In Practice

Just a quick post to add to the recent conversation here. I know I’ve been beating this drum a lot lately, but only because these different studies and reports have been popping up and coming to my attention. Here is the latest: Poverty May Impair Growth Of Brain -  by Lex Alexander -  News & Record - Greensboro, NC 

 ”Poverty can have negative effects on child and adolescent brain development, a report out today concludes.Those effects, in turn, can lead to learning disabilities, behavior problems and other psychological and emotional problems, the report says.”     

Yeah, I know, this is not totally new information, but some haven’t gotten this message. Part of this research comes out of Harvard and maybe that will get more people to listen. (?) This is a short piece, so follow the link to learn more. 

“It’s no cop-out to acknowledge the effects of socioeconomic disparities on student learning. Rather, it’s a vital step to closing the achievement gap.”

 So begins the article on the ASCD web site:Whose Problem Is Poverty? by Richard Rothstein  This might be a “must read” for teachers in Title 1 schools. Mr. Rothstein explains why students from low socio-economic groups have lower average acheivement:  

“Because low-income children often have no health insurance and therefore no routine preventive medical and dental care, leading to more school absences as a result of illness. Children in low-income families are more prone to asthma, resulting in more sleeplessness, irritability, and lack of exercise. They experience lower birth weight as well as more lead poisoning and iron-deficiency anemia, each of which leads to diminished cognitive ability and more behavior problems. Their families frequently fall behind in rent and move, so children switch schools more often, losing continuity of instruction.   

Poor children are, in general, not read to aloud as often or exposed to complex language and large vocabularies. Their parents have low-wage jobs and are more frequently laid off, causing family stress and more arbitrary discipline. The neighborhoods through which these children walk to school and in which they play have more crime and drugs and fewer adult role models with professional careers. Such children are more often in single-parent families and so get less adult attention. They have fewer cross-country trips, visits to museums and zoos, music or dance lessons, and organized sports leagues to develop their ambition, cultural awareness, and self-confidence.

Each of these disadvantages makes only a small contribution to the achievement gap, but cumulatively, they explain a lot.” 

One quote I especially liked was this one:

“Some critics cite schools that enroll disadvantaged students but still get high standardized test scores as proof that greater socioeconomic equality is not essential for closing achievement gaps—because good schools have shown they can do it on their own. And some critics are so single-mindedly committed to a schools-only approach that they can’t believe anyone could seriously advocate pursuing both school and socioeconomic improvement simultaneously.”  

And this one:

 ”And yes, we should also call on housing, health, and antipoverty advocates to take a broader view that integrates school improvement into their advocacy of greater economic and social equality. Instead, however, critical voices for reform have been silenced, told they should stick to their knitting, fearing an accusation that denouncing inequality is tantamount to “making excuses.”"  

There is much more … follow the link.

Part One: Differentiate This! Why?
was published in Creating Lifelong Learners

OK, we agree (or most of us do anyway) that we need to tailor our instruction to the students in our classroom.

We cannot teach effectively by planning lessons in isolation without considering the interaction between what we’ve planned and the students in our room, without being truly present in the classroom to assess students’ reactions and understanding, and to appeal to diverse learning styles as we begin to observe them in our students.

How Do We Differentiate?

One misconception about differentiation is that a teacher must come up with an entirely different curriculum for each student or type of student in a classroom. That would be great but it’s not possible. In fact the very thought of it is overwhelming and it’s the reason that many teachers do not attempt to differentiate because they think it’s too much work.

The number one way we can begin to differentiate our lessons is to stop relying on worksheets for so much of our instruction. Not everything that involves a photocopy is necessarily bad but it is a lot harder to differentiate instruction by giving every student the same paper and having everyone fill in the same blanks. (And giving different levels of students different levels of worksheets isn’t much better).

Let’s replace some of our worksheets with activities that all students can participate in at whatever level they’re at. Some examples:

• Writer’s Workshop
  A time of day in which all students write on topics of their own choosing while the teacher conferences with students and guides them in their writing, discussing individual student needs.
• Discussion and persuasion
  Rather than having students answer yes or no questions, have students formulate ideas, communicate those ideas, and justify them by talking to peers.
• Inquiry and research
  Every student is curious if we allow them to be. Let them form their own questions and research their own answers. We guide them on this journey but they choose the journey.
• Project based learning
  Let’s have students brainstorm and concentrate on problem solving of real world issues and hands on learning.
• Create
  The highest level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Have students create a play, a movie, a song, a poem, a painting, anything to demonstrate content knowledge or to communicate their own dreams and wishes.

Please leave your own ideas on how to differentiate below and stay tuned for Differentiate This! Part Three: When? back at Creating Lifelong Learners

We seem to be on a kindergarten theme here so to spread it around, I’ve put my next post on this topic on The Blog of Ms. Mercer, where I discuss many of the kinder policies that make their reform more pressing to my mind than universal pre-school. Hope to see you there!

Since being named a blogger that Deserves a Bigger Audience, I’ve taken to reading eduwonkette, which received the same accolade. I thought of two pieces recently when reading posts here from Doug Noon, and Michaele Sommerville. Michaele thought I was eating too much paste, or something when I said I was going to tie in her recent piece on kindergarten readiness to and eduwonkette article, but let’s see if I can make this work.

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.