Collecting Feedback

Something I’ve wondered about education: Why is it that we so infrequently take the time to intentionally seek out feedback about how we’re doing from the parents, students, and communities we serve?

Related question: Does this minimal amount of personal feedback that we choose to gather play a part in our overreliance on standardized test scores, as they therefore become the only source of data available to be examined?

Educational Technology Response

A great response to my recent post about educational technology being behind can be found at nssea.wordpress.com.  Here’s one small excerpt that I found humorous:

“At home, our students are playing Soul Caliber IV on the Wii, and in the classroom we’re giving them multiple choice quizzes with radio buttons, flashcards that could easily have been made on HyperCard, and static cartoons apparently created with the free clipart that came with your word processing program – a decade ago.”

Caring Classroom Communities

I’m not much of a stat tracker when it comes to this blog, but I can’t help but notice that recently I’m seeing a major spike in hits for this May 2007 post about building a classroom community.  I find that extremely encouraging — that people, presumably teachers getting ready to start a new school year sometime in the next month, are searching around Google for ideas on how to make their classrooms into warm, caring places.

Here are a few ideas, some of which I’ve expounded on before (in which case a link is provided), on how to build a caring class community:

1.  Hold daily class meetings.  Use this time to give your students time to share about their lives, play team-building games, have discussions about issues that arise in your classroom, compliment each other, say the pledge of allegiance, sing songs… whatever!  Just do something to build a sense of “us” and give your students some ownership and voice in your classroom.

2.  If you are going to use praise, praise effort instead of talent.  I personally make a BIG deal about two things each fall: the first student that puts forth a ton of effort on an assignment, and the first student that I see doing something kind for another student.  I want to show the students right away that I value those two traits. 

3.  Focus on the intrinsic, and drop the extrinsic rewards and punishments.  Nothing will spoil a classroom community faster than writing names on the board, using a divisive and competitive “table tallies” reward system, or lobbing threats at your students.

4.  Be real.  Your fake, high-pitched voice isn’t going to last all year, and the kids know it.  If you want to create a caring classroom community, you have to actually care about the students.  If you don’t, don’t bother trying to devise new tricks to mask this fact.  Consider switching to a field where you work with inanimate objects instead.

5.  Don’t make assumptions.  You can’t assume that your students will automatically know how to show the kindness you are promoting.  Use role-play.  Taking 15 minutes to discuss what may seem like basic or obvious scenarios is not a waste.  “What should we do if a classmate drops a tub of markers all over the floor?”  “What should we do if someone gets hurt or sick at recess?”  “What should we do if two people want the same cool new book off our classroom bookshelf?”  “What should you do if something good happens to someone else (and not to you personally)?”  “Does being first in line really matter?”

Best wishes as you work to make your classroom a place where children learn kindness as well as academics.

The Deprofessionalization of Teaching

I’ve ranted before about high-stakes testing and the negative consequences it has on the education of children, but a post I read online recently in a teacher forum has taken my concerns to a whole new level.

A teacher was talking about how much she likes “THE TEST” that my state gives each fall.  Why?  Because with all of the ”review packets” this teacher was planning to jam into a massive cram session during the first month-and-a-half of school, fall lesson planning “is easy.”  She gleefully reported that she was already all set for the first couple of months of school.

So there it is: Teaching has officially been deprofessionalized.

Let me make something clear for any teacher who stumbles across this page:

YOU CANNOT KNOW WHAT YOU WILL NEED TO TEACH YOUR STUDENTS TWO MONTHS IN ADVANCE. 

Let that sink in for a moment.  Read it again.

Real teaching involves meeting students where they are at and teaching in their zone of proximal development.  Real teaching adapts and adjusts based on reflections of what’s already transpired in lessons past.  Real teaching means that WHAT YOU WILL TEACH TOMORROW DEPENDS UPON WHAT HAPPENS TODAY.

If you aren’t teaching like that, you aren’t a professional.  If your district doesn’t allow you to teach like that (perhaps by mandating the use of scripted lessons or devising strict pacing plans that must be followed), then your entire district is unprofessional.  If that’s what we want “teachers” to do — all follow the same script at the same pace down the same list of standards — why not just film a really charismatic presenter as she lectures about these various standards, and then show the videos to every child in America?  It’d have the same effect and be a whole lot cheaper.

