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In “Advice to beginners” I said, “Learn how you learn,” and many people stepped up to tell me that learning styles are a myth. I know the research about learning styles, but people are over-applying it to dictate how people should learn.
If you haven’t heard about the theory and its debunking, you can read about it in The Atlantic or Education Next. Briefly: the theory was that some people were inherently visual learners, while others were textual learners, among other kinds. This has been proven untrue.
When I said “learn how you learn,” I meant for learners to take an active role in choosing what their path should be. I’m not talking about the four modalities from the debunked “learning styles” myth. There are many effective ways to learn how to program, and you have to choose your way. There are lots of possible choices:
Reversals in Psychology: A list of famous psychological findings that are now in doubt. Includes the Stanford prison experiment, implicit bias, Pygmalion effect, stereotype threat, power posing, multiple intelligences, brain training, learning styles, etc. https://t.co/WOES9XsMfs pic.twitter.com/VXGGhkxpCo
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 27, 2021
The idea that people learn better when taught in a way that matches their specific “learning style” — auditory, kinesthetic, visual or some combination of the three — is widely considered a myth. Research has variously suggested that learners don’t actually benefit from their preferred style, that teachers and pupils have different ideas about what learning styles actually work for them, and that we have very little insight into how much we’re actually learning from various methods.
Despite this evidence, a large proportion of people — including the general public, educators and even those with a background in neuroscience — still believe in the myth. And a new review, published in Frontiers in Education, finds no signs of that changing.
The team looked at articles that focused on belief in learning styles published between 2009 and April 2020. Articles with participant groups that were not made up of educators or trainee educators were excluded from analysis, as were surveys that focused not on whether learning styles actually existed but on other opinions — whether they explain differences in achievement, for example. Data from over 15,000 educators were included in the analysis.
Shaylene Nancekivell, Priti Shah, and Susan A. Gelman:
Many people, including educators, believe learning styles are set at birth and predict both academic and career success even though there is no scientific evidence to support this common myth, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.
In two online experiments with 668 participants, more than 90 percent of them believed people learn better if they are taught in their predominant learning style, whether that is visual, auditory or tactile. But those who believed in learning styles split evenly into an “essentialist” group, with more strongly held beliefs, and a “nonessentialist” group, with more flexible beliefs about learning styles, said lead researcher Shaylene Nancekivell, PhD, a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan.
Madison school district website “learning style” search
In the early ‘90s, a New Zealand man named Neil Fleming decided to sort through something that had puzzled him during his time monitoring classrooms as a school inspector. In the course of watching 9,000 different classes, he noticed that only some teachers were able to reach each and every one of their students. What were they doing differently?
Fleming zeroed in on how it is that people like to be presented information. For example, when asking for directions, do you prefer to be told where to go or to have a map sketched for you?
Today, 16 questions like this comprise the VARK questionnaire that Fleming developed to determine someone’s “learning style.” VARK, which stands for “Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic,” sorts students into those who learn best visually, through aural or heard information, through reading, or through “kinesthetic” experiences. (“I learned much later that vark is Dutch for “pig,” Fleming wrote later, “and I could not get a website called vark.com because a pet shop in Pennsylvania used it for selling aardvarks—earth pigs!”)
He wasn’t the first to suggest that people have different “learning styles”—past theories included the reading-less “VAK” and something involving “convergers” and “assimilators”—but VARK became one of the most prominent models out there.
The thing is, they’re not. Or at least, a lot of evidence suggests that people aren’t really one certain kind of learner or another. In a study published last month in the journal Anatomical Sciences Education, Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students take the vark questionnaire to determine what kind of learner they supposedly were. The survey then gave them some study strategies that seem like they would correlate with that learning style. Husmann found that not only did students not study in ways that seemed to reflect their learning style, those who did tailor their studying to suit their style didn’t do any better on their tests.
The idea that we learn better when taught via our preferred modality or “learning style” – such as visually, orally, or by doing – is not supported by evidence. Nonetheless the concept remains hugely popular, no doubt in part because learning via our preferred style can lead us to feel like we’ve learned more, even though we haven’t.
Some advocates of the learning styles approach argue that the reason for the lack of evidence to date is that students do so much of their learning outside of class. According to this view, psychologists have failed to find evidence for learning styles because they’ve focused too narrowly on whether it is beneficial to have congruence between teaching style and preferred learning style. Instead, they say psychologists should look for the beneficial effects of students studying outside of class in a manner that is consistent with their learning style.
Much more on “learning styles“, here
Since the beginning of Psychology as a field of study, psychologists have been categorizing people: as introverts and extroverts, in terms of their conscientiousness, their openness to experience, and so on. While many of these classification systems examine general personality, a number of classifications look specifically at the way people think—what is sometimes called their cognitive style. When solving problems, for example, some people like to focus on getting the evidence that is most likely to be relevant to the problem at hand, while others have a tendency to “think out of the box.”
When I was first getting into education research (about 2005) I was surprised to find how many people–teachers and others–assumed that there was scientific evidence supporting learning styles. In 2009 I made a 7 minute video arguing that this evidence is lacking. (You can see the video here). In 2010, with Cedar Riener, I wrote an article for Change magazine on the topic.
Mostly because of the video I get a lot of emails about learning styles, so I thought it might be useful to post Frequently Asked Questions, along with my answers.
How can you not believe that that people learn differently? Isn’t it obvious?
People do learn differently, but I think it is very important to say exactly how they learn differently, and focus our attention on those differences that really matter. If learning styles were obviously right it would be easy to observe evidence for them in experiments. Yet there is no supporting evidence. There are differences among kids that both seem obvious to us and for which evidence is easily obtained in experiments, e.g., that people differ in their interests, that students vary in how much they think of schoolwork as part of their identity (“I’m the kind of kid who works hard in school”) and that kids differ in what they already know at the start of a lesson. All three of these have sizable, easily observed effects on learning. I think that often when people believe that they observe obvious evidence for learning styles, they are mistaking it for ability.
That sounds like an unimportant difference in semantics. What does it matter?
The idea that people differ in ability is not controversial–everyone agrees with that. Some people are good at dealing with space, some people have a good ear for music, etc. So the idea of “style” really ought to mean something different. If it just means ability, there’s not much point in adding the new term. (Some of the other style distinctions could be matters of ability too: some people might be good at keeping track of details, whereas others are good at grasping the big picture. I don’t know if they’ve been studied that way.)
Outside of research, few people even mention the science of teaching and learning. When research is mentioned, it’s often flatly wrong. Psychologists Paul Kirschner and Jeroen van Merriënboer reviewed three “urban legends” in education that have no solid basis in the research literature.
The first myth reviewed has two related parts. The myth claims that modern children are “digital natives” who can learn easily from technological sources (e.g. computers). Children now have become independent and creative learners who can communicate, learn, and solve problems easily with technology. Relatedly, children are thought to be able to multitask with technology efficiently (e.g. doing homework like using social media). With regard to the digital natives claim, the authors review research that questions how tech-savvy young people are according to research. Students in many Western countries were found to have low or limited knowledge of information technology. Their skills were resticted to email, mobile phones, and basic software programs. Another study claims that students demonstrate the butterfly defect, where they click through hyperlinks without delving into the content deeply. Researchers in Finland surveyed the technological knowledge of young student teachers and also found their knowledge to be limited. Technology was used primarily for passive consumption, not active creation.
A teacher from the UK has just written to me asking for a bit of clarification (EDIT: the email came from Sue Cowley, who is actually a teacher trainer.)
She says that some people are taking my writing on the experiments that have tested predictions of learning styles theories (see here) as implying that teachers ought not to use these theories to inform their practice.
My own learning style is Gangnam
Her reading of what I’ve written on the subject differs: she thinks I’m suggesting that although the scientific backing for learning styles is absent, teachers may still find the idea useful in the classroom.
The larger issue–the relationship of basic science to practice–is complex enough that I thought it was worth writing a book about it. But I’ll describe one important aspect of the problem here.
There are two methods by which one might use learning styles theories to inspire ones practice. The way that scientific evidence bears on these two methods is radically different.
Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons:
The myth about learning styles was the most popular: 94% of the teachers believed that students perform better when lessons are delivered in their preferred learning style. Indeed, students do have preferences about how they learn; the problem is that these preferences have little to do with how effectively they learn.
Cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explained this conundrum in his 2009 book “Why Don’t Students Like School?” In the best tests of the learning-styles theory, researchers first ascertain students’ preferred styles and then randomly assign them to a form of instruction that either matches their preferences or doesn’t. For example, in one study, students were randomly assigned to memorize a set of objects presented either verbally (as names) or visually (as pictures). Overall, visual presentation led to better memory, but there was no relationship between the learners’ preferences and the instruction style. A study comparing “sensing” to “intuitive” learners among medical residents being taught new procedures reached a similar conclusion.
Of course, good teachers sense when students are struggling or progressing, and they adjust accordingly. Students with disabilities have individual needs that should be addressed. But a comprehensive review commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science concluded that there’s essentially no evidence that customizing instruction formats to match students’ preferred learning styles leads to better achievement. This is a knock not on teachers–we are teachers ourselves–but on human intuition, which finds the claim about learning styles so self-evident that it is hard to see how it could be wrong.
For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.
“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
Can we stop with the learning stations already? My teacher prep endorsed them. My first instructional coach trained me in them. Every school that I’ve ever worked at has incorporated them. Look them up on Teachers Pay Teachers and you’ll find scores of activities for various literacy stations, each one promising that they are proven effective.
Unfortunately, this idea—that a teacher should only teach for a few minutes before setting kids loose to transition through a maze of stations full of glitter, glue, and razzmatazz—is a glossy, inefficient, ineffective use of class time.
Stroll through a classroom that uses learning stations and you’ll see students engaged in all sorts of seemingly compelling activities and projects. Look more closely, and one sees a hodgepodge of the promising and the pointless, tasks that demand thinking beyond realistic expectations and tasks that require no mental effort at all: some extended writing or structured practice and lots of needless coloring or word searches.
Consider just one concrete example. In a video on the influential site Edutopia, which specializes in instructional advice, one station-based classroom exhibits high student engagement and seamless routines. But a critical consideration of what’s actually happening at these centers raises concerns. What’s the point of a twenty-minute station where students spend their time cutting, pasting, and writing in rainbow letters? And that doesn’t even touch on the copious references to kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and other ways of learning, allusions to the myth of “learning styles,” which has as much basis in reality as homeopathic medicine.
The most important metaskill you can learn is how to learn. Learning allows you to adapt. As Darwin hinted, it’s not the strongest who survives. It’s the one who easily adapts to a changing environment. Learning how to learn is a part of a “work smarter, not harder” approach to life—one that probabilistically helps you avoid becoming irrelevant. Your time is precious, and you don’t want to waste it on something which will just be forgotten.
During the school years, most of us got used to spending hours at a time memorizing facts, equations, the names of the elements, French verbs, dates of key historical events. We found ourselves frantically cramming the night before a test. We probably read through our notes over and over, a gallon of coffee in hand, in the hope that the information would somehow lodge in our brains. Once the test was over, we doubtless forgot everything straight away.1
Even outside of formal education, we have to learn large amounts of new information on a regular basis: foreign languages, technical terms, sale scripts, speeches, the names of coworkers. Learning through rote memorization is tedious and—more important—ineffective. If we want to remember something, we need to work with our brains, not against them. To do that, we need to understand cognitive constraints and find intelligent ways to get around them or use them to our advantage.
This is where the spacing effect comes in. It’s a wildly useful phenomenon: we are better able to recall information and concepts if we learn them in multiple, spread-out sessions. We can leverage this effect by using spaced repetition to slowly learn almost anything.
It works for words, numbers, images, and skills. It works for anyone of any age, from babies to elderly people. It works for animals, even species as simple as sea slugs. The effect cuts across disciplines and can be used to learn anything from artistic styles to mathematical equations.
As a person who’s taught at a number of universities for quite a while, I have some opinions about this.
