ASCD Express Calls for Submissions

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Designing Effective Homework." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by July 20, 2009.

Impassioned arguments for and against homework started early in the 20th century and continue to the present. Yet research shows that homework that's well-structured to ensure completion positively correlates with academic achievement. How does one kind of homework work better than others? How should homework for primary students differ from homework for secondary students? This issue will look at the essential elements of well-designed homework and offer tips for varying homework to address different learning needs and objectives.

Differentiated Results Now

On Sunday, conference-goers heard from a principal with firsthand experience applying differentiated learning in the classroom and seeing the results. Patricia Reynolds told attendees about the improvements her school, Intermediate School 73 in Queens, has seen during the session "Differentiated Results Now."

In 2005 just 46 percent of her students were proficient in English language arts, and 46 percent were proficient in math. Afer implementing a curriculum that focuses on differentiated instruction (DI) and results, in 2008 55 percent of students were proficient in English and an astounding 83 percent were in math. Reynolds put together an action plan that combines DI and results and makes sure her teachers are challenged and ready to push students to improve their performance in the classroom.

Looking at the statistics, it appears that Reynolds's plan is working well. She has devised a series of assessments that keep track of student progress throughout the year and that include pre-assessment quizzes and tests, an interim assessment, and the state test. She uses the data to figure out ways to improve each student's performance.

It's important to have strategies in place to encourage teachers to differentiate and to focus on the results they see in the data, she said. Such strategies include professional development, weekly planning meetings, and workshops. She explained why each strategy is important and how it helps not only her teachers improve, but also her students.

Based on the increase in Reynolds's students' test scores, I'm sure everyone in the audience was paying careful attention so that, when they go home, they can investigate ways to raise theirs as well.

Highlights from Summer Conference Day 2

After viewing tweets and overhearing chatter among attendees in common areas, the second day of Summer Conference appears to be a success. Attendees were excited to see such revered educators as Bob Marzano, Grant Wiggins, Allison Zmuda, and the numerous other presenters on hand. 

As day two comes to a close, please share your experiences from today's sessions.

Remember to check Conference Daily for schedule updates, stories, and other resources. 

ASCD Summer Conference Day 2

Welcome to day two of our Summer Conference! Which sessions were you especially looking forward to today? Share your experiences by commenting here or by visiting our Conference Daily site or our Twitter feed.

A Picture of Summer Conference

Here are some images from Friday’s events here at Summer Conference in Houston. Thousands of educators from across the country and outside the United States attended professional development sessions, shared experiences with colleagues, and learned about new innovations.

 

AMT

What is AMT you ask? Some new government agency? A hip, new rock band so cool that only young, city-dwelling bohemians have heard of it? Nope. According to Judy Hilton, it is a valuable concept that educators need to implement in the classroom if they want their students to truly understand what they are learning.

During her session at Summer Conference, Hilton explained how acquiring basic knowledge skills, making meaning of "big ideas," and transferring knowledge to new situations (AMT) is key for students to learn the game of life. Too often, she said, students just memorize what they are taught and repeat it back to the teachers because that is what they think is expected. That's not education, that's regurgitation.

Teachers must come up with curriculum and the knowledge they want students to acquire, then present ideas and questions to students that they then make meaning of. Finally, educators develop tasks that can tell whether students can transfer what they have learned to real situations. If they can successfully use their knowledge in the real world, then students will be more likely to succeed in that very place.

Do you find the concept of AMT useful? How often do you see students struggle with applying what they have learned to real situations?

 

You can read more about Hilton's presentation in the Conference Daily story "The Game of Life."

The Game of Life

An overwhelming number of elementary level educators attended Judy Hilton’s session "What Do I Teach on Monday? From Unit Design to Daily Instruction" to learn about Understanding by Design (UbD).

Hilton explained that there are three stages to UbD: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, and plan learning experiences and instructions. She focused mainly on planning learning experiences and instructions because educators must accomplish that first and then should work backward from there, she said.

If educators plan properly, everything should fall into place: They won’t have to worry much about focusing on specific teaching styles. If they take the time to be prepared every Monday morning, then teachers should reach their students.

Hilton pointed out that it is important for schools to have mission guidelines, but if the guidelines are not put into instruction, then they are little more than nice statements. The mission should come to life and allow students to understand what they are learning.

