While Charlie Sleeps

Kill Worksheets; Save Our Children

2009-05-04T20:20:00.005-05:00

The proliferation of worksheets is troubling. The idea that "homework equals worksheet" and a novel needs a "packet" is problematic on many levels. Start counting the worksheets your child brings home, and you will have a good idea of the quality of instruction s/he is receiving. Hint: less is better.

Worksheets

kill creativity in favor of route memorization and the questing for the right answer.
communicate a binary view of the world.
reward consumption.
encourage a busy work view of school.
are passive.
are irrelevant.
dumb down.
promote the glaze.
normalize.
are all about low expectations.
are lazy.

Q: Why do worksheets persist?
A: Worksheets persist because parents were, for the most part, educated with worksheets.

Irony

2008-12-08T21:07:00.002-06:00

No Child Left Behind, now that's ironic. I look forward to post irony. Let's get real and keep it real.

What do you want your kids to be able to do?

2008-07-07T12:47:00.003-05:00

What Summer Skills do you want your child to be able to do? I've been asking neighbors and friends this question throughout the last week. The list looks like this:

1) Swim
2) Ride a bicycle
3) Throw a ball
4) Catch a ball
5) Play tennis
6) Play golf
7) Bait a hook
8) Cast a line
9) Sail a boat
10) Hit a ball

The list is a tell. It communicates, to some extent, class and cultural norms. I wonder how this list would change if I asked this question in a different neighborhood...

DIY: Alternative Yearbook

2008-02-23T11:15:00.005-06:00

Combine a six word memoir with a five line self-portrait and students can create an alternative yearbook. Better yet, have teachers create six word philosophies and five line self portraits for open house.

The Future is Here!

2007-11-17T09:35:00.000-06:00

Imagine what the video below will look like when these guys get to college.
Wow! Now!

Writing a Book about Education

2007-11-15T17:27:00.000-06:00

How to write a book about education:

1) Have students keep learning logs in the form of rhyming couplets.
2) Write your own rhyming couplet as a lesson reflection.
3) At the end of the year collect and publish both.
4) Title the work: The Carnegie Unit.

Echoes of Saul Alinsky and the Problems Facing America

2007-08-26T13:19:00.000-05:00

TO: The Folks on the Block
FROM: Saul Alinsky
SUBJECT: Freedom
CC: Corporate America, Current and Future Administrations in Washington.

"People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people."

Worst Practices: Round Robin Reading

2007-08-26T13:08:00.000-05:00

Based on my observation, Round Robin Reading (RRR) is a dominant reading strategy across high school. In RRR students are encouraged to “follow along” while one student reads aloud. In practice students either read ahead or tune out.

Is RRR effective?

A review of literature indicates that RRR is detrimental to academic achievement:

1) Wastes Time—amount of reading is insignificant.

2) Inefficient—only one reader at a time.

3) Slow and meaningless reading.

4) Promotes bad reading habits, e.g., sub-vocalization, single word focus.

5) Causes behavioral problems.

6) Increases time off task.

Why does it persist?

1) Teachers tend to teach the way they were taught, rather than the way they were taught to teach.

2) Teachers don’t realize the alternatives or are unwilling to try them.

What to do?

Ban round robin reading. Provide professional development to promote high impact reading practices that align with district initiatives. Enforce through direct observation.

Summer Reading List 2007

2007-06-08T15:28:00.000-05:00

While Charlie Sleeps' Kick Ass Summer Reading List

The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Mating by Norman Rush
Billy by Albert French
Interpreter of Maladies by Jumpa Lahiri
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safour Foer
The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

While Charlie Sleeps' Summer Reading Assignment

Post summaries, quotes, and questions using twitter for every ten pages read. Be sure to leave your rss feed in the comments section so that progress can be monitored.

The Importance of Praise

2007-06-04T21:59:00.001-05:00

Educators know that general praise sucks the growth out of children. Repeatedly telling children the are wonderful kills their development. Keep praise specific, and always praise action and effort. In fact, praising the action makes criticism and growth a possibility(Cimpian, 2007).

Review

Not "You are a great writer," but, "You wrote a very powerful essay."

Not, "You are a good hitter," but, "You did a great job keeping your head down and following through when you hit the ball."

How to Praise

Keep it simple, praise effort. If your kid is successful, point out the effort behind the task and reward it accordingly. Coaches do this all the time when they start the kid who worked the hardest in practice. Teachers should do it too because students don’t get anywhere with genius alone. Since work ethic and character are critical to success, it makes sense to grade on both quality and effort. That’s right reward the kid who busts his ass.

Related:
Got Grit?

What Teachers Make

2007-06-04T16:20:00.000-05:00

Taylor Mali gets it right. Anyone who has ever taught will get it too.

Improve Nonfiction Reading with the Berkeley Protocol

2007-01-31T20:09:00.000-06:00

Eddie Perez, whose work as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) in the Department of Political Science at Berkeley earned him the Outstanding GSI and Teaching Effectiveness Award, developed this set of reading questions for his graduate students at Berkeley. He used these questions both as a protocol for student reading and as a formative assessment.

Learning to apply this protocol to complicated texts will improve students' ACT and SAT reading scores. What's good for Berkeley is probably good for our students too.

The Berkeley Protocol

What does the article say?
What does it mean?
And why does it matter?
What is the question--the problem or puzzle--being asked in this article?
What is the author's main argument or thesis?
What claims does the author present to support his or her thesis?
What are the author's conclusions?
On what assumptions does the author's main argument rest?
Is the argument persuasive?
What evidence does the author use to support the argument?
What evidence is omitted?
Do you agree with the author's assumptions? Why or why not?
What criticisms can be made of the author's argument?

Common Sense Blocks Learning

2007-01-28T17:49:00.000-06:00

Poems must rhyme.
Good writers are born, not made.
Paintings must be photo realistic.
Acquired characteristics are inherited.
Heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones.
Thinking and writing are two separate things.
The difference between summer and winter is determined by the earth’s distance from the sun.
Right?

Wrong, such “common sense” understandings of the world often lead our students astray. Students use these misconceptions to understand ideas presented in our classes. All too often students retrofit new ideas with their original misconceptions. Students may even reject ideas they see as being contrary to their initial beliefs.

A keen example of retrofitting:

“The world is flat.” + “The world is round” = “The world is shaped like a pizza.”

These misconceptions don’t disappear by telling students they’re wrong. In fact these misconceptions represent existing neuronal networks; therefore, to change a misconception we literally have to change our students’ brains! To do this we have to start where they are, not where we are.

What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Richard Feynman

2007-01-18T21:52:00.000-06:00

I'm a big fan of Richard Feynman. Parents, teachers, administrators, and students can learn a lot from one of the most gifted minds of the 20th century. The best part is you don't have to be a scientist to appreciate his wisdom. Feynman was not only a brilliant physicist but a gifted storyteller as well. Listen to him describe how his father instilled a love of learning in him. Listen to what he has to say about algebra curriculums. Listen to a genius and learn about fostering curiosity and a love of learning in all our students.

Don't run out of word bags.

Steve Jobs is a Great Teacher

2007-01-18T21:18:00.000-06:00

Who is on your faculty?

Curiosity
Intuition
Learning
Beauty
Design
Trust
Story
Death
Love

Stay hungry. Stay foolish.

Zappa was a Great Teacher

2007-01-18T20:32:00.000-06:00

This clip from CNN in 1986 proves that Frank Zappa understood the fundamentals of debate and argumentation, but what makes this interesting is his belief in American youths and his fear of an America slipping into a fascist theocracy.

Visionary? You decide.

Simply Elegant

2006-12-22T15:54:00.000-06:00

"Hey, Charlie, how does the idea of 11 parallel universes sound?"
"Cool."
I love science.

3 Questions for Your Teacher/Professor

2006-12-22T14:37:00.000-06:00

According to Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, a good syllabus should communicate the promises of the course; what students will do to realize these promises; and how the teacher/students frame the nature and progress of learning.

Therefore, I encourage you to ask your teacher/professor 3 questions when they review their syllabi:

What’s the promise of the course?
What will I do to realize these promises?
How will we frame the nature and progress of learning in this course?

Ask the Feynman Question

2006-12-22T14:16:00.000-06:00

Super brain Richard Feynman framed the enduring understanding of scientific knowledge as a response to the following question

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?

I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence you will see an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

Teachers at all levels should be required to answer this question. The next time you meet a teacher ask them the Feynman question. It doesn’t matter if they teach kindergarten or graduate school, their answer will take you places.

If you are a teacher, ask yourself the Feynman question; better yet, ask your students.

The Feynman Question Template:

“If, in some cataclysm, all knowledge of ____________________were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

6 Ways to Embed Conceptual Binding Points in Your Lessons

2006-12-03T10:32:00.000-06:00

Give students things to notice. Noticing exercises prime the curiosity pump and curious students want to learn.

Provide students with the vocabulary necessary to discuss the content. This allows for entrée into the discourse community—the first step to being an academic badass.

Provide students with a conceptual framework—a vehicle for understanding and arguing about material. Teaching students how to argue is more important than the content. Cogent, persuasive arguments come out of logical reasoning. Teach logical reasoning and amp up the deep learning in your classroom.

Integrate pictures—visual analogies are critical to learning. Pictures penetrate and resonate as they stimulate new neuronal networks.

Encourage curiosity by promoting the why. The more questions we ask the more we reinforce neuronal networks. Whying the day away promotes deep learning; just ask a three year old.

Make time for play. Playing keeps your brain engaged and thinking strategically.

Neuronal Networks

2006-11-24T16:08:00.000-06:00

Neuronal networks are prior knowledge--they're indistinguishable. The video above provides us with background knowledge necessary to understand neuronal networks. It's not enough to say prior knowledge is important. It's essential that we understand a bit of the neuroscience that makes learning possible. Everything we understand takes the form of neuronal networks. That's why it's impossible to just tell students their wrong; instead, we have to begin where they are. Easy? Not really, all too often we start where we are and not where our students are.

Teacher Hack: NinjaWords and the Academic Word List

2006-11-19T10:01:00.000-06:00

Generate vocabulary lists with definitions using NinjaWords in conjunction with the A cademic Word List. It’s easy. The NinjaWords dictionary doesn’t refresh, so just enter the words on the AWL separated by commas and let the Ninjas go to work. You’ll end up with a word list with definitions. Cut, paste, post or print. NICE!

Here’s a sample:

structure
(v) : give a structure to
"I need to structure my days"
(n) : a thing constructed; a complex entity constructed of many parts; the manner of construction of something and the arrangement of its parts
"the structure consisted of a series of arches"

significant
(adj) : fairly large; important in effect or meaning
"won by a substantial margin"

derived
(adj) : formed or developed from something else; not original
"the belief that classes and organizations are secondary and derived"

context
(n) : discourse that surrounds a language unit and helps to determine its interpretation; the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event
"the historical context"

analysis
(n) : an investigation of the component parts of a whole and their relations in making up the whole; the abstract separation of a whole into its constituent parts in order to study the parts and their relations

Related Post: Word Poverty and the Academic Word List

Let Them Create

2006-11-11T15:22:00.000-06:00

Creativity is as Important as Literacy.

Sir Ken Robinson gets it right. Watch, listen, and learn.

Think Aloud, Brain Mechanics, Academic Achievement, and the Million Dollar Question

2006-11-11T15:00:00.000-06:00

Seed Magazine has a must read article “Who Wants to be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire?” A cognitive science researcher, Ogi Ogas, applies his understanding of brain mechanics (i.e., learning, memory, decision making) to win big bucks on the syndicated game show. The article is an uber think aloud; a wonderful piece of metacognition.

Isn’t it time we teach students the basic of brain mechanics so they can have an academic edge? Mini lessons in priming, intuitive decision making, and theory of mind would be a start.

David Armano is Right.

2006-09-26T21:04:00.000-05:00

David Armano has written an excellent piece entitled “What I Learned in D-school” on Logic + Emotion. He has inspired me. This entry could easily be called “What I Learned While Reading What I Learned in D-school”; thanks, David.

Pratt’s Mantra, "Be true to your work, and your work will be true to you."

Why not apply Pratt’s Mantra to the classroom? Why not have kids believe in what their doing? Why not have teachers believe in what their doing? Why not create a space where teachers want to go to work and students want to learn? After all If we believe in our work, there is nothing we won’t do to see it through. The bottom line is the same for teachers and students: passion kicks ass.

Develop First Ideas

We should never be satisfied with first ideas. They are first steps to something better. First ideas can sometimes be really good—but they need to be developed before they become something powerful, inspirational, and even wonderful. We need to stop believing that first ideas are sacred, and tinker away.

Too often we let students get away with undeveloped good ideas. They need to know that good ideas are the jumping off point. In the classroom it comes down to timely, collective feedback. All too often we reward the good idea to the detriment of the well developed good idea. It’s the difference between a 5-line portrait and a Rembrandt.

Capture and Execute Ideas

Ideas need to be written down and executed rapidly or they disappear forever. I carry a BIB (Big Idea Book) with me wherever I go to capture ideas, metaphors, observations, and conversations. We need to encourage our students to carry around BIBs too. Places where students can record ideas, play with language, transcribe metaphors, and build arguments. We need to go large and create Wiki sites in order to build larger collective BIBs where students can workshop and critique ideas. Finally, we need to provide the support system necessary for students to execute ideas—time, space, materials—before they go stale.

Got Flow?

2006-09-23T17:01:00.000-05:00

Hours felt like minutes.
I was immersed.
It rocked.
Killer.

What do these statements describe?

The first thing that comes to mind probably isn’t learning. But why not? I just finished Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and all I thought about was learning.

Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of Flow and its 8 components as summarized on wikipedia:

Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).

Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).

A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.

Distorted sense of time - our subjective experience of time is altered.

Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).

Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).

A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

It should come as no surprise that these are also the qualities of effective learning experiences. Classrooms that FLOW are populated with students and teachers that kick ass. They are spaces of

Discovery

Challenge

Self-expression

Social framework

Cognitive Arousal

Thrill

Triumph

Accomplishment

Fantasy

Learning

Ever been in a classroom that Flowed?

Smarter in a Week?

2006-08-11T14:21:00.000-05:00

The BBC rocks. First I took the memory test on their site. Now after some poking around, I have found their Get Smarter in a Week page. Although I've missed the opportunity to win prizes, I think the opportunity to get smarter in a week is a prize in itself. Maybe the whole family will get involved. MENSA, you're on notice.

Memory Test

2006-08-11T14:08:00.000-05:00

The BBC has a 20-minute interactive memory test. I checked it out and discovered that my visual memory is lacking. The site also offers memory tips from the pros. It’s well worth a visit.

How to create learning junkies

2006-07-24T14:05:00.000-05:00

Remember how it felt when it all clicked? When, after hours, days, or even years of intensive study, you finally understood something complicated? Perhaps you would describe it as a high. According to a recent study you would be right. This moment of insight, this click, results in a shot of “natural opium-like substances”. It appears that those folks who took pleasure in learning were on the money. As far a junkies go being a learning junkie doesn’t sound so bad.

Irving Biederman, professor of neuroscience at USC, also finds that the fix is associated with new, novel material. “Without thinking about it, we pick out experiences that are richly interpretable but novel.”

This all reminds me of a post by Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users where she outlines the Typology of Cognitive Pleasures.

Briefly:

Discovery

Challenge

Narrative

Self-Expression

Social Framework

Cognitive Arousal

Thrill

Sensation

Triumph

Flow

Accomplishment

Fantasy

Learning

It’s not hard to see how these “Cognitive Pleasures” may play on the release of opiates in the brain thereby giving the learning junky their fix. Perhaps this Typology of Cognitive Pleasures provides a blueprint for aligning instruction with the new mind.

Aligning Instruction to the New Mind

2006-07-21T15:35:00.000-05:00

Think about something that you do well. Now think about how you learned to do it. Chances are that you learned to do it without being aware that you were learning. This is called habit learning. How we conceptualize the world is a product of habit learning.

How we write, speak, read, and listen are all habits reinforced over time. Technology is having a profound impact on habit learning. Digital experiences are changing the way we process information. In fact through habit learning these digital experiences are changing our brains. The time has come to align instruction not only with state standards, but to align instruction with the new brain. Failure to align instruction with the new brain will have devastating consequences in years to come.

According to a recent article in The Sunday Times:

..the reason why some children today do not pay attention in school is that they find traditional teaching methods dull compared with their digital experiences. Instead, parameters are increasingly set by “wiki-thinking”, peer groups exchanging ideas through digital networks. Just as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been built from the collective knowledge of thousands of contributors, so digital natives draw on the experiences and advice of online communities to shape their interests and boundaries. A telling symptom is blogging. Where once schoolchildren and students confided only in diaries, no they write blogs or entries into MySpace.com—where anyone can see and comment on them.

In the digital world students are learning how to sift through information in seconds. When they find information that they deem important they lock on to it. Sadly, it appears that students are discarding most of the information in classrooms. This is not a failure of intelligence; it is a failure of alignment. Teaching methods are not aligned with the new mind. Most classrooms today are overly reliant on traditional forms of instruction—students still sit in rows. Students still take notes from lectures. Students still complete worksheets. Instead of changing the way they teach, most teachers graft the latest technology on to older methodology. This is how the filmstrip of yesterday has become the PowerPoint of today.

Some important observations about the digital native’s brain according to an advertising executive:

It has rewired itself.
It responds faster.
It sifts out.
It recalls less.

Some important observations about the digital native’s brain according to a professor of human-computer interaction:

Younger people sift more and filter more. We have more information to deal with, and we pay less attention to particular bits of information, so it may appear attention spans are shorter.

But I don’t think attention spans are diminishing per se, if we find something engaging, then our attention span is just as long as it has always been

The bottom line is that the educational delivery system is out of synch with how students process information. This disconnection appears to be the reason kids are tuning teachers and lessons out more and more. Clearly, students have acquired the habits of the digital age; teachers have not. The time has come to align instruction to the new mind. To embrace the emerging wiki-world our students already in-habit.

Tufts to weight the whole mind as part of new admissions policy

2006-07-11T10:49:00.000-05:00

Remember how ironic it is that NCLB focuses exclusively on left-brain smarts? Of course elite universities have long bought into this paradigm ala the SAT and ACT, but the times they are a changing. Starting this year, Tufts University will include assessments designed to measure R-Directed aptitudes in their admissions process. Tufts will weight analytical ability, academic history, and now…creativity when evaluating applicants.

The reason for the shift is because Robert Sternberg is the new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. Sternberg is the noted creator of the Rainbow Project--a battery of tests that measure R-Directed aptitudes. Sternberg developed the Rainbow Project at Yale, and has published research that validates its ability to predict college success.

A student participating in the Rainbow Project may be asked to provide humorous captions to New Yorker cartoons, to write a story “using only a provided title as their guide", and to problem solve several real-life scenarios. Significantly, the Rainbow Project Test when used with the SAT is the best predictor of how well students will do in college.

Tufts is piloting the use of the Rainbow Project as part of their admissions policy. The test will be administered to students who wish to add it to their admissions packet. Tufts administrators see the Rainbow Project as a way to distinguish students who are on the admissions borderline.

Sternberg describes it this way, “It’s not that the analytical skills aren’t important, but they aren’t enough. We have to stop putting so much emphasis on only a sliver of the abilities that kids bring to college.”

