Canaries in the Classroom

I watched Bella as she sat quietly at her desk, looking at nothing I could perceive. She had done nothing in my class during the first quarter. I knew it was not just my History class, she was like this in all of her classes. It was almost time for report cards and I was discouraged that nothing I said, nothing I did could penetrate the armor she put on each morning before she came to school. I thought I would try another tact, “Bella, what are your parents going to say when you come home with all Fs on your report card?”

She looked at me in a way that spoke to her lack of emotion and replied, “They can make me go to school, but they can’t make me learn anything, can they?”

In my 31 years of teaching I encountered many Bellas, children traumatized by going to school. I did not love going to school, the same with many of my friends. However, I was not traumatized by the experience in the way that Bella was. Why do children choose to follow a gang leader rather than a teacher. What are schools doing that make them such a terrible place for some of the children in America?  

Perhaps a clue lies with another problem I had as a teacher. I taught U.S. and World History to 15-18 year old high school students. Part of my class included testing. Those terrible evaluations that teachers use to prove how little their students learned over a period of time.  I always included some type of question that required a written response. I was always amazed at the number of students who did not even attempt to answer reply to those questions. It was usually the same student who did not participate in class discussions nor particularly care what grade they received. It was the same symptom Bella displayed.

It is important to understand that not all students shut down like Bella, but I believe most students feel this way, even many who thrive at school.  Students like Bella are sending a powerful message to all of us. Something is not right in our education system and they are the first to let us know.  

So, what do we do, we label them, put them in special programs, take away privileges, demean, tutor, and provide all manner of treatment that seems to cause the disease of hating school to spread. It is a virus that has gone viral in our schools. Today we are holding the entire education system hostage until these students perform at 100%.

It seems that society has turned against it’s young, demanding that they be ready to solve the problems we have caused. Somehow our method of making this happens seems convoluted.  We continue to do more of the same, pouring knowledge into the brains of our poor canaries expecting them to sing upon demand, and sing better than all the other canaries. We place them under great stress by expecting everyone to perform in the same way.

In one respect Bella was wrong. She didn’t realize she couldn’t not learn.  

Education and Politics

I keep hearing politicians in New Mexico talk about a need for vocational training and the limitations of a college education. One candidate even spoke about universities restricting the majors that are available based upon the ability to pay high enough wages to pay back their loans.  There was an indication that vocational education would cut costs for universities.

These are certainly wrong headed notions about the purpose of universities and the cost of vocational training. All majors can produce enough money to pay back student loans. No one needs to start at the top of a pay scale. They are also wrong headed notions about freedom of choice.  Each person needs to learn to create their own plan for their future, not fulfill somebody else's plan.

What we need to do for education is stop preparing children for college or work. We need to prepare them for life. How to establish relationships and how to manage a household. People should know how machines and things like water systems work. In this way they will learn what they need to know for their future, not the society's past.

To accomplish this, mandatory education should be complete after 10 years of schooling. Students should know enough academic skills at this point to choose a direction to explore. Secondary education should allow them to explore the world of work and academia to learn what is possible and make choices about their future that suits their needs.

The best thing politicians can do is promise to fund an education system that allows for personal growth and development, not one that fits children into boxes and determine their future. Margaret Mead once famously said, "children learn what they need to know for the future." Let us accommodate that idea, not one that determines their future

Educational Organization

Education is still mostly organized around control.  We have been operating on a 19th century philosophy developed by Prussians to teach cohorts of students, based on age teaching the same subjects each day.  We use a technique that pours information into their brains and those who can not keep up are rejected or shunned in some way by the establishment.  The twentieth century brought about Pavlov and his ideas of reward and punishment.  These became the established system for controlling students in their classrooms.  The primary example is grades, A for the hard worker and F for the lazy.  The rhetoric is straight our to Protestant orthodoxy.  Work hard, live a good life and you will go to heaven. This system fit neatly into an industrial society where creativity and critical thinking were not important for the average worker who basically shifted widgets around for the owners of industry.

These concepts and philosophies never worked because they are antithetical to learning.  Certainly those who were motivated to learn did so, but those who had no support and found the lessons difficult had no way to excel in this system.  There were many more drop outs than graduates of the system.

The end of the 20th century brought the technological revolution which required that education actually teach students knowledge they would need to work.  Not just basic skills and science but, retrieval of data that they would use in the workplace.  This includes creative and critical thinking,  research skills  and social emotional maturity necessary necessary to work cooperatively as teams to develop, plan and create. 

As Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms shift slowly and much of what we know about learning has been discovered in the last thirty years.  Changes in our thinking has been shaped by neuroscientists who delve into the physical brain to discover how it works.  These discoveries have debunked the systems of reward and punishment we have used to control students in school.  There have also been many experiments in education to find out what is the best way to organize for learning and it is not large groups of children, sitting at desks listening to a teacher talk.

The primary finding is that when children are treated with respect and given individual support they do much better.  One of my favorite stories is about a free school in Massachusetts where students are not required to do any academic work.  There were no classrooms, no desks, no prescribed curriculum.  The students sit on committees that hire teachers and make decisions about the nature of the school.  They can learn anything they want, when they want and choose how they want to learn.  One girl, for whom this school was a last chance for education due to her behavior, decided that she would leave. There were no guards, no rules about attendance.  As she reached the street she had an epiphany.  Why am I leaving there are no reasons to do so.  She turned around and decided to pursue her education. We must have internal motivation to truly learn.

If we want school to be a place where learning is a center of organization rather than control we must rethink our schools.  To certain extent the charter movement has cut into traditional schools but they have not been embraced by the establishment.  We must decentralize our classrooms, understand how humans learn and treat all students with dignity and respect before our education system will be center on learning.

Unreal expectations

I stopped writing this blog because I was going to university and wanted to concentrate on my studies.  Now it is time to share some of that information.  The purpose of the blog will change a bit as I will no longer only concentrate on education issues, but will broaden my scope into other issues that I find interesting.

I would like to start by sharing my thoughts about getting a second bachelor's degree in my social security years.  That has, so far,  been a highlight of my retirement and given me much to think about.  One of my thoughts was that college really was not much different than it was when I went in the 60s and 70s.  Certainly American culture has changed and students today have fingertip access to information that would have taken me weeks to find back then.  Still, there were students interested in learning what the professors had to say, some who were primarily working for the credential to improve their lives and some who were in as much a daze as I was at 18 years old.  I don't think that has changed.

One of the complaints about young people today is that they can not read nor write as well as their parents generation.  I question that assessment.  It seems that kids are reading all the time, it just that reading is different with all of the technology.  I have always know people who preferred movies to books, particularly in the fiction genre. I would also say that a student today has probably written far more than I did at that age if they post on social media or text.  Is there quality in what they write, I am not sure how important that is for everybody.  I certainly encountered students at the university in the last three years that could write much better than I ever did.  I will say that this time around I was an English major and almost all of the people in my classes liked to read and write.

Being a grandfather of an almost college aged student put me about one generation away from my fellow students' parents.  That was the generation I taught as a public/private school teacher/librarian.  That was a generation that was also constantly harassed by certain segments of society as not profiting from their public education.  I have never been sure if all of the comparisons are with my generation or my parents' but it seemed to me then as it does now that some liked to learn and some couldn't stand it.  I think that has always been true.   There is a factor which gets overlooked in comparing generations of students in America.  Today we teach everyone and expect them to succeed.  The diversity of the students today was a larger spectrum than when I began school.  That means there are going to be more on the low end but I believe there are also more on the high end of skills and motivation.

I believe that motivation is the key for all learners.  At 18 years of age many people do not yet know what motivates them.   College for many is a test to find that out.  It took me three attempts at college before I was really ready to learn.  Our high schools do not allow students to spend much time discovering what motivates them.  This is nothing new, Dewey proposed this idea in his teachings, demonstrating the links between interest, curiosity and effort.  Perhaps I can best illustrate this with a story about my last education job.

I spent the 2005-2006 school year working in a rural district that basically was one elementary, one middle, one high and one alternative school.  I was the librarian for the district and spent most of my time working with grades 3-6.  The teachers supported a very robust Accelerated Reader program for these students and everyday they would come to the library to choose books to read for the program.  They read and read and read.  They seemed to have a strong interest in reading and I thought they truly enjoyed reading.  These students passed the standardized testing and had high reading scores.

This seemed a success story until I began comparing the amount of reading done at the elementary school with the middle and high schools.  The number of books read per student declined each year.  By 12th grade almost nobody checked out a book from the library to read unless they had to for a class, although as everywhere there was a small cadre of those who loved to read.  Further observation and discussions with students led me to the conclusion that most of them did not like to read.  In addition the middle and high schools were not passing the standardized testing of the time.

I realize there were many other factors involved that I did not consider, but it was undeniable that most of our high school students only read a book if they had to.  It is my belief that we took the joy out of reading.  Is that different from my time at that grade?   Certainly many adults love to read the stories in books and many students dropped out of school along the way.  But we have created a system of schools where the Chancellor of Washington DC schools is allocating 5 million dollars to make sure that those students like school.

It is all about motivation.  If you make someone do something, they will turn against it.  I .  Each individual is different.  But, if we expect to have students with high skills they need to be motivated to gain those skills and punishing them with education will not bring that about.

