Building a culturally responsive classroom is hard. To help you along your journey, here is your guide to exploring and respecting the cultural backgrounds of your students while also using diversity as an asset. If you you listen to this episode of the podcast, and take my advice, you will have a culturally responsive classroom in no time.
References
Culturally responsive teaching is a theory of instruction that was developed by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings and has been written about by many other scholars since then. To read more of her work on culturally responsive teaching and other topics, click here to visit her Amazon.com page.
It seems that every year around this time, school districts around the country report not being able to fill all of their open teacher vacancies. Why do these cyclical teacher shortages occur? In this episode of the podcast, we will explore this topic in-depth.
As summer reaches its peak, and fall gears up to make its arrival, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are all preparing for the beginning of a new academic year. So many gains were made last year, and they are eager to build upon that success. When we talk about education stakeholders who are concerned with starting the school year off right, we rarely, if ever, talk about edtech companies. They too are an integral part of the school community, as they provide a valuable service.
So how do edtech companies stay on their “A” games to begin the new school year? Not to worry, we have you covered.
Hello, my name is Dr. Matthew Lynch and welcome to the second episode of The Edvocate Podcast. Today, we will discuss back to school tips that will help your edtech company get off to a running start and sustain that momentum until summer break comes around again.
Regardless of where you go in the world, teachers are the backbone of the education system. Without quality teachers, school districts cannot provide students with the skills that they need to be successful academically. Without teachers, the next generation will not be able to compete in the global economy. These are sureties, and you will find few people who would disagree.
If you have been studying the field of education closely, as we have, you know that it is undergoing a metamorphosis. Students no longer respond to the teacher-centered pedagogy that our forefathers did. No, today’s students are immersed in a technologically advanced world and possess attention spans that last only a few seconds.
Because of this, today’s teacher needs to add a new skill set to their repertoire to be successful. In this today’s podcast, we will discuss the 8 key attributes that successful digital age teachers possess.
The United States entered the 21st century as the world’s sole superpower. Our diplomatic strength, military might, financial resources, and technological innovation were, and continue to be, the envy of the world.
However, in the crucial area of education, the U.S. lags behind many other developed countries. Although the U.S. spends more per student than almost any other country in the world, international exams have demonstrated that we consistently perform well behind countries such as South Korea, China, Japan, and Finland in the areas of reading and math.
Why is it happening and what do we, as Americans, need to do to rise to the top again? Here are a few thoughts on that.
Consider what’s really important: more respect for education and teachers. China, Japan, and South Korea understand that well-educated workers are crucial for survival in the competitive global economy.
Thus, they place enormous emphasis on education, ensuring that their students are given not only foundational reading and math skills, but also that they are able to think creatively and solve problems. Their youth are poised to take on and conquer the world. Educating, hiring, and retaining high-quality teachers are key to lasting reform.
On the other hand, the teaching profession in America is undervalued, certainly in comparison with countries like Finland and South Korea.
Recognize that money doesn’t solve everything. School systems are using more money but have less to show for it. Test results, especially among the children from low socioeconomic backgrounds, are dismal. America has extraordinary natural resources, a solid, functioning democracy, and an excellent infrastructure, but unless we can reform our educational system to produce students who are able to take advantage of new technologies and compete in the global economy, we will cede our position as world leader.
Weigh the various factors that make or break a student’s education, especially community involvement. The educational system involves seven major players: the federal government, district authorities, the community, parents and family, the school administration, teachers, and the students themselves. In order to reform our schools, we must look at each of these players, investigating the interactions among them, and offering suggestions for bolstering involvement and efficacy between them.
In areas where schools are successful, community involvement is a critical element. In low socioeconomic communities, there is often a sense that schools are separate entities, run by elite elements that have little connection to the community. Perhaps the starkest difference between students from low socioeconomic environments and those from wealthier environments is the amount of parental involvement in students’ education.
Consider that it’s not just about the tests. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), while admirable, has also proven fundamentally flawed. It is not producing the anticipated results, and has had the effect of forcing schools to teach to the exam, rather than fostering a love of learning among students.
