Archive for the 'Education Practice' Category

Things Thought But Seldom Expressed

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 17, 2008 in Education Practice and Teaching. 3 Comments

Courtesy of this week’s Carnival of Education, a post from an anonymous teacher at a blog called Current Education Issues, which makes for uncomfortable reading. After sitting through an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meeting with 15 people to talk about the a single child, he asks, “Does this make sense?”

Are we spending our tax dollars wisely on someone who will at most, according to her doctors, top-out at the mental level of a seven-year-old?” Meanwhile, her parents are pissed off (I don’t know at what) and are having everybody jump through hoops as an added bonus. I don’t know what they expect, but I do know they’re getting to what amounts to day-care for a special needs child for free.

“So who is going to be the heartless bastard who stands up and asks, ‘Is this wrong?’” he concludes. “I guess it’s just me for now.”

Having sat through several of these kinds of meetings, I can vouch for his accuracy in describing the process. I haven’t seen very much discussion of special education practice, cost or accountability in the edublogs, but I’d like to see more–especially about expectations. In my limited experience, IEPs were a joke. I taught in an inclusion class one year and listened to a special ed supervisor instruct my co-teacher to lower promotional criteria to an absurdly low level to ensure students passed. The entire process seemed geared to avoid lawsuits and actually having to educate children. There are doubtless heroic, committed special education teachers who make a difference. But at its worst, it’s educational hospice care with the bar set no higher than getting kids to the end of the day above ground.

And as this blogger points out, maintaining such low expectations ain’t cheap.

What happened to art and music in my school? Gee, I don’t know. How come my students don’t spend more time on a computer? Gee, I wonder. This one child’s education could buy an art, music, or computer teacher for my entire school. What about the other nine kids just like her in that class, What could they buy? I wish we could afford everything. I wish we could give this little girl what she deserves. I wish my students could get what they deserve. But the math doesn’t work out that way, folks. The “pie” is only so big. I understand equal opportunity, and I’m for it up until the point where it no longer makes any sense. I guess I never will understand taking away from most to benefit one. Apparently, I’m in the minority though.

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Math Meltdown

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 10, 2008 in Education Practice and Teaching. 0 Comments

When it comes to Math education, less is more says Virginia teacher Patrick Welsh in a USA Today opinion piece. Virginia’s Standards of Learning features 64-pages detailing “what math gurus in Richmond think kids should absorb at every step in their 13 years in school.” Still he notes at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Va., where he teaches English, “we have been graduating hundreds of kids who need a calculator to figure out that nine times five is 45.”

One reason for the teacher frustration is that the state’s math gurus have de-emphasized memorization in favor of “conceptual thinking.” The same philosophy has crept into English classes, where “creativity” has been elevated over knowledge of grammar, and into history classes, where knowing historical trends — “the big picture” — has replaced knowing dates of important events. The result is seniors who are not just incapable of multiplication, but also unable to identify the verb in a sentence or come within 100 years of placing the Civil War.

“Kids also are taught the wrong material at the wrong time,” says Welsh, who counsels slowing down and giving kids the time and ability to master basics. “Students are not the only ones who must ‘get’ math. Many elementary school teachers are notoriously weak here.”

Related News: Every California eighth-grader will be tested in algebra — ready or not — under a policy approved Wednesday that could make the state the first in the nation to require an upper-level math class before high school, the L.A. Times reports.

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Right Said Fred

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 9, 2008 in Education Practice and Teaching. 0 Comments

Fred Strine, the veteran Seattle teacher whose Seattle Post-Intelligencer column calling on teachers to, well, teach, set tongues wagging here and over at Joanne Jacobs. He honors us with a visit in the comments section and a correction: He’s not retired, he’s just fed up.

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Cuts Not Cutting It

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 8, 2008 in Education Practice. 0 Comments

The United States Tennis Association is expanding its efforts to encourage high school coaches to adopt “no cut” policies.  “The idea is that students benefit from participating, even if they aren’t top players, and that they will become lifelong players and fans of the sport, EdWeek reports.

Coaches who take part in the program receive gifts, such as caps and a sports-magazine subscription, as well as professional recognition, such as a letter of commendation to their school principals praising them for maintaining a large team. Perhaps most important, they receive access to features such as a new Web site created this year, which allows them to share information through a coach-to-coach online forum and gives them tips on how to run a no-cut team effectively.

Not being cut and playing, of course, are different matters.  Having ridden the pine on a couple of baseball teams as a kid, I’d prefer to have been cut rather than to endure the humiliation of playing only in blowouts.   

 

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Who Is National Certification Worthy?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on July 1, 2008 in Assessment and Testing, Education Practice and Teaching. 0 Comments

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards should consider student-learning gains when deciding which teachers deserve national certification, a team of researchers says in an interesting study reported in Education Week.

Students who are taught by teachers certified by the board outperform students whose teachers lack such certification on standardized tests, according to a study released last month.  Now, researchers from Harvard, Dartmouth and the Los Angeles Unified School District “make a case for combining the current measures with newer, ‘value added’ calculations that take into account the test-score gains that students make in applicants’ classes, or at least lending more weight in the assessment process to the individual tests that link most closely to improved student achievement,” says EdWeek.