So what learned this time around in college is that not much has really changed other than society's unreasonable demands upon students.  The students haven't changed.  Read I found a blog by Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American entitled Interest Fuels Effortless Engagement for more information about this Thought From Yrisarri.

Beyond the Hard Truths of Teaching

I have been trying to get myself motivated to start blogging about education on a regular basis once again.  I am going through my education files and while doing so found this article by Marvin Chachere that closely mirrors my feeling about teaching.  


Click here to learn more about Mr. Chachere  a retired teacher and University of California administrator who played saxophone in his youth with a New Orleans jazz band and died June 17, 2010 after 82 years of life.

BEYOND THE HARD TRUTHS OF TEACHING 

Marvin Chachere

EARLY ON in my teaching career I learned that most principals, superintendents, and deans don't worry much about fostering student learning. 

I'm not sure precisely what they do worry about or even what interests them. Perhaps it's management itself. matching means to ends. Or maybe it's simply tranquillity, • school that's run smoothly. At any rate, teachers and managers have little in common. 

When I taught college. I told my students each semester, quite bluntly. that their institution wasn't organized and run primarily for their learning. I reminded them that they'd worked hard to gain admission. only to be hassled in registration lines. circumscribed by course requirements, intimidated by term papers and exams. categorized by grade points. 

My message, of course. was a truism: Wanting to know something is a necessary precondition for leaming it. "How many of you are here to learn philosophy?" I'd ask. Everyone. (It was an elective course.) "How many of you would be here if this course offered no credit?" No one. 

Students know the difference between learning a subject and going through the motions because they need the credits. Indeed, if a student really wants to learn, he doesn't need good teaching, and if he doesn't want to learn, the best teaching is useless. You can't force anyone to learn anything, unless you're an army sergeant teaching a recruit to fire a rifle. You may tell others what to learn, but this carries no force. Students recognize their rights in this very clearly, and they can easily reject your teaching. 

By now you may be thinking that if I had any self-respect [ should have long ago sought other work.  But for me it was precisely by recognizing these realities and struggling. with them in my own mind (if not in faculty committees, board meetings. and teachers' unions) that I found nourishment as a teacher. I enjoyed teaching and I stayed with it, but not to invent methods for jamming Iearning into the minds of unwilling students. If I wanted reform at all. it was in how I saw my job. Gripped by cynicism regarding my superiors and futility regarding my charges. I still struggled to see teaching as noble work. 

My efforts weren't completely successful, but they brought satisfaction. Once I decided to Iet the managers and policymakers get on with their work, whatever it may be. I was free to get on with mine. By concentrating on the conditions of my students their real and supposed reasons for being in my class, their interests and abilities, even their joys and sorrows. I sought to reform my thinking, to neutralize the negative forces. In other words. I sought the essence of teaching: to stimulate, inspire, animate and arouse another.

" The main job of the teacher is to convey enthusiasm. A teacher isn’t a purveyor of intormation, a guide to the realm of ideas, ambassador of culture, a certifier of students' achievements, or a  guarantor of good. paying jobs. Even less is a teacher concerned with development of a students' character and good citizenship. The only goal that's worth pursuing is to inspire your students with a love of your subject. Any other outcome, however honorable, is incidental. 

This is simplistic, you say. All teachers try to get students interested in their subjects-and good teachers succeed. My point may be simple, but it's not simplistic. It carries three practical consequences, each affecting the improvement of teaching. 

The first consequence is that you acknowledge your students' individual likes and dislikes even as you continue to show them how they can become enthused about what you're teaching. Realize that some students just don't like math, history, literature, science, or whatever. In recognizing individuality, you recognize reality. 

The second consequence is that there's no subject for which studentls' enthusiasm is unworthy or unwarranted, not even basket-weaving. Let me quickly add that I don't propose teaching something just because students will sign up for it-a Bruce Springsteen seminar? But interest in one thing may lead to interest in other things; basket-weaving isn't unrelated to geometry, to physics, to history. Any student who shows you enthusiasm about anything at all has displayed a certain capacity. Good teaching implies the ability to exploit that capacity. find ways to put it to use, and transfer it, if possible to your subject. 

The third consequence follows from the simple essence of teaching. You can’t arouse enthusiasm for a subject unless you've mastered it. The more you learn the more ways you have for arousing students' interests, and the better your teaching will be. Mastery is far more important than methods. Methods follow mastery, not the other way around. Students will be quick to see your enthusium. and if it sterms from mastery they may catch it. 

