Anonymous weighs in

Here's a weird thought to ponder: across the land, future teachers are being taught that direct instruction is bad, that they should be the guide on the side, that the discover method is the best way to educate...but exactly HOW are they being taught this? Does a guide on the side help them to discover the enduring understanding that this is the best way to teach? I bet not. I bet they are being directly instructed not to directly instruct. Hmm...

The reason this came to mind is that I was remembering a curriculum writing workshop in which I was instructed (and it felt direct to me) that if a question has a single correct answer then it is not an essential question.

What has happened is that the understanding-by-design crowd has claimed the term "essential question" as their own special buzzword. I guess the common core crowd is using it too.

Doug Lemov has a new book out

Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better

For several years now, when I think of the public schools, the first issue that springs to mind is the stark absence of any mention or consideration of the need for practice. In the 14 years we've had kids in our local schools, I don't believe I've ever heard an administrator use the word 'practice' in any context other than 'football practice' or 'basketball practice,' etc.

When the subject is academics, the word is always 'understand.' Students will 'understand.' Not practice.

That's a problem because although class time is all about understanding, the tests are about remembering: students are tested on what they know. Which means students have to practice the content taught in the classes, but the school doesn't worry about providing effective practice. Teachers give homework, but no one collects or corrects the homework, and no one asks whether the homework actually works. Does the assigned homework increase knowledge? Nobody knows, and nobody asks. Practice is not a topic of conversation. At least not within my hearing.

Naturally under this system (Teach, test, and hope for the best), parents end up hiring a lot of tutors --- but tutors can't really provide effective practice regimens, either. (Even if a tutor would like to provide a practice regimen, parents don't need a whole new set of homework-from-thetutor to deal with.)

So the core requirement of all learning -- practice -- is left to the kids.

Let's just hope they're following the literature.

Is this true?

Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students.
Why School Should Focus on Engagement Instead of Lectures by Salman Khan

I'm trying to think how long I talk at a stretch, with no word from my students.

Five minutes? (For passersby, I teach freshman composition in the context of an English class.)

I'll have to time myself.

It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that "millions of students" are spending entire school days listening to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day.

In fact, it strikes me as being at least somewhat unlikely you could force millions of students to listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day even if you tried. But I could be wrong.

My impression (and again, I don't know) is that the only teachers using straight lecture as their predominant or exclusive method of conveying knowledge to students are college professors teaching lecture courses. And lecture courses in my experience typically have "recitation" or "discussion" sections where the content of the lecture is elaborated and questions answered.

Plus college students take four courses, or thereabouts, each of which meets typically 2 to 3 times a week, so college students aren't spending 6 hours a day listening to lecture even when they're taking 4 lecture courses.

Besides which, I object to the blanket assumption that lecture is somehow an intrinsically bad form. The lecture is a time-honored, efficient, and often inspiring means of organizing and communicating material from an expert to a novice -- or from an expert to a colleague.....

And with that, I see I've veered off-topic.

A school would play heck getting me to pay attention to 6 hours of lecture a day, that's for sure. I don't have the focus.

Good thing no school I attended ever tried it.

Back to K-12. My intended topic is not to ask: Do students listen to lecture? I'm sure they do.

My intended topic is to ask: Do students in K-12 spend 6 hours a day moving in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50-to 90-minute lectures?

(And, if they do, my follow-up question is: how is that possible?)

People seem to think "explicit instruction" means lecture, which is not remotely the case.

See, e.g.:
Barak Rosenshine, Five Meanings of Direct Instruction and Principles of Instruction; and Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion.

Not only does "explicit instruction" not mean "lecture," it means almost the opposite. I recall watching a professional development video on direct instruction a few years back (no longer available online, it appears) in which the presenter gave teachers an explicit figure for the number of questions they were advised to ask per each 20 minute segment of class time.

It was a lot.

