Tag: curriculum

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Leading for Literacy

By Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf

Every day, middle and high school teachers ask their students to read and understand complex texts in disciplines such as history, literature, biology, or economics. Such reading is foundational to student success in school, the workplace, and in civic life. Yet, national tests results and our own eyes tell us that the majority of high school students aren’t getting it.

How can teachers and administrators create classrooms where students routinely engage with challenging material, think critically about texts, synthesize information from multiple sources, and effectively communicate what they have learned? And how can we spread and sustain innovative practices beyond a few classrooms?

Tackling adolescent literacy challenges is no easy lift for schools. For one thing, subject-area teachers have their plates full with the demands of covering and assessing large amounts of subject-matter content. Many teachers see any request to “teach reading in your subject area” as beyond their responsibility—and skill set. That’s understandable given how little time there is for teacher collaboration and learning.

But hundreds of middle and high schools, districts, and colleges (especially open-admissions institutions) have taken up the challenge—and have been able to create cultures of literacy. They have classrooms where teachers and students work together to identify comprehension problems, tap and elicit critical dispositions known to support learning (like curiosity, courage, stamina, and persistence), and use an array of evidence-based instructional approaches and discourse routines to collaboratively make sense of complex disciplinary texts.

Our new book, Leading for Literacy: A Reading Apprenticeship Approach, and an open webinar we are offering on March 8, show how they’ve done it. The book is based on what we’ve learned from 25 years of implementing Reading Apprenticeship, a framework for helping schools and districts transform how literacy is taught.

The Reading Apprenticeship framework builds on teachers’ existing knowledge and expertise and provides structured opportunities for them to explore their own reading and comprehension processes as they, themselves, struggle with challenging texts. The insights they gain—through training and participating in ongoing learning communities—broadens their mindsets about what students are capable of doing and provides the foundation for apprenticing students to reading, writing, thinking, and speaking in the different disciplines.

Teachers build a culture of inquiry in their classrooms by teaching students how to work individually and as a group to conduct metacognitive conversations that help them take on rigorous texts, regardless of the subject matter. The goal is to have students learn to take control of their learning.

This approach is effective at the school and college classroom levels and as scaled across institutions and systems. The evidence of federally funded randomized controlled studies, shows positive, statistically significant effects for students whose teachers participated in Reading Apprenticeship professional development.

Ultimately, the success of the program depends on leadership from teachers, principals, and advocates for students, for whom creating a culture of literacy requires:

  • political cover on the part of site and district administrators to protect teams and their time from external challenges;
  • new structures, such as dedicated literacy teams and communities of practice;
  • dedicated time—and more of it—to engage in high-quality professional learning, professional collaboration, and problem solving with colleagues;
  • a focus on inquiry, which encourages and supports sharing and exploring questions and observations as a group;
  • community partnerships, to build support for more time spent on reading and literacy development in the schools; and
  • teacher-led advocacy that is strength based and solution driven.

Leading for Literacy presents portraits, case studies, research findings, and key insights from scores of practitioners, and details how to get started, build momentum, assess progress, generate partnerships, and sustain networks across schools, districts, college campuses, and regions. It is more important than ever for schools to advance better approaches to literacy instruction. Why not rewrite the script at your school?

Ruth Schoenbach and Cynthia Greenleaf are co-directors of the WestEd Strategic Literacy Initiative, and, Lynn Murphy, co-authors of Leading for Literacy: A Reading Apprenticeship Approach (Wiley/Jossey-Bass, December 2016).

 

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Disengaged Students, Part 3: The Role of Nationalism

In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

The 20th century saw the rise of a new sort of anti-intellectualism in America, one stemming from a nationalist perspective. The idea that love of country trumped all other ideas and ideals was popularized during both World Wars, and exacerbated by the Communist paranoia and McCarthyism in the decades that followed. Speaking out against war or showing sympathy with other countries at odds with the U.S. was frowned upon, and sometimes outright condemned. Questioning the reasoning of war as a concept was seen as direct disloyalty to the country.

Even today movies that showcase nationalist perspectives, like 1995’s classic Braveheart, remain popular with Americans, despite the fact that nationalism was not actually a European philosophy until the 18th century. It is more likely that 13th-century William Wallace performed his feats of bravery (much exaggerated in the Hollywood version) out of loyalty to his individual tribe rather than a grandiose faithfulness to Scotland. Still, the American tendency to cover all sins with flag-waving patriotism found its roots in the 20th century and still exists today.

