Eduwonkette has touched on this frequently when she discusses differences between charter and non-charter families that can be summarized here:

First, that students selected into a charter lottery makes them different from those who did not. It may be that their parents are more involved in their education, that they are having a particularly bad experience at their neighborhood school, or that their parents can no longer pay for private school. Whatever the reason, families selecting in, even if they are all poor and minority kids, are different by virtue of choosing a non-neighborhood school.

There are folks that don’t always get that difference like this reporter at the Washington Post doing a piece on District charter schools. A whole study was done that is talked about here, eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Stefanie DeLuca, which shows Karelis’ theory in practice. Parents were unable to make the “rational” choice of moving their children out of a neighborhood school because of the complexities of their lives.

The opposite side of the choice coin and a significant issue in low-SES schools is transiency, the frequent movement of students from school to school. My school has a 30% turnover rate. Each year, leaving out kinder, about 30% of our students leave, and are replaced. Some families circle around, and come back after a hiatus. There are many reasons for these moves. They have housing instability, income instability, and any other kind of instability you can name.

This transiency is not good for a child’s education. Part of the argument for scripted programs with pacing guides like the one we use is that it was supposed to make this transiency meaningless for a child’s education. At this point many of you are probably having a ironic chuckle that somehow keeping that one little piece of normalcy, being on the same page in your basel reader, will make up for a 7 year old who has been in 3-6 different schools already. Since I’m on the site student study team, I’ll share another problem that occurs. The district is VERY careful about starting special education testing, they want a minimal number (3) of SST meetings or three 8 week periods of intervention before doing testing. Some sites like mine are on RTI, so kids get services without qualifying, but others do not. We have a fourth grader who is new to our site who cannot decode at a second grade level, or add and subtract with carrying. She has not yet had special education testing, but she has moved around a bit, so that’s not surprising. What can be done? At my present site, the principal is very helpful about giving families permits to stay at our school, and some families travel pretty far to keep coming there, but that doesn’t work for everyone.

But there is another dark side to transiency, which is movement by choice. I’ll share a story from my son’s school which is a Title One school, but not whole school free-lunch (75%+ in poverty), but does have a growing population of poor students as the downturn goes on. The principal was discussing a situation with my my husband about a first grader that had a lot of behavior problems. They had a couple of parent conferences, but the mother and the school were not of the same mind. The parent still had a VERY high affective filter up. The child was missing a lot of school too. They went on a home visit, and the parent had moved. I’ve seen that pattern in various places I’ve worked and it fits with Charles Karelis’ theory that he illustrates with this analogy

A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The … poorer one is … the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

I would add, let’s say a corollary to this. It’s like having multiple medical problems and trying to figure out what to fix. You’re not a doctor, so you pay attention to what is bothering you the most (like taking care of a stubbed toe, but ignoring high blood pressure), and not being a doctor, you may do something that’ll take care of it in the short run (take some pain reliever instead of having the foot x-rayed) but won’t resolve it in the long-term.

To these families, the frequent complaints and requests for intervention with their child from schools is like a stubbed toe, and the best way for them to deal with it is to move. Schools don’t help because they are usually happy to see the backside of those families going out the door. And there is an incentive in California for “driving” a family away (which, btw, I don’t think this principal intended, but I have seen some that do this as an unofficial policy getting into some real snake and mongoose conflicts with parents). You see, to be fair the state only counts test scores for kids you could reasonable have affected, so if kids arrive after what’s called the CBEDs date, they are not computed in your AYP or API (state measure). This was intended to prevent issues with getting a kid right before testing (which happens) that you had NOTHING to do with educating, and having their scores on your test. Since CBEDs is the first Monday in October, this is a little over generous perhaps, but you can see the incentive for schools.

What is the answer to these “choices”? The obvious answer is more housing stability. That would definitely involve moving federal policy in the opposite direction than it’s been going for a long time. Some of what I will talk about in the next and last post will address this issue. In the meantime, we need to do the things to minimize transiency. Work with those parents to lower their affective filters (what I addressed in the last post), let families stay at your school after they move, and give families a stake in your school community (my next post).

