Balls and Strikes: The Week's Links

Um ... considering all the talk this baseball season about expanding the postseason to five teams, the bottom two having a one-game showdown for the Wild Card, thus reviving the Moribund Pennant Race, what does the final-day theatrics say about that?

Interesting piece by Dahlia Lithwick over at Slate about why the Administration might let the health-reform law go before the Supreme Court sooner rather than later.  She quotes Peter Suderman:

If the mandate is upheld, Obama will claim constitutional victory, and argue that Republicans pursued a frivolous challenge in service of political gain. If not, he'll presumably argue that the challenge itself represented a partisan attack by political foes who aren't interested in fixing the health care system and that America's court system has become hopelessly biased by an extremist conservative judiciary that's in the thrall of the Republican party.

And a wonky piece at The New Republic surprisingly makes me feel optimistic about the dwindling of the death penalty, in practice and in law.  Didn't know they'd dropped so precipitously, for a lot of reasons.  Of course, that DP still exists at all is to say that it persists as an idea, problematic in a country that stakes much of its global swashbuckling moral authority on ideas. 

Finally, I only buy electronics that make me bare my teeth and growl FIIIIRRRE.  As in this.  The name sort of beats you over the head, but at least you can't accuse them of mixed metaphors.  Appealingly low-cost.  And appealingly making me want to get one and walk down the street with it humming "ooh, ooh, ooh, I'm on ..." or "we didn't start the ..."

Eight Is the Loneliest Number

Every once in a while, a statistic just comes out of nowhere and knocks me down.  The share of GED recipients who actually complete college once they've started (now, there's a conversation for another day).  The Red Sox' abysmal September record (now, there's a conversation for ... oh wait, there might not be another day).

Yesterday's stunner?  A number (from the 90s) showing that only 8 percent of public investment in education is spent on children birth-to-5.   

Everything we know says that kids cognitive, emotional, linguistic development has a huge, lifelong impact.  Why don't we fund 0-5 better?

Now, I understand: the public K-12 system is a 500-billion-dollar gorilla taking up much, much more than 8 percent.  A lot of birth-to-five life happens at home.  The private-public balance for daycare is more on the private end than in K-12.  The "Head Start didn't work" perception is out there--even if it's not entirely true.  But it's still shocking how little our society invests in arguably the most important five years of life.


For society at large, I think it comes to down to this: perception of crisis.  Major foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton zealously fund all stripes of K-12 school reform.  These initiatives are problematic in many ways, but I think they've caught fire among donors because of the obvious crisis of American high schools.  Open the paper and you read about this-or-that failing school.  Turn on the news and you get a steady diet of "kids these days'" troubles with drugs and gangs.  Employers are finding that young adults can't do the job.  Colleges are finding freshman can't do the classwork.

But there's very much a 0-5 "crisis," as well.  Toddlers with health problems, kids who haven't seen letters or heard enough talking at home, and on and on.  But this crisis is much more silent.  It has to do with complicated genetic-environment interactions beyond the grasp or interest of policymakers.  Further, three-year-olds who are falling behind aren't marauding the streets in gangs ... they're just not getting right kind of attention or discipline from Mom or Dad.  And even if kindergarten teachers can already see the negative outcomes, these outcomes aren't blaring over the news or failing in droves out of Stats 101 at Your Local State College.

So we don't intuitively grasp early-childhood issues the way we do with older kids.  Even if we did, where would the political will be to act?  Kids don't vote.  Parents of poor, at-risk kids don't either.

Just yesterday, I heard a former advocacy worker say: You have to kiss serious politico butt to get lawmakers to give money to early childhood.  I don't want to be mired in pessimism, but how do we change this?

The Right Stuff: Skills and Behaviors Beginning ESOL Students Must Have

In "Teaching Students How to Be Students,"  I recommended a few steps for helping students learn the skills and behaviors they need to be successful in your classroom--or any future classroom they might step into.

Since Monday is a good day for Serious News, let me be clear: these are not quick fixes.  If it took two minutes to show students how to organize a binder, and they could do it perfectly after a single observation, every teacher would do it.  But everybody doesn't do it. 

So in signing up for a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, it is a huge help to know exactly what skills and behaviors matter in your class, your grade, your level.

