[onoway]

http://www.ted.com/t..._education.html

[blackshoe]

Awesome idea!

[sallyally]

I think this is truly amazing. Just how smart might I have been Now a video to help me get lebensohl down would be nice.

[Elianna]

For people that don't like reading long posts, my first sentence below is basically a summary.

I don't think that this guy knows what's happening in many classrooms now. Or a lot of educational theory.

Yes, he's got many good ideas, but the "classroom" that he keeps comparing to is dying anyway.

Also, it is rather interesting contrasting what he is promoting to some other new research in math education (granted, most of what I've learned is about middle school/high school). He is still based on the model of "person in authority says what to do - then learner shows what they've learned". What's been shown to work even better (especially with at risk students) is a student-centered classroom, where the student builds the knowledge by doing exercises that lead to them figuring out the central idea.

I do think that what he's doing could work in certain levels, and his model for elementary school seems like it works, except that it seems to lose the inquiry-based side, which seems sad. And while there's some student-student interaction in that he wants "green" students to help "red" students, I think that at all levels (1st-12th grade) that help usually consists of "here's the answer" instead of an explanation how to do it, especially because peers don't tend to understand the subject in multiple ways enough to be able to explain in the way that their fellow student would understand. Lastly, in upper grades, peer tutoring in classrooms wouldn't work in many classrooms, because some "red" students would tend to resent the "green students, and have emotional responses to that. Also (and more prevalent in my experience), many "green" students don't like to help their fellow students because they think it slows them from learning something (and for various other reasons), and sometimes parents have called and complained about it.

Sorry for this post being rather stream-of-conscious.

[blackshoe]

So we try different things and see what works. I think it's too early to tell whether this doesn't, or whether some other method works better.

[Elianna]

 blackshoe, on 2011-June-30, 20:33, said:

So we try different things and see what works. I think it's too early to tell whether this doesn't, or whether some other method works better.

In most fields, practitioners rely on research-based solutions to problems.

Take the medical field for example. Would you like that your doctor picks bunches of chemicals and says "we'll try and see what works" or would you prefer that s/he reads the current RESEARCH and tries to find the best combination of chemicals for you? Yes, it might involve some trial and error, but at least there is some previous methodology backing up the doctor's experimentation.

In fact, this attitude of "we'll try and see what works" is part of what has made a mess of many school systems. A specific example: many school systems signed up for a reading program that worked in one specific location with one specific set of students (these sign-ups were directed by the school board, which usually does not include people with a lot of training in education). Needless to say, this reading program was very expensive, and did not work with many of the schools that signed up for it, because it was not designed with the diversity of student population that those school systems had, and had not been tried with many diverse learners. You could say that these school systems participated in the research and WERE the guinea pigs, but they paid a lot of money to do that.

[Elianna]

This is somewhat on the same track as my first post, but I think that I can state my problems a bit more coherently:

1) This idea is still in keeping with the old paradigm of teaching, albeit using new technology. Probably most students who learned well before would still learn well. Maybe some who struggled might struggle a little less. But unless new paradigms are explored (which is being done, btw), many of those who did worse than struggled will be as little affected by this as by what they would get in an old-paradigm classroom without technology.

2) People who have not been in a classroom since they were students, and have not studied what goes on in them in both the US and around the world, should perhaps not be so quick to think that something is the best thing since sliced bread. This is not so much directed at anyone HERE, but more at the political bodies that control public schools.

[blackshoe]

 Elianna, on 2011-June-30, 21:37, said:

In most fields, practitioners rely on research-based solutions to problems.

Take the medical field for example. Would you like that your doctor picks bunches of chemicals and says "we'll try and see what works" or would you prefer that s/he reads the current RESEARCH and tries to find the best combination of chemicals for you? Yes, it might involve some trial and error, but at least there is some previous methodology backing up the doctor's experimentation.

