Back to School

Teaching ideas whose time has come…and gone? Courtesy of yours truly and Alice Wiggins, who oversees the Core Knowledge Foundation’s Schools Department, here are common classroom practices that need to go away, be rethought, or curtailed:

1.      Data Driven…What?

An increasingly common feature in classrooms are data walls—bright, cheerful displays that show if students are advanced, proficient, basic or below basic in ELA and math.  As Rick Hess has written, schools have gone from not using data to inform decision making, to using data in half-baked or simplistic ways. Displaying decontextualized data is a prime example.  What exactly do we expect a third-grader to do with the knowledge that he or she is “approaching proficiency” in reading?  If data isn’t being used to drive instruction thoughtfully, what’s the point?

2.      Fiction Only Read-alouds

Fortunately, very few elementary school teachers need to be sold on the .  They’re great for language development and exposing kids to rich vocabulary, since a child’s ability to read with comprehension doesn’t catch up with listening comprehension until about 8th grade. But if teachers aren’t devoting significant class time to nonfiction readalouds, they’re missing out on a golden opportunity to build background knowledge, which is essential for reading comprehension.

3.      Dumb Test Prep

Decrying test prep as a misuse of class time is a little like complaining that your kids are watching Fear Factor when they could be reading Chaucer. It’s true, but it’s not likely to change anytime soon.  But if we have to waste devote precious class time to test prep, let’s stop trying to teach and reinforce like making inferences and finding the main idea that are content-specific, and cannot be mastered in the abstract.  More effective might be what Dan Willingham calls practice that reinforces the basic skills required for the learning of more advanced skills, protects against forgetting, and improves transfer.

4.      Reciting Lesson Aim and Standard

There’s nothing wrong with standards for planning and focusing lessons.  However, the idea of standards-based instruction is often misinterpreted.  Sure, students should be introduced to what they are about to learn, but having kindergarteners recite, “Through this lesson I will develop phonemic awareness and understanding of alphabetic principles” does nothing to support attainment of this standard or develop these students reading achievement.  In other cases, rather than using the standards to guide instruction on meaningful content, the standards become the instruction. Neither practice is an effective use of limited instructional time.

5.      Overusing Teaching Strategies

Too many classrooms seem to function on the principal that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.  Group work and differentiated instruction are two prime examples.  In Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov writes that group work is “as likely to yield discussions of last night’s episode of American Idol as it is higher-order discussions of content.”  Asking frequent, targeted, rigorous questions of students, Lemov believes, “is a powerful and much simpler tool for differentiating.”  Too many classroom practices are used based on a compliance mentality—students are in groups because “that’s what administration wants to see”—rather that because it makes sense for a particular unit, lesson or activity.  Like using data to drive instruction rather than as bulletin board fodder (see above) there needs to be a sound instructional strategy underlying pedagogical choices.  And let’s not even talk about learning styles.

6.      The “Theme of the Month”

It’s standard practice to organize instruction by “themes,” such as holidays, seasons, my neighborhood or foods of the world, for example.  Organize units around knowledge “domains” instead.  A teacher might use the theme “Our Great Big World” in kindergarten to invite children to explore the setting of a story.  But since every story has a setting, that “theme” is arbitrary and doesn’t coherently build background knowledge.  A domain-based approach to “Our Great Big World” might include teaching children about continents, countries, climates and land forms in a coherent fashion.

7.      Reading Comprehension Skills

We can’t say it enough and Dan Willingham said it best:  .  The most overused tool in the box in elementary school is reading strategies.  Yes, there are benefits to reading strategies, but there’s no evidence that repeated practice yields additional benefits.  Comprehension typically breaks down and test scores plummet because of a lack of background knowledge, not because kids have failed to master reading strategies.

TAMPA, Fla. — Does Florida need more dentists?

That’s the question at hand as the governing board for the state university system prepares to consider whether to allow more universities to offer dental schools. Currently, the University of Florida is the only state university that has a dental school, but at least three other universities are considering starting one.

The Board of Governors for the State University System heard a report Thursday on a Department of Health survey released this year that shows that there are enough new dentists entering the profession through 2050 to offset any attrition due to retiring dentists.

An estimated 3,054 new dentists will be added to Florida’s workforce every decade, the Department of Health study shows, which will more than offset any losses. And that doesn’t even include data from the Lake Erie College of Medicine dental school, which will open in Tampa in 2012 and graduate about 100 students each year.

But that same study shows that there aren’t enough dentists in rural Florida. Most Florida dentists work in South Florida, leaving rural counties in the Panhandle and Central Florida underserved.

“Southeast Florida has the most dentists,” said R.E. LeMon, the associate vice chancellor for academic and student Affairs. “There are from few to virtually no dentists residing in certain primarily rural areas of Florida.”

The Board of Governors will look more seriously at this issue at its September meeting. The University of Central Florida, Florida A&M University, and Florida Atlantic University are all considering opening dental schools and the University of Florida wants to expand its school.

“Whether we need more dentists and how we go about getting there is certainly something the board has to consider,” said Board of Governors Chairwoman Ava Parker.

One reason these schools are eager to open dental schools is they want to replicate the University of Florida’s successful – and money-making – program. According to a presentation by Teresa Dolan, a dean at the College of Dentistry at the University of Florida, the university took in $17 million in research dollars thanks to the school.

But, dental schools are also very expensive to create. The American Dental Association says in 2007 the average dental school cost $93,000 per student.

Florida has over 11,000 dentists and ranks fourth nationally in the number of dentists.

One reason dentists are unwilling to set up shop in rural areas has to do with Medicaid reimbursement rates, university officials explained. Because the reimbursement rates for Medicaid patients is low, dentists with huge student loans to pay off are reluctant to open an office in an area with a high percentage of Medicaid patients.

Florida universities should look at incentives for dentists to work in rural Florida, such as loan forgiveness programs, LeMon suggested. Universities interested in offering their own dental schools are pitching their programs as the solution to the lack of dentists in rural areas.

Florida A&M University President James Ammons said after the Board of Governors meeting that his school’s dental program would focus on providing dentists to low-income areas. “All of the unmet needs and issues are right at the core of FAMU’s dental model,” Ammons said.

The Florida A&M University Board of Trustees will vote on the issue at its August meeting.