So is this what schools mean when they insist on developing 21st century skills and go on and on about preparing our children for the jobs that don't exist yet?
I'm speechless.
If you're a glutton for punishment, and watching Engage Me! just wasn't enough, I dare you to read Engage Me or Enrage Me: What Today's Learners Demand.
If you still have words left at that point, please share them.
"Officials from the Education Department, the National Education Association and the American Association of School Librarians saw Finnish teachers with chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and lessons shown on overhead projectors instead of PowerPoint. Keith Krueger was less impressed by the technology than by the good teaching he saw. "You kind of wonder how could our country get to that?" says Mr. Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of school technology officers that organized the trip."
"Visitors and teacher trainees can peek at how it's done from a viewing balcony perched over a classroom at the Norssi School in Jyväskylä, a city in central Finland. What they see is a relaxed, back-to-basics approach. The school, which is a model campus, has no sports teams, marching bands or prom."
"Despite the apparent simplicity of Finnish education, it would be tough to replicate in the U.S. With a largely homogeneous population, teachers have few students who don't speak Finnish. In the U.S., about 8% of students are learning English, according to the Education Department. There are fewer disparities in education and income levels among Finns. Finland separates students for the last three years of high school based on grades; 53% go to high school and the rest enter vocational school. (All 15-year-old students took the PISA test.) Finland has a high-school dropout rate of about 4% -- or 10% at vocational schools -- compared with roughly 25% in the U.S., according to their respective education departments"
What You’re Not Doing
But what about journaling, book reports, and imaginative writing?
In Years One through Four, it’s not necessary for the student to do original writing. In fact, original writing (which requires not only a mastery of both steps of the writing process, but the ability to find something original to say) is beyond the developmental capability of many students.
There is plenty of time for original writing as the student’s mind matures. During the first four years, it is essential that students be allowed instead to concentrate on mastering the process: getting ideas into words, and getting those words down on paper.
Some children may be both anxious and willing to do original writing. This should never be discouraged. However, it should not be required either. Students who are required to write, write, write during elementary school are likely to produce abysmal compositions. Take the time to lay a foundation first; during the middle- and high-school years, the student can then build on it with confidence.
"[I]t's absolutely NOT necessary for an educated person to write creatively. You either enjoy it, or you don't, and forcing a child who doesn't have a bent for creative writing to do creative assignments can result in a child who loathes ALL kinds of writing."
It’s important to resist the my-child’s-writing-more-than-your-child pressure.
Your neighbor’s seventh grader may be doing a big research paper, while your seventh grader is still outlining and rewriting. Don’t fret. Those research papers have been thrown at that seventh grader without a great deal of preparation. He’s probably struggling to figure out exactly what he’s doing, making false start after false start, and ending up with a paper which is largely rehashed encyclopedia information. I’ve taught scores of students who went through classroom programs which had them doing book reports, research papers, and other long assignments as early as third grade. This doesn’t improve writing skill; it just produces students who can churn out a certain number of pages, when required.
As someone who’s had to read those pages, I can testify that this approach is not, across the board, working.
We could do this for any partition--7ths, 162nds, etc. It doesn't matter. No matter how you partition into equal bits, you haven't moved off of your point on the number line. Nothing about repartitioning changed your location.A delegation led by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) recently toured Scandinavia in search of answers for how students in that region of the world were able to score so high on a recent international test of math and science skills. They found that educators in Finland, Sweden, and Denmark all cited autonomy, project-based learning, and nationwide broadband internet access as keys to their success.
What the CoSN delegation didn’t find in those nations were competitive grading, standardized testing, and top-down accountability—all staples of the American education system.
[snip]Kati Tuurala,[snip] credits Finland’s success to its major reforms of the 1970s, which included an emphasis on primary education for everyone in the country. “That’s the reason for our present-day success,” Tuurala said.
In all three countries, students start formal schooling at age seven after participating in extensive early-childhood and preschool programs focused on self-reflection and social behavior, rather than academic content. By focusing on self-reflection, students learn to become responsible for their own education, delegates said.
Barbara Stein, manager of external partnerships and advocacy for the National Education Association, said Scandinavian countries “encourage philosophical thought at a very young age. … Grading doesn’t happen until the high-school level, because they believe grading takes the fun out of learning. They want to inspire continuous learning.”“My teacher” and “the teacher” are terms of respect, not only when used by the students, but also by the school leader or headmaster. The teacher is most often viewed as a mentor, someone who has both knowledge and wisdom to impart and plays a key role in preparing students for adulthood.