In fact, this attitude of "we'll try and see what works" is part of what has made a mess of many school systems. A specific example: many school systems signed up for a reading program that worked in one specific location with one specific set of students (these sign-ups were directed by the school board, which usually does not include people with a lot of training in education). Needless to say, this reading program was very expensive, and did not work with many of the schools that signed up for it, because it was not designed with the diversity of student population that those school systems had, and had not been tried with many diverse learners. You could say that these school systems participated in the research and WERE the guinea pigs, but they paid a lot of money to do that.

I did not suggest we should just pick ideas out of a hat, nor that there are any "one size fits all" solutions. As for "research-based solutions", education is quite a different thing to medicine (or any other science). How do you "research" these possible solutions other than by "let's try it and see if it works"?

Since it's clear that there's more to it than "well, it worked in Cornhusk, Iowa, so it ought to work in South-Central LA", I suppose the problem, potentially at least, would be trying to implement something on the large scale before it's been thoroughly tested. Not in favor of that, either.

[Elianna]

 blackshoe, on 2011-June-30, 22:00, said:

I did not suggest we should just pick ideas out of a hat, nor that there are any "one size fits all" solutions. As for "research-based solutions", education is quite a different thing to medicine (or any other science). How do you "research" these possible solutions other than by "let's try it and see if it works"?

You may not realize this, but there are many places that conduct research on education ideas. They're called "Education Departments" at major universities. People with PhDs study and do research in general ed, special ed, educational psychology, etc.

[BunnyGo]

 Elianna, on 2011-June-30, 22:58, said:

You may not realize this, but there are many places that conduct research on education ideas. They're called "Education Departments" at major universities. People with PhDs study and do research in general ed, special ed, educational psychology, etc.

I am quite aware of these. We just had a 1 week conference here in May. That said, I'm largely unimpressed by most of the so called "science" and analysis being presented. It is sloppy statistics, anecdotal evidence, and frequently they'll present clear evidence that the new techniques take more effort from the teachers and produce the same or worse results, and declare that these new pet techniques are amazing. There is some occasional good research and studies done, but in general they get drowned out by lots of garbage. Granted, most of the talks and research I've seen are done at the college level, but honestly this "college level" is really "high school" level mathematics (as in, was "standard" for high school, and not just for the "green" students only 10 years ago).

In short, we are not amused.

P.S. I am not discussing special ed. That is an entirely different beast. I'm discussing educational techniques "for the masses".

[blackshoe]

"The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship." -- R.A. Heinlein

[kenberg]

I believe that we could make much better use of technology that we so far have done. We should be a little skeptical of some of the claims, however. For example, he points out that with videos a student can go back and watch it again. True enough. Of course the same is true of a book. So the question, for me, is what can a video do that a book cannot? And maybe we need to also ask what a book can do that a video cannot. I'm not at all down on the use of videos, I favor it. Although truth be told I found this particular video boring. Different strokes for different folks and all that, I guess.

Learning has many components. No doubt videos have their uses and could have greater impact in education than they now do.

[awm]

A lot of the problems with education in the US stem from the fact that the decision-makers (from the Secretary of Education down to district superintendents and in some cases even school principals) often have little or no experience teaching in a public school classroom. There are a number of very smart people who've made careers out of teaching in public schools, some of whom have later gone on to do some excellent research (perhaps in a university faculty position) on what works and what doesn't. The fact is that we have a quite good handle on which reforms will work and which won't.

However, the people in charge tend to listen to outsiders much more than they listen to those who are career educators. People with no real knowledge or experience in the field come up with ideas and somehow the folks in charge then mandate "experimenting" on our nation's kids, often trying ideas already known not to work. There seems to be an industry in faking statistics about these things... for example, most charter schools perform worse than public schools! There are some examples of high-performing charters (but equally there are examples of high-performing public schools). Yet we have movies like "Waiting for Superman" advocating charter schools anyway. Performance pay for teachers leads to "teaching to the test" and in some cases academic dishonesty... this was known before Michelle Rhee, yet nonetheless she (with about one year's worth of teaching experience) is hailed as a reformer, then publicizes the results in schools where her ideas have "worked"... and then years later we find out that they were falsifying test results and she refused to investigate. All this trouble just to disprove an idea that education experts already knew would not work.

