SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

An unpolished stone

To tie a neat bow around my mini-series on how well-prepared and well-supported Asian teachers are, I thought I would share my personal experience of being integrated into the public school system. This took place in the mid-sixties in a North York school, and things may have been different there and then from the here and now, but somehow I doubt it.

I was 21 years old, and I had just graduated from teachers’ college which, as I have mentioned before, did not prepare me for - well - teaching. I had been hired the previous spring, without an interview or any personal contact whatsoever, except for a letter that instructed me to show up at my assigned school on the Tuesday after Labour Day to teach grade 5. That was all I knew.

Well, I wasn’t totally clueless (just almost-totally clueless), and so I showed up at the school on the day before classes started. Someone showed me where my classroom was and where the supplies were, and after that I was on my own. No one told me what my class needed to learn (there was no curriculum, as far as I know - or perhaps there was and no one told me, who knows). So I just grabbed whatever textbooks I could find and that was that.

On the first day of school, my class was kind of rambunctious (newbie teachers got more than their fair share of bad actors) and I had no idea of how to establish routines and keep order - so I had problems with controlling my class right from the start. The principal took a dim view of this, but his efforts to help me (assigning me a touchy-feely consultant and sending me to visit a very progressive school) helped not at all. I just had to figure things out, as I eventually did on my own.

There was no mentoring - indeed mentoring or professional consultation with the other teachers would have been impossible, as I had no prep time whatsoever and most of the teachers fled the school shortly after the final bell. The professional development days were spent mainly alone, working on my classroom’s bulletin boards and the like, although I do dimly remember being herded into another school to hear Lloyd Dennis speak about his just-released report called Living and Learning. You can imagine how helpful I found that!

To make a long story short, my experience was exactly the opposite of that of Asian teachers. And, perhaps worst of all, although in my opinion I became a pretty good teacher as the year went on and my students started learning quite a bit, no one knew or cared - as there was no testing and no apparent value attached to academic achievement.

That was my first and last year of teaching in a regular classroom.

Learning from each other

(CONTINUED)

• In addition to this early tutelage in teaching techniques, Japanese teachers, beginners as well as seasoned teachers, are required to continually perfect their teaching skills through interaction with other teachers One mechanism is through meetings organzied by the vice principal and head teachers of their own school. These experienced professionals assume responsibility for advising and guiding their young colleagues. The head teachers organize meetings to discuss teaching techniques and to devise lesson plans and handouts. These meetings are supplemented by informal districtwide study groups and courses at municipal or prefectural education centers.
• A glimpse at what takes place in these study groups is provided in a conversation we recently had with a Japanese teacher. She and her colleagues spend a good deal of their time together working on lesson plans. After they finish a plan, one teacher from the gorup teaches the lesson to her students while the other teachers look on. Afterward, the group meets again to criticize the teacher’s performance and to make suggestions for how the lesson could be improved. In her school, there is an annual ‘teaching fair’. Teachers from other schools are invited to visit the school and observe the lessons being taught. The visitors rate the lessons, and hte teacher with the best lesson is declared the winner.
• In addition, national television in Japan presents programs that show how master teachers handle particular lessons or concepts. In Taiwan, such demonstrations are available on sets of videotapes that cover the whole curriculum.
• Making use of lessons that have been honed over time does not mean that hte Asian teacher simply mimics what she sees. As with great actors or musicians, the substance of the curriculum becomes the script or the score; the goal is to perform the role or piece as effectively and creatively as possible. Rather than executiving the curriculum as a mere routine, the skilled teacher strives to perfect the presentation of each lesson. She uses the teaching techniques she has learned and imposes her own interpretation on these techniques in a manner that she thinks will interest and motivate her pupils.
• Of course, the teachers find it easier to share helpful tips and techniques among themselves when they are all teaching the same lesson at about the same time. The fact that Taiwan, Japan, and China each has a national curriculum that provides a common focus is a significant factor in teacher interaction. Not only do we have no national curriculum that provides a common focus is a significant factor in teacher interaction, but the curriculum may not be consistent within a city or even within a single school. American textbooks with a spiral curriculum that repeats topics year after year and with a profusion of material about each topic, force teachers to omit some of each year’s material. Even when teachers use the same textbook, their classes differ according to which topic they choose to skip and in the pace with which the proceed through the text. As a result, American teachers have less incentive than Asian teachers to share experiences with each other or to benefit from the successes and failures that others have had in teaching particular lessons.
• Adding further to the sense of isolation is the fact that American teachers, unlike other professionals, do not share a common body of knowledge and experience. The courses offered at different universities and colleges vary, and even among their required courses, there is often little common content from college to college. Student teaching, the only other activitiy in which all budding teachers participate, is a solitary endeavor shared only with the regular classroom teacher and perhaps a new fellow student teacher.
• Opportunities for Asian teacher to learn from each other are influenced, in part, by the physical arrangements of the schools. In Japanese and Chinese schools, a large room in each school is designed as a teachers’ room, and each teacher is assigned a desk in this room. It is here that they spend their time away from the classroom preparing lessons, correcting students’ papers, and discussing teaching techniques. American teachers, isolated in their own classrooms, find it much harder to discuss their work with colleagues. Their desk and teaching materials are in their own classrooms, and the only common space avaialble to teachers is usually a cramped room that often houses supplies and the school’s duplicating facilities, along with a few chairs and a coffee machine. Rarely do teachers have enough time in their visits to this room to engage in serious discussions of educational policy or teaching practices.

