Have you met Webb's Depth of Knowledge in all its reformy goodness. I just spent a couple of blood pressure-elevating hours with it. Here's the scoop.
In Pennsylvania, our state department of education has Intermediate Units which are basically regional offices for the department. The IU's do some useful work, but they are also the mechanism by which the state pumps the Kool-Aid of the Week out into local districts.
Today my district hosted a pair of IU ladies today (IU reps are typically people who tried classroom teaching on for size and decided to move on to other things). As a courtesy, I'll refer to them as Bert and Ernie, because one was shorter are chirpier and the other has a taller frame and a lower voice. I've actually sat through DOK training before, but this was a bit clearer and direct (but not in a good way).
Why bother with DOK?
Bert and Ernie cleared this up right away. Here's what was written on one of the first slides in the presentation:
It's not fair to students if the first time they see a Depth of Knowledge 2 or 3 question is on a state test (PSSA or Keystone).
In other words, DOK is test prep.
Ernie showed us a pie chart breaking down the share of DOK 2 and 3 questions. She asked how we thought the state will assess DOK 4 questions? Someone went with the obvious "on the test" answer, and Ernie said no, that since DOK 4 questions take time, the Test "unfortunately" could not do that.
There was never any other reason. Bert and Ernie did not even attempt to pretend to make a case that attending to DOK would help students in life, aid their understand, or even improve their learning. This is test prep.
Where did it come from?
Webb (it's a person, not a piece of jargon) developed his DOK stuff in some sort of conjunction with CCSSO. Ernie read out what the initials stand for and then said without a trace of irony, as God is my witness, "They sound like real important people, so we should trust them." She did not mention their connection to the Common Core which, given the huge amount of CCSS love that was going to be thrown around, seems like an odd oversight. The presenters did show us a graphic reminding us that standards, curriculum, and assessments are tied together like the great circle of life. So there's that.
How does it work?
This turned out to be the Great White Whale of the morning. We watched two videos from the Teacher Channel that showed well-managed dog and pony shows in classrooms. Bert noted that she really liked how the students didn't react to or for the camera. You know how you get that? By having them spend lots of time in front of the cameras, say, rehearsing their stuff over and over.
The first grade class was pretty impressive, but it also only had ten children in it. One of my colleagues asked if the techniques can be used in classes with more than ten students (aka, classes in the real world) and that opened up an interesting side note. The duo noted that the key here is routine and expectations, and that you need to spend the first few weeks of school hammering in your classroom routines so that you could manage more work. One teacher in the crowd noted that this would be easier if all teachers had the same expectations (apparently we were all afraid to use the word "rules") and Ernie allowed as how having set expectations and routines from K through the upper grades would make all of this work much better. "Wouldn't it be lovely?" she said.
Because when you've got a system that doesn't work very well with real, live children, the solution is to regiment the children and put them in lockstep. If the system and the childron don't mesh well-- change the children.
Increasing rigor!
You might have thought this section would come with a definition of that illusive magical quality, but no. We still can't really explain what it is, but we know that we can increase rigor by ramping up content or task or both.
We had some examples, but that brought up another unsolved mystery of the day. "Explain where you live" (DOK 1) ramped its way up to "Explain why your city is better than these other cities" (DOK 3). One of my colleagues observed that this was not only a change in rigor, but a complete change of the task and content at hand. Bert hemmed and hawed and did that little I Will Talk To You Later But For Right Now Let's Agree To Ignore Your Point dance, and no answer ever appeared.
So if you are designing a lesson, "List the names of the planets" might be a DOK 1 question, but a good DOK 3 question for that same lesson might be "Compare and contrast Shakespeare's treatment of female characters in three of his tragedies."
Audience participation
Bert and Ernie lost most of the crowd pretty early on, and by the time we arrived at the audience participation portion (two hours later), the audience seemed to have largely checked out. This would have been an interesting time for them to demonstrate how to handle a class when your plan is bombing and your class is disengaged and checked out, but they went with Pretending Everything Is Going Swell.
The audience participation section highlighted just how squishy Depth of Knowledge is. Bert and Ernie consigned all vocabulary-related activities to Level 1, because "you know the definition or you don't." That's fairly representative of how test creators seem to think, but it is such a stunted version of language use, the mind reels. Yes, words have definitions. But there's a reason that centuries of poetry and song lyric that all basically mean, "I would like to have the sex with you," have impressed women far more than simply saying "I would like to have the sex with you."
There's a lot of this in DOK, a lot of just blithely saying, "Well, this is what was going on in the person's brain when they did this, so this is the level we'll assign this task."
DOK's big weakness
DOK is not total crap. There are some ideas in there that can lead to some useful thinking about thinking. And if you set it side by side with the venerable Bloom's, it can get your brain working in the same way that Bloom's used to.
But like all test prep activities, DOK does not set out to teach students any useful habits of mind. It is not intended to educate; it is intended to train students to respond to certain sorts of tasks in a particular manner. This is not about education and learning; this is about training and compliance. It's a useful window into the minds of the people who are writing test items for the Big Test, if you're concerned about your students' test scores. If you're interested in education, this may not be the best use of your morning.
