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In a recent article entitled, The Lost Art of Teaching Soundly Structured Lessons published in Education Week’s Teacher magazine, Mr. Mike Schmoker calls out some of the reverence afforded new fads in education when he said we should consider the elements of effective instruction that decades of research has shown to work. I tend to consider some of the feverish and questionable ed. tech approaches to learning I’ve seen of late. IN many ways, ed.tech needs to consider putting more energy and consideration into instructional know-how than they put into minimal viable product design and launch. Schmoker does a good job identifying what a resurgence of what teachers know to be true in basic approaches to teaching and how it can surpass the effects of all other initiatives thus far launched in this confused, distracted era of “reform.” Consider the following:

There are only a few such game-changing interventions available to educators, but they do more to determine how many students we can educate than all else. One of them is a well-structured lesson, built around certain primary elements. These familiar elements (which I’ll describe shortly) are at or near the top of the list of the most effective known instructional practices. They have an impeccable pedigree, going back nearly half a century. They are critical, moreover, to the success of the most quintessential factors that promote college and career preparedness: coherent, content-rich curriculum, and authentic literacy (all of which the Common Core State Standards are happily, if imperfectly, attempting to clarify for us).

He goes on to identify the following elements:

Purpose of the Lesson: Provide the students a clearly-formulated, clearly-stated learning objective. Don’t forget, it is also important to include why the objective is important to learn and how it will be assessed.

Modeling or Demonstrating: Teachers should not only explain, but explicitly show students how to perform the thinking and working necessary to achieve the objective and succeed on the given tasks and assessments.

Guided Practice / Independent Practice: This is part of what Schmoeker identifies as the critical recursive cycle that starts with students practicing each step of the skill as modeled by the instructor.

Check for Understanding: This is a formative assessment component in which the teacher observes the students’ processes to make sure that they are acquiring the requisite components of the overall skill or concept.

Group Work: Pairing or grouping students in order to allow them to assist one another with the process, tasks, thinking, and work. Schmoker points out that a teacher might observe that all students are not progressing as individuals, and this strategy can help distribute the possibility of success across a few brains, however in some instances a teacher will have to re-teach or re-address the core skill or concepts with the whole class.

For my part, it is not identified explicitly, but there are some other elements that I call out directly for teachers to consider and include in most of their lessons. To start it all off, and as part of elaborating the purpose of the lesson, we urge teachers to excite, invigorate, and ignite students’ interests through a good Anticipatory Set or Hook Activity and always end with a Closure Activity that helps student conclude their process and internalize what they’ve learned and how to connect it with a continuum of skills from previous learning.

I wish I could disagree with the following observation Mr. Schmoker makes later in his article, but I can not.

Accompanied by local educators, I visit dozens of schools every year all around the United States. I assure you that the lessons we witness in the great majority of classrooms violate most of the elements of well-structured lessons.

And for those that have utilized our online tools that support our workshops and training can attest to the focus we place on illuminating and coordinating quality instructional practice right down to the design of the humble lesson plan. There is a DNA in good teachers that understand and know this structure and can create variations from it to provide rich instructional diversity in the form of inquiry-based instruction, project-based instruction, and the like. Here is a link to one of our simple PDF support documents for lesson development that we have refined and used with over 5,000 teachers over the past few years. (You can view a more comprehensive support plan for Lesson development from one of our projects at the following page.)

Their merits are commendable. “Student Achievement Partners, Inc. is a nonprofit organization that assembles educators and researchers to design strategies based on evidence that will substantially improve student achievement. It is devoted to the successful implementation of the Common Core State Standards.”

They go on to identify the fact that they are not in pursuit of any state contracts nor take money from publishers. As such, they have freely released many resources including their professional development modules for teacher Common Core State Standards implementation strategies at www.achievethecore.org. I go take a look like I have for a number of high-profile, large scale, large agency CCSS pd models online over the last year. Alas, more of the same.