What about choices for kids? I remember a point that Mathew Needleman made in a presentation about video in the classroom, that when computers were used by low-SES vs. high-SES children, the low-SES children were largely engaged in being told what to do by the computer (test prep quizzes), while the high-SES children told the computer what to do — e.g. LOGO, ALICE, Scratch (Towards Digital Equity, Neuman). This doesn’t just happen with computers. Based on recommendations from the feds, more time is spent on Direct Instruction in Title One schools. Students are being told what to do, but are not given a lot of choices. Students need to learn how to work and learn independently, otherwise you are just preparing them to be a line worker.

Is this always easy? No, but it is possible. I’ll point to two examples, one with a what, the other with a how. The what is the subject matter you give students. I have students look at rights and especially inalienable rights. This can be a bit difficult for students to grasp, so I have them look at their own rights. Last year I did assignments on the Rights of the Child, and had students come up with some rights of their own. The year before that, I did it to help make the unit on the American Revolution more comprehensible. The how comes from Mathew Needleman who has a series of posts were about independent work time, and how to make it effective, which took on the frequently given excuse for avoiding doing it, with “My Students Just Can’t Work Independently This Year”, and what you’ll need to do when you have kids who don’t know “how to work independently”, (hint–you’re the teacher, so you teach them how).

Further useful reading on parents and school choice:

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Brian Jacob

eduwonkette: Cool People You Should Know: Cecilia Rouse

Here is an example of that vagueness:

“The best possible thing we can do for low-income students is to fight for their basic human rights, such as equitable access to fully-equipped schools, healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and the sorts of things their wealthier peers take for granted.”– Paul Gorski

I’ve decided to do a series on poverty. The posts will start with theory, look at an anecdote from my or another teachers experience, and last, will finish with approaches that can be used in those situations. While the “solutions” may not always work, but they are more helpful than talking about how lacking poor parents are, or saying the answer is to fight poverty. This first post will be on the overall theories of poverty, next up will be on choice, and the third will be on parents and communities…

“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money. “– George Carlin in brain droppings

George Carlin has a point, and that’s not just my opinion by the opinion of an interesting economist, Charles Karelis that I ran across here at Economist’s View: Is Poverty Caused by Irrational Behavior?

Karelis’ view is actually the opposite of the title, in that he finds that poverty causes people not be rational actors (and make rational choices), because they have too many problems simultaneously to give attention to any one of those problems (like say, their kid’s education).

If, for example, our car has several dents on it, and then we get one more, we’re far less likely to get that one fixed than if the car was pristine before…

In recent decades, experts and policy makers all along the ideological spectrum have worried that the more aid the government gives the poor, the less likely they are to work to provide for themselves. … It was this concern that drove the Clinton administration’s welfare reform efforts. But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. …

Those problems become stressors (lack of money, violence, etc.) that lead to brain damage that we see in some of these reports, Study: Poverty dramatically affects children’s brains – USATODAY.com, Poverty may impair growth of brain : News-Record.com : Greensboro, North Carolina I remember seeing a post somewhere after these news reports coming out, saying, yeah we know this is true, now what do we do? Karelis says we need to quit being afraid to fix the problems of the poor directly, but there is something else that Karelis talks about that I think can be extremely helpful and a foot in the door for teachers dealing with this.

