On Teaching Science

The New York Times Editorial Observer has published some very interesting observations about why American Higher Education fails to produce more scientists. I can't help but think that the conclusions apply to secondary education as well.

The rabid legislators who concocted and condone the NCLB practice of anxiety, stress, and memorization are doing our children and society harm. They need to be voted out of office as soon as possible. And the institutions like the Department of Education both at the Federal and State levels are failed experiments as well.

These institutions should be decommissioned as soon as possible. The Bush administration has turned them into ugly, dogmatic, and cruel institutions meant to cause harm instead of serve the interests of children.

In the following excerpt you will note that learning is best performed as teamwork [something discouraged by high-stakes testing schemes] and that students are encouraged to stay until they learn the basics even if their grade is a 'C'.

There is no excuse for teachers, administrators, elected officials or anyone with a semblence of intelligence to continue to entertain the NCLB paradigm.

Read on, and take action.

Why American College Students Hate Science By BRENT STAPLES, Published: May 25, 2006

Science education in this country faces two serious problems. The first is that too few Americans perform at the highest level in science, compared with our competitors abroad. The second problem is that large numbers of aspiring science majors, perhaps as many as half, are turned off by unimaginative teaching and migrate to other disciplines before graduating.

Furthermore...

The new students are welcomed into a well-established community of scientists and scientists-to-be through a summer program that sets the stage for the next four years.

The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals. At the same time, however, the students are pushed to perform at the highest level. Those who earn C's, for example, are encouraged to repeat those courses so they can master basic concepts before moving on.

The laboratory approach keeps the students excited and prevents them from drifting off into less challenging disciplines. Indeed, according to Science, 86 percent of the Meyerhoff participants have graduated with science or engineering degrees. Nearly 9 in 10 of those graduates went on to graduate or professional programs, with a significant number earning M.D.'s or Ph.D's, or both.

Critics have sometimes accused the Meyerhoff program of cherry-picking bright students who would perform spectacularly well wherever they went to school. But the numbers suggest that the school's instructional strategy makes a real difference. Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.

The higher education establishment is generally startled to learn that more than half of the high-flying Meyerhoff students are black. This surprise stems from the unstated but nonetheless well-established belief that high-performing science students don't actually exist in the black community.

U.M.B.C.'s president, Freeman Hrabowski III, knows better. He has spent years expanding his school's access to high-performing minority students and has taken great pains to reassure black families that their children will be well looked after on his campus.

It has long been known that teachers' low expectations, particularly those related to race and racism, can depress student performance. At U.M.B.C., sustained success by minority students seems to have alleviated this poisonous problem. Faculty members who once looked askance when asked to take on minority students in their laboratories now clamor for them.

Off campus, meanwhile, the students are much sought after as research assistants and as candidates for summer internships. Those who finish their education and take their places in the ranks of researchers and professors often become powerful proselytizers for science.

The Meyerhoff model shows that a vibrant, well-structured science program can produce large numbers of students who excel and remain in the field. It has also debunked the myth that academic excellence and minority access are mutually exclusive goals.

Is Hartford listening? Is Connecticut listening? Is Washington listening? Can we finally get rid of the incipid representation in Washington that spends our tax dollars on dogmatic nonsense instead of learning?

C'mon, people, work with me here.

A Teacher - Parent - Student Web-based Portal

Okay the big downside to this is that it's absolutely free to students. This means the State Department of Education will immediately start a five-year plan to build it for millions.

The actual cost from the chalksite.com website specifies;

How much does it cost?
Chalksite is available in 5 different plans ranging from a completely FREE plan to pay plans ranging from only $4.95/month - $19.95/month. There is also school pricing available with discounts up to 35% off.

