Every Teacher Can Improve

I believe that highly effective teachers are persons who are able use their inate abilities and learned techniques to impart knowledge to children. Some of the skills of a great teacher may be inborn, but I believe most of the methods of teaching can be learned and perfected through years of practice. That's why I've always looked for better ideas about good teaching. We can all learn to improve our profession and our skills as teachers. Scientists have made great strides in recent years in the study of the brain and particularly about how humans learn those concepts and skills that make them successful in life. One recent book by a cognitive scientist deserves to be read and utilized by teachers who want to improve their instructional techniques. The book is titled Why Don't Students Like School? By Daniel Willingham. This book is designed to inform teachers about some of the latest discoveries about learning theory and how teachers may apply these principles in their classrooms.

The book is very readable. It does not have technical jargon we usually see in scholarly works but attempts to describe good teaching techniques in everyday language. Here is a brief summary of some of the concepts about learning and teaching that are described.

• The author points out that people are naturally curious but the mind is not designed for thinking. When confronted with a situation that requires analysis and thought most people rely on past knowledge instead of trying new ideas. Teachers must apply techniques that stimulate the learning of new skills and knowledge.
• Knowledge and facts accumulated through reading and stimulating experiences are vital to thinking and learning. Some students are handicapped because of minimal reading and limited life experiences.
• Teaching lessons must be planned in such a way as to utilize those brain characteristics that encourage learning and remembering.
• Why is it so difficult for students to understand abstract ideas? Is it always necessary to relate school lessons to everyday life?
• One chapter has a very interesting discussion about recent findings about the misuse and over use of praise for school work. It turns out that one type of praise is helpful while another type of praise is actually counterproductive.
• Is drilling worth it?
• What is the secret to getting students to think like real scientists and other experts?
• How should I adjust my teaching for different types of learners?
• How can I help slow learners?
• How does the teacher's mind figure into the teaching and learning process?

Many of these topics have been addressed in teaching methods classes or in inservice  workshops for teachers. But the difference here is that these topics include the latest research about the mind and about learning theory. The author includes numerous real life examples that make his points applicable to actual teaching situations. This stuff is really state of the art learning theory.

If you believe that teaching is a profession and a craft that requires constant honing of skills and the use of the latest science based strategies, you will find this book quite useful.

Education vs Incarceration

Recently a committe of the Legislature was informed that the cost to taxpayers of each young person confined in a juvenile institution amounts to approximately $115,000 per year of incarceration. It also turns out that about 90% of the young people who commit crimes requiring sentencing to juvenile institutions are school dropouts. There is obviously a strong connection between crime and failure in school. The cost to taxpayers for students who drop out or flunk out of school and then turn to crime is at least ten times the cost per pupil for students who remain in school. There is also a major cost to taxpayers for those dropouts or flunk outs who somehow resist the temptation to do crime. Most of these young people have no job skills and end up on the welfare rolls where they are supported by the taxpayers instead of becoming productive citizens. It turns out therefore that Louisiana taxpayers have a major stake in keeping more students in school and insuring that they are prepared with marketable work skills.
This problem belongs to all of us whether we want to face it or not. We must either find a way to educate all children or be prepared to support them in prison or on the welfare roles. Its pay now or pay later.

So why do we continue to allow fully 40% of our children to leave school without an education? The cost to our state of such a tragedy makes the cost of the gulf oil spill look like peanuts. The failure of our education system of almost half of our students is the elephant in the room dragging down the economy of our state, yet it is barely noticed by our policy makers.

Newspaper accounts of higher salaries this year for new positions in our Department of Education while most local school systems are reducing teacher ranks and increasing class size are amazing! It reminds me of the bonuses paid to Wall Street bankers after their extremely poor job performance bankrupted their companies and forced a bailout by taxpayers. Louisiana taxpayers are also funding a public school “Recovery District” which pays generous salaries to top administrators while hiring inexpensive two-year “teach for America” instructors. This state takeover school system continues to produce the lowest graduation rate in the state.

Unfortunately Louisiana's next round of “reform” which consists of implementing the new National Curriculum Standards will likely result in more dropouts. That's because all the emphasis is being placed on implementation of a college prep curriculum for all. No one has figured out how to convince the thousands of students who are disengaging from our education system as they reach middle school and high school to actually buy into these new and improved standards. One of the most ridiculous statements I saw coming from the Obama administration recently was a comment that “many students are doing poorly in school in our country because the curriculum is not challenging enough!" I don't know about the other states, but in Louisiana, the issue with our students is not whether the curriculum is challenging, but much more whether it is relevant to their lives. A subject is not challenging to a student if he has no interest or motivation to learn the material. The problem is that few of our education policy makers or highly paid Education Department heads have made the effort to make school relevant to our huge underclass of "at risk" students. The educational system cannot succeed by attempting to apply middle class values and goals to students who come from a different world.

