kitchen table math, the sequel

The opt-out movement may become a force to be reckoned with, if and when it organizes effectively. What has to happen, it seems to me, is that the movement must also be FOR something. I suggest a straight trade: two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep! In other words, don’t just stay home; fight for positive changes.

The Common Core Brouhaha by JOHN MERROW on 24. APR, 2014 in 2014 BLOGS

I was sitting here mulling what a terrible fate this would be when it came to me: "two weeks of project-based learning for every day of testing AND test-prep" probably isn't a bad  description of what's happening in my district now.

That along with insane homework loads in the run-up to the tests. Parents here were complaining a couple of months ago about having to drive their kids through hours of HW every night because the middle-school teachers were worried about their evaluations.

I've seen the same thing in a neighboring district, where middle-school kids seem to spend their time either doing group projects and group discussions OR test-prep.

At least some of the time, teachers who've been trained only in constructivism equate direct instruction with cramming.

President Obama recently visited a school that "relies 100 percent on project-based learning." Not just visited, lauded.

Sigh.

Apparently the White House is launching a "High School Redesign" initiative, which appears to be supported by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Boards of Education:

Today's global economy requires new approaches to teaching and learning in America's high schools to foster problem solving and analysis, to support creativity and collaboration, and to connect student learning directly to the real world. Students learn best when they are engaged in complex projects and tasks aligned with their interests and when they work with others through practical examples and case studies that engage them in rigorous academics and in the application of knowledge.
Fact Sheet: Redesigning America's High Schools

Manor New Technology High School, a 100% project-based school, is cited as one of five Promising Examples of Redesigned High Schools.

From the President's speech:

• at Manor a history teacher might get together with a math teacher and develop a project about the impact of castles on world history and the engineering behind building castles
• or a group of students might be in charge of putting together a multimedia presentation about the moral dilemmas in literature as applied to WWII
• folks who use mathematical equations to build musical instruments
• tests on bungee jumping with rubber bands and weights
• robots that were being built
• all kinds of great stuff
• there's a lot of hands-on learning here
• part of what makes this place special is that there's all this integration, various subjects and actual projects, and young people doing and not just sitting there listening
• I could not be prouder of what's happening here at Manor

AND SEE:
Help Desk: Project-Based Learning
High School Redesign Gets Presidential Lift
Smartbrief on How to Make Project-Based Learning Work
Tips for Transitioning to Project-Based Learning
Manor New Technology High School

The founder, chairman, and CEO of Netflix has a really bad idea
Larry Summers has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea
David Brooks has a really bad idea, part 2
All is forgiven.

The good news

A recent report shows that although project-based learning is a growing trend in education, only about 1% of schools nationwide use the practice on a regular, committed basis.

How to make project-based learning work

One percent!

One percent is not a growing trend for a teaching method that dates back at least one hundred years. At least, I hope not.

There's bad news, too. (President Obama has a really bad idea.)

Have just this moment stumbled upon a UK education blog: Wasting Time in School."

Check out this post.

Brilliant.

This reminds me of that business idea we all had a while back, doing school projects for beleaguered parents.

Thought experiment: since the parents are already doing the projects & everyone knows it....wouldn't a School Project Business be legit in a way a term-paper business is not?

I think it might.

I added a chart to the post on group learning:


The blue bar represents the low performers, the red bar high performers. All have the same measured IQ (126), and at the beginning of the study all are performing well below the level their IQ would predict. The higher performers then recover, and their performance increases to a "126" level. The the low performers do not recover, and their performance remains suppressed.

re: group work lowers IQ

I've skimmed the article (free online).

Assuming the findings are confirmed in other studies (I suspect they will be), this is bad news.

Set-up

• Subjects had the same IQ: 126.
• They were put in small groups of 5 and introduced to each other.
• They took an IQ test with no feedback as to how they did.
• Then they took a second computer-administered IQ test.
• After each question, they were told whether they got the answer right or wrong.
• At the same time, they were also given their rank inside the group (rank determined by each person's # of correct answers).
• They were also given their rank vis a vis 1 particular member of the group, chosen "pseudorandomly."
• 2 people had brain scans during the test-with-feedback condition.

Results

• Everyone did worse in the beginning. Across the board. Everyone. Everyone did worse than his/her measured ability.
• As the test went on, some people recovered. Their performance went back up to the level predicted by their IQ scores. 
• The others never improved. They started low, and they stayed low. 
• Females were more likely to start low and stay low than males. 
• For high performers, brain scans showed activity in the amygdala (likely fear), decreasing over time. (That is, they were likely feeling less fear, perhaps growing more confident.)
• For high performers, activity in the lateral PFC increases over time. Activity in lateral PFC is associated with IQ tasks, with working memory tasks, and with increased task difficulty. 

