Applications to Teach for America from graduating college seniors continues to surge —up more than a third this year from about 18,000 to nearly 25,000, reports BusinessWeek. “Of those, about 3,700 are expected to step up to the blackboard as new teachers this fall. That’s up more than 25 percent from the 2,900 who did so last year.” The New York Times also weighs in on TFA.
Archive for the 'Teaching' Category
Most of us in education probably think of marketing, brand building and customer relations as beneath our dignity. We’re educators, after all. We’re not selling soap or soft drinks. Food for thought then, courtesy of Scott McLeod at the Techlearning blog, who notes that every interaction is at heart a marketing transaction representing “an opportunity for us to build or erode our brand, a chance to increase or decrease the trust and goodwill of the people with whom we are interacting.”
“What’s this mean for schools? Well, it means that every time a parent walks away unhappy from an encounter at school, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a teacher has yet another boring lesson, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a school board member puts her personal agenda ahead of what’s best for students, that’s a marketing interaction. Every time a member of the community walks through an uninviting building, that’s a marketing interaction. And every time an administrator squanders an opportunity to be a leader rather than a manager, that’s a marketing interaction.”
Schools do a host of wonderful things,” McLeod concludes. “But they also engage in a number of individual and organizational behaviors that chip away at the trust and goodwill of their internal and external communities.”
Smart stuff. And worth reflecting on, as McLeod notes, next time someone complains about problems with student engagement, parental support and community involvement.
In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. A teacher’s turns to leaving. TMAO, the earnest if occasionally sanctimonious blogger behind Teaching in the 408 files a first-rate post with the best kicker ending since The Sixth Sense (HT: Alexander Russo). Over at Eduwonkette, the link between NCLB and leaving the classroom is discussed. Yours truly posted at length in the comment section there; I’ll spare you the cross-post here.
To a list that includes posting a risque Facebook or MySpace page, announcing your desire to pose nude in a major magazine, and smoking pot in the teachers lounge, you can also add putting a bikini and talking about your sex life on the Howard Stern Show.
“Teaching comprehension strategies is not the same as equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.” — Sara Mead, Early Ed Watch
Nice to see Sara Mead at Early Ed Watch pick up on what E.D. Hirsch and others at Core Knowledge have been arguing, that reading is not a skill that exists in a vacuum. All the reading “strategy lessons” in the world won’t help if you don’t have background knowledge to apply to what you’re reading.
Mead weighs in on Reading First noting the IES research released last week “raises serious questions about Reading First’s effectiveness, but it’s worth taking a closer look before writing the program off entirely.”
“Finally, we should ask whether the person who should really be declaring victory here is not Reading First’s critics, but E.D. Hirsch,” Mead notes “This study focused on one indicator of children’s reading performance: student reading comprehension as assessed by the Stanford Achievement Test. The researchers did not assess children’s phonemic awareness, decoding ability, or fluency, for example. That makes sense because comprehension is, in the researchers’ words “the essence of reading.” But it’s also problematic because, as Hirsch has argued passionately in recent years, reading comprehension is about much more than basic literacy skills. To comprehend, readers must also have a rich content knowledge that enables them to connect what they read to existing knowledge. (Hirsch is fond of citing an article describing a baseball game as an example here: Poor readers who know a lot about baseball will comprehend the article better than excellent readers who have never seen a baseball game.) Teachers observed in this study spent substantial time teaching children reading comprehension, but teaching comprehension strategies is not the same and equipping children with the content knowledge they need to understand what they read.”
The way we teach reading—endless focus on comprehension strategies—has limited efficacy as Dan Wilingham and others have shown. If we really want our kids to succeed, we’ll arm them with decoding skills, then a content-rich curriculum that gives them broad background knowedge. Teaching content isn’t something to do after kids have learned to read.
Teaching content IS teaching reading.
With more than $4 billion expected to be cut from public education budgets in the coming school year, school districts across California may increase class sizes in primary grades. “Educators are loath to increase student enrollment in the youngest grades,” reports the San Diego Union-Tribune, while noting that research on the efficacy of smaller class size is inconclusive.
“Since 1996, California has nevertheless set aside huge amounts of money – nearly $2 billion for the current school year – to limit class sizes to 20 students in kindergarten through third grade. Those are the crucial early years of schooling, when children acquire reading and math skills that determine their success later,” says the U-T.
When I was in kindergarten, my teachers were worried about me because I never brought my paintings home. When my parents asked me why I didn’t, I told them that the paintings weren’t good. This horrified the teachers, who had marked “Great!” on every single one of them (I can still see the handwriting). I knew the paintings weren’t great, and didn’t know how to make them better. No one at school was willing to teach me.
Fast-forward thirty-eight years to a professional development session on the arts in education. We are provided with long sheets of chart paper and instructed to trace and then portray each other, in groups of two or three. We have about thirty minutes to complete this slipshod activity. When this is done, we hang the portraits around the room and circulate for a “gallery walk.” We are given Post-its for making observations, not criticisms. Observation is greater than judgment, we are told. I feel ill. My horrible drawing must now endure cheery “observations.” I want to go home.
