Clay Burell's Library tagged teaching →  View Popular

Teaching versus planning time

•In most European and Asian countries, about half of a teacher's workweek, 15 to 20 hours, is spent outside the classroom
– preparing lessons, meeting with students and parents, and working with colleagues. In South Korea, teachers spend up to
65 percent of their working time outside the classroom. In Japan, teachers study one another's best lessons in groups and
analyze the strengths and weaknesses.

•American teachers are typically given three to five hours a week for planning.

Duke-NUS has adapted Mr. Michaelsen’s method slightly. It calls its variation of the method “Team LEAD, ” which stands for learn, engage and develop. But the essentials of this version remain the same as Mr. Michaelsen’s method.

At the start of the year, students are divided into teams, which remain the same through the year. Before each class, they are given assignments to learn independently and in their teams. In the classroom there is an initial “readiness” phase in which they are tested, individually and in their teams, through multiple-choice questions on a scratch card.

“This is a good way to teach students to work in a team, to be able to express their opinion and critically analyze what other people say,” Dr. Kamei said.

After the readiness phase, they move on to specific case studies, tackled by applying their memorized knowledge, complemented by medical literature and notes.

“Faculty does not talk, but listens to the conversations of the students, who are still working in teams,” Dr. Kamei said. “The students have to explain and defend their answers because they could have found the right answer but for the wrong reasons.”

At regular intervals, as the course progresses, the students undergo peer evaluation focused on their ability to contribute to the team effort. The results of peer evaluation contribute about 10 percent to the final grade.

Across the land, students in science class diligently memorize human cell components like DNA, mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum. They learn to rigidly order the natural world, from kingdom down to species.

And — most disturbingly, say a growing number of scientists — they learn to hate science.

Advocates cite many problems with science education, such as teachers lacking a science background. But perhaps the most critical issue, they say, is standardized testing that forces students to memorize and regurgitate.

“Students don’t need to know what an endoplasmic reticulum is,” said Bruce Alberts, editor of the journal Science and former president of the National Academies of Science, who has called for a “revolution” in science education.

“Bad tests are forcing a trivialization of science education and drive most students away from science. Real science is exciting. It’s completely different from these textbooks.”

Yet change may be afoot in Texas, with some legislators calling for a re-evaluation of the influence of TAKS testing. And some science educators see opportunities to change science class from a dull exercise in memorization to inquiry-based learning.

There’s no shortage of smart people tackling the issue, like Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman, who argues that children should be taught physics first in high school in order to grasp the broad outlines of the natural world.

“I’ve been working at it for a long time,” he said. “We’re not doing well. Meaningless testing is a bad thing. If we want scientific literacy, then we want teachers to teach the beauty of science, the fun in it, the humor in it, and to bring examples of modern science into the classroom.”

A history of literacy instruction

Early schooling in the United States largely did not tackle these challenges. Instead, teachers in the mid-1700s emphasized instruction in the basic skills of decoding text. By the mid-1800s, schools began to separate classrooms by grade level, allowing teachers of older students to focus more on content. Through the Industrial Revolution, the notion of reading for meaning continued to grow in importance. However, during World War I—when officials were shocked to discover that many U.S. soldiers could not read training materials—educators began to develop remedial instructional approaches. The responsibility for this instruction was given to reading specialists who helped struggling readers with basic skills, usually in a setting outside the content-classroom. Thus content-teachers began to think that reading was a separate content and that reading instruction was the responsibility of reading staff.

First, America’s elite colleges do not accurately reflect America.  Students from privileged backgrounds are drastically overrepresented at these schools. As this invaluable paper found, fully 74 percent of students at the nation’s most selective colleges come from families in the top income quartile. Only 10 percent come from families in the bottom half of income, with only 3 percent from the poorest quartile. In other words, if you meet a student from an elite university, he/she is 25 times more likely to come from a rich family than a poor family.

It is tempting to assume that this means that only rich high school graduates are prepared for elite colleges. Not so, shows this great report from the Education Trust. There are plenty of highly talented low-income students; they just don’t have equal access to the top colleges. “High-achieving, high-income students are five times more likely to attend a highly selective college and nearly twice as likely to attend a selective college than are similarly accomplished students from the bottom three income quartiles.”

So obviously there are many highly talented students at second-, third-, and fourth-tier universities. Given that we don’t have any reliable measures of colleges’ value-added, particularly their ability to improve a student’s ability to teach disadvantaged K-12 charter students, why the explicit bias in favor of graduates from elite universities? Why not recruit, say, the top 10 percent of graduates from all colleges or the top 20 percent from the top half of colleges?