Textbook Dependence

There's been lots of talk lately on textbooks (or maybe not so lately--I've been avoiding writing). First, Beverlee Jobrack's Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes How Educational Materials Undermine Reforms was published. Next, the edu-world was all aflutter over Apple's entrance into the textbooks market. Finally, veteran textbook author and publisher Annie Keeghan offered some not-so-pretty insights into the aging, hulking industry textbooks have become.

I haven't gotten a chance to read Jobrack's work, but luckily Education Week curriculum journalist Erik Robelen and by the Fordham Institute's curriculum expert Kathleen Porter-Magee did.

I agree with Jobrack's premise as stated by Robelen that in discussions of education reform:

improving the curriculum—what actually gets taught in classrooms—is all too often left off the table. And the author, who provides an insider perspective on the world of developing and selecting curricular materials, contends that this neglect is a key obstacle to increased student learning.

Now I can't refute Jobrack's contentions, but I can speak to my opinion on textbooks, which is that they may well be inaccurate and I can only imagine that they are just slapping new labels on old content. (And this is why textbooks on i-pads will not be "revolutionary.") I also can mostly speak as a social studies teacher. When I taught strict ESOL, I didn't use one textbook in particular but various books and resources depending on what I was teaching. That was true of social studies, too, but I did lean on the textbooks more. But I think the problem with textbooks is two-fold:

1) Especially in subjects such as social studies, textbooks are over-emphasized. Sure, textbooks are useful. Especially when I teach social studies, I use them as reference books and encyclopedias. I like to have two or three sets of textbooks in the class--to check different sources but also so that students of varying reading levels can access the content. Otherwise, I have students read historical fiction and non-textbook non-fiction books, and I use articles and readings that I come across on relevant topics--from the newspaper, from periodicals. What I like about using these is that they usually reflect in some way current scholarship in certain matters, and they are what I want my students eventually to be able to read and make sense of outside of school, independently. Part of what I'm teaching students is that yes, there are facts in social studies and history, but there is also how you put together the facts, interpret them, and which facts are accepted and which are controversial and why. This leads me to the problem that. . .

2) teachers, especially at the secondary level, don't often know enough about the subjects they teach to know if the textbook is wrong or to come up with readings beyond it. When you know very little about a subject you will be teaching, if for example if you are assigned at the last minute to teach World History (as I have been), when you know much more about US History, there's going to be a lot to learn in a brief amount of time and the textbook will get leaned on more and questioned less. I won't be able to fact-check an entire textbook and nor should I have to--that's the publisher's job. And, unfortunately, these days it seems like textbooks need even more scrutiny.

Porter-Magee is right on when she says you can't just have a great curriculum and expect teachers who don't know what they're doing to implement it well. Pedagogy matters; quality of instruction matters. Nor should we just make "teacher-proof" curriculum. Where I might disagree or question Porter-Magee is when she talks about emphasizing data-driven instruction:

And so any discussion about classroom-level implementation of curriculum should include a discussion of using formal and informal assessment to track student mastery of essential content and skills, and of using the data from those assessments to really drive short- and long-term planning and instruction. This kind of data-driven instruction is essential in ensuring not only that teachers have covered essential content, but that students have actually learned it.

Implementation and assessment are vital but before they even get to the classroom (and continuing as they're there), teachers, especially at the secondary level, should be much better educated (and yes I think they should also be better trained) in the subjects they teach. Teachers should rely less on textbooks and more on other books, texts, and other sources of information. Teachers should be able to spot and to point out inacccuracies. They should help students notice diverging viewpoints or conflicting information in different sources and they should facilitate discussions about these different perspectives--their genesis and how to evaluate them. Far from making textbooks and curricula teacher-proof, teachers should be able to make sense of and judgments about the curriculum and texts they're teaching and to teach their students to do the same.

To attract people that knowledgeable and educated, we have to at least provide much better working conditions, greater professional autonomy, and better pay, but I guess I already covered that in another post.

Rather than Choosing "Best" Teacher, Parents Should Seek Best Match

I have another guest post up, this one over at Nacy Flanagan's Education Week blog, Teacher in a Strange Land. In it, I respond to the matter of letting parents choose their children's teachers.

Check it out.

