Dan Meyer at TED x NYED: Blow up the US curricula (Impatient Problem Solving)

Here's the talk:



Another blogger heard the talk and was so inspired that he interviewed Meyer

BrainFruit Interview w/ Dan Meyer: Eliminating Homework, Using Technology, and Inspiring Kids

I had the good fortune on Wednesday of being able to interview Dan Meyer, who gave a great TED Talk recently on math curriculum reform. He also has a wonderful blog, dy/dan, which is worth checking out.

An Interview Highlight @ 9min 30sec

I saw in my classes when I was first teaching that the students who did homework tended to be students who didn’t need to do homework, [and] the students who didn’t do it or copied it DID need it. So there was a weird imbalance there.

So I did a study for my master’s thesis and found that it didn’t improve my student’s grades. Completing homework, it didn’t have an effect, positive or negative… and that was kind of scary. So I decided to really focus on my in-class time and really maximizing that.

So much good information came out of this interview- that’s just a taste of it. Let me know what you thought, and if there’s anything I can do to make these even more valuable in the future.

election 2010

nice to meet you

black helicopters

write-in

tutoring & an endorsement

Robyne Camp

a damn shame

we need more like her

Robyne Camp

answering to the great Oz

from a parent:

There is no question in my mind that "wealthy" suburban municipalities have school systems that are the victims of "predatory" management and vendors.

The administrators, consultants, publishing companies (selling curriculum) and every layer of union, specialists etc. have contributed their portion of excessive profit taking to leave us with a torrent of spending resulting in bloat, and little to no accountability for results.

A generalization that fits here....

Our schools appear to be high quality because our children are simply high performing (in general) and come from households which are education oriented, set high expectations and are involved and assertive in their child's learning. For the most part, you could put this profile of child in almost any school, and they will do well.

I have some cynical views on how we the "powers that be" spend our money - mostly on visible items like themselves (sharp/well spoken/well dressed) infrastructure, equipment (fancy exercise rooms, fields and theaters and smart-boards), because these give the appearance of quality and visually represent "progress." Yet, our curriculum is gutted, there is little to no investment in the soft/invisible skills delivered by humanities, art and critical reasoning, exposure by travel to the great city we live, museums etc.

You get the picture.

Barring those important educational aspects, the school day is reduced to a form of day care where state tests are the focus. Again...you know the rest. That puts us on a vicious loop of paying extraordinary taxes for little beyond what any other school can offer educationally - without all the bloat. Correcting this is the the principal behind Charter Schools.

I have some ideas on how to pick-away at this, and it involves very concrete steps using novel approaches form technology...

First crowd-source community help to...

1) Translate all state mandates and laws governing schools into plain English. This way the community can defend itself every time the Administrators and come Board member invoke inertia in the name of "well it's the law" or "it's NY mandate." We as a community should know those rules better than they do.

2) Create a Benchmarking group or citizens from like and non-like communities with high performing schools and low performing schools to uncover what goes right and what goes wrong. We are way too much in a vacuum.

3) Create another team that looks for visionary, unorthodox ways to deliver great results with little spending. There are example all over the country of great leaps in education by making small changes no one thought of.

4) This is risky and counter-intuitive: Do challenge the budgets, hold back money and where appropriate, encourage communities to vote no, because if the money dries up, the vultures will leave.

5) Create regular surveys to act as plebiscites and referendums to steer the school's philosophical direction in line with the community. Today it is a disconnected space ship answering to the great Oz.

You cold have a volunteer group report everything up to the board in open community meetings every month, so as to distill the info gathered, and present it as workable ideas that can be voted on to implement.

Study how Giuliani and Bloomberg neutered the unions in NY, because they will always be a challenge here. I would also make a very public showing of removing the "Union Free" name in our schools. It's misleading, and the unions hide behind it. I would go as far as calling them Union based schools. They won't be able to hide. You will be amazed how many people don't know we have a very strong union to answer to over there, even though it's our money. They dictate to us. I am not anti-union, but I am very anti- lack of progress and results and a very high cost. They are part of the problem if they don't allow the teachers the flexibility that many of them want to further our kids along. With few exceptions, we have good educators and they deserve our support. The Administration, Union, NYS and even sometimes the Board is often in their way. They deserve our support. I'd love to see them all get raises (with less ongoing Health and Retirement Benefits - sorry, join the rest of us!), and way less to the Administrators.

