A number of states including Florida are contemplating changes that would hold institutions training and certifying new teachers more accountable for the quality and performance of their graduates, NPR’s State Impact blog reports.

The renewed concern about training teachers who can cope with the challenges of educating students in coming decades comes as a growing number of baby-boomer-generation instructors are preparing to retire.

Conventional wisdom holds that many, if not most, education schools are doing a poor job at training teachers; after all, they have a history of taking in some of the lowest performing students, and student achievement in the United States has stagnated. Nationally, education schools have been criticized for being far too easy and, as a result, pumping ill-equipped teachers into the system and harming student achievement. Schools across the country are trying to mitigate the criticism by changing curriculum or increasing the amount of field experience teachers receive.

Lawmakers and regulators who hope to bring more uniformity to the student-to-teacher pathway have a challenge ahead of them. The variety of teacher-training programs in existence is bewildering. At the moment, those who aspire to lead a classroom can choose from an undergraduate degree, graduate programs, or stand-alone certification courses that are offered in a traditional environment — or even online. Yet, which one of these provides the best preparation is a question without a real answer.

According to Arthur Levine, who heads up the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program that seeks to aid those switching to teaching as a second career, there is no consensus regarding exactly the type of preparation that is vital for classroom success.

At the moment, the most common approach taken by aspiring teachers is to enroll in undergraduate programs in colleges of education. Levine is just one of many critics who feel that these schools are to blame for the majority of ills afflicting the profession of teaching. Their chief shortcoming, according to Levine, is lack of focus on content. Instead of graduating science teachers or English teachers, these programs are turning out jacks-of-all-trades not fully equipped to specialize in any one particular subject, and generally underprepared to teach anything at all.

The very idea of an “education degree” may be an antiquated concept, says Timothy Knowles, director of the University of Chicago Urban Education Institute. He argues that there is little evidence to show that traditional programs’ focus on pedagogy—including classes on child development and how students learn—helps new teachers succeed in the classroom.

“Maybe we should ask some deeper more existential questions about the value of teacher education as it is constructed,” he said.

The post Calls for Changes to Teacher Training Programs Grow Louder appeared first on Education News.

by John Jensen, PhD

In his article “Solving the ‘Boy Crisis’ in Schools,” (Huffington Post, May 1, 2013), Michael Kimmel notes statistics indicating boys’ worse achievement in school than girls. He suggests boys’ perceptions of masculinity as the determining variable; what, in boys’ eyes, is respectable as “real work.”

While boys and girls may indeed view classroom work alternately, a different elephant stands in the room. Its nature became clear to me in 1992 while watching my son play soccer in a light rain with his middle-school friends.  They were motivated, by all visible measures, dashing about and encouraged constantly to the effort of the moment by their equally motivated coach (“Nicely Done, Nicely Done!).  Standing on the sidelines I reflected on what I knew about the boys—across the board mediocre students, but here, “motivated.”

The reason for the difference between the boys’ behavior from playground to classroom struck me. It wasn’t the boys, it was the conditions!  They were not unmotivated individuals.  Instead they were subjected to unmotivating conditions! On the playfield they experienced practice, growth in competence, teamwork, clear direction, accurate accounting of their progress, and public recognition for it. In the design of soccer, effort gets you somewhere. But change places, focus on a different task, and their motivation changes instantly.

The point is critical: they instantly absorb every difference in glance, tone, concept, task, and relationship they perceive directed at them, and instantly adapt to it.

The point underlies teachers’ common experience of being required to try out some new approach the district buys. They know the first day whether it is reaching the kids.  Maybe a couple weeks are used to tell for sure, but surely no more than that. In two weeks, any new teaching method reveals its portents. If it doesn’t work in two weeks, it probably won’t work at all.

Wondering how to generate the same enthusiasm in the classroom as on the soccer field set me on a twenty-year voyage of observation, development, testing, and application — of methods that generate in students the same energy they experience on the playfield.

A central stream unites factors coherently, not as isolated characteristics forced into an aggregation. Around a common channel of energy, different emphases draw it onward. Follow the thread:

Players practice together in order to become more individually and collectively competent, enabling them to perform skillfully to peers and significant others.  Objective scoring enables them to plot their advancing skill with tangible evidence of progress they can take pride in.  Because each one’s success contributes to the whole, they give good feelings to each other and communicate effectively about the issues involved with displaying their competence.

Note the intrinsic harmony of this picture that is reproduced in one sport and activity after another: practice, competence, performance, scoring, pride, good feelings, and communication. In view of the bizarre events displayed on TV that draw eager participants and crowds of spectators, we might guess that any activity that reproduces these conditions generates enthusiasm!

If climbing a slide flowing with whipped cream can generate enthusiasm, why not classroom learning?  Really, it’s simple.  All we need is a better understanding of a few things mainstream education misunderstands.