I know that when I teach my SET scores better be excellent or else I will have some problems in my life. And so I put some effort into making my students like me (Trust me, it’s a challenge) and perform a burlesque of hyper-competence lest I get that dreaded “doesn’t appear to know the material” comment. I give them detailed information about the structure of the exam. I don’t give them tasks that they will hate even when I think it would benefit certain learning styles. I don’t expect them to have done the reading*.
Before anyone starts up on a “kids today are too coddled” rant, it is not the students who make me do this. I teach the way I do because ensuring my SET scores are excellent is a large part** of both my job and my job security. I adapt my teaching practice to the instrument used to measure it***.
I actually enjoy this challenge. I don’t think any of the things that I do to stabilize my SET scores are bad practice (otherwise I would do it differently), but let’s not mistake the motives.
(For the record, I also adapt my teaching practice to minimize the effects of plagiarism and academic dishonesty. This means that take-home assignments cannot be a large part of my assessment scheme. If I had to choose between being a dick to students who didn’t do the readings and being able to assess my courses with assignments, I’d choose the latter in a heartbeat.)
But SETs have some problems. Firstly, there’s increasingly strong evidence that women, people of colour, and people who speak english with the “wrong” accent**** receive systematically lower SET scores. So as an assessment instrument, SETs are horribly biased.
Learning facts by rote should be a central part of the school experience, the education secretary, Michael Gove, will argue on Wednesday in a speech which praises traditional exams to the extent of arguing they helped spur the US civil rights struggle.
In the address, titled In Praise of Tests, Gove describes the ideological underpinning to his planned shakeup of GCSEs and A-levels, a philosophy which will further delight educational traditionalists but is likely to prompt criticisms that he is seeking a return to the teaching styles of the 1940s and 50s.
Competitive, difficult exams for which pupils must prepare by memorising large amounts of facts and concepts will promote motivation, solidify knowledge and guarantee standards, Gove is to tell the Independent Academies Association, a trade body for academy schools.
“Exams matter because motivation matters,” Gove will say, according to extracts of the speech provided by his department.
Diverse student learning styles need to be met with a variety of learning tools. Teachers at Cherokee Heights Middle School reflect on the transformation and student growth they see with the introduction of technology such as digital media.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee plans to establish an experimental program that would offer customized lessons for disabled, regular and gifted students in the same classroom, a key component of her strategy to reduce exorbitant special education costs.
Rhee’s proposal would launch a “differentiated learning” laboratory at West Elementary School in Northwest Washington, then replicate it citywide. Under the proposal, which is being met with skepticism from some West teachers and parents, the system would hire a private special-education school to run the program.
The proposal is among several actions Rhee is taking to overhaul special education, which for years has lacked high-quality programs for learning-disabled and physically disabled students. The system spends about $137 million on private school tuition annually for about 2,400 children (out of more than 9,400 disabled students) whom it cannot serve in the public schools.
Since 2006, the D.C. public schools have been under a federal court order to eliminate a backlog of more than 1,000 decisions from hearing officers regarding placement of students in special education programs. The order stemmed from a consent decree that settled a class-action suit filed by parents protesting the system’s long delay in providing services for the students.
Federal law requires schools to practice “inclusion” — putting special education students in regular classrooms whenever possible — a mandate the system has ignored in countless cases, advocates say. Under differentiated learning or differentiated instruction, an approach that has been used in schools in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties and across the nation over the past decade, students are grouped in the same classroom according to their ability levels and learning styles. They get the same lesson but are given different assignments and tasks based on their abilities.
For instance, a third-grade class in St. Louis recently was assigned to report on Martin Luther King Jr., with some students writing a timeline, others illustrating pages and others comparing the era of the slain civil rights leader to today.
Rhee is proposing to go a step further than most other districts using the concept. She wants to treat all students in the differentiated instruction classrooms much like special education students, with each getting an education plan outlining how teachers would address the child’s specific strengths, weaknesses and learning style.
Special education “is about individualization of instruction — that is going to be the overarching theme of these schools. Every kid — gifted kids — need really good individualization,” Rhee said in an interview. “All kids will benefit when we’re operating in that manner.”
A leading scientist has dismissed the latest approach to teaching that has been endorsed by the Government and embraced by teachers.
Under the new system children are considered to have different “learning styles” and instead of being taught by the conventional method of listening to a teacher, they should be allowed to wander around, listen to music and even play with balls in the classroom.
But now Baroness Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institute and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, has dismissed as “nonsense” the view that pupils prefer to receive information either by sight, sound or touch.
She said that the method of classifying pupils on the basis of “learning styles” is a waste of valuable time and resources.
The approach, first introduced in the United States following research on brain development, is being adopted by an increasing number of schools, colleges and local authorities and forms a key part of the Government’s drive for “personalised learning”. In effect, it dismisses so-called “chalk and talk” teaching as inadequate.
Madison Teachers, Inc. (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
The streets of Portland resemble those of Madison in 2011, only in Portland it is the Board of Education’s failure to bargain in good faith which is causing the labor dispute.
“Fighting for the Schools Portland Students Deserve” is a predominant sign. This refers to the School Board’s failure to implement an Arbitrator’s Award which would provide additional planning time and reduce class size to provide more time for teachers to work with students and their individual learning styles; individual differences.
The District has nearly $30 million it could access to address the issues presented by the Portland Association of Teachers, but the Board refuses. Instead the Board of Education threatens to take away the early retirement (TERP) benefit, even though it saves the District significant money. Among other issues are just cause and due process standards, videotaping instruction for evaluative purposes and the District improperly using “letters of expectation” to bully teachers.
The Union plans to strike if Contract issues are not resolved by February 20.
Is it the best of times or the worst of times for charter schools in Marin?
Well, it certainly hasn’t been the best of times in the Lagunitas School District for the past few months. In fact, it seemed to be “deja vu all over again.” Forty years ago a group of parents and educators fought hard to bring the child-centric Open Classroom emphasizing individual learning styles to the small district–a program that continues to flourish.
In addition to the Open Classroom and a Montessori program, the district offers the Lagunitas Waldorf Inspired Program (LWIP), based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. It is one of very few public school Waldorf programs in the state or country. (The Novato Charter School is also a Waldorf-inspired model.)
There is, indeed, an important conversation to be had about education reform, and I heartily applaud any effort to address different learning styles and methodologies. If nothing else, Hacker’s misguided op-ed has fostered a discussion. And I agree that learning practical math like statistics and probabilities is dead useful for a good social citizen. I just think it should augment, not replace, the traditional curriculum.
Hacker tosses out a lot of statistics on students unable to pass algebra to support his “case,” but I don’t think anyone disagrees that this is a problem. I just can’t see how ditching algebra comprises a sensible solution. Hacker’s thinking seems to be that, because algebra is such a stumbling block for many students, we should throw up our hands and despair of ever teaching it to them. But do we really want to throw in the algebraic towel just because it’s, like, rilly hard?
The state Department of Public Instruction is requiring backers of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy to provide scientific research supporting the effectiveness of single-gender education to receive additional funding.
The hurdle comes as university researchers are raising questions about whether such evidence exists. In an article published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers also say single-gender education increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
Efforts to justify single-gender education as innovative school reform “is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence,” according to the article by eight university professors associated with the American Council for CoEducational Schooling, including UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Hyde.
The Urban League of Greater Madison originally proposed Madison Prep as an all-male charter school geared toward low-income minorities. But after a state planning grant was held up because of legal questions related to single-gender education, the Urban League announced it would open the school next year with single-gender classrooms in the same building.
I find this ironic, given the many other programs attempted within our public schools, such as English 10, small learning communities, connected math and a number of reading programs.
Related: Co-Ed Schooling Group Study Assails Merits of Single-Sex Education and from Susan Troller:
A newly published article by child development experts and neuroscientists blasting the trend toward single-sex education as “pseudoscience” won’t help the cause of the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy.
Neither will the continued opposition of the South Central Federation of Labor, which reiterated its opposition to the Urban League-sponsored proposal this week because teachers at the school would not be represented by a union. The Madison Metropolitan School District has a collective bargaining agreement with Madison Teachers Inc. that runs through June of 2013, and Madison Prep’s plan envisions working conditions for its staff — a longer school day and a longer school year, for example — that differ substantially from the contract the district has with its employees.
With a public hearing on the charter school scheduled for Monday, Oct. 3, the debate surrounding Madison Prep is heating up on many fronts. The Madison School Board must take a final vote giving the charter school a go or no-go decision in November.
Kaleem Caire, CEO of the Urban League and a passionate proponent for the separate boys and girls academies aimed at helping boost minority youth academic performance, says he is unimpressed by an article published in the prestigious journal, Science, on Sept. 23, that says there is “no empirical evidence” supporting academic improvement through single-sex education.
Are other DPI funded initiatives held to the same “standard”?
The timing of these events is certainly interesting.
14mb mp3 audio. WORT-FM conducted an interview this evening with Janet Shibley Hyde, one of the authors. Unrelated, but interesting, Hyde’s interview further debunked the “learning styles” rhetoric we hear from time to time.
UPDATE: The Paper in Question: The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling:
In attempting to improve schools, it is critical to remember that not all reforms lead to meaningful gains for students. We argue that one change in particular–sex-segregated education–is deeply misguided, and often justified by weak, cherry-picked, or misconstrued scientific claims rather than by valid scientific evidence. There is no well-designed research showing that single-sex (SS) education improves students’ academic performance, but there is evidence that sex segregation increases gender stereotyping and legitimizes institutional sexism.
I was reminded of this story after reading about the lobbying some parents of Madison elementary school children do to get their kids assigned to teachers who match their “learning styles.”
What a contrast between a parent who’s more or less OK with a school official delivering not only a beating, but an undeserved beating, and parents who seek to intervene in the basic decisions of professional educators.
Such lobbying and the district’s willingness to hear it have “been a common thing as long as I can remember,” said district public information officer Marcia Standiford, a former teacher and audio/visual specialist who has been with the district for 15 years. Parents of Madison elementary students have long been asked to fill out questionnaires about their kids to help in assigning them to teachers.
The seasons, they go ’round and ’round, and the painted ponies go up and down.
No, I’m not just having a Joni Mitchell musical flashback. The painted ponies on my mind are block scheduling and the way school systems – Milwaukee Public Schools particularly – make and unmake decisions, over and over.
Block scheduling of high schools and middle schools is an idea that seems to come around, pass by, then come around again. In fact, at the moment, it is both coming and going in the Milwaukee area.
Under a block plan, the traditional daily schedule of seven classes of 45 or 50 minutes is replaced with four classes of 80 to 90 minutes. Commonly, courses are completed in a quarter, rather than a semester, and then new classes start. Some argue that longer class periods allow different learning styles and more depth. Others argue block schedules mean more wasted time. I’ve seen evidence of both in classes I’ve observed. Research nationally doesn’t reach a strong overall verdict.
Brookfield East and Brookfield Central high schools in the Elmbrook district will switch to blocks for the coming school year. And Homestead High School in Mequon is going to a relatively rare trimester program, in which the school year will be broken into three sections. As part of that, there will be fewer, but longer, classes each day.
Even as administrators and legislators push schools to dump printed books in favor of electronic ones, evidence mounts that paper books have important advantages as tools for learning. Last month, I reported on a study out of the University of Washington which showed that students find printed books more flexible than e-books in supporting a wide range of reading and learning styles. Now comes a major study from the University of California system showing that students continue to prefer printed books to e-books and that many undergraduates complain that they have trouble “learning, retaining, and concentrating” when reading from screens.
The University of California Libraries began a large e-textbook pilot program in 2008. In late 2010, more than 2,500 students and faculty members were surveyed to assess the results of the program. Overall, 58% of the respondents said they used e-books for their academic work, with the percentage varying from 55% for undergraduates to 57% for faculty to 67% for graduate students. The respondents who used e-books were then asked whether they preferred e-books or printed books for their studies. Overall, 44% said they preferred printed books and 35% said they preferred e-books, with the remainder expressing no preference. The preference for print was strongest among undergraduates, 53% of whom preferred printed books, with only 27% preferring e-books. Graduate students preferred printed books by 45% to 35%, and faculty preferred printed books by 43% to 33%.
