The National Education Policy Center is a think tank known for its incisive reviews, studies, and reports. In this post, it demolishes five myths about teaching.
Myth 1: Evaluating teachers based on student test results is fair, objective, and effective. Wrong.
Myth 2: We’d get better performance out of teachers CONTINUE READING: NEPC: Five Myths About Teaching | Diane Ravitch's blog
I was in a meeting the other day in which we were discussing NX grades. That's what we have in lieu of failure these days. A lot of teachers are upset about this, for various reasons.
I understand that it's better to err on the side of not hurting kids for things that aren't their fault, so I can't complain about it that much. I have one student, for example, who was excellent in my class. Once we went remote, he tuned out completely. Without human contact, forget it. In fact, the NX won't help him, but I'd be happy if it did.
One teacher said the NX grades were advantageous to students who do nothing. When students hand in things late, we grade them. Maybe we take off something for lateness, but we look at them. In fact, they have an advantage over students who did work poorly and got bad grades. (I don't know about you, but I haven't got the time or inclination to look at work over and over until every students gets 100 on everything.)
So this teacher was arguing a kid would be smart to just do nothing all semester, wait until the end, and then do everything. I wasn't persuaded. For one thing, people who are inclined to do little or nothing are highly unlikely, at the last minute, to find the energy to do five months worth of homework in a day, a week, a month, or perhaps ever. Of course, there are exceptions.
I myself once spent a year in a biology class, failed everything, learned nothing, but spent the last week with my nose in a red Barron's review book. Back then, if you passed the Regents exam, you passed the CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Does It Pay to Do Nothing?
SACRAMENTO—Even through the challenges of remote learning and the COVID-19 pandemic, California teachers continue to find ways to bring out the curiosity, excellence, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities in students. Today, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond honored six exceptional mathematics and science teachers, naming them as finalists from California for the 2021 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST).
“This has been a year full of significant challenges for students—personal, economic, and social. The teachers recognized today are giving their students the tools to help them tackle difficulties, find creative solutions, ask questions, and be the problem-solvers we need for the challenges of tomorrow,” Thurmond said. “These incredible educational mentors are driving preparation in math, technology, engineering, and science, including computer science, that connect students with the world around them and help them grow their skills to persevere in any endeavor.”
The California Department of Education (CDE) partners with the California Mathematics Council and the California Association of Science Educators to recruit and select nominees for the PAEMST program. Each applicant must display subject mastery, appropriate use of instructional methods and strategies, lifelong learning, and leadership in education outside the classroom. Each candidate is also required to submit a 30-minute video lesson in support of their application.
Kristen Donovan, Woodbridge High School, Irvine Unified School District, Irvine
Kristen has been teaching for 13 years and has had experience teaching Math II, Enhanced Math II, Enhanced Math III, Advanced Placement Calculus BC, and Math Foundations. Kristen previously worked as a Teacher on Special Assignment, where she built relationships with secondary math teachers across the district and led district math teams in creating new math classes, implementing integrated math courses, and reexamining high school grading practices. She also mentored teacher candidates and two early career teachers. Kristen is a National Board-Certified Teacher and has presented at the California Mathematics Council—South Conference as well as the annual National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference in Washington, District of Columbia in 2018. The lesson Kristen taught in her Enhanced Math III Honors class was on students discovering the relationship between Cartesian graphs and their corresponding polar graphs.
Maria Garcia, Richard Henry Dana Middle School, Wiseburn School District, Hawthorne
Maria is a grade eight Algebra I teacher. She has been teaching for 20 years and is currently the Math Department Chair. Maria was a previous California PAEMST State Finalist in 2019. The lesson Maria submitted helped students discover patterns in quadratics leading to conceptual understanding of completing the square. In addition to her teaching schedule, she hosts Math Saturday Events for parents and students. Maria has created the Girls Who Code Club at her school and has led the Mommy and Me coding event. She also launched a Hack-a-Challenge in which students from grades five through twelve came together to work on building/creating a robot that could successfully clean the surrounding beaches in the community.
Stephanie Paris, Granada Hills Charter High School, Los Angeles Unified School District, Granada Hills
Stephanie has been teaching for six years. The lesson Stephanie submitted for her Algebra I class explored exponential functions and examined patterns of growth and decay. She is a Master Teacher Fellow with Math for America, Los Angeles. As a Fellow, she has provided professional learning to teachers across the district and state. She mentored student teachers and helped teachers develop Project Based Learning units. Stephanie also co-taught classes with a science teacher who helped create interdisciplinary projects that connected mathematics and science, specifically Algebra I and Physics. During 2020, she facilitated two professional learning courses where she helped teachers create virtual math lessons and build community relationships during distance learning.
