Archives for category: Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

David Greene: Teachers or Technology?

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2015 //
66

Teacher and teacher trainer David Greene tells a true story about a teacher in an unnamed district.

Read it and see what you think.

“Derrick’s Story”

The other night I had dinner with a couple I’ve known for a long time. Let’s just say that one of these people is not named “Derrick,” but that’s the name I will use. It will be easy to understand why as I tell this story. The facts are correct, but I will not identify him nor identify the school so that I don’t put Derrick in a bad spot.

Derrick is a retired high school teacher who was recently hired as a substitute in an upper-middle class suburban high school whose population is 80 percent white with less than ten percent of students considered to be economically disadvantaged. Approximately 70 percent of students take AP courses. Almost all meet ELA and math proficiency standards.

It is a town similar to several NYC suburban towns. The estimated median household income was about $90,000, which is $30,000 higher than the New York state median. More than half of the town’s population has at least a bachelor’s degree, while more than a quarter has a graduate or professional degree.

In short, this is not your average high school in your average suburban town.

Derrick started by saying he has been learning a great deal of new technology while on this job. Great, I thought, but then he went on.

His story soon morphed into a version of “The Walking Dead” or a parallel of the story of Clarisse McClellan, an unorthodox teacher, in the film and stage version of “Fahrenheit 451” — fired for not believing in Ray Bradbury’s fictional, high tech, book-burning, future society she lives in.

Derrick began to describe how he had to learn the Smart Board, specific tablet apps, Infinite Campus, and Pearson-created, computer-directed curricula for his courses. He was forced to implement a rigid, computer-directed classroom where all students worked in groups, listened to a Kahn Academy-like lecture, followed computer-programmed procedures outlined on the Smart Board, and did assignments on their tablets. Lesson plans were only to be followed, not created, and rigidly broke the period down into timed sections.

Derrick was told not to use the Socratic Method or any kind of class participation where he did anything more than monitor student progress on their work. He became a glorified babysitter. A cog in a machine. An automaton.

A technician, rather than a teacher.

Coincidentally, the next morning I read a New York Times piece related to this issue. Entitled, Lecture Me. Really., it told the tale of a college American history prof who inspected her new classroom and was pleased to see all the new technology there, but was surprised that there was no lectern for her to place her notes. She managed to get one after weeks of telephoning and emailing.

Although she defended lecturing in her piece, of which I am not a fan, the tale is still important to this discussion.

The point is that even if this room was used for a student-centered Socratic classroom, the emphasis was solely on the non-human technology. We need to combine active learning (which can easily be done via low or high tech tools) and the kinds of teaching tools that allow students to “keep students’ minds in energetic and simultaneous action and… a rare skill in our smartphone-app-addled culture: the art of attention, the crucial first step in the “critical thinking” that educational theorists prize.

To quote the author, Molly Worthen, “Technology can be a saboteur. Studies suggest that taking notes by hand helps students master material better than typing notes on a laptop, probably because most find it impossible to take verbatim notes with pen and paper. Verbatim transcription is never the goal: Students should synthesize as they listen.”

Derrick’s story, on its own, is scary indeed, but we also know that this is happening all across the country where school districts, even relatively wealthy ones such as his, are buying into the high tech trend regardless of what it does to the quality of teaching and learning.

All districts want to upgrade their technology, so when giants like Pearson, Apple, or Microsoft tell them they will install everything and provide all students with tablets, many jump at the chance to sell their souls to the devil. The devil corporations or foundations give districts the hardware and software, but they are locked in to using their curricula and lesson plans.

The result? Instead of technology creating great teaching tools for teachers, teachers become the tools of technology!

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers

Teachers: This Is What We Do and Why We Love It

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2015 //
11

Kate Sacco is a first grade teacher in upstate New York. In this post, she describes the joys and satisfactions of teaching. While many others may complain about the many demand placed on them, Kate writes about the pleasure she takes in her children, the love she feels for each of them, and the awesome responsibility of caring for them.

Public schools are “an amazing place,” she writes.