Use authority wisely. There is mounting evidence that the U. S. education system is failing our students. Appropriate engagement and direction by district authorities is crucial to creating a quality learning environment. Too often, cronyism, corruption, and misuse of resources diminish the influence of the district-level administration.
Society in general needs to understand that the lack of quality teachers, effective administration, and parental involvement are all factors that contribute to the current state of our educational system. The country must unite and work together to carry the responsibility of enriching and continuing America’s future via educational excellence. We must become supermen and superwomen.
What are your thoughts on how the American education system can reach elite status globally? Please leave a comment below.
Now that the first month of school is over, parents can get ready for the next milestone of the school year – they will soon get reports of the state tests their children took last year.
My estimates show that approximately 26 million students in public schools took statewide tests in reading and math last year. Many of them also took statewide tests in science. These tests provide important information to parents about how well their children are doing in school.
However, my research also shows that when parents receive their child’s test score report, they may have a tough time separating the important information from the statistical gibberish.
What’s more, the results might not even give them accurate information about their child’s academic growth.
Is your child ‘proficient’?
The No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002, required all states to set “achievement level standards” in reading and math for grades three through eight, and for one grade in high school, typically 10th or 11th grade. States were also required to develop tests to measure students’ level of “proficiency” on each test.
As a result, the test reports parents receive classify children into achievement levels such as “basic” or “proficient.” Each state decides what these classifications are called, but at least one category must signify “proficient.”
These achievement level categories are described on the test score reports, and so this information is easily understood by parents. For example, I find it helpful each year to see if my sons reach proficiency in each subject area.
But children’s test scores in a given year, and their achievement level, are not the only information reported in some states. A new statistical index, called a “student growth percentile,” is finding its way into the reports sent home to parents in 11 states. Twenty-seven states use this index for evaluating teachers as well.
Although a measure of students’ “growth” or progress sounds like a good idea, student growth percentiles have yet to be supported by research. In fact several studies suggest they do not provide accurate descriptions of student progress and teacher effectiveness.
What does it mean?
What exactly are “student growth percentiles”?
They are indexes proposed in 2008 by Damian W. Betebenner, a statistician who suggested they be used as a descriptive measure of students’ “academic growth” from one school year to the next. The idea was to describe students’ progress in comparison to their peers.
Like the growth charts pediatricians use to describe children’s height and weight, student growth percentiles range from a low of one to a high of 99. However, their calculation involves a lot more error than physical measurement such as height and weight. Our research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst indicates substantial error in their calculation.
Student growth percentiles are derived from test scores, which are not perfectly accurate descriptions of students’ academic proficiency: Test scores are influenced by many factors, such as the questions asked on a particular day, students’ temperament, their level of engagement when taking the test or just the methods used to score their answers.
Each student’s growth percentile is calculated using at least two different test scores, typically a year or more apart. The most recent test scores of a student are then compared to the most recent test scores of students who had similar scores in previous years. This is to see which of those students had higher or lower scores this year.
The problem, however, is that each of the calculations carries some measurement error. Further calculations only compound that error. So much so that the results end up with twice as much error. No statistical sophistication can erase this error.
The question is, why are so many states using such an unreliable measure?
Using it for accountability
The use of student growth percentiles is due in part to a desire to see how much students learn in a particular year, and to link that progress to accountability systems such as teacher evaluation.
In 2010, the Race-to-the-Top grant competition invited states to come up with innovative ways of using test scores to evaluate teachers, which paved the way for this new measure of “growth” to be quickly applied across many states.
However, the use of student growth percentiles began before research was conducted on their accuracy. Only now is there a sufficient body of research to evaluate them, and all studies point to the same conclusion – they contain a lot of error.
In addition to our research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, research on the accuracy of student growth percentiles has been conducted by education nonprofits such as WestEd, Educational Testing Serviceand other research institutions. Researchers J.R. Lockwood and Katherine E. Castellanorecently concluded that “A substantial research base already notes that student growth percentile estimates for individual students have large errors.”