Related Articles

Tufts Gets Creative on Admissions
A Rainbow Approach to Admissions

Bravo, Tufts!

Build a Better Brain--Play with your kid today

2006-07-07T13:24:00.000-05:00

My wife and I often obsess about how to help our children’s brains flourish. We’ve been to all the classes, purchased all sorts of toys and listened to all sorts of music. Through it all we have had a nagging sense of guilt that we weren’t doing enough to stimulate their brains.

Sure we play with our kids all them time, but don’t we have to read to them all the time, too? And what about sorting games and patterns and talking to them and with them? And what about playing the “right” music? What about television? Is their time too structured or not structured enough?

A new policy paper bottom lines it for us: "The key issue is the nature of kids' relationships with the important people in their lives. It's not about the toys, it's about the human connection." That is according to the paper’s author Jack P. Shonkoff, MD, chair of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child.

Play with our children; bond with them; provide them with a secure relationship. That’s it.

Neuromarketing, Neurolearning, and a Warning

2006-06-27T08:44:00.000-05:00

Neuromarketing—the study of the brains response to advertising—is everywhere these days. Neuromarketers are as brash as to propose that there is a buy button in the brain.

Of course the marketing is way out in front of the science, but that doesn’t mean that folks aren’t diving in—learning brain basics, sifting through brain research, and even conducting fMRI studies. Figuring out how the brain works just makes sense from a marketing perspective.

One wishes that educators pursued neuroscience with the same vigor as their business brethren. Why not a quest to discover learning button in the brain? Why not a race between the learning button and the buy button folk? Why not a cognitive psychology requirement for pre-service teachers?

Brain basics are essential to determining the merits of brain-based learning. In fact, anything with the prefix neuro should come with the warning “consumer beware”. Deena Skolnick a graduate student at Yale, conducted a study that asked her subjects to judge different explanation of psychological phenomena. She found that including a few sentences of neuroscience was all that was needed to make bad explanations look like good ones in the eyes of experts and novices. The message is clear, the next time you see neuro attached, beware of seduction and manipulation.

The best defense against manipulation is to realize the limits of neuroscience by studying the brain yourself. A good place to start is the Society for Neuroscience. You can get a free copy of Brain Facts there and jumpstart your knowledge of neuroscience today.

Something about Stossel

2006-06-26T13:29:00.000-05:00

For those of you who missed it a while back, here is the 20/20 report “Stupid in America”. After you finish viewing it, you can check out my earlier entry Stossel gets stupid with America. Enjoy.

Experience and Education

2006-06-22T15:19:00.000-05:00

John Dewey, "The history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formation from without; that it is based upon natural endowments and that education is a process of overcoming natural inclination and substituting in its place habits acquired under external pressure."

China 2006:

Thousands of students in central China rioted this week because they were duped by university officials. The protests were the most prolonged student protests since Tiananmen Square. Classrooms were ransacked, windows smashed and there were even clashes with police. It is important to note that the government did not roll the tanks in this time. Why the riot? According to the NYT News Service:

Students at Shengda, a privately run college with 13,000 students outside Zhengzhou, say they were assured on admission, and repeatedly afterwards, that they would get graduation certificates that would appear identical to those issued by Zhengzhou, the top university in the province.

When this year's graduating seniors picked up their diplomas on Friday and saw the revised language, the reaction was instantaneous and incendiary. "We bought a Mercedes-Benz and they delivered a Santana," said one angry graduate, referring to a low-priced Volkswagen sedan made in China.

I like the car metaphor.

Imagine if we applied cars to diplomas in this country? Ah, the possibilities…Yale? Tufts? Illinois State? SUNY Purchase?

And what about John Dewey? After all he visited China once.

Reader's Digest is right, laughter is the best medicine

2006-06-22T12:21:00.000-05:00

Sometimes you just have to take time and laugh. Last night, Charlie was running around the upstairs, yelling and carrying on way past his bed time. After trying unsuccessfully to catch him, I announced, “That’s it I’m going to bed.” To which Charlie replied, “Good night, daddy.” Everybody laughed, and everybody eventually made it to bed. Ending the day with a belly laughter took me to a good, peacful place right before falling asleep. The day felt better.

Laughter is important; it makes you feel better, and it just may improve your health. In the spirit of good spirits I offer Is Psychology a Science to whet your apetite, Statz Rappers, and if you haven’t seen it yet, The Evolution of Dance. Enjoy…

Schools need knowledge champions

2006-06-14T15:44:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading about Knowledge Management (KM) lately, and am convinced that schools need knowledge champions—folks who will facilitate the effective acquisition of new knowledge from multiple sources. Today, new knowledge can come from anywhere—students, parents, professional organizations, other schools, design firms, start-ups, blogs, wikis, phone conversations, instant messages. Knowledge champions are passionate about new ideas, innovations, and knowledge. They are fueled by curiosity. They look toward a multitude of outside sources and networks always synthesizing what they find. An email, an IM, and an article in Fast Company are synthesized into something new. Knowledge champions are all about how we can take ideas and turn them into something that increases student achievement.

Public schools desperately need knowledge champions because schols are stale places for most students. If we view students as consumers of information student boredom takes on new meaning. Could it be that the information kids are given at school, just isn’t that compelling? We live in a world of verbs, yet teachers still argue about nouns (content). When teachers do get around to verbs they are usually consumed with coverage instead of innovation. When the subject of wikis or blogs is broached the questions focus on grading and not student engagement. In such a system, is it any wonder that students are board to death?

Let’s make schools a place for the curious instead of the apathetic. Let’s make ourselves knowledge champions.

Dig for new knowledge.

Network for new knowledge.

Synthesize new knowledge.

Apply new knowledge.

Execute new knowledge.

Spread new knowledge like a virus.

Remain curious.

Finally, let’s follow this process in our classrooms and make our students knowledge champions.

Related Posts
Knowledge Management and the Classroom

Expand Graduations

2006-06-12T10:57:00.000-05:00

There’s talk about getting rid of 8th grade graduation in Chicago. In many ways graduations fly in the face of high expectations. After all, if we expect children to graduate, then why the pomp and circumstance? Why the ceremony? What’s the big deal; isn’t graduation the expectation and not the exception? I felt this way throughout my academic and teaching career. But there are good reasons to rethink this stance.

Most parents love graduation ceremonies. In fact, it may be the only time a parent makes special arrangements to get involved in their child’s education. Graduation trumps all other school activities when it comes to parental involvement; even parent-teacher night.

Perhaps we need celebrations honoring the successful completion of each grade. Viewed this way education is similar to a video game. Each grade is a level. Each level is more challenging than the one preceding it. Each level culminates in an award. It’s a win-win: kids love video games and parents love ceremonies.

Make them biannual events. When students demonstrate mastery of a grade level allow them to move on. Give them badges; have pinning ceremonies; get the parents into the school. Talk to the parents at these events. Work the parents. Build the community that education professors and pundits love to talk about.

Some will say, “What about the student who fails?” The answer is evident. The ceremonies are for the students who are successful; therein lays there value. It is time to do away with graduations and replace them with regular academic ceremonies that honor kids and parents for making it to the next level. Only then will education become an expectation and not an exception.

Teaching with Expertise in Mind

2006-06-02T14:37:00.000-05:00

Nobel Laureate V.S Naipaul is right when he says that “Most people are not really free. They are confined by the niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of their vision.” This is true in education and the limits are damning. Teachers, parents and administrators limit academic achievement by feeding in to a defeatist mindset that says “can’t” instead of “can”.

Actual phrases I’ve heard that retard academic achievement and intellectual growth:

“That’s too hard for him.”
“My students will never be able to do that. Do you know my students?”
“They can’t.”
“He can’t.”
“She can’t.”
“Let’s be realistic…”

Statements like these indicate low expectations, and we could debate expectations theory all day and get no where; instead, let’s look at what the experts have to say about education and expertise.

First we need to clarify that education is not easy or natural for children. According to MIT Professor Steven Pinker, “education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don’t go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.” So let’s admit that school work is both difficult and necessary.

Professor K. Anders Ericsson, from Florida State, has spent the last 20 years studying expertise and believes that there are no special inherited qualities that distinguish persons with expert abilities. The key is a willingness to “stretch yourself to the limit and increase control over your performance.”

Ericsson even breaks it down into a cogent individual study plan:

Set a goal. Identify a skill you want to improve.

Practice. Design a detailed plan for improvement.

Critique. Analyze your advancement. If you’re not getting better consider a new plan.

It’s not a big jump to turn this framework into a lesson plan.
One more thing about Ericsson, he claims that expert level skills can be attained in 200 hours!

So our brains aren’t wired for school; however, with a detailed focused plan and hard work we can attain expertise. That’s powerful stuff when thought of in terms of education. The truth is that it's all "can" except for those who preach the gospel of "can't".

Must Reads

Ericsson’s The Road to Excellence
Pinker’s The Blank Slate
Restak’s The New Brain

Flashback

2006-06-01T10:57:00.000-05:00

We used to look like this at While Charlie Sleeps. I think that we've come a long way. But you decide. For more information on why we changed check out this post from a while back.

Cool Education Resources

2006-05-26T12:28:00.000-05:00

Here are some awesome educational resources that I’ve been checking out lately.

Connexions is a clearinghouse of peer reviewed educational resources out of Rice University.

Creativity Techniques offers cool tools ranging from Idea Generation to SWOT Analysis and everything in between. A must have resource for teachers and professional developers.

Learning Sciences and Brain Research Excellent resource; I used this site to create the Anticipation Guide for Brain Based Learning.

The Society for Neuroscience offers Brain Briefings, Brain Facts as well as facilitating the neuroscientist/teacher partnerships.

Indiana University’s How to Write a Better Test Handbook is a great resource for teachers, administrators, and parents interested in improving assessment.

WikEd out of UIUC is an awesome site for teachers, parnets, and all those interested in education. It is one of the best Wiki Education sites out there today.

All You Need to Know About Book Banning in Suburban Chicago

2006-05-24T13:42:00.000-05:00

All you need to know about the attempt by northwest Chicago suburban high school District 214 board member Leslie Pinney's quest to ban books like Beloved, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Things They Carried , The Awakening, Freakonomics, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, and The Perks of Being a Wallflower is this:

Leslie Pinney admits she only read passages of the controversial selections"

I have no comment.

UPDATE

In a 6-1 vote, the District 214 School Board approved the reading list as-is. This may have the added benefit of having kids actually read the books on the list, something we can't say for Leslie Pinney who soughtht to ban the books in the first place.

Are teachers and education professors ignorant or arrogant when it comes to teaching reading?

2006-05-24T13:10:00.000-05:00

It appears that many teachers and schools of education aren’t following the guidelines put forth in the National Reading Panel. Schools of education persist in presenting all methods of reading instruction as “equally valid, and how one teaches reading is merely a decision that works best for the individual teacher" rather than teaching scientifically proven methods.

Here are the “scientifically proven” methods:

Early identification of children at risk of reading failure.
Daily training in linguistic and oral skills to build awareness of speech sounds, or phonemes.
Explicit instruction in letter sounds, syllables, and words accompanied by explicit instruction in spelling.
Teaching phonics in the sequence that research has found leads to the least amount of confusion, rather than teaching it in a scattered fashion and only when children encounter difficulty.
Practicing skills to the point of “automaticity” so that children do not have to think about sounding out a word when they need to focus on meaning.
Concurrently with all of the above, building comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge through reading aloud, discussing, and writing about quality children’s literature and nonfiction topics.
Frequent assessment and instructional adjustments to make sure children are making progress.

The study conducted by The National Council on Teacher Quality examined 72 elementary education programs throughout the United States. The findings are discouraging. According to the authors, “only 11 out of 72 institutions (15 percent) were found to actually teach all the components of the science of reading.”

The problem appears to be an outright contempt of the “science of reading” in professorial circles. This stance is arrogant because it flies in the face of quantitative studies and destructive because it ultimately retards the intellectual growth of millions of children. The problem is bigger than that though: "The big step between us and animals is language. But the big step between civilization and more primitive forms of human society is written language" Dr. John Searle, Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at University of California- Berkeley, 2004 National Humanities Medal winner for Contributions to the science of the Mind. (COTC Interview)

My favorite finding is that MUCH OF CURRENT READING INSTRUCTION IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE SCIENCE!

Many reading teachers and textbooks describe the process of becoming a reader as a natural, organic process, though there is no scientific basis supporting such a view for any child, even for children who seem to find it easy to learn how to read. Many courses indicate that exposing children to literature that speaks to their own experience will spark a natural development of reading skill; the right motivation is sufficient to build skill. However, these assertions are also unsupported by scientific evidence.

Obviously we need to right the ship. As parents we need to demand that our schools teach scientifically proven reading methods. We need to hold teachers, administrators, and boards of education accountable. As pre-service teachers we need to challenge our professors when they downplay or ignore the science of reading. We shouldn’t stop their though, we need to hold professors accountable for propagating reading myths by outing them.

Undoubtedly, some folks will argue that the National Council on Teacher Quality is a conservative think tank ala the Fordham Foundation, but remember to distinguish between name calling and the refutation of facts when evaluating their research. The future of our civilization may depend on it.

Anticipation Guide for Brain Based Learning

2006-05-23T14:10:00.000-05:00

True or False

The brain is only plastic for certain kinds of information during specific "critical periods", with the first three years of a child being decisive for later development and success in life.
There are visual, auditory and haptic types of learning.
We only use 10% of our brains.
In bilingual students, two languages compete for resources.
Knowledge, acquired in one language, is not accessible in the other language.
In order to become bilingual the first language must be spoken well, before the second language is learned.
Left brain/right brain dominance determines a person’s way of thinking and his/her personality.

Go here for the answers.

Teachers Differ on Prior Knowledge of "Prior Knowledge"

2006-05-23T13:39:00.000-05:00

What’s your prior knowledge of “prior knowledge”? Where does prior knowledge come from? What role does it play in learning? Researcher Helen Meyer asked teachers these questions and found out that their conceptions of prior knowledge (pk) differed with experience and expertise.
Novice teachers believed that pk came from prior teaching as in “I hope that they have studied this before.” However, expert teachers believe that pk comes from “life experiences”.

As for its role in learning, novice teachers view pk as a hook—a way to get students engaged in a lesson—and as a foundation for new learning. In contrast, expert teachers view pk as a bridge to understanding and integrating new information. For expert teachers pk is all about building connections from one experience to another or from informal to formal learning. Pk is about synthesis.

In summary, for novice teachers students’ pk is about nouns; for expert teachers it is about verbs. Novice teachers sought to replace faulty pk like one might replace a brick in a wall. While expert teachers viewed pk as a means to get at how students put their ideas together and to get them to think in new ways about what they are learning.

Novice teachers are also less apt to adapt their teaching according to students’ prior knowledge than were expert teachers. This does not mean that novice teachers are bad teachers; it means that they are learning how to teach. Let’s make sure they have a firm understanding of how to fully realize the potential of mining students’ pk.

What we need to take away from Meyer’s research is the need to clearly define terms like prior knowledge and explain how to integrate it into teaching beyond a “hook”. Mining students’ prior knowledge is critical to enhancing student learning. Let’s make sure we are all on the same page when it comes to implementing it in the classroom.

Related Posts
Knowledge Management and the Classroom
ACT Reading Prep and th 2 Point Conversion

The Mental Edge in Teaching and Learning

2006-05-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

I just picked up a copy of Kenneth Baum’s The Mental Edge. Baum is a premier sports performance consultant. He has worked with Olympic and professional athletes. His book is all about maximizing your athletic performance, but I think it has a lot to say about teaching and learning. Early in the book, Baum outlines "10 Perception Stretchers" that have a direct application in the classroom.

“A loss becomes a gain if you change how you trained.” So, if your students aren’t doing well on assessments, examine your approach and make the appropriate modifications. Teach your students to do the same. Have them examine their deficiencies as a means to lean about themselves and modify their learning.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” I have heard this one a million times, but Baum is right. When we resist change we are refusing to admit that there is a path to improvement. However, being able to change and adapt is critical to increasing our performance and the performance of our students. This means taking risks and trying new approaches in the classroom. In essence we all need to become educational explorers. The added benefit in teaching this way is that it gets us outside the monotony loop. Each day we are energized. This approach to teaching fights off burnout and the desire to phone it in. Of course we should encourage our students to discover new ways of doing things too. If you’ve ever watched a kid play a video game, then you know that kids are natural explorers. We need to harness this curiosity in our classrooms.

“The imagination is more powerful than the will.” This is all about visualization. Teaching ourselves and our students to visualize an experience before they actually encounter it. Walk them through visualization exercises. I used this type of preparation when preparing kids for numerous assessments. I even had students compare their actual experiences to the visualized ones. An added benefit is that visualization strategies go a long way toward preparing students for stressful situations like testing.

“The mind gets in the way.” The student who knew it all, but didn’t execute on the high stakes exam is an example of the mind getting in the way of optimal performance. Remember that brain research indicates that students who perform well on high stakes tests have more efficient brain activity than those who don’t perform well. Doubt is a killer distracter for our students. It feeds anxiety and impedes focus. Unfortunately, when it comes to performance it appears to be all about focus.

“Limitations are temporary.” Teach kids that there are no limits to what their minds can do. When students understand that they can always forge new neuropathways, then they are more open to learning. Feelings of intellectual inferiority are replaced with feelings of hope. In essence, teaching kids that limitations are temporary teaches them to be resilient. That’s why it is important that students have a basic understanding of the brain. It is time to create a nation of little neuroscientists.

“Anyone can improve.” That’s right even the best can get better. Despite being the best in the world, Tiger Woods still works on his game. We can always improve our teaching and learning if we are willing to work on the weak points. This is an inspiring lesson for students. A taste of improvement goes a long way toward sustaining increased academic achievement.

“Events have no meaning except what you give them.” This is all about mindset and flow. We create meaning. Our perception of things is the reality we live. Therefore, education should not be a zero-sum game, but a continuous improvement game. Think about the meanings we attach to things and how that frames our experience. Think about how kids perceive our classrooms. Perception makes us negative or positive people. We can help students manage their perception of learning by helping them framing it as positive, neurobic experiences.

“Getting better is more important than winning.” I remember telling my baseball team that the real accomplishment will be when we play the “perfect game”. We never did, but it gave us a focus beyond zero-sum thinking. The same holds true in the classroom. The key is to persuade the students that improvement is better than “winning”. After all who improved more the student who comes in knowing everything and cruises to an “A” or the student who struggles overtime and improves to an “A”?

“Practice like you play.” If we want students to perform well on high stakes assessments then it makes sense to give them plenty practice that mirrors the big day. This is essential if we want to break students of self-defeating test-taking behaviors like answering the questions in numeric order. The “practice like you play” mantra holds true for performance assessments too. All too often students are required to give oral reports in school with out as much as a mini-lesson in public speaking. The solution is to scaffold the oral report with mini-lessons that introduce public speaking and require students to practice public speaking with critique. One method of scaffolding is to have students talk to the duck. It is time to put the meat in the “learn by doing” approach to education.

“The more you expect from a situation, the more you will achieve.” Yes, Baum is all about internalizing high expectations. Remember, it is one thing for us to have high expectations for our students; it is quite another thing for students to have high expectations for themselves.