“I work in an increasingly diverse school. Every year we get more children who are immigrants or refugees and every year our poverty level grows as more families struggle. These children are OURS. At bus duty you see the ratio of students to adults. You see how much they love their teachers and how much the teachers care about these kids. You also see what an awesome responsibility it is to have these children in our care. These children are someone’s babies. These children have been entrusted to us, for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, 10 months a year. These children’s parents have trusted us enough to send us what they cherish the most. They trust that we are not only educating their children, but also protecting them, advocating for them and loving them.

“Teachers know this. Those of us who are parents are entrusting our babies to teachers too while we take care of other peoples’ children. We know how powerful this is. This is why, although we love what we do and we love our students, our hearts are quietly breaking. Teachers understand what education reformers and many administrators and State Education officials do not. We understand that these beautiful children are not scores, data points or part of some bizarre VAM formula. We know that rigor and grit have no place in classrooms. We know that these children are so much more than test scores, rankings and data. We know that we are not in education to help children prepare for tests or non-existent or yet to exist “college and career readiness”. What we know is that we are growing people, humans, citizens of our nation and our world. Along with teaching the curriculum, we are teaching children to be kind, to love, to learn, to be curious, to question and to become better people.

“It is breaking our hearts that these children, who trust us and whose parents trust us, are being used as weapons against us. Their scores determine our “effectiveness”. Scores on tests that are poorly designed and mean nothing. Scores that are derived through some combination of voodoo magic, fairy dust and crystal balls. Scores whose cut scores are changed and manipulated to create a narrative that our schools are failing.

“Let me tell you, our schools are not failing. Our schools are thriving, and thriving in spite of budget cuts, cut scores, terribly designed curriculum, nonsensical mandates and outrageous expectations. Our schools are thriving because they are staffed by teachers who know what is important. Our schools are thriving because in spite of it all, the teachers who work in our public schools accept and love all the children who walk in and out of our doors every day.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching

Emily Talmage: Teach Like a Champion…Or Like a Robot

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2015 //
31

Emily Talmage recently reposted an interview she had with Jim Horn, editor of Schools Matter. Horn wanted to interview teachers who had taught in KIPP or KIPP-like schools, and Emily responded. She shared her experiences with him in 2011 and decided the interview remained relevant and worthy of reposting.

She writes:

I am re-posting the interview here for a couple reasons:

First, at Brooklyn Ascend, we relied heavily on Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion,” – a book that has been the subject of a number of posts going around the internet right now. I want people to understand what my experience was like with these teaching methods.

Second, I have become increasingly concerned by parallels between the practices used at Ascend (and schools like it) with the system of education that I have written a great deal about on this blog, known in Maine as “proficiency-based” education, but elsewhere as “competency-based” or “mastery” learning. In these systems, as at Ascend, “outcomes” reign supreme – meaning that all learning must be observable, skill-based, and measurable. Teachers have very little autonomy; instead, they are treated like technicians. Micromanagement is the norm. Children’s performance on assessments are the “bottom line.” The natural joy, humanity, and messiness of real learning are lost.

Then follows a lengthy interview, which is fascinating. Emily is referred to as “R.” It is well worth reading the whole exchange.


INT: When you went looking for an opportunity to teach in a charter school, can you talk about that a little bit? Why a charter school?

R: At the time I didn’t know a whole lot about them. I actually hadn’t seen it yet. I had seen the advertisement for Waiting for Superman. I had this idea in my head that charter schools were, and I think I even said at the time that they were, “getting the job done.” I didn’t really know what I meant by that. What I was looking for was just a different type of experience after working at the public school that I had been at for three years. I had heard that you can get paid more at a charter school. I had heard that they treat teachers more like professionals at charter schools. I don’t even know what else I heard.

I went on the web sites, and I had found a couple of schools that had really nice looking websites. Harlem Success had one. There was this school called Harlem Village Academy in Harlem that had one also. I had heard that charter schools are closing the achievement gap. There are these certain schools that are really making it work. I didn’t really do my homework before I got into it. A lot of what ended up happening, ended up really surprising and disappointing me.

INT: Let’s talk a little bit about that. I guess I could phrase it this way. How was the experience of working in a school different from your expectations?

R: I had thought that I would be treated like a professional, and that teaching would somehow be seen as a respected job. I don’t really know what I expected, looking back. I know that when I got there, they immediately changed what I had applied to do. I had applied to be, and they had hired me as a third grade pull out teacher.

