Books Every Teacher Should Read: The Global Achievement Gap

I think that there are similar experiments from MIT:
Recountings: Conversations with MIT Mathematicians edited by Joel Segel

I was a behavior therapist for years before entering the legal profession. There is a fair amount of literature (research) on the efficacy of observation as an integral component of training new therapists working with students with disabilities. I suspect that the principles would remain the same, even if the target audience is typically developing individuals.

Harry, what you’re talking about seems to be what my education professors call “modeling.” Good teachers model good behaviors. This isn’t just about physical behavior, although it’s particularly effective there. For example, you don’t just ask a group of 9th graders to read about how to set up a bunsen burner. It’s far better to model the behavior, pointing out as you go what you’re doing and why you’re doing it that way step by step. It’s also effective, I’ve found, as an English teacher, in teaching how to perform close readings. At the beginning of sophomore English, I often begin my lengthy unit on Hugo’s *Les Miserables* by modeling what I do as a trained reader as I read the opening pages of the novel. I read out loud and stop to ask myself questions, posit possible answers, reflect back on the sorts of questions I tend to ask, etc. Students have told me it works. We then do it together. I read out loud, and students stop me with observations, questions, answers, etc. Afterwards, I give them a handout with all sorts of questions we tend to ask ourselves as we read novels. But still, they need practice, so those questions form the basis of their daily study guides, which they write out as they read at home.

This is what the Harvard program seems to offer teachers: an opportunity to see effective teaching modeled and an opportunity to reflect on what works or doesn’t as they observe.

Modeling and imitation are classical pedagogical techniques. Old-school rhetoric textbooks always include model passages that students are asked to use as the basis for their own imitations. I do this at the sentence level to teach grammar, pulling out various types of sentences and asking students to use the syntax to pattern their own sentences. Again, it’s more effective than having them memorize abstract grammatical rules like “use ‘that’ for restrictive clauses and ‘which’ for nonrestrictive clauses.” Once they get a feel for the pattern in real usage, then I give them the rules.

In terms of measuring learning, it is so important for departments to decide clearly and well in advance what will constitute mastery on each particular assessment. Having transitioned from college teaching to high school teaching, I’m still shocked that even centralized freshmen writing programs do not establish a rigorous rubric for grading different types of writing. Often, these programs don’t even set up a common vocabulary for talking about writing. One teacher talks about a thesis statement, another about a controlling idea. One teacher talks about analysis, another about interpretation, another about forming an opinion, another about commentary.

This isn’t to say that writing should be formulaic. But students should learn to master clear models of effective writing, and they should be evaluated on exactly what they’ve been taught about writing and not on what they’ve picked up along the way. (That often means moving beyond the “holistic grading of writing,” where a teacher evaluates every single aspect of the essay, and moving toward a more focused grading, where the teacher says up front, “So far we’ve covered thesis statements, transitions, and the use of evidence, so those aspects will constitute the majority of your grade for this writing assignment.”)

This is something like how clinical learning occurs in medicine (or so thinks this social scientist observing docs “in the mist”). Docs learn by doing more than by reading, and part of learning by doing is presenting cases to each other for guidance and under supervision.

David — that’s right — there is a lot of thought going into this in some circles of the academic education world, and within those circles (on which I am the periphery) people certainly think that progress is being made. Turning that into a set of practices which diffuse through the profession (not just the k-12 profession, but HE as well) is another matter, and no-one really knows how to do it (at the moment).

Laurel — if after looking at your notes you are willing to share them, I’d love to add them to my collection.

A paragraph from a paper I wrote on the subject:

‎ Japanese “teachers can easily gain access to an array of ‎publications written by their colleagues about their lesson study experiences. . . . Journal ‎publications of research conducted by and for teachers outnumber those of university researchers ‎in Japan . . . . The National Institute for Educational Research compiles every year over 4,000 ‎research papers written by teachers.” (Fernandez and Yoshida, 2004, pp. 212-213). Thus, in sharp ‎contrast to the American situation – in which teachers have little access to what techniques or ‎concepts have proven useful in other classrooms – Japanese teachers “have ready access to ‎information of the form, ‘When presented with problem A, 60 percent of students will choose ‎Strategy One, 20 percent Strategy Two, 15 percent Strategy Three, and 5 percent some other ‎strategy.” (Stigler and Hiebert, 1999, p. 164). Moreover, due to Japan’s national curriculum, any ‎lesson that has been planned and analyzed will be more readily applicable to classrooms in other ‎schools. “Reports published by lesson-study groups have an instant audience among their ‎colleagues throughout Japan. Many such reports, in fact, can be purchased in neighborhood ‎bookstores.” (Stigler and Hiebert, 1999, p. 123). ‎

This is something like how clinical learning occurs in medicine (or so thinks this social scientist observing docs “in the mist”). Docs learn by doing more than by reading, and part of learning by doing is presenting cases to each other for guidance and under supervision.

Speaking as a long-time medical school physician and teacher, what you say is correct. It’s sort of an apprenticeship model. However, one traditional aspect of such teaching, public ridicule, is one we shouldn’t model.

Recently, there has been a push by a well known conservative activist to have a thing called “Direct Instruction” adopted in disadvantaged schools. The results, according to a conservative columnist (so you can see there is a considerable bias here) are wonderful. I haven’t been able to find much about DI via google.Hope this isn’t too tangential, but I would love to read the opinions of Harry, Laura and other educators about this. I’m a little suspicious because the writer describes results being sent back to Head Office in the US (from Australia) to be analysed; why can’t they be analysed here? Is this some big moneyspinner for Siegfried Englemann and his organisation?

(When I was a young person in the loud music industry a DI meant a Direct Injection (of your solid body instrument’s audio signal) into the mixing desk. I can’t help but visualise the kids with jacks plugged into their heads, and the signals going back to some Borg in the States. But that’s just my overactive imagination.)

the conservative advocates of such things would NEVER allow it to be done to their own kids

But they’re not suggesting that it be done to their own kids. Every society needs some hewers of wood and drawers of water, so you might as well start educating them that way from an early age, right? And anyway, those kids aren’t like the kids from middle-class backgrounds — you can’t expect them to master complex abstractions. Teach them enough to hold a minimum-wage job and vote how their preacher tells them, and that’s good enough for them.

Of course, they don’t spell out any such analysis. But that’s what’s going on under the surface.