Love, Loyalty and Loss of Debate

That school of nationalist thought which was widely accepted following the two world wars came into question as anti-war protests grew in strength during the Vietnam War. The anti-war demonstrations that surrounded the Vietnam War were met with counter-attacks by pseudo-intellectuals like Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Though he attempted to explain the rationale behind the alarming number of U.S. casualties in intellectual terms, the American public saw through his attempt at dumbing down the realities of the war. For demonstrators who spoke out against the Vietnam War, fighting was a poor substitute for the harder work of actually seeking out true change.

Many of the soldiers in Vietnam were the sons of World War I and World War II veterans who were witnessing the cyclical nature of wars that seemingly had no end. As the soldiers from the 1940s and 1950s aged, it is reasonable to assume that at least some of them experienced a feeling of helplessness, believing their sacrifices really had not made enough of an impact, since their own children were back fighting the same battles under a new banner. Even today, as struggles in the Middle East stretch across two decades, Americans have become desensitized to what the ongoing loss of life means in a world that seems unable ever to be truly at peace.

This nationalist challenge to intellectualism, like the fundamentalist challenge discussed earlier, is based on an orthodoxy which forbids questioning and reasoned disagreement.  While it is less pronounced than in previous generations, it still exists and integrates itself in our schools.

But are we building a spirit of national camaraderie at the expense of intellectualist thought?

 

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How companies learn what children secretly want

Faith Boninger, University of Colorado and Alex Molnar, University of Colorado

If you have children, you are likely to worry about their safety – you show them safe places in your neighborhood and you teach them to watch out for lurking dangers.

But you may not be aware of some online dangers to which they are exposed through their schools.

There is a good chance that people and organizations you don’t know are collecting information about them while they are doing their schoolwork. And they may be using this information for purposes that you know nothing about.

In the U.S. and around the world, millions of digital data points are collected daily from children by private companies that provide educational technologies to teachers and schools. Once data are collected, there is little in law or policy that prevents companies from using the information for almost any purpose they wish.

Our research explores how corporate entities use their involvement with schools to gather and use data about students. We find that often these companies use the data they collect to market products, such as junk food, to children.

Here’s how student data are being collected

Almost all U.S. middle and high school students use mobile devices. A third of such devices are issued by their schools. Even when using their own devices for their schoolwork, students are being encouraged to use applications and software, such as those with which they can create multimedia presentations, do research, learn to type or communicate with each other and with their teachers.

When children work on their assignments, unknown to them, the software and sites they use are busy collecting data.

Ads target children as they do their homework. Girl image via www.shutterstock.com

For example, “Adaptive learning” technologies record students’ keystrokes, answers and response times. On-line surveys collect information about students’ personalities. Communication software stores the communications between students, parents and teachers; and presentation software stores students’ work and their communications about it.

In addition, teachers and schools may direct children to work on branded apps or websites that may collect, or allow third parties to collect, IP addresses and other information from students. This could include the ads children click on, what they download, what games they play, and so on.

How student data are used

When “screen time” is required for school, parents cannot limit or control it. Companies use this time to find out more about children’s preferences, so they they can target children with advertising and other content with a personalized appeal.

Children might see ads while they are working in educational apps. In other cases, data might be collected while students complete their assignments. Information might also be stored and used to better target them later.

For instance, a website might allow a third party to collect information, including the type of browser used, the time and date, and the subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over by a child. The third party could then use that information to target the child with advertisements later.

We have found that companies use the data to serve ads (for food, clothing, games, etc.) to the children via their computers. This repeated, personalized advertising is designed specifically to manipulate children to want and buy more things.

Indeed, over time this kind of advertising can threaten children’s physical and psychological well-being.

Consequences of targeted advertising

Food is the most heavily advertised class of products to children. The heavy digital promotion of “junk” food is associated with negative health outcomes such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Additionally, advertising, regardless of the particular product it may sell, also “sells” to children the idea that products can make them happy.

Research shows that children who buy into this materialist worldview are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and other psychological distress.

Teenagers who adopt this worldview are more likely to smoke, drink and skip school. One set of studies showed that advertising makes children feel far from their ideals for themselves in terms of how good a life they lead and what their bodies look like.