1.  Practice is calling up and demonstrating an internal model of an activity.  For learning, this just means calling up the knowledge that went in before, and making it understandable to someone else. Two features are integral to the practice of learning: memory and sense-making. You have to call up factual parts with sheer retention, but then you integrate them so they make sense to someone else.  And what do we call this two-step process? We call it explaining.  Students need to explain every part of every course back to its beginning, and do so often and thoroughly enough that by the end of the course a “final exam” is superfluous. Everyone knows that everyone else knows it back to the start of the course. This is the “real work” boys can respect.

2. Competence.  Competence is achieved only by practice.  There is no shortcut.  The hints and aids and review questions and test-taking methods and scaffolds serve mainly to suggest to students that there is a defensible alternative to actually knowing the material. Competent with the material, you can start thinking about it from any angle and work your way into everything else.  You can explain it to anyone of any age or sophistication. This is “real work” boys can appreciate.

3.  Perform.  Barely a few minutes a day can flavor a whole day’s work.  Performing is the moment of demonstrating what was practiced and revealing the competence achieved. All a teacher need do is keep track of every question learned by the class as a whole, write it on a slip of paper, and drop it in a bag that eventually incorporates everything taught for the entire term.  At the end of each day, save five minutes to draw a slip, draw a student’s name, read the question, and let the student rise and answer (competently, again, because all the questions were already practiced peer to peer).  The teacher leads the class in applause.  To stimulate everyone’s investment in everyone else’s performance, reward the class based on the performance of individuals.

4.  Objective scoring. To score all learning objectively, notice the step of advance that occurs on the basis of student effort. In what you teach, where does effort go, and how do you identify an increment of progress? That’s the part to score unit by unit: more vocabulary words, key terms, rules of grammar, parts of speech, steps of a process, factors in a formula, meaning of technical terms.  Ask yourself “If this were on a final exam and they got it wrong, what score would I mark off?” but then give them that positive score for knowing it instead of focusing on the mistake. Ask yourself “How many distinct pieces of knowledge would I expect from this question when it is performed?” Allot those distinctions as the score for a given process.  Post a wall chart with everyone’s names, and a column for every section of a course treated.  Add numbers steadily to each column identifying the cumulative, objective count of what each student continues to know.

5.  Communications and good feelings.  The same principles hold for teaching these two skill areas quickly and effectively.  Part can be learned thoroughly as academic knowledge—about friendship, managing feelings, mutual problem-solving, personal goal-setting, grasping values, and so on.  Other parts are learned readily by practice–getting an idea, applying it, and giving oneself and others a tally in recognition of having done so.  The process is not complicated.

To return to our initial concern of boys not doing well, how does the analysis above tweak the picture?

It suggests going straight to the conditions that we know galvanize boys’ energy and notice that they motivate girls as well.  Let them all practice to become competent.  Let them perform what they know, be applauded for it, and receive objective scoring of what their effort achieves, and let them practice (and be recognized for) good communications and generating good feelings. Take two weeks to prove out this approach and you’ll discover that worries you had about your students evaporate.  You will be able to see the knowledge being reproduced hour by hour and day by day, leaving you no doubt about the depth and breadth students achieve.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

The post John Jensen: Setting the Conditions for Boys – and Everyone – to Learn appeared first on Education News.

A shortage of technology workers continues to plague the UK, but a new approach that would bring together those in the market for tech talent and the country’s schools could work to close that skills gap. In addition to the IT GCSE curriculum overhaul supported by the coalition government, putting tech companies in touch with students directly could work to inspire more of them to pursue a career in the tech field after their leave school.

Young kids just do not dream about being programmers and engineers when they’re younger. They want to be firefighters and police officers, doctors and ballerinas, because people who employed in those fields are considered heroic and romantic. There’s probably not a lot of romance to be had in a STEM profession, but jobs in technology can be challenging, fascinating, lucrative and put students in a driver’s seat of the country’s economic future.

And who better to deliver that message to students as early as primary school than current IT professionals?

Tamar Newberger, vice president of marketing for virtualisation security company Catbird, said this type of intervention would benefit the entire tech industry.

“It’s just good business because we cannot staff these jobs and there are not enough good people pursuing technology careers,” she told IT Pro.

Richard Nott , the website director for the recruitment job site CSJobs.co.uk, seconds Newberger’s call for more tech firm involvement. As he explains, those who will be entering the profession in a decade are currently in grappling with rudimentary math in primary school. Driving their interest in pursuing a technology career in 10 years is a job that needs to be done by the technology sector today. Increasing the number of students interested in a STEM career will offer an economic boost in the arm not only to the companies hoping to eventually hire them, but also to the students and the country as a whole.

The introduction of a new GCSE ICT syllabus is a step in the right direction, said Adrian Cullen, technical consultant at IT security company Damballa.

This is because the current one fails to equip students with the kind of IT skills the industry is looking for.

