Indexed!

Time for something fun: Tomorrow a brand-new book, Indexed, becomes available for sale.  If you haven’t been following Jessica Hagy’s work over at indexed.blogspot.com, you really should check it out.  Somehow she repeatedly manages to provide insights into every imaginable aspect of life in just a simple graph.

For example, here’s one that pertains to education/youth.  Jessica entitled it Note to Helicopters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll let these two speak for themselves:

Grand Rapids Students: Wear Uniforms Until You Succeed!

Welcome yet again to the Grand Rapids Public Schools, where the beatings will continue until morale improves.  When we left off, you will recall, Superintendent Bernard Taylor was planning to make all of the high school teachers in the district reapply for their jobs, and the teachers’ union responded by giving Dr. Taylor a vote of no confidence.

Having blamed the teachers, it’s time to turn our attention to the students; perhaps we can find a way to make them suffer for not making Adequate Yearly Progress.

From MSNBC: “A student advisory council recommended that middle- and high school students be required to wear uniforms until their school meets certain standards tied to grades, attendance and suspension rates.”

OK, to everyone involved in this decision, listen clearly: Having students wear uniforms would be a matter that intelligent people could have differing opinions on.  But using uniforms as punishments to try to get students to perform better in school absolutely will not work.

As an insightful commenter stated in an earlier post of mine: “It’s impossible to successfully legislate education if you keep thinking in the paradigm of student or teacher accountability.”  That is the core problem that we’re seeing here in Grand Rapids.  The answer to every problem is to ratchet the accountability and harshness levels up a few more notches.

To school administrators everywhere and to Grand Rapids officials in particular: Positive, lasting change can only come from leadership that inspires rather than punishes.

Teaching For Depth vs. Breadth

Here’s an interesting video that confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time: we are teaching too much stuff, and we’re not teaching it deeply enough.  I recommend watching from the three-minute mark to the eight-minute mark in particular; that segment includes the most striking example in the video.

Robert Frank speaking at Google:

Teaching Without Telling

Lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that throughout my teaching career, my definition of “teaching” has been a whole lot closer to “telling” than “causing learning to occur.” 

We’ve known for a long time that students learn best when they are doing things through multiple modalities, particularly when they are speaking and actively doing the task to be learned.  One source asserts that “students retain 10 percent of what they read, 26 percent of what they hear, 30 percent of what they see, 50 percent of what they hear and see, 70 percent of what they say, and 90 percent of what they say and do.”  I’m not looking to squabble over those exact percentages, because other sources come up with somewhat different numbers, but the key point remains: students need to be speaking and doing more than listening and watching.

Then I started reading Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which I highly recommend.  They talked about how retention is increased dramatically when a message is made “sticky” — and one great way to do this is to make the subject matter to be learned a mystery.  Let me explain:

Let’s say you wanted to teach your students about photosynthesis.  It would be all too easy to begin by saying something like this: “Today we’re going to learn how plants use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide to make their own food.  This process is called photosynthesis and it begins when…”

What a mistake!  First of all, since you’re only telling this to your students, a low percentage of this information will be retained.  Second, because you’ve spolied the entire element of surprise, you’ve made an amazing topic sound absolutely lifeless.

Imagine having students actually observe plant growth, then starting a conversation by creating a mystery: “How can plants survive and grow without eating?  If you and I went even a few days without food, we would feel very sick; if we went weeks without food, we would die.  Why don’t plants die like we would?”  Then let the students do most of the talking.

Once I’ve written this, it seems so obvious to do things in this type of manner, but for some reason the teaching style most of us seem to regress toward is one of mere telling.  Even as I work on it, I also urge you to make ‘teaching without telling’ something you try to do more consistently.

The Amazon link to Made to Stick is here.

RSS Feeds

For those of you who visit a variety of blogs and haven’t paid attention to the  icon most of us have somewhere on our sites, I point you to Google Reader.  Instead of having to come visit this blog periodically to see what new posts I may have written, you can just subscribe to this blog as well as all your other favorites.  Then, every time I (or your other favorite bloggers) post something new, you’ll see that post on your Google Reader page without you ever needing to come here.

Subscribing using these RSS feeds is basically like having an email inbox where all of your favorite blog writers’ posts are collected.  It’s definitely a time-saver that you may wish to consider.

Grand Rapids Teachers Union Responds

Nine days ago, I wrote about how the Superintendent of Grand Rapids (Michigan) Public School System, Bernard Taylor, had told all of the city’s high school teachers that they would need to reapply for their jobs next year.  Today, the saga continues.

To quote from woodtv.com: “The legislative body of the Grand Rapids teachers’ union has taken a vote of “no confidence” in GRPS Superintendent Dr. Bernard Taylor, Union President Paul Helder announced at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.

