Tag Archives: professional development

Steven Jay Gould on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales

Posted on August 9, 2016 | Leave a comment

Here’s the late, great, Stephen Jay Gould writing on the Stanford-Binet test of intelligence:

“Alfred Binet was commissioned by the minister of public education in France to devise a way of identifying students in primary school whose difficulties in normal classrooms suggested some need for special education. Binet specifically denied the test—later called an intelligence quotient (or IQ) when the German psychologist W. Stern scored the results by dividing ‘mental age’ (as ascertained on the test) by chronological age—could be measuring an internal biological property worthy of the name “general intelligence.” First of all, Binet believed that the complex and multifarious property called intelligence could not, in principle, be captured by a single number capable of ranking children in a linear hierarchy. He wrote in 1905:

‘The scale, properly speaking, does not permit the measure of the intelligence because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured and linear surfaces are measured.’

Moreover, Binet feared that if teachers read the IQ number as an inflexible inborn quality, rather than (as he intended) a guide for identifying students in need of help, they would use the scores as a cynical excuse for expunging, rather than aiding, troublesome students. Binet wrote of such teachers: “The seem to reason in the following way: ‘Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the children who trouble us,’ and without the true critical spirit they designate all who are unruly, or disinterested in the school.” Binet also feared the powerful bias that has since been labeled “self-fulfilling prophecy” of the Pygmalion effect: if teachers are told that a student is inherently uneducable based on misinterpretation of low IQ scores, they will treat the student as unable, thereby encouraging poor performance by their inadequate nurture, rather than the student’s inherent nature. Invoking the case then wracking France, Binet wrote:

‘It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned. This would be to operate as the graphologists did who, when Dreyfus was believed to be guilty, discovered in his handwriting sign or a traitor or a spy.’

Binet felt that this test could be used to identify mild forms of retardation or learning disability. Yet even for such specific and serious difficulties, Binet firmly rejected the idea that his test could identify causes of educational problems, particularly their potential basis in biological inheritance. He only wished to identify with special needs, so that help could be provided:

‘Our purpose is to be able to measure the intellectual capacity of a child who is brought to us in order to know whether he is normal or retarded…..We shall neglect his etiology, and we shall make no attempt to distinguish between acquired and congenital [retardation]….We do not attempt to establish or prepare a prognosis, and we leave unanswered the question of whether this retardation is curable, or even improvable. We shall limit ourselves to ascertaining the truth in regard to his present mental state.'”

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

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Charles Van Riper on a Teacher’s Responsibility to His or Her Students

Posted on July 26, 2016 | Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I circumnavigated northern Vermont and New Hampshire. After twenty years, I enjoyed seeing the Northeast Kingdom again. Making my way, I indulged in a favorite pastime, haunting used book stores. I stumbled across, I believe in St. Johnsbury, a book by Ken Macrorie called 20 Teachers: In Their Own Words, Extraordinary Educators from First Grade through Graduate School Tell What Works for Their Students and Why (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). The book appears to be long out of print–a targeted search on Amazon (i.e. including both title and author name)  turns up some used copies, but a general internet search doesn’t (but it will net you rubbish like “20 Hot Teachers That [sic!] Slept With Their Students”). That’s probably just as well; the book is a mixed bag and poorly copyedited, a particular bugaboo of mine.

However, one of the 20 teachers whose remarks distinguish this otherwise lackluster volume is the late Charles Van Riper. Mr. Van Riper was a pioneer in the field of speech pathology and audiology. A severe stutterer, he knew whereof he spoke, wrote (he compiled an eclectic and extensive bibliography during his long career) and practiced. His work as a speech therapist remained as important to him as his scholarly endeavors, and he was possessed of a beautifully clear sense of ethical compassion for his charges and a love for his profession.

Here is an excerpt from a statement Charles Van Riper made to his staff in 1967 (“or thereabouts”) that I thought important for those of us working with students who have diverse learning needs; I quote this from page 115 of the edition of 20 Teachers cited above.

Our duty to our students, to our cases, to all our fellows, is to set them free. We must not bind with our chains their potentials, for our own selfish needs or ego status or in revenge for our own enslavement. We must guard ourselves constantly lest we make them dependent upon us for our own ego-needs. This is hard to do, for many of our cases and students will seduce us into the master’s role, thereby absolving themselves of the burden of responsibility for their own failure to fulfill themselves. We must not blame them, for this is all they have known but we should not aid them in their folly. Each of us is responsible for the fulfillment of his potential….