A couple of months into the year, they gave the students a mock ELA test and a mock math test. They panicked, and realized that the kids weren’t really doing very well, or that they weren’t on track, just pulling threes and fours at the end of the year. They decided to completely rearrange the third grade.

INT: What kind of tests did they give them?

R: They gave them a mock ELA. You know New York State has a state exam each year, and they gave them a mock test. I think it was one from one of the previous years. These are done about once a month, all through the school year, gave them a mock test to see what their progress was. They completely changed it, and then they decided to restructure the third grade.

They had us come in over Christmas break, and told us that I was no longer going to be the pull out teacher. They were going to put all of the lowest performing kids into one class, and have it so there was the low, medium and high class. Now all of a sudden, I had a class of thirty scholars, we had to call them. I was only allowed to teach reading and math. I really wasn’t even allowed to plan my own lessons.

That was a big difference than what I had expected versus what actually happened. I had it in my head that I would be working in this place where teaching is really respected. Then I ended up having to spoon feed to the kids. They were handing everything to me, saying, “You have to teach this lesson, and this lesson.” I felt more like a robot for a while, to be honest. It was pretty miserable.

INT: What were these lessons like? Were they scripted lessons? Did you have a script?

R: What they did is we had at Brooklyn Ascend a data analyst. She’s a former Teach for America person. I think she was a PhD in Data Instruction, or something like that. Basically, she took the mock ELA and the mock math data and analyzed it, and came up with these certain concepts that the kids weren’t doing well on. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on the main idea questions. Some certain percentage hadn’t done well on making inferences in narrative procedure type passages. Just pulled right from the test. I’m trying to get this all right. Our data analyst basically pulled out these skills from looking at the mock data. I remember another thing that really surprised me which was that I didn’t have any authority to actually assess the kids myself. Which for me was really disappointing because I had come from working with a really small group, and that was a big part of what I enjoyed about teaching. Really getting to know the kids, and figuring out on a really deep level what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, why they’re struggling in some parts of reading and not others. That was something I loved about teaching.

All of a sudden, I had no power to do that at all. We had to use documents placed in front of us that said, “This percentage needs to work on this.” Our school Director, who incidentally a Teach for America graduate, decided to take one of the second grade teachers and put her in charge of the third grade. We now had this supervisor, and it was her job to come up with these scripted lessons that we would then have to present to the kids.

INT: You had a script. You had something to say, and the children had something that they were supposed to say back to you?

R: Some of it was. The lessons were scripted in that it was all written, like say such and such to the kids. We had to do this thing where we had to snap our fingers and then the kids would repeat it back. To me it was just complete and utter nonsense. The kids aren’t learning a thing this way. It blew me away. For some reason, nobody said anything about it, either. Everybody was just going along with this way of teaching. I don’t know–It felt like we were training dogs, with all the snapping.

INT: Was their chanting also?

R: We had to do the chanting, oh yeah. Every morning we had to start out. The way it worked is the kids would come in at seven-thirty. They came in silently. They had to walk in single file. The first thing that would happen would they would stop in front of the doors to the cafeteria. There would be a teacher sitting there who would pull up their shirt, and make sure they had a belt on. Pull up their pants, pull up the bottoms and make sure they had on the right color shoes, and the right color socks. If the top three buttons weren’t buttoned, she’d button up the top button.

The kids would come in and they had to have breakfast completely silently, which I think is what they do at KIPP. I’m not positive. A completely silent breakfast, which was also fairly disappointing to me because at my old school, breakfast was a time when I’d chat with the kids about their weekend. Get a sense of where they were at in their lives. What was going on with them. Are they having good days? Are they having bad days? Did they get their homework done? Do they need any help with it? This was a time to chat with the kids. It was also a time I really liked. Now I had to be completely, completely silent.

As teachers, we were required to carry these clipboards that had a list of each child’s name. Any time we had to give a kid a “correction,” we had to mark it on the chart. If a kid whispered to another one during breakfast, we had to write down “talking.” We had what I think at some schools they call it “Slant,” but at Brooklyn Ascend we called it STAR. They had to sit up tall, track the speaker, attention forward, respect always. That’s what it stands for. At breakfast, everybody’d come in silently, eat their breakfast silently. They had a choice to either take out a book, or they had to sit with their hands folded in front of them. I wasn’t even allowed to talk to them. Sometimes I’d secretly try to walk beside them and whisper, “Did you have a good weekend? Is everything okay?”