“There are still some very bright children out who are interested in IT that go away and figure things out for themselves, but they’d do that anyway, the problem is the syllabus should support all the children and it clearly doesn’t,” he said.

The first crucial step is finding the right teachers. Only about 35% of ICT instructors have actual technology experience or specific training. A majority are just amateurs.

“We have got to have well-trained teachers and well-equipped schools,” said Dave Smith, school improvement advisor of ICT for Havering School Improvement Services.

The post Together, Tech Industry and Schools Could End STEM Worker Shortage appeared first on Education News.

As a school consultant tasked with drawing individual students from their classroom for a specific purpose, I soon recognized when this was unwelcome.  Glancing inside the door, I could see that all were concentrating, heads angled toward their desks, bobbing up and down rhythmically. If the activity was presentation, all eyes would be directed toward the teacher.  Clearly in evidence was focus.

Walking in and saying to the teacher “I’d like to pull out Jeremy for a few minutes” could break everyone’s concentration and deprive Jeremy of the current high-value time.  Particularly for teachers who fiercely guarded these delicious periods of concentration, scheduling pull-outs carefully (or not doing them at all with that teacher) was required.

The value of such concentrated activity was the focus of a recent Carnegie Mellon University study advanced by Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson (“Brain, Interrupted,” New York Times, May 3, 2013).

Studies to date have found that multi-tasking causes all the tasks to suffer in effectiveness due apparently to the cost of the effort at switching focus. To take the research a step further, the Carnegie Mellon study examined first the effect on mental tasks of interruption compared to non-interruption.  Interruption made the brain 20% dumber.

Other variables were introduced. Research subjects were told to expect an interruption (which later occurred), and then were told to expect one but that did not occur. In the former, being able to expect the interruption improved mental efficiency from a 20% deficit to a 14% deficit.  The results of expecting an interruption but it not occurring, however, were startling. Mental efficiency improved 43%, exceeding even the control group.

From these findings, researchers concluded that an expectation of interruption and an intent to counteract it enabled participants to learn how to adapt to the distraction and sustain their concentration. We draw from these findings that 1) concentration is important for mental tasks and 2) people can learn how to stay focused.

To appreciate the significance of this for classroom instruction, we can add a couple other factors. To begin with, teachers know that distracted students are not learning, while focused students usually are, but what’s the difference instructionally between these two conditions?  Is it simply a matter of teacher discipline, pressing students to “pay attention?”

The difference lies deeper.  In order to concentrate, students’ attention must be removed from the teacher and shift instead to a mental field they themselves sustain.  Concentration and distraction each describe a relationship to a mental field, one attached to it and the other not.  Students don’t just concentrate.  They concentrate on something.

In distraction, the mind wanders off from a consistent focus, typically with attention directed outward  to stimuli of sound, word, activity, or physical environment that bear little relationship to academic content. The distracted state is not a total loss, however, because alertness to changing outer conditions fills a role in our physical and emotional survival.  Students allow themselves to be distracted by peers because it meets a perceived need.

In focus or concentration, however, the mind draws back from the outer stimuli to attend to internal stimuli it chooses consciously to invest in, internal stimuli it at least temporarily values more than the external stimuli. The presence of the teacher moves to the background, distractions from peers are fended off into a manageable periphery, and the mental field already carried within looms larger.

For the stimuli to be already accessible in the mind, they must have been placed there earlier—hence, dependent on memory and prioritization.  The contents of the mind exist only because the individual has previously determined them to be important enough to save and return to for later processing.  We might apply the word  “education” to this added processing of sensory data,  but it also incorporates the development of all the competences necessary for living.

The mental field is pivotal to education, however, because all consistent learning holds together as a field. To the extent that students perceive a given course they take as a random aggregation of data bits bound together only because they appear on the same test, and lack any intrinsic internal relationships, students can’t think about the information, passing their mind smoothly from one facet to another–feature to quality, event to concept, past to present, global to micro, system to detail.

A way to appreciate this point is to ask yourself “What am I good at?”   In place of an academic discipline, you might name “personal relationships” as your field of mastery.  But about whatever you choose, ask yourself then, “Can I think about this field with no further input right now?”  Your answer is “Of course,” and you set about to demonstrate.  Your mind picks any corner of the field, and zooms in on it. You draw up any experiences, actions, expectations, or questions, and dwell upon them.  This very flexibility and breadth of movement within the field distinguishes your mind from the mind of someone less skilled.  Your mastery means you can accomplish any task you wish within the field of attention you hold.

Now imagine that every school subject reached such a level of familiarity.  Students could enter it (choosing to concentrate and determined to resist distraction as we noted above), and then develop whatever tasks naturally at hand there. In academics, this would draw from prior input (retention) of an array of factual material, but then the development of it in the direction the course suggested—more nuanced judgments, better problem-solving, mastery of sequences and relationships, and so on.  All this would depend first on entry into the field and then development of the material that lay within.