However, many states seem to be unaware of these research findings. Massachusetts even goes so far as to classify children with growth percentiles less than 40 as “lower growth” and children with growth percentiles greater than 60 as “higher growth.”
Measuring teacher performance
As I mentioned earlier, 27 states are using student growth percentiles to classify teachers as “effective” or “ineffective.” Research on the use of growth percentiles for this purpose indicates they could underestimate the performance of the most effective teachers, and overestimate the performance of the least effective teachers – the exact opposite of what these states are trying to do with their teacher evaluation systems.
A recent report by WestEd evaluated the use of student growth percentiles for evaluating teachers and concluded they “did not meet a level of stability” that would be needed for such high-stakes decisions.
Let’s go back to traditional measures
I believe student growth percentiles have taken us a step backwards in the use of educational tests to improve student learning.
Traditional measures of children’s performance on educational tests, such as whether they are “proficient” in a given year and their actual test scores, give a good idea of how well they performed in math or reading in a particular year.
These traditional percentile ranks are still reported on many educational tests, just like they were when we as parents were in school. Traditional percentile ranks compared us to a national or state group in a given year, rather than comparing us to how other kids in the nation or state were “growing” across different tests they took in different years, as student growth percentiles attempt to do.
Given what we now know about student growth percentiles, my advice to parents is not only to ignore them on their children’s test score reports, but also to contact their state department of education and ask why they are reporting such an unreliable statistic.
Developing measures of how much students have learned over the course of a year is a good goal. Unfortunately, student growth percentiles do not do a good job of measuring that.
As an English teacher in Oklahoma’s Moore Public Schools, I was recruited by some textbook providers to help them create content. It was a lot of fun, and I was happy to make some extra money doing it. But there are so many teachers in our district who are much more talented than I am. If I was developing curriculum materials that school systems across the nation were purchasing, they certainly could be doing this, too.
So when I became a technology integration specialist for the district, one of my long-term goals was to leverage the expertise of our teachers in creating high-quality digital content.
Teachers are already scouring the web for videos, articles, and other free instructional resources, then pulling these together into coherent lessons and adding their own valuable context to help students understand the material or promote deeper lines of inquiry.
My thought was, why don’t we take some of the money we’re hemorrhaging on expensive, print-based textbooks that aren’t interactive and don’t effectively capture students’ imagination—and use it to pay our teachers more money for their efforts instead?
Our vision is to create a central repository of exemplary digital content that is developed and curated by teachers, for teachers in our district. All teachers would have access to these shared instructional materials. Not all teachers would be required to contribute, but those who do could receive a stipend for their work if it’s approved as a district-vetted lesson or unit.
This would allow us to use our most powerful assets—our teachers—to their fullest potential, while also recognizing and giving value to teachers for the lesson planning and content creation they already do so well.
That’s important, because in Oklahoma, our teachers are among the lowest paid in the nation—and many leave the profession after only a few years. Honoring their talents and contributions could help stop this mass exodus of young teachers as well as veteran content experts and keep them in our schools.
To realize this vision, we needed to have a technology platform that would support teachers in creating and sharing digital lessons. We found this platform in Ogment, which helped us create curriculum by making it easier to grab digital content, including what we found on the web, and turn that into useable lessons for our classrooms.
Part of the problem is not the lack of resources, but rather the overabundance of resources. Every teacher knows how much great content exists online—but managing it all can be a nightmare. Ogment has let our teachers clip videos, articles, games, and other internet resources and put them into lessons or presentations with a simple drag-and-drop process. Then, they can embed questions within a lesson to check for students’ understanding or prompt further discussion—and they can easily share their lessons with other teachers.
Our teachers have used the service to “flip” their classrooms and even personalize instruction. For instance, Tiffany Truesdell, a math teacher at Westmoore High School, says she has used Ogment to make customized lessons for her students.
“I can assign a lesson that presents all the material, and as students go through the lesson, I can have questions that check for their understanding just as if I were presenting the material in class. I can pull videos from any website to enhance the lesson, and if I only want a small section of the video, Ogment lets me assign just that portion of the video in my lesson,” she says.
