Let the Debunking Continue: Learning Styles

Our founding president at ABCTE, Kathy Madigan, used to bristle (to put it mildly) at the mention of “learning styles” telling us the research just did not support trying to teach to different learning styles. Now one of my favorite cognitive scientists, Dr. Dan Willingham from UVA is in the Post to discuss the issue and tell us that the research doesn’t support the fact that kids learn in different ways.

Love the money quotes from this article:

“Some lessons click with one child and not with another, but not because of an enduring bias or predisposition in the way the child learns. The lesson clicks or doesn’t because of the knowledge the child brought to the lesson, his interests, or other factors.”

“When you think about it, the theory of learning styles doesn’t really celebrate the differences among children: On the contrary, the point is to categorize kids.”

“Learning styles has become unquestioned dogma among many educators, despite the utter lack of evidence to support it.”

Huh. That never happened in K12 education before has it?? This is perhaps the most difficult part of education reform – tradition and unquestioned dogma always win over actual evidence.

Also a great quote from one of the comments at the end of the article:

“If I present the material three different ways, people assume that the kid got it the third way, instead of getting it because they got the same information three times.”

As comedian Dane Cook says – it’s funny, cause it’s true.

Rhee likes Teachers

Please read Michelle Rhee’s op-ed today in the Washington Post. While I still feel that some of the praise for her should wait until the results are studied, the progress she has made in moving the district forward is impressive. Her work ethic and drive are just amazing to me in tackling this amazingly difficult task.

The op-ed is important because it clearly demonstrates that she does appreciate great teachers which is why she has dedicated most of her life in this effort. It seems that education reformers, like ABCTe, often get tagged as hating teachers. We all know that teachers are the key to success and we just want the best possible teachers in every classroom.

She is setting the stage for a difficult negotiation and hopefully this will clear some of the air. But since so few people read the newspaper anymore, it probably won’t help much.

DC Schools moving forward

Yesterday I was going to blog about the outstanding opinion piece by Colbert King in the Washington Post on Saturday appropriately titled “Beyond Publicity, What is Rhee Producing”. King makes a great point that seems to occur with every rock star superintendent of schools – they make changes and are immediately canonized before we even see the results. Education reformers start drinking, and even making, the kool-aid because we are so desperate to see any progress that anyone who actually makes a change must immediately be worshipped. Then, because of the superintendent’s fame for making changes, they leave before anyone can really see results. In theory they could be a disaster, but no one will really know because the results never catch up to them.

However the nasty flipside is also true. King advocates for an independent auditor to see if all these changes provide results but it is difficult to see solid results in a short period in a school system that has been mired in sub-par performance for so long. While I applaud the need to really understand the results of these disruptive innovations, I am fearful that her detractors will see the results and find ways to say that her methods are not working. People will try to reverse what she has done before we have a chance to see what she can achieve. This happened most recently in Philadelphia.

Had I blogged yesterday, I would have been a lot more harsh about the fame thing and the education reformer fawning that occurs at every conference. It is as if every education reformer signed a pact never to have a conference unless Michelle was a keynote speaker with angels singing in the background. I would ask that everyone tone it down and not make a huge deal until the results are in. Our critique of the status quo is they focus too much on inputs and not enough on results – yet every superintendent we worship is because of their inputs, not results. Plus we set the expectation so high that they are doomed to disappoint.

But then I read this and I am drinking the cool-aid again. The key element in true reform is great teaching and Michelle is going to provide a laser focus on improving the District’s teaching corps. She is dumping National Board because it is too costly and does not get results, setting high expectations for students and trying to eliminate bottom performing teachers. She is eliminating teacher training which does not produce results, in favor of a program that is getting results in Montgomery County and she is going to improve mentoring.

This is a huge, much needed step to get DC Schools back on track. If we can combine that with King’s idea of an accountability measure – with very reasonable goals – I think the attention Michelle is getting will be justified in two years when we see DC finally become a place where kids come to learn.

Fixing Teacher Quality

Teaching quality continues to move forward in the news. Mike Petrilli has an excellent write up in the Gadfly from last week and now a new article in the Washington Post about what the newly canonized Michelle Rhee plans to do. But they are all trying to run before we learn to walk.
Management texts will tell you that you need to focus on improving staff. In teaching, the staggering numbers always tell the tale.

There are 3.2 million teachers. Jack Welch, the brilliant CEO of GE, made his managers rank all staff so that they knew the top 20%, middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% were fast tracked into leadership positions and the bottom 10% got fired.

We would have to fire 320,000 teachers per year. That would double the number of teachers we need to hire each year and since we can’t find enough to fill our positions now, we will never have enough if we start to really push an aggressive approach towards eliminating mediocre teaching.

The other problem with rating teachers is that our principals have not demonstrated that they are really all that great at rating teachers. Here I am siding with the teacher’s unions again - but we would really need some serious evaluation training for principals before we can start this type of approach.

To solve teacher quality we need to do the following:

1. Fix recruitment – have enough candidates for each position so that the principal can hire the right teacher for his/her students – we need more routes to the classroom to increase the numbers
2. Be Selective - less than 40% of our ABCTE candidates make it through the program and we are starting to see great results from our teachers
3. Train principals in hiring – ensure they know how to match the teacher to the students
   Develop great performance evaluations for teachers – outcomes and observations based and ensure the evaluation is more than once a year
4. Train principals on evaluations – ensure they know how to develop teachers
5. Develop truly great professional development for teachers – develop efficacy measure for the professional development to ensure it meets minimum standards
6. Train principals on how to assign prescriptive professional development from performance evaluations

Once that is in place, then you can start to move teachers who do not succeed with students out of the classroom. But we have a lot of work to do learning to walk before we can start running.