Garrett Lim, Walnut High School, Walnut Valley Unified School District, Walnut
Garrett has been teaching for 14 years. He helped develop and currently teaches the school’s first-ever International Baccalaureate Higher Level Chemistry course. Garrett was part of a district committee tasked with brainstorming how the Common Core curriculum could be implemented and integrated within the science classroom. The topic of his lesson was how different materials have different specific heat capacities and its relationship to how they feel.
Catherine Messenger, Los Gatos High School, Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District, Los Gatos
Catherine teaches Advanced Placement (AP) Biology along with a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Research class. She has been teaching for 15 years. She was the Science Department Chair from 2015–2020. Previously, she also led the Los Gatos High School team participating in a multi-school program to launch a corrosion of iron experiment to the International Space Station. Catherine also shared advanced science research curriculum with San Francisco Bay Area teachers. The topic of her lesson focused on the properties of carbon and water.
Zachary Moore, Laguna Blanca School, Hope Elementary School District, Santa Barbara
Zachary has been teaching for 22 years and also teaches Physical Science, AP Physics C: Mechanics, Introductory Engineering, and Advanced Engineering. Zachary was a recipient of the Fulbright Distinguished Award in Teaching as a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Integration Specialist in 2019. As the early kindergarten through grade twelve STEM Coordinator, he developed the middle/upper school elective sequence in computer science, engineering, and robotics, which also integrated 3D printers, computer automated drawings, Arduino processors, and design thinking through professional development for fellow faculty. The topic for his lesson served as an introduction to the energy unit and contextualizes personal power usage.
For more information, visit the CDE Presidential Awards for Math and Science Teaching web page or the PAEMST website
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Tony Thurmond — State Superintendent of Public Instruction
Communications Division, Room 5602, 916-319-0818, Fax 916-319-0100
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
Nearly all social studies lessons that I taught between the 1950s and 1970s contained at least one weekly lesson on “current events.” In these lessons, I tried to connect contemporary happenings to past events I was covering in my U.S. history and world history classes. Moreover, for at least five years, I used cut outs from Time magazine covers portraying world leaders in the 1950s–China’s Mao, Ghana’s Nkrumah, France’s De Gaulle–positioned on a wall ledge to link a particular event that occurred that week to those faces on Time covers.
By the mid-1960s, I had learned to incorporate national events (e.g., civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War) into U.S. historical topics such as slavery and Reconstruction and anti-war activism during the Mexican and Civil Wars. Even with those linkages, I still would set aside at least one weekly lesson to connect the past to the present by focusing on “current events” through newspaper articles, political cartoons, and local events in the city. And throughout those years, most other social studies teachers maintained a current events lesson (see here and here)
Looks like those kind of lessons, however, are waning. Except for those instances where national attention is riveted such as the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, or sexual harassment allegations against men in powerful positions as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, current events (data are scant on social studies and other subject matter teachers teaching such lessons) appear fleetingly in classrooms except in traditional Civics and Government courses required for high school graduation.
When did current events lessons begin in social studies classrooms and why?
The Progressive school reforms of the early 20th century including the teaching CONTINUE READING: Whatever Happened To Current Events Lessons? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Much present and past policy making to make better classroom lessons is anchored deeply in myth and memory. Both morph into one another as policymakers (aka “reformers), many of whom are parents, connect their children’s tales of what occurs in classrooms filled with iPads and Chromebooks to memories of what went on in their elementary and secondary classes.
Sure, school boards and superintendents consult with researchers and look at classroom studies, and ponder the changes that new technologies have made in how teachers teach but even research findings are sorted through memories of writing an essay for that English teacher or the 5th grade quizzes that constricted one’s intestines. So I do not discount the power of myth and memory to shape policies aimed at getting teachers to teach better even after a decade of new technologies being tamed by teachers to become part of their instructional repertoire.
What is too often missing from the mix of data, Golly Gees over new software and remembrances are the few accounts by historians of education who have documented–albeit in fragmentary ways–what actually went on in classrooms over the past century. Some CONTINUE READING: How Teachers Taught: A Look in the Rear-View Mirror | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Most policymakers, researchers, and parents believe that good teachers and teaching are the keys to school improvement yet these very same folks know little about how teachers teach daily. And that is the rub. Good teachers and teaching are the agreed-upon policy solutions to both high- and low-performing students yet reliable knowledge of how most teachers teach and what are the best ways of teaching in either affluent or low-income, minority schools are absent among policymakers, researchers, and parents.
At a time when remote instruction has dominated the practice of teaching during the pandemic year, it is useful to take a moment to consider how teachers have taught for the past century and the traditions of teaching that teachers have straddled since the first age-graded school opened in the mid-19th century.
