Speaking of 'instructionism'...

...which I was doing a couple of hours ago, Chris's best friend from NYU was here today, in need of a brief session of instructionism himself.

Chris had been telling me his friend -- D. -- "can't do commas."

(I don't absolutely know Chris can do commas, by the way, though I think that, on the punctuation front, he's pretty much arrived. Will have to ask Ed, who's been advising Chris on history papers this year. Suffice it to say Chris knows enough about commas to be able to copy-edit D's papers.)

UPDATE 1/12/2014: Ed says Chris's punctuation is fine. It was basically fine by the time he graduated high school.

Anyway, I'd been mulling D's situation, and had decided I could probably fix all of D's comma problems in a couple of weeks, max.

The reason I was pretty sure all of D's comma problems could be remedied in a couple of weeks is that I've just about got sentence punctuation boiled down to the absolute, bare minimum of things you need to know in order to punctuate declarative sentences in college papers, and guess what?

There are only 8 basic sentence punctuation patterns.

That's not very many, eight.

To learn the 8 patterns, you need to know:

• Finite and nonfinite verbs
• Independent and dependent clauses
• Restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers (how to tell them apart)
• Coordinators
• Subordinators (aka dependent marker words)
• Adverbial conjunctions (which I call "fancy FANBOYS" in class)

If you are a native speaker (D. is), you already know these things nonconsciously (though I'm not sure that's true of the distinction between restrictive versus nonrestrictive modifiers), no matter how random your commas.

So I figured I could simply tell a smart kid like D. how to use commas in sentences, and he would know. His writing is good -- I've seen it -- it really is just the commas that are the problem.

So today Chris and D. did Hunter College's Exercise B, and I looked it over.

Turned out D. had never heard of "comma splices."

Or dependent clauses.

Never, in 13 years of public-school English class and 1 year of writing instruction at NYU (tuition $48k).

His only tactic for deploying commas was to listen for pauses as he wrote. Listening for pauses is a good idea as far as it goes, but, as D. pointed out, it's not going to fix comma splices. It's going to cause comma splices.

I suspect that listening for pauses may have caused both of the mistakes he was making:

• He was hearing the pause between sentences loud and clear, and was inserting naked commas^* between sentences he wanted to join. 
• He wasn't hearing the pause between opening dependent clauses and main clauses -- or, more likely, he was hearing the pause but was experiencing it, correctly, as softer than the pause between sentences. So he was failing to place commas after "introductory elements."

The instant I explained to D. that, generally speaking, in college prose you're not supposed to use  commas to join sentences, he got it. He correctly punctuated the last four sentences on the page without further ado. 

I'm pretty sure he instantly got introductory subordinate clauses as well. I told him that, with "introductory elements," you can just listen for the pause and use a comma or not, depending. 

I'm pretty sure that observation is true (once someone tells you that introductory elements are usually followed by commas). At least, it seems to be true with my students, but take it with a grain of salt. Somehow, for native speakers, hearing introductory elements appears to be natural even for students who have never in their lives placed a comma after an introductory dependent clause. So it seems to me. 

In any event, D. was having no trouble hearing the pause. He heard the non-pause that results when you move the dependent clause to the end of the sentence, too:

• When you get to the corner, turn right. [slight pause between clauses]
• Turn right when you get to the corner. [no pause between clauses]

We didn't have time to get into restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses, which is a challenge for my students.

D., by the way, is very smart. Had all 4s and 5s in multiple AP classes; wrote his friends' college admission essays. And didn't know what a comma splice is.

Someone should have just told him. It simply is not the case that smart people -- or good readers -- "pick up" punctuation by osmosis. We're not built that way. We're built to register the gist of a sentence, not the particulars.

Plus which …. there's nothing magical or even important about commas versus semicolons. Using semicolons instead of commas to join sentences is a convention; twenty years from now comma splices will probably be  correct. So just tell students what the convention is and move on.

But somehow, telling is not possible.

Not even at the college level, not even in a full year of college-level writing instruction.

^* "naked commas" meaning commas unaccompanied by a coordinator (and, but, or, so, nor, yet, for: the FANBOYS)

Knowledge and memory posts

6/24/2006: Mastery learning and IQ (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

10/25/2006: On not teaching to mastery (warning: broken links; page can't be edited)

4/26/2007 How to build a fast learner

4/26/2007: Extremely fast learning

6/10/2007: On Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins)

9/9/2010: The rule of 20

1/23/2012: Why students have to memorize things

3/30/2012: Look it up

8/13/2012: Jeff Hawkins: intelligence is memory, memory is intelligence

6/18/2013: Deeper shmeeper

7/2/2013: Why students need to memorize, Common Core edition

uh oh

A note from palisadesk:

Unfortunately, it is true that using Lucy Calkins' methods can raise test scores, due to the design of the current generation of "authentic assessments" (aka holistic assessment, standards-based assessment, performance assessment). I know several schools (including my own) where test scores rose substantially when they STOPPED doing systematic synthetic phonics and moved to a workshop model instead.

So to prove the instructivist stuff works you also need to have in place testing that assesses actual skills -- phonemic decoding, vocabulary, grammar, spelling, arithmetic, etc.

It's really not all that unbelievable, if you consider how the testing has 
changed. Schools used to use norm-referenced measures (like the IOWA, the
 CTBS, Metropolitan Achievement Test, etc.) which also have definite 
limitations, but different ones.