Politicians are usually sticks in the mud, technologywise, but that certainly wasn’t the case down in Tallahassee this week. Florida legislators closed their eyes, clicked their heals, and took a giant leap forward into the Information Age, passing a budget measure that bans printed textbooks from schools starting in the 2015-16 school year. That’s right: four years from now it will be against the law to give a kid a printed book in a Florida school. One lawmaker said the bill was intended to “meet the students where they are in their learning styles,” which means nothing but sounds warm and fuzzy.
Michigan can harness innovation as a way to do more with less in K-12 education, even though that challenge may seem overwhelming. At a time when new investments in our K-12 system are not likely, Michigan must face the daunting task of improving student achievement and increasing graduation rates with fewer financial resources.
To date, K-12 education has yet to realize the full potential of using online learning to improve how educators teach and how students learn. Nearly every sector of our economy is now turning to information and communications technologies to reduce costs and improve efficiencies. Education is not alone in its need to manage scarce resources, maintain relevance and succeed in today’s new global economy.
Research has shown online learning is academically effective and can provide meaningful alternatives for students who have a need for greater flexibility with their education due to individual learning styles, health conditions, employment responsibilities, lack of success with traditional school environments, or desire to be working early at the college level. Online learning needs to be part of the broader policy discussion related to restructuring public education during this prolonged budget crisis. Economic arguments in addition to the latest research on student learning support this position.
In discussions of “effective” teaching, we often hear about the “objectives” that teachers should spell out and repeat, the “learning styles” they should target, the “engagement” they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide–all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.
Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: “No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!”
Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson’s content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students “on task,” reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives.
Yet try to find any mention of charter schools in the Madison School District’s new strategic plan and you’ll feel like you’re reading a “Where’s Waldo?” book. You almost need a magnifying lens to find the one fleeting reference in the entire 85-page document. And the words “charter school” are completely absent from the strategic plan’s lengthy and important calls for action.
It’s more evidence that much of liberal Madison clings to an outdated phobia of charter schools. And that attitude needs to change.
Nearly 10 percent of Wisconsin’s public schools are charters. That ranks Wisconsin among the top five states. Yet Madison is below the national average of 5 percent.
Charter schools are public schools free from many regulations to try new things. Parents also tend to have more say.
Yet charters are held accountable for achievement and can easily be shut down by sponsoring districts if they don’t produce results within a handful of years.
One well-known Madison charter school is Nuestro Mundo, meaning “Our World” in Spanish. It immerses kindergartners, no matter their native language, in Spanish. English is slowly added until, by fifth grade, all students are bilingual. My daughter attends Nuestro Mundo.
It was a battle to get this charter school approved. But Nuestro Mundo’s popularity and success have led the district to replicate its dual-language curriculum at a second school without a charter.
The School Board has shot down at least two charter school proposals in recent years, including one for a “Studio School” emphasizing arts and technology.
Madison School Board President Arlene Silveira told me Friday she supports adding charter schools to the district’s action plans in at least two places: under a call for more “innovative school structures,” and as part of a similar goal seeking heightened attention to “diverse learning styles.”
I agree. I believe that diffused governance, in other words a substantive move away from the current top down, largely “one size fits all” governance model within the Madison public schools is essential.
“States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier” (Usiskin 98)
Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of “equal outcomes,” due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a “philosophic absolute” and declares its use to be “totally unacceptable.” The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts “inherently unequal” (94). They state “If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement” (emphasis in original). The Draft for “Standards 2000′ from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.
Our urban and suburban school districts are under tremendous pressure to be all things for all students. Special learning needs and unique learning styles complicate the process of providing each student with a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE).
I have served in conventional schools and public charter schools in the Milwaukee area. I’ve found that every school has its strengths as well as its needs to improve.
I am currently a speech therapist in two Milwaukee public charter schools, the Downtown Montessori Academy and Inland Seas High School. Yes, charter schools are actually public schools. Yes, many public charter schools provide special education services for frequently occurring disabilities.
Teaching at a charter school allows me to think outside the box as I serve my students. Public charter schools can offer teachers greater autonomy to be innovative in the classroom. For example, if a school’s reading program is not serving the needs of a classroom, charter schools have the autonomy to make changes as needs are identified. I think the ability to initiate necessary changes is where the “can-do” attitude of fellow teachers in charter schools comes from.
Many of Milwaukee’s charter schools are based on cutting-edge curriculums that serve a variety of learning styles. One option is referred to as “project based,” where students design and carry out a learning project of their particular interest. Another option is the student-led, teacher-guided Montessori environment. Direct instruction is a teacher-led style of learning that uses the repetition of very small, specifically targeted learning goals.
Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn:
For a candidate who’s been criticized as being out of touch on technology, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has been refreshingly ahead of the curve when it comes to disruptive innovation in education.
While Republican Presidential candidate McCain and the Democratic candidate, Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), both see the benefits of using technology in revamping how classrooms run, McCain’s campaign early on embraced the benefits of nontraditional online education in some key ways.
Whichever candidate prevails on Nov. 4,, the most successful educational policies will be those that approach education challenges from an innovation perspective.
CUSTOMIZATION IS KEY
One of the core reasons schools struggle is because their structure compels standardization in the way they teach and test. This standardized, monolithic experience would be fine if all students learned in the same way. But as we know from our own experience, we all learn in different ways. Different things motivate different people, we each have different intelligence strengths and learning styles, and people learn at different paces. Standardization in schools therefore will not do the trick. We need customization.
Much more on Clayton Christensen here.
Zeum is a non-profit multimedia arts and technology museum with a mission to foster creativity and innovation in young people of all backgrounds, communities and learning styles. By providing hands-on experiences in four core creative processes (animation, sound and video production, live performance and visual arts), we encourage youth to share their stories, build their voices, and use multimedia tools for creative self-expression.
The WTL was asked by the Waukesha School District what three criteria we would be looking for in a new superintendent. Here is our response.
1. Strong fiscally conservative background with a desire to be creative in finding solutions to budget woes other than referendums and new fees. Stability is a must to protect the children and deliver a high quality of education.
2. Knowledge and belief in charter and virtual schools including but not limited to “IQ academies”. These are great tools to address different learning styles, abilities and interests of children so they can succeed.
3. Belief in high academic standards in the core subjects to be competitive not only locally but worldwide. We have a worldwide economy and thus must deliver an education that will allow our children to compete worldwide.
Walbridge School is unique state wide in teaching children with different learning styles to become successful. With a full-day curriculum, Walbridge School teaches grades one through eight with individualized instruction focusing on strengths rathers than weaknesses. Walbridge School will host a summer school program from July 7 through August 1 offering creative courses in reading, writing, and math. Please call for more details at 608.833.1338, email: walbridge2006@yahoo.com.
Math Excellence in Columbia Missouri Public Schools:
To: Columbia Public Schools Board of Education and Superintendent Phyllis Chase
An increasing number of parents and community leaders have expressed concern about the various math curricula currently used in the Columbia Public Schools (CPS). These experimental math programs go by the names of Investigations (TERC), Connected Math (CMP) and Integrated Math (Core Plus) and they emphasize “self-discovery” over mathematical competency. We are concerned because these curricula have been discredited and abandoned in other regions of the country after they failed to deliver demonstrable results. The failed curricula are currently the only method of instruction in the elementary grades and middle schools. At higher grade levels, CPS has actively discouraged students from enrolling in math courses that place more emphasis on widely accepted standard methods. And, while implementing and evaluating these programs, the Columbia School District did not provide open access to meetings or adequately consider the concerns of professional mathematicians, parents and community leaders.
Therefore, we, the undersigned, would like to express our deep concern with the following issues and to propose that the Columbia School District adopt the following goals:
1. Protect the right of students to become computationally fluent in mathematics. We expect students to receive direct instruction in standard algorithms of all mathematical operations and laws of arithmetic so that they can master the skills that allow fast, accurate calculation of basic problems. This goal cannot be met with the current Investigations/TERC math curriculum for lower grade levels.
2. Ensure that math instruction is flexible enough to allow for various learning styles and is age and grade-level appropriate. The elementary level should focus on math standards that will build a solid base of mathematical skills for ALL students. Middle school curricula should build a bridge between the fundamental arithmetic learned in elementary school and the more abstract concepts taught in high school. At both the elementary and middle school levels the curricula should allow teachers the flexibility to meet the needs of all types of learners. This goal cannot be met with the Connected Math program currently used in middle and junior high schools.
Related: Columbia Parents’ blog site, which offers a number of useful posts. [RSS]
Math Forum Audio / Video.
Via a reader.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association is speaking out against MCAS, saying the state’s standardized test “has allowed white supremacy to flourish in public schools.” The teachers union is endorsing a bill that would eliminate the MCAS graduation requirement in the state.
The bill scheduled for a committee hearing Monday on Beacon Hill would offer “multiple pathways” for students to demonstrate educational competency, outside of standardized testing.
MTA President Merrie Najimy said the MCAS has been “alienating students who have diverse backgrounds and differentiated learning styles.”
“The implementation of the MCAS and other standardized tests has had the exact opposite effect of what was supposed to occur when the system was introduced more than 20 years ago,” Najimy said in a statement. “Public schools in predominantly Black and brown communities have been taken over by state bureaucrats who have been using standardized testing as a tool not to improve opportunities for students but instead as one to pry public education from the hands of the families and educators who know best what their students need.”
The MTA shared a Twitter video earlier in the week saying, “It’s time to cancel MCAS.”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
If Albert Einstein applied for a professorship at UCLA today, would he be hired? The answer is not clear. Starting this fall, all faculty applicants to UCLA must document their contributions to “equity, diversity and inclusion.” (Next year, existing UCLA faculty will also have to submit an “equity, diversity and inclusion statement” in order to be considered for promotion, following the lead of five other UC campuses.) The mandatory statements will be credited in the same manner as the rest of an applicant’s portfolio, according to UCLA’s equity, diversity and inclusion office.
A contemporary Einstein may not meet the suggested evaluation criteria. Would his “job talk” — a presentation of one’s scholarly accomplishments — reflect his contributions to equity, diversity and inclusion? Unlikely. Would his research show, in the words of the evaluation template, the “potential to understand the barriers facing women and racial/ethnic minorities?” Also unlikely. Would he have participated in “service that applies up-to-date knowledge to problems, issues and concerns of groups historically underrepresented in higher education?” Sadly, he may have been focusing on the theory of general relativity instead. What about “utilizing pedagogies addressing different learning styles” or demonstrating the ability to “effectively teach and attract students from underrepresented communities”? Again, not at all guaranteed.
As the new mandate suggests, UCLA and the rest of the University of California have been engulfed by the diversity obsession. The campuses are infatuated with group identity and difference. Science and the empirical method, however, transcend just those trivialities of identity that UC now deems so crucial: “race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexual orientation, gender identity and socioeconomic status,” to quote from the university’s Diversity Statement. The results of that transcendence speak for themselves: an astounding conquest of disease and an ever-increasing understanding of the physical environment. Unlocking the secrets of nature is challenge enough; scientists (and other faculty) should not also be tasked with a “social justice” mission.
This week is the time to show appreciation for the teachers in our lives. The official Teacher Appreciation Day is May 8, but the entire week may be set aside. Given the challenges we face in education at all levels, it is important to acknowledge those persons central to the process. Despite administrative bloat and the rise of the online university with its master course models and other mechanisms for automating learning, the teacher remains pivotal.
Classical and medieval education centered on the tutorial. This mentoring model worked with small cohorts of students who were guided through multiple disciplines over the course of years, sometimes by the same person. At the Abbey of St. Victor in the twelfth century, students went through the seven liberal arts under the steady hand of a single master, most likely Hugh of St. Victor until his death in 1144.
The teacher was to embody virtue as well as communicate it, and students traveled thousands of miles to study with the best. Bernard of Clairvaux sent a letter to Hugh of St. Victor recommending a promising Italian named Peter as a student. After studying with Hugh and probably also Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard went on to become bishop of Paris and write the standard textbook for theology.
