A Little Learning

Arne Duncan drives the bus to the University of Michigan Ed School

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny DeMonte) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:48:00 +0000

The secretary added a last-minute stop on the bus tour to the UM School of Education, where he'll have some up close and personal time with Dean Deborah Ball and some faculty. Deborah Ball is known for being one of the sharpest academics when it comes to improving teacher quality, and Duncan must know it. I mean, he's here right.

More in this space later, including pictures!

Race to Evaluate

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny DeMonte) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 18:29:00 +0000

In the rush among state's to announce that teachers will be evaluated on student achievement and on their own teaching performance, no one is particularly clear about exactly how this will be done and whether any model of evaluation is a tried-and-true method with rock solid validity and reliability.

Those last few words betray my research background, and also note the big problems with evaluation of teacher effectiveness. Validity and reliability mean we are sure that teacher performance is the cause of the student achievement we are measuring, and that we know exactly what kinds of behaviors and actions they teacher undertook to cause the learning.

That's a problem because in education things might appear related, even though they are not. So suppose one year, students in many classes in a district do very well on reading. Is it because of what the teachers suddenly did? Or is it because the new reading curriculum is well suited for students and teachers? It's like hemlines and the stock market. Does a rising market really "cause" people to wear shorter skirts?

Meanwhile, what contextual aspects of students, schools, and teachers should be included in the statistical growth models of student learning? There are a couple of models most commonly discussed, EVAAS eg. But some places are making it up as they go, with each district creating its own model.

I'm catching up with this post, getting in the habit of writing and starting build a body of work.

Excellent teacher training: Not content OR pedagogy; it should be content AND pedagogy.

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny DeMonte) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:33:00 +0000

The American Educator Summer 2011 issues spotlights the ugly divide between knowing a subject and knowing how to teach. I keep circling back to the idea that good teacher requires that one know how to teach a particular subject. Jeff Mirel aptly points out that during the early part of the 20th century, the rise of professional expertise led both the educationists and the liberal arts experts to pull back into different corners and bolster the specialization within their fields. Which led, I think, to the division of content and pedagogy to the detriment of teaching in schools of education and in other disciplines.

Which takes me back to another piece in American Educator by David K. Cohen entitled "Learning to Teach Nothing in Particular." Cohen wisely points out that teacher education programs cannot prepare teachers to teach anything because every state and district has its own curriculum, its own sequence of courses and content, so teachers must prepared to teach anything, anywhere. That is particularly true of elementary grade teachers, but it applies in secondary subject areas. Teachers of Social Studies in one state might have students enter a class without US History, while teachers in another state would have a class in the same grade of those who did.

It all seems absurd, I'm sure, to teachers in Finland and other places we turn to when we compared ourselves--all of which are places with some version of a national curriculum that can be part of teacher training. In Finland, I am fairly certain that teachers are not prepared to teach nothing in particular.

Joanne Jacobs and Eduwonk read American Educator

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny DeMonte) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:33:00 +0000

She notes that articles by professors at the UM School of Education emphasize that teacher need to content--and how to teach it. Thanks for shout out.

Eduwonk also mentions the issue and decorates the post in maize and blue. Wolverines everywhere salute you.

John Dewey would have liked the Common Core

noreply@blogger.com (Jenny DeMonte) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:32:00 +0000

At least that's what I take from Jeff Mirel's article in American Educator, "Bridging the 'Widest Street in the World:' Reflections on the history of teacher education." Mirel is an educational historian at the University of Michigan, and this pieces explains why teacher education ended up where it did--distant from disciplinary knowledge and thinking.

The twist here is that Mirel declares that Dewey was a disciplinary thinker who wanted rigorous content married to real world problems, so students could apply what they learned quickly. Dewey wasn't about learning by doing--he championed learning and then doing.

Would Dewey have liked the Common Core? My take from Mirel's piece is that Dewey would have like the push toward disciplinary rigor and the flexibility to build problem solving into the mastery of the discipline.