Showing posts with label rigor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rigor. Show all posts
Monday, October 6, 2014
Monday, May 19, 2014
Rigorizing Eight Year Olds
One of the most odious policies to emerge from the Reformster swamp is the mandatory retention of all third graders who don't pass the Big Test in reading. And now Mary Laura Bragg, the director of Florida's program, has popped up to help us all understand just how anti-child this policy is.
She has popped up in North Carolina (motto: Strapping schools to a rocket and shooting them back into the 19th century) where such a program is being definitely considered* (I would say "seriously," but nobody who is serious about educating children would ever consider such a policy). She is responding to an op-ed by Janna Siegel Robertson and Pamela Grundy laying out why the politics-driven Read to Achieve program is an educational mistake; their piece explains (with like, actual facts from experts in the field) why Read to Achieve is a dumb idea. But Bragg (who is also the National Director of Policy for FEE, a prolific generator of anti-public-ed nonsense) questions the rigor of their work, and wanted to make her own point. So what is her point?
Florida's program is called "Just Read, Florida!" and that name really captures the cluelessness of the whole approach. Like many Reformster programs, this one starts with the assumption that these little eight-year-old slackers just aren't being sufficiently threatened and browbeaten. They could read, dammit-- they're just holding out on us! Don't tell me about your problems or your challenges or your background or your use of English as a second language or your cognitive impairments or how your life gets in the way of your school-- Just Read, Dammit! Just do it! Because there is no better pedagogical technique than Insisting Strongly.
Bragg says the proof of her programs success is that the NAEP scores went up. This, too, captures what is so screwed up about this approach. Because remember, Moms and Dads, the school is not here to serve the students by providing them with an education. The students are here to serve the school by cranking out the scores the school needs to make its numbers.
The biggest complaint against retention is the use of test scores in making decisions. But good tests objectively measure real reading skills. A score is not simply a number on a piece of paper but a reflection of actual ability.
Well, that's sort of true. Sometimes a score isn't simply a number on a piece of paper. Sometimes it's a number in a computer. But either way you cut it, it's simply a number. Do good tests objectively measure real reading skills? Here you're just making a definition, and if that's your definition, then no good tests exist, and they never will. (Also-- is that really the biggest complaint against retention. Because as Pamela Grundy points out below in the comments, the biggest complaint might actually be that retention does more harm than good.)
There is no such thing as an objective concept of "real reading skills." A reading test will always--ALWAYS-- measure the biased picture of reading skills promoted by the people who wrote the test. Always. We could break the internet launching into that argument, but if you want to shut me up, just provide an objective picture of Real Reading Skills that all educational experts agree on. I will not be waiting.
Children who enter fourth grade as struggling readers are four times more likely to drop out of school. The vast majority of teenagers who wind up in the juvenile justice system are illiterate. In other words, the most important indicator of whether a child will succeed in life is whether he or she is a strong reader by the end of third grade.
Is there some sort of requirement that all Reformsters must skip Basic Statistics class. Maybe you missed this when it was going around the net, but here are some great charts showing, among other things, that the lower the divorce rate has dropped in Maine, the less margarine has been sold.
Your "most important indicator" is bogus, fake, false, unsupportable. At the very least, the correlation door can swing both ways-- a student unhappy enough with school to eventually drop out is less likely to try at his reading lessons (even if someone shouts, "Just Read, Dammit!" at him). What is most likely is that dropping out, getting in trouble with the law, and failing in school are all related to a separate factor.
But Bragg is STILL not done being ridiculous!
Retention policies are badly needed tough love.
Oh for the love of God. Yes, because all those elementary teachers are in classroom saying, "Yes, reading's okay and all, but I would rather give Pat a cookie and sing Kun-Bay-Yah" because if there's anybody who DOESN'T understand the value of education, it's the people who decided to devote their adult professional lives to education.
Yes, these damn kids just need a kick in the pants. Bunch of slackers!
Children should hit developmental milestones when they are told to. The average height for an eight year old boy is 45 inches. I propose we hold all boys in third grade until they reach that height. If they won't reach that height, let's just use tough love and yell "Just Grow, Dammit!" Because children should grow as they are told to grow, and they should all grow exactly the same way at exactly the same time. And if they won't behave and conform and obey, they must be punished until they will.
Bragg's closing shot is as anticlimactic as it is obnoxious: "This debate obviously will continue. It is important to ensure all relevant information be included. One would hope those in academia would not rely on others to do basic research." This despite the fact that she has not offered any relevant information or basic research.
Look, North Carolina-- this is a bad, bad, dumb idea for which there is no good argument. It assumes that children can be punished into excellence and achievement, and while that is a logical extension of the NC policy towards teachers, there isn't a lick of support to suggest that it creates smarter, healthier, happier grown-ups. And taking education advice from Florida is like taking political advice from Iraq. Just Say No, Florida!
*EDIT: Just to clarify-- yes, NC actually has one of these reprehensible laws in place. As it comes time to actually make third graders suffer the consequences of NC legislative malfeasance, Grundy and Robertson have stepped forward to plead that NC's leaders reconsider before somebody (particularly a third grade somebody) gets hurt. Bragg stepped in to argue staying the course. So the law's in place, but nobody has really thought about what it's going to mean until now. That's where we come in at the beginning of this piece.
