Book Review

Mathews, Jay. Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin of Chapel Hill, 2009. Print.

Work Hard. Be Nice. is the story of how two Teach for America Alumni started KIPP charter schools. The author Jay Mathews, a well-published author of education in America, writes the book as a narrative as he follows the two main characters: Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin through all their many challenges and triumphs. Since this book is meant as an insiders look into the history of KIPP it provides insights into how to be an effective teacher in the classroom and outside of the classroom, the inner workings of charter schools and how they are created, and finally it provides a critical review of charter schools like KIPP, and whether or not they are the silver bullet of education reform. In this paper I will summarize of each of these topics and connect each topic to how it can improve my teaching as a first year teacher with Teach for America.

I. Effective Teacher Inside and Outside of the Classroom

Work Hard. Be Nice. proves without a doubt that Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin are very successful teachers. They are and compatriots at their schools, including Frank Corcoran, a Notre Dame alumnus, routinely won Teacher of Year awards. Countless visitors attested to the fact that these guys could each low-income kids to succeed. These guys were so successful because they employed their 5 Pillars of KIPP. First, they set high expectations for their kids, in terms of the academic and behavioral. 2. They had parents commits and students commit in written contracts to this success. 3. They taught until 5:00 and had 3 week long summer courses. 4. They had teachers who ran the classroom and the principals who ran the school with complete control. 5 Everything boiled down to results.

These were the five things that KIPP claimed as their reasons for success. However, I noticed that they did other things that could be used in any classroom. First, everything about their classrooms was about learning, right down to the vocab clouds on the ceiling. Even if a kid was staring-into-space they were learning. This is something that I don’t do in my Spartan classroom. Second, they built a culture of learning, where the cool thing was to be learning, to be smart, and everything revolved around that. Punishments of being put on the porch were designed so that they would want to return to this learning environment. Three, they also used a lot of different mnemonics and games to make learning fun. I don’t do this. Four they also teach a lot of study skills and critical thinking, which my kids lack and I wish I knew how to teach. I want to be able to teach these skills but I don’t know how you teach a kid to have critical thinking. Fifth, and most importantly they would do whatever it takes from getting that parents involved to completely changing teaching styles in order to succeed.

In terms of outside of the classroom, these guys were always looking for mentors who they could watch and learn from. This was the biggest take away, they found good teachers and simply copied. This is something I need to do more of as well.

II. Charter Schools

Charter schools can be more efficient because they are easier to create a culture of learning and separate this culture from previous experiences. When a child enrolls in a charter school, the entire school can be a different experience from their past home-life or school life. Its hard for a single teacher to do that because you never know what’s going to happen before or after they leave that classroom.

In terms of creation, it seems that basically anybody with an idea, the motivation, and the money could start their own school. The key thing is always money and in this case it came from the founders of GAP. Money is just as important at Campbell, and in order to make sure the teachers are supplied with the proper equipment, we always have to seeking new ways to get money.

III. Critique of KIPP

The last few chapters of the book took a more critical eye to KIPP and raised a number of points to why KIPP might not be a silver bullet. Number one, KIPP creams the students who have parents who care. If it’s something they have to sign up for then its getting the better parents. Although the techniques that KIPP employs are good, its not sure that they will work for every school. However, regardless of its expandability, KIPP has allowed hundreds of low-income students who wouldn’t go to college go to college, and as long as its doing that its doing a good thing.

History of Education

The History of Education in America

During the 1880’s, America education system lead the world. America’s education system was first was highly decentralized. There was no national agency dictating school curriculum or even school structure. This model followed the ingenuity of America’s federalism system as it allows multiple ideas or systems to develop at the same time. Thus, America’s education system flourished as different communities set up schools that meet the needs of their respective children. This differed from the European model, where only the rich children could go to the nationally-based education program.

This highly adaptable system allowed several important developments. The first was the advent of Middle Schools. Middle schools were originally designed to give those kids who wouldn’t go onto high school the necessary skills in order to survive in real life. Thus, middle school focused on many practical classes including home financing. Once high school became more mainstream the schools adapted to prepare students for success at this level. However, the federalist system that allowed for such freedom of adaptability has fallen victim to the balance between freedom and equality. With these freedom, the equality of the schools started to diminish as many suburban schools became very successful, but the urban or rural schools fell behind their peers. It was this very lack of national restrictions that led to the achievement gap.

