NEWS
- Study: Billions of dollars in annual teacher training is largely a waste
- Blended Learning Leaders Are Over the Honeymoon—and Rolling Up Their Sleeves [DC Prep PCS mentioned]
- Back to school for military kids is not always an easy time
Study: Billions of dollars in annual teacher training is largely a waste
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
August 4, 2015
A new study of 10,000 teachers found that professional development — the teacher workshops and training that cost taxpayers billions of dollars each year — is largely a waste.
The study released Tuesday by TNTP, a nonprofit organization, found no evidence that any particular approach or amount of professional development consistently helps teachers improve in the classroom.
“We are bombarding teachers with a lot of help, but the truth is, it’s not helping all that much,” said Dan Weisberg, TNTP’s chief executive. “We are not approaching this in a very smart way. We’re basically throwing a lot of things against the wall and not even looking to see whether it works.”
Researchers examined three large school districts as well as one network of charter schools. They looked at professional development programs at all the schools and teacher performance data over several years, and they surveyed 10,000 teachers and interviewed more than 100 administrators. They identified teachers who improved their job performance and tried to figure out what experiences they had that differed from teachers who were stagnant. To determine if a teacher had improved, researchers analyzed multiple measures — evaluation ratings, classroom observation and student test scores.
And they didn’t find many answers.
“When it comes to teaching, real improvement is a lot harder to achieve — and we know much less about how to make it happen — than most of us would like to admit,” Weisberg said.
The school districts that participated in the study spent an average of $18,000 per teacher annually on professional development. Based on that figure, TNTP estimates that the 50 largest school districts spend an estimated $8 billion on teacher development annually. That is far larger than previous estimates.
And teachers spend a good deal of time in training, the study found. The 10,000 teachers surveyed were in training an average of 19 school days a year, or almost 10 percent of a typical school year, according to TNTP.
“The bottom line is, they’re spending a lot of money on this and it’s such an appealing idea — take your existing teachers and just make them better and everybody is better off,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “But this report finds that, on average, it doesn’t do much.”
The findings echo two recent federally funded studies, which concluded that current approaches to teacher training have no significant effect on performance.
“At the federal level, we spend $2.5 billion a year on professional development,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said at a teachers town hall meeting in 2012. “As I go out [and] talk to great teachers around the country, when I ask them how much is that money improving their job or development, they either laugh or they cry. They are not feeling it.”
School districts have failed to adequately scrutinize the quality of their training programs, Hanushek said.
“School districts just have to take it more seriously,” he said. “They have to manage the use of professional development, evaluate its usefulness and dump the bad stuff. Which is a common problem in schools. They add something, and if it’s not working, they add something on top of that. They’re good at adding, not as good at taking away.”
In the TNTP study, about one-third of teachers — 3 out of 10 — improved over a two-to-three-year period after participating in training while 20 percent got worse, as measured by teacher evaluations.
The study also found that school districts are not helping teachers understand their weaknesses. Fewer than half of the teachers surveyed agreed that they had weaknesses in the classroom while more than 60 percent of teachers who earned low performance ratings gave themselves high grades.
“There is no doubt that there are initiatives that are probably producing positive impacts,” Weisberg said. “But it’s not helpful if you don’t know what they are. It is really important for school systems to begin to set goals and measure impacts against those goals. If we do that, we’re going to be so much smarter than we are now.”
Blended Learning Leaders Are Over the Honeymoon—and Rolling Up Their Sleeves [DC Prep PCS Mentioned]
edSurge
By Alex Hernandez
August 3, 2015
This summer, I spoke to leaders at six public charter school networks who are now wily veterans in the art of blending teacher-led instruction with online learning--also known as “blended learning”. Their titles range from Innovation Manager to Director of Individualized Learning, meaning they work directly with teachers to effectively incorporate edtech in the classroom. The school networks include: Summit Public Schools (CA/WA), KIPP Bay Area Schools (CA), IDEA Public Schools (TX), FirstLine Schools (LA), RePublic Schools (TN/MS) and DC Prep (Washington DC).
I asked them one question: What has you jumping out of bed and rushing to work, in regards to blended learning?
In short: finding out what learning software is working for students; making edtech tools usable for teachers; putting better data in the hands of teachers and students; and--now that they know enough to be dangerous--designing 2.0 versions of their school models.
