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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Young children should not be seen and not heard
Here's new evidence that just surrounding babies and toddlers with language, by for example turning on the radio or television, is actually bad for them. This is at least partly because young children's language acquisition depends on how often their vocalizations are responded to, as opposed to how much exposure they have to spoken language. For compelling evidence that this is so, I refer you to this previous posting. H/T to Chas
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I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto
Across the pond, more and more kids are being designated "special needs", according to this article in The Telegraph. At present, 21% of all students fall into this category and, because boys and disadvantaged kids are most at risk, about a quarter of all boys and almost a third of all disadvantaged kids are being labeled in some way.
It's hard to get a handle on the percentages on this side of the pond (and I would be very interested in some alert reader could help us get definitive information on this phenomenon), but for the time being I will just mention the Canadian Council of Social Development's estimate that anywhere from 15% to 30% of Canadian children have some kind of disability.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that 20% of kids have special needs. That's something like 400,000 children in Ontario alone. How can this be possible? HT to Chas
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Over-Promised and Under-Educated
I'm sure you've all been hearing about the Occupy Wall Street movement, but I'm guessing you didn't know it was initiated by the Canadian activist group Adbusters. I draw this to your attention lest you discount this interesting perspective on the grounds that it is written by an American and can't possibly apply to Canada.
Anyway, the interesting perspective to which I allude posits that the protesters are justly upset because they had been led to believe by their teachers that they were all special and could expect rewarding careers and brilliant futures. Truthfully, we have let them down.
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Kids won’t be kids any more
Good news for the parents of rambunctious preschoolers! Things were looking grim for a while there, what with the thumbs down on using computers and television to keep them quiet, also ixnay on the video games.
But now comes new hope from the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has just given its blessing to the sedation of boisterous four-year-olds with Ritalin. Of course, the parents of active two- and three-year-olds are still being overlooked here, but perhaps in a couple of years these harried parents will be granted relief as well....
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The trouble with vertically-integrated curricula
Guest blog by Rod Clifton, SQE Honorary Patron and professor of education at the University of Manitoba
Educators generally think of curricula as being designed from a theoretical perspective. In the past, two basic perspectives were taught in faculties of education, vertically- and horizontally-organized curricula, but unfortunately the courses are increasingly rare or watered down so as to be unrecognizable.
Nevertheless, there are still many classical books that teachers and student teachers can use to learn about designing curricula to improve student learning. Books like The Systematic Design of Instruction by Walter Dick and Lou Carey and Curriculum Planning: A Handbook for Professionals by David Pratt provide excellent guidance.
Unfortunately, these textbooks were last published in the mid-1990s.
Curriculum design can be approached in two ways. Curricula can be vertically integrated (students must master the first unit before they can master the second unit and master the second unit before they can master the third unit, etc.) Obviously, high school and college mathematics and physics courses are most often designed this way.
The other approach to curriculum design is horizontal integration (students do not need to master the first unit before then can master the second unit). In fact, they often do not need to master any unit before they can master another unit; each unit is unique, and each often begins at a basic level. Obviously, middle years social studies and physical education courses are most often designed this way.
Recently, Diane Ravitch, the eminent American historian of education, published The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (available from the SQE lending library) in which she is justifiably critical of much of what is going on in American education. Everyone who cares about education in North American should read this book.
Professor Ravitch has two basic arguments that parents, citizens, student teachers, and teachers need to understand if they want schools to improve. Surprisingly, these issues are not that schools have too many tests or that parents have too much choice, which is suggested in the book’s subtitle.
Rather, the two things that need attention according to Professor Ravitch are, first, the orientation of North American curricula, which has shifted from vertical to horizontal even for disciplines that are, by nature, vertical; math and physics, for example. This shift in the design of curricula has resulted in students not getting to the higher levels of understanding that are required in colleges and universities. No wonder so many students flunk out of college and university before they graduate.
The second thing that needs attention, according to Professor Ravitch is teacher education programs. These programs have also changed substantially over the last 30 years, such that their programs are also organized in a horizontal manner. These new teacher education programs are much too simple to be helpful for teachers in real classrooms. This is an extremely serious problem because student teachers become certified teachers who are not very knowledgeable about and skillful in many of the things they need to know and do in order to be effective teachers.
Specifically, student teachers do not know that the horizontally-organized curriculum they have experienced throughout their careers in school is not the only design for curricula. They may think that mathematics and physics, for example, should be organized horizontally even when their own students are not as proficient as students in China and Japan, for example, where the curricula are organized vertically.
In addition, these student teachers are not knowledgeable about or skillful in fairly and reliably assessing their students’ academic performances. In the horizontal curriculum design that is now almost universal, it is not necessary to use reliable ways of assessing students because each unit starts and ends at roughly the same place. The lessons are not very complex, so it is relatively easy to see if the students grasp the point. Frankly, this is why standardized tests, graded essays, and work-sheets, are increasingly discounted in both public schools and teachers’ colleges.
The solution to these problems is very simple.
First, we need a national, or better yet, international curriculum so that children can more easily move from school to school across provincial and national borders without losing too much or being too advanced for their classmates.
Second, we need curricula in elementary and secondary schools that are vertically integrated in virtually all subjects, including history and physical education.
Third, we need meaningful, reliable, and standardized tests to ensure that when students pass from one level to the next, they can actually do the work specified at the previous level and required at the new level.
Finally, we need teacher education programs to become vertically integrated themselves so that their courses build on one another. These redesigned programs would need to ensure that student teachers actually know and practice some of the higher-order thinking and skills that are necessary for effective teaching. In addition, such programs would help prepare student teachers to actually function in schools that are serious about having their students learn the core curriculum at levels that stretch them beyond the basics.