Karelis discusses the economic theory of marginal utility with regards to this behavior. It’s similar to an idea in behavior science called the affective filter, and specifically having what’s called a HIGH affective filter.
When families are stressed out, they can’t always hear what you are offering, or accept help. You have to lower that filter to work with them. You all have been very patient while I outlined my theory, so here is where I show how this can work in a school…

My principal is on a mission (he’s that kind of guy). He wants to build relationships with some of our most “difficult” families. He spends a lot of time talking to them, and more importantly listening to them and their concerns. I facilitate our site SST meetings where students having problems are discussed with their parents. He is trying to implement this long term relationship building plan. I was resistant at first because my background working in a behavior school led me to trying to develop discipline and behavior plans that were not parent dependent. The problem with my approach is that kids who are acting out will keep pressing things until you have to involve their parent, so then your alternative becomes suspending them, which doesn’t resolve the long term problem. I think his approach will probably be better for this. In a sense I’ve been doing a lot of this stuff over time as I’ve sat on the student study team.

When parents have a kid with a behavior problem, I share my son’s horrible first grade year. This lets them feel like they are talking to someone who is a mother, and not a teacher who is judging them. With my son having ASD (autism), and the school nurse having two adopted kids on ADD meds, we have a lot of the behavior issues that come up covered. This is not easy. I will share that the hardest thing I have to do is see parents wrestling with a child who may have a language disorder (and the possibility of an autism diagnosis). Those parents always seem to end up in tears, and I feel that because I’ve been there. I never cry with them, but I try to convey to them that I’ve felt that pain. This all helps lower their affective filter. I also try to give them things they can do that are possible, and probable, like behavior plans, etc. I give tips on how to structure those so they are effective, and are not a complete pain in the butt. I tell them it can be hard, but I tell them it’s possible.

Does this work every time? No, but it works better than sitting in a circle around the parent saying, this is what you need to do. Does this address Paul Gorski’s points about addressing the underlying problems of poverty, no, but it is a precondition to doing that which I’ll cover in my last post. So readers, what do you do to lower the affective filter of parents?

My school serves a population of students who have many needs; linguistic, financial, emotional, etc. Obviously, as a school we can’t fill in all these gaps. However, we do try to help out where we can. We offer English language classes to parents and other community members during the school day and in the evenings. Teachers have driven students to school for evening events and home afterward. Teachers or other staff members have driven students and/or parents to see a doctor, dentist, or mental health professional to help with paperwork, especially when there is no insurance.

I’m wondering about the role and limitation of the school. What should a school be doing? Where does it end?

Obviously, our responsibility is the education of the students. It is easy to simply draw a line that divides educational duties apart from everything else. I believe our students deserve better from us. I’m unwilling to abdicate responsibility simply because something is not clearly related to my educational duty. My students deserve every opportunity to be successful and sometimes that requires more from me or from my school.

But a school can’t be everything to everyone. At some point we can’t or shouldn’t be involved. Where is that line? Does the line differ at different schools? Should I be doing more at my Title I school than a teacher at a school in a middle-class neighborhood? How do we help students whose parents can’t or won’t care for them properly? What is the role of a school in our society?

First, Graham Wegner’s comment at Bud the Teacher’s blog talks about the edublogosphere as a series of intersecting circles, where you have some overlap, and connections, but no “center” (sorry Graham if I misread your comment, but that was my take-away). This is how I see the intersections in these articles. Now let me elaborate…

When Worlds Don’t Collide | In Practice

where Doug Noon talks about a report on blogging and literacy instruction of High School students in AP classes.

There are two points he makes, the first is about the limits of this case study both because it’s about a “successful model” (Doug is like me, he learns from failure analysis), and high-end students in getting a high end education.

Next, he discuss the incongruity of reading a study of blogging in a traditional print journal format (no hyperlinks, the author having to translate “WTF”, etc.)

Right about the time he posted this, I read eduwonkette: AERA continued: The Teachings of Russ Whitehurst which had Whitehurst discussing the divide between education researchers who want to study things “scientifically” but don’t seem concerned about real world applications, and policy makers who can’t understand why researchers can’t give them a straight answer (i.e. exact policy objectives) from their research. The two are talking past each other, and that’s similar to the feeling discontinuity that Doug felt reading a print journal article about a plugged-in approach to education. Doug feels that this will be resolved when “credentialing” authorities like research journals cease to be the gatekeepers, as more free flowing information bypasses them, much like policy makers like to bypass researchers, and look for more inviting ideas about how to make schools work based in one-off, “case study” narratives (where is Jamie Escalante when you need him?).