Now we are cutting teacher's benefits and laying them off, increasing class sizes, ending specialty schools and programs that were known to work.. mostly in the name of budget austerity but with the waters very much muddied by people who claim this will somehow help education. You can see why teachers get frustrated when people like the author of this video come out with some half-baked ideas (some of which are good, some of which are lousy, but virtually all of which have already been analyzed to death in the research community) and then his ideas are hailed as "truly amazing" by people who.. well.. don't know much about the field.

With that said, of course good ideas can sometimes come from people who are outsiders and not "experts." However, by and large experts are a lot more likely to be right; when we have hard evidence we should look at it, and when we don't we should tend to trust the experts over the outsiders.

[kenberg]

I'm a little torn between discussing the video and following the more general issues being brought up. Going for the moment with the latter, I'll say a few words about Michelle Rhee. I live near D.C. and paid some attention to what happened during her tenure.

At the beginning of the school year there was a Washington Post story about how some students were upset on their return to school because they had lost their class schedule and it was taking several hours to determine where they were to go. Before Ms. Rhee, a typical story would have a great many students who had never been given a schedule, no one had a clue where that should go, and it took days or weeks to figure it out.

This little incident has a larger point. In some of the more troubled systems, there are some really basic things that desperately need doing. A woman I know played a role in helping a troubled system improve its math scores. One of her first "reforms" was to insist, absolutely insist, that every student have a textbook. This might help, no?

Some remarks based on my own experience. I taught my first class in the fall of 1960, I taught a class yesterday, I suppose just by dumb luck I learned something along the way. There are many things to be learned, and not only do people have their own learning styles also different topics need different approaches.

For example, I have taught calculus for the engineers many times. They are pretty motivated and reasonably well prepared (the successful ones, anyway). By the end of the semester most all of them can differentiate functions and do simple integrations. The crunch comes not with these routine skills but rather with having the conceptual understanding so that they know which function is to be differentiated or integrated and what to do with the result.

At the higher level, similar comments apply. I am currently in charge of an REU with several students and several mentors. The acronym stands for Research Experience for Undergraduates. This may sound like an oxymoron but it definitely is not. I have a group of three students who are investigating a question that I do not know the answer to, and which, as far as I know, no one knows the answer to. Most undergraduate math majors go through all four years without direct involvement with a professor thinking about a problem that he doesn't know the answer to. I have them try a few things, I think a bit, I suggest they try some other things, progress gets made. Once a pattern becomes clear, I guide them in proving that the pattern has some general validity beyond the cases that they have explicitly checked. Some real intellectual growth takes place, and you won't be accomplishing this with a video.

Still, I very much believe that there could be a strong role for well designed videos. The speaker, I think, has in mind that some good things can be done with videos, leaving more time for the more intensely personal interactions I am describing. I'm in his corner on this view. As long as no one thinks of it as a miracle cure, I expect a great future for the general concept.


The problems "How do we get more people highly trained in advanced mathematics", "How do we get more students adequately prepared in mathematics so that they can succeed in college" and "How do we get high school kids up to something approximating basic mathematical competency for daily living" are different questions. "Show them a video" is not apt to be the answer for all questions and all students. And then, also, there are other important subjects besides mathematics. Or so I have been told.


PS, for those wondering about the research topic. Standard Nim is a well-know game solved by expressing the stack heights in binary and doing simple calculations. Vary the game: Some stacks have red tokens, some stacks have blue tokens, the game ends when all of the red tokens have been taken regardless of the number of blue tokens that are left. Players (it's a two person game) take turns taking tokens, as many as they wish, from any one stack, blue or red. The person who takes the last red token wins (or, in the misere version, loses). Determine the winning positions and moves. I am not at all an expert on these combinatorial games but I have looked some in the writings of those who are and I have not yet found this game analyzed. I told the students that I could not guarantee that someone had not already done this (and if pushed I might bet that they had), but I haven't done it, I don't know the complete answer, and I haven't found it in the literature. The REU is six weeks long, we have made some progress, the students have learned a lot about how to think about a mathematical problem that is not of the "apply the techniques of the last section of the book in the same way that it was done in the examples" type.

