I’ve been invited, then accepted, into Marquis Who’s Who ( https://marquiswhoswho.com/ ).

What is Marquis Who’s Who?

Details to follow

The goal of EDUCATION is to correctly, consistently and collectively implement proven cognitive science, to measurably advance, sustained, key, skills based, student learning outcomes, for all students.

Incumbent, 20th century, one size fits all teaching, WILL NEVER accomplish this. period.

21st century ADAPTIVE learning, will.

I’ve spent 20+ years understanding & documenting both & I’ve created a FREE, SELF-FUNDED, 1,200+ page, third party documented, PUBLIC teaching vs. education resource

Review, share and correctly implement

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Student learning focus

Teacher correct, consistent, collective, implementation of proven cognitive science

Individualized, reinforced over time learning 

 Relevant curriculum

Money spent to directly advance learning

Credibly documented learning research

Measurably making learning stick for all students

Working smart/Critical thinking 

Successfully engage student, parents, the funding public and society 

Owning your job failure

Facts, honesty, transparency and willingness to change for the better

#21stcenturylearning

Things that aren’t measurably proven advance student learning:

Teacher focus

Teacher salary and benefits/Collective bargaining

Buildings and grounds

One size fits all teaching

Politics in classrooms

Premeditated ignorance/Defending learning failure

The incorrect implementation of cognitive science

Money spent that simply increases the cost per student

Woke and other useless curriculum

Undocumented, Self-serving opinions

Working hard/Judging

Openly and publicly disparage students, parents, the funding public and society

Blame others for your job failure

Classroom size

Simpleton Naysaying

Defending learning failure

Inability to positive change, or resistance to positive change

Dedicated, serial lying and false narratives and union talking points

#20thcenturyteaching

What Have I Missed?

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(1) AI and the Future of K–12 Education:

From Control to Capacity in a Rapidly Changing World

https://tinyurl.com/bdhjrp8s

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SpdV1lJCHPPHClzhAgOKiiE7rvruQWQ8/view?fbclid=IwY2xjawOvp7FleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFKUUlTVFFaMUh2VFF1cHNuc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHtehDC7rFj9T_4V5y-fdsPoAUCyuySCDBYA9RR9qerPDp0ofbEkHIEdf3676_aem_dEOU9m7doXyUocwPcoJLgQ&pli=1

(2) Dr. Queinnise Miller’s words mean so much to us:

“If you want to lead with love and execute with precision…this is a must read for all educators. Well done Dr. Antonio Corrales and Ted Fujimoto. Hands down the best book I read all summer!”

We’re beyond grateful for her leadership, passion, and commitment to delivering on what matters most for students and communities. Honored that Built to Deliver resonates so deeply with her—and with our readers everywhere.

Built to Deliver

A powerful strategic planning framework for educational leaders who want results—not just plans.

Built to Deliver is lighting up social media.

Follow us and be part of the movement redefining educational excellence.

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Built to Deliver – Facebook

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March 3, 2022 — 12.01am

Forget higher pay for all teachers, smaller class sizes and increasing ATAR scores for teaching degrees, a contentious new report says overhauling teaching degrees and boosting pay for qualified maths and science teachers will make the biggest difference in improving educational outcomes.

Glenn Fahey, education research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies think tank, said many of the factors commonly believed to improve student achievement – smaller class sizes, improving teachers’ pay and conditions and boosting the reputation of teaching – had “virtually no effect on student outcomes”.

The report has been slammed by the Australian Education Union, which last month finalised an enterprise agreement with the Andrews government that gives teachers a 2 per cent annual pay rise over the next four years, as well as more time to prepare lessons and a reduction in face-to-face teaching hours.

However, Mr Fahey said how teachers used their working time, their practices in the classroom and the quality of teacher training were the “significant factors” that influenced student achievement.

His Teacher workforce: fiction vs fact report, released on Thursday, said teaching degrees often failed to prepare trainees, arguing they benefited most from teaching rounds in high-performing schools with effective supervision.

“The greatest risk to the quality of the teaching profession is not the ‘quality’ of teachers who come into initial teaching education courses, but the quality and preparedness of teachers coming out of initial teacher education,” Mr Fahey said.https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/modules/graphic-embed/?resizable=true&v=238&configUrl=https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/hub/configs/graphic-embed/5855.json

“One of the issues that’s missing is having more time in practical training [teaching rounds], having practical training earlier and having a structured program of supervision. At the moment it remains ad hoc.”