So. All told, membership in a small group produced a net decrease in number of correct answers compared to what you would predict for the same 5 people working alone.

Everyone's performance dropped at the outset.

Some people recovered, others didn't.

The people who recovered simply went back up to where they had been going in, before experimenters assigned them to a small group.

Questions

• How small is small? Would group of 20 students in whole class instruction show the same pattern? 25 students? 30? 
• If so ... yikes.
• In the wake of this study, mixed-ability groups strike me as an even worse idea than I've thought in the past. Lower ability children in a mixed-ability group are going to be getting constant negative feedback about their status vis a vis the higher ability children. On the other hand, the study did not include a condition that manipulated feedback in this manner. That would be interesting.
• Assuming this study picked up on a personality difference (which we don't know, of course), what would happen if you grouped the 'nervous' kids together, putting the 'confident' kids in their own group? Would two groups still separate out in this way?
• Would same-sex groups change the results?
• What does this tell us about grades and grading? 

The blue bar represents the low performers, the red bar high performers. All have the same measured IQ (126), and at the beginning of the study all are performing well below the level their IQ would predict. The higher performers then recover, and their performance increases to a "126" level. The the low performers do not recover, and their performance remains suppressed.

Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the expression of cognitive capacity and associated brain responses

I was just telling Ed about the study on group projects & IQ, and he said that already, in the 1990s, when he headed the California History Social Science Project (under the umbrella of the California Subject Matter Project), group learning was drilled into him as the absolute best way to teach.

Ed also tells me that Phil Daro (B.A. in English), was head of the original math project, and Bill Honig got rid of him: kicked him upstairs & hired a real math professor from San Diego State to take charge. Ed doesn't remember his name now.

The point of the Subject Matter Project was to take professional development away from ed schools and consultants and put it in the hands of content specialists.

Phil Daro wasn't a content specialist.

He still isn't a content specialist but he's chairing the Mathematics College and Career Readiness Standards Work Group for the new Common Core standards.

AND SEE:
Calculators? Don't Answer

Chris came into the bedroom this morning to announce that group projects make you dumber. He read it on cracked.com. (Only dimly aware of the existence of cracked.com. Now I'm a fan.)

Sure enough.

AND SEE:
Implicit signals in small group settings and their impact on the expression of cognitive capacity and associated brain responses
Attending meetings lowers IQ: research
Neuroscientists Find That Status within Groups Can Affect IQ
Group Settings Can Diminish Expressions of Intelligence, Especially Among Women, Study Finds
Warning: Meetings May be Bad for Your IQ

I had forgotten this one from 2007.....

I attended a meeting today as an advocate for a student, something I've never done before. It was great. I think the outcome was very good --- I sure hope so.

One of the central issues was projects. The student cannot handle projects. Period. He is a SPED kid, and he can't handle projects. Can't handle projects is plainly stated on the IEP, the help on projects that will be provided is specified, etc., etc ... and the upshot is that his mother has spent the entire school year trying to find out whether there is a project due, what the project is, what the instructions are, where the instructions are, what the instructions mean, and on and on and on. She's been run ragged, and she's extremely stressed juggling middle-school projects and a full-time job (in a business with daily lay-offs and salary cuts and all the anxiety that entails).

On top of all this, the grading of projects is bizarrely harsh, so harsh that a student who has had a string of 100s on tests gets bumped down to a B or a C entirely on the basis of an F- or two on projects. Projects trump tests.

So, in the meeting, we went round and round on the question of projects. (I won't get into anything else because I don't want to give away identities.)

After traveling down a number of blind allies, I asked whether the student could just stop doing so many projects. Could we solve the problem that way? I said I didn't see how failing a project was contributing to his education; if he is failing projects then he isn't actually doing the projects, not really (leaving aside the issue of grade deflation, of course).

No one expected to hear that, and at first no one knew what to say other than "No."

When I persisted, the chair of the meeting explained to me that American schools are moving away from teachers standing at the front of the classroom and teaching content: today classes are interactive. Someone else said that the goal is for students to learn to work collaboratively, and another person said it's important for students to solve problems.

I said I didn't do projects when I was in school, I don't assign projects in my classes at the non-selective college where I teach, my husband doesn't assign projects in the selective college where he teaches, and I just wasn't seeing the value in XXXX being assigned projects he couldn't do and then receiving failing grades when he didn't do them.