[pause]

OK, here we go. The Use of Questions in Teaching, 1970:

Certainly teachers ask many questions during an average school day. A half-century ago, Stevens (1912) estimated that four-fifths of school time was occupied with question-and-answer recitations. Stevens found that a sample of high-school teachers asked a mean number of 395 questions per day. High frequencies of question use by teachers were also found in recent investigations: 10 primary-grade teachers asked an average of 348 questions each during a school day (Floyd, 1960); 12 elementary-school teachers asked an average of 180 questions each in a science lesson (Moyer, 1965); and 14 fifth-grade teachers asked an average of 64 questions each in a 30-minute social studies lesson (Schreiber, 1967). Furthermore, students are exposed to many questions in their textbooks and on examinations. [emphasis added] 

This is what everyone on the planet (our current planet, I mean) seems to have forgotten: old-time teaching wasn't about teachers standing on a stage delivering a lecture for 50 or 90 minutes.

How could it have been?

How would that work in a one-room schoolhouse?

Old-time teaching, as far as I can tell, was highly interactive and fundamentally social. Probably most effective teaching is fundamentally social; at least, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it is.

And that's the problem with trying to learn math from a math video. It's lonely!

I'm pretty sure that reforms whose purpose is to topple straw men are the wrong reforms.

Is Handwriting Causally Related to Learning to Write?

The contribution of handwriting to learning to write was examined in an experimental training study involving beginning writers with and without an identified disability. First-grade children experiencing handwriting and writing difficulties participated in 27 fifteen-min sessions designed to improve the accuracy and fluency of their handwriting. In comparison to their peers in a contact control condition receiving instruction in phonological awareness, students in the handwriting condition made greater gains in handwriting as well as compositional fluency immediately following instruction and 6 months later, The effects of instruction were similar for students with and without an identified disability. These findings indicate that handwriting is causally related to writing and that explicit and supplemental handwriting instruction is an important element in preventing writing difficulties in the primary grades.

Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers.
Graham, Steve; Harris, Karen R.; Fink, Barbara
Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 92(4), Dec 2000, 620-633

dysteachia, part 2

A popular textbook on special education (Rosenberg, et. al, 2008), notes that up to 50% of students with learning disabilities have been shown to overcome their learning difficulties when given explicit instruction.
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity Barry Garelick

So the sequence is:

a. Collaborative group inquiry with spiraling
b. Huge increase in children diagnosed w/learning disabilities
c. Provision of explicit instruction (w/o spiraling?) to children diagnosed w/learning disabilities
d. Followed by 50% of learning disabilities resolving

Back on my home planet, we didn't bother with Steps A, B, and D.

teach the sentence

Close on the heels of Katharine's post about reform writing and Debbie's on the lost art of sentence diagramming, I came across this study mentioned on Language Log:

Research into grammar by academics at Northumbria University suggests that a significant proportion of native English speakers are unable to understand some basic sentences.

[snip]

The project assumed that every adult native speaker of English would be able to understand the meaning of the sentence:

"The soldier was hit by the sailor."

Dr Dabrowska and research student James Street then tested a range of adults, some of whom were postgraduate students, and others who had left school at the age of 16. All participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier "every."

As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

Dr Dabrowska comments: "These findings are ground breaking, because for decades the theoretical and educational consensus has been solid. Regardless of educational attainment or dialect we are all supposed to be equally good at grammar, in the sense of being able to use grammatical cues to understand the meaning of sentences.

[snip]

The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar. The theory assumes that all children learn language equally well and that there must therefore be an underlying common structure to all languages that is somehow "hard-wired" into the brain.

Dr Dabrowska has examined other explanations for her findings, such as limitations to working memory, and even so-called "test wiseness," but she concluded that these non-linguistic factors are irrelevant.

She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence. Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.

Many English Speakers Cannot Understand Basic Grammar
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2010)

Turns out grammar needs to be taught.

missing knowledge

Barak Rosenshine on teacher effectiveness research:

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

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

Return of the repressed.

Op-Ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on autistic spectrum students and Reform Math

Here!

For all the talking points that Reform Math proponents deploy in response to the general criticisms, I haven't yet seen any talking points that respond to concerns about children on the autistic spectrum. Has anyone else?

Since it's well-documented--and generally agreed--that AS children require structure, direct instruction, and discrete tasks, and that many of them have the potential to excel in math, and since the education establishment's purported missions include (1) mainstreaming and (2) catering to different learning needs, I believe this is a fruitful message to keep plugging.