They’re eight year olds, and they need somebody to check in with. At least that’s the way I feel. I had one little girl who I had moved into a shelter, but we had to whisper about it at breakfast. She had to whisper and tell me, “Things are okay.” (Deep sigh.) It was awful. A silent breakfast. Silent breakfast would stop when one of the head teachers — our third grade supervisor would stop and say, every morning was the same thing, it was “Good morning, scholars.” They’d say, “Good morning, Miss ….” Then we’d say, “How do you feel today?” Then they would say, “Hungry for knowledge to get us to college.”

Then we’d do some other type of cheer, “Pick up your pencils, and you will be rewarded” was another one. These all come right out of, I don’t think they come from KIPP but I know that they use them at the Uncommon Schools, and a lot of the other charter schools in the area. Every morning, right before you went upstairs, we had to say this one cheer, “What’s out destination (clap clap)? Higher education.” Have you heard that one before?

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene Summarizes Bill Gates’ Speech on Education

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2015 //
31

Bill Gates gave a major national speech yesterday, announcing that he was very pleased with his efforts to improve teaching in America, even though they had produced no results other than a national teacher shortage. He promised to stay the course.

Peter Greene here presents the gist of Bill’s speech to the nation.

“It’s been fifteen years since we started trying to beat public education into submission with giant stacks of money, and it turns out that it’s a hell of a lot harder than curing major diseases. Turns out teachers are not nearly as compliant as bacteria. Who knew?

“Actually, there’s a whole long list of things that came as a surprise to us. Teachers and politicians and parents all had ideas about what ought or ought not to be happening in schools, and damned if they would just not shut up about it. At first stuff was going great and we were getting everyone to do just what we wanted them to, but then it was like they finally noticed that a bunch of clueless amateurs were trying to run the whole system, and the freaked out.

“I have to tell you. Right now as I’m sitting here, it still doesn’t occur to me that all the pushback might be related to the fact that I have no educational expertise at all, and yet I want to rewrite the whole US school system to my own specs. Why should that be a problem? I still don’t understand why I shouldn’t be able to just redo the whole mess without having to deal with unions or professional employees or elected officials. Of course nobody elected me to do this! I don’t mind, really– happy to take over this entire sector of the government anyway, you’re welcome…..

“Look, I’m a simple man. I had some ideas about how the entire US education system should work, and like any other citizen, I used my giant pile of money to impose my will on everyone else. It’s okay, because I just want to help. We’re not done yet– I’m going to keep trying to fix the entire teaching profession, even if nobody in the country actually asked me to do it. And no, I don’t intend to talk to anybody actually in the profession. What do they know about teaching? Besides, when you know you’re right, you don’t have to listen to anybody else.”

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

What Is the Ethical Responsibility of Teachers?

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2015 //
38

Colin Schumacher, a teacher at the Earth School in Néw York City, has written a thoughtful analysis of the ethical responsibilities. What should a teacher do when the Governor and Legislature pass laws that harm children and require teachers to abandon their conscience?

Categories New York, Teachers and Teaching

See “Heal Our Schools”! Sponsor a Showing in Your Town

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2015 //
4

Laurie Gabriel is a teacher who decided to take action to save her profession and students. She directed and produced an excellent documentary called “Heal Our Schools.” Below is her schedule of showings.

My favorite scenes: when she interviews three critics of teachers, then invites them to teach a lesson. It is hilarious!

Contact Laurie to show it in your community.

She writes:

Heal Our Schools Fall Screening Schedule – add your city to the list!

Heal Our Schools is a teacher-produced film about giving classroom control back to teachers.

NEED VENUES IN LA ON OCTOBER 18 AND ALBUQUERQUE NOVEMBER 20!

OCTOBER 2 – DENVER
10:00 am, Elvis Cinema, 7400 E. Hampden Ave.

OCTOBER 3 – DENVER
2:30 pm, First Unitarian Church, 4101 E. Hampden Ave.

OCTOBER 18 – LOS ANGELES
evening – looking for venue/charity to share in proceeds!