C ya!

Jaywalking

funny as always

Mandatory bubbling session for AP students

While we were at the High School last week, viewing the 10th grade IB students' personal projects (year-long self-discovery projects), I noticed this sign in the commons. For those not familiar with standardized tests, this is a MANDATORY session on how to correctly bubble in the answers on the AP exams.

Really.

Did Congress Authorize Race to the Top?

Brookings Institute article.

There is nothing in the text of the ARRA, or in the portions of the two other statutes to which it points (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the America Competes Act), that authorizes, requires, or even suggests that states competing for funds would need to adopt common state standards, create more charter schools, evaluate teachers and principals based on gains in student achievement, emphasize the preparation of students for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or restructure the lowest 5 percent of their schools.

Yet the grant program the administration designed to implement the provisions of the ARRA, the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top initiative, included each of these policy priorities, and states had no chance of winning unless their applications were built around them.


Let's Do The Numbers
Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper #263
(p. 7) In sum, Massachusetts’ willingness to permit the public to comment on its academic standards, combined with a few quirks in the weighting system, cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars.

David Steiner, David Steiner

here

here

and

here

Amazing.

Are standards requirements? Are curricula products?

The push for standards is everywhere. But what are standards?

In engineering disciplines, engineers build products based on *requirements*.

Requirements are specifications of a problem to solve in order to build a product, or system or process. Requirements are NOT a design--they are not a solution. They specify key elements that a solution must have, should have, and would like to have, but properly written, they leave open what the actual solution is.

Examples of requirements are:
device must weigh less than 2.2 ounces;
device must operate properly during and afterw a fall from 8 inches into a bath of 110 degree liquid for not less than 6 seconds duration
device user input method must support touch typing at not less than 20 wpm

system performance requirements are things like:
system must detect intrusion within N seconds with probability of detection >=80% in noisy/cluttered environment

system must locate target within accuracy of 3 sq feet at range of 1.5 miles with false positive rate of no more than 1%



Excellent requirements are difficult to write. The best ones are (at least) unambiguous, concise, testable and/or measurable, and finite. Unambiguous requirements leave little room for confusion (and seldom have compound requirements in them.) Measurable requirements give you a way to tell performance; testable ones allow you a method to demonstrate you've met the requirement.

Requirements define inputs and outputs as well as what happens in between.

Given good requirements, a good design will meet them, and even more, will trace how they are met (if possible, every design choice points to a set of requirements, and on design choice exists without such requirements backing it up.) Every choice at every stage would be traceable to the requirements.

Among the stakeholders looking for a product/process/system, most aren't skilled at requirements writing. Explicit requirements are few and far between, and most must be teased out, so that derived requirements (that do meet the above criteria) can be created.

Given that, what in the world are standards in education? Are they supposed to be requirements? Of WHAT system/process/product? A classroom's learning? A classroom's teaching? Are they requirements from which one defines curricula? Is the curricula the product that meets the standards? Are students the product that are supposed to meet standards?


Reading the Common Core standards, they don't come close to meeting the criteria of requirements.
Here's an example:

1. Understand that multiplication of whole numbers is repeated addition. For example, 5  7 means 7 added to itself 5 times. Products can be represented by rectangular arrays, with one factor the number of rows and the other the number of columns.
2. Understand the properties of multiplication.
a. Multiplication is commutative. For example, the total number in 3 groups with 6 things each is the same as the total number in 6 groups with 3 things each, that is, 3  6 = 6  3.
b. Multiplication is associative. For example, 4  3  2 can be calculated by first calculating 4  3 = 12 then calculating 12  2 = 24, or by first calculating 3  2 = 6 then calculating 4  6 = 24.
c. 1 is the multiplicative identity.
d. Multiplication distributes over addition (the distributive property). For example, 5  (3 + 4) = (5  3) + (5  4).

So, apparently, these are *student* requirements.
They mean to be saying
"THE STUDENT SHALL understand that"

But what student? All students? A typical student? A student who passed the prior year's standards?

What does it mean to understand that 1 is the multiplicative identity? Does it mean to be able to recite that phrase? use that fact in a problem? use that fact in N problems, and get the answer right M times out of N problems? does it mean being able to cite the use of the multiplicative identity in order to solve the problem?

