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Beyond standards, curriculum, and teaching: Attending not just to supply, but to demand

Submitted by cadre-admin on Thu, 06/24/2010 - 4:06pm

Editor's Note: People like us (DR K-12) are primarily funded to understand and/or fix parts of the supply chain in education. If something isn't working well, we fix standards or testing or administration or curriculum or teaching, etc. Goldenberg suggests that, in addition to thinking about the supply side of education, we research and think about influencing the demand side as well.

 

Why does Japan do better than us in mathematics? (Well, ok, some people argue that they don’t do better than us, but I’ll start by assuming that they do.) People point to curriculum; or teaching and lesson study; or national standards. Surely these all matter, but there may be more to it than that.

I’d never argue that curriculum isn’t of major importance. Curriculum is what I do. The often vitriolic wars over curricula in news and in courts tell us that the public also believes curriculum matters. The NSF funds it, and many of us, devote much of our lives to it, designing new models or analyzing existing ones. People differ about what good curriculum is, but all agree that it matters.

Ditto teaching. People argue about what’s good pedagogy and about the background teachers need; people even still try to finesse the problem of teacher quality by creative use of technologies; but all agree that the teaching is critical.

Sort-of ditto standards. For literally thousands of years, people have deplored the decay of standards (morality, mathematics, whatever). But the notion of The standards—for math ed, at least—is new. After NCTM’s The came many state The’s. NCLB led to nearly ubiquitous The’s. The Common Core effort hopes to reduce that Balkanization, but we don’t yet know what problems it will solve or create. Standards for schools may not be enough to control for the variables: curriculum, teaching, ed schools, and life opportunities (or lack thereof) to study for, but people broadly agree that some form of standards need to exist.

But back to Japan. They differ from us not just in curriculum, teaching, and the coherence that can come from greater centralization. They also differ in culture in ways that plausibly affect the mathematical learning of their children. For one thing, Japan has a lively puzzle culture! A quick web search turns up not only the familiar Sudoku, and increasingly popular KenKen, but a host of other puzzles. Our personal friends from Eastern Europe—Rumania, Bulgaria, Russia—often report how their families would joust verbally with riddles and other puzzles over dinner. We have puzzles, too, and they’re popular enough to appear in our newspapers and on supermarket checkout counters. But I wonder if they’re valued in the same way. Logic puzzles of the form “Amanda, Betsy, Carla…have cats named Eeyore, Fuzzy…. Fuzzy and Betsy eat the same things…. Who likes tuna fish sandwiches?” appear only in specialized puzzle magazines, and occasionally in schools on a rainy Friday afternoon (but only for students who have finished their “real” work). Oh, and in the Law School Admission Test! So, if you want your kid in law school, these puzzles are not dessert, but could be the main course. And what about KenKen? Nobody puts up with the same amount of arithmetic practice in a battery of arbitrary exercises, so curricula include less and less practice, so kids get less practice, so...(you get the idea). But people--even kid people--typically love KenKens. People like the feel of nailing a puzzle! That's why it's economically sensible for supermarkets (not your high-end intellectual bookstores) to stock up with puzzle books.

Japan and Rumania also believe that people can learn mathematics and that success comes from effort, not genes. In the U.S., we tend to talk as if some people have “mathematical minds”—and get it from their parents—and others just don’t.

It would be depressing to conclude that it’s all about culture if we had no control over our culture, but we do. We can change culture partly through schools. Instead of fighting drill-and-kill by eliminating practice, we can adopt drill-and-thrill methods. KenKen won’t solve all problems, but it can do a whole lot for elementary arithmetic computation. And we can treat solid intellectual exercise in the form of (thoughtfully selected!) puzzles not as enrichment for the already-rich—the kids who have finished—but as part of the staple diet of all children, to make them richer. But puzzles do not a whole curriculum make.

A big problem with curricular and pedagogical change is that it requires social change as well. We can’t focus attention just inside the schools: on materials, teachers, frameworks, pacing guides, and so on. We can’t focus only on the supply side of education. We also need projects that focus on the demand side, studying how to change what people expect—they currently expect only some kids to be any good at more than the rudiments of math—and we must change what they want. We must even change the popular definition of the word “math.” If you watch TV or read the Sunday comics, you know that it’s the subject you hate and can’t understand. If a kid happens to be blessed with a curriculum that is designed and taught so that the kid does like and understand it, someone—the kid’s parent or perhaps even the kid—will eventually complain that it can’t be the real thing! Change can’t “take” if the public—the people who staff the schools, vote on local school budgets, support or harass the teachers, stand on the school committee—doesn’t want it.