That's all you can hope and work for. And it's enough. ~ 

School Improvement Grants

I read Jonathon Kozol's book Savage Inequalities many years ago and still wonder why we have not developed programs to turn our inner cities and their schools around.  I remember talk about enterprise zones and throughout my career people have acknowledged the sad conditions people in inner cites endure, yet nothing seems to have been done to help bring dignity and humane conditions to these areas where many of most needy children grow up.  That is why I wonder why the current reform movement is so intent upon creating conditions to punish all schools for failure when we need to marshal our resources to help those who live and go to school in intolerable conditions.

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Education news releases reported that a handful of states are receiving School Improvement Grants to turn around their persistently lowest achieving schools.  This seems like a really great thing to do.  Unfortunately the states must present one of the following plans for these schools to receive the money.

• TURNAROUND MODEL: Replace the principal, screen existing school staff, and rehire no more than half the teachers; adopt a new governance structure; and improve the school through curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies.
• RESTART MODEL: Convert a school or close it and re-open it as a charter school or under an education management organization.
• SCHOOL CLOSURE: Close the school and send the students to higher-achieving schools in the district.
• TRANSFORMATION MODEL: Replace the principal and improve the school through comprehensive curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies. 

These steps constitute doing more of the same old thing.  The problem is not the schools nor the teachers, it is the condition in which many of these schools operate and the despair within their communities.  These grants are another opportunity to turn America's public schools over to corporations and privatize education.

I firmly believe that any child can receive the best education in the world at almost any American public school.  It is the responsibility of the adults in the community and the governments that support those communities to provide  models and the ethics of success for their children.   This can not be done if the adults, children and the community are in states of stress and disrepair.  Let us solve the problems for our children and not pander to political whims.

College For All: An Unnecessary Goal for Public Schools

Some Useful Websites
Lure of the Labyrinth- A cool way to develop pre-algebra skills
Map Maker is a great site for middle school and high school students who want to add maps to a report.
Architect Studio 3D On this Web site, you can design a house, walk through it in 3D, and then share it with the world. You can also learn more about architecture, past and present, and explore Frank Lloyd Wright's life and work.
The How-To Series The five posts from the blog Free Technology for Teachers give directions on how to use Web. 2.0 tools in the classroom

Articles to To Read
Revolution and Evolution in Educational System by PRof.MSRO ICFAI, University of India

 Education and character are two sides of same coin and one without the other makes no sense. Money can come and go, but it is the character that is valid from the beginning to the end of life. Any person, whether they can be equipped with the formation of character of each part of the world beyond. To put it in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. Put “The function of education to teach an intensive course, to think and think critically intelligence and character ….. .. .. This is the goal of true education. “

Meeting Kids Where They Are-Not Where We Wish They Were  by Jack Schneider From Education Week

Precious, in all likelihood, is not going to college.
This runs contrary to the aims of the dominant players in modern school reform, who, whether they are in government, school districts, or philanthropic organizations, routinely employ the phrase “excellence for all” in justifying their expenditures. The theory of change among the educational entrepreneurs, it seems, is simple: Find what works and make it available to all students. As Teach For America’s chief executive officer, Wendy Kopp, has said of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “He just wants to find and scale the ideas that work"

 Adolescence and Mistake-Based Education by Carl Pickhardt PHD in Psychology Today

In childhood, the age of dependence, a conscientious parent is often the best teacher. In adolescence, the age of independence, confronting hard consequences is often the best teacher. 

The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is it Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? by Peter Gray in Psychology Today 

Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past fifty to seventy years. Today five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or an anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.

Books to Read
Happiness and Education by Nel Noddings

Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities and Ordinary Resurrections  says, 'Noddings' thesis and argument that happiness and education not only can but should coexist must be taken seriously by everyone concerned about preparing children and young adults for a truly satisfying life in our democratic society.'

Quote of the Week

I used to think that a college degree was the leg up to success in life, an accomplishment that made you a better person, a stronger contributor. I thought it mattered less where you went to college than what you did with that education. Now, I understand that as a first-generation graduate of Regional State U, and a Baby Boomer, I was simply part of "credential creep."         Quote from Nancy Flanagan in the blog, Teacher in A Strange Land

Thoughts from Yrisarri
Educational policy reform is being driven partially by the idea that our public school system should prepare all students for college.  This is not only unnecessary but it is unrealistic and based upon arrogant beliefs about the value of work.

The goal is being proposed by well-intentioned people who believe in diversity and want all Americans to have the advantages of a college degree.  The argument is that statistics show that a person with a college degree is more likely to have a higher salary than their peers who do not.  As a matter of fact, as you progress on the educational ladder you statistically improve your chances of higher lifetime earnings.

