Pedagogue Blog

Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Ask An Expert: Should Teachers Give Spelling Tests?

Question: Should students be given weekly spelling tests? Rebecca S.

Answer:  First of all, thank you for your question. Weekly spelling tests are a time-honored tradition in American elementary schools. For quite some time now, however, schools across the U.S. have elected to cut them out of their curriculum. Why? Because many education experts, like me, believe that they only test student’s short-term memory and do not assist students in gaining spelling mastery.

Over the last decade or so, many districts have elected to use a method called “word study,” which focuses on patterns instead of rote memorization. Word study is based on phonics, spelling and vocabulary and teaches students to examine, recognize and comprehend the patterns in words. An understanding of these patterns helps students master spelling more effectively.

During word study instruction, students engage in challenging and motivational activities instead of simply memorizing a set of words. In order to become literate, students need hands-on practice with dissecting and rearranging word elements in a manner that permits them to generalize learning from remote, individual examples to entire clusters of words that are spelled the same way. In itself, word study is not a panacea, as there are exceptions to every rule. Students can, however, learn invaluable strategies that teach them how to read, write and spell words.

Word study also teaches students how to examine words so they can construct a deep understanding of how written words function.

Even though many educators and parents are totally against abandoning weekly spelling tests, it is my professional opinion that alternative methods of spelling instruction, such as word study, are more viable. If you are an educator who is still giving traditional spelling tests, I strongly urge you to give word study a try — not because I said so, but because it will provide your students with balanced literacy instruction and exponentially increase their ability to read, write and spell.

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

Half of black college students graduate $25,000 in debt

A recent Gallup poll found that in the last 14 years, around half of black college students graduated with student loan debt exceeding $25,000. Only 35 percent of white students had loan debt that high.

Often the only way for black students to afford a college education is by taking on these loans. Four out of five black students take student loans to attend college and typically have nearly $4,000 more student loan debt compared to white students, according to a 2013 report by The Center for American Progress.

There is deep inequality here in the U.S. In 2013, the median income for black households was $34,600, and the poverty rate is 27%, nearly three times that of white Americans.

Michelle Obama visited Booker T. Washington high school in Atlanta in September. She had an important message to deliver: Do not drop out of school. Go to college. Get out of poverty. Giving up on education is not an option.

President Obama admits that loans helped finance his and the First Lady’s education, and the President tried to convey to America’s youth that he sympathizes with the burden of student loans – they just paid off their student loans ten years ago. He also shares that he and Michelle are saving money for their daughters’ tuition.

Higher education has long been considered the key to escaping poverty, but it doesn’t come without a price tag attached. For black students, the cost is often higher than their white classmates. It is unfortunate that the burden of loan debt often follows students for decades after their graduation. This cycle only reinforces the income and racial inequalities so prevalent today in our country.

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Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Secondary Education

What if K-12 Education Were More Like Preschool?

By Chris Thinnes

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, after all, if high school students were as deeply absorbed in their ‘work’ as five-year-olds are in their play? – Deborah Meier

The other day, a colleague and I preparing for a conference workshop gave ourselves some time to ask ourselves a number of the 30,000-foot questions we rarely take the time to ask. I found myself fascinated by how rarely in our national dialogue about K-12 school reform – dominated by a myopic, nostalgic, and restrictive construct of “college readiness” entrenched by federal education policy and public education debate — we ever dare to pose critical questions about learning theory or teaching practice in college settings; just what K-12 schools are preparing children to accomplish in college; just what colleges are doing to attend to the demonstrated learning needs of their students; or exactly what relevance much of college learning brings to bear either on the developmental needs of young adults enrolled in college, their discovery of joy and purpose, or their fitness for engagement in a democratic society.

Instead, we tend to wed ourselves to sweeping assumptions about the nature and propriety of college-level academic readiness, uncritically accept the principles embedded in it, and plan backwards from that unexamined construct of ‘college readiness’ in all the grade levels that precede it. K-12 education has become as a result, in the public imagination and in many of our schools, an elaborate dress rehearsal for a show that might not, at the end of the day, be particularly well-conceived, written, directed, or produced. But who can tell for sure?

