• Washington DC/ All Eligible States Apply for 2nd Round of Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge 
• Washington DC/ The Writing Revolution 
• Washington DC/ Adaptive Testing Evolves to Assess Common-Core Skills 
• New York NY/ Engaging Children With the Siren Call of the App 
• Washington DC/ COLUMN: Cures for Bad Teaching of Writing 
• New York NY/ OPINION: Teaching Lessons 

 

ABQ/ Montessori Charter School Breaks Ground

 

By Glen Rosales

ABQ Journal

October 27, 2012  

 

A project nine years in the making reached fruition when dirt went flying Friday at the Montessori of the Rio Grande Charter School. It was a groundbreaking for a 7,059-square-foot building that will house four classrooms and a multipurpose room.

 

The $2.4 million project is expected to be completed by July.

 

The school with 200 students from kindergarten to fifth-grade is in the Duranes neighborhood near Rio Grande and Interstate 40 in the North Valley.

• "This has been a love of work, a work of love for many people and it goes back nine years ago when we first came together to look at moving from a private Montessori School to a charter school," said school president Lawrence Rael.

School leaders, parents of students and community members "came together and thought about how they want to leave something for the community and for the neighborhood," Rael added.

• "We wanted something that we can all be proud of to help educate these beautiful young kids and kids to come," he said. "We wanted to leave some legacy for the community. We worked together through the charter application and we moved forward and here we are nine years later with a great accomplishment."

The project is one of six that are on the drawing board for Albuquerque Public Schools charter schools, said APS chief finance officer Don Moya, who was representing Superintendent Winston Brooks at the event.

 

The district has committed $34 million to those schools for projects over the next four years, Moya said.

 

"To see the first phase of our new building taking form is astounding," said principal Bonnie Dodge. "The partnership with APS is what made this possible."

 

Seeing this long-awaited project get underway is example of what can happen in a successful collaboration, said Lorenzo Garcia, the APS board member who represents the area.

 

"The Chinese used to have a curse that said something like, may you live in interesting times," he said. "And to say the least, in education, these are interesting times. When we find so many things being politicized about education, we rarely find these kinds of opportunities where the private sector and the public sector can get together to work together to make things go better for everyone, in particular, for our children."

 

The project, which is the first time APS has built a permanent structure for a charter school, should pave the way for similar projects in the future, Garcia said.

 

"I hope this becomes a model for us in the future with charter schools," he said.

 

This project is the first phase of a four-phase project that will include another classroom pod, an administrative building and another multi-use room for a gymnasium/performing arts area and cafeteria.

 

"The new building will provide a learning environment for our students that says we do care and we want the best for each and every student," Dodge said.

 

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ABQ/ National Conference Focuses on Homeless Children

 

By Deborah Ziff

ABQ Journal

October 29, 2012  

 

Rachel Kindell got kicked out of her house when she was in high school, then spent the next couple of years sleeping in her car or staying on friends' couches.

 

"I didn't really think I was going to graduate from high school," she recalled.

 

But with the help of an Albuquerque Public Schools Title I Homeless program, she pulled her grades up, graduated from West Mesa High School and got 13 scholarships to go to college.

 

Now 22 years old and on schedule to graduate from the University of New Mexico in the spring, Kindell spoke at a national conference on homelessness that began Sunday in Albuquerque.

 

The conference, held by the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, brings together more than 900 individuals who work with homeless children in schools, shelters and community agencies. An estimated 6,000 APS students don't have homes.

 

It's the first time that the conference is being held in Albuquerque. Gov. Susana Martinez will speak at the conference today at noon.

 

On Sunday night, 15 high school students or recent graduates from New York to Montana received scholarships of $2,000 to attend college. Five other students got scholarships of $1,000.

 

Kindell won one of the scholarships in 2008.

 

She got kicked out of her house, she said, when she got into an argument with her mother's boyfriend in 2006.

 

"Not because I was doing anything bad, but just because I didn't have anyone to believe in me or support me," she said.

 

She said she was too proud to talk to counselors about being homeless in high school, even after a coach noticed she was showering in the locker rooms and falling asleep in the gym.

 

Staff members from the APS Title I Homeless Program stepped in and gave her a backpack full of school supplies. They encouraged her to apply for college scholarships, and the one she received from the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth was her first.

 

She is on track to get a degree in criminology and a minor in psychology in May. If so, she will graduate in four years with no loan debt.

 

"Even after I got the scholarships, there were times I didn't have a place to live. Through my whole high school, I was homeless. I went into UNM being homeless. I just want to say it's still possible," Kindell said to a standing ovation at the conference.

 

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Socorro/ Professional Development Plan is New in Code of Ethics

 

By Lindsey Padilla

El Defensor Chieftain

October 27, 2012

 

At the Socorro school board meeting Monday night, the board approved a change to the code of ethics for certified employees.

• All certified staff will need a professional development plan instead of obtaining a master's degree within six years of employment.

According to the revised code of ethics document, staff are required to develop an individualized professional development plan within their first year of employment. The purpose is to have professional development in the classroom, said Superintendent Randall Earwood. He also said the plan is to focus on instructional needs in the classroom to benefit students.

 

According to the code of ethics, the professional development plan can include, but isn't limited to the pursuit of a higher degree level.

 

The plan can also focus on specific instructional strategies or specialties that will improve the employees' teaching effectiveness.

 

Earwood said he is getting a committee together to develop regulations to make sure the policy is enforced.

 

"Our teachers need to carve their own path with professional goals," Earwood said.

 

According to Earwood, the teachers need to have a professional development plan to move toward new teacher evaluations. The plan will be more effective in the classroom. In a previous meeting in September, board members discussed the 2006 policy from the school district that required teachers to have their master's degree within six years of employment.

 

At the time, the school district was paying for the master's degree for the teachers, but due to funding situations, the district could no longer pay for the degrees, Earwood said.

 

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ABQ/ Controversy Remains over APS Westside Stadium

Stadium set to be completed in May 2013

 

KOAT-TV, Channel 7

October 28, 2012

 

The controversy continues to stir over a Westside stadium currently under construction.

 

The long row of construction equipment near the Interstate 40 and 98th Street exit of the Westside are reminding taxpayers of a controversy that has built both support and animosity throughout many neighborhoods.

 

While many residents have voiced their opposition, saying they want to build an education corridor, both city and Albuquerque Public Schools leaders have said that the stadium is desperately needed.

• "We think it's going to be a real asset to the community," said city councilor Ken Sanchez.

Many feel the stadium will help increase property values in the area, and for the first time, officials said Westside schools will not have to travel across town to play at either Wilson or Milne stadiums.

• "They are building the APS football stadium kind of like a pit. It's in a bowl, which I think will mitigate many of the sound problems. I know residents are still worried about traffic, but we've waited for many years on Albuquerque's Westside to see a football stadium," Sanchez said.

