NVM

[ErinE]

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Edited February 19, 2018 by ErinE

[SKL]

The teachers I know include a vast range of talent regardless of their on-paper credentials.  I think it's hard to pin down who is going to be a great teacher.

 

I would definitely support reducing the number of graded / tested subjects before age 11 or so.  I would be happy to see no grades/tests in the early grades for:  social studies, science, health, art, music, gym, foreign language, computers, and similar.  The experiences are valuable, but I don't see the value of documenting how well they remember the details.  But, then I would wonder if the non-tested subjects would be neglected, and that would be a problem too.  How would we make sure they were happening?

[regentrude]

The most effective solutions begin before the child enters school.

One program that delivers a lot of bang for the buck is Parents as Teachers. If parents are taught how to interact with their children, to read with them, play with them, TALK to them,

that will go a long way to close the gap that children have at age 3.

I do not think anything schools can do will be effective in leveling the playing field if it is that uneven for four year olds.

So, improving the environment at home seems to me the first and most important step.

 

Of course, schools can be improved, too. Qualified teachers, grouping not according to age but according to academic levels, which allows differentiation in the classroom. Both ends of the spectrum will benefit from it.

Getting rid of one-size-fits-all mentality that gets schools to teach to the lowest common denominator.

[FaithManor]

I think that teacher education has changed a lot. I don't blame teachers, I blame the system. Locally, the test of basic skills is WAY too easy, and the pass grade allowed is too low on top of that which means that people who actually need remediation on their own in writing, math, and reading comprehension, are being put into teacher education courses. That's BAD. Second, it is entirely possible to go through elementary education coursework and not major in anything specific so no area of expertise, and also many not even being required to take more than one Gen Ed math course. So if you take a math class the first semester of your freshman year, you are done if you are elementary ed. Skills get mighty rusty, and math education at the elementary level is abysmal here and of course leads to an inability to handle high school level math with the high school teachers being laid to blame, and it isn't their fault to begin with all of which is crazy.

 

While the high school math teacher majors in mathematics thus is a competent mathematician, or majors in science and is therefore competent in science, etc., the elementary teacher takes an awful lot of classroom management courses, classes that involve "teaching bulletin boards", and blah, blah, blah...sociology/psychology type stuff which in and of itself isn't a bad thing but if we are going to talk about being ready to teach academic students to a classroom of 36 kid it is probably better to take that four years and do two things, prep for teaching academics by being really, really competent at the subject material functioning WAY ahead of the kids, and then how to approach the subject material in a variety of ways to meet the most needs which would involve teaching in front of experts in subject material, not another elementary teacher, and in front of special education experts, then being told why explanation x,y,z is good or bad, and how to fix your problem.

 

And I agree that grouping by instructional need in the three R's is probably for the best. I like the idea of kids coming together in a wider skill base for things like art, music, science exploration at the elementary level, history, PE. But allowing an expert teacher to focus on the needs of a single group is likely much better than trying to take 36 kids and figure out how to challenge the little book worms who are reading Charles Dickens in 3rd grade, the kids reading A Wrinkle in Time, the ones on Magic Treehouse, and the ones still needing phonics readers all in one room with only maybe 45 minutes a day to devote to reading to begin with! It just doesn't work. Everyone, in order to get an education that is appropriate for their abilities, needs the opportunity to be helped right where they are ate. I'd even be all for ungraded elementary schools where the kid that has a science bent but doesn't do well in math might be headed to one classroom for assistance with memorizing those all important multiplication tables while headed to another room to collect data on the mold spores he is growing, while assigned to the PE class for the "I can't figure out which foot to use to kick the soccer ball", and the band room because in music he can already read pretty well and is ready to try an instrument, going to the low spelling group because yikes he barely spell anything right, and yet to the creative writing group on the high end because wow can this kid write a great short story with nice sentence structure if only he could spell!

 

But who am I kidding. It takes more classroom space, more teachers, more teacher aides, and more of everything to do this, and I don't see our politicians being the type so committed to education for the masses that they would be willing to take money from their own crazy pet, pork barrel spending projects that enrich themselves and their friends, and spend it on having really great schools where every child has an opportunity to he helped according to ability in each subject area by highly trained individuals who are subject matter experts even in first grade.

[regentrude]

But who am I kidding. It takes more classroom space, more teachers, more teacher aides, and more of everything to do this, and I don't see our politicians being the type so committed to education for the masses that they would be willing to take money from their own crazy pet, pork barrel spending projects that enrich themselves and their friends, and spend it on having really great schools where every child has an opportunity to he helped according to ability in each subject area by highly trained individuals who are subject matter experts even in first grade.

But not necessarily!

Our middle school for example has 12 5th grade classes who are taught by 6 math teachers. There is absolutely no reason they could not run several different levels of class for kids of different instructional needs using the resources they have already, without it costing another penny.

It is simply politically unwanted to differentiate.

 

I grant that trained teachers are expensive. But a lot of other things aren't really. If the school has x teachers for subject y, they don't all have to teach at exactly the same level.

But oh the outcry if there were different classes...

Edited May 6, 2016 by regentrude

[SparklyUnicorn]

Getting rid of one-size-fits-all mentality that gets schools to teach to the lowest common denominator.

 

It was this way when I was in school.  I'm not entirely sure why they moved away from this model.  Reading was always tracked.  Kids who struggled in other subjects were given extra assistance through either one on one tutoring during school time or through special classes.  Beginning in 7th all classes were tracked.  Gifted programming, however, at that time was weak and often nonexistent.  But it was less about teaching to the LCD.

