Changing the Odds for Student Success (and other Week 5 CEDO 525 stuff)

When I was 18-years old and trying to decide what I was going to be when I grew up, my parents pulled me aside and told me, "Son, you can do whatever you want to do, just don't be a teacher." Want to venture a guess as to what they did for a living? You got it, they were both public school teachers. Don't get me wrong, they both loved teaching, they just knew all too well how difficult the profession had become (even 30-years ago) and they figured I had to be able to find an easier way to make a living.
I mention that story because I recently finished reading Using Technology With Classroom Instruction That Works by Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn and Malenoski, and I can't help but wonder if I received some well-intentioned, but misleading advice. All the learning strategies in this book make perfect sense to me and I am mystified that every teacher in America is not making a conscious effort to apply these principles in every class they teach. 
Some thoughts about the last three learning strategies:

Identifying Similarities and Differences
Crucial for connecting prior knowledge and for broader understanding of concepts in context. Can be either teacher directed or student-directed. Technology supported diagrams and graphic representations are particularly effective in this exercise.
Homework and Practice 
Homework can't just be busy work - it must have a clearly defined and communicated purpose and relation to the learning targets. Allows students to extend their learning outside the classroom. Use of web-based resources is helpful because they can be accessed both in and out of the classroom.
Generating and Testing Hypotheses
Not just for science, this strategy really speaks to accessing those all-important higher order thinking skills. Students should be able to explain their hypothesis and what evidence they use to test it. Computer-based simulations are a great way to test hypotheses because it is relatively inexpensive and students get immediate feedback.



I also started reading a supplemental resource called Changing The Odds for Student Success: What Matters Most by Brian Goodwin and came across some interesting information that is directly related to the learning strategies. The report looks at education from an interesting perspective; that to improve the chances for life success for all children, educators and policy makers don't need more guidance, they may actually need less.
 

http://www.mcrel.org/topics/products/422/

There's no question that the current state of education in America fails to meet the needs of many students. The report goes through a litany of statistics to make the point - from the fact that one-third of students fail to graduate high school with their peers, to the prediction that high school dropouts have a life expectancy that is five years shorter than college graduates. The premise of this report is that we have to stop thinking in terms of helping student "beat" these odds, and start thinking about how we can change the odds in their favor.
There have been many school reform initiatives attempted over the years and the vast majority of them have done nothing to change the odds. Instead of looking for the next new trendy reform movement, the author says research shows that we already know what works. He says that effectively teaching all students does not require different strategies; rather, it requires skillful and intentional use of existing proven practice. 
Goodwin identifies five practices that matter the most in effective instruction for all students:

1. Guarantee challenging, engaging and intentional instruction
2. Ensure curricular pathways to success
3. Provide whole-child student supports
4. Create high-performance school culture
5. Develop data-driven, high-reliability systems

This is a rather long report that goes on to examine each of the five practices. Very interesting stuff if you have the time to check it out.