With the rise of mass education, the tutorial model has been replaced by models that accommodate higher numbers of students. The classroom lecture became the standard way to automate the educational process for most of the twentieth century. This was especially the case in colleges after the explosion of enrollments in the wake of the G.I. Bill. In the classroom, the teacher became the expert whose task was to distill a body of knowledge through interaction with primary sources or by communicating the contents of the curriculum and its texts. The teacher as mentor was woven into the teacher as expert.
After the emergence of developmental psychology in the 1960s, public schools entered the age of self-actualization, with the teacher forming part of a team that included the school counselor. Under this model, the teacher became a social worker who facilitated holistic growth. The mentor model did not go away entirely; rather, it remained in the form of “individualized learning plans” in the context of larger class settings. Class sizes rose steadily, with some teachers facing more than thirty students in a high school class while at the same time being required to individualize assignments so as to accommodate diverse learning styles.
Anyone who has worked in education for any length of time knows that the models keep changing. And yet, the more they change, the more they stay the same. The educational process may have one of two goals: to produce citizens, or to produce workers. America has never decided which goal is the more important. Do we want to turn out citizens who understand the history of the nation and can function as a morally responsible electorate? Or do we want to turn out workers who can enter the workforce immediately and contribute to economic development? The answer is always “yes” to both. In practice, we swing between one pole and the other. Currently, we are swinging away from the citizen pole, which is grounded in the humanities, and toward the worker pole, which is invested in STEM and vocational education.
What Should Teachers Know?
Is my experience representative? Are most teachers unaware of the latest findings from basic science—in particular, psychology—about how children think and learn? Research is limited, but a 2006 study by Arthur Levine indicated that teachers were, for the most part, confident about their knowledge: 81 percent said they understood “moderately well” or “very well” how students learn. But just 54 percent of school principals rated the understanding of their teachers that high. And a more recent study of 598 American educators by Kelly Macdonald and colleagues showed that both assessments may be too optimistic. A majority of the respondents held misconceptions about learning—erroneously believing, for example, that children have learning styles dominated by one of the senses, that short bouts of motor-coordination exercises can improve the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres, and that children are less attentive after consuming sugary drinks or snacks.
But perhaps when teachers say they “know how children learn,” they are not talking about learning from a scientific perspective but about craft knowledge. They take the question to mean, “Do you know how to ensure that children in your classroom learn?” which is not the same as understanding the theoretical principles of psychology. In fact, in a 2012 study of 500 new teachers by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), respondents said that their training was too theoretical and didn’t prepare them for teaching “in the real world.” Maybe they have a point. Perhaps teachers don’t need generalized theories and abstractions, but rather ready-to-go strategies—not information about how children learn, but the best way to teach fractions; not how children process negative emotion, but what to say to a 3rd grader who is dejected about his reading.
Related: National Council on Teacher Quality.
More, here.
The potential benefits of increased access to private school choice programs in the United States remain a hot topic in educational policy. According to economic theory, private schooling should improve student achievement by increasing competitive pressures on educators to provide high-quality educational experiences. In addition, since children have differing interests, abilities, and learning styles, private school choice would allow for an improved match between educators and students.
To see if these market benefits materialize, I examine the effect that increased access to private schooling has on international student test scores in 52 countries around the world. Notably, this study establishes causal relationships by comparing these countries to themselves over time while controlling for any fluctuations in gross domestic product, government expenditures, population, school enrollment, life expectancy, and infant mortality. I find that a 1 percentage point increase in the private share of total primary schooling enrollment would lead to moderate increases in student math, reading, and science achievement within nations.
Last November, the citizens of Madison supported a referendum to offset the drastic budget cuts forced upon our schools in recent years. The Madison Metropolitan School District has let class sizes expand for the past few years to cope with funding shortfalls. In this first budget cycle after the referendum, I ask the Madison School Board to use this money to reduce class sizes at the elementary, middle and high school levels.
The advantages of small class size are unassailable. Over the last decade, my three children have benefited enormously from the small classes at Midvale and Lincoln elementary schools. In 2007, when my daughter started kindergarten, she flourished in a class of 14 with enough additional support staff to produce a teacher/student ratio that rivaled any private school in the area. My children have spent their formative years in classrooms of between 15 and 18 with dedicated teachers who knew them well, who could assess their learning styles and differentiate lesson plans to meet their needs. These small classes allowed my children to thrive and set them up for success in middle and high school. Unfortunately, today many children in Madison’s schools, including some of our highest-poverty schools, are in classrooms that are much too large.
Madison’s budget and long term, disastrous reading results.
Midvale Lincoln.
MAP assessment results.
In health there are well-established protocols that govern the introduction of any new drug or treatment. Of major consideration is the notion of doing no harm. In education there are no such controls and plenty of vested interests keen to see the adoption of new strategies and resources for a variety of ideological and financial reasons.
Teachers need to be critical consumers of research – as with medicine, lives are also at stake – yet with the best will in the world and without the knowledge and time to do so, decisions may be made to adopt new approaches that are not only ineffectual, but can actually do harm. A case in point is learning styles.
Massive open online courses, first envisioned as a way to democratize higher education, have made their way into high schools, but Washington is powerless to stop the flood of personal data about teenage students from flowing to private companies, thanks to loopholes in federal privacy laws.
Universities and private companies this fall unveiled a slew of free, open-access online courses to high school students, marketing them as a way for kids to supplement their Advanced Placement coursework or earn a certificate of completion for a college-level class.
But when middle and high school students participate in classes with names like “Mars: The Next Frontier” or “The Road to Selective College Admissions,” they may be unwittingly transmitting into private hands a torrent of data about their academic strengths and weaknesses, their learning styles and thought processes — even the way they approach challenges. They may also be handing over birth dates, addresses and even drivers license information. Their IP addresses, attendance and participation in public forums are all logged as well by the providers of the courses, commonly called MOOCs.
Google’s education privacy practices are worth a look.
Today the Sutton Trust and the University of Durham have published a fascinating new report called What Makes Great Teaching? It sets out to answer that title question, as well as looking at ways we can measure great teaching, and how that could be used to promote better learning. Here is my short summary of some key points from the report.
1. What is effective teaching? This report is very honest about the fact that we don’t have as clear an idea of what good teaching is as we think we do. I think this is an important point to make. Too often, reports like this one start from the point of assuming that everyone knows what good teaching is, and that the challenge is finding the time/money/will/methodology to implement changes. This report is saying that actually, there are a lot of misconceptions about what good teaching is, and as such, reform efforts could end up doing more harm than good. We need to think more clearly and critically about what good teaching is – and this report does that. As well as listing what effective teaching practices are, it also lists what ineffective practices are. This list has already received some media attention (including a Guardian article with a bit from me), as it says that some popular practices such as learning styles and discovery learning are not backed up by evidence. The report draws its evidence from a wide range of sources, including knowledge from cognitive psychology. It cites Dan Willingham quite a lot, and quotes his wonderful line that memory is the residue of thought. As regular readers will know, I think cognitive psychology has a lot to offer education, so it is great to see it getting so much publicity in this report.
There are myriad books and professional development materials devoted to the study of learning styles. The problem, says University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, PhD, is that most of them don’t rely on good science.
“If you talk to teachers frequently, they’re surprised there isn’t a firm research base for different learning styles,” says Willingham, author of the books “When Can You Trust the Experts?” and “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
That lack of good information is among the reasons Willingham has devoted his work to researching the application of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to K–12 education — and popularizing the information for the general public. In addition to providing commentary about science and education on the education blog RealClearEducation.com, he is working to help schools and families determine which educational approaches — from games and software to training programs and workbooks — are scientifically supported and worth adopting.
Willingham spoke with the Monitor about the importance of offering students a challenging curriculum and providing motivation and praise to help struggling students.
What are some of the other unfounded beliefs teachers have about what works in the classroom?
One example is so-called neuromyths, or beliefs that some educators may have about the brain. For example, the characterization of left-brain versus right-brain thinking is not well-supported and really never has been.
The truth is that most teachers in my experience really have a lot of common sense. There are ideas that are peddled to them that are wrong, but most teachers are pretty skeptical of them. They’re in the classroom every day, so they have a sense of what works and what doesn’t work with kids.
The HOPE (Having Options in Public Education) Coalition is a grassroots group of concerned parents, educators, and community members who believe creating and sustaining new educational options would strengthen MMSD. New options in public schools would benefit students, families, teachers, and our community. Options are needed because “one size does not fit all”! The diversity of students’ backgrounds and learning styles requires a diversity of learning models.
The HOPE Coalition met last week to discuss the superintendent search. We found 3 characteristics to be important for our incoming superintendent. Using the points below, and/or your own words, please make your voice heard! You may copy and paste the below paragraphs if you are pressed for time. The superintendent should:
Make your voice heard…
… to the Board! Email them all (comments@madison.k12.wi.us) or contact them individually (go to www.mmsd.org/boe and scroll down to find contact information). This may be the most influential means of sharing your opinion!
… to the consultants hired for the search! Complete their survey by going to www.mmsd.org/topics/supt and scrolling down to find the link to it. You will also find information about the community input sessions. Please attend one! and tell us your impression of how successful it was.
Encourage friends, neighbors, and coworkers to make their voices heard too! Please contact Sarah Granofsky (s.granofsky@gmail.com) or Lauren Cunningham (cunningham.lauren@sbcglobal.net) with any questions or suggestions, or if you would like to learn more about HOPE for Madison.
As a former charter school student, I can attest to how valuable they can be to a child’s education. When they’re properly planned, a charter school can give a student exactly what he or she needs to succeed later on in life. I feel I owe many of my present successes to my charter school upbringing.
However, we need to cut back on the number of educational options in Wisconsin, specifically in the Fox Valley.
In the last decade, there has been an explosion of charter schools in Appleton alone. Programs like the Classical Charter School, Magellan Charter School, Tesla Engineering School and the Renaissance School for the Arts are examples of the numerous alternative schooling opportunities now available to parents and their children.
Despite my earlier comments about the good qualities of charter schools, the increasing number of programs isn’t beneficial to anyone, especially the student. It is, after all, possible to have too much of a good thing.
Take the charter school I participated in, for example. When most kids would have gone to middle school, my parents opted to send me to the Magellan program. It allowed gifted students to take classes at a high school setting with high school teachers at an accelerated pace.
Not only did the Magellan students learn a great deal more about traditional subjects then they would have normally, they were also exposed to a world of new opportunities at Appleton West, where the program was located. Students in the program were allowed to join the debate team as well as many other character-building activities and organizations.
Magellan was exactly what the students needed — accelerated learning in a high school locale with endless possibilities for development.
A visit to a public school classroom will reveal the immense range of learning styles among students.
There’s the boy sitting seemingly idle in the back corner. He says little, but his test scores indicate he’s among the intellectually gifted.
In the middle of the room is the student who can play anything he wishes on the piano, but simply can’t comprehend long division.
There’s the student who finds it difficult to learn from a lecture, but she makes great academic strides while doing a hands-on project.
Charter schools allow for more academic freedom. They’re publicly funded schools that have been released from some of the regulations that apply to other public schools, and instead are accountable for producing certain results written in the school’s charter.
Charter schools can avoid many of the procedural obstacles that distract other schools’ resources and energy away from the goal of education. Diversity in learning styles, a sense of community and potential benefits to public schools make expanding charter schools in the Fox Valley a good decision.
One reason why charter schools should be expanded is to address the diversity in learning styles.
Three interactive programs from Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions are for sale at iTunes for downloading to iPods with video screens. The programs were released last week, giving vacationing students plenty of time for practice quizzes before the next test date in October.
The three programs, in critical reading, mathematics and writing, correspond to the three graded sections of the exam. The programs cost $4.99 each and are available in the iPod games section of the iTunes store alongside slightly more entertaining, if less educational, options like Tetris, Pac-Man and Lost: The Game.
“Learning styles have changed a lot since Stanley Kaplan founded Kaplan in 1938,” said Kristen Campbell, the national director of SAT and ACT programs for Kaplan. “Students take their iPods with them all the time, whether they’re in a car driving to baseball practice, or at home, or sitting at school waiting for their parents to come and pick them up.”
The incumbent policy is more of the same. Both parties in Washington champion more government involvement in primary education and more subsidies for existing colleges and universities.
