Category Archives: Blog

Being Taught By an Unprepared Teacher Is a Mathematical Certainty

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The shortage of qualified teachers in our schools is real and if it has not touched children in your school yet it will.  I remember Andrews, the naval architect in the movie Titanic, saying to Captain Smith, “Titanic will founder (sink).  It is a mathematical certainty, Sir”.  He was not believed.  The Titanic was supposed to be unsinkable!  So, it is with less than prepared teachers in classrooms.  A school’s statement of “a quality teacher in every classroom” has the same credibility as believing the Titanic could not sink.  Your children will be taught by unprepared teachers; it is a mathematical certainty.

A shortage of teachers had been a long time coming, but it always was coming.  It always was a story of numbers.  Today there are more teaching jobs posted than candidates and the gap in this trend is widening not narrowing.  Principals in the 80s and 90s could unabashedly expect between 50 and 100 applications for a posted teaching position.  In 2022 too many postings for teaching positions did not stir a single application. 

Four reasons are engineering our shortage of classroom teachers.

  1. Starting a career in education is economically difficult to impossible.  The disparity between the cost of a college degree and teacher certification and a teacher’s salary during the first ten years of employment turn people away from becoming teachers.  Too many teachers are burdened with college debt and their salaries are inadequate for meeting today’s cost of living and debt payments.  Debt is driving teachers from the classroom and preventing others from a career in teaching.
  2. Public confidence in public education was dramatically damaged by the pandemic.  The work of classroom teachers was not the issue.  It was the political battleground of school closings, required quarantining, masking and vaccination, and the failure of remote and home-based learning that constantly grew parental hostility to public schools.
  3. The continuing inequality issues inherent in education have not changed.  As a correct generalization, children in wealthier communities and well-financed schools receive a better education and educational experience than children in impoverished and under-financed schools.  Everything from student-teacher ratios to midday snacks to enrichment field trips hinges on financing.  It is hard to recruit teachers to teach in under-supported schools.  These schools are plagued by a lack of prepared teachers.
  4. More teachers are retiring and resigning than are graduating from teacher preparation programs of any design.  Interestingly, we have enough people with a teaching license to place a prepared teacher in every classroom.  We do not have enough licensed teachers who want to teach.

State legislators are responding to constituent school districts declarations of teacher shortages by modifying statutory requirements for a teaching license.  To meet legislative direction, state departments of public instruction are creating a “buffet” of alternative strategies for awarding a teaching license.  Sadly, the buffet is becoming more of a snack bar.  These “buffet” options:

  • Incrementally reduce the requirement of a baccalaureate degree in education as the benchmark for a teaching degree.  Teacher licensing based upon a BA degree requires a candidate to have completed a broader array of course work in English, mathematics, science, and the social sciences.  This background education provides teachers with contextual information that more completely teaches children the “why and wherefores of answers” and not just if an answer is correct or incorrect.  Reducing background academic knowledge reduces the quality of instruction and learning.  Without adequate background knowledge teachers are unprepared.
  • Focus on how to teach and not how to teach children.  For example, a Career and Technical Education (CTE) certification program allows a candidate with a BA in a technical field and more than three years working experience in that field to complete a minimum number of instructional courses to qualify for a teaching license.  Too often classroom management, child psychology, testing and assessment, and teaching children with educational challenges are not included in CTE preparation.  Teachers who do not understand children are unprepared.
  • Eliminate student teaching.  The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE) offers a teaching license based upon virtual course work and exams.  No student teaching is required; if you can pass tests, you can teach.  ABCTE says so.  The practicum of student teaching is how unexperienced teachers become prepared.  Without student teaching, children are guinea pigs for unprepared teachers.
  • Keep reducing teacher preparation to place an adult in the classroom.  Legislation is pending to allow a person with an associate degree and experience as a Teacher Aide to be eligible for teacher training.  Legislation is also pending to allow a person with a high school education to work as a substitute teacher.  This returns us to 1900 when an 8th grade graduate could teach elementary school and high school grad could teach secondary school.  It is the Cadillac of unpreparedness.