Ravitch thinks that these changes will help improve education in North America. So do I. But, if we are going to do it, and not just talk about improving education, we have a lot of hard work to do.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Baby Einsteins)
Find out how being a baby is like being in love in Paris for the first time after having drunk three double espressos. PS we have Alison Gopnik's book The Philosophical Baby available for borrowing from our lending library.
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Teachers aren’t widgets
The latest addition to our lending library is The Good School: How smart parents get their kids the education they deserve by Peg Tyre. Written in a very chatty (some might say wordy) style, the book caters to parents who have the ability to choose their children's school. The author offers parents some sophisticated ways to assess classrooms and introduces you to research-based information about how to help kids do better in school. The chapters on testing, class size, reading, math, and curriculum are particularly valuable, but the last chapter offers what in my opinion is wrong-headed advice - encouraging parents to keep their kids in sub-standard schools and work to change the schools for the better. The following excerpt (pp. 180-182) provides ammo for parents who receive the crushing retort "But children aren't widgets" when they ask for more efficient and effective practices.
"For the last couple of decades, our schools and many of our children have been kept from their true academic potential by a deforming myth: that all teachers are created equal. Although we freely recognize that there are good and bad doctors, lawyers, engineers, cleaning ladies, and chefs, in the bizarre universe of your child's school, teachers are all uniformly good. Each and every one. Here's what we are supposed to believe: teachers earn a teaching certificate, then enter their profession with sharp skills and an uncanny level of know-how to get the best out of all kinds of kids.
"A group of remarkable education reformers came up with a name for this myth - they call it the widget effect, as in 'Teachers can be treated as interchangeable widgets'. And the implications of the teacher-as-widget idea, reformers argue, have been corrosive and prevented our schools from adapting to the changing educational needs of our country. When kids are not learning enough, the widget myth lets everyone off the hook. How? It works on a few levels.
"First off, the widget myth works for the people who run our schools - superintendents, principals, and assistant principals. It allows them to be detached from what happens in the classroom. Because teachers are supposed to have the same level of skill, there is no need to provide them with regular evaluation that pinpoints their strengths and weaknesses. Principals can deal with the disciplinary problems that get sent to their office, organize the bus schedule, set up an after-school program, or figure out how to communicate with parents of students who speak only Urdu. Principals or assistant principals are under no obligation -- professional or moral - to methodically help teachers improve their practice or to fire bad teachers (which, by the way, is next to impossible under most districts' union-negotiated work rules). Once or twice a year, principals organize teacher development days - teachers get a paid break from teaching, listen to a lecture or attend a workshop, come in to school late and leave early - but very little of that intervention is ever targeted by a teacher's managers to produce better outcomes in students.
"It works for teachers, too, sort of. As I mention above, it allows teachers' unions to press for work protections unknown in other industries. On a school-by-school level, it promotes a kind of superficial collegiality too. In a school where the widget myth prevails, for example, a good teacher could not demand that a colleague do better, even when the evidence that he or she is hurting kids is clear. A second-grade widget won't turn to a first-grade widget and say, 'What the heck did you do last year? Nearly half of the kids you sent me in September aren't reading at grade level!' because teachers are all widgets and failure to get kids to progress rests with all teachers, not just the ones who can't deliver good instruction. At a school that promotes the widget myth, the prevailing thinking in the teachers' lounge is, 'I'm okay. You're okay. It's the kids who, for a variety of reasons, just aren't learning.'
"The widget myth also keeps parents from asking important questions about their children's education. If our teachers are widgets, then they are all supposed to have the same level of skills. That means any teacher can teach anything. And yet we watch with unease as this plays out in our children's schools. You drop your daughter off on the first day of fourth grade and, surprisingly, you find that last year's first-grade reading specialist is her lead teacher. Ask her what training she got for the new job and, more often than not, she'll just shrug. It's an awkward, hard-to-interpret moment. Here's what's happening: your daughter's fourth-grade teacher knows she's supposed to pretend that she's a widget.
"In fact, the widget myth allows us all to look at teaching as just a job - like stenographer - and not what it really is, a wonderful combination of a gift and a craft. It encourages us to see one teacher as about the same as another, to smile tolerantly at those hyper parents who jockey to get their kids in front of one particular teacher or another. when we let these myths affect our relationships to schools, it is our kids who lose out."
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My Blackberry is not working
This video is not at all educational, except maybe you can learn a new word ("dongle"), but it's very funny.
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A “To Do” List for the New Minister of Education
Over the next few months, the new Ontario minister of education will face huge challenges in the wake of Working Families ad campaigns and College of Teacher porno scandals.
So to help the new cabinet minister roll up his or her sleeves and get to work, the Society for Quality Education has come up with a hypothetical “to do” list for the, still unannounced, new minister of education for Ontario:
1. Make sure the faculties of education are actually teaching teachers how to teach during that proposed second year of training (and not making contacts with teen book publishers).
2. Figure out how we are going to pay for all-day kindergarten without affecting the upper grades, especially those kids who just can't bear to leave their beloved school and hang around for a fifth year of high school.
3. Clean up the Ontario College of Teachers disciplinary committees.
4. Get real data on how much private tutoring is actually boosting EQAO test results without having to put that scarlet "P" on Grade three marks.
5. Figure out how to placate the teachers’ federations this time next year when their contracts expire at the end of August.
The Society wishes our new minister good luck!
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