Some residents find the underground concept appealing.

 

"I wasn't privy to that initially, but I think that's a pretty good idea," said resident Bill McMillan.

 

City leaders plan to hold a tour at the new stadium site at 11 a.m. Saturday.

 

The stadium is set to be completed in May in time for 2013's football season.

 

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ABQ/ APS Releases Bullying Statistics

Last year bullying was combined with assault

 

By Alex Tomlin

KRQE-TV, Channel 13

October 27, 2012

 

The Albuquerque public schools have been trying for a couple years now to get a better handle on bullying. KRQE News 13 has been trying to get APS to give us specifics about how widespread it is.

 

News 13 made  a formal request and the numbers the district just gave us may surprise you.

• "One kid is one kid too many," Kris Muerer, with APS, said.

APS has a fight of its own on its hands. Trying to figure out just how many of its almost 90-thousand students are being bullied and how to stop it.

 

News 13 asked the district to give details from last school year; problem is the district lumped bullying reports and physical fights in the same category last year. The district had 1337 reports filed.

• "They are not actually the number of students they are the number of incidents that occurred and it could be more than one student involved in an incident," said Muerer.

932 students were suspended for their part in those incidents.

 

But keep in mind, schools don't tell the district about students being teased or taunted unless it's an ongoing thing.

• "We don't report all classroom behavior things because if we did that's all we would be doing reporting all day long," said Muerer.

APS also says there will always be ullying victims that don't come forward, "If you don't know about it you can't do anything about it."

 

The district has a clear definition for bullying, "Conflict is a one time incident, bullying is something that happens over time and continues to happen."

 

In order to figure out just how big of a problem they are really dealing with the district is changing the way schools report bullying this year.

• Those reports will now longer be lumped in with assaults.
• They are also tracking the cases more closely.

"What the number doesn't tell you is what happened how was it reacted to what happened with it, those kind of things, that's even the deeper story that we want to know," said Muerer.

 

APS is also trying to get all 140 schools on the same page and with the same training to deal with bullying. The district says that probably won't happen until next school year.

 

The district suspects less than half of those 13-hundred reports filed last school year were cases of actual bullying. If that's true, that would amount to about five cases of bullying per school last year.

 

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Santa Fe/ EDITORIAL: Learning to Write-A Welcome Reform

 

The New Mexican

October 28, 2012

 

So many reforms in American education fall into the flavor-of-the-month category. We have had, over the past four decades, just to name a few fads - open-concept schools, new math, whole language vs. phonics for reading, experiential learning, manipulatives and most recently, testing as a cure-all for every educational ill. That's why a story in the October issue of The Atlantic magazine caught our eye.

 

"The Writing Revolution," by Peg Tyre, [Full article in PSFA News Digest National News section below] describes a specific curriculum reform at a failing high school on Staten Island. There was little fancy or short-term about this reform. Instead, the school doubled down on teaching students how to write.

 

Deirdre DeAngelis, principal of New Dorp High, frustrated with so many failing students, investigated. "By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students' inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects." In fact, a large difference between success and failure was that successful students knew how to communicate.

 

The program started in 2009, emphasizing writing in nearly every academic subject. The results, according to the article, were seen quickly.

• Sophomores who had writing instruction their ninth-grade year did well on exams - in English, the passing rate on the mandatory high school graduation test went from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in June 2011, and
•  for history, from 64 to 75 percent.
• The graduation rate has improved to 80 percent from the 63 percent before the new writing program began.

This, from a school with a student body that is 40 percent poor students, with a third Hispanic and 12 percent black.

 

Unlike other fads, solid writing should be a given in schools. It is based on classical principles; mainly, the need for humans to be able to think, analyze and express thoughts clearly. New Mexico, like most of the nation, is in the midst of adopting Common Core Standards.

 

Buried in those standards - which spell out more clearly what students should learn - is greater attention to writing. Rather than focusing so much on students' personal opinions or fiction, students will write essays in elementary school and longer, more researched papers once in high school. Writing, and the teaching of writing, is going to take a more important spot in American schools once again.

 

Education reforms come and go, often seeming to leave students, teachers and schools in much the same mess as before the so-called cure began. Helping young people learn to think analytically and write critically, though, is more than a fad. It's a pillar of learning that we will be pleased to see back in the classroom.

 

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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Bullying-Prevention Effort Aims to 'End the Hate'

 

By Robert Nott

The New Mexican

October 28, 2012

 

I was bullied as a middle-school kid in New York back in the 1970s, so it's an issue I like to spotlight. Clara Evans, vice principal at Capshaw Middle School, was bullied, too, while growing up in Los Angeles. I suspect it's one reason she works so hard to address the issue, which doesn't mean she can solve it all by herself. She estimated she hears five bullying reports per day, and each of those reports can take her and her counseling staff one to three hours to investigate.

 

Wednesday, she hosted a bullying prevention talk in the library at Capshaw.

 

Jenn Jevertson, program manager for the Therapeutic Adventure Program of the Santa Fe Mountain Center, gave the presentation to about a dozen interested parties - mostly parents and children. "Parents don't always understand it. They don't know how to deal with bullying and put [the responsibility] all on the schools," Evans said before the event. "We want to form a partnership with parents to help address this." She and Jevertson held a similar presentation last spring, which attracted only about 20 people.

• One problem, Evans noted, is that students who are on the receiving end of bullying or are witnesses just don't want to talk to adults. "Kids feel they are being snitches if they come forward," she said.

But there are many reported stories coming from parents and their kids who are fed up with a system that seems incapable of stopping bullying - which, Jevertson noted, exists in arenas far outside of the schools. One mom, who said her son has been bullied from grades four to 10, said she wants "justice." A concerned dad said he wants an authoritative response and follow-through from the district.

 

Jevertson may have hit it on the head when she said, "They want it to stop."

 

One mom at Wednesday's talk said nothing can be done and nothing will be done. "I don't think the public school people are doing enough," she said.

 

Jevertson, who was honest enough to admit she not only was bullied, but in turn became a bully as a child, said parents and students need to get involved to have an impact.

• "Bullying will stop when we empower young people to stop it," she said.

She cited an interesting statistic: 70 percent of teachers believe they are intervening when they hear bullying reports, but only 25 percent of students say that's true.

• "There's a disconnect there," Jevertson said, adding that it's possible that adults just don't witness actual bullying incidents: "80 percent of the time adults just don't know," she said.

National statistics suggest that one in three students in grades six to 10 report being bullied.

 

Bullying tactics have changed with the advent and popularity of technology. "It's more prevalent, more severe," Jevertson said. "It's easier to hide. People can do it anywhere, anytime. It spreads like wildfire because it can be shared." It also allows for anonymity if computer users find a way to hide their identity. The possible silver lining to the Internet is that there are also more online stories and resources available to help those who are being bullied, she noted.

