From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
ON A WINTER DAY five years ago, Doug Lemov realized he had a problem. After a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter-school founder, he was working as a consultant, hired by troubled schools eager — desperate, in some cases — for Lemov to tell them what to do to get better. There was no shortage of prescriptions at the time for how to cure the poor performance that plagued so many American schools. Proponents of No Child Left Behind saw standardized testing as a solution. President Bush also championed a billion-dollar program to encourage schools to adopt reading curriculums with an emphasis on phonics. Others argued for smaller classes or more parental involvement or more state financing.
…
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
Better schools prepare better learners! Can anyone dispute this? Hence, innovative strategies in education are presented in this book with the primary purpose of developing better schools. Key areas covered in this book are:
Organisational effectiveness
Emotional intelligence
Collegial leadership
Fear of failure in education: Tobephobia
Media-based learning
Gifted learners
High risk learners
Self-regulated learning.
Novel strategies are presented that educators can employ to focus on and to improve practice. The issues discussed in this book are therefore typical issues that educators are faced with daily in their schools. It equips them with useful information to cope with the challenges of being teachers. Also, Innovative Strategies to Develop Better Schools gives educators the opportunity to introspect critically their professional integrity and status. Ultimately, no matter how much we do in our schools, our learners must be the beneficiaries of quality educational outcomes.
In the education portion of the State of the Union speech, Obama emphasized incentivizing success and reaffirmed his committment to community colleges. He also outlined a number of financial aid reforms, including a $10,000 tax credit and limits on the percentage of a worker’s income that must go towards repaying students loans. He set a goal of renewing ESEA, but some experts are skeptical that it can be accomplished this year given the amount of discord NCLB has generated.
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
The game isn’t exactly Halo or Assassin’s Creed. Instead, Space Fortress looks a lot like the very first arcade games, with geometric shapes subbing for spaceships and buildings. “The graphics stink,” admits Arthur Kramer, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who designed the game in the early 1980s. Gameplay is fairly complex, however: Players must shoot down a fortress with their ship while avoiding enemies, the bad guys look a lot like the good guys, and the ship has no brakes.
Over the years, researchers have used the game to study memory, motor control, and learning speed. The U.S. Air Force and the Israeli air force have even changed their training regimens based on how cadets fared as players. Recent studies have suggested that players appear to heavily utilize their striatum during gameplay. So Kramer and Kirk Erickson, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, decided to investigate whether the size of the striatum alone might be responsible for these abilities.
From Josh Karp in Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning
Digital media can extend the goals of National Lab Day and help the United States rebuild its lead in science and math.
And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”
During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.
It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.
On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.
Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system. The prescription is a complete overhaul.
In accordance with a traditional understanding that continues to be widely followed in our region by many educationists, the process of learning in Southasia today is still largely by rote. As such, there is little or no understanding on the part of most students of what exactly they are studying, nor why. It is critical to realise, however, that education in the 21st century is far more demanding and competitive than it was in the past, due to the vast and growing knowledge base, developments in technology and an increasingly globalised perspective. It is imperative, then, to make students into active rather than passive learners to deal with this changing context – but this is a lesson that many in Southasia, and particularly in Pakistan, have yet to appreciate.
Around the world, the idea of ‘quality’ education has itself been forced to evolve in recent years, in three particular ways. First, in terms of the education process itself, students must be taught how to relate their learning to their day-to-day lives, with a focus on how to learn rather than depending solely on teachers and textbooks. Second, the goal of quality education has also changed, with an eye to enabling students to perform well academically and socially, and to become thinking, caring and tolerant global citizens. The third aspect is facilitating learners not only to perform well academically, but also to groom them to think for themselves. In short, we hope that they will be adaptive, mature and tolerant; and to respect ideological, cultural and religious diversity. Indeed, such skills – quite removed from the central tenets of the traditional curricula in this region’s countries – have become important for a student’s very survival in the globalised world. Quality education assumes the pivotal role of trained teachers who have a solid knowledge base, and have control over what to teach and how to teach it. The teachers themselves, therefore, need to be allowed to develop the expertise and self-confidence to show students the path to independent thinking and learning – and without feeling threatened themselves.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
“I believe that all reforms which rest simply upon the enactment of law, or the threatening For the full post…of certain penalties, or upon changes in mechanical or outward arrangements, are transitory and futile.”For the full post…
If the author of those words is correct in his belief, then the entire thrust of American educational policy of the past few decades, since the release of A Nation At Risk in the Reagan administration, is doomed to failure.