“Ogment also allows me to differentiate a lesson. For example, if I have a student on an IEP who needs multiple choice, but I want the other students to have a free response question, I can create the lesson once but with differentiated questions. When the questions come up, it will give the IEP student the multiple choice question instead.”
Mrs. Truesdell’s example shows that with the right technology, our district can build a shared repository of lessons that is truly usable. More importantly, a system like this allows our teachers to apply their talents and reignite their passion for creating great content.
We are working toward a model in which we pay teachers extra for the content they create and share through this tool. We’re not there yet; we’re still trying to free up the funding to be able to do this.
But when we come up with the funding to realize our vision, we’ll be able to pay our teachers extra for creating and sharing top-notch lessons—rewarding teachers for their work and restoring professionalism to the field.
Brandon Wilmarth is a technology integration specialist for Moore Public Schools in Oklahoma.
We’ve all heard of studies claiming that attractive people enjoy advantages, such as earning more money and are generally perceived as being smarter. Two economists, Rey Hernandez-Julian and Christina Peters, set out to determine exactly why this is. They hypothesized that perhaps other factors come into play such as confidence, various personality traits or greater effort given, not solely appearance that influences these benefits. They set out to Metropolitan State University of Denver to test their theory, with some interesting results.
Overall, attractive students did receive better grades than their less attractive peers. However, when taking online courses, more attractive students didn’t receive better grades. The more attractive the student, the larger the difference in grades between traditional and online classes. In other words, in virtual classes where students couldn’t be seen, the difference in grades between the more and less attractive students narrowed.
Peters, an associate professor at MSU Denver told the Washington Post, “we really thought it was just that more attractive people have other personality traits, other skills. But it does appear to be some type of actual discrimination on the part of the professors. That surprised us.” The study also determined that better looking professors were ranked higher by their students as well.
Though more attractive students did receive higher grades in traditional in-person classes, the difference was small. For example, the deviation would be from an A- to a B+ for the less attractive student. Still the fact that the bias exists at all is concerning.
The question now becomes if professors do possess these biases, how can they be fixed? It is likely not being done intentionally so it will take a commitment to consciously not grading in a biased fashion to avoid. Is it even possible to enforce something like that?
What do you think? Do attractive students fare better in class?
As more and more governors and local politicians denounce Common Core initiatives, and more states officially back away from the standards, the debate over the place and effectiveness of Common Core heats up. There is a lot of talk about students, but what about teachers? After all, they are the people who are most accountable for any standards and testing systems that are put in place. They are also the ones who see firsthand how education policies impact students. So what do teachers say about Common Core and PARCC testing?
• 75 percent support Common Core, says a May 2013 American of Federation (AFT) poll that surveyed 800 teachers.
• 76 percent strongly, or somewhat, support Common Core based on an Education Next Survey from 2013.
• More than three-fourths support Common Core Standards “wholeheartedly” or with some minor reservations, according to a September 2013 National Education Association member survey.
• 73 percent of teachers that specializes in math, science, social studies and English language arts are “enthusiastic” about the implementation of Common Core standards in their classrooms, from a 2013 Primary Sources poll of 20,000 educators.
A higher amount of elementary teachers are optimistic about Common Core than their high school counterparts. A survey conducted by The Hechinger Report Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation found that just 41 percent of high school teachers are positive about Common Core standards. A recent survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals found that more than 80 percent of principals (out of 1,000 from 14 states) say that Common Core standards have the potential to increase student skill mastery, create meaningful assessments and improve areas like conceptual understanding.
These are just a few examples of studies of educators and administrators that relate directly to Common Core initiatives, but each one lists well over a majority who back the standards to some degree. This, despite the fact that many parents and legislators cite “unfairness” to teachers as a reason to dissolve the standards on a national level. In fact, this idea that all teachers somehow “hate” Common Core or are against the standards being taught is just not true. Yet this widely held public belief has led to even greater fervor when it comes to Common Core, PARCC testing and the related lessons in classrooms.