In Finland, for instance, teaching is one of the most highly venerated professions in the country—and only one in eight applicants to teacher-education programs are accepted. All teachers there have a master’s degree.
I think that Karen Pryor would approve.Correct all mistakes immediately.
The very term "correction" has a negative connotation, but corrections are a positive, critical part of effective teaching. Corrections are the equivalent of MORE INSTRUCTION, and that instruction is prompted directly by needs that students demonstrate.
Bringing every student to mastery on every component of Spelling Mastery exercises is vital to the effectiveness of the program. Spelling Mastery departs from traditional spelling programs in that once a word (or generalization) is introduced in the program, IT DOESN'T GO AWAY. Everything in the program is reviewed cumulatively, as insurance of long-term retention and transfer to writing.
[snip]
Using quick pacing and an upbeat, positive attitude toward corrections are major keys to effectively correcting an entire group. Don't forget to communicate to students how pleased you are when you are not having to correct them, particularly on difficult items.
Remember this about corrections. Students don't always know what constitutes a good job. When you hold them to a very high criterion of performance (especially early in the program) they learn exactly what your expectations are. They also see that by having high performance expectations, you are making it easier for them to learn and use what is being presented. Once they see the rules of the "game," their performance improves dramatically. They learn fast and generalize well -- things they would not do if they never learn what "good work" really means.
I have little doubt will be found true, and that is, that it is scarcely possible to devote too much time to the spelling book. Teachers who are impatient of the slow progress of their pupils are too apt to lay it aside too soon. I have frequently seen the melancholy effects of this impatience. Among the many pupils that I have had under my charge, I have noticed that they who have made the most rapid progress in reading were invariably those who had been most faithfully drilled in the spelling book.
Richard G. Parker
1851
> Are your 7th graders who tested Level A less skilled readers than the kids
> who tested higher??
Yes, definitely, but the correspondence isn't exact. That is, some lousy spellers are excellent readers but none of the SUPER-lousy spellers were excellent readers. All the sixth and seventh graders who scored at level A (meaning they couldn't spell even regular words like plant correctly) were middling to poor readers, though some had B's in reading and most were not considered remedial readers. I found a consistent correlation between word decoding and word recognition and basic spelling.
In fact, some kids with poor orthographic memory learn to read via spelling. They don't really master distinctions like "supper" vs. "super" or "stared," "starred" and "started" until they master the spelling skills involved. Then it seems to click in.
I'm familiar with Ehri's work [post on Ehri's new study t/k] and the fluency research is supportive, too, of the need for visual representations of the word (Shaywitz's "word form area" in the, I think occipital, lobe, is key to fluent word recognition, and also connects to the right hemisphere visual and meaning areas).
Many normal kids, not "LD," get stalled at the point of multisyllable words such as the ones they encounter in more advanced (especially nonfiction) text -- words like photosynthesis, heterogenous, homeostasis, bicameral, etc. They have not been trained to "see" word parts (morphemes) and they have a strategy of just taking a wild guess based on the first letter or letters. Guessing from context or pictures no longer works well in middle school and beyond.
I call these kids "bumper car readers" -- they crash into the front end of the word and hope for the best, but can't segment it into its parts. Once they can easily do this, long words are no problem and are easy to read AND spell, with a few glitches here and there (is it occasional or ocassional?). Bob Dixon, who wrote the Spelling Mastery series and Morphs as well, calls this the morphographic principle, and says kids need to g through abnout half of Spelling Through Morphographs (about 70 lessons) to really internalize it. I bet a year of SM level D,E, or F would do the same. For reading, rather than spelling, a good quick fix is a program called REWARDS from Sopris West (www.rewardsreading.com) -- it teaches multisyllable word decoding, morphemes, word parts, some vocab and spelling, and fluency (rate). There's an intermediate level for kids in grades 4-6 and another for grades 7 and up -- the strategies are identical but the vocabulary is more advanced in the secondary version.