For the record, I am not specifically targeting Achieve the Core nor their efforts. I am targeting tired professional development models. I have been involved in designing, developing, and implementing professional development in various forms, from workshops for less than 10 teachers, to conferences for hundreds, to online modules for thousands for the better part of a decade. I am critical. Therefore, I find myself once again being asked to look at a new, nationwide model for CCSS training. I conversely find myself again asking,

“Why do we not apply our own most basic understanding about differentiated learning, engaging activities, and use of instructional media and technology to our own learning as educators?”

So here I go…These modules are rife with exhaustive powerpoint presentations with slide after slide of information redundant to any and all instructional practices/pedagogy/strategies of the past five decades.

This just in….there are many ways to scaffold student learning as they meet the standard:

• Multiple readings
• Read Aloud
• Chunking text (a little at a time)
• Provide support while reading, rather than before.

(the above taken from actual slide of Introduction to ELA/Literacy Shifts module)

Yawn…

The central “hands-on” activity of the module is to have your English teachers read the reading standards and then in small groups of 2-5 generate a 1-5 word phrase that best captures the essence of the standard. Then have a discussion of their resulting titles.

Yawn, Yawn…

Here are the directions, complete with a worksheet handout to write down your imagined titles.

Participants will closely read and name the Common Core State Standards for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects with a 1 -5 word phrase, which will allow them to become more familiar with the content of the standards. Participants will record their work on the Name the Standards handout.  Begin with the Reading strand and continue with the Writing strand as time permits.  Allow 20 – 40 minutes for this activity.

So consider reading with a partner something like this:

• Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of primary and secondary sources, attending to such features as the date and origin of the information.

And maybe coming up with the 1-5 word phrase like: evidence about date and origin

Then, being asked to consider other groups that came up with phrases like, evidence to support analysis, or analysis of sources, or evidence from primary and secondary sources (oops, I went over 5 words there), etc…and then you all have to work to come to consensus on an appropriate title while the facilitator has a worksheet that says, “help teachers work towards the answer of evidence” Now multiply that times every reading standard for the grade levels you collectively support.

Yawn, Yawn, Yawn…

Don’t believe me…go take a look. (http://www.achievethecore.org/ela-literacy-common-core/professional-development/introduction-literacy-shifts-content-areas)

Perhaps while we consider how to best Achieve the Core, we can consider better ways to achieve professional development that is not one-size-fits all, modeled after archaic one-dimensional teaching strategies that have long since been chastised as poor classroom practice, and acknowledge any of the technical media and content that has been in place for the better part of the last two decades. Can we all just agree to try to not be so damn common in our Common Core implementation models?

PS-
The critic in my own head is already saying, “Hey Mister! You are quick to point out what is wrong with PD…so how about tendering a genuine idea of your own?”
And I get that. Off the top of my head for that given activity, I would probably gather together a good 10-15 videos of classroom practice and other instructional reource samples of teaching and/or skills and assign teachers to connect them to standards of “best-fit”. We could then expose where teachers connected them consistently across their own analysis and where there was significant incongruence in their response. (By the way, Achieve the Core has some good, albeit very limited video case studies of classroom practice…but didn’t use them in their PD modules for some reason).

Additionally, I set my expectations higher for a group that nationally touts, “Our goal is to create and disseminate high quality materials as widely as possible. All resources that we create are open source and available at no cost.” and can only conclude that they are trying to remind me of the old adage my grandmother liked so well, You get what you pay for. And while we are on the topic of maternal adages, my mother liked the saying, “Always look for the silver lining.”…so here it is: For the children’s sake, we can be glad the folks that come up with “learning activities” such as these aren’t in classrooms any longer (if they ever were).

Brought to my attention by my colleague MaryRose Lovgren…this excerpt just in from a recent article entitled Good Teaching in Difficult Times: Demoralization in the Pursuit of Good Work submitted to the American Journal of Education by Doris Santoro.