Once they replaced those (as many states
 have done) with "constructed-response" item tests, variously known as 
performance assessments, holistic assessments, standards-based assessments 
and so on, a more fuzzy teaching approach also yielded benefits. These 
open-response items are usually scored on a rubric basis, based on anchor 
papers or exemplars, according to certain criteria for reasoning,
 conventions of print, organization, and so forth. These are variously 
weighted, but specifics like sentence structure, spelling, grammar,
 paragraph structure etc. generally carry less weight than such things as
 "providing two details from the selection to support your argument."

The 
open responses often mimic journal writing -- it is personal in tone, 
calls for the student to express an opinion, and many elements of what we
 would call good writing (or correct reading) count for little or even 
nothing.



The same is true in math. A local very exclusive private school which is 
famous for its high academic achievement recently switched from 
traditional math to Everyday Math and saw its test scores soar on these assessments (probably not on norm-referenced measures, but they aren't
 saying).



Another school where I worked implemented good early reading instruction 
with a strong decoding base (and not minimizing good literature, either),
 but saw its scores on the tests go down almost 25%. I think the reason
 for that is that teaching children to write all this rubbish for the "holistic assessments" is very time consuming, and if you spent your 
instructional time teaching the basic skills -- which aren't of much value 
on these tests -- your kids will do poorly.



So yes, you can post [my email], not referring to me of course. You can say -- 
because I don't think I've mentioned it publicly anywhere -- that I have 
been involved in the past in field-testing these assessments so have a 
more complete picture of how they are put together and evaluated, and what 
they do and do not measure.

Different states have made up their own but 
they share many similarities.

I was surprised when I read this ..... somehow I had assumed that, basics being basic, absence of basics would make any test hard to pass.

Apparently not.

'good writing matters'

in the Atlantic:

I have an MBA and was a turnaround corporate and real estate banker for over 23 years. My husband also has an MBA and is a senior-level manager in the financial services industry. What we've both seen, in the course of our careers, is that good writing matters. While the weak writers may get hired -- job interviews rarely require a writing sample -- once the candidates get the job, they don't tend to go far. Soon after they start work, they are asked to prepare a presentation or simply send an email. Then, the trouble begins.

Writing longer pieces -- presentations, for example -- only confirms the negative impression weak writers make in the workplace. While they might be very intelligent, their inability to clearly and concisely advocate their position on paper completely undermines their reputation. As a result, others become reluctant to have them on their team. Even individuals in verbally focused careers such as sales need to write pitches and send frequent follow-up correspondence.

When my husband and I were children in the public education system, we routinely wrote five to six paragraph essays across several subjects. We also learned proper handwriting, a skill that's far too underrated today. (One cannot use the computer to fill out a worksheet or critique a colleague's hard-copy document.) In addition, we rarely took multiple choice tests, instead tackling open-ended questions that required at least full-sentence answers. None of this is the case in many schools today. What's particularly frustrating to us is seeing these shortcomings in a school district like ours, one that has far fewer obstacles than a lower-income school like New Dorp.
Why I Took My Child Out of Public School

As long as process pedagogy rules the day, matters will not improve.

Of course, it could always be worse:

Pedagogical resistance is perhaps most apparent in the claim that writing cannot be taught, which stems from the argument forwarded by Kent that writing is a situated, interpretive, and indeterminate act. In Paralogic Rhetoric, Kent suggests that accepting a post-process perspective (at least in a paralogic sense) means rejecting process as the ultimate explanation for the writing act and instead recognizing the role of interpretation and indeterminacy in the writing act. Consequently, if we consider writing as an indeterminate and interpretive activity, he asserts, then "writing and reading -- conceived broadly as processes or bodies of knowledge -- cannot be taught, for nothing exists to teach" (161).
Post-Process "Pedagogy": A Philosophical Exercise by Lee-Ann M. Kastman Breuch

I wonder how post-process people feel about comma splices.

Explicit and implicit learning

Explicit (Declarative)	Implicit (Procedural)
facts and experiences	skills and habits, priming, classical conditioning
knowledge can be verbalized (conscious)	knowledge is inaccessible (unconscious)
tested by recall, recognition, cued recall (as in school)	evidenced via altered dispositions, preferences, judgements, behavior
one trial learning	often acquired gradually over multiple trials
requires effort and intention.....	acquired incidentally (without intention, attention, or awareness)
flexible knowledge, available to multiple response systems	inflexible knowledge, limited to response systems participating in original learning
not durable	durable
can form conjunctions between arbitrary stimuli (e.g., paired associate learning)	cannot learn conjunctions
“specialized to detect variance, i.e., what is different or unique about the events of a particular time and place” [Eichenbaum].....	“specialized for detecting invariance, i.e., for extracting what is common in stimulus environment” (i.e., regularities)
medial temporal lobe (hippocampus)	striatum (basal ganglia)
source: Learning and Memory

Various:

• I always remember the meaning of "declarative knowledge" by the sentence: "I declare that Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States." Or: "I declare that I was born in Springfield, IL." Declarative knowledge is facts and factoids you can (consciously) declare.
• I think these two systems correspond to Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. (Take that with a grain of salt.)
• It's misleading to characterize implicit learning as strictly procedural. Category learning and probabilistic learning are both handled by the basal ganglia. It's the basal ganglia that allow you to learn that where there is smoke, there is fire.
• It's the hippocampus that allows you to learn the aphorism "Where there's smoke, there's fire."
• The basal ganglia-frontal circuit understands language. Procedural memory processes grammar; declarative memory learns vocabulary. 
• "One trial learning" is a bit misleading (in column one). Declarative knowledge can be acquired in one trial in a way that procedural knowledge (e.g.: how to hit a tennis ball) cannot. But retaining declarative knowledge over time requires spaced repetition and practice.
• Not sure about 'cannot learn conjunctions [8th row].' Offhand, it doesn't jibe with scenarios like the weather prediction task. update 8/1/2012: paired-associate learning at Cambridge Brain Sciences - vocabulary learning is a case of paired-associate learning
• Must determine the meaning of "limited to response systems participating in original learning."
• Alzheimer's affects the hippocampus.

And:

Seems to me constructivism mixes these two systems up.

The basal ganglia are built to look for a pattern naturally and unconsciously. You don't have to think about it, and you don't have to go to school to do it. But constructivists want students to expend a great deal of time and conscious effort figuring out the patterns and regularities in school subjects.

Meanwhile declarative knowledge has to be attended to and consciously acquired, but constructivists seem to want students to learn content knowledge more or less by osmosis. Osmosis is the basal ganglia's department. Ditto learning by doing.

Constructivists seem to want to make easy things hard and hard things easy.

oldies: do not press send

I had forgotten this one from 2007.....

Why students have to memorize things

re: Larry Summers' claim that "in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device..., factual mastery will become less and less important":

Larry Summers is wrong.

Factual mastery has not and will not become less important, for the simple reason that it is not possible to think about something stored on Google.

While you are thinking about something, that something has to be lodged inside working memory, not Google.

Biology does not work the way Larry Summers thinks it works.

Working memory

If I ask you to multiply 36 by 3 inside your head, working memory is what you use to do it.

Working memory (WM) does three things:

1. Holds the problem -- "multiply 36 by 3" -- in consciousness 
2. Retrieves the relevant knowledge from long-term memory (the times tables, in this case)
3. Performs the calculation

Boiling it down, working memory is:

1. a form of storage
2. a search engine 
3. a "computer" or thinker

"Critical thinking" is accomplished by working memory.

3 to 5

The fact that we can think only about things stored inside working memory leads directly to the need for "factual mastery."

Factual mastery—knowledge stored inside long-term memory—is essential because although long-term memory is vast, working memory is tiny:

...cognitive tasks can be completed only with sufficient ability to hold information as it is processed. The ability to repeat information [you have just heard or read] depends on task [difficulty]... but can be distinguished from a more constant, underlying mechanism: a central memory store limited to 3 to 5 meaningful items in young adults.

The Magical Mystery Four: How Is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why? by Nelson Cowan

Working memory can hold three to five items at once. That's it. That's the limit.

Three to five.

I hit this limit all the time trying to write about new topics. The basal ganglia, for instance. For well over a year, I have been endlessly working and re-working a project on the basal ganglia, a subject I knew essentially nothing about going in. Where the basal ganglia were concerned, my long-term memory was a blank slate.

The upshot: I was not able to write about the basal ganglia until I actually learned about the basal ganglia: learned as in committed the material to memory. It didn't matter how many times I looked up basal ganglia on the internet. I looked up the basal ganglia on the internet a lot, as a matter of fact; then I forgot whatever it was I had looked up while I was looking up something else to do with the basal ganglia, after which I'd have to go back and re-look up the first thing all over again.

Try it if you don't believe me.

Here are some terms related to the basal ganglia:

Dorsal striatum
Ventral striatum
Putamen
Nucleus accumbens
Ventral tegmental area
Orbital frontal cortex
Dopamine
Two pathways
OCD
Addiction
Habit
Impulsive
Compulsive
Intuition
Probabilistic learning
Associative learning
Statistical learning
Serotonin
Orbitofrontal cortex
Cortico-striatal circuit

Now supposing I handed you a laptop and asked you to look up each term on Wikipedia, then write a coherent, reasoned 5-paragraph essay on the basal ganglia: what it is and what it does. Just a quick summary organized into 5 coherent paragraphs.

You couldn't do it.

You couldn't do it because every time you wrote about the ventral striatum, the dorsal striatum, and the orbitofrontal cortex, you would forget the VTA and the putamen—and you would forget the VTA and the putamen because your working memory will hold only 3 to 5 things at once. Something has to go.

That's what happened to me when I took the SAT with a calculator I didn't know how to use. Each time I swapped the steps for using the calculator into working memory, my brain swapped the information for the problem I was doing back out of working memory. Then, when I tried to cram the information for the problem back into working memory, the calculator steps got squeezed out again.

I could remember the problem, or I could remember the calculator, but I couldn't remember both at the same time. Too much information, literally.

My calculator fiasco illustrates the reason you need to practice until you learn content and skills to the point of 'automaticity.' (Automaticity is another basal ganglia term, by the way. The basal ganglia are the part of the brain that underpins automaticity.) Once you've learned something so well you don't have to think about it, you free up space in working memory to hold other things.

Thus if you know the times tables "by heart," you don't need to pull "3x6=18" into working memory. Working memory can locate "3x6=18" inside long-term memory and use it without displacing "36x3."

