Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Make It Stick - is 3 the magic number?
I'm reading Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel's Make It Stick in a mixed state of trepidation and fascination.
Trepidation because the wording is so incautious and, often, so imprecise that I think it's entirely possible we'll see Make It Stick touted as justification for bad teaching of every stripe.
e.g.: the preface spends a great deal of time denigrating "drill and kill," which the writers take to mean massed practice. Also, "easy" lessons are slammed on grounds that learning should be hard. (So drill and kill is too easy?) And at one point the text baldy avers, sans footnote, that "people do have multiple intelligences" while in the same breath asserting that there's no evidence learning styles have anything to do with anything. So instead of worrying about our learning styles we should all use all of our multiple intelligences all the time because you learn better when you "go wide," drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.
What can any of this possibly mean?
Hard is good but hard drill-and-kill is bad .... learning styles are meaningless but we should deploy all of our "intelligences" all of the time (dancing in math? math-ing in dance?) ...
And does the exhortation to "go wide" mean multisensory programs are always to be preferred? I'm completely open to that possibility myself, but there's no listing for "multisensory" in the index, so who knows?
But that's the preface.
The first chapter, on retrieval practice, is riveting.
Retrieval practice, or the testing effect, refers to the finding that taking a test -- any kind of test, in-class or a quiz you give yourself -- increases your memory of the material you are trying to learn. In other words, taking a test or a quiz is a form of practice in which you practice remembering.
What's more, simple retrieval practice is probably superior to the kind of "active," "higher-order" learning students are purported to do via concept mapping. It also appears likely that retrieval practice produces knowledge that is readily transferred to new contexts and to problem solving.
In short, memorization makes you smart. (That's not how Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel put it.)
What is shocking to me is the tiny amount of retrieval practice the middle-school students in Roediger's studies needed in order to recall the material they had covered in class: just 3 "low-stakes" (ungraded) clicker quizzes in all. One quiz at the beginning of the class (on material they were supposed to have read the night before), one quiz at the end of the class (after the teacher's lecture on the same material) and one before the unit test a few weeks later. Students scored a full letter-grade higher on quizzed than on un-quizzed material.
When Roediger expanded the study to 8th-grade science, students scored an average of 92% on quizzed material, 79% on un-quizzed material. They still remembered the quizzed material eight months later, for the final.
After 3 ungraded quizzes no one had to study for.
Is 3 the magic number?
Here are Rawson & Dunlosky on "How Much Is Enough?"
Clicker quizzes work.
I need a clicker.
Trepidation because the wording is so incautious and, often, so imprecise that I think it's entirely possible we'll see Make It Stick touted as justification for bad teaching of every stripe.
e.g.: the preface spends a great deal of time denigrating "drill and kill," which the writers take to mean massed practice. Also, "easy" lessons are slammed on grounds that learning should be hard. (So drill and kill is too easy?) And at one point the text baldy avers, sans footnote, that "people do have multiple intelligences" while in the same breath asserting that there's no evidence learning styles have anything to do with anything. So instead of worrying about our learning styles we should all use all of our multiple intelligences all the time because you learn better when you "go wide," drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable.
What can any of this possibly mean?
Hard is good but hard drill-and-kill is bad .... learning styles are meaningless but we should deploy all of our "intelligences" all of the time (dancing in math? math-ing in dance?) ...
And does the exhortation to "go wide" mean multisensory programs are always to be preferred? I'm completely open to that possibility myself, but there's no listing for "multisensory" in the index, so who knows?
But that's the preface.
The first chapter, on retrieval practice, is riveting.
Retrieval practice, or the testing effect, refers to the finding that taking a test -- any kind of test, in-class or a quiz you give yourself -- increases your memory of the material you are trying to learn. In other words, taking a test or a quiz is a form of practice in which you practice remembering.
What's more, simple retrieval practice is probably superior to the kind of "active," "higher-order" learning students are purported to do via concept mapping. It also appears likely that retrieval practice produces knowledge that is readily transferred to new contexts and to problem solving.
In short, memorization makes you smart. (That's not how Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel put it.)
What is shocking to me is the tiny amount of retrieval practice the middle-school students in Roediger's studies needed in order to recall the material they had covered in class: just 3 "low-stakes" (ungraded) clicker quizzes in all. One quiz at the beginning of the class (on material they were supposed to have read the night before), one quiz at the end of the class (after the teacher's lecture on the same material) and one before the unit test a few weeks later. Students scored a full letter-grade higher on quizzed than on un-quizzed material.
When Roediger expanded the study to 8th-grade science, students scored an average of 92% on quizzed material, 79% on un-quizzed material. They still remembered the quizzed material eight months later, for the final.
After 3 ungraded quizzes no one had to study for.
Is 3 the magic number?
Here are Rawson & Dunlosky on "How Much Is Enough?"