 

A high school boy at the meeting told his story of trying to avoid bullies, trying to remain invisible and accepting physical blows without fighting back for fear he would be suspended. (Under the school district's Code of Conduct, if you fight back, you get punished, too.) How does he handle the continual pressure? "I just keep going," he said impassively.

 

His mother is feeling the pressure. "You don't know how much your kid can take. You know it bothers them, it bothers you. Are they going to come home with a black eye? Are they going to come home at all?"

 

The Santa Fe Mountain Center promotes youth resiliency and works to address pressing social problems facing vulnerable populations. It will team up with various community members, including Santa Fe Public Schools, to initiate a citywide End the Hate campaign in January to foster kindness and peace and engage youth to put an end to harassment and bullying among teens. www.santafemc.org.

 

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Washington DC/ All Eligible States Apply for Second Round of Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge

Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin submit plans to strengthen early learning programs for all children

 

US Department of Education [Ed.gov]

October 26, 2012

 

Today the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that all five eligible states-Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin-have submitted applications for the second round of Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge. The Departments will award up to $133 million to fund investments in state-level, comprehensive early education reform.

• "The road to good jobs and a healthy economy runs through the classroom, and we can give every child a strong start by increasing access to high-quality early learning programs," said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
• "By applying for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, these states are continuing commitments to provide children-especially those with high needs-the tools to enter kindergarten ready to succeed in their education and ultimately their careers."
• "For our nation to compete in the global economy, we need to utilize the talents of all of our people," said Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Strong early education programs are a key part to helping every child reach their full potential."

Last year, 35 States, D.C. and Puerto Rico applied for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, creating plans that increase access to high-quality programs for children from low-income families, and provide more children from birth to age 5 with a strong foundation needed to succeed in school and beyond. The Administration awarded nine grants in the first round.

 

Up to $133 million for the second round of Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge state grants is available from a larger $550 million fund provided by Congress through the Department of Education's fiscal year 2012 budget.

 

Because of the limited funding available, the second round of the Early Learning Challenge was only open to the next five highest-scoring states in order to help build on the momentum from the 2011 competition. These five states were able to apply for up to 50 percent of their original request.

 

Staff from both Departments will review the applications and make awards by no later than Dec. 31. For more information, visit http://www2.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop-earlylearningchallenge/index.html.

 

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Washington DC/ The Writing Revolution

 

By Peg Tyre

Atlantic Monthly

October Issue, 2012

 

In 2009, when Monica DiBella entered New Dorp, a notorious public high school on Staten Island, her academic future was cloudy.

Monica had struggled to read in early childhood, and had repeated first grade. During her elementary-school years, she got more than 100 hours of tutoring, but by fourth grade, she'd fallen behind her classmates again. In the years that followed, Monica became comfortable with math and learned to read passably well, but never seemed able to express her thoughts in writing.

 

During her freshman year at New Dorp, a '70s-style brick behemoth near a grimy beach, her history teacher asked her to write an essay on Alexander the Great. At a loss, she jotted down her opinion of the Macedonian ruler: "I think Alexander the Great was one of the best military leaders." An essay? "Basically, that wasn't going to happen," she says, sweeping her blunt-cut brown hair from her brown eyes. "It was like, well, I got a sentence down. What now?" Monica's mother, Santa, looked over her daughter's answer-six simple sentences, one of which didn't make sense-with a mixture of fear and frustration. Even a coherent, well-turned paragraph seemed beyond her daughter's ability. An essay? "It just didn't seem like something Monica could ever do."

 

For decades, no one at New Dorp seemed to know how to help low-performing students like Monica, and unfortunately, this troubled population made up most of the school, which caters primarily to students from poor and working-class families.

• In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level.
• Students routinely scored poorly on the English and history Regents exams, a New York State graduation requirement: the essay questions were just too difficult.

Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet. In the spring of 2007, when administrators calculated graduation rates, they found that four out of 10 students who had started New Dorp as freshmen had dropped out, making it one of the 2,000 or so lowest-performing high schools in the nation. City officials, who had been closing comprehensive high schools all over New York and opening smaller, specialized ones in their stead, signaled that New Dorp was in the crosshairs.

 

And so the school's principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp's students were failing.

 

By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing.

• Students' inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects.
• Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well.

"When they told me about the writing program," Monica says, "well, I was skeptical." With disarming candor, sharp-edged humor, and a shy smile, Monica occupies the middle ground between child and adult-she can be both naive and knowing. "On the other hand, it wasn't like I had a choice. I go to high school. I figured I'd give it a try."

 

New Dorp's Writing Revolution, which placed an intense focus, across nearly every academic subject, on teaching the skills that underlie good analytical writing, was a dramatic departure from what most American students-especially low performers-are taught in high school.

• The program challenged long-held assumptions about the students and bitterly divided the staff.

It also yielded extraordinary results.

• By the time they were sophomores, the students who had begun receiving the writing instruction as freshmen were already scoring higher on exams than any previous New Dorp class. Pass rates for the English Regents, for example, bounced from 67 percent in June 2009 to 89 percent in 2011;
• for the global-history exam, pass rates rose from 64 to 75 percent.
• The school reduced its Regents-repeater classes-cram courses designed to help struggling students collect a graduation requirement-from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20 students.
• The number of kids enrolling in a program that allows them to take college-level classes shot up from 148 students in 2006 to 412 students last year.
• Most importantly, although the makeup of the school has remained about the same-roughly 40 percent of students are poor, a third are Hispanic, and 12 percent are black-a greater proportion of students who enter as freshmen leave wearing a cap and gown. This spring, the graduation rate is expected to hit 80 percent, a staggering improvement over the 63 percent figure that prevailed before the Writing Revolution began.

New Dorp, once the black sheep of the borough, is being held up as a model of successful school turnaround. "To be able to think critically and express that thinking, it's where we are going," says Dennis Walcott, New York City's schools chancellor. "We are thrilled with what has happened there."

 

In the coming months, the conversation about the importance of formal writing instruction and its place in a public-school curriculum-the conversation that was central to changing the culture at New Dorp-will spread throughout the nation.

 

Over the next two school years, 46 states will align themselves with the Common Core State Standards. For the first time, elementary-school students-who today mostly learn writing by constructing personal narratives, memoirs, and small works of fiction-will be required to write informative and persuasive essays. By high school, students will be expected to produce mature and thoughtful essays, not just in English class but in history and science classes as well.

 

Common Core's architect, David Coleman, says the new writing standards are meant to reverse a pedagogical pendulum that has swung too far, favoring self-expression and emotion over lucid communication. "As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don't give a shit about what you feel or what you think," he famously told a group of educators last year in New York. Early accounts suggest that the new writing standards will deliver a high-voltage shock to the American public. Last spring, Florida school officials administered a writing test that, for the first time, required 10th-graders to produce an expository essay aligned with Common Core goals. The pass rate on the exam plummeted from 80 percent in 2011 to 38 percent this year.

 

According to the Nation's Report Card, in 2007, the latest year for which this data is available, only 1 percent of all 12th-graders nationwide could write a sophisticated, well-organized essay. Other research has shown that 70 to 75 percent of students in grades four through 12 write poorly. Over the past 30 years, as knowledge-based work has come to dominate the economy, American high schools have raised achievement rates in mathematics by providing more­extensive and higher-level instruction. But high schools are still graduating large numbers of students whose writing skills better equip them to work on farms or in factories than in offices; for decades, achievement rates in writing have remained low.

 

Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching. They watched passively as Deirdre De­Angelis got rid of the bad apples on the staff; won foundation money to break the school into smaller, more personalized learning communities; and wooed corporate partners to support after-school programs. Nothing seemed to move the dial.

 

Her decision in 2008 to focus on how teachers supported writing inside each classroom was not popular. "Most teachers," said Nell Scharff, an instructional expert DeAngelis hired, "entered into the process with a strongly negative attitude." They were doing their job, they told her hotly. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out-they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts. "It was my view that these kids didn't want to engage their brains," Fran Simmons, who teaches freshman English, told me. "They were lazy."

 

Scharff, a lecturer at Baruch College, a part of the City University of New York, kept pushing, asking: "What skills that lead to good writing did struggling students lack?" She urged the teachers to focus on the largest group: well-behaved kids like Monica who simply couldn't seem to cobble together a paragraph. "Those kids were showing up" every day, Scharff said. "They seem to want to do well." Gradually, the bellyaching grew fainter. "Every quiz, every unit test, every homework assignment became a new data point," Scharff recalled. "We combed through their writing. Again and again, we asked: 'How did the kids in our target group go wrong? What skills were missing?'"

 

Maybe the struggling students just couldn't read, suggested one teacher. A few teachers administered informal diagnostic tests the following week and reported back. The students who couldn't write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences. A history teacher got more granular. He pointed out that the students' sentences were short and disjointed. What words, Scharff asked, did kids who wrote solid paragraphs use that the poor writers didn't?

 

Good essay writers, the history teacher noted, used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas-words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher devised a quick quiz that required students to use those conjunctions. To the astonishment of the staff, she reported that a sizable group of students could not use those simple words effectively. The harder they looked, the teachers began to realize, the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not-the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.

 

The exploration continued. One teacher noted that the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence. Curious, Fran Simmons devised a little test of her own. She asked her freshman English students to read Of Mice and Men and, using information from the novel, answer the following prompt in a single sentence:

 

"Although George ..."

 

She was looking for a sentence like: Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

 

Some of Simmons's students wrote a solid sentence, but many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: "Although George and Lenny were friends."

 

A lightbulb, says Simmons, went on in her head. These 14- and 15-year-olds didn't know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did. "Yes, they could read simple sentences," but works like the Gettysburg Address were beyond them-not because they were too lazy to look up words they didn't know, but because "they were missing a crucial understanding of how language works. They didn't understand that the key information in a sentence doesn't always come at the beginning of that sentence."

 

Some teachers wanted to know how this could happen. "We spent a lot of time wondering how our students had been taught," said English teacher Stevie D'Arbanville. "How could they get passed along and end up in high school without understanding how to use the word although?"

 

But the truth is, the problems affecting New Dorp students are common to a large subset of students nationally. Fifty years ago, elementary-school teachers taught the general rules of spelling and the structure of sentences. Later instruction focused on building solid paragraphs into full-blown essays. Some kids mastered it, but many did not. About 25 years ago, in an effort to enliven instruction and get more kids writing, schools of education began promoting a different approach.

 

The popular thinking was that writing should be "caught, not taught," explains Steven Graham, a professor of education instruction at Arizona State University. Roughly, it was supposed to work like this: Give students interesting creative-writing assignments; put that writing in a fun, social context in which kids share their work. Kids, the theory goes, will "catch" what they need in order to be successful writers. Formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure, and essay-writing took a back seat to creative expression.

 

The catch method works for some kids, to a point. "Research tells us some students catch quite a bit, but not everything," Graham says. And some kids don't catch much at all. Kids who come from poverty, who had weak early instruction, or who have learning difficulties, he explains, "can't catch anywhere near what they need" to write an essay.

 

For most of the 1990s, elementary-and middle-school children kept journals in which they wrote personal narratives, poetry, and memoirs and engaged in "peer editing," without much attention to formal composition. Middle- and high-school teachers were supposed to provide the expository- and persuasive-writing instruction.

 

Then, in 2001, came No Child Left Behind. The program's federally mandated tests assess two subjects-math and reading-and the familiar adage "What gets tested gets taught" has turned out to be true. Literacy, which once consisted of the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and express complex thoughts about the written word, has become synonymous with reading. Formal writing instruction has become even more of an after­thought.

 

Teacher surveys conducted by Arthur Applebee, the director of the Center on English Learning and Achievement at the University at Albany (part of the State University of New York system), found that even when writing instruction is offered, the teacher mostly does the composing and students fill in the blanks. "Writing as a way to study, to learn, or to construct new knowledge or generate new networks of understanding," says Applebee, "has become increasingly rare."

 

Back on Staten Island, more New Dorp teachers were growing uncomfortably aware of their students' profound deficiencies-and their own. "At teachers college, you read a lot of theory, like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but don't learn how to teach writing," said Fran Simmons. How could the staff backfill the absent foundational skills their students needed in order to learn to write?

 

Seeking out ideas, DeAngelis took a handful of teachers to visit the Windward School, a small private school for first-through-ninth-graders located in a leafy section of White Plains, a suburb of New York City.

• To be accepted there, children have to possess at least average intelligence,
• have a language-based learning disability, and
• have parents who can afford the $45,000 yearly tuition.

Students attend Windward for two or three years before reentering mainstream schools, and because so many affluent children move in and out of Windward, the writing program there, which was developed by the former Windward head Judith Hochman, has become something of a legend among private­school administrators.

 

"Occasionally, we'd have a student attend Windward. And they'd come back and we'd find that that student had writing down," says Scott Nelson, the headmaster at Rye Country Day, an exclusive independent school in Westchester County. Nelson figured that Rye Country Day kids could benefit en masse from the Windward expository-writing program. Three years ago, Nelson sent his entire middle-school English and social-studies staff to be trained by Hochman.

 

The Hochman Program, as it is sometimes called, would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950.

• Children do not have to "catch" a single thing.
• They are explicitly taught how to turn ideas into simple sentences, and how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by supplying the answer to three prompts-but, because, and so.
• They are instructed on how to use appositive clauses to vary the way their sentences begin.
• Later on, they are taught how to recognize sentence fragments, how to pull the main idea from a paragraph, and how to form a main idea on their own.

It is, at least initially, a rigid, unswerving formula. "I prefer recipe," Hochman says, "but formula? Yes! Okay!"