How then can we help our cases and students to realize these truths, if truths they be? First of all we must hunt hard in each of them for every small sign of potential, focus upon it our spotlight of faith, reward its confrontation by our own pleasure in the insight. Next we must help them to search for alternative modes of action and insist that they choose the one most promising in the long run. To do this, of course, they must gather and scan the available information and do some predicting. This they will resist because of the labor and the responsibility involved. They should be encouraged in every way to get this and do this. We must not get it for them and do it for them though we can make it easier. But we must not say to them “This is what you should do or try.'”The moment we do this, we assume the role of master; we make them dependent. Always they should choose. We must help them learn to hunt for ideas and activities from any source, from books, from other members of the staff, from their own cortical convolutions or glands–but they should choose and we should not tell them which one they should choose. Let them find out!

All men should be their teachers and supervisors. A supervisor should be a companion, not a comptroller, he must not be a yes-no man, a good-bad man. We can control by praise as well as punishment. Accordingly, we must as teachers, therapists, and supervisors, be permissive, giving absolution for comprehended errors of judgment, but always helping our students to grow tall. Our responsibility is to make them responsible.

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The Weekly Text, July 1, 2016: A Trove of Documents for Conducting a Professional Development Inquiry into Executive Skills

Posted on July 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

Are you done with the 2015-2016 school year? I gather that our school year here in New York City goes much later than other districts in the United States. Our last day was Tuesday the 28th.

So it’s summer break! I always schedule my share of fun for these months, but I also work some–because I want to. You can continue to look for the Weekly Text at Mark’s Text Terminal, because I only plan to miss three Fridays during the summer.

Over the years, as an employee of the New York City Department of Education, I’ve experienced a mixed bag of professional development sessions. A few years ago, at least in the school in which I presently serve, teachers were responsible for performing professional inquiry groups, which selected its own topic for, well, inquiry, and analysis, germane to the work we do, but obviously for improving pedagogy. For this week, then, here are–in three separate links–the raw materials for a professional development presentation on executive skills and function I wrote for the group I joined in the 2011-2012 school year.

First up are the the proposal for this inquiry group, and a learning support for teachers, which are the teacher’s materials for this presentation; first up is the proposal for this inquiry group, and a learning support for teachers; second, here are four student surveys to assess executive skills; third, and finally, here is a letter explaining these surveys to students. I adapted the student surveys from Ellen Galinsky’s excellent book Mind in the Making.

Addendum, July 27, 2016: Here is the scoring criteria for the surveys that this professional development asks students to complete.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Meeting Fundamental Needs

Posted on June 9, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Children and adults alike share needs to be safe and secure; to belong and to be loved; to experience self-esteem through achievement, mastery, recognition, and respect; to be autonomous; and to experience self-actualization by pursuing one’s inner abilities and finding intrinsic meaning and satisfaction in what one does.”

Thomas J. Sergiovanni Building Community in Schools (1994)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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The Intellectual Devotional Series

Posted on June 6, 2016 | 2 comments

Several years ago, while I was engaged with my final go-around with the Book of the Month Club, I took a chance on a title that sounded interesting: The Intellectual Devotional Modern Culture. The book’s title is about as exact a description of its contents as I’ve ever seen. First, it contains daily devotionals, just like the religious books that serve as part of its namesake, for each of the 365 days of the year; second, each entry–which I should mention are stylishly written and cogently edited–addressed a topic in modern culture.

Reading its daily entries, it didn’t take me long to understand that these readings, particularly those on athletes and pop music stars, would serve well as reading work for the struggling and alienated learners in my classroom. I broke the spine of the book and began separating pages to scan into my computer and save for future use. At the same time, I started writing reading comprehension worksheets to accompany these readings.

Moreover, I soon discovered that the authors of my book, David S. Kidder and Noah Oppenheim had in fact published a series of five Intellectual Devotional books. It didn’t take me long to buy the rest of the series and begin developing curricular materials from them keyed to various topics in the high school course of study. At this point, I have several hundred readings and worksheets that I’ve developed from these excellent books.

I recently wrote the authors of these books to seek permission to post some of their readings on Mark’s Text Terminal–particularly those I have rendered in typescript, so that teachers who work with struggling readers might edit them for those students. I have yet to hear back from them, but hope springs eternal, I guess. The good news is that all five books remain in print in durable hardcover editions. You can order them from your preferred bookseller (which I hope is local and independent, if I may presume to say so).

