Dozens of studies have shown that employees who are treated with respect are the happiest and the most productive. And it makes sense – who would be happy if they’re constantly treated poorly?
The same truth applies to professors (who are also employees). When professors feel disrespected by the administration, the unions, and by their students, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be happy.
Unhappy professors almost always have unhappy classrooms and office hours. There’s no scientific data on that, but anecdotal evidence from everyone who has ever had a cranky professor speaks to its truth.
As students, you can do something to help. You can show your professors some respect.
How You Can Help Your Professors Create a Better Classroom
The best way to show professors respect isn’t to treat them irreverently or try to become their friend. Rather, it’s better to be a good student. Here are three ways to do that.
Pay Attention
Professors are in the classroom to teach, to impart their expertise on students, and to guide young people with an interest in the subject they’ve dedicated their lives to. So, standing in front of a classroom of students who are clearly not paying attention and not giving any clear indication as to what the professors could be doing better, well, that will make a professor upset.
Imagine spending four hours preparing a lecture to share with a group of students only to realize that many of those students aren’t even willing to hide how much they don’t care. How would that make you feel? Now, imagine doing it week after week.
We’d all be cranky.
Be Honest
The second best way to show your professor some respect is to be honest. Professors get wild emails filled with incredible excuses that seem to imply students think their teachers are stupid. Avoid being too honest, but don’t make up an absurd lie. And if you’re going to provide a lame excuse, own it and apologize.
Don’t Be Demanding
Asking for recorded lectures, detailed PowerPoints, class notes, practice tests and extensive feedback is often confused with being a good student. But it’s more akin to asking the professor to do your studying for you.
Professors are happy to provide clarification and help you overcome obstacles. But you’ve bought an expensive book and have access to your notes and the library – all those resources provide everything you need to pass the class.
Professors are balancing their teaching, research, and administrative duties all while having their jobs threatened on an annual basis. You can help keep them happy by being a decent student.
What else can students do to improve the classroom environment? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Think back to your carefree days of life as a college student. Loans and grants may have financed your education so you could concentrate on studying. You didn’t have to worry about living expenses. All you had to do was go to class and get decent grades.
University students today have similar experiences. Many students live off campus in luxury apartments, unwilling to delay gratification in the pursuit of maintaining a lifestyle similar to what their parents enjoy. Co-eds share expenses with roommates, and they enjoy deeply discounted amenities during their time in college.
College life gives students an unreal sense of living expenses.
What college costs
Average college costs are $24,610 per year at a moderate four-year public university and $49,320 per year at a private school. Those estimates include tuition, books, fees, room, and board. Students still must factor in the cost of purchasing personal items, having a social life, and maintaining a personal vehicle. These expenses can cost an additional $250-$500/month.
University students are spending an average of $41,165 per year of study.
What students do not realize is that this standard of living is subsidized – by the government, the university, and often, by the students’ parents.
The real cost of living
Multiple those yearly costs by four and college students will see how much it costs to replicate their current standard of living. Leaving university life will be costly as well as eye-opening.
The lifestyle enjoyed in college would cost, on average, $160,000 per year. That estimate does not take any indebtedness into account. Many students consider going into debt as much a part of the college experience as attending football games. They know they won’t face that debt until they graduate.
They have unprecedented levels of debt without understanding the consequences of creating that indebtedness and delaying repayment. The average undergraduate has $37,172 in student loan debt and will take 21 years to pay it off.
At an annual average salary of $49,785, recent college graduates entering the workforce will not be able to maintain the lifestyle they enjoyed in college.
A new lifestyle
The shocking difference between college life and living as an adult on ones own is what has caused one-third of college graduates to move back in with their parents, a significant other, or friends.
It may be one way to avoid the sticker shock that comes from having an unreal sense of living expenses.
If you’ve ever found yourself reciting the phrase, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you’ve likely observed older coworkers, and family members refuse smartphones and tablets. As a professor, this kind of attitude is unacceptable. Your students need an education infused with technology, and it’s your responsibility to become a tech-expert yourself.
We’re breaking down the top 10 habits of tech-savvy professors! Implement these in your professional life and regain control of the classroom.
They Invest in Personal Development: If you’re new to the world of tech, do everything you can to invest in yourself. Invest time in trips to the library for reading material, invest money in online courses that offer advanced instruction and speak to higher-ups at your university about opportunities for additional training. Remember: great schools make internal professional development a priority!
They Practice, Practice, Practice: Sometimes this means investing in new equipment or speaking to the school board about implementing new classroom resources. After all, to learn how to use technology, you must have technology that’s easily accessible. Once the physical resources are available, anyone can master an unfamiliar digital landscape by taking the time to practice, practice, and practice. We recommend having an iPad or digital device at home that mimics tools students use in the classroom for additional, at-home practice. It’s better to make mistakes in the privacy of your own home than a lecture hall filled with 200 students.