As for you and me, our typical areas of expertise are in mathematics, psychology, teaching, research, and curriculum design, not in changing the public will. But there are people who are experts at changing demand. Marketers and advertisers know how to sell people things they don’t need and don’t even want! Politicians also know how to change the discourse when they need to. Mentioning marketers and politicians invokes a sleazy image—power corrupts—but the same skills also serve good ends. We have projects that focus on change in the schools. What about projects devoted to changing what the public expects of schools? Projects that create a better brand for science and math, a brand that claims, as its sexy property, iPods and cell phones and cameras? And projects that work on adults’ beliefs as well as the beliefs of kids? That “sell” the idea that genes don’t create the bottom third of the class. NPR was recently was saying it was “like school, only fun.” What about selling the idea that school does not have to be boring to be good? And what about projects to inform media people who certainly didn’t intend to hurt education that their totally unconscious digs at math or school might actually be damaging? What about selling science through pediatricians? Or puzzling as part of anti-mental-obesity “get moving” campaigns? Or that valuable work can be play? We’re not the experts who can decide what technique to use, but we can take on this challenge and get the marketing experts to help. What about it?

Reflections on 2010 Conferences

Submitted by cadre-admin on Wed, 05/19/2010 - 2:21pm

Melissa is one of 8 fellows selected by CADRE to represent the next generation of STEM researchers and developers. She is a doctoral student and research assistant at the University of Washington and associated with Tool Systems to Support Progress toward Expert-like Teaching by Early Career Science Educators.

NARST 2010 Philadelphia

   For this year’s NARST conference in Philadelphia I had the opportunity to bring a high school teacher, Bethany Sjoberg, who has been a participant and collaborator on our research projects for the past four years. Having her attend sessions with me allowed me to see research in science education through new eyes as Bethany reflected about connections between conference presentations and her classroom practices. The highlight of NARST for us was a poster symposium: Developing the Skills and Practices of Modeling featuring work from researchers at Vanderbilt, Michigan State, and Northwestern examining how students reason with models and learn about models and modeling both within a specific science content domain and across various science domains. Additionally, these projects raise important questions about supporting teachers who are working to take a model-based approach to science teaching despite their own unfamiliarity with models and modeling.

    In his discussion of the projects, Bill Sandoval pointed to two questions that resonated with the work that I am currently doing with my research team. First, how can we shed light on the day-to-day decisions and practices made by researchers when working to support teachers learning to engage in ambitious pedagogical practices like model-based inquiry? Second, how can we expand our design research to build stronger theory about teacher learning and the development of instructional practices? Our team has learned so much over the past four years by working closely with teachers, listening to how they wrestle with students’ science ideas, and listening to how they talk to one another about their practice. As we listen to our teacher participants, we hear themes that were also raised within the poster symposium:

  • How can we navigate the tensions felt between the norms of taking a model-based approach to science teaching & learning and the norms typical of schooling?
  • How can we help teachers embark on the risky practice of allowing students to theorize and think abstractly for themselves?
  • How can we navigate the tension between working with students to generate consensus models while also supporting the development of students' individual models to explain phenomena?
  • How do we envision teachers working with students to explore competing models and explanations, and what are the roles of multiple, alternative models and explanations in lieu of priviledging normative, consensus models?

 

AERA 2010 Denver

   Two sessions stood out for me from my 2010 AERA experience. Each of these sessions raised questions – and potential lines of research – that are on the horizon for scholars in science and math education working closely with teachers.

Question #1: How can science and technology studies inform science education – and how might science education inform science and technology studies?

A panel of John Rudolph, Phil Bell, and Jonathan Osbourne chaired by Noah Feinstein with Dick Grandy as the discussant raised this question as they explored connections between literature in science studies and projects in science education. The panelists suggest that some major themes within STS may be of use for science education such as helping science educators engage in “boundary work” to re-define for themselves the kinds of ideas and practices that “count” in science and, particularly, in school science. As Phil Bell points out, science educators do not have to start from scratch – frameworks for thinking about scientific ideas and practices already exist in the STS literature and these can be helpful guides for practices such as argumentation, explanation, and modeling. Grandy raised a critical point that STS literature can help inform science education in two seemingly paradoxical ways: 1) it highlights the disunity of practices within the sciences affording broader horizons for science education, and 2) it points to a collection of common practices that unify the sciences informing some potential core practices for science education.