So then in eduwonkette: Why Do Journalists Love Shaky Science on Race? the author(ess) tears to shreds, the often cited notion that lower black academic performance is due to blacks not wanting to “act white”. Tucked in there is what she thinks would make a difference:

We could invoke the standard explanation that journalists don’t understand research, but there is plenty of research (bad and good) on structural causes of achievement gaps (i.e. boring stuff like prenatal care) that receives much less coverage…Culture is much easier to write about than structure – the reasons why black kids show up to kindergarten .4-.6 standard deviations behind white kids don’t translate into a chatty crowd-pleasing story about why school isn’t cool

Basically, they are showing up behind from the very start, before they might have developed much of a notion about what “acting white” and “acting black” might mean.

I thought about the readiness issue (and what eduwonkette thinks it’s caused by) as I read through, That Time of Year…Kindergarten Roundup | In Practice by Michaele Sommerville, where she gave a really nice checklist of information/skills she looks for in new students. I have no idea if you could calculate a standard deviation of students from her list, but it took it from the ephemeral (if heated) discussion of research, to the practical practice of how to judge readiness, so you can address your students’ needs, which brought it back full circle to Whitehurst and the gap between research and practice, and the readiness of the children of haves and have-nots.

If our children need to make connections to learn, then maybe, so do we.

After some initial research (google to wikipedia search), I have come across the idea of Education for Sustainable Development. As far as I can understand it has to do with meeting our needs today and assuring that future generations can meet their needs as well. Easier said than done. Most of the work has been done through the United Nations and several international conferences starting in 1992.

Agenda 21 looks at a blue print for action on how we as humans affect the environment. I am particularly interested in the sections on involving children in this responsibility. This is where I hit the paradigm shift. In 2005 The United Nations declared a decade of education for sustainable development. I didn’t realize how important I am as a father/teacher and the role I must take in this endeavor. And so the Odyssey begins…

1. Fill in background knowledge with visuals. To borrow a film making adage, “Show, don’t tell.” Find something visual, auditory, or some realia that grabs students’ interest and helps them to understand the story. If you’re reading about Martin Luther King, don’t just tell them what a great speaker he was. Show them a video, play them the speech…it’s too easy to find these and download them now not to do it.

   Pictures work too. You don’t have to make a powerpoint, just print out a picture! Mount it to construction paper, label it, and hold it up. If you’re reading about the city of Parmele, show them pictures of Parmele and locate it on a map. Reading about a guinea fowl?…show them a picture of a guinea fowl (or present a feather).

   Where do you find these pictures? As long as you’re just using the pictures in your classroom, use Google Image Search. If you need to repost the pictures, then try these royalty free image sites. Don’t just open the book and start reading.
   

2. Everybody reads, all the time. If you didn’t get the memo, popcorn reading is out (see: Goodbye Round Robin by Opitz and Rasinski). When one student reads, notice what the other students are doing. Most are probably not paying attention. If you have students read in a predictable group pattern, then they anticipate when they’re going to read, get ready, and then tune out again when their turn is finished You will see increased participation if everyone reads the story aloud at the same time.
3. Have students discuss…not with you, with each other. Typical teaching involves a teacher asking questions to which the teacher already has an answer in mind. The teacher calls on the first student who raises their hand, hears the right answer, and then rephrases it further.Everyone who isn’t that one student answering is bored or not listening and all the students get the message that there is one right answer. Then we wonder why students aren’t capable of higher level thinking. We don’t expect it or even allow it in most classrooms.

   Instead, ask authentic questions…ones that have no right answer, questions that really ask for an opinion or something that you really want to know an answer to. Lower level thinking questions are fine to begin with but don’t stay there forever.