They Listen (To Their Own Students!): Let’s face it. Unless you’re Steve Wozniak, the students in your classroom can handle a tablet better than you can. As a professor, it’s difficult to feel like your students know more than you. But don’t be afraid to ask them questions and listen to their advice. Get the perspective of students who love online learning and figure out how their minds adapt to new tools. Your students can be your best tech resource if you allow them to be.
They Have Confidence: The less certain you feel handling technology, the less motivation you’ll have to continue mastering new resources. The more courses you take, the more materials you read, and the more Google searches you navigate through, the more inspired you’ll feel to continue educating yourself. Build up your confidence through practice and don’t let little mistakes discourage you.
They Focus on the Purpose: Every edtech tool implemented should be applied with a particular purpose in mind, whether that’s to address students struggling with dense material or inspire students to improve their research skills. Likewise, every tech-savvy professors understand why they’re learning what they’re learning, whether that’s to improve their ability to navigate classroom web pages or understand how to pull information from an online database quickly. If you don’t understand why it’s important for you to master a particular program, you’ll never successfully communicate that information to your students.
They Create Their Own Web Presence: Create your own blog, website, or social profile. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn navigating a web page that you’re responsible for managing and updating. You’ll learn to troubleshoot, you’ll master the principles of digital design, you’ll figure out how to communicate effectively with other influencers online, and you may even learn basic coding.
They’re Fearless: Like anything else, don’t be afraid of failure. Don’t be afraid to troubleshoot and, when things get especially tough, don’t be afraid to ask questions. Even professionals who’ve mastered tools like Adobe Photoshop and Avid Media Composer have, at one point, doubted their ability to do so. Once you have a little experience under your belt, technology begins to feel less frightening and more enjoyable.
They Communicate: Communicate with fellow faculty members who’ve been in your shoes, communicate with higher-ups who’ve recommended resources to other professors and communicate with your students. If you’ve got a classroom full of tech pros, figure out how they’ve learned to adapt quickly and implement their advice.
They Stay Up-To-Date on Tech Trends: Read articles about software updates, follow the launch of new products, watch news stories on cutting-edge technology, and subscribe to blogs outlining digital trends. Once you’ve got an understanding of the modern tech landscape, mastering specific tools becomes much easier.
They Love Change: This takes serious practice. The tech world is constantly evolving, and the minute you revert back to old resources, you’ll stop learning. Accept software updates with open arms, listen to fellow professors who’ve implemented tools in their classrooms that you’re unfamiliar with, and make an effort to shed stubborn habits. Otherwise, the modern world will leave you behind.
Technology is a part of the professional landscape. It requires knowledge of digital citizenship, and it allows for effective communication and collaboration. Not to mention, many schools that have implemented tech programs for students have witnessed incredible student growth, increased efficiency, and higher test scores. Like it or not, technology is here to stay. It’s your job as an educator to prepare students for the dangers our digital landscape presents while instilling essential habits for healthy tech consumption. For that to happen, you as the professor must master technology and become savvier than those who’ve grown up with an iPad glued to their hands.
If you have children, you are likely to worry about their safety – you show them safe places in your neighborhood and you teach them to watch out for lurking dangers.
But you may not be aware of some online dangers to which they are exposed through their schools.
There is a good chance that people and organizations you don’t know are collecting information about them while they are doing their schoolwork. And they may be using this information for purposes that you know nothing about.
In the U.S. and around the world, millions of digital data points are collected daily from children by private companies that provide educational technologies to teachers and schools. Once data are collected, there is little in law or policy that prevents companies from using the information for almost any purpose they wish.
Our research explores how corporate entities use their involvement with schools to gather and use data about students. We find that often these companies use the data they collect to market products, such as junk food, to children.
For example, “Adaptive learning” technologies record students’ keystrokes, answers and response times. On-line surveys collect information about students’ personalities. Communication software stores the communications between students, parents and teachers; and presentation software stores students’ work and their communications about it.
In addition, teachers and schools may direct children to work on branded apps or websites that may collect, or allow third parties to collect, IP addresses and other information from students. This could include the ads children click on, what they download, what games they play, and so on.
How student data are used
When “screen time” is required for school, parents cannot limit or control it. Companies use this time to find out more about children’s preferences, so they they can target children with advertising and other content with a personalized appeal.
Children might see ads while they are working in educational apps. In other cases, data might be collected while students complete their assignments. Information might also be stored and used to better target them later.
