Education

Research: Covering Less Means Learning More

by Clay Burell

category: Curricula And Methods

Published March 16, 2009 @ 02:00PM PT

A few weeks ago, I posted on the old "Depth v. Breadth" question, and entertained the possibility that teachers who covered less material in favor of depth in what they do cover would paradoxically see their students score higher on standardized tests that tested for...breadth.

Jay Matthews at the Washington Post reported on some research that supports that theory:

[A] surprising study — certain to be a hot topic in teacher lounges and education schools — is providing new data that suggest educators should spend much more time on a few issues and let some topics slide. Based on a sample of 8,310 undergraduates, the national study says that students who spend at least a month on just one topic in a high school science course get better grades in a freshman college course in that subject than students whose high school courses were more balanced.

The study, appearing in the July issue of the journal Science Education, is “Depth Versus Breadth: How Content Coverage in High School Science Courses Relates to Later Success in College Science Coursework.”

{snip}

The study weighs in on one side of a contentious issue that will be getting national attention this September when the College Board’s Advanced Placement program unveils its major overhaul of its college-level science exams for high school students. AP is following a direction taken by its smaller counterpart, the International Baccalaureate program. IB teachers already are allowed to focus on topics of their choice. Their students can deal with just a few topics on exams, because they have a wide choice of questions. AP’s exact approach is not clear yet, but College Board officials said they too will embrace depth. They have been getting much praise for this from the National Science Foundation, which funded the new study.

He also touches on another study that supports another of my pet peeves: teaching with textbooks. (I slammed the poisonous effects of history textbooks recently here.) To wit:

Sadler and Tai have previously hinted at where this was going. In 2001 they reported that students who did not use a textbook in high school physics—an indication that their teachers disdained hitting every topic — achieved higher college grades than those who used a textbook.

Just FYI. I love the non-schooliness of these findings. Teach slowly enough for students to have time to go deep and learn, and do it whenever possible without the textbook. Yes, yes, yes.

And if that means the AP program is considering putting its bloated textbooks on a diet instead of force-feeding them ever more information, I'll drink to that.

Image by Jef Harris

A David Sedaris Webcam Book-talk

by Clay Burell

category: Education And Technology

Published March 16, 2009 @ 06:57AM PT

[This is a teaching experiment I did a couple of summers ago and can't recommend highly enough. Though Flixn is now a thing of the past, YouTube will work just fine for students with webcams. Be sure to check out the bonus YouTube of Sedaris reading one of his works on David Letterman below the fold!]

I just finished reading and responding to the first summer reading assignment for next fall's AP Literature class. It was just a warm-up, asking them to read David Sedaris' "Us and Them" from the Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* collection of memoirs. If you haven't read this story, I can't recommend it highly enough, from an English teacher's perspective. Of all the Sedaris stories I've read -- and I've read most of them -- this one qualifies Sedaris to me as a "literary" writer, in the highbrow sense of the word. Beneath the vulgar surface of low humor are quite a dazzling number of literary tricks and trap doors, all there for the discerning reader to enjoy alongside the jokes about turds and other crowd-pleasers.

I like assigning this story as a first class reading especially because it's a litmus test that separates the skilled from the less-skilled readers. Sedaris writes with a double point of view -- himself as an adult writer remembering an experience of himself as an eight-year-old. The child's point of view dominates the narration, which concerns a family ostracized by its community because this family (the Tomkeys) "doesn't believe in television." The child narrator reflects the TV-worshiping pathology of the "normal" community, and tells the readers how "puny," "stupid," and undesirable the Tomkeys are with a wide array of damning words. And the less-skilled readers fall for one of the best tricks in the "literary " authors bag: the unreliable narrator.

You can count on more than half of most classes blindly parroting the third-grader's opinion of the Tomkeys. Uncritical readers, they swallow whatever whatever moral judgments they hear from the narrator--even if he's an eight-year-old. The power of the printed word to kill thought: "It's true because the book says it's true." A scary irony there, how books can as often close our eyes as open them.

