Support for Teachers from the Field of Medicine

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At last someone has linked the problems of inappropriate use of testing in education with Doctorthose of the prestigious profession of medicine. Robert Wachter, Professor of Medicine at UCSF, has written a book titled The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age in which he argues that measurement has gotten out of hand. In a New York Times article “How Measurement Fails Us” (Sunday Review, Jan 17, 2016, p. 5) he states:

“Two of the most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far.”

In the article Wachter notes that “burnout rates for doctors top 50 percent” and he says recent research has shown that “the electronic health record was a dominant culprit.” He then draws a parallel with teaching.

“Education is experiencing its own version of measurement fatigue. Educators complain that the focus on student test performance comes at the expense of learning.”

Wachter maintains that what is needed is “thoughtful and limited assessment.” “Measurement cannot go away, but it needs to be scaled back and allowed to mature. We need more targeted measures, ones that have been vetted to ensure that they really matter.” We also need to take account of the harm excessive measurement does. Again he compares the two professions: research has shown that

“In medicine, doctors no longer made eye contact with patients as they clicked away. In education, even parents who favored more testing around Common Core standards worried about the damaging influence of all the exams.”

With this welcome support, we in education need to consider how we can keep measurement within limits and focused on key matters, so it does not undermine our profession. When is measurement useful, and when does it do more harm than good?

The “Google generation”

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Many of our learners have grown up with access to all sorts of search engines, namely Google which has quickly turned from a noun to a verb: “Just Google it.” With access to Google, many of our learners have instant answers that are just a few clicks away.

There has been an ongoing debate on whether Google is harmful or not to our ability to critically think about texts. Tan (2016) from Mindshift recongnizes, “with the advent of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now that aim to serve up information before you even know you need it, you don’t even need to type the questions. Just say the words and you’ll have your answer.” However, there are ways to ensure questions/inquiries in the class are “Google proof.” A former Kentucky middle-school teacher suggests re-thinking our instructional design is key in making work Google proof. He says, “Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one…if students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there’s a problem with the instructional design.”

I envision project-based learning and inter-disciplinary approaches as a way into creating Google proof material. Any suggestions? What have you tried/created/heard about?

 

 

Field trips in Teacher Education: Connecting teachers with student teachers in teacher education courses

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In a recent article our research team wrote about the complex work of experienced literacy teacher educators.

Kosnik, C., et al. (2014). Beyond initial transition: An international examination of the complex work of experienced literacy/English teacher educators. English in Education. 48 (1). 41-62.

The findings show the complexity of being the “linchpins of education”  where on the one hand literacy teacher educators negotiate their evolving identity as classroom teachers and on the other hand are navigating the university professorial landscape.

As a teacher educator I (Yiola) can relate to the tensions expressed by our participants. To address some of the tensions I have developed a model that brings together the schools and student teachers through my university courses. My work as the “linchpin” is to make the theoretical and scholarly connections with the student teachers. In this post I give an example of the relationship between the schools/teachers and one of my teacher education courses.

I teach a curriculum course that explores the arts (Visual Arts, Music, Drama and Dance) and Health and Physical Education. In a very short period time teacher candidates are expected to have competence and confidence in teaching these subjects across the elementary grades. I have designed a course that explores the literature, both content and pedagogy, and that provides opportunities for exploration and experience. To achieve the exploration piece I have reached out to exemplary teachers in the community seeking their participation in the course. Each and every teacher I have reached out to has been keenly interested to share insights into their practice. We have gone to school gymnasiums and experienced a physical education class and also observed a teacher teach children in the gym. We have gone to a “ballet” school to learn more about movement competence and what that means, and we have visited classrooms to learn more about teaching the visual arts.

Last week our class “set up shop” at the Fraser Mustard Academy for Early Learning where teacher Niki Singh  shared her expertise on teaching visual arts in the early years.