 

Hochman, 75, has chin-length blond hair and big features. Her voice, usually gentle, rises almost to a shout when she talks about poor writing instruction.

• "The thing is, kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let's stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them."

Because the tenets of good writing are difficult to teach in the abstract, the writing program at Windward involves a large variety of assignments, by teachers of nearly every subject. After DeAngelis visited the school, she says, "I had one question and one question only: How can we steal this and bring it back to New Dorp?"

 

For her part, Hochman was intrigued by the challenge New Dorp presented. Research has shown that thinking, speaking, and reading comprehension are interconnected and reinforced through good writing instruction. If the research was correct, Hochman told DeAngelis, a good writing program at New Dorp should lead to significant student improvement all around.

 

Within months, Hochman became a frequent visitor to Staten Island. Under her supervision, the teachers at New Dorp began revamping their curriculum. By fall 2009, nearly every instructional hour except for math class was dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject. So in chemistry class in the winter of 2010, Monica DiBella's lesson on the properties of hydrogen and oxygen was followed by a worksheet that required her to describe the elements with subordinating clauses-for instance, she had to begin one sentence with the word although.

 

Although ... "hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion," Monica wrote, "a compound of them puts out fires."

Unless ... "hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous."

If ... This was a hard one.

 

Finally, she figured out a way to finish the sentence. If ... "hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion."

 

As her understanding of the parts of speech grew, Monica's reading comprehension improved dramatically. "Before, I could read, sure. But it was like a sea of words," she says. "The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important."

 

Classroom discussion became an opportunity to push Monica and her classmates to listen to each other, think more carefully, and speak more precisely, in ways they could then echo in persuasive writing. When speaking, they were required to use specific prompts outlined on a poster at the front of each class.

 

 "I agree/disagree with ___ because ..."

 "I have a different opinion ..."

 "I have something to add ..."

 "Can you explain your answer?"

 

The structured speaking was a success during Monica's fifth-period-English discussion of the opening scene of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. "What is Willie Loman's state of mind? Is he tired? If he is tired, why would he be so tired?" asked the teacher, Angelo Caterina. "Willie Loman seems tired because he is getting old," ventured a curly-haired girl who usually sat in the front. "Can you explain your answer?" Monica called out. The curly-haired girl bit her lip while her eyes searched the book in front of her. "The stage direction says he's 63. That's old!" Other hands shot up. Reading from the prompt poster made the students sound as if they'd spent the previous period in the House of Lords instead of the school cafeteria. "I agree that his age is listed in the stage direction," said John Feliciano. "But I disagree with your conclusion. I think he is tired because his job is very hard and he has to travel a lot."

 

Robert Fawcett, a loose-limbed boy in a white T-shirt, got his turn. Robert had been making money working alongside the school's janitors. "I disagree with those conclusions," he said, glancing at the prompts. "The way Willie Loman describes his job suggests that the kind of work he does is making him tired. It is repetitive. It can feel pointless. It can make you feel exhausted." The class was respectfully silent for a moment, acknowledging that Robert had analyzed the scene and derived a fresh idea from his own experience.

 

By sophomore year, Monica's class was learning how to map out an introductory paragraph, then how to form body paragraphs. "There are phrases-specifically, for instance, for example-that help you add detail to a paragraph," Monica explains. She reflects for a moment. "Who could have known that, unless someone taught them?" Homework got a lot harder. Teachers stopped giving fluffy assignments such as "Write a postcard to a friend describing life in the trenches of World War I" and instead demanded that students fashion an expository essay describing three major causes of the conflict.

 

Some writing experts caution that championing expository and analytic writing at the expense of creative expression is shortsighted. "The secret weapon of our economy is that we foster creativity," says Kelly Gallagher, a high-school writing teacher who has written several books on adolescent literacy. And formulaic instruction will cause some students to tune out, cautions Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. While she welcomes a bigger dose of expository writing in schools, she says lockstep instruction won't accelerate learning. "Kids need to see their work reach other readers ... They need to have choices in the questions they write about, and a way to find their voice."

 

To be sure, the writing program hasn't solved all of New Dorp's problems. The high rate of poverty makes the students vulnerable to drug abuse and violence. And in some subjects, scores on the Regents exams this year showed less growth than the teachers had hoped for. Still, word of the dramatic turnaround has spread: principals and administrators from other failing high schools as far away as Chicago have been touring New Dorp. As other schools around New York City and the nation scramble to change their curriculum to suit the Common Core standards, New Dorp teachers say they're ready.

 

In a profoundly hopeful irony, New Dorp's re­emergence as a viable institution has hinged not on a radical new innovation but on an old idea done better. The school's success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals-fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten-need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.

 

As for Monica DiBella, her prospects have also improved. She expresses more complex and detailed ideas when she raises her hand. Whereas she once read far below grade level, this year she earned a 77 on her English Regents exam (a 75 or above signals that a student is on track to engage in college-level coursework) and a 91 in American history ("Yep, you heard that right," Monica tells me). Although many of her classmates can now bang out an essay with ease, she admits she still struggles with writing. She hurried through the essay on her global-history exam, and the results fell far short of a masterpiece. The first paragraph reads:

 

 Throughout history, societies have developed significant technological innovations. The technological innovations have had both positive and negative effect on the society of humankind. Two major technological advances were factory systems and chemical pesticides.

 

But Dina Zoleo, who taught Monica as a junior, points out that the six-paragraph essay shows Monica's newfound ability to write solid, logically ordered paragraphs about what she's learned, citing examples and using transitions between ideas. Together with her answers in the multiple-choice section of the test, it was enough to earn Monica an 84. She's now begun the process of applying to college. "I always wanted to go to college, but I never had the confidence that I could say and write the things I know." She smiles and sweeps the bangs from her eyes. "Then someone showed me how."

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

 

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Washington DC/ Adaptive Testing Evolves to Assess Common-Core Skills

The goal is to build better measures of student skills and knowledge

 

By Michelle R. Davis

Education Week, Vol. 06, Issue 1 [Edweek.org]

October 17, 2012

 

When Delaware switched to computer-adaptive testing for its state assessments three years ago, officials found the results were available more quickly, the amount of time students spent taking tests decreased, and the tests provided more reliable information about what students knew-especially those at the very low and high ends of the spectrum.

 

But the path to launching those tests involved a significant education of students, parents, and teachers, a sizeable technology investment by the state, and the development of hundreds of test items for every exam.

 

As many states move to put in place online testing tied to the Common Core State Standards in 2014-15, at least 20 states have indicated they plan to use new computer-adaptive versions of the tests, and they're looking at states like Delaware to learn some lessons.

• "Adaptive testing is really beneficial and can pinpoint a student's learning level more closely," says Gerri Marshall, the supervisor of research and evaluation for the 15,000-student Red Clay Consolidated School District in Wilmington, Del., which piloted such tests.