   Give students a chance to pair share or talk in groups. Sometimes they can share out to the whole group but they don’t have to. Resist the urge to rephrase everything students say as if we know more than they do. We don’t always.

   The goal of having them discuss is to involve more students in the conversation and to ask them to think on their own in a safe environment but without the safety net of the teacher stepping in with “right answers” when things get tough.While students are talking, you walk around and monitor. Sometimes encouraging students to share what they’ve said in small groups with the whole class, sometimes asking followup questions to stimulate further conversation.

   Note: If you’ve never done this before, the first few times you do it will be hard…pulling teeth hard. Don’t give up, it gets better.

4. Explicitly teach comprehension strategies before and after beginning the lesson. Particularly if you are working from a reading anthology, the point of the reading is to practice using comprehension strategies, particularly ones which involve clarifying and lead to inference (these are the spots that tend to tie students up when they’re reading on their own).

   I teach students that they’re not going to like everything they’re going to be reading. Sometimes I even tell them (when we’re done reading and already discussed it) that I don’t like a particular selection. However, the point is that even a story we don’t like is an excuse to practice our reading strategies.

   By explicitly I mean you can’t just use the strategies and expect students to absorb them through osmosis. You need to emphasize the strategies you’re using by naming them and drawing attention to them.

Earlier, I talked about why Larry Ferlazzo got it right when he said face to face relationships have a quality that can’t be replicated online. Now, I’ll bring some thoughts up to the contrary.

Here are some caveats to that point…Larry himself, has already had to eat his words (okay it wasn’t that extreme) when he said he didn’t get Second Life as an education platform, and then had a reader point out how great it was for people with disabilities. This is a significant population that is often ill-served by our current education and social institutions and the online community has been a welcome advent for many (although many participate in “regular” schools and society too, thank you very much).

I started thinking about non-face to face relationships in the past. Yes, these did exist in the days before computers. First, pen pals and correspondence relationships go back far in time. This was illustrated nicely in the fictional account 84 Charing Cross Road. And as for organizing, look at how well Paul did with a few letters in organizing the early Christian church! Okay, I overstate a bit, but this is part of an ongoing process of using communication to reach out to others. In pencil and paper days, we have pen pals and other correspondence relationships. Party lines (the larger modern ones, not the old ones that just had your neighbors) showed people were dying to talk to complete strangers. CB radio (and its more technical precursor the HAM) had strangers talking to each other and becoming acquaintances and sometimes friends.

The written relationships were the most widespread. I imagine that blogging, et. al. will be bigger than pen pals were because of the ease of entry. Whether it takes the place of face to face, or is a significant part of most adults’ social life I wouldn’t want to venture a guess.

There is one area where the relationships will be at a whole variety of different levels of physical distance and that will be in work, and being able to flexibly adapt to working with a variety of people who are in a variety of different countries will be a skill needed for a larger and larger number of workers. My example of this is my brother in law who works with a team literally on different continents. They trade off conference call times because there is no time that works for everyone. By moving it around, they all feel the pain sometime. They use IM chat, email, and teleconferencing extensively. This is not an intimate relationship, but there I think back, and my face to face relationships with my co-workers aren’t that intimate either. I mean I like them, and I respect them, and we work well together, but would my relationships be any “cooler” if I only meet them over a conference call? I don’t know.

The professional relationships I’ve built up online over the last year have been invaluable to me because there are so few doing what I do where I am. It’s also nice being able to see Larry. I loved meeting with Brian, and I look forward to meeting Glenn someday. There are some things about my relationship with Larry that are closer than say, with Brian. We have the shared experience of working for the same district. In some ways though, I have feel closer to other bloggers because they aren’t in my backyard. My working in the same “place” makes me cautious so as not to piss in my pond so to speak. This may be healthier for that relationship in the long run. Who knows?

I think it’s hard to see the future. It’s easy to overstate “change” but I sense things are changing and have been for a time now.

I, though, have a different point-of view.

