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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Literacy)
This video, shown in several parts on YouTube, talks about teaching reading using systematic phonics, but goes further to link illiteracy to many social problems.
The Retarding America video is c/o one of our Friends of the Society for Quality Education on Facebook.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Acquiring the facts of the matter
Here, as promised, are some basic principles guiding the acquisition of extensive background knowledge and vocabulary.
Wide Exposure is Best
In this case, a little learning is not a dangerous thing. Children benefit from exposure to a wide range of experiences, topics, and places - going to concerts, playing baseball, walking in the woods, visiting a farm, travelling to other places. Especially if you and the child discuss everything afterwards using precise terms, some new knowledge and vocabulary will be retained - providing brain Velcro for additional related information to stick to later on.
Talk With Children
Whenever possible, draw children into conversation. Don't use baby talk or talk down, but rather use your full vocabulary, and encourage the child to respond in kind. Talk about everything under the sun.
Books
Another excellent way to build knowledge and vocabulary is reading - reading to the child and reading by the child. In choosing books to read to your child, be mindful that the content and vocabulary is suitably challenging and stimulating. A good source of book ideas can be found here and, as well, your local children's librarian is often a mine of information. At the same time, you should be moving heaven and earth to ensure that your child becomes a fluent reader who enjoys reading, since people who read for pleasure enjoy lifelong cognitive benefits. For most kids, this means the healthy application of systematic phonics. You might like to consider teaching your child to read yourself before he or she begins school.
Start Early
Children who enter kindergarten with impoverished vocabularies and general knowledge are at a terrible disadvantage. Put another way, the number of words and the amount of general knowledge a child possesses are closely related to his or her IQ. Children are never too young to start learning.
A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Medicine Go Down
Knowledge and vocabulary can be purposefully taught - word of the day, word games, word roots, board games, prefixes and suffixes, Internet games, etc. - but avoid trying to drill long lists of unconnected facts or words.
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Who Knew? III: Mastering fundamental math skills
Just as mastery of fundamental decoding skills is essential to reading fluency later, so is it the same for math. University of Missouri researchers have found that basic arithmetic skills are crucial for later more complex math. According to this long-term study (still to be published), children who had mastered numbers, counting, and basic factoring arithmetic in grade one had better success with math in grade five:
Researchers from the University of Missouri encourage educators to ensure that young students understand numerals and quantities, and give them plenty of practice with basic arithmetic. "This study reinforces the idea that math knowledge is incremental, and without a good foundation, a student won't do well because the math gets more complex," researcher David Geary said.
Seems perfectly logical to SFT, but then SQE has been citing similar remarks from accomplished mathematicians for years.
While we're on the subject of math, the highly successful online Khan Academy, which SFT has often blogged about, has had this out of body experience with teachers who hope to incorporate some of the free online tutorial's techniques in their own classrooms. For a profession that has always prided personalized instruction as the ideal, the request to modify Khan's program to "stop students from becoming this advanced" was mind boggling. This quote was from an article in Wired magazine and re-quoted on Andrew Coulson's blog at Cato:
Even if Khan is truly liberating students to advance at their own pace, it's not clear that the schools will be able to cope. The very concept of grade levels implies groups of students moving along together at an even pace. So what happens when, using Khan Academy, you wind up with a kid in fifth grade who has mastered high school trigonometry and physics - but is still functioning like a regular 10-year-old when it comes to writing, history, and social studies? Khan's programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who've seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it "to stop students from becoming this advanced."
If readers want to help their kids get some practice in basic math skills over the summer, SQE has a series of math skill builders. Stairway to Math is a free resource that can be found here or on our menu bar to the left under Remedial Programs.
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The facts of the matter
It's fashionable in education circles to denigrate the accumulation of "mere facts", but the truth is that a large collection of general knowledge is extremely important and useful. According to cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, "data from the last thirty years lead to a conclusion that is not scientifically challengeable: thinking well requires knowing facts, and that's true not simply because you need something to think about. The very processes that teachers care about most - critical thinking processes such as reasoning and problem solving - are intimately intertwined with factual knowledge that is stored in long-term memory (not just found in the environment)."
Take the importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Quoting from Why Don't Students Like School?,
"Ashburn hit a ground ball to Wirtz, the shortstop, who threw it to Dark, the second baseman. Dark
stepped on the bag, forcing out Cremin, who was running from first, and threw it to Anderson, the
first baseman. Ashburn failed to beat the throw."
"If you're like me, this passage is hard to comprehend. There are a number of individual actions, and they are hard to tie together. but for someone who knows about baseball, it's a familiar pattern, like CNN. The sentences describe a double play.
