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SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Teachers: First, do no harm
GUEST BLOG BY JOHN BACHMANN, SQE DIRECTOR
John wrote the following piece in response an editorial in the Globe and Mail that recommended the introduction of merit pay for teachers.
While, in theory, merit pay for teachers would be a good thing, in practice it could create more problems than it solves.
What metrics do you use to determine that one teacher’s performance is better than another? You can’t use currently available test scores like the EQAO data in Ontario because it’s impossible to determine how much a particular teacher contributes to those scores since we don’t know the levels the students are at when they enter that teacher’s class.
In order to provide “value-added” data that would allow us to determine how much students progressed in a given year with a teacher you would need to administer cost- and time-effective testing every year and implement a universal student number system, preferably country-wide, to make it possible to include students that transfer in from other schools in Canada.
Given that the teacher unions, school board administrations and faculties of education are openly hostile to the current frequency of testing, trying to introduce more in the near future sounds like an exercise in futility. As for universal student numbers, the track record for similar government- led IT initiatives (think eHealth in Ontario) is not good.
Also, while the testing would provide useful data, so many other factors contribute to what makes a “good” teacher, e.g. after school mentoring or coaching, that a true evaluation quickly becomes very subjective.
While merit pay for teachers may be a non-starter for the moment, the studies about the determinants of student success do provide us with an opportunity for short-term action. The same studies that emphasize the importance of good teaching often point out the damaging effects of poor teaching. They show that it is not unusual for a student to take three years to recover from one year of incompetent teaching. And yet, it is still extremely difficult to fire a bad teacher.
Two years ago, a friend told me that his wife would be accompanying her grandson to the opening day of school to make sure that he did not end up in Ms. X’s class. Over a number of years this teacher’s incompetence had become well-known in the neighbourhood and my friend’s wife’s was not alone at the principal’s office. Pity the poor kids whose parents didn’t have the time or energy to lobby on their behalf!
Yes, teacher unions need to protect the rights of their members, but if the process of removing teachers who are negatively impacting their students is so onerous and expensive that most school administrators limit their actions to attempting to transfer them to another school, something is very wrong.
The blame for this situation does not reside solely with the unions. The evaluation process needs to change and the skills of school administrators using it need to be upgraded. They might find it distasteful, but when it comes to staff evaluations these administrators need to act more like managers and less like colleagues and “lead educators”.
They need to advise incompetent teachers that their performance is unacceptable, provide remediation assistance, and finally, if performance does not improve, terminate the employee. Of course, letters to the employee and their union must document every step.
But two things are needed for this process to work effectively. Firstly, administrators need a good evaluation tool and be trained to use it. Secondly, teacher unions need to moderate their strong opposition to every potential termination.
The evaluation tool must allow administrators to do objective evaluations quickly and fairly. In the past Ontario’s education system has resisted the development of such an instrument in devious ways. Several years ago I sat on the advisory panel for what the unions quickly labelled the “Teacher Testing” program. The end result of this exercise was a multi-page teacher evaluation form with 161 evaluation criteria. The non-educators on the panel warned that this instrument was so cumbersome that it would be useless in the schools. A year later I asked a principal if he was using the new form. He laughed.
It’s time that those running our public schools, and that includes the unions, realize that the process of shuffling incompetent teachers between schools and hurting countless students is only different in degree from what the Catholic Church hierarchy did for decades with “problem” priests who moved from parish to parish. The Church has owned up to its scandal and begun to act. Can our school system do the same?
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Help is on the way
Although the spotlight is currently on Ontario's declining math scores, in fact its language and science scores are declining as well, and grassroots efforts to address the language problem are also underway.
Click here for information about a free seminar being given by Remediation Plus, a company that remediates struggling readers. The seminar will take place on Wednesday, February 5, from 6:30 pm until 8:00 pm, at 101 College Street, Toronto. Space is limited, and at press time there were 47 tickets left.