Anyone wanting to try their hand at standard Nim could go to
http://scratch.mit.e...ts/jehsom/50329
Solving the variant version of Nim would allow a person to write a similar computer program for this version. We have a program that does this with (heavy) restrictions on the size.

[barmar]

"Try it and see how it works" may be how the research is done.

My town paper this week mentioned that next year the kindergarten classes in 2 of the 3 elementary schools in town will be participating in a study of a new program called "Tools of the Mind", in which the students are encouraged to motivate themselves rather than rely on the teachers. The third school will keep the current curriculum, and serve as the control group. They'll then follow 6 students from each class through the next 3 years, comparing their progress.

I assume that research went into developing this program, but academic research can only go so far. To really gauge effectiveness, you need to try things out in the real world.

[kenberg]

Here is an NPR story on Tools of the Mind. Apparently the children plan what to do, and the thought is that this will give needed skills. Perhaps so. Here is an excerpt which I found depressing, especially depressing since I think that it is correct.

Quote

Transformation in Play

Now, the reason that the Tools of the Mind curriculum asks kids like Zee and Emmy to fill out paperwork before they pick up the Play-Doh lies in the fact that today's play is very different from the play of past eras.

For most of human history, children played by roaming near or far in packs large and small. Younger children were supervised by older children and engaged in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and heroes.

But, while all that play might have looked a lot like time spent doing nothing much at all, it actually helped build a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of elements, such as working memory and cognitive flexibility. But perhaps the most important is self-regulation — the ability for kids to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline. Executive function — and its self-regulation element — is important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child's IQ.

Losing Skills

Unfortunately, play has changed dramatically during the past half-century, and according to many psychological researchers, the play that kids engage in today does not help them build executive function skills. Kids spend more time in front of televisions and video games. When they aren't in front of a screen, they often spend their time in leagues and lessons — activities parents invest in because they believe that they will help their children to excel and achieve.

We just bought bikes for the twins (grandsons, age 7) and I intend to see to it that they get out on them. But they will never use the bikes the way I used mine when I was a kid. Briefly put, I explored the world. Childhood is just different now. There's no point in moaning over it, and the grandkids seem to grow up, but I liked it my way. I hope the Tools plan works.

[onoway]

I think that perhaps the greatest value of this sort of thing is for the kids who are weaker in school.

Excellent teachers usually find ways to reach the kids even if it means doing things differently in their classroom, as I see it,and often what they do differently is picked up and run with as "the answer". The thing is that excellent teachers have the adaptability to see when such and such a technique is appropriate and when a different one is, and don't count on one technique to reach all the kids. Lesser teachers often do, out of time or energy constraints or simply because they are not natural teachers and don't see the need/have the techniques to hand.

Even worse is a teacher who has his/her own techniques and is thrust into a situation where different techniques are demanded. Sometimes these are simply incompatible with the teacher's attitudes or beliefs or even capacity. A teacher who is a strong believer in structure may have a very difficult time if expected to run a classroom where the kids decide their own priorities and activities, just as some kids who need more structure will have a difficult time thriving in that classroom.

Some kid's bodies sink like a stone when they try to swim and others bob to the surface like buoys no matter what they do. Some kids need to understand; others just need to have the tools at hand to get by with. Not all of us are mechanics and care or even know anything about how the car functions, but we can still be good drivers and get from here to there competently.

I liked the concept of this a great deal. I have nothing to say about the content or the presentation but I think the idea has a great deal of value in that it COULD be a way to give the kids access to the very best teachers for the material and the ones in the classroom could then be enablers and give the kids the intellectual and emotional support to deal with inevitable frustrations. Especially with class sizes this seems too much to expect now.