In the shadow of national anxiety about ‘college readiness’ — in which many of us spend our time assessing how well our K-12 schools prepare children for college learning by determining how much their current learning resembles it – I have long found Deborah Meier’s account of the formation of the Central Park East schools a dynamically different challenge and welcome inspiration. When I first landed on these lines from The Power of Their Ideas a few years back, for example, something changed forever in the way I think about teaching and learning:

Just as our elementary school was based on the idea of keeping the traditions of kindergarten going through the sixth grade, so for our secondary school we largely imagined our task as keeping the spirit of kindergarten going for a few more years. I do not mean this to sound condescending or belittling. I see the spirit I’m referring to as fundamental to all good education; wouldn’t it be wonderful, after all, if high school students were as deeply absorbed in their “work” as five-year-olds are in their “play”? (p. 47)

Meier concedes that “I speak here of an old-fashioned kindergarten, one that doesn’t look like first grade” (48), and from that – as well as the increasing and regrettable insistence in recent decades that kindergartens should look more like first grade — I have taken license to ask some of the same questions about preschool and the influence it could bring to bear on older students’ learning.

In the last several weeks I’ve been spending some of my time with kindergarten and 1st grade teachers at a progressive elementary school, helping them explore together how documentation practices and collaborative inquiry protocols, adapted from the Reggio preschool model, can deepen their learning, teaching, and professional collaboration. On other days, I’ve been spending time at an extraordinary Reggio-inspired preschool – observing highly skilled teachers in practice, and participating in shared inquiry and reflection after hours – to learn how such practices are implemented among younger learners still. In off hours, I find myself – as someone who has long been preoccupied by the work of Project Zero in collaboration with leaders of the Reggio Schools since I first stumbled upon Making Learning Visible — continually thinking about how elementary, middle, and high school teaching and learning could be deepened by an explicit understanding, appreciation, and extension of practices in early learning. And in my continued research, I’ve been thinking about the ways these practices represent a dramatically more authentic and effective alternative – in their acuity, their intentionality, their integrity, and their transparency – to many of the problematic notions embedded in current constructs of ‘accountability.’

All the while, I find myself remembering the way that Deborah Meier framed both a construct of early learning, the immense power it brings to bear on our conceptualization of older students’ learning, and the remarkable prospects these principles invite in K-12 schools in a time of transformative change: not only the prospect of more engaged, joyful, and purposeful learning, and not only the prospect of more inclusive, democratic, and devoted learning communities, but also the promise of deeper, richer learning and the extraordinary academic achievement that — ironically, perhaps — inevitably emerges from it. For these reasons I wanted to share an extended passage from The Power of Their Ideas to invite your reflection:

Kindergarten is the one place— maybe the last place— where teachers are expected to know children well, even if they don’t hand in their homework, finish their Friday tests, or pay attention. Kindergarten teachers know children by listening and looking. They know that learning must be personalized because kids are incorrigibly idiosyncratic… Kindergarten teachers know that helping children learn to become more self-reliant is part of their task—starting with tying shoes and going to the bathroom. Catering to children’s growing independence is a natural part of a kindergarten teacher’s classroom life.

This is, alas, the last time children are given independence, encouraged to make choices, and allowed to move about on their own steam. The older they get the less we take into account the importance of children’s own interests, and the less we cherish their capacity for engaging in imaginative play. (In fact, we worry in kindergarten if children lack such capacity, while later on we worry if they show it too much.) In kindergarten we design our rooms for real work, not just passive listening. We put things in the room that will appeal to children, grab their interests, and engage their minds and hearts. Teachers in kindergarten are editors, critics, cheerleaders, and caretakers, not just lecturers or deliverers of instruction. What Ted Sizer calls “coaching” is second nature in the kindergarten classroom.

A good school for anyone is a little like kindergarten and a little like a good post-graduate program— the two ends of the educational spectrum, at which we understand that we cannot treat any two human beings identically, but must take into account their special interests and styles even as we hold all to high and rigorous standards…. We don’t need research on this astounding proposition. (pp. 48-49)

Many of the moments that have particularly captivated me in recent weeks have emerged from intentional dialogue with teachers about the relational elements of children’s learning: purposeful efforts by educators to learn more about individual children’s unique needs and challenges in the context of our relationships with them, and equally purposeful observation and interpretation of children’s dispositions and behavior in their relationships with each other. This makes me wonder—among many other things—just how much we’ve sacrificed in supporting students’ learning, to say nothing of the fullness of their and our humanity, to the altar of academic ‘excellence’ as it’s conventionally constructed, and the slippery signifier of ‘college readiness’ as it currently dominates debate about school reform.

I hope to explore emerging and related questions more in the weeks and months to come. For now, my primary purpose was to share this compelling passage from Meier’s work and to invite your thoughts.