These standards aren't finite, concise, unambiguous, and without guidance, certainly aren't testable.

Where does that leave curricula? Since the standards are "THE STUDENT SHALL" rather than "the system shall", how can any curricula meet the requirements of what a student is required to learn?


If curricula aren't solutions to the problem defined by the standards requirements, then what are curricula? And what are teachers or students or schools? Stakeholders ? Or something else?

Why do we insist on teaching fractions like we teach poetry?

...asks professor Hung-Hsi Wu of Berkeley at last week's NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) Conference. Once you learn algebra, precision is most desirable, mathematics can not be taught in an ambiguous manner. He brings Mark Twain, Shakespeare and Keats into an informative and, for me, entertaining conference session.  (At one point, he turned the definition of multiplication of fractions into free form verse!) From his presentation:

Consider Hamlet's comment on Denmark after his father's death:
'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Compare it with the definition of 3/4 :
Take a pizza (or a fraction bar) and divided it into 4 equal parts. Take 3 parts.

My favorite quote from his presentation came after working to understand the product formula (is there an official name for this?): a/b x c/d = ac/bd. He said something along the lines of:

"You've worked so hard to understand, don't you need a treat? Here's the standard algorithm. You can almost use it mindlessly."

At which point people in the audience started snickering & guffawing. Wu continued:

"We drive mindlessly. Do we consider the internal combustion engine when we do so?"

He insists that computation is a part of mathematics:

Analogies and metaphors have a place in mathematics. They can be very helpful in the understanding of precise concepts and reasoning. However, it is a mistake to allow them to replace precise concepts and reasoning.

Let us hope that fractions will be taught with less poetry, but with more emphasis on

precise definitions, and
precise reasoning

Want to enjoy the whole presentation in your own home? Point your browser to: http://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/NCTM2010.pdf

Karen Pryor on paying students to learn

Why economists can't learn something about reinforcement theory is beyond me.

explanation, please

$1,675?

How exactly does a publisher arrive at this figure?

I would like to know.

who decides?

from Steve H :

"It's a numbers game. The argument is how many people actually have it and use it. If it's not a significant portion of the population than you can make the argument that it's a ludicrous goal to set that says we have to get every student there."

Who makes this decision and when do they make it?


"This thread poses the argument that the kids have already figured this out, long before the adults."

What, exactly, do they figure out? Do they come to the conclusion that they are just not good in math; that they don't like math? Is that really the case or is that because of bad teaching and curricula? KTM is all about fixing the problem of K-8 math and making sure that kids don't come to the wrong conclusion. It's about keeping educational doors open. Besides, up to a point, I don't care what my son likes or doesn't like. He has to do the work. I will decide which doors to close, and I will thank the school and other adults for not making that decision for me. I would also hope that they would not make that decision for kids who do not have parents who protect them from do-gooders and societal bean counters.

I agree. I have put three children through the public school system, two with autism. For all three of my kids, educators have made assumptions about what they couldn't do that were flat wrong.

Probably our worst experience of this was the public school in Los Angeles where the teacher thought Jimmy was nonverbal. We had no idea they thought that, and when we found out Ed videotaped me working with Jimmy on his flash cards.

"vacuum cleaner"

"newspaper"

After the teacher saw the video, she said, "I wish you'd told us."

E.D. Hirsch: a brief history

Hirsch writes:

In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville wrote admiringly: “In the United States the general thrust of education is directed toward political life; in Europe its main aim is to fit men for private life.”

[snip]

The reasons for this communitarian emphasis were obvious to American leaders in the nineteenth century. Loyalty to the Republic had to be developed, as well as adherence to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration. For without universal indoctrination by the schools in such civic virtues, the United States might dissolve, as had all prior large republics of history, through internal dissension.

The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans. This was the inspiring ideal of the common school in the nineteenth century, built upon a combination of thrilling ideals and existential worry. By the end of the century we were educating, relative to other countries, a large percentage of the population, and this forward movement continued well into the twentieth century. In the post–World War II period, the US ranked high internationally according to a number of educational measures. But by 1980, there had occurred a significant decline both in our international position and in comparison with our own past achievements. Two decades ago I was appalled by an international comparison showing that between 1978 and 1988 the science knowledge of American students had dropped from seventh to fourteenth place. In the postwar period we have declined internationally in reading from third place to fifteenth place among the nations participating in the survey.