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Here our learning was brought to life. She spoke about the school’s philosophy, key elements of the program, and connected the curriculum to practice. This discourse alone cannot be achieved through academic readings and discussion. Then, we were invited to observe a one-hour class in action. From observing the classroom set up, materials, learning environment to watching the opening procedures and capturing the nuances of teachers’ language, tone, pace, and rhythm. We then toured the classroom as children engaged with the arts. We observed; we interacted; and we explored. Hearing the sounds, seeing the sights and capturing the details of a day in the life of what Niki calls “The Living Gallery” was a worthwhile learning opportunity. Here are some images of the experience:

 

 

Student teacher begins working with one child who has an interest in string and letters. She encourages him to cut the string and create letters. After some time a crowd of curious students gather and join in the process: cutting, lines, and literacy through the exploration of the arts.

 

 

Exploring materials and how they are set up and utlized by the children. Art, culture, child development and curriculum all working in harmony for the student teachers to observe.

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Watching children problem solve in the arts. Here two students are creating fashion designs using a variety of textiles. How to combine fabrics? How to make them fit?

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Examining documentation and understanding how assessment in the visual arts can take shape was another area explored. In the picture above we see children’s work along with their talk about the art, capturing their understandings.

There is mutual benefit to the student teachers and the school community when the university comes together. Teachers are able to share their knowledge and student teachers are able to gain understandings outside of their practicum obligations.

I end this blog with an observation so inspirational that it cannot be felt through a text or screen but that can only be understood when seen in the context of the school. Niki, the visual arts teacher brought nature, the outdoors, into her classroom when she gathered fallen branches in the community into the school. The children created a “Rainbow Forest” where they wove colourful wool around the branches and sculpted a beautiful forest inside their school. We were able to see the children’s artwork and the language around the artwork. Children talked about diversity and how difference stands united. Here we see the commitment to diversity and inclusion.

 

The student teachers enjoyed the experience. I see their engagement by the ways they are involved, the questions the ask, the thoughtfulness and effort placed on connecting scholarship to the experience. The teachers have often shared that they feel re-inspired after listening to and sharing with the student teachers. The relationship between schools and the university is beneficial and is one way I am able to reconcile some of the tensions I feel as a teacher educator.

 

Well-Being – How are we doing?

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I (Clare) recently discovered an extremely interesting research study. How are Ontarians Really Doing? by the Canadian Index of Wellbeing

The concept of well-being is near and dear to my heart. In my doctoral thesis I wrote that well-being should be the ultimate goal of schooling. Even if you are not from Ontario I think you will find this study interesting because it goes beyond traditional and typical ways of measuring how well a country is doing. Below are some excerpts from the document and here is the link to the entire document.https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/

What is wellbeing? Image_InfographiconWellbeing

There are many definitions of wellbeing. The Canadian Index of Wellbeing has adopted the following as its working definition:

 The presence of the highest possible quality of life in its full breadth of expression focused on but not necessarily exclusive to: good living standards, robust health, a sustainable environment, vital communities, an educated populace, balanced time use, high levels of democratic participation, and access to and participation in leisure and culture.

The United Nations and the OECD agree – the true measure of a country’s progress must include the well being of its citizens.

While the most traditional metric, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), measures all goods and services produced by a country, it has two critical shortcomings. First, by focusing exclusively on the economy, GDP fails to capture areas of our lives that we care about most like education, health, environmental quality, and the relationships we have with others. Second, it does not identify the costs of economic growth — like pollution.

To create a robust and more revealing measure of our social progress, the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) has been working with experts and everyday Canadians since 1999 to determine how we are really doing in the areas of our lives that matter most. The CIW measures overall wellbeing based on 64 indicators covering eight domains of vital importance to Canadians: Education, Community Vitality, Healthy Populations, Democratic Engagement, Environment, Leisure and Culture, Time Use, and Living Standards. The CIW’s comprehensive index of overall wellbeing tracks progress provincially and nationally and allows comparisons to GDP.

Comparing the CIW and GDP between 1994 and 2010 reveals a chasm between our wellbeing and economic growth both nationally and provincially. Over the 17-year period, GDP has grown almost four times more than our overall wellbeing. The trends clearly show that even when times are good, overall wellbeing does not keep up with economic growth and when times are bad, the impact on our wellbeing is even harsher. We have to ask ourselves, is this good enough?