From time to time, outside The Weekly Text, I’ll publish here my worksheets to accompany the readings in The Intellectual Devotional books. To that end, here’s a reading comprehension worksheet on Michelangelo from the book I call, for file-coding purposes, The Intellectual Devotional Basic, so called because it has no subtitle, and is simply called The Intellectual Devotional (the subtitles for the other four books are the aforementioned Modern Culture, as well as Health, Biographies, and American History).

As always, I hope you find this useful. If you do, I’d like to hear how these kinds of readings and worksheet work in your classroom, particularly if you adapt them for struggling or alienated learners.

Post Scriptum: Here is the reading that accompanies this worksheet on Michelangelo, which I posted at a user’s request in October of 2017.

Addendum: I’ve posted these in the About Posts & Texts page, but I want to put them here as well. As I mentioned, there are five volumes of The Intellectual Devotional series and I’ve prepared reading and worksheet templates in Microsoft Word (so you can alter them to your needs) for all five books. So, here are the templates: The first set is from the general book (which I have called, for my purposes of file management, “Basic”), simply titled The Intellectual Devotional.  Here are templates for preparing materials from the American History volume. Next up is the set of four templates work with the Biographies volume. Here are the four templates for the Health volume. For the Modern Culture volume (the first of these I bought, incidentally, and a book full of high-interest material that I recognized had great potential for designing short reading and comprehension exercises for struggling learners, especially those with short attention spans), here are yet another four templates for readings and worksheets. Finally, here is the bibliography of all five titles for copying and pasting citations, or whatever else you might need it to do.

 

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What Teachers Really Do

Posted on May 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

“The teacher’s task is not to implant facts but to place the subject to be learned in from of the learner and, through sympathy, emotion, imagination, and patience, to awaken in the learner the restless drive for answers and insights which enlarge the personal life and give it meaning.”

Nathan M. Pusey (1907-2001) as Quoted in The New York Times (1959)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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On Role Modeling

Posted on May 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

“Setting an example is not the main means of influencing another, it is the only means.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.

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Jane Jacobs and Diane Ravitch

Posted on May 4, 2016 | Leave a comment

Astute readers of Jane Jacobs‘ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities recognize from its first page that Ms. Jacobs was an extremely subtle observer of the phenomena that interested her–the street life of New York City, and more specifically, the activities of her neighbors on her lovely block along Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. Ms. Jacobs was able to recognize patterns in the day-to-day activities of the residents of New York City (and Philadelphia as well, to wit Rittenhouse Square, which is a neighborhood very similar to the Village) that most other people, particularly her principal foe, New York City “master builder” Robert Moses, simply could not or would not. Her powers of perception, and her gift for composing lucid prose that dealt with complex issues, have made The Death and Life of Great American Cities a staple of urban planning curricula at the college level. Robert Caro has apparently said that the book was the strongest influence on his masterful biography of Moses, The Power Broker.

Diane Ravitch opens her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System by announcing that its title is an homage to Jane Jacobs and her magisterial assessment of the life of cities. That’s clearly the case, but there’s much more to this book–and what it says about Diane Ravitch the historian and author. Like Jane Jacobs, Dr. Ravitch possesses exquisitely subtle powers of observation and perception. Her bailiwick, however, is public education. While it is true that Robert Moses was the leader of a large bureaucracy, he clearly enjoyed the limelight, which made him a focal point for Jane Jacobs, a clearly identifiable opponent. Educational “reform” is a dense and tangled forest of persons, bureaucracies, institutions, and foundations (not to mention motivations), many of whom operate surreptitiously. Sorting out the strands of this web–something for which many busy teachers have no time, if no patience as well (I certainly don’t)–takes real dedication and talent, something Diane Ravitch, the reader will observe from the first page of her book, possesses in ample measure. As a prose stylist, she surpasses Ms. Jacobs, which is no mean feat.