Question #2: How do science and math teacher leaders – people who work to support practicing science and math teachers – learn to become facilitators of teacher collaborative inquiry groups focused on improving reform-oriented practice?

This panel of scholars working with science and math teacher inquiry groups is examining an important question facing any of us who currently serve as the primary facilitator of teacher groups – how do we eventually turn these groups over to teacher leaders in order to scale up and promote self-sustaining teacher networks? The panelists’ projects converged on similar themes about specialized math/science content knowledge, discourse facilitation skills, and the development of an inquiry stance necessary for teacher leaders. Scholars on this panel are just beginning to understand how these teacher leaders learn – it will be fascinating to watch the emerging findings from Kazemi, et al.; Little, et al.; Borko, et al.; and Nelson, et al. As teacher collaborative inquiry groups continue to form, this line of research will become increasingly important.

 

 

Fellows Reflections on the 2009 DR-K12 PI Meeting

Submitted by cadre-admin on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 9:58pm

Leigh Arino de la Rubia

During a plenary session of the 2009 DR K-12 PI meeting a description of the emphases in K-12 education over time described the role of teacher quality in the last decade. Many of the presentations during this year’s meeting emphasized the importance of teacher quality, sharing their group’s solutions to the teacher quality equation through innovative teacher preparation programs, induction programs, and/or professional development initiatives. In most sessions there was a noticeable lack of discussion on how these solutions should be implemented with diverse learners, however, with an exception being the ‘Working in Diverse Contexts’ SIG. Why was this the case? A major effort of the National Science Foundation is broadening participation and the DR K-12, IMD, and TPC programs have produced innovative and effective programs through the hard work of many. Each program is a worthy initiative - but how do we seamlessly broaden participation while considering that teachers of highly diverse students often need these programs the most? Not only do these teachers face additional classroom challenges but they are more likely to be under-qualified and have less access to technologies and materials, for example.

The inclusion of diversity in thought, word, and deed on DR K-12 (and other NSF) projects is not just an ‘urban’ or ‘rural’ issue but affects all of us and our future workforce. Why are studies of diverse learners often treated as a ‘specialty’? Diversity in education refers to more than persons of color - there are a wide diversity of learning styles and pedagogies effective within ethnically homogenous groups. Perhaps we should all be reminded that effectively teaching diverse groups is often a matter of good teaching practice, such as CREDE’s Five Standards for Effective Pedagogy. Essentially, if a best practice works well within a diverse group it will typically work in any group. To those who work with majority teachers and mainstream students, I challenge you to seamlessly incorporate and address solutions effective with diverse learners into your programs - it is not as difficult as you may think. For those who currently work with indigenous and/or other non-mainstream students, I challenge you to expand your research through collaboration with others who work with vastly different minority groups. What lessons have been learned through one group that can be applied to the benefit of all diverse groups of teachers and students? For example, the work of Glen Aikenhead with indigenous populations and navigation of the subculture of school science (1996) is highly applicable with groups of diverse urban students. Issues of equity present in precollege science with African-American students (Atwater, 2000) are equally important when teaching students with physical disabilities. If we are all (theoretically) working towards improving teacher quality, we need to emphasize the needs of diverse learners (including teachers) when designing research programs and curricular materials.  Diversity means everyone is included rather than just those who are not a part of the mainstream view.

 

Cynthia D’Angelo

One of the over-arching themes that I noticed during the meeting was an awareness of and desire for good measurements. Some researchers were more focused on measuring student learning in a meaningful way, while others were looking at how we can recognize and foster good teaching. This theme was brought up in a variety of places, from SIG meetings, panel discussions, and observations walking around the many interesting posters. Even though the specific topics covered differed in each forum, the need for measurable outcomes that could be understood by other educational stakeholders was important for everyone. However, what exactly we are measuring and why was not always well defined or closely examined. 

In terms of student learning, what kinds of learning do we want to measure? What do our measurements say about our priorities in learning and research? A few people mentioned the need to consider the types of knowledge and skills that administrators (and therefore teachers) will find valuable so that we can convince practitioners that our work is worthwhile and effective. Although the standards do not necessarily reflect all of these ideas, an emphasis on 21st century scientific thinking skills and integrating instruction across the STEM disciplines were mentioned over and over again. While measuring student learning, we need to be aware of what our measurements say about knowledge and thinking and learning and perhaps need to, as one participant said, to include the “messy middle knowledge” that shows how students progress from simple to more complex thinking. This kind of picture is hard to capture and is something we can definitely work on developing in the future.