Teacher training varies across the states and territories, and across universities. The federal government has put together a panel to develop new standards for initial teacher education courses after a review found that lifting the top pay rate of teachers by $30,000 to $130,000 would make young high achievers 13 percentage points more likely to choose the profession.

Mr Fahey said while across-the-board pay rises for teachers were unnecessary, qualified maths and science teachers ought to be paid a premium to encourage graduates in these fields to choose the profession.

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Jordana Hunter

Education program director at the Grattan Institute

“Australian teachers are among the highest-paid in the world, are nearly twice as likely as the OECD average to be satisfied with pay, and report relatively high perceptions of their status,” he said.

“There is some international research that suggests a salary supplement equivalent to a 5 per cent permanent differential for science and maths teachers can result in a significant increase in teacher supply and reduction in attrition.”

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe accused the report of cherry-picking data and said comparisons with other OECD countries had been used to downplay the gravity of teacher shortages in Australia.

“No distinction has been made about how private schools are benefiting disproportionately from increased resources and reduced class sizes,” she said.

The Grattan Institute has long argued that teachers who have a strong academic record are likely to be more effective in the classroom and has urged for incentives to encourage them to choose teaching. It has also called for the country’s best teachers to be rewarded with new roles overseeing other teachers, for pay of up to $180,000 a year.https://omny.fm/shows/please-explain-1/education-in-the-time-of-covid-what-does-it-mean-f/embed?background=f4f5f7&description=1&download=1&foreground=0a1633&highlight=096dd2&image=1&share=1&style=artwork&subscribe=1

Grattan education program director Jordana Hunter said the influence of top teachers could be extended by asking them to observe and coach others.

“This can also be a very effective way to help teachers translate relatively dry academic research about effective teaching practices directly into their classrooms.”

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Less work, lower pay: Victorian graduates pay price for pandemic

Teaching shortages are not as much of a hot-button issue in Victoria as they are in NSW. A recent Victorian Education Department report predicted teaching supply would meet demand in coming years, although specialist subjects, including languages and technology, were chronically short of qualified teachers and 20 per cent of advertised maths and science roles went unfilled.

NSW has yet to resolve its teacher pay dispute, with the government offering an annual pay rise of 2.5 per cent, but the NSW Teachers Federation is seeking an increase of between 5 and 7.5 per cent.

The University of Melbourne’s Peter Adams said effective teaching required knowledge of both the curriculum and how to teach.

“The question needs to be asked whether initial teacher education adequately addresses the latter,” he said. “A good teacher knows their subject, but also knows how to teach it.”

Acting federal Education Minister Stuart Robert said parents deserved the reassurance that graduates had the skills and knowledge needed to “hit the ground running” when they entered the classroom.

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.SaveShareLicense this article

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Madeleine Heffernan is an education reporter for The Age. She has also worked as a city reporter and a business reporter.Connect via Twitter or email.

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https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-why-doesnt-every-teacher-know-the-research-on-reading-instruction/2018/10?utm_source=fb&utm_medium=soc&utm_campaign=edit&fbclid=IwAR1w-CF0-dLvvIJj7FFrGSeepkcZt5tQMtdumr2q8vpQ6wKpEFaybaTjaEY

Susan PimentelSusan Pimentel is a co-founder of StandardsWork and a founding partner of Student Achievement Partners, both nonprofits dedicated to improving K-12 student achievement through evidence-based action. She was the lead author of the Common Core State Standards for English/language arts literacy.

Almost two decades ago, the National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and arrived at recommendations for how students should receive daily, explicit, systematic phonics instruction in the early grades. Why is this literacy research not more widely known? Why is the fact that reading skills need to be taught, and that there is a well-documented way to do it, not something highlighted in many teacher-preparation programs (or parenting books, for that matter)?

Recently, a remarkable audio-documentary by Emily Hanford went viral, shining a spotlight on such crucial literacy research—none of which is new, but much of which is unknown to today’s teachers. Like many in the literacy community, I worry about our failure to bring research into classroom practice. My concern is greatest for teachers who are being sent into classrooms without the tools they need to succeed. I’m hopeful this renewed interest will serve as a catalyst for overhauling reading instruction in our teacher-preparation programs. However, relying solely on better preparation for the next generation of teachers is a slow delivery system to children. The stakes are too high. We need more immediate solutions.

Only roughly one-third of our nation’s 4th and 8th graders can demonstrate proficiency on national tests, with students from low-income families and students of color faring the worst. When students can’t read, they have trouble learning; the great majority of students who fail to master reading by 3rd grade either drop out or finish high school with dismal lifetime earning potentials.