The familiar activity that enables that development to occur is essentially explaining. Conducted for oneself it leads to increased understanding, and toward another it amounts to making sense.  Four implications are suggested for a teacher:

1.  Teachers need to deliver essential input by one means or another.

2.  Teachers need to create the conditions for students to learn concentration.

3.  Students need to sustain concentration on the mental field so that its intrinsic order binds it into a field of understanding.

4.  Students need to explain the field to each other so they learn to make sense of what they retain.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

The post John Jensen: Picture the Brain Learning appeared first on Education News.

Michael Gove has made his intentions clear for the UK’s education system. He envisions an school system where power is handed back to education professionals and where, if they can maintain high academic standards and prove themselves worthy of the responsibility, power will be devolved to head teachers in charge of individual autonomous schools.

According to Anthony Seldon writing in the Telegraph, Gove believes this independence will reignite creativity in education and help to rescue the UK education system so they can once again compete with the best schools in Asia and Scandinavia.

Gove’s vision extends beyond simply having autonomous schools; he wants to see a revamp of the entire system whereby teachers are trained in school rather than by earning abstract diplomas at universities. Leaders should arise from, and be trained at, their schools, and education research is conducted by the schools themselves rather than performed by University departments.

And while teaching unions may be calling for his head, Seldon reports that head teachers appear to be in favor of his plans.

“The best thing this Government could do for education,” one state head told me, “would be to abolish the teaching unions outright. The NUT and NASUWT are the worst.” Another said: “The trade union leaders are 100 years out of date: the world has moved on. We are now professionals and they have to reform or die.”

However, it appears this support must for now be delivered anonymously because many heads are frightened of union reprisals. Seldon was told directly by one head teacher that if the unions decide to target a school, then it’s in a lot of trouble.

Gove has butted heads with union leaders many times in the recent past; he was extremely troubled by their close relationship Labour before 2010 with union leaders given permission to roam freely within the Education Department.

An independent school colleague who does much work with state schools said: “The biggest reason why independent schools are so far ahead is that we have so little to do with unions at national level: their negativity and time-watching has held back the achievement of state school children.”

Gove has a potential solution for the union problem. He plans to make them irrelevant by introducing a professional body for teachers called the Royal College of Teachers which would function much like the Bar Council does for lawyers and the Royal Colleges do for medical professionals.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, is predictably disparaging about such an arrangement, but if the NUT’s answer to negotiation continues to be threatening strikes until it gets what it wants the public may tire of these antics and Gove may get his wish.

The post Gove Outlines Vision for Radical UK Education Reform appeared first on Education News.

by John Jensen, PhD

A tradeoff lies in how you use class time. Less of this, more of that, and you get different results. If you ever studied the piano, you’ll understand.

Let’s say your mother resolved to provide piano lessons for you and your brother, but from different teachers. Yours required an hour of practice a day and your mother had to sign off on it. Your brother’s teacher instead relied on “motivation.”  She believed that his interest was the key, and to encourage it she taught music appreciation, played music for your brother, told stories about musicians, gave background on musical forms, but never required him to practice anything.

After a year of lessons, which of you could play the piano better, you or your brother?

We know the answer from one simple measure. All we need to know is which of you practiced more. By some remote chance, maybe your brother was inspired to go to the piano on his own and begin to learn it.  Maybe the key spurring him to discipline himself through the difficulties of learning was exactly what his teacher supplied but it’s an unlikely outlier.

Probably instead, your daily hour of practice vaulted you far ahead of your brother.  Practice gave you confidence that you could learn. You noticed weekly improvement and that you were causing it by your practice. Progress built on itself.  As your repertoire expanded, you realized ever more keenly that you could do piano, a thought that never crossed your brother’s mind—yet, anyway.  Given comparable innate ability student to student,  the bottom line for learning the piano is that progress is directly proportionate to the quality and quantity of practice.

Here we have a standard insight about progress, applying across the entire spectrum of human skill. Practice determines eventual competence, and turning to knowledge with this principle in mind, we would like to discern how to translate it into classroom time-use. In the standard U.S educational environment, can we expect the principle that works everywhere else to apply also to academics? Will learning still correlate with the amount and quality of practice?

Let’s say you answer no.  If so, why?  How could you assert that?

Maybe you believe that your enthusiasm or assignments or classroom activities supply something beyond practice, that they replace it.

Actually such influences don’t. They are incentives for or means of practice but do not replace it. They set practice in motion, but do not substitute for it.  In fact we can assess every classroom activity for what we might call “the practice element,” a quality telling us that practice occurs. Something changes activity from a use of time about knowledge into the practice of knowledge.