For instance, a website might allow a third party to collect information, including the type of browser used, the time and date, and the subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over by a child. The third party could then use that information to target the child with advertisements later.
We have found that companies use the data to serve ads (for food, clothing, games, etc.) to the children via their computers. This repeated, personalized advertising is designed specifically to manipulate children to want and buy more things.
Indeed, over time this kind of advertising can threaten children’s physical and psychological well-being.
Consequences of targeted advertising
Food is the most heavily advertised class of products to children. The heavy digital promotion of “junk” food is associated with negative health outcomes such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
Additionally, advertising, regardless of the particular product it may sell, also “sells” to children the idea that products can make them happy.
Research shows that children who buy into this materialist worldview are more likely to suffer from anxiety, depression and other psychological distress.
Teenagers who adopt this worldview are more likely to smoke, drink and skip school. One set of studies showed that advertising makes children feel far from their ideals for themselves in terms of how good a life they lead and what their bodies look like.
Additionally, nearly 300 software companies signed a self-regulatory Student Privacy Pledge to safeguard student privacy regarding the collection, maintenance and use of student personal information.
First of all, most laws, including the Student Privacy Pledge, focus on Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII includes information that can be used to determine a person’s identity, such as that person’s name, social security number or biometric information.
Companies can address privacy concerns by making digital data anonymous (i.e., not including PII in the data that are collected, stored or shared). However, data can easily be “de-anonymized.” And, children don’t need to be identified with PII in order for their online behavior to be tracked.
Second, bills designed to protect student privacy sometimes expressly preserve the ability of an operator to use student information for adaptive or personalized learning purposes. In order to personalize the assignments that a program gives a student, it must by necessity track that student’s behavior.
This weakens the privacy protections the bills otherwise offer. Although it protects companies that collect data for adaptive learning purposes only, it also provides a loophole that enables data collection.
While education technologies show promise in some areas, they also hold the potential to harm students profoundly if they are not properly understood, thoughtfully managed and carefully controlled.
Parents, teachers and administrators, who serve as the closest protectors of children’s privacy at their schools, and legislators responsible for enacting relevant policy, need to recognize the threats of such data tracking.
The first step toward protecting children is to know that that such targeted marketing is going on while children do their schoolwork. And that it is powerful.
In our five-part series, Making Sense of Exams, we’ll discuss the purpose of exams, whether they can be done online, overcoming exam anxiety, and effective revision techniques.
It’s a pattern many of us have likely experienced in the past.
You prep for an exam and all the information seems coherent and simple. Then you sit for an exam and suddenly all the information you learned is gone. You struggle to pull something up – anything – but the harder you fight, the further away the information feels. The dreaded mind blank.
So what is going on?
To understand what’s happening during a mind blank, there are three brain regions we have to become familiar with.
The first is the hypothalamus. For all intents and purposes, we can conceive of the hypothalamus as the bridge between your emotions and your physical sensations. In short, this part of the brain has strong connections to the endocrine system, which, in turn, is responsible for the type and amount of hormones flowing throughout your body.
The second is the hippocampus. A subcortical structure, the hippocampus plays an incredibly important role in both the learning and retrieval of facts and concepts. We can conceive of the hippocampus as a sort of memory door through which all information must pass in order to enter and exit the brain.
The third is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Located behind your eyes, this is the calm, cool, rational part of your brain. All the things that suggest you, as a human being, are in control are largely mediated here: things like working memory (the ability to hold and manipulate information in your mind), impulse control (the ability to dampen unwanted behavioural responses), decision making (the ability to select a proper response between competing possibilities), etc.
How a mind blank happens
When you are preparing for an exam in a setting that is predictable and relatively low-stakes, you are able to engage in cold cognition. This is the term given to logical and rational thinking processes.
In our particular instance, when you are studying at home, seated in your comfortable bed, listening to your favourite music, the hypothalamus slows down the production and release of key stress hormones (outlined below) while the PFC and hippocampus are confidently chugging along unimpeded.
However, when you enter a somewhat unpredictable and high-stakes exam situation, you enter the realm of hot cognition. This is the term given to non-logical and emotionally driven thinking processes. Hot cognition is typically triggered in response to a clear threat or otherwise highly stressful situation.
So an exam can serve to trigger a cascade of unique thoughts – for instance,
If I fail this exam I may not get into a good university or graduate program. Then I may not get a good job. Then I may perish alone and penniless.
With this type of loaded thinking, it’s no wonder that those taking tests sometimes perceive an exam as a threat.
When a threat is detected, the hypothalamus stimulates the generation of several key stress hormones, including norepinephrine and cortisol.
Large levels of norepinephrine enter the PFC and serve to dampen neuronal firing and impair effective communication. This impairment essentially clears out your working memory (whatever you were thinking about is now gone) and stops the rational, logical PFC from influencing other brain regions.