I came up with a brief taxonomy of topics for Beginning ESOL learners.  I thought.  I sketched ideas.  I begged, borrowed, and stole from fellow teachers.  Here's a sample of our results--some language-specific, some adult-specific, some transferable to any classroom:


Beginning ESOL Skills & Behaviors

1) Puncuality

• Being on time
• Having your materials out before class starts

2) Academic Habits

• How to listen to classmates
• Tracking the teacher
• How to find directions on a worksheet, and where to write your name and the date

3)  Behaviors

• How students or the teacher should get the class's attention
• Transitioning efficiently into groups
  
• Working patiently and productively with other students
• Listening to instructions, and repeating them back
• Using extra time effectively if you've finished an activity early
• Self-advocating in class: I don't understand.  I need to go to the bathroom.  Pass me the scissors.  I can't come to class tomorrow. 

4) Homework & Studying

• How to use a "dialogue journal"
• Completing homework fully and to the best of one's ability
• Where, at what time, and with what materials to complete homework
• How to space out studying for a test, and identify what to study
• Getting help vs. copying an answer
• Practicing for a performance assessment
• Identifying a teacher's feedback, and whether it's positive or corrective; responding to it through questions or corrections

5) Classroom Materials

• What an organized desk space looks like
• How to organize and maintain an effective binder
• Dating papers
• Having all the necessary materials: pencil, eraser, notebook, binder with divider

6) General Functioning, i.e. The Other Stuff

• Asking for clarification about directions
• Methods to support your own learning outside class
• Evaluating personal strengths and weaknesses
• Asking the teacher or a classmate to resolve a difficulty
• Getting/making up missed work
• Finding a class buddy to save papers and provide notes if you're absent

I know, I know.  Many of these seem to warrant a big, blinking "Obviousness Alert."  They weren't so obvious to my students, though.  Most of these I didn't include in the program contract: that was a fast path to forgetting them.  Instead, I rolled them out gradually and in a very carefully planned sequence.  Each topic got a "mini-lesson" that incorporated visuals and metaphors and had students actually practicing or preparing for the skill.

This list could go on and on.

What are the most successful techniques you've used?

Out Standing in the Field?

Took a lot of field trips today:

11:15: Interview at an organization that facilitates policy-changes to strengthen community-college outcomes

1:00: Met with the co-director of an upstart parenting program that is explicitly trying to be small and focus only on early-parenting--while linking with other resources to help low-income parents give their kids a successful life

3:30: Met with a social-entrepreneur/student who's poised to launch an organization that would connect poor schoolchildren with wraparound services for their families, to help remove barriers to learning and change the "conversation" about how schools operate

It's a good thing at my age you don't need to fill out permission slips!  

By my count, that's 1 existing "linkage" program that's very big and supports front-line work, 1 new front-line program that supports linkages but wants to remain small, and 1 new linkage program that works at the front lines and wants to be big.

If you followed that, I bet you can tell me where the pea is!

Two lines of argument I'm constantly thinking about (in a very, very reduced form):

1) We have enough organizations and enough services.  To help disadvantaged folks, we just need to connect them better from one program to another.
2) Poor people shouldn't have to run from program to program to meet their needs.  Give them one-stop shops with all services under a single roof.  Found a new org that does it all.  Or add another program to round out your org.

What do you think?

Speaking My Language

Does a parent's low literacy affect their child's language acquisition?

That was the question that came up yesterday in a class I'm taking.  I'm neither a linguist nor a developmental psychologist, but I have plenty of experience helping parents with literacy and language acquisition. In hearing the question, I thought: Absolutely not.  At least, it shouldn't have to be that way.

First, defining terms, "parental low literacy" entails a struggle in one or more of the pillars of reading, e.g. decoding, fluency, phonemic awareness.  (In their own language, I mean; a lot of folks struggle to read English while learning to speak English, and the two are connected, but that's for another day).

Many of my adult clients have had low literacy in their native language, but they were all fluent speakers of their language.  And there's no reason their children can't pick up language well, too.  The parent needs to use a lot of "parentese"--real words, phrases, and sentences tailored to the child.  Lots of back-and-forth with the child, even if it's responding to their babbling with words and questions.  High-pitch, slow cadence, overemphasizing some words.  That's not all you need for language acquisition, but it's the bedrock.

Beyond that, the amount of language and kind of language the child hears has a big impact on their cognitive development.  Lots of words, and not just commands or admonitions, but speech about the past, future, colors, objects, emotions.  Mixed with songs, which are a great way to teach cadence and introduce children to rhyme.  The more of that you get, the better those kids' brains as they head to school!

And at home, it can happen in any language--Somali, Spanish, Mai Mai, you name it.  The development is the key.

We know that kids from tough backgrounds come to school having heard fewer words, and less of a variety.  That affects their learning.  Their parents may tend to have low literacy, but that doesn't mean the latter caused the former.  If your mom's got low literacy, it doesn't doom you to low language acquisition--as long as there's a healthy serving of good, solid "parentese."