To discern the difference, we examine the role of practice. As referred to here it is the repeated outward expression of an inward model.  The key realization is that practice begins after its inward model is robust enough to answer a teacher’s question about it. A teacher presents something and asks a question here and there to assure herself that she got across what she intended.  By then, students as yet have had no practice, but have barely installed in their mind the model of the knowledge they need to express, and the teacher has barely affirmed that she has handed the model over to them.  The input phase has occurred, but practice itself begins with the output phase by students.

Instead of this effective second step, what we see most commonly is teachers themselves continuing to practice the knowledge at hand. They explain and re-explain to all. They re-explain one to one to students who don’t get it.  They answer questions. They try to anticipate questions and answer them ahead of time. They practice their knowledge hourly but usually at students as their talk re-exposes student minds to the repeated input of knowledge.

Students themselves begin practice only when the arrow of action reverses. After ideas have come in, students then express them outgoing, needing four to five times as long talking as they formerly spent listening. If the teacher’s time is the first 10-15 minutes for  input, the remaining 40-50 minutes should be the students’ turn for practice. With teacher’s time, students grasp the new material initially. With their time, they internalize it.

The internalizing activity for any skill is typically performing the action thoughtfully. Knowledge has an activity of its own, which is explaining. The mind receives an approximate model of the knowledge and practice occurs by expressing, discussing, or writing it. The outward expression of knowledge already grasped I refer to here as “the practice element.”  Its significance is that the degree of the practice element in an activity determines its value for learning. Let’s list the practice element in common classroom activities and then consider each more deeply:

Teacher explains = zero practice element.

Students ask questions of the teacher = minimal practice element

Teacher assigns written questions = minimal practice element

Teacher asks scattered questions = medium practice element

Students write out their knowledge = medium to high practice element

Teacher gives pop quiz = high practice element

Students do Q and A practice with partner = high practice element

Students perform their learning = high practice element

Students run all their learning as mental movie = high practice element

Students explain the course back to the beginning = high practice element

While your personal approach to these activities may incorporate more practice than I note as the norm, the continuum between the first and last stages contains the key insight.

1.  Teacher explaining has zero practice element. Practice requires output of an inner model, but this experience is the opposite.  The teacher does all the output and students  receive it. This is particularly telling since teachers appear generally to do 2/3 to 4/5 of the talking in most classrooms. Students’ minds often go into triage, dismissing what the teacher has already said in order to listen to what she says now. From a long presentation, students may retain almost nothing.

The practice element lies in the effort to express the knowledge, so whoever exerts that effort  is the one practicing the knowledge. For this reason, teachers “learn a subject by teaching it.”  They do the input/output cycle over and over—week by week, year by year. And if the teacher uses 70% of classroom time to talk, 30% at best remains for students to divide up.  Do the math.  70% of a 50 minute period is 35 minutes for teacher time, leaving 15 minutes to apportion to students. With 15 students in the class, they would each have one minute or with 30 students a half minute if time were divided equally. In practice, the dominant ones hold the floor while those needing it most remain silent, and most of their comments anyway are short enough to deliver by Twitter.

This is not to discount teacher talk, which often is the most effective way to convey new material.  But once it’s delivered, further teacher talk pre-empts the time students need for practice. With inadequate practice time, their learning remains surface, dependent on the random movements of their attention..

2.  Students asking questions of the teacher offers minimal practice element. While an individual student may benefit by calling up assorted data pieces from within, the effect for the class overall is that of someone else explaining, adding details to the input phase. And because student questions rely on student initiative, the teacher cannot rely on them to deepen learning for all.  They typically clarify what the teacher has presented, and hence draw on information current in the classroom.

3.  Teacher assigns questions students answer in writing by referring to the Internet, a textbook, or a handout. Since they typically respond by transferring knowledge from one spot to another, they may draw little on their own retained knowledge, leaving this activity with a minimal practice element. They look up anything, cut and paste, and track ideas organized on a basis other than their own thought, often just plugging unassimilated data into an assignment structure.  Search-and-collect may help them form knowledge and so offers minimal practice, but they typically dismiss it just when they could actually use the written form for practice in depth.

4. Teacher asking scattered questions of students offers medium practice element.  When questions follow right after a teacher presentation, the goal is often just maintaining attention and checking understanding rather than an opportunity for in-depth practice of the content. Only one student answers the teacher at once, while everyone else listens. Deferring questions to the next day  may help, but teacher-questioning allows only a few students to answer on selected points while the remainder coast. The benefit of answering a question is not spread evenly among all students nor all ideas.

5.  Students write summaries, essays, notes, and syntheses of their learning. This has a medium to high practice element. Thorough note-taking during a presentation calls both on understanding what’s presented and processing it into a summary form—potentially at least a medium practice element.

The most challenging practice arises from students writing while drawing just on what they have already learned from all their sources. As the assignment asks less of them, it relies more on their skills in search-and-copy. As they merely string together what they collect, the practice element diminishes.  Since this tool can be used constantly with all kinds of learning, however, it remains an important option.

