Back to School

Debate simmers nationally on value-added assessment: evaluating teachers based on the standardized test score gains kids make from September to June.

What are other ways teachers can get feedback? Sometimes it can be simple.

In our teacher prep program, we ask every trainee to rate every class on a 1 to 10 scale, and then comment.

Here are the ratings I received yesterday. This was a class about Carol Dweck and her concept of “growth mindset.”

My reaction:

1. My ratings are down from last session (not shown). That’s quite useful in itself.

2. An 8 out of 10 is average for our program. Either we’re good, or they’re generous, or both.

So this chart, as published, might make me a bit complacent – the bars look high, but this is really a so-so performance.

Therefore, I usually re-set the scale, at least mentally, so it’s a 5 to 10 scale.

3. Okay. That just makes things a bit easier visually. Now I turn to comments. Basically, I’m looking for the main themes, and then the outliers (which I sometimes respond to individually).

7 out of 10. The session was helpful but the idea of these two mindsets (growth and fixed) is just difficult for me to really get my head around. While I understand the importance of having a growth mindset and seeking out feedback, it’s hard to always want to be “growth mindset.” It kind of feels like you’re never satisfied. Which is good — but maybe also overly critical, which can be very trying. I just feel like I have a lot of soul searching to do on this front.

7 out of 10. I think we’re bordering on too soft when we talk about psychology of the teacher (compared to the other session: How to build relationships with parents; how to give crisp directions in class, etc).

7 out of 10. This particular point has been beat to death.

Okay, so:

*Unclear as a concept
*Unclear why we’re still talking about it
*Unclear that this will help me be a better teacher

Even some of the higher ratings amplified the clarity issue.

9 out of 10. I found this useful for myself — I agree with some of my fellow corps members that Carol Dweck’s model is somewhat constraining and feels so forced, but it was great to have a semi-structured way in which to think about how my projected firmness and self confidence has played out this week in tutorial. (Or the “synthetic” confidence I have created by prepping thoroughly for tutorial).

Obviously, these are all areas where I could have done better. My preparation needs to improve.

Yet immediately my brain tries to put some blame on Dweck. “It is her book that was unclear,” I tell myself. “Not my teaching, which was fine.”

I’m like an English teacher whose kids tune out of his lesson, and then he says “Well, not my fault, many kids don’t like Shakespeare.”

But the lapse is just momentary.

I recognize the desire to blame something external (Dweck!), and turn back to the feedback.

Useful outliers:

Maybe more small group discussion? I think our group might be too big for a large group discussion to be effective and engage everyone.

And another:

When it became clear that there was a misunderstanding or some confusion about what Dweck meant by her model, I wanted MG or someone to stop and say, “Ah, I see that you are confused. Let me clarify and let’s move on” rather than “Let’s get 20 people’s feedback on this.”

This goes to a classic teaching challenge:

When do I pick my moments of “Okay, let me tell you stuff, cuz I know it” versus trying to elicit the ideas from the group (which leads to them thinking more, remembering more, but also inefficiency and sometimes fuzziness)?

Port of Los Angeles High School in San Pedro received a boost from local dignitaries on Wednesday, with the visit of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilwoman Janice Hahn and City Attorney Carmen Trutanich.

School official say they have the support of the trio in seeking to purchase their campus from a powerful landowner: the Port of Los Angeles.

School Executive Director Jim Cross said he believes the Harbor Commission will vote early next month on the school’s offer to purchase its building, a former shipping company office structure on West Fifth Street. To the frustration of POLAHS officials, there have been multiple delays since negotiations began in fall 2008.

Cross and other POLAHS officials consider the building’s purchase vital to the future of the six-year-old charter school. It currently pays about $800,000 per year in rent to the port.

Meanwhile, the school this fall is celebrating having reached its goal enrollment of 850, and recent achievements on state tests.

It earned an API of 778 this week — a gain of 47 points that it put it well above all of LAUSD’s traditional comprehensive high schools in the South Bay and Harbor Area. In results released in August, POLAHS also outperformed those campuses on results from the California High School Exit Exam: 93 percent of 10th graders passed the English section on their first try, and 91 percent passed math.

Next Wednesday, the school will host a ceremony marking the dedication of a new science classroom to FTR, the firm building the new port police headquarters next door. FTR made an in-kind donation of about $90,000 to the school by constructing a new sewer line. The dedication is the fifth such ceremony for the school, which recently built five new classrooms on its once-empty second-floor space.

The state has publicly posted the new Academic Performance Index scores, which show a significant uptick for most campuses.

