Involving Parents through Social Networking

Through Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and text messages, districts are giving parents news and information about their children's schools. (Education Week)

Schools Are Using Social Networking to Involve Parents

By Nora Fleming

Digital technology is providing a growing variety of methods for school leaders to connect with parents anywhere, anytime—a tactic mirroring how technology is used to engage students.

Through Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and text messages sent in multiple languages, school staff members are giving parents instant updates, news, and information about their children's schools. Not only that, but a number of districts are also providing parents access to Web portals where they can see everything from their children's grades on school assignments to their locker combinations and what they're served for lunch.

Socioeconomic disparities in Internet access can make such digital-outreach efforts challenging and even divisive, however; some parents have many options for connecting digitally, and others don't.

Yet some school leaders are meeting that challenge head-on by teaching parents how they can use technology to become more engaged in their children's education, and in some cases, by providing them with access to it in their own homes.

"Digital learning levels the playing field among parents in a pretty profound way," said Elisabeth Stock, the chief executive officer and co-founder of CFY, or Computers for Youth, a New York City-based nonprofit that works with low-income communities and schools to improve digital literacy.

"For low-income parents who feel they can no longer help their kids with learning as homework starts to become appreciably harder, access to high-quality digital learning content at home and the training to use it keeps these parents in the game," she said. "These parents can now easily find help online or learn side by side with their child."

Interest among school leaders in using digital tools to connect with parents in new and more cost-effective ways is rising across the country, educators say, in efforts to save staff time, ease language barriers through translation services, and provide opportunities to reach more parents than ever before, no matter their socioeconomic status.

For those reasons, some of the largest districts have recently undertaken or expanded digital-engagement initiatives involving parents.

This school year, the 1.1 million-student New York City system launched a new text-subscription service that notifies parents in English or Spanish of school news and a series of webinars on topics of relevance to parents. The 640,000-student Los Angeles school district hired its first-ever director of social media this past spring, whose main charge is communicating and sharing district information with parents and students via tools such as YouTube, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Those and similar efforts around the country are attracting the attention of parents.

In the 182,000-student Fairfax County school system in Virginia, 84,500 people have subscribed to the district's enhanced news and information email and text service, the district's Facebook page has 26,000 "likes," and its Twitter account has 8,100 followers.

'Menu of Offerings'

It's not only the biggest districts that are reaching out to parents digitally. Individual schools and smaller districts are also increasingly connecting to parents using a number of virtual tools, efforts often stemming from the vision of an administrator, such as the principal of the 600-student Knapp Elementary School, about 25 miles from Philadelphia.

When Principal Joe Mazza took on his position six years ago, he made it a priority to use digital technologies to improve communication between the school and parents.

Today, the school—where 40 percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and 22 languages are represented—has grown from its first outreach effort of an email listserv to communicating with parents through Twitter, Facebook, a parent-school Wiki, virtual chat, blog, and a Google text line.

In addition, the school—part of the North Penn district—has its teachers use Skype to run parent conferences and airs live and archived video of all parent and teacher association meetings for parents who are unable to attend. Recently, Mr. Mazza and some staff members even brought laptops into a local mosque that a number of the school's families attend, and streamed live footage there of one of the meetings.

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"We have parents from all walks of life. The feedback we have from families has told us we can't provide a single communication means to engage them, so we provide a 'menu of offerings' they can pick and choose from," Mr. Mazza said. "Our goal is relating these family-engagement offerings to how we work with students, in a differentiated manner."

Other school leaders have similar goals.

In California's 26,000-student Vista school district, 40 miles north of San Diego, Superintendent Devin Vodicka decided when he took the job this past summer to use social media to improve district communication with parents and staff members.

Mr. Vodicka started a Twitter account and began making the rounds to schools, with the goal of reaching every classroom in the district and tweeting his experiences at each to his Twitter followers. Other administrators in the district have followed Mr. Vodicka's lead—now, 60 administrators have school-related Twitter and Facebook accounts, and around three-quarters of the schools now have some kind of social-media presence.

Recently, a teacher told him, " 'I feel like I already know you from following you on Twitter and seeing what you see as you go around the district,' " Mr. Vodicka recalled.

Super Centers

Given that the level of access to and familiarity with digital technology can vary substantially among parents, some districts have made it just as much a priority to provide digital-literacy training to parents as to communicate with them via social-networking tools. To leaders in those districts, parents need to be familiar with such tools because their children continue to use social media and other technology tools for learning after the school day ends.