The literature on testing effects is vast but supports surprisingly few prescriptive conclusions for how to schedule practice to achieve both durable and efficient learning. Key limitations are that few studies have examined the effects of initial learning criterion or the effects of relearning, and no prior research has examined the combined effects of these 2 factors. Across 3 experiments, 533 students learned conceptual material via retrieval practice with restudy. Items were practiced until they were correctly recalled from 1 to 4 times during an initial learning session and were then practiced again to 1 correct recall in 1–5 subsequent relearning sessions (across experiments, more than 100,000 short-answer recall responses were collected and hand-scored). Durability was measured by cued recall and rate of relearning 1–4 months after practice, and efficiency was measured by total practice trials across sessions. A consistent qualitative pattern emerged: The effects of initial learning criterion and relearning were subadditive, such that the effects of initial learning criterion were strong prior to relearning but then diminished as relearning increased. Relearning had pronounced effects on long-term retention with a relatively minimal cost in terms of additional practice trials. On the basis of the overall patterns of durability and efficiency, our prescriptive conclusion for students is to practice recalling concepts to an initial criterion of 3 correct recalls and then to relearn them 3 times at widely spaced intervals.The chapter also says that short answer and essay tests are probably superior to flash cards and multiple choice, but flash cards and multiple choice produce superior retention, too.
Clicker quizzes work.
I need a clicker.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Doing versus explaining and the process method
Fabulous comments on the Should math students explain their answer in words post. I'll try to get as many as I can pulled up front…
In the thread, Allison points out the irony that good teachers are the people who actually know consciously the nonconscious steps experts use to do what they do, and yet teachers are the one category of human being expected to stand aside while students figure things on their own out by deploying strategies and asking three before me.
Which brings me to my own experience teaching college composition.
I know I've said this a number of times but it bears repeating, I think: when I returned to teaching three years ago, I was chronically stymied by the fact that while I knew how to write myself, I had no idea how to explain what I did to my students.
In fact, it was worse than that. The problem wasn't just that I had no idea how to explain what I did when I wrote. The real problem was that I had no idea what that was. What was I doing when I wrote that was different from what they were doing?
All I really knew about what I did was that I wrote by ear. And so I would tell my students, frequently, that writing by ear was an option, and that the way to develop an ear for college writing was to do all their assigned college reading (and hope for the best).
Beyond that, I was stumped.
I didn't particularly want to tell freshman writers just how obsessive the process of writing entirely by ear actually was.
Writing by ear, for me, meant I would write something that sounded bad; I would hear that it sounded bad (that seemed to be the critical element, hearing badness); and I would then spend endless hours writing and rewriting and rewriting again (and again and again), trying to make what I'd written a) stop sounding bad and, only then, once that was achieved, b) start sounding good.
I did this for hours on end.
Until things sounded right.
So what does writing-by-ear translate to inside a composition class?
I'll tell you what it translates to: it translates to the process method, which I think is a lousy way to teach writing.
The Process Method, by the way, seems to have originated in the Bay Area Writing Project, now called the National Writing Project. Ed was somehow connected with the Bay Area Writing Project & has spoken disapprovingly of it for lo these many years. I'll have to get him to brief me again…
In the process method, students write something bad, then have their peers tell them it's bad, then revise the bad thing they've written to make it …. better.
Then, if they happen to be in a class taught by Peter Elbow, they find a volunteer copy editor to fix all the things that still need fixing.
OK, time to cook vegetables.
Will finish up later.
In the thread, Allison points out the irony that good teachers are the people who actually know consciously the nonconscious steps experts use to do what they do, and yet teachers are the one category of human being expected to stand aside while students figure things on their own out by deploying strategies and asking three before me.
Which brings me to my own experience teaching college composition.
I know I've said this a number of times but it bears repeating, I think: when I returned to teaching three years ago, I was chronically stymied by the fact that while I knew how to write myself, I had no idea how to explain what I did to my students.
In fact, it was worse than that. The problem wasn't just that I had no idea how to explain what I did when I wrote. The real problem was that I had no idea what that was. What was I doing when I wrote that was different from what they were doing?
All I really knew about what I did was that I wrote by ear. And so I would tell my students, frequently, that writing by ear was an option, and that the way to develop an ear for college writing was to do all their assigned college reading (and hope for the best).
Beyond that, I was stumped.
I didn't particularly want to tell freshman writers just how obsessive the process of writing entirely by ear actually was.
Writing by ear, for me, meant I would write something that sounded bad; I would hear that it sounded bad (that seemed to be the critical element, hearing badness); and I would then spend endless hours writing and rewriting and rewriting again (and again and again), trying to make what I'd written a) stop sounding bad and, only then, once that was achieved, b) start sounding good.
I did this for hours on end.
Until things sounded right.
So what does writing-by-ear translate to inside a composition class?
I'll tell you what it translates to: it translates to the process method, which I think is a lousy way to teach writing.
