Entries Tagged 'Cut the Crap' ↓

Psychologese Crap

News flash for teachers and parents:

Students learn when they are engaged in their lesson!  You can watch the two-minute video yourself.

Students learn when they are engaged?  I am glad a psychologist revealed that (sarcasm).

Cut the Crap

In common language, students learn when they put their mind to it.  They learn when they bring understanding, imagination, and strong character to the lesson.

We can pretend psychologists offer insight, or we can keep it simple: Just model and teach the six virtues!

Richard Tabor Greene identified 48 capabilities of the educated person.  Does his research answer my question about what it means to be educated?  Or is it another list of desired qualities that is neither useful nor inspiring?

Cut the Crap

I tried to read the explanation; but it’s an example of why philosophers get a bad name — discussing esoteric topics in tortured language.  Greene conducted social scientific research to answer a philosophical question.  He provides charts and arrows to illustrate what he found.

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Concerning ways to help students succeed in school, Benedict Carey, (NY Times, 9/6/2010) wrote:

Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. . .

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? . . .

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

The last sentence applies to all psychological and educational research.  If, unlike natural science findings, social science findings can’t predict how people will behave, how helpful are they?

Cut the Crap

Concerning how we learn academic material, Carey put it this way: “The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.”

It is simple — just model and teach the six virtues, the third of which is strong character — the topic of this article.  Those who know the six virtues of the educated person don’t need to read it.

Arthur Costa and Bena Kallick believe schools should teach 16 habits of mind.

In their words:

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Education Week (online, January 6, 2012):

Popular Frameworks Found to Identify Effective Teachers

Descriptor:

For this study, the researchers broadened the list of outcomes slightly to include a measure of student effort and emotional engagement. Students taught by the teachers studied reported, for instance, on whether they pushed themselves to understand lessons in the class, and whether they felt happy in class.

Who doesn’t already know that teachers whose students “pushed themselves to understand lessons,” and “felt happy in class” will get better results than teachers with students who did not push themselves to understand lessons and who were not happy in class?

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Scholarly Crap:

Here is another recommendation for what we should teach in public schools, complete with complicated qualifications:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/10/26/09rumberger_ep.h31.html?tkn=OLYFtreV4voT%2FW7RAccRvXg87EF1JSnhFISv&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

From the article:

So, instead of defining high school success solely in terms of mastering a common, college-preparatory curriculum, we should develop a broader and more individualized measure of high school success where students achieve a sense of competency by demonstrating mastery in an area that most interests them—whether it is math, physics, cooking, mechanics, or sports—while achieving acceptable proficiency in core academic areas.

Educators should teach young people “math, physics, cooking, mechanics, or sports” and core academics.  Is this a new idea?  How many of these do we pump out each year?  How is that working?

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Bill Gates Crap

Thanks to the WSJ, we hear from Bill Gates again:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576641123767006518.html?mod=dist_smartbrief

Two excerpts:

(1)  The intermediate goal of MET (Measures of Effective Teaching) is to discover what we are able to measure that is predictive of student success. The end goal is to have a better sense of what makes teaching work so that school districts can start to hire, train and promote based on meaningful standards. . .

(2)  Some people think that teachers should be like commissioned salespeople, receiving pay based on end-of-year test scores. We don’t believe that. When we think about the kinds of teachers we hope our children have, we realize that it’s impossible to capture everything in a single metric. We believe you need multiple measures to make evaluations accurate and fair.

There are others who say that teaching is so nuanced that it is simply impossible to measure. We can’t accept that either, because we know that just throwing up our hands is bad for students and for teachers.

Because we have been unable to define effective teaching, we now reward teachers for easy-to-measure proxies like master’s degrees and seniority, even though there is no evidence that these things help students learn. As a result, a tenured teacher with a master’s degree whose students aren’t learning much will always earn more than a recent college graduate whose students are sweeping the academic decathlon. (Emphases added.)

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Bully Prevention Crap:

The Education Week email said:

Advocacy groups have designated October as National Bullying Prevention Month, and education organizations from across the country are getting involved by disseminating information and promoting anti-bullying curricula.

I wrote about this before, but it is National Bullying Prevention Month, so I will write about it again.

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Psychology Crap

Several years ago I read Howard Gardner’s The Disciplined Mind; and I thought, “Truth, beauty and goodness are ideals, not virtues.  This is an incredibly ironic book title.”

Those thoughts returned when I read Gardner’s recent response to critics:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/21/04gardner_ep.h31.html?tkn=VQNF5hjTxvm0j2RhMQNzLtXPUG2ElOSgmJN2&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1

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The Washington Post headline reads, “Evaluation of DC Teachers is a Delicate Conversation:”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/evaluating-teachers-is-a-delicate-conversation/2011/03/09/ABpPILn_story.html

The article is about a teacher who wanted to know why a “master educator” evaluator gave him a low grade on his math lesson:

Master Educator:  This does not measure your effort . . . But I do see your effort . . .

Math Teacher: So — what is this measuring?

Master Educator: It’s measuring the effectiveness of that effort . . .

Really?

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