The 203,000-student Houston district, for example, just launched a parent education initiative this school year around digital literacy; it targets low-income parents, most of whom do not have Internet access or even computers in their homes. More than 80 percent of the district's students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

With donations from the Microsoft Corp. as well as $25,000 from the local school endowment, the district created "parent super centers" on five school campuses. Each center provides classes and training to parents on office software, Internet use and safety, and the district's online grade-reporting system, among other topics.

About 2,000 parents have already received training since the start of school this year, according to Kelly Cline, the senior manager of parent engagement for the Houston district.

In addition, organizations such as the Boston-based Technology Goes Home and CFY are partnering with schools to provide parent, teacher, and school leader training and even computers for parents to use after completion of the training.

CFY, for example, has served more than 50,000 families in 13 years in New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The program, which works with schools where at least 75 percent of students are eligible for subsidized lunch, provides all-day training on weekends at school for parents to complete with their children. They learn how to use a computer, the Internet, and an academic platform that has lessons that are grade- and age-appropriate. Afterward, parents receive a refurbished, personal computer and are guided in how to get broadband Internet in their homes, which they can typically access at highly discounted rates.

Ms. Stock said the organization often witnesses the leverage technology can have to repair relationships between schools and parents. Parents who felt the school saw them as apathetic suddenly feel more empowered to participate when the school provides them with technology and "enlists them as part of the solution," she said.

One parent, Sadara Jackson McWhorter, said that until she completed the training with CFY in Atlanta over the summer, she didn't know even how to turn a computer on, let alone use the Internet. Now, Ms. McWhorter and her three school-age children use their new personal computer, the Internet, and the CFY content daily, she said. She's even using online tools to teach herself Spanish.

Wendy Lazarus, the chief executive officer and co-founder of The Children's Partnership, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based nonprofit that helped launch a school-based digital education initiative for parents in the Los Angeles area several years ago, said most of the attention around technology in education focuses either solely on schools or solely on the home.

To have parents become both digitally literate and more engaged in their children's education, schools and organizations need to make bridging the gap between home and school a priority, she said.

"New dollars aren't necessarily needed to implement a school-to-home model, but leaders would need to allow schools and school districts to blend funding from different sources," Ms. Lazarus said. "The model takes leadership, commitment, and a partnership sustained over time. And to achieve meaningful results, it needs to be available widely, not just in pilot efforts."

But while more districts are seeing the importance of reaching parents digitally, in others, basic hurdles such as home Internet access are still waiting to be addressed.

Equity Problems

When Sean Bulson, the superintendent of the 12,000-student Wilson County schools in a rural part of North Carolina, took his position last summer, he made improving digital learning in the district, where 60 percent of students are on subsidized lunch, a top goal. All middle school students now receive iPads to use at school and home, and the district hopes to provide all district students with devices to take to and from school in the future.

But the impact of the technology is and will be limited, Mr. Bulson said, unless the district addresses the home-access issue: A number of families cannot afford high-speed Internet access, and it's not even available in the most isolated parts of the county. Students in those households can take their devices home, but they can't use them to connect to the Internet.

The Wilson County district is now applying for a federal Race to the Top district grant for $24 million to have its local fiber-optic-cable provider, Greenlight, connect families throughout the county to broadband. District families who couldn't afford to pay would receive free Internet service.

It's the district's hope that once more families get connected to broadband, they can begin to do more digital outreach to parents, Mr. Bulson said, but right now access itself makes that an obstacle.

Michael Searson, the executive director for the School for Global Education and Innovation at Kean University in Union, N.J., and the president of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education, said addressing what technology is used, and where, is essential if educators continue to make using digital technology in schools a priority.

"It's unethical to provide a robust digital learning program in school for kids who don't have access in their bedrooms and family rooms," Mr. Searson said. "As schools begin to integrate mobile devices and social media into education, the out-of-school equity issues have to be considered. Education leaders need to understand equity is not only access to devices, but access to the networks that allow people to get information."

Coverage of leadership, expanded learning time, and arts learning is supported in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation, at www.wallacefoundation.org.

Vol. 32, Issue 11, Pages 1,16-17

More Nonfiction for Students: Good or Bad?

Schools nationwide are revamping reading instruction, involving more disciplines and tilting toward nonfiction, among other changes. I am interested to see what this will look like for our reading and writing instruction, especially as it pertains to higher level critical thinking. Bloom's Taxonomy, anyone?

