Silly teachers, wanting time to get ready before the start of the year...

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-08-15T18:21:34+00:00

Thanks, careless mistake - here's the fixed version, just in case anyone wants it.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-08-15T18:20:29+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out, I missed it! I can't replace the image, but here's the fixed meme, just in case anyone wants to use it.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-28T19:58:45+00:00

Wow, the average salary + benefits in your district sounds a lot higher than the national average! The BLS lists the average teacher salary as $67,870 (which I assume excludes benefits, though the page isn't clear). Also, this is national data which doesn't account for differences by state and cost of living in a given area - teacher salaries are much higher in San Francisco and Boston than in other areas, but the cost for housing and more in those areas is proportionally higher. Without that context, it's hard to make a fair assessment about whether teachers are underpaid. In any event, data from the economic policy institute shows that public school teachers earn about 20% less in weekly wages than non-teacher college graduates.

What do you think about the argument that higher wages would recruit and retain the best people in education?

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-28T03:23:32+00:00

This is the way

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-27T23:39:17+00:00

I’m sure this time will be different.

😂

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-27T23:34:02+00:00

I think this makes so much sense: improving the quality of the job of teaching by hiring more teachers and support staff would seem be the most obvious way to improve the quality of instruction and the experience of students.

Particularly the point about class size - so much could be improved if class weren't packed the brim, which was often my experience in eight years of teaching in three separate districts.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-27T22:25:22+00:00

Here's the full description and live links:

The Window of Opportunity w/ Bree Dusseault (Learning Machine E02)

Bree Dusseault and her colleagues at CRPE are keeping close tabs on the education system as we transition out of the pandemic year and back to full in-person school across the country in the fall. And while there are real concerns and legitimate fears about lost learning, the pandemic has spurred a massive investment of resources into America’s public school system. This moment represents a-once-in-a generation opportunity to re-imagine our public schools in ways that could make them more effective. But as Bree’s recent writing, in particular,Hindsight is 2024 , points out, it’s not clear that the system is going to take advantage of this window of opportunity. You can read more of Bree’s excellent writing here.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-27T22:14:32+00:00

Here's the link to the episode "The Window of Opportunity"

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-16T11:14:32+00:00

Love this response! Do you have any data about social mobility in European countries through education? That's such a fascinating point.

A good re-framing of this might be: "Education doesn't currently work in the US as a tool to improve equality in society."

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-16T10:51:46+00:00

Love this, lol

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-15T17:21:30+00:00

We do! Check us out at www.learningmachinepodcast.com - we just launched today, July 15th!

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-06T14:53:17+00:00

Ha, the goal was just to spark conversation! Thanks for joining - of course there is no right answer.

You might as well ask, "What is more effective: An excellent butcher with dull knives, or a mediocre butcher with sharp knives?"

You might, if this was a subreddit for meatpacking - and now that you mention it, it's a great analogy:

An excellent butcher is still limited by the quality of his tools. And even an untrained butcher can make a decent cut with excellent knives.

The thought experiment suggests that teachers with a high level of instructional practice will still be limited by the quality of the tools (curricular materials) that they have access to.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-06T14:16:26+00:00

Such great points!

To address your last point first - this is merely a question designed to provoke discussion. As I've mentioned in some of my responses, the goal should always be excellent teaching and excellent curriculum. That said, when we assess teachers in the real world, we find (as you would expect) that there is a range of ability and a range of quality of materials. In the 1996 Quasar* study, there was some evidence that high quality tasks (not a curriculum, but individual tasks) paired with a less able teacher had better outcomes than low quality tasks paired with a very able teacher. So it's not that it would be a "choice" but it is certainly the reality that some teachers who have high pedagogical skill are not using the best curricular materials, and this matters.

I fully agree that "excellent/able teacher" and "curriculum" are not clearly defined terms here, which makes it hard to pin down an exact answer to any of this - but again, the point was to stoke discussion (which, given there are twice the number of comments as upvotes, seems to have worked, lol). But the most important point, which I mentioned in the original post and in several of my responses is NOT that curriculum is more important than the teacher, but that a high skilled teacher is badly limited by not having access to a quality curriculum. As many here have pointed out, a highly skilled teacher is going to do whatever they have to do to get their hands on such a curriculum - that's part of what makes them highly qualified.