The chair got hot under the collar. "You come in here and you question our philosophy ----- !"

We got past that, and continued to go round and round on the project issue .... and quite a bit later I asked a teacher in the room, who had taught in the high school, how many projects students actually do in grades 9-12, which is where XXXX is headed. It had suddenly occurred to me that the high school kids probably weren't doing nearly the number of projects the middle school kids are doing.

This turned out to be the case. The middle school kids do many projects; the high school kids do far fewer.

The chair explained that, in the high school, students have to pass Regents exams, so, unfortunately, teachers must spend a fair amount of time preparing students to pass the test.

The flipped classroom is going to sweep.

That's what I'm thinking at the moment.

AND SEE:
Has Constructivism Increased Special Education Enrollment in Public Schools? By Nakonia (Niki) Hayes
Mathematics Education: Outwitted by Stupidity by Barry Garelick
Growth of Special Education Spending and Enrollment in New York since 2000-01

The lead presenter in the Workshop on "project-based assessment" told us that, in college, half the knowledge a "technology major" learns freshman year is obsolete by the middle of sophomore year, so "content doesn't matter."

That is a direct quotation. I wrote it down.

"Content doesn't matter."

Also "technology major."

Susan Kramer watched her packed 10th grade biology class weave through rows of desks, pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead “carbohydrates” and goofy “phosphate” hats as they navigated their “cell.” As they went, they explained how the cell’s interior system works.

It’s the kind of activity her students love....
Lectures Are Homework in Schools Following Khan Academy Lead by Sarah D. Sparks | Education Week | September 27, 2011

10th grade?

Really?

They're 15 years old and they love weaving through rows of desks pretending to be proteins and picking up plastic-bead carbohydrates and goofy phosphate hats as they navigate their cell?

hmmmm...

Granted, Flipping the Classroom is Hot! Hot! Hot!. But still.

from Don Stewart: Preface to the Third Edition - Notes Toward a New Rhetoric by Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen:

I first asked [Bonniejean] to tell me about the research that her husband, a professor at the University of Southern California, had done that led him to discover the secrets of the world's great authors. She first had me conjure up in my mind an image of the classic English professor's study, lined from floor to ceiling with book shelves containing volumes of all sorts of writing, both fiction and nonfiction. In the middle of the room was a large mahogany table, and on that table stood dozens of glass canning jars, each with a label taped to it displaying the name of a particular grammatical construction and its placement in the sentence: participial phrase in initial position, adverb clause in medial position, absolute phrase in final position. In front of those soldier-like jars was a pile of coffee beans. Whenever he could capture a moment between classes or late at night, Francis would pull a book from the shelf, open to his bookmark, and read -- very carefully. Sentence by sentence. If the sentence began with an adverb clause, he picked up a coffee bean and dropped it into the jar labeled "Adverb Clause in Initial Position." He watched the jars as they filled up with beans, and at the end of each week he would pour out each jar's contents and count. He recorded the results and made charts that showed what types of grammatical elements these authors used, where they placed them, and how often each grammatical unit occurred. And from this most primitive of bean counting he discovered the answer to that most mysterious of questions, How do writers write?

Reading this passage, I recalled a Grade 5 data-collection project from Math Trailblazers:

more from teacher Christine:

Progressive educators would like to promote a more democratic society advocating greater equity, justice, diversity and other democratic values, yet their methodologies do just the opposite, with "Fuzzy Math" and "Whole Language" causing lesser privileged students who can't afford tutoring to fall way behind. NYC has 70% of its student population in this category. Imagine how devastating to the morale and sense of self-esteem the use of poor curriculums can have on a child's psyche. These students subjected to these methods grow to believe they can't do anything; they are labeled as special needs children and become distraught that they are not mentally capable of becoming educated. Many are just pushed through the system because there is no where else for them to go. Progressivism which is trying to enforce some kind of social agenda, rather than purely impart knowledge, is causing many students to fail and teachers to become distraught and despondent.

What do teachers who refuse to follow the leader do? Many shut their doors and pull out the curriculum they know works. I know of teachers who, when whole language is being implemented by the district, will use their phonics programs undercover. Teachers will set up look-outs in the hall to see if supervisors are coming and drill students in what to do should a supervisor show up. I have had my students open their "readers" and put in the phonics books I'm using inside. "If someone comes you take the book slide it in your desk and pretend you're reading." I've instructed.

Smart Teachers in Stupid Schools