OCTOBER 19 – SAN FRANCISCO
7:00 pm, – First Unitarian Church, 1187 Franklin St.

OCTOBER 20 – SEATTLE
7:00 pm, Freedom Socialist Hall, 5018 Ranier Ave. S.

OCTOBER 24 – BOULDER / LAFAYETTE CO
2:00 pm, Running River School 1370 Forest Park Circle, Lafayette

NOVEMBER 5-7 MINNEAPOLIS, MN
Details pending

NOVEMBER 12 – 14 YAKIMA /TRI-CITIES WA
Details TBA

NOVEMBER 19 – SANTA FE NM
7:00 pm, Center for Progress and Justice, 1420 Cerrillos Rd.

NOVEMBER 20 – ALBUQUERQUE
evening – looking for venue/charity to share in proceeds!

Call 719-213-6850 or email laurie@healourschools.org for more information.

Categories Corporate Reform, Teachers and Teaching

John Ewing: Let’s Celebrate Our Dedicated Teachers!

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2015 //
7

John Ewing is a mathematician and president of Math for America, an organization that supports STEM education. In this excellent post, he explains how the past several years of teacher-bashing has been deeply demoralizing to teachers. He writes that teaching must be a respected profession, and the teacher-bashers must recognize the harm they do.

Ewing writes:

“As another school year gets underway, the public receives its annual dose of hand wringing about the state of American education…..
Editorials excoriate public schools; pundits offer glib solutions; politicians excoriate “whining” teachers and their unions, which, we are told, have brought education to this state of affairs.

“This ritual of education bashing has become so commonplace that it’s easy not to notice and move on. But we ought to notice because the annual lamentation is causing great damage.

“Because of it, confidence in public schools has fallen by nearly half over the past four decades, from roughly 60 percent to below 30. Because of it, job satisfaction for teachers has fallen dramatically, from 62 percent to 39 percent in just five years. And because of it, experienced, accomplished teachers are leaving classrooms in droves, while interest in teacher training programs is plummeting.

“Each year, about 13 percent of the nation’s roughly 3.5 million teachers either move to a different school or opt-out of teaching altogether. This means schools are in a perennial scramble to find replacements. Some see recruitment programs such as Teach for America as the answer. But filling classrooms with bright people with little training or support is not much of a solution. A few recruits succeed, growing into talented and passionate long-term educators, but many more struggle and leave after a year or two. Recruitment is important, but until we find ways to retain outstanding teachers we will be pumping water out of a sinking ship instead of plugging the holes.

“Even more concerning, such programs are predicated on the belief that great teaching requires only enthusiasm and determination, not deep knowledge and carefully-honed skills. By perpetuating this view, they demean the profession and ultimately reduce its prestige. These programs may attract plenty of college graduates eager to burnish their resumes, but until teaching is viewed as a respected profession that requires both talent and training, our best and brightest will never consider it a career.

“Study after study shows that experience counts in teaching. While recruitment may be an immediate need, retaining a workforce of outstanding, experienced educators is the ultimate goal.

“So what do we do?

“First, stop casting teachers as the cause of the problem rather than partners in the solution. Stop pretending that one must choose between the interests of teachers and the interests of students. This only serves to demoralize the people on whom our education system depends. Teachers grow weary of having to defend themselves, and they eventually burn-out.

“Second, treat teachers like the professionals they are. Teachers, present and future, want two things–honest respect and sensible autonomy. Neither is automatic or easy in an accountability system that is designed on distrust, but both are possible. Programs like the one I head at Math for America attempt to create an environment in which teachers can thrive as professionals. We don’t fix them–our teachers don’t need fixing– but rather provide them with opportunities to grow, refine their craft, and take control of their own career. Teachers thrive in an environment of respect and autonomy…,

“We need to focus on excellence, not failure. We need to highlight teachers who are accomplished, not obsess about those who are not. We need to avoid driving away several outstanding teachers in order to rid ourselves of one who is mediocre.

“The good news is that retaining our most accomplished teachers–showing them respect, giving them independence, and making their careers not merely acceptable but prestigious–turns out to be the most effective way to recruit new teachers as well. If we want to attract talented people into the classroom, we must start by making the teaching profession more attractive.”