The insecurity and dissatisfaction may lead to negative behaviors such as compulsive buying and disordered eating.

Aren’t there laws to protect children’s privacy?

Many bills bearing on student privacy have been introduced in the past several years in Congress and state legislatures. Several of them have been enacted into laws.

Additionally, nearly 300 software companies signed a self-regulatory Student Privacy Pledge to safeguard student privacy regarding the collection, maintenance and use of student personal information.

However, they aren’t sufficient. And here’s why:

Student privacy laws are not adequate.Mary Woodard, CC BY-NC-ND

First of all, most laws, including the Student Privacy Pledge, focus on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII includes information that can be used to determine a person’s identity, such as that person’s name, social security number or biometric information.

Companies can address privacy concerns by making digital data anonymous (i.e., not including PII in the data that are collected, stored or shared). However, data can easily be “de-anonymized.” And, children don’t need to be identified with PII in order for their online behavior to be tracked.

Second, bills designed to protect student privacy sometimes expressly preserve the ability of an operator to use student information for adaptive or personalized learning purposes. In order to personalize the assignments that a program gives a student, it must by necessity track that student’s behavior.

This weakens the privacy protections the bills otherwise offer. Although it protects companies that collect data for adaptive learning purposes only, it also provides a loophole that enables data collection.

Finally, the Student Privacy Pledge has no real enforcement mechanism. As it is a voluntary pledge, many companies may scrupulously abide by the promises in the pledge, but many others may not.

What to do?

While education technologies show promise in some areas, they also hold the potential to harm students profoundly if they are not properly understood, thoughtfully managed and carefully controlled.

Parents, teachers and administrators, who serve as the closest protectors of children’s privacy at their schools, and legislators responsible for enacting relevant policy, need to recognize the threats of such data tracking.

The first step toward protecting children is to know that that such targeted marketing is going on while children do their schoolwork. And that it is powerful.

The Conversation

Faith Boninger, Research Associate in Education Policy, University of Colorado and Alex Molnar, Research Professor, University of Colorado

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Disengaged Students, Part 2: The Anti-Intellectualism of Thomas Jefferson

In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

It is easy to blame the rise of anti-intellectualism on the vagaries of the digital age, but in fact anti-intellectualism has been present in America from the beginning of our national history, and its roots lie in other civilizations.

The Roman Republic had anti-intellectual overtones, particularly when it came to assimilation of new cultures. Roman culture was seen as providing a model of the “right” way to live, speak and practice religion.  Questioning, dissent and rational analysis were no more welcome in ancient Rome than in certain radical groups of contemporary Americans.  Deportation of “dangerous” free-thinking groups was a common practice in Rome. The Roman fear of letting in outsiders, thus exposing Roman-born citizens to the danger of becoming the minority, is reminiscent of some American sentiments regarding immigration reform today. As the Romans learned, and as Americans have discovered, fear-driven resistance to outside change cannot keep change from happening sooner or later. The idea that control of movement over a particular group can and should be mandated by any government entity is an old one, but alive and well in American culture still.

Fear of outside influences was not the only hallmark of anti-intellectualism in America. As early as colonial times, influential men wrote about the danger of a public educated in progressive thought. The famous Puritan John Cotton spoke out against too much education, saying it made the learned “more fit to act for Satan” and therefore a danger to society.

Another problem for intellectuals in the early days of American colonialism was that they were considered less valuable than those with practical skills like farming, construction or other hands-on tasks. Lofty thoughts without clear application to the practical side of life were seen as irrelevant to the physical tasks of building a new nation. Furthermore, most of the people who arrived in early America were not part of the so-called intellectual group of Europeans. They were working folks who had reason to flee their home countries in pursuit of freedom from persecution. They possessed a type of intellectual thought that cannot be taught, but lacked the education which might have enabled them to relate those thoughts to other revolutionary and intellectual ideas in history.

Jeffersonian Contradictions

Thomas Jefferson has long been described in history books as an intellectual who was partially responsible for founding America on concepts of equality. Contemporary history, however, paints a different picture of Jefferson as a man who owned slaves and fathered illegitimate children through abuse of his master status. Jefferson didn’t actually believe in equality for all; he actually believed in limited equality as long as it benefitted his own gains. Jefferson used his education and position in society to justify his own misdeeds when it came to slavery and general treatment of people in lower classes.