Or we could get back to being professionals again, and we could base our teaching on the actual students that we serve.

Educational Technology, Part 2

My previous post asked the question, “Why is educational technology so far behind?”  Through the comments and emails I’ve received, it turns out that although there’s not an Amazon-like behemoth of educational sites just yet, perhaps there are some smaller, less-well-known sites out there that are on the cutting edge of doing just what I had described.

Jennifer points us to aleks.com which, if we believe its introductory video, claims to learn where a child is at mathematically and then move them forward in their zone of proximal development.

I am also pleased to see that the state of California has started an Open Source Textbook Project where teachers can collaboratively use wikis to write future textbooks.  The project doesn’t go as far as I’d like — the goal is still to publish textbooks, but just more cheaply — but it is a great start at using some of the incredible cognitive surplus that is out there waiting to be tapped into.

In the comments of the previous post, Rebecca Haden notes, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, ”An Amazon-esque educational experience could do away with schools as we know them — that is, schools with layer upon layer of expensive admin and legislation and New Programs, each hailed with a change of buzzwords and a new T-shirt for everyone.  Who’s going to back that?”  Certainly many people who make money from this existing setup won’t back it, but I’m guessing your typical taxpayer — who personally is struggling financially right about now — is going to get more vocal in demanding that it happen sooner rather than later. 

Educational technology is lagging behind other sectors, but I can’t help but wonder if we may be on the verge of a really transformative era that redefines the way we educate our populace.

Why Is Educational Technology So Far Behind?

Money obviously commands more attention that children do.  At least that’s certainly what it looks like as we take a stroll around the Internet.

When I go to Amazon.com, the site knows me.  It anticipates my future tastes and purchases based on purchases I’ve made in the past and behaviors of other similar customers Amazon has encountered.  Similarly, ITunes makes some pretty good guesses as to what I want to hear next by gleaning information from my past listening habits.

So why is there no academic site out there that offers a comprehensive K-12 math (or earth science, or spanish, or whatever) program that quickly learns where kids are at and immediately begins to take them through a progression of learning based on their zone of proximal development?  Why are we still downloading worksheets from EdHelper or playing that infernal Math Baseball on Funbrain or watching videos on BrainPop instead of having a website that nails down, over time, that Johnny is a visual learner who is strong on the basic math facts but struggles with multi-step story problems and logic problems, and then works to cure it through targeted (visual!) practice? 

Why, in a web 2.0 world for consumers, does the internet still look like a web 1.0 brochure in terms of academic opportunities for kids?

Academic Rigor: How Hard Is Too Hard?

An email blast was sent out to a bunch of us educational bloggers from the nice folks over at www.2mminutes.com, letting us know that they’ve got a new challenge out there entitled, “Are You Smarter Than a Third-World 10th Grader?“  That link allows you to try your hand at India’s 10th grade exams in a variety of subjects, the idea being — of course — that most of us will struggle greatly with these tests.  The same types of challenges have been offered to American adults (and specifically Congressmen) with U.S. exams, typically with similarly dismal results.

So, if successful adults can’t pass tests being given to high school students — both here and overseas — what are we to make of all of this?  That the world is getting more competitive and our kids need to be smarter than previous generations are?  That most of what people are taught is forgotten, so we should focus on creating logical thinkers and excellent searchers who will be able to find whatever specific information they need in a hurry?  That much of what passes as academic “rigor” is really just worthless stuff that no one needs to know?

The big new thing here in Michigan is that all high school students must pass Algebra 2 to graduate.  There are 50 mandatory benchmarks and 13 recommended benchmarks in Algebra 2 here in Michigan.  As an example, one of these 63 benchmarks reads: “Use special values of the inverse trigonometric equations to solve trigonometric equations over specific intervals (e.g. 2 sin x - 1 = 0 for 0 < x < 2 pi).” 

I think we’re off track here.  In our push to be competitive globally, we’ve focused on rigor to the point where we’ve lost track of facilitating actual learning.  I don’t believe that every child is Michigan is truly capable of understanding special values of the inverse trigonometric equations.  Nor do I believe that there is any value in trying to force every student to learn that; doing so will just force students to try to memorize things without understanding them, which is downright harmful.