The statewide API went up 13 points to 767. Now 46 percent of California schools meet the target score of 800 or greater.

We’re still combing through the scores, but here are some standouts:

• Harbor Teacher Prep in Wilmington gained 52 points to 936, making it the highest-scoring secondary school in LAUSD.
• Port of Los Angeles High in San Pedro, a charter campus that’s starting its sixth year, gained 47 points for an API of 778.
• Troubled Leuzinger High in Lawndale added 34 points to get to 611. Now only Gardena High, the subject of my profile in today’s paper, has a score below 600 for South Bay secondary campuses. Gardena did jump up 11 points to get to 586.
• A number of Inglewood elementary schools saw big gains. Oak Street Elementary jumped 84 points to 826, marking the biggest gain in the South Bay.
• Hawthorne’s Eucalyptus Elementary also saw a big jump: to 772, gaining 57 points. All of the Hawthorne elementaries saw gains.
• All of Torrance Unified’s middle saw gains, including Hull, which was the last to jump above the 800 mark. North and Torrance high schools jumped into the 800 range too.
• Palos Verdes High lost a surprising 17 points, dropping down to 848. That’s now significantly below rival Palos Verdes Peninsula, which gained 6 points to hit 891.
• Despite the region-wide upward trend, a good handful of schools did see significant drops, including two PVPUSD elementaries and Victor Elementary in Torrance. Eleven local elementary schools in LAUSD saw drops of 15 points or more.

Good question from Paul in comments, about teacher-tutor tradeoff.

Benjamin Bloom, the guy who coined Bloom’s Taxonomy, wrote an article called The Two Sigma Problem. Thanks to Shaun Doherty for the article.

U of Chicago studies showed that tutoring created a ginormo, 2 standard deviation improvement in learning. “Good teaching,” which they call “mastery teaching,” created a 1 standard deviation improvement. The baseline was regular ol’ teaching, I suppose.

Bloom wondered in 1984: can we devise teaching (i.e., a whole group at a time) methods that generate the same level of learning as tutoring?

We’re obsessed with the same question today. Bloom’s team thinks if you combine a bunch of stuff, you can get there. Like a drug cocktail. But so far as I can tell, they don’t have evidence. They just argue that the results of 3 or 4 different methods are cumulative/additive. Sometimes stuff is additive. Sometimes it’s not.

Another way to consider the problem: what if, instead of a system where we try to make all teachers “mastery” level, we provide a lot more tutoring?

Tutoring is too expensive. That’s the usual response.

But shouldn’t the question be: How much learning is generated per dollar?

A median kid in a typical American school probably gets 1,000 hours per year of class time (including some that’s probably “mastery” level).

And while there’s no good data on this that I know of, that same kid also gets about…10 hours per year of tutoring? That’s 20 minutes per school week over the year.

Is that really the right ratio? 1,000 hours of class time and 10 hours of tutoring time?

I’m having fun with this K-12 school design work. That’s because I’m learning. I love learning new stuff.

Background: Last month we wrote a 25-page proposal to create a new MATCH School. We’ll find out this month if we advance to the next ground of the competition (which would mean writing a 55-page application).

In the next round, we would need to describe more specifically how we would teach little kids to read (since right now our model is only Grades 6 to 12).

There are so many juicy issues to explore.

One is the big debates is the usefulness of “reading strategies.”

This blog has two videos. The first one is a 6-minute video explaining the “reading strategies” approach.

The second video, 10 minutes long, from UVa prof Dan Willingham, attacks reading strategies. He believes there is massive overuse of this approach. He says strategies do help – but just a little, short-term. He recommends no more than 10 lessons on it (not sure if he means in a year, or ever).

Instead, Willingham argues, teaching reading should be mostly teaching “content” — topics in geography, science, history, art, or whatever.

His video is excellent. I find his argument quite persuasive. But I’m a newbie at this and I’m sure my opinions will swirl around for a while.

Reading Strategy Basics

Teaching Content Is Teaching Reading (Keep Strategies To Very Small Doses)

What is a reading strategy?

For example, one is making a “text-to-self” connection, or “text to text” connection. The idea is you try to get a kid to connect what he’s reading to his life, or to another book.

If I’m reading Curious George, and George is in charge of taking a dog for a walk, maybe I write down that my friend has a dog that he walks. Or that in the TV show “Martha Speaks,” the dog doesn’t get walked. She kinda ambles around on her own.

Good readers make connections like that automatically. The idea is that if kids learn to explicitly make those connections, it helps. Willingham says: Yeaahhhh not really that much.