The other thing I liked about it is that it could give homeschoolers a way to make sure they were getting the best material for their kids. If I had school age kids now I would be all over this, to use as a basis for the math & sciences and as a jumping off point for whatever investigations arose out of the material. My math was fine in my day but now is totally inadequate it seems (although I CAN make change:)) and it seems a good thing to have such material presented in a nonjudgemental if not fun way (is solving these problems harder than figuring out how to defeat the dragon or get the gold?.)

[Elianna]

I was discussing this on a teaching board, and someone shared a link to this blog, which is really interesting. I also highly recommend the sections on pseudo-teaching for anyone who teaches math/science, or thinks that they can.

http://fnoschese.wor...-final-remarks/

[phil_20686]

I have actually just been reading a book called "Class warfare" about education reform in the US. It seems to me that several things are abundantly clear:

(1) You have a major problem with your teaching unions. Your teacher tenure is a mess. It takes 3-5 years to remove a teacher from the payroll even when the headmaster catches them drunk in front of their class. Principals have been reduced to attempting to make life miserable for their bad teachers so they will move somewhere else (called "Passing the Lemons") I believe. This is bad for the system as a whole and bad for teacher morale. It is even worse for the economics. Union contracts stipulate that teachers are to be on full pay until the end of their hearings, this has resulted in teachers with no incentive to expedite the process. New york state alone has close to 1000 teachers in "rubber rooms" where the average length that a teacher is there before the case is resolved is close to four years. It seems incredible that you need more than a week to establish whether a teacher is fit to practice.

(2) Teachers for America (TFA) has demonstrated conclusively that smarter teachers are better teachers on average. 75% of your teachers graduated in the bottom third of their cohort from university.

(3) AWM's claim that charter schools are no better than public schools in the US is false. It is certainly true that there are some bad charter schools. Not least the one led by Randi Weingarten (UFT president). However, in those cases where the charter system has been rigorously implemented and properly supervised it has had dramatic improvements. New Orleans, and New York State are the prime examples. Where the public schools are better it is mostly in those states where governors have managed to push through a reform adgenda which is not dissimilar to the CHarter schools system, of changed union contracts, and better measures of teacher effectiveness. For example Jeb Bush in Florida has managed to get many contract reforms of Teacher tenure through.

(4) The UFT has managed to exert a strangle hold on local democratic politics, through vote mobilisation, in order to block many needed reforms. It was only the involvement of heavyweight political bodies like Democrats For Education Reform with deep pockets that allowed efforts for reform to get past local legislatures.

(5) The oft repeated refrain that the problem was more money is patently false. The US spends nearly 30% more per child than Finland, and has incomparably worse results. The real problem has been the unwillingness of the UFT to admit that teacher effectiveness is a real thing. Weingarten has repeatedly made statements to the effect that there is no such thing as a good teacher, and this has created a system that protects poor teachers. Research has shown that teacher effectiveness can be measured, and that good teachers reliably get their students to do nearly 10% better per year than poor teachers. Over several years that difference starts to add up.

(6) If charter schools were not effective, they would not be forced to hold lotteries for places based on the fact that they are over subscribed by almost ten to one in New York state.

I think that the secrets to a strong education system are not rocket science. You need to create a culture of high expectation in the classroom. That means creating a structure of discipline where children are punished not only for misbehaviour, but also for under performing. As soon as it becomes ok for bright kids to hand in adequate assignments, then one has lost the battle for expectations. Further, you have to create the same expectation within the teachers common room. That mediocrity from teachers has a social stigma, and that teachers should be expected to properly plan and prepare their lessons and do a bit extra with difficult children and bright children. Often teachers are the best role models that kids have, and teachers who do "just enough" will teach that lesson to their kids. Teachers who are determined to succeed will breed that mentality in their kids. Obviously, you also need the nuts and bolts of education, textbooks, jotters, pens etc, but no education system in the developed world should have any worry here, except due to bad administration.

[PassedOut]

 phil_20686, on 2011-August-04, 09:51, said:

I have actually just been reading a book called "Class warfare" about education reform in the US. It seems to me that several things are abundantly clear:

Did you find that book more convincing than the others you've read on the topic, or is that one book sufficient to clarify matters?