After five years, there is a growing maturity reflected in the blended learning work as these leaders become less preoccupied with connectivity, student logins and basic troubleshooting and are focusing more on what works for students and teachers.
1. Finding Out What Learning Software Works
Online learning products report on student progress, and some vendors commission research to prove their products’ effectiveness, but the leaders I spoke to were working hard to validate that 1) students are actually learning from specific edtech products; and 2) any online gains show up in the school’s other assessments.
KIPP Bay Area runs correlations between its students’ ST Math data and their scores on the NWEA MAP test to gauge ST Math’s impact on learning. Internal analysis shows that their top quartile 5th grade students benefited most when moving through content faster than the recommended pace, while students scoring in the bottom quartile on MAP responded positively to more frequent, positive feedback from ST Math.
The ways in which teachers proactively helped students with pace-setting and grade-level placement made meaningful differences in student achievement. “We originally focused on fidelity of use (e.g., use the program for 60 minutes a week) but, now that we know more, we have changed the conversation with teachers to be about excellent use,” say Jennie Dougherty, KIPP Bay Area’s irrepressible Innovation Manager.
DC Prep ran a similar correlation analysis with ST Math, NWEA MAP and in-house assessments. They discovered that similarly-performing students performed better on their in-house assessments after they had completed the relevant content in ST Math. “It is really good to have validation from someone other than ST Math--that it’s not just students playing games, but that these programs are really fostering student achievement and growth,” notes DC Prep’s Director of Academic Technology, Dan Englender.
Harvard researcher Thomas Kane, is now organizing a broader network of schools, both district and charter, to compare students’ use of edtech products against independent assessment data, using a similar approach as KIPP Bay Area and DC Prep. “Our goal is to make it easy for school leaders to evaluate the impact of their own initiatives, using their own data, and spot implementation bottlenecks while they still have time to fix them,” says Dr. Kane. Interested schools can sign up for the Harvard / Schoolzilla project here.
Students at Summit Public Schools work through digital playlists to prepare themselves for online assessments on discrete content standards. By now, students have made hundreds of thousands assessment attempts in the Personalized Learning Program. Summit is partnering with research institute SRI International to analyze this data and figure out what student behaviors and/or content resources contribute most to student learning.
The shift from implementing edtech with fidelity to implementing effectively is helping schools focus on teachers needs in the classroom.
2. Bridging the Gap Between Teachers and Edtech
If “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” we still need a big dose of Harry Potter when it comes to edtech in classrooms. Even small difficulties in classroom implementation can render the best tools useless for teachers.
Jennie Dougherty says, “I love making tools that bridge the difference between what teachers need and what edtech products offer.” For example, KIPP Bay Area’s Innovation Team created a tool that automatically generates Khan Academy playlists based on each student’s individual MAP scores. No need for teachers to stay up late curating playlists. Their students immediately have a personalized set of intervention resources.
Nashville-based RePublic Schools is taking the relationship of teachers and technology to a whole other level. Ryan York, RePublic’s Chief Information Officer, ran voluntary coding classes for 20 teachers, where they built web apps for their school. One tool groups students in math intervention groups based on their needs while the other (pictured below) streamlines teacher observation and feedback.
3. Creating Better Ways to Look at Data
Nearly all the groups were working on ways to help teachers and students visualize data better.
IDEA Public Schools is launching its new “Actionable Dashboard” that provides a holistic view of students from a wide variety of sources. The first dashboard is designed to help teachers make more effective instructional decisions while future versions will help students make better decisions about their learning.
FirstLine teachers at Phillis Wheatley Community School are helping students see their own progress in new ways. Instead of hanging a chart or a data table on the wall, 2nd grade teachers Shannon Lindsay and Liza Kostreva created a garden that blooms as their students make progress with online assessments.
In all cases, teachers and students are looking for ways to make academic data more actionable and impactful.
4. Redesigning the Learning Environment
After several years of blended learning implementation, some schools are now engaging in a second or third major push around school design, in order to create deeper personalization and richer, more holistic experiences.
IDEA Public Schools began with a Rocketship-type learning lab approach in its elementary schools. The school network is now launching a high school model called Catalyst. Catalyst helps individualize learning for high school students through a combination of small-group instruction, project-based learning, adaptive software and distance learning.
