Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Educational Experimentation

I just read this article about teacher training colleges, and it struck a nerve. I am very opinionated on this topic, and I've felt a blog post brewing for years. This just pushed me over the edge. Apologies to all the education majors I'm about to offend.

There are many problems with U.S. education, and it's not fair to blame everything on the teachers. My post below does not address all of the complicated issues.

That said, I took a few education classes in college and then fled in terror. My fellow students were mostly dunces: they couldn't do research, write a decent essay, or grasp basic statistical principles. (More on that later.) The professors were little better: the curriculum focused on abstract theory and not on anything useful, like "this is how to quell a riot." I actually asked a tenured professor of education about classroom management once. He shrugged and said "Oh, just be consistent, and you'll do fine."

When I say the education majors couldn't grasp basic statistical principles, I'm not talking about "this is how I take a data set of test results and calculate the standard distribution." I'm not even talking about struggling with "this is why it's a lot harder for a kid re-taking the SATs to move from the 95th to the 96th percentile than from the 50th to the 55th percentile." No, I'm talking about problems like not even grasping why "scoring in the 99th percentile on a national achievement test" is different than "getting 99 percent of the answers right." Some of these people couldn't even figure out the difference between a mean and a median, let alone how to find each.

My class in "measurement and assessment in teaching" was actually very helpful. It taught me how to design a good test, the pros and cons of each type of test (essay, multiple choice, etc), and when to use each. Sadly, the material was wasted on most of my classmates.

I took a "Children's Literature" class in which half of the students were English majors and half were education majors. I peer reviewed the most appalling paper ever--three pages of poorly spelled ungrammatical gushing about how much the author just loved children, with nary a research reference in sight.

That semester, I frequently emerged from class shaken to the core. "I never want him to teach my kids math, or her to teach my kids English, or...well, I never want any of them to teach my kids ANYTHING," I told Jon. (This is a testament to just how shaken I was: normally I avoided any mention of hypothetical future children when talking to Jon.)

Don't even get me started with the problems of teachers of middlin' capability dealing with brilliant students who can out-think them at every turn. I was reasonably charitable to my teachers, but I recall sitting in Mrs. N's 5th-grade class, thinking, "If I didn't have a conscience, I could make this woman's life a daily living hell."

For years, I have considered the problem. If I were designing the perfect education system, how would I go about it? The simple answer is that, if I could, I would fix families. Since that isn't an option, here are my next best suggestions:

1) Raise admission standards to colleges of education. Require prospective teachers to pass some basic exams before they begin their course of study.
2) Require ivory tower college professors to spend a semester "in the trenches" every three years. (After all, we force "in the trenches" teachers to take college classes occasionally to re-certify. Let's reciprocate.) Bonus points for teaching remedial summer school classes in the inner city.
3) Recruit people who have mastered core areas and train them in how to teach. Would you rather have a French teacher who is great at sticking to The Book, or one who is actually fluent in the target language? Would you rather recruit an education major with a 2.0 GPA (from a mediocre school), teach him some rudimentary chemistry, and hope it sticks? Or would you rather grab a person who did R&D for DOW for a few years, give her intensive training for six months, and then shove her in front of a classroom?
4) Hold colleges of education accountable. Look at long-term success rates. Ask graduates to complete surveys after one, two, three, five, and ten years. See how many of them are still teaching. Publish this information to prospective students.
5) Focus more on guided real-world practice teaching and less on abstract educational theory. Most of the people in my classes who could answer questions about Jean Piaget were going to be hopeless at actually managing a classroom.
6) Apprentice new teachers to master teachers. Focus on practical techniques and problem-solving.
7) Start a pilot program to evaluate the "bar exam" idea. It has merit and should be considered. If it works, try to spread its adoption.
8) Raise teacher standards--AND pay. Recruit the best and then pay them well. Let go of our "desperate for warm bodies" model.
9) Once we have actual teachers in place, give them a great deal of leeway. Tell them what results we want, and hold them accountable--but don't micromanage the daily lessons.
10) Recognize that even the best teachers can only do so much with kids from failing homes. Don't expect teachers to be independent social workers. Support them, but don't demand miracles.

Never mind. Most of this is impossible in our current ossified system of politics, teacher's unions, and Tradition. Scrap it all and start over. Or homeschool.

If sea steaders can start petri dishes of sociopoliticaleconomic experimentation, I want to join them. Let's start an educational utopia and see what happens. It probably wouldn't work, but at least we wouldn't be trying to impose our latest teaching fads on the rest of the United States.

My only caveat is that the experiments must be performed by actual scientists and statisticians, not education majors.

Who's with me?

8 comments:

  1. I've been with you from the day I started attending school. I had maybe 4 teachers in all my years of elementary and secondary education that knew what to do with me. I attended Ohio State University with a double major in English and Elementary Education (which was a required major if you wanted to teach in Ohio). I learned nothing from the El Ed classes that had anything to do with a real classroom situation. A few years after I started teaching, though, I received a survey to inquire how I felt my Education degree had helped with my teaching. They received a scathing response, and I gather they received more of the same from my colleagues. They then set out to improve the College of Education -- and I'm pleased to see from this evaluation that they actually did succeed.