At the same time, large levels of cortisol enter the hippocampus and not only disrupt activation patterns there, but also (with prolonged exposure) kill hippocampal neurons. This serves to impede the ability to access old memories and skews the perception and storage of new memories.
In short, when an exam is interpreted as a threat and a stress response is triggered, working memory is wiped clean, recall mechanisms are disrupted, and emotionally laden hot cognition driven by the hypothalamus (and other subcortical regions) overrides the normally rational cold cognition driven by the PFC.
Taken together, this process leads to a mind blank, making logical cognitive activity difficult to undertake.
Is there any way to avoid this?
The good news – there are some things you can do to stave off mind blanks.
The first concerns de-stressing. Through concerted practice and application of cognitive-behavioural and/or relaxation techniques aimed at reframing any perceived threat during an exam situation, those taking tests can potentially abate the stress response and re-enter a more rational thinking process.
Another concerns preparation. The reason the armed forces train new recruits in stressful situations that simulate active combat scenarios is to ensure cold cognition during future engagements.
The more a person experiences a particular situation, the less likely he or she is to perceive such a situation as threatening.
So when preparing for an exam, try not to do so in a highly relaxed soothing environment – rather, try to push yourself in ways that will mimic the final testing scenario you are preparing for.
In January 2015, a young woman was sexually assaulted while unconscious behind a dumpster on the campus of Stanford University. The victim was visiting campus to attend a fraternity party.
Last week, the perpetrator, Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, was sentenced to six months in jail and three years of probation. The lenient sentencing of the star athlete has provoked public outrage – on the Stanford campus and nationwide.
Scholars writing for The Conversation have been pointing to the enormous risks students face on campus. They have raised questions about whether universities are doing enough to protect students.
The most vulnerable time is the first two months of the freshman year. In fact, to symbolize the danger, the first few months of the fall freshman semester are now commonly called the sexual assault “red zone.”
A public awareness campaign regarding sexual assault on campus. Wolfram Burner, CC BY-NC
Sarah Cook, professor and associate dean at Georgia State University, wrote about President Obama’s efforts in 2014 at convening a White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. She pointed out how the 2013 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SaVE Act), which “requires colleges to report more crimes” in their annual Clery Act reports, could have led to the “upsurge” in campus investigations.
Scholars also pointed out how like most other problems, campus assault does not exist in isolation. Leah Daigle, associate professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology, Georgia State University, noted that it is, above all, the party culture on campuses that puts students at risk.
About 65 percent of college students consume alcohol and just under half engage in binge drinking. Her research looks at which students are most vulnerable.
Lack of information
Knowing that students are at risk, are universities and colleges doing enough?
Elizabeth Englander, professor of psychology at Bridgewater State University and director of the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center (MARC), observed,
Only one-third or fewer of the websites had any information that might be useful to a victim of sexual assault, such as a hotline number, the importance of preserving evidence or how to report sexual assault to police.
To make campuses safer, Georgia State’s Curcio emphasized that studies should be conducted that examine the locations where sexual assaults were more likely to occur.
And, as Englander said, schools need to make sure everyone has access to quality information. However,
only 15 percent of university websites offered any information about how to file an anonymous report.
In this political climate, academic and public libraries may be in danger. The existence of vast amounts of information – a lot of it free – on the Internet might suggest that the library has outlived its usefulness.
But has it? The numbers tell a very different story.
In spite of the findings of a survey in which Americans say they are using public libraries less, the usage numbers reported by libraries indicate the opposite.
U.S. public library usage statistics: 1993-2012. Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, CC BY
Here’s what data on circulation (books and other items checked out to library users) and annual visits to public libraries reveal.
The number of books and other items borrowed from U.S. public libraries increased from 6.5 items per capita in 1993 to 8.0 items per capita in 2012 (up 23 percent). Over the same time span, the number of visits to U.S. public libraries rose 22.5 percent.
The one major public library usage measure that did decrease was the number of times library users asked questions of reference librarians, dropping 18 percent from 1993 to 2012.
The popularity of U.S. public libraries is, it seems, at least as strong as it was before the web became a household word (much less a household necessity).
Rise of the e-book
For academic libraries, the data are more mixed. Circulation of physical items (books, DVDs, etc.) in U.S. academic libraries has been on a steady decline throughout the web era, falling 29 percent from 1997 to 2011.
Total circulations (in 1000s) by U.S. degree-granting post-secondary institution libraries: 1997 through 2011. Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY
More tellingly, over the same time span and among the same academic libraries, the annual number of circulations (of books, DVDs, etc.) per full-time student dropped from 20 circulations to 10 (down 50 percent).