Acquire, make meaning, and transfer (AMT) is something educators have been failing to do, Hilton said. She stressed how important transferring knowledge to students is and how students should be able to transfer what they have learned to situations in their own lives. If you have students learn something and regurgitate it, but they can’t use that knowledge when they are out of the classroom, they haven’t learned anything, Hilton said.

“Synthesize and evaluate is what they should do,” Hilton said, “but they think we just want them to recall and give us back what we have taught.”

The audience listened intently as she gave tips and explained her philosophy, but one sentence may have summed it all up: “Our job is to teach students to play the game called ‘life,’ not the game called ‘school,’” Hilton said.

You can read more about AMT in this post.

Are You in a State of 'Curriculum Anarchy'?

“I like dramatic language,” said Tim Westerberg at one point during his session, “Distinguishing Between Learning Goals and Activities: Exploring the Critical Difference,” and he wasn’t lying. For two hours Westerberg kept the audience engaged and laughing while exploring serious education issues. He was the teacher you always liked, and the audience was his class. He had them brainstorming together and forcing them to think about the issues plaguing their own classrooms.

Westerberg discussed the necessity for educators to develop learning goals for their students, but he also warned that educators are inclined to forget to personalize the goals for each student. Each unique student must understand the learning goals, such as learn how to revise writing, and learning activities, such as writing a paper, to be successful in school, he said. Students should be able to personalize what they learn and relate it to life, and educators should allow them choices in how they learn. Applying these concepts, he said, will lead to successful learners.

After asking the audience to discuss among themselves the effectiveness of how they set up their objectives, Westerberg brought up the topic of curriculum anarchy. He described it as one teacher in a school teaching and grading on his own scale while another educator teaches the same class doing the complete opposite and working on a different scale, which can hurt students' grades.

Welcome to ASCD's Summer Conference

After arriving in Houston yesterday afternoon and stepping onto a full shuttle heading toward my hotel, I found myself surrounded by educators from around the country all going to ASCD's Summer Conference. It soon became apparent how important the issues being discussed at this year's conference are for people as debates sparked up over differentiated learning, assessment tests, charter schools, and other similar topics during our short ride to the hotel.

So let me take this time to welcome everyone to the conference. I hope that listening to such esteemed presenters as Jay McTighe, Thomas Rye, Carol Ann Tomlinson, and many more will fill you with even more passion for educating the youth of the United States and beyond—and that my ride back to the airport will again be filled with lively debate. 

Make sure to check out Conference Daily, our blog, and Twitter for updates and stories on this year's conference. Feel free to post comments about your experiences on our various publications or e-mail me if you have any stories you wish to share.

Welcome and enjoy this year's Summer Conference!

Fighting the Lake Effect, One District at a Time?

Yesterday, the Center for American Progress hosted a panel discussion/paper presentation on the inadequacies of teacher evaluations and tenure for recognizing effective teaching.

Since tenure woes could be largely negated by a fair and accurate evaluation system used to recognize and reward effective teaching, I'm going to skip the section on fixing tenure (the bottom line: focus tenure on teaching and learning and look to Toledo, Green Dot, and Minneapolis for good tenure policies in practice). 

UConn professor and Project on the Next Generation of Teachers researcher Morgan Donaldson's paper "So Long, Lake Wobegon?" hits notes familiar to those who've read the New Teacher Project's Widget Effect report. Donaldson said the road to Wobegon is paved with

• Very inadequate evaluation instruments—for example, simple checklists and rating systems that often focus on trivialities like how neat a bulletin board is and are rarely aligned with district improvement efforts and a professional development focus. 
• External constraints to differentiation, like limited time and other resources for evaluation and the wide range of staff evaluations principals are responsible for.
• Internal constraints to differentiation, like lack of training for evaluators, very little oversight and incentives to accurately evaluate, cultural norm of noninterference with teaching, and little evidence that replacement teachers would be better (or even readily available).
• Evaluations are used for cheerleading and motivating, not critical feedback. Widget Effect and others report evaluations do not improve teachers' knowledge and skills. Evaluation does not improve teachers' knowledge and skills (i.e., data from Widget Effect). 
• Evaluations have few consequences, either positive or negative. 

Supreme Court Affirms Student Rights

Today's Supreme Court decision that the strip search of student Savana Redding was a violation of the Fourth Amendment is a clear affirmation of student rights and a stirring lesson about civics, law, and students’ constitutional protections.