Son of how Asian teachers polish each lesson to perfection

Continuing as threatened - I mean promised - with the excerpt from How Asian teachers polish each lesson to perfection, today’s chunk focuses on Japanese teacher training.

• The second reason Asian class lessons are so well crafted is that there is a very systematic effort to pass on the accumulated wisdom fo teaching practice to each new generation of teachers and to keep perfecting that practice by providing teachers the opportunities to continually learn from each other.
• Americans often act as if good teachers are born, not made. We hear this from both teachers and parents. They seem to believe that good teaching happens if the teacher has a knack with children, gets along well with them, and keeps them reasonably attentive and enthusiastic about learning. It is a commonly accepted truism in many colleges of educaiton that teaching is an art and that students cannot be taught how to teach.
• Perhaps because of this belief, students emerge from the American colleges of education with little training in how to design and teach effective lessons. It is assumed that teachers will discover this for themselves. Courses in teaching methods are designed to serve a different purpose. On the one hand, they present theories of learning and cognitive development. Although the students are able to quote the major tenets of the theorists currently in vogue, the theories remain as broad generalizations that are difficult to apply to the everyday tasks that they will face as classroom teachers. At the opposite extreme, these methods courses provide education students with lists of specific suggestions for activities and materials that are easy to use and that children should enjoy (for example, pieces of breakfast cereal make handy counters for teaching basic number facts). Teachers are faced, therefore, with information that is either too general to be applied readily or so specific that it has only limited usefulness. Because of this, American teachers complain that most of what they know had to be learned by themselves, alone, on the job.
• In Asia, graduates of teacher training programs are still considered to be novices who need the guidance and support of their experienced colleagues. In the United States, training comes to a near halt after the teachers acquikre their teaching certificates. American teachers may take additional coursework in the evenings or during summer vacations or they may attend district or city-wide workshops from time to time. But these opportunities are not considered to be an essential part of the American system of teacher training.
• In Japan, the system of teacher training is much like an apprenticeship under the guidance of exprienced colleagues. The teacher’s first year of employment marks the beginning of a lengthy and elaborate training process. By Japanese law, beginning teachers must receive a minimum of twenty days of inservice training during their first year on the job. Supervising the inservice training are master teachers, selected for their teaching ability and their willingness to assist their young colleagues. During one-year leaves of absence from their own classrooms, they observe the beginner in the classroom and offer suggestions for improvement.

Tomorrow’s excerpt outlines how Asian teachers continue to receive guidance and support throughout their teaching careers.

Sunday at the Movies (Mathemagic)

This is a very entertaining video, but it also serves to demonstrate what an ordinary brain can achieve (given years of purposeful practice). However, I don’t know how the mathemagician is able to tell people what their missing digit is. If anyone can enlighten me, I would be grateful. TedTalks link.

How Asian teachers polish each lesson to perfection

A recent article in the National Post highlights the problematic nature of professional development. This article, obviously, is on about bad professional development, and the meretricious nature of most pd days in Canada is giving professional development a bad name. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Used properly, pd days have an enormous potential for improvement. In Spring 1991, there was a wonderful article in American Educator, the magazine of the American Federation of Teachers. I have a hard copy of the article, but unfortunately I could find only the first part of the article online. So I will excerpt today from a relevant part of this article and plan to continue next week. I can snail mail a copy of the entire article on request. H/T GR