…many teachers reap moral rewards when they develop responsive lessons that connect subject matter with their students. . . When that source of moral reward (e.g., designing lessons) is supplanted with, say, scripted curriculum, teachers lose access to a vehicle to moral rewards.

http://www.ajeforum.com/?p=145&goback=.gde_3847644_member_244809018

“Well, it’s ten acres,” said George. “Got a little win’mill. Got a little shack on it, an’ a chicken run. Got a kitchen, orchard, cherries, apples, peaches, ‘cots, nuts, got a few berries. They’s a place for alfalfa and plenty of water to flood it. They’s a pig pen-…Sure, we’d have a little house an’ a room to ourself. Little fat iron stove, an’ in the winter we’d keep a fire goin’ in it.” 

If the above passage seems familiar, it’s from Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I taught this novel to 9th and 10th graders at two different high schools. This specific part of the story focuses on George describing the dream home and property he and Lennie hope to own after shifting from farm to farm as migrant laborers. There were both literary standards and historical reading and analysis standards highly aligned to this excerpt, but neither were of any real interest to most 14-15 year olds. So I, like most teachers, endeavored to come up with a way to intrigue the average teen to consider the passage and the writing style and the context. “How would you describe your dream home?” I would ask them. “Was it as simple as George and Lennie’s?” Always, the answer was, “NO!” It was easy for us to understand that the dream of these farm laborers was fairly muted due to the harsh conditions of their own existence. Students were instructed to draw inferences from their own lives in direct relation to the location, features, and trappings of the dream home that they described. As an extension into the real of informational reading, we would look over Homes and Land real estate magazines to see how current realtors described properties as a means to get the interest of potential buyers.

The joy for me as a teacher was in devising a way to connect the classic literature piece and the literary style to the students’ own dreams and to the contemporary home advertisements that worked to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from a potential buyer in just 3-5 sentences. What was even more fun was challenging students to find a write-up of a current property listing and creating a better version of it using figurative language to sell a dream and submitting it to local realtors for consideration in their publication.

Creating scripted lessons for teachers to consider using on a day to day basis could be a wonderful resource. Creating sequences of links to related content on the great depression of the 1930’s and Steinbeck’s life along with online multiple choice questions would be helpful. But neither of these things should be confused as an adequate substitute for a strong, connected learning exchange. I certainly loved knowing of and having good, quality, interesting methods, activities, and materials at my disposal from other instructors. I also enjoyed devising my own activities and lessons, or minimally modifying those of other teachers specific to the needs of my students. But the discretion to make those modifications or just completely design new curriculum (as long as I could show the definitive connection to standards) connected with students’ lives and concerns and futures was paramount to my drive and joy and conviction as a teacher. Prescribing guiding materials and lessons to teachers is important, as long as they are imaginative and diverse (created by other exceptional teachers help with this) AND are seen as guides to the classroom activities and not dictated scripts to be followed judiciously. The Common Core State Standards are not designed to be the latter, so let’s make sure agencies and ed.tech tools don’t erroneously translate them as such.

1. WHAT should students know and be able to do by the time they exit our public education system at Grade 12, prepared for both college and careers? (These are the standards)
2. HOW can we best teach them these things along the K-12 continuum in a way that is accessible for all students and cognitively sequenced for learning? (This involves the instructional materials and the instructional methods by which teachers enable learning.)
3. WHY are these skills critical to students’ success beyond the K-12 system? (The target is to produce students that are both college and career ready.)

The Common Core State Standards are the WHAT. They are declarative statements and focus on skills that students should have at various grade levels. Take a 4th grader for instance: at 9 -10 years old, the standards identify that s/he should be able to: Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text. This is simply the WHAT. It does not imply how they are to learn that skill, or demonstrate mastery of that skill. Therefore, the methods by which a teacher organizes materials and sets up opportunities for a student to learn how to determine the main idea from a passage, then figure out key details that support this main idea and ultimately summarize the text is the HOW. This is where we see differentiation between teachers and the materials and methods they use to connect their students with concepts, topics, knowledge and skills.

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One teacher might follow his textbook’s structured activities around this skill. Students read about Westward Expansion using an excerpt from the book Desperate Passage that focuses on the plight of the Donner Party. The materials include a hand-out of the excerpt and students are directed to underline the main idea and circle key details that support the main idea, then write a one paragraph summary of the article in their own words prior to engaging an open discussion on the topic in class. During the discussion, the teacher connects this one event to larger themes they have been covering on the topic of Westward Expansion.