Extremist doctrines tumble upon teachers continually, in education programs, training sessions, and so-called literature. Today I will examine a recurring shibboleth: “Teachers should not correct student errors explicitly.” Trainers and administrators discourage correction for at least three reasons: (1) they are concerned for the students’ self-esteem and self-celebration; (2) they believe that correction could exacerbate existing inequities in the classroom; and (3) they are anxious about the difficulties and uncertainties inherent in correction.
I have dealt with anti-correction dogma on numerous occasions. I have been told not to mark up a student’s sacrosanct compositions, but to write comments on post-its (which, of course a student is entitled to throw away). On one occasion, the facilitator of a PD session said, “As a constructivist I don’t believe in telling a student, ‘that’s right,’ because that would invalidate another student’s answer.” I have visited classes with “Socratic Seminars” or “cooperative learning” in which the student discussions got muddled and the teacher refused to intervene.
For the Google generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and knowledge in a user-generated world of information saturation?
This question posed in an excellent, thought-provoking article by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post (”Truth: Can You Handle It? Better Yet: Do You Know It When You See It?”) has profound implications for educators. It has become an irritating cliche that children do not need to cram their heads full of facts when they can merely Google their way through the sum of human knowledge. But repeat inaccurate information enough times, and it becomes universally accepted as fact. The paper cites an apocryphal quote from Abraham Lincoln, falsely attributed to the 16th President on over 11,000 web sites “including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.”
Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “wikiality” to describe this phenomenon, meaning “a reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it must be true.” Information specialists have another label for it: the death of information literacy.
The Post notes an interesting experiment by the Hoover Institution: When 100 terms from U.S. history books were entered into Google, the topics’ Wikipedia articles were the first hits 87 times. “If it’s wrong is the big If, the question that plagues librarians and teachers today,” notes the Post. “Of course, the information might be right–in one study, published in Nature, that reviewed scientific entries side-by-side, Wikipedia was found to be only slightly less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica (four errors to Britannica’s every three). There’s at least a decent chance that the wisdom of the crowds is fine wisdom indeed.”
“Information is about tidbits, crumbs of data,” Hesse notes. “Information can be carried around on a Trivial Pursuit card. Information says, ‘It’s currently 95 degrees in Anchorage.’ Knowledge is different. Knowledge is about context — about knowing what to do with accumulated information. Knowledge is saying, “Dude, based on what I know of Alaska, it’s never 95 degrees in Anchorage.”
Men accounted for less than one-fourth of all elementary school teachers in 2006–a forty-year low–according to statistics released recently by the National Education Association (NEA). The highest percentage of male teachers can be found in Kansas and Oregon, where about one-third of teachers boast a Y chromosome (hey, it’s the Core Knowledge blog), while fewer than one in five Mississippi and Arkansas teachers are men.
“We’re experiencing a significant male-teacher shortage,” Reg Weaver, president of the NEA tells Edutopia. “Teachers in elementary school typically don’t make as much money as teachers in high school do,” Weaver says. “More than 50 percent of male teachers are at the high school level.”
Edutopia sites research conducted by MenTeach, a nonprofit organization that promotes the recruitment of male teachers, suggesting that low status and as well as pay deter males from entering education. “If you started paying teachers $150,000 per year, you’d see a lot of guys going into the field,” admits Bryan Nelson, founder of MenTeach, stating the obvious. You’d see a lot more guys going into any field that paid $150K.
Amazing statistic cited by Edutopia: There are 150 participants in program called Call Me MISTER (Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models), which provides tuition assistance and leadership training to male African American students pursuing education degrees at South Carolina’s Clemson University. “When they start working, they will double the number of black men teaching in the state’s elementary schools,” the magazine notes.
To write about education is to dwell, alas, on what isn’t working in our schools. So for once, a tale about something that went very right. If you don’t follow sports, you probably missed it on ESPN and the sports page of the New York Times. It’s the story of a remarkable display of character and sportsmanship at a college softball game the other day.
Western Oregon’s Sara Tucholsky, all of 5′2″ and a .153 hitter, hits the first home run she’s ever hit, in high school or college. Even though it’s out of the park, the rules say “touch ‘em all.” So when she runs past first base and realizes she didn’t touch the bag, she stops to go back. And blows out her knee.
The rules also say her teammates can’t help her around the bases, or even help her off the ground. If a coach touches her she’s out. If a pinch runner comes in, it’s a single, not a homer. Tucholsky crawls back to first but can go no further.
Confusion. Silence. Then a voice, belonging to Central Washington senior Mallory Holtman, who holds every softball record worth holding in the school’s record book: “‘Excuse me, would it be OK if we carried her around and she touched each bag?’” There’s no rule against it. So Holtman and teammate Liz Wallace pick up Tucholsky and carry her the rest of the way, stopping to let her touch each base with her left foot–an act that contributed to their own elimination from the playoffs.
“It kept everything in perspective and the fact that we’re never bigger than the game,” Western Oregon coach Pam Knox told ESPN. “It was such a lesson that we learned — that it’s not all about winning. And we forget that, because as coaches, we’re always trying to get to the top. We forget that. But I will never, ever forget this moment. It’s changed me, and I’m sure it’s changed my players.”
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