Of course there is more to Baum’s book than the "10 Perception Stretchers" outlined above. I strongly recommend reading The Mental Edge, because it complements the latest in brain research and learning theory in a reader friendly way.

E-Prime the Classroom

2006-05-10T13:06:00.000-05:00

We all want our students to write with clarity, but seldom do we give them the tools to get the job done. Student writing often appears both vague and flat. We tell them to tighten up their language, use a variety of verbs, to show and not tell. We tell them lots of things and expect them to get it. Sadly, most students don’t get it at all. They want a rule and not ambiguity.

We must E-Prime our classes. E-Prime prohibits the use of the verb form “to be” in all its forms. For example the phrase “roses are red” becomes “roses appear red”. The phrase “the book was great” becomes “I like the book”. Cool, huh?

Obvious bonus: practicing E-Prime eliminates the passive voice.

Therefore, ban the forms of the verb “to be” in all written work. Essentially, transform the classroom into an E-Prime zone. I recommend reading Elaine C. Johnson’s “Discovering E-Prime” for a classroom perspective on E-Prime.

To recap, E-Prime bans:

be
being
be
being
been
am
is; isn't
are; aren't
was; wasn't
were; weren't
I'm
you're; we're; they're
he's; she's; it's
there's; here's; there's
where's; how's; what's; who's

Good Teacher or Great Teacher?

2006-05-09T13:19:00.000-05:00

In my experience as a parent and a teacher, I can attest that great teachers are honest, passionate and gritty individuals who are never satisfied with “good”. Today, I’m going to focus on the qualities of great teachers; the kind of teachers I want my daughter to have. Great teachers have to be honest people. After all, no one wants his or her child taught by a dishonest person. Honest teachers engender trust, and trust is a critical component in fostering a diverse learning community—be that a classroom or a school. Thankfully, the vast majority of teachers are honest people.

However, a great teacher needs to be more than an honest individual. After all, my accountant is honest, but that does not make him a great teacher. No, honesty is best viewed as a prerequisite for a great teacher. Good teachers are honest, but great teachers are passionate about teaching and learning. The surest sign that a teacher is passionate is evidenced through reflective practice. Great teachers use a variety of strategies to interrogate their instructional practices. For example, great teachers use formative assessment to diagnosis student progress and instructional effectiveness. Great teachers realize that teaching and learning are about continuous improvement and are never satisfied with their results. This drive to improve feeds their passion to perfect their craft and realize ever-higher levels of student achievement. Needless to say such teachers are intellectually curious and creative people.

It should be no surprise that great teachers are gritty individuals. I define grit as the determination to accomplish an ambitious, long-term goal despite the inevitable obstacles. Grit encompasses tenacity, resiliency, self-discipline, and optimism. Teachers with grit never quit.

The difference between good and great when it comes to teachers is one of character and work ethic. In a world of instant messaging, speed dating, and immediate gratification, being a great teach comes down to perseverance.

Related Posts
Badass Teachers...
Selling the Benefit to Students
Teachers enroll in classes at their school
Think Alouds, Justifying Methods, and Learning Jams
Knowledge Management and the Classroom
Teacher Stories and Professional Development
Teach to the Duck
See what the students see

Cheating, Academic Honesty, and Creativity

2006-05-09T11:22:00.000-05:00

Academic honesty is hot because of academic competition and high stakes testing. Schools across the nation are wrestling with cheating, and an entire industry has sprouted up around academic honesty. Ipods, Blackberries, graphing calculators, photo phones, text messaging, paper mills, and Ebay have made cheating easier and more sophisticated than ever.

Companies like Turnitin and Caveon offer sophisticated gotcha services to schools for a fee. For example, Turnitin will compare electronic copies of your students’ papers to its database and highlight “lifted” passages. Caveon services include forensics to identify exam cheats.

However, the solution to classroom cheating doesn’t reside in the tech sphere; it resides in the teaching and learning sphere. Creative“plagiarism proof” assignments are critical to restoring academic honesty to our classrooms. Sometimes it is a simple as placing constraints on assignments like utilizing essay templates that force students to synthesize information instead of appropriating online resources.

As for cheating on assessments, vigilance wins the day. That said, Caveon has an informative slide presentation on cheating. The oldies but goodies are there like the rubber band method, but so are the more sophisticated methods too. Anyway, if you are a teacher or administrator it is worth a look.

Leadership Team Qustionnaire and Teacher Satisfaction

2006-05-05T16:54:00.000-05:00

This entry is a riff on “Ten Self-Defeating Behaviors to Avoid” by Mark Goulston applied to school leadership.

If you’re on a leadership team and your team is guilty of these behaviors, change now.

If you’re a teacher and your school’s leadership team is guilty of these behaviors—find another school before your career becomes a variation on Sisyphus. Your career curve and mental health may well depend on how you answer these questions.

Is your school leadership team guilty of lousy leadership?

Do they

think their indispensable?

talk over teachers?

not listen to teachers?

micromanage teachers?

embrace the latest educational fad without even reading the book?

speak in educationese?

are afraid to fire the real awful teachers?

fear confrontation?

fail to get buy-in?

take attendance at every meeting?

solicit input, but don’t consider it?

take programs because programs mean more money?

blame teachers, parents, students?

restrict access to opportunities to their “pet favorites”?

use other people to enforce their rules?

selectively enforce their rules?

To add to the list post a comment.

Knowledge Management and the Classroom

2006-04-26T22:12:00.000-05:00

I’ve been reading about Knowledge Management (KM) lately, and I began to think about its application to education. Systems theorist Russell Ackoff posits that the mind can be classified into 5 categories—data, information, knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. The big split comes between information and knowledge. Data and information are inert—they do not cause things to happen.

Traditionally, education has focused on knowledge—the domain in which data and information get committed to memory. Not surprisingly, knowledge level learners can regurgitate the facts. They can take data and information and kick back some of it because some of it stuck in their memory. However, knowledge level teaching and learning is not where the cognitive action is.

Real, deep learning occurs at the understanding and wisdom levels. These are the levels that require students to synthesize information and create. When students synthesize information they take new information and integrate it with prior knowledge. The more a student synthesizes the more a student gets to the why. Likewise, when students work at the wisdom level they create theory.

The question is at what level does student learning terminate? How do we know? The short answer is “ask”.

At a minimum we want students to learn at the level of understanding. We can facilitate deep learning if we relentlessly probe prior knowledge and connect it to new knowledge through writing and peer dialogue. All too often prior knowledge is queried at the beginning of a lesson, only to stay there. However, by explicitly revisiting prior knowledge in light of new knowledge we can help students to create synthesized knowledge. Another key to understanding is the ability to communicate effectively within the discourse. As teachers we can immerse students in the discourse of the subject matter. If we want students to talk in class they need to be taught how to talk in class. This includes building the requisite subject level vocabulary. The key of course is getting students to use this language in peer dialogues. Simply, the student that can integrate the term metaphor into a sophisticated peer dialogue about literature knows metaphor far better than a student that can define the term metaphor on a test.

Knowledge gets you in the game; understanding wins the game; wisdom takes the series.

Selling the Benefit to Students

2006-04-19T14:57:00.000-05:00

As a teacher it is critical to sell the benefit of a lesson to students. Students too often fail to realize the benefits of education let alone a lesson. As teachers, we need to ask ourselves what we want students to know and be able to do in relation to what we are teaching and why. The answers to these questions will get us to the point where we can sell the benefit to our students.

These questions have various timeframes and answers. In the immediate future our answer may be that we want students to know and be able to do something so that they can pass the test on Friday. However, when we push the timeframe to a month or a year from now, it forces us to evaluate what we are teaching, what students are learning, and why.

Curriculum maps and the EPAS Standards for Transition help teachers answer these questions. Nevertheless, I found that a more personal sell was in order. With this in mind I aligned the curriculum with a singular focus on improving communication. I told students that their goal was to be understood the first time—in speech, writing, body language, etc. Through group discussion students were able to link improved communication with their college and career aspirations.

A word of caution, never preach the benefit to students; instead, let students discover it for themselves. Use the benefit as a mega-theme for instruction, and steer classroom dialogues in the benefit direction whenever possible. The key here is to meaningfully connect what we are doing in the classroom to the students’ futures.

PowerPoint Presentations, the Filmstrips of Today

2006-04-18T14:37:00.000-05:00

A sure fire way to get kids to put their heads on their desks used to be to say, “Heads down thumbs up. Now it’s time to play 7-Up.” It appears that catch phrase from elementary school has been replaced with “Take out your notebooks, I have a PowerPoint for us today.”

Let’s face it; PowerPoint presentations are the filmstrips of today. Remember filmstrips? The only kid that paid attention was the kid that got to advance the filmstrip. Sadly, PowerPoint presentations have done away with the one kid who did pay attention leaving a classroom full of lethargic zombies drooling on their desks. A typically teacher designed PowerPoint presentation is usually chuck full of bullet points and other “valuable” information.

If we listen we can probably hear the echo of another PowerPoint presentation gone awry: “Is everybody ready? Does everybody have the bullet points down in their notes?” Simply put, this is a lousy way to learn. Just think of how many times you sat through a PowerPoint at professional development sessions. You probably can’t recall much of the information contained on the slides; although, I’m sure, the presenter thought they were important. Yet, we have no problem doing the same thing to our students. In fact, we expect more from them than we do from ourselves. We expect them to LEARN from a PowerPoint presentation.

We need to use PowerPoint to visually enhance instruction not to be the instruction. Visuals are powerful learning tools, and using visuals can help us to “brand” our lessons. Visuals play off the right hemisphere of the brain. Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words. In place of bullet points use pictures. Google Image Search and Flickr are good places to start looking for those visuals. Hopefully, the heads will stop hitting the desks, the next time the projector is turned on.

Find Something You're Passionate About

2006-04-18T14:16:00.000-05:00

If you are not passionate about a lesson, students will know it. Students have a nose for negativity; therefore, it's important to bring the A-game each and every day. Look, I used to hate teaching grammar. The thought of prepositional phrases numbed me to the bones. My attitude sucked and it was contagious. Since the brain imitates observed behavior it wasn't long before the students were recalcitrant.

In an effort to counteract this slide into negativity, I resolved to find something interesting about grammar. Soon I rediscovered sentence diagramming, and got hooked. I even started diagramming sentences in my free time. It was cool, and it became something I could hang grammar and usage instruction on. Soon the class picked up on my passion for sentence diagramming, and the class was transformed.

The key is to find something your passionate about in everything you teach. Make no mistake, students got into grammar instruction when I got passionate about grammar instruction.

Teach to the Duck

2006-04-18T14:07:00.000-05:00

Charlie has an extensive rubber duck collection. Blue, pink, and yellow ducks of various sizes fill up the bathtub each night. It should be no surprise that sometimes Charlie talks to his rubber ducks.

It got me to thinking that rubber ducks are underutilized in teacher preparation programs. Like many teachers, I used to go over my lessons in my head on the way to school. I remember being surprised when what I said in class sounded rushed or clunky. Of course, the problem was that there is a difference between thinking the words and actually saying them. So why not go over lessons aloud, with a rubber duck? Before you laugh, think about the importance of verbalizing lessons to students. Talking through a lesson with a prop—like a rubber duck—allows us to better pace our delivery and to avoid clunky sounding words and phrases.

My advice to teachers—start teaching to the duck.

Little Idea: See what the students see.

2006-04-11T14:35:00.000-05:00

Early in my teaching career, a fellow teacher said, “Our presentations to students have to be on or they’ll eat us alive.” He was right; in my experience, ineffective teachers were ineffective communicators. Ineffective communication retards student achievement, and can make school boring.

Teachers communicate with students all the time, but very few teachers scrutinize their communications. In my second year of teaching, in order to improve my technique, I videotaped my class. I thought I was a good presenter. I thought I was effective. In a nutshell, I thought a lot about me.

Nothing made me cringe more than watching those tapes. To my chagrin, I discovered that I talked way too much. I nervously rambled, often interrupting the flow of the lesson. I stammered and used gap fillers like “ah” and “um”. On the positive side, I was very enthusiastic, and the students were surprisingly patient with me. My God, there was so much room for improvement.

As a result of the videotape, I started adhering to time frames to bracket my speaking. I found that by cutting down on my “teacher-talk” I was increasing students’ time on task. Suddenly,the class had flow. Ultimately classes became student focused; instead of teacher focused. My advice to teachers is to videotape you classes, get some popcorn, and see what the kids see. It wasn’t easy, but it made me a much better teacher. Since then I've been videotaped countless times, but the viewing experience remains a time for critique.

BIG IDEA: Teacher Stories and Professional Development

2006-04-05T13:30:00.000-05:00

The fact is that water and dirt make mud; however, the story is a whole lot more interesting. Sure it has to do with mud, but it also concerns a little boy with tons of energy, a school project for my nephew in New York, and the absorbent power of corduroy pants. The point is there is a story here, and nothing beats a good story.

Stories are powerful because our minds are wired to understand stories. Whenever I do a presentation, I use stories to connect abstract information to experience. I have found that people are more likely to remember a story then they are a list of facts. Therefore, integrating stories with professional development makes sense.

Unfortunately, in the data driven world of NCLB, administrators often ignore the power of stories. I have heard countless administrators ask what the data “say”. Remember dead men don’t wear plaid, and data don’t tell stories. People tell stories. Getting members of a learning community to share education stories is critical in actualizing the potential of a school.

Here is a simple exercise that can help remind us of the power of story. What are your first three memories that have to do with school? Write down each of these memories. Now ask yourself, how those memories inform your practice in the present?

I’ve used this activity in the teacher lounge, and am always amazed at the richness of the stories. Teachers don’t answer this question with a list of facts or data. They get into their stories, and they want to share them with others. Those that hear the stories often want to tell their own stories. In this way storytelling becomes contagious. An added benefit of the above exercise is how surprised teachers are to learn the extent that the ghosts of their past inform their daily practice as teachers. Engaging in this type of storytelling builds reflective practice, humanizes faculty members, and increases the cohesiveness of a learning community.

Imagine the power of having a professional development day dedicated to teacher storytelling. The focus could be on educational memories or on each teacher’s “hero’s journey”. It sure beats imaging a guest speaker or a PowerPointless presentation.

BIG IDEA: Teachers enroll in classes at their schools

2006-04-03T13:58:00.000-05:00

Teachers have long been encouraged to take courses to enhance their classroom practices. Under NCLB, teachers have even been mandated to earn continuing education credits. In response to these mandates, many teachers have enrolled in college courses locally or over the Internet. In general this is a positive development for teaching, but the quality of some of these programs has recently come into question. In fact some teachers have lost their jobs in pay-per-credit schemes.

My suggestion is that teachers should go back to school—they should enroll in a course at the school they teach in. Over the years, many teachers have forgotten what it means to experience school from a student persepective. For example, imagine a high school English teacher enrolled in a biology course. The teacher assumes the role of student. She goes to class, takes notes, participates in assessments, and receives a grade. In the process she learns about teaching and learning from a student’s point of view.

However, it is critical that she move out of her comfort zone. It won’t work if she takes another English class because her content expertise will interfere with her learner stance. The task here is to immerse oneself in the role of student and to learn along with students.

Benefits of this approach are numerous—it breaks through teacher isolation, it focuses on learning, and it may even increase the quality of the instruction for the teachers who teach their class to other teachers. If I were back in high school, I think I’d enroll in physics or calculus or maybe art.

Jim Collins and Latino Achievement

2006-03-31T22:15:00.000-06:00

Good to Great and Built to Last have already had a profound impact on education. Many school administrators have read them and attempted to implement their messages. I've sat through countless meetings with administrators how talked about the importance of “getting the right people on the bus.” In fact, Good to Great has replaced Senge’s The Fifth Discipline as the must read business book for educators.

Collins bases his studies on comparisons. In his books, Collins takes a successful company and compares it with a company that flounders. A similar methodology is used in Why Some Schools with Latino Children Beat the Odds...and Others Don't. Collins and and company compare elementary schools that are beating the odds to “twin” schools that are not progressing.

One thing is clear, lot will be made of the report's findings. Collins found that successful schools:

focus on improving the things they actually can control that will make a big difference in student achievement.
do not play the blame game when it comes to student achievement.
focus on the achievement of every student, and every classroom.
examine achievement per class and per teacher.
unmask poor achievement that is hidden in school-wide data.
systematically employ formative assessment and adjust the curriculum weekly arriving at individualized instruction.
spread the responsibility for student achievement across the school.
work effectively in teams.
pick a proven program and make it work over time.

It is important to take note that the usual suspects were missing from the list:

parental involvement teacher turnover
class size high qualified teachers
length of instructional day
tutoring
central office programs

Undoubtedly the cult of Collins among administrators will grow as a result of this report, and it should. I found that the Collins' report supports a learning focused, decentralized approach to education that emphasizes administrative and teacher grit. Make no mistake, the schools that were successful in the study had administrators and teachers that exhibited a laser like focus on improving student achievement. To me a lot of this affirms Richard DuFour’s Professional Learning Communities at Work and Whatever It Takes. Collins’ report is a must read for all educators.

The End of Best Practices in Education

2006-03-31T09:50:00.000-06:00

It appears that folks are sick of “best practices”. Garr Reynold’s has taken it on at Presentation Zen and Steve Mykolyn even argues that there is no such thing as a best practice. These guys inhabit the private sector, but their critiques ring true in education. Educators need to banish best practices from their vocabularies and get down to the business of big ideas.

Early in my career, education was in the throws of the best practice movement. Best practices were everywhere. They were a convenient, marketable; one size fits all solution to teaching and learning.

I still get queasy when at the memory of rayon clad women preaching best practices and higher order thinking skills (H.O.T.S.). “Best practices have the H.O.T.S., got it? They have the H.O.T.S.! What do best practices have? I can’t hear you? That’s better. One more time, what do best practices have? Wonderful, orchids to you! Orchids to you!”

Despite the unbridled enthusiasm, it always appeared that the proponents of best practices where up to something. Some claimed that their best practices were “scientifically proven”. If you know anything about educational research, these claims are dubious at best and often verge on the fraudulent. According to proponents, best practices failed only if they were poorly implemented. This logic gave best practice advocates an out when it came to accountability. We hear this excuse today from school based test prep companies. “The kids didn’t improve because you failed to implement the program correctly.” Blame the school leadership, blame the teachers, but never blame the product.

School administrators often complained that teachers were resisting to best practices because they were resistant to change. The irony is that best practices kill change because they, by definition, discourage innovation. After all, it is impossible to improve on what is a deemed to be the best.

It’s time to kill off best practices in education.

Feel better?

Now that best practices are gone, it is time to work the big ideas that have the potential to transform teaching and learning.

Face Recognition, White Matter, and Connectivity

2006-03-29T12:28:00.000-06:00

I played an online face recognition game with Isabelle yesterday. Isabelle’s focus improved along with her score. After a few tries she was able to recall all 10 components of the simulated face. Give it a try for yourself here. She loved playing. We also played an online version of Simon both with audio and without. We agreed that it was easier to play Simon without the audio. Check it out for yourself.

When the kids went to bed, I stayed up and read an article on reading performance and white matter. The study of 32 kids age 9 to 12 found that the stronger the connectivity of white matter, the better the reading ability. White matter is described as essential for information transformation. If the gray matter is the computer, the white matter is the wiring.