Number of circulation transactions per full-time student in U.S. degree-granting post-secondary institution libraries: 1997 through 2011. Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY
That fewer books are circulating is hardly a surprise given the vast amount of scholarly information (the bulk of it purchased with academic library budget dollars) that is now available to students via their electronic device of choice.
Electronic scholarly journals have driven their print-format predecessors to obsolescence, if not quite extinction, while e-books have become increasingly plentiful.
In 2012, U.S. academic libraries collectively held 252,599,161 e-books. This means that over the course of about a decade, U.S. academic libraries have acquired e-books equal to about one-fourth the total number of physical books, bound volumes of old journals, government documents and other paper materials acquired by those same libraries since 1638 – the year Harvard College established the first academic library in what is now the United States.
E-books are not only plentiful, they are popular with academic users (in spite of some shortcomings in usability). For example, data provided to the author show that when the University of California, San Diego made a collection of academic e-books available to students and faculty through the popular JSTOR interface, the usage numbers proved impressive.
In just under a year, UCSD students and faculty used 11,992 JSTOR e-books, racking up 59,120 views and 34,258 downloads. In response to user demand, the UCSD Library outright purchased over 3,100 of the titles offered via JSTOR, making those e-books a permanent part of the UCSD library collection.
Who needs the encyclopedia?
As with circulation numbers, reference questions asked of librarians in U.S. academic libraries have undergone a sharp decline – standing now at 56,000,000 per year, down 28.4 percent from 16 years ago. For the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries, the average number of reference transactions dropped from 6,056 per week in 1994 to 1,294 per week in 2012 (down 79 percent).
Average number of reference transactions per week for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries: 1994-2012. Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY
Today, students access information digitally. The Google app on their smartphones allows students to look up information they once would have found only in analog, library-owned reference sources. And as for that old reference warhorse, the printed encyclopedia – Britannica churned out its final set in 2010.
Further contributing to the decline of in-person reference service is the fact that students are increasingly able to consult with academic librarians via the Internet.
By 2012, 77 percent of U.S. academic libraries were offering reference services via email or web chat. Currently, over 400 academic libraries provide around-the-clock, chat-based reference service as members of OCLC’s 24/7 Reference Cooperative, a global library cooperative that provides shared technology services.
Given only the above numbers, the hasty conclusion would seem to be that everything is online and nobody uses academic libraries any more.
But not so fast.
Even while circulation and reference transaction numbers were tanking, the data show a steady increase in the number of people actually setting foot in academic libraries.
The cumulative weekly gate count for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries increased nearly 39 percent from 2000 to 2012. Library gate count data for all U.S. institutions of higher education show a similar (38 percent) increase from 1998 to 2012.
Cumulative weekly gate count for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries: 2000-2012. Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY
So if students are not going to the academic library to access print collections or ask reference questions, why are they going at all?
The lure of the academic library
I believe that students are trekking to academic libraries because academic libraries have been actively reinventing themselves to meet the needs of today’s students.
Academic library square footage is increasingly being converted from space to house printed books to space for students to study, collaborate, learn and, yes, socialize.
Besides providing some of the last refuges of quiet in a noisy, distraction-filled world, academic libraries have taken such student-friendly steps as relaxing (or eliminating) longstanding prohibitions on food and drink, providing 24/7 study spaces and generally recreating themselves to be comfortable and friendly rather than cold and forbidding.
Examples of how forward-leaning academic libraries are attracting students include:
The Grand Valley State University Library’s Knowledge Market provides students with peer consultation services for research, writing, public speaking, graphic design, and analyzing quantitative data. Among a number of specialized spaces, the library offers rooms devoted to media preparation, digital collaboration, and presentation practice.
Library space is changing: three girls using a computer at San Jose library. San José Library, CC BY-SA
The libraries of North Carolina State University (NCSU) offer Makerspace areas where students get hands-on practice with electronics, 3D printing and scanning, cutting and milling, creating wearables, and connecting objects to the Internet of Things. In addition, NCSU students can visit campus libraries to make use of digital media labs, media production studios, music practice rooms, visualization spaces and presentation rooms, among other specialized spaces.
The Ohio State University Library Research Commons offers not only a Writing Center but also consultation services for copyright, data management plans, funding opportunities and human subjects research. Specialized spaces in the library include conference and project rooms, digital visualization and brainstorming rooms, and colloquia and classroom spaces.
For several generations, academic librarians were primarily preoccupied with the role of their library buildings as portals to information, print and later digital. In recent years, we have reawakened to the fact that libraries are fundamentally about people – how they learn, how they use information and how they participate in the life of a learning community. As a result, we are beginning to design libraries that seek to restore parts of the library’s historic role as an institution of learning, culture and intellectual community.