 

David M. Majerich

While rivers have often been a backdrop for musical, theatrical, song, and dance productions, as well as for literature, no metaphor other than that of a river could better serve to represent the flow of ideas about the innovative research topics shared at the 2009 Discovery Research K-12 Principal Investigator meeting in Washington, DC.  Clearly, the headwaters of the DRK-12 river of research are not static.  Our river headwaters consist of freely flowing currents generated from active, thoughtful research and shared discourse about teacher content knowledge, support for teachers in the effective use of new curricula, teacher development, contextual issues, research and evaluation, and policy.  A more in-depth study of the river currents reveals that the well-planned individual projects are not detached from others, rather each is intertwined with other projects that are also rooted in advancing student and teacher learning of STEM disciplines. As future needs become present research concerns, the river flows.  As these projects are investigated and results continued to be shared in the DRK-12 community, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” (A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, 2001). 

However, changes that a river undergoes may not be immediately observable.  The flow of a river is mitigated when obstructions are encountered and dealt with.  The flow of research is also mitigated when obstructions are encountered and dealt with.  At the DRK-12 meeting all of the researchers that I encountered were open to discuss their research projects.  Rather than conceal their obstructions encountered in their projects, the researchers were generous in sharing their crafts and preliminary results.  On the topic of teacher recruitment and retention (which does not appear in the introductory paragraph), Dr. Judith Stull, Temple University SMART project, gave me permission to share her preliminary findings in this reflection.  “While participant recruitment into a project is important, retention is equally important if the goal is to generalize the research findings. If there are patterns to participant mortality, the findings can only be generalized to the types of individuals who remain.”  She added, “ In the Temple University SMART project we found that having the size of the stipend tied to how long the person has participated rather than what there were being asked to do significantly reduced participant mortality thereby strengthening our results.”  In this project the research obstruction was identified and dealt with head on.  Critical steps were taken to minimize the effects of the obstruction to the ongoing research, and essentially the ecological integrity of the river was nearly restored.

On the same topic, Dr. Janet Carlson, Project Prime, gave me permission to share her preliminary findings. “It is difficult to do meaningful research that will yield generalizable results because districts and schools have many constraints and restraints that inhibit our ability to conduct classroom-based research over time.”  She was generous and offered several examples of constraints and restraints such as: “Teaching assignments change from year to year as well as during the year. Science teachers are not in rooms equipped to conduct labs. Teachers have minimal lab supplies. Coaching assignments affect attendance at professional development sessions during the school year. Pressure to teach to the test, when the test does not reflect an inquiry-orientation to science, keep people from participating in studies. District personnel do not understand the nature of rigorous research and will commit to participate when a proposal is written only to make subsequent decisions that make that participation impossible when the proposal is funded.”  Obstructions to research like those mentioned by Dr. Carlson can interfere with the flow of her research that has been carefully planned.  In this case, the change to the river is rapid, and the researchers took notice.

The types of obstructions that Drs. Stull and Carlson reported independently are not unique to only their projects.  Other DRK-12 attendees reported similar obstructions that brought their research plans to an abrupt halt and/or compromised original research schedules.  While I was originally assigned to follow the teacher content knowledge strand, I simply could not ignore the recruitment and retention problem that plagued other research programs as well.

 What strategies are others using to address the recruitment and retention issues in their projects?  What obstructions have you faced and how have you minimized the effects on your research?  What successes have you celebrated?  I turn this over to the DRK-12 community of researchers.  Your continued discourse and the dynamic of change will release the talent within the community to keep the DRK-12 river flowing.

I would like to thank Drs. Stull and Carlson for their generosity and assistance in supplying me with their valuable information.

 

Andrew Morozov

I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on a project funded by the NSF Discovery Research K12 Program, and to participate in the 2009 DR-K12 PI Meeting, organized around the theme of “Building the Knowledge Base of Teacher Learning in STEM Education.”  During the months of working on the project, and while attending the conference, I had numerous opportunities to connect and interact in meaningful ways with experts in different areas of STEM education.  Over the past year here in Seattle, and for those three November days in Washington, D.C., I was given a chance to assist with challenging and important work, engage in conversations on topics I am interested in, and get to know incredibly smart people who are now part of my professional network.  I could not ask for more!