Scale Tips Toward Nonfiction Under Common Core

College and workplace demands are propelling the shift in text

By Catherine Gewertz

The common standards expect students to become adept at reading informational text, a shift in focus that many English/language arts teachers fear might diminish the time-honored place of literature in their classrooms.

In schools nationwide, where all but four states have adopted the Common Core State Standards, teachers are finding ways to incorporate historical documents, speeches, essays, scientific articles, and other nonfiction into classes.

The new standards envision elementary students, whose reading typically tilts toward fiction, reading equally from literature and informational text. By high school, literature should represent only 30 percent of their readings; 70 percent should be informational. The tilt reflects employers' and college professors' complaints that too many young people can't analyze or synthesize information, or document arguments.

Some passionate advocates for literature, however, see reason for alarm. In a recent paper issued by the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based group that opposes the standards, two language arts experts argue that those distributions make it inevitable that less literature will be taught in schools. Even if social studies, science, and other teachers pick up much of the informational-text reading, co-authors Sandra Stotsky and Mark Bauerlein argue, language arts teachers will have to absorb a good chunk as well, and they will be the ones held accountable.

Expanded Bookshelves

The Common Core State Standards require students to read many “informational” texts along with novels, poetry, and plays. An appendix to the standards lists dozens of titles to illustrate the range of suggested reading. Some “exemplar” texts can be found on the bookshelf.

SOURCE: Common Core State Standards, Appendix B

"It's hard to imagine that low reading scores in a school district will force grade 11 government/history and science teachers to devote more time to reading instruction," the paper says.

De-emphasizing literature in the rush to build informational-text skills is shortsighted, the study argues, because the skills required to master good, complex literature serve students well in college and challenging jobs. The problem is worsened when teachers make "weak" choices of informational texts, such as blog posts, Mr. Bauerlein said in an interview.

"If we could ensure that the kinds of stuff they're choosing are essays by [Ralph Waldo] Emerson or Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, then that would be wonderful," said Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University in Atlanta. "Those are complex texts, with the literary features that make students better readers in college."

Rethinking Literacy

Common Standards Drive New Approaches to Reading

States Target 3rd Grade Reading

New Literacy Research Infuses Common Core

Writing Undergoes Renaissance in Curricula

Scale Tips Toward Nonfiction Under Common Core

Literacy Instruction Expected to Cross Disciplines

Retooled Textbooks Aim to Capture Common Core

N.M. School Builds Bridge to Standards for ELLs

Web Extras

Chat: Literacy and the Common Core: Reflecting on the Research

Webinar: Common Core, Literacy, and English-Language Learners

The only required readings in the standards are four foundational American writings, such as the Declaration of Independence, and one play each by Shakespeare and by an American dramatist. Students also must "demonstrate knowledge" of American literature from the 18th through early-20th centuries.

An appendix to the standards lists texts that illustrate the range of works students should read across the curriculum to acquire the skills outlined in the standards. Those titles are not required reading, but are being widely consulted as representations of what the standards seek.

Stories, poetry, and plays share space with nonfiction books and articles. Kindergarten teachers are offered Tana Hoban's I Read Signs, along with P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? For 4th and 5th grades, the standards suggest Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince as well as Joy Hakim's A History of US. Middle school suggestions include Winston Churchill's 1940 "Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat" speech and an article on elementary particles from the New Book of Popular Science along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. For 11th and 12th graders, T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is suggested, as are Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

A New Blend

Taking a cue from the standards, many teachers are blending fiction and informational reading as they phase in the common core.

At Calvin Rodwell Elementary School in Baltimore last month, Erika Parker and her class of 4- and 5-year-olds were planning a trip to a nearby farm as part of a unit called "fall fun with friends." She read the children two versions of The Three Little Pigs; they joined her to shout out the famous refrain: "Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!" They were addressing a common-core expectation that they learn to compare points of view in multiple texts, Ms. Parker said.

She also read the children books and stories about fall weather, friendship, the life cycle of pumpkins, and how to grow apples. They ventured into the schoolyard to learn about tree trunks and limbs and how trees could be grafted to produce new varieties and colors of apples.

"We are certainly still reading works of fiction," she said later. "They love their stories. But they also really get excited about something in real life that they can make a connection to."

Quinton M. Lawrence, too, is trying out a new blend with his 5th and 6th graders at the K-8 Woodhome Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore. The language arts teacher is drawing on newspaper articles, novels, and poems to explore the theme of individuality.