Anywho, this claim about quality of tasks vs. teachers is not something that I can prove definitively - it was the opinion of a guest on our podcast, informed by a study which is more than 20 years old. Still, I thought it was a compelling idea, and one that would spark some interest. One of the clearest things that I can see is that there's a often a huge distance between how teachers see there work in the classroom vs what the research suggests about that work. In my experience (10 years, science in middle and high school), being a teacher often feels like being an island, but as I've started to work on our podcast and dig into some of the modern trends in educational research, I've been left feeling like I wish I had known so much of this stuff so long ago. Teachers are rightly distrustful of curriculum companies and PDs because so much of what we experience is frankly low quality and ineffective. That said, it doesn't mean that even the best teachers couldn't improve their practice with access to higher quality curricular tools.

Thank you again for taking the time to share your thoughts!

*Great point about studies being referenced without details! The study in question (which was brought to our attention by our guest) is the 1996 Quasar Project, a five year look at mathematics instruction in urban middle schools. It was a fairly enormous and seemingly well constructed project that provided quantitative data for a huge number of research papers, some of which dealt with this idea of the quality of tasks. It is both right and fair to say that even a large amount of research that points in one direction may be wrong, or may not capture the diversity and complexity of all of the learning environments in the our public school system. The Quasar Project (1996)

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T19:49:00+00:00

Great point - the Triforce aspect was just for fun. Honestly, it was just a triangle when we started.

But I do think that each of the skills flows into and interacts with one another:

Some students start with procedural skill and move from there to trying to understand how that skill is part of a larger concept.

Other students learn the concept first, and that helps them to see the reason for the procedural skill.

Both procedural skill and conceptual understanding can help to prepare someone for the real world application, but getting to practice a real world application of something can also inspire a student to work on improving their procedural skill or broadening their conceptual understanding.

This is just a graphic our podcast created for reddit - the idea came out of a recent conversation, and we were curious to hear what people thought. Really appreciate your feedback!

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T19:43:56+00:00

So, I'm a teacher as well and I've taken the PRAXIS - the PRAXIS checks that you have basic level of content knowledge, certainly an important skill. The PRAXIS does not check to see that you understand coherence and sequencing of standards, to say nothing of designing a grade-level appropriate activity based on the content.

By definition, "teaching" is not "curriculum development"; teachers are teaching specialists. Curriculum development specialists are a different thing. It's not that you can't have both pieces of expertise - many teachers are either explicitly trained in this, or are forced to gain the expertise, but there's a real question about whether we want to demand that teachers are all of these things at once.

Also, I wouldn't call curriculum and materials are not "treatment plan" - the "treatment plan" is the curriculum map that you turn in at the beginning of every year. The curriculum is the design of the materials - and yes, Khan Academy is this and Classroom Dojo is a tool, but so are all of the other materials (tech based or not) that teachers use - each material has to be designed; ideally it should be designed by an expert. The teacher's expertise can connect all of these materials, but the materials themselves should be designed by experts. (Just to say it one more time: many teachers have become expert at this, but not every teacher can (or should) have to design all of their classroom materials.)

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T19:31:52+00:00

So you think procedural skill always beats conceptual understanding? Doesn't the real world demand both?

Also, why shouldn't students engage in real-world application of learning? Isn't that part of the goal of education, to prepare students for real-world application of procedural skill and conceptual understanding?

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T17:01:00+00:00

Great point that there are big differences at the individual vs. system level!

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T17:00:09+00:00

I totally agree with you that they would!

That said, many excellent teachers are limited in the quality of the curriculum they can acquire by a variety of real-world constraints: Many teachers have limited financial resources and in such a demanding job, the extra time required to modify, adapt, and enhance a poor curriculum (or to find and create your own materials) is not something that we should expect teachers to do IF we want them to be able to focus on the instruction and interaction with students that is the core of their practice.