Summit Public Schools’ renowned personalized learning model originally focused on content mastery and growth in higher-order, thinking skills (e.g., using evidence and asking questions). Summit is now piloting badges for concrete learning strategies, such as note-taking or meta-cognition skills, that help students become more self-directed learners. And they are also badging project expeditions (e.g., coding, organic gardening, etc.) that reflect students passions and motivations. The goal is to create an even richer learning environment where students grow across multiple dimensions and are prepared to drive their own learning after high school.
Progress
These schools are moving out of the “getting-the-technology-to-work” phase and beginning to think deeply about the best ways to support student achievement. They are running their own internal evaluations of edtech effectiveness, training teachers on emerging best practices, exploring better ways to put data in the hands of teachers and students, and consolidating all their learnings to iterate on existing school designs or create new ones.
While the initial exuberance around blended learning subsides, these organizations are quietly and persistently pushing our understanding of how we might individualize learning for students going forward.
Back to school for military kids is not always an easy time
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
August 3, 2015
For teachers, those three words can bring shouts of hip-hip-hooray, because it means continued employment. For students and parents, those words can bring dread and anxiety — especially so if the students and the parents are military families.
I know we don’t ordinarily think of military kids as being in a special class, but they are. In fact, they are in an exceptional class because, when military kids’ parents serve and sacrifice, the kids serve and sacrifice, too.
Understand that:
• An estimated 2 million children and young adults (through age 23) have a parent or both dad and mom serving on active duty in the armed forces, the Guard or the reserves.
• Of those 2 million, more than 1.3 million are 4 to 18 years old.
• Of those 2 million, 80 percent attended U.S. public schools.
• Of those 2 million, about 8 percent attend Department of Defense (DoD) schools.
• More than two-thirds of active-duty families live in civilian communities, not on base.
• There is no nationwide, data-driven decision-making regarding military kids and education. The unknowns include whether they drop out or graduate, and not all school systems know how many students they serve in military families. The unknowns are prevalent because military families don’t always fill out those federal impact aid forms, the paperwork that decides how many federal dollars are poured into a school district.
“Military children generally move six to nine times during their K-12 school years. Many make multiple moves during high school years alone, some even during their senior year,” according to the Military Child Education Coalition.
Moving is a stressor for parents. Imagine the anxiety it levels on children — who have to make new friends, schoolmates, playmates, teammates and fall into the rhythm of a new community. And oftentimes, the new community is in a new state.
Deployment, of course, raises child anxiety to a whole different level.
“Kids tell us, ‘Gone is gone,’” Mary M. Keller, president and CEO of the Military Child Education Coalition, said in a recent interview with DOD News. “So if mom or dad are gone for training or they’re deployed, whatever it is, that’s a separation from a child, and it means a missed birthday, but it also means that parent has a challenge in staying as connected to school as they would like to so that whole education continuum is different for military kids.”
A preschooler might not readily notice the many sacrifices and changes underfoot, but even our armed forces leaders are trying to shift gears.
The military is rethinking the teaching and learning environments it oversees as part of the Department of Defense Education Activity, whose director, Thomas M. Brady, was in D.C. Public Schools and Fairfax County Schools, which is one of the largest school systems in the nation.
“I think that there’s an opportunity to work with those local districts and improve student performance and, certainly, awareness of what our children go through — which is completely different, in many cases, than the civilian community,” said Mr. Brady, a retired Army man.
I want to point out another problem you may be unaware of: Not all school districts follow the same grading systems and course requirements, which means the military kid’s new receiving school could decide a child who would have been promoted in her former school or even skipped a grade now has fallen back a grade at the receiving school.
I am not pointing this issue out to create some sort of all-schools-have-to-follow-the-same-rules bureaucracy. Heaven forbid.
I point it out so you can imagine what a drag this might be on a school-age military child who academically was on the ball in one school district, but another district says not so much.
So as we gear up for back-to-school month, don’t just think about the pens, paper and high-tech gadgets military kids needs — although if you want to donate on their behalf, go ahead. The kids can certainly use your help.
I want parents, teachers, principals, coaches and others in leadership positions to think twice about the exceptional class of children — children who, through no fault of their own, have to move when the military says move.
Do not take for granted that these 2 million children are sacrificing, too — and they don’t always say hip-hip-hooray, it’s back-to-school time.
Indeed, they could be in School A in State B this month, and have to be enrolled in School C in State D by the time of Santa’s arrival. And that is something their schools’ teachers don’t have to face.
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