Children are choosing from a range of novels with a "realistic feel," Mr. Lawrence said, including House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros,Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, and The Skin I'm In by Sharon Flake. They read newspaper articles about a school uniform rule and the creation of avatars—virtual alter egos—in video games.

Through discussion, the students zeroed in on 10 major components of individuality, such as intelligence, beliefs, and physical appearance, and they explored them through the real and imaginary characters they read about, Mr. Lawrence said. They will write two-page essays exploring the theme further, based on additional research from other articles online, he said.

From left, Nalani Williams, Joshua Johnson-Bey, and Unique Childs, all 4, select pumpkins to take home from Summers Farm.

—Greg Kahn for Education Week

"The idea that students are exposed to informational text is somehow taken for granted," said Mr. Lawrence, whose district serves a predominantly low-income, minority population. "Most of my kids have not been exposed to newspaper articles. Their parents don't subscribe to magazines. So it's good for them to see these kinds of things, learn about their structure, as well as the structure of novels."

Sonja B. Santelises, the chief academic officer of the Baltimore system, which has been working with teachers districtwide to design common-core modules and sets of texts in social studies, science, and language arts, said the emphasis on informational reading is crucial as a matter of equity for her 83,000 students.

"We're naïve if we don't acknowledge that it's through nonfiction that a lot of students who've never been to a museum are going to read about mummies for the first time or read about the process of photosynthesis," she said. She considers it important to use informational readings simultaneously as tools to build content knowledge and to familiarize students with a variety of types of text.

When Ms. Santelises visits classrooms, she still sees plenty of literature being enjoyed, so she isn't worried about fiction losing its place in school, she said. "Fiction and narrative have been so overrepresented, particularly in the elementary grades, that I feel this is more of a balancing than a squeezing-out."

In a study that painted a portrait of that imbalance, Michigan literacy researcher Nell K. Duke found in 2000 that informational text occupied only 3.6 minutes of a 1st grader's day and 10 percent of the shelf space in their classroom libraries.

The Role of Literature

In the rush to rebalance, however, educators risk cheating literature, some experts say. "The emphasis on nonfiction is leading to the development of a whole new universe of activities that will leave less time for the ones about literature," said Arthur N. Applebee, a professor of education at the State University of New York in Albany.

Thomas Newkirk, a professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, said he thinks the common core's "bias against narrative" doesn't serve students well. If teachers seek to make students ready for real life, he said, they must equip them not only to argue, interpret, and inform, but to convey emotion and tell stories.

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"The world is much more narrative than the standards suggest," said Mr. Newkirk, who teaches writing to freshmen and trains preservice teachers.

"Think about when candidates are running for office, and they have to tell the stories of their lives, the story of where we are going as a nation," he said. "When we honor someone who has passed away, someone who is retiring, we need to tell their story. The other skills are important, too. But in the real world, there are moments when we have to distill emotion, experience. To claim otherwise misrepresents how we operate."

The question of which faculty are responsible for the new informational-text expectations is permeating conversation.

Colette Bennett, the chairman of the English department at Wamogo High School in Litchfield, Conn., said she believes the standards allow her to keep her focus squarely on literature, with essays and other nonfiction used to enrich that study. Recently, she had students use "The Hero's Journey," a narrative framework designed by American mythology scholar Joseph Campbell, to help them interpret King Lear, she said.

"The standards say that 30 percent of a student's reading in [high] school should be literary, which is as it should be," she said. "That's my responsibility. My purview is fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and no other teacher is going to teach that."

But teachers of other subjects have not been asking their students to read enough, Ms. Bennett said. "I hear them saying, 'Oh, what am I going to drop out of my course to do more reading?' And I say, 'What? You haven't been doing a lot of reading all along?' "

More Time on Reading

To avoid sacrificing literature and still give students deep experience with informational text, one thing will be required, according to Carol Jago, a former president of the National Council of Teachers of English: more time.

"Teachers don't have to give up a single poem, play, or novel," said Ms. Jago, who now directs the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, which helps teachers design lesson plans. "But students are going to have to read four times as much as they are now."

Where will the time come from? From substituting good-quality reading for "busywork," movies shown in class, and the hours students spend daily on electronic entertainment such as texting and playing video games, Ms. Jago said.

In sorting out how to put the standards into practice, some experts caution against an either-or interpretation. It's important for students to be steeped in all kinds of reading and writing, they say, and it's all possible with good planning and collaboration.

"I don't know why this dichotomy has been constructed in a way that is so divisive. It's very unhelpful," said Stephanie R. Jones, a professor who focuses on literacy and social class at the University of Georgia in Athens.