Any library, public or academic, able to live up to so important a role will never outlive its usefulness.
A professor shares her tuneful tips for helping ELLs learn what to expect from English.
Dr. Nancy Drescher is a professor at Minnesota State University in Mankato, and has taught both children and adult English language learners (ELLs) in the U.S. and abroad. In this interview, she offers best practices for teaching these students to read, understand structure, and gain background knowledge.
The Edvocate: You believe that simply teaching English vocabulary words and grammar is not the best way to go about teaching ELL students. If that’s not the best way, then what is?
Dr. Nancy Drescher: When it comes to teaching English to a non-native speaker, you first have to build context for the words in the learner’s mind. Rather than teaching a list of standalone words, it is more effective to teach vocabulary using collocations, idioms, and other common phrases. Being a good reader comes from knowing what to expect.
For instance, you would never ask someone for a jelly-and-peanut butter sandwich. It has all the right words, but a native speaker would never phase it that way. It would go against their expectations.
Since ELLs have no pre-built expectations for the language they’re learning, reading becomes a much longer process. They have to stop and process each word and its context individually instead of being able to view a text as a whole. Learning phrasing and how words fit within context helps ELLs build these expectations and facilitate their reading experience.
The Edvocate: So you’re saying this is necessary for reading, too, not just for speaking?
Dr. Drescher: Yes. Students coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds can have difficulty with reading because they are used to a different set of expectations, both in terms of how words go together and background experiences. Students who have grown up using standard English (that is the English expected in school) at home and who have experience similar to what teachers expect and naturally build on in their classrooms are at a distinct advantage when it comes to learning to read.
Building these expectations is a normal process of learning to read for any child, not just language learners. Adults often groan when their child asks to read the same book over and over again, but doing this is actually an important part of the process of building these language expectations. Hearing the same book over and over is comforting when children are in the midst of figuring out those expectations. Teachers then build on that initial experience with language structures, but when students come to school with different initial experiences (whether that is a completely different language or a non-standard variety) and their previously learned language doesn’t match that of the classroom and of books, it is much harder for teachers to make those connections and for students to make that transition.
One way teachers and students can make that transition a little easier is narrow reading. Narrow reading involves reading many books on one topic or in a series. The repetition builds expectations by way of building vocabulary and structures in context. This concept is applicable for language learners and for struggling readers in general. If a person reads 10 different books on a topic or in a series, each one will get progressively easier as students gain familiarity with the language and conceptual expectations related to that topic. Another way to build this language repetition is through music.
The Edvocate: Tell us a little more about how using music can help build these expectations you’re talking about.
Dr. Drescher: Educators have been using music in language teaching for years. Music can enhance a student’s ability to read, understand structure, and gain background knowledge. It also adds another learning style, which broadens the reach of the lesson being taught.
The Edvocate: How can music help enhance reading?
Dr. Drescher: Connecting music, language, and books makes language easier to remember. The repetitive nature of songs helps set linguistic expectations. An especially catchy song will remain in students’ heads long after the lesson has ended, enabling them to hold on to the information in an enjoyable format.
Music and songs can also make language learning enjoyable. This is especially helpful for younger children, but also true for adult learners. Songs don’t feel like a grammar drill. Music is something people do for fun, and every culture and group has its own songs. Music brings people together in a fun and engaging way.
The Edvocate: What sort of curriculum is necessary for teaching ELLs?
Dr. Drescher: A lot of times there isn’t a curriculum already in place for ELLs. The current push is to have inclusive classrooms, where ELL students and teachers integrate with mainstream classrooms. This makes it all the more important to find additional scaffolds and supports for students in these types of classrooms. These scaffolds will help everybody, but they are completely necessary for language learners.
The Edvocate: Are there any particular scaffolds you’d recommend?
Dr. Drescher: A few years ago, I started working with Cantata Learning. They create picture books and corresponding songs with educational content for pre-K–3 students. Cantata’s materials benefit language learners, but also mainstream students. Inspired by Cantata, I wrote a few connected lessons geared towards English language learners. The songs integrated well into lessons, and it was easy to find a song about a particular unit. That is the sort of thing I recommend. If we can bring in multiple ways for students to engage with the language we hope they will be able to use and the content we want them to learn without drilling and killing their love of books and learning, I think we will find the most success for all kids.
The Edvocate: What do you think is the key to teaching English language learners?
Dr. Drescher: You have to keep in mind, learning any language is challenging, but our culture sometimes treats these challenges differently depending on the language being learned. For instance, a child learning English as a second language is often seen as having a deficit when compared to other children. However, when a native English speaker is learning a second language, or is enrolled in a second language emersion school, this is often viewed as an impressive feat.