While his writings contribute greatly to the causes of reason and equality, his life seems to have offered some justification for the anti-intellectual tendencies of many of his contemporary compatriots.

 

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Disengaged Students, Part 1: How did American Anti-Intellectualism Begin?

In this 20-part series, I explore the root causes and effects of academic disengagement in K-12 learners and explore the factors driving American society ever closer to being a nation that lacks intellectualism, or the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

Americans pride themselves on their high ideals. On national holidays Americans delight in quoting phrases like “all men are created equal” and “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The ideologies of freedom of religion, democratic government, and socio-economic mobility are ingrained in American children beginning in pre-K educational settings. While these ideologies are admired from a distance, real progress in reaching these goals is undercut by a growing national trend: anti-intellectualism.

The Why of Academic Disengagement

College students today are more academically disengaged than ever before, and this is a direct result of their K-12 classroom experiences. A UCLA survey found that college freshmen in 1997 had spent less time than any previous freshman class on homework and extracurricular activities when they were in high school. K-12 students are shaped by a media-frenzied society which promotes instant gratification and by an educational system that tries simultaneously to compete with attention-grabbing media and to keep all students on the same plane by watering lessons down. The outcome is a growing group of students who know much less than their ancestors did, and who care very little for educational pursuits that do not immediately affect their day-to-day lifestyles.

Academic disengagement does not discriminate. In his book Beyond the Classroom, researcher Laurence Steinberg finds that economic status, race and ethnicity do not have a much of an impact on K-12 student engagement. Steinberg concludes that anti-intellectualism and the accompanying disinterest in educational pursuits is a nationwide epidemic and that the number of students who simply do not care about what is being taught has never been higher. This is what might be expected from students who approach educational pursuits with a feeling of entitlement based on years of low expectations in education settings.  When students encounter a teacher who demands more than some of their previous instructors they become resentful and feel they should not be asked to do so much. A course with difficult requirements is written off by students as being “unfair.”

A Nation of Slackers?

Though the “slacker” mentality certainly affects students in other countries, American students are the poster children for this syndrome. More American children are attending college than ever before, but these students are less interested in what is being taught than their predecessors were. The push for equality in education, starting with the youngest pre-K students, has devalued educational content. Instead of raising the standards for all children, the US has lowered the educational bar under the guise of giving everyone a fair shot.  But in fact equality in educational opportunities and the demands placed on students are not necessarily correlated; difficulty and complexity of education need not suffer in order to promote equal opportunity. Dumbing down American students is not a formula for progress in future generations.

The U.S. has been affected by anti-rationalism and by self-contradiction from its earliest days. The founding fathers wrote movingly about inalienable rights and freedom from persecution, but they avoided outlawing slavery or giving women a share in the governance of the new country when they signed their names to formative documents. The liberties they outlined could be afforded only if they did not stand in the way of personal gain.

This is not to say that the signers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were completely devoid of intellectualism or that they were narrow-minded.  They poured over documents like the 13th century Magna Carta and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s 1762 Of the Social Contract to seek guidance for setting up a fair government that blended the best of what was already in existence with fresh, all-American ideas.

There was really no way in which the elite group of men entrusted with writing the country’s blueprints could have addressed every political or social issue with surety, but thankfully they knew enough to include reasonable avenues for change in the future. That “open for interpretation” mentality, however, has handicapped intellectual pursuits since the dawning of this great nation.

Roots in Anti-Intellectualism

From America’s earliest days as a nation to the present day a war between intellectualism, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as the “theory that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason,” and its enemy anti-intellectualism, often entrenched with deep emotional and spiritual attachments, has raged.  Though less vehement during certain periods of time, particularly prosperous ones, the battle for the adaptation of rational thought in American society has always been present.

It would seem, however, that the nation in the first quarter of the 21st century is in a particularly heightened state of polarization in the intellectualism spectrum. Despite attempts to broaden their world view, and expanding ability to communicate beyond the barriers of the past, Americans seem to be trending toward further division when it comes to the controversial issues of the day. Consider creationism versus evolutionary theory – one is based solely on faith and the other on science, yes the latter is still called into question when taught in certain areas of the country.

So how can the pursuit of intellectual knowledge be regained in our K-12 classrooms? Or is it past the point of no return?