But it's difficult to call anyone in the particular case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding a winner.

Certainly not the school district officials who have battled this case in court for years and have faced severe public disapproval over their decision to strip-search a 13-year-old girl for prescription-strength ibuprofen.

Not April Redding, Savana's mother, whose trust in school officials was broken after the incident and who has spent the past few years fighting for her daughter's rights in court.

And not Savana Redding, who was so traumatized by her experience that she didn't return to school after the incident and is still dealing with the emotional repercussions. She eventually transferred to other schools but never earned her high school diploma.

In an official statement ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter says, "We firmly believe this case highlights how intrusive student searches undermine the essential relationship between school personnel and students and their families, which should be built on mutual trust and understanding."

Carrie Brownstein Cues the Graduation Music

Yesterday, Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein waxed philosophical about why you might better remember lyrics from your childhood. From "Committed to Memory":

I suppose the fact that I would be able to draw more from the beginning of my musical knowledge is a testament to long-term versus short-term memory. After all, I spent my younger days in a slightly more obsessive frame of mind. As a kid, having a song fully memorized was akin to constructing a suit of armor; it's what you wore to shield you from the mess and confusion of adolescence, the intricacies of the songs were your friends, they were your secrets.

And in an earlier post, "Forever Young: Graduation Songs," she advises any "band worried about its legacy" to . . ."Write a song about growing up, changing, making friends, keeping them, loving your family and fearing the future, while also knowing that everything is going to be okay in the end. Oh, and you might want to imply that high school was the best time you've ever had, and that things might be downhill from here on out."

Brownstein solicits your graduation-day song memories. I think 10,000 Maniacs' "These Are Days" played at mine (does that date me? yes). Looking at this year's Diplomas Count, R.E.M.'s "Can't Get There From Here" unfortunately comes to mind, but my colleague Melissa's got a write-up that shows room for optimism.

Graduation and Beyond

Education Week released its annual Diplomas Count report earlier this month, and as usual, it's chock full of interesting information. This year's publication includes updated state-by-state graduation rates, as well as a look at the rates over a 10-year period. It also has a special focus on college readiness.

Graduation Rate Highlights

• Grad rate trends: The nation's graduation rate increased by almost three percentage points from 1996 (when the rate was 66 percent) to 69 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available.
• A recent dip: However, 2006 marked the first time in the past decade that the national graduation rate has significantly declined compared with the previous year. It fell more than one percentage point from the 2005 rate.
• Beating the odds: Some big-city school systems across the country have posted graduation rates or graduation rate improvements that surpassed expected levels based on a mix of district characteristics including student demographics.

Tracking "Makes You Feel Like You're Not Smart"

Most in the education community agree that academic tracking creates a caste system—from who gets challenging course content and is expected to go to college, to who your friends are and where you sit in the cafeteria. Historically, black and Latino students disproportionately populate "lower" tracks.

Cloonan Middle School in Stamford, Conn., made last week's most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief news with the story of their transition from tracking to mixed-ability classrooms. The school hopes detracking will help close the achievement gap by broadening academic opportunities and raising expectations for all students. Cloonan will maintain an honors tier, but students' math and English scores will not, as before, designate them across the board as honors students. Students qualifying for honors will likely take some combination of honors and mixed-ability courses.

For the last eight weeks of school, Cloonan experimented with the new mixed-classroom model and found a drop in behavior problems. In an effort to teach to more diverse classes, teachers are trying out more collaborative projects, where students can learn from one another. Parents are on both sides of the debate, with lower-tracked parents applauding the shift as more equitable and some higher-tracked parents petitioning to keep the tracks and threatening to pull their kids into private schools.

Inservice applauds Cloonan's efforts and hopes the administration will provide ample support for teachers in the transition. To explore this topic more deeply, check out the free sample chapters of the ASCD book Detracking for Excellence and Equity, by Carol Corbett Burris and Delia T. Garrity. You can also check out our talk with these authors: listen to the whole thing here, or browse clips from the talk by topic on our ASCD Talks With an Author page.

ASCD Express Calls for Submissions

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Establishing and Managing a Differentiated Classroom." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by July 9, 2009.