She has popped up in North Carolina (motto: Strapping schools to a rocket and shooting them back into the 19th century) where such a program is being definitely considered* (I would say "seriously," but nobody who is serious about educating children would ever consider such a policy). She is responding to an op-ed by Janna Siegel Robertson and Pamela Grundy laying out why the politics-driven Read to Achieve program is an educational mistake; their piece explains (with like, actual facts from experts in the field) why Read to Achieve is a dumb idea. But Bragg (who is also the National Director of Policy for FEE, a prolific generator of anti-public-ed nonsense) questions the rigor of their work, and wanted to make her own point. So what is her point?
Florida's program is called "Just Read, Florida!" and that name really captures the cluelessness of the whole approach. Like many Reformster programs, this one starts with the assumption that these little eight-year-old slackers just aren't being sufficiently threatened and browbeaten. They could read, dammit-- they're just holding out on us! Don't tell me about your problems or your challenges or your background or your use of English as a second language or your cognitive impairments or how your life gets in the way of your school-- Just Read, Dammit! Just do it! Because there is no better pedagogical technique than Insisting Strongly.
Bragg says the proof of her programs success is that the NAEP scores went up. This, too, captures what is so screwed up about this approach. Because remember, Moms and Dads, the school is not here to serve the students by providing them with an education. The students are here to serve the school by cranking out the scores the school needs to make its numbers.
The biggest complaint against retention is the use of test scores in making decisions. But good tests objectively measure real reading skills. A score is not simply a number on a piece of paper but a reflection of actual ability.
Well, that's sort of true. Sometimes a score isn't simply a number on a piece of paper. Sometimes it's a number in a computer. But either way you cut it, it's simply a number. Do good tests objectively measure real reading skills? Here you're just making a definition, and if that's your definition, then no good tests exist, and they never will. (Also-- is that really the biggest complaint against retention. Because as Pamela Grundy points out below in the comments, the biggest complaint might actually be that retention does more harm than good.)
There is no such thing as an objective concept of "real reading skills." A reading test will always--ALWAYS-- measure the biased picture of reading skills promoted by the people who wrote the test. Always. We could break the internet launching into that argument, but if you want to shut me up, just provide an objective picture of Real Reading Skills that all educational experts agree on. I will not be waiting.
Children who enter fourth grade as struggling readers are four times more likely to drop out of school. The vast majority of teenagers who wind up in the juvenile justice system are illiterate. In other words, the most important indicator of whether a child will succeed in life is whether he or she is a strong reader by the end of third grade.
Is there some sort of requirement that all Reformsters must skip Basic Statistics class. Maybe you missed this when it was going around the net, but here are some great charts showing, among other things, that the lower the divorce rate has dropped in Maine, the less margarine has been sold.
Your "most important indicator" is bogus, fake, false, unsupportable. At the very least, the correlation door can swing both ways-- a student unhappy enough with school to eventually drop out is less likely to try at his reading lessons (even if someone shouts, "Just Read, Dammit!" at him). What is most likely is that dropping out, getting in trouble with the law, and failing in school are all related to a separate factor.
But Bragg is STILL not done being ridiculous!
Retention policies are badly needed tough love.
Oh for the love of God. Yes, because all those elementary teachers are in classroom saying, "Yes, reading's okay and all, but I would rather give Pat a cookie and sing Kun-Bay-Yah" because if there's anybody who DOESN'T understand the value of education, it's the people who decided to devote their adult professional lives to education.
Yes, these damn kids just need a kick in the pants. Bunch of slackers!
Children should hit developmental milestones when they are told to. The average height for an eight year old boy is 45 inches. I propose we hold all boys in third grade until they reach that height. If they won't reach that height, let's just use tough love and yell "Just Grow, Dammit!" Because children should grow as they are told to grow, and they should all grow exactly the same way at exactly the same time. And if they won't behave and conform and obey, they must be punished until they will.
Bragg's closing shot is as anticlimactic as it is obnoxious: "This debate obviously will continue. It is important to ensure all relevant information be included. One would hope those in academia would not rely on others to do basic research." This despite the fact that she has not offered any relevant information or basic research.
Look, North Carolina-- this is a bad, bad, dumb idea for which there is no good argument. It assumes that children can be punished into excellence and achievement, and while that is a logical extension of the NC policy towards teachers, there isn't a lick of support to suggest that it creates smarter, healthier, happier grown-ups. And taking education advice from Florida is like taking political advice from Iraq. Just Say No, Florida!
*EDIT: Just to clarify-- yes, NC actually has one of these reprehensible laws in place. As it comes time to actually make third graders suffer the consequences of NC legislative malfeasance, Grundy and Robertson have stepped forward to plead that NC's leaders reconsider before somebody (particularly a third grade somebody) gets hurt. Bragg stepped in to argue staying the course. So the law's in place, but nobody has really thought about what it's going to mean until now. That's where we come in at the beginning of this piece.
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