While that is true, what about individual desires?  Why should we base educational goals on population wide statistical analysis?  There will always be individuals who are not ready or do not want to enter into a program of studies at a college.  Many of our high school graduates can benefit from going to work, or doing volunteer work to help them make informed decisions about their futures.  Why should they have to prepare for college in the public schools?

It is arrogant to think that the only pathway to success in America is through a college education.   There has been a misguided notion about the trades and their importance in our society.  After all, Benjamin Franklin was a printer who was as erudite as his better educated peers.  The value of work should not depend upon completion of a program but upon the quality of that work.  It seems to me that in today’s world the value of work is determined by the needs of corporations.  They provide large salaries to workers they need to create more money, not those who provide a high quality of work.

We seem overly concerned about another set of statistics.  Those that measure success in being able to make high scores on tests.  Our children’s relative standing among nations of test takers seems too low for many and we have to improve.  Once again we are not thinking about quality education but about being able to pass a test.  America has always been at the forefront of innovation because our educational system has worked.  We have provided the best scientists to the world, not the most.

College is not truly necessary for success in America.  What contributes to America’s success, however, is our ability to go to college whenever we are ready.  This requires a citizenry that values education for its own sake and pursues learning as a normal part of life.  A recent study indicates that anxiety and depression have increased exponentially in our children over the past 50 years.  This is not going to provide a foundation for success in the future.  As long as we place our values on statistics and corporate needs and not on individual needs and desires, our foundation for success will be weak.

Brain-Based Learning

Useful Websites
Read•Write•Think is a website providing educators and students access to the highest quality practices and resources in reading and language arts instruction.
Academic Earth provides free video courses from leading universities in most subject areas.  You can not get credit, but you can audit some awesome classes from universities like Yale and Stanford.
There is also a complete AP Test Prep course for your college bound students.
The 60 Second Brain Game and Word Wanderer are two games from Posit Science , a  company that provides brain training software.
More Brain Exercise is a site that has tons of interesting facts about the brain and exercises to help develop your brain's potential.

Articles of Interest
Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates : Early childhood education is becoming the first step in our stressful public schools.  We are creating high stakes testing for our youngest children! This article promotes the importance of play for kindergarten children. 
A Program Teaches Students What to Believe in the Digital World  This article discusses the topic of media literacy and the News Literacy project that brings seasoned journalists into high schools to help them learn how to interpret the news. 
From Brain-Based Research to Powerful Learning: Innovative Teaching Techniques In the Classroom visits Key Largo, a P-8 school of 1,200 students where all classrooms are wired and where the student-to-networked-computer ratio is 3 to 1.  It demonstrates ways to use technology to put brain-based research to work for our kids.

Thoughts from Yrisarri-Neuroscience and Education
I have always been interested in research concerning how the brain works and learning.  In 1980 my principal at La Plata Jr. High School brought a brain researcher to speak to the faculty and he told us of very interesting research concerning young adolescents and learning.  Since then I have attended workshops with Tim Burns, Eric Jensen and others speaking to this topic.  I believe that what neuroscientists are learning about how the brain works will change the way we teach.

In February LaWanda and I attended the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco.  The Learning and the Brain society is an organization dedicated to sharing information between educators and neuroscience.  They state in their members site that:

educators and neuroscientists share a great many goals. Neuroscience is delving into realms that have pre-occupied educators for years, such as learning and memory, the emotional development of children, the basis of musical talent, bilingual experiences, and dyslexia to name only a few areas of mutual interest.

At the conference almost every speaker spoke to this statement.  Neuroscientists are very interested in using their research to help teachers and are looking for feedback from eduacation to help them direct their research in useful ways.  As I think about what I have learned from my studies of how the brain works, I realize that much of their research reinforces what we already know about good teaching.  For instance, brain researchers have shown that if we want to remember something for a test, we need to practice with the information we want to remember.  Another finding that many educators already know is that vision trumps the other senses when learning new information.  But the brain research goes much deeper than just reinforcing what we know about good teaching.

An important neuroscientist's work that comes to my mind is Robert Saplosky .  His  Great Courses' class Biology and Human Behavior taught me how we are truly unique biological beings.  His presentation made me realize that there is no one way to teach everybody.  When we put students together in a lecture, we are lucky if only a few hear what is said, much less remember it.

Eric Medina's 10 brain rules have had a great impact on my thinking about teaching and learning.  His studies on stress strike me as one of the most important facts about our brains that all teachers should know.  Medina states that stressed brains do not learn the same way and:

Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt your motor skills. When you are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts your immune response. You get sicker more often. It disrupts your ability to sleep. You get depressed.