There is some hope for the future as school boards increase teacher compensation.  There is some hope as the federal government attempts to reduce student debt.  There is some hope as schools return to the look of pre-pandemic stability.  There is some hope that public confidence in public schools will return to a positive value. 

But trends, like the Titanic, do not change course easily.  A course correction for the Titanic or a public institution takes time to affect and during that time more harm is inflicted.  While it was a mathematical certainty the Titanic would sink due to a rip in its hull, the employment of unprepared teachers need not sink public education.  If we value public education, the trend toward the employment of unprepared teachers will reverse itself.  But it will take time, if we value public education.

Teach Less, Teach Better, Teach It Again and Again

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“I taught a lesson to my students.  They should have learned it.” 

Some students learned “it”, and some did not.  And some tuned out and were not mentally present for learning.  Walk the hallways of any school.  Stop to look in and watch the teaching and learning act in motion.  We see the teaching.  We assume the learning.  At the end of any lesson, we may hear the teacher sigh with this assumption.  “There.  I taught it.   They should have learned it”.  Or was it exasperation.

What do we know?

We don’t remember all that we are taught for very long.  This is a fact.  Hermann Ebbinghauss, a German psychologist, explored memory and why we forget.  His work in the 1880s has been replicated and validated over time.  His “forgetting curve” is instructive today.

“We forget 50% of the new information we are presented within 24 hours and 90% of that new information within a week.”

Perhaps the above statement should be emblazoned on the back wall of every classroom for teachers to constantly read as they teach.

https://www.mindtools.com/a9wjrjw/ebbinghauss-forgetting-curve

Ebbinghauss’ “forgetting curve” corresponds with Edgar Dale’s “Cone of Experience”.  In the 1960s Dale posited what he called the “Cone of Experience”.  Dale examined how people receive information.  He developed a model portraying the effectiveness of the mode for presenting new information and memory.  The isolated act of reading was the least effective while designing and making a presentation was the most effective. 

Later, misinterpreters of Dale’s work relabeled it the “Cone of Remembering” and this misinterpretation has been repeated until many believe it as factual.  This is the misinterpretation.

WE REMEMBER

10% of what we read.

20% of what we hear.

30% of what we see.

50% of what we see and hear.

70% of what we discuss with others.

80% of what we personally experience.

95% or what we teach others.

This is Dale’s Cone of Experience.

Presentation modes of verbal and visual symbols (words and graphics) are impersonal and less well remembered while the four experiential activities at the bottom of the cone require personal engagement and result in better retention.

https://uh.edu/~dsocs3/wisdom/wisdom/we_remember.pdf

Ebbinghauss and Dale inform us that memory is fickle and short-lived if it is isolated and left alone.

Capitalize on learning and make it memorable.

Further, Ebbinghauss’ research tells us that we can reduce the decline of memory by using several instructional strategies.  He found these to reduce forgetting.

  • Reinforce content, skills, and dispositions about learning regularly.  We know from retention theory that if we want information or skills to be accessible in short-term memory, students need 5-7 repetitions of mentally or physically working with they are to remember.  Theory tells us that 18 – 20 repetitions are required to create long-term retention.  If the biggest loss of memory is within one day, repetition must be at least daily to begin building memory.  This clearly is Ebbinghauss.
Memory Recall and Retrieval System

Consider automaticity of math facts.  We teach and drill children to learn addition, subtraction, multiplication and division math facts in the primary grades.  Then in the upper elementary and middle level grades we assume these facts are secured memory for all students.  In fact, they are not.  If we want to ensure automaticity, repeat episodes of the several times every year.  Make a game of it but do it.  Assumptions that children remember almost always leads to problems.