Education Non-Myths

I couldn't resist sharing these maxims from a new blog :
www.incentiveseverywhere.com
whose author I know from a previous book he wrote entitled Power Teaching (it's in the list of books I recommended in a post a few months ago: http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2009/02/recommended-reading-from-palisadesk.html



What follows is from the "Book of Right", the set of assumptions which will produce learning.

1. Although students come from different backgrounds, and some are much easier to teach than others, what education brings to the student is much more important than what the student brings to education.

2. All subjects are hierarchically arranged by logic and there is a sequence of instruction which must be followed by all but the most exceptional of high-performing students.

3. Reinforcement is a very powerful determinant of student achievement. The main reinforcer in education is the improvement the student sees in his skills. Ill-constructed curricula, the kind found in almost every government school, result in a steady diet of failure for most students.

4. Having a system of education which is not a civil servant bureaucracy is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for effective education. You can’t do it with such a bureaucracy, but just because you don’t have a bureaucracy doesn’t mean you can do it.

5. Higher order thinking skills are explicitly taught, not fondly hoped for.

6. Methods of teaching are determined by scientific research, not consensus based on experience and sincere belief.

7. Teachers use a curriculum and lesson plans which have been demonstrated to work best and are not expected to create their own.

8. Psychological assessments are used rarely, but assessment of student progress, which means assessment of the effectiveness of teaching, occurs at least daily.

9. Teachers are taught how to teach in detail rather than being expected to apply vague philosophical maundering.

10. Special education is rarely needed because students are taught well on the first go round.

11. If a student does not learn, the blame is not placed on neurological impairment, but on faulty teaching methods.

12. Self-esteem is not taught because it does not have to be.

13. Students are not given "projects" until component skills have been mastered and rarely thereafter.

14. No attention is paid to individual "learning styles" because these hypothetical entities have no effect on learning.

15. Academic success can be measured by reliable and valid standardized tests, although many of these tests are too simple.

16. Students are expected to perform correctly in spelling, writing, reading, and mathematics and it does not stifle creativity.

17. The precepts of Whole Language are not used to teach reading because these precepts are wrong.

18. Students are not expected to create their own reality because this leads to frustration and slow learning.

19. Students are not expected to learn when it is developmentally appropriate but when they are taught.

20. The concept of multiple intelligences is ignored because it has no positive effect on learning.

21. The teacher is a teacher and not a facilitator.

22. The spiral curriculum is not used because things are taught properly the first time.

23. The customer is the parent and the customer must have the economic power to move his child to another teaching situation when unsatisfied.

24. In private education, the cost of education is known. In public education, the cost can never be known because there is no motivation to tell the truth and every motivation not to.

25. The curriculum must be tested on children and provision must be made for mastery learning. Passage of time or exposure does not guarantee learning.

26. Students are not tortured by "creative problem solving" because this is just another crude IQ test and has no value aside from categorizing students yet again. http://incentiveseverywhere.com/2009/10/09/education-non-myths/


I'm not sure I agree that "special education will rarely be needed," because I have observed that students with certain exceptionalities (autism, some LDs, some language impairments) need the same effective instruction but can't benefit from it in an inclusive setting, at least not initially. However, I agree with the general case, that much "special education" is simply ineffective general education, watered down in in a smaller group. As Lloyd Dunne (I think) observed, "It's not special, and it's not education."

All students deserve better.

another nail in the coffin

Is Traditional Teaching Really All that Bad?

answer: no

Paul on military training

Paul: Having gone though a lot of military training myself I would note that it was excellent and every bit of it was DI [direct instruction]. Of course I didn't think much of it at the time but still it's amazing what it accomplishes in very short order.

Another point to ponder is the impact of military culture on the whole training system. From day one you're stripped of your individualism and made part of a group. It doesn't take long before your motivations are all about not letting your group down. You might even say that the last bit of remaining 'identity' that you have is your specialties and rank.

Powerful motivation, no fluff, intense focus, and high expectations, when brewed, create a potent drink. If all that doesn't work, there's the bad ass drill instructor/Master Chief/Master Sargent to provide 'direction'.

All of you.

Drop whatever you're doing right now.

Go read Work Hard. Be Nice.

Obi-Wan on what means 'teaching'

Personally, I find the whole thing deeply insulting.