"We shouldn't teach kindergartners as if they're going to join the workforce next year. But it won't hurt us to make sure we are emphasizing nonfiction a little more in K-5. And I don't think fiction has to be edged out at all," she said.

"In some college and career paths, it's important to state a claim and justify with evidence, and in others, it's important to be really creative and innovative and not start with an argument, but have open inquiry and move toward some kind of discovery."

Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the common assessments is supported in part by a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.

Excellent Resources on Differentiation!

Greetings!

18 teachers at my new school took part in an on-line professional development class. They said it was a wonderful opportunity to learn more about differentiation, and to learn more about each other.  They are working to arrange for another on-line course for the second semester, which I am eager to be a part of.
For those of us who did not get to take the class - below are the links to the key resources we used. There are some fantastic articles, learning styles inventories, and resources as we all work to improve our practice of differentiating our instruction for our students!

Most of the on-line class has been geared toward restructuring especially process and product to meet the needs of students based on learning profiles. This is a great compliment to our current efforts here at my school to differentiate our content based on readiness by providing scaffolded instruction to students who need it, and enriched instruction for the students who already get it.

If you have any questions about any of the resources, please see let me know. Happy differentiation!

http://marciaconner.com/resources/learning-styles-intro/

http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-theory-teacher

http://www.sdc.uwo.ca/learning/index.html?styles

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html

http://learningcommons.ubc.ca/what-we-offer/learning-self-assessment/

http://www.literacyworks.org/mi/assessment/findyourstrengths.html

http://www.edutopia.org/students-who-know-their-own-minds

http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-immersion-enota-how-to

http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-immersion-enota-how-to

http://www.teachervision.fen.com/intelligence/teaching-methods/2204.html

http://www.teachersdomain.org/

http://jfmueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/toolbox/tasks.htm

http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=8&n=14

http://www.cast.org/teachingeverystudent/toolkits/tk_lessons.cfm?tk_id=21

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/pdf/journals/ed_lead/el199909_tomlinson.pdf

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/8-lessons-learned-differentiating-instruction

Why Students Need Academic Vocabulary...

Academic vocabulary is one of the strongest indicators of how well students will learn subject area content. Unfortunately, vocabulary development can be an after thought in content area classrooms. Educators and experts discuss strategies for helping students acquire academic vocabulary in every classroom. Read on for more information on why these kinds of words are so critical to students' academic and cognitive development.

Academic Vocabulary Builds Student Achievement

By Laura Varlas

Academic vocabulary is one of the strongest indicators of how well students will learn subject area content. Unfortunately, vocabulary development can be an after thought in content area classrooms. Educators and experts discuss strategies for helping students acquire academic vocabulary in every classroom.

Complex texts. Rigor. Higher standards. Every year, the stakes are raised in the content area classrooms. Nancy Guth, supervisor of literacy and humanities in Stafford County Public Schools, says, "We need the tools to meet this challenge."

Vicki Urquhart, author of the ASCD book Teaching Reading in the Content Areas, 3rd Ed., says she hears from professors that students come to college unprepared to participate in a high level of discourse. "They don't have the vocabulary, they don't know how to process or discuss what they've read," says Urquhart.

Reading and writing in the subject areas are powerful strategies for content acquisition. Through appropriate literacy activities, students have opportunities to interact constructively with content, to create internal representations of content through reading, and then refine that representation through writing processes like synthesis, evaluation, and summarization. Both reading-to-learn and writing-to-learn are meaning-making activities that result in understanding. But there is a key, often under served component of teaching reading and writing in the content areas: vocabulary knowledge.

Vocabulary expert and Kent State University professor emeritus Nancy Padak says, "There's a strong, statistical link between a person's vocabulary knowledge and students' comprehension ability; and there's a very strong link between these two and academic success."

Use Simple Steps to Build Vocab

In Stafford County, Guth says teaching academic vocabulary was a challenge. "Our high schools' SAT and ACT scores dipped —we were struggling with how to help kids access the vocabulary that is the key to reading comprehension on those tests," she states. Guth needed a program that would shore up vocabulary learning across content areas.

As a backdrop to Guth's common concerns, there's a prevailing notion that plagues content-area classrooms: the myth that words teach themselves. Research shows that inductive or incidental approaches to vocabulary exposure fall short because context alone is seldom sufficient to allow students to conceptualize unknown words. Also, student conceptualizations, especially for technical terms, lack the precision needed to understand new words. In addition, students may not encounter technical terms frequently enough to accumulate an adequate number of examples of the term.

