SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

O Brave New World That Has Such People In’t

GUEST BLOG BY NANCY WAGNER, SQE TREASURER

When Lois Burdett was teaching Grade 3 in Stratford Ontario, she wanted to introduce her 8-year-old students to Shakespeare. To make his works more accessible, she re-wrote many of his plays in rhyming couplets using easier language. I purchased several of these books from her series “Shakespeare Can Be Fun”. Each book contains illustrations drawn by her students, as well as written interpretations of the story line.

We started with The Tempest. My 8-year-old grandson sat with me as we took turns reading, and we were soon joined by his 5-year-old brother. Here is a passage re-written by Ms Burdett:

Meanwhile, back at Prospero’s abode,
Ferdinand was toting his heavy load.
Miranda implored, “Do not work so hard!
The orders of my father, you should disregard.
He’s busy for three hours, so do what I suggest.
Put down those logs a while. You really need to rest!”
Ferdinand refused, “The sun will set before I’m done,
I cannot stop, dear mistress. My toil has just begun.”
“Then let me help she argued. I’ll haul them for a while.”
I’d rather break my back,” he answered with a smile.

And here is the interpretation of this passage by Courtney Vandersleen, age 8:

Dearest Ferdinand,
Oh stop that my love bud.
Put down those logs and rest for a minute. You are going to pull a muscle for heaven’s sake.
Oh Ferdinand, your smile sends shivers down my spine. I desperately want you!
Miranda

Ms Burdett has not only re-written these plays for her students, she has had the children stage them as well. What I find so impressive is that this teacher at an ordinary public school in small-town Ontario believed that 8- year-olds, with guidance, were capable of understanding and enjoying great literature. And she didn’t do this with just one class. She taught Shakespeare to her Grade 3 classes for more than 20 years. I call this ” the art of the possible”. And this is why truly great teachers make such a tremendous difference in the lives of their students.

Sunday at the Movies (Creativity)

This very-watchable video casts doubt on the wisdom of educators’ desire to instill creativity in their students.

It’s That Time of Year Again

Ah Spring!—birds singing sweetly, trees making new leaves, tulips and daffodils blooming, teachers’ unions threatening…  Around the country the various teachers’ unions have cranked up the rhetoric as contracts and provincial budgets are on a collision course. 

In Nova Scotia, the NSTU has called for the resignation of the education minister. The union there is ticked off with proposed budget cuts. This couldn’t be more laughable considering Minister Jennex was a 30-year veteran teacher AND a NSTU executive committee member herself before entering politics and becoming the NDP government’s education minister.  Talk about killing your own!

The BC Teachers’ Federation has yet to vote on next steps in their ongoing work-to-rule actions which has seen teachers in the province refuse to issue report cards or hold parent teacher interviews.   That action is now before the BC Labour Relations Board, which will decide if it constitutes an illegal strike.  One thing you can be sure, parents are getting fed up.  But hey, it’s all about the kids. isn’t it?

In Alberta, the ATU is stirring the pot as well.  With their agreement due to expire soon and a huge provincial election happening right now, there must be some handwringing going on considering their opposition to standardized provincial testing and school choice—strongly supported by the Wildrose Party.

In Ontario the Elementary Teachers Federation has walked out of provincial framework negotiations claiming that Education Minister Broten is bullying them.  On top of that, the union’s MALE president, Sam Hammond, claims that the FEMALE minister is attacking women.  This union leader replaced the last GUY who missed out on the 12.55% that all the other unions got last time in 2008, in addition to the 12.5% they got in the previous 2004 agreement.  The EFTO, 80% of whom are women, only got 10.4% in the last round because they wanted more than 12.55%.   The Ontario government, now facing huge deficits after spending it on all those wage increases, wants to freeze salaries and the grid.  They have been advised by the Drummond Report to go after benefits and pensions as well, but we shall see.

Time to go out and smell the flowers.

Maybe They Should Use Systematic Explicit Phonics

The Science of Reading: "This is Dan, Dan is a Baboon. Read Dan Read" (Some fun for Friday 13th)

While the researchers used whole words for this French study, reported upon here in the National Post, they might have been more successful if they used explicit phonics to teach these baboons to read. 

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

As threatened, the Toronto District School Board (Tedious Board) is sacking 430 of 493.5 education assistants as it "struggles to cope with a large projected deficit and the costs of full-day kindergarten", according to this Globe and Mail report. At the same time, the board will be "hiring 406 early childhood educators who are required to staff full-day kindergarten classrooms". 

Combined with the province's class size caps in the primary grades and the new provincial anti-Victory lap measures, the Tedious Board's new policy shows that Peter (the older kids) is being robbed to pay Paul (the younger kids). While we do agree that it's very important to give young kids a good foundation, we note that many young kids still aren't getting the necessary good foundation (but that's another story). And we wonder how much further the province and school boards are prepared to go in their favouritism towards younger children. After all, you can rob Peter only so much - eventually, he will be totally broke!

Computer tutoring has come a long way, baby

You know how new inventions are always kind of clunky at first - think telephones, think automobiles - but then, once people see the potential and start tweaking them, they get better and better? Well, this process has been at work in the sphere of computer tutoring. I suspect that many of us are still thinking of machine tutoring in terms of its early Model T versions, but in fact these programs have got better and better. This blog posting discusses a recent study that suggests that certain types of computer programs are now approaching human tutoring effectiveness. 

