SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Tips for Parents

Yesterday, I came across this article about a new book for parents written by two former teachers.  Meet the Teacher: How to Help Your Child Navigate School is billed as a guide book for parents.  From what I can gather from the article it is full of do’s and don’ts for parental behavior when it comes to interacting with your child’s school. Most of them seem to be common sense courtesies that apply when dealing with just about anybody.  No one could disagree with them and I suggest that parents do take them to heart.  Some examples:

• Talk with the teacher early in the year. Share information that will help them get to know your child, including their interests and learning style. Always let them know about an illness, new baby or other changes affecting a student.
• Feel free to suggest strategies, such as having an overactive child take attendance to the office or ensuring they get daily physical activity (DPA).
• Don’t criticize the teacher in front of your child.
• Ask about school policy on email correspondence. Some schools, boards and unions discourage it and want communication only through written notes, telephone or in person.
• Attend parent-teacher interviews even if your child is doing well. This sends the message that school is important and establishes a rapport with the teacher.
• If you have major concerns, don’t wait until the 10-minute teacher interview to raise them.
• Don’t call a teacher at home or show up unannounced and angry at 8:30 a.m. expecting a meeting.
• Consult the teacher when problems may be brewing rather than waiting for them to explode. Be involved in planning a solution.
• Take up concerns with the teacher first, before going above his or her head to a vice-principal or board superintendent.
• Before interfering with class placement, find out whether the school invites parental input, and keep in mind many factors go into the decisions

The book also has information on how to deal with bullying and peer pressure, different ways that children learn, reading to your child, interpreting report cards, and legal, medical and special education issues.

However, at a cost of $20 (plus tax!) for the book, you just might want to save your money.  A logical follow-up to “Meet the Teacher” is Malkin Dare’s updated, How To Get the Right Education For Your Child.  It is a realistic guide for parents who have done all those “right” things listed above and whose kids are still not getting the education they need. It’s free and can be downloaded from our website.  SQE will even send you a free copy upon request.  Now that’s a good tip.

Coping With Students Who Are No Longer Passive Receptacles to Learning

This is a guest editorial by Stacey Burnard. Ms Burnard is an educational consultant with 13 years’ experience in Ontario, BC, Yukon, and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs. She holds an MA in clinical psychology, and her professional work has focused on the areas of at-risk emotional children, learning including social cognitive challenges, and building meaningful 21st-century classrooms.

I believe that we need to form connections with our students before they will take direction from us. Due to a diminishing natural attachment to adults and a propensity to attach to peers, students will no longer be passive receptacles to learning. Those days are gone.

A necessary mental paradigm shift must take place in order to reach students today. Old-school or traditional teaching styles which principally relied upon our role as a conduit of knowledge are simply outmoded and do not respond to our children’s needs. Recognition that there is a need to expand the role beyond academic educator to emotional supporter must take place. The primary focus of this role must be on relationship building. That is, unless the emotional needs of our students are met, it will be impossible for teachers to convey the academic goals. Children have to feel emotionally supportive before engaging in academic pursuits that reflect their potential. This does not negate the need for basic skill development but rather purports that a number of our learners must feel connected to their teacher prior to becoming engaged in leraning to learn.

Kids are motivated to learn and begin to inquire only when they see an enthusiastic passionate teacher. As the concept of innate desire to learn does not exist in most learners, we must instill the desire to learn by our own passion for the topic and our reaching out to connect with students.

Will Humpty Dumpty Have a Great Fall?

Canada is one of only a handful of countries that still forces workers in its unionized companies to pay union dues, even if the workers choose not to join the union. This means that Canadian unions enjoy huge and guaranteed revenue streams. As a result, many unions are arrogant and greedy - and, of course, the teachers’ unions are no exception.

Now a group of employees at Alberta’s Old Dutch Foods (they make Humpty Dumpty potato chips) is challenging the law, as this Canadian Constitution Foundation article explains. If the employees win, there is the potential that other Canadian unions would lose their monopolies. 

We all know that monopolies are inflexible and unresponsive. Imagine if the teachers’ unions had to persuade teachers to join them - as opposed to joining a different union or even no union. For one thing, the unions might decide to reduce their dues (in the neighbourhood of $1000 a year, at present). They might stop supporting a bunch of left-wing causes, like fighting against free trade, that many of their members agree with. They might even offer to give teachers professional development in good teaching methods and materials. Wouldn’t that be something!

