Category: Studies On Education

An Outstanding Webinar Experience

26/2/2020

From time to time, over the years, I sign up to attend a webinar. One was called "The Non-Lecture Lecture." There was a speaker (lecturing) and a chat going on simultaneously. It involved multi-tasking reading the chat, answering the chat, listening to the speaker as he chuckled reading the comments. I lasted five minutes as a participant. But it was such a phenomenon that I watched to the end as the many participants finally clicked on an icon that gave the speaker a virtual round of applause.

As a person conditioned to watching talking heads on TV, I always found these webinars lacking personalities and production value. But today was different. I think Education Week has hit on a format that allows for REAL audience participation in REAL Time. The topic for the discussion is above. The conversation was divided up into six areas with a virtual "booth" in the virtual "lobby." There was a different question to chat about in each booth. That meant I could enter a chat room, click on the green "chat" button, read what others were saying and add my two cents where I felt I could make a contribution or add support. This allowed me to find people who were saying things that interested me.

At the end, there was a live-streamed video discussion from each editor who headed up a virtual booth. One of them actually quoted something I had written! How 'bout that! It also allows the conversations to hang around in their archives, which you can refer to later.

Of course the skills you need to do this well are reading and writing. I do that every day so participating was easy for me. I think that this format is a real innovation. It allows individuals to fully have their say in real time but also in their own time and according to their own interests.

If these coming webinar summits interest you, check out the new Education Week. It is really exciting to see a novel use of technology coming from an educational source where individual voices can be captured and heard.

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

1/11/2018

Source: pixabay.com

Over the past ten years I have experienced worrisome interactions with teachers and students. Last summer, when at a conference, a fourth grader was explaining a school project to me. I had to request that she make eye contact with me when she was talking to me. After the request she managed to do so but there were intermittent drifts of glances to some place over my shoulder.

The other day I had a video conference with some college-bound high-school seniors. I gave them a number of links to read and asked that they formulate questions for me prior to our meeting. Only one student had a prepared question and when I asked them questions I was greeted with silence. Not one hand was raised.

In a coaching session with young teachers on how to teach the solar system I asked them, “How do we know about the solar system?” They looked at me with blank fear and then at each other. I could easily imagine them frantically thinking “what’s the right answer?” I didn’t want to embarrass them, so I said, “We look at the sky” and followed up with, “and what do we see in the sky?” “Clouds?” one teacher tentatively responded. Since we were discussing the solar system, I could only surmise that she was not following the conversation. I could go on and on with my interactions where any question I asked generated panic that interfered with truly hearing my questions. I wasn’t testing them. I was trying to engage them in a conversation where I wasn’t doing most of the talking. But it wasn't working.

I’m self-reflective. I worry about my own inability to engage. Then I talk to my teacher friends in affluent school districts who tell me that kids only care about getting good grades. They demand instruction on only what they need to do to score well on tests. There is little or no enthusiasm for learning or content. When given choices, students respond by asking the teacher to choose for them. They fear making an incorrect choice as simple as one between colored pencils and markers for an art project. And their parents have become helicopters on steroids, protecting their children from any form of failure by intimidating teachers. Teachers are told not to put anything that suggests improvement of a student to the parents in writing. The threat of lawsuits hover over classroom interactions. I did an afterschool program through a public library designed to generate creativity. Instead the students just copied what I modeled for them. Professors at a school of education in Florida told me about their latest students, whom they called F-Cat babies—students who had experience standardized testing every year since kindergarten. They feared that these students only knew the testing environment for their own formal education thus becoming obsessed with testing, not with teaching others how to learn.

Is there evidence out there that supports my anecdotal experience? Yes! I’m giving you links. More than I ever imagined! So I've done a little curating to give you a variety of vantage points. The Common Core Standards want students to listen, speak, read and write. Instead, they are addicted to screen and are obsessed with social media. They don’t know how to have a conversation, make eye contact, even listen to stories. Here are linke to recent articles from reliable sources. I'm probably not telling you anything you don't already know. But the next question is what do we do about it?

How Too Much Screen Time Affects Kids' Bodies And Brains by Alice G. Walton in Forbes

Limiting children's screen time linked to better cognition, study says by Naomi Thomas of CNN

Here’s an instructional You Tube video on how to have a conversation by taking turns speaking and listening. I found the conversation somewhat stilted but maybe it’s useful.

Back-and-forth exchanges boost children’s brain response to language by Anne Trafton- MIT News

Protecting your kids from failure isn’t helpful. Here’s how to build their resilience – The Conversation

How Parents Can Foster Autonomy and Encourage Child Development by Eva Lazar, PhD- Good Therapy

Supporting the Development of Creativity by Laurel Bongiorno –NAEYC

The importance of eye contact in young children, and how to teach it as a social skill Rainforest Learning Centre.

Have you ever noticed how infants make eye contact? Why do they lose that skill?
Talking to babies: How friendly eye contact can make infants tune in -- and mirror your brain waves by Gwen Dewar, Ph.D-Parenting Science

Why is storytelling important to children? -BBC

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

25/4/2018

Wikimedia Commons

Now that teachers and students are almost through surviving this year's standardized testing, I thought you might be interested in a time when a standardized test was no big deal.