The root cause of this decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth—a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience. A 1939 critic of the new movement, Isaac Kandel, described it this way:

Children should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests…. Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation; the teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene except to guide and advise. There must, in fact, be “nothing-fixed-in-advance” and subjects must not be “set-out-to-be-learned.”

By 1950, with new, watered-down schoolbooks and a new generation of teachers trained in specialized colleges for education, the anti-bookish, child-centered viewpoint had taken over the schools. The consequence was a steep decline in twelfth-grade academic achievement between 1962 and 1980, after which, despite vigorous reform efforts, reading and math scores on the federally sponsored National Assessment of Educational Progress have hardly changed.

With the current emphasis on testing and accountability it might be assumed that the days of child-centeredness are now over. But that assumption would miss an essential point. The schools still lack a definite, pre-set, year-by-year curriculum (though this is changing in math) and yet at the same time schools are being required to make measurable progress on year-by-year tests.

How to Save the Schools
New York Review of Books
May 13, 2010
by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

advertisements for myself

A couple of days ago I caught sight of Ed's copy of The New York Review of Books lying on the kitchen table. (Where else?)

I looked at the cover, didn't see anything that caught my interest. Normally that's the end of it. I never look at the table of contents.

For some reason, though, this time I did. I opened the paper, turned to the contents, and was skimming down the list, asking myself why I was doing this since I wasn't feeling any more interested on this second pass, when suddenly I realized I was reading familiar words: Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Which hadn't been mentioned on the cover.

I had no idea!

After I stumbled across the review I called Ed to alert him, then left the house without reading more than a few paragraphs. I hate reading reviews. Ed called later to say that it was a "rave," and I still have not read the thing in its entirety.

But I'm glad it's there.

Joanne Jacobs community college blog

it's new!

Math on a farm

Jane wrote:

I suspect that the data that say the vast majority of people don't use math is inaccurate. I suspect that every small business owner is constantly using basic algebra. We have a family farm and constantly, daily use algebra. My contractor calculated angles, areas, amount of paint, flooring, labor and materials necessary to remodel our house. Our banker uses a calculator, but easily and obviously has the mathematical fluency to have a real time conversation about prices, quantities, exchange rates and whether certain data sources are reliable. The sales people we deal with calibrate machinery to determine how much material we need to use on a field. Of course, I check their calibration calculations as well. Yes, we all use tools, but without the understanding of how the math fits together, the tools would be black boxes and we wouldn't know when a number didn't make sense. And we are constantly figuring out, how much seed to put on a field, if a chemical needs to be applied at a certain flow rate and dilution, how fast does the tractor move. If we can x crop and it costs z to grow and we might sell it for a range of y1 - y2, Which crop should we plant.

My dad was a farmer. He always had a slide rule handy on his desk. I was fascinated by it.

I don't know why he had it, and I can't guess because I've never learned to use a slide rule.

I'd like to.

missing knowledge

Barak Rosenshine on teacher effectiveness research:

I suggest that the teacher effects era, between 1955 and 1980, was an impressive run of cumulative research. During this period, over 100 correlational and experimental studies were conducted using a common design and the different observation instruments shared many common instructional procedures. And it was cumulative: researchers cited and built upon the instructional findings of others.

After several years of immersion in the education world, I am just now finding out about this.

Return of the repressed.

success or failure

Constructivist Instruction: Success or Failure by Sigmund Tobias and Thomas M. Duffy

I discovered the book while Googling Barak Rosenshine.

Until last week, reading the Direct Instruction list, I had never heard of Barak Rosenshine. He is apparently Doug Lemov's predecessor;^* he did what Lemov did, which was to find highly effective teachers and then watch what they were doing.

Later on, he trained teachers in the techniques and compared their students' achievement to that of students in classrooms with conventional teachers. The teachers trained in direct instruction were more effective.


^* Please correct me if I'm wrong - just getting into this. Rosenshine has researched teacher effectiveness and summarized the research; I'm not sure which studies he did.

how to start a charter school

Laura sends this resource: Charter Schools Development Center