Knowledge stored inside the brain is different from knowledge stored outside the brain

Experts always possess factual mastery of their fields. Always.

The reason experts always possess factual mastery of their fields is that knowledge stored in long-term memory is different from knowledge stored on Google.

Knowledge stored in long-term memory is (or becomes) biologically connected, or "chunked." Thus to an expert on the basal ganglia, ten facts about the basal ganglia are just one or two big facts about the basal ganglia.

Chunking is the magic, because working memory doesn't care about chunk size. Working memory can hold 3 to 5 small and simple items or 3 to 5 large and complex items. Either will do. Chunking gets around the limits on working memory.

Dan Willingham's demonstration of working memory

For a demonstration of the chunking principle, read the list below, then look away and try to remember what you've read:

CN

NFB

ICB

SCI

ANC

AA

How many letters did you recall?

To find out how many letters you would have recalled via prior chunking inside long-term memory, see Daniel Willingham's explanation in "How Knowledge Helps" (American Educator | Spring 2006).

(The answer is all of them.)

You can't Google knowledge chunks

Knowledge chunks can be created only inside the brain, via learning. You can't Google someone else's complex knowledge chunks and swap them into your own working memory. It doesn't work that way. Your own brain has to do the work of chunking, and your brain does that work through the process of learning, bit by bit and step by step.

Which means that the process of storing content in long-term memory is not a simple matter of "memorizing facts" so you can "regurgitate" them later.

Over time, memorization creates the complex knowledge chunks that allow knowledgeable people to engage in complex thought.

Experts think better than novices because experts have factual mastery

To a gratifying degree, I can now think about nearly all 19 items on the basal ganglia list at the same time. I'm still struggling with "putamen" and "ventral tegmental area," but the other 17 are stored in memory: my memory, not Google's. So, for me, those 17 items are no longer 17 separate items, but closer to 2 or 3. When I think about 1 item on the list, I'm thinking about the others.

I reached this point by committing these terms and concepts to memory. As the terms entered my long-term memory, they became biologically connected and chunked. Now that I can think about them at the same time, which means I can write about them, too.

What makes experts expert, to a large degree, is factual mastery of their fields. Factual mastery allows experts to think deeply and well because the content they are thinking about has been biologically connected and chunked inside their brains, and there is no obvious limit to the amount of chunked content working memory can manage so long as knowledge has been chunked into no more than 3 to 5 separate entities.

Factual mastery is required for complex thought.

Which brings me back to Larry Summers.

If our schools are going to ask students to 'think' about material they haven't learned, students are going to be thinking about 3 to 5 small, not-well-elaborated items at a time. Period. Their thinking will be superficial, and the conclusions they reach will be superficial, too.

Which is exactly what we see in Larry Summers' op-ed about education, a field in which he is neither expert nor learned.

AND SEE: 
Superior Memory of Experts and Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM)
Extremely fast learning & extended working memory
The Number and Quality of Representations in Working Memory by Weiwei Zhang and Steven J. Luck
How Knowledge Helps by Daniel T. Willingham American Educator Spring 2006
#whystudentsneedtomemorize

oldies but goodies

May 7, 2006

momof4 on middle school versus junior high

My four kids all attended the same school between ES and HS, but it was a 7-8 JHS for my older two and a 6-7-8 MS for my younger two - over the strong objections of the parents in the attendance area. Apparently, the county required that a parent survey be done prior to the change but was not required to pay any attention to the results.

For my older kids, the JHS school had a strong academic focus and my kids and their friends LOVED the fact that the artsy/crafty, touchy/feely stuff had pretty much disappeared. Lots of girls who always had As in ES because they did lots of nice artwork were suddenly getting Bs and lots of boys who rarely got As in ES because they didn't care about pretty (or dioramas) were getting As because the correct answer was the main focus.

Three years later, when my third child entered the MS as a 6th-grader, the whole focus of the school had changed. The academic focus was GONE (even though many of the same teachers remained), replaced by teams, group-work and NEST (nurture, encourage, support and trust, I think). NEST was 20 minutes of daily torture; touchy/feely navel-gazing under the direction of the drama teacher. Lots of kids felt that their privacy was being invaded. The artsy/crafty projects were even more burdensome, since they had to be done in groups; often outside of school hours. It's SO easy and SO much fun to schedule 4 kids spread across 10+ miles of suburbs (irony alert) - and they all had significant extracurriculars, naturally. They also had to be driven by parents, of course. The only bright spot was that my youngest had a PE teacher for NEST and he didn't NEST - just expected the kids to be quiet enough to keep him out of trouble.

My experience was that the MS is awful; it focused on all of the worst aspects of adolescence and exaggerated them instead of minimizing them by focusing on academics. Also, the school obviously didn't understand adolescent (males, at least) very well because they didn't understand why the (male) winner of the Wonder Woman Award (best Women' History Month project) quietly dropped it into the trash can at the bottom of the stage steps - because guys should love the idea of being given a Wonder Woman award in front of 1500 peers. His parents were called in for a full-team conference. My kids could't wait to get out of that school.

a man after my own heart

Glen wrote:

I have my fourth grader do a hundred fraction problems while I do his "cut pictures out of magazines" homework for him. I have him work through middle school math contest problems, tossing him hints when he gets stuck, while I draw on his poster board. I had him learn every country in Europe while I built miniature teepees in a shoebox diorama.