  • Presentation matters for clarity of what is to be remembered.  Make the new information easier to comprehend and absorb.  Assign smaller chunks of material to be read or watched.  Use visuals and graphics to assist students to make a clearer understanding of new information.  Build outlines, maps, and graphic organizers for students to link new information to what they already know.  This clearly is Dale.

https://www.lucidchart.com/blog/types-of-graphic-organizers-in-education

  • Make learning relevant and personal.  Motivation theory tells us that when students see themselves using new information or skills, they are more receptive to new learning and invested in remembering it.  Personalizing new learning gives students a purpose for learning and remembering it.
  • Make learning active not passive.  Use as many modalities for students to engage with new learning as are reasonable.  Approach new learning verbally – say it, write it, interpret it in a different language.  Approach it creatively – draw it, paint it, sculpt it, build it, sign it, and act it out.  Be careful not to let the projection of new learning become more important that the new learning itself.

https://asc.tamu.edu/study-learning-handouts/using-learning-modalities

What to do – Teach it, Teach it better, and Teach it again and again.

Teach less.  A grade level or subject area curriculum always contain more learning than can be accomplished within the confines of school year.  A teacher who says, “I taught everything in my curriculum or course guide” either has Cliffs Notes as a guide or is settling for very minimal student achievement in the end of year assessments.  This is not a license to discard a curriculum or course guide, but to carefully select the essential content information, skills, and dispositions that all students must learn and remember.  Both words are critical – learn and remember. 

Teach it better.  Use sound theories of instruction to build student retention and use of what they learn.  Chunk new learning for clarity.  Provide organizers of connecting new to secured learning.  Use multiple examples to help challenged learners find a connection to new learning.  The use of sound theories to teach essential new learning by itself will propel student achievement.

Make it meaningful.  Attach new learning to what students already know.  Attach new learning to the interests of the students, their families, and their community.  Attach new learning to what students will be learning and doing in their educational and career futures.  Once a child finds a purpose for learning, get out her way and simply coach her along the way.

Teach it again and again.  We parse our curriculum into units and chapters and almost never reteach or return to a unit or chapter once we complete it.  Then we wonder why students at the end of the year cannot recall with completeness or clarity what they learned at the beginning.  Take the time to repeat a chapter review from several chapters ago.  Check to know what students remember and can to with completeness and clarity.  If that knowledge or skill is essential, teach it again.  Do this rear-view mirror chapter review throughout the year.  You will see better student performances on end of year tests and future teachers of your students will be amazed at their longer-term memory.

Are You Volunteering for an AI Dope Slap? 

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I know we don’t use physical violence in education, but if there ever was a time for a good old-fashioned dope slap it is now.  2001 Space Odyssey’s Hal in the form of generative AI is across the street from our campus and, if you are not prepared for Hal not only telling when the school day starts or perhaps analyzing student achievement scores or handing you a virtual pink slip, then prepare for a virtual dope slap.  AI is not coming; it is here.  Oh, “Hi, Hal.  Let’s talk about some creative lesson planning.” 

Two C words: certainty and change

Shakespeare’s Antonio (The Tempest) taught us “the past is prologue to the future”.  We can learn from Antonio.  Educators act the part of traditionalists in most scenarios.  We prefer the certainty of yesterday and today and aver change in the unknowns of our future.  This is a stereotype perhaps, but accurate.  If we consider the past half century, it safe to say that most teachers do not deal well with uncertainty or loss of control.  They like and lock in on a six-period day, a nine-week quarter, and a four-quarter school year.  Children are to be at their desks and ready for instruction when the class bell rings.  Keep your cell phones in your pocket or I will confiscate it!  Suggesting changes to the school day and school year or class structure disturbs the institutional status quo and school is an institution.  We like lateral change, if there is to be change at all.

