Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

Reimagining the Teaching of English

Published in The High School Journal (May 1951) by Dorothy McCuskey, a review of Lou LaBrant‘s most comprehensive work on teaching English, We Teach English, concluded: “In short, this is no ‘how to teach’ book. Rather, it is a book which will cause the reader to re-examine the bases of his [sic] teaching methods and the content of his [sic] courses.”

LaBrant was a demanding teacher and scholar with a career as a teacher of English from 1906 until 1971. And one of the defining features of that career was her persistent challenges to how teachers taught the field labeled, then, as “English.”

The field traditionally called “English” has evolved over the years, often at the K-12 level being envisioned as English/Language Arts (ELA) or simply Language Arts.

Nelson Flores, at The Educational Linguist, recently confronted “Language Arts” as a descriptor or teaching English:

Schools often teaches courses called Language Arts. Yet, little actual art happens in most of these classrooms. Instead, language is often treated as a static set of prescriptivist rules that children are expected to master and mimic back to their teacher. This is not an exploration of the art of language. This is linguistic oppression.

HOW ABOUT WE ACTUALLY BRING THE ART OF LANGUAGE INTO LANGUAGE ARTS?

Concurrent with this post from Flores, I argued that students must unlearn to CONTINUE READING: Reimagining the Teaching of English – radical eyes for equity

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

TO REDESIGN OUR SCHOOLS, POST-PANDEMIC, WE NEED TO REMOVE SOME SACRED COWS

Watch this video. What do you see?

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Literally, of course, it’s a sacred cow. And what strikes me is how everyone around it unconsciously adjusts what they do, to the point that the cow has become all but invisible to the chaos of a morning commute.

We have sacred cows here, too — but whereas in Nepal they literally block traffic, in America they block our ability to think in new ways. And I can think of no aspect of our shared public life with more sacred cows than America’s schools:

Grades. Bells. Schedules. Credit Hours. Classrooms. Tests. Transcripts. Homework. 180 days. Age-based cohorts.

And the list could go on.

For this reason, we produced a short film series that looks at a few of these structures, and how and why they need to change. Here’s one of them: CONTINUE READING: To Redesign Our Schools, Post-Pandemic, We Need to Remove Some Sacred Cows – Sam Chaltain

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity?

We’ve been told for decades we can’t do anything about poverty, we can’t change property tax-based school funding, and we have to use our teaching skills to raise achievement.  Sadly states and school districts have relied on top-down edicts and standardized testing, teacher voice is absent.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, two Democratic Senators are elected in Georgia and President Biden’s American Rescue Plan is law.

The plan attacks childhood poverty. We may be the richest country in the world, we have turned out back on children.

  ,For more than half a century, we have failed to address child poverty in this country. This neglect has resulted in negative outcomes on child well-being and threatens our nation’s future. A child who grows up in poverty is far less likely to perform as well as their classmates in school, more likely to have food insecurity, more vulnerable to homelessness, and more likely to be subjected to violence, abuse, and neglect. While the United States proudly leads the world in science, technology, innovation, and sports, we sadly also leader in infant mortality, violence against children, and child poverty. Despite lots of expressed concern for children, our nation’s leaders have failed make needed investments in child well-being.

The Organization for Economics, Culture and Development, (OECD) studies the forty plus industrialized nations and takes a deep dive into the question: does income poverty affect child outcomes 

Childhood Poverty in the OECD?

The links between family poverty and subsequent child outcomes have been CONTINUE READING: Will New York City Reimagine Education or Waste a Generational Opportunity? | Ed In The Apple

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING

“Once I called Miami City Hall a “bribe factory,” and another time described Tallahassee as a “festival of whores.” Too subtle? Possibly.” – Carl Hiaasen

 

An interesting event occurred Last Friday, MNPS announced its new literacy initiative, Literacy Re-imagined. A more appropriate title would have been, Literacy Rebranded. Rest assured there was nothing here that constituted a re-imagining, in fact, almost everything covered was a retread of past efforts.

The timing of the event was equally suspect.