I’d like to build on the momentum Hanford’s piece has sparked to call attention to additional research-based practices that go hand-in-hand with the importance of phonics. As educators experience ‘aha’ moments about the need for stronger phonics instruction, let’s talk about some other literacy practices that need fixing in elementary classrooms. Here’s my short list of practices and resources to add to the conversation:

1. Let all kids read the good stuff. The pervasive practice of putting kids into reading groups according to their “just right” reading level has meant that large numbers of students receive a steady diet of below-grade-level instruction. The texts they’re reading don’t require them to decipher unfamiliar vocabulary, confront challenging concepts, or parse new and complicated language. Noted literacy researcher Timothy Shanahan has written extensively about why this is the wrong approach, documenting that “after 70 years there still isn’t any research supporting the idea of matching kids to just-right texts” after 1st grade—yet still the practice persists. This, despite research showing that the ability to handle complex text is the distinguishing characteristic between students who go on to do well in college and work and those who don’t.

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Why would we deprive our youngsters of the opportunity to build this muscle in elementary school, when all that’s standing in the way of their doing so is the opportunity and the support that close reading can provide?

The Council of Chief State School Officers offers a host of resources to help teachers guide students with complex texts.

2. Build students’ general content knowledge. Some of the most profoundly important, yet under-recognized, reading research shows that students’ reading comprehension depends heavily on their background knowledge about the world—knowledge that comes largely from learning about science and social studies topics. When students know something about a topic, they are better able to read a text in which that topic is discussed, even when the sentence structure is complex or the words are unfamiliar. Cognitive science expert Daniel Willingham explains this principle clearly, and the Knowledge Matters Campaign expands on it further.

The implications for literacy instruction are enormous because young children are receiving less time with science and social studies content in their school day. According to a 2007 study, instructional time spent on these subjects dropped by an hour and a half per week since the 1990s. The diminished attention to these knowledge-building topics creates less fertile ground for reading comprehension to flourish and is a significant culprit in our stagnant national reading outcomes. Given that time is a scarce commodity in most schools, the takeaway for school leaders is to incorporate rich content, organized around conceptually-related topics, into the reading curriculum so that students learn new information about the world while they develop as readers. Student Achievement Partners has ready-made resources that teachers can pull into their classrooms.

3. Let quality English/language arts curriculum do some of the heavy-lifting. Poor-quality curriculum is at the root of reading problems in many schools. It is not an overstatement to say that a school that doesn’t have a phonics program is doing its students a huge disservice. Increasingly, the same can be said about the lack of intentionality for building students’ knowledge of the world and access to complex text. The current lack of educator know-how can be remedied by curriculum that points the way.

Fortunately, bolstered by emerging research about the “curriculum effect,” we’re in the midst of a curriculum renaissance. In recent years, a number of respected organizations have developed curricula that are tailor-built to both state standards and the latest research. Educator reviews conducted by organizations such as the nonprofit EdReports or Louisiana Believes can help schools easily identify the best curriculum for their context. No longer should classroom teachers need to scour the internet for materials. Instead, educators can spend their time focusing on how to become the best possible deliverers of thoughtfully arranged, comprehensive, sequential curriculum that embeds standards, the science of reading, and the instructional shifts described above.

I have great empathy for teachers who have labored under the weight of misdirected teacher preparation, insufficient curriculum, ever-shifting educational fads, and ever-increasing professional demands—and welcome the attention of journalists who are shining a light on the opportunity represented by the convergence of science and a new class of high-quality curriculum materials. Based on my own experiences with educators taking this improvement journey, significant reading gains are possible with the right support. Our students’ reading future can be bright—if we seize the moment.

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Research Reading: How Reading Is Really Being Taught

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There’s a whole literature on what works. But it’s not making its way into the classroom.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-the-science-of-teaching-is-often-ignored?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_3492351_nl_Academe-Today_date_20220107&cid=at&source=ams&sourceid=&cid2=gen_login_refresh

ACADEMIC CULTURE

• By Beth McMurtrieJANUARY 3, 2022

Acouple of years ago, five faculty members at Harvard University published an intriguing study. They had run an experiment in an introductory undergraduate physics course to figure out why active learning, a form of teaching that has had measurable success, often dies a slow death in the classroom.

The authors compared the effects of a traditional lecture with the effects of active learning, in which students solve problems in small groups. They found — to little surprise — that when students were taught in an active format they performed better on tests. Then they made another, more striking, discovery: Students felt like they were learning more when they sat through a lecture. In other words, though they were very engaged by the talk, it didn’t actually help them understand physics better.