Hawaii’s education system existed before the arrival of the United States federalist system. King Kamehameha III set up the same centralized system that Hawaii has today. This centralized system avoided the inequality of funding issues that plagued many mainland states. However, this pro is countered by the con that it yields a highly bureaucratic system that eschews family and community involvement with the schools. Governor Linda Lingle has tried to decentralize this system, however she has been stopped by the democratic congress.

According to Historical Development and Outlook document, Hawaii’s education system started with the Missionaries who set up the basic framework of a state-wide school system. King Kamehameha III formalized this in the centralized system and set forth a number of laws. One of these laws was that teachers had to be women. I think limiting to the process of instruction to women I think has contributed to the lack of appreciation of education today. Hawaii represents a very masculine culture, and the fact that education was deemed a second-tier profession I think has lead to a cultural lack of appreciation of education. However, this is just a theory based on a very limited experience with Hawaii culture applied to a few key historical facts.

Hunt, James R., Hawaii Department of Education. Historical Development and Outlook, 1969, Washington, D. C

http://iws.punahou.edu/user/JStevens/project/2006/06/history_of_hawaii_education.html

Claudia Goldin, A Brief History of Education in the United States, NBER Historical Working Paper No. 119, August 1999

Good Resource

One Thing that I have started to try and do is use sites.google.com as a website for my class. Mine still needs updating, but if any of you need to get a website for your class I would suggest this.

Educational Pyschology #2

Sadker, David. "Gender Equality: Still Knocking at the Classroom Door." Educational Leadership56 (1999)

I am a gender biased teacher. I give lots of negative and positive attention to the boys in my class, but leave the girls on the sidelines. I need to give more positive reinforcement to those who are doing what they are supposed to be doing. I discovered this because I read the article “Gender Equality: Still Knocking at the Classroom.” Gender equality despite all the news reports to the contrary is still a major issue in the classroom today. This article outlines 10 updates on the battle for gender equality emphasizing such things as the widening technology gap between male and females, the preference of males to get the majority of attention, and the fact that males are stereotyped too and need to receive individual encouragement rather than just be treated as rowdy boys. I think a number of these are interesting to educational policy makers and should be looked into, like how perhaps the technology gap is a reflection of video games. However, as a teacher, I think the most important one to look at is the positive and negative attention we give to males over females. I know that the best girls in my class I don’t give enough attention to because I am always yelling at the boys. I need to call on girls more, but because I think they are shy, I don’t do it.

In terms of the classroom segregation debate, coming from Notre Dame, I know my perceptions on gender bias are a bit different than the typical college student. Notre Dame is Catholic and at Notre Dame, all the halls are gender segregated. There is no option to live in the same hall as women, and women cannot even stay in the hall after midnight on weekdays and 2:00 on weekends. Gender Segregation is the norm at this school, and I loved it. Sure I didn’t have many good girl friends, but my hall was very close-knit with male camaraderie. We were the Knights of Keenan Hall and our lives were free from a lot of the drama that co-ed halls fall into. It was a brotherhood and I know many people who loved it.

Although this Hall life was created because of the conservative desire to keep the genders separated, it did have the positive effect of building brotherhood. I don’t know if this brotherhood could have been built in a co-ed hall. However, I do think that this separation led to a number of problems with the hook-up culture at Notre Dame. Girls were seen as something you tried to get on the weekends and treated as prizes. A lot of times real positive relationships were not built between the genders, especially if you came from a single-sex Catholic school. Those who came from the public schools were a little bit better at the interactions. I think there are some benefits to gender segregation, I think it allows boys and girls to focus on what really matters. But it can come at a cost of learning how to interact with the other gender, which might be too high of a cost.

Educational Pyschology #1

Osborne, Jason. "Testing Sterotype Threat: Does Anxiety Explain Race and Sex Differences in Achievement." Contemporary Educational Pyschology 26 (2001): 291-310. Web.