The event took place at a time that is typically referred to as the “Friday news dump”. Politicians use Friday afternoons to drop information that they don’t feel like talking about. The thinking being that on Fridays people’s minds are already focused on the weekend. Meaning pass over their head unnoticed. Also, most of the staff is out of the office, so any follow-up questions will have to wait until Monday. The hope being, that by then people will have lost interest or something of greater interest came along. Holiday weekends are even more helpful for this tactic.

I would argue that 12:30 on a Friday before Spring Break is not the ideal time to announce the beginning of a “brand new era” unless you didn’t want a whole bunch of people heralding that moment. This school year has been the hardest one in my memory. For parents, teachers, and CONTINUE READING: RE-IMAGINATION, OR JUST REBRANDING – Dad Gone Wild

We Need a Democratic Approach to Reimagining Schools—Asking People, Not Billionaires and Ideologues, What They Want | Ed Politics

We Need a Democratic Approach to Reimagining Schools—Asking People, Not Billionaires and Ideologues, What They Want | Ed Politics

WE NEED A DEMOCRATIC APPROACH TO REIMAGINING SCHOOLS—ASKING PEOPLE, NOT BILLIONAIRES AND IDEOLOGUES, WHAT THEY WANT

As soon as Anna Grant’s busy workday at Forest View Elementary School in Durham, North Carolina, ended, she would head toward the next school where she was needed. “I would get off work and immediately drive to meetings, press events, whatever we had organized [for the school],” she recalls. Her second school of concern was Lakewood Elementary, where Grant now works. In 2017, Lakewood was a flashpoint of grassroots protest due to a threat by the state to take over the school.

“Roughly 200 protesters, parents and neighborhood residents” rallied at Lakewood Elementary to keep the school out of the state’s new Innovative School District (ISD), reported NC Policy Watch, a media project of the North Carolina Justice Center. The ISD was created by the state legislature to take over low-performing schools and transfer governance from the local school board to charter school management companies. Lakewood, along with Glenn Elementary in Durham and three other schools in the state, was on the shortlist of schools at risk of being transferred into the ISD.

“It’s a takeover,” NC Policy Watch quoted Bryan Proffitt, then-president of the Durham Association of Educators. “I don’t intend to allow a terrible legislative idea to ruin our neighborhood school,” Durham school board member Matt Sears told a reporter for the Herald-Sun.

Grant now calls the protests “a community effort” that united teachers with parents, community activists, and the Durham school board in an effort to stave off a transfer of school governance from the community to a private organization. The activists formed the group Defend Durham Schools to share research and talking points on state takeovers and started a Facebook page to recruit more community support.

“Our zoned school was Lakewood,” recalls Durham parent and current school board member Jovonia Lewis, “and when the CONTINUE READING: We Need a Democratic Approach to Reimagining Schools—Asking People, Not Billionaires and Ideologues, What They Want | Ed Politics

Remote Learning Isn’t the Only Problem With School - The Atlantic

Remote Learning Isn’t the Only Problem With School - The Atlantic

School Wasn’t So Great Before COVID, Either

Yes, remote schooling has been a misery—but it’s offering a rare chance to rethink early education entirely.

The litany of tragedies and inconveniences visited upon Americans by COVID-19 is long, but one of the more pronounced sources of misery for parents has been pandemic schooling. The logistical gymnastics necessary to balance work and school when all the crucial resources—time, physical space, internet bandwidth, emotional reserves—are limited have pushed many to the point of despair.

Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always working so great before COVID-19 either. Like a tsunami that pulls away from the coast, leaving an exposed stretch of land, the pandemic has revealed long-standing inattention to children’s developmental needs—needs as basic as exercise, outdoor time, conversation, play, even sleep. All of the challenges of educating young children that we have minimized for years have suddenly appeared like flotsam on a beach at low tide, reeking and impossible to ignore. Parents are not only seeing how flawed and glitch-riddled remote teaching is—they’re discovering that many of the problems of remote schooling are merely exacerbations of problems with in-person schooling.