Academic Twitter praised the study for its clever design and for the way it resonated with professors who had struggled with active learning. But even as it was lauded in some quarters, the study was picked apart in others. It measured the effects of single lessons, some complained. Could you really conclude, others asked, that one test was a true measure of learning? The experiment said nothing about long-term retention, still other critics pointed out. Would those differences in scores still be apparent months later?

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That mixed reaction illuminates a central paradox in higher education. Scholarship on teaching and learning has grown exponentially over the decades, encompassing thousands of experiments, stacks of books and journal articles, and major initiatives to bring the science of learning into the classroom. Yet many faculty members are untouched by this work, unsure how to apply it to their teaching, or skeptical of its value.

To be sure, many instructors have participated in workshops run by their campus teaching centers. And the use of some evidence-based teaching practices, such as peer learning or the use of clickers to keep students engaged in the classroom, are far more prevalent than they were a generation ago. But faculty developers, education researchers, and learning scientists say they often feel like they are speaking to a select audience: namely, each other, or the same subset of professors eager to try new practices. And what does get through to many faculty members and students is often garbled, or just one piece of the puzzle.

So what’s going on? Some of the bottlenecks are a product of the structures and systems of higher education, in which faculty members are given few incentives for, if not actively discouraged from, improving their teaching. They care about their students, but they don’t have the time, understanding, or motivation to make their courses better. And if habits and preconceived notions about teaching remain unchallenged, say teaching experts, there’s little reason to change.ADVERTISEMENT

But it’s more complicated than that. Much of the research on teaching and learning is done on a small scale, perhaps in a single classroom or a lab-based experiment. How it might apply in different contexts, with different groups of students, isn’t always clear. Does the success of group work in an introductory physics class, for instance, say anything about how to run a Shakespeare seminar? Students, after all, are not interchangeable variables and classrooms are not laboratories.

This confusion and discomfort are also partly a natural consequenceof the relative youth of the field. It’s messy and not very definitive. Classroom experiments may be flawed.

Yet, teaching reformers argue, the dangers of ignoring the expanding body of knowledge about teaching and learning are ever more apparent. Traditional teaching may have sufficed when college campuses were more ivory tower than lifeboat, educating future generations of scholars and other elites rather than trying to lift up a diverse group of students and prepare them for an increasingly complex world.

As colleges enroll students from a wider range of backgrounds, they are seeing firsthand the unintended consequences of methods such as high-stakes testing, rigid course structures, and lecture-based classes. Such traditional approaches to teaching, reformers argue, disproportionately set up students from disadvantaged backgrounds to flounder or fail. Active learning and other evidence-based practices, such as building more small assignments, or scaffolding, into the syllabus, have been shown to close those performance gaps and help all students succeed.

The problems go beyond ones of equity. Research has shown that in fields like STEM, traditional teaching can be ineffective at helping students understand complex concepts and develop problem-solving skills. Struggling students often decide early on that science and engineering are not for them.

In fact, one of the inspirations for the Harvard study was earlier work done by Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and evangelist for active learning, who has long advocated for programs that help transform science education. His former student Louis Deslauriers, now director of science teaching and learning in the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, and one of the authors of the study, had written a high-profile active-learning study with Wieman 10 years ago. Yet, as he and the other physics instructors noted in their introduction to the 2019 study, most STEM instructors continue to use traditional teaching methods in large introductory courses.

Why? One reason, Deslauriers says, is that they have trouble imagining why new techniques would be necessary. Whenever he would try to talk to his colleagues about what the research on teaching showed, “it would always come down to, Hey, when I was a student, traditional lecturing worked for me.”ADVERTISEMENT

Part of the uncertainty about research on teaching and learning stems from how it is defined. What is it, exactly? Lab experiments on how the brain works? Studies of student behavior? Experiments with teaching styles and course structure? Or perhaps a more philosophical analysis of what it means to become an expert in a discipline or a new way of thinking? The answer, in short, is all of the above.

To education researchers the terms “science of learning” and “scholarship of teaching” mean two different things. The latter term was popularized by Ernest L. Boyer in his influential 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Boyer, who was president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argued that teaching, carefully considered, is a form of scholarship and should be recognized as such.

Boyer’s call to elevate the value of teaching helped open the floodgates for faculty members to begin examining their work in the classroom, says Regan A.R. Gurung, associate vice provost and executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Oregon State University. Early scholarship was typically descriptive, focusing on what professors had learned over time about their experiences as teachers.