A final note: The question for policy-makers and nonprofits is, How do we help parents help their children pick up language?  In a way that's respectful, cost-effective, and reaches the parents most in need of help?  How do we increase the supply of high-quality childcare that's brimming with language enrichment?  Going forward, there's a whole lot I'd like to say about that.

Method Man: Teaching Students How to Be Students

How do you teach someone who hasn't been in a classroom in decades?

When I've taught immigrant adults, that was my daily battle.  Some students' notebooks poured avalanches of unorganized papers.  Other students, coming late to class, executed preening runway-worthy entrance walks that might have made last night's Emmy ratings soar.  Others would circle multiple answers on a multiple-choice question on a test.

At least, that's what happened my first year.

So I watched, learned, and adjusted.  It wasn't enough to teach English, take students to the public library, and help them build career awareness.  I needed to teach them how to be students.  How to be students.  A dash of skills, a pinch of behaviors.  What do I mean?  Having all your materials--and only those materials--out before class.  Transitioning to group work.  Asking for help.  Finding directions on a worksheet--harder than you might think when it's not your native language.

The list goes on and on (as you'll see in a future post!).  And as any bedraggled kindergarten, 6th-grade, 10th-grade, or college-freshman teacher can tell you, teaching someone how to be a student is a must at every level of education.

So here are some general tips.  Look for a future post on ESOL-specific ideas:

• Wield Occam's Razor: Find the simplest way to teach the concept.  When I had my adult learners set up a desk-organization system, I showed them a picture of a messy desk, and a picture of a desk with a few key materials neatly organized.  "What's better?" I asked.  I guided them with questions.  They wrote rules.  It took all of 15, 20 minutes.  It was the right visual, and the right question.
• Speak their language: When I needed to teach my Latino immigrant students sequential goal-setting, I started with something they all understood: cooking dinner.  First a recipe, then ingredients, then pots and pans ... and so on.  They were hooked--more important, it helped them frame the concept.  
• Tap their knowledge: Introducing ninth-graders to a binder system?  They've probably done something like it before.  Or at least some have.  Make the connection.
• Target misconceptions: Asked to circle one of two options on a listening exercise, some of my adult learners, if they were having trouble, would circle both.  Hedging your bets--great for Vegas, perhaps.  Not such a great test-taking strategy.  Once I wised up to this, I started modeling exactly how to answer the question before the test.  I'd make a big show of circling both possible answers, then clearly demonstrate that you could not do that.
• Explain "why": Especially with adults.  With kids, depends on the situation.  If you're going to have systems and processes in class, it helps to lay out the reasoning.  Not always, under all situations.  But sometimes it can go a long way. 
•  Repeat, repeat, repeat--and gradually lessen your role: Call it what you like: At Bats.  Larry Bird taking 1,000 jump shots a day because he knew someone else out there was doing the same.  The first 80 times I had students put papers in their binders, I walked them through it while holding a binder and doing it myself.  Gradually I eased up and let them do it--but only when I knew they could.

Friends, we're not just teaching content.  Pick the key "student skills" and drive them home.  It'll make your class that much more efficient.  And your students' futures that much brighter.

NFP, HCZ, QED?

I was born into luck.

I had healthy, well-educated parents, married, and stable parents.  Dad had a good job, Mom was a dedicated and ardent community activist.  My mom wouldn't have even thought of drinking when she was pregnant with me.  They had the means to support having one more kid--my little sister--two years later.  I grew up near parks, not power plants.  There was no lead paint within sight or touch.  From the earliest moments, I was loved, read to, and played with--not just by my folks but by aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. 

Am I thankful?  You bet!  To try to make such positive fetal health behaviors, early parenting, and stable life pathways more prevalent for mothers who didn't have the background of my own, enter the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP).  I've been reading about it a lot recently. 

For someone like me who's very interested in the Harlem Children's Zone (HCZ) and programs like it, the NFP raises some big questions.

First, the NFP in a nutshell: It was a plan developed in the 70's by a developmental psychologist to make the conditions I benefited from more widespread for kids born to poor, teenage mothers in Elmira, N.Y., and later Memphis and Denver.  The backbone of the program?  Sending nurses into the homes, from early pregnancy to a couple years after birth, to talk, teach, model, counsel, what it took to be a good mother.

The results?  Less abuse and neglect, less use of public assistance by the families, and more involvement from fathers.  Many effects still showed up in kids when they were fifteen years old.  RAND found major cost-savings for the kids whose mothers were most at-risk and felt most helpless.  A flurry of similar programs emerged, and political leaders were quick to find and implement in their own cities and states. 