He gets good grades on his schoolwork, but other parents--I mean kids, of course--often cut and paste better than I do.

His teacher thinks he's a "natural" at math, but there's nothing natural about it. It's man-made. It's training--the same sort of training you'd do if you needed to teach someone to cut hair or build birdhouses: show them how, help them a few times, and put them to work.

She would be shocked if she actually knew the level of difficulty of the math and science work he can do, but we're careful not to let her find out. Last year the teacher found out and was nasty to him for the rest of the year. She liked him when she thought he was a natural, but when she found out that he had to work at math, she was outraged.

"It's not fair to me that you are willing to do that much work for your father, but aren't doing the same for me!" I thought that I--I mean my son, of course--was cutting enough pictures out of enough magazines for her, but she apparently thought she deserved more.

She wanted to discuss the "problem" with me. She was concerned about how I was using his time. (How ironic.) She said that their Everyday Mathematics emphasized "conceptual understanding" and was concerned that my approach might not lead to "actual understanding." The previous night he had solved,

"We have four times as many cows as horses on our ranch. If we sold 280 cows, we'd end up with twice as many horses as cows. How many cows do we have?"

He was in third grade. I almost asked her to go to the board and show me how SHE would have taught him to solve it, with "actual understanding," but that would have been cruel. I held my tongue to keep my son out of trouble and said that I tried my best to help him understand. We left it at that.

This is one of the top 5% of elementary schools in Silicon Valley, so almost all the kids are performing at grade level--and that's where they want to keep them.

And I've now found out that at higher levels, middle school and high school, it's almost standard practice for parents to take the mindless homework load off their kids' shoulders to free up time for them to do the portion of homework that is actually useful.

If I have to do even more mindless homework, I may have to outsource it to India.

Steve H on setting up problems

re: how many unknowns?

I like to use more variables than are needed because I find it easier to create correct equations. I know that I can always turn the algebra crank later without much thought.

r+s=12 is easy and I know that it's correct. I also know that the half perimeters are pi*r and pi*s.

I then look for enough equations to meet my unknowns. That is what's funny about this problem. You don't have enough information to directly solve for the answer before you look at the choices. There are not enough equations for the variables. Even if you use just r and (12-r), you have no equation, unless, that is, you plug in each answer.

I don't like problems like this, because my first reaction is that you don't have enough information. You do, however, if you look at the possible answers.

Also, why is there no variable in the answer? It's just a unique aspect of this particular problem. What if one of the semicircles is replaced by half of a square? You would have something like this:

4r + (12-r)*pi

for the perimeter. the variable does not disappear when the expression is reduced.

You can't trust what you think because problems try very hard to trick your understanding. You just have to follow the facts (equations) and see where they lead you. As I always say, let the math give you the understanding, not the other way around.

balanced literacy

For some time now, I've wondered exactly what people are actually doing when they teach kids to read via balanced literacy. This video makes clear what "predictable text" is and why knowing the sound of the first letter in a word isn't the same thing as phonics. Watch what happens at the end of the tape (what doesn't happen, I should say) when this little girl encounters the word 'me.'

Sarah on balanced literacy vs phonics

You can't balance whole language and phonics because they are opposites. "Balanced literacy" as taught to my 1st grader meant (in part) "if you don't know a word, look at the first letter and guess." Phonics is "if you don't know a word, sound it out." Those two points of view contradict each other and cannot be "balanced."

A friend here described her child's experience with balanced literacy.

It was exactly as Sarah says: the kids were supposed to guess what the unknown words were, using context.

But - and here's something I hadn't heard before - every day the kids would read the same authentic book and guess the same words.

I can only guess that that happened because no matter what curriculum they're using, teachers know that kids need repetition in order to learn. So instead of giving the kids repetition via decodable books, like the Bob Books, they gave them repetition via the same authentic children's book.

But I don't know.

speaking of rightwingprof

I've just seen this posted on the Clay Bond Memorial Facebook Page:

warning to Clay's Internet friends: Central Pennsylvania Orthodox will probably stay up for awhile because it runs on freeware. Right Wing Nation will vaporize at some point because there is a monthly charge for the blogspace. Cut and scrape things you want to keep, ok?

I'm going to save I Want an Answer now, but there must be a zillion other keepers on his site--does anyone have any ideas?

palisadesk on Direct Instruction and Whole Brain Teaching

(Part 1) Coming back to Liz's question at the end of her post, How congruent is [Whole Brain Teaching] with Direct Instruction, I would have to answer: Not.

The WBT people have adapted some ideas from DI and other sources (Peer-Assisted Learning, Kagan's Cooperative Learning, Fred Jones' Positive Classroom Instruction, Precision Teaching and still more). However, they have put their own spin on all of these so their variants differ in essence as well as in details from the originals.

Take unison responding -- something that is a prominent feature of DI programs at all levels. It is never used in DI as a "management" tool, nor as a rah-rah way to "pump up" the kids or manipulate them. The script, with its unison responses, is carefully researched to ensure clear presentation -- the exact wording, examples and non-examples to ensure than 95% of students will grasp the concept or skill being taught the first time, with practice to mastery built in over a spaced continuum of lessons. Unison responses are an empirically validated way of ensuring participation of all students, instant feedback to the teacher as to hope well the students understand or remember the presentation (if there are errors it is the teacher's responsibility to loop back and re-teach an item until all students can respond correctly. Individuals who make an error are not singled out, but are monitored closely and if additional practice is required for one or two, that is arranged separately so that the dignity of the student is always preserved.)