[ElizabethB]

It does not take too much time or $ to teach phonics well.  The "I See Sam" readers are free to print, and the study which showed poor students doing better than well off students in high school after 25 weeks of "I See Sam" in K is here:

 

http://www.3rsplus.com/documents/The_Long-term_Effects_000.pdf

 

I teach for $5 of materials per child and get an average of 1-2 grade levels of improvement per 10 week, 2 hour each lesson class with inner city minority children.  At first, you need high volunteer to student ratio for classroom management.  After 3 to 4 lessons when they get to know you and see how fast they are improving and see "Hey, I can read 4th grade words, I can read 7th grade words" (very motivating!!) you can drop off the volunteer ratio, there are practically no discipline issues if you keep a proper recess/snack/learning ratio going during the class.  (The first class took 18 lessons, I now have it down to 10 with the same results.)

 

The things I use to teach are here at the bottom of the page, I re-use the Blend Phonics books to save money, the rest of the material can be printed for $5 to $10 depending on your printer.  I have an old Laser Printer that I buy remanufactured cartridges for for $35, they last 1 - 2 years depending on how many classes I teach.

 

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On%20Reading/howtotutor.html

 

Liping Ma's book shows what can be done with specialized math teachers studying math while teaching.

 

Both Jacques Barzun and Rudolph Flesch thought that if teachers had a foreign language requirement, they would understand languages better and be better able to understand and teach phonics.  

 

A quote from my "proven" webpage: 

 

Scientific studies have repeatedly found that phonics is the best way to teach reading. In fact, as Dr. Keith Stanovich says,

 

The history of reading instruction illustrates the high cost that is paid when the peer-reviewed literature is ignored, when the normal processes of scientific adjudication are replaced with political debates and rhetorical posturing. A vast literature has been generated on best practices that foster children’s reading acquisition (Adams, 1990; Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, & Wilkinson, 1985; Chard & Osborn, 1999; Cunningham & Allington, 1994; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; Moats, 1999; National Reading Panel, 2000; Pearson, 1993; Pressley, 1998; Pressley, Rankin, & Yokol, 1996; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2002; Reading Coherence Initiative, 1999; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Spear-Swerling & Sternberg, 2001). Yet much of this literature remains unknown to many teachers, contributing to the frustrating lack of clarity about accepted, scientifically validated findings and conclusions on reading acquisition. [3]

Edited May 6, 2016 by ElizabethB

[SparklyUnicorn]

I do think we should go to using specialized math teachers to teach only math.  I think it's too much to expect someone to be strong in all subjects even at the early levels.  I had many many teachers who might have been great at language based subjects, who were very weak in math.  I even once had a teacher say "math is not her thing". I mean what?!  You are the teacher teaching us math...math is supposed to be your thing. 

 

I don't know how realistic it is to expect master's degrees for all levels of teaching.  They'd have to pay more.  And what do they do if there is a teacher shortage?  I'll tell you what I've seen with shortages..sometimes they hire whoever they can find who is minimally qualified.  Like the guy I had at the CC.  He teaches high school math.  If his teaching skills are anything like how they were at the CC, I wonder about his skills as a high school teacher.  But there are so few high school math teachers available schools fight over him.  His teaching skill level can easily remain low because he doesn't have much competition. 

[hepatica]

grouping not according to age but according to academic levels, which allows differentiation in the classroom. Both ends of the spectrum will benefit from it.

 

 

But this is tricky, especially at the elementary level, and you need a highly skilled teaching faculty to recognize learning differences.

 

Kids can be "behind" in reading or writing or math skills for a variety of different reasons. It may be because they have not had equal exposure, it may be because they are later bloomers, it may be because they have learning differences. And, kids who are later to skills like reading are very frequently highly intelligent and not "behind" in other areas. So you would need to differentiate subjects at a very early stage, and not have single teacher elementary school classrooms where all subjects are taught by the same teacher to the same group of students.

 

Highly skilled, subject specific teachers can work wonders (as was pointed out above, and as evidenced by teachers in China and Finland and Poland, just to name a few), but we simply don't train elementary teachers this way in the US. That has to change. Majoring in math at the college level isn't all that useful. What we need are teachers who are highly trained in teaching elementary math, for example.

 

Speaking from experience here, you may have an 8 or 9 year old who can barely read at the Magic Treehouse level, but who is comprehending and enjoying Black Beauty or The Secret Garden or Anne of Green Gables, can do  5th grade math, and, aside from the reading or writing requirements, would be indistinguishable from her "gifted" peers in science or social studies or other subjects. But, because we tend to evaluate "academic levels" using assessments that involve reading and writing, that child would be languishing just as much as a "academically advanced" student in an undifferentiated classroom. 

[LucyStoner]

I agree with using math specialists to teach math K-12. The elementary education majors at my university didn't even need to pass algebra. There was an elementary math education class that was essentially arithmetic through fractions and decimals and the elementary education majors often stressed at passing that. Many flunked it and had to take it again. I tutored several of the women in the program and had a sinking feeling about the idea that someday I was going to have kids and someday people this weak in math could well be my child's teacher.

 

I also think that education programs should be more selective and the pay should be elevated to a professional level to reward competent, strong teachers.

[ElizabethB]

From the I See Sam study, page 928:

 

20 to 30 minutes of group instruction per day for 25 weeks.

 

"Perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that, collectively, the high school seniors who participated in the program had a lower social class rating than those who did not. Thus, in spite of an overall lower class level, the students who received the kindgarten reading program still outperformed the higher social class students who did not. It is only in rare circumstances where a group with a lower social class raring outperforms one with a higher social class rating on a norm-referenced test of reading achievement. Further, the fact that these differences can be linked to an educational intervention make them even more extraordinary."

Edited May 6, 2016 by ElizabethB