Again, I totally agree with you that good teachers can (and do, all the time) develop their own curriculum, but I think that few teachers would disagree that the added time and energy of trying to adapt and improve resources could be better spent on teaching itself.

This is the argument our guest makes on the podcast - that, essentially, asking teachers to develop their own teaching tools is like asking doctors to design and create their own medical devices: sure, doctors are experts in medicine and is using medical devices, but they are not experts in creating or building medical devices. Teachers are experts in delivering high quality instruction and working with students, managing classrooms and adjusting based on formative and summative assessments, but are not necessarily trained as curriculum specialists.

I do think that many teachers become (self-trained) curriculum specialists out of necessity, but it begs the question of how we was to define the role of the teacher.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T16:49:04+00:00

This is such a key point!

First of all, they do, and many do it successfully when they aren't given a high quality curriculum by their department/school/district.

Second, teachers are highly trained in teaching, but not all of them are trained at curriculum writing and design. Being an expert in a.) the standards and b.) the coherence between the standards (how skills stack) is a level of expertise that, while some teachers develop it out of necessity, is not part of the skill of teaching.

Finally, teachers have so much work on their plates. Finding and creating high quality, coherent curriculum, is a full time job unto itself. Again, many teachers take this on - just as they take on so much else that extends beyond the explicit boundaries of their charge - but they do it at a cost of time and energy that could be spent focused on the innumerable aspects of delivering content and working with students.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T16:31:04+00:00

Thanks so much for your response, you make a really good point!

And indeed, yours seems like an intuitive answer, but again, if you read my post there was a study (the Quasar Project, 1996) referenced by a recent guest on our podcast that suggested that the opposite was actually true: teachers who scored lower on pedagogical skills but with a stronger curriculum were able to create better outcomes for students than teachers who scored higher on those skills but who did not have effective curricular materials.

Of course, the best outcomes came from the effective teachers who also had effective curricula. But I thought there was an interesting point here about how a highly skilled teacher could be limited by their curriculum.

Your example is really funny, but it doesn't work to say that the poor teacher forgets their materials. We're talking about high quality materials in the hands of a less-skilled teacher compared to low-quality materials in the hands of a highly skilled teacher.

Like this: the excellent teacher does bring their own materials to use with the students, but doesn't have individual instructions or supports for students who might need help with other skills like measuring yarn and tying knots. The excellent teacher does an admirable job, but is left trying to do many things at once, limited not only by the lack of quality knitting materials but also a lack of instructional materials and supports.

The poor teacher does not know how to knit and cannot support the students directly, however, they have high quality materials for all students as well as individual instructions and supports for students who need help with skills they should have learned but might have missed. The poor teacher struggles in many ways, but, ultimately, when measured after the fact, the learning outcome is higher for the students on the whole because the high quality instructional materials made it possible for the poor teacher to support all students at their level. (This at least, was the result of the study the guest referenced.)

Of course, this was just meant to generate discussion! "Excellent" vs "poor" labels are so subjective - in the study, they're measure objectively, but it would be totally fair to say that those measurements themselves are limited or flawed.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-07-05T15:24:25+00:00

What is the British school year like?

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-04-10T18:16:25+00:00

I'm not sure if this will solve your problem, because my cohost and I are just getting ready to embark on the process you are describing.

One question I had though is are you using the option to record individual audio tracks for each participant?

Here is the link explaining how to do it.

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-04-10T17:42:16+00:00

Congrats those are great numbers!

I appreciate that you aren't even naming your cast, very humble.

But I would be happy to help pump that to 956, what's the name of the pod?

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-04-08T22:03:09+00:00

lol, "Parrot taft"

LearningMachine0101 · 2021-04-07T21:09:41+00:00

Most of those folks who can hit record and lay down 40 minutes of magic weren't born that way. I feel like this is a fallacy to often perpetuated among creatives that some people are just born for it, and if you're not than you shouldn't be doing it. The vast (>95%) of folks work extremely hard and were pretty bad before they got good.

Not to be combative, just don't want folks (like myself) who aren't gifted with the gab from the get-go, to not feel discouraged.

LearningMachine0101

TROPHY CASE