This article explains who gender or racial stereotypes actually effect students and contribute to the achievement gap. This article specifically outline the idea of anxiety and how when students are aware of stereotypes about their gender or racial backgrounds they actually tend to fulfill these stereotypes. Thus, stereotypes are in fact a self-fulfilling philosophy. This is caused by the students who become aware of their stereotypes becoming psychologically anxious and feel that they do not have the ability to succeed. Since knowledge is such a psychological issue, the fact that these students no longer believe that they will succeed makes the students not succeed.

As a teacher this makes perfect sense to me. A big factor in whether or a not a child will succeed is whether they are confident in their ability to succeed. A kid with no confidence does not do well. A kid with high confidence learns better. Thus, if a kid is anxious about the fact that no one like him succeeds in math, then that kid will not succeed in math. It therefore becomes important for teachers to dispel as many of these myths and stereotypes as possible and have children believe that they can succeed. This is tough because you want the kids to not be complacent, and one way you do this is by showing them statistics about the school and their stereotypes and what will happen if they don’t do work. Its important to light a fire underneath them and get them to work. However, I think this catch-22 can be avoided if you simply explain that the statisitics are wrong and that hard-work can prove them wrong. Nothing is set in stone, therefore if they work hard they can break the stereotypes.

Learning Theory Article #2

Jones, Shelley. "Culturally Responsive Instruction." Leadership (2007): 14+. Web.

The article, “Culturally Responsive Instruction” by Shelley Jones overviews the teaching style of CRSBI, culturally responsive, standards based instruction. There are five components to CRSBI: Caring, Communication, Curriculum, Instruction, and Standards Based Instruction. All of these components are equally valued in the teaching-style, and this teaching style that empowers students intellectually, emotionally, socially, and politically. By using this teaching style, teachers and administrators can help to close the achievement gap that exists in America’s education system.

Caring is the simple idea of showing support and a genuine interest in the success of the students. Communication means both communication with the parents and the administration but also teaching what is proper communication to the students. Curriculum refers to the incorporation of cultural aspects. Instruction means trying pedagogies in order to accommodate to the student’s learning styles. Finally, Standards based refers to the idea of keeping instruction aligned to state or national standards.

Overall, I find this article enlightening in the fact that cultural responsive theory only contains one aspect about the culture. The other 4 elements of this are non-culturally sensitive, meaning caring or communication. So as a teacher it is just as important to be caring and have good communication as to be culturally sensitive. This can be taken to mean two things. One, since communication is very important for effective teachers, then cultural inclusion is equally as important. Second, it could mean that in order to be an effective teacher that is culturally responsive, the teacher can simply be caring and have good communication. These are things that will transcend cultural backgrounds and make them be able to connect with students of different backgrounds. Either way, it is important for teachers to implement the pedagogies of this discussed in this article in order to improve their teaching effectiveness.

Learning Theory Article #1

Gordon, Mordechai. "Toward a Pragmatic Discourse of Constructivism: Reflectiosn on Lessons from Practice." Educational Studies 45 (2009): 39-58.

This article gives an overview of the teaching idea of constructivism. The exact idea of constructivism has many different definitions, depending on the theorist. However, all constructivist theories revolve around the idea that knowledge is not independent of human knowledge or free of value. This means that knowledge is something that humans create, not discover. Thus, the role of teachings should be to facilitate student creation of this knowledge. Knowledge is not something that is learned from a text-book, it is built through student actions and interactions. Thus, teachers need to be aware of how knowledge is created, if they wish to use practices that are must conducive to having their students become knowledgeable. Now, this article shows that there are many different theories about how the idea of Constructivism actually plays out in the classroom. The ironic thing is that it concludes by asking for a constructivist discussion about how to use constructivism. It doesn’t give out any specific answers about how to use constructivism or what form it should take, but he does think that the knowledge of constructivism is still under construction.

As for the classroom, I find the idea that knowledge is created to be very applicable. Students need to have a part in creating their own knowledge, they need to be invested in the material and applying it to their own lives. It is very similar to the differences in pedagogies competition we did for an earlier group work. One group actually constructed knowledge through a play, while the other group simply learned the story through direct instruction. This is one way in which Constructivism can lead to better student internalization of the knowledge. Since, they created the knowledge they actually will retain that knowledge. Another good use of constructivism is inquiry based learning. The students will need to discover their learning objectives. This is very student centered as raises the question of how much knowledge of the material the teacher really has to know. These are all very interesting ideas to how to improve learning in the classroom.