Since when did we think that every child in America should be college-bound and be taking AP classes, anyway?

Everyday Math and “Spiraling”

Everyday Math (aka Chicago Math), a K-6 math program endured by over 2.8 million children, is set up based on a belief in something that they call “spiraling.”  Wikipedia describes this process well: “Mastery of a strand is not required to move on to concepts of another strand… The key principle in regards to spiraling and distributed practice is that mastery and fluency in basic skills are goals that should be achieved long after they are first introduced.”

One part of this concept makes sense — kids need to return to topics with some frequency throughout the school year.  The problem with spiraling the way Everyday Math does it is that kids never get a chance to feel successful as mathematicians.  Just as they’re working toward figuring some concept out, the Everyday Math series they’re using has moved on to something else.  

It strikes me that spiraling is the epitome of the “mile wide, one inch deep” type of teaching we’ve fallen into here in the United States.  To anyone who is considering acquiring Everyday Math: don’t!  If you’re stuck using it, try grouping the similar material together into units of study that allow students to delve deeper into concepts before moving on.  Doing this (and supplementing it with outside resources) enabled me to boost students’ morale much higher than when I solely used Everyday Math as it was designed.

Conspiracy Theories and Public Education

I lurk at a wide variety of education-related forums dealing with everything from elementary education to education policy to homeschooling, and one disturbing trend I find is this: a sizable minority of the population on these forums believes some pretty ugly conspiracy theories about public education in the United States.  Perhaps you’ve heard these assertions before:

• The educational system wants to turn out unthinking robots who will work as corporate slaves
• Teachers want to inculcate a morally relativistic outlook into the next generation
• All public schools care about is getting attendance numbers up so they get more tax money

…and so on.

But then, as I see similarly wild conspiracy theories about the U.S. government (Did you know we never really landed on the moon, and they’re covering up evidence of alien visits to Earth?), I’ve come to realize that people, in general, don’t trust large organizations.  (WalMart is evil!  Google is trying to hijack your health information!)

That’s where we as individual teachers come in.  More than ever, our job includes helping families understand that their child will be taught by us — Ms. Mercer, Mr. Pullen, Mr. Fisch — not some mysterious entity that can’t be trusted.  On top of that, we need to encourage parents to come in and be a part of the school community as well, through volunteering, open houses, information nights, and by generally maintaining an open-door policy toward guests.

Nowadays, it seems we can’t just assume that everyone will know that we are real people who genuinely care about each and every student.

Everything Lasts Too Long

I’m convinced that human beings learn more in the first few minutes of something (no matter what that “thing” happens to be) than at any other time.

As I sat in church listening to a half-hour sermon last Sunday, I got the gist of it in three minutes.  I learn more from a five-minute scan of my subscribed feeds — because the posts are concise and on a variety of topics – than I do in an hour of a typical one-topic workshop.  (For example, Monday’s post over at The Big Picture contained just six sentences and 10 heart-rending photographs and made more of an impact on me than a massive tome about famine in Ethiopia ever could have.)

This tendency seems to be even more prevalent among children.  The first math example I share with the students leads to more learning than the fifth example.  The first peer editor finds more meaningful edits than the second one, the first chapter in today’s read-aloud generates more discussion than the third, and the first round of Math Mayhem is way more exciting than the sixth.

So what should we do in light of all this?  I believe a key to successful teaching is to work to create more firsts.  Preschool teachers know that you can’t schedule anything to last for more than about 15 minutes (if you’re lucky!); I believe that all of us who teach, at all grade levels, should take the same approach.  Just because our older students might manage to stay seated throughout a 45-minute lecture (or writing time, or read-aloud, or math lesson) on one topic doesn’t mean they are learning much during the latter two-thirds of that time. 

On a related note, let’s also make sure our students learn the value of concise clarity.  A five-page essay is not necessarily better than a one-page essay; the days of more words being better, if it ever existed, has certainly passed.  To teachers of older grades: Start giving out more assignments with maximum lengths (no more than 200 words!) and fewer with minimum lengths (five pages, double spaced).

And to my pastor: would you ever consider trying two six-to-eight minute mini-sermons instead?