Nationally, two coalitions have received federal funding to develop English/language arts and mathematics tests for the common standards. Both coalitions-the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC-have said their assessments will feature high-tech, interactive questions that incorporate video and graphics and are designed both to identify what students know and to be more engaging.

 

Both assessments will be given online, but Smarter Balanced will use adaptive testing, while PARCC will use what are known as fixed-form tests, which feature set questions that generally do not change.

 

Only a handful of states-including Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon-are now using adaptive testing on a widespread basis. Even supporters acknowledge challenges to its implementation and use, considering that many school districts are currently doing little, if any, testing online.

• "It's a big philosophical shift for people," says John Jesse, the director of assessment and accountability for the Utah department of education, which is in the process of developing its own computer-adaptive tests for the common core.
• "If your district is still using paper, shifting to online is big, and then shifting to adaptive testing might be too much of a move all at once."

Seeking Greater Precision

So what exactly is the difference between a traditional test, which presents a student with a set number of test items that don't change during test-taking, and adaptive testing?

 

Testing experts say that traditional, or fixed-form, exams work well with the majority of students, who hover around the level the assessment is seeking to evaluate. Test questions are developed to appeal to most students and can assess how much those students know.

 

However, students at the farther ends of the spectrum-high achievers and struggling students-fare worse on those types of tests in terms of allowing teachers to identify exactly what material those students have or have not mastered.

• With exceptional students, a fixed test can't determine just how extensive their knowledge may be, and
• for struggling learners, it can't determine how far behind they may be.

A teacher won't know exactly how far gaps in students' learning on certain concepts go because the test questions don't move far in that direction.

 

"The range of proficiency among kids in a grade is huge," says Jon Cohen, the executive vice president and director of assessment for the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, which is already delivering statewide adaptive tests in several states and has been selected by the Smarter Balanced consortium to do pilot and field testing and to create the adaptive-test algorithm.

 

"With a typical test, a kid who is struggling is not going to see many items they can get right, and a kid at the top is not going to see many items they'll get wrong," he says. "Kids on the ends get a less precise score."

 

Adaptive tests operate from a large test-item bank. For example, for a 40-question test, an adaptive test bank might contain 800 items, Cohen says.

 

An algorithm guides the computer as it picks questions based on the answer given to previous questions to pinpoint a student's skill and knowledge level. Typically, a student will get about half the questions offered by the computer correct, whether he or she is a high, middle, or low performer, since the questions are tailored for that student's particular level.

• "With a computer-adaptive test, the percent correct is no longer relevant," says Tony Alpert, the chief operating officer for Smarter Balanced.
• "The adaptive test is always challenging for every student, and we need to help people understand that."

Computer-adaptive assessments aren't scored on the basis of how many right or wrong answers a student gets. A student's score depends both on the number of items he or she got right and the difficulty of the items presented. Early trials, or field tests, present items to representative samples of students to evaluate the difficulty of each item in the pool and to translate that into values that will provide a score, Cohen says.

 

Personalization Improves Security

The biggest advantage to a computer-adaptive test, experts say, is the ability to evaluate all students at their own levels.

 

Because of that, students often report that they are more engaged with the test and find it more interesting, says Dirk P. Mattson, the executive director of K-12 assessment for the Educational Testing Service, who is based in the nonprofit testing company's San Antonio office. ETS, which has been hired by Smarter Balanced to develop several aspects of the computer-adaptive test, also produces the GRE, an adaptive graduate school admissions test.

 

"There's a belief that this provides a more rewarding testing experience for the test-taker," Mattson says. "A struggling student doesn't need to be beaten over the head encountering lots of questions they can't handle, ... and the student who is strong might welcome an additional challenge."

 

In addition, because each test for each student is personalized and there are so many test questions in the bank, security risks are lessened, says Doug Kosty, the assistant superintendent for assessment and information services for the Oregon department of education. His state has used computer-adaptive testing for nine years.

 

It's unlikely that students sitting near each other would encounter the same test questions in the same order, for example. A student "can't go out on the playground and compare notes on question 14," Kosty says. "Kids are basically guaranteed not to have the same test."

 

Some educators who have used adaptive testing say the test window is shorter since students don't always have to answer as many questions. In Delaware, students used to spend multiple hours taking state reading and math tests, says Michael Stetter, the director of accountability and resources for the Delaware department of education. The computer-adaptive tests shrank that time to one hour for reading and one hour for math, he says, making it easier for schools to schedule test times around computer labs. "We're getting a more precise estimate of ability with the same or fewer questions," Stetter says.

 

However, Smarter Balanced's tests are expected to take 10 to 13 hours, depending on grade levels. Because of concerns from states, the coalition is now developing a shorter version it says will produce comparable results.

 

In addition, users of computer-adaptive testing laud the immediacy of the assessment results, which typically are posted when a student finishes the test, giving teachers the opportunity to adjust their instruction more quickly based on the results. Officials from both coalitions say some results will be available almost immediately or within days, while results from sections that contain more writing and constructed response may take several weeks.

 

But in the field, implementation of computer-adaptive tests can pose problems.

• Much like the PARCC tests, the Smarter Balanced tests will be given online, and that means schools will have to have enough devices and bandwidth.
• Delaware had to allocate funds to buy additional servers for districts and the state distributed 10,000 netbooks to get schools ready;
• the state also had to redesign training for teachers who were going to be test administrators.
• Districts are raising concern about lengthy testing windows tapping out their bandwidth for long periods of time and having enough devices with the right specifications to run the test.

Computer-adaptive tests can also be costly to develop since so many test items are needed. "The early years of computer-adaptive testing are extremely expensive," Stetter says. However, since his state's development of initial computer-adaptive tests, costs have dropped, he says, as test banks can be used for a long time.

 

Smarter Balanced estimates that once its adaptive tests are fully developed, its test bank will contain at least 30,000 items across all grades.

 

"Once you have an adaptive-testing pool, you can continue to run it for a long period of time, so there are a lot of efficiencies gained," says Walter "Denny" Way, the senior vice president of psychometric and research services for the education publisher Pearson, based in London.

 

Smarter Balanced received $160 million and PARCC received $170 million in federal grants to develop the common assessments.

 

Once the tests are ready, states will be expected to pay for them, but just how much and how those payments will be structured is still being worked out.

 

'Two Viable Solutions'

Experts seem to agree that computer-adaptive testing works well with multiple-choice questions, or one-word-response questions, but there are differing opinions about how it does with longer answers or with essays. That makes computer-adaptive testing more suited to some subjects than others. Oregon, for example, uses a writing assessment that is not adaptive that takes students three hours to complete.

• "Things that are essays or that contain more complicated projects that need to be evaluated through human judgment really can't be administered [through computer-adaptive testing] in this situation," says John Mazzeo, the vice president of research and development for ETS, based in Princeton, N.J.