I’m a firm believer that technology is used best as a tool to deepen and develop face-to-face relationships.  That perspective guides much of my use of technology in school – incentives in our home computer project encourage multiple family members to use the computer at the same time to read “talking ” books and discuss them afterwards;  students from different ethnic groups in our after-school ESL Computer Lab regularly connect with each other to share their favorite activities and have friendly competitions  in online games like “Verb Tense Basketball,”  and groups of students work together to successfully finish online video games. 

In addition, students create online games, make online comments about them, and, most importantly, discuss together what they’ve done in the following class discussions.   Students also leave online comments on other examples of work, including on blogs and online journals.   A key part of that is using sentence “stems” in their writing to model good communication – “I like _________ because_____________”; “I wonder why you ____________.  Can you tell me more?”; “What do you mean by __________?”   These phrases help prepare and reinforce the content and tone of subsequent face-to-face class conversations.  And many, if not most, of the projects students create are done in small groups, not individually.

That’s not to say I don’t also try to create opportunities for students to develop online relationships, too.  This semester my Government class will be working on joint projects with a class in Brazil to compare our respective governments and how people in each of our country go about organizing for social change.  I believe students in both classes will gain from the experience.  But, no, I don’t believe that my students will be developing “real” relationships with their Brazilian counterparts.

In fact, I believe that one of the things I want my students to learn is that virtual online relationships are not, in fact, anywhere near as substantial as the ones they can develop and deepen with the people in their lives now.   Focusing on these kinds of relationships are the ones where, I believe, they will gain the most emotional support, learn the most important life lessons, and identify the most opportunities in the future.  I don’t want them to get as seduced as they may be by the lure of virtual relationships where, among other things, they miss out on the 65% to 98% of non-verbal language that many researchers say are the most important aspects of communication.  And, yes, I know about webcams.  Even there, however, I know from my own experience in the classroom and out that there isn’t much that can compare to a genuine gentle touch on the shoulder or a hug.

My students do hundreds of face-to-face “individual meetings” each year with peers, family members and neighbors to learn about their lives, their visions for their future, and the problems that affect their families and neighborhoods.    This “methodology,” which I learned during my nineteen years as a community organizer,  helps them build a real connection with others that results in collective action to help solve those problems – whether it is bringing job training agencies to their neighborhood, meeting with Congresspeople about immigration issues, or developing bilingual education health education materials.  That is certainly a different type of relationship than having people they’ve never met leave comments online about their projects.

I want to emphasize, though, that I don’t believe it’s an either/or situation.  Both face-to-face and online relationships have their roles in education.  I just think we teachers need to be “real” about “real” relationships.

Jake is 5 and learning to read.

He points at a picture in a zoo book and says,
‘Look Mama! It’s a frickin’ Elephant!’

Deep breath … ‘What did you call it?’

‘It’s a frickin’ Elephant, Mama!
It says so on the picture!’

and so it does …

‘A f r i c a n Elephant ‘

Alice: Hey Michaele, ya know, jokes like this are easy to make. Many will recognize the photo above as the “H” sound/spelling card from Open Court (hey, you can buy a set of these flashcards for only $24.81 and the wall cards are a steal at ~$150). Look at the picture on the card (you’re wondering what is that…a hyena?), it’s a hound! A kindergarten co-worker in Oakland used to joke that the kids, recognizing it as a dog (or dawg) and never hearing the term hound, would label it the “hadawg” card. It’s easy for grown ups to make jokes about it, what has really happened? What’s your perspective on this?

Michaele: My kindergarten students come to school with a variety of prior experiences and life skills. A child who has never smelled an orange or tasted one will still recognize “orange” when examining a pumpkin, or learning to identify one crayon from another, but will only comprehend the many meanings and connections to “orange” for future reference after s/he experiences the concept in a multitude of ways.