The Process Method, by the way, seems to have originated in the Bay Area Writing Project, now called the National Writing Project. Ed was somehow connected with the Bay Area Writing Project & has spoken disapprovingly of it for lo these many years. I'll have to get him to brief me again…
In the process method, students write something bad, then have their peers tell them it's bad, then revise the bad thing they've written to make it …. better.
Then, if they happen to be in a class taught by Peter Elbow, they find a volunteer copy editor to fix all the things that still need fixing.
OK, time to cook vegetables.
Will finish up later.
Monday, June 11, 2012
"Confessions of an Instructional Leader"
excerpt from:
The Learning-Centered Principal by Richard DuFour
Educational Leadership - May 2002
AND SEE:
ruining Lemov
The Learning-Centered Principal by Richard DuFour
Educational Leadership - May 2002
When I entered the principalship a quarter century ago, the research on effective schools warned that without strong administrative leadership, the disparate elements of good schooling could be neither brought together nor kept together (Lezotte, 1997). I heeded the message and embraced my role as a strong leader with gusto. I was determined to rise above the mundane managerial tasks of the job and focus instead on instruction—I hoped to be an instructional leader. I asked teachers to submit their course syllabi and curriculum guides so that I could monitor what they were teaching. I collected weekly lesson plans to ensure that teachers were teaching the prescribed curriculum. I read voraciously about instructional strategies in different content areas and shared pertinent articles with staff members.Professional learning communities: ALL POSTS
But my devotion to the clinical supervision process at the school was the single greatest illustration of my commitment to function as an instructional leader. I developed a three-part process that required me to be a student of good teaching and to help teachers become more reflective and insightful about their instruction.
During the pre-observation conference, I met with teachers individually and asked them to talk me through the lesson I would be observing in their classroom. I asked a series of questions, including What will you teach? How will you teach it? What instructional strategies will you use? What instructional materials will you use? During the classroom observation, I worked furiously to script as accurately as possible what the teacher said and did.
During the postobservation conference, the teacher and I reconstructed the lesson from my notes and his or her recollections. We looked for patterns or trends in what the teacher had said and done, and we discussed the relationship between those patterns and the lesson's objectives. Finally, I asked the teacher what he or she might change in the lesson before teaching it again. I then wrote a summary of the classroom observation and our postobservation discussion, offered recommendations for effective teaching strategies, and suggested ways in which the teacher might become more effective.
The observation process was time-consuming, but I was convinced that my focus on individual teachers and their instructional strategies was an effective use of my time. And the process was not without benefits. As a new pair of eyes in the classroom, I was able to help teachers become aware of unintended instructional or classroom management patterns. I could express my appreciation for the wonderful work that teachers were doing because I had witnessed it firsthand. I observed powerful instructional strategies and was able to share those strategies with other teachers. I learned a lot about what effective teaching looks like.
In Hot Pursuit of the Wrong Questions
Eventually, after years as a principal, I realized that even though my efforts had been well intentioned—and even though I had devoted countless hours each school year to those efforts—I had been focusing on the wrong questions. I had focused on the questions, What are the teachers teaching? and How can I help them to teach it more effectively? Instead, my efforts should have been driven by the questions, To what extent are the students learning the intended outcomes of each course? and What steps can I take to give both students and teachers the additional time and support they need to improve learning?
This shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning is more than semantics. When learning becomes the preoccupation of the school, when all the school's educators examine the efforts and initiatives of the school through the lens of their impact on learning, the structure and culture of the school begin to change in substantive ways. Principals foster this structural and cultural transformation when they shift their emphasis from helping individual teachers improve instruction to helping teams of teachers ensure that students achieve the intended outcomes of their schooling. More succinctly, teachers and students benefit when principals function as learning leaders rather than instructional leaders.
[snip]
By concentrating on teaching, the instructional leader of the past emphasized the inputs of the learning process. By concentrating on learning, today's school leaders shift both their own focus and that of the school community from inputs to outcomes and from intentions to results. Schools need principal leadership as much as ever. But only those who understand that the essence of their job is promoting student and teacher learning will be able to provide that leadership.
AND SEE:
ruining Lemov
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Creative Students In The Classroom -- What Teachers Really Think
Jonah Leher discusses a study on elementary education
Link to study: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a790767558&db=all
You should really go read Leher's post and the comments there, plus the study.
Everybody wants a creative child - in theory. The reality of creativity, however, is a little more complicated, as creative thoughts tend to emerge when we're distracted, daydreaming, disinhibited and not following the rules. In other words, the most imaginative kids are often the trouble-makers.
Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn't. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures - the list included everything from "individualistic" to "risk-seeking" to "accepting of authority" - the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their "least favorite" students. As the researchers note, "Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity."
Link to study: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a790767558&db=all
You should really go read Leher's post and the comments there, plus the study.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
the ingredients to good teaching
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
Oh, check out these amazing videos.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/07/magazine/20100307-teacher-videos.html
The idea behind the whole article is that great teaching doesn't have to require the skills of a charismatic extroverted genius -- it's a set of concrete techniques combined with deep understanding of the subject you're teaching.
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