Interestingly, white matter is not distributed evenly in the brain. The right hemisphere has more white matter then the left. Significantly, synthesis occurs in the right hemisphere. Dan Pink describes it this way: “the right hemisphere is the picture; the left hemisphere is the thousand words. Clearly the hemispheres must be integrated for optimal performance.

Think About This

Two students are taking an exam—Andrew and Ashley. We are monitoring their brain activity. Andrew’s brain is popping with activity; Ashley’s brain is relatively calm. Which student did better on the exam? The answer is…Ashley. When it comes to performance, it is all about brain efficiency. It is similar to research that has been done comparing professional musicians to novices. While playing a concerto, the brain of the professional musician is more efficient than the novice. Practice until it’s automatic.

Cool, huh?

Take the Cognitive Reflection Test!

2006-03-28T16:46:00.000-06:00

Charlie is napping. For the second day in a row Charlie has insisted on wearing his superhero pajama bottoms over his pants. Quite a few people have noticed the new look. One guy at Starbucks commented that Charlie was starting a new trend, and that I should “trademark his look”. Another customer commented that the outfit was a clever solution to a problem she encountered while dressing her own sons. She’s right; it is a simple solution to a common problem.

As for me, I’ve been reading a lot about the brain, assessment, and video gaming lately and came across something called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). According to its creator, Dr. Shane Frederick of MIT, the Cognitive Reflection Test is valuable “for researchers interested in separating people into cognitive groups, the CRT is an attractive test: it involves only three items and can be administered in a minute or two, yet its predictive validity equals or exceeds other cognitive tests that involve up to 215 items and take up to 31⁄2 hours to complete.”

In fact the CRT has a high correlation with the ACT and the SAT tests. So in honor of testing season why not give it a go? Did I mention that it is only 3 questions long?

Grab a pencil!

Answer the following questions:

(1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost? _____ cents

(2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take
100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____ minutes

(3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size.
If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it
take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____ days

All of the questions have intuitive “BLINK” answers. The thing is, those answers are wrong. For example, most folks “see” the answer to the first question right away. The ball costs 10 cents, right?

Wrong, the ball actually costs 5 cents. Set up and run the equation yourself. For the math challenged, check this out:

B:bat
C:ball

B=C + 100
B+C=110
C+100+C=110
2C=10
C=5

The ball costs 5 cents.

Now, if you take the time to think through all the problems, and check your work, then you are more apt to get the correct answers. If I had students who were going to take the ACT or SAT, I’d give them this test to demonstrate the limits of intuition.

The answers are: 5 cents, 5 minutes, and 47 days.

Thanks to Eide Neurolearning Blog for getting me into CRT.

Let's Create a Nation of Little Neuroscientists

2006-03-24T13:58:00.000-06:00

Sometimes I miss the obvious. Lately I’ve been reading a lot about the brain—how it works, and how to enhance its performance. I’ve been reading with an eye toward improving education. I've been thinking about brain friendly learning strategies, but I've missed the obvious.

Wittgenstien said that the limits of our language mean the limits of our world. His message is that the stronger our vocabularies—the more we can name, the richer life becomes. If we are raising a generation of vocabulary impoverished children, what will the limits of their future be?

Wittgenstein words echo in my head whenever I go for a walk in the woods. I’m no woodsman. My experience when I walk in the woods goes something like—oak tree, tree, tree, oak tree, moss, moss, oak tree, bird. Now, if I studied the woods and knew the names of things then I’d be able to differentiate the different trees and birds. I would see things in a more specific way and not be blinded by generalizations. My experience would be infinitely richer.

Of course Wittgentsien was a philosopher and not a neuroscientist, but he was on to something. Today, we know that cognition is limited by the categories we create in our brains. That is, how we experience the world has a lot to do with the categories that we create in our brains. That’s part of the reason why graphic organizers and mind maps have become popular learning tools in schools. They try to graphically illustrate the way our minds integrate information. The thinking is that since “brains work this way” why not give students brain friendly mind maps and graphic organizers to enhance their learning. Here’s the rub, kids get inundated with graphic organizers and mind maps in school, but are never explicitly taught how the brain works. Think of it this way, you may have the tools to fix a car, but unless you understand how a car works those tools are useless.

A lot of lip service is paid to the creation of life-long learners. We hear about how important it is to integrate and synthesize information in the new economy. However, we do not explicitly teach kids about their brains. Research into the brain indicates that it continues to change over time. The term for this is plasticity. That’s right; we can all get smarter. The key is to change our brains. What a powerful message for kids and adults to learn. Perhaps if we taught a course where kids explored the power of their minds, then they would be better equipped to integrate information and optimize their brains.

Knowing what’s under the hood is important in autoracing. A racecar is only as good as its engineers, pit crew, and driver. Most kids go through school without knowing what’s going on under the hood. Kids have no clue about how their brains function. In fact, if you talk to kids you learn that they come to school with a lot of myths about how the brain functions. Certainly we could enhance student learning if we taught students about the brain For example, if students understood the concept of plasticity, then they may work harder at learning new things. It’s obvious to me that what’s missing in the curriculum isn’t necessarily brain friendly instruction, but the study of the brain itself. Let’s create a nation of little neuroscientists. I’m starting with my kids, Isabelle and Charlie.

Essential Books:
Carter’s Mapping the Mind
Pink’s A Whole New Mind
Restak’s Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
Restak’s The New Brain
Stafford and Webb’s Mind Hacks

Essential Web:
Eide Neurolearning Blog
Mind Hacks
Creating Passionate Users
Neurofuture
Science Daily
Brain Waves

New Link, thanks Sandra:
Neuroscience for Kids

Word Poverty and the Academic Word List

2006-03-21T18:26:00.000-06:00

Students today suffer from word poverty. Teachers know it and choose to ignore it. Did you know that high knowledge 3rd graders have vocabularies equal to low-performing 12th graders? Just ask a low-performing 12th grader to tell you story, and you’ll come to realize just how big the problem of word poverty is.

Somewhere along the line something awful happened to vocabulary instruction. Maybe it was when some teachers stopped requiring their students to memorize word lists and went solely for words in context—as if being asked to memorize word lists actually harmed students! The funny thing is that most teachers, when left to their own devices make esoteric vocabulary selections—opting for the exotic words instead of the high frequency words. The effect, over years, is dire word poverty among our youth.

The uproar over vocabulary at my own school started when I asked the faculty to have their students paraphrase questions that appeared in their textbooks or on tests. I love to drive home a point and knew that such a task would start conversation in the staff room. Of course, teachers soon discovered that many of their students didn’t understand academic questions. It looked grim—teachers would never know whether students had content knowledge because students lacked the academic vocabulary to decipher texts, lectures, and questions. Teachers were concerned and started asking, “If students don’t know the words in a question, how can they know the answer?” That question ushered in a school-wide focus on vocabulary.

While conducting research into this problem, I came across the Academic Word List (AWL). The AWL was developed at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Here are some reasons why the AWL rocks:

It was created so that it could be used by teachers to focus students on the words most needed to study academic texts.

The AWL does not include the 2,000 most frequent words of English.

Words on the AWL had to occur in over half of the 28 subjects. Just over 94% of the words in the AWL occur in 20 or more subject areas. This principle ensures that the words in the AWL are useful for all learners.

Teachers embraced the AWL. Departments divided up the AWL, created weekly word lists that included student friendly definitions. Students were tested weekly in their each of their classes on the AWL. Kids were exposed to a minimum of 35 words a week from the AWL.

Teachers also requested professional development on effective vocabulary instruction. Some of the most popular were sentence synthesis and yay or nay. Vocabulary instruction improved dramatically, and test scores went up too.

To Do List for Educators

2006-03-17T15:10:00.000-06:00

Start an online forum for teachers
Conduct virtual office hours
Accept only electronic copies of papers
Join a papermill
Get graphic with grammar instruction—diagram sentences
Stop giving dictionary definitions for vocabulary words
Take a speed-reading course
Buy a rap album and figure out how kids learn the lyrics
Align instructional time with assessments
Take a drawing class
Read business blogs
Integrate the power of visuals
Learn from the “pros”
Practice the power of story
Test ideas, collect evidence, share, get feedback, adjust the idea
Remember form and function
Write a blog
Interrogate instructional practices
Engineer powerful ideas
Play video games
Always be true
Learn about the brain
Be a synthesizer
Laugh
Establish new neural pathways
Play the caption game
Don't mistake kindness for weakness
Practice self-directed think-alouds
Find Aristotle
Organize and host a JAM
Practice creative abrasion
Time yourself
Make learning an opt-out instead of an opt-in thing
Promote open-source, asymmetrical learning
Answer the question, "What would I be most afraid to be wrong about?"

Think Alouds, Justifying Methods, and Learning Jams

2006-03-17T14:57:00.000-06:00

Charlie talks to himself. He runs a verbal commentary on what he is doing. If he is painting watercolors, he can be heard saying “Paint, paint, paint, orange, orange, paint, paint.” It’s called directed play, and it’s essential to self-instruction. I conceptualize it as self-directed think-alouds.

Here’s my self-directed think-aloud: I just finished an article in Educational Leadership by Wiggins and McTighe in which they point out “A great weakness of our craft is that we typically do not require faculty members to justify their teaching methods, course designs, and assessments against a set of learning principles.” They’re right; in the current system there is no incentive to interrogate teaching practices.

We won’t realize this professional interrogation unless we embrace open source, asymmetrical educational systems. In such a system, a teacher tries an idea out in her classroom and it yields great results. She posts the strategy on a message board for innovative educational ideas. Within days other teachers across the urban landscape tryout the idea in their classrooms and offer feedback through the message board. The idea becomes an innovation and is spread by the hive. Through this process urban educators are able to test ideas, collect evidence, and innovate.

Wiggins and McTighe go on to suggest that we mandate that teachers “learn about learning.” I disagree, because mandates feed a bureaucracy that loves to look good on paper. After all, what does it mean to learn about learning? Does it mean that teachers should study neuroscience or does it mean that teachers should study evidence based learning strategies? No, I think we need teachers that are passionate about learning. I propose that we identifying job applicants that are passionate about learning and hire them. I want intellectually curious teachers that are driven to improve their practice. Essentially, I want teachers that got grit.

However, most of us work in established schools and don’t have the luxury of creating the faculty from scratch. The question becomes identifying the teachers in our buildings that love learning and feeding that desire.

Here’s an idea: host a learning jam. Essentially, a jam consists of a bunch of people getting together for 24-hours with the singular focus of creating a product. Jams have been used to write books, music, and create video games. Why not host a standards based assessment jam or a curriculum writing jam or an interdisciplinary unit jam? All that’s needed is a location, take-out menus, wireless Internet, printers, and a common focus. Host a jam, see who attends—I bet you get the gut it out, love learning, badass teachers. For more information on Jams check out Passionate Users and the Ad Lib Game Devlopment Society.

Teacher Wisdom and Standardized Test Scores

2006-03-14T12:32:00.000-06:00

I hate to wait. I always have. Waiting is frustrating. As a kid I hated waiting in the lunch line. As an adult, I hate waiting in the supermarket checkout line. As an educator, I hated waiting for standardized test results. Following state testing I would ask teachers how well they thought the kids did. I always got vague, sometimes encouraging answers. In contrast, when I was asked about test scores I always commented that things looked promising but that we would have to “wait and see”. Of course “wait and see” meant waiting 3 months or more to get the final results from the state. I would have paid some serious cash for a crystal ball. Little did I know that the crystal ball was right in front of me.

I’m not alone; lots of educators would like to know the percentage of students who will meet/exceed standards this year on state tests. Administrators would avoid sleepless nights if they knew that answer. James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds may hold the answer. Surowiecki’s thesis is that “large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.”

Surowiecki identifies four key qualities that make crowds smart. According to him, for crowds to be smart, they need to be diverse, decentralized, independent, and they need to possess a means to summarize their opinions into a collective verdict.

In my experience public school faculties possess the four key qualities that make a crowd smart. After all, teachers are diverse because they bringing different pieces of information to the table. Teachers are decentralized because no one at the top is dictating their answers. Teachers also tend to be fiercely independent, in that they pay attention mostly to their own information, and don’t worry about what everyone around them thinks. In this instance, predicting state test scores, it is relatively easy to summarize teachers’ opinions into one collective verdict—average the predicted scores.

My advice to administrators is to ask the faculty to predict the school’s performance on the standardized test. That’s right; just ask all the teachers, not just the ones that teach the testing grade, to anonymously predict how well the students will do. Collect the data, and take the average. If the faculty size is large, diverse, and independent enough, then they should be able to zero in on the percentage of students who meet/exceed state standards. When the real results come in, compare them. Let me know how it goes.

Pink's Book Inspires a Whole New Look

2006-03-10T14:25:00.000-06:00

The new look around here is thanks to Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. The book is all about integrating the left and right sides of the brain. The future, or as he calls it, the Conceptual Age will require the mastery of six domains or senses. Those are design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. The best part about the book is that it has expanded the way I think, create, and learn. I view Pink’s book as a blue print for maximizing knowledge/power/action in the new economy. Pink even provides “portfolio” exercises to build capacity in each of the six domains. Cool stuff.

In part one of the book, Pink argues that developing the six domains will be critical in a world of abundance, Asian outsourcing, and automation. I was aware of most this stuff, but it was interesting to note the huge number of programmers and accountants that are working on the cheap. Bill Gates knows this. Why pay American programmers to do what Asian programmers can do at a fraction of the cost. All those kids being told that computers are a cash cow are being sold a bad bill of goods. According to Pink, the people who will make it in the emerging economy will be the creative-MFA types who blend traditional left-brain smarts with creative, empathetic right-brain smarts or as Pink calls it L-Directed and R-Directed aptitudes.

Isn’t it ironic that NCLB focuses exclusively on left-brain smarts? I think Pink is on to this too when he writes about a battery of assessments from Yale called the Rainbow Project that measures R-Directed aptitudes. The test asks students to provide humorous captions to New Yorker cartoons, to write a story “using only a provided title as their guide, and they are given several scenarios to problem solve. The Rainbow Project sure sounds more enjoyable to take than the SAT. Of note is the fact that the Rainbow Project Test is more a better predictor of how well students will do in college than the SAT.

Anyway, one of the activities Pink recommends is to C-R-A-P-ify your graphic design. CRAP is an acronym for Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity. With this in mind, I examined the old layout and decided it wasn’t CRAP. It could be argued that the old layout had no CRAP. So, I looked at some other blogs and spent some time looking at the Webby Awards. Anyway, what you see is what you get. At least it looks a lot cleaner. What started off as a means to post pictures of the kids and write about education now has design principles behind it. Form and function are now in harmony.

Got Grit?

2006-03-09T08:40:00.000-06:00

Patrick Welsh’s “For once, blame the student” has a tone reminiscent of the old faculty lounge. Listen, I’ve heard countless urban teachers blame students for sub par achievement:

“These kids are lazy.”

“They don’t work hard like they used to when I started teaching.”

“The kids are nice and polite, but they won’t do a damn thing.”

“I assign the homework; the kids just don’t do it.”

“Kids just don’t care about their future.”

Guess what? Some of those very same teachers were teaching their asses off, but the kids weren’t learning.

Look, in education the only time an individual admits to culpability is when the phrase, “there’s plenty of blame to go around” follows. Yeah, no one wants to take the blame for lousy student achievement, but if no one admits culpability then nothing will change.

Teachers, repeat after me: “I take full responsibility for the failure of my students to realize their peak academic performance.”

Parents, repeat after me: “I take full responsibility for the failure of my child to reach his/her peak academic performance.”

Feel better?

Now, here’s what we can all do to insure that students learn:

Insist on and reward effort. It makes sense, and it has an emerging research base.

Angela Duckworth, a researcher at Penn, studied high achievers in various fields and found out that “There were certainly a fair number of people who were brilliant, ambitious and persevering, but there were also a lot who were not a genius in any way but were really tenacious.” There it is; grit is back, baby.

Duckworth went on to design and administer a grit questionnaire and gave it to the entire entering class of West Point cadets. She found that the best predictor of a cadet completing the infamous Beast Barracks wasn’t class rank, SAT score, but G-R-I-T.

The biggest enemy to developing grit in a child is praising them on intelligence and not effort. After all if parents are right then where are all the geniuses?

Keep it simple, praise effort. If your kid is successful, point out the effort behind the task and reward it accordingly. Coaches do this all the time when they start the kid who worked the hardest in practice. Teachers should do it too because students don’t get anywhere with genius alone. Since work ethic and character are critical to success, it makes sense to grade on both quality and effort. That’s right reward the kid who busts his ass.

Badass Teachers, Open Source Education, and the End of Urban Eduation as We Know It

2006-03-03T14:33:00.000-06:00

It is my hope that the new world of small schools and asymmetrical, open source education will be a boon to the badass teacher. These are the teachers who evaluate learning strategies by asking a simple question, “How will this help the students kick ass?”

Badass teachers are disruptive. They are not one size fits all, team players, and as such, are feared by educationalists and careerists alike. Badass teachers embody a killer combination of action, knowledge, and power. They believe that students need to be taught the tools to kick academic ass, and to do this they spread power/knowledge like a virus. It is no surprise that badass teachers use tech to increase the spread of this virus. They confer with students during virtual office hours using instant messaging, and post their latest innovation online for feedback. They are the architects of open source, asymmetrical education, and in the end they are the only hope for urban education.

Badass teachers produce badass students that are informed, articulate, and inquisitive. Let’s face it lots of teachers talk about empowerment and valuing student “voice”; however, many complain when they have a truly informed “voice” in their class. That is because badass students are fierce self-advocates that realize that quietest inherit the least. Good for them, chance are they have a badass teacher to thank.

In urban school systems that reward “playing it close to the vest”, badass teachers are all about transparency. They employ blogs as a means to analyze, critique, and expose schools and policies that embrace paper pushers, pikers, and politicians. Needless to say, these folks are detested by administrators because they are a threat to the existence of the system.

Badass teachers will flourish in small schools that value creative abrasion while maintaining a duel focus on process and practice. Clearly these pioneers of open source, asymmetrical education are the best hope we have for creating passionate, informed, articulate students.

ACT Study Reveals Huge Achievement Gaps

2006-03-01T23:09:00.001-06:00

I’m sure that a lot of articles will follow the lead of the Washington Post’s “Study: Reading Key to College Success”, but those articles will miss the real story embedded in the actual ACT report, "Reading Between the Lines". The real story is the insanely huge achievement gaps among subgroups on the ACT. As for teachers and professional development types there is gold buried in the report when it comes to understanding ACT passages.

According to the folks who wrote the report, an ACT score of 21 out of 36 in reading indicates that a student is college ready. College readiness is defined as having a 75 percent chance of getting a C or better in a course, a 50 percent chance of getting a B or better. Of course students who don’t get a 21 are at risk for a whole bunch of disappointment, not the least of which is being labeled not having sufficient workplace literacy.

The report finds that only 51 percent of the tested students in 2005 met the college ready benchmark. Significantly there is a 38 point gap between African American (21 percent score 21 or higher) and white students (59 percent score 21 or higher). However an even larger gap, 37 points, exists between students who come from families that make less than $33K (33 percent) versus students who come from families making in excess of $100K (70 percent). I’m sure that the Illinois State Board of Education will check out this report, convene a blue ribbon panel, and issue a report of their own.