 

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Important Ways Assessment in the Classroom Impacts Testing and Curriculum

Assessment has become a central part of education. While lifelong learning should always be the main focus of a classroom, the pervasive knowledge that at some point, there will be testing, from the local scale to the national, has also become a backdrop in curriculum development.

Standardized testing has long been part of the K–12 scene, but since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001, student results have been used by the federal and state governments to determine the level of funding schools receive. The salaries and job security of teachers and administrators are also determined, at least in part, by the results of student achievement on standardized tests. As a result, a “teaching to the test” mentality has emerged in public schools throughout the country. The benefit to curriculum and lesson plans that focus heavily on anticipated test material is that a core standard for all students is established. The particular skills that are deemed most important are targeted, providing a blueprint for what students throughout the country should be learning.

The Center for Public Education, however, notes that the pitfalls of basing curriculum and in-class lessons on standardized testing are wide-ranging. When a narrow scope is applied to what is taught in K–12 classrooms, other valuable lessons are excluded. There is also the issue of spending too much time prepping for the test itself and learning test-taking skills during time that could be devoted to broadening an actual knowledge base.

In a best-case scenario, individual schools would base curriculum and instruction decisions on the performance of their particular student body on standardized testing. This does not mean excluding information that is relevant but may not appear in a multiple-choice format; it means taking a look at the broader areas where a student population suffers and finding ways to strengthen them. If a school or district sees lower math scores than average, it should consider that a sign that stronger math initiatives need to take place across the board. As such, standardized testing should be seen as an aid in curriculum development and modification, but not the entire teaching plan.

Figuring out how to make assessment and curriculum work synergistically is still a work in progress. As an educator, it will be a responsibility of yours to be a part of the effort. Talk to the other teachers in your district to see what’s working and what’s not. Put ideas to the test, and keep honing in on what yields the best results for your students.

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Another Failed Charter: Do These Schools have a Future?

In February of 2013, the Einstein Montessori School in Orlando became a casualty of the charter school experiment. State officials closed the school that had 40 students ranging from third through eighth grade. The school promoted itself as a specialty institution for dyslexic students but teachers told media outlets that there was no curriculum in place, no computers and no school library. Despite these and other red flags the school remained in operation longer than it should have because Florida law currently only allows for immediate school closures for safety, welfare and health issues.

Of course parents of the students at the school are outraged but so are taxpayers. Einstein Montessori received close to $165,000 in state money for operations – money that cannot be recovered or redirected. That number is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the total $287 million in state money that four failed Orlando-area charter schools received in recent years. Consider what that number looks like on a state scale. Now consider it on a national level. With stories like the failure of Einstein Montessori in the headlines, it is no wonder parents and other community members angrily attend charter school meetings and protest against their opening.

Despite this negativity, I’m on the proponent side of charter schools. Katie Ash recently posted the results from a charter school research study out of Stanford that found 63 percent of charter schools outperformed public school counterparts in mathematics. The report looked at schools in New York City but similar results exist across the country. I think that in addition to providing quality education overall, the competitive vibe that charters bring with them elevates the performance of all public schools. Traditional district schools are faced with more pressure to perform in order to keep the brightest students and this translates to higher levels of innovation by administration and teachers. I think that the future of K-12 learners is brighter as a result of the inception of charter schools but only if these schools are continually monitored for quality, strength in management and prioritization of student needs.

For charter schools to succeed in the future, there needs to be more transparency. States have long held a somewhat laissez faire approach to charters, allowing them freedom to operate how they see fit and not stepping in until mistakes are beyond repair. For charter schools to fulfill their mission – which I believe is to add value to the traditional public school system and raise the educational bar for all K-12 students – they need to consider their presence a partnership with the state. Since the first charter schools began sprouting up in Minnesota in 1991, the battle to find balance between accountability and innovation through autonomy has existed; stories like the ones out of Orlando show that not enough progress has been made in this regard. Educators and legislators need to realize the success of each depends on the other and approach charter school goals with this mentality.

For charters to achieve optimal success for students, the public also needs more information on what these schools actually are and how to heighten the public school education experience. While most educators recognize charter schools as public entities, community members often confuse charter schools with for-profit educational management organizations, or EMOs. This leads to an automatic feeling of resentment as students are viewed as a business opportunity. These misconceptions mean that charter schools are often viewed in a negative light for the wrong reasons. As more parents, students and community members understand the benefits of well-run charter schools, better outcomes for all are possible.