It’s important to remember that English language learners do have knowledge and experience in their own language and in the world. By learning English, they are taking on a second language in addition to the one they already know. They are used to a different set of expectations, and so ELL lessons need to meet learners where they are in order to build on what they already have.
“allocating the best teachers to the most challenging parts of a country; and providing teachers with the right mix of government incentives to remain in the profession and ensure all children are learning, regardless of their circumstances.”
It is clear we need good teachers, but just what makes for “teacher quality”? And can quality be systematically improved by public policy?
For 30 years I have been studying cultural expectations for what makes a good teacher, beginning with field work in a Tibetan refugee school and an ethnographic study of Japanese and American public schools conducted some years later. More recently, my colleague Alex Wiseman and I have been working on what researchers from around the world consider to be “teacher quality.”
The consensus is that teacher quality entails much more than just the way teachers deliver lessons in the classroom. Teacher quality is strongly affected by a teacher’s working conditions. Teachers working long hours, with low pay, in crowded schools cannot give each individual student the attention they need.
Simply raising the requirements for teacher certification, based on what has worked in some high-performing countries, is not effective. An effective policy requires changes at the level of teacher recruitment, teacher education and long-term support for professional development.
Quality is more than certification
Around the world, more than a dozen nations have recently engaged in efforts to rapidly reform their teacher education and certification systems. The United States, along with nations as diverse as France, India, Japan and Mexico, has sought to improve its educational system by reforming teacher certification or teacher education.
It is true that a teacher’s qualifications, experience, personality and instructional skills all play a role in contributing to “quality.” Teacher quality covers what teachers do outside the classroom: how responsive they are to parents and how much time they put into planning lessons or grading papers. Teaching certificates can make a difference toward ensuring teacher quality.
But that does not make for an effective policy. And here’s the problem: One, merely focusing on standards like certification is not enough. Two, the effect can vary by grade level or because of student background – so borrowing models from other countries is not the best strategy.
In the U.S., for example, a key part of the important legislation No Child Left Behind (NCLB)was to put a “qualified teacher” in every classroom. The law emphasized certification, a college degree and content specialization, but failed to identify teachers who knew how to implement reforms and who promoted critical thinking skills in their classrooms.
The law allows states to experiment with different types of teacher training academies and with measures of student progress other than just standardized tests.
Goal of American teachers different from Japanese
Moreover, teacher quality is context-dependent: What works in one country may not work in another, or even for another group of students.
Let’s take preschool or early elementary teachers as an example. At this age, many parents would look for teachers who are warm, caring and understand child development. But this, as we know, would change for high school students.
In high school, especially in college preparation courses, students and parents would expect teachers to focus on the lesson. The quality of their teaching would be judged by how well their students score on tests, not how well they are developing socially or emotionally.
Classroom goals vary: First grade English class in session in Japan. Colin Ryder, CC BY-NC-ND
Other than the age of the student, goals of the educational system would matter too. For example, American, Chinese and Japanese teachers take very different approaches to caring for small children and helping them learn basic academic skills. In their book, “Preschool in Three Cultures,” educational anthropologist Joe Tobin and others showed that Japanese preschool teachers are comfortable with classes of 20 students, and tend to tolerate noise and disorder that most American teachers would find uncomfortable.
By contrast, American teachers place great emphasis on one-on-one interactions between children and adults, especially in helping children learn to express their feelings. It is possible that a competent, “high-quality” teacher from Japan would likely feel incompetent and confused in a U.S. school, even if she was fluent in English.
Countries have their own challenges
That’s not all. National conditions impact teacher quality. In some nations, it is a struggle to retain good teachers and distribute them evenly.
For example, many low-income countries face challenges related to poverty, illness and labor shortages that create teacher shortages. Peter Wallet, a researcher at UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, shows that in many countries, national governments struggle to find enough teachers to staff their schools. He writes:
“The impact of HIV and AIDS in Tanzania for example meant that in 2006 an estimated 45,000 additional teachers were needed to make up for those who had died or left work because of illness.”
The loss of so many teachers places many children at risk of having no access to quality teachers. This basic lack of qualified teachers has been identified by UNESCO as the major barrier to providing access to quality education for all the world’s children.
The fact is that teaching is complex work. Teachers must build trust, increase motivation, research new methods of teaching, engage parents or caregivers and be adept at the social engineering of the classroom so that learning is not disrupted.
Effective teacher policy has to have at least three levels: It must provide clear goals for teacher education and skill development, it must provide “support to local institutions for the education of teachers” and it must address national demands for high quality education.