The skilled readers, though, don't fall for the unreliable narrator trick. They notice more than what is "told" in the story; they notice what Sedaris, the adult author, shows. And the images he shows of the Tomkey family, contrary to the herd-like judgments bleated by the vindictive and petty-minded "normal" community, are all too admirable. The Tomkeys are actually the healthiest and wisest family in the neighborhood, ostracism and all. It's the couch-potato, consumerism-drugged "normal" community that's sick.

(click "Read more" below for the rest, including a great student analysis of the story on her webcam, and YouTube of Sedaris reading one of his pieces on David Letterman ;-)

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Ode to Rationality (video)

by Clay Burell

category: Controversial Materials

Published March 15, 2009 @ 05:08PM PT

One for the science teachers, poetry teachers, preachers, and beatniks - and all the confused science-bashers commenting on last month's anti-creationism post.

Give the poet in this 2008 London performance about 3 minutes to reach his groove, and then I hope you'll enjoy the rest of the 9-minute ride as much as I did. There are a few adult words in there, but they're only harmlessly taboo vowel-consonant combinations.  No ears, heads, nor souls will burst into flames from them.

The ending is beautiful and full of grace, without leaving reality for a second.

h/t to Decrepit Old Fool, SEB, and The Meming of Life.

What Makes a Good Teacher Preparation Program?

by Clay Burell

category: Great Teachers

Published March 15, 2009 @ 06:10AM PT

I'm enjoying the pooling of insights and discussions in the threads to the posts on unions and teacher evaluations.

Since another target in the cross-hairs of the reformers radical edupreneurs is education schools, I'm curious to hear everybody's thoughts on whether and to what extent they deserve criticism.

Again, I'll offer the following from my own experience as a conversation-starter, but by no means finisher:

I came into teaching late. My undergraduate degree was not in education, but in the Humanities - heavy loads of literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and social sciences.

I was amazed to discover that many teachers major in education instead of their content area (math, science, literature, history, etc) during their undergrad years. I don't think that's a good thing, at least on the secondary level. While an ed bachelor's might impart knowledge valuable for teaching - instruction and assessment, syllabus and curriculum design, classroom management, child development, teaching non-native English speakers or students with special needs, multi-cultural sensitivity and so forth - none of these things should replace, in my view, deep and broad content knowledge.

I got my secondary certification taking graduate courses in the above subjects over two summers. The courses were valuable overall, and did inform my practice somewhat, but I can't say they struck me as enough. And I had a standard by which to make that judgment, too - because three years before taking these courses, I went through an ESL teacher certification course in Portugal.

(click "Read more" below for the rest....)

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Tales from a New Orleans Moneybags Academy

by Taylor Scott

category: Education Reform

Published March 14, 2009 @ 11:51AM PT

[Taylor Scott isn't her real name, but she is a real teacher in the really troubled schools of New Orleans.]

Our little academy is funded by a foundation we'll call Moneybags. Moneybags has given the school district tons of money to implement a program developed by a different foundation we'll call Bag of Tricks. Moneybags paid beaucoup dollars to the school district for the program we're supposed to be using, supplied to us by Bag of Tricks.

Some of the features this program is supposed to include are symposium-type interdisciplinary classes such as the Geo-Lit class my teaching partner and I are teaching, 1:1 technology implementation, and project-based learning. All of which I'm in full support of as concepts, and all of which I was very excited about when I took this job.

Trouble is, the school district hasn't supported the academy's needs for implementing the program successfully. The list of things needed but not supplied by the district for this program is long, and maybe I'll bore you with that another time.

Reasons for this lack of support are myriad and complex, I'm sure. I can't even remotely figure out the tangled issues at the district office. I would just be thrilled if I could get the forms I need from them so I can get health insurance.

One clue to the mysterious workings of the district office is this: they do keep humanoid beings there. I know this because a woman showed up the week before Mardi Gras, called a meeting with the academy teachers, and began issuing orders without even introducing herself. Despite her lack of typical human manners, other teachers confirm to me that she is, in fact, a human being from the district office.

The orders this human issued were interspersed with statements about how she didn't even know the district had an academy such as this one, or what the requirements are for making it work.

(click "read more" below for the rest....)

