Monday, April 30, 2012

Preschool and Play



A recent report on CNN revealed that there has been a significant decline in physical activity and playtime for preschool age children.

The report further listed the benefits of physical activity and playtime for preschoolers:
  • health and fitness
  • gross and fine motor development
  • development of social skills with interaction with peers.
I was surprised, however, that the report did not include the academic benefits of physical activity and play. (I think the reason for this is CNN does not want provide too much cognitive dissonance for its viewers, but that's a topics beyond the scope of this blog.)

Anyway, this report got me to thinking about the qualities to look for in a preschool--qualities found in Orchard's preschool program.

First and foremost, it's critical that parents understand that learning, especially in preschool, is embedded in play. In any exemplary preschool, there needs to be a healthy balance of academics and play. Too much sedentary work can even lead to delays in gross/fine motor development, which are actually crucial for brain development and a catalyst for academic skills. Research studies have also shown that too much academic emphasis in the preschool years can eventually lead to less motivation and even aggression in subsequent school years.



Second, free, imaginative play is crucial. Children are using this time to make sense of their world.  They are reflecting on experiences and processing these experiences in order to comprehend new information.  Imaginative play develops the ability to concentrate and focus for extended periods of time, and it is also a necessary component in the development of empathy. 

Third, an effective preschool program places heavy emphasis on social skills development. Learning to share, to get along with others, to develop self-discipline and control are essential for future success in schools. (The ability to self-control and self-regulate is actually twice as great an indicator of future success than intelligence). 

Fourth, there needs to be lots of verbal interaction from preschool teacher. Kids need to hear, speak, and sing. There needs to be lots of out-loud reading. The more children speak, hear, comprehend, the larger their vocabulary will become, which will ease learning to read. Learning to read is preceded by being able to discern words in sentences and sounds in words. In preparation for future math classes, preschool teachers need to introduce numbers and their relationships, e.g., bigger than/less than, sorting, measuring. Focus on letters, colors, rhyming are also important.

Finally and most important, is the high-quality of the teacher. They need to be quintessentially positive and love teaching in preschool. They need to know what preschoolers need to learn and experience, how to break it down into manageable chunks, and develop these skills and knowledge through fun activities.


There is ample evidence of the importance of a high quality preschool experience setting the foundation for subsequent learning. But, as you can see in the above characteristics, this doesn't translate into a "more academic preschool", which can actually cause more harm than good.

Monday, April 23, 2012

Rating Teachers

There has been much written in the past few years about the key to increasing student performance in schools is to evaluate teachers against stricter, more quantitative criteria and then rank them--as New York City public schools has done.

While I don't disagree with improving quality in schools (although the rub here is what constitutes added quality) or better supervision and evaluation of teachers (after all, the most important variable in any classroom is the teacher), a recent article in The New Yorker illustrates the inherent subjectivity in evaluating anyone.

In the study referenced, better-looking men and women received greater salary increases than average-looking men and women. (Also, taller people get paid more as well.)

Good news if you're tall and good-looking; less so for everyone else.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of being in a leadership program at IU, and one of the professors shared his research on the subjectivity of performance evaluations. While most managers/supervisors would assume that the relationship between their employees' actual objective performance, e.g., how many widgets made in a month, and their performance evaluation would directly correlate, the actual correlation is only 5%-10%.

The reason?

Even though managers/supervisors believe they base performance evaluations on objective criteria, they in fact unconsciously base their evaluations on "organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs)."

OCBs are qualities like altruism, courtesy, cheerleading, peacekeeping, sportsmanship, conscientiousness, and civic virtue.

No matter how objective you try to be, you are influenced by subtle and unconscious factors.

As a humanities teacher, I have for over 30 years had to grade student work in poetry, creative writing, art projects, etc. I have always recognized that even though my grades are based on defined criteria, my grading was influenced by the uniqueness of each student. One student needed a boost of confidence, another took a risk on an assignment but fell short in performance, another completed the assignment well but did not push or challenge himself. Consequently, I have often found myself grading student work based more on the individual than on the "objective standards."

Most of us look to objectivity as a fair and impartial way to measure performance--be it in the classroom or the widget factory--yet we must recognize that any performance system will be influenced by outside factors.