Sunday at the Movies (A Call to Action)

You have to watch this, even though it’s 53 minutes long. This is a speech given by the governor of New Jersey about the state’s educational problems and what needs to be done. Although the problems in New Jersey are worse than they are in Ontario, it’s only a matter of degree, and this speech just lays it all out. An inspiring, dazzling, and moving performance.

She’s Not Done

At first I was very discouraged when I learned that Michelle Rhee had been forced out of office by the electoral defeat of her mayor, due largely to the strenuous efforts of the education establishment - especially the teachers’ unions. Ms Rhee had been the take-no-prisoners chancellor of the Washington, DC school system and, as her Wikipedia page relates, she closed bad schools, fired bad principals and teachers, and took many other actions on behalf of the students. 

However, it turns out that Ms Rhee is not done. Turning down many attractive offers, she has founded a student advocacy organization: Students First. This organization will eschew the polite op-eds, conferences, and scholarly studies approach taken by all of us education reform think tanks. Instead, Students First will play hardball: it will make cash contributions to suitable political campaigns and engage in professional lobbying and public relations activities.

Michelle Rhee has identified the only access point to excellence in education - namely political leadership - and she is going full tilt in that direction. Go Michelle!

This Elephant Didn’t Forget

Time to get into the Christmas spirit by watching this short video. The education connection is pretty tenuous, but the message is uplifting and might be considered relevant to some of our commenters. Make sure you have the Kleenix handy though….

What Fools These Mortals Be

A couple of weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times stunned the education world by ranking the city’s teachers and publishing the results - by name (see our posting on this). Now the Times has done it again, this time analyzing the effects of the school board’s budget cuts. Because of union contracts, the school board has to lay off teachers on the basis of their seniority, as opposed to their effectiveness. It found that this policy is harmful in three main ways.

• Hundreds of the school board’s most promising young teachers lost their positions.
• Schools in the city’s poorest areas were disproportionately hard hit.
• Many more teachers were cut than would have been the case if the decision had been made on the basis of effectiveness (because more senior teachers are paid much more).

Since the same seniority provisions are found in all Canadian teacher (and support staff) contracts, the same situation prevails here. Imagine what a Martian would think of a system-wide deliberate policy of rooting out the better yet less-expensive teachers!

There Is No Joy In Mudville

The 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results were released yesterday. The big news is the stunning success of China whose students - despite the country’s poverty and relatively low spending on education - scored higher than every other country in every category and by a convincing margin. Here are the highlights expressed in terms of Ontario students (scroll to the bottom).

Comparing the performance of Ontario students on this test with their performance three years ago on the 2006 test, their raw scores dropped 3 points in reading, stayed the same in math, and dropped 6 points in science. The combination of this drop in raw scores and the entrance of two very successful countries (China and Singapore) means that Ontario dropped from 5th place in reading to 6th place, from 10th place to 13th place in math, and from 5th place to 10th place in science.

Although the Ontario government is doing its best to put a positive spin on these results, it begins to look as if the Liberal government’s education reform efforts are backfiring.

All Together Now

Modern teaching methods and the resulting problems have been with us for so long now that most people have come to take them as normal and inevitable. Some examples are behaviour problems, bullying, and the poor performance of boys and disadvantaged children. This article from "Education Next" discusses another of the consequences of modern teaching methods, namely the enormous disparity in children's academic performance. This disparity widens with each subsequent grade, and a useful rule of thumb is that the number of years separating the best and the worst students is at least the same as the grade, if not more. In other words, in grade 3 the spread in achievement is roughly three years (with some students still performing at a grade 1 level and some students performing at a grade 4 level), and by grade 8 the eight-year disparity might have the bottom students performing at a grade 3 level and the top students performing at a grade 11 level.

The "Education Next" article is mostly about how best to cope with such a wide disparity - whether to use ability grouping or differentiated instruction. But these are just Band-Aids. A more sensible approach would be to eliminate the root cause of the problem. Just as malaria could not be dealt with effectively until mosquitoes were identified as the causative agent, so too it is necessary to understand that modern teaching methods are actually causing the enormous disparity in children's academic performance.

You Will Be Tested On This

Critics of testing are fond of pointing out that weighing a pig doesn't fatten it, the inference being that testing doesn't increase learning. But, as this article from The Globe and Mail and this article from our archives report, testing in fact DOES increase learning. It turns out that regular and frequent quizzing is a powerful method for increasing retention - and its power is increased when immediate feedback is provided.

Unfortunately, testing has fallen out of favour in modern educational circles. As one cognitive scientist points out, "The way we typically do things in education seems almost reverse-engineered to produce the least learning."