You may notice that many of these studies I mention are a little bit outdated. Even something from six months ago does not take teachers’ true feelings into account following teaching the standards, and facing assessments on them. Implementation aside, though, based on the criteria alone teachers appear to think that Common Core is a step in the right direction for the students in their classrooms.
Some teachers’ unions are calling for delayed implementation of the standards, for several reasons including the fact that materials have not yet made it to all the classrooms (which makes assessments based on those materials unfair, and impossible). These groups are not asking for states to abandon Common Core though. There is a difference.
It seems that the basis of Common Core is a solid one, then, when it comes to the people who understand teaching the most. Today’s teachers are in overcrowded, underfunded classrooms with higher accountability standards placed on them than ever before. If there truly was an unfair setup, teachers would certainly be the first ones to point it out.
I think that we need to stop using teachers as a reason to abolish Common Core standards. There are other reasons perhaps to take another look at these initiatives and modify them – but assuming that teachers are against them (and therefore everyone else should be) is a false pretense.
Are you a teacher that likes or dislikes Common Core standards?
By now, just about every American parent has seen the reports that American schools rank well below schools in countries such as China and Japan. Or maybe they’ve heard President Obama declare a “dropout crisis.”
The abundance of news reports and discouraging case studies has created panic among education stakeholders, who want to know why American school systems are failing. Many Americans believe that only a small percentage of leaders understand the complexities of the school system, and that those who do understand use their knowledge to justify the mediocre performance of our teachers and students.
It’s not hard to see why this is the typical opinion. Maybe it’s because:
1. The American school system is the best-financed system in the world, but is one of the lowest performing in the developed world.
2. The American school system as a whole has an appalling performance record. For children living in urban environments, the story is even more alarming. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are often educated in dilapidated schools where the too many educators lack the credentials and skills necessary to perform their duties adequately.
3. High student-to-teacher ratios are found in most urban schools, and these schools often lack the resources to deal with the diverse challenges they face, including unruly student behavior.
Education has been called the great equalizer, but for students living in poverty-stricken urban areas it is little more than a babysitting service and a place to get a hot meal.
4. No Child Left Behind was a giant mess. Many people question whether the No Child Left Behind Act has contributed to achieving academic success. Although NCLB was well intentioned, it has not lived up to the hopes of government or schools. In the eyes of some, NCLB has actually contributed to subpar academics becoming even worse. If American educators and school personnel do not make a concerted effort to develop effective measures to hold schools accountable for the education of all of our children, then the education crisis will continue.
There is an exception to every rule: some urban school systems are providing a quality education. Unfortunately, however, only a small number of school systems meet the state and federal government student performance requirements.
5. For underperforming urban school systems, a lot of the “plans for change” are full of hot air. At least, they often seem to be.
The problem usually lies with the inability to sustain existing reform efforts and initiatives. Mayors and school superintendents in these areas often concoct grandiose reform plans that are merely political devices meant to woo voters into believing they genuinely care about educational reform.
It is sad and sobering to realize that often, politicians create school reform to gain popularity and votes. It is discouraging to realize that our children’s futures might be used as a political device to win elections.
6. Finally, people are too busy trying to play the blame game. Politicians are not the only people at fault for the shoddy education American children are receiving, but no one will take responsibility for subpar educational environments. If administrators were asked who was at fault, they might point to a lack of parental involvement and too few quality teachers.
If teachers were asked who was at fault they might also cite a lack of parental involvement and ineffective administration.
If parents were asked who was at fault they might blame teachers and school administrators.
Society in general seems to conclude that the lack of quality teachers, effective administration, and parental involvement are all factors contributing to educational failure.
Whatever the reason, Americans have become the laughing stock of the free world when it comes to K-12 education. The solution, of course, is for the country to unite and work together to carry the responsibility of enriching and continuing America’s future via educational excellence without playing the “blame game.” But, realistically, where does that begin?
Please leave your thoughts in the comments section.