In Building Academic Vocabulary, Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering advocate for a six-step process for vocabulary development:

Step 1: Teacher presents the term in "student-friendly" language (including descriptions, examples, and nonlinguistic representations of the term).

Step 2: Students restate the term in their own words (linking the new word to known experiences and background knowledge).

Step 3: Students represent the term in graphic form (reinforcing and deepening understanding through processing in a second modality).

Step 4: Students use the term in other contexts (deepening meaning by applying the term in new situations, through writing or conversation).

Step 5: Students discuss the term with peers (building understanding as a class, and augmenting this knowledge with new discoveries about the word).

Step 6: Vocabulary games give students more exposure to the term (serving as continued review in ways that engage multiple modalities for learning).

Larry Ferlazzo, English l anguage l earner (ELL) teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., helps build students' vocabulary by using simple word charts that include student-created drawings and by allowing students to use physical gestures to represent word meaning. Ferlazzo describes a simple way to preteach academic vocabulary:

First introduce a small number of key words, then have students work in groups to see if they know any of them. Follow with the use of drawings and physical gestures (for example, with the word "fact" the teacher could point to the ground and stomp her foot, and with the word "opinion" she could point to her mind). Lastly, include sentence stems where students can apply the newly-learned words (perhaps in a question/answer mode with partners). For example:

Q: "We are in a classroom. Is that a fact or an opinion?"

A: "'We are in a classroom' is a fact."

Ferlazzo adds that E LL s might also write a translation of the new words in their home language. He emphasizes that strategies for pre teaching academic vocabulary benefit both ELL and non-ELL students.

Time, Expertise, and Relevance

For content area teachers, comprehensive, research-based approaches can seem daunting in terms of the time and expertise needed to enact them with fidelity and precision. In some cases, there is also the concern that this sort of instruction should be the sole purview of the English/Language Arts teacher.

"Time is a big issue," admits Padak. "We've already got a curriculum that is jam-packed, so if we just tell students to go memorize these words, then we can kind of pretend we're doing what they need for vocabulary —even though we know better," she says.

Urquhart thinks it's really teachers' lack of comfort that keeps them from delivering reading and writing strategies. Padak sees something to that theory. She suggests that maybe the real problem is that content area teachers haven't been carefully and systematically exposed to good alternatives to handing out the weekly vocabulary list.

"When you adopt a more constructivist approach to vocabulary instruction, there is a pretty steep learning curve for teachers and students," Padak says. "It's going to take some time; it's a whole different way of doing vocabulary both in terms of how teachers have taught, and how they were taught, as students. From a PD perspective, if you hope for change in this area, you need to be in it for the long haul."

A Return to Our Roots

In the Summer 2012 Educational Leadership article "Vocabulary: Five Common Misconceptions" Padak and colleagues address misconceptions about vocabulary instruction. One is that studying Latin and Greek roots is too hard for young learners.

"More than 60 percent of academic words have word parts (also called morphemes or roots) that always carry the same meaning. Knowing that words can be broken down into meaning units is a powerful strategy for vocabulary development," write Padak, Rasinki, Newton, and Bromley.

Adhering to this logic, Stafford Public Schools developed the "Root of the Week" initiative, which is spearheaded by high school literacy coaches and enacted across the district. Each week, the coaches introduce a new Latin or Greek root word. Over the course of the week, coaches work with content area teachers to embed this vocabulary instruction through stories, posters, and events.

Example: Root of the Week

a-, ab-, abs- "away, from" EXAMPLES averse: opposed to; have a dislike for it aberration: a deviation; an abnormality abstract: expressing a quality drawn away from an object absent: not present or existing; missing; lacking Source: Pamela Smith, Literacy Coach, North Stafford High School, Stafford, Va.

"At first, content area teachers were hesitant," Guth says of the initiative. "But when we introduced that the first root was "chron-" and the second was "dec-"; they immediately saw the connections. From science to world languages to family life to automotive classes, when you're reading manuals or technical vocabulary, everything comes from a Greek or Latin root."

"Helping kids get a handle on what roots mean is going to help them learn the vocabulary of science, social studies, and so on," says Padak. "And really, those [root] words are labels for concepts. If you can help teachers see that what they're doing is helping kids learn the concepts of their discipline, then it makes a whole lot more sense to content area teachers."