The so called high stakes testing system is a failure. High standards and high minded rhetoric does not educate students if there is no practical plan for getting students to buy into the system. Our educational system must connect with these students where they are, not where we think they should be. We need to find ways for these students to succeed, instead of adding to the barriers to their success. Programs that have been shown to connect with at risk students such as Jobs for America's Graduates and career development programs, which include job shadowing and mentoring beginning at the middle school level must be implemented on a statewide basis if we are to see results. The cost of career coaches in critical schools would be more than paid for by savings from Louisiana's Corrections budget. Every student has strengths that the school system should constantly strive to identify and nurture rather than focus only on his/her failures.

 Maybe if tackling Louisiana's continuing dropout problem were viewed purely as a way of saving taxpayer dollars, we would have a better chance of getting action on a crisis much bigger than the BP oil spill.

Education Department Reorganization

I know I'm repeating myself, but someone needs to constantly remind educators and the general public in Louisiana that education in our state is headed in the wrong direction. Recently, BESE approved a reorganization plan proposed by Superintendent Pastorek that continues to ignore the real problems in Louisiana elementary and secondary schools. Pastorek was quoted as saying the new Department “will be the envy of the country” (which shows that he continues to have delusions of grandeur) The new plan continues the trend of hiring highly paid department heads that seem to have little experience in Louisiana elementary/secondary education with the notable exception of St Tammany Supt. Gayle Sloan.  The plan continues to require all school systems in the state to offer a “one size fits all” plan of education to an extremely diverse population of students. I just can't help but cringe when I see statements in the reorganization plan like “ all students will perform at or above grade level in English and Math by grade 8”. To a naive non-educator such a statement may sound good, but it is an unrealistic goal that can only lead to greater frustration with public education.
It is completely appropriate to place maximum emphasis in our elementary/secondary school system on basic skills such as reading, language arts and math. What is wrong about the Department plan and extremely frustrating to experienced educators is to expect all students to perform at the same levels in these critical subjects. To expect all students to perform at or above grade level is something called the “Lake Wobegon effect”. (Lake Wobegon is a mythical community created by radio celebrity Garrison Keeler who describes his imagined home town as a place where "all women are strong, all men are good looking, and all children are above average". Its a joke!) This is a cute idea for a radio skit but why would our Education Department decide to actually adopt it as a goal for all schools in our state?

Grade level achievement has its origin in the results of standardized testing (not criterion referenced testing), where the test results of a national representative sample of students are distributed along a bell curve, and analysts carve out a swath of scores on both sides of the median score and decree this group as achieving at grade level. The students testing below and above this section of the bell curve are deemed to be performing below and above grade level. There is nothing educationally significant about grade level achievement except that is is near the average for our national student population. Different populations of students depending mostly on their socioeconomic background will produce results skewed somewhat below or above the national results. Our goal in Louisiana education should be to constantly improve our student's performance in the basic skills, not to have them achieve an unrealistic goal of being “average or above” like the kids from Lake Wobegon. That's why a value added approach makes much more sense than such an unrealistic goal as a measure of educational progress. Yet our state department continues to hold up totally arbitrary and unrealistic goals as measures that the public will eventually expect our schools to achieve. Goals like "by the year 2015, all schools will achieve a school performance score of 120"!

Something else is wrong with our one size fits all education plan. When all students are expected to achieve at or above grade level in certain subjects, the system misses the opportunity to focus on the strengths of individual students. For example, by 8th grade, a particular student may be found to be two grade levels behind in reading. This is a perfectly natural result based on the wide variation in student aptitude and home environments. It does not mean that the student is defective, or that his/her teachers were negligent or incompetent. Yet our system is now set up to penalize both the student and the teacher for this perfectly natural result. This same student may possess several exceptional talents in other areas such as artistic ability, mechanical dexterity, or social abilities that would qualify the student for a valuable career. Unfortunately our system of education makes no effort to identify and capitalize on individual students strengths and interests. Many students would love to have career training starting as early as middle school. If the school system were oriented to the interests, needs and abilities of the student, much could be done to develop a plan of education for each student that would truly engage the student in preparing for his career.

Our Education Department just doesn't get it. We keep trying to force feed the same diet to all students when all have different nutritional needs. We have raised the mandatory attendance age to 18, the legislature has set a goal of 80% graduation rate, yet students and their parents continue to evade the system. Fully 40% of our students avoid public education like a toxic oil spill. Now kids are registering for home schooling in large numbers to escape mandatory attendance, and in urban areas like East Baton Rouge and New Orleans, students are simply transferring from school to the streets in such large numbers that they cannot possibly be rounded up by authorities. In a country that claims to have invented the free market system, where customers can choose from an infinite variety of products, our public school students are treated like the citizens of communist era Russia. The present system, even as reorganized will continue to lose support among all stakeholders.