BTW Bob Dixon wrote a great book for grownups that you can sometimes find cheaply on alibris -- it's called "The Surefire Way to Better Spelling." It's got a lot of the handy stuff from Morphs in it. But the actual programs are better for teaching kids, because they are carefully structured to provide the needed practice, transfer etc.
Some fifteen years ago [circa 1990] I was working on problems and issues involved in the design of simulators for training in complex skills. Projects included applications in military and in paramedical and nurse training. In both contexts, the projects arose as a result of evidence that the investment in simulator design and development – many millions of dollars annually in the case of the military training applications – was not leading to the expected improvements in learning. Analysis showed that the design teams involved habitually followed certain principles, one of which was “fidelity” – the simulated experience should replicate as closely as possible the “real life” experience of doing the job.
However, a search of the literature on fidelity in simulator design revealed a chain of studies, initiating from some of the earliest work of Robert Gagné in the1950’s, clearly demonstrating that absolute fidelity to the real-life job situation in the simulated exercise was ineffective, especially in the early stages of learning. Partial simulation, that focused attention on the key skill elements that had to be learned, that enhanced relevant guidance and feedback information, and eliminated irrelevant “noise” that could distract the learner, was shown to be the most effective design for the early stages of learning. It was, indeed, quite possible to construct a research-based design theory for the incorporation of fidelity – indeed different aspects of fidelity (physical, perceptual, etc.) – in specific ways at specific stages of the learning process. However, the bulk of those involved in the design of simulators were completely ignoring this research base.
[snip]
Maybe education is doomed to progress in ever repeating circles of reform that lead nowhere. Maybe this is a phenomenon of society in general, summarized so neatly in the French expression “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”- the more things change the more they stay the same.
"Constructivism Revisited: Progress in ever decreasing circles..."
by Alexander Romiszowski, Ph.D. Contributing Editor
Effect size = (mean of experimental group - mean of control group)/standard deviation Generally, the larger the effect size, the greater is the impact of an intervention. Jacob Cohen has written the most on this topic. In his well-known book he suggested, a little ambiguously, that a correlation of 0.5 is large, 0.3 is moderate, and 0.1 is small (Cohen, 1988). The usual interpretation of this statement is that anything greater than 0.5 is large, 0.5-0.3 is moderate, 0.3-0.1 is small, and anything smaller than 0.1 is trivial. There is a good site that describes all this that is worth a visit for those really interested.
source:
Bandolier
Interpreting Effect Sizes
Provided our data have the kind of distribution shown in Figure 1 (a ‘Normal’ distribution), we can readily interpret Effect Sizes in terms of the amount of overlap between the two groups.
For example, an effect size of 0.8 means that the score of the average person in the experimental group exceeds the scores of 79% of the control group. If the two groups had been classes of 25, the average person in the ‘afternoon’ group (ie the one who would have been ranked 13th in the group) would have scored about the same as the 6th highest person in the ‘morning’ group. Visualising these two individuals can give quite a graphic interpretation of the difference between the two effects.
[snip]
Another way to interpret effect sizes is to compare them to the effect sizes of differences that are familiar. For example, an effect size of 0.2 corresponds to the difference between the heights of 15 year old and 16 year old girls in the US. A 0.5 effect size corresponds to the difference between the heights of 14 year old and 18 year old girls. An effect size of 0.8 equates to the difference between the heights of 13 year old and 18 year old girls.
What is an effect size? A brief introduction
Robert Coe
From Kevin McGrew's blog, a guest post by Walter Howe, Cognitive Load Theory for School Psychologists:
This theory suggests that learning happens best under conditions that are aligned with human cognitive architecture. The structure of human cognitive architecture, while not known precisely, is discernible through the results of experimental research. Recognizing George Miller's research showing that short term memory is limited in the number of elements it can contain simultaneously, Sweller builds a theory that treats schemas, or combinations of elements, as the cognitive structures that make up an individual's knowledge base. (Sweller, 1988)
The contents of long term memory are "sophisticated structures that permit us to perceive, think, and solve problems," rather than a group of rote learned facts. These structures, known as schemas, are what permit us to treat multiple elements as a single element. They are the cognitive structures that make up the knowledge base (Sweller, 1988). Schemas are acquired over a lifetime of learning, and may have other schemas contained within themselves.
