Carol Corbett Burris posted a critique of the Relay Graduate School of Education here. Robert Pondiscio questioned Burris’ metaphor about “lighting a fire” rather than “filling a pail,” on the assumption that she does not care about the content of the curriculum.
My view: Curriculum matters; resources matter; poverty matters; and teachers should be free to use the teaching style that works best for them. And I still doubt the validity of a “graduate school of education” that has no scholars on its faculty and no curriculum other than data analysis and classroom management.
Burris responds here to Pondiscio, followed by Pondiscio’s response to Burris:
| If Robert is a believer in enriched and challenging curriculum, he will find a great friend in me. This year every 11th grader in my school with the exception of the severely disabled who need life skills training, took IB English….our special Ed students, Black students, Latino students and White students (we are 22% minority). The 16% who receive free and reduced price lunch with the majority who do not, sat side by side, without tracking, to study the rigorous curriculum of the IB. At the end of the year they tool the Regents. All but one (an ELL special education student) passed. 77% reached mastery. In our IB English classes, No fingers wiggled, no responses were cut off. The conversation focused on analytical questions and challenging literature. I watched many videos on the Relay site and others on Doug Lemovs site. If a teacher used that regimented drill style in my school, they would be asked to leave. If they did a demo lesson like the one on the site, they would not get a job. The idea that the ‘urban’ (which is a polite code for Black and poor) child cannot thrive with respectful instruction that includes thank yous, think time and open ended questions horrifies me. Every prospective teacher deserves an enriched teacher preparation program that exposes them to a variety of teaching styles.
This is from Robert Pondiscio:
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
I would love to have you visit. The taxonomy guides much of our thinking and as the great Ben Bloom said, our cannot teach the higher levels, if the lower levels (retention, understanding and application) are not in place. I use the doll within a doll analogy when explaining it to new teachers. Filling the pail referred to cognitive non engagement of students not to content. Sorry if I was not clear.
I think Carol’s penultimate sentence is the critical point, around which all of us should rally. Cognitive non-engagement plagues our schools — indeed, the regnant standardized testing regime demands it — and those in power are promoting it more and more. To be sure, there are differences, among those of us who love learning, about what the *relative* priority between inspiration and conveying knowledge should be. But that debate of yore is one we no longer have the luxury of indulging in. Now, rote learning and an obsessive emphasis on just math and reading — a curriculum thus devoid of substantive richness, projects, self-direction, or any other humanistic values — dominates. The Relay techniques in the video show all this in reductio ad absurdum fashion. It, and the mandatory cognitive non-engagement it represents, has to stop.
I love discussions like these. I agree that students need a firm grounding in core knowledge in order to engage in deep critical thinking. In recent years in my classroom, I’ve likened it to cooking…they need to know how to whisk eggs, measure ingredients, and handle utensils properly before they create any culinary masterpiece.
Knowledge may be the kindling that feeds the fire, but wiggling fingers and militaristic teaching are the rain drops that snuff out the flame. There are many ways to instill a love of learning and convey information that do not require mechanistic, cookie cutter teaching.
I, too, appreciate the civility of this exchange, and look forward to Mr. Pondiscio’s visit to Ms. Burris’ school. It would be very refreshing to have an educational reformer learn something from an educator.
In what sense are there no open-ended questions in that Relay video? Having students generate character traits and evidence for them are both open-ended tasks.
Where in the video does each individual student have the time to stop and individually brainstorm their own ideas? Where did they get in small groups and create a master list? Where did they share all their ideas as a class and have a truly rigorous classroom discussion? Don’t tell me that was the next day’s lesson; it wasn’t.
Relay recently changed the titled of this video as though that makes it better. Taking it down completely and re-thinking the purpose of their program would have been a better idea.
You can throw at open ended questions rapid fire, but if kids don’t have time to think, process and share, it is pointless. This was just crowd control while baffling them with BS.
Typo…throw out (not at)..wish I could edit.
I, like you, have no idea what happened outside of the few minutes we see in the video, but I’m reluctant to make sweeping condemnations on the basis of the little bit we see. And it looks like we agree that, contrary to the original criticism, the kids are in fact answering open-ended questions.
No actually I don’t agree kidS were answering open ended questions.
One boy, maybe two (who was trying to save him), was on the hot seat to conform to what the “teacher” was looking for…she was guiding him to get what she wanted and making him quite anxious. This isn’t open ended. This is manipulation.
i think you need to read Linda’s reply again–she doesn’t see any open-ended questions in that video, and neither do i.
and whether our conclusions are sweeping or not, its hard not to believe that the video excerpt isn’t representative of the teaching methods taught at Relay, as that’s what the video was posted to represent,right?
We might want to argue that the *delivery* of the open-ended questions is not ideal, but some of them (which I already pointed out) are quite clearly open-ended.
The video was – explicitly – posted to illustrate one particular teaching technique. There’s no reason to assume, based on this video, that this video represents the entirety of what Relay thinks teachers should do.
What teacher would want to be evaluated the way this teacher is being evaluated here?
Frankly, what concerns me is calling this program a graduate school of education. It is a program to train charter teachers a particular pedagogical style. I think future teachers should learn a variety of strategies and use what is right for their students. I don’t understand how they can grant a masters degree for learning this limited way to teach. But then, I don’t think much of online degrees either.
Diane
Do you attend or “teach” at this institution? Are you a teacher of
children ages 5-18?
I am worried that you even view this clip as an example of a “teaching technique”. I think we will not be able to agree on anything because you view this as teaching and many of us (who do teach real children every day) do not. This is worrisome.
with all due respect, there were no open-ended questions in that video. if you think there were, you need to look again.
as to whether or not this is a “graduate school,” its clearly not graduate education. its more like a trade school approach, which is sadly becoming more common for many teachers who are required to get grad degrees or credits to remain certified. there has been a real “dumbing down” of what constitutes a masters degree, and Relay is just another example of this trend. this kind of education is more like “training” than “preparation”–we are watching a real Balkanization of the teaching force into “haves” and “have-nots.” and the Relay grads are in the “have-not” camp.
Given the overwhelming lack of evidence that traditional education masters’ degrees do anything for anyone, I’m not sure why people are picking on a tiny new program.
Read Arthur Levine’s scathing reports, starting with this one: http://www.edschools.org/teacher_report.htm
Folks could also look at more recent research on the master’s effect, such as this:
http://www.edweek.org/tsb/articles/2012/02/29/02effect.h05.html
and this:
Click to access ArroyoResearchServices_MastersDegreesAndTeacherEffectiveness_Brief_2012Feb9.pdf
Sorry, Folks (not Folds). Geeze! I hate that my eyesight has deteriorated so much that I keep missing typos and then have no way to correct them!
Please present peer reviewed studies that demonstrate the overwhelming evidence that graduate programs do not work. I am so tired of the sweeping negative generalizations made about public schools and Ed schools not working. Second, Relay is expanding and has been joined by MATCH. No “tiny” aspirations for this program.
I have a post “awaiting moderation”, in reply to Stuart’s, in which I provided links to a couple studies that are more recent than the paper at the site he linked to, and which demonstrate positive outcomes from teachers with master’s degrees. (That’s the post where my spelling typo that i was referring to is.) I’d provide the links again here, but I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the links in posts that may red flag them for moderation, in case they’re spam.
One thing I noticed at the site provided by Stuart is that they recommend,
“Shifting the training of a significant percentage of new teachers from master’s degree granting-institutions to research universities”
I agree that programs like Relay and MATCH should be part of research universities, not stand-alone grad schools.
“Prof” — your Ed Week link is not relevant evidence at all. It merely shows that students of teachers with masters’ degrees score higher on NAEP. But for all you know, those students are richer and more privileged students who would have scored just as high if their teachers had merely an undergraduate degree, if even that much.
Your second link isn’t much better. It does try to control for some student-level variables, but in the end, it may just be telling us that within particular schools, teachers with masters’ degrees tend to get better students in their classes, compared to other teachers in the same schools.
Carol — read Clotfelter, Ladd, and Vigdor’s 2007 paper for just a taste of the real scholarship that has been done on this issue: http://www.caldercenter.org/PDF/1001058_Teacher_Credentials.pdf They are respected scholars, and Ladd in particular could be said to be on Ravitch’s side of the fence. If you look at pages 32-33, they find that masters’ degrees have, if anything, a negative effect on students.
NOTE: Masters’ degrees in a more difficult academic subject (i.e., in math or in chemistry) might have an impact on high school teachers of those subjects. That’s a different issue.
Stuart,
You said, “the overwhelming lack of evidence that traditional education masters’ degrees do anything for anyone”
Now it’s only about master’s degrees doing something just for kids in poverty. Never hear from people in that camp when the government only reports aggregate statistics on students and doesn’t mention that national averages are pulled down by the scores of children in poverty. Same folks who say poverty is no excuse for school failure and then use that as an excuse to ignore poverty –and scape-goat teachers. Same folks who don’t report when other kids are doing well.
International studies demonstrate that only 14% of school achievement is attributed to quality schools, but no one wants to address out of school factors here because it’s easier and cheaper to blame teachers (and their teachers):
Click to access 2123.pdf
There is no international conspiracy amongst teachers and ed schools to not teach poor children. Poverty is a socio-economic condition that cannot be mediated through education alone. Those 80+% out of school factors must be addressed.
Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success by David Berliner:
Click to access PB-Berliner-NON-SCHOOL.pdf
I’m not sure what you’re talking about, as neither I nor the linked paper said anything about whether masters’ degrees’ relevance had anything to do with poverty.
Stuart, please don’t insult me. You didn’t have to specifically say the word “poverty” to infer that you’re looking for the disaggregate scores of children from different income groups, and the teachers who taught them, when you said this,
“for all you know, those students are richer and more privileged students who would have scored just as high if their teachers had merely an undergraduate degree”
and this,
“it may just be telling us that within particular schools, teachers with masters’ degrees tend to get better students in their classes,”
I don’t have time to run down data but you can look at the Arroyo and Rountree websites provided for more detailed reports. The NAEP reports are here:
http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/
Well, the point is that if you want to make claims about what effect masters’ degrees have, you can’t just compare teachers with masters’ degrees to teachers without masters’ degrees. The former might end up working in richer districts or schools (or even in more advanced classrooms within a given school).
Unless you have some way of ensuring that all the kids assigned to both groups of teachers really are equal, you can’t just say, “Kids who have teachers with masters’ degrees do better, therefore masters’ degrees are wonderful!!!”
So in reality, I’m agreeing with you: poverty is important. That’s the very reason that your Ed Week link is so irrelevant: it doesn’t take poverty into account. The fact that you think you were refuting me by bringing up poverty, when you were really just proving my point is interesting.
Anyway, the point is that you DO have to take poverty into account — and not just poverty, but everything else about students. Only then can you have an idea whether teachers getting masters’ degrees in education do any good for students (in quality studies, they do NOT, as anyone who has taken such classes would have already suspected).
Stuart, As horrible as it is that we now have nearly 25% child poverty in this country, it’s equally horrendous that our government has ignored it, by failing to address the socio-economic conditions and out-of-school factors known, both here and abroad, to negatively impact the school performance of poor children.
It is also reprehensible that ed “reformers” have exploited children in poverty, in order to vilify virtually all teachers and promote the privatization of public education.
As indicated in this link http://nationsreportcard.gov/reading_2011/ to the US Department of Education’s nationsrepordcard.gov website provided in my last post, the Edweek page was merely a copy of the graphs provided by DoE. If you have a problem with how that was reported by DoE, examine the data.
Sorry,I have no more time to deal with ed “reform” spin.
You’re not disagreeing with anything I said. But you do need a refresher on basic social science principles. Good luck.
Isn’t “social science” an oxymoron?
Don’t cast stones at others when you have failed to follow “basic social science principles” yourself, such as by omitting a citation for research supporting this sweeping claim in your book, “Children who are wealthy tend to be smarter, or at least better prepared from having had the sort of parents who put alphabet flashcards above their infants’ cribs.”
See Einstein Never Used Flashcards: http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Never-Used-Flashcards-Learn–/dp/1594860688
Cosmic Tinkerer, Who are you addressing? What are you quoting?
Diane
The quote is from Stuart Buck’s book, “Acting White”, and the post was in response to Buck’s nasty dig about someone needing “a refresher on basic social science principles.”
Research does not support the claim Buck made in his book that using flashcards with infants makes them “smarter, or at least better prepared” and he did not provide a citation for it. Studies to the contrary, indicating young children learn better from hands-on experiences than from drill for skill, can be found in the book, “Einstein Never Used Flashcards”. Research demonstrates that some of the most effective things wealthier parents do that give their kids an advantage is they talk to them often using rich language and they read to them a lot. Sorry I didn’t clarify this before.
Thanks.
Diane