Several years ago, the whole-language versus phonics debate was mostly over invented spelling, which no one seemed to understand wasn’t the rule, but was rather an exercise of not penalizing students as they tried to learn and use letter sounds in the first place. Whole language, in the hands of good teachers, integrated phonics, memorization, language usage and student interest (and others, I’m sure), while in the hands of the inexperienced, not-so-good teachers or critics, it ended up on the receiving end of the blame game when students “couldn’t spell.” The predictable result was that teachers, parents, and administrators were again on the look out for what I like to call the “magic pill program.”

In my opinion, language acquisition doesn’t occur in the isolation of specific skills, but rather when children are immersed into the whole world of language, literacy, expression, and communication. Their voices, questions, mistakes, and continued language development should all be valued equally, and given the time and ALL resources available for individual mastery. Teachers who focus only on phonics or who endorse strict memorization of sight words deprive students who may not learn best by those methods. Knowing the sounds that letters make is essential to developing language and literacy, but students are not likely to learn all the rules, and all the ways that they are broken in one sitting. Perfect pronunciation or spelling does not equal comprehension.

Yep, I’m a whole language advocate, which means I’m a phonics-integrated advocate too. In my mind, phonics materials need to be culturally relevant, which a singular magic pill phonics program, game, or set of cards will never be. I’ve been able to use one phonics program with many of my Caucasian students living in each state to which I’ve traveled, but have also utilized “Athabaskan ABC” lessons while teaching in Alaska . In New Mexico , it was necessary for me to modify the Harcourt Brace phonics activities because my Hispanic/Latino students would see the “A…Apple” card and immediately substitute “A…manzana.” Before advocating for a strong phonics base, consider all of the E.L.L. students whose primary languages don’t have sound equivalents to the English alphabet, then try locating a curriculum kit that will solve all of your district’s worries. You probably won’t find one.

The frickin’ elephant is a funny joke easily emailed, and especially enjoyed by teachers in-the-know, but it’s the type of humor that gets us thinking after we’re done laughing…side splitting to migraine-inducing.

Alice: Well, here are some of my observations. This is a great program for getting most kids to a Basic level of proficiency, but because it stresses delivery of instruction, not students thinking or teaching them to do that. Under my state standards, they will never reach grade level proficiency for third grade or later. Also, as a former upper grade teacher, students often learned more decoding skills than thinking skills. Unfortunately, there is no fluency test as part of state testing. They have to read, and comprehend, not race through a passage. In addition, my Spanish speaking students would sometimes turn out to be champion decoders, but they had no idea what they were reading. They needed language and vocabulary development to understand what the heck they were reading so fast.

Next up, we’ll have Matthew Needleman, who has done a lot with Open Court (and other scripted programs) to bring in that higher order thinking. This is one of my favorite posts that he wrote which basically tells a first grade teacher, forget the pacing guide timing for teaching decoding/phonics, your first priority in scheduling is independent work time (centers/workshop) so you get to both higher-level thinking, and small groups (not just you in front of the class). I like that thinking. His post will be on the topic of effective delivery of instruction for English language learners (trust me the post in more interesting than I just made it sound).

I told Larry at the time, there is NO way that anyone could mistake that for a post from me. It talks about zero periods, and government class (I teach periods, but only one subject, Computers). Also, my writing style is so different from his. Still, one  member of the In Practice team thought I had written it. Makes you wonder about voice. Although I am prone to using SAT vocabulary, as Larry does, I love to throw in colloquialisms, and my sentences really do abuse commas and punctuation–what do you expect from a girl who grew up in the San Fernando Valley with too many intellectual pretensions? Also, Larry has done studies on his practice whereas I, the lazy intellectual, have limited myself to criticizing educational research.

But, maybe it’s the time for change? I recently received an email from Jeff Felix with his dissertation study on blogging, and surprise, surprise, I was one of the subjects. It got me thinking about maybe doing some research of my own. What to study though, hmmm…

This was just supposed to be a quick notice of the authorship mixup, and now I’ve gone and done a post!