The Community Reading Project (sponsored by SQE) is offering free reading clinics on Monday nights, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm, in the Royal Canadian Legion, 1083 Pape Avenue (at O'Connor). This clinic is for struggling grade 3-8 readers and offers one-on-one help to identify missing reading skills and provide exercises to develop them.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Can your child blend and segment?
GUEST BLOG BY TOM BEREND, SQE DIRECTOR
Reading depends on a set of basic skills, and this blog post looks at one of them. Keep reading if you know a child in middle school who struggles with reading, writing, or spelling.
Along with some colleagues, I am running a pop-up school for grade 7 and grade 8 kids with severe reading deficits - a pilot for a specialized charter school. I previously described our project on the SQE blog at /index.php/blog/read/ask-yourself-this-question-why-arent-public-schools-doing-this-themselves.
Most grade-8 students come to us reading at grade-3 level or less. You would think such poor reading would be evident, but often the parents don't realize how serious the problem is.
These kids DO read - they have learned to 'read' with memorized words, guessing from context, and using first-and-last-letters. It isn't magic - the 100 most common words make up half of all written materials, and these are smart kids who have memorized thousands of words. But memorizing and guessing isn't real reading, and they start to fail in grade 4.
These kids are also masters at hiding their reading problem. They read graphic novels, where the context helps understand the story. Or they simply avoid reading. They carry around books that they have no hope of understanding. They excuse themselves and hide in the washroom when the classroom takes turns reading aloud
Can your child read? DO NOT ask him or her to read a passage from a book - one or two good guesses and your child will fool you. You have to test the components of reading, skill-by-skill. We will now show you a test for one of the most basic, most important skills.
Kids with severe reading deficits are usually missing the skill to sound out words. This is not a developmental disability, it is merely a technique that needs to be learned. We use a simple WordSpinner to assess and drill very basic sounding-out skills: /stairway/wordspinner/wordspinner.php.
Click on a letter in each group to form a 3-letter word, and you will immediately understand how to operate it. Now click away, and ask your child to read the words you spin out. Start by spinning the first letter (bat, fat, cat, rat), then spin the last letter (rat, rag, ran, rap), and then finally spin the vowels (rap, rip, rep).
Don't worry whether the words you create are 'real', because they will eventually show up in reading anyway. You should intentionally create non-words, they are like proper names and can't be memorized or guessed. It is an easy version of asking your child to read the credits on a movie poster (which you should also try). If your child can't read 'san', then 'Sandra Bullock' isn't going to happen either.
Most students know their consonants but will struggle when you spin vowels. 'E' and 'u' seem to be the hardest. We had a student who read 'bag', 'big', 'bog', and 'bug', but was clueless when 'beg' came up even when we ran them in exactly that sequence with lots of prompting about the /ӗ/ sound.
Then we test segmenting, the skill to hear 'bat' and break out the sounds /b/ /ӑ/ /t/. We call out words, and ask the student to 'write' them with the WordSpinner, like 'bat', 'rig', and 'hum'. And of course we call out nonsense words too. Spelling weakness is usually obvious for a child with a severe reading deficit. Memorized words usually work only one way: the child can recognize 'bat' on the page but cannot pull that spelling from memory.
Do not accept ANY hesitations or small errors, especially from an older child. Most readers have mastered this level of blending and segmenting by grade 1. By middle school this is a hair-on-fire emergency. And remember that we are only testing the first and simplest technical skill that might be holding your child back.
Sit down with your child and try the spinner out Or try it with your grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Pass this on to your neighbours and friends. Bring it to a party, family dinner, or church group. Post it on Facebook. If you coach a sport, try it on the team members. It is fun, only takes a few seconds, and can save a smart kid from a lifetime of struggling with impaired reading.
Finally, what should you do if you find your child has a problem? You need to get knowledgeable help. Your child won't 'grow out of it'. If you can't afford competent tutoring, then you need to learn how to help your child yourself.
The WordSpinner is a nice practice tool, but not so great for teaching blending and segmenting. We have some better tools for that. And we also have more advanced spinners that drill consonant clusters and vowel digraphs, and drills for morphology.
If there's enough interest, we can run free clinics in the Toronto area, or free Internet seminars to help you use them. Interested? Leave a comment below, or contact me privately at [email protected].
If you want to be kept in the loop with updates about this project, including notification when new tools are released, you can sign up here: /index.php/subscribe.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Sunday at the Movies (Right to Work)
Given that Ontario PC leader Tim Hudak is promising right-to-work legislation for Ontario if elected, I thought our faithful readers might be interested in this discussion about how Michigan's recent right-to-work legislation is playing out with the teachers' unions there. Apologies for the poor technical quality of the video, but it's worth putting up with for the insight that right-to-work legislation is not as easy as it looks (and of course it doesn't even look easy).
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
If winter comes can spring be far behind?
In a surprise move, the Ontario government has extended its 30% tuition subsidy to students who enroll in the province's private career colleges. more There are hundreds of these colleges in Ontario (here's a list of those registered with Career Colleges Ontario).
The rationale seems to be that it doesn't matter whether an institution is public or private so long as it is doing a decent job of educating the students. It may be too obvious to mention, but this rationale applies to education at all levels. H/T DW
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Math that doesn’t make sense
Click here for a column by the Vancouver parent who started the BC petition to reinstate math fundamentals in the curriculum. H/T JD And here for a column about the Edmonton parent who started the Alberta petition. H/T AS
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
And the trend continues…....
GUEST BLOG BY BARRY KAVANAGH
After spending 17 years working in the engineering fields of highway construction, electrical power generation and distribution, municipal services design and construction, I joined the new faculty (second person hired), in 1969, of an Ontario college in their Civil/Resources Engineering Technology programs.
When I was preparing my first final exam for surveying (my specialty), I realized that surveying was a first year subject in both the new 3-year Civil Engineering Technology college program and in the existing 4-year Civil Engineering university programs. Accordingly, I decided that the exams should be similar and used one or two questions from my own saved surveying exam from U of T engineering (many years before). The exam results showed that the questions from the old U of T engineering exam were not too difficult or inappropriate in any way for these well-prepared first-year college students. The class average was 75 percent – which (as a new teacher) I worried was a bit too high.
Over the next 27 years, I taught at least one first-semester surveying class each year and continued to use the same appropriate level of surveying exam questions. The class average fell steadily every year from 75 percent in 1969 to 56 percent in 1995. I retired in the spring of 1996 and am still trying to get over the shock and dismay of watching the destruction of a fine education system - all taking place during my teaching career.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Multiplying Potential
Here's a TVO clip that presents the various points of view about Ontario elementary math education. In it, John Mighton refers to an important article in the magazine of the American Mathematical Society, and it is indeed worth reading, as it will open your eyes to the potential of every single child to learn math to a very high level.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
Brave new world
If you are a ditch-digger or garbage-truck driver, your job is likely going to be safe for a while yet. But many other low-level jobs are on the way out, as this Economist article explains. The author calls for changes to education, including some that I don't personally agree with, but the bottom line is that the only hope for displaced workers is re-education of some kind.
SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT
One must be cruel only to be kind
Concern about children's self-esteem is all the rage these days - we do our best to protect kids from feeling bad about themselves by avoiding rankings and even comparisons, along with lavish praise for unlavish work. The idea is of course that we are being kind to children and making them feel happy and valued. But what if this treatment is actually having the opposite effect?
This article cites recent research suggesting that moderate stress is in fact good for kids, while praise tends to diminish their self-esteem. The article lists the following eight new principles.
- 1. Constructive, even painful, feedback helps students improve
- 2. Drill and memorization improve performance
- 3. Failure increases motivation
- 4. The most effective teachers are strict
- 5. Creativity is learned
- 6. Grit is more important than talent
- 7. Praise makes you weak
- 8. Stress makes you strong
Quoting from the article:
"Admittedly, individually, these are forbidding precepts: cold, unyielding, and kind of scary. But collectively, they convey something very different: confidence. At their core is the belief, the faith really, in stdudents' ability to do better .There is something to be said about a teacher who is demanding and tough not because he thinks students will never learn but because he is absolutely certain that they will."