Legislating to the Test

Recently, the Virginia Senate passed a bill that would eliminate the 3rd grade SOL (Standards of Learning) Tests in Science and Social Studies. That means less standardized testing! As a Virginia public school parent, I should be thrilled, right? Not necessarily.

See my post on this over at The Core Knowledge Blog.

Teaching Quality Series Part V: Parental Engagement

It's generally true that the more that parents are involved in their children's education, the more academically successful their children will be and the more effective the teachers will (at least appear to) be. I largely agree with Thomas Friedman's take on this.

That being said, the seemingly growing "parent accountability" movement troubles me. Moreover, the strategies (which are in many cases de facto requirements) some charter schools are using to engage parents are in some cases are worth emulating but in others amount to punishing kids for the failures of their parents.

Before I continue, I must acknowledge that I have almost exclusively taught students with parents who weren't very involved in their education, despite my varied efforts, and so some of my thinking on this may be colored by a certain fatalism. The parents could have been less involved because I taught secondary school and parents often think of this as a time to step back. It could have been because the parents worked very long hours and simply didn't have the time be involved. It could have been because I taught mostly the children of immigrants, whose parents sometimes cede almost all education authority to schools and teachers, or whose parents want to be more involved but don't feel included in the school community. Also, in some cases, these parents expect their older children, especially the males, to be at least partial bread-winners, treating them more like adults. Alas, frankly, a handful of parents simply didn't seem to care.

Now, in my mind, a lack of involvement doesn't necessarily translate to a lack of support. If nothing else, being supportive means doing an adequate job at home, as a parent and as such: sending your kids to school prepared to learn, adequately feeding and housing your children, making sure they have a quiet place to study, and encouraging them to read and study. For me, as a teacher, such support would be more than enough.

That all being said, just because parents aren't much involved or supportive, doesn't mean in any way that teachers and schools shouldn't work actively work to engage, involve, and get input from parents; they absolutely should. However, if such outreach fails, teachers must still keep in mind that their job is to educate their students, regardless of parent involvement. Students should not be punished because of their parents' lack on involvement. At the bare minimum, the parents should parent and the teacher and school should educate. And when the parent fails to parent adequately, well, schools are still responsible to educate those children students as best they can.

Which leads me to parent accountability. I've noticed among some of the blogs I follow, some support of the concept of parent accountability. Now, these links are pretty old (yes, it takes me a loooong time to get around to finishing many of my posts), which I hope means the idea is losing traction, but in case it doesn't. . .

Though he recently agreed with Friedman's softer take, this past summer, Ed Week blogger and former teacher Walt Gardner expressed a bit of a harder line on parent accountability, saying:

Yet there is a faint glimmer of hope on the horizon. According to The New York Times, legislators in some states have introduced bills holding parents responsible for their children's performance and behavior ("Whose Failing Grade Is It?", May 21). Whether these bills ever become law is another matter, but at least they signal a possible shift in the accountability movement.

An American Propsect blogger also threw her hands up, saying (albeit at the end of an otherwise very good post about evaluating teachers),

On a final note, I wonder if the day will ever come when we legislate or evaluate parenting as part of the performance of children. It may be an unfair intrusion of the state into the home, but it's rare to see improvement and advancement in children if it doesn't come from encouraging or demanding parents. This is the "x" in the education equation, and until we find a way to solve for it, no answer will ever truly be accurate.

This post on The Answer Sheet by is by Catherine Durkin Robinson who is the founder and president of a group called National Coalition for Accountable Parenting, which promotes parent accountability measures, including fines, jail time, mandated parenting classes, school-issued parent report cards, and financially rewarding "good" parents. Yikes. I'm not able to chose even one block from this piece as the whole thing is so chock full of terrible recommendations. I strongly suggest you read it for yourself. I'm telling you, the Tea Party couldn't make this stuff up.

Many states are considering fining parents for their children's truancy. In West Virginia, legislators proposed a bill that would revoke parents' driving licenses due to truancy and tardiness of their children. It's unclear to me how fining parents who are likely already struggling financially or taking away a means to get their children to school is supposed to help their children go to and succeed in school.