I believe that our competitive nature and fear of the future for our children have caused us to create schools that are institutions of stress.  Teachers can cause a child to feel stressed with a look, a few demeaning words or work that is beyond their ability.  We have not created places of safety and security for all children.

The research on memory holds much promise for teachers.  There is no one place that holds a memory.  Memory is a web of nueronal connections that have been prompted by something that can pull them together.  You have to cause students to remember what they already know in order to teach them something new!  In addition,  memories are suspect, brain research indicates that after you learn something you do not recall it exactly as it was learned.  Then, each time we recall that memory it is remembered as it was the last time it was recalled.  Memory is a complex process and if we want students to remember what we teach, brain research can help us understand how to do that.

The concept of the plastic brain is an important for educators to understand.   As Mariale Hardiman and Martha Denckla state in their article,  The Science of Education: Informing Teaching and Learning Throught the Brain Sciences:

Research shows that learning changes the brain. The brain is “plastic”—it makes new cellular connections and strengthens existing ones as we gain and integrate information and skills. In the past decade, the enormous growth in understanding brain plasticity has created an entirely new way to consider how learning and achievement take place in the education of children.

This means that everyone can learn.  The brain can change and adapt to meet the needs of each person.  Almost every child in school can learn what they need to know!

Probably the most important thing for teachers to know about brain research is that when a statement begins with "based upon brain research...." we should be skeptical.  Last week I used the article about Disney refunding money because of their claims about the Einstein Baby videos and learning were false.  There are many brain myths circulating in our culture and we need to research claims of better learning based upon brain research before we purchase programs making those claims.

Thoughts on Teacher Compensation plus Websites and Articles For Teachers

Sites of the Week

Open Library- Teachers  and  school librarians might be interested in this book website featuring 23,747,948 books (including 1,111,774 with full-text).  Once you have located a book you can browse for purchase or find it at a library.  Some are catalogued and some can be read online.

Watch Know - The Internet is full of useful information, but it's disorganized and often unreliable.  This site is collecting all the best free educational videos made for children, and making them findable and watchable on one website.  Many of the videos feature children sharing their knowledge.

Highlights Magazine - A great magazine has moved to the web and has many interesting games, puzzles, and activities for young children.

Pestworld for Kids - Here is a great site for youngsters interested in bugs.  Checkout the video contest underway that can earn $3000 for your school!

Articles of Interest 

Education Alone Can Not Save Our Economy by Anthony Cody in Teacher Magazine writes the following in his blog Living in Dialog:

Our goal should not be the degree at the end of college. Our goal is knowledge and the ability to do useful, creative and productive things in the world. The quality of education needs to be measured not by how well we get our students to score on tests, but on how capable they are at interacting powerfully with the real world. Are they able to do skillful work? Are they able to express themselves through writing, music and art? Can they invent solutions to the problems that have landed in their laps?

Getting it Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn by Henry L. Roediger and Bridgig Finn in Scientific American Online debunks the myth of errorless learning.  Research shows that learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.  Just remember how much you learned when you went over the test in class the next day. 

National Standards

Common Core
The National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers released the first official draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative and will be accepting feedback on the draft until October 21, 2009. This initiative is a set of Core Standards for college and career readiness in maths and language arts. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, has applauded this initiative and stated, "There is no work more important than preparing our students to compete and succeed in a global economy, and it is to the credit of these states that this work is getting done.” I am not opposed to national standards that are process oriented but believe that the problems these standards propose to solve are systemic in our culture not failures caused by the schools. It is more important to address the skills of living in our culture and motivating children to love learning before we set standards that address the problems of universities and career development.

In his article entitled National Subject-Matter Standards? Be Careful What You Wish For Marion Brady wrote “ It will fail for the same reason the No Child Left Behind Act failed—because it will be driven by data derived from simplistic tests keyed to simplistic standards keyed to a simplistic, dysfunctional, obsolete, 19th-century curriculum.” I agree with his assessment of national standards when viewed as a core of knowledge. Standards for college bound students can be controlled by universities. If they have higher expectations, students will meet them. Those who truly want to go to college work hard to achieve their dreams.

A reading of the standards led me to think that we are trying too hard to quantify what we learn as opposed to how we learn. Most of the standards have been in place in our schools for a long time. I guess that pulling them together into a list is a good idea but, I am not sure it is necessary. The standards for world wide competition can be met if we devise an education system of cooperation that individualizes skill development, teaches problem solving and how to find answers to questions. These are skills needed to succeed in the 21st century.

I fear that common core standards will lead us to spend more time teaching a common core of knowledge rather than those skills students will need for the future. I can’t help but think about a video I saw where a teacher was working with a group of elementary students who were developing a project. As she questioned them about their project they would pull out their mobile devices and look up the information they needed to answer the questions and fully develop the project. This points out that the common core of knowledge needed for any project is available to anyone who can use today's technology and knows how to ask the right questions.

The standards that are being developed do not, in my opinion, address the primary aim of our schools. A set of common standards should address the notion of literacy, citizenship and problem solving skills you need in life. Our present aim to send everyone to college is unrealistic just like our expectations in No Child Left Behind. Not everyone is going to go to college or begin a career when they are 18. It seems to me that as our population ages, childhood should be extended to provide life experiences and some time for fun. We are all going to work for 30 or 40 years. Let’s ease up on our kids and let them explore the possibilities of life and develop lifelong learning and coping skills before going to work.

The core standards being developed are more of the same stuff we have been doing since the 19th century. We need some ideas for the 21st century!!

Some Sites of Interest
Flowing Data is a website all about visualizing data so that it can be used. You can't visualize it if you don't find it. A problem I encountered time and again with students doing research was there total reliance on Google for information. It is a fine search engine but there are other places to go. Flowing Data's 30 Resources to Find the Data You Need could be helpful to extend a student's understanding of how to find informtion.

Fighting Drug Use
Teachers frequently encounter adolescent attitudes towards drugs and alcohol that are based upon popular culture's view of their use rather than facts. I was always looking for ways to try to convince my students that children's brains are growing and the use of drugs and alcohol can be detremental to them. They were frequently skeptical. Here are two sites that have some information about the effects of drugs and alcholol on the teenage brain from Scientific American Online:

Marijuana Hurts Some and Helps Others and Is Bad Judgment the Cause and Effect of Adolescent Binge Drinking have some useful information for teenagers.

Book Review

Daniel T. Willingham is a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Why Students Don’t Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What it Means for the Classroom (Jossey-Bass, 2009). I have always been intrigued by the question of "liking" school. In my experience most people do not like doing things they do not want to do. School seems to be a place that fits that profile for almost everybody at some time during their education. I disagree with the premise of this book. Children do like school! They like meeting their friends, they like learning new things, they like activities, they like some teachers, they like some subjects, but they do not like all of school every day. In other words they feel about school much like adults feel about work. This book presents some other ideas about "liking" school.

Willingham brings some important ideas to the classroom teacher. As a cognitive scientist he discusses the importance of story, emotion, memory, context and routine in building knowledge and developing learning experiences. He also dispels some cognitive myths that pervade the teaching profession. He shows that learning styles are much less important than the fact that people’s processes for learning and thinking are more similar than different and he provides information about the plasticity of the brain and intelligence.

Willingham’s most important argument has to do with his definition of thinking. He argues that the brain has limitations in terms of our ability to think and that if we do not teach with this idea in mind, children will not like school. His definition of thinking is that working memory receives input from the environment and then connects with long term memory to begin to create new neural pathways that remember this new information in the context of our old information. This seems logical and I think it is a useful way to define thinking.

The limitation is that our brains are not designed for thought, but for the the avoidance of thought. Most of our brain is devoted to seeing and moving and those functions operate efficiently and reliably while thinking is effortful, slow and uncertain. One of the problems is working memory, remember the model of how thinking works? Working memory is at the center of that process. One of the things neuroscientists know is that working memory can only hold about 5-7 thoughts at a time. So if thinking is retrieving information and procedures stored in long-term memory to create something new and working memory has limitations, how do we make thinking easier. Willingham believes that one must know the information and procedures well in order to come up with something new. It is our background knowledge that facilitates thinking.

Despite the brain’s limitations Willingham stresses that hard work in the form of practice pays off. IQ is not totally genetic and has been steadily rising around the world for some time. The message this should send to students is that the only limitations they have are ones they place on themselves. But, this work coupled with lots of practice that is too hard cause students to not like school.

In my opinion Willingham has overlooked the importance of motivation and seems to believe learning core knowledge is at the heart of student success. The pursuit of core knowledge often kills motivation in children. It also seems that a person can only obtain this information in school through hard work and it must be learned at a determined rate to be successful. Students will tell you they like to learn but want to have fun. Willingham believes that if the work is too hard it turns students off and if it is too easy it turns students off. I believe that if the students enjoy most of the work they will not be turned off!!

Verbal Put Downs

In my last post I talked about unkind words at school. How frustration leads to anger causing verbal outbursts which raise stress levels. I believe that stress is one of the primary problems in our schools today.

Verbal put downs are a part of our youth culture. Young people, adolescent boys in particular, are constantly putting each other down. This is different than outbursts of frustrations. It is probably caused by the stress of competition in our schools. Young people have not yet learned the power of words and do not understand the devastating effects of verbal harassment and put downs. The see it as an accepted part of the culture. After all trash talk in sports is all about winning!