What do we know about children that we have neglected to honor in our commitments to traditional notions of academic excellence? What parts of this collective knowledge must we recapture and reintegrate? How might we draw on early learning practices to enrich students’ social, academic, and ethical development in K-12 schools in the years to come?

What if K-12 education were more like preschool?

Reference:

Meier, D. (2002). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. New York: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1995)

____

Chris Thinnes is a veteran independent school leader, an active collaborator with educators from the private and public sectors, and an engaged public school parent. In the 2013-2014 school year, he was honored as a Fellow of the Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence, named one of Carney Sandoe’s “8 Thought Leaders to Follow Now,” and featured as a panelist for the ASCD Whole Child Town Hall.

This post originally appeared on chris.thinnes.me and was republished with permission.

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

Report: Nearly 90% of college freshmen receive a tuition discount

It’s no secret that college tuition is expensive and that rising student debt is a real economic problem. Not everyone is paying full price for a college education, though. In fact, a vast majority are paying below the advertised price.

By way of NPR.org, the National Association of College and University Business Officers conducted a study “of tuition discounts at private, nonprofit, four-year colleges and universities.”

The information released in the survey suggests that all colleges that were surveyed offered some sort of discounts to its students.

“They estimate 89 percent of first-time, full-year freshmen received some kind of discount in 2014-2015. Of those students, the average grant they received is estimated to cover 54.3 percent of tuition and fees.”

That’s at least half off of student fees and maybe tuition.

Still–even with the steep discounts, it’s not enough to curb the rising rate of students who carry too much debt. At least this survey doesn’t go into detail as to how these discounts may offset the full cost of college or how it impacts the load of debt that students carry post graduation.

While the study is a brief overture into how some schools attend to the full cost of college, it also shows just how expensive some schools are if nearly 90 percent of freshmen are able to utilize discounts. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a college system that was just plain affordable for all students, without the trappings of all these discounts and needing to spend so much time tracking down the money to attend?

 

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Matthew Lynch published in Diversity, EdTech & Innovation

STEM projects help ESOL students build skills and shine

Middle school can be challenging as students make the transition from elementary school and adjust to the many physical and emotional changes they’re undergoing. For English language learners the challenges are even greater. Not only do these students have to learn how to speak, read and write a new language, they have to adjust to a new culture. At Hunter’s Creek Middle School in Orlando, FL the school’s 165 ESOL students speak 32 different languages and are gaining confidence and language skills using STEM and project-based learning (PBL).

According to Hunter’s Creek ESOL teacher Yvette Ramirez, “Project based learning is a good fit with ESOL because it gives students an opportunity to dive deep into a topic and really spend time with it. They also get to practice their language skills in a variety of ways from listening to and watching videos to reading articles and writing their own content.”

As an Orange County Public Schools Digital Curriculum Pilot School all of Hunter’s Creek’s students work exclusively on iPads. On the rare occasions when Ms. Ramirez asks her the kids to take out a piece of paper “they look at me strange because they want to use the iPads. We’re not just using digitized work. We are digital.”

Ms. Ramirez is using one of the digital curriculum programs that came pre-loaded on the school’s iPads to implement PBL in her STEM lessons. Defined STEM is an online program that provides educators with resources to create engaging, relevant, cross-curricular PBL lessons. “One of the great things about Defined STEM is that the students are able to access the lesson directions and rubric in many different languages,” said Ms. Ramirez. “But, all of the articles, videos and other supporting content are in English. So students can feel comfortable that they understand the directions by reading them in their own languages but must use their English skills to actually complete the assignments.”

A cultural and a STEM learning experience

During the 2014-15 school year Ms. Ramirez’s ESOL students worked on several STEM projects. The project that generated the most excitement and engagement was Defined STEM’s Culinary Artist: Sustainability performance task. The Developmental Language Arts class, which is for students who speak very little English, worked on the project.

The goal of the project was for students create their own farm to table restaurant, including deciding where to locate the restaurant geographically, what to farm, how to farm, and ultimately what the menu would be. “Defined STEM had a lot of articles and videos within students’ Lexile levels that helped them get started but then they had to go find additional resources outside of Defined STEM,” shared Ms. Ramirez. “Students researched healthy recipes and figured out what kind of gardens they needed and where in the country they needed their gardens to grow.”