Fortunately, the ACT has a solution that involves policy makers and teachers. The ACT contends that policy makers need to draft better, more thorough reading standards—like the EPAS standards drafted by the ACT, huh? Problem solved—adopt the ACT’s standards, teach to the test, and then use the ACT as your accountability mechanism. Done.

As for teachers, the ACT recommends using more sophisticated texts with students. No argument from me on that. In my experience, once students acquire the tools to take apart text, they get hooked on it, and the best texts to take apart are the most sophisticated. The sad truth for many kids who attend urban schools is that the first time many kids encounter a sophisticated text is either on the ACT or as part of an ACT prep course; this reveals a lot about the state of urban education, teacher expectations, and instruction. According to the ACT, having students work sophisticated texts can result in a “10 point” increase on the reading test. It’s true, I’ve witnessed this effect though my involvement in policy debate. Among other things, policy debate teaches students how to critically evaluate and manipulate sophisticated texts. It is no surprise that debaters kick ACT ass.

I can’t overstate the importance of using sophisticated texts with students. A few years ago I created and implemented a whole school reading program that was EPAS aligned and inculcated students with an approach to critical reading transferable to ACT texts. Not surprisingly test scores went up as students outpaced expected gains as measured by the ACT Link Report, and the district.

One more thing, as a teacher and professional development guy, I loved the Appendix of the report where the folks at ACT walk the reader through the sophistication of ACT reading passages. I loved it! It is helpful because it clarifies what an ACT reading passage is, and we all know that clarity is crucial.

For added clarity don't forget to visit my ACT Reading Prep Posts:

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

Embezzlement and the Fiscal Crisis in Chicago Public Schools

2006-03-01T12:59:00.000-06:00

The news of former Simeon High School’s finance manager, Marilyn Jenkins-Evans, being charged with embezzling $450,000 in school funds while working in $79,800 position should shed light on hiring and promotion policies at the Board of Education, but it probably won’t. Ironically, Ms.Jenkins-Evans was promoted to a central office position at the same time she was embezzling money from Simeon; so much for the vetting process downtown. For a picture of this 47 year-old diva, click here. The questions begin to bubble to the surface. Who hired Ms. Jenkins-Evans? What are Ms. Jenkins-Evans’ credentials? Does she wear Prada? Does she have a drug habit? Christ, how many Ms. Jenkins-Evans types are there out there in CPS in charge of the cashbox? Where did all the money go? How did she get promoted so fast? Why did Pastor Katie Peecher of New Heritage Cathedral feel compelled to call her a "wonderful woman"? WTF? What is no surprise is that with folks like Ms. Jenkins-Evans in charge it is no wonder that CPS is in a fiscal crisis.

Many budget directors, finance managers, and principals across CPS are probably quite worried today. In all likelihood there will be more charges in the near future. Perhaps it is time we have highly qualified individuals not only in the classroom but manning the money too.

For all you high school math teachers prepping for the PSAE, try these timely word problems out:

1) Assuming that #2 pencils cost $0.78 a dozen, how many pencils could Ms. Jenkins-Evans have purchased for Simeon students?

2) If a tutoring company offers private, one-on-one, tutoring for $75/hour, how many hours of private, one-on-one, tutoring could Ms. Jenkins-Evans have purchased for Simeon students?

3) What is the minimum number of central office administrators’ salaries that Ms. Jenkins-Evans could have picked up? Use The Champion to obtain salary information.

Good Luck

Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

2006-02-28T13:32:00.000-06:00

After booting-up the brain, it is necessary to provide the brain with a purpose for reading and to supply it with key words to look for in the passage. The idea here is to connect the questions to the passage. It also gives something for the students to do to keep them focused. If they have to read and circle, it stops them from losing focus and daydreaming. Circling keywords in the question stems starts this process.

Read and Circle Keywords in the Question Stem

Read each question stem and circle key words—dates, proper nouns, important phrases, line references, etc.

DO NOT READ THE ANSWER CHOICES. Since you haven’t actively read the passage yet, reading the answer choices is a time suck.

Actively Reading the Passage

Use your finger to pace yourself through the passage. Glide your finger across each row of text. Read according to the pace set by your finger. Keep moving.

Unlike booting-up, read each word but keep pace.

As you read the passage, you must determine the thesis statement of the passage as well as the main idea of each paragraph. The thesis statement is the big idea of the entire passage often referred to as the central argument. You may not realize it until you finish the passage, when you realize it—write it down or circle it.

Individual paragraphs are made up of main ideas and significant details. It is critically important that students understand the difference between main ideas and significant details.

Main ideas are usually found in topic sentences. Always underline the topic sentence of each paragraph. Topic sentences are usually the first or last sentence of the paragraph.

As you read the passage circle key words—dates, proper nouns, transitional phrases, as well as the words you circled in the question stems.

Don’t bounce between the questions and the passage yet. Keep reading, following your finger, and circling key words until you complete the passage.

Good Models Think Aloud

Model this process for your students by doing a think aloud as you mark up a transparency of an ACT reading passage with questions. Have students practice this process so that it becomes second nature. We want to condition students to use this method on test day; instead of reverting to old behaviors that are manifested by stress.

FYI

In the meantime, take a look at my test prep posts. They are free, and they have worked with city kids. If you have any questions drop me a comment. All comments are posted to my email first. I will never post any email addresses in the comment section. So if you want to contact me, drop me your email and I’ll get back with you. It is my hope that my expertise in this field will help someone out there. Let me know.

Posts Concerning Test Prep

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test

2006-02-28T13:17:00.000-06:00

On test day students need to maximize their brain power. Think of a computer. When we turn on a computer it takes time to boot-up. Once in operational mode a computer is capable of amazing things. If we don't take the time to boot-up a computer, it functions as a paperweight. Bootin-up isn't tech specific either; athletes warm up their muscles prior to a game to insure peak performance. The same holds true for the brain. In fact, jumping into the first word of a reading passage does not give the brain the opportunity to “boot-up” and diminishes comprehension. When some students read material “cold” it results in a cognitive shutdown. A cognitive shutdown on test day is disastrous because it diminishes students’ scoring potential. We want our students to be able to play the whole game; therefore they need to boot-up their brains. The boot-up process takes no more than 10 seconds per passage and yields tremendous results.

The booting-up process taps into the power of our brains to create order out of chaos. It also has the added benefit of making the passage familiar when students actively read it, and more familiar students are with a passage the better they perform on the test.

The booting-up process will appear unnatural to students at first, but in the end it will yield optimal results for all test takers. Practice this technique with students well in advance of test day. The more booting-up a student does, the more booting-up will become second nature, and the more likely students will boot-up on test day.

Booting-Up the Brain

Beginning with first line and visually drink the passage.

Move your eyes down the page instead of across the page. See every line, not every word. Do not attempt to read individual words. See they line of text as a whole. Your brain is picking up words and phrases and making sense of them subconsciously.

You can use two fingers to assist in this process.

Separate your index and middle finger an inch apart, place them on the first line and move your fingers down the first column of the passage. Let your eyes follow your fingers. Continue this process at the top of the next column.

Do not back track, let your eyes drink the text. This provides your brain with a variety of subconscious inputs that will help you optimize your performance.

Remember:

The booting-up process should take no more than 10 seconds.
The brain must be booted-up for each passage.
Practice, Practice, Practice

FYI

In the meantime, take a look at my test prep posts. They are free, and they have worked with city kids. If you have any questions drop me a comment. All comments are posted to my email first. I will never post any email addresses in the comment section. So if you want to contact me, drop me your email and I’ll get back with you. It is my hope that my expertise in this field will help someone out there. Let me know.

Posts Concerning Test Prep

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Coversion

2006-02-28T12:50:00.000-06:00

I call the program I developed to raise ACT reading scores the “Two-Point Conversion” because that’s the minimum amount of gain a literate high school student can expect from this regiment. Let me be upfront, the target audience for this approach is students who score between a 16 and a 22 on practice ACT tests. However, students who score higher than 22 will benefit from some of the techniques that have to do with building speed. Students who “honestly” score below 16 are not at a point where they will benefit from this regiment.

The Best Practice Materials

It should be no surprise that the best ACT test prep materials are the released tests produced by the ACT; therefore, acquire as many of those tests as possible. A good place to start is with the book Getting Into the ACT. Additional released tests are available from the ACT. The rationale for having students use released ACT test materials whenever possible is that all other ACT prep materials are an approximation of the ACT. Again, my advice is to keep it real and use actual ACT questions when preparing for the test.

Background

ACT reading passages are approximately 750 words in length. They appear in the following order: Prose Fiction, Social Science, Humanities, Natural Science. Each passage is followed by 10 questions. Students will have 35 minutes to answer 40 questions. Getting half of those right translates into a 19 or 20. At this level there is usually a 1 to 1 correspondence when going from raw (number right) to scale (number reported on score report) score. People are usually astonished when they learn that an average score on the ACT corresponds to getting 50 percent of the questions correct. So in reality, getting a few more items right on test day can mean a significant score improvement.

Minimize Time Sucks

On the day of the test we want to minimize the amount of time students spend wasting their time. Reading the instructions on test day is a time suck. Make sure that students understand the directions long before they take the actual test. Explicitly instruct them not to read the directions on test day.

Students also spend a lot of time agonizing over what passage to start with on test day. Many start with the first passage. The first passage is prose fiction and requires a different mindset than the rest of the test. In addition, prose fiction requires a more sophisticated reading than nonfiction. My advice to students is to knock out at least two nonfiction passages before going after the fiction section.

Taking It to the Nonfiction Passages

It is very important that students take the test on their own terms. Students need to start with the nonfiction passages they are the most comfortable with. People are comfortable with what they know. If students have accurate prior knowledge of a topic and it shows up on the test, bingo—there I the zone. Obviously it becomes important to preview the passages to see what’s out there. The preview process should take no more than 10 seconds. Here it is:

To get an idea of what the passages are about read the blurbs at the top.

If possible, select a passage that you know something about. Never underestimate the power of accurate prior knowledge.

If you have no prior knowledge, start with social science (Passage 2)

In the next entry, I’ll get into how to boot-up the brain to get the most out of “cold” reading passages.

FYI

Take a look at my test prep posts. They are free, and they have worked with city kids. If you have any questions drop me a comment. All comments are posted to my email first. I will never post any email addresses in the comment section. So if you want to contact me, drop me your email and I’ll get back with you. It is my hope that my expertise in this field will help someone out there. Let me know.

Posts Concerning Test Prep

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work

2006-02-28T12:38:00.000-06:00

It is crunch time in Illinois high schools. The PSAE looms. I’m going to dedicate a few posts this week to preparing for the PSAE Reading Test. I have an excellent track record in this regard. I advocate a comprehensive program that transcends the typical test prep regiment. However, I realize that we are in crunch time so I will dedicate some entries to a proven approach to the PSAE Reading Test. I am not a test prep company. I do know what works and what does not work.

I am aware that many schools outsource their test prep efforts to companies that promise to deliver, but charge upfront. The success of any test prep program rests on student buy-in. Kids who have been raised to compete academically will buy-in automatically. Children of parents who pay for test prep courses are more apt to buy-in than kids at low achieving schools.

Test prep representatives are quick to point out that their approaches raise test scores. This allows them an easy out when scores don’t go up at a particular school. They can argue that students didn’t implement the approach correctly. If the company is operating from the train the trainer model and has actual public school teachers implement the test prep material then they can blame those classroom teachers for failing to correctly implement the program. When questioned about their products apparent failure, the company will claim that the fault falls on the teachers whom either resisted the program or failed to implement it correctly. The company will stake this claim on the fact that mountains of data demonstrate the effectiveness of their product. Of course, the mountains of data that the company stakes its reputation to are based on the achievement of students whose upper middle class parents paid big dollars to enroll them test prep classes taught by test prep instructors. In a nutshell, their data is culled from a population and a setting that has little in common with your school.

Times change, but part of the sales pitch to inner city schools is predicated on the data generated by the students in the upwardly mobile set. Ask for a client list and check school report cards to see if their clients have improved beyond the rate of the district. Note, it is particularly difficult to secure a complete client list from these companies, so good luck.

FYI

Take a look at my test prep posts. They are free, and they have worked with city kids. If you have any questions drop me a comment. All comments are posted to my email first. I will never post any email addresses in the comment section. So if you want to contact me, drop me your email and I’ll get back with you. It is my hope that my expertise in this field will help someone out there. Let me know.

Posts Concerning Test Prep

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

Illinois Lowers Math Cut Score to Secure AYP in 2007

2006-02-24T13:12:00.000-06:00

The Illinois State Board of Education just lowered the cut score on the eighth grade I SAT math test to the 38th percentile. The ISAT is used to determine if schools are making AYP in Illinois. This change means that, by definition 62 percent of the students who take the test will meet standards. A student with an IQ in the 38th percentile has a below average IQ, and a student with an ACT math score in the 38th percentile wouldn't be able to gain admission many colleges. But evidently the 38th percentile is just fine for 8th graders in Illinois.

In retrospect, it's pretty obvious why Illinois didn't apply for flexibility in reporting AYP; instead the state lowered the standard. The reason why has to do with meeting AYP in 2007. The percentage of students M/E in math in Illinois has remained at 54.3 over the last 2 years. Next year, the AYP bar will be raised to 55 percent. It appears that rather than try to squeeze the needed 0.7 percent improvement out of schools that Illinois has opted to adjust the cut score to insure that 62 percent of its students meet standards. There is the wriggle room. Don't expect to see a change in 8th grade reading cut scores this yearÂ72.7 percent of students meet/exceed standards there.

Adjusting the ISAT is not that complicated since itÂs not a national test. That is why High schools are going to pose a particular problem since they rely heavily on the ACT and WorkKeys to figure AYP. The problem is that the state of Illinois tops out at about 52 percent in math and 59 percent in reading. Tinkering with cut scores on high profile national exams is sure to come under more scrutiny than tinkering with homespun tests like the ISAT.

Of course the business community is in an uproar over this; as are the RepublicansÂafter all no one wants to be perceived as soft on education these days.

According to the SunTimes the move was supported by the educationalists who make up the Illinois Statewide School Management Alliance who contend "that the change will not affect the difficulty of the test questions themselves and therefore would not affect student performance." That's right; the state didn't change the questions on the test, only the number students need to get right to meet standards. Am I the only one that finds this ridiculous?

Zero-Sum Thinking, Demassification, and Asymmetrical Educational Systems

2006-02-24T10:14:00.000-06:00

Imagine a contagious optimism surrounding urban education. Imagine children enthusiastically engaged in learning across the urban landscape. Imagine innovations in education spreading like a virus from one classroom to another.

A teacher has an idea, tries it in her classroom and it yields great results. She posts the strategy on a message board for innovative educational ideas. Within days other teachers across the urban landscape tryout the idea in their classrooms and offer feedback through the message board. The idea becomes an innovation and is spread by the hive. Through this process urban educators are able to test ideas, collect evidence, and innovate. Imagine optimism instead of pessimism.

Unfortunately, Rich Karlgaard is right to point out that the world’s greatest disease is zero-sum thinking. Public education in this country functions in a zero-sum framework that divides schools into winners and losers. Zero-sum thinkers have come to influence much of today’s education policy. Superintendents and principals fall into this camp because their positions are zero-sum in nature. After all, there is only one superintendent per district and one principal per school. In fact, zero-sum thinkers go all the way up the education policy food chain to the folks who passed NCLB and the president who signed it into law. Politics is predicated on winners and losers. The No Child Left Behind Act is zero-sum thinking writ large—labeling schools as winners and losers based on AYP.

Within the zero-sum paradigm failing schools are allowed to build cultures of failure while successful schools build cultures of success. But what if it were possible for all urban schools to be successful?

Don’t look to education professors for the answers to urban education because they are the product of a tenure system that inculcates them with a zero-sum worldview. Yes, even the most left leaning professor has been co-opted by the university system. The worst of this breed line their pockets with consulting fees from urban school districts. The flawed logic is that those farthest from implementation know best. These professors have a symbiotic relationship with urban school districts adding their credentials to reading initiatives, math, and science initiatives in exchange for fat checks. That’s right; they make money off the losers.

Sadly, zero-sum thinking trickles down to the level of the classroom teacher. Teachers are at the point of implementation in education, yet there motivations tend toward self-preservation instead of innovation. Many innovative teachers are under the radar because they are protective of their methods. The attitude is along the lines of “I’ve got mine; you get yours.” This is not a shock considering that trust is impossible in a zero-sum system. After all, that’s a big reason that the Coalition for Essential Schools had such disappointing results in large urban districts. Innovation and collaboration become the exception and not the rule. The status quo doesn’t support the hive, and instead thrives on self-preservation.

There is hope. John Seal Brown, Director of the Palo Alto Research Center, notes that we have seen the transformation in business from conglomeration to demassification. According to Brown, “Power in the new economy is shifting to the smallest possible unit.” Instead of urban education bureaucracies that are wildly inefficient money pits we need asymmetrical educational systems with portfolio oversight. Such a system would be comprised of numerous, autonomous small schools that would tailor their programs to meet the unique needs and tastes of their target audiences. In such a system, schools would encourage innovation by valuing the transformation of ideas into knowledge. Effective schools would prosper under entrepreneurial leaders who would steward the development of intellectual and social capital. Schools will be held accountable to accelerating the development of knowledge over time.

Since they have a stake in maintaining the status quo, zero-sum thinking educationalists and politicians will not go quietly. The demand for asymmetrical educational systems has to come from outside of this system. The innovative, entrepreneurial spirit made America great; that same spirit will soon be called on to reinvent the American educational landscape.

Flexible AYP and Salient Advice from Bruce Lee

2006-02-22T20:24:00.000-06:00

It was interesting to note in today’s NYT that New York, Illinois, and California are not seeking flexibility from the Department of Education in figuring Annual Yearly Progress. It is also significant that these states contain the largest urban districts in the country, all of them facing the most severe sanctions under NCLB. In short, why not apply for flexibility? In Illinois, I think it’s about the upcoming gubernatorial election. It appears that in today’s world being soft on education is as bad as being soft on crime.

Nevertheless, according to the Times, ten states have applied for flexibility this year and an additional ten for next year. This flexible system for figuring AYP will amount to chaos. All it really is, is a way for states to avoid NCLB sanctions. Under the proposed flexibility states would be allowed to judge schools by “tracking the progress of individual students over time.” This type of value accountability would be used to demonstrate improvement toward mastery and not mastery. That’s right; the states want to count students toward AYP that aren’t meeting standards. There are also logistical problems with this approach including instrument reliability and student mobility. And where does the buck stop on this one? Are high schools going to be forced to take the brunt of the sanctions or can the argument be made that a 17 year old is on track to meet standards by the time he is 19 or 21? Come on, this is ridiculous.

It shouldn't surprise anyont that NCLB has been an implementation nightmare. State to state assessments and cut scores vary. Some state tests are significantly more difficult than others. We all know that students who exceed a standard in one state may not meet the corresponding standard in another state. Now, with flexible reporting being granted to some states, one cannot help but wonder about equal protection under the law.

It’s good to know that Margaret Spellings still contends that the “core principles” of NCLB remain intact including 100 percent of students meeting standards in reading in math or is it approaching 100 percent? It becomes apparent that what is really important is parsing the language so that no child appears to be left behind.

Perhaps we should all heed the advice of martial arts master Bruce Lee, “When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit--it hits all by itself.” It sure looks like that’s happening right now.