Another educator might opt to provide her students an online article (http://www.history.com/topics/donner-party) and read it aloud to them and have them notate in their own journals the main idea and write down at least 3 key details to support that idea. As a peer-to-peer exchange, the teacher places students into groups of 3 to compare their notes and come to a consensus on their 3 best collective details to report out to the rest of the class. For homework the students are given the article to take home and are asked to further review it and draw a flow-chart of decisions and circumstances that led to the Donner Party’s ordeal as a means of demonstrating their ability to summarize the event from the reading.

In both these instances, the key skills (the WHAT) being focused upon are Reading skills. More specifically, the reading of informational text as identified in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts (http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/4). And in this specific case, the selected text is referencing a historical event, however it could be a piece of text describing the water cycle as a process (science) or how to save an image from a website for inclusion in a powerpoint presentation and cite it correctly (technical subject). The HOW provides teachers an opportunity to follow the guidelines of supporting instructional materials or to blend in their own unique methods in an attempt to make the activities more engaging, or differentiate the learning to accommodate for diverse learner needs, or provide students various means to demonstrate the intended skills.

The WHY of the exercise is a bit more complex. The WHY tries to establish the relative importance of the skill of Determining the main idea of a text and explaining how it is supported by key details; & summarizing the text. Well the short answer to parents and external stakeholders is…it is important because a cross-section of educators, business leaders, instructional specialists, cognitive development experts, and the like, referenced decades of research to determine its importance as an individual skill, and as a step within a continuum of reading skills that extend from grade K through grade 12. What we would hope, is that the importance of this skill and the others found in the CCSS are self-evident. They do represent a set of skills, that a large and diverse cross-section of communities both within and outside of education, collectively worked and agreed upon for the better part of 5 years. It is unprecedented in public education for this many segments of the education universe to agree on such a wide-ranging set of definitive skills for the topics of English Language Arts and Mathematics, and that, in and of itself, is not without its merits. However, it does not mean the standards are beyond reproach.

And I am not referring to conspirator fomented allegations that they represent some centrally-controlled attempt to consolidate children’s thinking and the operation of schools under the authority of the federal government. Anyone working on the standards knows all too well that the impetus and development of this framework began and persists at the state level and the powerpoints supporting this work lie far beyond the thinking and processes of the federal U.S.D.O.E.

No, when I open up the idea of dissension with the Common Core State Standards, I am directing educators and parents to consider evaluating the assertion that all of the skills are equally valuable for all communities and all learners at all grade levels. I’m challenged with the notion that the skills present in CCSS are so ground-breaking and unprecedented as to present a necessary departure from the existing curriculum, focus, and instructional support efforts of any given state or schools. The rhetoric surrounding the CCSS would have you believe that teachers need extensive professional retraining to understand and re-engineer their classrooms, assignments, and instruction to implement CCSS. This largely comes from those that provide said PD. Additionally, review and adoption of new and diverse instructional materials aligned to CCSS are purported to be of critical import for each and every district, as suggested largely by those in the business of selling said instructional materials.

However, consider the above Reading of Informational Text examples. As is the case with most of the CCSS, they can be addressed with existing or readily available materials with modifications made on how the materials are introduced and taught and how students are required to demonstrate competence. And the seemingly “big changes” in the end, as was the case in past standards-adoptions and reform movements, are that teachers and schools must embrace their right to their own analysis and focus on ordering and ranking standards as a means to make decisions on behalf of and with their communities to support the needs of their students.

The Common Core State Standards present the WHAT. Schools should inspect and analyze those for sure, with the needs of their families and students in mind and the culture of their communities at heart. But absolutely allow teachers to interpret and develop and share their own HOWS and make sure that many others are involved in coming to some conclusions on the WHYS in a way that makes best use of your existing talents, resources, experiences, and collaborative efforts.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

Passion, conviction, diligence, fortitude, funding, support, energy, and a grand vision if not an all-together clear one is what I have been encountering of late in our work. And these are great things to have and difficult to generate when and where they are not present naturally.