The Culinary Artist project culminated in students presenting the commercials and TV interviews they created that showcased their unique farm-to-table concepts. “These students have influences from around the world which they got to show in their menu and food choices,” said Ms. Ramirez. “So even though the project really helped them build their English skills and gain knowledge about American culture and geography, the students still were able to incorporate a bit of home.”

Technology makes effective STEM and PBL instruction easier

Ms. Ramirez has a strong background in teaching ESOL students and believes that a digital PBL STEM curriculum is a highly effective method to teach students both language and curricular skills. A common approach to teaching ESOL students is to pair a student with stronger language skills with a struggling student. This helps them both build their skills. PBL facilitates this kind of collaborative learning. “Without Defined STEM it would have been much harder to do these types of complex, lengthy STEM projects. All of the resources are there and designed to support English language learners. Plus, Defined STEM makes the performance tasks so interesting and intriguing that even when the work gets tough, the students persevere because they’re totally engaged.”

“The Culinary Artist projects were amazing,” shared Ms. Ramirez. “The students worked so hard and really deepened their understanding not only of English but of technology, geography, math, and so much more. They were so proud of themselves and that is exactly how I want my students to feel when they walk out of my class.”

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch

K-12 Online Learning as a Life Skill

Online learning is more than a fad. The facts are staggering: According to the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, there are nearly 1.9 million K-12 enrollments in online courses every school year, up from under 50,000 in 2000. The current number does not even include students enrolled in primarily online schools. Thirty-one states have full-time online schools that serve on a statewide basis.

The top reason that districts give for offering online options is for credit recovery, with 81 percent of urban schools citing this reason. Are online courses really equal to ones in the classroom though? It really depends who you ask. Recent news reports out of California show that high school graduation rates are at an all-time high of 78 percent, with even higher numbers in areas like San Francisco and San Jose. While some educators use these numbers to point to student success, critics say the rise in graduation numbers does not necessarily mean that students are college ready. The rise of online courses as a means to “make up” failed or incomplete classes are part of the reason more kids graduate – but do they know what they should?

It is of course impossible to answer that vague of a question but the debate rages on just the same. Just how rigorous is an online high school course? This is likely a cloudy area for those of us who grew up before the Internet forever changed the face of distance education. On a basic level, if a student reads the material, and is able to give correct answers on a test, that means he or she has “learned” the content. When an educator takes into account other influential factors like learning style, intelligence and work ethic, that basic definition becomes murky. The general consensus in the education community seems to be that even though online courses have merit, they are less rigorous than classroom settings.

Then there is the issue of online learning as an overarching ideology. Embracing the inevitability that online learning is a very real part of the average college education, the state of Florida began requiring in 2011 that high school students in the 24-credit graduation option to take at least one online course. The public, Internet-based Florida Virtual School leads the way in this innovation and is considered a national leader in the e-Learning model. So in this example, Florida is not simply offering online courses as a backup; the state mandates that students on a college prep path get early exposure to the type of learning they are likely to see in college.

This point really accents the two very different ways to look at online courses in K-12 education. On one hand, there is educational merit, though that education is debatable as to the actual extent of its effectiveness. On the other hand, there is the practicality aspect of exposing students to online learning long before the college years. The second point paints online learning as a life skill of sorts – something for kids to understand before entering the real world as adults, much like balancing a bank account or learning how to create a resume. Without a solid understanding of online learning before graduation, students are less prepared for what they will face academically following high school.

The K-12 online course dissenters are just wasting their breath, in my opinion. The momentum of online learning is gaining speed.

The educators I know love online courses, because they can teach online from anywhere. What are your thoughts?

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Secondary Education

Service-Learning Develops Character in Students

By Michele Pitman, CEO of intelliVOL

Educating the whole child and developing character goes beyond the core subjects being taught each day. Many school districts recognize this and have instituted programs encouraging or requiring students to give time in service to their community and peers. Organizations like the National Honor Society have incentivized service, giving recognition for student efforts outside of school. And, when these students apply to colleges and universities, their service record usually improves their chance at being accepted.

Given how much we as a culture value community service and the well-rounded individual, more U.S. high schools need to offer institutionalized and systemized service opportunities for their students. In the vast majority of public schools, service is a club activity. In private schools, service is so important that it is graded. But in most public schools, students must find their own charitable organization and arrange to work there of their own initiative. There may be an advisor to help in this process or they have established relationships with nonprofits thereby making it is easier to connect, but a student’s service has no bearing on their formal school record.