Teaching parenting is important.  Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone have taken that cue, and added to it: good early parenting should lead to good pre-school, to good K-12 education, to good social-service supports.  

But there's an issue with this cradle-to-college "conveyor belt" now being replicated nationwide through the Promise Neighborhoods.  The very psychologist who developed NFP, David Olds, found that benefits to his parental supports were only for the at-risk mothers.  Secure families who got the supports didn't need them, and were a cost loss from an investment angle.  Olds's warning: making services universal may cover some families that don’t actually benefit, diluting resources that at-risk families most need.  

By keeping kids on the “conveyor belt” perpetually even if some of them could prosper by graduating out of it—cradle-to-college may threaten to “dilute” services at each level of its continuum.  Most of the families in these program's zones would probably be called "at-risk."  But maybe not all of them.  With scarce resources to fund the kind of childhood I got, that's a reality worth examining.  

Right Seating = Great Learning

In "Sweatin' the Details," I wrote how the minutiae of classroom setup (presented nicely by Coach G) isn't just good for reducing distractions.  It also reduces time-wasting.  Every minute matters: over the course of a year, the amount saved by cutting an inefficient transition can multiply into whole class-periods.

When I started teaching adults, they set up around a "Great Table": three tables shoved into one, with a dozen students seated around it in.  Problem was, if students against the back wall wanted to write on the board--let alone work with a different student or use the bathroom!--they had about 3 inches to squeeze out of their chair, then had to clamber over three classmates, finally huff-and-puff around the corner of the table.  D'oh!

In setting up a classroom, anybody can think about what management-types call "task design": what are people doing, who are they working with, and where are they located?

Here are some tips for classroom setup for adult learners, based on a single "task-design" question: What do they as learners, and you as teacher, need to do?

• The teacher needs to room to get to each chair to assess students' when they're working, or help them when they're lost.  Spread out tables, and leave enough room so you can access each chair.  If you've got a tight space then leave room to lean over a table toward a student.
• Students need to turn to classmates and immediately form pairs and groups of three.  Make sure nobody's seated alone.  Or at the corner of a table several feet from classmates.  Make sure their chairs are roughly turned toward each other--or at least can be turned that way quickly.
• Students need to stand up, move, and form new groups.  I've taught classes up to three hours long.  Like kids, adults benefit from movement breaks.  In an ESOL classroom, they'll also benefit from hearing different accents and working with classmates with different skill levels.  Make sure they have enough space to pull out their chairs, all at once.  Have students designate a good place for bags and umbrellas during class.  Against a wall, hanging from hooks--anywhere but under their chairs.  (And as any Harry Wong-reader can tell you, don't forget to practice how to transition during the first couple weeks.)
• Each student needs space for her binder, notebook, textbook, and workbook--and arm space to write.  Together with students, determine what an "organized" desk or table ought to look like, and make it part of class expectations.  Keep all the dross (food, bags, phones) off the table.  If somebody needs a lot of space to write, make sure they're not crammed in.
• Students might need to get up to check for work in their "absence folders," sharpen a pencil, or get scissors or highlighters for a group activity like scissors or highlighters.  Keep these things nearby, and organized.  Even better, teach students when to get them, and how.

Some of this "design" is in how tables are set up.  Some is in where the students sit on a daily basis.  Some is how you train them, and what your (and their) expectations are.  I wouldn't recommend seating charts for adults, but you can always say, "Hey, since Janet's absent today, why don't you join the other group, Nora?"  A good nudge goes a long way.  And once you have a good setup that everyone feels comfortable with, you'll be thankful the rest of the year.

Ten Years

Under a bright blue sky we couldn't help but comparing to that distant Tuesday, my girlfriend and I walked through Boston yesterday, from the T station across the Common, through the throngs of people sunning and playing frisbee, past the arepas vendors and t-shirt stands, across to the Public Garden, with its families spreading out lunch and swan-boat tours gliding into the blue water, where we headed toward Arlington Street and finally to the 9/11 Memorial.

A clutch of police stood to the side of the semi-circular, low stone monument bearing the names of the 200 state residents who perished that day.  Bouquets, and cards and photographs and children's drawings, adorned the cement in front of it.  We dutifully moved out of the way as a woman came through to add her own flowers.  Beyond the memorial, on a small plot of grass with a newly-planted tree in the middle, were nearly 3,000 short American flags, placed in the turf that morning. 

We spent a good while by those flags.  One does not suspend honesty in the face of remembrance.  Any single flag was a small, humble scrap of fabric on stubby wooden pole--hardly "banners," to be sure.   But collectively they imparted much more, three thousand flags curving and flapping with each light breeze, like leaves rustling on tree branches.  Their black shadows shifted and fluttered across the grass, the shadows of paper cranes.  The stillness and immutability of death each flag represented belied by this: they looked ready to take off. 