I started my career as a teacher in the early ‘60s. For most of you who are too young to remember, let me tell you what it was like. First, I had a very hard time finding a job. I was 22 years old, married, and armed with a Master’s degree in high school biology, chemistry and physics instruction. I had no experience, except for student teaching; yet, I had to be paid a higher starting salary because I had an advanced degree with no guarantee that I'd be any good. And I was married, which implied that I would get pregnant and create problems for a school to replace me. I was routinely asked at interviews what my intentions were for starting a family (now against the law). I was ultimately hired by an unmarried, careerist, public school, female principal to teach 7th and 8th grade science. She put her arm around me and said, “I think you have great potential as a teacher. Whatever time you give us, I’m grateful for.” I gave them 2 ½ years and was forced to quit in my sixth month of pregnancy because I “showed.”

Make no mistake. I LOVED teaching. The department chair handed me a textbook to teach from. I took one look at it, and decided I couldn’t inflict such dry, pedantic stuff on my students. I also noticed that my classroom door was closed and no one was watching me. So I went to the library and found exciting books on the same subjects I was required to teach. I used them to create my own materials. Perhaps I was an outlier. I had no idea with my colleagues were doing in their classrooms. One day, when Mr. Dinsmore, the militant, scowling, assistant principal unexpectedly dropped in to observe me, my students and I were in the middle of deriving the equation for the Doppler Effect (in 8th grade!). (The Doppler effect is the change in the pitch of a sound from a moving source--you've heard it from ambulance sirens and locomotive whistles as they approach and pass you.) They knew I was being evaluated and rose to the occasion. Every hand went up. Every kid was in lock step with me. They broke into applause when he left after an abbreviated time! That spring, my students took the assessment tests (after about three days of test prep); they did just fine.

Today’s public school teachers are not trusted with the kind of autonomy I had. They are burdened with paperwork and have all kinds of rubrics to worry about both for themselves and for their students. A friend of mine, who is a professor in a CUNY school of education, tells me that teachers in public schools advise her students NOT to become teachers.

Education has made some progress since I left the profession. We now have a lot more resources and knowledge for teaching children with special needs. Technology and the availability of information are having an impact. When we look at Finland, which is successfully creating a knowledge-based economy, the teaching profession is the profession of choice for bright people. Each school faculty operates as a team to do whatever it takes to get students to learn. If you are not aware of how this works read this article from the Smithsonian Magazine. Finnish schools trust their teachers and give them the support they need to do their job. Contrast this with the current exodus of American teachers from the profession and the damage that has been done to public schools by the high stakes placed on the standardized test.

A few years ago, at an education conference, I interviewed Finnish Professor Jorma Routti, one of the founders of Finnish venture capital and one of Europe’s leading technology experts. “Education cannot be rushed,” says Professor Routti. “There are no short cuts, no magic bullets. It’s a law of nature. It takes nine months to make a baby and 30 years to make an engineer.”

How do we educate the powers-that-be to see the light? Testing will die a slow death. Problem is that there is too much money in it. Please comment.

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

29/3/2018

This is the rather uninteresting cover of the report in which I am a guinea pig.

With today’s brouhaha about high-stakes testing, I was curious about the outcome of the Ford Foundation Early Admissions program that lasted from 1951 to 1955. (I was in the penultimate group admitted). A little online research brought me to this study: They Went to College Early. There I was — a guinea pig data point in a five year study that ultimately involved about 1,300 students. I found the motivations and the outcomes very interesting, particularly in light of what is happening in schools today.

Why did they do it? The overall purpose was to addressed the future supply of “.... what is variously termed ‘high ability manpower,’ ‘specialized talent,’ or ‘leadership.’” Mostly they were afraid that if bright students were not put in challenging environments they would be lost as highly productive members of society, including teachers. “The most critical requirement, of course, is to attract into teaching enough of the Nation’s finest quality manpower, for it takes talent to produce talent.” [italics, mine] They feared that the American educational system, which kept students in lock-step with their chronological peers, would ultimately “frustrate young talent...for whom the pace is too slow and the academic diet too thin.” In other words, they knew that students needed to be challenged and happy for learning to be successful. [This applies regardless of class ranking by any standards.] They thought early admission to college for able students might help.

How did they do? The program was deemed a success. Most Ford Scholars did slightly better than assigned “comparison students” who had similar backgrounds and aptitudes but had finished high school. The programs live on today with Advanced Placement programs and early admittance for college courses for credit for bright high school juniors and seniors. A few schools, including Shimer, still admit 11th and 12th graders for a college degree.

What conclusions did they come to? “The important lesson from the Early Admission experiment is that the American educational system cannot afford to overlook the individuality of the students with whom it deals. [italics, mine] Whether these students are normal age or underage, or whether they have completed a formal program in secondary school is probably of less importance than their capabilities and aspirations as individuals.

Students are now facing weeks of Standardized Tests. My question: why are we now oppressing students with formalized standards that are the same for everyone and creating school environments from which students want to flee?

Clearly, no long-terms lessons were learned from this grand experiment of which I was part of the data. In fact, the standards for teachers have now been formalized to the extent that they have little classroom autonomy--a privilege extended to professionals in all fields and one I enjoyed as a teacher. I have felt for a long time now that sadly, education is going backwards.

It is very interesting that at this moment, teachers in red states are organizing and marching, not just for a living wage for themselves but for money to repair crumbling school buildings and for updated instructional material for students.

An Outstanding Webinar Experience

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

Vicki Cobb

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An Outstanding Webinar Experience

Are Children Losing (or Never Acquiring) Social Skills?

The Teaching Profession: Then and Now

I Was a High School Dropout -Part 2

Vicki Cobb

​​​​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

Categories