Guth adds that the Common Core State Standards' focus on informational texts goes hand-in-glove with root study. Urquhart agrees. She generally sees a higher profile for academic vocabulary instruction heralded by the Common Core. "Reading and writing skills parallel all the content area standards in the Common Core," explains Urquhart. "When you bring them together, they support each other; they're the full package for learning that content."

"Helping kids develop a more robust academic vocabulary is all over the Common Core standards," says Padak. "Having kids work with more challenging texts is all over the standards, as well, and in order to do that, you have to have the academic vocabulary."

But what about time? "In terms of instructional time, our advice is 10 minutes a day ought to do it," says Padak. And the pay off? "This year, our ACT scores are above the state and national average, and one of the highest in the state of Virginia," says Guth. "Our scores continue to rise even as our number of students who take the test also rises." Stafford County has expanded its root study program to the middle schools, and is dabbling with the idea of introducing it at the elementary level, as a complement to their larger, word study program.

Words Your Way

There are plenty of free online tools out there to help students reinforce academic vocabulary. On his blog, Ferlazzo lists several of these resources. An added benefit of online tools is that they're a place for ELLs to practice and make mistakes privately, he notes.

Teaching academic vocabulary can feel empowering. "Now, content area teachers actually seek us out and say, 'Hey, we haven't seen the root of the week yet!'" says Guth. "One of our schools has it on its digital marqu ee as you drive by: 'Ask your kids about the root of the week.' The school board members joke that we'll cause accidents because everyone slows down as they drive past. It's gotten to be a community event," Guth says.

"It's not just one more thing piled onto content area teachers," Guth adds. "It's fun that translates into learning." 

Greek and Latin Roots in the Common Core State Standards

Root-specific standards are located in the "Foundational Skills" and "Language/Vocabulary Acquisition and Use" sections of the standards. Sample standards, grades K–5: Use most frequent inflections and affixes as clues to meaning (K) Identify common root words (begins at grade 1) Use common prefixes and compound words (begins at grade 2) Use affixes and root words (begins at grade 3) Identify and know meaning of common prefixes and derivational suffixes (begins at grade 3) Decode words with common Latin suffixes (begins at grade 3) Use combined knowledge of [phonics] and morphology—e.g., roots and affixes (begins at grade 4) Know and use common Greek and Latin roots (begins at grade 4) Sample standards, grades 6–12: Determine or clarify meaning of unknown or multiple meaning words by … analyzing word parts (begins at grade 6) Use common, grade-appropriate Greek and Latin affixes (begins at grade 6) Identify and correctly use patterns of word changes that indicate different meanings or parts of speech—e.g., conceive, conception, conceivable (begins at grade 9) Acquire and use accurately general, academic, and domain-specific words (begins at grade 9) Demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge (begins at grade 9) For more information about these Common Core standards, see http://www.corestandards.org. Source: Adapted with permission from Nancy Padak.

What children SHOULD read....

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

I thought I would share this article with you all.  It was forwarded to me by a colleague in my school -

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/blogs/what-should-children-read.xml?f=76

Too much data??

Thought you all might find this article interesting. Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!

Data-driven to distraction in school reform

By Valerie Strauss , Updated: November 21, 2012

“Data-driven reform” is one of the mantras of the school reform movement. Just how annoying has it become? Esther Quintero, research associate at the non-profit Albert Shanker Institute, located in Washington, D.C., tells us. A version of this post originally appeared on the institute’s blog.

By Esther Quintero

In the education community, many proclaim themselves to be “completely data-driven.” Data Driven Decision Making (DDDM) has been a buzz phrase for a while now, and continues to be a badge many wear with pride. And yet, every time I hear it, I cringe.

Let me explain. During my first year in graduate school, I was taught that excessive attention to quantitative data impedes – rather than aids – in-depth understanding of social phenomena. In other words, explanations cannot simply be cranked out of statistical analyses, without the need for a precursor theory of some kind – a.k.a. “variable sociology” – and the attempt to do so constitutes a major obstacle to the advancement of knowledge.

I am no longer in graduate school, so part of me says: Okay, I know what data-driven means in education. But then, at times, I still think: No, really, what does “data-driven” mean even in this context?

At a basic level, it seems to signal a general orientation toward making decisions based on the best information that we have, which is a very good thing. But there are two problems here. First, we tend to have an extremely narrow view of the information that counts – that is, data that can be quantified easily. Second, we seem to operate under the illusion that data, in and of themselves, can tell stories and reveal truth.