To me, these example of parent accountability via legislation is just spreading bad policy pain. I don't want to be held accountable for things that are beyond my control, but I also don't want parents and students to be held accountable for things beyond their control. The solution is not to transfer draconian and unreasonable demands from teachers onto parents (or even unto principals), to find new teams to play the blame game; the right thing to do is to do away with the concept altogether. As my father always told me growing up (and as I'm fond of declaring in these education reform conversations): Two wrongs don't make a right. We don't need a war on bad parents; we need a society and government that supports families, especially ones that are struggling. Also, do we really need to criminalize more things in our society? I really don't think so.

Some reformers, for example, Peter Meyer of Fordham, makes the case that good schools will make good parents. He posited in an earlier post that charters are superior to neighborhood schools because they better educate kids and they get better results. He said that KIPP, for example, creates motivated parents rather than merely attracting them because the type of education KIPP offers is a motivator. I tried to discuss the finer points of this with him (for one it's very hard to measure motivation) but didn't get very far.

Though people like Meyer do have a point that KIPP may well "motivate" parents simply by offering a solid education, this logic is ultimately faulty. I, as a neighborhood school classroom teacher, can promise and offer a rigorous and engaging curriculum, but I can't say that students can only remain in my class if their parents do their homework with them each night. That would be punishing my students for the behavior or actions of their parents. That's not fair to the students. Also, I just really couldn't do that.

I am responsible for communicating and being available to all parents, but if the parents don't do their part, I still have to treat that student the same as the one whose parent does meet me halfway. I need to promise my students best and most appropriate pedagogical practices and a rich and meaningful curriculum. If the parents get more on board because of that, so be it, but my duty is primarily to their children, not to them. Likewise, as a teacher I learned to assume nothing about my students' home life, to give only homework that they could do on their own. Any bigger projects that required supplies or computers or extra help we worked on in class. Otherwise, I would be rewarding students who had more resources and more available and educated parents and punishing those who didn't.

KIPP, HSA, and other charters can exclude kids because of their parent won't get involved. They can counsel them out if the kid hava behavior issues or special needs. I don't think KIPP denies this and this post isn't meant to explore any ethical dilemma inherent in that, only to say that it's not fair to compare performance of the two or claim that charters like KIPP are doing a better job with the same population. Such schools can openly exclude or expel or punish kids for their parents' lack of involvement, while traditional public schools can't. This is a form of parent accountability that ultimately holds students responsible.

We should work harder to engage and inform parents at our traditional public schools and to offer better education, and we shouldn't get rid of all charters--they're not without value. But if we really want to put the most vulnerable students first, we should focus our education reform efforts on strengthening the neighborhood schools that are responsible for educating them regardless of their parents' commitment to their education. We should strengthen our outreach to parents, or at least, not diminish it. And when parents can't for whatever reason be adequate parents, making their lives even more difficult via parent accountability schemes is not going to help and will ultimately, I fear, punish the children we're trying to help in the first place.

In Defense of Flipping the Classroom & the Lecture

There's been a lot lately about "flipping the classroom," a teaching method where students are to view a lecture at home --ostensibly on-line--of their teacher presenting key concepts while saving doing harder and trickier homework-type assignments for in class. This idea appeals to me and I've been somewhat surprised that so many other education peeps out there whom I follow don't seem as enamored. Not only are they disparaging of the idea, but they seem to think "lecture" is synonymous with torture.

Before I begin I want to offer two caveats. First, the access problem is no small one and if not satisfactorily solved, could easily be a deal breaker. Second, I am envisioning this for older students, not necessarily for younger ones. As I've written about before, considerations of grade, age, and subject are very important in any conversation about teaching and learning.

Now, I wouldn't flip the classroom all of the time (getting stuck in one practice or approach is never a good idea) or get rid of outside-of-class readings and I wouldn't say it's going to "transform education" (puh-lease), nor would I call it a silver bullet method (don't believe in silver bullets), but, again, access issues aside, what's not to like?

As a teacher, and this was partly because I generally taught students who didn't have a lot of support at home (though these same students would lack access to technology, as well), when I assigned more challenging reading, projects, papers, and essays, I had them do a lot of the work in class anyway because that's when they needed guidance the most. I saved easier reading assignments and exercises that involved practicing or analyzing what students had already learned for homework.