The National Honor Society does fill in the gap where organized, school-mandated service is not available. Through the NHS, students give hours and track that data by school sponsors who are responsible for verifying, tracking and reporting student hours given to service. This legitimizes the student’s efforts and for college applications, is a critical validation in a hyper-competitive landscape.

Yet, turning service into more than simply checking-off-the-box-so-I-can-get-into-college scenario, requires a bit more effort. In the over 10 million service hours that students have logged and tracked for schools through our company, the overwhelming majority of school leaders tell us that students need to think about their service and its impact. They need to make a personal connection between their lives and those whom they have helped. Schools call this reflection. Service, they say, is more significant and meaningful when students are required to write down their thoughts after they’ve completed their service.

Teachers and student advisors recognize this connection between action and mind. Guilford County Schools in North Carolina has a very active service-learning program with over 1.4 million service hours logged to date, and is nationally recognized as a District of Character by Character.org. Yvonne Eason is the coordinator for character development and service-learning at the district. Guilford, like many schools we work with, requires students to write down their thoughts about their service. “The reflections piece is huge for us. We’re looking for our students to reflect on the experience of service-learning. This goes well beyond just recording the number of learning hours served. It gives students a chance to share what impact each experience had on them personally as learners and individuals, as well as what type of impact they’re having on the community, or organization they’re serving,” says Ms. Eason.

Reflection is at the very base of building a well-rounded individual who has skills and experiences beyond classroom instruction. This simple action–writing down our thoughts of helping others—takes our regimented, subject-heavy learning environment beyond the “how” and answers the question, “Why?”

 

About the Author

Michele Pitman, creator of x2VOL developed the platform in partnership with high schools to give them an easier, more accurate way to manage, track, verify and report service hours students give in the community. x2VOL is the most widely used service tracking and reporting platform in K12 education with over 10 million approved service hours.

 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Teachers

Spend less time searching for classroom resources

A teacher’s job does not end when the school bell rings. From grading papers and prepping classroom materials, to creating lesson plans and seeking out professional development opportunities, to say that educators have a lot on their plate would be an understatement.

Finding classroom resources and quality training has been an even more arduous task with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. According to a report from the Center on Education Policy, a majority of educators are creating new curricula independently—more than two-thirds of districts reported that their teachers were designing their own curricula to meet the new standards.

This has left many teachers looking for tools that can help them find high quality lesson plans, worksheets and other resources to aid their instruction. The process of sifting through irrelevant content can be a drain on educators, who are often spending their own money on classroom materials and resources. Educators need an effective and affordable way to find peer-reviewed content so they can spend less time searching and more time focused on the classroom.

Unlimited Resources, On-Demand

Teachwise Inspire, a new online platform for educators, can most easily be described as the “Netflix” of teaching resources. For a low monthly subscription, members gain access to unlimited, on-demand classroom and professional development resources, eliminating the potential for buyer’s remorse.

The online tool currently includes 28,000 teacher-reviewed, teacher-approved K-12 resources that are aligned to the Common Core and connected to curriculum goals. Content is curated in partnership with Lesson Planet based on their rigorous review criteria. The platform allows users to easily search for resources by subject area, grade level, and specific standard-alignment so they can find exactly what they are looking for. Members also have the ability to rate and review resources, making it easy to see how other educators are using the resources in their own classrooms.

There are also professional development videos and coursework for teachers, with topics ranging from behavior management to implementing new teaching strategies.

Save Time and Money

Teachers spend too much time and money finding resources to use in the classroom. Teachwise Inspire is an affordable tool that can give educators back some of that time, allowing them to focus on their number one priority—students.

Basic membership is available at a monthly cost of $7.99, and for a limited time is available for a seven-day free trial.  To sign up for the free trial, educators can visit inspire.teachwise.com.

Read all of our posts about EdTech and Innovation by clicking here. 

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Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation

Why School Leaders Should Never Get Into a Twitter War With Kanye West

Responding impulsively to negative comments on social media will only make the problem worse.

By Luvelle Brown

Kanye West is at it again.

The Grammy-winning rapper turned ubiquitous social media bully has a knack for getting under people’s skin. First it was former girlfriend Amber Rose. Then Taylor Swift. Kanye’s 21.7 million (and counting) Twitter followers can hardly wait to see who, or what, ends up in his online crosshairs next.

So far-reaching is the rapper’s social sniping that President Obama himself has weighed in, calling Kanye a “Jack#$!” for the way he lashed out at Ms. Swift.

