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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars, But In Our Schools
Margaret Wente's column today takes on Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in his book Outliers that phenomenally-successful people owe their success to three factors: a combination of a fierce drive to succeed; 10,000 hours of purposeful practice; and extremely lucky circumstances. Wente, while agreeing with the first two factors, would substitute extraordinary talent for lucky circumstances. She thinks that all the ambition and practice in the world will not result in élite performance if talent is lacking.
In a way, there's not all that much difference between the two positions, in that for both Wente and Gladwell extraordinary accomplishment depends on the luck of the draw - lucky genes or lucky circumstances, take your pick. But there is in fact a crucial distinction in terms of the percentage of the population who can become accomplished performers. If Wente is right, only the very talented can achieve high-level performance. If Gladwell is right, high-level performance is possible for virtually everyone - although of course only a few individuals will be lucky enough to become superstars.
This distinction has important implications for educators. If Wente is right, then schools should be pretty much sorting institutions - identifying and supporting talented students. After all, in Wente's scenario, there's not much point in trying to teach calculus to kids who don't have a math gene! But if Gladwell is right and élite performance is possible for most people, then schools should be trying to motivate students to reach for the stars and then providing them with the means to do so.
At School for Thought, it is our perception that schools lean strongly to Wente's position - to the detriment of their students.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore
MSN is polling its readers as to whether or not they think parents should be able to negotiate no-homework contracts for their children. Only 20% of respondents think that parents know what's best for their children. The remaining 80% of respondents say that the rules should be the same for all students. This implies that most people believe that remote bureaucrats - who have probably never even met the children for whom they are making policies - are going to make better decisions than parents who know and love their children intimately. To us, this shows a touching (but naïve) faith in authority.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Homework of Champions
Let's say you're a parent who is fed up with "helping" your young children complete their ridiculously-difficult homework (think creating model buildings or critiquing authors' writing styles). In this case, you will probably applaud the Calgary couple who have achieved a total ban on homework for their kids.
Part of the Calgary couple's thinking, of course, is that homework is a total waste of everyone's time. But that's true only of some homework assignments (the kind their kids appear to have been getting) - but not true of other kinds of homework. It's a bit like watching kids eat Twinkies and Coke for breakfast and then concluding that breakfast is bad for kids.
Just as a nutritious breakfast confers numerous benefits, so too do judicious homework assignments. The nature of good homework assignments is outlined here. In a nutshell, good homework is short and doable, practises newly-learned material, and receives timely feedback. When used properly, homework can leverage teaching time - doubling or even tripling the value of every instructional minute.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Bluewater Board Satisfaction Survey
The Bluewater District School Board has released its long-awaited satisfaction survey. What is most noticeable is the frequent, but not surprising, disconnect of opinion between parents, community, and staff at the Bluewater Board. For example, "43% of community respondents believe that Bluewater District School Board puts students first in its decision-making, compared to 31% of staff and 25% of parents."
What almost all agree upon, however, is dissatisfaction with the board itself, to wit - "one quarter of parents and staff would not recommend Bluewater schools and overall system leadership is cited as the reason."
The report further states:
"Throughout the survey, verbatim comments from all three respondent groups flag the need to address governance and management issues, often through suggestions to remove or replace some or all of the senior leadership and trustees. While some respondents repeat the same concern with each open-ended opportunity, the theme appears across the three surveys. There is an overall tone of frustration with a perceived lack of accountability, especially when the leadership appears to be judged by a different (lower) standard than staff and students."
School for Thought wonders whether, if this survey were given to all school boards in the province, the results might be similar? Probably. For a start, readers might want to go to Ontario Sunshine on Schools.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Schoolproofing and a Great “National Post” Series
Kate Tennier has a series of three op-eds beginning in today's National Post that begins with the question Why Does More Classroom Time Actually Hinder Learning? She looks at it from the premise that parents have a false sense of security - insurance, she calls it - about the education system.
"Why is it that more schooling can actually hinder learning? Perhaps it's time to start pointing the finger at moral hazard, the blanket scholastic insurance policy that induces those insured - students and their parents - to become less inclined to take an active role in securing their own education. Examples abound of the phenomenon at work.
"The first comes from a story told by a remedial reading teacher. After a week of individualized instruction, the mother of one of her students announced she would no longer need to read with her son at home because the 'teacher was taking care of that at school'. The mother thought her son's literacy skills were 'insured' so she became negligent about insuring them herself, even though the vigilance a parent provides - reading with a child at home - has a much greater long-term impact than that which schools can offer."
At SQE, we have seen this many times - not because parents have abandoned their responsibilities, but more often because the school system tells us that "things will be fine" and the non-reader will just "get it" somewhere down the line. Parents trust that education is supposed to work for their kids. The popularity of remedial programs, like our own free Stairway to Reading and the growth of private tutoring lead us to believe that this trust needs to be earned much better. We have long advocated that parents take responsibility and schoolproof their kids. Either that, or let them choose schools that work successfully for their children's needs.