For all the thousands of years of human existence, teaching has meant one thing, and one thing alone. 

For a few years, a bunch of hippies told us that "teaching" meant the exact opposite of that, and that we couldn't do that thing that used to be called teaching. We went through the motions of their BS while they were looking, and taught our kids the right way when they weren't.

Now, they've rediscovered teaching, think they need a new term for it, and my district thinks I need to attend a week's worth of in-services to know how to do it.

I've got two words for the whole educational theory crowd, and they ain't gonna like the first one.

Obi-Wan is a math teacher, by the by.

a definition of explicit instruction

Explicit instruction is instruction that does not leave anything to chance, and it does not make assumptions about skills and knowledge that children will acquire “on their own.”

For example, explicit instruction requires teachers to directly make connections between the letters in print and the sounds in words, and it requires that these relationships be taught in a comprehensive fashion. It also requires that the meanings of words be directly taught and be explicitly practiced so that they are accessible when children are reading text. Finally, it requires not only direct practice to build fluency, but also careful, sequential instruction and practice in the use of comprehension strategies to help construct meaning.

Using Common Science and Common Sense to Teach All Children to Read by Holly B. Lane, Ph.D. University of Florida hlane@ufl.edu (pdf file of ppt presentation)

power to the people

I am seriously tired of our policy elites. (Scroll down for observation re: "[constructivism] works well enough with middle- and upper-middle-class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives.")

Do policy elites have any idea what is actually going on inside public schools?

At all?

Or do they just sit around swapping clichés?

"Middle- and upper-middle class kids who get plenty of structure in the rest of their lives:" these are not real people. Yes, I do know a number of moms who are capable of putting dinner on the table at the same time every night, and whose kids have a regular bedtime: feats the one low-income mom I know also managed to pull off when her son was a boy. One of my pals here is so on top of things I have occasionally threatened to ship C. off to her house for a week or two or possibly three. "That will straighten you out," I say.

That mom spent this year teaching her kids math.

A child can have dinner with the family at 5; he can have bedtime at 8; he still needs explicit instruction in arithmetic.

So here's my question.

Why is it that policy elites, unions, and ed schools all have say and we don't?

I'd put money on it that if you scrolled back through the years and compared parent decisions about where and how their kids should be educated^* to the corresponding decisions made for parents by policy elites, union leaders, ed schools and all the rest of the stakeholders in the system,^** you would find that parents have consistently made the better choices.

Here's Joe Williams:

One of the most overlooked tools of modern school reform is the concept of power--who has it, who wants it, and who needs it. One reason so little changes in education is because the people who hold the cards are always the same, no matter what the popular reforms of the day involve. We have tried centralization of decision-making power and decentralization of decision-making power. We've raised standards and enacted zero-tolerance policies. We've beaten into the ground such catch phrases as "lifelong learners" and "capacity building." Yet, in all these reform efforts, parents have never really been allowed to be the ones who get to make the ultimate decision: choosing their child's school. Bureaucrats and politicians always seem to get the last word, even though parents have the best odds of making decisions that put their kids first.

Cheating Our Kids
by Joe Williams
p. 214-215

I've decided to start a collection of what do parents want stories.

This one's my favorite:

One of the most interesting aspects of FT that is rarely discussed in the technical reports is the way schools selected the models they would implement. The model a school adopted was not selected by teachers, administrators, or central office educrats. Parents selected the model. Large assemblies were held where the sponsors of the various models pitched their model to groups of parents comprising a Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) for the school. Administrators were usually present at these meetings and tried to influence parents' decisions. Using this selection process, the Direct Instruction model was the most popular model among schools; DI was implemented in more sites during FT than any other model. Yet among educrats, DI was the dark horse. Most educrats' bets would undoubtedly have been placed on any of the models but the Direct Instruction model. The model developed by the Illinois preschool teacher who didn't even have a teaching credential, much less a Ph.D. in education, was not expected by many educrats to amount to much, especially since it seemed largely to contradict most of the current thinking.

The Story Behind Project Follow Through
by Bonnie Grossen

^*on those few occasions when parents were allowed to make a decision, that is
^**note: I exclude students and parents from that category