• Few who have visited urban classrooms in Asia would disagree that the great majority of Chinese and Japanese teachers are highly skilled professionals. Their dedication is legendary; what is often not appreciated is how thoughtfully and adroitly they guide hcildren through the six years of elementary school. We, of course, witnessed examples of excellent lessons in American classrooms. And there are of course individual differences among Asian teachers. But what has impressed us in our personal observations and in the data from our observational studies is how remarkably well most Asian teachers teach. It is the widespread excellent of Asian class lessons, the high level of performance of the average teacher, that is so stunning. 
• The techniques used by Chinese and Japanese teachers are not new to the teaching profession - nor are they foreign or exotic. In fact, they are the types of techniques often recommended by American educators. What the Japanese and Chinese examples demonstrate so compellingly is that when widely implemented, such practices can produce extraordinary outcomes.
• Unfortunately, these techniques have not been broadly applied in the United States. Why? One reason, as we have discussed, is the Asian belief that the whole-group lesson, if done well, can be made to work for every child. With that assumption, Asian teachers can focus on the perfection of that lesson. However, even if American educators shared that belief, it would be difficult for them to achieve anything near the broad-based high quality that we observed in Asian classrooms. This is not the fault of American teachers. The fault lies with a system that prepares them inadequately and then exhausts them physically, emotionally, and intellectually while denying them the collegial interaction that every profession relies upon for the growth the refinement of its knowledge base.
• The first major obstacle to the widespread development and execution of excellent lessons in America is the fact that American teachers are overworked. It is inconceivable that American teachers, by themselves, woudl be able to organize lively, vivid, coherent lessons under a regimen that requires that they teach hour after hour every day throughout the school year. Preparing lessonss that require the discovery of knowledge and the construction of understanding takes time. Teaching them effectively requires energy. Both are in very short supply for most American teachers.
• Being an elementary school teacher in the United States at the end of the twentieth century is extraordinarily difficult, and the demands made by American society exhaust even the most energetic among them. “I’m dancing as fast as I can” one teacher summarized her feelings about her job, “but with all the things that I’m supposed to do, I just can’t keep up.”
• The full realization of how little time American teachers have when they are not directly in charge of children became clear to us during a meeting in Beijing. We were discussing the teachers’ workday. When we informed the Chinese teachers that American teachers are responsible for their classes all day long, with only an hour or less outside the classroom each day, they looked incredulous. How could any teacher be expected to do a good job when there is no time outside of class to prepare and correct lessons, work with individual children, consult with other teachers, and attend to all of the matters that arise in a typical day at school! Beijing teachers teach no more than three hours a day, unless the teacher is a home-room teacher, in which case the total is four hours. During the first three grades, the teaching assignment includes both reading and mathematics; for the upper three grades of elementary school, teachers specialize in one of these subjects. They spend the rest of their day at school carrying out all of their other responsibilities to their students and to the school. The situation is similar in Japan. According to our estimate, Japanese elementary school teachers are in charge of classes only 60 percent of the time they are at school.
• The large amounts of non-teaching time at school are available to Asian teachers because of two factors. The first concerns the number of teachers typically assigned to Asian schools. Although class sizes are considerably larger in Asia, the student-to-teacher ratio within a school does not differ greatly from that in the United States. By having more students in each class and the same number of teachers in the school, all teachers can have fewer teaching hours. Time is freed up for teachers to meet and work together on a daily basis, to prepare lessons for the next day, to work with individual children, and to attend staff meetings.
• The second factor increasing the time available to Japanese and Chinese teachers at school is that they spend more hours at school each day than do American teachers. In our study, for example, teachers in Sendai and Taipei spent an average of 9.5 and 9.1 hours per day, respectively, compared to lnly 7.3 hours for the American teachers. Asian teachers arrive at school early and stay late, which gives them time to meet together and to work with children who need extra help. Most American teachers, in contrast, arrive at school shortly before classes begin and leave no long after they end. This does not mean a shorter work week for American teachers. What it does mean is that they must devote their evenings to working alone on the next day’s lessons, further increasing their sense of isolation.

First Position

Here’s a trailor of a new documentary, First Position, that follows six hopefuls in ballet’s Grand Prix, the world’s largest ballet competition. Here’s a review of the documentary. Does anyone here think there’s a reason why the same intensity and high standards should not be applied to academics?

Children - and Grandchildren - of Special Me

The other day, Margaret Wente did a column on teacher bullying, this time profiling a teacher who spent a month at home falsely accused of forcing a kid to eat a squishy banana. This is very similar to Lou D’Amore’s story. It’s worth reading Margaret’s entire column, because there is more wrong here than just an educational bureaucracy making the bumbling mistakes we have come to expect from bureaucracies. Something is rotten in the state of parenthood as well. The comments to Margaret’s column (266 of them at press time) are even more enlightening. They paint a picture of out-of-control kids whose shenanigans are backed by their parents.