This I found an important distinction between true DI and WBT -- Engelmann (in his writings, his presentations, and his videoed interactions with children in all settings) is extremely respectful of the dignity of the learner. While he can be funny and show a humorous side (mostly at his own expense), I cannot imagine him ever presenting a task to students and then (as in the 4th grade critical thinking video) asking them to "beg me to let you do it." Even if in jest or in a good-hearted spirit, I found asking students to plead and beg en masse to be disturbing and degrading, however well-intentioned. The kids seemed to go along with it, which is even more disturbing. Why should children have to beg their teacher to engage in a valuable learning activity?

Another fundamental difference between DI and WBT is the principle of parsimony. Engelmann is very explicit in emphasizing the need for instruction to be parsimonious--- to contain nothing extraneous, to include the minimum verbiage needed for clear communication, to require only the amount of practice needed to mastery -- no more and no less. Extraneous yakkety-yak, whether by teacher or students, is a no-go.

It would be completely alien to DI to have the teacher explain a new concept to the class, then ask the STUDENTS to explain it to each other. It's the teacher's responsibility to ensure the students grasp it, not the responsibility of the student's partner. All the scripted cheers and call-and-response stuff in WBT is totally foreign to the DI principle of parsimony, and to the concept of respect for the learner as well.

Only the instructional language in DI is scripted; the teacher is trained to give lots of positive feedback (at a ratio of 5:1 or better), and to teach in an animated and engaging manner, but how he or she does so is an individual matter. This means the teacher can adapt praise and encouragement to his/her own style and the culture of the community or classroom.

Also, DI has the scripted unison-response component to every lessons, but that is only a part of the lesson. All lessons also include individual work, sometimes partner work, sometimes small-group work, so children are not being overwhelmed by all the noise and demands to produce a response. DI makes tracking points an optional feature, but does not suggest extrinsic rewards for these (it suggests they could be tied into normal student evaluation), although teachers may use them in this way if they feel it is necessary, as is sometimes the case.

Finally, DI fundamentally differs from the example of WBT that I saw in several videos, in that it regularly monitors progress in an empirical manner so that the teacher knows what every child is learning, and ensures mastery through a research-based set of criteria at multiple points.

Although the program itself is very tightly crafted and leaves no room for "creativity," the teacher's creativity can blossom in its application and in response to the needs of the individual learners as the program moves along. In fact, it frees the teacher to be more attentive to kids' responses and to devise ways to help them overcome whatever hurdles present in their path. Not needing to re-invent the wheel in every lesson, the teacher can truly engage with and pay attention to each individual student s/he teaches.

(part 3) To be fair to WBT, some of the videoed activities I saw were pretty well done and are based on sound precedents. The one on the Speed Read 100 or something was a good example of peer-assisted learning under a teacher's direction, with children encouraged to help each other (within a pre-trained format), to aspire to beating their own record and to celebrate small steps forward.

If it weren't for the other accoutrements, I would have given this activity two thumbs up, but it was pretty good. I would recommend Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (see Sopris West for some examples for the primary classroom) as it has a positive effect in several areas, including achievement, student motivation, building classroom community, student self-confidence, and so forth. Similarly, some of the Kagan strategies, such as Think-Pair-Share and Turn and Talk are also well-validated empirically but do not need to be carried out in the chaotic manner we saw in the videos.

Another point: attention signals, such as Class-Yes! are a valuable tool in any classroom. What bothered me was not that they used it, but how it was used -- in a theatrical, almost buffoonish, hyperdramatic way. Learning can be fun and engaging, but it shouldn't be a joke, a circus or a day at the football stadium.

For primary kids, a good attention signal is (teacher says, in calm rhythmic voice) "1,2,3, eyes on me!" Children stop where they are, turn and face the teacher and clap. "1,2, eyes on you!" This is used in a purposeful manner, when something needs to be said to the whole group but it is not necessary for everyone to go back to their seat as if for a lesson. There's nothing manipulative about it, either. Class-Yes! in a straightforward way would be fine for older students, I think. I myself would not allow yelling and silliness to accompany it. We want to keep the focus on learning.

To that end, gestures can be very useful. A popular and effective program for K in the UK, Jolly Phonics, uses hand signals (called "actions") to teach the letter-sound correspondences. I can imagine similar applications at other levels. These have at least two positive benefits: they give the wiggly, energetic student an opportunity to engage in a physically active way, and they provide the teacher with instant formative assessment data on how well the lesson is progressing.

.....I doubt there are any videos out there that show DI and WBT and contrast the differences. WBT is a recent development and that explains why ... there isn't any longitudinal data on how effective it is in ensuring student learning. As for videos exhibiting DI, most that I have seen consist exclusively of video of the teacher presentation (the scripted part) since that is the most difficult to learn to do well. Signaling, pacing and knowing when to loop back and review are the hardest elements to master....

Since basic differences between the two lie in underlying philosophy and curriculum design, those wouldn't be apparent anyway. However, I did note that none of the WBT videos I saw consisted of a teacher presentation that appeared "scripted," i.e. specific language from the teacher, requiring a specific instruction-related response from students, over a period of several minutes. The "scripting" in the WBT videos consisted of management call-and-response practices, not scripted presentation of concepts and content.