Attached is an interesting article from a public school teacher about her decision to move to private school due to teacher ratings: Click


Monday, April 16, 2012

The End of Lecturing

A recent Harvard Magazine article focused on physics professor Eric Mazur who has gained national recognition for his abandonment of lecturing in his classes.

For many years in his freshmen physics class at Harvard, Mazur lectured to his class of 150 students, but more often than not found that his students (Harvard students, mind you) were not understanding, let alone applying, the basic content of physics and his course.

Like many teachers, he looked for logical explanations. "Maybe I have dumb students in my class. Maybe there's something wrong with the test." Eventually, however, he settled on the real culprit: his teaching style of lecturing was ineffectual pedagogy.

Rather than lecture, Mazur began using peer instruction where students share, discuss, clarify misperceptions, answer confusions.

While most elementary and middle school teachers use peer instruction, Mazur discovered that active learning, which includes explanation to others, is a better way to learn than listening passively to a teacher lecture.

As the article points out, the key to effective learning "is taking new information and applying it to real situations, connecting it with personal experience, projects, and goals, and taking personal ownership of it."

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about the "flipped classroom" where teachers expose students to new content, concepts, etc. as homework and then devote classtime to understanding and using the content in projects and activities.

For Mazur, this reverse style of teaching has not been without controversy. "The general complaint (from my students) is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I'm making them prepare for class--and in class, rather than telling them things, I'm asking them questions."

A truism for most teachers is "the person who learns the most in any classroom in the teacher." For me, I didn't really learn the rules of English grammar until I had to teach them in front of a class.

In a previous blog I referenced a study from 1997 about how people best learn:
     -We remember 10% of what we read
     -We remember 20% of what we hear
     -We remember 30% of what we see
     -We remember 50% of what we see and hear
     -We remember 70% of what we say
     -We remember 90% of what we do and say

Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers details that the necessity of practice in attaining proficiency.

And what better way to practice than to work with others on a project or to help someone who is confused about a concept.

Mazur is on a crusade to minimize lecturing in education. "The danger with lucid lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners. Sitting passively and taking notes is not a way of learning, yet lectures are 99 percent of how we teach."

For Mazur, "learning is ultimately a social experience" where interaction and give and take among student are paramount.

Mazur also has quantitative data to support his ideas. He has kept data on his students for the past 20 years and through peer instruction his students'  conceptual understanding of physics is three time better and their long-term retention of factual knowledge has improved significantly.

We're still long way from eliminating the lecture from schools, yet more and more educators (and parents) are moving away from lecture as the preferred and fall-back method of teaching.




Monday, April 9, 2012

A Personalized Approach to Education?


My blogs have centered on the benefits and advantages of a progressives education: whole child focus, student engagement, wider definition of success, etc.
In a recent article entitled Teaching to What Students Have in Common by Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist from University of Virginia (who wrote one of my favorite books, Why Students Don’t Like School), somewhat calls into question the progressive tenet of a personalized and individualized education for students.
The premise of the article is that teachers are misguided in focusing their attention on the differences among students and should rather teach to the commonalities, specifically in the “fundamental features of cognition, development, emotion, and motivation.”
Willingham notes that there is obviously variety among children in areas like learning style, ability level, interest, backgrounds experience and personalities—and that teachers need to be sensitive to these difference and clearly get to know and understand their students as individuals. Yet he feels teachers should pay greater attention to the ways students are the same.
He breaks down cognitive characteristic into two parts: things the cognitive system needs to operate effectively and methods that work well to help students meet those needs.
In the first area, Willingham stresses the importance of factual knowledge or what he calls “domain-specific knowledge.” He also describes the need for student practice of knowledge and skills until they become automatic. Finally he outlines the value of students getting feedback from a "knowledgeable source", i.e. their teacher(s).
Orchard believes in focusing on the individual needs of the learner. However, I can be guilty as a teacher and as head of school of over-emphasizing this quality. The reality is that, while everyone is unique, there are more commonalities than differences in how students learn in the classroom.  Ensuring students have a core set of essential knowledge in each discipline, having ample opportunity to place this knowledge in long-term memory so recall is automatic, and getting guidance, support, and feedback from teachers are vital qualities in any classroom.
 As Willingham states in his article, it is “important for a teacher to realize that the observation that not every student can do everything the exact same way at the exact same time should not lead to the overreaction of hyper-individualizing the curriculum.”