The difference between an expert and a novice is that a novice hasn't acquired the schemas of an expert. Learning requires a change in the schematic structures of long term memory and is demonstrated by performance that progresses from clumsy, error-prone, slow and difficult to smooth and effortless. The change in performance occurs because as the learner becomes increasingly familiar with the material, the cognitive characteristics associated with the material are altered so that it can be handled more efficiently by working memory.
From an instructional perspective, information contained in instructional material must first be processed by working memory. For schema acquisition to occur, instruction should be designed to reduce working memory load. Cognitive load theory is concerned with techniques for reducing working memory load in order to facilitate the changes in long term memory associated with schema acquisition.
3rd grade slump? Maybe everything is bigger in Texas.On the other side are supporters of a more traditional approach proposed by Donna Garner, a retired teacher and conservative education activist. Those board members say students need more spelling drills, phonics lessons and practice in grammar identification to learn to read and write properly. This side also favors developing suggested reading lists with a heavy emphasis on classical literature.
"They teach reading by getting them to read every third or fourth word," Garner said of current methods. "But the problem is when they start getting the harder (words) at about Grade 3, and they hit a wall."
I'll be keeping Texas in my prayers.Dozens of passionate educators are expected to attend today's public hearing. Garner won't be among them; she says her presence is too polarizing. But that doesn't mean she isn't devoted to the cause.
"I've committed years to this cause, and I cannot believe that people can be so wrong about what kids need to learn," she said. "We've lost millions of Texas children in the last 10 years. We can't afford to lose millions more."
A year ago I went to a large conference on school improvement (the focus was on using test results and assessment to determine instructional priorities, action plans, etc.). There were a number of presentations from schools that had made significant progress. My principal and I went and chose to attend presentations on low-income, high-diversity urban schools, since we figured that would be most relevant to our situation. We both noticed that nearly all of the presentations (teacher and principal teams presented what they had done and details of their implementations, etc.) were from Catholic schools.
What stood out was not so much the specifics of what they did, but the commitment of the faculty. They were clearly dedicated and willing to go more than the extra mile in a way that would be unusual in a public school, even one with very competent and caring staff. Whether it was their faith per se, or more of an ethos of service, it was quite strikingly different from what one would encounter in a public school, even a good one (and I have worked in a few).
Now of course these were "success stories," and it does not follow from this that every Catholic school is similarly graced with highly committed staff, but the factor of shared vision is probably an important one that should not be underestimated, and is difficult to replicate in a diverse public system, where many values are simply not shared.
Kirk and Montega have accepted a job mowing the soccer playing fields. They must mow an area 500 feet long and 400 feet wide. They agree that each will mow half the area. They decide that Kirk will mow around the edge in a path of equal width until half the area is left.
43. What is the area each person will mow?
44. Write a quadratic equation that could be used to find the width x that Kirk should mow.
45. What width should Kirk mow?
46. The mower can mow a path 5 feet wide. To the nearest whole number, how many times should Kirk go around the field?
Glencoe Algebra, p. 537
ISBN: 0-07-873316-2
Seton Hall’s Epics program — the acronym stands for Educational Partners in Catholic Schools — is one of about 20 similar efforts by Roman Catholic colleges and universities. Taken together, the initiatives have placed several thousand teachers in urban Catholic schools, and collectively they comprise a sort of religion-based version of Teach for America.
One major difference, besides the religious component, is in national visibility. Teach for America has become a virtual brand name on elite college campuses and a coveted item on graduate-school applications and corporate résumés. Programs like Epics have received far less public acclaim, and yet they are vital to the almost literally lifesaving role that Catholic schools play as an affordable alternative to chronically failing public schools in many low-income areas.
[snip]
In 1970, more than half the teachers and administrators at Catholic elementary and secondary schools were unpaid clergy members. As of 2008, Ms. Helm said, clergy members account for about 5 percent of teachers. At the same time that nonwhite and often non-Catholic pupils are increasingly seeking out Catholic schools, the number of such schools in cities has been shrinking in the face of rising costs and insufficient revenue.
St. Patrick’s, where Mr. Encarnacion teaches, offers an archetypal example. The school, which runs from prekindergarten through eighth grade, is actually a merger of three schools. Roughly two-thirds of its 440 students are black Protestants. Of 26 full-time teachers and administrators, one is a member of the clergy.
Offering Teachers Incentives; and a Chance to Live Their Faith
by Samuel G. Freedman