Check it out (from the title link);

While attending college, the student control panel was the one thing that I always felt my educational system just could not get right. Every student was given access to a control panel that had been built to help students keep track of schedules, important dates, finances, email, and announcements, and I am sure the average college provides students with this as well. This is great, although I personally found it confusing, horribly crafted, and pointless (I really didn’t like the control panels during my college education). So, what were these systems lacking? I feel they were mostly lacking student/teacher communication. Whether I had to catch up on missing assignments, ask a question, keep up with grades, or whatever the case may have been, I had to email the teacher. Now, the problem with this is that I had to wait for a reply, the teachers had to put time and effort into making a reply, and not to mention teacher email accounts were built into the control panels as well, which teachers weren’t too fond of either (funny). What I am getting at is communicating was a handful and had always seemed to be more troublesome then it should have been in an educational system.

Chalksite solves this communication problem by providing teachers with an easy to use central point where they can communicate with students and parents, post assignments and grades, send messages to each other, and even manage a website for their courses. However, so there is no confusion, Chalksite is not a learning system like Nuvvo. It is more of a system to organize and communicate rather then a full-fledged system for teaching. This is what I like about it though and it definitely is a service that I would have absolutely loved to use back when I was attending college.

Quality Control, Growing Teachers, and Xenophobia

A most interesting New York Times Editorial post on improving education. Well worth clicking on the link for the full text. Here's an appetizer;

Why the United States Should Look to Japan for Better Schools

By BRENT STAPLES
Published: November 21, 2005

-snip-

The No Child Left Behind Act, passed four years ago, was supposed to put this problem on the national agenda. Instead, the country has gotten bogged down in a squabble about a part of the law that requires annual testing in the early grades to ensure that the states are closing the achievement gap. The testing debate heated up last month when national math and reading scores showed dismal performance across the board.

Lurking behind these test scores, however, are two profoundly important and closely intertwined topics that the United States has yet to even approach: how teachers are trained and how they teach what they teach. These issues get a great deal of attention in high-performing systems abroad - especially in Japan, which stands light years ahead of us in international comparisons.

Americans tend to roll their eyes when researchers raise the Japanese comparison. The most common response is that Japanese culture is "nothing like ours." Nevertheless, the Japanese system has features that could be fruitfully imitated here, as the education reformers James Stigler and James Hiebert pointed out in their book "The Teaching Gap," published in 1999.

The book has spawned growing interest in the Japanese teacher-development strategy in which teachers work cooperatively and intensively to improve their methods. This process, known as "lesson study," allows teachers to revise and refine lessons that are then shared with others, sometimes through video and sometimes at conventions. In addition to helping novices, this system builds a publicly accessible body of knowledge about what works in the classroom.

The lesson-study groups focus on refining methods that improve student understanding. In doing so, the groups go step by step, laying out successful strategies for teaching specific lessons. This reflects the Japanese view that successful teaching is the product of intensive teacher development and self-scrutiny. In America, by contrast, novice teachers are often presumed competent on Day One. They have few opportunities in their careers to watch successful colleagues in action. We also tend to believe that educational change would happen overnight - if only we could find the right formula. This often leaves us prey to fads that put schools on the wrong track.

There are two other things that set this country apart from its high-performing peers abroad. One is the American sense that teaching is a skill that people come by naturally. We also have a curriculum that varies widely by region. The countries that are leaving us behind in math and science decide at the national level what students should learn and when. The schools are typically overseen by ministries of education that spend a great deal of time on what might be called educational quality control.

-snip-

Faced with lagging test scores and pressure from the federal government, some school officials have embraced the dangerous but all-too-common view that millions of children are incapable of high-level learning. This would be seen as heresy in Japan. But it is fundamental to the American system, which was designed in the 19th century to provide rigorous education for only about a fifth of the students, while channeling the rest into farm and factory jobs that no longer exist.

The United States will need a radically different mind set to catch up with high-performing competitors. For starters we will need to focus as never before on the process through which teachers are taught to teach. We will also need to drop the arrogance and xenophobia that have blinded us to successful models developed abroad.