Other aspects of flipping the classroom that excite me: Teachers can record their lectures a few times until they get it just right and then maintain a video library, if you will, of these presentations. Teachers can share and exchange video clips with one another. Students can have access to the library of them and can view each presentation as many times as they need to. They can access the library anywhere, without having to lug a textbook with them, and unlike a textbook, it's a living source of information. The teacher can get feedback on it and alter it easily if necessary without having to send it back to the publisher; students can leave comments or questions beneath the video. For someone who can't even upload digital photos from camera to laptop without assistance, I sound pretty excited about this, don't I?

During discussions of "flipping the classroom" I have been disturbed (and this has long bothered me) by how many of my fellow educators, bloggers, and commentators use "lecture" as if it's a bad word, dismissing it as an instructional technique almost out of hand. Flipping the classroom is just another form of lecturing! Lecture?!? You can't lecture the children! Heaven forbid. Lecturing is baaaaad. Well, I disagree.

To me, the problem isn't giving lectures per se, but rather with how and when they're done. Lectures come in all shapes and sizes. Certainly, lectures can be monotonous and boring, but they can also be lively, creative, interactive. So, there are good lectures and bad lectures, and there are times, places, and audiences for lecturing. Some audiences and topics require shorter lectures and some longer. When you go to hear Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch, Deb Meier, or Jonathan Kozol speak, you're listening to a lecture. Listening to a news report? That's a lecture. TED talk? Lecture. Author reading? That, too, is a lecture.

When I was in ed school (to read some of my thoughts on ed schools, read this post and this comment I made on the same post), I learned that the lecture was one way to present information, or teaching methodology, but lecturing was definitely frowned upon. (As you can imagine, I especially loved being lectured on how it was bad to lecture.) When I was student teaching high school US Government, I did everything but lecture. Finally, as I was gathering feedback, which I did often (come to think of it, much more often than I did as a regular classroom teacher. Why was that? Adding that to my list of things to change when I go back to the classroom) the students were growing frustrated and unresponsive. So we stopped to talk about it. One student hesitated but then said, "Look, Ms. Levy, you're asking us to work together and put together presentations on topics we don't really know anything about. We need you to teach us about them first, to tell us about them. You're the teacher--you're supposed to know about these things." I looked around and saw the rest of the class nodding in agreement. So, for the rest of my time, I lectured more, not all of the time, but more often than I had been. On the day when my university adviser and supervisor came to observe me, I happened to have a lecture planned. In our debriefing, she asked me, and I knew this was coming, what I could have done differently besides, "you know, just standing up there and lecturing." I explained to her that I had been doing all of the other stuff but that the students had told me to lecture more. She raised her eyebrows and said, "Huh. Interesting." To her credit, she didn't evaluate me negatively on this (she actually was a fantastic teacher and adviser).

The following summer, when I started my first teaching job (and I wrote about this particular class before here) I taught tenth grade English. If I recall correctly, we spent about one quarter of the class explicitly on writing. On one piece I decided to have students do peer editing. This, I had been told, was a great thing to do, but it was a disaster. The students really got into it and tried their damndest but it wasn't working; they weren't properly editing one another's work. The straw that broke the camel's back was when as I was circulating, I overheard two students arguing heatedly about a rule of punctuation (awesome!) But they were both wrong (arrgghh!) Nobody was learning anything and worse, the students were reinforcing bad habits and giving one another terrible advice.

Since then, I've learned to assess what students already know or have been successfully taught before expecting them to "teach one another" or "learn cooperatively." For example, after teaching lessons on how to give constructive and diplomatic feedback, I have students give one another feedback on what they take away from or hear in another student's piece or suggest questions they think might be left unanswered. However, I avoid peer editing or advice that involves peers giving advice on how to write or explain rules of grammar when they don't know them themselves. That, ahem, is my job.

Which leads me to another problem I have with privileging group work or cooperative learning over direct instruction or lecturing. I've seen it as an excuse to be lazy and I've seen it done wrong. Here kids, you do this. You're responsible for your own learning now. Go forth and teach yourselves. I'll sit back and do nothing. Of course, students should certainly be responsible for their work and learning but they need some help and guidance along the way. Of course, instruction beyond direct presentation or lecturing has its place, but it's not an anti-dote to poor lecturing.

I will end this with some much more articulate and organized thoughts on the subject of group work from Diana Senechal. As usual, she says exactly what I'd like to say myself.