6.  Teacher gives a pop quiz. Expression is confined to the limits of the questions, but the quiz at least elicits prior learning so that practice is involved. Its value is minimized when  used only to assess students rather than help them deepen their knowledge. Because it challenges students’ retention, it has high practice element although perhaps of limited value because employed infrequently.

7.  Teacher breaks information into questions and answers and asks students to explain them to a partner until both know them. Here finally is clear-cut input and output.  Presentation has already occurred and knowledge gathered. The teacher has made the information understandable and arranged it in a form suitable for practice. Students explain it to each other.  They develop a mental model and then express it repeatedly to deepen and expand it.

Such practice also offers a logical end-point that encourages efficient time-use: “You’re done when you can explain it back anytime without looking.” In this high practice element activity, every minute spent at it deepens knowledge, and teachers can draw on it briefly or at length. It works with both new and familiar material, and deepens knowledge probably better than any other activity.

8.  Teacher utilizes knowledge learned for daily performances of learning.  A student name and a question are drawn randomly, and the student stands and answers impromptu.  This activity leverages the value students place on peer opinion and admiration, and generates zest and interest. It has a high practice element, works with knowledge at all levels of sophistication, offers much stimulation with little time spent, and motivates partner practice.

9.  Teacher conducts Mental Movie.  Students close their eyes and review the day’s learning minute by minute. In this high practice element activity, they “run the film” of their day, bringing to mind everything they can recall. They discover the power of their mind to record with increasing detail each activity of their day.

Teachers need not worry that children will waste time if their eyes are closed. They love to exert effort in socially valued ways. This one matters because it expands their ability to practice and perform their knowledge in front of peers, and helps especially with subjects containing visual structures such as math and science.  Observable forms, relationships, and sequences are absorbed as imagination paints them.

The more time teachers require in medium and high practice element activities, the more practice students obtain per hour, and the deeper they learn. The more they do this, the easier the teacher’s responsibility becomes. If we cease extinguishing knowledge, understand the power of steady accumulation, and use students’ time to arrange for them to practice properly, their learning cannot fail to take off.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

The post John Jensen: Mastering Practice, Teaching’s Key Tradeoff appeared first on Education News.

If teachers make a substantial impact in student outcomes, students who are having difficulties with mathematics are victims of some very tough luck. According to recent studies on teacher effectiveness, qualified math teachers at a high school level are very difficult to find – especially in places where students chronically struggle with the subject.

How critical is a good teacher for a high schooler having troubles in mathematics? According to Sarah D. Sparks of EdWeek.org, if students don’t catch up to their classmates most of the way by the end of 9th grade, they’re at a much higher risk of dropping out of school before graduating.

It’s a nasty cycle, according to the study presented by Cara Jackson of the University of Maryland last month. In districts where students typically struggle in math, highly qualified math teachers could make the most difference. Yet these are exactly the districts and high schools where highly-qualified teachers are least likely to be found.

Teachers have been unevenly distributed both within schools, in that students in lower academic tracks have had less well-qualified teachers, and across schools, such that qualifications of teachers tend to be lower in disadvantaged, low-income, and high-minority schools . Not surprisingly, these inequities in students’ educational opportunities have been linked to disparities in educational outcomes. The achievement gap between more and less advantaged students can be attributed in part to the inequitable distribution of teachers across schools.

This discrepancy was one of the chief issues that the passage of No Child Left Behind was supposed to address. Yet 7 years after its passage, when it comes to schools that underperform chronically, students who are high-performers in math are still about 10% more likely to be assigned a highly-qualified teacher than those who underperform. The trend appears to be exactly opposite in schools where children are better math students on average. In such cases, administrators appear to assign the best qualified teachers to students who are struggling most.

In short, if you’re struggling in math, your best odds for getting a teacher most able to help you improve is to attend a high-performing school, even if that means enrolling with students who outpace you in the subject.

Though the research on school context suggests teachers prefer working with higher-income and white students, Hanushek, Rivkin and Kain (2004) acknowledged that student characteristics may be proxies for other factors that shape teachers’ preferences. That is, if lower income and minority students attend schools with less attractive working conditions, the patterns of teacher behavior that suggest a preference for wealthier and whiter students might be at least partially explained by preferences for better working conditions. Ingersoll’s work suggests school staffing problems result from a “revolving door”, where large numbers of qualified teachers depart their jobs out of dissatisfaction with aspects of the school environment, such as student discipline problems.

The post High Schoolers Who Struggle With Math Lack Qualified Teachers appeared first on Education News.

by Joe Nathan

What advice would you give to a young man who recently asked for suggestions?  He’s hoping for a career in which he helps make major improvements in public education.  Here’s a little about him, and a few suggestions.  Reactions welcome.