Since then, scholarship on teaching and learning, or SoTL as it is commonly called, has become more sophisticated, complete with controls, statistical analyses, and quantitative measures of learning, says Gurung, who has written extensively about the evolution of the field. A subset, mostly found in STEM, is known as discipline-based education research, and focuses on the challenges of teaching, say, certain chemistry or physics concepts. Many disciplines now publish journals related to teaching, in which such studies appear. And more colleges are giving grants and other support to faculty members who want to do research on their own teaching.

In recent years, a new strand of research has focused on analytics — mining the data that can be found in learning-management systems and institutional research offices to ask very specific questions, such as: How does the amount of time a student spends watching video lessons or doing online reading correlate to grades? One of the potential benefits of this form of research is that it can be scaled up, looking at large numbers of courses in an institution, or longitudinally, to see how students’ performance in a prerequisite affected their ability to succeed in the more advanced course.

The “science of learning,” by contrast, most often describes the work of researchers in fields like cognitive psychology and neurology, who run lab- or classroom-based experiments on how the brain works, and how that relates to learning.

Some of the earliest, and most familiar, research of this kind involves motivation and memory. Many studies have shown, for example, that people remember things longer if they space out their learning sessions and test themselves at regular intervals rather than cramming the night before a test. Another common finding is that people make stronger connections among concepts if they review earlier ideas as they learn new ones instead of learning in discrete segments.ADVERTISEMENT

In 2014 the book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning was published, eventually selling more than 600,000 copies. Mark McDaniel, one of its authors and director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education at Washington University in St. Louis, credits the book’s appeal to the way it translated experimental research into classroom practices, something that was lacking in the scholarship at that time.

Since then, research on learning has branched out to include the study of how emotion and environment can affect a person’s ability to learn. As colleges grapple with how to raise retention and graduation rates among struggling students, researchers have homed in on questions like: How does a student’s self efficacy or sense of belonging correlate with academic success? How can you foster curiosity in your classroom? How does trauma affect the brain and the ability to learn?

Books such as The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom With the Science of Emotion, by Sarah Rose Cavanagh, and How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching, by Joshua R. Eyler, embody this trend.

Many professors are open to using evidence-based teaching practices, notes Eyler, director of faculty development at the University of Mississippi, but would benefit from understanding the science behind them. What, for example, makes peer learning an effective technique? What do cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience tell us about how traits such as curiosity and authenticity increase a person’s ability to learn?

Given all these strands of research and scholarship on teaching and learning, it’s not surprising that your average professor might feel intrigued yet overwhelmed. Much like trying to evaluate studies of diet, nutrition, and exercise, faculty members can struggle to determine what research is relevant for them.

Some of what works is dependent on a scholar’s discipline and teaching demands. What’s needed to engage a student in an introductory science course is different from what makes a history seminar run well. But there are also profound differences of opinion over some fundamental questions. Among them: What constitutes good evidence? How do you define learning?

Cavanagh, the author of The Spark of Learning and an associate professor of practice in psychology at Simmons University, in Boston, recalls an incident from a workshop about her research. She usually finds a receptive audience, often with other STEM professors who may be interested in her scholarship. In this instance she was talking to a group of humanities professors participating in a yearlong examination of the social and emotional aspects of learning. She had begun talking about how, if learning is the retention and retrieval of information and the development of new skills, then emotion may be the best route through which to engage students.ADVERTISEMENT

One of the professors interrupted her: Learning, he said bluntly, is not the same as remembering. Realizing the humanities professors might be operating within a completely different frame, Cavanagh moved the conversation toward a broader discussion of the role of emotion in learning.

The divide often comes down to this question: Can you measure learning? If you don’t believe you can, in a quantitative way, Cavanagh says, “then you’re never going to believe a research study that shows pedagogical technique XYZ boosted exam scores.”

While describing the divide as a disciplinary one would oversimplify it, many humanities professors would argue that learning is a process of transformation. They are happy to study their teaching, but their scholarship is more reflective than quantitative. And they challenge their peers to take a deeper, more nuanced, look at what’s happening in and around college classrooms.

This “methodological saber rattling,” Gurung says, is tough. “So many of us will scoff, and rightly so, about a 30-person study that has not been replicated. And a lot of folks in the humanities will say: ‘What’s all this replication stuff? Let’s examine my group of 30 students.’ There’s a lot of power in that.”