So how have most teachers taught and teach today?
The long answer can be found in many books such as Mary Kennedy, Inside Teaching (2005), Dan Lortie, Schoolteacher (1975), Philip Jackson, The Practice of Teaching (1986), and Larry Cuban, How Teachers Taught (1984).
The short answer is that teachers today draw from two traditions of teaching.
From the early 19th century, teacher-centered and student-centered traditions have dominated classroom instruction (see photo below of a classroom taught within this tradition a century ago).
The teacher-centered tradition refers to teachers controlling what is taught, when, and under what conditions. Were you to sit for a few minutes in such a CONTINUE READING: Classroom Teaching Then and Now | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
So our dining room table becomes a storage area, except on the rare occasions when we have company. Since COVID hit, we haven't had more than one outside visitor at a time.
When my students see me, they see a clean area with a painting hanging on the wall. What I see is a mountain of papers, books, and a few violins for good measure. I frequently have to hustle to find the materials on which we're working, as I misplace them religiously.
It's symbolic, though, of the times we're facing. Everything is fine, we tell or show the kids. But as they know, and as we all know, everything is a perpetual shitstorm. Were that not the case, we'd be in school seeing and talking to one another, as opposed to viewing one another over Zoom, or whatever platform we happen to be using.
I was extremely lucky this year, in that I was assigned to teach a level up from where I taught last year. This left me with a lot of students I already know well. I have gotten to know some of my new students well, particularly those who are extroverted, but they represent a distinct minority. Those who are shy, and a whole lot of newcomers are shy, take a long time to cross my radar.
There are a lot of people out there advocating for student privacy, and for them that includes the right to no CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Reflections on Apocalypse Teaching
In 2001, I retired from fulltime teaching and research at Stanford. The Dean invited me to give a talk to the graduates and their families that June. Here is an abridged version of what I said.
“I have thought a lot about the past 46 years I have spent in education. I have taught in urban high schools and Stanford for many years [in addition to being an administrator]. It is teaching–not administration or scholarship [however]–that has defined me as an adult….
Teaching has permitted me to be a lover of ideas, a performer, a lifelong learner, a historian, a writer, and a friend to former students and colleagues. For these reasons and because at this moment in our nation’s history teachers have moved to the top of the nation’s school reform agenda, I want to comment today on both the exhilarating and troubling aspects of teaching….
Two basic reasons are behind this strong push for higher quality in teachers: Policy makers and teacher educators believe that when teachers understand deeply their subjects and possess a full repertoire of teaching skills students will learn more, do better on tests, and eventually get good jobs. And, second, higher teacher standards will move the occupation much closer to professional status.
And, of course, who could argue against teachers acquiring more expertise in the subject and displaying polished skills to help children learn more? Who would argue against teaching becoming a full-fledged profession? Certainly, I don’t. Yet, in all honesty, what troubles me is the cramped image of teaching that has CONTINUE READING: Thoughts on Teaching | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Early in the semester of my first-year writing seminar, we consider and reconsider openings in essays, an interrogation of students’ experiences with the mechanical “introduction” with the obligatory thesis sentence.
We examine, for example, several Beginnings from Barabara Kingsolver’s essays in High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonder. Two essay beginnings reveal the complexity of student awareness about genre, writing forms, and language/text conventions.
Kingsolver’s “Creation Stories” opens with “June is the cruelest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts until the end of July.” Students always struggle with tone (missing the exaggeration and humor), and completely miss the allusion the T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (a work itself rich with allusion and historically situated).
I have them consider that their dominant experiences with literary texts in school have been deadly serious, both the texts they have read and the approach taken to those texts (analyzing for deeply serious meaning). Then, I stress the problems with referential texts, such as the use of allusion, since the author is expecting the readers/audience to have the background knowledge needed to recognize the reference and its significance to the texts being addressed.
“Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile,” Kingsolver begins in her “Jabberwocky.” Immediately, students identify this reference to fairy tales, CONTINUE READING: Teaching WandaVision: A Textset on Pastiche – radical eyes for equity
Kristina Rizga is a writer based in San Francisco, co-creator of The Atlantic’s On Teaching project, and author of Mission High. This article appeared November 8, 2020.
For the past 26 years, Chuck Yarborough, the U.S. and African American history teacher at the Mississippi School of Mathematics and Science in Columbus, has been surveying his students on how American history is taught. Students come from all over the state to spend their last two years of high school at this diverse public boarding school, and he wants to know what they’ve learned by the time they get there. The feedback from more than 1,400 students over the years has been consistent. In each class of about 18 students, an average of five come in with some basic knowledge of the Civil War, but very few have studied the role that slavery played in it—or the connections between the war, white supremacy, Jim Crow laws, and how this legacy continues to uphold racial segregation and inequities in Mississippi.
