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SQE NEWSLETTER
Vol. 23, No. 3, June 2014
ISSN-1201-215 |
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Now that we are sending out a weekly blog digest (you ARE reading our digest, aren't you?), there is really no need to continue our newsletter. So, after almost 25 years, our newsletter is being discontinued.
This does not mean we are ceasing our operations - quite the contrary! Now, more than ever, our voice is needed to speak for the voiceless - those children who are struggling in school but whose parents are unable to intercede on their behalf.
In case you haven't heard the good news, SQE has attracted a $25,000 matching grant. This means that our donor will match any amount that we can raise from our supporters up to the amount of $25,000. We have been thrilled by your response - so far, we've received just over $19,000. If you haven't already, please help us reach our goal. Remember, we can give you a tax receipt and, combined with the matching grant, it means that your donation is worth four times its cost to you. Click here for donation information.
Thanks for all your support over the years.
Malkin Dare |
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A veteran of the school wars herself, with the scars to prove it, Malkin Dare has had lots of experience dealing with education problems. If you want some been-there-done-that advice, give Malkin a call at 519-884-3166 or e-mail her at [email protected].
Question
I am three months pregnant, and of course I am following all of the medical advice about having a healthy baby - eating carefully, avoiding liquor and drugs, exercising moderately, not smoking, etc. This part is easy, as the experts are unanimous about what to do when you're pregnant. However, the advice is extremely contradictory when it comes to what I should be doing to properly prepare my baby for school. What advice do you have for me?
Answer
Actually, the mainstream research is very clear about the education side of things as well, but you wouldn't know it because of all the extraneous noise being made by a few know-nothing educators. Here are five basic principles to follow.
1. Talk to your baby as much as possible, and use your normal vocabulary. When your baby begins to be capable of holding up his or her side of the conversation, make sure you listen to what he or she is saying and respond to it. Interactive conversations are very important.
2. Expose your baby to as many new experiences and new information as possible. Your goal should be to build your baby's vocabulary and fund of general knowledge.
3. Expose your baby to a second (and even third) language if possible. The ideal situation would have your baby conversing with a native speaker in one language and a native speaker in another language.
4. Start teaching your baby basic phonics and arithmetic at an early age, perhaps as young as three, making sure that the sessions are short and enjoyable. Your goal should be to give your baby mastery of reading, writing, and phonics by the time he or she starts school.
5. Read to your baby, using books that are near the edge of his capacity to understand, and continue this practice until he or she no longer wishes to be read to. Involve your child in the story.
If you follow these five principles, I can pretty much guarantee you that your child will do well in school and beyond.
Regards, Aunt Malkin
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GUEST EDITORIAL BY DVOIRA JANOVSKY
John Ford and Dennis Bolton were my favourite high school teachers - you really could say I worshipped them. Mr. Ford taught vocal music and Mr. Bolton taught English. They were two marvellous teachers - masters of their subjects and passionate about them. And each had the ability to teach skills and inspire performance. I was fortunate enough to graduate in 1980, when many teachers still taught and had high standards.
I didn't actually go to university until my early 30's. After getting an English specialist degree, I went on and got a B.Ed at the University of Toronto's faculty of (mis)education. That year was an absolute joke. I kept wondering when they were actually going to teach us HOW to teach. It was a constructivist nightmare, although I didn't know that term at the time. After graduation, I began teaching in a self-contained special education class in a very economically depressed area of East York. This school was immersed in the Australian "First Steps" literacy program. Right away, I could see that this program, despite all its checklists, activities, and so on, didn't actually teach anything. I started calling my students "whole language victims". My mother dug up an old phonics textbook and I started to use it with some of my students. This was the beginning of my real education.
The first real critique of progressivist education I read was The Literate Elite by Ruth Weir and Ilona Matthews. [Editor's note: Ruth Weir was one of OQE/SQE's founding members.] Dr. Weir was a family friend and long-time Communist party member. She clearly saw what most members of the left do not - that teaching skills and knowledge does not oppress children, working-class or otherwise, but liberates them. I would describe my own politics as pretty much centrist, so I find it amusing when I raise eyebrows by expressing education views that some of my colleagues consider right-wing.
Right now, I teach high school English in Vernon, BC. This year, my principal got a small grant, and I'm using Anita Archer's REWARDS program with a handful of grade 8 students. I'm also on the provincial development team that writes the Grade 7 Foundation Skills Reading Assessment test, similar to the EQAO. Naturally, my union hates the FSAs, which bothers me not one bit.
I have spent most of my career learning more about instruction, and reading instruction in particular. After moving to BC, I luckily happened on Rudolph Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read. From there, I started googling and researching until somehow I ended up on the Direct Instruction listserv out of Oregon. The people there were a wealth of information, leading me to Siegfried Engelmann's terrific programs, Anita Archer, Dan Willingham, etc. I'm not sure how I stumbled upon SQE, but I'm thrilled I did and more than happy to support it.
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 Progressively Worse: The burden of bad ideas in British Schools. Robert Peal.
This first part of this book recounts the history of progressive education in England, showing that it is a juggernaut that mercilessly tramples everything in its path - regardless of the accumulating evidence that it is deeply flawed. The second half of the book refutes today's trendy teaching methods and materials, but lots of other authors (see, for example, the book review below) have already done this and nothing has changed. The bottom line is that as long as education reforms are entrusted to the educators already in charge, nothing will change. Writing about England's poor results on international comparisons of student achievement, the author notes:
Such findings cannot be disentangled from the education establishment's longstanding attachment to progressive education. For decades, these ideas have dictated how our teachers teach and how our schools are run. In 1997, there was an early promise that David Blunkett would overturn them, but rhetorical commitment soon foundered in the face of political reality. By 2000, government agencies were actively promoting these orthodoxies. Far from transforming Britain's schools, the government's indiscriminate approach to reform poured billions of pounds into propping up the very ideas that had already been causing schools to fail.
 Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn. John Hattie and Gregory Yates.
John Hattie's 2009 book, Visible Learning, presented the biggest-ever collection into what actually works in improving children's learning in schools. With this book, Dr. Hattie partnered with cognitive psychologist Gregory Yates to build on the original data and show how its underlying ideas and the cutting edge of cognitive science can and should inform classroom teaching. The book basically destroys the theoretical underpinnings of child-centred learning, showing that it modern trends have almost no research evidence to justify them. The excerpt (p. 67-68) discusses the role of praise.
Within educational circles, there has been much misinformation about the psychology of praise. To some extent this notion was mixed up with Skinnerian psychology, behavioural modification, and the notion (which is incorrect) that praise has more powerful effects than punishment. But the notion was also mixed up with the self-esteem movement. Two readily identified fallacies are that (a) people learn more when they receive praise, and (b) people need continual praise to establish and maintain feelings of self-worth. Despite thousands of projects, neither statement has any serious support....
We have witnessed parents and teachers attempt to operate on the principle that they have to issue praise every time the child or student does something of which they approve. Any such continuous praise violates one of the well-entrenched canons of behavioural psychology: that intermittent and unpredictable reinforcement produces strong and persistent habits, whereas constant and predictable reinforcement leads you to stop efforts once reinforcement is no longer present. Seriously, if we want to produce people who lack persistence and self-control, who are accustomed to immediate gratification as their default position, then rewarding them on every single opportunity is one known technique.
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| And Now For Something Completely Different |
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Starfall is an excellent site for parents to use as a supplement when teaching their young children to read using systematic phonics.
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