A statement read by Helder claims Taylor, among other things, has proposed programs that violate employee contracts. That claim likely refers to [his] plan to have teachers at the city’s four traditional high schools reapply for their jobs and allow principals to select teachers for their schools.

The superintendent has said the plans are legal under the contract.”

Here’s the thing, Dr. Taylor: what is legal is different than what is ethical, wise, or beneficial. 

My favorite piece of irony is this quote from Dr. Taylor’s biography on the Grand Rapids Public Schools website: “He is committed to the work of our traditional public schools. Dr. Taylor has developed a management philosophy that recognizes the need to establish meaningful relationships, maintain open lines of communication, encourage collaboration between and among internal and external stakeholders, and focus the collective effort of the organization in the best interest of all students.”

I guess if we put some serious spin on this, we could still say Dr. Taylor is living up to that biography.   For example, we’re seeing a lot of collaboration among the teachers in GRPS, now that they’re all united against Taylor’s idiocy.  You could also say that Taylor’s relationships with his staff members are “meaningful” — perhaps not “productive” or even “cordial” — but meaningful nonetheless.

One commenter on my previous post sees Dr. Taylor’s actions as being so bizarre as to even be suspicious.  In case you missed it, a key part of that comment reads, ”However, there’s mounting evidence that, in fact, Taylor is being supported by the Mackinac Center–which gets some of its funding from the DeVos family, who want to privatize education entirely (as if education-for-profit was actually sound educational policy)…and partly funded by ties to a large private insurance company.”

The coming months will be interesting (in a morbid can’t-look-away-from-the-train-wreck sort of way) as it truly appears that Dr. Bernard Taylor has no interest in engaging the teachers of GRPS in any meaningful dialogue. 

Ultimately, as is always the case, the students will be the ones to suffer from this ill-conceived decree.  What a shame.

Flip Flippen: Capturing Kids’ Hearts

As readers of this blog will know, I have frequently written in the past about the importance of building classroom community.  Today I had the chance to listen to Flip Flippen, founder of an excellent Capturing Kids’ Hearts program that reminds teachers that “If you have a child’s heart, you have his head.”  I was happy to see, too, that Flip is emphasizing the importance of praising effort instead of intelligence.

This program, in my opinion, is a welcome addition to the current conversation about what makes certain schools and teachers excel.  In a standards-driven and high-stakes-testing-driven era, I wholeheartedly applaud someone who reminds us that our students are in fact children and youths who need to be loved much more than they need to be tested.

World Math Day

Here’s a fun event I just happened to stumble across: World Math Day.  Students of all ages from around the world are invited to enter a global contest where they can compete against students of similar skill from around the world as they answer a variety of online mental math problems on Wednesday, March 5, 2008.  The organizers’ goal is that a total of more than 50 million math problems will be solved by students around the world on that day!

By the way, if your students enjoy this competition, you should start thinking about getting them involved with the Online Math League contests next fall, since those competitions keep students’ motivation high with three challenging events throughout the year!

Hey Teachers: Reapply For Your Jobs!

In an amazing display of administration vs. teacher insanity, the superintendent of the Grand Rapids (MI) Public Schools, Dr. Bernard Taylor, has just announced that all high school teachers in Grand Rapids will need to reapply for their jobs next year.  The idea is to give principals more of a say in restructuring their staffs to try to help students improve more on our state’s all-powerful MEAP tests.

From the article at mlive.com: “Grand Rapids Education Association President Paul Helder said he doesn’t think the union’s contract will allow ‘principals to select teachers like a football draft.’

‘Dr. Taylor has to realize that he is not back in Kansas City and a right-to-work state where contracts can be ignored if they are inconvenient,’ Helder said. ‘In the end, he’s going to realize that being superintendent isn’t the same as being emperor.’ “

When it comes right down to it, I’m not a rah-rah union type of guy.  But Dr. Taylor needs to realize that treating all of the teachers working in his district like dirt will never lead to the higher test scores and student achievement he covets.

As Helder noted in that same article, “[Taylor's] got to remember the old political adage, that a leader without followers is just a guy taking a walk.”

Math Assessments by Strand

To help with differentiation and pretesting in math, I am looking for 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade math assessments that are laid out by strand and by benchmark.  Something like this:

Fractions pretest: identifying fractional parts –> placing simple fractions on a number line –> adding and subtracting fractions with common denominators –> finding equivalent fractions –> comparing fractions using greater than and less than –> finding fractional parts of large groups –> converting improper fractions into mixed numerals –> etc… 

…where each of those topics is tested separately so that it is easy to distinguish what topics a student needs more work on and which are already mastered.

Does anyone know of anything even remotely close to this?  It doesn’t really matter to me which state or national standards are used for this… anything would be better than nothing.