But the thing is: (1) numbers are not the only type of data that matter; and (2) all data need to be interpreted before they can be elevated to the status of evidence – and theory should drive this process, not data.

Remember the parable about the drunk man searching for his wallet under a streetlight? When someone comes to help, they ask, “Are you sure you dropped it here?” The drunk says, “I probably dropped it in the street, but the light is bad there, so it’s easier to look over here.” In science, this phenomenon – that is, researchers looking for answers where the data are better, “rather than where the truth is most likely to lie” – has been called the “streetlight effect.”

As David Freedman explains in a Discover magazine article that asks why scientific studies are so often wrong, researchers “don’t always have much choice. It is often extremely difficult or even impossible to cleanly measure what is really important, so scientists instead cleanly measure what they can, hoping it turns out to be relevant.”

As Freedman says, “We should fully expect scientific theories to frequently butt heads and to wind up being disproved sometimes as researchers grope their way toward the truth. That is the scientific process: Generate ideas, test them, discard the flimsy, repeat.”

But what if they develop the ideas to fit the data they have, rather than finding the data to test the most important ideas?

So, as yawn-inducing as the word “theory” may sound to a lot of people, theory acts to rationalize the search for your wallet or anything else, helping to focus attention on the areas where it is most likely to be found. In education, it often seems like we are too preoccupied with the convenient and well-lit. So, while it seems like we are drowning in education data, are they the data that we need to make sound decisions?

Sociologists Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (1996) wrote:

Quantitative research is essential both for descriptive purposes and for testing sociological theories. We do, however, believe that many sociologists have had all too much faith in statistical analysis as a tool for generating theories, and that the belief in an isomorphism between statistical and theoretical models [...] has hampered the development of sociological theories built upon concrete explanatory mechanisms.

Something similar could be said about the data-driven education movement: Excessive faith in data crunching as a tool for making decisions has interfered with the important task of asking the fundamental questions in education, such as whether we are looking for answers in the right places, and not just where it is easy (e.g., standardized test data).

As education scholar (and blogger) Bruce Baker has shown (often humorously), data devoid of theory can suggest ridiculous courses of action:

Let’s say I conducted a study in which I rented a fleet of helicopters and used those helicopters to, on a daily basis, transport a group of randomly selected students from Camden, NJ to elite private day schools around NJ and Philadelphia. I then compared the college attendance patterns of the kids participating in the helicopter program to 100 other kids from Camden who also signed up for the program but were not selected and stayed in Camden public schools. It turns out that I find that the helicopter kids were more likely to attend college – therefore I conclude logically that “helicopters improve college attendance among poor, minority kids.

As preposterous as this proposal may sound, the Brookings report he mentions argues somewhat along these lines – only the helicopters are vouchers. The study, says Baker, “purports to find [or at least the media spin on it] that vouchers as a treatment, worked especially for black students.” A minimal understanding of the mechanisms involved here should have made it obvious that vouchers are likely no more relevant than helicopters to children’s educational attainment.

A second example: About a year ago at the United Nations Social Innovation Summit, Nicholas Negroponte suggested that the “One Laptop Per Child” program might, “literally or figuratively, drop out of a helicopter with tablets into a village where there is no school,” and then come back after a year to see how children have taught themselves to read.

This faith in the power of new technology to bring about fundamental educational transformation is not new, but I think it could be minimized if we reflected on more basic questions such as:  What it is that helicopter-dropped tablets might actually do to increase children’s educational gains?

My colleague recently wrote that NCLB “has helped to institutionalize the improper interpretation of testing data.” True. But I would go even further: No Child Left Behind has helped to institutionalize not just how we handle data, but also, and more importantly, what counts as data. The law requires schools to rely on scientifically-based research but, as it turns out, case studies, ethnographies, interviews, and other forms of qualitative research seem to fall outside this definition – and, thus, are deemed unacceptable as a basis for making decisions.

Since when are qualitative data unacceptable in social and behavioral science research and as a guide in policy-relevant decision-making?

Our blind faith in numbers has ultimately caused impoverishment in how (and what) information is used to help address real world problems. We now apparently believe that numbers are not just necessary, but sufficient, for making research-based decisions.

The irony, of course, is that this notion is actually contrary to the scientific process. Being data-driven is only useful if you have a strong theory by which to navigate; anything else can leave you heading blindly toward a cliff.

The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the Albert Shanker Institute, its officers, board members, or any related entity or organization.

© The Washington Post Company

Full article available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2012/11/21/data-driven-to-distraction-in-school-reform/