For some reason, the teacher-effectiveness debate is broken into two camps, says Thomas J. Kane, a study author and a professor of education and economics at Harvard’s graduate school of education. One side focuses on students’ achievement, and then there’s another side that focuses primarily on measures of teacher practice. We think the reasonable approach is not either, but both.

To its credit, the research was one of 22 research efforts commissioned by NBPTS to gauge the effectiveness of its process. The results are apparently non-binding on NBPTS; they’re not obligated to adopt the value-added recommendation.  But one wonders if the fact that the report is being discussed in EdWeek before it’s release isn’t tantamount to a trial balloon of sorts. 

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On Teaching: Where Jigsaw Misses the Picture

Published by Diana Senechal on June 27, 2008 in Education Practice and Teaching. 2 Comments

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
–Aristotle, Metaphysics, severely misquoted

Imagine yourself at a PD for ESL and ELA teachers. The desks have been arranged in groups of four. You may sit in any group you like, at the outset; but be aware that your grouping will change over the course of the morning.

The workshop leader informs the teachers that they will be participating in a “jigsaw” activity. In this activity, they will be reading abridged versions of four stories by Nikolai Gogol: “The Nose,” “The Overcoat,” “Nevsky Prospect,” and “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich.” In just a few minutes, they will move to their new groups: A, B, C, or D. Each group will read a specific story and discuss questions of plot, character, central conflict, and comic device. Having arrived at complete consensus, each group member will enter the answers (using identical wording) on his or her copy of a graphic organizer (chart). Having completed the chart and become “experts” on the story, the teachers will return to their original groups and report their “findings.” Supposedly, everyone will benefit by learning about four Gogol stories over the course of 1-2 hours. They will then feel inspired to use this strategy with their own students, so that everyone may learn the art of rapid misreading.

Why would I bother to complain about the jigsaw method, of all things? Don’t we have greater problems at hand: school violence, neglect of gifted children, teacher attrition, poorly written standardized tests, high dropout rates? I agree: jigsaw in itself is no cause for alarm and may have good uses. I object not to the jigsaw itself, but to its misapplication, characterized by (a) superficial consensus, (b) false expertise, (c) disregard for the whole of a given work or topic, and (d) use of groupwork for groupwork’s sake, as an alternative to so-called “passive learning.” These conditions suggest a deep distrust of subject matter and an apotheosis of social activity in the classroom.

Continue reading ‘On Teaching: Where Jigsaw Misses the Picture’

Class Culture, Not Size, Matters

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 20, 2008 in Education Practice and Teaching. 3 Comments

Class culture matters more than class size writes Pamela Felcher, a high school English department chair in Los Angeles. She makes some smart points about the classroom experience:

“I do not mean racial or ethnic or socioeconomic culture, I mean the culture of a particular group of students in a particular room in a particular institution. I have two 10th-grade classes of about 30 students each. One of them is an “honors” class; the other, “regular.” In my honors class, the 30 students are engaged and demanding. They probe texts, cultivate questions, encourage discourse and write analytically. My regular class, on the other hand, is allergic to homework; students belch aloud and feel no shame because this is “just school”; they bully and curse at one another; they cannot sit still; they cannot listen; and their distraction is heightened by the gadgets they carry.”

In both of her classes, writes Felcher in the L.A. Times, her expectations exceed her students, however the best students in the regular class, she notes “often collapse under the weight of the apathetic, the rude, the defiant, the indolent mass that defines that class’ culture.”

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The Smartest Bears in the Zoo

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 19, 2008 in Education Practice, Educational Policy and Research and Reports. 0 Comments

One of the most revealing aspects of Fordham’s report on high-achieving kids in the era of NCLB is the accompanying teacher survey:

The national survey findings show that most teachers, at this point in our nation’s history, feel pressure to focus on their lowest-achieving students. Whether that’s because of NCLB we do not know (though teachers are certainly willing to blame the federal law). What’s perhaps most interesting about the teachers’ responses, however, is how committed they are to the principle that all students (regardless of performance level) deserve their fair share of attention and challenges.

This precisely describes my experience teaching 5th grade in the South Bronx. A teacher in a school where the majority of kids read below grade level is unlikely ever to be asked what he or she is doing for kids who are at or above grade level. The immediate concern is triage.

Continue reading ‘The Smartest Bears in the Zoo’

A Fuelish Notion

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 12, 2008 in Education Practice. 1 Comment

Some school districts are considering four-day instructional weeks to save money on bus fuel.

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June: National Social Promotion Month?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 11, 2008 in Education Practice. 6 Comments

Every June, I and other teachers in my South Bronx elementary school, would go to great lengths to assemble portfolios of written work for students who were in danger of being held over. The point, as far as there was one, was to demonstrate that students who tested below grade level were in fact, making good progress, and that their test scores were not a reflection of their actual ability. It was an annual exercise in frustration and irrelevance. Say what you will about standardized tests, but rarely was a failing grade a poor indicator of a student’s ability. But more to the point, none of my students were in danger of being held over. Even those who scored a “1″ on their ELA exams (the lowest possible score) were shipped off to summer school and miraculously got up to speed in six weeks (I must have been some kind of lousy teacher not to have pulled that off myself) and “earned” promotion. In five years, the only time one of my students was held over was one whose mother insisted to the principal that he repeat the grade.

Social promotion, in short, is alive and well. Was my experience an anomaly? I’m curious as to the state of play elsewhere. Is social promotion happening in your school?

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