Also, I don't know of any DI videos that include the whole lesson -- the non-teacher-directed parts. They don't depict the independent work period, student partner work, or small group/team work. These are an essential element of every lesson, as is the "work check:" students and teacher review and correct the independent work at the end of the lesson, to ensure students can clarify any misunderstanding before going on to the next step.

As for preschool, DI does offer specific programs for that level, most notably in language skills and verbal reasoning. They don't recommend moving on to reading instruction until children are proficient in the language skills, which include making comparisons, understanding and using if/then statements, applying a rule (if all birds have feathers, and Paco is a bird, what else do we know about Paco?).

(2 of 2) The early phases of the reading program for this level teach a lot of the phonological processing skills (blending and segmenting sounds, sequencing,left-right progression) needed for successful reading later on, and introduce only very regular grapheme/phoneme correspondences, in a special orthography modified to be less confusing to very young children whose visual perception and visual efficiency skills are less well-developed.

The letters are darker, bigger and "fatter," with distinct differences between the u and n, the p and q, the b and d, so as to prevent children's confusing them. Visually similar letters are not taught together, but presented one at a time, and when one of the pair is introduced, it is taught to mastery before the other is introduced. The program for 4-year-olds moves quite slowly, and many elements are taught in a playful or gamelike way, with lessons expected to take only about 15 minutes. So it is unlikely a child would be "unready" (after completing the language sequence), and s/he would not be pressured to move too fast.

There is very little written component at this stage; the seatwork consists often of coloring, tracing or making discriminations, such as crossing out an item that doesn't belong. These provide short, frequent opportunities to develop graphomotor skills, but not to the point of frustration.

DI is most valuable at the preschool level for children with a less-advantaged language background, though in Engelmann's early work his comparison group of "middle class" kids took off like a rocket with DI and were able to do very advanced work in reading and math by age 6, as well as verbal reasoning skills that Piaget thought impossible before age 11 or 12. He talks about that in one of his books; I'll see about finding an appropriate link....

you are here

from Paul B:

Kids can't do 6 times 7 because they are 'taught' multiple ways to multiply. Then they discover the one they like best (usually involves fingers) and stick to it until somewhere along the way they are given a calculator to expedite things.

They are assessed subjectively. They are promoted without regard to those assessments. And finally, they're never given targeted remediation or practice that is up to the task of keeping them on track.

Other than that there's not much wrong.

I have already confessed my own problems with 6 times 7.

no one can teach

In reality, no one can teach mathematics. Effective teachers are those who can stimulate students to learn mathematics. Educational research offers compelling evidence that students learn mathematics well only when they construct their own mathematical understanding (MSEB and National Research Council 1989, 58).

Constructivist Learning and Teaching

Time to put the public back in public schools.


CT Coalition for World Class Math
NJ Coalition for World Class Math
PA coalition for World Class Math
United States Coalition for World Class Math
Parents' Group Wants to Shape Math Standards
Common Core Standards: Who Made the List?

KTM as keeper of the flame

We go on a lot about whether government money can fix things, if vouchers can work, what the future innovations can look like, what would make them possible. We don't reach consensus very often, and it's unclear whether or not we should. It makes me wonder if I'm doing any good by participating on this blog if I just go back again over the same arguments, returning to the same points we've made before. Even when I agree with others, I've found I am busy negating arguments instead of finding new solutions. So, what then, am I doing that's valuable? What is KTM doing that's valuable?

One big way in which KTM is valuable was so obvious to me that I overlooked it. KTM is a keeper of the flame of What Works. When everyone else has forgotten what curricula worked, what methods worked, what subjects were supposed to be taught, and how they were taught, this blog will recall.

We're now at least two generations into an education establishment that has eradicated the idea of direct instruction of students in subject areas. Two generations now means no one knows that reading or literature used to be rigorous; that grammar was once taught to schoolchildren. Two generations where no one knows the simplest algorithms for helping children master basic math facts. Two generations of no direct knowledge of the value of a comprehensive liberal arts education.

Ed schools are busy burning every copy of every wheel left in existence. The teachers themselves have never heard of this odd invention, because they've been taught by ones who never used it.

Someday, parents, teachers, school administrators, whomever, are going to start looking again for the wheel. They are going to start asking "What subjects should be taught? How can they be taught efficiently?" This blog has done more to promote the answers to those questions in every subject than anything other institution. KTM is a living museum, in the best sense of the word. Who else out there is performing this service? KTM is a virtual monastery that doesn't need to cloister itself to keep the truth alive. We need more of them, but having even one will be a necessity for parents in the future. Every time we find another answer, another subject that was taught, can be taught, and find references to the materials themselves so we can teach it again, we're saving a kid in a future generation. Even if we never can find a way to save them from the schools we've got now.

Independent George boils it down

Is it me, or can the entire philosophy of K-6 education be summarized as:

1. It's not our fault.
2. It's not our problem.
3. We're underfunded.

I'm thinking we should make this our default kitchen table math post on days when everyone's too busy to write something new.

