Emerging views on what to teach in school and how to reward teachers
From thisamericanlife.org this week:
474: Back to School
SEP 14, 2012
As kids and teachers head back to school, we wanted to turn away from questions about politics and unions and money and all the regular school stuff people argue about, and turn to something more optimistic — an emerging theory about what to teach kids, from Paul Tough’s new book How Children Succeed. Photo: Theotakes the marshmallow test.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/474/back-to-school
And NPR: ”
Do Scores Go Up When Teachers Return Bonuses?
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/19/161370443/do-scores-go-up-when-teachers-return-bonuses
Jonathan 12:25 pm on September 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Frank for this. This American Life always does great work and I’ll be sure to queue this one up on the iPhone for my next drive.
Jonathan 1:55 pm on September 22, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I haven’t heard it yet, but it got me thinking about another This American Life about the Brooklyn Free School where there are no tests, courses, homework and the kids are the key decision makers. This one is pretty good too! 🙂
Act 3: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/424/kid-politics?act=3#play
sophiabb 6:11 pm on September 23, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Jonathan, thanks for the link. Interesting concept – children and youth engagement and empowerment in the truest forms. I run a youth engagement program within a organization whose primary services are for adults. We have a lot of creative tensions. It is so hard for adults to let go of the reign of control. I wonder about the extent that learning technology is incorporated into this program?
~Sophia
Jonathan 9:48 pm on September 24, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It’s been a while since I’ve heard this one about the Brooklyn Free School, but from what I remember it was a lot of student led meetings. Students would call meetings whenever they were upset about something and deal with it as a group.
It worked initially, but towards the middle of the podcast you got a sense that students were being overwhelmed with meetings. Students began to get upset at one another. There was a sense that in some way this worked, but in others — leadership from the top (in the form of a teacher) was needed. There wasn’t quite enough maturity for it to work.
With regards to learning technology, I do remember computers being available. But that there were no electronic days in the school as well to allow for some peace and actual “talking” to occur. 🙂
Patrick Pichette 7:24 pm on September 24, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I’m very skeptical of the approach proposed. I’ve read that for most tasks that require little to no active thinking, you can use rewards to improve performance but once active thinking comes into play, it’s quite difficult to achieve any level of improvement strictly through monetary rewards. Generally speaking, better results are obtained by granting employees certain freedom to innovate to allow them to get incredible ideas out of their heads and onto a sharing medium. By encouraging teachers to work harder to obtain certain results without providing them some ‘cool-down’ time, they are likely to find more of these ‘loss-aversion’ teachers in a burnout state rather quickly.
frank 1:39 pm on September 28, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks Jon, Sophia and Patrick.
Jon, I’ll have to check that one out, I’ll try to plan it for a road trip as well 😉
You are right Sophia, with creative freedom comes innovation, but also, greater room for conflict, perhaps over what should be done and how best to do it. We may have to learn how to help adults feel more comfortable about giving up control; maybe by helping them gain a greater sense of relatedness to their students and the people they work with, so that at core, there is mutual trust among participants that people’s intentions are good.
Patrick, as a trained economist, I am first to confess that economists have an extremely narrow and thereby, limited view for understanding human behaviour. Working harder for better results in the short-term can definitely lead to burnout in the long-term as you have identified. I’m hopeful however that the financial crises is challenging this discipline to take a long, hard, and deep look inwards, and realize the errors of their ways. Also, budding work in neuroscience and behavioural psychology/economics, is not only exceptionally interesting, but also directly challenging many of the conventional wisdoms of economic thinking: “People are rational” etc..
Here’s a sarcastic but somewhat insightful critical look within (5-minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVp8UGjECt4
My current interest is gaining a greater understanding of meta-cognitive skills and how technology might be used as a vehicle for delivering this kind of education. I also believe that better financial capability might be one concrete example of such skills, as consistently good financial decision making is, I would argue, more habitual and behavior than necessarily cognitive.
With your permission, I may continue to post content to this feed on this area as I come across it; though I am open to suggestions on how to better do this for the purposes of sharing and archiving.
Observation on Financial Literacy Shortage:
[–]Betsy514[S] 12 points 3 hours ago
You know – I’ve read about a million studies on this issue and while some indicate that increased tution is a result of increased federal aid – others conclude the opposite. I’m not an economist so I can’t give you any theories or proof either way – but I think the increase in tuition is probably more the result of a combination of factors. I think the increase in student debt is in part the result of the lack of financial literacy/education resources available to families – especially when they are making the college decision in the first place.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/10m8yn/i_work_as_an_advocate_for_people_with_student/
Jonathan 9:20 pm on September 28, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Frank –
Just listened to the podcast and it was again another well put together piece by This American Life. It was neat to hear about the “different smarts”, got me thinking about multiple intelligences. Any different than what they are talking about being “social smarts”? Actually from what I recall, they were having trouble labelling all the different “smarts” without it sounding off.
I also enjoyed the last story piece about intervention pieces that can go in. It’s nice to know that all of these can be helped. What is key is that the individual has to want to do it. It’s really about persevering and motivating through something. It’s effortful as the girl in the last piece spoke about, but she enjoyed it! Thanks for this again!