    I totally agree that the highest skill in your field is your best grounding for teaching. But seriously, folks, if you don't actually like wiggly, noisy, curious, nosy, distractible, intense, carefree, unpredictable young people of the age that you will be teaching, please don't go into education. For your own mental health, and for the greatest stimulation of your students, embrace the weird, unusual, funny, shy, outgoing, and unpredictable nature of kids. They will surprise you with their wit and creativity if you let them fly.

    About percentiles -- I still cannot seem to explain to people that if a child tests in the 99th percentile that he is doing the best he can do. No, he is only doing the best compared to other students within the limited bounds of the test that he was given. The test does NOT tell you what his potential is. He might be able to (and probably IS able to) achieve far beyond the limits of what was tested.

    And yes, politics, teachers' unions and tradition all are beating a death knell to public schools as we know them. I have seen some homeschooling groups that have created classrooms approximating the size of public school classrooms, but with educational possibilities that you could not find in the public school. It isn't the size of the class. It is the quality of the teaching. Amen.

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  2. Ha. I needed to proofread one more time. About the percentiles -- it should be "I cannot seem to explain to people that if a child tests in the 99th percentile that DOES NOT MEAN that he is doing the best he can do."

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  3. Regarding percentages and percentiles, here's a little illustration. If Eric and I took the same high school algebra class, we could both score 99% on the tests, and we would each earn an A+. The teacher would probably assume that Eric and I were equally good at math, but that would be a mistake. The tests are designed to measure mastery of basic content, not to assess profound giftedness. Thus the teacher would have no way of knowing that Eric's math IQ is significantly higher than mine. If Eric and I were both to take an AMC exam, though, he would whomp me, since those are designed to tease out the spectrum at the top 1% of the population.

    In most of the math contests Eric does these days, getting 50% of the questions right is considered a solid score. In most public schools across America, getting 50% of the questions right equals an F. We've had kids try out for his math group who had done very well in a traditional math classroom, but when confronted by the really tricky "think outside the box logic puzzle" applications of math, they got less than a fourth of the problems correct and went home in tears. No matter how many times we explained to them that they didn't "fail," they still fell apart.

    It goes back to percentages versus percentiles. I'm probably in the 97th or maybe 98th percentile for mathematical talent. Eric is probably in the 99.999th percentile. One needs to understand exactly what is being measured, how it is being measured, and what the results signify. Otherwise we compare apples and oranges and don't even realize they aren't equivalent.

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  4. Exactly. I have a grandson who tests at 99th percentile in math for his grade, but I have to remind him and his parents that he might also score at 99th percentile on a college math test. The test itself was limited to his grade (and perhaps a little above), so we really don't know what he is able to do.

    On a separate topic, many teachers don't consider a child "gifted" or "talented" (or whatever their word of the day is) unless the child is advanced in all subjects -- in particular, both math and language. Although many are, there are a significant number of gifted children with uneven giftedness. When the school wanted to skip me up a grade, there was a big to-do, because although I was a very early reader, I didn't already know the math for that higher grade. Of course, I picked it up quickly -- no thanks to that teacher, who was angry that I was skipped into her class, and thought it would just mean extra work for her. In spite of that, I'm glad I skipped.

    I do think it is harder to give public elementary school kids advanced work. Teachers need to be very willing to adjust their schedules or lessons -- which they are often unprepared to do. In high school and college, advanced students can just take more advanced courses. But elementary teachers don't know what to do with bright students. That was not in their college education lessons!



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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. @ Jenni -- I responded to your comment in a new blog post. Thanks for contributing to the discussion.

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  7. My son had a science teacher this year who came from the professional world to teach middle school and it's not working out so great. She tries to manage her kids as one might manage an experiment. There needs to be both expertise and a love/understanding of children.

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  8. @ Jessica -- That's very true. Jan said something similar.

    I should mention that one of my grandfathers was a math professor at BYU for years. He was brilliant at mathematics. One of my favorite stories about him was when he taught himself trigonometry from a book--in just a few hours. This was during the Great Depression and he was trying to clep out of an extra class so as to avoid paying unnecessary tuition.

    Sadly, he was apparently not a particularly good teacher, even at the college level. Since things came intuitively to him, he had trouble "breaking it down" for his students. He made these logical leaps and they were left floundering, unable to follow his reasoning.

    I think we're all agreeing that teachers need to 1) love the students, 2) master teaching methods, and 3) know their content.

    I find myself wondering if your son's teacher (I'm guessing this is T--?) would have done significantly better at classroom management if she'd had an education degree. It might have helped, but if most education colleges are doing a rotten job at preparing teachers for practical realities, perhaps it wouldn't have helped all that much. What do you think?

    Thanks for your comment! Bless you!

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