Yarborough has spent his career trying to fill these omissions in how U.S. history is taught—and thinking about his own role as a white educator in the Deep South, teaching about the roots of racial injustice. During my visit in the fall of 2018, I asked Yarborough to describe his approach. Our conversations have been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Kristina Rizga: How are the Civil War and Reconstruction taught at Mississippi schools?
Chuck Yarborough: They are not taught for the most part, unfortunately. In theory, students are supposed to have been taught the Civil War and CONTINUE READING: How to Teach American History in a Divided Country (Kristina Rizga) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
The Washington Post gathered stories of creative teaching from throughout the Washington region. The anecdotes collected below do not represent everyone’s experience, but they highlight notes of grace — and offer sparks of hope.
She kept thinking about the projects cut short by the pandemic: The crown-wearing dinosaurs her kindergartners would never finish painting. The cityscapes her second-graders would never finish crafting.
Dillingham, who teaches at James K. Polk Elementary School in Alexandria, was also concerned about her students’ lack of engagement — so few were completing the assignments she emailed to parents. She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.
That’s when she spotted it, shared on an online forum for art teachers: Someone had twisted the CONTINUE READING: Treehouse teaching and laundry art: Educators find creative ways to reach kids - The Washington Post
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, followed the debate about what to do “after COVID,” and he shares his wisdom here.
I’ve been wrestling with two quandaries regarding post-COVID schools. Yes, in the short-run, the tactical use of digital technology has been prioritized, but the longer term priority must be human-to-human relationships. The last thing we want are 21th century schools driven by screen time. So, what can we do to recover from the pandemic which came on the heels of the corporate school reform disaster that was imposed on teachers and students?
Last spring, I timidly made suggestions but I knew that educators were overwhelmed, and it wasn’t time to be pushy about future visions of schooling. It’s unlikely that many of today’s teachers would be allowed to do so, but I used to start my inner city high school classes’ orientation week with music, poetry, and film clips like Amiri Baraka’s “The X is Black,” Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin,” and Denzel Washington in Cry Freedom, playing Steve Biko, explaining colonialism.
So, if I were still teaching high school, I’d have used CONTINUE READING: John Thompson: What Teachers Should Do When Schools Re-Open | Diane Ravitch's blog
I looked on the chat board and saw that one of my 7th-grade students had, once again, posted a picture of a McDonald’s meal. This meant that they needed a break and wanted to tell me about the Travis Scott meal at McDonalds.
Ms. Osman: What did you learn about the Travis Scott meal?
Student: Miss! This meal is craaazy. I heard that people are just going up to the window and telling the workers, “you know what I want.” (poop emoji and laughing crying emoji)
Ms. Osman: How would the worker know what they want?
Another student: Idk. But I don’t like Quarter Pounders.
Student: I don’t like Big Macs In & Out’s better
I let a few more minutes of this go on. I’ve been trying to build in time for the students to chat with each other, especially since they haven’t seen their peers this whole year. This is a crucial part of the school experience, and as middle-schoolers, a time in their lives to learn how to properly socialize. It also allows me to get to know them as well.
In history, 2020 will probably be remembered as the year of despair. Just in the U.S., hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, millions are unemployed, and even getting to spend time with friends and family is severely limited (if even possible).
One of the most affected areas has been education. Every community is handling schooling differently: Classes are in-person in some places, virtual in other areas, and CONTINUE READING: What It's Like Teaching On Zoom To Students I've Never Met, And Often Not Seen Or Heard | HuffPost
Recently on social media, a professor asked if others used rubrics with graduate students. Since rejecting rubrics has been a central component of my career-long efforts to de-grade and de-test teaching and learning, I chimed in.
My posts in the comments explaining why I don’t use rubrics were significant outliers because the thread of comments was overwhelmingly endorsing rubrics, almost entirely in terms of making grading easier or more transparent as well as providing teachers/professors protection against (hypothetical) students challenging their grades.
One immediate response to my comments is also worth highlighting since a person who doesn’t know me made fairly nasty assumptions about me being like the professors they had in grad school, the “gotcha” professors who use grades to ambush and punish students.
While most of my public (see here and here, for example) and scholarly work rejecting the use of rubrics—especially when teaching writing—has focused on their negative impact, along with grades, on students and learning (see this example), the recent social media thread highlights that grades also tarnish CONTINUE READING: Grades Tarnish Teaching as well as Learning – radical eyes for equity