Categories Teachers and Teaching

OECD: Technology in Schools Associated with Lower Test Scores

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2015 //
49

No state has invested so much in technology as Florida. Jeb Bush has made educational technology his signature issue, and his Foundation for Educational Excellence has received generous support from the technology industry. Jeb has encouraged states to require students to take online courses as a graduation requirement.

But the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development reports that use of technology is associated with lower test scores.

This story, from Florida’s NPR state Impact describes 5 things we learned from the OECD report.

This research matters in Florida, writes John O’Connor, because:

“State law requires schools spend half of the instructional budget on digital lessons. School districts have spent the past few years adding Internet bandwidth, improving networks and adding high-tech teaching tools.

“Here’s five things we learned from their study:

“The more technology, the worse the performance on tests — This was the big conclusion. The students who spent the most time using computers or on the Internet in school did worse than expected on international tests.

“The students who ranked in the middle for technology use — what the OECD called moderate use — did the best on international tests.

“That’s pretty sobering for us,” said Andreas Schleicher, who leads the OECD’s education efforts. “We all hope that integrating more and more technology in school is going to help us actually to enhance learning environments. Make learning more interactive…but it doesn’t seem to be working like this.”

“The OECD noted that east Asian nations, such as China and Singapore, intentionally limited students use of technology. They also used more traditional techniques teaching math — and have the best-performing students on math exams.

“Basically, you can say the less computers are used in mathematics lessons,” Schleicher said, “the better students perform.”

“The OECD couldn’t pinpoint why students who use technology more didn’t do as well on tests, but suggested a number of explanations: Reading online is a different skill than reading on paper; technology can be a distraction; and schools aren’t making the best use of technology.

“Teachers who use technology get better results — The OECD found that nations that emphasized training teachers to use technology performed better on tests. That meant allowing teachers to connect by video conferencing, observing other teachers, sharing lessons and ideas and just chatting with other teachers.

“Again, it was east Asian nations which encouraged teachers to connect via technology that also had the best-performing students on exams.

“For the most part, Florida policy has focused on connecting students to technology. Plenty of teachers are advocates of high-tech lessons, but the OECD study suggests the state and districts might want to consider emphasizing training for teachers to get the most out of all the new gadgets in classrooms.

“Slow down and get it right — Right now, the way schools are using technology isn’t working for students. Schleicher said schools might want to take a step back, look at what’s working and focus on those areas.

“In Florida, schools are moving ahead with the state’s digital instruction mandate and lawmakers are considering setting aside money in the state budget each year for new technology….

“Digital skills are important — Right now, students aren’t getting good results from technology in schools. But Schleicher said computer and Internet skills are important job skills.

“And other research shows that most workers never use Algebra 2, Caluculus or other high-level math courses in their work — but most jobs require some digital skills. Teaching students how to use computers and the Internet is still time well-spent.”

Categories Bush, Jeb, Florida, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Peg Robertson Eviscerates “Teach Like a Champion”

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2015 //
46

Peg Robertson has been teaching for 19 years in elementary schools in Colorado. To say that she is a passionate teacher would be an understatement. Peg is the founder and leader of United Opt Out.

Can you think of a better person to review Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion”? Lemov’s book is the Bible of pedagogy for no-excuses charter schools. It is used as a canonical text in the Relay “Graduate School of Education,” where successful charter teachers train new charter teachers how to get higher test scores.

To Peg, teaching is an art and a craft, not a science. To Lemov, teaching is a process that can be standardized to achieve the goal of education, which is higher test scores. To Peg, the goal of education is to inspire a love for learning, curiosity, and wonder.

To be fair, Peg reviews only half the book. She read half, then started writing because she disagreed so strongly with Lemov’s advice.

A few snippets:

“To be honest, after reading over 100 pages of the book (there will be a follow-up blog when I finish reading the entire book), I have to say it’s incredibly shallow and simplistic – yet the scary part is the dictatorial demand to keep everything shallow, uniform and simplistic. And as mentioned above, Lemov’s beliefs about “teaching like a champion” are beginning to co-opt what true educators really understand about teaching, child development, and engaging learners. This book is a great primer for reducing learning to uniform and robotic student behavior which is easy to “track” (Lemov’s word – not mine) and manage, in order to get the results that you want. And the results that they want are high test scores. Lemov is clear in stating that this work is gauged via state test scores.