But there is something about knowing. 

When I was a young man, about 16, my dad was a carpenter and I often worked with him and the men who made a living with lumber and nails, re-bar and concrete, in the sun and the rain. Of those men that he “pounded nails” with for a living was a man named Truman. He wore dungarees or Carhart overalls regularly, was not ever too pleasant, and had hands like gnarly, sun-baked oven mitts. One day on a job site, Truman told me to go fetch all the 4 x 8 sheets of cedar siding where the lumber supply truck had dropped stacks of some 30-40 pieces each on the far side of the property in which we were building a home.

“Don’t make us wait.” he said. “We’re gonna be coming up and down these ladders nailing and moving fast. I want at least 3 sheets ready to go in advance at all times laid out ahead of us. Got it?”

Like most my tasks, the work was never complex, but was usually difficult. The sheets were heavy, but being young, I carried two at a time and despite the splinters that the coarse grain introduced into my hands and shoulders as I heaved them from one side of the property to the other, I was able to get a bit of a lead and keep ahead of Truman and his partner without having to run due to the amount of time it took them to complete all the nailing by hand, while precariously holding the sheets in place, while balancing on ladders pitched on uneven ground.

Over halfway through our first stretch of wall, with two sheets balanced on my shoulder, I came around the far corner of the house to find Truman down off his ladder and standing dead in my path. “Put ’em down.” he barked. I put them down.

“Is there a reason you’re not running?” I wiped my forehead off. “I’m out in front of you aren’t I?” I asked with just enough indifference to cause him to take a step a little closer to me and raise his voice a bit more. “I don’t care how far out in front of us you are, on this job site, you’ll run.”

He turned and started back for his ladder. Being 16. I unwittingly dared another observation. “I don’t see anyone else running on this job site.” At this point, Truman’s partner, who had remained up on his ladder this whole time waiting for our conversation to end, simply dropped his head down in a disparaging manner to where I could no longer see his eyes from under the brim of his dirty, sweat-stained hat. He came down off his ladder slowly shaking his head back and forth knowing that my persistence had just afforded him a rare break from keeping pace with Truman.

What I said was accurate, yet I fully knew I was in the wrong from the look on Truman’s face. Truman, however, didn’t move menacingly back in my direction, nor did his voice escalate when he said, “Hey man. You’re right, we don’t run. That’s because we know stuff. But you don’t. For instance, I know you’ve been grabbing them sheets from the far side of the stack and then walking across them on your way back over here.”

I had been, but not within eyesight of him. And while I momentarily wondered how he knew I had, it didn’t stop me from saying, “What does that matter? They’re still getting here aren’t they?”

Truman slowly looked up at the wall and said, “Ya, doesn’t matter to me either dude.”  as he pointed up towards about 90 feet of wall that had already been nailed and secured , “‘But it should matter to you ’cause you’ll be the one up on these ladders long after we’re done today, sanding off all of your boot prints across each of these boards before they get stained tomorrow morning.” As I shaded my eyes and focused on the wall, I saw dusty, size 9, Vibram sole prints  tracked back and forth across every sheet of that cedar at both levels.

“Like I said man,” Truman concluded, “on this job site, for what you don’t know you run. And sometimes, even that ain’t gonna help much.”

Long after they left that day, with the sun going down, I stood precariously on a ladder, pitched on uneven ground and sanded away my boot prints and thought about the line, “For what you don’t know, you run. And sometimes, even that ain’t gonna help much.”

Almost 30 years later, I still recall that line. On any project, its wonderful to have people who have energy and passion, and there are plenty of motivated, excited people trying to affect education; however a little knowing goes a long way. It’s critical to have people with real knowledge and experience. And while I do appreciate people willing to run, in place of what they don’t know, it’s like Truman said, “Sometimes, even that ain’t gonna help much.”

 

 

Knowing vs. Understanding (or, in honor of Spring Break…EdTech Start Ups Gone Wild!)

Q:
How much does the typical ed. tech investor want to know about education?