"A number of studies have shown that people understand what they read much better if they already have some background knowledge about the subject. Part of the reason is chunking. A clever study on this point was conducted with junior high school students. Half were good readers and half were poor readers, according to standard reading tests. The researchers asked the students to read a story that described half an inning of a baseball game. As they read, the students were periodically stopped and asked to show that they understood what was happening in the story by using a model of a baseball field and players. The interesting thing about this study was that some of the students knew a lot about baseball and some knew just a little. (The researchers made sure that everyone could comprehend individual actions, for example, what happened when a player got a double.) The dramatic finding, shown in Figure 5, was that the students' knowledge of baseball determined how much they understood of the story. Whether they were 'good readers' or 'bad readers' didn't matter nearly as much as what they knew."
The bottom line for parents and teachers who want to help their children succeed in school is that they should expose the students to a wide variety of experiences and information. In a subsequent posting, I will list some of the basic principles behind helping children learn background knowledge.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Say a Little Prayer?
This issue just doesn't seem to want to go away. The other day there was a protest in front of the Toronto District School Board offices (reported here here and here) organized by a coalition of other falth organizations.
Two articles in the papers actual point out the hypocrisy around the issue of prayer in school. This National Post op-ed points out (as SFT did in a previous post) that Eden High School, a public school, holds Bible study before the school day:
In fact, Eden High School has a "spiritual life department" with a website that quotes directly from the Bible. The department provides Grade 9 Bible study, as well as "a rich array of spiritual life activities," including retreats and missions. Oh, but prayers happen just before school starts. Apparently that makes it all right.
and concludes:
If this latest debate was purely about keeping religion out of publicly funded schools, then you'd think protesters would indeed head straight for St. Catharines. But something tells me that all this bluster has more to do with who is asking for the accommodation than the principles behind it. It's the latter we should be discussing.
But it's Christina Blizzard's column in today's Sun, that really nails it:
Meanwhile, a simmering issue is proving just how hypocritical it was for the Grits turn the faith-based school funding issue into a political football in the 2007 election. We need a full, frank - and emotion-free - discussion of how to deal with the discriminatory nature of funding for faith schools in this province, where only Catholic schools are tax-supported.
Asked about it, McGuinty said he counts on school boards to "work in consultation with their school communities talking to parents in particular to strike the kinds of accommodation that they think are reasonable and supportive. "When it comes to faith matters, I have faith in the school boards, I have faith in schools themselves to make judgments they think are appropriate in their particular circumstance."
Well, that wasn't what he said in 2007, when he said public funding for faith-schools was "segregation and sequestration."
Say a prayer indeed.
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Bad apple teachers
I don't know if you've seen the movie "Bad Teacher" (by all reports, you shouldn't - it's lousy), but the film's light-hearted attitude towards a teacher who drinks, uses drugs, cheats, blackmails, steals, and curses at her students is fairly typical in education circles. Some real-life examples include teachers marching in DC to protest the dismissal of ineffective teachers, the attempts to excuse the educators involved in the widespread Atlanta cheating scandal, New York's rubber room for teachers under a cloud of some sort, and the list goes on. In Ontario, Mike Harris tried to address the problem more than ten years ago by bringing in teacher testing, but this measure was successfully defeated by the Ontario education establishment - and no subsequent government has even acknowledged the problem of incompetent teachers.
Generous teacher salaries and benefits mean that bad teachers are strongly motivated to hang on to their jobs, and teacher tenure rules mean they can.
As the evidence mounts of the importance of good teachers, policies protecting bad teachers are increasingly unacceptable. Every profession has its bad apples, and it's long past time that they were sorted out and discarded.
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Bill Gates on Improving Schools
It seems Mr. Gates has realized it's not how much money gets spent on schools, it's HOW you spend it. In this interview Gates notes that his foundation will shift their focus from spending on small schools and classes to measuring teacher effectiveness:
"This understanding of just how little influence seemingly large donations can have has led the foundation to rethink its focus in recent years. Instead of trying to buy systemic reform with school-level investments, a new goal is to leverage private money in a way that redirects how public education dollars are spent.
"I bring a bias to this," says Mr. Gates. "I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts." Compared with R&D spending in the pharmaceutical or information-technology sectors, he says, next to nothing is spent on education research. "That's partly because of the problem of who would do it. Who thinks of it as their business? The 50 states don't think of it that way, and schools of education are not about research. So we come into this thinking that we should fund the research."
The Gates Foundation is a big supporter of charters, but not so for vouchers, which he sees as having hot political issues not operational ones.
