Category: Pedagogy

What Makes for an Effective School?

Dobbie and Fryer (2011) investigate the key things that make for an effective school. Effectiveness is based on test scores, which is a significant caveat, but most of their results seem reasonable.

  • Frequent feedback for teachers about their teaching from classroom visits,
  • Longer teacher hours, (10+ hours per week)
    • Middle school teachers at better schools worked over 10 hours a week more than lower performing schools.
    • Interestingly, salary had no discernible effect. It seems that the teachers did not even get paid more for putting in the extra hours. The willingness to put in these extra hours without extra pay implies a different philosophy and culture among the teachers of the “more effective” schools.
  • Data driven instruction – more effective schools “adjust tutoring groups, assign remediation, modify instruction, or create individualized student goals,” based on frequent feedback from interim assessments.
  • Feedback to parents – better schools have more frequent communication with students’ parents
  • High-dosage tutoring – The better performing schools were found to be more likely to offer tutoring where, “the typical group is six or fewer students and those groups meet four or more times per week”,
  • Increased instructional time – about 8% more hours per year
  • A relentless focus on academic achievement
    • This was assessed with a survey of principals. Those who put, “a relentless focus on academic goals and having students meet them” and “very high expectations for student behavior and discipline” as her top two priorities (in either order) scored higher on this assessment of the rigor of school culture.
    • I have serious reservations about this result. If the key focus of the school is on doing well on tests (as their “academic goals”) they should do better on the tests. This is certainly a good way to score better on standardized tests, but it has serious, negative implications when it comes to creating intrinsically motivated students.

These results come from comparing charter schools in New York City.

Sandra Cunningham has a rather cursory summary in The Atlantic, but her post’s comments section has some very interesting perspectives.

Teaching Your Kids how to Argue

All that arguing with your teenager is, basically, teaching them how to argue. You yell, they learn to yell. You listen, and make your rational arguments respectfully, and they learn to do the same — both with you and with others; so much so that it inoculates against peer-pressure.

Patti Neighmond has a nice story about the benefits of parent-teenager arguments, on NPR’s All Things Considered. One particularly interesting is that adolescents who learn to argue well are much less susceptible to peer-pressure.

Motivating Teachers

Teachers are, I believe, human too. So it should not be surprising that more motivated teachers perform better. Oscar Marcenaro-Gutierrez and Peter Dolton highlight an OECD report that shows the benefits of increasing teacher pay.

Image from Dolton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011).

What’s most interesting though is their explanation of the data. It’s not necessarily that if you pay an individual teacher more they work that much harder, but that if you pay more you increase the status of the profession and so you attract more potential teachers and are able to select better teachers:

… improving teachers’ pay improves their standing in a country’s income distribution and hence the national status of teaching as a profession. As a result of this higher status, more young people will want to become teachers. This in turn makes teaching a more selective profession and hence facilitates the recruitment of more able individuals.

Higher status and higher pay are invariably linked but the two can provide separate driving forces to engineer better recruits to the profession. The key hypothesis is that better pay for teachers will attract higher quality graduates into the profession and that this will improve pupil performance.

— Dalton and Marcenaro-Gutierrez (2011): If you pay peanuts, do you get monkeys? in CenterPiece Magazine

(via The Dish).

So the actual pay is secondary to the status conferred by the job. I would further speculate that teachers motivated more by status rather than pay are more likely to want to excel at their work, since the quality of their work is tied more on their self-worth.

The Benefits of Sarcasm

[Sarcasm] appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger

— Miron-Spektor et al., 2011. Others’ anger makes people work harder not smarter: The effect of observing anger and sarcasm on creative and analytic thinking. in J. Applied Psychology via Smithsonian Magazine.

If there’s anyone for whom sarcasm is a primary language, it’s probably adolescents. It can be used to bully or put down, but, according to Richard Chin (2011), is more often used among friends; a bit like positive aspects of teasing.

Chin has a good article that looks over recent research into how sarcasm works on Smithsonian.com.

Apparently, sarcasm exercises the brain more than regular comments:

… observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems”

—Miron-Spektor et al., 2011.

Boys vs. Girls in Math: The Difference is Only Cultural

Boys tend to be better at math. That’s been the stereotype, but a new study (Kane and Mertz, 2011) published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society provides evidence that, at all levels, it’s only because society and culture tend to support, and advance the stereotype.

… we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. … It is fully consistent with socioeconomic status of the home environment being a primary determinant for success of children in school.

— Kane and Mertz, 2011: Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance in Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Kane and Mertz compared math achievement in a number of countries. If there were some genetic reason for different math abilities then boys should be better than girls everywhere. This is not the case. In more wealthy countries where there is more equality between the genders, the mathematics performance gap disappears.

In poorer countries like Tunisia boys tend to do better at math, while in rich ones like Barhrain girls do better. However, in places with greater equity between the genders, like the Czeck Republic, boys and girls do equally well. Figure from Kane and Mertz (2011).

Sensory Integration

… people learn a visual task better when it’s accompanied by sound, for instance — even when they are later tested using only vision.
— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.

What I think this means, is that there is now scientific evidence to support the widespread use of sound effects in lectures/presentations. Woohoo!

For the educator, the interaction between sound and vision is one of the fascinating findings of recent research on how our senses interact (see also the work of the Visual & Multisensory Perception Lab). It seems to add some support to the arguments for multimodal learning; rather than just targeting specific learning styles — auditory vs visual vs kinetic etc.– to specific people, including multiple styles of information should help everyone learn better.

But beyond just education a better understanding of how the senses interact has a lot of implications.

… what people saw affected what they heard; that certain types of music or background noise affected how food tasted; and that smells could influence how a texture felt to the touch.

— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.

This research is already affecting how things are marketed and presented to us.

A study published this year showed that people thought a strawberry mousse tasted sweeter, more intense, and better when they ate it off a white plate rather than a black plate.

— Humphries, 2011: The new science of our cross-wired senses in The Boston Globe.

This research is also pertinent to the issue of Sensory Integration Disorder, which, by some estimates, affects somewhere between 1 in 6 and 1 in 20 children.

Math & Art Contest

The Missouri Council of Teachers of Mathematics (MoCTM) has a Math & Art Contest that focuses on Geometry. It has fairly simple expectations, and it’s aimed at Middle School students and lower. The tie between the math and the art does not require much depth, but that’s probably appropriate for students who are still developing abstract thinking.

A tessellation. Image via Wikipedia.

I’m usually a bit cautious about the utility of contests. Their primary benefit is in the work that they motivate, not the reward (or hope of a reward) at the end; although, students do need to learn to win or lose with equanimity.