A:
As little as is necessary to ensure at least a 10:1 return on their investment.

To be more precise, most of the investors and start-up angels I spoke with base much of their solution approach on their own experiences as a student, which is not a bad start point I guess.  However it is helpful to recognize the need to secure at least some time with people who not only know, but understand the intricacies of the teaching and learning process as acted out daily between adults and children in the classroom as well as the materials appropriations and legislative processes at play in any given state education agency and everything in between those two distant points on the public education spectrum. In the end, there seems to be far too little understanding of how teaching works, how teachers create rich learning opportunities, how students access and process information in a meaningful way…and too much, “Ya, we know.”

Without working to create education-centric perspectives, we can expect to keep seeing “new” ed-tech content “play” tools and instruments that look a lot like existing web community tools that are suddenly, miraculously, awkwardly and indescribably trotted out as educator resources a’la a new banner slapped across the top of the old tools with a quizlet service tacked on the side (maybe, click on image above to see new Education features!). Same pony trotted out during the last act, but now painted with stripes and touted as the worlds smallest zebra.

Here is today’s announcement from a resource aggregation site that takes urls and descriptions of said urls you the user provides and processes them as a pinterest like tiled poster with auto-generated thumbnails of the sites you submit and your own description wrapped around them, (which is not un-interesting as a feature set, but…)

We just got a whole lot better: better text, comments, and reports! Create beautiful text tiles more easily than ever – add hyperlinks, quotes, and tables!  Stay up-to-date – we tell you how your students are viewing your lesson with our education platform!

(Hmmm, tell us how our students are viewing our lessons…with their eyes? Via a browser? Or do I dare imagine a drop down of adverb options for students to select how they’re viewing a teacher’s lesson – Begrudgingly, Hesitantly, Reluctantly, Precariously, Egregiously,  Contemplatively, Soberly, Cautiously, Other)

Or how about a popular online portfolio tool that allows professionals to develop a visual tapestry of work accomplishments or individuals to frame out pillars of their life accomplishments and happenings, that announced in January that it now has an educator community and online suite of course development tools. I signed up to see these tools, and was then directed to an ambiguous video about proposed tools and a “coming soon” screen. I was forced to identify the grade level of students I work with (only one, because all teachers teach one grade level) and quickly was called by a young man about my use of their new tools which don’t exist yet. For the record, I did not express excitement, nor alluded to my 6th grade class, but told him I had to make that up to create my educator acct. and was merely trying to see how things worked. Here is how he processed that conversation and has sent 3 more emails since this one.

Hi Brian,
It was great to talk to you today and hear about your 6th grade classes. I am glad to hear that you are excited about our new xxxxxxxxx for Educators Solution!

Once you get a chance to play around with the new educator features please let me know what your think. Any feedback you could give us would be extremely valuable.

(btw, as a former English teacher I love when people say, “…let me know what your think”.) Awesome.

In a follow up call, he asked how my 6th graders were doing. I said, “Great.” He added, that they would have those course tools available for me soon and I asked, “Will the courses essentially be a portfolio of weblinks and files that I have uploaded into one playlist similar to the portfolio I made about my hometown and life which includes my bikeride to work video, a Yelp review of my favorite lunchspot, a picture of downtown’s best barista, a Mark Twain quote, and the high-score I registered on the pinball machine in our office?”

He said, “Yes, but you can pose questions and discussions around those items and then your students can access that course and learn.”

“How do my 6th graders access my course then?” I asked. He said, “You can create accounts for them or provide them a key that we will use to get to your course at which time they will be charged $10 a piece for full access.”

I said, “How are they supposed to pay?” He replied, “They can pay online via credit cards.”

I said, “My fictitious students are 11 and 12 years old.” He said, “Their parents can pay then. Or the school can with a purchase order.” I sat silent…long enough for him to add, “If they are low-income students and qualify for the reduced lunch thing, then they can indicate that and get free access.”

I asked, “Are you tying their student id back to their qualification for free or reduced lunch?” He said, “No, we just take their word for it so you could just have all your students just do that. We don’t check.”

Indeed, well then…let’s party.