Robin DeRosa, director of the Open Teaching & Learning Collaborative at Plymouth State University, in New Hampshire, suggests two other reasons that some faculty members may be skeptical of studies that rely on measurement. One is the underlying assumption that only what can be measured is relevant. Yes, collecting data is important and valuable. “But anyone who works in education with actual humans knows that data only tell small glimpses of the story,” she says. “A metric cannot tell you if a student’s mom died while she was taking an English course, or whether they are on the [autism] spectrum.”

Professors may also be skeptical of the messaging that comes with some of this research, particularly if it’s used to support a single tool or strategy. “Because higher education is in crisis now, we’re very solutions oriented, we’re very data driven,” DeRosa notes. That can cause college leaders to think that one initiative or approach can help fix a big institutional problem, such as a 45-percent graduation rate. “That’s a really naïve way to think about teaching. And it also does damage to the faculty.”

Disagreement exists even among scholars who focus on more quantitative research. Can a study of a single intervention in a single course, for example, say much of anything? Maybe not to anyone except instructors who teach similar courses. Are all the controls set up correctly? It’s hard to know, if you haven’t been trained in education research.ADVERTISEMENT

One of the reasons the physics instructors at Harvard pursued their study, in fact, was because they were troubled by the lack of quality controls in much of the work that came before them. That continues to be a challenge. “When I do research I get super excited by the titles of papers, but when I click on them and start reading the abstract it’s such a narrow, specific context and they don’t control for anything,” says Kelly Miller, an associate senior lecturer in applied physics. “It doesn’t really shed any light on the actual issues. I would say the vast majority of studies are like that.”

Some researchers are advocating for more rigor in the training of faculty members who want to do this work in their classrooms, and in the design of teaching experiments. One of the more recent innovations is a project called Many Classes, which involves a network of faculty members studying the same teaching challenges. It is a model that could represent the future of certain types of education research, says Ben Motz, who runs the project and directs the eLearning Research and Practice Lab at Indiana University at Bloomington.

The Many Classes project recruits instructors across a variety of institutions and in different disciplines to test out an intervention, giving researchers a large and diverse sample. Its first study asked a common question: Does it matter when you give students feedback on their work? It found no difference in student performance between those who had received immediate feedback from instructors and those for whom it was delayed.

Faculty developers, whose job it is to translate education research for their colleagues in the classroom, say that it often takes years and myriad experiments to draw broad lessons. That can make the research tricky to communicate.

“It’s hard for faculty to understand sometimes that the science of teaching and learning is built on lots and lots of smaller studies that give us this broader picture,” says Lindsay Wheeler, assistant director of STEM-education initiatives at the University of Virginia’s teaching center, who has studied what prevents faculty members from changing the way they teach.

Active learning broke through the noise thanks to a 2014 meta-analysis of 225 studies of STEM courses, which found that active learning increased grades and reduced failure rates, compared with lecture-style teaching.

It’s easy to dismiss any one study, in other words. But collectively many point to a cohesive set of practices that improve learning.ADVERTISEMENT

Another problem hamstrings the classroom adoption of research on teaching. What feels right to students — and some professors — is not necessarily what serves them best. Active learning, as demonstrated by the Harvard study, is one such example. In their analysis, the researchers suggest that faculty members explain in advance to students why strategies such as group work will help them understand the material better, even if it sometimes feels far more difficult and less satisfying. That may increase students’ willingness to try new things.

Anne Cleary, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies human memory, says there’s a term for these kinds of learning strategies: desirable difficulties. They require a lot of effort on the part of the student, but they’re necessary for learning that sticks. Yet how do you get students to break bad habits?

“I can still remember having this list of vocabulary words as a kid and sitting at my parents’ dining-room table and repeating them over and over,” she says. “Now I know it’s one of the least effective strategies for learning. But when I ask students every semester how many think it’s useful and how many do that, a large number raise their hands.”

Cleary is among those professors trying to tackle that challenge with strategic interventions. Through an elective called the Science of Learning she hopes that if students read the research on memory and learning they will adopt better strategies. These desirable difficulties include strategies like testing yourself regularly on what you’ve learned, rather than reading the same passage over and over with a highlighter in hand.

“What we’re teaching people doesn’t feel good,” Cleary admits. And the techniques require continual practice to be effective. “It’s a horrible sales pitch.”

Cleary also helps other faculty members figure out how to incorporate these strategies in their teaching. Students tend not to like, say, weekly quizzes. And professors often don’t want to stop in the middle of a lecture to ask students to jot down what they’ve learned so far. It makes Cleary uncomfortable, too. “It feels like I’m not doing anything. I’m just standing there,” she says. ”I should be cramming more content into my lecture.”