Emily Gould: Remote learning is a bad joke

It’s remarkable how little schools have changed over time; most public elementary schools are stuck with a model that hasn’t evolved to reflect advances in cognitive science and our understanding of human development. When I walked into my 10-year-old son’s fourth-grade classroom a year ago, it looked almost exactly like my now-28-year-old son’s classroom in 2001, which in turn looked strikingly like my own fourth-grade classroom in 1972. They all had the same configuration of desks, cubbies, and rigidly grade-specific accoutrements. The school schedule also remains much the same: 35 hours of weekly instructional time for about 180 days. The same homework, too, despite the growing wealth of evidence suggesting that homework for elementary-school children (aside from nightly reading) offers minimal or no benefits. Elementary education also values relatively superficial learning that’s too focused on achieving mastery of shallow (but test-friendly) skills unmoored from real content knowledge or critical thinking. School hours are marked by disruptions and noise as students shift, mostly en masse and in age-stratified groups, from one strictly demarcated topic or task to another. Many educators and child-development experts believe that some of the still-standard features of pre‑K and elementary education—age and ability cohorts, short classroom periods, confinement mostly indoors—are not working for many children. And much of what has changed—less face time with teachers, assignments on iPads or computers, a narrowed curriculum—has arguably made things worse.

As distance learning has (literally) brought home these realities about how we educate young children, an opportunity to do things better presents itself—not just for the CONTINUE READING: Remote Learning Isn’t the Only Problem With School - The Atlantic

A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice -

 A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich)

Justin Reich is a Professor at MIT and director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of the Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Harvard University Press, 2020). This article appeared in Teaching Times, August 20, 2020.

Over the last ten years, education technology evangelists have made remarkable claims about how new technologies will transform educational systems. In 2009, Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School predicted that half of all secondary school courses in the US would be online by 2019, and that they’d cost 1/3 of a traditional course and provide better outcomes. Sal Khan of Khan Academy proposed in a TED talk that he could use short videos to reinvent education.

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity said that in 50 years we’d have only 10 institutions of higher education in the world after massive open online courses colonized the field. As the winner of the TED Prize, Sugata Mitra claimed that students didn’t even need schools or teachers, and that groups of children with access to the internet could teach themselves anything.

A disaster

And then in 2020, the world was blighted by a terrible pandemic. Schools serving over 1.6 billion learners shut down. It was a moment that technologists had promised for years could be transformative, but for most learners and families, remote online learning has been a disaster.

As educators face the challenge of spooling up new online and hybrid schools to CONTINUE READING:  A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School, 2015-2020 (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School, 2015-2020 (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School, 2015-2020 (Part 2)

The system of public high schools in America really hasn’t undergone any kind of serious transformation in 100 years,” [ Super School Project CEO, Russlyn H.] Ali said. “It was built for an economy and a system that is no more.”

“What if you’re the one who helps America rethink high school?”

“This is a challenge to empower all of America to change high school. Together, we can transform communities and build schools that inspire new possibilities.”

From these quotes taken from the website for Super School Project, philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs and chief executive Russlyn Ali are interested in transforming the existing high school.

After the initial announcement in 2015, the Super School Project accepted proposals from 700 teams across the nation in a competition to design and execute a new kind of high school that would make this hardy–seemingly unchanged–institution relevant to their daily lives . A year later, XQ announced that $10 million would be awarded to 10 teams to put their ideas into practice within five years. Since 2016, nearly $140 million has gone to 19 teams to re-imagine the American high school.

Matt Barnum wrote about the project a year ago and said:

Most of the XQ winners are now up and running. There’s a Washington, D.C. CONTINUE READING: Reimagining the Public High School, 2015-2020 (Part 2) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Reimagining the Public High School in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Part 1)

Since 2016, the XQ Institute has awarded almost $140 million to 19 schools across the country to “reimagine” the American high school. They have had five years to do so. Backed by philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, these high schools are in the midst of putting into practice the major changes they proposed for their schools.

Then the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. Except for essential services, businesses, schools, and public services closed in March 2020. Of the 24,000 secondary schools in the U.S. (2018), nearly all shifted from in-person classroom interactions to remote instruction. Such an immediate and fundamental shift in the medium of instruction had never occurred before in the history of American public schools.

In effect, schooling, under the shadow of Covid-19, was forcibly reimagined by school boards and superintendents. Historically, reformers have talked about fundamental change for decades and have sought such planned changes in previous incarnations of high school reform. Now, massive, sudden, and I must add–unplanned basic changes in classroom teaching and learning happened over night.

While the pandemic caused the emergency closures, such fundamental change in CONTINUE READING: Reimagining the Public High School in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Part 1) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice