Parent Cortical Mass

Teacher Effectiveness and Education Policy

Teacher effectiveness policy stirs up more controversy and debate than any other education policy.  Two camps, each with charismatic leaders and top researchers, battle to win over public opinion.  Both camps agree that classrooms should be lead by effective teachers.  But, they disagree on how to make that happen.

A decade ago educators, researchers and lawmakers agreed that low standards caused the poor performance of America’s public schools. That consensus let No Child Left Behind pass with full bipartisan support. Now, education reformers say the problem is less about standards and more about ineffective teaching. 

Even though research shows that student achievement is most closely tied to family factors, of all the possible school factors, the quality of teaching is the most important to student learning.

From Highly-Qualified Teachers to Teacher Effectiveness

Research shows that certified teachers produce higher student achievement than uncertified teachers.  But certified teachers are not distributed fairly throughout America’s schools.  To address this, No Child Left Behind required states to put a “highly-qualified” teacher--one with a college degree, certification, and subject expertise--in every math and language arts classroom or risk losing federal funding. This rule made little sense to educators at ground level who knew qualified teachers, especially in math, were in short supply.

Why don’t rural schools and urban schools serving poor neighborhoods get a fair share of highly-qualified teachers?  For the straightforward, free-market reason that these schools lack funds to make competitive offers. The short supply of certified teachers compelled the Education Department to waive the highly-qualified rule and allow teachers with track records of effectiveness to continue teaching.  The education community began focusing on a new question, “How do you determine if a teacher is effective?”

Teacher Effectiveness and Value-Add Assessment

Everybody knows that qualified teachers are not equally effective. When economists started working on how to identify effective teachers, they figured effectiveness should be defined as student “learning growth” since that was the goal.  The best measure of learning growth available was the standardized test score.  The most effective teachers, they reasoned, would be those who increased test scores the most.

Economists and statisticians began to apply “value-add” measures to the data generated from years of NCLB testing.  They developed models that took a student’s year-over-year test scores, figured the before-and-after difference, filtered out family and peer factors, then matched the differences to specific teachers. Teachers could then be given percentile scores based on how much value they added to students’ tests scores.

Researchers could also determine each student’s “learning gain.” Was it the expected year’s worth? More than expected? Or less?

Teacher Effectiveness and the Achievement Gap

The results from value-add studies inspired economists and statisticians to make bold statements.  A few years in a row of effective teachers, they said, could close the achievement gap.  Various studies put the time needed to close the gap between 3 and 5 years. These claims fueled optimism in one camp and incredulity in the other.

Are value-added assessments of teachers reliable?  The research is still inconclusive.  Most everyone understands that some teachers produce stronger gains in test scores than other teachers.  But, year-to-year, a teacher’s effectiveness can swing from the highest to the lowest quartile, or vice versa.  Research is also unclear if a succession of strong teachers accumulates to close achievement gaps. 

Teacher Evaluation and Compensation

The way we evaluate and compensate teachers currently is based on verifiable paper credentials and was negotiated over decades by teacher unions and school districts. A policy shift from qualifications to effectiveness requires a whole new evaluation and compensation system.  That’s why teacher effectiveness policy is a game changer.

One camp argues that value add assessments are too unreliable to use in the high-stakes personnel decisions of firing and pay.  The other camp argues that the current system based on qualifications is even less reliable, if the goal is to reward effectiveness.

What Teacher Effectiveness Means for Parents

Teacher effectiveness policy is being hashed out right now at the local level. In your kids’ schools, the district might be wrangling over value-add assessment, Last In First Out tenure policies, merit pay, and teaching to the test.

Both camps include parents and teachers, and Democrats and Republicans. To better understand the issues, ask yourself three questions:

• How do you determine the effectiveness of a teacher?
• Do value-add measures identify effective teachers?
• Should standardized tests be the measure of student learning?

Maybe just reading these questions clarifies where you stand. If not, additional information below on the pros and cons of value added assessment might be useful.

 

Additional Information:

What Studies Say About Teacher Effectiveness, by the Education Writers Association, summarizes over 40 different studies, as well as interviews with researchers, to better understand the relationship between teachers and student achievement.

Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems, a report by the Brookings Institute, presents the pros of using value add measures to evaluate teachers.

Problems with the Use of Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers, a report by the Economic Policy Institute, presents the cons of using value add measurements to evaluate teachers.

  -- Go to PCM's Top 10 Education Policies List --

What is the 10,000-Hour Rule?

When somebody performs in an exceptional way, you might exclaim,  "What talent!"  But if you refer to the expertise as “talent,” you lose sight of the hard work it took that person to reach such a high level of achievement. You might mistakenly believe an innate ability caused their success.  Knowing the 10,000-Hour Rule can free you from the myth of talent.

World-Class Expertise takes about 10,000 Hours of Practice

During the last 30 years, scientists studied experts in many fields and they discovered something groundbreaking.  Researchers expected to find that expertise required innate ability coupled with excellent preparation.  But, what they didn’t expect to discover was that innate ability played the smaller role and practice played the larger role in developing expertise.

The foremost researcher on expertise, K. Anders Ericsson, began by studying violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin.  He assumed that the violinists identified by the music professors as the most gifted had achieved their performance levels more rapidly and with less practice than not-as-gifted violinists who would need more practice to offset lesser talent. 

The violinists were classed by the music professors into three groups—the best, those likely to be world-class soloists; the good, those likely to be professional performers; and lastly, those likely to become music teachers.  Instead of proving that the most talented needed less practice, Ericsson discovered the opposite.  They had practiced the most.  In fact, they had practiced 10,000 hours over about ten years.  The graph below shows the practice hours for each group.

This result didn’t just happen with violinists.  Over numerous studies of experts, including athletes, scientists, writers, artists, doctors, and chess players, researchers kept encountering 10,000 hours of practice.  Instead of innate ability making effort easier and achievement quicker, the highest levels of expertise in each domain took about the same amount of practice to achieve.  In other words, experts are made, not born.

Ericsson says, "Popular lore is full of stories about unknown athletes, writers and artists who become famous overnight, seemingly because of innate talent--they're ‘naturals,’ people say.  However, when examining the developmental histories of experts, we unfailingly discover that they spent a lot of time in training and preparation."

Confusing Expertise and Talent

The 10,000-Hour Rule is both good news and bad news.  First, the bad news.  The misconception of talent says great performers are born that way. So, if something is hard to do, you might think you lack talent, which lets you off the hook to push through the difficulty.  But, the research is clear.  No one reaches the highest levels of achievement without putting in ten thousand hours of practice over about ten years.  No expert says getting there was easy.  Einstein put it succinctly, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s that I stay with problems longer.”

The good news is that you actually have more control over what you might accomplish than if you believe the myth of talent.  Understanding that high achievement is more about effort and less about giftedness can boost motivation and persistence when getting to the next level is difficult.  You don’t have control over innate abilities, but you do have a say about effort.

The 10,000-Hour Rule does not mean innate endowments contribute nothing to high achievement.  It’s clear that physical traits matter in sports, for example.  It just debunks the notion that innate giftedness is the cause of exceptionality.  Deliberate effort matters more than talent.

Deliberate Practice

Not just any kind of practice works.  Ericsson discovered that experts practiced in a particular way, which he called deliberate practice.  “Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them,” he says.

Deliberate practice requires a mindset that remains unperturbed by the continuous failures inherent in practicing skills outside your current reach. (For more on this mindset read Incremental Intelligence.)  The elements of deliberate practice are similar to the conditions that create a state of Flow, which might explain why putting in the long hours to gain mastery can be sustained.

What the 10,000-Hour Rule Means for Parents

When parents understand the research on expertise they are no longer misdirected by the myth of natural talent.  They say different things to kids about their interests and potential.  Many high achieving performers didn’t exhibit superior performance early.  In his sophomore year, Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school varsity basketball team and had to be satisfied with another year of JV.  This spurred him to work harder.  

When kids understand that time and deliberate practice drive success, they have more options than if they believe that innate ability makes great performance come easily.

 

Additional Information:

Chapter 2 of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is titled The 10,000-Hour Rule.  It's the #1 book on PCM’s Top 10 Books for Parents.  This influential and entertaining NYT Best Seller introduces many of PCM's Top 10 Learning Concepts.

The Making of an Expert, by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues, a 6-page article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review, doesn't sugarcoat the conclusions.

The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk, subtitled Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, is on PCM’s Top 10 Books for Parents.

A Star is Made, an article by Freakonomics authors Dubner and Levitt, is said to have caused an avalance of popular, best selling books on expertise, talent, and success.

No You Can’t: Is Genius a Simple Matter of Hard Work?  Not a Chance, a short article that argues genius is more than a matter of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.

 Go to PCM's Top Ten Learning Concepts List

What Parents Need to Know About "Informal Learning"

Formal learning is what takes place in schools; informal learning is what takes place the rest of the time.  Teachers are in charge of formal learning; parents watch over informal learning.

When you hear the concept of informal learning, you think, “So that’s obvious.”  What is less obvious though, is just how much time children spend in informal learning.  The pie chart below shows the percentage of time during a calendar year that students spend in school.  It’s a small slice.

Even more surprising is how much informal learning time occurs over a lifetime.  The graph below shows the percentage of formal and informal learning over the course of life.

Along the horizontal axis are the years of our lives, segmented in life stages.  The vertical axis represents 16 waking hours.

The orange depicts formal learning time.  The teal, so encompassing that it looks like the background color of the chart, shows the hours of informal learning time.

During the critical learning period of infancy through early childhood all learning is informal.   From birth through high school graduation, the graph shows clearly that parents oversee most of kids learning time.  Whether or not parents are aware of it, they are continuously engaged in their children’s learning out of school.  

The quality of kids’ informal learning is tied to their parents' skills. How can parents improve their skills at extending this learning?

The Fun of Informal Learning

Boosting informal learning does not necessarily mean adding more “scholastic” activities at home.  Fortunately, informal learning happens during down time, family time, and all other out of school time.

Where formal learning is mostly adult-led curriculum with tests to measure learning, informal learning is mostly child-directed activity with play as the purpose.  During informal time kids have the chance to pursue what interests them, for its own sake. This experience lets kids cultivate curiosity and intrinsic motivation.  Self-directed activity lets children develop the ability to focus their attention and engage deeply in what they are doing.

For the most part, informal learning happens on-the-fly and is relevant to the context the child is in.  With formal learning teachers have the challenging job of making subject matter, which is prescribed and scheduled, relevant to students sitting in a classroom. The #1 academic complaint of students is that their learning doesn’t seem relevant.  (The #1 overall complaint about school is the food.)  Informal learning has the advantage of being relevant in the moment.  Relevance strengthens learning.

During informal learning children often interact with a parent or adult who provide specific and immediate feedback.  Research shows this adult-child interaction expedites learning.  In school, a teacher’s attention must be distributed over many students and feedback is delayed.  Informally, a child can access their parent’s attention, ask a question, and get a customized answer, maybe even a discussion, that addresses what’s on their mind.

Fortunately for parents, self-directed activity, on-the-fly learning, and focused and immediate adult feedback means learning is more fun, spontaneous, and potent. These informal learning conditions are hard to duplicate in formal settings.

Building Skills at Facilitating Informal Learning

Just as teachers can get more skillful at increasing student learning in school, parents can improve their skills at fostering learning out of school.  You already know the basics, like reading to your kids, assuring homework gets done, and providing resources and opportunities to cultivate talents and interests.  But you can develop new skills and put them to use while doing all the regular activities of raising kids, while keeping them fed, clean, clothed, and safe.  If you are game, the day-to-day interactions can offer plenty natural opportunities to support learning out of school.

The remaining nine concepts listed on PCM’s Top 10 Learning Concepts present ideas that will influence what you see during the informal learning time you manage.  Understanding the concepts of 10,000 Hours, Incremental Intelligence, Flow, Background Knowledge, Language Dancing, Chunking, Metacognition, Digital Learning and Persistent Misconception will sharpen your observations during informal learning time.

Parents "gaining cortical mass" about how children learn is great for children, interesting for parents, and good for all our futures.

 

Additional Information:

Mind/Shift, a website and blog with the tag line "How we will learn" and part of KQED Public Television, has this article called, "Where Does Informal Learning Fit In?"

Education Week has this great article about informal science learning that says, "..an ever growing body of evidence demonstrates that most science is learned outside of school."  Includes several links to other science informal learning resources.

FutureLab, a UK not-for-profit organization advancing education, teaching, and learning, has a website with interesting resources for parents.  If you are looking for a summary of the research on children's informal learning with technologies outside school, this 30-page report should satisfy. 

Go to PCM's Top Ten Learning Concepts List