The innovative policy is to support any alternative to our current education system. Ultimately, we would trust consumers to keep the best alternatives and discard the rest.
…….
While politicians champion more homogeneity in education (national standards; send everyone to college), my guess is that what we need is more differentiation. Students are heterogeneous in terms of their abilities, learning styles, and rates of maturation. Putting every student on the same track is sub-optimal for large numbers of young people.
Some students — probably more than we realize — are autodidacts, meaning that they teach themselves at their own pace. One of the brightest students in my high school statistics class simply cannot handle the structure of a school day. He is motivated to learn on his own (he was curious to read my book on health care and asked me for a copy), but he is demotivated by most of his classes.
Some students are not suited for academic study. We speak of the proverbial auto mechanic, but in fact the best career path for many of these students in today’s economy would be in the allied health fields. Unfortunately, this career path is blocked by occupational licensing requirements, which prevent many otherwise capable students from pursuing careers in dental hygiene, physical therapy, or similar professions. If we had the equivalent credentialism at work in auto repair, you would need four years of college plus two or three years of post-graduate education just to work on a car.
Kling website and blog.
Interesting timing. I spoke recently with a Madison parent (pre-K child) who agrees with this sentiment (balancing education power with parents via greater local choice).
Seattle Alliance of Black Educators:
To help African American students experience success in school districts and meet the challenges of the state graduation requirements, Seattle Alliance of Black School Educators in partnership with Seattle Public Schools, Pearson Scott Foreman, National Urban Publishing Companies, and other community organizations will host an Educational Summit on October 13 & 14, 2006 at Mercer Middle School in Seattle.
Many African American students have been left behind in the public education system in the state of Washington, and a transformed education system is needed that honors all students in a holistic manner—accounting for their various worldviews, languages, learning styles, cultural heritages, and multiple intelligences. Therefore, it is critical that our parents and communities must partner with schools, churches and other service providers to maximize resources and to improve student learning outcomes.
The idea seems odd to many. But some scholars and administrators say raising class sizes and teacher pay might improve achievement
It was 9:45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Jane Reiser’s mathematics class in Room 18 was stuffed with sixth- and seventh-graders. There were 32 of them, way above the national class size average of 25. Every seat was filled — 17 girls, 15 boys, all races, all learning styles. A teacher’s nightmare.
And yet, despite having so many students, Reiser’s class was humming, with everybody paying attention. She held up a few stray socks to introduce a lesson on probabilities with one of those weird questions that interest 11- and 12-year-olds:
Come listen to a panel of experts discuss the social and emotional needs of gifted and talented students. Diagnostic, assessment, treatment/intervention, educational, parenting and theoretical issues will be addressed. Resources will be shared. This program is intended for parents of children within the full range of high ability (i.e., not only the profoundly gifted).
This event will be held on Thursday, January 13 in McDaniels Auditorium of the Doyle Administration Building at 7:00 p.m. Please note that this is a location change from Room 209.
Please note: Questions for the panelists are heartily encouraged. Questions may be submitted before the meeting at tagparents@tagparents.org.
Zvi:
As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup:
England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me:
However, teachers’ unions said that the crackdown was misguided because most schools already imposed a ban. Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, branded the reform a “non-policy for a non-problem” and said ministers should focus on limiting children’s access to social media platforms.
I fail to see why this is an issue? I am pretty sure this is not a ‘non-problem.’
Jay Van Bavel: My kids go to a public middle school in NYC where they lock up their phones for the day. This is what the school observed:
“Overall, the program has been a massive success. We are happy to share that we continue to see the benefits of using Yondr, with increased student engagement in the classroom, less time spent in the bathrooms and hallways, more genuine connections within the community and a decrease in reports of cyberbullying.”
We need some RCTs on removing smartphones from entire schools or classrooms to see the impacts (which are often network effects, rather than on individuals).
Some parents worry this will mean they can’t find their kids in case of an emergency.
Not true.
The kids carry the pouches and parents can still easily track their location (if necessary). In an emergency kids can just break open the pouch. It only costs ~$20 to replace.
Sounds good to me as a way to quiet the concerns. It should not be actually necessary to carry the pouches, and I think psychologically it would be better not to do that so kids are not tempted to break the pouch and don’t have to spend willpower to avoid it.
Phil McRae: SMARTPHONE BAN
In the US, a teacher (Mary Garza) instructed her students to set their phones to loud mode. Each time a notification was received they’d stand up & tally it under a suitable category. This occurred during ONE class period. Each mark is a learning disruption
A story confirmed to not mean anything.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: “I grew up in the City Where Nobody Can Sneak Up On Anybody, forced to wear a little hat that went ‘ding ding’ every 2 seconds anytime I went outside my house. I hated that hat. When I was six years old, enough deaf people had moved into the City that the hat acquired flashing LED lights.
Thankfully when we started to get deaf and blind people they stuck to their own city subsection and we didn’t *all* have to wear the vibrating boots that let people feel us coming through their toes… anyways, I hated that City and I told anyone I met that as soon as I was thirteen and had my own bank account I was moving somewhere, anywhere else; and they’d always nod wisely and say, ‘Valid.’
And then I turned thirteen and moved out and it was awesome. Every city is a quiet city for me now. I decided that I’d make my own kids grow up wearing hats that said ‘ding ding’, just so they could appreciate the quiet when they grew up. And for this, they make me move to the City of Clever Parenting Ideas?”
This story doesn’t mean anything, so please don’t try to decode it.
Did you know that Snapchat+, the $4/month subscription service, offers friend rankings? You can check how often a friend interacts with you relative to how often they interact with others. This often goes exactly the way you would think, with both friend and relationship drama ensuing when someone is not ranked high enough.
Even without Snapchat+, the app can show teens where they stand with friends via emojis. This occurs if two people are on each other’s private eight-person best-friend lists.
A yellow heart indicates “Besties” status—these two have sent the most snaps to each other. If they’re besties for at least two consecutive months, they graduate to “Super BFF,” indicated by two red hearts.
Jonathan Haidt: I have said much less about Snapchat than other apps because I know less. But the more I learn, the worse it looks. It’s not just the streaks, designed to hook kids. Their “solar system” maps are even worse.
Katy Potts: I call it the “anxiety app” in online safety training I run – grim – unbelievable they get away with it.
This is the kind of social information where we benefit from lack of clarity. There is a reason groups strive to avoid a known pecking order outside of the top and bottom ranks. Even if you know you are not so relatively close, you don’t need the details in your face, and real ambiguity is even better. For teens I am confident this is far worse, and also it will lead to people strategically gaming the system to get the outcome they want, and every implementation of that I can imagine only makes the whole thing worse.
Jonathan Haidt went on the Free Press podcast, in addition to the one with Tyler Cowen. On TFP, he laid out the case that smartphones are the primary thing ruining childhood this way.
Suppose a salesman in an electronics store told you he had a new product for your 11-year-old daughter that’s very entertaining—even more so than television—with no harmful side effects of any kind, but also no more than minimal benefits beyond the entertainment value. How much would this product be worth to you?
…
What the smartphone user gives up is time. A huge amount of it.
Around 40 hours a week for preteens like your daughter. For teens aged 13 to 18, it’s closer to 50 hours per week. Those numbers—six to eight hours per day—are what teens spend on all screen-based leisure activities.
…
I should note that researchers’ efforts to measure screen time are probably yielding underestimates. When the question is asked differently, Pew Research finds that a third of teens say they are on one of the major social media sites “almost constantly,” and 45 percentof teens report that they use the internet “almost constantly.”
As I said in the main part of the post, if kids are indeed being allowed to spend that kind of time on their phones, that seems obviously deeply unhealthy, and the decision to permit this seems bonkers levels of nuts. No, I do not need a study to see this.
If you are spending that much time on a phone, then unless something is deeply engrossing in a way that for example school almost always isn’t, every minute that you are not on your phone, you are spending part of that minute jonesing for your phone. You are thinking about pulling out your phone. You are using willpower not to.
There aren’t zero useful things to do with phones, but at that point, come on.
There is also this. You can say it isn’t smartphones. It’s obviously largely smartphones.
I do not buy that this can be explained by ‘some unexplained shift in mood.’
Haidt also wrote a book, The Anxious Generation. As I noted earlier I haven’t had opportunity to read it. Candice Odgers reviews it here in Nature. Here is the teaser line of the review.
The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
Remember The Law of No Evidence: Any claim there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit.
One could add a corollary, The Law of Distracting Us From the Real Issue. Which henceforth is: If someone warns that paying attention to X could distract us from the real issue, that is evidence that X is the real issue.
This is because the phrase in question is an attempt at deep magick, to act as if evidence has been presented or an argument made and social cognition has rendered a verdict, when none of that was otherwise the case.
There are of course many cases where X is indeed a distraction from the real issue Y. What these cases mostly have in common is no one using the phrase ‘could distract us from the real issue.’
One could also point out that phones are themselves a massive distraction and time sink, thus even if something else is ‘at fault’ somehow, getting rid of the phones would be a first step to addressing it. Candice doesn’t even have any real objections to Haidt’s actual proposals, calling them mostly reasonable, or objecting to them on the grounds that they would be insufficient because teens would work around them. Which is not exactly making me want to instead do nothing.
Candice does of course pull out the no evidence card as well, saying studies fail to find effects and so on. Yeah, I don’t care. The studies are asking the wrong questions, this is dumb. Then of course she says ‘there are, unfortunately, no simple answers,’ so I am confused what we are even at risk of being distracted from. What does she offer?
Researchers cite access to guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation as leading contributors.
The idea that kids today have more contact with guns, violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse than they did in the past is obviously backwards. Yes, of course those things continue to make the world worse, but they are much better than they used to be, so it can’t explain a new trend.
Economic hardship is complicated, as I’ve discussed in the past, but certainly there has not been a dramatic rise in economic hardship starting in the mid-2010s.
That leaves the opioid epidemic and social isolation, which are indeed getting worse.
Of course, citing ‘social isolation’ while denying that phones are at fault is a pretty rich thing to say. I am pretty sure a new activity soaking up most non-school hours is going to be bad for social isolation.
The opioid epidemic is bad, but this can’t be primary. The fall in child well-being doesn’t map onto the opioid epidemic. The rate of opioid abuse under 18 is relatively low, only about 1.6%. Even if you include parents, the numbers don’t add up, and the maps don’t match.
Yes, there is narrative among the youth that all these things are worse than ever. And that narrative is bad for mental health. But do you know what is a prime driver of that? Social media and everyone constantly being on their phones. And you know what else? Articles and academics like this one, pushing a narrative that is patently false, except where it is self-fulfilling.
There is an alternative hypothesis that does make sense. One could say that kids are on their phones this much exactly because we do not let kids be kids. If kids are not allowed to go off and do things, then of course they will end up on their phones and computers. We give them no other options.
So yes, we should cover that base as well. Let kids be kids.
The contrast between this and Tyler Cowen’s must better challenges is very clear.
People have gone completely insane. Do not put up with this insanity.
I mean, this would be insane at any age, but thirteen? At thirteen I do not even feel entitled to know which friend’s house my children are going to.
Hannah Posts: It would never occur to me that this would be unexpected or inappropriate. If I’m at Mary Ann’s house playing dolls, ofc her mother’s dearest old friend Miss Margaret would be in the kitchen chatting.
Can you imagine getting that call? Your kid is over at a friend’s house and their mom calls you to ask if her sister can stop by for a coffee
Andrew Rettek: parents like this don’t just stiffle their own kids, they mess with your kids, calling the ~cops if you give your kids “too much” autonomy. And they teach childless people, including their own kids, that this is reasonable behavior and anything less is negligent.
We used to let kids babysit other kids. I remember having at least one sitter, a neighbor from upstairs, who was only twelve or so. As opposed to now, when someone is terrified their 13-year-old is in a house with a friend, their mom and an uncleared third adult. We still use the term ‘babysitter’ but it means paying an adult at least $25 an hour, rather than letting kids learn some responsibility and earn some cash. It is all so insane. I would of course happily let a normal (non-adult) babysitter take the job for my kids, if I could find them and was confident no one would call the cops.
Also, let your kids pay cash or have their own debit card?
Patrick McKenzie: An anecdotally common user behavior I wouldn’t have guessed: many children old enough to go out with friends but not old enough to have independent purchasing power (or payment methods) now order in restaurants via a text message to Mom, who places order through app and pays.
At minimum this requires Mom to be by the phone willing to respond. That is not always an option. What do you do when she is busy?
Also you should not be tracking your kids and their spending like this. If you are old enough to go out with friends, and it is worth spending money to go to a place to eat, then give the kid the money. Don’t scrutinize their food orders. The responses seem confused by this as well.
In reasons you don’t need to devote crazy amounts of attention to your kids news:
Robert Wiblin: If incremental parenting effort for infants had large benefits you’d expect second and third children to do worse than they in fact do, seeing as how they have to share their parents’ attention with siblings while firstborns do not.
They do [a bit worse] but the effect is pretty modest given the reduction in parental effort is presumably large (20%, 30%, maybe more). (Though I guess one could argue it’s offset by learning effects.)
Daniel Eth: Unless there was a similar-sized effect in the opposite direction from better parenting due to learning.
Another hypothesis is that having older siblings is actively helpful, and this makes up for some of the difference. I generally am inclined to believe this.
The three Rs are taking a back seat to climate change in New Jersey schools.
As one of the lead state partners for the Next Generation Science Standards developed by the National Research Council, New Jersey has been integrating climate change into its K-12 science curriculum for the past decade. The Garden State has upped the ante in recent years by becoming the first state to incorporate climate change into all school subjects, not only science.
In 2020, the state board of education adopted a new set of climate-focused student learning standards. Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy, was the primary cheerleader for these standards, which were implemented in the 2022-23 school year after a pandemic-related delay. Under those standards, all public school districts across the state are required to teach and test students in every grade about climate change. The requirement covers core content areas including science, computer technology, social studies, world languages, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and life and career planning. Districts are encouraged to incorporate climate change into English language arts and mathematics instruction.
Climate education resources distributed by Trenton’s first-in-the-nation Office of Climate Change Education provide sample lesson plans to illustrate how teachers can highlight climate change in class while constantly reminding students that New Jersey is suffering “the worst impacts of global warming.” When learning about U.S. and world history, students are required to explain how natural resources such as fossil fuels remain a source of conflict, both at home and abroad. When mastering a foreign language, students are asked to discuss “the impact of climate change on the target language region of the world.” And in school performances, students are encouraged to use climate change to “inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles and varied cultural perspectives.”
Among last year’s cavalcade of Big Ideas movies, Alexander Payne’s quiet period dramedy “The Holdovers” was, I think, considered somewhat slight, despite being well-regarded. But although it lacked any literal nuclear explosions or dramatic political speeches, the film wrestled with one of the major social themes of our times: a kind of structural transformation in the value proposition of elite education that I think about whenever I see a new campus controversy.
This is not so much the plot of the movie (no spoilers here) as the backdrop to it. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a teacher at the fictional Barton Academy in the 1970s. Barton is an elite boys’ boarding school, but even though the students are mostly very rich, the accommodations are not particularly nice.
Part of the ethic of this kind of school is that students live under rather spartan conditions, away from the comforts of their parents’ posh lifestyles. And Hunham, who teaches ancient history, is a particularly strict old-school teacher. He maintains high standards for discipline and for learning. He assigns a lot of reading, expects his students to do it, and gives them bad grades if they don’t. He expects students who receive bad grades to suffer consequences. In his understanding of himself and his job, this is the role of an elite educational institution: Wealthy parents hire Barton to put their kids through the paces, because they think that this will be good for the students in the longer term. The school is providing a service, and part of the service they are providing is harshness.
Why do you take notes? What do you hope to get from your notes? What are Cornell Notes and how do you use the Cornell note-taking system?
There are many ways to take notes. It’s helpful to try out different methods and determine which work best for you in different situations. Whether you are learning online or in person, the physical act of writing can help you remember better than just listening or reading. Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop. This page and our Canvas module will teach you about different note-taking systems and styles and help you determine what will work best for your situation.
For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.
Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.
Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”
At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.
For parents (and students) who might be out there right now fretting over college tuition and applications and aren’t rich Hollywood players , here are some college alternatives to consider. Free yourself from the “labels” of elite institutions. If they’re thinking of becoming a lawyer (but seriously, how many more of those do we need??) or an engineer then obviously you’ll need to pursue institutional options. But if they’re just not sure about their paths and/or might have skills that are immediately marketable, here are some ideas to give some serious thought. I’ve seen plenty of parents and students take these paths, and almost to a person they are far, far ahead of their peers in terms of earning, achievement and job satisfaction.
Teach English in a foreign country. I headed straight to college from high school but I had a few friends who headed overseas to teach English to the students of hopeful and/or rich parents desiring to give their kids an advantage by learning Western culture. Typically, you don’t need any type of special training or education. Often times living expenses are paid for. It’s a great way to earn for a year or two and learn about different cultures and lifestyles firsthand. It’s basically getting paid to be educated!
The military. Somewhere in the last few decades the idea that the military was the “last resort” for people who are too dumb or too poor for college became pervasive. This idea couldn’t be further from the reality that military service can be a fantastic conduit to a successful and fulfilling career. Military life teaches discipline and teamwork, two extremely valuable skills in the civilian job market. They’ll also educate you for free and provide healthcare and housing subsidies. There are a plethora of non-combat tracks to pursue that can lead to incredibly elite and specialized careers, including information tech, health services and other support personnel. You can pursue a lifetime career or serve for a limited amount of time and leave with a degree, money in the bank and the very distinguished resume enhancer of having served your country. It is a legitimate career path that boasts some of our greatest minds.
Charitable service. The Peace Corps, missions work through a religious organization, volunteering with a UN or WHO organization that provide healthcare and sustenance in third world countries — if you’ve got a child with a heart for serving others and a thirst for new experiences, it might be a great idea to look at volunteering for a fixed time. Again, often the basics are paid for and you’re learning skills in an intense environment that could offer an invaluable advantage in the job market back home. Also, the quickest and best way to find contentment in your own life and a perspective that makes you flexible and resilient is to see firsthand how challenging life is for most of the rest of the world. Like military service it is also a fantastic resume-enhancer. Few things are more valuable to potential employers than an employee who can easily shift gears and refocus when things get tough.
Work on a cruise ship. This isn’t for everyone, but it can be a great option for those who endeavor for careers in the arts. Cruise lines need entertainers and often hold mass auditions once or twice a year in port-of-call regions like California or Orlando. They’re always in need of comedians, dancers, singers, musicians and also production staff…pretty much any position in stage entertainment. Not only are your accommodations paid for but you’re also earning a competitive salary, one that often ends up being far and above the yearly income for a struggling artist on land. It can be an adventure and an opportunity to intimately connect with other artists who will no doubt be the one to lead you to more work once your cruise stint is over.
Take a gap year…or two. The bourgeois fantasy of a gap year includes travel and adventure, but it doesn’t have to be that. A gap year can just be taking some time off to simply work and get a better feel for what you want to do in the future. It’s also a great way for parents to help their kids when they aren’t in a position to pay for college tuition. You may not be able to pay for four years of college, but you can allow your child to continue to live at home rent-free, get any job they can find and then save their money to pursue something more fulfilling once they’ve figured out what it is. Don’t turn your nose up at a year or two behind the counter at McDonald’s. Some of the wealthiest people in America started right there.
Instead of paying for four years of college, pay for a couple of years of living expenses. A young friend of mine decided that she would like to pursue a career in film production. Her parents had some means to pay for schooling but they made her an offer — they would pay for a few years of college or pay for two years of reasonable living expenses and she could move to L.A. and start working her way up the food chain. She chose the latter, found some less than ideal roommates in L.A. and began volunteering for every crap job on every indie film set she could get close to. By the time the two years were up she had worked her way into a steady job in the industry, earned enough money to get her own place and is now a working executive producer in Hollywood for the independent film scene. If you’ve got a child who is disciplined enough to take on the challenge of forging their own way, this is a great alternative to college. There’s no replacement for real-world experience and some career paths aren’t really enhanced by a degree. In some industries, employers only need to know you can do the job. If you can earn while you learn, you should!
Trade school. A Gender Studies degree might get you a job teaching Gender Studies to other Gender Studies students but more likely (statistically speaking) it will get you a minimum wage job to help pay the bills while you search for another career path. You know who does work steadily and lucratively? Plumbers. Electricians. Morticians. Mechanics. Even if you’re the type of snob who feels those jobs aren’t “elite” enough, don’t worry…there are actually elite positions in most trade jobs that can satisfy that perverse need. Someone has to fix the toilets at Buckingham Palace. The Queen poops too!
Nothing. Let your kid figure out how to pay for school or travel or whatever all by herself. Offer her advice on budgeting, living frugally, give her a timetable for complete independence and then back away. The notion that we parents are obligated to pay for our kids’ higher education is a big part of our debt problem in America. Your children are in the prime of their lives. They have energy to burn. They can go to school, work/party through the night and get up the next day to do it all over again. You remember the days! You (and I) on the other hand are nearing retirement age. Our window for earning enough money to carry us through our later years is closing quickly. There’s nothing wrong with just letting your child pay their own bills and choose their own path while they’re in the physical position to be able to work hard, work long and work smart. Let them take advantage of their youth and concentrate on padding your future so you don’t overly-burden them down the road with the financials of your care just as they’re incurring their own family financial burdens. I know it’s a shocking thought, but it’s really not that crazy to about 99% of the rest of planet Earth. The idea that we’re supposed to provide every single privilege for our kids no matter the cost is embarrassingly Western and relatively new. I’m not saying you have to choose this option, I’m just telling you it is an option and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Welcome to Yale. Please disregard what you’ve been told so far, and follow these instructions.
1. Understand that you’re here to learn how to be good citizens of the United States. Many of you come from Japan or Ghana or France, and we’re glad to have you. But Yale can’t teach you to be a good Japanese citizen; we don’t know how. Nor can we teach you to be a “global citizen” or “citizen of the world,” because there is no such thing. The “globe” has no citizens, because the globe, as such, has no art, religion, music, literature, theater, traditions, folk songs, heroes, traumas or TV stations; no tastes, fads, styles, treasures or shared experience. So you might as well learn to be good Americans for now.
Like all nations, America is defined by its shared experience, and by the enemies it’s made: the Kaiser, the Nazis, the Japanese imperialists and the Soviet Union, among others—in just the past century or so. We are the one nation that always marks itself “C-minus: room for improvement!” Americans work constantly to clarify, concentrate and distill our principles and become more like ourselves—more like the luminous city on a hill to which all nations look up.
2. You are now a part-owner of Western civilization. This should be no surprise: You have come, after all, to one of the country’s leading schools for training Western leaders. You can tell this and other American colleges are Western because they are dedicated to noisy public argument about the truth, to the teaching of history without chauvinism, factionalism or (theoretically) self-hatred, and to competition among everyone over everything. Furthermore, we love sports more every year, starting at age 2, until at last we die of sheer boredom.
3. Now that you are a college student, learn skills. Everything else can wait. Learning science, mathematics or engineering centers on learning skills. Much of the arts, letters and history is centered on skills too. Learn as much music as you can. Master at least one foreign language completely. Reading and writing English are the most important skills of all.
4. Listen skeptically. Grade-school education is built on the myth that the teacher knows what he’s doing. Here, things are different. Never close your mind to the possibility that your teacher—despite his authoritative tone, his many books, papers, patents, theorems or epic poems, his international reputation and his world-wide following—might not know what he’s talking about.
Last week the Nation’s Report Card announced that no more than 40% of America’s 4th and 8th graders are proficient in reading and math. Those are scary numbers, but the numbers for writing are even more frightening: only 27% of American 8th and 12th graders attained proficiency.
Why are American students such terrible writers?
Several answers to this question dawned on me while reading through an 1897 text by Dr. Edwin Lewis. Entitled A First Book in Writing English, Dr. Lewis’ book was recommended for freshman and sophomore students and used in places such as Ann Arbor High School around the turn of the 20th century. Needless to say, American schools, students, and even adults regularly violate three principles which Lewis deemed essential to the writing process.
1. They Don’t Read High Quality Literature
As has been previously noted, today’s schools often fail to present their students with many literature selections which demonstrate good examples of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other components of high-quality writing. A thorough and challenging reading program, however, is one of Lewis’ keys to successful writing.
“One of the quickest ways of learning to know good English, is oral reading. For him who would write the language it is therefore a great economy to learn to read it. It is an invaluable habit to read aloud every day some piece of prose with the finest feeling the reader can lend to it. In no other way can one so easily learn to notice and to remember new words. In no other way can one catch the infinitely varied rhythm of prose, and acquire a sense of how a good sentence rises gradually from the beginning and then descends in a cadence. This rise and fall of the sentence is not merely a matter of voice; it is a matter of thought as well.…
If the student reads aloud from writers whose work was natural, unforced, original, he will gradually come to see his own ideas more clearly, feel his own feelings more keenly.”
2. They Skim
The fast-paced age of the internet has trained all of us – adults and children alike – to become text skimmers. But such a practice diminishes thought and understanding, two facets essential to good writing.
“To gain new words and new ideas, the student must compel himself to read slowly. Impatient to hurry on and learn how the tale or poem ends, many a youth is accustomed to read so rapidly as to miss the best part of what the author is trying to say. Thoughts cannot be read so rapidly as words. To get at the thoughts and really to retain the valuable expressions, the student must scrutinize and ponder as he reads. Each word must be thoroughly understood; its exact value in the given sentence must be grasped.”
3. They Don’t Memorize
“Drill and Kill” and the memorization of facts has become a prominent no-no in an age where creativity and feelings are encouraged. But is the de-emphasis on memorization actually depriving children of valuable writing material?
“To the habit of memorizing, many a person is indebted not merely for high thoughts that cheer hours of solitude and that stimulate his own thinking, but for command of words. The degree to which the language of modern writers is derived from a few great authors is startling. Shakespeare’s phrases are a part of the tissue of every man’s speech to-day. Such writers as Charles Lamb bear Shakespeare’s mark on every page. The language of the King James version of the Bible is echoed in modern English prose and poetry. It formed styles so unlike as those of Bunyan, Ruskin, and Abraham Lincoln. Most teachers would declare that a habit of learning Scripture by heart is of incalculable value to a student’s English.”
Would we see American writing ability increase if these three elements were restored to the classroom?
– Via Will Fitzhugh.
“We aren’t teaching students how to think critically!” So goes the exasperated lament you have probably heard and possibly uttered. The thing is, that’s a crazy hard thing to do. It may seem like a logic class should teach you to think in a more disciplined way, for example, but the sad fact is that those mental habits are very unlikely to transfer beyond the walls of the logic course. There are many different styles and contexts of critical thinking, and there is no magic subroutine that we could insert into our mental programming that covers them all.
But despair is not the only option. Effective coursework can build important and useful critical thinking skills. Doug Bonn at the University of British Columbia and Stanford’s N.G. Holmes and Carl Wieman focused on good scientific, quantitative thinking when teaching a group of first-year physics students. And like good critically thinking educators, they put their strategy to the test and published the results so they can be evaluated by others.
In this freshman calculus-based physics course, students worked through weekly experiments in lab sections as most physics students do. But the researchers tried a little something different a couple years ago when a fresh class of 130 students came in. In their early lab sections, the students were guided through comparisons between multiple experimental datasets and between experimental datasets and mathematical models.
By applying some statistics they were gradually learning, they grappled with why their comparisons came out the way they did. Rather than simply chalking up mismatches to “we’re just students, and our measurements probably aren’t perfect,” as students often do, they considered modifying their experiments. How could they reduce their error bars? Were the data telling them the mathematical model was incorrect?
WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from Kennesaw State University in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour.
Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job at an investment consulting firm. Her debt has swollen to $65,000, but she will have little trouble paying it off.
As Ms Styles’s story shows, there is no simple answer to the question “Is college worth it?” Some degrees pay for themselves; others don’t. American schoolkids pondering whether to take on huge student loans are constantly told that college is the gateway to the middle class. The truth is more nuanced, as Barack Obama hinted when he said in January that “folks can make a lot more” by learning a trade “than they might with an art history degree”. An angry art history professor forced him to apologise, but he was right.
College graduates aged 25 to 32 who are working full time earn about $17,500 more annually than their peers who have only a high school diploma, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18.
The education research of recent years has pointed overwhelmingly to the importance of teachers. Perhaps more than anything else – quality of principal, size of school, size of class – the strength or weakness of classroom teachers influences how much students learn and even how they fare later in life.
The great unknown is how to improve teacher quality, be it by attracting more good teachers, weeding out more bad teachers or helping teachers become better at their craft.
A new study released on Thursday, offers powerful if still tentative evidence that teacher-evaluation programs can play an important role. The study is especially notable because past research about evaluation programs suggested they had little effect. The new paper, however, studies an evaluation program – called Impact, in the District of Columbia school system – that is far larger, with bigger rewards and stiffer penalties, than most programs.
Impact, which began under Michelle Rhee while she was chancellor, has been a hotly debated program, and the new study is sure to attract attention from both supporters and critics of teacher evaluation. New York state’s plan to begin evaluating teachers has also been the subject of intense praise and criticism, as have such programs elsewhere.
How high do we want to turn up the heat? Where’s the line between “justifiable and productive” and “we’ll be sorry”?
Not questions that are easy to answer, but they deserve very serious thought, especially as the state budget process heats up. The questions involve money, of course, but they also involve the huge amount of change that is going on within schools – the pressure for better results, major changes in learning standards and teaching styles, and new approaches to evaluating teachers and principals that could carry big career implications.
I’ve visited several schools lately, both city and suburban, and I’ve seen some really big changes in what is going on, much of it appealing and promising when it comes to how students get engaged in their learning and what is expected of them. Cool stuff.
But I’ve also talked to teachers who went from describing great work with their students, and, within seconds, have tears in their eyes when talking about how things are going for them personally and for their schools. These are people – some of the best we have in classrooms – working under enormous stress. It is in everyone’s long-term interest for teaching to be good and ultimately doable work. Negative forces can – and are – putting that at risk.
For the moment, let’s focus on how much money public schools will get for the next two years, to be determined by the state budget to be set this spring.
My daughter recently broke her finger playing basketball. When we went to the clinic, the waiting room was packed with dozens of patients, and there were only a couple of medical doctors on duty. We spent 20 minutes with a nurse, ten minutes with the X-ray technician, seven minutes with the orthopedic resident, and just two to three minutes with a doctor. Against apparent odds, our visit turned out very well. Thanks to the combination of talents, expertise and communication styles provided by several professionals, my daughter experienced a remarkably effective – and efficient – healing experience.
In the school day of the future, imagine a similar scenario playing out in classrooms and schools here in California and across the country. The role of the teacher would evolve from that of a soloist to a choreographer, bringing together people and resources in different combinations to create a vibrant learning environment that efficiently serves a growing, evolving population and provides enrichment through a combination of caring relationships.
Research shows daydreaming leads to improved learning; enhanced abilities; greater creativity & increased success I researched how people achieve success. I wanted to find out if there is a pattern that can be replicated and used to help others get the same results. I initially looked at highly successful people in their chosen field from Entrepreneurs like Richard Branson & Peter Jones to Geniuses like Albert Einstein & Leonardo Da Vinci. I also looked at the thinking styles of successful creative people like Beethoven & Walt Disney. What I found was that they all had one thing in common. They all spent time daydreaming about their area of success. “When I get an idea I start at once building it up in my imagination.” Nikola Tesla “When I heard the music it made pictures in my head…here are the pictures.” Walt Disney (Describing the film Fantasia)
PLoS/One: A Program for At-Risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science
Improving the academic performance of at-risk high school students has proven difficult, often calling for an extended day, extended school year, and other expensive measures. Here we report the results of a program for at-risk 9th and 10th graders in Binghamton, New York, called the Regents Academy that takes place during the normal school day and year. The design of the program is informed by the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and learning, in general and for our species as a unique product of biocultural evolution. Not only did the Regents Academy students outperform their comparison group in a randomized control design, but they performed on a par with the average high school student in Binghamton on state-mandated exams. All students can benefit from the social environment provided for at-risk students at the Regents Academy, which is within the reach of most public school districts.
One body of knowledge that we drew upon to design the Regents Academy is based on the work of Elinor Ostrom [19], [20], who received the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. Ostrom is a political scientist by training but has become part of the evolutionary science community. Working primarily with groups attempting to manage common pool resources, she identified eight design features that contributed to the success of each group, which can also be used by groups attempting to achieve other shared objectives. Briefly, the design features are: 1) a strong group identity, including understanding and agreeing with the group’s purpose; 2) benefits proportional to costs, so that the work does not fall unfairly on some individuals and unearned benefits on others; 3) consensus decision-making, since most people dislike being told what to do but will work hard to achieve their own goals; 4) low-cost monitoring, so that lapses of cooperation can be easily detected; 5) graduated sanctions to correct misbehaviors, which begin with friendly reminders and escalate only as needed; 6) conflict resolution that is fast and perceived as fair by group members; 7) sufficient autonomy for the group to make its own decisions without interference from other groups; 8) relations among groups that embody the same principles as the relations among individuals within the group. These design features are consilient with the general evolutionary dynamics of cooperation and the social environment of small-scale human societies throughout our own history as a species. Any educational program, including one for at-risk high school students, can potentially benefit from implementing these design features.
The following questions and concerns are submitted to you for your consideration regarding the “findings and recommendations” of the MMSD K-12 Literacy Program Evaluation report:
1. What findings and recommendations are there for ‘year-around’ literacy experiences to help mitigate ‘losses’ over the summer months in achievement gains during the traditional academic year?
Although “summer loss” was not a particular focus of discussion during the evaluation process, there are several ways in which the recommendations address reducing the impact of summer reading loss. These include:
Recommendation I – curricular consistency will provide for a more seamless connection with content and instruction in summer school, Saturday school (pending funding) and after school supports.
Recommendation II – more explicit instruction focused in early grades will allow students to read for enjoyment at earlier ages.
Recommendation III – a well-developed intervention plan will follow a student through summer school and into the following academic year
2. What are the findings and recommendations regarding parental (significant adults in student’s life) participation, training, evaluation and accountability in the literacy learning process?
Parental participation opportunities to support their children’s enjoyment and achievement in literacy include:
Family Literacy Nights at various elementary schools and in collaboration with Madison School and Community Recreation. Town Hall Meetings that provide opportunities for families to share pros and cons of literacy practices at school and home.
Literacy 24-7: Parent training for Spanish speaking families on how to promote literacy learning. Read Your Heart Out Day: This event builds positive family, community and school relationships with a literacy focus and supports both the family involvement and cultural relevance components of the Madison Metropolitan School District Strategic Plan.
Tera Fortune: Professional development for parents about the Dual Language Immersion Program with a focus on bi-literacy throughout the content areas. MALDEF Curriculum Training: Nine-week training covering a variety of topics to assist parents in sharing the responsibility of student success and how to communicate effectively in schools.
Regular column in Umoja Magazine: Forum to inform families and community members about educational issues through African American educators’ expertise. Several columns have focused on literacy learning at home.
Training is provided for parents on how to choose literature that:
Has positive images that leave lasting impressions
Has accurate, factual information that is enjoyable to read
Contains meaningful stories that reflect a range of cultural values and lifestyles
Has clear and positive perspective for people of color in the 21st century
Contains material that is self affirming Promotes positive literacy learning at home
Evaluations of the Read Your Heart Out and Family Literacy Night were conducted by requesting that participating parents, staff, students and community members complete a survey about the success of the event and the effects on student achievement.
3. What are the consequential and remediation strategies for non-performance in meeting established achievement/teaching/support standards for students, staff and parents? What are the accompanying evaluation/assessment criteria?
A District Framework is nearing completion. This Framework will provide clear and consistent expectations and rubrics for all instructional staff and administrators. Improvement will be addressed through processes that include the School Improvement Plans and staff and administrator evaluations processes.
4. Please clarify the future of the Reading Recovery program.
MMSD proposes to maintain Reading Recovery teachers and teacher leaders as an intervention at grade 1. There are currently two Reading Recovery teacher leaders participating in a two-year professional development required to become Reading Recovery teacher leaders. One of these positions will be certified to support English Language Learners. The modifications proposed include: 1) targeting these highly skilled Reading Recovery teachers to specific students across schools based on district-wide data for 2011-12 and 2) integrating the skills of Reading Recovery staff into a comprehensive intervention plan along with skilled interventionists resulting in all elementary schools benefiting from grade 1 reading intervention.
5. How will the literacy learning process be integrated with the identification and development of Talented and Gifted (TAG) students?
The development of a balanced, comprehensive assessment system will result in teachers having more frequent and accurate student data available to tailor instruction. K-12 alignment uses tools such as Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) and Educational Planning and Assessment System (EPAS) are being implemented in Spring, 2011.
The Response to Intervention model is based on evidence-based instruction and responds to students who need additional challenge and/or support.
6. What will be the 2010-2011 budgetary priorities and strategies for undertaking the literacy program and resources recommendations outlined in the report?
PreK-12 literacy will be a priority for the 2011-12 budget process. In addition to the prioritization of funding within our budget parameters, MMSD is in the process of writing a major grant (Investing in Innovation – i3) to support the recommendations of the literacy evaluation as a key strategy to close achievement gaps and improve literacy for all students to be ready for college and/or careers.
At 10, Grace Morgan is a young fashionista and takes pains to dress in the latest styles. But her mom, Amy, works part-time and her husband was recently laid off, leaving little room in the family budget for designer-brand clothes.
So Grace didn’t ask her mom to open her wallet this fall to buy clothes. Instead, she sold a stack of her own old jeans and shirts at a rummage sale and paired the proceeds with discount coupons to get the stylish jeggings and tops she wanted for school, says her mother, of Lake in the Hills, Ill. Grace is learning “we have to make choices with our money,” she says.
The cost of raising kids is continuing to rise. A middle-income family can expect to shell out nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or $222,360, to raise a baby born in 2009 to age 18, according to the Department of Agriculture. That is up about 1.4% from 2007, before the recession began–and it doesn’t include college costs.
The premise of this book is enticingly simple . It presents two solutions to two prevalent problems in education . The first is the vast amount of content required to be taught because of various state standards, and how one can thread that maze and “teach for understanding .” That is, how can educators get students to apply what they’ve learned to new and unfamiliar problems? The second is the diverse nature of today’s classrooms, the result of heterogeneous grouping of students of different abilities . How does an educator differentiate instruction to accommodate such diversity in a single classroom?
I read this book in a math teaching methods class a few years ago . One event in that class stands out regarding this textbook . In a chapter on assessing understanding, a chart presents examples of “Inauthentic versus Authentic Work” (p . 68) . For example, “Solve contrived problems” is listed as inauthentic; “Solve ‘real world’ prob- lems” is listed as authentic . The black-and-white nature of the dis- tinctions on the chart bothered me, so when the teacher asked if we had any comments, I said that calling certain practices “inauthentic” is not only pejorative but misleading . Since the chart listed “Practice decontextualized skills” as inauthentic and “Interpret literature” as authentic, I asked the teacher, “Do you really think that learning to read is an inauthentic skill?”
She replied that she didn’t really know about issues related to reading . Keeping it on the math level, I then asked why the authors automatically assumed that a word problem that might be contrived didn’t involve “authentic” mathematical concepts . She answered with a blank stare and the words “Let’s move on .”
That incident remains in my mind because it is emblematic of the educational doctrine that pervades schools of education as well as this book . The doctrine holds that mastery of facts and attaining procedural fluency in subjects like mathematics amounts to mind- numbing “drill and kill” exercises that ultimately stifle creativity and critical thinking . It also embodies the belief that critical thinking skills can be taught .
In a discussion of what constitutes “understanding,” the authors state that a student’s ability to apply what he or she has learned does not necessarily represent understanding . “When we call for an appli- cation we do not mean a mechanical response or mindless ‘plug-in’ of a memorized formula . Rather, we ask students to transfer–to use what they know in a new situation” (p . 67) . In terms of math and other subjects that involve attaining procedural fluency, employing worked examples as scaffolding for tackling more-complex prob- lems is not something that these authors see as leading to any kind of understanding . That a mastery of fundamentals provides the foun- dation for the creativity they seek is lost in their quest to get stu- dents performing authentic work from the start
Lanyon, Grams, and fellow Hawthorne teachers Julie Olsen and Abby Miller received a grant from the national nonprofit Fund for Teachers that allowed them to travel to Harlem to learn about the art, music, poetry, literary history and drama of this hub of African-American life. They all agree that they now have a new appreciation for the richness of black culture and its profound impact on American life and culture as a whole.
For these four, plus a dozen more local educators whose travel was covered by a couple of additional grants, the experience was part of a wider effort to help them better teach in what’s known as a culturally relevant way.
“Culturally relevant practice” is a relatively new movement in education that recognizes that learning, for all of us, is related to our cultural background and what we know from our daily living. Research shows that effectively bridging the gaps between a teacher’s background and student’s experience can improve academic performance.
Andreal Davis is one of two district administrators in charge of helping to create culturally relevant practices in local classrooms. A former elementary school teacher at Lincoln, Davis, who is black, now helps colleagues recognize that different groups of children bring their different backgrounds, expectations and even communication styles to the classroom.
She says teachers sometimes need help learning to translate different ways their students learn, or what kind of interactions make sense to different groups of children.
“Communication styles for all of us can vary a great deal. It can be like the difference between listening to conventional music, or listening to jazz, where the narrative doesn’t just go in a straight line,” she explains. “If that flow is what you’re used to, it’s what you know how to follow in a conversation, or in a class.”
Given Hawthorne’s demographics — 70 percent of the students are poor, with a diverse population that includes 18 percent Hispanic, 20 percent Asian, 32 percent black and 28 percent white — the school has respectable, rising test scores.
People who saw the recent Madison screening of The Lottery saw another part of the Harlem world: the battle between the traditional public school system and charters, specifically the Harlem Success Academy.
Cassie Frankel seems an unlikely martial arts warrior.
The sophomore at West High heard about the Mixed Martial Arts Club from her chemistry teacher and decided to give it a try. The group meets Thursdays at noon, learning and practicing a variety of fighting styles, including boxing, wrestling, judo and jujutsu.
“I like that it’s an individual sport because I’m not that athletic,” Frankel says during a break in practice. “It’s more about how your body works.” She likes boxing best: “I feel really tough with the boxing gloves, even though they’re pink.”
Frankel acknowledges the controversy over teaching kids to fight. But, she says, “I think it’s a good idea because if you know how to fight you’re less likely to get hurt.”
Third-graders at Hunters Woods Elementary School are required to learn the fundamentals of the violin. They know how to stand up straight, how to hold their instruments and how to use the tippy tips of their fingers when they press on the strings so they don’t make what their teacher calls “an icky sound.”
After learning a grand total of eight notes, they also know how to make music. Their repertoire one fall morning included pieces from a range of cultures and styles: “Caribbean Island,” “Seminole Chant,” “Good King Wenceslas.”
In Fairfax County and elsewhere, students often begin studying violin in fourth grade. Hunters Woods, an arts and science magnet school in Reston, gives them a one-year head start. Experts say the earlier children begin, the more likely they are to succeed in music.
Hunters Woods, with 950 students, is one of more than a dozen local schools in which teachers are trained through the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to infuse arts education into other subjects. For instance, students might build instruments from recycled materials, learn science through lessons on sound and vibration or study math through measurement and patterning. Some also compose songs with lyrics inspired by Virginia history.
But music programs and the rest of the education budget are under scrutiny as the county School Board seeks to close a $220 million budget shortfall for the fiscal year that begins in July. One proposal to save about $850,000 would trim band and strings teaching positions, making it tough to keep such programs in third and fourth grades, said Roger Tomhave, fine arts coordinator for Fairfax schools.
This tune sounds familiar. Madison formerly offered a 4th grade strings program (now only in 5th).
“The model is inspired by the success of home-schoolers,” he said. Students will set their class schedules, enabling them to learn at their pace and in their styles. Teachers will act as advisers, not taskmasters.
As for homework, “the one-size-fits-all [model] mandated in today’s schools is largely counterproductive,” Shusterman says in a slide presentation he uses to sell his idea. School for Tomorrow will have a home reading requirement and “encourage and support individualized, student-initiated homework.”
Much of Shusterman’s plan is inspired by John Dewey, a 20th-century educational philosopher whose devotees have called for teachers to be “guides on the side, not sages on the stage.” Dewey led a movement called progressive education in which, he said, children learn best when pursuing individual projects that allow them to explore their world.
Many teachers, in both private and public schools, use project-based learning to a degree. But at School for Tomorrow, Shusterman said, every course and project will be linked to this question: What does a high school graduate need to know and need to be able to do to thrive in college, the workplace and life in the 21st century?
There has been bitterness, surprise and resentment over my vote with respect to the Lapham/Marquette consolidation. I would like to let people know why I voted to move the alternative programs to Marquette. I have a mix of emotions several days after the storm and hope you find it helpful to understand the process from my perspective.
I made this decision in the most thoughtful and respectful manner possible. Unfortunately, the process of getting to this vote is more complicated than the moment in time when the board makes a single vote. I hope those of you most affected by this can see how this transpired.
In the past three weeks, Beth Moss and I, as newly elected members of the Board of Education, have met with the staff of MMSD to get up to speed with our current programs. This process takes many, many hours. We have also spoken with teachers, visited schools, gone to public forums, taken calls, studied data, looked at programs with a critical eye and visited with many constituents.
On a sunny September morning in 2005 Preston Hollow Elementary School hosted Bike to School Day. Dozens of grinning children with fair skin played and talked outside in the courtyard, relaxing happily after rides through their North Dallas neighborhood of garish mansions and stately brick homes. Parents shared tea and fruit, capturing the smiles of their kids with digital cameras. A police officer gave the group a friendly lecture on bicycle safety. Inside the classrooms surrounding the courtyard, other children watched glumly. Many of them lived in the modest apartment complexes off Central Expressway, separated from their school by busy roads and shopping centers. Those kids, nearly all them Hispanic and black, took the bus to school.
As their classmates parked their bikes and snacked on fruit and juice the other children waited in English as a second language (ESL) classes. A federal judge would later rule that many of them shouldn’t have been there. Their language skills were good enough to be in the same classes as the kids who rode their bikes to Preston Hollow.
From Dallas Observer, January 11, 2007.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:
The School Board should proceed down this path, but cautiously. As officials of the Milwaukee Public Schools have noted, private schools have long offered single-sex education. Parents who send their children to public schools deserve that choice, too. But officials should be prepared to abandon this experiment if it is shown to hurt girls, as gender separation did in the past.
The proposal is to open an all-boys school and an all-girls school in September, though that target date may not be met. There should not be a rush to do so. Getting the schools right is more important than getting them open quickly. MPS has yet to specify what grade levels the schools would encompass.
The initial impetus for proposals to separate school kids by sex was to help girls, who lagged behind boys in math and science. The theory was that girls were too reticent around boys and that the sexes had different styles of learning. In an all-female setting, girls wouldn’t be afraid to show how smart they were, and the material could be presented in a feminine style. Also, such a setting would permit girls to take leadership roles they would be too bashful to assume in a co-ed milieu.
Video and audio from Wednesday’s Math Forum are now available [watch the 80 minute video] [mp3 audio file 1, file 2]. This rare event included the following participants:
- Dick Askey (UW Math Professor)
- Faye Hilgart, Madison Metropolitan School District
- Steffen Lempp (MMSD Parent and UW Math Professor)
- Linda McQuillen, Madison Metropolitan School District
- Gabriele Meyer (MMSD Parent and a UW Math Department Lecturer)
- Dr. Terry Millar of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research
The conversation, including audience questions was lively.
schoolinfosystem.org