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The "Twilight" of Serious Teen Reading?

by Tom Panarese

category: Literacy

Published March 13, 2009 @ 03:00PM PT

[Guest-blogger Tom Panarese is currently in his fourth year as an English and journalism teacher and yearbook adviser in Virginia. Prior to a career in education, Tom worked in marketing as a proposal writer for a a variety of companies in technology, telecommunications, and law. Tom's essays have been published in print and on Education Week. He blogs at the often gut-bustingly funny The Uninspired Teacher.]

In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wonders aloud what has become of the radical youth because college students of today, instead of reading seminal counterculture works by Jack Kerouac, Abbie Hoffman, and Anais Nin,  are reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series.  Apparently, the idea that the younger generation rebel against the older generation, rise up and challenge the status quo was smothered to death in a cul-de-sac somewhere in the last 30 years ("On Campus, Vampires are Besting the Beats"):

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans -- those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents' dismay?

He goes on to lament that college campuses don't seem to be what they were 40 years ago when his generation was stirring up trouble in protest for equal rights or against the Vietnam War (in fact, he mentions that a tour guide at Kent State University doesn't mention the infamously fatal 1970 riot on his tour), and that the average college student has become more conservative in some ways, but simply less active in others.  Even though he does admit that they way today's youth participates in politics isn't the same way their parents or grandparents did, he doesn't seem to approve:

"As young people shift toward the Internet and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be 'Don't trust anyone over 140 characters.' What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that's so uncool. For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot to offer, it's time to start chanting, 'Hell, no! We won't go!'"

I've read this article three times now, plus what people have written in the Post's comments sections (well, except for those beating the "liberals are destroying learning ... all college is radical ... teachers are communists ... and what do we do with witches?  BURN THEM!" drum, which ... *yawn*.  Wake me up when you come off it) and I'm still vascillating between two thoughts:  yes, we're all doomed, because sometimes I'm amazed that my students read at all; and no, you're just another whining boomer that I had to hear from when I was in high school in the '90s and you people were calling everyone between 15-30 a "slacker."  While I honestly admit that I've never read On the Road, I took enough writing classes in college to be around people who had read both Kerouac and Plath -- and discontent coming from a kid at a private Catholic college whose biggest problem is telling mom and dad that he ran up the Visa buying clothes from J. Crew doesn't exactly come off as genuine. (And most of the Plath lovers seemed to have already preheated the ovens in their dorms.)

(click "Read more" below....)

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Web Roundup: Charter Research, Incentive Pay, Edu-Santellis, and Obama's C- Ed-Speech

by Clay Burell

category: Education Politics

Published March 13, 2009 @ 01:05PM PT

For all the well-funded hype and hoopla about charters being the answer, a couple of pieces of research to put a pin in that balloon:

• Philadelphia Charters No Better Than Non-Charters
• Chicago Charters, Traditional Schools About the Same

Obama supports lifting caps on charters, as long as they're better-regulated. By George, he'd better be serious about that, as this charter charlatan in California demonstrates:The School Guru Who Promised Rescue and Brought Ruin

Chicago's Michael Klonsky reports some inconvenient truths about Arne Duncan's much-hyped Renaissance 2010 program.

Pay students to make better grades? The NYTimes recaps decades of research showing this is an old idea for a good reason, though we seem to have forgotten this history: Rewards for Students Under a Microscope - NYTimes.com

More pay will make better teachers? Alfie Kohn gives this a skeptical once-over in The Folly of Merit Pay.

Really? Certified teachers are no better than Ivy League wonders fresh out of college? New research suggests otherwise: Certified teachers+modern instruction=better public-school math scores

For-profit schools run by business executives are the way to go? Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect gives us an in-depth case study of the travesty of Edison Schools in Business School.

Gerald Bracey at HuffPo gives Obama's education address low marks in On Education, Obama Blows It .

The Testocrats and "no excuses" camp got a lot of mileage out of their "soft bigotry of low expectations" slogan. Rethinking Schools addresses that camp's studiously-ignored elephant in the classroom in the nicely-riffed Hunger, Academic Success, and the Hard Bigotry of Indifference.

Image by williac on Flickr.