Like adults in other occupations, when educators feel change is being done to them rather than by them, they become even more change resistant.  A diagram of change theory shows that there always is some initial resistance, a bump in the graph line, to the installation of change.  Teacher attitude toward change is that bump.  Also, there is a pecking order in a school and teachers have status in that order; change risks their loss of standing.  Change also raises issues of insecurity.  Change too often is viewed as a determination that things were not going well or even were going badly.  If not, then why change?  Lastly, change often necessitates new learning and veteran teachers frequently resist going back to school.  In our institution of public education, change happens but it has not always been a happy time. 

https://www.edweek.org/education/opinion-10-reasons-your-educators-are-resisting-your-change-initiative/2011/05

Moore’s Law and AI

Gordon Moore posited in 1965 that “the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every decade.”  In 1975, he modified the observation to “doubling every two years”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

We use Moore’s Law simply as a statement that the rate and degree of change in technologies is ever increasing.  When applied to generative artificial intelligence, the rate and degree of change can be measured monthly not in two years’ time.  What AI could do last summer is now history to what it can do this winter.  And, if the past is prologue to the future, generative AI’s reach into our culture is growing exponentially.  Consider reading these sources among so many others on the Internet.

Generative AI – the pace of change

https://hbr.org/2022/11/how-generative-ai-is-changing-creative-work

The explosive rise of generative AI and how it will change everything

I am an educator.  I am not a technologist.  I rely upon my capacity to read and listen and study.  I encourage all educators to do the same.  As my thoughts about generative AI are constantly changing, I dabble in the uses of AI for educational purposes.

In my role as an educational consultant for teacher preparation programs, I write courses to teach teacher candidates how to teach.  I am using Chat GPT 3.5 to start the writing process.  Chat never is the finished product, but it is remarkable how, with carefully worded prompts appropriately loaded with the names of instructional leaders and the titles and key concepts of their works, Chat prints a respectable outline in seconds of time.  A better prompter no doubt would cause a better outline.  However, the act of using Chat GPT moves me to wonder not only how can classroom teachers can use generative AI but how can they teach children to use generative AI to propel their learning of our grade level and subject content curricula?

21st century skills and AI in the post-pandemic

Although the 21st century began 23 years ago, most of our public-school curriculum is written for 20th century goals.  The Common Core standards were a 2010 recapitulation of curricular objectives at the time.  Reformers of education and student learning strove to create new strategies to bring all children to common benchmarks of performance of 20th century curricula.

As devastating as the pandemic was to national health (1,000,000-plus deaths), the economy, state and national politics, and our understanding of truth and lies, it does pose one very positive educational opportunity.  We can use the pandemic as a 20th to 21st century skills divide.  In the post-pandemic, we can make 21st century skills the focal outcome of a 21st century education not the vehicle for carrying 20th century skills into a next century.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills prepared by the OECD/CERI (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation/Center for Educational Research and Innovation) listed the following as learning and innovation; information, media, and technology skills; and life and career skills for children around the world.  These are the skills, they said, that will make the learning of core subjects (all that we teach in school) and core themes meaningful in the 21st century.

21st Century Skills:

  • Critical thinking
  • Creativity
  • Collaboration
  • Communications
  • Information literacy
  • Media literacy
  • Technology literacy
  • Flexibility
  • Leadership
  • Initiative
  • Productivity
  • Social skills

https://www.oecd.org/site/educeri21st/40756908.pdf

AI as a rough draft

Generative AI is the right tool at the right time to make each of these twelve skills come alive for children.  More than Googling the Internet, AI allows a student to craft a creative and intelligent product through the use of well-phrased prompts.  The product of AI is not the final product of student learning, but just the beginning.  Standing upon the shoulders of AI, students then make the product their own – they refine the AI rough draft.  And that is the power of the AI tool.

Whether it is an essay, an architectural rendering, a drawing of a bowl of fruit, the solution to a mathematical problem, a summation of the history of Rome, or the creation of a next Rubik’s Cube, the work process is the same.  Student prompts create an AI output that is the rough draft for student refinement.  We want children to learn how to prompt and then learn how to refine.  It is the refined product of generative technology and student talent that is submitted to a teacher at the end of the day.