In any case, this book addresses the tendency of education scholarship, theory, and practice, to cycle through various fads. While these generally range from the silly to the occasionally deleterious, it is our current state of “reform” faddism, led by “reformers” like Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, and the man who succeeded Mr. Duncan as United States Secretary of Education (after antagonizing parents and teachers across New York State), John King, Jr., that this book exposes and analyzes. The corporate foundations–Bill and Melinda Gates, The Walton (i.e Wal-Mart) Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation and their ilk–that abet the various enterprises that this group of functionaries oversees suggests what the real project here is: privatizing public education so that “educational entrepreneurs” can capitalize on it. It’s no coincidence that various hedge fund billionaires–you know, those self-proclaimed geniuses who were culpable in almost driving the world economy off a cliff in 2008–have jumped on this particular bandwagon. Dr. Ravitch has followed these trends closely, knows the players–in some cases personally–and sorts them out for her reader.

What makes this book particularly compelling is the fact that Dr. Ravitch, who served in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, was a proponent of George W. Bush’s signature, and dubious, education legislation, “No Child Left Behind.” One of the most compelling moments in her narrative occurs when she realizes that No Child Left Behind is doomed to failure, and that she has bet on the wrong horse. Indeed, she repudiates this piece of dismal legislation in a few economical but well-sourced sentences.

As that great subverter Nietzsche wrote, “a very popular error–having the courage of one’s convictions: Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one’s convictions.” Diane Ravitch demonstrates such courage here, and I have to imagine that it was neither fun nor easy to excoriate one’s former positions before the public as she does in this book. What makes Dr. Ravitch a paragon of scholarly disinterest and integrity is her willingness to follow the evidence. She does so here, and distills it into highly readable (I envy her ability to pack so much information into a single declarative sentence) account of these reformers and their failed ideas.

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The Weekly Text, April 22, 2016: A Glossary of Basic Poetic Terms

Posted on April 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

Next week is my badly needed spring break, so Mark’s Text Terminal will be on sabbatical, enjoying spring weather and light. I’ll return with a fresh Weekly Text on Friday, May 6. For today, here is a glossary of basic poetic terms. One of these days I’m going to write a unit to accompany this support. This learning support is several years old, and it is an example of the kind of cart-before-the-horse planning I used as a novice teacher. I suspect this will be useful for teachers–if nothing else, it can be manipulated to serve your purposes in teaching poetry and poetic from.

Happy Spring! See you again on May 6.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Book Review: Poverty and Cognition

Posted on April 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

There are number of charter school chains operating in New York City, and nationally, which vaunt their “no excuses” approach to student discipline. My own admittedly cursory understanding of this behavioral cosmology is that it means what it says: teachers, school administrators–in other words, the authority figures that matter in school–will accept “no excuses” for poor disciplinary or academic performance in school.

Unsurprisingly, this controversial approach to dealing with students has found its way into public schools, and into the collective consciousness and discourse of administrators and teachers. Whatever the merits or demerits of this approach to managing students’ behavior, it militantly ignores the economic, social and emotional realities of students’s lives. Indeed, the quality of students’ interior and social lives is essentially shunted aside in favor of the metrics that standardized tests provide.There is talk now of a test to measure “grit,” which is the new buzzword to describe a student’s resilience. This has tended to strike me as primarily an ideological and bureaucratic fantasy, and ignores psychological realities, among others.

The “no excuses” ideology has lodged itself among educators in what has begun to look like an institutional denial of poverty as a cause of children’s problems in school. Facebook friends of mine who work as educators complain regularly of their superiors’ unwillingness to discuss the role of poverty, in professional development sessions and the like, in our students’ struggles. This is particularly offensive to many teachers, as it–patently–displays an appalling ignorance of the role of poverty in students who struggle in school. I suspect that for many of us, our understanding of this dynamic is common sense, or instinctual.

Happily, and thanks to Sendal Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir and their excellent book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How it Defines Our Lives, teachers now have ready access to the empirical data they need to support their arguments on poverty’s effect on students’ intellectual lives. Both of these scholars are leaders in their fields. Yet they have written a highly readable, cogent work that presents their important scholarship in plain English.

To make a concise story short for the purposes of this review, Messrs. Mullainathan and Shafir designed a number of basic experiments in cognitive psychology that called upon subjects to consider outcomes and make decisions in circumstances of real or imagined scarcity. What they found, unsurprisingly, is that when people must make decisions in straitened circumstances, they tended to lose several IQ points. In other words, poverty and scarcity hamper clear and effective cognition.

Needless to say, I’d like to see another book from these scholars that explores this further. I don’t know about you, but in the meantime, if I encounter administrators or colleagues who tout the “no excuses” line, I’ll point out that ignorance of this research and its literature is no excuse for not understanding poverty’s effect on our students’ lives.

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