SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

BC teachers are asking for trouble

British Columbia is Canada’s version of La La Land, and this Globe and Mail column outlines some typical antics, in this case concerning the teachers’ union. Perhaps because the province has only one teachers’ union (as opposed to Ontario which has four, engendering healthy competition among them and and marked lack of solidarity on occasion), the hubris of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) knows no bounds.

The BCTF has been so successful in negotiating bountiful contracts in the past that they’re starting to run out of things to ask for. So this time round their shopping list includes “a 26-week, fully-paid leave of absence per year for direct or indirect compassionate care ‘to any person’’ 10 days paid bereavement leave upon the death of any friend or relative (up from the five days teachers currently get); five paid days per year for professional activities (they currently get no allowance); two sick days a month that can be saved up”. And, of course, more money.

The BCTF’s demands are all the more ludicrous in light of the scandal we mentioned a couple of days ago involving the continued presence of convicted sex offenders and drug traffickers in the classroom. 

This sort of nonsense gives teachers a bad name and turns the public against them. To those who would argue that the union is behind everything, I ask - why did 90% of BC teachers approve a strike if their demands are not met? Why will they refuse to attend staff meetings, do any paperwork, or run any extracurricular activities, starting in September? 

The write stuff

Here’s a site with lots of free resources for improving English vocabulary, grammar and composition skills - and not just for English-as-a-Second-Language students. Some of the material is for sale but there are so many hints and examples on the site that it should be possible to use index cards to make your own materials.

Who will discipline the disciplinarians?

Talk about investigative reporting! Using the Freedom of Information law, Janet Steffenhagen of the Vancouver Sun obtained the names of all the discipline cases handled by the BC College of Teachers in 2008 and then tracked down those teachers to find out what they are doing today, three years later. Janet found that scores of these teachers are still in the classroom today, and in many cases there is no record of their misconduct. Yet their misconduct included “sexual interference and intimate relationships with minors; rough handling of a kindergarten student; slapping, punching, and shoving students; consuming alcohol during class; threatening and stalking colleagues; and accessing child pornography on a school computer”. The BC College of Teachers’ apparent lack of concern about rogue teachers may be partly explained by the fact that there is a majority of teachers’ union representatives on the college’s preliminary investigation sub-committee. You can read more about the BC situation here. 

I would be very interested in the results if someone were to do the same investigative reporting in Ontario, as the preliminary investigation sub-committee of the Ontario College of Teachers is similarly constituted.

These pictures are not worth a thousand words

In addition to judging primary reading books by their covers, most educators also judge them by the quality of their illustrations. The dominant education philosophy esteems gorgeous books with eye-catching pictures and beautiful colours. This means, of course, that kids’ reading material tends to be fiendishly expensive. It also means that scant attention is paid to how effective the books are in terms of teaching kids to read. And there is a third problem, not widely known.

The presence of illustrations in kids’ beginning reading material is actively harmful in terms of helping them become good readers. You can read all about it here (h/t to Alvaro Fidel Martinez). 

Beginning readers are frequently encouraged to guess at unknown words on the basis of various clues such as those provided by the story’s pictures. This encourages two bad habits all at once. The first bad habit is the guessing itself, a practice that is bad for two reasons: first, sometimes the kids guess wrong, with monster hits to comprehension; and second, the kids’ decoding skills remain undeveloped. The other bad habit inculcated by guessing words on the basis of the pictures is that this practice interrupts the smooth progression of the reader’s eye movements across the page. When kids lose their place in the sentence because their eyes are jumping to the picture(s) all the time, it is typically hard for them to get back to where they were in the sentence and, in some cases, to remember what they had read before.

The goal is for beginning readers to read as smoothly and continuously from left to right as possible - just as accomplished readers do. The presence of illustrations on the page militates against this.

Sunday at the Movies (Gila & Guests)

Here’s a discussion of phonics, school choice, and a few other topics.  SQE’s Doretta Wilson and Jo-Anne Gross from Remediation Plus on Gila & Guests from June.

Good teaching, not money, is the answer

When I first grasped the crazy teaching methods being used at my son’s school more than 20 years ago, I started spending hours in the local university library trying to find out what the research said about these methods. There was precious little to be found back in 1988, but that’s certainly not the case any more. Right now, I’m reading a book called Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement, a book that looks at thousands of studies of “good idea” educational influences, boils them down into 138 categories, and then ranks them in terms of their effectiveness. I would be happy to look up your pet reform and tell you where it ranks and what its standard deviation is. To give you an idea, the top influence is self-report grades, with a d of 1.44 and the bottom influence is student mobility, with a d of -0.34. Phonics instruction is #22, d of .60 (anything over .40 is considered powerful).