"On the fraught issue of school choice, his foundation has been a strong advocate of charter schools, and Mr. Gates is particularly fond of the KIPP charter network and its focus on serving inner-city neighborhoods. "Whenever you get depressed about giving money in this area," he volunteers, "you can spend a day in a KIPP school and know that they are spending less money than the dropout factory down the road."
"He praises the private school model for its efficiency vis-à-vis traditional public schools, noting that the "parochial school system, per dollar spent, is an excellent school system." But the politics, he says, are just too tough right now. "We haven't chosen to get behind [vouchers] in a big way, as we have with personnel systems or charters, because the negativity about them is very, very high."
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Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses
The latest addition to our lending library is Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement by John Hattie. Professor Hattie, a Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, wanted to make sense of the hundreds of thousands of education studies with their often-conflicting conclusions, and so he decided to synthesize more than 800 education meta-analyses (studies that convert the effects of multiple studies to a common measure, allowing the overall effects to be quantified).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Dr. Hattie basically found that good teachers/teaching are hugely important and potentially influential, and he listed six signposts of excellence. Here's one of them: "Teachers need to be aware of what each and every student is thinking and knowing, to construct meaning and meaningful experiences in light of this knowledge, and have proficient knowledge and understanding of their content to provide meaningful and appropriate feedback such that each student moves progressively through the curriculum levels." I would be happy to copy out the other five signposts on request.
Importantly, Dr. Hattie found that teachers' working conditions have much less influence on achievement when compared to good teaching.
d TEACHING
0,77 Quality of teaching
0.74 Reciprocal teaching
0.72 Teacher-student relationships
0.72 Providing feedback
0.67 Teaching student self-verbalization
0.67 Meta-cognition strategies
0.59 Direct Instruction
0.57 Mastery learning
0.68 Average
WORKING CONDITIONS
0.28 Within-class grouping
0.23 Adding more finances
0.21 Reducing class size
0.11 Ability grouping
0.04 Multi-grade/age classes
0.01 Open versus traditional classes
-0.09 Summer vacation classes
-0.16 Retention
0.08 Average
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Sunday at the Movies (Parent Trigger Law)
Picking up on Malkin's post from yesterday, this video shows that when parents have no voice, extreme measures may be taken.
"Last year, parents of students in failing California public schools were given a reason to be hopeful when Sacramento politicians passed something called the "parent trigger" law. The way the law works is that if 51% of parents at a failing school sign a petition, they can turn the school into a charter school, replace the staff or simply use the petition as a bargaining chip to initiate a conversation about change.
On December 7, 2010, with help from the non-profit group Parent Revolution, parents of children attending McKinley Elementary in Compton became the first group of parents to pull the parent trigger. Their dream was to transform the school into a Celerity charter school. Instead, the Compton parents were thrust into a prolonged fight with supporters of the status quo: the Compton Unified School District, the teachers' unions, Gov. Jerry Brown and Tom Torlakson, the newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction.
This is the story about a group of parents in Compton who are fighting to give their children a better education."
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The blame game
Some years ago now, Dr. Galen Alessi, a psychology professor at Western Michigan University, surveyed school psychologists about the cause of the learning problems of the approximately 5,000 students they had seen over the past year. Although the psychologists were offered a number of possible causes, including curriculum factors, inappropriate teaching practices, and faulty school administrative factors, to a man they located the blame in the children's homes (10% - 20%) or in the child (100%). You can learn more about the study here, along with suggestions for the parents of children with learning problems.
It's no wonder parents become apathetic and pull back from involvement in their children's schooling. The vast majority of parents start the schooling game with great enthusiasm, eager to take part and to help their kids be successful in school. Before long, however, they have become the apathetic bunch of parents educators complain about. Why?
The answer can be found in the present organizational structure of the education system. There are four main disincentives to parental involvement.
1. The administration of schools is complex and remote. Parents and teachers (and even principals) feel they have no control over the policies and practices imposed on their school.
2. Some educators are unwilling to share. They believe that they are progressive, up-to-date experts who are infinitely more knowledgeable than the old-fashioned parents who advocate higher standards and more formal instruction.
3. Most parents are bewildered by the new teaching methods and the associated jargon. The lack of textbooks, the elasticity of standards, the weird or non-existent homework: all help to keep them at arms' length.
4. Most educators are ill-equipped to communicate with - let alone reach out to - parents, having never been offered a course on how to foster parental involvement - despite universal acknowledgement of its importance.
Blaming parents for not being involved in their children's education is kind of like the guy who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the court's mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.