As for Illinois, our governor is tough on education, we have one of the toughest tests in the nation and we won’t be having any of this “flexibility” nonsense; even if it would be the fiscally responsible thing to do for Chicago.

Catalyst Article on King Misses the Big College Prep Story

2006-02-22T14:10:00.000-06:00

The latest edition of Chicago Catalyst is out. The cover story “Great Expectations for King Prep Come Up Short” chronicles the debacle on 44th Street. Although, the thesis statement of the article is “King’s story illustrates the difficulty in creating elite high schools, a key strategy in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s efforts to attract and keep middle-class families in the public schools system”, one finds little actual discussion of SES in the article. Instead, one gets the sad story of a school that has lacked visionary leadership and support. The author, Debra Williams, gets it wrong because she writes the wrong story.

For those who don’t know, King was opened in compliance with a federal desegregation decree back in 1998. The decree required that all students have equal access to magnet schools. A cynic might argue that King is a magnet school in name only.

Williams outlines the problems that have plagued King since 1998: inconsistent leadership, lack of vision, high teacher turnover, low-test scores for juniors, and the lowest test scores for incoming freshman of any magnet school in Chicago, very little central office support, and low enrollment in Advanced Placement courses. Suddenly it appears that oversight and accountability are dirty words down on 125. Of course the question to ask is “Why was King allowed to fail?” Unfortunately Williams never asks this question.

However Williams does get David Pickens, the Deputy to CEO Arne Duncan on the record when it comes to college prep high schools and King College Prep “Our goal is to have very little difference from one [school] to another. We are looking at it.”

One has to wonder if CPS is looking at King in the same way one looks at a train wreck—with morbid curiosity—or if they are vacantly staring into the abyss of an ethically bankrupt system where good faith promises to children are broken. Either way what happened at King is wrong. In fact what’s happening to college prep programs across the city calls for increased, third party oversight.

Most folk in Chicago, when asked to name college prep high schools in Chicago can probably name two: Northside and Payton. If we looked at just those schools we would see very little difference between the schools. Unfortunately there are seven high schools in Chicago designated as college preps, and their differences are abundant.

Lets begin by looking at Chicago college prep high schools that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Catalyst claims that King is the only college prep that didn’t make AYP. This is a false claim; a cursory examination of school report cards adds Hope College Prep and Lindblom College Prep to the list. In fact, Hope and Lindblom actually had worse test scores than King in 2005. I wonder if David Pickens is “looking” at that too.

I did a little research to determine the extent to which college prep’s attract the middle class. Working from school report card data I looked at the percentage of low-income students in the area surrounding the college prep and subtracted that by the percentage of low-income students within the college prep itself. I call this number the income difference. The higher the income difference, the greater the percentage of middle class students that attend the college prep versus the local area. A negative number indicates that the college prep attracts more lower income studnets than schools in the surrounding area. This provides information in terms of how well college preps attract the middle class. Here is what I found:

Payton College Prep 48.0
Northside College Prep 45.4
King College Prep 32.9
Jones College Prep 19.2
Brooks College Prep 11.8
Lindblom College Prep -2.2
Hope College Prep -5.9

As we can see from the data, Payton, Northside, and King attract a significant amount of middle class students to their schools when compared with their local area. Interestingly Lindblom and Hope have more low-income students than their local area. Can we say that Lindblom and Hope repel the middle class? Or does this fact speak to where college preps are located in a geo-economic sense in Chicago?

Anyway, if we rank these schools according to academic achievement in reading we get this:

Northside College Prep 99 percent meets/exceeds
Payton College Prep 95 percent meets/exceeds
Jones College Prep 87 percent meets/exceeds
Brooks College Prep 84 percent meets/exceeds
King College Prep 68 percent meets/exceeds
Lindblom College Prep 57 percent meets/exceeds
Hope College Prep 45 percent meets/exceeds

Perhaps Williams could have used this data to better inform her thesis concerning the creation of elite high schools and their ability to attract the middle class. Then again, if she used this data then perhaps she would have written an entirely different article. Perhaps an article that compared the creations of Payton, Northside, King and Hope would have been written. Such an article could include differences in budget allocation, hiring practices, core facilities, and administrative vision. In terms of the article we get in Catalyst, well sometimes the words we don’t write say more than the words we do.

Mathews' "Teaching to the Test" Gets it Wrong

2006-02-21T12:56:00.000-06:00

Charlie likes shoes, big shoes. His new favorite book is The Big Blue Spot. It's good, very good.

However, when a reporter turned columnist misrepresents the current state of testing and teaching that is bad, very bad. Yet that’s exactly what occurs in Washington Post’s Jay Mathews’ “Let’s Teach to the Test”. Clearly he hasn’t read my posts, or if he has he doesn’t understand them.

In Mathews’ world of education NCLB Assessments are written by teachers, state standards are clear, and a good old-fashioned lesson review is all that’s needed to prepare students for the big day.

Mathews claims that teaching to the test does not mean an annual drill and kill fest that use released test items to prepare students for state tests. I beg to differ. In my ten years of experience under Chicago Public Schools Accountability teaching to the test was a drop everything and prep affair across curriculums affair. The same drop everything and prep is alive and well in Chicago—at schools that are insecure about their AYP prospects.

First we need to first examine the word “test” before we can get down to the nuts and bolts of “teaching to the test”. There are two types of tests out there—norm referenced (NRT) and criterion referenced (CRT). Mr. Mathews’ failure to distinguish between CRT and NRT highlights a common misunderstanding about NCLB Assessments.

Briefly, NRT tests are general—they have a few items for each instructional objective or standard, and are designed to promote variability in scores—think SAT, GRE, ACT. In contrast, CRT tests thoroughly cover a limited number objectives or standards. CRT items reflect the criterion chosen and taught by the teacher(s). Most of us experience CRT tests in the form of teacher designed unit tests. The PSAE in Illinois is a hybrid—6/7 NRT and 1/7 CRT.

That means that 6/7 of the tests reflect national norms. The Day 1 exam is the ACT—a NRT by design in which students are intended to fall along a “normal curve”. Two thirds of the day 2 exams are made up of Work Keys Reading and Math—both nationally normed tests written by the ACT for use in the workplace. Only the day 2 science exam is written by teachers. Teachers in Illinois have input on 1/7 of the total state exam. The rest of the test is designed by psychometricians to fit a normal curve. That means that students won’t really budge on the curve. This has been corroborated by a report by the Chicago Consortium that found little movement in scores on the PSAE. Few parents, teachers, administrators, and politicians know that PSAE tests are designed in a way that prevents substantial movement from quartile to quartile.

Nevertheless starting in February of each year, teachers are pressured, and many cases mandated to teach to the ACT and Work Keys portions of the test. I call this type of teaching ACTriage. Companies like Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Cambridge are more than willing to offer materials and curriculum to assist in these efforts. Unfortunately these materials are geared to students how possess the requisite skills to do well on the ACT. Teachers in Chicago who participate in ACTriage quickly realize that many students have never been exposed to material at the level it is presented in the ACT. This means that many students don’t read the questions, let alone the passages with any level of competence. The same holds true for math—the math tests on the PSAE are verbal heavy, the current math curriculum in Chicago is not. Even the most resolute teachers begin to panic when they realize how fundamentally ill equipped the students are to take the exam. Each year ACTriage is a bust to teachers and students and a boon to test prep companies.

Mathews gets partial credit for his belief that teachers teach to the state standards since they can’t legally get a copy of the state test. This assumes that the standards and tests are in complete alignment. As anyone familiar with teaching knows, only certain standards are actually assessed on the state exam. Many teachers teach to the state standards that are assessed on the state test. In Illinois, the ACT offers teachers the EPAS to assist them in this effort. The EPAS represents the subset of standards that are assessed by the ACT. Not surprisingly, schools that have used the EPAS to design curriculum score quite high on the ACT. It appears that Illinois has outsourced both the testing and standards to a testing company. Let’s be clear, a teacher who teaches to the EPAS is teaching to the test; not teaching to the vast array of standards in Illinois.

Mathews’ failure to understand the fundamentals of assessment and curriculum renders his critique toothless. One more note to the uninformed, International Baccalaureate and Advanced Placement represent a set of curriculums and assessments, not just test that are “taught to”.

Oh, Mr. Mathews, your contempt for teachers is as palpable as your ignorance of NCLB, curriculum and assessment. Your paper gets an “A” for style and an “F” for substance. All hat, no cattle my friend—just what I expect from someone inside the beltway MSM. Hey, if the shoe fits...

Reports Call for Disruptive Changes to Urban School Systems

2006-02-19T14:08:00.000-06:00

Charlie likes oranges. Seeing as how he is the only one in the house that's healthy right now, maybe he is on to something. As for me I like green tea with mint.

I just finished reading two reports that have confirmed my resolve for disruptive change in urban education. Those reports are the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) report Put Learning First and the Designs for Change 15 year study The Big Picture School-Initiated Reforms, Centrally Initiated Reforms, and Elementary School Achievement in Chicago (1999-2005).

PPI was once described as "Bill Clinton's idea mill," and its research and proposals were the source for many of the "New Democrat" themes that figured prominently in national politics during the 1990s. The new report was commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and examines from a macro perspective what is needed to reform school systems throughout the United States.

The crux of the PPI report is that we need flexibility of instruction, funding, setting, and teacher hiring; along with public oversight that can be provided by a variety of organizations—not just the school board.

The reports author Paul T. Hill argues for a portfolio approach to manage schools. Such an approach would include:

Public oversight;

Public funding;

Concentration of resources near the student;

Strategic use of community resources;

Rewards for high performance;

Openness to promising ideas, people, and organizations;

Free movement of dollars, students, and educators; and

An environment of support for both new and existing schools.

Of course Hill’s proposal is hostile to teachers’ unions and central office bureaucracies. For Hill flexibility in school choice, teacher and administrator training and having per-pupil funding allocations follow students are the crucial components of portfolio management.

Hill praises the initial efforts of the Chicago Public School Renaissance 2010 but argues that they need to downscale central office, change teacher allocation (union contract), and put more money in the hands of individual schools. CPS receives a substantial amount of Gates money, so I wonder how they are going to digest a report that is both complimentary of the systems innovation and critical of its resistance to change at the same time. In my opinion, incremental change like we are seeing in CPS in the form of Ren 10 ultimately impedes the forces of disruptive change by attempting to co-opt those forces.

Since the PPI report was commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation it can be read as an assault on urban school systems by corporations in the name of reform. Nevertheless, the Put Learning First Report should be taken seriously by educators and not dismissed as neoliberalist rhetoric because the status quo is bankrupt and ripe for disruptive change.

Another report that should be read by everyone interested in education reform is the Designs for Change report The Big Picture School-Initiated Reforms, Centrally Initiated Reforms, and Elementary School Achievement in Chicago (1999-2005). Designs for Change identified 5 key components for achieving schools in Chicago and those are:

School Leaderships Focused on Success for All Students

Social Supports for Learning (School Culture)

Family and Community Partnership Support Learning

Adults Collaborate and Learn

Quality Learning Activities with Focus on Literacy

I recommend this report because it offers a clear, quantitative look at what works in urban school systems and what does not. The report was suppressed by the Chicago Board of Education because it offers quantitative proof that 3 high profile central office initiatives failed. Those failing initiatives are: academic probation for schools that underachieve, grade retention, and the Chicago Reading Initiative. These initiatives cost tens of millions of dollars and had no return on investment. This is represents a huge waste of taxpayer money the school system that has the largest operating budget of all public entities in Illinois. With no real results, it begs the question, “where did all the money go?”

The Design for Change report first came to my attention when I heard one of its authors on the February 6th edition of NPR's Eight-Forty-Eight. The board contested the findings with Designs for Change, but other than that they have been silent. It is a must read for everyone involved in education from taxpayers to teachers, from community activists to administrators, from me to you. It supports the PPI report because it argues for local control, flexibility, and community support. Of course, CPS is interested first and formost in protecting its high paying jobs, so I don't expect it to go gentle into that good night.

The reports have a cynergistic effect on the reader. When read together these two reports challenge the very need for central office bureaucracies and offer viable structural alternatives to them on the macro and micro level. Never before have we been armed with proven means and the support of the cognitive elites to effect disruptive change. As the concept of Vishnuic reform makes its way from policy reports to public radio we are fast approaching a tipping point in public education.

Is Speed Dating a Hot New Learning Strategy or Just Literacy Arts and Crafts?

2006-02-17T13:23:00.000-06:00

Speed dating is hot. That’s right, speed dating—we have seen it in movies, on television, and now it is coming to a classroom near you. That’s right, teachers have started to adapt the speed dating model as a learning strategy. So it begs the question, is speed dating a viable learning strategy or is it another example of the mindless edutainment that’s proliferating in our public schools?

Somewhere along the way it became necessary for teachers to entertain their students. We can blame MTV, video games, and the Internet, but the fallout remains the same. Many teachers appropriate pop culture in their classrooms to keep pace with the instant message mindset of today’s youth.

On the surface there is nothing inherently wrong with this practice. For example, I attended an ISTE conference back when Who Wants to be a Millionaire was number one in the Nielsen Ratings. At one of the sessions we learned how to incorporate the Who Wants to be a Millionaire website into a search engine game. The idea was to get the answers using Google. I have to admit it was kind of fun and it was used to assess students ability to perform sophisticated searches. It worked; it was fun. The reason the strategy worked so well was because it had a clear educational purpose beyond being “fun” and filling up the time. I’ve even seen a variation of this learning strategy on the television show Veronica Mars. So we come full circle—pop culture embraces a learning strategy.

For every strategy that works, I’ve seen many that are just awful. A lot of these “strategies” fall into the literacy arts and crafts category. To qualify for admission in this category a strategy must be a time-suck and have a suspect academic focus.

A short list of literacy arts and crafts that I’ve observed in the high school setting:

Making Posters of Greek Gods

Making Sock Puppets of characters in Of Mice and Men

Making Book Covers based on Beowulf

Making Autobiographical Collages

Sketching Characters from The Outsiders

Many teachers include a “written” activity to supplement and justify these activities. I say “supplement” in the truest sense because the focus is on the arts and crafts, not on the writing. That said, these types of activities are seductive because kids like them and tend to stay on task for longer periods of time when engaged in them. These activities also yield beautiful albeit vapid bulletin board material.

Do students in elite schools do literacy arts and crafts? Hell, no. Those students are too busy learning to read, think and communicate effectively to waste time on the educational equivalent of basket weaving.

As for the speed dating strategy—it has instructional potential because it focuses on language acquisition, which means that it can be morphed into a vocabulary lesson applicable across disciplines. I would adapt it like this:

Materials:
Paper
Pens
Timer
LCD Projector
Vocabulary Back List

Give each student a word from the master list

Each student writes down a sentence using the word.

Share using speed dating protocols.

Divide class into two groups—A and B

Spread group A students out in “café style” seating

Each group B student visits a group A student for two minute intervals during which time they share and write down each others sentences as well as the one’s they’ve added during previous “speed dates”.

When final time is called, students will have a copy of every sentence.

At completion of the strategy each student evaluates all the sentences and “fixes” the ones that are incorrect.

Collect all work.

This strategy would work because it clearly focuses on vocabulary development and sentence construction. The structure of the activity insures that students are intellectually active throughout the lesson. Since each student is responsible for getting it “right” in the end there is an onus on individual contribution to the learning community as a whole. So it is evident that speed dating passes muster as a learning strategy. We will know that the speed dating learning strategy has arrived when we see it on Veronica Mars.

The Possibility for Radical Educatonal Reform in Chicago Starts on the Northside

2006-02-13T12:04:00.000-06:00

Props to Stephanie Banchero for getting this right in her Chicago Tribune Magazine cover story, “Traditionally, public schools have ignored—or lacked the resources to deal with—dysfunctional households that handicap children’s ability to learn. But some educators argue that they cannot teach these students how to read, write and do arithmetic if they cannot first stabilize their home lives.”

When read alongside the Sunday NYT article “Tutor Program Offered by Law is Going Unused” we can begin to understand why these non-mandatory tutoring programs are “underutilized” by those in the “deepest need”. It’s the parents and the community, stupid.

Not that CPS gets it, Beth Swanson, the director of after school programs blames the assistance shortfall on tutoring companies’ failure to reach special needs and limited English students “Typically, we see providers opt not to serve those populations and likely because they don’t have the materials, expertise or resources to do so.”

Sounds like most folk don’t want to deal with the reality of dysfunctional parents and dysfunctional communities. Blame every service provider, but don’t deal with the real problem. Smother them with basic skills and keep them in the surround. Never expose them to the best education because then they will become active in the political sphere. Right now, in Chicago, poor kids are surrounded by hunger, guns, family violence, isolation, drugs, criminals, police, abuse, gangs, dumbing-down, and bling-bling. And that is just the short list. Such an environment breeds a special kind of hostility—one where being “disrespected” or “mean mugged” leads to murder. In short the sphere that the poorest children live in manifests a slow form of suicide.

CPS claims to hold schools accountable and shuts some of them down—shuffling the students to other underperforming high schools and offering non-mandatory tutoring. They even hold hearings where the community has there “say”. Of course these “bogus” controlled hearings are held ‘downtown”. The machine keeps humming along. Now, I’ve been reading Earl Shorris’ Riches for the Poor alongside Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and it becomes evident that true education reform in Chicago is a sham.

If the folks in the Collins neighborhood wanted to take a stand, they should demand that their children go to the best schools in Chicago. In order to drive this point home they should take their protest to the posh academic magnet school known as Northside College Prep and disrupt the lives of the intellectual elites in Chicago. Remember that Northside College Prep, a magnet school, is 7 percent African American in a district that is 49 percent African American.

I’m sure that if hundreds of parents, students and community members from the Chicago’s Westside took their protest to the school for “people of means” on the Northside, that that would make front page news in all the papers. How’s that for a splinter in the eye of the establishment? This would bring the debate about education in Chicago front and center.

Let’s be clear: I believe that the best education for the elites is the best education for all. After all, if students are to learn to think critically, they need something to think critically about. Basic skills—kill children’s’ desire to think critically in an academic setting. What to do? Demand the elite curriculum for all students in Chicago not just the intellectual elites. Create bold new small schools that embrace elitist humanities curriculums—like the curriculum at Phillips Exeter. This bold step would value every student and every community in Chicago. Perhaps this is the bold vision needed to effect disruptive change in Chicago.

Hearing on School Closing Generates Silence in Mainstream Chicago Media

2006-02-10T13:24:00.000-06:00

Looking for information on the CPS hearing concerning Collins High School? Well the Sun-Times ran one paragraph in the Metro Briefs section and the Tribune ran nothing. That’s right; the Chicago Tribune had nada on the hearing. What is going on over at the Tribune? Not only did they drop the ball completely on the hearings, but they didn’t even mention the national attention garnered by Morgan Park High School for having the greatest number of African American students receiving AP credit in two courses -- English language/composition and European history -- than at any other high school in the nation offering AP courses last year. Now there is a conspicuous silence that marginalizes a huge chunk of Chicago. Ouch, and couldn’t that be conceived as racist by omission? If it walks like a duck...

Anyway, given the lack of coverage surrounding the hearings one would think that there wasn’t much going on there. But if you read the Chicago Defender article then you would get a better picture of the hearing. The Chicago Defender, for 100 years, has been the voice of the African-American Community in Chicago and across the United States.