Place all of these disagreements, uncertainties, and challenges within the structures and systems of higher education, and it becomes even clearer why research on teaching and learning has made limited inroads into the classroom.ADVERTISEMENT

Tenured and tenure-track faculty members are under tremendous pressure to manage multiple responsibilities, including research in their own fields and service work, leaving little time to catch up on the latest study on, say, peer learning.

Contingent instructors, many of whom are in charge of large introductory courses that are extremely challenging to teach, are not compensated for the additional time it would take to sort through much of the research on these courses. Even committing to something more than a single workshop can seem like too heavy a burden.

Gurung, a professor of psychology, has been tracking academics’ attitudes toward research on teaching and learning through the years. Surveys from 2008 and 2017, he says, demonstrate a growing interest across disciplines in conducting this kind of scholarship, with faculty members in psychology leading the way. But many professors still report a lack of institutional support for the work.

Higher education also creates few incentives for faculty members to explore scholarship on teaching and learning. Tenure and promotion policies rarely reward, or even recognize, the hidden work it takes to improve one’s teaching. Departments routinely rely on student course evaluations without looking at how much time a faculty member might spend trying out new teaching strategies, taking workshops through the campus teaching center, or reading the latest education research in their discipline.

Given the de-emphasis on professional development, says E. Shelley Reid, director of the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning, at George Mason University, it’s no wonder that few professors want to take risks with their teaching. “It’s not like doing research in the lab and there are three or four people and you’re expecting things to fail,” Reid says. “It’s a public performance every night: ‘We’ve got this Broadway show. Should we tinker with it mid-run? No.’”

Mix those structural challenges into the broader culture of academe, where a stellar record of research is often held in higher regard than a reputation for excellent teaching, and it’s easy to see why so many professors are unaware of the scholarship on teaching.

As early as graduate school, the message is clear. Most Ph.D. programs devote nearly all of their time training students to do research, the implication being that disciplinary expertise is all that’s needed to be effective in the classroom.ADVERTISEMENT

“Being a good teacher isn’t rewarded in the academy,” says Lindsay Masland, an associate professor of psychology at Appalachian State University, in North Carolina. “Why would they know about this research? Why should they?”

Academics who might want to study their own teaching could also feel discouraged from doing so. Masland recalls how people in graduate school reacted when she said she was interested in the scholarship of teaching. “I got the feedback, You’re too smart for that.” So she pursued a minor in statistics, she says, “to make myself seem more serious. I wouldn’t have admitted that at the time, but I did. And it helped open doors.”

Masland, who spends about half her time doing faculty-development work through the campus teaching center, continues to bump up against these biases. She considers them the legacy of an era when teaching was considered women’s work, while universities were the purview of men. “The academy is a place where you’re expected to perform intellectualism,” she notes. “And your value depends on how badass you can be intellectually. Teaching excellence doesn’t feel very rock star, for whatever reason.”

In 2012 the National Research Council published an influential report urging more scholars to get involved in research on teaching within their disciplines, and described how such research can help meet fundamental challenges in science and engineering education, such as improving students’ conceptual understanding and problem-solving abilities.

While discipline-based education research, or DBER, has steadily grown, integrating it into departmental work has remained a challenge, researchers say. Oftentimes there’s no one in a department trained to understand this research, as it draws on other fields, such as psychology and anthropology.

Short of creating new hiring lines for faculty members trained in DBER, some institutions say the solution is to offer support for professors to study and use such research. At Miami University of Ohio, Ellen J. Yezierski, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence created a program called DBER Associates to do just that. Professors from the same discipline dive into education research with the aim of bringing more evidence-based teaching practices into the classroom.

“That transition to practice has to happen,” she says. “We can blame the practitioners or we can suck it up and make it more translatable to them.”ADVERTISEMENT

Yezierski has brought two cohorts into the program at Miami, each tackling a teaching challenge of common concern. The physics department, for example, is rethinking an introductory course, which may require stripping out some content in order to zoom in on core concepts. “They’re very much having to put a puzzle together that maybe hasn’t been solved for their course,” she says. But they are digging into the research on how others have measured learning of physics concepts, and which concepts are most important to learn.

Washington University is supporting randomized teaching experiments through its Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education, which embeds education specialists into departments. ”It’s not speedy,” says McDaniel, who directs the program, noting that one department spent several years studying the impact of active learning. “It’s a slow process.” But, he says, it’s a model that other universities could adopt. “Instructors sometimes feel like they’re out there on their own,” he says. This program changes that dynamic.