The study categorizes tutoring as follows: "[The study] splits machine and human tutoring research along a spectrum of “grain-size” for the interaction.Answer-based tutors provide feedback and guidance after a student has worked through a problem and selected an answer, based on that answer. Step-based tutors break a solution to a problem or task into steps, and follow those steps with students, providing feedback around each step in the problem.Substep based tutors work within the steps – e.g., checking if students are familiar with the concepts or actions that make up a step before they get started working on that step, and intervening if they don't.Human tutoring is the most finely-grain sized approach of all, of course."

The study finds that "it looks like typical answer-based tutoring systems average an effect size of around 0.35 standard deviation units (real progress by itself), while all three of step-based, substep-based, and human tutoring seem to cluster around an effect size of 0.75 standard deviation units".

The article mentions two good computer-tutoring systems that I hadn't heard of: Carnegie Learning and ALEX.

To me, the most exciting aspect of these technological advances is summed up here: "Machine-tutoring systems change the economics for student help.  While there's a lot more up-front cost involved, the delivery cost per student goes way down.  This can shift investment in people resources (which do not have to go down unless you want/need it to go down) to other parts of the learning puzzle – the most intractable learning situations, motivation issues, diagnostic and group activities (where evidence shows those latter to pay off well), etc."

Googling our way to educational excellence

I wish I had a nickel for every time one of our supporters urged SQE to start a school - and by modelling what excellence looks like, lead other schools (especially government schools) to excel. This excellent column by Andrew Coulson shows why this plan is a non-starter. Best case scenario? Government administrators close their eyes to what's possible. Worst case scenario? Government administrators move quickly and savagely to shut down the threat. Here's an article from our archives giving a couple of Ontario examples.

Acknowledging that the lighthouse school notion doesn't work, Andrew Coulson draws on historical and statistical evidence to find an approach that does work. His conclusion is compelling: an entrepreneurial educational marketplace is the best way to facilitate a scaling up of excellence. 

The same free enterprise system that has given us Google, Starbucks, and Apple works in education, too—if we let it. This system works for businesses through several key conditions: freedom to innovate, consumer choice, competition between providers, price signals, and the ability to distribute profits to investors.

These same tools can allow and encourage educational success. In fact, they’re already doing so. In the Korean tutoring sector, it is not uncommon for the top teachers to have class sizes in the range of 20 to 40 thousand students, thanks to effective use of the Internet to distribute lessons. The best among them earn millions of dollars a year from profit sharing programs operated by the tutoring firms. The more effective a teacher becomes, and the larger the number of students who seek out her lessons, the more she earns.

At the other end of the economic spectrum, hundreds of entrepreneurial independent schools currently operate in the slums of Hyderabad, India, vying to serve the children of day laborers and food-stall vendors whose poverty is beyond anything in America. These parent-funded independent schools outperform the local state-run schools, and they do so at a fraction of the cost—barely four dollars per month.

Off The Clock

There is an interesting article on the effectiveness of the currently-popular "Extended Learning Time" (ELT) approach to school reform. The idea is that disadvantaged students need more school time if they are to catch up to their more advantaged peers. The issue is of particular relevance to Ontario, as it embarks on its ground-breaking experiment with universal all-day junior kindergarten. 

Perhaps not surprisingly, the article reports that ELT is far from a slam dunk. For one thing, there are a number of unintended consequences - for example, the budget-draining cost of higher teacher and support staff salaries and the tendancy of experienced and highly-qualified teachers to transfer out of schools that bring in ELT. According to the article, students in US states with mandatory ELT policies perform the same as students in states without mandatory ELT policies. 

It turns out that simply adding extra school time changes little. "Schools that have succeeded with extended time have done so largely because they include time as part of a more comprehensive reform.... Good schools are made by strong networks that support and demand great leaders, who create and cultivate effective teams of teachers, who really know what and how to teach students. To suggest that our nation's worst schools will be transformed, and that student outcomes will improve, because of more time, is not any different than suggesting that they will be transformed by more money. Both are necessary, and both boast plenty of persuasive adages about why more is better. But both are overly simplistic treatments to the very complex problem of improving education."

Hamsters work long hours on their running wheels, but they don't accomplish a thing.

Sunday at the Movies (How private schools are serving poor students)

Dr. Pauline Dixon unveils an amazing story about how the private sector is serving poor students around the world. I know the story is true, because I accidentally visited one of these schools when I was in Ghana a few years ago. The school was unimaginably basic, but the children were achieving - in English! - at a higher level than their Canadian counterparts.

Danger - or opportunity?

There’s an article in today’s Globe and Mail on declining public school enrolments in Canada (except in Alberta and Nunavut) and the resulting temptation to close schools - despite the devastating impact on small communities. But it doesn’t have to be like this. To find out why, read Paul Bennett’s and my recent opinion piece in the Halifax Chronicle Herald. 

The written word for crisis in Chinese consists of two characters - one representing danger and the other representing opportunity. The school closure crisis is in fact offering school boards an opportunity - if they can only see it.