One major point in the Defender article was that State Senator Rickey Hendon (D-5th), assistant majority leader, threatened to use state funding for education as a leverage point to keep Collins open. Remember that CPS is suffering a major budget shortfall. Hendon said, “He's not going to get a damn penny. And his pension plan? He's not going to get that either."

Remember that Hendon, whose district includes Collins, found out about the closing when it was announced at a press conference; now that is CPS at its politically savvy best. CPS could have avoided a lot of the politics if they had just gone ahead and phased out the bottom high school in each of the cities 5 geographic “Instructional Areas”. This may not have been popular, but it would have sent a message regarding failing schools to residents across the city. No, what the board did here is politically inept and open to myriad critiques from folks across the spectrum.

Another good point raised in the Defender article had to do with gentrification. Alderman Michael Chandler (24th Ward) said at the hearing, "Many of my constituents believe that this is about gentrification, and I feel like they're right this time." Right on! That’s why everybody needs to read Pauline Lipman’s High Stakes Education. She argues that exact point and others too. So if you really want to know more about the intersection of political economy, race, and urban education policy, run out and buy her book. Clearly, if we rely on the mainstream media in Chicago we won’t learn a damn thing.

A Teacher's Guide to Resisting NCLB

2006-02-09T13:04:00.000-06:00

Education is grounded in metaphors, and those metaphors carry a host of assumptions. As we have seen before high school teachers who refer to their students as babies betray a condescending racism toward the adolescents that populate their classrooms. Metaphors also shape how the public thinks about urban education.

Educational issues are framed by policy makers and the media, not by teachers or students. The power to frame educational issues results in the consumption of policies that are viewed as common sense. Today schools are seen as businesses producing products. A premium is then put on profit, getting the best “product” for the least cost. The metaphor here is productivity. Of course to speak of productivity implies that there is a succinct way to measure it. Currently we measure productivity in the form of standardized test results. Schools are rated, classrooms are rated, teachers are rated, and students are rated. In such a system, what counts is what is assessed on these tests. In turn, effective teaching can be quantified and compared. Comparison is at the heart of neoliberalism.

Accountability is done under the aegis of leaving no child behind. After all who wants to leave a child behind? The productive get ahead, the unproductive are left behind. After all exactly what does it mean to be left behind? The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read, “In case of Rapture, this car will be abandoned.” Until No Child Left Behind, I associated the phrase “Left Behind” with a series of Christian novels by Timothy LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that had to do with rapture. The poor souls that are “left behind” get thrown into the pit of hell while Christians ascend to heaven. It is kind of funny to think of No Child Left Behind in this way given President Bush’s faith based bend. Given this context, we don’t want any child “left behind” when the educational rapture commences.

What if we took the time to think about the actual effects of accountability instead of its metaphoric frame? For one thing we would quickly discover that accountability has resulted in the displacement of students. In Chicago student displacement has resulted in riots at receiving high schools. Another effect is that many teachers have lost any semblance of academic freedom in the name of test preparation. Finally, some good teachers lose their jobs and are stigmatized because they taught at chronically underperforming schools.

Teacher opposition often misses the point. Typically teachers simply invert the logic of accountability and provide a romantic, subjectivistic, overly emotional pleas on behalf of the preciousness of the individual child. But what teachers fail to recognize is that their “expertise” has already been undermined. Their claims to really “know the child” go out the window because in the system such teacher knowledge, since it can’t be measured, is discarded and labeled “subjective”.

Teachers and critics need to stop debating why the department of education or the board of education behaves the way it does. We don’t need anymore teacher stories that provide teachers with feelings of empowerment, because those in power are deaf to the testimony.

Teachers must also avoid the “if onlys” because they are not grounded in reality. You hear this all the time in high schools, “If only the elementary schools did a better job.” I even heard this at the city college level, “If only high schools did a better job.” The “if onlys” get us nowhere because they aren’t built on reality.

The reality of education today: Only the aptitudes, knowledges, and actions directly related to the overall needs of society are recognized; everything else is either marginalized or silenced from the curriculum. In education today what is true is what is measurable. That’s why NCLB puts a premium on quantitative research. If it can’t be measured it is either suspect or irrelevant. What is measurable becomes what is taught. Teaching methods are dictated by measurement. Eventually the range of possibility in the classroom becomes a function of compliance to an established quantifiable “norm”.

So what can teachers do? They can start by interrogating themselves, and noting how they are implicit in the application of power at the capillary level. Here are some questions to start this process:

What happens when a student receives the lowest possible grade on a project when it is the best work has has ever done?

What happens when a teacher tells a student they are wrong, when the student knows he is right?

What happens when a child is too hungry to work?

What happens when a child is punished for talking in class, when he was asking another student for help?

How does a student feel when he can’t ask a question because a teacher has to “move on”?

What happens when students only do what is difficult for them at school?

What happens when a student expects to learn about American history and is given test prep every day for 2 months?

What happens when a teacher refers to a student as lazy or disrespectful?

What happens when a teachers refer to their students as “babies”?

What does the expectation that students will always do as they are told indicate?

What do we learn about ourselves when we examine these questions in light of our own critiques of power and neoliberalism?

What happens when we justify a lesson by saying, "it's on the test" and nothing more.

What happens when we teach content that we don't believe is important?

What happens when we answer our own questions instead of pushing students?

What are the consequences of student failure?

Only by considering these questions can teachers claim a meaningful voice in determining the future of education.

Educational Welfare and the Shape of the Spoon in Chicago

2006-02-07T12:12:00.000-06:00

The biggest threat to academic achievement in Chicago and across the nation is educational welfare. We can go on forever talking about the merits of standards based education, formative assessment, and differentiated instruction, but if we allow educational welfare to creep into our schools then we have lost the war. When teachers practice educational welfare they undermine academic achievement at every turn. Over time the recipients of educational welfare learn to be dependant, intellectual dullards.

Educational welfare occurs when a teacher’s lecture takes the place of assigned readings and/or homework. It works like this: During the course of a class a teacher becomes aware that students have not done their reading/homework and then “gives them” the material in the form of a lecture. Educational welfare does not teach students to read, think, or interact with the world; in fact all it teaches is passive learning and dependence on the teacher. In short educational welfare trades on the future of our students and creates docile bodies. A clue that this going on is when teachers talk about “covering” material. The worst offenders put it in the first person, as in “Oh, I covered that a week ago.” The problem here is that the teacher knows the material (hopefully) and “covered” it, but what about what the students know? Well for one thing educational welfare undermines the importance of homework. It creates dependence on teachers.

Some teachers foster this dependence by referring to their students as “my babies” implying that students are as helpless as infants. Since metaphors structure the way that we think, this disturbing, condescending remark reveals a defeatist and racist mindset in those that speak this way. Yet, we allow these folk to staff our urban schools in the form of teachers, principals, and other ancillary staff.

What to do? The best means to counteract educational welfare is in making our classrooms and schools intellectually safe environments where students have the freedom and confidence to enter in to civil, robust, informed debate. The only way to get to that point in a classroom is to place a premium on justice, learning, personal growth and productivity. Teachers, administrators, parents, and students must work collaboratively to create this place. Impossible? Such an education is a reality at Phillips Exeter, a private, elite boarding school, why shouldn’t it be the reality for all children? After all E.M. Forester is right, "Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon."

CPS Student and Teacher Attendance Lacking

2006-02-05T16:38:00.000-06:00

I couldn’t help but laugh at the articles I read this morning. Over Sunday morning coffee I read “And for Perfect Attendance, Johnny Gets a Car” in the NYT along with an article in the Sun-Times about teacher absenteeism in the Chicago Public Schools. The NYT article mentioned a program in CPS where students with perfect attendance are eligible to win one month’s mortgage or rent. Funny, CPS appears to have been paying students to come to school while as many as 1,500 teachers get paid to stay home each day. No, make it 1,800 teachers on Fridays. Yes, you read that correctly 1,500 teachers per day on Monday-Thursday, 1,800 teachers on Friday, and they get the summers off too. This wouldn’t cut it in corporate America, but this is the public schools, remember.

As a result of this lousy attendance record, the Chicago Public Schools will start publicizing teacher attendance rates for its schools next year. The union boss Marilyn Stewart responded by saying that, “We have a professional work force, and people are not taking advantage of that situation. I don’t see why the personal information of employees has to be made public…if it’s not related to student achievement.” Let’s be clear, if a teacher isn’t present, student achievement suffers. I have seen students perform well below their pears on standardized tests when their teachers became truant. I also watched a teacher lock a position and refuse to come to school, leaving her students to sit in the auditorium for months. All of these kids failed that class, and had to make it up in the cottage industry known as summer school.

So, Marilyn, I guess teacher attendance does impact student achievement. The union has also claimed that teachers miss school because teaching is a stressful job. Last time I checked teachers got the summers off in Chicago, and nothing beats unwinding from a stressful school year like June, July, and August. Sadly, maybe we should agree to pay the mortgage or rent for one month if a teacher has perfect attendance, wait doesn’t that sort of happen already, and on the public dime in the name of a paycheck? All except for the perfect attendance part that is. How about if we made teachers bring a note to school like the kids and then they could have excused and unexcused absences?

Let’s be clear, if a teacher is sick they should stay home, but if a teacher is a chronic truant they should do us all, including their students a favor and resign. Of course that will never happen because careerists value their paychecks and tend to know their “rights” and how to abuse those “rights”. These types ruin it for the legitimately professional type teachers in Chicago, of which I have known many.

Dubious School Research and Dubious Journalists

2006-02-05T14:32:00.000-06:00

I’ve just read Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat aloud for what feels like the thousandth time this week; however, my efforts have been rewarded and the once cranky Charlie sleeps.

It’s like this: the New York Times runs a story on Jan 28th about a research study that claims that demographic differences more than make up for achievement differences between public and private schools. This article has culminated in headlines in other papers that read along the lines of “Privatization is no answer to improving education,” Sun-Times Feb 4. Thankfully, I happened upon a great critique of this study entitled “NY Times Touts Dubious Conclusion on School Quality”. After reading all of these articles I took time to read the study and you should too.

In reading the study it becomes clear that the journalists reporting on the study haven’t taken the time to evaluate the claims in light of the actual research. Simply, they haven’t taken the time to read the actual study “Charter, Private, Public Schools and Academic Achievement: New Evidence from the NAEP Mathematics Data”. Maybe they just read the conclusion section of the research. Well, you know what they say about jumping to conclusions…

If they had they would realize that educational research is not like medical or scientific research in that nothing is definitive. In fact the authors caution the readers on page 18 that “overall, due to the complexity of the issues involved, no single study can provide a definitive determination of the effectiveness of various forms of schooling.” Clearly journalists missed this caveat.

Next, the authors warn readers on page 38 that “the present analysis treats charter schools as monolithic when they are not.” Remember that charter schools that don’t cut the mustard will cease to exist—they are not one entity, but multiple.

If we get in to research design we find that the authors of the study double counted for income using socioeconomic status and “Home Resources” as variables. Finally, the authors of the study do not include the following variables “school discipline, teacher qualities, and even parent involvement”. Of course these variables have a profound effect on student achievement.

More troubling is the claim that the authors or unbiased. This claims appears in the Sun-Times article when co-author of the study Sarah Lubienski says, “I went to a private, conservative Christian school and had no preconceived bias on the issue. I just wanted to create an accurate, comprehensive picture.” I journalist would look at the study’s bibliography they may have noticed that the authors cite themselves 9 times, and that many of these articles challenge the privatization of public schools. How is that unbiased?

The most troubling finding of the study—the persistence of the black/white achievement gap has been the least reported. The study finds that “Black eighth graders scored an average of almost 20 points (roughly 2 grade levels) lower than White students within the same school who were identical on all other demographic measures suggests that the goals of ‘leaving no child behind,’ and monitoring and reducing the achievement gaps within schools, are critically important”(39). Now, that is a bombshell and few folk want to talk about that because race makes most folk uncomfortable. Don’t we owe it to the children in America to discuss this persistent achievement gap?

I know that in my previous job I fell under fire for merely presenting the data from the school report card that indicated an achievement gap. Evidently, everyone wanted to put blinders on and when confronted with the numbers they became hostile. Folks need to set their defenses aside and work toward closing the achievement gap by any means necessary—even the full scale dismantling of the careerist public school bureaucracies.

EMOs are the Future of the Chicago Public Schools

2006-02-02T14:12:00.000-06:00

Charlie and Isabelle have been listening to the Langley Elementary Schools Music Project’s Innocence and Despair. The recording is from the 1976-1977 school year and features Canadian elementary students singing pop songs from the 60’s and 70’s. Isabelle and Charlie love the version of Sweet Caroline. It is a reminder of the possibilities of arts education, and hey, the kids love it.

Anyway, on the education front I’ve been reading a lot about education management organizations (EMOs). EMOs are for profit companies that come in and oversee charter school operations. Of course the traditional education establishment—schools of education types—are against these entities. They argue that EMOs are another example of the corporatization of education that runs counter to democratic ideals…huh? A brief look at the history of education in this country makes it clear that corporate interests have always been at the heart of education. Check out John Taylor Gatto’s The Makers of Modern Schooling for some background. The problem is that the in your face approach of EMOs is perceived as threat to the triad of educationalists, careerist, and unionists. Clearly, the triad has mobilized out of self-preservation. Remember one of the major reasons our urban schools are in such disarray is because of this triad. In many respects this triad has created its own kingdom and made a ton of money too.

In Chicago, many teachers have ACT scores well below the state average. They come from third tier schools of education and are looking for teaching jobs that offer job security—classic careerist. Obviously they oppose merit pay, school choice, and accountability. Remember that the bulk of CPS administrators come from these ranks. Yes, and 100’s of them pull in six figure incomes. When six figure folk lose their jobs, they scramble and are picked up elsewhere in the board; therefore, despite the tough talk there is no real accountability at the board when it comes to its highest earners. This phenomenon is similar to the rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic. This happens because there is no real competition or oversight. For that reason alone we should all embrace EMOs. The system is not only failing the students it is failing the taxpayers too. Here’s a radical idea, Mayor Daley should take his own advice when it comes to throwing good money after bad and dismantle the bureaucracy that is CPS and replace it with an EMO at a fraction of the cost. Of course this would spell an immediate end to careerism at the board. Why not do it? Just maybe, they’d do a better more efficient job than the status quo. Six-sigma quality control may not work with students because kids aren’t widgets, but it could certainly work with teachers and administrators.

What about the union? Yeah, what about the union? EMOs are for profit and sustained profits are a sign that a company or school is doing things right and pleasing its customers. A profitable board of education would be in a good position to have "rainy day" funds to make needed school repairs. Profits also reflect better management and planning; in short a more efficient system. For teachers, profitability can also mean the opportunity to personally share in the success. For example, a New York-based EMO now offers its teachers stock options, an added benefit that traditional educational institutions and arrangements cannot provide. So what about the unions?

Policy Debate Charter School in Chicago?

2006-01-31T15:48:00.000-06:00

Today, I went to the park with Charlie. He spent the morning chasing ducks and is now off in dreamland. As for me, I just got of the phone with Chicago Public Radio. They are working on a piece about debate for the Chicago Matters Series. The conversation got me thinking about how urban debate was my most rewarding experience in urban education.

Ever heard about policy debate in Chicago? No? Then you are not alone. As an means to improve academic achievement, policy debate is underutilized in Chicago, and that is a travesty.

In terms of academic rigor, policy debate outpaces even the most demanding academic programs, and unlike International Baccalaureate programs and magnet schools, debate is open to students across the economic, geographic, and academic spectrum. Yet, debate isn’t really talked about at 125 South Clark (the Chicago Board of Education) as a means to improve academic achievement across the system. I have seen the power of policy debate to transform students into advocates and scholars. Check out the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues for more information about the power of debate.

Perhaps the folks down at 125 just don’t get it. They don’t see the spark in the eyes of students as they encounter the complex rhetoric, research, and philosophies that make up policy debate. They don’t see kids at schools with single digit academic achievement reading and coming to terms with philosophers like Foucault. Note: these are the kids who are increasing academic achievement at these schools because, for them the PSAE is important as a means to open college doors. No, the folks at 125 don’t see kids actively debating for 12 hours in a weekend. I’m talking 12 hours on point, at full focus. God, teachers would kill to see this kind of attention in their classes.

How’s this for an idea—a policy debate charter school? Think about it. The centerpiece of the school would be each year’s debate resolution. That means that the curriculum would actually change annually! No more teaching the same content over and over again. Of course kids would take all the core subjects, but the academic focus would be in preparing for policy debate tournaments. This type of charter school would garner national attention and it would be an easy sell in terms of partnering with any of a number of university debate programs in the immediate area.

A policy debate charter school would be a cutting edge place where students would learn the language of power and politics. Since debate teaches advocacy, what a better way to revitalize struggling neighborhoods than to teach children the tools that make the policy wheels in our nation work? A policy debate charter school would not only produce top notch policy debaters, but more importantly top notch college bound citizens. A policy debate charter school would be a radical departure from the status quo, even among charter schools. So, let’s give it a try. Why not? If you chase ducks in the park, you just may catch one.

How Standards and Test Prep Shrink the Curriculum

2006-01-29T20:27:00.000-06:00

The kids are feeling better and have played hard today, now they are sleeping. I've just come across a piece I originally wrote for an Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) monograph. It is fairly interesting, and, I think, fairly readable. Anyway, it provides a real look at the profound, and, for the most part, undocumented shrinking of the curriculum as a result of standards and accountability.

As a ten-year veteran of the Chicago Public Schools, I have observed the rise of the standards movement. My tenure in the Chicago Public Schools has been spent at one of the largest schools in the city. I have spent this time in the classroom as an English teacher and as an instructional coordinator responsible for professional development in reading, standards based instruction, and test preparation. It is my contention that the standards movement has destroyed rich multicultural curriculum possibilities. While writing this piece, I came across the following definition in the Oxford English Dictionary:

Standard: b. (Originally, standard of commerce.) A commodity, the value of which is treated as invariable, in order that it may serve as a measure of value for all other commodities. (1989)

From this definition it is clear that standards formalize knowledge, and therein endorse specific types of knowledge. This endorsement of specific forms of knowledge is problematic in its creation of an exclusionary hierarchy of knowledge that engenders numerous questions akin to whose standards, whose knowledge? However, it is important to note, that standards by definition curtail inquiry. After all, how can one argue with something that is “invariable”? All of this is troubling, but what is more insidious is how the standards are measured and the effect this has on the school curriculum and day-to-day instruction. What emerges is a triangle of standards, accountability, and test preparation that overpower school-based curriculum and instruction.

Standards are measured through standardized tests. In Illinois, for example, six- sevenths of the accountability mechanism is measured by tests designed by the ACT. These tests are retrofitted to meet the Illinois Learning Standards. Given the high stakes involved in these tests, it is no shock that schools have analyzed test items to clarify how the standards are measured. The logic is straightforward—if a teacher knows how a standard is assessed then they will figure out how to teach to that standard. However, when one examines how the standards are assessed it becomes evident that not all standards are assessed. Now, if standards are a subset of knowledge, and the assessed standards are a subset of that subset, then we have a rarified set of standards that are the only ones that count in the accountability game. If teachers teach to the test, and they do, then the curriculum shrinks, and with it the possibility of rich multicultural education.