Social-psychology research shows that even for "flashbulb" events like that of 9/11, our memories dissolve just as much as they do for mundane happenings.  As we walked, we found it healing to fill in the details of the day.  We moved through some of the past week's stories, invariably featuring tales of heroes--the financial-firm security guard who seamlessly ushered hundreds of staff out, only to turn around and go back upstairs to check for anyone left behind ... the fighter pilot who boarded an F-16, loaded only with blanks because it had just returned from a training run, prepared for a kamikaze mission should one of the hijacked planes approach D.C. ... the imperishable coordination of the United 93 passengers, for which we have at minimum an untouched Capitol to thank them for.  To recount, correct, fill in gaps was both minor and major.

We also shared our dark associations: the cringe when seeing jets take their routine but low flight paths over cities, the slight stop in the throat when boarding a plane.  All traumas leave scars, the scars always persist through such associations.  Our national consciousness has suffered much disunity in the years since 9/11, but at a biological level, in our collective cringes and twinges, we will be united probably forever.

We are also perpetually united in this: it could have been any of us.  This attack that targeted civilian populations, and indeed was partially undercut by the very civilians on Flight 93.  September 11 memorials are unique among our heritage in that they honor fellow civilians.  Each flag in the Public Garden exalted a regular individual.  In those stubby banner-ettes we saw our peers, buried somewhere or reduced to ashes, yet somehow greater in death.  Each remembrance that evoked an individual moment of bravery, by those dead to say nothing of by those thousands of living rescuers and responders, seem to transform our negative heritage into something positive, something unifying, something, indeed, very much worth caring about.

A Long Day, and Decade: The Week's Links

A touching remembrance of 9-11 by Scott Simon heard on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

From Leon Wieseltier:

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done.

In lighter news, a pretty good eight years for Esther Vergeer!

For/Gainst

Great, short, pithy post by Sara Mead at EdWeek.  The gist is, the debate between "charter schools" and "traditional public schools" is beside the point.


"How can public policies ensure a supply of good schools—charter, traditional, or something else—to meet the needs of kids in each community in our city?"

Reminds me of what Deborah Meier once wrote, and I seriously paraphrase: great public schools have more in common with great private schools than they do with poor public schools.  And the inverse is true.

The bigger point, though, is our compulsive need to divide things into either/or options.  It's a fine approach when there truly are only two options (Obama vs. McCain).  Otherwise, it's a great way for people to stop thinking about the details of an argument and simply race for the labels.  For the unions in Wisconsin, or against them?  Love Sarah Palin or hate her?  Think Obama is the Second Coming or Un'Merican Socialist?  Yankees or Red Sox?  (Oh wait, that may be a fair one ...).


You understand these divisions in the soppy world of national punditry, but when it comes to the next generation of children?  Let's leave labels behind and get to the root of the issues. 

Sweatin' the Details

Ah, nice to think of sweating as the summer inevitably turns into fall, isn't it?  But this time of year is when the sweating begins, at least for teachers.

Coach G's got some characteristically insightful thoughts on student movement within classrooms.  The gist?  Naturally steer students toward the least disruptive ways to sharpen their pencils, staple their packets, and throw out their trash.  You do most of the "policing" ahead of time and you get to do less policing in class. 

Tactics like this are the meat of what I'd call the "every-minute-counts" strategy.  It doesn't just apply to individual students' behaviors, but also to group movements.  Students should know how to form groups and transition to different parts of the classroom.

Do the math: an extra 30 seconds spent transitioning as a class, times four times per class, is 10 minutes a week.  Times 35 weeks a year?  That's 350 minutes wasted preening, slouching, slinking.  Or the equivalent of about seven class periods.  For each class!  Figure out where you need students to move, and when, and how, and teach it, starting at week one.

Movement strategies are great for minimizing disruptions by individual students.  Combine that with strategies for groups, and you've got: more teaching time, and more on-task.

ACE In the Hole: The Week's Links

Over at The Informant, writer-prison inmate Richard Gilliam--inspired by this Paul Tough piece in The New Yorker--discusses the benefits of treatment for early childhood trauma.

Rick Hess on Steven Brill.  He basically says, "define your terms"--it's too easy to toss around "pro-reform" and "anti-reform" without specifying exactly what either might mean.

The universe (well, at least this corner of it) seems to be telling Elizabeth Warren to jump into the race.

Finally, forget about those pesky SATs and admissions interviews.  High school students seeking the Least Rigorous and Horniest colleges (among other discernible traits) can direct their browsers this way.