Having looked at more than 800 meta-analyses of education research, together comprising thousands of studies, the author concludes that teachers are among the most powerful influences in learning, and goes on to explain what good teachers do. Then he writes:

“Note what is not said. There are no claims about additional structural resources, although to achieve the above it helps not to have the hindrance of a lack of resources. There is nothing about class size, about which particular students are present in the school or class, or about which subject is being taught - effective teaching can occur similarly for all students, all ethnicities, and all subjects. There is nothing about between-school differences, which are not a major effect in developed countries. There is little about working conditions of teachers or students - although their effects, though small, are positive, and positive means we should not make these working conditions worse.” (p. 239)

Here’s a table from the section that reports on how much more effective active and guided instruction is than unguided, facilitative instruction. 

TEACHER AS ACTIVATOR                       d

Reciprocal teaching                                0.74
Feedback                                              0.72
Teaching students self-verbalization         0.67
Meta-cognition strategies                        0.67
Direct Instruction                                    0.59
Mastery learning                                    0.57
Goals - challenging                                0.56
Frequent/effects of testing                      0.46
Behavioral organizers                             0.41

Average activator                            0.60

TEACHER AS FACILITATOR

Simulations and gaming                         0.32
Inquiry-based teaching                           0.31
Smaller class sizes                               0.21
Individualized instruction                         0.20
Problem-based learning                          0.15
Different teaching for girls and boys         0.12
Web-based learning                               0.09
Whole language - reading                       0.06
Inductive teaching                                  0.06

Average facilitator                           0.17

Who knew?

There is a big fuss in Indiana, Colorado, Georgia, and South Carolina about proposals to drop cursive writing from the curriculum. Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea - because you can write faster with cursive and I believe this leads to generally better writing. But this is not my point today.

My point is that cursive writing was dropped from the Ontario curriculum several years ago without debate or fanfare. Are you surprised?

The loss of our faculties

I’m reading a very interesting book called Too Simple to Fail (which I’ll review later), but I thought you might be interested in the author’s section on teacher training. 

He begins by describing a study by W. James Popham that set out to discover a way to measure how effective teachers were. Dr. Popham designed a series of teacher performance tests, developing discrete instructional objectives that could easily be tested - for example, whether students could correctly supply the sum of any two single-digit numbers. He then created two groups of teachers: the first consisted of professionally-trained, credentialed, experienced teachers, and the second group consisted of individuals, such as housewives, electricians, and auto mechanics, who had never had any formal teacher training or teaching experience. Everything else was held the same - the amount of teaching time, the students’ characteristics, etc. Dr. Popham, a renowned testing expert, was stunned to discover that the two groups of students learned the same amount. The housewives, electricians, and auto mechanics were exactly as effective as the professionally-trained, credentialed, experienced teachers.

Unwilling to accept this conclusion, the author of Too Simple to Fail set out to replicate the experiment. This time the non-credentialed group of teachers consisted of incoming undergraduate education majors who had not yet enrolled and who had no formal teaching experience. He got the same results. Still unable to believe it, the author replicated the study a second time - still with the same results. He then wrote an editorial for Phi Delta Kappan entitled “Are Teacher Training Institutions Really Necessary?”, an article which he describes as saving him the bother of explaining why he had to seek employment at somewhere other than a college of education. Here’s the last paragraph.

“Teacher preparation as provided by colleges of education does not result in increased student achievement. The implications of this conclusion are equally inescapable. If the effect of an institution upon its primary purpose is not robust enough to be detected by existing measuring instruments, then the lives of men should not be much affected by its absence. Therefore, given limited educational resource allocations, should we not abandon teacher education?”

Union Does a U-Turn

Seems that the writing was on the blackboard for the U.S. teachers’ unions and they have changed their position on using student achievement to gauge teacher evaluations.  The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union has joined the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in accepting evaluating teacher effectiveness based on more value-added concepts:

     “In passing the new policy at its assembly here, the 3.2 million-member union, the National Education Association, hopes to take a leadership role in the growing national movement to hold teachers accountable for what students learn - an effort from which it has so far conspicuously stood apart.”

BUT they oppose using standardized test scores as the measure of that learning.  Understandably, they will want to control what mechanism will be used to evaluate teachers.  Go figure.

What Was All The Fuss About?

This story has been in the news the last few days.  A Toronto public school has been allowing Islamic Friday services to take place in the cafeteria after lunch for about a year.   Students are not being taken out of classes nor is any religion being taught as any part of the curriculum. The school population is almost completely Muslim and this is a decision that has been made at the local level with the knowledge and approval of the board.  Naturally, the proverbial you-know-what has hit the fan.  Talk radio and columnists are all abuzz over it for all the predictable reasons.

This is not new.  There has been a Christian school that has long been under the jurisdiction of the Niagara public board and pretty much does exactly the same thing.   It makes one wonder what all the fuss was about during the last Ontario provincial election.