Blurts

It is late in the “hiring season” and some schools have yet to staff their classrooms. This challenge has reached the level it has generated coverage by the NY Times (North Dakota was not mentioned, but it appears the state has a similar problem).

I have relatives involved in both the education and health care “industries” so inconsistencies sometimes jump out at me. Remember before the compensation for nurses jumped how the health care industry was concerned about staffing challenges? I don’t remember that bringing in “community experts” to fill positions normally held by those with training was considered a solution. So, a nurse might teach biology, but a biologist could not be a nurse? A pharmacist could teach chemistry, but a chemistry teacher could not count out pills? Is this kind of the way things work?

Yes, this post is over the top. But, my point is that we accept ideas when applied to the profession of education we find ludicrous when applied to other professions.

A study (The New Teacher Project) implemented a study attempting to determine what professional development strategy or strategies could be associated with improved teaching. This is what I would call an atheoretical study – measure an outcome and see what factors correlate with the outcome (see a similar approach to improving classroom management from Jacob Kounin). Neither study initially found much. Kounin went on to propose that being proactive rather than having a superior way to respond to problems seemed to be a key. In other words, create expectations and reduce “issues” within the environment associated with problem behavior.

Since the TNTP study concluded that while some teachers do become more skilled no form of professional development seemed to be associated with this growth. This “nothing works for everyone” is hardly a new educational theme, but it seems to apply to the growth of educators as well as the growth of their students.

I encourage your reading of the full report. I have paid most attention to the executive summary and the research methodology to this point. First, I am not certain those involved in teacher preparation and professional development would agree with the conclusion. I will let those who work in this area debate the finer interpretations of improvement and research methodology.

This is one of those situations in which I think more research is needed. Atheoretical approaches are inherently flawed when it comes to reaching conclusions and I tend to regard such “shotgun” methods as a way to generate hypotheses. Education and on-going development are inherent in our thinking about professional performance in many areas (education, business, health care). My immediate reaction to a failed impact in teacher performance would be to trace the connections between the training experiences and outcome measures. a) Have teachers acquired the knowledge and skills the training was intended to develop? My experience with most professional development options is that we assume things about exposure to professional development experiences we assume about no other learning contexts. For examples, we include some form of assessment in most learning contexts to determine if learning has occurred and to allow adaptation when necessary. b) Can teachers demonstrate transfer/adapt this knowledge and these skills to activities appropriate for their classroom circumstances? What does it look like when teachers attempt to implement strategies they have learned? c) What is going on a month later? The idea is to determine when the process breaks down.

When in a cynical mood (which can occur frequently), it seems to me that educational innovations are very often rediscovery (without attribution) or rehashes of older ideas.

• Growth mindset = effort attribution
• Flipping = preparing for class
• Individual progress = the Personalized System of Instruction

I claim no great insight for making these connections. I am old and the paired ideas were simply ideas that were advanced during different points in my career. In some cases, the new idea is better. Not because the new idea is new – often it is not. Present circumstances (e.g., access to online technology) may make an old idea more practical.

One of the core ideas my wife and I have pushed for the past 15 years has been the value of externalization. My wife would likely prefer that I not use this term because it sounds abstract. Externalization pretty much just means show what you know. Specific versions of which might involve authoring to learn or teaching to learn which we have used as a way to offer ideas to educators. The more current terminology used by others might be Making Thinking Visible.

I tend to equate the origins of our version with writing across the curriculum or generative learning (Wittrock).

Simply put, externalization is beneficial because such activities:

a) require of the learner cognitive processing that may not occur without the demands of producing the external representation,

b) reveal limitations in personal understanding due to the struggles to externalize (a remedy for failed metacognition), and

c) offer others (the teacher) information that can be used to address learner limitations. We used to call this showing your work.

What I think would be interesting is to investigate what happened between then and now. Assuming these concepts are very similar, what happened to the original ideas that prevented them from being widely adopted? If this is known, should we assume a better result this time?

Paint Map offers users a way to color code maps based on statistical data. The service provides an XLS file with a column designated for your statistical data. Uploading the file then generates a map. Sample maps are provided. This service offers interesting possibilities for class projects.

Sample map based on populations data.