Joe Nathan

The young man works in a suburban public school.  He’s a first-generation college graduate, and grew up in a “single-parent” home. He’s done what he’s supposed to do – graduate from high school and college, earn a master’s and obtain a job at a school.  He sees some things he likes, and a lot that needs improving.

The first person I talked with about him is Mary K. Boyd.  Boyd has been a teacher and administrator in the St. Paul Public Schools, worked for Ramsey County, served as interim dean at the Hamline University College of Education, and directed St Paul’s “Street Academy. “  She suggested:

• Make sure you have a group of support that will keep you grounded, inspired and supported;
• Constantly read and look for others who are being successful;
• Gain a greater understanding of what’s going on around the state and country?
• Don’t give up!

Then I talked with Dr. Samuel Yigzaw, director of an award-winning, “Beat the Odds” K-12 charter school, Higher Ground Academy. Yigzaw also teaches at St. Mary’s University, and serves as a mentor in a Leadership Academy our organization runs.   He recommended, “Know your resources, human and financial well.  Who can you can you count on, and for what?   You can’t do it all!”

Boyd and Yigsaw’s advice reminded me of a one-page document in the publications area on our website, http://www.centerforschoolchange.org.  It’s called  “Reminders for Reformers.”  Here are a few of the suggestions you’ll find there:

• Set priorities for the next week, month, six months and year.  You can’t do everything you want, immediately.  Every successful person I know sets some priorities, both personal and professional.
• Look for, read about and visit schools open to all that that are succeeding.  Doesn’t matter whether they are district, charter or private.  You want to be, as Mary K Boyd suggested, “a life-long learner.”
• Look for ways to share what you’ve learned.  Write to local newspapers.  Offer to make presentations to service groups.
• Make your school a community resource.  Don’t just ask for help.  Your students can help improve the environment.  They can provide singing, drama or dance to senior citizens and other community groups. Having youngsters provide service is valuable for them and their audience.
• View families as allies and partners.  While some will disappoint, many will be very helpful.
• Be prepared to be betrayed.  Sometimes someone you trust will do this.  It’s impossible to know why people do some things.
• Acknowledge mistakes and apologize.  No one is perfect.
• Exercise.  Stay fit.  You are engaged in an ultra-marathon, not a sprint.
• Retain a sense of humor.   While some of us are funnier than others, we all should laugh and enjoy our blessings.
• Stay positive.  It is possible to make a difference.  Creators ultimately accomplish more than complainers.

What’s on your list?  What would you suggest to educators who want to make a difference?

Joe Nathan, formerly a public school teacher and administrator, directs the Center for School Change. Reactions are welcome, and he can be reached at joe@centerforschoolchange.org.

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by John Jensen, PhD

In my prior article “Classroom Turnaround is Easy” I suggested three conditions for jumpstarting student motivation and learning. First was to make the instructional goal to be maintained rather than temporary knowledge, and arrange practice time so students could achieve that.  Second was to perform what everyone masters .  Third was to write out personally everything they master.

A reader responded  with an inquiry about the practicality of  this paragraph in my article:

Arrange for your students to continue to practice explaining what they wish both to master and to recall. Optimal time-use sees fifty to eighty percent of each period spent at this in partner pairs. From the first week, they easily explain everything back to the beginning of the term, and continuing to do this, by the end of the term they master the entire subject. But this occurs only if you turn over the bulk of class talking time to students so they can repeatedly practice putting the entire course into their own words and thought-forms.

The reader continued:

I understand and appreciate the purpose and value behind the paired review and the process of recalling, summarizing , and modifying the content as the school year progresses, but for the 50-80% time stipulation, I am interested to see how this would look in practice.  How would one go about responsibly putting this into action when the benefits are long-term but the initial thought suggests that time should be spent focusing on the current material? …I can see how this could be implemented at the classroom level but not how that would stretch to a larger-scale system.  Administrators I have interacted with simply do not seem to be inclined to buy into a bigger-picture plan such as this.

I’m accustomed to being on a different wavelength (sometimes even planet ) than many educators, and often find that words I assume to be plain and understandable are not received that way by others.  So here I guess at understanding the question adequately.

In the paragraph cited, the issue appears to be time-use. Basically I suggest that the proportion of classroom time spent in practicing needs to be vastly larger than it currently is coast to coast.  The problem is compounded by what I observe to be teachers’ unfamiliarity with what it means to practice (which I explain in depth in the books noted below).

The easiest way to understand the point is to think about common skills we obtain. Compare the amount of time spent getting a lead, or new idea, or coaching about it with the amount of time spent practicing its application. A ski instructor may take three minutes to suggest a change in a skier’s technique.  The skier does three ten minute runs to practice it.  A piano teacher gives a weekly lesson for an hour, and the student spends seven hours practicing the lesson during the week. For two minutes an English teacher makes suggestions to a student about a paper. The student applies them for an hour.