At the risk of appearing evaluative (the idea is constructive/reflective feedback) and over-generalizing from only a small sample of projects, which I had opportunity to observe at the Meeting, I have noted several apparent sources of difficulties with the research and development process, and implementation of DR-K12 projects.  First, it is the availability and nature of incentives for project stakeholders outside of the research team that are essential to ensuring sustainability of developed innovations.  Second, it is the tension between the systemic and cultural constraints of existing institutional structures and processes, and the possible alternative structures that may be necessary for successful adoption of innovations in ways that are responsive to increasingly more heterogeneous, flexible, and unbounded patterns of inquiry that characterize the 21st century learner.  Third, it is the pronounced (albeit by no means unique) pressure on this community to conduct research in a context characterized by ambiguous merits, and the ensuing looseness of the linkage between, the research on teaching quality, and the research on learning – owed in part to the prescriptive flavor of such research, infused by the ongoing vacillation over what the “right” learning outcomes look like, and how, by what means, and for what purposes to assess them.  On account of the last point, I believe that the evidence-based approach, championed by the DR-K12 program and reflected in every project I had come across, essentially amounts to validity testing of our construct definitions, hypotheses, and proposed interpretations of the results achieved.  Thus construed, my overall impression is that the research carried out within the DR-K12 framework entails tremendous opportunities for discovery and innovation, and ultimately moves us toward higher quality education – for both teachers and learners.

 

Sytil Murphy

There were several questions and comments asked either by the plenary speakers or audience members in the question/answer sessions that followed that sparked my interest.  Suzanne Wilson commented that the “educational system focuses on what it can (or thinks it can) control,” with, in this case, the focus being on controlling teacher (or teaching) quality.  An audience member asked how two exceptional teachers with different teaching styles could both be fairly evaluated by the same instrument?  Courtney Bell asked, among other things, “how many observations of a class are needed for a stable estimate” of a teacher’s quality?

I have been working on a project, the National Study of Undergraduate Science Education (NSEUS) that has led me to ponder similar questions.   One conclusion that I have reached (that I am sure none would argue with) is that one classroom observation is not enough.  I have attended several classes as part of this project that, had the class gone as planned, would have performed quite well on our instruments (like receiving a high RTOP score), but due to other issues, like classroom management, the lesson did not perform well.  Additionally, I have begun to ponder additional, related questions, specific to the RTOP, the instrument the study uses.  Is the RTOP a valid instrument at all ages, or, in other words – are there certain reformed teaching techniques or ideas that are less appropriate for a kindergarten classroom than a middle school or high school classroom?  Are all items on the RTOP necessary for all lessons?  Or, can there be a lesson for which a particular item does not make sense?  And, if so, how should this be handled? 

Because my work involves the RTOP, my thoughts are directed towards it.  However, I feel they can be generalized to any instruments and to the broader issue of teacher (or teaching) evaluation raised by during the plenary sessions. Therefore, I would like to expand on the questions asked during the plenary sessions.  Can teacher (teaching) quality be controlled and, if so, how? How do we evaluate it?  Can one instrument be constructed to fairly evaluate all levels, lessons, teaching styles and disciplines?  How do we implement it?         

 

Scott Strother

What I enjoyed most about the 2009 DR-K12 PI Meeting was the cooperative nature of the sessions. Rather than hearing about one research project per session (e.g. at many conferences), we were immersed in discussions around a topic and how our research addresses that topic. As a CADRE fellow, this allowed me to hear several points of view around a particular body of work, as well as learn about many on-going projects. Personally, the most important thing that came out of these discussions was realizing how many projects NSF funded that could inform my own work or ideas for future research in an area in which I had interest.

The Special Interest Group session Algebra K-12 was especially oriented towards sharing ideas around the current and future state of research on algebra. Our goal at the end of the session was to continue our conversation after the meeting. Then we could constantly receive updates on on-going work and ideas for research needs and possible collaborations. However, we had trouble deciding a format for on-going collaboration and idea sharing. Blogs and email chains often do not work when people do not actively engage with them for any length of time. I want to keep in touch with the group and the new contacts I made in the context of sharing ideas about our work, but what are the best ways to continue this discussion in which people will actively participate?

 

 

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