Here’s what one person wrote: “The teacher is frightened of the school board. The school board is frightened of the parents. The parents are frightened of the kids. The kids are frightened of no one!”

What has happened? Why are things so different from when I first taught in the mid-sixties and was expected to strap misbehaving kids?

Here’s my theory, and I’d be interested in hearing from the educators still reading us, if there are any left (bye, Steven, sorry to see you go). Could it be that all the chidlren swaddled in the preserve-their-self-esteem-at-all-costs treatment from the seventies onwards have grown up to become today’s parents – parents with swelled heads about their own self-worth, convinced they’re pretty special themselves and of course with kids who must be even more special?

Choosing Wisely

The recent news articles about two controversial Toronto schools, one public and one private, had me searching through the SQE newsletter archives.  The alternative public Grove School has been accused of teaching eight-year-olds to be political activists and a private Muslim Sunday-school (that rents space from the Toronto board) had anti-Semitic content on its website, since removed.  The school has also since appologized but is being investigated.

This gem, Choosing Wisely, written by Dr. Mark Holmes, former OISE professor and SQE advisor, outlines how school choice can work under criteria that schools would have to adhere to in order to be elligible for support.  The criteria follow, but the full article is worth reading.

• Access to the school must not be limited on the basis of religion, race, or ethnicity. This does not disallow Christian, Muslim, or Black cultural schools, provided that admission is not limited to Christians, Muslims, or Blacks (as it is not to Catholic high schools).
• The school must not deny entry on the basis of academic ability, but it must have the right to determine the grade and the program level, based on the student’s demonstrated competence. This prevents élite schools from skimming off the talented.
• The school must use either English or French (or both) as the first language of instruction. This introduces the important matter of society’s obligation to ensure that all children, irrespective of their parents’ culture or religion, prepare themselves for full participation in Canadian adult life.
• The school must provide instruction towards the official provincial goals and objectives in all major fields of study. This ensures that all children have the right to choose programs leading to post-secondary education or employment such that they may choose a future in accord with their own abilities and interests. It does not require independent schools either to follow detailed provincial curricula or use provincially-approved instructional methodology.
• The school must provide access to and recognition of a broad, age-appropriate representation of human knowledge and to bona fide versions of the truth other than its own. A good, readily-accessible library will generally satisfy this requirement. This prevents a narrow and blinkered form of indoctrination.
• The school must not inculcate, promote or approve ideas and behaviour that are incompatible with a liberal, democratic society and the rule of law, e.g., hatred of others based on their own or group characteristics, superiority of one religion or race over another, or the use of violence to achieve political goals within a democracy such as Canada.
• The school’s public funding should be related to its commitment to equality of opportunity. Practical expression of this principle means that grants should be tied to per-pupil expenditure, with schools spending very much more than the public schools receiving little or no public support, and schools spending the same as or less than the equivalent public school receiving close to full funding.

I agree with the Sun, third-graders are too young to go to protests.  I also think that how the science is taught needs to be scrutinized, considering some of the comments from the children. (See our look at cross-Canada science curricula.)  You can’t force-feed the kiddies An Inconvenient Truth on one hand and then expect young children to question its content accuracy on the other if they don’t get the other side too. Media studies anyone?  If the ultimate goal of education is to teach students knowledge in order to become critical thinkers, how can this happen when they do not receive a full balance of knowledge with which to do so?  As far as the private religious school goes,  Dr. Holme’s second-last point covers that one.  No school sould preach hatred.

[Oh, and bravo! to the Sun’s editorial: “We advocate school vouchers instead — where parents who pay school taxes wanting an education for their children outside the public system, are given a voucher representing the cost of their child’s education, which they can apply to the school of their choice.”]

No Numbers Land

Just to take a break from the heavy stuff, here’s a light-hearted video about the importance of numbers. YouTube link.

Teachers Matter

The latest addition to our lending library is the book I have been liberally excerpting from lately - Teachers Matter: Rethinking how public schools identify, reward, and retain great educators by Marcus A. Winters. Here are the key points identified as essential for any effective reform.

• Systematically identify the best and worst teachers.
• Use the data to prevent potentially-bad teachers from entering the classroom and remove them before they become entrenched.
• Remove unnecessary barriers to becoming a teacher.
• Remove ineffective teachers. 
• Pay great teachers more.

"The proposals above reflect what we have learned over the past two decades from empirical research: teachers are important; teacher quality varies enormously; we must evaluate each teacher directly, and compensate teachers for outstanding results. Those basic and obvious facts are pushing us toward a system that distinguishes and values great teachers." (p. 129)