When I was in the military decades ago, I had a class for officers-in-training about designing training for recruits.  Our teacher told us that from long experience, the Army had found that to deliver a new skill to recruits, the optimal use of time was 5% used for explanation, 10% for demonstration, and 85% for practice.  A study I read long before the Internet was created (and that I cannot retrieve now) aimed to pin down the most effective use of time for student learning, assessing the common methods known then.  The study concluded that the optimal use of time was 40-80% of it spent in the effort to recall.  Various studies of expertise in adults reveal a direct correlation between their level of ability and the sheer time spent in practice of their skills, whether mental or physical.

As to how this would look in practice, I attempt to answer that question  by breaking time down minute by minute in chapter nine of the Effective Turnaround book (cf. below).

The change in purpose is the essential organizing principle.  The intent I propose is to align every minute of the period in service of long-term retention.  As we proceed with classroom activities as they are done now, we  tweak time-use toward that outcome.  So I suggest that the period begins with 5 minutes of review practice, calling up all prior material from memory.  Why?  We first want to solidify everything previously known, and restore students’ intent that they are learning for the long haul instead of for knowledge they will discard.

A presentation or other gathering of new knowledge follows, combined with writing it out.  Why?  Our aim is to carve off a piece we can immediately place on a conveyor belt toward permanence, so it needs to be the right size. Writing it down delineates it exactly and underscores that we are serious about specific knowledge mastered long-term.

Then they spend the larger time of the period in practicing it, telling it back and forth to each other.  Why?  I think teachers miss the obvious here, failing to notice that it is only calling up what we know approximately that enables us to know it completely.  We strengthen the neurons carrying this particular memory only by stressing the memory!  We do so by retrieving, remembering, and explaining it.  Remembering alone is important (anyone who has taken a test will vouch for that), but explaining it to a person adds a demand for sense-making.  When we face someone else, we configure our knowledge differently, conscious that we cannot fragment our thought processes if we expect to make them understandable to another.  So having students face each other and challenge their brain with this particular task over and over is the essential activity that gives them complete mastery of it.

About the reference to administrators, my own impression is that they are so preoccupied just with operating the system that they have little mental space left to be instructional leader.  Yet I would think that any teacher whose year-end scores showed a dramatic improvement would get their attention and cooperation.  A key feature of my approach is that it remains entirely under the control of the teacher and accommodates curricula of any content.  It amounts just to a more efficient way to reach year-end goals than what most are doing now.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

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Elementary schools are full of kids making noise, smiling, laughing, learning — and a visit to a neighborhood elementary school will show plenty examples of each throughout the day.

But one thing that’s a rarity in the average elementary classroom is a man. At ABC News, Susan Donaldson James attempts to answer a complex question, the answer to which leads to a female-dominated K-5 education: Why don’t more men teach elementary school?

She profiles a teacher named Philip Wiederspan whose career has seen him spend decades teaching elementary school starting with first grade. Wiederspan says that when he first began teaching, parents scheduled classroom visits just to come see him in action. They weren’t sure what to expect.

Wiederspan detailed his approach:

“I am definitely not a mommy figure,” said Wiederspan, who, after 17 years, moved up to third-grade. “Boys are a challenge. I try to draw them out. I use humor a lot and sometimes, when a kid is really shy, it’s going to take a while for them to warm up.”

The importance of having men like Wiederspan in elementary classrooms is receiving a considerable amount of attention. Some focus on the rift between our current system and approaches that are most effective with boys; others point to a growing trend of single parenting and a lack of male role models — a niche male elementary teachers can fill for young boys without fathers at home.

According to MenTeach, an advocacy group that promotes the presence of men in the teaching corps, the number of men in elementary and middle schools hovers around 16-18%. For kindergarten and first grade, the number is closer to 2%.

Psychologist and author Michael Thompson wrote a book, “Raising Cain,” arguing that society isn’t geared toward the development of boys — and he finds the lack of men in elementary classrooms to have a

“Girls can sit still more easily and are more efficient at processing language. Many female teachers have a “pretty low tolerance” for boys, who are more active and like competition, according to psychologist Thompson.”

But men who go into elementary classrooms often face a great deal of suspicion — a factor that, along with potentially lesser pay than they could earn in another sector, makes the career an unappealing choice.

“”It’s very hard to change the suspicion of men who are going to elementary education when there are so few of them,” Thompson said. “Schools ask me to talk to men on their faculty and when I sit with them behind closed doors, they say the moms look at them like potential pedophiles. “

It takes a committed, patient man like Wiederspan — who says he’s never faced an issue of suspicion like Thompson describes — to pass over the difficulties of the job and focus on the positive aspects. Organizations like MenTeach and greater attention to the effects of our educational approach on boys might encourage efforts to close the gender gap in schools that few talk about: the one that persists with adults.

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