Easy?  No way.  There is a boatload of instruction children need in order to be prepared to use AI.  There is a world of context that must be constructed in order for generative AI to be used appropriately and for its rough product to be understood.

Simple?  Not.  Veteran teachers today will remember the learning curve for teachers and students when hand-held calculators were introduced in schools.  Veterans will remember the learning curve required before desktop computer stations were placed in classrooms – one station per classroom was a big deal.  There was a learning curve required for laptops, notebooks, and IPad usage in classrooms.  Cell phones?  We still struggle with how that technology fits into teaching and learning.  AI is just another in the long line of innovations that require teacher and student learning. 

Don’t get in the line for dope slapping

NPR’s Car Guys taught me the term “dope slap” decades ago as a way to signal to another person that their stupidity is reaching the top of the stupidity gauge.  In the years since, I developed a virtual dope slap that is part facial part verbal and a whole lot visual.  No one gets slapped, but someone gets a clear wake up call. 

In the past fifty years of working in public education, I observed teachers who bragged about being Luddites.  I observed teachers move to the back of the room because they did not embrace change.  They are the Doubting Toms who believe the change will fail or go away.  I observed teachers as pioneers who did not run from change but stood in place and diligently worked with it until, over time, they developed new skills.  There are pioneers in every new innovation.  And I observed pathfinders who eagerly embrace change and are out in front of the rest of us in trying to understand and use features of the change.  Given every new technology innovation in education, there have been Luddites, Toms, Pioneers, and Pathfinders.

In a 21st century school, there is little room for Luddites.  They made their name and reputation in Britain’s textile industry two centuries ago; they failed then as they fail now.  AI is not coming; it is here.  Don’t get in the line for dope slapping and don’t be a Tom.  21st century children need 21st century teachers; be a pioneer or a pathfinder.  Be a teacher.  

Because Transparency Has Become Opaque Require Integrity

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Each generation has its own edu-speak, those coined words used by educational professionals that are spoken so often and in varying contexts that they soon have no meaning.  These are not the acronyms that abound in school conversations.  We have long abused parents and the public with IEPs, RtI, and BIPs; educators love their acronyms.  I point to the whole words, single stand-alone words, that are used to convey a universal understanding of a concept or value that once stated assumes an end to the conversation.  The word transparency has become one of these and it is meh!  We say “Our decision-making processes will be transparent to the public” as if “transparency” is the end all.  The word is uninformative, uninspiring, unexceptional, and too often is a slight of hand or mouth.  “If I say we are transparent, we are transparent.”  Meh and more meh!

I read of a school board who touts transparency yet when the administration removed two dozen book titles from the school libraries, no board member could provide a rationale other than “we support the administration”.  End of conversation.  They lived their version of transparency.

Another school board claims transparency yet when the administration announces a multi-million-dollar post-pandemic shortfall coming in the next several years’ school budgets, there are no explanations of the decisions that led to gross expenditures over revenue in the recent past.  The task force delegated to create a solution to the huge shortfall is hand-picked and, by design, there will be little voice for the community who sit in school board meeting audiences governed by a very restrictive public participation policy.  Transparency up to a point but no further.  One has to appreciate the complicity of a person who says, “It is transparent to me”. 

I know a school administration that grieves over the drop of student achievement scores in the post-pandemic yet will not make achievement data available to the parents beyond the statewide school report card.  School leaders declare they are being transparent about the continued school ratings of “This School Does Not Meet Expectations” yet there is no accountability for low achievement year after year in the same grade level and classrooms.  It is a personnel supervision problem more than a student achievement problem.  This is an example of being transparent about what does not matter and not transparent about what does.