If the words sound like those of a contemporary critic of the sanctions No Child Left Behind or of the big stick approach of current Secretary Arne Duncan, then perhaps the author was more prescient than many realize. The words appeared in print on this day in 1897 in School Journal. The piece is titled My Pedagogic Creed and was written by the great American philosopher and Educator John Dewey
During a fellowship in neuroscience at the National Institute of Health, it struck Jack Hidary that the facts he’d learned during a lifetime of classroom science education mattered less than the basic lessons he’d learned tinkering around on his own as a kid.
“It was clear to me that the facts I’d accumulated weren’t what was important,” says Hidary, a successful finance and tech entrepreneur who established his own foundation in 2001 to promote sustainable development and apply market forces to social issues. Instead, he found, the more important factor was his experience with “the process of discovery.”
And it’s the love of that process that Hidary and the Obama administration are hoping to instill in school children with National Lab Day, a nationwide effort to provide support and opportunities for kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) through “hands on” application, rather than in the world of Bunsen burners and books with titles like “Laboratory Procedures.” The underlying idea, according to Obama, is to encourage American kids to be “makers of things, not just consumers of things.”
It is one of the simplest ideas in American education—and one of the most confounding: Elected officials and educators have been talking about establishing national, or common, academic standards for at least a half-century.
On its face, the logic of that goal seems incontrovertible.
Why should students in one state be introduced to a topic such as fractions as 1st graders, to cite a common example, when their peers in other states won’t cover that mathematics topic until later? More broadly, why does the United States—a mobile society in a globally competitive era—maintain an education system that tests students, trains teachers, and churns out textbooks and classroom materials based on the myriad and often idiosyncratic demands of different states?
In several higher-performing nations, a single set of national academic standards guides all or most of those decisions. Yet in this country, the obstacles to establishing national standards have proved numerous and persistent, even amid concerns about the United States’ international standing in education.
From Mac Montadon in Spotlight On Digital Media and Learning
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.
Collier should know. She is the co-chair, along with MySpace Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam, of the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, a taskforce formed in the wake of the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act. The working group is charged with gathering information on both public and parental tools along with approaches to educating kids to be safe and responsible digital citizens. It will deliver its findings to Congress in June.
“What does that do?” Collier, a journalist and the executive director of NetFamilyNews, Inc., asks during a recent phone conversation. “It gives teachers the excuse not to use social networking in classrooms, and that’s a 21st century tool for learning.”
It was enough to make Anne Collier cringe. At last month’s Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., this statistic was bandied about: In a recent survey, 65 percent of teachers polled agreed with the idea that predators are out there, lurking in social networking sites to prey on unwitting children.
Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork write in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 105-119,
Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.
We conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporating learning-styles assessments into general educational practice. Thus, limited education resources would better be devoted to adopting other educational practices that have a strong evidence base, of which there are an increasing number. However, given the lack of methodologically sound studies of learning styles, it would be an error to conclude that all possible versions of learning styles have been tested and found wanting; many have simply not been tested at all. Further research on the use of learning-styles assessment in instruction may in some cases be warranted, but such research needs to be performed appropriately.
I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about corporate innovation; how to define it, how to inspire ideation and how companies can move forward in their implementation of ideas. And the more I read and think about innovation, the more I realize that something far greater is at stake here than just the ability of US companies to create new product lines and services during a recession. I want to make the case that there is a fundamental, philosophical problem with the US education system, and that if the current educational trends for most of the children in the US aren’t addressed, then the ability for this country to generate innovative scientists, politicians and business leaders out of future generations will be drastically undermined. The extent to which this is a valid concern was highlighted in the recent Newsweek-Intel Global Innovation Survey and its companion article.
Some of my basic premises are drawn from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, both of which I thoroughly recommend. My premises are as follows:
A combination of technological advances and globalization have increased outsourcing and automation of tasks to the point where soon, any rule-based, linear thinking business activity that can be outsourced to a computer process or to another country will be. Countries, like China and India, have highly educated populations who are increasingly able and willing to perform the white-collar jobs of Americans and Europeans at a fraction of the cost, and these are only the most recently successful recipients of outsourcing, other countries are quickly catching up. Technological advances have meant that the outsourcing of this work can often be seamless and transparent to the end-user. In addition, time-differences enable companies to have a 24-hour workforce without paying anyone overtime to work a night shift.
The New York Times for 14 November 2009 carried an article by Winnie Hu discussing the increasing trend of teachers offering lesson plans and other classroom material for sale on the World Wide Web.