Then there's this:

If kids don't learn math, it's because they're not capable of learning it. And if they enter high school five years behind grade level, then it's up to the parents and the high schools to catch them up. Either way, they need more money so that they can facilitate kids learning on their own.

the golden age 1956-1970

A woman here in town gave me permission to post this account of her experience teaching in Manhattan public schools between the years 1956-1970:

As a retired teacher, my experience was in Manhattan elementary schools in the NYC school system. This was a challenging teaching environment since the children ranged from the economically advantaged to the very economically disadvantaged. I taught in East Harlem and later in P.S. 9 on West End Avenue/84th St., two extremes.

We teachers were not indoctrinated in, and certainly didn't teach, the "whole method" system of reading. Most of us went to the City Colleges--City College, Hunter College, Brooklyn, Queens-- and learned teaching methods, materials, and philosophy. Most of my peers had a Masters degree in Education.

We could not qualify to teach in the NYC school system merely by sending for a certificate to show that we went to college. We had to be licensed by NYC, thoroughly tested in knowledge in every area of teaching before going into the classroom. This included a speech test. Any student teacher with an accent, speech impediment or related problem, especially with s, t, d, r, or l, was to be helped by a speech pathologist. FREE! I remember going to Professor Davidson, a leading speech therapist and being drilled with the poem "Jenny Kissed Me" on many 8AM mornings.

The NYC Board of Education issued curriculum bulletins for every grade and in every subject area. These bulletins were uniform for all the boroughs and indicated what was to be taught. I never experienced any teacher who thought they or the students were being stifled. On the contrary, we teachers were as creative as was necessary to do our jobs. I, being a budding artist then, always found creative ways to engage the students in learning.

We were required to make lesson plans for approval. Our lesson plan book was collected every week by our assistant principal. Each lesson had to have a stated goal, a provision for review and reinforcement, procedures or methods, and a conclusion. It wasn't fun making lesson plans, but it made us more efficient, focused, and better teachers.

Why should anyone need "Field Tested" curricula if teachers are properly trained and supervised?

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

A quick explanation of that last observation: the writer of this account was responding to my assertion that Irvington should adopt only field-tested curricula.

I read her narrative & marvel. She is talking about the public schools of Goldin & Katz's America:

At the dawn of the twentieth century the United States became the richest nation in the world. Its people had a higher average standard of living than those in Britain, the previous leader. America was poised to ascend further. The gap between it and other front-runners would widen and the standard of living of its residents would cotinue to grow, even when its doors were open to the world's poor. American economic supremacy would be maintained to the end of the century, and beyond. In economic terms, the twentieth century fully merits the title "The American Century."

The twentieth century could also be titled the "Human Capital Century." By the end of the twentieth century all nations, even the poorest, provided elementary schooling and beyond to most of their citizens. At the start of the century and even by its midpoint many nations, including relatively rich ones, educated only those who could personally afford to attend school. The United States was different. Its educational system had always been less elite than those of European countries. By 900, if not before, it had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level not just in primary schools, at which it had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

That the twentieth century was both the American Century and the Human Capital Century is no historical accident. Economic growth in the more modern period requires educated workers, managers, entrepreneurs, and citizens. Modern technologies must be invented, innovated, put in place, and maintained. They must have capable workers at the helm. Rapid technological advance, measured in various ways, has characterized the twentieth century. Because the American people were the most educated in the world, they were in the best position to invent, be entrepreneurial, and produce goods and services using advanced techologies.

The Race Between Education and Technology
by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
p. 1-2

That was then.

Two Tales of the Twentieth Century: A Summary

The history of inequality during the twentieth century is a tale in two parts. The first was punctuated by episodes of declining inequality, some quite sudden and rapid. Stable or slowly rising inequality marked other parts of the period. On the whole, the first three-quarters of the century were years of greatly diminished inequality and lowered returns to education. Americans grew together as economic growth was shared throughout the income distribution during much of the period.

Everything came to a halt in the 1970s.

by Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz
p. 87

Are teachers today required to include "provisions for reinforcement and review" in their lesson plans? (Come to think of it, what is the status of lesson plans nowadays, anyway?)

My own school district appears to be almost exclusively concerned with understanding. Not just understanding: Enduring Understanding. Enduring Understanding and Essential Questions. It's in the Plan.^*

Actual learning, in the sense of content making it into a child's long-term memory, is assumed.

When, lo and behold, a child fails to recall on tests the material he has "understood" in class, that is a problem for parents to fix.

That's not the way it was when American schools were great.


Steve Levitt summarizes The Race in 2 sentences
Jimmy graduates

The anemic response of skill investment to skill premium growth
The declining American high school graduation rate: Evidence, sources, and consequences
Pushy parents raise more successful kids

The Race Between Education and Technology book review
The Race Between Ed & Tech: excerpt & TOC & SAT scores & public loss of confidence in the schools
The Race Between Ed & Tech: the Great Compression
the Great Compression, part 2
ED in '08: America's schools
comments on Knowledge Schools
the future
the stick kids from mud island
educated workers and technology diffusion
declining value of college degree
Goldin, Katz and fans
best article thus far: Chronicle of Higher Education on The Race
Tyler Cowan on The Race (NY Times)
happiness inequality down...
an example of lagging technology diffusion in the U.S.
the Times reviews The Race, finally
IQ, college, and 2008 election
Bloomington High School & "path dependency"
the election debate that should have been
the golden age: a NYC teacher remembers
the White House cites Goldin & Katz


^* the newly approved 21-page Strategic Plan, the one that includes 21st century skills but does not include college preparation