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s Foundational Course Initiative tackles the problem of implementation on a broader scale. Experts from the campus Center for Research on Learning and Teaching work with departments to restructure courses to be more engaging, reduce achievement gaps among different groups of students, and develop students’ critical-thinking skills. The work on any one course stretches over several years and involves dozens of people and reams of analysis.

“If institutions are interested in promoting change, it can’t all be left to instructors’ doing their best,” says Matt Kaplan, executive director of the center. “Especially if it involves so many pieces, as a large course does.”

What might persuade more faculty members to dive into the research on teaching and learning? Teaching experts say that professors often act when they feel a gulf between what they’re doing and what they want to achieve in the classroom. The pandemic and related social-justice movements of the last couple of years have led many to re-examine their teaching, because the effect of students’ emotional states and living conditions on their ability to learn became so clear.

Studies have also shown that faculty members are more likely to try evidence-based teaching practices if they feel they have supportive colleagues and departments. Faculty learning communities can be particularly helpful, teaching experts say, because instructors meet regularly over a series of months to tackle complex challenges, often by exploring the research and experimenting with small changes to their teaching.

Reforming teaching evaluations so that they reflect the hard work of reading and reflecting on teaching scholarship is also a critical lever for change. At Appalachian State, Masland has worked with faculty members to create a rubric listing specific teaching behaviors, such as inclusive teaching, that have been backed up by research, as a motivator to try new things. “We footnoted every behavior with a series of citations. There’s a hyperlink to every study,” she says. “That changed people’s attitudes.”ADVERTISEMENT

Deslauriers, of Harvard, thinks the evidence will ultimately win out. “At the end of the day, faculty really care about teaching and learning,” he says. And when they become aware that their preconceived notions may be wrong, “all of a sudden these obstacles — and I’m exaggerating a bit — kind of fall by the wayside.”We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.TEACHING & LEARNINGSCHOLARSHIP AND RESEARCHGRADUATE EDUCATION

Beth McMurtrieBeth McMurtrie is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she writes about the future of learning and technology’s influence on teaching. In addition to her reported stories, she helps write the weekly Teaching newsletter about what works in and around the classroom. Email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie.

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Tom McDonald, tsm7300@gmail.com; 608-788-5144; Skype: tsmw5752

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https://www.lexialearning.com/sites/default/files/resources/Trust%20the%20Science%20of%20Reading%20to%20Inform%20Instruction.pdf

” Simply put, the Science of Reading is not an opinion, nor is it a philosophical belief. The accumulated Science of Reading evidence should be trusted to inform the why, what, and how of reading instruction.
This paper considers the impact of the Science of Reading on reading instruction”

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How do children learn to read?

For almost a century, researchers have argued over the question. Most of the disagreement has centered on the very beginning stages of the reading process, when young children are first starting to figure out how to decipher words on a page.

One theory is that reading is a natural process, like learning to speak. If teachers and parents surround children with good books, this theory goes, kids will pick up reading on their own. Another idea suggests that reading is a series of strategic guesses based on context, and that kids should be taught … https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/how-do-kids-learn-to-read.html?cmp=eml-enl-eu-news1&M=59004586&U=1124971&UUID=bcce76636941e0372539f07922e11399

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Classical education is like a very large museum with many beautiful, wonder-filled rooms that could be studied over a lifetime. It is a long tradition of education that has emphasized the seeking after of truth, goodness, and beauty and the study of the liberal arts and the great books. What are the liberal arts? They are grammar, logic, rhetoric (the verbal arts of the trivium), arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the mathematical arts of the quadrivium). This approach to education also includes the study of Latin. (You can read more about the study of Latin in Why Latin?) The classical approach teaches students how to learn and how to think.

What makes classical education so effective? It is largely because of its approach to how and when students are taught. Regardless of their learning style, children learn in three phases or stages (grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric), known as the trivium. In the grammar stage (K–6), students are naturally adept at memorizing through songs, chants, and rhymes. If you can get children in this stage to sing or chant something, they will remember it for a lifetime. In the dialectic or logic stage (grades 7–9), teenaged students are naturally more argumentative and begin to question authority and facts. They want to know the “why” of something—the logic behind it. During this stage, students learn reasoning, informal and formal logic, and how to argue with wisdom and eloquence. The rhetoric stage (grades 10–12) is naturally when students become independent thinkers and communicators. They study and practice rhetoric, which is the art of persuasive speaking and effective writing that pleases and delights the listener. Again, it is this approach to teaching students based on their developmental stage that makes this approach so very effective.

Does “classical” teaching improve outcomes?

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