Some of the topics addressed are:

  • Progress in education, community vitality and healthy populations
  • Decline in leisure and culture
  • Decline in the environment
  • Lagging far behind in living standards

Second Wave Change

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Every once and a while I check online to see if my favorite literacies scholar, Allan Luke, has presented something new I can learn from.

Allen

Although not ‘new’, this time I happened upon a  short and poignant video called Second Wave Change.  It’s a succinct  explanation of  the kind of substantive content our students need to be discussing and thinking about to change our world.  This is a perfect video for student teachers.

So worth watching, but Allen Luke always is.

 

 

Is Texting Killing Language?

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Image_JohnMcWhorterOn Sunday Clive posted a blog Short or Long Form Writing? I (Clare) also wonder/worry about our new forms of communication and what is happening to “English.” John McWhorter did a fabulous Ted Talk  asking is Texting Killing Language. http://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk

It is truly worth listening to because he gives us a different perspective. He notes:

We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn’t true, and it’s easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we’re seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that?

Casual speech is something quite different. Linguists have actually shown that when we’re speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You’ll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That’s what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It’s much more telegraphic. It’s much less reflective — very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that’s what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things.

What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That’s what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it’s a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we’re used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It’s a very natural sense.

Short or Long Form Writing?

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There is a lot of enthusiasm today about the potential of short form communication – SocialMediatweets, blogs, etc. – to facilitate inquiry and professional development. At the same time, books and long articles continue to be published in huge numbers. Which medium is likely to have greater impact? An obvious response is that we should use both; but when forced to choose (either as reader or writer), which should we opt for? In my (Clive’s) view it depends on the context and how we go about it.

Teaching is such a complex process that individual tweets or blogs about it may be of little use. However, if they are part of an ongoing conversation (literal or metaphoric) they can be very valuable. It is the same with articles and books: they must respond to the concerns and thinking in the field if they are to be helpful.

Wittgenstein once said (according to Iris Murdoch – NYT, January 24, 2016): “One conversation with a philosopher is as pointless as one piano lesson.” So much for short form communication! But it depends on the context. For a serious pianist, a single interaction with another pianist can have a big impact. And equally, if an academic is willing to dialogue rather than just lecture endlessly about their theory, one conversation can be very helpful.

Whether short or long, communication should as far as possible “keep the conversation going” (to use Rorty’s phrase) so people learn from each other and there is a cumulative effect. We cannot always have an actual conversation, but if we listen to what others are asking and thinking we can make a contribution.

 

 

 

 

Professional Learning in Top Performing Systems, part 2

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I (Clare) thought you might find this blog interesting about high performing schools. Not sure I agree with all of it but food for thought

internationalednews's avatarInternational Education News

PDinfographicv2The National Center on Education and the Economy’s (NCEE) Center on International Education Benchmarking has released two reports on professional learning environments in top performing systems: Beyond PD: Teacher Professional Learning in High-Performing Systems and Developing Shanghai’s Teachers. To explore and share the findings of these reports, the NCEE held a conference last week featuring presentations and panel conversations with the leading voices in education from around the world. This conference was also streamed live and can be viewed online. Moderated by Marc Tucker, president and CEO of NCEE, speakers included Ben Jensen (author of Beyond PD) and Minxuan Zhang (author of Developing Shanghai’s Teachers).

Ben Jensen began his presentation with the questions, “What is at the core of high performing professional learning systems? What is the strategy to ensure effectiveness?”

Jensen argued that we need to move past the idea that there is a single answer…

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You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.

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I (Clare) was sent this article from a friend and it truly captures the complexity of teaching and the misconceptions about teaching. All parent, politicians, and journalists should have to read it. A shout out to all teachers! Here is the link to the article from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/22/you-think-you-know-what-teachers-do-right-wrong/

By Valerie Strauss February 22, 2014

School_Globe

You went to school so you think you know what teachers do, right? You are wrong. Here’s a piece explaining all of this from Sarah Blaine, a mom, former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey who writes at her parentingthecore blog, where this first appeared.

