same striking results.”

It is now widely accepted among cognitive psychologists that every skill is dependent on relevant background knowledge. Reading, for example, requires frequent and rapid reference to stored information, a process that must be so automatic that it does not interfere with comprehension. 

Parents and teachers ought to be aware that their emphasis should be on teaching facts, not skills. “Once the relevant knowledge has been acquired, the skill follows.”

The Narrowing Gap

An interesting discussion is unfolding in our "'Secret' Principles of Direct Instruction" thread concerning the best way to handle the wide variations in academic ability among children. This article from our archives examines the Swiss approach whereby kindergarten children are kept together academically, even though it means that the more advanced children must move forward very slowly at first. The author postulates that the slow start is good for all of the children, even the abler ones, and in time the whole group achieves a very high performance level.

York School Board Wants to Know

Attention York Region parents, it is refreshing to see that in Ontario the York District School Board is seeking input from the public on how they can "improve" education at the board:

"Trustees of the York Region District School Board invite parents, staff members, school council members, students and other stakeholder groups to provide input about how to improve public education in York Region. This consultation process is aimed at identifying key priorities for improving student achievement; student well-being; delivery of education programs and effective use of resources. The information gathered will help set the agenda for education improvement."

There is an online survey that can be found here.  While I'm sure that they want to hear from York Region residents, School for Thought readers from any location may have lots of suggestions of their own.

HT to Mark.

A Non-Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

Faithful readers may by now have deduced that we do not care for the current emphasis on indirect instruction in schools. The paper Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching conclusively proves that indirect approaches work poorly - and explains exactly why.

The first point - that indirect methods work poorly - is proven by a devastating review of the literature. Here's an excerpt from the paper.

"A number of reviews of empirical studies have established a solid research-based case against the use of instruction with minimal guidance. Although an extensive review of those studies is outside the scope of this article, Mayer (2004) recently reviewed evidence from studies conducted from 1950 to the late 1980s comparing pure discovery learning, defined as unguided, problem-based instruction, with guided forms of instruction. He suggested that in each decade since the mid-1950s, when empirical studies provided solid evidence that the then popular unguided approach did not work, a similar approach popped up under a different name with the cycle then repeating itself. Each new set of advocates for unguided approaches seemed either unaware of or uninterested in previous evidence that unguided approaches had not been validated. This pattern produced discovery learning, which gave way to experiential learning, which gave way to problem-based and inquiry learning, which now gives way to constructivist instructional techniques. Mayer (2004) concluded that the 'debate about discovery has been replayed many times in education but each time, the evidence has favored a guided approach to learning'."

The second point - why indirect methods work poorly is proven with reference to "human cognitive architecture", the way our brains work.

The paper explains that learning does not occur unless it has been stored in long-term memory and that the aim of all instruction is to alter long-term memory. Long-term memory can be accessed only through working memory, the structure in which processing takes place. But problem-based searching makes such heavy demands on working memory that long-term memory can be affected only minimally, if at all. However, when learners are given adequate information, their working memories have enough capacity left over to transfer some of the new concepts to long-term memory.

There is no mystery about which teaching approach works better. The mystery is why so many educators turn up their noses at it. 

Better Teachers and Methods DO Make a Difference…

...at least when it comes to teaching reading.  This is from an interesting study out of Florida State University that looked at reading achievement using identical twins who had different teachers. The abstract from the report (here) states:

"Children's reading achievement is influenced by genetics as well as by family and school environments. The importance of teacher quality as a specific school environmental influence on reading achievement is unknown. We studied first- and second-grade students in Florida from schools representing diverse environments. Comparison of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, differentiating genetic similarities of 100% and 50%, provided an estimate of genetic variance in reading achievement. Teacher quality was measured by how much reading gain the non-twin classmates achieved. The magnitude of genetic variance associated with twins' oral reading fluency increased as the quality of their teacher increased. In circumstances where the teachers are all excellent, the variability in student reading achievement may appear to be largely due to genetics. However, poor teaching impedes the ability of children to reach their potential."

A further article on this topic (here) quotes lead researcher Jeanette Taylor: "When instruction is less effective, then children's learning potential is not optimized and genetic differences are left unrealized." The article continues as follows.

"The researchers found that good instruction promoted stronger reading development. Without it, children were less likely to reach the potential conferred by their genes. 'When teacher quality is very low, genetic variance is constricted, whereas, when teacher quality is very high, genetic variance blooms,' they report. While teacher quality appears to be an important contributor, other classroom factors, such as classmates and resources, might also influence reading ability, the researchers noted."

With teacher quality gaining increasing attention in U.S. political circles, the study highlights the potential for education to moderate the genetic effects on early reading. "'Putting high-quality teachers in the classroom will not eliminate variability among students nor guarantee equally high achievement from all children, but ignoring teachers as a salient contributor to the classroom environment represents a missed opportunity to promote children's potential in school and their success in life,' the researchers concluded."

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!

It's official. The school founded by Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues at her faculty of education, the showpiece of progressive teaching methods, is being shut down by the state for persistent abysmal performance. Read all about it here. Please excuse the snickers.

Mozart Worked His Butt Off

The latest book to join our lending library, The Genius in All of Us: Why everything you've been told about genetics, talent, and IQ is wrong, makes the case that élite performance is the result of hard work, perseverance, and purposeful practice - as opposed to inborn gifts. While it may be tempting - even comforting - to think that the reason you aren't a great opera singer or golfer is because of the way you are wired, it turns out that almost anyone can achieve greatness if he or she is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. The problem is not inadequate genetic assets, but rather the inability or unwillingness to tap into what we already have. The book presents cutting-edge research from a wide variety of disciplines - cognitive science, genetics, biology, and child development - to bolster this argument. 

The excerpt (pp. 16-17) discusses scientists' new understanding of the role of genes.

"This new vanguard is a loose-knit group of geneticists, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and others, some of whom call themselves developmental systems theorists. I call them interactionists because of their emphasis on the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment. Not all of the interactionists' views have yet been fully accepted, and they freely acknowledge their ongoing struggle to articulate the full implications of their findings. But it already seems very clear that these implications are far-reaching and paradigm-shifting.

"To understand interactionism, you must first try to forget everything you think you know about heredity. 'The popular conception of the gene as a simple causal agent is not valid,' declare geneticists Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. 'The gene cannot be seen as an autonomous unit - as a particular stretch of DNA which always produces the same effect. whether or not a length of DNA produces anything, what it produces, and where and when it produces it may depend on other DNA sequences and on the environment.'

"Though Mendel couldn't detect it with his perfectly calibrated pea-plant hybrids, genes are not like robot actors who always say the same lines in the exact same way. It turns out that they interact with their surroundings and can say different things depending on whom they are talking to.

"This obliterates the long-standing metaphor of genes as blueprints with elaborate predesigned instructions for eye color, thumb size, mathematical quickness, musical sensitivity, etc. Now we can come up with a more accurate metaphor. rather than finished blueprints, genes - all twenty-two thousands of them - are more like volume knobs and switches. Think of a giant control board inside every cell of your body.

"Many of those knobs and switches can be turned up/down/on/off at any time - by another gene or by any minuscule environmental input. This flipping and turning takes place constantly. It begins the moment a child is conceived and doesn't stop until she takes her last breath. rather than giving us hardwired instructions on how a trait must be expressed, this process of gene-environment interaction drives a unique developmental path for every unique individual."