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
Reviewing the books The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose in the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco says,
In short, the more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes. The most reliable data, lucidly presented by Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard, in his book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, do disclose some noteworthy trends. Especially in mathematics, student achievement has lately improved at the elementary school level, but the gains have not been maintained through middle school and high school. Test scores of African-American students in reading as well as in math continue to lag behind those of white students, though the gap has been narrowing. Hispanic students also score lower than non-Hispanic whites, although, as Koretz points out, the meaning of these data is complicated by the fact that “the Hispanic population is constantly refreshed” by new immigrants who, at first, may have difficulty understanding and reading English.[4]
Yet despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence—an idea that Rothstein dismissed as a “fable.” It was a well-chosen word, since “fable” is the name we give to a tale whose claims cannot be empirically verified but that may nevertheless contain some admonitory or normative truth.
Science for 23 October 2009 prints an editorial entitled Europe Rethinks Education by Pierre Léna discussing the importance of strengthening science education. Among the topics discussed is the Rocard Report on Science Education and efforts now underway to respond to it.
For societies to understand the consequences of vital issues such as climate change, education—especially science education—will play a critical role. Improving the quality of science education in primary and secondary schools is a challenge faced by nearly all countries. Europe has finally recongnized for a trans-European effort to rejuvenate the scientific education of all students, promising efforts are now under way.
“Like a steady drip from a leaky faucet, the experimental studies being released this school year by the federal Institute of Education Sciences are mostly producing the same results: ‘No effects,’ ‘No effects,’ ‘No effects.’ ” So began Education Week ’s description this past spring of findings reported in rigorous, more scientific evaluations from the 7-year-old research agency. ( “‘No Effects’ Studies Raising Eyebrows,” April 1, 2009.)
The reports evaluated the impact of a wide array of federally supported programs and practices, in areas such as professional development, after-school programs, mentoring of new teachers, and Title I instruction. Often—though not always—the results were “no effects.”
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
With an ever changing clientele there is urgent need to attempt unconventional, innovative strategies that positively influence what happens in educational institutions. Readers are provided with tried-and-tested models that can be adapted to suit their personal needs. The book aims to energize and catapult readers into a new dimension of innovation and encourages them to experiment in classrooms and reflect on their practices as they seek to improve themselves as professionals.
This paper presents findings related to how the nature of class changes when asynchronous online courses are used rather than classrooms. The qualitative study involved interviews with 32 university professors who have taught both in–class and online courses. The findings provide insight into how when the medium of teaching changes, there is also significant change in the composition and indeed the very nature of class. Such change occurs as the students attracted have more work experience and groups such as those living in rural areas, older students with work experience or those living outside the province are more likely to be included in the composition of class. Also, the medium itself changed the dynamics of class interactions, not only those between students and professor, but also the interaction between students themselves.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus concocted an experiment that countless children have unwittingly replicated ever since, over a morning bowl of Alpha-Bits. Ebbinghaus took consonants from the alphabet, slapped a random vowel between them, and, voila! some 2,300 nonsense syllables were born. For years, Ebbinghaus practiced these syllables at random, learning and re-learning until he had mastered the material. In 1885, he recorded his observations in Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology — a seminal work that countless psychologists have wittingly read ever since, over morning bowls of cereal or otherwise.
Near the end of his monograph, Ebbinghaus mentioned a “noteworthy” detail from his learning trials. He found that a particular 12-syllable series could be conquered in two ways: by cramming 68 repetitions into a single day before testing, or by spacing 38 repetitions across several days. The difference, he wrote, was significant. “It makes the assumption probable that with any considerable number of repetitions a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.”1
Ebbinghaus’s tests had a sample size of one: himself. But time and again, using far more rigorous empirical settings, psychologists confirmed the potency of this “spacing effect.” The method would seem to lend itself to immediate real-world application; what teacher or student would not want to enhance learning while limiting study-time? More …
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From Elizabeth Green in the New York Times Magazine:
Always stunk at video games? Perhaps you’ve been cursed with a small striatum, a region of the brain involved in learning and memory. Researchers have found that college students with relatively large striatums learned how to play a challenging video game faster than their small-striatum peers. Large-striatum individuals were also better at shifting priorities from, say, shooting a target to outrunning an enemy–abilities that could translate to the real world.
Outdated materials and obsolete techniques characterise Pakistan’s school system.
At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read.
Spotlight talks to Anne Collier of NetFamilyNews about the myths and realities of online safety.