“True learning is incredibly messy, but with an inherent structure in place to support the messiness. Those of us with vast experience in public education know this. And we also know that in order for true learning to occur, we must embrace the messiness, while all along keeping a structure in place to allow for the ebb and flow of learning. We create routines and structures, with student input, to foster an environment which supports student engagement, student learning styles and interests, all the while making certain that our teaching is developmentally appropriate and meeting the needs of each learner. If we have the necessary resources, the autonomy to teach, and a class size that allows for us to address each child’s needs – amazing things can happen. If children have food, healthcare and books in their home we can move mountains. However, in this day and age – having everything necessary for all public school children to thrive mentally, physically, academically and emotionally – is rare, if not non-existent.”

Here are her examples of what learning should be:

“In the 90’s I had great autonomy to teach. The inquiries and projects my students completed would not even be possible under today’s testing conditions. Several of my classes opened restaurants – we literally opened a restaurant in our classroom and charged for meals. We designed the restaurant, shopped for the ingredients at the grocery store, and we made the pasta from scratch in our classroom. Students applied for jobs at the restaurant. We took reservations for parents and district staff to come and eat! Another example was with a sixth grade class in which we created a partnership with a nursing home. Each sixth grader had a friend at the nursing home where we visited weekly to plant flowers, read, sing, and develop relationships with these women and men at the home. The sixth graders interviewed their friends, researched the corresponding time period, and wrote biographies. I had a fourth grade class who researched activists across the country who were making changes in their communities. These students really wanted to know how they could give back to the community. We created our own service learning project and gathered food for food banks and worked at the food banks and served at a soup kitchen. We canvassed the neighborhoods gathering canned goods and other items to support families in need. I had other classes who raised money to end landmines that were harming children – we researched these countries and read about the impact on children and created a public campaign to end the landmines. What is interesting about all of these inquiries and projects is that we could connect them to every facet of our day – math, science, social studies, language arts, music, art, and on and on. Those are just a few of the learning opportunities my students had….”

“On page 12 Lemov states, “Few schools of education stoop to teach aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers, even though it is one of the most valuable things they could possibly do.”

Wow. I don’t even know what to say to that. Perhaps the best thing to say is that that statement pretty much exemplifies the depth of the entire book. Honestly, reading the book and watching the videos is terribly depressing.

The sections I have read in the book so far deal with getting students to answer questions and making sure that the answer is (god I hate this word) “rigorous.” Students must answer questions and if they can’t answer the question they must repeat the answer after another student or the teacher gives the answer. At one point in the book (p.92) he shares an example of a student who doesn’t parrot back the answer and he states that the child will have to come in at recess because this is a “case of defiance.” So – not “parroting” back an answer is defiant? Defiance is defined as a daring or bold resistance to authority or to any opposing force. I personally wouldn’t parrot it back because I’d find it insulting. I’m not a dog who needs to repeat a trick in order to be “trained.” If this is considered defiant I fear for the child who feels the need to scream and throw these worksheets in the trash.”

There’s much more of Peg’s explanation of her keen disapproval of the Lemov model. You will enjoy the review. Meanwhile, I await part 2.

Categories Charter Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers and Teaching

Edweek: The Hype and Crash of Joel Klein’s Amplify

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2015 //
17

Rupert Murdoch made M a big bet on Joel Klein and his promise to bring radical disruption to the education marketplace, as he had brought radical disruption to the Néw York City public schools as Chancellor. Murdoch invested $1 billion in Klein’s Amplify company, which was competing with the giants in the business.

Amplify was a bust. It lost tens of millions every year. This year it lost $371 million, and Murdoch pulled the plug.

Only one district bought Klein’s tablet: Guilford, NC. Unfortunately, the new tablets had many problems. Screens broke. Chargers melted.

Now Amplify is searching for an investor so it can focus on curriculum and assessment. It is not clear that the market has room for this newcomer.

That’s the risk of the marketplace. Businesses come and go. Reputations rise and fall. Innovations may fail. People lose their shirts. Disruption is no guarantee of success.

Sort of like charter schools.

Categories Teachers and Teaching
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »