Reflecting on Blogging through out the semester

This is the first blog thing that I have ever done.  I have to admit I am not one of those people who read blogs or ever seeks them out.  I have nothing against blogs, they just don’t come up on my radar when I think of things that I want to read, one reason may be that I don’t like reading on-line, although I am getting more use to it now.

However, blogging and reading other peoples blogs has a very different voice than other texts.  It feels more casual, people write more personal stories and write more about their connections to the text they are reading.  I think I enjoy reading those aspects of connections to the text and seeing peoples experiences that have led them to connect in that way.

I think in my own blogging I have felt the freedom to write more casually as well because of this space.  I feel more free to make connections, talk about the text in a different way than I might in a class or a more formal situation.  I also like having the freedom of being able to respond to text in any way, not being restricted by having to answer certain questions. So in other words, one word that I have already used over and over, FREEDOM to react to think and to write on my own terms and to be able to see that process for other people as well.

Blogging also forces me to think about what I have read. I have to admit that if I do not make notes, write something about what I have read, I just forget about it.  Blogging makes me thing about what I read and how I am going to connect to that piece and then represent it on “paper”.  Writing is such an important thinking tool for me, that often when I start writing things come out that I was not originally thinking about, kind of like right now.  Writing makes me stop to think about what I read critically and blogging helps with that process.

I think the part that was most challenging for me was responding to other’s blogs.  While I enjoyed reading them, I didn’t always feel like I had ample time to respond to a posting.  People wrote so much and so in-depth, that to respond adequately to those thoughts takes time and consideration.

Toward Teacher Development for the Urban in Urban Teaching

Well this article brings up so many excellent issues about teaching and teaching in difficult spaces.  I don’t think it needs to just be about urban education, many of the issue brought up in the article reminds me of similar issues of teaching in rural South Africa.  I had to prepare pre-service teachers to teach in environments that were incredibly difficult and environments that were not set up for teachers and students to be successful.  There was no support for new teachers, it was very much sink or swim, no collaborative teaching and mentoring and again spaces that would make any normal teacher run away.  Most teachers did not run away in this environment because teaching is one of the few jobs available in the rural areas that pays.  But instead, teachers would give up and just not show up to teach their classes.  I can’t tell you how many times I would go out to schools to visit student teachers and walk past classrooms full of students and no teachers.

 

While I was there I got involved in forming the rural english teachers association.  The goal of this groups was to recognize educators who were committed to teaching and improving education and who wanted to come together to share best practices and stories about their classes.  We organized a conference and the teachers would present.  This was really difficult to convince teachers to present because they did not think of themselves as effective educators, they were so use to getting outside, top down directions, that they felt disempowered to make changes in their classes.  This article brings that issue up as well, that teachers look outside instead of relying and collaborating to build a strong foundation and community supporting learning and teaching at the local level.   The teachers did finally agree to present and the conference went so well.  The teacher were re-energized with new ideas and new collaborations.  I really believe in the power of small, committed groups of teachers who work in similar environments coming together to collaborate and share and how powerful that experience can be.  That is what this article reminded me of.  It is not a perfect process, and teachers are dealing with difficult issues that they can’t fix, in this case gang violence, in South Africa, hunger, HIV, drug abuse, sexual abuse and slew of other issues that I am sure also affected the community around Power elementary school.  But having these groups can be a place to start and let teachers who teach in these incredibly difficult spaces that they are not alone in their efforts and mission to provide students of all backgrounds a good education.

A bilingual education for a monolingual test?

There are a lot of issues that this article  brought up that I did not find surprising.  The problems of high-stakes testing effects all areas of classroom instruction espcially when you start talking about bilingual programs.  I had a class this summer with many bilingual teachers and I asked them how do they make the choice of what language the students will take thier exams in, all of them had something different to say.  I think as a teacher that would be an incredibly hard choice to make.  The teachers, some had consulting processes they went through with teams, others just made the choices themselves and others just taught in English, even though they were suppose to be bilingual teachers.  This issue of what language to take a test in just highlights another reason why high stakes testing can not be the only measure for schools and students.

 

Another aspect of this article I find interesting, is the underlying belief of teachers that kill and drill in one language is going to improve students proformance on a test, when most research shows that balanced bilingual education is much more benificial.  So, in light of that I sitll don’t understand teachers descisions not to keep with the principles of bilingual education and keep a balanced instruction.  I wonder if someone did a study on that what students would perform better, the students with balanced bilingual instruction, or the students with the kill and drill method in one langauge.

Another thing I dont understand is why can’t the TAKS test just have both languages on one test for the kids?  They have already gone throught the expense of making and translating this test, why not just have both and have kids choose while they are taking the test which language to answer in.  Maybe some questions they will answer in English and some in Spanish, won’t that be a more balanced way to do this kind of testing.  Why do they have to choose between two languages?  Maybe there is some administrative reason for it, but I have to imagine that the folks who are grading the Spanish test are bilingual.  Maybe somebody knows more about this than I do and has a answer to it.

The point the article makes about rich and diverse instruciton time lost due to preparation for the TAKS test is so true.  That hurts all students.  It makes me think of the schools that spend so much time focusing on TAKS preparation seem to do worse than schools than the schools who do not spend time focusing on preparation, and I just think that widens the gap instead of “equalizing” education the supposed purpose for standardized testing in the first place.

Four Resources Model

I like the way this article ended with the questions, “What better way to assist teachers’ work and pedagogy in these new times than with complex and critical questions rather than simple answers.”  It seems with NCLB and just looking at “scientific based” research in the U.S. that powers at be are trying to boil down complex issues of what literacy is and how it should be taught in schools with simple one-sided programs that you just hook your learners up to.  They take away the role of the teacher to be a critical thinker and to design classes that suit their learners, instead it is like they want teachers to punch a time clock like in a factory setting and go in to school and produce readers and writers as their factory output all using the same methods.  What is so wrong with diverse classes, diverse thinking, and diverse literacy practices, why can’t we celebrate these differences, embrace them in our classes and make responsive inclusive lessons that include all of our learners? Why do we need to look for simple answers when there none to be had?

Turn up that radio, Teacher- Duncan-Andrade & Morrell

While Idon’t diagree with the premise of this article, that is to respect the diversity of knowledge and experience of our students, to bring in culturally relevant material to the class to engage students and that popular media can be used to teach academic skills (e.g. research, essay writting etc..) I think the article makes teaching students from disadvantaged backgrounds seem simple.  From reading this article it seems the only thing you need to do is to bring in egaging material in the voices of our students.  I don’t think it’s that simple, how do you move a student from disecting a piece of rap music to writing a sucessful statement of purpose to enter college?  These are two very different and distinct discouse styles.  These different discouse styles carry with it our idenities, the way we think, and feel about our environment and kids, young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds (may) use a discouse that in the end is not valued by the education system.  I think the article makes it seem like academic language will come naturally if you just bring in the right kind of content.  I think academic language is very awkward, has a very defined genre and is not a natural process for many students no matter what background you come from.  Not only is it awkward, it might just not feel right.  For example I had to teach (English) academic reading and writing to my students in South Africa, learning things like essay structure and paragraph structure were really uncomfortable because of the discouse style.  In many African langauges (and I am really simplifying here) it is considered rude to tell someone right away why you came to tell them a story, but the first thing we ask students to do in academic writing is to tell us why you are telling us this story in the form of a topic sentence and/or thesis.  I would get beautiful essays from students that had no paragraphs, very few sentence markers and a thesis statement at the end.  Why?  Because this kind of academic literacy was not natural, did not respect the kind of discourses that take place in the community, my students did not have a lot of experience with academic text and could not identify with why you would ever be so disrespectful to someone and be as rude as to state in the first paragraph why you were there.

Another reason why I don’t think just brining in popular culture into the class is enough to engage students in academic content is the emotions that students have around learning.  If students have had a lifetime of negative experiences with learning at schools by the time they get to highschool it is really hard to move beyond these emotions.  I had many students in South Africa who didn’t trust me or believe me that they could be sucessful students, to the point that they would not even try to do an assignment or engage in class no matter what the content was.  They were so use to failing, so use to being told that they couldn’t be good students, that they had very low expectations of themselves and were afraid to even try.  Then I had very good students, who didn’t identify with being writers and would turn in plagerized work because they thought they couldn’t write or that anybody was a better writer than them.  Even after several student/teacher conferences of helping students formulize thier ideas on paper, showing them that they had great ideas a thoughts etc.. some students would still in the end turn in plagerized work.  Not because they waited till the last minute to turn something in, but because they still doubted thier ability to be writers and identify with being a writer that had something worthy to read.  Anyone who has worked with disadvantaged students knows that the emotional side of learning is most of the battle.

I could go on here with more examples of why I think that brining in the right kind of material to class is just the start and a good start at that, it is just not that simple.

RTI-Mesmer & Mesmer

I really don’t know much about RTI, or in general reading intervention of any kind at schools, except what happens to E.L.L.’s.  So this article helped me understand a little better about what RTI is.  After reading the article I was still confused about what the difference between RTI and the discrepancy model is?  I know then they are not tying it to an IQ test, but in the end how is the intervention different between these two different kinds of intervention?

Of course the article presents and ideal model of how RTI should look, I do wonder how it really looks at a school that is using it and not part of a research site (although the authors do mention this as a limitation).  If you are teaching at a school that has a high amount of struggling readers, how could this response be possible?

The article also mentions that a LD can not be diagnosed if appropriate instruction, socioeconomic status, culture, sensory issues, emotional issues or English Language Learners are of a concern.  Well, that counts for most of the struggling reader population, so how do they recommend that a LD be determined if a learner has some of those mentioned issues?  They do not make alternate suggestions for that.

This article in general just left me more confused, even though it is a clearly written and supposedly easy to understand piece of writing.  I may be missing the necessary background knowledge to understand this article very well, but I don’t see the difference between RTI and what the alternative is.  Kids are still working on deficits.  Maybe somebody can explain to me what I have missed here.

Afferbach NRC Policy Brief & Mallette

When I was reading the Afferbach policy statement on high stakes testing there was not much there that I did not agree with.  I just wonder if so many people, educators, researchers and test producers know that just basing a child’s progress on one test score is not very humane, then why does education keep moving in the direction of more and more high-stakes testing?  I was also thinking while I was reading it about the bit of conundrum that testing presents, because the alternatives mentioned, e.g. “reading assessment should reflect performance over multiple time points with various texts and purposes” and that reading should measure a wide range of skills with a variety of formats and responses”, to do these things right in addition to high-stakes testing is also very expensive.  As it is to make a good test.  If they do this in lieu of high-stakes testing, then all the better, but I just don’t see high-stakes testing going away anytime soon. In this article too, it also mentioned that the test producers/companies warn against using one test as the only assessment of a student.

I also work as a rater for the TOEFL (Test of English as a ForeignLangauge) test, which is a standardized test that all students entering U.S universities who speak English as and additional langauge have to take.  It is a test of academic English for university settings.  The test has gone through major changes over the years and is probably much better today then it was before.  It use to be mostly a grammar based test and then students would enter U.S. classrooms and not know how to speak English very well.  Universities complained and test takers complained and the company continues to work on the test and now it has reading, writing, and a speaking section that are more representative of what a student would do at a University.  They also changed the test from a paper-based test to a computer based test.  Test takers pay the fee for the test($150).  The company almost went broke changing the test to its current format.  I am not a fan of high stakes testing and this is not the only measure that Universities look at for entering international students, however if they do not score a minimum score on the test, they will most likely be denied entrance (although not all universities do that).  I am not advocating here for the TOEFL exam, but I do think it one example of a test that has gone through significant changes to become more representative of the types of academic skills that students need to be successful at a University, that does not mean that students who do well on the test, do well at a University.  This was a little of what Afferbach was calling for in the policy document, that testing needs to be more open, and responsive to stake-holders.  In this case it was universities, test takers and the company.  I think it worked ok at this level for a lot of different reasons, one of them being the government not being involved and policies like NCLB.  Also, test takers pay for the exam, where at school test takers do not pay for the exam.  So, I keep thinking how could standardized tests really be more representative of curriculum that is taught in schools, community involvement in testing, providing parents with comprehensible feedback, giving administrators data related to standards and performance, and I don’t think that test would be possible to make without all resources going towards making that test.  So in the end, in very round about way, I guess I do have a critique of the Afferbach position statement and that is the suggestions in addition to high-stakes testing seem unrealistic.

Allington and the NRP

I thought it was very fitting that I was reading Allington’s article on my was back to Austin from Seattle via Tennessee this weekend.

In reading this article, one of the first ideas was the search for a “one-size fits all” curriculum.  It still amazes me with all the research out there on how that will never come to light, but yet so many resources are put into finding some magic curriculum that will improve instruction for all.  Instead of looking for the magic curriculum why can’t we put those resources into teacher education programs that prepare teachers for critically thinking and researching their own classes and preparing new teachers for diverse classrooms?  and as well as a multitude of other ways that resources could be spent.  Not to give a simplistic answer to a complicated issue.

It was interesting to me in the Allington piece that he mentioned that the NRP was underfunded and did not have enough time to conduct the kind of research that needed to be done.  I had never thought of those issues when looking at the NRP.  That may contribute to why they choose to only choose quantitive studies to review.  Because if they had widened their scope they would have had to have had more time and would have had to have a way to synthesize the diversity of qualitative studies done out there.  However if they had looked at qualitative studies it would have provided them with plenty of teacher-education studies.  They were complaining about the lack of studies available on teacher-education, but that is because they had such a narrow scope  and most of those studies are qualitative.  In not looking at qualitative studies, they really missed a lot of interesting and diverse work.  In one sense, the report only allowed for one type of thinking to be permitted resulting in very narrow knowledge construction on a complicated issue.  So much research in education is done through qualitative measures and to not allow that in the NPR I thought was really reckless and a misrepresentation of the kind of work that is happening in the field.

Allington also mentions the four aspects of effective reading instruction, which seem so simple, but why are they still not emphasized?  This goes back to what is considered “scientific” based reading research.  It does not surprise me that the NRP had so much focus on phonics, because that is the kind of variables you can control for in a quantitive study, while it is much harder to control what kinds of knowledge did a student gain from reading a text that he/she choose?  Until the NRP extends its’ view on what is acceptable research, the results are going to be narrow and only provide a narrow “solution”.

High-stakes testing in reading

One of my favorite quotes from the reading is “If you have a poor instrument, then you will always make poor decisions.” I think is summarizes so many points that were made in the article including the call for independent people to run assessments on the assessments and statistics that politicians are claiming as good returns.

In general reading about testing is always like someone running their nails down a black board to me, it always has all of the usual suspects, linguistic minority children.  For me that is the most deplorable part of testing, especially for high stakes testing, it will always favor the dominant group and dominant thinking.  When it is used as the only assessment, to make big decisions in students lives, like whether they can get a diploma or pass a grade, it seems inhumane to me to use this as an only measure.  While research and teachers may not support this kind of action, so many parent and politicians do.  There seems to be this obsessive need to make a complex system, education, into something that is simple and one-sided.  In the end it just waters down education and stamps out things like creativity, diversity in thinking and perceptions, higher order thinking skills and the list can go on and on.  If we are just expecting students to pass test based on some skill set that favors a group of people and nothing else is considered, how much valuable diversity are we stamping out in the name of keeping things simple and accountable?