Despite those limitations, Alpert says the English/language arts and literacy component of the Smarter Balanced assessments will be adaptive. The only exceptions will be a handful of performance tasks, which may be longer activities that take place in the classroom or offline.

 

As states and schools get ready to address the challenges of adaptive testing, training students, educators, and even parents becomes increasingly important, says Steve Slater, the lead psychometrician for the Oregon education department.

 

Melissa Fincher, the associate superintendent for assessment and accountability in Georgia, a state that has joined the PARCC coalition, says she appreciates the fact that the federal government has financed the work of both coalitions.

 

"The jury is still out, and I see this as an opportunity to look large-scale at the best way to assess students," she says. "I don't see this as an either-or situation. I'm pleased we have two viable solutions in the works."

 

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New York NY/ Engaging Children With the Siren Call of the App

 

By Geraldine Fabrikant

New York Times

October 26, 2012

 

Each summer for several years, a two-week seminar at the American Museum of Natural History has allowed 25 youngsters to use technology to resurrect a prehistoric marine animal by designing realistic 3-D models and sea environments.

 

Every year, the program, "Virtual World Institute: Cretaceous Seas," for children ages 11 to 14, fills up quickly.

 

One attendee in last summer's program, Tammuz Frankel, a 12-year-old student at Hunter College High School, said, "From a very young age, I have been interested in paleontology, but I don't know much about prehistoric seas. I wanted to learn more about this little-known part of the Mesozoic Era."

 

The program has been so successful that the museum has since added two more August seminars on different topics.

 

The natural history museum is not alone in seeking innovative ways to engage children and families in the museum-going experience. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and others have also been active.

• Because digital platforms are relevant and accessible, they are familiar to "digital natives," young people who have grown up with technology, said Rebecca Edwards, education specialist for family audiences at the Getty.

One advantage of digital games is that many visitors already have smartphones. And the games let museums offer a broader menu for youngsters without requiring more staff members, like tour leaders, or printed materials, although creating the games is not an inexpensive challenge.

 

Not all museums are enamored with technology, however. Some are hesitant to encourage families to bring on the iPhones.

• For example, next summer the Philadelphia Museum of Art is planning five simultaneous exhibits oriented to families, including an interactive watercolor project inspired by the award-winning artist and author Jerry Pinkney as well as an environment using fancy dress costumes from the early 20th century for children in a setting designed by the artist Candy Depew.
• "There is a small amount of technology, but that is not the focus of what we do with kids," said Emily Schreiner, associate curator of education for family and community learning at the museum.
• "Technology is kind of a contentious issue," she said. "Adults are not always comfortable with their kids being on iPhones. What we want them to take away from the museum is an opportunity to slow down, look closely and spend time as a family."

Already the museum has a monthly series of "Stroller Tours" for parents and caregivers that lets them spend time together looking at art. "We have found them to be extremely successful," Ms. Schreiner said. "We find that our visitors come back, become members and feel welcomed into the museum."

 

Nevertheless, technology is a component of many programs.

• For example, the Getty has a new youth-oriented application for smartphones through a game it calls Switch, in which an evil genie has wreaked havoc at the museum. The paintings in an app are not the exact duplicates of the paintings on the wall, so players must find the differences. The challenge is to correct details in a copy of the museum painting on the iPhone so that it matches the actual image.

In the first test, there were a series of details including the absence of a brooch in an oil painting of Leonilla, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn, by Franz Xaver Winterhalter. The player has to figure out and correct what is inaccurate.

 

The game consists of four paintings, a deliberately small number to keep the game from feeling repetitive and to encourage youngsters to go on to other things at the museum.

 

The Getty has also created an audio tour in which animals in various works of art talk about themselves.

 

Since admission to the museum is free, the games are not intended to increase revenue, although more visitors are certainly a benefit.

 

"What these do is provide parents a way for their children to focus on art that perhaps they could not have done themselves," said Ms. Edwards of the Getty.

• In another game strategy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has introduced "Murder at the Met," a game for any smartphone that children can download and then use to search for the person who murdered "Madame X," the woman in John Singer Sargent's portrait. They must check out statues, paintings and objects throughout the American wing, following clues to the murderer and the witnesses. Though the museum does not aggressively publicize the game, children can find it on the museum's Web site.
• "Digital is the new iteration of games and certain games are based on narratives, so it is a natural way to get youngsters interested in art," said Peggy Fogelman, head of education at the Metropolitan. Ms. Fogelman added that the museum arranged an event played by 125 teenagers, in teams. Asked afterward in a questionnaire what they liked about the game, they said that they most liked looking closely at the works of art. That meant the game "did not interfere with the experience," Ms. Fogelman said. "It enhanced it."

While there are 278 million Americans with cellphone subscriptions, according to Chetan Sharma, an independent mobile analyst, it is impossible to know how many museum visitors already own smartphones. Museum officials across the country are debating whether they should provide the devices so that all visitors can use them, said Ms. Edwards. "But as we discuss it, the number of smartphone owners continues to increase and many people walk in the door with their own phones. Our approach is to scale up our offerings as the public is scaling up its ownership of smartphones."

 

And at the Metropolitan "our experience suggests that people prefer to use their devices," Ms. Fogelman said.

• The American Museum of Natural History supplies a wealth of material for its summer education project, including laptops and smartphones. It provides them to students, some of whom pay to attend the program and some of whom receive scholarships.
• "We have taken the digital world and embraced it in a full-throttle way," said the museum's president, Ellen Futter. "It extends access to content on site and digitally and deepens our relationship with our audience. It is an opportunity to examine real specimens, talk to our 200 scientists and take that understanding and use it in a digital application."

The summer Cretaceous Seas seminar lets students play the role of scientists and learn to interpret fossil evidence to bring an extinct sea creature to life. New versions of the program are "What Happened to the Neanderthals?" and "Digital Universe: Flight School."

 

"None of those programs could have happened to this extent a few years ago," said Nathan Bellomy, youth initiatives coordinator at the museum. The Cretaceous Seas project included one activity in which the group went to Big Brook, N.J., to dig up prehistoric sharks' teeth and rodent fossils.

• "The kids were working with real scientists and translating what they found into a virtual prehistoric environment," Mr. Bellomy said. "The project helped them interpret fossil evidence and then use their computers to recreate the fish in the appropriate environments.

Another young participant, Emily Di Napoli, an 11-year-old student at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn, said she had always loved "prehistoric animals and sea life including reptiles that are as long as buses and can swallow anything." Her long-term goal is to build rocket ships, but Emily said she liked her summer program because "we learned a lot of interesting stuff, and the museum is really cool."

 

Just what museum officials want to hear.

 

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Washington DC/ COLUMN: Cures for Bad Teaching of Writing

 

By Jay Mathews [Education columnist]

The Washington Post

October 24, 2012

 

The teaching of writing is one of the great weaknesses of American schools. It is also the only one about which I, as a paid manufacturer of sentences, am competent to give personal advice.