And in order to develop teacher quality, nations need to do far more that “borrow” policies from high-scoring nations. Nations can learn from one another, but this requires a systematic exchange of information about sets of policies, not just identifying one promising approach.
The International Summit on the Teaching Profession, an annual event that began in New York in 2011, is one example of this kind of global exchange that brings together governments and teacher unions for a dialogue.
To be effective, reforms need to have the support and input of teachers themselves. And, national and global leaders need to create more ways for teachers to provide suggestions, or criticism, of proposed reforms.
Leaked cabinet papers seen by the BBC suggest that back when she was home secretary, Theresa May wanted schools to carry out immigration checks and withdraw school places offered to children of parents unlawfully in the UK.
The leaked documents show that the proposals were vehemently opposed by the then-education secretary Nicky Morgan, who wrote to then prime minister, David Cameron, to warn on the “practical and presentational” risks of such measures. Using rather anodyne jargon, Morgan’s letter questioned the “deprioritisation of illegal migrants” proposed by May.
May’s suggestion to “deprioritise” places for these children also implies that they had been in some way prioritised in the school admission system in the first place – which is simply not the case. The law guarantees the right to education for all children of “compulsory school age” irrespective of their lack of immigration status and of the circumstances that led to it. But our research shows that even though these legal provisions exist, access to them has become increasingly difficult for these children.
This is fuelled by contradictory and frequently changing rules and regulations, political announcements and cuts to public spending. Along with broader reforms in the provision of public and children’s services. And research also shows that children’s well-being is bearing the brunt of these aggressive enforcement measures, which are targeted at parents.
May’s department wanted schools to withdraw places for some children. Shutterstock
In the context of the Conservative Party’s overall immigration goal – to reduce net migration in the UK – excluding children’s access to schooling would actually have little impact on numbers. And our research shows this type of legislation could also end up targeting UK-born children.
Our study estimated that of the 120,000 undocumented migrant children living in the UK, a large majority are either born in the UK or migrated at an early age. UK-born children make up around half of the undocumented child population, and according to existing legislation are entitled to British citizenship after ten years of residence in the country. So legislation such as this would produce a generation of disenfranchised youth – who are non-deportable as they don’t have any connection with other countries and yet excluded from society.
Outposts of border control
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme about the leaked proposals, the head of Ofsted, Michael Wilshaw, said: “I’m amazed and shocked by it. Schools should not be used for border control.” Yet schools are increasingly being turned into outposts for immigration control and enforcement.
Social workers have a duty to report suspected violations of immigration rules to the Home Office. But fears of being reported to the Home Office makes children and parents wary of interacting with teachers and support workers in the school settings.
A social worker based in a school in West London described the situation as “dehumanising” as it put frontline workers who advise irregular migrants at risk of losing their jobs:
Because of the dehumanising system of the Home Office, people like us, social workers and teachers, are forced to, there is no other word, to treat people like animals really, like we can’t support them. I could lose my job if they find out that I’m supporting a young person.
Immigration watch
But the ideas in this leaked proposal are not particularly new. The recently discussed and then withdrawn proposal for ID checks on school pupils fell into the same category. It is was a model of intervention that has already been piloted in universities where – despite some occasional resistance – checks on visa attendance sheets and immigration inspections have become commonplace.
There is however another aspect of this story that deserves attention: the timing. The leak coincided with the publication of the latest Office of National Statics figures on net migration which showed that, under the watch of May, immigration to the UK hit record levels prior to the Brexit vote in June 2016.
The influx meant net migration remained at a near-record high of 335,000: more than three times the government’s target to reduce annual net migration to below 100,000 a year. The ONS figures are very bad news for May’s government as they question the PM’s ability to deliver on one of the main promises she has made since taking office – curbing immigration.
And not surprisingly, the newly appointed UKIP leader, Paul Nuttal, jumped on the opportunity to say that the figures “just go to show that you can’t trust the Tories to bring down immigration”, blaming the “abject failure” on the prime minister in particular.
UKIP’s newly elected leader Paul Nuttall. Reuters
The timing of a leak is rarely coincidental. Outrage by the liberal media at the idea of schools turning away undocumented children could actually serve as a badge of honour to the prime minister. It confirms her anti-immigration credentials to her core supporters.
So perhaps for them, another way of reading the BBC story is this: May was a lone voice in the discredited Cameron cabinet who was serious about cutting immigration. But she failed in getting net migration down because of people like Morgan, who, as the readers of the Daily Mail and The Sun would know well, is also a fervent Remainer.
Controlling immigration is a key pillar of May’s government, on which she is under huge pressure to deliver. Targeting children in school, or students at university offers an easy symbolic (and yet ultimately ineffective) point-scoring solutions. So it is likely we will see more of this in the weeks to come.