As a school district superintendent who uses social media daily to engage his community, I can’t help but cringe every time one of Kanye’s social digs lights the Twitterverse on fire.

Love Kanye or hate him, it makes no difference to Kanye–so long as Kanye keeps trending.

<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>Everyone has made mistakes. I just make them in public.</p>&mdash; KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) <a href=”https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/712426781245050880″>March 22, 2016</a></blockquote>

<script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script>

Only in Hollywood
That sort of a mea culpa might fly if you’re an egomaniacal rap superstar with a nose for controversy. But making mistakes in public is exactly the kind of folly that lands school leaders and other public figures in hot water.

If you’re reading this thinking, “More evidence to steer clear of social media,” you’re missing the point. There’s a reason that Kanye’s social media missives make headlines. Research shows that parents and students increasingly communicate online. A recent Pew Research study found that 79% of parents get “useful information” via their social networks. A similar Pew study found that 65% of adults use social media, a tenfold increase from a decade ago. The same study found that social media use is nearly ubiquitous among teens and college-age students.

The majority of your community is already on social media. They’re asking questions and sharing information–true or otherwise–about your schools. And they expect you to be there too. The question isn’t whether you should use social media; it’s how to use it responsibly to meet the changing needs of your school community.

At Ithaca City, where I serve as superintendent, we use social media daily to connect with parents and students on a range of topics, from classroom teaching to school policy. There are risks. Every community has a Kanye or two. When you witness parents and others sniping at staff or spreading misinformation about your schools, there’s a tendency to engage without thinking. Tools such as Twitter and Facebook make putting your foot in your mouth easy.

Resist the urge to get down in the dirt with community members and others who use social media to stir up trouble. Monitor your social networks for controversial chatter and misinformation, and think before you post. There might be instances where the conversation is better conducted offline, via email, or in another setting that you can effectively control.

At Ithaca City, we use a solution called Let’s Talk! from K12 Insight. The cloud-based technology makes it possible to invite feedback from parents and community members through our district website. It also allows us to monitor our social networks from a single location. We know the instant someone mentions our schools or teachers online, giving us the time we need to a plan a smart response.

Next time someone calls you or your schools out on social media, don’t pull a Kanye. Take your time. Think. Then post. It’s simply amazing the difference a thoughtful response can make.

Looking for more ideas about how to use social media to engage your school community? Get more advice from me and other educators in The School Leader’s Definitive Guide to Navigating Social Media.

Luvelle Brown is superintendent of the Ithaca City School District in upstate New York.

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Matthew Lynch published in Higher Education

How to use the Delta Model in higher education

**The Edvocate is pleased to publish guest posts as way to fuel important conversations surrounding P-20 education in America. The opinions contained within guest posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of The Edvocate or Dr. Matthew Lynch.**

A guest post by Enrique Suarez

If Educational Institutions are to achieve success in the marketplace, they must begin to think about their business strategy in new ways. Traditional competitive approaches that rely on product differentiation do not produce optimal results, nor do they take advantage of new sources of profitability that the connectivity of a networked economy offers. Too often, they focus the attention in the wrong place.

To survive and prosper today, Educational Institutions must shift their attention from products to customers and create a business plan based on:

  • The innovative restructuring of your customer relationships
  • Segmenting your customers more creatively
  • Delivering a value proposition that places the customer at the center of your strategy

The research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has given rise to a powerful business model that reflects the many new ways to compete in the current economy. Called the Delta Model, it was designed to offer senior managers a fresh and pragmatic approach to critical strategic business thinking. This new, integrative, strategic framework presented by Enrique Suarez, allows educational managers to identify new sources of profitability, develop new strategic approaches, establish new directions for their educational institutions, and implement an enhanced strategic agenda.

This strategic framework will also allow Educational Institutions to gain pragmatic insights on how to:

  • Begin to change from a product-driven orientation to a customer-driven orientation
  • Utilize “complementors” to extend your enterprise network
  • “Decommoditize” the way you do business by strengthening your customer relationships

The First Task: Positioning The Foundations of Management Strategy

In the conventional, best product positioning approach to business strategy, the way to attract, satisfy, and retain the customer is through the inherent characteristics of the product itself. Managers are guided by product economics and measure their success in terms of product share. In contrast, MIT has developed a different model of business strategy based on customer economics. Called the Delta Model it was designed to identify better ways to compete in a networked economy and advocates an innovative, customer-centric approach to business strategy. I’ll examine the current state of critical business thinking at institutions of higher education and the Delta Model’s triangle of strategic options that make it possible for educational managers to craft more creative and effective business plans. These three options include:

System Lock-In – a broad-scope strategy that relies on a full network of meaningful contributors to create both customer lock-in and competitor lock-out and achieve the highest level of customer bonding. Those who are successful in reaching this position gain a de facto dominance of the market.