Teachers who match their instructional approaches to meet the needs and interests of every student are engaging in the practice of differentiation. It's challenging but possible, says University of Virginia professor Carol Ann Tomlinson, who has written extensively on differentiated instruction. What are the essential principles that support the differentiated classroom, and how can educators overcome the initial challenges? What strategies and tools do teachers use to make this theory a reality?

My Back Pages: Is the Socratic Method Dangerous?

Can the use of the Socratic method pose a danger to our students? Such is the premise of a September 1984 Educational Leadership article by education professor Louis Goldman.

Read the article: Warning: The Socratic Method Can Be Dangerous (PDF)  

Plato advised against teaching with the Socratic method until students had mastered all of higher education and, even then, believed it shouldn't be used with students until they are 30 years old, Goldman says. The intense process of inquiry and examination, argues Goldman, goes against the goal of providing "a firm grounding in the nature of our values and culture." He states that while educators should be open to discussion and put lessons in the proper context, they should not try to "take the initiative to demonstrate inconsistencies" in them. 

Goldman allows for a middle ground, what he calls "an idea-centered curriculum," grounded in traditional liberal arts by a staff with diverse worldviews, as opposed to a curriculum that is skill-centered. He suggests that attempts to explicitly teach "problem-solving techniques or critical thinking" may lead to less critical thinking (a viewpoint he concedes is "heretical").

Have you used the Socratic method in your classrooms—and would you recommend it?

Summertime Jam: Read Whatever You Like

This week marks the close of the school year or a short break before summer intercession for a lot of schools. Over at E.L. Haynes Elementary in my D.C. neighborhood, it also marks the accomplishment of a huge milestone—collectively, students at E.L. Haynes have logged 5 million minutes of reading in the past year.

As part of the schoolwide celebration, the ridiculously talented and energetic teaching staff created and performed "Read Whatever You Like," a riff on T.I.'s hit song and roll call of some of the students' favorite young adult fiction. We're blastin' this from our laptops in honor of all the hardworking kids and educators—w00t!! Keep on readin'!

MP3: "Read Whatever You Like"

Add your proud moments from the school year in the comments! Read on for suggestions for getting books into students' hands over the summer.

Clearly Defining the Learning Desired

One of the busiest presenters at this year's Summer Conference will be education consultant Allison Zmuda. Zmuda will conduct three different sessions on various topics that include designing essential questions for the classroom, trouble-shooting student learning challenges, and the foundation of school improvement. 

In this Speaker Spotlight, Zmuda discusses ways to develop and answer essential questions, and getting a game plan together for students with learning difficulties. Click the video below to hear Zmuda's solutions to these everyday challenges. 

Finding the Right Words in Parent-Teacher Conferences

In a bonus, free, online June edition, Educational Leadership revisits teacher learning from different angles. "But What Do I Say?" looks at learning how to conduct parent–teacher conferences—important opportunities to work with students' guardians as part of the school community. Teachers are often unprepared for the variety of situations they'll encounter in conference, the authors say. Syracuse University's semesterlong Parent/Caregiver Conferencing Model program helps pre-and inservice teachers move beyond winging it and develop strong communication skills to connect school and home.

The model borrows from the medical school practice of using standardized patients—actors performing specific symptoms, giving doctors and nurses opportunities to practice their diagnosis and communication skills. At Syracuse, standardized parents perform in a range of specific scenarios—a mother concerned about students bullying her son for his perceived sexuality, parents who disagree with the content of assigned readings, a parent whose autistic child is about to enter an inclusive classroom for the first time, and so on.

While the standardized parents are trained in exactly what to say in the conference, the teachers in the program are not. Their simulated conference is taped, and then, in debriefing, they discuss the interaction as a class and focus on one area to improve in the next rehearsal.

Go to the article to view a video of a simulated conference, and find out what students and directors in the program learned about teacher–caregiver communication, and the guidelines they developed to improve it.

What guides you in conferences with caregivers? What's been the biggest challenge?

EdBlog Watch: The Future of Education Is Here

Looking for an education blog that pokes fun at traditions and urges educators forward to new ways of thinking about teaching and learning? You may want to visit The Future of Education Is Here, from the folks at the KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

The blog doggedly challenges assumptions: posts examine such topics as the relevance of report cards and the need for physical schools. One post about the slow shift away from traditional textbooks describes them as "one of those technologies that has lived out its usefulness but, like the landline phone and the oil-combustion engine, is so deeply entrenched in our system that the switching costs seem more expensive than the potential benefits of something new."