Part of the article also talked about how schools that have a high pass rate to do not teach to the test, they just don’t worry about it and teach other things.  While schools who do not have good records on testing spend so much instruction time teaching to the test.  Is this not widening the gap even more?  High performing schools are going to be teaching higher order thinking skills, creative arts etc.. while low performing schools will be just trying to get kids to pass this test.  This seems to fly in the face of what standardized testing is suppose to do, which is to equalize education for all.

An interesting part of this article that I had not thought about before was the issue of “cheating” or unethical behavior in regards to testing.  Helping kids with the right answers, changing scores, all that lead to an unreal inflation of student success and do not paint a real picture of what is happening.  I guess when you talk about testing being tied to funding, raises etc.. that this would only increase the attraction of cheating on testing.  This is just another disturbing part of testing that I had not thought of before, but that makes perfect sense.

I did like how the article ended with what educators and researchers can do, they had some very good suggestions on how to fight high-stakes testing.  It can not be the only acheivement factor that matters for students, other alternates have to be used as well.  I really like the suggestion of not being suduced by what you think high-stakes testing can achieve.  It’s so true, who is going to argue with making schools accountable?  Nobody, but it is the way that it is carried out that matters.

Views on the relationship between practices, research, and policy

Well, I am not sure here if we are suppose to post about the article we read or our personal feelings about the relationship between practices, research and policy, so I will do a little of both.

In an ideal world I  picture the river to run three ways, that sometimes practices would influence research and policy, that sometimes research would influence and sometimes policy.  That partnerships between researchers, teachers and policy makers would be common place even though that does not mean that all parties would be in agreement.  Also that when policy makers were out to draw up new policies that they would look to more than one “expert” about a given topic and try to understand the complexity of the issue instead of just taking the expert who seems to make the most sense and doesn’t bother or “bore” people with “complicated” things with how a study was designed.  Multiple inputs and views are needed to make an effective policy, especially when you are talking about including research and basing policy on that research. Researchers need to have close relationships with teachers in the field, so they are not just putting theories or methods out there without a practical applications and input from teachers and policy makers need to also me part of this process, either teachers or researchers themselves or have a good understanding of elementary education and reading.

However, that is ideally and the article paints a really depressing picture of how one policy about reading was made in California, it was almost diabolical in some areas.  But what a vivid example of policy making gone wrong.  Wow, the river only runs one way in this picture with only one “expert” scientist consulted.  I think in one part of the article Lyon, the expert, choose his words so carefully about what reading is, “phonemic awareness, phonics and high-interest, decodable text are necessary to ensure the “fast and accurate decoding of text”, it seems that he knew reading was more than this, but was just selling this part of reading.  I wonder what stake he had in all this?  Was his family in the publishing business and going to benifit from the massive amounts of phonics text that would be bought by the state of California, was he just enjoying his power at the moment or did he really believe that he could fix the reading “problem” with such a simple idea that was so easily consummed by policy makers?

There are so many sections of this article that just truly disturbed me, one of those being the implications of to in-service training for teachers having to teach by phonics out of context.  The article mentioned that 90% of teachers would have to attend this new mandatory trainings, but I kept wondering who would be conducting these trainings?  My feeling is that the state would contract it out to publishing companies from their approved lists of phonics text and publishers would be conducting the trainings.  I don’t know if that happened, but is seems one way that they would get this much training done by people who believed in this phonics approach because they have a direct stake in selling textbooks to California and to the rest of the country.

As I mentioned before, the whole article was disturbing and the total lack of consultation with multiple people, teachers and researchers, to really understand what the “problem’ may be (not sure if there was a problem there or not), but just taking the word of one expert that made things sound simple enough for policy makers to understand.  It is so disturbing to me that politicians make educational policy now.  They really have no idea of what is going on in education, but feel like they make policy.  That education just needs these simple fixes and the whole system can be fixed.