Total Customer Solutions – which emphasizes customer bonding through a portfolio of customized products and services that represent a unique and comprehensive value proposition to individualized customers. It is a 180 degree departure from Best Product positioning (see below) and requires a very different mindset.

Best Product – a more narrow option built on classic forms of competition and centered on the intrinsic superiority of a product or service, being first to market, or the differentiation of a so-called dominant design. Most companies are positioned here, with limited opportunities for customer bonding. System Lock-in, Total Customer Solutions, and Best Product are alternative options for achieving customer bonding and can be pursued simultaneously.

You can download the entire presentation in the following link:

https://www.academia.edu/8227956/How_to_use_the_Delta_Model_in_Higher_Educ

_____

Enrique Suarez has a Master’s of Education & International Development from Harvard University. Read more at http://www.com/suarezenrique/delta and contact him at [email protected].

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Matthew Lynch published in Parental Involvement, Teachers

Listening, not testing, will improve children’s vocabulary

James Law, Newcastle University

Every few months a story appears about the declining speech and language skills of children arriving in primary school. The epithet “the daily grunt” was invented by one newspaper to capture the lack of communication between parent and child, implying it caused poor communication skills and a lack of “school readiness”.

Now a new report by the UK school regulator Ofsted – its first on the early years – has called for children to start school at two years old, in part to help those from lower-income backgrounds who arrive at primary school with poor reading and speech.

While we may actively teach our children to read, oral language skills (the ability to learn words, form sentences and to communicate abstract ideas) is a defining human characteristic and, of these, it is vocabulary which is the pivotal skill. Children grow up acquiring these skills driven by, in Canadian telly-don Stephen Pinker’s words an “instinct” for language.

Recent evidence from twin studies suggests that language skills become increasingly heritable as the child moves through middle school, stressing the import role that the environment plays in the early years.

Yet there has been an abiding concern that some children are simply not speaking enough to access the national curriculum, the inference being that they are not being talked to enough.
But how would we really know there was a problem?

When vocabulary develops

To start addressing this question we have to look at the whole population rather than focusing on the most extreme cases. Fortunately the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study allows us to do just this. The graph below compares the vocabulary skills of thousands of five year olds, across five different social groups, measured by what is known as the index of multiple deprivation.

The vocabulary of five-year-old children in England. Save the Children

The graph tells us two things. First, vocabulary skills do differ markedly from one social group to another. Children from more disadvantaged groups recognise and name fewer pictures than those from higher groups. Second, and perhaps more importantly, there are lots of children in each group who have difficulties learning vocabulary. Unfortunately, we can’t say whether this pattern has changed over the decades without repeating the same assessment on different cohorts of children across time.

But how important is vocabulary at school entry? Parents often say that if they ask their GP whether they should be worried about how much their child is talking they are told that he or she will “grow out of it”.

In another study we followed 18,000 children born in 1970 until they were in their early thirties. Rather to our surprise we found that children with restricted vocabulary at five years old were more likely to be poor readers as adults, have more mental health problems and have lower employment rates.

This does not mean that everyone who had poor vocabulary aged five had difficulties later on, just that their risk was higher. There were all sorts of variables that contributed to this prediction but social factors were always in the mix. What is more, there is plenty of data to suggest that the difference between children from higher and lower social groups widens over time.

Creating the right environment

It is tempting to jump to conclusions and say poor speech in young children is simply a matter of parents not talking to their children in a way that encourages language. This is the position taken in the often-quoted 1995 book by Hart and Risley in which they studied 42 children. Their solution is essentially paternalistic – intensive daycare from very early on for the most disadvantaged groups.

A more positive approach is to support both children and parents through awareness, careful observation and the fostering of these early language skills – both in terms of expression and comprehension – from birth. This creates the right environment for language learning rather than simply providing instruction.

Sure Start and Children’s Centres in the UK have played a critical role in doing this. And there will be more opportunities for schools as the pupil premium in the UK – extra money schools get for disadvantaged children – starts to be paid in early years settings. It is important that this type of work should begin long before children reach compulsory schooling.