In 2004, due to budget constraints, Illinois removed the social science test from its accountability mechanism, and with it many schools walked away from the social science curriculum in favor of test preparation. After all, here was a set of standards that were not being assessed at all by the state. Due, in part to the pressures of accountability, my school purchased a test preparation package from a major corporation. In implementing these materials my school decided to re-design English classes for the ACT English test, mathematics classes for the ACT Mathematics test, science classes for the ACT Science test, and social science classes for the ACT Reading test. The school then decided to use 2 days a week per class to implement the program. In essence, 40 percent of the curriculum has been displaced by test prep. In this system, teachers become delivery conduits for a one-size-fits-all test preparation curriculum. Worse yet, social science teachers forfeit their curriculum in favor of packaged reading skills review and test preparation. Given these circumstances, it is shocking that any young teachers stay in the field. The contracted company promised a “targeted approach” to test preparation that focuses on questions that when mastered will produce an average test score. Essentially, through targeted test preparation we have yet another subset of the standards. Clearly, the real “target” is the ever-vanishing curriculum, and with it any hope of expanding students’ understandings of the diverse world they inhabit.

The standards-accountability-test preparation triangle has vivisected curriculum and instruction. This technocratic Bermuda Triangle over limits students’ exposure to meaningful, diverse curriculums and, in essence, kills any and all forms of meaningful student inquiry, be it multicultural or otherwise. In keeping with the spirit of the Nation at risk document that gave rise to the standards movement, I posit that if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose this triangle on America, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

References
National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989 (ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner), Additions 1993-7 (ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner; Michael Proffitt), and 3rd ed. (in progress) Mar. 2000-(ed. John Simpson). OED Online. Oxford University Press. http:// dictionary.oed.com

The Potential for Disruptive Change in CPS

2006-01-25T13:23:00.000-06:00

Charlie is taking another nap. We went to Stuff and Gym at the YMCA. I had a discussion with a mom who was marveling at the amount of stay at home parents with advanced degrees. Anyway, Charlie and I returned home had some lunch and, yes another nap. This gave me time to read a great article and take a wonderful quiz on disruptive innovation.

The article “Change or Die” by Micahel J. Petrilli is on the NRO website. Petrilli, vice president of national programs and policy at the Fordham Foundation, examines the promise of vouchers and charter schools as a reform mechanism for large urban bureaucracies. He finds that they are for the most part ineffective in this reform effort. He asks “What if some bureaucracies are so brain-dead, so dysfunctional, so entwined in special interests that they simply cannot respond to competition?”

Instead of reform Petrilli appears to endorse the radical overthrow of the current educational bureaucracies that rule urban areas. He acknowledges that this will take time, but that if students learn better in charter schools or under voucher systems then it is only time before the bureaucracies go belly up. Finally someone, albeit a conservative, who gets it.

One thing that bureaucracies excel at is preservation of the status quo. What happens if the bureaucracy attempts to co-opt the movement? Recently I attended a Teach for America alumni meeting at Harris Bank in Chicago. Although not a TFA alumnus, I went with a friend who put me on the guest list. CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan spoke at this networking event. Ringing the room were a series of tables where charter schools had set up shop to recruit alumni. Duncan praised the efforts of Teach for America and endorsed their participation in Renaissance 2010—the education initiative to open up 100 new small schools throughout Chicago. Coincidently, the CPS Renaissance 2010 Office is run by TFA alumni. Duncan called TFA essential to the future of CPS. He spoke briefly about the need for Renaissance 2010. He was speaking to the choir. I found it interesting that the head of the third largest district in the country recognizes that the system as it exists is broken and bloated.

It is a matter of time before the small schools replace the behemoths down the block. Vishnu is both destroyer and creator. Vishnuic reform would imply the dismantling of the bureaucracy before a new system could replace it. This is the problem with urban school districts---they want both the spirit of the charter school movement and the job security/inertia/shuffle the chairs on the Titanic mentality of preserving the status quo.

If 1,000 teachers lose their jobs in CPS they should go out and form charter schools! Simply, they owe nothing to a system that has in some cases nailed them twice—don’t forget the 1,000 teachers who were cut last year. And of course the real irony is that the lousy teacher down the hall with 20 years experience kept his job while the go-getter third year, finally hitting my stride, teacher lost hers. But for those teachers to reinvest in a system that is broken, bloated, and impersonal is insane. Go, form a charter. Of course, the poorer teachers will balk at this because they view CPS as an employment agency. The better teachers will welcome the challenge and be able to see the fruits of their labors at work in small charter schools.

Just for fun I took a Disruptive Innovation Quiz to see if CPS was ripe for disruptive innovation. It is. According to Professor Clayton Christensen at Harvard, disruptive innovations either “create new markets or reshape existing markets by delivering relatively simple, convenient, low cost innovations to a set of customers who are ignored by industry leaders.” Sounds good to me; Vishnu, your day is coming.

IRONY Rules!

2006-01-25T09:40:00.000-06:00

IRONY

After reading Foucault's Fearless Speech, Charlie deserves a nap.

Mayor Daley is out praising charter schools and lauding the efforts of the private sector to finance them at the same time CPS is $325 million short. Aldermen in Chicago are talking about how excited families are when their kids get into the charter schools. Wait, as opposed to going to the crumbling monolith down the block? Is this an admission that Chicago Public Schools aren’t doing as well as has been touted? What about those schools? Are we moving toward the Vishnu Reform Plan? High school scores in math and science are down. Reading scores are up. What gives? What about turnaround specialists? We need Big Audacious Goals for the system. Like trimming the fat.

Anyway, turns out that the private funding for Ren 2010, about $40 million, isn’t all that much when compared to the $325 million gap in the CPS budget. Does anyone really think there are grounds for comparison here?

Did you know?

Acording to Pauline Lipman, CPS has the largest operating budget of any public works in Illinois. All of those contracts…

In response to CPS budge woes, union boss Stewart says that ‘teachers are sacred,” is she kidding? Over 1,000 teachers were cut last year. What did the union do then? Not a whole lot except sponsor resume writing sessions. Remember it was the union that bailed out CPS back in the day to the tune of $110 million dollars from the teacher pension fund in 1993.

This just in:

According to the Sun Times CPS is poised to go ahead with the Chicago Virtual Academy:

"Students will have 300 minutes a day of instruction. It's not an issue anymore. We have determined that there is a way to verify attendance," said CPS spokesman Maylon Edwards.
The Chicago Virtual Academy would serve students in kindergarten through eighth grade. They would receive a computer on loan, free Internet access and about 70 pounds of books and supplies to take online courses.
According to the proposal, students will range "from the academically challenged to the academically gifted, including difficult to reach populations such as expelled and homebound students. . . Parents or other responsible adults will guide students through their daily coursework in their own home or other small group setting."

Did you know?

Chicago Virtual Academy will be run by K12 Inc which was founded by William Bennett in 1999. This is the same Bennett who decried CPS as the worst school system in the country back in the 1980’s. How’s that for irony? (Bennett resigned from K12 Inc. following remarks he made about abortion, African Americans and crime rate on his radio show.)

That aside, having elementary kids stay at home with the expectation that they complete 300 minutes of instruction per day is a compelling, almost utopian idea. Exactly what parents are we talking about? Is this targeted to the traditional home school set or are we talking about virtual school for other groups as well? How do we prove that the parents or “responsible adults” are “highly qualified”? How about discipline issues? Substitute teachers? Surprise, the union is… against…the proposal.

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores

2006-01-24T13:00:00.001-06:00

Charlie is napping so I have had some time to think about the things I used to do to raise test scores. Test scores are not about play, so let's put down the crayons and get down to business. In my former incarnation I worked on improving student test scores on the PSAE. Over the years those scores increased, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. If your school needs an edge—a few points here or there—then this will serve as a good quick and dirty guide. Remember that this is about raising test scores and only that. It does not reflect my belief in education. It is simply a means to an end. As for test prep, I have very specific ideas on that but they are outside the scope of this piece.

1) Do not invest in a test prep program with the idea that it will “fix” the problem. In Illinois, the ACT is administered to juniors statewide. It is a demanding, text heavy test. Students need to be able to read demanding passages and decode difficult questions in order to be successful. Test prep programs assume that the students can read these passages with a degree of fluency that is simply not the case in many schools. Don’t assume that a test prep program will do this. Most programs will tout that they can raise the bottom quartile, but the real movement under state accountability is from the second to third quartile—or roughly the difference between a 16 and an 18 on the ACT. Remember at the end of the day, test prep companies do not face NCLB sanctions, the school does.

2) Take an initial practice tests early and a second practice test after explicitly teaching students how to take the test, and hold them to the strategies that you are pushing. Go on a special schedule that mirrors testing conditions for both exams. You can purchase practice ACT exams from…the ACT. Score them and report the scores to students and faculty. Invest some time in item analysis, but not too much. Some companies provide these services. If I were to take anything from a test prep company it would be their score reports; as for their intervention strategies, no way.

3) Have kids paraphrase question stems that appear in practice tests and classroom assignments. It is amazing how many kids are unfamiliar with what the questions are asking. Like one teacher pointed out, "If they don't know what the question is asking, how can they possibly know the answer?"

4) There are numerous ways to administer the PSAE. It may be a shock, but why not use data driven decision making here? Why not group students according to score ranges on the practice test? For example, you could group students according to a cut score of 16. Goup studnets who score below 16 together and students who score 16 and above together. Adjust these cut scores according to your situation. Don’t tell students that you are doing this. The easiest way to get around this is to group the under 16’s by division for testing. Those that score 16 and above are pulled out. The benefit and justification is that all students area being provided a smaller testing environment in which to do their best. Note, students who score higher on the ACT tend to try harder on the test and take the whole thing a lot more serious then those who do not.

5) Many schools provide students with show up prizes on testing days--BIG MISTAKE. Instead of having “show up” prizes have all incentives tied to a measurable attitude and behavior rubric. I had proctors score each student that was testing according to such a rubric and attached a cut score to be eligible for prizes. Of course, this rubric was shared with all students and faculty prior to testing. Yes, there was a strong correlation between high rubric scores and high test scores on the PSAE. The beauty of it is that any student who took the test seriously was rewarded for their efforts. High scoring students on the ACT were also rewarded with still more special incentives.

6) If your school is struggling with the PSAE then a schoolwide focus on vocabulary pulled from the academic word list, and nonfiction EPAS aligned reading assessments both weekly and quarterly may be necessary. These programs should be continuous from 9th grade through 12th grade. I found that the longer students worked these programs the better their test scores. Nonfiction readings should be selected by the content area teachers and they should both relate to what is being studied in the class and be of an appropriate length and complexity. I suggest looking to the Explore, PLAN, and ACT to guide the length and complexity of readings for 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students accordingly. These programs require buy in and monitoring, but in the long run they can improve student achievement.

7) Always keep the students and teachers in the loop regarding the testing plan. Small group forums work best for this. In my experience when more than 60 kids were present for a presentation it was a waste of time. The same goes for teachers—the smaller the group the more profound the impact.

8) Always stay on point—if your goal is to increase test scores then don’t let anything detract from that—this includes initiating or implementing school policies that distract the faculty or students from the goal. A good rule of thumb is to keep everything stable except for the test push.

FYI

In the meantime, take a look at my test prep posts. They are free, and they have worked with city kids. If you have any questions drop me a comment. All comments are posted to my email first. I will never post any email addresses in the comment section. So if you want to contact me, drop me your email and I’ll get back with you. It is my hope that my expertise in this field will help someone out there. Let me know.

Posts Concerning Test Prep

Quick and Dirty Guide to Raising PSAE Scores
PSAE Test Prep Strategies that Work
ACT Reading Prep and the Two-Point Conversion
Maximizing Brain Power on the ACT Reading Test
Realizing Focused Active Reading During the ACT

High Stakes Budget Cuts in CPS

2006-01-23T13:46:00.000-06:00

Charlie just went down for his nap and I just read an article that will make CPS teachers freak out. According to the article in Crain's Chicago Business, CPS can't remotely balance the budget and will have to cut about 1,000 jobs along with pension woes for teachers. Last year over 1,000 teachers were let go because of budgetary constraints, so what is new? The pension and increased class size, that’s what and the union is irate. All of this makes for an interesting fight in the media, but as a friend of mine points out, taxes in Chicago have increased, property values have increased, development is up and enrollment is down, so where is the new revenue going? Good question, but there is a deeper question, who wins when education, globalization and neoliberalism come together? Better yet, how does this effect teachers and students?

CPS teachers should turn to Pauline Lipman’s book, High Stakes Education for a unique, informed perspective on their schools. Lipman, a professor at DePaul University, validates even most paranoid teacher’s fears. She details the efforts of the Chicago Commercial Club, the Mayor’s office, and CPS Officials to gentrify the city and attract corporate finance at the expense of the poor.

The heavy hands of globalization, neoliberalism, and simple framing are all here. I was transfixed. Is it all so bizarre though? Not too long ago the CPS website contained the phrase “people of means will choose our schools”. If that is not in your face neoliberalism, what is?

I had a professor who when asked about NCLB would reply, “the con is on.” Well, CPS reform efforts were praised by Clinton and used by Bush to inform his NCLB agenda. Reading Lipman it is clear that the con rolls on. Of course kids and teachers suffer because the focus is test scores and not education. Anxiety fuels fear and fear fuels the appropriation of discretionary funds to test prep programs that are all hat and no cattle.

The underlying belief is that the public and policy makers do not trust teachers to do the right thing in the classroom. From this viewpoint teachers, particularly those at “less academically rigorous” schools too often pad their lessons with fluff activities when given autonomy. The blame here is off. It needs to fall on the heads of the administrators of those buildings who do not create academically rich cultures and supervise those environments.

This book provides a critical lens for understanding what is happening to teachers, administrators, and children in Chicago. Although written for academics, this book is prime reading material for a broader audience. Like all critiques, I’m left with wondering what the alternative to the status quo is. Once, in graduate school I suggested the Vishnu policy of education—one in which the current system is torn down and a new one is built in its place. Perhaps it is time…

Other books that teachers and administrators should look into reading are Foucault’s Fearless Speech, Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and Hernstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve. I’ll write about these books in the weeks to come.

Stossel gets Stupid with America

2006-01-19T13:53:00.000-06:00

Last Friday after watching the Princess Bride with my daughter my wife and I caught the 2020 Report “Stupid in America” by John Stossel. In a time that calls for a measured sober discussion of the future of education in America, Stossel and company opt for a sensational critique of American public schools. Oh, and they get the thesis wrong—it is not American schools that are the problem; it is that most American schools are too large to meet the educational needs of their students. Oh, and they miss the boat on special education funding. Oh, and…

As with most mainstream media reporting these days, Stossel sounds very corporate. His ideas are those of the business community. For example, Stossel adopts the competition is good mantra for schooling. Of course this assumes that we have equity of access for the lowest performing/poorest students. Otherwise a free market approach to education will further widen the achievement gap. However, we get no discussion about access. We are led to believe that all kids do or will apply to charter schools. Not true, charter school applicants reflect a subset of the population in a given attendance area because these students “opt into” the lottery system. More apathetic parents (bad parents) do not take advantage of these school choice options and dump their kids in the general public schools.

Nevertheless I found the discussion on spending interesting, but not without its flaws. Reducing spending to per-pupil comparison is contrived. I get this per-pupil rhetoric all the time from the Catholic school my daughter attends—“We do a better job with less per-pupil expenditure”. Okay, great, but Catholic schools don’t have to take special need children. Special needs children can cost in excess of $50,000 a year to educate. Of course, these “special” expenditures are folded in to the per-pupil statistics—skewing them. Not a word was spent on this in the Stossel report.

Next, the data on charter schools is somewhat muddy; therefore, any absolute claim is just silly. Let’s be clear, I’m a supporter of charter schools in America, but the data is not definitive, yet. Come on!

Finally, what gives with the Sylvan Learning product placement and endorsement in the middle of the program? I’m referring to the part where “20/20″ sent Dorian to Sylvan, to see if teachers there could teach Dorian to read when the South Carolina public schools failed to. At Sylvan Dorian used computers and workbooks, and he reading went up two grade levels — after just 72 hours of instruction. Please note that 72 hours is the equivalent of 14 weeks of an hour a day class. And please note, that Dorian and those that attend Sylvan Learning Center want to be there. If Sylvan were available to all it would be no surprise that a subset of the population would shrug its shoulders and continue in mediocrity.

Of course his mother, Gena Cain, is thrilled with Dorian’s progress but disappointed with his public schools. “With Sylvan, it’s a huge improvement. And they’re doing what they’re supposed to do. They’re on point. But I can’t say the same for the public schools,” she said. But are they “on point” enough to have Dorian take the test that the kids in New Jersey and Belgium took?

Stossel and company make a case, but it is not as strong as it needs to be. Instead of attacking American education in general, they should have focused on the failure of large schools to maximize academic achievement, instead of opting for sensational programming. Sadly, the future of American Education cannot be reduced to an advertisement for neoliberalist values.

By the way, I believe that the public school system as we know it needs to be dismantled and re-imagined to meet the acceleration of information technology. Simplistic and sensational programs on what’s wrong in Public Schools collapse on their own specious claims. However, from what I’ve read online about this report it appears that Stossel and company are right about one thing, many of the posts represent the “Stupid in America”.

A final note, someone should make a documentary comparing the state of the bathrooms that our students use and the test scores they produce. A news piece like that might facilitate real debate and I’m sure would make riveting television.

Education, NCLB, and Nap Time

2006-01-13T11:17:00.000-06:00

I have a five year old and a two year old. My oldest is in kindergarten, my youngest at home. I am a stay at home dad. We keep busy: doing the arts, sports, reading, all the good stuff. I take my little guy, Charlie, for coffee and bookstore runs. Like his dad, he enjoys these things. He chatters on about coffee and books--not bad for a two year old.

Yet I worry about my kids. I worry about school, as an English teacher by trade and a curriculum and instruction guy, I hate to say that my anxiety is all too well informed.Since the advent of the school reform era, the school curriculum has been hijacked by the government-testing-industrial complex. It's all about the numbers baby, because the numbers show up all over the place and are interpreted by folk who have no clue. The uninformed make decision based on numbers all the time. The numbers aren't necessarily fuzzy, but the interpretation of them is up for grabs. For example, what constitutes a good school? I've asked a bunch of people this over the years and there is little consensus.

A buddy of mine--a stats and evaluation guy--argues that NCLB will implode because its targets are unattainable. Let's hope. In the meantime, teaching and learning in public schools have homed in on a discrete set of standards--those that are tested, and ignored the rest. Why? Because the fear of failure is palpable. Nervous laughter and jaded cynicism are just as bad as neophetic optimism when it comes to standardized testing.

Let's be clear, NCLB fulfills one neoliberalist goal--comparison. In the global economy comparison is essential to the open market. When did our children become data to be compared in the open market? Don't believe me, check out the The Interactive Illinois Report Card that allows anyone, anywhere to do just that. Most disturbing is the tab labeled student data that allows those with passwords to examine data by student. I don't care how secure it claims to be a talented hacker could have a field day. Well my little data packet to be is getting up from his nap so it's time to go change a diaper, get some coffee, and let my thoughts percolate.