By Sarah Blaine

We all know what teachers do, right? After all, we were all students. Each one of us, each product of public education, we each sat through class after class for thirteen years. We encountered dozens of teachers. We had our kindergarten teachers and our first grade teachers and our fifth grade teachers and our gym teachers and our art teachers and our music teachers. We had our science teachers and our social studies teachers and our English teachers and our math teachers. If we were lucky, we might even have had our Latin teachers or our Spanish teachers or our physics teachers or our psychology teachers. Heck, I even had a seventh grade “Communications Skills” teacher. We had our guidance counselors and our principals and some of us had our special education teachers and our study hall monitors.

So we know teachers. We get teachers. We know what happens in classrooms, and we know what teachers do. We know which teachers are effective, we know which teachers left lasting impressions, we know which teachers changed our lives, and we know which teachers sucked.

We know. We know which teachers changed lives for the better. We know which teachers changed lives for the worse.

Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no respect.

We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They teach.

We are wrong.

We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of student growth on so-called objective exams.

Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students.

We don’t know.

I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree. Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my 4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a great deal of my year as a master’s degree student in the education school of a flagship public university hadn’t taught me how to manage a classroom, how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach. Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I didn’t know anything about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert. Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching students. Of making a difference. Of teaching.

I didn’t stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey, and a year later I enrolled in law school.

I passed the bar. I began to practice law at a prestigious large law firm. Three years as a law student had no more prepared me for the practice of law than 18 years of experience as a student had previously prepared me to teach. But even in my first year as a practicing attorney, I earned five times what a first-year teacher made in the district where I’d taught.

I worked hard in my first year of practicing law. But I didn’t work five times harder than I’d worked in my first year of teaching. In fact, I didn’t work any harder. Maybe I worked a little less.

But I continued to practice. I continued to learn. Nine years after my law school graduation, I think I have some idea of how to litigate a case. But I am not a perfect lawyer. There is still more I could learn, more I could do, better legal instincts I could develop over time. I could hone my strategic sense. I could do better, be better. Learn more law. Learn more procedure. But law is a practice, law is a profession. Lawyers are expected to evolve over the course of their careers. Lawyers are given more responsibility as they earn it.

New teachers take on full responsibility the day they set foot in their first classrooms.

The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no idea what I really do.

All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice law.

All of you former students: you did not design curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings, assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare report cards, and monitor attendance. You did not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create study questions. You did not assign homework. You did not write daily lesson objectives on the white board. You did not write poems of the week on the white board. You did not write homework on the white board. You did not learn to write legibly on the white board while simultaneously making sure that none of your students threw a chair out a window.

You did not design lessons that succeeded. You did not design lessons that failed.

You did not learn to keep your students quiet during lock down drills.

You did not learn that your 15-year-old students were pregnant from their answers to vocabulary quizzes. You did not learn how to teach functionally illiterate high school students to appreciate Shakespeare. You did not design lessons to teach students close reading skills by starting with the lyrics to pop songs. You did not miserably fail your honors level students at least in part because you had no books to give them. You did not struggle to teach your students how to develop a thesis for their essays, and bask in the joy of having taught a successful lesson, of having gotten through to them, even for five minutes. You did not struggle with trying to make SAT-level vocabulary relevant to students who did not have a single college in their county. You did not laugh — because you so desperately wanted to cry — when you read some of the absurdities on their final exams. You did not struggle to reach students who proudly announced that they only came to school so that their mom’s food stamps didn’t get reduced.

You did not spend all of New Years’ Day crying five years after you’d left the classroom because you reviewed The New York Times’ graphic of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that one of your very favorite students had been killed in Iraq two years before. And you didn’t know. Because you copped out and left. So you cried, helplessly, and the next day you returned to the practice of law.

You did not. And you don’t know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you didn’t teach.

The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.