Stop using the word transparency.  Another way to explain the need for changing this word is that people today say transparent, but they mean translucent.  The clarity of truth and facts has given way to lies and non-facts that are spoken so openly and freely that no listener can take the words of a person in authority at face value.  We have come to expect if not accept cloudy translucency.  This is wrong.

Start using the word integrity, as in “We make all decisions with the integrity our students, parents, and community deserve”.  Integrity, meaning the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, is not meh.  Integrity describes the direct, honest, data-based, straight-forward answer that a person who asks an honest question deserves.  While there may be a shading in information that claims transparency, a response to a question or problem either is made with integrity, or it is not.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/integrity

I know a superintendent who told his faculty and staff first and then his parents and community, “… regarding the teaching of reading, we have been doing it wrong.  For the past 30 years we have taught children about reading but not how to read.  We did not use a phonics-based, literacy creating instructional program.  Instead, we asked each child to look at the pictures or listen to an adult read and asked children to memorize words hoping that these three strategies would cause a child to become a reader.  And we did this year after year.  Today, we stop that nonsense and are beginning to teach each child how to read.  I invite you to come to school and watch us make these changes”. 

Transparent, yes.  But more to the point, his declaration has integrity.  Communicating and acting with integrity is easier and less stressful than the work needed to obfuscate and maintain an obfuscation. 

We find examples in our daily communications about children and school that are simple and factual and relatable.  As listeners and observers, we must thank and applaud clear and uncompromised communication and actions.  And we must be more stalwart in calling out “Nonsense” and “Bull Roar” when we are treated to an episode of translucency.  At the end of the day, it is better to deal with bad news than with a lie.

Learning Loss – Yesterday is gone, let it go!

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Enough of the complaining about learning loss!  Our children will be okay.  Our second-hand adult worry about what children did not learn in the covid school years ignores the realities of the first-hand teaching and learning that successfully brought children back into school life that is preparing them for their future.

I watch the traditions of September unfold in our local school.  The school website shared faces and names of new teachers; each brimmed with excitement for their new school home.  Elementary grade newsletters shared information about the start of the school calendar so parents could plan ahead and be prepared.  Banners in the school yard welcomed children to the “23-24 year of learning”.  Our school celebrates the beginning of a new school year with all the excitement it deserves.

Athletic seasons give secondary students a quick blast of school in late August.  Football, boys’ soccer, girls’ volleyball, and both cross country teams practice and have their first competitions before the first day of classes.  There is a special strut to teams on the first day of school who already have wins in games, matches, and races.  Cockiness, maybe.  Pride, assuredly.

It is against this reality of September and a new school year that discussion of past learning loss needs to be put in a proper context.  To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “School is as school does”.  Our local school is active and forward-leaning.  It is known1 widely as offering a private education of small class sizes and maximum opportunities in a public-school setting.  Few, if any children in our school, look backward worrying about what did or did not happen in recent years.  They, their teachers, and their school start new learning in September based upon each child’s “readiness to learn” assessments and focused new instruction.  Forward leaning for forward learning.

In hindsight, life and learning took hits from the disruptions of pandemic mitigations.  Every child now in school will have lifelong memories and stories to tell about when schools were closed, and classes were zoomed.  They will talk of being quarantined and wearing masks, even in their sports.  They may tell stories of what they did while not in school or how they played hooky and “unplugged” from zoomed classes.  What they will not talk about is what they did not learn due to the pandemic because it will be have been inconsequential in the big picture. 

We are two school years-plus past those events: two school years of renewed schooling.  The swarm of academics, activities, arts, and athletics of school life embraced children on their first days back in their re-opened schools and few children ever looked back.  Adults, on the other hand, gather their worry beads and fume about lost learning.

Stop worrying and get in step with your children or grandchildren and their 23-24 school year.  For them, every day brings something new to learn and do and they are growing their learning not from what they missed or lost but from what they know and can do.  It is our proper role to assist them as we can and as they will let us.  Children are all about today and tomorrow; let’s join them and start moving forward.