 

I think students would benefit from one-on-one editing by their teachers. This is rare, but teachers and students who have done it tell me that it works for them as well as it did for me when I was a beginning journalist.

 

They like my idea of a required one-semester high school English course called Writing and Reading. Each student would produce a written piece each week and have it edited by the teacher for 10 minutes.

• The rest of the week, students would work in class on their next essay or read whatever they like while their classmates are edited.
• This spares teachers from marking up essays at home.
• Just 10 minutes of editing a week per student does not seem like much, but such personal contact is powerful.
• By the end of a semester, that would total nearly three hours of personal editing per kid, unheard of in schools today.

A few places are already doing it.

• "I have been working with students one on one for more than a decade," said fifth-grade teacher Sean Duffy at Waples Mill Elementary School in Fairfax County. "I agree with you that 10 minutes with a kid is far more important than margin notes at home."
• Former English teacher Eric Christenson of Arlington County learned the power of showing rather than telling in his writing classes after learning to ski and make pottery that way. Many of his students became published writers. He has written journal articles, book chapters and speeches.
• Sylvia E. Robinson, president of SER Associates in Oak Hill, Va., said my suggested method resembles the way she was taught by English teacher Kathleen F. Sharkey at Medford High School in Massachusetts 46 years ago.

Sharkey "required those of us fortunate enough to be selected for . . . her honors English classes to write a theme a week," Robinson said. "She would meticulously edit - in red ink no less - each week's theme, sitting down with us to go over the comments. We were then required to rewrite that essay and have an additional essay ready next week. . . . While she met with one student, the rest of us read the 'great books.' "

 

"We learned to read, and we learned to write," Robinson said. "In my senior year, I won a National Council of Teachers of English writing award and went on to get a full scholarship to Stanford University. Me, a young African American female and a first-generation college student, off to the wonders of California and an education at one of the nation's elite schools."

• Gwendolyn Cannon, a 2010 Montgomery County high school graduate, learned to teach through editing as a peer writing tutor at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. When she found a confusing passage, Cannon asked: "What do you mean by that?" She said, "This type of criticism was rarely, if ever, addressed in my high school English classes."

Not all teachers have the confidence to carry it off, but that could be fixed.

 

Why not have inexperienced teachers write essays for experienced teachers and get a 10-minute editing session once a week? A year of that, even in small doses, would be the equivalent of what happened to me as a college sophomore, having my student newspaper stories torn apart and reworked before my eyes by students who had survived the process.

 

Those heavily edited teachers could then do the same for their students. The change could become exponential. We would soon have a generation of good writers, to the great benefit of their country and themselves.

 

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New York NY/ OPINION: Teaching Lessons

 

By Sara Mosle

New York Times

October 27, 2012

 

How do we help students achieve academically and socially? As a teacher, I have lofty answers. But challenges - and questions - arise when I try to translate my ideas (and ideals) into concrete lessons, delivered in 90-minute increments to a very particular set of sixth graders, each as individual and evanescent as a snowflake.

 

To help teachers succeed, schools offer "professional development," universally known as P.D. Like a lot of teachers, I've come to regard such training with a mix of optimism and disappointment. Over the last 20 years, I've attended more education "workshops" than I care to remember. Such courses typically lasted no more than an hour or a day, and nearly always contained valid, even vital ideas, but were too superficial, too removed from the realities of my classroom to alter my teaching very much, even when I yearned for change.

 

Then I started work at a school that takes P.D. seriously. This summer, my school sent me to a weeklong, intensive course for middle school teachers called Developmental Designs, which derives from a teaching approach known as Responsive Classroom.

 

Among its guiding principles is a belief that students who develop social skills like cooperation, assertiveness and empathy can achieve more academically. The idea is similar to the "character education" Paul Tough advocates in his new book "How Children Succeed."

 

I'd already watched colleagues attain enviable classroom management through this technique. Still, given my previous P.D. experience, I initially harbored skepticism. I imagined catching up on e-mail during the course's slow moments. But, it turned out, I didn't send e-mail all week. The program was a model of effective P.D. and what it can achieve.

 

The Responsive Classroom approach centers on several ostensibly mundane classroom practices. Each morning students form a circle, greet one another, share bits of news, engage in a brief, fun activity and review the day's agenda. The idea is to build trust, ensure a little fun (which adolescents crave) and confront small problems before they become big. Students might welcome one another with salutations from a foreign language. An activity might involve tossing several balls around a circle in rapid succession. Students share weekend plans or explore topics like bullying before lessons begin.

 

If this sounds obvious or intuitive, it is, but so is being loving and kind. That doesn't make it easier to achieve. Part of what makes the approach effective is that each routine is highly structured, and so replicable, but allows for student input and choice.

 

The fun and games have an ulterior purpose. My instructor emphasized how, at the end of each activity, we should bring the exercise back to concrete classroom skills. Tossing a ball, for example, is like the exchange of ideas, requiring students to follow a discussion's trajectory with their eyes.

 

Another tenet is that teachers should avoid indiscriminate praise in favor of neutral language that encourages specific behaviors so children can precisely identify and so replicate their triumphs. (The research of Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford, has separately come to similar conclusions.) Finding the best words, however, can be surprisingly difficult after years of crowing, "Great job!" So the course had us devise and rehearse the verbal and nonverbal cues we wanted to use.

 

In my classroom, the shared routines have already led to a greater sense of calm and purpose, which has led to more productive lessons. I'm not alone in enjoying concrete results from the Responsive Classroom method. In one study, presented in September, researchers looked at 24 schools randomly assigned to training in the Responsive Classroom or to a control group, which did not receive the same teacher training or support. When faithfully implemented, the approach correlated with a substantial rise - a roughly 20-point gain on average - on state standardized test scores in reading and math.

 

Why does Responsive Classroom work where other approaches do not? Sara E. Rimm-Kaufman, the study's lead author and an associate professor of education at the University of Virginia, theorizes it's because teachers not only received intensive training but also had follow-up coaching once they returned to their classrooms, which increased the chances that new practices would take hold. Teachers also praised the program's pacing: coaches encouraged teachers to adopt steps slowly over a sustained period, instead of trying to transform their classrooms overnight.

 

"The take-home message," Dr. Rimm-Kaufman says, "is that interventions that take a long time to learn and that require more resources also produce more change." The required financial investment isn't enormous, and the findings suggest that schools and districts would do better to devote limited resources to a few sustained programs, rather than providing scattershot offerings in teacher training.

 

Schoolwide buy-in also appeared critical to the approach's success. Where principals and administrators supported the use of the Responsive Classroom method, gains on test scores were greatest. But, if the program was just one of many randomly tossed at teachers, then test scores remained flat or even declined.

 

In other words, teachers can't go it alone. They need sustained training and support using empirically tested methods in concert and collaboration with one another. This is how schools succeed.