Clearly children who do not communicate well are vulnerable for all sorts of reasons. There are risks associated with relatively weak early oral language skills but children are immensely resilient and there are many things that can be done to promote these early skills.

But we need to be careful that our expectations are not driven by the pressure to formalise the child’s educational experience. We know that early years settings and primary schools are immensely variable as to how well they support communication. The solution is less about structure than following relatively simple guidance and improving the interaction in class.

It is certainly not about doing more testing – something the government is determined to introduce for younger children. If we demand conformity from young children, immaturities can be seen as “problems” – as with behaviour so as with oral language.

Oral language skills are important in their own right but also because they are critical precursors to inclusion in school and elsewhere. We know that children are active learners. This is not just about the instruction they receive but the environment they are in at home and in school. This means encouraging oral language skills in young children is everyone’s job.

The Conversation

James Law, Professor of Speech & Language Sciences, Newcastle University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Matthew Lynch published in Matthew Lynch, Policy & Reform

Waivers, Blueprints and Reform: The Future of Educational Policy

Kids are taught from infancy that every person is special – that each child has his or her own talents and strengths to bring the world. Yet K-12 education policies tell a very different story by implementing blanket assessments and declarations that do not take the individuality of learning into account. How can today’s students be expected to recognize their strengths when they are all treated as one collective group by educators and policy makers?

Reforming NCLB. The Obama administration has made it perfectly clear that plans to redesign the latest version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act because it has “reinforced the wrong behaviors in attempting to strengthen public education.” The current version of the law, No Child Left Behind, is already five years past its reauthorization date and the Obama camp believes that the “pass-fail, one-size-fits-all” mandates deter full learning potentials by punishing students and schools that miss their goals. Any spirited argument of NCLB has those who enthusiastically agree, or vehemently disagree, with the President. What is not up for debate is that NCLB is outdated and does not adequately meet the needs of the American K-12 student population.

In 2010, the administration proposed a Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that addressed the problems with NCLB and also made recommendations for closing the achievement gap. There has been no official move by Congress to modify and authorize NCLB, so the administration has moved forward with a system of granting waivers to states, and even individual districts, that can come up with a better plan for addressing their own weaknesses in teaching and learning outcomes. NCLB has provisions that allow exactly what the President and his education advisors have done in the way of waivers, making it possible for schools to take control of their learning experiences to meet the needs of their unique student bodies.

A look at NCLB waivers. In 2011, President Obama said that his administration would grant NCLB waivers to specific states that provided rigorous plans to benefit K-12 learning in their communities. As of last week, all but nine U.S. states have been approved for these waivers, along with the District of Columbia and some districts in California. Many of the districts that have been approved for ESEA flexibility have a heightened teacher evaluation system in place that is meant to override Obama’s goal of 100 percent student proficiency in math and reading by 2014.

Just this month eight individual California school districts were granted waivers with the idea that each one would create customized plans that take local influences into account. The eight districts banded together when the state of California decided against requesting ESEA flexibility for this school year. Each NCLB waiver is different. For example, the Colorado Department of Education was approved for a waiver of the 14-day notice requirement to inform parents of public school choice in 2009, while in the same year Hawaii was given a one-year waiver of the requirement to spend 20 percent of its fiscal yearly spending on choice-related transportation.

In the Colorado waiver documentation, the state agreed to still provide public school choice notices to improvement districts. In Hawaii’s application, the governing educational bodies of the state agreed to use the funds released by the waiver to fund specific student needs based on data. In all of the waiver requests, states were required to carefully craft their requests and provide a reasonable alternative. The idea of individual states and districts asking for control over their student directives when it comes to achievement is a smart one that makes up for some of the flaws of NCLB. Every student population is different so one federal mandate regarding assessment can never work for every district, school or student. Even with the NCLB waivers, individual K-12 students are grouped together but at least the waiver makes specificity of assessment and teaching a little bit more possible.

Future of educational policy. Waivers are a step in the right direction when it comes to policy reform simply because they give states and districts a voice in the teaching, learning and assessments processes. Even a complete overhaul of NCLB would mean applying monotonous standards to a diverse K-12 student population, assuming that it included federal mandates again. Giving more power to individual districts, right down to specific schools, is really the right way to address the needs of custom student bodies. But would accountability suffer if there were less demands from the top?

What should be included in educational policy reform to truly benefit the next generation of K-12 students?

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

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