We look forward to the next installment of Kate's articles.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Eonverye taht can raed tihs rsaie yuor hnad
A message is making the rounds of the Internet, claiming that the fact that 55% of people can read the words in the title proves that the order of letters within a word doesn't matter as long as the first and last letters are in the right place. The message goes on to claim that the brain doesn't process individual letters but rather reads each word as a whole. The implication is that whole word methods of teaching children to read are appropriate.
It apparently doesn't occur to the author to think about the 45% of adults who cannot read mixed-up words. There is nothing strange or mysterious about who falls into the 45% category and who falls into the 55% category. The 55% who can read mixed-up words are the fluent readers, and the 45% who can't read them are the unskilled readers - the adults who can't read very well, if at all. No beginning reader is able to read mixed-up words. It would be our guess that everyone who reads our blog would be able to read the mixed-up title, no problem.
Sally Shaywitz, a neuroscientist and professor of pediatrics at Yale University, has carried out brain imaging studies to find out how people learn to read. It turns out that there are two subsystems involved - the parieto-temporal region and the occipito-temporal area. In her book Overcoming Dyslexia, Dr. Shaywitz writes: "The parieto-temporal system works for the novice reader. Slow and analytic, its function seems to be in the early stages of learning to read, that is, in initially analyzing a word, pulling it apart, and linking its letters to their sounds. In contrast to the step-by-step parieto-temporal system, the occipito-temporal region is the express pathway to reading and is the one used by skilled readers....After a child has analyzed and correctly read a word several times, he forms an exact neural model of that specific word; the model (word form), reflecting the word's spelling, its pronunciation, and its meaning, is now permanently stored in the occipito-temporal system. Subsequently, just seeing the word in print immediately activates the word form and all the relevant information about that word. (p. 79)
In other words, kids have to laboriously sound out each unknown word several times before it can be transferred to a different part of the brain which allows it to be instantly recognized. The proponents of whole word methods are making the mistake so common to experts in any field - forgetting their own learning processes and assuming that novices can just jump right in and copy their advanced performance without going through the beginning stages. However, only a small percentage of students, most of them with a head start provided by enriched homes, can manage this. The majority of students need to be taught systematic phonics in order to become fluent readers.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
EQAO Testing: The Debate Continues
Last week there was an interesting debate about EQAO testing on the TVOntario online show Your Voice. The panelists included economist Dr. David Johnson, who is the author of Signposts of Success research that looks at outliers among Ontario schools. Using EQAO results and demographic data, Dr. Johnson has discovered that despite the expectation that achievement should mirror socio-economic status, there is actually quite a bit of variation. The debate is interesting, in my opinion, mostly because the two panelists who oppose province-wide testing really cannot make a good case against it. It's worth viewing.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
How to Get the Right Education for your Child
"Let's imagine you're the parent of a nine-year-old boy named Jack. He is now beginning grade 4 at his neighbourhood school, John Dewey Public School. Starting from when Jack was in grade 2, it has become very obvious that his school experience is not going well. Not only has Jack not learned to read, but also he is starting to get a reputation as a 'behaviour problem'. Things are going from bad to worse, and none of your discussions with Jack's teachers has made the slightest bit of difference. The time for waiting and hoping is over!"
It may not be quite up to the standard of "It was the best of times, it was the worse of times", but these immortal words open How to Get the Right Education for your Child, a practical manual for parents of children who are struggling in school. The Alberta Report described the book as "an easy-to-read and very funny (if at times painfully close to the bone) guide to the jargon, pitfalls and inadequacies of education as currently practised in most Canadian jurisdictions". The London Free Press described it as "shrewd, well-informed advice" and the Kitchener-Waterloo Record said "In a field crowded with self-help literature on education, this book stands out for its common sense, its experienced tone and its usefulness". You can read How to Get the Right Education for your Child online here, or order your free copy here.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
The True Definition of a Socialist
Love him or loathe him, Conrad Black is always good value. His column in yesterday's National Post is delightful, as Mr. Black describes how rewarding he has found tutoring illiterate inmates in the low-security facility in Florida which he currently calls home. This is writing to be savoured, for example ""the 32-year-old small-time drug dealer who had six children with five women, none of them attached by the bourgeois relic of matrimony" or "it pains me to verge on platitudes, but life's rewards do sometimes come in strange ways and unexpected places". Pointing out that he "would not meet the usual definition of a socialist", Mr. Black is living proof that those of us who quest for education reform are the true friends of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Holy Coincidence, Batman!
Added Woes for Dyslexics (scroll down to the middle of the page) reports on a new brain study that reveals many dyslexic children have "difficulty distinguishing different sounds in a noisy environment". School for Thought would like to point out that the ability to hear the sounds in words is the very essence of learning to read, and it should therefore come as no surprise that so many dyslexic kids have trouble understanding what the teacher is saying when there is a lot of background noise. According to the news item, dyslexic students often benefit from being seated "at the front of the class or using wireless technology to enhance the teacher's voice". And, if we could make a polite suggestion - quiet classrooms are associated with better learning in general, and not just for the dyslexic students.