March/April 2007
More Than "Making Nice"
Getting teachers to (truly) collaborate
by Laura Pappano
There was no yellow Post-It note, no collegial
suggestion like, “Hey, I’ve tried these ...”
Newly hired French teacher Amy Moran merely found a stack of worksheets
tossed on her desk by a colleague soon after she arrived at Westford
Academy, a public high school in Westford, Mass.
With 10 years of teaching already under her
belt, Moran had seen students benefit when teachers shared observations
about strategies, lessons, and test results. The pile of worksheets
made tangible what Moran already knew: She and her new colleague
weren’t working together. The two teachers gave students
different tests and assessed the results separately. Who knew
if their students were learning the same things? “To dump
papers on a person’s desk doesn’t mean anything; it’s
not helpful,” Moran recalls of the incident that occurred
seven years ago.
It’s hardly rare to find teachers who
don’t click. But such behavior—once considered an
unfortunate personality conflict—is increasingly seen as
a barrier to school success. Spurred by shifting teacher demographics
and the drive for standards-based instruction, schools across
the country are pressing teachers to take active roles in changing
practice and to work together more effectively.
The rest of this article can be found in the current
issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy
this issue.
An Interview
with Sharon Griffin
"Doing the Critical Things First"
An aligned approach to PreK and early
elementary math
Sharon Griffin is an associate professor of
education and psychology at Clark University and author of the
Number Worlds curriculum for teaching number sense in the preK
and elementary years. In this interview with the Harvard Education
Letter, Griffin discusses what cognitive science can teach us
about aligning preK and early elementary curriculum and teaching
methods with the natural development of children’s mathematical
thinking.
The rest of this article is available in full-text.
To purchase the current issue of the Harvard Education Letter.
Buy this issue.
High-Stakes Testing and the
Corruption of America's Schools
by Sharon L. Nichols
and David C. Berliner
Since the fall of 2003, after NCLB required
high-stakes testing in all 50 states, we have systematically scoured
news outlets and scholarly journals for accounts of the impact
of high-stakes testing. We have amassed a significant collection
of evidence highlighting the distortion, corruption, and collateral
damage that occur when high-stakes tests become commonplace in
our public schools.
We found reports and research about individuals
and groups of individuals from across the nation whose lives have
been tragically and often permanently affected by high-stakes
testing. We found hundreds of instances of adults who were cheating,
including many instances of administrators who “pushed”
children out of school, costing thousands of students the opportunity
to receive a high school diploma. We also found administrators
and school boards that had drastically narrowed the curriculum,
and who forced test-preparation programs on teachers and students,
taking scarce time away from genuine instruction. We found teacher
morale plummeting, causing many to leave the profession.
Supporters of high-stakes testing might dismiss
these anecdotal reports as idiosyncratic or too infrequent to
matter. But all of these problems could have been foretold. A
little-known but powerful social science law known as Campbell’s
law explains the etiology of the problems we document. Ignorance
of this law endangers the health of our schools and erodes the
commitment of those who work in them.
The rest of this article can be found in the current
issue of the Harvard Education Letter. Buy
this issue.
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