"We need to get away from the idea that bullying is always physical. Bullying can also include verbal harassment, which can be just as damaging and detrimental to student learning," said Christy Lleras, a U of I assistant professor of human and community development.

Her study used data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study and included 10,060 African American, Latino, and white tenth graders in 659 U.S. high schools. "In looking at whether students felt safe at school, students' fear for their physical safety was actually pretty low. But 70 percent of the students said they were bothered by disruptions in their classroom, and one in five students said that they were often put down by their peers in school," she said.

One of the primary human needs is for safety. This study points out that put downs and verbal harassment at school probably cause stress levels to rise in students causing a climate of fear to exist in our classrooms. Ms. Lleeras speculates that verbal put-downs in schools may be a coping strategy that students use when they don't have the skills to do the work and have little hope of acquiring them in their academic environment.

I believe that as long as competition is at the heart of our educational system, these problems will persist.

You can access the full article at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901105142.htm

Kindness

School has always been a place that gathers frustrated people whose unkind words are often heard on the playground, library, classrooms and the office! John Medina, in his book Brain Rules, has as his 8th rule "stressed brains don't learn the same way."

When frustration is released with unkind words, stress is one of the side-effects and learning is the casualty. The Red Robin Foundation is doing something about this problem by providing grants of up to $15,000 with their U-Act program.

The goal of the Red Robin Foundation U-ACT Program is to encourage kindness among students and help create a sense of neighborliness inside and outside of school settings. U-ACT which stands for Unbridled Acts, or random acts of kindness, is a character-building initiative specifically for middle and junior high schools with grades six through eight, which aims to inspire and energize students about the value of being kind to others.

You can find out more at http://www.redrobin.com/rrfoundation/uactprogram.aspx
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Ebooks for education

Google, Barnes and Noble and others are preparing digital books and hardware anticipating the educational digital book market. California is testing electronic textbooks that can be viewed on e-book readers and is planning to bring free digital math and science etexts to schools this fall. The move to digital books in schools in education is underway.

As a school librarian I have been anticipating this movement for several years. As printed text books became more expensive and schools invested heavily in technology ebooks seemed inevitable. As I discussed this inevitable change with teachers and other educators, there was a lot of resistance to the idea. Mostly from people who love books (most teachers love to read books) and can not imagine technology can give them the same feeling while they are reading. Students, on the other hand, accept the idea and do not have the same sentimental attachment to printed books as adults. Educational publishers have been producing ebooks for the library and commerical market for a number of years and they are certainly convenient, although in my experience they were not widely read, Many students I have worked with in the last 10 years do not really care to read for pleasure or information.

I have often thought about the impact upon libraries if schools were to purchase their libraries as ebooks. The space taken up by printed materials would be available for other uses and students would not have to leave their class to check out a book. Man hours spent physically checking in and reshelving books could spent in other pursuits. School libraries have already cut back on certified librarians and with ebooks they could probably cut back on library assistants. So there would be a savings of space, use of time and maybe money.

Money seems to be driving the California initiative and it is certainly driving Barnes and Noble, Google and other players in the e-book publishing game. My experience with ebooks in the library is that they are not appreciably cheaper than printed books. They are easier to update and certainly easier to handle but once the printed book is no longer the norm, ebooks will cost about the same as a print book. In addtion, some educational publishers charge a yearly fee for access to their ebooks. States may be able to hold costs down for etexts by negotiating with edubusiness, but I believe there will be other associated costs that will cause the price of textbooks to continue to be high.

What about the ereading hardware? Education will have to be sure that there is a standard format for ebooks and etexts if they are going to use them. Sony has a reader, Kindle is Amazon’s reader and certainly the lure of government money will cause other entrepreneurs to try to dip into the pool. How will schools ensure that whatever they buy can be used with whatever they own? I expect there will have to be a big investment in new technology in order to be ready for digital books.

The investment in hardware will mean more of the budget goes to the technology department. Those laid of library assistants will probably be replaced by more people in the technology department. If my experience in education is any indication, there will be misspent money, unused technology, broken equipment, poorly thought out plans, noncompliant students and resistant educators. The change to ebooks will not happen smoothly nor will it be quick. Most likely by the time all the technology, training and attitudes are in place, there will be a new movement that will replace ebooks.

Ebooks in education are inevitable, I hope that educators and school boards proceed cautiously and do something novel. That is to put learning at the forefront of their educational plans. Right now with print texts and books, we put information at center of our curriculum. All the information in printed books, textbooks and digital readers are only secondary to a useful education in the 21st century.